Today in Anti-Democracy

So I guess Fox and Rasmussen conducted some goofy poll, as is their wont, in which they inquired whether or not You, America, would like to shoot a terrorist's balls off. Naturally the Plurgressive Blurghosphere is on the case, and as usual it is unintentionally making a killer argument for the failure of democratic government as a practice, practical philosophy, or ideal.

And since when does public approval for anything make it right? If the public still thought slavery was alright should we bring that back? How about women being allowed to vote? Inter-racial marriages--should we be taking some polls on what the public thinks about that topic?

So there you have it. Popular opposition to a war makes it wrong, but popular opposition to homos getting married makes it . . . right? I understand that representative governments like ours use the power of the judiciary to constrain--sometimes--majoritarian rule and protect minorities, but you know, if you find yourself routinely questioning the wisdom of majority opinion to such degree as to make public approval a sort of counter-indicator of good policy and moral practice, then perhaps predicating an entire political system on the will of the enfranchised public is a bad idea.

To Every Season

When I imagine George F. Will writing a column, I imagine it goes a little something like this. He rises from a coffin full of his native Illinoisan soil, gazes across the wide bedroom to his wife in her twin bed and sleeping cap, cinches his bowtie, drinks seven gin-and-tonics, and tells his PA to finish the column by the time he returns from his daily session of whipping Latina whores in the special dungeon Fred Hiatt maintains for him underneath the US Naval Observatory.

But if you want to see what a George F. Will column would be like if he got up, performed a linked series of sun salutations, drank an acai smoothie, kissed his power crystal, smoked a doob, and put on some Peter Paul and Mary, well, Merry Christmas.

Madness and Civilization

in·sti·tu·tion·al·ize
Pronunciation: \-shnə-ˌlīz, -shə-nə-ˌlīz\
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): in·sti·tu·tion·al·ized; in·sti·tu·tion·al·iz·ing
Date: 1865
1 : to make into an institution : give character of an institution to {institutionalized housing}; especially : to incorporate into a structured and often highly formalized system {institutionalized values}
2 : to put in the care of an institution {institutionalize alcoholics}

The next time some Foucauldian grad student starts trying to tell you how the West has institutionalized insanity, tell him that he's using the word in the wrong sense.

Forensics

I would like to revisit Sarah Palin for a moment. I want to concede that she is wrong about everything. But I also want to say, look, your schematic cultural objections to her winking style of pretended regular-guy-ism is no excuse for judging her to be a greater moron than Barack Obama, who is also wrong about everything. If there is one characteristic that this dude has demonstrated over and over again, it is that the world-view he has synthesized is fundamentally stupid and unsound. His Nobel speech proceeded more neatly from word to word than Sarah Palin's RNC convention barnburner, but as an expression of a thesis it was equally incoherent, and as a statement of principles it was a good deal more bloodthirsty.

KISS

This Times editorial blithely proceeds from bitching about onerous airport security theater and bureaucracies that are both inefficient and ineffectual to agititating for the quick confirmation of "the heads of the T.S.A. and the customs agency, both of which have been under interim management for a year [because there] is no excuse for more politicking or delay with the nation’s security." The food at this restaurant is so terrible. And the portions! So small!

They also get in their quick shot at Yemen, our nemesis du jour, the new, new, new Afghanistan, wherein we are now doing . . . well, something, and in the future we definitely need to . . . do . . . more . . . of it. Probably.

Now I cannot be the only one to note that the vast and historic catastrophe that was Northwest Flight 253 was neither vast nor historic nor indeed a catastrophe. It was in fact an unspectacular failure. What it objectively demonstrates is that it is very difficult to blow up an airplane, that even if a terrorist mastermind manages to sew C-4 into his cloak of invisibility and smuggle himself into the luggage hold, it is very difficult to blow up an airplane. And obviously most yahoos never get as far as getting the bomb, let alone getting onto the plane with it, and even when they do, it is very difficult to blow up an airplane. Unlike the movies, in which every ricocheting bullet finds its way directly into the nearest fuel tank which immediately and for no reason explodes, explosive chemical agents here in our matrix world-line are finicky and difficult; detonation is not assured; minor variances in temperature and pressure, in the ratios within the explosive mixture, in the application of heat or electrical current, all of these make a difference, and any of them can doom the experiment. Dear America, I know that you are watching Mythbusters. Pay. More. Attention.

It is very difficult to blow up an airplane, and that, more than any other reason, is why it is so motherfucking rare for airplanes to get blown up.

In attempting to construct a rational security process, one could begin with a set of factually accurate premises, actuarial probabilities, and some general principle of parsimony. Or, one could demand that we add x-ray specs along the snaking lines at airport security checkpoints, because why not?

