Magical Thinking, Al Queda, and Aliens

The origin of Guantánamo is pure magical thinking, as is the current mainland US resistance to bringing Gitmo defendants onto our soil for trial before federal courts. Perhaps the ancient Hindu practice of untouchability is the clearest analog. A person who can pollute places and people by his very presence in a room, or by casting his shadow upon a Brahmin’s food, is, on one hand, the lowest of the low. On the other hand, he also has a kind of super-power. Remember cooties? Back when we were fifth-graders and the boys had decided that girls had cooties, the girls could chase the boys halfway across the playground threatening to pollute them. Oh, to have that kind of power again!

Well, Al Quaeda, and anybody even remotely suspected of being connected with Al Quaeda, has that power. If any of them are allowed onto US soil, we will instantly dissolve into terror and anarchy. The super-max prisons that now securely hold the worst of our worst home-grown criminals are presumed to be utterly ineffectual against these Muslim super-criminals. Never mind that the latter’s accents and looks make them a lot easier to spot and retrieve than our home-grown murderers and rapists. Never mind that many of them have probably been deprived of most of their physical and mental competence by their treatment at Gitmo. Once their feet touch US soil, they will gain 100 pounds, get a foot taller, and turn green and even meaner than, say, Ted Bundy, Ted Kosinski, and Brian Dugan.

We knew that back in 2001, of course, which is why we created Gitmo in the first place. Those of you familiar with pagan magick know about wards and circles, which create places outside normal space and time to which the most dangerous forces can be restricted. Well, that was Gitmo. The detention facility there was created to be a legal black hole, under no one’s jurisdiction for purposes of legal review, but under the absolute control of the US government for purposes of keeping the Bad Guys from our shores. Of course, as anyone who saw “A Few Good Men” well knows, there is legal US jurisdiction at Gitmo. That’s why the US military servicemembers stationed there can be disciplined and even court-martialed, right there on the base, if they violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they don’t like the result, they can even appeal, first up the military chain of command all the way to the Pentagon, and then to the civilian federal court system on the mainland. But, apparently, the US public can’t handle that truth either. They/we can accept the novel concept of an “unlawful combatant” who is in a different category from prisoners of war, spies and irregulars subject to being shot on sight, and criminal defendants. Such a person therefore cannot be granted any of the legal rights of POWs or criminal defendants. But by reason of some strange compunction, he cannot be shot on sight either (perhaps because many of them were never encountered by US authorities on the battlefield in the first place, but were picked up from local bounty hunters.) Presumably that’s one of the three impossible things a good American is required to believe before breakfast. But we can’t imagine allowing these people to touch our sacred soil, lest they pollute it, and us, with deadly weakness.

Which is closely related to what happens to our sacred soil when the wrong kind of alien touches it. And also what happens to the right kind of alien (ie anti-communists and especially Cubans) touches that same soil—they are immediately free and legal. The soil that renders anti-communist Cubans free and legal is itself rendered vulnerable and polluted by capitalist-wannabe Mexicans. Does Hogwarts know about this?

Red Emma

Groups upset man wouldn’t marry interracial couple

“By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer – 6 mins ago

“NEW ORLEANS – At least two civil and constitutional rights groups in Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple.

“The head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana and the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice said Keith Bardwell should quit immediately.

“Bardwell is a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana. He refused earlier this month to issue a license or marry Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black.

“Bardwell said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace.

“He says children of such unions face troubling futures.”

Umm, like the President of the United States? Or Tiger Woods? Oh, never mind.

Red Emma

Why Are There Poor People?

Beck’s comment on my last post inspires this query. “[T]he existence of our poor,” says Beck, “emerges from a massively systemic problem with the way our political and economic systems are structured.” It also triggers my recall of an old album of comedian Bill Cosby about the joys of a college education, titled “Why Is There Air?” Cosby chats about the various kinds of people he met in college, from the philosophy majors who went around asking “why is there air?” to the athletes who knew perfectly well why there is air—it’s for blowing up basketballs.

