3-D Blogger

September 15 Elections: Vote for Yassky as Comptroller

2009-09-06T01:23:02-04:00

David Yassky is running for NYC Comptroller.

September 15 will be election, and if you are like me, you're getting mighty sick not only of all the robo-calls, but the mounds of junk mail.

I think nowadays, like a lot of people voting, I pay more attention to email and Facebook than junkmail which aggravates me. So I pay attention to the Freelancer's Union, which says:

"Christine Quinn has been a strong ally for independent workers, championing our Unincorporated Business Tax proposal, which was just signed into law, and she will continue to fight for us to meet the needs of freelancers."

She's in the Murray Hill area.

In our area, a candidate who also supported reducing the harsh impact of the Unincorporated Business Tax on freelancers and home workers was David Yassky.

Says the Freelancers' Union:

"We’ve endorsed David Yassky for Comptroller for all that he has done—like tax reform—and all that he will do, like creating unemployment protection for freelancers."

The flyers are geting bigger and more colorful and glossy and more frantic about the "hate" in "negative campaigns" of the other guy (itself a kind of hate) -- and the cost in designing and producing and mailing it would likely be enough to put some people without health insurance like me on at least some minimal plan...

But it rains, and pours, and it is hard to pick your way through it. I did save the magazine printed on newsprint that seemed to describe all the positions, but to be honest, like other people in the neighborhood, I'm going to be looking for the candidates who actually get up and out on the street to shake hands with people and hear their concerns about issues like health and housing, people like Brian Kavanagh who has always walked around the ward here the old-fashioned way unlike the ward-mailers who never seem to set foot up here.

I will be struggling to make sense of them all -- but I have a request for next time. Could you guys and gals quit it with the endorsements from the big guys? I don't care if Mayor Koch endorses you or if you are Cy Vance's son. I'd like to know what YOU stand for. Your endorsements might give you some luster, but they aren't helpful in really pulling the lever, to be honest.

And, could you *re-introduce yourself* when you make the robo calls *again* at the end of your call? Because all your robo calls coming into my voice mail, which is always turned on precisely for occasions like this, seem to get caught off at the first line, so I can't tell...hmm....why is someone who *sounds* like Hillary Clinton stumping for Cy Vance, Jr.? Am I hallucinating? Does Hillary still live here? Didn't she get a big job in Washington?

I think nowadays, like a lot of people voting, I pay more attention to email and Facebook than junkmail which aggravates me. So I pay attention to the Freelancer's Union, which says:

Christine Quinn has been a strong ally for independent workers, championing our Unincorporated Business Tax proposal, which was just signed into law, and she will continue to fight for us to meet the needs of freelancers.

She's in the Murray Hill area.

In our area, a candidate who also supported reducing the harsh impact of the Unincorporated Business Tax was David Yassky.

Says the Freelancers' Union:

We’ve endorsed David Yassky for Comptroller for all that he has done—like tax reform—and all that he will do, like creating unemployment protection for freelancers.

The Moral-Equivalence Squad at the Russian-American Summit

2009-07-08T19:38:39-04:00

This sort of article, even by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe -- which knows better -- was bound to appear during the Russian-American summit with the first black American president visiting the Kremlin. Just as the politically-incorrect Charles Wrangel quipped that Obama should stay out of visiting some New York City neighbourhoods, where even black policemen are mistaken for criminals and shot to death by their fellow policemen -- Obama should stay out of a lot of Moscow neighbourhoods where even just plain white Americans can face rampant hatred.

Criticism of American racism was a long-time staple of Soviet propaganda, and the existence of both slavery and its after-effects in racist policies were often duplicitously used by the Soviets to distract from their own crimes against humanity on their own territory.

It seems as a consequence of that very effective propaganda, especially as imbibed more uncritically by the Internet generation, liberal intelligentsia in both America and Russia today still see the American legacy of slavery and racism as "worse" than anything that ever occurred in the Soviet Union. I think this bears some nuanced context -- and a lot more history than it gets.

People who have a stake in trying to portray the U.S. as "worse" cite what in fact was highly selective propagandistic Soviet manipulation of figures like Paul Robeson as proof that the Soviets were "more tolerant". Or they cite the presence of a figure like Yelena Khanga in the Russian elite of today as proof that Russians are "more" progressive and tolerant on race.

They aren't. And the Soviet legacy is abysmal, regarding the minorities and non-Russian ethnic groups on Soviet territory as well as those of Africa descent.

The alarming increase in racist murders in Russia indicated by the research of Sova and other human rights monitors is part of the story that lets us know that all is not well with the issue of race in Russia today.

But it's also worth looking at the two countries over a longer period of time.

Russian serfdom was an institution in its way similar to slavery -- and while formerly abolished roughly at the same time American slavery was abolished, persisted long after U.S. slavery as even during the Soviet era, peasants on collective farms had no domestic passports and were not free to move out of their farms at will.

But perhaps the more appropriate analogy to American mistreatment is to look at Soviet oppression of "the punished peoples" like Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans and others. Hundreds of thousands of these people were forcibly displaced under Stalin's nationalities policies, particularly when they fell under suspicion as supposed collaborators with the Nazis. Their populations were decimated as they were forced into cattle cars, with many suffocating or dying of disease along the way, or after they arrived to be forcibly resettled in bleak and unprovisioned collective farms. The parallel is something like the U.S. internment of the Japanese during World War II only with far more brutality.

Aside from those forced displacement tactics, of course the Soviet "small peoples" as they are called in Russian, i.e. minorities have suffered all kinds of other forms of racism that have forced disappearance or assimilation or second-class status.

The wars that the Soviets -- and later Russians -- have waged on their "nationalities" such as the Chechens have been attributed to racism by many activists who try to work with these awful situations -- and the point has some merit. When you have such an enormous population of clear non-combatants -- Chechen women, children and elderly men -- winding up massacred and disappeared during what are supposed to be pinpointed anti-terrorist operations, you have to ask about parallel issues of racism.

Moral equivalence debates are usually not so helpful in understanding developments in either America or Russia; it's better if both sides appeal to universal human rights and live by universal values rather than seeking to justify their own bad deeds by exigencies of parallelism. They are not equivalent countries in terms of their history or societies or forms of government or economies. Still, as long-time enemies and as large multi-ethnic states, they do often get compared.

Usually what I do with these sorts of inevitably long and contentious moral equivalence debates that rage around Russia and America is I wait for them to die down after an hour or two and then I ask quietly: OK, but in which direction is the migration going between the two countries? Is it going away from that place where everything has historically been "worse" and is supposedly "worse" today...or?

And the answer is: emigration continues to flow out of Russia to the United States; it does not go in the opposite direction, with few exceptions.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews emigrated to the United States in part because they faced discrimination in their own society. Today, Russian Jews continue to emigrate to the U.S., as do artists and intellectuals, and there are increasing numbers of both Russians leaving the former Soviet republics because they cannot find a place in Russia or Central Asians and Caucasians leaving Russia because they face discrimination.

My Encounter With Frank Zappa

2009-04-14T02:34:13-04:00

Weasels Ripped My Flesh cover by Neon Park. 1970.

It was a curious encounter indeed -- and a memorable one, and was strange and directly appealing, the way everything about Frank Zappa had been strange and directly appealing from the beginning.

I first saw Frank Zappa's odd albums in the record store when I was 13 and 14, in the old days, when they sold big 33 1/3 RPM vinyl records in stores, in big cardboard jackets with album art. Weasels Ripped My Flesh was one album with a creepy parody of a 1950s sort of commercial on the cover. There were albums Zappa produced as well like Capt. Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Wild Man Fischer.

Somehow, I recall an album, or perhaps it was even the B side of a 45, in which it seemed to me Frank Zappa was singing (but it was more likely Wild Man Fischer, characterized as insane, even violently so at times) a very odd song, "Miss Jennifer Jones is lying dead on the porch doo doo doo doooh." The song was so arresting because its content was so unlike the sugary bubblegum stuff we usually heard on the radio (at least until I started listening to Spark Hicks' WCMF.fm), and unlike a lot of rhyming romantic 1960s Mo-town stuff, and was more like an opera, telling a story, albeit a very grotesque one of a bizarre murderous rampage. I didn't understand any of this -- the weasels, the dead Miss Jones -- but I felt it was some kind of fascinating parody that was saying something more deep and mysterious about our age than was usually being said.

Zappa had a strange fascination for us. There was the name of the band which seemed so clever -- "Mothers of Invention" (necessity being the mother of that). Then there were all the strange songs that were stories, not just banal lyrics. It's hard to explain now why the weirdness of those songs and the album art and the deconstruction of the 1950s and parody of the 1960s seems to penetrating -- yet it did. I never saw Zappa in any concert, I don't think the Mothers ever came touring close enough to where we lived, but I was interested to follow his career, read about him in Rolling Stone, and see that he even inspired the Czech dissident band Plastic People of the Universe -- in Eastern Europe, where perhaps the edginess of weird deconstructions were more keenly in demand, Zappa was very popular, maybe even more than at home in the U.S. In time, Zappa also came to fight the good fight against censorship of rock music which took the form of a battle over ratings of music (something I'm not sure I oppose, but given the context, it was good Zappa took on the fight).

Back in February 1990, Vaclav Havel, who had just been elected president by a now-free Czechoslovakia, came to the United States for a kind of victory tour, stopping to see the people who had supported him when he was a political prisoner. I worked for several organizations that had campaigned for him and for the rock musicians and we were all invited to a gala event at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, followed by a fancy reception. The event was very crowded, and I found myself standing next to one of the former political prisoners I knew from various travels who had now been made minister of something -- there was a lot of this free and exciting feeling in the early days of the Havel administration when everyone thought this playwright-turned-dissident-turned-politician was going to represent some kind of new form of governance. Remember, this was even before the Soviet coup defeat in 1991, and of course long before 9/11, it was a day when the wind was really in the sails of citizens' movements especially in Eastern Europe.

After the church ceremony and a lot of speeches, we made our way to some fancy venue -- I can't recall where, but only that the feeling of it was a lot like entering the ramp of a jet plane, upholstered walls winding up a ramp to a large room. With the crowds, and trying to get cabs or something, we were somewhat late.

I arrived to find myself in a kind of long receiving line that eventually snaked up to Havel himself to shake his hand. I saw writers like Bill Styron and his wife Rose and other celebrities, and various State Department officials and ambassadors. There was such a crowd that it seemed the food and wine were already dwindling.

