When 9/11 happened, for those of us who were nearby, it felt like a local experience. It happened in a specific handful of places. Over the weeks that followed, we learned that the perpetrators were a specific group too; part of a small hard-core movement of nihilistic Islamic extremists.
Over the months that followed 9/11, it didn't feel so much like a local experience anymore. Everywhere you went in America, people had United We Stand bumper stickers, American flags flew everywhere, and housewives coast-to-coast had New York fireman calendars. People became wary of those who wear turbans, even though most of them are Sikhs.
Over the years that followed 9/11, it stopped feeling like it all came down to some cabal of dastardly villains lurking in the mountains outside Tora Bora. We were all over Afghanistan. Soon enough, we even took over Iraq looking for any sign that they too were involved in the events of that day.
For such a big event, 9/11's implications started out as relatively small. It was a terrorist act committed by specific people on specific places. Before too long however, everything had some relationship to the event. It seemed like people speculated on the impacts of ice cream sales in a post 9/11 world. Every small town had contingency plans. Laramie Wyoming was sure it was next on the list. Before we knew it, the whole thing went past a normal conflict between nations. It blew up into a full-on clash of civilizations.
I know how serious that day was. I understand the threats that face the United States and our allies. Having spent years in DC wondering if the sirens roaring past were responding to a bombing, or whether the street that was cordoned off had a suspicious package on it, I get it. That's terror. Beyond that, I get the whole geopolitical thing. There is a simmering movement of dangerous religiously-motivated people intent on doing us harm. Their representatives can be found on every continent. We need to do everything we can to stop them from carrying out their grizzly plans.
But it's the proportionality that I don't get. Terrorism and the motivations behind it are actions and ideas. They're not nations or races. Terrorism isn't a religion. We've taken something rather specific and made it into a universal, existential, all-out world war of faith. It's exactly what those bearded guys in caves wanted.
If this were truly a clash of civilizations, if this was an epic battle of capitalists versus communists, allies versus the axis, GI Joe against Cobra, I'd say it's not such a good idea for them to build a base right where they blew up one of ours just a decade ago. But this isn't some $100 million budget action movie. This is the West against primitive fundamentalists with street smarts and good networking skills. We took a group of cavemen with bronze-age mentalities, and turned them into the Decepticons to our Autobots in desert camo, adding hordes to their legions.
When we treat Al Qaeda as representatives of an equal, opposing force, we eliminate their intrinsic disadvantages as the little guy in asymmetrical warfare, giving them both the pity rights of underdog status, and the clout of a billion allies. When we lump all Muslims in with them in assigning blame for 9/11, we make the war a lot more symmetrical than it might have been. We make the war they wanted, the one we can't win.
If we're really better than Al Qaeda and the rest of them, we build that mosque right there at Ground Zero. We should make it an American institution, just like the JCC, the YMCA and baseball. At night we light its minaret up red white and blue, and during the day we teach water aerobics to the elderly of Lower Manhattan. I don't care what they'd do in Saudi Arabia. The whole point is that we're not them. The real danger is if the rest of the world forgets that.
Let's get back that proportionality. Hunt them down, arrest them, kill them. But don't turn this into the Lord of the Rings. Don't send the message to a fifth of the world that they're our enemy. Bush at least knew this much. Obama knows this too, but he's too damn timid to stand up to the demagogues like we need him to do.
America should do what America does best. Kill the ones who need to be killed with Special Forces. But kill their potential sympathizers with kindness, inclusiveness, and tolerance. Build it right there. I'll even make a donation in the name of peace and real moral victory.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Airlines and Falling Down
Steven Slater is a fifteen minute folk hero. Everyone who has endured the growing squeeze on the working stiff, the added frustrations of customer service for all concerned, or the aggravation of air travel has to feel something for the guy who lashes out. It seems that ever since 2001, the experiences of going to work, dealing with other people, and air travel have all taken a serious turn for the worst. Mr. Slater just put those looming menaces of the zeitgeist on flamboyant display. Catharsis happened.
Everyone has had enough of taking abuse from a boss because they have no choice. Lots of us have had enough of taking abuse from strangers who pass their own abuses onto the guy next to them. From finding a place to drop someone off at departures to the baggage claim area, air travel just plain sucks, and it sucks the most for the people in the industry. They face the trifecta of crappy pay, pissy people, and air travel itself. Out of toil and obscurity emerges the hero.
