Saint Mathew Pray for Us! Bank Deregulation Is Back!

Shock and awe and bank deregulation

Amid the boom and flash of the spectacular political theatre going on right now, you may not have noticed the announcements in a single utterance on television or in columns in the back pages of your local newspaper—“banks need to start lending money again,” (Trump on CNN), “President Donald Trump promised a meeting of community bankers to strip away some Dodd-Frank financial regulations” (B3 Globe and Mail 10 March 2017) and White House fires Preet Bharara “the high-profile Manhattan prosecutor known for his pursuit of public corruption and Wall Street crime” (A18 Globe and Mail 11 March 2017)—bank deregulation is back! “Bank deregulation” was the precursor to the financial collapse of 2008 causing banks and financial institutions to go bankrupt, individuals to lose homes, jobs and pensions, and triggering the government bailouts of the banks costing taxpayers what is now estimated to be a trillion dollars.  (Historically the British and Americans defined “billion” and “trillion” differently, but these days the American definition seems to prevail.  In the American system, a “billion” is a thousand million and a “trillion” is a thousand billion. Here is a more visual and visceral sense of how much a trillion is.)   The “Dodd-Frank regulations,” about to be "stripped away," were the rules put in place to prevent the collapse of 2008 from happening again.

Saint Mathew, the patron saint of bankers and accountants

Saint Mathew was an apostle of that Jesus the Anointed (who was voted “God” by the Council of Nicaea in 325).  Mathew is the alleged evangelical author of the first gospel of the New Testament  (although his name was not attributed to the text until after he was long gone, and oddly, in the gospel, he refers to himself in the third person--but then again so do I sometimes), and the patron saint of bankers and tax collectors (these days we might suggest that he choose a side), of accountants and money in general  He has a lot to answer for.  Even though I have graduated from agnosticism to atheism since beginning this blog, I’m recommending prayer in this case, because there really don’t seem to be any other options.  Bank deregulation isn’t just on the agenda, it seems a foregone conclusion.  

Bank regulation, bank-robbery deregulation; tomato, tomaato

I have to confess that I broke my pedagogical rule of Do No Harm Part II: Avoid Irony in my last post on bank robbery, but the point I wanted to make is that the next time you hear someone talking about “deregulating banks,” you can substitute “deregulating bank robbery”  and discover that the arguments, the logic and justifications turn out to be the same. So what?  We may be living in a global oligarchy these days with wealth dictating government policy and the law, but perhaps there is some measure of solace in being able to say, “I know you are going to screw us because you have that power, but forget being smug and self-righteous because we know what you’re doing.”

Step one of being un-fooled is to understand what the expression “bank deregulation” means.  Here are three words that you need to know in order to know what "bank deregulation" is all about: "derivatives," "leverage," and "rent-seeking."

• Derivatives.  I may have talked “derivatives” to death in my earlier post, but basically what you need to understand is that “derivative” means that banks and financial institutions can “bet” on the stock and bond markets.  “Bet” is the important word here.  As described in The Big Short (both book and film), these “derivatives” are not investments in companies or products or services, they are simply companies and individuals betting that a stock will go up or down without actually investing in the company they are betting on or against.  Finance people make “derivatives” sound reasonable by describing them as “insurance”; as in you buy an insurance policy on your house to protect yourself against the possibility that it might burn down.  However, a derivative is more like buying an insurance policy on your cigar-smoking, alcoholic neighbour’s house in the hopes that his house will burn down—so why not buy him a bottle of vodka and a box of cigars for Christmas, his birthday, etc?  In the film version of The Big Short derivatives are shown as being like following your neighbour to the casino and when he bets two dollars on the roulette table, you bet 10,000 dollars with someone else that he is going to lose his two dollars, and someone else bets 100,000 dollars that you are going to lose your 10,000—that’s the derivatives market.  The derivatives market is estimated to be between between 710 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion US dollars.  (see "The Size of the Derivatives Bubble").  Just to put those numbers in perspective once again the total GDP of the USA is 17 trillion.

