Expectations Vary

     Growing up, my family took to the board game Trivial Pursuit shortly after it came out, and played it seriously.  Not grimly; we had a lot of fun.  But it was a game with definite answers to clear questions and that's how we approached it.

     I dated a guy for several years, and his family played board games too -- Yahtzee among them, which I'd never played, but they approached with brisk precision.  So imagine my surprise the evening they got out Trivial Pursuit game and proceeded to play it very lightly, a game so hard no one could be expected to know most of the answers, an occasion for bluffing and swapping hints where the points didn't really matter.  And they had a nice time with it, too.

     Even when we're playing the same games, we don't all play them the same way.  And it doesn't mean the people playing it differently are necessarily doing it wrong, either.

Social Media: Basicially Turbocharged Junior High School

     An utterly scurrilous rumor made the rounds on social media recently before being thoroughly and easily debunked.  Rest assured that no current candidate for President or Vice-President has ever described their personal experience of having sex (of sorts) with a couch in a memoir.

     Never happened, should have been immediately obvious as a falsehood intended to tarnish an individual's reputation and was dispelled via the kind of text search that modern technology makes quick and simple.  But the lie was all the way around the world before the truth had even put its glasses on, and there we have politics in 2024, a game that any amateur with a knack for it can play.

Quaint?

     Today is the anniversary of the "Kitchen Debate" between Richard M. Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.

     Say what you will about the two men -- or their attitudes toward women and housework -- it's a better time when the struggle between capitalism and communism comes down to addressing the immediate and long-term personal and societal merits of dishwashers and lemon squeezers.  I'd rather see countries and political philosophies compete in terms of home appliances and the average person's standard of living than who can build the biggest bomb or wage the most effective proxy war.

     Of course the politicians didn't see it that way.  But just once, for a little while, they did.

In Search Of Excellence

     Digging into history, I sometimes take odd turns.  Recently, it was "When did we stop calling the President of the United States 'Excellency,' and why did we ever start?"

     The last part is the easiest to answer: "Excellency" was (and is) the honorific or style for a representative of a government as a whole, especially if they had no other title.  Ambassadors were (and are) "Excellency."  This was extended by analogy to the head of government of a republic and was already in use when the United States was formed.  As an honorific, it was often "sticky:" if you'd held a post that carried it, by courtesy you were allowed to keep it when you moved on.

     Another use of "Excellency" is to refer to the Commander in Chief of armed forces.  So when George Washington was first elected President, he'd already been an Excellency and arguably still was.

     Washington is sometimes decried as an "Imperial President," pompous and high-handed.  He did enjoy a degree of formality that can look excessive to us, but was it far less so than British practices of his time, shockingly abbreviated and brusque.  He is known to have complained about the necessity of issuing Executive Orders to fill in where Congress had, in his opinion, skimped on their work and gone out of session.  Over two terms of office, he backed away from "Excellency" in favor of "Mr. President."  Nevertheless, John Adams continued to be addressed that way; Thomas Jefferson was as well but doesn't appear to have liked it much.  He tried to use other titles, but in formal correspondence, he was still "Excellency."

     While the term has faded away in everyday speech, and even internally in the Federal government, it still shows up in letters and documents from foreign governments.  In many countries, the head of state is still called "Excellency" if they don't hold some inherited title and it spills over onto our Chief Executive.  Unofficially at least, the U. S. President is still "Excellency."

     But to give the 18th-Century revolutionaries their due, it sure does sit oddly in the ear, doesn't it?  In our heart of hearts, we all know the President of the U. S. is Just Another Citizen, stuck with the worst job on the planet: under constant hostile scrutiny, on call 24/7 with no real vacations and they have to live over the store.  No matter what happens on their watch, no matter how much or how little they had to do with it, they'll get all the blame and small credit if any. 

Switcheroo

     Oh, no!  A Presidential candidate from one of the major political parties, who had already won that party's primary, has stepped down!  It's a crisis!

     At least that's what leading lights of the other party are saying, along with a few of his own.  But is it true?

     You can't look to the U. S. Constitution for answers.  The men who drafted that document weren't thinking much about political parties and it doesn't address primaries.  When they did get around to mentioning factionalism in the Federalist Papers, they didn't like the idea. (Some history here, a little here.)