Mr. Slater: we thank you for your childish outburst. If it makes the world a little easier for all of us working stiffs, you have done the world a real service. If people are a little nicer to one another on the plane, if TSA reconsiders making everyone take off their shoes in line, if airlines rethink the checked baggage fee, we will have you to thank.
To those of you who would consider "going postal," think of Mr. Slater. For the video game satisfaction of blowing one's boss to Kingdom Come, you will face a life in prison, a bloody standoff, or suicide. People will die. Your family will be ashamed. Your glory will be far overshadowed by your infamy. No one will learn anything. Instead, think of something clever. Pull a fire alarm, release crickets in the cubicles, reveal the boss's darkest secret. Go out in Facebook Fame.
For once, someone who screamed, "Enough!" didn't do something so stupid or dangerous to overshadow the proper public response, "Why?" Let's hope we can really learn from this.
Everyone has had enough of taking abuse from a boss because they have no choice. Lots of us have had enough of taking abuse from strangers who pass their own abuses onto the guy next to them. From finding a place to drop someone off at departures to the baggage claim area, air travel just plain sucks, and it sucks the most for the people in the industry. They face the trifecta of crappy pay, pissy people, and air travel itself. Out of toil and obscurity emerges the hero.
Mr. Slater: we thank you for your childish outburst. If it makes the world a little easier for all of us working stiffs, you have done the world a real service. If people are a little nicer to one another on the plane, if TSA reconsiders making everyone take off their shoes in line, if airlines rethink the checked baggage fee, we will have you to thank.
To those of you who would consider "going postal," think of Mr. Slater. For the video game satisfaction of blowing one's boss to Kingdom Come, you will face a life in prison, a bloody standoff, or suicide. People will die. Your family will be ashamed. Your glory will be far overshadowed by your infamy. No one will learn anything. Instead, think of something clever. Pull a fire alarm, release crickets in the cubicles, reveal the boss's darkest secret. Go out in Facebook Fame.
For once, someone who screamed, "Enough!" didn't do something so stupid or dangerous to overshadow the proper public response, "Why?" Let's hope we can really learn from this.
The Paradox of Capital
A lot of people have been fired in the name of productivity.
The boss hires a third party consultant to deliver the bad news. An administrative assistant meekly collects the victim's personal items, handing him a cardboard box in exchange for a career. A rent-a-cop escorts the victim from the building, shaking his head, saying, "you know, I'm just doing my job." Everyone else breathes a sigh of relief, opening their Outlook calendars and canceling that vacation. On a Friday afternoon, another poor schlub is cast out into the austere wilderness of the job market.
Down the hall from the ritual beheadings, a kid fresh out of school takes an unpaid internship in the hopes that it will lead to an entry-level position at a place that is letting go all of the employees who have enough tenure and health insurance claims to cost the boss something. He's living at his parent's house, and delivering pizza at night for a little extra cash.
In the boardroom, company executives pour over a PowerPoint full of graphs and tables that show the employee raises, benefits, hours, and wages of those poor souls without stock options or an MBA. They're able to close down half the accounting department because of some new software. Their product can be made at half the cost across the world. Their competitors are ravenous. This is no time for a raise. There will be no bonus this year. The people downstairs should be glad we still need them.
Competition is spoken of as a virtue in the same way that gladiators who kill other gladiators are spoken of as honorable warriors. Competition trims the fat, separates the wheat from the chaff, culls the sick from the healthy. You must compete or die, but playing the game leads to glory. But for a civilization, as opposed to a conglomeration of individuals, competition can be a race to the bottom just as easily as a race to the top.
Neoclassical economics is rational and internally consistent, but it considers power to be some extraneous variable even though it is square in the middle of the behaviors it intends to model. Neoclassical economics posits that the tension between labor and capital can produce high-quality goods and services, and it does, provided that the tension between the two is balanced. Too much power in one direction or another can mess up the whole market dream. If labor has the upper hand, products are crumby and expensive. We hear that all the time. It's the unions who did GM and Chrysler in. That's probably true, but if it is, so is its converse. If capital has the upper hand, products are stellar and cheap, but labor doesn't even have the money to buy what they make.