Cosby, however, not having been a philosophy major himself, didn’t stop off and look at Aristotle’s multiple analysis of causality. There’s:

• The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.
• The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
• The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
• The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

So okay, the material cause of poverty is lack of resources. That’s easy. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway between them made it plain. The poor are different from us because they have less money, or none at all.

The efficient cause requires an economodicy (it’s a monstrous word, but I can’t think of a better one for justifying the ways of The Invisible Hand to man.) Maybe the Invisible Hand is the efficient cause.

The final cause: the perceived self-interest of everybody, I suppose.

The formal cause is the really difficult one, here. We tend to regard poor people as useless. In fact, they are anything but useless.

Let’s stipulate to two classes of poor people: the working poor and the begging poor. The begging poor are necessary as a spectre to frighten the working poor into continuing to work. If there were no homeless people or panhandlers, Wall Street would have to hire out-of-work actors to impersonate them. (In my conspiracy theorist moments, I suspect they did, at least in the early ‘80s.) Poverty gives people an incentive to work harder to make money for other people as well as for themselves. Without poverty, we would all be lounging in some Polynesian Eden, picking breadfruit off the trees and getting semi-dressed for the next luau.

And the working poor are necessary to do the things for which machines are still too expensive. In Saudi Arabia, where oil reserves have pretty much abolished poverty among native Saudis, they actually have to import an entire population of poor people to do their manual labor, mostly from Asia.

This explanation of the formal cause of poverty, of course, requires some entity to do the formulating. In economics, that’s a whole field of study in itself. The Invisible Hand? The Ruling Classes? I tend to the latter explanation, if only because I can’t get my mind around the notion of what an Invisible Hand can be planning. Yes, there are people in positions of power in our economy who consciously and deliberately see the existence of poverty as one among many implements creating The Workable Economy. That was, essentially, the thinking behind the developments that brought one generation after another of new workers into newly-created poor people’s jobs. First it was married women, to do the clerical work. Then it was teenagers, to flip burgers. Then it was former welfare recipients, now “reformed” into the private sector, to become temporary or part-time workers with no job security, even from week to week, and no benefits. Somewhere along the line, undocumented immigrants got into the act, to do anything American poor people wouldn’t or couldn’t do for the wages available.

Of course, most employers who pay poverty wages don’t actually like employing poor people. Poor people are fat, and ugly. They have lousy teeth and sometimes questionable personal hygiene. And they keep missing work, or being late, usually because they’re sick or their cars have broken down or somebody in the family has some dumb problem and can’t take care of it without help. Whenever possible, employers prefer hiring people who are middle-class by virtue of the earnings and assets of other family members, and who therefore won’t start living and looking like poor people simply by virtue of not having enough money. That is, the employer is looking for a subsidy from the worker’s family, in return for the inestimable gift of a job. If I show up at a Mercedes dealership with a bus token and assume that the dealer will stake me to the rest of the cost of the car, I’m pretty nervy. But an employer who pays poverty wages and expects the families of his workers to stake him to workers with the look and behavior and work habits of middle-class people is just being rationally self-interested.

Anyway, that’s why there are poor people. Beck calls this a problem with our economic structure. That depends, obviously, on what the economic structure is for. A case can be made that poverty is a solution, from some points of view.

Red Emma

Mean(s) Testing and Compassionate Conservatism

Most self-proclaimed conservatives who believe government has any legitimate role in alleviating poverty, believe that role must begin with means testing, that is, checking to make sure that any would-be recipient of government aid to the poor really is poor. They underline their case with horrifying references to “welfare queens” using food stamps to buy steak and lobster, and travelling to and from the welfare office in Cadillacs. The goal these compassionate conservatives claim to be aiming at is a reasonable one–let’s give scarce public resources only to the people who really need them. Even when public resources are more plentiful, they are still most effective when targeted to those most in need.

But the c.c.’s–who normally presume that all the consequences of any governmental program not aimed at killing the enemies of the people at home (police) or abroad (army) are unintended–seem to have lost their grip on this fundamental law as it applies to means testing. Means testing really does have unintended consequences. At least, one hopes they are unintended. (Oliver Stone probably thinks they are intended.)

