The Right Way To Secure A Border

Whenever politicians and pundits talk about infrastructure projects that create jobs and put people back to work, they invariably trot out their favorite projects and hook them up to as many current issues as they can.  If they think green jobs are the wave of the future and global warming is the direst threat to the survival of the human race since Komogators, they come up with something like a massive investment in renewable energy to put people back to work and slow down global warming. Things like that.

I have my own pet infrastructure projects  -- cleaning up Fresh Kills Landfill and other toxic dumps across America, for example.  That one might be incredibly labor intensive. 

Or how about something like the Tennessee Valley Authority along the Rio Grande and the Colorado rivers?

I don't know what it would take to clean up and dam up the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers along the U.S. - Mexico border to produce hydroelectric power, but I know you could put solar and wind farms, desalinization plants and hydroponic gardens along those rivers.  You could put factories with fences around them there. You could create Economic Development Zones -- joint ventures between the U.S. and Mexican governments, the border states and communities, and the private sector -- guaranteed to attract businessmen eager to create great fortunes by getting in early on government programs.  And the power plants and solar and wind farms, along with the desalination plants, factories and who knows what else entrepreneurs might crowd into the development zones, would create a massive barrier to illegal immigration, while providing thousands of jobs.

Thoughts In Progress

"During the most active period of the Industrial Revolution, from 1795 to 1834, the creating of a labor market in England was prevented through the Speenhamland Law." Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

The Poor Law Reform of 1834 ended the Speenhamland System and did away with "the right to live" in England.  Outdoor relief was withdrawn from the unemployed and a "market" for labor was created.

Conservatives in America often compare Medicaid and programs like SNAP to the Speenhamland System. Some include the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Dealing with the problem of poverty has been a central concern of first English and then American governments since at least the 18th Century. 

Speenhamland is especially difficult for me. Polanyi thought the effects of outdoor relief and aid in lieu of wages on the rural population of England after the commons were enclosed were devastating, reducing the rural population to pauperism. With the government providing a subsistence level of income, wages fell to zero. The repeal of the Speenhamland system forced the rural population to sell their labor on the open market. Those who could not find work in the countryside or in the city died of starvation, but in the long run the supply of cheap, mobile labor fueled the Industrial Revolution.

Are our solutions to the problem of poverty in America dooming future generations of the poor to an abject, Speenhamlandish existence? Are there better alternatives?

I need to think about programs that directly benefit children. 

Clearly, the Trump budget and tax bill will hurt, not benefit children. 

The CTC modestly rises in value but does not extend to the poorest non-working parents; the EITC survives intact but faces new anti-fraud screening.

SNAP and WIC cuts, plus Medicaid work rules, remove automatic safety nets that have proven strongest at reducing child food insecurity and developmental delays.

Head Start funding slow-downs and CPB defunding hit two of the few evidence-backed interventions (quality preschool and educational television) that improve long-run earnings.

Linkage to SNAP means children bear collateral damage from adult work rules, echoing 19th-century concerns that the poor law punished families to discipline working-age adults.

So the Trump package turns more of the child-focused social safety net into conditional or self-financed support (tax credits, charity or private streaming subscriptions for programming, for example) and shrinks the unconditional, federally funded pieces. For conservative architects like the Heritage Foundation, that is the whole point; for antipoverty advocates, it breaks several of the rungs that help children climb out of poverty before they ever enter the labor market.

Cuts or administrative hurdles to SNAP, WIC, Head Start, and PBS attack the very in-kind and developmental programs that research shows yield the highest long-run returns for poor children—leaving a landscape in which the tax code offers slightly more help, but day-to-day supports for nutrition, early education, and learning are squeezed.

Within the set of writers / institutions who invoke “Speenhamland” to attack modern welfare policy, Heritage has the clearest, proximate line into Trump-era decision-making:

Robert Rector’s long-running papers on work requirements and wage-subsidy “traps” supplied language that showed up almost verbatim in the 2025 reconciliation bill’s SNAP and Medicaid sections.

Heritage’s Project 2025 handbook doubled as a résumé book; dozens of its contributors took posts in the second-term agencies drafting the bill.

Heritage briefed the relevant House committees while the bill was being assembled, positioning its Speenhamland framing as the historical rationale for tightening aid to the able-bodied.

I need to think about other views of Speenhamland and the Poor Law Reform.

