A Vocabulary Exercise in Virtue

David Brooks and Charles Murray are depressed because we don’t use words like “dignity” and “duty” any more. They have a point.  A lot of good words have fallen into disuse over the last century or so.  “Piety,” for instance. “Sublime.”  “Sin,” “Vice,” and “Virtue,” except in the context of diet and exercise.  It would be hard to imagine Bernie Madoff using any of these words, even in the course of lamenting his failings.  Well, heck, it would be hard to imagine Bernie Madoff lamenting his failings.

Back in 1999, Jed Purdy tried to start an anti-irony movement that might have rehabilitated some of the good old Victorian words.  It seems to have pretty much fallen flat.  The last time anybody advised me to be careful for my dignity was when I was in high school, and the teacher who gave us that advice was a source of giggles for weeks afterward.

So here’s an exercise in expanding our moral vocabulary:

The Four Cardinal Virtues—Prudence, Courage, Justice, and Temperance: Courage and Justice do get a fair amount of use, though not necessarily the way Aristotle would have liked.  We are a lot more concerned about other people treating us with Justice than about being just in our dealings with other people.  And we talk about Courage, often, when we are really describing gall, nerve, or chutzpah.  Charles Murray says we don’t talk about Prudence or Temperance at all, rather than risk derision.  Perhaps we make up for our reluctance to talk about Temperance by having created an entire spiritual path to support it, the Twelve-Step Movement.  Prudence gets no such backup, at least not since Bush Senior espoused it and got laughed out of office in 1992.  Let’s try to use each of these words once a week, in its original meaning.

The Seven Deadly Sins—Pride, Anger, Envy, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, and Sloth, get a surprising amount of attention on the History Channel, of which I am a late-night aficionado.  Amazon.com lists 10,638 “results” for a search of “Seven Deadly Sins.”  What none of these respectable sources do, as nearly as I can tell, is approach the subject without irony.  Who am I to blame them, when my college roommates and I spent most of our sophomore year devising ways to commit all seven of the deadly sins within 24 hours? (Needless to say, Sloth was the deal-breaker.) Face it, we like sin.  We admire it.  Let’s try to use each of these words, without irony, at least once a week.

Let’s try to use the words “sin,” “vice,” and “virtue” in some context other than diet and exercise, at least once a week.  And then tell us all how other people respond and how you feel about doing it.

RedEmma1

The More Things Change…

Mr. Wired and I are spending a lazy summer Sunday afternoon listening to NPR, while Krista Tippett interviews an expert on children’s play, who tells us, wonder of wonders, that play is good for children.  Mr. Wired finds it annoying that Stuart Brown, the expert in question, is claiming credit for this discovery, when it was a commonplace while we were growing up.

Actually, it was a commonplace long before that. Froebel, the first official child psychologist, coined the phrase “Play is the child’s work” in the early 1800s.  Two hundred years earlier, John Commenius said some of the same things.  And Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which quotes both of them, was published when Mr. Wired and I were in grade school.

That bothers Mr. Wired more than it bothers me.  Yes, it’s true that academic scholarship is supposed to be dedicated to giving credit where credit is due, rather than claiming three-hundred-year-old ideas as one’s own.  The rabbinic tradition says, BTW, that teaching something in the name of the person from whom one learned it hastens the redemption of the world.  I take this seriously, to the point where I publish all my blogging under Talmudic copyright—use my stuff as much as you like, just mention my name (or at least one of my pseudonyms) when you do.

But these days, we don’t want to know where good ideas came from originally.  The people who promulgate good ideas now want to be able to claim credit for them, at least if the only other contenders are safely dead or in the public domain and therefore not likely to sue.  If a scholar can’t take credit for passing on somebody else’s good idea, s/he won’t bother publishing it in the first place.  [In the case of the value of children’s play, that means a lot of young first-time parents won’t have access to that useful information and their children will be stuck in preschool 8 hours a day, without recess, learning their letters and colors and shapes beginning at age 3 and then popped in front of a TV set for the rest of the day.]  Scholarly ego, in short, serves the same sort of evolutionary purpose as the peacock’s display plumage, or the self-interest of Adam Smith’s pin manufacturer.  By allowing the scholar to promote himself, we allow him to promote ideas we all need to hear about.  Okay, we have a copy of Homo Ludens somewhere on our shelves, left over from my grad school years.  Our neighbors upstairs, raising a four-year-old and a toddler, don’t.  They need to hear these ideas somewhere. Their kids need them to hear those ideas even more.  Feeding a pseudo-scholar’s fraudulent ego is a small price to pay for that.

