Change is slow

(Written May 6, 2008)

The end of the Cold War. Germans dancing on the Berlin wall. The United States breathes a sigh of relief; The great Communist empire has fallen, now we’ve only Cuba left to deal with. How hard can it be, after all, to starve a small island nation into submission? The hippie movement – already creaking under the strain of children, jobs, real life – finally bends its knee to the inevitable; flashy technology is more addictive than hard drugs. Baby needs shoes. Bill Gates gives this talk to the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo – discussing, among other things, floppy drives, and the upcoming move from 8 to 16-bit computers.

And Russia? Russia flings away its satellite states, willingly lets go her hold on the Middle East – especially Afghanistan, Russia’s Vietnam during the warmer days of the Cold War. Russia turns inward for almost 20 years, accepting a lack of dominance, a lesser place in world affairs, letting a hand – or two – go by in the great-stakes game that is International Affairs.

Fast-forward to the mid 2000’s – Russia, resurgent. In a February 28, 2008 article titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” The Economist styles Russia’s economy ‘booming,’ citing a 7% growth rate, and stating,

…Even Mr Putin’s critics are impressed by Russia’s transformation in the past few years. A country that almost went bust ten years ago now boasts a $1.3 trillion economy, foreign-currency reserves of nearly $480 billion and a $144 billion stabilisation fund for surplus oil and gas revenue. Annual growth of real incomes has been in double digits. GDP per head has risen from less than $2,000 in 1998 to $9,000 today at current rates of exchange…

Russia even ranks fourth in the world in the creation of new millionaires, and while it certainly has its share of problems – falling fertility counts, infrastructure issues, and high inflation rates among them – it’s safe to say Russia is making a strong reappearance on the world stage.

In 15 years, in other words, Russia’s transformed itself from an international pariah into an up-and-coming powerhouse. The transformation has not been easy, and could not have been made without a deliberate stepping-down, an acknowledgment that even Russia – with her power, might, and vast natural resources – couldn’t continue as she was. A Cold War analyst- Soviet Side – was quoted saying Russian politicians realized they could build bombs or they could build Russia – but that they couldn’t do both at once.

And so Russia turned inward. Millions of people suffered. Political upheaval. Social upheaval. Unrest, riots, deaths. And today, she’s stronger than before.

I think we’re rapidly approaching a similar decision point in the United States. Do we build guns, or capital? Do we build other nations, or our own?

We’re a state – not a nation. (state implies political borders; nation, emotional ones). As citizens, we’re fundamentally divided on far too many issues. The top 10% lives very well, but things are getting harder for the bottom 40. The American Dream is poised to turn into a nightmare, along with the crash of Social Security, an eventual revaluation of the Chinese Yuan, and a rise in socialized medicine. School systems are faulty at best, a breeding ground for disillusionment, at worst. None of this is to say we’re out – just that we’re down; we can’t continue to ignore problems at home, and expect those issues to be solved, as they have in the past, by our position at the receiving end of the so-called ‘brain drain’ – it’s no longer working in our favor. Indian engineers are choosing to stay in India, as conditions rise for them there.

And so: We get to choose our own fate. Here’s a thought: What if we lean heavily on China, India, Brazil, France, England, etc, to form a serious coalition on banning – and preventing the gain of – nuclear weaponry? What if we accept that we’ve made nothing but poor choices in the Middle East, and throw as much money as possible, now, at the fuel problem, pull out of the Middle East as soon as it’s economically – not image-wise – feasable. What if we turn inwards for a while, and build our infrastructure, our economy, our sense of national identity? What if – for the first time since the early 1940’s – we focus on #1? If the only thing we insist on, on the world stage, is nuclear weapons?

So we lose standing in the world economy. So we lose trade networks. So we lose influence – but much of that we’ve lost, already. We can get it all back, but not if the center is weak.

The Iran-U.S. War, incoming

U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22537199/

WASHINGTON – Iranian boats harassed and provoked three American Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to blow up the vessels, U.S. officials said Monday.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Monday the confrontation was “something normal” and was resolved, suggesting the Iranian boats had not recognized the U.S. vessels. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the Bush administration urges Iranians “to refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future.”

