In Yogi Berra’s Washington Post obituary, the subtitle “American philosopher” is well-chosen. While some of the quotes attributed (or misattributed) to Yogi Berra may just be funny malapropisms, some strike me as quirky ways to say something important, akin to Zen koans. One of his gems is widely applicable and especially relevant to a world on the brink of ecological and/or political collapse. It deserves a special name. It is also so widely quoted that 2 versions are common, as indicated below:
Yogi Berra’s Law
The game ain’t over til it’s over.
It ain’t over til it’s over.
Yes, the original context was baseball. With 2 outs in the bottom of the 9-th inning, the home team may be trailing. Yogi rightly admonishes both the home team (to resist despair) and the visitors (to resist complacency). A lot can still happen with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9-th inning. I prefer the shorter version of the law because it is more explicit about the law’s generality. “It” could be almost anyhthing.
My current context for heeding Yogi Berra’s Law is the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as POTUS. At best, this event marks the start of 4 long and nasty years in the US. At worst, this event might combine with trends elsewhere (in China, Europe, and Russia) to start a new Dark Age. To consider the worst case is prudent, not alarmist.
Mindless repetition of platitudes like
is no substitute for the eternal vigilance that Jefferson said is the price of liberty. (There are other prices.) I resist the complacency of those platitudes; I also resist despair and continue (in my own small way) to be a citizen rather than just a complainer.
In a late inning in the biggest game of my lifetime, the Enlightenment is trailing. That sucks. But 2+3 is still 5 and Yogi Berra’s Law is still true.
I cannot draw my way out of a paper bag, but Poet Rummager can draw. She is also a fine creative writer (with an impish and sometimes dark sense of humor) and a fun collaborator.
Originally posted on Slasher Monster:
the British Royal Navy bombards the fort guarding Baltimore’s harbor with state-of-the-art artillery. The attack inspires a mediocre poem that is just barely singable (if U pretend that “yeh-et” is a word) to the tune of a British drinking song. The Brits eventually get a consolation prize for the failure of the seige of Baltimore, when their song becomes our national anthem (but with lyrics from the poem, not the pubs).
I find that the Pink Rebel (a Xmas cactus that blooms when it damn well pleases, and never at Xmas) has a nice blossom. I take that to be a good omen. Good omens have been in short supply recently, as the pseudoconservative coalition of bigots and plutocrats bombards a wobbly electoral process with state-of-the-art ratcrap, propelled by dark money and deep resentments. The pseudoconservatives hope for veto-proof majorities in Congress as a consolation prize, if they cannot install a protofascist buffoon as President.
My local polling place is crowded. The people who run it have finally found an efficient way to arrange all the stuff that must be crammed into a tiny room in the firehouse: a sign-in table, little booths for marking the ballots, and a machine to scan the ballots and keep them secure in case a recount is needed. I have finally remembered to remove my ballot from the privacy sleeve before feeding it to the scanner. (It is only in theory that the scanner can grab the ballot by an edge protruding from the sleeve.) The scanner accepts the naked ballot w/o fuss. Walking back to my car after an unexpectedly smooth and quick process, I tear up a little.
I have just now experienced an America that is calm and polite and competent. For how long?
I rise with the dawn’s early light and go online to see the results for races that were not foregone conclusions. Mostly vomit-worthy, with a few consolations in the Senate. The Dems will keep the NV seat that Reid is leaving. The new Dem for IL is a combat veteran who knows the difference between patriotism and posturing; a seat for NH also flipped. Maybe filibusters can keep the pseudoconservatives from passing the very worst things on their wishlist.
For at least the next 4 years, I expect that American politics will not be calm and polite and competent. I hope I am wrong in this prediction, and not wrong merely because of surrender by those who oppose the pseudoconservative agenda.
Remember Mitch McConnell’s declaration (soon after the 2008 election) that preventing a 2nd term for Obama would have his top priority? I was angered by that commitment to reflexive opposition (regardless of the cost to the nation) to whatever Obama might propose. So I will try to keep an open mind. It is conceivable that Trump will surprise everybody (even himself) by growing quickly and well into his awesome new responsibilities. But not at all likely.
What is likely? Zombie economics and accelerating climate change will lead to global suffering comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930-s. Less likely (but still far from being alarmist hype) is the possibility of descent into thinly veiled fascism.
Yes, our traditions of liberal democracy are stronger than those of the Weimar Republic in 1932 and 1933. The question is not whether our traditions are stronger than Weimar’s but whether they are still strong enough to withstand escalating bombardment from pseudoconservatives who have honed expertise at selective vote suppression. The land of the free has its share of people with authoritarian personalities and deep resentments, often legitimate but exaggerated or misdirected. As did Germany in the 1930-s.
