Shrinking (Without The Violet)

Yesterday I watched David and Lisa on YouTube.  The movie is from 1962 and is done in black and white, mainly without background music and at times the digitized version is hazy. while at other times it seemed as if the screen was shaking.  I watched it on my computer in theater mode rather than full screen, because of the low resolution of the video.  These glitches notwithstanding, I found it compelling.  I had watched it on TV as a kid, perhaps more than once.  I don't believe I had previously watched it as an adult.  Below are some impressions from doing that.

Much of the story takes place at a high school for students who have profound psychoses.   The students live at the school.  The actual classes aren't part of the story.  The time spent in social activity provides the focus.  The school staff includes healthcare professionals who casually interact with the students.  The head psychiatrist, played by Henry Da Silva, is notable for his low-keyed and gentle demeanor, which remains unwavering.  His conversations with David are one of the features of the film.  In these discussions David is skeptical and non-cooperative, at first.  Eventually, David becomes trusting.   

David is played by Keir Dullea, who also starred in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The character is very intense, quick to display anger at any provocation, yet also phobic and extremely frightened of death, so much so that he tries to protect his personal environment by not letting anyone touch him.  He also seems to prefer a degree of formality, both in the way he talks and in the style he dresses, often wearing a jacket and tie, though later in the movie sometimes a sweater replaces the jacket, with the tie remaining.  Presumably the formality is a vestige of his upbringing and that his parents, particularly his mother, cares a lot about appearances.  Ultimately in the movie David finds fault with his parents for the superficial and dishonest way they interact with him. He runs away from home after that.  The formality also conveys that David would be considered well educated and quite intelligent, at least as applied to abstract school subjects.

Lisa is played by Janet Margolin, a rising young actress in the 1960s.  Facially, she is simultaneously beautiful and innocent, and her look makes it quite understandable for why David would fall for her.  She speaks in rhyme of a sing-song variety, simplistic in some ways, yet quite on point as well.   While others who don't penetrate Lisa's shell respond to her in normal speech, David soon figures out that to communicate with Lisa he must enter her world and respond in rhyme on the same subject that she brought up.  This is effective.

I found myself sharing some characteristics with both David and Lisa and I wondered (and am still wondering) whether if if were possible to somehow merge these characters then would that produce a type of balance"  In other words, its not that for me the stimuli aren't there to produce psychoses, and some response to stimuli is needed, but by then moving onto other things, the response doesn't fester into something more serious. Maybe that's true, but maybe it's wishful thinking.  For now, I won't try to resolve that.

I also wondered what it would be like if we all had ready access to a psychiatrist in the Henry Da Silva mode, having conversations on our frustrations as needed.  Would that help?  Giving such access to adolescents, as in the film, makes some sense as at that age a person's worldview is not yet a settled thing, and the psychiatrist can help the person work through the various dilemmas.  As an an economist, I'm quite aware that demand heavily outweighs supply in this domain.  I'm ignoring that issue here.  I'm just wondering about the benefits from a normative view, taking my assume-a-can-opener approach.

So, I wondered if old farts like me might still benefit from such conversations with a psychiatrist, or is it enough to talk things out with friends once in a while.  My sense of things is that we repress our anger frequently, vent occasionally, and sometimes indulge in unhealthy recreation as a form of consolation.  Is there a better way and would chatting with a psychiatrist help us find it?

The movie itself is a charming love story and I think it works on that level because the characters are otherwise more extreme than we're use to.  But there are some minor flaws in the film that I'll simply mention here.  Keir Dullea was in his mid 20's when the film was made and the other actors in the school were also in their 20's or in their late teens.  In other words, they were too old for high school, under otherwise ordinary circumstances.  This is not a big deal in the movie because they seem approximately the same age, relative to each other.   For comparison sake, I did a search on Welcome Back Kotter and found the same issue emerges these.  The other flaw I'll mention concerns David's grooming, which is immaculate.  But how could he get a haircut if he wouldn't let anyone else touch him?  It's a puzzler.  Now I'll leave that one alone too.

One last point I'll make is in the form of a question.  Would younger audiences today be drawn in by this movie or is a generational thing where people my age would find it compelling but younger folks today would not, perhaps because so many of then are already experiencing anxiety, loneliness, and depression that they don't need a film to remind them of that?   I don't know.  Bridging across the generations is a challenge.

Flying Under The Radar Politics

While I mean this to be a stand-alone post, in some sense it can be taken as a sequel to my post from Saturday.  It was motivated by asking these questions.  If there were an effective way to fight back against regressive income distribution and someone like me wanted to support that effort by making a money donation to it, how would that happen?  How would I know to trust the mechanism wasn't some scam? How would I learn about this mechanism, in the first place?

