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Monthly Archives: April 2010

The Devil’s In the Demographics

“Now it’s just me, all alone, with minorities.  What will the minorities do with me?  I’m sure that’s what’s on all their minds.  I have to make myself seem useful to them or they will surely not let me live.” – Eric Cartman

Of all the pixels that have been killed and all the ink that has been spilled over Arizona’s Brown People Intimidation Act of 2010, the only person who’s come close to the real guts of the matter is, of all people, John McCain.  In a meandering, often incoherent interview with an extremely sympathetic Greta Van Susteren, the increasingly senile Arizona senator got right to the heart of things when he said:

So we need the National Guard there. We need 3,000 additional Border Patrol. We have to use surveillance techniques. We have to build the physical wall.

There it is, the often unstated dream of so many on the right, the true motivation for Arizona’s recent “immigration” law: a militarily sealed border.

First, let’s dispense with the fantastic notion that the border can be physically controlled.  It can’t.  It’s too long and too inhospitable and if we sunk billions and billions into building some kind of a wall, and billions and billions more into guarding it, it too would quickly be subverted.  Mexico is our third largest trading partner, behind only Canada and China, do you want to start subjecting every truck, bus and car to Israeli style inspections?  We export over one hundred billion dollars worth of goods to Mexico every year, what would such a thing do to our economy?  The notion of controlling the border so that only “approved” crossings take place is a fantasy.

Obviously, this is not the first time that right wing fantasies have collided head on with reality.  But since it is a fantasy, it’s worth asking where it comes from.  What motivates this fevered day dream of No More Mexicans?

The answer is demographic fear.  It’s no coincidence that Arizona passed this law just a few weeks after news broke that 2010 is likely to be the first year in American history (well, since the early eighteenth century or so) that the number of minorities born is greater than the number of whites born.  The news that the United States is likely to be a minority-majority (i.e. no one ethnic group is over 50% of the total) country by 2050 couldn’t have been comforting either.  Combine that with the fact that the Republican Party is the party of white people and you have Arizona’s “kick them all out” law, passed and signed by Republicans.

If modern right wing thought is indeed, as William F. Buckley famously wrote, standing “athwart history, yelling Stop”, then this is it in its purest form.  It’s an effort to artificially lessen one segment of the population that has been historically and naturally growing.  That is a damning charge, especially since it’s but a hop, skip and a jump away from even more odious things like “ethnic cleansing”.  But there really isn’t any other motivation that fits the facts.

The bill the Arizona Legislature passed uses law enforcement, the legally physical force of the government, to inspect people and toss out some of them.  No other infraction is required.  (“Ma’am, could you put your arm up against this color wheel?”)  Not only is this a gross violation of what’s left of the Fourth Amendment, but given the racial realities of immigration, legal and otherwise, it amounts to an ethnic sifting of the general population.  There’s no other honest way to describe it.

There is a silver lining to all this, though it will come as cold comfort to anyone who has their life turned upside down by this law in the meantime: long term it won’t matter.  As long as there is work to be had here in the States, people from Mexico and points further south will continue to come here.  And as long as they keep doing that work the people most involved with them, from their employers to their friends to their barbers and mechanics, will look the other way.

Yell “Stop” as loud as you want, the rest of America, of every shade, will be too busy humping us into the multi-ethnic future to hear.

Aren’t We Forgetting that David Blaine Is the Real Enemy?

“So you mean to tell me that even though people fight and argue over different religions, you guys are all actually friends?” – Stan Marsh
“More than friends, young boy, we are Super Best Friends, with the desire to fight for justice.” – Mohammed

There was a minor kerfuffle last week when, for the second time in four years, South Park tried to show an image of the prophet Mohammed.  Two weeks ago, they set up the whole thing with the first installment of a two part episode.  In the first part, they animated Mohammed but he was censored out.  During the second part, not only was the image of Mohammed censored, but his name was bleeped out the way words like cock, cunt and fuck normally would be.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone were trying to make a point about intimidation and the inherent messiness that comes with censorship.  Comedy Central, and its owner Viacom, ended up making their point for them, though in a meta way they apparently didn’t intend:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn’t mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we’ll see what happens to it.