Jane Grey

The Silent Alphabet

(contributions welcome)

A as in ?

B as in deBt

C as in indiCt

D as in WeDnesday

E as in icE

F as in

G as in liGht

H as in ligHt

I as in busIness

J as in ?

K as in ?

L as in waLk

M as in Mnemonic

N as in ?

P as in Pneumonia

Q as in ?

R as in ?

S as in horS d’oeuvreS

T as in cloThes

U as in ?

V as in ?

W as in ?

X as in Grand PriX

Z as in ?

Jane Grey

Poison Pills

Acetaminophen turns up everywhere, in anything that bears any relation to making somebody feel better.  It gets mixed into cough medicine, cold medicine, tranquilizers, migraine meds, and prescription painkillers.  Sometime around thirty years ago, it suddenly replaced aspirin everywhere except in doctor jokes.  This happened for several different reasons.

One was that the patent on aspirin had long since run out.  So anybody could use it for anything.  As a result, those who manufactured it couldn’t charge outrageous sums for it.

Another was that aspirin did, and does, have side effects.  Most of them have to do with bleeding, especially in the digestive tract.  People with ulcers are especially at risk from aspirin.  And then, in 1963, aspirin turned out to be connected, in ways that are still mysterious, with Reye’s Syndrome, a sometimes fatal illness that attacks children and adolescents.  So there are good medical reasons not to recommend aspirin for children and ulcer patients.

But the most significant reason for mixing acetaminophen with prescription painkillers has nothing to do with improving the effect of those medications, or avoiding the side effects of aspirin.  Rather, it is added to legal oral medications so that turning them into illegal injected drugs will be difficult or impossible.

Now, the health care industry is starting to worry about acetaminophen.  It too has side effects.  In excessive doses, or in combination with even a small amount of alcohol, it can seriously or even fatally damage the liver.  And since it turns up in so many medications, accidental overdoses can be tragically easy.  Some experts advocate  putting conspicuous labels on any medication that contains acetaminophen, and large-print warnings against overdosing. Others recommend simply eliminating it from any mixture to which it does not actually contribute anything useful. No doubt adding it to oxycontin or codeine was not originally intended to make those drugs more dangerous, but ultimately it does have that effect (rather like adding various poisonous substances to rubbing alcohol to keep it from being sold as a beverage without payment of the liquor tax..)

Mr. Wired suggests, if the pharmaceutical industry really wants to keep addicts from shooting up oxycontin or codeine from tablets, they could just as easily mix fiber into them—psyllium or whatever they use for Metamucil.  Not only would it make the tablet uninjectable, it would also serve to counteract the constipating effect of many opiates.  A whole new marketing gimmick, and one that would actually be useful to the patient.

The underlying question remains, however.  The War on Drugs makes it a lot harder for real patients with real medical needs to get analgesics without risks to their health than for addicts to get their daily fix.  Somehow I suspect that this is not what Hippocrates had in mind.

CynThesis

The Upside to a New Technology

HD Radio

For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, HD radio offers the possibility of a lot of really good stuff to the listener.  No, it bears absolutely no relation to HD television. But it is digital, and it comes in much more clearly than AM and many FM stations.  For more technical stuff, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Radio.  At least here in Chicago, stations are really taking advantage of it.  Especially 95.5, which used to be easy-listening jazz and then got bought out by a Hispanic megastation.  Now their HD station has reincarnated the previous easy-listening jazz station.  Good for them!  Most stations are just using HD to broadcast their usual stuff, but we’re hoping to see some more originality soon.  Unlike Sirius and XFM, it’s non-subscription, but you do have to have a dedicated radio.  There are several brands, but most of them are available only on-line.  The only place I know of to buy them in person is Radio Shack.  Obviously things may be different outside Chicago.  It would be nice to hear about what’s available in HD radio elsewhere.

Jane Grey

The Technology of Exposure

Does Privacy Require Anonymity?

More and more transactions are requiring picture identification documents.  An airline ticket used to be a negotiable bearer document–if you had it, you could use it, or you could give it to somebody else, or sell it.  Now it must be purchased by the person who intends to use it.  If s/he turns out not to be able to use it, s/he must turn it in for a refund, which the airline may or may not choose to provide.

