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?

Wotan's Will, Alberich's Market

I try to wait until my colleague, Cindy Warner, weighs in on San Francisco Opera performances as SF Opera Examiner; but this afternoon's performance of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre sent me down some philosophical paths. I figure that, as long as I keep to those paths, there should be little risk of my stepping on any of Cindy's toes. Most important was that I quickly lost count of the number of times the word "will" came from Wotan's lips; and, in a close second place, I found that this was the first time I was thinking about all four operas in Der Ring des Nibelungen in terms of a fundamental opposition between Wotan and Alberich. I believe that these are two pieces of a common puzzle, at which I shall make some attempts at assembly.

Let us begin with that concept of will. We knew that Wagner had a fair amount of interest in philosophy; and, while I suspect that he was a bit of a cherry-picker in the way he read philosophy, we may arrive at a better understanding of the dramatic side of his operas through some of those cherries. In this case the source most likely to be of interest is Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. As contemporary readers we might consider whether or not this book was sowing the seeds of what would later be called "constructed reality," either subjectively or socially. However, we might also have the inclination (which Wagner may have shared) to consider the opening words of The Gospel According to John as a reflection on creation by will:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

In other words will had its origins in the godhead and only subsequently descended to mankind, perhaps as a result of eating from the "tree of knowledge of good and evil." Thus, will has a place in Wagner's pantheon; and much of the drama has to do with the fact that the exercise of will is not restricted to Wotan. Both Fricka and Brünnhilde exercise will, and Wotan's will does not always dominate.

What may be more interesting, however, is that, in Wagner's narrative, will resides only in the pantheon. In particular Wotan's primary opponent Alberich is never driven by will. His whole obsession with the gold-to-become-Ring is "market-driven;" and all of his actions are driven by marketplace thinking and the ambition to dominate all markets. Thus, if, as Wotan claims, the Ring has the power to bring down all residents of Valhalla, it is because market-driven thinking has no need for divine will and can essentially "eliminate gods from the equation."

Go back to Rheingold. Wotan's will has no power over Alberich. In order to get the Ring, Wotan has to resort to trickery and theft (not to mention probably violating the principles of contractual agreement etched into his staff). This is the beginning of a slippery slope. Wotan is already losing his right to godhead (and the divine exercise of will) before the entry into Valhalla that concludes Rheingold. By the beginning of Walküre, the Ring is being hoarded by Fafner; and Wotan is trying to recover it. This involves a "cunning plan" for the procreation of a "hero" through the incestuous union of his Volsung children.

Director Francesca Zambello may have come up with an interesting way to suggest that this is the next phase of the slippery slope. Siegmund and Sieglinde begin their duet under a full moon. Moonlit night gives way to dawn, but not before the sky displays a churning red color that looks more like fire seen from a distance. This led me to consider that the first romantic embrace of Siegmund and Sieglinde provided the spark that began the fire that would eventually consume all of Valhalla at the end of Götterdämmerung. (I suggested to my wife that this was the longest "Hail Mary" forward pass in the entire musical repertoire!) To be overly reductive, all catastrophe is motivated by the union of Siegmund and Sieglinde; and that union is motivated by the displacement of will by market-based thinking and the chain of thefts resulting from that displacement.

There is no sign that Karl Marx ever showed any interest in Wagner; but, from this particular point of view, it is amusing to consider how he might have reacted to the Ring cycle!

Preventive Maintenance

It is hard to read the opening remarks of Paul Volker's recent address to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, whose transcript appears in the latest issue of The New York Review, without feeling that "I told you so" is embedded somewhere in the subtext. However, when we consider the current economic crisis in a broader view that includes other disasters, such as the fall of Enron, we realize that, from a philosophical point of view, we face an opposition of two fundamental strategies. One of the prevailing themes in both the book and documentary versions of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is that the only factor of importance was the bottom line on the balance sheet. If the numbers were good, nothing else mattered, which is basically a variation on the mantra, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." As a management strategy this directly opposes the more conservative view that all systems require preventive monitoring and maintenance, and the amount of maintenance required increases in direct proportion to the complexity of the system. This is why cars are sold with a booklet providing a maintenance schedule: You do not want to be in the position of worrying about how to fix it after the engine has choked up due to the absence of oil.

In the opening paragraph of Volker's address, he seems less distressed about how overt the warning signs of a downturn were than he was about "so little willingness or capacity to do much about it." Both of those nouns are important; and I realize that they seem to have provided me with an I-told-you-so moment of my own. Last November when I was on a run of posts dealing with the impact of the propagandizing efforts of the "consciousness industry" through mainstream media, I summarized my own assessment of the danger as follows:

Ultimately, the consciousness industry succeeds through undermining not only our capacity for reflection but also our will to reflect at all.

The same nouns are there, just in the opposite order; and it may be that the erosion of capacity is corollary to the erosion of will. Without will there is no motivation to reflect, particularly if one is trying to reflect on a system as complex as the financial mechanisms that had been cooked up by the "smartest guys" at Enron or their successors' efforts to turn massive amounts of debt into tradable commodities.

One of the oldest adages in politics is that people get the government they deserve. To the extent that government is also sustained by both willingness and capacity to run and maintain the system, this seems to be a principle that generalizes. People get the economic system they deserve; and, while we are at it, another generalization is probably that people get the health care system they deserve, too. Can we cram all of those principles into one teabag?

The Consciousness Industry Flexes its Muscles

Two weeks ago, when we were still ramping up to any Congressional vote over health care reform, I wrote the following remark about the impact of the "consciousness industry" on any likely outcome:

Thus, the future of health care will rest not on either the underlying principles of "how doctors think" or even religious convictions of the faithful over the difference between right and wrong but on the power of the "consciousness industry" to bias prevailing opinions based on both reason and faith. If these biases continue to hold sway, then both doctors and their patients will be the losers in any effort towards health care reform.

If this weekend's vote in the House of Representatives, along with the debate leading up to that vote and the post-vote comments from key figures in the Senate, was not enough to establish the impact of that consciousness industry, then we have only to see how Fox demonstrated its mastery of consciousness industry methods on Sunday. For a change the arena was not the usual forum of what Calvin Trillin once called the "Sabbath Day Gasbags." No, if you are going to go for the jugular of electorate consciousness, you have to hit them where things matter the most on Sunday. That is neither the talk show circuit nor the Church; rather, it is the most sacred of American Sunday traditions, professional football.

