Political Idiocies

Although I’m fairly opinionated in terms of politics, and try to keep informed on what’s going on, I have to say it’s not the evil that gets to me most.

No, it’s the sheer stupidity.

Evil – intentional or accidental – is an inevitability in politics. There are a lot of people in the world, many of them with quite odd beliefs and priorities, and we won’t always get our own way. They try to make things one way, we try to make things another. You can account for evil. In some cases, you can even respect it – most of these people are genuinely trying to make the world a better place, even if their views on how to do so are utterly wrongheaded.

But what really, instinctively, viscerally irritates me about politics is idiocy. Ineptitude. The very least we should be able to expect from our enemies – or friends – is basic competency!

Take, for example, Trump’s package of immigration restrictions. Now, I don’t intend to get into an argument about whether these are morally good or bad, or even their strategic value in the long term. Those are contentious questions. But what I think we should all be able to agree on is that whatever the merits of the theory, their implementation has been, politically speaking, monumentally moronic.

Let’s look at it this way: imagine you want to swing public opinion against a particular government policy. What ought you to do? Here’s a few suggestions…

• make the debate about real, specific people, with real faces and life stories. Far away people about whom we know little are hard to empathise and easy to ignore. Names, faces, stories, individuals are what you need the argument to be about if you want to get people on your side. And what has Trump done? He’s put specific individuals into detention on American soil, while not isolating them from journalists and lawyers, creating a ready-made cast of characters for the public to feel sorry for;
• make the debate about cruelty and unfairness. People might sigh over policies that are harsh or inhumane, but cruelty and unfairness are what get them pissed off. You can sell “tough but fair”, but it’s really hard to sell “tough and unfair”. And what does Trump do? He detains men who have risked their lives collaborating with the US armed forces. Everyone knows that that’s unfair. He detains elderly grandmothers, and he detains five-year-old children, separating them from their parents. Everyone knows that that’s unnecessarily cruel. And he has people asked about whether they personally support Trump as a precondition for entry into the country, and nobody can deny that that’s ridiculously unfair;
• make people confused and afraid by stressing any vagueness or confusion. When it’s clearcut and simple, people are glad they weren’t affected personally and move on – but when nobody really knows what’s going on exactly, they get worried and distressed. And what does Trump do? He rolls out his policy without any guidance to people on the ground and contradictory statements by senior officials, so that nobody really knows what’s going on. Why is one person let free, while another is detained, and a third is detained without access to lawyers? Are dual-nationality travellers affected, for instance? Yes and no, appears to be the answer;
• create specific times and places that can act as focuses for protest; when discontent, like sparks from a fire, is spread out and abstract, it’s easy to overlook it, easy to let it die away in the cold and the wet; but when discontent is focused in a particular place, at a particular time, each person’s anger can sustain that of others, and the fire can rage on for weeks, or even months in some cases. And what has Trump done? He has created the perfect protest sites: concentrated enough to bring large crowds together, and bring the journalists to monitor the crowds, but numerous enough to allow every protestor in America a potentially accessible site;
• find cracks in the policy that allow fruitful lawsuits to be brought and other potentially successful small-scale campaigns. You don’t have to overturn the policy itself that way, that’s not the point. The point is that if you can mount a plausible case against an element of it, it spreads doubt about the legitimacy of the entire edifice. People feel uneasy about things when they see courts taking challenges seriously, or when they see authorities backing down. And if nothing else, these challenges create a steady stream of news stories to stop people forgetting about the issues. And what has Trump done? He brought out his policies without, in essence, having court-proofed them first. His policies raise strikingly obvious legal concerns – by issuing Visas and Green Cards with one hand, promises and rights attached, and ignoring them with the other – and they do so without any of the due diligence, consultation and legal i-dotting and t-crossing that scares courts away from challenging things like this. His detain-first-and-maybe-release-shamefacedly-later-when-journalists-notice approach also maintains the story by offering a drip of releases, a trickle of new stories, new victims, rather than clearing things out of the way one way or another and drawing a line under it; and he even tried to do this when the person responsible for enforcing it, ultimately, was still an Obama appointee. When you end up having to sack someone within a week of appointing them to their caretaker position, there’s no way to come out of that looking good.

