California is burning and I want to blame somebody, maybe those climate change deniers or Congress. But it really is all of us. None of us wants to get rid of our toasters. Including me. It is not just so called Global warming or that sea level is rising, we are running out of water – here in the west, atleast – and we are polluting the oceans as well as the atmosphere. To protect communities built where they shouldn’t be, we have national policies that results in bigger fires (don’t forget, those fires are adding CO2 to the atmosphere and they are going to get bigger and the season is going to be longer). We want to think we can still do something to stop the change but the change is here. Maybe we can do something to stop it from getting much worse, but I doubt it. Maybe, just maybe, we can stop the climate from getting catastrophically worse, but there is no particular reason to think we have the political will to do that. It really is time to look at how we are going to mitigate the changing climate. I am not saying that we should stop thinking and talking about improving the way we live and what we are going to leave future generations, but we should also adjust to the reality that we have already trashed the planet. Maybe our policy should be that when an area gets devastated by a natural disaster, we don’t try to restore it. Including the Fifth Ward in New Orleans, the New Jersey coast, and the areas burned by this fire. Maybe we should admit that our hubris is part of the problem and it is time to admit that we can’t go mano a mano with nature. 
Category Archives: Politics
Clinton, Obama, and a Unified Field Theory of the Outsider
I grew up feeling like an outsider, I don’t know why, really, but I did and it left me with a disdain for the ruling elite – the longer ruling and the more elite, the greater my disdain, Saudi princes are high on the list for example – and, of course, I desperately want to fit in, even to be part of the ruling elite. When Michele and I were in India, while we were staying at a bed and breakfast Royal Castle, I had the chance to photograph the mini-Maharajah – called a Rao, I believe – who owned the place. I did everything but genuflect. All my disdain was gone and all that was left was conditioned deference. I was in the sun and his highness was in the shade and I was sweating so much I was worried the camera might squirt out of my hands.
When Clinton ran for president as the new, young, energetic, leader and, then, after winning, nothing really changed; I wondered why. He was an outsider, the son of a single mom, from Hope Arkansas and I expected him to understand that America was heading in the wrong direction. Unions were getting weaker, good jobs were going overseas, the rich were getting richer and everybody else was just limping along. In many ways, Clinton just seemed powerless, making little changes around the edges while the tide of American prosperity continued to run out. It seemed like a time for bold action and Clinton was cautious.
The next guy, George Bush the Younger, brought bold action. He said things like I am going to use my political capital and we all laughed. And then cried.
The came Obama and I had such great hopes. Obama ran on bringing change – real change – to Washington and I believed him. The son of a white mother who had once been on welfare and an African intellectual who went back to Africa, he was almost the definition of an outsider. During his campaign, he seemed to understand the country from outside the Washington bubble. I thought It will not be business as usual, and I was so wrong. As Gary Young editorialized in The Guardian, When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That’s not the change people believed in.
Obama ran on closing Guantanamo (or Gitmo, as we have learned to call it). Gitmo is still there, the prisoners are still there and now Obama’s administration is force- feedings the detainees. Candidate Obama wrote about smoking pot – when questioned if he inhaled or, like Clinton, only pretended, he said that he inhaled, That was the point – now his administration is going after California pot dispensaries at a higher rate than Bush. Obama ran on bringing transparency to Official Washington, and he has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.
That is not to say Obama is a complete bust, far from it, by all rational accounts, he is an excellent establishment president. It is just that he has not been an agent of change, not in the way either Roosevelt was, or Bush, for that matter. I wonder why. Again
It seems like a pattern. It is easy to say that they are both Democrats and Democrats are pussies, to say that Democrats are too reasonable. That Democrats are Liberals and too willing to see the other side. I don’t believe that. I think the pattern is that both Clinton and Obama were outsiders. For Clinton or Obama to rise to power from where they started, they had to fit in. I read somewhere that black people have a much better sense of white people than the reverse because they are observing white life – in detail but from the outside – where white people are completely oblivious to black life and the same is true of a guy from Hope Arkansas.