When considering a news source w/two sides like this, I try to put it through a thought-grid of sorts:

• Both sides are telling the truth
• Neither is
• Only one side is
• There’s something bigger going on

So: Iran is telling the truth, and they just can’t recognize U.S. warships. … which always carry flags, as i remember …? So they’re idiots (unlikely), or they’re trying to provoke something (implied by the U.S. statement), or they never existed.

I think that’s slightly unlikely, if only because faking something of this magnitude would have someone up in flames.

So perhaps the Iranians were just harassing the U.S. to make a point, that it’s their space.. and the U.S. took the moment to make a point; we’ve got muscles, and we’re not afraid to use ‘em.

We have to read intentionality, too; what does ‘threatening’ mean in this context? (that’s what US soldiers said of villagers during the Vietnam War, too, and sometimes the villagers had guns, and sometimes they had fishing poles …)

This is the bit that really worries me: “The Bush administration urges Iranians “to refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future…”

That’s a pretty damn clear signal, if you ask me. — “don’t make me come back there…”

So i suspect there was an incident; the Iraqis trying to make a point (bad idea, badly carried out), the U.S. using the incident to make their own on the international stage (“don’t mess with Texas,” heh).

But what’s the bigger picture here? The U.S. sees Iran as dangerous, by virtue of its Muslim government (Achmadinijad is only nominally head of state; he was elected and is effectively controlled by a set of mullahs… well, here, check this out:

Note that the president (Achmadinijad, who made all the noise at Columbia University during the UN meetings in NYC) is not the supreme ruler. The supreme ruler and armed forces hold a great deal of power and they’re nominally elected from .. well, aside from some citizen input to the “Assembly of Experts” (not ‘balanced’ elections in US terms), the overriding power-granting force in Iran rides with spiritual and military leaders.

Achmadinijad is basically a puppet wielded by the magician that is the larger government of Iran. He exists to distract the viewer while the magician performs the impossible.

This all makes the U.S. nervous. Meanwhile Iran, looking at a growing power vacuum in the Middle East, seeing schisms between even the U.S. and old allies (Saudi Arabia, etc) – feels it can move quickly in the gap to gain nuclear weapons – and, therefore, bargaining power.

Also it feels untouchable, perhaps? This might explain the nonsense.

We could also postulate it’s got an ace up its sleeve, and is hoping to provoke the U.S. into war.

We could argue this all serves a greater purpose; the U.S. cannot extend into another war/occupation. Cold hard numbers and the collective American will says no; a refusal to respond to a blatant act of terrorism would give the signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. was in retreat – we’d lose face – while another major military commitment, along with the inevitable concomitant loss of prestige and goodwill in the world community – that’d be disastrous for us as well.

So what I want to know is, what’s going on here, why, and how? I don’t for one minute believe, as Iran says, that it was all just a case of mistaken identity.

Torture and objectivity

This is from the FBI’s website, witness accounts of detainees being tortured.

Guantanamo Bay Inquiry

A survey of 493 FBI personnel who were asked whether they observed aggressive mistreatment, interrogations or interview techniques of GTMO yielded 26 positive responses and several additional responses that were “not purely negative.”

Here’s one of the ‘positive’ ones:

W(itness) observed women crying near the river, their homes had been destroyed by planes. Trucks full of people trying to surrender were blown up by planes. On 2d day after capture, d(etainee) was put in a ditch by Northern Alliance people. Next day, he was allowed to jump into a truck and taken to Mazar-e-Sharif where he was forced into a metal “shipping”-type container w/about 100 men. The container was then closed and d blacked out due to lack of air. When he awoke, there were new holes in the container., The man next to him was dead. He thinks he was in the container 24 hours – only 20 men survived. When it opened he was at Sabergaan jail. The dead were put into a hole and buried, he heard that those too weak to get out of the container were as well. US soldiers arrived about a month later

