Sorry, Dad, I Can’t Do Politics Anymore

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

My father thinks I should run for elective office. Because I strive to stay informed on local, national, and world affairs, and base my opinions on solid facts and information, he thinks I’m potential leadership material. Me, I thought I only took seriously the 11^th-grade American Civics warning to be an involved citizen and voter. But too few people share that value today, and Dad thinks that makes me electable.

This week’s unfolding events demonstrate why I could never hold elective office. We learned Monday that a squadron of Executive Branch bureaucrats, including the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense, and the Vice President, were conducting classified government business by smartphone app. For those sleeping through the story (or reading it later), we know because National Security Adviser Mike Waltz dialed Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat.

Unfortunately, Dad is wrong; I’m no better informed than anyone else on unfolding events. I’ve watched the highlights of senators questioning Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA head John Ratcliffe, but even then, I’m incapable of watching without collapsing into spitting rage. Gabbard’s vague, evasive answers on simple questions like “were you included in the group chat” indicate an unwillingness to conduct business in an honest, forthright manner.

Not one person on this group chat—and, because Goldberg in his honesty removed himself after verifying the chat’s accuracy, we don’t know everyone on the chat—thought to double-check the roster of participants. This despite using an unsecured app with a history of hacking. That’s the level of baseline security we’d expect from coworkers organizing a surprise party, not Cabinet secretaries conducting an overseas military strike.

The Administration compounded its unforced errors by lying. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pretended that Goldberg’s chat contained no national security information; on Wednesday, Goldberg published the information. Millions of Americans who share my dedication to competent citizenship couldn’t get our jaws off the floor. Hegseth knew not only that Goldberg had that information, but that he could produce it. And he lied anyway.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

In a matter of weeks, we’ve witnessed the devaluation of competence in American society. Trump, who had no government experience before 2016, has peopled his second administration with telegenic muppets who similarly lack either book learning or hands-on proficiency. But then, no wonder, since studies indicate that willingness to vote for Trump correlates broadly with being ill-informed or wrong about facts. We’ve conceived a government by, and for, the ignorant.

Small-d democratic government relies upon two presumptions: that everyone involved is informed on the facts, to the extent that non-specialists could possibly keep informed, and that everyone involved acts in good faith. Both have clearly vanished. The notorious claim that, according to Google Analytics, searches for the word “tariffs” spiked the day after Trump’s election, apparently aren’t true: they spiked the day before. But even that’s embarrassingly late./p>

Either way, though, it reveals the uncomfortable truth that Americans don’t value competence anymore, not in themselves, and not in elected decision-makers. This Administration’s systemic lack of qualifications among its senior staff demonstrates the belief that obliviousness equals honesty. Though the President has installed a handful of serious statesmen in his Cabinet, people like Hegseth, Gabbard, and Kash Patel are unburdened by practical experience or tedious ol’ book larnin’.

Now admittedly, I appreciate when voters express their disgust at business-as-usual Democrats. Democratic leadership’s recent willingness to fold like origami cranes when facing even insignificant pushback, helps convince cocksure voters that competence and experience are overrated. The GOP Administration’s recent activities have maybe been cack-handed, incompetent, and borderline illegal, but they’re doing something. To the uninitiated, that looks bold and authoritative.

But Dad, that’s exactly why I can’t run for office. Because I’ve lived enough, and read enough, to know that rapid changes and quick reforms usually turn to saltpeter and ash. Changes made quickly, get snatched back quickly, especially in a political environment conditioned by digital rage. Rooting out corruption, waste, and bureaucratic intransigence is a slow, painstaking process. Voters today apparently want street theatre. I’m unwilling to do that.

My father might counter by noting that the Administration’s popularity is historically low, that its own voting base is turning away, and that this controversy might be weighty enough to bring them to heel. I say: maybe. But unless voters are willing to recommit themselves to being informed, following events, and knowing better than yesterday, the underlying problem will remain. The next quick-ix demagogue will deceive them the same way.

