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December 11, 2006

Two-Dot-Oh

Internet usability comes of age

From where I'm standing, the Web is finally starting to get interesting.

You must think I'm joking -- calling a social/technological phenomenon that's connected up the world as never before, revolutionized the way we interact, transformed the way we shop, triggered an economic boom (and one hell of an economic hangover)... surely all that constitutes something interesting already.

True enough. However, for all the Internet's revolutions and transformations, there's one area in which it has fallen short: Its user experience has, to date, been less-than-steller.

This limitation was apparent right from the beginning. HTML (HyperText Markup Language to the uninitiated) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory) as a medium for eggheads to collaborate. Textual documents could be published with live links ("hyperlinks") to other documents. A marvel for those with a penchant for non-linear wanderings, it was never designed to support the creation of full-blown applications for mail-order shopping, organizing finances, or editing data.

Consider, for instance, that most familiar piece of desktop software, the word processor: Most contain a nice page-looking shape inside a window where you compose your text; at the top are menus and buttons that open up dialog boxes or take action in real-time on highlighted text. Or consider a spreadsheet program such as Excel, where calculated "cells" are recomputed instantly when a value in any dependent cell changes. There's functional richness there that just feels right -- and as well it should. The team who originated the core paradigms at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) spent years getting it right.

Then came the Web. Relatively early on, HTML's shortcomings gave rise to some new technologies: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, DOM (Document Object Model), and DHTML (dynamic HTML). A crude "form" specification in early HTML provided a few desktop UI gizmos, such as textfields, buttons, and drop-downs (also knowns as "comboboxes"). With JavaScript and DOM, we could alter elements of an HTML page in real-time (as opposed to waiting -- sometimes endlessly in the days of dial-up -- for the next Web page to load). Still, it all felt a tad primitive, jury-rigged, and clumsy. Probably the worst incarnation of Web usability was a version of Microsoft Outlook Web Access from a few years ago: Individual pieces of the screen loaded in one by one, and if you clicked on anything, you had to wait, and wait, and wait... sometimes for only a small change like viewing the contents of a folder.

Small wonder that usability fans such as myself initially stayed away from Web development. Building desktop apps circa 1999-2000 (as I was doing) may not have seemed glamorous, but over the years Web developers have whispered to me how envious they were -- I got to wire up fancy screens and see users partake of rich interactivity; they got stuck coding JSPs, EJBs, and other bits of alphabet soup from the Web universe.

Well, now I'm happy to report that we get to have our interactivity cake and eat it too. Two new (well, not-so-new, really, as I'll explain) technologies promise to deliver the Web from usability purgatory and make it feel more like the user experience we've expected from our PCs for the last 15 years (20 if you're a Mac user).

One that's been getting lots of attention lately is called Ajax (ostensibly another acronym, for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML"). First propounded in this seminal article, Ajax takes some existing stuff (the JavaScript/DOM duo described above, along with a type of Web communication that doesn't require waiting for a page load) and makes something new out of it. The foremost example of this is Google Maps, which blew me away when I first tried it: Instead of the maddening wait for an entire static map to redraw whenever you want to move or zoom, Google Maps lets you click and drag, as if you were moving a file around on your desktop or drawing a circle with your favorite paint program. The secret? Bits of the map around your current location load in "asynchronously" -- that is, your Web browser asks for them and displays them whenever they come back. In the meantime, you aren't stuck looking at an empty page (unless the map images load in too slowly, in which case only the not-yet-loaded quadrants appear blank).

Google has gone on to use Ajax in many other places, including their finance section, where stock charts can be moved around in real-time; and their Web-based e-mail service, Gmail, where your inbox refreshes automatically. Almost makes you want to chuck your desktop e-mail application.

Less well-known, but potentially just as influential, is Adobe Flex. Macromedia's Flash is already familiar to us Web hounds: If you've ever gone to a site with an animated intro (such as this blog's host, Holistic Ideas, Inc.) or watched the political JibJab cartoons, then you've seen Flash in action. For the last little while, however, Flash has been including an ever-richer set of user-interface widgets of its own.

Flash is limited, however, in that it was designed for animation. The tool that developers must use to write Flash programs operates very much on the "movie" paradigm: There's a "stage" (where the animation takes place), a "timeline", and "keyframes" (for marking animation start and stop points). It's not very convenient for writing UI applications (I couldn't imagine, say, building a Web shopping application on it); conversely, its impact has been relatively limited outside the Web animation world.

Enter Flex. This is the first Macromedia product branded with the Adobe name (they bought out Macromedia in 2005), and, simply put, makes it a lot easier to develop Web applications that behave almost exactly like desktop applications -- more so, even, than Ajax apps. Ajax is clever, but it's still a somewhat awkward yoking-together of existing technologies. Flex, by contrast, is set up a lot like Java, a very popular language in the Web world. Unsurprisingly, Flex has seen some rapid adoption: the new Yahoo! Maps, which behaves much like Google Maps, is written in Flex.

Flex's one big disadvantage, however, also lies is its similarity to Java: Although Java found new life behind the scenes on the Web, it too was once intended for Web user interfaces. Remember Java applets? They were, by now, supposed to be everywhere -- mini-applications that would load in on demand and behave like desktop applications right from your browser.

Unfortunately, off-the-shelf browsers generally can't read Java applets (which are, by the way, completely unrelated to the JavaScript I describe above as part of Ajax); they need an add-on "Java plugin" to interpret the applets. The Java plugin was slow and unreliable; even today, it's a hassle to keep the different versions straight and make sure the right one is loaded on your PC (it's also quite large -- about 7 Mb).

Unlike Ajax applications (which will work with just about any current browser), Flex applications also need a plugin -- in fact, the very same plugin that Flash uses to display its animations. Unlike the Java plugin, however, the Flash/Flex plugin is significantly smaller (about 1 Mb) and much easier to maintain (upgrades to it can be set to download automatically). But it is still a plugin, which means yet another something that users need to install before going to a site that requires it. For sites reliant on fragmented customer attention in the highly-competitive online marketplace (where a quicker-to-load alternative is just a click away), this could mean trouble.

Happily, though, the Flash/Flex plugin is installed on a huge percentage of browsers, so the plugin issue may not be too serious after all. Flex is also a bit less cumbersome for developers, and this lack of encumbrance will hopefully lead to some seriously creative Web usability in the future.

Whether only one of these technologies dominates, or whether they both end up sharing the marketplace, is still a matter of conjecture. I doubt, however, that they'll both peter out -- though if they do, I'm sure something similar will come along. As we UI types have discovered, once you give users enhanced interactivity, they only want more, not less.

Given that, I plan to be much more a part of this new Web -- Web 2.0, as some pundits are calling it -- as the full power we take for granted on our local PCs finally moves online. Exciting times lie ahead, I have no doubt.

November 13, 2006

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Democrats

A personal take on what's next

Dear Democrats,

Congratulations! After years in the political wilderness, you scored a major victory last week by taking back both houses of Congress. Oh sure, media pundits and other assorted experts like to point out that this was more a vote against the Republicans than a vote for you -- but so what? A win is a win.

But how to hang on to it? Here are, as Bill Maher would put it, some polite musings from a not-so-timid observer:

1. Fix The Vote

Redistricting is a normal part of representative political process, but in this country it's gone too far. To be fair, both parties have done their share of gerrymandering. But two wrongs don't make a right. A non-partisan formula for determining and assigning districts needs to be put in place. Some may protest, but on the whole, the electorate will thank you.

Also, do something about voting irregularities. Just because you won doesn't mean this issue has gone away. Ideally, you should push for a nationwide voting standard; if it involves computerized voting machines, make sure they also produce a paper printout that slides into a ballot box for easy, certifiable recounting -- technology is great, but there should always be a manual fail-safe. As a software person I'm astounded no one thought of this sooner.

2. Balance The Budget

The budget deficit may be shrinking, but there's hardly an economist worth his or her salt who'd place the degree of faith in "trickle-down" fixing this as your opposition has done. The flush situation last seen when Clinton was President may not come back soon, but it would be nice to see things moving in that direction again. Right now feels like the 1980s again -- the economy is theoretically doing well, but many of us aren't, and we're all sitting around waiting for the day of reckoning to come. How much longer before countries such as China, who are effectively subsidizing our government spending, turn off the tap?

The subject of China brings up another deficit -- trade. This country was not built by a society of passive consumers. We need to lead in producing again, and restore the balance of ins and outs. In the 1990s, America recaptured the world's attention as the "technology leader to the world". We need to maintain and extend that edge, and require the participation of government to work with private industry to make that happen.

If you need to raise taxes on the rich (those making over $100,000/year and/or with net worths of in excess of $1 million), I doubt you'll hear much complaining. They had a good enough run during the last 6 years. If Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can give away such large proportions of their estates, then surely we can get the rest of the well-to-do to pitch in. It need not be in the form of taxes per se; perhaps tax breaks for investing in energy-independent technologies or in smaller-scale community help initiatives might do the trick. But something to prod these folks to contribute.

3. Rescue Health Care

America spends more than any other first-world nation on health care without any significant improvement in lifespan or health outcomes. If we are indeed a world leader, we should not trail behind everyone else on this one. Hillarycare may have bombed, but it's time to start seriously looking into universal health coverage once more. It is simply unconscionable that a country this wealthy should have 40 million uncovered residents.

On top of that simple fact, there are many, many problems with the system. For instance, why does an uncovered person pay so much more for health care than an insurance company's "negotiated rate"? Does the insurance company need the savings more? I know, all this talk about supply, demand, volume discounts, and the "free" market. Well, perhaps it's worth asking ourselves if we really want the same market mechanisms that drive the price of our SUVs and DVD players to work out the tough questions of who lives, who dies, and who remains ill, and who goes bankrupt because they were unlucky enough to get sick. Blanket socialized medicine may have its problems, but that doesn't mean we can't do better than what we have now.

4. Fight For Energy Independence

The fact that our civilization still relies on the combustion of liquefied organic remains (a.k.a. oil) would be amusing if it weren't so sad. Indeed, the Mr. Fusion of Back to the Future may not be upon us anytime soon, but energy alternates are becoming increasingly viable -- they just need a bit of a boost. Conservatives claim that the free market can solve everything, and we know they're full of crap. Capitalism can do many things, but long-term vision is rarely something it does well. Private industry does have the means and ability -- and, of late, is developing more and more of the will. Keep nudging them in that direction, and maybe Mr. Fuel Cell won't seem so far-fetched after all.

At the same time, however, don't get too hung up on solutions that take decades at the expense of shorter-term improvements; I suspect the Bushies' push for fuel cells over hybrid technologies may have something to do with their stake as oilmen: Might as well keep the wells pumping right to the end, even if stopgap measures are workable and needed. Don't make this mistake: Invest for the long and the short term.

5. Save The Environment

In addition to doing precious little about the oil situation (in spite of platitudes stolen from The Economist about "oil addiction"), the Bushies have done even less about the most precious resource of all -- the health of our planet. Global warming is not a vague hypothesis; it's a very real danger. Even if it weren't, we should try, in our industries and endeavors, to create schemes and systems that clean up after themselves without contaminating the cycles of nature. This is possible -- and profitable. Look here for more.

6. Change The Subject (on guns and gays)

I for one support equal rights (including the right of all consenting adults to enter into legal unions), while at the same time failing to see the point of possessing the right to bear high-efficiency murder weapons. However, many in this country still don't see it that way. It seems that pushing this agenda too hard seems to be playing into the Republicans' hands and allowing them to exploit these "wedge issues" at the expense of everything else. Don't give them this opportunity. While it pains me to push for evasion or delay in implementing these progressive ideas, I think it might be the best course of action, at least for now. Fix the other things on this list first, and then think about gun control and gay unions. Besides, by the time you get around to it, I think a lot more of America will have evolved, just as they did about civil rights and female suffrage. Give it time, and don't dwell on it much.

