Caller Id

Drat and bebother! Once again the American government has decided my (or perhaps your) rights to unsurveilled speech are functionally area-code-dependent. When the NSA wiretap brouhaha began, I thought perhaps, as with the Dubai ports deal, Americans overreacted. Monitoring international calls, especially given the far-flung locales where we rich Americans cavort, seemed not necessarily intrusive and almost certainly bound to be beneficial. The most colossal failure of the press conferences and presidential ripostes was to turn an international security issue into a debate about how much the government ought to know about its citizens. Here, William Stuntz (subscription required) argued that the ideal privacy situation in America is actually less transparency in government and more accessibility into the lives of its citizens. Among his more salient points:

"...different forms of evidence-gathering are substitutes for one another. Anything that raises the cost of one lowers the cost of all others. The harder it is to tap our phones, the more government officials will seek out alternative means of getting information: greater use of informants and spies, or perhaps more Jose Padilla-style military detentions with long-term interrogation about which no court ever hears, or possibly some CIA "black ops," with suspected terrorists grabbed from their homes and handed over to the intelligence services of countries with fewer qualms about abusive questioning. In an age of terrorism, privacy rules are not simply unaffordable. They are perverse.

Transparent government may be perverse, too. Consider the recently disclosed tape in which Governor Kathleen Blanco, fema Director Michael Brown, and various other state and federal officials discussed the response to Hurricane Katrina just hours after the storm made landfall. As the conversation happened, the situation was spiraling out of control. But the participants spent most of their energy congratulating one another (and themselves) and repeatedly saying that they stood ready to do anything that needed doing--while not actually doing anything. It was as if everyone in the videoconference expected the tape to be on the evening news."

We are birthed into and bound to a nation built on distrust between governmental branches. Distrust has fueled America's meteoric rise (thinking here, like a good liberal, to our place in history 300, 500, 1000 years hence) as surely as has the sweat of the immigrant. Business in America has had to innovate faster in large part because of antitrust (a rhetorical giveaway as to America's ethos) legislation. So when our government pleads for us to just trust that they're doing the right thing with wiretapping, of course our instinct is to recoil! I am angry at this administration for a number of reasons, vapidity and belligerence chief among them. But this fundamental misreading of the American public saddens me more than angers me. Take a look at this excerpt from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speech to the nation after the bombing of Pearl Harbor:

"I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again. "

It's not a tremendous statement, given the attacks. In fact, it's mostly vague and simple politician speech. Shrewd Roosevelt, however, made clear in the first sentence that he was interpreting the will of the people rather than asking the people to trust his will. That is the difference between a man who understands his historical privilege to be the U.S. President (and according himself arbiter's robe rather than messiah's) and a man who, drunk off his own reflection, conflates privilege, power and purpose. A man whose persona requires the savaging of others' (including his coveted demographics) is not a man at all; rather, he is a walking, seething id, and his bravura will wear thinner yet.

I want to believe in a government that, given unfettered access to my phone records, would apply the correct metrics and pursue the terrorists, pinko bastards and Scientologists lurking in my neighborhood. That I cannot believe in the inherent goodness of this administration should not be causally linked to the means they use. If Al Gore said he'd been monitoring phone calls to see what countries were called most often (and when, and how, etc.) I'd be a thousandfold more willing to let him carry on - not because I don't value freedom of speech or unlawful search, but because Gore never struck me as the type to abuse trust placed in him during crucial events. This NSA business is as Orwellian as we allow it to be because we keep ceding small defeats to a small man. (Witness: "More tax cuts! I'm totally out of ideas!" Boy, the NYT sure is liberal these days) We don't need transparent government; we need principled government.

Cars Go Star Trek

I've neither enough time nor enough adjectives to properly explain how much I've come to love Star Trek, in its multiple iterations, over my lifetime. There have been some breakthrough moments - that one day in college when I discovered Deep Space Nine's first few seasons were heavy with Israeli-Palestinian symbolism; the high school Power Reading class in which my teacher explained (using Vonnegut and Commander Data) how men make machines of other men to circumscribe their own inadequacies. Along the way I've come to hope for certain technological breakthroughs implicit in the show but woefully slothful in development here. Among my favorite Trek changes was the touchscreen/voice-activated computer system. Such luxury!

