Experience

Jimmy Carter had no connections in town when he arrived in Washington DC. If we had followed his program of energy independence, then we would be driving electric cars and using solar and wind power right now. Instead, we are paying extortionate prices at the pump and pumping petrodollars to terrorists.

America's friends in other countries have commented that whether we have a Republican or Democrat in the White House makes no difference; our bad foreign policy never changes. I have to agree with those who say: "What has experience gotten us?" The answer appears to be wars, a collapsing economy, high fuel prices, bad public schools, a dying planet (the number of species going extinct is accelerating), and a hundred other ignored problems.

For those who read this installment of this blog, there are things you can do to effectively solve this piling up of social problems:

1. Question whenever you hear some pundit say we need experience. If it is a talk show, then call in or email or write a letter and post it saying how much you disagree.

2. This is a general blog. Next year I might be doing cooking recipes and gardening tips. Those of you with the personality and ability to specialize and focus on this might consider dedicating a blog to making extinct the deadly meme (wiping out the infectious logical fallacy) that experience automatically connotes better government in Washington DC. It never has. On Inauguration Day, president elect George Washington had never been president of the United States of America before. He was simply smart and well-educated and smart trumps experience. He was our best president.

3. If you are a student trying to decide what to do with your life and have not chosen a major in college, consider a field of sociology called Social Problems (the equivalent of pathology in medicine). Your brain power might make the difference. You might make the world a better place.

4. Vote for term limits. "Experience" is often code for corrupt, compromised, sold out, part of the Establishment or whatever derogatory term you prefer. In McCain's world, black men will never be smart enough or educated enough to be president not even if they graduated top of their class (not near the bottom like McCain). No matter what Obama does McCain will find fault. He goaded Obama into going overseas. Leaders in other countries liked this particular American, so McCain was furious. What experience will satisfy McCain? None. What experience does the Constitution require? None. McCain has a clever speech and he's a celebrity but he's just not ready for the job.

5. The whole idea of reform is that what we have now isn't working. Support reform.

6. Read Saul Alinsky.

7. While being a radical is neither good nor bad per se, being radicalized can be a path to progress. Example: White people will allow black people to be brutalized by the police until white people experience what black people have to suffer. The newly recruited young freedom riders and civil rights workers went to the Jim Crow South as liberals but returned to the North and the West as radicals after being beaten by police for walking down the street and riding buses. The die hard segregationists have a different view: "They interfered in how we (meaning whites) run things." Never mind that black Southerners invited them to come and help out with voter registration. In Florida and other Southern states, black votes are still thrown away in 2008. [The point is to engineer things so that whites or men or the old or whatever groups you are trying to reach experiences what blacks or women or the young or whatever group you are goes through everyday.]

This is one tactic that the Establishment cannot use or use to turn the clock back. If some billionaire wants me to experience what life at the top is like, then I welcome the experience with open arms. That doesn't make me a sellout. Some of the new economy billionaires trying to bring green technology (for example) are hated by the old economy billionaires enough that . . . . that's why rich reformers get assassinated.

If experience is so great, then why has the Wall Street that dominates our capitalist system
1. resisted energy independence?
2. overpaid CEO's who bankrupt America's largest financial institutions that are "too big to be allowed to fail"?
3. opposed welfare for you while accepting corporate welfare?
4. invested in dying technologies while ignoring new technologies?
5. encouraged the USA to run up debt owned by China (these are the conservative capitalists who supposedly hate communism)?

Addendum: When Republicans talk about "experience", it is racist code for "if he lived longer than Methuselah, a black man will never have enough experience because we don't want a black man in the first place"? Or is "experience" code for Borg-like assimilation: "we want a puppet for our Establishment and Obama ain't a puppet"? Maybe it is both.