7. Don't Give Up On Civilizations' Discontents

Iraq was poorly executed, and the mess we made there will haunt us (and much of the Middle East) for years to come. But don't go on prattling about "the only conflicts we ought to get involved in are those that affect our interests." The rest of the world hates that -- the biggest kid on the block interested only in the fat profits of its citizenry. The cause the Bush team only belatedly, half-heartedly, and disingenuously endorsed -- building a better Mesopotamia (and, possibly, a stable Mideast) from the ashes of a psychotic dictator's regime -- was, in principle, a good idea. Woodrow Wilson wasn't wrong, and muscular idealism isn't bad. It's just hopelessly misguided to think we can do it alone, and it's terminally stupid to allow stubborn, mean-spirited types like Rumsfeld and Cheney to run the show.

Instead, remind the public what Bill Clinton has been saying when pressed: That if Republicans in the 1990s hadn't declared a jihad of their own on him (Monica, Whitewater, Troopergate), and had instead supported bipartisan liberal internationalism (instead of opposing intervention in the Balkans)... well, we might have avoided a genocide or two and, perhaps, been able to stop Bin Laden and bring peace to Israel and Palestine. Why? Because Clinton stood for these positive ideas, and had the charisma to help make it happen. With more support from the other side, all this might have come true.

Thus, it's important for us to start thinking like that again, even if Iraq has made campaigns to "save the world" unfashionable. For a start, you can finally get cracking on Darfur...

Do these things, and you might turn things around from the disgrace of the last six years; I for one believe it's not too late for you to put things right. The ball's in your court now. Don't drop it.

September 7, 2006

Nickel and Dimed, Redux

What the cost of higher education means for the middle class

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed provides a chilling look at what it's like to be minimum-wage in America. For me it was doubly surprising, having come from a vaguely welfare-state country (Canada), and a (relatively) inexpensive big city within it (Montreal). In my college days, a good-sized flat in a bohemian (and safe) section of town could be shared for some $350 a month; health insurance was, of course, free; and the city's solid public transit virtually eliminated the need for a car. I worked at a one-hour-photo store with a number of early-twentysomethings who were making do on minimum wage -- of course, back then in that part of Canada (minimum wage is regionally adjusted there by law) it was higher than it is in America now. So minimum wage life in my hometown back then was a spartan, but hardly unendurable existence.

Nowadays, however, I find myself noticing another disturbing trend that probably in part accounts for the disappearance of the middle class here in America: The alarming cost of higher education.

This is nothing new, to be sure, but it has gotten ever-more pitched as the years have gone by. Unsurprising: As health care costs have spiraled upward, along with real-estate in America's biggest cities, this country has begun to feel ever more like an every-man-woman-and-child-for-themselves kind of place. In such circumstances, people scramble for the nearest lifeboat -- and, in spite of its much-pooh-poohed reputation, a college degree is still a reliable dinghy. But not just any college degree: while only a relatively small percentage of colleges and universities have selective admission, those that are the ones that matter: An arts degree from a fourth-tier school is frequently of little economic use; however, a business degree from a top-tier school is quite the opposite. And it's those schools that, as a rule, cost the most money.

To break this down a little further, let's examine what some higher-education programs cost, and what the expected return on such investment can be. Let's also add in the costs of amortizing an education, and determine who's winning and who's losing in this game.

A recent College Board pricing study gives us some broad strokes: Total average costs of tuition plus room and board comes in at around $12,000 for public universities, and $29,000 for private schools. But that's just the average. The scope of this blog precludes an exhaustive examination of every single school out there, but my understanding is that for most top-tier public schools (one notable exception: an in-state California resident admitted to the University of California system), costs are significantly higher. Let's say, then, that instead of the $5,000 or so the College Board estimates (which takes into account all schools, not just the "best" ones), we're talking closer to $12,000 -- or, conservatively, that a student can be fed, clothed, tuitioned and supplied for, say $25,000 a year.

Likewise for private schools: The best of these typically cost closer to $30,000 a year (instead of the College Board's average of $21,000), but let's be charitable and assume $25,000, bringing our total up to around $38,000 a year.

Now multiply that by four (I'm assuming a 4-year degree here, which is widely thought to be the ticket to the good life): We're at $100,000 a year for a public school, and $152,000 for a private school. Suddenly that $5,000-a-year average doesn't sound so enticing. And we haven't even gotten to grad school yet.

The go-to-college crowd typically responds by pointing to what corporate bean-counters call ROI -- return on investment. In a Yahoo! article using College Board-sourced data, it is estimated that college grads "can expect to earn about $2.1 million over their lifetimes, compared with $1.2 million for people with high school diplomas only." So that means a return on investment of about $900,000 for an initial investment of $100,000 to $150,000. Sounds pretty good.

Or does it? It's important, when calculating such things, to remember when money was spent and earned. A college degree may confer an extra cool million to one's earnings (and hopefully savings) over a lifetime. But all the investment money must be spent up-front, and there's practically nothing legal that a college grad can do to recoup that $900,000 immediately upon graduation. Typically, that money is earned slowly, with most of the reward coming in later years as the compounded advantage of higher education and its attendant access to opportunities begin to bear fruit. But what if, hypothetically, one had the college cash up-front, didn't use that money for college but instead invested it, while making do with the measly $1.2 mil in earnings of a non-college grad?

$100,000 invested at 5% at age 18, by age 65 (typical retirement age) will have grown to $990,597. $150,000 at 5% yields $1,485,895. These numbers are higher than the college-education differential, but it's probably safe to assume that a top-tier public or private education provides opportunities to garner even greater returns. So let's say that higher education, while not the spectacular bonanza it is frequently touted, is nevertheless a solid, if unspectacular, monetary prospect.

However, all this is academic (if you'll pardon the pun) if you can't foot the bill in the first place. One hundred thousand dollars is a sizeable amount of money -- and, of course, it increases by multiples if you're a family of more than one college-bound child. There are indeed grants and scholarships (word is that many top-tier schools are working harder to increase subsidies for needier students), but on preliminary inspection they don't amount to very much: Federal Pell grants top out at $4,050 per year, or $16,200 for four years. That still leaves some $80,000-to-$135,000-plus to pay for.

Scholarships based on merit have always bothered me a little: Why should poorer kids need to be smarter than richer ones? Come to think of it, for that matter, why should first-generation students find themselves victims of admissions discrimination, as discussed in a recent New Yorker article about legacy admissions. (When I learned about this program, where children of prestigious-school-grads are given preferential treatment, I was appalled -- there is, of course, a financial reason behind it all, what with encouraging alumni to donate cash by having their kids go to their alma mater... but for academia, supposedly the bastion of meritocracy, to stoop to such blatant whoring in order to attract endowments... am I the only one who finds this problematic?).

However, all this is beside the point: Even is we ignore all legacy and merit assistance, the current form of "financial aid" remains problematic. The term itself strikes me as a bit of a euphemism, since most of a cash-strapped student's "assistance" often comes neither from grants nor from scholarships. Instead, it comes from a massive form of indebtedness taken on early in life: the student loan.

On paper, the principle of student loans sounds fine: College-bound kids receive loans at discounted interest rates, typically with no need to repay until they finish school (there's even a grace period of between 6 and 9 months after graduation). At that point, repayment schedules can be set with some flexibility, but 10 years is a typical maximum time span to pay everything back.

Let's take, then, two students: Amy Affluent, an only child whose parents' household income is around $300,000. Amy's parents are able to fully fund her education. Larry Limited, by contrast, is one of three kids in a family with a household income of around $75,000 a year -- still well above the national median. Larry's parents are able to contribute $5,000 per year to Larry's schooling.

To even things out further, we'll say that both Larry and Amy have the misfortune of living in a state with high-priced public education (like Illinois); both are reasonably bright students that are able to get into the "public ivies" such as the University of Michigan or UCLA. I'll even give each of them a stroke of good luck and say they both also secured admission to one of the top-tier private schools such as Stanford, University of Chicago, or Yale.

Amy has a love for literature, but isn't really sure what she wants to do with her life. Larry's good in the sciences, and has a knack for the practical -- though like Amy, he's not sure where he's going with his career either (a not-uncommon dilemma at 18). Larry enrolls a civil engineering program; Amy enters English Literature. Both do reasonably well, and graduate after 4 years.

In the ten years after graduation, their paths diverge, but not tremendously. Still unsure of what she wants to do, Amy moves to New York and tries to break into publishing. After six months of trying, she secures one of the coveted entry-level positions in that field, earning around $30,000 a year (about the average for English majors). Larry also takes a few months to find a job -- he graduated in recessionary times and there isn't much demand for engineers. He moves to a big city too (though not New York -- he can't afford the rent), and keeps himself busy with $12-an-hour office temp jobs. Finally, he secures a position in his chosen profession at the average starting salary of $45,000 a year.

Over the next decade, Larry moves into a supervisory role and winds up earning around $75,000 a year by age 32. Amy, more of a dilettante, bounces around from publishing job to publishing job while writing poetry and participating in small-time theatre. By year ten she's making barely $45,000 a year. Amy's parents help her out some, but not egregiously so -- they cover some of her expenses in living in pricey New York, but, we'll say, just enough to make her living expense about equal to Larry's.

There is, of course, more to this story than meets the eye: Amy's apparent disadvantage in career choice is offset many times over by her parental (and therefore financial) leg up stemming from her college days. Here's how this breaks out:

Assuming that Larry receives $5,000 per year from his parents, and $4,000 per year from Pell Grants, he'll still be responsible for around $50,000 if he goes to a public school, or about $120,000 is he attends private college. Let's say he worked when he could and ended up with $30,000 in debt for public school or $90,000 for private.

Based on a repayment schedule of 10 years (the maximum allowed for student loans), and an interest rate of, say, 6%, the monthly payment on $30,000 is a somewhat-manageable $333.06 -- which, according to the site www.finaid.org, requires "an annual salary of at least $39,967.20 to be able to afford to repay this loan. This estimate assumes that 10% of your gross monthly income will be devoted to repaying your student loans. If you use 15% of your gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only $26,644.80 , but you may experience some financial difficulty."

However, if Larry's obligation is $90,000, he'll be stuck with a whopping $999.18 monthly amount -- which, the site adds, can only be afforded on salaries from around $80,000 to $120,000 a year -- definitely in excess of what we've projected for Larry.

So, realistically, Larry can't afford private school even if he did receive grants, loans, parental aid, and worked during the summer (and in the school year too, if an engineering workload allows it). That $333-to-$999 balance is typically just the right extra that young people would sock into a retirement account such as a company 401(k).

As a result, Larry and Amy's paths in life will diverge significantly, even if, by some catastrophe, Amy's parents became destitute when she turned 32 and had to fend for herself. By that time, she could have saved a lot more money, had access to greater opportunities due to living in a larger, more cosmopolitan city, and, if she jumped into a safer profession such as technical writing, might even catch up to or beat Larry at the earnings game. While Amy was off in New York, some other classmates of hers with similar financial opportunities could have moved back to their hometowns (or to other more affordable cities) and bought their first homes -- providing them with an equity boost that Larry won't get until well into his thirties, if at all.

The tragedy of this is that Larry probably exemplifies the middle class types Bill Clinton had in mind when he talked of people who "work hard and play by the rules." While it's safe to say the Larry wouldn't have had to attend a private school to take advantage of good work opportunities, the disparity increases at the post-graduate level: Starting salaries for MBA or law grads from the private Ivies definitely outpace those of the public. Unless he wants to take on an even more crushing debt burden, these doors will be closed to the Larrys of America.

