Citizen Cartwright

What would Einstein do?

In addition to being a famous physicist, Albert Einsten "was a pacifist, a political activist, an active anti-racist, and one of the most iconic and celebrated figures in all of history," says Big Think.

 

"He was also known for his unconventional behavior in a variety of ways that flouted social norms, including his unkempt hair, his witty humor, and his unrelenting hatred of socks," Big Think says. "But less well-known is Einstein’s freely-given life advice to many of his friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, which are perhaps even more relevant today, in the 21st century, than when he initially doled out his words of wisdom and compassion."

 

"The Einstein Effect," a book published in July, provides some of that life advice. "Full of humor and surprises, 'The Einstein Effect' is the perfect read for fans of a larger-than-life figure whose heartfelt dedication to human rights rivaled only his groundbreaking science," says Paul Halpern, physics professor and author of Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat.

 

One of my favorite examples of Einstein's approach:

 

"Think about the problems that we face, both as individuals and collectively, as a civilization,” says Big Think. "These could be financial, environmental, health-related, or political, for example, as those arenas affect us all. Do you view these problems as crises? If you do, you probably feel despair at them, as there’s very little that’s empowering about facing a crisis. But if you view them as a puzzle, you might be inclined to think about a fresh approach to solving them. In this regard, Einstein was pretty much the prototype individual for someone who viewed every difficulty he faced as a puzzle to be solved: in physics and beyond."

What would Einstein do?

In addition to being a famous physicist, Albert Einsten "was a pacifist, a political activist, an active anti-racist, and one of the most iconic and celebrated figures in all of history," says Big Think.

 

"He was also known for his unconventional behavior in a variety of ways that flouted social norms, including his unkempt hair, his witty humor, and his unrelenting hatred of socks," Big Think says. "But less well-known is Einstein’s freely-given life advice to many of his friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, which are perhaps even more relevant today, in the 21st century, than when he initially doled out his words of wisdom and compassion."

 

"The Einstein Effect," a book published in July, provides some of that life advice. "Full of humor and surprises, 'The Einstein Effect' is the perfect read for fans of a larger-than-life figure whose heartfelt dedication to human rights rivaled only his groundbreaking science," says Paul Halpern, physics professor and author of Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat.

 

One of my favorite examples of Einstein's approach:

 

"Think about the problems that we face, both as individuals and collectively, as a civilization,” says Big Think. "These could be financial, environmental, health-related, or political, for example, as those arenas affect us all. Do you view these problems as crises? If you do, you probably feel despair at them, as there’s very little that’s empowering about facing a crisis. But if you view them as a puzzle, you might be inclined to think about a fresh approach to solving them. In this regard, Einstein was pretty much the prototype individual for someone who viewed every difficulty he faced as a puzzle to be solved: in physics and beyond."

Making your holidays as original as you want

Travel travails, preachy politics and tedious traditions may have led you to change, or want to change, your approach to the holidays.

 

Here are ideas on updating traditions while being sensitive to the emotions that may be involved, from Vox.

I’m rousing myself — to give back to the democracy that’s given much to me

Yesterday, I wrote about Barton Gellman’s article on The Atlantic website titled “Trump’s next coup has already begun.”

“There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it,” Gellman writes. "Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

“We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024, but urgent action is not happening,” Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine is quoted in the article as saying.

Why? 

Well, when it comes to people like me who were trained as journalists, Gellman says in an NPR interview:

"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party. But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders.

"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not — I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting. 

 

"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.”

"If [our democracy] is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves," Gellman says.

I believe in balanced reporting and journalism that’s as objective as possible and is fair to everybody. I hope that’s been clear to those of you who’ve been reading this blog over the years.

Authoritarians tend to be impatient with balanced, objective and fair journalism. President Trump certainly was.

I came to Washington many years ago to work for a Republican member of the House of Representatives. The depth and breadth of the chasm between the party then and now is beyond my ability to describe.

This blog is all about what it means to be a citizen in this democracy. 

For me, that means it’s time to change my “mainstream journalist” approach. For example, I rarely run opinion articles because there’s no on-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand balance. But mainstream journalism isn’t calling out the Republican Party as seems to be critically needed right now, and I’ll be running opinion pieces and other work by people who are.

If you come across articles, studies or reports you think our fellow citizens need to be aware of, please send them to me.

Our democracy is at risk, and 'its defenders have to rouse themselves'

That’s the bottom line of the cover story of The Atlantic magazine’s January/February 2022 special issue, which is focused on “American democracy in crisis.” 

Online, the article, by Pulitizer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman, is titled "Trump's next coup has already begun."

