Mincing Words

It seems the entire world has come to the conclusion that mincing words is acceptable. We have leaders who, when asked if they will do 'A' respond by saying they fully support 'X, Y and Z', without answering the question. We have corporations making statements about horrific abuses of power or failure of oversight saying, 'We value the safety of our employees..." or "We are committed to....", again without answering the question.

Additionally, emotionally-driven people are demanding misusing the use of terms like 'they' and 'them' to refer to individual, simply to fit their own preferences; read a modern news story about someone demanding to be referred to as 'them' and you can't tell if an individual or a crowd is the subject of the article. We're trading verbal precision to accommodate the emotional whims of a small, misguided segment of society. 

It's been demonstrated that language has a huge impact on cognition; how we speak, and the language we have available to us shapes our thoughts and actions in a fundamental way. By ceding the concept that fair questions require fair answers and words have specific meanings, we're damaging our society in a way that is probably not yet fully apparent. 

Clarity of thought and the ability to precisely articulate those thoughts is fundamental to meaningful communication, and meaningful communication is fundamental to a healthy society. By accepting imprecise language, we're giving that up. 

The important part of all this to remember is that the people demanding these changes-the politicians refusing to answer, the corporations talking around an issue and the people demanding modifying word usage to assuage their personal predilections KNOW this. That's the point of it all-control the way someone speaks and you'll eventually control the way they think; illegal aliens become undocumented workers, and mothers become birthing people.

The natural reaction of a true libertarian is to let folks do as they wish, as long as they're not hurting anyone, but language belongs to all of us; allowing it to be purposely distorted DOES hurt us, and intentionally so-when your children can't tell the difference between someone who migrated here and someone who snuck into the country illegally, you're damaging their understanding of the world. 

While most of us (libertarians, that is) naturally shrink from directive behavior, this is a place we need to stand and fight-letting people undermine the language YOU THINK IN is about as fundamental as damage gets. 

Machines, Machinery and Life

Machines aren't alive; everyone knows this, except possibly the people who work on and with some of them. 

The machine I'm currently on certainly seems alive; it's spent the last ten minutes trying to spit me off it in some sort of weird, innocent puppy-play way. It wants me to roll on the rug and play tug of war, and isn't going to settle for me sitting on the couch and scratching its ears.

The word, of course, is 'anthropomorphization'; the endowing of non-human animals or inanimate objects with the traits of humanity. It's an illogical kind of thing, and the basis for almost all the really good Disney characters of the last century. I know this, but can't help thinking this new bike has a distinct personality.

I decide it might be safer to play along, then, and so I stop futzing about and start riding with more intent. Puppy-Motorcycle signals its approval by immediately settling into its suspension and roaring toward redline as I downshift and speed up. It certainly seems happier now, and, like seeing a puppy you're playing with enjoy itself, this is making me happier. 

I'm no longer the rider, I'm a co-conspirator, listening to the bad advice getting whispered in my ear and seeing if the footpegs will touch in the corners now that I've warmed the tires up a bit, and turning that pesky traction control down so the front wheel can get off the ground and stretch a bit on the corner exits. I'm still the one turning the bars and pulling the levers, but I'm no longer telling the bike what to do; we're cooperating in all this. It's a partnership, rather than a rider and a bike, a team rather than someone controlling a dumb machine.

I glance down at the dash (a quick one, this is a curvy road) and I'm astonished at the speed that's registering. My instinctive reaction is to slow down-I don't really like hospital food, and don't really feel like bringing in a whole new crop of skin, something the armored gear I'm wearing could never fully prevent if Mr. Puppy-Motorcycle and I were to make some tiny miscalculation at this speed and on this road. But as if sensing this, the bike settles the front end into the next curve even more solidly, giving feedback through the bars showing the suspension working and tire gripping with insane force as it leans over and rails through. "Don't worry", it says, "we've got this. Not breaking a sweat here." I listen, and we continue to speed through these corners faster than I've ever dared on any other bike.

I know machines aren't alive. Every sane person knows that. 

Except for really, really good motorcycles. 

Math Tests

I remind myself that it is, when you boil it all down, essentially a math problem. Weight plus speed equals momentum, and the rubber/asphalt coefficient of friction times the surface area of the contact patch of the tires tells me the forces I’ve got to manage, and what I’ve got available to manage them. Really just a math problem.

