A War Correspondent Confronts Truth

Today while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, I happened to be reading Fintan O’Toole’s article for the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books. He was reviewing a recently published collection of letters written by Martha Gellhorn between 1930 and 1949. The title of the article was “A Moral Witness,” and most of the letters in the collection dealt with Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent.

To many Gellhorn may be known better as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. Hemingway, of course, also wrote about war. While his texts may have followed the stylistic lead of journalism, Hemingway himself was no journalist. Indeed, O’Toole calls him “one of the great spinners of self-aggrandizing narratives,” which is probably the best way to summarize his fiction. Gellhorn, on the other hand, was “the real deal” among journalists that chose to cover battles. Like Hemingway, she followed the Spanish Civil War; but, decades later, she was still “in the game,” going off to cover Vietnam in 1966, much to the consternation of all those government influencers that kept sending more and more of our troops there.

However, it was back in the days of the Spanish Civil War that Gellhorn realized that not everyone believed that truth was an ideal to be pursued in either journalism or any other genre of writing. Reflecting on that time in 1959, she wrote in one of her letters:

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

It today’s context, one might almost say that her characterization of lies was a bit too polite. It may, indeed, be a habit, but not necessarily one that is either “homey” or “appetizing.” Rather, it is a habit like addiction, not only filling the vast space of cognitive capacity but also determined to make sure that no truths share that space.

Gellhorn died in 1998. She never got to experience either the horror of 9/11 or the military nightmares of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps that was why she never quite grasped just how addictive lies can be and how much damage they can cause. In the context of the current Presidential campaigns, O’Toole’s article could not have been better timed.

John Harbison’s Requiem Setting: For Our Times?

courtesy of Naxos of America

Today Naxos released a recording in its American Classics series devoted entirely to John Harbison’s setting of the text for the Requiem Mass. This is a world premiere recording, even though Harbison completed the composition in 2002. The back cover of the album of the CD describes the piece as “Completed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks;” but I feel this is not particularly fair to Harbison, his work practices, or the mindset behind the work’s creation. As we learn from Harbison’s contribution to the accompanying booklet, he began work on the idea of setting the Requiem text in 1985, a time when the very thought that any foreign power might bring destruction and fatality to our own country was, for all intents and purposes, beyond reason of all but a relatively small coterie of strategic analysts.

More interesting is how an undertaking, which proceeded in fits and starts over the course of sixteen years, came to take shape and what that resulting shape was. The more useful content on the back cover concerns how structure that emerged, which is basically a division of the Requiem text into two parts. In the final paragraph of his booklet notes, Harbison distills his thoughts on the nature of that text down to a single sentence:

An accidental collection of words about mortality (part I) and continuity (part II), to be shaped into a purposeful collection of sounds.

My guess is that those for whom the Requiem text has deep religious significance might be put off by this description. On the other hand those who are seriously devout about celebrating the Requiem Mass are as likely to be put off by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hector Berlioz, and Giuseppe Verdi as they would be by Harbison’s choice of words. What strikes me as most interesting about Harbison’s composition has less to do with any article of faith than with his approach to giving his work and overall logic. Each of those two parts is conceived as a continuous whole, thus departing from pretty much every musical setting of the text that those familiar with the repertoire are likely to encounter.

On the other hand, from a strictly musical point of view, this piece comes across as a decidedly contemporary approach to past traditions encountered in earlier settings of the text. Thus, both harmonic progression and richly woven polyphony signify as the underlying concepts as each of the two parts of structure unfold. Modernist approaches to both of those disciplines often mask the words themselves; but there is nothing wrong with Harbison making the assumption (correct, for the most part) that listeners already know the words. More important is that those words are delivered through an ongoing flow of changing sonorities, and it is that flow of sonorities that realizes Harbison’s score as a “purposeful collection.”

On the performance side Harbison’s score benefits significantly from its interpretation. This begins with all four soloists providing compelling realizations of Harbison’s vocal lines: soprano Jessica Rivera, mezzo Michaela Martens, tenor Nicholas Phan, and baritone Kelly Markgraf. For that matter, Giancarlo Guerrero’s efforts in conducting the Nashville Symphony and the Nashville Symphony Chorus, as well as the soloists, did much to bring a convincing overall coherence to a musical plan based on an “accidental collection of words.” The result may not be the “spirit of a Requiem;” but the attentive listener will find much to engage the mind in the “flesh of the music.”

Vänskä’s Mahler Project Advances to the Sixth

This past August, this site reported on a project of the Swedish label BIS Records to release a series of recordings of the music of Gustav Mahler performed by the Minnesota Orchestra led by Music Director Osmo Vänskä. The series began with a single-CD album of that composer’s fifth symphony, along with word that the sixth symphony had already been recorded. That second album was released today.

There are certain symphonies for which one need only give the number. Unless you are in a room full of passionate devotees of the music of Anton Bruckner, saying just “the ninth” triggers an immediate association with Ludwig van Beethoven; and the odds are with you for getting the same association when you say “the fifth.” However, “the sixth” tends more likely to be connected to Mahler than to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony (perhaps because the Beethoven symphony has that nickname).

However, while the Beethoven associations tend to be based on some impressive achievement, the Mahler association seems to have more to do with notoriety. By the time Mahler gave the first performance of this symphony in 1906, he already had a reputation for going “over the top” by augmenting his orchestral resources in order to provide “sound effects,” one of which, in this particular symphony, involved the blows of a “hammer of fate,” whose specifications were given only loosely. This resulted in the publication of a cartoon, which appeared in January of 1907:

from Wikipedia (public domain)

The caption in German (which may not be legible on the scale of this reproduction) reads, in English translation, “My God, I've forgotten the motor-horn! Now I shall have to write another symphony.” A special effect intended for the height of tragedy had become the height of ridicule.