Well, some industrious fellow has finally yoked my inverse atavism with a damned good idea: a purely electric car. Click the link in the article for a slideshow. Take special note of the touchscreen dashboard. How long until we sit idly behind the non-wheel of our electric car, program our destination and watch as the GPS microbrain whisks us thither, we listening to the quiet hum of the motor, reading Dickens and, dream of dreams, asking for hot Earl Grey tea, only for the car to prepare that as well? On a less whimsical level: Considering this enterprising gent named his young company Wrightspeed - I quiver with gooseflesh - and has already raised 8 million dollars in funding, I see no reason why we can't someday soon (read: next twenty years) abandon our use of petroleum combustion. Sure, the car only has a 100-mile range, but with some battery upgrades I'll bet we could see a car with 400-mile range and a 6-hour recharge time by 2025. "But Robert," you say, "what if I want to blast across country with three friends and stop only when our bladders dictate?" Extra batteries? I'm grasping at straws. In truth, I think we're going to have to come to grips with reality very soon: petroleum is a luxury and traveling vast distances is also a luxury. When we invade Iran and they block of the Strait of Hormuz and our gas starts to cost 12 dollars per gallon, we'll all understand. So I'm saying this now: Americans must accept that the key to surviving this coming half-century with our sanity intact is to stop demanding everything be available cheap! Right now, gas doesn't cost as much (adjusted for inflation) as it did during the embargo in the seventies. And if you can believe it, we actually have more allies in the gulf now than we did then! Qatar just gave 60 million dollars to New Orleans. Dubai's interest in our ports is not new; that little nation-state has done more to expand its global image in the last few years than anyone outside China and India. (And we really overreacted there, by the way)

Phew. The upshot: if you're rich, buy one of Ian Wright's toys. You'll be funding the revolution. And if you're poor, like me, bicycle away in the hopes that, one day, this too shall all be ours.

Death, to Moussaoui

Thankfully, I mean only to speak of death in the abstract. He keeps his distance yet, skirting the edges of my life, testing boundaries, nipping chicken wire. For many others death is far too regular, a fixture, background accompaniment like humming locusts and cicadas. He is endemic and anthemic to thousands of Africans, the only repetition with regularity. He is slicked with oil and dogma in the middle east; his cowl swells and ripples; he bellows.

Two days ago, twelve jurors saw fit to deny Zacarias Moussaoui a meeting with grim finality, and sentenced him to life in prison. I am unsure if the conspiracy charge alone sufficed to earn him the life sentence - certainly the severity of his attempted crimes merited as much. But the jurors did something I feared they would find impossible: convict a narcissistic, braggart terrorist (who had accomplished nothing) without stringing him up publicly. America should exhale coolly and strongly right now. His culpability in question, Moussaoui waited until he was near the end of his trial to recant and tell the world that he planned all along to hijack another plane and kill thousands more. Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, even his rhetoric sounded like a pitchman who, having botched his sales shtick, finds his audience nonetheless receptive and, palms sweaty, seals the deal and thanks his gods. Moussaoui, nothing more than a hate-filled opportunist, saw his trial as his only means to become a martyr, but in his self-serving taunts and tirades managed to confuse jihad-al-asgar (struggle against an external force) with jihad-al-akbar (struggle for the soul). Whether he conflated the two because of misguided religious teaching or his abusive childhood or his disfranchisment growing up in France is irrelevant. What is relevant is that an apostatic (according to him) state managed to finesse the difference for him.

Moussaoui's sentence means that, for the rest of his natural life, America will spend about $25,000 per year keeping him incarcerated, doing goodness knows what. Now, if I may editorialize for a moment, I think this is a small price to pay for the triumph of the internal struggle despite our ongoing external struggle. Moussaoui is a misanthrope, to be sure, but he was not always so. As I've mentioned before, the emphasis among young Arabic Muslim men to attack America (or "the West") stems from isolation and demagoguery, not from inherent distaste for America. Killing Moussaoui would have validated both the worst fears and the highest hopes of a young, impressionable, impoverished Islamic Arab. Keeping him in prison may expose religious martyrdom for the fraud it is and keep others from accepting a radical imam's words at face value.

I cannot understand why so many people dislike this verdict! Do Americans thirst for death? Have we not seen that killing under false pretenses only ups the body count by an order of magnitude? Legally, it seems clear that he ought receive a life sentence instead of death. Ethically it seems even clearer! Kill a prisoner who, for all intents and purposes, was the merest attache to the masterminds and executors? Though I find the death penalty immoral without exception, here I would have found it especially reprehensible. Death, as I said, is regular for people in the middle east in a way we cannot understand. To give Moussaoui that release would be to grant that regularity on our shores. Now, if Osama bin Laden happens to be settling down for tea in Waziristan when a predator drone comes a-rampagin', I'll shed no tears at his death. But if a unit of Rangers apprehends him and extradites him to New York to stand trial, I hope those jurors would also keep him locked away for life. Far better that he languish, forced to pound license plates (irony of ironies; do inmates still do that?), than become practically deified. I daresay the internal struggle - is it right to kill if our opponent craves and needs death? - is the only path to resolving our place in the external struggle. (As I write, the fight for Iraq's trust, and for Afghanistan's peace)

I will not discuss which mitigating factors the jurors used to come to their decision; I'll let far smarter people do that for me. I will say that, no matter how those twelve people came to grips with Moussaoui's bigotry, they came to the right decision, the moral decision, and they will have my enduring respect.