In nearly 14,000 words, the article examines the current GOP trends. Here are the main points:

— Ballots cast by American voters may not decide the presidency in 2024. People already are working on that. And "who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today,” Gellman says.

— "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft,” Gellman says. 

"Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. 

"They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.”

— "By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response,” Gellman says.

"Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire.  … His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”

— A main concern of Trump supporters is the “Great Replacement” — that Africans Americans or Hispanics eventually will "have more rights than whites,” as one poll put it.

— Since Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans in at least 16 states have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature, Gellman says. Under the banner of election integrity, even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

— Trump’s legal team — of top-tier lawyers this time around, according to Gellman — is fine-tuning a constitutional argument to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. 

It "exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an 'independent state legislature' doctrine, which contends that statehouses have ‘plenary,' or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead," Gellman says.

— President Biden’s response to the threat to democracy so far comes down to “enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes,” Gelllman says.

(And Gellman says in an NPR interview about his article: "grassroots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.

"And news media, frankly, could be putting a lot more attention on this. … they are not [doing the] sort of sustained war-footing news coverage that says democracy is under threat.

"You're accustomed, as a mainstream journalist, to not taking sides in a political dispute and not being for or against any political party," Gellman says. "But what we're for as journalists is truth. And what we're for as journalists is democracy. We are unambiguously in favor of our democratic system and of allowing the people to choose their own leaders. 

"And the conundrum is that right now we have a political party that is bowing to authoritarian forces, that is systematically lying about the political process, about the election process itself. And so we're not —I'm not trying to advance the interests of the Democratic Party in my reporting. 

"But we have only one party right now that is small-D democratic. We have only one party that is prepared to lose a legitimate election and another one that's prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy. And so I am calling out the mainstream of the Republican Party for its lies and for its election subversion in a way that tonally is different from what I could have imagined writing 10 or 20 years ago.")

— "The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.”

— Gellman concludes his article: "Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”

Yes, this is a holiday to be grateful, but what about that Pilgrim part?

It's the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving.

 

And as they have since 1970, indigenous people and their allies will be gathering in Plymouth, Mass., to commemorate a National Day of Mourning.

 

So, since this blog is about being an informed citizen, let’s take a look at an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum on the National Mall titled "Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations.”

 

The exhibit "documents the history of treaty making between American Indians and the United States, from the days of the early republic, when treaties were considered by both sides to be serious, diplomatic agreements based on the recognition of each nation’s sovereignty, to the U.S. government’s use in the 19th century of coercive treaties to dispossess Native Americans of their lands, to the 20th century, when Indian Nations successfully fought court and legislative battles for federal recognition of their treaty rights,” the museum says.

 

I hope you have a chance to watch these videos from the exhibit:

 

"Nation to Nation" exhibit introduction, 4 minutes

"The 'Indian Problem,'" 12 minutes

"Sovereign Rights, Sovereign People," 5 minutes

You can be a 'time millionaire'

First named by the writer Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation, says an article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

 

“Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,” Roy says. “But I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.”

 

The coronavirus pandemic has created a new cohort of time millionaires, the Guardian says.

People actively embracing a less work-focused life are, generally speaking, childless members of the professional classes, the Guardian says. But this shouldn’t have to be the case, says Roy: “If society was truly progressive, it would not work people to the bone in the first place, or make the assumption that leisure, time to rest, time to be with your family, is only for the wealthy.”

"The enforced downtime of the pandemic caused many of us to reassess our attitudes to work, and whether we might be able to lead less lucrative but more fulfilling lives,” says The Guardian.

 

The article mentions Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay, "In Praise of Idleness." He wrote: “Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all [but] we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”

 

One of my favorite quotes from Walt Whitman: "I loaf and invite my soul.”

New book says we’re really 4 Americas

Our national divide goes beyond red and blue, says journalist and author George Packer in his latest book, “Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal.” 

 

He describes four Americas: Free America, of Reaganism; Smart America, of professional elites; Real America, of Trumpist reaction; and Just America, of a new generation of leftists.

 

"The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagan’s America,” Packer says in a New Yorker interview. "And this is really the story of my adult life, from the late nineteen-seventies onward. It’s been the most dominant narrative in our society. And it says, 'We’re all individuals.' We all have a chance to make it. The best way to make it is to get government out of the way and to cut taxes and deregulate and set us free in order to use our industry and talent to make something new. And that was a really potent story that Reagan told, and that the Republican Party lived by for decades, and to some extent still does.”