I repeat: this is from the FBI’s website. It’s been released under the Freedom of Information Act. Here’s another:

on several occasions, witness (“W”) saw detainees (“ds”) in interrogation rooms chained hand and foot in fetal position to floor w/no chair/ food/water; most urinated or defecated on selves, and were left there 18, 24 hrs or more. Once, the air conditioning was so low that the barefoot d was shaking with cold. Another time, it was off so the unventilated room was over 100 degrees, d was almost unconscious on floor with a pile of hair next to him (he had apparently been pulling it out throughout the night). Another time, it was sweltering hot and loud rap music played – d’s hand and foot was chanined and he was in a fetal position on the floor. Upon inquiry, W was told that interrogators [military contractors] ordered this treatment. Took place in Delta Camp.

So those accounts have been told to the FBI and are under investigation; I can imagine one or two people giving a false account to the FBI for the shock value of it, but not 30+ military personnel, many/most of whom would certainly lose their careers – and possibly freedom – if it turns out they’re lying.

If you want to be (more) shocked, and along the same lines, read this article, posted on Salon, a San Francisc-based news source about which I know nothing whatsoever, except that they carry interesting articles. This one is (purportedly) by a Yemeni man who was held and tortured by the US for two years.

All of this, naturally, brings me to political philosophy.

The hardest thing to attain in life is objectivity; to see yourself, others, the world itself, without bias. This is as true for nations (and states) as it is for people. Perhaps objectivity is an impossible goal – but I’ve spent enough time outside of the U.S. now to say that the view from the outside frightens me

• Allegations of institutionalized, government-sanctioned torture all over the world.
• Unnumbered and hugely destructive nuclear weapons – more than most of the rest of the worlds’ combined – in the hands of an incredibly flexible, lethal army/navy/air force, with trigger-happy generals and Presidents at the helm.
• An intelligence community so advanced it can spy on its own citizens without disturbing either their consciences or daily lives.
• Surly airline security that repels and humiliates instead of inviting.
  (see this Salon article – an entertaining read, at least! – or my own thoughts on airline security/hysteria here).
• A ‘closed’ border so porous we’re enacting punitive immigration laws.
• Most US citizens – by far – don’t even have a passport. Those who do, likely have never been anywhere other then Canada or Mexico.
• Most don’t speak a second language, but if they do, it’s most likely to be Spanish, and they speak it at home.
• The highest murder rate – by far – among other industrial and first world nations, and one of the worst school age reading and math skill sets among that same group.
• Capable of holding an international grudge – and the world’s longest-running embargo (against Cuba) – for over 40 years.
• An upper class whose top 1%’s increase in income from 2003-5 was more than the total income of the poorest 20% – most of whom are black or Hispanic.

The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.
The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.

“Report Says That the Rich Are Getting Richer Faster, Much Faster,”
NYT 12/17/2007

… shall I go on?

I’m not denigrating the United States here, merely pointing out that the view from the outside is quite different from that on the in. Every story has another side. The United States, like India, is a nation state where any statement you make about it will be both true and false.

Can we fix this? I don’t know. We’ve been running on massive deficits since WWII, and on a wartime economy since WWI. We are a nation of spenders – up to and far beyond our means. We eat, we drink, we enjoy life at home – and, hemmed in by oceans on either side, and by neighbors who have no reason for aggression – we feel (mostly) safe.

Most Estadonidenses (am I spelling that right, M?) are like people anywhere; they (we?, heh) simply want to have a home and community, to find a partner, raise our children safely, eat good food, enjoy life.

Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve gotten lost; we’ve forgotten that no one can have it all, no country, no person, no government.

• We cannot be the masters of war, the world’s arms dealer, the military innovators and be loved and respected as a peaceful, peace-making, mature nation.
• We cannot act like “ugly Americans” while in Paris, and expect to be welcomed with open arms at the European summit.
• We cannot refuse to deal with China – or, for that matter, with the rational Middle East – on realistic and equal terms and expect to be able to control the outcome of all action in the region.
• We cannot refuse to buy oil in Africa – on whatever grounds, be they morally correct or not – and then expect to have African oil when our Middle East wells run dry.
• We cannot torture criminals – of any stripe – and be regarded as purveyors of justice.
• We cannot ignore history if we wish to survive the present.

