From "The Last American Man"

This is the incredible story of Eustace Conway.


For those who find this characterization of "The American Man" odd or offensive, remember that the mortality rate for the first Virginia settlers was something like 98% for the first few years. Thus, those that remained were of the sturdiest stock available. They didn't survive by playing Sudoko or badminton but by biting and killing their way to reproductive maturity. This kind of brutality is almost entirely lost on us in the Northeast, but it's nonetheless a vital bloodline of the country. We ignore it at our peril.


Here is my favorite quote from the introduction:

"The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.

This was a particular kind of man, this wilderness-bred American. He was no intellectual. He had no interest in study or reflection. He had, as de Tocqueville noticed, "a sort of distaste for what is ancient." Instead, he could sterotypically be found, as the explorer John Fremont described the Über-frontiersman Kit Carson, "mounted on a fine horse, without a saddle and scouring bare-headed over the prairies." Either that, or whipping his mighty ax over his shoulder and casually "throwing cedars and oaks to the ground," as one extremely impressed nineteenth-century foreign visitor observed. In fact, to all the foreign visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the American Man was a virtual tourist attraction in his own right, almost as fascinating as Niagara Falls or that ambitious new railroad system or those exotic Indians. Not everybody was a fan, of course. ("There are perhaps no people, not even excepting the French, who are so vain as the Americans," griped one British observer in 1818. "Every American considers that it's impossible for a foreigner to teach him anything, and that his head contains a perfect encyclopedia.") Still, for better or worse, everyone seemed to agree that this was a new kind of human being and that what defined the American Man more than anything else was his resourcefulness, born out of the challenges of wrenching a New World from virgin wilderness. Unhindered by class restrictions, bureaucracy, or urban squalor, these Americans simply got more done in a single day than anyone had imagined possible. That was the bottom line: nobody could believe how fast these guys worked."

Clearly this take on American productivity was written before the Detroit Union Era. When Obama says that no one works harder than Americans do, I always scratch my head. Seriously? How can they work so hard when they're all obese and on 2 dozen medications? I figure what motivates hard work is hunger - like the kind they have, say, in, oh, I don't know. . .China? Or any other country looking to claw its way out of desperate poverty? How can the fat, unionized American worker compete with that? What the hell was Obama talking about?

But I guess he was resurrecting the old frontiersman myth to try and inspire us anew. But when I look at the unionized stagehands at Carnegie Hall who make low six-figures for moving music stands two times in an hour, I have to wonder how far along this line of reasoning is really going to bring us into the 21st Century. It was one thing when the rest of the world was riven by warfare and destitute with disease and poverty. But now, we will have to call on something other than distant memories to allow us to compete. I'd bet on the hungry guy over the fat guy any day.

From Fredrick Jackson Turner

"In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

First stabs

Some of you may know that my ongoing cause celebre has been youth suffrage, coupled with abandonment of child labor laws and compulsory schooling. I have many paragraphs strewn around google docs and Micro Word on the subject, but they have yet to congeal into a concrete paper.

To me, this is the most important topic of the day, though it is admittedly quite far from the mainstream awareness. Since most people in America went to school and were not allowed to work for compensation or vote, it requires some imagination for them to perceive the value of something so far from their experience. Unfortunately, the public is not well known for its powers of imagination, Obama's messianism aside.

Still, I think it is important to make rational points on behalf of what I believe is the silver bullet to many of America's problems, including the national debt, global warming, medicare, and gang violence in our inner cities.

That's a pretty weighty docket of problems, but I am certain that over a generation or two, they could largely be addressed by giving a voice to the only people who have a genuine interest in their positive outcome. in the case of gang violence, that would be the young people themselves who are getting killed, and in the other cases, the young people who will grow old enough to bear the brunt of the latent catastrophes their parents are creating.

In fact, that is the point I would add to the argument below: that self-interest is what rules American democracy- period. The interest of a 6-year-old born today, who can reasonably be expected to live for another 90 years are other than the interests of his father who might live another 30 or 40 at most. The long term impact of economic and environmental irresponsibility will be tangibly felt by the child but not likely by the father. Long term stability, therefore, should be the province of the young, who are going to live through the long term, not the old, whom death will spare the punishments for their profligacy.


I have heard only one other public voice share my concern, and this short post moved me to force some of my thoughts into a bullet point reply. You'll find my summary below.

Some points:

1. Being informed is not a pre-requisite for voting in America. Having interests is, and children have interests. There are people who vote by making pretty patterns with the levers on the ballots, and their votes count as much as yours do.

2. You can’t give parents an extra vote for their children, because parents’ interests and children’s interests are often at odds- think long term debt vs. short term market gains, or global warming impacts, etc.

3. Kids appear uninterested in politics because they have no power to influence politics. I have no interest in the private jet market, because I have no power to purchase a private jet.

4. Most likely kids would vote to repeal mandatory schooling and child-labor laws which restrict their ability to exercise their will and power in the world. When you treat somebody like a child they will act like one (Uncle Tom = Uncle Junior). Right now children have responsibilities (like homework) but no freedoms as a result. This is equivalent to tyranny over a minority and should not be allowed in a democracy.

5. All arguments that seek to deprive children of voting were applied to slaves and women in previous centuries and were all proven false once those groups were given power to affect their lives.

6. Just want to iterate that being an informed and educated voter is not essential in a democracy. People can be quite informed (Brooks and Dionne) and still come to opposite conclusions. It’s not about being right, it’s about having desire. And even if being right were a valid consideration, millions of senile, uneducated, old people can vote but an informed 17 year old can not. Even on those terms, this is not a just state of affairs.

7. And even assuming intelligence is a valid concern, while all young people might not be intelligent, a natural leadership would arise from those who are. Not all women or blacks (or environmentalists or WASPS) are intelligent either, but their interests can be wrangled by bright leaders within their own community. There are plenty of children who would be capable of representing for their fellows in lobbying government. This is particularly true in poor black and latino communities where these young politicians (for lack of political power) become gang leaders and express their leadership in violence rather than in debate. These poorer communities would benefit the most from youth suffrage, as they already have powerful leaders who have no other outlet to seek their own interests other than gunplay and crime.

8. Finally, engaging the generation that is closest to the future and future trends, who is fluent in the technology that will be running our lives a generation off, would be a huge boon to our community. Shunting these kids into schoolroom dungeons is the biggest waste of resources in the country. I want that 6 year old programmer developing aps for my iPhone, investing in stocks, and retiring at 40 to become a philanthropist- not memorizing multiplication tables and poetry that he doesn’t like or understand.

End of lecture.
D

"Haven't they suffered enough?" - H.S.

I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but I find it hysterical. As Sullivan says, it's not an Onion headline.

The American Scene

So I'm digging this blog. A link to a provocative, and I believe accurate, post.

Manzi

Manzi's article here is right on point. I was impressed by the nuance of his reasoning and by the dexterity with which he teased apart two nearly overlapping concepts over the course of his article.

What surprised me a bit, then, for such a clever thinker, was that his final paragraph seems to be completely irrational. In it, he cites human slavery as the sort of moral problem that might upend Libertarian thinking. But how can slavery fit at all in a Libertarian framework, since the human slaves themselves possess no liberty? (Letting alone the political and moral problems, slavery in and of itself causes huge market distortions for the labor market, as much a reason to be rid of it as any, from a Libertarian point of view.)

For a man as obviously intelligent as Manzi, this lapse in logic is perplexing. Would love for him to further elaborate in case it is I who is missing something.


In the mean time, I offer this playful post as a truly Libertarian notion of slavery, influenced by recent acquaintances I have found who are deeply embedded in the sexual bondage community. While presently I find this lifestyle to be somewhat out of my reach, I have been fortunate enough to meet with folks who are embedded in it who have opened my mind to new and surprising values in the perverse and scandalous. For further elaboration, I can do no better than to direct my reader here.


In any event, it is a pleasure to have discovered Mr. Manzi (by way of Andrew Sullivan's hiatus), and I shall look forward to keeping up with his work over time.

Health Care

Well it's time I weigh in on this one. I have been reluctant to for some time, since I have long believed that guaranteed universal health care is a bad idea and that, even though most people want it, there is still no reasonable way it can be achieved. And we are now at a point in the debate where I believe it is clear that the idea is going to fail, so I think it's time to look at the real reasons why.

It has been argued that health care is too costly, that costs go up and up, largely because medical innovation continues - and will continue so long as we humans still experience death. It has been said that it is too complicated. It has been said that without tort reform (an impossibility for a Democratic administration), there can be no true reduction in cost. It has been said that the details of the plan are unbeknownst to anybody - including, based on his prevaricative explanations of the plan, the president. It has been said that the government can't do anything well or efficiently, and so they should not be put in charge of something as important as emergency medical treatment, long term care, or end of life decisions.

A lot more has been said besides, and it is all true. This sort of policy making is the messiest, sloppiest, most boondoggle-laden monstrosity that the government could possibly come up with. It was doomed to fail from the start.

But how did it get so complicated?

Why is it so so so so complicated?

Well I'll tell you why.

It's simple, of course. In any economic system, when you have a monopoly of control, when you have high degrees of regulation, you create unneeded complexity. It is a law of life- regulation created problems, it creates inefficiencies, it creates overlapping jurisdictions, it creates waste- it creates unmanageable systems.