As I inched along the walkway, suddenly, I looked straight into the dark brown eyes of someone who seemed terribly familiar -- and also very sad. It was one of those moments in life where it seemed as if you had always known the person forever, and you were just picking up the conversation where it had left off -- and that you knew *exactly* what they were thinking.

Looking at Frank Zappa sitting, dejected at a table, alone, with crumpled napkins and used champagne glasses around him, I instantly sensed what had happened -- somewhere, somebody, had talked Havel out of making Zappa special ambassador for culture and tourism. We had all marvelled when the appointment was first made, and like the other appointments of rock stars as interior ministers and such, it seemed part of that wacky, wild heady moment of the Havel reign that simply would not last -- reality would set in.

Without hesitation, I went straight over to Frank's table and sat right down. I nodded toward a prominent ambassador who was involved in Eastern Europe. "Did he...did they...?" I said, speaking in only half phrases, because we both knew what this was all about. He nodded sadly -- I could see that something had been said to him just recently, and he was still kind of in shock. I hung my head, feeling crushed, too. Certain cool things were just never meant to be. Having Frank Zappa as a cultural minister accepted at a state level with official protocol in the United States was something that obviously more than one fussy bureaucrat was not going to let go by.

I sat there in silent commiseration with Frank Zappa. I don't know what was more strange about this moment -- that I had instantly recognized him (his hair was different than I had recalled from the album pictures); that I had immediately understood what had happened just when it did; or that when I sat down, I was somehow accepted as a commiserator from a community of people that had found Weasels Ripped My Flesh compelling. I can't remember if I said anything more, I just patted his hand, letting him know that I cared. He seemed dazed, lost in thought -- and his dark eyes sad. Famous people kept pushing by the little table -- nobody seemed to give him a second glance. Eventually, nodding in sympathy again to Frank, I got up and got back in the line. I never saw him again.

Later, it turned out that in fact indeed, James Baker, who apparently had a longer-standing grudge with Zappa over an insult to his wife, apparently got some intermediaries (quite possibly the ambassador I had known) to talk to the Czechs and tell them that it was unacceptable to have "an American citizen" (well, this one, anyway) as an ambassador. Apparently Baker even said something like "You can do business with the United States of America. Or you can do business with Frank Zappa." Havel then must have made some sort of awkward explanation for why he chose the former -- but somehow he cooked up something later called "unofficial cultural attache" or something that of course wasn't any compensation -- the look on Frank's face let me know that.

My 9/11

2008-09-11T13:00:00-04:00

9/11 for me has always been a living embodiment of W.H. Auden's Musee de Beaux Arts -- my daughter marvelled at the way in which people kept walking their dogs and even getting a suntan along the banks of the East River even while the horror downtown was unfolding.

I found this year on the 7th anniversary that I simply didn't want to remember or memorialize at all. I will wait until another year to pull out envelopes of items related to 9/11 or watch TV. I didn't go to the memorial service at our church as I have done other years or go to the memorial garden made from cement and metal from the site in memory of our parishioners who died there as well as Fr. Mykal. I listened to my son recount his memories of that day, but the conversation was brief. At the time, he concluded, at the age of 9, "God is a terrorist." He's remained with that conclusion, which I think is intellectually and emotionally sound, given the circumstances, which is that God enabled terrorists to kill innocent people. I don't think God is a terrorist, I merely think He has given man free will, and these are the results. My son, who exercises a great deal of free will that then leads to his free will being removed for periods of time when he is grounded, hasn't grasped yet the larger context of free will -- but then, he's young.

So I wasn't even going to blog, and it was only Zha Ewry's pious musings that impelled in me that notion of civic duty that makes me write again, and again, and write too long, and write in a way that is not accessible to many people, but that's ok, write I must.

At the time, a week or so after that attacks, there was suddenly an alarm at the Empire State Building where I had just been for a meeting and where a colleague was still up on a higher floor -- there was concern that it was going to be "next". It was a bomb scare, and false alarm, but like a lot of the false alarms in those first days of copycatting, you couldn't be sure. I had already taken a hike down lots of stairways in that building because of a false alarm, and while it was reasonable to consider it was another one, I sent an email to the friend in case they were glued to the screen and not paying attention but the phone wasn't answering.

We went to my son's window and stared out at the Empire State Building, which could still be seen in those days before construction blocked it, and began the mental trajectory that all New Yorker's seem to instinctively know these days especially due to constant crane accidents -- if that building falls, will it fall on *me*? Am I in its pathway?

"Are they going to attack our house?" my daughter asked, worried. "No," I said. "They only attack symbols. They crashed into the World Trade Center because it's a symbol."

"But am *I* a symbol?" my little seven-year-old daughter asked, without hesitation.

Chilling, that a child would have to ask that question at such a tender age, not even quite understanding what "symbols" are -- taking it literally as "the thing you become because people make you one." We're not special -- all kinds of people have to live under armed conflict all over the world, but it hasn't been the norm in the U.S.

And I while I tried to reassure my daughter at the time, I would have to conclude philosophically that yes, a little white American girl is a symbol. Just like a little Jewish girl in Israel is a symbol. And, some leftwingers will hasten to add, a little Palestinian girl is a symbol.

And here's where I say, "No." The little Palestinian girl is *not* a symbol, dehumanized, for Israel as a state, or Israeli armed forces or movements (if they existed) to attack *deliberately* as it is for Palestinians, both the armed movements and the mobilized civilizans. Israel is not a state funding suicide bombers as other states are; it is not sanctioning and excusing the deliberate attack on civilians; its citizens don't dance in the streets at another's misfortune, as Palestinians did after 9/11. If Israel has in fact been responsible for the deaths of innocents it is due to accident, disproportionate use of force, even larger policies like the settlements which one might conclude are responsible, but it is not the same kind of raw, murderous, deliberate hateful logic of symbolism that a suicide bomber engages in. There aren't any Israeli suicide bombers. If throughout history you can dredge up examples of a Jewish terrorist here or there, everyone has to concede that they are not the norm, and dwarfed by the numbers of Palestinians. There isn't a moral equivalence to the two sides when you look at the use of symbols. It's one-sided. And that's why the morality you develop around this can't be falsely "bilateral".

And that's why, on this day, I don't fetch up moral equivalence bromides and follow faddish activities like "The Day of Interdependence" trying to whip up more blame to distribute to the U.S. and other Western nations for its bad policies (the war in Iraq) -- as Zha Ewry does here, just to cite one of many examples. And maybe it's simply because Zha, who went to the exact same area I did on that fateful day, had a very different day...

Zha describes in vivid detail the rush around town to pick up children in the E. 20s, the people covered with white powder, the shock, the worry about friends on the upper floors, culminating in a happy scene somewhere uptown or in the suburbs in Zha's affluent life where there are just happy children playing on a playground, not children who ask if God is a terrorist, or if they are a symbol, and who continue to play with blocks, building up big towers, and knocking them down...

The E. 20s might seem an affluent neighbourhood of its own, after a fashion, but it isn't, as it happens to be all hospitals and public housing and people who have lived there in rent control for 50 years, and then the big complex formerly owned by MetLife sprawling down to the East River, which is filled with people in services that were settled there as a class after World War II -- for many returning servicemen. They are firemen, policemen, insurance adjustors -- outsiders don't realize that the Towers were not the center of world commerce with big guys like Soros or Trump sitting in them -- their offices are uptown -- rather, it the Towers were the back office to world commerce.

It happens that a lot of people in those service occupations are ethnic Irish or Italian or Spanish and tend to be Catholic. Interestingly, the Jesuits claim that of all groups vying for victim status around the event, they suffered the greatest losses, since they made roll calls of all those who perished, and so many had happened to graduate from their high schools. Of course, the tragedy knew no nationalities or creeds or races -- Muslims, Jews, and secular humanists were all burnt to a crisp by the homocidal suicide bombers without distinction.

A friend of mine in the building trade pointed out that the suicide pilots deliberately turned their planes sideways at the last minute so as to achieve the absolute maximum of destruction, something that acquired an even more special type of fanatical concentration than the fanatical concentration that they would have aready had as suicide bombers in the first place. Many extra people died -- and the buildings fell over -- precisely because of that chilling calculation to turn the planes rather than just slice through them. But we didn't know that was happening.

When the first plane hit, I had just exited the polls -- we had a local election that day -- and as I made my way home to pack my suitcase to take the train to Washington (an aborted trip, obviously), I saw a circle of people standing outside my doorway. My neighbour was holding up a cell phone, saying he was trying to talk to someone inside the tower, and the doorman was fiddling with a radio dial. Nobody seemed to be able to find out anything coherent, so I went upstairs and turned on the TV and watched the news about one plane hitting. Perhaps it's a tribute to our thick skin as New Yorkers or my own obliviousness, but I concluded that it was "just like February 1993" when the towers were bombed as I sat nursing a baby and watching out my window at the towers, which suddenly went dark. It was bad, but a localized sort of bad.

I sat down and tried to finish up a document but then suddenly there was an email from a friend in Congress, where I was scheduled to go and testify at a hearing. "We are evacuating. Congress is closed." I still didn't fully grasp the situation as I kept watching TV. I called my office manager and she said "The Pentagon has been hit," which is something that I hadn't gleaned from TV or radio or computer at that point because we were obsessed with the first -- and then the second planes. I told her to go home immediately, and raced toward the door -- while one or two towers being hit in New York might not ruffle me as a New Yorker who had seen them bombed before, the Pentagon being hit must mean that it was a war -- so my first thought was to get to the kids.

As I raced down the steps, I saw other parents who had arrived at exactly the same conclusion as I racing toward the schools as well. When I got to my daughter's school, the head of the PTA was in the hallway, quietly organizing the situation to avoid panic. On my way, I had seen people lining up already at bank ATMs and stores, and said I was concerned there could be some kind of shortages. There was also the awful situation that wives of firemen were also starting to show up and Monsignor decided to open up the church and parish hall for everyone to come in as a kind of community organizing point. I fetched my daughter, who had been told that a big accident had been happening; one of the more curious things about this day was that she was carrying in her backpack one of those black-and-white marble school notebooks, and inside, dated September 10, was her carefully-worded advice to the Mayor, in a school essay that was supposed to teach civic involvement, that he should take care of buildings better so they didn't fall over -- this was of course *before* 9/11, and referenced the situation of the odd bricks falling, as they had done in our area, necessitating the removal of a playground the ended up nerfing it into something not as fun for the kids.

