2019 will be a momentous year. Let that suffice for predictions. Now we have a moment to consider where we are at the end of 2018, and in my opinion most are having difficulty determining that because of a problem with their mental models. I’m going to talk about this without apologizing for length or scope. As always, my chief concern is leaving a record for the ones who will come later, after we are all dust.

I’m organizing this in several parts. First up, a mental model lots of people are using, whether you know of it or not.

1. The Overton Window

This is a model developed in the 1990s. By model I mean a conceptual framework for understanding things that are happening and to some extent how and why, the better to prepare for the future. A conceptual model is a metaphor, a hopefully elegant way of saying “this is like that.” We all have them, in all sizes and scales, modeling our own views of how the world works and even the things in it, from internal combustion engines to PTA meetings.

The Overton Window is a model for distinguishing what’s possible and what isn’t at any given point in time. What’s inside the window frame is the realm in which change, reform, breakthroughs, bad stuff, whatever you want to call it, is possible. What’s hidden and therefore outside of the window frame is the past, the future obviously, and whatever long term process timeline is unfolding. Here’s an example of how the Overton Window is used to explain things.

Same sex romance and politics as reflected by popular music in the 1970s and 1980s.

Feel free to blow up the window size to identify titles and pics.

Status of same sex politics and romance by the time of the Obama Administration.

Pop music may seem trivial as a ‘window’ on the realm of the possible, but it is in some ways sufficient. What’s important from this vantage point? We’re looking at a huge change here, one accomplished in the approximate ten year gap between 1999 and the first Obama term. (We’re naming him for timeline purposes, not as a prime cause.) In the earlier window, hit songs are about self acceptance, coming out, and the emotional burden of homosexuals generally in the American culture. In the later window there is no more asking for acceptance but aggressive, demanding self confidence, a vision of “having it all,” whatever that might consist of.

Overton Window 1’s realm of the possible seems to be what we might call a Separate Peace, a live and let live accommodation between the straight and gay worlds. Overton Window 2 is a realm in which open, state-sponsored gay marriage is not only a possibility but an inevitability. Mind that we are talking about a truly massive shift in public opinion in this differential, on an issue that cuts very deeply to the heart of the cultural consensus on the meaning of human sexuality.

The value of the Overton Model is supposed to lie not in any trick of managed perception but in the opportunity to identify change and try to track its progression from where we were to where we are. The fact of progression is perhaps the key part of any Overton analysis. A timeline is always there, right behind the time segment being focused on. In our case it looks like this:

The ‘open’ window is outlined in black. The timeline graphic has been there behind the wall the whole time.

Our interest is not in the causes for the rapid transition we’re seeing; it’s in the way the model actually works and whether its way of working is effective and useful. Like any conceptual model/metaphor its purpose is to provoke questions and suggest lines of inquiry. Where in the timeline do events behind the pop music culture line up with or explain the transition? What makes the same sex constituency acquire so much more boldness and how is the growth in their assertiveness, anger, and power accomplished at such speed? It might be useful to ask, for example, if we are seeing a spontaneous change of mind here or a mere inevitability mandated by judicial fiat.

It is here that the Overton Window falls short. The window shows us a point of view, not a chain of cause and effect, and it has a structural bias not shown but implicit. We have used the word ‘progression’ several times now. That is what the proffered timeline shows. It is showing us a context in which change is to be understood implicitly as ‘progression’s cognate ‘progress.’

How does it do this? Look at the way the model works in a technical sense. (Check the directional arrows in the previous graphic.) It is the window itself which is being dragged forward through a set of ordered time events that exist independently; that is, they ‘are written’ and the window has to move to keep up. Interestingly, this means that the timeline itself is actually pointing backward, progress working its own will on the focus of the window. The next window, for example, will bring elements of an as yet unseen timeline of progress leftward/backward from today’s future into a new already ‘written’ now. It’s not hard for us to guess that that future timeline includes TG rights, unisex bathrooms, and the demolition of the word ‘gender’ as a meaningful descriptor of anything.