The machines have been criticized by privacy advocates. We’ve had some qualms, too, especially with early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly. But security officials have managed to blur the images and adopted other procedures that should allay those concerns. What is needed is a rigorous and independent process of evaluation for whole body scanners and other equipment — the Transportation Security Administration has 10 at some stage of development — to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost.

The problem is not that the scanners traduce the prudish boundaries of the American moral self-bubble. I, for one, would be perfectly content to stroll naked through Pittsburgh International, especially in the winter, when I lack a poolside at which to make a show of my ass and abs. The problem is that there will always be a clever means of evading the scanners. Just as "lethal chemicals, plastic explosives and ceramic knives" evolved in part to evade the metal detectors, so too will new substances and materials be created to evade body scanners. Thus ever does the wheel of progress turn. When the Federal Government mans every checkpoint with a levitating ascended master whose great googly third eye pierces all the etherial layers of the transdimensional mutliverse, you can be sure that some clever bomber will find a loophole in the eighteenth dimension to scurry through. And it will still be very difficult to blow up an airplane.

Notice, meanwhile in mundane reality, that the editorial demand for "a rigorous and independent process of evaluation . . . to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost" is in fact firmly precomitted to the application of "whole body scanners and other equipment." In other words, the rigorous and independent process is not a process of inquiry at all, but rather a purchasing process seeking a low bidder. It's not an experiment, it's a fucking RFP!

Avatard

The plot is ludicrous.

-Maude Lebowski

In a year, when James Cameron's Avatar appears to be no more than an overlong bit of interstitial video-game narrative (perhaps literally so, as the game-console tie-ins roll out), the critics who hailed it as a technological breakthrough are going to look mighty foolish. To be fair, it is hard for me to imagine the New York Time's Manhole of Darkness goofing off with an afternoon of DragonAge, and so I'm willing to call this sort of oversight an error of ignorance. This is not to say that Avatar wasn't pretty, prettier even than I expected. Although his magical blue planet is as under-realized a fictional world as a magical dolphin dorm poster . . .



. . . it is fair to say that it's nonetheless superficially well executed, which isn't just faint praise. I mean, I can't draw a still picture of my last psylocibin experience, let alone animate the fucker.

That said, it was hardly revolutionary. Yes, it captured in higher resolution and with more convincing textures the looks of both organic and inorganic material, but that is a difference of mere degree, not of kind. Jurrasic Park was revolutionary. Avatar is merely refinement a couple of decades later. I am routinely impressed by the graphics today's games afford, but when was the last time you were really overawed by the realization of what a computer-contained world could be. The Miller brothers in the nineties? Anyway, I digress.

The story, as elsewhere noted, is basically blue Pocohontas having sex with the blue Dances with Wolves, and it does drag on. The ultimate outcome is never in doubt. Of course, it never would be. I am actually quite all right with the lousy noble natives defeat rapacious paleskin narrative; I am fine with the marine falling in love with the native girl and leading her people to victory. Yes, there are colonialist overtones; yes, the shit is all over the noble savage mytheme; (yes, it is preposterous to imagine that an insterstellar human civilization would commit ground troops when they could just dump a spacemissile from space); but these are hardly new stories. I mean, hello, The Aeneid anyone?

But as there are no stakes for the crippled marine who eventually goes native to enjoy a fully abled blue existence, there is never the slightest tension. Though glancing reference is made to an ecological catastrophe on earth, all the humans are motivated either by cartoon-capitalist money-hunger or by goofily gung-ho militarism, and so there's never a choice, an agonizing fork in the road where, even though we may guess which path the protagonist will take, we still feel the wrench of his decision. With a few more lines of throwaway dialogue, Cameron could easily have established a scenario in which the survival of human civilization itself depended upon the successful extraction of the miracle mineral from the alien world, thus rendering the nobility of the natives more heroic and the violent hubris of the humans more tragic.

Now. As completely inane and absurd as was 2012, it actually created a compelling antagonist (you can't call him a villain) in Oliver Platt, by giving him the firm conviction that sentimental morality had no place in seeking the survival of the species itself. This point was of course undercut by the plot's insistence on a highest-bidder mode of access to surviving the apocalpyse, which was in turn a narrative conceit to justify saving John Cusack (why, oh why, did they save John Cusack) and giving The Black Scientist a sentimentally moral speech about giving everyone a chance because Rawlsian fairness must hold even unto the ends, literally, of the motherfucking earth. But still, Platt's character was a thousand times more compelling than the corporate hacks and military contractor-manqués of Avatar. He was animated by a realistic--within the context of the story--belief that had merit. Imagine, Avatar fans, if the battle-scarred colonel were not merely a casual racist and blood-thirsy goon, but a brutal realist willing to contemplate terrible things, including xenocide, because he believes it necessary for the survival of his own people.