The Stains of Politics Don’t Wash Off

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 120
Lawrence O’Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics

Those of us born afterward—which, over half a century later, is most of us—probably know the 1968 presidential election for LBJ’s abrupt withdrawal, or for Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. As this highly contested election recedes from living memory, we risk losing important context that helped define a generation’s relationship with politics. Just as important, without that knowledge, we’re vulnerable to those who would exploit weaknesses that still exist.

Lawrence O’Donnell is a journalist, not an historian; but some of the best history for mass-market readers in recent years has come from journalists. Names like David Zucchino and Joe Starita have returned lost history to Americans, sometimes redefining our self-image in the process. Unconstrained by the necessities of academic writing, journalists can deep-dive into primary sources and spin them into vernacular English. Which is exactly what O’Donnell does here.

As 1968 began, the Democratic party split over Lyndon Johnson. The President’s civil rights legislation alienated old-line conservative Dixiecrats, but his deepening commitments in Vietnam left White progressives politically homeless. This led not one, but two sitting senators to challenge Johnson in the Democratic primary. Bobby Kennedy, son of a political dynasty, moved slowly and strategically, but Eugene McCarthy, a former professor, mustered the enthusiasm of college students and Yippies.

Republicans faced substantially similar problems. George Romney, a center-right maven, failed to muster much enthusiasm, so the question became whom the Republicans would embrace. That old anti-communist firebrand Richard Nixon told Cold War Americans what they wanted to hear, and whom they should fear. But New York governor Nelson Rockefeller offered a relatively optimistic, liberal option. 1968 would be the final knell for Republican liberalism.

But then as now, the presidential election wasn’t only about the political maneuvering. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was ramping his “Poor People’s Campaign” to new heights. That fateful day in Memphis, he’d visited to help organize the city’s striking sanitation workers. When an assassin’s bullet struck him, it basically exposed an entire generation’s bottled rage. The resulting nationwide explosion redefined the terms for would-be presidential candidates.

Lawrence O’Donnell

Back then, the primary system didn’t matter like it does now. Kennedy, McCarthy, Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan led aggressive ground campaigns to garner votes, but Nixon and Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey played internal party politics. Their aggressive gladhanding secured party nominations for two candidates who didn’t necessarily have deep grass roots. Both parties would have to change future nominating processes to address this injustice.

Even more than the individual candidates, 1968 would redefine party identities. Before the Sixties, party loyalty had more to do with community and geography than issues and platforms. That’s why Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, could shepherd multiple civil rights bills through a historically divided Congress. It’s also why a liberal like Rockefeller, and moderate like Romney, and a conservative like Nixon could compete for the Republican nomination.

But new alignments based on domestic issues changed these alignments. Over the course of 1968, the Nixon contingent, backed by that old segregationist Strom Thurmond, squeezed the liberal Republicans out. Meanwhile, as two anti-war candidates vied for the Democratic nomination, party regulars closed ranks to preserve the Johnson wing’s privilege. Thus, throughout the 1968 primary campaign, the Republican Party became increasingly conservative, and so did the Democrats.

O’Donnell wrote this book directly after the 2016 election, and comments liberally on how the Nixon/Humphrey contest presaged the Trump presidency. As always, history is about what happened, but it’s also about us, the contemporary readers. Presidential campaigns, once scholarly affairs based on debate and communication, became increasingly oriented toward television. Vibes became more important than policies—and Democratic Party vibes were so authoritarian, they made Nixon look amiable.

At the same time, O’Donnell omits information his audience could learn from. He never names the assassins who killed Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, and never mentions their motivations; James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan don’t even merit index entries. Therefore, Ray’s connection to organized bigotry gets erased, as does Sirhan’s anger over the Six-Day War. O’Donnell pores over living candidates’ policies extensively, but assassins’ bullets apparently just happen.

In O’Donnell’s telling, the 1968 election serves as a fable to explain Trump-era politics. By examining the partisan extremes that calcified during this campaign, we gain the vocabulary to understand what happened in 2016. And though O’Donnell couldn’t have anticipated it, his words became more necessary, his vocabulary more trenchant, after the disaster of 2024. It’s often difficult to examine the present dispassionately, but the past offers us useful tools.

Why Ostara?