This distortion is an artifact of how the model works, and it is quite easy to see how its reliance on the emotional appeal of progressive transitions can break down utterly and embarrassingly.

Here’s our final application of the Overton Window, focusing this time on progressive perspectives on Donald J. Trump:

Two distant dates. Two different perspectives. What kind of progressive transition will the Overton timeline show us?

Maybe the timeline will show us an evolution, a development, a logical progression from one mental state to another.

Huh. The Overton Window appears to be broken. It can’t point to real causes, and it can’t predict the ‘progress’ that will inevitably occur from this point forward.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. We are going to be needing a better conceptual model of what is going on in the heads of the Progress Party. It just so happens we have one.

That brings us to the end of Part 1. The next part, Of Graphics and Tables, can be found here:

Part 2.

Mental Models, Old and New

The most important thing a conceptual model of our present situation should do is explain the extraordinary phase transition regarding Donald Trump that occurred on November 6, 2016, and has not budged at all, not even a blip, in terms of the view of him cherished by the people who call themselves liberals, Democrats, Progressives, and hard line traditional conservatives.

A valid model will not involve reliance on opinion polls, pop culture fads, election horserace tactics or even overarching political strategies. The model will involve understanding the particular reality our culture as a whole is living in, which is not synonymous with anything that can be compiled from statistics of various sorts or the meticulously quoted words of those who have opined about the nature of 21st century reality. Why?

Because reality has become a very dicey business. Broadly and accurately speaking, reality is easy to define as the way things are, the superset of all things of all kinds everywhere, seen and unseen, from the particle and string level to the cosmological/multiverse level. Every kind of reality definition you encounter in contemporary America, however, is only a subset of that greater reality, because the one human drive even more powerful than sex and survival is the imperative to chop reality down to manageable size, in accordance with our own agreed upon criteria.

Here is the metaphor for that subsetted reality I propose:

Yes. A tabletop. A hard glossy, formerly living surface with no legs. Of course, every man, jack, and jill has his own tabletop, and those tabletops have legs you can see and depend upon.

There are others among us, of course, who have their own legless tabletops, but they are not on THIS particular tabletop.

The Main Tabletop is an extrapolation from the rise of science during and after the European Enlightenment that gave us chemistry, biology, geology, cosmology, physics, medicine, information technology, and other disciplines relying on the hard rules of the Scientific Method given us by Sir Isaac Newton. Breakthroughs in these areas also gave us somewhat less nuts-and-bolts-type disciplines like economics, psychology, anthropology, capitalism, earth sciences, and most marvelous of all, advanced mathematics.

The tabletop has no legs because they were finally chopped off in the 19th century when Newton’s mission statement was thrown overboard because it declared science a tool for better understanding and honoring Divine Creation. The toolset he devised was retained, however, and his religious delusions are now chalked up to his Asperger’s.

Hence the Tabletop of our model. It has a hard surface, representing definite tangible reality. Nothing is permitted on its surface but that which can be measured, counted, catalogued, seen, touched, stored, dissected, and plugged into various kinds of probability models and recordkeeping and modeling algorithms. Everything which does not meet these criteria is thrown over the side into the infinite nothingness which is the only larger universe the scientists dare to accept. The meaninglessness of the nothingness is the indispensable tool for declaring that it is not the responsibility of authoritative science to explain life, the universe, or the meaning of absolutely anything. What they have in place of literary mythology is a scientific narrative that tells them all they need to know about the weak-minded human race, where it’s going, and who should be in charge of it. Here’s what that narrative looks like on top of our table.

Don’t worry about the TV show. We’ll get around to it. Runs on PBS between pledge drives.

