Pensées

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Opium, Rape and the American Way

By Chris Hedges

The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.

“We need to tear the mask off of the fundamentalist warlords who after the tragedy of 9/11 replaced the Taliban,” Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament two years ago for denouncing government corruption and the Western occupation, told me during her visit to New York last week. “They used the mask of democracy to take power. They continue this deception. These warlords are mentally the same as the Taliban. The only change is physical. These warlords during the civil war in Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 killed 65,000 innocent people. They have committed human rights violations, like the Taliban, against women and many others.”

“In eight years less than 2,000 Talib have been killed and more than 8,000 innocent civilians has been killed,” she went on. “We believe that this is not war on terror. This is war on innocent civilians. Look at the massacres carried out by NATO forces in Afghanistan. Look what they did in May in the Farah province, where more than 150 civilians were killed, most of them women and children. They used white phosphorus and cluster bombs. There were 200 civilians on 9th of September killed in the Kunduz province, again most of them women and children. You can see the Web site of professor Marc Herold, this democratic man, to know better the war crimes in Afghanistan imposed on our people. The United States and NATO eight years ago occupied my country under the banner of woman’s rights and democracy. But they have only pushed us from the frying pan into the fire. They put into power men who are photocopies of the Taliban.”

Afghanistan’s boom in the trade in opium, used to produce heroin, over the past eight years of occupation has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban, al-Qaida, local warlords, criminal gangs, kidnappers, private armies, drug traffickers and many of the senior figures in the government of Hamid Karzai. The New York Times reported that the brother of President Karzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been collecting money from the CIA although he is a major player in the illegal opium business. Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium in a trade that is worth some $65 billion, the United Nations estimates. This opium feeds some 15 million addicts worldwide and kills around 100,000 people annually. These fatalities should be added to the rolls of war dead.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said that the drug trade has permitted the Taliban to thrive and expand despite the presence of 100,000 NATO troops.

“The Taliban’s direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex and increasingly widespread,” said Costa. The UNODC estimates the Taliban earned $90 million to $160 million a year from taxing the production and smuggling of opium and heroin between 2005 and 2009, as much as double the amount it earned annually while it was in power nearly a decade ago. And Costa described the Afghan-Pakistani border as “the world’s largest free trade zone in anything and everything that is illicit,” an area blighted by drugs, weapons and illegal immigration. The “perfect storm of drugs and terrorism” may be on the move along drug trafficking routes through Central Asia, he warned. Profits made from opium are being pumped into militant groups in Central Asia and “a big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources,” Costa said.

“Afghanistan, after eight years of occupation, has become a world center for drugs,” Joya told me. “The drug lords are the only ones with power. How can you expect these people to stop the planting of opium and halt the drug trade? How is it that the Taliban when they were in power destroyed the opium production and a superpower not only cannot destroy the opium production but allows it to increase? And while all this goes on, those who support the war talk to you about women’s rights. We do not have human rights now in most provinces. It is as easy to kill a woman in my country as it is to kill a bird. In some big cities like Kabul some women have access to jobs and education, but in most of the country the situation for women is hell. Rape, kidnapping and domestic violence are increasing. These fundamentalists during the so-called free elections made a misogynist law against Shia women in Afghanistan. This law has even been signed by Hamid Karzai. All these crimes are happening under the name of democracy.”

Thousands of Afghan civilians have died from insurgent and foreign military violence. And American and NATO forces are responsible for almost half the civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have also died from displacement, starvation, disease, exposure, lack of medical treatment, crime and lawlessness resulting from the war.

Joya argues that Karzai and his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has withdrawn from the Nov. 7 runoff election, will do nothing to halt the transformation of Afghanistan into a narco-state. She said that NATO, by choosing sides in a battle between two corrupt and brutal opponents, has lost all its legitimacy in the country.

The recent resignation of a high-level U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh, was in part tied to the drug problem. Hoh wrote in his resignation letter that Karzi’s government is filled with “glaring corruption and unabashed graft.” Karzi, he wrote, is a president “whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains who mock our own rule of law and counter-narcotics effort.”

Joya said, “Where do you think the $36 billion of money poured into country by the international community have gone? This money went into the pockets of the drug lords and the warlords. There are 18 million people in Afghanistan who live on less than $2 a day while these warlords get rich. The Taliban and warlords together contribute to this fascism while the occupation forces are bombing and killing innocent civilians. When we do not have security how can we even talk about human rights or women’s rights?”

“This election under the shade of Afghan war-lordism, drug-lordism, corruption and occupation forces has no legitimacy at all,” she said. “The result will be like the same donkey but with new saddles. It is not important who is voting. It is important who is counting. And this is our problem. Many of those who go with the Taliban do not support the Taliban, but they are fed up with these warlords and this injustice and they go with the Taliban to take revenge. I do not agree with them, but I understand them. Most of my people are against the Taliban and the warlords, which is why millions did not take part in this tragic drama of an election.”
“The U.S. wastes taxpayers’ money and the blood of their soldiers by supporting such a mafia corrupt system of Hamid Karzai,” said Joya, who changes houses in Kabul frequently because of the numerous death threats made against her. “Eight years is long enough to learn about Karzai and Abdullah. They chained my country to the center of drugs. If Obama was really honest he would support the democratic-minded people of my country. We have a lot [of those people]. But he does not support the democratic-minded people of my country. He is going to start war in Pakistan by attacking in the border area of Pakistan. More civilians have been killed in the Obama period than even during the criminal Bush.”

“My people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies,” she lamented. “The occupation forces from the sky bomb and kill innocent civilians. On the ground, Taliban and these warlords deliver fascism. As NATO kills more civilians the resistance to the foreign troops increases. If the U.S. government and NATO do not leave voluntarily my people will give to them the same lesson they gave to Russia and to the English who three times tried to occupy Afghanistan. It is easier for us to fight against one enemy rather than two.”

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War Is a Hate Crime

By Chris Hedges

Violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is wrong. So is violence against people in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the bizarre culture of identity politics, there are no alliances among the oppressed. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the first major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, passed last week, was attached to a $680-billion measure outlining the Pentagon’s budget, which includes $130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic majority in Congress, under the cover of protecting some innocents, authorized massive acts of violence against other innocents.

It was a clever piece of marketing. It blunted debate about new funding for war. And behind the closed doors of the caucus rooms, the Democratic leadership told Blue Dog Democrats, who are squeamish about defending gays or lesbians from hate crimes, that they could justify the vote as support for the war. They told liberal Democrats, who are squeamish about unlimited funding for war, that they could defend the vote as a step forward in the battle for civil rights. Gender equality groups, by selfishly narrowing their concern to themselves, participated in the dirty game.

“Every thinking person wants to take a stand against hate crimes, but isn’t war the most offensive of hate crimes?” asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who did not vote for the bill, when I spoke to him by phone. “To have people have to make a choice, or contemplate the hierarchy of hate crimes, is cynical. I don’t vote to fund wars. If you are opposed to war, you don’t vote to authorize or appropriate money. Congress, historically and constitutionally, has the power to fund or defund a war. The more Congress participates in authorizing spending for war, the more likely it is that we will be there for a long, long time. This reflects an even larger question. All the attention is paid to what President Obama is going to do right now with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the Democratic Congress could have ended the war when it took control just after 2006. We were given control of the Congress by the American people in November 2006 specifically to end the war. It did not happen. The funding continues. And while the attention is on the president, Congress clearly has the authority at any time to stop the funding. And yet it doesn’t. Worse yet, it finds other ways to garner votes for bills that authorize funding for war. The spending juggernaut moves forward, a companion to the inconscient force of war itself.”

The brutality of Matthew Shepard’s killers, who beat him to death for being gay, is a product of a culture that glorifies violence and sadism. It is the product of a militarized culture. We have more police, prisons, inmates, spies, mercenaries, weapons and troops than any other nation on Earth. Our military, which swallows half of the federal budget, is enormously popular—as if it is not part of government. The military values of hyper-masculinity, blind obedience and violence are an electric current that run through reality television and trash-talk programs where contestants endure pain while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition. Friendship and compassion are banished.

This hyper-masculinity is at the core of pornography with its fusion of violence and eroticism, as well as its physical and emotional degradation of women. It is an expression of the corporate state where human beings are reduced to commodities and companies have become proto-fascist enclaves devoted to maximziing profit. Militarism crushes the capacity for moral autonomy and difference. It isolates us from each other. It has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and yes, our gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual citizens.

Klaus Theweleit in his two volumes entitled “Male Fantasies,” which draw on the bitter alienation of demobilized veterans in Germany following the end of World War I, argues that a militarized culture attacks all that is culturally defined as the feminine, including love, gentleness, compassion and acceptance of difference. It sees any sexual ambiguity as a threat to male “hardness” and the clearly defined roles required by the militarized state. The continued support for our permanent war economy, the continued elevation of military values as the highest good, sustains the perverted ethic, rigid social roles and emotional numbness that Theweleit explored. It is a moral cancer that ensures there will be more Matthew Shepards.

Fascism, Theweleit argued, is not so much a form of government or a particular structuring of the economy or a system, but the creation of potent slogans and symbols that form a kind of psychic economy which places sexuality in the service of destruction. The “core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes enjoyment and pleasure,” Theweleit wrote. And our culture, while it disdains the name of fascism, embraces its dark ethic.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, interviewed in 2003 by Charlie Rose, spoke in this sexualized language of violence to justify the war in Iraq, a moment preserved on YouTube:

“What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ ” Friedman said. “ ‘You don’t think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, suck on this.’ That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”
This is the kind of twisted logic the killers of Matthew Shepard would understand.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote, in words gay activists should have heeded, that exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group made fascism and the Holocaust possible.

“The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people,” Adorno wrote. “What is called fellow traveling was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else, and simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo. The silence under the terror was only its consequence. The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to test ever anew.”

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The answer is 42 – what is the question?

by Jenny Turner

‘I remember the early 1980s, a Betamax recording of the BBC series that my grandparents had taped,” writes CMK, a blogger, born in 1979. “I would watch it almost every day.” “I sat in the car in the driveway, getting cold, listening to Vogon poetry” – thus Neil Gaiman (b 1960), who before American Gods, before The Sandman, wrote a gushy fan-book called Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion (1988). “I was happy; perfectly, unutterably happy.” Among psychologists, no one is sure whether “flashbulb memories” – in which you see everything as it was, but heightened, as if your mind had lit up and snapped it – really happen or if people just think they do. It’s agreed, though, that the phenomenon has to do with shock – a death, a disaster, something that leaves everything catastrophically changed. How curious, then, that this is so often the way fans talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Is this only because it’s so funny, or is it because it’s a story that begins with the total destruction of planet Earth?

For readers who need it, here is a brief recap. H2G2 – as Gaiman was the first to call the show – started life as a BBC radio sitcom in 1978; it went out with little publicity, but right away became a hit. The story begins with a man called Arthur Dent, described in the 1979 novelisation as “about 30 . . . tall, dark-haired, and never quite at ease with himself”, who discovers one day that his house, somewhere in the west of England, is about to be demolished in order to make way for a motorway bypass; shortly after, he also discovers that the very world he lives on, “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet . . . far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy”, is about to be demolished too.

Luckily for Arthur, though, his drinking pal, Ford Prefect, hitches them both a lift on a spaceship under the command of Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed pan-galactic renegade. The adventures that follow involve Vogons (“one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy – not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous”); a great deal of faff about the number 42; and the discovery that humans are descended not from apes, but from hairdressers and management consultants. They also feature a “manically depressed” robot called Marvin the Paranoid Android, whose funny voice came second only to that of Daleks among playground comedians of 1980s Britain: “Life. Loathe it or ignore it, you can’t like it.” “Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”

The story’s author, Douglas Adams, was, apparently, tall and dark and awkward-looking too. Born in Cambridge in 1952 – he was proud of his initials, DNA – he studied English at Cambridge University because he wanted to be in Footlights, then found himself, by the late 1970s, a comedy sketchwriter in need of an idea. Suddenly, he remembered a drunken reverie he’d had, staring at the stars one evening, while hitchhiking round Europe. The first Radio 4 series led quickly to an LP, a stage version, a second Radio 4 series, a BBC television sitcom. The first novel led, over the next 12 years, to four sequels – you can buy them packaged together, as “a trilogy in five parts”.

Adams himself went on to begin another series of comic novels – Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (1988) – but increasingly it was newer media that absorbed him. He worked for 20 years, off and on, trying to get a Hitchhiker’s movie off the ground, and in 1994 launched the Digital Village, an internet startup of which he was the self-appointed “chief fantasist”. He died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 2001, mid-workout at a private gym in Santa Barbara, southern California, where he had relocated with his family a couple of years before. The movie appeared at last, in 2005, starring Martin Freeman – Tim from The Office – as Arthur Dent and Mos Def, the American hip-hop artist, as Ford Prefect. The Digital Village failed in the great dotcom shakeup, but parts of it survive on h2g2, an interactive resource currently billeted towards the unfashionable end of the BBC website, a bit like Wikipedia except not half so good.

Adams’s really big idea, though – what used to get called his killer app – was the one he’d got on that drunken night of dreaming. What if, instead of a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe, you carried in your backpack a handbook to the stars? And so, as well as being the story of “a terrible, stupid catastrophe”, the original Hitchhiker’s presented itself as “the story of a book”. We are told that this book – or rather, in fanspeak, “the Book” – is “the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor”; it’s “an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe”. The Hitchhiker’s Guide, in other words, was not simply a comic space opera, but also participated in two other, albeit converging, literary traditions: the postmodern interest in metafiction and the ancient narrative device of the book within a book.