Here in my home town of San Francisco, many of us have a memory that transcends that ridicule. In September of 2001, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and its Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) had to contend with a “hammer blow” of their own. They had been scheduled to perform the sixth only a day or so after the September 11 attacks. After considerable and thoughtful discussion involving different perspectives of SFS staff, SFS released an announcement that all of the subscription performances would go ahead as planned. MTT himself observed that he felt that this would be a case in which the music would have a useful cathartic value.

Personally, I feel that this was a good judgment call from MTT. The sixth may be Mahler’s darkest symphony (the only one to end on a minor triad); but MTT knew how to conduct it without wallowing in the darkness. Many may take a dismissive attitude toward the score, but MTT’s interpretation made it clear that this was not music to be summarily dismissed. Indeed, in the wake of 9/11, it may well have been just what the doctor ordered.

This brings us to the new Vänskä recording. Having heard him in performance as a Visiting Conductor of SFS, I am well aware of his ability to evoke intense emotional associations from his performances without ever giving any sign of wallowing in them. Similarly, there is absolutely no evidence of wallowing in this Mahler recording. Rather, there is a recognition that, however much this symphony may have been a product of personal distress, Mahler had a reason for every single mark that he committed to paper. As a conductor Vänskä made it clear that he grasped every one of those reasons and wanted to make all of them clear to the listener.

Nevertheless, my own personal reaction was that Vänskä’s attentiveness may have resulted in a reading that was a bit too clinical for its own good. There are certain compositions that take the listener to the brink of madness without going over the edge. (Franz Schubert’s D. 760 “Wanderer” fantasy in C major was responsible for my own first listening experience that put this thought in my head.) Having listening to Vänskä conduct Jean Sibelius in concert, I know he can get closer to that brink than he did in his approach to Mahler. As a result I suspect that, in the future, I shall be likely to listen to this recording for its details, rather than its expressive impact.

The Many Faces of Martyrdom

Last Friday I felt it necessary to recognize BBC World Service Radio as one of the few sources willing to acknowledge the complex relationship between free speech and hate speech. In the wake of all of the demonstrations that took place over the weekend (including here in my home town of San Francisco), I have to say that the cool voice of BBC reason seems to have taken a permanent back seat to righteous indignation. However, I use that adjective "righteous" precisely for its religious connotations.

Several sources have now shown an interview with one of the Charlie Hebdo casualties in which he said explicitly that he would not be surprised if he ended up dying as a consequence of his determination to exercise free speech in the cause of biting satire. Had such words been uttered by a Muslim fundamentalist, we would dismiss it as a fanatical embrace of martyrdom; but is Charlie Hebdo any the less fanatical just because it is a secular publication that, for all intents and purposes, lives by the creed that nothing is sacred, whether it involves religious, governmental, or any other establishments? The amount of blood spilled as a consequence of the exercise of free speech by Charlie Hebdo is relatively small in comparison with the lives lost on 9/11, but both incidents seem to share a paralysis of reason on the part of those determined to write analysis in the wake of the catastrophic turn of events. Actually, when one takes into account the many dimensions of mindlessness induced by not only the Internet but also a mass media industry dominated more by consumerism than by any drive to inform, it would be fair to say that paralysis set in a long time ago. It just takes mass tragedies to bring it into the foreground, where, as in Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, we have our official rites of mourning before going back to business (perhaps that should be capitalized) as usual.

Confidence or Con?

A BBC News report quotes Secretary of State John Kerry on the current round of efforts towards peace in the Middle East as follows:

We have six months ahead of us on the timetable we have set for ourselves and I am confident we have the ability to make progress.

Does Kerry really mean this, or is this just another example of obligatory jawboning. To Kerry's credit, the BBC report also included the following sentence:

Mr Kerry reaffirmed Washington's rejection of Israeli settlement activity as "illegitimate".

I would guess that, in this case, Kerry meant what he said. However, I have to wonder if it will have any effect. It may certainly help in getting the Palestinians to trust him as an "honest broker," which would be a significant improvement over the conditions that I last examined at the end of 2010. The problem is that it is next to impossible to believe that anyone with any power of substance in Israel will take that comment with anything other than a grain of kosher salt.

As "outside observers" we need to recognize that the Executive Branch of our government has little (if any) influence over what happens in Israel. Any influence that does exist at a governmental level derives all of its substance from the American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC). While AIPAC is ostensibly a lobbying organization, we may assume that it can choose to apply its generous budget to objectives other than buying off members of Congress. Indeed, in the spirit of Charlie Wilson, AIPAC could conceivable finance operations in Israel that run contrary to any positions taken by any elected representative of our government.

Meanwhile, public opinion is rallied around the proposition that Israel must be supported because it is the only "real" democracy in the Middle East. (Note the scare quotes.)  Those who continue to embrace this proposition would do well to read Chris Hedges' recent column on Truthdig, a book review of Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel released under the headline "Imploding the Myth of Israel." The bottom line is that what we know about Israel comes entirely from a well-financed propaganda effort and is nothing more than toxic Kool-Aid. Some might even argue that 9/11 was the first serious symptom of its toxicity, but the consciousness industry had thus far been successful in keeping those voices inaudible. Whether or not Hedges' voice suffers the same fate will be up to those of us still willing to read with an open mind.

Becoming Aware of Other Voices

Last week saw the launch of Al Jazeera America. To my surprise (and delight), Comcast assigned it the channel slot previously held by Current TV (which had been bought out by Al Jazeera). As a result, after several "dry" decades, I actually had the ability to choose between two channels, both of which showed the same attentive respect to the coverage of hard news that had once been the agenda of CNN.

