A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Those statues are about marking territory, not preserving history

August 19, 2017 by Doug Masson 6 Comments

Some statues are better than others

The Internet has suddenly become full of self-styled statue enthusiasts and historical preservationists. Their specific focus of interest are statues in the public square glorifying Confederates who took up arms against the United States. The flurry of slippery slope, whatabout, and bothsides arguments is almost blinding in its intensity. They conjure up dire images of an Orwellian world where history is erased, forgotten, and repeated.

Taking these arguments at face value, good-natured people seeking a reasonable compromise say, “how about a museum?” This suggestion is mostly ignored. It’s ignored because the wailing about history is a pretext. We have a million books about the Civil War. The statue of a noble-looking Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson in a public place of honor tells you nothing about the men or their times.

These statues are about marking territory. They are about demonstrating who is in control of the public square and promoting their values. These statues mostly cropped up in the Jim Crow South and during the height of the Civil Rights movement. That’s not a coincidence. The people in control were sending a message by venerating this very specific slice of American history; by venerating men whose only notable role in our history was committing treason in defense of slavery. That message will not be communicated if those statues are in a museum, surrounded by information and context that gives perspective to their place in history.

Does this mean we have to take down statues of George Washington? No. Because we still value his contributions to this country. Who is the “we” that gets to decide these things? That’s the real rub, and the real source of anxiety and concern. The “we” who are increasingly leaning toward tearing down monuments to treason are different than the “we” who decided to put them up in the first place. But, mostly the folks who were so powerful in the old “we” can’t say that out loud. So, we get a lot of hand-wringing about historical preservation.

Antifa is a ten foot tall beastman who showers in vodka and feeds his baby shrimp scampi.

August 16, 2017 by Doug Masson 1 Comment

I’ve been hearing a lot about “Antifa” lately. Well, let me tell you about Antifa.

Antifa is a ten-foot-tall, two-ton son of a bitch who could eat a hammer and take a shotgun blast standing!

Did I ever tell you about the time I went horseback riding with Antifa, but there weren’t any horses around? Well, Antifa throws a saddle on my back and rides me around Wyoming for three days. Well, wouldn’t you know it, my stamina increases with each day and I develop tremendous leg muscles. So anyway, Antifa decides to enter me in the Breeders’ Cup, right, under the name Turkish Delight. And I’m running in second place, and I’m running and I break my ankle! They’re about to shoot me. Then someone from the crowd yells out, God bless him, ‘Don’t shoot him, he’s a human.’”

Antifa is a son of a bitch! He would eat a homeless person if you dared him!

I went camping with Antifa … I’m in the back of a pickup with Antifa and a live deer. Well, Antifa, he grabs the deer by the antlers, looks at it and says, ‘I’m Antifa! Say it!’ Then he squeezes the deer in such a way that a sound comes out of its mouth — “Annifa!” It wasn’t exactly it, but it was pretty good for a deer.

I once saw Antifa scissor-kick Angela Lansbury.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa was in a production of ‘The King and I’? On opening night, Antifa chloroformed the entire cast and slowly eats them in front of the audience for two hours. The production got pretty good reviews.

Antifa sheds its skin once a year.

Did I ever tell you about the time Antifa went hunting? He decides he’s going to hunt down all four of the Banana Splits. He stalks and kills every one of them with a machette. They all begged for their lives…except Fleagle.

Oh, wait. My mistake. That was Bill Brasky.

“Antifa” is the latest right wing boogeyman. It got a Wikipedia page on August 8, 2017, following an Atlantic article by Peter Beinhart on August 7, 2017. But, judging by right-wingers casting about for false equivalence to Klansmen, Nazis, and Confederate sympathizers, Antifa is legion.

I’m happy to condemn violence as a political tool. Here: “Violence should not be condoned as a political tool.” But it’s not a deep concern for pacifism that motivates the Antifa panic. It’s a desire to always focus on how bad liberals are.

Let’s not pretend there is any equivalency between a movement that didn’t even rate a Wikipedia page last month and movements that have plagued our country for a century and more. At one point in the 1920s, the Klan counted something like 1/3 of white protestant Hoosier men as members. Confederate monuments erupted over the Jim Crow south in public spaces as a way of demonstrating who was in control. Nazis killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and embroiled the world in a war that would kill about 60 million people. Condemning the Nazis, the Klan, and the Confederates isn’t based on a desire to focus on how bad conservatives are — at least it shouldn’t be.

