Practical and impractical politics

It is perhaps unfair to criticize the Arabs, with an unbroken political history of straightup despotism, for spoiling their attempts at democracy, considering that with our two centuries of experience, we still haven’t figured out the simplest things. Three current local examples:

The Puna vote

This one raises questions that it would take a lot of effort to answer.

The immediate case is only mildly troubling. The Hawaii Supreme Court decided the appeal narrowly, merely saying the statute did not give it review jurisdiction, or that some of the complainants did not have standing. No doubt, if it had thought the outstanding issues were really important, it could have found a way.

In this case, there was only the smallest chance that the Puna votes could have swung the Democratic senatorial primary. To win, Colleen Hanabusa would have needed about 65% of all the votes if all the registered voters who had not voted early did vote. While she did about that well in her home area, she got less than half the votes in Hawaii County.

I do not know anything about local Big Island politics, so cannot speculate about what the missing votes could have meant in local Puna races.

People allegedly trapped by hurricane debris were not totally disenfranchised; they had had the option of voting earlier (though not of deciding to do so after the prospect of the hurricane became evident). And besides, it does not take a tropical storm to keep voters away from the polls; even an ordinary rainstorm will do it for significant numbers of people.

There are mishaps in most elections, and despite what civics books or even statutes may say about it, as a practical matter there has always been a very strong pressure to get the result confirmed, even if not every possible or even plausible doubt has been resolved. However much mischief has been done in the runup to the voting, experience suggests that leaving the results hanging opens the way to even more mischief.

We have a current example in the Afghanistan presidential election, and if that is not really the best laboratory for voting experience, we have also the infamous Hays-Tilden election in our own past. (Some people would cite the 2000 presidential election, but not me. The handling of the count was unsavory on both sides, but I was persuaded at the time that either candidate would have been a disaster. Experience proved me at least half right.)

However, there is a bigger issue forming. We no longer have Election Day. It is now Election Month, or at least Election Fortnight, and the day the polls open at the local school (Aug. 9 for the primary) is really the end, not the beginning.

Permanent absentees were able to vote from July 28 through Aug. 2. Early walk-in voters were allowed to vote between July 28 and Aug. 7.

More and more people are voting early.

In one way this is good. It becomes less and less effective to spring a last-minute smear, of the kind John Waihee used to beat Cec Heftel, when so many votes have already been cast. And so last-minute smears have dropped off, it seems to me.

On the other hand, sometimes important information comes out late legitimately, and if you have already voted you don’t get do-overs. (The Mitt Romney 47% videotape was revealed in mid-September 2012, which gave it plenty of time to stew in the gullets of ordinary Americans, but it might have been held later.)

I am uncertain how spreading out the voting affects the habit of voting, but I am sure it does. Part of what drives participation is anticipation and a big, culminating event. The four quarters of the Super Bowl are not played over four days but all at once.

Going to the polls was a civic sacrament. It also gave you a sense of community and some insight into who else was voting. I vote early about half the time, but I like going to my Makawao precinct. I always see a few people there who I haven’t seen for a long time -- maybe not since the last election.

Anonymizing elections will not, I suspect, have a good long-term effect.

The Calvin Say residency challenge

It amazes me that residency challenges come up in every election. How hard can it be to live in the district you want to represent; or alternatively, to offer your candidacy in the district where you live?

And voters do not give a damn. Time and again they have shown themselves ready to elect people who were probably no longer residents in their districts, sometimes even candidates who were never in their districts. The moving factor seems to be a feeling that they know the candidate. That is enough.

The Say challenge raises a perennial question about independence of the legislative branch, but those conflicts are baked in. They are never going away. A better-crafted statute would leave less room for the disputants to maneuver, but they will find a way.

Patsy Mink, a local girl if ever there was one, did not live in the 2nd Congressional District; she had moved to her mother’s house, which was (by a short distance) in the 1st. There is no requirement that congressmen live in the districts they represent so long as they live in the state. But the indifference to where Mink lived is telling.

