Category: Red-Blue America

The much talked-about divide in America of “blue” versus “red” is real.  The two factions conflict at the most basic cultural level.  A “blue” mind-set pervades almost everywhere by its control of and access to media, corporate America, and educational institutions.  It invades and  conflicts with the more traditional outlook of “red” America.  You can’t get away from blue-America’s weltanschauung (worldview).  It’s omnipresent.

Super Bowl LI provided no sanctuary from the onslaught.  An Audi ad has a male voice worrying about the discrimination his daughter will face: “Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets?”  You can watch it here.

If  the commercial was targeting the NFL fan base, the probable $10 million ad buy may have missed the mark.  NFL fans  are almost two-thirds male, three-quarters white, 91% age 18 or older, and almost three-quarters earning $40k or more (as of 2013).  Was this advertising or sermonizing?

An alternative explanation follows the provocation principle of media marketing.  Just be over-the-top in some way and you’ll get looks, clicks, and tweets.  But why does outrageousness appear to overwhelmingly lean left?  I suspect sermonizing to be closer to the truth.

Pontificating wasn’t limited to a compulsive anguish over alleged gender inequities.  If the audience wasn’t pummeled with the usual pickups and beer, multiculturalism and its cousin “diversity” were thrust at viewers.  Airbnb, a marketer of vacation properties, seemed more intent on establishing its multicultural bonafides than renting a Maui condo.

Coca-cola trotted out a 2014 Super Bowl commercial with the same message.  Beauty and goodness are glued to racial and ethnic diversity, not to individual goodness, in these things.  To be in the land of the righteous, “difference” as part of group identity is the sanctifying grace.  Group “difference” alone is all that matters.  It stops there.

Once ethnic and racial diversity is conferred with the halo of goodness, where is a person to stand on the key “diversity” issue of immigration?  Quite frankly, opposition to open borders must place you somewhere between purgatory and hell.

An all-in for diversity creates a mind prejudiced against accepting  the jarring realities related to “diversity”.  Harvard’s Robert Putnam stumbled into a hornets’ nest in 2007 when he uncovered the downside.  His research discovered a decline in civic engagement and social capital in diverse communities.  People don’t care much about each other and they withdraw into the isolation of their homes.  He writes, “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

Maybe the withdrawal “like a turtle” could have something to do with the ethnic youth gangs.  Nortenos and Surenos gang alliances, MS-13, etc., plague many of the poorer ethnic neighborhoods.

Granted, gangs have been evident throughout U.S. history in all slices of the poorer demographic pie.

They are a notable feature of ethnic districts, much replenished with new arrivals during periods of high immigration.  It may be a result of a social anomie, an uprooted people without the civic controls of the old country.  Still, the prospect of declining public morality is threatening to any family having to live with it.  Perhaps, “hunkering down” and separating oneself from the immediate surroundings is an understandable reaction.

My guess is that ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods have a better chance if residents have common values and language, and a common middle class educational, income, and occupational orientation.  That would mean some sense of assimilation.  “Assimilation”, though, is blasphemy in the church of diversity.

Many of the Super Bowl commercials were sermons from the diversity seminary.  More than that, they are a window into the modern corporate soul.  Along with the appropriate dress and manners in the corporate boardroom, part of the uniform includes a blue-America ethos.

The secular martyring of girls and immigrants and the worship of diversity are elements of the dogma. Rob Schwartz, chief executive of the marketing firm of TBWA\Chiat\Day New York (whose clients include McDonald’s, Michelin, GoDaddy, Nissan) at halftime proclaimed, “If there’s anything that’s screaming out here, it’s diversity. People are saying, ‘Is this trolling Trump?’ I don’t think it’s trolling. It’s a big smack in the face of ‘dude, this is America.”

Corporate mission statements are bland affirmations of Schwartz’s enthusiastic declaration.  “Diversity” is a mantra in Coca-cola’s self-professed mission: “The Coca-Cola Company’s global diversity mission is to mirror the rich diversity of the marketplace we serve and be recognized for our leadership in Diversity, Inclusion and Fairness in all aspects of our business …. Diversity is at the heart of our business.”