In this case the target of Fox' consciousness manipulation was not health care but the promotion of our ongoing military adventurism (presumably in defense of our right to manipulate other people's consciousness). Ostensibly as a gesture in honor of Veterans Day, Fox NFL Sunday was broadcast from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Having received my Bachelor of Science degree from a school without a football team, I have little interest in football as either an athletic or a media event; but I have long been fascinated by the many strategies that Fox invokes in the interest of mucking with people's minds. So I read Neil Genzlinger's account of Fox NFL Sunday for this morning's edition of The New York Times with great interest.

True to his responsibility as a reporter, Genzlinger concentrated on giving an account of his personal experience in front of his television:

The broadcast was full of mutual back scratching, both during the show and in promotional spots during the commercial breaks: Fox and the National Football League trying to establish themselves as the country’s most fervid supporters and thankers of the troops, the military steering the Fox crew to feature segments without an ounce of blood or moral ambiguity.

Each member of the Fox on-air crew — Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson, Jay Glazer and Curt Menefee (who was excellent as the frontman) — wore a uniform commemorating a different branch of the service. Early on there was a segment spotlighting N.F.L. players and employees who have served in the military and relatives of current players and coaches who are serving now.

A military unit led into a commercial break with a marching chant promoting the show and its personalities. (“I wanna hear the news by Jay; his latest scoopage makes my day.”) A promotional spot in which the N.F.L. honored the troops wrapped both football and military images around the words “teamwork, courage, leadership.” In a feature we saw American soldiers advising a village on agriculture, trying to encourage it to be self-sustaining and, presumably, to stay out of the opium business.

And then the lines got even blurrier. In another feature Mr. Bradshaw tried to use a robotic device to pick up a football. Presumably in real life it’s used to poke potential bombs and such. A group of soldiers joined the Fox men on an impromptu field to demonstrate the blitz — the football one, not the military one.

At no time, though, was the show more eerie than when, in the second hour, it turned its attention to Pat Tillman, the N.F.L player who left football to enlist and was killed in Afghanistan in a 2004 friendly fire incident that is still reverberating.

Mr. Menefee introduced the Tillman segment without mentioning how he died, and then the camera shifted to a festive scene inside the Pat Tillman Memorial U.S.O. on the base. Soldiers extolled the computers, phones and other nifty communication gear in the lounge, named for a man whose death was shrouded in miscommunication and cover-up.

Having laid out his evidence, Genzlinger could then confront us with his conclusion:

For two hours the Fox show — though it acknowledged several times that soldiers, not football players, were the real heroes — gave us the illusion that the war and the game were the same. Maybe Tommie Harris of the Chicago Bears had been watching it just before heading onto the field for his 1 o’clock match against Arizona and became confused about which world he’s living in. Within the first 10 minutes he was ejected from the contest for slugging an opposing player.

Those last sentences sealed the deal for me, providing a simple example of the consequences that arise from mistaking illusion for reality.

"Illusion" is the operative word in the way in which Fox runs its consciousness industry. It is one thing to offer dramatic fictions, for which we are willing to suspend disbelief while the story is told, only to return to the "real world" when that story has concluded. It is quite another thing to deliberately engage devices that distort the cognitive apparatus that turns sensation into perception. That is the apparatus responsible for our "sense of reality;" and illusions arise when that apparatus is induced to go out of whack. Ironically, there are times when such illusions may actually have survival value; but we are blessed with a cognitive capacity that can learn that first impressions can be deceiving. We thus have the ability to reflect on our first impressions and sort out illusion from reality.

Ultimately, the consciousness industry succeeds through undermining not only our capacity for reflection but also our will to reflect at all. With any interference from reflection safely out of the way, the industry can shape our opinions and actions to satisfy whatever contract it has made with a particular customer. If that customer is the Pentagon, then one can see why it might be useful to identify war with professional football. If the customer is the health care industry (as opposed to those trying their best to practice health care), then the prevailing illusion seems to be a profit-based capitalism has a higher priority than a healthy life for every American citizen. The playing field may change, but the game will remain the same.

Forgetting the "Inter" in "Internet"

Apparently, the media have decided to celebrate September 2 as the 40th anniversary of the Internet. This seems to be because September 2, 1969 was the date on which two computers exchanged data in the first test under the ARPANET project. This took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and I find it interesting in the context of our general cultural ignorance of history that there is no mention of this date in the Wikipedia entry for ARPANET. The first specific date documented by the wisdom of the Wikipedia crowd is October 29, 1969 in the caption of a photograph taken from the UCLA "IMP [Interface Message Processor] Log" for that date. The portion of the log reproduced describes, as the caption says, "setting up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI [Stanford Research Institute] SDS 940 Host computer." No mention is made in either the image itself or its caption of the fact, cited in an Associated Press release this morning, that "the network crashes after the first two letters of the word 'logon.'"

Since I have now reached an age where I think about my own birthday as little as possible, I am not particularly interested in how either our pioneers or their acolytes decide to peg down a specific date of origin. What does annoy me, however, is the overall Associated Press story, since it was released under the title "Key milestones in the development of Internet." More important than whether history began with the connection of two computers within the proximity of the same university campus or with a connection across California from Los Angeles to Menlo Park is the origin of the actual Internet concept. This is captured in the Associate Press chronology as follows:

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true Internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on Jan. 1, 1983.

What is missing from the chronology is any mention of how those multiple networks arose in the first place. Once the ARPANET concept had been proven, it was only a matter of time before similar networks (without ties to the Department of Defense, which had sponsored the ARPANET project) emerged and proliferated. Wikipedia lists several of the key emergents, including the British JANET and American public access services, such as CompuServe. Most important, however, was the emergence of Usenet, which provided Unix developers with discussion groups through which technical problems could be addressed and resolved without face-to-face meetings. Usenet was supported by UUCPnet, a network of Unix-based hosts.

