James M. Redwine

Franz Kafka

TikTok

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Photo by Peg Redwine

Congress and President Biden have decided to save America from the disclosure of state secrets by the Kardashian wannabees of our society. Peg and I do not do TikTok but occasionally some marginally functioning teenager will create a TikTok post that is so lacking in taste and talent that the main stream media airs it as a parody. Those are the only TikToks I have seen; that’s plenty.

Physically unattractive people gyrating to two-beat music while wearing too small bikinis is not my choice of leisure listening and viewing. Fortunately, the shameless exhibitionists who are totally lacking in true self-images almost never say anything. So, at least, we only are assaulted by their physical repugnance.

Why we are paying our leaders to spend countless hours on the foibles of misguided or unguided youths while Congress is profligately spending 100 billion dollars per year arming every country from Ukraine to Israel is a mystery to me. Perhaps they should concentrate on such issues as war and the environment or even why our banks are failing and why inflation is wreaking havoc on our 401(k)s. Regardless, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, is going before Congress’ House Energy and Commerce Committee this month to explain the First Amendment to people who should already know it.

When our Constitution was adopted the very First Amendment provided:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The great English legal philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704), helped lead the Enlightenment. The American legal philosopher, James Madison (1751-1836), owed so much to Locke in Madison’s drafting of our Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights. Both Locke and Madison strongly believed Freedom of Speech was essential to preserving all other freedoms.

It is ironic that our leaders of today cite fear of Russia and China as they call for restrictions on free speech. We have long rightfully complained that China and Russia severely restrict their citizens’ right to freely express themselves. Now we want to make federal law based on that same fear of American citizens that the Chinese and Russians enforce as to such patriots as Alexei Navalny. At least, Navalny actually has something to say that Putin should fear, that is the truth. TikTokers pretty much simply wish to share their irrelevant and boorish behaviors.

My guess is our leaders are as clueless about the workings of TikTok as I am and that they are simply knee-jerking to baseless fears of the very people who put them in office. What about such public policy as the 1966 Freedom of Information Act that was enacted to guarantee the people could monitor their government? Then there is the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act that allows taxpayers to track government spending. Have our current leaders decided too much information in the hands of Americans is dangerous, at least if that information can be accessed by foreign governments, as they can easily do with a simple request for data?

Of course, Congress and the President say they fear China and Russia and other countries will mine the internet data and use it against us. But every credit card transaction, every online post such as filing a tax return, every cell phone use is already “mineable.”  Any hostile foreign country can already legally obtain more information than they would ever need via our own legal system. I ask you, Gentle Reader, is there anything on TikTok that could be used to start a lawnmower much less build a nuclear weapon?

I would like for our leaders to revisit Joseph Goebbels who was evil but prescient when he said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” In other words, our government is making its own reality and using that as the basis to restrict our rights under the First Amendment.

Another author that should be considered is Franz Kafka whose hero, Joseph K in The Trial, pointed out that the enacted laws made it impossible for anyone to rely on what the law truly is. This is much like George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in 1984 where the only true purpose of governmental language was to control the populace.

In other words, instead of taking Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as our free speech guides, perhaps we should look to our Constitution and our history and rationally analyze TikTok and its mainly pathetic users. I point out that just last year (2022) the European Union, which we look upon favorably, passed the Data Act (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act) that was designed to standardize international contracting and commerce by standardizing digital and internet language. Should we not also want to clarify by expanding instead of restricting internet usage even if the usage may be frivolous?

I call upon Congress and the President to not put the means as Kafka might say, “to exercise discretionary moral judgment” by the lone U.S. Secretary of Commerce to determine “freedom of speech” when it comes to foreign technologies and companies. That is how the proposed anti-TikTok law is structured. Instead, let’s have faith in ourselves and also recognize the banality and futility of trying to draft laws that defy human nature and common sense and by the way, are most likely unconstitutional and unenforceable.

Motherhood and Apple Pie

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I am for both of these institutions and I bet so are most voters. So the slight of hand our politician’s must pull off is to make us think we are getting Mom’s apple pie for our tax monies when, in fact, we may be getting Jezebel’s cow pie.  

Take the Patriot Act for instance. The full name the naming gnomes came up with for this abomination is: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001.” An example of the Act’s true purpose is the secret FISA courts it created. FISA courts are Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts where the term “court” is turned on its head. Secret proceedings are the stuff of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, not places where due process and the protection of rights and liberty occur. Nothing could be less patriotic than The Patriot Act.

Much as we have ignored and subverted our core principles of innocent until and unless proven guilty in Guantanamo Bay “Detention” Camp, our legal and political system has incrementally used words to obfuscate and mislead. A detention center is where bad behaving children are disciplined. Guantanamo is America’s shameful gulag where we give the lie to our core values every day it remains open.

George Orwell was an English writer but his prescient works, Animal Farm and 1984, could be sounding the alarm for our government’s attempts to have us believe politicians pet projects are infrastructure and military incursions are peace missions. It is difficult to get voters to re-elect a politician if they know the person they are paying about $200,000 per year is spending trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds on pet projects and claiming they are infrastructure. Maybe what the politician wants to fund is a good idea but lying to the American public to get it funded is not.

Perhaps if we would rename broccoli, ice cream, we could save broccoli farmers from bankruptcy. Or maybe we could champion those wonderful brussel sprouts as COVID-19 cures. I am confident there would be some late-night charlatan somewhere on the internet or cable t.v. who would run such an idea as a Biblical alternative to vaccines.