I should mention that before I raced out, the phone had rung several times, one from my babysitter, saying that she didn't think she could get on the subway, it wasn't running, and one from a very distraught neighbour on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, who said the same thing -- and worried how her son would be picked up from school. I assured her I'd get her son and keep him at my house.

Once I picked up my daughter, and saw all the lines hitting the stores, I was concerned about my aunt and ailing grandmother who lived next door to the school -- perhaps they'd not be able to get out. I ducked into a deli with less lines on a side street and bought some water and soup as the quickest things I could get with the money I had. (Of course, like a good New Yorker, later as I saw the disaster was larger than originally conceived, I filled the bath tub with water, having gone through a number of water outages in the past in these situations).

So I went upstairs to drop off things for them and said I had to get my son and his friend -- and meanwhile, my aunt filled me in on the Pentagon and mentioned that the two planes were empty (this was a fervent wish that many people passed around as a story in the early hours).

We went outside...and looked downtown. The towers were a pillar of smoke and black clouds. I don't know at which point they began falling. My aunt went up on her roof and watched as one of the towers collapsed, but I didn't stay to look, needing to get the other kids. At this point men and women carrying their briefcases, covered in white powder, looking for all the world like those public sculptures in parks of business people, began to stagger uptown. We continued our way up to the E. 30s, and entered the public school, which as I've written before, contrasted vividly with the combination of private administrative and civic involvement in the parochial school. Children were wandering, confused. School safety police deployed in the schools were insisting that children not be removed without presentation of ID, causing a huge traffic jam. I managed to get upstairs, and we heard a teacher sobbing -- apparently she was talking to her husband in the tower, we were told, but we were never able to find out anything more about it.

My son helped me find his friend, and we decided to go down some back stairs out to another exit to avoid the traffic jam. On our way, we met an administrator, the same man who had told me on our first day about "fuzzy math" (TERC), and how "there are no right answers". I told him that the other boy's mother was trapped in Brooklyn and couldn't get him, and I was simply taking him, and the ID check would be damned. The administrator, whether due to common sense or fuzzy math, made an executive decision simply to let us pass because the boy vouched for me as "not a kidnapper".

As we made our way back home, we passed huge lines around the hospitals -- people already looking for "missing" (actually: dead) friends or co-workers. There was little to be done for them except give them some water or use of a cell phone. Another chilling scene I won't forget: lines and lines of hospital cots rolled right out on the sidewalk, with the Ringer's solution already hanging, in anticipation of mass numbers of casualties. Buses filling up with men and women in their white doctor's coats and stethyscopes to go down to the scene of the tragedy. But...nobody would ever go on the cots. They were never filled, for the most part, because you either survived, or died, it seemed.

Off we went -- and there was a co-worker knocking on my door, scared because he seemed to realize before any of us, coming from the former Soviet Union, the dimension of the crisis. He, and the children's father, were calling us and urging us to get out of New York immediately -- it would be attacked again, because enemies always circled back to attack wounded and funerals. But there was absolutely no question of departure -- the mayor closed the exits to prevent entries for a time. We made big pots of soup to store, got more water and flashlights, and watched TV -- and the panorama of the emergency playing out below the window, with its view on to all the hospitals, the cots, the buses, the lines, the police and helicopter and ambulances with lights flashing.

The mayor got on TV and made two important points: "We are not going to have group hate," he said very simply, to try to stem some harassment of Muslims -- or people who were mistaken for Muslims, such as Sikhs, as a few incidents of this nature had occurred. "Group hate is what brought us THIS" he said, gesturing toward the wrecked towers. I felt that was the single more important thing Rudy said in that moment -- it set a tone, it was simple and direct, and it worked. The other point he made was that first, the city would have a "snow day". We were to treat it as a "snow day" -- and with all the white ash falling everywhere, it seemed appropriate. The next thing is that on September 12, we were to go out and purchase something and restore business to usual. I recall going outside and buying a cat box (no, I'm not a cat lady, it's the kids' cats) and buying socks for dogs -- one of the things our tenant committee had said we should all purchase and turn in for the effort were dog socks for the K-9 units to be able to have dogs walk over those hot embers. We also brought in all our towels and sheets we could spare as the firemen were bunking in a school and showering and sleeping there. Police from as far away as Florida and Maine arrived -- we saw the state troopers in their big hats.

Let me try to explain the toll some more, so different than Zha Ewry's 9/11 which involves only his own brush with the visuals and a friend in the tower who happily didn't go to work (I had one friend like that, too, who stopped to get a pizza and was saved.) First, there was the boy in my son's class who lost his father -- the whole school turned out for the funeral. There were the other parishioners -- firemen, insurance adjustors, a policewoman who left a two-year-old. For days, as we walked to school, we saw two vivid scenes: firemen's boots and flowers put out on the steps of buildings in memory of the fallen, and black hearses blocking the sidewalk by the church. We picked our way around the weeping women in black veils to go to school. Day after day it seemed, for weeks, although there couldn't have been more than a dozen, they seemed endless.

Then there was the neighbour whose son played with ours at the playground, with whom I always had a pleasant chat. I saw him unshaven, sweaty, stricken on the sidewalk. He is a volunteer fireman. He told me his nephew was still down there but he was confident he'd turn up. He said the same thing when I saw him the next day -- and the next, when he pointed out to me where they were putting the bodies -- in a back ally, in refrigerated trucks, requiring a lot of staging and piping of some sort of chemical that foamed up along the street. Eventually, I saw a list at the fireman's union, and it unfortunately contained his nephew's name. I saw him at the playground, and his son told me he wanted to be a fireman when he grew up. We can all remember the two New Yorker covers from those weeks: one showed a scared Sikh man in a taxi cab, covered in flags and "I Heart America" buttons, barrelling along the street; another showed Halloween, with lots of little tykes dressed up in fireman and police costomes carrying their pumpkins.

For days, the hospital lines continued, then dwindled, but each one becoming a huge memorial site with pictures and candles. And for some reason, the authorities decided that the "Missing" concept for people who had obviously died pretty soon and been pulverized, was a good way to cope. It gave people long forms to fill out. It kept them busy finding hair in hairbrushes or bringing plastic bags with toothbrushes along to people waiting at cardboard tables. It also kept them busy put up posters everywhere. Those posters, waving, fluttering, ripping, finally disintegrating along all the avenues are among my strongest memories. I wrote something that was even immortalized by the Library of Congress oral history project. And then of course the smell. Didn't Zha smell it? It was the smell of burnt flesh, mixed with burnt plastic. It was everywhere. All over everything. I looked out and saw the East River filled with ceiling tiles. I went up close. There was the plastic cover of a Blackberry floating along, with some tattered and gristly...thing attached to it that I didn't want to think was a hand.

Bodies. Or should I say parts. They kept them stored in the quonset hut there for years. I can't think that there are many people who knew they were there (the Times didn't write about it for awhile) -- I had found out accidently from that neighbour. Few people had a view on to it, just because of the layout. Each day, for a long time, I would wake up and say a prayer for the departeds' souls and for the survivors. It seemed insane, no? To keep some 5,000 or more parts in refrigeration as people painstakingly got a finger or a shinbone to bury...and then had to come back the next year to get some other chunk.

Yet, here are the difference in two societies: one creates suicide bombers, who can turn the plane at the last minute to maximize the mass deaths, obliterating themselves as individuals along with others. The other holds the body parts in storage for years, so that individual families can get individual closure for individuals who died. And I know which society I pick, and any moral and intelligent person does have to pick, and even Zha has picked by continuing obliviously to spout ideals.

You have to chose at this level. You don't get to say, "Oh, but the whole reason they bombed us is because we support Israel and they hate that, and we are responsible for the wrongs of Israel, and therefore they get to do this." That's immoral. You don't get to say, "Our policies did this," because as one Latin American from a new democracy put it very starkly, "What, I'm poor, I get to blow up a building?!". No. You don't. The wrongfulness of a policy isn't endorsed by the stark, criminal wrongful means to end that wrong policy -- terror. It *is* the lesser evil.

When you pick this side of the lesser evil, or the ideal that knows bounds, you don't pick nationalism; you pick the rule of law. You don't say "I remain uncritical" but you do pick the morality of not dehumanizing the individual. It really is all about the individual and the collective. You can say, "I won't be forced to pick, because it's not black and white." Perhaps if you think more about the burnt stench, the funerals, the orphans, the boots and flowers, the white ash everywhere, you will be helped to see the problem of morality here, although I suspect it won't work in Zha's case, as she is determined to be a moral equivalizer to the bitter end.

That's partly because Zha imagines she belongs to another polity, some sort of utopia, some international do-good organization or movement or sophisticated club of those who are intelligent and "get it" and who imagine "the rule of law" isn't in imperfect governments or countries, but some kind of magical transnational empire, perhaps "the best of Second Life". That sort of capacity for speculative utopianism is how she is able to imagine that America had some moment when every one was on her side, but lost its chance for leadership and decency. Baloney. The problem is that the terrorists kept coming -- in London, Moscow, Madrid. They keep coming in Iraq -- it is not the U.S. that is reponsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths there, but the terrorists, who are backed in part by states. Terrorists don't change by America being better. Terrorists are terrorists; if they stopped because America got better (they didn't; they won't; they can't) then only tribally-decided policy or code-as-law would matter, yet not the rule of law which must apply to everyone, governments and terrorists alike.

Now, the question comes: is it proper to call this a war? Should it have been a police operation? I'm happy to study a lot more about this, as I've heard a lot lately from the scholars and lawyers of this issue and they make a compelling case that we went down the wrong path making this a "war on terror" instead of "an international police operation against terrorists". There are many compelling arguments to make against the "war" approach, the leading of which was the wrongful and injust decision of the highest leaders of our country to sanction torture of foreigners abroad. This is why they have to be voted out of office; this is why a lot of Republicans I know will vote them out of office and why I think we can be fairly certain Obama will come to power.

