Dictatorship and political laziness

Sunday’s Parade magazine’s cover story asked and answered the question, “Who is the world’s worst dictator?” The author listed the  top 10 men and justified each selection with a description of the horrible conditions their countries were in. The clear implication was that these deplorable conditions occurred because the country was run by a dictator, and in particular, this one. Dictatorial rule goes hand in hand with a poor standard of living and poor quality of life. Right?

The problem is, not all of the men listed could truly be called dictators. (And yes, they’re all men. Let’s not be distracted by a gender argument here.) Since the author never defined what he meant by “dictator”, however, he was free to lump together despots of any stripe into his list.

Memo to Parade:  “despot” does not mean “dictator.”

A despot is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “an autocratic ruler.” A despot rules arbitrarily, usually punishingly, from a position of unchecked power. Despots are the broader class of totalitarians into which dictators fit. A dictator is a despot who rules from a position of personal power, whatever he or she says (dictates), personally, is law. It’s a single person, whose authority draws from their own source. A king or emperor inherits the throne; Caesar or Hitler abolishes the secondary institutions of government (or act as if they did); a military dictator issues orders which must be strictly obeyed. In a plutocracy (a system of collective despotism), however, the despot may run his totalitarian regime within the confines of such institutions: an Ayatollah must have the support of his senior mullahs, the Communist chairman must obtain the cooperation of his party or central committee.

There’s plenty of grey area, of course:  the central committee, the mullahs, or the Senate may be hand-picked puppets of the leader; a generals orders need to be supported and executed by his chiefs of staff. One has to draw the line somewhere. The point is to draw the line – stake one’s claim – rather than blunt one’s point, as did the Parade article, by leaving the definitions vague and proceeding willy-nilly into political “analysis.”

What different does it make? Plenty. The transfer of power in a plutocracy is usually very orderly:  a new chairman or mullah succeeds the old from the ranks of the second tier. The institutions of government are stable, not depending upon the leader himself. Remove the leader (Kim Jong-il, the current Ayatollah), and nothing much changes. In a dictatorship, removal of the leader (Hitler, Caesar, Saddam Hussein) means everything:  the regime collapses without him. The implications for what, if anything, the regime’s enemies can do about the situation are very different in a dictatorship vs. a plutocracy.

Okay, but still. It’s just Parade; so what? The reason it matters is this:  lots of people read Parade, and treat it like an authoritative source (particularly people who are not very astute politically). When a magazine of its distribution publishes such sloppy work, it only encourages more sloppy political thinking. This sort of political laziness is what got us George W as president, an intractable war in Iraq, a $500 billion annual deficit, and prescription drugs that cost twice here what they do in Canada.

Whatever one’s political leanings, we owe it to ourselves and each other to, at the very least, (1) get the facts, (2) ask questions, and (3) think clearly about the answers.

Otherwise, the U.S. may someday end up on Parade’s “Top 10 Dictatorships” list.

can you have romance without friendship?

How do you know when to toss somebody from your life and move on?

I suppose just asking the question begs the answer:  Now! “If you have to ask…” And in the case of my most recent girlfriend, it’s pretty much moot, since I’ve already been tossed out like so much excess plastic packaging. Nevertheless, I’m still interested in the question from a more general perspective – let’s say, for future benefit.

For the most part, I’ve remained frinds with the women I’ve dated, as well as – perhaps especially – my ex-wife. This tends to hold more true for those with whom I developed a friendship before dating them, or for those with whom the relationship developed more slowly, giving time for the friendship to build before we became intimate (with exceptions on both sides of this general tendency, of course).

But in a few cases, once the romance was ruled out, the friendship disappeared, or the other person decided it was untenable (or simply undesirable) and cut ties. This I find both hurtful and confusing. If you love someone, doesn’t this mean that you have a continuing interest in his or her welfare? Assuming neither party did anything deceitful or cruel to the other, wouldn’t some level of caring and friendship persist once the one element that you know won’t work (romance) is ruled out?

It begs the question:  can you have romance without friendship?

To me the answer is no. There is no love without friendship, and without love, there is no romance. Without friendship, all that is left of romance is flirtation and infatuation. How can two people become partners – or plan to, or dream of it – if they are not, at base, close friends? My parents have been married 55 years as of next week (wow!). Remarkably, they still have romance, infatuation, and a craving to be together. More evident, though, is that they are best friends, and have been for all 55 years they’ve been together.

Of course, friendship guarantees nothing – not even that a couple will remain friends (or, of course, that two mutually attracted friends will ever be more than friends… sigh… yes, I cam thinking of someone in particular here!). Things happen, circumstances change, feelings subside, focus shifts. A new romance comes into play and the old flame represents a threat to the new, or simply takes a back seat to the pressures of time, schedule conflicts, or physical absence.

But to actively choose to exclude someone from your life who just a short time ago was the one around whom your whole life was organized, and with whom you made plans for the future, is a whole different matter. Is it healthy? Unhealthy? Or just necessity?

And I have to ask myself:  how much would I desire an ongoing friendship with such a person, knowing what I know now?

Probably, not much.

Getting over breaking up

Breaking up is hard to do, the song goes, but what’s really hard is, getting over breaking up with someone. Even when it’s clear, in retrospect, that the relationship really wasn’t right.

And I knew it wasn’t, even when we were in the midst of it – at least at times. The three-hour drive each weekend – and her refusal to make the drive herself, meaning I had to go there most of the time. Which meant sacrificing my weekends at home when I used to brew beer, play cards with friends, tend my garden, clean house – spending them instead in a strange place that never felt like home.

