Cobb

As Black As A President Gets

Back when I was a baby, there was some controversy over the Irish Catholicism of Candidate Kennedy. I didn't participate in that sort of thing, obviously, but I heard enough about it so that it was a big deal. Eventually, Kennedy was shot, and so finally was his brother Robert. I suspect that if I read whatever the most notable Irish newspaper in America at the time, I would hear all over the editorial section how blatantly anti-Irish it all was. And the chorus says 'huh?'

I do read the headlines from The Root every day, and they serve to remind me of a number of things. Primarily however they remind me that the American Left is at odds with itself with regard to its multiculturalist principles and priorities. That comes out as frustration with its racial narrative and the actual way that successful ethnics express their power in America. 

America is a melting pot, but only the Civil War made it hot enough to melt Africans into citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement, often interpreted as a grass roots revolution, demonstrated a different kind of heat that melted glass ceilings and second-class citizenship. But between you and me, it was the triumph of Thurgood Marshall's legal practice and that of his amicus partners.  I've always expressed my interpretation of the progress of the African in America as one of human rights to civil rights and continuing on towards social power. But I am rather convinced these days that there are only civil rights in law and the rest requires old fashioned clout of the sort that is never arrayed for the masses outside of revolution. In other words, the only people who get 100% Civil Rights - the only kind of rights there are, are the rich and powerful. Everybody else gets a gentleman's C, and as such they follow the prerogatives of class, education and general human fitness. Nevertheless certain aspects of these rights and privileges accrue through the example of those who amass social capital, of which African Americans have a goodly share, and quite frankly have enjoyed since society girls started dancing Uptown. You could ask Sir Duke or Marion Anderson if they were still alive. 

None of that changes the fact of the Black Power Struggle which always and everywhere refused the very idea of assimilation. America is no melting pot to them, but a lumpy salad and they like it lumpy, with a particularly tart flavor of relativist salad dressing called multiculturalism. But everybody knows a black olive is fundamentally different from egg whites... 

You must keep this in mind when reading contemporary accounts of the complaints of the so-called 'African American' and discussions of 'race' attending such debate. I was reminded of this starkly last week as I tuned in to some of my old favorite reggae albums, notably that of Steel Pulse. Their music provides a very useful insight. 

 

I won't belabor the point of the following lyrics:

They took us away captivity captivity
Required from us a song
Right now man say repatriate repatriate
I and I patience have now long time gone
Father's mothers sons daughters every one
Four hundred million strong
Ethiopia stretch forth her hand
Closer to God we Africans
Closer to God we can
In our hearts is Mount Zion
Now you know seek the Lion
How can we sing in a strange land
Don't want to sing in a strange land no
Liberation true democracy
One God one aim one destiny

Except to point out that they come from an album entitled True Democracy. If you ask a certain type of black American if they are patriotic you will find that they are, contingent on America's ability or willingness to produce True Democracy. I leave it to your curiosity to determine what degree of multicultural salad dressing that is, or more pointedly if there is sympathy with Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon or Black Liberation Theology. 

That is a very critical question that must be pointedly raised when certain assumptions about 'the' black polity's satisfaction with the purported black agenda of Barack Obama. I understand him very well to be exactly the sort who like me, loves to play the dub version (without lyrics) of that Steel Pulse song, (yes it is very popular). Unlike me, I happen to think Barack Obama would enjoy tweaking our democracy towards the 'True' in service of a lumpier multiculturalism. 

The Washington Post's editorial by Frederick Harris reflects the disappointment anyone in search of 'True Democracy' must have with real political power in America. Him say:

After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.)

Obama has followed this pattern. During the 2008 campaign, the most significant moment when race hit the national stage was when controversy broke out over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing Obama to deliver a much-heralded speech on race in Philadelphia. During his presidency, racial discussions have been largely limited to his reactions to unexpected public debates, such as the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

In theory, these two episodes offered opportunities for Obama to discuss reforms to the criminal justice system — an issue he’d raised early in his campaign — but instead, he limited his response to tamping down potential racial conflicts, then quickly moving on.

I take this complaint as one typical of the racially minded who can never be satisfied that America is talking enough about race - when the fact of the matter is they themselves can never shutup about race. 