 

Except it doesn’t feel like a math problem, it feels like I’m carrying 70MPH into a corner that is quite a bit tighter than I expected, I’m already leaning in while just BARELY trailing the front brake, and I know if I ask much more of that credit card-sized contact patch up front it’s going to throw up its little hands and decide its life would be simpler if we all just took a moment to slide across the next couple hundred feet and go rest in that barbed wire on the side of the road. I’d rather not.

 

So I ramp up the front brake as much as I dare, lean the bike down HARD to tighten the corner and somehow, inexplicably, don’t even so much as cross the painted stripe outlining the edge of the road along the shoulder. I try not to look surprised that I’m still wearing all the skin I came with, though no one is there to see, straighten the bike up as we exit and make the triple soar toward its redline while the front wheel goes light.

 

I’ve never been good at math, but I’m pretty good at this. Curves and apexes, momentum and friction, put faces on the numbers and forces I struggled with when they were abstract ideas in a classroom. The little chatter you get from the front tire when it’s braking as hard as it can, right before it locks and starts to skid, is math in a language I can understand. The weight of bike and rider shifting inward and down as I countersteer into a corner is applied physics that conveys, with visceral precision, the tightening of cornering forces that will keep us on this curvy, twisty road and out of the trees-or worse, yet, that barbed wire.

 

It’s best not to look too hard at the barbed wire as it shudders past, speed making it turn to snaking ribbons that whip along the road. It’s best not to look at the oncoming traffic, either, or to wonder if the driver of that big SUV is going to cross the centerline and swing into my lane. Trainers call it ‘target fixation’, and avoiding it is a learned skill, but in reality it’s just exercising that most magical of human abilities; the gift of ignoring what isn’t relevant to the moment. It’s how a person can live their whole life happily, knowing they’ll probably die in pain, or wracked by illness, or alone far from home. Right now, I’m ignoring the fact that a minor miscalculation in some fairly complex mathematical calculations taking place somewhere in the back of my head could bring down the curtain on my own personal little world. Ignoring it, and simultaneously glorying in it; living in the math problems like a pop quiz where one mistaken answer means, at the very least, pain.

 

I’ve never been that good at math, but I’m pretty good at this. 

Science as Assurance, or "Experts Say"

     As we enter the post-COVID world (or more accurately, the 'post-COVID hysteria' world, since COVID still exists), it makes sense to reflect on how society managed the only real 'pandemic' to affect America in my lifetime. (The H1N1 outbreak in 2009, while more virulent, wasn't met with the same hysteria, largely because it wasn't as contagious. I can personally attest, however, having had both that COVID isn't big enough to be H1N1's weakling little brother....)

    There were myriad lessons learned from how countries and individuals reacted to a new virus outbreak, and one of the lessons is probably the wide variation in what each of us would consider the lessons to be learned; fear, whether justified or not, showed the incredibly wide variation amongst us for risk acceptance, driving such a wide range of responses that some folks screamed for the 'unpersoning' of folks refusing an experimental vaccine, and others demanding to be left to choose for themselves.

    Of course, the 800# gorilla in any room, the Federal government in the US and its analogs in Europe and other places, was at the crux of the dispute, since it's not really possible for people to compel others behavior without the force of the government behind them. As mentioned, everyone takes their own lessons away from how that went; since this blog focuses on the intersection between government, anarchy and chaos, it seems appropriate we discuss the ones which relate to that:

    We Got the Leadership We Deserved

    A governmental system where leaders are chosen by popularity is doomed to fail in the situations where real intelligence and competence is required. Oh, I know folks will tell you they look at a candidate's record, their concordance with the voter's own beliefs and all that, but it's a popularity contest in the end. We have debates, which approach game show levels of shallowness, and are consumed by the majority of the population as curated sound bites at that. In the end, however, it's common to hear people say, "I just like him/her better" or "I think they're trustworthy." 

    Compare the skills needed to campaign-the ability to deliver short, memorable messages repeatedly, the ability to organize people toward a goal and the ability to raise money-and you'll find little overlap with the ability to understand emerging science, understand mass psychology or seek advice from subject matter experts effectively. In fact, most of our elected officials have been nothing BUT elected officials for most of their lives, preventing them from getting any real-world, problem-solving experience dealing with emergencies or disruptions. As a job interview, campaigns are ineffective. 