Apple proudly announces its fealty at the “diversity” altar.  It’s integral to their employee relations and hiring:

“We see diversity as everything that makes an employee who they are. We foster a diverse culture that’s inclusive of disability, religious belief, sexual orientation, and service to country …. Creating an inclusive culture takes both commitment and action. We’re helping employees identify and address unconscious racial and gender bias. We’re cultivating diverse leadership and tech talent. We’re continuing our advocacy for LGBTQ equality, investing in resources for Veterans and service members and their families, and exploring new ways to support employees with disabilities.”

Apple’s corporate scripture is a veritable laundry list of the fashionable victims’ groups.

Seattle-based Starbucks is similarly hitched to the “diversity” train.  Under the mission statement heading “Creating A Culture of Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity” we find the following bullet points,

“At the heart of our business, we seek to inspire and nurture the human spirit – understanding that each person brings a distinct life experience to the table. Our partners are diverse not only in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age, but also in cultural backgrounds, life experiences, thoughts and ideas.”

“Embracing diversity only enhances our work culture, it also drives our business success. It is the inclusion of these diverse experiences and perspectives that create a culture of empowerment, one that fosters innovation, economic growth and new ideas.”

A Google search would uncover more of the stuff.  Corporate America is immersed in the doctrines of secular martyring and diversity.  And so are the kiddies.  The education blob is wallowing in it as much as any corporate HR department.  Nothing like spreading the faith to the next generation of soon-to-be activists.

“Diversity” has a prominent place in the curricular standards for the youngest of the blob’s clients, kindergartners.  Under California’s “Historical and Cultural Context” of the “Visual Arts Content Standards” for kindergarten, the state pays homage to “diversity” in the section titled “Understanding the Historical Contributions and Cultural Dimensions of the Visual Arts”:

“Students analyze the role and development of the visual arts in past and present cultures throughout the world, noting human diversity as it relates to the visual arts and artists.”

The “diversity” incantation is littered throughout your public school protocols.  I’ve got nearly 30 years of exposure to the hogwash as a public school teacher at the secondary and community college levels.

How does this secular doctrine enter the state’s mandates for teaching the kids?  The stuff percolates from the college ed departments, and they train the teachers and administrators.  A sample of such guidance is enlightening.

Lily Wong Fillmore of UC Berkeley, like many of her professional kin in college ed departments, lays out her view of the situation in her study, “The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” .  Beware, teachers, you’re part of the problem in her estimation.  Under the heading “But is diversity the problem?”, she writes,

“The problem has never been that the kids, whatever their background, couldn’t handle the rigors of the school’s curriculum––they could, and would have––the problem has been that educators have doubted that all of their students are prepared or motivated to do the work the curriculum required.”

You see, cutting to the chase, according to Fillmore, teachers and others are not sufficiently devoted to the “diversity” mantra.  More likely, teachers face the realities that Ms. Fillmore pretends doesn’t exist.  Ms. Fillmore, et al, can’t accept the uncomfortable possibility that “diversity” puts intense stress on public institutions.  But don’t mention that, and don’t dare bring into question the false god of “diversity”.

Despite the pressures on the schools, the ed blob’s satellites fully embrace the same party line.  The ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), one of the blob’s guidance and lobbying arms, is a stickler for “diversity”.  In its “Introduction: Teaching in Diverse, Standards-Based Classrooms”, “diversity” is approvingly referred to as a “mosaic”.

“Factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and language also contribute to the classroom mosaic and may influence the cultural characteristics that students bring.”

And what do the ASCD’s “experts” want to do about it?  “Diversity”, the abstraction, is always-and-forevermore good and the young ‘uns must be made to accept it.  Littered throughout the “Teaching in Diverse …” document is fetishization of “diversity”.  As in,

“Cultural diversity gives students a chance to learn about different languages, customs, and worldviews.”

“Through everyday activities in diverse school settings, students are challenged to find ways of interacting effectively with students who are culturally different. In so doing, they develop important skills in cross-cultural competence.”

The mind-set is buried in the psyche from a person’s earliest days all the way through adulthood.  The problem isn’t with “diversity” as such.  It’s the worship of “diversity”.  The thing absorbs so much of the attention of the school that other necessities begin to recede, like discipline.  In fact, “diversity” may be encouraging behavioral problems by giving a green light to grievance, real or imagined.  The result can be unsafe schools.  Take a look.