I was among those who marched against the war in Iraq as it was launched because I simply think it's always a good thing to show up and protest any war that will lead to massive loss of life, and this one not only didn't start as a "just war," but did not even prove itself to become a "just war," which in the Thomist sense would mean "a war that put an end to war." I went to a friend's 65th birthday party that October who used the occasion as an old lefty to protest the invasion of Afghanistan, too, and stood with everyone else to sing the Internationale -- both sets of lyrics, as befitting of an event for Trotskists. I think Obama supporters are going to be rethinking their notion that the way to get out of Iraq is to "take the war over to Afghanistan". Look at the British. Look at the Russians. You get into Afghanistan easily; you don't get out except in failure and humiliation. Of course, a long the way, many lies about this are told. Certain peace groups claimed falsely that 100,000 civilians, mainly children would be killed if the U.S. went into Afghanistan. It didn't happen. Noam Chomsky lied and claimed that the U.S. withheld wheat deliveries to starve out the Taliban -- false, it didn't happen (I'm amazed nobody ever calls him on his lies, I guess because if he gives chapter and verse of an incident and a newspaper clipping, nobody thinks to *keep reading the newspaper the next day after* to see how the story is further investigated and unfolds). They should have sat and heard the UN personnel describing the starving, literally *blue* children of Afghanistan *in August* before Masoud was killed (which should have been a bigger warning to us than it was) -- before 9/11. The Taliban would forbid or shoot at humanitarians using sat phones to coordinate aid deliveries. Where's Noam Chomsky about *that*?

Those who inhabit this false utopian realm of the failure to make a moral choice (a moral choice that need not lead to ill-conceived wars) imagine that they can suspend moral judgement for ever as an act of good will. But I know which side I pick: the societies that even if their highest leaders have sanctioned torture, have the means to expose and address it, as Abu Ghraib is exposed and is being addressed, or as the Israel Supreme Court has condemned torture. There is a difference between imperfect societies that establish and aspire to the rule of law, and fall short but have remedies, and those that are tribalist mobilized movements of hate wishing to make symbols out of children. So I know what I pick: I pick the society with the rule of law, because the moral choice is to pick the rule of law. You don't get not to pick, and say "a plague on both their systems," unless you wish to pick *away from* the rule of law, and succumb to the argumentation of the tribe whose code is law. That's what Zha is doing and many others are doing who are delivering big, baggy, platidinous lectures on these anniversaries imaging that wrongs on the side still upholding the rule of law balance the saddle bags to equal the wrongs of those with lawlessness. They don't.

Zha's lofty and pious sentiments of 7 years ago remind me a bit of something actually written a lot better, from Susan Sontag, that was heavily criticized at the time. I don't agree with the essence of her point, that the attack wasn't one on "civilization" or "liberty" ("They hate our freedom") but on a superpower with bad polices. Why? Because the policies aren't at root all bad. What *is* the right thing to do for Israel, surrounded completely by bristling, hostile Arab states who fund suicide bombers? Abandon it and make them refugees to America? You might criticize 100 things about the policy, but a) you have to have a better idea about how to deal with the hostile encirclement than a solution that dissolves the Jewish population and b) you have to have a solution to the problem of killers who use these means -- suicide bombing -- to achieve their ends. You cannot sanction that. You do have to chose *against* that.

Yet one thing Susan Sontag said stuck in my mind and I kept repeating it to myself in those weeks: "Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together." No, we don't want to be stupid, and start a stupid war that is stupid. We don't want to get in a worse plight. Yet, upholding the rule of law and civilization is an imperfect -- not a utopian exercise. It's execution is imperfect, and at times heavily flawed. We can listen to Susan Sontag or Mr. X or Zha Ewry mouth pious notions, but as I re-read Zha's words, I don't feel any cold anger toward anything but her as a pious and useless lefty (which prompted me to write all this on an occasion when I didn't even want to write anything.) That's because justice cannot be swift when you are chasing terrorists, and is long and messy. That's because you can't move on when you can't even capture the main bad guy (Pakistan protects him; we need Pakistan to keep the area from further disintegrating). Bin Laden isn't caught for the same reason Karadic wasn't caught -- the people backing him, namely Serbs and Russians, couldn't be tangled with and confronted *more* without risking *more war* (look at Georgia).

David Levine lives in the utopia of Second Life, as I do. But even he, like Icarus, had his wings melted recently and fell from the sky, and that was exactly the image I summoned up, noticing recent events where he was Burnt by the Sun -- even before I recalled Auden had written about this painting. I don't wish anybody suffering, but I do wish them knowledge so that they don't keep defending utopias mindlessly. They aren't defensible.

One of the things that occured on 9/11 wasn't immediately clear to me. I had a job -- a book I was translating, and I had just sent in my final chapters on September 10. I hadn't really focused on the address of the place, as I worked from home, and was only going to be visiting it in the future, during a special event we were planning -- which never happened. An email I sent September 12 about the manuscript came back returned, and then again and again, strangely and then I decided to look. The address was right next to the World Trade Center, a building which was immediately condemned, while still standing, and nobody was allowed in even to fetch the office equipment. The entire place decamped to another state, and had to kill or postpone their spring list -- and send us only a partial payment with a letter in lawyerly language talking about "force majeure". The expected revenue from the completion of the project never occured. At another job, our salaries were cut in half -- all the activities and programs planned involving people flying from foreign countries here and there all had to be cancelled in the wake of 9/11. While experiencing nothing of the horror that any family with a real 9/11 loss could experience, the impact was substantial and contributed to an ongoing sense of loss that Zha Ewry never experienced.

Am I resentful or bitter? Not about losses, they can be restored, after a fashion, or coped with. I am resentful about the moral equivalency and the utopianism, however. She acts as if the worst thing that happened is that we lost our ideals and didn't live up to them. But that's wrong. That is NOT the worse thing that happened. We retain our ideals and we are working to put them into effect and in fact addressing the wrongs. The worse thing that happened is that the terrorists, with *their* ideals came, and keep coming *and they have no plans of changing their ideals*. They come to countries that don't even support these polices that Susan Sontag was outraged about. The worst torture and mayhem happen often most of all to those living under these very repressive regimes that sponsor or breed the terrorists, as they suffer more than any of us. The wrong is terrorism, not somebody coping with terrorism the wrong way. The wrong *is terrorism*, and terrorism is wrong not because it is a response to wrongs (that might really be wrongs) but because it is wrong in and of itself. THAT is where the moral choice must occur: 1) the rule of law and civilization -- our ideals -- is right and we must live up to them; 2) terror is the tyranny of uncivilization and is wrong, and we must not do anything that choses it or sanctions it or excuses it.

All over the world, people focus on what they can focus on as "wrongful" in the "war on terrorism" -- America. The book and TV and blogosphere industries are constantly heated up on these issues that get a huge amount of exposure, and I hope all of this will lead to Guantanamo being closed down, which of course I'm for. But I contrast all of this with the huge hall of empty echoes in the other societies -- Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran. There isn't the intellectual class able to furiously write and blog and appear on these issues critical of their states -- without winding up murdered or put in jail. I simply have to, if indeed I am a global moral person, worry more about THAT vacuum, and the thousands of ways THOSE states are inciting and contributing to terror affecting thousands of lives, with thousands of victims more for whom terrorists, not U.S. policy are responsible -- without any rule of law or Susan Sontags or Zha Ewries, than worry about a situation affecting far less people in a situation getting enormous scrutiny. Morality should go to where the victims are, not only where the surrogates for advocacy are.

A great deal of thought and debate has to go into how to fight terrorism without declaring a war on our own people or on foreign peoples who are not combatants. I actually think Mr. X's long piece contains some helpful thinking, and I've heard this recently mischaracterized as being about "not becoming like them" -- which in fact isn't said in this piece at all in so many words, but something quite different, which was more about "becoming more like ourselves":

"This is not only a question of the modest measure of informational activity which this government can conduct in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, although that, too, is important. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problem of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. To the extent that such an impression can be created and maintained, the aims of Russian Communism must appear sterile and quixotic, the hopes and enthusiasm of Moscow's supporters must wane, and added strain must be imposed on the Kremlin's foreign policies. For the palsied decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of Communist philosophy. Even the failure of the United States to experience the early economic depression which the ravens of the Red Square have been predicting with such complacent confidence since hostilities ceased would have deep and important repercussions throughout the Communist world."

Here's what will happen in the coming years of America's waning power. We will get Obama and a "better government". It will make some difference -- but not as much as the utopians who think if we live up to our ideals everything will be fine. In part, they fall prey to this grave fallacy of the left which "Blames America First," thereby reinforcing an illegitimate notion of American hegemony in the world, as if America can affect everything. It can't. Their assumption that it can is utopian, and a lumpy sort of anti-matter that originates from the premise they reject of America's imperialism. The other powers that arise -- China, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, the far more united Arab world -- will make America and Europe irrelevant in many settings that will not be under our power or influence and for which we will not be able to be blamed whatsoever. We may go on for a long time to create a beacon of freedom with a free and prosperous society to which people from all those other powers will wish to flee -- or at least get a grant from. But it will wane, and the overshadowing that occurs won't be because we lost our ideals, but because these other powers will not even have the same ideals, but others, antithetical to the liberal concepts of freedom for which we stand.

The Russian-Georgia War in Cyberspace

2008-08-16T02:43:53-04:00

I've been avidly reading all the mainstream media about the war between Russia and Georgia, like many in and out of this field of Eurasian studies, and of course reading alternative sites like Open Democracy and various blogs and lists, like Johnson's list, which has tilted pro-Russian as it often does. These are all standard Internet Web 1.0 tools for understanding the situation officially, or unofficially but within a kind of framework, along with your Skype and your private email where you can hope to write friends in both countries to try to round out the picture.

But this war is different in that it has richly played out on Web 2.0 tools as well, in ways that the mainstream media hasn't even noticed. I got my first pictures from the war outside the standard AP issue by seeing in Tweetscan that someone had Twittered about navoine.ru -- a harrowing photo essay that shows the raw ugliness of war -- burnt people, in jumbles of flesh and bone... Of course, the war began in cyberspace, and Georgia's government made use of Google blogging when temporarily disabled, and the war continues there (cyberspace is the continuation of war by other means, as Lawrence Weschler once said, "war was the continuation of TV by other means" in the Balkans. For the first time, you could hear an American General give a briefing in which he talked seriously about hacking of websites as a matter of international security, and how the U.S. became involved in hosting Georgian government sites temporarily.

I was actually surprised to log on in Second Life at the Memory Bazaar and find two posts on the bulletin board there saying RUSSIA OUT OF GEORGIA! and then of course the trolling maria30 klaar writing AND U.S. OUT TOO! I saw some discussions in Second Life, including one scheduled for 6:00 am SLT tomorrow by a European fearing to lose Internet service. I expected -- and got -- the belligerent Russian commentary which Evegency Morozov has effectively written about as the outsourcing of hate.

