The Commander-in-Chief reveals his priorities

 

Donald Trump displaying his priorities 

https://www.sfgate.com/news/politics/article/trump-interrupts-a-cabinet-meeting-dealing-with-22153824.php

… and, as far as I am concerned, we have every cause to be skeptical, if not afraid! 

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Mozart the Islamic Terrorist?

According to an article on the Web site of the London Telegraph:

Speculation is rife that Isis, Lord Grantham’s yellow Labrador in the ITV period soap-opera [Downton Abbey, for those who need to be told], may be on the verge of being killed off, as programme bosses scramble to avoid any association with the terrorist group.

Julian Fellowes, who created the series, claims that any comment on the plot would be a "slope," by which I assume he means "slippery slope." However, things are already slipping pretty badly if we are to judge by another sentence in the Telegraph article:

Isis Martinez, a woman from Florida, started a global petition urging the media to “stop calling the terrorists by our name”, while an Australian construction firm urged staff not to wear uniforms, and Isis Equity Partners recently announced plans for a re-brand.

I guess we shall known when we have slipped into the gutter when a call goes out to change Sarastro's aria at the beginning of the second act of The Magic Flute.

When Both Parties in Congress Agree with the White House, Something Must be Wrong!

Yesterday's post was written out of a sincere effort to observe that deciding whether or not Edward Snowden is an asset or a liability is no easy matter. It is clear from a BBC News report, updated most recently early this morning, that there are many voices in Germany, in both the government and the press institutions, that have come to recognize him as an asset. Whether or not that trend is simply blow-back from the goring of a precious German ox (Angela Merkel's cell phone), it should provide our own government with issues worth considering.

Unfortunately, the current state of play seems to indicate that the prevailing view in Washington is that Snowden is a serious liability, if not a downright traitor. This has been declared explicitly by White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer. Meanwhile, both the Democratic and Republican sides of Congress got their licks in during yesterday morning's weekly "Sabbath-Day gasbags" (as Calvin Trillin liked to call it) circuit. Unfortunately, the voice of the Democrats was Dianne Feinstein, whom, in spite of my general voting preferences, has become one of my favorite targets when it comes to any form what amounts to legislation over information. I heard clips of Republican Mike Rogers on Al Jazeera America yesterday. He was no less rabid; but I am not sure that he represented any significant form of authority, informed or otherwise. Is this circling the wagons for protection? It could also be surrounding Snowden with "men with guns" all pointed at him but just as likely to hit someone standing on the opposite side of the circle.

Should We be Biting Snowden's Finger or Looking at Where It is Pointing?

My title draws upon an expression I picked up during my student days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was attributed to Warren McCulloch, who was recognized, long after his death, as one of the pioneers of computing based on neural networks. When wrapped up in an intense argument, he was apparently known to say:

Don't bite my finger; look where I'm pointing!

The act of whistle-blowing often involves little more than pointing at something that "everyone knows" but would prefer to disregard. As a result, whistle-blowers are extremely vulnerable to having their fingers bitten. This is particularly the case where "national security" is involved, as I discovered in one of my posts from 2011. Now we have Edward Snowden; and, according to the news from this week, the German government is more interested in looked at where he is pointing than we are.

Thus, by way of retaliation, Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decided it was appropriate to run an opinion piece in today's Chronicle under the title:

NSA's call-records program is prudence – not prying

Granted that one man's meat is another man's poison, I have to wonder just how much Feinstein knows about intelligence (in the technical sense of the word) and, more specifically, the complex relationships established in that chain that beings with "raw data" and proceeds through "information" into "intelligence," as a result of what may best be called "acts of interpretation."

Back in the days when laws about communication were being reviewed under the Clinton Administration, there was a rather ludicrous side-show surrounding what was called the Communications Decency Act. Many of us realized that this was a camel trying to get its nose into the tent of Internet censorship. It turned out that Feinstein was a strong supporter of censorship. She saw the Internet as a potentially dangerous environment. Her prime example was that one could go to the Internet to learn how to make bombs. Since this was still a time when Internet access was slow, pricey, and relatively limited, she seemed to forget that, in those days, it was a lot simpler to learn this by going to the public library.

Long before there were networks, there were clever kids hacking into presumably "secure" time-sharing system, many of whom had also figured out how to hack into the telephone company. Many of those kids were subjected to the full force of criminal law. However, in a few of the sites that had been hacked, there were someone in upper management that realized that knowing what these kids know would be useful. This seems to be the German attitude towards Snowden; and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why we refuse to persist in our belief that the Germans might be on to something, particularly at a time when we should be trying to heal our injured relationship with them.

The Sword of Hatred Can Cut Both Ways

It would seem that, from the time the Democratic Party nominated Barack Obama as their candidate for President of the United States, the Republican Party has been dedicated to campaigning based on the lowest common denominator of hatred. Those of us whose memory stretches back to 2008 probably recall that this denominator got so low that even John McCain had the good sense to back away from it (a moment that was included in the HBO Game Plan movie, to the great credit of that film’s production team and to Ed Harris for depicting just how offensive that moment was to anyone with common-sense regard for truth and humanity). Nevertheless, those wheels of hatred kept rolling, building momentum through the rise of the TEA Party, to a point where maintaining momentum was more important than getting anything done in Congress. (After all, if Congress achieved anything of value, that might be perceived as going to Obama’s credit; and who would stand for that?)