And the issue of where the legislator beds down most nights -- currently causing a flap which, I suspect, will amount to nothing for Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieux -- is mostly bogus. Mink told me she ran for Senate (and lost) because she wanted a six-year term instead of two so she wouldn’t have to come back to Hawaii so much.

And the travel is a serious matter for us westerners.

Only in Maui County is the residency requirement cogent. The imbalance among the three islands would assuredly mean that only seldom would Molokai or Lanai ever have a resident on the County Council, and Hana almost as rarely. (On the other hand, when I covered my first Hawaii elections in 1988, I was assured that never again would a Neighbor Island control the top committees in the House and Senate the way Yama and Souki did then. This prediction was only modestly successful.)

It is virtually impossible for the Lanai and Molokai members to do much living on Lanai or Molokai. Bob Carroll commuted every day from Hana, a grind but not that exceptional. Numbers of Mauians chose long commutes in order to sleep in their favorite part of this so-diverse island; Mike White is unusual but not exceptional.

The expense of maintaining two residences is a genuine barrier, though, to people of ordinary incomes trying to win the Lanai or Molokai seats. Perhaps the county should provide a duplex for each council member to bunk in in Wailuku, college dorm style, as a reasonable accommodation.

The GMO initiative

Susan Halas posted the language that will appear on the November ballot on her Facebook page this morning, and it is ugly:

“Should the proposed initiative prohibiting the cultivation or reproduction of genetically engineered organisms within the County of Maui, which may be amended or repealed as to a specific person or entity when required environmental and public health impact studies, public hearings, a two thirds vote and a determination by the County Council that such operation or practice meets certain standards, and which establishes civil and criminal penalties, be adopted for Maui County?”

Although initiative has been allowed in Hawaii for a long time, it has not been used, which helps explain how such a ridiculous statement is to be presented to the voters; but places like California that use initiative a lot have not done that much better.

Or perhaps it is not so ridiculous; perhaps the lawyers have an agenda not concerned with the substance if the initiative.

As a practical matter, I don’t care. The anti-GMO drive is based on lies and confusion and I will have no difficulty in voting against it.

IANAL, but it seems probable that if that passes it will be rejected by the judges on several grounds, including vagueness and not being limited to a single issue.  The words “certain standards” will be the crux.

What standard? Written by whom?

An initiative asking “Shall Maui County establish standards for cultivating crops?” would make a legitimate political question, although it would still be silly from a scientific viewpoint.

Who dunnit? Officer Friendly . . .

. . . in the laundry, with a clothes dryer.

I started to type what a weird story this is, but when it comes to frearms, it isn't weird at all. A little imaginative, though.

Heaven knows there's been more than plenty of material for a gun-grabber like me to work with lately, but stories about toddlers gunning down other toddlers are so old hat, y'know. But then along comes this story -- full of doubts and uncertainties though it is -- from Wisconsin, and it has it all:

The perp was a law officer, so trained in the responsible use of firearms (ha!). The victims were his (apparently) loving wife and her sister. No black-on-black street violence here; all in the family home by white folks. No word about who in the home was armed or how heavily.

There are suggestions that the lawman was crazy, possibly (who knows) as the result of disease (ALS, a bad one) or perhaps its treatment. Or maybe he wasn't stitched together, ever.

Trying to commit suicide by clothes dryer was a new one on me. The guy probably skipped science class.

I cannot wait to hear Wayne Lapierre explain how owning firearms improved this situation.

Evolution of politics

Estimates that National Impeach Obama Day would draw dozens of patriots into the streets were wildly overhyped. (The group, which is perhaps the most transparent in politics, has a counter on its website, which has yet to hit 16,000, and I suspect half of those visits were from tourists like me who are not sympathizers.)

But I have a more vital question: When did political rallies start taking place on highway overpasses, looking down on motorists whizzing by at 60 mph? With the ralliers behind chainlink, looking for all the world like monkeys in the monkeyhouse?

We don't have overpasses like that on Maui. Can we complain that we are politically oppressed?