The value of computer-based discussion groups caught on quickly; and it became readily apparent that many of the discussions would benefit from the participation of those on other networks. Thus, a major shot in the arm for the promotion of TCP emerged with the establishment of gateway processors through which users on all those other networks could both enter Usenet discussions and exchange electronic mail with the discussants in more private settings. Mail exchange was particularly tricky. Basically, you had to send your mail to the right gateway with a destination that involved your formatting the address of the receiver in a form which that gateway could understand. Many of us heavily involved with Usenet kept a copy of a page from the Communications of the ACM with a chart that provided all of the gateway addresses and the formats they required. Getting to a UUCP user was particularly tricky, since you had to define a path from the gateway to that user's actual host that might run through several computers.

The most important contribution of the Internet as we now know it, which is never mentioned in the Associated Press chronology, is that it simplified this mess. From a user's point of view, the Internet became a reality on the day when we could all throw away that Communications of the ACM chart and reach everyone through the format of an address consisting of a user identification followed by @ followed by a domain-based host. Perhaps the Associated Press chose to ignore this event because it was too complicated to explain. History is like that; and we have become too lazy to have the will to negotiate such complexities, which is probably why we have dispensed with any account of history except those that are over-trivialized by sources like the Associated Press!

Transcending the Trivial

Were it not for cable television (particularly the HBO offering of Generation Kill but with honorable mentions to Showtime for another round of Weeds and AMC for Mad Men), it would be easy to write off this summer as one triviality after another, not only where the paucity of "live" performance is concerned but also in the paucity of texts worthy of that activity that may legitimately be called "reading." Perhaps this is precisely the point that Nicholas Carr was trying to make in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," not to mention Andrew Keen's thesis that the Internet (and, in the subtitle of the paperback edition of his book, The Cult of the Amateur, a whole lot more) is "killing our culture." However, I suspect that what Keen's version of amateurism has in common with Carr's critique of "bite-sized content" is the extent to which Gresham's Law may be as applicable to content (whether in the form of a text we read or a performance we attend) as it is to currency: the "artificial" (paper fiat money in Gresham's case) drives out "specie" (taken either literally or metaphorically).

In this bleak time I was thus happy to see that the San Francisco Chronicle chose to give pride of place (even if most of the space was occupied by a photograph) on the first page of their "Books" section (which, unfortunately, is now "embedded" within the "Insight" section, as good a demonstration of "artificiality" as you are likely to find) to How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of recent essays by Daniel Mendelsohn. Regular readers of this blog know that I am already familiar with Mendelsohn's writing, particularly where it involves opera and music. What might not be evident is that I have been drawn to Mendelsohn by his canny perceptions that always seem to give equal attention to questions of text and questions of performance, those two "fronts" currently being so brutally assailed by trivialities. Reviewer Martin Rubin hit on what appeals to me most, even if he saved his observation for his concluding remarks:

Unlike so many critics whose writing seems designed to draw attention to themselves and the impressiveness of their mental processes and theoretical underpinnings, Mendelsohn is rightly content to let his [scholarly] methodology speak for itself.

Rubin explains that Mendelsohn's title comes from a stage direction in Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, whose overall plot line can well be read as a reflection on the intimate relationship between beauty and fragility. However, Rubin supports his own concluding remarks by citing an extended passage in which Mendelsohn offers his reason for choosing the title:

I suppose that one reason that this haunting line struck me with such force when I first came across it is that it acknowledges, with perfect simplicity, the inevitable entwining of beauty and tragedy that is the hallmark of the Greek theater, and is a consistent element in the works that have always moved me the most, from the plays of Euripides to the 'History' of Thucydides, from the light comedies of Noël Coward to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. As the Greeks knew well, it's the potential for being broken – which boils down to the knowledge that we all must die – that gives resonance and meaning to the small part of the universe that is our life.

That last sentence captures, for me, why it is that I shall always prefer "live" performance to recordings, no matter how great the quality of reproduction may be. The "live" performance always has that "potential for being broken" and thus demands far more substantiality (the fundamental quality of "specie") from the performers than is required for recording studio work. Indeed, that potential also says a lot about texts that, were it not for Mendelsohn's intervention, I might well have been content to dismiss as trivial, the most recent example being the score and libretto for Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

However, this sentence also captures the prevailing malady that has made this summer so disconcerting. Critical thinking should not be reduced to rooting out trivialities and calling attention to what makes them trivial. Ultimately, such thinking is about that quest for, in Mendelsohn's words, "resonance and meaning;" and, if this summer has given cause for regret, then that regret concerns the extent to which, as a culture (perhaps the very culture that both Keen and Carr have put so much effort into analyzing) we seem to have given up on the quest altogether. Returning to my analysis of how Vladimir Putin may currently be viewing the United States, it may well be our national resignation to giving up such a question that indicates that our fruit has gone rotten.

Music for an Era?

Sometimes a piece of music becomes representative of a particular era. Beethoven's ninth symphony probably acquired an iconic status during the nineteenth century, due less to Beethoven's (many) merits than to the raising of public consciousness of Beethoven by Franz Liszt (with some assistance from Richard Wagner) within the context of what Isaiah Berlin called "the apotheosis of the Romantic Will." To some extent Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" is assuming a similar role for the twentieth century, having drawn upon the harrowing texts of Wilfred Owen, written from the trenches of the First World War and invoked to rededicate cathedrals destroyed in both England and Germany during the Second World War. We have not yet completed the first decade if the twenty-first century; and I find myself wondering whether or not Appomattox will play a similar role in representing its Zeitgeist. Ultimately, the opera is less about the conclusion of the Civil War than it is about the problem of discrimination that has yet to be resolved in relations between the races in the United States and looms with equal significance in just about every other part of the world. It is also interesting to note that while Beethoven's symphony stood as a celebration of the best of humanity, particularly as seen through the post-Enlightenment lenses of Romanticism, Philip Glass has followed Benjamin Britten's selection of the requiem structure as a framing of the time that Berlin would later call "the most terrible century in Western history." Through its flash-forwards Appomattox reminds us that we should mourn not only the blood shed during the Civil War but also the extent to which, in spite of Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, that blood was shed in vain and will continue to be shed, both literally in continuing acts of racial violence and figuratively in the growth of more insidious discriminatory practices.