This weekend, however, we may have seen a tipping point. When it comes to triggering hatred, Republican Congressman Todd Akin may have crossed the line in justifying his hard line that abortion can never be accepted as legitimate, even in the most extreme circumstances. As just about everyone knows by now, the “trigger words,” so to speak, were the following:

If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

These words have the power to tap into that same sort of visceral hatred that Republicans have tried to direct towards our President and those who agree with him that government has a role in trying to offer a better life for all of its citizens, rather than just the wealthy ones. Akin’s statement might not offend all women. However, they are likely to cut through to a strong majority of them, even those with Republican loyalties; and, given Mitt Romney’s immediate distancing from those words, one might expect that there are plenty of men out there, regardless of party affiliation, will to recognize that Akin went far over the line of basic human decency.

It would be nice if Akin inadvertently sounded the wake-up call that hate-mongering is no way to run a political campaign. I would not hold my breath. Nevertheless, it is about time the Republicans get a better feel for what it is like to be on the receiving end of such irrationality. I suspect that hate-free campaigning is beyond reasonable expectation; but, if Akln’s behavior leads to even a slight turning down of the rhetorical heat, there may be a glass of lemonade coming from his oversized lemon.

Freedom of Speech in the World the Internet has Made

BBC News reported a significant turnout by major figures in British comedy at a benefit to raise money to assist Paul Chambers with his legal expenses.  For those on this side of the pond unfamiliar with the name, Chambers is the frustrated traveler who, upon discovering that his airport was closed due to snow, vented his anger through the following tweet:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!

In a culture that now lives in fear of terrorists, he was prosecuted for sending a menacing communication, found guilty, fined £385, and told to pay £600 costs.  He has appealed the verdict, which he why he needs help with his legal expenses.

The guests of honor at the benefit held to the position that the tweet was never more than a joke.  Addressing the benefit audience, Chamber’s lawyer said:

We should be able to have banter.  We should be able to speak freely without the threat of legal coercion.

The United States has had more than its fair share of freedom-of-speech cases.  Indeed, there have been enough to fill a book;  and Anthony Lewis wrote that book, giving it the title Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.  However, of all the judicial decisions issued over First Amendment rights, the most memorable will always be Oliver Wendell Holmes’ proposition that freedom of speech does not grant the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded place when there is no fire.

Much as I respect the spirit behind this benefit, I would submit that the Holmes decision still stands as a valuable guideline.  I believe it is relevant because, whatever else we may say about it, the Internet has become a very crowded place.  A decade ago we fretted over a miniscule amount of information triggering automatic trading software and sending the markets into a tailspin.  Ultimately, that was an objective problem that could be reduced to mathematical models.  The complexity of the Internet as a social space cannot be so simply reduced (however hard the online marketing folks may try to do so);  and its dynamics are far less predictable that those of an audience filling every seat in a theater.

Indeed, the dynamics are so complex that the simple question of whether the text of a tweet can be classified as a joke or a terrorist threat is just not a well-defined one.  It is not only that the text cannot be classified by a context-free method;  it is also that it will be read by many readers, each endowed with a different context.  Thus, in the absence of any sound approach to evaluating the incriminating text, the court chose to rule on the side of caution.  Ultimately, the ruling had more to do with the social climate of fear than with the content of the text.

Do I agree with this ruling?  Before I answer this I feel it appropriate to state a bit of my own context that I feel is relevant.  I was living in Singapore when the American teenager Michael Fay was arrested, tried, and convicted for theft and vandalism there.  His sentence included four strokes of the cane, making this the first time that an American citizen had been sentenced to caning.  This happened in 1994, which, in the grander scheme of things, was after Singapore had made its first venture into cable, meaning that I could get my news from both Singapore Broadcasting and CNN;  so I had a good sense of how the American media chose to inflate this story.  I also had a personal sense of what it meant to be an American expatriate in Singapore.

My own opinion of the Fay case was that anyone who lives in another country is obliged to understand enough about the culture of that country to anticipate the consequences of any action within that culture.  Actually, that obligation holds as much in one’s native country as in any other.  We just take it for granted that we understand our own culture, but I would argue that this is a specious assumption.  Indeed, the weakness of that assumption provides a reason for why Holmes’ issued the decision he did;  and we may treat that decision as a corollary of this general “law of culture and consequences.”

Both Fay and Chambers chose to ignore that cultural law.  Fay had to take the consequences of his decisions regarding both his specific criminal act and his lack of cultural awareness.  It is all very well for Chambers’ lawyer to argue that we should be able to banter;  but, between the “crowded conditions” of the Internet and the climate of fear that has become global in scope, we cannot do so casually.  The consequences of what we say are not what they used to be.

Simic's Case

Since I just endorsed Charles Simic’s post to NYRBlog on “The New American Pessimism,” I suspect that it would be fair for me to say something about what I endorse.  The crux of his case lies in three paragraphs towards the end of his post:

In an atmosphere of growing anxiety and hysteria, in which the true causes and the scale of our dire national predicament are deliberately concealed and obfuscated by our political establishment and by the corporate media, no wonder there’s confusion and anger everywhere. As anyone who has traveled around this country and talked to people knows, Americans are not just badly informed, but downright ignorant about most things that affect their lives. How nice it would be if our President leveled with us and told us that our deficit is caused in significant part by the wars we are fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the hundreds of military bases we are maintaining around the world, the huge tax breaks for the rich, and the bailout of Wall Street. As we know, we are not about to hear anything of the kind.

