57 Fe

You know that thing scientists always say when hippies jump up and down about Chernobyl and how nuclear power is going to kill us all? It goes something like, "10* different things went horribly wrong in the Chernobyl accident; only the Soviets could possibly be stupid enough to let them all happen at once." I feel like we're going to be saying the same thing about the American oil regulato-industrial complex in about twenty years.

*I made that number up, but the truth is not an insignificant integer

Fe

Okay readers, your challenge is to come up with an irony greater than the idea that the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could make it more difficult to pass climate legislation (thanks to President Obama's crazy notion that bribing Republicans was ever a good idea; sorry, I refuse to accept that anyone I voted for actually in his/her heart of hearts thinks that offshore oil drilling is ever an acceptable alternative to anything).

"yes, John; of course, John; whatever you say, John"

[that's John Sheridan; not anyone who may be reading this blog; it's a reference to the Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place"]

I recently flew home for a quick break before the madness ensues. The next two weeks will be a constant stream of workshops (yay!) and visitors (yay! [this time without the sarcasm]) before I fly home again on my way to Houston for the wedding of a dear good friend (yay! [add the cowbell]). Riding shotgun as my Mom took me back to SeaTac for the return to Seoul, I noticed that the car in front of us had two bumper stickers. One featured "goarmy.com" printed on a camouflage background; the other said "Give war a chance." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that neither was an attempt at irony.

The CIA has recently added a United States citizen to its list of people it is going to try to kill. I'm still trying to sort out my reaction to this news. Let's meander through some of the salient points.

1) Initially, I was very upset that the CIA can kill people. That's what the military is for. This thought is, of course, even more troubling than the news that spawned it. To borrow a thought from Joss Whedon, "a government [or military] is just a group of people, most notably ungoverned." Hopefully I'm alone (but I doubt it) in the visceral notion that the military somehow has the right to decide who should live and who should die. Regardless, the idea is hogwash. If we trust the military, it is because we believe they will never buck the authority of our elected representatives. Remember how we felt when we thought health care reform meant that our elected representatives would be deciding whether or not to pull the plug on grandma? (I actually don't, since I never thought that, but I can imagine I would've been pretty upset if I had.)

2) I invested a lot (hopes; dreams; time; and, yes, money) in this administration. I want to believe that Barack Obama is a good man and a great President. That idea involves believing that Awlaki has it coming. If the official story is to be believed, he's not really a nice guy (any more). He seems to be doing a pretty good job of encouraging people to kill other people. Of course, what is missing from the official story is the notion that Awlaki has actually pulled the trigger on anyone himself. I reconcile my intellectual rejection of the death penalty* with my emotional desire to pee on Osama bin Laden's bloated corpse with the reassurance that "they intentionally target civilians; the American military does not." Now we're targeting a guy (and I guess this description also applies to bin Laden, which, I'll admit, is more than a little troubling) whose participation in the War on Terror seems to be at the level of military recruiter or maybe Department of Defense official, but definitely not soldier. Living in a country where bluntly criticizing the military is considered impolite (there's even a law forbidding colleges who don't allow full access to military recruiters from collecting federal funds), I'm not sure this is a line we want to cross.

3) [in which I go completely off my rocker] We are occupying the world. There is no habitable continent on which we do not have military bases. Our budgetary outlook is so red it has almost left the visible spectrum, but, while we are allowed to say whatever we want about eliminating programs to fight poverty, discussions of reining in military spending require careful maneuvering and political subterfuge and are generally criticized as being radical hippie goofishness. Now we want to start killing our own citizens without due process, and a former major party nominee for the Presidency thinks that Mirandizing Americans is optional.

None of this denies the notion that the people we think our military is fighting (the Taliban, Al Quaeda) are awful human beings. Among other things, I hope that I believe that the idea that "women are people, too" deserves defending**. I fear though, that when the history books are written, they will not say that "the world went bat sh#t f$%#king loco while the United States of America remained perfectly sane and reasonable in its response." More likely, they will say something about how we, from our position as "the winners," could afford to go crazy while the other side, from their position as "the losers," had no other choice. I feel like we should be shooting for something a bit more complimentary.

