Category Archives: Decline of the west

Things no longer work

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Decline of the west

 

Once again we have headed to the southern part of the USA to escape the harshness of Canada’s winter. Our first stop in the U.S. was Fargo where we purchased gasoline. This was a surreal experience. The gas station was large and highly visible from I-29 to which it was adjacent.  As Julie Gold said in her famous song, “From a distance there is harmony, and it echoes thru the land.”

 

This day it was a serious illusion. When we got closer we noticed that most of the gasoline nozzles were covered with a paper sign that said, “Not working.” The diesel pumps were working but not most of the ones for ordinary gas. Almost all the regular pumps were not working, so I lined up behind a row of cars going toward one of the pumps without a sign. When I got there, after a considerable delay, the pump would not deliver gas after I signed in with my credit card. I went inside to explain my problem to the clerk. When he came out the same thing happened. Gas was not pumping and a grade of gas could not be selected. It did not work for him either. At least until it miraculously worked. Then, of course, when the job was completed the machine refused to disgorge a receipt. Since Christiane insists on receipts, I had to go back inside a second time to beg for a receipt.

 

As the clerk was making the receipt for me, I asked him what was the problem with this service station. Why did so many pumps not work? He merely shrugged his shoulders and grinned sheepishly, as if to say, ‘what do you expect in the USA?’

 

This is how many things operate here in the richest country in the world and the leader of the free west. The Americans claim the US is the best country in the world. Many Americans worship the country. They consider it “exceptional.” Sadly, evidence of exceptionalism is lacking.  It is exceptional in its polarized and dysfunctional politics. In fact, I believe that the profound dysfunction in their political system is a mirror of a much deeper dysfunction in society.  America is in serious decline. Things are falling apart,. The center cannot hold. But baubles hide that. And what do the people do about it?  They shrug their shoulder and grin. Sheepishly.

 

Nobody cares that things don’t work. The expect that. They are resigned to that. Just like no one expects politicians to tell the truth. Again, they expect that, and are resigned to it. That is nation in decline. And since the US is the leader of the west, this demonstrates that the west is declining. That is a problem.

 

Insecure People are a template for disaster

Decline of the west, Health

As Astra Taylor says in her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, this is the age of insecurity.

Charles E. Moore a physician and the Chief of Service Otolaryngology at the Grady Health System points out that for African Americans who have always had a lower life expectancy than comparable whites, it is significant that they have always had chronic stress. The life expectancies of African-Americans have been rising slightly while that of white working-class people has been declining.  He suggests that this might be because whites experiencing stress is something new.

Yet African-American life expectancies are still 3 &1/2 years less than whites. But the gap is closing. Dr. Moore also operates a clinic in Atlanta.  He says you can expect a 12-year difference in life expectancy between the African-Americans he largely treats and the whites that live north of Atlanta. All you have to do is look at their zip codes and you know the story. It is that simple.

Many of his patients have to choose between medication and food, or medication and gas. Those are some tough choices they have to make. That generates a lot of stress.

People who have been laid off from their jobs often blame greed. Often, they believe compassion is lost from society. It is all just about money. The pain they feel can easily turn to despair. Many of the people thought they had job security and then they got laid off. Many times they had committed to buying houses they thought they could afford because they had job security. Then they found out the hard way that they had no security. Those people have suffered. It is even worse when they continually hear that the economy is improving. Laid off people don’t see that. Insecure people don’t see that. Many people don’t see that.

Many of such people find the stress intolerable and turn to suicide. As Dr. Gupta said, “In the United States more people die by suicide with a hand gun than die by homicide with a hand gun. It’s gone up 30% in the last 17 years.”

Dr. Gupta believes that the problem is ultimately expectations. Many people in the United States and Canada for that matter believe that if you just work hard enough everything will work out fine. “Those dashed expectations end up being a unique and toxic feature here. The headline is that stress kills.”