And that is what we have in health care in this country.

But where, you say, are the regulations? Where is the monopoly?

The answer is that it is in the very concept of modern medicine itself.

As always, when things get crazy, the solution lies in uncovering assumptions we make that are incorrect and which lead to needless confusion. In our case, the assumption we make is that the only way (this is the monopoly part), the only way people get healthy is through western medical intervention. This is the false assumption upon which our entire system lies. It is one that is so entrenched, that people hardly see it for what it is - an assumption, not a truth. That the medical model has asserted supremacy over all forms of legally sanctioned healing is an impressive display of will and power that has taken nearly a century to consolidate. And now that it has, it is asking for more.

One other principle of economics, which compliments the problem of mandates and regulations, is that when you guarantee someone something, you are also guaranteeing waste and inefficiency. One can see this in all manner of government service jobs and in many positions that involve the guarantee of tenure. If you are guaranteed $100,000 a year to do your job, and you will get that money no matter what, your honor may compel you to do the job well for a time, but eventually, you will descend to perform it adequately, and eventually, once it sets in that you will be making your money anyway, you will apply your energy someplace else and do your job poorly- while still making the money, thus creating huge waste for your employer and unbearable annoyance to your customers.

When the government guarantees money to doctors and pharmaceutical companies - which it already does in the form of Medicare and Medicaid - you are giving them a monopoly on care, and you are guaranteeing corruption. It is a law of nature. Whether the doctors heal people or not, whether they do it efficiently or not, whether they use experimental methods on unwitting patients or not, they are still guaranteed the government's money. When there is no alternative to a method of care, when there are no choices, then you are no longer free, and you are no longer engaged in an open market system. And a closed system is a system that will breed waste, inefficiency, and corruption every single time. It will create confusion and overlap as different entities vie for their share of the guaranteed dollars. It will create a monster.

And that is what we have today in the medical model. A monster. An expensive monster that is growing and growing. Were Obamacare to succeed, we would be throwing gasoline on the fire. The financial guarantee to the medical industry would form a monopoly to make Microsoft look like the corner bookstore. It would divert nearly 1/3 of US dollars to the medical monopoly, who, if they were smart, would find new ways to make us sicker and so provide us with more drugs, tests, and procedures. It is a simple business model.

Right now, doctors have no idea why people really get sick, and what's more, they don't really seem to care. We have innumerable diseases that were non-existent even a generation ago. And the diseases that we used to have are presenting many times more frequently and more virulently than they ever were before. For someone who makes money treating the symptoms of these diseases, this is a very good thing for business- more customers. By treating symptoms and not underlying causes, we can create the illusion of health-giving, while insuring that true health - in the form of absence of need of doctors - is never achieved.***


I have been a raw food and detoxification enthusiast for five and a half years this September. I have seen miracle after miracle in my own body and in many of my colleagues who have followed this healing path. Most of us are convinced, through our own experience and transformation, that much of the underlying cause for what people call disease is horrendous nutrition combined with innumerable artificial toxins in our food, air, water - indeed in all areas of our life- including our medicine. Is it a coincidence that we ingest on a regular basis chemicals that have never been in contact with biological organisms in the past and that we are coming down with illnesses that have never afflicted us before either? Are these statistics not running in parallel with one another?

There are many other non-western medical healing modalities which produce miraculous healings on a daily basis. For many Christians, simple prayer is responsible for much in the way of increased health and healing. The Christian Science literature is jammed with testimonial after testimonial of disease reversal. And there are all manner of modern shamans, acupuncturists, and bodyworkers who have watched their clients' lives turn around through their work. Of course, as with any system that operates on the fringes of society, there are many incompetents and even frauds in these professions. This is undeniable. But that does not mean that they are all frauds - or that even most of them are, as the medical industry would prefer we believe. And with medical error (to say nothing of drug side effects) being the number 2 cause of death in America, I think it is unfair to say that the incompetents are in the alternative field alone.

While I am impressed by the work of these various healers, my own experience with deep tissue detoxification has convinced me that in a true level playing field of health practices, this method would win out over all. I have never felt more ecstatic - moment to moment - than when I have completed a deep cleanse and am fasting or eating raw foods. I now have a definition of health that is not merely, 'wow, my arm doesn't hurt today,' but 'wow, I feel really ecstatic today.' It is not simply an absence of disease that I feel, but a presence of health, radiance, and joy. To my knowledge, there is no parallel for this in modern medicine. One either has an illness or one is "healthy." But there is no thought that one could be healthier and healthier, though one can be sicker and sicker. There is no concept that the avoidance of disease is not the end but the beginning. For raw foodists, striving towards ever increasing levels of health and happiness is a lifelong passion. In a level playing field, raw foods would win every time.

But of course it is not a level playing field. Massive subsidies are provided by the government for drug research. Non-profit status is granted to hospitals and medical schools, saving them tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year. The foods we eat - which make us sick - are subsidized as well. We are funding both the diseases and the "cures" at the same time, creating a profit cycle that goes round and round and never stops. The libertarian and the rational economist both know that this is insane- that this is why you stop giving free money to companies in a free market. It is a guarantee of disaster. The danger here is that the majority of the population thinks it is helping them.

The only comparable wastes of money are the global war on terrorism and the global war on drugs. Our interventionist attitudes are feeding the resentment of America and growing new terrorists faster than we can kill the old ones. The drug war follows largely the same pattern, except the "terrorists" in this case are the domestic suppliers, whose market is insatiable. The good news, at least with the drug war, is that we are beginning to see that we can not afford to spend all our money incarcerating domestics and warring with foreign nationals when there is no tangible societal benefit. It is my hope that the head we are coming to in the medical debate will have a similar "wake-up" effect- that we simply can not afford to spend every last dime on the medico-pharmo industry. True alternatives must be found, and they will be found in healing practices that really produce health, not which tinker around the edges at ruinous cost.

Most economists understand the principles at work here. What they don't understand is the assumptions they have made guaranteeing medicine a primary position in the nation's pursuit of health. If they did, they would apply normal economical principles and let the different available modalities compete on an equal playing field. They would pull ALL the money to doctors and drug companies and let them compete against colon hydrotherapists and rolfers. This would eliminate much of the unnecessary complication and would radically reduce costs. It would eliminate layers of government bureaucracies, and it would increase innovation that leads to price reduction. Right now the medical innovations only increase the cost of doing business. That's not what innovation is supposed to do. It is supposed to make things cheaper and more accessible. If there are techniques of acupuncture that reduce suffering and inflammation better than surgery, then those would be flocked to by willing patients. And since acupuncture can be had for less than $100 per hour, it would be stiff competition for doctors performing $5000 surgeries + huge hospitalization bills.

If people became healthier by eating organic raw foods instead of corn-starch cereal, then they would do that. But right now, chemical foods and agriculture are being subsidized and raw food is not. This gives the illusion that such "food products" are cheaper. In fact, they are not cheaper even on their face, once the subsidies are lifted, and when the cost to people's health is factored in through early onset cancer or diabetes, then the costs turn out to be much, much higher.

Government intervention distorts the marketplace. Always. Always. This is true whether they are subsidizing sardines or surgery. Al-Ways. Understanding where we mistakenly think these subsidies are helping is the first step to simplifying the process and making it less expensive. But instead, subsidizing all health insurance will do the opposite. It will make everything more costly, less efficient, and more complicated. This is why I have opposed it from the start and continue to now. My only hope is that this breaking point in the debate opens up new avenues for the exploration of other, saner options. If this be the effect of the discussion at this point, then it will have been worth the fight.



***At the risk of appearing too cynical here, it is worth repeating what I have said elsewhere- that while the motives of doctors themselves may be as pure as the New England snowfall, the people who control them, the drug and medical equipment companies, are beholden to shareholders, not to patients. I, myself, own stock in some of these companies, and I assure you I have never taken the Hippocratic oath. It would be against my financial interest to do so. Again, I don't wish to impugn the motives of all doctors. In many ways they are the equivalent of well meaning, patriotic soldiers who wish to do good by the people. But these same loyal soldiers have placed their destiny in the hands of corrupt and mischievous governments whose interests often collide with those of the military- and even their own citizens. (I will not insult your intelligence by offering examples from recent history.) By turning their art over to anonymous corporate interests - like myself - doctors leave themselves vulnerable to these same unfortunate distortions.

Switz

I always had a hunch these guys were cooler than they let on.

The New Hampshire of Europe. . .I hear Ron Paul may even be moving there.

Check it out.

Guns, Guns, Guns. . .

Well this is interesting. E.J. Dionne is suggesting that the gun nuts in congress quit pussying around with security guards and metal detectors and just go ahead and defend themselves with concealed weapons like real Americans.

Of course, he's being facetious. E.J. Dionne is no gun nut, and he would sooner turn health care over to the pharmaceutical companies than carry a fire arm. But the article has some bite to it, as he calls out what he considers to be hypocritical politicians to, as he challenges, rather disrespectfully, "put up or shut up."

This line of reasoning is effective, but I believe it obscures one of the more nuanced features of the gun law discussion, and at the same time it betrays Dionne's own unconscious biases.