    It's not human nature to say, "I loathe that person, but they're the most qualified so I'm voting for them." It doesn't happen, so we choose our leadership by a popularity contest, and (as we just found out) that's no way to find competent managers.

    People Don't Understand the Scientific Method

    Oh, they think they do, but most folks seem to have a deeply flawed view of how science actually works. This was obvious when 'Experts Say..." became a de facto debate ender, and when the 'argument from authority' supplanted the rigor of conflicting ideas working to disprove theories until only the truth remained, which is more like the real scientific method.

    We were told repeatedly that 'the science says' as a foundation for actions the government took, when the simple truth is that good science is never about consensus, but about diversity of opinion contending, with supporting data, to become the primary hypothesis. It's why Pluto was a planet and no longer is, it's why we're still studying the process of evolution and why most real scientists will almost never claim something is 'settled science.' 

    Does this matter? Well, I took a shot I was assured was perfectly safe-'settled science'-and which is now off the market because of the risks it presents. Science is a process, and not a destination, and power-hungry scientists obscured that to the uneducated public to gain authority, quell healthy dissent and consolidate policy with questionable scientific foundations. 

    Half the World is Below Average, and They Vote Too

    The simple fact is that large societies might simply be untenable in the modern age. With large numbers of folks lacking critical thinking skills (often with advanced, non-STEM degrees giving them an air of expertise that's wholly unwarranted) and their voices amplified by social media, it might be that true Democracy is not workable. Consider this conundrum:

You're at sea in a lifeboat with ten other people, and the boat is too heavy to ride the waves so you have to jettison some supplies. You vote to jettison the seven years of back issues of People magazine, and the other nine vote to jettison the water. 

"Democracy" might not be the solution to that problem....

When is a Game a War?

 I started thinking about this (on the surface, not very logical) question a few days ago, prompted by some things the current occupant of the White House said in the past few weeks:

• We're not going to have a recession, and if we do it will be a minor one
• The border is secure
• He is, amazingly, part of the Puerto Rican community

I'll admit that last one is essentially irrelevant; from Hillary adopting African-American speech patterns when speaking to an African-American audience to Francis O'Rourke spouting Freshman-level Spanish during a presidential debate, there have always been politicians so vacuous, so essentially devoid of any really genuine conviction or identity that they chameleon into whatever crowd they're pandering to at the time. That's not to say it's admirable, but it's at least traditional in some parties.

The first two, however, defy objective reality; by the definition that was universally in place until about a month ago (two consecutive quarters of negative growth = recession) we're ALREADY in a recession. Retroactive definition-wrangling notwithstanding, the statement 'we're not going to have a recession' is false on its face. (Unless in true Jedi Master, Three Dimensional Chess fashion, Biden was answering about ANOTHER recession? Hmmmmm......)

Of course, following the initial report we'd officially entered a recession, followed by the White House's redefining of  the term, a host of media and governmental figureheads chimed in to explain to the uneducated masses that the definition we'd all understood (and many of those same figureheads, in fact, had very recently referred to and used themselves) wasn't ACTUALLY the correct definition of a recession. As planned, this gave the denial just a bit of wiggle room, all they needed to stop talking about it.

And while the government's own statistics say that there are more folks entering the US illegally than ever before, the WH and its occupant, along with its spokesperson, continue to state with a straight-face that the border is 'secure.' When confronted, they repeat the lie, chuckle condescendingly ("look, another one too dumb to understand what 'secure' means!") and move on.

Hence the game vs. war speculation. And what I've come up with, essentially, is that in a game both sides agree to and follow the rules of the game; you can tackle the guy, you can steal the guy's ball, but you can't knife him in the ribs. You can move the rook and knight in certain ways, but you're not allowed to set your opponent's pieces on fire. 

Most importantly, both sides agree to accept the results of the game in deciding who won it. The most points in a basketball game decides the winner, the first one across the line in the 100 yard dash gets the ribbon. 

And as far as rules, the most basic, elementary and unchanging rule is that of objective reality; we saw the ball go over the fence, you get the run; we saw the puck go in the net, you get the point. Agreed upon rules, based on objective reality, underly every human game.