But I saw all this coming back when Obama proved his charm to the American electorate years ago. All of his black politics were a fiction, and then he made all black politics into a fiction - both the traditional and the newly opportunistic. Because it was all about Barack Obama, not about any real continuation of 'The Struggle'. Nevertheless, Obama played the right background music, gave fist bumps onstage and did those things that suited the styles of the revolutionaries and radicals. A suit he wore very well. I believe my characterization of him was 'Barbara Boxer in a black man suit', which is to say a typical Lefty American with no real loyalties but to the prerogatives of Left rhetoric as usual and win, win, win, elections. His agenda was indistinguishable from that of John Edwards basically until Shepard Fairy made the famous poster. And then he went on to raised more money in his campaign than any man in American history.

I understood, as much as I found Obama to be disagreeable, that he would not paint the White House black and that he would fit, one way or another, into the President Suit - that giant robot that says Made in America and Leader of the Free World with the stars and stripes on its chest. And in several ways he has done so admirably. But some fraction of his black electorate has reason to be disappointed in themselves for following a racial line that turns out not to be the doctrine they were expecting. And thus they have to be asked about their definitions of True Democracy.

Well actually they really don't, because if Barack Obama ain't black enough for you, then perhaps you take blackness not only too seriously, and in dubious directions. But the real news is that the next US President of African descent will have much less to prove about his blackness or the color of his skin indicating something about 'race relations.'

You see, the Civil Rights Movement is over. It is as over in 2012 as the Civil War was over in when those society girls were getting their Charleston on up in Harlem. We are fast approaching the day when all Civil Rights Movement veterans will be as dead as Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps Steven Speilberg or Clint Eastwood will direct the movie that has the last word on Thurgood. I'd like to see that movie.  And if the idea that it won't be Spike Lee makes you uncomfortable - well then you just peed your own pants on that one, brother. And every day we will bury with another layer of abstraction those stories that retain their racial purity, as if only Africans can tell the story of Ocean Hill - Brownsville, only gays of Stonewall, only Chicanos of the Zoot Suit Riots. Because it will be America's history, and Americans will only tell themselves the stories that they feel comfortable with. That's not because the truth doesn't matter so much, but because race doesn't matter so much.

When the truth is told, that's what America wants. 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Kill List

Deconstructionist, post-modernist, relativists once more are muddled in a semiotic swamp of their own indiscipline. The news is that the American President pursues and destroys enemies of America, and so now they are stuck, now that this president is their boy with coming up with more euphemisms and justifications for such. Instead, they have the starkly frank 'Obama's Kill List' and the implications of all the meetings and decisions that went into such a thing. 

This is like a previously 'perfect' and catty teenager discovering her own zits, and it has about that level of emotional impact on me. I guess I've lived long enough.

My input on the matter is simple. According to the New Yorker, the President has been intimately involved in giving the go orders from the Oval Office. This can only mean that he is micromanaging the military - having usurped their public credibility - doing the exact same thing with assuredly worse competence but with presumably superior political cover. I would not go as far as to say 'accountability' because accountability requires transparency, and transparency can only be established at the President's level when he hasn't scorched the earth of his predecessor.

A wise Obama, the sort we don't have, would have merely declared such targets of his 'kill list' as 'enemy combattants', a term we in the American public know as well as we do 'WMD'. He could have then said that the Army was doing America's business as usual, standing on the shoulders of GWBush. Of course the suckers who voted him into office would never accept that, but he would have the benefit of actually telling the truth. Instead, he must continue to pretend to be the European Social Democrat, drive on the left hand side of the road and call a hood a 'bonnet' and all sorts of other un-American things. Only that way can he please a constituency steeped in doublespeak. Speaking of which...

The method we have built, over a couple of hundred years, for sorting out questions of guilt and innocence and probable cause, is due process. And that may be the most degraded phrase of all.

No grownup could possibly make this kind of assertion about military action if Obama didn't give such poison rhetoric the sort of cover he has. But the President has backed himself into the corner of putting an actual war using our own actual soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and special forces on his own political shoulders while sustaining the foolish and incorrect context of criminal prosecution. 

That's the massive ego of a man responsible only to those fools who elected him. Unfortunately, that's not America. I wonder if Romney can do any better. 

Reagan was a coward with his plausible deniability. Obama is a snake with his obfuscations and duplicity. GWBush called out our enemies to the world and reminded us every day what his intentions were. There was never any question that we are at war.  But we clearly have a man in Washington who will use weasel words to suggest that we are not. 