But nothing prepared me for this: a Facebook group I myself joined casually the other day thinking it would never have more than a few hundreds members that has grown to a whopping 16,650 people, called Stop the Russian aggression against Georgia. The group gained 3,615 More Members since I logged on yesterday, is showing 13 videos, has 67 Board Topics, and 2,276 Wall comments -- of course many pro and con. Five demonstrations are already being organized, in Washington, London, the Hague, and Tbilisi. Well, imagine all of this! Just imagine! Of course, as I've written before, we are not really 69 million of anything, and the 16,650 people, while impressive, and even if 1 percent go to demonstrations and write congressmen, often don't have any real social weight. And yet...and yet...

People are YouTubing, and complaining on Twitter that YouTube is taking out anti-Georgian comments. A Fox news clip showing a 12-year-old girl talking about Russia as the aggressor has to date 367,384 views.

If you have ever worked in social movements, even big ones, even ones that have demonstrations that can turn out 100,000 people at times, you know that you just never see these types of numbers form so instantaneously -- 16,000. But then...they face 367,000 viewers, many of whom will post the most outrageously hostile comments, and get a further viral life on sites like FriendFeed, where many "liked" what they felt was a man-bite-dog story on Fox, trying to portray Fox as "censoring" the "truth" as articulated by two obviously biased Southern Ossetians. The wars in cyberspace cancel each other out, and nobody really reaches any clarity.

But what do they add up to? Perhaps nothing more changed than a mindset. Perhaps nothing more than the levering open of a space where open discussion can still take place in the face of Russian propaganda, along with Georgian boasting and American self-servicing. The YouTube is a totally one-sided propaganda stunt, fanned by Fox, which seems curious, but they were desperate for an eyewitness I guess. The pro-Georgia forces are simply going to have to work harder at their videos to get those kind of YouTube views, which of course might have been artificially gamed up by Russians.

There's something to the old idea that you can topple dictators with humour, as this wag has found with his "Earth Facebook" where "Georgia is no longer friends with Russia" after Russia sends "gifts" to Georgia in the form of bombs.

Other social networks like Ning had only a few members discussing Georgia. I am waiting to see if someone will -- perhaps me! -- will start a Facebook group to boycott the Olympics in Sochi.

The Bitter Truths of ABC

2008-04-27T03:05:14-04:00

Hendrik Hertzberg got it all wrong. I'll explain how it works.

Oh, sure, ABC may have been glib or even fatuous -- but this is TV, not a Mensa debate. George Stephanopoulos -- anything associated with the Clintons -- can be irritating, sure.

But let me show you how it works.

Hertzberg speaks of the seriousness of the moment, about to be trivialized, in his view, by the journalists' questions:

"the death toll of American troops in Iraq had reached four thousand; the President had admitted that his “national-security team,” including the Vice-President, had met regularly in the White House to approve the torture of prisoners; house repossessions topped fifty thousand per month and unemployment topped five per cent; and the poll-measured proportion of Americans who believe that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track” hit eighty-one per cent, a record."

Yet, in his view, Gibson and Stephanopoulos indulged in questions that seemed distractive and frivolous:

"Obama’s April 6th remark about “bitter” small-towners; whether each candidate thinks the other can win; ; Clinton’s tale of sniper fire in Bosnia; Obama’s failure to wear a flag lapel pin; and Obama’s acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground. And the problem wasn’t just the questions’ subject matter, or the fact that all but the last had been thoroughly raked over already; it was their moral and intellectual vacuity. “Number one, do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” That was Stephanopoulos. (His follow-up: “But you do believe he’s as patriotic as you are?”) The idea was to force Obama either to denigrate Wright’s patriotism or to equate it with his own. Obama’s exasperation showed, though he slipped the trap by pointing to Wright’s service in the Marines. One question—“I want to know if you believe in the American flag”—was apparently beneath the dignity of even Gibson and Stephanopoulos, so ABC hunted up a purportedly typical voter to ask it on videotape."

The pundits imagine that television is eroding, and that the incursion of Facebook or YouTube (ABC even invoked a Facebook and web page commentary section for this debate) signal that "social media" is more powerful and affective -- and judging from the enormous amount of indignant commentary about ABC in the blogosphere -- it is.

Yet, television is changing, too, and becoming more crowdsourcey and more emotional -- hence these kinds of seemingly superficial questions that really do in fact resonate with the masses (and that's why the Web 2.0 gurus and leftist deadtree commentators like Hertzberg get so furious). Because...the questions, when you unpack them, really aren't so fatuous or silly. They actually are merely short sound-byte memes that, if mined, contained a wealth of feeling and opinion about the issues that really need to be heeded. In fact, the very questions that Hertzberg finds to be the "serious" ones -- the war in Iraq, the sub-prime mortgage, the state of the country, are all perfectly well contained in the seemingly frivolous questions.

What are they really about:

1. The Bitters of Pennsylvania. Sorry, but Kristol, as much as he will be discredited for some by being a right-winger, got this right. The mask *did* slip. Obama, in his SF tete a tete, resonated with a sensibility he knew to be present, which was not only elitist, but determinist about people outside the magic circle of the affluent but extreme left. Everybody "out there" with their guns and their religion, so unlike the politicized Godbox style of faith, which conveniently Obama slips on and off. They are "other". Their "otherness" can only be explained by concepts like "alienation" from their product -- by Marxian economic invocations that purport to explain everything away by economics -- if only there was a robust economy to float their boats, why, they'd drop all this obsession with guns, right-wing Christian beliefs like creationism, and opposition to trade agreements. One wonders why, when the Clintons were in power and the country was flying, the gun-obsessives didn't die out...

Suddenly, in this debate, the whole American population is boiled down by Obama to a preposterous stereotype, a caricature, a meme, a "guy out of work" who "can't even find gas money" to go look for a job. A person really in that sort of position isn't likely even to be able to vote! Come on now, there's unemployment payments you can apply for, welfare, church food banks, friends, families -- and hey, taking the bus. A lot of us *just take the bus*, Senator. Hearing this sort of thing is just fantastical; if you read Deer-Hunting with Jesus, you realize that even the author, who is hip and liberal, ends up rooting for guns, even as a secular humanist -- and at the end of his book, you wind up finding him and his extremist beliefs more of a problem than the meager remnants of Protestant work ethic and self-reliance that still pertain in the southern locales the author visited.

The "bitter" SF speech resonated profoundly for me, as a voter for Obama in the primary, learning toward becoming a McCain Democrat from everything I've seen. Because it reveals that Trotskyite caricature of the world that keeps poking through Obama's speeches coming from the moveon.org gang and all the other extremists flocking around him as a vehicle to propel themselves into power. It's not only the labour theory of value and the "material dictates consciousness" of the classic Marxist texts, it's that nothing is said to resonate with ordinary, middle-of-the-road people. Only hapless victims, Pravda cartoons.

2. "whether each candidate thinks the other can win". This might seem a silly game of trivia -- a perfect sort of Facebook app about what traits your friends have and which friends' features beat other friends' features, but it is actually about something different: does this party have respect for the people registered in it? Are they going to allow the two top contenders to fight so dirty, and become so nasty, that they wouldn't even consider serving as each other's number two? That they have so little party sense, if you will, that they would actually try to utterly destroy the other? That's all. At its most simple, the interlocutor is looking for a simple gesture of politeness on this one -- not a stumble or an evasion.

3. "the Obama family’s ex-pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr." This one unpacks as several issues all at the top of the national agenda. It's not about one pastor, or his ill-advised homily, which one can wish away, or claim wasn't typical. It's about everything that he has stood for over the years, his affiliations, his political ties, and everything that epitomizes the 1960s Chicago radicals. So this is again about the extremist of ideological positions, but for many, about Farrakhan, which is a capsule meme that is about "Islam" and "Israel" and the attitudes one can have about them (pro and con in the case of Farrakhan -- Obama works overtime trying to disassociate himself from the latter).

Having this pastor was always credible radical chic for the Senator; it never occurred to him in his surroundings, with lack of feedback from more mainstream, normal people, that it could be a liability. And that's what jars. The endless parsing of Wright as an individual -- the long Bill Moyers interview which attempts to normalize (sanitize?) him (I have yet to watch it) -- this is not only what the problem is about. It's about a whole cluster of ideas, politics, ideologies, groups, and gestalt of the time, and their idea of America -- which they usually spelled like this: Amerika. It's about the constant cropping up of these ideologies, figures, politics, groups in this campaign -- and the constant distraction and denial about them, which only fuels more fury.

Obama's latest shtick is to invoke Wright being a Marine. Yet being a Marine doesn't free you from that sort of rad lib 1960s stuff -- if anything, it might reinforce your hatreds. That old hipster idea that you do it all in reverse -- wear the flag on your ass to patch your jeans, say "God Damn America" and fall for 9/11 conspiracy hoaxes. They're all of a piece. We absolutely get what we're dealing with: the mindless babble of those in entitlement mode, biting the hand that feeds them, rebels with a discredited cause.

4. "Clinton’s tale of sniper fire in Bosnia;" I truly marvel at the insanity with which the hate-Hillary witch-hunters made hay over this. Anyone who went to Bosnia in those years was under sniper fire. To forget that is to forget the meaning of Sarajevo for so many people. The take-away here is that Hillary was willing to go to a *war zone*. This wasn't after the war; this wasn't during a cease-fire, even if there was some particular lull in that particular sniper alley, as it happened. It was a war in which snipers were the lead players -- it was often an urban warscape. You didn't go outside. If Hillary didn't recount the accuracy of it, she relayed the truth of it.

And what this is all about is simple -- it's not about Bosnia. It's not even about "lying" (I don't believe she did lie). It's about presidents who are willing to go to war zones and eat the dog food, so to speak. To see their handiwork. To accept ownership. To do what they can to bring conflict to an end. To understand a war, up close, and not merely send young people into it.

I began to think more about this, and then found myself Googling "Obama war zone" because I realized he had probably never been to one -- and as saturated as the couch-potatoes are with seeing footage of warzones on TV, very few have actually experienced the terror of it -- and this is part of the experience quotient Hillary simply has head and shoulders over her opponent. If the message is a snarky, "You can't tell your war story right," then the retort is "At least I have a war story to tell."

