2020 in the Rear View Mirror

Janus, the two-headed god looking both forward and back. 2020 was a tempting year to just forget. Ryan Reynold’s humorously captured the spirit when he produced this:

I love the clear Satan inspiration from Legend (1985)

Sure it’s a Match commercial but I am a sucker for its dystopian humor. The focus is on the impact of Covid and plays on the forced isolation, and then flips it on its head with the promise of finding love – a match made in Hell? Inversion to prove the universal – it’s fun, clever, and obvious all at once. We are laughing and grateful to have survived a mortal threat and are running up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as fast as we can!

I know I am desperate to just put it all behind, to look only forward after that royal shit-show!

But Janus looks back because what preceded defines what follows; Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

So what lessons can we learn from 2020?

Covid. Our common humanity. Covid is a painful reminder that a globally connected and highly integrated economy [1] is a great boon that comes at a price which every monoculture risks: the spread of disease. We have a shared human biology and isolation is impossible. We are all in jeopardy at the species level.

The incessant coverage of infection rates and the focus on the disparate impacts based on wealth (when has it ever been different?) all highlight inequalities but miss the binding common factor: we are all in this together. This should be the visceral lesson – more immediate and evident than Christ’s homilies – truly we are all children born of one god, bound to one another through our vulnerabilities. But to be reminded of our mortality is impolite – so most of us shut it out. We hide from any reminders of death.

Isolation. I know the challenge of cloistering with one’s immediate family, but I have a deeper empathy for those who have no family to shelter with – solitary confinement is inhumane.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beat or a god.
Aristotle, Politics

Isolation and training. I wrote a few posts on methods and suggestions. The absence of scheduled training time, I admit, lead to my own failure at maintaining discipline. I have been lax. No, absolutely slothlike, and – worse still – indulgent by using isolation as an excuse to excess. I have absolutely enjoyed the extra time with my family and am grateful that we have the financial security and a home sufficiently large to weather Covid without grave deprivation – just great inconvenience to an otherwise privileged life. I am grateful! It will take serious training to get back to pre-Covid conditioning.

Politics. Dangerous populist demagoguery. The polarization of America troubles me most. Trump poses the oldest question in democracy: why do we still fail to recognize the obvious threats of populist leadership?

Victor Hanson, a scholar I respect deeply, is an intelligent and articulate apologist for Trump. I admire Hanson’s dedication to the common-man thesis that Trump rode into office as well as Hanson’s lambasting the elitist isolation and “do as I say not as I do” moralizing hypocrisy that blinds them to Trump’s virtues. And while I understand his intellectualizing the Trump thesis, Hanson’s classical-tragic lens misses the deep psychology of Trump: the man is a megalomaniac and a pathological imbecile with none of the Sophoclean nuances Hanson ascribes to him.

I have close friends and family members who remain Trump supporters – and who fear the “socialist” Biden agenda. The rhetoric has descended to puerile levels and idiotic arguments. My fervent prayer is that some semblance of civil discourse will return in 2021.

I watch newscasts and shows (the Twilight Zone in particular) from the 1960s and am amazed at how intelligent the discussions were. Thinking back and remembering that the Greek plays and Shakespeare – subjects of deep collegiate scholarship now – were the HBO of their times, one might be seduced to believe the myth of mankind’s steady moral and intellectual decline (Spengler).

Yet we have our modern morality plays. The Avengers staged it best:

Defiance defended by the living incarnation of traditional American values

The scene poignantly is set in Germany – a clear reminder that we should be thinking about Hitler’s domination:

Loki: Kneel before me. I said kneel! Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.
Old German: Not to men like you.
Loki: There are no men like me.
Old German: There are always men like you.

The danger of the charismatic leader – Frank Herbert‘s eternal villain. Why are so many seduced? Tyler Cowen reviewed his most popular posts of 2020 and found this one was read frequently:

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Why did so many Germans support Hitler?

by Tyler Cowen March 30, 2005 at 7:47 am in

Political Science

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a “feel good dictator,” a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a “warm-hearted” protector, says Aly, author of the new book “Hitler’s People’s State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism” [TC: I cannot find it on U.S. Amazon, try this German link] and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich’s unsavory, murderous side.

Financing such home front “happiness” was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.

I am a believer in studying the extremes. Hitler’s Germany (extreme oppression and persecution), modern Haiti (a complete mess), and Yugoslavia in the 1990s (relapse from tolerance into murder) have a special hold on my attention in this regard.

