I have led a charmed life.
When I moved into our present house, in 1983, we were in the lower middle class.
I had just lost my job at a weekly newspaper. My wife had just gotten work and, with her employer’s help, was going to grad school. We could barely afford the interest on the $44,500 we borrowed. Her dad gave us $5,000 down, but grudgingly. He thought we were wasting our money.
My new neighbors changed me.
Moore’s Law does many things. It is deflationary, and it accelerates the pace of change. It has given us longer lifespans, with more ease, than any generation before.
Moore’s Law was originally a prediction that chip densities could double, every year or two, as far out as Gordon Moore, later co-founder of Intel, could foresee, at least in 1965. But it is much more. Moore’s Law infects every technology, and everything technology touches, accelerating the pace of change in every direction.
For example.
I should be dead by now, or infirm, as my father was at my age. But the discovery of statins and ARBs keep my cholesterol, measured at 373 in 2000, and resulting hypertension under control. (My dad had his first heart attack at age 47.) My dear wife should be crippled, or dying, but advances in treating cancer and implanting artificial joints mean she still walks ahead of me.
This is Moore’s Law in action. Call it Moore’s Law of Health. We live longer because of the technology created by Moore’s Law, and for those who can afford it, an active life to age 100 is within reach.
But there is no Moore’s Law of Software. Software only improves as new tools are created and implemented.
There is no Moore’s Law of Education. You learn only as fast as you learn.
There is also no Moore’s Law of Politics. If there is one, it acts in reverse, against change. We don’t change our political beliefs in reaction to technology. Our assumptions remain those we started with. Very few people change political sides.
America has been the terror of the world for nearly 75 years now. Along the way we have overthrown many elected governments, killed and brutalized millions. When the Cold War ceased to be our excuse, we did it for oil, or because “terrorists” were doing it back.
We glory in our military excess. This is bipartisan. President Obama attacked Libya to get rid of Qaddafi, which is now a hellhole and source of migrants destabilizing Europe. He got involved in Syria but did nothing to stop the war there. Europe’s refugee crisis has “Made in USA” stamped all over it.
We’re still in Afghanistan. Obama refused to get out. He never moved against the military control of sporting events, the staged reunions, “God Bless America” replacing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” or thank you for your service.
The United States spends more of its treasure on the military than all our conceivable rivals do, combined. We have usually gotten away with it, but not always. We still haven’t gotten our heads around losing in Vietnam, or the Iranian Revolution.
Thanks to Trump, the price of arrogance is now going to be paid. Trump’s stupidity guarantees it. And there’s nothing for us to do but take it.
This is where the next Democratic Administration will get its fiercest pushback.
Are we the baddies?
The British comics David Mitchell and Robert Webb did a sketch about that a decade ago, portraying two German soldiers. It was funny because, indeed, we couldn’t conceive of ourselves as the baddies.
But we often are. We usually are.
Even Barack Obama didn’t stop us from being bad. He didn’t get out of Iraq until he had a government there of his choosing, not the Iraqis’. He never got out of Afghanistan. Those detention centers kids are languishing in were built under his Administration.
The Darkness is always around us.
It searches for us in the dark teatime of the soul. It tries to drag us down into nothingness. Usually we resist it.
Not always.
Wealth and fame are no immunity from the Darkness. Talent doesn’t make you immune. Knowing it, being able to name it, doesn’t mean it won’t come for you. I’m not immune to it.
We don’t know what leads people to choose eternal Darkness. We can’t know. It’s a secret they take to the grave. As with mass shootings, we’re desperate to know, but our souls are private worlds.
We think celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade are special, but they’re just people. We also think America is special. The lesson of our time is that it’s not.
The idea of America has always been built on its denying the Darkness, but Darkness has always been here. It was a snake under the table when the Constitution was being written. It remained there, despite everything, after the Civil War. It remained there after World War I and World War II, spreading its tentacles through the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The Darkness wasn’t destroyed by the Civil Rights movement. It just went underground.
While we pretended to have beaten the Darkness, it continued to grow in the American soul, despite the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower that trying to police the world or build a military-industrial complex threatened everything we called our light. Now it has come out to play.
At this point in 1978, no one in politics saw oil coming.
I was getting ready to graduate from Northwestern, and would spend the next several months, mostly unemployed, back home in Houston, the capital of oil, before getting the job resulting in the picture to the right. People were becoming accustomed to the strange man in the White House and his scandals. His “Georgia Gang” of cronies was being derided as a political gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
But beneath the surface, economic change was brewing. Oil had been handed political power under Lyndon Johnson and found a ready embrace in the Nixon years thanks to former Governor John Connally, whose decision to switch sides seemed at the time like a small story but would later prove massive.
Oil didn’t want to become a Republican bulwark. They wanted to play both sides against each other. Carter, and his more liberal detractors, forced them into the Republican camp. During the 1978 campaign, and beyond, this would prove decisive.
We’re at a similar historical junction now. Washington is becoming accustomed to a strange man in the White House, and his scandals. His “Wall Street Gang” is being derided as a political gang that can’t shoot straight.
But beneath the surface, change is again brewing.
Continue reading "The 1978 Game: Our New Political Overlords" »
The current economic era is unique.
In the past, economies were driven by human labor, by land and its resources, by financial capital, or by infrastructure.
Technology is different.
Technology doesn’t require land, it can replace resources, and it doesn’t require massive amounts of low-skilled labor. Singapore (right), Hong Kong, Israel and Silicon Valley have none of these things.
What these and other tech centers have, is trained minds in abundance. They can create them. They can attract them. They nurture them. They give them what they need to thrive.
The media calls it the Lynching Memorial.
Its proper name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Equal Justice Initiative built it, and an accompanying museum, on a six acre site at Centennial Hill in Montgomery, Alabama , near where I-85 meets I-65. It is just a few blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Hank Williams museum.
Call it the duality of the southern thing.
There are 313 names inscribed there, on tombstones that also bear the names of counties across the South where men were murdered during the days of Jim Crow. There are two sets of tombstones, and the museum hopes this second set will eventually be picked up by those counties, creating memorials to the dead there.
It is, without question, the most moving monument built in America since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982.
Recently my dear heart dragged me to a wedding.
It was for the son of one of her co-workers. The groom was born here, the parents arriving from India a few years before his birth. The bride was born in China but moved here as a toddler and is a U.S. citizen.
The bride and groom grew up together. They met in high school about 15 years ago. They moved among their guests with the grace and comfort of a long-married couple, secure in themselves. Their relationship may have once been controversial, but their joy in each other buried that long-ago. They live in Boston. He is a doctor. She’s a business consultant. They came down to be with his family. Some of her relatives traveled from China to Georgia to be at the celebration, in the shadow of Stone Mountain’s Confederate carving. Some of his traveled all the way from India.
Recent Comments