Cobb

Only the Lonely

This morning I'm doing a blackness tour in my online reading. Same old stuff. Feeling a pinch odd that I could be hanging with Jimi at The Root if I tried and cared enough. Kind of pissed that I may have become perennially difficult to understand and thus always something of an outsider. Wondering how long I can do it all without becoming a caricature of myself. I mean, I don't have to make any excuses about sleeping with little boys or hitting the crack pipe, but then again I'm not Michael Jackson or Marion Barry. If I were to hype up the Cobb personna I could get away with being perverse. The thing is, I'm not perverse, I'm actually just achieving knowledge and some wisdom at an accellerated pace. It makes me move on.

So the subject at P6 is Martha's Vineyard and which section the Obamas might find most comfy for their summer vacation. The same-old is the same, 'it doesn't matter how rich you get...' observation that their likely choice will be Oak Bluffs, the ink-welliest spot on the isle.

My favorite parts of the Vineyard are Menemsha Bight, West Chop and the Katama beaches south of Edgartown. I hadn't made it out to Gay Head, but would prefer that because I don't see what the point of living on the water is if you can't see the sunset. To read the NYMagazine article that spurred all this talk, there is a distinct racial geography to the joint and social and psychological incentives not to buck the trend.

The Only Ones deal with glass ceilings at work, unfortunate misunderstandings in their neighborhoods, condescension from blacks who think their education or class makes them inauthentic, and identity crises in their kids. When they get to their Vineyard vacation homes, they want to escape that casual, institutional, and intra-black racism and be around people who help them feel less anomalous. Trey Ellis, who wrote the script for The Inkwell, the notoriously bad film about the black Vineyard experience (Ellis himself called it terrible), says, “The black part of the Vineyard is like, I would imagine, being gay and going to the Castro. It’s this mecca where you can be yourself and be with people who have so much in common with you. No one has to feign some street cred when they’re playing tennis.” It’s a source of communion and of pride. “When you see a beautiful black family with their kids, it makes you feel really good about being black,” says Chrisette Hudlin, wife of Reggie and a lifelong Vineyarder who travels there every summer from L.A. “As a person who’s high-achieving and striving for the best for their family, you’re looking at these other black people who have the same goals, and it makes you feel good as a black person. You don’t feel out of place.” Several Only Ones say there’s nowhere in America that makes them more proud of black people.

This is particularly true among parents, who talk about the importance of introducing their children to other black upper-class families so they can know they’re not as peculiar as they might feel. “Black kids need to be around successful black families, because other blacks from humble beginnings want you to apologize for being successful,” says psychiatrist Carlotta Miles. “On the Vineyard, you don’t need excuses or self-consciousness or defensiveness.” Drew Dixon Williams grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother, Sharon Pratt, served as mayor, and she spent summers on the island. “It’s sort of embarrassing to say this, coming from Washington,” she says, “but I used to say with a straight face—because I was too young to know better—that I would get my black experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I didn’t have to be defensive about not being black enough or being black in the first place. We were all from The Cosby Show.”

Only Ones. I'm not sure that I don't like that. There have got to be more OOs like me, who tend not to break a sweat over our OO factor. But I hear what Drew Dixon Williams is saying. The thing is that I don't particularly care a great deal about my kids' black experience. I'm not trying to psychologically prepare a racial Maginot Line in their consciousness in defense of The Insult. There is no Black Experience(tm). There used to be one, but an old man died with the recipe, and now everybody thinks they have it right - like the drama over the recipe for the perfect hamburger. Sometimes it's better to just have a hot dog and call it a day.

But there was a time when I thought I was a Big Mac in my odd situation of being in the black upper middle class all by my lonesome, which was to say 30 and single and trying to pull the perfect babe. The rarefied atmosphere of Oak Bluffs was exactly what I was looking for - a bunch of Cosby kids looking for another bunch. And yet I still needed to play volleyball, because that's what I did. And so when I did that, I ended up at Katama among kids who didn't work. I mean to say white kids who shuttled between the Vineyard and Palm Beach depending on the season. Trust funders, social specimens to us in the real world, or at least that was my assumption at the time. But back in Oak Bluffs, the more urban setting, last whites night (as in post Labor Day dress codes) resulted in more dancing in suits, the same phenomenon I had grown ill of years before.

The irony was that when I came to the East Coast originally, having broke up with my progressive girlfriend, there was a great expectation in me that I would find in New York the very equivalent of a dense, upscale black community on whose margins I could dance my New World Afrikan dance. In the advanced bohemian brashness I considered my pose to be, I could speak to the artistic expression doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and sportos could not approach without being so crass as the lot of entertainers we suffered in the degrading state of hiphop. I wanted the audience of the new black progressive novel, the people who went to BAM and who dug Wynton. I wanted the people who were looking for the creative blacks now unleashed parallel to Spike Lee who would inherit the mantel of August Wilson without caving into what eventually became the Black WB. It was a narrow ledge that needed broad support, and it turned out that there was little such concentration in the Big Apple. Deciding against all that after a couple frustrating years in recognition that ex-gangsta drug dealers and their coteries were bankrolling all the new black cultural production, I was too through with it all. By the time I got to the Vineyard, it John Singleton and Terry McMillan were the king and queen of black highbrow which was all actually just middlebrow, and the likes of George C. Wolfe belonged to... well the same people who made The Blue Man Group rich. What we got was Diddy, Dre & Jay Z. Three new Barry Gordys living three times as large. What we didn't get was one theatre on Broadway or playwrites to replace Jones or Hansberry, no new Paul Robeson or Leontyne Price.

That little black community simply wasn't wealthy enough, and I think today it probably still is not. And so I predict that it never will be because none of us will survive the inflation of the post-Obama world who aren't already wealthy today. The hamburger will stay hamburger and never move to the black cultural filet mignon of my dreams. Not a raisin in the sun, but a jerky beef that produces hard little turds of frustration no matter how much water you drink it down with. Mine is all shat out, but it took years to comprehend both the size and cost of this failure. In the end I have to live with our history, of having Michael Jackson's death celebrated as if he were our new black shining prince.

The fool's errand is pumping the old fighter of blackness full of steroids and painkillers to fight another round of the Culture Wars. And you wonder why a people who should have found quite enough in their humanity or even Christianity generations ago are still tied to minding the color line and carving out discursive space around Obama, the Great Black Avatar. As if he could be.

This morning I read that the NSA is building a new data center just south of Salt Lake City. I think I could retire there in 15 and do some consulting until my fingers become too arthritic, white as that joint might be. Still, I'd prefer Boise, where at least they drink vodka openly. Nevertheless I pause to think of all the undiscovered countries too non-black for the OO taste not to mention that of the average middle class black Americans. I understand the desire to perfect a black aesthetic which stands above the dysfunctional fray of the multifarious legacies of slavery, and racial brownian motion of American society. I understand my generation's deep desire to accomplish the Beloved Community, to have an unassailable elite black vanguard with the social clout of the voice of Thurgood Marshall in the wake of the Brown decision - all black Americans backing him no matter their class status. But nothing is so monolithic and sure. Rather we are black mothers and fathers to Benjamin Buttons whose adventures lie in foreign lands beyond our experience. It's good enough to make home right, a home right with God.

The Only Ones, those who deign to be that and stay that, would be a lonely bunch. As Steven Pressfield says, a tribe has no law so much as it has a code of honor.  America and the West are not tribal, but black Americans are perhaps the last tribe here, still trying to get it all together. Looking for unity in all the wrong places, as victims, as leaders, in the meritocracy, in the rarified moral arena of our stentorian politics. Everywhere we are reminded that our code of honor stands for jack in the social marketplace. It's only the head bob on the street, the appropriated high five, pound and now fist bump all forever lost to the leveling heat sink of transparent American culture. Nobody cares enough to learn Swahili and so the heat death of black American culture is inevitable. It can only be sustained by physical proximity and along the same lines of fear and distrust as Jim Crow ever established.

The distinction of being from the best and brightest of these, the least of my brothers, is being played out now, five steps over my head in Obama's house. His election was the last leverage our black social capital will ever aggregate. We'll go down finally, like the Irish after Kennedy. And no fat headed, thick accented brothers of our sort will remain stock characters in our popular entertainments and consciousness. There will be no future Charlie Rangels just as there are no future Tip ONeils. There will only be the same-old, the dialog that becomes a lonely monologue.

Some Unstated Thoughts About Achievement

One of the themes I have been considering is the necessity for war. But more importantly is the very accomplishment of war. It has been a while since I began entertaining the idea. At this point I trace it back to the days when I first started thinking about Patton.

It is a popular idea, which may or may not be owned by the Left, that war is essentially stupidity writ large. That the act of war represents a failure of intellect - an inability to think through problems. Note the use of the term 'resort to violence' as a way of achieving one's ends. The kneejerk ethos would suggest that 'violence as a last resort' is the thoughtful way forward. But none of that really scales to war. Making war is an enterprise that requires a great deal of thought.

As one of those permanent institutions in the history of civilized mankind, the standing army is the beneficiary of generation upon generation of wisdom. And as such it is appropriate to think of those generals and military officers as the beneficiaries of said wisdom. They may or may not learn well, but as a class of men who are expected to lead tens of thousands of men during the regular course of their careers, sometimes to death, quite a bit depends on them. Most certainly central to the authority vested in military officers is the fact that civilization turns on their actions. The ability to wage war is the greatest fortune a people possess, for it is the manner in which they preserve their very lives, when their lives themselves are threatened.

I am studying the means of war because at this moment in American history the study of economics is fruitless. Nobody knows what to do with a surfeit of unemployed, educated, literate people but make them EGBOK promises. So what if that fails and we depose the promisers? We might very well suffer a coup of the sort Iran has suffered and what would all those angry people do? Who knows, but even if they were to 'resort to violence' that would be a trifle compared to the the business of waging war. You cannot spontaneously generate a fighting army. You cannot transform rage into battlefield victory.

If one is to take Machiavelli seriously in taking politics for non-violent war, then business is perhaps, some fraction of politics. Surely the power of law outweighs the power of money in this world. An economy is a well-managed game and those who cheat or lose are rarely shot. The stakes simply aren't so high. And so all those who might think that the global corporation is some new sort of superpower really don't understand power. When it comes to ultimate sacrifices, rich and powerful people always end up paying for soliders. Nobody can match the organizations that print money, and even the narcotraffickers who printed cocaine were ultimately no match. Surely soldiers will fight and die for money, but more will fight and die for the honor that politics bestows.

Equally there is much to be said for religion, but I am coming to think of religion as a hedge with regard to its conspiracy in national governance. The Catholic Church does not demand that Christians defy the laws of men. Men fear jail more than excommunication. That is the way of the world today, except obviously in areas that are unpoliced.

My point is that the greatest projects of mankind still do inevitably involved armed conflict, and when people starve that is what results. Feeding an army will always be possible and humans will not 'civilize' themselves past that. All the greatest mistakes end in war, it is how we solve ultimate problems. We will fight until we are exhausted of fighting, and the man who leads the most and smartest of his tribe to victory at war is by definition the greatest man.

The difficulty in understanding this fundamental principle I place at the feet of a sort of false ethics. It is literally the power of a hegemonic understanding which is the same thing as mass hysteria or a successful grand conspiracy. Only people leveraged by a system whose roughneck roots they are completely isolated from can develop a worldview that defies the acknowledgment of war as the ultimate solution. Only people who circumscribed or extremely disciplined to live in a fraction of their humanity do not know.

So I measure things in terms of cost of life. I measure things in terms of loyalty unto death. I judge achievements by the willingness of those who oppose it to die trying. Whatever can be gotten can be gotten for a price. Every ethos that doesn't extend that to the ultimate price can and will be sold out, betrayed, undermined and refuted. When I came understand this in terms of politics, it was a revelation. It was then I wrote 'The Cost of Not' and came to recognize racial equilibrium in America. 

I live in the belly of the economy of America in its upper middle class. What I have isn't really much. It was hard won for me as an individual but the slightest war wipes me away. So I am reconciled to my spoiled and recondite existence, all relativism aside. I play by the rules of the inner circle privileges, but I never forget the outer boundaries - the human ultimate that lies outside.

Never forget that you can be punched in the nose. So don't be so proud of things you have that you didn't have to punch for.

On Transcending Multiculturalism: A Sotomayor Addendum

I think that the experience of living as a free man is precious and quite frankly more rare than it should be. And I think that in large societies the (peasant) masses are not free, and so learn to operate with a certain lack of respect. Ultimately it is a weakness. In our society the unfree have traditionally been marked by race and so I look at the extent to which blacks have navigated well without standing to full height and maintained a subculture of doing so. Because my aim is to break out of that subculture whose very existence is the result of suppression.  

So for the lack of a better term, I would expect a man of means and property to bear himself in the same way anywhere around the world and I think there are ways that such a man indicates that level of power which responds to its equal. The same thing could be said of soldiers in uniform, or frocked priests, or medical doctors. There is a universal understanding.  

I'm not certain that the same thing applies to middle classes. I think middle class people are very much products of their environments by default and must strive to become free men, shedding the conventions of peasantry and the peculiarities of their upbringing. There is a gap they must cross. Many may reach prominence but not all cross the gap. It's the difference between Bobby Short and Bobby Brown.
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For Sotomayor to be the great leader she aspires to be, I think that whatever she might do to appeal to peasant, ethnic, middle class, sensibilities degrades her. I think her first loyalty should be to higher, more rigorous principles. I cannot tell the extent to which her speech to La Raza and the Aztlan movement unbalances her from that higher loyalty, but I think that the American ideal is to be transcendent. It is what we expected of Bobby Kennedy and it is what his critics played upon vis a vis his qualifications to be President.  

To 'be' a minority is, to my reckoning, a concession to a prior state of oppression, a perverse badge of pride and a reason to never transcend, to never cross the gap. In the end, I believe it will always end in appeals to tribalism. It is a character flaw to be scrutinized.

The keyword for future reference is 'cosmopolitan', although it does not properly imply an intellect of rural propriety which of course must exist. I speak of this in the context of black politics and identity formation here:

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

Open Collaboration vs Propriety

I've begun reading 'The Success of Open Source' as I try to get my head around the idea, or the fact, that open source databases have leapfrogged enterprise engineered databases in many important ways. It's a disorienting feeling I have, so I need to reconcile it with reality. That's the thrust, but I think there are important implications as well.

If there is one thing I've always liked about my industry and also hated it is the way in which programmers have been organized to work and create wealth has managed to be casual. I thought about this today while looking for a bathroom that was not being serviced in the spanking new building where I'm working. And so I'm curious to know some of the underlying principles, if there are any.

You see the building I'm currently working in has been architected for collaboration. Nobody owns a desk, anybody can use any 'cube' which is more like an open plan workstation, to dock their laptop and do whatever it is they do. There are lockers disbursed through the building so that if you have stuff, that you can park it securely as your itinerant work takes you wherever in the building. There are small private rooms with phones and glass doors so that you can do a conference call. Some are as small as a large telephone booth, others can seat three or four folks.

Now the unwritten rule of this architecture has to be written, and you will find spontaneously printed notes all around the joint reminding employees that camping is not allowed. In other words, it defies the spirit of the collaborative environment to claim one of these small private rooms for yourself. But enough people have camped for the signs to become necessary. I even noticed one printed in large red letters in the elavator this morning.

This environment comes complete, as one would expect in Silicon Valley, with an area with beanbag chairs a ping pong table and subsidized soft drink machines. It's hardly what one would think of as panoptic. Yet despite its thoroughly contemporary style you'll still find a catering truck pulling up to to the front of the building every day at lunch. I've been to a large number of companies in my time, and I would argue that this particular campus is on the more advanced edge of the IT high tech sort. In the building I visited yesterday, there are no corner offices. In the corners are conference rooms. Everything about the place says, young, smart, tansformative & green. Yes green. Outside the front door of my building is a solar powered trash can. Don't ask.

Is propriety at risk here? Yes, a little bit, but I cannot tell to what extent. My immediate reaction to the no camping sign is split. One could easily be chagrined that old habits die hard. On the other hand re-engineering is not necessarily quality improvement. To work in a building that encourages collaboration and play is a hallmark of the new style of business organization you find in Silicon Valley. But is hierarchical organization necessarily bad? Is the desire to be territorial wrong? Is it necessarily a good thing to have a rumpus room in a corporation?  I think it all depends at root on one's understanding of the ways and means people are organized around property and how that is perceived by workers and their management.

For example. If I understand the open source movement correctly, it produces a high quality product because the inner workings of products are subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. In architecting a building where people work around that same principle, you don't own your office because your work should be subject to arbitrary and massive scrutiny. Camping implies propriety, of keeping to yourself, of privacy.

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The downside of proprietary engineering development that I am intimately familiar with originated with my experience at Xerox. Xerox fumbled the future because it slavishly attended to its customers - customers who were not future-oriented. Likewise when you make your money designing to spec in a bespoke manner for a limited set of customers you are likely to satisfy them very well but you will be inefficient for the masses. Open source takes advantage of the masses and a new arrangement between customer and provider. So I am aware how propriety inspires loyalty and trust and how loyalty and trust can be the enemies of innovation.

There are great implications about this new kind of property which is inherent in the open source movement, but the manifestations of the broader social implications are just beginning to appear.

The Hype Ratio

One of the things that we notice about the news cycle, which has become a feature of our society is the extent to which it defines the public interest in defiance of perspective. As we move forward towards a Banksian Mind Singularity, we should keep in mind this ratio.

The Hype Ratio is the extent to which the public is alerted to something in which it has relatively stake or say. I now think of the Hype Ratio as some function of the inability of smart questions to be answered readily. There are many factors to consider but I want to focus on the fraction which has to do with the non-integration of information pathways which is a function of the profitability of mass media. But let's look to the future and see how it should be and how I think that the smartest information technologists are thinking about it.

I invoke both Ray Kurzweil and Iain Banks when I talk about Banksian Mind Singularity. Kurzweil is famous for a number of things, but lately his prediction is that there will come a point in time in the future that non-human intelligence will outweigh human intelligence. He's right of course, except what he doesn't understand is that human culture won't give a damn. We'll still be watching Michael Jackson videos in 200 years even though there will have been invented ninja-bots that can outdance Jackson. The point is that when cars run faster than horses, we may no longer care about horses. But even though horses have always outrun humans, we still care about the fastest human runner. And just as we care about the fastest kids who can do math in their heads or drummers who are much slower than drum machines, we will still care about Bernie Madoff when the math told us not to invest in him. Bottom line is we will always be able to ignore non-human intelligence even if the whole of it is smarter than the whole of humankind. And it will not necessarily be at our peril. The value of human life is not subject to optimization, and this is the error that so many make.  We still don't understand, the lot of us, how ecology of the earth works. Our relation to the other species of the world is about as tenuous as the commerce secretary's relation to job creation. It ain't cause and effect and we have no idea how the system actually works, but we take his word for it.

Iain Banks, in his Culture novels, describes a galaxy full of advanced civilizations of many different species. In this galaxy are great mechanical intelligences which have evolved under a law that protects all sentience. The greatest of these minds are deployed to attend to the functions of navigating warships - essentially all humanity and its governing body has outsourced the business of war to battling AIs. But as part of that same advance technology are smaller units which mind over planetary systems and their economies. They are all interconnected as peers and any individual human has access to just about everything they could possibly want to know, immediately.

It is important to consider Banks' vision primarily because he asserts something that is fundamental and inalterable. Human freedom, no matter what it desires, is always constrained by the laws of physics. From physics come economics. Understand as well that in Banks' speculative future, energy technologies are mastered, therefor the economies are vast, and significantly beyond human scale problems.

A Banksian Mind can thus be like an ultimate butler. It answers all of our questions in as great a detail as we are capable of absorbing. But we still have our free will to ignore it - still we keep them around as servants - all of our professional advisors wrapped into one, towards our ideal of human perfection. The Banksian Minds will be our guidance counselors, our dentists, our tax accountants, our bodyguards and our Jeeves. The important thing to note about the Banksian Mind is that in its sentience, it is co-dependent on humanity, and it is this co-dependence and the recognition of individuality that throws something of a wrench into one of Kurzweil's notions about Singularity, which is that we would merge with our sentient creations symbiotically and thereby change what it means to be human.

So what does instantaneous access to all information give us? In the Bansksian Mind Singularity, the Hype Ratio drops asymptotically to zero. Everything you want to know, you can know with accuracy and certainty. The difference and the distance between you and your goal is reduced to two dimensions instead of three. Ignorance is not part of the equation, rather it is primarily a matter of distance and time, or more properly speaking, energy and time.

Now, let's go back to the contemporary reality of the news cycle and its dysfunctions. I can be influenced to consider the implications of a great number of irrelevant matters. The first reason for this is that the mediasphere can be thought of as expository. The fundamental characteristic of its operation is that it finds out things that it thinks that people want to know and then translates that information, according to its editorial priorities, into a product for daily consumption. And the invention of CNN and the 24 hour news cycle has made it into a product for constant consumption. The internet on the other hand, is a medium which has been gradually infused with an extraordinarily broad and deep data set (more than just 'news') and in the way it functions like the MSM, it is enabled by search engines, but primarily though queries. That is to say it is not pushed, it is pulled. Furthermore, it can be researched.

The extent to which the accuracy and certainty of any news item can be guaranteed is in inverse proportion to its complexity and volatility. This makes for some strange dilemmas facing editorial boards of the news cycle. On the one hand, the accuracy and certainty of a train wreck's body count or the death of a hooker, or the cuteness of a baby can be readily ascertained by contemporary news organizations. The pertinent information can be gathered and processed at low cost and the impact on an audience of consumers can be nearly guaranteed. However the accuracy and certainty of any comment about the sentiment of investors on Wall Street as indicated by the DJIA is greatly dubious. Nevertheless, you are apt to hear on June 25 that the Dow closing up 190 points was due to X. We accept that diet of misinformation based on any number of rationalizations, but there's also the factual reason that we don't necessarily understand enough about the issue being reported to know any better.
We know that we are buying news. And over time as alternative ways of getting high quality information become available, we will pay less and less for that news.

I predict that the same thing will happen in education.

A Question for Shirky, Surowieki & Rheingold

Here comes everybody and the wisdom of crowds produces smartmobs.

Why don't I believe it? Because I am a conservative thinker, in the way David Brooks describes as epistemologically modest. I don't believe that I can know everything and so I don't presume to rethink what history has shown.

But I think what the theories of collaboration are attempting to do is enable frameworks of organization that accellerate the process of change. I question whether or not: A) this is possible. B) if so is it wise. And consequently what is the proper speed of change? And my instinct weighs in against revolution. So if putting a million minds together is revolutionary, what are we revolting against and is that a good thing?

I began thinking about this when Facebook decided to change its interface and become more Twitterlike. I now understand that some of the brains behind Facebook could do this because they could. Which is to say they've got cats like Hammerbacher who... strike that. They don't have cats like Hammerbacher (which is sort of the point) they've got Hammerbacher. Hammerbacher knows what it takes to build the guts of a system like Facebook so as to make it scalable to the tens of millions. Suffice it to say he's a genius. 

But if you understand something about power laws, then you understand that genius is generally responsible for that which gets done in the area of expertise. Genius doesn't give up being genius and integrates all that is needed to know which might be produced by collaboratively enabled grassroots. And so there is a horrifying itch in the back of my head that collaborative networks may function as little more than panoptic seives for those with root. That's part of the problem I'm anticipating.

Let's try for a moment to imagine that we see no benefit in the term 'empowerment'. Let's imagine that 'democratic' was not a fairy adjective and that we're not emotionally invested in 'democratization'. Let us be purely pragmatic and say that what we care about is getting X done, and not the sense of well-being that derives from any individual's sense of participation in getting X done. Let's imagine that it was simply impossible to broker aggregations of that sense of well-being from mass constituencies. Or to put it consisely let's say that we don't give a rats about the consent of the governed, but we still want to have it. What's to stop us from building social networking software? Nothing.

Do you see where I'm going? I don't mean to suggest, because I'm not second-guessing, that there are sinister aims in those who build and seek to build such social systems. But there is an inherent conflict and competition between such new forms of collaboration which are non-hierarchical and older forms which are hierarchical. And key in this is the matter of loyalty (which is a value I will now focus upon as I weigh in against this 'progress'). As I do so, I want you to keep in mind the reasons people you know who have resisted Facebook have presented as their case. 

