Author: brittblaser

Doc’s been in North Carolina, saying his final farewells to his beloved mother. His cell phone is spotty. His email server’s hosed. Since I can’t get in touch with him, I’ll just put my thoughts here and let him pick them up when he can.

Hi Doc,

Sorry I haven’t been in touch for about a week. You’ve been so distracted with your mother’s illness and then your return for her memorial last weekend. I appreciate the updates on voicemail and, before it went down, email. I’ve been moved by your comments. I envy you your wonderful history with your mother, something I never had. I especially appreciated the picture of you and her at the beach, and the one with the whole family, you at six, holding the beer bottle. You had a wry look then and still do. Some people “get” irony at an early age and some never do. You’re my favorite “man of iron”-y.

Though you haven’t been able to update, I’m sure the interment and memorial went well, and that your eulogy was as eloquent as you always are. I’ll bet you even leavened it with humor from your deep reservoir of benevolent irony. I never asked if you agree with me (but I bet you do) that the most important element in grief is high mirth and the vital antidote to arrogance is an appreciation of our essential absurdity.

Things have been a little quiet here in NYC, but the weather has been magnificent, early fall, really. I’m spending every morning in Bryant Park, soaking up the WiFi, the good vibes and some sun, since the air’s cool enough to encourage a few rays. What a great place. As I write this tonight, they’re concluding the free film series with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Here are some pix from this morning. The first one’s looking west from the terrace next to the New York Public Library.

I chatted with a fellow there this morning about free WiFi in the Park, a very well-dressed midtown type. I shared your advice that, should one wish to gain access to the whole of the world’s knowledge from the Library’s west reading room, you need to sit by the windows and log on to the Bryant Park WiFi. It’s uncertain if you’re better off in the Library’s impressive reading room without WiFi, or online at the Park’s charming little reading room, with its staff of maroon-shirted volunteers:

My new friend’s a big-time Madison Avenue attorney, who spontaneously said, “I love anything that weakens Microsoft’s stranglehold on us all!” Whew! You don’t expect that kind of spontaneous emission in middle-aged guys like us. With just a bit of encouragement, he also expressed his dismay with the current administration. He can’t make the Dean rally tomorrow night, but seemed heartened to detect a way out of the wilderness.

This next picture is of an actor in some kind of commercial, gesticulating meaningfully behind a laptop with a green screen into which some video jock will paste some important-appearing computer information, without which no enterprise could hope to compete against the awesome forces arrayed against it.

You will appreciate the irony reeking from the image. Nothing meaningful said. No information on the screen. No comprehension of the message by the actor. In fact, at the moment I snapped this, the crew had just quit shooting but hadn’t yet told the actor, who continued buzzwording on, full of sound and flurry, signifying nothing.

Xpertweb is moving along, albeit more slowly than I’d like. Roland’s waiting for me to rough out the datatypes for the three preference sets present in each task, the Seller, Buyer and the Product/Task. I hate it when I’m the one in the middle of the critical path. It forces me to stop pontificating and to get on with real work.

Well, I’d better get on with Roland’s datatyping. Travel well. Tell your relatives that there are now people all over the world who care about them–people whom they will never meet. Now that’s news.

