pav dot quest

You Choose to Exist Here: Reliving Deep Space Nine

Deep Space Nine has always been my favorite of all the Star Trek incarnations. Sweeping in scope, meticulous with character, and challenging my moral intuitions, I got the feeling from the entirety from Deep Space Nine that one gets from a rich and satisfying novel: I felt like a better person for having experienced it.

Occasional viewings of particular out of context episodes aside, I’ve been through the series twice. Once when it originally aired in the 90s when I was in high school and college, probably missing a view episodes due to the ephemeral nature of fixed-schedule TV airings (which seems an absurd way to watch a series now); and in the aughts when I was in my twenties, mostly via torrented downloads on my computer and old-school video iPod.

I am now beginning a third time around, in my late 30s, this time alongside my wife who, while no stranger to Star Trek, never saw DS9. We’ve just watched the pilot episode, titled “Emissary,” and there was something different about it this time, some things I truly didn’t expect.

First of all, I think I expected it to seem more dated and hokey. Instead, it came off as rather mature, far more sure of itself than most TV pilots, and head and shoulders and freakin’ torso over other Star Trek pilots. Jessica, to my surprise, said it seemed a little more mawkish than she expected, but within acceptable parameters (my words, she never talks like that). But not for me. It really held up. I rarely felt taken out of the action by something that seemed forced or overdone.

Also, I know that DS9 has the reputation of being the “downer” of the franchise, the “grim” series, but coming back to it, from the beginning, after all these years, this really was something of a shock. The original series, The Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise all began their runs with heaps of wonder and optimism. (Things of course go badly wrong for Voyager in order to set the stage for the series, but the hopeful “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning” spirit was always there.)

The series opens with a flashback to a massacre, and our lead protagonist unable to save his dead wife, and having to abandon his ship to a relentless zombie-cyborg force. Being stationed then at Deep Space Nine, née Terok Nor, we are placed in the midst of an ugly transition out of a brutal occupation. In the pilot episode of a Star Trek series, we are immediately faced with violent, pointless deaths and several characters absolutely spilling over with anger, regret, and helplessness. It’s quite stirring, and it all works.

But there was one part that hit me the hardest, that sunk deep into me, and oddly it’s something I’d almost entirely forgotten about from past viewings.

Toward the end of the episode, Ben Sisko is conversing with the skeptical wormhole aliens, non-physical entities who don’t even experience linear time as we do. They speak to him by taking the form of people in his memories, in the very settings he originally experienced them. So, for example, he discusses how humans experience time with his “son” Jake as they sit by what appears to be a lake, or with his late wife “Jennifer” as they walk down the beach where they met. It’s not really Jake and Jennifer, but wormhole aliens who have assumed their forms, taken from Sisko’s memory.

Somehow, Sisko repeatedly finds himself talking to the aliens amid his memory of the day his wife was killed by the Borg, where he sees his wife, dead, under a pile of rubble, as he’s about to be pulled away toward an escape vessel by his Bolian crewmate. Memory after memory, conversation after conversation, Sisko returns to the place and time he lost his wife.

Throughout their conversations, which are some of the headiest and evocative pieces of dialogue one was ever likely to hear on prime time commercial television, Sisko struggles to explain to the aliens how humans and other “corporeal beings” do not exist in a timeless state, but begin an existence, live their lives through a chain of causal events, and then cease to exist. The aliens are entirely unfamiliar with such an existence, and they ask increasingly probing questions in order to grasp the concept.

One thing doesn’t make sense to them. Remember, they only have Sisko’s memories as a frame of reference. Sisko is telling them that corporeal beings travel along a timeline, and make the best of their lives from one moment to the next, aware that each choice affects and allows the moments to come. And yet, they keep returning to the scene of Jennifer’s death. One of them asks Sisko, “If what you say is true, then why do you exist here?!”

It’s not the aliens taking Sisko to this scene, it’s Sisko taking them.

“I never left this ship,” Sisko says, a realization dawning on him.

“You exist here,” the alien in the form of Jennifer says, also beginning to understand.

“I exist here,” says Sisko. “I don’t know if you can understand.” He begins to sob, increasingly so as he speaks. “I see her like this, every time I close my eyes. In the darkness, in the blink of an eye, I see her… like this!”

“None of your past experiences helped prepare you for this consequence.”

“And I have never figured out how to live without her.”

“So, you choose to exist here,” says the alien, and Sisko nods. “It is not linear.”

“No,” he says, drained, exposed, defeated. “It’s not linear.”

In previous viewings, this scene was meaningful, but to the extent that it was a character I was interested in coming to terms with something painful. It did not truly resonate with me.

Now, as I approach 40, with a wife and two children that I love beyond measure, and with an ongoing struggle with my own post-traumatic stress, I understood.

For so long after I was attacked, I existed there, on that sidewalk, in the dark, with the sounds of footfalls running toward me, of the blows to my head and body, the impact of the concrete, the vertigo of the stumbling walk home. I existed there.

I existed in the throngs of middle school classmates joyfully mocking me, I existed in the oppressive air of the abuse and scrutiny (real and imagined) of my preteen and teenage years. Decades on, I stayed there.

And much to the sadness and frustration of those who loved me, but couldn’t understand, it was not linear.

I suppose I simply hadn’t yet lived enough to truly understand Sisko’s journey before. It’s amazing to me now, to think that this profound, climactic lesson of my favorite show just flitted away in previous viewings. I’m so glad I came back to it now to experience in earnest. I wonder what else Deep Space Nine will show me this time that it couldn’t before.

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August 30, 2016

attack, deep space nine, ptsd, star trek, television

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This Fucking Guy: How Our Shitty Electoral System Let a Monster Run Maine

Even in the Age of Trump, one political figure stands out above all others as the lowest of the low, the king of the boors, the bastard of disaster, Paul LePage, second-term governor of the great state of Maine, my home.

In just the last 72 hours, he has left a threatening voicemail with a state legislator, promising to “come after you” and calling him a “cocksucker.” He also demanded the legislator “prove I’m a racist,” which LePage quickly did all by himself:

When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don’t you? You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts.

These are just the latest two examples of what kind of an abysmal pit of a human being he is.

Believe me when I tell you that Maine is a good state. The people are by and large good-hearted, decent, and tolerant. There is a generosity of spirit within the state’s culture that I’ve not seen the likes of in any other place I’ve lived. Now, of course, Maine is populated by humans, and that means a large number of them will be assholes, ignoramuses, vultures, bullies, cowards, and gross opportunists. Such is homo sapiens in all its wonder.

But Paul LePage does not represent the Maine I know. His governorship is not a true reflection of the politics, nor even the simplest notions of decency, of Mainers as a whole. And yet somehow he has been elected the state’s leader, twice. How could this be?

You might already know that in both of LePage’s gubernatorial races, he faced not one but two opponents: A Democratic nominee, and an independent, Eliot Cutler. Now, Maine has a history of being open to independent candidacies that sets it apart from other states. Sen. Angus King is one such independent, and was previously a very popular governor. It is rational for other potentially-strong independent candidates to think they have a realistic shot at being elected over the major party candidates.

