The Cairo streets are alive with democratic fervor...or Islamic fervor...or something else. The economic crash was caused by greedy bankers...or inept regulators...or low interest rates...or something else. The health plan is a godsend...or a disaster...or unconstitutional...or something else. We are buffeted by conflicting winds of change. And, while the politicians and the press are episodically quite convinced and convincing, they are changable. Obama's State of the Union Speech was all spend and stimulus in the first half, all caution and frugality the second. Now it seems the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012 is Jon Huntsman Jr.; where did he come from? Who decided that?
In 1954, June 18th, 480 men, led by an exile named Armas, armed and lightly trained by the United Sates invaded Guatemala with the intent of overthrowing the current president-for-life Arbenz. Their plan was not to engage the government forces because they knew they were too weak. (They lost half their men the first several days anyway--most at the hands of local townspeople.) This was convenient for Arbenz who was fearful that total destruction of this ragtag group would cast him as a tyrant in the eyes of the Americas. But while Armas had few men, he had a big radio--"The Voice of Liberation"--that touted itself as a jungle revolutionary station but was actually relayed through Honduras from Miami. This CIA funded effort gave out dramatic accounts of battles, heroes and victories as it charted a gradual advance of a nonexistent army towards its objective, the evil Arbenz. Eventually Arbanz resigned and Armas became president and the next assignation target.
Manipulation of information is as old as the Garden of Eden but usually less malevolent; it is usually just bias. Or conjecture. Or a result of a need to fill a space. The West--indeed everyone--is at a point where errors can have significant impact. Dithering, guessing or dogmatism are not going to be adequate responses to our highly leveraged problems. Probably the mob in Cairo is well intentioned, Jon Huntsman Jr. is likely a swell guy, the politicians in Washington may well know what they are doing but the world needs some leadership that is well grounded.
This country has no Delphi. And politicians--and the press--have to do more than come out every so often and make decisions based on whether or not they see their shadow.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Cairo: The Power of Cameras and Placebos
The population of metropolitan Cairo is eighteen million. The protest/demonstration numbers are estimated at about 250,000. One wonders how the decision is made to take such an event seriously. There are much larger demonstrations after sports events in much smaller cities. The Tea Party demonstrations in Washington were much bigger as were Glenn Beck's curious gatherings; they had little effect on anything and rightly so. Why should this Egyptian demonstration be so honored? And what is expected?
Demonstrations are nothing if not eclectic. They attract everyone from the wild-eyed partisan to the bored. A mob is difficult to read and impossible to summarize; it has countless motives. Moreover, any change in Egypt will be internal. The chairs at the table will be rearranged among the military. No one new will be invited in. Why do we anoint this one with significance?
Are we feeling guilty?
Demonstrations are nothing if not eclectic. They attract everyone from the wild-eyed partisan to the bored. A mob is difficult to read and impossible to summarize; it has countless motives. Moreover, any change in Egypt will be internal. The chairs at the table will be rearranged among the military. No one new will be invited in. Why do we anoint this one with significance?
Are we feeling guilty?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
SOTU
It was apparent immediately that the constitutional small print had morphed into high drama--more than usual. The politicians in their usual finery, hair coiffed, whitened smiles--but this year with politically integrated seating, implying that political principles distinguish the parties and that they were willing to put them aside to sit with each other, like self conscious school kids, while the press ooh'd and ah'd about the pairings. It was felt this would be of more import than most. The country feels it is under some pressure and is looking for solutions. Obama, the best speaker since Reagan, would surely rise to the occasion. Everyone knows the budget has to be cut. Everyone knows that taxes have to go up. Everyone knows that the result will be a decline in living standards--"temporary inconvenience, permanent improvement". The Americans can do this. The question is: How will this be done? What is right? What is fair? What will do the least damage? And, with the singularly American preoccupation, how will this be done consistent with our political principles? (This strange nation seems to have more principles in its population than in its politicians.)
The worry, anxiety and labor of the last year gave birth to a mouse. Obama was strangely subdued. He was fluid but facile; nothing was challenging, nothing hard won. We were encouraged but not led, inspired but to no end. He was like a sparring partner: Technically perfect. Like General McClellan, he knew everything about combat but commitment.
Some coaches are all fire; they rely on their assistants for technique and tactics. Some are all tactics. At a moment last night that demanded energy and vision, Obama walked into the spotlight, won the coin flip and deferred the choice.
