Adulthood

I watched the inaugural ceremonies with a great sense of relief. A dear friend put it best: It is as if we’ve had our collective heads held underwater for eight years and finally we’ve been allowed to lift our heads up and breathe. I was impressed with President Obama’s inaugural address and I’d like to parse it out.

The theme that ran through it was adulthood. The key phrase was his quote from the bible, arriving a sixth of the way through the address: “We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” Truly, the United States has been childish, as a government and as a people.

Childish in its self-centered arrogance and exceptionalism
Childish in its ignorance
Childish in its unilateralism
Childish in its petulance at dissent (Freedom Fries, anyone?)
Childish in its uncontrolled anger
Childish in its unquestioning acceptance of authority, no matter how misguided
Childish in its fawning over celebrity
Childish in its desire for unearned wealth

President Obama repeatedly touched on the themes of adulthood, responsibility, and hard work, invoking the efforts of previous generations.

“Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

“…we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned.”

“It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

“Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life.”

“But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed.”

(Referring to soldiers) “We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.”

Making hard choices, facing the unpleasant, earning one’s reputation, taking risks, thinking beyond the self, making sacrifices for future benefit; these are the activities of an adult.

“For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.”

This is not the president who, after the September 11th attacks, told Americans to go shopping.

“But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old.”

Here President Obama throws the much blathered but little obeyed precepts of the corporate conservatives back in their faces.

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

This is an adult talking to adults about the mature pleasure of a job well done.

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship.”

We are citizens after all, and not passive consumers. The benefits of citizenship and community require personal effort.

Naomi Klein, in her excellent book Shock Doctrine, writes about despots taking advantage of people in their traumatized, infantilized state. People in shock tend to regress to childlike behaviors, making them vulnerable to emotional manipulation. Despite the panic brought on by our foundering economy, President Obama did not play the paternal card. He was not a father alternately scaring and comforting children. He spoke to us as an equal speaks to equals, reminding us of our shared duties and responsibilities.

This approach gives me confidence about how the Obama administration will conduct its business.

Next essay: Lead pipe clues in the inaugural as to Obama administration policies.

Gunfire, F.I.R.E., and Hard Reality

With eight endless years of the Cheney/Bush administration coming to an end and an economic crisis facing us, I’d like to step back and look at our economic policies from a long-term perspective. I’d like to explore three concepts: planned obsolescence, inherent obsolescence, and capital intensity.

Planned obsolescence is a familiar concept to most people, so I won’t dwell on it. It took hold in the auto industry in the 1930s, when the market was beginning to saturate with used vehicles. Up until then, car models came out periodically, but the automakers started coming out with the yearly model changes familiar to us today. The apex of this appears to be the computer industry, with last year’s desktop or notebook being hopelessly outclassed in both price and features by this year’s model.

Inherent obsolescence is a simple concept. Consider the candle. You buy it, you light it, it burns, and you need another.

Capital intensity is the quality of a business that churns great quantities of money in its operations compared to its production. One could contrast it with labor intensity, the quality of a business that requires relatively large amounts of human effort per unit of production.

These three concepts explain the economic appeal of the military industrial complex. By appeal I mean appeal to big business, not ordinary people. Especially not ordinary people who live where the bombs get dropped.

Military spending through the ages has been a profitable promoter of inherent obsolescence. Perhaps the best and simplest example of inherent obsolescence is the bullet. It is made (by the millions) to exacting specifications at high cost, because its failure could be fatal to its user. It is shipped at high cost to a battlefield, where it is fired. Then you need another. The problem with using the military version of inherent obsolescence is that it requires a war to really chew up projectiles, weapons, and the vehicles that carry them. Therefore, the bigger the better, because bombs cost thousands of dollars per death instead of a fistful, even with precision guidance. This is capital intensive war. Fewer soldiers mean fewer aggrieved relatives and a smaller constituency for peace.

We did have a way around this, for a while. We had the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. In the Cold War we managed to farm out some of the fighting, allowing military industries to make money without costing us voters’ sons. The nuclear arms race, however, was a brilliant program of capital intensive planned obsolescence. Military contractors designed and built incredibly complex bombs and missiles. The budget and details were secret, limiting oversight. The nukes were vital to our national security, so contractors could completely overrun their bids without penalty. When a missile was finished, it would be stuck in an incredibly expensive secret hole in the ground. At this point it would be obsolete, because the Soviets might already be ahead of us. The design and production of the next money churner would already be in place. As some persistent investigators later found out, we had always been ahead of the Soviets in the arms race, in both technology and quantity, and the insiders in Washington knew this. It was a great hog trough while it lasted.

There was the problem of taxes, and it was twofold. First, the government has to get taxes to pay for the endless stream of obsolete hardware, and this annoys the voters. Second, the few people who become rich from all this flim-flam pay a share of these taxes. President Reagan’s advisors solved this quite simply: Cut taxes on the wealthy and borrow money to make up the difference. During the Reagan years the national debt nearly doubled, deficit after deficit.

