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Pretty much all of the ugly problems of the world - economic inequality, climate change, domination of our politics by money, and just general crap quality of life - are made worse by the gargantuan scale of our institutions. Bigness may not be the cause of our many problems, but it goes a long way towards preventing any progress in solving them. Government is vast, impersonal and distant; corporations are faceless monoliths that have their own needs and logic. I’ve long believed in the principle of subsidiarity: that institutions should be as close as possible to the people they affect. It’s why I believe in DEVOLUTION rather than revolution per se: revolution would keep our institutional elephantiasis, while devolving to smaller units of government and of business would make progress much, much more possible.
I think collapse of the US, Soviet-style, is not a matter of if but of when… and HOW. Empires crumble, and they’re often messy on the way out. I’d much rather see a planned devolution, rather than the Republic of New England skirmishing with the Union of Great Lakes States over access to the St. Lawrence Watershed, or nuclear war between Texas and California. But history will decide.
Even the Wall Street Journal is positive about the benefits of a breakup, and it’s true that this is one area where the far-left and the hard-right have often met. I think, though, that they envision a US much more like the EU than my own preference of a patchwork of city-states and county-scale governments from sea to shining sea, with a functioning judicial system to arbitrate disputes and ensure civil rights, so that the remnants don’t turn into apartheid states.
I think we’re much more likely to devolve into some Beyond Thunderdome dystopia than an anarchist commonwealth, but the future has a way of surprising you…
I was at a nonprofit I volunteer for, talking over the pros and cons of moving a database they use onto the Internet. As a community organization, they don’t have private or confidential information, but there was still a reluctance (understandable) to put their data “out there.” I reassured them that they’d be able to password-protect their data so it couldn’t be inadvertently modified. But I know that someone sufficiently motivated can always crack anything they want, and I’d certainly never recommend they put anything sensitive out on, say, Google Documents. It’d be like pee in a pool.
It got me thinking of the amount of personal information I have out there. I’ve been online since the early ’90s, have an Amazon account going back over a decade, and I’ve got active and inactive profiles at a number of social networking sites, from Facebook to match.com to LinkedIn. It’d be trivially easy to put together a fairly complete dossier on my political interests, my purchasing habits, my sexual proclivities and my health history. And, yeah… I’m a little creeped out by that, but I’ve pretty much accepted it from before the time I linked my Google account to my old blog. And part of it may be that - having spent my formative young adult years in a communal living situation - I’m used to living under a microscope, and I don’t have that big an issue with people knowing my business.
The fact is, our sphere of privacy is vanishingly small. And the danger lies in the fact that there is less and less accountability of the corporations and governments that possess and control all of this information As security writer Bruce Schneier notes, “those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it.”
I used to be an advocate for personal privacy, appending a PGP key to my personal emails and whatnot. Now I find myself moving closer and closer to the Transparent Society vision of British author David Brin: given that personal privacy is increasingly a joke, we must demand similar openness from those who run the show. If there is no one to watch the watchers, then this power will be abused, sure as winter follows autumn.
The up side is that we’ve never had better tools for keeping our governments accountable. The down side, of course, is that our governments have zero interest in being accountable. Even President Transparency is moving to retroactively hide information and prevent anyone from finding out whether they were illegally surveilled.
We’re at a delicate stage of the whole secrecy/transparency curve… in fact, the inflection point is probably well behind us. There is probably still time to reverse the trend… but it will require fairly massive sustained effort.
And in these days of Terror Terror Terror and PATRIOT Acts, the momentum is clearly in the other direction.
I’m pretty cynical about politics in general, and US power politics in specific, but even I have been surprised at how quickly and completely Obama has moved to make Bush policies his own… and with only sort of a half-nod at putting a friendly face on them.
So far we have
This is why I’ve felt that a liberal President is more dangerous than a conservative one. With a right-winger in the White House, at least there’s the possibility of a challenge from the left. But when the President is one of their own, liberals sit on their hands even if they object. And this benefits neither Obama nor the left.
Obama might be doing a lot of these things because he genuinely believes in them, or he might be responding to what he perceives as political pressure. Either way, though, he’s going to keep making these moves as long as there’s no real resistance to them. That’s just political reality. And that’s exactly what we saw throughout the Bush years: the Leader made a move, and his followers rushed to endorse it.
With so-called progressives in the media praising Obama for his “post-partisan” mindset, and his desire to “look forward, not backward,” Obama is totally empowered to carry on most of the Bush policies while refusing to charge anyone for - or even investigate - the worst abuses.
I can’t see any way it could ever be any different, even if the Democrats nominated a saint for President. The realities of power politics make “change from within” an empty slogan, regardless of what the Imams of Hopeandchange are preaching this weekend.
My feelings about Obama remain the same: in his ceremonial role of Head of State - our constitutional King - I’m still kinda proud of him as our first national leader of color and as an often inspirational speaker. As Head of Government, though, he is perpetrating evil acts, as have all Presidents of the United States. It’s as dangerous as hell for progressives and liberals of whatever stripe to let their regard for the man - or the symbol, whatever - keep them from protesting, and working to reverse, his actions.
Update: add “don’t ask, don’t tell” to the list…
The sun comes up really early in Arizona.
Maybe it’s the whole Daylight Savings thing (Arizona doesn’t observe it). And maybe I’m just used to the sun coming up through coastal clouds. Whatever it was, I was up at about 5am after a tossy-turny night.