What if the mobs are not smart? What binds their action together? What is their aggregate purpose? I don't beleive that there is any sort of integrity to smartmobs. They essentially react to reactions at an accellerated pace, and they bring their own preconceived notions. As we speak, I am watching Republicans with an agenda against Obama use his diplomatic plans for Iran to justify calling protestors currently in the streets backing Mousavi as a true democratic movement. It has nothing to do with whether or not Mousavi is good, bad or democratic. But an election, as the prototypical collaboration engine, can only be used to produce very simple results. It is the result which is designed by its facilitators: the license of consent. The brokerage of aggregations of the sense of well-being imparted by "Our guy won". When it doesn't work, as it hasn't worked recently, we know that everything is called into question (if proportional participation is high). But when it does work the only thing that forestalls calling everything into question is the degree to which the benefitting geniuses can wait for another spin of the wheel. 

It occurs to me that the more you enable mass participation in social networking software, the more finely grained the expression of desire becomes. Which is to say, if you limited, twitterlike, what 10 million people are able to say, Twitter appears more decisive and more consensual. Whereas in Facebook which allows for structured inputs of a much broader variety is less likely to be exploited for the purposes of collaboration. MySpace is more free, as it is less structured, and the Web itself cannot be aggregated in any coherent factor. Elections work because you have fewer choices. And of course any student of logic knows that assertion of a falsity can be used to prove anything. The chances of choosing a false candidate seems very high, and isn't that the purpose of a political campaign? To engage as many as possible? Not to exemplify and embody every degree of your Yes, but to overcome your No. When all you have is a Yes or No to a candidate and the election satisfies you, then you leave the polling place intact, but then as reality intervenes, you go to Facebook or MySpace or the entire Web to articulate all of the finer points of your Yes But or your No Because. Except that the social software doesn't really empower you because it is trumped by an election.

The genius who gets things done in any representative system is who is elected. On Facebook those with standing have already been promoted. In standing and promotion I am introducing some finer grain of distinction along the long tail toward genius. And I suppose I should say that the greater the standing, the greater the influence they would have over the shape and function of the system and all of its colloborators. Let us consider the implications of power laws in what is taken sometimes at face value to be a meritocracy. The inventors are the ultimate geniuses of the system, and the those who win by exploiting the system successfully gain standing and are promoted by the sytem (otherwise, what's their incentive to participate?).  I'm saying that this state of affairs doesn't change whether or not there is a direct hierarchy, and I have a strong sense that there is not so much empowerment going on in open collaboration as it would seem.

What I have found to give some solace, in fact much solace, is the hierarchical example of feudalism. With fuedalism, the value of loyalty is embodied in the ethics of chivalry. When you are betrayed by your hierarch, it is very clear and present. When a market leader within and open collaborative framework gains the authority to change the nature of the framework, you can be betrayed while still believing the meritocracy stands. Nobody is under any obligation to make the implications of that change clear and present to you. You remain in the long tail giving consent to what you believe to be a framework for empowerment, but power remains concentrated. 

So what exactly is the change that these collaborative frameworks seek to establish? Again, not insuinating anything sinister, just questioning justifications. It might be change for it's own sake. It might be a geek factor which gets lucky, they built it and people came. I'm also considering my own ideas about upgrading Robert's Rules of Order to internet speed and distance and the creation of a virtual parliament. I'll deal with all that later. But this is the way I'm thinking about how social networks operate.

Shirky on Twitter

Apropos Iran, but recorded in May.

Foreign Testimony

I've been thinking about frameworks for credibility and circles of trust for a bit and also about thinking at scale and thirdly about the communicability of analytic data. So it's a timely moment to speak up about the Iranian elections.

It is my opinion, given the networks of trust I have established, that indeed there was some fixing of the Iranian election. I claim to know this because there are particular analysts of geopolitics that I find credible. These are people I know more or less personally but that's not the right word. I know that they exist and they know that I exist. I have had the experience of them recognizing my name and writing emails to me. That is an element of trust and connection.

One of the things I am saying is that these are not media fixtures - they are not journalists per se. They are writers in different fora who write on a periodical basis on the events I find compelling and through a variety of means I have found them to be credible. In other words I am evaluating them not on the basis of the way they are presented to me authoritatively with any assumptions, but on their performance in a network of similar minded people. Not only am I evaluating the performer, but I am evaluating the audience feedback to that performer with regard to his ability to respond to the feedback I find useful in the analytic context.

This is one of the reasons I have shut down comments here - in order to participate in those higher feeback loops on a more regular basis.

Now if somebody in a smartmob tells me that Paris is burning or that the Iranian election is a sham, how do I know to trust that person? Suppose they give me some claimed figure like "Mousavi got 66% of the popular vote." I'm a database guy, I could, given the raw records, have a system to determine that particular metric. But that data is challenged or challengeable because of its availability. There is no transparent system in place and nobody but interested parties with their hands on it.

This too is the same problem with those people actually on the ground in Iran who voted. How do they know what they claim to know?

It is conceivable that news organizations would provide what they can of a vetting process on raw data and certify it then publish certified data for independent analysis. That would be something quite useful. What is available in the 'public record' is not necessarily useful if it doesn't present sufficiently certified raw data for independent analysis. This ought to be the aim of the new class of periodical writers. I would aim to support such a process given the coming ubiquity of tools and exhibits available to the blogosphere.

But what we will continue to need are circles of trust.

In the matter of the Iranians, we are at something of a conundrum. In one regard, there is a certain political spin inherent in the willingness for the American government to engage with Iran in such a way that authorities there might communicate internal goings on with authorities here. But there is also, because of our relationship, incentives to publish dysinformation. That is surely the case in the latest election. Disputed as it has become we would be remiss not to suspect tampering with any news out of the country as regards those election results.

However, somebody has got the election results. Somehow they got here. What is the chain of evidence? Who told what to whom? Who knew what and when did they know it? Who did they tell and why?

The tools exist of course for sufficiently sophisticated consumers of information and news to get closer to these questions given the disclosure of certified artifacts. This is what I seek. 

When You Stare Into the Mirror

The mirror stares back at you, and in the process of seeing yourself see yourself, you see that you see. Yes but do others see what you see?

Getting dizzy yet? If not, try this:

“The gross assumption here that both undergirds and haunts tourism, as well as particular practices in ethnography and intercultural scholarship in general is that the researcher/tourist is a privileged viewer and is not held to the culture-specific codes of propriety that govern human sociality in the spaces of their observation”.

Mark Anthony Neal gives a respectful review of Performing Black Masculinity. Remember the joke about the self-absorbed people who say "Well I've talked enough about me, what do you think about me?" This is the sad state of black identity fermentation. What started as nationalism 40 years ago has twisted itself up in self-referential mutations of navel gazing. Except it's called 'gaze' without the navel part, because the Other is supposed to be engaged and thinking seriously about what it means to look. This was an interesting subtext in 1990 but now it appears that it is the text.

All of this is much ado about nothing except perhaps for the twenty dozen academics who can recite this pomo stuff without cracking a grin or falling into a spiral of snake tail eating that disappears into a black hole. And so we get books and reviews of books about the intricacies of what it means to walk into a barbershop and get one kind of 'gaze' and then to walk into a beauty shop and get another. Whoa! Seriously variant vibes, dude. It could like totally stress you out. Like especially if you are like a big black dude with dreadlocks and not really like that Predator dude or Samuel L Jackson on the inside. And like what if on top of that you were gay? Whooaaa! Duuuude. That's deep.

Or perhaps it's more serious. Maybe the intricate existentials of black manhood are so worthy of study that there should develop an orthodoxy that completely redefines manhood as we know it. Wait. That's called tribalism, and the world has been there and done that. I don't think it has worked out quite so well, at least not to the extent that books about the greatness that was the dignity of Bayard Rustin get under the skin of people who do things.

It seems to me you have two fundamental choices. You can admit that you're an individual and deal with the dissonance, or you could determine to conform into something larger and go with that flow. They are both species of my admonition: Get over yourself. And quit trying to generate new a new ethics of thoughtcrime.

Gaze. Sheesh.

OK now I am done being snarky and I ask the serious question. How many times, and against what species of evil should any man be redefined? How much existential space will newly recognized forms of manhood carve out and where are they going to go? The answer lies at the extremes - those of birth and death. When you deal with that fundament of humanity at a level that matters, then you're saying something. The problem is twenty dozen pomo academics aren't saying anything.

As an old man in the classic sense of being closer to 60 than to 30 years of age, I am prone to study military history. I want to know the extent to which certain things run men to gather in actual crowds of thousands to work in concert, and I am rather dumbfounded by the notions that academics and scholars who write books that influence thousands might think of themselves as leaders in a similar sense, especially in these times where the currency of relativism is high. It seems to me that nothing cheapens life like the idea that everyone is so freaking different that they need their own existential space. On the contrary - it is only when you get underneath all of that delicate self-actualization that you recognize your coghood in the gearworks of humanity. This is exactly why I defy the exotic ramifications of post-modernism.

Never Forget Peripherals - The Edge is the Center

Just so I'm on record for saying so, the next revolution after the cloud is done, is with peripherals. There's going to be a lot of fabulous interest and I think some very good money to be made as computing goes utility. But never forget peripherals. I'm going to make an example of three.

1. Guitar Hero
The gaming industry was set on fire with the introduction of the Wii, but I poohed it and I was right. My point was that the most intense gaming experiences are not done with broad sweeping motions and that the people who would be the finest gamers in the world would have a lot more in common with musicians than with athletes or soldiers. In other words, eye-hand coordination in a gaming world can and should be reduced to your hands and fingers, not you arms and legs. As exciting as Project Natal is, I'm not sure I want to hold my arms out for an hour playing a driving game with an imaginary steering wheel.  In fact what revolutionized the gaming industry that is still delivering is the creation of the guitars and drums for Guitar Hero. In this you have an intermediate complexity of eye-hand in a dumbed down instrument and it has generated new leagues of fans.

2. iPhone
You already know what's great about the iPhone. But now just think of it as the thing that makes everything that AT&T does seem interesting. In fact, you could sell AT&T on the basis of what the iIPhone puts into your hand. And now it is widely known that AT&T is bashed because it does support everything the iPhone does.

3. Nike & Oakley
Huh? Actually these two are the tip of the iceberg. What you really need to understand is all Nike and Oakley do are make gear. But the attention they pay to the detail of the their products is extraordinary. You don't know or care about the infrastructure that enables them, you care very much about what you touch and what touches your skin. These are high touch vendors. They are outfitters. Outfitters enable the outdoors. Without the Nike shoes, nobody cares about the running track.

This is all about gear. It's about user interface. When it comes to networks, the edge is the center. Delivery networks are plumbing and like the New York City water supply, you need to accomplish massive engineering perfection ahead of time, but people spend the money on the sink, the faucet, the Jacuzzi down the tail, and it will be the beauty of the peripherals that increase the demand for the network. That will be the business driver.

Coming to Some Conclusions on the Old School Project

For the past 15 years or so, my invisible partner in crime has been Dr. Lester K. Spence. He is, professionally, what I have been on a part-time basis for the past oh say 20 years. Actually more like 25 which would be about 1984 - yeah that's about right. That is a compelled investigator into the dynamics of and prospects for black politics as a righteous participant seeking improvements to American civic life. His path has taken him through a doctorate in political science, mine through profligate writing and Socratic dialog in all sorts of computer mediated communication spaces. 

Through all my years of attending conferences and seminars and in reading dozens of books on the subjects, I have come to respect his opinion higher than just about anyone. Where I have been skeptical and challenging, he has been thorough, correcting and determined. What I know of him as a person is that he has a much bigger heart than I, and given his powerful analytical ability, he keeps it real and informed with scholarly discipline. So where I can afford to be dismissive and blithe, Spence is my antidote. He knows what's real and I think he has his fingers on the pulse of black politics with an attitude that is appropriately serious and intellectually adequate to the task. 

Since I am no longer interested in Socratic dialog here at Cobb, I have endeavored to do so at a few specific blogs. I haven't mentioned his, and I didn't expect to be there, but that was a mistake. The fact is that I will follow his work until the end. This morning he posted this matter on racial disparities in health care, and in writing my response I have come to some conclusions about all the reasons I have ever dealt with race as a compelling subject in these 25 years, and specifically those of the past six that I have written here at Cobb. 

He begins:

Now where is race in this debate? Melissa Harris-Lacewell asks this question, pointing to disparities in care (black and brown individuals and communities receive poorer care than our white breathren), in health outcomes (black and brown individuals and communities suffer more from a variety of illnesses and maladies). It’s important to note here that these differences cannot solely be reduced to class, although class is an important component. Even controlled for income and education, black life expectancy is lower, black stress levels are higher. Even controlled for class and education, black and Latinos are less likely to get quality care from doctors. But there are actually a number of frontline organizations from the Joint Center, to the Praxis Project, to the Opportunity Agenda, bringing these disparities to light and ensuring that legislation ameliorates them.

Do read the whole thing. The issues of health care are, of course, sophisticated and nuanced. But my response to the racial component does put quite a bit in perspective. 

I conclude: (with some very minor wording changes for clarity)

I think you illustrate very clearly how the dissonance on race makes the smooth edges ragged, and how a lack of an orthodox way of looking at race on any subject matter makes it impossible to achieve a neutral position in dealing with disparities. I think you appreciate how there aren't enough competent social scientists in the world to establish that orthodoxy and nothing seems to defy the oxygen sucking quality of those racial designated hitters. You also clearly see how partisans manipulate this dissonance to their advantage without regard to the moral capacity of their political opponents. Well, Sisyphus, you have adequately assessed the dimensions of your boulder. 

To repeat my angle, it is my contention that the path of integration requires a sort of social mobility that has been enabled by the acceptance of Civil Rights law. And to the extent that Americans are fluid in their identity, there should not be resistance to that social mobility. Or to put it more simply, if it's easy to sell out your race, and race is what's holding you back, then sell out. It seems to me that the integrity of the racial construct is critical for anyone, be they social science subject, majority or minority object, to satisfy the balancing of the racial formula. This integrity is at odds with the implications of racial integration. In otherwords, the actual solution which satisfies the demands of a discrete narrowing of racial gaps (ever the benchmark), requires a sort of nationalist fidelity across all parties. So long as non-white but good is not good enough, perfection by race is the enemy of good.

You see, if you teach to a standard, say high school algebra. There is no way you can suppress the benefit to people who had a headstart unless you make math teaching a zero sum game. So to constantly harp on the gap between those who *obviously* started with some combination of advantages and those who didn't is to beg the question of establishing a zero-sum game. That's the problem here and it appears to be deep and fundamental. You require a racial signifier that cannot be satisfied by achievement, only by parity. Such a standard of 'equality' is the moral equivalent of coveting thy neighbor's house.

If you could do this exclusively in the context of wars on poverty.. it might not be such an odious problem. But it cannot be denied that American poverty lies fairly lightweight when contrasted with world poverty - which relegates all of the moral agitation rather empty. It all sounds like middle class politics to me. We want to live to 84 instead of 72. What a conceit! 

I exaggerate, but the matter of poverty is key. What concerns me is whether or not the aegis of 'black' as in 'up you mighty race' establishes in any broadly accepted context, matters relating exclusively to poverty as was with King's primary agenda. But in the American reality of the majority of black Americans being middle class, how do you make 'black' issues, dysfunctional and poverty and indigence issues with moral suasion considering the existential ties to so many millions who don't suffer at the base levels of Maslow? Because if the politics of hiring legions of social scientists is not about all about alleviating objective human misery, it's nothing more or less than middle-class racial spoils politics. That's hardly fitting of anyone claiming moral authority for their project. 

I've been asking the question, 'who owns black?' for six years or so, with the premise in mind that a post-black-nationalist adjudication of flaws could redirect black American energy onto a more righteous path. But I have found blackness itself too postmodern and without a useful orthodoxy. In the end, race being a social construct, it is too subject to both regressive obstinance and clever manipulation to be useful to a moral cause, precisely because it is so politically fungible. The only absolute with regard to race is its history. With every day that passes, that history becomes larger and more immovable. It cannot be reformed. It can only be abandoned.

In some ways this is not a particularly new sort of conclusion. I'm the guy who writes a new 'the end of my blackness' essay every 4 years, only to find myself like Michael Corleone, pulled back in again. But then again, if I thought the cycle was endless, I'd be raising my kids much differently than I am. I am of the sort who expects race to be trumped and rather than studying anti-racism (which I gave up long ago) I study the trumping cards. This is not so easy, not because of what race is, per se, but because determining the appropriate context for individuals in Western society is difficult. I'll be talking about that over the next week or so with an eye out for what I'm calling Adler's Dichotomy. I've been a part of the set that asked for abandonment of 'white' identity as a solution. Now I see that black identity is equally doomed, and I see how the perpetuation of these ideas of identity can be managed and the extent to which they corrupt Christian and Western civilization. How much? Enough to merit dropping, but not as a precondition to progress.

I am Old School. That history cannot change. I inherit a great deal. But I also inherit and have cultivated a powerful sense of individuality, modernism and critical detachment. These figure large in my desire to advance myself and my family in this society and in the world.  These things about me force me to study more, think more, write more, do more than fit into prefabricated buckets of identity. To the extent that I am a writer and I experiment with my imagination, I am something of an elusive figure - it is the price I pay every time I try to describe or defend myself. And I struggle with a deep sense of isolation without the consequent satisfaction of absolute self-confidence. But that's just me and it's not about me. Or at least it wasn't as I championed and promoted the Old School. Maybe in the future it will be more about me. 

Karma Trekking & Karma Police

There's a cat on Wealth TV (yeah I know, but they have great HD camera work) named Damon Redfern who narrates an interesting show called Karma Trekkers. Although he is not as bad as Jeff Smith, he's something of liberal lapsed Christian Brit searching for original cultural and spiritual meaning out in the great wide world. Eating and photographing your way across the planet is an excellent way to live if you don't have any kids and your wife is the production crew, but watching KT is beginning to unnerve me. I'm wanting to turn down the volume, expect the music is good. How do I know all these things about Redfern? It has only taken a couple shows for him to reveal it in his off comments.

I caught my first view of the show long ago but only watched it all the way through this week. It was his second part of a two parter on China, and I really enjoyed it. Primarily because both I and Redfern were clear that no amount of documentary was about to capture all of what China is. So we were both happy, I think, to take in what little we could without coming to any conclusion except - wow I didn't know that, hey what is that, gee isn't that fascinating? 

Then he went to Malta. I like Malta, a lot. My biases start showing up through my attraction to the military history of the place and the role of the Catholic church. Then he went to Ireland, or was it Scotland? I must confess that I only watched a portion of that show as he started talking with the Druid chick and thinking about leprechauns and fairies. It actually wasn't such a bad show - his conversations with the historian was very good, as was his conversation with the royal dude at Malta. In fact, if he had more of these conversations and did a two hour show, I think it would be a great improvement. But probably not as appealing to those who are apt to follow in Redfern's footsteps.

Which brings us to Burma. It was the Burma show that rather unnerved me. I can't imagine myself talking about the beauty of these thousand temples and the unchanged skyline and the same train in operation since the days of the Raj without dealing more directly with the entire question of 'Myanmar'. And then he actually, actually spent a good amount of time looking for a fortune teller. In every way it seemed to me that Redfern must have made a conscious effort to avoid speaking of the obvious, which is that the people of Burma have suffered from a severe lack of modernization. Why? Because the military junta that renamed the country were colossal screwups and among hyper-inflated economies, Burma set records. And then suddenly the entire romance of Karma Trekking came crashing down under the weight of a thousand liberal stereotypes. Now it was just longing pictures of cute children and of Redfern thoughtfully scribbling in his journal and eating rice with his fingers and trying not to disrespect the local customs.

Yike.

Of course without Redfern as the tall bearded Western barbarian, like Clavell's Anjin-san, contrast and the struggle for recognition of what truly is cannot be made. By being a pliant tourist, or rather what I interpret to be something of a signatory to a speak-no-evil code of multiculturalist tourism, Redfern is in the awkward position of being almost superfluous to the camera work. Thus Karma Trekking needs its companion show which shows the military and political history as well. Very difficult to do with just one host, and likely to cause problems with the issuance of visas as well. 

The show must go on. So let's all take it light, neh?

--

Thinking of Redfern's observational dilemma brings me back home to the the states and the difficulty posed by the emergence of Obama's presidential narrative. It is difficult because it has little to do with black Americans as we know them, which brings into question exactly how we know black Americans (or not). The entire difficulty I am having with black politics, or those sentiments that could pass a lazy media's definition of politics, is how it too evades economic sense. 

An entire generation of so-called black leaders made mistakes similar to post-colonialists all around the world, which was to try to moderate between capitalism and communism without fully grasping the fundaments of either. But in that moderation was an implicit understanding that the politics of meaning and of identity were more important. And so for the sake of Negro unity and subsequently black unity, it was assumed that economic progress would automatically follow the reconstructed people. But when it came to truly addressing how that was to be accomplished, there were no thoughtful plans. And so we are faced with an elaborate 'black politics' that makes no economic sense, doing little more than repeating brain-dead platitudes like 'when America catches cold, black America gets pneumonia' and other such simpleminded coalmine canary analogies. Black America is economically weak by default, the default of the weakness of any economic thought in what passes for black politics.

And yet there are any dozen karma trekkers as well as black karma police who have a studied romance with black American spirituality, music, and food among our various celebrated cultural tourist attractions. And like Redfern, they can make, with their cameras and thoughtful poses, quite splendid documentaries without any mention our elephantine economic disgrace. 

The karma police are, of course, those discredited black leaders who attempt to ride herd over our political and cultural capital - those who would serve as the gatekeepers to black authenticity be it cultural, spiritual or political. Yes, political. It's all of a piece the way I see it. But it's all of a small piece and I don't get too excited about it. My blog and perspective is just drips of Chinese Water Torture to those who try to corral, which at one time included me. The inducements to speak for and lead a race are mighty, but it's a thousand times harder that those who pretend to have done so would ever dare to admit. It might be done from Wiemar, but only if the economic timing is right, and this is something all black leaders have lacked. 

I am not suggesting that all that is needed is some economic genius to sally forth and make things right. If it were so, then Earl Graves and his sons would have done so long ago. Rather I am suggesting that some general repetition of the drumbeat of ever increasing economic sophistication is key to the continuing evolution of liberty in black America. It cannot happen otherwise. The identity well is dry despite the harping of the karma police. 

--

The trekking for and policing of karma are profitable enterprises. They surely will continue to be. But they are purposefully blind to the greater economic forces at work in this world. That's only OK if you're a tourist.

Elsewhere: field negro: Does "our" culture discourage wealth building?

The Dirty Clothes Cycle

Much of the American economy is dedicated to the proposition that middle class life should be as convenient as possible. We spend the majority of our moola on getting better quality of the same goods. And so the supply responds with the new and improved. That's been about 67% of our GDP. With any luck, that number will decrease marginally and our savings increase. Marginally though, we still are going to have to figure out a way to issue credit or else the rest of the emerging world will ignore American finance. It's a halfway done deal anyway, but there's still 2012.

Today's little lesson is about the entirely predictable consequences of new and improved consumer cycles. 

I left my clothes in the washing machine too long and they got sour. So I had to wash them a second time. This would happen to you if you happen to be one of those fortunate slobs like me who has so little closet space that there is a specific balance and significant fraction of your clothes that you need to keep in the dirty clothes cycle. 40% of my clothes are hanging in my closet, another 15% in my dresser. Then 25% are in a large box in the garage for the off season. 2% are at the dry cleaners and another 2% have gone into the single sock singularity and will never be heard from again. I do have the advantage of being married, so 0% of my clothes are at various girlfriends houses - this is at a 20 year low from the peak in 1989 of 12%. That leaves about 16% of my clothes in the dirty clothes cycle, adjusting for the specific accounting of the offsite dry cleaning. This is approximately 3 1/2 loads. 

I have a full hamper of dirty clothes, and one full basket of clean clothes that have not been put away. (I was going to say folded & hung, but there's only a 60% chance that they will end up so organized.) I have another load that is wet and in the dryer awaiting my push of the start button, but blogging is so much more interesting. I have an interest in keeping that many clothes in the cycle. I'd have to do more storage, folding and hanging and laundry if I were to reduce my dirty clothes cycle. 