As Dr. Rajita Sinha, a Clinical Neuroscientist and Director of the Yale Stress Center said, “Stress is everywhere. We are drinking more. We were smoking more before we had social interventions; we have a massive obesity epidemic, and we have economic and economic stress. So we have the stage for uncontrollable chronic stress.” That is a template for disaster.

It is also a template for a declining society. That is really the point I am trying to make.

The Meaning of Life under Stress

Decline of the west, Health

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told Dr. Sanjaya Gupta. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and Anne Case coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

In the end of the second decade of the 21st century everyone seems to think the economy is improving, but all these working class people see are plants closing and jobs disappearing. The economy may be booming but they don’t see that for themselves. Everyone else seems to be doing well. The economy may be booming now but so many people are still left behind. These people feel deep resentment. These people feel betrayed. They don’t think America is great. They want it to be great again like it was. And resentment is a powerful and explosive force!

What do you do when the plant you have worked at for decades shuts down? It is tough. It is also tough on those who work in other plants. They can see that this might happen to them too.  That makes people feel uneasy. They are insecure and stressed. And this has happened over and over again in many sectors. Economic insecurity has become rampant.

The key is the lack of control that leads to stress. How much does your job or your status affect your health? There was a famous study out of England called the Whitehall Study that was one of the first that tried to dig into this issue.

Sir Michael Marmot an epidemiologist from University College in England was involved in that study. He said when his study started everybody “knew” that stress caused heart disease. And everybody “knew” that high status people had more stress. It was obvious to everyone. I knew as a lawyer in what I always thought was a high stress profession that I had much more stress than most other people. Then one day I read a report in a newspaper about stress. It might have been a report about the Whitehall Study in fact. It said legal secretaries had more stress than lawyers. How could that be? Yet the study revealed that among civil servants at least the lower your status the shorter your life expectancy. Lack of control at work increases heart disease, mental illness and muscularly skeletal disorders. That is what chronic stress is all about.

As Professor Marmot said, “So close the link between social circumstances and mental health gives us a measure of how well we are doing as a society.”

Insecurity leads to stress which leads to poor health. This is a dangerous path that so many of us are walking and it can transform our lives sometimes in very unpleasant ways.

Anne Case and Angus Deacon: Deaths of Despair

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his HBO special and Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn for the New York Times, all interviewed Anne Case and her husband Angus Deacon. Both of them are economists from Princeton University but we won’t hold that against them. As she said, “Whites are reporting poorer and poorer health, more and more pain, and more and more social isolation. More depression. Along with this increase in mortality from drugs, alcohol, suicide there is just a lot more morbidity, pain, and social isolation.” Anne Case came up with the expression “deaths of despair” and it has become very popular.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, conducted an important study of mortality and wrote the book, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century. Dr. Gupta interviewed them for the television show. In that book they described “deaths of despair” as “death by drugs, alcohol and suicide.” According to them, so many people have died from deaths of despair to equal all the people who have died of AIDs since the beginning of the AIDs crisis. Those deaths were enough to cause life expectancy to fall first for whites and then for the entire population. That is a very unusual event.

These people were the children of the people that won the world war and were expected to live glorious lives in the land of the free and the brave. The parents expected their children to do even better than they did. Those expectations were often not met. As Deaton put it, “They were promised the earth but they did not inherit it.” Case said, “in every state but 2, cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholic liver disease went up. And in every state drug poisoning went up. In every state between 1999 and 2015 suicide rates went up for people aged 22 to 64. If you treat people in a really shabby way for long enough bad things happen to them. That happened to African Americans forever and it started to happen to whites with a High School degree or less, starting probably in the mid-seventies. And now bad things are happening to both of those groups.

Dr. Gupta that if we wanted to know the effects of economic decline all we had to do was visit the American Rust Belt.  There they produced more steel than the rest of the world put together. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week smog from those plants went into the atmosphere of American cities.

