Helpless

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich believed that fascism is the result of bad parenting.

Parental abuse, neglect and repression combine, Reich said, to produce fascists, deeply warped individuals who are "apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, and good and adjusted, in the authoritarian sense." 

Fascists are, in addition, incapable of finding love and sexual satisfaction. Today we call such frustrated people incels.

Donald Trump and his followers are proof of Reich's beliefs.

Sadly, there's little, if anything, we can do to change the minds of Trump's followers. Their parents shaped them years ago to fall into line behind authoritarians. They may deserve pity; but not tolerance. They're helpless, loveless, diabolical, and—for the most part—beyond our reach. Our best course it to cede them that bleak corner of the playground where the civilized rest of us never wish to tread. Alaska comes to mind.

"The more helpless the 'mass-individual' has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the Führer," Reich said. 

"The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the Führer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the 'national heritage,' of the 'nation,' which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising 'the masses' and confronting them as an individual.

"The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant Führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance."

God help us, and grant us the serenity to accept what we cannot change.

Leg Up

We live in a world of unused knowledge and skill.

— H. G. Wells

I had surgery a week ago to repair my shattered leg. 

Moments before I was rolled into the operating room, the orthopedist pulled a purple Sharpie from his pocket and scribbled his initials—DMT—on my thigh.

The doctor's simple act gave him a leg up, by driving to zero the chance he'd operate on the wrong limb.

SharpieGate aside, we need more Sharpie-wielders in our lives. 

Simple signoffs like my surgeon's (which he would call a "wrong-site protocol") protect us from human error.

We especially need more Sharpie-wielders in government, where human error now runs rampant.

The past few weeks have proven—as if we needed proof—that conservative-run governments are derelict. A freshly minted example reveals how much so.

Boris Johnson's government this week issued a £2 coin to commemorate H.G. Wells, author of The War the Worlds.

 

Wells fans are in an uproar. 

They're demanding to know how the government could have added a leg to the writer's famous "monstrous tripods," depicted on the coin.

“Can I just note that the big walking machine on the coin has four legs?" one fan said. "Four legs. The man famous for creating the Martian tripod. How many people did this have to go through?”

“It’s nice to see Wells memorialized, but it would have been nicer for them to get things right,” another said. “A tripod with four legs is hard to comprehend."

To date, Johnson's government has failed to explain or apologize for the blunder. 

Clearly, it doesn't have a leg to stand on.

My Second Act

There are no second acts in American lives.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Second acts fascinate me. So it's pleasing to learn my own encore has been featured in Carl Landau's Pickelball Media.

Thanks, Carl.

And sorry, Scott.

You were wrong.

Above: Tangerines. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 inches. Sold.

Follow the Money

A grifter scams people. 

Grifter is a 20th century Americanism that stems from the English word graft, meaning “the obtaining of profit by shady means, especially bribery, blackmail, or the abuse of power.”

Grifters abound, particularly on the right.

Trump's "Stop the Steal" is a scam, and it turns out Michael Flynn's endorsement of QAnon is, too. 

QAnon itself is a scam.

Before there was QAnon, there was Glenn Beck, another grifter. 

Beck monetized right-wing conspiracy theories, prying millions from the pockets of gullible followers. In a bold show of cynicism, Beck named his company Mercury Radio Arts after Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air, whose 1939 broadcast of War of the Worlds famously faked out gullible fans.

Beck was a grifter, and proud of it.

The next time you hear another crackpot claim about Dominion Voting or Lizard People, remember to follow the money.

That phrase came from the late William Goldman's script for the 1976 film "All The President’s Men," the political thriller about Watergate.

Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein that if they hoped ever to understand how Washington worked, they should "Follow the money."

Just Jake

America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Astute economists predict we're on the brink of another Roaring '20s, according to Axios.

"The economy may be close to consolidating years of technological advances—and ready to take off in a burst of productivity growth," Axios says. Those advances include digitization, AI, robotics, remote work, solar, and biomedicine.

A spree is overdue.

Although World War II drove three decades of productivity gains, that growth all but stopped in the 1970s. Despite a blip in the 1990s—attributable to computers—productivity has stagnated ever since.

But businesses have been investing in the new technologies over the past decade, and are mastering their use, Axios says. As a result, they're situated at the very bottom of a "productivity J-curve." 

They are ready to skyrocket. A survey by the World Economic Forum reveals 80% of businesses are accelerating digitization; 80%, remote work; and 50%, job automation. A big productivity leap is right around the corner.

That's just jake, as they would have said in the 1920's.