As fascinating as all this is, and I'm sure there are great analogies to monetary policy in there somewhere, it's not the reason I began writing this. Rather the offhanded comment that the Spousal Unit made that since we use Gain, they might not be so sour. Gain is cheaper than Tide and smells green. Not green as in environmentally correct, but as in that urban sense we have of artificial colors and flavors. Gain smells green like Big Red Soda tastes red, and Lysol has a kind of blistering yellow presence. But if I were one of those poor unfortunate souls who wanted to be a scientist for the sake of great discovery, I might have sadly only discvering the inside of a chemistry lab for detergent additives at Proctor & Gamble. Not a bad profession, mind you, but terribly obscure. The career making move for me might be the concocting of some new additive for Gain that would fight the sort of bacteria that gather on clothing after they sit wet in the washing machine for two days. You know, that sour smell. Upping the green smell content might fool us slob husbands and our tidy wives, but to the ethical chemist.. well, he'd know. There's real bacteria in there. And just like with the new class of pump liquid soaps that we now spend five bucks on to wash our hands more clean than brain surgeons and astronauts, there's probably a good sized market for an additional five grams of anti-bacterial active ingredients in your laundry detergent bottle. 

GAIN WITH ANTI-BACTERIAL ADDITIVES !!

Well I wasn't a marketing major, but you get the point.  The new ingredient would change the marketplace and the smartest people would come up with 'reasons' that it needed to be in your detergent - although the breakthrough is operating on the same two principles as ever. A) We can make more profit. B) Your life needs to be easier. It's easier for me to suggest that A gets more obscene than B, but that is an untested assumption. 

Clearly the commies and leftists would suggest that 'A' is the greater sin, or perhaps the root of all evils and the un-Americans and Jihadis tend to believe 'B' is the greatest problem. But I posterize a more colorful palette of thought. In fact I think both are OK so long as they don't reinforce themselves into a cycle worthy of ridicule, like my dirty clothes cycle. The fact that my clothes are in organized disarray and for the sake of my expanded wardrobe, it is in my interest to keep some of them 16% of them necessarily dirty indicates some inefficiency, some excess. 

I'm going to suggest at this moment an 'Asian' or 'third' or 'balanced' way. There is clearly something wrong with the system but nothing wrong with the incentives that power the system. It's just that they are out of balance. Sixteen percent of clothes staying dirty, because I'm too lazy to provide adequate washer -> drier liquidity can generate the weird science of anti-bacterial detergent and the attendent mendacious marketing. Or I could just expand my closet space and reduce the number in the cycle to 10 percent. 

Which solution to this problem I select depends upon my cultural favoritism. I might admire chemists and demand the detergent. Or I might admire carpenters and expand my closet. Or I might admire self-improvement and increase the throughput. Or I might admire child labor and make my kids do it. Or I might admire a revolutionary pose and rant against all parts of the the clothing cycle at once. Down with closets & washing machines! In which case I would probably lose my wife and end up upping the girlfriend stash ratio as well as the fraction of my clothes just somewhere around the house and unaccouted for.  Or I might admire austerity programs and argue for fewer clothes. Or I might dig on Christian charity and give more to the Salvation Army. 

Today's mind poker is this, now that I've done some thinking and listened to Fareed Zakaria's 92Y presentation (the whole thing, not just the YouTube excerpt): What's the point of innovation? I mean, after all it's just a cultural choice in solving something out of balance in the cycle. It doesn't necessarily need to be the detergent chemist who gets the marginal improvement in responsibility. 

Zakaria is of course the author of the instant best-seller The Post American World. His (end of history) position is that there were three great periods in modern history and the second, which is the domanation of America in the 19th and 20th century is coming to a not-too screeching halt, but a halt nonetheless. His oughts, include recognizing the world-altering significance of the BRICs ascendance into the ability to have .. oh 67% GDP consumer economies. He calls it the Rise of the Rest, something smart people will rejoice in. My take on Zakaria is that in preaching to the choir of Bush discontent, he elides a great deal and also makes some fundamental mistakes in his interpretation of the Rise of Rest. I've also bought the Post American book so I'll get into more of that later. But my point stands. If America stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world, why should we be fascinated by the fact that others are learning to stand up? The tallest building, the biggest shopping mall, the largest oil refinery are all outside of America - but that's all so 20th Century. If Argentina is experiencing 8% GDP growth and in 20 years they'll be what California was 10 years ago, why is that a great call for celebration? Unless you're Brazilian. I say what happens in Brazil stays in Brazil, and I don't necessarily have to have a conniption simply because Brazilians have washing machines and now participate in the global household chemicals market. 

Deeper still is the matter of American exceptionalism, which I say still counts for plenty. Zakaria himself admits that nobody should be overly concerned about China's authoritarian communism because the model is doomed to fail. Why then should he single out obiter dicta of the head of the Phillipines saying that China is their big brother? The thing is not to be overly impressed with the rest of the world catching up to America but being very concerned about what sustains America beyond what it has accomplished - because if the future of America is to 'ride the Axiom' becoming fat and lazy until the rest of the world becomes habitable... well that's just contrary to the spirit our constitutional democracy nurtured in the first place. 

If we are in an absurd cycle, we have to figure out very specifically what our cultural priorities are. That will become the incrementally profitable economy we Americans will grow. Those cultural values will clash in a global market when 16% of something looks absurd. So ahead of us lies a greater war than ever because in 50 years the world will have 5 Europes. Maybe that's why they are teaching passivity in school.

Mortimer Adler, First Look

What's more interesting than this interview, aside from the fact that it is rather fascinating, is that Adler's syllogism around the existence of God makes more sense the more you believe in multiple universes.

Affirmative Action vs Black Families

One of the main focuses of the Cultural Revolution was the abolishment of the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.
-- Wikipedia on the Cultural Revolution

When I went to college the second time, I made it happen. The first time I let it happen to me and so it didn't, properly. As part of my second attempt, I sent out letters to all sorts of groups and organizations seeking scholarship money. I found one which was a ladies bridge club. They sent me $50. I bought my first college book with that money, specifically Salas & Hille's Calculus.

The ladies were black and had sent me a handwritten letter with the check. I wrote them back thanking them for the money. Although I got many other scholarships all for much more money, none were as significant to me as that. To me it was the embodiment of the best of Old School values. 'We work twice as hard even if we only get half as far'. They were taking care of their own in me.

Many years later I sat down to write a novel. I had added other experiences to this which signified something important. The first was meeting a young man who was the head of marketing for the Kool Jazz Festival. The second was meeting filmmaker Charles Burnett at a film festival with a great number of corporate sponsors. The third was attending the Essence Awards as the guest of a friend who worked for Toyota, the major sponsor. And there were any number of experiences I had watching young black children receive t-shirts with DARE or other corporate logos on them. All of these things, I perceived to be Affirmative Action. As I wrote my novel, there was a chapter about the Ladies of the Club, referring to the legendary Wilfandel House in Los Angeles, home to the wives of established upper class  black families  and their charitable concerns. In my novel, they lamented their declining influence on contemporary youth. Their connections to Hampton U meant less when blacks were now being admitted to UCLA and Yale. Their scholarship money meant little in the face of new corporate community relations funds scholarships. Their all black Talented Tenth efforts were losing sway in a black community increasingly integrated with the mainstream.

In the novel, they represented the best of the black bourgeoisie and stood in opposition to new, fast money they saw being laundered through the crack trade. The dramatic point was that they were booed off the stage by a real-estate tycoon who was part of that vice. It was one of the many symbols of change I saw in black America during the 80s.

These days being a conservative challenges me to consider the downside risks of institutional leverage, especially dependence on political largess. That's straight out of Thomas Sowell. And while I'm in no position to assess what Affirmative Action has done in terms of money and numbers of people, I do know that it is not black Talented Tenth Old School money. It is not the $50 from the black ladies of the bridge circle, it is the $500 Xerox Minority Scholarship. I got both, I know. I know what it is like to look at your parents and wonder whether or not they are secretly rich given their wisdom and strength. I know what it is like to evaluate your parents and realize they have no economic power worth beans in this big old world. But the symbolism in my book stretched that point. And I wrote about black youth who chose the streets turning a deaf ear to their mothers only 16 years older, and to their unknown fathers. I wrote about a world where the word of 30 year old ex-con with a gun and a kilo of cocaine was about as powerful a word as anybody knew. Where the word of a rapper with a $5,000 gold chain was gospel truth. Where the promises of a girl with a big butt and a smile was as good as life's pleasures could get, if you could get her kid locked in the other room. That world was the stereotypical foil to the institutional world of stereotypical integration of black faces in McDonald's commercials, of Kool & The Gang's song Celebration being played at the Super Bowl of buddy cop movies and the Old OJ Simpson running through airports.

Living Colour once had a song that asked, can you tell me how to get to your America? Some people said hard work, some people said colorblindness, some people said black power, some people said Affirmative Action. Some people said fuck your America and fuck you too. Me, I was a little different. I said it was my America. All I had to do was prove it. I didn't think that was too tall of an order, you see I was writing this novel in the front seat of my BMW parked on the beach of the Pacific Ocean, and my imagination and spirit were free. All I needed in life that hadn't been provided for me by my family was wealth. I figured that made me just like everybody else, except the rich of course.

There has always been a way for me to respect the Old School. I have had the good fortune to come from a good family. Everyone has their journeys and their needs. I have never had a need to sell out, because when you start out in the middle class all you have is ego's ambition. So what if you don't get filthy rich? Good is good. I've never had a reason to despise being black. I've never had a reason to disrespect my origins. The only thing I am not is great. I'm a child of God and all that. It's all good. Good is good.

They say you can't cheat an honest man, but people are right to wonder who's selling out to whom and at what cost. As a conservative, I am challenged to consider the downside risk of institutional leverage. And the formula for liberal vs conservative is simple. The conservative uses the power of the family to guard against the corruption of the state. The liberal uses the power of the state to make up of the corruption of the family. If the black family is in disrepair, if it gives no strength, if it's not good, then the kids end up wearing some corporation's t-shirt and thinking inside the box of some institutional agenda.

Except that there's nothing wrong with that. Get in where you fit in, but remember where you came from. In your heart you know whom you owe.

Thoughts About Courage & Safety

I watched John Frankenheimer's excellent 'Grand Prix' over the weekend. It's an extraordinary film about men and women, love and marriage, freedom and challenge, courage and ambition. And it's got a lot of very fast cars.

As a gearhead, I am increasingly taken with Formula One Racing and all sorts of high performance endeavors, and I am struck with how rarified things get. I think a lot of it is stomach, not necessarily skill. There are just people out there saying - to hell with it all, I'm just going to try to be the best whether or not I have a lot of company. One condemns oneself to obtaining perfection. But this wasn't what prompted me to write today.

See, early in the film, the James Garner character wrecks his car at Monaco. It got caught between third and fourth gear and some other strange mechanical foulup that they couldn't fix in the non-existant pits forced him off the road. And then I saw this strange ritual of women and men running across the track with a stretcher to fetch him. Some of the movie is dedicated to make the point that a good number of the race fans come to see explosions and blood. F1 in those days seemed to have 90% of the ghosts we have today - few people die of late, but then it was part of the draw and of course part of the thing that made those men something different.

But today the sport is a great deal more safe, and so I wonder a little bit if the quality of courage in today's race drivers is diminished. Moreover, in everything we do if we are safer do we lack courage? There's a thin line between extreme performance and foolishness isn't there? And as we study and study and improve and improve aren't we making it all easier?

A Fate Worse Than Death

Is torture a fate worse than death?

I think that's a very difficult question to answer. Academically, and for the sake of argument, it makes sense to suggest that.
Now it seems to me that it takes a rather curious personality to volunteer for waterboarding. But you certainly cannot say that waterboarding is torture if torture is a fate worse than death. Which leaves us with a very simple and perplexing question which does not appear immediately answerable by someone who is not familiar with the particulars of the Geneva Convention (as if it were the last word).

Situation: Battlefield capture.
You are the officer and you are engaged in a firefight in enemy territory at the suspected HQ of the local AQ honcho. You win the firefight and enter the premises. You take fire and return fire inside the building, and then you corner the last five in a room. They surrender in a Mexican standoff. You now have them handcuffed inside their quarters.

The only reason you did not kill them is because you want to extract information from them. Forgetting the policy, legal and procedural distinction between brutal interrogation and torture, is it useful to torture them or should you have killed them?

What about if you tell them that they are going to be killed and that they must confess now, and then you kill them? Is that any different from torture? Is that any different from brutal interrogation? What if you give them 24 hours to live?
--

Everything that mitigates against killing the captives says that whatever is in store for them is NOT a fate worse than death. Everything that compels the enemies to not booby-trap their headquarters and initiate a self-destruct sequence says that whatever is in store for them is NOT a fate worse than death.

What if the order from our side is 'Take them alive' and the order from their side is 'do not be taken alive'.

What I conclude is that there is no objective answer which is practical. In other words, the moment there is any deviation from a zero-tolerance principle which requires no law and allows for no extenuating circumstances ever, then the entire morality of the situation is compromised. Morality becomes situational. A situational morality is not a true morality, it becomes merely political, and the entire value of a policy is its acceptability by those who design it and those who agree to abide by it. In that regard policy merely has to be reasonable and consistent. A moral judgment is not applicable, because - even as ambitious journalists can demonstrate, anybody can invent a reason to do it.

So that's my answer to the question of whether or not it is moral to participate in this exercise in journalistic voyeurism. You just watched somebody being tortured. How can you live with yourself, morally? The answer is that the context excuses it from being a moral question.

That being said, I am satisfied that the entire context for judging the appropriateness of torture, or brutal interrogation as the case may be, depends entirely on the legality of the policy. And that is a political question, consistent definitions of 'torture' be damned.

The White Offender

I get letters. A thoughtful, 'white suburban' undergrad asked a few insightful questions. Namely:

Are you of the opinion that racism is not a problem, merely a circumstance surrounding all civilizations/cultural integration? Or, are you saying that racism is inherent in the human psyche.... Or something completely different...

and

If I'm not mistaken, you also had a section about how the perceived cultural oppression of Black Americans is illusory and sustained by learned inferiority??

The short answers are:
A. Racism is a character flaw. It is immoral behavior. The rewards for such immoral behavior are diminished but remain.

B. Black culture is transparent. This means that anyone can use it to any effect they choose. If you find that you are not getting what you want through some cultural effort, try another. If you're going to KFC, don't order a Big Mac. (hat tip to Run DMC).

The more involved position is this:

Let's consider the idea of racism as immorality. How moral do you have to be in order to have a stable society? Well, we tend to organize our thinking around class. That is to say, we Americans accept that lower class people will not be as morally fit as upper class people. Accordingly when upper class people offend, we are generally more outraged. This works independently of power. Russell Simmons is a very powerful individual, yet in the comedy acts he produces and promotes there is a fairly low standard of morality. But any dentist at a whites only golf club would find himself in a world of trouble were he to say some of the exact same words as a comedian onstage at the Apollo Theatre. It's not power, it's class.

We therefore accept a sliding standard of moral behavior according to class. What then is the use of activism? Is activism reducing the immorality of low class people or is it raising the morality of high class people? In America most anti-racist activism is of the latter sort. You can simply accept this as a matter of considering your own position as a university student. Anti-racism is surely a more compelling topic on campus than it is in the low rent areas. And I suspect that your expectations - which are normally American - would be that you would be much more outraged at the dismissal of anti-racist activism in the boardroom of some corporation than you would in the vestry of some inner city church.

My point is simply this. The immorality of racism is absolute. There is only one principled acceptable standard which is zero tolerance. But if you are to accept that premise, you will find, objectively that there is more work to do in the lower classes. This compromises the activist pose, the cache if you will, of the anti-racist activist which generally comports to typical leftist ideas of 'social justice' and 'power to the people'.  But the masses are the problem and that is because they are invested in their racial identities to a greater extent than the upper classes are.

I strongly believe, and I think the career of Eddie Murphy underscores all my points, that the primary difficulty posed by white supremacy in America is economic oppression. I would also point out that there is nothing in MLK's Dream that suggests he expected anything more in his vision of social justice than middle class standing for black Americans. Therefore, once a certain economic level is reached by black Americans, their own interest in the effect of racism on them is diminished. That is, of course, the thesis of William Julius Wilson - there's nothing new in me saying so. I'm sure you'll find that the attitude is: "So long as we get paid, who cares what they call us?"  I think it would be interesting research for you to ask people, of the racism they regularly encounter - that they feel disables them, at what level of annual salary would the ordinary racism be palliated. As Dr Funkenstein said, the bigger the headache the bigger the pill. How big a pill does the average racial minority need? Moreover what are the effects of self-medication?

From a black nationalist perspective, my original position, activism in the upper classes, or some change in white America was not a priority. Rather, I refer you to this, my favorite quote from Malcolm X.

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

So at a very basic level, the human solves his own problem by refusing to stand in the racial box defined by his oppressor. Except many black Americans insist on prioritizing a black, rather than human context. Another good question is the 'Afrolantica' question. If you got rid of racism overnight in America, how much of your blackness would disappear overnight?

Racism is a particular sin. Like all sin it is learned behavior. People do it because it feels good or it gives some advantage. In that way it is like any other immoral failing. It is a failure of character. It is therefore part of the human condition, not because 'race' is real or natural, but because human fallibility is. Immoral people from anywhere on the planet who come to America will find out exactly how racism works here in short order and attempt to exploit it to their benefit.

As a 'suburban white kid', you will likely be the object of some orthodox indoctrination about how 'all' black people feel about certain slights to their dignity. People will await your 'getting it', and should you fail to, your own racial identity will be blamed. My advice is to keep reading books and thereby individuate yourself. You'll find the books are older than you, and therefore so are the solutions, which will only go to show some political overproduction in your educational environment.

You'll also enjoy the great irony of becoming an upper class individual with the benefit of your learning, and the masses are still the same. And yet the most delicious irony of all is that today, without racial malice aforethought you have not offended. But by the end of your studies your peers will likely assure you that you have been offending all along, and now you know exactly how (or generally how) not to offend in the future. It's rather like a prison education, but is it truly moral instruction?

Good luck.

--

Man, I'm starting to sound like Shelby Steele. But really, I'm raising kids in America. We don't have time for this foolishness. And it is precisely that thing, class, that multiculturalists have ignored which undermines their entire thesis and apparent upper hand in discussions about race. They never expected the black upper class to say anything, but that we would remain marginal and permanently wed to Talented Tenth racial servitude. Instead, we have broken off, like Bill Cosby, dissenting from the notion that 'black culture' does not respect class or morality. And it is this difference which inoculates us from the Left cache of liberal chic and hearts that bleed for blacks in dysfunction, as if white supremacy was the only reason for their condition.

Black Americans are doing exactly what they want to do. This is what people keep forgetting.

The Gang Press of War

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Marianne Williamson

According to Beevor, there were gangs of Russians pressed into the service of the Werhmacht. Since Hitler was a racist, he had to change the racial designation of these men such that their ethnicity wouldn't defile the uniform. They were thus called Cossacks and some were made officers in the army headed towards Stalingrad. Others, known as Hiwis from 'hilfswillige' were more often than not Russian POWs. The Russian Red Army was so brutally strict that it was often better to desert to the other side rather than be summarily executed for not obeying orders.

Since I am in a bleak mood, owing to my back injury and slow days, it has become easy for me to imagine the necessity of war. War is a prison of necessity and no man escapes. And thus it becomes the mismeasure of manhood, and yet the very basis upon which his life depends. It seems there is only one way to survive a war with one's self intact and that is to be a career officer. Everything else is destroyed. All other concerns fall into the singularity of war's destruction. You will be conscripted into the affairs of killing the enemy. A nation at war preserves only the dimensions of military thought. A desperate nation at war includes the madness of wishful thinking and barbarity for its own sake.

Imagine yourself, not a fighter, but a social worker in drug and gang intervention. Now you are charged with the supervision of forced labor over the captured enemy. They will break rocks and build roads or be shot and you must make them or be sent to the front. Nobody has a choice - the entire aspect of voluntarism and free association is gone. Everything is enforced at gunpoint. Your humanity has come to be expressed in the gesture of the extra ration of water, the two minute break. What kind of man are you now?

You are the same kind of man, except you are functioning in a different economy - the economy of war. Nothing is any more precious than it is insipid today. If somebody hands you a glass of water, it is a cheap and meaningless act that will never mean anything, but your life has been reduced to that. That is the tragedy of war, of slavery, of captivity. 

I bring this up to remind us that all such deprivation resides in the direction of crime. Our deepest fear is our greatest weakness. It is our acceptance of deprivation, our willingness to conform to the economy of shame. This weakness should remind us of the necessity of defending liberty such that we might shine as we ought. Our great weakness is that we are inadequate and we know it, and we accept it, and we accept punishment for it, and we enable that which is merely bold to rule over us. We trade in the economies of shame and blame the economy and we forget in whose image we were made. We forget our obligation to shine.

Are we pressed or do we volunteer? For the privilege of being designated Cossack?

Some say that our nation is at war. It is a figure of speech. We are not. We are merely engaged in military activities in service of geopolitical positions. Sure there are bombs being walked into marketplaces and men dropping down nylon ropes from helos, but we are not a nation at war. We are a nation that watches basketball contests and talent shows. We are a nation with an entire class of political money minders whose greatest accomplishments are to scandalize themselves and incrementally bankrupt millions of dozing fools. We are a nation that watches simulacra of war in movies and video games - we keep our limbics limber through the literature of Michael Bay, harboring up our store of grit and gumption for some showdown in the dystopic future. You know, in case some commie destroys the iTunes store, or some alien creature tramples down the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we're ready to rumble, or pwn as the adolescent case may be. Oh our brutal spirits are dormant, but they're in there.

An old soul like mine, doesn't need war. I don't want it. I don't feel the need for fire's purification and evil's wakeup call. I'm still hoping for a good situation. But I recognize how sleepy we have become, how easily we have subordinated our best selves behind the comfort of an easy peace. Just walk away from Vietnam. Just walk away from Iraq. Just walk away from Afghanistan, Pakistan. Close your eyes and find your cool cave, your spirit animal is a sanguine penguin, an amiable panda, a furrymuck squirrel.

Peace and prosperity cannot be trusted by the corrupt. They need war and sacrifice and conscription. They mistake liberty for decline because of the way they sinfully indulge their free time. They don't understand the rewards of industry or the moral constraint of free and honest enterprise. All profit is moral hazard to them that horsetrade and try to bankroll virtue with loot of vice. There's always some dirt in their deal, and so they assume that the biggest deals must be hugely dirty. If there were no truth in that such people would never come to power. 

I don't know what it might take to get us to shine, to chrome dip ourselves and smooth out our inevitable pits and pockmarks so that life's mud doesn't stick. More likely it's a daily scrubbing that gives us a finer finish. But we cannot wait for the gang press of war.  We have to wash our faces every day and prepare to work. An early start beats fast running a steady daily prayer beats shouting and screaming at the last moment. America is moving from crisis to crisis. We are in glum preparation for a dozen wars, we are girding ourselves for economies of shame within economies of doom. We have irony as our sidekick, a snide muse aiding in our craven calculations.

Bolsheviks vs Nazis. No escape.

Norman O. Brown's Animal Spirits

Back in the late 80s I had begun my journey to understand the rest of life. Computers I knew. There wasn't much to know back then and today there is too much. Nevertheless my understanding of the liberal arts was nascent and simple.  I was heartened by the observation of some great intellectual whose name I have forgotten - but he said that the life of the mind is circular and complete. That if you begin studying science you will find the same truths ultimately confirmed by the arts and vice versa. It is with that in mind that I had the confidence to be something other than a singular geek, although I cannot say with any conclusive certainty that I have become a Reconnaissance anything. Still, I have my moments.

I didn't know Norman O. Brown, like I don't know many figures of the liberal arts. But I had invented him as a foil to my own sensibilities. Here, R. R. Reno introduces him as the father of all today's post-modern primitivism.

These days, multiculturalists attack the very idea of a normative culture, but often with vague claims about “inclusion” and no clear idea of what sort of world they seek. In contrast, Brown sees clearly. Brown wants to release us from the tensions of history. Therefore, it is essential to let go of purpose. “The unrepressed animal,” he writes, “carries no instinctual project to change his own nature.” History is all about doing. In contrast, Brown wants us to affirm pure being, which he associates with the free, non-purposeful play of children. Or as he puts is elsewhere, we should embrace “that simple health that animals enjoy.”

Yes. I know, I know. I was just saying this in my Prick essay.

