Politics

After Charlottesville

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I spent last Sunday reading condemnations of others’ racism after Charlottesville.  I read few investigations of self.

I’ve just returned from a road trip through Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – country I’ve traversed, and loved, for years.  Impassable red rock craters and spires.  Rigid fields of irrigated potatoes.  Windy plains evoking Mongolian steppes, dotted with antelope.

And every fifty miles or so, a town – sickening, dying, or dead.  I’ve watched these little towns over the years, stopped in their gas stations and eaten in their cafes.  I’ve seen how the movie house closed because it couldn’t afford a digital projector.  How the musty old hotel restaurant, where you could get a steak under the stare of a stuffed buffalo head, has become a Denny’s.  How a grocery store’s converted to an antique shop, as the keepsakes of a rural community bleed out through its last open orifice.  How the diner we used to stop at because of the row of pickups out front is now empty, its windows painted over with dust-covered bald eagles and American flags.  How it doesn’t take long, once the last business goes, for the buildings to bleach like bones.

Of course this is hardcore Trump country.  Businesses are festooned with “Make America Great” signs.  People’s country courtesy comes edged with resentment.  I’ve always been an outsider, and I’m still a customer.  But I’ve felt increasingly like an enemy.  This trip, a motorcyclist passing the other direction flipped us off – I guess just for our Colorado plates.

Still, even after Charlottesville, I carry these people in my heart.

It goes deeper.  My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery.  Its people faced a terrifying future.  My great-aunt wrote, in a memoir depicting our family’s struggle out of that awful shadow: “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  My great-uncle beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man refused to call him “mister.”

Outwardly, I am none of these things.  A professional, progressive Boulderite, I harbor no ideologies of racial separation or superiority. I have no trouble condemning the KKK.  But we do not live in the world of Indiana Jones, where good guys punch out cartoon Nazis.  The racism we must confront is not merely the tiki-torch variety.  It’s our own in-group out-group hard wiring, overlaid with the history, power structures and acculturation of our regional, familial, and personal roots.  By this standard, of course Donald Trump is racist.  But so am I.  When I meet a person, among the first things I notice is their race.  Also, a quick flash of wariness.  It has always been there.

The great damage wrought by Bannon and Trump is that they align such deep-rooted racism with our often legitimate sense of economic loss and cultural fear, and meld them into tribal resentment.  People thus incited do not experience themselves as haters.  What they feel is allegiance and safety.  So they deny being – or at least feeling — racist.  But the hatred and violence engendered are no less real.

Humans as a species are universally vulnerable to race-baiting like Bannon’s.  Democracy’s defenders should condemn and confront it.  But we — especially people of privilege — should also be honest about ourselves.  The therapy for racism is not righteousness.  It is understanding: of other, of self.

One morning last week we set out before dawn on Highway 50.  The Great Basin opened up ahead, a carpet of black sage stopping at silhouetted cliffs, thrusting to indistinct peaks and ridgelines and tumbling bruises of cloud, dark grey, burgundy, pink — then suddenly breaking into orange fire.  What had been a wash of soulful gloom abruptly turned every color, green, yellow, lavender, each proclaiming its particular self.  Oncoming headlights faded to twinkles, like morning stars.  Mary Chapin Carpenter crooned:

Oh my darling, oh my love,
The things that we are made of.

The Art of Storytelling

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For Boulder filmmakers, last Monday was New Years’ Day — the day after the biggest and best celebration of the year, hosted by impresarios extraordinaires Robin and Kathy Beeck.  This year’s Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) was their latest annual triumph, turning Boulder into an ever-enlarging red dot on the world filmmaking map (disclosure: I edited one of the documentaries screened).  BIFF’s roster served a delicious elixir of cosmopolitan entertainment and social awareness. We all got smashed.