At issue here is the fact that college education -- widely considered a stepping-stone to a better life, is increasingly off-limits even to those who are not considered impoverished. In this regard, I fear that higher education is returning to its gilded-age status as a delineator of class, a place where the children of wealth, privilege, and academic legacy can romp without worry while the rest of us look on with despair.

While making education free for everyone is an unlikely solution, I think it's time that we look hard at this problem and try to stop nickel-and-diming the poor and the middle class (more like quartering-and-dollaring, given the amounts) simply for the opportunity to get a 4-year degree. If indeed America is to retain its status as a land of (relatively) equal opportunity, it would be best if it ensured that all qualified applicants could afford to go to school without undue burden on their financial life.

Of course, the same could be said for universal access to health care, or the above-mentioned practice of legacy admissions, or about many other things in this country. But one thing at a time. For now, I'd be happier if the Larrys of the world were given more of a fighting chance.

August 14, 2006

Appeasement Really?

Why It Isn't 1938 After All

I write these lines in the shadow of an all-too-relevant family tragedy: Last weekend, one of my Israeli cousins lost her husband as he led a appeasementLink1">commando raid into Lebanon.

Given that, I'm not sure if the time is right for a piece on this subject, with my extended family grieving and all of us trying to make sense of the unimaginable. And yet, perhaps this is not the worst of times for such musings, both on the nature of the seemingly-endless Middle Eastern conflict and on the reaction of some journalists here in the West to it.

The term "appeasement" belongs in the historical pantheon of dirty words, along with "quisling", "benedict arnold", and "uncle tom". All convey similar themes of betrayal, love-thine-enemy, and general moral squalor. The specific history it refers to, of course, is Britain and France's negotiations with Hitler in a futile attempt to ward off another Great War. Looking backward, it's easy to see how their approach was naive, tragic, and futile.

World War II has become, in our remembrance, the "last just war". I'd go one step further and call it "probably the only just war" -- and even there contemporary reexamination has found ambivalence: The massive Allied civilian bombings of Germany were ineffective in their excess; the atom bomb on Japan was in part meant to scare the Soviet Reds, not the weakened Empire of the Rising Sun. Nevertheless, World War II does possess a certain moral clarity that is, for lack of a better word, comforting. If pop culture references are not inappropriate, it was the last Star Wars war, pitting a peace- and freedom-loving alliance against a for-real Axis of Evil.

So it's understandable that right-winger writers -- hardly a "shades of gray" lot to begin with -- would want to frame the current "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West as the next World War II, thereby imbuing our side with the moral clarity of Roosevelt and Churchill. By their estimation, then, we in the West calling for cease-fires and restraint possess the moral cowardice of Chamberlain and Daladier; in fact, a recent appeasementLink2">Victor Davis Hanson article said as much.

For me, however, I see Hanson falling into the usual right-wing "straw man" trap: he writes how "postmodernism, cultural relativism... and moral equivalence... filter down from our media, universities and government." Come on, Victor: I've seen left-wing academia for myself and agree, they do possess many of his hated qualities -- but their moral-equivocating virulence is, if anything, feeble in its reach and influence. appeasementLink3">Ward Churchill is hardly taking over America. And the media? I've heard cries of "bias" from both sides. As for government, the charge that the current rulership is cozying up to Hezbollah is nothing short of absurd; while Hanson trots out one quote from one Congressman who refuses to take sides "for or against Hezbollah", I'm sure he had to look pretty hard for that sound-bite, and in doing so ignored countless other exhortations from our appeasementLink4">political officials against murderous Islamists.

Nevertheless, I found that Hanson, along with his hawkish cohort, Charles Krauthammer -- gifted wordsmiths if nothing else -- make an interesting case. But is the comparison valid? Are we still politicking like it's 1938?

I don't think so.

To begin with, let's compare numbers and potencies. Germany was a fair-sized European power back then, roughly on a par with England and France. America was an isolationist superpower-to-be. The Soviet Union was a wildcard. Nevertheless, the adversary was well-identified and contained: When Nazi Germany spoke, it spoke with one voice. There were no dissenting fuehrers or sibling-rival factions of National Socialism that simultaneously opposed and fellow-traveled (as, say, Hamas and Hezbollah). Moreover, the Nazis desired land, conquest and war, and stated as much -- with intent to achieve these ends by fielding armies loyal to the sovereign. One might say, grimly, that Hitler was one of the few politicians who was true to his promises.

The current geopolitical situation is much different. To be sure, there are far, far more Muslims today than there were Germans, Nazis, or persons of Euro-Aryan descent in 1938. At first blush, this should give fuel to the Hanson-Krauthammer fire: Even if a small percentage of Muslims are of the jihadist/death-cult-set, they might say, it still constitutes a clear and present danger. True, but this ignores the disunity, factionalism, and dispersion of Islam: Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran hardly speak with one voice. In fact, the single biggest disunity factor that is too often ignored by hawkish apocalytists is the deep divide between Sunni and Shia Islam, a fissure that make trhe divides between antebellum U.S. North and South or Irish Catholic and Protestant seem quaint. Even with a much larger population base, Islam -- even radical Islam -- is no Nazism.

Furthermore, at the risk of dismissing the movement as "just a few extremists" (a famous-last-words statement if there ever was one), we need to look at the power calculus. To paraphrase Lincoln, all the Muslim armies of Asia, Africa and Europe could hardly stand up to that of the United States. Iran's nuclear ambitions notwithstanding, America could flatten it in an afternoon. Contrast this with Nazi Germany, whose defeat took six years and the combined might of many nations, America among them. Clearly the conventional military threat is no threat at all.

Of course, as pundits on all sides of the political field quickly retort, that's hardly the point. In today's wired, jetlinered, globalized society, one doesn't need a Luftwaffe to bring a nation to its knees. 19 men and some box-cutters will do quite nicely, thank you. And yet, that's exactly my point.

Shadowy, guerrilla-type or terrorist-style warfare is nothing new; Sun Tzu's point about harassing a stronger enemy goes back millennia. What is new is how we deal with it in the modern world. In ancient days, it was easy: If you laid siege to a city, and the locals rebelled, you massacred them all. This is, perhaps, the "hawkish" notion that Krauthammer and Hanson have in mind when they talk of rejecting "appeasement". By their estimation, Israel's recent loss in Lebanon was not due to excessive force, it was due to too much restraint. If Israel (or America) can flatten its enemies in an afternoon, then let them.

Let's take that notion at face value, ignoring for a moment the obvious eye-rolling and moral outrage. For one thing, this sort of action would backfire: America's unchallenged power, lest we forget, comes at the behest of the rest of Planet Earth. There's nothing God-given or foreordained about its military might; it simply exists because other countries haven't bothered to challenge it. China, India, South America, the Middle East, even hopeless Africa, have not focused their energies and resources on building an army to challenge America's. But some of them could: Consider that a country barely out of feudalism, having just fought a devastating revolution and civil war, and with a far shakier economy, kept the U.S. on its toes for half a century. I'm speaking, of course, of the Soviet Union. For them, a fusion of Slavic tribalism and misguided Communism served as motivators. Would it really take much to tip a China or an India from passive trade partner into active adversary?

There's more. Back in the 1940s, America was the world's largest oil producer and a net oil exporter. One historian, in detailing the story of the petroleum industry, makes a pretty convincing case that World War II was in many respects a war for oil: The Japanese coveted the oil fields of Sumatra, and the Nazis' entire Stalingrad misadventure began as a push to take the oil fields of the Caucasus (today still a key source of that region's wealth).

Nowadays, however, the story is much different, as the major First World powers are quite reliant on oil from the unstable Mideast. Granted, this is no reason to appease anyone -- whether a Mideastern despot like Saddam or a self-identifying terrorist like Bin Laden. But it is another reason to proceed differently than the mass-destruction of yesteryear.

Then there's the issue of Muslim immigration, and the not-so-veiled right-wing notion that the Europeans have essentially accepted a fifth column into their midst. I partly agree with the notion that welcoming hostile cultures and creating conditions where they remain forever separate, never assimilating into the host country, is a recipe for disaster. But there are different interpretations of this European mistake: The Hanson-Krauthammer crew sees mushy Euro welfare-state lefty multiculturalism. But an article in the left-leaning The Nation during last year's French riots had a different interpretation: The Europeans retained their emigres in a perpetual netherworld status; generation of foreigners remained non-citizens (in contrast to the United States, where citizenship track is more clearly delineated -- I should know; I'm on it). Having grown up in a country (Canada) that tried to have its multicultural cake and eat it too (with resultant tensions between the countries two founding cultures -- English and French -- as a by-product), I can attest that some degree of melting-pot credo is important, if not essential, to a country's unity and integrity. Clearly, the Europeans dropped the ball on this one -- but it seems simplistic to blame it all on moral relativism and its wholehearted embrace of radical Islam. The causes seem more nuanced than that.

All these factors lead me to dismiss Krauthammer and Hanson as misguided romantics, dreaming of a chivalrous America vanquishing Islam as surely as it vanquished Hitler and Tojo. This 1940's scenario no longer applies to our world. What we have, instead, is a complex multipolar planet with a quasi-reigning giant who's up there mostly by consent, and reliant on a highly-connected international market to retain this balance. Behave too rashly, and we might upset the balance -- and cause greater chaos than the trouble we set out to correct (just look at Iraq).

On top of all the economic dangers, there's the biggest factor of all, one that renders the entire 1930's comparison an academic exercise at best: the nuclear threat. The Cold War may have caused nuclear holocaust fears to recede, but the danger is still out there. We couldn't wage war like we did in the old days even if we wanted to. Even with overwhelming superiority, it would be suicidal for the U.S. to wage fights large enough to provoke a nuclear exchange with anyone. If a sufficiently-determined rogue nation, with (or without) the aid of terrorists, managed to stage a nuclear attack on just five U.S. cities... well, just imagine the consequences.

The savviest politicians understand this global calculus, and know that there is a time to kill and a time to heal. Violent actions must be modulated and balanced, which is why I thought John Kerry's comment about a "more sensitive" war on terror -- pilloried, of course, by Dick Cheney -- was right on the money. The powerful states of the world -- America chief among them -- need to have their finger on the pulse of the planet and know when to use the carrot and when to use the stick. This is something that seems totally lost on both the current presidential administration and their hawkish cheerleaders.

Which brings us back to where I began, with the tragedy closer to home: Israel, I feel, shares many characteristics of its chief sponsor, the U.S. The Zionist pioneer tradition strongly mirrors the John Wayne ethos: Less talk, more action, facts on the ground. As a result, I feel that the Israelis, to quote one of their own statesmen, Abba Eban, all too often miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Eban, of course, was referring to the country's Arab adversaries, but I find the accusation cuts both ways. As a Western nation filled with determined, smart, tough-minded folk, Israel has built up formidable military and industrial might. But they fall short on reading the tea leaves and acting accordingly. Perhaps Hezbollah, in abducting soldiers and firing rockets, was baiting the Jewish state into a massive response that it could use to garner worldwide sympathy. Perhaps an air campaign wasn't the right choice (even Hanson says so, and the historical record of the effectiveness of air strikes should further drive home that point).

So what must be done? A recent much-maligned critique of the Israel lobby made an interesting point: In their narrow focus on militance and toughness, the right-wing pro-Israel crowd often acts against the country's best interest. Perhaps a smarter blend of politically-driven talk (where was an outraged Israel at the U.N. presenting photos of Katyushas a la Adlai Stevenson in 1962?) and better-directed force might achieve better results; it's not enough to kill Hezbollah leaders and other genocidal fanatics. It is far better to discredit them in the eyes of their own people. The work needed to do this (which may indeed include some violence) is not appeasement; it's the prosecution of the fight by smarter means. There is indeed a threat to global peace and stability in radical Islam; few question that. But gazing wistfully at the beaches of Normandy is not the answer.