Long story short: everything that Trump enemies should have been trying to do to rally opposition to these measures… was already done for them by Trump himself. It’s like he went down a checklist of ways to screw up. And I don’t approve of these policies, but still… as a reasonably intelligent person, it’s just plain irritating to see people in power be so calamitously bad even at doing bad things. It’s reassuring in a way – the hyperbolic fears about Trump’s new fascist dystopia are plainly exaggerated, if for no other reason than that Trump’s regime clearly don’t have the elementary competence required to dictate anything to anybody. But it’s also sort of scary. There ought to be a dozen different people around Trump with the foreward-thinking (or basic political awareness) to spot these problems and steer him away from them. It wouldn’t have been hard. No self-respecting political operative should have allowed that executive order to apply to people currently in transit – that’s just so fundamental. Anonymous people not allowed on planes in Iran? That’s controversial. Specific five-year-old children in solitary detention at US airports, on US soil, within marching distance of major US population centres, and all with the awareness of US journalists? That’s a crisis. More of the fire could have been taken out of the affair by some relatively minor adjustments to automatically exempt the most contentious victims – exempt special visas, green card holders, maybe post-graduate scientists, etc. That might not make a lot of moral difference, but it would make a huge difference to public opinion. And it goes without saying that they should have lined everything up before firing – an ironclad order with clearly defined terms, guidance issued to staff simultaneously, legal loopholes addressed before signing.

So either everyone around the President is an imbecile, or else they can see how terribly managed this is but don’t have the influence to do anything about it. And frankly those thoughts are both worrying, because next time it might be something really critical that they’re bollocksing up.

 

Of course, it’s not just the Republicans who have problems in the simple-mindedness department. Take the Supreme Court fight, for instance. Democrats in the Senate apparently want to fillibuster any nomination Trump makes. This is understandable, given that the Republicans started it. But “but mummy, he started it!” is very rarely an effective rhetorical approach when it comes to persuading unaffiliated observers. So there are two ways that this can go:

•  Say “we’ll be looking very closely at the nomination, and we hope the President will nominate somebody we can all quickly move to confirm.” This makes you look reasonable and fair, while not actually committing you to anything. Then when he nominates someone you can say “we deeply regret that the President has chosen to make this a partisan issue with this appalling nomination. As you know, we were willing to work with the President in the interests of the nation, and we were reluctantly willing to confirm even a conservative nominee, because unlike our Republican colleagues we put our constitutional duty ahead of our party – but unfortunately the President spurned that offer of bipartisanship by nominating somebody who is so extreme that we plainly cannot support their confirmation in good conscience.” And people say “hey, the nominee must be bad if they’re putting up this fight over them!” – and when the Republicans say the fillibuster is a break with tradition and imperils the functioning of government, just say “hey, nominate someone moderate next time and you’ll have no problem!”…
• Or, come out ahead of the nomination and say “we’re going to fillibuster the nomination, whoever it is”. And people say “clearly this isn’t about the appropriateness of the nominee, it’s about party politics”, and they think you’re the one being unreasonable. And then Trump has absolutely zero reason to nominate anyone even vaguely moderate, since you’ve already told him it’ll be the same level of fight no matter whom he names. And then he and the Republicans can turn around and say “look, the Democrats are misusing the fillibuster as pure obstructionism, and we’ll clearly never get a justice confirmed so long as the fillibuster remains”, and then they’ll abolish the fillibuster and the Democrats will be more screwed than they were to begin with.

But needless to say, a number of Senate Democrats have gone for the bullet-to-own-foot Option B!

This is an easy one, people. The ‘reasonableness’ gambit gives you a chance of pressuring Trump into a more moderate pick, and makes your protest when he doesn’t look more legitimate. The obstructionist approach lands you with a more extremist Justice and probably the loss of the fillibuster, while also alienating swing voters. The only upside is that this development is probably close enough to Trump’s announcement that it’ll get overshadowed and people might not notice it – but the fact it’s happening at all is a head-slapping moment.