It should be dead easy for conservatives to join in the chorus of unequivocal condemnation for history’s assholes. And for many it is. George H.W. Bush spoke out against David Duke in 1991, and he and his son spoke out against the Charlottesville groups today. That’s what makes Trump’s hesitation so confounding. This should be a softball for any public leader. Trump is not a man known for weighing his words. The fact that he hesitates to condemn these guys tells you what you need to know about how he views them.

Both Sides

August 13, 2017 by Doug Masson 2 Comments

A lot of people are spilling ink on the violence in Charlottesville where white supremacists gathered to “Unite the Right,” ostensibly in protest of the removal of Confederate statues. I’m not sure I can do much better, but I feel like I ought to post something here anyway. Those who feel some affinity for the movement but aren’t ready to go full on Nazi are espousing some variant of a “Both Sides” argument. Either they want to blame violence that erupted on the counter-protesters or they point to some incidence of violence that took place at an event with a message they did not favor.

It’s fine and appropriate to be against violence. However, it’s a little telling if “All Violence Matters” flies out of your mouth easily but you choke a little bit when trying to spit out the idea that white supremacists have uniquely bad and dangerous ideas and they are bad people for holding those ideas. If you’re a Quaker or a pacifist or something and messages of nonviolence are a passion of yours, I’ll give you a pass — but that’s not what I’m seeing.

And it’s no surprise that these guys (and it seems to be almost entirely male) had an event that came to violence. White supremacists like to talk tough and invoke violent metaphors. Judging from the things you see out of the broad overlap between “Men’s Rights” activists and white supremacists, you see a toxic view of masculinity that regards nonviolent responses to challenges as emasculating. Their beliefs and fragile egos make them almost uniquely unable to co-exist with other ideas or turn the other cheek when confronted.

So, sure, violence is bad. That can be, and perhaps should be, said every day. But this event gives us a particularly relevant opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to opposing fascists like the ones we saw trying to “Unite the Right.” People celebrating the Nazis in defense of statues of rebel traitors are uniquely un-American.

Driving slowly in the left lane makes you a bad person and you should feel bad about yourself

August 2, 2017 by Doug Masson 4 Comments

Be polite: get right.

I probably went too far with that headline, but still, you should use the left lane for passing then get back in the right lane. A friend passed along a Vox video on the subject. Hanging out in the left lane causes congestion and causes more accidents than speeders do.

In 2015, the Indiana General Assembly passed legislation basically instructing drivers to get right except to pass. I’m not sure how enforceable it is as a criminal law, but maybe it gives police a tool for pulling drivers over and educating them about why driving in the left lane is problematic.

At the time, I wrote:

Generally there seem to be two or three things that lead to people hanging out in the left lane – 1) Not trusting other motorists to also play by the rules, resulting in you getting trapped in the right lane; 2) Not being comfortable with your ability to use passenger’s side rear view (I speculate due to the inordinate number of mini-vans hanging out in the left lane); and maybe 3) being an oblivious jerk. This law would seem to be an attempt to address items #1 and 3 to some extent.

So, don’t be that person. Pass quickly, then get right so you disturb the flow of traffic as little as possible.

Sometimes Being “Right” is Beside the Point: Thoughts About Religious Certainty

July 30, 2017 by Doug Masson Leave a Comment

Idea 1: Find people of good faith with different world views and keep talking with them.
Idea 2: If something brings a person joy and doesn’t hurt you, don’t be a jerk by telling them they’re wrong.

I had a good exchange on Facebook with Eric Schansberg. I tend to disagree with him more than I agree with him, but this sort of exchange was a reminder to keep talking with people with different world views — particularly those who are smart, friendly, and of good-will. (I frequently get people commenting on the diversity of views in my Facebook threads, leading me to believe that this is unusual and that folks have retreated into their bubbles to a greater extent than maybe I appreciate.)

Anyway, the exchange that prompted this blog post had to do with an article about the phenomenon of atheists reading the Bible like a fundamentalist. It’s not necessarily uncommon for atheists to take the most literal interpretation of the Bible and demand that Christians defend an apparent contradiction. This prompted me to chime in:

I think much of it has to do with the fundamentalists being some of the loudest voices the atheists hear — just as the atheists who want to play “gotcha” with Bible passages are some of the loudest voices that Christians hear.

