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Thursday, September 13, 2001
And maybe just a certain 33% are the only ones disconnected 
| | Just saw a poll on ABC that said something like 67% of the country supports military action, even if it involves large American casualties. |
| | Looks like the story is working. |
But Dubya is no Bill Gates
| | Dave: The U.S. is the Microsoft of the World. I believe that's a very deep statement. |
Other voices
| | Tonight listening to NPR I was glad to hear Daniel Shorr observe the extreme disconnect between the federal government's rhetoric of war and the citizenry's rhetoric of caring. |
| | I've listened to Rudy Guilliani exert calm, caring, extraordinarily effective leadership as Mayor of New York. Not once have I heard him call for, or even use, the term "war." Okay, maybe I've missed it. But it's clearly not what he's after, even though war has been declared in response to what happened to his city. |
| | Right now Donald Rumsfeld, our Defense Secretary, is on TV talking about "attacking terrorism at its source." Earlier on the radio I heard a caller talking about his friend the Army colonel, who said if we're going to go to war, we need to be ready to fight a global Viet Cong, on a worldwide basis. |
| | In the Vietnam War we made the mistake of thinking that we were fighting "Hanoi" and Ho Chi Minh personally. We weren't. We were fighting a resolute and committed grass roots movement. |
| | What we call "terrorism" isn't just cells of evil people "harbored" in a few bad countries. It's the insane end of widespread disapproval in other parts of the world of various American policies and actions over the years. |
| | The Taliban in Afghanistan, which harbors Osama Bin Laden, is supported by the Pakistani government, which is also somewhat friendly to the U.S., yet in constant threat of civil war between its own moderate leadership and its own Taliban-like movement. Are we ready to risk whapping that hornet's nest with a baseball bat? |
| | As we get ready for World War III, let's pause to read what W. H. Auden wrote at the dawn of World War II. It is titled, simply, "September 1, 1939." It ends this way: |
| | All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. |
| | Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
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| | I thank NPR for that one as well. What a terrific job they are doing. If you listen, please send money to your local station. |
Let's hope she's alone in her handbasket
| | I hadn't visited the National Review site yet, maybe because I kinda knew what I'd be reading there. I had no idea Ann Coulter, who I had read before and pegged as a simply thoughtful voice from The Right, had clearly gone off the deep end after losing her friend, CNN's Barbara Olson, whose calm work with a cell phone on board the Pentagon-bound suicide jet was a heroic high mark on Tuesday. Here's what Coulter says in a piece titled "This Is War": |
| | We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war. |
| | Not a whole lot different than what those fatal flights' final pilots also had in mind. |
| | O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. |
Sad difference
| | I don't dislike President Bush. I do, however, regret that the man cannot, as Johnny Carson once said of a lesser comic, "improvise a fart at a bean party." Without a script, he's lost, able only to churn and rechurn some carefully rehearsed talking points. |
| | This morning after one of his stiff speeches "reassuring" the country of its government's resolve, the TV network switched to a live address by George Bush the Elder. While the old man was known to twist his syntax from time to time, his intelligence and ease with the abundant information in his mind were manifest in his speech, his command of his subjects, his ability to make sense of complex subjects. |
| | Dubya can't do it. Worries me. |
| | Right now Bill Clinton is speaking off the cuff to cameras, making more sense than Dubya has made in the last three years. |
W-Day?
| | So what do we call Tuesday, September 11, 2001? [Not Monday, as I first wrote.... thanks for the correction, everybody.] The headline above works for me. Stands for the World Trade Center and Dubya Bush at the same time. |
| | Only one problem: letter-hyphenated days were given to victorious ends of wars, not painful beginnings. Still. We need a name for it. |
What tale are we spinning?
