Mouse trap

When it comes to U.S. politics over the past decade — hell, the past generation — the only thing we've been consistently able to agree on is, of course, that we can't agree on anything.

That probably shouldn't come as a surprise. Let's face it; all the easy legislative work got done right out of the gate, a couple centuries ago. "Murder? Theft? Yeah, we probably ought to put those down under 'felonies.' All in favor? Right. OK, we're done for the day. Let's go down to the pub and grab some Sam Adams." And everybody was happy, except possibly for Samuel Adams. And hey, maybe he liked the attention.

What's really telling about all this divisiveness is how, over the course of the past several presidential elections, the focus of the division has sharpened until no one, no matter which misleading kinds of straw men (sorry, straw persons) they'd built to represent their opponents or allies in the past (remember "soccer moms"?), no one can now deny the principal characteristic that divides us.

Urban vs. Rural.

That's right. All this political angst boils down into a bad — and I mean "grade-school theatrical adaptation" bad — retelling of "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse." Just fucking wonderful. That's what's gotten us so upset that, on the left and on the right, there are growing numbers of people arguing primarily about who'll get to secede from whom.

I can see where simply breaking the nation up into the Red country and the Blue one might be tempting. Only problem is, it's not even remotely possible, and I don't just mean the constitutional legalistics and the negotiations about custody of, say, the armed forces and the nuclear arsenal.

You can find a slew of red-vs.-blue maps scattered across the Net, based on the voting patterns of the elections of 2016 and earlier. Some are the basic news-network state-by-state tallies showing how the Electoral College votes broke down ... and those are misleading as hell for secessionist plotters. More ambitious maps show which counties the Red or Blue candidate won ... and those are almost as misleading, since (1) how each county in a given state went has nothing to do with how many electoral votes (or popular votes, for that matter) went to each party's stooge, um, candidate, and (2) counties vary even more in population than their parent states do, ranging from Los Angeles County's 10-million-and-change to the fewer than 90 people living in Kalawao County, Hawaii, which apparently is, honest to god, a former leper colony. (Leaving aside those poor bastards, whose situation is definitely unique, the next smallest counties are largely prairie-state acreage with fewer than 500 residents each, not counting their livestock, so the point still stands.)

The better election maps do two things to earn the distinction: They use a color spectrum including various shades of purple in the middle (pure red indicates a Republican landslide, pure blue a Democratic one, and pure purple indicates a near-50-50 split) for each county, and/or they include indicators of how populous each county is. My favorite source for this is the work website of Princeton University professor Robert J. Vanderbei, who's broken down presidential elections using one or both of these methods going back to the Kennedy-Nixon title bout of 1960. Here's his page for 2016, which yields this graphic showing county-by-county breakdowns for both votes and populations:

Note how red, broad and flat (i.e., unpopulous) the rural heartlands are; how towering and blue the teeming megacities; how confusingly and wishy-washily purplish the suburban counties and smaller cities.

Now tell me we can split the country into Red and Blue subdivisions. Because those are the lines we'd have to draw to give each squabbling side its own sovereign nation. Ever since anarcho-libertarianism caught on in the science fiction realm, writers have had major fun imagining micro-governing systems with little or no dependence on geographic boundaries, but none of them have borne much resemblance to anybody's "America."

So what we need is not secession but a system in which no one feels that need.

Funny thing is, we've already got one, at least on the national level.

There are many variations on that old tale, "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse," going all the way back to Aesop's Fables, but most of them run along these lines: The City Mouse visits his country cousin and finds there a place where life is quiet and pretty dull, the food available for scavenging is plain and sometimes sparse, but the few dangers are easily avoided. Then the City Mouse plays host in turn, and the Country Mouse gets a taste of a much more bustling and exciting world with varied and plentiful food to feast on ... and deadly, nerve-racking hazards around every corner.  The moral of the story is usually either "everything in life's a trade-off" or just "to each his own."