It doesn’t seem to be recorded anywhere how interested Adams was in Calvino, or Borges, or Swift, or Lovecraft, or Flann O’Brien’s magisterial de Selby. But he was evidently familiar with “the great Encyclopaedia Galactica”, as invented by Isaac Asimov for his Foundation stories in the 1950s – The Hitchhiker’s Guide, we are told, has “already supplanted” it, being “slightly cheaper”. And once Adams got the imaginary-book thing going, the ways he turned it amount to a typology of the form. Sometimes, the imaginary book is used pragmatically, to shovel off boring lumps of background and exposition. Sometimes it’s used sceptically, to upset the linear surface of the story, and sometimes it’s completely bogus, generating phoney mystery and depth. The book-within-a-book trick, in short, allowed Adams to develop a story that was both unified and modular, tight yet flexible, compact yet potentially infinite.

Within this handy framework, the Hitchhiker stories make up a sort of folk-art depiction, like on a tribal carpet, of the late-1970s English middle-class cosmic order. So there he is, the hapless Arthur Dent, in the middle, his maths insufficient to grasp even the first thing about his current position, in a county in a country, on a continent on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, and so on. (Even now, the only way I can get the hierarchy right is by referring to the products of Mars Inc.) Except that the universe, 1979-style, would have seemed different from the one we know, and don’t know, today, with space travel, in the years between the Moon landings and the Challenger disaster, both current and glamorous-feeling in a way it certainly isn’t now. Tomorrow’s World went out on the BBC every Thursday; Carl Sagan’s Cosmos went out in 1980; cool space-junk was everywhere, Star Wars and Close Encounters, Bowie and P-Funk and the Only Ones. Relativity and the space-time continuum, wormholes and the multiverse featured everywhere in science fact and fiction, and were easily bent and twisted into the sort of paradox at which Adams’s mind excelled – the armada of spaceships diving screaming towards Earth, “where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog”; the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where you can pay for dinner by putting 1p in a present-day savings account, meaning that “when you arrive at the End of Time . . . the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for”.

Except that the Guide wasn’t just a literary device, a concept. It really was a “Book”, a thing of plastic, an actual piece of tech. It looked, we are told, “rather like a largish electronic calculator” – as such a device would have had to look in the 1970s, before iPhones, Kindle, Ernie Wise’s Vodafone. On it, “any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice” – what, only a million?, 21st-century readers object. The Book was brilliantly brought to life in the 1981 television series, in two-dimensional line graphics, moving along behind a cursor, like on the primitive arcade games and home computers of the time. They looked – they still look – cooler, funnier, more techy, than the more GUIesque animations in the 2005 movie, although Rod Lord’s design had nothing digital about it; images were drawn on acetate and filmed with a rostrum camera in the traditional cartoonists’ way.

Literature, of course, is full of proleptic descriptions of imaginary IT – EM Forster did it in “The Machine Stops” (1909) and William Gibson would shortly start colonising cyberspace in Burning Chrome (1982). Adams, though, went beyond prophecy not to dystopia – lots of writers do that – but to small-scale obsolescence and disappointment. The babel fish, for example, is apparently a “small, yellow and leechlike” organism that you stick in your ear, whereupon it feeds on other people’s brainwaves, excreting them, simultaneously translated, into yours; neat, but none the less silly and pathetic, in the way only sticking a fish in your ear can be. The infinite improbability drive is “a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances” which runs on the energy released from ridiculous coincidences; in an explosion of surrealist mournfulness, it transforms a nuclear missile into a fully sentient sperm whale. The method is a bit like steampunk, in that it proceeds counterfactually, but with careful logic; or like steampunk, only without the steam. But there’s a definite tea theme, and a lot of Englishness, and a distinctive note of piscine melancholy: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; The Salmon of Doubt. If Adams’s books were a domestic appliance, they’d be a Sinclair ZX80, wired to a Teasmade, screeching machine code through quadraphonic speakers, and there’d probably be a haddock in there somewhere, non-compatible and obsolete.

On 12 October, the first Hitchhiker’s novel will be exactly 30 years old. That apparently is why the Adams estate has chosen the date for what it’s calling “a publishing event of electro proportions”: Eoin Colfer, the author of the Artemis Fowl books, has written an authorised sequel, to be called And Another Thing (Penguin). An orchestrated explosion of high-end promodrivel is planned to celebrate it: a “Hitchcon” at the Southbank Centre in London will be attended by fans in their dressing-gowns; an Irish design firm plans to issue 42 custom-pimped Arne Jacobsen chairs. Colfer was chosen, apparently, because Adams’s daughter likes his other books. Jane Belson, Adams’s widow, has given the project her support.

Coming back, after all this time, to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I found myself completely floored. It was like when you’ve had a dream that you can’t make head nor tail of, until you start telling someone about it, at which point it all becomes suddenly, embarrassingly obvious: “As our story begins, Arthur Dent is no more aware of his destiny than a tealeaf is aware of the East India Company . . .” Whether or not its author ever noticed, the story is just one massive post-colonial metaphor, in which the nice-but-dim English gentleman is dethroned, diminished, lost in space – caught, not exactly with his pants down, but dressed only in his pyjamas; his house, his planet, flattened by aliens; his anthropocentrism about to be exploded, and so on. Or, as Zaphod Beeblebrox puts it, why not replace Arthur’s brain with an electronic one? “You’d just have to programme it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? Who’d know the difference?”

Thirty years later, and it also seems obvious that the whole tellyverse around the story, whether or not its author was aware of it, was on the point of sliding off one plane of reality and on to something else. In politics, the so-called postwar consensus was being taken apart by Mrs Thatcher; the BBC itself was one of her many targets, under pressure to abandon its old-style Reithian body politic and sell off bits of itself for scrap. Unlike John Lloyd, his friend and occasional collaborator, Adams was not interested in the courte durée of topical satire (Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image) that gives memories of the early 1980s so much of their fizzingly bitter flavour. Adams’s mind worked better on deeper, odder resonances – the “digital watches” considered to be “a pretty neat idea” by the “amazingly primitive . . . ape-descended life-forms”, who shortly will never know what hit them; the convergence of cosmological science towards a generalised theory of everything – had Hitchhiker’s not popularised the notion of an “ultimate question”, the science writer Michael Hanlon has suggested, Stephen Hawking might not have sold quite so many copies of a book purporting to answer it (A Brief History of Time, 1988).

Above all, Adams’s books give voice to a sense of dismay and uprootedness, of being oneself out of date and unfit for purpose and somehow not in on the joke: “All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was,” as Arthur complains to Slartibartfast. In Britain, in the early 80s, such unease found a shape, often, in anti-Thatcher activity of one sort or another, and, what with Ronald Reagan in power across the water, a furious anti-Americanism; in post-punk indie music in particular, the fashion was for using small, cheap, home-made bits of technology, as if against what was perceived as a big, dumb and incoming American demolition squad. And although Adams was not into post-punk music – his taste, I’m sorry to say, was for Pink Floyd and prog in general, and even the delightful Hitchhiker’s theme-tune turns out to be by the Eagles – it’s obvious that there is a continuity, of some sort, between the universe as he saw it and the “defiance”, as the critic Mark Greif calls it, of certain post-punk musicians, “the insistence on finding ways to retain the thoughts and feelings that a larger power should have extinguished”.

This perhaps is one reason Radiohead some years later found themselves doing an album called OK Computer (1997) – the title echoes something Zaphod Beeblebrox often says – with a song on it called, of course, “Paranoid Android”: “When I am king, you will be first against the wall / With your opinion which is of no consequence at all . . .” “At its best,” Greif writes in a brilliant 2005 essay in n+1, “Radiohead’s music . . . can abet an impersonal defiance . . . It might be the one thing we can manage, and better than sinking beneath the waves.”

So there I was, the other day, watching a DVD of the 1981 Hitchhiker’s sitcom with my sci-fi-crazy six-year-old son. First the good news. Eagles or no Eagles, that theme tune is still terrific, gleeful and wistful and full of space. So are the animated Book extracts. And so is Magrathea, filmed in the pre-Eden Project clay-pits, and so is Zaphod Beeblebrox’s waggling spare head. The 1981-ness of it all is overwhelming. Both my son and I agreed that the show still really rocks.

The weird news, though, is that it’s also oddly backward-looking. Simon Jones plays Arthur Dent as though he’s a squire with a servant problem, his dressing-gown tweedy, his face a cipher of well-bred exasperation – do none of you damned aliens even know who I am? (Apparently the part was written with Jones in mind from the beginning – Adams knew him from Cambridge.) Jones’s accent is old-fashioned posh, like Prince Charles’s. Hearing it, I suddenly realised, after 30 years of not getting it, why it’s meant to be funny that the computer is called Deep Thought – it’s not a joke that works in commoner British accents. Straight after Hitchhiker’s, Jones went on to play Bridey in the ITV Brideshead Revisited (1981), the defining TV show of the early 80s Tory ascendancy. Not that the poshness is attributable to him alone: Ford Prefect sports a Footlights-friendly boating blazer. As the Vogons are attacking London, shots are cut in of chaps in Python-sketch-like bowler hats.

In the 2005 film, on the other hand, Martin Freeman’s dressing-gown is made of terry-towelling; Ford Prefect is played by an African-American (being an alien, ho ho). Yet it gradually dawns on you that there’s something disturbingly kitsch about the voice of the Book itself, as it tells you not to panic, not to forget your towel, and so on – something creepy and fantasy-English, like those 40s-throwback Keep Calm and Carry On mugs. It is, in fact, intolerably smug and self-adoring, the voice of the British light-entertainment panel-show pantheon. It is, in short, the voice of Stephen Fry.

My son was disappointed with the 80s Marvin, mainly because he looks as if someone on Blue Peter made him out of cornflake packets. And I didn’t like watching Marvin either – he made me feel obscurely angry, uncomfortable and ashamed, and as I went on watching I realised why. Like an entire generation, I probably came across the word “paranoid” for the first time via Adams’s writing (if not, it was via that of Ozzy Osbourne). It took me years to realise that Adams had chosen it not because it clarified the agonies to which his creation gives voice, but only because it rhymed. It’s the same with the phrase “manically depressed”, used more than once as a description of whatever it is that Marvin is. Psychiatrically speaking, it’s nonsense, and in any case, it’s lazy, ignorant, unkind: “I didn’t ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don’t think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings,” as Marvin says.

Marvin appears very little in Hitchhiker’s, and is known only by a few lines and phrases, yet his situation, surely, makes perfect sense. “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Because I don’t.” “What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don’t bother to answer that, I’m 50,000 times more intelligent than you and even I don’t know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.” The word “robot”, the OED reminds us, came into English from the Czech “robota”, forced labour; Marvin, basically, is a chippy, whining support-desk worker, a highly skilled, profoundly bored and accordingly resentful IT boffin. Last year Zadie Smith published an essay about how in her family, television sitcoms “served as . . . a vital link between us when, classwise, and in every other wise, each year placed us farther apart”; and really, I wonder if it’s possible for anyone ever to talk about British sitcoms without immediately talking about class, family, the British body politic as well. Ask CMK, with his grandparents and their Betamax recorder. Ask Neil Gaiman, in the family car in the drive.

Early in its history, the Hitchhiker’s storyline started diverging into variant versions, depending on whether you were listening to the radio, or reading the novels. Changes were made for copyright reasons, for artistic reasons, for both; quickly, the story ceased to be a mere story and became a franchise, a brand. For the novels, in particular, Adams had to keep finding new ways of starting successive sequels; and so, like many a sci-fi writer before him, he turned increasingly to time travel and parallel realities and the like. Bent and bent back again, erased and re-recorded, the characters fade into a general crackle; there is something Sisyphean about their movements, pushing and pushing towards resolution, only to be dropped right back to a new beginning, to push and push again. At the end of the final novel, Mostly Harmless (1992), the Vogons came back and destroyed Earth properly this time, killing off absolutely everyone; except in the later radio adaptation, in which there was instead a cheery reunion at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Marvin the Paranoid Android, though, died earlier, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1985). “Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half limping, half crawling. It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred metal . . .” Arthur lifts Marvin up, so he can read God’s Final Message to his Creation; “I think I feel good about it,” Marvin murmurs, “from deep within his corroding, rattling thorax.” “We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” as Camus once put it; and so, in at least one dimension of the tellyverse, that is surely how he’s best left

********
Nous Rend Idiot?

by Nicolas Carr

“Dave, arrête. Arrête, s’il te plaît. Arrête Dave. Vas-tu t’arrêter, Dave ?” Ainsi le super-ordinateur HAL suppliait l’implacable astronaute Dave Bowman dans une scène célèbre et singulièrement poignante à la fin du film de Stanley Kubrick 2001, l’odyssée de l’espace. Bowman, qui avait failli être envoyé à la mort, au fin fond de l’espace, par la machine détraquée, est en train de déconnecter calmement et froidement les circuits mémoires qui contrôlent son “cerveau” électronique. “Dave, mon esprit est en train de disparaître”, dit HAL, désespérément. “Je le sens. Je le sens.”

Moi aussi, je le sens. Ces dernières années, j’ai eu la désagréable impression que quelqu’un, ou quelque chose, bricolait mon cerveau, en reconnectait les circuits neuronaux, reprogrammait ma mémoire. Mon esprit ne disparaît pas, je n’irai pas jusque là, mais il est en train de changer. Je ne pense plus de la même façon qu’avant. C’est quand je lis que ça devient le plus flagrant. Auparavant, me plonger dans un livre ou dans un long article ne me posait aucun problème. Mon esprit était happé par la narration ou par la construction de l’argumentation, et je passais des heures à me laisser porter par de longs morceaux de prose. Ce n’est plus que rarement le cas. Désormais, ma concentration commence à s’effilocher au bout de deux ou trois pages. Je m’agite, je perds le fil, je cherche autre chose à faire. J’ai l’impression d’être toujours en train de forcer mon cerveau rétif à revenir au texte. La lecture profonde, qui était auparavant naturelle, est devenue une lutte.