Events That Should Never Occur

What a Monday! First, immigrants march across the nation, making Howard Zinn proud. I've no doubt that many Latino immigrants take jobs away from Americans. But does the usurpation of jobs that have never been "white" jobs actually drive wages down? Studies vary, as you might expect, but here is a sample. Points 14, 16 and 17 are especially pertinent. General trends suggest immigration neither raises unemployment levels nor decreases wage levels appreciably in the destination countries. Wage variation depends, in part, on elasticity between wage demand and native labor supply. If America were still largely agrarian and American labor were not just desired but required to keep the country chugging, we wouldn't be worrying about the illegal immigration problem. Our problem is that we have a surplus of native labor too stubborn to take the jobs we suggest illegals are stealing. America may be the standard bearer for capitalism but that does not mean her citizens are all so brainwashed as to follow free market lieutenants demanding suicide missions - we want government to take care of us, protect us, enable us, but we also demand government do so at the lowest cost possible. From a strict economic perspective, if we just slapped massive tariffs on oranges or landscaping services (or, indeed, any industry redolent with illegal labor), we could discourage employers from hiring illegal immigrants. But that's not really the issue here, is it? We enjoy having a consumer surplus and we enjoy that oranges cost $2.99 per pound instead of $6.99 and we certainly enjoy that, for $250, five Mexican men will cut our grass, move shrubs into aesthetically pleasing arrangements, pull weeds and generally beautify our obnoxious four-acre plots of land. So, what do some of the more radical anti-immigration types propose? Tom Tancredo, when he's not calling immigrants a "scourge," proposes kicking out the illegals and raising the wages of those jobs they take so Americans will want them. But then our oranges will cost more! To which constituency should we pander: the people who love cheap goods or the people who want the greatest fiscal benefit for native Americans?

While we're discussing money matters, let me first note I understand next to nothing about macroeconomics. One thing I do know, however, is that if your government runs out of money, you're proper screwed. The advent of the information age has given us "flash mobs," but this may be the first time in history I've seen a flash layoff. How does a commnwealth go bankrupt? Well, though the term applies to Puerto Rico, it's actually an unincorporated American territory, meaning it has only those "natural" rights imparted by Constitutional jurisdiction (freedom of speech, for example). Does that mean the mainland U.S. is under no directive to assist our tiny, annexed neighbor? I'm not necessarily suggesting that our immigration issues and our commonwealth issues stem from a common source, but, well, it sure seems so, doesn't it? Since the United States ratcheted up its imperial ambitions shortly before the turn of the 20th century (Teddy Roosevelt's "big stick"ism, if I recall) we've roundly thumped all Spanish presence in our backyard while ignoring an important fact: since the 1400s the history of the Americas has been violent conquering and reconquering of indigenous peoples and the imposition of newer and wackier forms of government. How dare we blame the immigrants for seeking some peace? Amnesty for the illegal immigrants, aid for the Puerto Ricans - we owe them that much, don't we?

Ozymandias on Baseball

The Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates are bad baseball teams. A quick peek at the standings shows each team in last place in their respective divisions and, worse, they have given up 99 and 100 runs respectively, the worst marks in the majors by a whopping 14%. Kansas City, through 14 games, surrenders an average (!) of 7 runs per game, while Pittsburgh watches opposition batsmen cross home 5.9 times per game. Last year, Kansas City allowed 5 or more runs per game 102 times and, unsurprisingly, won a mere 19 of those contests. Hard to compete for pennants with those numbers. Pittsburgh allowed 5 or more runs in 76 games last year and won only 8!
Why is any of this important, you ask? Well, some of you may remember, shortly after both the plane attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, that some religious know-it-alls suggested the acts might be divine retribution for America's hedonism and homosexuality (but certainly not its rampant overconsumption or We-Da-Best attitude, no). Some of you (sports aficionados you must be) might also have noticed the prevailing trend across sports to thank god for bringing victory to the team. (Tacitly assuming, by process of elimination, He waxed wroth on the other team for its sins) Could the religious idiocy creeping into states like Pittsburgh (remember this?) and Kansas (all babies are God's babies, dammit!) cast a pall over their beleaguered sports franchises? Couldn't God really be speaking to us, to the sports lovers, and saying "Look on these jerks, ye flighty, and despair!" ? I'm just asking.
Further note: a good counter-argument would be to cite the success of the Pittsburgh and Kansas City football franchises in recent years, though I'm convinced - thanks to Gregg Easterbrook - that a different pantheon influences gridiron gambits.