And might you think that the German soldiers always followed orders? How about this:

In Auschwitz…there is not one case in the records of an SS man being prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings, while there is plenty of material showing that the real discipline problem in the camp — from the point of view of the SS leadership — was theft [from arriving Jews and others]. The ordinary members of the SS thus appear to have agreed with the Nazi leadership that it was right to kill the Jews, but disagreed with Himmler’s policy of not letting them individually profit from the crime. And the penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian — almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to take an active part in the killing.

That is from the new and noteworthy Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees.

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Loki had it partially right, most people want to be told what to do and happily follow orders – even repugnant ones. Another very human trait – the desire to fit into society is so great that it takes moral courage to remember what is right. (Review again the making of a Unabomber. Thank you Harvard!)

It is easy to think that we would not be corrupted thus – surely I would never blindly be so evil. But I am too honest to be blithely righteous. I drive by the tents of the homeless and have no real empathy – I have no solutions and thus just want them to simply go away. My instinct isn’t to help, to provide aid and succor for the desperate and in need, but rather to retreat to a refuge of safety. Keep them away lest I too be infected and suffer a similar fate. The brotherhood of man lessons are all forgotten when faced with committing to a course of action to better everyone if it means giving up my family’s security and comfort: my charity is circumscribed by tax-deduction calculus.

So would I have been complicit within Das Dritte Reich? I wish I could defiantly assure myself that never! is the answer. All too easy an answer because it is the right one – but not necessarily the honest one.

Trump follows an august lineage of populist leaders that – for me – starts with Themistocles, continues with Julius Caesar, segues to Hitler, and leads to Trump. Much like Hitler, with Trump I am baffled at the evident physical ugliness of the man and the manifest charismatic impact they command. How, exactly, did Trump co-opt the power of the Republican party and foil the establishment? I watched it happen and am at a loss to understand it. The danger is palpable – the fact that martial law is even a topic of discussion should be clarion call for civil action in extremis: Flynn should be keelhauled! And yet many of Trump’s supporters gained nothing tangible from his rule: faith sustained by grievance alone.

Biden’s presidency we can hope swings the pendulum toward the center, but I fear that Trump is a bellwether of the demise of republican values (note the small “r”). The common cause of American exceptionalism is now but a dream – and one criticized by the radical left as an elitist institution.

Thus dies all republics?

Alexis de Tocqueville was prescient in his warning – a populous isn’t always violently cowed but its government is a more insidious process where:

It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; … it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Remain vigilant.
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My father died April 2019, the plague descended March 2020, and one of my oldest friends was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just as Covid hit. Death is very much present with me and my memento mori is the M3 in the driveway. Trying to outrun death? Undoubtably. But also, a wonderful tool to bond with my boys – celebrating life even as it reminds me of its inevitable end.

Concerns over Covid-19 started in March 2020 and at first we were very assiduous with protocols and quarantine. A late snow provided some added refrigeration for the extra food we stocked up on.

The snow was short-lived, leading to Spring and the eternal return. We have a rabbit warren under our deck – the cats watch them eagerly and inspired Kyrian to draw.

As the weather warmed, we all became more active. Heidi and I began walking on a regular basis and explored the beauty of our neighborhood parks. The scale of the trees in Oregon is impossible to capture with a camera.

Panning up to capture their height creates a wonderful distortion

On Mothers’ Day, we visited the Walk of the Heroines, where Heidi had honored her mother by adding her name to the wall in 2011.

In June, we enjoyed a long weekend at Cannon Beach – and we were not alone.

In July we spent a long 4th of July weekend in Bend – again, it is impossible to capture the scale and majesty of the country with a camera.

In early August, we stayed in Seaside for Kyrian’s dance competition – the beach town was packed with tourists despite Covid – and not everyone wore masks.

Throughout the summer, we continued our cul-de-sac basketball games – usually me vs Kyrian, but occassionally the boys went one on one

The highlight of the summer, was a trip to Michigan. The boys wanted something “normal” and the chance to see their cousin Aaron at Dad and Nancy’s meant we all risked flying.

School resumed online only.

One weekend the boys and I drove to Newberg to explore and happened upon Storr’s Smokehouse – some of the best barbeque we have found.

As the winter rains and short days descended, we all became more despondent. Heidi got a puppy

The Christmas to New Year break was challenging. We all spent too much time alone within the same house indulging in high-calorie food.

Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago pizza sent Fed Ex to celebrate

The boys played more video games and I found Titans and Doom Patrol to distract me. Only Kyrian was productive and he started to teach himself guitar.

Boba and Wit have become playmates/rivals

Looking back now, Janus would remind us that reflection itself is survival. 2020 stripped away illusions, about health, politics, even self-discipline, but left behind gratitude. The lesson is simple, if rarely learned: comfort is fragile, courage is choice, and memory is armor. Remain vigilant. Janus would approve.