Je crois savoir ce qui se passe. Cela fait maintenant plus de dix ans que je passe énormément de temps sur la toile, à faire des recherches, à surfer et même parfois à apporter ma pierre aux immenses bases de données d’Internet. En tant qu’écrivain, j’ai reçu le Web comme une bénédiction. Les recherches, autrefois synonymes de journées entières au milieu des livres et magazines des bibliothèques, s’effectuent désormais en un instant. Quelques recherches sur Google, quelques clics de lien en lien et j’obtiens le fait révélateur ou la citation piquante que j’espérais. Même lorsque je ne travaille pas, il y a de grandes chances que je sois en pleine exploration du dédale rempli d’informations qu’est le Web ou en train de lire ou d’écrire des e-mails, de parcourir les titres de l’actualité et les derniers billets de mes blogs favoris, de regarder des vidéos et d’écouter des podcasts ou simplement de vagabonder d’un lien à un autre, puis à un autre encore. (À la différence des notes de bas de page, auxquelles on les apparente parfois, les liens hypertextes ne se contentent pas de faire référence à d’autres ouvrages ; ils vous attirent inexorablement vers ces nouveaux contenus.)

Pour moi, comme pour d’autres, le Net est devenu un media universel, le tuyau d’où provient la plupart des informations qui passent par mes yeux et mes oreilles. Les avantages sont nombreux d’avoir un accès immédiat à un magasin d’information d’une telle richesse, et ces avantages ont été largement décrits et applaudis comme il se doit. “Le souvenir parfait de la mémoire du silicium”, a écrit Clive Thompson de Wired, “peut être une fantastique aubaine pour la réflexion.” Mais cette aubaine a un prix. Comme le théoricien des média Marshall McLuhan le faisait remarquer dans les années 60, les média ne sont pas uniquement un canal passif d’information. Ils fournissent les bases de la réflexion, mais ils modèlent également le processus de la pensée. Et il semble que le Net érode ma capacité de concentration et de réflexion. Mon esprit attend désormais les informations de la façon dont le Net les distribue : comme un flux de particules s’écoulant rapidement. Auparavant, j’étais un plongeur dans une mer de mots. Désormais, je fends la surface comme un pilote de jet-ski.

Je ne suis pas le seul. Lorsque j’évoque mes problèmes de lecture avec des amis et des connaissances, amateurs de littérature pour la plupart, ils me disent vivre la même expérience. Plus ils utilisent le Web, plus ils doivent se battre pour rester concentrés sur de longues pages d’écriture. Certains des bloggeurs que je lis ont également commencé à mentionner ce phénomène. Scott Karp, qui tient un blog sur les média en ligne, a récemment confessé qu’il avait complètement arrêté de lire des livres. “J’étais spécialisé en littérature à l’université et je passais mon temps à lire des livres”, écrit-il. “Que s’est-il passé ?” Il essaie de deviner la réponse : “Peut-être que je ne lis plus que sur Internet, non pas parce que ma façon de lire a changé (c’est à dire parce que je rechercherais la facilité), mais plutôt parce que ma façon de PENSER a changé ?”

Bruce Friedman, qui bloggue régulièrement sur l’utilisation des ordinateurs en médecine, décrit également la façon dont Internet a transformé ses habitudes intellectuelles. “J’ai désormais perdu presque totalement la capacité de lire et d’absorber un long article, qu’il soit sur le Web ou imprimé”, écrivait-il plus tôt cette année. Friedman, un pathologiste qui a longtemps été professeur l’école à de médecine du Michigan, a développé son commentaire lors d’une conversation téléphonique avec moi. Ses pensées, dit-il, ont acquis un style “staccato”, à l’image de la façon dont il scanne rapidement de petits passages de texte provenant de multiples sources en ligne. “Je ne peux plus lire Guerre et Paix“, admet-il. “J’ai perdu la capacité de le faire. Même un billet de blog de plus de trois ou quatre paragraphes est trop long pour que je l’absorbe. Je l’effleure à peine.”

Les anecdotes par elles-mêmes ne prouvent pas grand chose. Et nous attendons encore des expériences neurologiques et psychologiques sur le long terme, qui nous fourniraient une image définitive sur la façon dont Internet affecte nos capacités cognitives. Mais une étude publiée récemment (.pdf) sur les habitudes de recherches en ligne, conduite par des spécialistes de l’université de Londres, suggère que nous assistons peut-être à de profonds changements de notre façon de lire et de penser. Dans le cadre de ce programme de recherche de cinq ans, ils ont examiné des traces informatiques renseignant sur le comportement des visiteurs de deux sites populaires de recherche, l’un exploité par la bibliothèque britannique et l’autre par un consortium éducatif anglais, qui fournissent un accès à des articles de journaux, des livres électroniques et d’autres sources d’informations écrites. Ils ont découvert que les personnes utilisant ces sites présentaient “une forme d’activité d’écrémage”, sautant d’une source à une autre et revenant rarement à une source qu’ils avaient déjà visitée. En règle générale, ils ne lisent pas plus d’une ou deux pages d’un article ou d’un livre avant de “bondir” vers un autre site. Parfois, ils sauvegardent un article long, mais il n’y a aucune preuve qu’ils y reviendront jamais et le liront réellement. Les auteurs de l’étude rapportent ceci :

“Il est évident que les utilisateurs ne lisent pas en ligne dans le sens traditionnel. En effet, des signes montrent que de nouvelles formes de “lecture” apparaissent lorsque les utilisateurs “super-naviguent” horizontalement de par les titres, les contenus des pages et les résumés pour parvenir à des résultats rapides. Il semblerait presque qu’ils vont en ligne pour éviter de lire de manière traditionnelle.”

Grâce à l’omniprésence du texte sur Internet, sans même parler de la popularité des textos sur les téléphones portables, nous lisons peut-être davantage aujourd’hui que dans les années 70 ou 80, lorsque la télévision était le média de choix. Mais il s’agit d’une façon différente de lire, qui cache une façon différente de penser, peut-être même un nouveau sens de l’identité. “Nous ne sommes pas seulement ce que nous lisons”, dit Maryanne Wolf, psychologue du développement à l’université Tufts et l’auteur de Proust et le Calamar : l’histoire et la science du cerveau qui lit. “Nous sommes définis par notre façon de lire.” Wolf s’inquiète que le style de lecture promu par le Net, un style qui place “l’efficacité” et “l’immédiateté” au-dessus de tout, puisse fragiliser notre capacité pour le style de lecture profonde qui a émergé avec une technologie plus ancienne, l’imprimerie, qui a permis de rendre banals les ouvrages longs et complexes. Lorsque nous lisons en ligne, dit-elle, nous avons tendance à devenir de “simples décodeurs de l’information”. Notre capacité à interpréter le texte, à réaliser les riches connexions mentales qui se produisent lorsque nous lisons profondément et sans distraction, reste largement inutilisée.

La lecture, explique Wolf, n’est pas une capacité instinctive de l’être humain. Elle n’est pas inscrite dans nos gènes de la même façon que le langage. Nous devons apprendre à nos esprits comment traduire les caractères symboliques que nous voyons dans un langage que nous comprenons. Et le médium ou toute autre technologie que nous utilisons pour apprendre et exercer la lecture joue un rôle important dans la façon dont les circuits neuronaux sont modelés dans nos cerveaux. Les expériences montrent que les lecteurs d’idéogrammes, comme les chinois, développent un circuit mental pour lire très différent des circuits trouvés parmi ceux qui utilisent un langage écrit employant un alphabet. Les variations s’étendent à travers de nombreuses régions du cerveau, incluant celles qui gouvernent des fonctions cognitives essentielles comme la mémoire et l’interprétation des stimuli visuels et auditifs. De la même façon, nous pouvons nous attendre à ce que les circuits tissés par notre utilisation du Net seront différents de ceux tissés par notre lecture des livres et d’autres ouvrages imprimés.

En 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche acheta une machine à écrire, une “Malling-Hansen Writing Ball” pour être précis. Sa vue était en train de baisser, et rester concentré longtemps sur une page était devenu exténuant et douloureux, source de maux de têtes fréquents et douloureux. Il fut forcé de moins écrire, et il eut peur de bientôt devoir abandonner. La machine à écrire l’a sauvé, au moins pour un temps. Une fois qu’il eut maîtrisé la frappe, il fut capable d’écrire les yeux fermés, utilisant uniquement le bout de ses doigts. Les mots pouvaient de nouveau couler de son esprit à la page.

Mais la machine eut un effet plus subtil sur son travail. Un des amis de Nietzsche, un compositeur, remarqua un changement dans son style d’écriture. Sa prose, déjà laconique, devint encore plus concise, plus télégraphique. “Peut-être que, grâce à ce nouvel instrument, tu vas même obtenir un nouveau langage”, lui écrivit cet ami dans une lettre, notant que dans son propre travail ses “pensées sur la musique et le langage dépendaient souvent de la qualité de son stylo et du papier”.
“Tu as raison”, répondit Nietzsche , “nos outils d’écriture participent à l’éclosion de nos pensées”. Sous l’emprise de la machine, écrit le spécialiste allemand des médias Friedrich A. Kittler, la prose de Nietzsche “est passée des arguments aux aphorismes, des pensées aux jeux de mots, de la rhétorique au style télégraphique”.

Le cerveau est malléable presque à l’infini. On a longtemps cru que notre réseau mental, les connexions denses qui se forment parmi nos cent milliards et quelques de neurones, sont largement établis au moment où nous atteignons l’âge adulte. Mais des chercheurs du cerveau ont découvert que ce n’était pas le cas. James Olds, professeur de neurosciences qui dirige l’institut Krasnow pour l’étude avancée à l’université George Mason, dit que même l’esprit adulte “est très plastique”. Les cellules nerveuses rompent régulièrement leurs anciennes connexions et en créent de nouvelles. “Le cerveau”, selon Olds, “a la capacité de se reprogrammer lui-même à la volée, modifiant la façon dont il fonctionne.”

Lorsque nous utilisons ce que le sociologue Daniel Bell appelle nos “technologies intellectuelles”, les outils qui étendent nos capacités mentales plutôt que physiques, nous empruntons inéluctablement les qualités de ces technologies. L’horloge mécanique, qui est devenu d’utilisation fréquente au 14e siècle, fournit un exemple frappant. Dans Technique et Civilisation, l’historien et critique culturel Lewis Mumford décrit comment l’horloge “a dissocié le temps des évènements humains et a contribué à créer la croyance en un monde indépendant constitué de séquences mathématiquement mesurables”. La “structure abstraite du découpage du temps” est devenue “le point de référence à la fois pour l’action et les pensées”.

Le tic-tac systématique de l’horloge a contribué à créer l’esprit scientifique et l’homme scientifique. Mais il nous a également retiré quelque chose. Comme feu l’informaticien du MIT Joseph Weizenbaum l’a observé dans son livre de 1976, Le pouvoir de l’ordinateur et la raison humaine : du jugement au calcul, la conception du monde qui a émergé de l’utilisation massive d’instruments de chronométrage “reste une version appauvrie de l’ancien monde, car il repose sur le rejet de ces expériences directes qui formaient la base de l’ancienne réalité, et la constituaient de fait.” En décidant du moment auquel il faut manger, travailler, dormir et se lever, nous avons arrêté d’écouter nos sens et commencé à nous soumettre aux ordres de l’horloge.

Le processus d’adaptation aux nouvelles technologies intellectuelles est reflété dans les métaphores changeantes que nous utilisons pour nous expliquer à nous-mêmes. Quand l’horloge mécanique est arrivée, les gens ont commencé à penser que leur cerveau opérait “comme une horloge”. Aujourd’hui, à l’ère du logiciel, nous pensons qu’il fonctionne “comme un ordinateur”. Mais les changements, selon la neuroscience, dépassent la simple métaphore. Grâce à la plasticité de notre cerveau, l’adaptation se produit également au niveau biologique.

Internet promet d’avoir des effets particulièrement profonds sur la cognition. Dans un article publié en 1936 (.pdf), le mathématicien anglais Alan Turing a prouvé que l’ordinateur numérique, qui à l’époque n’existait que sous la forme d’une machine théorique, pouvait être programmé pour réaliser les fonctions de n’importe quel autre appareil traitant l’information. Et c’est ce à quoi nous assistons de nos jours. Internet, un système informatique d’une puissance inouïe, inclut la plupart de nos autres technologies intellectuelles. Il devient notre plan et notre horloge, notre imprimerie et notre machine à écrire, notre calculatrice et notre téléphone, notre radio et notre télévision.

Quand le Net absorbe un médium, ce médium est recréé à l’image du Net. Il injecte dans le contenu du médium des liens hypertextes, des pubs clignotantes et autres bidules numériques, et il entoure ce contenu avec le contenu de tous les autres média qu’il a absorbés. Un nouveau message e-mail, par exemple, peut annoncer son arrivée pendant que nous jetons un coup d’œil aux derniers titres sur le site d’un journal. Résultat : notre attention est dispersée et notre concentration devient diffuse.

L’influence du Net ne se limite pas aux bords de l’écran de l’ordinateur non plus. En même temps que l’esprit des gens devient sensible au patchwork disparate du médium Internet, les média traditionnels ont dû s’adapter aux nouvelles attentes de leur public. Les programmes de télévision ajoutent des textes défilants et des pubs qui surgissent, tandis que les magazines et les journaux réduisent la taille de leurs articles, ajoutent des résumés, et parsèment leurs pages de fragments d’information faciles à parcourir. Lorsque, au mois de mars de cette année, le New York Times a décidé de consacrer la deuxième et la troisième page de toutes ses éditions à des résumés d’articles, son directeur artistique, Tom Badkin, explique que les “raccourcis” donneront aux lecteurs pressés un “avant-goût” des nouvelles du jour, leur évitant la méthode “moins efficace” de tourner réellement les pages et de lire les articles. Les anciens média n’ont pas d’autre choix que de jouer suivant les règles du nouveau médium.