Let's Celebrate Martyrdom! (Part II)

Well, well, well, looks like that whole Islam-martyrdom union may not be as ideologically unique as we westerners like to think. Now, I am and will always be first in line, theologically speaking, to embrace the heretical. Want to draw a cartoon of Muhammad choosing between virgins trapped behind a deli glass? (Halal, of course) Go there. Want to call Mother Teresa a stupid fraud? Oh, do so, and send me a transcript, audio copy and any extant glowers unable to be cast your way! Put your ass cheeks in the Buddha's footprints, tell a Hindu that Rama and Hanuman were more than just friends, call a Shinto torii nothing more than a proxy for a vagina. Let a neighboring conservative Jewish buddy know that pigs are clean these days (maybe mention how delicious cheesburgers are at the same time), suggest to a Sikh that the music of the Guru Granth Sahib ain't got shit on Clapton in Cream. All I ask for a burgeoning blasphemer is that you get your basic facts straight.
So, to return to the Gospel of Judas: hooray! More scholarly work that will be denounced by the Roman Catholic church as irredeemable and unfit for canonical inclusion. Elaine Pagels has already passionately argued that the Gospel of Thomas inspired John's reactionary screed; today on NPR she asserted that the Judas Gospel is seminal to our understanding of early Christianity. You'd think that good scholarly work like hers would send divine undulations through the bloated corpus of the Catholic church, but the church continues to marginalize and treat recovered texts as one might an underfoot wart. Not that Gnosticism doesn't have its unsightly hairy moles - the idea that this world is essentially detritus is certainly among its kookier claims (and there are many, often contradictory). What Pagels argued and what I think resonates is that contemporary Christianity need not be the monolithic, fun-deprived hymn-along we all know (and some, inexplicably, love). Assimilating extra texts and parrying doctrine with anthropology is essential to vigorous spiritual debate and, if my understanding of this Judas Gospel is correct, we could have a hum-dinger of an argument on our hands!
The upshot: Judas and Jesus were just two Godfellas looking to get made. The former turns in his friend - at his friend's request! - while the latter gets to ascend to heaven having died for the holiest of causes. Let's address Judas first. Dear Betrayer: You've got a friend with a bounty on his head, the value of which will fund your nascent church for years. For your part, you may become a social pariah but will attain antihero status rivaled by few in history. You will figure prominently in one of the finest poetic works ever written. Hell, your name will essentially be retired in perpetuity. (Put another way: what do you think the odds are Tom Arnold's parents ever considered naming him "Benedict?") You've got one life - fame or infamy doesn't matter much so long as people keep talking about you.
As for you, Jesus...J, what gives? I go ahead and rant about how bombers are like illustrated men, performing their violent political art to disrupt strained social fabric and what do you do but decide you want to be a martyr too! Sure, you were a peaceable sort and you went quietly, but if this new Gospel is a fair depiction (as fair as any other, right?) you basically wanted to die so others would take up your banner. That, sir, is wasteful. Is wastes a life of good teaching and it wastes what I can faithfully call your real divinity - the ability to lead men to do what a repressive state will not: prejudice no individual against another.
As Easter nears (look for me to spout off about that, too) I think it's only fair to remember that everything that is old is new again. Now, go, paint your pagan eggs and buy your chocolate fertility rabbits and, for gods' sake (all of them), screw on Easter!

Love is Like the Ocean Part II: May Yield Wet T-Shirt

I realize the hackneyed gender stereotypes I noted in my last post don't even scratch the gnarled skein of American sexuality. I blame my reductive cultural analysis on being forced to read this book when I was 14. My foibles notwithstanding, Time did a nice piece on how what we used to assume was alcohol-induced hedonism is really just feminine aggression abetted by alcohol. I like it because it speaks to one of my pet peeves when discussing sexuality: causality. The feminization of men and the masculinization of women do not comprise a zero-sum game. Our culture likes to alternately demonize and celebrate its vices: cigarette manufacturing were among America's first businesses and, legislation notwithstanding, smokes persevere as avatars of cool. Alcohol is little different - these days we see something of a renaissance of choice if not one of advertising. Those Bacardi and Cola Miami Vice lookalikes may be racist and misogynist but they sure do move product. (Subscription required) That men and women alike use booze as an excuse to explore their ids more freely is not causally related to alcohol's inherent evil. It's my same argument for sex, death metal, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. I mean, kids want to be bad; if their intemperance causes them to turn out BAD! that can hardly be the fault of their chosen indulgence. If we're hellbent on attacking drinks with deleterious effects, I've got some fresh candidates. Pun intended!
I suppose the way to think of the sexual challenges America's facing is similar to the problem biologists have in explaining emergence. We're faced with women becoming more like men and men becoming more like women, creating weird interstitial cultures that exhibit bizarre behavior that do not conform to antiquated definitions of pink for girls and blue for boys. Now, I'm not saying we should celebrate the emergent tendencies unequivocally; Girsl Gone Wild, for example, is exploitative and a shameless front for the hardcore porn industry. (My roommate freshman year of college ordered the very first video; within a month he received weekly deliveries of beige, unlabeled videos that read XXX on the spine. Everything was charged to his credit card he'd used to make the first purchase. His buddy would come over and they would drink a case of Schlitz and watch while I wrote papers. Good times) But it's far better to ride out this wave of recklessness while fixing the roots of the "problem," namely all the stuff Mary Pipher wrote about in this book. Ten years can make a world of difference for a sensitive young man, you see.