Stowe Boyd retweeted somebody saying, microblog style, that sometimes it's worth being gay just to annoy Republicans. To which I had to respond in the reverse, sometimes it's worth being Republican just to annoy gays - and it certainly is. But nobody tends to believe that old queers can take it, that they can just dish it in victimized frustration. I'm the one that's frustrated. Live and let live is what I say, but that doesn't apply if you're gay, or black, or Republican. Except that I should capitalize Gay and Black because they are not so much identities as political identities. The fact that we don't capitalize them shows the blurriness of our thinking and inability to recognize the difference between being and doing. Everything, it seems, is argued ad hominem because everyone, it seems, is trying to be loved. Doing something, to be loved. Say that slowly and realize how people struggle to achieve a state of grace, a retirement threshold after which you *are* something by acclamation. And so there is a political struggle, work and doing, to designate 'gay' as a state of grace, after the foolishness that granted the doublespeak of colorblindness that false honor.

I have been arguing against being in favor of doing for years now. It's one of the tropes of Cobb and now to see it reified elsewhere gives me glum satisfaction. There are at least two of us who see our cities on fire with the heat of wanton ignorance. And we know the arsonist.

I have also been saying that the Sexual Revolution is another sad revolution with no particular destination in mind and I was thinking just yesterday on how we conservatives are the enemy of Progress. This giant disambiguated 'progress' that goes under the heading of 'the modern world'. The modern world has been around for a century and because our cars are faster we naively try to believe that everything is getting better at the same pace, or that all incremental intellectual changes to what was are good. Surely, "we didn't know anything then".

I find myself fighting the temptation to leave society every day to stop pushing the boundaries of what my life has become. I am caught in the struggle between the appeal of solitude and responsibility to my fellows. Half of me wants to find a house by the lake 10 miles off the main road (with internet of course), the other half wants a penthouse on Central Park West. Which is the better retirement? There is some proper passage regarding this in Ravelstein. And I am reminded of all the books I am missing.

I attempt an economy of words. I hear this was Bacon's great gift, but I digress.

Conservatism is under threat for a number of reasons, all relating to the failure of society to maintain a level of integrity that allows a sufficient number of adults to remain in control. We conservatives are engaged out of discontent and the others out of desire. The deconstructors seem to have the upper hand.

A Christian Mob

You don't use words like that
St. Louise is listening.
-- Soul Coughing

Today somebody who decided to call himself Jesus Christ the Molester got a virtual beatdown by a Facebook mob of Christian persuasion. It could be proven but it won't, so I take note of it. I know the name of the inciter, and I was on my way to get some licks in but he was already dead. The criminal facilitator was Zynga's Mafia Wars.

Yesterday I was directed to this video. The inciter's name is forgotten but could be discovered. It's vaguely conspiratorial with little disambiguation between Muslims. But when it comes down to it, nobody cares if you are Sunni or Shia, Protestant or Catholic. Ultimately it's just Jesus or Muhammad.

You don't remember Electric Sheep, but I do. The story is called Spiders.

It is just a matter of time between this war and the next. Because I listen to podcasts that lull me to sleep about history, and so as I listen to Beevor's Stalingrad I wake in the morning and I don't hear cannon and I wonder why. See yesterday I also got a very wise tweet about how a country's decline is pretty much marked by the moment they start beating up the Jews. But what happens when they start beating up the Muslims?

We are living in a democracy that isn't functioning properly. I'm pretty sure that we have an adequate level of corruption and incompetence to ruin us. But something is telling me, very likely my back injury, that I am very close to being officially and old man and somewhat past being part of the solution. I am not past caring, which is the difficult part. It's the part that makes me feel helpless and angry. So I watch the Christian Mob pounce and I think 'I told you so'.

Conviction. Conviction is the energy that rules the world. I wish everyone would live so long as I have.

Egocasting, Literacy & Relativism: The Answer

(From the Archives May 2005)

In a world where college students in their 20s still haven't mastered enough skills to live a middle class life; when there are millions of ideas and billions of literate people all trying to hit the big time, whose knowledge can we trust?

It's time to swing the pendulum back to the body. And maybe, perhaps just maybe for the first time since the communist revolution we might begin to start thinking about the New Man.

Surely philosophy students would consider me lazy, but I've never managed to find much about C. Wright Mills. His name has popped up several times in my studies and travels as a father of the Pragmatists, of which I am a somewhat sloppy devotee. I always picture him in the phrase 'the philosopher wore hiking boots' and I imagine him something of a muscular Ansel Adams. The man himself and his work are a mystery beyond that and I wonder how it has come to pass that he is. If I didn't have to work for a living I might find out.

This week I have been working with a man who has lived most of his life in three states: Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. He is actually capable of discerning smog over the city of Salt Lake, an acuity which completely eludes LA me. So I have stopped a moment to contemplate what a man of the American West knows in contrast to the rest of us. So while I have no answers to that or the question of Mr. Mills I will entertain the notion that they both converge on and inform what I am about to say.

We are on the verge of great discoveries in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. I think we are going to discover in this century why we behave certain ways in certain environments and lay plain some scientific mysteries that we plainly understand as people. What part of the brain makes us laugh? Why does music affect our emotions? What exactly does it mean to be afraid of the dark? What is the physiological description of spiritual epiphany? What chemicals are involved when we open up our eyes and discover a Great Salt Lake over the peak of the mountain we have been climbing in search of a new homeland?

The eternal truths of humanity are based on our shared experiences. Yes, blue looks like blue to all of us, but perhaps that stuff they ate on the Neb was Crispy Wheat. But think of it this way, if we didn't all evolve the same way and there actually was a great difference between the way we function how would anybody ever get pregnant? We are not different enough for blue not to look like blue.

So in the near future, the oil is going to stop flowing, Moore's Law is going to poop out and nobody is going to come up with any new ideas for television programming, theatre programs or religious deprogramming. The intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th are going to slow down and we will be, as Morpheus says we will marvel at our own magnificence, and then will come the doldrums.

And we will all video record ourselves and we will spend countless hours looking at the video recordings we made a year ago, ten years ago. We will study mankind's history and rediscover the discoveries of the ancients. The art of discovery will turn science inside out, and nobody will go to the moon, we'll all just gaze at our navels. The difference is that this time we'll understand it in a completely different way. We are going to re-invent emotional intelligence.

I say this now with a bit of worry, because I want to wear the hiking boots and find a way to live somewhere where the bandwidth is high and the cost of land is low. I want Dyson's Utopia and a new chemistry kit to truly understand and grow my own herbal cures.

Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do

There ain't nothing I can do, or nothing I can say,
Some folks will criticize me.
So I'm gonna do just what I want to anyway,
And don't care if you all despise me.

If I should take a notion
To jump into the ocean,
It ain't nobody's business if I do.
-- Billie Holiday

Billie is dead. Isn't it strange that those Americans who find little else to love about the symbol of Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit and living in despair are so apt to destroy the import of this song? What do I mean? I mean the welfare state and making it your business.

As we are all aware, the Governor of California, whose election is beginning to trouble me, is flirting with the idea of legalizing marijuana. As well, that provocative busybody Gavin Newsome, is flirting with prostitutes and pursuing an agenda of legalizing their trade. These are a few other vices that the government is trying to horn in on.

When I was a kid, I never had a good head for cards or dice games. I never quite understood gambling. Sure I was good at math, but not that kind. I couldn't get my head around those figures, but I sure did know people who could. A kid named Phillip Driver was the most brilliant chess hustler I ever knew. He knew what it meant to take a half point off the spread. You couldn't even pitch pennies and win against him, and he was devastating at dice. Of course he got kicked out of our Catholic school because such enterprises were frowned upon. And we all know that we can't run dice games or run numbers or have bingo without running afoul of the law. But still somehow we do. There's not much three card monte on street corners in LA, that's because people don't walk - they take the bus, so that's where the games are. The personal gambling still happens.

But in Gardena, you can play Pai Gow Poker. That city takes a piece. Obviously if you're in one of the new counties where there is Indian gaming, the deal has been struck. But let's not forget that millions of Californians manage, somehow, some way, to get their sex for hire and their weed and their crystal meth and nitrous for their cars and their porn and everything else. I'm a civil libertarian. Always have been. So my argument is fundamentally that people find their own way to happiness, even if that happiness is morally suspect. I tolerate a lot of uncivilized behavior in civil society that I disapprove personally because I'd rather not have the government enforcing codes of social behavior outside of crime.

So for the sake of our argument, let us imagine that along the spectrum of human behavior that half is civilized and half is uncivilized. Let us further say that one half of the uncivilized behavior is evil. That leaves 75% of human behavior which is better or worse, but not evil. I would consider prostitution and getting high as not inherently evil - they're in the 75% Then again, running through a stop sign or painting graffiti on a subway are not inherently evil either. But both are uncivilized. So in our society we have decided in the aegis of the law covers a great deal of our behavior, both civilized and uncivilized. There are crimes which are not evil, and that covers prostitution and getting high. 

I think we'd all agree that we'd have a police state if we were to enforce every law all the time - if we tried to force people to be civilized. And so it works out that while we have laws against uncivilized behavior, those laws are understood that they are not to be enforced. In that regard the morality of the law is in our minds, but the government is not necessarily in our faces. 

So where am I going with this? As soon as we take prostitution and getting high off the black market for the purposes of regulation or taxation, we are getting in people's faces. This is counterintuitive to all of the arguments we've grown up with, but there is no getting around the fact that all of the conflict around these uncivilized human behaviors is being handled right now without any assistance from the government or regulation. That's what a black market is. It happens in darkness.

To shine light on prostitution and getting high, to give them the protection of society, is to bring more of the spectrum of human behavior into the regulation of government. Pimps, johns and hookers will fill the civil courts with their beefs. Drug dealers and suppliers will have arbitration in small claims court. For what?

More and more of human behavior under the spotlight and control over government is a bad idea. Why this is considered 'liberal' defies reason.

Ever Increasing Complexity

My good friend Ed Hopkins is probably the second most well-read person I know. This morning he interjected some observations about what would impress him about law students (he's a law student). I responded.

It's interesting to observe the ways in which you describe the distinctions between law students amongst themselves. We lay-victims only notice your collective capacity to exploit our petty jealousies, defend the indefensible, and destroy the value of common sense. The most telling phrase I hear attorneys say is 'pray that you never need me', which I do on occasion. I'm not trying to demonize, but I do wonder if the legal profession has arced towards dealing only with the troublesome. In other words, what is it that draws ordinary people through the profession that makes them ultimately defenders of our increasingly complex and obfuscated law. Is there not, ever, an effort to simplify?

It took me a very long time to understand the value of complex law. The analogy was that law is like a dense jungle between the desire of mankind and the object of his desire. Were it not difficult to negotiate, everyone would get everything all the time. Thus the value of law's complexity is to allow a man to do anything, but only if he is most persistent. At this point, it only sounds like bad religion - a series of fetishised fetters on our freedom for our own good.

Of course I defend the concept of liberty, freedom under the law, but I am always concerned that the law is becoming more like that microlubricant that Carroll Shelby hawks. It doesn't only get between the friction generating engine parts, it penetrates into the steel itself.

We are now met on the great battlefield for the future of the American economy, and its banking system in particular. We are in a Depression, so says Judge Posner, and I agree with his thesis. So we are faced, ultimately with dealing with the networked effects of what passes for the wisdom of the moment. There is plenty of evidence from the information that I get, that that wisdom is neither great nor consistent and so will inevitably cost us. We are trying to think our way out of one pain for fear of taking it on the chin and so are likely to navigate ourselves into a position of catching a blow to the throat.

The law is an ossified relief of the positions of policy which fit more or less within the bounds of Constitutionality. And yet as I look at the law from the perspective of a software programmer and essayist, I know that it cannot be as logically sound as all that. The imagination of attorneys to make citations outside of a narrow context would be impossibly constrained were the law to flow from a singular perspective. It would not be a dense jungle but a concrete maze.

I worry today, in spite of my conservative bearing, that we do not take some libertarian opportunity to clear the legal jungle as our economy undergoes drastic change. More specifically, and in reference to the passing of the Special Interest State, we need that room.

Alternative Literacy

I went to a memorial service yesterday and was somewhat weirded out by the fact that I knew absolutely nobody there. Since I work in a bizarre kind of niche industry, I am often put in such situations, where I know things that people assume that I don't and isn't it weird that you're here because we don't expect you. It's one of the reasons I'm attracted to spycraft.

Anyway, on the way back home from San Diego's Kate Sessions Park overlooking majestic Mission Bay, I turned on the radio to KPFK, our Pacifica Radio affiliate in Southern California. It was rather fascinating to hear the kind of disjointed ranting they do because I haven't listened on a regular basis since 1987. The thing they were ranting about was the tangential to State of Play which I also saw of the weekend. It was print media vs the blogosphere. Now this morning I got a link about Twitter, some cartoon about dogs and Twitter disinformation and a request for a picture of my son from somebody who doesn't want it emailed, but snail mailed on Kodak paper. 

Here's the problem. Everything we know about representative democracy and the imperatives of the Fourth Estate is undergoing profound change because of technology. This is, despite what anybody likes to think about , still the Information Age. And quite frankly, I think it is reasonable to believe that the Industrial Revolution which ultimately created the Jet Set was really just a precursor to what the real end will be, and that is more like village society. But before I go into any theories about village society, let me just focus on the KPFK debate and the the lede of Russell Crowe's latest flick.

I'm going to spoil it OK, so if you haven't already seen State of Play then you really need to stop reading this paragraph. But in the end, what happens is that what smells all over like a global conspiracy is really nothing more than a little local murder. If this film is to be taken as realistic, the fact that what sells newspapers is basically spectacular is absolutely right - it means that the business model for newspapers is very wrong and the only way it's going to change is when people realize that you cannot sell politics and sports in the same paper. Newspaper editors, I believe, think they are more important than they are- the fact of the matter is that it does come down to a few good writers, and a few good writers can be had for much less than the price of supporting all of that printing equipment and gasoline powerd distribution network. The resources of big newspapers don't seem to be doing what they should - how can it be all about the deadline? What difference does breaking news make, really? If it takes a persistent fellow like John Young at Cryptome some years and processing of FOIA cases to get the real deal on some story as important as exactly what's going on at Site R Raven Rock, then that's what it takes. You cannot feed that economy with classified ads. Newspapers have not adopted to the information economy. Newspapers are not our only news organizations, and the professionals in that business have to recognize.

When I speak about alternative literacy, I'm talking about the Long Tail, Dunbar's number and power laws. I'm talking about the ways in which particular information appeals to particular individuals that don't necessarily aggregate in the ways we think of 'the public'. It's true that a story about torture or mayhem will attract large audiences, but that's something that the blogosphere has proven it can do very well. Drawing large audiences is the point of all mass communications and propaganada, but are such affairs crucial to the running of the republic? In other words, if Hollywood takes over network news, is our democracy decidedly in decline? I think the answer is no in a way that sounds cynical on the surface - which is that the American Elite knows what it needs to know. Again it's not that the traditional media isn't important, it's just not important to the same fraction of society their marketing numbers suggest.

Think of it in terms of 'actionable information'. If every 5th grader in America was exposed to  Julius Caesar, how many of them will make use of the wisdom it could impart? In the new world, only those 5th graders who *want* to see the play will, because the rest will have a choice - alternative literacy. You cannot force every 5th grader to watch, but the presumption of the old media is that they were owed that mass market share.

It might be disturbing to many that significant majorities are not attuned to the highest quality reporting that large media organizations could provide, but if you understand information theory the way I do you wouldn't be troubled. I think of it exactly like I think of the information about nuclear weapons. Like the fifth graders at the Shakespeare Festival, the information is out there to be had if you are persistent in pursuing it, but for that information to be actionable, requires no small effort on your part. The most valuable information is valuable to producers, not necessarily consumers. This is why high quality literacy doesn't apply to a consumer society. If snooty newspaper editors realized that, they wouldn't bleat so loudly. Or perhaps even more cynically, they do understand that which is why they sell classifieds and employ paparazzi with only a nod to serious journalism. Inventing CNN, Ted Turner had it right in the beginning. Now only Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal seem to have it right. They know that their audience is elite and will pay, and so that elite pays.

Again, I am using information theory. It takes energy to sustain knowledge and the discipline that makes that knowledge actionable. When the consumer can get a simulacrum of knowledge for free, the marginal utility of newsprint is not worth it, especially given the quality of information the web provides free. Note that all of this applies to higher education as well, except that higher education in America has priced itself out of reality. The bursting of that bubble is immanent. I'm attracted to spycraft - to information whose value is partly determined by the relative few people who know it.

We should take note of American suceptibility to markets. We are a market-oriented society. In that regard P.T. Barnum's aphorism applies. There is a sucker born every minute. But more aptly, if a fair price is whatever price the market will bear, such things apply to our literacy as well. A good education is what the market rewards whether or not that education includes anything of absolute value. A fair election is whatever the electorate will vote for. Everything is a horse race. And because America is extraordinarily wealthy, there is always good money to follow after bad. It will, I think, unfortunately take us all to the very brink. With any luck, I and everyone I know will be dead before that occurs.

Perhaps I have come full circle as I find myself thinking once again about Marshall Blonsky's dissection of American high culture - how it is a mere semiotic swamp of relativism. Even those so absolutely convinced that they operate on the basis of unchangeable 'values' often mistake the value of singular principles applied overbroadly. Be that as it may what is clear to me these days is that only subscribers, paying subscribers in information consumption markets are going to get their money's worth.

I'm not certain how this bodes for the nation. Because as loathe as I am to think about it at length, I know that there are not many levers of power available to the unsure grasp of the masses. Nor is our cheap and free information going to teach us how to reach and properly control them. The fate of the nation will be dependent on the ethics and fates of Caesar and Brutus and honorable men.

(Anti) Black Self-Actualization

I just browsed through an interesting and new blog to me called Black Women Blow the Trumpet. I read the first post reviewing a film about a woman caught in a web of pity and thought eww. But I soldiered on through more and found an interesting passage.

In the long and detailed post called Multiculturalism and the Dangers of White Privilege Idolatry the author starts off banging away at some dysfunctions.

At this think tank, we have examined many aspects of the conditioning that occurs in those constructs. The emotional baggage that most of them have unknowingly accepted seems to have fostered several fallacies:

Fallacy #1: Black women have to take responsibility for black children.
Fallacy #2: Black women have to prefer black men above other men.
Fallacy #3: Living among all blacks proves blackness and affirms racial loyalty.
Fallacy #4: Black women should uplift/rescue black men in order to solidify their own destinies.
Fallacy #5: Black women are not highly desired by men of other races so they should do everything they can to be validated and chosen by black men.
Fallacy #6: Leaving all-black constructs will result in social isolation among non-blacks and rejection by blacks who are in black constructs.
Fallacy #7: Divestment requires the rejection of black men.

It stays juicy and it gets better. We get interesting passages like this:

In order for black women to leverage their resources wisely, they need to understand how to shrewdly navigate the social systems in several different cultures within this country. Multiculturalism requires mastering of social systems of several cultures.

I have noticed that many black women are not ashamed of being culturally ignorant. They make uninformed and stunningly ignorant comments about other groups without any embarassment at all. They actually think that blacks, whites and Latinos are separate races. They don't know the difference between a racial group and an ethnic group. They decide that the cultural ignorance embraced by others justifies their own ignorance. For black women, the costs of remaining culturally ignorant is too high.

We finally land here:

I think that black women need to think strategically about how to leverage their agenda within all settings that they find themselves in. We need to stop focusing on gaining acceptance from other groups, and begin to strategically leverage the Four Pillars of Black Self Actualization:
Dismantle!
Divest!
Diversify!
Dominate!

There is both odd consistency and inconsistency in what the author, Lisa, a black minster, writes. But it's clear that she recognizes the wreckage wrought by the false loyalty to blackness. She appears to be desirous of reconstructing blackness, and I wonder how close she will come to tossing it out entirely. I note this because she is definitely critical of afrocentrism and she adopts a post 9/11 mentality with regard to understanding that a social bomb has gone off in black America and so many people are still picking up the pieces. On the one hand she is wary of multiculturalism to the extent that it is somewhat defined by whites (but she never says white liberals, which is why she may be in a quandary) and yet she clearly understands that her black women subjects will not be respected if they do not reciprocate respect for other cultures.

But what is clear is that she appears to recognize no black orthodoxy. So it comes as no surprise, as pomo as her reading list suggests, that she is a deconstructor of black identity. That's useful, and I think that on the road to recovering a sense of individuality that black Americans have sacrificed, her writing will be paid more attention.

Of Course Brutal Interrogation Works

If it didn't, there would be no moral courage in opposing it.

Because I choose my words very carefully I'm making the distinction between torture and brutal interrogation. Just as I make the distinction that many people choose to ignore, between immigration and illegal immigration, between gay marriage and civil union you'll find many people with bashing conservatives on their mind pretending that I don't. So here we go again.

To make things clear, the difference between torture and brutal interrogation in my mind is that torture is aimed at destruction of the subject. Interrogation is aimed at gaining information. I make the distinction along the same lines as I make the distinction between individual citizens shooting each other in the streets and police officers shooting in the streets. Simply because an officer shoots someone dead in the line of duty does not make them a murderer. They are authorized to use deadly force under circumstances laid out in policy. They are proxies for the people. Likewise our military and spy agencies are proxies for the people. In our defense, we burden them with doing things that we are incapable or unwilling to do.

I will stipulate that waterboarding is not torture but that it is brutal. I would call it a brutal interrogation. On a scale of brutality, I don't find it particularly high, but that's enough mincing of words. The moral distinction between torture and interrogation is the intent and the proxy as well as the degree. I don't find it immoral for a police officer to kill a human being in his line of work, which can be admittedly brutal. That is the nature of a proxy. A proxy gets an immunity based upon the service rendered on behalf of society. The suspect is certainly just as dead as if he were murdered in cold blood, but it doesn't make the cop a murderer. Similarly, someone who is interrogated using brutal methods - say cigarette burns, suffers the same amount of pain as someone who is tortured for the purposes of terrorizing a community, but there is a distinction based upon the license an individual is given by society to do so.

The point is that because we know that brutal interrogation works, it is a tool that can be used in defense of society. It is part of a structured defense, it is not an ad-hoc act of desperation, it is a rationalized and calculated act whose aim is the protection of society. In this regard it is not whether or not the act itself is brutal then therefore to be avoided as a moral hazard, but the circumstances under which it is deployed. Brutal interrogation is a defensive weapon. And because it is an effective weapon, we understand how its use by the enemy compromises our position.

Here's the quote of the day from Belmont.

Nobody I know, or have heard of who has had experience in real-life situations has ever said, “our cell should continue as usual and the safehouse should remain open, despite the fact that one of our own is being tortured by the secret police, because I read in the New York Times that coercion never works.” The probability is that torture works and that is for that reason its use constitutes a moral dilemma; and the reason why Jacoby believes he is expressing a noble sentiment when he forswears it even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on Terror.

So there's this dilemma. All of those disclosed brutal interrogations which have taken place under the authority of the US Government was done for national security reasons.  Since 9/11 there have been three captives subjected. There is a certain moral consistency in the pacifist argument against the Long War or any war. The objection against brutal interrogation on principle which is based not on degree but on proxy is the same as one of disarming police officers on principle. It is the zero-tolerance argument, and I find it morally sound. However, as this objection comes from citizens who benefit from the 'ill-gotten gains' all the same as those who support it, there are no clean hands. We all live in a society whose policy it is to allow immunity for brutal interrogations. Whether or not we actually do interrogate brutally, the moral burden of that brutality is shared by all citizens, in the same way as the fact that we have nuclear weapons. The immoral gravity of that burden depends upon the conditions under which this weapon has been deployed.  In the same way that any state with police can become a police state, any state with brutal interrogations can become brutal. It is a matter of corruption. But the mere deployment of police or brutal interrogations does not automatically push us over the brink. Rather, it is when we push the system towards a lack of restraint when we jeopardize legitimate rule.

Here's what I said about the consequences of pushing the envelope in 2004:

I think that the Administration has every right to push the envelope as regards immunity [of interrogators]. To the extent that we are sovereign and we have to fight dirty the President ought to have the leeway to do so. Absolutely. But the inevitable consequence of crossing over that grey area is rooted in the implication of reserving the right. That is that you cease to respect your enemy, and that is the thing that obliterates the possibility of an honorable peace.