And when the post-Revolutionaries finalized their design for this country as the "United States of America" back in 1789 (c'mon, folks — the year the Constitution took effect), they did so knowing they were knitting together not just cities and country settlements but a widely disparate collection of communities, and deliberately rigged things to give those communities, for better or worse, the freedom to stay as they were as much as possible. The powers assigned to the federal level were a little vague but limited to the sorts of things that weren't practical on a state level: diplomacy, defense, interstate commerce, etc. They made this more explicit with the Tenth Amendment, the one that reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

And, with a few exceptions, later amendments have generally stuck to that principle, with most of the exceptions being in another area — the rights of American citizens — that can only really be dealt with at the federal level. (I'm not going to get into the permanent pissing contest over the one authorizing the national income tax other than to note that without it, the feds would be stuck with the relatively pissant revenues available from things like excise taxes, and we'd have to wave goodbye not just to social programs but, say, a fighting force capable of modern-day combat.)

In fact, the biggest bonehead move we've yet made in amending the Constitution was when enough people got their panties twisted over liquor that we banned it nationwide in 1919. And fourteen years later, when we repealed that amendment with another one, the replacement specifically included language allowing states and their communities to stay dry if they so wished. Some of those communities still do (even though their mini-Prohibition was already a joke in an era when anybody looking to tie one on can get across damn near any county line in less than an hour).

Honestly, the only way you could give the various flavors of Americans any more legal leeway in being who they want to be is if you were somehow able to single-handedly amend every state's constitution to end with "the powers not delegated to this state by its constitution, nor superseded by the United States Constitution, are reserved to its municipalities respectively, or to the people."

So it's not going to come as any surprise to readers of future posts here if I sway in the direction of states' rights, and people's rights, when trying to hash out ways to soothe our national neuroses. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me, mind you; for much of my adult life, if I thought of balances of power at all I tended to lean slightly federalist, if only because that seemed more efficient while state- and community-level lawmaking felt kind of archaic.

But if Prohibition didn't serve as an illustration for us all that acting at the federal level can be a serious overreach, it should've; if the lesson had been learned, Congress would never have tried to pull constitutional fast ones like the "Defense of Marriage Act." (While I'm on that subject, let's clarify that civil rights issues are still the kind that belong at the federal, not state or community, level, the shitty tainting of "states' rights" as a cloak for "legalized bias" notwithstanding. And if you're still up for restricting rights of people based on things like sexual orientation, be honest and attentive enough to see that you're already behind in that battle, and based on how your fellow Americans' beliefs have been shifting, your final defeat appears to be nigh.)

That mouse story would've sounded bizarre if it ended with the City Mouse and the Country Mouse each marshaling all their resources for a culture war to impose one mouse's values on the other one. Why the fuck doesn't that ring false in real life?

The view from our navels

Back on my original website, I once did a running series called "The Seven Deadly Bullshits," on the various flavors of irrationality and illogic that suppress our primate instincts toward forming working community interrelationships and bring out that other instinct for flinging feces at each other. Just as with the Seven Deadly Sins I was ripping off, there was one flavor that I tagged as the "original sin" of bullshit, and that one I called "Solipsism."

There were a lot of essays I wrote on that site that, if I had to do them over again,  I'd have had to tweak, or overhaul or throw out. But I still think, more than ever, that I was onto something with that "Solipsism" essay.

If you're not familiar with the term "solipsism," it comes from philosophy and metaphysics, where the literal meaning is the argument or belief that only you yourself truly exist (well, from my perspective, it'd be "only I myself truly exist"), and everyone and everything else that appears to be around you is essentially a figment of your imagination.

Obviously, literally believing this to be true leads to results like being fitted for jackets that fasten in back and being liberally fed whatever medication is in vogue for treating major psychosis. There's a less literal sense of the word, though, defined as "extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption," and that one comes closer to what I've been seeing.

To be clear, I'm not dragging this term out as a five-dollar synonym for "selfishness"; that's a somewhat different thing as far as I'm concerned. Selfishness and self-interest are built into our DNA (and into the genes of every other species with a survival instinct) — we're all geared up to maximize success at surviving for ourselves and the others we identify with, whether they be family, demographic group or just the folks who share our chosen obsessions. And if you identify with a group that doesn't remind everyone else of, well, you, you'll often get the benefit of being labeled "selfless," even if you're still trying to stick it to the groups you don't identify with. So when you get down to it, the differences between "selfishness" and "selflessness" can frequently just depend on which vantage point you're observing them from.