 

Honestly, there’s a fight going on for the soul of the world right now, and both sides appear to be staffed with buffoons who either don’t know or don’t care how to actually win…

 

…Still, at least the Labour Party is still here to make even Republicans and Democrats look like they know what they’re doing…

 

Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett

One part in my ongoing (and going on, and on, and on…) Complete Discworld Reread project

Let’s try to list all the things I didn’t like about this book.

It still has too many Feegles in it. They’re amusing in very small doses, but the jokes quickly wear thin – and, more importantly, their presence and behaviour constantly undercut the tone of the book. The Tiffany books have grown more adult and serious with each installment, but the Feegles remain back where they started, so that they feel like heavy-handed comic relief when I want to be getting on with the main story.

Because Tiffany is still young and inexperienced, a lot of things have to be explained to her. A lot. Pratchett is pretty fond of Explaining Stuff at the best of times, but here it feels at times like she’s just wandering from one font of explanation to another.

Not unrelatedly, there are a few points where I felt it tipped over into lecturing the reader.

And on that note, there’s the gender politics. Which actually manages to irritate me from both directions. On the one hand, the latent feminism of all his Lancre books boils over here to the point of pretty much declaring that all males are useless and inferior and need to be controlled by women for their own good – and while of course that’s a conclusion it’s been not unfair to draw from the books since at least Witches Abroad, I’d really prefer that sort of thing to be left in the background, rather than stated outright by the author. As a male, it’s a little patronising, frankly. And yet at the same time, the way Pratchett pitches his female dominance is frankly reactionary, reinforcing the tired cliché that women should try to manipulate men through combinations of fear, attractiveness, passive-aggression, and large helpings of shaming, and that if a man doesn’t do exactly what a woman wants she just wasn’t devious enough about not telling him outright what she wanted. I don’t think this helps anybody.

Of course, Pratchett’s witches have always been a portrait of one particular kind (or a certain set of kinds) of woman, and as demonstrations of how women can have power and agency even in a society that on the surface seems entirely patriarchal this is not a bad thing. But here he seems to go over the line into presenting this as the only way for women to be, having an authoritative female character opine, without contradiction, that this is all automatically “written in [all women] somewhere”, and if they don’t know that then they just “haven’t read [that page of themselves] yet”. And I’m just not sure that that’s the best message to be aiming at the book’s intended young female readers. [It’s also notable that at this stage we are no longer using tropes about a certain sort of traditional female authority figure as background for the characterisation of the witches: we are now almost explicitly using the witches as symbols for that sort of female power].

And perhaps that wouldn’t aggrevate me as much if it weren’t alongside Tiffany’s otherwise inexplicable breakdown into Cliche Teenage Girl syndrome. Most of the time she’s a hardened woman of the world – she’s stayed up all night watching over corpses, she’s put her hand in a sheep to turn around a breach-birth, she’s a no-nonsense, sensible woman. Except that suddenly, for no apparent reason, the merest thought of her not-a-boyfriend-honestly even talking to another woman fills her with a jealous, giddy-headed, insecure rage. Instantly. Giddy. Now, I get that people can be irrational about loved ones, even sometimes when they don’t yet know they’re in love. Frightened, certainly. Jealous. Unhappy. And yes, sometimes even angry. But Tiffany, of all people, and with no build-up to it whatsoever? The implication very much seems to be that “losing all rational sense of perspective while becoming furiously, using-multiple-exclamation-marks-per-sentence angry whenever you read in a letter that a boy you like spent a few minutes talking to a girl about something innocuous” is just another part of what we’re expected to accept is just “written in” to the nature of women. And we’re not even talking coherently angry – not even “he knows I wouldn’t like that” or “she knows he’s mine” or even “what if he likes her more than me?”, just aimless!? hysteria!!! talking!! how could he?!. Politics aside, it feels like a betrayal of the character as written everywhere else – since, while I can imagine Tiffany being possessive, sometimes even irrational, one thing she never is is hysterical.