This is very likely America's intent in the WOT. There seems to be no question that this Administration wants to give no quarter to terrorists. Our aim is not an honorable peace with them, but their total destruction. I think also that American are fairly united in that sentiment. I believe GWBush's term 'bringing them to justice' is something of a euphemism. 'Capture or Kill' is more the sentiment, and my reading of 'capture' absolutely means interrogation to find the rest of the AQ gang.

It is not entirely clear to me that the sentiment in the current Adminstration is to reach an honorable peace with Al Qaeda, although there are surely people on my side of the aisle who find the President to be an appeaser of the first order. If there is any consequence to the splitting of hairs between citizens who like the current policy over the prior policy (if there is one), it doesn't matter much to Al Qaeda. Then exactly to whom does it matter? 

I happen to be skeptical in general but sanguine in particular that probable excess in the liberalization of the use of brutal interrogations will be restrained in our current political environment. Outside of the pacifist principle, I would find it difficult to believe that any nation among our allies would find our brutal interrogations of AQ members to arouse a diplomatic row. They are not afraid America has turned irrevocably for the worse. We are not turning into a police state. We are not making a mockery of our justice system.

All that said, it is clear that our use of this brutal interrogation has exceeded the boundaries apparently set for its preauthorized use. Depending on the nature of the legal machinations invoked to circumvent these rules I would make the call. If, for example, I were to discover that there were some dozen others who were waterboarded in addition to the three captives disclosed, I would call the system into greater question if their interrogations also exceeded the pre-approved guidelines. However if they were waterboarded according to those guidelines set forth, I would have less concern.

That's all I have to say on the matter at this point. I am interested in knowing some example in which my framework of pre-authorized brutal interrogation used like a tool, or a defensive weapon violates some moral immunity given for other weapons of war and in what way.

But I also understand the degree argument and find it respectable. If you simply say that waterboardning, without regard to its effectiveness is simply intolerably brutal I can respectfully disagree. I would say rape or dismemberment is simply intolerably brutal, but not waterboarding. I think it is clear again in the disclosed cases of 266 waterboardings that the guidelines were abused, but I am also relying on a kind of gut measure of proportionality...

Susan Boyle vs The Era of Affirmation

The other day I was thinking about Sammy Davis Jr. It was because of a scene from Transporter 3 in which Jason Statham has a conversation with his onscreen buddy about Jerry Lewis vs Dean Martin. The moment made me think about how unfortunate we are to have only George Clooney and Brad Pitt. As I go through my inventory of talented entertainers only I can only think of Prince as multi-talented. Or perhaps Tommy Tune. The point is that nobody comes close to Sammy, and there are no American men I can think of who, like those in the Rat Pack + Hugh Hefner might by their presence and talent transform the degraded state of American manhood and style from its trajectory towards the aesthetics of Hulk Hogan. It's no wonder people idolize Barack Obama. He's got no competition.

I love Bruce Willis, but he actually has ruined it for the American film star. I love Daniel Craig as the new James Bond as well, but all of these guys are way too hard. What are we going to do? We have to buy Transporter 3 and watch Jason Statham as well and wait until perhaps Hugh Laurie makes a film. Until then, there will continue to be people in the movie business who get paid to handle facial scar continuity as our men in film bounce from explosion to explosion.

This has everything to do with Susan Boyle because her presence in a reality show demonstrates how little our star system deals with real talent. What we are stuck with is an entire class of celebrities who possess a little bit of everything and a giant chunk of nothing. That is, except on the margins. On the margins where talent still counts for everything we have a broad pool of insufferable savants. Race car drivers, for example, and young men who can flip motorcycles or snowboards 360 degrees in the air in the space between ramps. They are excellent to be watched, but not heard. Boyle is the opposite, she has, as they say, a face for radio. Excellent to be heard but not watched. And most singular talent is like that, singular. There are no CEOs in AIG who can stand in front of a camera and explain their value to a Congressional subcommittee, they just do what they do. There are no basketball or baseball stars who can articulate the style of their mansions or luxury cars. Let them just play ball. There are no counterterrorism experts who can get on the radio and explain exactly under what circumstances they work, passing a politically tractionable message to the masses. They just do what they do. We all, most of us, struggle mightily to do the thing that butters our bread as best we can - we don't have time to also look good doing it. Then of course there is that class of people who spend all their energy so that they can look good doing anything. These are the people who own our sense of talent, which is why Susan Boyle surprised everyone.

Susan Boyle inspired everyone because we all wish that talent will reward, and we all pray that our meritocracy finds all of the rough diamonds in time. We know that we suffer from a surfiet of mediocre multi-talent and from the stranglehold of the celebrated elite. As much as we actually do love Jeopardy's Alex Trebek, we shouldn't have to watch him in a celebrity sports car race. The man is 68 years old. There is no reason whatsoever that we should put up with Regis Philbin any longer. He already holds the Guinness Book record for most time in front of a television camera. Let go.  We don't need presenters being presentable. We need the producers to produce.

If we could let the singers sing and the dancers dance, then maybe we can let people be respected for their talent rather than just making respectable appearances. Maybe we can let people be what they truly are knowing that in at least one way they are valuable in our society.

Instead we pretend that the crippled are not crippled and that through the artifice of language and tact that everybody's beautiful in the same way. We pretend that the weird are not weird, and that there's always a way to smooth over defects and make them all acceptable. We affirm. To affirm is to make true, and we live in an Era of Affirmation, and yet we know it's false. This is why we Americans crave reality shows, because we know at bottom that it can't all be true - we need to exercise judgment in a society that has gone too affirmative for its own good. We know that there are three judges on American Idol, but we know that only one really counts.

One day among our children we will see an entertainer who can sing and dance and act and look good while doing it all, because she actually can. And she will put Madonna, Paris, Britney, Lindsay and the rest of their ilk to shame. She will be Lena Horne reborn. And she will shame us all for putting up with their mediocrity for all this time. She will end debate. When she comes we'll all be a lot better off because then we'll know that be high standards our politicians can't dance their way out, our bankers can't act their way out, our teachers can't sing their way out and all of the people who are failing and trying to look respectable while doing so will have no cover. The era of affirmation will cease.

Until that day we will be reminded smartly that only the talent of having a pretty face has a pretty face, and that for the most part talent is singular. That Joe the Plumber is not a political commentator, that Barney Frank is not a banker, that Caroline Kennedy is only Caroline Kennedy, that Sarah Palin is only Sarah Palin; that things are only what they are and that no amount of affirmation can make them more. Let us recognize things as they are.

Success Has 100 Parents

Failure is an orphan.

There's nothing new to say about the failure of marriage among black Americans. But considering that's what we've been talking about, marriage, now is as good a time as any to bring up Hymowitz again.

On Conscience

I'm a philosophical kind of person, and I often find myself describing things according to my own evolved understanding with very precise language. If I didn't know me any better I would consider some of it contrived- it sure doesn't sound like how I grew up speaking, around the way in 90016. But it does serve a purpose which is as a stepping stone towards a perfecting wisdom. It's not easy which is why I appreciate history and its accumulated wisdoms. History for me includes the history of morality which means the history of the church. And since I understand information theory, I recognize the institution of the church vis a vis its ability to keep moral wisdom alive, and the necessity of theology and ecclesiastical studies in keeping that ability alive.

So this is why I find Mirror of Justice to be an excellent help. Today this is what I found there.

[Stanley] Fish is absolutely correct: conscience is not a self-contained "black box" -- it is an inherently self-transcendent set of moral claims.  But that does not invariably mean that the exercise of conscience must lead to some "public" establishment of conscience's substance.  Fish seems to assume that the alternative to an individualized conscience is a state-established conscience, and it leads him to this rather sinister rationale for condemning the Bush regulations:

..an inherently self-transcendent set of moral claims. Sounds like Fish and his critics do the same thing with language I do. It's good to have company - which is rather the point all parties are making about the nature of conscience. Break it up. If 'science' is knowing and a process of discovery, then conscience is that *with* others. You conscience is a joint creation and it acts on you individually. Your conscience reflects the understanding of a greater moral plurality - something shared with something bigger than you. You develop conscience in collaboration.

Where the MoJ writer and Fish diverge has to do with the materiality and proper form of that bigger something. Fish seems to locate it in the State, MoJ obviously in God. There are more than simply religious reasons to distrust the moral capacities of the State, and one need only take a short tour around George Orwell to recognize that.

I like the idea that conscience is not your own - that it is a state of internalization of self-transcendent morality. That angel and that devil on your opposite shoulders aren't you - they don't have your face. A man with a troubled conscience is not struggling with himself, but he is struggling to keep the deal he has already made with a self-transcendent moral power. That's deep.

Waiting for Inspiration

Vernon Reid famously said that your favorite song was a commodity before you ever heard it on the radio. This concept came to mind in a combination of reading things today first over at Blacksmythe and secondly over at Tooley's joint. How many in our generation are listeners?

Spence investigates the utility of listening to Booker T vs WEB arguments as we shake our heads in dismay over economic development and the proper discussion that is evidently not happening anywhere but in history texts for all we talk about those two. He comes to the same conclusion as I do. It's not only useless but dangerous.

Avery notes how much 'darker' we've gotten as he looks at the pages of Jet magazine in the 70s as they represented ideals of black beauty during that era. I note that, wow, we've come a long way. I did so in investigating a few pages of the Rodney Allen Rippy issue of 1975.

The most fun part of Jet is the bathing beauties and the music charts. It's the only part I read back in the day, making sure that I was hip. It's rather amazing that we couldn't know then that Carl Douglas would still be remembered and the Three Degrees would not. Everybody sings about Kung Fu Fighting, already I forget the song by the Three Degrees that I used to know and be inspired by, and I just read this stuff 20 minutes ago.

There are lots of ways to castigate consumer culture. But on the subject of Booker T. Washington and economic development there's no way to get around the bit about buckets and bootstraps. So when the conversation turns to the miracle of Obama's election and what it might mean to black Americans today, it's difficult for me to avoid the obvious comparisons. I don't know and won't guess what Washington might have said if he were not spinning in his grave or some other similar game played by us gadflies. But I do know what blacks who tend to be entrepreneurial and conservative have said about Obama today and last month and last year. They are more appropriate critics, and many of them said what I said. Obama gonna what? Yeah Right.

So it occured to me to throw Vernon Reid into the mix because Obama is the Funky President. And just like with teenagers looking at the back of Jet magazine, I percieve that many Americans are looking at the man at the top of the charts and singing the lyrics to his song. They are listeners. They are recieving the commodified products of a political machine, an industry that knew what to say before any speech was said.

I don't know how sad to feel for the guy who buys a Barry White album or the Isley Brothers single in hopes that playing it at the right time will make the right girl have the right feeling for him. I don't know how sad to feel for the girl who listens to Lionel Ritchie and dreams of having the right guy say those exact same words, once, twice, three times. But I'm sure there are some awfully clever songwriters and musicians who are glad they do. Because they get paid and they get power putting together those notes and lyrics. Until there are music stores and radio stations full of romantic product. Not romance; it's not the real thing, it's just the commodified product.

I do feel sad for the guy who buys a political promise hoping that invoking it at the right time will make the right somebody do the right something for him. Maybe the right congressman will put together the right jobs program. The right think tank will come out in support of his 'silver rights'. I'm sure there are some awfully clever speechwriters and pollsters who are glad they do. They get paid and they get power putting together those phrases about hope and change and reform and diplomacy and other such commodified democratic shiny things. Not progress; it's not the real thing. It's just commodified progressivism.

You know a good song when you read about it on the Jet top 20. You can sing it and you can't wait to hear the next time the DJ gives you the new song from your favorite band. You listen attentively for inspiration.

Perhaps we have a generation of attentive listeners. But how many can play instruments for themselves? OK let's not be too demanding. How many of us have a piano in our home upon which a talented friend might play for the party? That used to be the way it was up in Harlem back in the days of a rent party. We actually knew the piano player and we actually sung the song right there and it wasn't a commodity. It wasn't part of The System we all love to hate. But we threw our own parties - we didn't go to the club and stand in line and wait to be searched for weapons, or picked up by some dude with a big fancy car.

Yeah everybody's waiting for 2010 and 2012 when we all get a chance to undo some of our 'doing' the last time we cast a ballot at the clever commodities exchange we call democracy. Meanwhile we talk about what some old artists might have done or said before we were born. What would Booker say about...? I'm not listening.

Nosocomialities

Nosocomial infections are infections which are a result of treatment in a hospital or a healthcare service unit, but secondary to the patient's original condition. Infections are considered nosocomial if they first appear 48 hours or more after hospital admission or within 30 days after discharge. Nosocomial comes from the Greek word nosokomeion (νοσοκομείον) meaning hospital (nosos = disease, komeo = to take care of). This type of infection is also known as a hospital-acquired infection (or more generically healthcare-associated infections)
-- Wikipedia


So I'm driving to pick up my daughter from her friend's house, and two women are on the radio. One is impersonating a nose. The other pretends to be a pair of eyes, presumeably on the same face. They tell of a fabulous new allergy medication (some name that ends with 'air') that treats both of them at once - a medical threesome.

Allergy medications are not allergy medications of course. They only treat the symptoms. You know, itchy watery red eyes (says she) and drippy cloggy sneezy nose (says she, nasally). And as usual they get to the list of side effects. We're all used to this but I didn't expect to hear glaucoma, cataracts and nasal fungus. Nasal fungus? Then the capper - they actually say 'please don't spray it in your eyes'.

I am reading up in Amity Shlaes, who has already earned the great emnity of the Left by publishing her book 'The Forgotten Man'. It's a very useful history for me and of course it's controversial because she likes Herbert Hoover (so far) and Wendell Willkie. I am coming to appreciate, among other things, how contentious was the matter of rural electrification and the the nature of the battles over public utilities. But ultimately I expect to find from Shlaes those actions and reactions in the wake of the Crash of '29 that were cures worse than the disease. I'm trying to understand how the excess of politics gives us the prospect of a medical threesome which ends up as nasal fungus and cataracts. Which then of course must be treated with medical marijuana.

I expect that my sister, whom I'm trying to integrate into the blog somehow, might be able to tell me in her spare time what is so fabulous about the medical system in Cuba that she's fond of. And so as I spend a tiny bit of time understanding those KPIs, I'll keep my eye out for the nosocomial infections. While I'm not so cynical that I think the whole world is polluted beyond reclamation, I don't doubt that we Americans are particularly susceptible to buying into foolishness. In attempts to be pain-free we jump out of Teflon coated Calphalon into the stainless Bertazzoni cooktop. We may be stupid, but we do it with style. Heaven forbid we walk around with itchy eyes sounding nasally.

Something about this sort of consumer desperation reminds me of my lunch with the Scandinavian journalist in Long Beach several years back. He was visiting for a tech conference and we happened to meet and speak. I bought him a drink with my blue debit card and explained how everybody in America knows that gold credit cards are a more impressive way to spend the exact same amount of money than with a blue debit card. He happened to have been raised on lentil soup. Every day that's what he ate as a youth. I recall my old toast 'Top of the food chain!', and I'm certain we had appetizers (appetizers!) from all over the world set before us. Even the waiter who serves us will respect us more if I use this card instead of that.

It is a sense of constant amazement with which I find human interest in the semiotic offerings of life. PT Barnum was correct of course, and more of us are suckers than we care to admit. You can, for a while, pull an economy out of a hat. So there is a market for medicines that don't heal, for securities that are insecure, for policies that are just talk all with great downside risks. It is unnerving to me as a scientific professional. It is alluring to me as somebody who would like a faster class of automobile. It is tragic to me as a moral individual. I shrug in my commentary. Human nature is what it is.

To be fair, most people do not die from dealing with the deadly. They only die. Our attention is drawn to the oddment of the side-effect gone horribly wrong. Terror twinkles and our vision takes us towards such flashy ugly things. It is an evolutionary feature and we'll never get over it. But I think there's a creeping up here. I hope that I am merely becoming more aware as I age and that my own fear is such an evolutionary feature. I hope that it is not the case that the world is going to Hell in a cloud of nasal spray.

Is that hope I can believe in?

On Civil Rights in 2009

I have civil rights. I have them so much that I don't even think about them. In fact, the only time I think about civil rights is when I am provided some provocation to talk about who doesn't have them and what I should think or do about that. Such a provocation has just arrived and I see some duty to respond. And so I put it in the form of what I might say if I were invited by some august institution to speak on the matter.

Some of you today have the nerve to think that you don't have your civil rights and that you are bound up in a struggle to preserve them. I have civil rights, you have civil rights. We all have civil rights. But we are dissatisfied with what civil rights guarantees don't guarantee. Civil rights guarantee our right to vote. And we vote. We have been voting for decades. I am not a Democrat, but I can certainly recite the political mantra of the Democrat agenda. Jobs, Education, Health Care. Every American has the right to participate in the democratic system and vote their interests, and all of my life I have heard that I owed it to the people who died so that I could. But I have learned among the many, four hard lessons about voting.

You cannot vote yourself paid.

You cannot vote yourself smart.

You cannot vote yourself healthy.

You cannot vote yourself safe.

I began this piece thinking that I might be able to say something about Civil Rights. Now I simply realize that I don't think about it enough. When I began writing this blog one of the axioms was that the Civil Rights Movement was a success and that its results were more or less permanent. We have moved past the politics of civil rights towards the politics of social power, we meaning me and people like me. That all started with Trent Lott.

You see back in the day, Trent Lott was put down by black social power, not civil rights legislation. So it was easy to see that a new sort of dynamic was ruling the day. And that dynamic has continued to grow, it is the expectation, now quite large, that disrespecting black Americans carries significant social costs. It's as simple as that, and it is that simplicity baked into our culture which obviates for me any necessity for deep thinking on the prospects that my civil rights might be in jeopardy.

It is reasonable for any and every American to make it their responsibility at some point on their journey as a citizen to insure that civil rights laws are obeyed and sustained. It's the patriotic thing to do. But anyone who knows about the stories of Mexican kidnapping and the coyote trade in the American Southwest knows that black Americans are not and should not be the focus of our nation's continuing efforts in defense of liberty. I know some of us are going to feel put out by that, not being the focus of all the upstanding moral probity and concerns of American patricians. But folks like me are happy to move on.

Me I want to be paid, smart, happy and safe.

Three Kinds of Black

Perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation. If Afro Americans have never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon them -- from chattel slaves to cinematic stereotype to sociological myth -- it's because the black collective conscious not only knew better but also knew more than enough ethnic diversity to subsume those fictions.
-- Greg Tate

I was thinking about encapsulating what I think these days about being black and several old metaphors came to mind that bear repeating.

The first, and I think most steadfast is that being black is like being from a small town. Because no matter what you think about  being black, the one thing you know is true is that it makes you a minority - from someplace other than from most people on this planet. Whether you loved or hated your small town, you can't change that you were from there and it shaped what you thought when you looked out into the rest of the world.

The second notion was a bit more complicated. It has to do with the back of the bus.

All educated Americans know that in the Jim Crow South, black Americans were forced through various laws and social pressures into second class citizenship. And before the success of the change of those laws and pressures, it was required of them to sit in the rear of public transportation. You almost certainly know the story of Rosa Parks at the tip of the spear in the heart of that particular abuse. She was a Negro and she was part of the solution of the Negro Problem. Rosa Parks was one of the last of her kind, and her often sung heroism is of a different sort than the attitude of blacks. Whereas most blacks march, Sister Rosa marched into battle. We often capture the cadence and the style, but rarely the stamina nor the prize. And because of the distance between ourselves, we blacks of the post-soul generation, we often ask ourselves about the nature of our blackness. Rosa didn't have to ask, because as I mentioned, she wasn't black, she was Negro and part of the solution of the Negro Problem.

The black problem is a bit more ephemeral which is why it isn't capitalized and why there are nary any statuary of men in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr. We like to think of all African Americans in our histories as 'black', but we're merely grasping. I have come to accept that there is no black orthodoxy. But what is there? There is the back of the bus.

When I rode the 85, back before it was the 210, northbound on Crenshaw just before my stop at Jefferson all the best drivers would hit the tracks at Exposition at a good clip. The best place to be was the back of the bus because the bounce would send you two feet into the air. It was an ecstatic moment at the most energetic place on any bus through the 1970s 'hood. The back of the bus was where the three card monte games were played, where kids like myself played the trickster.

Black Type One - Trickster.
If you're academic, you know the drill. Brer Rabbit and some loas I've long forgotten circle around this archtype of blackness. I'm not going to get all elaborate into it other than to fill in the metaphor for the bus. We knew, black kids like me, that we sat in the back of the bus in defiance of the sort which goes to the heart of my kind of black - of taking the negative and turning it on its head. It's all about Perverse Pride. Of keeping the outer signs used against you intact but keeping an inner fire, of wearing the mask of compliance while doing the deeds of subterfuge. Think of that black kid, wisecraking and crafty, smirking at the back of the bus. That's his bus, and you only think it's being driven from the front.

Black Type Two - Prisoner.
The prisoner sings not we shall overcome but we are overcome. He never bothered to move to the front of the bus. He wouldn't be comfortable elsewhere. He never went anywhere, not even inside his head. He might be a prisoner actually overcome or one that never bothered to dream. The movement simply passed him by. He minds his business and it all enough. He is the eternal reminder, the rat in the maze - the one people point their fingers at. Like C J Memphis in A Soldier's Story, he is not uncomprehending of the Struggle, he's just not trying. He's on the bus where he belongs. Why make a fuss?

Black Type Three - Traveler.
The traveler is on the bus to get from point A to point B. Which seat makes no difference. He's not caught up in the symbols. He might sit in the back, but for him it's about the legroom, or maybe it's the warmest part in the cold weather, or perhaps he's avoiding a funky smell in the front of the bus. Whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with the Struggle. He is indifferent to the schemes of the Trickster and the plight of the Prisoner. He's on the bus because his car is in the shop, or he just didn't feel like walking today. Or maybe he saw a familiar face in the back.

--

As I was thinking about marking these three types of black, I was considering what is the roughest part of being black for myself. That is, I think, the problem of the time I have spent thinking about it all and the extent to which the expression of what I have learned is not, in fact, black. And black was what I expected it to be, and to a certain extent I am a bit saddened that I have come to learn about humanity in metaphors I somehow expected to be a siren call to my own people. It turned out that I have no own people, and it's the hardest lesson of all. No black Americans have their own people because we, of all people have striven the most against being owned. So I keep repeating that question which is a basic human question, is when are people going to realize that they don't own people? When are black people going to learn that they don't own black people? When is humanity going to realize they don't own humanity? I suppose never, which is when we'll all realize at once that we are God's children and we don't even really know God. The alternative belief is more comforting and wrong.

So it's easy to ask, where are all the black people? The answer is disappointing on the surface. The black people are still at the back of the bus. But they are not who you think they are and their reasons for being there are more than the simple answer implies. Besides, if you have to ask...

One more thing. I wrote about The Fungibles ten years ago and updated it about six years ago. Maybe we can add two more names, but I'm still right.

Liberal Structuralism

The problem isn't at all structural, else Christianity would be wrong and it's certainly older than capitalism. But as in everything its the person trying to make the difference that does, or doesn't. And so one by one, individuals and their individual acts make up society. It's all the abstraction that's the problem. 

Be all that as it may, there was a time when an industrious and pious individual was considered at his word and deed. And our civilization, as were all civilizations, arranged around him in protection of such virtues. And somehow people have become convinced (people who in the end delude themselves into thinking their proxies matter) that civilizations can be made to do well for the masses without consideration for such piety and industriousness. That in fact the only industry that mattered was the industry of the government and that a properly run government ought to get in the way of religion. So laws proliferated and transcendent texts were put away. 

Now we have lawyers who finagle behemoth jungles of legislation and statutory swamps for the supposed benefit of the masses, and the affairs of the average Joe are now fettered with a million rules, such things that a pious and industrious individual of virtuous word and deed doesn't require, save a minimum few. Yes of course that's how lawyers were instructed - they are only capable of becoming what their schools teach them, which are agents of some edifice of complexity, for the supposed benefit of the masses. Overwrought laws implemented by overlarge government bureaucracies for overspoiled children who cannot manage their own affairs independently, like individuals of piety and industry. So long as people will be petty and unable to resolve their differences on their own, there will always be lawyers and laws springing up to fill the vacuum of common sense and decency. Listen for the herald cry: 'There oughta be a law'. Short of that, some re-education program and its attendant activism all with the same end in mind, Congressional approval and Presidential signature.