When more nuanced Christians are talking to more nuanced atheists, their religious differences tend not to be very important to the conversation.

Eric allowed as how he didn’t care for loud, dogmatic fundamentalists regardless of whether they were championing the cause of atheism, Islam, Christianity, or whatever. And he mentioned that his reaction to such folks varied based on the level of their self-righteousness, their pretensions of intelligence, volume, smugness, etc. Then he asked about my thoughts on the matter. This seemed like an easy question, and when I started writing, I expected a one line response was coming out of my keyboard. Instead, it grew a little more thoughtful, and seemed like a decent basis for this blog post.

I don’t care for dogmatic fundamentalism regardless of the underlying source because the emotional underpinnings mostly seem to come from a bad place. The ferocious certainty some people have about things that are unknown and possibly unknowable isn’t based on a desire for understanding. Instead, they seem to want to use that certainty as a cudgel with which to beat people they perceive as being outside their particular tribe. But I guess it’s not just being certain — it’s that certainty combined with a need to loudly hurl your beliefs against others. There is no problem with a person who is steadfast in his or her faith but is comfortable that others believe differently.

I’m sure I’ve played “gotcha” Biblical games with others in the past. I viewed it as an intellectual exercise or a fun debating game. Hopefully it was with people who were also enjoying the mental gymnastics. But, ultimately, that approach is pointless. As I get older, the more I appreciate that there is tremendous value in anything that helps people find joy and meaning in the world. Whether it is objectively true or not is almost beside the point.

If I didn’t happen to like a particular kind of art or music, I’d still be a bad person if I insisted on telling someone who did like those things that they were wrong — or that the artist who most spoke to them wasn’t correctly following the rules of that particular art form. If their love of those things makes them a happier or better person, that fact in itself should make me appreciate the art or the music even if it never speaks to me directly.

But I’m afraid that this view was not one I held as strongly when I was young. Being “right” seemed much more urgent back then. The passions of youth, I guess.

McCain casts deciding vote against McConnell’s last-minute, back-of-the-napkin healthcare repeal

July 28, 2017 by Doug Masson 4 Comments

So, Sen. John McCain never should have cast the vote to proceed with the House’s healthcare repeal bill. It was passed under a make-shift process with only the most cursory of committee hearings. And it was not a policy recommended by anyone of substance in the healthcare community. But, credit where it is due, he cast the deciding vote against a Senate measure that was even more slap-dash than the House bill. And that’s saying something. The other two Republican votes against McConnell’s cocktail napkin overhaul of 1/6 of the nation’s economy were Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Indiana’s Senators were split. Joe Donnelly voted against it. Todd Young voted in favor.

For years, we’ve heard opponents of Obamacare howling bitterly about how unfair and rushed they thought that process was. Despite the Pelosi quote we’ve all heard taken out of context ad nauseam, with Obamacare, there were extensive committee hearings over the better part of a year with a great deal of open, bipartisan debate and members of Congress returning to grueling town halls during the process. President Obama was knowledgeable about the bill and went out in public a defended it at length.

[T]he ACA was debated in three House committees and two Senate committees, and subject to hours of bipartisan debate that allowed for the introduction of amendments.

In June and July 2009, with Democrats in charge, the Senate health committee spent nearly 60 hours over 13 days marking up the bill that became the Affordable Care Act. That September and October, the Senate Finance Committee worked on the legislation for eight days — its longest markup in two decades. It considered more than 130 amendments and held 79 roll-call votes. The full Senate debated the health care bill for 25 straight days before passing it on Dec. 24, 2009.

Detractors decried this process as Obamacare having been “rammed down their throats.” What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks and particularly last night was that this complaint was utterly insincere.

I’m obviously not a fan of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare – not so much because I love Obamacare which has a lot of problems but because the alternate proposals that have been put forward have been a lot worse. But last night’s maneuvering was something else again. As I probably remind you all too often, I have a legislative background — having spent a couple of my early work years at Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency. While I was there, those who had been around a lot longer spoke reverently of Senator Bob Garton who led the Senate and had cleaned up and opened up its processes and was a stickler for its traditions.