Hopefully it’s not amiss, as we nurse our happy hangovers, to reflect on the stories we tell and consume at such festivals.  We believe, as makers and watchers, that film is an agent for social change.  Films flagged as “call2action” at BIFF featured talkbacks at which local activists brainstormed with the audience to translate message into movement.  At several such gatherings, a participant would ask: how can we get Trump to watch this film?  As if the simple act of watching would change his mind.

Of course, we know it wouldn’t.  But beyond a little healthy reality-check, it’s appropriate to ask: what is the power of our craft?  Is there a trade-off between telling stories that open others’ eyes and ones that simply make ourselves feel more righteous?  Are the objectives of persuasion and entertainment aligned or in tension?  I worry that it’s the latter – that if our narratives entertain by congratulating us and preaching to others, instead of challenging us and connecting with others, we end up diminishing our power to accomplish the social change to which our projects aspire.

Take for example the festival’s runaway favorite film, “Chasing Coral” — a vitally important movie that won the Audience Award at Sundance as well as three awards at BIFF.  It follows a team of filmmakers racing to document, through time-lapse videography, a cataclysmic “mass bleaching” event in 2016 that killed 22% of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change.  The images they took, shown in the last fifteen minutes of the film, devastate the viewer.  The scope of this silent catastrophe is beyond words, and the “Chasing Coral” team has done an inestimable service in capturing it.

Yet the 75 preceding minutes focus heavily on the exploits of attractive, white Boulderites building gadgets, making witty repartee, jetting to exotic locales and strapping on adventure gear.  It’s “The Amazing Race” for the Patagonia set.  Of course Sundancers and BIFFers love it, because it’s all about us, or who we fancy ourselves to be.

And we, almost to a person, already understand and agree with the film’s central thesis that climate change is killing corals worldwide.  Indeed, the film pretty much assumes this viewer knowledge and orientation from the opening frame.  The first character it introduces is a former advertising executive who has been a scuba diver for many years (i.e., a very wealthy person) and who has decided to leave corporate advertising and dedicate himself to publicizing the plight of climate-caused coral death. The film assumes viewers will cheer this choice without question or exploration.

It is only at the end of the film, after the devastating time-lapse images, that the film lays out the science of CO2 loading of the atmosphere that causes warming of the oceans, and makes the connection to fossil fuels.  And it does so through a montage of talking-head scientists who lecture nearly to the point of scolding.

Let’s rewind for a minute.  Place yourself in the shoes of a person who is not from Boulder and does not particularly like Boulderites or Sundancers.  A person, more importantly, who thinks the theory of fossil fuel-induced climate change may be a hoax, and that ocean warming may be the result of natural cycles.  Does “Chasing Coral” change your mind?  My worry is that you are so alienated by the assumed politics and liberal cultural markers of the first half-hour that you will never get to the denouement.   You will turn away, just as I do when I try to watch a documentary by Dinesh D’Souza or a debate on Fox News.  If I were watching a documentary on abortion that opened on a group of filmmakers on a mission to “expose abortionists”, I’d have a hard time not immediately turning the channel, even if the film had more nuanced content later on.   I can’t abide the cover, so I never read the book.

It’s not just a problem for filmmakers.  We all struggle to persuade others across political and cultural divides.  We often try to do so by pointing at ourselves – our superior style, education, numerosity, power.   In bygone days, we could efface ourselves and “let the facts speak for themselves” – that is, back when facts were, well, facts.  Now, it’s undeniably harder.  I still believe in the power of an honestly-told story – but sometimes the teller needs to get out of the way.

Bring On Ranked Choice Voting!

~ John ~ Leave a comment

There was a unicorn sighting in the papers recently – a piece of election news equally welcome to left and right.  Voters in Maine, fed up with a governor repeatedly chosen by a minority of the electorate, decided that state elections will be decided by majority rule.  How?  They enacted ranked choice voting for state offices.  Colorado should too.