I have long been for strict gun control. That is, until I moved to the country. The thought of a New York City populace armed to the hilt with handguns or worse would threaten to close the city in a bloodbath every time somebody "blocked the box" or held the subway doors open too long. There is too much stress - caused by too much proximity - in a dense urban environment to give people such easy and sanitary access to murder. This is why, for better or or worse, we have codes of conduct and restraint in cities that we loosely define by the term "civilization." And we like it that way.

Now there is a great argument in America - and it is one I subscribe to - that says that "civilization" is something best avoided, that there is a naturalness and an instinctive truth that is lost with too many societal constraints. This tradition goes back to the first generation of settlers in Virginia who suffered a 98% mortality rate for their first two years in the New World. Those who were able to survive such grueling living conditions were not the ones who did the best at the New York Times crossword puzzle. They were the ones who were the most savage, the most hearty, and the most instinctive- that is, the least civilized. And their descendants would form much of the culture that we now describe as Southern and (even more so) Western.

The mythem of the self-reliant man-beast wended its way through Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Huckleberry Finn, Eustace Conway, and, in a strange media distortion, George W. Bush, aka Shrub. For these characters, real or imagined, the encroachment of civilizations with its strictures and controls was too much for the wild spirit. Freedom didn't just mean freedom of religion, freedom of assembly - it meant Freedom, non-negotiable and absolute.

For this culture, guns were - and are - a certain guarantor of that freedom. What is also required for that kind of freedom is a lot of open space.

Dionne's prejudices come from his experience as a Boston native and Washington, DC resident. These are dense metropoli - lacking in wide open spaces where men can roam free as in the wild. Civilization, even, dare I say, European-style civilization is a requirement of order when you have that many people in such a confined space. A Boston, a New York, or a DC in which every whack-o was walking around with a Beretta in their fanny pack would be an instant no-go. People would (rightfully) be afraid to walk the streets - in the day or the night - businesses would close, commerce would stop, and the economical juggernaut which is the big cities would quickly screech to a halt as the best and the brightest retreated to their compounds in the exurbs.

So in the end, perhaps, like so many things, gun control advocates are pushing an economic issue. Urban life would simply cease to be if everyone in town had recourse to such easy death and maiming. I know I, myself, would be responsible for at least 5 cabbie deaths a day + a handful of Midwestern transplants and two or three tourists holding up the line at Balthazar's. Where would we find time to prosecute everyone? Likely an agreed upon quota would have to emerge on how many German tourists you could kill in a week without getting dragged into court. The whole city would be dead in no time.

Anyway, you get my point.

But much of the pro-gun lobby lives far away form these urban centers - and gladfully so. For those folks living on a 1,000 acre ranch in states with cattle outnumbering people by 10:1, a gun is a reasonable way to protect yourself in an area where 911 is a long distance call. Wide open spaces allow for a kind of civility about firearm use due to the lack of relative stress compared to urban environments. Each time two strangers face each other, both knowing each other is armed, a kind of temporary, localized civilization forms which keeps each other's worst instincts in check. When the two men part ways, this mini-civilization dissolves and they can return to the naturalness of wilderness life. For many rural Americans, that's the American way.

Now rural folks do occasionally congregate at the local cafe in town, each with their firearms by their side. But these are voluntary social gatherings to help break up the solitude, and the numbers of those assembled range in the high single digits rather than the high 6 figures. The civility that gun possession engenders in public places can work fairly well on that smaller scale, especially considering that the people who are meeting in the local towns are generally people who are all, excuse me, the same "type" of person, whatever that means in a particular locale. The lack of ethnic and cultural diversity in small towns makes for one less strain of tension that can lead to trigger happy massacring. While it may seem backwards from the high mindedness of the northeast, for much of the country, mono-culturalism is still very much the norm. And for each of the half dozen hicks sitting around the table at the local bar-b-q joint to be carrying a firearm is largely as innocuous as a half a dozen Columbia students sitting around the juice bar with a copy of Das Kapital.

Which brings us back to Congress.

The nation's Capitol is surely one densely populated area. People from all walks of life, from all the various states of mental derangement inhabit it. Lobbyists, Congressmen, staffers, tourists, and sandwich vendors all swarm in and out of the great public buildings which litter the Washington Mall. Such a menagerie cries out for civilization. And they get it - in the form of gun control laws, security officers, and metal detectors. Yes, this sort of division of labor and forfeiture of self-reliance principles is anathema to the rural sensibility. It is a degradation of the human being to a kind of cubicle-troll. Of this there can be no disagreement.

But don't expect the southern congressmen to take Dionne up on his challenge. They are in Rome when they are in the Capitol, and they know better than to open the doors to all and sundry with the hopes of being able to pick off the stray assassin while voting down a cloture motion. Plus a lot of these geezers would be pretty slow on the draw. And who would want to pay for all those special elections?

But these same congressmen, though visiting Rome, will eventually return to their districts, where those they represent may go days or weeks without seeing another two-legged critter. Those rural Americans and their ancestors chose that way of life on account of its greater sense of freedom and individual self-sustenance. And their representatives understand that.

Dionne's stealth attack is certainly a charming read, and while he protests that he doesn't offer it lightly, his thinking on the subject is as thin as the paper it's printed on. I'm sure his chorus doesn't mind being preached to, but in terms of furthering the national debate, Dionne has simply hit his head one more time against a very thick wall.

msm wtf?

My feeling is that this week will mark a turning point in the descent of newspaper journalism and, increasingly, other big outlets in the mainstream media. The lack of Iran coverage from the NY Times to NPR has been bewildering to me. On the morning after the "election," The New York Times headlined that Achmadinijad had won and that there were protests in the streets. Same old same old, muslim riots. Move on to page 2.

But it has been obvious for some time to anyone following this election that this was an event of enormous proportions, and that the day after would not be the end of things if the election were considered a sham. By all counts, the election was just that - a sham, and a poorly disguised one at that. Why, then, did the New York Times fail to mention that fact? Why did it roll over and concede the election when the rival parties refused to - and while they were under house arrest?

I have been away from TV for the past week or so, so I have not seen the coverage - or lack of coverage - but from what I can discern from blogs and a little bit of radio is that what coverage there has been has served only to marginalize the election results and the ensuing riots.

To which, all I can say is, WTF?

Answering my own question, I come to the conclusion that the MSM is more in bed with the political establishment than is tolerable. From the point of view of the Obama Administration, while it would be nice to have a more moderate leader in Iran and have their public's voice heard, it is much more useful to have Achmadinijad in there. He is a known quantity, and he is easy to characature. For the hawks in the administration - and even some of the doves - who feel that military conflict is inevitable, any change in the calculus, i.e. a new leader, would disturb their plans and make it harder to forge ahead.

I can only come to the conclusion that Washington wants Achmadinijad there and that the MSM, acting as their mouthpiece, is encouraging that particular outcome.

This is nuts. And it may well turn out to be Obama's "Weapons of Mass Destruction," charade in which the MSM once again fails to think critically about Administration policy.

Andrew Sullivan has been reporting on his blog about Iran non-stop for three days. He has video clips, "tweets," and emails from people in the field. He is all over the story including the notable silence sweeping the main stream media coverage.

Perhaps more than WMD, this media response parallels the second wave of coverage after 9/11, the wave that acquiesced to Bush Admin Newspeak about hating freedom and so forth.

To me it is appalling, and my hope is that in this country, the obvious, Katrina-like blunder on the part of the MSM initiates our own green-style revolution against the tyranny of the Media which shows itself - again - to be nothing more than well-paid stenographers for the wish and whim of the people in charge. Let this be the transition to blog-land where writers are not in bed with the people they are reporting on, do not go to comedy, black-tie dinners with the people they are reporting on, and do not cow to to their every dispensation of scoopy tidbit.

Media is meant to be antagonistic to those in power, not cozy with them. Even the fact that reporters pay the government to fly on their airplanes poses an enormous conflict of interest. Not necessarily in the monetary pay-for-play sense, but in the sense that it automatically places the media in a position of subservience vis-a-vis the people they ought to be seeking to undermine. This DOES NOT WORK. It did not work in the Bush White House, where journalists were punished and rewarded based on the quality of their coverage, it does not work when the media fawns endlessly over Obama, and it does not work when real news and real history are at stake, as they are today in Iran.

So I say enough already with the pomp of the Main Stream Press. Put it to rest and bring the debate down to your level. There are plenty of articulate voices out there, and I prefer the twittering reports of real Iranians to the anemic narrations of US media foreign bureaus. We can figure out the news just fine without you.

Vibrant Democracy

Today there were widespread accusations that the current administration in Iran rigged the elections to give Achmadinijad another term. Protests raged in the streets by opposition supporters, and it took several hours to effectively suppress them by the police. One of the things that is striking about this footage is that many of the rioters are dressed in some sort of business attire, suits and slacks. I've never seen footage of rallies/riots in the middle east where the protesters were so well dressed. Not sure what conclusion to draw, but it seems at least that the violence is not just by the normally disaffected elements of society.

For a contrast, I have posted the schlappschwanz response to our 2000 version of an Achmadinijad victory in our country. It makes you think, who has the more vibrant Democracy?

Media Part 2

This is a little cynical, but forgive me.