UPDATE: There was a Hawaii rally. According to the organization's Facebook page, 1 (count 'em, one) person went. You got to admire their transparency, or maybe they just haven't figured out how to disable the counter thingy.

UPDATE OF UPDATE: Wonkette, which has pictures of the Washington impeachment rally, reports that no one showed up there. A commenter claims the Hartford protest drew 1 person.

It is useful, perhaps, to recall that 99% of Americans do not watch Fox News. It may be that loud noises from a very small number of mouths have been mistaken for loud noises from many mouths, because decibel levels are not additive, y'know.

Commenter Billy_Reuben (who I suspect is a medical researcher; just a guess) was pretty funny:

Remember last week when we were all laughing and joking about how maybe only a dozen or two angry losers would show up? How did they manage to *still* under-perform to our predictions? Where do we go from here to recalibrate future expectations of their grabassery? Will future events be attended by fractions of a single protester? Negative integers? Imaginary numbers? How can you even try to model something so weird and dumb?

He then added:

Once we get to functions that involve a probabilistic number of demonstrators less than unity, we have arrived at "Schrödinger's nutjob" paradox.

Book Review 333: Pegasus Bridge

PEGASUS BRIDGE: June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose. 199 pages, illustrated. Simon and Schuster paperback, $14

The story of the British Airborne’s coup de main on the left flank of the Normandy invasion is an old one, but it has its relevance for events, or would-be events, today.

The seizure of the bridges over the Orne River and the Caen Canal succeeded, as such bold strokes so seldom do. The attempt to rescue American hostage James Foley this month, foiled by the simple fact of moving the target, is usual.

But the British stroke did not deserve to succeed. As author Stephen Ambrose shows but fails to apprehend, the stroke failed except that Hitler’s orders controlling panzers from Germany prevented the local commander from crushing the small Pegasus force. He had more than enough time and muscle to do it.

Would that have ruined the British portion of the invasion? Who can say? It would have made it more difficult.

This was Ambrose’s first book, before he became a sort of figurehead for assembly-line war narratives, and like the British soldiers, he took plenty of time --  two years for the paras, 20 for Ambrose. (His reputation for truthfulness, challenged later when he became rich and famous, is not improved by his claim in "Pegasus Bridge" to have examined 2 million documents, which works out to 300 a day non-stop.) This allowed him to interview some of the veterans in depth, making the narrative of the attack clear and convincing.

The wrap-up is much less persuasive. He faults the British Army for expending its highly trained force as ordinary infantry -- a cogent point and another mark against the shredded reputation of Montgomery, who, as we now see, was all show and very little go. But he goes way beyond probability when he speculates that the same force, if available, could have repeated its success at Arnhem, thus (perhaps) turning that defeat into a victory.

First, at Arnhem the invaders would not have had the detailed intelligence they had in June. Second, they would have had at most weeks, not years to train. Third, at Arnhem as at Caen, the paras would have landed in the lap of skilled, veteran armored forces, and at Arnhem those tanks would not have been on a leash.

It might have worked, but the odds would have been very long, and anyway, Montgomery made the same mistake as that other overblown fool MacArthur that got the US 8th Army destroyed in Korea: extending a force on a single line of supply far into hostile territory with no prospect of flank support.

It might be as well, if you read this book, to stop at the end of Chapter 9.

Found Sounds 18: Open Pipe Symphony

I thought a long time before deciding I was willing to risk an hour listening to "Open Pipe Symphony" (JL Productions USCD 666; 1997)

As it turned out, it was more musical than most modern symphonic compositions -- whose premieres are often their last performances, too -- and very like a composed symphony -- 19th century kind -- in structure, with movements, development and so on.

The skimpy liner notes say to play it at full blast although "divorce threats may result." In one of 2 Amazon reviews, Meg Estey says, "My hubby loves this CD it is not for me and drives me crazy. But he puts it on in the garage and zones out while doing a project."

In reality, the noise has been detuned so that you get the Formula One whine and crescendo/diminuendo without the earthshaking volume.