One of the axioms of US politics is you can’t vote for a third-party candidate without betraying “your side” of the great electoral divide. Our history is littered with shipwrecks of third-party voyages that lasted only a cycle or two — Progressives and Bull Moose, John Anderson and Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Gary Johnson.  First hailed as heroes, they were soon branded as spoilers, accused of siphoning votes from friends and handing victory to enemies.  Perot “elected” Clinton.  Nader “elected” Bush.  Champions become pariahs, and “conscience” voters become turncoats or dupes.  In the ensuing melee, the new party is bludgeoned to death by its own natural allies, without mainstream Democrats or Republicans ever having to lift a finger or bloody a glove.

Ranked choice voting — or RCV, also known as “instant runoff voting” — eliminates this problem.  Here’s how it works.  Voters rank their candidates in order of preference, marking ballots with choice 1, 2, 3, 4. If any candidate wins a majority — over 50% of the total votes cast — that person is declared the winner.  If not, the last place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are redistributed to the other candidates according to the next top preference marked on each ballot.  Then the votes are recounted.  If there is still no majority winner, the process is repeated, by eliminating the next lowest candidate and redistributing her votes, until one candidate gets an outright majority.

Let’s take Michigan for example.  In Round 1, Donald Trump was the highest vote-getter by 11,012 votes, but there was no outright majority.  The lowest vote-getter was Conservative Darrell Castle, with 16,926.  So in Round 2, we distribute all of Castle’s votes to Trump, whom we’ll assume Castle’s voters ranked #2.  Now Trump is up by nearly 28,000, but there’s still no outright majority.  Next lowest is Green Jill Stein, with 50,700. Let’s assume Stein’s voters ranked Hillary Clinton #2, so she gets all those.  Now Clinton’s ahead by 21,300.   Notice that all of these third-party voters got to choose where their votes went after their candidate’s elimination, and nobody has helped “the other side”.

But there’s still no outright majority, because third-place Libertarian Gary Johnson polled 173,057 votes. Pundits argue Johnson voters split evenly between Clinton and Trump.  If that’s true, in this example each would get 86,528 and Clinton would end up winning by 22,162.  But those “pundits” are the same smart folks who predicted a Clinton landslide, and without RCV we have no idea whom Johnson voters actually loathed least.

So whom did the true majority of Michigan voters actually prefer?  Nobody will ever know.

And nobody will ever know who “won” the majority vote in America either. Hillary got 2.8 million more votes than Trump, but third-party candidates collectively polled nearly 8 million, and we have no accurate way of apportioning their choices.  Johnson alone polled 4.4 million votes.  This is a problem for both ends of the political spectrum, which RCV might address.  As such, it is not a partisan reform.  In 2016, depending on the distribution of Libertarian votes, RCV could have boosted Hillary’s total to an electoral college victory, or it could have given Trump an outright popular vote majority.    Either way, it would have allowed Americans to know which candidate a true majority of voters actually prefer – something, after years of campaigning and billions of dollars spent, we still don’t know today.

Complicated?  A little at first.  But not too hard for Australia and Ireland, who use RCV in national elections, or Berkeley, Oakland, or San Francisco, who use it for mayors, and now Maine, who will use it statewide.  Colorado law already allows home rule jurisdictions to experiment with RCV, so our city or county governments could adopt it right now – though RCV doesn’t mix with a multi-candidate slate such as our City Council’s.  For statewide use, we’d need new law.  A few folks just started group, RCVforColorado, to explore the options.

There are obvious reasons for renewed interest in RCV, just as there are for abolishing the Electoral College.  We are at a tipping point in our nation’s history.  Our elections are repeatedly being decided on the edge of a razor.  The traditional parties have begun to fracture and transform.

The next generation is likely to see changes in climate, geography, food production, and population. There is no guarantee that democracy will survive these tectonic shifts.  For it to do so, democracy must remain responsive to human needs, through voting mechanisms that allow parties to reflect changes in the popular will.  People are sensing that it’s time to unlock the potential of third parties, and to unblock the momentum of majority rule.  RCV might do both.