The Gopher Hole

In the news:

Two weeks ago, Steve Wozniak made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals.

EFF supports Wozniak's position: while Apple's products have many virtues, they are marred by an ugly set of restrictions on what users and programmers can do with them. This is most especially true of iOS, though other Apple products sometimes suffer in the same way. In this article we will delve into the kinds of restrictions that Apple, phone companies, and Microsoft have been imposing on mobile computers; the excuses these companies make when they impose these restrictions; the dangers this is creating for open innovation; why Apple in particular should lead the way in fixing this mess. We also propose a bill of rights that need to be secured for people who are purchasing smartphones and other pocket computers.

Apple's recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple's contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or "jailbreak" their devices can escape these limitations.

Marred?

Follow my analogy for a moment. "No car is perfect if everybody can't be a mechanic." Get me? Or let's go to the example of nature. 

Everyone should be permitted to run free through the forest. In fact, this is the state of nature. And in this unregulated free state of nature if during your sprint you catch your foot in a gopher hole and snap your tibia, you will basically become wolf bait. You can't sue the gopher. You can't take your broken leg back to your parents and demand a refund. You also can't sue the property owner because there is no property owner. You are in a state of nature.

But if you want the risk mitigation of running through a forest that is owned by somebody who takes responsibility for your idiot mistakes, then you must accept the possibibility, and in this modern world the probability, that there will be posted signs that tell you not to run off the paved path and denies you any legal recourse should you step into a gopher hole. (Remember it was the 'freedom' to run in a forest which brought you here in the first place - you thought the treadmill at Bally's was too artificial.) But you want to run with the risks, ignore the signs and sue the makers anyway. Why? Because you want your freedom. So jailbreakers are like joggers who hate people on bikes. And Apple's IOS is like a tollroad with a nice fence on it, and the joggers don't want to be treated like people on bikes, or God forbid people in passenger cars. They want to cut the switchbacks. But they don't want to run in their *own* forest because it takes too much time to grow the trees, and you like the trees in Mr. Steve Jobs' forest even though you think they can stand some improvement.  But most importantly, you want an army of joggers to follow your path.

When is the last time you actually read the terms and conditions on a piece of software you purchased, or borrowed, or appropriated? What do you really care? You don't. You just think you're entitled to run. It's what God gave you legs for. 

This is a case of people in the open source community, if you can call it that monolithically, being shameless. It's not enough that they have a functional rival in Android. But they cannot stand the idea that something functionally equivalent cannot be subject to their criticism and meddling. 

I suppose this would all be a no brainer with regard to fault if the legacy of Mr. Jobs had an absent landlord who didn't go poking around in other forests and claiming ownership of the shape of the trees. But that's what happens when too many people are greedy; it doesn't pay not to be greedy.

Still, I maintain the perspective of a little bit of age and a fair bit of sophistication, and my wisdom tells me that there is greed all around. After all, what is the point of fooling around with IOS and the iPhone in the first place? It's the same point as being interested in getting exclusive interviews with [Kim Kardashian] <= {Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Spears, Courtney Love, Nancy Kerrigan}. IOS is a hot bitch. But really should you have a dog in that fight?  Dear Capitalist, Turing's Rule is still in effect. Signed Scientist.  What you really want to be is the guy who did the "Duh" improvement over the legacy of Apple. Three years ago it was adding 'cut' and 'paste', and didn't that little glitch keep you awake nights? Two years ago it was background processing. Oh you poor unrecognized geniuses. 

We have entered a new era of hateration, which is to say, the counter on the same cycle of human impatience and jealousy has been incremented and given a new typeface. 

 All any of us need is an audience. It's hard to gain one if all you want is applause and its hard to convert one once it is gained. In the end, I think there is a lot of disingenuous friending going around. But that's how markets work. Unfortunately, we also know that interest groups with lawyers work hard too, which is why people who grow forests have to post signs. 

Meanwhile, where there's no money, no youth and no particular public agenda, things are a bit more peaceful. 

Amazon: The Next General Motors

At some point, we must consider the basic needs of humanity and figure out how the economy is arranged to provide for it and what goods and services the markets can sustain beyond those of necessity. In America, we can predict beyond necessity because ours are so well spoken for. It is that interesting gap that I spend hours thinking when I try to distinguish our 9% unemployment rate from the poverty of the second and third worlds. 