1943

 

Receding Out Of Sight

I've become convinced lately that I was born and grew up during America's very best years, between 1939, when America was finally coming out of the Great Depression and about to enter WWII, and the Seventies, when America began to fall apart.  I'm sure other generations have felt and will feel the same way about their time in the sun; even my daughter, as she commutes in an armored SUV between her fortified apartment complex and her office in the secure zone -- whatever color it is that year -- may have the feeling that her America is the best America that ever was.  But I think of the war years, the post-war boom of the Fifties and Sixties, and the rise and fall of the Counter Culture as a rush to the top of the world, followed by a slow decline, a breaking up and drifting apart that has literally torn holes in the fabric of our society. I'm glad the generation that came before mine held America together as long as they did, and sad that my own generation let go of her hand.

Conviction

Are there any American institutions left that are capable of reconciling freedom of speech with the responsibility to speak reasonably, to limit self-expression to less hurtful forms than we've experienced in the last couple of decades? At one time, I believed the American criminal justice system, grounded in the Constitution, was such an institution. Now, I'm not sure. The courts seem to be politicized. Even the Constitution itself is the subject of sophomoric chalk talks, foisted off on television viewers as political analysis, while other commentators -- just as opinionated -- decorate their rants with lines better men spoke in better times. Is it any wonder that by now we view other opinions as, essentially, unreconcilable with our own?

The truth is unlikely to come to us from polemicists on the right or on the left. It will come -- if it comes at all-- tentatively, in the form of a dialogue, a collaboration. And the best collaborations take place inside the same skull, inner dialogues, examinations of conscience, that proceed haltingly, full of doubt. By their very nature, they must lack conviction, but lack of conviction is popular culture's unforgivable sin. That such a dialogue can occur any longer in the context of American pop culture is doubtful to say the least.

The Cyborg Revisited

This old piece from ten years or so ago might be interesting in light of speculation nowadays that large language models like ChatGPT are on the verge of becoming conscious in the human sense. Scientists are already beginning to talk about creating "meat-based computers" that incorporate living cells. I've been wondering how the film industry has kept up over the last decade, but the idea of ploughing through ten years of the output of Hollywood plus the streaming services is daunting. Maybe I'll turn the job over to ChatGPT. Give it the text below to chew over and add to. 

The Cyborg

Societies resolve conflicts between opposites like good and evil by reconciling them within the fabric of myths. For me, the struggle of humans against the not so human, which has been the subject of myth since Homer, comes closest to being resolved in the myth of the cyborg, a creation that is part human and part machine. The cyborg re-unites humans with characteristics we projected onto the world of machines and set ourselves in opposition to around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Machines are cold, dead and hard, but living human beings are warm and, compared to machines, very soft. The fragility of human beings is revealed in war, murders, car wrecks and plane crashes, the art of Schwarzkogler, Burden and Mark Pauline, the reproductions of Andy Warhol, and the films of motion picture directors whose forte is the action sequence, and, piling action sequence upon action sequence and genre upon genre, the Action Adventure Science Fiction Fantasy film.

The struggle of humans against machines, as it has played out in our best films, has two main variations. In the first variation, machines are evil. In the second variation, machines are just dangerous and it's the "mad scientists" who create or use them who are evil or insane. Machines have a potential for evil, but they usually include a built-in safety mechanism to protect people -- the first law of Robotics is not to harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm -- but, of course, the safety mechanism doesn't always work. Forbidden Planet (1956) is an especially bleak rendering of the mad scientist myth. After thousands of years of rationality, with the assistance of a machine to end all machines, the Krell are destroyed by monsters from the id. Morbius, in his pursuit of the knowledge and power of the Krell, is transformed into a monster who, subconsciously, seeks to destroy anyone who opposes him.  In masterful renditions of the myth like Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both the evil machine and the mad scientist versions of the struggle between human and machine resonate at once. Dangerous men are caught up in dangerous machines. We can see the Strategic Air Command as a machine out of control, we can see it as a machine in the hands of a mad general, or we can see SAC as a cog in the menacing machine we used to call the Cold War, a concept that comes close to what the Hindus mean by karma. A clockwork.

Until the Eighties, most Science Fiction films, and in particular the ones in which the machine is a robot, cyborg, or some combination of human and machine, favored the evil machine story and reflected the ambivalence and caution toward machines that had informed the Science Fiction film since Fritz Lang created the evil robot, Maria (the original material girl) in Metropolis (1926).  These films include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969),  Westworld (1973), The Demon Seed (1977), Alien (1979), and, finally, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator (1984), the genre's last solid rendition of a truly evil machine. The machine in T1, like Skynet, the Artificial Intelligence that created it, is bad to its alloy bone.