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[1] The global economy is demonstrably old – spice and food goods were circulating in the Bronze Age – but the modern scale is wider and faster because of air travel. Viral vectors, like all good zombie and pandemic movies show, are necessarily quickly global.

January 6, 2021 – Civil Insurrection

Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.
Robert Heinlein, Gulf (1949)

I emerged from my basement office and was shocked to see images of a Trump-incited mob storming the Capitol Building. I laughed; my psychological defense mechanism, because I am frightened to my core. Today I witnessed the death of American Exceptionalism as a shared civic creed.

This was not a principled insurgency. This was a mob deluded by a populist megalomaniac feeding the gullible conspiracy theories.

When has a mob been incited by such drivel? Perhaps an indexed comparison is in order?

When have we seen this before? Was it Berlin, March 23, 1933?

Exceptionalism is an impolite word because people who do not understand its context hear it as exclusionary. But that isn’t the proper philological understanding. Exceptionalism – Lincoln’s ordaining of America as the last best hope on Earth. Regan’s City on the Hill hearkens to our nation’s Puritanical foundation. These speeches highlight aspirational and laudatory ideals that bind a people to a higher cause.

In part, I blame Obama. Obama implicitly derided the concept by saying, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” The idea that every national power considers itself ‘exceptional’ is probably a truism – but that is a weak understanding of the concept of Exceptionalism. The Right chastised him for that speech (and the Nation has the most succinct review of the issue).

Obama was too honest. He showed us, and the world, that America needs to continue to work – that we have yet to create the ideal society. He pointed too closely at the details of how we needed to improve. He revealed chinks in the armor. And while he articulately did so with the belief he could inspire us to improve, the rhetorical miss was this: by highlighting the work, the path to progress, the ideals were made mundane – became part of a ‘to do’ list. Inspiration reduced to a project. We were no longer Exceptional, just another work in progress. Well-meaning to be sure (since real work needs be done) but a dream made concrete is no longer an ideal.

Trump’s deluded mob believes in MAGA because they dream of an America where self-sufficiency means America can go it alone.

An insular return to a more rural, less globally integrated, less involved America. A tragic an ill-informed dream but a comforting one where manufacturing jobs would magically return to the shores of America and save small towns from their imminent demise. Hillary derided these dreamers, calling them “deplorables,” concluding “thankfully they are not American.” An understandable political flourish but one that demonstrates the arrogance of the elite who were tone-deaf and dismissed the real pain of millions. Trump capitalized on that pain and fear.

And thus: to Trump alone I assign culpability.

Trump struck the match! (*Nero and the Burning of Rome by Henry Altemus, 1897)*

Trump: you are responsible for the actions of your minions – for they heed your call. You played on the fears of the masses. Your lawyers will parse the phraseology and make exculpating arguments, but the culpability is yours alone!

Well maybe him too – trial by combat Rudy!

Trump ruined the true dream that was America – the fragile belief in Exceptionalism. Exceptionalism: not a boast but the illusion that one place is better than every other locale – a Utopia (Gk. ‘no where’). It was always an illusion, a goal, Fiddler’s Green, a dream, but a necessary one.

President-elect Joe Biden delivered a timely speech, but only after providing ample time for Trump to assert leadership. This was a gentlemanly act, and that gives me a glimmer of hope. I am guardedly optimistic that Biden’s reserve can restore America to a position of deserved prominence: a resurrection of Exceptionalism. But how?

We have in fact been here before, albeit the damage was perpetrated by a foreign government. On August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops burned the Capitol and almost all other public buildings in Washington. The Capitol Building was set ablaze and only a sudden rainstorm prevented its complete destruction. Earlier still, Shay’s Rebellion was a spirited and principled insurrection by soldiers of the Revolution.

It was Shay’s Rebellion that elicited Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted quip about the “blood of patriots,” which is cited here with full context:

The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. yet where does this anarchy exist? where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? and can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. they were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. the people cannot be all, & always, well informed. the past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.
Thomas Jefferson to William Smith (1787)

I doubt seriously that the motivated Trump supporters can be set right to the facts (what are facts in an era of QAnon?) and therefore merit pardon and accept pacification. Today we had one death resulting from the riot (or was it four?). The number matters; the indifference to truth matters more. Is that sufficient manure to fertilize the tree of liberty?