One man's productivity increase is another's job, is another's mortgage payment, is another's tax payment, is another's grocery bill. Too many of us are caught in what Marx rightly called a "paradox of capitalism." The guy who costs the company money in wages is the same guy who'll be buying the company's product at the mall. Hardcore businessman Henry Ford recognized this, and paid his people enough to afford a Model T. We're feeling the consequences of low wages: people can't afford to by what they're selling.
In order to save capitalism, the people in charge need to brush up on their Marx. We've had enough Hayek and Friedman for now. Stock markets are doing ok, executives have never done better. Capital is plentiful and ready to work. This is a labor crisis.
Unlike Marx, I believe that this tension between labor and capital will always be there. The alternatives on either side are untenable. But I've heard enough from the monied interests who claim that there is no choice, that people should take what they can get and like it. I'm tired of the corporate apologists who tell us to suck it up. People are making the same amount of money as they did in 1998, and have far higher expenses, even as our GDP has increased about 20 percent. Capital has too much power. Labor is more than just a cost of doing business, like the price of wheat or pork bellies. We depend on it for prosperity as much as we depend on capital for production.
Maybe productivity can come from somewhere else instead of that guy they just fired. At least for a little while. Please?
The boss hires a third party consultant to deliver the bad news. An administrative assistant meekly collects the victim's personal items, handing him a cardboard box in exchange for a career. A rent-a-cop escorts the victim from the building, shaking his head, saying, "you know, I'm just doing my job." Everyone else breathes a sigh of relief, opening their Outlook calendars and canceling that vacation. On a Friday afternoon, another poor schlub is cast out into the austere wilderness of the job market.
Down the hall from the ritual beheadings, a kid fresh out of school takes an unpaid internship in the hopes that it will lead to an entry-level position at a place that is letting go all of the employees who have enough tenure and health insurance claims to cost the boss something. He's living at his parent's house, and delivering pizza at night for a little extra cash.
In the boardroom, company executives pour over a PowerPoint full of graphs and tables that show the employee raises, benefits, hours, and wages of those poor souls without stock options or an MBA. They're able to close down half the accounting department because of some new software. Their product can be made at half the cost across the world. Their competitors are ravenous. This is no time for a raise. There will be no bonus this year. The people downstairs should be glad we still need them.
Competition is spoken of as a virtue in the same way that gladiators who kill other gladiators are spoken of as honorable warriors. Competition trims the fat, separates the wheat from the chaff, culls the sick from the healthy. You must compete or die, but playing the game leads to glory. But for a civilization, as opposed to a conglomeration of individuals, competition can be a race to the bottom just as easily as a race to the top.
Neoclassical economics is rational and internally consistent, but it considers power to be some extraneous variable even though it is square in the middle of the behaviors it intends to model. Neoclassical economics posits that the tension between labor and capital can produce high-quality goods and services, and it does, provided that the tension between the two is balanced. Too much power in one direction or another can mess up the whole market dream. If labor has the upper hand, products are crumby and expensive. We hear that all the time. It's the unions who did GM and Chrysler in. That's probably true, but if it is, so is its converse. If capital has the upper hand, products are stellar and cheap, but labor doesn't even have the money to buy what they make.
One man's productivity increase is another's job, is another's mortgage payment, is another's tax payment, is another's grocery bill. Too many of us are caught in what Marx rightly called a "paradox of capitalism." The guy who costs the company money in wages is the same guy who'll be buying the company's product at the mall. Hardcore businessman Henry Ford recognized this, and paid his people enough to afford a Model T. We're feeling the consequences of low wages: people can't afford to by what they're selling.
In order to save capitalism, the people in charge need to brush up on their Marx. We've had enough Hayek and Friedman for now. Stock markets are doing ok, executives have never done better. Capital is plentiful and ready to work. This is a labor crisis.
Unlike Marx, I believe that this tension between labor and capital will always be there. The alternatives on either side are untenable. But I've heard enough from the monied interests who claim that there is no choice, that people should take what they can get and like it. I'm tired of the corporate apologists who tell us to suck it up. People are making the same amount of money as they did in 1998, and have far higher expenses, even as our GDP has increased about 20 percent. Capital has too much power. Labor is more than just a cost of doing business, like the price of wheat or pork bellies. We depend on it for prosperity as much as we depend on capital for production.
Maybe productivity can come from somewhere else instead of that guy they just fired. At least for a little while. Please?