By the president’s calculation, telling the truth to the American people would doom his reelection campaign, since he would not be able to raise the billion dollars he needs this time around. The kind of people who have that kind of money and will agree to contribute to his campaign know very well what informed voters in a working democracy would to do to them once they understood just who has depleted the national treasury to line their own pockets. No doubt, he and his political party will do anything to avoid the truth and will propose outwardly attractive solutions—like the health care bill that not only expands coverage but greatly benefits insurance companies and does little to reduce healthcare costs. They hope that these kinds of measures will lure the majority of voters who won’t bother to learn the details, but they will also send a clear signal to the moneyed classes that they won’t be inconvenienced in the least.

As for those who continue to insist that there’s something fundamentally wrong with a democracy that doesn’t address the ever-growing income inequality the sheer madness of our open-ended military ventures in Afghanistan, the miseries of the sick and unemployed, the suffering of the near destitute and of the children and the old, they’ll be dismissed as being unrealistic in present circumstances and reminded that with the other party in power things would be even worse. The reason pessimists are multiplying is that we dishonor the intellect and the knowledge of history in this country by refusing to admit that corruption is the source of our ills. It takes no great mental effort to realize that there’s no effective political forces either in Washington or locally that are able to do anything serious to correct our self-delusions about being the world’s policeman, because any sensible solution would seriously cut into profits of this or that interest group.

Nevertheless, I would not say that I am in total agreement with his claims.  Thus, I would argue that Americans are “downright ignorant” because any process that should be informing them is not just failing them but is failing them through its own corrupted state.  In other words we should not be thinking of these people in terms of their ignorance but in terms of their suffering from the symptoms of what Max Weber called “loss of meaning” as a result of the systematic manipulations of the consciousness industry.  This is why Hans Magnus Enzensberger hit the nail on the head so accurately when he coined that phrase, because we are talking about an efficient industrialized approach that manipulates the workings of our very consciousness, that capacity of mind to make sense out of sensory input that would otherwise confuse us.  Adolf Hitler knew all about undermining that capacity;  he wrote about it in Mein Kampf.  Those who practice it today, however, have got it down to such industrial efficiency (hence Enzensberger’s terminology) that we barely recognize Hitler’s ancestry in their practices.

Insecure about Security

Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Officer for BT, has got at least one thing right.  In her article this morning previewing the RSA security conference here in San Francisco, Maggie Shiels, Technology Reporter for BBC News cited Schneier’s attack on the use of phrases like “cyber warfare,” dismissing them as “emotive rhetoric” that “does not match the reality.”  This is true as far as it goes, but where does it actually take us?

Like it or not, emotive rhetoric is a fundamental part of human nature.  Where human relations are concerned, it is basically a less violent way of whacking a mule with a two-by-four in order to get its attention;  or, as Warren McCulloch would say, it provides a way to keep others from biting your finger when they should be looking at where you are pointing.  This happens to be a case in which there are a variety of instances of behavior on the Internet that serve as pointers, and it is unclear whether Schneier is bothering to look in the right direction.  Instead, he seems to prefer quibbling over the rhetoric itself, at least if we are to take his words, as quoted by Shiels, seriously:

Stuxnet and the Google infiltration are not cyber war - who died?

We know what war looks like and it involves tanks and bombs.

These are the sorts of words I used to hear in those never-ending bull sessions that took place among undergraduates at MIT, back when I was one of them.  They come from immature minds that never heard of Carl von Clausewitz, let alone thought of reading him when there were much cooler things to do in the laboratory (say I, pleading guilty on all counts).

Yet the Internet is now experiencing phenomena that amount to standing Clausewitz’ most famous aphorism on its head.  Where once war was diplomacy by other means, the flourishing of malware has opened up a world of “war by other means.”  The question is no longer one of what war is but of the more fundamental exercise of domination and the motives behind such exercise.

RSA may have begun as a cryptography conference, but the underlying theme has always been security.  Since I do not attend this conference, I am not sure how often the conferees revisit the implied question, “Security against what?”  However, I suspect that there is some agreement that, at its basic level, we all worry about secure protection from sociopathic behavior, whether it involves destruction of data or physical harm (or threat) to life or property.  Tanks and bombs are the physical instruments of such sociopathic behavior;  but on the Internet that behavior manifests itself “by other means.”  I would have thought that anyone in today’s telecommunications business would have recognized that this is where the real problem lies, but I keep forgetting that specialists rarely seem to look at fingers pointing beyond the horizons of their respective specialties.

The Triumph of Fear

I never had a chance to hear Mort Sahl perform until my wife and I moved to Los Angeles in the Eighties.  By that time his Kennedy-era wit had long gone out of fashion;  but there was still a sharp edge to just about everything he said.  I particularly remember his conjuring up an image of Charlton Heston stretched out in his hammock behind his house in Topanga Canyon “dreaming of military takeover.”  Then, allowing only the slightest pause, Sahl hit his punch line, “Son of a bitch doesn’t realize it has already happened.”