Consequences in China

Perhaps the Chinese finally are beginning to recognize that consequences matter. While I have not been particularly optimistic about the progress that China has been making in dealing with the problems of hazardous foods and manufactured goods, they at least have come around to recognizing that their public face cannot hide behind veils of denial. It may be possible that the Olympic Committee played a role in this recognition with their threat of cancelling certain events if the air quality was not improved. This brings us to today's dispatch from Beijing by Jamil Anderlini reporting for the Financial Times. It turns out that the Chinese are finally coming around to recognize that the Three Gorges Dam, one of the greatest efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, may, itself, be an environmental disaster:

China’s Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact.

The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world’s largest dam are coming true.

Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

In all fairness Mr. Anderlini then suggests that there may be a political side to this admission of the problem:

The unusual criticism of such a symbolic project could be politically motivated in the lead-up to the 17th Communist Party Congress, a five-yearly event in which senior officials jockey for power before the top ranks of the party are decided.

In his published remarks, Mr Wang quoted Premier Wen telling China’s cabinet recently that “the environmental cost is the most pressing of the serious problems facing the Three Gorges project.”

The dam was the brainchild of Mao Zedong but construction began under the government of former President Jiang Zemin, who still exercises residual influence in the current government even three years after he relinquished his last official post.

Former Premier Li Peng, the man widely believed to be responsible for sending in troops to quell the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement, is the official most closely associated with the Three Gorges project.

In other words, whether or not, as is the case with addiction, recognition is the first step to rehabilitation, it can also be the first step to cleaning up a political house. This would be unfortunate, because it would then distract attention from the environmental impact of the dam, which is a serious problem requiring serious attention. Furthermore, since the dam itself was supposed to address the problem of air pollution, this means that the threat of the Olympic Committee still hangs over China's head, with the possibility of resolution more remote than had previously been anticipated.

Now I suppose there are plenty of idealists who would argue that the impact of this problem has now escalated to a global level and should be addressed by (at least) the industrialized nations, acting in concert under the leadership of the United Nations. However, given that the President of the United States chose to ignore a discussion on the environment that took place at the beginning of this week, we would probably be more likely to bet against the idealists. Furthermore, it would probably be unfair to lay all of the blame on our President. Ours is a country of self-determination; and we want to keep it that way. To a great extent China is trying to deal with its problems in that same spirit of self-determination. At least they have now come to a point where they can admit that this approach is not working, but it remains to be seen how they will seek out to design and implement more effective solutions.

A "Perfect Storm" of Hazards from China?

The day before China's Health Minister made the embarrassing statement that being conscientious about the safety of foods and manufactured products could, itself, be a "sickness," Victoria Ho issued a report on CNET News.com about a survey of malware conducted by the antivirus company Sophos. Here is the basic substance of her report:

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China--including Hong Kong--hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August. The U.S. ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of sites that contain malicious code.

The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August.

The company warned that simply staying clear of sites hosted in the top three countries of China, the U.S. and Russia is not an effective method of avoiding malware.

"Hackers are hijacking Web sites around the world to make them point to malware on sites based in China, the U.S. and Russia," Carole Theriault, Sophos senior security consultant, said in a statement.

Sophos also warned about a sharp rise in spam pointing people to these infected sites. Malicious senders, in an attempt to bypass attachment virus scanners, are using messages that direct people to Web sites with malicious code. Computers get infected when people click on the links in the e-mail message.

"Most malware writers...are using spam and the Web to infect users," Theriault said. "Criminals are hard at work trying to slip past filters at the corporate gateway."

Today we have a Reuters report, filed from Beijing, which indicates that these physical and virtual dangers may be combining into a sort of "virtual storm" of hazards within the scene provided by the annual Moon Festival, celebrated by the consumption of the special sweet moon-cake pastries. In the physical world there are the findings of the food safety bureau in Guangdong to the effect that, in the words of the Reuters story, "only 85 percent of 80 batches of mooncake filling tested met quality standards." In this context the conclusion of the report inspired as little confidence as the recent official statement from the Health Minister. Here is more of today's Reuters text:

Despite finding excessive traces of intestinal bacteria, preservatives and high acidity levels, the authority said consumers could "rest assured" -- 98.1 percent of the finished product on supermarket shelves met standards.

However, almost as an addition of insult to injury, the "contamination" of the Festival itself has also taken over the virtual world:

China has warned Internet users to be wary of downloading virus-infected mooncake greeting cards ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival after a wave of Internet worms hit hard-drives last year.

Is this just one of those coincidences that usually account for actual perfect-storm situations; or is it the latest set of symptoms of a more systemic malady? Having tried to situate this story in a context-setting "scene," that scene should also account for today's China Daily report (whose results are available through Al Jazeera English) of the widening income gap in China. In this report the gap being examined is between rural and urban Chinese. However, it is likely that the gap is further enhanced by those rural Chinese who are so financially strapped that the succumb to the lure of urban prosperity, only to find that they have traded one state of poverty for another (which may be even greater). As we begin the aggregate all of these symptoms and acknowledge the magnitude of the collection (not to mention its unpleasant consequences), that recent rant against capitalism from Osama bin Laden should induce a chilling resonance.

However, this should not be taken as a call for either rant or revolution. After all, the last attempt to revolt against capitalism now as a sort of tired been-there-done-that feel to it, probably because all that came out of it was a replacement of the Ruling Classes of capitalists with the Ruling Classes of opportunistic ideologues. Rather, we should recognize that we are in a situation that demands what I have called "crisis-driven strategic planning." This means that we need not only to invoke what I have cited as the Neustadt-May fundamental questions of crisis management but also but also to think critically about the very nature of rationality that we apply to addressing those questions. This is no easy matter; and I have previously invoked Andy Grove's observation that it requires a lot of "intellectual ergs" (observing also that such a commitment requires a matching commitment of personal will). To return to the nautical metaphor, we are like Odysseus, in that we cannot avoid a course that leads us to both the Scylla of capitalism and the Charybdis of self-serving ideology; so we have no choice but to negotiate a path that avoids both hazards. To opt out of the choice is to elect to succumb to at least one of the hazards (if not both of them).