There is value in those traditions. Even though the process can be more illusory than real sometimes, they help maintain the consensus that legislation is something more than a bunch of words slapped on to paper. The process is what transforms those words into law. McConnell and those who voted for his proposal did not even give a nod to that process. He slopped about eight pages together (25% of which had to do with Planned Parenthood) and released the language at about 10:00 p.m. last night.

The measure would increase the number of people lacking insurance over a decade by 16 million, raising the total to 43 million. CBO also estimated that premiums for policies in the nongroup market, or individual plans, would increase by roughly 20 percent relative to current law in all years between 2018 and 2026.

A little over 3 hours after McConnell’s proposal was released, the Senate was voting on whether to send it to the House. The House would then have the option of taking the law to conference or concurring and sending it to the President. In other words, there were no guarantees that the Senate would ever get another chance to consider the merits of the legislation. Forty-eight Democrats along with Collins, Murkowski, and McCain voted “no.” Forty-nine Republicans, including Indiana Senator Todd Young, thought this was an acceptable process and voted “yes.”

A rushed, dead of the night vote on major legislation with no chance for review, debate, or constituent feedback is simply no way to run the Senate. Obamacare was passed after months of consideration. This was voted on in a matter of hours.

The Gentry is Frivolous

July 16, 2017 by Doug Masson 12 Comments

Abdul Hakim-Shabazz (the man, the myth, the legend) has a column entitled “The Revolution has been Gentrified.” He reports that the protest of the police action shooting of Aaron Bailey by two IMPD officers was much more heavily attended by white people than black people. The black folks were, he suggests, at Black Expo. I’m not writing to offer any thoughts on the particular event.

Instead, what caught my eye was the characterization of the white people who attended the event. It was in what I’m tentatively calling “The Gentry is Frivolous” genre. Abdul’s wasn’t particularly egregious, nor did it dominate his piece. (In his case, it was mainly used for comic effect):

[T]he Don’t Sleep crowd drew the hipsters and people most likely to serve you a tall latte, with skim (or almond milk), and no sweetener.

. . .

[T]he revolution has culturally appropriated by progressive white privilege. And when that white privilege drove home, it probably didn’t even have to worry about getting pulled over in a traffic stop.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about social class in America, and this seems like a fairly common theme. The upper middle class, the gentry, is a bunch of coddled, soft little ninnies with frivolous concerns. The food they eat is silly. Their stated social concerns are merely “virtue signaling,” not truly held beliefs.

They aren’t real Americans ™ doing real work ™. A real job — after all — requires that you shower after work, not before. And, after work, instead of drinking real, American beer like Bud Light or Miller, they drink pretentious, hoppy beers with funny names. Their kids, if they can be peeled away from the screen, probably run around with brooms pretending to play Quidditch instead of something manly, like football. Or worse, maybe they play boring, scoreless soccer instead of exciting American games like baseball.

Again, to be clear, I’m not piling this on Abdul. His line about the latte was just the launching point for something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. I have a very lefty acquaintance with a blue-collar job whose distaste for professionals was a lot stronger than I had anticipated. This class division is real. And it seems to be more about education than wealth. Trump can somehow be seen as of the blue collar social class despite being an alleged billionaire who was born into immense wealth. The professional classes are the ones more likely to inspire resentment among the white working classes. (And maybe the non-white working classes as well — politically, however, the leaders preferred by the white working classes are disastrous from any number of angles for members of the non-white working classes.)

The stated reason for the resentment by the white working class is often that they feel condescension by the professional classes. Whether that’s the true reason or not, I’m not so sure. After all, looking at the withering condescension you see going the other way. There is endless condescension about liberals and their lattes. Or maybe it’s arugula. Or maybe it’s participation trophies. Ann Coulter has made a lot of money telling white working class people what they want to hear over the years. She said:

“Liberals are not like most Americans. They are the biggest pussies on Earth, city-bred weaklings who didn’t play a sport and have never been in a fight in their entire lives. Their mothers made excuses for them when they threw tantrums and spent way too much time praising them during toilet training.”