When I woke up, my computer was still spazzing, but I decided I had plenty of time to figure out what that meant for my job, so I packed up, checked out, and wrote some postcards over a light desert breakfast. It was still cool, but I could feel the heat of the day coming on. Even the waiter was like, “I try to tell these people how much water it takes to digest these big breakfasts, but they still want eggs, bacon, pancakes…” I bought a gallon jug of water and headed for the park entrance.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the crowds, even at 8:30 am: a week before July 4 at one of the great tourist attractions in America, if not the world. Why a dozen busloads of Koreans chose that morning to arrive at one of this country’s premier holes in the ground may forever be beyond my ken, however. I considered making for the North Rim, but that would take hours and get me there in the main heat of the day. I had nothing but running shoes, no water in a carryable size… and no real desire for an expedition, anyway. I just needed some peace and quiet. I headed to the trailhead on the South Rim furthest from bus parking: Grandview.
Once the aging frat boys got finished bellowing into the canyon (why do Americans always seem to do the most cringeworthy things just when foreigners are watching?) it actually got pretty tolerably calm. I hiked a couple thousand feet down and found a little cleared area that led to a cleft in the rock where I could sit and not see - or be seen by - anyone else. This was about as much solitude as it seemed I was likely to get.
I did some breathing meditation to quiet my mind and clear out the jangling energy of all those tourists. Once I settled, it was actually not all that distracting to hear the occasional snatch of conversation or sound of boots on the trail. The hugeness of the canyon tends to be a pretty effective sink for human disturbance.
I wondered for a bit about my constant need for distraction - with my computer and Blackberry safely packed away there was nowhere to go but inside, and I had some time to catch up with all the various dramatic changes of the past months. So many things had just come to a close, and the new phase of my life hadn’t even revealed itself in all its details. I was, literally, sitting in limbo, in open space.
Most of what passed through my mind under that rock is non-bloggable stuff. What I can say about the experience is that it represented the clean break that merely leaving San Diego did not achieve, with all the packing and rushing about. It felt very much that my entire life up to that point had brought me to that quiet place on the cliffside, and I hung out there for a few hours before moving on.
The car was warm and welcoming. Still with the music off, I headed back out on the open road. The deep quiet was refreshing, and the vistas of the Kaibab and Coconino forests uplifted me - there had apparently been a recent fire, and blackened trunks were intermixed with bright green saplings.
It’s incredibly clichè to say that change is the only constant, but the things that seem so simple and obvious are things we so often ignore.
Reset.
I don’t vote.
It’s not easy for me to say that, because I have always taken my voting rights very seriously… ever since voting for Walter fucking Mondale in my first-ever election. But I didn’t vote in either of the two primaries California had this year, and I have no real intention to vote in November.
I chose, very consciously, to withdraw my support from a society I see as immoral and a system that I feel hoodwinks people into thinking they have a voice. The vote is rigged ten ways from Sunday: not necessarily through outright stealing of the election (though that has happened and will happen again), but by controlling what candidates get on the ballot, through using the money primary to marginalize outsiders, and through the whole superstructure of finance and control that makes legislators pawns of the power elite.
It’s clear that neither of the men who are running for President has any intention of making any change to the imperial policy of the United States to order the world as it - and it alone - sees fit. In 2012, and in 2016, we will still be in Iraq and threatening other nations in that part of the world - barring of course, some cataclysm almost too awful to think about and growing more likely by the day.
The possibility of the United States going through some kind of awakening — of all its citizens, elites and plebs, suddenly realizing that our current course can only end in tragedy for ourselves and for the world — is so remote as to not be worth considering. I mean, if there were some movement, even the blastocyst of a fistula of an embryo of a movement, in that direction, I’d give it whole-hearted support. But there is nothing like that. There’s TV and sports and the quadrennial reality show we call Election.
So I’m out.
At 5:04 EDT today, 11 June 2008, an Aer Lingus jet left JFK for Dublin, with a connecting flight to Rome early tomorrow morning. I was supposed to be on that flight. My plan was to leave this sick, sad society behind and make a new start in the country of my ancestors. For a whole host of reasons, I chose not to go. And it’s still not clear why, but I had - and have - a strong intuition that my karma lay in these here United States. A big reason for my upcoming journey, uprooting myself from a comfortable existence in “America’s Finest City,” is to find out why.
Since I was a teenager riding the Hi-Speed Line into Philadelphia and walking to the Wooden Shoe bookstore to soak up radical literature, I’ve been searching for a different way. And through college and communes and back-to-the-land in Hawai’i I’ve tried to find that way, so far without success. But as Edison once said after yet another of his experiments went wrong: “I have not failed at each attempt; rather I’ve succeeded at discovering another way not to invent an electric lamp.”
It really might take the total collapse of American society to shake things up to the point at which they can change. And I’ve dreaded it every time I’ve come to that conclusion: with all the guns in this country - and the increasing number of well-trained, hardened warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan - a new American Civil War would make the breakup of Yugoslavia look like pro wrestling. But we are headed down the Slip-n-Slide to disaster at an alarming rate, and there has to be something on the other side of that - something other than a new Fascism and culture war - for people to look towards.
There is another way - a uniquely American way - for us to live with each other. Consumerism and the lust for power has deformed the ancient spirit of community and turned people into drones who work until they drop, then go home and narcotize themselves with drink, with drugs, and with American Idol. It does not have to be that way.
I’m going to be thinking a lot and talking to a lot of people all across the country about what that might look like. Eurocommunism won’t work, not will Latin American-style socialism or any other system that works in different countries. Deep in the cultural DNA of this country, however, is the ethic of cooperation and struggle that brought us the eight-hour day, cleaned up the slaughtehouses and began the still-incomplete work of extending full civil rights to women and people of color.
The question - and it’s an open question to me - is whether anything, even a full-blown apocalyptic collapse of society, can reawaken that spirit, if only on a very small scale.
I’m very curious.