5. Obama’s failure to wear a flag lapel pin. This, and the failure to put his hand on his heart during the national anthem only provokes second looks, and then worry. People in government and Congress and out taking part in elections routinely put the flag pin on -- not as a symbol of some kind of uber-patriotism and God Bless America guns and bitterness, but as...a symbol of doing work for the country. Taking part in something larger than yourself that is for the national good. I don't much care whether any of them do or don't wear flag pins, but I recognize that it is ubiquitous, and that in that context, not wearing it is to send a statement, a statement that says, if not "God Dam America" then more something like "I am part of a global movement that knows no country boundaries" -- see above points about the Marxian concepts, of which "internationalism" of this type, foregoing any kind of national pride or love of country, would be typical.

6. Obama’s acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground. And here's where Hertzberg goes off the rails, the left goes off the rails, and Obama goes off the rails and starts losing the election for his party and dooming us to 4 more years of Republicans, corruption, lawlessness, and war. My hair stands on end, reading all about this, because I remember those days, the pictures in Life magazine, the radicals, their violence, their anger, their hatred.

Having a person like this in your rolladex is a kind of statement. It's not about what that person did "40 years ago when I was 8," as Obama keeps saying (under some lawyer advice?). It doesn't matter whether Obama was 8 or 80. He characterizes the acts as "despicable" -- but he lessens the judgement about them by characterizing them as mere acts that took place 40 years ago, *and not a despicable extremist ideology, which is what he should have declared as despicable*. Never, have we heard a condemnation of the *group* and *its ideology* -- we've only heard about the irrelevance of *discrete acts of one person years ago* -- lawyers again. Trial truths.

See, that's where Obama -- and his moveon.org and his SF advisors and all his favourite influences like Dave Winer just go clean off the rails -- they cannot face the music, and condemn violent movements and extremism, which is what we need the possible future of President of the United States *to do*. It's a simple and legitimate request. Not something to be eating your waffles about.

The Times adds insult to injury by minimizing the Weathermen, saying they were good little terrorists, who bombed things, but only blew up 3 of their own people, and were "careful" never to bomb targets that would leave people dead, and would just destroy buildings. Gosh, by contrast with the 9/11 gang, they are mere pranksters! This minimizing of the violent, extremist movement that split off an already-extremist leftist student movement (the SDS) is the entire problem of this wing of the Democratic Party (if you can even characterize them as working within the party anymore -- they aren't, really): giving violence, extremist, nutty, wacky ideologies a pass -- and letting them be excused by "the times" or "anger" or "poverty" in ways that those ugly "other people" with their guns and religion don't get to be excused.

81 percent of Americans can say in a poll that "things are on the wrong track" because of the criminal war in Iraq or negligence around Katrina; because of the sub-prime mortgage disaster; and even now hoarding and rationing of food as if we were in Soviet Russia.

But these American people just won't accept a tolerance of, let alone any embracing of, extreme ideologies, that give a pass to violence, that excuse hatred, that write off bombing as a youthful protest, that fail to understand the realities of a real war zone with snipers, that try to find every explanation of what's wrong in the "labour theory of value" with evil capitalists exploiting workers, dismissing them, or shipping their jobs overseas because they are greedy profiteers, instead of struggling companies that are part of society with jobs for you or me.

A presidential campaign seems to be an intense forge for a man -- or a woman. Let us hope there is still time for Obama to learn from the feedback he is getting from his unconscious tropism to the Chicago 60s radicals, a re-examination of the negative features of what they stood for -- the violence the incitement, the hatred, the extremism -- and a re-affirmation of mainstream liberal values of inclusiveness and tolerance and admitting the complexity of issues like race or religion, not reducing them to economics.

Open Source=Closed Society

2008-03-09T16:52:25-04:00

Tony Curzon-Prize, who visited Second Life recently, has an editorial up today at opendemocracy.net about Zittrain's presentation. In a fitting (unwitting) coda to his piece, I can't get logged in to his site to leave a comment. My usual password doesn't work, I finally get the right user name, I urge the system to send me my password again...and it never comes, and no, duh, it's not in the spam filters, which of course I long ago learned to look into. Closed out again, from the Open Society of Open Democracy by a technical glitch (not a ban, in this case, but it could be that at other venues like Terra Nova).

Tony's pieces are always very thinky, and it's always good to find someone this thoughtful on these issues, but they're usually about one or two levels above what I'm willing to exert on a Sunday afternoon. I spent years studying Aristotle, but what's "Aristotelean" about Zittrain's comments escapes me, and it's one of those occasions when you wish the author, instead of appearing learned, would teach, so that others could learn. No matter. The point is he's willing to give a critical study of Zittrain, which is a public service.

Zittrain is ranting on in PowerPoints about all these top-down evil structures that want to control the Internet and which we must fight. However, what we really must fight is him and his technolibertarian viewpoints because ironically, the big bland corporations that he rails against, just by showing up, having a bottom line, and maintaining the rule of law, may provide more liberties for the average person than he's willing to admit. This is an awful trade-off, of course, the kind of trade-off that any cradle-to-grave socialism or corporativism will make, but the question has to be starkly asked online.

When Zittrain (or Curzon-Price) waves around the term "communitarian," I can't help thinking they've merely found a term that they think will have less baggage than communism. But communitarianism is no better, in placing the "community" (as they define it) above the individual, and talking about "social needs" and such -- as these techno-elites, again, define them.

Here's what gives it away:

"JZ's impassioned cry in the face of all these attempts to move problems into the realm of authority is to ``give communities a chance''. JZ's view of the future of the Internet is that it will continue to be assailed by ills of various sorts, from malware to business interests protecting their old way of making bacon. If at every turn we acquiesce and allow the top-down ``solution'', the Internet will have demonstrated its ``self-closing'' property: the open system that shut itself down

Well, no. The open system that isn't really open that is threatening to shut the Internet down is in fact...the soi-disant opensource movement, the hacker mentality, the copyleftism. This belief that some evil top-down corporation or government bringing in rules or property rights are the ones "shutting it all down" is only a tech-meme.

That is, only those who want to take power as techno-elites *say this*. The rest of us might well find our interests protected *better* by "top down" solutions that have more interactive democracy than a horrid geeky closed "open source working group" that decides for everybody else because they're "too stupid".

Seriously, this is not only a cultural problem of the geek style of doing things ("let's not have any 'no' votes because that's negative and we need positive collaboration"); it's political. Highly political.

>Is the space of most our politics--representative democracies establish a single structure of control, with, in reality, little choice between them

Sleight of hand once again. Take away representative democracy with a facile, geeky swipe, claiming that a complex, multi-party, multi-interest-group society has "a single structure of control". Huh? With "in reality, little choice between them." What does this guy *smoke*? For him, Hilary or Obama or McCain may look no different at all, if he posits that it's all part of the American evil imperialist blahblahblah.

But of course, they do have different positions, and they matter for people in all kinds of ways, and they participate in the debate, with actually more activism that Americans have participated in a long time. We're to shed this...for a PowerPointer who wants to put his own tribe in charge?

Or here's another giveaway!

As Tony paragraphs Zittrain:

"Pragmatic, expert-driven communities "got things done" on the Net, all the way from the protocol stack in the Internet's innards to its Domain Name Server (DNS) system to Wikipedia."

Yeah, I'll bet they get things done! Because nobody gets to participate in their little closed shops that are "open" only in the sense that they hang out a shingle openly to collect and filtrate other "like-minded".

And, the DNS system is something everyone is happy with? Isn't it a kind of bridge-troll system that ensures there are all these little companies that constantly collect money to do something that takes a few mouse clicks?

And Wikipedia...Wikpedia!...is your example of an Open Society? *Blinks*. It's no accident, comrades, that we are seeing scandals now involving Jimmy Wales himself and charges that he sold off the right to edit pages to some lucky individuals or that he used foundation money for his girlfriend.

That's what happens in *any* system that has no checks and balances...no board that exercises responsibility...no editorial policy...no RULE OF LAW. Of course when there is money just given away to something that claims it is Doing Good, there will always be people who grab it for their mistresses. Happens all the time. Of course, when you have no paying public, no editorial policy, no board, like the old dinosaur media, you will have edits in your favour available to the highest bidder.

Here you hated on advertising and said that American and imperialist and evil because big corporations presumably got to support the conservative or establishment middle-of-the-road papers that suited their businesses, and the left-wing truths couldn't see the light of day. But...how is buying off a page to get the left-wing or person truth visible so different?

Honestly, we all know there aren't perfect solutions in the old media, and that the new media is bringing important rectifications, empowerments, opportunities. But it is also rife with the same old problems of power, human beings didn't change their natures.

There's more...of this sort, "

"Polyarchical/top-down: is where the market lives.."

Sigh.

Evil market...that plays to consumers...that brings mass culture and mass taste so hated by tekkie grouplets!

Staying the Dyer's Hand

2008-03-08T04:36:15-05:00

One day, 32 years ago, I was walking along Elmsley Place at St. Michael's College in Toronto with Prof. Marshall McLuhan. I had taken several of his classes at the Centre for Culture and Technology, one on poetry where he focused on Shakespeare's sonnets. The name of his institute was an awfully grand and tekkie-sounding thing for 1976, but...the Centre was merely a kind of weathered brick and comfy sort of house overlooking Queens Park, not one of those high-tech buildings over on the main campus of the University of Toronto. I fell into step with McLuhan because he was on his way to Mass, too.

I was only 19 years old, and fairly clueless. No doubt I missed half or more of what was being taught to me and referenced in these classes. In fact, we used to have one professor at St. Mike's, Fr. Belyea, who used to tell us in exasperation that we were useless, and that we shouldn't have come to college, but should be working and putting *our parents* through college. They, after all, with a long life of cares and responsibilities and most importantly *experience*, would now be in a better position to appreciate and benefit from great literature and philosophy, which was utterly lost on us idiot youths!

I must have asked McLuhan something stupid -- I don't remember what it was. There was a certain apprehension, trying to understand, trying to hurry to daily Mass at 12:10 -- and yes, this figure of the counterculture, embraced by so many secularists and Whole Earthers and Extropians, this patron saint of Wired magazine, went to daily Mass. Born of Methodist parents, he had converted to Catholicism in 1937, a good year for that, after reading G.K. Chesterton, we're told by Wikipedia. I don't know. He didn't speak of it. Going to daily Mass wasn't any sign of piety or virtue in this circle. We all went, that was just how it was at the college.

The bell was ringing, and I was looking up at a sort of blank blue sky with leafy trees and the tall professor. He was going over a sonnet that I was stumbling on, no. 111 (There is also the book of Auden's essays of this title, of course):

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means, which public manners breeds;
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand;
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed,
Whilst like a willing patient I will drink
Potions of eisell 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me.

