The Casual Blog

Last week we rented a house at the Outer Banks and had a family gathering.  We walked on the beach, played in the pool, rode bikes, read books, watched the Olympics, and enjoyed each other’s company.  I also took some pictures of wild horses at Carova and shore birds at Corolla, a few of which are here.

In photographing the wild horses, I generally try to catch them in natural-looking settings, and avoid showing roads and structures.  But that’s misleading, in a way.  A lot of the time the horses are grazing in front yards and walking along the sandy roads.  They’re really part of everyday human life in that part of the Outer Banks.  It was good to see most of them looking healthy, and some had new foals. 

Some mornings I walked on the Corolla beach looking for sanderlings and other shore birds.  In places there were good-sized flocks of the little sandpipers running away from the waves, then speeding back and probing for edibles with their sharp beaks.  Some of them were not at all shy of me.  But they’d fly off when a jogger got too close, or a dog came bounding toward them.  

Speaking of dogs, Nicholas Kristof had a thought-provoking column recently about dogs and pigs.  He noted how much we love our dogs, which is great, but also odd, considering how cruel we are to farm animals.  The similarities between these mammals seems pretty obvious – indeed, pigs are smarter than dogs – but somehow we’ve worked them into disconnected ethical categories.  We would never eat our dogs, but many of us are quite comfortable eating pigs.  

Kristof put it bluntly:

Just as today we wonder how people like Thomas Jefferson could have been so morally obtuse as to own and abuse slaves, our own descendants will look back at us and puzzle over how 21st-century humans could have tolerated factory farming and the systematic abuse of intelligent mammals, including hogs.

“Farmed animals are just as capable of experiencing joy, social bonds, pain, fear and suffering as the animals we share our homes with,” Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals, told me.

This is a lot more that could be said about this issue, but I’ll leave it there for now.  Except for noting, I used to think people mostly agreed on the key differences between right and wrong.  But Kristof reminds us that, at least in some important areas, such as animal rights, people differ amazingly in their basic morality.  Another example of surprising differences on basic morality concerns human rights and the rule of law. 

I used to take it for granted that almost everyone in the U.S. had high regard for our traditional constitutional rights (like privacy and freedom of speech and religion), fair elections, and equality under the law.  The various authoritarian alternatives that empower a charismatic strongman leader and silence dissent, such as fascism and Soviet-style communism, were, I assumed, generally viewed as bad.

But with the ascendance of Trump, this assumption is now highly questionable.  Trump has boldly declared his support for measures that are characteristic of authoritarian systems.  These include his intention to pervert the legal system to reward friends and punish enemies, to use the military to quash political protests, vilifying minorities, dehumanizing immigrants, otherizing gender non-typicals, and attacking women’s bodily autonomy.  

His support in the presidential election is currently around 50 percent.  I’m hopeful that some of that 50 percent have not got round to examining what he actually stands for and will reconsider their support.  But a significant portion plainly have no problem with his racism, his xenophobia, his transphobia, his rejection of fair elections, and his calls for violence.  They may be fine people in certain regards, but they have very surprising views on right and wrong.  

I just finished listening to a recent podcast series called Ultra (season 2) that puts our situation in a helpful perspective.  Produced and narrated by Rachel Maddow, it concerns the aftermath of WWII, and focuses on the rise of Joe McCarthy and his movement.  

Most of us were taught that McCarthyism was centered around an exaggerated fear of communism and false claims that communists were taking over the country.  We might know that in the mid 1950s McCarthy as a U.S. Senator rose to power by leading an effort to persecute ordinary people for sympathizing with communism, and in fact destroyed careers and lives.  But McCarthyism seemed relatively short lived.   We, or at least I, didn’t know, before listening to Ultra, that it was a mass movement that was driven in part by Nazi sympathizers and ideology, and its spirit is still with us.

McCarthy was a corrupt politician, a compulsive liar, and a remorseless bully, and his dishonesty and brutality were plain to see at the time.  But there were apparently millions who didn’t mind any of that.  They considered him a great leader and supported his looniest ideas.  Shortly before he died, a project began to move him into the presidency through subverting the election of 1956.  

Ultra doesn’t bother pointing up the parallels between McCarthy and Trump, presumably because they’re so obvious (the lies, the corruption, the sedition).  It is particularly striking that Trump and his team have been trying to label the Harris team as communists.  Alarmist and baseless name-calling is standard operating procedure in Trumpworld, and sometimes, as in McCarthy’s time, it works.  

But somehow I doubt it will work this time.  For anyone not already deeply infected with the Trump virus, any acquaintance with  Harris and Walz will put the lie to Trump’s attempt to label them as communists or otherwise wildly radical.  It remains to be seen whether the great start of their campaign will hold up.  It’s by no means clear that they will win.  But things look more hopeful than they have for a long time.