Monday, August 09, 2010
America
Poplar Bluff, MO
101 degrees Fahrenheit (38C)
I got off a Delta jet in Memphis this afternoon, picked up a Ford Focus at the rental lot and pointed it north along I-55 , crossing the Mississippi river and into the flat cotton fields of Arkansas. The road was the highest ground for miles in all directions. With Jimi Hendrix live at the Filmore blasting on the stereo, I held the car straight and steady at 75 on into the Missouri Bootheel. The air conditioning could just barely keep up.
At Hayti I took a left west through Kennett, past fields and copses, gravel roads going perpendicular away from the tarmac to somewhere unknown, dusty towns, shuttered gas stations and high, dry corn. The land went from board-flat to a gentle rolling stretch of crops, weeds, low-slung houses and trailers, punctuated by the occasional creek. Speed limits dropped outside of towns: White Oak, Holcomb, Campbell, Qulin, and picked up again at the last intersection, speeding the traffic into the foothills of the Ozarks.
Poplar Bluff feels huge. It's a town of a little under 20,000 with all the modern conveniences. Like everywhere else these days it has its share of empty strip malls. Like everywhere this hot summer, it feels wilted, distorted in some mirage. Like everywhere, people seem run through the ringer, but resilient. People churn their way along the main road, through a McDonalds drive-thru, past an accountant's office, down to Walmart, off into their subdivision, and home after a day of who-knows-what.
When I checked into the Holiday Inn there were guys in Forest Service uniforms unloading duffel bags from dented old government pickups. There was a lineup of Union Pacific railway trucks with Texas tags. In the pull-through at the front entrance were two massive tricycle motorcycles, waxed to the gills, pulling low trailers with coolers on top. Off to the side there were 5th wheel campers attached to Chevy Avalanches and Ford Excursions.
With all the nervous energy of travel, I had to get some exercise. Crazy as it sounds, I put on my running shoes and headed out the door into a wall of heat. Taking it slow, I jogged down the main drag, moving from parking lot to parking lot. There were no sidewalks, just a gravelly shoulder and high grass. I jogged through a Burger King drive-through, past a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Dairy Queen, along car washes with 40-year-old designs, and office parks. I turned right into a neighborhood and headed down a gentle slope, past ranch houses, along driveways, each with American cars and trucks. One house had cute road signs and gas station logos on it. There was a car parked there that had a bumper sticker that reads: God, Guns and Guts Made America Free. Everybody who drove by nodded or raised a hand from their steering wheel.
I kept going, pounding the concrete, winding up a hill next to some boarded-up pre-fab buildings, transformer stations, and tall pine trees. Down at the bottom of a hill there was a dry creek bed running through a tunnel under the street. Smoke billowed out from below me, fresh scorch marks were on the grass off to the right. I hit a dead end with campers and boats lined up neatly in driveways, and I turned around back up the hill.
Everyone seems ready to work. Everyone wants to do something respectable, put food on the table, and keep the cable TV coming and the bills paid out of the fruits of their own labor. Everyone is ready, sitting here, idle, churning their way down the wide boulevards from store to store, making the exchange of money for goods and services like bees stopping to pick up nectar in exchange for carrying some pollen.
It feels hot, angry and abuzz with discontent. People want something better. They want to be part of something great even as they want to be self-made independent individuals. They want schools and roads, but they're tapped out or freaked out about paying for them. Charity and good are abundant even as they battle against hardscrabble self-interest. Everyone is waiting for a message that straightens the contradictions out, makes sense of it all, puts their lives in the right direction. Friends aren't enough. Family is dysfunctional as usual. The church helps, but it won't put you to work. Low-paying jobs provide a meager subsistence and a modicum of dignity. People beg for benefits and a week's vacation down at the lake.
So much idle restlessness is a force in itself. It can be tapped for something great, or it can lead us to ruin. As I jogged through Poplar Bluff I felt the presence of some crucial moment in our history. Some fundamental change is happening in America, but I have no clue how things will turn out.
But I'm optimistic. After all, what choice do I have?
101 degrees Fahrenheit (38C)
I got off a Delta jet in Memphis this afternoon, picked up a Ford Focus at the rental lot and pointed it north along I-55 , crossing the Mississippi river and into the flat cotton fields of Arkansas. The road was the highest ground for miles in all directions. With Jimi Hendrix live at the Filmore blasting on the stereo, I held the car straight and steady at 75 on into the Missouri Bootheel. The air conditioning could just barely keep up.