I know it's easy for us in the West to play armchair quarterback, and the tragedy that's befallen my family is sobering reminder of that. Nevertheless, I can only hope that the leaders here and elsewhere pay more attention to these sorts of big-picture musings, and look beyond the simplifications of the peace-at-all-costs doves and the war-above-all-else hawks. Reality is much bigger than is dreamt of in either philosophy, and many, many lives hang in the balance.

July 2, 2006

X Marks The Spot

My generation's science-fiction coming-out party

Generation X, as those of us born in the mid-60s to mid-70s were labeled, is associated with many things: cynicism as a reaction to political and economic uncertainty; anti-establishment slacker-ism; resentment at our immediate forebears, the Baby Boomers, who have always and continue to hog the demographic spotlight.

But there's one thing for which we are, as a group, under-recognized: Our childhoods were spent in the period when science fiction went from dweeby cerebral curiosity to mainstream phenomenon -- thanks, in large measure, to the cinematic rendition of the genre finally coming of age.

I'm speaking, of course, of 1977 to 1984, or about the span of the original trilogy of Star Wars films. Consider that, in addition to George Lucas' space opera, there was Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, Alien, Star Trek resurrected in movie form (including what many consider the best Trek yet, number II, released in 1982), E.T., and Blade Runner. Sci-fi cinema before that period seemed either cheesy (consider The Blob) or sixties avant-garde-ish (like 2001: A Space Odyssey). While literary SF was already mature and well-established, it remained somewhat on the fringes until the visual media brought it out of hiding.

Of course, it wouldn't last; while that period seemed to strike the right balance between smart and entertaining, the morass of what followed often didn't. Lucas and Spielberg lent their name to ever-sillier works of adventure (The Goonies, Batteries Not Included), and by the mid-1990s (with the exception of paranoid thrillers like The X Files) we were greeted with bilge like Independence Day. Even the best stuff of the nineties feels derivative -- how many times did we have to hear yet another uplifting John Williams score?

I've always maintained that the most enduring creative works are those that strike chords on many levels. Popular filmmaking of the late-1970s qualifies, I think, since its key practitioners were the first of the film school generation. Also, they had yet to be corrupted by the Hollywood success that would later prove their near-undoing (Coppola with Apocalypse Now, Spielberg with 1941, Scorsese with New York, New York).

Part of what made the popcorn films of our youth so good is that they emerged in the decidedly child-unfriendly years of the sex-drugs-rock-n-roll seventies. Consequently, they needed a dash of self-referential edge to lure in our elders -- be they stoner teens or our own parents. Lucas did not flinch from putting in shots of Luke's aunt and uncle burned to death at the outset of the first Star Wars film; nowadays, as a sci-fi eminence-grise, he seems unwilling to take such chances.

Many of us Xers were thus disappointed at the glossy, family-friendly retread Lucas performed on the Star Wars saga when he released The Phantom Menace in 1999. Happily, though, Lucas was no longer the only game in town, and some of his younger disciples were coming into their own in the business to set things straight: The Wachowski brothers (both Xers themselves) came out with The Matrix in that same year. Lucas (perhaps under pressure from angry fans) himself ratcheted things up a bit in the later two Star Wars films; by the third one, I was at least moderately impressed.

Meanwhile, on the small screen, a "re-imagining" of the classic Battlestar Galactica series performed the ultimate wonder: It met and exceeded not just the quality of the original (which to my jaundiced thirtysomething eyes seems dated and cheesy itself), but the memory of it. I consider this series to be the finest work of television speculative fiction (as sci-fi and fantasy have been termed) since at least The X-Files. All the moral complexities of our age -- terrorism, torture ethics, enemies among us, weapons of mass destruction -- have been cleverly distilled in galaxies far, far away.

For me, this is what sci-fi at its best should be about: Placing characters, both flawed and heroic, in technologically impossible (but one-day quite probable) situations as a means of focusing our attention on the our own world. All those brave new worlds serve as meditation on our own. I don't doubt that myths and legends served the same purposes in archaic civilizations -- a fact Lucas must have been aware as he incorporated elements of mythographer Joseph Campbell into his movies.

The final confirmation of this trend came just last week, with the release of Superman Returns (helmed by yet another Gen X filmmaker, Bryan Singer). Critics mused (and sometimes complained) that this film was almost too reverential to the early films of the series (Christopher Reeve's and his wife's passing may have contributed to that); for me, however, it was sheer bliss from the word go: The thunderous opening titles and music (using the same John Williams score from the 1978 film) brought me right back to that sleepy old theatre in downtown Montreal where my parents dragged me and my younger sisters more than a generation ago.

Nostalgia aside, however, I'm happy to say that these filmed fictive works have, for the most part, sidestepped the pitfalls of becoming sentimental rehashes. As stories in their own right, they succeed; if anything, the complaint one can make about most of them is they succeed a little too well: They seem more adult, more cynical, more... like Gen Xers today. The Matrix and Battlestar Galactica are unlikely to appeal to 8-year-olds. But no worry: There is, I believe, plenty of stuff floating out there in the pop-culture ether that will carry nostalgia for the kidlets growing up now; as I write this, one of my toddler nephews is on his 87th viewing of Finding Nemo.

June 15, 2006

Booklist: Heart and Soul

William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism posits a real Third Way

If there's one thing hard-core liberals and conservatives agree upon, it's the intractability of the modern-day capitalist system.

For conservatives, the capitalist system is no world-weary Churchillian "worst except all those other forms" compromise. (Churchill was in fact speaking of democracy, not capitalism, but his equanimity is my point). No, for conservatives, capitalism is, in fact, the best system; talk to some (I have), and they imply it's the perfect system. By regulating all human enterprise via the invisible guiding hand, the so-called free market represents the truest expression of humanity's nature. Any illogic, unfairness or inconsistency will get shaken out. In finance, a related notion is called the "efficient market theorem", which insists that any irregularities in pricing or valuation -- think of the dot-com bubble -- will get worked out eventually. As for the yawning chasms of inequality the system may produce -- well, those merely reflect disparities in ambition, worthiness, grace. And besides, as one conservative once said to me, "there will always be people who are poor and disadvantaged." Meanwhile, it is capitalism's job to provide liquidity and opportunity in the relentless quest for "more".

For traditional leftists and their successors, this description of the system is pretty much accurate -- except they view it as repellant, corrupt, and evil. It impoverishes millions while enriching a tiny minority; it relies on accident, caprice, and backdoor classism (via the access of the privileged to wealth, power and education) for its perpetuation; and it has effectively destroyed the natural world in its relentless pursuit of luxury and comfort for this very few. The only way to correct the inadequacies of the system, say the leftists, is to overthrow it altogether. The fall of the Soviet empire has disheartened many, but it has really not blunted critique of the system (Noam Chomsky is still quite active). Instead, it has made the left the voice of despair, idealists without a solution since their God failed in Berlin circa 1989.

William Greider's book, published in 2003, during the heart of the Republican honeymoon (what with Bush still enjoying some post-9/11 glow and the war in Iraq in its early stages), offers another option. What if the successes and failures of capitalism can be acknowledged, and in so doing, corrected in a way that works better than either side can suggest?

Greider's smartly points out that capitalism's founding notion -- that scarcity drives the human condition -- is no longer really true. We no longer want for food, clothing, shelter, or even many things that past societies would have considered unimaginable (electricity, home appliances, transit). Even in those parts of the world where these things are largely lacking (such as the one-plus-billion who live on less than $1 a day, or the two-plus billion who live on less than $2 a day), the limitations are (tragically) due to corruption, tyranny and geopolitics, not actual scarcity. There are enough resources and technical know-how in human society to ensure a decent, comfortable life for everyone; trouble is, our system isn't providing it.

For Greider, the heart of the matter is the mission of the corporation, something conservatives hold sacrosanct and leftists deplore: To make money. In that regard, leftist critics who consider the corporation to be sociopathic are not entirely wrong: environmental costs are often (literally) dumped onto an unsuspecting public; lifelong employees are dismissed and their pensions gutted; and executives -- often nothing more than employees themselves, as opposed to founders or stakeholders in the company -- escape the wreckage they create with multimillion-dollar "golden parachutes". If this is the direction the invisible guiding hand takes us, it is an inglorious direction indeed.

But, unlike leftists, Greider also points out the benefits of capitalism: How it has spearheaded the centuries-long forward march from medieval squalor to latter-day abundance; how it has midwifed cures for disease, astounding technological breakthroughs, and unparalleled human mastery of planet Earth. Warts and all, capitalism has improved lives for millions, even billions. But is it possible to channel that momentum to eliminate the negatives?

Greider no doubt earns the accolades of conservatives by noting what won't effect change: the public sector. Consider that in the United States and in most Western nations (to say nothing of Third World dictatorships), government in its many forms tends to do the bidding of the status-quo. The American two-party system is a great example; however much either party claims to be the "party of change," not enough truly fundamental reform is ever carried out.

So where will change come from?

One doesn't need to be a fan of the film Office Space or the TV series The Office to acknowledge one simple fact: Corporations are not democracies. They are, in effect, dictatorships (and judging by the number of ex-military I've worked with in some conservative companies, it's a form of governance which many corporate rank-and-file strongly endorse). As a result, corporations have the capacity to treat people in demeaning, degrading, and blatantly un-democratic ways, all in relentless pursuit of the bottom line. Most often, this is not the calamity it seems: In many workplaces, managers and underlings work out systems of collaboration that are congenial, often flouting the rules. Nevertheless, the inflexibility of many corporate arrangements is stultifying.

But so are some traditional solutions: Greider notes the limitations and past mistakes of labor unions, but does sneak in a few heartening stories of companies and workers' cooperatives that seem to be shrugging off past oppressions and building better employee relationships. He's especially hopeful about some new initiatives where employees are owners of the company -- though he does note sharply that it doesn't always work as planned (the 1996 employee ownership scheme at United Airlines was a dismal failure, in large measure due to that company's longstanding internal dysfunction).

For this and other corporate maladies, Greider sees some hope in another development (one that conservative editorialists at The Wall Street Journal lamented in a recent piece I saw): "Shareholder activism" from large holders of stock.

The stock market is an interesting beast, a place dedicated to accumulation of wealth with a back-door bit of democratization: Anyone who can afford a share becomes, in effect, part-owner of a corporation. But this "ownership" is something of a mirage: As a rule, one has control and sway over the things one owns (such as a home or a television set). But shareholders -- even large ones -- usually relegate their ownership clout to boards of directors and other proxies. On the surface, this arrangement makes sense: A company's board is far more familiar with its workings than some stock-rich individual or group. But this relegation of power by shareholders is not a given: If a sufficiently-motivated large shareholder is unhappy with a company's direction, they do have the clout to speak up, even change policy altogether.

In the past, this rarely happened, since wealthy shareholders didn't rock the boat for their similarly-wealthy executives and directors (often these were one and the same). But nowadays company stock isn't usually owned in large quantity by wealthy individual shareholders; they're owned by mutual and pension funds. Some, like CalPers (the California Public Employees' Retirement System), are groups whose "owners" are a mass of workers. Consequently, it is not much of a stretch in their mandate to insist that the companies in which they invest treat workers properly. This may mean some degree of sacrificing "shareholder value," (for instance, insisting that a company retrain rather than eliminate employees) but if done correctly, a confluence between building value and doing right by workers can be achieved.