That memory came to mind while reading Howard W. French’s “Looking for Hope in Burma” in the latest issue of The New York Review.  The primary book being reviewed by French is Than Shwe:  Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant by Benedict Rogers.  Burma is such a closed society that I was more than a little surprised that French managed to get both into and out of the country, let alone conduct a series of interviews (all conditioned on the anonymity of his subjects) about the future of the country after the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.  If anyone was qualified to review a new 256-page book about Than Shwe, it was definitely French;  and his article is a highly informative interleaving of Rogers’ account with French’s personal experiences.

What interested me most from French’s side of the story was the narrative of his attempt to get into Naypyidaw, the new capital city of the country, two hundred miles north of Rangoon and accessible only by a single superhighway.  The official policy is that foreigners cannot visit this city without a formal invitation.  (As one travel agent put it, casual tourist visits are “not convenient.”)  French took the risk of hiring a car and driver to go up the superhighway to get at least a glimpse of this secretive site.  He discovered that the “virtual barriers” around the city served not only to keep out the tourists but also to confine the bureaucrats.  French quoted what one relief worker said about those government workers:

They are trapped there, and can’t leave the city without authorization.  What you have basically are lots of unhappy people in an enterprise sustained by fear.

That was the text that triggered my flashback to Sahl, except that I was not thinking about Heston;  I was thinking about Dick Cheney.  More specifically I realized that our own country had become one of “lots of unhappy people in an enterprise sustained by fear.”  That enterprise had been engineered by the Bush Administration through cultivating the fear of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.  It is now less than a year until the tenth anniversary of that catastrophe, and electing a new President has not made much difference.  Fear of terrorism may have abated to some extent, but irrational suspicion of Muslims is still with us.  Meanwhile, our “unhappy people” have had to face a new crop if fears due to a damaged economy that has not yet been adequately repaired.  Why worry about terrorists when you have to face the more immediate worry that your house will be foreclosed or that the job you have may no longer exist next week?

Granted, things are much worse in Burma than they have ever been here.  Nevertheless, it is hard to resist associating those in our “ruling class” with those fleeting visions of Than Shwe.  Like Heston they have long dreamed of an authoritarian takeover that would obliterate the visions of our Founding Fathers from our national consciousness.  Unlike Heston, they probably are well aware that their dream has come true.

"Bad Faith" among the Faith-Based

The current state of play in negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians has now become blatantly pathetic.  The week began with Israel successfully pressuring the United States to give up on pressuring Israel to cease settlement-building;  and, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to be diplomatic about this mess, prevailing Palestinian opinion seems to agree that the United States has now forfeited any credibility that it can serve as an honest broker in mediating talks between Israel and the Palestinians.  Now a group of former leaders of European Union (EU) countries is trying to enter the discourse by establishing more acceptable “honest broker credentials.”

These leaders have distributed a letter that recognizes settlement-building as a violation of international law to which Israel should be held accountable.  In other words they have composed a “frank and open” statement of what needs to be done as a precondition for meaningful peace negotiations.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that it does not look like the current EU Administration is going to buy this message and will probably hold to the United States party line.  Meanwhile, the reaction from the Israeli foreign ministry has been to declare this attempt at straightening out the rules of engagement for peace negotiations as “a giant leap of bad faith.”

No words could better capture the extent to which the peace process has deteriorated to name-calling between black pots and kettles.  It is because the United States has continued to support Israel in the face of Israeli intransigence to show any sign of good faith that our own country has contaminated its honest-broker reputation.  Now it appears that the contamination has spread to EU policy.

It thus seems fair to acknowledge those who have tried so hard to find a better way.  The initiative appears to have come from Javier Solana, former EU Minister for Foreign Affairs.  According to the BBC report on his action, those who have signed on with him include “Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato of Italy, Richard von Weizsaecker and Helmut Schmidt of Germany, Mary Robinson of Ireland, Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Norway's Thorvald Stoltenberg.”  This is not a case of partisan politics, as it is in the United States, where it is virtually impossible to hold any significant office without a nod of approval from the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).  Now we see the extent to which the partisanship of the United States can interfere with clear-headed deliberations at the EU level of governance.

Israel is clearly pursuing a strategy of exhaustion.  They figure that all they have to do is hold their hard line until everyone else gets tired of trying to break it.  They are far from the first to have engaged this strategy.  Nevertheless, someone should be asking just what consequences are likely to ensue if they succeed.

The Malice of Ignorance

Whatever we may say about WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange, they certainly have come up with a unique way to raise our consciousness about verb tense.  Their announcement to make public what they call the “Embassy cables” has forced our State Department to enable a phrase which I recently quoted from Alfred Schutz:  “to place ourselves mentally in a future state of affairs which we consider as already realized.”  Suddenly the State Department finds itself deep in the throes of what Schutz called “thinking in the future perfect tense,” perhaps, in the spirit of Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, without having the foggiest idea of what the future perfect tense is.

If Assange were doing this for no other reason than to give a grammar lesson to those in power in order to dissuade them from exercising their power recklessly, it would be easy to recognize his announced intentions (his own “thinking in the future perfect tense”) as positive-connotation chutzpah worthy of a Chutzpah of the Week award.  Unfortunately, we do not know what his intentions really are.  Thus, while there may be no doubt about the degree of chutzpah, there are no criteria for assessing the underlying connotation as positive or negative.