First, the eligibility line for any means-tested program is always set at least a couple of notches below the income which would enable a person to purchase all of the goods and services supplied by such programs in the private sector. There is always a group of people in the middle, too poor for private health insurance but too rich for Medicaid, too poor to be able to afford a balanced diet on their own funds but too rich for food stamps, too poor to be able to afford the rent on a decent private-sector apartment large enough for the whole family but too rich for public housing, too poor to be able to afford a lawyer but too rich for Legal Aid. Naturally that group in the middle will direct their envy and anger, not upward at the legislative and regulatory bodies that set the eligibility standards, nor at the agencies that administer them, but at the people below them who do qualify. This too, we must presume, is unintended.

Second, the procedure for qualifying for such programs requires the applicant to supply humiliating and exhausting detail about his or her personal life, beginning of course with the public (or at least on-the-record) acknowledgment of being poor. Most of us would rather confess to having sex with an underage dead chicken than to poverty, these days. But the mere admission of poverty is never enough. Verification must be supplied: paycheck stubs, rent receipts, utility bills and so on. The official purpose of the ritual is to weed out ineligible applicants. But the effect is to weed out any of the eligible applicants who still retain any pride or still value their personal privacy. This mostly gets rid of applicants without dependents, since most of us will endure a lot more humiliation and intrusion to provide for our children and disabled or elderly relatives than for ourselves. Anyway, we know for a fact, and repeated studies have verified it, that nearly half of those eligible for governmental assistance to the poor either never apply for it, or drop out of the process in the very early stages. We have known it for well over 50 years. I’m with Oliver Stone on this one–we want it this way.

Third, once we have designated a program as being for “the poor” and no one else, no one else but the poor will have any interest in maintaining it, or administering it properly and effectively. Once a program has been labeled “for poor people only”, its days are numbered. Why should “we” pay for a program that benefits only “them”?

Most of us have lived with this situation so long that we respond almost reflexively, “But of course the people who need the programs can’t afford to pay for them–otherwise, why would they need them? And of course the people who pay for the programs don’t need them. The best we can do is appeal to their sense of generosity and charity. ” (We do that, of course, only after a concerted campaign to discredit those virtues.) But we literally cannot imagine any other way to distribute public benefits, except by putting the people who pay on one side of the Great Divide and the people who receive on the other, and making sure than never the twain shall meet.

Well, no, it’s not quite accurate to say we cannot imagine any other way. We have in our midst a program open to most citizens and residents of this great country regardless of their current resources, and paid for by almost all of us. It is the most popular government program in the history of this country. And it is currently under constant assault in a relentless effort to discredit, privatize, and ultimately destroy it precisely because, to most of us, until very recently, it was proof positive that government could do something useful in alleviating poverty without humiliating the beneficiaries of the program.

I am referring, of course, to Social Security. Until a decade ago, the closest thing to a means test for Social Security (or its younger brother, Medicare) was an earnings limit. Now, even that is long gone. And the compassionate conservatives–including even some “centrist” liberals–cannot stop fulminating at the thought that Bill Gates will someday be able to collect his $1,100.00 per month from the public treasury. Under current law, most of that $1,100.00 would actually be taxed away (although the value of Gates’ Medicare would not.) Most American senior citizens can live with that arrangement, because it spares them the necessity of confessing poverty and pleading for charity. But conservatives and “centrists” simply cannot swallow the idea of giving a public benefit to anyone without collecting the recipient’s dignity in return. Indeed, now that we have finally given up on the idea of privatizing Social Security, our main suggestion for “saving” it is to means-test it.

Most honest conservatives will come out and say that, regardless of where it comes from or what we call it, any aid to the poor from the non-poor is charity, and the poor should acknowledge that fact. Means-testing is one of the more effective ways of rubbing it in. Which might be acceptable, if we were willing to allow dignity to the recipients of our charity. If “poor” were not a four-letter word. If we did not, at heart, believe that all of us get what we deserve and deserve what we get. Or don’t get.