Well, that would have been another and better movie, but perhaps a less popular one, as it would have required that the audience consider, if only briefly, that it is possible to confronted with a circumstance in which clarity is elusive and there is no plain right and wrong, in which necessity dictates heinous acts and victory in a righteous cause may yet spell disaster for one's enemies, who were themsleves impelled to act evilly by forces beyond their individual control. Oh well. Flying fucking dinosaurs! Fuck. Yeah.

Future Hocks

My only hope is that the big Lebowski kills me before the Germans can cut my dick off.

If you think that the passing decade saw America at its full, retarded apotheosis, then I say you've got another thing coming. As much as the stench of rot emanates from the cracks in our civilization's crumbling sidewalks, we remain in truth the preeminent smasher-upper of things on this, the good Lord's blighted garden, and though it is now fashionable to imagine the Chinese dashing past us in the home stretch, it will be a long time indeed before they manage to extricate themselves from the lumbering pas-de-deux in which they lend us the money that we use buy their goods, thus returning said money to their national coffers in an infernal economic perpetual motion machine that, though a fraud like all perpetual motion machines, is a damned good and durable one.

At last count, we were admittedly, openly, actively engaged in offensive military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, with a fifth, Somalia, a not-so-distant memory, and our government's media interlocutors are hastily prepping the ground for the further expansion of our china shop routine to Muslim Africa. Worrywort liberal technocrats of the Krugmanite variety worry endlessly that we are a civilization on the decline because our most recognizeable national symbol has horribly metaporphosed from the eagle clutching the fasciae to the Sam's-Club fatass using her cart less as a receptacle for purchases, more as a makeshift walker as she wheezes in diabetic near-catatonia from frozen, fifteen-pound bags of denatured chicken parts to palattes of quadruple-ply toilet paper, but as the saying goes, this is a feature, not a bug. While good progressive types bray that the traitorous Obama econ team is feverishly working to reinflate the bubble, as if Larry Summers et alia were unaware of their own project, from my cheap seats it seems the perfectly reasonable thing to do, if indeed your ultimate goal is the maintenance of a vast, underliterate, overweight, edge-of-poverty, reactionary, religious, chauvinistic, bovine, compliant, wage-slave comsumer class down whose ever-hungry gullets you can shove ever more crap in order to fund the vast and indifferent engine of hegemony. Do you think America is going to get any less fat and stupid over the next ten years? Whyever so, when precisely that society has so well served the interests of expansionism? I was in a Wal-Mart last week and saw a man the size of seventeen of me zipping around in a Rascal. On the back-end of the seat was the old, familiar bumper sticker. "These Colors Don't Run!"

Harvest Moon

The invention of the camera and then, in the last century, the advent of audio and video recording gave rise to some of our classic tales of total surveillance, the dystopian vision of a society in which everyone's every act was observed and recorded. And as these technologies have improved and miniaturized, as our electronic brains have grown in capability and sophistication, it sometimes seems, when standing in front of an ATM's electronic eye or being photo'd by a traffic camera at a red light or, say, living in London, that to a degree the nightmare is no dream at all. By the same token, though, the very ubiquity of such surveillance, the sheer volume of information, has made the process of scooping up pebbles into the more difficult task of squeezing handfuls of sand. Every children's toy now records DV, and though it seemed inordinately creepy when premiered, a program like the unlamented Total Information Awareness project of our darling DARPA now seem less hubristically totalitarian than merely foolish. As the familiar illustrative example reminds us: to make a completely accurate map of a coastline, one must in fact recreate the whole coastline. To miniaturize is to lose resolution, information. To be totally aware of the information on the Internet is to be the Internet. And we all know what happens then.

As the volume of information in our non-possession has come to resemble an ocean ecology far more than a filing cabinet, full of rich zones and dead ones, bright shallows and abysmal depths, the clear reality is that there is no clear reality. We can cast nets, but nets are more hole than rope. When we go bonkers about this or that threat slipping through the cracks and demand to know why we didn't know more, know it sooner, know it better, and know it faster, we ignore the plain diagnosis: the problem isn't too little information, but too much. The problem isn't that we can't collect it. We can. We do. We have. The problem is that we can't make sense of it. It can no longer be organized, sorted, collated, cross-referenced, and made to cohere. There is a certain universal principle at work here, an inexorable fact of uncertainty. You just can't know everything. The desire for total awareness and the attendant desire for absolute control that are the twin pillars of our relentless, also futile, push for total security are, to reuse a metaphor, built on sand. It keeps slipping and shifting. Our "intelligence" points us in one direction, and suddenly we are forced to wheel in another. We have no perspective. A minor and utterly failed plot ignites a reaction as if to a catastrophe. Our attempted cure for the perceived ill of too little knowledge inadvertently feeds the actual syndrome of too much.