     By the time the new government was in place and George Washington was stuck with the top job, the first Senators and Representatives were well on the way to inventing a party system, centralizing Federalists against the free-trade yeoman farmers of the Democratic-Republican party.  Washington warned against it, but in that effort, he was more Cassandra than Cincinnatus.  But there weren't any primaries; Congressmen from each of the parties caucused to pick who'd they'd chivvy into trying for the hot seat.  That system held up for not quite a lifetime before state-level parties agitated to have more of a voice against Washington, D.C.'s insider's club; a third party who didn't have any Congressmen held the first nominating convention in 1831 and the idea caught on.  For the next eighty years, a mix of conventions and colluding elected officials picked candidates with conventions gradually dominating: the "smoke-filled rooms" of each party got bigger.

     That system had some merits, but transparency wasn't one of them.  Just ahead of the First World War, primary elections began to emerge as a way to advise and even direct the choices of delegates to political conventions.  It took sixty years for that movement to grow, but by 1972, the "binding primary" had taken root in all fifty states, fueled in part by the dramatic mess of the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.

     Notice anything?  I haven't mentioned the Constitution.  It still doesn't have anything to say about political parties or how those parties ought to go about choosing candidates for Federal office.  Even a binding primary only holds convention delegates to obey the results per their party's convention rules --  usually for a round or two of voting, after which, it's a free-for-all.

     We still have, as Benjamin Franklin observed, a republic, and both of the major political parties are determined to keep it that way at their conventions: the delegates represent voters and are expected to use their best judgment, not simply carry the results.  Parties set their own rules at their own conventions.

     So there's your "crisis:" a tempest in a teacup, intended to stir public opinion and get eyes on screens while keeping emotions riled up.  The Democats will sort their candidates out at their upcoming convention and presumably the Republicans will gird up to campaign against them, same as has happened every four years since the first party system emerged.  We're not on the same two parties, not even close; we're on the sixth or seventh party system and it's still running ad hoc, improvised outside the terms and definitions of the United States Constitution.  So don't be buffaloed; it's all as legal as church, and (finances aside) slightly less Federally regulated than religion.

FYI

     For those of you hankering for the lost Roman Empire -- or even the Republic -- it's 2777, ab urbe condita.  Do you know where your lares and penates are?  The literal ones or the figurative ones?  Have you checked your impluvium lately?

Of Course It Wasn't Worth Getting Out The Crayons

     I didn't expect it would do much good.  If you're deep into the Trumpian Cinematic Universe, you've left objective reality behind.

     In response to pointing out that attempting a crime counts as committing the crime, even if the attempt does not succeed, I got a tortured hypothetical situation with only the slightest connection to the counting of votes in the 2020 election and disputes about the count.  Yeah, no, and not even the point; and easily dispelled by using a parallel:* the downballot Dems didn't do all that well in 2020, with narrow majorities in the Senate and House (the latter flipped the other way, barely, in 2022, and how'd that happen if the fix is in?): if they'd had a fat enough thumb on the scales to change the Presidential vote, they could have handed themselves comfortable majorities in both bodies and legislated to their heart's content.  They didn't.  Congress has been remarkably unproductive.  One commenter claimed the Democrats want a "tyranny of the majority," but given the number of times in the last forty years they've held the House, Senate and Presidency, if they were after it they'd have got it by now, with bells and ribbons and parades on May Day.  Hasn't happened and it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

     Commenters have accused me of being "ignorant," while supplying no facts or history to counter mine.  If you won't do the homework, you don't get to call other people ignorant and expect any response aside from derisive laughter.  I was able to watch January 6 in real time and there's no retconning actual events, no matter how much you may wish to or how many glittering lies your Great Leaders may spin.  (Of note, live/near-live TV coverage that day was often forced to rely on wide shots, showing the literal "big picture," the true extent of the crowd and the broad sweeps of movement, the lulls and pauses as they happened, the cries of "Hang Mike Pence" after his decision was announced.)