| | Many years ago, when I worked in academic parapsychology (not the wacky tabloid sort) in a small research facility loosely connected to Duke University, I was in the company of some very bright and challenging people who made a habit of asking the kinds of questions that attract more thought than answers. One of those people was my friend Dr. Jerry Solfvin. One day we were working together ripping a hole in the ceiling of a house when Jerry asked, out of the blue, "what is the fundamental unit of consciousness?" |
| | Later I started looking at why — because I certainly hadn't given much thought to the question before I had heard it. That answer came to me as unexpectedly as the question had come to Jerry. |
| | After studying the subject, I came to understand that, beyond satisfying our bodily appetites, stories are primarily what attract and maintain human interest. Whether it's a course, a drive, a job, a fight, a game, a love affair, or whatever — the elements of a story are always there. Those elements are: |
| | - A protagonist — some person, group or easily personified cause with whom we identify
- A problem or conflict that holds our interest
- Movement toward a resolution
|
| | No story starts with "happily ever after." That's when the story ends. What matters is the problem is at the heart of every story. That's what makes us keep staring at the tube, turning the pages, showing up for a date, a class or a game. Soon as the home team is up by 40 points, the new problem is how to get out of the parking lot ahead of the crowd. "The journey is the reward," Steve Jobs famously says. But we have to care about who's taking the journey and know it's going somewhere. |
| | Now to the matter at hand. In the piece cited below, written as as the Gulf War was being planned, George Lakoff wrote about the "fairy tale" at the heart of the stories that often bring us to war: |
| | The Fairy Tale of the Just War |
| | Cast of characters: A villain, a victim, and a hero. The victim and the hero may be the same person. |
| | The scenario: A crime is committed by the villain against an innocent victim (typically an assault, theft, or kidnapping). The offense occurs due to an imbalance of power and creates a moral imbalance. The hero either gathers helpers or decides to go it alone. The hero makes sacrifices; he undergoes difficulties, typically making an arduous heroic journey, sometimes across the sea to a treacherous terrain. The villain is inherently evil, perhaps even a monster, and thus reasoning with him is out of the question. The hero is left with no choice but to engage the villain in battle. The hero defeats the villain and rescues the victim. The moral balance is restored. Victory is achieved. The hero, who always acts honorably, has proved his manhood and achieved glory. The sacrifice was worthwhile. The hero receives acclaim, along with the gratitude of the victim and the community. |
| | The fairy tale has an asymmetry built into it. The hero is moral and courageous, while the villain is amoral and vicious. The hero is rational, but though the villain may be cunning and calculating, he cannot be reasoned with. Heroes thus cannot negotiate with villains; they must defeat them. The enemy-as-demon metaphor arises as a consequence of the fact that we understand what a just war is in terms of this fairy tale. |
| | The most natural way to justify a war on moral grounds is to fit this fairy tale structure to a given situation. This is done by metaphorical definition, that is, by answering the questions: Who is the victim? Who is the villain? Who is the hero? What is the crime? What counts as victory? Each set of answers provides a different filled-out scenario. |
| | As the gulf crisis developed, President Bush tried to justify going to war by the use of such a scenario. At first, he couldn't get his story straight. What happened was that he was using two different sets of metaphorical definitions, which resulted in two different scenarios: |
| | The Self-Defense Scenario: Iraq is villain, the US is hero, the US and other industrialized nations are victims, the crime is a death threat, that is, a threat to economic health. |
| | The Rescue Scenario: Iraq is villain, the US is hero, Kuwait is victim, the crime is kidnap and rape. The American people could not accept the Self-Defense scenario, since it amounted to trading lives for oil. The day after a national poll that asked Americans what they would be willing to go to war for, the administration settled on the Rescue Scenario, which was readily embraced by the public, the media, and Congress as providing moral justification for going to war. |
| | I am not saying that the attacks on New York and Washington were fairy tales. I am saying that Attack on America headlines fit the model, and that our government right now is constructing, along the natural lines of human interest, a compelling story. In this story, unlike earlier ones, including the Gulf War, we will be asked to trade lives for lives. George Bush the Elder was not in a position to risk large numbers of American lives. Nor was President Clinton at any time during his eight years as Commander in Chief. George W. Bush is in exactly that position. He was put there by Monday's events. |
| | Whether or not he chooses to commit American ground troops to action in Afghanistan, the eye-for-eye mathematics of revenge just gave President Bush permission to commit thousands of American troops to real combat on the ground. And if he can get his story straight, thousands will gladly do their duty. And, as good Americans who feel wronged by our new enemy — Terrorism with a capital T — we will support the effort. |
| | Again, he may not choose to take those steps, but he is clearly in position to do so, as long as he can credibly say "America is angry." |
| | But let's think first. Let's open our hearts and minds. Let's look at the compassion of countless Arabs throughout the world for our suffering. Let's look at the humanity perverted by hatred of the Other, and the casting of the Other as villian, no matter what side they are on. |
| | For the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, America was the Other, the villian. What was their story? Who else is following that story, and believes in it, for whatever reason? Why? What can we do to change that story? |
| | Because the actions we take in the next few weeks or months may achieve some Strategic Objective in the story we tell ourselves. But it may also make us more the villian for countless Others who are anything but. |
Wisdom of many vintages
| | Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure. — Tacitus (Thanks to Jim Sterne for the quote.) |
Nowhere everywhere
| | Still one friend not accounted for. |
| | Meanwhile, this Time photo essay shows how print, even in pixels, carries Art better than TV. (Thanks to Dave for the link.) Newsweek's essay starts here. Larger pictures are also viewable starting on the main page, but they appear to be served up without a URL. The New York Times has an amazing set of pictures as well (go to the bottom of the home page), but nothing with a unique URL. All these essays are from multiple sources. One source is Agence France-Presse, which has a photo essay here. Perhaps the most moving photo is this one. |
| | Back during the Vietnam war, the AFP was often relied upon as a relatively propaganda-free international source of news. |
| | And between the last paragraph and this one, my friend's voice answered the phone with a message that began "I'm all right..." Such a relief. |
| | Yet so many others are dead. And the world will not be the same. |
| | So: how can we make it better? |
Makes no Xsense
| | We were just off the Net for several hours. Again the culprit was the XRouter Aero, from Xsense. It's a combination router, hub and wireless base station. The router in this thing has dropped out of service twice since I bought it, restored only by disconnecting the power and going through an annoying reset routine. |
| | The last time I called, tech support consisted of an answer machine with an outbound message promising to get back "within 48 hours," followed by nothing. This time I didn't bother. |
| | I will bother, however, to recommend against buying the product. The price is right: just $279. But the performance is wrong. You'll do better buying the components separately. |
Con trail? We'll find out.
