From Gutenberg and Luther to Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs

About 500 years ago, the new technology of the printing press enabled a religious revolution in the Christian church. The Catholic power structure was subsequently torn apart by the spreading of new Scriptural doctrines that were brought forth by Protestant leaders such as Luther and Calvin.

About 250 years ago, as that printing press technology was maturing, the political world was similarly torn apart by the rapid spreading of new political ideas. The old monarchic empires of Europe--most notably the British and the French--lost control of their institutions. Emerging democratic and republican movements rendered the old power structures irrelevant and replaced them with new, fledgeling governments. The American Revolution and the French Revolution changed the world forever.

Now those revolutionary movements of the 1700s have themselves produced worn-out overdeveloped institutions which have become cumbersome and must therefore be replaced or radically downsized

I'm talking about our old political parties and our old media institutions. And who knows-- even the government itself?

Like the 16th-century revolutionary advent of the printing press, we are witnessing an emerging 21st-century revolution in communications technology: the Internet. This changes everything about how we organize ourselves as different interest groups and cultural movements.

We will also endure a revolution in government institutions.

The powers-that-be, now morphing as powers-that-used-to-be, include not only the government itself but also the media behemoths and two political parties of the old order.

ABC, CBS, NBC appear to be going the way of the buffalo. Like IBM in the 1990s, morphing under assaults at the Gates of Redmond and the Jobs of Cupertino, the fates of these media giants will be determined by whether their leadership can change with the times.

And the old behemoth newspaper dailies--same thing. They gotta roll with the punches. Jeff Bezos bought the WashPo. What does that tell you?

But where this stuff is really hitting the fan now is in the political parties.

Bernie and Donald are tearing the old political landscape apart.

The old tags of Democrat and Republican are becoming irrelevant.

Our new identities slice right through both of those bloated institutions. Bernie and Donald are beneficiaries of this creeping political anarchy.

How can I identify these changes in a way that is descriptive without being simplistic?

Like it or not, the Democrats are now all basically socialists. But they are split between:

Occupiers and Mandarins.

Republicans are now all basically reactionaries (against Democrats). They are split between:

Trumpians and Conservatives.

Although this writer is a registered Republican, that association may be coming to an end. If the Trumpians take the booty in Cleveland, I'll be looking to find a new American party. It's dangerous, but I've read about some old guys from two centuries ago who took awfully risky chances when they signed a Declaration against King George III and then wrote a Constitution to boot.

Here's the beginning of my declaration, and the old Constitution will do just fine with maybe just a few updates. And this radical centrist is looking for some way to extend the American Experiment, without it falling apart.

People doing their thing on the Internet cast a plethora of disparate forces that are fragmenting our nation. The new political arrangements will have to reflect these changes or we're toast when the jihadis figure out how to penetrate whatever remains of our moral fortitude.

Glass half-Full

Mad

They say all the political powers that be are quaking in their boots because voters are mad and nobody can accurately predict what's going to happen.

Young Dems, hyper venting under the rhetorical influence of Bernie, are magnetizing progressively leftward toward a newly-discovered frigid frontier which must be the absolute dead-0 Socialist north-pole, heretofore unseen by any yankee marauders, but well-known to their European vanguards. They better get to their fragile pole quick because that could-be black-hole which used to be a white-hole , having been sighted now at the Leftward arctic pole hole is--it is wholly disappearing fast, having fallen under the destructive influence of global warming, climate change and them infamous heat-seeking carbon emission missiles.

Channeling the wicked witch of the North, the possessed pole is reportedly melting because Dorothy blew in from Kansas or maybe it was Texas and put a crimp in their plans by drillin' in some frickin' fracking destructionics down south where people are living and taking up space and generally messin' up the planet. But it'll be a high tide in hell before anything gets done to stop the global carbon juggernaut, even though they've pointed out, from Paris, Lima, Copenhagen and Kyoto, poles are melting, according to the polls.

Speaking of Poles, where's Lech Walesa when you need him?

But I digress, although I think it should be pointed out that the opposite of "digress" is "progress", which I used to advocate until the Democrats absconded the term for their own socialist identity crisis antithesis. That said, I like progress, not progressive. Progress is what Republicans used to facilitate with their capital by investing it in American industry before all the derivatives and the MBSs and the CDOs and the credit default swaps and the debilitating .gov regs, and the nuts and bolts stuff getting moved offshore or wherever it went after Nafta and Chairman Mao got a hold of it. Now you understand of course you'll have to take that with a grain of salt as I move into phase II of my political analysis.

Republicans, on the other hand, unlike the hyper-magnetizing Dems, are furiously de-magnetizing, which is to say they're falling apart at the seems under the hyper-influence of Trump's methodical craps-table croupier call of snake-eyes, which will damn-shure be a rude awakening for them when those two little black dots show up on white dice, staring back at them, instead of the Seven that the republican rabble thought would turn up when they staked all their chips on Donald Duck, or excuse me, that other Donald. You thought there was trouble in Paradise and Camelot, just wait and see what happens in Dodge City when the chips fall where they may, probly long about May of 2017, after the Donald has terrorized all Washington's heretofore decent and proper bureaucratic denizens by trumping their full suited straight-flushes and de-levitating their long-standing no-trump pipedreams of legalese and illegal ease. After he will have been yanking their yonder inside-the-beltway chain-games for a few months with very little response from the sedentary Establishment, he'll get flustered enough to fire them all if not even call down the goons on em. "Get 'em outa here; get 'em outa here," will be the order of the day.

