Ep41 -- Not-So-Great Expectations

A couple months ago, I went up to San Francisco to get a tattoo, as one does.  I wanted to kind of abstract image of mountains leading down to the ocean to represent one of my favorite places on earth: Montana de Oro State Park near Morro Bay about halfway between LA and San Francisco. I found Alex, who does a lot of smoke imagery, and designed to tattoo that was pretty much exactly what I was imagining. I'll post his info in the show notes and you should definitely check out his stuff, it's really cool.  Now it's not the tattoo that I want to talk about. It's San Francisco.  I lived there for a brief time right after college and have visited a bunch of times since then.  

When I got there this time, I walked around everywhere, my old haunts and a couple of neighborhoods I barely knew. And it was just great. I felt this strange sense of relief. And I realized that it was because I was expecting the city to be noticeably deteriorated compared with my previous visit.  Now, why would that be?  It must be because I've heard over and over again from a certain political faction in this country how awful San Francisco has become.  And while I'm proud to say that, at least consciously, I know that faction lies about pretty much everything, it was disturbing to realize that their message had nevertheless wormed its way into my brain.  It really wasn't until I saw reality with my own eyes that I consciously realized my belief in reality had been altered.  I can only imagine what the reality of someone who embraces that faction's messaging must look like.  So this week with only a few days until the election, I want to revisit a topic I've talked about a lot on this show and remind people just how much of our views of reality are influenced by external messages, whether we take those messages seriously or not. 

Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first, a word about a sponsor.  

This week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by the Yes on 34 campaign. For those of you in California, you're facing a whole slew of complicated ballot initiatives this election cycle.  I'm not a big fan of our proposition system since even the most well-informed voters have a difficult time disentangling all the misleading messages swirling around these initiatives, let alone people who aren't policy walks and really don't have the time or interest to dig into these things. After all, that's what politicians are for.  So my usual approach to ballot propositions is, if in doubt vote no. If you don't feel strongly about an initiative or feel you don't understand it, then just maintain the status quo and move on. 

Now prop 34 is a perfect example of an initiative that's nearly impossible to wrap your head around.  But if you remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the messenger is the message. Well, with propositions, if you look at who is sponsoring them, that should give you a pretty good sense of what the proposition is actually about.  So if you visit the Yes on 34 website, you see that it will cut government drug costs and protect patients and taxpayers. Okay. A little further down, you see that it would drastically reduce Medi-Cal prescription drug costs and stop drug pricing scams. Okay, again. Well, yeah, that all sounds pretty good. And Yes on 34 is endorsed by the ALS Foundation, the San Francisco Women's Cancer Network, the California Chronic Care Coalition and others.  But it's not until you scroll all the way down to the very bottom of their webpage down there in the small print of the footer do you see that it's sponsored by the California Apartment Association, which contributed 36.1 million of the total 36.4 million raised for Prop 34.  Huh.  

Why would the California apartment association spend $36 million to cut drug costs and protect patients? Well, a big clue can be found in the actual title of the proposition, as it appears on the ballot. Proposition 34 restricts spending of prescription drug revenues by certain healthcare providers.  Now that "certain" seems a little odd stuck in there, doesn't it? And based on the specific criteria in the text of the proposition to define which certain healthcare providers would be affected, it becomes clear that this initiative is targeted at one and only one healthcare provider: the aids healthcare foundation.  

Why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, you might ask? 

Well, that becomes clear when you look at Prop 33, which is intended to allow cities in California to set their own rent control rules. That proposition is primarily funded by the aids healthcare Foundation.  Now, what do they have to do with rent control? Well, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation owns thousands of low-income housing units around LA. It turns out that the AHF president Michael Weinstein is a big affordable housing advocate and has sponsored many such initiatives in the past, which have failed.  Coincidentally the main opponent of Prop 33 is the California Apartment Association.  Now full disclosure weinstein and the AHF have a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to running housing developments. They've been cited for nearly a thousand violations over the past few years and we're the subject of a scathing LA Times investigation into the living conditions in their buildings.  But Prop 33 at least makes some sense. Rent control measure pits affordable housing advocates against landlords. Fine. Make your case. Knock yourselves out. 

But. Prop 34 seems specifically intended to prevent one issue advocate from being able to spend the money to even get their propositions on the ballot in the first place. And it's funded by that advocate's direct opponent.  

Quick side note. I don't buy into the whole corporations are people and money as speech thing. It seems like the height of hypocrisy when people who claim to only care about the original text of the Constitution established laws based on ideas pulled from the 20th-century ether. 

But if you establish that those are the rules, then let everybody play by those rules.  That hypocrisy I talked about shoots through the roof, like Willy Wonka is elevator, when those same people who believe in corporate personhood and that money is speech try to limit the corporate spending of a single organization that promotes ballot propositions that they don't like.  

 And we're back.  

This video popped up on my social media feed this past week, and I realized that it elegantly illustrates this week's theme. You may have seen this or similar brain teasers, but just play along and you'll see what I'm getting at.  Okay. I'm going to play a clip of a chant from some English football fans. It's a little tricky given their strong accents, but you can pretty easily make out the phrase, "That isn't mercy." Give a listen.  

[AUDIO CLIP]

But what if I told you what they're actually saying is "Baptism piracy." Listen again.  

[AUDIO CLIP]

Or how about "Rotating pirate ship?"  

[AUDIO CLIP]

And finally, what if I told you the truth? What they're actually saying is "This is embarrassing."  

[AUDIO CLIP]

So obviously the point of that little auditory illusion is that our brains don't just receive reality and pass it along to our consciousness. Our brains interpret reality based on priming and expectations.  You may remember a couple of weeks ago I talked about the era we've been in since the late seventies. I'm fascinated by eras what they actually mean, and what causes the shift from one era to the next. At the highest level, an era seems to be defined by certain broadly accepted worldviews, sort of the zeitgeists of the overall population. And I can't believe I haven't mentioned David Foster Wallace's graduation speech, "This Is Water" in a couple months, but when you're in an era, it's difficult to notice its defining characteristics because they're just your normal reality, like water to a fish.  It's only when you study history that you can begin to see how historically anomalous our normalcy might actually be.  

On Monday, Heather Cox Richardson's "Letter from an American" was about the great depression, which began this time of year in 1929.  She talks about the massive societal impact of that financial crisis. And then the rebuilding that took place as the nation slowly recovered.  

After the popular success of FDRs New Deal and Eisenhower's Middle Way, Professor Richardson reminds us that "politicians and commentators agreed that most Democrats and Republicans shared a liberal consensus that the government should regulate business provide for basic social welfare promote infrastructure and protect civil rights."  I'm not so sure about the civil rights part, but the rest seems pretty accurate. And I mention it just as a contrast that helps us see our current reality more clearly and within historical context.  

And it starts becoming obvious just how out of whack so many things are in our current reality.  You look at the billionaires playing kingmaker and controlling the editorial voice of major American newspapers and you can't help but ask, what else will we look back on and ask, how did we ever think that was normal?  

Well, that's it for this week. If you like this episode, please share it with a bunch of friends who you think would also enjoy it. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.