This seems to be the wave of the future for intercity railroad and bus tickets as well.  Even paying in cash does not free the would-be traveler of this obligation.  (However, city and metropolitan public transportation tickets can still be purchased anonymously for cash.)

Driving a car, of course, requires a driver’s license.  Now, increasingly, buying a car does too.  And that car can be tracked by various street-corner videos and tollway security cameras, though so far not with any easy way to confirm who is actually driving.

Merely walking in and out of public buildings or on public streets and sidewalks can involve getting your picture taken, in still or video, with varying degrees of readability.  Using an ATM will almost certainly get your picture taken, but since you have to use a personally keyed card in such a transaction anyway, it matters only if you are not the person properly attached to the card.

Banks are now required, under various federal statutes against “money-laundering,” to report cash transactions involving $10,000.00 or more. And a person who carefully breaks down such transactions into three transactions of $3333 apiece can be prosecuted for evading such statutes.  Carrying large sums of cash can be a ground for suspicion of all kinds of offenses.  Your credit card, of course, enables any government agency to track your purchases by date, time, and place.

ID of some sort is usually required to rent a post office box.  If you make a phone call, the person on the other end will probably be able to ascertain who you are from a “caller I.D.” facility.

The only countervailing forces are new technologies which enable you to purchase a cell phone or a credit card and put money into its account in cash over the counter.  Never having done this, I have no idea what kind of I.D. is required for the transaction.  Nor am I willing to hazard a guess about how long law enforcement will take to require production of a picture ID for such transactions.

The purpose of all of these new strictures is to make us safer from money-laundering, drugs, and terrorism.  Have they made us any safer?  They haven’t been around long enough to tell.  My personal guess is that the larger quantity of information now available on the comings, goings, and financial transactions of each of us cuts both ways.  More can be known about us, but most of the agencies capable of accessing that knowledge lack the resources to read and use that knowledge effectively.  And the more information there is, the harder it is for the appropriate agencies to use it.  We found that out before September 11, 2001.  It turned out we already had lots of information on most of the hijackers.  But we were so badly backlogged in reading it that we didn’t know what we had until weeks or months later, when it was long since too late.  (One of the techies commenting on this problem in the months immediately after 9/11 pointed out, “You don’t get any better at finding needles in haystacks by adding more hay.”)

My guess is that, no matter how much information we gather on the lives of our ordinary citizens and residents, we will prioritize it for review based on what we think we already know about its subjects.  So we will continue to suspect “the usual suspects,” and let the moles and sleepers go their way because they are smart enough not to look like the usual suspects.

Does that mean that these new strictures do not impinge on our freedom?  Alas, no.  Certainly they impinge on the freedom of “the usual suspects,” about whom more can be known, and more limits placed on their lives, than ever before.   What this probably does is enable governmental and corporate authorities to protect their own power from dissidents and activists, and people with darker skins and flatter wallets than their own. Which may drive some of the usual suspects into the ranks of the terrorists, but will certainly not make us any safer from the real Bad Guys.

It’s scary to know how much information about us there is out there.  It is both more and less scary to know how much of that information is inaccurate.  For instance, I regularly get spam in my e-mail based on the assumption that I am a single Christian male with bad credit, erectile dysfunction, and a dog.  All but one of those assumptions is dead wrong.  My husband somehow got onto the mailing list of a psychic hot line that spells his name wrong!  He also regularly gets mail from the Hispanic Bar Association, despite the fact that he is neither Hispanic nor an attorney.  (Obviously all this stuff was meant for me, since I’m both, but this tells you a lot about organizational sexism in the Hispanic community.) We both get lots of attempts at contact from people who sell aluminum siding and other goods and services appropriate only for the owners of single-family detached houses, even though for 40-plus years we have lived in a multi-family building.

And those of us who read and write speculative fiction, as well as the political loonies at both ends of the spectrum, may also worry that, if governmental and corporate power is seized by the Bad Guys (or is already in their possession, depending which conspiracy theory you buy) we and the other Good Guys are already in their gunsights and no longer have any way to protect ourselves by “silence, exile, and cunning.”

On the other hand….

I do not share the idea of the self-proclaimed guardians of our privacy, such as the ACLU, that caller ID infringes the privacy of the caller.  When you make a phone call, you don’t have any privacy.  You are stepping outside of the zone of your privacy. You have no more right to conceal your phone number from the person you call than to knock on his door while wearing a mask.