Is it any wonder that pious and industrious individuals who neither seek nor need such assistance seem to be such strange creatures to Americans? But this country was supposed to be about that type, not the sort who have grown up with all the million rules and attorney-nannies. And so the structural is forever to be amended and reformed and changed and revolutionized. Well, of course. I pity the poor fools who take their own definition of self from that unending, un-still complexity. 

What is at stake here, in my view, is the very idea of the capacity of individuals for good. And I think that idea will die for lack of experience of its fundamental operation which is the employment of one man by another. For me to see some quality in another man and for me to take the risk in paying that man out of my own pocket for him to do a job is the elemental transaction of industry. For us to agree is a contract. The pledge of one man to do and another to pay. That's what we cannot forget, lest we forget the very pillar of civilization. For any man who has good honest work and who is entrusted to do it and does it, must inevitably become a good honest man.  And so any man understanding that, should he manage to accumulate the means, must then continue and finding other men and good honest work for them in turn. The examples are all around today and in history should we bother to look. 

But there is a political class in this country that is prepared to agitate against that simple bond and redefine what work and industry are. They are inevitably those who haven't experienced the bond, and so there may be some justice in that. For who else but those who don't know good and honest work would seek to destroy the very idea? If that is our political majority then it will take some work to undo their undoing of work. 

The difference between capitalism and everything else is that capitalism honors the contract between individuals and subjects it to the minimum of interference from the government. To the man who risks to pay goes the profit without third parties telling him how. To the man who delivers the work goes the pay without third parties taking a piece. These are the relationships into which non-capitalists wish so ardently to stick their noses. They wish always to investigate, criticize, second-guess, adjust, adjudicate, reform, correct, oh and take a piece of the action for their involvement, their blessing, their approval, their eternal self-righteous and condescending tolerance.

Why? Well for the good of the masses of course. For the people who cannot manage to broker their own deals, to enter into face to face contracts for good honest work. For people to climb pre-fabricated ladders to 'success', ladders built by lawyers and their superfluous laws. For the sake of a 'structure' that is 'equitable', for the sake of a 'safety net' for the 'forgotten'. For people incapable of finding some good and honor on their own, for the people who are 'useless' to the 'current system'. For the least of these my brothers, at the express and punishing expense of those who avoid their schemes. 

You'll never find an adequate amount of charity from the liberal towards liberal causes. By definition they must draft the unwilling, they must bend those who disagree to their will. They choose to redefine the world in defiance of private arrangements so that they can tax a fraction of the world in their master plans to redefine the world. And so for their aims of global justice, world peace, universal rights they are never satisfied with localities. Their ambition is total, their need for panoptic control is insatiable. They will always claim a higher moral authority - higher than God. Because God's covenant is with individuals.

Yeah. We live in cities we wern't born in. We live in houses we didn't build and we eat food we didn't grow wearing clothes we didn't sew. We speak in languages we didn't master and communicate over computers we cannot program. We drive cars we cannot fix to places we can't even find without a map or a cluster of satellites in space.  We're leveraged, and we all ought to spend our time de-leveraging and become more independent. The Conservative direction is to enable the self-sufficient, the virtues of individual word and deed. 

Steve, Is That You?

This morning, my brother mentioned a name I haven't heard in many years: Steve Rivers. I know I know somebody named Steve Rivers and I have strange emotions associated with him. I can't say exactly, but they weren't positive. Oh well, I'll just say. I remember the guy as a big crybaby. I don't remember why, but that's what I recall. Of course I'm conflicted about it, he might have been just a nice guy I might have punked with my rather acid wit and snobby attitude. I can't remember enough detail to know why I feel that way about Steve Rivers.

So I took the odd chance that I could find him on Facebook. Yeah right.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook (or FB, as we call it) these days, getting in touch with everybody from everywhere. I've gathered something over 300 friends and associates which is twice Dunbar's Number.

I want to keep gathering everyone, because my book says you can never be too well known. You never actually have to deal with more than a couple score folks at once and they take up 168 hours a week. So even as I figure out ways to define circles of friendship in FB's context, I don't mind appearing to be one of those sociopathic individuals with more than 1000 'friends'.

On the one hand, I am immediately drawn to the idea of concentric circles. Intimates, then close friends, then ordinary friends and associates. Then business colleagues, peers and clients, online commenters, fellow politicos and friends of those friends. But then I decide I don't like the hierarchy much, because there are always breaks. On the other hand, why not supersets and subsets and overlapping circles of friends? Hard to say really, all I really want is to keep track of how those I might forget came to know me. If there are 500, many of whom I share some experience in the distant past, how would I know what to do or say if I actually met them? I might say, Saint John's Church 1975-78 and hope they recall. But then for them it might not have been a favorable time. Such dilemmas trouble me, and I don't have a Miss Manners answer for someone who finds virtue in some lack of pretense - which is to say that I enjoy my class role though its privileges are relatively few. It's hard for me to know exactly why I should presume to have some answer acceptable to society, except that I might have 500 friends. That must mean something worthy of a thoughtful answer.

They say that FB has 175 million members, and that it turns nary a profit. How on Earth can one keep that many servers and networks and programmers all going? In a world with so many different kinds of Steve Riverses, somebody ought to figure out something. I might even pay for it. After all, at my age, with seven thousand someodd names in my electronic black book, there ought to be some better way to meet and remember them electronically. It seems people have only bothered to do so for the purposes of dating. There's profit in being the Yenta just as there is in being the Pimp, and unfortunately for our society the trend seems to be angling towards the latter having more business. So I'm thinking there's got to be a better use for profiling software than all this sort of solicitation. There's a project.

There's one thing I have thought about. That would be a kind of wristwatch worn on the right hand perhaps. When you shake someone's hand, that triggers enough of an intimate association to give some trace of a profile. At the Peace during church I give a two-handed shake. It means more. For some, I embrace which means even more. If I work a crowd, I'd want something more of me left behind and more given, and I sure as hell wouldn't want something like Facebook mediating it for me. That's *my* information. But FB is good for getting into groups and gangs of associates from all of ones walks of life. It's a big lobby and I think it's a great start. But there's a lot more that can and should be done.

Cabaret, Lebanese Nazis & A Subsidy for Sub City

Here in Sub City life is hard.
We can't receive any government relief.
Give Mr. President my honest regards
For disregarding me.
-- Tracy Chapman

It has been a long time since I hung out with my friend Art McGee. Like a lot of the oldtimers, black homesteaders of the digital frontier, he has moved on to other pastures. He has always had a real concrete connection to the infrastructure of the domestic left agenda, think tankery and liberal concerns. It has been many years since I last saw him at the African Marketplace over at Rancho Cienega here in LA. So such distance has been placed between myself and the black grass roots, or at least what I interpret them to be having once been intimate. Now it's all vague signals from a dispersed and confused confederation of tribes - like Chuck D on Air America, somehow it doesn't fit quite right as it used to.

This morning as part of my return to a more steady diet cultural reflections I couldn't help but notice as I was writing my impressions of Tracy Chapman's Crossroads, one of the great albums of my life, that I still know all of the lyrics to Sub City, directed as they were against all things un-Left. So I wonder what portion of that sentiment remains clear in the rhetoric of those people I casually refer to as whiners, and alternately know as Obama's most passionate xxx's? How can I say so without contempt I wonder? My political passion doesn't apologize very well, it's a product of being brought up black nationalist. We didn't apologize for shit, it was part of our problem and equal part of our appeal.

For the first time in life, I watched the film Cabaret. Silly Americans. It's a good thing I didn't see it when it first came out when I was young and impressionable. I can't imagine that I could have interpreted it correctly, and yet I have the unfortunate blessing of having reworked my intellectual plumbing to feel the disgust poor Brian must have had to find himself suddenly ready to smack Sally Bowles for her abortion. Those were the romantic icons of the 70s, including what I now see as incredibly stupid women who destroyed the fragile manhood of incredibly gullible men as if reckless abandon is something from which one can easily be extracted by the sudden responsibility of family. At least they were honest, but criminy the idea that she could just sleep it off and return to work. I guess finally the the ending song didn't resonate or maybe I'll get it next week. So I'm thinking perhaps that the way they got run over, steamrolled by the Nazis was predictable those confused decadent people in their underground clubs and palatial estates. They didn't have the moral backbone to stand up.

So perhaps it has come down to CSM Mellinger and Christopher Hitchens as the final two great symbols of spine. If I would be so bold as to call Hitchens an 'American' because my adjusted sense of nationalism doesn't quite understand the proper term for men and women of Continental birth who nonetheless are wed indelibly to the cause of liberty, than these two Americans possess what so many do not. A proper contempt for the enemies of freedom and civil liberty, ready to resist - as Hitchens through Totten's telling eschewed throwing a right cross for presumably sophisticated reasons.

You see it's all about foresight. Could we see it coming? When the average Negro, in whatever state she found herself became determined to need what the loudmouth nationalists were offering, could she see it coming? When Sally Bowles danced and shocked and tried to be brave without the affection of her father, could she see it coming? When we all wished we could play unplugged and complained about working in the factory like Tracy Chapman actually never did, could we see it coming? The real threats I mean. It's easy to see in retrospect that George W. Bush never laid a finger on anybody's civil liberties though clearly through the derangement of the opposition that was all they could ever 'see'. But they couldn't see it coming, that multi-trillion dollar cave under our feet we are now freefalling through.

Nah. People only see their own bleeding fingers and not quite the futility of the wall scratching that got them that way. We ask for bandaids and gloves when we need to be doing squats, the better to leap you with my bete noir brick wall. But leaping requires spine and all we ever seem to talk about is taking to the wind and working our fingers to the bone, hearing things that shock and looking about and finding nothing worth respecting. Leaping requires faith. All we ever seem to talk about is semiotics and regimes of truth and who knew what when. Few tropes of wisdom in that pseudo-intellectual 'debate'.

There is no real subsidy for Sub City. That's because by definition, life is hard. One shouldn't expect any government relief, and the less one is noticed by those 5,000 times as powerful, loud, beautiful and willful, the better. Tracy Chapman was right about one thing, all that you have is your soul. Sally Bowles experienced the greatest tragedy imaginable, being unsure about who is the father of the baby inside her, one possibility that he is the man she seduced, one possibility that he is the man who seduced her and the other man too. Those without backbones are easily seduced. Those out looking for a subsidy are the easiest of all. That was Fritz' problem. He was so seduced by wealth that he fell into the trap of selling a self he made up in its entirety - a self in jeopardy. It takes great courage to be oneself and to grow with integrity. There is no subsidy for that.

There is a subsidy for suckers. In fact there is a Nazi party waiting in the wings of human desire, always just offstage ready to sing songs. Out of the pieholes of wholesome boys are the great stirrings of childish dreams. Give them enough votes and they'll clean up all the spineless, confused fakery that attaches itself to people looking to be seduced - to be swept up and overtaken in a rush of emotional redemption. Emotional rescue is always for sale from the proper Party. All you have to do is salute the right color flag, which is a lot easier to do, even en passant on some Lebanese street, then to remember that the mind is attached to the spine.

Sometimes you're out there alone with a real sense of what you've done right in your life. There really isn't much to it despite the fact that it's very difficult to sell that amidst the noise and media power of people selling dreams and escape.

At the bottom of this cave whose pitch black atmosphere we're currently falling through is a rebirth of freedom. When you reset your own broken legs, you'll remember what's real.

Carnap, Occam, Utility, Emergent Behavior & Thermodynamics

Looking up an old college professor I used to hang out with, I ran into one of his peers. He brought forth Carnap, a name I haven't heard since my days at State.

Carnap tends to evade the traps of epistemological confusion with the notion of utility. Carnap's razor, as contrasted with Occam's is conservative of utility, whereas Occam's tends to dismiss complexity. I happen to think Carnap's is a better system for determining the value of a knowledge framework, however there are two things missing I think.

In the observable universe there are several dynamics that I think need to be taken axiomatically. The first is that of the net energy of a system. The second is the role of emergent behavior, or 'one-wayness'.

In every aspect of human behavior and of the behavior of objects in space, there must be some energy used in order for change to occur. The amount of change is directly proportional to the amount of energy expended. This applies to all things. You cannot instantly understand calculus any more than you can instantly transport yourself to a position in space one mile away. So whether or not you are configuring your thoughts or your body some effort is required. The question of free will vs predestination figures in this. You may have free will to make the choice of climbing Everest, but unless and until you climb Everest, there is no change. The decision to clime Everest may take 1/2 calorie of effort in your mind, but to configure your mind and body to actually accomplish the deed takes a great deal of energy. There are also limits to the way that energy must be applied to your mind and body in order to accomplish the task. It is in this manner that one must also evaluate the knowledge framework of Climbing Everest.

It may take, the average man 200 hours of reading and research into mountaineering to be adequately mentally prepared. It might take him an addition 200 hours of exercise and physical conditioning to accomplish minimum fitness for the task. Each of these energy factors are determined in some way by external factors as well as the man's pre-disposition to the framework of Climbing Everest. In another, less fit or less mentally capable person these 400 hours would be insufficient. Indeed our ideas of what a 'superhero' might be depends upon our understanding of the amount of time and energy such a being can absorb in order to climb a mountain. It might take Superman equally 1/2 calorie of effort to decide to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but because he is super he can immediately generate the energy needed and get there in 15 minutes under his own power. Whereas a mere mortal would need to spend money, thereby leveraging other external powers, to fly him into the country, purchase supplies and equipment, hire assistance, etc. We might simplify this into a thermodynamic equation and say that it requires 30Kilowatts of energy to climb Everest with the understanding that no human being could absorb that much energy in 15 minutes. Their body would be destroyed. And yet 30KW could launch some inert projectile to that same height and location. Free will is thus externally constrained by physical and intellectual circumstances, energy and time must be applied in order for a single human, or a society to accomplish change. When we speak of this in terms of societies, we speak in terms of economics.

So it is not merely enough to consider the utility of a knowledge framework, one must consider its efficiency in terms of the thermodynamics and economies of accomplishing change. The razor then gets more complex, but also more accurate in describing what the costs are associated with maintaining the utility of the framework. It is not merely the intentionality of the framework that is to be judged in the context of better or worse, but the cost.

Now there are certain other axioms of the natural world that serve to make a framework of knowledge more or less efficient. That is the 'one-wayness' of certain natural phenomena. The most obvious is the passage of time. There is no amount of energy a human might possess to stop, slow or reverse the passage of time. Einstein theorized (after the use of an enormous amount of mental energy) that a human being or object travelling near the speed of light would experience time differently and we can take that for what it's worth. However it must be understood that it take an enormous amount of energy to get a human near light speeds even if that speed is relative to another object.

Another type of one-wayness is what I would call non-adaptive emergent behavior. The perfect example of this is knots of string. If you apply random energy to a string, say by leaving it in your pocket all day and periodically putting things in and out of that same pocket. It is very likely at the end of the day that the string will have knots in it. This is the essense of evolution. Certain things, even with randomness have meaning. As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I would add that if it's moving quickly backwards (with energy) it is right more than twice a day, and if it's moving slowly forwards it might not be right once in a whole day. The efficiency of a knowledge framework also depends upon its ability to make use of such non-adaptive emergent behavior and one-wayness of natural phenomena.

We might say that the numbers between 2 and 4 might not be 'real', but human beings have developed number systems over the ages. It makes sense for a new knowledge framework to make use of numbering systems that already exist - that have evolved in the collective human experience as randomly jostled as it may have been by the energies of the universe. It then makes sense to observe that strings will knot and humans will count. Frameworks built upon these natural one-way phenomena will be more efficient. That is not to say that knots won't be untied or humankind could not be reduced to innumeracy, but both of these would require focused and directed ... what? You guessed it. Energy.

There are all sorts of ways of thinking through philosophical questions that are made plain, I think, with this thermodynamic context.

As I mentioned at the top, I speak about the net energy of a system. This means that knowledge frameworks require a certain amount of constant energy to maintain their state. If people stop going to university to study philosophy, only certain low-energy observable philosophical understanding will be maintained in humanity - common sense if you will.  It took me only about 20 minutes to write this document, but these are things I've been thinking about for a long time. Now that I can save it to the web, with the assistance of your attention and the many subscribing entities to this space, it may persist in an easily accessible form. With any luck it will meet with its appropriate criticism, some additional energy will be spent in rebuttal and we might craft an even better understanding.

That Uncle

"When are black people going to realize that they don't own black people?"
-- D. Bowen

Now is the time for me to begin casting around for a new reason, a new angle, some way to be purposefully 'black'. I'm kinda stuck and out of ideas at the moment.

If I was trying to be consistent, I would call this 'The End of My Blackness: Part Eight' but even that meme is tired. Where I am is simply across a line, which is something I should have expected as much as I've talked my way towards it. The line is faith and devotion to black cultural nationalism. I have come to accept that it is unnecessary and inconsequential. And I think that Aggregation has to go out the door too. It's down to the cultural production voices crying into the wilderness. And this must mean with no anticipation or perhaps respect for a popular movement, I probably need a sponsor. And so I'm considering exactly what it means to take a culturally black sponsor. It may or may not go the way I want, but since I'm planning to do a lot more technical work this year, it may not matter at all. I expect that my boy Jimi will help me figure that out, and maybe Farai too.

---

(I wrote a letter to Farai)

--

Here is an excerpt from a salient bit which may or may not stand on its own without some context which is not all here:

So I'm at a point where I am thinking, in an entirely new way after all of the many simple ways I have before, that there is no meaning left in a popularly construed blackness worth respecting. Furthermore, there is no substance in a uniquely construed blackness worthy of sustaining. We have arrived at the future and there's nothing more to do except tabulate the number of people who still can't believe it and the slackness of the jaws of people still amazed by it.

I'm one of the unknown number of Americans whose abeyance offstage was minimal. I haven't needed black people to be anything or white people to be anything for me to have everything I needed for my liberty. I've been too busy writing my own script to worry about the other characters - perhaps that's solopsistic, but it's true. And people recognize that I'm not ad libbing my life.  But I'm at the point at which something has changed in the larger dynamic that has me a bit off beat. I can't put on the same old mask and work the angles.

If I could have a conversation with Randall Kennedy and Debra Dickerson and you and the rest of those figures, I might figure something out. Here's the thing. There was always only a middle class dream for African Americans. Beyond that, nobody had done much thinking. People who logically undid the fiction of race must have been equally stymied. I suppose they had to go to Africa and forge a new brotherhood. And there's the thing. Generations of African Americans have had the same wish, and now that wish (although it happened inexorably) has been fulfilled. Do you remember dreaming of the year 2000? Did your dreams include America going broke in 2009? No wonder nobody is prepared.

The best context I can think of at the moment are these two posts:

The Black Endgame

Sometime after the fourth black President, somebody will ask why it's only 4 out of 60. That's not proportional. Or maybe by then the Endgame will have already occurred and people will stop asking such questions. I always recall that at the end of WW2 the big question was whether the average Negro was intelligent enough to drive a truck. People stopped asking such questions - they are Negro questions, beneath us all, long forgotten, like Negroes born at home in the Negro Community. Like sharecroppers from Louisiana wondering if they could survive in a big Northern state like Massachusetts where today the governor is black.

The thing is, you never know. You just watch the who's tugging, and you keep track of your own imaginary lines. Or maybe you lose track. Or maybe you stop counting. Or maybe you decide that the world is not enough. More likely however, the world keeps turning, and something new becomes what's happening.

Thirteen years ago some black businessmen from Harlem told the black people of Harlem to resist and refuse this new thing called the Internet. Refuse it unless a black company can get the rights to own the wires. And a few years later there became this thing called the Digital Divide, because it was said that black people had no computers and no stake in things digital. Today, black teenagers have all of that and then some in their pockets. I watch them download music and send voice messages and digital pictures at the mall. That's more than most people at MIT did thirteen years ago. Nicholas Negroponte bade us be digital in 1996. All of us are. How big is the black question of being digital? Very small indeed. Who cares about black wires?

Casting Off Radical Ideas

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

...

I understand that it is premature to suggest that everything blackfolks generated politically that is not deeply centered in Obama's philosophy is worthless. But that does not change the fact that Obama is *our* president, meaning the American president, not just black people's president. And what the Obama administration is going to mean and how it's going to be remembered will not be a function of what black people feel about him or his expression of what black politics has been until now. Like everything else in American life, the mainstream story will survive, the alternative and 'authentic' black story will live only in dimly remember legend, and books by blacks.

There's only one regret in this, I suppose, although I've never been so entranced with the burden of my own writing that I feel the possible dilution in its valuation a dilution of self. I note with some unease the ease with which the easy adoption of Obama might become all that black politics ever was. Which is to say that those Progressives and Conservatives not directly served by the moderation of Obama are likely to be forgotten by all but graduate students, just like all those who realized the shortcomings of MLK are but mere footnotes. I walked in the door MLK opened with a minimal set of obligations lightly sprinkled. Just like aging white liberal Boomers blithely drop the line 'I marched with Dr King', so today's politically victorious will dribble 'I voted for Obama' when challenged in the future. That is the way of political inheritance, the facts be damned. Just like I still get smeared with the ridiculous charge of supporting the Republican Southern Strategy, so gratuitous flattening of history will take place in the future.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep writing at about the pace I am now. One or two, maybe three posts a day - an easy volume. And I will focus more on my technical life over at Cubegeek. I'll decide how black I want to be and figure out whatever that means in this new world order. I'm pretty sure black cultural nationalism is dead. Let's see how long people think it still makes sense to call what I write that of an Uncle Tom and how long that kind of stupid racism remains in currency.

So here's the bottom line. You cannot 'sell out' an independent people. I accepted that a long time ago. Maybe some of those people who never thought they'd see this day will realize that they are and finally recognize...

Loury & Franklin on Symbols

A thoughtful reader passed on this discussion of note about the role of Rick Warren in the Obama oevre and other matters of some political and religious significance. This is the kind of debate I hope to be hearing less of as time goes by. My pendulum, while quite interested in the way in which the Catholic Church deals with the natural world, has swung towards the natural world itself. I am finding myself less and less drawn to matters of interpretation, especially of symbols, and most especially of symbols coming from politicians. 

Firstly, I find much of the controversy over the selection of Rick Warren to be a great deal of smoke and mirrors, and I think that it is overplayed precisely because of the recent passage of Proposition Eight. At the outset, Loury went in a significantly excellent direction which was to get some response about what to do with dissent from the progressive agenda, and I think once that question was left out there unanswered, it gave both parties license to sidle up to the particular issues that bother them most. The particular thing that worried Franklin the most was that of the Vatican closing debate. 

As the sort of conservative I am, I find something extraordinarily wise about the decision to close debate, and I wonder how it is that any religious leader finds otherwise. I think perhaps it is, now that I reflect on Franklin, because he is part and parcel of the Ecumenical Movement which energizes this desire. I see it as perfectly logical for the sort of Christian who finds some threat in the obiter dicta of Sarah Palin to have the propensity to keep debate open indefinitely. Because sooner or later there will be some value in this eternal debate for the inclusion and sanctity of his every constituent. At that point, debate can close, right? He will keep arguing for the ordination of women until such time as it becomes 'common sense' that women should be ordained, and from that point forth debate shall close, as it is surely presumed today.

So it comes as no surprise that the vector of this Ecumenical Movement, dedicated as it seems to a program of enforced diversity must seek to find some very special meaning and moment in the inauguration of this man, Barack Obama, as the first black president of the US. Loury was correct to note how thin this skin must be and how foolish it might be to notice the skin color of the pilot on the bridge of the first ship behind which is the entire fleet of American power. The steering wheel was not built for black hands, but for human hands - there are only so many degrees of freedom that fleet can be steered - but then again we are only talking symbolically. It allows them to make the non-point but Loury's use of the word 'patina' was altogether correct. 

It seems to me that the two gentlemen are, perhaps unwittingly, contributing to the raising of political expectation in all areas of life and are thus making enemies of religious dogma of the sort which they also unwittingly lament. For it is conformity that they resent and resist. And it seems to me that it is only confession and creed that can establish the kind of unity of purpose they both desire. Unless they are willing to pay that price for establishing harmony, they are going to keep debating in circles, fruitlessly ad infinitum.  