The worry, anxiety and labor of the last year gave birth to a mouse. Obama was strangely subdued. He was fluid but facile; nothing was challenging, nothing hard won. We were encouraged but not led, inspired but to no end. He was like a sparring partner: Technically perfect. Like General McClellan, he knew everything about combat but commitment.
Some coaches are all fire; they rely on their assistants for technique and tactics. Some are all tactics. At a moment last night that demanded energy and vision, Obama walked into the spotlight, won the coin flip and deferred the choice.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Phantoms and Operas
Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.--Marker in a cemetery. A ghost's testimony was actually admitted as part of the court record
The Marcellus Shale Formation is a petroleum rich area that runs from western New York through western Pennsylvania into western West Virginia. The formation is deep, between six to eight thousand feet and recently has become approachable through modern drilling and extraction techniques. Part of the technology-fracing--involves sending pressurized liquid, water, into the shale layers to break them and make the petroleum recoverable. This technique has evolved over the last years in several similar sites throughout the North America, most recently in the Bakken area in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The site is rich with potential and southwestern Pennsylvania is at the center of it. The area has suffered terribly in the last generation or so with the decline of the steel industry and current estimates are that the Marcellus Shale project will bring up to 200,000 jobs to the area, productive and high paying jobs. But rather than celebrating this potential, the area has begun a strange symbolic and ritualized dance between the businesses that want to develop the area and a poorly identified group that fears terrible consequences of local industrialization. The industry presents its plans, advantages, downsides and quality control methods, the opposition presents its anxieties over the industry, mainly their fear that the pressurized fluid used in the process will contaminate the drinking water generally and the local aquifer specifically.
This debate has been loud and intense in the area despite the fact that several sources show that there has never, ever, been a single episode of fracing resulting in groundwater contamination. There are episodes of organic contamination--plants and animals--but never a fracing contamination.
What is interesting about this is that evidence does not lead to conclusion. There is no endpoint to discussion. Debate goes on as long as people show up--sometimes to meeting places that have no involvement in drilling at all. Nor do facts or accuracy seem to play a part.
This quality of ongoing debate about prima facie questions have become a characteristic of our politics and our journalism. In "JFK" the storyline presented with real historical persons had only coincidental relationship with history. Michael Moore's films are scripted fiction woven in and around factual geography. Positions have become the structure around which the facts are molded; when that is impossible the facts are simply ignored. Every event comes with narrative camp followers who see and analyze through their own specific prism and present their conclusions with operatic drama.
Cormac McCarthy has a recurring theme in his fiction that history and fiction are intermingled by their very nature; it is a necessary--and productive--creative and subjective error. To apply such a distortion to the present and the future is either insincere opportunism, nihilism or madness.
The Marcellus Shale Formation is a petroleum rich area that runs from western New York through western Pennsylvania into western West Virginia. The formation is deep, between six to eight thousand feet and recently has become approachable through modern drilling and extraction techniques. Part of the technology-fracing--involves sending pressurized liquid, water, into the shale layers to break them and make the petroleum recoverable. This technique has evolved over the last years in several similar sites throughout the North America, most recently in the Bakken area in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The site is rich with potential and southwestern Pennsylvania is at the center of it. The area has suffered terribly in the last generation or so with the decline of the steel industry and current estimates are that the Marcellus Shale project will bring up to 200,000 jobs to the area, productive and high paying jobs. But rather than celebrating this potential, the area has begun a strange symbolic and ritualized dance between the businesses that want to develop the area and a poorly identified group that fears terrible consequences of local industrialization. The industry presents its plans, advantages, downsides and quality control methods, the opposition presents its anxieties over the industry, mainly their fear that the pressurized fluid used in the process will contaminate the drinking water generally and the local aquifer specifically.
This debate has been loud and intense in the area despite the fact that several sources show that there has never, ever, been a single episode of fracing resulting in groundwater contamination. There are episodes of organic contamination--plants and animals--but never a fracing contamination.
What is interesting about this is that evidence does not lead to conclusion. There is no endpoint to discussion. Debate goes on as long as people show up--sometimes to meeting places that have no involvement in drilling at all. Nor do facts or accuracy seem to play a part.