This situation is further complicated by the current Administration having campaigned on the promise that the workings of governance needed to become more transparent.  That is but one of many promises that was not kept;  but, given the chronology of WikiLeaks itself, one wonders whether or not Assange has deliberately managed it as a thorn in the side of the Obama White House, a seriously painful reminder of the failure to make good on this promise.  This might further tilt the balance toward positive connotation were it not for the question of just who would feel the pain.  If that pain were focused on specific reckless acts of specific individuals, Assange’s intended action might, indeed, lead to more members of the State Department acting with a level of discretion that, by all rights, should have been the norm;  but there is no focus at all in Assange’s threat.  If we go by the numbers provided this morning in David Dombey’s report for the Financial Times, we are talking about between 250,000 and 400,000 documents scheduled for release;  and, on the basis of the protestations coming from the State Department, there is a good chance that the State Department knows more about what is in those documents than Assange does, since it is hard to imagine Assange having reviewed them all.

This is where the connotation balance swings to the negative.  It is hard to tell just what Assange takes his job description to be.  The “editor-in-chief” description, which Dombey used in his Financial Times piece, can also be found on Assange’s Wikipedia page;  but the Wikipedia page for WikiLeaks itself names him as “director.”  This may be a fine point;  but it is one way to assess the underlying question of WikiLeaks own “code” of behavior.  (I was pleased to see that “A man gotta have a code” has first place in the Web page of Top 10 Quotes from The Wire.)  If Assange is acting in an editorial capacity, then, according to prevailing normative practices of editing, he is responsible for every piece of text he releases for publication.  Since it is unlikely that he has examined every one of those documents whose numbers run to six figures, the act that he is threatening would be viewed as negligent, at least by any other editor who takes his/her work seriously.  As a “director,” on the other hand, he could either delegate this responsibility to someone with professional editing qualifications (recognizing that the buck would still stop at his own desk) or decide that no such individual was necessary, meaning that WikiLeaks was effectively a conduit, simply moving content from a limited-access site to a public one.  My own feeling is that all of these options place Assange in a very negative light.  The chutzpah still stands, but the connotation is unlikely to be positive.

There remains one other way to read the current state of play, which is that Assange has decided to play a game of chicken with the State Department.  This, too, would be an act of chutzpah;  and, while some might see it as a positive act of one lone individual setting himself up against as monstrous bureaucracy whose interests may be questionable more often than not, there is too much brinksmanship going on in global relations right now to allow for the influence of such a wild player.  In other words Assange’s “code” may be that warped version of an old Sixties motto:

If you are not part of the solution, you can make the problem so bad that someone else will finally get around to fixing it.

Unfortunately, Assange’s strategy for calling attention to the problem runs the gamut from perverse to downright dangerous.  I would thus conclude that Assange has attracted enough attention this week to deserve the Chutzpah of the Week award;  but, at least within the norms of my own worldview, the connotation of his chutzpah is decidedly negative.

It's Not About Issues!

“Americans Against Themselves,” Ronald Dworkin’s post-mortem on Tuesday’s elections in the form of a post to NYRBlog, says less about Americans than it does about those like Dworkin who only know how to appeal to reason.  He says it all in his first two sentences:

The results of Tuesday’s election are savagely depressing, wholly expected, yet deeply puzzling. Why do so many Americans insist on voting against their own best interests?

Dworkin’s usual “beat” is the analysis of judicial decisions;  and his accounts are reliably as perceptive as they are readable.  However, there is a wide gulf between understanding how experienced judges make decisions and understanding what happens in the privacy of the voting booth.

Dworkin’s flaw begins with the assumption that every individual acts according to his/her own “best interests,” the same premise behind Adam Smith’s pioneering examination of economics as a discipline worthy of study.  Like Smith he seems to believe that one can infer those interests through the right combination of observation and common sense.  Consider the examples Dworkin gives after his opening question:

Why do they shout hatred for a health care plan that gives them better protection against calamity than they have ever had? Or stimulus spending that has prevented a bad economic climate from being much worse for them? Or tax proposals that lower their own taxes by raising taxes on people much richer than they will ever be? Why do they vote in such numbers for the party favored by the bankers and traders who brought on the economic catastrophe?

These are vivid counterexamples to action based on the individual’s “best interests,” to be sure.  However, from a more detached scientific view, they provide grounds for questioning the initial premise rather than bemoaning the sorry state of our country.

Dworkin needs to spend less time reviewing judicial records and more time with the writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, particularly on the subject of the "consciousness industry."  Were he to do so, he might have a better grasp of the extent to which the interests of any individual are a product of influences that have more to do with the social world than the objective world, which means that, as a corollary, the interests of most (if not all) individuals submit readily to manipulation.  The “consciousness industry” is nothing more that the application of such manipulation on the “industrial scale” of large masses of individuals.  This leads to another corollary, this time formatted by the other Adam Smith (the author of The Money Game):

The crowd is always wrong.

For Smith this was a postulate about Wall Street, but it is just as applicable to the voting both.  Furthermore, if we study this history of our Presidential elections, we quickly recognize that it was operative long before Enzensberger was writing about it.