A 19th century engraving depicting
Ostara (source)

Each year during Lent, social media surges with claims that Easter derives its name and mythology from the Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess Ostara. These memes often include claims about how Ostara gives us numerous Easter myths: that rabbits and eggs were her sacred symbols, that her worship involved sexual rituals which early Christians suppressed, even that Ostara died and rose again. These claims are largely fictional; Ostara’s actual mythology is lost.

Less interesting than what Anglo-Saxons believed, or didn’t, about Ostara, is the eagerness with which online critics invent Ostara mythology. No information about Ostara, beyond her name, survives, yet commentators assert a panoply of just-so stories, many beginning with “it’s said” or “the story goes,” variations on the folkloric “Once Upon a Time.” Some such stories are pilfered from Germanic or Near Eastern religions; others seem to be purely fabricated.

Such attempts to revive otherwise lost pre-Christian religions seem counterintuitive. The so-called New Atheists, like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, claim that scientific modernity doesn’t need creation myths and just-so stories to organize society. Yet even as Christianity seems ever-further removed from today’s culture, at least a vocal contingent seeks moral justification, not in science, but in ancient myth. The very antiquity of pre-Christian myth gives it exotic appeal.

Multiple factors contribute to why Christianity, and its myths and practices, are fading in Western Civilization. Clergy abuses, past and present, surely contribute. Christianity’s association with warlike, nationalistic, and racist factions doesn’t help. Even its ancient texts, unchanged since the Iron Age, makes it seem weighted with antique baggage. But I’d suggest one important reason Christianity seems distant from modern culture: the religion focuses heavily on death.

Why does Jesus’ suffering and death dominate Christian theology? The Apostle Paul highlights Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, far beyond Jesus’ moral lessons. Christianity originally spread amid conditions where death was commonplace; most people died, not in hospitals, but at home, surrounded by family. Funerals were massive public gatherings signified by music, food, and other festival trappings. Such events still sometimes happen in rural areas, but have become uncommon elsewhere.

A 19th century Easter card (source)

Rather, modern death has become aberrant. The most common causes of death throughout history—tuberculosis, malaria, bubonic plague, polio, tetanus, whooping cough—have become rare in the last century, the time when Christianity saw its fastest decline. Even industrial accidents and war wounds are treatable in ways past generations didn’t know. Death, once so ever-present that people discussed their funeral preparations over family dinner, has become rare, distant, and distasteful.

Theologians have created convoluted justifications for Christ’s death and resurrection. As Fleming Rutledge writes, virtually no such justifications withstand scrutiny. But for early Christians, no justification was necessary; Christ died because we’ll eventually die, probably sooner rather than later. That camaraderie with God brings comfort. I’ve known two atheist friends who embraced faith and prayer when loved ones were dying, then returned to unbelief when the crisis passed.

But death doesn’t define Ostara. Though some online stories claim she dies and is resurrected every spring, these stories are peripheral. The made-up myths generally highlight fertility, growth, planting, and sex. Concocted myths prioritize life, flourishing, and birth, which seem closer to modern daily experience. In a culture where death seems abnormal, a unifying spiritual narrative privileging birth and life arguably makes sense. Penicillin rendered Christianity obsolete.

This stumbles on one important problem: we’re still going to die. As someone who recently watched a loved one struggle on life support before the merciful end, I find the Easter narrative of God’s mortality comforting in new ways. But we’ve made death distant and antiseptic, hidden inside hospital or nursing home walls, no longer present with daily life. Death has become atypical, but we’re still going to die.

Speaking personally, in past years, I’ve found the romantic mythmaking of Ostara merely treacly. This year, it’s become something more pointed, something harsher. It’s become an active denial of human inevitability, and a shared refusal to accept the human condition. Modern technological society hides death, and dying persons, in antiseptic conditions, pretending they don’t exist. Life has become an eternal present, a permanent now.

I’ve written about this before: myths are ultimately not about the truth, they’re about the people who create them. But in this case, the attempt to invent new “ancient” myths about a lost folk religion aren’t just explanations. They reveal a way modern society denies an important aspect of life, and hides our mortal end like a shameful thing. These myths look cute, but they’re subtly dangerous.