That is the bottom line, I suppose. When we say one thing and do another, we must eventually explain ourselves.
So how do we fix it?

I expect that eventually, we’ll have to face a choice – as the USSR did, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. To let the outside states go, and sacrifice the heart, or to keep the heart of the nation, but let the empire crumble to pieces? In 1989, Gorbachev let the satellite states go, and, unable to fund both guns and plowshares, turned to inward economic development. Today, under Putin, Russia is emerging, a lean, confident Phoenix, triumphant from the ashes of her past.

Could we do the same? Could we let the empire go, withdraw from our bases, allow the rest of the world to muddle about as it did before we came on the scene? Could we take 50 years to revitalize our economy? Could we reinvent, reformat, reenergize, re-Constitutionalize (sorry) ourselves?

Do We, The People, have it in us any more?

Have we become too .. soft, too sedentary to take on the task of first, seeing ourselves, and second, affecting change in our own lives and backyards?

I’m no political analyst, and I don’t know shit about economics, but I do know we’re overextended in every way imaginable. If we don’t pull back soon, well .. something’s got to give.

Thinking: Action and reaction

When we distort our language, we may distort our thinking, and we hamper our efforts to find solutions to the grave problems we face…

George Shultz
Terrorism and the Modern World
October 25,1984

United States Department of State
Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, D.C.

This is a fascinating speech on terrorism (and the modern world), given by Secretary of State George Schultz in 1984. If you have the time and you’re (honestly) interested in terrorism, I recommend reading it. It’s only six pages, and you’ll be amazed; aside from a few extra USSR references, it might as well have been written last week. Check out these quotes:

We are attacked not because of some mistake we are making but because of who we are and what we believe in. We must not abandon our principles, or our role in the world, or our responsibilities as the champion of freedom and peace.

But part of our problem here in the United States has been our seeming inability to understand terrorism clearly. Each successive terrorist incident has brought too much self-condemnation and dismay, accompanied by calls for a change in our policies or our principles or calls for withdrawal and retreat. We should be alarmed. We should be outraged. We should investigate and strive to improve. But widespread public anguish and self-condemnation only convince the terrorists that they are on the right track. It only encourages them to commit more acts of barbarism in the hope that American resolve will weaken.

Clearly the democracies have a moral right, indeed a duty, to defend themselves.

The grievances that terrorists supposedly seek to redress through acts of violence may or may not be legitimate. The terrorist acts themselves, however, can never be legitimate. And legitimate causes can never justify or excuse terrorism. Terrorist means discredit their ends.

We now recognize that terrorism is being used by our adversaries as a modern tool of warfare. It is no aberration. We can expect more terrorism directed at our strategic interests around the world in the years ahead. To combat it, we must be willing to use military force.

This is a particular danger in the period before our election. If our reaction to terrorist acts is to turn on ourselves instead of against the perpetrators, we give them redoubled incentive to do it again and to try to influence our political processes.

What the public must know first (very end of the article)

• The public must understand before the fact that there is potential for loss of life of some of our fighting men and the loss of life of some innocent people.
• The public must understand before the fact that some will seek to cast any preemptive or retaliatory action by us in the worst light and will attempt to make our military and our policymakers – rather than the terrorists – appear to be the culprits.
• The public must understand before the fact that occasions will come when their government must act before each and every fact is known – and the decisions cannot be tied to the opinion polls.

Public support for U.S. military actions to stop terrorists before the commit some hideous act or in retaliation for an attack on our people is crucial if we are to deal with this challenge…

So I don’t know about you, but it looks to me as though whatever plan of action we have and/or are using isn’t working; we’re dealing with the same issues, in the same way, 20 years later.

So then I go to the historic New York Times (via Proquest on a university site) and pull this quote:

“Terrorism is adopted as the arm of the weak against the strong, deliberately chosen to goad and madden the bull so that he acts to weaken himself. The most effective retaliation is not sheer force but a resourceful strike at the terrorists’ own points of vulnerability, their need for secrecy and anonymity… terrorism isn’t a clear, identifiable enemy that can be overwhelmed by military means. It’s a technique, and it takes astute technique to counter it.”