What makes this whole situation funnier in an even more meta way is that in the summer of 2001, South Park had an episode in which Mohammed was a minor character:

As the image above clearly demonstrates, all that happens when you begin compromising fundamental principles like free speech is convoluted stupidity.  Sadly, there’s been a lot of that going around the last ten years or so, witness the Bush and Obama Administrations’ convoluted legal evasions for indefinite imprisonment.  Warrantless wiretapping and torture spring to mind as well.  Once you begin flouting the foundational ideas our government and society are supposed to respect, all kinds of practical absurdities begin to pop up.

In this case, we have the intellectual incoherence and utter ridiculousness of censoring an image of Mohammed while the very same show, network, and corporate owners are depicting him around the clock on DVD.  Unless they’ve released an alternate version of Season 5 that pulled the “Super Best Friends” episode, Viacom and Comedy Central are blaspheming Islam every second of every hour of every day.

Where’s the logical justification for that?  Where’s the standard you’re claiming to uphold?  The global Muslim population has plenty of legitimate reasons to be pissed off at America.  From our blind support of Israel’s worsening treatment of the Palestinians, to our invasion of two separate Muslim majority countries, to our inhumane and illogical detention and torture policies, we have done a lot of things wrong the last few years.  Censoring a cartoon known for its offensiveness to delicate sensibilities just confirms those mistakes.  After all, if we ignore our principles abroad, then we can’t very well act surprised when other people don’t respect them either.

This is like five men beating a sixth to a pulp, but then one of the five calls the victim a name and the other four act like the name calling, not the beating, was the real problem all along.  Children can see how stupid that is (sticks and stones and all that).  Cartoons aren’t the real problem, war, occupation and torture are the real problems, and if we had our house in order on those, then no one would care in the least about cartoons.  But getting rid of those is a hell of a lot harder than bleeping the last minute or two of a television program.

This was not the first time Parker and Stone have tried to show Mohammed since Bush the Younger declared war on a billion people.  They ran into the same chickenshit censorship wall back in 2006.  That time they had Mohammed in a fake episode of Family Guy, and all he did was appear on screen and hand a football helmet with a salmon on it to Peter Griffin.  It was blacked out.  Since they’re signed for three more seasons, one suspects that this will not be the last time South Park attempts to show Mohammed.  It will be a telling sign of whether or not some semblance of sanity has returned to the world when Trey Parker and Matt Stone come back to this in 2012 or 2013.

Here’s hoping that when that happens, they’re allowed to show Mohammed again.

Victory for Me, None for Thee

“Um, uh, what town did we just crush?” – Krusty the Klown
“Shelbyville.” – Principal Skinner
[Enthusiastic Cheers] – Everyone

In a day when a major party Senate candidate advocates a return to a barter economy and a state legislature hears serious testimony from a woman who believes the government implanted a microchip in her body, the bar has been set very high for outright denial of reality.  Sentiments like these used to be confined to the less respectable tabloids and the occasional syndicated conspiracy show.  Now they’ve gone mainstream.  But they all fall short of the lunacy of Iraq War revisionism.

Not that any was needed, or that those inclined to think things turned out alright between the rivers will listen, but further proof of this folly recently appeared in the obscure pages of The New York Review of Books in the form of a damning article about the continued marginalization of Iraq’s massive refugee population.  That refugees are rarely a part of the discussion is nothing new.  Like most of the post-invasion problems, this one was completely ignored by the geniuses who started the war.  Once the war was going, the Bush Administration actively ignored it because the mere existence of refugees clashed with their officially rosy view of the war.  And now that it’s winding down, those same people are an unpleasant reminder of how out of hand things got.