Love is Like the Ocean: Salty and Rife with Urchins

Pain surges, swells, crests, ebbs. Love washes, floods, saturates. Different names for a similar tidal effect; our mental castles - those places we build to define our petty, irrational, small selves - drown in hurt as easily as they do in pleasure. Rare is the person who grants unfettered access to the gilded rooms, the mirrored halls, the isolated towers and torture chambers alike. Most of us petition at a suspended drawbridge.
It is not this feudal littoral zone that keeps us forever uniting, ceasing, and uniting again - impulse suffices. Yet somehow we have come to imagine that deep barriers are not only important but intrinsic to healthy sex/love relationships. Women shouldn't like their hubby's friends; men should hate shopping for shoes, or jewelry. (Or, perhaps more telling, Men Shouldn't Cry, among my favorite pastoral perfidies) Outdated mores are no less culturally relevant for their being anachronistic. A long-standing tradition to avoid these sexual detentes has been "the setup," in which two (or three, or four) people get together, decide "We know precisely the set of attractiveness parameters our casual, weekender friend seeks and we will totally ignore those guidelines and select another friend for whom we also care a great deal and yoke them, producing an awkward social melange guaranteed to yield, at best, a relationship built on duty to those same friends who seemed to care," then implement their grand scheme. It's an aged form of puffery that inexplicably survives.
Toward the end of college I half-joked that, for the sake of avoiding blind dates and friend set-ups, men and women should provide their exes with a "sexual resume," formalizing breakup components and agents that stood in the way of relationship progress. Naturally the resume would include an aegis - a comprehensive list of positive, makes-one-eminently-datable traits. Roommates and I drafted several, as a lark, then discarded them to watch Euro Cup soccer. Who could take an idea like that seriously?
These people could. And these people, in a sure-to-be-litigated libelous way. What happened to the shy witticism and awkwardness of a first date, that revelatory moment where social compunction cedes to fancy? Are the last vestiges of chivalry (male or female) - the token, the ever-escalating promise - now merely detritus on Gawain's boot? I think I'm disgusted.

Why People Should Listen to Me

At the tender, callow age of 17, as I was joining a new peer group and tasting the fruit of what would come to be a disastrous young love, I posited to a few friends a wacky, tremendously nerdy and uncool idea of the universe. The universe, I suggested, should be seen as a biosphere on a scale commensurate with its size. Just as we once had no idea that the interaction of solar winds in our ionosphere created the light shows we call the aurorae or that coronal mass ejections could alter animal migratory patterns, we know next to nothing about why nebulae coalesce the way they do or why so few pulsars emit in the gamma-ray spectrum. Fancy-shmancy theoretical models aside, we had (and still have) a long way to go before "understanding" and "universe" should ever be spoken matter-of-factly. I liked my idea of a universe biosphere at the time because it allowed me to think of that celestial sphere as dynamic and possibly influenced by many more factors than I could wrap my measly simain brain around. There have been many nights since when I lay awake thinking about our earth, our sun (Sol), and our galaxy as entities that, owing to their higher-order complexity, must in some way approach consciousness. Italo Calvino helped my musings. I envisioned galactic neighbors exchanging stars the way you and I might swap books we'd like the other to read. At the same time, we made magnificent progress in understanding how our own bodies function and the myriad roles chemicals and proteins play; their dances, eerily enough, were almost celestial themselves. Ribosomes floated through a viscous ether and gleefully churned out the amino chains we need for life just as stars floated through a vacuum and churned up materials that became planets, planetesimals, other stars and who knows what else. Sometimes, biology and astrophysics were so yoked in my head I found it difficult to define one as exterior and one as interior. (Derrida suffered from a similar teleological crisis, methinks) All this is merely some rhetorical buildup to a fascinating little blurb I found on CNN. Seven years later, and my nerdy little supposition gains some aesthetic impetus. Hooray, science; my love for thee is gossamer and gold.