Several years ago, the NYT published a survey about the most prestigious professions. I was mildly surprised to see that Database Administrators ranked third, behind doctors and lawyers out of 447 job titles. But what has not been surprising is how much of our economy has moved into what I must call industrial dependency on computing services. We are at a point in our history where taking away the computers would be like taking away the automobiles. Information technology and telecommunications are where what we know must live or else die. The efficiencies and effectiveness of this industry too compelling to put aside. In this world there are as many microchips as grains of rice, and the trend is irreversible.

Clay Shirky, among many inquisitors into the phenomena of this age has written a book entitled 'Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age'. In i, he shows how many ventures on the internet capture human efforts quite effectively - in ways heretofore impossible. Imagine the creation of a global encyclopedia in fifty languages written by nobody in particular in their spare time. That's Wikipedia. The ability for a literate population of billions to create products and services for the intellect is the world historical process that is emerging now. 

The Industrial Revolution as we know it come to be because it generated a great surplus in one basic human need, clothing. It turned out that once properly organized, ordinary people had the skill to produce in factories, a product everyone needed. By applying a process that scaled up the ordinary work of an individual tailor, people were able to earn more money, make more clothes and create for the population of ordinary people, choices in what clothing to wear. What started as clothing, once individually crafted, moved on to other sorts of manufacture with its ultimate expressions in the automobile and jet aircraft.  For an ordinary person to have choices in how to get to a destination, and have many destinations to choose from drastically changed the shape of the world. We don't talk much about the 'jet set' because now frequent flying is commonplace. It's hard to imagine rolling back to a time when an automobile was not an option or when jet transport did not exist. FedEx overnight delivery was created in our lifetimes. In America, 'allow six weeks for delivery' used to be the standard.

In these ways the future of IT are certain to create surpluses for the common man. What is necessary is for the high cost of craftsmanship to be surpassed by the low cost of mass production. For manufacturing, that required the factory. For computing it requires the cloud. What is a factory but a streamlined and standardized version of a craftsman's workshop scaled up for mass production? The cloud is certainly that as compared to the typical corporate IT shop.

In 1908, the head of Cadillac in England famously put on a remarkable demonstration. He had three Cadillac Model Ks race around a track and then disassembled. Then he scrambled the parts and even took out some and replaced them with off the shelf replacements. He then had the cars reassembled. All three of them worked perfectly. Today, most software is built in such a way that this would be impossible, but the cloud and the open source movement are rapidly changing that condition. 

Amazon is the leading cloud provider and I predict that the services, products, standards and practices that emerge from what it is learning about computing, networks, and security at massive scale will be every bit as influential in society as the paradigms that emerged over the 20th century for the automobile at Ford and General Motors. Moreover, the effect of these new ideas will provide similar surpluses. 

It was 1903 when the Wright Brothers first succeeded. It was a mere 14 years later when the Red Baron emerged as the combat 'ace' of WW1. That is how quickly people can adapt and master something that didn't even exist, on a world scale. Amazon and its rivals now host the software solutions of companies like Netflix. 14 years ago, in 1998, high definition video on demand to mass markets of mobile devices was considered impossible.

General Motors became the world's largest business and ushered in a new way of thinking about business. Even today we have a hard time not thinking about those businesses organized around the automobile when we say the word 'industry'. Glass, rubber, plastics and steel were all made that much more important owing to their place in the autombility manufacturing. Today oil is king because it is the consumable part of the worlds automotive needs. But it is *an* economy, not *the* economy. The next economic progression will come from the real fact that we will have more literate people on the planet than ever before in our history. Their cognitive needs and wants will fuel an even larger economy than that based on the clever assembly of glass, rubber, plastics, steel and oil. 

It begins with enabling a new class of database administrators, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all of the various kinds of creative, thoughtful knowledge and communications workers we can assemble and setting them loose in the cloud - the scaled up information factories of tomorrow. 

Today, we sit on the verge of enabling the common man a choice of thought previously only available in the same ways a choice of clothing was scarcely affordable in an age of hand sewn tailored garments. He will demand his choice and those who provide it will profit. The economy of intellect is at hand and it will be the Americans, once again, who light the way forward by providing the infrastructure necessary - the largest and most advanced software factories in the world. Considering what Microsoft and Oracle have been, I do not see how Amazon can lose.