As a blogger myself, I am clearly in favor of the new media's getting on with it and the threshing out of most of the waste from the old. In the next decade or so, we are likely to see a new golden era for crack reporting as the citizen journalist and whatever new models waiting to be born stake their claim in the national marketplace.

But my guess is that period will eventually come to an end- and perhaps more quickly than we would expect.

My hunch is that at some level, democracy or not, we Americans appreciate that there is someone out there doing the dirty work that we don't have to see. ("You can't handle the truth!") We'll never really know because we'll never really know, but faith in democracy and transparency can sometime obliterate other aspects of life- subterfuge, espionage, dirty tricks, and under-the-table bargaining- what congress calls "sausage making."

While these "old-school" dealings have largely been progressed through (few Blogojovichian scandals remain, and those that do come off mainly as charming anachronisms), my sense is that they are still a historical constant, only one that changes form and adapts- like the media itself will.

But there is always a lag time for the entrenched interests to catch up with the newest developments. For that critical period where the technology outpaces the "establishment's" ability to figure it out, there can be a series of stunning revelations and progress.

We may remember such a rush in the 90s when New Media first hit the scene. The democratic potential for wealth, success, and excess was realized in almost every kitchen in America. Any dot com had the potential for making everybody rich, and the dinosaur mega-companies of old were all doomed to be replaced by urgonnamakemerich.com.

And they almost were, until they caught on. Now, of all those IPOs from the Clinton years, you can count the remaining successes on one hand- and still have a finger or two left over to click on WalMart.com. So much for that.

There will be another round of this, though- perhaps several. The blog phenomenon will no doubt be part of the next wave of playing-field-leveling, and new technologies such as Kindle and Google Books will have an enormous effect on publishing.

This is all good news, but be sure to get it while the gettin's hot. Stasis and change are in a constant g-rated tango (no penetration), and neither has the lead for too long before the other catches up. For those of us who feel at home on the cutting edge, it is wisdom to know when to dull it up a bit and leave the casino. For the dinosaurs, it is helpful to keep an eye out for comets.

So let's drink a toast to the next wave, soberer though we may be for having lived through dot com 1.0. If we could think ahead a little bit, let's try to shoot for some less goofy names for our giants of 2.0. Although it may be too late for "blog."

Related

More from Andrew Sullivan. This line of reason doesn't shock me and, like most conspiracy theories, resolves the cognitive dissonance in my mind about the Iraq build-up. That doesn't necessarily mean it's true, but there's no reason to assume it's not. If this turns into another "grassy knoll" it will turn out to be a long century. If Obama is as attuned to history as he appears to be, he will want to flesh this out, damning the political costs. Witch hunt or not, the Republicans aren't coming back any time soon. If he takes his time and goes about it rigorously and patiently, allowing the truth to reveal itself, then there is a decent chance of a healthy national/international purging of the issue. Whatever outcry from the Right, it will have minimal political consequences, but the self-corrective nature of our democracy at work will reinvigorate our country and our mission in the world. Much more important, I'd say.

Media

Now I'm an old-fashioned guy. I think my record is pretty clear on that.

But I've never loved newspapers. Perhaps that's because for my generation, "old-fashioned" means Jim Lehrer instead of Keith Olbermann. And while the dulling radiation of TV is still sickening, it's not nearly as grotesque to me as a hand full of ink and the fingernail-on-chalkboard tactility of folding and creasing the old papers.

So right now, the current self-obsession the print media has with its own demise I find completely uninteresting. My only surprise is that it's taken this long to happen, considering the morning news is often stale by the afternoon, to say nothing of the evening. Papers, being what they are, keep reading the same as they did the night before when they were printed.

As best as I can figure, from the stories that pop up on the subject - despite my earnest attempts to ignore them - the argument boils down to, "If the newspapers don't do the 'real, nose-to-the-ground reporting,' then who will?"

Obviously this question is retarded. Nothing would seem to reflect the current media's liberal bias more than the fact that they have no faith in basic economics- that if we knew what would replace something before it happened, then it would have happened already. Cool down and enjoy the ride is the winning strategy for those of us on the slightly-more-right.

As usual, the only real danger at this moment of self-conscious suffocation is that someone might seek to initiate a solution prematurely which could short-circuit the natural "creative-destruction" process. The only one in a position to do that now would be Uncle Sam.

The Obama administration's endless enthusiasm for doing good may be the only real danger here. Nothing feels better than "saving" someone or something from demise. But we economists know that saving is more dangerous than dying. Protecting is more dangerous than fighting. And with the newspaper industry (as with autos, steel, and agriculture), propping up a dying industry would be a disaster long on our hands.

The good news is that the Obama administration remains committed to change and a certain kind of populist progress. He is the Blackberry President and so must realize the value of new media in displacing the old. Nothing would be more helpful to instigating change in Washington than shaking up the media-government duopoly of information that culminates each year in the National Press Club Back Scratching Extravaganza.

But that might be the point. Frank Rich, in his piece today in the Times (which I read online), mentions four important examples of big media snooping that he thinks represent their importance to Americans at this time: Walter Reade, Steroids, Enron, and warrantless wiretapping.

The furor around these subjects is somewhat akin to the furor over the torture techniques the country has used- they are lightweight compared to what's really out there, and that's the truth. Let alone that two of those "big stories" would never have existed if the press had gone after the real story, which was the phony build-up to the Iraq war. Once you blow that one, you don't get let off the hook. Sorry, guys. In any event, even if you give the press a pass on that one - and you shouldn't - these stories, for all of the indignation they elicit, are relatively minor.

The more important questions are: what are the stories that they didn't get to? Giving the public its regular dose of outrage-bait is useful, and if I were a politician engaged in foul play somewhere, I would welcome such distractions. Doesn't everyone know that phone calls in the US are monitored? Why is that such a shocker? There are a million bills that go through the House each day that would blow your eyeballs out, but we never hear about them. And if I were in the House, I would want it that way.

Ditto, obviously, for steroid use in baseball. Who cares? And who is really that surprised? Like wiretapping, most of us were happy to tacitly go along as long as it kept us somewhat safer and more likely to catch a home run ball in the bleacher seats. But once revealed as fact, the indignation became a necessary display of piety, and so we were distracted from real news for a dozen news cycles or more.

[Note: I will concede the value of the Enron story, but it appears the company was crumbling on its own without too much press digging, no?]

At any rate, if there is some body that would benefit from maintaining the journalistic status quo besides the journalists, it would be the politicians. So watch out for any high-minded "save the free press" campaigns you hear coming out of the Capitol. It's a racket.


In a previous post, I was pleased to suggest an approach for dispersing government throughout the country so as to better represent the people and better guard against terrorist threats in a centralized region. One of the advantages I didn't mention was that it would require a dispersement of the press corps as well. Spreading the culture of journalism across the country would make the cronyist element of news gathering a little less intense.

And while there would be adaptations to the new forms, it would largely mean a clearing of the air in terms of what is reported- primarily, one could envision a lot of conflicting information from different parts of the country, since the "group think" of all living in the same town would be whittled away. This is a good thing. Conflicting reports spur action to find "truth," where that is possible. It reveals that the "truth" we discovered when everyone was living in the same city might not have been truth at all but something more akin to a collective conspiracy.

This would do an awful lot for openness of journalism. It may even revive some of the lost jobs.

Vigilante Week

Now onto something serious. . .

I am trying to refine this idea which took hold in my mind when I first moved back to New York from California. I was appalled at the level of noise and commotion here in the City- most of it unnecessary, and most of it the result of impulses from out of towners safely ensconced in their automobiles. Nary a day goes by when I don't hear a sting of sustained honking outside my window that serves no other purpose than to release frustration. And noble as that may be, the effect on those of us who make our homes here is deleterious at best - maddening at worst.

Now it's not just the out of towners who get to play "tough guy" when they're in the big city in their shiny, big cars. You and I both know that, besides the city trash collectors and ambulances, the primary culprits are the cabbies. Now I generally defer to them when it comes to decisions about how to drive. After all, they must survive on the streets, and due to the sheer volume of time they spend there, the numbers creep up against them in terms of safety. Fair enough.

But the real offenses from cabbies come at night, when the streets are empty and their risk of incident is almost non-existent. The solicitous honk, every time they see a pedestrian is what gets me the most. What is this, Los Angeles? Do they think that people who are walking are always in need of a ride? Ridiculous. I don't have a problem with the night hacks whoring themselves out any way they can- it is, after all, a tough shift. But there are ways to do this without waking up the neighborhood with staccato interruptions throughout the night. Simply slowing down next to a would be John is enough to discern a response. The honking really must stop.


Legislation, as it so often does, has failed to do the trick. And when government fails the people, there is only one choice remaining. It is time for the people to take the law into their own hands.

My answer to this has become tempered over the years. Originally the idea was to permit citizens to carry a handful of rocks around in their pockets. When a vehicle passing by committed some offense in the eye of the pedestrian, they could let hurl a rock and cause a miniscule, but still painful amount of damage to the passing vehicle.

Yes, there would be collateral damage. Some of the elderly may not have the best aim (or the best hearing). People would certainly abuse the privilege as so many vigilante groups have done in the past. And then there is always the possibility, however remote, for violent retribution from the coked up yuppie in the Suburban.

