Ken's Blog

Today is Juneteenth — a portmanteau for the 19th of June. On this official U.S. holiday we Americans celebrate the end of the institution of slavery in our nation, on and about June 19th 1865.

Juneteenth is, arguably, the most important of all American holidays. July 4th merely celebrates a promise — the assertion, in the words of Thomas Jefferson “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But that assertion, initially made by a handful of wealthy landowners, was a promise left largely unfulfilled for nearly a century. It wasn’t until the abolition of slavery that the nation had found anything like a true moral compass to match its lofty claims.

To be sure, the path to realizing equality in the U.S. has been slow, uneven and inconsistent. But it has generally moved forward, as we travel a winding path toward the angels of our better nature.

Yes, the current president is clearly a racist, but then again he and his enablers are many offensive things, as well as being shockingly incompetent. I am confident that millions of patriotic Americans will realize what we can now all plainly see, and will soon collectively vote to remove that cancerous growth from our republic.

In the days leading up to our midterm elections, let Juneteenth stand as an official beginning of that collective journey back to redemption.

On this day in history, June 18 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace sent Charles Darwin a research paper. That paper made it clear to Darwin that Wallace had reached essentially the same scientific conclusions about evolution and natural selection that Darwin had reached.

Darwin responded by immediately rushing his own version of the theory into publication. The rest is history.

Today we often talk about Darwinian evolution. Not just as a scientific theory, but as a metaphor for everything from business to technology to personal relationships.

But we don’t ever talk about Wallacean evolution. In fact, most people have never heard of Alfred Wallace.

In this case, cultural evolution clearly selected the more aggressive member of the species. Which I guess just goes to show that “publish or perish” is a uniquely human form of “survival of the fittest”.

I had an interesting conversation today. A colleague and I were exploring the following hypothetical question: If you could live forever, due to some new scientific breakthrough, and you could choose whichever age you wanted to be forever, what age would you choose?

But here’s the kicker: You can choose a physical age and a mental age, and they can be different. So, hypothetically speaking, how far apart would be your physical age and your mentally age in your ideal scenario of a forever future?

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses

Happy Bloomsday everyone.

I read today that the world-wide rate of production of toilet paper is about 83 million rolls per day. My first thought was “Wow, that’s a lot of toilet paper!”

But then I took a moment to think about it some more. And I remembered that the current world population is about 83 billion.

Which means that the average person gets access to only one roll of toilet paper every 100 days. Take a moment to let that sink in.

If you are reading this, you are probably not that “average person”. And you might take a moment to reflect on what that really means.

Here in the United States we are mostly shielded from true poverty. Some people here even celebrate billionaires — and now trillionaires.

We fortunate ones can mostly get away with living in an oblivious bubble. But every once in a while, something punctures that bubble, and the terrible truth manages to seep in.

The only political garb in my current wardrobe is a t-shirt that says “Talarico 2028” in big bold print. It’s something that is fun to wear around New York City, but I suspect it could get me shot in those parts of the country where they’ve been taken in by the convicted criminal in the White House.

Stephen Miller, the special advisor to the president, has questioned Talarico’s sexuality. Apparently a human male who is capable of compassion and kindness seems incomprehensible to Miller.

Although I’m starting to wonder whether it is not the male part that is causing confusion, but the human part. To be fair, it is very impressive to try to understand the gender of an individual of a different species, and we have to give Miller credit for trying.

Miller is making a valiant effort, but seems to be venturing into unknown territory here. For example, I would never attempt to make a guess as to Miller’s gender, because I am not a herpetologist.

For roughly six months, one of our nation’s most revered institutions, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has been defaced by crude and obscene graffiti. Today, at last, the offensive scrawl has been removed.

I won’t discuss the contents of that graffiti, because children might be reading this post. Suffice it to say, all patriotic Americans can breathe a sigh of relief that it is now gone.

The wheels of justice may grind slowly, but they usually get to where they need to go. The courts have now decided, correctly, that those who would deface our nation’s most hallowed and respected monuments should not be permitted to do so. Nobody should be allowed to turn our shared cultural heritage into the punchline of a crude joke.

Nations are sometimes destroyed by military force. But more often, nations are brought down by the destruction of their core sense of identity and shared community.

Once you know what makes a country great, it becomes much easier to destroy it. So that’s the way to go if you want to destroy a once great nation, and leave it a mere shell of its former self.

If somebody really hated the United States, or else worked for its geopolitical enemies, the most efficient way they could bring it down would be to destroy it from within. If you can take away from America the things that make it truly great, what is left will no longer matter.

So the first thing you should do is convince the American people that its greatest virtues are actually vices. Diversity, equality, inclusiveness — the very defining American traits that Lincoln pointed proudly to at Gettysburg — need to be perceived as weaknesses, rather than the strengths they truly are.

Once you manage to plant that sickness into the soul of the American people, it will grow like a cancer. Millions of Americans will forget who they are, and will change from being a free and generous people to becoming suspicious, selfish and filled with hate.

But who could have so much hatred for America that they would try to destroy it in such a monstrous way?

In recent posts I have been addressing the question “What makes America great?” The collective results of my analysis can be summed up roughly as follows.

All empty bragging aside, the truly great things about America are three related aspirational principles: The principle of embodying and celebrating diversity, the principle of wishing to support a spirit and practice of equality between people, and the principle of wishing not to exclude people from these benefits merely because they have the “wrong” ethnic or cultural identity.

In short, there are three things that make America great: Diversity, Equality, and Inclusiveness. This can be expressed by an acronym: DEIMAG: Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness Make America Great.

Perhaps to show that we are patriotic Americans, and to show support for our nation, we can have T-shirts or hats made up that say “DEIMAG”. Maybe printed together with little American flags.

I wonder what color they should be. I’m thinking blue might be nice.

It can also be argued that one of the great things about America’s ideals (alas, not always its reality) is a belief that achieving the American dream is not based on who you are. In contract, some very fine cultures definitely do not work that way.

For example, the French have historically made a clear distinction between those who are French and those who are not. Japan is similar in that regard. I think that these are simply the natural consequences of having a long history as a monoculture.

But America has never been a monoculture. And therefore the idea of who can be an American is far more amorphous — a natural consequence of its particular history.

Other than Native Americans, whose ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, America is very much a nation of recent immigrants. Nearly every American you know can easily trace their roots to somewhere else in the world by going back just a few generations.

America is therefore necessarily an amalgam of many cultures and many ways of life. So the entire franchise can only operate, pretty much by definition, by being inclusive.

When you look at it this way, it becomes clear that America’s principle of inclusivity is one of its greatest strengths. More tomorrow.