*death penalty supporters are urged to click on that link

** Dear Conservatism, I will trade you one War on Terror for one "you never get to bring up or restrict abortion ever again." Think about it.

***And now I am hesitating to actually publish this post because it is implicitly critical of the military on all levels (that may have been the point) and I am currently living in a country that is forever on the brink of existential war with its nearest neighbor, whose citizens all share family trees with its own. Springsteen said, "all men want to be rich; rich men want to be kings; and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything." What, I wonder, do they think they're going to do with it once they rule it?

I wanna go fast!

Listening to criticism of the financial reform bill echoing on NPR, it sounds like some people are concerned that it will jeopardize our ability to recreate the financial explosion of the middle-aughts.

Isn't that the point?

Isn't the reason that 2005 was so good that it was based on a house of cards... in a wind tunnel?

The analogy at the tip of my tongue is: it sounds a little like baseball saying "we want to ban steroids, but only so long as it doesn't jeopardize our players' ability to hit 70 home runs a year." We need to be able to trust our financial sector. Trust has to be earned. That usually requires sacrifices of some kind or another.

all the cool kids are doing it

A few weeks ago, "This American Life" did another episode ("Inside Job") about the economic crisis. This one focused on a firm named "Magnetar" (after a breed of neutron star with obscenely strong magnetic fields; that is about the extent of their coolness; sort of; maybe; I'm having a hard time parsing this one). This firm made an obscene amount of money off of the crisis by (and this is the executive summary; you should really listen to the episode)

a) duping larger firms into investing in mortgage-backed securities. I say "duping" because these larger firms only invested in said securities because Magnetar volunteered to buy up their least stable part (in effect, agreeing to be the fall-guy for the investment). However, unlike the well-mannered fall-guys of mafia mythology, Magnetar was actually

b) betting heavily against those securities.

The idea was that, while Magnetar would certainly lose money on account of part (a) when the securities failed, that amount would pale in comparison to the amount of money they would make in part (b). One of the theses of the "This American Life" episode is that Magnetar started doing this right as the market was beginning to figure out that mortgage-backed securities were a bad idea (back in 2005). By volunteering to be everyone else's fall guy in part (a) Magnetar breathed life into a pretty bad idea and helped bring on 2008.

I am sad to say that none of this seems to me as clear-cut as it should.

Obviously, what Magnetar did was bad for a lot of people, but, at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that "they never promised anyone that they would look out for society as a whole; all they ever said was that they would make an obscene amount of money, and, as I said, they made good on that one."

Everyone keeps talking about "the demise of the American Dream," both in terms of health care and in terms of the economy and its possible solutions. Is it possible that this crisis is the American Dream: making aforementioned obscene amounts of money at the expense of quite literally everyone else in the country? I mean, as a nation, we're not really big on social responsibility. Our national identity seems pretty rooted in proving how much more awesome our nation is than everyone else's, not in anything we concretely do as a nation.

There's a stanza in the Springsteen song "A Long Walk Home"

"That flag flying over the courthouse // means certain things are set in stone // who we are, what we'll do // and what we won't."

I wonder if that isn't a little optimistic. Does our flag really stand for things we will do, or just things we won't? We won't abridge freedom of speech. That's great. We won't torture. That's obviously not true, but it's probably the point of the song. What will we do? We will send in the Marines to topple dictators (I'm not sure I believe that, either, but let's just take it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay, fine, we'll prove that our military is stronger than yours. Will we give cheap medical care to the least able among us? Who knows? Not without screaming about communism and fascism. Will we use our intellectual and industrial gifts to do something positive for the planet, or will we hide behind China and India's greenhouse gas emissions as if the words "per capita" don't actually mean anything? To whom are we actually responsible?

Obviously, I'm still coming down from having just read Ursula K. Leguin's "The Dispossessed." I don't understand why that book wasn't on my first year Core reading list and "the Communist Manifesto" was.