Similarly, I believe that video cameras in public places do not violate the privacy of the people who frequent those places.  IF YOU WANT PRIVACY, STAY HOME!  In the public realm, your face is visible to all. All a camera does is make that visibility more durable in time. (No, I won’t get into recent burqah litigation, thank you.)

I am also not opposed to the idea of a universal ID.  On the contrary, I think we would be better off having it.  Places of public accommodation would no longer be able to discriminate against those they do not wish to serve, by claiming that their ID isn’t “good enough.”  We would know exactly which ID is good enough.  I think a universal ID would be a lot better than our current use of the driver’s license for that purpose.  People who are too old, too young, too disabled, or too poor to drive would no longer be reduced to second-class citizenship.  And the driver’s license could be returned to its original purpose of ensuring that people who drive are competent to do so, regardless of their immigration status.

That takes care of the present, and the technologies now available to pierce the veil of anonymity.  What about technologies that now exist but are not yet in wide use? For instance, what about medical information chips?  We already have them for our pets.  Cats, dogs, and horses get “chipped” for identification and to insure proper and prompt treatment for medical problems.  So far, only upscale animal owners bother with this, because it’s expensive.  But the price will come down fairly quickly, and at that point we may start to wonder why sauce for the cat cannot also be sauce for the cat’s person.  Are the chips a violation of privacy?  Do they improve our chances of getting the right emergency care when we are in no shape to demand it?  In theory, the answer to both questions is yes.  In fact, I suspect that medical chips will get used the way Medic-Alert tags get used now–when and as it’s convenient for emergency responders.  Most of us know of people who wear Medic-Alert bracelets, who have been picked up by paramedics who don’t bother to read the bracelets (sometimes with disastrous results.)  No technology is any better than the people who use it.  But what is absolutely certain is that the chips will be used first, not by medical professionals, but by insurance companies.  The insurers will devise some way to make sure that the people they insure get “chipped” with a complete record of all diagnoses and treatments, in order to avoid insuring anybody whose medical past they don’t like.  This will, of course, provide the patient with less medical care, not more.

In the meantime, we all carry “smart cards,” such as credit/debit cards, bus passes, and library cards.  Most of those, at least theoretically, enable Them to track Our movements anywhere within reach of a card reader, which is most towns, cities, and businesses.  Should I leave my smart cards home?

And what about the technologies we can imagine, or are even in the process of implementing, for the future?  That really is the realm of speculative fiction, and the gee-whiz crime investigation TV shows that recklessly tread the border between what we can already do and what we can imagine doing (or could do if our governmental agencies had the money.) We could use public video to identify every person who crosses a particular intersection, or all intersections.  We could run that information through real-time information processing that would set off an alarm every time a camera sights a person wanted for a crime, and direct the police to his current location to arrest him.  Because we generally prefer paying for gadgetry to paying for the people who use it, we probably will never have enough cops to actually respond to every such alarm.  Or the resources in the criminal justice system to prosecute and lock up all the offenders caught this way.  So we will concentrate on information emanating from the places we consider most important, either because of their proximity to the people and places we are willing to take the trouble to protect, or because of their likelihood of turning up large numbers of the usual suspects with minimal effort.

In short, if we merely use advanced technologies to do more, faster, of what we are already doing now, we will merely get more of what we are getting now, faster.  Only if we would be satisfied with that as a goal should we bother pursuing it.  Or, as Mr. Wired explained early in the days of the computer, what we learn from computer technology is that it is possible to get a reputation for being extremely smart simply by doing one or two stupid things very quickly and very often.

Red Emma

The Anti-Ugly League

When I was in college, I dated a city planning major for a while.  A friend of his belonged to the Anti-Ugly League, an organization that had its roots in Britain but apparently was trying to branch out into the US.  Its mission was to oppose ugly architecture, either by written criticism or by public demonstrations such as picketing with signs like “This is an ugly building”, and occasionally by throwing eggs at really ugly buildings.  I just tried googling the league, with no results, so I can only conclude that they have shut down, probably because there was just too much work for them to handle.  Apparently, in the UK, Prince Charles has taken over some of their job, as we see from That Other Blog.  The Chicago chapter, if we ever get around to starting one, should probably be called Friends of Donald Delgade (he being the hapless ex-mental patient who drove his car through the glass walls of the Thompson Center in Chicago in 1999.)