What is needed is to replace the overbearing “diversity” dogma with simple human kindness and respect.  Yet, simple kindness isn’t nearly as useful  in preparing young minds if your goal is the student taking one side in controversial issues … like immigration.  C.S. Lewis wrote about the mind-forming potential of a biased curriculum in Abolition of Man.

“It is not a theory they put into his [the student] mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”

After years of “diversity” sermonizing, we have a generation much less likely to understand the counter argument to broad and nearly unfettered immigration.  Not being able to understand the argument makes it easier to dismiss as mere bigotry.  However, the real bigotry is a prejudice against other and unfamiliar arguments.  This bigotry was implanted by a tendentious abstraction from the beginning.

Everywhere we look, we find the tentacles of the exhortation to treat girls and immigrants as secular martyrs.  Alongside, the drumbeat of “diversity” plants multiculturalism as an unalloyed good.  Counterfactual realities are waved aside as nonexistent. From Super Bowl commercials to the corporate boardroom to the classroom, it’s the same mind-numbing message.   It’s as if we are expected to ignore the daily realities that brush up against us on the street and in our classrooms.

Chico Marx in Duck Soup could very well be the spokesman for the blue-America congregation when he said,  “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

RogerG

Sources:

“Escapism Reigns in Super Bowl Commercials, but Politics Proves Inescapable”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/5/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/business/super-bowl-commercials-politics.html?_r=0

“27 JAN 2013 SPORTS FAN DEMOGRAPHICS”, Danielle Eby, openddorse, http://opendorse.com/blog/2013-sports-fan-demographics/

“Challenge for Super Bowl Commercials: Not Taking Sides, Politically”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/2/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/super-bowl-advertising-fox-border-wall.html

“The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” Lily Wong Fillmore, University of California at Berkeley, The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !”

California, Kindergarten: Visual and Performing Arts: Visual Arts Content Standards, http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/vakindergarten.asp

Coca-cola website, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/diversity

Apple website, http://www.apple.com/diversity/

Starbucks website,  https://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/community/diversity-and-inclusion

ASCD, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109011/chapters/Introduction@_Teaching_in_Diverse,_Standards-Based_Classrooms.aspx

“The downside of diversity: A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?”, Michael Jonas, 8/5/2007, Boston Globe, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/

While reading the December 20, 2016 issue of Forbes, I ran into an article, “The Just 100: America’s Best Corporate Citizens”.  It extolled certain companies in a variety of industries for their humane and environmentalist policies.

Further into the issue was a small piece titled, “Giving Big to Change the World”.  It identified 10 large donations that go big to “Change the World”.  Michael Bloomberg’s $30 million grant to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the Donald Graham and William and Karen Ackman’s $50 million contribution to TheDream.US for scholarships to the undocumented, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation’s handout to The ClimateWorks Foundation to mold a “low-carbon society” are but a few examples.

Both pieces shared space with an article on Silicon Valley’s tech dynamo NIVIDIA and one of its founders, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.  Not uncommon for the Valley’s success stories, the author, Aaron Tilley, celebrated the lavish employee perks and environmentalism that permeates the corporate culture.

((Huang and NIVIDIA)

What’s the point?  Colossal corporate America, big philanthropy, and Silicon Valley inhabit “blue” America.  By “blue”, I mean bastions of progressivism, modern liberalism, and the Left.  The terms are practically synonymous.  And “blue” America is toxic to the rest of the country, called “red” America.

Today’s progressivism encompasses a fixation on sexual/melanin-count/ethnic diversity and solipsism (the relativistic libertine individual as the center of all things).  It also incorporates environmentalism.  Environmentalism isn’t science.  It’s ideology.  It is a cluster of beliefs at home with progressivism.

People sometimes confuse environmentalism with science, and try to bleach environmentalism of its “ism”.  The two are distinct things.  Science can depict the heat-trapping properties of CO2.  It can’t predetermine policy choices requiring more than “heat-trapping” as a consideration.  Filling the gap from fact to decision is environmentalism’s ideological bias to socially engineer a particular definition of the better person and society.  The alleged betterment aligns with the prejudices of “blue” America to the detriment of “red” America.

The consequences are a purging of progressives in “red” America as “blue” America’s policy preferences threaten to destroy the livelihoods of  many in “red” America.  The 2016 election was a clash of the two Americas.