• Leverage. How are these crazy numbers possible?  How is it possible that so much money—40 to 70 times the total wealth of the USA, 700 to 1000 times the amount of US paper currency which actually exists in circulation—is being gambled?  The answer is “leverage” (that’s chapter six in The Art of the Deal, the book which Trump’s ghost writer, who wrote the book, called “a tissue of lies”).  “Leverage” is what “bank deregulation” is all about.  If a bank has assets worth one million dollars, the average person might imagine that a bank can therefore lend out to clients up to one million dollars.  Under current US banking regulations the leverage ratio is 4%, which translates as a ratio of 1 to 25.  In other words, if the bank has 1 million dollars, they can lend 25 million dollars.  That’s right; for your mortgage or your car or your kid’s education, they can lend you 24 million dollars that they don’t have—but you, of course, must repay in money that you actually have.  (By the way, the mortgage that you owe to the bank is considered one of the bank's assets.  If you owe the bank $200,000, by regulation the bank is considered to have that money within its assets.)  The current "leverage ratio" (1 to 25) is the key regulation that banks find too onerous, limiting and difficult to comply with.  They want to change the leverage ratio so they can lend you even more money that they don’t have.

• Rent-seeking.  This is the concept that we really need to watch out for.  The idea has been around since the 1970s, and is being much discussed in financial circles.  I found out about it reading Christia Freeland's Plutocrats:  The Rise of the New Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.  You might imagine that with all this money floating around it should be easy to cure cancer, end world hunger and poverty, offer everyone daycare and free education from kindergarten to PhD, but as the operations of rent-seeking become more obvious, it is becoming apparent that all this fabulous wealth doesn't actually produce anything, and it isn't the result of anything being produced.  Monumental wealth is being produced simply through the manipulation of government regulations, in particular the laws govern finance and banking. "Money" has become like Tinkerbell's pixie dust, not tied to anything of value, but available to the super rich to sprinkle on politicians, and for politicians to sprinkle back in greater measure on the super rich by adjusting the regulations for banking and finance to their whims and favour.  The disappearing middle class can look back on "trickle-down economics" and crumbs from the big table as "the good old days" because pixie dust may float in cosmic clouds above  but the .1% are exceptional at keeping it afloat and have little motivation to let it fall on the rest of us.

"Everybody knows."

Should Bank Robbery Be Deregulated?

Phoenix, Arizona

March 9, 2017

UNKNOWN BANK ROBBER

DESCRIPTION

• Height: 5'4"
• Sex: Female
• Complexion: Light
• Race: White (Hispanic)

• Remarks: The suspect was described as having a medium build with long dark curly hair. She was seen wearing a purple hat with a white flower on the front, purple jacket, purple dress and was carrying a large black purse.
• Vehicle Information: Tan older model Nissan Pathfinder

CAUTION

On March 9, 2017, at approximately 10:18 a.m., the suspect entered the Fry’s grocery store located at 2626 S. 83 Avenue in Phoenix. She proceeded to the Wells Fargo branch inside where she displayed a robbery demand note which indicated she was armed with a gun. The suspect also told the teller to not follow her because there was a second suspect in the parking lot that would shoot anyone who did. The teller gave the suspect U.S. Currency and she fled the store to the listed vehicle parked in the lot.

SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS

Should bank robbery be deregulated? 

I have decided to spotlight this particular Phoenix bank robber (above--oops, not sure why her photo has disappeared from my post) from the FBI's list of 486 because I liked the panache of her purple hat with a white flower, plus I thought her image might gain me some cred with righteous Americans in search of undocumented Mexican criminals--though there is no evidence she is Mexican or undocumented.  

Why bank robbery should be deregulated:

• Bank robbery is a business transaction between an individual and his or her banking institution of choice.  Government interference through regulation and enforcement causes inefficiency, bureaucracy and needless costs to tax payers.
• Banks are better able to deal with bank robbery than outside government agencies because they are uniquely positioned and qualified to understand the business of bank robbery and how best to deal with it.  
• Bank robbers take risks, like any investor, and are sometimes rewarded and sometimes penalized for their risk taking. Banks and bank robbers are better qualified in risk management than government agencies currently tasked with regulation and enforcement. 
• The average bank robbery nets less than $8,000.  The cost of policing, security and enforcement (incarcerating one prisoner for one year in the USA currently costs more than $30,000) is much higher than the amounts that bank robbers actually steal.