The launch has had major impact on our home viewing habits. When everyone was covering the Senate Committee hearing on taking action against Syria, my wife and I chose Al Jazeera America. We felt that it would be the most likely source of both sides of opinions, and we were not disappointed. The same could be said of the discussion prior to Barack Obama's address on Tuesday evening.

Once again, American television viewers are getting the opportunity to listen to points of view other than those that the rich and mighty want us to hear. One result seems to be a renewal of reluctance to engage in another military exploit being given a more "legitimate" voice than it had received in the wake of 9/11 hysteria. Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin chose to make his case directly to the American public through an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Regardless of how many people will actually read the piece (which was written with a well-honed sense of convincing rhetoric), the word is sure to circulate heavily that the Times took the trouble to run it today.

Whether this will make a change in what seem to be our culturally-embedded trigger-happy inclinations, it is a sign that at least a few media outlets are beginning to honor the fact that ours is not the only voice in any conversation with global repercussions.

As might be guessed, there seems to have been a general attack on Putin's article coming from a variety of different "establishment" representatives. I was most trouble to read, in a report on the BBC News Web site, that Leon Panetta went "on the record" by declaring that Putin was not in a position to lecture the American people about human rights. On the basis of this country's track record since we first ventured into Afghanistan, does Panetta really believe that Putin is any less qualified than any representative of our own government to take strong positions of human rights?

The Heart of the Problem

Catrin Nye, of the BBC Asian Network, has an interesting background piece on the Internet on today’s BBC News site.  In concerns a study by an independent research group, Demos, that tried to assess the level of trust that current students in the United Kingdom put in the reliability of what they read on the Internet.  The results are, to say the least, mixed and may ultimately involve factors that have nothing to do with what is sometimes called “digital literacy,” the capacity for critical thinking and evaluation applied to any content discovered on the Internet.  Thus, for example, students at school whose student body is predominantly Bangladeshi Muslim appear more inclined to believe conspiracy theory stories involving 9/11 and the death of Osama bin Laden.

It seems to me that the real point behind these results is that the underlying question is not one of being able to distinguish signal from noise on the Internet (or any other media source, for that matter).  It also is not a matter of how well any individual is trained in “critical thinking.”  Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that every individual’s thought processes has a social dimension and that interpersonal communication cannot be achieved without accepting that this dimension plays a critical role.

Jamie Bartlett, a senior research at Demos quoted in this article, probably came close to acknowledging this proposition, even if she only closely grazed it.  She has the last word in Nye’s report with the following quote:

Without a common base of history that we all understand and accept and agree upon it's very hard for people to have a shared understanding of where we are now.

This is one way of recognizing the role of the social dimension;  but that claim about “a common base of history” is probably seriously misguided.  Ultimately, it is the prerequisite for “shared understanding;”  and, as I have previously argued, this tends to be a self-centered framing of the problem of understanding:  You understanding me once you share my point of view.  It is why I have rejected the concept of shared understanding in favor of one of negotiated understanding.  This latter does not require “a common base of history.”  It requires, rather, an awareness of differences in history among those parties trying to achieve understanding, which serves as a platform upon which negotiation over differing worldviews may take place.

In terms of how we use the Internet, we may be dealing with a world in which one man’s signal is another man’s noise.  The problem is that, if both men are locked into their respective signals, they will never communicate.  The question is not one of how we get rid of the noise on the Internet.  Rather, the question will always be what any body of content may actually be trying to tell us and, as a result, how we should respond to such communicating “move” (as Erving Goffman would put it).  This requires considerable mental effort on the part of all communicating, which may be asking too much of a global society whose only commonality has become a tendency towards laziness.

9/11 was not an Arbitrarily Selected Date!

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, only the slightest attention was given to the “originating significance” of the date in recent world history.  That significance was again ignored yesterday by just about all of the American news media and probably by most of the world … except where it mattered.  Among the sources I read this morning, only Al Jazeera English used their wire sources to file the following report from Chile:

Thousands of Chileans have marched in the capital Santiago to remember the more than 3,000 people killed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that was launched 38 years ago with a military coup on September 11, 1973.

Organised by a group of relatives of those killed, the march on Sunday led to a memorial erected at a cemetery to commemorate the victims of Pinochet's 17-year long regime.

They marched peacefully through the streets, unable to approach the presidential palace La Moneda because of the tight police cordon.

Salvador Allende, the first and only Marxist to come to power in Chile through a popular vote, died at the palace when military forces surrounded it during the coup.  He is believed to have committed suicide.

The full story discreetly avoids any mention of American involvement in this coup, but this was definitely an event that stands out in the chronicle of episodes that could only cultivate ill will towards the United States.  Chile still remembers, and apparently Al Jazeera decided it was worth taking the time to remember Chile remembering.

In Praise of C-SPAN

Yesterday’s prediction of oversaturated media coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 came true this morning with a vengeance.  However, I realized that I was less annoyed by the fact that just about every news source was on site at Ground Zero as by their presence being reinforced with no end of babble, filling “vacant” time with an abundance of opinions, few of which were informed and most of which were self-serving.  After all, media is a business (even at the BBC as I quickly realized);  and business is about competing for audience share rather than about the solemnity of the occasion.  So it was that I found that C-SPAN was the only feed willing to recognize that an unadorned approximation to being there was all that mattered.  This amounted to the video equivalent of standing in the crowd at Ground Zero.  Anything C-SPAN wanted to say by way of explanation (or promotion) appeared as text at the bottom of the screen.  I am sure that just about every other channel would have written this off as the moral equivalent of dead air, but for me it was a sign of respect.  I realize that the corollary of this observation is that respect no longer signifies in the media business, but is this new to any of us?


