Author: p_c_neary@hotmail.com

Life is good. Very good, I would say. The global economy is sound, and the US economy is driving it forward again. In the States, unemployment is at record lows, even for disadvantaged groups who have usually not benefited from near-full employment. Inflation appears to be missing in action; economists are revising their economic theories to account for its absence. While there are numerous small wars, we have no big ones. While antibiotic-resistant strains of various bacterial infections are growing, we’re still a little ahead. Teenage pregnancy rates and alcohol use statistics are way down. Violent crime is at a sixty-year low.

Yet so many people I know are somewhere between deeply upset and very angry: and there is data to back that point too. US deaths of despair (including drug overdoses, suicides, and lifestyle-choice diseases like cirrhosis) have increased to a rate unseen since the 19th century! Almost sixty-four percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the States. What gives?

A major part of the explanation lies in the marketing power of outrage. Politicians, businesses, entertainers, athletes, activists, online influencers, and especially the media have discovered that exaggerating or hyping has few drawbacks and significant monetary rewards. Taking things to the extreme, whether in what gets covered or how it is described, results in more interest, more feedback, and more revenue.

This “Outrage-Us” approach is bipartisan and apolitical. If you try to isolate when it began, I guarantee you I can find an earlier incidence from the opposite faction (political, religious, or polemic). It occurs in major policy issues (immigration, opioids, war, racism) and in minor topics (weather effects, cultural issues).

How does it work? Always begin with some kernel of the truth: don’t simply make things up out of whole cloth, as that is too easy to refute. Someone in the country illegally commits a crime, and this becomes an “invasion” where ‘they’re sending us rapists.’ Push out statistics which favor one view without acknowledging other statistics or interpretations. Exaggerate policies by using inflammatory language without considering the full details of the issue. Play to a predictable point of view: the one your readers/listeners/friends are likely to enjoy. There are few rules other than never apologize, never explain, always rebut and in a LARGER VOICE.

Who does it? Nearly all politicians and activists, but even most forms of media, including social media. Watch how often “breaking news” interrupts the broadcast or streams across your screen. Watch for the word bombshell in coverage of any topic: more dud bombshells have “exploded” during the Trump administration than during World War II. Some media forms do it with their opinion sections, others even with with their news sections, but all do it.

Why do they do it? How likely are you to read an article entitled “Border agencies face unexpected challenge of child immigrants” versus “Trump puts kids in cages”? Think I’m kidding? Check out the New York Times subscription numbers before and during the Trump Administration. Cable news stations like MSNBC were literally dying prior to the Trump candidacy. And lest you forget, Fox News was born as a conservative alternative during the Clinton presidency, and rode the Obama administration to the top of the cable news marketplace. Outrage works.

It works in small, apolitical ways, too. Ever wonder why there is so much weather coverage on the local news? Because (1) it is cheap and easy to cover, (2) it is usually non-controversial, and (3) it is easy to hype. If the weather is not as extreme as predicted, no one will call you on it, because, well, we dodged a bullet, and that’s just the weather! Wonder why they cover windchill and heat indices today rather than actual temperatures as in the past? The latter drive the readings more to the extreme!

You see the “Outrage-Us” approach in stories about gun violence, hate crimes, infectious diseases and natural disasters. You find it is almost any story about social security, military spending, or marijuana use/”treatments”.

None of this is to claim there aren’t serious problems out there. Remember, “Outrage-Us” stories must start with a kernel of truth, but they go to extremes to get you to look and then get excited.

• The coronavirus bears watching in case it mutates in a bad way. If you’re really interested, Johns Hopkins has a site tracking the spread in real time. But while this coronavirus is novel, coronaviruses have always been with us; they are one cause of the common cold. Remember MERS? SARS? They were both coronaviruses. MERS had a 33% fatality rate, while SARS was under 10%. Today’s novel coronavirus is running around 2%. Remember Swine flu? Bird flu? Zika? Dengue fever? Living in the tropics where it is endemic, Dengue is a personal favorite. Dengue fever is very real, but did you know that 80% of those who contract it have either no symptoms or a mild fever? Hardly as exciting as the “breakbone fever” covered by the media but experienced by only a tiny percentage of cases.
• It’s more exciting to cover a poll on how bad US race relations are than report that interracial marriage rates are up almost fifty percent to all-time highs.
• Seems like natural disasters are becoming more frequent? Nope. More expensive, yes, as we continue to develop areas that we know are vulnerable. (Beachfront property in Florida? California tree-lined canyon views? Anywhere in New Orleans?)

