Putting a Little Heat in Thanksgiving: Occupy History!

So, I’m thinking … the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner with all the fixins’ is kinda bland.  Not much in the way of gastronomic punch.  Basic bland gravy.  Basic bland potatoes.  Basic Bland Bird.

So, what to do?

Well, now I’m thinking that the folks at UC Davis Police Department may have had the right idea after all. 

Nothing like a little pepper spray to liven things up. 

After all, the good folks at Fox News – in the person of Ms. Megyn (“it’s a food product, essentially”) Kelly – have apparently decided that military grade pepper spray is some kind of tasty food item, and therefore, eminently suitable for the Thanksgiving table.  After all, it’s derived from pepper (which lots of people eat) and even appears with other edible peppers on the Scoville scale (see above)  -  although it’s somewhat off the charts, being ten times "hotter" than habanero peppers.   

You can get more info about this kind of industrial-strength pepper spray from Pulitzer Prize author and science writer Deborah Blum’s blog here.  

I guess that for Fox News viewers, the mustard gas used in World War One would be some kind of condiment as well, to add zest to those bland Boche sausages…

Of course, if you watch a lot of Fox News, you’re likely to have a somewhat skewed view of reality.  At least that’s what a recent study done by the folks at Fairleigh Dickenson University seems to show.  

Sure, I know it’s hard to believe that watching Fox News can actually make you about 18 percentage points stupider than folks who watch nothing at all, but the study seems to show that to be the case. 

For example, Fox News viewers and radio talk show listeners think that the protesters in Syria have already effected regime change there.  Apparently nobody’s told Syria's Bashar al-Assad that he’s out of work and, chances are, he doesn’t watch Fox News. (Of course, to some folks, all those Middle Eastern types all look alike.  Al-Assad, Gadhafi, Mubarak… what’s the difference???)

Chances are, you’ve never lived in a “third world” country.  I have.

Chances are, you’ve never experienced the militarization of the local police before.  I have.

Chances are, you probably think that if you just mind your own business, don’t get too deeply involved and just spend your time doing your genealogy, everything will be all right.  It won’t.

When Thanksgiving rolls around in a few days, and you brush off your family group sheets and remember your Mayflower ancestors, remember also that they were Separatists and Dissenters. 

Whatever the "status quo" was at the time... they were not a part of it.

They were not the folks in power and they were not the folks in political control in their own country.  They had more in common with the folks at Davis who were pepper-sprayed than with the folks in uniform with the canisters. In many respects, they were much like the Occupy Wall Street (or Oakland, or Albany, or Boston or Paris.... well, you get the idea....) folks.

Oh no, you say... my Pilgrim folks were all about religion, not politics.  Quick reality check: in the 17th century, religion and politics were pretty much inseparable.  The concept of "separation of Church and State" was still a long way off.

Chances are, there were also powerful folks in England in 1620 who thought that those annoyingly scruffy Mayflower passengers could greatly improve their lot in life if they’d just take a bath and get a job.

Sound familiar?

Votin’ Time Is Just Around The Corner! But I’m Okay – Cuz I’m White, Male, Old, Literate and I Own Real Estate!

Very soon the Political Silly Season will be in ultra high gear and people will be once again running loudly for public office.  They’ll be after our votes, and will tell us whatever it is they think we want to hear and will, in the process, paint a gorgeous , glorious picture of a country that never was.   

If we will just give them our vote, they promise to “Take Our Country Back”, which I suspect may well be a trademarked phrase by now. 

Back to the time when Everything Was Wonderful.

Just how far back?

Perhaps back to the days of “The Founding Fathers Who Were Always Right -  In a Country That Was Always Right -  Until THEY (insert target group here) Messed It All Up.”

So, who gets to vote on this stuff?   

Surely, in the “Greatest Nation On Earth That Ever Was – Bar None”, all of us acting collectively have always been asked to make the choice of who should lead us. Right?.

Well, not really…

In the dim recesses of our collective memories, we know that voting rights for women and blacks were things that People Fought About A Long Time Ago, and sometimes for a long time.  Still, the “Founding Fathers Were Perfect and Omniscient” crowd has a singularly curious one-note view of history. 

The Past was always Better Than Now. We need to go Back to Better.

Back to Better...

If you can follow their logic, back in those early days of the Republic, everything was rosy and peachy-keen. People lived without lots of gub’mint interference in their lives, and everything worked fine – just like God intended. 

After all, our nation was designed to be all about Private Enterprise and  We, The People – no King for us! Give us leaders with real business experience in meeting payrolls – like, say, plantation owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Oh, wait…Washington and Jefferson didn't actually PAY their workers...

We, The People?

So, let’s take a look at this “We, The People” thing.  In fact, let’s look specifically at voting – at who could and who couldn’t vote.  One of our esteemed Founding Fathers – John Adams of Massachusetts – had some very definite views about who should (or should not) be able to vote.  He wrote, in a letter to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776:

“Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.”

