So Little to Say, So Much Time to Say it...
My uncharacteristic silence is a result of a lot of travel
and having so many things going right with my projects that I hardly know
where to start.
I've
also had a writer's block on a rant regarding the nature of organizations
in an open source economy. More on all that later.
The Futures of Terrorism
DARPA's on-again, off-again
market for information on terrorism inspired an interesting blogalogue.
Doc pushed back against it, attracting
claims he was trashing something Clueful. From an intelligence standpoint, PAM,
the Terror Market Bimbo, immediately howled out of existence, would have
been a good idea if you believe
in efficient markets having perfect knowledge.
(Of course
there is no such thing as perfect market knowledge, despite the brilliant
people
who have made a career selling the theory to amateurs hoping to beat
experts at their own game.)
ENRON and WorldComm and their ilk suggest that terrorism would
find better funding and planning if it had its own futures market. It would increase
our predictive skills, and it would increase terrorist activity.
But that wasn't the real reason PAM died at the box office.
Every society has limits on what it conceives and the ideas it pursues. So
we do
not support
public hangings or cane-lashings or stoning adulterers.
Those things and millions of others are, literally, unthinkable to us,
and it's right for a society to not use tools and weapons it finds inconceivable.
Toward an Aesthetic Culture
Steve Jobs famously told Bill Gates that the problem
with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Software is routinely released
by MS that would be inconceivable at Apple, based on its appearance,
its function and its bugginess. The two companies
simply
have different tastes in what's acceptable. So it is with cultures.
Any student of cultural aesthetics would observe that ours
has grown a lot uglier in the last two years. Winston Churchill or even Tony
Blair would have forged a stronger society upon the anvil of our post-9/11
rage, grief, and world sympathy. Our illiterate leader and his opportunistic
handlers have contrarily cheapened our demeanor and savaged our international
reputation. Compared to the rest of the civilized world, this administration,
literally, has no taste.
It's absurd to wonder if we could somehow develop better cultural
taste, and agree to look beyond our petty concerns and agree on a society
more pleasing to the spirit. But a guy can dream...
It's the Opportunism, Stupid
Politicians are naturally opportunistic, but at each point
in the trajectory of a nation's evolution, there are levels of opportunism
that even they won't sink to. For two centuries it was inconceivable that
states would operate a numbers game because property owners prefer not to
pay for
proper schooling. Lottery income isn't a fiscal necessity, it's the product
of a lack of the political leadership to lead people to pay for what's important
in
an
informed and civil society.
Since the phone tap was invented, it was literally
inconceivable that the government would eavesdrop on your line without
a warrant. That's a nicety
that evaporated when our TV culture got its high-profile
WTC face slap.
Just as opportunists in state government couldn't resist the
siren call of lottery profits, so too was the big-gummint temptation too
great for the opportunistic Ashcroft, Bush and Cheney. Like any government,
they
want to control our lives, ensure their power and shrink the opposition
into oblivion. The odd thing is that they claim to be conservatives
while violating the conservative aesthetic of small
government,
fiscal responsibility and avoiding foreign entanglements.
About that Face Slap
What if our 9/11 tragedy wasn't? I hate to sound harsh about
our losses, but has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes
into buildings might not have been the logistical masterstroke of the century?
I'm suggesting that there was an operational
hole in our hijacking prevention system and that some passionate Arabs
got lucky and managed to kill some of us. I've got
about 2500
hours
in a Boeing 707, and I'm sure that a couple hundred hours in Microsoft
Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch off a 767 autopilot,
turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that they did some actual
flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant.
There's almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs
killed a little over .001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week.
Instead of panicking, we could have started locking cockpit doors, continued
to keep guns off airplanes, and we'd have plugged that
loophole.
Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course,
there's a war on terror, but we're the foot soldiers in that war, and we
should acknowledge that some of us are going to get hurt. It's a war, fer
chrissake! I've been traveling a lot lately, and as most
of us know, the airport precautions are more charade than anything else.
We all understand that we're not significantly safer than we were before.
Feeling safer is not the same as being safer.
What we
might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness were
part of our national makeup, would be
to say,
"OK,
you motherfuckers, you got lucky once. We're not changing how we
live our lives, but we're changing
how you live
your lives, starting with Saudi Arabia, which is the obvious catalyst
for this foolishness. We're going to do the thing you can't stand
us to
do: Freeze your assets, dictate what we're willing to pay for oil,
and spend those saved billions on energy independence and telecommuting
technologies.
Any
company
that
resists
that initiative
will be exposed
for its un-American activities. Now you guys fix that Taliban problem
or we'll get really nasty and put an embargo on bizjets."
That
kind of thinking
arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives flying
into
large mountains
avoiding
small
bullets.
I learned
that lesson when I saw a guy do that very thing in Viet Nam, so clanked
was he about the idea of someone shooting at him
that he ignored the reality that airplanes and
mountains are a bad combo.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we can't dictate market forces.
But if OPEC can, we can. Of
course we'd
only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American
people
and
if
national
security
were more
important
to us
than oil company
profits. Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil
Industry benefits from artificially low prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as
ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob Baer points out in Sleeping
With the Devil:
How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited
today by Salon,"the real war we should be fighting is
not in Baghdad."
Small Minds, not Small Government
Maybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about
small
government, but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they
were fixated on what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures,
they're unlikely to get more votes than last time. The opportunity
the Bin Laden family handed the Bush family was to paralyze our culture
so ordinary electoral logic would not apply.
"Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,'' Bush told [Mitch]
Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
–
Miami Herald , Nov. 29, 2001*
These cynical points have been made by smarter people than
I. I'm just riffing on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance
of cynicism. The political cynicism we're seeing
is related to
the cynicism
of
public
companies
and
TV evangelists
and the
media.
Our
cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal values most of us hold,
regardless of our politics. Instead, we're gripped by the opportunistic
economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as long as it increases
stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues.
1:26:17 AM 
|