At Hayti I took a left west through Kennett, past fields and copses, gravel roads going perpendicular away from the tarmac to somewhere unknown, dusty towns, shuttered gas stations and high, dry corn. The land went from board-flat to a gentle rolling stretch of crops, weeds, low-slung houses and trailers, punctuated by the occasional creek. Speed limits dropped outside of towns: White Oak, Holcomb, Campbell, Qulin, and picked up again at the last intersection, speeding the traffic into the foothills of the Ozarks.
Poplar Bluff feels huge. It's a town of a little under 20,000 with all the modern conveniences. Like everywhere else these days it has its share of empty strip malls. Like everywhere this hot summer, it feels wilted, distorted in some mirage. Like everywhere, people seem run through the ringer, but resilient. People churn their way along the main road, through a McDonalds drive-thru, past an accountant's office, down to Walmart, off into their subdivision, and home after a day of who-knows-what.
When I checked into the Holiday Inn there were guys in Forest Service uniforms unloading duffel bags from dented old government pickups. There was a lineup of Union Pacific railway trucks with Texas tags. In the pull-through at the front entrance were two massive tricycle motorcycles, waxed to the gills, pulling low trailers with coolers on top. Off to the side there were 5th wheel campers attached to Chevy Avalanches and Ford Excursions.
With all the nervous energy of travel, I had to get some exercise. Crazy as it sounds, I put on my running shoes and headed out the door into a wall of heat. Taking it slow, I jogged down the main drag, moving from parking lot to parking lot. There were no sidewalks, just a gravelly shoulder and high grass. I jogged through a Burger King drive-through, past a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Dairy Queen, along car washes with 40-year-old designs, and office parks. I turned right into a neighborhood and headed down a gentle slope, past ranch houses, along driveways, each with American cars and trucks. One house had cute road signs and gas station logos on it. There was a car parked there that had a bumper sticker that reads: God, Guns and Guts Made America Free. Everybody who drove by nodded or raised a hand from their steering wheel.
I kept going, pounding the concrete, winding up a hill next to some boarded-up pre-fab buildings, transformer stations, and tall pine trees. Down at the bottom of a hill there was a dry creek bed running through a tunnel under the street. Smoke billowed out from below me, fresh scorch marks were on the grass off to the right. I hit a dead end with campers and boats lined up neatly in driveways, and I turned around back up the hill.
Everyone seems ready to work. Everyone wants to do something respectable, put food on the table, and keep the cable TV coming and the bills paid out of the fruits of their own labor. Everyone is ready, sitting here, idle, churning their way down the wide boulevards from store to store, making the exchange of money for goods and services like bees stopping to pick up nectar in exchange for carrying some pollen.
It feels hot, angry and abuzz with discontent. People want something better. They want to be part of something great even as they want to be self-made independent individuals. They want schools and roads, but they're tapped out or freaked out about paying for them. Charity and good are abundant even as they battle against hardscrabble self-interest. Everyone is waiting for a message that straightens the contradictions out, makes sense of it all, puts their lives in the right direction. Friends aren't enough. Family is dysfunctional as usual. The church helps, but it won't put you to work. Low-paying jobs provide a meager subsistence and a modicum of dignity. People beg for benefits and a week's vacation down at the lake.
So much idle restlessness is a force in itself. It can be tapped for something great, or it can lead us to ruin. As I jogged through Poplar Bluff I felt the presence of some crucial moment in our history. Some fundamental change is happening in America, but I have no clue how things will turn out.
But I'm optimistic. After all, what choice do I have?
Friday, August 06, 2010
May You Live in Interesting Times
So goes the Gypsy curse.
But there's something seductive about interesting times. Many of us imagine what we'd be like in a true crisis. We'd like to think that we would know what to do in that situation, that we'd be the one who avoids getting trampled in a stampede of panic, that we might be the one to save a child from a burning house. Beyond just retaining control over oneself, we imagine that we'd rise to the occasion of interesting times. We'd be the person we always thought we were, if only something would come along to let us prove it.
Much of human mythology serves as a corollary to the Gypsy Curse. The story goes like this:
A young man from an inconsequential town somewhere in the hinterlands is called to fight some existential battle. He is reluctant at first, but once the gravity of the situation is made clear by wise but impotent elders, he becomes a champion of the cause. After much travail the young man becomes a sage himself, a battle-hardened beacon of morality. He defeats the great enemy and returns home to his inconsequential town to settle down in peace, get married, have kids and grow old and wise gracefully. That story is found with little variation in Star Wars, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Superman, Perseus, Moses and many others. Sure, sometimes there's no girl in the end, and sometimes the hero is actually of noble blood, though raised by farmers, but the myth gets at that yearning all the same. We all want to live in Interesting Times so we can be heroes too.
The Gypsy Curse also comes up in today's conspiracy theories. People would like to think that 9/11 was more than just an act of wanton violence, that despite all possible evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, or that the Federal Reserve makes us all the pawns of 19th century industrialists. There is no reason to get into the business of refuting or supporting these claims. Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that it won't satisfy that human desire for Interesting Times. There will always be another conspiracy to uncover.
Today, many of us believe that there is something sinister lurking in the back rooms of American government, multi-national corporations, and other seats of power. Matt Taibi writes that:
The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal.
Another way to put this is that the truth is less interesting than fiction, even if it's sometimes stranger than said fiction, and sometimes even worse than we could have imagined. The genius of true evil is in its banality-- its numbing of the passions that might actually put up a fight against it. Good and evil aside, epic battles are extraordinarily rare. Much more common are the thousands of small decisions, deals and compromises that are at the root of any cooperative endeavor, be it public or private. There is nothing more numbing than a shareholder report that arrives in the mail, or a committee meeting on CSPAN, and there are few things that are more important.
About heroes and villains, Taibi also writes:
In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life.
Evil is boring. If you want to do something about it, you'll have to be boring too. There will be no war, no sudden illumination of the truth. You'll have to fight tooth-and-nail just to stay awake as you toil at a computer screen for days, months, years, even decades. You'll have to resist the powerful draw of the Gypsy Curse.
But there's something seductive about interesting times. Many of us imagine what we'd be like in a true crisis. We'd like to think that we would know what to do in that situation, that we'd be the one who avoids getting trampled in a stampede of panic, that we might be the one to save a child from a burning house. Beyond just retaining control over oneself, we imagine that we'd rise to the occasion of interesting times. We'd be the person we always thought we were, if only something would come along to let us prove it.
Much of human mythology serves as a corollary to the Gypsy Curse. The story goes like this:
A young man from an inconsequential town somewhere in the hinterlands is called to fight some existential battle. He is reluctant at first, but once the gravity of the situation is made clear by wise but impotent elders, he becomes a champion of the cause. After much travail the young man becomes a sage himself, a battle-hardened beacon of morality. He defeats the great enemy and returns home to his inconsequential town to settle down in peace, get married, have kids and grow old and wise gracefully. That story is found with little variation in Star Wars, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Superman, Perseus, Moses and many others. Sure, sometimes there's no girl in the end, and sometimes the hero is actually of noble blood, though raised by farmers, but the myth gets at that yearning all the same. We all want to live in Interesting Times so we can be heroes too.
The Gypsy Curse also comes up in today's conspiracy theories. People would like to think that 9/11 was more than just an act of wanton violence, that despite all possible evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, or that the Federal Reserve makes us all the pawns of 19th century industrialists. There is no reason to get into the business of refuting or supporting these claims. Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that it won't satisfy that human desire for Interesting Times. There will always be another conspiracy to uncover.
Today, many of us believe that there is something sinister lurking in the back rooms of American government, multi-national corporations, and other seats of power. Matt Taibi writes that:
The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal.
Another way to put this is that the truth is less interesting than fiction, even if it's sometimes stranger than said fiction, and sometimes even worse than we could have imagined. The genius of true evil is in its banality-- its numbing of the passions that might actually put up a fight against it. Good and evil aside, epic battles are extraordinarily rare. Much more common are the thousands of small decisions, deals and compromises that are at the root of any cooperative endeavor, be it public or private. There is nothing more numbing than a shareholder report that arrives in the mail, or a committee meeting on CSPAN, and there are few things that are more important.
About heroes and villains, Taibi also writes:
In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life.
Evil is boring. If you want to do something about it, you'll have to be boring too. There will be no war, no sudden illumination of the truth. You'll have to fight tooth-and-nail just to stay awake as you toil at a computer screen for days, months, years, even decades. You'll have to resist the powerful draw of the Gypsy Curse.
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