Are We Getting Dumber? Are We Actually Enjoying It?

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It's always been true that it's easy to be dumb. You just have to ignore things. It takes work and bother to pick up a book, a magazine, or anything in print and read it. It takes energy to care enough to watch the news.

It seems that this country is becoming dumber and having fun doing it. I don't see any Democrats who agree. This seems to be a Republican thing to do.

Recent developments confirm this. Fear is overtaking inquiry. New information has become too scary to consider. So we don't. Ignorance, heaven help us, really is bliss.

It is also whistling past graveyards. Learning new things isn't necessarily a nod toward one political party over another, but when the other one makes it clear that it's apparently so, it represents a line in the sand that it doesn't want people to get smarter. Just listen to us, they say. Ignore those other people, like scientists and sociologists and researchers. They're "woke." That's goofy.

It's also very damaging to human development. Because real learning, as the historian Daniel Boorstin once wrote, is finding out what you didn't even know you didn't know--to have your previous assumptions questioned because you embraced the possibilities that they might have been based on obsolete, erroneous or intentionally misleading information.

Thinking about that becomes uncomfortable and unsettling. There is an inertia to humans that fights this automatically, that wants to leave things be. But that belies the essence of inquiry--which is part of the essence of humanity: the acceptance that, while we will never know everything, needing to continue down that path can make things better.

It can also overwhelm us with worry. Artificial Intelligence can scare the hell out of us. It can thwart any coherent meaning of what constitutes reality. It has the potential to revise education irrevocably--and to ruin it.

The inclination is to withdraw into a sheltered state where information is endlessly familiar. But that's the easy way out.

Ron DeSantis is advocating for the easy way out. Discovering about transpeople somehow seems to mean advocating for them. But he's not delineating those two things. All it means is that they should be accepted. Too tough, I guess. Too much thinking. Too great a challenge to manhood, as if he knows what that is.

No, he'd rather scare people into thinking that it represents a slippery slope. At the far end, it would mean, I suppose, that nobody can tell the difference between men and women any longer, that transpeople will be revealed all over the country, and that we will actually have to see them walk around in new clothes. That's so ridiculous it almost doesn't deserve commentary. And it won't win him any elections outside of Florida.

Beyond that, libraries are suddenly in distress because they include books about gay people and their sexuality. Some of those books are relatively new, but some have been there for quite a while. Nobody's made a big deal about them until now. Hasn't that occurred to the naysayers at all? Why haven't they considered that they might be getting duped by fear-mongering Republicans? And why haven't the gender preferences of our whole population been reversed or confused before our very eyes?

Instead of discovering what being gay is all about, these folks want to shove books into the same closet they'd rather see gay people put themselves back into. Intelligent conversations can't happen without a knowledge base. What's left is to maintain ignorance.

These ideas are suddenly re-emerging. It's as if people can't be happy unless they descend into the same vacuum of knowledge they once had. Thing is, they're not happy anyhow. They feel like being angry, and so they are. So they will stay.

Such conversations with such folks should be centered around that: What are you so angry about? Why does any of that affect you?

Then sit back and listen. And ask them what, if anything, they'd prefer that could actually happen.

Would it be that AP African-American studies, dismissed as "indoctrination" by Arkansas' governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, be cancelled or denied as qualification for graduation from the state's high schools? Note that those high schools are offering them anyhow. Note that the teachers' union has taken a stand in support of that course. 

Note that learning can't be stopped. Note that "indoctrination" is, in point of fact, the cancellation of methods of inquiry that might help lots of people understand an important part of our history. "Indoctrination" is her preferred mode of education, not someone else's.

These people want us to stay stupid. Some people actually like that. Not me. Count me out.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Now Let Me Talk to Phil Mickelson

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I want to talk to Phil Mickelson now.

Now that we know that at least 655 people, by last count which in all likelihood is short several hundred, have been shot trying to cross the border between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia.

Now that we know that the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, journalist for The Washington Post, wasn't just a one-off that might have gone wrong (or so I'm sure it's being spun).

Now that we know that Saudi Arabia is the paranoid, repressive dictatorship that anyone who's been watching carefully has understood for years.

Now I want to ask him: Do you get it at last? Is this enough of an indication that the millions you took for joining the 'rebel' LIV golf tour was, and is, deep red blood money?

That you are, by direct implication, supporting a regime that would do this to people?

Of course Saudi Arabia's government denies the charges. And you can count on the simple fact that that information was sneaked out of the country by unidentified sources who would soon be killed, like Khashoggi, if they were ever caught alone or naively drawn into a trap, like he was.

So they can trash such sources because they'll never step forward. Which is what authoritarian dictatorships succeed in doing: muzzling information by demonstrating why sources should be fearful.

But back to Phil: He, as well as other outstanding golfers such as Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith, took guaranteed money upfront--millions of dollars in Saudi chump change, to add legitimacy to their "sports washing" plans to make themselves look somehow culturally mainstream, or at least leaning that way.

When they did that, they conveniently overlooked Saudi Arabia's awful, ongoing record on human rights. The money was being dispensed in the tens of millions.That made it pretty appealing, granted, but you'd think, with the kind of discipline it takes to be a successful golfer at the highest level, that that discipline could be extended as far as refusing blood money.

But as far as Phil was concerned, you could easily assume that the money would be too much to turn back. Two reasons for this: One, Phil is now over 50 years old. That he is still playing the game at an elite level is to his credit, of course, and he won the PGA Championship at age 50 at Kiawah Island, no pitch-and-putt track. But he can see the calendar like anybody else, and his window of competitiveness is closing. So dangling ten million dollars (or so; but that's a typical offer) in front of his face might make anybody jump.