Alternatives to the current system of regulating bank robbery:

• Banks currently supply much of their own security.  Bank security should be turned over entirely to the private sector and banks themselves, replacing onerous costs to tax payers and a system of multiple layers of conflicting police forces (FBI, Municipal, State, sheriffs, marshals from local police forces as well as the banks' own security systems and other private security companies, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, and Private Military Contractors such as Blackwater) with a single efficient system paid for and managed by the banks themselves.
• Many prisons in the USA are private, for-profit ventures.  In essence banks already own and run a significant part of the prison system.  Allowing banks to once and for all take over the incarceration of captured bank robbers would alleviate the burden on middle-class tax payers, clear the court system for more profitable forms of litigation, and convert the incarceration of prisoners into profitable work.  
• Smaller banks may feel unprepared to manage their own security, policing and incarceration.  Private contractors and franchises will be able to fill these gaps.  Some smaller banks may simply decide that bank robbery is "the price of doing business" and such a policy will no doubt function in the short term given the relatively small cost of individual bank robberies; however, it seems clear that these banks will eventually be absorbed by larger enterprises with their own police forces, court system and prisons.  
• Some left-leaning, liberal bankers (widely know as "oxymorons" or just "big morons") may decide on sending bank robbers to school (a year of college costs less than a third of the cost of a year of incarceration in the USA) and profit from the disparity of costs.  However, until such time as banks have more fully privatized the education system in the USA, this approach is not  recommended.

The time is ripe!

The USA is once again on the verge of massive deregulation of the banking and financial services industry, and a return to the golden age of 2007.  The time is right and ripe and propitious for the deregulation of bank robbery within the wider and much more significant scope of the deregulation of banking as a whole.  Don't let this moment pass you by without considering how you and I and the entire world will benefit from the deregulation of banking and financial services!

Creedence heard it though the grapevine.

Just to reinforce the point:  

'Deeply concerning': Canada pension fund invests in US immigration detention firms

Addendum (Aug. 29, 2020)

Accidentally, the bank robber I featured at the beginning of this post (the picture has disappeared) looks a lot like the "bombshell bandit" whose life story is described in this article:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-bombshell-bandit?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The Things We Know that We Don’t Know We Know!

The OA in my dreams

After I finished watching Netflix’s series The OA, I went to bed feeling fairly confused—wondering if I hadn’t just wasted a few hours on a shaggy-dog story.  As often happens to me, I woke up feeling I had a better grasp of the plot. Not very surprisingly, the scene that stayed with me from the final episode was of the trauma counselor advising Prairie, “the OA,” who had been kidnapped and held captive in a basement for seven years, that her premonitions could be the result, not of magical powers to predict the future, but the fact that she was sensitive to information that she collected without being fully conscious of it, which then organized itself into conclusions about the future which sometimes came true.  In other words, sometimes we know things, but we just don’t know that we know them.

Trauma counseling and palmistry

The trauma counselor’s words rang a bell with me, not just because my brain is sometimes smarter when I am asleep than when I am awake, but because I used to read palms.  To be absolutely honest, everything I know about palmistry I learned when I was 10 or 11 years old from a booklet that came as a bonus gift inside boxes of Red Rose Tea.  I have held on to the basics since then:  people with stubby fingers are skeptical, with long, thin fingers artistic, and there are lines representing life, romance and intellect.

Over the years, I have been surprised by how convincing people found my readings to be.  When I taught in Portugal, I knew I was in trouble when I arrived at the University one day and the department secretary announced there was a woman in my office waiting to have her palm read.  The real problem wasn’t that people were beginning to believe in my palm reading; it was that I was beginning to believe in it.  

What the brain does without us

The myth that we use only one-tenth of our brains and consequent speculations of our undiscovered telepathic abilities have long been debunked.  However, whether or not we believe in Freud’s hypotheses about the subconscious mind, it is irrefutable that our brains do lots of things for us without our active conscious participation:  regulating heartbeat and breathing, creating pain warnings, telling us when to be afraid, and signaling opportunities for procreation—all done without our instruction or thinking.

At another level there are all kinds of rules that we follow, which seem to bridge the ephemeral divide between nature and culture, which we follow without knowing that the rules exist or being conscious that we are following them.  The grammar of whatever language we speak is a primordial example.  As I never tire of pointing out, the average native speaker of English hasn’t a clue about the rules of English grammar but follows most of them nonetheless.  