Since my brief relationship with The Planner, I have become something of an architecture buff myself. In college in the early 1960s, I audited a course on the history of American architecture.  A few years later, Mr. Wired and I moved to Chicago, where roughly half of the buildings we had covered in the course had been built. By that time, half of them had been torn down.  But I actually had the privilege of working in two of those remaining, and living two blocks away from a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  (And my favorite niece is an architect.)

All of which has led me to a top-of-the-head classification scheme for architecture. There are Great Buildings, and there are Good Buildings.  Great Buildings are impressive to look at from the outside, in isolation or in their geological and architectural setting. What they mainly impress the viewer with is the importance and greatness of whoever or whatever commissioned the building in question.  The ultimate Great Building is the Great Pyramid of Giza.  Note that the Great Pyramid is not only not intended to be lived in, it is in fact a tomb.  Once completed, it was never intended to be seen from the inside at all.

As opposed to Good Buildings, which are judged by how well they suit the people and entities that live and work inside them.  The major architectural thinkers tend to do most of their thinking about Great Buildings, perhaps because it’s easier and pays better.  By definition, after all, anyone who can commission a Great Building can afford to pay for it.  Whereas most of the people who will be living and working inside buildings can’t.  Working out ways to get Good Buildings paid for is a major economic discipline in itself.

Some horrible examples of attempted Great Buildings at their worst: in the 1950s and 1960s, it became fashionable to construct major public buildings, such as schools and colleges, out of poured concrete, and with flat roofs.  I had the misfortune to teach in several such buildings in Chicago.  Over the following 20 years, all of them developed leaks and cracks, and ultimately crumbled.  All of them have since been either completely rehabbed, or abandoned and rebuilt altogether.  The big secrets are that (a) flat roofs don’t work in cold wet climates like Chicago’s; moisture doesn’t pour off them as it does from pitched roofs, so, since it has to go somewhere, it is likely to end up inside the building, or worse still, inside the walls of the building. (Flat roofs are for deserts!) and (b) poured concrete is susceptible to expansion and shrinkage in extremes of temperature, which sooner or later leads to cracking, leaking, and crumbling.  As an added bonus, buildings that leak sooner or later attract mold spores and become medically dangerous to those who live and work in them.

(In a supreme irony, one of the law students who worked for me a few years ago had been an undergrad architecture major at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which prides itself on most of its buildings—sorry, Great Buildings–having been designed by Mies Van Der Rohe—flat-roofed glass boxes.  My student’s opinion of Van Der Rohe was seriously impacted by the fact that one of those buildings, in which he had his studio, leaked all over a major set of his drawings and nearly cost him his degree.)

Even the Great Buildings I really like, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s stuff, have the same problems.  Falling Water is, well, falling.  The Robie House (two blocks from where I live) is in a constant state of rehabbing.  One would think that the first requirement for Greatness in a building would be that it stays up without undue effort and keeps out the weather.

Architecture, in addition to aspiring either to Greatness or Goodness, has politics.  Totalitarian architecture, like that sponsored by Hitler and Stalin, is readily distinguishable from democratic architecture like the Acropolis.  The easiest way is to look for doors and windows and other “envelope penetrations,” as engineers now call them.  The Acropolis has them all over the place. Admittedly it is situated in a mostly warm and dry climate.  But fascist architecture—regardless of climate–has as few as possible, often no windows at all, or no street-level windows, and only one or at most two doors.  This enables The Authorities to monitor and control who comes in and goes out.

You may have noticed an increasing proliferation of fascist buildings, both public and private, especially since 9/11.  Older buildings have for many years been caught in the crossfire of a war between architects (who try to design buildings with doors in all the most convenient places for ingress and egress) and administrators (who then lock all but the single least convenient one.)  Additionally, in the years since the time of Hitler and Stalin, more and more public buildings have been erected with their only entrances in places other than on a pedestrian-accessible street—one floor up from an entrance kiosk, down in a parking garage, or around the corner in a parking lot. And that was before metal detectors.