Swissvale Pennsylvania , according to Eric Horgos, is the valley that is  “the epicenter of the greatest industrial collapse in the entire developed world in the 1980s. 1983 is when economic Armageddon hit them.”

Is it surprising that people who lived a certain way that they liked for 30 years and then had the rug pulled out from under them wanted to commit suicide? Is it any wonder they turned to alcohol or drugs? Is it any wonder that they despaired? Is it any wonder that they gave up on politicians that that they had once respected, and then turned instead to a demagogue?

Constant Change

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

 

Americans, like Canadians, are living in a world that is changing faster than ever before. And that is change is constant. As a friend of mine always says, ‘Change is the only constant”.  And such constant change can be stressful.

There are all kinds of health problems out there. I know some of them too personally for my taste. People are obese.  It is astonishing how obese people are in the richest nation on earth. In Arizona where I spend a lot of time in recent years, we see it all the time. People have heart conditions. They have cancers. Yet, there is something harder to define. What Dr. Sanjay Gupta called the “real state of stress” in his HBO special.

And everyone wants a pill to solve their health problems. People want quick solutions to their problems. So do I of course. Americans take more drugs than the people of any other country on earth. And Canada is not far behind. Those drugs served a really useful purpose. They can save lives. They can ease pain. Yet, as Dr. Gupta pointed out, in the US  “50 people die every day from prescription pain killers!”

Shown on Dr. Gupta’s special, Angela Glass was a mother in Victoria Texas. She knew that stress can be ugly. It can cause issues in every area of your life. Wherever you already have problems, stress can make them worse. Stress compounds the problem. Angela was prescribed a huge cocktail of drugs every day for her stress. She took pain medication–hydrocodone. She took other drugs for anxiety.  Things got worse. She lost a child. She took way more drugs than she was supposed to. She had suicidal thoughts. She considered taking all her pills and ending the pain once and for all. She couldn’t sleep. She was haunted. How many Americans and Canadians have been led down this path to drug dependence? How many Americans and Canadians have died as a result? In one year more Americans died from drug over doses than died in the entire Vietnam War! Since that happened in the United States, it has happened again!

 

Dr. Gupta believes that all this chronic stress, the pain which comes with the stress, and the desire to make that pain go away have combined to create a toxic brew that is destroying America and Canada. Many take medications even when they know it could take their lives.

This is dangerous stuff.

Chronic Stress

Decline of the west, Health

 

As Dr. Sanjay Gupta pointed out, in his CNN special, One Nation Under Stress,  in the United States, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World,  “we are 4.7% of the world’s population and take 80 to 90% of the world’s OxyContin and hydrocodone. And I’m pretty sure that we don’t have 80-90% of the world’s pain.” How could this happen in the richest country in the world?

Another thing is that epidemic of drugs is mostly affecting whites aged 35 to 55. Stress should be listed as a contributing cause to many deaths. Why whites? Why so much stress in the richest country in the world?

Stress of course is a natural phenomenon.  As Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist from Stanford University said,

 “When you look at the stress hormones we secrete exactly the same chemicals as a lizard and a fish and a bird. This is ancient, ancient biology. For 99% of the beasts out there what stress is about is 3 minutes of some screaming crisis when somebody is very intent on eating you or you are very intent on eating somebody, and everything your body does at that time makes perfect sense. You increase your heart rate, your blood pressure, your breathing rate, you turn off everything that is not essential and you shut down growth, tissue repair. When a lion is chasing you and you are running for your life and one of the things you are doing is all sorts of metabolic stuff to divert energy to your thigh muscles. Oh my god you think you only have 3 months until your taxes are due and you divert energy to your thigh muscles. That makes no sense whatsoever and that’s where you pay the price.”

 

Robert Sapolsky who wrote a book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers points out that when a lion is chasing a zebra it needs stress to get away. Stress is entirely good in that situation. Yet once the zebra gets away the stress level returns to normal. That also happens quite quickly. Life is good again. The zebra relaxes. The stress was entirely good.  It saved the zebra’s lie.