It's the Poverty, Stupid!

The good news about the Associated Press report of the study by the Trust for America's Health, which ranks Mississippi as "the fattest in the nation," is that it goes beyond (in its own words) "making Mississippi the butt of late-night talk show jokes" by recognizing that this is not so much a story about obesity, or even the impact of obesity on public health, as it is about poverty. Here are the key paragraphs from the report:

Poverty and obesity often go hand in hand, doctors say, because poor families stretch their budgets by buying cheaper, processed foods that have higher fat content and lower nutritional value.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a self-described "recovering foodaholic" who lost 110 pounds several years ago explained during a Southern Governors' Association meeting in Biloxi last weekend that there are historical reasons poor people often fry their foods: It's an inexpensive way to increase the calories and feed a family.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the nation, and the Delta is the poorest region of Mississippi.

That Delta region, of course, shared with New Orleans the dubious honor of being one of Katrina's prime targets. Thus, all the that cautionary prose by Walter Mosley that I cited yesterday applies as much to the Delta (if not the rest of Mississippi) as it does to New Orleans. Couple these observations with President Bush's announcement last month that he would veto legislation to renew a program that provides health coverage to poor children, and we see that the Delta is as much a "front line" in the war against the poor as is that fortress of unbridled capitalism, the new floor of Saks devoted entirely to designer shoes. When the neglect of the impoverished by public health policy is at stake, it is hard to ignore what I have previously called "the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge." Scrooge, of course, ultimately changed his ways, but only through the narrative machinations of his creator, Charles Dickens. The fate of the population of Mississippi rests in the hands of agents acting of their own free will, rather than the decisions of some skilled author; and, if there really is a war against the poor, then someone should be asking those agents which side they are taking in current and future battles.

Who Pays?: An Incomplete Story

Yesterday's Associated Press report, released under the headline, "Medicare won't pay for hospital mistakes," on Yahoo! News, raises more questions than it answers. From a chronological point of view, the beginning of the story was postponed until the end of the report:

Last year, Mark McClellan, then director of the Medicare and Medicare programs, said the government could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year if the Medicare program stopped paying for medical errors such as operations on the wrong body part or mismatched blood transfusions.

About the only thing wrong with this proposition is that no one had thought of it (or had the intestinal fortitude to implement it) sooner. After all, negligence in matters of fiscal accountability is probably one of the major reasons why health care is in the mess it is now in. The result is a new rule that identifies several hospital procedures that will no longer be eligible for Medicare payments:

The rule identifies eight conditions — including three serious types of preventable incidents sometimes called "never events" — that Medicare no longer will pay for.

Those conditions are: objects left in a patient during surgery; blood incompatibility; air embolism; falls; mediastinitis, which is an infection after heart surgery; urinary tract infections from using catheters; pressure ulcers, or bed sores; and vascular infections from using catheters.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it also would work to add three more conditions to the list next year.

Reading these paragraphs reminded me of Bob Newhart's old routine about those vending machines that sold flight insurance policies in most airports. The punch line was, "Buy the damned thing, if it make's you feel better; but, for God's sake, don't read the policy!" There is nothing like being told what might happen to you when your in a plane, and the same seems to be true of going to the hospital.

Nevertheless, this is still an incomplete story, since every hospital procedure has to be accounted for by the billing system. The rule recognizes this fact but not in a particularly comforting way:

Hospitals in the future will be expected to pick up the cost of additional treatment required by a preventable condition acquired in the hospital.

"The hospital cannot bill the beneficiary for any charges associated with the hospital-acquired complication," the final rules say.

This much is clear: Medicare won't pay; and "the rule" states that the patient cannot be billed. So what happens? Are those entries in the billing system logged as bad debts for tax purposes? Is the hospital truly bound by that rule, or will it find loopholes through which the patient can be billed? Or will the hospital just raise all of its rates to absorb these new expenses, meaning that, in the grand scheme of things, both Medicare and the patients will continue to pay for those errors?

From an objective point of view, we are probably talking about something that can be covered by malpractice insurance; but, as far as I have been able to determine from the news, this is just another ingredient in that whole stew that is the current health care mess. It is as if everyone recognizes how bad the system has become, yet no one has the will to clean up the mess. This is very much a time to reflect on the connotation of that phrase that Vonnegut made so famous, "So it goes."

From the Grass Roots to the House of Representatives

When Cindy Sheehan "came out of retirement" to announce that she would run against Nancy Pelosi as an independent if the Speaker did not move to impeach George Bush by July 23, I was not sure how to react. Since I live in California's Eighth Congressional District, this would affect me personally. However, this also means I know a thing or two about the cost of declaring residency in the District; and I wondered whether or not Ms. Sheehan had factored that into her plans (and that would be before worrying about financing an actual campaign). In other words I reacted as someone who appreciates passion, particularly when it involves my own strong beliefs, but also recognizes that passion has to be balanced against pragmatics. Now I actually had several reasons for not voting for Ms. Pelosi last November, but one of them was that I knew that the polls were giving her a pretty safe majority. Thus I could use my own ballot to register discontent without jeopardizing Pelosi's chances, and I still believe that this was a good thing to do. So the pragmatist in me could not help but wonder to what extent Ms. Sheehan was thinking beyond the passion of the moment to the consequences of her action.

Today, the day before the "deadline" she declared, she published an opinion piece in the "Insight" section of the San Francisco Chronicle; and it provides at least some indication of the extent of such thoughts since the made the announcement a couple of weeks ago. She began by raising the question of whether or not her announcement had prompted support:

The feedback I have been receiving since I announced that I would challenge U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, for her House seat -- unless she gives impeachment the go-ahead -- has been running about 3-to-1 positive.

Some people have offered to quit their jobs to move to California's Eighth Congressional District to help my possible campaign. People are lining up to donate and help, and I am again very grateful and touched beyond belief by the generosity and energy of my fellow Americans.

My guess is that her numbers are pretty informal. We do not even know if that 3-to-1 ratio is based on a statistically valid sample space; and while I am sure that people are "lining up to donate and help," we have no good way of assessing the extent of either their checkbooks or the amount of personal time they are willing to commit. Then, of course, there is my initial question of moving into the District in time to change the base of the electorate already there. At least Ms. Sheehan confirmed that she had given this factor of the equation some thought!