But in general, I think it is worth the cost. A cracked windshield or a dented body is a significant pinch in the old wallet, though seldom a fatal one. But it would be enough to ensure that drivers think twice before laying on the horn. It might even serve to reduce the number of drivers willing to expose their vehicles to ricochets or "friendly fire" misdirects, and this would be a great boon to the city.

No laws would need to be passed, only the deliberate ignoring of the current ones in certain situations by the powers that be. This could be the City's response to Albany's killing of the congestion pricing scheme which was intended to reduce traffic (and therefore noise) in Manhattan.

So I mentioned that I had tempered my approach to this, didn't I? What's so tempered about this approach, you might say. Within weeks, the city would turn into a carnival of rock hurling and windshield cracking with the streets littered with spent rounds and debris, getting kicked up by car tires and sent hurling back towards pedestrians where real injury could occur.

Yes that's true. So I looked back in my mind to see how other cultures dealt with the issues of social unrest caused by the disparity between the haves (in our case, drivers) and the have-nots (pedestrians).

The best example was the classic Roman festival of Saturnalia where, for one week, all social roles were reversed. The aristocrats were treated as slaves and the slaves as aristocrats. Everything was upside down for the prescribed period, and when it was over, hostilities duly vented, things returned to a peaceable norm.

So you can see where this is going. One week, that's it. It could even be in August when most folks are away. For one week, we, the people, would let the drivers know - with force - how we feel about them polluting our city with unnecessary noise. For one week.

This would be enough to cow drivers for the rest of the year, as it would effectively "train" them to be aware of the damage they are doing to our quality of life. Some might act up and honk a little extra during the intervening 51 weeks, but somewhere their conscience would speak and they would live in the constant fear of comeuppance during the fateful week when they just *have* to drive into the city for their neighbor's daughter's gallery opening.

The psychological terror is enough to make the plan effective.

I leave it to the communities to decide what is best, but the government has clearly failed us in providing relative peace and quiet in an already overstressed environment. It is up to the people to take it from here.

Thinking the Unthinkable

[NB: There is a summary of this post at the bottom, if you would prefer to skip the elaborative preamble below. I think this proposal is important enough that even the attentionally deficient should be able to read it without prejudice against their distractability.]


So in the last post, I alluded, obliquely, to certain circumstances we could imagine that would actually, realistically, be worse than the defaming of our nation's reputation and the wounding to our national soul. While it has been alleged that waterboarding was successful in eliciting information about a plot for a spectacular 9/11 copycat attack in Los Angeles, as alarming as this is, it is not the disaster situation we all know is possible but almost never mention.

That situation, the most alarming, would be the obliteration of a major American city through means which I will, deferentially, not mention in this post. Obviously, the destruction of New York or Washington, DC would be the most damaging to our country- with all due respect to Los Angeles, Boston, Wichita, and the rest, these two cities represent the densest concentrations of wealth and power in the United States, indeed the world, and were they to instantly disappear from the planet, the repercussions would be everything an anarchic jihadist would long for.

For the purpose of offering a constructive solution, or prophylaxis for this situation, let me take Washington, DC primarily.

Whatever we may think of our elected representatives, and the teeming masses of bureaucrats, technocrats, lawyers, lobbyists, secretaries, generals, judges, journalists, diplomats, and dignitaries that inhabit - some would say infest - our nation's capital, they nonetheless are the ones who run the country and, by extension, the world. They have the experience, expertise, exposure, and awareness of the mechanics of governing that even the most highly educated of the rest of us do not. This is a statement, on which even the most hardened Idaho Libertarian could agree.

The instantaneous "disappearance" of the capital city would leave our nation without 95% of our federal elected officials in the blink of an eye. The results would literally be catastrophic, bordering on cataclysmic. The top shelf of the executive line of succession from the President to the Vice-President, Pro-Tem, Speaker, Secretaries of State, Defense, etc., would all be within the radius of destruction. Likely the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be as well. The power vacuum left without a Washington, DC would be unimaginable, and the chaos that ensued could prove to be insurmountable.

It has become custom, over the years, for a member of the line of succession to be absent from the annual State of the Union address in the event that some wacko planted a bomb in the Capitol and dispatched the top of the chain. Unfortunately, that scenario is proving more and more quaint as we begin to imagine scenarios using more and more powerful explosives.

Now it is possible that I am overstating the magnitude of this kind of catastrophe. Perhaps there are already plans in place to "back-up" the government in the case of some sort of unimaginable disaster. But, while I hate to be this cynical, since Washington works almost entirely on the principle of self-interest and self-preservation, since most of its residents would be dead in such a scenario, it is hard to imagine them envisioning, much less implementing, plans that would only have value once they were dead.

Before I present what I believe to be an excellent solution for this morass-in-waiting, I should like to say that the country we know now, despite our lip-service to our ideals, is very much different from the one our radical forefathers founded over 200 years ago. That country, indeed that world, was largely agrarian, extremely diffuse, with power and wealth highly decentralized and concentrated in land rather than money. The government, with no standing army and limited power and reach was far less powerful and far less centralized than it is today. The Daniel Boone lifestyle was a reality for more people than it is today, and the concept of self-reliance, self-self-defense was much more active in the psyche than it has become under today's police-and-nanny state.

Among the many things this country lost when the Civil War was won was this kind of diffuse, agrarian power structure. The Civil War was a victory, among other things, for industrialization, modernization, and centralized power and wealth. The "big cities" of the time were industrial cities, and for the making of products, concentration of wealth and labor were required.

As we move into the digital age and the post-industrial age, America's wealth and labor will hopefully grow more diffused, bridging the decentralization of the ante-bellum U.S. with the high levels of wealth and paid employment of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In other words, much of the modern economy can be run from anywhere in the world. Airstrikes and surgeries can now be performed remotely, via computer technology, thus obviating the need for gross centralization in big cities. Traders can get all of their information online and require fewer and fewer trips to the office. Theoretically, this could mean the Wall Street tycoons could still maintain their empires while living 8 months out of the year in Jackson Hole.

For business, this will hopefully be a good thing, as the concentrated wealth of the great cities can be spread around into the various local communities around the country. It is my contention that for government, this model should be adopted a well- and for reasons of national security, it should be adopted as quickly as possible.

There is no longer a logistical reason for the primary elected officials to be concentrated in Washington, DC. The nation's capital was founded in that nasty swamp as a compromise between the northern and southern power centers of the time (Virginia/Carolina and Boston/New York). There were no states west of the Mississippi, and so Washington was the political as well as the geographical center of the country.

But that is no longer true. A more accurate symbolic location of the Capital would be Lincoln, Nebraska, or thereabouts. But this is not the point. The point is that the center of the country should be everywhere within the country. There is no longer a reason, due to technological advances, to have the White House and the Capitol in the same city or the same state. Ditto for the State Department and the Pentagon. More interestingly, through conferencing software, Congressmen and Senators could stay at home in their districts and state capitals.

Modern businesses do not store all of their documents in one geographic location, for fear of fire, theft, or terrorism. The Internet is "everywhere" at once, backed up in different locations for the same reasons. Government, whose resources could be described as being even more valuable, should follow the same model of dispersing its members both for the sake of getting closer to the country as a whole and also for mitigation of risk in the event of a targeted catastrophe.

Putting all of your eggs in one basked is never a good idea. In investing, we describe this as diversifying your portfolio, spreading around the risk. Washington was built and incubated during a time when that risk was relatively small, a stray musket, a home made explosive, or, at worst, some kind of arsonist. But the threats today encompass real estate margins that exceed what any city planner could have envisioned a century ago, and we need to adjust our reality to that reality.

After 9/11, Don Rumsfeld determined that either "they" would have to change or "we" would have to change, which, he declared, was impossible. So there exists on the right much insistence that we "preserve our way of life" whatever that means. But of course, we, as a nation, have changed enormously since 9/11, and with the current financial downturn, we will find our way of life changing even more.

Perhaps some on the right would accuse this plan of admitting failure prematurely and of being a sign of weakness to our enemies. The truth is we have already shown weakness to our enemies by botching a war and a half, selling out our values, and relying on military drones to do our dirty work for us. Jihad has never been more emboldened than it has become based on our actions to avoid appearing weak. This diffusion of government power would be an intelligent, forward looking venture that would significantly hamper our enemies' ability to do us harm.

Virtual communication software will become more and more a part of our lives, particularly as China and India become real global players. It will simply become impractical to travel 24 hours in an airplane for frequent business meetings in Asia. America could take the lead in secure global conferencing and networking technology by starting with our own government.

Is it really so hard to imagine a congressional session being conducted over large monitors in Senators' home offices in the nation's capitals? Could not each member be given individual screens for private meetings with colleagues for arm twisting and bargaining sessions? Scheduling would be more efficient, travel time would be reduced, and the immediate needs of the local districts could be addressed more convincingly. And obviously campaigning would be a lot easier as well.

Local economies would flourish as lobbyists, lawyers, and other bureaucrats moved into regional offices. And the wealth of the country as well as the culture of the country would be more interlinked. Global teleconferencing would be advanced as a technology, and most importantly, national security would be enhanced as the national economy grew. All in all, not such a bad way to change our way of life. It is, after all, no longer the 19th century.