You know how this ends, of course. In 2010 the vote was more or less split three ways, with LePage eking out a plurality victory with almost 38%, and the independent Cutler coming in second with 36%, and the Democrat Libby Mitchell lagging with about 19%. Fast forward to 2014 and the unthinkable was thunk all over again, but this time Cutler faltered, earning only a little over 8% of the vote, but enough to deny a victory to the Democrat, Rep. Mike Michaud, who lost with 43% to LePage’s 48%.

I say that Cutler denied a victory to Michaud because there was very little overlap in those who favored both Cutler and LePage. Had Cutler not run, Michaud would have won. In 2010, had the Democrats realized they were out of luck that year, they could have rallied behind Cutler, and kept LePage from ever having gotten near the governorship, with a guaranteed blowout victory.

So is it all Cutler’s fault? Is it Libby Mitchell’s for not facing reality in 2010? In the narrow view, yes. For the good of the state they sought to lead, they should both have examined their consciences and done what needed to be done to stop LePage from becoming governor.

But in the broad view, the fault lies not with the candidates, who rationally believe they have a shot to win and a right to run, but with the electoral system itself. Hate the game, not the player.

I’m talking of course about the first-past-the-post system used for almost every office in American politics, where the person who simply gets the most votes – not the candidate who gets a majority of votes, and that’s important – wins. Pluralities, not majorities, decide who takes power. And pluralities have a funny way of being very small and very unrepresentative of electorates as a whole.

Let’s pretend that Maine instead used a voting method that allowed voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. If voters get to indicate their second and third (and so on) choices on their ballots, non-viable candidates can be eliminated and a real consensus can emerge.

You might have heard of Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff Voting (insider secret: they’re the same thing!), particularly during the 2000 election when Ralph Nader began to whittle away at Al Gore’s support. It’s actually wicked simple.

To be brief, you look at your ballot, and you mark your favorite candidate with a 1, your second-favorite with a 2, and so on. In 2010, a Mitchell voter would likely have indicated Cutler as their second choice (not all of them, of course). So when the ballots were counted and showed that Mitchell had come in third place for first-choice votes, she’d have been eliminated, and those ballots would then be allocated to Mitchell voters’ second choices. Most of those would have been for Cutler, and Cutler would have gone over the 50% mark, winning with an actual majority instead of a mere plurality.

If you have a gut reaction to this along the lines of “well that doesn’t seem fair,” let me put it this way: Is it fair that the person taking office is someone wholly rejected and disliked by two-thirds of the electorate? By counting the second-choice votes of non-viable candidates, the electorate gets the candidate who was the true consensus choice of the majority. Mitchell voters, otherwise relegated to electoral irrelevance, can now say, “If I can’t have Mitchell, I’ll take Cutler,” and actually be heard. They still count.

Now repeat this for 2014. Chances are most Cutler voters (doomed to see their candidate get crushed) would have preferred Michaud over LePage. Eliminate Cutler in the first “round,” reallocate his supporters’ second-choice votes, and you probably have Michaud eking out a majority.

Or maybe you don’t! Maybe I’m wrong about who Cutler voters would have preferred and you still get a LePage win, but at least that would reflect the actual will of the electorate. As you can imagine, though, I find that implausible, and despite LePage’s strong 48% showing in 2014, a sizable enough portion of Cutler’s slice of the electorate would have pushed Michaud over the 50% mark, needing only an additional 6 and a half percent or so.

If Florida had used such a system in 2000, it’s inconceivable that Gore would not have won the state, being the overwhelming second-choice of Nader voters, and saving us from eight years of horror. And more to the point, it would have been the fair thing to do, representing the actual majority consensus of Florida’s voters. You know, “the people.”

(Now imagine if the current presidential election were closer than it is, and it really looked like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein might tilt the race from Clinton to Trump, when you know for certain that Trump doesn’t have the support of the majority of Americans. Yeah, think about that. Think hard about it, then get a drink.)

This is so obvious to me, that it pains me that the push to get ranked choice systems in place, even experimentally, is such an uphill slog. I was in the slog, having worked for FairVote back in the aughts, which is the country’s main advocate for these kinds of reform. There is a real movement to get this adopted in Maine statewide, as it has already been working successfully in the mayoral elections for Portland, Maine since 2011.

So let me wind this down by narrowing the focus back to the Goblin King of New England. Maine is not a state of grotesque monsters, and yet because of our first-past-the-post voting system, we have one for governor, and he’s one that threatens people who get under his skin and talks about shooting down black and Hispanic people. And that’s just what he says out loud. His policies (and just as important, the policies he blocks) are as dark and soulless as his words and his heart.

That’s not Maine. That’s not us. I wish we had a voting system that allowed us to say so.

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August 27, 2016

electoral reform, instant runoff voting, lepage, maine, paul lepage, ranked choice voting, voting

essays
You Don’t Seem Autistic to Me: Asperger’s and the Fear of Not Being Believed

[Updated below]

Do you remember when you were a kid, and being sick meant the tantalizing possibility of staying home from school for a day? I was usually pretty pleased to be just sick enough to avoid the misery of middle and high school, as long as the illness in question wasn’t something agonizing. (I did have some brutal ear infections back then that I did not enjoy.)

I remember that I would become pretty defensive about just how sick I really was. “Are you sure you’re not well enough to get through the day?” my parents would ask. I, taken aback by my parents’ skepticism, would respond with incredulity. “Yeeeesssss! I’m suuuuuure!” That defensiveness was due to the fact that I knew I wanted to be sick, and I knew that it was possible that I could maybe make it through the day, that I was perhaps playing it up a bit. It didn’t occur to me then, but does now, that this over-dramatization of illness on my part was probably already being taken into account by my parents and their decision to allow me to stay home. Melodrama was built into the stock, as it were.

Today something very similar is cropping up for me in a whole new way with my recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. (Here’s my first post on this new revelation, and some follow-up.) I am finding myself feeling very defensive about the fact of my condition. I am often under the suspicion that certain people in my life doubt the reality of my Asperger’s, that they think I’ve either gotten a bad diagnosis, or that I’ve somehow manipulated the process to get it.

In reality, only one person has actually said anything like this, and it was said with the best and most generous of intentions, saying that I am just too “charming” and personable to be someone with Asperger’s, comparing the behavior they see from me with others they know with the same condition, and who seem very, very different.

And I get that. Many people with Asperger’s, and many of the fictionalized portrayals of Asperger’s in entertainment, have glaringly severe social impairments that are obvious and off-putting to neurotypical people. There are aspies who really look like they “have something.” Whereas I don’t seem that way to most people. I would venture to say that no one, save my wife and therapist, would have ever entertained the notion that I might be at all autistic. I pass extremely well in most cases.

And why wouldn’t I? I have spent the better part of four decades trying to not seem like an alien, but suffering under the constant stress of my what I perceived to be scrutiny and revulsion from others. I had every incentive to appear as normal, as charming, as personable, and as funny as possible when in the company of people. And when attention on me wasn’t a requirement, my incentive was to blend, to disappear, to go as unnoticed as possible. As far as my brain was concerned, this was a struggle for survival. I, at a biological level, believed I needed to pass and to blend in order to live.