It’s easy to talk about Great Buildings and their drawbacks.  It’s harder to define Good Buildings, much less analyse them.  Christopher Alexander has taken some useful stabs at it.  Stewart Brand, in How Buildings Learn, talks about the ways a building can change, for better or for worse, throughout its lifetime. In the process, he says some useful things about how Good Buildings change for the better.  Aside from that, not being the Prince of Wales, I haven’t had the time to construct a reading list on the subject, much less read everything on it.  But we should be encouraging underemployed royals, and anybody else with the time and the inclination, to think about this stuff seriously, since there isn’t enough money in it for the rest of us to do it for a living.  Buildings shape the lives of the people who live and work in and around them, just as they are shaped by those people.

Jane Grey

Health Care Revisited Once Again

What Am I Missing This Time Dept.

The Prez came back to Chicago yesterday to present his health care program to a major set of stakeholders.  Aside from tying up traffic long enough to make me 20 minutes late for a client appointment, what he accomplished remains to be seen.  But some interesting observations come to mind:

• NPR, at least, now feels it has to explain to its listening public that the American Medical Association is “a major group of doctors.”  This probably reflects the fact that the AMA, which was once a universally known name brand, now represents no more than 19% of practicing physicians.  Do other MSM types feel the same need to explain who they are?
• The docs are worried about unfair competition from a government medical plan.  I find this baffling.  Aren’t most of them the same guys who believe government can’t do anything right, and government medical plans (most notably those in Canada and the UK) are a total disaster?  Why on earth would the savvy consumers in the American public choose a total disaster over the sunny vistas of today’s health care system?
• Obama is talking about cutting Medicare costs, at the same time that he is touting Medicare as the model for the government option plan.  This also doesn’t exactly make sense.  Most people I know who have Medicare are more or less happy with it, but docs generally think it wildly undercompensates them.  OTOH, that was not a part of yesterday’s discussion at the AMA convention.

CynThesis

Required Reading

The New American Militarism

Andrew J. Bacevich

Thirty-plus years ago, I sat in somebody else’s suburban living room and heard Daniel Ellsberg say that we weren’t on the wrong side in Vietnam, we were the wrong side.  At the time I thought it was hyperbole, though I found a lot of the other things he said that night very persuasive.  Like “if every American who was against the war had been willing to lose his job to stop it, it would have been over long since.”

Now I have found myself reviewing a lot of what Ellsberg said then.  I just finished Andrew Bacevich’s book, The New American Militarism, and it puts a lot of things into a different light.  It was written in 2005, two years before the author’s own son was killed in action in Iraq.  Bacevich has been both professional soldier and academic, and now a Gold Star father.  This impressive life has resulted in several impressive books.

Bacevich is a historian, and he starts the story of American expansionist militarism where it pretty much began, with Woodrow Wilson, who got elected to keep us out of World War I and ended by dragging us into it (sound familiar?), and then into a peace that almost inevitably led to World War II, all to “make the world safe for democracy.”  (Bacevich neglects to mention that the kind of democracy Wilson had in mind had no place for citizens with darker skins than his own; among his other dubious achievements, Wilson re-segregated Washington DC.)

Bacevich goes on to describe the oscillating fortunes of American militarism through the 20^th century and into the 21^st.  After World War I, the military establishment shrank back almost to its 19^th-century size, as the Depression and the mistreatment of World War I veterans soured the public on foreign wars.  With the exception of more-or-less illegal leftist participation in the Spanish Civil War, that sourness lasted until Pearl Harbor, when the military sprang back with a vengeance.

Bacevich, like many revisionist historians on all sides, has taken to re-numbering the World Wars. After World War II came the Cold War, which he prefers to call World War III.  Its early years were both expansionist and beneficent.  It kept communism out of Western Europe with the cornucopia of the Marshall Plan and the shield of several hundred thousand American soldiers on bases all through the “free world.” (This was when, in keeping with this idealistic mindset, the War Department became the Defense Department.) In Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it didn’t do so well.

Which brings us to Vietnam.  Back in 1962, when most Americans didn’t even know where Vietnam was, the upper reaches of the Kennedy administration were the scene of a great debate pitting deterrence/massive retaliation/nukes against counterinsurgency. (I was a distant witness of that debate, in the Stuart Hughes vs. Ted Kennedy senatorial campaign in Massachusetts.)  In Vietnam, the counterinsurgency buffs won out.  That was where the Ugly American came from—Burdick’s novel about the good-hearted American trying to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, and save Vietnam from the evil communists.  And of course, the counterinsurgency buffs failed, either because theirs was the wrong strategy, or because they lacked the courage of their convictions in implementing it.