This quality of ongoing debate about prima facie questions have become a characteristic of our politics and our journalism. In "JFK" the storyline presented with real historical persons had only coincidental relationship with history. Michael Moore's films are scripted fiction woven in and around factual geography. Positions have become the structure around which the facts are molded; when that is impossible the facts are simply ignored. Every event comes with narrative camp followers who see and analyze through their own specific prism and present their conclusions with operatic drama.
Cormac McCarthy has a recurring theme in his fiction that history and fiction are intermingled by their very nature; it is a necessary--and productive--creative and subjective error. To apply such a distortion to the present and the future is either insincere opportunism, nihilism or madness.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Arresting a Culture
The recent effort to Bowdlerize Huck Finn should be a warning to all that nothing is safe from overprotective sanitation. However, the recent release of Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus as N-Word of the Narcissus--http://www.amazon.com/N-word-Narcissus-Joseph-Conrad/dp/9076660115#_--is a true milestone; the culture has surely been taken into protective custody. Even the sanctimonious substitution of BCE for the offensive B.C. casts a shadow when placed beside this decision. Imagine the initial, insightful analysis of white guilt in the West having its title changed because of white guilt. It is as if The Onion had a publishing arm.
One wonders who the arresting officers are. Imagine the vastness of the task: Sanitizing a culture. Many people can't get their children to distinguish between the nominative and objective case. Some businesses suffer over dress codes. And here is a movement, seemingly unspoken yet uniform, that is going to make the culture right. There is a bit of the fist shaking Temperance Union about this but no one is laughing. No one dares.
A quality of recent times is the appearance of organizations with huge agendas, huge aspirations. Organizations plan to help us conserve water by controlling the water in toilets. (Half the water, twice the flushes.) Some want to cut down on butter use so they mandate unsaturated fats. Transfats. DDT is banned because it is felt that it might harm bird eggs and malaria comes off the endangered species list. The overriding character of these efforts is hubris; despite failure and disaster, there is no shortage of confidence. These censors are undeterred by failure. The bluenose cannot be embarrassed. They do not learn.
Years ago a movie was made about a struggle between students bent on liberalizing a country and a junta resisting them. The leader of the rebellious kids is eventually killed but he continues as a source of inspiration and the code word for him is "Z", the sound of the letter meaning "He Lives!" The junta eventually bans the letter "Z".
One wonders who the arresting officers are. Imagine the vastness of the task: Sanitizing a culture. Many people can't get their children to distinguish between the nominative and objective case. Some businesses suffer over dress codes. And here is a movement, seemingly unspoken yet uniform, that is going to make the culture right. There is a bit of the fist shaking Temperance Union about this but no one is laughing. No one dares.
A quality of recent times is the appearance of organizations with huge agendas, huge aspirations. Organizations plan to help us conserve water by controlling the water in toilets. (Half the water, twice the flushes.) Some want to cut down on butter use so they mandate unsaturated fats. Transfats. DDT is banned because it is felt that it might harm bird eggs and malaria comes off the endangered species list. The overriding character of these efforts is hubris; despite failure and disaster, there is no shortage of confidence. These censors are undeterred by failure. The bluenose cannot be embarrassed. They do not learn.
Years ago a movie was made about a struggle between students bent on liberalizing a country and a junta resisting them. The leader of the rebellious kids is eventually killed but he continues as a source of inspiration and the code word for him is "Z", the sound of the letter meaning "He Lives!" The junta eventually bans the letter "Z".
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Short Review
"Men Who Hate Women" is the original name--kept in the Swedish version--of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Such a title might warn you the author may be so preoccupied as to undermine his story, as Pullman's wearying anti-Catholicism blunts his clever daemons concept in The Golden Compass. The first page does nothing to reassure us; the introductory quote is " 18% of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man." Such focus may be distracting--for example, when the second part of the book starts with the quote "46% of women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man" the math just doesn't seem to work. But the author is not kidding; he feels that violence against women is a savage fact of life inherent in Sweden. Moreover he feels that the state support system which should protect these victims is not simply incompetent; it is a malignant accomplice. These surprising positions form the undercurrents of this popular mystery and they must be dealt with by the reader. These concepts are awkward, isolated and, early, dis-integrated; they float undigested for a while as the story meanders through its early development.
Strangely the opening of the book mirrors this poor integration. Several plot lines and characters bob through the scenes, some going nowhere, some destined to be central. But after the momentum mounts, this is a very exciting story. The main character is interesting and interestingly developed. When the confluence of real story line and characters converge, the speed, tension and violence of the story carry along well.