Jamais système de communication n’a joué autant de rôles différents dans nos vies, ou exercé une si grande influence sur nos pensées, que ne le fait Internet de nos jours. Pourtant, malgré tout ce qui a été écrit à propos du Net, on a très peu abordé la façon dont, exactement, il nous reprogramme. L’éthique intellectuelle du Net reste obscure.

À peu près au moment où Nietzsche commençait à utiliser sa machine à écrire, un jeune homme sérieux du nom de Frederick Winslow Taylor apporta un chronomètre dans l’aciérie Midvale de Philadelphie et entama une série d’expériences historique dont le but était d’améliorer l’efficacité des machinistes de l’usine. Avec l’accord des propriétaires de Midvale, il embaucha un groupe d’ouvriers, les fit travailler sur différentes machines de métallurgie, enregistra et chronométra chacun de leurs mouvements ainsi que les opérations des machines. En découpant chaque travail en une séquence de petites étapes unitaires et en testant les différentes façons de réaliser chacune d’entre elles, Taylor créa un ensemble d’instructions précises, un “algorithme”, pourrions dire de nos jours, décrivant comment chaque ouvrier devait travailler. Les employés de Midvale se plaignirent de ce nouveau régime strict, affirmant que cela faisait d’eux quelque chose d’à peine mieux que des automates, mais la productivité de l’usine monta en flèche.

Plus de cent ans après l’invention de la machine à vapeur, la révolution industrielle avait finalement trouvé sa philosophie et son philosophe. La chorégraphie industrielle stricte de Taylor, son “système” comme il aimait l’appeler, fut adoptée par les fabricants dans tout le pays et, avec le temps, dans le monde entier. À la recherche de la vitesse, de l’efficacité et de la rentabilité maximales, les propriétaires d’usine utilisèrent les études sur le temps et le mouvement pour organiser leur production et configurer le travail de leurs ouvriers. Le but, comme Taylor le définissait dans son célèbre traité de 1911, La direction des ateliers (le titre original The principles of scientific management pourrait être traduit en français par “Les principes de l’organisation scientifique”), était d’identifier et d’adopter, pour chaque poste, la “meilleure méthode” de travail et ainsi réaliser “la substitution graduelle de la science à la méthode empirique dans les arts mécaniques”. Une fois que le système serait appliqué à tous les actes du travail manuel, garantissait Taylor à ses émules, cela amènerait un remodelage, non seulement de l’industrie, mais également de la société, créant une efficacité parfaite utopique. “Dans le passé, l’homme était la priorité”, déclare-t-il, “dans le futur, la priorité, ce sera le système”.

Le système de Taylor, le taylorisme, est encore bien vivant ; il demeure l’éthique de la production industrielle. Et désormais, grâce au pouvoir grandissant que les ingénieurs informaticiens et les programmeurs de logiciel exercent sur nos vies intellectuelles, l’éthique de Taylor commence également à gouverner le royaume de l’esprit. Internet est une machine conçue pour la collecte automatique et efficace, la transmission et la manipulation des informations, et des légions de programmeurs veulent trouver “LA meilleure méthode”, l’algorithme parfait, pour exécuter chaque geste mental de ce que nous pourrions décrire comme “le travail de la connaissance”.

Le siège de Google, à Mountain View, en Californie, le Googleplex, est la Haute Église d’Internet, et la religion pratiquée en ses murs est le taylorisme. Google, selon son directeur-général Eric Schmidt, est “une entreprise fondée autour de la science de la mesure” et il s’efforce de “tout systématiser” dans son fonctionnement. En s’appuyant sur les téra-octets de données comportementales qu’il collecte à travers son moteur de recherche et ses autres sites, il réalise des milliers d’expériences chaque jour, selon le Harvard Business Review, et il utilise les résultats pour peaufiner les algorithmes qui contrôlent de plus en plus la façon dont les gens trouvent l’information et en extraient le sens. Ce que Taylor a fait pour le travail manuel, Google le fait pour le travail de l’esprit.

Google a déclaré que sa mission était “d’organiser les informations du monde et de les rendre universellement accessibles et utiles”. Cette société essaie de développer “le moteur de recherche parfait”, qu’elle définit comme un outil qui “comprendrait exactement ce que vous voulez dire et vous donnerait en retour exactement ce que vous désirez”. Selon la vision de Google, l’information est un produit comme un autre, une ressource utilitaire qui peut être exploitée et traitée avec une efficacité industrielle. Plus le nombre de morceaux d’information auxquels nous pouvons “accéder” est important, plus rapidement nous pouvons en extraire l’essence, et plus nous sommes productifs en tant que penseurs.

Où cela s’arrêtera-t-il ? Sergey Brin et Larry Page, les brillants jeunes gens qui ont fondé Google pendant leur doctorat en informatique à Stanford, parlent fréquemment de leur désir de transformer leur moteur de recherche en une intelligence artificielle, une machine comme HAL, qui pourrait être connectée directement à nos cerveaux. “Le moteur de recherche ultime est quelque chose d’aussi intelligent que les êtres humains, voire davantage”, a déclaré Page lors d’une conférence il y a quelques années. “Pour nous, travailler sur les recherches est un moyen de travailler sur l’intelligence artificielle.” Dans un entretien de 2004 pour Newsweek, Brin affirmait : “Il est certain que si vous aviez toutes les informations du monde directement fixées à votre cerveau ou une intelligence artificielle qui serait plus intelligente que votre cerveau, vous vous en porteriez mieux.” L’année dernière, Page a dit lors d’une convention de scientifiques que Google “essayait vraiment de construire une intelligence artificielle et de le faire à grande échelle.”

Une telle ambition est naturelle, et même admirable, pour deux mathématiciens prodiges disposant d’immenses moyens financiers et d’une petite armée d’informaticiens sous leurs ordres. Google est une entreprise fondamentalement scientifique, motivée par le désir d’utiliser la technologie, comme l’exprime Eric Schmidt, “pour résoudre les problèmes qui n’ont jamais été résolus auparavant”, et le frein principal à la réussite d’une telle entreprise reste l’intelligence artificielle. Pourquoi Brin et Page ne voudraient-ils pas être ceux qui vont parvenir à surmonter cette difficulté ?

Pourtant, leur hypothèse simpliste voulant que nous nous “porterions mieux” si nos cerveaux étaient assistés ou même remplacés par une intelligence artificielle, est inquiétante. Cela suggère que d’après eux l’intelligence résulte d’un processus mécanique, d’une suite d’étapes discrètes qui peuvent être isolés, mesurés et optimisés. Dans le monde de Google, le monde dans lequel nous entrons lorsque nous allons en ligne, il y a peu de place pour le flou de la réflexion. L’ambiguïté n’est pas un préliminaire à la réflexion mais un bogue à corriger. Le cerveau humain n’est qu’un ordinateur dépassé qui a besoin d’un processeur plus rapide et d’un plus gros disque dur.

L’idée que nos esprits doivent fonctionner comme des machines traitant des données à haute vitesse n’est pas seulement inscrite dans les rouages d’Internet, c’est également le business-model qui domine le réseau. Plus vous surfez rapidement sur le Web, plus vous cliquez sur des liens et visitez de pages, plus Google et les autres compagnies ont d’occasions de recueillir des informations sur vous et de vous nourrir avec de la publicité. La plupart des propriétaires de sites commerciaux ont un enjeu financier à collecter les miettes de données que nous laissons derrière nous lorsque nous voletons de lien en lien : plus y a de miettes, mieux c’est. Une lecture tranquille ou une réflexion lente et concentrée sont bien les dernières choses que ces compagnies désirent. C’est dans leur intérêt commercial de nous distraire.

Peut-être ne suis-je qu’un angoissé. Tout comme il y a une tendance à glorifier le progrès technologique, il existe la tendance inverse, celle de craindre le pire avec tout nouvel outil ou toute nouvelle machine. Dans le Phèdre de Platon, Socrate déplore le développement de l’écriture. Il avait peur que, comme les gens se reposaient de plus en plus sur les mots écrits comme un substitut à la connaissance qu’ils transportaient d’habitude dans leur tête, ils allaient, selon un des intervenants d’un dialogue, “arrêter de faire travailler leur mémoire et devenir oublieux.” Et puisqu’ils seraient capables de “recevoir une grande quantité d’informations sans instruction appropriée”, ils risquaient de “croire posséder une grande connaissance, alors qu’ils seraient en fait largement ignorants”. Ils seraient “remplis de l’orgueil de la sagesse au lieu de la sagesse réelle”. Socrate n’avait pas tort, les nouvelles technologies ont souvent les effets qu’il redoutait, mais il manquait de vision à long terme. Il ne pouvait pas prévoir les nombreux moyens que l’écriture et la lecture allaient fournir pour diffuser l’information, impulsant des idées fraîches et élargissant la connaissance humaine (voire la sagesse).

L’arrivée de l’imprimerie de Gutenberg, au XVe siècle, déclencha une autre série de grincements de dents. L’humaniste italien Hieronimo Squarciafico s’inquiétait que la facilité à obtenir des livres conduise à la paresse intellectuelle, rende les hommes “moins studieux” et affaiblisse leur esprit. D’autres avançaient que des livres et journaux imprimés à moindre coût allaient saper l’autorité religieuse, rabaisser le travail des érudits et des scribes, et propager la sédition et la débauche. Comme le professeur de l’université de New York, Clay Shirky, le remarque, “la plupart des arguments contre l’imprimerie était corrects et même visionnaires.” Mais, encore une fois, les prophètes de l’apocalypse ne pouvaient imaginer la myriade de bienfaits que le texte imprimé allait amener.

Alors certes, vous pouvez vous montrer sceptique vis-à-vis de mon scepticisme. Ceux qui considèrent les détracteurs d’Internet comme des béotiens technophobes ou passéistes auront peut-être raison, et peut-être que de nos esprits hyperactifs, gavés de données surgira un âge d’or de la découverte intellectuelle et de la sagesse universelle. Là encore, le Net n’est pas l’alphabet, et même s’il remplacera peut-être l’imprimerie, il produira quelque chose de complètement différent. Le type de lecture profonde qu’une suite de pages imprimées stimule est précieux, non seulement pour la connaissance que nous obtenons des mots de l’auteur, mais aussi pour les vibrations intellectuelles que ces mots déclenchent dans nos esprits. Dans les espaces de calme ouverts par la lecture soutenue et sans distraction d’un livre, ou d’ailleurs par n’importe quel autre acte de contemplation, nous faisons nos propres associations, construisons nos propres inférences et analogies, nourrissons nos propres idées. La lecture profonde, comme le défend Maryanne Wolf, est indissociable de la pensée profonde.

Si nous perdons ces endroits calmes ou si nous les remplissons avec du “contenu”, nous allons sacrifier quelque chose d’important non seulement pour nous même, mais également pour notre culture. Dans un essai récent, l’auteur dramatique Richard Foreman décrit de façon éloquente ce qui est en jeu :

“Je suis issu d’une tradition culturelle occidentale, pour laquelle l’idéal (mon idéal) était la structure complexe, dense et “bâtie telle une cathédrale” de la personnalité hautement éduquée et logique, un homme ou une femme qui transporte en soi-même une version unique et construite personnellement de l’héritage tout entier de l’occident. Mais maintenant je vois en nous tous (y compris en moi-même) le remplacement de cette densité interne complexe par une nouvelle sorte d’auto-évolution sous la pression de la surcharge d’information et la technologie de “l’instantanément disponible”.”

À mesure que nous nous vidons de notre “répertoire interne issu de notre héritage dense”, conclut Foreman, nous risquons de nous transformer en “crêpe humaine”, étalée comme un pâte large et fine à mesure que nous nous connectons à ce vaste réseau d’information accessible en pressant simplement sur une touche.”

Cette scène de 2001 : l’odyssée de l’espace me hante. Ce qui la rend si poignante, et si bizarre, c’est la réponse pleine d’émotion de l’ordinateur lors du démontage de son esprit : son désespoir à mesure que ses circuits s’éteignent les uns après les autres, sa supplication enfantine face à l’astronaute, “Je le sens, je le sens. J’ai peur.”, ainsi que sa transformation et son retour final à ce que nous pourrions appeler un état d’innocence. L’épanchement des sentiments de HAL contraste avec l’absence d’émotion qui caractérise les personnages humains dans le film, lesquels s’occupent de leur boulot avec une efficacité robotique. Leurs pensées et leurs actions semblent scénarisées, comme s’ils suivaient les étapes d’un algorithme. Dans le monde de 2001, les hommes sont devenus si semblables aux machines que le personnage le plus humain se trouve être une machine. C’est l’essence de la sombre prophétie de Kubrick : à mesure que nous nous servons des ordinateurs comme intermédiaires de notre compréhension du monde, c’est notre propre intelligence qui devient semblable à l’intelligence artificielle.

Nicolas Carr

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Working Class For Hire

by Timothy Egan

The first nine years of the new century have yet to find a defining label, something as catchy as Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” of the 1970s or the “Silent Generation” of 1950s men in gray flannel suits. Bookmarked by the horror of 9/11 and the history of a black president, the aughts certainly don’t lack for drama.

But last week, lost in the commotion over the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson and the shotgun blast of rage in the Washington protest, something definitive was released just as this decade nears its curtain call.

For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey.

The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. Ten years earlier, adjusted for inflation, it was $51,295.

Of course this reflects the ravages of a horrid recession. But the decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors — and it was calculated, in the eyes of some.

Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it “a plutocratic boom.” If anything comes close to defining the era, that would be my nomination. President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top 1 percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Mark Williams, a Sacramento talk radio host, was speaking to CNN on behalf of the demonstrators — many of whom carried signs comparing Obama to a witch doctor, an undocumented worker or a Nazi — when he played the blue collar card.

Who is Williams? A garden variety demagogue who calls Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug” and the Democratic party “a domestic enemy” of America. He also refers to the president as “racist in chief.” That says all you need to know about leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Williams repeatedly invoked the “working stiffs” who feel left out. Working people are always the last to get aboard the gravy train, and the first to be used in campaigns that will not advance their cause. And with these demonstrators, and the hucksters trying to distract them from real issues, history repeats itself.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff.

“A working class hero is something to be,” John Lennon, that product of ragged Liverpool, sang just after leaving the Beatles. “Keep you doped with religion and sex and T.V.”

As someone who had a union card in my wallet before I owned a Mastercard, I don’t share Lennon’s dark view of blue collar workers. But as long as they can be distracted by people who say all government is bad, while turning a blind eye to manipulation at corporate levels, they’re doomed to shouting at phantoms.

One more detail caught my eye in these new economic reports on the lost decade. People in their prime earning years — age 45 to 54 — took the biggest hit in the last years of the Bush Administration, their median income falling by $5,000. And the region that suffered most — the South.

Older southern whites — that’s who got hit hardest by the freewheeling decade now fading. They should be angry. But they’re five years too late.

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Freikorps For US

By Chris Hedges

The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.

The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.

Violence is a dark undercurrent of American history. It is exacerbated by war and economic decline. Violence is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.

The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day—about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population, according to the National GAINS Center Forum on Combat Veterans, Trauma and the Justice System. There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don’t have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin.

War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I know what prolonged exposure to industrial slaughter does to you. I know what it is to confront memories, buried deep within the subconscious, which jerk you awake at night, your heart racing and your body covered in sweat. I know what it is like to lie, unable to sleep, your heart pounding, trying to remember what it was that caused such terror. I know how it feels to be overcome by the vivid images of violence that make you wonder if the dream or the darkness around you is real. I know what it feels like to stumble through the day carrying a shock and horror, an awful cement-like despair, which you cannot shed. And I know how after a few nights like this you are left numb and exhausted, unable to connect with anyone around you, even those you love the most. I know how you drink or medicate yourself into a coma so you do not have to remember your dreams. And I know that great divide that opens between you and the rest of the world, especially the civilian world, which cannot imagine your pain and your hatred. I know how easily this hatred is directed toward those in that world.

There are minefields of stimulants for those who return from war. Smells, sounds, bridges, the whoosh of a helicopter, thrust you back to Iraq or another zone of slaughter, back to a time of terror and blood, back to the darkest regions of your heart, regions you wish did not exist. Life, on some days, is a simple battle to stay upright, to cope with memories and trauma that are unexplainable, probably unimaginable, to those seated across from you at the breakfast table. Families will watch these veterans fall silent, see the thousand-yard stare, and know they have again lost these men and women. They hope somehow they will come back. Some won’t. Those who cannot cope, even by using Zoloft or Paxil, blow their brains out with drugs, alcohol or a gun. More Vietnam veterans died from suicide in the years after the war than during the conflict itself. But it would be a mistake to blame this on Vietnam. War does this to you. It destroys part of you. You live maimed. If you are not able to live maimed, you check out.

But what happens in a society where everything conspires to check you out even when you make the herculean effort to integrate into the world of malls, celebrity gossip and too many brands of cereal on a supermarket shelf? What happens when the corporate state says that you can die in its wars but at home you are human refuse, that there is no job, no way to pay your medical bills or your mortgage, no hope? Then you retreat into your private hell of rage, terror and alienation. You do not return from the world of war. You yearn for its sleek and powerful weapons, its speed and noise, its ability to abolish the lines between sanity and madness. You long for the alluring, hallucinogenic landscapes of combat. You miss the psychedelic visions of carnage and suffering, the smells, sounds, shrieks, explosions and destruction that jolt you back to the present, which make you aware in ways you never were before. The thrill of violence, the God-like power that comes when you can take a human life with impunity, is matched against the pathetic existence of waiting for an unemployment check. You look to rejoin the fraternity of killers. Here. There. It no longer matters.

There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about “service.” But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality. And so these veterans nurse their fantasies of power. They begin to hate those who sent them as much as they hate those they fought. Some cannot distinguish one from the other.

As I stared into the faces of the men from A Gathering of Eagles on Saturday at a protest calling for the closure of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, I recognized these emotions. These men had arrived on black motorcycles. They were wearing leather jackets. They had lined up, most holding large American flags, to greet the protesters, some of whom were also veterans. They chanted “Traitors!” at the seven people who were arrested for refusing the police order to leave the premises. They sought vindication from a system that had, although they could not admit it, betrayed them. They yearned to be powerful, if only for a moment, if only by breaking through the police line and knocking some God-hating communist faggot to the ground. They wanted the war to come home.

It is we who are guilty, guilty for sending these young men and women to wars that did not have to be fought. It is we who are guilty for turning away from the truth of war to wallow in a self-aggrandizing myth, guilty because we create and decorate killers and when they come home maimed and broken we discard them. It is we who are guilty for failing to defy a Democratic Party that since 1994 has betrayed the working class by destroying our manufacturing base, slashing funds to assist the poor and cravenly doing the bidding of corporations. It is we who are guilty for refusing to mass on Washington and demand single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. It is we who are guilty for supporting Democrats while they funnel billions in taxpayer dollars to sustain speculative Wall Street interests. The rage of the confused and angry right-wing marchers, the ones fired up by trash-talking talk show hosts, the ones liberals belittle and maybe even laugh at, should be our rage. And if it is not our rage soon, if we continue to humiliate and debase ourselves by begging Obama to be Obama, we will see our open society dismantled not because of the shrewdness of the far right, but because of our moral cowardice.

*******
Lobbyist Democracy – Welcome To Your Slavery

By Paul B. Farrell

Democracy dead? Lobbyists ruling America? Lobbyists the new “Unseen Hand” of capitalism? Sadly yes.

And here’s why: Ask any neuroeconomist, behavioral-finance quant, investment psychologist or other practitioner of the mysterious “science of irrationality” and they’ll tell you that Americans have two self-sabotaging mental biases that killed democracy from within: “Denial” and “Magical Thinking” make us easy targets. Our brains are being manipulated by clandestine forces beyond our control. We can’t see them or resist.

The Pelosi-Obama deficitThe Obama White House and the Congressional Budget Office announced that the deficit will increase to $9 trillion over the next decade, $2 trillion more than predicted earlier this year. Watch the Journal Editorial Report on FOX News on Saturdays at 2 and 11 p.m. EDT.
Yet we refuse to believe in this new Orwellian America. We prefer the world of magic, myth and illusion.

Yes, folks, democracy is dead. Oh, the illusion will be kept alive in our history books, in the rhetoric of politicians, in the manipulated minds of America’s 95 million Main Street investors. The propaganda machine works. Like a child’s fairy tale, democracy has been deeply imbedded in our brains for decades; we prefer believing old, familiar stories. They comfort us, even when no longer true. The real democracy, what so many fought and died for since 1776, is dead.

Lobbyists now run America, own America, rule America. Forget the 537 politicians you thought we elected to the White House, Senate and Congress to run America for us. No, they’re mere puppets, pawns for the “Happy Conspiracy,” an oligopoly, plutocracy, cabal, monopoly all-in-one — a private club of America’s richest few on Wall Street, in Washington and in Corporate America.

Voters and elections are irrelevant. Lobbyists decide what’s in the best interests of this elite club. The usual suspects? Try the Forbes 400.

Last year Michael Barone wrote a “Defense of Lobbyists” in U.S. News & World Report: “Lobbying is as American as apple pie, going back to the colonies.” How naïve, how in denial.

He obviously missed reading Bob Kaiser’s brilliant 25-part series in the Washington Post a couple years earlier, on “how lobbying became Washington’s biggest business.” Turns out that modern lobbying actually began in the mid-1970s with the innovative “earmarked appropriations, federal funds directed by Congress to private institutions when no federal agency had proposed spending the money.”

Kaiser expanded the series to: “So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government.” In just three decades, Washington has earmarked hundreds of billions thanks to lobbyists peddling influence bribes to buy Washington votes.

After all, the cost of a Senate race has exploded from $437,000 to $7.9 million. So lobbyists shovel millions to friendly senators, like Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd and Alabama Republican Richard Shelby.

Lobbyists love spending your tax dollars
In another example of lobbyists stealing taxpayer dollars Kaiser tells how “last fall the House of Representatives set off a sudden collapse of the stock market by voting against the first version of the bailout legislation that had been hurriedly written to try to stabilize American banks and other financial institutions.” Lobbyists then “scrambled to change the legislation in ways that would win support for it from a majority of Congressmen.”

How? Simple: Within just days they manipulated Congress to throw in more taxpayer cash. “Sweeteners” included excise-tax rebates for Puerto Rican rum. tax breaks for stock-car-track owners, tax breaks for Hollywood movies made in the USA and lots more. So “days after rejecting the $750 billion bailout, the House approved it.”

Why so easy? There’s a huge, highly paid army of mercenary lobbyists in Washington. Registered lobbyists may be 42,000 versus a mere 537 elected officials. American University political scientist James Thurber says there are actually 261,000 members of the “influence-lobbying complex” running your government. Many are former congressmen, senators and staffers. Others are ad hoc mercenaries, like the 350 hired by the GOP just to kill health-care reforms at a cost over a million bucks a day.

Another example: Former Senate leader Tom Daschle is not registered, yet has emerged as a key go-between for Obama and health-care insurers, a perfect example of how Obama’s $9 trillion programs have fueled an explosion of influence peddlers. Daschle told the New York Times he sees no conflicts, although he’s highly paid by insurers. He calls himself a neutral “resource.”

This anti-democracy trend was recently exposed in a BusinessWeek piece, “Don’t Call Them Lobbyists,” where we see this industry rebranding itself as cooperators, as “special policy advisors,” “crisis managers” and “strategic planners.” Reminds us of that fairy tale about a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” guarding the hen house.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans will never hear about all the day-to-day shenanigans: The buying, selling and bartering of sweeteners, earmarks, votes and senatorial seats. Most of the behind-the-scenes deals never cross the radar of Middle America.

Most voters are destined to live in denial, trapped in mind-numbing illusions replaying over and over as they sit passively, dazed. Or they angrily feed their macho delusions of power at town-hall meetings, carrying AK-47s, convinced that grandma will be sacrificed by one of Obama’s death panels. Either way, they aimlessly drift, unaware of how lobbyists rule America, how lobbyists help the “Happy Conspiracy” rob them blind.

Sinking sensation … democracy is rigged
Still, we feel it. As Frank Rich put it in the New York Times: “What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand.” This pervasive public “mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged, that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to ‘the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few’ who have ‘run Washington far too long.’ He promised to smite them.”

He can’t. Why? Because like the rest of us, he’s controlled by the new “Lobbyists Nation of America.” Obama’s now inside this “Happy Conspiracy,” working with lobbyists like Daschle, all aggressively competing for their slice of a $9 trillion pie for rich clients … as taxpayers sail the good ship “American Titanic Deficits” into a huge iceberg, dead ahead.

Stop kidding yourself. Wake up, you’re in denial, in fantasy world, dreaming of a new “American Democracy.” Wrong, you no longer live in a democracy. Lobbyists run Washington. They even have their own greed-driven operating rules guiding members working inside “Washington’s biggest business.”

Here are some of the principles in the Manifesto of this new “Lobbyist Nation of America.” This is real behavioral economics in action:

Manifesto: ‘Lobbyists Nation of America’ 16 Principles
1.Lobbyists destined to fill a void left by democracy’s failings. Voters are irrational, cannot be trusted to act without guidance from lobbyists.

2.Lobbyists are the new behavioral nudgers guiding America. Forget behavioral scientists, special interest lobbyists will do the real nudging.

3.Lobbyists must nudge voters to elect “friendly” politicians. Lobbyists must invest millions to elect officials favorable to special interests.

4.Lobbyists are the new “unseen hand” of American Capitalism. Capitalism’s new “unseen hand” is the enlightened deals of 261,000 lobbyists

5.Lobbyists will guide economic recovery for special interests. Congress, the president and regulators all have a price, find it and pay it.

6.Lobbyists protect special interests using taxpayer money. The wealthy will have ready access to the assets and credits of the Treasury.

7.Lobbyists amass extra capital anticipating a new meltdown. Plan ahead for the next recession by stockpiling benefits for your clients.

8.Lobbyists hire new blood directly from inside government. The contacts of senators and congressmen are worth millions to clients.

9.Lobbyists reward politicians, treat them like co-lobbyists. Everyone in Washington wants to get rich off big government, help them

10.Lobbyists must defeat programs unfavorable to clients. Programs that weaken the power of the rich must be aggressively defeated.

11.Lobbyist clients’ interests come before public interest. Principles of fiduciary duty mean clients take precedence over public needs.

12.Lobbyists must defeat or gut financial literacy programs. Intelligent, informed investors undercut special interests; Kill the CFPA.

13.Lobbyists give traders access to commercial bank assets. Investment banks switched to get access to deposits for high-risk trading.

14.Lobbyists never help mortgagees and credit-card holders. Helping failing homeowners and card holders means less for bank insiders.

15.Lobbyists want cap-and-trade derivatives for a new bull market. America needs a new bubble, new bull — global warming trades will do trick.

16.Lobbyists must reward the rich, eliminate the “death tax.” Eliminating inheritance taxes assures continuity of wealthy gene pools.