I prefer the Jewish tradition in its view of charity. To the extent that we have any resources, they come ultimately from the Holy One, Who makes all of us conduits for those resources. I like the approach of Maimonides, Writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, he is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have. The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.) If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin. Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies. Ultimately, he says, means-testing is the job of the Holy One.

Cynthesis

Living in an Immaterial World

A few weeks ago, Amazon.com did something that rocked the whole system of private property. And all most of us did about it was kvetch. We saw it as a mere inconvenience. You buy a copy of 1984 for your Kindle™, and some days later, you log back on and discover 1984 isn’t there. Since then, Amazon has explained, and apologized, and most recently cleared up the legalities between Amazon and George Orwell’s estate or whatever owns the rights to 1984, and most of those who bought it have had it restored. Most of us regard it as a mere pothole on the road of life. It’s patched now, all’s well that ends well and so on.

Given that most people buy books before reading them, rather than after, can we then conclude that those inconvenienced bibliophiles are only now reading 1984 for the first time, and only now realizing that Orwell pretty much predicted what has happened to his book? George Winston, after all, was in the business of making, and remaking, history, in the most basic sense, de-happening events that had now become inconvenient for Big Brother’s current ideology. Those of us who read the book before Amazon put it onto Kindle™, or at least some of us, are bloody spooked. Anybody who can make a book disappear from your library without any kind of notice, much less permission, can just as easily change the content of the book so that (for instance) Big Brother turns out to be the hero, and poor George Winston is just a pathetic dupe. Or rewrite the history of the Civil War to make slavery a noble cause. Or rewrite the JFK assassination to make Lee Harvey Oswald a Wahhabi Muslim and Marina Oswald a femiNazi.

How do you know that when you Google™ a news story from 2005, you won’t see George W. Bush™ filling sandbags and pitching in to reinforce the levees in New Orleans? Or Silvio Berlusconi™ inventing a new and vastly improved version of linguini bolognese? Or Governor Sanford entering a monastery?

Back in “the Sixties,” when Mr. Wired and I were active in all kinds of countercultural religion and politics, I took to clipping the papers regularly, to preserve stuff that I felt the next generation would never believe if I couldn’t produce it. (In the Talmud, BTW, you run across all sorts of weird stories to which the Rabbis themselves add a little note: “If it were not written, it would be impossible to believe this.”) I filled up most of a 4-drawer filing cabinet with high-acid-content paper (that was the flaw in my reasoning), which I only recently went through and mostly discarded, since it has mostly turned into stiff yellow snowflakes of indecipherable memory and I needed the drawer space for client files. Now, like most other people, I am at the mercy of the Mass Media and what little paper documentation the librarians have managed to preserve.

The Buddhists (with whom I have been hanging out occasionally of late) would not be seriously distressed by these developments. Nor would a client of mine from thirty-odd years ago who was trying to get discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector because, while on maneuvers in Hawaii, he sat on a beach for an evening and became Enlightened. My usual approach to these cases is to refer the client to a psychiatrist who firmly believes military service is bad for most people’s mental health, especially that of people who think killing people is wrong, and encourage Uncle Sam to discharge the client for reasons of emotional stability. It’s usually faster and cheaper than using the official regulations for Conscientious Objector discharge. This client objected to the tactic. He wasn’t crazy, he explained. The Navy was crazy. They still believed in the reality of the material universe. The real universe is an eternally-flowing mesh of causes and consequences, assumptions and reactions.

Now, causality can reach backward as easily as forward. If we need the Reconstruction to have been a Bad Thing in order to accomplish some current political goal, we can revise it without even recalling and re-publishing the encyclopedias and textbooks that will shape the next generation’s understanding of history.