With hope and trepidation, I wait for January 20, 2021 when President-elect Biden takes office. Biden’s burden is heavier now. Yes, there is the pandemic, yes, there is economic damage, yes, there is global uncertainty – but all those issues pale in comparison to the most critical agenda: restore facts as the basis for dialogue; restore civil dialogue as the basis for debate; prove that healthy debate can bring consensus, that consensus can lead to productive change and ultimately return to Exceptionalism. Where America emerges again to take its role as the preeminent example for others to emulate.

It all starts with leaders who have cultivated true character!

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Postscript? The future of American dialogue?

Old friends and some family members continue to believe in the inane narrative that Trump was the bastion of American values. And these believers are only entrenching deeper and further – a burrowing tick:

No, our friendship is not contingent on political views, because this is so far beyond politics now. I simply do not have the time for anyone that doesn’t share my beliefs.
No, Trump wasn’t perfect, but he was the only thing that stood between us and a shit country run by globalist communist. The Ty I used to know was a fighter. This is not politics; this is life and death now.
We had for a short time, a president that lit the White House in blue in support of cops, compared to the one before that lit it up with the rainbow flag. Which do you want for your two sons?
Would you stand face to face with one of the laid off Keystone Pipeline workers and tell them it is “just politics”? As the globalist puppet John Kerry just said, “They can learn to build solar panels now”
Have you read the democrat sponsored bill HR 127 yet regarding your guns?
But Trump was stupid they say, he was given all his money by his father. No, he turned millions into billions. Yet, our buddy Chris (Trump hater) is so much smarter. He managed to turn 1/4 million into nothing.
But Trump said, “grab a pussy”. Yeah, that’s what us alpha males say around one another. But the same stupid cunts elect a hair sniffing child groper.
My point is, you have become too comfortable in your suburban existence now my friend. Frankly, it is making you soft. The world is only going to get harsher. So, if you want to talk, I don’t have any interest in talking about comic books or movies.
I am sorry to hear about your roommate. I have lost 5 guys I went to the academy with already. 1 drank himself to death, 1 hanged himself and the other 3 blew their heads off. One of those caught his wife cheating with his best friend, went to the best friend’s apartment, walked in shot him to death and then stepped out on the deck and blew his own head off.
Be strong, the world is full of too many pussies. ~Your friend~

No doubt the last email, the end of a friendship. How is dialogue possible when facts are not a shared substrate? HR 127 is an over-reach (required registry) but even if enacted, it would not be much different from what Connecticut already imposes on him – and the mental health provision might have saved his fellow officers. And Keystone – what does one say to workers in a dying industry? The Luddites who broke auto-looms are not the model of Western progress. There are inevitable losers in the wake of economic creative destruction. Buffett summed it in 2001 when speaking at the University of Georgia:

What you really should have done in 1905 or so, when you saw what was going to happen with the auto is you should have gone short horses. There were 20 million horses in 1900 and there’s about 4 million now. So it’s easy to figure out the losers, the loser is the horse. But the winner is the auto overall.

The cult of personality. Why are so many so willing to cede their free will? I still don’t know. But I know this: I will never understand the willingness to follow.

DISARMS

There are of course doubters. Typically those who doubt the efficacity of any given disarm are well-prepared to anticipate the technique. In short, they know the trick and therefore know how to defeat it. This is a false dichotomy because “disarms are accidental if not incidental.” Disarm techniques are taught because one must know what to do when the opportunity is present and how to make the move effective. But disarms are not first order engagement strategies, meaning one does not engage specifically to disarm an opponent, rather they are the opportunities that present themselves in the ebb and flow of an active engagement.

Nevertheless, one must train the specific mechanics, just know that sensing the opportunity is a different (and higher level of) skill than the body mechanics of making the movements effective.

Disarms are a necessary part of any combative art and techniques are shown in early fightbooks. The Italian Fiore de’ Liberi wrote his Flower of Battle manual circa 1409:

Talhoffer in Germany produced his Fechtbücher (fight books) just over half a century later – this from 1467:

Domenico Angelo, also shows a series of disarms. The point is this simple: disarms have always been taught along with the primary attacks.

All these are very similar to what FMA practitioners call snake and vine disarms. These examples from Master Cliff Lenderman:

Snake

Vine

And note that the disarms are inserted into more combative flow patterns like puno sumbrada:

Combative engagements

These are cumulative skills – meaning each pattern is accretive, bolstering the overall competency of the practitioner. While each technique is important to master in isolation (as a pedagogical means of teaching the curriculum), it is when all the components are strung together that mastery begins to emerge.

Aikido practitioners need to remember that every technique (ikkyo, nikyo, etc.) that we practice in isolation is just one isolated moment within an engagement. None of the techniques are ends unto themselves – they are disarms.

All Aikido techniques are disarms.

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