Present-day analysts of that war like to find ways of blaming it for all our current problems, from all possible sides.  Did we lose because we were wrong to be there in the first place?  Or were we wrong to be there because in the end we lost?  The orthodox military historians consider the American defeat the result of political interference in the military’s business.  So, of course, did Rambo.  Bacevich points out that the original American ideal was civilian (i.e. political) control of the military.  The civilians (politicians) were to set forth the goals and the military would then supply the means.  But that relationship has always been an uneasy one, especially since Americans have a habit of electing military leaders to civilian political office, and furthermore don’t much like civilian politicians. After Vietnam, it broke down completely for a while. The American civilian public repudiated the military leaders who had organized the war and the grunts who had fought it.  (Bacevich doesn’t mention this, and may well not have known it, but for the first ten years after the Vietnam War ended, the only American civilians who gave a flaming damn for the welfare of Vietnam veterans were all in the peace movement.)

[Sidenote: I don’t mean to diminish the value of Bacevich’s work, especially since so far, this is the only book of his that I’ve read.  If I do him an injustice when I point out things he doesn’t mention in it, I apologize deeply, because in general this book knocks my socks off.]

The Cold War/WWIII ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.  It was popularly considered a victory for “our side.”  It might more accurately be viewed as the culmination of a potlatch, that fascinating institution of the Northwest Pacific Indians, in which a person or a group gains power, status, and dominance by winning a contest to see who can destroy or give away more of what he values most.

Afterward, the Vietnam debacle ultimately gave rise to the Powell Doctrine, enunciated first by one of the younger graduates of that school of hard knocks: we don’t enter a war except to protect America’s vital interests; the war must have concrete, achievable objectives; it must have the full support of the American people; it must have an exit strategy set up at the very beginning; and we must approach the task with “overwhelming force”—not merely sufficient, but preponderant.

The First Gulf War was the model for this doctrine (and the opening salvo of what Bacevich calls World War IV.)   Indeed, the First Gulf War, in a few short months, completely rehabilitated the reputation of the American military and of American militarism.  It was short, cheap (in both casualties and finances—Bacevich doesn’t mention that one of the reasons everybody liked it was that we fought it mostly on other people’s money), popular (at home and abroad, which is how we managed to get other people to pay for it), and effective.  It was even preceded by a stirring and impressive congressional debate, probably the most serious public discussion of Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution in more than fifty years.

But it was the very opposite of the Wilsonian ideal.  The American army stopped well short of Baghdad and left Saddam Hussein in power.  The United States paid minimal honor to our promises to the Kurds and the Sunnis, who had relied on us when they rose up against Saddam; to protect them, we created a batch of no-fly zones, policed regularly from the air.  And the international community imposed economic sanctions on Iraq which reduced it from its previous highly-industrialized status to a part of the Third World. We changed Iraq, but not by democratizing it.

And it was followed by what Bacevich portrays as a perfect storm of neoconservative politics, newly-politicized evangelical religion, a newly-professionalized officer corps, and a “crusade theory of warfare.”  It was no longer enough to set limited military goals and accomplish them.  “Containment” was once again a dirty word.  The United States has been divinely chosen to rule and impose its values on the world.

We all know what happened next. First came 9/11.  Conspiracy wackos like to think it was the work of either the Elders of Zion or the CIA.  What matters is that, if Osama bin Laden hadn’t set up 9/11, the Bush government would have had to, to accomplish its own ends.  ( If the Reichstag fire had been caused by improper use of smoking materials, who would know the difference today?)

At first, Bush responded more or less appropriately, by dropping bombs on the region from which Al Quaeda had plotted the attack.  But then, he turned his glance back on Iraq.  And at first, even that seemed to follow the Powell doctrine.  The troops went straight to Baghdad, wiped out most of the Iraqi army, and floated the “Mission Accomplished” banner.

A peripheral note here on karma: during the First Gulf War, Saddam decided to pull the rest of the Arab world into the war on his side by dropping some bombs on Israel.  Israel, of course, was in no way a party to the war on either side.  The US had asked them to stay out, and they complied.  But Saddam figured, logically enough for an Arab politician, that bombing Israel for no reason whatever was an activity all the other Arab governments would want to get in on.  It didn’t work, partly because too many Arab governments worried that Saddam did not play nicely with others, and that his Arab “allies” might end up meeting the same fate as Kuwait.  But Saddam himself became the victim of precisely the same kind of maneuver from Bush several years later—Bush decided that, if he couldn’t count on overthrowing Osama bin Laden, he could at least reconstitute the old “coalition of the willing” by overthrowing their old adversary, who had in no way been a party to 9/11.  That didn’t work either, except on the UK and a few representatives of “the new Europe.” But one has to admire the symmetry of what happened to Saddam.