This is quite different from what, say, Ted Cruz would do.

You see Ted is mad too.

"We're all mad," he said to Megyn Kelly yesterday when she asked him something about who is mad or why the people are mad, or something like that.

There we were in closed venue, which happened to be a church in North Carolina, about 600 of us Americans listening to Megyn Kelly interview Ted. I mean, sure, it was a friendly crowd, not like the 47%ers.

And he said that, yes, the people are mad, and something needs to be done to change the way things are done in Washington, so that the .gov reflects the will of the people instead of imposing the .gov's will on the people.

He mentioned a few revisions, long overdue, such as abolishing superfluous federal agencies that presume to do for the people what the people can actually do for themselves. Hence, phase out: the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Housing/Urban Development. He mentioned repealing Obamacare and Common Core, defunding Planned Parenthood, and abolishing IRS by implementing a flat tax.

All of which should be done, but systematically--the way a, say, Constitutional attorney would do it, legislatively organized and judiciously authenticated. Not undertaken recklessly like a Trumpian bull in a china shop would do it. Let's just get our government back to Constitutional basics. That's all we can afford without taxing We the people into scurrilous servitude.

However, it is obvious that the whole streamlining process could prove to be disruptive.

Therefore, the formidable task of deconstructing our overbloated, overbudgeted, overdeficited Federal government should be entrusted to someone with a Constitutional conscience. I'd trust Ted to lead it before I'd trust a high-rollin', trash-talkin' robber baron with a smirk on his face who's got a bouncer at the door.

Just sayin'.


Glass Chimera

Why I am a Republocrat

The other night Pat and I were enjoying a meal in our home with a couple of dear friends. Our after-dinner conversation turned to heartfelt expressions about past, present and future. In the midst of some shared recollections about previous phases of our life, I wondered aloud about how this idealistic young McGovernite college kid could now find myself, at age sixty, running with a bunch of Republicans.
Then last night, Pat asked me why I am uncomfortable being a Republican. I found myself unable to offer an answer. But today, after some mulling the question over, I collected a few thoughts.

I am in fact not a Republican at heart, although I am registered to vote that way. But that’s because I’m not a dam Democrat either, and wouldn’t want to be caught dead anywhere near their gov’ment-take-all way of doing things.

Here is why:
I believe in the power, proven in our American history, of a free people to do great works. I believe in the limitless possibilities of a free people who, with their individual liberties constitutionally assured, can do what needs to be done, and prosper while performing it, both individually and collectively.
I believe in free enterprise, free markets, free trade, the invisible hand, Main Street, and God.
I believe human life, from its earliest inception , is worthy to receive the protection of the law.

These days, although I empathize with the opportunity-challenged. underemployed Occupy wall street 99% crowd, I also have no complaint with the so-called 1% gathering as much wealth as they can accumulate. The rich cats can only squander so much of the gravy before spreading some of that prosperity around as expenditures and investments, whereby the rest of us 99% can catch a little of the action.
Philosophically, I do not favor the practice of governmental income redistribution, and I surely do not want to see government take over everything-- not health care, not business, not philanthropy, not any of that stuff that good citizens ought to be doing from the abundance of their own hard-earned resources.

Now perhaps you can see why I am not a Democrat, and here’s why I am not really a Republican either.
Beginning about 200 years ago our pioneering American spirit began to focus on settling and developing the north American continent. Figuratively speaking, yankee industry, southern agronomy, widespread entrepreneurship and nascent capitalism took on the challenges of capitalizing and developing this exceptional experiment in democratic/republican nationhood that we call the United States of America.
Led by wealth-seeking industrialists and prosperity-seeking workers, we built in short order an amazing infrastructure of railroads, electricity grids, highways, airways and communication networks. Thousands, yea I say unto thee millions, of folks got in on the action and got a slice of the copious wealth. We were in high cotton for 150 years or so, in spite of a depression or recession or two.
But now we’ve gotten lazy. And I’m not just talking about couch-potato consumers. Now, American business, unwilling to take on the risks—and the sweat and the toil and the uncertainty—of capitalizing the upgraded prerequisite infrastructure for 21st-century prosperity, dithers with profit-obsessive derivatives and credit default swap schemes, instead of venturing out into the new frontiers of what really needs to be done.
The infamous, phantasmic Wall Street, whatever that is, refuses to capitalize for us a way out of the self-destructive oil addiction rut in which we find ourselves cluelessly bogged down. I can’t blame the Dems for taking a stab at these dependencies when our famous free enterprise entities won’t, or can't, take a chance on it. So the self-appointed prophets and the planners and the socialists and the gov’ment do-gooders and the democrats and the intellectual elites want to take on the burdens of what unbridled industry used to do. Maybe they’ve overregulated the captains of industry into neutralized industrial impotence, I don’t know, but now it seems that the Dems want the government to initiate everything. Meanwhile, the Repubs are still dreaming in lala land about bonuses, unfettered capitalism and tax shelters.