And I had no idea why it was so, so incredibly hard. I had to assume it was my own stupidity, laziness, obliviousness, or defectiveness.

So of course I don’t seem like an aspie to most people most of the time. As a contrast, there’s a person I know who I strongly suspect is also an aspie, but hasn’t felt the same need to adapt or ingratiate themselves to others, and has instead fully embraced their quirks, to hell with everyone else if they don’t like it. I never had the luxury to go in that direction, and it never occurred to me to be an option. I felt I had absolutely no choice but to pass.

And like the kid who is secretly glad to be sick in order to be able to stay home and watch TV all day, I wanted this diagnosis. I hoped the neuropsychologist would come back with a clear statement that I, indeed, had Asperger’s. It promised to explain so much of the pain and alienation and utter confusion I’ve experienced all my life, and it would mean that it wasn’t all due to my own failures to “live up” to the rest of the world’s norms and expectations. So I worried that in my testing, I might unconsciously try to “game the system,” and make myself seem more “aspie” (as though I would really know how to do that). Just as I was worried about others’ suspicions of me, I was suspicious of myself.

This worry, though, turned out to be a pointless one. The testing, which took about 10 hours total, was so, well, alien to me, so removed from anything that I thought could relate to Asperger’s or much of anything else, I couldn’t have gamed it if I’d wanted to. And like the mom who already presumes their sick kid is probably overstating things just a little, these tests and evaluations have unconscious leanings already taken into account, as their abstractness and inscrutability are a definite check against the gilding of psychological lilies.

In the interviews and written portions of the evaluation, I did check myself for embellishment, but it turned out I felt no impulse to embellish. Honest, straightforward answers according to my own genuine thoughts and feelings were enough. They spilled out. I told my story as honestly as one could, because that story was full and rich and silly and sad all by itself. It didn’t need any dramatization or exaggeration. It was whole on its own.

And the doctor’s diagnosis was indeed definitive. There was no hedging, no “jump ball,” as Ray Romano’s character on Parenthood put it when he looked into the possibility of being an aspie himself. It was for sure. The doctor described it as “severe,” meaning firmly on the spectrum, and she explained how my results on the barrage of seemingly unrelated tests all confirmed this, one after the other.

She also described how people with Asperger’s commonly find themselves drawn to the arts and to acting in particular. Aspies usually have sharp minds and good observational skills, and use those to their advantage in learning particular crafts and in the imitation of others’ mannerisms and behavior. I’m a pretty good stage actor, and it turns out I’m also a pretty good neurotypical imitator. As I said, I’ve had almost 40 years of practice.

So it’s no surprise that I don’t “seem” autistic to most people. The doctor actually tried to impress upon me what a remarkable achievement it is that I’ve gotten this far, with a master’s degree and a meaningful job and a wonderful wife and amazing kids, all while trudging through this morass, and navigating through the confounding labyrinth of my differently-wired brain.

But rather than take pride, I tend to feel defensive. I still stress over scrutiny. I still worry about the doubts of others. Just as I’ve felt like a fraudulent human, always about to unmasked and humiliated (which, remember, I internalize as a genuine threat to my survival), here I am again afraid that others will think my autism is overstated or a mere performance.

Just last night I had a conversation about my autism with someone who has their own personal experience with people close to them who also have Asperger’s, and I felt like I was drowning. I rambled and sputtered, I spoke too loud and too fast, and I kept lurching back and forth between filling up conversational space and worrying that I had gone on too long. I was a hot mess, and now I realize it was because I was afraid I wasn’t being believed. This person had not said or done anything to make me think that, but I just thought that. In discussing something so new and personal and raw, I scrambled and flailed to protect myself.

I don’t want to feel that way anymore. Part of this new chapter of my life is the beginnings of acceptance and belief in myself, regardless of what others think, or even more important, what I perceive or suspect they think. That would be true even if I didn’t have Asperger’s.

This is real. This is who I am, and who I have always been. And though it is as old as I am, for now it is also new. In some ways, I am new. The coming months and years will find me experimenting with and easing into new ways of being and behaving that better suit me, and stepping back from many of the affectations and masks I’ve layered upon myself over the years. Many of those layers will stay, because they, too, are me.

I guess, when it comes down to it, I get to decide. I will try not to make that process harder on myself by worrying about the imagined doubts of others, which only fixes those layers more firmly in place.

Update August 27: Since writing this, one thing should be clarified. Some of the doubt I imagine to exist, but likely doesn’t, is about me, but another more problematic version of skepticism is doubt about the neuropsychologist who diagnosed me. And I just don’t know what to say to that. She’s an expert in her field, with decades of experience, and a particular specialization in adults on the spectrum, and she tested me for hours and hours over a period of months. And that’s in addition to the diagnosis of my regular therapist. But they don’t know what they’re talking about?

Honestly, if you think my doctor is wrong, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m not sure why you’d know better than them, or know enough to think they somehow screwed up completely. But it’s very frustrating.

If you like the work here, please consider supporting it at Patreon.

August 26, 2016

anxiety, aspergers, autism, autism spectrum disorder

essays
I’m Now On Patreon (And I Feel a Little Weird About It)

I am now experimenting with Patreon, the crowdfunding service, in order to see if I can ease some of my financial stress by creating meaningful units of consumable Content™. I feel a little weird about it, and I’m a little uneasy about the idea that there might be people who want to give their money to support my extracurriculars. But I already have one patron (thank you so much, Lisa Boban!), so maybe there are more who are similarly generous.

Go check out my Patreon page if you’re so inclined, and if you’re feeling really inclined, maybe pitch in. If you want. But you totally don’t have to.

August 25, 2016

crowdfunding, housekeeping

blog
Madame Defarge’s Memes

At Wired, Issie Lapowsky summarizes some research that tells us something that is not surprising, that more or less no one is ever persuaded to change their mind about a political position because of a post they saw on Facebook.

I suppose people do actually think that their social media posts are badly-needed ammunition in the political war of ideas, and that their fierce, impassioned, and ironclad arguments will surely win over the misguided. I assume they really do think that. Intellectually.

But the truth, which I believe they at least feel at a gut level, is that these political social media posts are social tokens, signifiers of belonging to a particular group, earning good will and social capital by reaffirming that which they all already believe. That’s largely why I write political tweets, usually because I think I can do so in a funny way and get some positive validation that might begin to fill the abyss that is my self-esteem. My zinger about Trump or my spirited defense of Hillary isn’t going to move the needle one teeny tiny little bit in anyone’s mind, and I have no expectation that it will.

At this level it’s harmless (other than those perilous moments when my tweets are not affirmed and I fail to achieve validation). The problem arises when the posts and tweets and memes go from social tokens to something more like Madame Defarge’s knitting. Outside of the more black-and-white world of election-year D vs. R posts, social media posts involving politics and heated social issues are designed to affirm via othering, by striking clear delineations between the good people and everyone else who is irredeemably bad for failing to check every ideological box, whether they know those boxes exist or not.

And it’s not just reactions to one’s own posts that do this work. It’s the posts of others. Lapowsky writes:

The majority of both Republicans and Democrats say they judge their friends based on what they write on social media about politics. What’s more, 12 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of Democrats, and 9 percent of independents who responded say they’ve unfriended someone because of those posts.