-Summary-

So just to be clear (due to the touchy nature of this subject, I have been even more circuitous in my discursions than usual) - what I am proposing is a decentralization of our main centers of power in Washington with a relocation of those centers throughout the country. While the White House and Executive could remain in DC, the Supreme Court, State Department, Defense Department, Agriculture, Labor, etc. could be relocated to secure sites around the country. [e.g. Agriculture in Kansas, Defense in Kentucky, Labor in Ohio, Energy in Colorado, State in New York, etc.] Congressmen and Senators would set up base primarily in their home districts and state capitals.

Meetings between relevant parties - including sessions of Congress - would become mostly virtual, through secure conferencing technology - hard wire, backed up by cellular and satellite transmissions. Handhelds would be in use for private meetings between lawmakers, etc. over longer distances. The infrastructure in Washington would remain for use as desired by national leaders, but it would no longer be the sustained, concentrated geographical power center that it is today.

The benefits of this adjustment would be manifold. First of all, it would significantly reduce the damage from a potential large-scale terrorist attack using non-conventional means. It would bring state and local representatives into closer contact with their constituencies. The remoteness of representatives has been a major complaint from local regions- particularly from states in the far West where travel time and expense can be excessive. This program would bring Delaware and Oregon into balance in terms of ease of representation.

The program would also create jobs and revitalize economies throughout the country. Larger bureaucracies would be built around local government centers. Lobbyists would be forced to travel to various locales to make their cases, thus supporting regional hotels, restaurants, car services, etc. (of course lobbyists could also be granted selective access to virtual meetings, based on the disclosable discretion of the individual lawmakers). Long defunct state capitals would receive a surge in development and economic vitality.

And finally, the program would reestablish America's place at the forefront of technological innovation as we remodel democracy for the 21st century. If we envision a future in which all of the world's nations operate in sync with one another in real time, this "virtual" government infrastructure would prove the foundation for the global model. And America would be at its leading edge.

I believe that these proposals are worth considering- especially as we seem intent on developing infrastructure as a means of dealing with the financial downturn. Why not invest in infrastructure that has certain, long term benefits for the entire country rather than make-work projects of dubious national benefit? Surely national security, economic expansion, technological advancement, and increased regional representation are things all Americans could get behind.

Torture

I suppose it's worth me putting my two cents in here.

The first thing I'll say, as I've said here, is that saving lives - particularly lives in the short term - is not enough of a justification to commit a particular act. If we dropped down into a ghetto in Oakland with helicopters and took every individual there prisoner, that would no doubt save lives from gang violence- innocent lives. But the long term results would be catastrophic for the people's relationship to their government. Other gangs in other cities would respond with increased violence, possibly even linking forces to protect against the police, and the cost in innocent lives would increase. And most importantly, the legal/moral code which binds the society would be shattered, and there would be no common order holding the country together.

We could impose a mandatory 10mph speed limit on our highways. That would save lives. We could mandate AIDS testing for all of our citizens and then quarantine all those who test positive. That would save lives. We could outlaw cigarettes and Alcohol (again). That would save lives.

There are countless other ways we could save innocent lives. Kick down doors, forced truth serum injections, racial profiling, curfews, etc. But they would all have the same deleterious effect in the long term. And besides the practical dangers of such policies, the self-respect of the nation would be wounded, and though the effects of such a wound are not easily measured, they would no doubt be enormous.

And this is the problem with torture for the sake of "saving lives." Due process is what makes the Western system unique- and many would argue superior. When we skirt that code, we lose our purpose and our right to a destiny all our own.

In the end, descending into torture reflects cowardice, not strength. It is an open admission that we are out of control and we are too fearful of you to maintain our integrity in approaching you. In effect, you have broken us without even trying.

We therefore lose before we begin by ennobling our enemies through our own debasement. This statement could be taken to cover most of the Bush presidency foreign policy- weakness, poorly disguised with bluff and bravura. Even the ingenious unmanned drones are received in this spirit by our enemies- that Americans are too cowardly to fight face to face like men. They hide behind gadgets and toys to do their killing for them, anonymous, sanitary, remote. Such approaches do not evoke fear and respect from those they are used against - only rage. We are weakened by our seeming strength.

But.

There is no but here, truly, but I have to say this to make a point for the devil, because it needs to be made. Putting oneself in the place of Yoo, Bybee, Bush, or Cheney, you could argue the following:

Think back to 2005, before torture allegations were widespread. Then think of the word "torture" and watch what pictures come into your mind.

For me, it would start out with something like we saw in Pan's Labyrinth. A person hanging from the ceiling and being questioned. Refusing to answer, the interrogator breaks his kneecaps- wrenching pain. After a while he pulls out a fingernail, then another, then another. Maybe even a few teeth. Several humiliating slaps across the face would be a mere decoration of the procedure at this point.

Burning and branding might follow, the smell of flesh filling the dank chamber. Then, inevitably, the loss of digits, ears, tongue, nose. . . the grotesquery continues.

I picture the rack. Thumbscrews, stretching, whipping, breaking bones. Screams of pain, salt in the wounds, no hope of release, better to die here. Genital mutilation would follow, and life would lose all meaning.

In 2005, in my mind, this is torture.

Somewhere along this continuum, we have sleep deprivation. We have enclosure in a small cell with a scary insect. We have loud music and extremes of temperature. We have our bodies thrown against a wall (while wearing a neckbrace to protect our neck).

It is not hard to convince oneself, given the great many procedures all would admit to being far worse, it is not hard to convince oneself that this is not torture- that sleep deprivation is consistent with our "humane," "humanistic" values when compared with whipping and cutting off fingers. Or at the very least, that given that a terrorist threat might be imminent with innocent lives at stake (but more realistically, massive economic and political uncertainty following in its wake), it might be possible to justify to oneself these acts which, though depraved, fall far short of the irreversible devastation suffered by torture victims of yore.

I think any reasonable person could look at it this way.


But this does not matter. Because reason is not what is at stake here; it is honor. And evocations of dehumanizing treatment in the one nation founded on and dedicated to human rights is an unforgivable sin- both in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard if we are to be a beacon unto the world. Freedom is always risky. Freedom is always risky. But therein lies its glory. The willingness to be harmed because one chooses Freedom over security, as all of our forefathers did in the 18th century, reflects the essential light of our nation. To forfeit that is to forfeit everything, and what is left exposed when that light is dimmed is a corrupted vision, lazy, fat, and unwilling to back up our principles with anything other than fear.

And this, for the United States, is far worse than anything a terrorist could do to us. . . But even saying that, I am unsure. . . because there are things that a terrorist could do that would undo as much of our country physically, emotionally, economically as torture has done to us philosophically. I feel fortunate that it was not my decision to make, and I imagine President Obama feels the same way.

But since we remain essentially safe, the desire for justice that is ensured by security is unabated, and it may in fact hang innocent men. But the waters are too poisoned in this country now to do without some sort of public excoriating, some sort of purging of our evil. And, to continue, that is why we have tended to focus on waterboarding as the prime example of having gone "beyond the pale."

I have never been waterboarded, but the horror seems quite intense. The purpose remains unclear, since false confessions are all but guaranteed once one is truly in fear for one's life. Some would say that was the point. I have no information on that, but it would certainly round out the "reason" for doing what we did.

What I can say is that the effects of waterboarding are largely reversible and impermanent when compared with the effects of my earlier list of sadistic deeds. Can anyone argue with this? Yes, the waiting between waterboardings must be anguish, especially if one is sleep deprived. I can only imagine. But eventually it ends, as it has, and the wounds can begin to heal. The same can not be said about the other methods. It really can not.

As horrified as I am with myself to go down the road of condoning such a treatment of prisoners (and in my heart of hearts I truly do not), it is impossible for me to see this issue entirely from one perspective. I do believe many people out there are twisted souls- and the government seems to draw more of them than most professions. But it is possible for me to believe that they are not twisted beyond all sense, and that sometimes in our condemnation, we give ourselves permission to twist our own perspective so much that it dehumanizes those whom we believe to have dehumanized others.

Who can say? That is why I write this blog, to reach the extremes of thought and give us a wider pool to muddle around in the middle. Centrist vitriol. Perhaps it works.

Distraction

I've always had the feeling that part of the genius of American politics is that if you play it right, you can get it to leave you alone almost completely. If you stop taking the endless back and forth seriously, it seems possible to live a satisfactory life "in the cracks," as it were between the poles.

Legislation goes back and forth, regulation goes back and forth, politically correct trends go back and forth. It is impossible to plan your life around what the government is going to do next and what popular whim they will follow.

But the advantage to the endless tit-for-tatting is that it keeps people's political interest distracted - endlessly - on issues that transcend relevance to the average human lifespan. So if some movement or litigation takes 50 years to move through, this can be scored as a great victory for humanity and for future generations. But if you were 20 when it started, that leaves you with precious little life left to enjoy the fruits of the struggle (or suffer its consequences depending on what side of the issue you were on).

But when we largely ignore the collective zeitgeist tennis match, we can carve out a niche for ourselves that can be left largely undisturbed by the throngs throwing their electoral weight this way and that. This always struck me as one of America's best kept secrets for insuring individual liberty - endless, narcissistic distraction of government with itself.