     They have also accused me of being a Democrat.  Nope.  I'm a Democrat voter these days, but I'm still not a registered member of any political party; Indiana doesn't require it to vote in general elections and in party primaries, they only ask which ballot you want.  I'm a small-d democrat and small-r republican, and a small-l libertarian, too.  I think it's too bad Republicans decided Christian Nationalism (with a wide streak of White Nationalism) and a cult of personality was their way forward.  All my life, I have counted on having two big mostly-sane parties running in elections that are mostly "Coke vs. Pepsi" and "Crest vs. Colgate," and keeping one another between the rails, despite the occasional John Bircher or would-be socialist in their ranks, and that they maintain internal Party discipline by pitching out the genuine nuts, crooks and extremists that sneaked in.  I can't count on the Republicans to clean up their own party any more, and they're immune to any shame when their worst ideas and politicians are revealed.  At best, the GOP are the Whigs and Know-Nothings of our time, riding a ticking clock to irrelevance; at worst--  Well, extreme parties have ruined nations and instigated wars plenty of times in the past, and the price is always paid in blood and ignominy.
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* One of the better examples of this way of reality-testing is physicist Richard Feynman's work investigating the Challenger disaster: he looked into the history, engineering and production management of the Space Shuttle's liquid-fueled engines, and found the same pattern of each successive level minimizing the risk analysis of the preceding level that had doomed the solid-fuel boosters: if the engineers determined there was a one-on-ten risk of failure, their bosses, not wanting to look bad and knowing how cautious the engineers were, reported it as one in a hundred, and this happened over and over, all the way up: there were design problems, but there was a problem with management culture that kept them from being recognized and fixed until we lost a Shuttle.  And even then, we lost another one....

Is It Worth Getting Out The Crayons?

     I was going to refute in extensive detail a commenter who loftily informed me that "January 6 was not an insurrection" because there weren't stacks of dead bodies and no buildings got burned to ground.  But it's simpler than that:

     Sorry, old boy, there is no ineptitude exception for insurrectionists.  The mob that stormed the capitol was seriously lacking in command, control and communications -- not to mention intelligence -- but they did have a clear aim: to interfere with the certification of Electoral Collage votes and to apprehend or hang one or more elected official (the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House),  They didn't succeed.  They were poorly organized, despite the presence of members of a few militia-type organizations.  Too much would-be brass, too many undrilled troops, zero sergeants -- and you won't go too far without noncoms.

     You know what we call unsuccessful bank robbers?  Bank robbers.  You know what we call the perpetrators of unsuccessful robberies, like the guys who broke into a local gun store and found all the guns in the store's vault or armored display cases?  Burglars.  If a man runs up to you on the sidewalk, sticks a gun in your face and demands your pocketbook, he's an attempted robber even if a car comes around the corner and he panics and runs away.  (That happened to me, and while I was sure glad to not be shot and to keep the $2.75 in cash money that I had at the time, the perp had nevertheless committed a crime.)

     You don't get a pass for being lousy at it.  People were injured and killed.  Historical properties were damaged.  I watched real-time video, handheld stuff, security cameras, some professional coverage, whatever the networks could lay hands on.  It was a mob assault with the intent of overthrowing the normal functioning of the Federal government and installing a different President than the one who had been duly elected.  And not just duly elected, but repeatedly challenged in court and every challenge found meritless.  Every recount -- even the ones most suspicious of the results and set up to be well outside normal channels -- found the same winners and losers as the original counts.

     The candidate the mob tried to put in office had lost the election.  That makes their actions an attempted coup -- an insurrection.

     How sad for your bloodlust that it wasn't as productive of carnage and otherwise terrible as it could have been, I guess, though at the time, I thought the country had a very narrow escape from a truly dire outcome, and I still do.

     I am stunned that the instigator of that insurrection has been given another chance at the office.  Win or lose, his party will come to regret it.  History shows that autocratic usurpation never comes to a good end; the only question is how long it will take and how many people will be maimed and killed before the sickness has run its course.

     I'm telling you now, you don't escape a wood-chipper by jumping into the maw and hoping to ride it out, and you sure don't avoid the guilt by volunteering to gas the thing up and push the starter button.

They've Told Me Who They're Voting For

     It doesn't change how I plan to vote.  A few of my commenters are true-red Trumpists, and have told me how the former President "really loves this country." to which I can only point out that he loves it so much that this man who swore an oath to protect and defend our Constitution attempted by multiple mean to overturn an election which he lost, including inciting an insurrection that interrupted Congressional certification of the results and resulted in multiple deaths, and when out of office, hewing to his unsupportable Big Lie of a stolen election,* he called for the Constitution to to be suspended.  The man swore an oath to protect and defend it, and that oath -- and the U. S. Constitution! -- means no more to him than an empty pop bottle, to be tossed out if it gets in his way.

