2022 Excuse of the Year: Doubling Down

Posted on by J. Nelson

Putting out fire with fire –mentally mitigating a bad choice with bad choices 2, 3, and 4– is Where Excuses Go to Die’s “Excuse of 2022.”

Our new Counter-Enlightenment American Moral Culture confuses foot-stomping with tenacity and self-congratulatory ethics with fairness. Personally, I see an inhospitable ocean of tangled and misled self-interest. Here are but a few examples that exclude Kanye, Elon, Putin, and Maggie Haberman.

• LA City Council member Kevin DeLeon ––scandalized, despised, and stigmatized–– refuses to relinquish his seat despite leaked audio of his racist views, calls for his resignation, recall attempts, walk-outs by fellow council members upon his arrival at meetings, and now physical altercations with constituents protesting his occupancy. Me, I see a double down that reveals a man-child in need of attention, mistaking that attention for position and position for integrity.  

• Referring to Maricopa County’s election system, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake recently told a Turning Point USA gathering, “I’m not going to just knock that house of cards over. We’re going to burn it to the ground.” Me, I see a person mistaking craven for inspiring and populist for decent. 

• Like someone in sneakers on an ice rink, newly minted Republican Congressman-elect George Santos seems to be slipping all over career freezing contradictions regarding his claims of Jewish-Ukrainian lineage, his alleged descent from Holocaust survivors, his education, his employment history (is anything this guy claims true??). Backed into a corner, his accounts and renditions are all over the explanatory map. Here, I see a double down on par with a prison snitch or at minimum a proud citizen of the The United States Of Until You Get Caught.

• Tanner Horner, a FedEx driver with no previous criminal history, recently backed his delivery van into 7-year-old Athena Strand on or near the driveway of her family’s home. Reportedly, she was not seriously injured, but Horner later admitted to authorities that he’d “panicked” and pulled the girl into his van, killing her to keep her from telling her dad. And as if choosing to cover up vehicular negligence with murder isn’t bad enough, Horner is now also facing three unrelated charges of sexual assault of a minor. So I think we all see the double down of extraordinarily poor decision making happening here.

I admit these example are blousy, media-driven, and bat-shit. But when’s the last time you doubled-down, say, while driving? Maybe you made a lane change with a little less room than you thought you had, and you got honked at in return. I’m sure a bunch of you Ghandis out there just ignored that honk, but those of us who aren’t so evolved may have middle-fingered our way into some version of payback.

Who among us hasn’t, at some point, admitted to ourselves or others, “I don’t know what I was thinking”? Who hasn’t heard themselves trying to justify a solution that was worse than the problem? Who hasn’t doubled down? For that matter, who hasn’t experienced dismay over a double-down that’s backfired? The darker side of doubling down can be quite humbling.

I’m certainly guilty of going too far in the name of saving face. When it came back to haunt me, my guilt, ego, principles, good intentions, and a bunch of other things all collided to cause an embarrassing end result, one in which my credibility drained at my feet. With nothing I could do to stop it and no wealth to throw at it, only anger remained –which guaranteed a bad end.

We’ve all put ourselves through this sawmill. And while individual results clearly vary, doubling down is the Excuse of the Year because of how far we’ve taken it, or where, in this entitled age of poor coping skills, it has taken us.

 

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The Supreme Court: Operationalized

Posted on by J. Nelson

“Follow the money” applies to everything, most of all to Supreme Court Justices.

CAR GUY 101: knowing the parts in the machine –any machine– is essential to comprehending how it can be affected by the elements.

I just took in this excellent piece by the award-winning publisher of “The Hightower Lowdown,” Jim Hightower. The guy is funny, and I wish I could say it made me laugh. It didn’t. But it did offer me insight that went beyond what I already knew about SCOTUS, and it reminds me to take less pleasure in the disintegration of norms and barometers (which laughs tend to abet).

The notorious “Powell Memo” (a.k.a. “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System”) was drafted in 1971 by Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and it’s a good example of something about which I knew previously zilch. Yet from it, Hightower notes, SCOTUS’ current conservative majority has drawn, uh, major inspiration.