So it’s not political persuasion, as we might like to believe, it’s shaking the trees for villains to fall out of, it’s political partitioning.

In the film Bananas, the Castro-like ruler Esposito delivers his first speech to his people, and tells them, “All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.”

The kind of social media I’m talking about is that underwear you just changed, and you’re pretty damned proud that you did it after only 29 minutes.

August 16, 2016

facebook, twitter

blog
Asperger’s, Corrective Lenses, and the True Self

What does it mean to “be yourself”? I think it means to behave as you would if you were more or less unconcerned with how others perceived your behavior, and I assume it’s implied that this being-yourself behavior is largely within the bounds of the law and socially acceptable norms.

My recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome has opened up the opportunity for me to let go of my self-doubt and self-mortification, and to begin to embrace my Aspie nature, within reason, without concern for how it plays. It sounds pretty exciting! A lifetime of anguish can now be discarded, and real liberation experienced! I can be myself! I can be the real me!

The problem, however, is that I’m not sure what the real me actually is. I’ve never really experienced the unfettered, unthreatened real me. Depending on the circumstance and either my comfort level or lack of inhibition, I presume have let varying degrees of “real me” emerge, be it in small drabs or convulsions of impulsivity that I have almost always regretted. But to put down all of the armor, to remove the masks, and to deactivate the constant self-surveillance, I do not know what that is. I don’t know who that is.

I mean, it’s “me,” right? But “me” is also the sum of my experiences plus the “real me” of genetics and biology. By that way of thinking, the self-loathing and self-censoring mini-golem I have been all my life is the real me.

However, now I know about my condition. I know that my brain was wired differently at birth through no fault of my own (or anyone else’s). So this new knowledge is now one of those experiences, it’s a new piece of “real me.”

Which I guess brings us back to where we were. So maybe the question is, what is the real me now?

One way to answer that might have to start with a different question: What would I like to be the real me now?

When the prospect of being prescribed things like anti-anxiety and anti-depressive medication first came into my life, I was very reticent. I was hung up on the fact that what makes me who I am is my brain, just the way it is. While taking certain medications might make me feel better in certain ways, and make life more manageable, I feared that the medication would fundamentally change who I was, by tinkering with the chemistry of my very Self.

But what I came to accept and appreciate is that if we’re lucky, life, being ridiculously short, offers us the chance to augment or repair aspects of our existence that hinder our well-being. I wear glasses to correct my vision, and I don’t consider blurry vision to be a key aspect of my true self. Having corrected vision absolutely impacts how I perceive and interact with the world, with countless internal and external implications. It’s a small thing, to wear glasses, but its effects are life-altering. But I don’t feel I’m being untrue to myself to wear them. If anything, I now consider them a part of my identity. I have adopted them into my “self,” so that “real me” is, among other things, a guy who wears glasses.

And so I decided it could be for pills to make me less sad and less scared. The real me would now be a guy (with glasses) who takes pills to make himself less scared and sad. That feels okay.

Today, I’m a guy who’s just found out he’s autistic at the age of 38. I didn’t have the benefit of this knowledge growing up, so I assumed I was faulty and subhuman, sent into this breathing world scarce half made up.

Cynthia Kim of Musings of an Aspie wrote something about self-acceptance that echoed my own experience, to a point:

When you grow up knowing that you’re different – and worse, suspecting that you’re defective – acceptance doesn’t come naturally. Too often, autistic individuals are acutely aware of the ways in which they don’t measure up to social norms. As a child, I knew that I wasn’t like most of the other kids and in the absence of an explanation, I assumed that I was simply doing something wrong.

Finally having an explanation for my differences forced me to challenge some long-held beliefs about myself. What if all these things that are wrong with me – I was still thinking more in terms of “wrong” than “different” – aren’t my fault?

Those first inklings of acceptance brought me immense joy. Decades of thinking I just wasn’t trying hard enough were cast in a new light. I wasn’t defective; my brain worked differently.

I hoped for immense joy, but it hasn’t come yet. When the diagnosis was confirmed, there was no light from the heavens that lit up my soul and freed me from my past. A burden was lifted, surely, but a different one was placed on me, one that sounded more or less like “now what?”

To be sure, self-forgiveness is coming. I now know why I didn’t “measure up to social norms,” when “be yourself” was simply not an option. And that’s very welcome. But what’s not clear yet is how to move forward.

Here’s what I do know. I want to drop the armor and masks in a pile, and walk away from them forever. I want to shut off that self-surveillance system that’s been running inside me since I can remember, and disconnect the power supply.

But I also want to know which of my Aspie quirks and predilections can be fully embraced, which I have to regulate, and which I have to bury. I know I can’t let go of all control and turn into some hyper-misanthropic live wire. I have responsibilities, and I have people I care about who need me to regulate. Who need me to put my Asperger’s traits aside as best I can, at least sometimes.

So it seems what I need to do is to start examining all these pieces one by one, and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t, which aspects of the “real me” I can run with, and which ones need to adjusted or worked against. I’ll need to discover how they work in different combinations with each other, and in what contexts. I’ll need to decide which ones I actually like, and which ones I want to curtail because of some unhappiness they might bring.

What eventually becomes the “real me,” then, will take time to emerge, and be at least in large part of my own making. I’ll be a guy with glasses, who takes pills to keep from getting to sad or scared, whose brain is wired to have some real big problems with the world around him, who also has some gifts to take advantage of, and who found out at 38 that he has Asperger’s syndrome. Somewhere, in all that, I hope I can find a real me.

And I hope that eventually I can, for the first time in my life, be myself.

August 14, 2016

anxiety, aspergers, autism, autism spectrum disorder, depression, identity, self

blog
The Plausibility Threshold

I’m not at all opposed to the idea of allowing third party candidates into the general election presidential debates. In most cases, of course, there’s little reason to, as even the exposure and legitimization it would give to said third party candidates would almost never result in one of them becoming seriously competitive for the presidency. (Ross Perot in 1992 was legitimately competitive, so he definitely belonged in those debates. In 1996, there was no real chance for him, and being on the debate stage wouldn’t have changed that.)

A great shame of our electoral system as it currently exists is that there is no mechanism for expressing preference for a third party in a way that doesn’t result in self-sabotage. It’s a first-past-the-post plurality game, so a vote for liberal-third-party-candidate X means one less vote for less-liberal-but-actually-viable-Democrat Y. Without something like instant runoff voting, the whole discussion is more or less moot.

But let’s pretend for the sake of argument, though, that our system is set up to make it reasonable to vote for third parties, and that there ought to be a relatively low threshold for getting into these debates. Let’s say, again for the sake of argument, that instead of the current 15 percent in polls, it’s something like 5. That would have probably gotten Ralph Nader on the stage in 2000, and in this election, it would easily qualify both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.

But even granting all of this in our imaginary scenario, something still doesn’t sit right with me about it, and I think I know what it is.

To fully understand my thinking, you have to temporarily forget that the Republicans nominated a lunatic huckster this time around. Donald Trump’s presence in the equation clouds the air of gravity for the presidential debates, so it might help to replace him in your mind with someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain. So do that now. On this imaginary debate stage, with Martha Raddatz or Bob Schieffer or whoever moderating, you have some Romney-McCain type, former Secretary of State and Senator Hillary Clinton, and…Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.