My think-alouds qua blog posts do satisfy the requirement of flying under the radar, but that's because hardly anyone reads them.  The hidden message in my title is perhaps best thought about via a metaphor of a military submarine that deploys effective radar.  There is ample and full communication aboard the ship, but the enemy subs and other enemy vessels can't detect that communication at all.  Now, to make the problem harder, imagine that it is a virtual submarine, where the crew are actually geographically dispersed, as are those aboard the enemy ships.  Can this sort of communication still happen?  

My intuition tells me that yes, it can happen, but that much of the last mile in such communication will need to be done face-to-face rather than online. This is not a perfect solution, for sure.  The movie, The Conversation, comes to mind even though it came out more than 50 years ago.  And the money donation itself would almost certainly still need to be done online, as for someone like me that's how I do all my charitable giving.  So the face-to-face part would need to be sufficient as to not bring attention to those other bits of communication that remain online.  And the face-to-face part would also need to establish the credibility of the participants, thereby developing trust between them.  The intermediaries who do this work likely will require substantial training ahead of time, so they are effective in what they do.

Now let me get beyond this issue of communication and talk about other reasons for why one might want some of our politics to fly under the radar.  If you see the world as I do, then it seems that the Trump White House is proactive, for better or worse, mainly for worse, while those impacted by the decisions of the Trump White House are reactive. Their instrument to restore things as before is to rely on the courts by them suing the government.  Further, political activity by the rank and file has happened mainly through public protests, such as the recent No Kings Day.  Participants certainly felt empowered as a result.  But did this and other protests have any impact on the the Trump White House?  

It is my belief that the vast majority of us who didn't vote for Trump, as well as those who now regret from doing so, still believe in American Democracy and that the right curative for what ails us now should happen at the ballot box.  But what if intelligent insiders have come to believe otherwise, that we're too far gone done the path to totalitarianism, to expect the ship to right itself of its own accord.  In this case more proactive steps would be needed.  Let me leave for now which proactive steps to take, but rather simply consider this one question, whether proactive steps are necessary or not.  That is a fundamentally political decision that needs to be made and it can't be made out in the open.  Further, if it is decided by these insiders that a series of proactive steps are necessary, then some sketch of an implementation plan must be developed.  That plan also can't be distributed out in the open.  The secure communication that I briefly discussed above will also be needed to put such a plan into action.

Now let me switch gears and ask something different.  Even though this is impossible, if one could poll those who are outspoken against the Trump government, how would they react to the suggestion that their protestations are insufficient and that some sort of targeted guerrilla warfare is needed, because the ballot box solution will fail?  I posed this question to argue that a two-faced strategy will be needed.  The public face will continue to advocate for the ballot box solution, while the flying-under-the-radar face will advocate for a proactive strategy, which may then become known to the public, but only after the implementation is well underway.  And, if eventually making the public aware is indeed part of the implementation plan, then it must be the same political leadership who wears both faces.  

Could this be happening already?  I have no way of knowing, but I hope it is.  

Crass Warfare

I'm going to give a personal reaction to the passage of the recent bill that has garnered attention from so many.

First, I want to talk about household income and expenditure.  The word "comfortable" is what I rely on in describing my own situation. For a change, compared to prior posts where I've talked about income distribution and income inequality, I'm not going to give any income numbers here.  I will just make a qualitative argument.  While we do have a mortgage on the house, we also have substantial equity in it.  Other than that, we don't carry debt.  Credit card bills are paid in full.  We have a decent income and a nice nest egg.  I'm 70 now, so will have to start withdrawing from my IRA in a few years.  We haven't planned for that yet - give some of it to the kids (or grandchildren if and when they appear on the scene) or sit on it just in case, which in my mind would be for long-term care expenses for which we don't have insurance.   I was treated for prostate cancer back in 2018 and while it is in remission now, I was told immediately afterward that I didn't qualify for long-term care insurance as a consequence.  My mother did eventually spend through her estate because of such expenditure and since I was handling her finances then, I've got that notion of spending through the estate firmly in my mind.  But apart from that, modest changes in either income or expenditure have no impact on family well being and mostly money matters are not on my mind, even while I'm the one who files the tax return annually.

With that, I should mention a few other things that are related.  We live in Champaign, Illinois, a college town where the cost of living is modest compared to more urban settings.  With various issues of arthritis and other health tsoris, primarily in my right hip and lower back, I don't travel much at all, as that seems to make things worse pain-wise.  I do have some of my father's miserly ways (he came of age during the Great Depression) so, for example, I will turn off the ceiling fan in a room when nobody else is there.  But this is more to appease my conscience than it is to save us money.  I really don't know what the dollar savings amount to from this behavior.  On the flip side, I do try to be generous on the rare occasions when I'm out with friends, especially when that's with folks who used to work for me back when I was doing campus ed tech.  I know that our relative incomes are advantaged in my favor, so I treat this as a kind of obligation.  