The separation of humans from machines in popular culture began to close in the 1980’s. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), more physical damage is sustained by replicants than by people, the replicants have pitifully short life spans, and, in fact, all of the women in the film are replicants.  Scott's film stands Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, on its head. Dicks’ novel is about a bounty hunter who is so human he is capable of empathizing with the ruthless machines he hunts down and destroys. That capacity almost destroys him. Fourteen years later, in Blade Runner, the machines are more human and compassionate than the humans. It's the machines who recite poetry and philosophy and who have "seen things you people wouldn't believe," and it's pain that keeps Roy Baty alive long enough to redeem the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard.  In Robocop (1987) the human, torn down and reconstructed with machine parts replacing limbs and organs, sustains massive injuries in his first encounter with a killer robot. And, in Cameron and Hurd's Aliens (1986), their sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the robot or "artificial person" is ripped in half by WATCH OUT! A XENOMORPH! Cameron and Hurd's word for a non-human life form. The humans and the machines are on the same side, and, at the film's climax, it is the badly damaged "artificial person" -- his legless torso resembling a broken, plastic doll -- who saves the human child from being sucked into space.

By the time Cameron and Hurd released the sequel to their first Terminator film, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the chasm separating people and machines was gone. T2, like The Terminator, is set within the context of an apocalyptic war between humans and machines that follows a 1997 nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The nuclear war begins when Skynet, the U.S.A.'s computer-based defense system, achieves self-awareness and attacks the Russians, hoping the human race will be destroyed in the nuclear holocaust that follows. In this, both films are consistent with each other, and with Dr. Strangelove, Colossus: The Forbin Project and other films of the Cold War era.  And Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Terminator have the same basic plot. Skynet sends a Terminator from the future to kill Sarah Connor or her son John before John can be born, grow up, and lead the humans in their war against the machines. In both films, the humans send a warrior back through time to protect John and his mother. It is at this point that T1 and T2 diverge. In The Terminator, the protector is a human being, and the Terminator is a machine. In T2, the protector is a machine, and the Terminator is neither human nor machine. He is something else.

T2 is a brilliant rendition of the mad scientist myth.  Three heroes, John Connor, his mom, and John's cyborg protector, hustle to stop the mad scientist before he can invent the basic technology that leads to Skynet. To stay alive, they have to stay out of the clutches of a new kind of Terminator who, though Cameron and Hurd call him a machine, is depicted, especially in his grotesque death throes, as essentially organic or worse. Unlike the Terminator in T1, who is a machine disguised as a man, the Terminator in T2 is an organic whole, not an assemblage of parts, and, although it's possible to read "machine" into his strength, agility and relentless focus, when he's consigned to a caldron of molten steel at the climax of the film, he shape shifts, writhes and bellows in agony like a monstrous animal or demon.

T2 is remarkably misanthropic and predictably iconoclastic in its assault on the usual people and institutions, including Ma Bell, bank machines, cops, bikers, foster parents and the city of Los Angeles, which is flattened by a hydrogen bomb. But T2’s rendition of the cyborg who is sent back through time to protect John Connor is heroic. And, just in case we can't follow the sub-text, T2 spells it out for us in a voice-over by Sarah Connor. Watching the cyborg and her kid, Sarah says: "Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."

In the film's Wagnerian finale, the cyborg sacrifices himself to save the human race by following his evil counterpart into the cauldron to make sure that the last remnant of the mad scientist's work, the computer chip inside the cyborg's own head, is destroyed. As the cyborg prepares to enter the flames, Cameron and Hurd use a series of close-ups to create a beautiful portrait of The Cyborg. Half of the face is human, the other half, where the skin has been torn away to reveal the gleaming metal armor underneath, is machine.



But there is more.  In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron and Gayle Anne Hurd gave us our first glimpse of a new, still unformed technology that might replace the machine as the not-us adversary upon which we project our worst fears. Having united human and machine through the myth of the cyborg, having accepted the machine model of human intelligence and anatomy to the extent that we understood ourselves better as machines than as animals, having realized that we are evolving, not into angels but into machines, we have joined with The Cyborg to face the uncertain, and, because our paranoia stays one step ahead of us, always dangerous natural and supernatural worlds. The myth of the evil machine is dead. We are ready to confront, in myth and in art, the potential of bioengineering and of our own over-heated subconscious minds.