So, I don’t think it’s an abiding concern for condescension that causes the resentment. It’s a sensitivity to condescension running the “wrong way” that seems to be provoking. And, by the way, this “city people are soft and lack virtue” notion is nothing new. The Greeks were using it against the cosmopolitan Persians. (Persians wore perfume and slippers, don’t you know.) The fall of Rome was ascribed to its adoption of cosmopolitan ways and abandoning the simple, more rustic virtues of real Romans. (Kids these days and their aqueducts. Why, in my day, you had to go to a well to get water!)

So, as you run across critiques of “liberals,” try to see how much of it can be boiled down to mere “the gentry is frivolous” hand waving.

State Impact on High School Career and Technical Training

July 1, 2017 by Doug Masson 3 Comments

Peter Balonon-Rosen, writing for State Impact Indiana has a good article on career and technical training initiatives in Indiana schools:

A new state law could allow job training programs to replace other high school graduation requirements. The law requires the State Board of Education to develop new pathways to high school completion.

It comes just as job training in Indiana high schools has taken on a new life — and new name.

“I think there’s a negative perception associated with the term ‘vocational training,’” Deuberry says. “Instead it is kind of like job training program. It’s so much bigger.”

. . .

Career and technical education programs are growing across Indiana. Today, students learn skills from welding to 3D printing to cooking – not just shop class skills, as was common in the past.

This is probably a good concept if done well but subject to abuse if done poorly. (Not very insightful: you could probably say that about almost literally any initiative.) Earlier in the article, Balonon-Rosen mentions that policymakers have struggled with whether education should be about getting kids ready for college or for the workforce. Molly Deuberry, speaking for the Department of Education, says “both.” And that’s correct as far as it goes, but I cringed a little at the idea of “college” being the counterpart to “workforce” because you run into the same question in college. Is that just advanced vocational training?

The larger question, in my mind, is whether you are teaching the student to be a worker or teaching the student to be a person. The ability to make a living is a big part of what is going to make you a productive, happy, fully developed citizen and human. But, it’s obviously not the only thing. Schools have to focus on vocational capabilities as a significant part of what will make a student a good person and a citizen who will improve the community. College preparation is not necessarily the path to excellence in those non-vocational areas of life.

But, I’m straying a bit from the point. When I was a kid, it seemed like vocational classes were a place where the troublemakers were shunted off. As I walked the hallways, I saw lots of rough kids through the doors of shop rooms that I never set foot in. The danger is that these vocational classes won’t be used so much as an alternate route for a fully developed education as storage space for troublemakers.

But it definitely doesn’t have to be that way, and from the article it sounds like the aspiration of the career and technical training initiatives is to recognize that college isn’t for everyone. (And, as I say this, I’m extremely wary of sounding like Judge Smails in Caddyshack when he tells Danny, “the world needs ditch diggers too.”) A strong career and technical education path was one of the recommendations of the NCSL report on how to build a world-class educational system after the study group reviewed a number of other educational systems around the world. As I put it in a blog post from last year:

Develop a Career and Technical Education path for those students preferring more of an applied education rather than a more academic approach. This shouldn’t be an educational backwater like so many vocational programs. It should be geared to boosting the national economy and providing a higher standard of living for a broader base of the population.

Italy Trip – Part VI: Back to Rome and on to Berlin

June 22, 2017 by Doug Masson 2 Comments

Day 7: Back to Rome, Pantheon, and Capitoline Museum

All my ducks in a row.

After three nights in Florence, it was time to return to Rome where we would spend another night before catching a plane out of Italy. We started the day with breakfast at the same cafe on the Duomo plaza. I’m a big fan of a simple breakfast of croissants and coffee, so that’s what I ordered once again. Then we packed our stuff, hauled our luggage down four flights of stairs, and through the streets of Florence back to the train station. By this time, such trips were becoming fairly routine. The train ride was easy. From my very limited experience on this trip, Europe just seems to do train and plane travel a lot better than we do in the U.S. Back in Rome, we stayed in the Hotel Torino whose main asset is being close to the train station. It was perfectly serviceable, but it was billed as a four star hotel — so I guess I don’t know what that rating entails. Certainly nothing to do with quality WiFi! But, we weren’t spending much time in the hotel anyway, so it didn’t much matter.

