We forget so easily where we came from, what we are. Here I am, a solid citizen of Whatcom County who has served on a county board, has voted in every election for the past fifty years, and pays plenty of local, state, and federal taxes.
I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would likely themselves be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.
Last week, the sheriff of Whatcom County announced that the department’s role would be “a collaborative partnership in participating in [federal] Task Forces related to criminal activity that affects our community—not immigration enforcement.”
Our attorney daughter pointed out to me that the announcement was unnecessary because it is a foregone conclusion. Local officials who enforce federal law violate the 10th amendment (the states’ rights amendment). Subsequent supreme court decisions have made the separation clear. She cited Prinz v. U.S. 1997 SCOTUS.
The sheriff’s announcement was publicized in Whatcom News, a popular– at least with me– local news source. I was disappointed that the reader comments on the announcement were mostly unfavorable.
For the most part, the commenters confused the roles of local and federal law enforcement, saying that the sheriff was shirking his constitutional duty, when, in fact, he was correctly stating his constitutional role.
I am repeatedly amazed how personal sentiment changes people’s minds. Not long ago, the same folks who favored immigrant deportation and suppression of minority rights were asserting states’ rights against federal protection manifestos. Now, as the federal pendulum swings, states rights are sent to the back of their agenda.
I am also amazed at the changes in my home, Whatcom County. I can remember (just barely, I admit) when church services in both halves of my German and Dutch immigrant family were regularly held in German and Dutch respectively.
I overheard conversations about deportation and internment camps for Germans that my grandparents feared during World Wars I and II.
My grandfather was born in Minnesota, but his parents were both born in East Prussia, Germany. I vaguely recollect hearing that my great grandfather formally became a U. S. citizen in order to get a U. S. passport that would ensure a safe return home after a visit to Germany, probably in the 1920s. However, until then, my grandfather’s citizenship was from his birth in Wells, Minnesota, not his parents’ citizenship.
My grandmother was born in Germany and was never a documented U.S. citizen. Her citizenship derived from her marriage to my grandfather. In today’s parlance, an undocumented immigrant.
It’s likely that if you were to scratch into the family history of anyone whose Whatcom County roots go deeper than the mid-twentieth century you will find undocumented immigrants among their forebears.
As our daughter points out, the difference is that those Whatcom County immigrants were white, not brown. When I counter that a white at the bottom of the social ladder is still at the bottom of the ladder, she frowns and says its easier to climb to the next step if you don’t have to change your skin color; I have to agree.
I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would themselves likely be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.
Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.
Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.
Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.
Oh how naive that farm boy was.
Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.
I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”
A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.
This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.
G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:
“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”
I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.
We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.
But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.
The other day, I wrote about W. Edwards Deming on business success. Today, I thought of another great American businessman. I’ll bet many of my readers think of P.T. Barnum as the great huckster, the progenitor of Donald Trump, which Barnum probably was. The two characters use similar tactics, but Barnum’s enterprises were roaring business successes that changed the nation. Trump is such a business bungler, he bankrupted New Jersey casinos.
Daniel Boorstin, the renowned American social historian and Librarian of Congress, dubbed Barnum as “a genius at making pseudo-events,” in his book The Image. Trump, who announced digital trading cards with comic depictions of himself last August, also makes pseudo-events.
There’s no evidence that Barnum ever said “never give a sucker an even break,” or “there’s a sucker born every second,” but he was a master at using gimmicks and distortions to get attention. Boorstin reports that Barnum sent a man out to ostentatiously move single bricks stationed around his American Museum in Manhattan (now the American Museum of Natural History) to draw a crowd which would follow him inside every hour attempting to discover what the man was doing and also paying the entrance fee. The stunt paid for itself and greatly increased the notoriety of the museum.
The brick stunt was harmless, but Barnum also generated empty publicity– pseudo-events if you like Boorstin’s term—around racism and people with physical oddities such as dwarfism. In this, Barnum was cruel, but perhaps not perceived as cruel during the 1830-1880 period when Barnum was active. To his credit, Barnum successfully ran for public office on anti-slavery and fair treatment for former slaves.
Barnum readily admitted that some of his stunts were outright fakes, or humbugs as he called them, and the public seemed to accept his chicanery as good-natured entertainment. His museums captured the public favor. He raised the stature of the theater, which became acceptable middle and upper class entertainment through his guidance and publicity. He brought the famed Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind, to the U. S. on a popular tour that was immensely profitable for both Barnum and Lind. And, of course, the Barnum Bailey Circus was a crowd-pleasing success.
Both Trump and Barnum published books on how to succeed in rough and tumble business. Barnum had no ghost writer; he wrote The Art of Money Getting himself. Unlike Trump, who has reviled factual news platforms, Barnum wrote:
Always take a trustworthy newspaper, and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species. In these days of telegraphs and steam, many important inventions and improvements in every branch of trade are being made, and he who don’t consult the newspapers will soon find himself and his business left out in the cold.
This brings up an important point that may help folks who do not look forward to the 47th presidency. Follow Barnum’s advice and seek verifiable facts. They influence business (and life) far more than false “alternate facts.” People who act on false information are cut off from their species and make poor decisions, both in life and business. Barnum knew that.
Notice, like Boorstin, that pseudo-events, only generate publicity. Pay attention to events, not pseudo-events; your life will be easier.
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