Where Dworkin is at his best is where he recognizes the connection between the state of affairs he bemoans and a judicial decision:

A grotesque amount of money—up to $110 million—was spent on Congressional campaigns by sources kept secret. Spending by outside organizations has dwarfed spending by the Republican and Democratic party committees themselves, and we can expect exponentially more spending in the much higher-stakes presidential election to come. Those who claimed that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case would make little difference to our politics have been quickly and dramatically proved wrong.

You cannot have an industry without an adequate base of capital, and the Supreme Court has now made a giant leap in furthering the capitalization of the consciousness industry.  (Alexander Hamilton saw this coming in the original debates over the electoral process.  He knew that votes could be bought and sold.  He just could never conceive of how this could be extrapolated to such mass capitalization.)

I suspect that Dworkin simply cannot get beyond a personal faith that human interest is always a product of information.  However, this is totally inconsistent with an axiom I formulated in September, which is one way of summarizing Enzensberger’s theory:

I suppose this means that, in a market-driven culture, information is inevitably displaced by propaganda.

At the time I was writing about how it is getting more and more difficult to find good sources of “straight news.”  Dworkin should recognize that this difficulty may have a lot to do with why the elections turned out the way they did.

Things Change

Back when I was living in Los Angeles, KPFK had an announcer who would always sign off with the line:

Buy something New Zealand, the world’s only nuclear-free zone.

A report from the BBC today explained the context of that injunction:

Military ties [with the United States] were damaged 25 years ago when New Zealand refused to allow US nuclear-armed ships to dock.

New Zealand has banned nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships visiting its ports since 1985.

The US traditionally refuses to say whether its ships are nuclear-powered or not, so New Zealand has refused entry to all of them.

The substance of the report, however, is that all this has now changed.  Rather, what is reported is the signing of the Wellington Declaration, a new “strategic co-operation document” between the United States and New Zealand.  New Zealand is no longer a nuclear-free zone;  and for this we can thank Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acting on behalf of President Barack Obama.  One might almost miss the days of Ronald Reagan yelling at Mikhail Gorbachev (who was not within earshot) to tear down the Berlin Wall!

Those who Should Know Better Ignore History

This week Mikhail Gorbachev gave an interview, excerpts of which were broadcast on the PBS feed of BBC World Service News, in which he talked about Afghanistan.  Speaking from his own unpleasant experience, Gorbachev, who was in an excellent position to deliver the refrain of history being repeated by those who ignore it, suggested that a “war on terrorism” was no justification for that ignorance.  Indeed, I would not be surprised if the excerpts excluded a suggestion that the war on terrorism has clouded our ability to think clearly as much as the Cold War had done in its time.  Think of our efforts to prop up an Afghani government of questionable value strictly of the interest of keeping the country from falling into “terrorist” (more specifically, Taliban) hands.  Then think of the number of downright brutal dictatorships we supported in countries with no goal other than keeping Communists out of those countries.

This strikes me as the lens through which we should view the following report that appeared on Al Jazeera English this morning:

In a decision critics say has undermined a powerful new law, the United States has decided to turn a blind eye to four countries that use child soldiers in their armed forces.

In a brief and little-noticed announcement on Monday, the White House said Barack Obama, the president, had decided to exempt Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan and Yemen from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008, which prohibits funding for foreign governments' militaries if they recruit or use child soldiers.

On Thursday, Foreign Policy magazine posted  online a nine-page memo from Obama to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, that linked the continuation of funding to US counterterrorism efforts in some of those countries.

"Everyone’s gotten a pass, and Obama has really completely undercut the law and its intent," Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times newspaper.

Of the six countries identified by the state department as having used child soldiers in 2009, only Somalia and Myanmar were not granted an exemption. Myanmar receives no military aid from the United States, but the vulnerable Transitional Federal Government of Somalia receives significant assistance. In May 2009, the United States applied for exemption from an United Nations arms embargo in order to provide Somalia with assault rifle, mortar and machine gun ammunition, and rocket-propelled grenades.

This is precisely the sort of madness that we readily associated with the previous Bush Administration.  When we voted for “change we can believe in,” we were voting for getting beyond our involvement is such a horrific amalgam of absurdity and atrocity.  Yet we have both the White House and the State Department maintaining the rules of the Bush playbook, presumably to avoid any criticism of being “soft on terrorism”

The ultimate irony is that the Research Briefing section of the Web site for the Republican National Committee ran their own account of the above story;  and they ran it under the headline “Indefensible.”  This, of course, was precisely the language that Democrats rushed to use when George W. Bush was being the “decider” in such matters.  We now are half a week away from an election at which the Republicans are doing all they can to give Obama a beating that will be impossible to ignore or rationalize.  Was it in any way “defensible” for the Administration to give the Republicans yet another stick to use in the beating?