By way of afterthought, however, I feel that the San Francisco Chronicle deserves to be acknowledged for putting any acts of remembrance today into perspective.  Right in the middle of the Books section of today's paper are two reviews, one on either side, of books that deserve to be read, because we cannot remember 9/11 without also remembering the dark consequences that ensued in the ways in which our government chose to react.  Each of these books provides an uncompromising examination of those consequences.  The first is a collection edited by Alia Malek entitled Patriot Acts:  Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, whose review appears under the headline "Freedom denied."  The second is Jay Feldman's pursuit of a broader context in his book Manufacturing Hysteria:  A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America.

9/11 is not just a story of what happened in our country on that day.  The more important story is what happened to us through our reaction to what happened.  These books dare to tell at least pieces of that story when the consciousness industry would prefer that we just ignore what they are trying to say.

9/11: Paul Auster's Jaundiced View from Brooklyn

My greatest concern about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is that there will be an oversaturation of media coverage that could easily turn the memory of a significant tragedy into yet another monstrous propaganda exercise by a national consciousness industry that may not be an institution unto itself but, on the basis of its impact, might as well be.  I say this knowing full well that I now act as a media contributor.  Tonight I shall be covering the world premiere of Heart of a Soldier, Christopher Theofanidis’ opera with a libretto by Donna Di Novelli based on the book of the same name by James B. Stewart about Rick Rescorla, Head of Security for Morgan Stanley at Two World Trade Center.  However, the preview piece I wrote on my Examiner.com site focused almost entirely on Theofanidis’ work as a composer, since his music has received so little exposure here in San Francisco.  I could then leave it to my colleague, SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner, to preview the 9/11 side of the story.

I have also assigned myself the task of doing a piece on my national site covering the performance of Gustav Mahler’s second symphony in C minor (“Resurrection”), which will be broadcast at 9 PM tomorrow night on KQED.  This will be a Great Performances program featuring the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Alan Gilbert.  Ironically, the last time I heard this music in concert was this past May at Davies Symphony Hall, when Michael Tilson Thomas had prepared a series of three concerts in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth and the 100th anniversary of his death.  The irony was that this was the second concert in the cycle, which concluded with the sixth symphony in A minor.  Many had already hung the epithet “Tragic” on this symphony;  but, for all of us in the Bay Area, it has its own association to 9/11.  As I explained in my Examiner.com review:

It was scheduled to open the season in September of 2001.  The date of the concert was September 12, 2001.  In the wake of what had happened on September 11, there was considerable discussion over whether a concert should be given at all.  The concert took place, appreciated by many for its cathartic value.

The bottom line is that I do not plan to spend much of my time as a “media consumer” dwelling on 9/11 coverage.  I have enough on my plate already, thank you very much.  Nevertheless, I found myself very absorbed by this morning’s BBC World Service broadcast of an interview with Paul Auster for today’s broadcast of The World Today Weekend, originally aired at 0500 GMT.  It did not take me long to find that this program had been assigned a BBC iPlayer Web page, and those who wish to follow that hyperlink will find that the interview begins shortly after the 37’ time stamp.

I chose the above title very carefully.  Auster really did see the Towers fall from the window of his daughter’s bedroom on the top floor of his house in Brooklyn.  He also experienced the ash that fell in his neighborhood, as well as any number of toxic smells.  He also dwelled on the experience of crossing the Manhattan Bridge after the catastrophe and the change in a view he had long relished, which took in the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline of lower Manhattan.

At the same time that opening adjective is also justified.  He began the interview with the following retrospective assessment:

It’s been a dismal ten years.

He made his case through references to “mismanaged government and economy” leading to the conclusion that “we’ve reached a moment of great irrationality.”  He then proposes that the irrationality is a product of our own “ingrown” thinking.  As he put it:

I don’t think we give a damn about anyone but ourselves these days.

He furthers his case by addressing the nature of our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, asserting that we are there because:

It’s our problem, not theirs.

In other words we are there for the sake of those who want us there, and they want us there for their own personal gain.

Auster’s jaundiced assessment of what we have become in the ten years since 9/11 reminded me of a piece I had written on April 19, 2007 on a topic that related to 9/11 only by association.  The title of the piece was “A Brotherhood of Mourning?”  Since it is my own “intellectual property,” I think that, on the threshold of tomorrow’s anniversary, it deserves to be reproduced in its entirety:

Yesterday I accused the President of using his visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for political purposes and reflected on whether this could be considered chutzpah, since we have to assume that politicians do everything "for political purposes." Today, to invoke the terminology of Kenneth Burke, the act is the same but the agent and scene have changed. This time the agent is Rudy Giuliani, and the scene is the gathering in Oklahoma City on the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. I was struck by one particular sentence quoted by Associated Press Writer Tim Talley:

We mourn and hurt and will never forget, but we don't live under fear.

Because it is hard for me to view Giuliani as anything but a politician (and one trying to become the Republican candidate for the next presidential election at that), his use of the first person plural just stuck in my craw. It was as if he wanted to gather the Oklahoma City bombing under the same tent as 9/11 in the formation of a "brotherhood" of mourning and personal pain, then alluding to Virginia Tech for adding new members to this brotherhood. I am really chilled by this kind of political maneuver, possibly because I fear that it may actually work. Sartre had conceived of such a "brotherhood of mourning" in The Flies. This was his version of Aeschylus' Oresteia; and the brotherhood concept was invented by Aegisthus in memory of Agamemnon, who had been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra with the assistance of, you guessed it, Aegisthus. Sartre saw this as manipulation of the worst kind; and, for better or worse, my own world-view was informed by seeing a performance of this play back in my student days. The San Francisco Chronicle recently observed that, in time of war, it is very easy to find theatre companies mounting productions of Lysistrata. Perhaps some of those companies should also think about reviving The Flies to remind us of how the political mind can actually work.