Hugs,

Britt

11:01:18 PM    

Zack Rosen is a brilliant young man who represents everything that’s right about the Dean campaign. He’s a student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the world’s finest CS programs. The last UIUC CS student who made a major difference was Mark Andreessen when he wrote Mosaic, the little web browser that grew into Netscape. The UIUC’s Computer Science program is trolling for some reflected glory from Zack. The CS Department’s home page has a link to the Wired article describing Zack’s vision. On July 19 & 20, Zack and his friend Evan DiBiase met with Zephyr Teachout at our apartment in New York. Zephyr is Howard Dean’s Director for Internet outreach. Wouldn’t you love to be able to tell your grandkids you held that job the year politics got re-invented? The thumbnail images on the right link to Evan’s photos from that weekend. Mouse over them for a description. In early July, I had asked Zephyr if she’d like to use our apartment to meet with Zack to plan Dean Internet v. 2.0. The mini-summit was set up and Zack and Evan drove over from Pittsburgh and Zephyr flew down from Burlington. Zack told us that weekend that if he went back to school in the fall, he’d just flunk out since he’d be working full time on the project. So, wouldn’t it make sense for the campaign to hire him and save a brilliant career from premature ruin? When he put it that way, it was impossible for the campaign to resist. The results of our work excited us all and now Zack’s in Burlington working on several important projects, supported by a small army of volunteers around the country. As I’ve said before, his major project involves the best imaginable toolkit for grassroots campaign management. Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, told Larry Lessig last week that this is an open source campaign, that the important and truly effective stuff originates and is championed by the people and then spreads to campaign management. Everything that we’ve seen so far is the result of lashing together existing tools and web services, ad hoc, into the most effective Internet-based campaign ever. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet Rev 2.0 of the Dean Internet involves the RSS-based DeanSpace toolkit that I’ve described before. The system uses interacting RSS feeds to facilitate viral interaction among purpose-built local campaign sites, with blogs, mutual help, email lists and every other goodie you can imagine. Probably some we can’t imagine. Our next Dean event at the apartment will be a get-together here prior to the big Dean rally in Bryant Park on Tuesday and I’ve asked Zack to spread the word among the Dean interns who are thinking of a road trip. Every month or so, it’s exciting to host a dormitory for committed, clear-eyed young people with a high purpose. It’s amazing how much fun you can have by offering the right people a place to sleep in Midtown Manhattan with no check-out time. Oh yeah, with free pizza. Part of the deal. I’ve depicted the DeanSpace concept before, when it was called Americans for Dean, but here it is again:

Open Sourcery These truly are the best of times, because our tools have become permission-free. Just as there is no way to stop us from Purchasing the Dean Campaign by buying our own votes, there is also no way any force on earth can keep citizens from equipping themselves with the tools to contribute money, ideas, talent and shoe leather to the political activity of their choice. DeanSpace is building an open source toolkit. I call it Campaign-in-a-Box (notice that little RSS Feeds widget in the center): The campaign has built a rapid feedback loop that’s not going to disappear after the election. These donors will be just as demanding of the President they bought as any other donors. And that’s where the DeanSpace network comes in. Remember that widget called RSS Feeds in the network graphic? It’s a technical breakthrough in campaign organization, a chaordic disruption of party politics, and another genie freed from its bottle. This is a big deal: The campaign (or resulting presidency) can’t ignore the comments posted to its own blog Interesting comments rise through the Dean sites to reach a broader audience More information moves to the campaign than from it More initiatives and work get proposed and acted upon from outside the campaign than within It’s a Kick in the RSS What Zack saw before almost anyone else is that the aggregator is the network. By distributing a consistent toolkit, Deaniacs (as they call themselves) will build a zillion Dean sites. Each of those sites will vote good ideas to the top and expose them in their RSS feeds. Other sites will absorb those good ideas and vote the best ones further up the hierarchy of common sense. War is a series of campaigns that try to perfect the means for blowing things up. A Presidential election is a series of campaigns that try to perfect the means to aggregate lots of voices around a candidate’s shared vision. Both kinds of campaigns have, until now, forced the troops to conform to the whims of HQ. For the first time, a Presidential campaign is submitting to the elegant chaos of the grass roots. If that campaign elects the President, we’ll be started down a path that looks nothing like the road that got us here.

11:12:19 PM    

This is a repeat of an earlier blog, inspired by Jim Moore’s opinion, repeated most recently on 7/24 that we can raise a billion dollars for the Dean campaign:

A billion dollars for Dean, slight reprise

The fiscal year 2004 Federal budget is $1,731 billion dollars. Yup, one point seven trillion dollars–for a YEAR.

I’m amazed, based on these figures, that there isn’t more money in campaign finance!  Bush is blowing everyone’s mind by raising $200 million for his 2004 “primary” and general election campaign. He expects to spend over $170 million for his unopposed primary victory, prior to the Republican convention!  Everyone thinks this is a lot of money. Hell, I think it is a bargain. Chump change, given what is at stake. Bush and the Republicans will then turn around and control one point three trillion dollars a year–for four years. That is a lot of Haliburton contracts.

Awhile back I suggested that if just 1 million people (1/2 of Moveon.org’s registered users) gave $1000 to the Dean campaign, a billion dollars could be raised. What is the cost of taking back the presidency? If you have never written a campaign check before–you are in luck! This year you can put it on your credit card–it’s like buying a book from Amazon. Wouldn’t you buy a few more books to change the face of America?