Chatterbox Jazz and the Victim Complex, Part Two

This essay is a follow-up to Chatterbox Jazz and the Whie Victim Complex

Another angle on the entrance to the Chatterbox Jazz Club, which only a
complete doofus would mistake for apolitical. (source)

I can’t help considering the parallels, and the lack of parallels, between Elise Hensley, who videoed herself getting ejected from the Chatterbox Jazz Club, and George Floyd. To reiterate, Hensley almost certainly recorded her expulsion deliberately, hoping to cultivate the impression of herself as an oppressed minority. But so far, the explosion of outrage she expected hasn’t arisen. It bears some time to consider why.

Hensley’s video and Darnella Frazer’s recording of George Floyd’s death might seem superficially similar to chronically online denizens. Both filmed on cellphone cameras, these videos show what their respective target audiences consider an injustice. But the online outrage machine flourishes with such displays of false equivalency. Hensley’s staged confrontation, and George Floyd’s unplanned murder, only resemble one another to lazy media consumers.

To exactly such lazy consumers, the sequence appears thusly: somebody distributed video of an injustice in progress. Millions of Americans were outraged. Protesters filled the streets. Ta-dah! We see similar reasoning in the hundreds of January 6^th, 2021, rioters who live-streamed their push into the Capitol Building, speaking metaphors of Civil War and 1776: they thought simply seeing provocative media created public sentiment.

This bespeaks a specific attitude, not toward current events, but toward media. Lazy consumers see events not as events, but as content, and information distribution not as journalism, but as content creation. Functionally, Hensley doesn’t elevate herself to George Floyd’s level, she lowers George Floyd to her level. The spontaneous recording of an actual crime in progress, becomes neither better nor worse than her forced confrontation with a queer bartender.

Let me emphasize, this isn’t merely a conservative phenomenon. I’ve struggled to follow political TikTok because, Left and Right alike, it mostly consists of homebrew “journalists” either repeating somebody else’s breaking reports, or shouting angrily at like-minded believers from their car or bedroom. The read-write internet has expanded citizens’ speaking capacity to, hypothetically, infinity, depending on server space. But it’s created little new information.

But conservatives, especially White conservatives, receive one key point differently. They’ see stories of injustice multiply rapidly and gain mainstream attention, and they believe the media creates the martyrs. If martyrdom happens when cameras capture injustice, rather than when humans or institutions perform injustice, then anybody with media technology could recreate the martyrdom process. Anybody could, with a 5G connection, become a martyr.

Such lack of media literacy travels hand-in-hand with the inability to distinguish between forms of injustice. Hensley’s description of her ejection as “discrimination” suggests she thinks herself equal to Black Americans denied service at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in the 1950s. By extension, it suggests her MAGA hat equals organized resistance to injustice. She can’t see the difference, and hopes you can’t, either.

When all news is media manipulation, in other words, then all injustice, no matter how severe, no matter how authentic, becomes equal. Hensley can’t distinguish her own inconvenience from George Floyd’s death—or at least, she expects that others can’t distinguish. The meaninglessness of Hensley’s public stand, as nobody has rallied around her faux injustice, reveals that media manipulation isn’t the same as reality, and some people still can tell.

One recalls the occasional online furor surrounding some doofus who just discovered that “Born in the U.S.A.” isn’t a patriotic song, “Hallelujah” isn’t a Christmas song, and punk rock is political. These people aren’t stupid, despite the inevitable social media pile-on. Rather, these people consume all media, from music to movies to news, passively. Under those conditions, everything becomes equal, and everything becomes small.

Did Elise Hensley seriously believe herself a martyr, surviving a moment of bigoted injustice? Well, only God can judge the contents of her heart. But she evidently hoped other people would believe it, and throw their support behind her. Some evidently did, although the fervor has mostly sputtered. Without the jolt of authenticity, her media manipulation stunt gathered scarce momentum, and seems likely to disappear with the 24-hour news cycle.

The whole “fake news” phenomenon, which pundits say might’ve helped Trump into the presidency twice, relies upon the same action that Hensley attempted, mimicking real events under controlled conditions. But, like Hensley, it mostly failed to fuel real action. It might’ve helped calcify political views among people already inclined toward extreme partisan beliefs, but like Hensley, most “fake news” produced meaningless nine-day wonders.