No, what I'm talking about is something more akin to what rationalists and logicians call the "typical mind fallacy," the belief that your worldview is the way everyone else perceives things too. If you're running this particular bit of junk code in your headspace, then when you run into other people who appear to perceive things differently, you'll tend to assume that either it's just a observation error ("There must be part of that story that I'm not seeing, and if I did, I'd immediately identify with what's going on"), or a glitch on their part ("This'll all be smoothed out if I just explain this to them my way"), or, more ominously, a wrongness in the world that you need to stamp out real soon.

And the other reason I focused on the label of "solipsism" is this notion I see more and more in people's heads that, while it may not be literally true that you're the only one who really exists, the people around you are supposed to be behaving as if you are — that everything they do ought to be done for your benefit. You can see at least one yutz of this type on any given season of any reality-competition TV series: the person who's about to be voted off the island or whatever and is absolutely flabbergasted that even apparent allies might be voting or working against them. "Wait, how could they do that to me? It's ... it's ... almost as if they wanted to win the million-dollar prize themselves rather than rig things so I could win it! What were they thinking? How could that be?"

Or, a little more topically considering how much bickering is still going on over the last Election Day ... well, you think I'm going to pick on the people who are upset that their Chosen Candidate didn't win (even if their party did), or the ones who get upset when, despite the victory by their side, they realize they're still not going to get everything they want. And I'll get to them someday, but in the meantime, they're already being verbally ass-kicked by plenty of snarkmeisters. But what about all those people we meet or hear about who've decided they aren't even going to vote anymore because "my vote just doesn't make a difference," the usual translation of that turning out to be "I don't pick winners often enough"? Let me get this straight: With somewhere around 225 million people eligible to vote in the U.S. — or, to get real, the 132 million or so who actually did it last fall — there are people out there who expect that their ballot choice for president should make a noticeable difference to the result, and if it doesn't, that means "the system is broken." I can't imagine a more thorough rejection of the concept that Other People Exist than this right here, that someone can be incapable of accepting that in a nation of hundreds of millions, made up mostly of states with populations in the millions, the vote of a single person is always, and should be, just one drop in the waterfall.

A society, any society, is a consensus of its members; otherwise, it's a civil war in progress. When you start to realize there are a large and growing mass of people who aren't even equipped to perceive the other members, much less accurately understand how they tick, it becomes a lot easier to understand why we're having such trouble keeping our society running reasonably smoothly these days.

While it might be fashionable to lump this latter-day navel-gazing as one of the Things We Can Blame on the Internet, let's face it; we've been heading in this direction in this country for a long time, possibly since World War II ended. That was the last era when events actively conspired to throw us together with people who were our fellow nationals but otherwise might be nothing like us. Since then, our neighborhoods, our upbringings, our workplaces and our interests have been busy pressing Like together with Like, and sifting the various Unlikes apart from the others. Hell, the interactive parts of the Internet might actually be introducing people who share one common interest but differ on all the others ... at least until they bring up some social or political stance and all its opponents scream out allcaps obscenities and flee to friendlier comment threads elsewhere.

And it's the solipsistic outlook that drives the speed of that flight; that puts us in situations where we think things have been "worked out" if 51 percent win what they want while the 49 percent remainder get the friendly suggestion to go fuck themselves; that makes us forget that there's even such a thing as a "positive-sum" solution, an outcome that goes beyond "I win, you lose" to reach "we've all won something more than what we had, even if nobody won everything they craved."

So how do we get past that outlook and start striving again for more than win/lose zero-sum outcomes? I'm not entirely sure, but I know it's the topic I'll keep coming back to on this blog, because, like I said, it's our Original Bullshit, the one that will sicken and kill us if we're unable to flush it.

Note One: You'll notice I didn't take any political stances here myself. That's because which stances any given yutz is yammering about are irrelevant to how we might stop yammering and return to negotiating. And also because I don't believe there are any saints out there, politically speaking. I'll no doubt sum up my own beliefs eventually, if only for the public service of giving anyone who's reading here an accurate sense of why I piss them off, but for now let's just say my political philosophy boils down to "I'm everyone's asshole, and I'm fine with that."

Note Two: In case anyone's curious about what my original list of Seven Deadly Bullshits included, they were: Solipsism, Inconsistency, Pretension, Overgeneralizing, Oversimplifying, Inflexibility and Intolerance. Read into each one whatever you want; it's not worth recycling that whole series here just to explain how I chose and defined each one.