From “The Technique of Terror,”
Flora Lewis, New York Times, December 28, 1984

I don’t know if secrecy and anonymity are the concerns of terrorists in 2007, but the point still stands; we’re pitting our weaknesses (our open societies, our need for complete information, action via the will of the people) against their strengths. We should be doing the reverse …

Interesting Research Website:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/

It’s a wiki research timeline; people add in sources on a specific topic as they find it, whether it’s papers, news articles, whatever. Interesting, but could have a potential for abuse/being taken the wrong way…

I poked around a bit in here: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=lossofcivilliberties (under the “loss of civil liberties” timeline) and learned a number of concerning things (all linked to reputable news sources.

For instance, check out this story: http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/11/15/no_fly/index.html (you have to wait for the really annoying ad to load, then use the top right-hand link)… The whole idea of a No-Fly list is like a lot of things in life; I don’t like it, there’s nothing I can do about it. Seems a waste of everyone’s time to me …

In any case, interesting idea, no?

General Abizaid

I was talking with Madiha and Ben after dinner yesterday evening, and have some thoughts on communications/conflict/sustainable development/technology for you, but first, about the dinner and today’s talk:

We ate with General Abizaid (no, really, I’m serious) and then spent some time talking about the Middle East, U.S. actions in the region, etc. Abizaid was quieter than I expected – someone I wouldn’t at first have taken for 4-star general. He was quietly impressive; the more time we spent talking, the more obvious the depth of his thought process. He wasn’t trying to prove himself, as so many academics do when you speak to them (part of the reason I’m thinking of stepping outside the academic system for a while), and he wasn’t interested in fluff. He was genuine, obviously used to leading people, handled all of us really well. Remembered our names. Looked each person in the eye. Made a few jokes to set us at ease.

And then, after introductions – and after all of us finished our Thai food, with chopsticks – he gave us a bit of a talk. Said there are four specific movements in the middle east that bear watching right now:

1. Sunni fundamentalism
   • This is what we’ve seen so far with Al-Qaeda etc.
2. The rise of Shi’a Extremism
   • We’re especially concerned that extremism not take hold in any government – right now, it’s contained to the fringes of society, but if it were to take hold (especially in a country like Pakistan, which has nukes), the balance of power/ideology could shift dramatically, and very much not in our direction
3. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
   • Is providing a rallying point for terrorists, and is a long-term conflict sitting in the backyard of the Arab states. Helping with the peace process here will demonstrate our own good intentions and might significantly decrease tension in the region.
4. Instability and a possible move toward extremism in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia

In the talk today (today is Wednesday), he put #4 in with #2, and his #4 was the U.S. need to wean ourselves from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

He had quite a bit to say, but mostly he talked about these four points. A few other notes I found interesting:

• He said our involvement in the Middle East right now is 80% military and 20% other (say, anthropology, cultural understanding, education, etc etc) – we need to reverse that percentage
• He said that no one can ‘control’ the Middle East (“5000 years of history…”) but that we can help the people there achieve stability.
• Said that Al-Qaeda didn’t (necessarily) want to take over Iraq – the idea is to keep it in chaos so that insurgent and terrorist groups will have a “haven”
  • (to me this sounds very much like Iran’s interests in the region…)
• And so on and so forth.

In any case, it was really interesting to meet someone of his stature and experience. I wanted more time to talk with him, to figure out where he was coming from, but it wasn’t to be.

A few other interesting things: the dean was only choosing older people to ask questions — i think to keep the questions balanced and not too loaded, although there weren’t that many students raising their hands. Also, I noticed that sometimes he would reframe the questions in a way that meant they were similar to the original question asked, but not identical…

Alright, enough of this post (i’ve been typing a sentence here and there for a couple days, and now it’s Thursday… on to the next thing)

Guns

…. what would happen if the US stopped selling arms, except, say, to countries that are first-world long-time allies? I mean, aside from the gun lobbies going nuts, and a “rearrangement of resources” …

I suppose at this point China would pick up the slack, but it seems that – at least at some point – we might have made a lot of difference by simply refusing to arm anyone but ourselves.