Also, it feels as though Pratchett is laughing at her, and at other women through her, and it isn’t pleasant. It’s not genuine character development, it’s an allegedly amusing “and women are like this!” routine stuck superfluously onto the side of the story (and basically never mentioned again).

Oh, and of course there needs to be a Hero. Even if he’s only there for show because women do everything important, every still needs a Hero to look like they’re doing the rescuing. Apparently.

Similar issues arise with the class politics, where again Pratchett turns support into what looks suspiciously like antediluvian thinking. As always, Pratchett is on the side of the common man, the ordinary person. We know this, because he has his heroine shout at another character that they’re failing to respect the common man, that they’re being patronising, that these are real people. OK. Except… well, the gist of it seems to be that we should accept that because these are real people, rather than witches or novelists, they’re all cretins. The Common Man, with his, to quote, “peasant ignorance”, is portrayed throughout as a bumbling nincompoop, barely able to survive a day without killing itself through stupidity, and desparate, no crying out even, to be manipulated, patronised, tyrannised and spoken down to by a properly educated sensible person.

That’s a little less unpleasant when we’re in Ankh-Morpork with Vetinari, where the properly educated sensible person is ruling the city, and the affairs of high politics are perhaps understandably not foremost in the minds of the citizenry. It’s less forgivable when we’re dealing with small communities of farmers and the most basic day-to-day decisions. And again, there’s nothing new here: this is inherent to the idea of the witches. But the difference is, it used to be that that we were told that the witches could serve a valuable purpose, that sometimes people would turn to them for help. But now it’s gotten to the stage where they need to ‘help’ (i.e. control) every single element of everybody’s lives because everyone else is too stupid to live. [In the earliest books, occasional worried people would make their way to Granny’s door for advice in a crisis; here, constant streams of people flock to every witch (and there’s a vast number of them) for instruction regarding the most minor things.]

And more, everybody is begging to be controlled because they know they’re so inferior. Oh no, not inferior, that’s the point. Nobody in the book actually says “how dare you look down on them! Just because they’re brainless idiots who are stupider, more ignorant, more irrational, less self-aware, less wise, less disciplined, less moral, and generally less likeable than us, doesn’t mean they’re inferior! Apart from in the obvious ways!”… but it almost feels like they do. “We must respect them,” they don’t quite say in so many words, “by making them do what we know they ought to do and not caring about their own feelings in the matter because what do they know they’re just peasants!”

So yes, that’s an irritation. And there’s a subplot that isn’t really necessary, but isn’t fleshed out enough to stand by itself either. And the ending… well it makes sense, but it seems to all happen a bit too quickly.

And the structural gimmick, while a break from Pratchett’s normal linnear methods, and while not exactly a failure, also don’t fully convince.

And “boffo” is a stupid word.

Oh, and there’s sort of a feeling that this is all set in a very small world, in a controlled plot, with a small cast of characters and none of the sense of scope, and of chaos, that the more ‘adult’ Discworld novels have.

But all that aside….

…this is a fantastic book.

Wintersmith is clearly the best of the first three Tiffany books, and while it may not have the depth to really rank with Pratchett’s greatest it certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as them. The writing is consistantly fantastic; the imagery constantly intriguing. It is highly polished, yet retains its character. It is, in essence, a Pratchett book that does almost everything right – for the handful of things it doesn’t get quite right, see above. There’s not a lot else to say, really.

Adrenaline: 3/5.

Emotion: 3/5.

Thought: 4/5.

Beauty: 5/5.

Craft: 5/5.

Endearingness: 4/5.

Originality: 3/5.

[sorry! Left this in a file for too long before filling in the words here… now I don’t have any words to put it. Given how many Pratchett books I’ve reviewed already, however, the words probably aren’t necessary anyway at this point.]

Overall: 6/7. VERY GOOD.

 

errr…. yes. It’s possible the balance of this review has been a tad misleading? It’s just really difficult to write about someone getting things really right that you’ve already described them getting partly, mostly or completely right in 40 other books…. it’s much easier to compile the wrong notes, as there are are so many fewer of them…