ORANGE  IS THE NEW  BLACK

 

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."

                                                                                            -Yeats


I've been thinking a lot about centrism lately.  Mostly that it no longer seems to exist.  The left calls the right clueless, the right calls the left naive.  Where the hell is Ward Cleaver in all this?

It seems to me that it is not cluelessness or naiveté but simple, galloping bias which has silenced  the majority - and then co-opted them to pick a side.  My purpose here is not (necessarily) to scapegoat an institution or a social development or a political philosophy to blame for this ascendency of bias.  The media are the usual suspects in this regard and for this there is sound evidence.  I will leave it to others to flog them; there will be no shortage of takers.

We all have different biases.

I believe my biases encompass positions which are superior to yours  - in the way of morals, ethics, and the entire array of things from the 'right/wrong' dichotomy all the way down the scale to the simple, overfed, American aesthetic preferences.  In other words, the big things - and the little things.

You of course, believe the same thing about your biases.

It is this relatively recent phenomenon - what we'll call bias inflation - which has at least in part driven this ugly migration of so many of us to the edges of the liberal/conservative continuum. This may explain our recent choices of Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton - instead of... of.... well, are there any centrist politicians left?  I know of a few.  All are in the dust-bin of national electoral politics. Remember John Huntsman?  I didn't think so.

In the endless arguments we watch (or try not to, perhaps) 24 hours a day on cable news the term 'common sense' is trotted out fairly often. (Remember when we got along pretty well with 24 minutes of dinner-time news five days a week?) Use of this term is a transparent indicator of bias.  The very notion of common sense connotes an opinion that there is in fact a widely acknowledged group of opinions and beliefs which are (or perhaps, should be) held by a majority of people.  There are, in fact, no such group of opinions.  

Both liberals and conservatives fall into this trap of false equivalence. There does exist some small-ish, finite group of beliefs which might be loosely described as common sense.  Killing for pleasure is wrong; torturing babies is wrong. But when you unleash the flying monkeys of your own biases common sense will expand like mid-western housewife's polyester jogging pants at the buffet on her first cruise.  Ideas like "it is acceptable to degrade civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorists" or "ending the life of viable fetuses based on the life-style preferences" become common sensical. They are not. 

Bias runs amok, masquerading as 'common sense' under the soothing light of the cable feeds from Fox and MSNBC.

These preferences based on individual notions of what is right and what is wrong exist along the almost infinitely long continuum defined by the breadth of the human psyche. 

We are, to a man, prisoners of our own definition of reality.  Our biases cause us to hold opinions which we believe are facts. The differences in these matters may vary by inches and feet (in the case of you and your friends of the opposite political persuasion - and having such friends is, I believe, vitally important in the cause of combatting our biases) all the way to parsecs (think: the differences between the late Osama Bin Ladin and the late Jerry Falwell.) Two people, by the way, if there ever were any at all, of which it can truly be said that singing the song "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!" at a funeral makes perfect sense.

I've said it a million times (Tom Paine notwithstanding) common sense is not all that common. 

It's not even a thing. 

This conflation of notions like "It is a bad idea to stand too close to the edge of a cliff."  (or an attractive 17 year old girl...) with notions such as "The shrill black lives matter  movement doesn't really have a valid point."  or "All government actions are essentially those of the black helicopter variety." or "Life begins at the moment of unzipping of pants." or "People should starve to death rather than eat cage farmed eggs." beget a spiral downward which ends in... who knows where.

Presently, we are exploring the limits of how far we can take these things.

The above list actually contains only one item of common sense (two if you count the one about the girl).  The others are all of a piece.  They are preferences; individual notions of right and wrong based on our biases.  And depending on the strength of ones convictions, the set of things which are perceived as 'common sense' grows ever larger.

Many people know these things.  I know these things.  Perhaps you know these thing.  This knowledge does not free us from our biases and the resulting perspectives which we understandably believe to be logical and well informed by 'evidence'.  The reason we can have civil conversations with our Republican/Democratic friends is that we do know these things.  These conversations don't force us to agree but simply enable us to engage in civilized (even enjoyable - and perhaps educational) debate and discussion.

This brings me to The One - and The Orange One. A guy like Obama has opinions and preferences every bit as subjective and biased as those harbored by a guy like Trump. Obama understands what I am talking about in the above expositive, just as you might.  Trump does not appear to understand these things, just as your crazy uncle doesn't.  It's OK for your uncle not to understand these things. It is not OK for the president of the United States to not understand these things. Your uncle has nothing more dangerous than a pint of Old Crow, a pack of Marlboros and an AOL email account. Trump has the nuclear triad - even if he didn't know what precisely that was during the campaign. 

There's an old joke that they take newly sworn presidents down to the situation room where the CIA and FBI chiefs run the original 26 second Zapruder film on an old projector about 8 times, turn on the lights and say "Any questions?"  What they actually do is sit him down with an Air Force colonel who carries around the nuclear football and explain the precise procedures to incinerate the planet.

At that moment, it is usually a good idea (and every POTUS since Truman seems to have managed this) to set aside many of your own biases.  There is a bounty of evidence that Donald John Trump may be constitutionally incapable of doing that.

I might be wrong about that. It would be best if I am.

Time will tell.

One thing is certain: we continue to get precisely what it is that we deserve in this country.  And we deserve Trump. We ordered him on the Home Shopping Channel or on Cyber Monday just as surely as we ordered up a pair of cheetah pajamas by Kim Kardashian or a virtual reality oculus.  

We haven't been paying close enough attention. We seemed to learn more from 24 minutes of Cronkite than from 24 hours of Anderson Cooper and Bill O'Reilly.

This sort of thing would never have happened to Ward Cleaver.