So when one side/party/group/whatever stops paying attention to reality, stops paying attention to the defined meaning of words (and enlists allies at dictionaries to support their post-hoc redefining) and just generally refuses to abide by any of the agreed-upon rules of the game, it's NOT a game any longer. When you disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling and decide the appropriate response is to reconfigure or dissolve it, you're no longer within the rules of the game, which is important because this game is called 'Western civilization.'

So if we're not playing a game, what are we doing? Well, think of it this way:

• All that matters is the end, regardless of the means
• Rules, conventions and even reality can be discarded if they prevent our side from winning
• There is no sense of shame or failure for those who break these rules, defy logic or redefine the world to allow them to win; their overarching purpose is to win, and anything which furthers that end is noble, so there can be no shame in deception, cheating or anything else

And when you add that all up, what does it sound like? Yep, it sounds a lot like a war. All's fair, and all that. And why is that important? Because the single most dangerous kind of war is the one you won't acknowledge you're actually in; the one you keep telling yourself is a game with rules, and where you're perpetually shocked to find your opponent disregarding them.

Nobody's surprised when the guys in the trench opposite yours start shelling and opening fire at you. Nobody is surprised when the other side's planes drop bombs and not candy bars. It's time people stopped being surprised that their opponent, who's made it apparent time and time again that they aren't playing by any rules, are actually at war with them, and to realize that you don't have to WANT to be in a war to be in one. 

Enemy Mine

 There are a variety of ways to make an enemy. Some folks excel at it, and could provide a nearly unending list of things you can do to make an enemy of someone, whether intentionally or not.

One of the less obvious ways to make an enemy, though, is to simply tell someone you're their enemy. Declaring that you represent a danger, a threat, a risk, an abomination, and need to be dealt with in the most serious, harshest manner possible is a tremendous way to instantly make you actually become an enemy, and perhaps become some of those things you've been accused of. 

In the end, shouting 'You're my enemy!!!' at someone is, reciprocally, shouting 'I'm YOUR enemy!!!', and needs to be considered in that light. And declaring someone-or, let's say, half a country-your enemy is a wonderful way to ensure they will become, and remain, your enemy.

One has to wonder what the strategy the current administration is using by slicing off about 50% of the country and declaring them 'an enemy' of not only them, their party and their views, but the future of the country as a whole. Some ideas present themselves, but all are at least disturbing, and some are terrifying:

• The strategy is to message the administration's political base, and let them know there is now 'permission' to become as hateful and violent as 'necessary' to defeat their political opponents. We're back to 'declare your opponent Hitler and you can justify anything you do to them.'
• The plan is to widen the political division in the country to the point that the hyperbolic, rancorous screeching that has replaced political debate can escalate further, driving us toward that messy divorce we certainly seem to be headed for.
• There is a twisted hope that by declaring so many people who simply disagree with them as 'terrorists' or 'a threat to democracy', they'll find the few (there are always a few in any group) riding the shoulder of the road and push them over. Shouting 'you're a threat!!!' at some folks will potentially convince them that they are being attacked, slandered or otherwise threatened themselves. And someone who's under attack will either submit, or fight. Could the administration really be trying to provoke an act that would, circularly, work to prove their point? Horrifying, but I'm no longer able to discount this level of Machiavellian machination from the current administration, something that's horrifying itself on a whole different level.

So who is the enemy of whom? If it used to be difficult to tell, it's certainly become easier; it's the person pointing at you and shouting, 'You're my enemy!!!!'

 

The Disadvantage of Being a Libertarian in Today's Politics

 There isn't anyone who's turned on a television or checked out a news site in the last ten years who doesn't know today's America is strongly divided along party lines-party lines which are based on important philosophical differences. Many of these likely can never be resolved-gun freedom, abortion, forced language-as the opposing views don't simply differ, but diametrically oppose each other.

This presents problems and opportunities for folks with strong beliefs; political maneuvering, media content bias and other 'weapons' in this war of ideas are brought to bear with the intent of having your views carry the day. And more and more, it's become a dirty war, with no Geneva convention to put limitations on the actions of either side.

As disappointing as that is, it has another side effect; the further the national discourse strays from one of debate and rational discussion, and the closer it gets to outright lies, government coercion and misinformation, the more it favors the side who WANTS to control everyone else. The folks with a strong tendency to dictate how you should think, speak and act have a built-in advantage here over the folks who simply want government to leave them alone; the first is essentially playing 'offense', and the second is permanently playing defense. 