As Dr. Gupta said, “Stress is not the enemy. It’s the constant never-ending toxic stress–that’s the stress that’ll kill you.” Chronic stress in other words is what we should be stressed out about. Sapolsky says he has learned a lot about stress from the baboon world. What he learned is,

“What makes psychological stress really corrosive is lack of control, lack of predictability, lack of social support. You might say insecurity is the problem. If you are chronically stressed you will chronically increase your blood pressure and you are going to get more liquid turbulence into your blood vessels and hit the walls. They pound the walls and they cause microscopic bits of scarring, tearing, and inflammation there. And you get plaques and you get the whole cascade there. It’s a fairly straight biological line from chronic stress to your blood pressure that is chronically elevated. It’s a much more indirect route to liver sclerosis.”

 

 

Sapolsky was convinced that stress is the common cause of liver sclerosis, suicides, and opioid overdose.  They are all related. Stress is the root problem, he is convinced. “Our lives are more psychologically corroded by stress. Stress: am I valued? Stress: do I have a meaningful place in the community? Stress: is there even a community I can rely upon. Stress: why am I here?”

Note all these questions point to social issues. This is what chronic stress is all about.

American on the Edge of Fascism

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Decline of the west, Populism

 

I posted about a judge in Colorado evaluating all of the evidence, hearing arguments from both sides and concluding that Donald Trump was engaged in insurrection.  As a result I submitted that it was astonishing to think that Trump supporters  still don’t believe that he was engaged insurrection. To me it seems obvious.

The judge however said she was not sure that this section applied to the presidency so refused to ban Trump from the upcoming presidential ballot in 2024.

The American Constitution, unlike the American people,  takes insurrection very seriously. In s. 3 to the 14th amendment to that constitution it says:

“Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability”

 

What does this section mean? Donald Trump’s lawyers argued that this meant the section did not apply to the president. It only applies to every other officer of the United States, the lawyers argue.

In effect if Trump wins this argument then he has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Think about that, a former president is arguing in court that he cannot suffer any legal consequence for participating in an insurrection!

Laurence Tribe a well known Harvard Professor of law and constitutional expert said this decision by the Colorado Judge was “bizarre.” I am not that bold because I find the wording in s. 3 perplexing, but Professor Tribe had no such doubt. This is what he said when interviewed by PBS Newshour about this decision:

“it would turn the presidency into a dictatorship. It would basically mean that the revolution that we fought against King George failed, and that the American experiment in constitutional democracy, with no one being above the law, lasted 225 years, and then ended. I don’t want that to happen.”

 

Now I have to agree with Professor Tribe that this would be bizarre, but frankly I find many aspects of the American Constitution, which so many in America consider Holy Text, to be bizarre. Remember that according to constitution the president  has the authority to pardon anyone from a a criminal offence without giving any reasons or justification. Trump used this last time he was in office to pardon a slew of his corrupt cronies. Some have even argued that the Constitution would allow Trump to pardon himself if he was convicted. What could be more bizarre than that? Sometimes I really wonder if the US can be said to have the rule of law at all. Like so much holy writ, the American Constitution is far from perfect.

We have already heard that Trump will make it his job to destroy all of his enemies if elected. How could he be stopped?

This is what Professor Tribe says about the possibility that Trump’s argument succeeds:

“I think it would be a disaster for the freedom of every one of us to have anybody completely above the law. We have in this case someone who said he would terminate the Constitution. He will make his presidency about vengeance. It’s what fascists do.

 

That is precisely what fascists do all right, and America seems to be headed in that direction thanks to the undying support of millions of Americans for Donald Trump. No matter what he does they will continue to support him. It doesn’t matter if he engages in insurrection. It doesn’t matter if he shoots someone in Times Square. It doesn’t matter if he sexually abuses a woman in department store, his true believers will continue to believe.