It is ironic that we spend so much time fighting people armed with weapons we sold or gave them.

… also, i predict that in ten years or so, we’ll be fighting whatever the current Iraqi peace forces (the U.S.-created police etc) become …

These musings courtesy of the International Herald Tribune:

U.S. leads arms sales to developing countries
WASHINGTON: The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global weapons market is highly competitive, with manufacturing countries seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations that reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/30/america/arms.php

shadowplay

Doing research on modern terrorism (under Soviet war in Afghanistan), I came across this photo in Wikipedia:

Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, 1988. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Found myself thinking about light and shadow, about all the contrasts inherent in war. Soldiers giving peace signs to small children. A baby-faced 19-year-old screaming for his mother and trying to hold one arm on with the other. Silence before a mine explodes or a bomb strikes. Smiles on politicians’ faces as they proclaim victories we may never achieve.

A thousand shades of gray:

The study of policy is confusing, enlightening, embittering. Sometimes I get so far above the fray, into the theory, that I have a hard time coming back down to earth. There are so many ways to look at everything, it’s easy to get lost in ideology, or in points of view – as much value as each has, the older I get, the more I feel you have to see all the angles before you have any idea what something looks like …

The Vietnam War, for example:

• A “proxy” war - a way for the great powers/ideologies (USSR/Communism vs. US/Democracy)
• A rebellion/freedom struggle – the Vietnamese had been struggling to repel foreign invaders since the late 1800’s – the French, the Japanese, then us Estadonidenses…
• A massive terrorist action -I’m not saying this in an incendiary way, just as a way to look at it. Here’s a definition of modern terrorism:
  • “Terrorism is the capricious and illegal application of politically-motivated force or violence by a clandestine individual, small groups or cells claiming to represent larger bodies or communities, independent of the accepted conventions of the rule of law and international conflict.” (It’s from an article on the birth of modern terrorism, but I left the essay at work; I’ll drop the title in here on MondaySo “Terrorism” comes from the French, from the governmental massacre of dissidents, called “terrorisme.” (Now that I think of it, you might liken that ‘terrorisme’ to the killings by the Argentine Junta in the 70’s and 80’s … In any case, before modern terrorism, there was state terrorism, which basically involved killing a lot of innocents to frighten or intimidate the guilty (or the dissenters) and/or to get the citizenry to rise up against the guilty (as denoted by the state) in order to make the killings stop. This, of course, generally works best when the government is considered so strong as to seem unstoppable …) So: politically-motivated violence against the citizenry; that might fit the definition, eh?
• A ‘just’ war - this one’s easy. All U.S. wars are ‘just’ wars, wars considered ‘justified’ by the general public when initiated. In Afghanistan, we were chasing terrorists. In Iraq, WMD’s.
  • Please to note that this is not a normative statement. Term usage, not judgement made.
• A war to maintain U.S. internal stability – I don’t know enough about the Vietnam war to say for sure, but one could easily argue that this war, the Iraq war, came to exist, initially, due to a combination of factors including one president’s wish to remain in office, a U.S. economy that is largely a war economy (we need an excuse to power through on economic stupidity as we do)… anyone know it was the same w/the Vietnam War?

… and now i’m into the present …

• To give the army practice/To flex our muscles for the rest of the world/to say, “don’t step on me”/to gain a foothold in the Middle East
• To boost our national self-esteem/see if anyone wants to knock the chip off our shoulder …
• To divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’…/to show how bad ‘they’ were/to defeat evil in our time
  
• A war for religious freedom
• A war over resources
• A war to maintain control
  
• A war against religious intolerance
• A clash of ideologies/cultures/languages/traditions
• YourPointOfViewHere

Annnnd the bad guys and the good guys switch sides, depending on your starting point, your angle of view.

Shadowboxing.