As John Steinbeck put it:

"This is the law. The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplementary.“

A libertarian, if they're genuinely committed to the philosophy, has essentially NO desire to direct the actions of others. Not only do they want the government, the corporate conglomerates and society to leave them alone, they feel just as strongly they have no right to use any of those levers of power to control others. It is the closest political philosophy to 'live and let live' in America at this time, and that may well be their downfall; while the political left is constantly on the offense, pushing restrictions, changing norms and dictating which beliefs are acceptable and which are not, libertarians are restricted to simply resisting these attacks. They push back, and as Steinbeck taught us, pushing back is not a scheme for victory.

Those committed to freedom are unlikely to weaponize the government to crush their enemies, unlikely to burn a city to get their way; their predisposition to 'live and let live' seems like it could, ironically, lead to their destruction. 

We Missed Our Chance

 It's looking more and more like our opportunity to have an amicable separation between the two opposing viewpoints in the country has passed, and we're doomed for something like a bitter, lawyer-strewn court battle with the kids in the middle. How did we get here?

Well, for one thing, we've managed to mainstream hyperbole into political discourse; if your opponents are 'literally Hitler', there isn't much you can't justify doing about them, or to them. Constant screaming about an existential crisis to 'our democracy' (or, less commonly, the more accurate 'our Republic') creates the urgency, the sense of imminent doom, that focuses folks more on the end than the means; and focusing on the end, rather than the means, is almost the perfect OPPOSITE of what a Republic is supposed to be.

One of the means that's become more popular (although it's certainly not new) is using the apparatus of government against your political rivals; rivals who, conveniently, you consider a 'threat to democracy' and thus worthy of any efforts, legal or not, to bring them to a non-threat. 

When you're living in the most prosperous, most free nation that's ever existed and yet loathe the very principles and philosophies that made that country possible, I'm not sure if there's any other rational outcome; you can't try to reach higher by cutting off your legs.

I suppose the most realistic hope now is that this messy, furious divorce happens in a courtroom, though finding a fair venue, jury and judge seems impossible; alternatives will be far, far worse. 

So that's what we're reduced to; pining hopefully that this will 'only' be a devastating, extraordinarily expensive and overtly hostile divorce. Not optimal. 

And....more.

 It feels good to look back and see that you were able to predict the future with at least a reasonable degree of accuracy, doesn't it? If that foretelling resulted in you buying Amazon stock at $4 or Apple at $20, you can justly feel that Nostradamus really wasn't all that, compared to your demonstrated precognitive abilities.

Of course, it's less fulfilling when what you foresaw was bad news, and you weren't only right, but grossly underestimated how quickly those bad things would happen. Foreseeing the iceberg an hour beforehand only works if you can turn the Titanic in that time, and we couldn't; or at least we didn't. 

"Once we roared like lions for liberty, and now we bleat like sheep for safety..." is a Norman Vincent Peale quote that seems particularly apt at this point in history, and it's ironic that the man who wrote 'The Power of Positive Thinking' should have so accurately captured the dire problems we find ourselves struggling with. And ultimately, I think this IS the fundamental issue in America; half of the country doesn't want to be told what to do, and the other half wants to tell them what to do.

Only it's not quite that simple, since the halves aren't clearly defined; there are 'conservatives' more than willing to use the apparatus of government to compel compliance with their beliefs, just as there are authoritarians on the left who want to force people to use words, particularly pronouns, that aren't based in objective reality, among other things. Essentially the fight for America is a fight between two (actually many, roughly divided into two) factions vying for access to the levers of power only to impose their will on the other side.

What few are saying is that the levers of power themselves are actually the root of the problem; the idea that compelling behavior, whether it be who can be called what, or what beliefs can be discussed publicly, or what people can do in their own homes, is fundamentally unAmerican. 

We are a country founded by those who left; we left authoritarian Britain, we've fled dictatorships around the world, we've fled societies that didn't offer opportunities, just to come here and prosper. We didn't build our greatness by dictating every aspect of people's lives, but by mostly getting out of their way and letting them get things done, but that's no longer the case. Want proof? The permits to open a restaurant in San Francisco run around $22,000; let that sink in. You're working to start a business, and before the government will 'allow' you to even begin, you need to hand over the price of new compact car. And the most damning part of all that? Outside of some quiet grumbling, there is no uproar; there is no rebellion. We've come to accept that the government is a drag upon every aspect of our financial lives, taxing our businesses, our wages, our savings, our purchases and even our deaths. The problem isn't really that the government is doing this; the problem is we're complacently allowing it.