However, there is also a question of the mentality that Ms. Sheehan would be bringing behind her challenge. This is where I found a paragraph that made me a bit nervous:

I was a lifelong Democrat only because the choices were limited. The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th century, except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal income taxes, not one but two World Wars, Japanese concentration camps, and not one but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan -- all brought to us via the Democrats.

This is where I worry that the balance between passion and pragmatics has been knocked way out of kilter (or, as they probably still say in the military, "fouled up [or words to that effect] beyond all recognition"). What particularly concerns me is the way she lumped the Federal Reserve, perhaps the most important effort in regulation to stave off a repetition of the Great Depression, in with the two World Wars (the second of which had been supported by some of the most extreme opponents to the first due to the nature of the enemy) and the Japanese internment camps created out of the same irrational passions that now drive our "homeland security" policy. Pragmatism is, among other things, a matter of finding an appropriate perspective from which to assess every situation. Perspective is one of those traits that is sorely lacking in our current Executive Branch. It is more present in the Legislative Branch because, if nothing else, the new leadership has enabled more exchange of perspectives than the previous set of puppets to gave the Executive everything without question.

This brings me to my strongest fear, which is that Ms. Sheehan is no better than President Bush when it comes to making decisions. Both of them are ruled by their passions, and the fact that Ms. Sheehan's passions are closer to my own is not a determining issue. For all the unpleasant qualities that a "political animal" must have, just by the nature of the work, I would rather be represented by such an animal than by a candidate who speaks from the heart, however much I may sympathize with what her heart tells her.

How we got into the Knowledge Management Mess

This morning I realized that, while I have been all too eager to vent my position on the "knowledge management mess," I have not respected my own injunction to apply the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time strategy by asking how we got into the mess in the first place. As the comments keep coming in on Lou Paglia's CoRrElate blog in response to his most recent post on knowledge management, I think I may be able to start conjecturing about this Neustadt-May question. That conjecture is based on another of my favorite themes, which I have called the "epistemological comfort" of nouns and noun phrases.

The "bottom line" of the conjecture is that the IT concept of data (particularly as realized through database technology) has engendered a fixation with the static that has debilitated our capacities for both thinking and acting. We only seem to be able to deal with “specific states” that we can hold before us an examine. Even the “business process” is an impoverished abstraction that tries to reduce the complexities of work practices to “specific states.” (Needless to say, the idea that knowledge has anything to do with specific states, which is often a product of silly efforts to explain the distinctions between "data," "information," and "knowledge" that inevitably muck up three concepts in place of one, was shot full of holes back when Plato documented how Socrates would needle his students; and the holes are still there, probably bigger than ever!)

Effective managers know better than to try to freeze the world into a state they can examine. (This is why I have tried to follow Isaiah Berlin's lead, taking his text about Bismarck in his "Political Judgement" essay as a "blueprint" for effective management.) It may be that IT has ultimately sapped managers of the skills they once had for dealing with the flow of activities of business while they are flowing; and we can now witness the consequences of this “addiction to the static” just about every day. Unfortunately, our perceptions have become so warped that we barely recognize these consequences, which may explain one of my other favorite themes: our inability to summon the will to do anything about the messes in which we situate ourselves!

Have Nancy and Harry Fumbled the Ball?

The numbers are in from the latest poll conducted jointly by the Washington Post and ABC News, and they are not kind to the Congress. Here is the summary from Reuters:

Just 39 percent said they approve of the job Congress is doing, down from 44 percent in April. Approval of congressional Democrats dropped to 44 percent from 54 percent, according to the poll results.

Much of that drop was fueled by lower approval ratings of congressional Democrats among strong opponents of the Iraq war, independents and liberal Democrats, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

In April, Americans, by a 25-point margin, trusted the Democrats over U.S. President George W. Bush to handle the situation in Iraq. In the new poll, Democrats held their advantage but only by 16 points, the Post reported

Bush's job-approval rating stands at 35 percent, unchanged from April.

The idea that the Congress would not provide the White House with a "blank check" for financing the war in Iraq can be traced back to language that Nancy Pelosi used shortly after the current Congress began its session. At that time this seemed to indicate that both Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid were determined to honor the will of the American electorate with regard to Iraq and probably with regard to the ineffectiveness of the preceding Congress. This poll seems to indicate that the recent Congressional action on funding the Iraq War is not honoring that will and that the American electorate is only too happy to let the pollsters know about it. In other words the voting public is becoming as unhappy with the Congress as they have been with the White House. This is reinforced by further numbers:

Seventy-three percent of Americans said the country is pretty seriously on the wrong track, the newspaper said.

Overall, 61 percent said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, and nearly two-thirds said the United States is not making significant progress restoring civil order in Iraq, the Post said.

Fifty-five percent, a new high, said the number of U.S. military forces in Iraq should be decreased, but only 15 percent called for an immediate withdrawal, the report said

So much for the hope of the electorate that a new Congress might reflect their feelings! I just wonder how they will react to poor Russ Feingold, whose pessimistic assessment was not delivering a message that the American public particularly wanted to hear.

Before Repudiation there Must be Shame

Yesterday I suggested that repudiation amounts to saying “I screwed up, and I am committed to undoing the mess I made.” I then argued that it takes an act of will to repudiate and concluded that we, as a people, were too comfortable to muster such will. I realize, however, that there is another equally important element in repudiation. That paraphrase cannot be uttered (at least in a meaningful way) without a sense of shame. We find ourselves in such an enormous mess because those who put us there are so convinced of the rightness of their acts that they cannot conceive of a sense of shame about them. Of course there is nothing new about such oblivion to shame. It can be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche and was mastered by both Hitler and Stalin. Now it is in our own backyard; and those of us who were brought up to “do the right thing” really have no way of dealing with it.