All the recordings were made in France and Monaco, mostly during races but some also in the garage or on a test run. The sound is, therefore, very different from what you hear at an American race.

Cars include Ferraris, Peugeots, Porsches, Renaults, Matras, Mercedes and a bubbly 1928 Bugatti. Most of the engines are V-10s and V-12s.

The producer was Jean Lerust, a  racing journalist for Echappement and Le Dragon.

Lerust began writing in 1969, a little after I published my first auto racing (and first newspaper) story in 1966. It would never have occurred to me, though, to make a recording of a race, because Billy had already done that, and the results were not pretty.

Billy was a big, slovenly, slow, friendly, mostly toothless wizard who hexed NASCAR drivers. No, really. All of them believed he could do it, or said they did; and they would pay Billy to slow down particular opponents.

Billy did this by standing in turn 3 and scraping one forefinger across the other as his target came by. He was absolutely concentrated on his job.

Billy, who was a high-functioning moron, hung out at the body shop of the local racing promoter, Hank Hankins, and would have loved to have been included in all that manly ricin' talk, but a little of Billy was all anybody could take.

But everyone treated him kindly. Drivers -- some very famous ones -- would give him $20 to hex a race. Although Billy wanted to travel with everybody else, no one wanted to be cooped up with him in a truck for hours, or even minutes, so he had to take the 'Hound. Someone always arranged for entry tickets.

After I had known Billy for a couple of years he acquired a cigar-box sized battery tape recorder, which he used to record races. He then held the recorder up to his ear and played it, continuously, as loud and as long as the batteries held out. Unlike the song of the screaming Ferrari P4 running down the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, a musical rise and fall, the sound of 40 modifieds snarling their way around a half-mile track was insufferable, but it made Billy happy.

He may have been the happiest man, overall, in Virginia, despite not riding with the mechanics, at least as long as his batteries held out.

Book Review 332: The Great Hedge of India

THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA: The Search for the Living Barrier that Divided a People, by Roy Moxham. 234 pages. Carroll & Graf paperback, $14

When I saw the title of Roy Moxham’s “The Great Hedge of India,” I had the same first thought that he did when he encountered entries about it in books he was conserving: Probably another example of dotty sahibs left out too long in the noonday sun; or, if not that, perhaps one of the numerous attempts by the Government of India to figure out how to modernize the place.

But, as we learn in a few chapters and as Moxham learned over several years in the 1990s, the story is darker. Murderous, in fact.

The thorn hedge -- 2,500 miles long, around eight to 12 feet wide and 14 feet high -- was at its peak in the 1870s, but the story begins earlier.

Moxham skillfully weaves the threads, the question of the human requirement for salt, the development of salt policy by the East India Company in Bengal in the 18th century, the corruption, death and suffering that followed, and Moxham’s search for some remnant of the hedge, which was second only to the Great Wall of China in size.

It was also nearly forgotten; much of Moxham’s labor involved trying to find maps at a large enough scale to find remnants of the hedge -- if any were left.

Along the way, we get a vivid picture of how unchanged India is; Moxham’s guide came from a village not reached by any road, with no electricity, running water or post office. But also of how much it has changed; the guide is a modish city dweller, and the hedge has been almost obliterated by roads, extension of cultivation and harvesting of the trees and bushes for firewood. It adds to the drama that the out-of-the-way places where the hedge might have been left alone today are the home now, as then, of ruthless robber gangs.

In the heat of India, an adult requires about an ounce of salt a day -- thankfully Moxham does not bother with metric measures -- for health. And salt cannot be stored.

The Company imposed a tax so high that it would have required two month’s income of a ryot (landless farm worker) to pay for it. The hedge was made to stop smuggling of salt from western India, where the taxes, though high, were not murderous.

As so often when capitalists are involved, greed and individualism resulted in less, not more income for the capitalists, since salt-deprived workers are sickly, weak -- when not dead -- and unable to produce wealth. It goes without saying that the Bengalis were made poorer, but that was not a concern of the British.