Since winning isn’t in the cards for Johnson or Stein, regardless of the electoral system in place, the ostensible benefits of their participation in the debates would be 1) to have someone articulate positions and concerns not expressed by the major party candidates, and 2) to lend new legitimacy to, and build up the viability of, the third parties for future elections, sending the message that, yes, candidates from these parties are and will be serious options for the presidency.

But is Gary Johnson really presidential material? Really? He seems by all accounts to be a good, principled man with good intentions, and he was a governor, but still. He doesn’t seem to have thought through all of his positions, he has trouble answering questions in succinct sentences, and he hasn’t held an office since a year before Facebook even existed. In my opinion, he doesn’t quite present the figure of a plausible president, and the irony is that he’s the closest the Libertarian Party has ever come to offering up someone who does. He’s more of a “this is the best we could do” candidate for a struggling minor party.

And even presuming the best about Jill Stein (which is a major challenge for me), despite her admirable activist background, she has never won elective office (save for a “Town Meeting Seat” in Lexington, Massachusetts), she panders to conspiracy theorists and paranoiacs, and deifies people like Julian Assange. She is definitely not a plausible president.

And that’s so dispiriting. As someone who’s worked professionally for systemic solutions that would clear the way for third party candidacies, I would love to see a more vibrant and dynamic set of views represented in these debates, but that also means I want those views articulated by credible candidates. Plausible presidents.

This year, the Republican Party has decided not to put forth a plausible candidate. In my imaginary scenario, we had a veteran officeholder of real gravitas to stand for the GOP, but in reality, we have a dangerous man-child. So it’s easier to look to the third party candidates and think, well, shit’s already crazy, why not let them in too? And I get that. But it’s also true that he could actually win, unlike the other two minor candidates, so he needs to be confronted by his billion-times-more-qualified opponent in front of the nation.

But for the third parties, in the abstract, I don’t think debate inclusion achieves what these parties hope they might, and what they really need them to achieve: to show the American public that their zone of the political spectrum can offer up real presidents too. The Libertarians are almost there with Johnson, and frankly would be there now if they’d flipped the ticket and nominated VP candidate Bill Weld instead, or recruited some titan of Silicon Valley like Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Sheryl Sandberg. The Greens are nowhere near plausibility right now, with Nader 16 years ago being by far the closest they’d ever come to putting forth a credible would-be president. I honestly can’t think of anyone today who might jibe with their politics and be a plausible president, save for perhaps Bernie Sanders.

I want to see that debate, with three, four, or more honest-to-goodness potential presidents advocating and arguing their cases. But our electoral system makes it pointless, and the candidates we’ve gotten so far from the third parties makes it doubly so.

August 7, 2016

2016 presidential election, debates, donald trump, electoral reform, gary johnson, green party, hillary clinton, instant runoff voting, jill stein, libertarian, presidential debates, ralph nader, ranked choice voting, third parties

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A More Forgiving Lens

The author and his little brother in 1980.

I have never felt like I belonged in this species. I resembled a human, and I could force myself to awkwardly ape the basic mannerisms of people, but I would always suspect that there was something alien about me, and that everyone else suspected (or knew) the same thing.

A lot of this alienation is in regard to my relationship to, and interactions with, other people. I’m a pretty severe introvert, that’s no secret. Being around people, even those I love and feel most comfortable with, utterly exhausts me. But I’ve always felt that there was more to it than mere introversion. For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled to relate to almost anyone, unable to comprehend others’ values, aspirations, needs, obsessions, or subtexts.

As a result, I’ve been at a loss as to how to blend, to appear as though I do understand, or at the very least to keep my bewilderment hidden. So I’ve thrown an inordinate amount of processing power at figuring out how to appear normal, how to talk, stand, sit, move, gesture, and where to fix my gaze or how to modulate my voice. I pretend to value the same things other people value and aspire to the same kinds of things they aspire to, even to the point of almost entirely convincing myself.

That alienation, this constant dissonance, was of my own making, I believed. I didn’t share the same interests as others because I had somehow failed to grasp the obvious reasons they were important or provided joy. I didn’t engage in sports or other physical activities because I was weak and afraid and unwilling to put the time in to not be that way. I had trouble comprehending instructions and directions because I was being self-absorbed and inattentive. I had trouble reading for any length of time because I was superficial and distracted. I upset people I love, not giving them what they needed, because I was negligent, self-centered, and oblivious. I didn’t want to socialize because I was a stick in the mud, narcissistic, and timid. I didn’t want to go on big adventures, travel, take big risks, or throw myself into new situations because I was cowardly and lazy. That summed up why I fared so poorly, academically and socially, throughout much of middle and high school: I was cowardly and lazy.

What else could I conclude? And having reached such a conclusion, over and over, in every circumstance from childhood to my late 30s, brought self-hate, depression, anxiety, resentment, and resignation. How could it be any other way?

I did have one suspicion, though. A suspicion that kept popping into my awareness, something that felt familiar, but also sounded too alien even for me.

That suspicion only grew, however. When I would air it out loud to someone, it would be summarily dismissed. I, not trusting my own perceptions of the world, not knowing how to be a person, conceded to the dismissal. But only outwardly.

I stopped conceding. I have finally pursued this suspicion to its end, and, well, it turns out for once I was right.

Last week, at the age of 38, I was officially diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, along with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

I have Asperger’s. I am autistic.

I’m so very glad to know. And I’m also glad that there was no hedging on the part of the doctor, the neuropsychologist who tested and diagnosed me. As my wife Jessica and I sat down in her office, the doctor mercifully began by saying, “I’ll cut to the chase, because I know you’re eager to know,” and told me that I had what she characterized as “severe” Asperger’s syndrome. Not severe in the sense of debilitation or in some kind of danger, but meaning that I’m firmly, well into the spectrum. Had the diagnosis been fuzzy, a borderline case, I’d never stop wondering and doubting. Having it be so clear-cut was a relief.

When I first began toying with the idea of getting tested, I couldn’t avoid the fact that simply knowing I had Asperger’s, if indeed I did, wouldn’t really change anything. There’s no medication to take, there’s no real treatment. I’d just go on as I had been. I had to ask myself, well, why bother?

Here’s why. The dissonance of my life – my strange predilections, my quirks, my strong and irrational aversions, my inability to read or connect with other people, my lack of interest in the experiences of life, my intractable obsessions over particular topics and utter lack of curiosity for almost anything else, my desperate need for safe and reliable routines, my spacial disorientation, my hypersensitivity to heat, sound, and light, my clumsiness and lack of coordination, my over-reliance on rules and logic, my inability to think in broad, big-picture terms, and most especially, the panic, pain, and exhaustion I experience in even the most benign social situations – I have always ascribed these things to my being a failure as a person. A lazy, cold-hearted, short-sighted coward.

Now I know that much of it (not all, of course) stems from something I was just born with. There was an actual condition that made it impossible that I could ever be and think like everyone else. My brain was literally different from theirs, and there was nothing I could have done about it.