Structuralism, semiotics and readings of the everyday world

The many things we know but don’t know we know; that is, those rules of human behaviour that we read and follow but do not articulate, supplied the examples in my attempts to juice up my lectures on structuralism.  In literary studies, structuralism was the attempt to make criticism scientific, to move the analysis of literary texts beyond emotional responses or opinions about beauty or as the raw material for studies in other branches of the humanities like sociology or psychology.  For a time, structuralism dominated anthropology which was under the sway of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but its origins were in linguistics as practiced by Ferdinand Saussure, which in turn was founded on the understanding that the human brain functioned through binary reasoning.  (See Binary Thinking Versus the Other Kind. ) Saussure proposed that we could create a science of all signs which he called “semiotics.”  There is nothing more boring than a semiotic analysis of a literary text, but the idea that we could read and understand the world around us as a text which could be submitted to semiotic analysis was bound to capture the attention of even the least curious undergraduate.

Proxemics

Most of the examples I presented had to do with proxemics; that is, the study of how people occupy space.  All animals have “rules” for the occupation of space; most obviously,  fight-or-flight reactions.  The circus lion-tamer trained the king of the jungle by calculating the exact distance of its fight-or-flight reactions, then mesmerizing the animal by crossing back and forth across that line.  The snake charmer used the same technique, waving a flute back and forth, in and out of the cobra’s attack distance paralyzing it into immobility.  The rules for human beings are equally obvious but are made vastly more complicated by culture.

The rules of personal space

You can get a sense of how much you know without knowing you know with this thought experiment.  Imagine you enter a room where a group is gathered.  If you can accurately visualize the gathering, you can also make some pretty good guesses about the role each individual is playing in the group.  Right?  You can immediately pick out "the leader,"  "the supporter," "the opposer," "the alienated loner," etc.  Now imagine there are only two people present--a man and a woman.  Consider what you might guess simply from their body language and how they occupy space.  If they are standing within two feet of each other, you would wisely surmise that they are in an intimate relationship.  (One of the oldest anecdotes on breaching the personal “space bubble” tells of a meeting between Arab and American businessmen in a large conference hall.  For Arabs, the comfortable conversation distance was six inches, for Americans twenty-four.  As someone wryly observed, with Arabs inching closer and Americans backing away, “the meeting looked like a ballroom dance competition.")  If the imagined couple is standing perpendicular to each other, theirs is a friendly, bordering-on-intimate relationship; face to face, they are in confrontation or debate.  If she is sitting at a small desk and he is standing:  student-teacher or something analogous.   If he is sitting at a big desk and she is standing, he is a boss and she an interviewee, or something analogous.  The bigger the desk the bigger the boss.  

Etiquette: The bigger the desk the bigger the boss

These clichés wax and wane and change with time.  Sometimes they become rigid and highly codified.  In my first teaching job, I occupied a cubicle next to the “furnishings” sector of the Canadian Treasury Board and Department of Finance.  Through skilled eavesdropping, I discovered that the size of an employee’s desk and the number of inches of carpet space s/he was entitled to were directly tied to the employee’s rank within the civil service—and there was a manual of directives spelling out the exact measures to the square centimeter.  In Henry James’ novel, The Portrait of a Lady, the climax comes when the heroine walks past an open door and glances into a room to see her husband sitting while talking to a mutual female friend.  This breach of etiquette, a gentleman sitting while a lady stands, was so codified that the heroine immediately understood that her husband and the lady were lovers.

Lies and other rules we follow

I was an immediate fan of the television series Lie to Me because I felt it was likely based on someone’s real-life scientific claims.  Sure enough, the series is loosely based on the work of Dr. Paul Ekman.  The social-psychologist Stanley Milgram also made a career of studying the behavioural rules we follow without ever knowing or acknowledging their existence.  

Dilated pupils are a sign of sexual arousal

On the concupiscence front, men are attracted to women with dilated pupils because, though most men remain unaware, dilated pupils are a sign of sexual arousal.  George Eliot (aka Mary Anne Evans) was meticulously discreet and euphemistic in her treatment of matters sexual, but when I read this line—“her face bent toward him, her eyes dilated, her lips parted”—I had to ask myself, “Was Eliot telling us that Gwendolen was sexually aroused as she confessed to Daniel Deronda that she had just killed her husband?”