Which assumes, of course, that the next generation will have an understanding of history. Yesterday, a paralegal in our office, a smart and reasonably well-educated young woman, asked me who was on the other side in World War II. While Big Brother’s right hand is busy rewriting history, his left hand has managed to make the whole idea of history irrelevant to those who would ordinarily be expected to create its next chapter. When Seward, mourning the just-deceased Lincoln, said “Now he belongs to the ages,” he meant that Lincoln would always be part of what shaped America and the world. These days, when somebody says that a particular person or thing is “history,” they mean it’s gone, disappeared, never to be seen again. Even the History Channel™ is mostly taken up with the exploits of ice road truckers in Alaska and myopic analyses of the DaVinci Code pitting the Freemasons against the Bavarian Illuminati.

We are just now realizing that all the gee-whiz forensic technology that lies at the foundation of any criminal prosecution in which the State has somehow not managed to persuade the defendant to plead guilty, is highly fallible, precisely because it contains nothing so physical as a smoking gun, just a bunch of digital impressions on “a media” [sic] that the next generation of forensic “scientists” won’t even be able to read.

Friends of mine with libraries as extensive as the one in the Wired residence are contemplating selling them, or donating them to schools in the Third World, or recycling them for pulp, now that the best that has been thought and said is available in digitized format through Google™ or whoever, on “a media” the size of a good Cuban cigar. But a good cigar is, at least, a smoke. The best that has been thought and said can be rendered unreadable through a simple electromagnetic hiccup or an “updated” digitizing format.

We have already allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the best music and drama that has been composed and performed being recorded onto one short-lived medium after another. Those of us who really cared about such stuff now have more than six generations of it in our “media rooms,” accumulated over only a mere half-century. More reasonable people just throw out the last generation when the new one reaches an affordable price. The newest generation, of course, doesn’t exactly accumulate at all. Like the Kindle™ books, it merely takes up residence on our current “media” until we get bored with it, and then makes way for the next batch of stuff. We never own any of it.

I think (maybe I’ve been hanging out with Buddhists too long?) that this might be okay if the generations of ideas and songs and plays that wander into and out of our minds originated among real thinkers and artists, and not just the minions of media conglomerates who “own” most of what gets “created” these days. I’ve been through distributing the books and records and pictures of my deceased parents and friends, and part of me doesn’t want to put anybody through the same process again for my stuff. But if the alternative is to let Sony, Bertelsman, and Gulf Western do my thinking and my enjoying for me while I live, and leave no thoughts or music of my own to those who come after me, then, thanks, I’ll stay in the material world a while longer, even if it means stumbling over my accumulated books and music while I live and burdening my friends and family with them afterward.

Jane Grey

Starve and Shoot

How do you get rid of a mule when everybody else on the farm really likes it? First you cut out one of its daily feedings, then you cut back to food every other day, then every third day. By that time, the mule is so weak it can’t do any work at all, so nobody will blame you if you shoot it.

How do you get rid of a program (whether government, corporate, or TV) that people really like but you (one of the people in charge) really hate?  It’s easy.  You underfund it, understaff it, reorganize the caseload and the chain of command every four months or so, move it around so nobody can find it, and, in general, deprive it of all the things that made people like it in the first place. Then, when you kill it, if people notice its absence at all, they’ll just say good riddance, it had already jumped the shark anyway.

I have personally been involved in one such shameful episode (you may have your own) in our nation’s history, when the federal agency I worked for became the target of its own administration’s dislike.  That was how I found out that the administration, if it has any smarts at all, will not respond by firing everybody and shutting the agency down, because that’s expensive.  You have to pay severance and accumulated leave and set up COBRA payments and so on.  So instead, you just reorganize them every four months or so, which is just about the optimal length of time for people to have finally regained their competence and figured out where the copier paper has been moved to after the last reorganization.  A couple of rounds of this and everybody except the most hidebound and unimaginative careerists will quit on their own, one at a time, which is financially a lot easier to cope with than mass firings.