Given this background, I'm going to next consider how the recent bill will affect me.  I expect my Federal taxes to be lower, which as I understand things will be both because the SALT limits have been raised substantially and because the marginal tax rate that applies will be lower.  We'll see.  So, this will implicitly be a modest increase in income, which if the bill hadn't gotten such attention would largely go unnoticed by me and have no evident effect on family decisions.  

Given that, the reduction in Federal taxes seems to me like an implicit bribe.  A bribe for what, you might ask?  I interpret this as saying - take the money and then shut up about it.  Don't point out that others, with much higher income than yourself, are going to receive much more money.  There has been a good deal written about how regressive the bill is; for example, consider this recent opinion piece.  If there were enough people in a similar income situation to mine who complained about this regressivity, then the bill would be a political loser.  It might still end up that way, but if the complaints come mainly from those who are at or near the median in the income distribution, it will seem like the same old, same old.  I do have the feeling that the Republicans have bought out people in my income situation and have been doing that for a long time, certainly since the Bush tax cuts and perhaps as far back as the Reagan tax cuts.  

To go a bit further on this, I've felt for some time that Democratic Socialists, like Bernie Sanders and AOC, make a mistake because they focus on the beneficiaries of progressive income redistribution and, with the exception of the uber rich, ignore those who will make the necessary contributions so that the income redistribution happens along with a balanced budget.  In that scenario, people with income like mine are simply out of the picture, nonplayers without a role.  Instead, and I've written quite a lot about this in this blog, particularly under the tag Socialism Reconsidered, with posts that date back eight years or so, there should be an emphasis on Social Responsibility, which would then define our roles, both to make contributions to the income redistribution and to monitor the very rich, so they are held to account and don't weasel their way out of the their financial responsibilities to fellow citizens.  

This mistake has enabled the approach where folks in my income situation can be quietly selfish, perhaps make some charitable contributions to ease their consciences, but in no way does that solve the income redistribution problem, and the country becomes more and more unequal as a result.  And privately, this view is supported by a notion of meritocracy and the Just-World Hypothesis, even as the system seems more and more rigged by the already haves.

In this sense, the recent bill appears to me as more of the same, though more so.  Further, it demonstrates that those who want progressive income redistribution don't have a meaningful way to fight back. 

* * * * * 

What would a meaningful way of fighting back look like?  Recently I finished reading Tolstoy's War and Peace.  I am going to to use the history depicted there - mainly the close of the Napoleonic Wars, where the French invaded Russia, eventually took Moscow, but then the French troops lost all sense of discipline, began looting the city which had largely been abandoned, and found there wasn't enough to loot for them to survive, let alone thrive.  So the French withdrew, and kept on withdrawing, all the way back to France, with the vast majority of the remaining French troops dying along the way.  

Now it may seem quite unusual to look for a meaningful way to fight back by turning to historical fiction, in this case where it isn't even American history to consider.  But it's not so unusual for me to do so.  After all, I'm a complete outsider to the American political situation, for one, and I don't think the news and the limited number of opinion pieces I do read provide much fodder to come up with a helpful answer.  Consider that in March I wrote two blog posts that were directly or indirectly driven by this question, though I will readily admit that each also contained more than a little bit of wishful thinking.   

In each of these and in the present post as well, I take the various plutocrats as the enemy.  Given some of the egregious behavior perpetrated by rank and file MAGA types, one might consider them as the enemy.  In my view, however, these people have largely been played, with the antipathy and racism they openly exhibit stirred up to distract these people from the underlying economic issues.  If significant progressive income redistribution were to take place, my belief is that these folks would calm down substantially, though I'll admit there might be quite a lag between cause and effect.   

In the first of these posts from March, entitled Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May?, I muse about what it would take to make a vote for conviction in a Senate trial of Trump, following a third Impeachment.  The two such trials we already had were each a sham.  Could such a trial be rigged in the other direction if suitable pressure were brought on the plutocrats who donate heavily to Senators and shower them with largesse? What pressure would need to be put on the plutocrats to make them behave in this way?  Who can exert such pressure?  I think it is necessary to ask these questions and try to identify answers, even if the conclusion is that it will be extremely difficult to orchestrate, so it is very unlikely to happen.  If there is a good answer to the original question about a meaningful way to fight back, it is not likely to be found directly.  One will need to noodle around quite a bit before finding some alternative that truly seems plausible.