Generosity of spirit is one of the virtues I value most, but it is never something I allowed for myself. Instead, I have tortured myself over my past, for the things I endured and the things I felt I had brought upon myself, because I had failed at some point to become fully human. I blamed myself for having neglected to learn how to be a normal person. I wasn’t just unable to cut myself a little slack for the failures and disappointments of the past, I had forbade myself from doing so. To forgive myself, I felt, would be to allow myself to continue to fail and disappoint.

Now I can reevaluate. I can look back on the story of my life through a more forgiving lens. I honestly don’t know what that might do to me.

As I sit here now and tell myself this is real, it’s hard to accept, even though it’s mostly welcome. I obviously have a great deal more processing to do. Some of that processing I’ll do here, in writing, as it seems to be the way I best understand and express my thoughts. In writing, the rules and parameters, and there are no social cues to miss or misinterpret, no eyes with which to avoid contact, no expected time frame in which to form and verbally express a thought, no expectation that I intuit the nuance and give-and-take of a real-time conversation. Here, I don’t have to second-guess my very worth as a human being.

Actually, maybe that’s the first thing I should do: Accept, finally, that there is nothing to second-guess, and that I don’t have to pretend to be normal anymore. Maybe I never did.

If you like my work, please consider supporting me.

July 31, 2016

adhd, anxiety, asd, aspergers, autism, depression, introversion

blog
The DNC Doesn’t Owe You Anything

I just want to expand upon a point I made snarkily on Twitter that’s gotten some attention and heat. I said:

BREAKING: Secret emails reveal that many in DNC did not like non-Democrat, anti-DNC candidate Sanders, preferred actual Democrat.

WikiLeaks (which probably needs a whole other post to complain about) released private email correspondences from the Democratic National Committee showing that, shock of shocks, the DNC really did favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

Well no shit.

There is nothing wrong with a political party’s operation preferring one candidate over another, especially if one candidate would be a terrible choice for nominee. Especially if that terrible choice also happens to have been a Democrat for about five minutes. Especially when that terrible choice seems to loathe the very party he wants to nominate him.

The DNC would be full of suicidal lunatics if they didn’t prefer one over the other when the choice is so stark. If it were a choice between, for example, John Kerry and Joe Biden, there would be little reason for there to be any kind of consternation over who might get nominated. Neither of those candidates oppose the party itself in any meaningful way, and both would have comparable electoral prospects. But Clinton versus Sanders is easy. If you are in the DNC, and you’re not a lunatic, you prefer the former Secretary of State and First Lady who’s mind-blowingly qualified and has been fighting for and winning Democratic objectives for decades. You don’t choose the batty old socialist from Vermont who has accomplished little in office, who has accused the party of all manner of crimes and corruption, and who isn’t even really a Democrat to begin with. Because, again, we’re assuming they’re not lunatics.

Ah, you might retort, as many have in various forms, So it’s okay that the party cheated and denied the voters their true choice???

Stop it, I say, you sound crazy.

First, there’s no reason to believe anyone cheated anything, and asserting as much is just conspiracy mongering. And there would have been no reason to “cheat” anyway, because Clinton — at all times throughout this entire campaign, without any exception of which I am aware — was the more popular candidate. Thus, she won the most votes, and also thus, won the most pledged delegates. So the voters actually got their choice. Just because you might not like that choice doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Second (and I feel like I’m beating this drum to death), political parties are not the government, and they have no obligation to choose the candidates they field for office by election. None. The DNC doesn’t owe you an election, or a voice, or any role in its nomination process whatsoever — especially if you’re not even a Democrat. They’ve chosen to go about it a certain way that includes a mix of statewide popular elections and the judgment of some party leaders. But any political party could decide tomorrow that they will choose candidates by random lottery, by a series of duels, by high score at Crossy Road, or — and I know this sounds nuts — by a bunch of party leaders getting together to hash out which candidate would best advance the causes of the party and have the best chance of getting elected. Insane, right?

This is to say that if the DNC did put their thumb on the scale for Clinton somewhere, that’s entirely within their right to do so. But it’s also true that there’s little evidence that they did any meaningful thumbing. The scheduling of the early debates on Saturday nights was stupid and transparent, and actually kind of cowardly, but it wasn’t evil or undemocratic or anything like that.

The DNC’s obligation is to further the Democratic Party. That’s what they owe you, the best shot for Democrats to be elected to office. They are not obligated to appease a loud and hostile constituency, or even to honor small-D democratic principles. They need to help Democrats who believe in Democrat things get elected. That’s it.

My only wish is that they were better at it.

July 25, 2016

2016 presidential election, bernie sanders, democratic party, dnc, hillary clinton

blog
I Watched the Mighty Skyline Fall

Cleaning up the kitchen after dinner this evening, my wife Jessica had put on some Billy Joel to listen to, and asked what album of his I preferred to hear. Songs in the Attic, I replied, his 1981 live album intended as a way to introduce his older songs to an audience who has just become aware of him from 1977’s The Stranger. The performances of songs like “Streetlife Serenader,” “Los Angelenos,” and “Summer, Highland Falls” are far, far superior to their studio album versions. Perhaps my favorite song on the record, however, is “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway).”

And then it hit me. Holy shit, I thought to myself. It’s 2016. Next year is 2017. That’s crazy!

Let me just quote Wikipedia for an explanation of what this amazing song is all about:

Joel has described it as a “science fiction song” about an apocalypse occurring in New York as a result of discussions that the city was failing in the 1970s. … He explain[ed] that the song depicts the apocalypse occurring in New York, “the skyline tumbling down, this horrendous conflagration happening in New York City.” Joel stated that the song is titled “Miami 2017” because many New Yorkers retire to Miami and the narrator is telling his grandchildren in the year 2017 about what he saw in the destruction of New York.

So in Joel’s sort of alternate-parallel-universe, New York City becomes an unfathomable disaster (“it always burned up there before”), its problems in the 70s running out of control, and some unmentioned authority sees to it that the city is simply wiped off the map. (“They said that Queens could stay,” of course, and someone “picked the Yankees up for free.”)

I assume that this urban apocalypse happens more or less contemporaneously with the time the song was written, the late 1970s, because in the song, 2017 is supposed to be the far future, when elderly retirees in Miami are thinking back on the event, “Before we all lived here in Florida / Before the Mafia took over Mexico.” But of course 2017 is no longer the far future. It’s five and a half months away.

It’s worth pausing to consider, as noted by Joel himself, that on September 11, 2001, we all, in fact, “watched the mighty skyline fall.” But it wasn’t a failed city that needed to be “dealt with,” as in the song, but a revived and ascendant city that was attacked by those who preferred that we all exist in a kind of Bronze Age hellscape.

But in both cases – the obliteration of the city in the song, as well as after the towers fell in real life – New Yorkers are and were defiant and resilient:

We held a concert out in Brooklyn,
To watch the Island Bridges blow.
They turned our power down,
And drove us underground,
But we went right with the show!

Luckily, in the real world, New York is still here as 2017 approaches. But there’s also the eerie line in the song about how “the Mafia took over Mexico.” That, of course, hasn’t happened as far as I know. But the intractability and unthinkable horrors wrought by drug cartels in Mexico today make the line disturbingly prophetic.

