Facebook Deactivation

I contend that this remains The Economist's most brilliant cover. It's from 2012, when Facebook shares were made public.

I elected to deactivate my Facebook account yesterday. According to Facebook, deletion is a 30-day process and I suppose that means I can be found on there until the end of July. It's a little sad, as I'll miss the way in which the program allowed me to connect with people I ordinarily don't get to see. There are some friends who will miss seeing what I post, though I've become much more passive on that platform in the last year or so.

That being said, I am in contact with the people who mean the most to me in many other reliable ways. The real cost here, it seems, are those chance meet-ups that may have occurred via Facebook over the next few years. So there are two or three voices and faces from the distant past I'll miss out on seeing. And that's a shame.

Are there political reasons for my decision to deactivate my account? Yes. It's 2020, after all, and it seems anything we do has political overtones. Going into all that doesn't seem like a good use of time right now.

I will share with you now, though, that for me Facebook had simply ceased to be fun. It didn't bring me joy, but instead the angst as if walking on eggshells. Part of this is political. A more important reason why Facebook was becoming joyless, though, stems from my role as a teacher. A cost of choosing that vocation is that I must be more careful about what I say and represent for a whole host of reasons (ethical, legal, professional).

So, I'll keep writing here. And I'll lean more heavily on some platforms that have proven less joyless and more useful the past few weeks (Zoom, Teams, and Facetime come to mind). I still actually like email. On this pessimistic weekend, I need to remind myself that we have tools that allow me to stay in touch, even though I've turned one of them off.

It doesn't repeat . . . it rhymes

Two teacher friends have left me with clever ways of thinking about teaching the past. Judy is one of them. She's the one who scolded me some time ago for not looking hard enough to find connections between history and current events. Josh, meanwhile, likes to tell his students that the past doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

I just finished a book on the diplomatic history of the U.S. between 1931 and 1941. I learned a lot from it. I'll admit, though, that it's too dry a book for me to recommend. It seems as if I'm alternating these days between heavy historical works and lighter ones. This most recent one was a heavy one.

There are some interesting takeaways from the book, though, and some learnings from what our nation went through between 1931 and 1941 and today. To wit:

• The author really hates to use the term isolationism. Too perjorative in his opinion. Instead he talked a lot about anti-interventionists. 
• And anti-interventionists had some multifaceted motivations for their point of view. I was surprised at the weight the author gave to anti-British sentiment, which he asserted was more prevalent in 1930s America than most of us realize. That sentiment fed in with a perception that the British might just be guilty of using the U.S. as the keeper of our empire, and anti-imperialism was a common attitude in America at that time as well. There was some moral indignation over war and its costs, too. 
• A great deal of cynicism and mistrust motivated the anti-interventionists as well. There was wide-spread belief that we had been lured into World War I as a result of the pursuit of profits by war industries and financial interests. Certainly the attitude that we not be suckered again motivated many at that time. 
• And before 1939 there was some ambivalence about how much of a menace the Nazis truly posed. But sympathy for them and their ideals really seemed to disappear after the invasion of Poland, an event that seemed to focus Americans on knowing the Nazis were a threat, and the debate then seemed to center on how to best counter that threat. 
• I walked away with fairly different impressions of two events that I have taught (or mistaught) that are two of the most dramatic before Pearl Harbor: The Quarantine Speech and The Atlantic Charter. 

Of course Japan's conquests in Asia loomed large in the telling of the book. But there weren't as many surprising insights in there for me about that.

The author certainly did not fawn over Roosevelt. His ultimate judgment was somewhat critical, that he was a leader who had a vague sense of where we were going and who the enemy was, but didn't have the discipline to master the details for getting there. Also, he was somewhat reckless in how he would pit cabinet members and advisors against one another. The author often floated a tantalizingly negative legacy FDR may have set, that of accepting presidential duplicity in the name of foreign policy, a duplicity that allowed America to drift toward war without Congressional permission. There are overtones of the decision-making that led us to Vietnam in that judgment.

I left the book being reminded of modern-day realities a little more than I expected. However, I am saddened to see the contrast between a country then in which bipartisanship mattered a bit more than now. More interestingly, I saw a time when our parties were divided themselves into cleaner factions, factions that forced political leaders to harmonize interests across groups rather than bludgeon them with self-righteousness.

