Political Pessimism [irked]

New Orleans is a city of nearly endless delights. Of course, one of those delights is a windowless conference room at a middle-tier hotel where I am being extensively trained on something. I will let you know when I figure out what the something is. I am learning certain things, such as, did you know that there are more than 15 different sub poenas for financial entities? The fact that I’m fresh from my second full day (of five total) of this stuff informs my mood, but what happened yesterday during out “icebreaker” informs the content of this post.

The problem my table had to discuss was actually interesting: your plane has crashed in northern Canadian [sic] and you are required to prioritize a list of 12 items in order of their importance for your survival. As these things go, kind of cool, right? Well, only if you really don’t mind freezing to death.

My table is pretty smart, actually, if you measured that person by person. More than half realized the pistol is pretty useless if the main problem is how to avoid freezing to death. But the ex-marine wanted it as #1. Forget about the fact that I have done this problem before and heard the expert’s answer (the last time the government bought me a hotel for a week to learn about those 15 subpoena target flavors…). The pistol is the least important, I say. I explain how I know this. The marine will not hear of it. Ya need a gun, son. He does not understand how we could even consider not ranking in #1.

Just when I have the whole table about to over-rule him, having spent 15 minutes convincing them that his list is back-asswards and that we’d be better off making snow-angels naked next to the smoldering fuselage, the marine pulls a brilliant last-ditch move. He says “we can each rank what we want and then add them up — that way the one with the lowest number should be the our first choice. It’ll be like a vote.”

I should have seen where this was headed, but I was blind-sided. And it’s hard to argue against something that seems so transparently democratic. It’s a mathematical expression of the group’s decision, applied objectively.

You can imagine how this went — even though the group was close to arriving at a majority list, there were slight preference differences among us that allowed this guy’s minority picks to muck up the remainder of an emerging consensus. Our resulting order made absolutely no sense as a coherent whole. The pistol ended up in the middle and the top was filled up with three different ways of starting the fire (when you only need one) with fuel items far too low down the list (we’d spent too much time talking about the gun, apparently, to talk about the things that mattered). Plus, when called upon to explain why we picked the order we did, we had no rationale to point to, only a process.

Lessons I extracted from this little microcosm: A government of enlightened dictatorship would have kept me and my group alive long enough to be rescued. Democracy, even when conducted during calm and reflective times, utterly failed to address the problem that some people seem determined to be loudly both opinionated and wrong.

Broadening a bit, I wish I shared Grimbil’s optimism about the future. No doubt, there’s a solid basis for his predictions. At times, I share both the optimism and the expectation that events will unfold that way. Lately, it’s hard not to because of the palpable undercurrent of hope in the air.

And yet, I have felt the tingle of that hope before, and I remember the rocks it crashed into. Maybe my hopes for America have been Swift Boated too many several times in recent memory.

What makes me cautious is not that reactionaries might use Swift Boat tactics. The use of the tactics don’t bother me, but I have been repeatedly betrayed by the willingness of the American public to allow those tactics to be effective. Meanwhile, the darker side of my imagination begins to generate even more extreme measures that The Right or The Far Right or Ann Coulter might take to prevent Obama from being elected. Does anyone on The Left think there is anything — literally defined as “any action” — they would not do to prevent that from happening?

Dark Helmet memorably said: “So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.” One possible corollary is that evil will always do whatever it takes to win. But I worry that the real lesson of American politics may be turn out to be that evil will always win because evil is better at relying on the dumb. Talk about an elitist thought, but, hey — at least my group wouldn’t have frozen to death as quickly.