Imagine the societal dangers if “all ranks” were prostrated “… to one common level.”  Sheesh, the next thing you know, they’ll want to use our bathrooms…!

But when it comes to voting, that’s not all!

Sure, we all know there were some minor age and residency qualifications on the books back in olden times: in some places, you had to be 21 to vote, in others, 24.  In some places, residency could mean two years in the same place.  Plus, for starters, you had to be white. And male. Still, no big deal. Besides, that's all gone now.

Otherwise, things were pretty much as they are now, as some folks would have you think. 

So let’s take a closer look on how easy it actually was to vote in early America, in the days of the Founding Fathers. If, of course, you were free, white, male, and a long-term resident over 21...

Secret Ballot?  - Hardly!

During the colonial period and into the early Federal period, elections were public events. Both voters and candidates gathered at the appointed time, usually at the local courthouse, and the voters publicly indicated their choice of candidate. My own experience with Virginia records shows that for early 19^th century Presidential elections, lists showing the candidates’ names and the names of those who voted for them, can sometimes – but not universally – be found in the county clerk’s record books.

A Religious Test – Really?

During colonial days – and prior to the adoption and widespread acceptance of the first amendment to the Constitution – if you happened to be a Roman Catholic or a Jew, you were pretty much out of luck when it came to voting in many parts of North America.  Even if you weren’t specifically banned from voting (as you were in early 18^th century New York), you couldn’t in good conscience take the required oath to the monarch as both head of state and head of the established (official) church.  And while it didn’t affect voting itself, many states adopted a provision in their constitutions that prohibited all but those who believed in a Supreme Being from holding elected office.  No agnostics or atheists need apply. Some states still have this clause in their constitutions.

Give Me Land, Lots of Land … Otherwise, No Vote

When it came to voting, our Founding Fathers were very concerned about riff-raff (see John Adams above).  Heaven forbid the landless and unemployed have a say in running things. That’s why they wrote into law basic minimum property requirements for voting.   

For example, at one time in Virginia, you needed to actually own (not rent) 25 acres of land in order to vote.  This “landowner” provision was very effective in disenfranchising lots of the folks who lived on the western frontier (i.e., present-day West Virginia) from messing things up by voting, since a great many of them simply squatted or leased their “back-of-beyond” land. In colonial New York, it wasn’t so much about acreage as it was about land value. If what you owned wasn’t worth at least forty pounds (big, big bucks in those days), fuhgeddaboutit.  New Hampshire was the first state to abolish the “minimum property” voting requirement in 1792.

Readin’ and Writin’ and … (Well, Readin’ Anyway…)

We all know about the "Jim Crow" literacy tests that were put in place to make sure that former slaves (who were prohibited from learning to read by many “slave-state” statutes prior to Emancipation), could not vote.  However, not as well known is the fact that many Northern abolitionist states enacted literacy provisions to ensure that the unlettered Irish Catholics flooding the shores of the United States to escape conditions in mid-19^th century Ireland couldn’t spoil things by voting.  Connecticut adopted a literacy test in 1855; kind of a “No Irish Need Vote” provision.  After the Civil War, a number of states discovered that there were adult white Protestant males who were (wait for it…) illiterate, so many laws got modified to “grandfather” in those who could legally vote before the poll tax provisions were put in  place.

Poll Taxes – Goodness me, what’s that all about?

As the 19^th century progressed, and Congress by fiat declared that former slaves (all of whom happened to be black, or nearly so) were actually Real People and Citizens of these United States, lots of local governments suddenly decided that education was a Good Thing.  So, they enacted a tax to support it and made paying it a requirement of voting (i.e., a Poll Tax).

Don’t have enough cash to pay the poll tax this year, Mr. Son of Former Slave?  Not to worry…Mr. Rich White Guy here will do your voting for you.  Don’t worry though; he’ll be looking out for your interests, and that will save you all the hassle of voting. 

Turning Back The Clock of History?

I could go on and on about this, but I think you get my point.  Nearly universal suffrage – almost all of us being able to vote for our leaders -  is a Good Thing – in spite of what most of the Founding Fathers believed. 

Our ancestors – the ones we spend so much of our time researching – gave both blood and treasure so that we could do this.

So, when I hear folks like a Texas Governor suggest that the 17^th Amendment (direct election of US senators by popular vote) wasn’t such a good idea, I get a little bit uneasy.  Yeah, right. I’m sure the folks in the wildly popular and efficient New York State Legislature would pick just the right US Senators for me and thus save me the trouble of thinking about it…

And then, what can I say to those who advocate the return to the days of the all-wise and all-knowing Founding Fathers, when only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population could vote because the rest were … well, riff-raff…

As we say around here – fuhgeddaboutit!