Le voix de l'etat n'est vraiment pas moi!

It's easy and fun to belittle the French. I'm American and French, more of the former and (in my estimation) the most obvious and sometimes best parts of the latter. I ususally get incensed when friends call the French timid or cowardly - you try holding the Maginot line when there's three Panzer regiments bearing down on you! (Curse those Belgians and their docility!) I patiently defend the French from those friends of mine who complain of being treated awfully in Paris (where even Parisians are treated awfully) and I expound on the virtues of meandering vineyards in the Loire valley. Yes, the French can be smarmy and snobbish and curt - just like the British, the Italians, the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Portuguese, the Swiss, the Dutch and the Russians. And you know what? Each of those countries has, to one extent or another, earned that right. There are cathedrals in France two and a half times as old as the United States! Cultural accretion can and does account for a lot of political bias. What is inescapable, however, is that France and America are buddies, nationally speaking. They love to come here and write alternatingly brilliant and insouciant prose on America's triumphs and failings. We love to go there and enjoy eternally temperate weather and sit outdoors and eat and inhale culture and an unhealthy dose of cigarette smoke. Some of us go to speak a language as self-loving and whimsical as any that has ever existed.
We tend to think of the French as residing somewhere between quaint anachronisms and aggressive Laputan descendants. No one I know cares about our longest-standing ally's politics, certainly not to the extent we care about India's, or China's, or Israel's, or even Iran's. Why don't we hear about French minutiae in the way we hear about, say, North Korea's (for example, why do I know Kim Jong-Il loves musicals and theater? The guy misfires some short-range missiles and I'm supposed to care that he wrote an opera?)? In the interest of mending the cultural rift between the average American and the average Frenchman, I link to this piece on CNN; nothing stirs American passion and empathy like a school hostage situation! At least in France the wacko just demands to speak to an education administrator. I pray (to the cosmos, in lieu of belief in the divine) for a swift resolution. For an internal take on the standoff, look here. (Warning: subscription to speaking French required)
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! (Unless you're Muslim)

Penal Enhancement

No hemming and hawing today - this post speaks of assholes. We begin with Jack Abramoff. Here's an article (via HuffingtonPost and ThinkProgress) regarding his interview in Vanity Fair. Check out the quote at the bottom: "Let me teach English, history, music. Or let me sweep floors at the reservation. Instead you'll be paying to feed me to sit in a jail." Frankly, I don't want this guy teaching English or music and especially not history. ("Lesson One: Influence and Power are parthenogenetically derived from Money") It's the reservation comment I laughed at; he swindles Indians out of millions and thinks they'll be willing to forgive? To let him live in their community? Achilles Abramoff - nice sounding, no? Abramoff is right in one respect: it would be stupid to throw him in prison. It's stupid to throw anyone in prison - the American penal system is an aural double entendre of the worst kind. None of this is news to anyone likely reading this blog. But Abramoff might be on to something beyond the scope of his glib comments.
Andy Fastow, former CFO of Enron, is currently testifying against his old buddies Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling about bilking employees and consumers out of millions of dollars. Fastow has already pleaded guilty to a number of charges in exchange for reduced sentences and delivering his bosses to the state. Personally, I'd like to see them all get a wicked punitive boot. Abramoff has provided me an idea: all these white-collar criminals should be punished by putting them to work on Indian reservations. Nothing cruel, mind you - many of these men are in their 40s and 50s, after all - but there are few places in America in need of infrastructure more than Indian reservations. (South Dakota, anyone?) A 9:00 to 5:00 routine of mixing cement and laying down good roads, building better houses than tin-covered lean-tos, and laying cable for electricity and internet wouldn't be a bad start. In the process, we keep these white-collar criminals under the jurisdiction of Indian security hired and trained by the most upstanding and noble of our police forces. (The movies Crash and Trainng Day notwithstanding, I do believe our law enforcement tries to adhere to good ethics) Of course, many of these deposed CEOs or Wall Street hucksters are unlikely to know what makes cement harden, let alone how to mix it or pour the stuff. So, we teach them! I cannot for the life of me understand why prisons focus on brutal negative reinforcement as much as they do; don't let the prisoners work out, just make them work! Since many of the white-collar criminals stole away with millions that they get to keep (I'm looking at you, Lay, and with more than a touch of malice) let's make them reinvest that money in communities they then help build.
Sure, my rants are grounded in a sort of Darwinistic utopia in which everyone suddenly realizes that to do good for the community is to do good for oneself, but this isn't way out of line, is it? Prison reform needs to happen as a pincer attack - the worst prisons need to be turned into decent, clean centers of rehabilitation and the best prisons (where guys like Fastow and Abramoff invariably go) need to be made slightly less comfortable and provide more tangible benefit. You really think Andy Fastow is going to put up a fuss when you tell him it's either ten years with some malcontent nicknamed the Diddler as his roommate or drywalling on a mesa in New Mexico? I don't.