On top of worker rights, there is another hot-button critique of capitalism that Greider zeroes in on: The rampant environmental devastation caused by the industrial development. Today, on the American West Coast, atmospheric pollution is on the rise -- but not due to industrial plants in the region; instead, the pollution comes from burgeoning industries in China. Winds across the Pacific carry the pollution to the western hemisphere, an unwelcome accompaniment to those Asian-made goods on our shelves.

In our current system, however, companies are rewarded (in the form of increased profits) for pushing off environmental costs -- either by making the public pay for them (as in the case of mine operators who leave toxic runoff for states like Montana to clean up), or by "offshoring" the heavy work to countries with less stringent environmental rules. But this sort of offloading is simply pushing down on one side of a balloon: the air just pops out on the other side. The capitalist system, with its push toward "more" production and profit, has no accounting for this.

To answer this I was happy to see Greider looking toward other books I've read: Cradle to Cradle and Natural Capitalism. Both write about means of reinventing our industrial framework not to simply be more "environmentally friendly", but rather to incorporate the very principles that drive nature itself.

Consider that, periodic volcanic eruptions and catastrophic asteroid strikes notwithstanding, nature is a remarkably resilient and regenerative system. All its "messes" (animal manure, dead leaves, decomposing flesh) are reused and regenerated. But rather than despair that this is an irreducibly complex God-created wonder (as Creationists would have us think) or a hopelessly complex system that we could never replicate (as cynical environmentalists believe), what if we made our creations mirror the way nature works?

For instance, "recycling", as the Cradle to Cradle writers point out, is simply "downcycling": An item only designed for one use is awkwardly made into something else -- usually incurring other environmental damage in the process. But what if the object or material was designed, at inception, to be easily remade once its original use was complete? And what if the object was engineered as part of a greater "closed-loop" system, where industrial products all integrate symbiotically, rather than generate useless waste products that do little more than wreak havoc on the natural system? Such a world is already in the offing (albeit at the early stages), and Greider, along with the authors of these other two books, is hopeful that these developments can effect huge change.

So what can we do as individuals? Not as much as I'd like -- unless you're involved with the environmental consulting firms behind Cradle to Cradle and its ilk. In terms of political action, looking beyond partisanship is a start -- it's unlikely that we'll find cheerleading for these ideas among the ideologically ensconced. Perhaps, then, it's incumbent on any and all of us who see such possibilities to expound upon them and do our best to implement them in our lives. Perhaps, if enough people pushed and agitated -- instead of sinking into leftish despair or rightish triumphalism -- we'd see more of this come to fruition.

August 29, 2005

Designers Challenge

Imagining The Possibilities (Yes, Really) of Intelligent Design

The debate swirling about Intelligent Design (also dubbed "Neo-Creationism") forces me to sheepishly make an out-of-character confession:

I'm somewhat intrigued by Intelligent Design.

This is, for a scientist-type like me, akin to blasphemy. Especially since I've variously called old-school creationists "lunatics", "wackos", and other epithets from the Liberal Elite Book Of Common Scorn. When I first moved to the U.S. almost ten years ago, and was told that almost 50 percent of Americans rejected or distrusted the theory of evolution, I was astonished: Could Americans really be as dumb as uppity Canadians and Europeans believe?

Not much of a foundation to uphold ID, I realize.

So why the heretical change of heart? ID seems entrancing to me because it's reminiscent of a very popular body of work among philosophically-minded techies: science fiction. Lots and lots of Isaac Asimov's, Frederick Pohl's, and Arthur C. Clarke's writings (among others) are devoted to phantasmagoric speculation about our origins -- even to the point of reaching blockbuster movie status (remember 2001: A Space Odyssey?). In addition to musings about robots and warp drive, SF has probably been the biggest exponent of ID out there.

Thing is, "out there" is where ID should remain. Science fiction is, as the name implies, fiction. That said, there is definitely a place for ID in schools. Lest I cause my scientific brethren to have palpitations, let me finish that thought by saying: not in science class.

Science, loosely defined, is a systematic, rigorous process of understanding the universe. It does not purport to answer moral questions, nor does it guarantee that its theories are whole. Science is about building paradigms to explain natural phenomena, always with the proviso that new data and/or more complete paradigms may supersede what's thought to be correct right now. But throughout it all, science's job is always and only to explain what is known.

As a result, I see no problem with ID being taught in schools -- but as a philosophical notion, not as an empirically-based paradigm. If we teach comparative religion, or the writings of great philosophers, then why not Intelligent Design as it relates to these (and other) strains of thought? Sounds like an interesting basis for a speculative cosmology class, and none of it should interfere with the mission of science. In fact, I see no reason why proponents of ID (at least some parts of it) couldn't accept the Darwinian paradigm in tandem with their own speculative musings.

But that's not what the controversy's about, of course.

I'm guessing the ID folks would be quite offended by my comparing their pet theorem to Star Trek. And so we enter the pernicious agenda it seems the ID crowd has got: To get ID into schools as science, and in so doing, to debunk or replace Darwinian thought. This is what has precipitated the firestorm of rage among scientists -- and rightly so. How can Intelligent Design - at best a fantastical musing from the pages of Amazing Stories -- be taught alongside the output of centuries of peer-reviewed evolutionary research?

Such objections couldn't be more right-on. ID has no more place in science class than "research" on telekinesis, astral projection, or teleportation. They're great to imagine, to dream about, to analyze the social consequences if they existed -- but not to be discussed as proven, testable facts.

But the science world doesn't get off the hook so easily. I actually think both the scientific community and the ID crowd (if they're willing to listen) ought to change their approaches:

The scientific community should stop prattling on about how "teaching ID is unconstitutional," (since it violates church-and-state laws). This is barking up the wrong tree, as it pushes ID proponents to cloak their divinity in ever-more-scientific jargon. Eventually, if the jargon sounds convincing enough, it might actually influence school boards to adopt it as science -- and this would be catastrophic. Something like it is probably already happening in the much-publicized case in Dover County, Pennsylvania. Instead, scientists should embrace ID as a philosophical notion -- but insist that it's not science until proven otherwise. (Some scientific thinkers in a recent TIME Magazine article did just that).

What might help is to place guidelines in all schools as to what constitutes science education -- perhaps wording not unlike my definition above. This way, the IDers will be free to ply their trade without contaminating the science curriculum.

Fine, say the scientists -- but what about the relentless push to weaken Darwinist theory, as IDers pick at ostensible gaps, even to the point of fudging some facts. For instance, ID posits a notion of "irreducible complexity," the idea that living things are so heinously complex that they simply must have been designed. Nothing as intricate as, say, the human eye could have come about by chance.

While thoughts like these sound interesting, there in fact are sufficient explanations in evolutionary research to account for such developments; again, the broader philosophical picture can dream about intelligent designers -- personally, I find such musings fascinating -- but without empirical evidence for a Higher Power, writings about it stay off the science-room blackboard.

Instead, scientific teaching should include only the best-accepted notions, as confirmed by peer-reviewed publications. Only this, and nothing else, must be taught in science class. Indeed, Darwinian theory has gaps -- as does every scientific paradigm (do they really think quantum theory is perfect?) This is why science alters and replaces paradigms as newer ones come to light; without such changes, Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein would have been out of a job.

With this firm definition of "science education", scientists need not worry about the encroachment of wishy-washy ID hypotheses muddying the waters of their trade. Plus, they'll actually be doing the ID crowd a favor: If, indeed, evidence of Intelligent Design does come to light (it doesn't have to be as melodramatic as the monolith in 2001, but you get the idea), and passes peer-review scrutiny… then by all means, it can be included in science class. But not until then.

In addition, scientists and educators should hotly contest any legislation that requires teachers to pass off ID notions as scientific fact. That is, quite simply, legislating untruth. That is what a lot of this battle is about, and indeed, should be about -- come up with proof, and your ID theory will find a way to Biology 101. The only thing the courts should legislate (though even this should probably be left up to the school boards) is that science is about fact, not fancy.

Sadly, I fear this "modest proposal" to reconcile the warring factions will fall on deaf ears: many scientists will likely still fret about constitutionality and creationism. And I doubt the ID crowd will be content with playing by science's rules. But that could play very nicely into the hands of their adversaries, and reveal them to be what we believe they truly are: A group interested in Christian evangelism, not in expanding students' philosophical mindset; creationists in science clothing, hell-bent on legislating ignorance and bringing darkness to the light of analytical reason.

Ironic, given that the first act of the God they worship was to bring forth light out of darkness.

July 18, 2005

Targeting The Wrong

How Left and Right Miss The Mark (Again) on Government

Talk to many conservatives, and chances are you'll hear a familiar set of refrains: government is bloated, wasteful, and inefficient (except, oddly enough, for national defense, which they feel should never be cut); those dependent on governmental largesse are good-for-nothing welfare cheats, illegal immigrants, and unpunished criminals; and there will always be inequality and want in our world and no government can fix that. All we can do is deregulate and allow the organized, capable and abstemious the freedom to pursue their happiness without being beholden to parasitism.

Quite a damning set of statements. No wonder the Bushies have their hands full.

The first point is essentially a retread of 19th-century populism. The populists (in the American tradition) came from down-home places like Kansas and Missouri; they wanted to retake the country from avarice and greed -- except the greed they were fighting was that of corporations, robber barons, capitalists. Precisely the people who are lionized by the Right today. For today's Right, it's big government that's the enemy, along with the liberal elites on the "silly" coasts (as one staunch conservative I once worked with called them). The image of the little guy against the big, soulless machine is an entrancing one, and by replacing the Morgans and Rockefellers of old with Bill Clinton and his Hollywood friends of today, the Right has done a very successful bait-and-switch.

But is it true? Perhaps we can all sympathize with the rants against government: Think of the line at your local Department of Motor Vehicles, or of the paralysis gripping the Immigration service, or of the absurd amount of time it took to finish the Big Dig in Boston. It's not much of a leap to say that government is utterly, completely incapable of getting things right, and we ought to chuck as much of it as possible lest it muck up our society any further.

And yet, surprisingly, sympathy pops up in unexpected places for some government programs -- witness the chilly reception Bush's Social Security privatization plan received this past winter. Suddenly the nanny state didn't look so bad.

What astounds me (and in fairness, I lay blame on the Left here as well) is the failure of the Right to imagine alternative solutions to the often-justified plaints. Government may have problems, but maybe it still does have a role in our lives; it's the execution that's flawed. Government has done quite a number of things right -- such as electrifying the Tennessee Valley or funding research that led to the Internet. However, it's hard to see all that amid the partisan bickering; worst of all, no intelligent solutions to problems have been proposed. Here are some thoughts.

One key issue I see with government-as-usual is the matter of incentive. The Right earns their stripes on this one, noting that the lack of private-industry-style initiative is a fundament of government inefficiency. With the exception of, perhaps, NASA in the 1960's, or certain arts foundations or cause-based initiatives (I know a few tobacco-awareness people who are very dedicated), there is very little incentive for government to be efficient, innovative, or cutting-edge.

Take that most basic of incentives, one's salary. Congress has the authority to give itself a pay raise; this has always amazed me-- if only we working folk were so lucky! Perhaps some retooling is in order here: How about if their pay raises were pegged to our sign-off on a job well done? Let voters determine, at election time, not only who they should vote for but whether the elected office deserves more cash. Likewise, government agencies such as the Department of Labor could be mandated to hit performance-based targets, with pay raises to follow accordingly. And wouldn't it be nice if infrastructure improvements operated that way as well? I doubt there'd be as many projects going over budget and over schedule if there was incentive to finish them on time (such as the freeway repairs in L.A. after the 1994 Northridge quake).