Fear and Freedom

Don't tell people what you're going to do. It just gives them an excuse to second-guess you. Shutup until you're done, then tell people what you did.
-- D. Bowen

Doc and Pops treated me to lunch yesterday. It was all Doc really. He's not angry, he's a happy man but you have to listen a long time until you know that. He's deep in the middle of a struggle, the dimensions of which seem to be beyond him and all of us. But that's how he lives. He's the manly man - the one that rushes into the middle of the conflict. He enjoys donning the armor and putting on a heightened sense of awareness so that he's always prepared. He said that we don't understand, that he's made of cork and nothing can sink him, but you can tell that he's surrounded on all sides by deep, dark, cold water. That is the life of one LAPD officer.

The context of the quote comes from Middle America, the America of South Dakota, the one that doesn't exist here. He said that he told people that he was going to buy property in South Dakota, something that is supposed to be a crazy endeavor for a black man, in certain minds. But he got there explaining the dimensions of fear.

He put himself in the shoes of fear. He was walking near his home in downtown LA and a white woman was coming up the street towards him at night. He described himself in silks, carrying groceries - but he knew what was coming. Her jaws were clenched, she was scared to death. What could he say to put her at ease? A second scenario. The Asian woman alone in the elevator with the black man. Scared to death, but he's a cop. She's actually safer around him than anyone else. People in Los Angeles are living with Black Pathology Television in their heads, and that's all they know. It's not America.

Switch gears. What is the black man's greatest fear? He has run out of gas out in the boondocks and is lost. He has to get service at the lone gas station run by Bubba. Out front is Bubba's red pickup truck with the gun rack and inside is Bubba wearing a plaid hunting jacket. What can Bubba say to put him at ease? Doc runs down the specs on the pickup truck - he finds where Bubba's love is and the bond is made in 20 seconds. A second scenario, reality. He's driving from Yankton to Wakonda South Dakota. He talks to the man who tells him a shortcut. Wow, thanks. Takes 15 miles off the trip but you have to go through some cornfields.

One hour later it's dark and he is at the corner of Corn and Stalk. The sky is clear and the land is flat. The stars are out and they come all the way to the horizon - not that he can see it because he's in 8 foot corn as far as the eye can see. He stops the car and puts on the blinkers. He's lost in South Central South Dakota in the dead of winter and it's mind-numbingly cold. The car pulls up slowly. A woman gets out, white woman and she asks what she can do to help. "I'm lost and I'm trying to get to Wakonda". Wakonda is a five block square of houses in the middle of 1000 square miles of farmland.

She says "Follow me".

That's where America is, Doc says. Not here in the Los Angeles where officers of the law are not permitted to look at anyone's breasts lest they get written up administratively. Here, everyone is afraid of men who have to be men. It's enough to defeat the courageous. So he's out to rescue liberty and wondering where everybody's honesty has gone.

Doc has got a fantasy. It's about living where the living is honest and good. Right now he's got some small parts of middle America but in the future it's in Western Australia. Out there where people don't step on each other's feet you understand that you have to look out for your neighbor. Western Australia is like Africa without the Africans. There are no tribal conflicts, no wars. Millions of acres of unpolluted wilderness and gorgeous shorelines in a constitutional republic with liberty. Western Australia is like what America used to be before it got too crowded and hated - where people had to work to make life work rather than spend all their time trying to vote themselves into existence and politick themselves into the receiving end of demographically proportionate patronage.

I don't know much about Kenny Chesney. That's something both Doc and Pops share that I know very little about, but I do know the effect he has on people that love and respect his music. It was on the list of basics that you need for a life of liberty in Western Australia, including the four-wheel drive, the Brazilian wife, the cargo pants, Tommy Bahama sandals, and a year's supply of Chimay Ale. Silly me, I kept wondering if he was going to say broadband access. But I couldn't disagree. I mentioned Bora Bora, but he said no. Not enough land, you'd get cabin fever. You need to see out to the horizon full of land and know that the land is free.

I'm impressed.

Pops still sends all the emails about Obama in 48 point caps. Sometimes he sends them in different colors. On the way to the spot yesterday I saw a poster from the Californian Medical Marijuana League inviting people to Celebrate Change at some rally. At the bottom of the poster was the notice that smoking of medical marijuana was not allowed at the rally. Funny we were just talking about that. Funny they had to mention it. Funny I can't remember when so many people made such a big deal about going to any Inauguration.  But Pops doesn't care really about winning any political battles - really, not any battles at all. All he wants is to spend enough time with his 10 grandchildren to enjoy the fact that they're not engaged either. So that's why there is no method to his madness. He's just being, as the kids say, 'random'. Well he does know how to pick a good ale. 

I'm watching romantic comedies because people knew, back in the days of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and before, what their roles were. They knew how to be men and women and not issue administrative citations for improper breast observation. Masculinity and femininity have lost their moorings because the Boomers felt obligated to reject EVERYTHING and celebrate that as freedom. But now all of the descendants who watch television and movies don't know how to deal with each other's passions, and the land doesn't require them to meet people on the road and be something more than 'a young hispanic female', or however the description comes across the network. Because when Americans react to each other in the modern terms, it's based on demographically assigned fears. Walking on downtown streets and riding in elevators and shouting out of cars in traffic doesn't require people to be Americans, and so America is lost here in Los Angeles, which very few people identify as land that goes out to the horizon where the people are free.

So the votes are in and the symbol is in place but life doesn't change. It's no surprise that people of a sort would vote for the man who talks the right game, but the talking is not going to change. The clenched jaws of fear are unable to open and ask "How can I help", not here in the urban jungle. That counts for the Los Angeles with the Latino mayor and for the America with the African president. It's not the adjectives that count, but the verbs. 

Living in fear vs living in freedom is always a matter of reaching out to touch in truth with passion. I sometimes wonder if we do that enough, and today when its 20 below in South Dakota and sunny and bright here in the Southland, I think the difference has to do with the demands of the land. Out here we wear sunglasses and only smile if we've had our dental perfection done.

SuperSpade & Black Male Loneliness

A new friend on Facebook hipped me to a series of essays concerning issues surrounding manhood and friendship. It covers a number of bases and makes some excellent observations. Written by a blogger 'SuperSpade', it's worth checking out. Here are some interesting excerpts.

From Part Two

5) We don’t use each other as sounding boards before the jinks goes down. This is because we rarely ever tell our male friends anything of substance unless our plans or mistakes have been obliterated.

6) Unless we have something specific to talk about, we don’t call just to touch base and see what is going on in each other’s life for fear of looking like we are keeping too many tabs on our male friends.

7) We don’t feel comfortable sharing emotions with our male friends because if we even do that to begin with, we typically focus these conversations towards our female friends. We rarely tell our male friends that we appreciate them being there for us when they helped us through that tough situation. Or God forbid, we wouldn’t be caught dead telling our male friends that we love them (look up agape and phileo in the Greek language).

From Part Five

As I stated earlier, whenever I am in a relationship, the woman I am with becomes my best friend. This has its perks but one of the major downsides is trying to express how I feel by prefacing it as a best friend or a boyfriend. One of the biggest issues I have is that I have a tendency to mince my words when I know I want to share something as a best friend but I know that it has the potential to cause confusion on the boyfriend front.

And I have said on numerous occasions, “Listen, you are my best friend and while our relationship is fine, please interpret what I am about to say with your best friend hat on.” More often than not, confusion reigned supreme due to the fact that I was expecting my girl to understand issues only another man would understand.

From Part Six

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in situations where I learned that a friend of mine knew a guy that I knew and I would follow up by saying, “Oh that’s my boy.” It doesn’t matter if I only played basketball with him a couple times or he is my ace boon coon.

One of the major premises I have for creating this series is that Black men have too many boys and not enough friends. As a result, we end up fooling ourselves by calling dudes our boys when most of the time they are just associates.

Good reference and touch points for those sorts of discussions.

'Natural' Constituencies

The center of gravity of my concern today on Farai's show was radicalization.

When the producers called me last week and gave the list of topics, I was somewhat disappointed to hear that we were going to talk about two (more) black men who were shot by police. It's a tired old story. One took place in Bellaire, TX which was incorrectly identified by one of the other guests as an 'all white suburb' and the other in Oakland. I went to Bellaire a couple years ago and it's a largely Asian suburb - a malltown looking very much like those in Southern California's Inland Empire. But you can't stop the old black vs white idea when we run these stories.

The germ of my idea against this assumption of radicalization began when I was listening to Hugh Hewitt take on one of the writers from Slate. Greenwald I think was his name. Anyway he went on about how the residents of Gaza were 'obviously' and 'naturally' going to be radicalized by the excesses of the Israelis. And sure enough this morning, one of the other guests started in with explanations about how this is to be expected in the black community.

But radicalization is not a natural phenomenon. It requires intellectual discipline and leadership. It requires, quite frankly, radicals. These are the ex parte individuals who often call themselves 'community activists' who organize protests and hire people with bullhorns to chant 'no justice no peace'. There is always some leader somewhere with a political agenda, fuzzy and ill-informed as it might be, that is behind these riots. I don't want to sound like Richard Nixon, but he was right when he said that there is a silent majority who are always for law and order and they don't ever want to be parts of the mob.  Even giving these radicals the benefit of the doubt as to their peaceful intentions, how do you square their leadership and responsibility to the community when you get stuff like this:

The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.

"This is our business," shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. "This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?"

Wednesday night's vandalism victims had nothing to do with the shooting death by a BART police officer of Oscar Grant on New Year's Day - but that did little to sway the mob.

"I feel like the night is going great," said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. "I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It's for the murder of a black male."

Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.

"She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life," Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: "I just hope nobody gets shot or killed."

The chances that Nia Sykes is going to vote in favor of candidates who would spend more money on police is slim, but the circumstances around the shooting indicate more money for training is just what's needed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. But whether or not police improvement of that particular nature is needed, there is some definite responsibility I think writers and journalists need to take when discussing the reactions of people who assemble into mobs.

I think a number of writers irresponsibly contribute to the radicalization of people through their injudicious use of terms like 'oppression' and their arbitrary recognition as legitimate anybody behind a protest or grievance movement.

This idea follows up the slight opportunity for people to take seriously the idea that Obama changes things. I recognize that people are now giving themselves license to believe things about black people that they never did before. When you get words like this:

He continues his commentary: "We are so comfortable defining black in certain ways, in restricting it to the politics of grievance and lament, that we sometimes do not recognize it when it takes other forms. One is reminded how people used to say 'The Cosby Show' was not black enough and never mind all those cultural signifiers, never mind the anti-apartheid sign on Theo's wall, Cliff's penchant for sweaters from historically-black colleges, all those guest appearances from elder statesmen of jazz and R&B, that episode saluting the 1963 March on Washington. Not black? No, what they meant was, this is not the kind of black we expect, not the black of violence, ignorance, poverty and clownishness."

Booker Rising response: As others and I across the ideological spectrum have commented, it's long overdue. The promotion of thuggishness, ignorance, and clownishness as "authentic" blackness is out. Authentic blackness promotes positive culture, about progress and education and staying connected with your family. Stragglers, get in where you fit in and show some class. Oh yeah, young uns, pull up those pants and put on some clothes.

You want to say 'yay' maybe they finally get it. But I think so many Americans have been so pessimistic about race for so long that they forgot what the entire point of change was all about. They kept arguing that black could only be as much as 'subtle racism' would let it be, and completely forgot about the human spirit. So I am likely, when I hear 'how can it be in 2009 that we still have this kind of racism', I'm going to turn that around on the spot. For how can it be 2009 and people still feel limited by it? It is a reductive co-dependence.

Several years ago when I started this blog, one of my axioms was that the Civil Rights Movement is over and the good guys won and nobody is about to turn back the clock. Y'all didn't believe I was serious.

Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession is a cornball flick. It is the sort that I find fascinating too - a tale of morals and manners and altruism. Something the wealthy Americans of the post-war era needed. As a melodramatic overview of our morals and dreams, it's a watercolor work of art. 

Some time this afternoon between my run to Karl's Jr and the Asian Water Place, I was thinking about Islam, and why I don't have a Christian reason to support Israel. The thing that bubbled out of my brain as I merged into the left lane of PCH was that their DNA is not far apart. Oh yes, and it was in the context of why 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' was such a sucky flick. It makes no sense for sentient civilizations capable of engineering that genetically hybrid thing Klatu was to archive Terran fauna at the scale they did. The DNA is simply not that different. If intelligence evolves in an emergent way, then the paths converge - thus the Singularity, thus Judeo-Christian merges with all the sky god religions. The differences aren't so great. Which means that the Klatu aliens were fratricidal, like all them Semites. Our moral instinct is therefore to show the similarities and the differences. And eventually we will. With film.

So Magnificent Obsession, like the Philadelphia Story and several other classic American films I like, are immediately translated by me as a habit I've had since childhood, into a black cast. But while I was watching this one - the only person I could think of as Rock Hudson was in fact Wesley Snipes. He's the only black actor I can think of who can play an intelligent and sensitive badass. Jackson can't do it. Denzel isn't bad enough. Omar Epps could pull it off but you can't make him look big. Delroy Lindo could do it, but I've never seen him do convincing romance. Fishburn is just too damned bumpy. Hmm. I'm fresh out. It leaves only one man, now that I have gone through the lot. Eriq LaSalle. Eriq LaSalle could play a snot nosed millionaire playboy who suddenly gets religion falling in love with... hmm, who's the woman? I suppose it would have to be Angela Bassett done softly, which she could do very well. 

Translating Magnificent Obsession, which has a very subtly Christian undertone, and too damned many ethereal choruses in the background when somebody says something 'profound' into an Islamic themed motion picture would be the job of a proper multicultural artist. I would have thought, way back in 1988 when I got on board that wagon, we'd be knee-deep in that kind of talent by now. Perhaps not until movie production is even cheaper will the industry not be a single file line of ass kissers - meaning some kind of anime something. Perhaps that will be the final great contribution of the videogame industry. Books about manners don't have quite the impact of watching men and women do what they do. Sorry.

You cannot look at Magnificent Obsession and not feel like you're watching, at least you can't from my generational perspective, animated versions of Barbara Ann Bread. (Well what do you know, Googlewhack). OK how about Little Debbie? You know what I mean. You cannot for the life of you imagine these women naked - they had a kind of naive respectability about them which was an affect that in the end actually made them respectable. Everybody in contemporary film and TV is gratuitously naked as compared to Agnes Moorehead, not that she was a romantic figure in this or almost any film - but there she is in this one, the stern and proper nurse; she could very well have been wearing a burka throughout. But you wouldn't mind that because she was supposed to be respectable, which is something we understand at the compiled end of Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics. Women who aren't sluts shouldn't dress like sluts - or undress like them for that matter. Today it is de-riguer for a woman who is supposed to be attractive to have at least one introductory scene in which she's acting like a model - the introduction of the fiance of the First Son in the new season of 24 is illustrative. The little twat gets petulant because her man wants to spend 20 minutes talking to his old best friend instead of roll in the hay with her one more time. She's liberated. She takes her jollies seriously. 

At least in the 70s feral motorcycle flicks the gratuitous show of boobs was, well more obviously gratuitous. Now we look at women in long dresses as if something has gone horribly wrong with their sense of self. 

This recession could be a very good thing for us conservatives. Sex could become complicated again. Speaking of which, I just caught a bit, while falling awake and asleep of Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and it suddenly seemed completely obvious how men and women of his temperament could talk their ways completely out of marriages. It's astonishing when I looked at those arguments between drooping my head down, how emotionally unsuited for anything approaching marriage those pathetic souls were. I'm going to get through those again and give myself the comfort of knowing I undid myself well. When I was 13 and watched 'Billy Jack' I didn't realize that was a rape scene. It seemed kinda cool. I figured that's how it went, you know, now that pre-marital sex is OK. After all, it's the 70s and everything is better now than in the old-fashioned days. More freedom!

Rock Hudson was, of course, homosexual. We all know this in hindsight because we're supposed to. And it was a secret in Hollywood, or an open secret or something, because it was supposed to be. And films like Magnificent Obsession poured a great deal of time and effort into demonstrating how a fool who expects everything from the world might become a wise man who contributes instead, and how difficult it is in that kind of moral world to find love. True love worth pursuing. For our hero it takes years. But how is the sex? Isn't that the bottom line - how did Rock do it? How did Jane Wyman do it? Wouldn't it be interesting to know that Rock and maybe that other hunky guy were doing it? That's what enquiring minds want to know these days. Because 'how is the sex' is what the question is all about, if you can find out. Which is why a smart producer would keep the details of his actors' sex lives under wraps. At least that's how it used to be when in the years like 1956 when they still made movies about true love, ethical true love that takes years to achieve back when women wore elbow length gloves and strings of pearls that never suggested cleavage. All the 'how' about sex was still generally a private matter between respectable people. You could make those kinds of movies today in an Islamic nation I bet. 

What is America's Magnificent Obsession today? It's such a catchy title that you want to just send your lawyer to talk to their lawyer so you can use it in a commercial about underwear or high cholesterol foods. If I had to guess, I'd say that Radiohead gets it right in that song Creep. 

I don't care if it hurts 
I want to have control 
I want a perfect body 
I want a perfect soul 
I want you to notice when I'm not around 
You're so fucking special 
I wish I was special 

But I'm a creep 
I'm a weirdo 
What the hell I'm doing here? 
I don't belong here 

We've been convinced. Well, I don't mean me in that we. You've been convinced, my beautiful Americans, that you're not good enough - that the complexities in your life are your fault. That if you could just win that game show, if you could just... You know. The next movie I'm going to write about is THX 1138, and the preview is that what they do is that they confess. You know. The people. They confess to a god they can probably guess does not hear them, but they confess anyway. 

Americans don't confess. We obssess. 

We keep looking for a perfect way out. We keep trying to make ourselves better, holier, stronger, faster, smarter, more ethical, more *something*. Because the guy next door disgusts us. He drinks the wrong beer, and those pants! What is he thinking? There's judgment out there, America. The world is judging us, right? And when the shit comes down, I don't want them to think I'm like you. Sooner or later the shit's going to come down, right? And we're going to be all wrong - I mean look at all the *stuff* we've taken from the planet. That's what makes us all wrong, right? 

I'm toying with you. Sorry. What I want you to do is confess your sins. To yourself is ok. And then give yourself permission to go ahead and feel content. Rock Hudson and Eriq LaSalle, they had to prove it to Jane Wyman and Angela Bassett. And the Jews and Muslim stars of the same film had to prove it as well. And once we saw them prove themselves worthy of true love, with all their clothes on, somehow the fact that everybody in the film was stinking affluent or stinking rich didn't smell so bad. It's an old story about how somebody who is achieves noblesse. It's rather about exceptionalism. Exceptionalism still counts - it always has and it always will. It's in our DNA and our DNA converges over time. Somebody just has to take a little extra time and translate, or run parallel versions in our imaginations. 

I had nothing else to do and I wasn't sleepy so I decided to let you in on that. 

Strange Days 2009

As some of you know, some fraction of the value of this blog is that it carries context with it. Some of it is historical and some of it is in real-time opposition, contrast and synergies in the comments. But something just came up that makes me think of the historical - although it is outside the blog. It's the movie Strange Days.

Strange Days was the first DVD I ever purchased. I remember because of the coincidence of it being about a new way to consume information. For those of you who don't know, it's a story that centers around a sort of drug dealer who deals in memories. There is a device, in 1999's future according to this film released in 1995 but made many years earlier in the wake of Rodney King prior to the LA Riots.... This device allows one person to experience another's thoughts. So the whole film has this anticipatory feel to it, anticipation of social collapse which was in the air during those days. I would say that this was the last film that I took very seriously as illustrative of the sort of doomsday Y2K millenarian social breakdown of the sort that my bete noir Nulan continues to anticipate.

In one of the opening scenes to set that stage, the protagonist aptly played by a shaggy Ray Fiennes drives down Hollywood Boulevard as the radio voiceover speaks of school shootings, expensive gasoline, teetering economy. We see the LAPD as paramilitary enforcers with APCs on the street, roving gangs and somebody mugging a Santa Claus. The entire point of this in the film is to play up the sense of a powderkeg society - and Fiennes finds a memory tape that documents the execution of a political rapper the equivalent of Chuck D at the hands of the LAPD as well as the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute who was a witness. Obviously - take Rodney King to the nth degree, with multiple rapes and murders and have the evidence all on full sensory tape and you have the perfect storm for revolution. The tale of intrigue surrounding the discovery of this evidence is the story. Everything was thrown in the mix.

As a young progressive, this was the kind of cultural production that got all eyes burning. As it happened, I took this film particularly seriously because I was aware of it as it was being made. There was a call for extras - they needed a multicultural mix for a climactic scene. I and my girlfriend were hyped to participate, but she more than me. She answered the call and related some controversy about the ending as communicated to her by Angela Bassett who stars in the film. As you could imagine, back in those days, progressive politics tried to intervene in the very process of making such a film.

Fourteen years later I squeamishly sat through the brutality of this film with an eye towards placing it in the context of 'feral motorcycle films' of the 70s days of malaise. Yet it stands up to time very well as a fine litmus test of several tropes I deal with in the crossfire of political debate today.

I expect that the themes of this sort of film will be explored again. I find it an interesting take on the future of the past - in terms of explaining what people used to think, or perhaps what some people always think. The film avoided being preachy in that it didn't portray any of the main characters as everyman. Surely the suburbs and ordinary middle class seemed to disappear into a Los Angeles that looked like a rave turned inside out, but like most action thrillers, there isn't much for ordinary people to do except stare with their mouths open - to be innocents and marks, people who get pushed out of the way on the stairs during chase scenes. So you can argue that Strange Days is not social commentary about the way we will be living. But does anybody give films like this such an easy way out. I think not.

Have you seen it?

Accepting Post-Apocalyptia

I keep telling my children that there is one thing that never changes, and that is human nature. The more you know about what people will do, the less you need to care about what the world becomes. I hope I get them deeply aware of that before I ship them out of here.

As I have spend about 52 hours in the Capital Wasteland, my living room has been transformed. Last night I realized that some of the weird smells from the garden wood we burned in the fireplace was not actually coming from the game. That let me know I was deeply immersed.  Oddly enough, I had deleted all of my 400 odd saves from the months I played Oblivion a couple years back, so I can't tell you how many hours I spent in that creation, but I can tell you now that I am right back into that adventuring frame of mind with Fallout 3.

It took the guys at Bethesda four years to complete this masterpiece and I can only hope that their next adventure remains at this scale of endeavor. I may register my first reflections in terms of hours played and other gamer-crit categories but there is something deeper going on here. This is not merely gaming, this is literature.

When I put together my bucket list the other day, one of the items - Latin Mass at the Vatican was inspired by my deeply religious experience attending such a short service in Latin at Il Duomo in Milan several years ago. What was transcendent about the experience was that I was doing that thing which architects of the cathedral dreamed, hundreds of years in the future. I think of many of us stuck in the present, incapable of seeing beyond the here and now and dismissive or ignorant of those schemes in which we play parts designed for us my artists who take their time. Television is the ultimate short attention span theatre. We have commercials which have remained in our minds for decades 'Hey Mikey, he likes it.' And those are the works of art crafted to inspire us to pour milk on squares of wheat.

David Frum despairs of the loss of literature in the infinite self-replicating reinterpretations of Kafka. I've never read Kafka and really as a young ghetto child needed no introduction to the Kafkaesque - or so I rationalized. Nor did the fate of Dostoyevsky's characters in Crime and Punishment intrigue me to spend more than a few hours digesting their fate. But in this sort of artistic expression - in the literate first person sandbox of quests and requirements, all of the multiple choices are constrained within a universe. No matter who you are, despite there being innumerable degrees of freedom, you remain in the control of these creative authors. There is nothing you can do or experience which they haven't forseen. It is the magnificent scope of that foresight that makes the violence, bravery, exploration, commerce, and moral choices of Fallout into a class of recreation all to itself. What makes it literature is that it serves to inform us about human nature, not only of those observable characters in the game, but of ourselves.