We can’t exactly steal it, but we can buy it. Cheap.

We can buy the Dean campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise:

You can buy people’s votes

The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing.

But if we do what Jim Moore suggests, a million people giving $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window.

Scale

Everyone seems to agree that 6/30/03 will be written about for years since it was the first spontaneous expression of political will by self-organizing voters talking each other into caring more and donating more through the Moveable Type Comments function. That inspiring day caused the campaign to believe more strongly in its core aspiration: to somehow get nominated and then to give the Republicans a decent challenge. If 6/30 is as important as it seems, the campaign should re-calibrate its goals:

$1 Billion
60 Million votes (including 15% of the Republican vote)
A Patriotic Congress (Patriotic = constructively bi-partisan), riding Dean’s coattails
A re-definition of American as cooperative, kind and open-minded

Do the Math

Internet-equipped people caused $802,000 to be donated to Dean on 6/30/03. They did it by chatting each other up as the new totals were posted every half hour, and as the goal, depicted as a baseball bat, was increased as goal after goal was surmounted through the afternoon.

A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late.

Metcalfe’s Law says that this mob’s value and power will grow with the square of its population, attracting more people and volksmoney as an accretion disc in space sucks matter away from the systems around it. I believe this phenomenon is a social force too powerful to be stopped, and that historians may be as interested in 6/30/03 as 9/11/01.

The smart mob is not limited by the campaign’s preconceptions. At a gut level, this mob seems to be saying, “We’ve got plenty of money for this little problem. Shit, we send $6 billion a year to Apple Computer. Apple! We can easily spend a billion or two every four years to own our own government!”.

Easy Monthly Payments

I’m encouraging the Dean campaign to set up three giving clubs:

• Club   42, whose members put $  42.66 on their credit card each month = $  500 per year
• Club   83, whose members put $  83.33 on their credit card each month = $1,000 per year
• Club 166, whose members put $166.66 on their credit card each month = $2,000 per year

Is That a President in your Pocket or are You Just Happy to See Me?

Imagine being a significant financing source for a populist President. Imagine being part of an army of people who, for less than $3 a day, transforms the face of American Democracy.

It could even be a return to the spirit of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, and even more like Teddy Roosevelt, beloved by the people despite his patrician roots. Like Roosevelt, Dean is presented with the opportunity to break the stranglehold that business has on politics.

The more things, change the more they stay the same.

7:37:42 PM    

A little break can be a good thing. After posting my Minimalism entry, I entertained friends on Wednesday night and then Thursday we had a little trouble with the utilities in Manhattan, so we entertained stranded co-workers willing to climb 28 floors: an evening of candlelight, wine and conversation reminded us of simpler pleasures (“Let’s drink the white first while it’s cold”).

It was a surprise three day weekend and the Internet seemed less compelling than I would have thought–I found it relaxing to be offline. I had unused power in the PowerBook battery and a POTS phone line and internal modem, but it didn’t seem necessary to add to the descriptions of what was, essentially, obvious.

When asked to comment on Niagara Falls by its enthusiastic boosters, Calvin Coolidge took a look and asked, “What’s to hinder?”

Amy Harmon of the New York Times called on Saturday for background on an article she was writing. I told her I really didn’t have anything more interesting than relaxation to report. And so she didn’t.

I do have a small bit of advice for handling blackouts. Yesterday was a glorious day, so I took a long walk, enjoying a street fair on Lexington and a stroll through the Park. Last night brought stomach upset and a real-life Immodium commercial. Why would a seemingly rational man buy a Gyro sandwich from a street vendor the day after every piece of meat in town has been warmed to room temperature?

Now back to our regular programming…

Resistance is Mutual

The theme I discern from my idle rants and the more thoughtful deliberations of others is consistent: at a deep level, each of us is convinced of our authority as the pinnacle of reason; that intelligence and insight degrade rapidly with the distance from our influence (ignoring the fact that, if a husband’s alone in the forest, he’s still wrong). So, rather than a participatory search for collective enlightenment and right action, we spend all our effort trying to convince others to think and act as we do.

How well does this work? Take a look around.