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Losing The News

By Chris Hedges

I have spent most of my life locked in the embrace of two of the most sanctimonious institutions in America—the church and the press. They each bow down before their self-created holy creeds, never tire of trumpeting their supposed virtues, which they hold up as the highest good, and are blind to their glaring inadequacies and mounting irrelevance. They are also, in a time of seismic cultural change, dying.

Alex S. Jones, in his new book “Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,” is a believer. Jones, a former reporter for The New York Times and the author, along with Susan E. Tifft, of “The Trust: The Powerful and Private Family Behind The New York Times,” defends the traditional press and castigates those who fail to acknowledge its contribution to our open society, its high ethical standards and the work and skill that go into producing the news. Jones believes that newspapers are the best guardians of what he calls the “news of verification” as opposed to what he calls the “news of assertion.” The “news of assertion,” he writes, “is mostly on display these days in prime time on cable news channels and in blogs.”

The technology of the Internet, like the earlier technologies of radio and television, is a phantom. It is a convenient and simplistic way to explain a cultural shift. To limit a discussion of news to technology, as Jones often does, means we simply have to find a way to plug the old bolt of newsprint and traditional reporting into the new machine of the Internet. But what is happening is far more revolutionary. We are entering an age in which the electronic image, endowed with the ability to manufacture its own reality, has thrust us into a state of collective self-delusion. We are embarking on a frightening, post-literate world where we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. The death of newsprint is intimately tied to this shifting landscape, including the parallel decline of the publishing industry. And the solution is not to cling to the outdated ethic of newspaper reporting but to adjust this ethic to confront a new cultural landscape.

“Traditional journalists have long believed that this form of fact-based accountability news is the essential food supply of democracy and that without enough of the healthy nourishment, democracy will weaken, sicken, or even fail,” he writes. Jones concedes that “newspapers that sought to retain readers by investing in their newsrooms have not been able to show that this strategy pays off with a surge in circulation. The argument that quality will keep readers is not one that can easily be demonstrated.” He excoriates the corporate overlords of most newspaper chains for placing profit over content and pleads for a return to the ethic of news as a public trust.

The newspaper elites, like all dying elites, have built ideological and physical monuments to themselves—look at the new $600 million New York Times headquarters—in the same way the pharaohs decided to construct massive pyramids to their own immortality at the very moment Egyptian civilization fell into irrevocable decline. These elites celebrate a past greatness and era of moral probity that never really existed. Those running newspapers remain blind to their own systemic flaws, which saw them serve as propagandists for the invasion of Iraq and consistent apologists for the criminal class on Wall Street. They have proved unable to adjust to a changing landscape and have become objects of ridicule, as “The Daily Show” illustrated when it visited the offices cast aspersions on the integrity of The New York Times.

Objectivity, the sacred creed that Jones and the old elite hold up as the highest good, has as often been used to blunt truth as disseminate it. The creed of objectivity, as Jones points out, “sprang mostly from the commercial interests of newspaper moguls in the 19th century, who wanted to sell papers to as many people as possible.” Objectivity worked as long as there were two clear, discernible sides, but this bifurcation of reality is in fact quite rare. Reality never quite lends itself to this simplicity. The creed of objectivity, which treats human reality the way the scales of justice treat a court case, has often stymied reporting, especially about the oppressed. It elevates the oppressors and the oppressed to the same moral level and obscures the truth. This pleases the power elite and mollifies the corporate advertisers but frequently does little for journalism.

The New York Times’ commitment to “objective” journalism, for example, clouded the reality of the lynching of blacks in the South. Read these stories now and you shudder at their mendacity and heartlessness. More than 4,000 African-American men and women were hanged, shot, mutilated, burned alive or killed in other horrible ways by white mobs between 1880 and 1947. And the articles, while they report the lynching, also report what historians have now found to be lies: that these black men raped white women. The Times in an editorial in 1894 decried those who take the law into their own hands. However, the paper wrote, “the crime for which Negroes have frequently been lynched [rape], and occasionally been put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which Negroes are particularly prone.” The paper proposed that the states do the hanging legally. Balance becomes, in moments like these, repugnant.

The best journalists in the South were not those who sought balance but those who wrote for the abolitionist papers. “Being caught in the south with an abolitionist paper in the 1830s,” as Jones notes, “much less publishing one, was a crime punishable the first time by imprisonment or the lash. A second offense usually meant death. In 1837, a mob in Alton, Illinois—just across the river from St. Louis—murdered the editor of the St. Louis Observer, an abolitionist newspaper.” This is the spirit, shunned by the corporate managers of large newspapers and rejected by “objective” journalists, that we will have to recapture if journalism is to endure. It is the spirit, in an age of precipitous cultural and political decline, of open and direct confrontation, one embodied by the greatest reporters, such as I.F. Stone, who spent most of his career as a pariah because he exhibited the moral autonomy most mainstream reporters lacked. If we champion moral autonomy rather than the dead creed of objective journalism, we may save the press. This requires replacing the managers of most newspapers with people who have not been poisoned by journalism schools and rigid newspaper stylebooks. It requires an open commitment to reform and justice that defies the corporate state.

The New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza earlier this year is the modern equivalent of the paper’s reporting on lynching. A Feb. 3, 2009, article titled “Story of the Gaza war, told by a village,” by reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise, uses the same faux objectivity to obscure truth. Nearly every other paragraph—and to be fair to Bronner and Tavernise the foreign desk probably demanded this—offers the official Israeli version of the attack. Never mind that the Israeli spokesman was not in the village of El Ataba. This objective style, the heart of modern newspaper reporting, neutralizes the eyewitness testimony. It permits the paper to include sentences such as “The war in Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving very different versions. Palestinians describe Israel’s military actions as a massacre and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.” Believe what you want to believe. Palestinians simply become the new “Negroes.” Or look at the coverage about health care. Reporting should begin with the factual understanding that our for-profit health care system is the problem. It should begin with the understanding that when it is destroyed we can debate real alternatives. But objectivity ensures that health insurance corporations, which quite literally profit from human suffering and death and which reward and promote employees for denying costly coverage to people who are ill, have the power and clout to shape how we perceive the debate. And years from now when readers look back on articles about the suffering of the Palestinians or those denied health care, if there are any people left who read, they will be as disgusted as we are with the paper’s “objective” accounts about lynching.

News organizations are flooded with statistics and facts released by the government and corporations that purport to be objective. These facts often determine what gets written and how we report about daily events. But these statistics and facts—such as The New York Times saying in a recent news story that only 10 percent of Americans do not have health care—are partial truths. They let readers draw conclusions that are often false. The absurd preoccupation with the stock market and the housing market as reliable guides for growth and our living standards is a partial truth. The rise in stock and home values, at least before the current downturn, was not a lie, but the idea that rising stock prices meant rising prosperity was a lie. It is one of the reasons news organizations were as clueless about the looming economic meltdown as they were about the effects of occupying Iraq. The “objective” standards by which they measure society are often useless. Their approach allows them to report accurate details—often fed to them by public relations firms that work for corporate or political interests—but give a misleading picture of the whole. Truth becomes, through objectivity, the principal vehicle of falsehood. And the traditional press, which as Jones points out adopted “objectivity” not to raise journalism to a higher plane but to increase its profits, is clinging to a flawed system of reporting as corporations, which they had sought to placate, walk away from newsprint.

Papers, at least the ones that did not openly battle for greater justice, initially became very profitable. They did some great reporting although they also filled their pages with a lot of junk. They worked hard to appeal to the elite, and this meant fleeing from confrontations that could alienate the established structures of power.

“The public relations industry was born and has boomed,” Jones writes, “in a world of ostensibly objective journalism. The main purpose of PR is to place information favorable to a client in a context of news so that it has more credibility with the public than the same message might have if it were presented in the form of a paid advertisement or from a clearly self-interested source.”

These papers could be an important corrective force in our democracy and could give an important platform to investigative reports. But objectivity hurt as much as it helped. It usually denied a clear and strong voice to the oppressed and obscured important truths. Jones concedes, in a rather chilling aside, that his family newspaper in Greeneville, Tenn., opposed the civil rights movement. This is not a small admission. It lies at the heart of the weakness of the traditional press. And a black resident of Greeneville who grew up during segregation might not share Jones’ nostalgic view of the paper.

There was a Faustian bargain accepted by newspaper owners that allowed them, for a time, to make good money. This bargain turned reporters into members of the middle class. It made these publishers rich. But this era is over and the ethic that sustained it must be demolished if the press is to recover its thunder and importance in American society.

Corporations no longer need newspapers to disseminate their propaganda. The corporations are slashing their advertising and have plunged newspapers into crisis. The huge profit margins of newspapers, once over 20 percent, have given way to steady quarterly declines and losses. The managerial elite of newspapers have proved morally and intellectually bankrupt. They cloyingly plead with the power elite to save them rather than turn and chart a new course. Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post, recently planned to sell pricey tickets to lobbyists and corporate overlords that would allow them to dine with her and some of her key reporters at salons in her home. She was doing what all publishers are doing, appealing to the elite for salvation. Her proposed salons, when they became public, were canceled, but she no doubt will find other ways to reach out to the powerful and rich. This route means inevitable extinction. If Weymouth, rather than inviting the heads of the for-profit health care industry and other executives to intimate dinners, unleashed her reporters on that industry and allowed them to report bluntly on it, she would begin to restore the diminished stature of the press. But this kind of courage comes with a financial cost that Weymouth and other publishers appear unwilling to accept.

It is by shattering the creed of objectivity, by standing unapologetically in the swelling ranks of the poor and powerless and challenging corporate power, that journalism will survive. This does not mean that the press should become apologists for the oppressed, who have as many failings as any other class of human beings, or not report honestly. But it does mean that we should rediscover who it is we are speaking for and what we are trying to do. It means that the press should become openly confrontational with the power elite. This journalism will never bring in huge revenues. It, by its nature, makes corporations and those in power uncomfortable and angry. But it is the only journalism, discounting the celebrity gossip and trivia that masquerade as journalism, that will survive.

The great city newspapers will probably vanish. I will miss them as much as Jones will. The loss of these papers will, as Jones fears, leave huge holes in our public knowledge and weaken our democracy. Reporters will suffer financially. They will struggle without health insurance. They will be unable to send their children to elite colleges. Their home mortgages will be foreclosed. Few young reporters will be able to afford journalism school. Journalists will no longer be members of the professional class. They will write out of this experience with a clarity that may not be “objective” but will be compelling, real, vibrant and far more truthful.

“My nightmare scenario is one of bankrupt newspapers, news by press release that is thinly disguised advocacy, scattered and ineffectual bands of former journalists and sincere amateurs whose work is left in obscurity,” Jones writes, “and a small cadre of high-priced newsletters that serve as an intelligence service of the rich and powerful.”

But I like to think of the decline differently. I like to think that those reporters from older eras who knew that slavery and segregation were evil, who hated the baton-wielding goons hired to beat striking workers, who reported on inhuman conditions from the mills, factories and mines of the robber barons, who believed that elevating the oppressors to the same moral level as the oppressed was indefensible, will be resurrected as a new generation. Reporters, real reporters, will continue to report even as newspapers die and the airwaves are dominated by trash. Their voices may be marginal amid the din of celebrity culture and spectacle. It will not be easy. But a reporter is a personality type. Reporters are curious, brave and wired with an innate need to be heard. And while they may not be the dominant voices in our degraded culture, they will persist—long after Weymouth and most other publishers have become pathetic footnotes—to rescue our trade from oblivion.

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Comments About Cell Phone Providers Which Gather Personal Information:

(from the comments column on a report that Palm Pre users are having their location and other information recorded – he laments justifiably about the “Take it or leave it” attitude at banks and other institutions)

“As PC World’s Bradley concludes, “the only way to achieve complete privacy is to shun technology completely and live a Luddite existence in a cabin in the Rockies somewhere.”" Not true. Remember “we” are the consumers, and if we do not purchase these products for one reason or another, then they will be forced to make changes. It frustrates me to no end how apathetic most people are in this country. We just bend over and take it, without questioning anything. We do not voice our concerns or stand up for what we believe is right. By the time most people realize what is going on with all these privacy infringements it will be way too late to do anything about it. The time for doing something is now.

I go to rent an apartment and have to sign all these extra pages to the lease, and the lady working there is getting aggravated with me because I am reading everything before I sign. I go to Bank of America to cash a paycheck, and I get charged $6 because I do not have an account there, even though the check I am cashing is a BOA check. On top of that I must give my right thumb print or they will not ca—– . Everyone, including the bank manager, acted as if I was mentally impaired, and/or did not get out much.

It was like this is how we do it, who are you to ask questions? I was so pissed off when I left there I had to sit in my car for a few minutes and calm down. When does it stop? When do people wake up and do something? Or, am I one of the few that have a problem with all this? -Torch

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Hillary Fights a Tide of Trivialization

by Judith Warner

This was supposed to be the trip that would show exactly how Hillary Rodham Clinton would make good on her pledge, at her confirmation hearing for secretary of state, to make women’s issues “central” to U.S. foreign policy, not “adjunct or auxiliary or in any way lesser.”

There could have been no more dramatic setting: Overruling the security fears of her aides, she traveled to eastern Congo, where hundreds of thousands of women have been raped over the past decade. She visited a refugee camp and met with one woman who was gang-raped while eight months pregnant; she heard of another who’d been sexually assaulted with a rifle. She was told of babies cut from their mothers’ bodies with razors. She spoke of “evil in its basest form.” She promised $17 million to fight sexual violence.

And back home, all anyone could talk about was Bill.

Had he upstaged her with his trip to North Korea? Had he dogged her, in absentia, all the way to Kinshasa, where a university student, wondering about “Mr. Clinton’s” views, set her off, and set the world cluck-clucking, once again, about her marriage, her temperament, even her hair?