(This post is the bloviating offspring of what was going to be a comment on something Charles said on his blog)

(I'm tempted to edit this so the word "obscene" doesn't appear so often; I hate over-using words; it seems appropriate, though)

(It's also possible that the problem is in me. The first time I learned to play Hearts, I cheated. The rules didn't make sense to me. You were supposed to play in a way that was sub-optimal, but there was no external enforcement mechanism and no transparency by which other players could check that you weren't cheating. I think I was 23 at the time. I can't tell whether or not that supports my thesis.)

in case you were wondering

Today is the second day in two months I've heard air raid sirens in the city. It's only a drill, but still: air raid sirens. [Expletive].

"...if we assumed that these whales were ours to do with as we pleased..."

This post started out much angrier than (I hope) it ended. Story of my life...

The Radio Lab episode "Animal Minds" starts with a story about a whale tangled and drowning in the lines of about twenty crab traps and the bunch of humans with boats who, for no reason other than that they are awesome, worked to cut it free. They succeeded. Upon attaining freedom, the whale did not swim away. It hung around, gently nudging and staring at each of the divers in turn. Understandably, the divers took this behavior as whale for "thank you." From here, the episode turns to an animal psychologist who claims that it is "demeaning" to assign human emotions to other animals. Why, he asks, should we suppose that we live in a world in which every living being is somehow like us? Why shouldn't every species have its own way of relating (the implication being that maybe there is no whale "thank you")?

This is a fair point, much fairer than I thought when I first wrote those words. Not all animals are humans (though all humans are animals, a point which the Radio Lab hosts accentuate returning from the break before their last segment). Anthropomorphizing non-humans glosses over the reasons that this is true and prevents everyone involved from learning something from encounters with other species. There, I said it. What I take issue with is the way the point is raised. Instead of starting from the assumption that non-human animals are unlike us and trying to find the ways that we are similar, why can't we start from the assumption that they are like us (or, even better, that we are like them) and try to find the ways that we/they are different. To turn the psychologist's words petulantly around: "why shouldn't we suppose that we live in a world in which we are somehow like every living being?"

Case in point: The first piece of evidence the psychologist raises is a study done by another psychologist on dogs. The second psychologist (whose name stuck out for being a woman named Alexander Horowitz; she works at Barnard College) gathered a group of dog owners. Somehow, she contrived to have time alone with the dogs, after which she told every owner that their dog had misbehaved. This was only true in half of the cases. The owners (all of them) scolded the dogs. The dogs (even the dogs who had done nothing wrong) assumed the "guilty dog" posture (ears and head down; tail between legs). "Aha!" said the psychologist, "that posture does not denote guilt; it denotes submission. The dogs are just acknowledging our authority." Can we really separate this notion from guilt? Sure, there is a feeling I associate with the knowledge that I have done something wrong, but after 29 years of living in a society composed of religious, academic, and political authorities, I associate the same feeling with the knowledge that I have done something that an authority figure tells me is wrong.

I've always found the natural/artificial distinction some what troublesome. New York City is artificial. A beaver dam or an anthill is not. If this is really True, then there should probably be a word for "built by a beaver" or "built by ants" the way that artificial means "built by humans." "Artificial ingredients" also bother me. Unless they're holding out on us (or themselves; seriously, guys, there's a Nobel Prize -- or five -- in this), food scientists aren't in the business of producing particles from the aether, so everything must come from the Earth at some level. I know this is a lot of semantics and glosses over some very important distinctions about how margarine will probably kill you faster than butter, but there are consequences to how we draw those distinctions. After 2,000 years living from the assumption that we are different and therefore removed from all of the creatures around us, we have wiped out the Dodo, worse-than-decimated (which means to kill a "measly" 10%) several species of whale (and tigers, and gorillas, and...) and made an industry of felling the trees and polluting the oceans that regulate the composition of the air we breathe. We assumed the answer ("we are wholly different from all other animals") and the entire planet paid the price. Maybe we ought to consider assuming a different answer. The impact of assuming we are like other animals and being wrong is a world with fewer cheeseburgers, SUVs, and multi-national corporations. The impact of assuming we are not like other animals and being wrong is a world with less arable land.

People who think I'm being sentimental should read this. The elephants, it seems, are tired of putting up with our crap. If you'd rather not be depressed, you could also listen to this episode of Speaking of Faith.