And of course, everybody has had the experience of not being able to find a favorite TV program as it gets moved around the clock and then replaced every other week or so by some kind of “special,” so that when it finally shows up again, you’ve forgotten most of the plot line.  If that doesn’t work, the producers just keep switching writers until the characters start sprouting multiple, and non-credible, personalities and the audience loses interest, which is mostly what happened to ER in its last couple of seasons.  Somebody who was a lesbian feminist in season 4 suddenly falls in love with her boss, gets pregnant, and becomes a stay-at-home wife-and-mother, and so on in season 6, then dies of cancer just in time for the finale of season 7, which, if the other characters are having similar gyrations, is probably the series finale too.

And then there’s the standard way bosses deal with high-performing employees they for some reason don’t like.  You change their job descriptions, or change their actual duties without changing their job descriptions; you move their cubicles to Outer Darkness, if possible you change their working hours—you get the picture.  And the hapless target of these behaviors, if s/he has never experienced them before, is likely to think, “If I can put up with this without letting my job performance deteriorate, they won’t fire me.”  Which is precisely the opposite of what’s really happening—they aren’t cr*pping on you instead of firing you, they’re cr*pping on you preparatory to firing you.  First they starve the mule, preferably until its performance deteriorates into total uselessness, and then they shoot it.

Red Emma

Mirabile Dictu

(Which is Latin for:
Holy Cr*p)

Or maybe for “who’d a thunk it?”  I’ve been wondering for weeks where these utterly loony protestors at the health care reform town hall meetings are coming from, since they seem too loony to be mere garden-variety Republicans, and too organized to be mere “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more” individualists.  And now maybe we find out:  http://washingtonindependent.com/55566/was-barney-franks-nazi-questioner-a-larouchie.  Lyndon LaRouche does it again!  We need to spread this before the health care reform is totally sabotaged.

Some background information:  Lyndon LaRouche – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is most of the public knowledge stuff.  The LaRouchies actually sort of got started here in Chicago, and used to have an office right down the hall from where the draft counseling agency I worked for in the early 1970s had ITS office.  What we noticed about them at the time was (a) they generated a huge amount of trash, which they rarely cleaned up, and (b) they spent a lot of time trashing leftist groups and activities.  At the time, that led a lot of us to suspect they were a CIA front.  Which in fact, like the Afghan mujahadin, they may actually have started out as, perhaps before going rogue.

But by 1986, they had gotten into the big time, at least in Illinois.  During the Democratic primary elections that year, when the regular Democrats were running Adlai Stevenson Jr. and George Sangmeister for governor and lieutenant-governor nominations, and Aurelia Pucinski for secretary of state, the LaRouchies ran Mark Fairchild for governor and Janice Hart for secretary of state, and won the primary.  Theories abounded about how it happened, but the most popular, and (I’m afraid) the most persuasive was that the voters found names like Fairchild and Hart more “American” than Sangmeister and Pucinski.  So Stevenson led a secession to a new party, the Solidarity Party, in the general election, and of course the Democrats got creamed by the largest numbers Illinois Republicans have polled in a very long time.

Given that kind of well-documented history, the LaRouchies’ current slash-and-burn techniques make perfectly good sense.  While some people still consider them to be leftist, or even some species of Democrats, they have from the very beginning done most of their damage TO the Left and the Democratic Party.  If they have any kind of ideology at all, it HAS to be right-wing.  Watch this space.

Red Emma

The Wise-*ss Latina Woman, and Other “Racists”

Full disclosure: I guess I’m a Latina woman, sort of.  My parents were both born in Cuba. They told their secrets in Spanish, which is a great way to raise a bilingual kid without working at it.  Wise?  Dunno, let the reader decide.

Anyway, I’m fascinated by the latest tactic of the Radical Right:  calling any person of color or member of a minority group “racist” when s/he suggests that colorless people may in a particular instance be behaving in a prejudiced manner, or that race may still be a significant factor in current social conditions.

Sonia Sotomayor mentioned (in 4 or 5 different versions of the “wise Latina” speech) that the experience of being a double minority might enrich her judicial perspective, and the Republicans glommed onto the remark as if it were their last hope of salvation. In fact, it was more like their last chance at having anything at all to say in her confirmation hearings, in light of her 14 years of impeccably straight arrow judicial decisions.  Maybe if her paper trail had looked more like Robert Bork’s, they wouldn’t have bothered with the “wise Latina” stuff.  But her Republican opponents and several other critics have called her a racist for using the phrase.