Body language, machine learning and Minority Report

Women, we are told, are lured by men whose body language is expansive, claiming extra space.  We are all attracted by phi and symmetry, even those of us who don’t quite know what phi and symmetry are.  And then there are smells and pheromones that tell us who and when to love.  The number of things we don’t know we know might be greater than what we know we know.  However, before we succumb to species vanity about the unexplored potential of the human brain, consider this article on “machine learning” published recently in The Economist which describes algorithms and software capable of predicting human behaviour much more elaborately and precisely than we can.  The article references the movie Minority Report,  then concludes that “machine learning” will have to be fine-tuned so that our futures will be like the Minority Report but without the mistakes.

Tina Turner heard it through the grapevine.

The Sour Bibliography

Money Can Buy Happiness. The Question Is: “How Much Happiness Is Enough?”

How much money buys happiness?

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell we can now say that increased wealth correlates with an increase in happiness up to an annual salary of $75,000 USD—that’s $100,000 Canadian  (See Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs).  After $100,000 CAD, more money produces less and less happiness, until wealth eventually causes more problems than pleasures.  

    = < $100,000 CAD

We are left with the question: “How much happiness is enough?”  Strange question?  I hope so.  

Being unhappy is not a mental illness

Listening to a lecture given by Thomas Szasz, the psychiatrist who denied the existence of anything that could be called a “mental illness” (see also Terrorism and Madness:  Between Sympathy and Understanding), I was struck by his description of people who came to him thinking that they were mentally ill because they were not happy.  As Szasz reported, being unhappy is a perfectly reasonable, sane response to some of life’s events and circumstances.  

The pressure to be happy causes depression

I take as exceptions to the rule the numerous stories we hear of parents making their children direly unhappy, pressuring them to the point of neurosis, break-down and alienation over every choice imaginable from friends to habits to lifestyles to marriage partners to careers and everything in between.  For the average parent, myself included, wanting the offspring to be happy—no matter what else—is the number one priority.  However, I have at times found myself wondering if wanting your progeny to be happy isn’t just another way of putting pressure on them. (Overthinking!?  It’s what I do.)

Sometimes being unhappy is healthy

How often do we put pressure on the average millennial by telling her/im s/he should be happy, convincing her/im to believe, like one of Dr. Szasz’s clients, that being unhappy is a sign of mental illness?  How often do we oblige him/er to put on an endless display of alacrity and to answer every “How are you?” with Pollyanna enthusiasm?   Underlying these prescriptions for required happiness is the worst of all proscriptions:  “Sammy Jane, you do not have the right to be unhappy!”  At some point, we all have to admit the obvious.  Being bored, irritated, frustrated and enraged are the normal, sane, appropriate responses to situations which are boring, irritating, frustrating and enraging—if you have not encountered these situations in your life, you are not from this planet.

Imposing our view of happiness

The real risk of parents insisting on their kids being happy is that the things we ancestors might imagine as the precursors and prerequisites to happiness might not actually be what will make our heirs happy.  The prerequisites we imagine might actually be the things that would make us happy—if only our kids would do them.  We parents might unwittingly be insisting that our kids make us happy under the guise of our wanting them to be happy.

"The child is father to the man"

Happiness is not just a parenting issue.  True Romantic that I am, I happen to believe Wordsworth’s claim that “the Child is father to the Man.”   In most cases, adults have a lot more to learn about happiness from children than the other way around.  (Ever notice how many adults worry about spoiling children but never about spoiling themselves.)  In the adult world, happiness and its prerequisites have become addictions.

Definition of addiction

I once heard a specialist in the field describe addiction this way:  “You’re not hungry, but when someone places a bowl of salty peanuts near you, you decide to have one.  The taste of the first peanut creates a craving for more.  That is the process of addiction.”  As I listened, I wasn’t sure if this was just an analogy or if he meant it was possible to become addicted to peanuts.  No doubt the obesity statistics make it obvious that food is a North American addiction.  The desire for food is not created by hunger, but by food itself.

Sometimes addiction is the norm

I have to admit I guffawed when I read that Tiger Woods was in rehab being treated for sex addiction.  The idea that sex can be an addiction makes sense, I guess, but we live in a society where sex addiction is the norm.  Men are advised to take little blue pills to maintain the addiction, and women are expected to support the cause with purchases from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.  I’ve heard that men think about sex every seven minutes (not sure who gathered these statistics—see Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies ).  That sounds about right, not because men are naturally inclined to having sex every seven minutes, but because seven minutes is a typical interval between exposures to some sexual stimulus—ad, image, scene, smell, physical person or all of the above—in our society.  