Once we got our stuff up to the fourth floor rooms (elevator this time!) the first order of business was lunch. We ate at Er Buchetto. This place was fantastic for what we wanted. Just a quick, inexpensive sandwich to tide us over. The sandwiches were incredible — pretty much just pork on bread which we ate standing up at tables, which sounds awful, but when the pork is a delicious porchetta and the bread is great and the table you’re standing at is on a sidewalk in Rome, it’s the opposite of awful. I also had a Peroni because, why not?

Marcus Aurelius and Harper

From there, we walked to the Pantheon. We had seen the outside on the first night in Rome but had arrived too late to go in. When we went in, I was a little surprised — but really shouldn’t have been: the many gods one expects with a word like “Pantheon” have been replaced by the one Christian god. I know the popes haven’t controlled Rome for the full 2,000 years of Christianity, but they have at least done so for a long time. It makes sense that the Pantheon wouldn’t remain dedicated to pagan Gods. Wikipedia tells me it was dedicated to St. Mary and the Martyrs in the 7th century.

From there, we had yet more gelato, enjoyed some fountains, and made our way to the Capitoline Museums. This museum had been recommended by our tour guide for the Colosseum, and (in my opinion) it delivers. It sits atop the Capitoline Hill, has great exhibits, and was very uncrowded. In particular, the huge statues of Marcus Aurelius and Constantine are impressive. And the length of time there have been people settled on Capitoline Hill is staggering. They had evidence of Bronze Age settlements there. It’s a good, defensible location on the Tiber connecting the Mediterranean to the interior of Italy, so settlement there makes a certain amount of sense. We cut this visit a little short — our Museum Tyrant was a little gassed (as was the family generally) and not insisting on seeing every room.

A cozy little room with understated decor in the Capitoline Museum.

So, we made the long walk back to the hotel and had a little rest before dinner. Our last dinner in Italy was at the Alessio — a nice restaurant down the street from the Hotel Torino with tables in the basement. Seemed to be a popular place for Americans. I had a mushroom and sausage pizza. But, Harper’s meal was probably the most interesting — it was a seafood pasta with things like oysters, clams, and shrimp on top of the pasta. She had to do a fair amount of work peeling and whatnot with her meal, but it looked delicious!

I think I mentioned that traffic in Rome is like a perpetual game of chicken. At the crosswalks without lights, you have to kind of walk out into the middle of traffic and trust that cars will stop for you. And, they do stop. But for an American not used to this kind of thing, the level of trust it takes to walk in front of a fairly fast moving car is unnerving. Indecision will get you hurt. We were taking a stroll after dinner when we came upon one of these crosswalks. Harper kind of lost her nerve and her body was trying to go forward and backward at the same time, causing her to fall in the middle of the street! The rest of us were there and, so, the traffic was coming to a stop; so, nothing was hurt but her pride.

Last Supper in Italy

Day 8: Rome to Berlin

Our last day in Italy began with breakfast on the roof of the Hotel Torino. I was moderately excited to see a self-serve coffee dispenser, since I had not had a large cup of coffee since our trip began. But, unfortunately, the coffee was not that great. After making ourselves some plates, we went out onto the roof. This was clearly the pigeons’ roof. We were mere visitors. The wait staff had to be quick to remove the plates and the tablecloth when a patron finished eating because those pigeons were going to be on the table quickly. I think at this point, Harper started rethinking her view of pigeons as cute and interesting and began gravitating more toward the “rats-with-wings” consensus.

We took the Leonardo Train from Termini Station to the airport. There was a bit of trouble with the conductor as we had inadvertently not paid the fare for Cole. When buying the tickets we must have marked both kids down as “children” when 13 year old kids were required to pay full fare. Fortunately, the conductor chalked it up to a misunderstanding and we were able to simply pay the fare without paying the associated fine. Other than that, the train ride, checking bags, security, and the flight from Rome to Berlin were easy. I don’t know if we were lucky or if the Europeans are just better at this sort of thing than we are, but travel on trains and airplanes seemed to be much less of a hassle than I’m used to here in the U.S.