In Salena Zito’s piece in the Washington Examiner (1/29/17),  “The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, the Democrats are facing near extinction in “red” America.  As Kevin, a longtime Johnstown, Pa., Democrat and Hillary voter, said,

“There is no one who looks like me in the party anymore.  Every single thing that is part of my weekly routine is constantly under attack by my own party. I am a gun owner, I am pro-life and I work in the energy sector. That pretty much makes me an enemy of my own party.”

The party is in the process of cannibalizing the more moderate Blue Dogs in its caucus.  The faction has shrunk from 44 in 2006 to the 17 of today.   The handwriting for the Dogs appeared on the wall in 2006.  Joe Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, a classic Blue Dog, lost the party primary to the leftist Ned Lamont.  Lieberman won the general running as an independent.  Today, the party is the result of the cross-breeding of the Sierra Club, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.  There’s no room for the pro-lifer … or the coal miner.

The party is reflexively Left and increasingly relegated to urban islands, college towns, and the coasts.  The collapse of the party in the vast region between the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges and the western edges of Atlantic coastal plain is recounted in the loss of statehouses, governorships, and federal officeholders in this vast area not normally seen as haunts for the beautiful and trendy people.

The denizens of “blue” America are surprised that a West Virginia coal miner might find the infatuation with low carbon as a threat to the family income.  Amazingly, the very thing that the trendy lefties are trying to destroy, coal, along with thousands of livelihoods, may end up rescuing states like California from the self-inflicted blackouts that will strangle those Santa Clara server farms.

You see, that “low-carbon” future may mean a chaotic energy one.  “Sustainable” energy really means “variable” energy.  Solar and wind don’t track household use.  Solar peeks during the day while the ac continues whirring away at night.  And, of course, the wind is the wind.

Sorry, there’s no way to store any surplus generated during the day or when the wind is howling.  You use or lose it.

To keep energy flowing in the grid at all times during peaks and when lunar radiance has replaced solar, you need the backstop of nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro, and geothermal.  But the phobia of climate change, so much in vogue in the blue bubbles, has resulted in a breakdown of the backstop.  Blue states like California will feel the pinch.

Natural gas is the backstop.  It is preferable not only because it’s cheaper.  It’s because the alternatives have been executed (coal), fallen into obsolescence (nuclear), and nature doesn’t cooperate with droughts (hydro) and subsurface volcanism (geothermal).

For the lefty tekkies, coal is evil coal.  A coal company exec will be a lonely person  in the Santa Clara social circuit.  Those coal-fired plants in the blue fiefdoms have long since gone the way of the dodo bird.  Obama’s people were trying to exterminate the things nationwide before the Trump train disrupted the endeavor.

That leaves natural gas.  Fracking – another thing despised by the activists – has made it cheap, for now.  Prices are expected to rise this year.  It is transported by pipeline, another thing on the activist hit list.

Storage is limited  in a few central locations.  If anything should happen to those places, especially in states handcuffed to windmills and solar panels, well, buy a generator, get a gun for protection (do this at least 2 weeks before things go dark), and barricade yourself in your home.

California was warned by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) of blackouts last year.  In 2005, LA’s Aliso Canyon gas storage facility was closed due to a leak.  It has only partially reopened.  The nearby La Paloma plant will close soon as the direct fallout of the state’s climate change policies.  The backstop in Southern California is beginning to be dismantled.

New York, and much of the northeast, has similarly tacked left.  Tony Clark, ex-FERC commissioner, said, “The Northeastern states are notorious for policies that de-industrialize their economies. They are nothing if not consistent.”  If you lack a graduate degree in computer science, a resume’ chock-a-block full of tekkie employment, and sufficient personal wealth to rise above the over-inflated market,  make a mad dash away from the coasts.  Rescue yourself from “blue” lunacies.

When the lights start going out, will that sober up Angelinos and those in Manhattan penthouses to a greater appreciation of coal?

“Red” America understands that “blue” America is trying to impose a fantasy.  If “blue” America is granted the power to do it, “red” America loses its livelihoods and “blue” America gets to experience “Escape from New York”.  Lose, lose.  Eh?

2016 was the year red said “no” to blue.

RogerG

Sources:

Forbes, 12/20/16

“The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, 1/29/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-democrats-diversity-challenge/article/2613114

“Coal to the rescue”, John Siciliano, Washington Examiner, 1/30/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/coal-to-the-rescue/article/2613181