Now that the wrongs have been done, the only decent thing left is to make sure that they are not compounded. As much as the Bush Administration failed to plan for post-invasion Iraq, the Obama Administration must plan for post-withdrawal Iraq, and that includes helping the people whose homes and lives we destroyed.  It does not seem to be happening, and this does no augur well:

With US government resources stretched by the economic crisis and the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has provided only a fraction of the $2 billion in refugee aid promised to host governments in the Middle East. Iraq itself has been far less generous, despite sizable revenues from oil. For their part, humanitarian groups worry that when US troops begin to go home this summer, there will be even less reason to devote political capital to helping refugees. What was once a middle-class society without democracy may, for some time to come, be a democracy without a middle class. For talented Iraqis now scattered around the world, this would amount to a double betrayal: abandoned in their own country by the American and other forces that were supposed to give them a central place in a new Iraq, they now risk being abandoned again outside it.

$2 billion?  That’s it?  $2 billion is a rounding error on the War Department’s budget.  It is a number so pitifully small that there needn’t even be a debate about it.  And if Obama is serious about improving America’s image, this would be an extremely cheap way to buy a motherlode of global good will.

But there is no glory in respecting the dispossessed; there is no rah-rah in comforting those we wronged.  So we’ll abandon them to the wind, and should the subject ever come up in diplomatic conversation, we’ll throw our weight around and make it disappear.  However little attention it gets, it is still real.  Lives destroyed by us are as destroyed as those by anyone else.

Acknowledging them, it’s – literally – the least we can do.

Fragility

“Rainy day!  There’s never going to be a rainy day, Marge!  There’s not a cloud in the Simpson sky!” – Homer Simpson

There is no doubt that the eruption of Mt. Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland is something of a freak occurrence.  After all, commercial air travel is almost one hundred years old and this is the first time (that I know of) that a volcano has shut down air traffic over an entire continent.  It’s affected everyone from world leaders on down, but there doesn’t seem to be much that to be done about it, or even to prevent it from happening again.  There is nothing that we tiny humans can do except knuckle under and wait for it to end.

Once it does end the whole thing will be forgotten.  People directly affected will have a story to tell, and everyone else will go “oh yeah” when they see this during “year in review” season in December.  But once the silicates settle, there is a lesson that can be taken from this incident.

The systems upon which our relatively cushy modern lives are based are extremely fragile.  They’re designed to operate within a very narrow range of conditions, outside of those they break down almost instantly.  In this case, our airplanes are not designed to deal with elevated levels of volcanic ash.  But anyone who has ever lost power because of a storm has experienced the same thing on a smaller scale.  The electrical grid isn’t made to withstand all storm damage.  When failures inevitably occur all those devices and gadgets, from refrigerators to computers to light bulbs, are rendered instantly useless.  Events beyond anyone’s control break the system.

The same fragility that sees your power go out in a storm and grounds European air travel is built into everything else.  The availability of clean water is heavily dependent on relatively predictable precipitation patterns.  Modern agriculture depends on the easy availability of both fertilizers and fossil fuels, and the availability of those is in turn dependent on an enormous amount of other assumptions, from the ease and low cost of transport to the continued availability of raw materials.  Even a small alteration in one of them can cause massive disruptions in others.

Eyjafjallajökull has amply demonstrated how quickly one of those fundamental assumptions can change.  In this case, air travel is predicated on a sky that contains very little rock matter, if that number is increased by just a few parts per million, global chaos ensues.  Now remind yourself that global warming can easily cause larger and longer lasting changes in many more of our fundamental assumptions than some piffling Icelandic volcano.  This is what environmental disruptions do to the systems upon which our lives and lifestyles depend, only global warming’s will last a hell of a lot longer.  Just sayin’.

Enemy of My Enemy

“Why would you help us?” – Professor Chaos

The May issue of The American Conservative has a fascinating set of short essays by authors from across the ideological spectrum.  The topic is whether or not it is possible for people opposed to America’s militaristic foreign policy to bridge the traditional liberal-conservative gap.  There are, after all, plenty of – ahem – paleo-conservatives who opposed the Iraq War on realist grounds.  Shouldn’t they be able to join forces with all the liberals and progressives who also opposed the war?  And could such an alliance have long term anti-war influence on American policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere?

The collection has two basic themes: a) the anti-war conservatives don’t think the anti-war liberals can hold their noses on non-war issues long enough to form an alliance, and b) the anti-war liberals don’t think there are enough anti-war conservatives to make it worth their while to do so.  Sadly, both are probably correct, which is why most of the entries are rather pessimistic.