Our bunk room in Berlin

Once we got to Berlin, we were happy to see trees again. When I heard birds chirping again, I realized I hadn’t heard birds chirping while I was in Italy. The driving also seemed more civilized with cars giving each other more space and rules of the road being observed. We stayed at the Hotel 103 which was an interesting place. We initially had some trouble with the buzzer to get into the hotel. We rang the bell, the hotel staff buzzed to unlock the door, but we kept pulling instead of pushing. The guy came out and let us in, then observed that the door didn’t have a “push” sign on it and figured that was something he ought to take care of. The place almost has a feel of a cross between a hotel and a dorm or hostel. The lobby is more hotel like whereas the bedrooms are definitely more dorm-like. Our four bed bedroom was just a long, narrow room with four single beds lined up in a row along the wall with a small table separating each one. There was a table in the corner with a 12” TV. The table was situated such that the bathroom door didn’t open up all the way.

Dinner at Zum Bayernmichel

Making matters even more interesting, the lights wouldn’t turn on. After our inability to get in the front door, I was hesitant to ask the guy at the desk. But, we have to have light. Turns out there is a receptacle on the wall inside the room where you put your key card. This activates the lights. It’s an energy saving strategy. The front desk guy said it’s on his list of things he tries to remember to tell Americans because we’re apparently very often unfamiliar with the concept. We also asked for restaurant recommendations. He offered us a variety of cuisine types, but — much as we like, for example, Thai food — we felt we should get some German food. So, he recommended Zum Bayernmichel which was a block or two away and fit the bill perfectly. He said his wife — who grew up in Germany — described it as the sort of comfort food her grandma might make. The owner was so friendly. He was so enthusiastic whenever I’d order, I felt like I’d done something really good! I honestly can’t remember what I ordered. It was big, heavy, tasty, and made of some part of a pig. I mostly remember the cole slaw which was all kinds of delicious. And, I had some German beer. Again, I don’t remember what it was – but it was listed as the house beer. A pilsner of some sort.

Based solely on the location, I assume this is a reference to David Hasselhoff.

While we were in the restaurant, the only rain of the vacation began. It came down heavy, but was finished by the time we finished eating. So, we took a walk to the Mauerpark where we saw some of the graffiti painted on remnants of the Berlin Wall. Max Schmeling Hall was also in the area, mainly of interest to me simply because I’ve heard the stories about the Max Schmeling – Joe Louis fights in 1936 and 1938 and his later friendship with Louis.

At the end of the evening, we returned to the Hotel 103 where we had a delightful conversation with the hotel manager and his wife. Afterward, we thought we saw on the name tag that his name was Ben. But, that could have been part of his surname. But, for purposes of our story, we’ll call him Ben. He kind of ran the check in desk and the bar immediately adjacent to the check in desk. So, he was mixing drinks for us while chatting us up. I just had a beer, but he made the kids some kind of fruity, pineapple, nonalcoholic drink. I think Amy had a Berliner Weiss mit Schuss — like a wheat beer with raspberry syrup. Ben was originally from Israel but had moved to Germany and become a citizen. His wife told us about the time she’d been to the U.S. She told a story about going to New Jersey and getting hit on by Bruce Springsteen. Ben told us about the ongoing Berlin airport boondoggle. He asked us about health insurance in the U.S. We could have talked to him for hours. But, for me, that would have inevitably have led to drinking at the bar for hours, and we had a flight to catch in the morning. So, we made our way up to the room and called it a night. As we were waiting for the elevator, the kids and I were marveling at the vending machine that had beer as an option. A fellow patron confided in us that the beers were horribly overpriced. (Which was o.k. If I wanted another beer, I would have had it at the bar, talking to Ben.)

Day 9: Headed Home

Found a Masson sign about a block away from our hotel in Berlin

The day started early because the sun rose at about 4:45 a.m. in Berlin. The trip home was smooth. We got a cab, took it about 7 miles to the airport, checked our bags, cleared customs, and ate breakfast in about an hour. Again, Europe seems to be a lot better at moving people than we are. Air Berlin, once again, seemed eager to feed us, giving us a couple of meals and a snack. I was seated behind an aggressive recliner. But, all in all, the flight wasn’t too bad. The entertainment systems on board are pretty remarkable when you compare the situation 10 or 20 years ago. A few dozen movies to choose from, plus TV shows, music, and games with a console at each seat. Our biggest challenge on the return was that the review mirror had become detached from the window. I think it was an add-on mirror (with fancy pants temperature gauge and compass) and the adhesive that held it up had given way. The parking facility where we had our car helped us out with some duct tape to keep it from dangling from its wires. Other than that, there were no problems getting home.