It is impossible to say how many people were killed by the salt tax, but at least millions and probably tens of millions. When you add in the toll from famines caused by the secular decline in the value of silver (the currency of India) against gold (the money of Britain) the total reaches into hundreds of millions, but that is a story for another day -- you can find it in Mike Davis’s “Late Victorian Holocausts.”

The whole world is watching

Americans were shocked this month to see pictures of police — looking like, in the deft phrase of Doktor Zoom, Keystone Stormtroopers — threatening citizens with machine guns and tanks. Our grandparents or great-grandparents would not have been shocked.

It was only the New Deal that, among many other civilizing gifts to the public, changed the role of police and militia from agents of labor control into, more or less, guardians of property and ordinary order. As late as 1932, it was nothing unusual to see a governor — a Democrat no less — turn a machine gun on farmers protesting low prices. This happened just a few miles from Ferguson, Missouri, in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

Imaginary cop

The idea that the cop is Officer Friendly would have seemed outlandish to our forebears. Police were agents of repression in service of the rich, and everybody understood that.

This was true of both formal and informal police. It was most obvious with the “paterollers” of the upper South, white men conscripted to serve a few nights each month as cavalry to terrorize blacks and catch runaway slaves.

But it was also the case with formal police forces, once these began to be enrolled. Every boss knew that if he could not keep his workers in line with low wages, payment in scrip, company stores, eviction, blacklists and strong-arm men, he could call the mayor or governor to have the police or the militia shoot them, or their families.

Police were kept on a payroll in order to have them available to brutalize workers. The rest of the time they filled their days serving eviction notices for landlords and collecting bribes from whorehouses.

There is no instance known to me when police or militia refused to act as the bosses’ enforcers. Legislators chipped in by passing laws that excluded workers from civil rights protections.

It was usual to ride down workers and their wives and children with cavalry, and not unusual to place cannon in the streets to intimidate them.

In the South, the sheriff was also expected to organize and lead lynch mobs.

If the local arms of law and disorder were inadequate, in exceptional circumstances the regular army was available. In fact, President Washington used regulars against protesters because that was the only force he had available. Later, the militia was usually sufficient.

Despite what it says in the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights, the United States has never had — nor even attempted to create — a well-regulated militia. When used in war, the militia has performed poorly, usually running away (as recently as 1942); and in peace it has done nothing much beyond murdering women and children. Chivington’s Colorado “Volunteers” were a particularly noisome example.

Frank Murphy

Since the New Deal, however, bosses have not been able to call the governor and have him send out troops to shoot workers. The governor who changed this was Frank Murphy of Michigan, who called out his National Guard to protect workers who were under attack from police and mobs of company goons. It was the first time in American history that the militia were used to protect ordinary citizens instead of bosses. It was a startling change for the Michigan National Guard, which President Wilson had sent to Murmansk in 1919 to shoot Russian workers. The Russian workers fought back and over 500 Michigander militia were killed, most left behind in unmarked graves.

Murphy was punished by losing the next election, but his precedent has generally held. Nowadays, regular troops are even called out to uphold the rule of law, as President Eisenhower did at Little Rock; or sometimes when real disorders occur.

There is backsliding. Murphy’s adherence to lawful principles was shocking and unwelcome to the oppressing classes, who screamed, through their corrupt newspapers, for him to have the workers shot. At times, as at Kent State and Ferguson, large police or militia forces are deployed in order to create riots — as admitted, memorably, by Mayor Richard Daley who said his Chicago cops were there to create disorder. And the frightened right-wingers still want to go back to the good old days when Douglas MacArthur used panzers against unemployed veterans. Gov. Rick Perry has game wardens armed with machine guns in Texas.

But for the most part, the trajectory of policing over the past 70 years had been toward professionalism, training and enforcement of actual laws. The memorandum did not reach all districts, and racism is still in control in too many places, from the biggest to the smallest.

Still, the pictures of a masked cop training his rifle on women in the streets last week was shocking, because we do not know our own history. We have come that far. Or maybe we only thought we had.