There is nothing wrong with any of us mourning what happened on 9/11, regardless of whether or not he had a personal connection to that catastrophe;  but we should all be smart enough to recognize when our sincerest personal feelings of grief are being manipulated by others who care about nothing other than personal gain.

The Open Society and its New Enemies

I find it interesting that the name of Karl Popper has not come up in the recent discussions of the role of social media in mass protests, whether violent or nonviolent.  Popper will be remembered for many achievements, including a ten-minute argument with Ludwig Wittgenstein that David Edmonds and John Eidinow turned into a book of almost 350 pages, Wittgenstein’s Poker.  In this particular case, however, Popper’s relevant achievement is his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, whose Acknowledgements page includes “deeply indebted” recognition of Friedrich Hayek.  This is one of those books more talked about than read, particularly due to its influence on George Soros and Soros’ particular approach to philanthropy.

Popper’s “enemies list” is a short one, consisting essentially of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx, each of whom believed that “social order” had to be prescribed, rather than being allowed to evolve through a natural unfolding of events.  Plato tops this list for the advocacy of a controlled society that goes back to his “Republic;”  and Popper begins his book in terms of an imaginary debate between Plato and Pericles, the latter represented by the following sentence:

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

One can appreciate the sympathetic alliance between Popper and Hayek, since it is probably the case that Hayek was working on The Road to Serfdom at the same time that Popper was completing the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the one that focuses almost entirely on Plato.

There is a tendency to frame the open society concept as an early endorsement of radical libertarianism bordering on anarchy.  This explains much of the current debate, since cyberspace remains an anarchic “place” (to the extent that we can call it a place at all).  There are those who have tried to talk about governance, but those who talk the most about the concept tend to be those who have studied the concept the least and are just shooting from the hip.  They are countered by those who believe that the public should be deprived of any resource that can be used for sociopathic purposes, even if most of the uses of that resource are innocuous and some may actually be beneficial.  David Cameron seems to be the current cheerleader for this latter position;  and conditions in the United Kingdom are such that he has all three parties in the British Parliament joining in the cheers.  It is a little bit like the bipartisan enthusiasm for military action over here in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

When everyone is cheering the same thing, it is important to remember the wisdom of The Money Game, whose author published under the pseudonym “Adam Smith.”  The most important sentence in this book expresses the precept:

The crowd is always wrong.

Where the dangers of social software are concerned, Chris Matyszczyk has come up with a useful corollary in his Technically Incorrect blog on the CNET Blog Network:

I don't remember--before the advent of these heinous social media tools--plotters being blocked from using telephones. I don't remember conspirators or looters being prevented from, say, frequenting a pub or a Turkish bath because that's where they conducted their conspiring.

I know that this is very much in the same vein as the National Rifle Association’s favorite motto:

Guns don’t kill people;  people kill people.

Nevertheless, those who promote blocking the latest generation of digital technologies to support communication are doing nothing more that seeking out the most convenient scapegoat.

Those “happy few” with a sense of history can relate the current uproar to the debate over the Communications Decency Act during the Clinton Administration.  For those unaware of the reference, this was the first concerted effort on the part of our Congress to impose a framework for censoring Internet content.  It was a passionate debate;  and, as is almost always the case, the increase in passion was matched by an increase of silly propositions.  Diane Feinstein went as far as to declare that the Internet was hazardous because anyone could go there and learn how to build a bomb.  This left me wondering whether or not her next move would be to shut down all public libraries across the United States.

Popper made the right call by tracing it all back to Pericles.  Each of us is capable of judging the policies under which we live.  Our judgments may not always be properly informed;  but, for better or worse, they are embedded in our respective mindsets.  Back when I was deep in the throes of knowledge management research, a lot of evangelists liked to talk about a new world of “shared understanding.”  Ultimately, I realized that this was a fool’s errand, simply because that concept is inconsistent with the social axioms behind an open society.  Understanding may be negotiated to a point where opposing parties can live with each other’s difference, and that will always be far more realistic than aspiring to everyone embracing a common point of view.

How does this relate to mass protest?  When opinions differ, the worst thing that one side can do is exercise power to a point where any opposing side will “pass unnoticed.”  Social software makes it easier for those who hold a minority opinion to discover each other and to unite to an extent to which it is harder for them to pass unnoticed by the majority.  Once they become noticed, their opposition can try to shut them down (which is almost always counterproductive);  or it can recognize the need to establish negotiated understanding.  Unfortunately, those with power tend to prefer the former option, lest any negotiation lead to giving up some of that power that takes priority over all other values.

The Failure of Political Processes as we Know Them

David Cole has a relatively short commentary piece in the latest issue of The New York Review.  The title is “Guantánamo:  The New challenge to Obama.”  It is a disturbing piece, as is clear from its sixth paragraph:

A week before bin Laden’s death, the national news was dominated by WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of US intelligence assessments of the alleged risks posed by each of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Lost in the focus on WikiLeaks, however, was an even more revealing story in The Washington Post, detailing how President Obama has thus far failed to close Guantánamo. That story portrayed a president who at virtually every critical stage chose not to fight for what he said he believed in, and instead bowed to political pressure that left America’s values and safety compromised. If he is to build on his victory in killing bin Laden, President Obama needs to stand firm on Guantánamo and oppose Congress’s short-sighted and dangerous proposals.

