Kool-Aid or Diet Coke?

I know I should stay away from politics, for my own sanity's sake. I know it is poison, and yet, how can I? It's not a matter of addiction - although, in my case, there is some of that, too - but if I stay away, I will have no voice and will thus let somone else speak on my behalf... "Those absent are wrong" ("Nieobecni nie maja racji"), said the chairman of the Union of the Socialist Youth of Poland, sometime in the 80's. What he meant by it is that the voices of those who are not participating do not count and can be dismissed, as if they were plainly wrong. I remember disagreeing with him (only in my mind, of course - there was no opportunity for open disagreement), because not participating was the only way of saying "no". What else can you do but refuse to participate in elections where the only candidates were those from the communist party and its puppet associations? Yes, you could go to the polls, cross all the candidates out, write "F..k you!" on the ballot, and deposit it in the ballot box. (That's what I did the first and only time my father forced me to go and "vote"). However, the only outcome of that "protest" was that the state-controlled media could say the next day that "98 percent of Poles went to the polls yesterday to express the will of the people in our socialist democracy". (Sadly, those phony numbers were used by some "intellectuals" in the West to point out the sorry state of Western democracies, where the participation was mere 60 percent or less...)

I know how divisive politics can be, yet for some years after arriving in the US I have been quite angry at the fact that politics was almost never discussed: not at a work, not at parties, not with friends... It was so different from Poland, where politics was a very frequent topic of conversation, even in times, when openly griping about communism could land one in hot water. There was no time that was not right for talking politics. I remember heated discussions - well, quarrels really - at the Christmas Eve dinner at my grandmother's, where there seemed to be 10 different opinions among the 8 of us... And so I saw the reluctance of Americans to openly broach the subject of their political views as a sign of cowardice. Now I know better and see it as a sign of maturity and good judgment.

Perhaps it is a cultural difference, or a matter of not having been accustomed to democracy long enough, but Poles seem to have a very hard time disagreeing amicably with each other over politics. It's tearing not only the country apart, but families and friends as well. I just read this cautionary tale in the blog by a Polish writer and journalist, Malgorzata Karolina Piekarska. Unfortunately, it is in Polish, so let me summarize it for you:

She invited a bunch of close friends to a party at her home. Unfortunately, it fell on an "election weekend", so the conversation inevitably (?) drifted toward the candidates and their platforms:

"It started with watching the Prime Minister's speech. With timid comments. [...] With time, the comments became more and more blunt. Finally, the guests started openly expressing their views. [...] I was called into the kitchen. Here, my two married friends were arguing. He'll vote differently than she, because he's smart and she's dumb. He'll probably divorce her, because he no longer has respect for her. Doesn't matter that they have a child. [...] She is stupid and her views are stupid and harmful. [...] In the melee, for the first time, it got to male-on-female fights for political reasons - kicks, name-calling, even pulling each other's hair! Nobody was dancing. Almost everybody was arguing. One of the guests, on wobbly legs, showed his political adversaries his genitals. I swear that my friends are educated people. This is the so-called intellectual elite of the country."

Although she doesn't say that any divorce proceedings were started as a result of these fights, some friendships did suffer damage, possibly irreparable. When I think about how badly Americans are now divided along the political fault lines, and what issues are at stake in this division, I feel grateful that we still seem to have a good measure of civility left, that all this shouting and name calling is only temporary, and is already starting to subside. Perhaps the blessing lies in our short attention spans, or that we learned not to take politics and (especially) politicians seriously - whatever it is, given the number of guns in private hands, I'm really, really glad we know when to pull back and talk about the weather. :-)

Tolerancjonizm

A couple of weeks ago I heard a recorded lecture by a Polish feminist about the "new lines of tolerance and intolerance in Europe". She used the word "tolerancjonizm" ("tolerantionism" in English?), which I haven't heard before. She spoke of it with disdain - or at least that's how I understood her tone - as a term coined by the right wing in Poland in order to give a name to what it sees a the ideology of "tolerance for its own sake" emanating from the Western Europe.

It struck me as a very adequate term, probably better than its somewhat broader (and poorly translatable into Polish) alternative of "political correctness". Indeed, we seem to be living in the age of the "dictatorship of tolerance", which replaced the "dictatorship of proletariat" as the modus operandi of the Left. Like with the former, here too some are "more equal than others", more worthy of tolerance. Thus, having a statue of Virgin Mary on display, covered in elephant dung, should be tolerated as art, while there is no tolerance for a few cartoons ridiculing the moslem prophet Muhammad. (On the other hand, it's OK to show tolerance toward those, who demand death penalty for the cartoonists who "offend islam".) Displays of hatred towards the United States on American college campuses are to be tolerated. Not so much the patriotic (read "jingoistic") or conservative views on those same campuses. Signs of islamic oppression of women, such as hijab and forced marriages are perfectly tolerable facets of someone's culture (saying otherwise amounts to nothing more than "cultural imperialism"). On the other hand, telling a female colleague at work that she looks "sexy" is grounds for firing of the hapless male who would say such a vile thing. (Zero tolerance for sexual harassment!)