The second post from March, entitled The Sequel Where Clarence's Older Cousin Turns Mr. Potter Into Another George Bailey, is a fantasy where the problem of plutocrat selfishness resolves itself on its own accord.  To that I'm sure the reader will respond something like - let's not hold our breath waiting for that to happen.  I concur.  But if some other plausible alternative is found, this one might provide cover for the Plutocrats, the equivalent of waving a virtual white flag.

Now let me turn to applying lessons from Tolstoy to the matter at hand.  The Russian Commander in Chief during the Napoleonic War was Kutuzov.   After the horrific battle at Borodino, where there were a significant number of casualties on both sides, Kutuzov had the Russian army retreat, even as other Russian generals were calling for further armed conflict.  Kutuzov faced additional criticism from allowing the French to take Moscow.  But what the other generals and various critics didn't understand was that Kutuzov was waging a war of attrition, which became especially evident after the French army left Moscow and suffered heavy losses in retreat, even without other battles being fought.  This protected the Russian army, one of Kutuzov's main goals.  And without issuing any formal instructions for this to happen, Kutuzov cleverly enlisted Russian peasants to engage in guerrilla tactics against the then dispersed French army.  The peasants were motivated both by pride in country and by wanting to capture French army supplies for themselves.  

Before getting to some guesswork about how metaphorical guerrilla tactics might be applied against current day plutocrats, I have to admit that I don't know any of them so I can only surmise as to their motivation and I also have to admit to my own confirmation bias in making such an assessment, even as when I used to teach economics I'd say that we can't make interpersonal comparisons of utility, a commonplace statement within the discipline.  Nonetheless, I will assert that for plutocrats wealth is not about the consumption that can be afforded, as they can purchase anything they desire to consume, but rather is about the power and control that can be wielded.  The uber rich like the tax cuts they will receive under the current bill because it is a recognition of their power.  Conversely, they have been so against Obamacare precisely because it was an overt challenge to their power.  

Thus, any guerrilla tactics that have a chance at success must be an assault on that power, done in such a way that the plutocrats feel they can't defend themselves.  And, if I'm reading the situation correctly, the timing is ripe now for this guerrilla activity because the bill that passed greatly overextended the political will of Republicans in Congress, so there is likely to be substantial inertia now rather than any attempt at follow up legislation.  These Republicans will have shot their wad and, at least in regard to national politics, this means the plutocrats can claim victory but then should probably go into hiding for a while.  If, however, the plutocrats start to experience personal defeats that they feel they can't prevent, they won't have offsetting political opportunities to express their power.  

The Russian army did pursue the French army while the latter retreated, keeping their distance but encouraging the French to keep moving quickly.  The peasants were aware of these movements and in this way Kutuzov coordinated the guerrilla fighting.  It is likely that the current day version will also need coordinating.  But as the activity would mainly be illegal, the Democratic Party itself can't serve as the coordinating body.  If the guerrilla activity were nonetheless happening, Democrats could argue that when they retake the White House, those found guilty of crimes for pursuing the guerrilla activity will be pardoned.  After all, there is quite a recent precedent for that.  So, there can be more than tacit endorsement of the guerrilla activity.  Nonetheless, the leadership for it will have to come from elsewhere.

As to the aims and tactics of the guerrilla activity, it would be lovely to invoke stories of Robin Hood into the narrative at this point, income redistribution in the small if you will.  Is that feasible?  I don't know.  Beyond that, some of this might entail destruction of property, acts that the plutocrats can't defend against, while other parts of it might entail creating personal embarrassment for the plutocrats, where again they are helpless to prevent this.  With that, one might imagine a real physical presence that is disabling as well as an online presence (hacking if you will) which is likewise disabling.   An initial coordinating activity might be to produce a list of the plutocrats along with their significant holdings.  I'd guess their numbers would be somewhere in the low thousands.  Those who might engage in the guerrilla activity likely would number two or three orders of magnitude more than that.  Somehow, the tactics would need to leverage that numerical advantage.

The reader will want specifics here which, unfortunately, I can't supply as I have no experience in this domain.  My intuition tells me that for specifics it will require either people who formerly were in one  of the Intelligence Services or people who actively engaged in industrial espionage.  Such people will have to self-identify yet remain largely invisible for this to work.  Does that requirement in itself render the entire thing a pipe dream?  I don't know.

As I wrote at the end of the Seven Days in May post, I write these posts not to come up with an implementation plan, as I'm not competent to do that, but rather to get the reader to think through the possibilities.  And if as a byproduct some of the readers start in on War and Peace, all the better.