Basically, this is an unpleasant corollary to the proposition I tried to pursue on Friday, “that peace in the Middle East is too serious to be entrusted to political leaders.”  That proposition was further reinforced this weekend by a polemical speech given by Michael Scheuer, former head of the unit following Osama bin Laden at the CIA, given at the Hay Festival and reported in the London Telegraph (which sponsors the Festival).

The bottom line is that, whether it has to do with issues of signification, through which we might have understood enough about bin Laden to avert the 9/11 catastrophe, or issues of legitimation, according to which what Barack Obama has called “our most cherished values” are being annihilated under our very eyes in the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, our country has, as a matter of both domestic and foreign policy, relegated all decision making to the priorities of resource allocation maintained by political power.  Today is supposed to be the day we remember those who died in battle, but we must also remember the value system strong enough to motivate a commitment to our armed forces.  We have come to a point at which none of the three branches of our government seems committed to causes worth dying for, those causes that used to be fundamental to our sense of national pride.  Both Cole and Scheuer have been perceptive enough to speak out on this problem, but does anyone have the necessary combination of acuity of perception and strength of will to do anything about it?

No Revelry, No Closure

24 hours later my day began with a wrenching reaction of disgust.  The top of the San Francisco Chronicle blared out an oversized headline filling the width of the front page:

A world changed

Whom did the editors think they were kidding?  Yes, the world had changed in many ways over the ten years since 9/11.  Did they want to celebrate those changes?  Did they think that the death of Osama bin Laden would magically restore conditions to where they were on 9/10?  This was no different from the images of revelry at Ground Zero or in Times Square, as if the only way to react would be the same way we react when our team wins the World Series (which, let’s face it, is the sort of the story the Chronicle knows how to write).

Once again, I had to find more sober writing on the Web site of Al Jazeera English.  This time it was a story filed from New York by Gregg Carlstrom, but it was set in neither Ground Zero nor Times Square.  The scene was far more modest:

East Meadow, a middle-class suburb on Long Island, is home to Nassau County's September 11 memorial, the centrepiece of which is 10 granite plaques bearing the names of the 344 county residents killed in the attacks. Two aluminum towers, evoking the Twin Towers, stand over a reflecting pool next to the plaques.

Over 100 residents came there on Monday night to honor those 344 victims.  Those interviewed by Carlstrom were far more sober than the revelers, and many were reflective in the best sense of the word.  Here is how Carlstrom opened his account:

Eileen Zott is one of thousands of New Yorkers who lost family because of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but the news of his death brought little satisfaction for her.

Zott and her husband attended a candlelight vigil on Long Island on Monday night to pay tribute to her cousin, Louis Modafferi, a New York firefighter who was killed on September 11. Both seemed unsure about how to respond to bin Laden’s death 24 hours earlier during a US raid in Pakistan.


"I don't know how I feel about this," she said. "I'm a Christian, and killing isn't part of my beliefs. It doesn't bring anyone back."

Here is how he concluded:

The mood was somber, with many residents saying they needed more time to digest the news. Zott's husband John said he wasn't sure how he felt about bin Laden's death.

"It's a lot to process. It's all so sudden," he said. "We were watching Celebrity Apprentice, and suddenly the president was speaking ... it's not closure. And it drags up all these memories."

Ed Mangano, the Nassau County executive, said the vigil would be a "respectful location where we can grieve". Most of the attendees did exactly that: They lit candles, cried and reflected on their losses.

"It's partial closure, but it's never complete," said Lisa Fleming, a nurse from Nassau County who brought her two young children to the vigil. "I lost friends, lots of close friends ... and [this] will never bring those people back."

There was no sympathy for bin Laden, of course, despite the ambivalent reactions to his death. "If anything, he got off too easy," one woman said, a common sentiment in conversations across New York.

But many residents, rather than celebrating his death, opted to reflect on how bin Laden - and his actions - impacted myriad lives in the New York area. Fleming told me about a friend whose son joined the Marines after September 11; he was killed in combat in Iraq. Another woman talked about her brother, a police officer, who now suffers chronic respiratory problems because of dust he inhaled in Lower Manhattan.

There was scattered talk about a possible retaliatory attack, though few people seemed concerned. US officials say they have not received intelligence about any specific threats since bin Laden's death.

Robert Hopper, an East Meadow resident who attended the vigil with his brother, said he worried that bin Laden's death would not stop militant groups from targeting New York.


"You get rid of him, it'll be someone else," Hopper said. "You can't just kill one person. You need to get rid of the underlying problems."

Carlstrom could not have chosen a better punch line.  The problems were there before 9/11.  (No one has dared to consider how many of the people working in the World Trade Center building were flesh-and-blood versions of the fictional characters (s)he had encounter in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.  Whatever their character flaws may have been, their deaths deserved to be treated with solemn respect.  Why should bin Laden be treated any differently?)  Not only are the problems still there, they have grown to frighteningly hypertrophied proportions.  We tried to elect a President who would confront those problems head-on;  instead, he struggles to stay on his feet while subjected to an unrelenting salvo of head-butts from those determined to maintain all the degrading qualities of business-as-usual “by any means necessary.”

East Meadow gets it, the same way that those trying to earn a living fishing in the Gulf of Mexico get it and the same way that those who continue to lack food, clothing, and shelter in New Orleans get it.  What we need is a representative government that gets it, which probably means that we are sorely missing individuals in the institutions of government who take the responsibility of representation seriously.  Barack Obama may have gone into the Oval Office with the necessary seriousness of purpose;  but how must he feel if the only thing that boosts his approval ratings is the satisfaction of a national blood-lust for revenge?