This isn’t that hard a model component to parse. Just remember that nothing is permitted on this table that hasn’t been subjected to the myopic reality criteria of the current interpretation of the Scientific Method. We weren’t there to collect samples and conduct experiments on the fossils of the cosmologists’ Big Bang. We also can’t draw any sort of line from the beginning of Darwinian Evolution back to the origin of life, which can’t be nailed to the table and must therefore be thrown off it. What we have are fossils of dinosaurs, Darwin’s Theory postulated (by consensus of the cognoscenti) as Fact, and the measurable, countable physical evidence of about 5,000 years of human civilization. Which is quite enough, thank you, to produce repeatable results on the subject of human empires, the inevitability of man’s obsession with building more powerful weapons, and only one what you’d call ‘scientific’ route out of the omnipresent pattern of doom: technology; i.e., building computers and systems and robots that are smarter than we are and uncompromised by dangerous variables like individuality. And please don’t forget there’s no earthly reason for looking beyond this particular tabletop, because the physicists have discovered proofs that we simply cannot ever know enough about the big mess called the universe to look out there for help or even answers. If we had any questions left.

Which leaves only the one residual and not that important question anyone has to deal with. Who should be running things as the human experience winds down. Scientists are too bored to do it. Much much better to make high six figure salaries spending government money on detail-oriented projects like whether birds or feathers came first in the evolutionary Jitterbug.

Did somebody mention government? That’s obviously who should be running things. It should look like democracy and say fine words about liberty, opportunity, equality, elections, and progress, while doing what is necessary, which is a hard detail-intensive job for experts in dozens of academically approved disciplines. The technocracy they create is immune to everything merely human that opposes it, and the control of the tabletop by technocrats is absolute. Why they have all those meetings and hearings and managed planning projects. Theirs is the tabletop the scientists’ model of reality brought into being.

All is for the best in the least dangerous of all conceivable realities.

Great progress has been made by the time of the 21st century. The ruins of the horror called Christianity, which began the Enlightenment and only by accident failed to end it, have been pushed so far over the edge of the table that they’ll careen into the void any day now. Thankfully, there’s a substitute for religion produced by ever helpful science, which retains the fear of apocalypse in the form of a long term mankiller called climate change that can be used to give the technocrats a kind of papal authority. The advantage of this kind of artificial religion is that you really can measure and count and quantify things of earth to a fare-thee-well, and no big amorphous phantasm called the Flying Spaghetti Monster or some such pejorative nickname has any power over a human government that owns the reins of political power, the applications of information technology, and the will to ride roughshod over the rebellious in the name of those who prefer to live under the wing of a bureaucrat who tells the same lies enough times. Take that, Spaghetti Monster:

Look at that sad cloud formation. Pitiful.

Whoops. That graphic made our tabletop look just a little smaller in the scheme of things. But the sheer size and extent and variety of things not included or permitted on the tabletop doesn’t give them any power. All of the stuff that doesn’t belong, can’t be nailed, or ridiculed off the cold surface of REAL reality just doesn’t matter. Look at it all:

Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody.

These are insubstantial fables. Everyone knows — and our experts have repeatedly proven — that there is no mystery about UFOs or Flight 19 or the Thunderbird of the Native Americans or legends of ghosts or worlds beyond our ken. You do the math.

Maybe not the right instruction. Math is a tricky subject. You can’t see it, measure it, or even count it or put it under a microscope or at the end of a telescope. It is far bigger, in fact infinitely bigger, than the science which uses it as a utilitarian tool. It is at least as large as the entire universe, and it contains so many nested infinities even these can’t be counted. And unfortunately the very sad fact for our tabletop is that math preexists mankind and, given the rules of operation of the universe as we claim to know it, math is older than the universe as well.

But there is no meaning. Math can have no real meaning either because it can’t be nailed to our tabletop. In that sense it doesn’t even exist. Something men made up by accident that looks sort of infinite from certain points of view.

Oh well.

What does any of this have to do with Trump and the curious case of the Overton Window? (Part 1 of this post)

This the end of Part 2. The concluding section is here:

Part 3

The Trump Enigma Explained

We’ve seen the universe of things that can be ignored because they aren’t real and don’t exist.