Time to Learn About The Dunning-Kruger Effect and What It Means

I love political polls, especially the ones that reinforce Jay Leno’s “Streetwalking” segments – in which he asks “average Americans” about basic historical “general knowledge” facts, and they provide him with hilariously loopy answers.

Like “America declared its independence from France in 1865.”

Currently, those “common wisdom” polls suggest that we’re screwed and things couldn’t get much worse and that government is the problem.

Okay, I know.  

Everybody has a lot of stuff going on in their lives.  It’s hard to stay on top of everything.  Sometimes we just have to trust the folks that we figure are the experts. We can’t know everything. Simple is best.

But there are some things WE KNOW!

We KNOW that politics and politicians are all childish, evil and bad.  And government costs too much.  And taxes are evil.  At least, that’s what they say on TV, anyway…

So, when something really important comes along – say, like electing somebody to Congress or running the government – we tend to gravitate to candidates who we think actually THINK like us.  Chances are, they’ll represent us and our view of reality and do the Right Thing. 

This, of course, may be a tremendously bad idea, especially if we haven’t been paying really close attention to what’s been going on. Like The Issues.

Listen. There are lots of politicians out there who use the phrase “the American People” followed by verbs like “think”, “believe”, “want”, “expect”, “have said” and other similar nonsense.   Next, they’re happy to tell you that “the American People” (for whom they say that they speak) are damn near infallible on virtually every imaginable issue when they think collectively.

It's kinda like having a 330 million person Pope...gifted with infallibility.

 

Think about it – according to these folks, “American Group-think” is always right…which, of course, is why lynchings of blacks made so much sense in parts of the 1920s Deep South.  Local group-think indicated that was the way to go.  It’s hard to argue with majority opinion, after all. 

So…Everybody knows you can’t spend more than you have. That’s just common sense.  Or “group-think.”

Of course, if you ask those people if THEY should pay cash on the barrelhead for their $350,000 houses and thus be mortgage free or pay cash up front for their children’s college tuitions, - no mortgages or no college loans - they’ll look at you like you have three or four heads.

Apparently, that’s a different kettle of fish.

Problem is, most folks don’t know that all this “knowledge stuff” has already been studied by experts (Justin Dunning & David Kruger) who actually DO know what they’re doing.  In fact, they’ve gone so far as to lend their own names to their findings.

It’s called the “Dunning – Kruger Effect.”  You can read about it here, in a “Psychology Today” article published last year.  

In a nutshell, the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” posits the following:  If you’re really, really stupid, you’re probably too stupid to know just how stupid you are.  You are confident that you have a lockhold on The Truth.

You may actually believe that NPR, foreign aid and health education collectively soak up huge amounts of your tax dollars.  But, of course, they don’t.  And you probably have no idea how to find out how much they actually are – in real dollar amounts.  And I’m not going to tell you where you can find out …

Admit it, if this is all too hard, you’ve been watching “American Idol” a lot…

Therefore, you might think (incorrectly) that you actually understand what’s going on around you, when, in fact, you don’t.  Inevitably, you’re probably convinced that you understand the situation, even though you couldn’t explain it to an alien from Mars, except by using the current buzzwords being used by those TV pundits who keep telling you that (a.) you’re smart and (b.) they can tell you what you should be thinking.

Worst of all, people suffering from Dunning-Kruger truly believe they have “The Answer.”

Politicians learned years ago that it’s always a good idea to tell you – the voter -  just how smart you are.  The more they tell you that you’re smart, the more you’re inclined to agree with them.

And, if we can distract you with a few “hot-button” issues – Casey Anthony, Maria & Arnold's split, Amy Winehouse, America’s Got Talent, same-sex marriage – so much the better.

Interestingly, nobody in elected office would ever suggest that you’re suffering from “Dunning-Kruger”, even though their staff aides already know just how easily you can be manipulated with a couple of “feel-good” buzzwords. 

Face it, you really, really like it when politicians tell you that you’re smart, even when you’ve never heard of Ludwig Van Mises and the Austrian School. If you had to explain Ayn Rand’s economic philosophy, you’d likely be at wit’s end, even when the guys promoting it say it’s the bee’s knees and you’re inclined to believe them. (If you’re not sure about those things, try Google…)

Politicians’ staffs understand the Dunning-Kruger effect; in fact, they rely on it.  Chances are, if you suffer from it, you don’t have a clue. 

Buzzwords sound good, and complex ideas seem understandable, especially if they’re reduced to buzzwords, which are the linguistic equivalent of the “lowest common denominator.”

Still, when it comes to making a choice about the future, I’m inclined to trust in the truth of Dunning-Kruger, not buzzwords.

And I’m not really all that fond of that “common wisdom of the American people” thing.  I’ve seen where that’s taken us in the past.