The concept of enough

I am still fascinated by E.F. Schumacher’s concept of “enough” from Small is Beautiful.  (See Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs.) How much of each of the things that are supposed to make us happy is enough?  How much food, sex, comfort, attention, fame, power, status, beauty, knowledge, admiration or love is enough?  How can we answer this question when each of these pleasures and affects can become an addiction; in fact, already are addictions in our culture and society?

Happiness is the absence of pain

On a Mediterranean cruise recently, I was struck by how many passengers—myself included—were beginning to find the endless luxury and pampering oppressive.  The philosopher Schopenhauer argued that happiness was the temporary absence of pain.  According to Schopenhauer, the achievement of our desires makes us sated and bored causing the endless cycle of pain to begin again.

Why are the Danes the happiest people in the world?

Year after year, Denmark is identified as the happiest country in the world.  The Danes, however, do not seem like a smiley, joyous people.  Analysis reveals that the basis of their happiness is their low, and therefore achievable, expectations.  The key, then, to being happy is knowing how much is enough.

Marvin Gaye Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Lies, Lies, Nothing but Lies! Oh, Wait a Minute, There’s a Bit of Truth There . . .

Analyzing Fiction

There has never been a better time to be a specialist in analyzing fiction.  Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature notwithstanding, there may still be hope for the study of “literature”; a.k.a., “the lies that tell the truth.”

Sarah Palin in a bikini! [click the link please!]

Fake News Is News

In the wake of the American presidential election, there has been a tidal wave of discussion online, on television and in the press about “fake news.”  One television news show I saw recently claimed that fake news stories outnumber “real” news stories (whatever “real” means) by a ratio of three to one, and fake news is viewed online tens times as frequently as its conservative cousin. Of course, the television news show in question was quoting online sources, raising the question “Is the news about ‘fake news’ fake?”

Fraudsters Target the Illiterate and Less Literate

Have you noticed that when you receive one of those fraudulent email messages trying to lure you to send money—you know, the ones that say my uncle in Nigeria has left me a multi-million-dollar inheritance, but I need your help to get it—those messages are full of grammar and spelling mistakes.  The mistakes are deliberate because the messages are designed to target people who are less educated, who cannot read well enough to detect the mistakes, and are therefore more susceptible to the fraud that the senders are attempting to perpetrate.

Understand What a Text Is Trying to Do to You

Other than going incommunicado and surrendering to the life of a recluse, the only defense against online frauds and fakes and misinformation in general is the ability to read.  Usually when people talk about reading they mean the ability to interpret alphabetic symbols marked on paper or a screen—and that’s what I mean most of the time when I talk about reading.  However, we also “read” images, numbers, people, situations, in fact, the entire world around us.  Anything we can read—which is just about everything—can be called “a text.”  

I would habitually tell university students that when you are reading a written text it is important to realize, at the outset, that someone is trying to do something to you.  The text might be designed to persuade, convince, enrage, shock, seduce, insult, confuse, convert, appease, hypnotize, pacify, inform, educate, or discourage you—and there are a thousand other possibilities.   As a practiced and skilled reader, you need to constantly consider what is being done (or attempted to be done) to you.  An educated reader begins her engagement with the text with an attitude of skepticism.  The attitude of an educated reader is to doubt, but if you are going to engage with or even enjoy a text to some degree you must consent, you must accept, as least provisionally to what is being done to you.  

Suspension of Disbelief

This process has long been recognized in literary studies.  It even has a name:  “suspension of disbelief.”  If you are going to enjoy a work of fiction, you must allow yourself to read as if it were all true—which, of course, invites the question of how to enjoy a postmodern novel where the author constantly intervenes to remind you that you are reading fiction.  The sophisticated reader is supposed to know how to believe in just the right degree.  There is even a threadbare old joke to make the point:  a country bumpkin announcing in a loud whisper as the ghost of King Hamlet appears behind Prince Hamlet:  “Ohh, he’s gonna shit when he sees that ghost!”

Resistant Reading

In contrast, postmodern feminism has given us the “resistant reading”  whereby unwary women are instructed to approach the slippery ideological seductions of Andre Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” and Leonard Cohen’s “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” with caution.