It's often pointed out, in response to this, that there is a mechanism for merit recognition: the ballot box. Yes, it's a start, but performance-based incentives (in the form of pay, bonuses, or some similar scheme) would affect the entire system, not simply the guy (or gal) in power. After all, the bulk of what we think of as "government" is in fact a for-hire bureaucracy; elected officials are in fact a minority amid a sea of functionaries.

I'm certain there are numerous objections and structural limitations to why this idea can't (or won't) be implemented -- but what astounds me is that neither side of the spectrum has even considered it, and chooses instead to catfight about the philosophical merits of the existence of government itself. This sideshow detracts from real problem-solving.

As for the second half of the equation -- the "dependent". Talk to any angry white male conservative (we all know a few), and you'll hear smoldering resentment against black welfare moms, Mexican workers stealing our jobs, and (or course) the lily-livered liberals letting it all happen. Then again, talk to some on the more extreme Left, and you will hear rants about stolen lands, Columbus as mass-murderer, the Middle Passage, and (of course) the doings of present-day white male conservative Nazis (starting with our President, no doubt). While some of these analyses are interesting (at least when they don't go too far), the Left, to my mind, has the same problem as the Right -- a bucketful of litany but few fresh ideas.

I think both sides can agree that a problem exists: A large underclass, living in misery and undercontributing to our society. Among this mix there are surely those bilking the system. But who, and how many? Our angry white guy seems to think it's everyone -- a fact that most responsible studies clearly decry. Leaving aside the obvious criminal element (welfare cheats, drug dealers and their ilk), let's head for the murkier territory of the merely poor. Why are they that way?

My own studied but admittedly not-impartial opinion actually comes from (surprise surprise) a conservative treatise I read a few years back, Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism. D'Souza's been vilified by some of his former conservative cohorts (David Brock, former neocon darling and author of Blinded by the Right among them). Having myself heard of D'Souza's verbal gay-bashing in his Dartmouth days (apparently he insisted, in his writing for the student newspaper, on referring to gays only as "sodomites"), I've been tempted to chuck the book and his right-wing ideas. But something about it keeps me coming back.

The one D'Souza conclusion that struck me was his notion of "cultural pathology" -- the idea that some cultures possess traits that are apparently maladaptive to success and prosperity (materially for the most part, though that bleeds into other things). He describes how black slaves (and, later, poor black sharecroppers) worked slowly and inefficiently as their only means of resistance against their masters. To me, it comes as no surprise that a group subject to those sorts of circumstances would have difficulty in a world where working your tail off (particularly in fields requiring education) was paramount.

Conversely, the history of my own people tells a different story: For centuries, Jews carried with them their holy writ as a badge of their identity. Learning was greatly stressed in the great cities of medieval Spain and in the tiny villages of Eastern Europe. The Jews were often segregated, but unlike African Americans were not enslaved -- leaving them free to pursue their culture of learning and education. And so, they pursued it with gusto bordering on obsession: Those same few thousand words of Hebrew spawned commentary and discussion (and occasional dissent) -- but it never left the confines of the faith. Until the 18th century, that is, when the European enlightenment led to the emancipation of the Jews in Europe. Suddenly, this people's concentrated burst of scholarly talent was unleashed on an unsuspecting West in the middle of its own Industrial Revolution. This melding spawned Einstein, Freud, Rothschild, and many more. And in spite of a dreadful genocide that wiped out nearly a third of world Jewry in the middle of the last century, Jews still constitute a sizeable presence in the elites of Western society out of proportion to their modest numbers.

To me, the lesson here is that culture and background, not the slippery and discredited concept of "race", make a huge difference in one's development. Add to that mix a dollop of socio-economic determinism, a variant of a critique leveled at one of my favorite books, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond is accused of reducing civilizations' successes and failures to an accounting of what people had around them -- a form of geographic determinism. To me, this is the one determinism I buy: If you don't have fertile earth and easy-to-plant seeds, it's unlikely you'll end up an agrarian civilization. Likewise, if your culture was based on rebellion through foot-dragging, it's going to be an uphill battle to reorient your mind in the direction of education and career (to say nothing of philosophy and literature).

To my mind, though, this is in fact a hopeful message: If indeed so many of civilization's malcontents suffer from worldview problems, then that is where we need to start. Here, in fact, some government programs have been quite successful -- such as HeadStart, which targeted the problems of education at a very young age (instead of some affirmative action programs which encourage the hiring of the less-than-skilled simply to satisfy a quota). Cultures and background are organic, living things, and perhaps a smarter set of government programs can really make a difference in those areas.

This point also refutes the final claim of the Right, that "there will always be poor and disadvantaged." I find it interesting that both ardent leftists (who view the world as an unending class struggle, sans the old Marxist hope for a worker's paradise, that having imploded over a decade ago) and embittered rightists (who seem to see poverty as intractable) both have such a bleak view of the world. They both posit a future that is essentially little different than the present, for they both believe that human nature is static and unchanging.

And so, both sides retreat to their camps, either fighting for government programs regardless of their efficiency or merit or else fighting to destroy them without examining if they can be improved. Both sides could badly use better analysis, a little creativity, and a little hope.

April 10, 2005

Reds For A Blue America

In his book What's The Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank makes the scintillating argument that the Republican-led "culture wars" in America are little more than a sideshow, a distraction to garner working-class votes in order to enrich another constituency entirely -- the wealthy.

It's a particularly damning accusation, since true-blue social conservatives seem particularly devoted to their cause. His case is compelling, however: In spite of the braying of socio-con elders such as Jesse Helms or younger acolytes such as Rick Santorum, the roll-back of civil rights, abortion rights, even gay rights, has not proceeded apace. Likewise, for all the liberal angst about right-wingers turning our society into a Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (where rampant sterility in the face of a post-nuclear holocaust has forced the surrender of all female reproductive rights)... really, it hasn't happened. Social liberation has, in many ways, continued to march on unsullied, in spite of all the protest. Yes, America lags behind many other Western countries on the gay rights score, and clearly religion (and fundamentalist Christian religion, at that) has infiltrated its way into the social debate far more here than in Europe (or my native Canada). However, the chasms of freedom within Western nations are not that yawning. Even the much-vaunted "Reagan Revolution" produced an ineffectual war on drugs and little else on the "culture war" front. And so far, in spite of his stamp on foreign policy, it looks unlikely that Dubya, who lacks Reagan's cross-partisan charisma, will be much of a lasting figure on domestic social policy.

But Frank's thesis could be extended even further; not only are red state voters, committed as they are to stemming the tide of rampant drugs, homosexuality, and moral permissiveness, not really advancing their cause; in the process of voting for a party brand that ostensibly represents them (i.e. free-market Republicans), they're actually making blue states rich.

Let's take a look at one indicator of a place's viability - population growth. At first glance, it looks like the Republican mission is succeeding: Conservative regions of the country are indeed growing, particularly the fabled "sunbelt," which includes such blue regions as Los Angeles and Miami, but also conservative areas such as Arizona. Of the top-ten population gainers by percentage between 1990 to 2000 (years of the Clinton culture wars over gays in the military and the Lewinsky debacle), all but one (Washington, in 10th place) are red states (Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina).

Hmm... so maybe those socio-cons are winning many new converts, who are fleeing the depravity of blue-land for a more righteous experience in conservative pastures.

A deeper look suggests otherwise: Of these top ten states, only two (Florida and Texas) have population over 10 million. Utah's breakneck near-30-percent growth actually amounted to barely half a million people - hardly a conservative mobilization. In fact, considering U.S. electoral politics, where smaller states receive outsize representation (the same 2 senators, a number that is added to its Presidential electoral vote count), this boomlet in smaller, conservative states probably feels bigger than it really is. A moderate number of people fleeing to small states to me seems to be an inadvertent Republican vote grab more than anything else (some of it is not so inadvertent, when their gerrymandering efforts in Texas and elsewhere are considered).

A look at the numeric figures presents a more balanced picture: We now have 4 blue states in the ranking (California, Washington, Illinois, and New York) and 6 red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Colorado). Blue California is number one, gaining over 4 million people (8 times that of Utah). Numerically, the reds still outnumber the blues (12.5 million to 7 million), but consider -- many of the fastest-growing red states have within them highly-visible liberal-leaning growth areas (particularly in the 1990s tech boom): Austin, Texas; Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Florida (an area that makes up a large share of Florida's overall population); Atlanta, Georgia; Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Denver, Colorado. In fact, looking at electoral maps from both 2000 and 2004 (to say nothing of ancedotal experience), it's safe to say that most cities are blue enclaves, even within solidly red states.

To further that case, let's look at some metro-area figures. When percentages are considered, lots of red areas prevail: the old-money set of Naples, Florida; the Mormons of Provo, Utah; the sunbelt conservatives of Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona. But here again, the only cities of over a million population in the top ten are Sin City Las Vegas, liberal tech town Austin, and (one of the few bona fide conservative big cities), Phoenix. Here again, a look at the numeric growth changes everything: Of the top-ten numeric growers, 5 are in blue states (Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. area, and the San Francisco Bay Area), and their total growth outstrips red city growth by more than a million.

Granted, population growth doesn't tell all: I didn't find figures for how many registered Republicans or Democrats moved to which states; the evidence seems to suggest no huge surge of liberals, but equally unspectacular changes on the conservative front, aside from the fact that many of them live in overrepresented smaller states.

Another interesting set of figures comes to us courtesy of the OFHEO (Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight); this might also explain why, try as they might, blue states haven't entirely dominated the population game (though they've been more than holding their own). OFHEO tracks appreciation of housing prices, a benchmark most Americans watch at least as closely as the Dow Jones average or the score of the Superbowl.

In this area, the blues triumph by leaps and bounds: Since 1980 (the dawn of the Reagan era), the American home (averaged out for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) has appreciated some 322%. But the lion's share of that growth has been in blue states, the 19 of which (including D.C.) average an appreciation rate of 427% -- 64% more than the 260% appreciation averaged out across all red states. Even the highest-appreciating red states are in fact bluish "swing states" with large liberal-leaning population centers: Colorado, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

Finally, let's look at another telling statistic, the overall economic wealth of a place as measured by "personal income." This is defined, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, as "the income... received by all persons from all sources... the sum of wage and salary disbursements, supplements to wages and salaries, proprietors' income... rental income... personal dividend income, personal interest income, and personal current transfer receipts, less contributions for government social insurance."

Looking at these figures (for the most recent available period, 4th quarter 2004), blue states and swing states also triumph: Aside from oil-rich Texas at number 3, every one of the top ten states is a blue state or a swing state with large urban population. Number one overall, unsurprisingly: California with $1.1 million per person (remember, this is an overall calculation, not simply salaried income alone): In descending order, after the Golden State: New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Massachusetts. To be fair, the bottom 10 is littered with blue states as well, but they're all small states with relatively sparse economic activity: Idaho, Rhode Island, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Montana, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The contrast here is large: ranging between $18,000 and $40,000, the personal income figures for all 10 of the bottom-ranking states combined is smaller than the personal income for any one top-ten state (whose range is from $1.1 million to $275,000).

So what does all this prove? As Benjamin Disraeli said, there are three kinds of untruths: lies, damn lies, and statistics. I'm sure a different set of facts could spin things quite differently. And indeed, correlation is not causation: These figures alone do not connect Republican policies with their outcomes. But considering that rightists brand themselves as the party of free markets, and tout that as the panacea to all our ills, it is telling that the very policies they preach seem oftentimes not to reach their constituents, but do benefit their alleged enemies. While conservatives everywhere rail at the coastal elites in their words, in their deeds they seem to be doing much to help the latte set realize high incomes, maximum return on their properties, and a steady stream of migrants to realize the ostensibly conservative American Dream. It appears Thomas Frank has it right: The distraction of the culture wars has made many at the polling place pick the horse that isn't right for them.