If I’m right in my interpretation, media consumers are growing weary of manufactured outrage. The next stage will probably be performative cynicism, which is hardly better, but will be at least less terrifying.

Chatterbox Jazz and the White Victim Complex

This TripAdvisor photo shows a gay pride flag above the front window
of the Chatterbox Jazz Club in Indianapolis, Indiana (source)

Late last week, a woman video-recorded herself being ordered out of the Chatterbox Jazz Club in Indianapolis, Indiana. When she asks why, the bartender specifically says “because you’re a Trump supporter,” apparently referencing a red MAGA ballcap. When the woman stalls, the bartender retrieves a short-handled baseball bat from behind the bar and says “I’m not fucking around.” The 36-second clip went viral before Monday.

Other commentators note the contradiction between this woman demanding her right to be served, and the Republicans who spearheaded a lawsuit to the Supreme Court letting businesses refuse commerce with gay customers. The case, Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, didn’t actually legalize anti-gay discrimination. It did, however, redefine “religious neutrality” when writing anti-discrimination law. It also basically kicked the lawsuit back down the ladder, leaving it essentially unresolved today.

I’d rather avoid rehashing that, not because it isn’t legitimate, but because I’m unqualified. Instead, let’s consider the medium. This woman didn’t just get ejected from a hostile venue; she recorded herself getting ejected. She recorded the confrontation on a cellphone camera held vertically, indicating her intention to distribute the footage online, probably on TikTok. Therefore this confrontation didn’t just happen; she probably engineered it.

The woman herself doesn’t appear in the footage. She verbally admits she’s wearing a “Trump hat,” but we never see it; she certainly doesn’t dispute the accusation that “you’re a Trump supporter.” Based on that fact, it seems irrefutable that she did or said something pro-Trump inside the bar. Management released a statement claiming that her party “intentionally misgendered and harassed a Chatterbox employee.”

In the video, the bartender arguing with the video creator appears gender-ambiguous and is coded nonbinary. Some unofficial websites describe the Chatterbox Jazz Club as a gay bar; the Chatterbox’s website takes no discernable position, but shows a trans-rights flag in the front window. The likelihood that accuser Elise Hensley, who describes herself as a repeat customer, didn’t know this before Friday night, is vanishingly small.

Therefore, if Hensley’s party entered this club wearing MAGA hats, they didn’t do so innocently. Unless they specifically said something about their intention to create conflicts or inflame tensions, it’s difficult to prove intent in court. However, their intent to start a fight seems highly likely, even almost certain. For our non-courtroom purposes, it seems clear that Hensley and her party intended to start a fight.

Moreover, because the bartender keeps a bat within reach behind the bar, they’ve probably faced previous challenges. Survivors generally buy weapons after they’ve been robbed or assaulted, not before. Hensley entered the bar spoiling for a fight, and bar staff appeared prepared to give her one. And she filmed the confrontation in process. Therefore, clearly, this happened not for Hensley’s benefit, nor the Chatterbox’s, but for our benefit.

Hensley clearly wants the world to see her suffering some oppression. We have this underscored when she says, “You know that this is, like, discrimination, right?” Other patrons reply with jeering laughter, but Hensley appears serious. In that moment, she perceives herself as suffering discrimination, as being the oppressed party in an unequal power dynamic. She sees herself as the victim in this confrontation.

American conservatives, especially the MAGA variety, occupy an ontological dilemma. They claim their opinions and actions represent most American citizens, that they’re merely saying aloud what everyone else really thinks. Simultaneously, they call themselves an oppressed minority, silenced by overwhelming forces. The Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies embody this duality of White authority and White victimhood: Whites are hypercompetent, but suppressed by incompetent minorities.

Hensley almost certainly recorded this confrontation because she thought it would make her look oppressed, victimized, put-upon. To those who share her prior suppositions, it probably does. The resort to cusswords and threats of violence implies victimhood. Maybe Hensley thought, in the largest city of an overwhelmingly Red state, she could make herself a celebrity victim and parlay that into a leadership position in the long-awaited conservative uprising.