But then the damned Soviets collapsed on us and the party was over. People were talking about a peace dividend; the money we’d have left over once we stopped blowing it on nukes, tanks, and submarines. Heaven forfend. Luckily, with some encouragement from Secretary of State James Baker III and his ambassadorial minion April Glaspie, our angry pocket dictator Saddaam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

“We [The United States] have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, July 25th, 1990, one week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in a meeting with Sadaam Hussein.

Back to capital intensive inherent obsolescence with a vengeance.

Our invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have had the cash registers ringing all over the military industrial complex. Bush II and a compliant Congress cut taxes on the wealthy even more, so deeper in the hole we went. Of course, the bankers felt left out, so in the late 1990’s banking laws were relaxed and we had the credit boom. Talk about capital intensive – it was all about shuffling virtual money.

Consider that banking isn’t really an end in itself for ordinary people. It is a means to some other end, generally storing money or owning an expensive object such as a house or a car. Banking and its costs are a drag on the real economy of goods and services. A couple of decades ago finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) accounted for less than 15% of our Gross Domestic Product. More recently it has grown to around 18%. Meanwhile, our manufacturing sector dropped from 27% of GDP to less than 20%.

(Click on thumbnail to enlarge)

(Data Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Dept. of Commerce)

What we are experiencing now is a return to reality. Our titans of finance cheerfully shuffled money around with a myopic eye on short-term profits and made a bundle of vapor. All they proved was that with a high enough credit limit anybody can look like a big shot…for a while. We have run full speed into the cold, hard questions of life. How much real stuff are we actually extracting from the earth and turning into useful things? What everyday services are we providing for each other? How much of our nation’s real wealth is ending up in the pockets of ordinary working people? How much can an average family really afford to spend on a house? How deep in debt can we go before bankruptcy engulfs us, as individuals and as a nation?

Big business will always be attracted to the profligate, wasteful nature of war and the unbounded, non-material world of finance. Politicians will always be tempted by deficit spending. I am somewhat heartened by Mr. Obama’s talk of Main Street superceding Wall Street in his stimulus plans. However, I doubt that he and Congress, filtered and threatened by big money, can spurn the advances of bankers and military suppliers. The material realities of nature and society will eventually force them to comply, but how much battering will we endure between here and our inevitable destination? I’m hoping for some uncharacteristic foresight.

Persistent Stories

I was at a party recently where I overheard a man talking about his close connection with his mother. He told a story about how he had been away at college and had developed this overwhelming feeling that his mother was in trouble. He called his parents’ house, got his father on the phone, and told him of his sudden concern. His father said that his mother was upstairs, that he (the father) had spoken to her just ten minutes before, and that she was fine. The son insisted, the father went back upstairs, and (you guessed it) the mother had just been stricken with pain and needed her medicine. The people standing around this man at the party nodded and commented on this mysterious connection.

I could have told a similar story, but I didn’t want to be obnoxious. I’ll tell it to you now. A friend of mine, who grew up in Connecticut, went to away to college in California. About six weeks after she arrived, in the middle of the night, she had a sudden, overwhelming feeling that her parents were dying. She called her parents, got her mother on the phone, and told her about the premonition. “We’re fine,” said her mother, “Go back to sleep.” She did. And her parents were fine. They still are doing well, even now, 20 years later.

Boring, huh?

Imagine the millions of college students who separate from their families and hometowns for the first time every fall. Out of these millions, almost all feel some separation anxiety. For hundreds of thousands, it is intense. Some tens of thousands act on that anxiety and call home. Occasionally, something has actually just happened to their loved ones. Those stories persist, for obvious reasons of drama. The vast bulk of the stories are like my friend’s story and get quietly forgotten.

There are thousands of stories like this. A dog gets agitated and howls at (roughly) the same time that its owner dies hundreds of miles away. Ignore the fact that this dog has howled hundreds of times before, as have millions of other dogs, without any dying owners. The fact is, we as a species like patterns. Looking for patterns is an ingrained and useful technique for making sense out of our world. The problem is that we find patterns in disconnected occurrences.

I read about a classic study involving pigeons. The researcher, the famous B.F. Skinner, put pigeons in so-called Skinner boxes, where there is a lever for the animal to push and a hopper that dispenses food pellets. The researcher can put all sorts of conditions on the relationship between the lever and the hopper – a colored light being on, for instance – and find out about the animal’s learning ability or color blindness. In this case, Skinner removed the lever and had the hopper open on a fixed schedule. Soon afterward he found the pigeons doing surprising repetitive things. One bobbed its head to the side. Another spun in circles. Another made vague pecking movements. He had created superstitious pigeons. A particular pigeon, having randomly performed the same movement several times just before the hopper swung into place, decided in its little pea brain that the movement produced the hopper. It proceeded to repeat the movement over and over and, voila, eventually it “worked.” The food reappeared.