He enlarged on his ideas, went beyond the sonnet, and said to me, "The problem is: staying the dyer's hand."

Perhaps I looked puzzled, because he patiently elaborated, explaining an analogy. Upstream, there is a man dyeing a piece of cloth, let's say. He decides to dye the cloth purple. The cloth is made purple. But he's dying the fabric in a stream, and even the slightest bit of purple gets into the stream and begins to cloud the entire water purple. If you have ever dropped food dye into water, you can see how it works. This is how media works.

The issue then, if I understood it correctly, was then not to stop the stream. Not to try to stop the free media. Not to try to change or divert or block the natural stream. Not to question the dyeing process, even.

The problem, then, was only about "staying the dyer's hand." Anyone pouring that much purple ink deliberately into the stream would have to be restrained, somehow, or they'd turn the entire stream purple. How to stay the dyer's hand?

Obviously, I've thought about that conversation all my life, I'm quite sure I didn't understand what was explained to me then, but perhaps it is what guided me to buy property in a town named Dyerbrook and to adopt the name "Dyerbrook" for my Sims Online character, and for a time, a Second Life avatar.

Of course, there's the usual cadres who will scream about *me*, as an outspoken blogger, being a "yellow journalist," and "libelous, scurrilous, purple-dyer" lol -- but that's because they are simply unused to sharp and consistent criticism, or even normal demands for credibility and accountability. Their way of dealing with a dyer they don't like is to put up a dam and stop the brook. Obviously I don't deliberately set out to "poison the well" as I write with all sincerity by the light of my conscience to the best of my ability about what I think and feel about virtual worlds, the new media, and the new technology. I think those that impugn or project this idea of deliberate dyeing -- "deliberate false fabrication of the socialist order" as the Soviet criminal code used to phase it, have need to put their own house in order to ask not only what their own dye is, but whether you restrain the dyer by restraining the stream.

There isn't really anything that *can* restrain the dyer's hand if they are going to dye the cloth and use the brook to wash their hands or rinse out the cloth. The dyer can pour it on thick or thin on the cloth, and what could restrain him? Only conventions, norms, religious beliefs, moral precepts, community standards, all things that larger societies don't want to put into law or excessively curb by law because it will place a chill on free speech. But who will stay the dyer's hand?

I thought of this today when an incident broke out on Twitter, where you can just type 140 characters of thoughts and links in a huge scrolling soup of consciousness with thousands of other people. The only way to make sense of it, actually, is to pick out about 100 or 500 "friends" who you will follow and pay attention to, filter out those who are noisy or don't make sense, and then actually focus regularly only on about 20-30 of that list, as there just isn't enough time to pay your attention to all of it.

Jeff Pulver is one of those high-signal-to-noise folks on Twitter that I do pay attention to because he usually has something worthwhile to say or a useful link. I have no idea who he is; apparently he's a venture capitalist or inventor of tech. Those in the tech world expect gasps and genuflections at these names that probably mean a lot to them in their world; I don't genuflect. (A guy complaining to me about my blog in a private email wrote in indignation that he was the worldwide X of Y in Microsoft, but he might have well said to me he was the manager of the vegetable department at D'Agostino's. These folks really don't understand how little they are known in the wider world and how little their fame matters.)

What Jeff Pulver put up today really nettled me. Help fight Israeli censorship, he twitted. Bleh. Perhaps it was because it was a day when for 24 hours, the news cycle had what my young son first came to tell me about from seeing it on the TV news: the murder of the Jewish seminarians apparently by a group tied to Hezbollah. My son was saddened and puzzled, and called what he saw "a Jewish Columbine." I don't think he quite realized, just seeing it on TV, that there were deliberate Palestinian suicide-bombers with a grievance, not fellow crazed students -- so inured is he now to the idea of the school shooter in America. So they must have them there, too, he reasoned.

Jeff threw something up on Seesmic, which is a new service sort of like YouTube where you "seize the mike"and put home-made videos of yourself talking, or your interviews, which are, I guess, supposed to be "seismic" in their ripple effect and influence. It has gotten quite popular among the Twitterati. The YouTube Jeff put up was about "Israeli censorship of blogs." Really skeptical, I clicked and watched the scene: a table of young men, long-haired tekkie/hippie types, aparently Israeli tekkies (?), sitting at a table drinking beer and playing poker (this was to be "in your face" on the topic). They were talking in that sort of self-righteous manner of the nouveau victim of censorship -- not a Chinese dissident in a torture cell, but kids playing a game and posturing before the very camera which was breaking through any wall of "censorship" they might be experiencing.

The scene -- before you even got into the point about what this "censorship" was that Jeff Pulver felt he had to crank up the outrage about -- seemed particularly sacrilegious -- for lack of a better word -- contrasted to the footage everywhere else showing bloodied scholars' books and worried students in yarmulkes. The contrast between people who were religious and seriously studying...books...in a library...seemed so sharp next to the card table of these casual and insolent youth being pumped up by an American do-gooder to blab on le dernier cri of new media, Seesmic. This, of course, was merely an accident, and not Jeff Pulver's fault -- perhaps he simply didn't feel any connection between the incidents, even making this film while on a trip to Tel Aviv. Such is the nature of Seesmic -- seize the moment, mimic being a CNN film crew.

Perhaps Pulver just didn't even *think* of what it means to post this or that thing on this or that day with this or that context. And why should he, when there isn't any context on the ever-changing Twitter?

For me, it was definitely the wrong context. I mean, I feel it's about this: can't the Jewish people have one day when they bury their dead and grieve and show Hamas and Hezbollah clearly in the wrong, without everybody having to snipe and attack on the other side and bloviate on about "collective punishment" or "Israeli blog censorship"? Not even one day? When the "collective punishment" of the other side can be seen? Here are these awful attacks on both sides, people dying. And...in the balance we're supposed to put...*this*...censorship? of blogs? Huh?

I researched the issue a bit and found that it wasn't worthy of mention on rsf.org, a liberal French group that would normally not have a problem criticizing Israel. Their essay on Israel makes a very important point often lost on the Western liberal media: the Israeli press is by far the freest in the entire region where it finds itself, the Middle East. I couldn't seem to find anything about "Israeli censorship of blogs" anywhere, except on one other Silicon Valley blogs. It's a meme. It's a tech-meme. Created by tekkies with other tekkies. Here we go again.

It turns out -- and I'm happy to be updated or corrected on this -- that the censorship concerns a law that isn't passed yet, but is getting a lot of debate (and people wishing to harness the new media with their side in it, obviously). It concerns the idea of having ISPs not allow children to access porn and gambling sites and content. It's a kind of Second Life-like "ageplay" and casino debate. The issue isn't so much censorship as it is about the typical kind of TOS you would find on this blog or many ISPs.

The Israeli bloggers were trying to hype this into an issue that they felt would chill their legitimate speech on issues of sex and money. Possibly they're right, no doubt someone can make the case. Maybe parents should do this filtration, not governments. Blah blah blah. We know all that.

But...the entire incident reminded me of Bonnie Ruberg's bleating on Terra Nova about the "sexual censorship" she said was happening in SL (it never happened). I really read her the riot act on that one, and that was one of the posts that led to my TN banning (hilarious, eh lol). Like Jeff and these Israelis, they were selectively outraged, amplifying the yet-to-be and the trivial and missing the larger picture.: that some terrorists had pretty well censored forever some students in a library...

Obviously people will disagree what the larger picture *is*. Let me suggest that it's not a picture you'll get from...Palestinian bloggers, such as they are, or the Saudi state-controlled media.

It's unfortunate, perhaps, that this notion of the dyer's hand is one I am trying to illustrate with this rather minor incident with Jeff Pulver. And that's because it's not one that all the politically-correct will be able to see, so rabid are they about Israel, and so heedlessly pro-Palestinian. I'm not interested in having that debate: I have a rule for debating people about the Middle East. I tell them I'll be happy to debate them, but they must pick sides. They must *admit they''ve picked*. They have to say *I picked this side already.* They can't say "Some of my best friends are X" or "I can well understand Y, but Z" or "both A and Z are to blame here, because historically J and Q." No. They have to *pick*. Once they admit it and *pick*, we can talk. Then, after 30 minutes, I'll ask them to switch sides and keep debating. I've never found that method to fail in making the debate very short and sweet.

Why does this matter? Because at a time when the media hype and hysteria cycle is pushing both the Gaza rocket bombing and the killing of 50 Palestinians and the Hamas terrorist attack and murder of 8 seminarians (and yes the first is *killing* and the second is *murder* just to be morally clear here), a headline or Twittering that says "Israel Censors Blogs" is going to make us think that Israel is censoring *news about rocket attacks in Palestine" or "news about terrorist attacks in Jerusalem" and not...child pornography and ads for casinos. That's the problem. Of course, if the law didn't pass yet, it's also an overstated scare headline just pressing the new media into service of a political faction.

No doubt there's lots that the Second Life laissez-faire technolibertarians can say about "Israeli blog censorship". I don't care. What I want to know is: who will stay the dyer's hand?

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Collapsing Geography

2008-03-08T01:51:00-05:00

Another Sunday afternoon hoping to read Cory Ondreijka's Collapsing Geography more thoroughly, and distracted again, by the actual virtual living out of "Collapsing Geography" that you experience in Second Life, which is of course, where he got the idea in the first place, being part of the team that coded the 3-D virtual world.

In my rentals business in Second Life, my customers reflect the international nature of this virtual world, which is said to have about 40 percent U.S. now and the rest from South America, Europe, and Asia -- but the list of countries is extraordinary (you wonder how somebody is actually logging on from Afghanistan or North Korea, or whether those are joke entries).

Cory's notion seems to me a bit of a conceit. That is, it's a kind of technolibertarian fancy, that the contiguous space supposedly interfering between real-life cultures, when removed in a virtual world and mapped in miniature and with more flexibility (teleporting, flying, IMing, groups), will simply melt away and we can all hold hands and sing "Kumbayah" or something. This is a kind of whimsy that is a sort of "geeks of the world will unite" -- because the geeks on the outer edges of their countries and cultures will find it easier to make bridges to each other and collaborate than the geeks might find even with people within their own country.

I saw this phenomenon in the international human rights movement a lot. The people who were human rights advocates, often members of minorities or classes of people who were victimized, would find it easier to contact, communicate with, and collaborate with people in other countries who matched their status of advocacy, minority, discriminated class, victim. They could talk to *each other* easier than they would with the other classes, let along ruling groups of their countries.