If I could, I would cast out both the demonDemo bureaucrats and the corporatublican devils.
What has happened to our business leadership in this country? Have they abdicated the wealth-generating mantle of industrial innovation?
President Reagan, patron saint of the Repubs, said that government IS the problem. But now, thirty years later, that’s only half the picture. We’ve got a new problem: business.
Business is the problem—not enough of it. Why has business shrunk from the profit-possibility challenges of the 21st century? Why have the capitalists conceded the venture-risking function to government? Why? Because there’s not enough money to be made, and too much risk and expense required to do the work that needs to be done. Call uncle Sam, even if he’s broke busted and his mother can’t be trusted. He''ll take the risk; he's got a pump-priming Fed to back him up.
Where are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Edisons, Fords, Morgans and Watsons of our era? For that matter, where is the Gates, or Jobs, of the next generation?

In Congressional hearings today... Solyndra? Hey, I don’t care about the rhetorical politicized blameshifting and fault-finding. Solyndra was attempting to do the work that needs to be done, before wily Chinese competition cut them out of the emerging solar collector market. Where’s the company that will, Henry Ford-like, put a solar collector on every roof by capitalizing mass-produced affordability in that sector? Where’s the UAW that’s willing to cut a deal so that every half-prosperous American can afford to put an electric vehicle in their garage? Where's the bold corporation that will take a chance on new-tech American bullet trains?
It almost appears that American business, labor and industry has outlived its usefulness. How can that great trail-blazing entrepreneurial thrust of ages gone by be recovered, and recycled?
Don’t get me started; I’m a Republocrat, and dam proud of it.

Glass Chimera

Deep in the annals of Semitic history is a lesson...

Effective leadership arises in a three-phase process that encompasses, though not in any particular order:
~willingness to take corrective action
~benevolence
~anointing.
Let's take a look at an example from ancient history.
Abraham, the patriarch of Semitic cultures, had a nephew who had gotten himself into a bad situation. There was a war going on between tribal kings in the valley of Siddim, an area in Israel that is now covered by the Dead Sea. A powerful warlord named Chedorlaome had gathered some lesser kings; together they went on a conquering spree. After mounting an assault on the town of Sodom, Chedorlaome's forces pillaged their settlement and took some prisoners, one of whom was Lot, Abraham's nephew.. A fugitive from Lot's camp managed to escape, and reported to Abraham that his nephew had been taken away. The patriarch then assembled a band of his trained men, pursued the marauding armies, defeated them, and rescued Lot.

Thus did Abraham's willingness to take corrective action fulfill the first condition of his subsequent role as patriarch of the Semitic peoples.
After this assertive mission of deliverance, Abraham found himself surrounded by a group of thankful people (including his nephew Lot) and a collection of recovered goods.
One beneficiary of Abraham's military prowess, the king of Sodom, offered all the booty to Abe as a reward. But the benevolent leader was satisfied with the mere rescue of his nephew and, presumably, the restoration of peace and justice. So he declined the grateful king's offer. Abraham's selfless distributions of windfall resources that might have been used toward his own enrichment were instead given to the recovering refugees.

Among those gathered at the occasion of Abraham's victorious return from battle was Melchizedek, the king of Salem (now called Jerusalem), who was also a priest, or person having spiritual enablement. Melchizedek pronounced a blessing on Abraham, and Abraham, discerning the spiritual authority imparted in that blessing, bequeathed a tenth of the captured goods to Melchizedek for his priestly use. Abraham then went on to become, you know, a pretty important guy in the history of world events.

Thus was leadership legitimatized in an ancient civilization in a two-pole balance of power between the king and the priest.

Parallel to this in secularized 21st-century democracy is the sharing of governance that is initiated when our Chief Justice administers the oath of office to the President, whose agenda is determined by a third authoritative source, the people's Congress.

Legitimacy requires, then: willingness to take corrective action, benevolence, and anointing. In our modern scheme of bestowing authority, the anointing ( legitimacy to govern), is now understood to originate among the people collectively, instead of some priest or pope. In the American manifestation of that principle, the President's anointing to lead is derived, according to the Constitution, from the consent of the governed instead of, say, coronation by a religious leader.

In the confusion of 18-century emerging democratique republicanism , it's a lesson not fully comprehended by Napolean, who impulsively grabbed the crown of French emporership from pope Pius VII. Bonaparte's eagerness to embody the new zeitgeist propelled him into a presumptuous grabbing of power that ultimately led to his demise and the decline of French hegemony.

120 years later, Hitler made a similarly disastrous presumption, although his delusion about the source of legitimacy went much deeper than Napolean's. But that's a different historical lesson.