Memory Engineering

It is an Orwellian world in which one must go to great, and potentially hazardous lengths, to debate the semantics of a noun like "history;"  but this seems to be the world of Ukraine, at least according to Timothy Snyder's post to NYRBlog on the Web site for The New York Review of Books.  The post was ostensibly about the arrest of Ruslan Zabiliyi, a young historian serving as director of a museum in Lviv (known as Lwów in Polish and Lemberg in German).  The museum was used by the Soviets as a prison during the Second World War and was "reconstituted" as a museum concerned with the occupation of Ukraine by both the Nazis and the Soviets.  When Viktor Yanukovych (Yanukhovych) became President, his Security Service (SB) shut down the museum and had Zabiliyi arrested.  The party that had successfully opposed Yanukovych in previous elections saw Ukraine as a future member of the European Community, while Yanukovych was more interested in better relations with Russia.  Such relations would not be furthered by exhibitions about the atrocities of Stalinism and Ukrainian resistance.  Snyder summarized the reaction of the new administration to the museum as follows:

On September 13 and 14, SB agents searched the offices of the museum’s research staff, confiscating two laptops containing archival documents for a planned exhibition on Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule; authority over the museum has been transferred to the Institute of National Memory, which is now directed by a communist.

It is the very idea of an "Institute of National Memory" that resonates so well with the vision of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  History has been denied the status of an innocuous academic discipline, whose practitioners can participate in the free exchange and discussion of papers and books.  These documents are so arcane that they conform nicely to Anna Russell's characterization of the work of a "great expert, primarily for the edification of other great experts."  In Ukraine, however, such practitioners are no longer an "effete elite;"  they are a threat to public consciousness in general and the concept of a "national memory" in particular.

I am reminded of what happened when HBO bankrolled Robert Wuhl to take standup comedy into a university classroom.  The result was a pair of lectures delivered to history majors based on the premise that the study of American history is the study of "the stories that made up America... and the stories that America simply made up."  This is not as outrageous as it sounds.  Because there cannot be history without interpretation, history is less a matter of trying to "reproduce" the past (which must always be a futile goal) and more one of "imitating" it.  This is Aristotle's sense of the word "imitation," with the implication the memory may be served by a rendering that is not a clinically perfect reproduction;  and, if there is not a story at our disposal that facilitates our understanding of some episode from our past, then there is nothing wrong with making up a story to serve that purpose.

Wuhl, however, was talking about "National Memory" as a process of fabrication, often involving Pooh-Bah's (as in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado) "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."  The Institute of National Memory, on the other hand, seems more occupied with maintaining memory through a process of judicious erasure, rather than the addition of such corroborative detail.  In the antinomic world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, not only is slavery freedom but also forgetting is memory.  Philosophically, Orwell wanted to warn us how easily his fictitious world could become our own;  and, when one considers the extent to which our prevailing consciousness industry gains strength through distraction, it is well to remember that such distraction well serves goals of "imposed forgetting."  We do not need to worry about whether we are headed for our own Institute of National Memory, because we have become a culture that no longer needs such institutionalized enforcement!

Shared CHUTZPAH over Nuclear Proliferation

Following up on my argument that you can no longer find an adequate American source of hard news, I just found a story on Al Jazeera English, which, while based entirely on wire sources, does not appear to have surfaced anywhere else.  One does not have to read far to discover why the usual mainstream American sources were not interested in distributing the content:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, has rejected an Arab-proposed resolution calling on Israel to join a global anti-atomic arms treaty.

The general assembly of the 151-member IAEA blocked the resolution at its meeting in Vienna on Friday. Fifty-one member states voted against the resolution while 46 voted in favour and 23 abstained.

Israel had warned the UN nuclear watchdog that an Arab-led push to target the Jewish state in a resolution could deal a "fatal blow" to future co-operation on boosting Middle East security.

"Adopting this resolution will be a fatal blow to any hope for future co-operative efforts towards better regional security in the Middle East," Ehud Azoulay, Israel's IAEA envoy said, shortly before the vote.

Indeed, when you read a bit further, you discover that there is an American dog in this hunt:

The United States had urged Arab states to withdraw the non-binding resolution, saying it could derail broader efforts to ban such arms in the Middle East and also send a negative signal to the relaunched Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

So here we are:  The United States can be as vocal and activist as it chooses when it comes to an Arab-based resolution on nuclear nonproliferation, but it will hold its diplomatic tongue when it comes to Israel building settlements and talking about redefining borders to accommodate those settlements.  This is beyond those "petty thoughts" that Friedrich Nietzsche declared to be worse than "evil deeds."  This is the raw and unadulterated chutzpah of intimidation, which, like many acts of chutzpah succeeds in spite of (or because of?) its very speciousness.  That a questionable position assumed jointly by Israel and the United States would be enough to defeat such a critical vote by such a reputable world body is more than adequate grounds for Israel and United State to share this week's Chutzpah of the Week award.

Hard News Loses Again

The latest news from Associated Press about a management shakeup at CNN offers little hope for those of us still trying to recover the service that Headline News used to bring when it was first launched:

Struggling CNN has fired Jon Klein, the head of its U.S. network.

CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton said Friday that Klein is being replaced by Ken Jautz, who currently runs HLN. The former Headline News Network has been a success in recent years with a switch to an opinionated prime-time lineup.

In other words Jautz is being rewarded for what he did to Headline News (which amounts to wiping out all trace of the you-give-us-twenty-minutes-we'll-give-you-the-world motto).  As far as I can tell, these days there are only two sources of "straight" news on a regular basis, neither of which is American.  There is the BBC World Service, which we can only get in occasional doses through the good graces of Public Television;  and, since the BBC is having major budget problems, it is unclear how long that option will remain.  Then there is Al Jazeera English, which continues to work its way up as a BBC competitor;  but, as far as I can tell, no American television delivery company, cable or satellite, is willing to touch that network.  So the only real option is to watch their live feed on computer.  I suppose this means that, in a market-driven culture, information is inevitably displaced by propaganda.