I wonder if Joel could have conceived in his dystopian 2017 that someone like Donald Trump might approach the presidency. After a year like 2016, it’s not hard to imagine a President Trump, fictional or nonfictional, deciding that the best way to deal with any hotbed of trouble and unrest, be it within or without our borders, is to lay waste to it.

In which case, we’d be looking back on it from, say, 2057. Not in Miami, of course, because by that time it’d probably be either under water or too hot to bear. But perhaps in Maine, forty years from now, a handful of us old folks will look back in horror and wonder, still alive, “To tell the world about / The way the lights went out.”

But of course, it’s just a song.

July 18, 2016

9/11, billy joel, history, music

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Uniquely Okay to Mistreat

“Bullying” is such a weak word, isn’t it? The word itself (not the act) always evokes silly images for me, either of cartoon schoolyard lunkheads or anthropomorphized bovines. The word “bully” doesn’t really do justice to what it can mean to the victim of bullying, particularly if the victim is a child, and experiences it day in and day out as I did. Maybe bullying would be taken more seriously if we used more specific and accurate words to define the behavior: abuse, harassment, assault, persecution, dehumanization.

We usually reserve words like this for crimes or significant social ills, and it’s understandable that it can be hard to comprehend them as applying to, say, 6th-graders in gym class. But if anything, the impact on the 6th-grader is potentially far more severe and pernicious than on the adult who is treated similarly.

I recently saw this Reddit thread on bullying, in which the original poster argues in favor of all-out legal prosecution for bullying (which I am not advocating here). “Aquareon” writes:

[One rationale against prosecution was that] they were “just having fun” (at my expense) and that if I could successfully have them sent to juvie or some similarly severe consequence, it would be a disproportionate retaliation.

I reject that reasoning as an adult because of the lasting scars bullying left. Knowing that those responsible got away with it scott free and are now forever beyond my reach has been the source of more suffering by far than the stuff they actually said and did at the time. It has undermined my belief in justice and left me feeling like I am uniquely okay to mistreat, where others are not.

Never getting “justice” for the abuse I endured as a kid is not the the greatest source of suffering for me, but it certainly sticks in my craw all these years after the fact. It’s really that last sentence that truly strikes a chord:

It has undermined my belief in justice and left me feeling like I am uniquely okay to mistreat, where others are not.

That’s the damage. In part because there is no meaningful recourse for victims of bullying (informing teachers and other authority figures usually only makes things worse for the victim), and because the perpetrators rarely face meaningful consequences (and when they do, again, the bullying only increases as a result), and because those peers who are not engaged in the bullying show a tacit approval of it by either enjoying the spectacle or staying silent, the message to the young, impressionable victim is, “you deserve this.”

How could it be otherwise? The school and its surrounding outcroppings (buses, extracurriculars, etc.), and the people who inhabit it, are a kid’s entire world. When a bullying victim’s entire known universe conspires to convince them that they are “uniquely okay to mistreat,” they will be easily convinced. I certainly was.

And I still feel that way. Of course I know intellectually that this isn’t true, but I’m fighting against years of memorized thought patterns, conditioned responses, impressions of myself that were baked into my brain just when I was at the age of figuring myself out. For all the work I’ve done on correcting this wrong thinking over the years, it may always be that my instinct will be to consider myself subhuman, of all things considered last, with only my higher reasoning to throw my sense of self-worth a rope and hoist it up to firmer ground.

So while I’m not here endorsing prosecution, I do think this aspect of bullying is worth taking very seriously as we figure out what the best response to bullying actually is. “Just get over it,” as I’ve been told innumerable times even by those who love me, just isn’t it.

July 7, 2016

bullying, childhood

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Jill Stein’s Shameful Pander on Vaccines and Homeopathy

About a month ago on a Reddit AMA, Dr. Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party nominee for president, was asked a simple question about her official stance on vaccines and homeopathy.

Stein is, of course, a physician, so the answer, one would think, would be simple. For example, “Vaccines are safe and save lives, and everyone who can get vaccinated against preventable diseases absolutely should. Homeopathy is a sham pseudoscience that doesn’t do anything, wasting people’s money and risking people’s health while having no effect.”

Nope. You see she’s running in the Green Party, and hoping to pick up some of that sweet, sweet Bernie-rage. So here’s her answer:

I don’t know if we have an “official” stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point. According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn’t allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of. In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs. In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs. So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US. So who wouldn’t be skeptical? I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial complex.

Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health. Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like small pox and polio. In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced. Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them. In an age when industry lobbyists and CEOs are routinely appointed to key regulatory positions through the notorious revolving door, its no wonder many Americans don’t trust the FDA to be an unbiased source of sound advice. A Monsanto lobbyists and CEO like Michael Taylor, former high-ranking DEA official, should not decide what food is safe for you to eat. Same goes for vaccines and pharmaceuticals. We need to take the corporate influence out of government so people will trust our health authorities, and the rest of the government for that matter. End the revolving door. Appoint qualified professionals without a financial interest in the product being regulated. Create public funding of elections to stop the buying of elections by corporations and the super-rich.

For homeopathy, just because something is untested doesn’t mean it’s safe. By the same token, being “tested” and “reviewed” by agencies tied to big pharma and the chemical industry is also problematic. There’s a lot of snake-oil in this system. We need research and licensing boards that are protected from conflicts of interest. They should not be limited by arbitrary definitions of what is “natural” or not.

What the fuck was that? I mean, I honestly can’t discern an actual position out of this inscrutable wall of pandering.

The best I can glean from this mess is, “Vaccines may have saved lives, but now you should be afraid for your life because Big Pharma.”

And on homeopathy, what the fuck does “just because something is untested doesn’t mean it’s safe” even mean? I honestly don’t know. But then she gets back to making people scared. It’s not the fake medicine that’s the problem, you see, but Big Pharma pulling the strings. I mean, YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYONE.

I so deeply regret my support of Ralph Nader in 2000, but I always maintained a place in my heart for the Greens, those well-meaning hippies. But this is just gross. Stein is a fucking doctor, and she should at least have enough respect for the voters to speak a plain truth about issues that are literally life and death.

And if she actually believes what she’s saying (assuming she even knows what she’s saying), then all the worse. Be gone, Green Party. You once seemed full of fresh ideas, but now, well, you’ve spoiled.

June 10, 2016

2016 presidential election, green party, homeopathy, vaccinations

blog
The Facile Conflation

Ariella Barker was a Sanders supporter who tried and failed to get the Sanders campaign to take seriously her concerns about what she called the campaign’s “disability outreach failures,” and problems she saw with Sanders’ policies around disabled issues. In the process, she saw Sanders a little more clearly, and now supports Clinton. She writes:

His speeches never change for a reason. It isn’t because, as his supporters allege, he’s authentic and always on the right side of things. It’s because he doesn’t care to adapt, to research issues other than income inequality and the environment, follow up on his lofty ideas with solid policy initiatives or to make any compromises to achieve his goals. Rather, he just plays the blame game, pointing out everything that’s wrong with this country and proposing no specific plans to achieve his goals. He prides himself on being so honest and trustworthy while lying to the electorate about his concern for our well being and Hillary’s lack thereof. In reality, I see now that he doesn’t care about anyone’s well being but his own ability to rise to power.