There are countless problems with the story. There is an element of the wild eyed pamphleteer in the writing. And the outsider is not immediately convinced of the virtues of the author's outrage. Are men really this terrible in Sweden? Are the rest of us naive or sheltered? Do they act this way because they are Vikings? Is the Nazi threat really current? My impression of the Swedish bureaucracy was rather positive; when a governmental official says "This society is responsible for you" the irony is fierce but surprising.
The male lead is inexplicable. He is passive, boring and the women he attracts can not explain him either.
Although the plot is annoyingly complex it is a bit predictable. But it is interesting, exciting and fun. The writer is inexperienced--this is his first book--but it is a very successful first effort. (So successful that some professionals are suspicious, others think that this may not be so difficult after all.) And Salander is a very successful character, first or not, and better than many experienced mystery writers can boast.
Exciting or not, as a first mystery novel this is not of the caliber of Sansom's Dissolution or even the creepy and flawed The Ghosts of Belfast. But it is an undeniable page turner with a very good main character, a rather surprising social and political view and rewarding lessons: Appearance belies potential and vengeance is its own reward.
Strangely the opening of the book mirrors this poor integration. Several plot lines and characters bob through the scenes, some going nowhere, some destined to be central. But after the momentum mounts, this is a very exciting story. The main character is interesting and interestingly developed. When the confluence of real story line and characters converge, the speed, tension and violence of the story carry along well.
There are countless problems with the story. There is an element of the wild eyed pamphleteer in the writing. And the outsider is not immediately convinced of the virtues of the author's outrage. Are men really this terrible in Sweden? Are the rest of us naive or sheltered? Do they act this way because they are Vikings? Is the Nazi threat really current? My impression of the Swedish bureaucracy was rather positive; when a governmental official says "This society is responsible for you" the irony is fierce but surprising.
The male lead is inexplicable. He is passive, boring and the women he attracts can not explain him either.
Although the plot is annoyingly complex it is a bit predictable. But it is interesting, exciting and fun. The writer is inexperienced--this is his first book--but it is a very successful first effort. (So successful that some professionals are suspicious, others think that this may not be so difficult after all.) And Salander is a very successful character, first or not, and better than many experienced mystery writers can boast.
Exciting or not, as a first mystery novel this is not of the caliber of Sansom's Dissolution or even the creepy and flawed The Ghosts of Belfast. But it is an undeniable page turner with a very good main character, a rather surprising social and political view and rewarding lessons: Appearance belies potential and vengeance is its own reward.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Conceptual Inkblot 2
"Because of the nail, the shoe was lost, because of the shoe the horse was lost, because of the horse the rider was lost ,because of the rider the dispatch was lost, because of the dispatch the skirmish was lost, because of the skirmish the battle was lost, because of the battle the war was lost, because of the war the king was lost, because of the king the kingdom was lost--and all because of a nail."
There is a chess-like reality to this children's chant; the loss of a pawn can doom a position or a game. In history it is a bit more dangerous an assumption, not because alternative histories can be imagined with one change--what if Albert Sydney Johnson had not died at Shiloh--but there are so many such possibilities, even within each supposition: What if the blockade runners had been stopped, what if the Enfields had never been delivered to the Confederates, what if Johnson had never fought the duel that impaired his leg's sensation....on and on and on. Some fantasy writers have begun to substitute alternative histories for alternative cultures and civilizations--instant creativity.
Nonetheless, in the absence of a response to my "Conceptual Inkblot", I bravely offer my own crucial moment in history (stimulated by "The History of Us") in the last 400 years: Tim Murphy's shooting of General Simon Frazier.
There is a chess-like reality to this children's chant; the loss of a pawn can doom a position or a game. In history it is a bit more dangerous an assumption, not because alternative histories can be imagined with one change--what if Albert Sydney Johnson had not died at Shiloh--but there are so many such possibilities, even within each supposition: What if the blockade runners had been stopped, what if the Enfields had never been delivered to the Confederates, what if Johnson had never fought the duel that impaired his leg's sensation....on and on and on. Some fantasy writers have begun to substitute alternative histories for alternative cultures and civilizations--instant creativity.
Nonetheless, in the absence of a response to my "Conceptual Inkblot", I bravely offer my own crucial moment in history (stimulated by "The History of Us") in the last 400 years: Tim Murphy's shooting of General Simon Frazier.
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