Up From Insignificance?

I'm not sure whether I am ready to recant the claim I made earlier this month:

Lady Gaga has never been anything more than an artifact of the whole viral promotion process.

However, even if she is such an artifact, I now feel far more favorably inclined towards her than I do towards Ashley Alexandra Dupré, with whom I compared her in my "Virus and Insignificance" piece. The actions she has taken in the name of gay rights indicate that she values at least one thing as much as selling records; and, for all I know, gay rights is the higher value being served by the artifact she created, recognizing that the artifact will communicate with a more convincing voice than whatever her "real" persona may express.

At the very least she has caught the attention of John Nichols, who maintains a blog, The Beat, on the Web site of The Nation. Nichols' latest post this morning saw fit to document the words from her speech to a rally in Portland, Maine:

Should the military be allowed to treat Constitutional rights like a cafeteria? In the military, is it acceptable to be a cafeteria American? What I mean to say is, should soldiers and the government be able to pick and choose what we are fighting for in the Constitution or who we are fighting for? I wasn't aware of this ambiguity in our Constitution. I thought the Constitution was ultimate. I thought equality was non-negotiable.

The rally concerns the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," an initiative being pursued by Senate Democratic leaders. The problem, of course, is that even the possibility of debate is likely to be blocked by a Republican filibuster; and Arizona Senator John McCain has already promised to lead that filibuster move. This is precisely the sort of pettiness that I discussed yesterday (with a little help from Friedrich Nietzsche) for its capacity to cripple the very functioning of government. Lady Gaga took her fight to Portland because any hope of getting governance back on track will require Republican support. As Nichols observed, Maine has two senators who could make a significant difference:

The two key Republican votes are those of Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both moderates who know the law has been abused and that it has driven good soldiers out of the military.

The voters of the state of Maine may thus well be in a position to determine whether their elected representatives will choose the productive functioning of legislative debate over petty adherence to partisan ideology (assume, that is, that both of these senators pay more attention to their constituents than to the "enforcers" of Republican Party leadership). If Lady Gaga has motivated those voters to take a stand and let that stand be known to both of their senators, then any cavil I may have about the source of that motivation being a calculated artifact may have less significance than the artifact itself.

Striking a Blow against Pettiness?

It would be a pleasant irony if Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity," scheduled for October 30 in Washington, turned out to be irrelevant, because the country had already awakened to that need to "restore sanity" before the gathering took place. As a matter of fact, it would be a double irony, turning against Reuters for dismissing the event as an "apparent spoof" by affirming the legitimacy of its goal. Then, just because good things come in threes, there would also be the irony that this recognition of the need for sanity should be a product of the weekend recklessness of the latest darling of the Tea Party, Christine O’Donnell. Perhaps the greatest endorsement that sanity can receive is a vivid demonstration of the alternative, and last night's Financial Times report from Washington by Tom Braithwaite provided a vivid analysis of both O'Donnell's recklessness and its consequences.

What adds to the O'Donnell irony is the extent to which she has achieved the very thing that Barack Obama has been trying to do since he took the Oath of Office, establishing an agreement between Democrats and Republicans based on shared centrist perspectives. Thus we had Colin Powell, the closest thing to a paragon of "Executive sanity" during the faith-based madness of the Bush Administration, telling Meet the Press that he would not rule out endorsing Obama for a second term. Then we had Michael Barbaro's report in yesterday's New York Times, which opened with the following paragraphs:

In an election year when anger and mistrust have upended races across the country, toppling moderates and elevating white-hot partisans, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is trying to pull politics back to the middle, injecting himself into marquee contests and helping candidates fend off the Tea Party.

New York’s billionaire mayor, whose flurry of activity is stirring a new round of speculation about his presidential ambitions, is supporting Republicans, Democrats and independents who he says are not bound by rigid ideology and are capable of compromise, qualities he says he fears have become alarmingly rare in American politics.

Ultimately, however, everything comes down to what I have taken to be Stewart's position as a satirist, which is that "anything that disrupts government from doing the people's business should be open to attack." The Tea Party basically held a magnifying glass to tactics that can be traced back to Newt Gingrich, that flourished under Karl Rove, and have been staunchly maintained by Republican ideologues in both Houses of Congress. The common theme of those tactics is one of disruption through the distractions of pettiness. Put another way, if you can get enough people to work up enough sweat about the small stuff, you can get them to forget about the really big stuff and turn that amnesia to your political (and personal) gain.

Curiously, that same section from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "On the Pitying," which I cited yesterday for taking on the evils of economic aid, also attacks the underlying nature of pettiness:

Worst of all, however, are petty thoughts. Verily, even evil deeds are better than petty thoughts.

…

An evil deed is like a boil: it itches and irritates and breaks open—it speaks honestly. "Behold, I am disease"—thus speaks the evil deed; that is its honesty.

But a petty thought is like a fungus: it creeps and stoops and does not want to be anywhere—until the whole body is rotten and withered with little fungi.

When it comes to the current crippling stagnation of the workings of our government and the agents responsible for that stagnation, who could ask for a better metaphor than a skin fungus (particularly during football season)?