The Question of Repudiation

Last Thursday Scott Ritter, never one to mince his words, posted a Truthdig report entitled, "Repudiation, Not Impeachment." This report has attracted so many comments that the bulk of them now extend to two Web pages. Unfortunately, almost all of them are about impeachment. This should be no surprise. My guess is that "repudiation" was not in the working vocabulary of most of Ritter's readers; and, in light of all those comments, it would be fair to say that he did not do a particularly good job of bringing them up to speed on the concept. Nevertheless, one reader, Mark A. Goldman, decided to take a stab at trying to figure out what Ritter was actually advocating. Here is the comment he wrote:

In once sense Scott Ritter is correct. He didn’t really say this, but I think what he meant to say, or at least would agree with, is this:

the reason that impeachment is inappropriate now is because as a people we have been complacent and neglectful to the point of now being complicit. And so to impeach Bush and Cheney would be incomplete and in this sense unjust. They would only be scape-goats. For we are all to blame for the crimes and the treason committed. For now we can see that they have actually represented us all along. If they hadn’t we would have stopped them a long time ago. Our half-hearted complaints do not obsolve us from responsibility. And so what is necessary for us to do is not to impeach but to take responsibility for our crimes. And this means to acknowledge what was done, to tell the whole truth about what has happened and what part we played in it and to demonstrate that we understand where we failed… and then to recommit ourselves to the ideals we left behind. What is needed is a complete telling of the truth so that everyone in our society understands what crimes were committed and what values were sacrificed. So, in fact, impeachment is not enough. We have lost our moral compass and our moral authority and the only way to get them back is to demonstrate to the world… to our children… and to ourselves, that we understand what has happened, we know where we went wrong, and we know what we need to do to redeem ourselves. We need to tell the truth. And we need to make amends.

http://www.gpln.com

Goldman wrote this comment yesterday morning; but it has had little effect in keeping the discussion "on message." In keeping with the strategy behind many of my own posts, I decided I had better consult my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The primary definition of "repudiation" is “Divorce (of a wife).” This makes for a great metaphor, but the second definition is more attuned to the Truthdig discussion. It, too, has two parts, one general and one specific. The general definition is “The action of repudiating someone or something; the fact of being repudiated; rejection, disownment, disavowal.” The second part is specific to legal usage: “Refusal or failure to meet with the terms of a contract; a denial or serious breach of contract.” (Note that this reflects back on the primary definition in the context of those cultures in which a marriage is “sealed by contract.")

What strikes me as most interesting about these definitions is that the agent doing the repudiating is essentially rejecting (or disowning or disavowing) some decision or action committed by the agent in the past. An agent who repudiates is essentially saying, “I screwed up, and I now disavow the decisions and actions that brought about this mess.” If we now move from denotation to connotation, then the agent is saying something else: “I screwed up, and I am committed to undoing the mess I made.” For me this cuts right to the bone of the question of what it means to repudiate, what turns the noun from the abstract concept on which Mr. Ritter has expounded to specific actions to which we commit.

Unfortunately, such commitment requires the strength of will; and, as I have proposed both in Truthdig and on this blog, we are far too comfortable to muster such will. Regular readers know that I thank Russ Feingold for prompting my thinking along those lines. He was the one who, after Congress caved into to the White House on troop funding, accused all of his colleagues, regardless of party, of placing their own political comfort above the voice of their electorate. Vonnegut also wrote about our lack of will for getting out of the messes we make. Unfortunately, a nation whose citizens who lack individual will is easy prey for a dictator who has it in ample supply. Guess what?

Averting Change by Avoiding the Right Questions

Yesterday I found myself mustering some pretty strong rhetoric about the extent to which we are losing our right to talk about change because that right is being suppressed by the ways in which mass media purport to keep us informed. Any second thoughts I may have had about being too extreme were dismissed this morning by Henry Banta's piece for Nieman Watchdog. For those unfamiliar with the Nieman Watchdog site (one of the sites listed below on my "What I Read" list), the motto posted on their header is "Questions the press should ask." Mr. Banta took this motto seriously in his examination of just how flawed media reporting has been in accounting for the current price of gas (and his analysis did not waste any time over sheer blunders, such as the one just committed by KOTV). Mr. Banta is one of those lawyers who appreciates and honors the value of clear, straightforward, and compelling language. His clarity concentrates on the extent to which media coverage of the price of gas has been obfuscating the actual "story behind the story;" and he poses specific recommendations (with strong argumentative support) of the questions that media reporters should be asking when they interview any connected with the energy business. It does not take long to read his piece; and, once you have done so, your respect for just about anything to see in a newspaper or on television about the "price at the pump" will probably be seriously eroded (if any of it is left)!

Cindy Sheehan's Example

Cindy Sheehan submitted a "letter of resignation" through yesterday's entry on her Daily Kos blog:

This is my resignation letter as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. This is not my "Checkers" moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

The above text is the conclusion of that entry. It was preceded by a rather extended text developing the argument that led her to this conclusion. In a time that has so tightly coupled the lack of reflection with the lack of will, the entire text makes for sobering reading. It deserves all that reflection that we no longer seem to be able to muster, whether through lack of will or the sheer laziness of lack of energy. One must read her remarks in light of not only Russ Feingold's criticism of the Congress for preferring "political comfort" to strength of will but also the tactics of the "media ideologues," both right and left, to turn the legislative process into grist for an entertainment mill that, as Ms. Sheehan observed in her blog, is probably best represented by American Idol. Last week I choose to pick on Keith Olbermann; but he is only a symptom of the far greater malady that has warped the democratic ideal of the "people's choice" to a point where it is barely recognizable. It is the country that grew out of that ideal that is the object of Ms. Sheehan's love in the above text; and she now seems as resigned to the death of that ideal as she has had to be to the death of her son Casey.

If Ms. Sheehan is right, then she has refuted my assertion last week that the Democrats care what she says, while Bush can ignore it by dint of his own personal morality. Actually, if I read her argument correctly, it is actually the Democrats who refuted my assertion, leaving me feeling about the same way I felt in 1968, when it was clear that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans had put up a presidential candidate for whom I could vote. This was all the more ironic, since this was the first presidential election in which I could cast a vote. So it was that, on the first opportunity I had to vote for who would be President, I gave my vote to Dick Gregory, running under the Peace and Freedom Party, because he made it clear that action in the face of an urgent situation was more important to him than "political comfort." However broad the playing field may appear right now, my guess is that the choice we shall ultimately face in November of 2008 will be equally disconcerting, if not more so.