So is there a way out of this foolishness? It looks to me like the Internet’s hive mind is working on the answer without us realizing it. In other words, paraphrasing Scott McNeely, the network is the human.

If so, then the self-directed Clint Eastwood is a mirage, though most of us believe that’s how we’re supposed to lead our lives if we weren’t so weak and other-directed. What’s worse, we believe that people who appear to be like Clint are people worth following, deferring to and voting for.

So we may be in a society where the leaders cling to their illusion of competence to stay in power and the rest of us cling to their illusion to stay in denial.

The Bloomin’ Truth

Howard Bloom is the one who first clued me that we’re not wired for solitary action, back in 1995 when his important book, The Lucifer Principle, was published. In fact, his second chapter (after Who is Lucifer?) is The Clint Eastwood Conundrum. Bloom demonstrates that we are totally social creatures and that isolation is the ultimate poison.

My guess is that we are drawn to those who appear to be independent and strong for the same reason that chimps and wildebeests are, but those types need our attention as an actor needs an audience. Bloom suggests, and Susan Blackmore reinforces the point, in The Meme Machine, that these strong, self-assured types are indeed actors, posturing in ways that have become second nature, attracting us with their compelling demonstrations of independence and stubbornness to ensure that they can avoid the fear we all share: never be alone.

So I wonder if we aren’t all resisting the truth that the strong, independent father figure is a threat to us all. George Lakoff points out that we’re inclined to embrace the metaphor of the strong father and question the value of a nurturant parent.

What if all our emperors are naked and we’re just their credulous patsies? What if the reality of sucking up to a strong-appearing leader is that we simply give a questionable ego more fuel and their self-indulgent personality more reason to spurn us?

10:14:00 PM    

Capitalism may not last forever. For decades I’ve been wondering what the next “ism” might be. I think I’ve got it. It’s Minimalism: a cultural sense of restraint.

Minimalism suggests that:

• The Government that governs least governs best.
• No one gets any say about another’s private behavior.
• Humans have a God-given right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,
  even if they don’t worship their neighbor’s god.
• Humans deserve non-interference from persons that are not human, such as corporations.

What we have today is the opposite of Minimalism: Grandiosity. Everything’s supposed to get bigger forever: every company, advertising campaign, bulk mail, spam mailing, copyright law, car and, above all, government. You know, the Texas-sized notion that everything should be bigger, flashier, more expensive and impressive. All-pervasive boosterism and Big Bidness, boy howdy! Guys with big hats and over-dressed women and huge Rolex watches.

We used to say of pilots with fancy chronometers on their wrist, “Big clock, small cock.”

Capitalism has developed to the point that it vests its chieftains with a grandiosity beyond belief. Our leader of the free world has not one but two 747’s at his beck and call, 5,900 employees and a budget estimated at $730 million as of three years ago.

FDR managed a war on two sides of the world with a staff of 18 and a rail car.

Federal Staff Reductionism

There’s only one way to reduce the Washington bureaucracy, which is the ostensible goal of conservatives, but obviously not their effect. Minimalism can only come about when the bureaucrats embrace smallness. But how to do that?

Web applications.

We all know that most bureaucrats could be replaced by a reasonably well programmed web app. Whether public or on an intranet, a properly designed web site can elicit the information needed to replace many a bureaucrat’s job of repackaging information for the consumption of those who think they need a bureaucrat to define the obvious.

I propose a crack team of experts on call to help bureaucrats eliminate their positions–a web site, an 800 number, bulletins on boards, etc. The message: if you can help us devise a web application that moves information as your job description specifies, then you get to go home and continue receiving the pay and benefits you’re getting and reasonable increases, plus a great retirement package when the time comes.

Yep. We’re ready to do that for you, Mr. Bureaucrat, to keep you from dreaming up programs to make your position seem necessary; to avoid the endless rounds of committee meetings and studies and travel and consulting contracts to make it appear that how you move information needs more study. No, we realize that the expensive part of government is the programs you dream up, not the cost of paying and retiring you.

Save the Children

But what about the programs that matter, you ask? Is this merely a variation on the NeoCons’ idea that if we just stop spending gummint money then we can return to a pristine world of bucolic villages and faith-based socials and solutions (don’t pay attention to those smokestacks and fetid water)?