Brief History Lesson

A local political leader recently likened our governor to Adolf Hitler.

Really?

Twenty-first-century American politics keeps finding new lows. And of late there seem to be more words from individuals likening this figure or that on the other side of the political divide to Hitler.

Adolf Hitler was a murderous madman who came to power in a wealthy, advanced nation nearly ninety years ago. He was clear with his ambitious, though duplicitous and sometimes cautious about how he would bring them about. He murdered more than six million Jews. At his orders, nearly another six million "undesirables" were murdered. He initiated a war that killed more human beings than any other conflict in history.

He was a demagogue. A racist. A murderer. A perpetrator of evil that we have not seen in this modern day.

Those who liken modern day political adversaries to this man cheapen the suffering that took place as a result of his deeds. They demean the bravery of those who fought him. And they show their own ignorance.

Several months ago, when it was fashionable to label Democrats socialists (Do you hear the hiss?) I urged my students to resist the name calling. After all, the historical opponent of socialism was fascism. And I suggested to my students that engaging in discourse in which they denounced liberals as socialists set us up for a harmful and non-sensical debate . . . that one side in our country were socialists (or communists . . . take your pick) and the other were fascists. And surely, in 2020 America, we must be in some place other than Lenin vs. Hitler.

We're better than that, aren't we?

America is handling this epidemic about as badly as possible. Which is a shame. Countless nurses and doctors and janitors and police officers are bravely fighting an exhausting battle. They're consistently let down, though, by an impatient populace and political leadership that cannot reach compromise.

(How can they compromise? One cannot make a deal with the devil.)

Brave soldiers slog through a challenging fight against a stubborn and somewhat-mysterious foe. Self-interested and jealous leaders let them down. The public gets impatient and demands more. Where have we seen this before?

Perhaps if we stopped paying attention to the leaders, we can better honor the soldiers.

***I've really tried to shut the news out of my life. I write this after a day in which the news kept finding me. American politics in this era has become like a bad show that many keep watching even though it makes us increasingly miserable. I'm fighting to keep it out. I don't mean to sound sanctimonious. Any attempt to sound even-handed is going to sound disingenuous for my opinions on our president and his party is pretty clear. That being said, I'm trying my best to step away to arm's length at least from the hell's vomit that passes for today's political news. And let's see if I can avoid it better today than I was able to avoid it yesterday.

Temple Worship

Some teacher friends and I were discussing what lessons we thought students would be drawing from this moment decades from now. And I think just now I'm coming up with the means of articulating it. We're nearing the end of an era in which assets were king, and the ownership of those assets was what really mattered. And this cult of asset ownership eclipsed other more ordinary ways to make a living, like working or building.

Supposedly, Calvin Coolidge said that he who builds a factory builds a temple, and those who work there worship there. It seems like a fairly crass assessment of who matters and who doesn't. I think the use of the world "build" matters, though, in that quote. For at the time Coolidge said that, many of the builders were still alive, or had not been out of the scene very long. Ford. Durant. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Some might view this group as a rogues gallery of corporate titans. And some of them (Ford comes to mind most prominently) espoused some odious views on human nature. They were builders, though, and made their fortunes through building something and then in large part owning that something. 

The last half century has been something different, though, in terms of wealth accumulation. It's more of a Jack Welch society of building shareholder value. Ownership of the assets are still key. But one doesn't need to build that asset. Just somehow own it. And then do what is necessary to maintain and build up its value. 

This ethos justifies the slashing of payroll costs and shutting of divisions. 

This ethos glorifies stock buybacks. 

This ethos rewards buying low and selling high. 

This ethos emphasizes short-run gains over long-run nimbleness. 

There are certainly builders in our economy. Many of them lead enterprises that, though successful, are too humble to garner much attention. And those builders who are prominent, such as Bill Gates, stick out as somewhat unusual compared to their peers-in-wealth. More philanthropic than most. And more focused on affairs that will outlive themselves.

But those builders aren't in this highest corridors of power. Those who worship at the temple of asset ownership reside there, and rule there, and write the rules to keep themselves in positions of wealth and prominence. And we continue to overlook the things that matter that will outlive ourselves.