I don’t actually believe that Sanders “doesn’t care about anyone’s well being,” but I think it’s clear he’s either lost sight of what’s important about this election, or perhaps never really understood it.

Sanders clearly doesn’t know how lucky he is to have been who he is, where he is; to have had Burlington, Vermont as his launchpad into electoral politics. There, he had the luxury of running as an insurgent, in a tiny state that is only rivaled by Texas in its sense of independence from national norms, complete with its own secessionist movement. It’s a place where, frankly, a batty old socialist with no party affiliation could become a U.S. Senator.

So this might be why Bernie thought he could ‘insurgent’ his way through the Democratic primaries, and then to the White House. It might be why he thinks he still can, even though he can’t. It might be why he thinks he’s been somehow robbed of the nomination by some chicanery or conspiracy, which he hasn’t.

(A side note to this: I don’t doubt for a second that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC are and have always been in the bag for Clinton, and they certainly scheduled the debates as they did in order to make this as easy a process as possible for her. But I also have no reason to believe that there’s been any malfeasance as is often asserted by Sanders supporters.)

His answer to how he will accomplish all of his goals is always the same: “political revolution.” That’s not a plan. It’s not politics. Freddie deBoer wrote a while ago what he says politics actually is:

Right now I just think there’s this fundamental problem where so many people who identify themselves as being part of the broad left define their coalition based on linguistic cues, cultural overlap, and social circles. The job of politics, at its most basic, is finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction — surveying the people who are just like you and trying to come up with ways in which that social connection is actually a political connection.

DeBoer is a Sanders supporter, and this was written in late 2015. But this critique I think nails the current state of the Sanders campaign, a campaign that reviles everything outside the moral circle of Sanders’ rhetoric. What the Sanders crusaders seem to be against in principle is “finding common cause with people who aren’t like” them. That not only means no compromise with Republicans, but with other progressives.

Andrew Sullivan, in his big New York Magazine piece about Trump and the threat of fascism, wrote:

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands.

This facile conflation has dogged actual politicians since time immemorial. It’s what disappoints the left about Obama, and what made Republicans uneasy about Romney. If you actually practice politics, you run the risk of being labeled a shill by those who speak in short sentences made up of little words.

I have no reason to think that Sanders isn’t sincere. I believe he wants to make things better, and that he believes that what he’s doing — as well as how he’s doing it — is absolutely necessary. That doesn’t mean that he’s not also wrong. And now he’s just making things worse.

May 23, 2016

blog
Apogee Apology

So I’ve moved the blog again.

I have a blog at the Patheos network, iMortal, which I have not written in for weeks. I’m not entirely sure why, but I wanted to get some distance from a site where I am set up for disappointment. I never earn sufficient pageviews to come close to qualifying for compensation (which is a pittance to begin with), and I find myself feeling shitty about being ignored, feeling shitty about not getting any promotional support from Patheos (I am one of approximately ten-bazillion other bloggers on the atheist channel alone), and feeling shitty about never making any money for my work.

I really wanted to be on Patheos, because I thought it would be a real leg up on some sort of legitimacy as a blogger, but it’s simply not panned out. I haven’t outright quit iMortal and Patheos, but for now I think I will only post there when I have something that I suspect would really do well there. Otherwise, it will remain dormant until such time as I come up with something to put there, or they kick me off. (They’re good people there, especially Dale, who’s a truly great guy.)

So I thought I’d go back to my personal blog, this one, which only yesterday was hosted at Squarespace. Well, Squarespace isn’t free, and it was time to pony up for another year. So I canceled it, and looked for a new home. I tried a lot of alternatives, briefly, but moving almost 800 posts proves too much of a burden for most homebrew blog-import utilities, so that removed Tumblr and Blogger as options. So I’ve imported everything into this WordPress.com site. It’s not pretty, but it’s something. Whatever, it’s free, and it displays the words I type.

(There will as a result be a lot of broken links in these posts, until I fix them, if I fix them, as anything that pointed to one of my posts at the Squarespace site will just hit a wall.)

I’m trying to care less about my online metrics, my pageviews, likes, retweets, and the rest. I have cordoned off notifications and analytics on my devices, and I am trying not to seek these numbers as often as I used to. I need to stop feeling like I need to be validated by other people’s eyeballs and clicks, most of which are the result of algorithms and social forces beyond by control.

They say that if you do really good work, the audience will find you. Well, maybe my work just isn’t that good, and maybe that’s not the end of the world.

May 17, 2016

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Romney’s New Game, House Rules

Mitt Romney is not an idiot. He knows that he can’t possibly win a presidential election as an independent candidate. And that’s even assuming he could get onto the ballot in enough states in time, which he can’t, having already missed Texas’s deadline. No Republican/conservative candidacy can win without Texas.

But I still give credence to this Washington Post report about his and Bill Kristol’s recruitment efforts for an anti-Trump candidacy, and it all comes down to this single paragraph:

One related objective is to prevent both Clinton and Trump from clinching a majority in the electoral college and thus throwing the presidential election to the House of Representatives, under the provision of the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. This scenario played out in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of electoral and popular votes but was defeated in the House by John Quincy Adams.

I don’t think this is a “related objective.” I think it’s the only objective. A presidential election decided by the House of Representatives is the only path to victory for Mitt Romney who, as I have noted, still desperately wants to be president. When he positioned himself as a fallback/draft candidate back when Trump’s victory was not yet assured, he must have known then that his chances were slim…slim but feasible.

And so it is here. It’s still pretty damned unlikely that a Romney independent candidacy could win any electoral votes, let alone enough to throw the election to the House, but it’s possible. He’d need to rack up electoral votes in states where he could plausibly squeeze out plurality wins against Trump and Clinton. The most likely places for that to happen, however, would be states that Clinton is already going to lose. So to make this plan work, Romney needs to eke out wins in a few blue states, and that’s really where this falls apart.

It’s not impossible. If we start with the 2012 race as a starting point, and, for example, give Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Michigan to independent-Romney, the election goes to the House. This assumes that Clinton doesn’t flip any ’12 red states blue in the mean time. You could also have a scenario where, say, Trump wins Iowa from the Democrats, but Romney wins Virginia. You get the idea. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

But “unlikely” could be enough as far as Romney and the anti-Trump GOP forces are concerned.

Of course, there’d be one more enormous hurdle, which is actually winning an election by the House. It’s not a majority-vote situation there. If the presidential election goes to the House of Representatives, each state’s delegation gets one vote. So the question then becomes whether Romney could convince a majority of Members within each state’s delegation to vote for him. (Oh, and the Senate would pick the vice-president. Fun, right?)

A deadlocked Electoral College vote going to the House would normally be an easy win for the GOP in a two-person race, because of the party’s vast over-representation in Congress. But two “Republicans”? I wouldn’t begin to know how to predict that. But I can say that it represents a glimmer of hope for Romney’s quixotic, last-ditch effort in his decade-long quest to become president.

May 15, 2016

2016 presidential election, donald trump, electoral college, hillary clinton, house of representatives, mitt romney

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