I have kept this space usually free of political statements. Frankly, my position in my personal life makes it problematic to be outspoken online. And I don’t see the point in arguing with people online. You never convince the people you want to convince and the things that are important to you are too valuable to argue about as if you and your ideas are competing to survive. For those with hardened minds and no empathy, I have nothing to say or discuss.

I also wanted to keep this space dedicated, as it was, to my love of writing and the products of this work. However, if you follow me on my social media (primarily FB, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky), you might get some idea of my politics. If you read any of the three novels I’ve written up to this date, you’ll likely get a better idea of my personal or political philosophy. Otto von Bismark once called politics the art of the possible. I would say (though I would not claim credit for its creation if someone said it previously) that politics is the inevitable by-product of human interaction.

In addition, there are many other great writers and thinkers out there who are doing great work out there in addressing our current situation in America, including current or former journalists such as Dan Rather and Laura Belin¹, as well as writers from other walks of life like Heather Cox Richardson and Laura Jedeed . They do great as themselves; I do not need to imitate them, but admire them.

However, I think I can’t remain silent regarding how I feel about the current national circumstances. I want to lay out how I feel about politics – my ideology, that is. I’ve often joked to family and friends the definition of ideology should be how a person or group of people feel the world should be like rather than the way the world actually is. I guess that could be said of mine.

However, I think I can’t remain silent regarding how I feel about the current national circumstances. I want to lay out how I feel about politics – my ideology, that is. I’ve often joked to family and friends the definition of ideology should be how a person or group of people feel the world should be like rather than the way the world actually is. I guess that could be said of mine.

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No One Person Should be in Charge

Trust no one, not even yourself².

• Joseph Stalin

A man who trusts everyone is a fool and a man who trusts no one is a fool. We are all fools if we live long enough.

• Robert Jordan

If there is a theme to the United States of America, it is the idea that power cannot be concentrated in the hands of the few and certainly not just one person, especially if such people don’t have any constraints on their actions. This is the problem the American colonists had with King George III and his government and how they didn’t seem to have the same rights as their British countrymen. I can see why they’d be upset, because they were arguably the most comprehensive rights given to any nation’s citizens up until that point. The entire middle portion of the Declaration of Independence is one long complaint about how King George³ was screwing things up for the colonies and was ordering them around for no good reason⁴.

Because of all this, those leading America after they managed to get their independence from Britain decided to build a constitution with the intention of setting up a system of government with the intention of trying to make sure the responsibilities of rule were dispersed among different branches of government, and among the federal, state, and local authorities.

The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

• Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Society in any state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense

I am in absolute agreement this was the right instinct to have in building a democracy (or a republic, if you wanted to stick with Franklin’s definition). However, they didn’t get everything right the first time around. First of all, they didn’t get the whole “slavery” thing right from the get go, which is symbolized by Thomas Jefferson talking about freedom for all while he owned slaves, some of which he had exploitive and predatory sexual relations (not a relationship) with⁵.

The destiny of the colored American … is the destiny of America.

• Frederick Douglass

In my opinion, we never got the whole slavery and racism thing resolved, even after the Civil War and the Civil Rights Era of the 1950’s through the 1970’s. A good portion of this country never grappled with the implications of what slavery and bigotry did to our country.

In addition, there were more than a few people before, during, and after the creation of our country and our constitution that never wanted to follow the path people like Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and others laid out for us as away from autocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, and dictatorship. More than a few of these people are now in charge of this country. That is a problem.

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Let’s jump to something is a bit closer to my own experiences, not that politics isn’t something relevant to me.

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On What Journalism Should Be

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion – a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

• Edward R. Murrow

A free and truly independent press – fiercely independent when necessary – is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy.

• Dan Rather

For-profit journalism is a contradiction in terms.

• Jason Liegois

The more I think about it, the more I feel like my debut novel, The Holy Fool, was looking ahead at the current situation where journalists were, if not extinct, then perhaps a dying breed. The book was published at the start of 2019, it was set in the second half of 2008, but I think its critique of the decline and fall of traditional media fits very well today⁶.

Journalism is inherently a community service, even though it cannot be provided, like others, by the government for obvious reasons. The need to pursue profits as a stockholding enterprise has been at the very best a necessary evil, but it has started to overwhelm nominally honest newsgathering enterprises in some cases and in other cases be eagerly put ahead of any need to inform the community.

I’ve come to the conclusion true journalism organizations need to be nonprofit and/or community-based to avoid these conflicts and remain sustainable while keeping the public properly and accurately informed about the world around them. There are plenty of great organizations attempting to do this work, from the Guardian in Britain, ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity in America, and the Iowa Writers Collaborative in Iowa.

Economics

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade and manufactures.

• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

The history of all hitherto existing societyis the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

• Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

From my understanding and study of capitalism, the process calls for an infinite expansion of markets, customers, goods, resources, and services. However, the only thing in the natural world that continues to grow in an uncontrolled manner is cancer. This is not a coincidence.

I am a student of history, of past civilizations which expanded beyond their means and collapsed as a result. Jared Diamond is famed for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I am just as much of a fan of his follow-up work Collapse, which details why several past civilizations failed because they overextended their resources and capabilities.

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won’t be able to get help.

• Jared Diamond

Beyond questions of capitalism and socialism, American and un-American thought, we cannot have an economic system that allows people to starve and go without shelter, no matter how hard they work, and we can’t have an economic system that cannot be sustained in the long term.

If Your System Doesn’t Work, Get a New System

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

• Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

• Declaration of Independence

Just because because things are the way they’ve been means they have to stay that way. As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of things we need to change. We need to get money out of politics once and for all. We need to dramatically reduce the power of the presidency and make it much easier to remove him. We need to end this whole lifetime appointments for judges. And all of these are just for starters.

Maybe we could tack on enough amendments to the old girl to improve things, but maybe it might not be a bad idea to hit the reset button on the whole constitution thing. France has been experimenting with democracy for about as long as we have, and they’re already on their fifth constitution, which they passed just less than seventy years ago.

There’s plenty of good ideas out there for how we could fix government, but I’ve already rambled a while here. Plus, it might make more sense to save some of these ideas for one of my upcoming fiction projects. We’ll see.

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Oh, and I’m not a fan of MAGA, if that wasn’t apparent.

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1. The latter of which is one of the better reporters on political events in my home state of Iowa and a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup . ↩︎
2. There’s going to be a lot of quotes in this piece, so buckle up, brothers, sisters, and all others. ↩︎
3. By the way, he was a little nuts. Take that for what you will. ↩︎
4. For those who are curious, below is the part of the Declaration of Independence dealing with the American colonies’ issues with the king. Feel free to look for any modern-day parallels.
   
   The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
   He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
   He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
   He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
   He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
   He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
   He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
   He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
   He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
   He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
   He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
   He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
   He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
   He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
   For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
   For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
   For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
   For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
   For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
   For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
   For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
   For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
   For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
   He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
   He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
   He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
   He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
   He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
   In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. ↩︎
5. It reminds me of the story of early 1980’s rapper Mellie Mel, who wrote the song “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” one of the legendary anti-drug anthems of the early rap era, while doing lines of cocaine in the studio. The contradictions of man and all that, one would say. ↩︎
6. That’s probably one of the reasons why I set the sequel to the book (currently under development) in 2024, right in our current circumstances. ↩︎