But even the slightest context awareness demonstrates that the patrons laughing at Hensley, not Hensley herself, have the greatest command of the facts. Hensley, like so many in today’s hyperconnected world, has confused being a content creator with being a newsmaker, and as a result, she makes herself look ridiculous. Conservatives love trying to enter themselves in the oppression Olympics.

Elise Hensley will be remembered alongside Amy Cooper, the Central Park woman who turned herself into a synonym for racism, ignorance, and media manipulation. And that’s all she deserves.

Follow-up: Chatterbox Jaxe and the Victim Complex Part 2

How To Invent a Fake Pop Culture

I don’t recall when I first heard the song “Sally Go ’Round the Roses.” I know I first heard Pentangle’s folk singalong arrangement, not the Jaynetts’ Motown-tinged original. Like most listeners my age, who grew up with the mythology of Baby Boomer cultural innovation, I received that generation’s music out of sequence; the 1960s appeared like a single unit, without the history of cultural evolution that define the decade.

Therefore I didn’t understand how influential the Jaynetts’ original version really was. Its use of syncopated backbeat, gated distortion effects, and enigmatic lyrics were, in 1963, completely innovative. The British Invasion hadn’t hit America yet, with the inventive tweaks that the Beatles and the Kinks experimented with. The original label, Tuff, reportedly hated the song until another label tried to purchase it, causing Tuff to rush-release the record.

Eventually, the track hit number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. More important for our purposes, though, a loose collective of San Francisco-based musicians embraced it. Grace Slick recorded a rambling, psychedelic cover with her first band, The Great Society, and tried to recreate its impact with classic Jefferson Airplane tracks like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody To Love.” Much of her career involved trying to create that initial rush.

Once one understands that “Sally” came first, its influence becomes audible in other Summer of Love artists, including the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Moby Grape, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. These acts all strove to sound loopy and syncopated, and favored lyrics that admitted of multiple interpretations. Much of the “San Francisco Sound” of 1966 to 1973 consisted of riffs and jams on the “Sally” motif.

That’s why it staggered me recently when I discovered that the Jaynetts didn’t exist. Tuff producer Abner Spector crafted “Sally” with two in-house songwriters, an arranger who played most of the instruments, and a roster of contract singers, mostly young Black women. The in-house creative team played around and experimented until they created the song. It didn’t arise from struggling musicians road-testing new material for live audiences.

Grace Slick around 1966, the year she
covered “Sally Go ’Round the Roses”
with the Great Society

A New York-based studio pushed this song out of its assembly-line production system, and it became a hit. Like other bands invented for the studio, including the Monkees and the Grass Roots, the Jaynetts didn’t pay their dues, the studio system willed them into existence. They produced one orphan hit, which somehow travelled across America to create a sound-alike subculture, back when starving musicians could afford San Francisco rent.

Culture corporations, such as the Big Three labels which produce most of America’s pop music, and the Big Five studios which produce most of America’s movies, love to pretend they respond to culture. If lukewarm dribble like The Chainsmokers dominate the Hot 100, labels and radio conglomerates cover their asses by claiming they’re giving the customers what they want. Audiences decide what becomes hits; corporations only produce the product.

But “Sally’s” influence contradicts that claim. Artists respond to what they hear, and when music labels, radio, and Spotify can throttle what gets heard, artists’ ability to create is highly conditional. One recalls, for instance, that journalist Nik Cohn basically lied White disco culture into existence. Likewise, it’s questionable whether Valley Girl culture even existed before Frank and Moon Zappa riffed in Frank’s home studio.

It isn’t only that moneyed interests decide which artists get to record—a seamy but unsurprising reality. Rather, studios create artists in the studio, skimming past the countless ambitious acts playing innumerable bar and club dates while hoping for their breakthrough. This not only saves the difficulty of having to go comparison shopping for new talent, but also results in corporations wholly owning culture as subsidiaries of their brand names.

I’ve used music as my yardstick simply because discovering the Jaynetts didn’t exist rattled me recently. But we could extend this argument to multiple artistic forms. How many filmmakers like Kevin Smith, or authors like Hugh Howey, might exist out there, cranking out top-quality innovative art, hoping to become the next fluke success? And how many will quit and get day jobs because the corporations turned inward for talent?