July 18, 2004

Rescue 911

Dissecting a Dissection of Fahrenheit 9/11

Having just seen Michael Moore's new and much-discussed film, Fahrenheit 9/11, I figured it would be interesting to compare my view of the movie with that of Moore's nemeses -- wit, a recent review in right-wing publication The Weekly Standard. Here's what Matt Labash had to say, and my responses:

Un-Moored from Reality: Fahrenheit 9/11 connects dots that aren't there

CONSIDERING THAT I'm writing this from inside the bunker of what many regard as the Alliance of Neocon Warmongers, it bears mentioning that Michael Moore and I have one surprising trait in common: We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent failure bordering on unmitigated disaster, that was never in our best national interest...

I was quite impressed that TWS threw the assignment of reviewing Moore's film to a staffer that's not so gung-ho about the Iraq war. Then again, perhaps that's unsurprising: The chatter of late on both sides of the spectrum seems to have soured on the war, even from its once-ardent supporters. Invariably, a piece that opens this way is likely to be softer on Moore than I expected from so right-leaning a publication.

It is proof, as if we need more, that Moore doesn't make art, he makes fudge. Since fact-checking his work has become a near full-time cottage industry, it is worth remembering that in his debut film Roger and Me, his indictment of heartless General Motors, he was caught fudging evictions, showing people getting bounced onto the street who'd never been GM workers. In 2002's antigun screed, Bowling for Columbine, he fudged his tear-jerking closer...

Blah blah blah. As one reviewer I read pointed out, this film should be judged on its merits, not on the dubious factuality of Moore's past works. Besides, the point Moore was making in Roger and Me was that GM's plant closings caused general impoverishment and hopelessness in Flint -- that only (or specifically) laid-off GM workers were the ones getting evicted. Anyway, the point is moot for me, particularly since, yes, from what I've read, the rigorous fact-checking apparatus was in place for F9/11.

Watching the film, one gets the sense that these facts and allegations are either totally false (unlikely -- Moore would have had the pants sued off of him for that) or are well researched and constructed. I don't see anyone making the former case (including Moore's enemies), so I'll accept that he's telling the truth in this film.

By the time the opening credits rolled, Moore had already explained how George W. Bush rigged the 2000 election by stealing votes from black people, as well as fallen back on his shopworn class-war claptrap to imply that Bush was out of touch with the common folk, since on September 10, 2001, he "went to sleep that night in a bed made with fine French linens." (The next day's terror victims doubtless slept on burlap.)

Deconstructing the ideological thrust of a polemical film is fair game, and Labash does it nicely here. I don't really believe that the 2000 election was rigged per se, and the dots that Moore connects reveal (as it did to me then) that there was no conspiracy, only a series of mostly-unconnected events that led to Bush becoming president. Unlike Moore, I don't contest the election per se -- though his footage of Congressfolk (mostly African Americans) arguing against the election results and having no senators to sponsor them strikes me as interesting: Why did no senators (even Democrats) come forward? This is a big and hitherto unexamined story, possibly almost meriting its own documentary. I tend to look at the 2000 election as a combination of bad electoral mechanics (vote machines and pregnant chad and such), arcane courtroom practices (recounting the whole state as opposed to some counties), and -- yes -- a likely long-established history of neglect in voting operations in impoverished (and frequently black) areas. I doubt this neglect is due to anything conspiratorial any more than the fact that impoverished areas are, well, impoverished and frequently lack basic services such as decent housing and public safety. It comes as no surprise to me (and is no less tragic) that vote tallying in such areas is spotty.

The intro credits are accompanied by creepy acoustic guitar runs -- third-world atrocity music -- play under a montage of our leaders/war criminals sinisterly readying themselves for television appearances. There's Dick Cheney getting his rake-over fluffed. There's Tom Ridge diabolically laughing. There's Paul Wolfowitz smoothing a cowlick with spittle. They smile. They have make-up applied before going on TV. Bastards!

I actually don't disagree with Labash here -- scenes of the "fatcats" readying for their closeups reminds me of scenes from polemical Soviet-era films from the 1920s showing the Czarist/capitalist elites reveling in their power and glory. It's kind of a cheap ploy -- make your adversaries look like idiots by capturing their unglamorous candid moments. It doesn't make me dislike these guys and more (or less); as a film student looking at this purely esthetically (as opposed to politically), I'd say this is one of the less effective (and sillier) parts of the film.

The same cannot be said for Moore's depiction of September 11th itself -- something Labash doesn't even mention. I'd heard about how this was done before seeing the movie (starting off with a dark screen, with only the sounds of that terrible day assaulting our senses); nevertheless, the sheer power of this scene moved me deeply. We've seen those images a million times already; by placing us in a dark room with only sound to elicit our recall, Moore really hits the high notes. Well done, and Labash should say so.

From there, Moore offers a full hour's worth of Bush-centric conspiracies so seemingly random, disjointed, and pointless that one's ticket stub should come with a flow-chart and a decoder ring...

Moore never passes up a chance to make Bush look like a lightweight, smirking chimp. In fairness, Bush provides more than enough source material. There's Bush, to the strains of the Go-Go's "Vacation," casting fishing lines and speeding away in golf carts, with Moore informing us that the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation. There's Bush in a grade school classroom photo op, sitting shifty-eyed and paralyzed for a full seven minutes after being told the second plane smacked into the World Trade Center, while a teacher reads My Pet Goat. (As a friend of mine says, "Maybe he just wanted to see how it ended.")

I thought this piece of the film was amusing, though it didn't really reveal much that we political junkies don't know. Nor was its tone that far from what we'd expect. Before 9/11, Bush indeed was viewed pretty poorly -- in addition to looking like an out-of-touch buffoon, he also pushed a senselessly hard-right agenda that alienated many. It seemed like an utter betrayal of the "compassionate conservative" talk of the election campaign. I think Moore captured it right.

Bush's reaction in the first moments of the terrorist attack has generated a lot of talk. Honestly, I'm with the people (like Moore) who seem aghast that the leader of the free world just sat there. If it was me, I'd be wanting to know more, and if charismatic (Clinton, anyone?), I'm sure I'd find a nice, soothing way to make it sound to the kiddies (and teacher too) that I'm going to talk to my guys about something... somehow I don't think anyone would have a problem with the leader of the free world interrupting a photo-op for... well, just about anything. If nothing else, Bush's action reveals bad judgment at best or (as Moore insinuates) poor leadership at worst. If Moore was attempting to show a "lightweight" President incapable of reacting appropriately to what (even in the initial minutes) was surely something huge, then I feel he succeeded.

Moore uses Bush's momentary inaction as a device to ask what he was thinking, which, to paraphrase Moore's answer, was how to cover his tracks. This allows us passage into the paranoid labyrinth of Moore's mind, which is illustrated by news footage and a string of experts (Moore spends less time physically on screen than in any of his other films, a fact which recommends it, comparatively speaking). He never fabricates out of whole cloth. Rather, Moore the filmmaker takes a perfectly reasonable proposition (our government generally, and the Bush family specifically, have been too solicitous of the Saudis), while Moore the fudgemaker throws entire trays at the wall, never overtly making allegations that amount to anything, but crossing his fingers that some of it sticks.

The insinuation is that Bush had to keep us scared, with color-coded alerts and a citizen-terrorizing Patriot Act, to distract the country from his tangle of conflicts of interests and to build sentiment for invading Iraq. Moore mentions that the Taliban visited Texas while Bush was governor, over a possible pipeline deal with Unocal. But Moore doesn't say that they never actually met with Bush or that the deal went bust in 1998 and had been supported by the Clinton administration.

Moore mentions that Bush's old National Guard buddy and personal friend James Bath had become the money manager for the bin Laden family, saying, "James Bath himself in turn invested in George W. Bush." The implication is that Bath invested the bin Laden family's money in Bush's failed energy company, Arbusto. He doesn't mention that Bath has said that he had invested his own money, not the bin Ladens', in Bush's company.

The family members who had disowned Osama were mainstays of American business, to the point that they were members of the nefarious Carlyle Group, a fact Moore naturally mentions, along with the fact that George's daddy was a member, too. One of the Carlyle Group's investments was United Defense, maker of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Moore says September 11 "guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year." See it all coming together? Moore tells us that when Carlyle took United Defense public, they made a one-day profit of $237 million, but under all the public scrutiny, the bin Laden family eventually had to withdraw (Moore doesn't tell us that they withdrew before the public offering, not after it).

At their own request, the bin Laden family was quickly shuttled away after 9/11, back to Saudi Arabia. Moore finds it suspicious, as well he should. Who would be stupid enough to let that happen, without working them over for a good couple of weeks? Actually, according to a May interview he gave to The Hill, it was Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism adviser and the new patron saint of Bush-bashers. Moore makes use of him in the film, though he manages not to mention Clarke's role in the departure of the bin Ladens.

Here, if we're going to play connect-the-dots, a few questions are in order. For starters, are we really supposed to believe that 9/11 and the ensuing wars were a collaborative profiteering scheme between the bin Ladens, the Bushes, and defense contractors? Furthermore, will Moore's DVD director's cut elucidate Bush ties to the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Freemasons? Who knows? Who cares? Moore doesn't seem to, as he speedily moves on, making another tray of fudge.

I only slightly agree with Labash here. Moore's tangled tale of Saudi connections doesn't seem to me to indicate any sort of huge conspiracy; I don't feel (as I think the film more-or-less states) that the Bushies went after Iraq solely or primarily to distract the public from their Saudi connections. That seems too easy, too unambiguous, and the thesis that Moore presents itself misses out on some opportunities to expand on the 9/11-Iraq muddle, to wit:

The Bush-Saudi connection does not, in itself, utterly invalidate the Adminstrations' actions -- but it certainly shines harsh suspicions on them. Given that the self-righteous Republicans spent millions of dollars and numerous years trying to catch former President Clinton in a lie about a sexual dalliance, it seems interesting that their own Presidential administration is knee-deep in this gigantic conflict of interest. This is a scandal, nothing more, nothing less -- it is a big one. It's certainly something that should have gotten more airplay over the past 2 ½ years, when the so-called "liberal media" was busy lionizing Bush as the stand-tall "war President".

The Iraq war was prosecuted for reasons that go beyond 9/11. Moore makes this point (mentioning that certain Administration officials had wanted this war even before there was a Bush Administration)... and then drops it entirely. He should have spent a bit more time on the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz obsession with Iraq, the Project for the New American Century, etc. Moore spends no time dealing with the terrors of Saddam, and the fact that disloging a psychotic dictator (even one with whom the U.S. once had ties) is, maybe, not such a bad thing. No matter: There are too many agendas and ideological biases for the Iraq war among this current Administration, and that's reason enough for us to cast some (if not complete) doubt on the project.

That said, Labash's above nitpicking at Moore's facts all seem to me like, well, nitpicks. The ties between the Bushes and the bin Ladens don't seem quite as unambiguous as "they personally gave me money so I'm giving them mafia-style protection". Nevertheless, Moore's sleuthing turns up unsavory connections and uncomfortable coincidences. Not enough in my eyes to make a crime, to be sure, but more than enough to cast doubt on his impartiality. And in Presidential politics, that's a big deal -- enough that it ought to make voters reconsider whether to elect this guy come November.

When Moore takes us to Iraq, on the eve of war, he shows placid scenes of an untroubled land on the brink of imperial annihilation. With all the leisurely strolling and kite-flying, it is unclear if Iraqis are living under a murderous dictatorship or in a Valtrex commercial. In Moore's telling of the invasion, the shock-and-awe is less high-value-target/smart-bombing, more Dresden/Hiroshima. According to the footage that ensues, our pilots seem to have hit nothing but women and children. If Moore's documentarian gig were to fall through, he could easily seek employment as an Al Jazeera cameraman.

