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.