The preceding thoughts were those of a mind not yet hooked in to American politics, but I think it still reflects a point worth considering. In the Enlightenment way of thinking, the thrust of action is more towards humanity than towards the individual human. So it can take ages for science to 'figure' out a cure for a disease or a new technology that will change everything, and this is fine and well. But people are living now, in the present (as they say in California), and this model tends to ignore that fact. Yes, part of us will always want to contribute to the "great work" of perfecting humanity and leaving a better world for our great-grandchildren. But we also must give due respect to this unique life lived in this unique, time-limited body. In our missionary zeal to change the world, we mustn't lose sight entirely of the simple, biological fact of mortality. Otherwise our struggle becomes nothing but an escape from our own leaves we are meant to live.

Amazing

For a lifelong Democrat (recently) turned Libertarian, my discovery of Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has been a revelation. Judging by his name, he may have actually been here at Plymouth Rock guiding the Mayflower into port. I have never seen a "Holman" or even a "Jr." writing for the Times.

You never hear stuff like this outside of the Journal. Really amazing- makes perfect sense. I always wondered why there were hardly any foreign pickups in the US.

For more than 40 years, a 25% tariff has kept out foreign-built pickup trucks even as a studied loophole was created in fuel-economy regulations to let the Big Three develop a lucrative, protected niche in the "passenger truck" business. [read: SUV]

This became the long-running unwritten deal. This was Washington's real auto policy.

For three decades, the Big Three were able to survive precisely because they skimped on quality and features in the money-losing sedans they were required under Congress's fuel economy rules to build in high-cost UAW factories. In return, Washington compensated them with the hothouse, politically protected opportunity to profit from pickups and SUVs.

Doesn't sound much like what you hear incessantly from your Congressman, about how Detroit's problems are all due to management "incompetence" in deciding to build "gas guzzling" SUVs, does it?

Kinda makes your head spin if you're a lefty, assuming this makes any sense to you.

National Security

I'd like to comment about the argument that releasing the CIA torture memos has made the US less secure and more vulnerable to enemy attacks.

This argument, though partially correct, is specious.

The truth is everything we do in this country makes us more vulnerable to attacks. Openness and transparency are the hallmarks of our democracy. Yes, we could close all of our borders, we could tap all of our phones (ahem), we could monitor our citizens' motions, we could dictate what goes on television or what books are published. All of these things would make us more secure. But they would also make us less American.

We have chosen, as a people, to assume the risk that comes with an open society. We have understood that, as in trade, the more open we are, the safer we are. The more transparent our government, the better it is for our government. The more information we have available, the more free we are to make sound choices.

In situations where information is controlled, it is not believed. And that leads to confusion, uncertainty, and a degradation of society. Tyrannical regimes deal with this uncertainty by cracking down even more until the state is completely strangled (see: North Korea as the best contemporary example. Saddam's Iraq would have been another.). We have chosen to live openly and therefore accept responsibility - and seek retribution - when and if that openness leads to abuse.

But to say that these memos are any more dangerous, say, than having a postal service that doesn't x-ray every package it receives is preposterous. Freedom's security comes in more freedom, not less. The conservative trade-experts should understand this. Protectionism is not just a blight of economic policy. If we really trust in a free and open society, it must be purged from political policy as well.

One World

For those of you that have had a conversation about politics with me during the last year or so, you'll know that I believe that youth suffrage is *the* silver bullet to most of our political problems. If you haven't had that conversation with me - and let me persuade you for half an hour or so - you will probably dismiss this idea out of hand. I'm in the process of penning a thorough defense of my position on the subject that I hope will spark a hearty debate and eventually will change some minds. But that is for another day.

Today while I was imagining such a debate, I played through my mind the following opposing argument:

You say that children in America are affected by US policies yet have no right to change them. Well this is the case with all peoples on earth. The rest of the world had an enormous amount at stake during the previous election, and yet they were required to sit by as mere spectators, not even permitted to make financial contributions. Should the rest of the world vote in US elections? (NB- this is not the only argument I make for youth suffrage. It is one of many and a minor one at that.)

There are two answers to this question- one legal and one philosophical.

The legal one is that the US affects the rest of the world because of its geopolitical position, not because of any inherent national distinction (American exceptionalism aside). If, in, say, 80 years or so, the US represented the same geopolitical force as France or Britain does today, then there would be no legitimate reason to have input on domestic elections from the world body. The world, under those circumstances, would no longer be so affected by US domestic decisions. But our youth still would, therefore the argument that one leads naturally from the other is incorrect.

However, it does lead us to an interesting alternate narrative which I quite prefer. And that is answer number two. Assuming youth voting was a fait accompli, and we had spread enfranchisement as far as we could on our own shores, we could begin to pay heed to other countries' sensible desire to have a say in US politics which, admittedly, affects them quite directly.

This assumes two things - that the US recovers completely from the economic downturn and that the US maintains its role as superpower and world economic juggernaut. If these two conditions persist, then the rest of the world will consider themselves to have an interest in US political outcomes for a very long time to come.

So I would say, then, let's do business. What would these countries give in exchange for their votes?

My own feeling is that if they would be willing to abide by our laws, then they should be considered for a sort of adjunct statehood.

It would have to be considered one nation at a time and would have to happen very slowly so as not to dilute the character and nature of our country by adding in too many foreign cultures all at once. But it wouldn't be so hard to imagine Canada or Britain being annexed by the US in exchange for some representation in congress and a say in who is elected president.

My feeling is that the EU is an experiment that will largely lead nowhere and that the countries of that continent will likely be served by putting their allegiances elsewhere- particularly as their own peculiar national identities dissolve in the process of globalization.

Becoming a state in our union would indeed be a way to preserve independence and to influence international law.


Once the English-speaking countries and perhaps Mexico were enfranchised, France, India, and other democracies could join as well. Eventually a "reform"-based incentive structure could be developed for the rest of the world as well, encouraging them to form open, representative governments.

One could easily, then, envision a time when the world had but one country, the democratic system of the United States having reached across the globe and sown democratic process where once there was only warfare.

This would be an impressive achievement in global unity to say the least. In fact, it is what is already happening, though nation-states still hold nominal sway. We are growing, through trade, a global culture that has less to do with lines on a map than by cultural and commercial intercourse. To place those nations states under the systemic umbrella of the world's oldest and most successful democracy would seem a just and sensible way to orchestrate their disparate wills.


Since I don't expect youth suffrage to come to pass for at least half a century, this idea might be quite far off, even in consideration- although there is no explicit need for youth suffrage to predate this sort of internationalism. But a century or so out would seem like a good prediction- long enough for the world's developing economies to have a strong enough position of their own and so would have something to contribute to the US as a new state.


I like this idea a lot. It can give us something to look to over the hump of the financial crisis. At the moment it appears that some sort of loose global federation will become the basis of the international system, the US being so horribly weakened by the 9/11 response and George W. Bush. But a resurgence in US power is not at all out of the question if we play our cards right in the coming years. No other country has the might, will, or global respect to take America's place, and truly no country would really want the responsibility. Countries whose identities are based on tribal/genetic nationalism do not have the same mandate as those which are based on a "mission," as it were, to form a new world. And there is only one of those on earth. But to form a new world requires cooperation from the whole world. Perhaps it is time to begin to think outside our own borders to see what that new world might look like.

A Propose

This cat seems to have it pretty clearly. 25. I'm impressed.

Gay Marriage

"My God. . .Gays and Lesbians want to get married. Haven't those people suffered enough?"
-Homer Simpson



It's truly a new era when I start getting my news from facebook.

In recent days I have seen posts saying GO IOWA and TAKE THAT, CALIFORNIA. Then today there was YAY VERMONT. Not being much of a sports fan, I assumed that these were references to some tournament I was missing, and so I mostly ignored them. But it didn't take long to corroborate with the New York Times about what was actually going on.

Firstly I would like to send my congratulations to all people in all places who demand equality under the law. This is certainly a moment I know will be celebrated by many of my friends and by millions of people - sadly mostly in silence - throughout the world.


But the politico in me is still perturbed. There is almost a guarantee that under the Obama administration the rights of all peoples will be affirmed in America. So the victory of the gay marriage movement on a grand scale is almost assured. But the joys of every victory are followed shortly by the uncertainty of what to do once victory has been achieved. The morning after can be as much a time of depression as of exaltation.

The gay movement in particular has defined itself largely in opposition to the norm. When it becomes normal (at least legally) how will it define itself then? I have no doubt this question will be answered in time, and I, as much as anybody, will be curious to see what mainstream homosexuality will look like in America. It will no doubt be as colorful as the rainbow.



But my most cynical side says that gay marriage has already served its purpose. It has already cemented devastation into the country's fabric that can not be easily undone. I am referring here, not to any dastardly act by any homosexual, but to the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004.

I have written elsewhere vis a vis the Evolution/Creationism debate, that these culture war issues are largely red herrings. They are conjured up in the laboratories of political strategists with an eye towards the cold calculus of demographics.

Since the homosexuals and the scientists tend to concentrate themselves in the so-called Blue States and in predictably blue, urban areas in other states, their votes have very little impact in presidential politics. What gets people out to vote is the stirring of their (usually baser) emotions. Anger, indignation, and fear will tend to get people to pull that lever for your guy.