Corporate distribution and its amplifying influence have good and bad effects. One cannot imagine seismic cultural forces like the Beatles without corporations pressing and distributing their records. But hearing Beatles records became a substitute for live music, like mimicking the Jaynetts became a substitute for inventing new culture. The result is the same: “culture” is what corporations sell, not what artists and audiences create together.

The Great Exploding Rocket Debacle Continues

A SpaceX Starship test rocket launch (AP photo)

Back in the 1980s, I remember being a science fiction fanboy, growing disgusted with the American space program’s apparent inaction. Sure, NASA maintained a robust schedule of space shuttle flights and satellite launches that had a certain earthside grandeur. But shuttle crews performed a string of low-stakes scientific experiments that yielded only incremental knowledge gains. Compared to Asimov-era promises, NASA seemed terminally timid.

Fiction countered this ennui with the promise of libertarianism. I’d be hard-pressed to name even one title or author forty years later, but a bevy of science fiction authors proposed the idea of private corporations and rich cowboys taking over where NASA proved timid. Ben Bova certainly hinted at this with his Moonbase novels. Arthur C. Clarke, though no Randian libertine, nevertheless had undertones of privatization in his Thatcher-age novels.

This promise of private-sector space flight seemed promising to my preteen self. I was mature enough to gobble down novels written for adults, a voracious reader hungry for the high-minded themes and promises of adventure which grown-up SF promised. But I wasn’t subtle enough to parse deeper meanings. These novels I greedily inhaled often contained dark implications of privatized space exploration encouraging rapacious behavior and destructive greed.

Watching the news surrounding this week’s SpaceX flight explosion, I can’t help remembering those stories I dimly understood. Elon Musk has spent a decade pitching how his multiple corporations can perform public services more efficiently than public bureaus. Yet his spacecraft’s multiple explosions, including this one which halted East Coast air traffic for hours, have repeatedly embarrassed us ex-scifi kids who still think space is pretty cool.

Elon Musk

Musk’s personal wealth reached nearly half a trillion dollars immediately following the 2024 presidential election, thanks to his connections with President Trump. Everyone assumed, not unreasonably, that Musk’s lucrative government contracts, including SpaceX, would yield heavy dividends in a Trump presidency. Yet in under two months since the election, Musk has seen his wealth fall by a quarter, fueled by his reckless behavior and personal unpopularity.

Importantly, Musk’s wealth has come significantly from government contracts. SpaceX makes some profitable product, particularly its StarLink satellite system, but that profit comes with significant amortized debt, underwritten by government credit securities. Most of SpaceX’s actual operating capital comes from NASA contracts since, following the discontinuation of the space shuttle program, NASA has no in-house launch capabilities anymore.

But this privatized space program has been, charitably, embarrassing. NASA spent much of its house budget creating scientific laboratories and testing facilities, because its budget, circumscribed by Congress, included little room for launchpad errors. SpaceX employs few scientists, but mostly engineers, preferring to build and launch physical prototypes, because even when they explode, they create valuable capital through the medium of name recognition.

In practice, this means NASA was slow-moving and timid, but it produced results: NASA went from President Kennedy promising a moon landing, to actually landing on the moon, in seven years. SpaceX moves quickly and dramatically, but it mostly produces falling debris and lurid headlines in the 24-hour news cycle. Its track record getting actual astronauts into space is spotty, and frequently beholden to the bureaucratic cycle.

Again, this underscores a contradiction in libertarian thinking. This week’s explosion, which scattered debris widely throughout the Caribbean, forced the FAA to halt traffic from major American airports—mere days after Musk’s own chainsaw behavior reduced FAA workforce numbers to critical levels. Musk disparages the public sector that, it turns out, he desperately needs.

Herbert Marcuse postulated, in One-Dimensional Man, that technological society produces intellectual stagnation and a headlong race toward mediocrity. This applies, he wrote, in capitalist and communist societies alike: engineers only reproduce what they know already works. Actual innovation requires government intervention, because only governments willingly embrace uncertainty and the capacity for failure.