Of course, a lot of these double standards are driven by fear of the "moslem street", which has been known to fly into murderous rage at the slightest provocation. But most of it is driven by the nihilistic desire to dilute and undermine Western civilization, with no regard to what it will be replaced with. It is a consequence of the narcissism that permeates our culture: "apres moi, le deluge!" seems to be the attitude ot the XXth Century's Western Man. (Not XXIst century's - I hope the new generation is smarter and better than we, the self-absorbed baby-boomers. If not, we're in trouble.)

What's really scary about global warming?

I feel very conflicted about the "global warming" meme being shoved down our collective throats. On the one hand, I'm convinced that this is a gigantic hoax driven in part by well-meaning people, but largely by anti-Western, anti-capitalist ideologies I'm extremely wary of. On the other hand, won't the good that may come out of that, like alternative energy and cleaner environment, outweigh the bad? Well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of - that it will not. For one thing, the benefits are yet to be realized, but there are already plenty of very troubling signs that evoke terrible associations for me. After all, wasn't the premise of communism a benevolent one? To distribute wealth more equally, to stop exploitation of one person by another, to introduce rational planning into the volatile nature of capitalist economy... And look what we ended up with.

I'm not saying that the global warming hysteria will lead to a revolution, a world socialist government, or gulags.  (I'm also not saying that it won't.) However, the attempts to silence and vilify the skeptics are extremely troubling. As is the politicization of science, the involvement of government bureaucracies, the enormous amounts of money that will be extracted from societies for all kinds of hare-brained ideas that, in the best of circumstances, will have very little effect, and in the worst, will cause irreparable damage.

Yes, I always hated the SUVs, considering them an idiotic fad that refused to go away. I don't think of myself as a tree-hugger (although I was one in my teenage years and early adulthood), but at the same time I don't like cars very much, and the notion that a single person could be burning so much gas moving his/her ass in a humongous car from one place to another was making me genuinely angry. Especially after 9/11, when it became painfully clear what our gas money had been paying for...

I would really welcome a much better public transit system in the US, and much smaller cars. I think I wrote about this before, but George W. Bush wasted a tremendous opportunity by not rallying the country around the idea of energy conservation and independence in response to the 9/11 carnage. Previous attempts by Presidents Ford and Carter to lower our dependence on foreign oil failed, because the OPEC countries responded by pumping more oil and lowering its price, thus making alternative energy sources badly uneconomical. Tying this to national security in the wake of the terrorist attack would have insulated this project - at least to some extent - from such economic pressures. The Americans would have swallowed $2 or $3 per gallon, if they knew that the revenue would go toward building energy independence. Now our only hope is that the price will stay high long enough for alternative energy to take hold, and that OPEC will not be able to increase production to kill it. (At the same time, it would be even worse if the price of oil got much higher, forcing the world's economy into a nosedive... It is a tough balancing act and we will need all the luck we can get.)

I cringe imagining government bureaucrats all over the world rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the windfall the global warming scare will produce. They will be relevant again! The public is virtually begging for more onerous regulations,  bigger taxes, more intrusions into their personal choices - let's give it to them! Governments are like those gigantic steam engines of the past: hard to get them going, but once they are in motion you have to keep feeding them, and it's awfully hard to make them stop or turn around. Remember these three idiotic questions the airline agents were required to ask years and years after the "Lockerbie bombing"?  "Who packed your bags?", "Have these bags been under your complete control since the time you packed them?", "Has anyone given you anything to bring on board?". It mast have been pretty evident to anybody with half a brain how ridiculously ineffective was this method of thwarting terrorism (was even a single bombing prevented because of this measure??) and yet it took 15 (or more?) years until finally the US government decided to let go of it. (Imagine my shock when I heard those questions last November, before boarding a plane at Schiphol in Amsterdam... They are still doing it. How sad and annoying.)

Another example: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is doing grave damage to American competitiveness, yet nobody has the guts to pull the plug on it. My point is that once you open the door for the government to regulate, you will have to live with the consequences for many, many years, even if it turns out that these regulations were ill-advised to begin with. This scares me much more than a change of a couple of degrees in average temperatures.