Esoteric crap. Who ever measured a sunspot or looked at it under a microscope or in an ice core? Nobody. Not even possible. Like figuring out where the gigantic moon we see came from: a huge (yuge?) mystery staring them right in the face. Nobody cares.

See that little ship riding a cloud in the upper right quadrant? It’s called The Flying Dutchman. A ghost story of the sea. People like the fantasy, retell it, claim to have seen it. No harm done. It’s nothing.

Until you open your eyes one day and look up from the all powerful conference room table to behold this:

The Good Ship Trump.

The rest of this is pretty simple. There is nothing of what you’d call reasoned analysis in attempts from every quarter to deal with the Trump presidency. The ones who would ‘remove’ him (and that is exactly the right word) cannot even permit his existence. He is not real, he is not of the table that is their cramped universe, and they have no tools or words or strategies to undo his offense against reality as they perceive it. He is an absolute, proven impossibility that is nevertheless THERE in front of and above them. During the campaign they had a full year to nail him to the table, put him under their microscopes, dissect him from stem to stern, count his ‘lies,’ graph his unfitness for a place at the technocrat table. When they found they couldn’t even touch him, they repeatedly threw effigies of the Trump phantasm off the table, but he was always back in their faces, never fell off in fact. Now they are stuck, paralyzed in an incredibly long wail of denial because they have nothing but denial to throw at him.

That’s why the Trump phenomenon, particularly the bizarre reactions of so-called smart people and their loutish serfs, has always seemed so insane. It is insane. It’s a psychotic break, the kind experienced when one’s whole sense of reality is broken into bloody splinters.

It will continue. Whether they succeed in their nominal objectives or not, the broken ones will never be whole again. Their table has a permanent wobble. America on the other hand has a reality that includes far more than tax tables and regulatory bureaucracies. And the Americans who elected Trump aren’t likely to forget that again.

DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC

SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Introduction)

This is about my challenge to people to share their personal experience of surreal places in space and time. The inspiration piece was a list of fifteen such physical places that are in some way overwhelming, disorienting, or otherwise unforgettable. I offered to share fifteen of my own, hoping the process of investigating their own memories would cause people to discover uniquely powerful moments in their own lives, linked to specific physical places and times.

This one is something that could seem trivial. Why I worked to capture it in a graphic visual way.

The subject of the experience was in part at least a motorized beast called the Countach, shown below.

SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 1)

The airport once known as Idlewild and renamed after a presidential assassination was always a depressing place for me. The ride to Queens was a stark reminder of just how much the great city of New York had declined. Highways in bad shape, shoulders home to numerous unremoved wrecked and stripped cars, the route itself involving a sad passage by the remains of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, tall weeds marring the view of the fairground’s once gleaming now rusting globe. The sixties and afterwards had been hard on world’s mightiest metropolis.

The airport has always been one of the nation’s busiest, the prime hub of NYC’s international flights, but it seemed when I was there that the place was always strangely empty, the terminal an echoing barrack and the tarmac not empty of planes but nearly so. At JFK you get a sense of how vast the property is and how bleak the surrounding landscape. Other airports are so jammed up, so full of themselves and their busy-ness you tend to feel like you’re walking through the equivalent of a transportation casino. (Except in Philly, but that’s another grim story…)

I’m sure the unpopulated, or depopulated, feel I got at JFK was not a special experience reserved for me but a function of the off-hours schedules that seemed to accompany my international business flights, the only ones I needed JFK for. This day was like the others, far from the busiest time, and I boarded the only airliner I saw, settled in for the takeoff, in a window seat for some reason I can’t explain because it’s so atypical of me. 

Not a very full flight as I recall, but more of us in business class.

The stewardesses (as some of us still thought of them) were bustling up and down the aisle, providing pillows and blankets, and I must have had a seatmate I didn’t want to exhaust my small supply of small talk with before we were even airborne, so I opened the blind of the window and looked out on the tarmac.

A ho hum glance.