That’s the fun stuff—the situations where the possibility of salutary readings are at least possible to imagine.  How do we deal with a digital universe in which 40% of what we read are outright lies and another 49% are out-of-context fibs, shadings of the truth, conspiracy theories, sales pitches and spin-doctoring?  (Please don’t quote my made-up percentages, but note that I have left 11% of space for facts, intelligent discourse, captions about cats and vacuity.)   The only viable countermeasure to being lied to, fooled, misinformed and defrauded is the ability to read.  

The Antidote to Fake News Is Reading 

. . . which returns me to the information which I cited in a previous post (How Many Americans Believe that Planet Earth Is Only 6000 Years Old) that 14% of Americans are illiterate and 21% of adults in the USA read below a grade 5 level.   Even as I quoted the article I found myself wondering if I wasn’t promulgating bogus statistics.  If I am going to post on the malaise of “fake news” and the antidote of effective reading, I have to make some effort to ensure that I am not spreading “fake news.”  I take as a basic truth underlying claims about illiteracy rates in both the USA and Canada that the reading skills of the population as a whole are well below where they should be—even though definitions of “illiteracy” are much debated and the measurement of reading skills always in question.

Why Reading a Book Matters

I also take the ability to read a book as the true measure of the capacity to read.  Having the skills and acumen required to hold on to the coherence and pattern of a text over hundreds of pages is the ultimate test of reading.  This coherence might be the connection between a hypothesis and statistical evidence, or the ongoing inductive and deductive reasoning that supports an argument, or details of plot, character and setting.  Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, this level of reading ability also means being able to spot inconsistencies, incongruities, outright contradictions, lacunae, logical fallacies, flawed writing and rhetorical smoke 'n' mirrors. 

Fake News Is the News We Want to Believe

"Fake news" is news that is oddly familiar; moreover, it is typically news that we would like to believe.  Every conspiracy theory contains a spattering of irrefutable facts; every fiction large chunks of reality.  The ability to read is not just being able to identify words on a page; the key to reading is understanding how the words connect together, and how collections of words work together and beyond--or don't.  More than the words themselves, it is the space between words that matter.  Making connections is making meaning.  Making the right connections--and spotting the disconnections--is getting the meaning right.

Fragments of News Convince Us that We Are Right and Knowledgable

However, we live in the age of headlines and captions and twitter.  We are bombarded with fragments of information on the assumption that we cannot or will not read sufficiently to question the ersatz.  As a result, we are all becoming lesser readers every day, more entrenched in the dogma of whatever we happen to believe at the outset, convinced of whatever panders to our current convictions and outrage, and unwilling or unable to read further.

Addendum

I may think myself a pretty good reader, but this bit of "fake news" fooled me.  It fooled me for a few of the typical reasons.  I'd heard it a couple of times, then years later I got this image, which looks convincing, emailed to me.  It is fake,

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2015/12/10/fact-check-did-trump-say-98-republicans-dumb/77099822/

When It Comes to Democracy, Who Are Canadians to Talk?

Trump, Trudeau and the popular vote  

When some of my Canadian Facebook friends seemed outraged that Donald Trump won the American presidency without winning the popular vote, I felt compelled to point out that the Trudeau Liberals only won 39.5% of the popular vote (Oct. 19, 2015) which translated into 54% of the parliamentary seats—which in Canada means 100% of the power.  

Trump tweets that he won a "rigged" election

Of course, being elected to the single most powerful position on the planet isn’t quite enough to satisfy Trump’s mega-ego, so his team has been pursuing claims that he did, in fact, win the popular vote, pursuant to Trump’s typical strategy of simply Tweeting that he, in fact, won the popular vote and that the voting was rigged.  Yes, he claims that the election which he won was rigged.  We live in dark comedic times.    

"There is a crack in everything"

As a Canadian, it’s difficult not to notice that Leonard Cohen died the day before Trump was elected.  In the past we could depend upon Cohen, with a single line or maybe two, to give the chaos some hint of meaning, raising us above it all.  On second thought, Leonard did leave us with the proper lines for this occasion:  “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

Is Trump the stereotypical American?

Unfair as it is to individual Americans—dare I say, to the majority of individual Americans—the gaping cracks now showing in the USA will force Americans to see themselves as they have seen themselves but dimly in the past.  Donald Trump is a perfect representation of that stereotypical view of Americans as loud, brash, rude, egotistical, self-aggrandizing, arrogant, bullying, and under-educated but rich—and proud of it all.  Americans may now be forced to see themselves in the unflattering light in which much of the world has seen them.

Will he or won't he, and which is worse?