As much as Obama – and Clinton – wanted to make a change when they became President, they found themselves in a world that they knew of more than knew and, even if they were critical when running, it is a world they admired and wanted to fit in. True, it was a world they thought they knew, but only from the outside, it is not a world they inhabited. It is a world they have been conditioned – for lack of a better word – to fit into. It is also a world, in which it was very easy to be intimidated when they actually got there. No matter how critical Obama has been at the lack of transparency in Washington when the Director of the National Security Agency says We can’t release this information, it is classified, it would hurt the country, he goes along.
Doing evil: Dr. Marta Shearing, Wernher von Braun, Larry Grisolano, Chauncey McLean, and Caesar’s Palace
Michele and I watched The Bourne Legacy a couple of days ago. If you haven’t seen it, the conceit is that – through a secret Government program called Treadstone – several top operatives have been chemically enhanced. They are both mentally and physically much more capable than the usual super-capable, James Bond type agent. Very early on, in the movie establishes that the people involved in running Treadstone are ruthless and evil. When the program gets exposed, to cauterize the leaks and save their own asses, the project heads start trying to kill everybody involved.
Dr. Marta Shearing is a brilliant scientist working on the project because the science is so interesting. She semi-doesn’t know how bad and evil the project is (part of why she doesn’t know is because she really doesn’t want to know). This science that, presumably, could be used for good purposes is – in Treadstone – being used to make enhanced killers.
I just read the The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics will reprint a series of articles on space exploration that were first published in Colliers Magazine in 1952. Wernher von Braun, along with several others, wrote the articles and I would have been about twelve when I first saw them. The articles were spectacularly illustrated and, as a twelve-year-old, that was probably their biggest attraction but what ever the reason, they drew me into the world of rockets and space travel (if you are interested, the AIAA will reprint them in their entirety).
It wasn’t until years later, when I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, that I learned von Braun earned his chops designing V-2 rockets for the Nazis. Like Marta Shearing, he was a brilliant scientist who was willing to sell his soul to pursue the intellectual work he was interested in. According to Wikipedia, According to a BBC documentary in 2011, the attacks [V-2] resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons. The forced labor was not von Braun’s concern and he makes a strong case that he really didn’t know about it and an even better case – although inadvertently – that he didn’t want to know.
A couple of days ago, Richard Taylor sent me a New York Times article, Data You Can Believe In, that talks about a singular breakthrough in the field of television ad buying. Working on the Obama campaign, Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean, among others, developed cutting edge technology to much better identify where to spend television dollars to get maximum effect (using social media, it is also much more intrusive than conventional, now old-fashioned, methods). Without going into detail – that I don’t know -a pretty good argument can be made that they were instrumental in Obama winning the election. The problem is that the election is over, the need – in Obama’s case, at least – is over and Grisolano and McLean want to keep working on the technology.
That is where Caesar’s comes in. This is exactly the kind of technology that Caesar’s can use to get casual gamblers to make more trips to the tables and working for Caesar’s allows Grisolano and McLean to keep doing what they love. According to the article McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign.
Seeing these three separate stories at about the same time got me thinking about them as different sides of the same coin (will that analogy hold up?). Good people, brilliant people, moral people, doing immoral acts with almost no repercussions. Dr. Marta Shearing did evil work because it was interesting and, in the movie, she is forgiven and becomes Aaron Cross’s accomplice and consort. When Wernher von Braun came to the United States, all his past sins were excused. He worked on our space program for NASA, and was instrumental in the Apollo Program. In 1977, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Most people won’t even think Grisolano and McLean did anything wrong by going to Caesar’s and they will make alot of money working for the gambling industry.
I am not saying that these people are evil – hell, Shearing isn’t even real – but their acts hurt people. I don’t want to say that working for Caesar’s is comparable to building a rocket that, more or less, randomly killed people, but, while not as dramatic, what Larry Grisolano and Chauncey McLean are doing is contributing to ruining lives.