There were other signs. I met almost none of her Seattle friends. The arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere; sometimes she picked fights with me just “to reconnect emotionally,” she’d say. “I get tired of the weather reports.”  Our differences, such as her way of “simultaneous talking” that I felt was just rude interruption; her varying enthusiasm for adopting children (she was no longer able to have them); our age difference – and the fact that she lied about her age at first. Her rigidity, even obsessiveness, about things like hand-washing and never allowing street clothes to touch the sheets. How I never felt good enough for her. How much appearances meant to her, and how little to me.

Before this turns into a rag sheet, I want to return to the point, which is:  I’m not happy with how it ended, even though I know it was right to end it. In my life, most of my relationships have ended amicably, each of us retaining respect for the other and remaining friends. My ex-wife and I took almost a year to get divorced, taking our time principally to keep the pressure off and keep it civil. We’re still friends and we still get together with each other’s family from time to time.

But not this last one. She raged at me and said I was a “mean, cold-hearted man,” while lying next to me in my bed. She said she didn’t want to accept any of my Christmas presents – she didn’t want reminders of me around her house. (She changed her mind in the morning.) We spent a three-hour drive back to Seattle not talking. There was no hug good-bye; in fact there was no real good-bye. I just went out to my car, cried for a minute or so, then drove back to Portland.

I wrote her an email a few days later, apologizing for my part and explaining my feelings on the matter. She called to thank me and said she wanted to keep trying. You could have knocked me over with a feather. After an hour of talking I said:  it still feels to me that we have the same issues we had last week. I need a little time to process the pain – a break. She said, forget it then. She never said, “I’m sorry.”

She scoffed at my suggestion that we try to stay in touch and remain friends, saying “What does that mean? Are you going to visit me in Seattle? Will I visit you in Portland? I don’t see it happening.” When I offered to keep her informed about my dad’s failing health – a man she’d recently met and said she adored – she said, no thanks; she didn’t want to be “added to one of [my] email lists.”

And I’m the cold, mean one?

Why? Because I wouldn’t yell and scream like she did?

Maybe I should have. Maybe then I’d have better feelings of closure than I do now.

What if Mr Potter never lived?

What if Mr. Potter had never lived?

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is rescued from suicide by the angel Clarence and given the opportunity to see how his humble town, Bedford Falls, and all of the people he loved would be different had he never been born. George is a generous, decent, albeit frustrated man, trapped by circumstances and conscience in a place much smaller than his ambitions.

The impacts he had on people’s lives seem small to him until Clarence walks him back through a George Bailey-less town now known as “Potterville.” Then he sees his brother Harry’s grave, dead at age 8 because George wasn’t there to rescue him from drowning (and presumably, none of the other kids would have been able to do it); thus Harry’s World War II battle heroics never happened, and a ship full of troops went down that otherwise, in George’s world, would have lived. Mr. Gower poisons the child with diphtheria and ends up an alcoholic wreck; George’s beloved Mary becomes a fearful old maid; his children are never born; Mr. Potter takes over the town and his mean spirit pervades its erstwhile benign, if dull, social fabric.

So that’s what happens if a good guy disappears. What if it happens to a bad guy? The answer may not be as obvious as you might think.

George’s family, The Baileys, acts primarily as Mr. Potter’s foil in Bedford Falls – a shield of goodness, protecting the weak and less fortunate from Potter’s greedy spite. Without Potter, though, the Bailey’s are just another decent, hard-working family, running a marginally-profitable savings and loan that by all accounts is poorly run from a business perspective. It succeeds because people turned away by Potter’s bank have nowhere else to go. If Potter’s gone, the bank takes on more of those loans, and the S&L probably fails for lack of customers. George’s father and uncle probably fold up shop and get jobs – perhaps at the very same bank Potter is no longer around to run. Uncle Billy’s mid-day nips aren’t tolerated at the more stuffed-shirt bank – this is Prohibition after all – and he becomes unemployable, a drag on the Bailey family for years.

With no savings and loan to save, George can take his trip to Europe, go to college, build his skyscrapers and bridges, and most important, leave Bedford Falls. He’s not there at Harry’s graduation dance to meet Mary again; she ends up an old maid anyway. While some of the immigrant families get home loans at the kinder and gentler bank, many do not; even with the two Bailey brothers there, the bank is still more frugal than the S&L. Bailey Park, the subdivision of modest, affordable homes for working people, is never built. Because George is gone, he never talks Sam Wainwright into building his new plastics factory in Bedford Falls; the town’s economy stagnates; families move away; the town shrivels to a shell of its former self, as did so many small towns in the Depression. George isn’t there to run the recycling effort during the war; Potter isn’t there to run the draft board; the war effort is diminished by the loss of both men’s contributions.

This isn’t to say that no good comes of Potter’s disappearance; far from it. The town is a friendlier place, more generous, less fearful. Perhaps George becomes a fabulous, visionary architect, rivaling I. M. Pei and Frank Lloyd Wright. Any number of good things can be imagined. That part is easy, and trivial. The interesting point is in realizing what good occurs because of Mr. Potter’s presence, or rather, because of the dynamic between Potter and George Bailey, and what bad occurs when that dynamic is removed along with Bedford Falls’ scrooge-like patriarch. Counter-intuitively, Bedford Falls may be worse off without him.

Unsavory motives and actions often undo the good work of some and crush the spirit of others, but they also add energy. They give impetus to the equal and opposite reaction of altruism and noble actions otherwise untapped or unregistered. Sadly, sometimes the only thing that spurs good people to action often is the challenge of combating evil.

Sometimes we wish that certain bad things never happened, or certain evil people never lived. Perhaps it is good to keep in mind on those occasions the old proverb:  Be careful what you wish for.