If you have been critical of American incongruity and hypocrisy in the past, get ready.  In the next four years, you will be able to compare hypocrisy with outright villainy . . . or maybe not.  What’s been happening lately is like that Woody Allen joke:  you know the one.  Two old ladies are eating in a restaurant, one turns to the other and says, “The food in this restaurant is just terrible.”  To which the second responded, “Yes, and they give such small portions, too!”

On the political scene, lefties and liberals like me used to complain “Gawd!  Aren’t the things that Trump is promising terrible!”  And now, “Isn’t it awful that Trump isn’t going to do the things he promised!”  Oddly enough, the latter is what Trump supporters had been saying since the beginning.

Canadian smuggery

We Canadians should not be smug.  Our diffidence better becomes us.  We are in the midst of our own dark comedy.  Hopefully, it is too early to say “I told you so,” but I did predict in an October post (Are Canadian Elections Democratic?) that the Liberal promise of electoral reform was unlikely to survive the combination of voter apathy and party interests.  According to various press reports, the opposition parties have been pushing to fulfill the Liberals’ election promises, while the Liberal party itself is struggling to delay implementation of its own promises.

Is Print more reliable than digital?

In a reversal of modern trends, election reform has been getting more play in the press than online or in social media.  In August of this year, Andrew Coyne published an excellent article countering dire predictions that “proportional representation” in Canada would lead to disaster:  "No, proportional representation would not make Canada a dystopian hellhole."

Proportional representation

As Coyne documents, all over the world where democratic countries have used proportional representation (that is, the party’s proportion of the popular vote determines how many seats the party gets in parliament), the end results have worked quite well.  However, as Coyne points out, the two examples which critics of proportional representation invariably cite, Italy and Israel, are not only anomalies, but the status-quo proponents exaggerate the difficulties these countries face and fail to acknowledge the very specific conditions in these two countries which do not apply to Canada.

The Conspiracy of online silence

At the risk of invoking a conspiracy theory, I have to point out that it was/is difficult to find this Coyne article online.  Not only was it necessary to use the exact wording of the headline but of the eight hits that came up seven of them were dead links leading a “404” message:  “file or directory not found.”  As I was about to share the one working link with you, dear Reader, I went to my bookmark to discover that the article has disappeared from there as well.  Consequently, if you want to read the article, you will have to visit your local library and check out the “National News” in your local paper for August 19, 2016. Paradoxically, what are accessible online are a few Coyne articles where he seems to be counter-punching against the election-reform process, if not electoral reform itself.

Is MyDemocracy deliberately just plain silly?

In an effort to create a bit of online buzz the government has launched MyDemocracy.ca which supposedly surveys Canadian attitudes toward electoral reform.  The government survey is a lot like those self-evaluation quizzes popular in days of yore in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ms and People, designed to answer questions like:  “Are you a good lover?”  “Are you a romantic or a realist?” and “How confident are you?”  (Fine, okay, you caught me.  I’ve done them all, and I’m a confident, romantic mediocre lover.)

Choosing between a fair democracy and getting things done

I found it hard to imagine how the government survey will in any way advance the cause of electoral reform.  Nor did the questionnaire quite live up to its promise of “being fun”; nonetheless, I would encourage you to try it out yourself.  What I found disconcerting about the survey was that I was being asked to decide if I wanted a parliament with many parties or one that got things done.  I don’t believe electoral reform forces me to choose one or the other; we can have both.  I think a fairer and more reasonable question—not to mention one directly to the point— would be: “Do you think it is fair that the Green Party got 3.5% of the votes in the last federal elections but less than 1% of the seats  (.29% to be exact, meaning one seat)?”

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" (Churchhill).

The one issue that the survey raised for me, about which I remain torn, fell under the general theme of “making it easier to vote.”  In past American elections, it was always the Democrats who accused Republicans of making it hard to vote. However, in the last election, we heard Trumplicans accusing the Democrats of voter suppression.  Part of me wants everyone to vote, or at least that there be strong voter turnout, but another part of me wants people to vote who are informed and aware of the issues.  Also, I am doubtlessly out of step with the times in being leery of online voting, but a part of me (okay, I’m running out of parts) thinks that maybe it’s a good idea that voting takes a bit of effort.  Certainly, voting about voting (i.e., a referendum on electoral reform) is an issue we should all be willing to give time and effort to—if we care at all about democracy.