The Royal Navy bombardment in 1814 was 202 years ago. After the imminent 4 years of intensified pseudoconservative bombardment, will our flag be still there?
Rightly disgusted with the choices offered by the major parties in the 2016 POTUS election, many voters abstained or voted third party. Being sympathetic to both Green and Libertarian concerns (and angry that those concerns got so little attention in the inane debates), I agree that there is something to be said for voting third party in the uncontested states that are safely blue or red. A minor party that crosses the 5% threshold in the popular vote will get ballot access and more attention in the next election.
What about the contested states?
Like it or not, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the only candidates who could have become the next President. Like it or not, abstentions and 3rd party votes in contested states could have tipped them from Clinton to Trump. Like it or not, tipping contested states could have tipped the Electoral College from Clinton to Trump (or even thrown the decision into the House of Representatives, which would have chosen Trump).
So what? Should I not vote my conscience, regardless of where I live? No!
The point of voting is not self expression. The point is to participate in choosing the driver of a bus we all must ride in. The 2016 POTUS election was a choice between 2 bad drivers. One of them had a record that includes moving violations and at-fault collisions, but not DWI or total losses. The other was (and still is) an intoxicated newbie seething with road rage.
Image cropped from the Seattle Times
Among the many posts on many blogs that deal with this election, U can read more with independent and unusual angles in Keith’s blog as well as here.
As John Adams noted long ago, facts are stubborn things. So are misconceptions. Tossing dull little facts against a seductively simple misconception is like tossing pebbles against a window. To break the window, U must organize the pebbles into something like a chunk of concrete.
One way to organize facts is to create a clear and colorful visualization that sums up the take-away. One kind of visualization is a bar chart where all the big bars have the same length but are divided into little bars of various lengths. Perhaps a green little bar shows the percentage of my daily protein that comes from breakfast, while yellow and red little bars show the percentages that come from lunch and dinner. Another big bar shows those 3 percentages for somebody else. This kind of bar chart can be very helpful when there are more kinds of little bar than just breakfast/lunch/dinner, if the chart marker chooses colors well.
An excellent example of this kind of bar chart is in a Daily Kos post by Auriandra dated 2016-10-05. The whole post is a good read; the chart is shown below, in a cropped screenshot.
Contrary to what many cartoonists and progressive purists (not to mention right-wingers) proclaim, Hillary Clinton is relatively truthful, among the pols considered. (None of them deserve high marks by the standards of scientific research or testimony under oath.) By far the least truthful is Donald Trump.
If voters eventually notice and heed the veracity difference between Clinton/Kaine and Trump/Pence, the loss will leave Trump angry at the fact checkers. How can someone with his skillset (blustering; lying; swindling) get back at them? He could try for yet another Pants-on-Fire rating, with a lie about the fermentation capabilities of his microbiome.
Revenge for Fact Checking
Donald Trump could say
his farts and his shit smell like
warm cinnamon rolls.
Learning from history is tough, even for those who remember it. Parallels are never exact. The importance of each difference between then and now is a judgement call. Consider a darkly hilarious cartoon by Jen Sorensen:
Yes, the resemblance of the armed guard to a Nazi storm trooper is as subtle as a sledge hammer. Fine by me. Maybe it will overcome the American propensity for historical amnesia and wishful thinking.
Much to my dismay, Hillary Clinton is the only Trump opponent who might conceivably be elected. The progressive purists who disdain supporting Clinton are confident that something like what happened in Germany in 1932 and 1933 could not happen here and now, with a Trump victory. Yes, our traditions of liberal democracy are stronger than those of the Weimar Republic. The pertinent question is not whether our traditions are stronger but whether they are still strong enough, after years of relentless assault from the pseudoconservative coalition of bigots and plutocrats that controls staggering amounts of dark money and has already taken over the GOP. Dammit, the answer is not obvious.
Who’s Bhaskara? We will get to that question shortly. First, consider whatever gadget U are using to read this post. It depends on many things, discovered over many years by many people who (unlike many pols) preferred building up to tearing down. With many steps omitted (and “depends on” abbreviated to ←), a few of those dependencies go like this:
Your Gadget ← quantum physics ← coordinate systems ← Pythagoras’ Theorem
Back in high school, Pythagoras’ Theorem may have seemed like a little fact about right triangles that may have been mildly interesting but did not deserve the effort of slogging thru the book’s tedious proof. I could read the proof line by line, observe that it was valid, and be glad that I never needed to retrieve it for a test. Hardly anybody could remember it for more than a few minutes.