In keeping with the period, corporate attorney Powell was not unlike Robert Duvall’s Godfather character, Tom Hagen, head lawyer for the Corleone family. As a Phillip Morris board member, Powell’s own “family” was Big Tobacco. In fact he represented the Tobacco Institute, the notorious research arm of the tobacco industry. This is important background info.

Powell’s so-called “memorandum” was a confidential letter to the Chairman of the Education Committee at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In it, he discussed what he termed the “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts” and proposed that corporate cash could and should lead to more corporate-friendly rulings by SCOTUS.

The heading itself is scary enough, given how little room it leaves for misinterpretation, but the memo actively urges “weaponiz[ing] the courts to serve business interests.” Powell wanted to use the courts as a tool to save capitalism. By rewarding Powell with a Supreme Court nomination just two months after writing his memo, Richard Nixon showed he was a man who also knew how to use a tool.

And so began the “operationalization” of the Court that brings us to the present day. From the 12+ year old Citizens United v. FEC ruling that allows unlimited corporate funding of campaigns and elections to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which corporations were portrayed as rights bearers for “the humans who own and control [them]” and beyond, Powell’s dream of a pro-business court was coming true even in opinions by presumably “liberal” justices (though hardly to the same extent as those on the other side of the political aisle).

So now, with a super solid and uber conservative majority, why limit judicial activism to just pro-business decisions? As they lingered over the wording of their destruction of a woman’s right to privacy around her so-called private parts, SCOTUS made it virtually impossible for inmates to win release as a result of ineffective lawyering (see Shinn v. Ramirez), it effectively removed all prohibitions against the use of excessive force by federal law enforcement in violation of the 4th Amendment (see Egbert v. Boule), and with Carson v. Makin it achieved a trifecta of rulings that support the union of religious schools and federal money.

Did I mention that all of the above came down during June alone?

Now that Roe is dead, it’s easy to envision many people feeling both empowered and powerless. I fear modern day adherents to the Powell doctrine. I fear we’ll use our rapidly changing nation as a continued excuse to take our anxieties out on each other. If any part of you agrees that Americans are being pushed into an every-man-for-himself/herself society, then no moving part is more critical than your informed vote.  

Do not give into despair.
Find out where your excuses go to die.
Learn the machine.
Arm yourself with yourself.

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Further Reading:

The Powell Memo: A call to Arms for Corporations by Bill Moyers

Dark Money and the Courts
The Right-Wing Takeover of the Judiciary

2021 Excuse of the Year: Moving Goal Posts

Posted on by J. Nelson

Expect an answer, get an accusation. Request specifics, get whataboutism. Ask for sources, listen to the claims of invalidated media. Try and catch even a hint of responsibility, and reach the end of the discussion hearing none.

We zig-zag, rather than discuss. We dodge debate like an NFL quarterback running for the end zone.

Sharing information is less about reading, considering, and proposing than about tossing headlines and social media posts at one another. We might as well bestow “Blame” and “Me” with special interest group status.

This has been the experience of many Americans lately, whether discussing restaurants, mandates, or Covid common sense. Co-workers, family, friends, and every other swingin’ TikTok in between argue over justifications and resentments, all of which leap from a narrow “yes” or “no.”

Agreeing to disagree isn’t what it used to be. Rarely are so many so proud of being so obstinate. It’s as if someone started a rewards programs for foot stomping and blindfolding. Trying to get a straight answer from a devout anti-vaxxer, for example, is like debating a barking dog.

Why?

Maybe we’re lazier now. It’s easier to follow a politician who exists on Likes, baiting, and tantrums than to read policy, and maybe frequently renewed health and science data has normalized our being unable to keep up. But someone’s got to, and too many Americans seem tired of caring: about public health and safety, about equity, and frankly, about each other.

Such a degeneration of discourse has worsened one of America’s current perfect storms. It has enabled our individual-obsessed, consumer natures, making it easier to anticipate less, expect more, and attach conditions to rare concessions.

“Yeah but..”

“Yeah but..”

“Yeah but..”

It’s no way to get anywhere and there’s no excuse for it, but such is the result of becoming a calculating, self-congratulatory, sound bite society.

I can only separate myself from the obscuring of accountability and the grinding down of fellowship when I remember to get character or become one.