No, there are real needs and real money to spend. Undernourished, under-educated children need a better future. Minimalism doesn’t have a problem with spending money on kids and job training and a health care safety net. It also doesn’t mind spending money defending us against real threats, like people who actually possess WMDs. No, Minimalism has a problem with ideological politicians funneling so much money through a bureaucracy stealing money from real problems.

Minimalism has an abhorrence of corporate welfare supporting obsolete business models and legislation to jail customers who invent their own media packaging and an arms race against ourselves. Rather, Minimalism seeks a spareness in all things, whether government, legislation, business, marketing or car stereo volume. It’s not a matter of making laws defining efficiency and slim government, it’s a matter of allowing a culture-wide sense of restraint to permeate our shared aesthetic about how to conduct our affairs. The time seems to have arrived.

When we get it right, we’ll know it, and the simple act of defining ourselves as minimalists may be a start. Howard Dean has ignited voters by saying that deficits need to be minimized, that federal gun control needs to be minimized and that the feds have no business telling states what form of ritual qualifies their citizens as life partners.

I’ve been traveling to Vermont for 42 years and got married once in Dallas, so I have a sense of the contrasts. Vermont’s always been a place of few words and laws. A quiet place where people keep to themselves but help their neighbors. Sure, there are more ex-urbanites there now, but the place hasn’t changed that much. The last president from Vermont was a man of few words. When asked to comment on Niagara Falls by its enthusiastic boosters, Calvin Coolidge took a look and asked, “What’s to hinder?”

Ayep, Vermont’s a good place to spawn an overdue sense of minimalism.

10:55:46 PM    

We all know that technology accelerates during wartime and that a war is a series of campaigns. I’m fascinated by the wartime mentality, whether or not it occurs in combat, so let’s call it a campaign mentality. The campaign mentality sets in when a group feels so strongly about its mission that it transcends the usual carping, grandstanding, empire-building and pettiness that marks so much of enterprise. It’s invigorating.

War is the easiest way to produce the campaign phenomenon, and gets the most attention. But the mentality is not unusual. Every time a plane takes off or a boat launches, its occupants share a campaign mentality as to the importance of arriving gently on dry land. In the startup companies I’ve started or helped, a campaign mentality was expressed by the participants’ olympian willingness to work harder, longer faster–and cheaper–than people in established companies.

Political campaigns are the best non-combat examples of the campaign mentality. And they’re an interesting counterpoint. The aim of war is to blow things up, so war technology is designed to blow them up more accurately and cheaply. The aim of political campaigns is to build consensus, so its technology is about building consensus faster and more cheaply.

I’ve felt for a while now that a smart mob is in the process of stealing the Dean campaign, because the smart mob is growing faster and more intelligently than any campaign’s ability to manage it. As Doc suggests, the competition will learn how to use the tools that Dean is using, but what will they get for their trouble? A campaign like Dean’s, where the people manage the dialogue, a decidedly counter-Rovian management style.

Massage the Medium

If the people take over your campaign, what have you got left?

• The campaign blog with staff personalities and volunteers’ comments is the Sunshine law of backroom politics. You lose control of the process and start to host the kind of dialogue that the front runners have never wanted.
• Your Contribute Now link attracts a zillion people who think they have a stake in your campaign just because they charged 20 bucks to their Visa.
• Rank experts set up their own campaign sites and then open source hobbyists invent a whole new set of tools to let the sites talk to each other and all their users blog and then let them vote on the ideas they like best, just like it was a participatory democracy rather than a Tory republic.
• People dream up new ways to give you money and then bitch at you if you don’t put up an automatic donation tool in a week. (Zephyr? Bobby? Anyone there?)
• People start chatting online with the campaign manager, taking valuable time away from the important work of writing ads to get people interested in the campaign.
• Instead of making up your own mind about fundraising tactics, you end up having to ask the donors if they’re ready to give another half mill you hadn’t counted on.
• College kids and even high schoolers (high schoolers!) run their own sites without asking permission, (the high schoolers patiently explaining that half the kids in high school will be able to vote in 16 months). They’re so insistent that the candidate feels obligated to shuffle off to Buffalo between Oklahoma and Iowa. The kids even organize their own ride board, fer chrissake!