International peace movements (some of them built on the Comintern methods and politics, of course) would also use this hands-across-the-sea that actually amounted to a campfire with themselves. Still, it had its poignancy and attraction, and I think those holding their hands around these campfires who had found each other sometimes drew in larger circles. That's why when E.P. Thompson, who tried to lead the charge against the cold war and its military structures in the 1980s European Nuclear Disarmament campaign, resonated so deeply when he coined its slogan: "We must be faithful not to East or West, but to each other."

I think this phenomenon of hands-across-the-sea can give you a false sense of internationality that in fact might prevent dialogue not only within your own country with people in different groups but also prevent all of you in your new-found internationalism from ever gaining any significant following.

There is always this theory that if you can get people to stop paying homage to some national superstructure, that some ideology will declare as inhibitive, constricting, even malicious, that you will Unite People. There was a parody of this idea, of course, with the spoof of the old Trotsky song, "Unite for unity..." Unite merely for unity's sake, and chloriform yourself to the consequences.

The reality is that there are some cultures and religions and belief systems that are by their nature more inclusive and tolerant of the other or the foreigner. It seems to be their lot that there are always gaggles of rabble-rousers to claim that they are intolerant, but the fact that those rabble-rousers aren't dead yet or expelled from the country is part of the chuckling acknowledgement you have to make that yes, indeed, there are some cultures that are more tolerant than others.

Second Life is no different than real life in creating a rich matrix of clashing cultures, and indeed, even a clash of civilizations in accelerated form, although, of course, there are some who deny such a thing is possible.

I found this with two incidents recently in Second Life -- they're frequent, and typical.

In the first, I flew to the international section of Info Island to check out the build and info there -- and was a bit disappointed. No one was there, there wasn't much literature, and I had to laugh a bit at what I found there: that grand gesture of international hospitality, the American donut. Somebody, likely David Therein at Kitchen Korner, had gotten up very early and said it was "time to make the donuts" and this little setting was the result. The combination of the coffee klatch and the Cubist home built by my old Sims Online friend Barnesworth Anubis somehow conspired to make the whole experience funny and eerie at the same time.

Suddenly, in walks -- flies -- a young woman from Germany, and I seize upon her for my first experience in conscious international uh...donut-giving lol. She seemed a little baffled (I seem to remember they have lots of cold cuts and black bread and tomatoes and such for breakfast in Germany, not donuts), but we chatted and she told me she was a librarian in real life and her boss was "making" her come in SL and she seemed rather wary.

I was startled. SL was such a creative and voluntary thing, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be "forced" to go into it for work, like making a boring Powerpoint. She seemed apprehensive about the building in particular, which she was being asked to do. I gave her some landmarks with tips, tutorials etc and talked about good camera angles and how Barnes, as wonderful as his houses were, had never really gotten into the value of living inside the house like a real cybering avatar, and so his staircase was very cramped in this house, and he also had failed to provide lockable doors and tintable windows. The house was more like an open-ended book case to perch avatars on and have meetings. Which we were doing.

So, here we were, collapsing geography, but nothing in common, really, with people not only very different in culture and outlook and jobs and such (although I used to work in a library) but in expectations and plans for SL. We were brought together perched over this...picture, this 3-D manifestation of a guy from suburban Colorado's concept of what "modern" and "cubism" might mean, and another guy's donut both of them likely uninformed by any "year abroad" lol. Moments like that challenge the suspension of disbelief.

We went downstairs, and discussed some more landmark places, and then I couldn't help gushing something about "isn't it amazing that we found ourselves here just as I was thinking about this collapsing geography stuff," whereupon the frightened librarian from Germany fled -- thinking I was going to hit on her or something. Sigh. Um, let's pull open that collapsible travel cup again, shall we? And have another go at the pixel coffee...

The next incident came with a group of tenants with a store who had been given a low-cost rental and help in setting up and a free search ad included, and I also tried to promote them when I could. One lot was reduced in price. They people stayed there for many months and worked hard and had a respectable number in traffic.

Several odd things happened on the sim, where people told me they couldn't put their house out, and I thought it was a rolling restart problem. Finally today one woman said she couldn't get more than a certain number of prims out and then all the prims on the entire sim seemed used up, and she was irritated. I suffered through the usual annoying round of suspicion, where the tenant thought I was "up to something".

I checked the sim and found the other tenants had put out 3,000 prims instead of the 1500 or so they were entitled to. So they had been mooching 1500 prims for weeks. I wondered why they seemed to be so busy putting out stuff but I didn't immediately put the whole thing together.

What ensued is something that has happened many times with people from other countries, but also with people from other classes or cultures in SL. Basically, it comes down to what people do when they are caught breaking the rules, deceiving, taking advantage, in the wrong. It comes down to morality: whether you say you are sorry, whether you can admit you are wrong, whether you have a notion of remedy and regret, or whether you have to beligerently keep finding fault with the person who has found fault with you, whether you can accept that a law is larger than you, and for the benefit of all, and it's not just your selfish entitlement and sense of expansion.

Normally, I try to give people notice when their prims are over to give them a chance to pick up the excess without risking loss or disruption. But here, with this many prims over, I was forced to return the prims because I now had 2 tenants complaining that they couldn't use the prims they paid for. The leases clearly state you must keep track of your prims and it is your responsibility. I realized that this situation had actually been going on for weeks, as I recalled that more furniture seemed to be put out than usual, but I was in a hurry, and figured it was sculpties, not prims or something.

I'm a big believer in the rule of law and trying to give fair notice. But it's not possible to go on at length in a lease about what happens if you put out such a huge overage like double or triple, using up the entire sim. Still, the lease is clear: it does tell you that you're responsible for your prim usage and going over takes them from others.

This problem of the "tragedy of the commons" is managed by rules and limits and courtesy and cooperation -- but it breaks when someone begins to get porky and defensive and entitlement-happy.

So, this tenant decided to take the indignant route first, and decided to say I was "absurd" with this notice. It turned out that he had a certain grounds for saying this, after I sent him screenshots of what I was seeing on the console. His non-English SL viewer actually showed a strange thing: a parcel with a different "objects this parcel supports" and "0" prims on it. Wow, that was weird. I never knew that was possible. Never seen it.

Well, I said, proof of my version being "correct" is that 2 other people can't put out anything, which clearly shows the prims have run out.

He continued to deny he was in the wrong for another few minutes, until finally I said, but look, you put out dozens of pieces of things, each 20 or 50 or 100 prims, so multiple them, and surely you can see that you had 3000 items that way. This was tacitly conceded, and the guy seemed close to admitting he was caught and to just make amends, but he decided to keep trying to portray himself as in the right.

OK, sure, he was caught, but...I should have notified him and given him a chance to fix things, he kept saying in outrage. Well, that's debatable, frankly. It's clear this guy has a clear realization -- he was not born yesterday -- that he has put out double the prims. Why? Because for months, he never *did* put out so many prims, and was always under the limit. Now, suddenly, in recent weeks, figuring no one noticed, or figured his glitch on his browser could give him an alibi, he put out loads more. That was the context.

Meanwhile, I now had 2 tenants IMing me, one new and irate, who was going to refund and leave if she didn't get her house out. So I had to free up the minimal space for her. It's not pleasant to get things back in inventory, but surely as they were being put out, there had to have been some realization that this 100 prim thing or this 10 or 50 prim thing was going to ad up!

This man, stuck in the macho groove, kept griping and griping. I was absurd. I was wrong. I should have told him. Blah blah blah. Nobody likes to get 1,500 prims back in inventory. But...these people weren't born yesterday, knew what was up, and were trying to put something over -- and then hide behind a cultural screen -- "my browser," or "I don't speak English," or "you didn't tell me" or "you are absurd and rude".

How often have we all had this experience in SL, not only from "foreigners," but those in our own country from a different class or generation, that does not value the law, admitting one is wrong, and making remedy, but makes endless entitlement the norm?

I told a few other residents of this story, and was shocked to get a slew of feedback, even hatred. This particular country and that particular country was now getting a rep in SL as "thieves, users, exploiters, liars, rip-off artists, content stealers." I thought over my experience with these folks -- and found that it was mixed, as with all people -- some good, some bad, some decent, some users. And yet in this clash of civilizations in SL, the acts of a few were going to stand for the many. I'd like to stop here with this hopeful bromide. But I can't. Because what is happening in SL is that it is very visible -- it's the acts of *quite a few* standing for the *not so many*.

Turtles All the Way Down

2008-01-06T05:44:29-05:00

I made a new group in Second Life called "Council on Virtual Relations". Working draft charter is about discussing international relations and ways in which Second Life could be useful, and also the intersection of real-life and virtual world policies. In trying to envisage a logo for the group, a turtle popped into my mind for some reason and I went Googling around to dredge up half-remembered information about turtles holding up the world and such.

It turns out there is an apocryphal story sometimes attributed to Bertrand Russell, that supposedly after he gave his lecture about "Why I am Not A Christian," and referenced the Hindu belief that the world rested on elephants, and the elephants on a tortoise, but there was nothing underneath the turtle, an Indian woman objected, and said, "But there are turtles all the way down."

I happen to think that there is something rather like "turtles all the way down" but it's also useful to stop at the world-bearing image and imagine that all of us have to behave like world-holders in various ways, and that's what holds up the world (hence the group title "World-Holders"). The turtle is also a good symbol for the concave shell symbolizing the heaven, and the squat feet on earth. And his amphibian nature, whereby he can survive on both land and water, is a reference to the transitions between virtuality and real life.

I think it would be useful to have a closed group for the time being but to give the right of invitation to each person who joins, so that it functions like various beta invitations sometimes start out. We could make a requirement that you must give your real-life name and affiliation to join *or* have the recommendation of two other members to join. In that way, more permeability is created than the real-life Council on Foreign Relations, which requires a rigorous membership procedure involving having existing members recommend you, but also somewhat preserves that idea of recommendation as a solution to the problem of those who don't want to give up their anonymity behind the SL avatar.

Why closed if you are advocating open society, democracy, dialogue and such? Because I'm tired of griefing, and tired of rabid sectarians showing up and ruining every meeting -- which in fact then means that you are so open that the enemies of openness destroy your liberal space. If you disagree, I suggest you hold meetings for a while *and* maintain a vigorous and controversial blog or forums, and see how you do : )