So be careful out there. On top of all the other groups trying to get you excited, there are armies of Russian trolls and bots specifically trying to set one group of Americans against another . . . and millions of Americans getting outraged and circulating the nonsense! Ever see an inflammatory post and find it’s years old: that is often the work of bots which recycle old news to new effect. Real problems deserve careful thought, not knee-jerk reactions or online emoticons. But that requires effort instead of raw emotion.

The only way to end this post is with a choice of dance-off music video. For those still angry, try on Nirvana’s ode to teen angst; for everyone else, a little Bobby McFerrin.

Odds & ends and photos from Christmas in the Year of Our Lord, 2019:

Ever hear the one about Christmas being a basically pagan holiday that the Church appropriated to quiet wild pagan revelries? It is so common you’ll hear otherwise intelligent people repeat it. It’s bunk. First, the solstice is the 20th/21st, never the 25th of December. Saturnalia, a Roman feast, ended on the 23rd. The Roman emperor Aurelian did inaugurate a feast of Sol Invictus (“The Conquering Sun”) in 274 AD, but Christians were already celebrating Christmas by that time. The other celebrations are only coincidences in time.

But what about Christmas trees, didn’t the pagans bring freshly cut trees into their homes in the winter? True! However, the whole Christmas tree thing comes from 17th century Germany (some claim from Martin Luther) and was a very late Christian addition. Probably a borrow, that.

Saint Nicolas, Papal Noel, Santa Claus: didn’t the pagans have magical figures who sometimes delivered gifts (or tricks) to children. True again, but there was also a real Saint Nicolas back in the third century AD. And the jolly old elf Americans know comes from . . . the publication of the poem “A visit from Saint Nicolas” in the early 1800s. You know it by heart: “Twas the night before Christmas, . . .” and it gave us a fat jolly Santa, magical reindeer, and chimney deliveries. Again, hardly a case for Christmas derivative of pagan practices.

Some claim the Bible does not tell us much about the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. There are clues throughout the Gospels, from the census of Caesar Augustus, the reign of Herod, etc. Some theologians spent their entire lives trying to discern clues like “when would pious Jews travel?” “when were the shepherds keeping watch in their fields?” or “what celestial events align with the star the wise men followed?” It ends up with a variety of possible days and even years. Early Christians were unconcerned: so much else that Jesus did was critically important; when he was born, not so much.

I was happy to see several commentaries this year on the meaning of Christmas, decrying commercialism, pettiness, discrimination and other vices of the human condition. Still, these writers too missed the meaning of Christmas. “It is better to give than to receive” is a beautiful thought, but not the meaning of Christmas. So too “treat others as you would be treated” and “remember the less fortunate” and even “love one another.”

The meaning of Christmas is so simple, it can be stated in a single Word: Incarnation. That God became man and dwelt among us, a revolutionary notion unprecedented in human beliefs before or since. He didn’t appear as a man, didn’t possess a body, wasn’t a spirit masquerading as a man, but was like all of us in all things except sin . . . and still God. That voluntary movement, from eternal and on-high to lowly, ephemeral, mortal? That is love. And He did this for all.

Christmas portends much more. It unlocks the door, setting the stage for the possibility of redemption. Easter will (of course) show just how far Divine love will go–even unto death, death on a cross–and throw open the gate wide. For now, we may revel in the possibility, the hope.

When you hear the phrase “Merry Christmas,” remember it is salutary greeting: not a challenge, not a conversion, just a sharing of joy. If you feel that joy, respond in kind; if not, simply say thanks.

¡Feliz Navidad!

Normally, I am supportive of almost anything that encourages a deeper look at history: it is my favorite subject, and I firmly believe everyone can learn from it. In the case of the New York Times 1619 project, I’m willing to make an exception. The effort commemorates the initial shipment of slaves to the colony of Virginia. It is a slick, interactive, multimedia presentation. The Times seems to be telling us “everything you know is wrong.” Let’s see.

The problem starts with its stated purpose. To whit: “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” It is very useful to study the contributions of different groups to the American story, especially when the groups in question have been historically marginalized. But “reframing” history and asserting a different foundation are another story, literally a manufactured one.

What’s the harm, you might ask, and surely the Times will provide some balance in the work? Not so much. For example, one article posits that the American prison system is so violent because it is a direct descendant of the plantation system. Maybe the author was unfamiliar with the Stanford prison experiment, which showed quite clearly that prison environments breed violence. Perhaps the author has never heard of Chinese prisons, or Turkish prisons, or Mexican prisons, which are even more violent and have no link to American slavery.

This is what happens when you look at history through a soda straw: you might really believe the little circle you see is the whole truth, but you might also be totally missing the point.