Trump Calls for Insurrection (Again)

2018 Trip to Iceland, Death of Democracy, Decline of the west, Trump, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

On September 15, 2022 Donald Trump was asked what would happen if he was indicted. This is what he said,

“I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.”

 

Then he was asked by Mr. Hewitt, “what kind of troubles, Mr. President?” Trump responded this way: “I think they’d have big problems. I just don’t think they’d stand for it.”

Don Lemon, when he was on CNN,  asked Phillip Mudd, a CNN analyst and former counterterrorism analyst if that was a threat.  Mr. Mudd’s answer was about as direct as you can get.  His answer was “Yes.”  Yet, Mr. Mudd went further. He added this,

“I don’t know if that is a subtle enough answer, Don. That’s a yes Don. Let me be clear about what this is.  In the world of extremism which I followed for decades that is what I would refer to as validation… You don’t have to tell someone to go out there and commit an act of violence for them to say, ‘Well if we were robbed then it is my constitutional right and responsibility to go to the Congress and storm it.’ That is the president of the United States having witnessed January 6th saying, ‘Well let me have a redo of that. That redo will happen if I ever get indicted.’  To me as an extremist follower that is not a political statement, that is a statement that anybody who follows extremists can understand. That is validation…”

 

Juliette Kayyem a CNN National Security Analyst agreed completely. She said,

“It is not even hinting anymore. We used to use the word “dog whistle” when we talk about Trump. This is now directing. Don’t just listen to Trump’s words. Imagine what his supporters are hearing. They are hearing the call to action…We need to call it what it is that we have a former president who is inciting violence as an extension of his political defeat. That’s what it is now.”

 

I know Trump’s supporters don’t believe anything CNN says, but I think CNN got this right from Trump’s own words. I agree with the CNN interpretation. This was the only logical interpretation of what Trump said. This was a call to violent action without mentioning the word. The message was absolutely clear, just as his words were absolutely clear to his supporters on January 6th. They knew what to do. And Trump was threatening to do it all over again if he was charged! This was doing what Donald Trump always does when he is cornered. He does not back down. He doubles down.

In November of 2023 a Colorado judge District Judge, Sarah B. Wallace, after hearing all the evidence and arguments from lawyers for Trump, and the District Attorney, and then ruled that former President Donald Trump “engaged in insurrection” during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol but rejected an effort to keep him off the state’s primary ballot because it’s unclear. The judge rejected the claim that the constitutional amendment that bars insurrectionists from public office applies to the presidency, but that is irrelevant.  The judge clearly said Trump was an insurrectionist based only on evidence.

This was not a judgement by the libs. This was not the “failing New York Times” claiming that Trump was an insurrectionist. Nor was it “fake news” CNN.  Nor was it a “biased House of Representatives committee. This was the decision of an impartial judge after weighing all the evidence and listening to the argument of the lawyers. Is this not something Republicans, and in fact all Americans, should take seriously? That judgment makes it absolutely clear, beyond any doubt in my view, that Trump was guilty of insurrection? Yet, as far as I know, his support among Republicans in the current presidential election campaign has not dropped! How is that possible?

Millions of Americans are prepared to elect an insurrectionist as President of their country! They don’t care!

I recall Trump once said that he could shoot someone in Times Square New York City and it would not affect his support. It looks like he was absolutely right!

Americans must realize what Trump is doing. He is doing the same thing Hitler did after the German Reichstag burned down. The German people continued to support Hitler. We must always remember that Germans elected Hitler because they wanted him to make Germany great again,

Now the question is what will the American people do? Will they acquiesce with  this dangerous slide into fascism?  I know many of his supporters will do that. They will accept that with the enthusiasm they showed on January 6, 2021.

I am not sure of what the majority of Americans will do, but I am uneasy.

Deeply uneasy.