It's Still about Will!

No matter how many YouTube clips I see, I still cannot bring myself to watch broadcasts of Countdown. I appreciate the value of Keith Olbermann's bully pulpit; but the product is just too slick (not to mention commercial-laden) for my tastes. Whether or not he is "on my side" matters less to me than the uncomfortable truth that, like most of the other plays in mainstream media, he is contributing to the culture of what I keep calling "A World Without Reflection." I found this particularly evident as I watched the full ten minutes of, as Truthdig put it, "disbelief and disgust over the Democrats’ war funding capitulation." (I watched the video on the Truthdig site.)

Fortunately, there was more reflective value in the comments submitted by Truthdig readers/viewers. I was particularly struck by one made by unregistered commenter david e:

The Democrats’ collapse illustrates the bankruptcy inherent in any opposition based on instrumental, as opposed to moral, criteria. “This isn’t working” cannot sustain a position. “This is wrong” can. Until enough Democrats embrace the latter, they will lack the strength and justification to employ the only real tool they have---to refuse any appropriation for continuation of the war.

This is well put; but it has good-news-bad-news implications. The good news is that the comment states in the most explicit language what it is that Bush has that the Democrats lack, the power to reduce everything to right and wrong (or good and evil) from the point of view of a personal moral stance. The bad news is that the Bush tactic still trumps anything the Democrats try to do, even when their efforts involve responding to the demands of their respective constituencies.

Let me try to make this a bit more specific. One way to interpret Bush's position would be to say, "I do not care what Cindy Sheehan is saying. My personal morality tells me that we are waging war against evil and must prevail, whatever the price may be." The Democrats do care what Cindy (and all of those who sympathize with her) says. They should, because their respect for that opinion got them elected. To put it in david e's terms, their morality has more to do with the "goodness" (or "sanctity") of the voice of voting Americans.

So what's the difference? Yesterday I argued that Russ Feingold seems to have assessed the situation most accurately: "There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action." The bottom line is that Bush has the will to stand behind his morality; and the Congress prefers "political comfort" to strength of will.

By the way, if there is any remaining doubt about what the strength of will can do, Sundance is currently airing the documentary Sir! No Sir! This is an excellent chronicle of the efforts to end the war in Vietnam that took place within the military. It left me with hope that a parallel effort may yet emerge.

Comfort is the Enemy of Will

Related to my recurring theme of the importance of consequences is the proposition that making the decision to think about consequences (in the manner recommended by Neustadt and May) and then acting on the results of one's thoughts are both very much matters of will, however critical the situation may be. (The most recent situation I examined in this light is the ugly state of affairs in Congolese Africa.) One does not have to get wrapped up in Schopenhauer or Nietzsche to appreciate the significance of will in the basic matters of getting on the in the world. Nevertheless, we have to ask, if will is so important in times of crisis, why is it now in such short supply?

One would not normally look to politics for an answer to this question, but Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin may at least point us in the right direction. The context is that of the "compromise" between the Congress and the White House over funding the Iraq War, better described by John Nichols' blog for The Nation as how "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid flinched in their negotiations with the Bush administration over the continuation of the Iraq occupation." Yesterday's broadcasts reports from the BBC described this as Congress finally acknowledging that it is not their business to set foreign and military policy; but, interestingly enough, this language is absent from the report on their Web site. From Feingold's point of view, it is the business of Congress to represent the people who elected them to their respective seats. In his words:

Congress should have stood strong, acknowledged the will of the American people, and insisted on a bill requiring a real change of course in Iraq.

There is the word, not quite in the center of his sentence: will. The context should galvanize us all around the political framework that was originally conceived by the Founding Fathers: "the will of the American people." So why did Congress fail to acknowledge this will; or, to play with the word at bit, why did the Congress lack the will to acknowledge the will of the American people, which had been expressed so explicitly in the last election? Feingold's answer is actually in the sentence that precedes the one just quoted:

There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action.

There we have the other word, the one that lies at the heart of the title selected for this post. Yes, will is important in a time of crisis; but it may not be engaged if the crisis, itself, is not acknowledged. The American people feel the crisis. Those who have lost family in Iraq may feel it more than others; but the media have provided the sort of coverage that practically guarantees that the rest of the nation will "feel their pain." Feingold has been bold enough to assert that the political comfort of our elected representatives trumps that pain, which means that those in pain really are not being represented.

Will they remember this the next time they have to make a choice? Most politicians tends to count on the right mix of short memories and a tendency to look at averages rather than instances. According to Nichols, MoveOn.org is already mobilizing to make sure that they do not get away with that tactic, at least where this issue is concerned. This brings us to Nichols' punch line? How many members of Congress (and which ones in particular) have the will to recognize crisis at the sacrifice of their own "political comfort?" Here is how Nichols wrapped up his own assessment:

Feingold is, of course, right. But how many senators will join him in voting "no"? That question is especially significant for the four Senate Democrats who are seeking their party's presidential nomination: New York's Hillary Clinton, Illinois' Barack Obama, Delaware's Joe Biden and Connecticut's Chris Dodd. Dodd says he is "disappointed" by the abandonment of the timeline demand; if he presses the point as he did on another recent war-related vote, he could force the hands of the other candidates. If either Clinton or Obama do go ahead and vote for the legislation, and certainly if both of them do so, they will create a huge opening for former North Carolina John Edwards, who has staked out the clearest anti-war position of the front runners for the nomination. But this is about more than just Democratic presidential politics: A number of Senate Republicans who are up for reelection next year -- including Maine's Susan Collins, Minnesota's Norm Coleman and Oregon's Gordon Smith -- may well be casting the most important votes of their political careers.

Collins, Coleman and Smith have tried to straddle the war debate. If they vote to give George Bush another blank check, however, they will have removed any doubt regarding how serious they are about ending the war -- as will their colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

This is an opportunity for the American people to watch the behavior of their elected representatives very closely, perhaps even without the mediation of mainstream media (or, for that matter, representatives of the "political blogosphere" like Nichols). They seem to recognize the crisis and have made at least one significant effort to exert their will. Whether or not that effort will be sustained remains to be seen.