"But what can you do? It's the way the rules are structured." Yes, yes it is; NOW. Keep voting for people who want control of your business, your lives and your future, and it will continue to be, and worse. Find the few people running for office who want to remove regulations, reduce the number of laws and reign in government power, and there just might-might-be a chance for a future that's more like what our founders envisioned; a country run by it's people, and to their benefit, not a nanny-state who believes it knows best what we should be doing, and controls us until we do it. 

Until we howl, rather than bleet, Americans will get the government they tolerate; and today, that seems more like a life with parental restrictions enabled by our government than real freedom. 

Separation, Divorce or Troubled Marriage?

 My dad and I were reminiscing the other day about family friends from when I was young. It was interesting to hear, as an adult, my dad's description of some of them and compare it to my childhood impressions.

For some of them, particularly the ones I recall from when I was very young, my impressions seemed to settle into (unsurprisingly) some simplistic themes; one of my dad's friends from that time I recall as being very tall (dad said he was about 6'4", so not exactly NBA fodder), and another as 'really cool.' It was interesting to hear more details about their family and work lives from an adult perspective ('very tall' was a truck mechanic, and 'really cool' went on to be a successful computer programmer, for instance.)

When I asked my dad about what these folks' politics were, though, he thought for a long moment; "I really don't know. It never really came up back then; we were just friends."

That started us talking about just when someone's politics became so central to their identity, and when it became something that was discussed so relentlessly that it was almost impossible to know someone and NOT know their politics. Was it when the 24 hour news cycle made grinding political discussion into a fine powder every day the norm? Was it when Nixon blackened the eye of Republicans so severely? We didn't manage to pin down a cause, or even a a rough date that the change took place, and could only agree that it had.

Reflecting on that, I began to wonder; are we simply too mature a country to be so innocent about politics ever again? And is that maturity the type of maturity that gets you a discount on your auto insurance, or the kind that gets you put into a home with someone to make sure you eat your pudding? 

Is it possible that in the nearly 250 years since our founding, we've managed to work through the peripheral issues of how to manage a country and dug down to the bedrock, fundamental questions of how we want to live? Is America in that stage of the final exam where, having answered all the questions we're sure about, we're now slowly working through the ones we're uncertain about, and spending time considering and weighing which answer is most likely correct? It seems to me that might be the case...

There aren't many issues more fundamental for government than protecting its citizenry from harm; government is, at its best, the oil in the gears of society, keeping the grinding and squeaking to a minimum, keeping friction from burning up the machine; a buffer between each of us and our neighbors who would harm us.

But what happens when we reach the point of having to decide which of us actually IS one of us; when we have to decide if a baby in a womb is the 'property' of the mother, to be disposed of at will, or an independent life, owed the protection of the state even against its own mother? We're down, with this one, to a core, fundamental question that can't, on this final exam, be left blank. Compromise between those who believe they are protecting a woman's fundamental right to control her own body (something which, in any other instance, is essentially as non-controversial as a political topic could be) and those who believe they are protecting an innocent child from murder seems impossible.

And that might be our issue, and eventually our undoing. As a society, we've solved many of the easy questions a country must face, and we're down to the real stumpers; the ones that seem a genuine toss-up, and which reading the textbook hasn't really provided an answer for. 

There's a reason most citizen-centric governments don't last, and why Benjamin Franklin, asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had decided upon, answered "A Republic, if you can keep it." That reason may well be that there are questions that simply cannot be agreed up, and which, in a country where every citizen has the duty to participate in the decision-making process about how we structure our society, cannot ever be resolved. Our country could be confronting those fundamental, unsolvable problems now, and their debate could be one that continues until it creates a rift so deep, and so profound, that it forces us to choose sides again, just as we did 150 or so years ago.

If that is the case-and I think it might well be-we'll again have to decide if America stays together for the kids, separates and lives apart in reasonable amiability, or goes through a nasty, potentially bloody, divorce.