And these people think that, just because they replace the PAC and National Committee and corporate soft money that they should have as much say in your administration as those they replaced. They feel entitled just because they bought their own votes!

Remember that part about users voting each other’s ideas up the queue like a bunch of SlashDotters? That’s the Knowledge Base tech that everybody’s been talking about but not getting around to. It’s the campaign mentality! These amateurs may not even think they’re inventing new tech and may have never heard the endless conversation about how to turn blogs into knowledge. Just like WWI for aviation and WWII for atomic energy, this campaign is spinning off blog-to-Knowledge Base tech.

Democracy, the Killer App

And blogs-to-knowledge base is the end of politics as usual. With citizen blogs and preference-registering knowledge bases and interested amateurs taking ownership of government, democracy becomes the Next Big Thing. The campaign mentality works like it always does, pushing tech to the limit. Special interests realize they’ll never get everything they want so they start to get real about what’s possible, so NYC Democrats cheer for a balanced budget pitched by a rural-state Guv who opposes national gun control.

It wouldn’t make sense unless they felt like they own the guy.

11:37:18 PM    

Frank Patrick’s Focused Perfomance blog is a reliable source of wisdom on what works in business processes and what doesn’t. When I rant on about the failings of large organizations, he gently hauls me back by reminding me that what seems like wasted effort is the natural result of supporting the truly effective people with those who do the less-than-excellent work that the stars simply can’t get to. He knows that companies can only avoid the over-use of great resources by backing them up with “good-enough” resources.

Now Frank has taken on a project that deserves a great resource like him. It’s called A Global Virtual Classroom, a continuation of a successful AT&T project linking elementary and secondary school classes from around the world in collaborative “virtual classrooms.” It’s a little like the Xpertweb concept, on the basis that what needs teaching in your school may be available elsewhere, in classes which have mastered the challenge you’re most interested in. Think of the real life Jaime A. Escalante who was the inspirational Math teacher in Stand and Deliver, one of Doc‘s favorite films.

Apparently AT&T has other fish to fry and has turned over the project to the Give Something Back International Foundation. The AT&T foundation has provided a small grant to re-start the initiative, and Frank is looking for additional support for his client and talent to get the tech part right. Check it out. It’s a chance to be part of something bigger than your local school bitchfest.

1:30:53 PM    

What if someone could use scientific research to divine the sure winner of the 2004 election?

I love it when someone finds valid patterns where everyone else sees chaos. I even love it when someone pretends to find valid patterns where everyone else sees chaos. Today’s report is courtesy of Doc, who sent me a link to research reported by Eric Schulman, Ph.D, an astrophysicist who probably understands math better than Doc and I combined. But Eric is also a humorist who has authored a book, A Briefer History of Time and a number of articles spoofing the world of research. My favorite title: “The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less in 30 Languages or More in Teeny Tiny Type“

Schulman has devised the Electability Formula, which looks at candidates’ years of experience in various public roles, and the actual results of campaigns:

12:31:24 AM    

My uncharacteristic silence is a result of a lot of travel and having so many things going right with my projects that I hardly know where to start. I’ve also had a writer’s block on a rant regarding the nature of organizations in an open source economy. More on all that later.

The Futures of Terrorism

DARPA‘s on-again, off-again market for information on terrorism inspired an interesting blogalogue. Doc pushed back against it, attracting claims he was trashing something Clueful. From an intelligence standpoint, PAM, the Terror Market Bimbo, immediately howled out of existence, would have been a good idea if you believe in efficient markets having perfect knowledge. (Of course there is no such thing as perfect market knowledge, despite the brilliant people who have made a career selling the theory to amateurs hoping to beat experts at their own game.)

ENRON and WorldComm and their ilk suggest that terrorism would find better funding and planning if it had its own futures market. It would increase our predictive skills, and it would increase terrorist activity.

But that wasn’t the real reason PAM died at the box office. Every society has limits on what it conceives and the ideas it pursues. So we do not support public hangings or cane-lashings or stoning adulterers. Those things and millions of others are, literally, unthinkable to us, and it’s right for a society to not use tools and weapons it finds inconceivable.

Toward an Aesthetic Culture

Steve Jobs famously told Bill Gates that the problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Software is routinely released by MS that would be inconceivable at Apple, based on its appearance, its function and its bugginess. The two companies simply have different tastes in what’s acceptable. So it is with cultures.