… and found wanting …

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Ben Franklin

This New York Times op-ed is making the blog and response rounds. The backstory behind the op-ed: an alcoholic mother publicly and violently lost her temper (is screaming and throwing your blackberry ‘violent’?) in the middle of the airport when she found her seat had been given away. She was cuffed and booked by airport officials – and then (get this) died in custody due to some weird condition nobody (her included) bothered telling the police about. The op-ed goes on in typical “bleeding-heart fashion” (yes, thank you, Dave :) about how we’re just missing our social agape these days, and if someone – anyone!! – had just put an arm around the poor woman, she’d still be alive…

gag me, please. All of us have had our bags searched, our underwear laughed at, our reading material scanned, our personal items touched by complete strangers. The rest of us have put up with worse indignities, without losing our tempers… Right?

.

.

That’s what I want to talk about here, not this article specifically. Sure, the woman was an unstable alcoholic. Sure, she died. But what happened to her has certainly happened to the rest of us.

Three months ago, I went through Miami security on my way home from South America. In my bag I had (among other things) a little stone fertility god – penis included – and a couple jars of a carmel-like Argentine sweet called dulce de leche. I had to strip down to pants, a tshirt and socks to get through the scanner, and then these two security guys – probably my age, 23, 25, something – went through everything I had with me. They pulled the sweets out and nixed them instantly, and then took out the god and started laughing. And I laughed with them. Wanna know why? – because I didn’t want them to take it away from me. I was fucking pissed – my stuff, my sweets, a present for my grandmother! – but I didn’t want them to toss the rock, too. They had all the power, and I was standing there in my socks with a lot of good memories associated with that particular piece of marble.
And so I teased them back, said a few sexy/racy things. Almost got the dulce back, too. Walked away thinking, “at least they didn’t declare the god contraband or something…”

… So what the hell, people?!?!

Satiated people have nothing to gain and everything to lose, and let’s face it; we are satiated here, on everything – goods, services, privileges, media, news (but not ideas or ideals). Who wants to argue over a fat, greasy finger in with their lacy thongs when they might get on a terrorist watch list over the issue?

.

We bend (over) to fit the circumstances.

… I think we have to face something as a nation: Freedom and safety – like, perhaps, freedom and equality – are diametrically opposed values. They’re opposites.

.

.

Give this a think:

• If everyone’s free to do what they want, some will do better or worse than others, and there’s no equality.
• If we enforce equality, most people aren’t free to do what they want.
• Ditto with safety; for perfect safety, we all need to be audited by the IRS at least once a year, allow our every communication to be monitored, provide biometric information to the government and wear tiny electronic radios to show our every movement.

We’d get all the terrorists that way, for sure, and all the prostitutes and their pimps and their clients, and all the illegal immigrants, and the people who watch kiddie porn or cheat on their spouses, the murderers, the drug abusers, the people who cheat on their income taxes, the people who drive too fast on the highway. We’d get all the bad guys.

No problem, right? I mean, if I’m not doing anything wrong, how could it hurt? Only a bad citizen doesn’t want their wires tapped!

Social networks have historically existed both in the matrix and the interstices of law and government; we all go to church on Sunday, but then I take food to the neighbor’s kid who got herself knocked up. I don’t rat on my cube-mate when s/he comes in late to work, and then I expect him or her to stay mum when I leave at 4:30, five minutes after the boss. I take an extra cup of coffee without putting in my dollar, but I pay an extravagant sum to the neighbor’s kid who’s fundrasing for the soccer team – and, perhaps, by the way, her dad brings coffee to the office. Perhaps I drive too fast, but I mow my neighbor’s lawn. We all need to feel we’re gaming the system, just a little, and sometimes we all need to feel we’re making it better, but off the record.

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Which brings me to this:

• Freedom lies in our ability to self-regulate – both socially and personally.

• Law exists to prevent willful and gross manipulation of the system. (whether that’s war, murder, theft, whatever –).

• Law (and government, for that matter) should provide outside stability so we can participate in social networking and regulation.

• Law does not exist to provide recompense for stress, accidents, or spilled coffee.

We cannot and will never be both perfectly free and perfectly safe.

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Back to my sexy-jokes interlude with the guys at the airport: The U.S. government has decided it can divest itself of care for our dignity and privacy in the interest of our safety and security.