 

"Smart America is the meritocracy,” he says. "It’s the professional class. It’s Americans who believe that talent and effort should be rewarded but who also think we’re part of a society and that society has to make sure that everyone has roughly an equal chance. So there’s affirmative action, there’s diversity hiring, there’s children’s health insurance. But, really, Smart America takes on the parameters set by Free America: deregulation and free trade and open immigration. And in a way you can see they have followed each other in power from one decade to the next. Free America in the eighties, Smart America with Clinton in the nineties. To me, he embodies it.”

 

"Sarah Palin was the early warning sign that Free America was breaking up,” Packer says. "There was a rebellion from below within Free America. And that rebellion was out in the heartland. It was a white Christian-nationalist narrative that said, 'Your free trade, your immigration, even your corporations and monopolies have not improved a lot of towns, and rural areas have sunk and are in deep trouble, and have some of the same serious problems that the inner cities have had for decades.' And so, when Trump came along, in 2015, he intuited in his reptilian way that the old, sunny, optimistic Reagan message didn’t cut it, and that something more dark and nativist and ugly would appeal — that people didn’t want to hear how good things were. They wanted to hear how bad things were. I’d call that Real America. It’s a phrase Palin used during the 2008 campaign."

 

"The fourth America is also a rebellion. As Real America is a rebellion against the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America — which is a difficult term, because it doesn’t quite capture it — is a generational rebellion against the complacency of Smart America, which had promised, 'As long as you get an education and work hard and play by the rules and go as far as your God-given talents will take you, you will have a successful life.' And the generation that came after Clinton, the millennials, found out that this wasn’t true, and that the sanguine promises of their liberal parents just didn’t resonate. And that generation has embraced a different narrative, which sees us less as striving individuals with an imperfect but ever-improving society and more as a fixed hierarchy of groups, some of which are oppressive and some of which are oppressed. And both are in an almost permanent state of conflict, in which the country really isn’t progressing. It’s stuck in its original hierarchy, and that hierarchy has to be overthrown in order for justice to come.”

 

How to bring the four America’s together?

 

"I have a bunch of ideas at the end of the book. None of them are original, and a lot of them are long shots. And one of them is national service. It would be giving young people a chance, whether through military or civilian ways, to serve the country and one another, and to get to know one another across all the lines that divide us. I don’t know where else it could happen.”

 

"The other thing that I hold some hope in, in lowering the temperature, is simply improving the material conditions of people’s lives through government,” Packer says. "That is Biden’s project. I think it’s exactly the right one. It’s the first time since Free America emerged, in the nineteen-eighties, that we’ve had a serious new political project as ambitious as that — of simply improving people’s lives in jobs, in working conditions, giving labor more power, breaking up monopolies, providing health care.”

Books to inspire us in difficult times

As I prepare for my annual year-end time off, I’m hoping to read some thought-provoking, attitude-altering, recharging, inspiring books.

 

There are lots of reading lists around, of course. Here is one that’s probably less known but has the approach I’m looking for.

 

It’s put out by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley. 

 

"Since 2001, the GGSC has been at the fore of a new scientific movement to explore the roots of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior — the science of a meaningful life," its website says.

 

The list focuses on books offering reason for hope and on increasing the personal moral courage needed in difficult times.

Note to readers — National Book Festival 2020 is online this weekend!

I said I wouldn’t be posting again until Monday, Sept. 28 — but I don’t want you to miss the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival. It’s one of my favorite events in Washington and usually involves more than 100 authors and 100,000 attendees at the D.C. Convention Center. 

 

But since it’s being held online rather than in person this year, we all can go, no matter where we live! 

 

The festival begins tomorrow, Friday, Sept. 25, and runs through Sunday, Sept. 27.

 

A major focus of the book festival this year is “Democracy in the 21st Century.”

 

"From the changing nature of the American political arena to the 'Arab Spring' to Russia under Vladimir Putin – to name a few – the landscape of democracy has proven to be uncertain terrain,” says the National Book Festival blog.

 

This topic will feature 21 authors in 13 programs, ranging from books for kids and books for readers of current politics and books for history fans who want to examine how we got where we are, the blog says.

 

"As always, there are big names in history – Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, Jared Diamond and David Rubenstein – and in journalism – Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Barton Gellman and George Packer. There’s also a delightful set of authors writing for child and teen audiences, including Sophie Blackall, Don Tate and Veronica Chambers. You can talk with authors via interactive chats, but don’t worry if you miss any — the Q&A sessions will be available at the close of the festival, too.

 

“Are we, worldwide, drifting away from a spoken allegiance to democracy?” asks Marie Arana, the Library’s literary director. “Why are governments becoming more authoritarian, and why do citizens sometimes like that they’re becoming more authoritarian? These authors are really getting down to the nitty-gritty of what it takes to uphold a democracy.”