And then the President called the behavior of the Cambridge cops “stupid” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for having broken into his own house. He started out by admitting he didn’t have all the facts yet.  In fact, he never will, and neither will the rest of us. The facts will undoubtedly never be completely clarified, since so far we have 4 different (and discordant) accounts, and there are a number of participants who have not yet been heard from.  Does that mean nobody is allowed to express an opinion, or just that POTUS should have kept his highly influential and controversial mouth shut?  Anyway, despite his diligent efforts at trying to cool things down with the aid of a Bud Lite, the “stupid” remark got him called a racist by several conservative types.

Apparently the reasoning of the Hard Right is that we are, or at least should be aspiring to become, a color-blind society.  Anyone who reminds us that race is still a significant social reality is obstructing this effort.  Anyone who obstructs our progress toward color-blindness by definition is a racist.

Some of my best friends espouse the ideal of a color-blind society.  They refuse to check the white/black/other boxes on the various forms everybody has to fill out these days. I can see why that’s attractive.  It would be nice to just cast off the shackles of our old errors and move on into a bright future for all of us, without regard to race, creed, color, or gender or………………….

Hey, wait a minute!  Would that mean we shouldn’t notice any difference between men and women?  Ummm, words fail me.  The species could be seriously disadvantaged in its chances for survival if the two sexes couldn’t even recognize each other.

And, assuming that there is some serious metaphysical difference between distinguishing characteristics people are born with and those they choose, does that mean that we should stop noticing race, but it’s okay to discriminate against Unitarians or anybody else who chooses a minority religion?  The gay rights movement has in some quarters gotten bogged down in a dispute over whether sexual orientation is inborn or chosen.  Are we sure we want that to matter?

Okay, I don’t want race to matter, when it comes to distributing social goodies, like the right to vote or move into a neighborhood or go to school or get a decent job.  I also don’t want religion, gender, or sexual orientation to matter for those purposes.  Does that mean I don’t want to KNOW about those things? Or that I don’t want the people distributing the social goodies to know about them?

Sometimes we do set up blinding mechanisms to screen out possible discriminatory effects.  It’s how we do reputable laboratory research—divide our subjects into two groups, without letting anybody know which group any individual subject is in, and experiment on one group while leaving the other along except for placebo tinkering.  It’s how the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra does its auditions—the musician plays from behind a screen, so the judges cannot ascertain his/her race, gender, age, or physical appearance.  They start with the premise that none of those things matter for their purposes.  All they need to know, and therefore all they want to know, is how good the candidate sounds.  Some academic journals do peer review by removing the author’s name and other identifying details from the article before distributing it to reviewers, to keep them from being blinded by gender, past reputation, or academic affiliations.  They don’t need to know any of those things to know whether the article is any good.  It should stand on its own anonymous merits. Same goes for juried art exhibits.

And it’s how the civil service system and the union seniority system are supposed to operate. Individuals get “points” for seniority and test scores, and if your points put you at the top of the list, you get the next job.  But as a practical matter, you don’t get into the seniority system until you get into the union, and until fairly recently, that often required a recommendation from a friend or relative.  As a practical matter, the civil service points awarded to military veterans are essentially an affirmative action program for men, since the military sets limits on both the number and the proportion of women admitted into the service.  Civil service doesn’t screen out as many high-scoring women as it used to, since there are a lot more women veterans than there used to be.  But the system still favors males.

Mr. Wired had a brilliant suggestion some years ago:  why don’t employers get serious about deciding what the real qualifications are for doing a particular job, advertise the job opening and qualifications to the general public, and then just hire the first qualified person who walks through the door?  These days, most employment discrimination doesn’t involve hiring unqualified people in preference to qualified people, but in choosing one qualified person over another for reasons having nothing to do with qualifications.  So let’s eliminate that step from the process.