     His running mate is hardly better; Senator Vance first swore an oath to our Constitution in 2003 and again when sworn in as a Senator a few years back, but he has called for Jacksonian defiance of the separation of powers and muses that the United States is "...in a late republican period," referring to Rome right before Caesar ended their Republic.

      I don't have any x-ray vision into their hearts, nor do I into President Biden's, but he's been swearing the same oath to the Constitution (without picking away at it afterward) and taking Uncle Sam's paycheck for half a century now, and if he didn't love this country, he surely would have gone into a different line of work.

     It is unlikely any of these people -- or Vice-President Harris, who has been swearing the same or similar oaths since at least 2011 -- do not love our country.  My concern is that they will play by the rules.  Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he will not.  Sen. Vance has implied he will will not.  By my lights, that's disqualifying, right there.

     That leaves whoever the Democrats end up running.  It could be Joe Biden in a coma -- I can at least count on them to get us to the next election with a functioning American republic.  The GOP's picks are far too willing to pull it down.
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* He has a long history of claiming any contest he does not win has been "rigged."  The Emmy awards, for example.  So his veracity in making that claim is questionable, at best -- as is his sincerity.

An Ancient Mystery

     The Lapis Niger -- "Black Rock" -- in Rome was kind of a mystery to the Romans and it's even more so today.  It was widely considered to be an unlucky spot.  Supposedly the place in the Forum where Romulus was supposed to be buried, but wasn't; or possibly the tomb of his adopted father, or of a pre-Republic king or the king's grandfather, the location had a stubby column, a horseshoe-shaped altar with some guardian lion statues (think library lions) and a stelae with an inscription in a very old form of Latin.  It's almost impossible to read now and for most of their history, it wouldn't have been much easier for literate Romans to puzzle out.  Later on, the area was given black marble paving to mark it.

     There were ritual artifacts (possibly associated with kingly rule) buried in a layer of gravel under all this, and a sarcophagus that modern non-invasive methods have determined is empty.

     So, what's that stelae say?  It's a puzzle, and scholars have been picking away at it for decades.  The best read we've got is incomplete, but updated to modern language, it comes out to:

NO DUMPING OR LITTERING IN THIS GROVE. VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED [one?] COW, PAYABLE TO THE KING.

     You can go read it on Wikipedia (scroll down to the end of the section), but it looks like Ancient Rome was walking wide and careful of an unreadable "No Littering" sign that people knew was bad luck, even though nobody remembered why.

I Don't Get It

     Caesar did nothing good for the Romans and left chaos in his wake.  Oh, they sorted it out, painfully, bloodily -- but the Republic was gone, never to return.

     We've kind of got King Log -- if you can call President Biden that, considering that he's managed to get a lot done despite a nearly deadlocked Congress.  Replacing him with King Stork is not an improvement.  Sure, the stork makes more noise and flaps around a lot, but perhaps the eager should review the fable.  You and I are, like the rest of the 99%, small and tasty.

Unexpected

     Sure, he was on the short list, but most pundits put him near the bottom of it.  J. D. Vance will be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket, beard, suspected eyeliner, literary ambitions and all.

     His book received mixed reviews -- no one said it wasn't well-written, but critics were divided on his self-appointment as the interpreter for a whole region of the country and one he had not, in fact, grown up in.  If you want a take on transplanted Appalachian culture, his is as good as any; but there are a lot of transplants who headed to the manpower-hungry industries of what would become the Rust Belt, and a lot of takes on how that worked out.

     Senator Vance has issued mixed reviews of his new boss over time, and you can take them as a record of how his thinking has changed; he has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, following his party's lead, and is very much the darling of the Federalist Society, and of the Heritage Foundation, the latter responsible for the "Project 2025" blueprint for, well, you can go read the thing yourself.  It changes the nature of government meddling and nudging, but not the amount of it.  And it throws open the door for the types of prejudicial treatment of people that would gladden the heart of the odious Woodrow Wilson.  It's not a good look.  Polls give Sen. Vance's party a 50/50 chance at implementing it, which is certain to provoke a strong reaction.  Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has promised a "bloodbath" if he fails to take the Presidency.

     Interesting times, either way.

     I hate interesting times.