| | There wasn't a cloud in the sky yesterday, for the second day in a row. Not even a wisp of cirrus. Why? No contrails. |
| | This isn't a small thing. We almost never talk about it, because we can hardly imagine doing without air travel (until two days ago); but jet aircraft flying at high altitudes cause lots of contrails, which often spread out to create large overcast areas. Many of the high altitude clouds you see may not resemble contrails, but that's because they've morphed from contrails into less obvious shapes. |
| | I've watched a few contrails here in Santa Barbara spread out to cover nearly the whole sky. And guess what that contributes to? Try global warming. Well, at least some folks think so. |
| | Wacko or not, the absence of commercial aviation in the U.S. is at least an invitation to all kinds of interesting science. When the current news trails off, don't be surprised to hear about some interesting discoveries made in the absence of airplanes. |
Dysconnections
| | Tonight on CBS I saw some Arab guy going on about retribution and killings and suffering on both sides and stuff like that, but in a not-very-coherent way. With this as a conversational set-up, Dan Rather invited his guest, an American expert of some sort, to help us understand what the guy had been talking about. Instead the guest went into the usual what-must-be-done to strike back at the Bad Guys. It was as if Rather and his guest were having two different conversations. |
| | Then I surfed through the zillion channels on our satellite system and lost count of all the "security experts" and other middle aged current and former bureaucrats, each running play-by-play scenarios for our inevitable "war" against terrorism, rogue states, Osama Bin Laden and other enemies real and imagined. I only saw two interviews with non-Israeli Middle Eastern talking heads, both of whom urged caution and sanity. (Rather in line with this piece in Salon.) |
| | It's interesting: when the networks stick to covering actual breaking events they can do some amazing work. But when it comes to shedding light on a subject no less important than going to war, they come off as propaganda instruments. |
| | Nowhere is this more obvious than in the disconnect between high-level talk about how "America is angry," while on the ground in New York all the talk is about how America is helpful. |
| | I grew up in the part of New Jersey that was basically New York with a different governor, and I've always considered myself a New Yawka at heart. And let me tell ya, what I've been seeing and hearing over the past two days makes me proud of My People, from the heroic police and fire professionals to the shopkeepers and other ordinary folks who have done everything they can to help each other out and nothing to complain about their condition, or even its cause. They've been getting a bum rap for generations, and now that they have a chance to show what good folks they are, they're coming through big time. |
| | Maybe the media are being selective in their coverage, or maybe I've missed it; but I have yet to see anybody pump their fist in the air and demand vengeance. |
| | Here's a challenge to President Bush: walk the streets of New York tomorrow and ask The People if they're ready to go to war over what happened to their city, their families, their friends and co-workers. |
| | Maybe I'm way off base, but I doubt Mr. Bush will get the same answer that he's getting from the security experts ready to go to war over the wrongs those people suffered. His mind might not change, but it might open up a bit. |
Just a thought
| | Maybe the new pre-flight security rap will advise passengers to turn on their cell phones. |
Brass tacks under the metaphorical tires
| | My sister, retired Navy commander and graduate of the Navy's War College in Newport, RI, attended a service at church in her new North Carolina home town last night. She describes the event as something of a Quaker meeting, in which one doesn't speak unless one can "improve on the silence." She reports: |
| | ...the first guy up was a good 'ole boy who said maybe this was God's vengeance for the Sodom of sin America had become and that the country needed to embrace Christian values again. |
| | He's entitled to his opinion but...nope. Rang ugly to me. "My way or the highway" stuff. God is weeping at what Man has wrought. True, God doesn't need Revelations with this evil loose, but... |
| | So I got up to speak. Turned around and saw....gulp...a full house. |
| | Don't remember just what I said, but much of it was around my comments to you here and on the phone... |
| | Afterwards, the new interim minister, a retired Navy Chaplain, came over to me outside and hugged me and asked if I would send him an email about my thoughts for him to use in preparing his sermon. So I forwarded him what I sent you. |
| | Then I thought of something else: |
| | We are hearing warfare metaphors everywhere. Attack, Ground Zero, etc. But they are more than metaphors - they are real. And so I want to share this: |
| | The aftermath of battle is horrendous. Be it the plains of the Ancient civilizations, the woods and fields of Gettysburg or a village in Bosnia, most poignant is the fading of the cacophony of battle into the individual voices of the wounded and dying. The women of Sparta heard it, Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, Whitman in the Civil War, Hemingway in WWI, Ernie Pyle in WWII, Dan Rather in Vietnam. |
| | They were highly skilled at telling the story, but no matter how hard they tried - even with TV, it was still just a story. Remote. Sad but...over. |
| | But yesterday, the voice of the fallen, the cry of the dying, the reach for a hand, was heard the world around. It reached out to mothers, fathers, children and spouses. |
| | And it came on a cell phone. |
| | Yesterday, the battlefield become boundary-less. |
| | Never again will the sound of battle fade away after the heat. |
| | I'm as proud of her out uniform as I was of her in it. |
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