The folks at Bethesda have engineered a physical game with moral dimensions. You can shoot your way and develop skills of various sorts into a powerful and purposeful character. It is an entertainment to be sure, but it seems to me that as they continue in this genre that it may only be a matter of time before they decide to pitch the balance another way - to create a moral game with physical dimensions. The engine has been built. They are certainly familiar with designing episodes and organizations whose rules of engagement challenge the gamer to work out moral dilemmas. In Fallout for example, in the far corner of the map is a small post-apocalyptic settlement known as the Republic of Dave which consists of four adults and a half dozen children. President Dave advanced the society by killing his father and thereby replacing the Kingdom of Tom with a democracy. President Dave has two wives and gets re-elected time after time. As you, the outsider, are granted a visitor's visa, it becomes clear how Dave has abused his power - after all, he counts the ballots and declares the winner. At any time, you have the option in all of your dialogs to declare the republic as forfeit and shoot Dave or any of his 'citizens' in the head. But is it worth it? The game has its own set of rewards and incentives, and although there is a karma system, there is nothing to be gained if your character rescues the second wife and takes her for his own. In many ways, altruism is built into Fallout, but I can't really comment on that because I'm playing the game as I do in life, as an itinerant benevolent mercenary. The Kung Fu Santa Claus, I discover every burrow and alternatively play according to my judgment a bringer of gifts or pain.  But F3 has brought me to an interesting sort of stalemate, something that literature does well. I'll describe.

I have come upon a joint in the southwest of the Capital Wasteland called Tenpenny Tower which is a well-guarded high rise full of relatively pampered and sometimes self-delusional people. The controversy at hand is that a representative of fiercly mutated humans has come up with a militant plan for integration of the cushy joint. His people, known as Ghouls, often mistaken for zombies have been excluded for a host of transparently bigotted although not particularly surprising reasons. The head of Tenpenny security trusts me to cut off the head of the snake and destroy the Ghoul movement. The head of the Ghouls trusts me to find a secret entrance to Tenpenny Tower to let his shock troops, actual zombies, decimate the building. I attempt to negotiate a settlement in which the owner of the property will integrate if four of the leading socialites agree to go with integration. It turns out that the four are intransigent although their neighbors are willing to give it a go.

I think that the secret to resolving the matter peacefully is to be had by reuniting one of the residents with his ghoul friend of yesteryear - a Wooster and Jeeves reunion of sorts. I on the other hand got impatient. So I murdered the head of Tenpenny security in an attempt to get access to the key to the secret entrance. (I had to off three of his lieutenants as well, naturally). In the process of opening the computer controlled door, I flubbed the password and got locked out. So I failed to unleash the zombies on the Tenpenny residents, who over the course of time had impressed me as insouciant wastrels who were overly dependent on military boneheads who did no thinking for themselves. A large factor in my decision was the fact that I had under contract a Ghoul named Charon who had, as my right hand man, gotten me through a number of excruciating battles in the Wasteland. How I managed to get his contract is another interesting tale. Suffice it to say on that matter, some measure of justice and revenged was dealt in the Ghoul community. So I realized my own prejudice against the Ghouls and was on my way to overcompensating when my own incompetence averted a small genocide.

In light of this, I decided to be evenhanded and to kill the number one militant Ghoul, his zombie army, and his revolutionary guard which apparently were only two, including his girlfriend and the particular Ghoul manservant whose reunion might have averted the entire disaster. And so we are at a stalemate of interesting dimensions. No integration has taken place at Tenpenny Tower but the militant plotters on both sides have been eliminated by me, a ruthless and deadly moderate. I have become a catalyst for inaction leaving the snobs and their impotent leader to their own devices and the Ghoul diaspora on the outside looking in.

This is the sort of nuanced drama that can only be enacted in the right sort of environment. Unlike in  the Republic of Dave situation, where I left characters to their own devices, I intervened big time but left the situation unresolved. I think I broke that particular narrative which lays in limbo right now, but I could later come back and with an advanced technical skill, unlock the doors I couldn't force open before. I could also come back and murder Tenpenny himself. That is an option I might take up depending upon how evil I interpret the Enclave to be. (In the larger scheme of things, residents of the Capital Wasteland are likely to side with one of two camps which I perceive to be claiming legitimacy near the endgame - I have reason to believe that Tenpenny will side with the Enclave).

One of the things that allowed me to justify my arbitrary nature in the Tenpenny intergration scenario was the amount of positive karma I had amassed during the course of the game - rescuing captives from terrorist cannibal mutants, providing engineering support to insure clean drinking water, negotiating a settlement between a small town and marauding vampires and assembling knowledge in a survival encyclopedia. I became a saint, and in so doing had indulgences to spare. Another simulation might have my public relations be a bit more volatile.

But in this amount of time, 50 hours, which probably represents about three months' in-world time, I have come to accept as my own, the people, problems and themes of a post-Armageddon America. It is a full life and the things that matter most today still matter in that rugged future. Living in that world, as I will continue to do, is a very good way for me to spend my time as I reflect on such basic matters of human society.

I would like to see, as I imagine some of my notes may get back to my favorite authors at Bethesda, a sort of Rashomon-like game in which the central drama takes place over a short period of time and that one comes into the event fully skilled - that there are perhaps 10 or 15 characters one might be and finds oneself asking the questions to which you responded in the prior game. What I like about such a scenario is that it begs some questions about parallel universes, pre-destination and the ability to alter things slightly but not hugely. One of the theories about time-travel and multiple universes that I find the most plausible is the one that denies the Butterfly Effect. Causality is certainly real but changes in causality, were one to go back in time, can be no greater than a small bit. Causality has great inertia and it is distributed widely. Just as you cannot predict where an electron will be, you can certainly better predict where it will not be. It simply takes too much energy to put it some hugely other place, and in the same way while you can never predict how an ocean wave will hit the shore, the net of its energy in erosion is essentially constant, where any molecule or eight tons of water is at any moment, no matter how you go back in time and rearrange it makes only infinitesimal difference.

There is a slide in unique transitions between episodes in the game in which a company that makes fallout shelters has some prediction about the odds of nuclear annihilation. We've been watching doomsday clocks for a long time, we don't know who it might be. Mustering all our causality altering wills towards any purpose won't make much difference in what the future holds, only how we view our own role in it. But I take some comfort in understanding the arc of human nature - so long as we are human and even if we turn to Ghouls, our souls will have the same dimensions. We will rescue and murder, we will barter, steal and create, we will live and let live, we will justify our evil by good deeds, we'll travel and discover, ally and betray. We will tell stories and make narratives and sense of our random experiences. We will trust and doubt. Some of the best of us will capture and make those stories realizable as literature - it hasn't taken long for the computer revolution to be put towards that ever-human aim, and now having seen it in this way, I'm not so afraid of doomsday.

The Future Black Intelligencia

Negronova offers the following observation:

I have to wonder WTF that is and it always boils down to do those who claim to want to see change by following the different path using another brand of politics, REALLY want to see change? And I'll be damned if i can't come up with another answer than "Not really." The willful ignorance from the Black intellegencia, no matter what side of the aisle, is sickening.

I am making a point to be at the seminar being held next month about the legacy of MLK between Debra Dickenson and Randall Kennedy here in Los Angeles. It has to do with the post-Obama world of blackfolks and politics. My general position has changed towards more skepticism of a black cultural or political orthodoxy and that is somewhat amplified by the popular phenomenon that is Obama, untied as he is from any real black think tank yet still reaping near unanimous support from the African American electorate.

Like most half-assed Americans, I feel like I understand MLK properly and that his life speaks in support of everything I believe in. I too enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing what to admire about the man. But he was just a man, and not a think tank - and his family has been particularly effective in blunting any effort to carry on what he might have had in mind for America's future. There is nothing but a pay-per-view system sustaining the King legacy and all think-tankery black America truly owns essentially lives in the head of David Bositis as it has for decades. And so we have emerged in the post-Civil-Rights era a diaspora of thought with a some-timy discipline.

We do have Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. We have Armstrong Williams, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and Michael Eric Dyson. Cornel West is out there as is Roland Fryer and Glenn Loury. I don't think any of them bother to blog and actually reach the millions, leaving it to amateurs like myself and the host of other sharp writers who deal with the issues of the day from a more thoughtful perspective than the evening news or the occassional editorial special. But is there really any insight to be gained by paying attention to these guys? Moreover do we have appropriate expectations and benchmarks for the black intelligencia, or are we only wishing them into responsibilities which nobody rightfully does or should hold?

We all know by now that there is no single black community, no single black leadership cadre, no single black voice in culture, politics or religion. It rather begs the question in my mind as to whether or not it is useful to think there should be, even at a small focus. I have the difficulty of writing at a national level and ignoring or discounting this or that story of black interest. But moreover I think we're all eventually headed into Debra Dickerson's back pocket. We are reaching, individual by individual, the black endgame. Except that from the shadows there will continue to emerge a trickle of folks wearing the black mask. But I think all of this ultimately is about attempting to reconcile ourselves to our own interpretations of the black imperative, which to my eyes always will be betwixt and between the visions of Booker T. Washington and DuBois. King for his part merely emerged as the inevitable figurehead in the march towards civil equality in law. About that endgame I wrote:

So we're watching blackness go back and forth over lines we imagine to be the end of blackness. How come we don't have but one TV show, Good Times? How come there's no McDonald's in our neighborhood? How come they don't play our music on the other radio stations? Can a black man be the Chief of Police? Those were questions at the end of blackness when I grew up. That's all done. And yet people reinvest. Well, OK forget what I said then, what I really meant was this kind of black person being Secretary of State. No what I really meant was a black Senator in a Southern state. No I meant somebody other than Jay Z as a media mogul. No, rap music winning Grammys isn't good enough, I really meant Oscars and Tonys.. no Pulitzer ..no Nobel.

Sometime after the fourth black President, somebody will ask why it's only 4 out of 60. That's not proportional. Or maybe by then the Endgame will have already occurred and people will stop asking such questions. I always recall that at the end of WW2 the big question was whether the average Negro was intelligent enough to drive a truck. People stopped asking such questions - they are Negro questions, beneath us all, long forgotten, like Negroes born at home in the Negro Community. Like sharecroppers from Louisiana wondering if they could survive in a big Northern state like Massachusetts where today the governor is black.

Black intellectuals have been, for the most part, keeping track of racial progress and watching numbers until they were magically insignificant. How long will they do that and have the attention of policymakers? Do they have that attention even now?

For my part, I'm tending to look at the long term historical parallels. I want to know, for example, how King's positions emerged in the context of his assumption of the role of the American Gandhi. So I want to look at India's independence and compare that to the black American 'nation'. We similarly have our own diversity that rather instantly moved from relative subjugation to independence. In a recent conversation about India as a democracy, an author noted that one of the things that makes Indian politics what it is has to do with the fact that it didn't evolve franchise like America or England. Instantly, poor people had the vote whereas this was not the case in the older democracies. This provides problems of identity politics in India as it does here in black America. That makes me say hmmm.

The Creative Wasteland

The worm has turned, and this economic downturn marks the beginning of the end of the profitability of the publication of generic foolishness. Conspiratorial and propagandistic foolishness will continue, but legions of 'creatives' are going to have to eat mac and cheese for a long time. Sorry Messr Mondavi & Gallo, but your cheese eating market is shrinking.

The other night, I'm shuttling various offspring to dog-sitting duties for Mr. Jones and our dear friendly interviewer Terri Gross is slackjawed with her subject on the topic of stealing bytes. She and her guest cannot understand why the younger generation does not appreciate all of the work that goes into putting together productions. They are convinced that youth has and ethical defect. I am convinced that youth has a lower tolerance for bullshit, given the fact that they swim in deeper oceans of it than we ever did as youth. Bullshit yearns to be free, even if expensive people are producing it in anticipation of profit.

The other matter I don't think many in the cultural production business understand very well is the extent to which their ideas of property run counter to the ethos of those technologists like myself who have become the intermediaries in their 'arts'. Without electricity, 90% of today's 'creatives' can create nothing but the sort of navel-gazing bleating noises they are increasingly given to. Revenge of the nerds may not be inevitable, but the cost of technology is going up and the marginal utility of creativity is going down. Why? Because YouTube has proven that the only thing we are missing when we turn the cameras on ourselves, relative to the 'reality' programming that has substituted for artistic genius on all of the world's screens, small and large, is production values. Production value is no longer a valuable product.

We are on the verge, therefore of seeing the return of the freak show. And we are going to see some strenuously bizarre freakage in order to displace the waves of thin puke couched in elaborate sophistication. Tony Soprano is not going to cut it any longer. We're heading towards Overfiend territory, mark my words. In the meantime, expect more Johnny Knoxville style hijinks on a screen near you.

En passant, I will be employing the term 'screen' to encompass all visual media - because the world is a video. That is, the world I am mostly ignoring but must know like an enemy kept close. My expensive combination of audiobook and print book gets me through a wad of material on the swift, and makes for permanence and referencability.

The web will lock down and go private. Good information is getting sparser. Get your PGP keys and join my circle of trust. Allmuseri.

In Defense of The Regling

Dear Brother

I am writing you this letter to help you better understand the dilemma I am faced with here on Arn. You see I fear that we are about to destroy The Regling. The Regling is under threat and I am concerned that I may not be able to save it. The General Authority has taken a position and declared its intent according to the changing will of the majority. I fear that if the General Authority takes this step, I shall have to resign my Order and flee. I seek your wisdom on this most pressing matter as someone fully independent of our world.

Since you come from another place, I'm sure you do not know what The Regling is. I'll explain. Our people mature, owing to our longevity, at a much later age than your people do. As you know we are all born as gels, neither 'male' nor 'female'. We have, before The Regling, aspects of both genders. However, in our hair patterns, there are clues as to how we might mature after balding. We enjoy a very extended youth, carefree but also sexual. After about 30 of your years, changes occur in our bodies which make us sexually mature at which time our sexual activity and energy is redirected. It's rather like your puberty in reverse, but a bit more dramatic. Specifically we very suddenly grow a new covering to our sexual organ and our hair patterns generally fix. Either a Phanth or a Virse grows during The Regling and we begin our lives anew as P or V.

The Regling is the formal rite of passage for our people that puts meaning and discipline around a physical change. It is an educational, spiritual and communal activity. For thousands of years, The Regling has taken place in one of our many Circs on Arn. I am from the Order of the Janesek Circ which has a tradition of carrying out the rite of The Regling going back to the Fecund Migration. The people of Peylyx return to this system from all over the sector to enroll their balding youth in The Regling at the Second Janesek Circ here on Arn. It is something of which we are very proud. We have responded to the desire to keep the primary tradition as it was handed to us. In general, parents bring their youth to a Circ about 30 days out when they started to bald and then bid them farewell, leaving them under our care for The Regling for about six weeks. As we are very proud of our hair patterns you can imagine that we don't necessarily want to be caught in the public bald. At the first sign, we get to a nearby Circ. For some young gels, balding without guidance can be a traumatic experience.

Gels then taken in by members of the Regling Order. I am such a Master. But the design and purpose of the Circ has not really changed. What happens is basically pretty simple.  As your hair starts to regrow about four days after full balding you can pretty accurately guess if you will be P or V, and your organs begin to grow too. Of course as Masters, we are rather expert at making this determination, although mistakes have been made. You will go to the Left or Right in the Circ and formally take your role.

It should be noted of course that not all Peylyxian gels bald in Circ. Surely you have seen our people on other worlds manage such affairs in private. There is also Wild Regling. I have even heard that some outside of the system have performed variants of the rite in the hands of saecular masters and even non-Peylyxians. Of course we frown on such things, orthodox as we are, but we are liberal enough to recognize no soul is lost or deserving of any less respect for such choices.

I'm sorry to take so long to explain but these are, as you can imagine, very difficult and emotional matters. I'm trying to be brief and I am attempting as best I can not to rely on arguments you might call appeals to religious authority. There are people who reject Regling, or perhaps I should say that they think the formality is unnecessary. These people accomplish 'Regling' outside of the Circs. That's basically called Wild Regling. That's bad enough, but then there are people who reject Regling entirely, or fake it. They're called all sorts of names, but the generally accepted term is Fry. You see they basically want to be, well.. they reject their new adult pattern. They play the child's game.

As you can imagine, not really knowing how you are going to mature and what role you will play for the rest of your life can be traumatic and understandably so. But it is a feature of youth, so acceptance of The Regling is a sign of maturity. You will now be P or V and you must accept that. You can now take a mate, have gels of your own, etc. Maybe I'm just being emotional because I am V, I apologize. But so long as you are a gel or even balding, there are sexual games you may play that are fully stimulating. It's all very much accepted until The Regling and then you must accept your role which is to be more modest and leave such sex games aside. That was the way I learned in my Circ, and this is the generally accepted matter of social order for Peylyxians on Arn all of the inner planets.

Now the power of law of Arn is held by the General Authority and it is part of the deep Covenant that the rites of the Circs would be preserved from outside interference. Obviously the Circs have their conventions and the Janesek, as one of the major Circs is quite influential. We represent in most Arnian opinion the most respected and traditions of the Circs. Legal power is not wielded by the Janesek Order but we have considerable social influence.As you can imagine, since we do The Regling in Circs among many other things, like Unction when we die or Bartan when we are born, these traditions mean a great deal. Of course one can do all of those things Wild, but it's not quite as respectable. I mean what's the point of having a Wild Unction, that's just depressing. Anyway what has been going on for the past 230 years or so is that Fry have been gaining power and have been lobbying Ps and Vs to change the attitude of the General Authority towards intervention in Circ affairs. For the most part they have been successful, especially in the outer planets of the Peylyx System (Car and Mezsia). We all have come a very long way in understanding and respecting the choice of the Fry, so long as they keep to themselves. I mean I suppose I'm a little bit prejudiced but isn't everyone? Surely you have similar social issues among your people.

But I digress. At Regling, the Masters sort the balding and bald gels into their respective sides. Potential Ps go Left at The Regling and potential Vs go Right. During this time, you experience your first feelings of adulthood with other Ps as becoming P and Vs as becoming V as the gel sexual energy subsides. You attend to each other's hair patterns as they emerge and you grow together and give each other support. We believe that as the physical gel subsides, there emerges the spiritual. The adult Pylyxian is a vessal of that thing - which is unspoken of directly. You might think of it as something akin to what you call a soul. The Regling is an invocation of that spirit.

During the rite you only look at your former youth friends across the brook for the six weeks of The Regling. I forgot to mention there is generally a body of water that separates the potential Ps from potential Vs during the rite. I'm sure you've heard all the stories about how we Peylyxians are hydrophobic - but that is a myth. Water to us is sacred, as we require water to transmit our genetic material in adult mating. No balding gel, bald gel or potential would dare cross into the water during The Regling. It is simply not done. I share these secrets with you because I need you to understand how important this matter is to us. The point is that after The Regling finally you emerge with all your doubts of youth removed because you've the adult hair, you have Phanth or Virse. You accept your pattern. You have chanted your proverbs and made your vow, you now don you modesty and return to life as full P or V.

Now obviously this differs from Circ to Circ depending on the Regling Order but the basics are the same. But now the Fry want the General Authority to declare them P or V. Now I am V of the Janesek Circ and my pattern is of a willing and accommodating sort but I cannot accept that the General Authority has any right to make such declarations. Fry reject The Regling, that's what makes them Fry, but they are demanding full equality with P or V.  We are all Arn, I understand that. We all, in order to be civilized, submit to the General Authority. But the G.A. has never dictated the rites of the Circs and it is part of the deep Covanant that it will not interfere. The Fry and their advocates make the point that Wild Regling makes Ps and Vs of Arn who don't have an Order and don't accept traditional rites. But the Wild don't call themselves P or V, they are just Arn.  Simply because you grow Phanth doesn't make you P. Not that they respect themselves.

It probably sounds a bit disrespectful of me, but I am, after all, a V Master. I have taken an oath to remain true to the letter and spirit of the rites of the Janesek Circ. I have a duty to my Circ and to my Order. Nevertheless, we do not seek to pass judgment on those who pass into adulthood without the benefit of The Regling. Nor do we condone any of the horrible acts which have been perpetrated against those who do not declare. No one would suggest that it is absolutely necessary and many find their pattern on their own. But we have political opposition that causes us to be defensive out of necessity.

So a bit of history. About 400 years ago on Fesra, the third moon of Car, a P Master by the name of Stanwyl famously took in his own gel, Merk who was balding. He loved his own gel so much that when he balded he sent him Left so that he could personally oversee his Regling, even though Merk was growing Virse. Merk objected but Stanwyl insisted. This traumatized Merk and his entire cohort. There was a revolt and Merk killed Stanwyl and all of the masters of the Circ on Fesra and burned it to the ground. The gels retreated to the forest of Frysson and reverted to their childhood. It is a tragic story in our history. But the lesson of Merk and the gels of Frysson has been interpreted many different ways. Obviously it resonates as a story of sexual liberation and it is from the forest of and river of Frysson that the Frys take their name. But Fry is now the generally accepted term for anyone not satisfied with their role and pattern. Perhaps you've also heard the term 'merker' which is pejorative, meaning a psychopathic misfit. You've probably also heard the term 'splasher'. And while it is certainly true that some Frys will get into the water with anyone, there are Ps and Vs who abuse themselves as well.

I'm sure that you, as a member of the Culture may find our sexual traditions and rites of passage quaint. Arn is, after all, just a small world that is poor in water resources and we Peylxians have only been space faring for one millenium. But it is our primary world, the world of our origin and the seat of our accumulated wisdom. We understand that you possess technology that allows you to change your gender at will. I know our ways about water seem strange to you in that we could manufacture unlimited supplies but we remain parched.  But we find compelling reasons to follow our original genetic disposition and not to meddle with the way it makes our species unique. We find strength in our discipline and in our traditions.

The Fry have been content to live on Fesra and are fairly influential in various places on Car. For some time we have lived at a comfortable distance. And surely they have political allies among the P and V. While obviously the majority of Peylyxians pray very fervently that no-one is made to suffer by being sent in the wrong direction at Circ Regling, some simply don't believe our Regling is meaningful any longer. We do suffer from a crisis of confidence over this issue. But now there are factions gaining strength in the General Authority who want to place a saecular inspector in every Circ. They also are establishing rights for gels who do not wish to be submitted to The Regling - that they can go Wild even after the rite has begun. Leaving the rite as it is in progress is almost unthinkable, though not unheard of. The point is that the General Authority has determined to usurp our authority and to rewrite The Regling according to its purposes 'in light of the greater good'.

What is still astonishing is that on Fesra there is support growing for a new Circ that will initiate gels into F. Can you imagine? Who knows? They already may have done it. As much as that appalls me, it is for my own Order and Circ I must concern myself. It is a violation of the Deep Covenant to have the General Authority interfere with the rite of The Regling. And while some orders don't seem to mind the Fryssonian movement, mine strenuously resists. Yet we may, if these steps are taken, as the General Authority suggests they will, have to disband, or fight. So there is a very long and deep history behind the recent antagonism between the Frys and we of the orthodox Orders, and now with the impending actions of the General Authority it has reached a crisis point.

I have spoken about these matters at length in coordination with other Masters and Grandees of the Order and I have been appointed by them as the official emissary of First Among Equals Grandee Hartke Rax to your people.  Grandee Rax has ordered me to secure outside counsel and open communications so this missive explaining our situation. There are also legal scholars of the Order who specialize in interpretations of the Deep Covenant. I lack those particular skills, but I do understand that a movement such as the Fryssonians have mounted can very well modify the Covenant or sway the General Authority to interpret it to their advantage.

So in summary, our ability to control and direct The Regling is under threat. The desire of the Fryssonian movement to exert control over our affairs through the General Authority is clear, and while they have their own worlds of the outer planets to do with as they please, they have chosen to bring their complaint to Arn, Gaia, Unicum and Destra. The Peylyxian System is on the verge of war with itself, a quiet war that will sublty and surely destroy one of its great traditions under the guise of 'equality'.

I seek your opinion in this matter. I will try to make sense of any confusion I may have presented in this brief history.

Sincerely yours,

Peylyx-Arnsa Parlek Reglimus Orsimer dam Ckas
V Master, Ordus Janesek (Circ 2)

The Non-Threatening Black Man

There is a vocabulary of black politics and culture that probably ought to be re-evaluated. Not just in light of recent events despite the seismic weight the BHO tends to throw around within certain communities of discourse, but as a general rule. History, you know.

For those of you who don't know, it is largely considered to be an insult to be called a 'non-threatening black man'. This begs certain questions. If you think about it, what threat is a black man supposed to pose? This is the question of the day.

Several observations.
1. If people decide to cross the street or clutch their pearls in the anticipation of some face to face encounter with a black man, is that not an acknowledgment of the threat? Isn't that a measure of respect?

OK all I have is that one observation. 'Non-threatening black man' is one of those terms, from my perspective at this moment in time, which presumes the usefulness of social segregation. To pose a threat is to lean towards a zero-sum society, no?