SpaceX has proven what 1980s SF writers said, and I failed to understand, that a successful privatized space program requires avaricious ego and casual disregard for consequences. Private space exploration requires a greedy space pirate to eviscerate public resources for private gain, then turn around and trust public servants to keep citizens alive when the engineered product literally explodes. That’s the opposite of innovation.

IMusk’s embarrassing post-inauguration behavior and continuing business disasters probably won’t cure anybody of libertarianism, at least yet. People who ideologically believe in the private sector’s goodness will persevere despite seven weeks of high-profile setbacks. But hopefully at least some will accept that, in a high-tech society, the private sector needs a public sector to survive without killing innocent bystanders.

Time For the 28th Amendment

How old were you when you discovered that the right to vote isn’t protected in the United States Constitution?

Like most Americans, I studied the Constitution, in different ways and different forms of depth, through high school, into college, and later in various books, seminars, and media deep-dives throughout my life. Teachers and commentators gushed lovingly over how the 15^th Amendment extended voting to former slaves, the 19^th Amendment gave women the vote, and the 26^th Amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the right to vote.

All of these are good. But they establish that the government cannot withhold the right to vote based on certain protected categories. Not once does the Constitution state who does have the voting franchise; the issue remains airy-fairy and undefined. And I didn’t know that until I read Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority, which I read when I was 49. Only when they pointed it out did I realize this information was missing.

Throughout much of American history, the question of what makes someone a “real” American has loomed large. The Philadelphia Convention of 1789, which drafted the kernel of our current Constitution, was dominated by slaveholders, who wanted their human property counted on the Census, but didn’t want slaves having any vote. These White male aristocrats, whom we dub the “Founders,” handled the problem by punting it onto the states.

As you’d imagine, this created a patchwork of standards. States have, at times, made land ownership a criterion—which created problems when rising industrialization pushed more Americans into cities. Old-fashioned bigotry encouraged many states, overtly or covertly to disenfranchise Black Americans, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned it. Since the Shelby County ruling, states have competed to find innovative new ways to make voting harder.

Many attempts to increase the voting franchise are doomed to fail. Because less populous states, which skew conservative, gain a tactical advantage from the status quo, many common suggestions, like ending the Electoral College or disestablishing the Senate, are non-starters. The Constitution sets the threshold for amendments so high that, in times of bitter polarization like we have now, changing the system is unlikely at best.

But I propose that it’s politically possible to start with something simple: just establish that American citizens have a right to vote, irrespective of state laws. This has multiple advantages. It will set the default for American voting as “opt-out,” rather than the current “opt-in.” It will capitalize on the American fervor for treating everyone equally, since setting a standard baseline of simply letting people vote is, facially, completely equal.

With that in mind, I propose a movement to pressure our lawmakers to create a 28^th Amendment. Since I’m not an attorney or Constitutional scholar, I don’t want to create a binding text for such an amendment; that exceeds my skills. But I propose the following as a starting point:

1. All persons who have been born citizens of the United States, or who have been naturalized as citizens under the standards of this Constitution, and having achieved no less than eighteen years of age, shall have the right to vote and to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the states in which they reside.

2. All persons who have the voting franchise under the standards of this Constitution, but who shall reside outside the United States for military deployment, lawful students studying abroad, citizens working abroad under a lawful visa, or for any other reasons which Congress shall protect by legislation, shall be permitted to participate in electoral processes in the United States, and in the most recent jurisdiction for which they were most recently resident.

3. The Executive Branch, under terms which Congress shall set by legislation, shall maintain a permanent roster of lawful registered voters in the United States, and shall take responsibility for maintaining the currency of that roster, and shall protect the voting rights of all persons who have the right to participate in the electoral process in the United States.

We voters can pressure American lawmakers to rally behind this straightforward, facially neutral action statement. Sure, I know anti-democracy activists like Peter Thiel exist in America, but I believe they’re controllable, while our system remains tractable to public pressure. We can organize to pressure our lawmakers to support this change by threatening them with the shame of being seen as anti-voting.

This won’t solve all of America’s problems. But it will at least get all Americans involved in the problem-solving process.