I don’t know anybody other than Mr. Wired and us who likes that idea.  Most employers think they want to hire the most qualified person available for a particular job.  Of course, a lot of things get in the way of doing that, like figuring out what the qualifications really are for a particular job, and deciding how much they’re willing to pay for stellar qualifications, and dealing with candidates whose wage demands may be as high as their qualifications.

And of course, there are the intangible qualifications. “Character.”  “Fit.”  “Comfort level.”  How the candidate comes across in an interview (which, of course, is never conducted from behind a screen.)  All the things that serve as proxies for whether the candidate reminds the interviewer of his/her best friend.  All the areas into which considerations of race, religion, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation can creep unrecognized, especially if one isn’t even allowed to notice how they affect the total employee mix that results from these decisions.

I would love to live in a society in which none of this stuff mattered to a person’s chance at the Good Life.  Gandhi says “we must live the change we wish to see,” and a lot of the time I think he’s right.  But living as if we had already overcome racism and other forms of discrimination will not actually overcome them.  It will merely blind us, not to color, but to its effect on the world we live in.  No doubt some of the people obsessed with race and discrimination are racists, or maybe just politically savvy race card players.  But most of them, I suspect, are just trying to avoid being blinded to the racist realities that still surround us.

Watch This Space for a further examination of such questions as:

Do we presume that the unspoken basic job qualification for most decent jobs is white middle class culture?  Are we willing to treat people of color, women, GLBT types, and people with disabilities like white middle-classniks only to the extent that they can disguise themselves as white middle-classniks?

If we do admit these outgroups to the white middle class, do they become fully qualified members of the Tribe, or only a cheap knockoff (I was going to say “pale imitation,” but that obviously won’t work) of the real thing?

Are we willing to accept people we recognize as different from ourselves as nonetheless entitled to be treated like ourselves?  That is, is equality possible without sameness?

CynThesis

Revisionist News

or, The Sanford Hypotheses

In deference to a friend of mine who used to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club (http://www.outdoors.org/), I am hoping to revise the commonly accepted view of what Mark Sanford was doing over Independence Day weekend, to forestall the snickers one currently hears whenever the phrase “hiking in the Appalachians” comes up.  The Appalachians are a beautiful place and do not deserve to have their reputation thus sullied.

In fact, it is entirely possible that the Guv really was hiking in the Appalachians at the beginning of that weekend.  And then, he was abducted by

UFO aliens       )

Communists      )    pick one

Terrorists          )

who flew him to Argentina and dumped him in an inappropriate bed for purposes of public embarrassment.  Obviously, Sanford and his staff were dealing with the only thing that would have been more embarrassing than a tryst in Buenos Aires—a kidnapping by critters most of us don’t believe in.  Give it a thought.

Red Emma

The Bennigan’s Index, July ’09 edition

The latest victim of The Economy here in Chicago is the Symphony Store, where Chicago Symphony memorabilia are sold on the first floor of the Symphony Center.  It now has a “closing” sign out front, alas.  On the other hand, it is located right across the street from our local Bennigan’s, which has reopened!!

On yet another hand, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies recently moved into a super-fancy bespoke building (is that the proper term?), and has now closed down most of it, allegedly until the economy improves.  Times are hard even in the nonprofit sector.

Jane Grey

More Haste, Less Speed

Mr. Wired and I have long accepted that “rush hour” is in fact the slowest time to get anywhere on most roads.  Now we are also adjusting to the fact that, if you have a medical emergency that needs immediate attention, the “emergency room” is the last place you want to go for that attention.  The last time we did, in April, we were there for 10 hours before even being triaged. If you are visibly bleeding from an artery or a bullet wound, the staff may take more immediate notice, but anything else, no matter how acute and alarming the symptoms, will run you into double-digit waiting times, at least on the South Side of Chicago.  Not sure whether this is a deliberate policy to discourage use of the ER for anything that does not require transportation by ambulance.  Any ideas from the docs among us?

CynThesis

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