The Tension of Economic Development

Every now and then some analyst is bold enough to consider whether or not the hostilities in the "developing" world may actually be due to the efforts of industrialized nations to provide the "benefits" of "economic development" (all scare quotes intentional). This argument generally leads to an extended critical analysis of the activities of "development" organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which usually culminates in some set of hard existential question concerning the raison d'être of those institutions. One would think that such a perspective is basically a consequence of the massive rethinking of values induced by what appears to be an increasing wave of terrorist attacks in general and 9/11 in particular.
As one who believes that the old books still have much to offer, I was somewhat amused to discover that this particular brand of critical thinking predates all of the current institutions, if not the institutionalization of economic aid itself. I am currently reading Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in Walter Kaufmann's translation for The Portable Nietzsche) and, in a section entitled "On the Pitying," I came across the following sentence:

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

One way to approach the current critical analysis is that all of the well-intentioned minds behind the World Bank and International Monetary Fund could never conceive that any of their actions would turn into Nietzsche's "gnawing worm;" but the hypothesis that every act of terrorism can be attributed to another chomp by that worm seems worthy of consideration.
Consider, by way of an alternative, the Grameen model of banking introduced by Muhammad Yunus. This model is less concerned with turning the entire world into a market-driven culture, which may be the most viable motive behind all loans made to poverty-stricken nations in the interest of their "economic development," and more concerned with the elimination of poverty itself. The small scale of the loans that Grameen offers stands in sharp opposition to the World Bank model, which amounts to imposing "Great indebtedness." A Grameen loan is "a little charity" that is easily forgotten as the recipient gets back on his/her economic feet (if not stands upright for the first time); and there is little sign of "vengeful" feelings among those recipients.
On the other hand such vengeful feelings are no longer confined to the "developing world." What is the Tea Party if not an attempt to institutionalize the expression of such feelings, first in rallies and then at the ballot box? How did such feelings arise? They are the feelings of those victimized by Nietzsche's concept of "Great indebtedness," manifested through the abusive practices of lending institutions, whether for home mortgages or for credit card usage. What, then, is our government to do when those vengeful feelings originate on our own soil, rather than among the disenfranchised around the world that find themselves drawn to loosely-structure organizations, such as al-Qaeda, whose philosophy (if one exists) may well be that the only way to make things better is first to make them unbearably worse? Does our government even recognize that this is a valid question?

Beyond Irony

It seems unlikely that either the ugliness or the magnitude of ironies surrounding the intentions of the Dove World Outreach Center to turn 9/11 into a Quran-burning ceremony is likely to register with the church's leader, Terry Jones. Thus, we may need to take a page from the French court of Louis XVI, where it was widely recognized that, if one cannot achieve shame and disgrace through truth, one would do better to resort to ridicule. Unfortunately, in this case the source of ridicule may be too dated to have a very strong effect; but it was inspired by the latest BBC News story about Jones. The Web page for this report includes an Associated Press photograph showing Jones standing alongside a series of signs receding into the distance. The first sign says "ISLAM." Behind it a sign says "IS OF THE;" and behind that sign is the single word "DEVIL." The photograph is cropped at the edge of the rear sign, giving the impression that it is the last one. However, I was raised to expect that there would be one remaining sign saying only "BURMA-SHAVE;" and, judging by Jones' display of facial hair in this photograph, I suspect he would be well advised to give more heed to that last sign than to the first three!

The Ugliest of Ironies

Could there be an irony uglier that the very name of the Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Florida? For those who do not recognize the name, this is the "New Testament, Charismatic, Non-Denominational Church" (their own description) that plans to "celebrate" the ninth anniversary of 9/11 by burning a copy of the Quran. This will probably not be the first time that the metaphor of the dove of peace will be turned on its head, but it may be the first time that the dove will give up its olive branch in favor of an actual lighted match. Indeed, to pursue the metaphor even further, this particular dove has managed to provoke at least two of our "hawks" (senior military commanders in Afghanistan) on the grounds that the most likely consequence of the desecration of the Muslim holy book will be to put our "boots on the ground" in even greater harm's way than they already are. To put the matter in the most cynical terms, the calculated anti-Islamic hatred of the Dove World Outreach Center may draw even more support to the Taliban than has frustration with the corruption prevailing in Afghanistan's "democratically elected" government.

This brings us to "phase two" of the irony, that word "outreach." This particular dove is not extending the olive branch of peace. It is extending the cross of the Church Militant, the deliberate superposition of the primary symbol of Christianity with the sword of the Crusaders. This brand of outreach is, indeed, that of the Crusades, using the "mission" to spread Christianity as an excuse for world exploitation through domination.

Under such circumstances one would think that the Dove World Outreach Center would at least try to lower its profile, if not capitulate. However, the report on Al Jazeera English, which draws upon Reuters as a source, indicated that this organization has chosen just the opposite tactic:

In comments broadcast on CNN, Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Centre, said it would be "tragic" if anybody's life was lost as a result of the planned Quran burning.

But he said: "Still, I must say that we feel that we must sooner or later stand up to Islam, and if we don't, it's not going to go away."

The church's website says it seeks to "expose Islam" as a "violent and oppressive religion".

It displays a sign reading "Islam of the Devil".

There you have it, the defiance of our fundamental principle of freedom of religion by a faith-based conviction that Islam is a "violent and oppressive religion" that needs to "go away." What would Jesus say?

Intelligence about Intelligence

Today The Washington Post launched its Top Secret America Web site. This is the product of a project of roughly two years' duration involving over a dozen Washington Post journalists under the direction of Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. The report itself is so extensive that it is being published in three installments this week. However, you will not easily find any information about the number of those installments on the Top Secret America home page. The easiest way to learn this useful detail is through the "report on the report" released on the BBC News Web site.