This is, it nearly goes without saying, his downfall as a storyteller. In his unctuous morality tales, everyone is assigned black and white hats. The white hats mainly belong to the oppressed people of Iraq, subject to our soldiers' midnight raids under the jackboot of occupation...

Not untrue... Moore's depiction of the war definitely evokes the Horrors Of War as we've seen in countless fiction films, from Paths of Glory to Apocalypse Now to Platoon to Saving Private Ryan to Black Hawk Down. And while, in fairness, it can be said that the Coalition did do its damndest to ensure this was as "decent" a war as could be, the reality is that war is anything but decent, and never easy. Labash's slam at Moore's depiction of prewar Iraq as a "Valtrex commercial" is, therefore, a bit unfair -- brutal dictatorship, yes, but in the moments before a battle for occupation of your country, even the days spent in a dictatorship at peace can seem bucolic. Moreover, the insinuation that the Bushies started this war with liberation of Iraq as a primary motive is specious at best: oh, they paid lip service to it now and then, but only amid the endless braying about yellowcake and fissile material from Africa. While no one (not even Moore, I think) would dispute that Saddam was a lunatic, the question that needs to be asked is "was this war, this way, at this time, really appropriate?" Since Labash himself doesn't think so, why support the side that does?

Significantly, Moore's war images deliver something badly overdue to the American people -- a look at the real face of this conflict, which our own "impartial" media seemed to censor. In my mind, that's appalling: If we're going into a country and invading it, we should damn well see what that entails -- the good, the bad, and the truly horrific. If this were to run later at night, so children won't see it, that's fine -- but not running it at all? There is simply no excuse for American media not showing this stuff. If we saw Iraqis cheering when they toppled Saddam statues, we should also also have seen grief-stricken Iraqi women fulminating about civilian casualties. That we didn't is shameful, and undermines every flowery Bush speech about America as the "fountainhead of freedom". Hats off to Moore for showing us what the mainstream media were too cowardly to put on their airwaves.

...other victims of the administration, such as the poor, underemployed people of Flint, Michigan (Moore's obsessively referenced hometown), who serve as helpless recruiting chum for Bush's killing machine...

Once more, I agree with Labash that there's no true conspiracy here. I doubt the Bushies, or any conservative warmongering Republican, would say (or even imply) that the poor are expendable subhumans who deserve to be cannon fodder -- and ought to be recruited as such using whatever salesmanly duplicity is needed. I tend to see the fact that many of the military's recruits are drawn from the poor and disaffected as a broader social problem facing America -- and heartily agree with Moore that more -- a lot more -- of Congress should have their kids out there. I'm not per se in favor of reinstating the draft, but would like to see a country where military service is a bit more of a point of pride, more a broad-based entity attracting a diverse spectrum of groups, and one where it's almost expected that if you're an elected official, you have a personal stake in the institution. However, this may call for the military itself to change -- to an institution more accepting of groups such as gays (especially those who are fluent in Arabic), and one which is less dominated (or perceived to be dominated) by warmongering conservatives. I think the ethos of a "warrior-philosopher" -- man or woman who holds grace, compassion, loyalty and strength in equal measures -- highly attainable in this modern age (to give credit where it's due, reading Atlantic Monthly writer Robert Kaplan, this is going on in some not-well-publicized quarters of the military itself). When the U.S. military evolves and embraces these ways, it'll find itself with many recruits from places other than Flint. Sadly, all that isn't a priority for the Bush Administration either. Moore's film serves to remind us of that.

The black hats (administration types) seem to be motivated solely by world domination and the desire to steer no-bid contracts to Halliburton. There is no allowance for moral ambiguity, or what would've been even more interesting, misguided moral clarity -- possibility that Bush made a bad judgment call, but did so for the right reasons (security concerns, the elimination of a brutal despot, and the liberation of his people).

Come on, Matt. I agree that the film's fiery invective misses an opportunity, somewhat, to reveal complexity and ambiguity. The movie probably won't help ease the left-right divide in this country, angry screed that it is. But sheesh, allow the lefties like Moore a bit of a pulpit -- God knows they've had to endure more than a decade of Rush, Newt, Kenneth Starr, and the Republican jihad against Clinton. It's nice to see somebody hit back, even if it's a little harder and angrier than I'd like. The applause this film gets at the end of every showing seems to bear that out. People are mad as hell.

As for the "right reasons" -- what right reasons? Iraq posed no immediate threat to the U.S. -- and, as Wesley Clark and other have eloquently pointed out, there were many, many more immediate threats around (including al Queda, for heaven sakes!) that were given short shrift in favor of this largely-superfluous war. Yes, I have neocon relatives who will argue that the Arab world is a cesspool of hatred and barbarism (ironically they seem to hate back in equal measure, so I don't know what that makes them), and view any effort to dislodge an Arab despot as good work. I don't entirely disagree -- for the record, I endorse, at least in principal, the Wilsonian project of making the world safer (for democracy and the pacific overall). I don't think psychotic despots like Saddam are useful. And I'd damn well like to see a truly muscular global entity (i.e. what the U.N. would be in a better world) that would enforce human rights in equal measure everywhere around the globe. Insofar as the Iraq war endeavored to do this, I supported it. But it was not undertaken for these reasons, and the elements of the effort that would have legitimized those reasons (getting global buy-in, lining up forces for reconstruction, forging links with an Iraqi underground, if one existed, to make control of the country less chaotic in the aftermath) were poorly executed, or not executed at all. Moore is therefore quite right to point a finger at the Administration and say "you screwed up."

Labash does offer praise to Moore for his portrayal of mom Lila Lipscomb, whose son is killed in action in Iraq; he chronicles her growing disillusionment with the Bush regime and with the war overall. I agree with Labash -- I don't see any exploitation of grief here. Lipscomb (whose articulations impressed and moved me) wanted her story told, and told it Moore did.

In short, I think this was a well-done, important, historic work -- has there ever been so overt a slam on a President showing on mainstream movie screens in an election year? After too many years of apathy, Americans are getting to fight the good fight over their country's future. I have seen the other side (heck, I once was on it, after a fashion), and it displeases me greatly. Hopefully Moore's salvo, however imperfect, will be a step in a direction many of us want.

September 11, 2003

A Nationalism Frayed

Thoughts on the 2-Year Anniversary of 9/11

By most measures, two years is not a long time, and yet the stretch from fall 2001 to today seems like a lifetime. Back then I was living most of a continent away, watching humdrum news about Gary Condit (who hailed from a town 90 miles from where I was then living), the faltering economy (my company had already had two rounds of layoffs), and the growing disillusionment with the tech bubble and what it had done to the cost of living in San Francisco.

September 11th hit like a thunderclap. This was especially true for Generation Xers like myself, for whom Kennedy and Pearl Harbor were little more than events on scratchy film. Having struggled some to make my way in the United States, September 11th burnished my sense of patriotism, of national pride and loyalty. Although no fan of the Bush Administration, I joined the vast majority of my adopted countrymen in rallying behind his call to get involved in the world, to deal with the al-Quedas and Talibans and, Woodrow Wilson-like, make the world yet again safe for democracy. Although I wasn't in New York to witness it (and cannot imagine what it was like for those who were), I empathized; I read Andrew Sullivan's mournful piece in the New York Times Magazine, "This Is What A Day Means", and cried more than I had in years.

Living where I was, however, it didn't take long for the voices of dissent to gather. My co-workers - mostly younger, West Coast party kids - had little understanding of or interest in the magnitude of what had happened in Guiliani-land. Many of them also accepted old-school knee-jerk leftism; it wasn't long before articles by Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and others were making the rounds.

I was dismayed: For one thing, this was not the time to be scathingly critical, with the Twin Towers and the ashes of some 3000 people still smoking. For another, I felt the critiques were as simplistic and hateful as I had found them to be back in college, when I was a closeted neoconservative. Bin Laden's henchmen, I retorted, did not murder secretaries, janitors and office workers in New York in support of peasants in Chiapas, sweatshop workers in Asia, or even Palestinians in Jenin. This was clearly an act of sheer lunacy, aided and abetted by ideologies of extremism and hate. While I was willing to discuss America's not-so-stellar record in Latin America or Indonesia... really, none of that was relevant to the tragedies of 9/11. It was time to play Churchill, not Che Guevara. I found 10 years of my journey toward liberalism evaporate in those fall days of 2001.

For a time, my principles held. It has always been the hope of political nonpartisans like myself (having abandoned my former neocon outlook) that the Right would answer the Left's critiques by truly practicing its often-hypocritical rhetoric about "liberty" and "freedom". Perhaps this time, in the wake of such an attack, things would be different. Maybe now those tough-talking executives and oilmen manning the Bush team would turn toward benevolent interventionism. I was willing to allow them that benefit as the bombs began falling on Afghanistan.

That campaign came and went quickly, and, for me, the eradication of the Taliban zealots was a far bigger victory than nabbing Bin Laden. Stepped-up security measures at airports also seemed to make sense -- I for one had thought they always X-rayed checked bags... how could they not? Such holes should have been patched long ago.

And then, almost as quickly as it had come, the hope faded.

Although the war in Iraq prompted similar expectations for the Wilsonians among us (notably, the overthrow of a vicious tyranny), many of us have become ambivalent about the motives and methods of those in power here in the U.S. of A. Long before France and Germany had their hissy fit at the U.N., this Administration had treated them (and other nations) poorly. I've read stories of diplomats and politicians from other nations not being accorded the respect they deserve (and had received from past Administrations, both Democrat and Republican). And we've all seen the bluster and disdain for "old Europe". It seems that to Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, America is not simply the City on a Hill, the beacon to other nations; it's the only city and hill worth any consideration. How much of the current Western animus toward the U.S. is simply retaliation for the arrogance of those in power?

Lately I find that, between the meanness of the Presidential Administration and the increasingly shrill conservatism in my midst, my initial love affair with America (which peaked last summer upon receipt of my permanent residency status) is on the wane. In the straightlaced financial firm where I work -- even the gays are Republican -- co-workers greeted the use of the military's huge "MOAB" bomb during the Iraq war with gladiatorial excitement. Was this their patriotic answer to Chomskyite leftism? It made the lingering complaints of some West Coast friends of mine, about "rednecks" and heartless conservatives, begin to ring true.

Unsurprisingly, on a recent trip to Australia I took pains to say "I am Canadian". My pride at hailing from a country that is legalizing gay marriage, decriminalizing marijuana possession -- not to mention leading the G-7 in economic growth -- continues to swell from year to year.

So where do we go from here? America's deliverance may need to come from above -- in the form of a strong, charismatic, decisive leader with a progressive agenda, a willingness to rebuild Western alliances, and the guts to take on not just threats from around the globe, but also fringe interests who have hijacked this country's soul. If he (or she) supports militarization, it had better be for a good cause -- "defending our (corporate) interests" alone is no longer acceptable. In this post-Cold War, jet plane- and Internet-girdled age, the needs of all humankind are intertwined, and important. This is something Churchill and Roosevelt, more pragmatically than Wilson, seized upon during the darkest days of World War II, when they began sketching out the new world order at Tehran and Yalta.

Bush, however, is no Churchill. A mix of Herbert Hoover and Wyatt Earp might be a better comparison, fiddling with his .45 while the world burns. Until better leaders are found, the smoke of 9/11 will never go out, and the Pandora's Box of chaos it unleashed will never be shut. Many of us await that better leadership, and the safer, saner world it may bring. I for one look forward to that day, when my pride at being a resident (and perhaps someday a citizen) of this country can be rekindled. I believe that future, whenever it comes, will sanctify the memory of those who perished that terrible day, two years and a lifetime ago.

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