The relatively small number of anti-war right wingers is only part of the problem, however.  In theory, you’d only need a few prominent anti-war Reds to give the larger number of anti-war Blues the kind of political cover they’d need to dramatically increase the clout of the anti-war movement.  The bipartisan leverage that makes the school papers swoon means that an anti-war op-ed in the Washington Times is worth ten in the New York Times.  After all, any serious candidate for President or Congress spouting a strong anti-war message is almost certainly going to come from the left (for obvious reasons).  So you can get away with fewer numbers of conservative supporters on issues of anti-imperialism because their job is bipartisan cover, not numerically significant support.

The problem, recently re-demonstrated by David Frum’s firing from the American Enterprise Institute, is that there is no room for deviation of any kind in the establishment right.  If the general FOX-CNN-MSNBC perception of politics was that there was a significant anti-war minority in the Red camp, that would allow some kind of a meaningful cross-partisan partnership against foreign military adventurism.  But the general political perception is that all Republicans are pro-war all the time, and that shows no signs of changing.

Ron Paul has been effectively pigeonholed, and Frum’s firing shows just how far the Red elite will go to protect their ideological purity.  All Frum did was call a massive legislative defeat a massive legislative defeat.  His sin was refusing to call it victory, and for that minor deviation he was excommunicated.  Imagine what would happen to a hypothetical someone who committed the far graver heresy of calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

What we have here is another example of the transformation of the Republican Party from an institution that welcomed foreign policy realists into one where batshit crazy neo-con orthodoxy reigns supreme and unchallenged.  Anti-war conservatives exist, they’re real and they have driver’s licenses and everything; but as long as they’re non-persons on FOX News, talk radio, and publications like National Review their political influence amounts to zero.  Until the prominent institutions of the right are less than 100% pro-war, there is no incentive for anti-war lefties to anger some of their own by bridging the gap.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon.  The major battle lines for 2010 have already been drawn, and Afghanistan (or foreign policy more generally) isn’t one of them.  And whatever happens in November, we’re now only about a year away from the first Red presidential debates.  (The first one for the 2008 cycle was on 3 May 2007.)  Ron Paul may be on that stage next spring, but he has about as much chance at the nomination as Mr. Snuffleupagus.  On the Blue side of the ledger, there is no credible anti-Obama anti-war threat.  Indeed, Obama himself was the most anti-war of the serious Blue contenders in 2008.

In other words, there still isn’t anywhere for the anti-war movement to go.  There are no cracks in the Red neo-con monolith, and, no matter what he does in Afghanistan, Obama is too important to the Blues on other issues to face any kind of serious left-wing challenge.  Neither of those two things seems likely to change any time soon.  If and when one does, then we might have something.

The Right to Remain Connected

“Randy, where will you go?” – Gerald Broflovski
“We’re gonna head west, there’s a rumor going around there might be some internet out there.” – Randy Marsh

Someone, I think it was Atrios but I’m not sure, once pointed out that if you had told US Senators in 1992 that the internet would let every twelve-year-old in the country have unlimited porn, we never would’ve gotten the internet we know today.  That’s a good thing to keep in mind when pondering the future of the internet, especially when you compare the innovative and freewheeling nature of http to the stultified mediums of print, radio, and television.

Last month the BBC conducted a poll that found, unsurprisingly, that a large majority of people worldwide see internet access as a fundamental right.  This is a vital attitude as we careen toward and ever more on-line society.  Here in 2010 it’s still possible, if you so desire, to file your taxes, do your banking, find a restaurant, get directions, etcetera without using electronics.  It’s less convenient and takes more time, but it’s still possible.  That may not be the case twenty or even ten years from now.  Sooner or later, a person’s ability to interact with the systems that keep society running will become totally dependent on internet access.

What we have in today’s internet is something that is open and easily accessible, but not yet genuinely vital to a person’s existence (politically, socially, financially).  What we need to demand is that it remains open and accessible as it becomes a necessity.  This is why that BBC poll is so encouraging, a widespread belief that internet access is a right is a powerful force in keeping the internet open and accessible.