And there was the most astonishing, fantastical sight I had ever seen at an airport. Much less than a hundred yards away, just forward of my window was an Air France Concorde, the first I had ever seen and the only one I ever would see. It was gorgeous, of course, more breathtaking in person than in its breathtaking photographs, low, white, weaponlike in shape but lovely of line and shockingly small compared to the Boeing 747 I was on.

Most shocking of all about the tableau before me was that the Concorde wasn’t even the most incredible thing in it.

Countach. A red Lamborghini Countach sitting on a huge wooden crate like some royal personage waiting with his vast luggage for dilatory attendants to arrive. Like ships, exotic sports cars are referred to as females, with the seductiveness, curves, and femme fatale temperaments to fit. Never thought of the Countach as anything but male, an Italian brute of a muscle car, four-square to the road and predatory in its stance. Here on a crate at JFK USA, the first Countach I had ever laid eyes on. Because they were famously unavailable in the United States.

It was a photo shoot. Had to be. The Countach was coming to the U.S. This might even be the first one. Nah, but close anyway. It wasn’t the Concorde that had brought it obviously. The crate was too damn big. It was a pairing of two of the world’s great mechanical beauties in a place of speed, glamor, and international flavor.

There you have it. My surreal moment at JFK. A jaded consultant injected with a disorienting rush of schoolboy enthusiasm. In my mind’s eye, I could see all the thousands, millions, of Countach posters tacked up on boys’ bedroom walls since the year 1978, a place of honor next to the iconic posters of Sophia, Raquel, Farrah, and whoever the It girl happened to be at the moment. The Countach was the It car of every boy who dreamed of going 200 mph with Sophia or Farrah at his side. None of those boys (well, say 99.9%, consultant talking) had ever seen what I was seeing now.

Cool. We done now? Should be, I suppose. But I like to show you old things I’m talking about. This was 33 years ago. Many of you have some familiarity with the Concorde and the Countach, close or distant, and more than I like to think probably know almost nothing of either except maybe for the tragic, fiery end of the world’s first supersonic airliner.

The Internet has no record of this event. I looked, using every search term I could think of. I was forced to a weak resort, finding photos on white backgrounds of the plane, the car (red!), and the crate. Particular angles required of all three. Laboriously assembled with many “close but no cigars.”

The Raw Materials

But how to put them together. I had Photoshop for a decade or so, but no longer. It perished in some computer nightmare years ago and I’ve not replaced it. The graphics I do must be done otherwise. I was complaining about my options to my wife, saying I can’t just post three different objects on white backgrounds and say, “All you have to do is imagine this one sitting on that one in front this great big one. Surreal, huh?!”

She said she thought it might be good that way. Imagination and all. Tried it. As you see here.

SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 2)

After I did that first Concorde-Countach rendering (or arranging), my wife liked it, or said so, and I hated it. So I dug as deep into my bag of graphic tricks as the bag was deep and produced this. I kind of liked it. My wife loved it. I was ready to go with it. Here it is.

I was proud of this one.

Conceptually pure. All elements in place. It was my favorite one.

SURREAL PLACES — JOHN F. KENNEDY AIRPORT, 1985 (Part 3)

On the verge of posting it I was reviewing all the interim graphic files I’d created with an eye to deleting a couple dozen of them when I saw a tarmac shot I hadn’t really studied before. Thought I’d try to up the ante on what I’d already done. Showed it to my wife thinking she’d probably agree that the all white background had a certain minimalist elegance about it that made it the right choice. No. She latched onto the new one with instant finality. “That’s the one. No contest.”

So here it is. I still kind of prefer the… oh forget it. This was the winner of the contest.

What I saw from the window of a 747. Almost exactly. My wife’s favorite.

P.S. Why am I boring you with the process of making a graphic? I think it might be the real proof of the impact this brief visual experience had on me. I had to do this for some reason. Pull a memory out of the mists of dreamy half-existence into living pixels. Not for you particularly, though partly, of course. But I did it for me. Re-orienting myself with respect to a gossamer airport romance, briefer but far more moving than a one night stand.