Any student of cultural aesthetics would observe that ours has grown a lot uglier in the last two years. Winston Churchill or even Tony Blair would have forged a stronger society upon the anvil of our post-9/11 rage, grief, and world sympathy. Our illiterate leader and his opportunistic handlers have contrarily cheapened our demeanor and savaged our international reputation. Compared to the rest of the civilized world, this administration, literally, has no taste.

It’s absurd to wonder if we could somehow develop better cultural taste, and agree to look beyond our petty concerns and agree on a society more pleasing to the spirit. But a guy can dream…

It’s the Opportunism, Stupid

Politicians are naturally opportunistic, but at each point in the trajectory of a nation’s evolution, there are levels of opportunism that even they won’t sink to. For two centuries it was inconceivable that states would operate a numbers game because property owners prefer not to pay for proper schooling. Lottery income isn’t a fiscal necessity, it’s the product of a lack of the political leadership to lead people to pay for what’s important in an informed and civil society.

Since the phone tap was invented, it was literally inconceivable that the government would eavesdrop on your line without a warrant. That’s a nicety that evaporated when our TV culture got its high-profile WTC face slap.

Just as opportunists in state government couldn’t resist the siren call of lottery profits, so too was the big-gummint temptation too great for the opportunistic Ashcroft, Bush and Cheney. Like any government, they want to control our lives, ensure their power and shrink the opposition into oblivion. The odd thing is that they claim to be conservatives while violating the conservative aesthetic of small government, fiscal responsibility and avoiding foreign entanglements.

About that Face Slap

What if our 9/11 tragedy wasn’t? I hate to sound harsh about our losses, but has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes into buildings might not have been the logistical masterstroke of the century?

I’m suggesting that there was an operational hole in our hijacking prevention system and that some passionate Arabs got lucky and managed to kill some of us. I’ve got about 2500 hours in a Boeing 707, and I’m sure that a couple hundred hours in Microsoft Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch off a 767 autopilot, turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that they did some actual flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant.

There’s almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs killed a little over .001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week. Instead of panicking, we could have started locking cockpit doors, continued to keep guns off airplanes, and we’d have plugged that loophole.

Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course, there’s a war on terror, but we’re the foot soldiers in that war, and we should acknowledge that some of us are going to get hurt. It’s a war, fer chrissake! I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and as most of us know, the airport precautions are more charade than anything else. We all understand that we’re not significantly safer than we were before. Feeling safer is not the same as being safer.

What we might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness were part of our national makeup, would be to say,

“OK, you motherfuckers, you got lucky once. We’re not changing how we live our lives, but we’re changing how you live your lives, starting with Saudi Arabia, which is the obvious catalyst for this foolishness. We’re going to do the thing you can’t stand us to do: Freeze your assets, dictate what we’re willing to pay for oil, and spend those saved billions on energy independence and telecommuting technologies. Any company that resists that initiative will be exposed for its un-American activities. Now you guys fix that Taliban problem or we’ll get really nasty and put an embargo on bizjets.”

That kind of thinking arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives flying into large mountains avoiding small bullets. I learned that lesson when I saw a guy do that very thing in Viet Nam, so clanked was he about the idea of someone shooting at him that he ignored the reality that airplanes and mountains are a bad combo.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we can’t dictate market forces. But if OPEC can, we can. Of course we’d only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American people and if national security were more important to us than oil company profits. Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil Industry benefits from artificially low prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob Baer points out in Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited today by Salon,“the real war we should be fighting is not in Baghdad.”

Small Minds, not Small Government

Maybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about small government, but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they were fixated on what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures, they’re unlikely to get more votes than last time. The opportunity the Bin Laden family handed the Bush family was to paralyze our culture so ordinary electoral logic would not apply.

“Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,” Bush told [Mitch] Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
                         – Miami Herald , Nov. 29, 2001*

These cynical points have been made by smarter people than I. I’m just riffing on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance of cynicism. The political cynicism we’re seeing is related to the cynicism of public companies and TV evangelists and the media. Our cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal values most of us hold, regardless of our politics. Instead, we’re gripped by the opportunistic economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as long as it increases stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues.

1:26:17 AM