Unsurprisingly, the general public has no understanding of just how fragile the internet as its come to be really is.  As with everything on-line, there are both legal/social issues and technical ones.  Whenever I try to explain to a non-technical person that the internet is held together with string, glue, and good intentions their eyes glaze over.  It’s certainly possible that I’m just a lousy conversationalist, but things like bandwidth throttling and the IPv4 shortage seem to have a natural narcoleptic effect.  The idea that one part of the internet couldn’t talk to another just doesn’t strike your average person as all that important, but it’s the fundamental principal upon which the internet operates.

Public misunderstanding of basic infrastructure isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.  Plenty of people think water just comes from faucets and fixtures; they’re mostly ignorant of the enormous amount of work necessary to engineer, build, and maintain the systems that get clean drinking water into their homes.  But water,* power and other basic utilities are relatively well established as concepts, the internet is in a far more juvenile state of development, and it’s end state is far from certain.

That BBC poll is, of course, at odds with the idiotic internet law that passed the British Parliament last week.  Australia is going all out with self censorship.  Here in America a federal court ruled that the FCC currently lacks the authority to force basic net neutrality standards on ISPs.  In each of these things we see the grubby fingers of big money and/or big government squeezing the internet into something less open, less accessible.  Those are worrisome developments, hopefully they’re not the start of a trend.  If internet access is to be a fundamental right, it ought to be one worth having.

*Though water scarcity is a serious problem, even in potentially unsustainable places like Phoenix and Las Vegas they’re not going to run out of water for drinking and cooking.  Golf courses and desert agriculture, on the other hand, probably won’t last.

The Final Argument of Kings

“Now, at the risk of being unpopular, this reporter places the blame for all of this squarely on you, the viewers.” – Kent Brockman

The arguments over the video of American helicopter pilots killing civilians in Baghdad in 2007 are just beginning.  First and foremost, credit needs to go to the much beleaguered Wikileaks for publishing the video, and to Reuters for doggedly pursuing it these last three years.  We wouldn’t be having this conversation without them.  And this is a conversation that it’s absolutely vital we have, because it provides a rare window for all the homebound Americans, in whose name these wars are fought, to see what modern war really means.

The back and forth over whether this was a justifiable act of national policy, or a screw up by overeager troops, or a war crime, or a mistake, or any other label one wishes to append to it is irrelevant.  The specifics of this incident do not matter.  Civilians whose deaths are not investigated, whose final moments never make it to YouTube, aren’t any less dead than those in this video.  Nor are their survivors any less justified to blame us.  What’s important here is that we see the events of this video as the inevitable result of the kind of policies we as a nation have chosen to pursue.

Just this week, NATO admitted that it accidentally killed five civilians, including three women, two of whom were pregnant (where are the anti-choice nuts screaming about these abortions, I wonder?).  As if that weren’t bad enough, they immediately tried to cover it up (with temporary success).  A few more Afghan civilians died yesterday, with no end in sight.

General Stanley McChrystal, commander in Afghanistan, recently admitted that not a single fatal incident of violence at roadblocks or checkpoints had been necessary:

We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn’t mean I’m criticizing the people who are executing. I’m just giving you perspective. We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.

McChrystal’s not saying that those deaths weren’t justified or within the rules of war, all he’s saying is that those deaths – every single one since he’s been in command – have turned out to be mistakes.

We can have an argument over whether or not those mistakes are acceptable in the service of greater goals.  But there are too many bodies for us to pretend that these sorts of killings are aberrations.  The arguments we need to have cannot be honestly held until we acknowledge the inevitable toll from our use of force.  Ultimately, those civilians were killed by and for the American people, and we must acknowledge the consequences of our choices.

Nothing in the helicopter video is extraordinary; and the mere fact that people react with outrage or surprise demonstrates just how far divorced from reality our war debates are.  Denouncing the soldiers’ laughter, or criticizing the title given to it by Wikileaks, are quibbles that should not become the main focus of the discussion.  This is simply what America’s wars look like in the 21st century.  This is what it looks like in Iraq, this is what it looks like in Afghanistan.  This is what it would look like in Iran, Yemen, Pakistan or anywhere else.

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