As Congress castigates Mark Zuckerberg and wrings its hands at his subliminal manipulation of our youth, perhaps it could turn its spotlight on itself and start policing its own Newspeak. The politicians’ callous indifference to the citizenry’s confusion over science and religion or peace and war or progress over stagnation is in need of a good analysis by a contemporary Will Rogers or Mark Twain or George Orwell or Joseph (Catch 22) Heller.

Anyway, I cannot devote any more time to such pursuits as it is the middle of football season. So, for now, I must concentrate upon what is truly important, at least to me, and I will blithely rely upon the goodwill of the politicians to address the rest in terms that lull me back to indifference.

A Goat Roping

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Last Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. Peg and I joined supplicants from numerous Oklahoma communities at the Grant County Health Department in Medford, Oklahoma, population one thousand. Medford is 105 miles from our home in Barnsdall, Oklahoma but there were pilgrims there from even further away. The convocation had the feel of a Hadj with the tiny health department being the Ka’bah and Medford being Mecca. Instead of seeking a later reward we were all beseeching the higher authority, our government, for salvation here and now from COVID-19.

The congregation consisted of a continuous stream of persons all of whom had the same color hair, were of similar size and shape and shuffled along as if in fear of falling. Because Medford’s Health Department is staffed with small-town Oklahomans who were born in the 20th century they were unfailingly friendly and efficient. Peg and I arrived early, of course, as did many others and were welcomed in out of the forty mile per hour cold wind gusts into the 10’ x 20’ reception area. We were there about 45 minutes, most of that time being required to see if either of us had a bad reaction to the shots; we did not. However, since these supplicants were mainly friendly refugees from an Oklahoma of the 1940’s and 50’s, in that time we learned more about them and they about us than any government census worker ever would.

Our experience with the fine folks of Medford, most of whom were unpaid volunteers, was difficult to reconcile with America’s over all response to COVID-19. Whereas our federal government should receive praise for developing vaccines in record time, we have fallen way, way short in delivering the vaccine. Every day the battle we are in with the constantly mutating virus becomes more dangerous and ’Ole 19 has already killed over 450,000 of us.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) has her main character, Milkman, in her novel Song of Soloman thinking, “Perhaps all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?” Morrison clearly understood Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) anguished frustration with the legal system in his novel The Trial. Kafka’s main character, Joseph K, cannot even get the legal system to explain what he is charged with or why. William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) Macbethsums it up: “Life is a tale told by an idiot”. Apparently Morrison, Kafka and Shakespeare were trying to get their governments to provide something as essential as a COVID-19 vaccination or whatever basic public service they needed then.

Whereas most of us are amazed that our government ramped up vaccines in about one year, the euphoria over discovery appears to have interfered with actually inoculating us. It is as if we have been so proud of finding a potential prevention of the plague that we have failed to develop a plan to employ the prevention. At the rate we are inoculating ourselves ’Ole 19 will mutate us out of existence. Supposedly millions of doses of vaccines will soon be shipped to CVS, Walgreens and Walmart. That is great but if our government has to use the existing Internet portal system, the virus will outpace us. We must be able to sign up “at the door” of the pharmacies or have the vaccine delivered and applied at our doors. We have already appropriated trillions of dollars to respond to COVID-19. We have spent enough taxpayer vaccination money to send a trained UPS, FedEx, Amazon worker or National Guard soldier to every one of our 330 million citizens with a needle and a vile of vaccine and the knowledge, training and emergency supplies to check for and respond to any bad reactions. Although in the millions of shots already given there have been virtually no deaths reported. We are allowing an extremely unlikely deadly reaction to the vaccination to interfere with the delivery of the vaccine and the almost guaranteed possibility the virus will continue to kill us in huge numbers if we do not quickly vaccinate a large percentage of our population. Another possibility would be to have the vaccines delivered directly to us and then allow us to contact medical providers of our choice to inject them. After all, millions of us receive billions of doses of medication by mail already.

We inoculated the whole country for polio without so much as a ripple. We all have had shots for smallpox, measles, TB, etc., etc. without this bottleneck. As Jonathan Reiner, Professor of Medicine at George Washington University, said back in January 2021, “The bottleneck is actually the logistics of vaccinating people (not the supply of the vaccine)”. And former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb stated in The Wall Street Journal, “New variants of the virus that appear more contagious increase the urgency to deploy the vaccine as fast as possible”.

The craziness of signing up on Internet portals, waiting in lines of vehicles or waiting in lines outside in the weather adds another level to Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Inferno. Americans can order everything from food to computers over the Internet and get them sent overnight right to our doors with simple instructions on how to use them. A packaged, pre-loaded syringe packed in dry ice is not a space shot problem. A looped YouTube video and public TV demonstration would get to 99% of our cell phones and homes for those who wish to DIY.

If our government does not think we, their bosses, are competent to give ourselves or our families shots then why not use each state’s National Guard or our 2 ½ million regular military personnel. When I joined the United States Air Force fifty-eight years ago, they gave us enough inoculations in one day to save the world from all known diseases and some not even thought of. Surely we can adapt from that system.

By the way, in a week or two after we get the promised email notices from the Oklahoma Board of Health, Peg will have to get back on the online portal to schedule appointments for our second shots at a location somewhere around the state. Hopefully it won’t take a month of checking daily/hourly to schedule the second dose as it did with the first. And, of course, we each have to get a separate appointment within the three to four week allotted period before the next dose is due. All this must take place while the virus continues to out fox us.