Apparently we are little better than pigeons in this respect. We wear “lucky” clothing, perform little rituals before trying to start the car on a cold morning, and pass on stories of miraculous coincidences that are just that – coincidences. I hope all who read this will look more skeptically at such things in the future…knock on wood.

Tweezed

The other day I needed to pull a splinter from my hand. I had to improvise on the removal because my tweezers were gone. A friendly, regretful TSA agent at Burlington International Airport had confiscated them a month ago. My tweezers were roughly 2 ½” long and pointed, so as to be useful in pulling splinters. The agent helpfully showed me a pair of blunt, useless tweezers and told me that if I had that type I could have gotten them through.

I didn’t take it up with him then, as I was in a hurry and not ready to endure whatever abuse the TSA dishes out to recalcitrant passengers, but let’s try a visualization exercise.

A man on a commercial flight stands up, pulls out a pair of 2 ½” long stainless steel tweezers, their wicked points glinting, and declares a hijacking. What happens next?

Here’s my most probable scenario. Chances are that everyone on the plane is already pissed off. They have fought traffic to get to the airport, endured petty humiliation as they partially disrobed at security, and probably waited in the plane for an hour and a half for a chance to take off. They know they have already missed their connections, so another bureaucratic kerfluffle isn’t going to cost them anything. There is the sound of a hundred seat belts clicking open, and then a feral growl from a hundred throats. There follows a brief period of mayhem, and the tweezer wielding hijacker is reduced to fist-sized chunks.

Perhaps you think that is extreme? Place yourself on that plane. You, along with every other inmate, are preoccupied with steaming, stewing resentment and thwarted plans. Then fate offers up a lightly armed hijacker, or even a heavily armed hijacker. You now have the opportunity, with a clear conscience, to literally rend the flesh and bone of some deserving moron. And you’ll be a hero. It’s like Christmas morning. Passengers will walk off the plane cheerfully whistling, sharing handi-wipes with complete strangers and tracking blood through the terminal.

A number of experts have pointed out that the two most effective deterrents to hijacking are now in place. First, locked and armored cockpit doors. Second, passengers with those 9/11 video clips in their minds, ready to fight dirty.

I don’t mind the whiteshirts checking luggage for bombs. In fact, I’ll join the chorus for better luggage tracking to make sure that a bag doesn’t get on a plane without a matching passenger. It might have the side effect of getting people’s bags to their intended destination. I’m fine with the prohibition of actual weapons on aircraft. I’ll put my broadsword in my checked luggage with my Leatherman. But tweezers? “Do what I say and nobody loses any nostril hairs.” I once had to go back to the luggage counter and put my multimeter in my checked bag because it had ½” long metal points on the wire leads. Oh...please.

Oh, and the one ounce liquids rule? Utter crock. Theoretically it prevents a would-be hijacker from concocting binary liquid explosives in his juice carton. In reality, it would take three hours under a fume hood with a temperature controlled cooling bath to produce the deadly explosive.

While I’m at it, let us keep our shoes on. We are the only nation on earth that makes people take their shoes off at airport security, thanks to that ding dong Richard Reid and his sweat-thwarted (and seat-mate thwarted) attempt at shoe bombing. I don’t want to give anyone ideas here, but a bomb you can fit in your shoe is a bomb you can fit in your underwear. Nude flying is only an option right now, but that is what it would take to assure absolute security.

Terrorism is a politically motivated crime: the use of violence to create fear in order to achieve a political goal. Its solutions lie first in political change and second in criminal investigation. Think of the classic standard of proof for murder: the suspect has to have means, motive, and opportunity. There is little we can do about means – the world is awash in guns and explosives. We can lessen opportunity, but it will always be there in an open society. The only sure way to minimize the risk of terrorism is eliminating the motivation. I should note the obvious - threats don’t work on people willing to die. People who have exhausted all normal channels of political change without success are most vulnerable to the appeals of violence. Promoting political reform, both here and abroad will make us safer in the long run. Cooperative international criminal justice efforts (with the emphasis on “justice”) will provide some near-term protection. In the meantime, barefoot, tweezerless airline passengers are so much security theater.

Oh, Holy (_____)

Time for a break from seriousness.

It is December, so we are being bombarded with Christmas music. It is usually in the form of aseptic background pap culled from elevator recordings and the backlists of has-been pop artists. As a rebuttal to this death-by-syrup I offer you a bit of auditory mayhem. It has to be my favorite rendition of any Christmas carol ever. This sound clip was gleaned from NPR's piece on the Annoying Music Show. Apparently it was a sincere attempt at an audition tape for a talent competition. Grit your teeth and hang in there - the song grows on you. The guy really swings for the fences. Just when you think it can't get any worse, or funnier, it does, right to the final note. Click on the link below and brace yourself.

Oh Holy Night