As she circles the globe in coming years, making the case for women’s empowerment, starting with their basic right to be taken seriously, Clinton really has her work cut out for her. And it isn’t just because the situation of women around the world is so dire, and the ocean of problems confronting them — maternal mortality, sex trafficking, domestic abuse, malnourishment, lack of education, lack of adequate medical care, just for starters — is so wide and so deep. And it isn’t just that her historic mandate — to equally empower the other half of the world’s population, to chip away at the forces “devaluing women,” in the words of Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s new ambassador at large for global women’s issues — is so huge and vague and seemingly overwhelming. It’s also because the tide of trivialization that washes over all things “Hillary” is just so powerful. That tide threatens to drown out anything of substance Clinton might attempt for a population whose problems have long been obscured in the androcentric world of diplomacy. And that’s a huge pity.

This could be a moment for America to redeem itself as far as the world’s women are concerned. Our recent track record, after all, is pretty dim. The Bush administration sent anti-feminists to Iraq to train that country’s women in participatory democracy. We pulled our financing from the United Nations Population Fund and imposed a global gag rule barring women’s health organizations that merely talked about abortion from receiving U.S. funds. We never ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a pretty base-level human rights treaty, because of worries by black helicopter types that American sovereignty would be compromised. Our lack of paid maternity leave made us something of a world joke.

But now things just might change, and not just within the state department. In the Senate, Barbara Boxer is leading a subcommittee charged with global women’s issues; a bill to combat child marriage is moving through Congress.

And yet, a peculiarly gendered form of trivializing scorn still tags our secretary of state. Just two weeks ago, The Washington Post had to remove from its Web site an ostensibly humorous video sketch by two of its prominent political journalists that juxtaposed a picture of Clinton’s face with a bottle of derogatorily named beer. This sort of thing bodes badly for the country’s ability to treat her — and the issues she most passionately champions — with appropriate respect.

“We have our own work to do at home,” Verveer told me. “We trivialize the importance too often of these issues: the ‘women’s issue’ — you put it in quotes, that little category over there, the box you check. What we have to do is realize these are the issues; if we want societies to prosper and if we want our own security, we have to raise the status of women.”

Women’s issues are being framed by this administration in terms of realpolitik: U.S. security depends on women’s empowerment. Global economic growth depends on women’s participation.

Women’s empowerment won’t be delivered at the end of a gun or through economic sanctions or even overt criticism, if it cuts into accepted cultural practices. This is messy stuff; some of our most sensitive allies have horrific records on women’s rights. Programs that show success tend to be slow-moving and incremental. Can all this complexity attract — much less sustain — the attention of the public?

Maybe — if we stop viewing everything Clinton does as entertainment.

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Smart President Does Not Equal Smart Country

by Bill Maher

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing – in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It’s how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O’Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke’s on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia… and no I can’t show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and “listen to their constituents.” An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife’s name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words “Bush” and “knowledge.”

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%. And don’t even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three-flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one-third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, “Do you have these in a relaxed-fit?”

And I haven’t even brought up America’s religious beliefs. But here’s one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That’s right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There’s a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. “Inside the beltway” thinking may be wrong, but at least it’s thinking, which is more than you can say for what’s going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they’re talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that “pure democracy” doesn’t work because “there is nothing to check… an obnoxious individual.” Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Until we admit there are things we don’t know, we can’t even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can’t stop the next one. A smart guy named Chesterton once said: “My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying… It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” To which most Americans would respond: “Are you calling my mother a drunk?”

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Hiroshima Day

By Daniel Ellsberg

It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall.

I thought: “We got it first. And we used it. On a city.”

I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended nine days later, but it didn’t make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 6 was wrong.

Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan Project, my first awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred—and my attitudes toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had formed—some nine months earlier than those headlines, and in a crucially different context.

It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was 13, a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a concept that was familiar then in sociology, William F. Ogburn’s notion of “cultural lag.”

After Labor Day, Daniel Ellsberg’s Web site, http://www.ellsberg.net, and some other sites including Truthdig, will start regular installments of his insider’s memoir of the nuclear era—“The American Doomsday Machine”—an Internet book reflecting his earlier classified work and 40 years of research. In the article here, Ellsberg says: “To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age. … I plan over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden history.”

The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much further and faster in human social-historical evolution than other aspects of culture: our institutions of government, our values, habits, our understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very notion of “progress” referred mainly to technology. What “lagged” behind, what developed more slowly or not at all in social adaptation to new technology was everything that bore on our ability to control and direct technology and the use of technology to dominate other humans.

To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in technology that might be realized soon. It was possible now, he told us, to conceive of a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium, which would have an explosive power 1,000 times greater than the largest bombs being used in the war that was then going on. German scientists in late 1938 had discovered that uranium could be split by nuclear fission, in a way that would release immense amounts of energy.

Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. None of these represented leaks from the Manhattan Project, whose very existence was top-secret. In every case they had been inspired by earlier articles on the subject that had been published freely in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self-censorship and then formal classification had set in. Patterson had come across one of these wartime articles. He brought the potential development to us as an example of one more possible leap by science and technology ahead of our social institutions.

Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the possibility of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be the probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be used, by humans and states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We were to write a short essay on this, within a week.

I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious.

The existence of such a bomb—we each concluded—would be bad news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not control it, safely, appropriately. The power would be “abused”: used dangerously and destructively, with terrible consequences. Many cities would be destroyed entirely, just as the Allies were doing their best to destroy German cities without atomic bombs at that very time, just as the Germans earlier had attempted to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps our species, would be in danger of destruction.

It was just too powerful. Bad enough that bombs already existed that could destroy a whole city block. They were called “block-busters”: 10 tons of high explosive. Humanity didn’t need the prospect of bombs a thousand times more powerful, bombs that could destroy whole cities.

As I recall, this conclusion didn’t depend mainly on who had the Bomb, or how many had it, or who got it first. And to the best of my memory, we in the class weren’t addressing it as something that might come so soon as to bear on the outcome of the ongoing war. It seemed likely, the way the case was presented to us, that the Germans would get it first, since they had done the original science. But we didn’t base our negative assessment on the idea that this would necessarily be a Nazi or German bomb. It would be a bad development, on balance, even if democratic countries got it first.

After we turned in our papers and discussed them in class, it was months before I thought of the issues again. I remember the moment when I did, on a street corner in Detroit. I can still see and feel the scene and recall my thoughts, described above, as I read the headline on Aug. 6.

I remember that I was uneasy, on that first day and in the days ahead, about the tone in President Harry Truman’s voice on the radio as he exulted over our success in the race for the Bomb and its effectiveness against Japan. I generally admired Truman, then and later, but in hearing his announcements I was put off by the lack of concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of tragedy, of desperation or fear for the future. It seemed to me that this was a decision best made in anguish; and both Truman’s manner and the tone of the official communiqués made unmistakably clear that this hadn’t been the case.

Which meant for me that our leaders didn’t have the picture, didn’t grasp the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications for the future. And that evident unawareness was itself scary. I believed that something ominous had happened; that it was bad for humanity that the Bomb was feasible, and that its use would have bad long-term consequences, whether or not those negatives were balanced or even outweighed by short-run benefits.

Looking back, it seems clear to me my reactions then were right.

Moreover, reflecting on two related themes that have run through my life since then—intense abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and more generally of killing women and children—I’ve come to suspect that I’ve conflated in my emotional memory two events less than a year apart: Hiroshima and a catastrophe that visited my own family 11 months later.

On the Fourth of July, 1946, driving on a hot afternoon on a flat, straight road through the cornfields of Iowa—on the way from Detroit to visit our relatives in Denver—my father fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road long enough to hit a sidewall over a culvert that sheared off the right side of the car, killing my mother and sister.

My father’s nose was broken and his forehead was cut. When a highway patrol car came by, he was wandering by the wreckage, bleeding and dazed. I was inside, in a coma from a concussion, with a large gash on the left side of my forehead. I had been sitting on the floor next to the back seat, on a suitcase covered with a blanket, with my head just behind the driver’s seat. When the car hit the wall, my head was thrown against a metal fixture on the back of the driver’s seat, knocking me out and opening up a large triangular flap of flesh on my forehead. I was in coma for 36 hours. My legs had been stretched out in front of me across the car and my right leg was broken just above the knee.

Unlikely thoughts for a 14-year-old American boy to have had the week the war ended? Yes, if he hadn’t been in Mr. Patterson’s social studies class the previous fall. Every member of that class must have had the same flash of recognition of the Bomb, as they read the August headlines during our summer vacation. Beyond that, I don’t know whether they responded as I did, in the terms of our earlier discussion.

But neither our conclusions then or reactions like mine on Aug. 6 stamped us as gifted prophets. Before that day perhaps no one in the public outside our class—no one else outside the Manhattan Project (and very few inside it)—had spent a week, as we had, or even a day thinking about the impact of such a weapon on the long-run prospects for humanity.

And we were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way. Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had occasion to think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing positive associations that accompanied their first awareness in August 1945 of its very possibility: that it was “our” weapon, an instrument of American democracy developed to deter a Nazi Bomb, pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a necessary one—so it was claimed and almost universally believed—to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan.

Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new nuclear era after Aug. 6, our attitudes of the previous fall had not been shaped, or warped, by the claim and appearance that such a weapon had just won a war for the forces of justice, a feat that supposedly would otherwise have cost a million American lives (and as many or more Japanese).

For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy, and its almost miraculous potential for good which had already been realized. For a great many Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a protector of precious lives.

Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective—as constituting just means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances—thus legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate in wartime.

To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral—as most Americans do—is to believe that anything—anything—can be legitimate means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country in the world that believes it won a war by bombing—specifically by bombing cities with weapons of mass destruction—and believes that it was fully rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.

Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years of study I’m convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but I’m not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American government and public’s ready acceptance ever since of basing our security on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.

By contrast, given a few days’ reflection in the summer of 1945 before a presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you didn’t have to be a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of foreboding we all had in Mr. Patterson’s class. It was as easily available to 13-year-old ninth-graders as it was to many Manhattan Project scientists, who also had the opportunity to form their judgments before the Bomb was used.

But the scientists knew something else that was unknown to the public and even to most high-level decision-makers. They knew that the atomic bombs, the uranium and plutonium fission bombs they were preparing, were only the precursors to far more powerful explosives, almost surely including a thermonuclear fusion bomb, later called the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. That weapon—of which we eventually came to have tens of thousands—could have an explosive yield much greater than the fission bombs needed to trigger it. A thousand times greater.

Moreover, most of the scientists who focused on the long-run implications of nuclear weapons, belatedly, after the surrender of Germany in May 1945 believed that using the Bomb against Japan would make international control of the weapon very unlikely. In turn that would make inevitable a desperate arms race, which would soon expose the United States to adversaries’ uncontrolled possession of thermonuclear weapons, so that, as the scientists said in a pre-attack petition to the president, “the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.” (In this they were proved correct.) They cautioned the president—on both moral grounds and considerations of long-run survival of civilization—against beginning this process by using the Bomb against Japan even if its use might shorten the war.

But their petition was sent “through channels” and was deliberately held back by Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. It never got to the president, or even to Secretary of War Henry Stimson until after the Bomb had been dropped. There is no record that the scientists’ concerns about the future and their judgment of a nuclear attack’s impact on it were ever made known to President Truman before or after his decisions. Still less, made known to the American public.

At the end of the war the scientists’ petition and their reasoning were reclassified secret to keep it from public knowledge, and its existence was unknown for more than a decade. Several Manhattan Project scientists later expressed regret that they had earlier deferred to the demands of the secrecy managers—for fear of losing their clearances and positions, and perhaps facing prosecution—and had collaborated in maintaining public ignorance on this most vital of issues.

One of them—Eugene Rabinowitch, who after the war founded and edited the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (with its Doomsday Clock)—had in fact, after the German surrender in May, actively considered breaking ranks and alerting the American public to the existence of the Bomb, the plans for using it against Japan, and the scientists’ views both of the moral issues and the long-term dangers of doing so.

He first reported this in a letter to The New York Times published on June 28, 1971. It was the day I submitted to arrest at the federal courthouse in Boston; for 13 days previous, my wife and I had been underground, eluding the FBI while distributing the Pentagon Papers to 17 newspapers after injunctions had halted publication in the Times and The Washington Post. The Rabinowitch letter began by saying it was “the revelation by The Times of the Pentagon history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, despite its classification as ‘secret’ ” that led him now to reveal:

“Before the atom bomb-drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had spent sleepless nights thinking that I should reveal to the American people, perhaps through a reputable news organ, the fateful act—the first introduction of atomic weapons—which the U.S. Government planned to carry out without consultation with its people. Twenty-five years later, I feel I would have been right if I had done so.”

I didn’t see this the morning it was published, because I was getting myself arrested and arraigned, for doing what Rabinowitch wishes he had done in 1945, and I wish I had done in 1964. I first came across this extraordinary confession by a would-be whistle-blower (I don’t know another like it) in “Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial” by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (New York, 1995, p. 249).

Rereading Rabinowitch’s statement, still with some astonishment, I agree with him. He was right to consider it, and he would have been right if he had done it. He would have faced prosecution and prison then (as I did at the time his letter was published), but he would have been more than justified, as a citizen and as a human being, in informing the American public and burdening them with shared responsibility for the fateful decision.

Some of the same scientists faced a comparable challenge four years after Hiroshima, addressing the possible development of an even more terrible weapon, more fraught with possible danger to human survival: the hydrogen bomb. This time some who had urged use of the atom bomb against Japan (dissenting from the petitioners above) recommended against even development and testing of the new proposal, in view of its “extreme dangers to mankind.” “Let it be clearly realized,” they said, “that this is a super weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb” (Herbert York, “The Advisors” [California, 1976], p. 156).