Bacevich ends with a sheaf of recommendations for amending our national life that include restoring the primacy of the legislative branch in warmaking decisions, restoring the ideal of the “citizen soldier” by attaching the promise of a free college education to national service, pulling US military bases out of those parts of the world long since capable of defending themselves, giving the State Department the budget and teeth to make realistic foreign policy, and setting realistic limits on the military budget.  It’s a breathtaking panorama, and in a recent book-signing at the bookstore down the block from my home, Bacevich seemed to acknowledge that the Obama administration was no closer to implementing it than Bush had been, not yet anyway.  Conventional wisdom calls Bacevich a paleoconservative.  He may in fact be preaching that old-time political religion established by the Framers.  One hopes that the new administration is paying serious attention to it.

CynThesis

Who’s Flying Your Plane?

That’s today’s headline in the local paper. It’s about, of course, the commuter plane crash near Buffalo, a few months back, in which all passengers and crew died. The crew included two pilots with minimal experience and low pay, lousy test scores, long commutes, and almost no chance to rest between flights. Apparently many small commuter airlines have similar staffing problems. They pay their starting pilots between $16,000 and $30,000 per year. The airlines in question piously hope that publicizing this kind of information won’t make the public reluctant to fly small airlines, whose staffing is just as good as that of the rest of the industry.

Right. Just as good as Sully the Miracle Man who, during the same period, with all engines stopped by bird strikes, managed to save all passengers and crew aboard his plane by landing it in the middle of the Hudson River at rush hour in New York. He, of course, has been flying for U.S. Airways or its predecessors for nearly 30 years, plus military flying service. We don’t know his income, but we can reasonably assume it’s well into the six figures. He obviously deserves every penny of it. But an airline spokesman says there is no connection between pilot pay and flight safety. Yeah, right.

Which raises the question—most of us fly at most a couple of times a month, and more often a couple of times a year. While the professionalism of our pilots on those occasions is an essential concern, it isn’t a constant concern. Unlike, say, the question of who’s caring for your toddlers, or your parents, or your disabled family member.

According to the Service Employees International Union, the average home health care worker earns between 6 and 8 dollars an hour, rarely works a full week of 40 hours, and gets no benefits whatever. And no, these not teenagers working their way up to better things; most of them are over 45, and many are over 65. For them, this is as good as it gets. Many of them have disabilities of their own, which they cannot afford to attend to.

While a pilot is responsible for a lot more lives, s/he also shares that responsibility with a co-pilot and an engineer. Even the cheapest of the regional airlines examined by the Chicago Trib pays $78 per hour in training and salary per crew member for its flight crews, or roughly $250 per hour total. That’s well over 30 times the hourly wage of a home health care worker, who probably cares for three or four clients over a week. If one of those clients is a member of your family, are you sure this makes sense?

Let’s get back to the issue of connection between pay and safety, either in the cockpit or behind a wheelchair. The main reason workers get paid at all is to enable them to maintain, day to day, their own ability to work. If they don’t get paid enough to maintain stable housing (note that an increasing proportion of homeless people have jobs, and that one of the pilots in the crashed Colgan flight had spent the previous night on a couch in the staff lounge), that will be reflected in the quality of their work.

The other reason workers get paid, of course, is to motivate them to show up and do their jobs competently. Most economic historians have concluded that ante bellum slavery in the American South, lacking this motivation for its workers, was grossly inefficient and might well have died on its own in a few decades, had the Civil War not intervened.

Unlike the airline industry, the home health care “industry” lacks any governmental statistical oversight. So we don’t really know much about the risks to client health and safety caused by poorly trained, underpaid, overworked home health care workers. But while you’re on the ground, gentle reader, you should have time to stop worrying about whether your pilot has been properly trained, housed, and rested. Why not use that time to worry about whether the person who takes care of your mother-in-law, or your nephew, or who will someday be taking care of you, is able to do the job safely.

Red Emma