It’s not a trick question for who among us wasn’t schooled to chime We the People Are!
As President John F. Kennedy said on Sept. 12, 1962, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”
That same year, two terrific comic movies were written, in JFK’s spirit, to rouse us from the impotence of peasanty.
“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World” (Nov. 1963) satirized how a motley bunch of Americans—from dentist Melville Crump to the truck driver Lennie Pike and sleazy salesman Otter Meyer—will go bonkers to find buried treasures.[i]
Peter O'Toole as Dr. Strangelove
Two months later saw the release of “Dr. Strangelove,” a brilliant mockery of how the commander of an air force base (inebriated because he “drank only pure grain alcohol” to avoid the toxic fluoride he was certain the Commies were slipping into our water) “learned,” as the film’s subtitle says, how “to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Both films were written in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear armageddon than ever.
Today, however, after Trump’s Iowa triumph, pollsters say the only thing uniting “liberals” and “conservatives” is depression, which a Gallup poll last fall said we’re suffering at a higher level than the organization has ever recorded.
Shouldn’t we have a bit more good cheer than that, with Wikipedia, Chat GPT4 and Reddit free of charge and medicine able re-encode RNA to slow or alleviate many diseases and then instant-message those cures into our genes?
That said, our bleakness may come as no surprise to fans of top-grossing PG13 films, in which, as the journal Pediatrics recently found, “gun violence has more than tripled” since the rating was introduced in 1985.
Nor to people streaming shows from top Internet providers; from “Black Mirror,” where creepy high-techs dissemble bodies and souls, to “Squid Game,” where fascists throw impoverished young adults into games they’re doomed to lose unless they let elites harvest their organs and crush their souls, and “Snowpiercer,” where largely young passengers are exploited by authoritarian billionaires who’ve trapped them on a train that loops around an Earth frozen by an apocalypse.
On Tuesday, some influential Sub-stackers pushed back in columns suggesting that dysphoria wasn’t about to hobble democracy.
Mary Trump—still seeing “the good in us”--said the resignation of Trump’s top three lawers may defeat him regardless of the polls. (Mary’s uncle Don strengthened her case on Wednesday when he made derisive comments that nearly led the judge to throw him out of court.)
Also on Tuesday, Scott Alexander argued in “Astral Codex 10” that Americans could still become “effective altruists” if only they learned to cut through “the bread and butter of modern news,” whose manufactured “if it bleeds it leads” not-so-melodramas make us feel angry in ways so vague they leave us impotent.
Scott respects empiricism so we have to evaluate his optimistic claims in light of a dark 2014 Cambridge University study by politics professor Martin Gilbert, which concludes that special interests have already stripped Americans of the efficacy they’d need to establish altruism on the ground. “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened,” Gilbert wrote because “majority voters” do not rule America, “at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
Though Gilbert’s study is a decade old, it retains a grain of truth, for in Washington DC our 535 elected officials are dwarfed by the number of lobbyists; over 12,000 have officially registered as such; and in 2022 they sweetened their pitches with $4.1 billion in cash.
I’ve given those lobbyists only a single grain because on Wednesday the Supreme Court suggested it may soon flummox their game.
The Justices’ questions in hearing “Looper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo” suggested they were close to overruling deference to “Chevron,” a doctrine which since 1984 has given federal regulatory agencies such as the FDA, FTC and EPA the authority to resolve ambiguities in the regulation of drugs, monopolies and pollutants.
The 3 and ½ hour hearing I remotely attended had nothing to say about how much clout should be given to the people or their President. But if it throws out Chevron, it could radically empower judges to overrule experts without having to show they understand anything about the experts’ fields.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that federal agencies, unlike judges, have expertise and knowledge of the consequences of policy choices.
“Why shouldn’t deference be given to that?” she asked. The attorney challenging Chevron responded evasively: “I don’t think Congress wants the court to do policy. I think Congress wants the court to do its ordinary function, which is interpret the law.”
Despite the conventional wisdom that America is divided by the glacial chasm pictured above, most Americans would be—by their own standards—far better off under Biden than under Trump.
That being said, most Americans don’t want a nice old dad; they want a strong-man father. Let’s face it: Biden will never spend $5,833 a month as Trump does to blush his face orange and to wrap around his pony tail into what his stylists call “a new romantic fringe” fashion. But he needs to consult with a dragon who can bring fire to both his throat and campaign, especially since the journalists who should be lobbing every legislator with hard questions will be throwing softballs to a few at best.
Trump’s grandiose delusion that “I alone can fix America” may make President Biden queasy, but Biden needs to talk a bit less about how government is working well (a sentiment shared by only 4% of Americans, according to that Gallup poll last fall).
Biden needs to emulate Trump in one way: using plenty of repetition, then dramatic pauses for applause, to help people see that if Trump wins, Trump he will do the very opposite of what majorities of both Republicans and Democrats tell pollsters should should be done:
Trump has vowed, for instance, to:
--withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement the 2015 treaty that still sparks most of the world’ progress in curbing climate change;
--appoint more judges to terminate women’s access to abortion, something he says he’s spent 54 years trying to terminate “and I’m proud to have done it”
--extend tax cuts the top 1%, who now own more wealth than the bottom 92% (Biden says he’d only extend the cuts to households making $400,000 and under a year)
--cut Social Security which 80% of Americans oppose
--eliminate universal pre kindergarten, which three quarter of Americans support
--create new tax loopholes to encourage corporations to ship jobs overseas when 63% of Americans want him to do the opposite
--hobble students with high interest rates while lowering rates for big banks, even though 69% of Americans want him to do the opposite.
[i] The director of “Mad, Mad, Mad World” never made another funny movie—his oeuvre was dark drama—he telegraphed his darkness in the movie’s title which most people in the early 60s knew was an acronym for “Mutually Assured Destruction.”