Ubi Sunt Qui ante Nos Fuerunt?

There are few more odious concepts to me than religious strife. Forget for a moment that otherwise rational human beings kill one another because one's interpretation of another man's hallucination 1100 years ago is unpalatable. Now we're losing impressive buildings left and right. First, the World Trade Towers, now a Shia mosque. Thanks to some of our radical friends in Iraq, every major newspaper carries the story of the Al-Askari Mosque bombing and subsequent reprisals. Courtesy of Bloomberg news, President Bush declared that this attack was "an affront to people of faith throughout the world."
What do you know - Bush is right! Before anyone who reads this gets his knickers in a twist, I offer a caveat: Bush is correct by accident. His implication is that the bombing is in some way equally repugnant to Shiites, Sunnis, Mennonites, Huguenots, Cathars, Coptics and Ludavitch Jews. If Bush were a little more, I don't know, human, he might have suggested the bombing offends a greater faith community: those who believe man's salvation lies in man's hands alone. The United States, like it or not, is in the thrall of a theocracy. On numerous occasions, Bush has intimated he has a divine mandate to lead the country. Mr. President, on behalf of those of us who require no supernatural explanation for our otherwise piddling lives, I say to you l'etat n'est pas toi. Chinese dynasties relied on Heavenly Mandate, and the great Chinese philosopher Mencius fiddled with the idea until he decided man quested to return to a purer morality. Heaven, to him, was abstracted to the realm of perfect morality; no divinities were harmed in the drawing of his conclusions.
Our president, I'm afraid, hews closer to the European tradition of divine right. Little wonder that Bush remains petulant; such is the rhetoric of a Richard II (who ascended the throne of England at roughly the same stage of maturity and mental faculty as our president, it seems), not the leader of a huge, purportedly democratic nation. Anyway, back to Bush's comment on affrontery, by way of anecdotes: My mother, a Catholic with zeal and tears to match any martyr, was not seriously offended by the bombing. Two other members of my immediate family, de facto Methodists, were saddened by the loss of a fabulous piece of architecture. A friend of mine who is best described as a pick-and-choose Jew (it's not his fault bacon is safe to eat nowadays!) actually felt relief that this had happened. Why? Because any Muslim-on-Muslim violence takes Anti-Semitism off the back burner for at least a few days. I would never suggest these few examples repudiate Bush's contention entirely, but I do think they speak to Bush's most troublesome articulation of his belief: his insistence that he speaks for anyone with that nebulous quality called "faith."
Certainly Bush is a faithful guy. He's faithful (to a fault) to his staff, he's probably faithful to his wife, and he's definitely faithful to his workout regimen. Honest religious faith, though, requires submission to divine mystery. Whether you want to talk about government graft, wiretapping, women's rights, environmental rights or our global friendships, Bush has brandished his faith-based flamberge in grand arcs. His faith is not one of mystery, but of carefully delineated firewalls to reason. God created the earth? Then any crazy human invention contradicting that view (say, evolution) needs more of his special brand of dialogue.
Americans haven't always been this easily duped, have we? Thomas Jefferson famously excised portions of the bible he believed superfluous (basically, the miracles and anything involving direct divine intervention) and Lincoln, equally famously, believed only in a far-removed cosmic arbiter. (Plus he was shot on Good Friday; maybe it's time we renamed that day) Our president is so absolutely right he sickens me: the bombing of the mosque was an affront to my faith, the faith that man can and will rise beyond the need for postmortem paradise; that we will recognize every minaret, architrave, one-act play, symphony, judicial review, economic theory and governmental system as an expression of our expanding minds. Want to believe the bible? Fine. Then acknowledge we've bitten from the apple. "Faith" is no longer an acceptable response to questions of poverty, disease or warfare. (In fact, thanks in part to our administration, faith and warfare now walk in lockstep)
My faith is biologically predicated: if you and I can produce viable offspring, then nothing separates your inherent humanity from mine; we must cohere as equals else every smooth area of our social fabric suddenly rumple. Bush's faith and its reliance on supernatural guidance makes him dangerous and makes his policies dangerous to America. Though he may believe he is guided by right, when his implementation turns out so wrong the public must blame the man, faith and all.