Pythagoras’ Theorem turned out to be essential to blogging (and much else), so it would be nice to have a proof that mere mortals could remember, appreciate, and be inspired by. Enter Bhaskara, 1114-1185.
Bhaskara replaced the usual picture (of 3 squares glued to the sides of 1 triangle) with a picture of 4 copies of the same triangle, arranged to form a big square with a little square inside it:
The proof is sometimes displayed more tersely, with just the figure. I prefer to write out a little algebra (while not belaboring why the angles do add up the way the figure suggests). Tho he did not have modern notation, Bhaskara did have an elegant way to provide more detail for the mathematically fastidious. He displayed another figure that also puts the 4 copies of the triangle inside a big square with sides a+b. In the other figure, the area not covered by copies of the triangle amounts to a²+ b² because it consists of 2 small squares. But the not-covered area amounts to c² in the figure displayed above, so we can conclude that
a²+ b² = c²
w/o bothering with algebra and how to compute areas of right triangles. We just need to bother with drawing both figures. Wanna try your hand at drawing the other figure? U can find the answer by following the link provided by Sieglinglungenlied in the comment section.
OK, I admit that having written a proof of mind-blowing elegance does not really qualify Bhaskara to be POTUS. Too bad that many people think mind-blowing arrogance can hack it.
Clicking on the “politics” category or tag in this post will display all my uses of acidic humor to cope with the current state of US politics. But acids are corrosive. Sometimes, I forgo acid and contemplate some of the enduring (so far) glories of modern Western civilization, one of which is that it is not exclusively Western. In particular, we got some elegant math from India and some elegant poetry forms from Japan.
One Way to Stay Sane in the Age of Trumpery
Cherish all that is
true and good and beautiful
(like Bhaskara’s proof).
While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest. The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account. U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like. Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people? Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug. Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.
While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked: Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc. The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
The choices listed in the following poll have varying plausibility; they do include the actual author. Please have a go before scrolling down to see the answer and why it matters.
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The image of the US Constitution’s famous oversimplification “We the People” was downloaded and resized from http://mtviewmirror.com/wp-content/uploads/we-the-people-9.jpg.
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All of the quotes are from a speech on The New Nationalism delivered 1910-08-31 by Theodore Roosevelt. More than a century later, the work has still not been done. More than a century later, pseudoconservatives still dump truckloads of ratcrap on anybody who opposes running the USA for the benefit of the biggest corporations and richest billionaires.
What to do in 2016? Yes, I feel the pull toward a protest vote like writing in Bernie Sanders (or Theodore Roosevelt). In what is not so obviously a mere gesture of protest, I could vote Green or Libertarian. But I will not. Unless U live in a cobalt blue or screaming red state, voting Green or Libertarian in 2016 is voting for Trump. In the real world, all options suck. Some suck worse than others. Much worse.
Yes, one can hope that the combination of Trump in the White House with McConnell and Ryan dominating Congress will be so blatantly toxic that “the people” finally wake up, rise up, and wrest control from the plutocrats. Alas, the 99% of us who are getting shafted includes bigots and nitwits. It includes those who bought the Fox News claim to be fair and balanced. It includes heavily armed crazies like Omar Mateen and Dylan Roof.
Popular uprisings do succeed now and then, as when the government of East Germany collapsed in 1989. Hey, the good people on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall suffered only 44 years (*) of communist oppression before that. More often, uprisings are either crushed (as in Hungary 1956) or seem successful for a while but descend into chaotic violence that spawns yet another tyranny (French Revolution; Russian Revolution; Arab Spring; …).
So I will trudge to the polls, hold my nose, and vote for Hillary. I will also remember a more familiar quotation from TR, excerpted below with a few letters added in italics:
While Hillary is deeply flawed, she is not one of those “timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat” detested by TR. For that matter, neither is Trump. He has other issues. While TR was far from being a pacifist, he could see the downside of putting an impulsive jerk in a position to start a war. That jerk also thinks appeasing the NRA is more important than making it harder for crazies like Adam Lanza to murder school children and their teachers.
Sound of Sunlight
Rushing waters bring
joy to those who hear them sing
and see them sparkle.
Silly Rhymes for Scary Times
A rhyme in blank verse?
President Trump would be worse.
Vote Dem or you’ll curse.
A public domain image of the American flag has been turned upside down to reflect the current state of US politics.
Mellow Curmudgeon 