But the second reason is more jaded: His gambling. It's recently been revealed that Mickelson has gambled away one billion dollars. That means losses. That means whatever he's done in charitable work could have been improved or buttressed incredibly with even half that much money. It's instructive to remember that if you were given one billion dollars at the rate of a dollar a second, it would take the benefactor more than 32 years to pay you off.

Phil Mickelson has frittered all that away with expressiveness that he would call "fun." Little surprise, then, that he'd lunge at ten million (or so) dollars. I've read nothing he's said that indicates that he's done gambling or has reined it in in any way. It would be ridiculous to assume, then, that he wouldn't take some of that and gamble it away, too.

But I don't feel sorry for him in the least. He's been the prime participant in corrupting a major sport that seemed above corruption, and being paid for it indirectly by a regime that also claims itself to be above corruption but is one of the most corrupt on the planet because it's an authoritarian monarchy that rules by conjured fiat.

Part of that corruption is the murder of hundreds of migrants, and the underlying assumption that, somehow, they don't deserve the better life that they're seeking (a problem some of us seem to be having here in the U.S., too, let's not forget, with razor wire along the Rio Grande).

I wonder if Phil Mickelson and his fellow LIV golfers have given any thought to that. If they want, they can just drag out the lame excuse that they don't pay any attention to politics. They just play golf and let the rest sort itself out. Something like that.

But is this politics? Are human rights an issue of debate? Not if you put ten million dollars in someone's pockets, I guess. That discussion apparently becomes moot.

I was sickened when the LIV group first broke away from the PGA. The Khashoggi murder compromised it from the start. That it's trying to rejoin through conjunction with the PGA now, with financial strength and nothing else to hold it hostage, deepens the illness. 

I like watching golf because I've played the game since I was ten, but I won't watch the LIV. I won't patronize such corruption of fatuous profiteering with the minimum of effort (because the players are paid handsomely regardless of how they finish in a tournament; they don't have to earn anything and, with a no-cut policy,  it doesn't matter if they play poorly). It spoils my viewpoint of it all.

But I want to tell Phil Mickelson off. He obviously has no principles other than bathing himself in megabucks, even though he's made megamillions. He bolted to the LIV because he believed the PGA could have loosened its moneybags. That he has turned out to be right about that hasn't brought him back into the fold, though. Ironically, that would be too big a risk, because he wouldn't be betting on chance. 

He'd be betting on himself. Too much of a gamble, I guess. Meanwhile, the country underwriting his and others' enormous largesse shoots hundreds at its border. Is it true that the more money you have, the less you need a conscience?

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Why Should We Be So Surprised?

Annette Ziegler is upset. The Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is unhappy about changes to her power that the new, progressive majority of the Court has apparently foisted upon her because, after all, they're now in the majority. That has to tell you a couple of things:

• That whatever restrictions the progressive justices had upon them were intolerable; and 
• That they are very aware that their majority may not last forever. In other words, once you have power, you'd better use it.

So, too, is the decisive and sudden effort of the state's Attorney General, Josh Kaul, to move the legal machinery to get a decision on abortion in front of the Court. Expect the same thing to start happening in the consideration of how electoral districts are determined.

In its totality, Wisconsin remains a slightly blue state. By their collective dominance over legislative elections, Republicans have fooled themselves into believing that their political machinations over legislative districting would last forever. Uh-uh. Now they reap the whirlwind.

They made it a point not to play fair for over a decade, coming ever so close to providing themselves with a veto-proof majority in both houses. And Annette Ziegler is upset because her side can't benefit from not playing fair anymore? Too bad. So sad.

Thing is, redistricting can only provide the state with more competitive districts. Republicans are undeniably in control in vast rural areas of the state, and Democrats can only hope to cut into some of them. But the oppressive, blatantly unbalanced nature of the present districting was meant only to perpetuate power, not to ever test it in any meaningful way.

Congressional races are proving to be the litmus test. In the last election campaign, two of the eight districts had no Democratic challengers. As noted here before, the Republican gerrymandered districts had guaranteed a 60-40 split between Republican and Democrats. 20 points is an impossible hurdle. It has rendered those districts uncompetitive, as it has rendered the two Democratic districts uncompetitive as well.

That's not democracy. That's a phony system without decent choices. What's emerging is what elsewhere was called the Solid South, except Democrats dominated those states. With no competition to test political thinking, it led to entrenched racism. Here, it's led to entrenched MAGA.

Beyond that, with the number of 'safe' districts increasing, the primary races become distorted. With one party guaranteed to win, the competing thinking becomes tilted toward radicalization--who can become crazier than the other person. So, to hang onto a position, a legislator must come out early with positions they wouldn't otherwise take. So, too, it stays that way while they serve in office, compromising with no one for fear that a primary opponent will emerge. It isn't the only explanation behind the polarization of our politics, but it ranks near the top.

If the present majority on the state Supreme Court can head that off at least somewhat, it will do our state a world of good. It might tone down the kind of political ads that we're now used to seeing, filled with hyperbole and smearing. It might get people to talk to each other again.

Normally, that wouldn't sound like a high bar over which to leap. There was the day in which that bar wasn't even necessary. But with an unconquerably dominant, nearly super-majority, one side has lorded it over the rest of us, pressing down with their thumbs to crush any opposition.

That's going to stop, at least for a few years. Tony Evers' presence in the governor's mansion shouldn't be the only thing stopping the Republicans from imposing absolute rule over Wisconsin. Now, the second of the three branches have people in them who seek to balance the scales.

That Annette Ziegler has sour grapes about that is to be expected. Compare that, though, with the discomfort that progressives have felt since Mr. F. Gow (Most Recent Former Governor of Wisconsin) was able to manipulate the entire system to favor not only Republicans, but anyone against unions that dismayed him. Maybe someone will do something about that, too. We can only hope.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark