By the People?

    As a general rule, I try to stay out of politics which I should clarify as defined by "heated" politics.  What was once a time for having civil discussions and bipartisanship seems to have become a distant dream.  This somewhat came home to me after reading a short entry in London Review of Books that noted former President Obama when he made a speech regarding the killing by police of George Floyd: ...a speech that was striking for its lack of eloquence -- or urgency.  His cheerful praise for the demonstrators and moderate calls for police reform felt obsolete, the voice of a well-meaning father whose children have long since grown up.   That and an duo-interview with the 71-year old Senator Elizabeth Warren and the 31-year old Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez at the New Yorker Festival in which the latter said that bipartisanship in Congress was basically a "vintage fantasy," one which brought the Iraq War but not a solution to social racism.*  The points was not that both speakers' words weren't meaningful, or that working together couldn't work, but rather that times had changed.  Most people running the upper echelons of the federal government today are my age or older, which pretty much means "old."  I could only hear that phrase echoing in my head louder and louder: "old ways die hard;"  it is long past time (in my opinion) for our country to "hand over the reins" (of power).  Times have changed (as one example, my state is only now introducing an amendment to our state constitution to remove the words "slave" and "slavery" from its text  -- there is no guarantee that the proposed amendment will pass).  

    Add to all of this a regular feature of The Atlantic which asks various people different questions each month.  A recent piece asked, "If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?"  For many, the changes they'd make would be fairly current, perhaps altering earlier election results or stopping the assassinations of world leaders.  But while those were some of the printed answers (Kennedy and Lincoln being shot, the promises made but not kept at the end of the Civil War, etc.) I found other answers more intriguing: The burning of the Library of Alexandria: Its destruction held back humanity at least a grade or two...The creation of the Interstate Highway System, which killed train travel and enabled urban sprawl, pollution, and inequality...The establishment of chattel slavery in the British colonies and its continuation after the American Revolution.  But then came this from author Anna Della Subin: In 1937, a British colonialist in Kuwait was said to have dreamed of a gnarled, uprooted tree.  A dream interpreter recognized the tree, and told him that the dream meant oil would be found at the site—leading to the discovery of one of the Earth’s largest oil reserves.  One wishes he’d had insomnia instead!  So a quick think, what single event would you change?  Or would you change anything?** 

    Our election system is, or at least appears to be, broken.  A conservative Supreme Court nominee is being rushed through just days before the election, this at a time when --on the death of Antonin Scalia in 2016-- the same party said that 269 days "...was too close to the election for it to be right to confirm a successor."  Said another piece in LRB: In the last presidential election, 0.5 per cent of Americans made donations larger than $200; that 0.5 per cent accounted for more than two-thirds of the money spent in the campaign.  Add to all of this that some states allow early voting while others do not; same with voter registration; same with showing identification; each state has different rules (prior to 1965, some states in the South used to ask black voters at the polling station how many bubbles were in a bar of soap; any answer would be wrong and voting was denied...a map of current restrictions can be viewed at Sierra).  Changes to such inequities can only come from the people, the people who vote...or do their votes really make a difference?  The answer is...not really, since our electoral system is more than a bit confusing even for those of us living here.  Presidents such as Trump and George W. Bush both lost the votes cast by the people, but still won the White House.  Wait, what?  How can that be? (and that's only the federal elections as our states often have their own rules)  If you're already confused  here's a very brief summary of how it all works, even if it sometimes appears that it doesn't (and while I try to use only reputable sources, this IS a blog and in a time when mis- or disinformation is rampant, I always recommend that you to do your own fact checking)...

    First off, the popular vote (those votes cast by the individual people) is basically overridden by our Electoral College, a process where states elect "delegates" to cast their vote for the candidate who received the most "people" votes...only in some states, those delegates are not obligated to do so.  Such delegates are chosen based on a state's population so in theory, the more people you have in your state, the more delegates you have...only it doesn't really work out quite that way either.  And if there's a dispute, state legislatures can even overturn the votes of delegates.  Sound confusing as if one's vote doesn't matter?  Here's a much better explanation (I think) from CNN (whittled down from a bevvy of sources which are also trying to explain the electoral system here in the U.S.): Americans who go to the polls on Election Day don't actually select the President directly.  They are technically voting for 538 electors who, according to the system laid out by the Constitution, meet in their respective states and vote for President and Vice President. These people, the electors, comprise the Electoral College, and their votes are then counted by the President of the Senate in a joint session of Congress.  Why did the framers choose this system?  There are a few reasons: First, they feared factions and worried that voters wouldn't make informed decisions.  They didn't want to tell states how to conduct their elections.  There were also many who feared that the states with the largest voting populations would essentially end up choosing the President.  Others preferred the idea of Congress choosing the President, and there were proposals at the time for a national popular vote.  The Electoral College was a compromise.

    An article in the New York Review of Books added this (in reviewing the book by Lawrence Douglas, Will He Go?): ...if no candidate receives a majority of the Electoral College votes, then the election for president is thrown into the newly elected Congress—which under the Constitution takes office on January 3 and, under the Electoral Count Act, convenes to count the electoral votes on January 6.  The House of Representatives selects the president from among the top three vote-getters for president in the Electoral College.  Each of the fifty states, whatever its population, gets one vote, and, under the Twelfth Amendment, “a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.”  The Senate selects between the two candidates for vice-president who received the most electoral votes.  

If those processes fail and we get neither a president nor a vice-president (who then serves as president), we turn to the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, passed pursuant to Congress’s authority under section 2 of the Twentieth Amendment.  The Speaker of the House of Representatives, if he or she is eligible to be president (which requires being at least thirty-five years old and a “natural-born Citizen” who has lived in the United States for fourteen years), can resign from Congress and “act as President.”  If the speaker is ineligible or unwilling, the act then turns to the president pro tem of the Senate, and one after another to the members of the cabinet, in order of the seniority of their departments.

    Still confused?  Believe it or not, it gets worse...our Constitution and the powers so granted by the Founders over two centuries ago, is being tested and questioned as to what gaps still need to be defined and filled (an ongoing process as any court will tell you).  And a disputed election would actually be nothing new in this country (yes, it's been equal or worse in past years).  So --and before this enters my dreaded arena of "heated" politics-- I present this from an interesting book that explored "myth and fantasy," From Homer to Harry Potter (yes, it even tackled the Bible): Baptism or death?  This was the choice King Charlemagne gave to the residents of Saxony in the second half of the eighth century...Believing that this tribe would be better citizens --more peaceable, and easier to rule-- if he could baptize them, Charlemagne's plan was not merely to defeat them in battle, but to force them to convert to Christianity.  Thus, he offered the conquered Saxons a choice of baptism or death.  As history shows, however, such forced conversions are rarely, if ever, effective.  On one day alone, Charlemagne beheaded 4,500 Saxon rebels.  And not long after, while Charlemagne was off fighting in Spain, the stubborn Saxons rebelled again.

    Columnist David Brooks mentioned on PBS Newshour that if the citizens felt that the 2020 election results were falsified or fraudulent, that he hoped that they would take to the streets in protest.  Merlin Sheldrake (in his fascinating book, Entangled Life) wrote: Many scientific concepts  --from chemical bonds to genes to species-- lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with.  From one perspective, "individual" is no different: just another category to guide human thought and behavior.  Nonetheless, so much of daily life and experience --not to mention our philosophical, political, and economic systems-- depends on individuals that it can be hard to stand by and watch the concept dissolve.  Where does this leave "us"?  What about "them"?  "Me"?  "Mine"?  "Everyone"?  "Anyone"?...The "loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of 'alien control,' " observed an elder stateman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness.  It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence.

    Can't we just get along and view the world as a whole?  The group War once asked: I'd kinda' like to be the president, so I could show you how your money's spent.  Actually, the song was titled Why Can't We Be Friends? and also said: The color of your skin don't matter to me as long as we can live in harmony.  Let's put this into perspective overall; here's how Merlin Sheldrake (mentioned above) did it: Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss.  They are inside you and around you.  They sustain you and all that you depend on.  As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years.  They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the coposition of the Earth's atmosphere.  Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave.  Yet they have their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.  The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.  We may not be Saxons but after reading that?  Politics?  Pshaw...

*In the same piece by Adam Shatz, he noted this about the younger viewpoint: ...today’s protesters don’t even believe in the dream.  They’ve been ridiculed for their sense of entitlement by those who’ve enjoyed far more prosperity and, for all the mainstream criticism of identity politics, they understand far better than previous generations that racism is a system, rather than a matter of individual hatred, prejudice or ‘ignorance’; they know that it’s embedded in institutions, and that unless it’s rooted out, American democracy will remain an unequal and unsafe space for black and brown people.

**Along those lines, if you could venture back to an earlier time, where would you go?  A peek at this came from Smithsonian when George Harrison visited his sister in Benton, Illinois; he was basically unknown in the U.S. (although the Beatles album was doing well in the U.K.).  One resident at the time who saw him play along with the local rockabilly band, saying, "He was pretty good, I guess, for someone who looked kind of like a hippie, up there playing with that country band.  But did I think he was going to be famous?  No, can't say that I did."