Gay Marriage as an issue seemed to rouse the indignation amongst gays and the indignation amongst religious folk in equal measure. But unlike the gays, the religious folk were concentrated in swing states and swing counties. This meant that if you got the religious people angry enough, they could turn a blue district red. If you got the gays angry enough, well, nothing would happen. They were already in the blue areas anyway.

The same thing was true for the evolutionary scientists. Cambridge, Manhattan, Chicago, the Bay Area and university towns throughout the country were going to vote predictably blue. So to rile them up about a non-issue like creationism made no difference. But to rile up voters in swing areas could make all the difference - and it did.

One has to ask- where did these "issues" come from? Who decided to start talking about them? Why were we not debating vehicle size with the same fervor? Perhaps it's because people drive big vehicles in every district. What about coke vs. pepsi or some other divisive issue?

The reason is demographics. These issues were "discovered" by Karl Rove & co. for their hot-button appeal in the areas where it counted the most. And his calculations proved correct. We must remind ourselves that Rove made his fortune in direct advertising - junk mail - so he was a master at demographic breakdown. And he used it to devastating effect during his electoral reign. And more impressively, he did it right under everyone's noses under the guise of "moral" or "cultural" issues.



There is actually a sane argument about gay marriage that goes largely unspoken. It is one that everyone can agree on, but since it is not useful to anyone politically, it is largely ignored.

It goes something like this: All marriages should be civil unions. Period. Marriage is a religious affair and should be left to the religious institutions to perform, monitor, etc. Leave the government out of it.

This is an idea that would have huge popularity on the right, where much of the anti-gay-marriage backers vote. Why should government be involved at all? It is intrusive and constrictive of people's liberties. This is classic right wing, anti-government boilerplate.

America used to have such a policy, in fact, but somewhere along the line, government thought it useful to "incentivize" marriage, and so it gave married people special privileges. This same noble idea underpinned the incentivization of home ownership which has led us into the financial nightmare we find ourselves in today.

Getting government out of people's private lives is a solution both the far right religious nuts and the far left gay crowd can agree on.

Politically speaking, the homosexual left would have actually benefited from this arrangement, as it would have left many one-issue conservative voters at home on election day. Or perhaps it would have put gays and conservatives on the same side of an issue, thus forcing politicians to draw their political lines differently.


Ignoring political bait is a practice for the politically savvy. The political novices (as the gay movement appears to still be) seizes on the opportunity to spout out about injustice. And morally they are right to. But politically they would do well to ask themselves, why are we being asked to do this in the first place? And is there a trap being set for us?

In this case the answer is to win a presidential election and yes. But the gay movement missed this and went after a social victory at the expense of a political one.

My fear is that the morning after party might come to recognize this. Once the battle is won and the emotions subside, it might begin to dawn on the community - what did we wind up gaining by this? And what has it cost us in terms of the "four more years" we'll be clawing our way out of for the next 20?

That remains to be seen.

But on its face, and as a matter of social justice I am glad the gays have gotten their marriages. I leave it to them to decide where to go from here and if the victory was ultimately worth the cost.

Nowhere

The appeal of socialism is that it is a kind of Utopia, where everyone gets along, and everyone is guaranteed a certain minimum of, say, comfort, security, or wealth. But like any Utopia, it only works when you leave something out. That something could be greed, it could be sex, it could be fossil fuels, it could be work.

The US Utopia worked pretty well early on because we left out labor, delegating that to a permanent underclass. The British and Europeans did a similar thing with their colonies. So while the Brits themselves were fairly comfortable, secure, and wealthy, those luxuries were built on the backs of those who were "left out."

In most of the Christian world, "greed" and therefore finance were left out of their Utopian visions and their high regard for themselves. They therefore required others - mostly Jews - to do their dirty work for them so they could maintain the benefits of borrowed money without the personal indignity of lending it.

Monks also live extraordinarily harmonious lives. They have everything you and I have except. . .wait a minute. . .oh yes! Sex! You leave that "one thing" out and everything else works smoothly. Fortunately, you have no shortage of inferiors to condescend to when you're in this exalted state. A permanent underclass of breeders allows you to maintain your enlightened condition while the population replenishes without you.

Some Utopian communes would like to exist without violence, some without fossil fuels. But violence remains the force that protects these hippies from having their land seized by enterprising Vikings, Turks, or even Poles who have none of the same distaste for violence. So a permanent underclass of soldiers must exist - somewhere out of sight of the "pure."

And as for fossil fuels, I always wondered if the hippies knew how their copies of Chomsky got onto their book shelves in the first place. Did these books grow on locally produced trees? Did the fall out of the sky? How would one know how to form a commune without reading the great ideas that inspired communes in the first place? Well these booksellers were reliant on a permanent underclass of truckers, motels, gas station attendants, and fast food chains to get those books from the printers to their shelves. And the energy for these operations was - fossil fuels. So the hippies were in collusion with Exxon-Mobile, only in ways that were hidden from plain sight.

So my anti-Utopianism comes from a sense of deep ecology. That the systems we live in are Whole, not fragmented. To leave something - anything - out is to engage in willful blindness to our own needs, even if they are locked in our own shadows. People have lived in communes successfully for millenia - they were called tribes. But at some point, the "one missing thing" came home to roost, and that was usually experienced as a war, or in the 20th century, as genocide.

Ecological systems which are inherently whole desire to remain so and do not take kindly to human meddling in an attempt to "perfect" them. Therefore, the missing part will always seek reintegration with the rest. This can be as innocuous as needing to do something for yourself, as in the ante-bellum US. It could be a nagging horniness in the case of the monk, or simply a need to get somewhere in the case of the hippie. It turns out, then, that these "bad" things that must be gotten rid of are actually pretty useful, even if our local cultural values tell us that they are "evil."

Money lending, is of course, evil in the Christianist worldview. But it sure is helpful if you want to buy a house, start a business, or send your kids to college. Sex is also considered evil by many, but it is certainly an effective means for replacing and growing the population- to say nothing of achieving the joy and enlightenment that monks seek through abstinence (odd, really). Fossil fuels, as polluting and hazardous as they are, are nonetheless the best way we have on hand to power the bus that took you out of your hick town and brought you to Humbolt County. Not such a bad thing, really.

The paradox is that if we want to "improve" these things that are "bad" - i.e. make sex about more than lust, make finance more about development than loan sharking, make driving more about freedom than about pollution - we need to engage these missing pieces, not reject them. We need to be less Utopian and more imperfect - or rather acknowledge openly the pre-existing imperfections that were there anyway.

In this way, the monk can learn tantra and satisfy his cravings for God and Flesh at the same time. The hippie can learn about distribution systems and lobbying that have been so effective in transporting gasoline (but not bio diesel) around the world. The Christian can learn about thrift and investment so that he won't have to get a loan to send his kid to college, but can pay outright. And the US slave owner can learn how to get his own hands dirty and realize the pleasures of working the soil and helping things grow. But none of this is possible in the socialist Utopia. Too many things are left out.

And this realization is where the Capitalist conversion usually happens for people. For Smith it was "greed" that was the great taboo to be overcome - the one missing piece in the Christianist world view from which he emerged.

But really there are so many others. Eating horse meat, for example, in France. "Underage" sex in the Levant (or in France). Polygamy in Utah. All manner of artistic expressions in every culture. Intergenerational mores - rejection of the old, of the young, or the ill. Whatever the case, capitalism and economics show us that the integration of the "one missing thing" enriches us all (both monetarily and culturally), and so the courage to face our own personal/collective shadows becomes imperative for our own fulfillment.

This puts us well on the way to our vision of the New Man, the Man unencumbered by cultural, religious, or traditional biases and arbitrary dogmas. Facing one's blinds spots - either internally or externally - brings us closer to the vision that we are All One race - transcending the peculiarities and temporalities of specific cultures and tribes. This is the true Utopia - the one we are living in right now with all of our fellow brothers on earth - the one which surrounds us at all times and yet which we do not rightly see.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is said to have pronounced that "the Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon this earth, but men do not see it." The same could be said for the brotherhood of man, so earnestly sought by civilizations throughout history. By seeing into our own blind spots - our own missing pieces - we can begin to see in our brother - in our enemies as well - our truer selves, our truer community, our truer collective.* And in that moment, Utopia will cease to be "nowhere" but will be right here - and everywhere.



*The connection to Jesus's other injunction to remove the log from your own eye should be obvious. Looking at what one is blocking in one's own sight is the key to recognizing one's neighbor's perfection. That we are all living in perfection right now is simply a matter of perceiving it.

By turning our "speck-eyed" neighbor into that one missing thing, that scapegoat, we persist in keeping our own selves in darkness. Therefore the communities which strive so fervently to remain in the light by expelling the "evil" only bind themselves deeper and deeper in the darkness they are struggling to emerge from.

This also is a clue to Jesus's meekness and unwillingness to fight evil. Turning the other cheek is the ultimate expression of this. Defusing rejection through acceptance is the only cure for our troubles. And finally, Jesus must have asked himself, what attitude did I hold to bring down such hatred from my brother? For surely he and I are of one flesh and the violence perpetrated "against me" by my own self must be also of my own doing. Why then would I resist my own self? How else am I to know me, then? This is the deep ecology of the religious - that I and my brother are one - that we are parts of one ecological system from which neither can be truly extracted.