However, the BBC seems to have trumped the Post on more than matters of structural architecture. In contrast with the report "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan," which received so much attention in January when it was released on a public Web page on the Web site of the Center for a New American Security, the Post web site does not (currently at least) provide an "executive summary" of their project's findings. Those interested in such a summary would to better to visit the BBC Web site and turn to the Post only in pursuit of more in-depth details. Currently, the best the Post seems to be offering is a video trailer for a Frontline documentary that will not be broadcast on PBS until October. Furthermore, in the tradition of covering all sides of the story, the BBC has also provided a reaction to the report from David C. Gompert, acting Director of National Intelligence while Barack Obama's nomination of General James Clapper to replace former Director Dennis Blair is being considered.

The irony is inescapable. In the wake of 9/11, intelligence operations have become so bloated as to be virtually unmanageable. This involves not only an organization chart blown out of all reasonable proportions but also "intelligence content" so abundant as to make all the evangelical proclamations about "knowledge management" seem more ludicrous than ever. In the midst of all this, we seem to have forgotten the axiom that the fundamental objective of terrorism is to cause confusion, if not chaos. As I put it after seeing the documentary Leila Khaled, Hijacker, a terrorist is someone determined to make things worse after having been frustrated in all efforts to make them better. If this does not describe what al-Qaeda has done and how they have done it, I do not know what does; and now we have a report that took two years to prepare, which basically concludes that the impact of al-Qaeda on our intelligence operations is tantamount to the physical destruction they have wrought since the morning of 9/11.

This takes us to Gompert's reaction as reported by the BBC. His bottom line is that the efforts of The Washington Post do not "reflect the intelligence community we know." Whether or not this is the case, one of the points of the report is that it is unclear (and probably unlikely) that anyone knows whether or not Gompert's claim is true. One can neither warrant nor refute the claim because it is virtually impossible to negotiate all the data involved in intelligence operations (which includes being cleared to get much of those data in the first place) in order to formulate a substantive argument in favor of either Gompert or the Post. At the very least this supports the Post's claim that confusion is rife, if not dominant, within intelligence operations; and the worst thing we can do is to ignore this proposition, however sincere Gompert's protestations may be.

"National Security Strategy"—the View from Al Jazeera

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the 9/11 attacks is that the national security of the United States has less to do with either our military or our economic might and more to do with our relations with those who do not see the world the same way we do. Our greatest liability in the wake of this catastrophe was the stubborn refusal of the Bush Administration to recognize that our worldview was neither the only one nor the "correct" one and that our system of values, whether those espoused or those actually practiced, were far from "globally universal." Thus, any analysis of the "National Security Strategy" document, released by the White House this morning, should account for the reactions of a diversity of points of view; and one of the most interesting sources is likely to be Al Jazeera, whose expansion into English-language journalism may be seen as one of the unanticipated consequences of the global reaction to 9/11, if not 9/11 itself. This morning's Al Jazeera English report on the release of this document is one of those items that is solely a product of its own staff, free from the influences of any of its wire services.

Thus, the first priority of this report concerns the extent to which the Obama Administration is departing significantly from the Bush Administration in its fundamental view of the nature of national security:

The document, updated every four years, sets priorities for America's military, law enforcement and foreign policy agencies. It drops some of the most controversial language from the Bush administration, like the phrase "global war on terror" and references to "Islamic extremism".

"The United States is waging a global campaign against al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates," the 52-page strategy document says.

"Yet this is not a global war against a tactic - terrorism, or a religion - Islam. We are at war with a specific network, al-Qaeda, and its terrorist affiliates."

This is followed by the acknowledgement that the scope of national security extends beyond the risks of further threats from al-Qaeda:

The strategy also calls for US engagement with "hostile nations," closer relations with China and India, and a focus on strengthening the US economy.

In other words we face two risks to our national security: the fragility of our economy and the possibility of further aggressive attacks. If there is an overall strategy in the new policy document, it is based on the premise that these risks may be mitigated through more effective communication that includes those who disagree with us rather than those in any "coalition of the willing." This is our most serious departure from Bush Administration policy, and it may also be the clearest statement to date of how Barack Obama is serious about bringing about change.

Another significant direction for change involves the need to move away from what I have previously called "that culture of fear that debilitated the entire country under the Bush Administration." As I reported in the wake of the failed terrorist attack on the Delta/Northwest airplane preparing to land in Detroit on Christmas Day, one of Obama's major "agents of change" is his advisor on counterterrorism, John Brennan; so it is no surprise that Brennan was one of those selected to preview today's report. Al Jazeera English quotes what I feel is the most important sentence from a speech Brennan gave yesterday:

As our enemy adapts and evolves their tactics, so must we constantly adapt and evolve ours, not in a mad rush driven by fear, but in a thoughtful and reasoned way.

I can think of no better way to reject Bush Administration thinking; and, presumably, this should be taken as a message to the world at large, rather than solely to our own citizens.

Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that "National Security Strategy," as it has been issued, is a statement of philosophy. Philosophy never translates easily into practice, particularly when its statement is issued by an Executive Branch of government bound by a system of checks and balances to a Legislative Branch and a Judicial Branch. Such a system imposes considerable inertia in the workings of our government, and Barack Obama is now intimately acquainted with that inertia. However, where George W. Bush turned to the agency of fear to "get things moving," Obama seems more disposed to persevere through that inertia; and his gift of perseverance may ultimately be the "secret sauce" to restoring our highly eroded sense of national security.