Of course, slavery played an important role in the story of America’s founding. It is not for nothing that the phrase “(s)lavery is America’s original sin” has been bandied about since the nation’s founding. But was slavery unique here, and does American history need to be “re-framed” around it?

Let’s start with 1619. The Times gets the date wrong, as slavery in America began when the Spanish imported the first slaves to what is today South Carolina in 1526. The Anglo-centric version of history is grist for another blog post, another day, but you would think the nation’s ‘paper of record’ would have a little more, say, diverse view.

Slavery neither began in America nor ended here: in fact it continues to this day. Slavery began long before recorded history, when one family tribe fought another and had to determine what to do with the defeated survivors: kill them, set them free and fight them again, or enslave them. Slavery was such an endemic condition of history that even the Bible treats it as given, while suggesting it is unjust and should be abolished. Slavery happened whenever the strong confronted the weak. St. Patrick was a Roman slave of the Celts. The feared Janissary warriors were Christian slaves of the Ottoman Sultan. And so it goes.

Slavery was not unique to Africa, but Africa was certainly the continent most affected by slavery. Arab slave traders in 8th century focused on Africa since Muslims were prohibited from taking other Muslims as slaves; demand only accelerated when the Europeans colonized Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet the reason Africa was such a target for slave traders was that slavery was already endemic within Africa! Africans enslaved each other, and then traded their slaves to outsiders. The notion that Middle Ages Europeans wandered about the African continent catching locals as slaves is transparently silly. Arabs and Europeans provided the gold, and Africans provided the slaves.

In the New World, where did most of the slaves go? Of the eleven million slaves who survived the transatlantic passage, less than 400,000 (<4%) went to North America, 35% went to Brazil (the most frequent destination) with the Caribbean being the other large collective destination.

Was American slavery more brutal? All slavery was inherently dehumanizing and brutal, so we are talking about the subtle differences in inhumanity. Still, the reasons the American South didn’t need to import as many slaves was the natural rate of increase. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the slave population in the Confederacy had exploded six-fold to almost four million slaves, approximately one-third of the total population! This increase was due to obvious factors: more births, fewer deaths, and a longer life-span, since cotton plantation life (as horrible as it was) was nothing compared the Carib sugar plantations or the mines of South America. Sugar plantation and mine owners estimated their slaves were good for seven years of labor, at which point they died from chronic mistreatment. Americans in the south actually encouraged slaves to have children (even as they broke the families up for sale) and found uses for the youngest and oldest slaves. Both systems were horrible.

Was slavery uniquely essential to the US economy? Hardly. While the “molasses-to-rum-to-slaves” trade route is well-documented (remember the musical 1776?), and slavery was the basis of the southern plantation economy, it was not nearly as important to the overall US economy as slavery was to Brazil or Spanish colonial Cuba. Still, the 1619 project states “(i)n order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” And this howler: “Perhaps you’re reading this at work, . . . (where) you report to someone, and . . . Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed . . . . It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.” Phew! Missing a few centuries of Medieval economic development there.

Is there anything that makes American slavery unique? Well, the most unique aspect of American slavery is our continuing fascination with it. About every other decade there is a renewed interest in the “peculiar institution.” No other former slave-holding nation spends more time or effort reconsidering the experience.

A second unique aspect is that while American slaves were considered property, they counted for purposes of political enumeration. Most people are rightly horrified at the Article I language in the US Constitution that dictates slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person. Few stop to think that this was exactly three-fifths more of an acknowledgment of a slave’s humanity than they received anywhere else. This provision was indeed a cynical political ploy to gain more representation for slave-holding states, but the fact remains–they counted.

By far the most unique aspect of slavery in America is this fact: America was the only country which fought a war to end the practice. Most nations outlawed the practice and let it gradually die. Haiti had a rebellion to forestall the re-imposition of slavery by France. Only in America, which was in Lincoln’s phrase “half slave, half free” did the sides battle it out. While the war was ostensibly about saving the Union (in the north) and state’s rights (in the south), the underlying cause was always clear: the Union was threatened by the challenge of slavery, and the ONLY state’s right in question was slavery. In the end, the cause of abolition made clear the real issue, and the pro-slavery side was decisively defeated.

The Times’ 1619 project is a thinly-veiled attempt to engage the fraught nature of US race relations today by polemicizing history. Racial tensions are indeed high these days, but the Times’ effort provides too much heat and too little light. We won’t solve the racial issues of today by inventing a new truth about the past. Perhaps the NYT should do a 2019 Project on itself, where only eight percent of the staff (and five percent of the leadership) are African-American.