The jet lag was definitely easier to deal with, returning east to west, when compared to the return from our Hawaii trip, coming the other way. As it turned out, with the early sun rise in Berlin and the late sunset in Indiana, we had about 22 hours of sunlight. Sad to have our trip end, but happy to be home.

Class War By Proxy

June 21, 2017 by Doug Masson 4 Comments

One of my favorite news sites is Cracked.com, a comedy site. I don’t know if it’s the old thing about the jester being able to speak truth to power or the lack of a particular axe to grind that makes me find it more informative than a lot of straight news and commentary places. A podcast they aired in March 2016 was a discussion about how bad America is at talking about class (and how that contributed to the rise of Trump). We like to pretend that we’re essentially a classless society, a meritocracy where people rise and fall according to their own abilities. We pretend that social class and wealth are pretty much the same thing. The podcast also talked about how we get a lot more riled up by people in the social class adjacent to us than we do by social classes who are a couple of steps removed. (So, the gentry (upper middle class) tend to get more pissed about acts from the upper class than the lower middle class might.) Social classes who are a few steps removed are more cartoonish abstractions than real threats to your way of life. The podcast website linked to an interesting essay entitled, “I can tolerate anything except the out-group.” The out group is going to be one that’s close to home. The author references what Freud described as the narcissism of small differences:“it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other.”

I had that on my mind as I read a column by Matthew Walther singing the praises of Chuck E Cheese as one of the best bars in America (h/t Tipsy). Says Walther:

Another great thing about Cool Chuck’s is that it is almost totally free of upper-middle-class white liberals, the most dangerous and annoying class of persons in America. They would have no reason to go. By the time ordinary people’s children are ready to enjoy the lights and ball pit, theirs are already studying for the LSAT and brushing up on calculus at bespoke magnet preschools. Besides, it is a place that serves real pizza, with pepperoni and mozzarella cheese, not the flatbread creations topped with avocadoes or peaches or goat cheese or broccoli or all four, which they pretend to like for the same reasons they feign enjoyment of prestige cable dramas instead of just watching Sanford and Son reruns. Also: Dylan and Heather already have iPads stuffed with classical music apps, so the games aren’t a draw either. More for the rest of us.

The other parents at Chuck E. Cheese’s are normal, emotionally well-adjusted, spiritually and morally upright working people happy to have found this little low-cost slice of Eden. We have great conversations about things like God, sports, and the difficulties of raising a family in the country’s most expensive metropolitan area.

He also proclaims that “macro brews” are “real beer,” and sneers at craft beer. This focus on seeming trivialities like what kind of pizza or TV shows people watch while the world burns, foreign relations deteriorate, health care is on its way to becoming a distant dream, and the White House is occupied by a person who lacks the emotional discipline to run the country seems like madness. But, it’s not about the pizza. It’s not even about God. It’s about social class and antipathy toward the adjacent social class.

So, when we start calling each other hypocrites it’s often because we weren’t really talking about those things we said out loud. A lot of the folks talking about the need for a leader to share their Christian values were able to vote for Trump because they weren’t really talking about the need for moral probity in a leader. They were talking about wanting the kind of guy who reflected their social class — or at least pissed off the social classes that they hated. That’s what the talk about Obama eating arugula and Trump eating burnt steaks with ketchup is all about.

When the talk radio guys talk about “elitism,” they’re not talking about money and they’re not talking about the super-wealthy. They’re talking about the professional classes that are adjacent to and piss off the social class immediately below them — what I’ve been calling the gentry. When the gentry hear “elite,” they think about the billionaires and such things as the Wall Street casino. But that’s not primarily what the talk radio guys are getting at. They’re pushing the emotional buttons of the working class white listeners hard enough to get them to listen through the next Gold Bond commercial. And it’s the narcissism of small differences that triggers that emotion. So, when I — as a member of the gentry — turn up my nose at Bud Light and reach for a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, it’s probably a worse affront than legislator who votes for a tax cut that benefits the billionaire at the expense of the extreme lower class.

I don’t want this to be read as saying “Both Sides ™ are equally to blame” or as a plea to ignore horrible policy ideas in favor of becoming unified and singing kumbaya with the people who advocate those horrible policy ideas. But understating the emotional landscape in which we’re operating is important.