And while we're at it, can we get rid of that pesky "under god" clause in the pledge of allegiance? I no more like the idea of being born into a national fealty than I do of being born into vassalage. Oh, wait, it's the same thing.

The Ground and the Slurry

Robert Kennedy Junior ginned up his rhetoric on HuffPo over the Supreme Court's take on wetlands and how to properly assess environmental regulations on pollution: read it here. The language is mostly boilerplate punctuated by ten-dollar words and grafted metaphors, like how a right-wing Court would "throw the Clean Water Act out with the dirty bathwater." Still, I've been hating the Court for this, too, and it's historically smart to align with a Kennedy. My guess was, even a totally blinkered, lived-in-a-hole judge would see that dumping industrial waste into an offshoot of a major river or lake would just poison the hydrological daisy chain at a thinner stem; the wreath entire would still rot through. But I misled myself! Dahlia Lithwick of Slate notes that John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (italics mine, for vitriol), asks "what words like "tributary" and "navigable" and "hydrological connection" even mean." What do they mean? Plenty, to those of us who took junior high science! A tributary, John, is a river that doesn't reach the sea and instead feeds another river. (Here I reveal my ignorance: it could also apply to rivers that meet lakes, though I think there's another term I've forgotten) Navigable, John, is straightforward - able to be navigated! Here I don the mantel of concerned citizen and say most rivers, streams, etc. are navigable, whether by foot, kayak, barge or aircraft carrier. Mm, let's not forget "hydrological connection," which even outside the context of environmental regulation is a term Americans can parse. It's the place where rivers, lakes, wetlands and other moist topo features come to rub elbows and hobnob, John! Most of the uproar over this case surrounds (rightly) the Supreme Court's ability to let polluters dump into minor streams that impact other river ecosystems in small and hard-to-quantify ways. If my treatment of the arguments is ham-handed, well, correct me; I like when I become better informed. So, here goes: pro-dumping-upstream: there's no obvious connection between a wetland and nearby streams right now, so we might as well forge ahead. Anti-dumping argument: wetlands influence nearby streams by myriad factors, including transfer of wildlife and movement of groundwater; dumping in the former would be tantamount to dumping in the latter.Forget for a moment that the removal of a wetland and replacement with at least some industrial runoff would lead us inexorably to an Erin Brockovich sequel (no one wants to see that, right?); at greater issue to me right now is the fact that John Roberts equivocated over the meaning of the word "tributary!" I don't expect him to know the precise cause of Mad Cow disease or the the various methods of stem-cell growth off the cuff. When he's hearing a case involving technical language, though, I expect him to familiarize himself with the field on which he's rendering judgement. This speaks to a pet peeve of mine - namely, the Supreme Court has too many lawyers on it! Where are the engineers, nurses, ambassadors and police officers? I know they need to be aware of legal precedent, but if we expect a lawyer to turn in an informed decision on, say, whether women should have the right to terminate pregnancies (something rabbits can do spontaneously, by the by; take that, right-to-life creationists!) then why couldn't we expect a thirty-year civil engineer to figure out legal rudiments?Bah, now I've worked myself into a lather. It'd be nice if I (or, ideally, my kids) could just jump into the clean, safe Chicago River to cool down. I guess I'm just not ready to make that hydrological connection.

What I Mean by "Reincarnated."

November 2005: To weaken the sting of Chicago temp-work drudgery, I start two blogs, one here, the other on MySpace. The latter bloats while the former starves.
May 2006: Fed up with MySpace spam and friend-request viruses, I return howling to this blog, promising myself better: more readers, nattier template, the trappings of decent prose.

July 2006: Quit job, road-trip to New York City, Boston, and the Carolinas. Exhaust my monies renting a house with friends in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Come home, begin graduate school, learn to hate to write. This is required to study Joyce. Forget blog completely.

August 2007: Fail out of graduate school. Roommate, fighting upstream toward PhD in high-energy particle physics, invites me to his childhood home in Puerto Rico, to decompress. Almost drown swimming drunk in the midnight sea. Try to set up hermitage in the limestone caves of Camuy. Authorities repatriate me.

March 2008: Chip away the days playing Nintendo Wii. Make shallow calculation to sponge off parents forever.

April 2008: Begin teaching English-as-second-language to adult Mexicans. Rediscover loves of language and soccer. Sign in to old blog, find terms of use have changed, opt not read boilerplate, forget blog completely.

April 2011: Decide to move come September. Stumble on blog purporting to be Shaquille O'Neal's, in which he calls Kobe Bryant a rapist. To post a comment warning of libel, must sign in to Google account, which asks if I'd like to reclaim this blog. Shout, "YES!" and scare entire coffee shop. View old posts, vomit, edit old posts, rededicate blog to fiction.