Capitalism has become our state religion and, if it is legal, what is done in and by the private sector is sacrosanct. It is never looked upon as evil, no matter how much devastation is done; maybe thoughtless at times, maybe evil as a byproduct, but decidedly not evil in itself (at least not by the same people who get upset at the government). There are honest reasons for holding private companies to a lesser standard than government. After all, governments can do alot more visible damage than the private sector and the people getting it done to – or on – them are usually not willing participants. Google knows more about us than the national Security Agency but Google can not put a person in jail for smoking pot, Google can not take away a person’s children for letting them ride in a car without a safety seat; our government has done both.
Still, private companies – the capitalist, or entrepreneurial system if you prefer – do major, systemic, long-term, damage . Damage to both the country and its citizens. Almost certainly, the private sector has done more harm than the government in the past – often aided or allowed by the government, it is true – and there is reason to think it will continue to. Few people think of McDonald’s as evil but McDonald’s has probably done more persisting damage to the health of this nation than all the people who are now in jail on drug offenses.
In the end, two idealistic guys – actually more than two – are helping Caesar’s get more money out of their customers because the work behind it is interesting and that just makes me sad.
A mea culpa
When the Robert’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional – Section 5 required that certain States and localities must get Federal permission for all voting law changes – it seemed to me that this was profiling and the Supreme Court was right in eliminating it. It seemed to me that the act said, in effect, Alabama is more likely to abuse people’s rights – especially people of color – than, say, Pennsylvania.
I have argued with several people about this since the Supreme Court decision, including Richard Taylor on the 4th, but now I realize that I was wrong. Yes, Section 5 is profiling, but it is like profiling Mohamed Atta, if he had been released from probation 50 years after driving one of the airplanes into the World Trade Center.
My change of mind is driven by two things, first a copy of the so-called literacy test Louisiana required black voters to pass in the 1960’s. It is a nasty test composed of mostly trick questions. A sample question is 21. Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order. or 24. Print a word that looks the same whether it is printed forwards or backwards. Click through; see if you pass the test, I didn’t.
The second mind changer was an article, entitled The Color of Law, Voting Rights and the Southern Way of Life in the combined July 8 & 15 issue of The New Yorker. The article, which is really a review of several books and movies, goes into some detail on the struggle black people went through to get the right to vote in the first place. It reminded me that people died trying to get the vote.
Think about that. There were people willing to die to get the vote. They didn’t want to die, but they were willing to take the chance. This is not like soldiers sent to war, these are people willing to march for their vote even if it means they may get killed. I didn’t vote in 1968 because I was pissed at Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, reading this article made me ashamed.
I think that it is important to remember that this law suit, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, was brought by Shelby County (duh! it is in the title, Steve). This is the same Shelby County that fought for a hundred years to keep black people from voting, hell! they fought for a hundred years to keep black people from using a white water fountain. To believe that everything is fine now, is to live in a world of fantasy.
(Oh, those KKK idiots above, that’s last week in a different Shelby County, Shelby County Tennessee.)
Syria
I remember a story – during our intervention, along with several NATO allies, in Bosnia and Herzegovina – about United States Army Forward Operating Base Cobra. This was in 1995 or so, after the majority of the fighting was over. FOB Cobra – if I may be so familiar – was the biggest American base around and it was surrounded by a plethora of concertina wire backed up by as many motion detectors as the supplier could talk the Army into. This was during the time when American soldiers going into town were required to wear helmets and body armor (other NATO troops wandered around in their uniforms with berets or other soft headgear).
Anyway, there was a farm nearby and the farmer had two teenage sons. They spent their teenage summer seeing how close they could get to FOB Cobra proper. When the teenagers were spotted by an motion detector, the lights would come on and sirens would go off. The base would go to Defcon One – or its local equivalent – with the entire base coming up to full attack defense status: all defensive positions were manned, the helicopter gunships were scrambled, and everybody was up and at their battle stations.
The thing is that after the first couple of attacks, everybody knew it was the kids but FOB Cobra couldn’t help itself. Every time the motion detectors were tripped, it reflexively reacted. Not in relation to a threat, everybody knew it wasn’t a threat, sort of like a reflexive knee jerk. I feel the same way about the United States and somebody else’s war. Somehow, we have to intervene. We just can not help ourselves. Obama ran on a platform of staying out of stupid wars like Iraq, and, he knows better, but he can’t help himself. Our body politic won’t let him.