I – personally, and I bet you too – have decided I am willing to collude with “a certain amount” of humiliation and non-privacy, so I can keep my stuff and catch my flights.

I care more about my stuff than my dignity.

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Do I deserve my freedom? Do you?

To be or Not To Be (human); Iraq War Taxation, Networking Detriments

(to skip to the “point” of this article, drop down to the paragraph beginning “I’m not so far afield as I appear…”)

If you read the end of my October 5th post titled “Networking, On-Demand Software, Disaster Scenarios,” you know I’m concerned about our increasing dependence on infrastructure/technology networking. I also have reservations about our dependence on technology in general (“Your Cyborg Future is Here“).

It may then come as a surprise to you that I really liked Thomas L. Friedman’s** op-ed in the NYT today (“Charge it to my Kids,” October 7, 2007).

A brief overview: The Republicans are ragging the Dems, who want to increase taxes to pay for the war (this will, of course, only bolster public condemnation of our Middle East “involvement,” which is bad for the Reps). Friedman, sarcastically, replies:

Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.

We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow… (emphasis mine)

That last part is important; we can’t have it all any more. Either we can have an advanced infrastructure, or we can have more fighter jets. We can provide social security benefits or we can revamp our transportation network … I’m honestly not sure what the economies of scale are here – i.e. what types of either/or comparisons are valid – but I do know the great steam engine of the U.S. economy is slowing down, or perhaps we’re running out of track. The landscape is coming clear, that green blur outside the window turned to grass, weeds, the fallen blocks of bridges and hiss of 50 year old phone lines. We’re getting passed by passenger cars, ladies and gentlemen, and most of them have Asian license plates.

On one hand, I’m not a huge fan of complete technology dependence; I’m not comfortable with the idea of individual humans living like spiders at the nexuses of a technology web. (the OED says “nexus” is the more common plural, but I prefer archaisms…) At some point the question will be whether it is us running the technology, or us serving as foci in/of/for a vast dataweb.

Perhaps the next step in human evolution is brains in cans (Alastair Reynolds’ Redemption Ark etc), or maybe, as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the physical world will merely be one’s ticket into a better, higher plane of existence; the loss of one’s ability to function on that plane, a hell;

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-pace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Neuromancer, Ch. 1)

I feel that sensuality – touch, sensation, pleasure, even pain – are all very much a part of what it means to be human. Don’t want us to lose touch of that. What have we become when flesh itself is a prison?

We humans have a way of turning everything into an art form – like a Dan Simmons character says, satirically, in in Hyperion, “even elimination must become pure poetry” – but this may not always work to our benefit. Art is a way of dramatizing experience; of pushing experience into overdrive. Like most media, it’s to help us appreciate the everyday, not an end in and of itself. Technology, I think, should work the same way.

Technological networking – yes, I know, I’m aware, this is an online blog after all! – has so many benefits; it’s just important imo to remember there are negatives, as well, and that we often don’t have good predictive methodology for large-scale consequences…

I’m not so far afield as I may appear; here’s the question: Do we really want to revamp our infrastructure just yet? We have so many social problems, one could easily and effectively argue they need to be solved first before we move on to things like replacing telephone networks and data cables. Maybe we should work on the physical network (bridges, roads, subways) before the technological, the mental, the elite.

It might do us some good, after all, to be a little behind, to have to play catchup, to be forced to take the time to stop, smell the roses, whatever it is - because we don’t have the ability to do otherwise. We have the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, after all, thousands of miles of ocean and a damn good army to protect us. We might gain immeasurably from holding ourselves back, just a little.

This is where the logic takes me: Perhaps we should therefore support the war in Iraq without promoting a tax increase, because we wish to leave ourseves even farther behind in the networking race. (Perhaps we’re doing this already, unintentionally…?)

Bottom line: what’s more important – winning a war, or creating a peace, being technologically advanced, or being more fully ourselves - whatever that means?

**Thomas L. Friedman (author “The World is Flat” and “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”) writes an interesting column for the NYT. I don’t always agree with him, but do visit it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07friedman.html