Once more, as I learned much later, knowledge of the secret possibility was not completely limited to government scientists. A few others—my father, it turns out, was one—knew of this prospect before it had received the stamp of presidential approval and had become an American government project. And once again, under those conditions of prior knowledge (denied as before to the public), to grasp the moral and long-run dangers you didn’t have to be a nuclear physicist. My father was not.

Some background is needed here. My father, Harry Ellsberg, was a structural engineer. He worked for Albert Kahn in Detroit, the “Arsenal of Democracy.” At the start of the Second World War, he was the chief structural engineer in charge of designing the Ford Willow Run plant, a factory to make B-24 Liberator bombers for the Air Corps. (On June 1 this year, GM, now owner, announced it would close the plant as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.)

Dad was proud of the fact that it was the world’s largest industrial building under one roof. It put together bombers the way Ford produced cars, on an assembly line. The assembly line was a mile and a quarter long.

My father told me that it had ended up L-shaped, instead of in a straight line as he had originally designed it. When the site was being prepared, Ford comptrollers noted that the factory would run over a county line, into an adjacent county where the company had less control and local taxes were higher. So the design, for the assembly line and the factory housing it, had to be bent at right angles to stay inside Ford country.

Once, my father took me out to Willow Run to see the line in operation. For as far as I could see, the huge metal bodies of planes were moving along tracks as workers riveted and installed parts. It was like pictures I had seen of steer carcasses in a Chicago slaughterhouse. But as Dad had explained to me, three-quarters of a mile along, the bodies were moved off the tracks onto a circular turntable that rotated them 90 degrees; then they were moved back on track for the last half mile of the L. Finally, the planes were rolled out the hangar doors at the end of the factory—one every hour: It took 59 minutes on the line to build a plane with its 100,000 parts from start to finish—filled with gas and flown out to war. (Click here and here for sources and photographs.)

It was an exciting sight for a 13-year-old. I was proud of my father. His next wartime job had been to design a still larger airplane engine factory—again the world’s largest plant under one roof—the Dodge Chicago plant, which made all the engines for B-29s.

When the war ended, Dad accepted an offer to oversee the buildup of the plutonium production facilities at Hanford, Wash. That project was being run by General Electric under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. To take the job of chief structural engineer on the project, Dad moved from the engineering firm of Albert Kahn, where he had worked for years, to what became Giffels & Rossetti. Later he told me that engineering firm had the largest volume of construction contracts in the world at that time, and his project was the world’s largest. I grew up hearing these superlatives.

The Hanford project gave my father his first really good salary. But while I was away as a sophomore at Harvard, he left his job with Giffels & Rossetti, for reasons I never learned at the time. He was out of work for almost a year. Then he went back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. Almost 30 years later, in 1978, when my father was 89, I happened to ask him why he had left Giffels & Rossetti. His answer startled me.

He said, “Because they wanted me to help build the H-bomb.”

This was a breathtaking statement for me to hear in 1978. I was in full-time active opposition to the deployment of the neutron bomb—which was a small H-bomb—that President Jimmy Carter was proposing to send to Europe. The N-bomb had a killing radius from its output of neutrons that was much wider than its radius of destruction by blast. Optimally, an airburst N-bomb would have little fallout nor would it destroy structures, equipment or vehicles, but its neutrons would kill the humans either outside or within buildings or tanks. The Soviets mocked it as “a capitalist weapon” that destroyed people but not property; but they tested such a weapon too, as did other countries.

I had opposed developing or testing that concept for almost 20 years, since it was first described to me by my friend and colleague at the RAND Corp., Sam Cohen, who liked to be known as the “father of the neutron bomb.” I feared that, as a “small” weapon with limited and seemingly controllable lethal effects, it would be seen as usable in warfare, making U.S. first use and “limited nuclear war” more likely. It would be the match that would set off an exchange of the much larger, dirty weapons which were the bulk of our arsenal and were all that the Soviets then had.

In the year of this conversation with Dad, I was arrested four times blocking the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production Facility, which produced all the plutonium triggers for H-bombs and was going to produce the plutonium cores for neutron bombs. One of these arrests was on Nagasaki Day, Aug. 9. The “triggers” produced at Rocky Flats were, in effect, the nuclear components of A-bombs, plutonium fission bombs of the type that had destroyed Nagasaki on that date in 1945.

Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between A- and H-bombs, or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.

Our popular image of nuclear war—from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.

The plutonium for these weapons came from Hanford and from the Savannah River Site in Georgia and was machined into weapons components at Rocky Flats, in Colorado. Allen Ginsberg and I, with many others, blockaded the entrances to the plant on Aug. 9, 1978, to interrupt business as usual on the anniversary of the day a plutonium bomb had killed 58,000 humans (about 100,000 had died by the end of 1945).

I had never heard before of any connection of my father with the H-bomb. He wasn’t particularly wired in to my anti-nuclear work or to any of my activism since the Vietnam War had ended. I asked him what he meant by his comment about leaving Giffels & Rossetti.

“They wanted me to be in charge of designing a big plant that would be producing material for an H-bomb.” He said that DuPont, which had built the Hanford Site, was to have the contract from the Atomic Energy Commission. That would have been for the Savannah River Site. I asked him when this was.

“Late ’49.”

I told him, “You must have the date wrong. You couldn’t have heard about the hydrogen bomb then, it’s too early.” I’d just been reading about that, in Herb York’s recent book, “The Advisors.” The General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC—chaired by Robert Oppenheimer and including James Conant, Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi—were considering that fall whether or not to launch a crash program for an H-bomb. That was the “super weapon” referred to earlier. They had advised strongly against it, but President Truman overruled them.

“Truman didn’t make the decision to go ahead till January 1950. Meanwhile the whole thing was super-secret. You couldn’t have heard about it in ’49.”

My father said, “Well, somebody had to design the plant if they were going to go ahead. I was the logical person. I was in charge of the structural engineering of the whole project at Hanford after the war. I had a Q clearance.”

That was the first I’d ever heard that he’d had had a Q clearance—an AEC clearance for nuclear weapons design and stockpile data. I’d had that clearance myself in the Pentagon—along with close to a dozen other special clearances above top-secret—after I left the RAND Corp. for the Defense Department in 1964. It was news to me that my father had had a clearance, but it made sense that he would have needed one for Hanford.

I said, “So you’re telling me that you would have been one of the only people in the country, outside the GAC, who knew we were considering building the H-bomb in 1949?”

He said, “I suppose so. Anyway, I know it was late ’49, because that’s when I quit.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I didn’t want to make an H-bomb. Why, that thing was going to be 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb!”

I thought, score one for his memory at 89. He remembered the proportion correctly. That was the same factor Oppenheimer and the others predicted in their report in 1949. They were right. The first explosion of a true H-bomb, five years later, had a thousand times the explosive power of the Hiroshima blast.

At 15 megatons—the equivalent of 15 million tons of high explosive—it was over a million times more powerful than the largest conventional bombs of World War II. That one bomb had almost eight times the explosive force of all the bombs we dropped in that war: more than all the explosions in all the wars in human history. In 1961, the Soviets tested a 58-megaton H-bomb.

My father went on: “I hadn’t wanted to work on the A-bomb, either. But then Einstein seemed to think that we needed it, and it made sense to me that we had to have it against the Russians. So I took the job, but I never felt good about it.

“Then when they told me they were going to build a bomb 1,000 times bigger, that was it for me. I went back to my office and I said to my deputy, ‘These guys are crazy. They have an A-bomb, now they want an H-bomb. They’re going to go right through the alphabet till they have a Z-bomb.’ ”

I said, “Well, so far they’ve only gotten up to N.”

He said, “There was another thing about it that I couldn’t stand. Building these things generated a lot of radioactive waste. I wasn’t responsible for designing the containers for the waste, but I knew they were bound to leak eventually. That stuff was deadly forever. It was radioactive for 24,000 years.”

Again he had turned up a good figure. I said, “Your memory is working pretty well. It would be deadly a lot longer than that, but that’s about the half-life of plutonium.”

There were tears in his eyes. He said huskily, “I couldn’t stand the thought that I was working on a project that was poisoning parts of my own country forever, that might make parts of it uninhabitable for thousands of years.”

I thought over what he’d said; then I asked him if anyone else working with him had had misgivings. He didn’t know.

“Were you the only one who quit?” He said yes. He was leaving the best job he’d ever had, and he didn’t have any other to turn to. He lived on savings for a while and did some consulting.

I thought about Oppenheimer and Conant—both of whom had recommended dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—and Fermi and Rabi, who had, that same month Dad was resigning, expressed internally their opposition to development of the superbomb in the most extreme terms possible: It was potentially “a weapon of genocide … carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations … whose power of destruction is essentially unlimited … a threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable … a danger to humanity as a whole … necessarily an evil thing considered in any light” (York, “The Advisor,” pp. 155-159).

Not one of these men risked his clearance by sharing his anxieties and the basis for them with the American public. Oppenheimer and Conant considered resigning their advisory positions when the president went ahead against their advice. But they were persuaded—by Dean Acheson—not to quit at that time, lest that draw public attention to their expert judgment that the president’s course fatally endangered humanity.

I asked my father what had made him feel so strongly, to act in a way that nobody else had done. He said, “You did.”

That didn’t make any sense. I said, “What do you mean? We didn’t discuss this at all. I didn’t know anything about it.”

Dad said, “It was earlier. I remember you came home with a book one day, and you were crying. It was about Hiroshima. You said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to read this. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read.’ ”

I said that must have been John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima.” (I read it when it came out as a book. I was in the hospital when it filled The New Yorker in August 1946.) I didn’t remember giving it to him.

“Yes. Well, I read it, and you were right. That’s when I started to feel bad about working on an atomic bomb project. And then when they said they wanted me to work on a hydrogen bomb, it was too much for me. I thought it was time for me to get out.”

I asked if he had told his bosses why he was quitting. He said he told some people, not others. The ones he told seemed to understand his feelings. In fact, in less than a year, the head of the firm called to say that they wanted him to come back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. They were dropping the DuPont contract (they didn’t say why), so he wouldn’t have to have anything to do with the AEC or bomb-making. He stayed with them till he retired.

I said, finally, “Dad, how could I not ever have heard any of this before? How come you never said anything about it?”

My father said, “Oh, I couldn’t tell any of this to my family. You weren’t cleared.”

Well, I finally got my clearances, a decade after my father gave his up. And for some years, they were my undoing, though they turned out to be useful in the end. A decade later they allowed me to read the Pentagon Papers and to keep them in my “Top Secret” safe at the RAND Corp., from which I eventually delivered them to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later to 19 newspapers.

We have long needed and lacked the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on the subject of nuclear policies and preparations, nuclear threats and decision-making: above all in the United States and Russia but also in the other nuclear-weapons states. I deeply regret that I did not make known to Congress, the American public and the world the extensive documentation of persistent and still-unknown nuclear dangers that was available to me 40 to 50 years ago as a consultant to and official in the executive branch working on nuclear war plans, command and control and nuclear crises. Those in nuclear-weapons states who are in a position now to do more than I did then to alert their countries and the world to fatally reckless secret policies should take warning from the earlier inaction of myself and others: and do better.

That I had high-level access and played such a role in nuclear planning is, of course, deeply ironic in view of the personal history recounted above. My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.

There was a close analogy with the Manhattan Project. Its scientists—most of whom hoped the Bomb would never be used for anything but as a threat to deter Germany—were driven by a plausible but mistaken fear that the Nazis were racing them. Actually the Nazis had rejected the pursuit of the atomic bomb on practical grounds in June 1942, just as the Manhattan Project was beginning. Similarly, I was one of many in the late ’50s who were misled and recruited into the nuclear arms race by exaggerated, and in this case deliberately manipulated, fears of Soviet intentions and crash efforts.

Precisely because I did receive clearances and was exposed to top-secret intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I, along with my colleagues at the RAND Corp., came to be preoccupied with the urgency of averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would exploit an alleged “missile gap.” That supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority was exactly as unfounded in reality as the fear of the Nazi crash bomb program had been, or, to pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMDs and nuclear pursuit in 2003.

Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering an illusory threat, I and my colleagues distracted ourselves and helped distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the mutual and spreading possession of nuclear weapons—dangers which we were helping make worse—and from real opportunities to make the world more secure. Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our country and the world less safe.

Eventually the Soviets did emulate us in creating a world-threatening nuclear capability on hair-trigger alert. That still exists; Russian nuclear posture and policies continue, along with ours, to endanger our countries, civilization and much of life itself. But the persistent reality has been that the nuclear arms race has been driven primarily by American initiatives and policies and that every major American decision in this 64-year-old nuclear era has been accompanied by unwarranted concealment, deliberate obfuscation, and official and public delusions.

I have believed for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences have threatened the survival of the human species. To understand the urgency of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world toward abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real history of the nuclear age.

Using the new opportunities offered by the Internet—drawing attention to newly declassified documents and to some realities still concealed—I plan over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part in unveiling this hidden history.

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Health Care Tyranny by 13 Obstructionists

By David Sirota

For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.

The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote—and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now, the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle—and potentially bringing about another disaster.

Here we have a major congressional push to fix a health care system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.

In the Senate, both parties have outsourced health care legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any health care bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.

This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their health care will on the other 96 percent of us.

Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal health care. So why are they leading the fight to stop—rather than pass—reform?

Because when tyranny mixes with legalized bribery, constituents’ economic concerns stop mattering.

Thanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the health care industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions—a massive sum further enhanced by geography.

Remember, politicians trade favors for re-election support—and the best way to ensure re-election is to raise money for TV airtime (read: commercials). In rural America, that airtime is comparatively cheap because the audience is relatively small. Thus, campaign contributions to rural politicians like these 13 buy more commercials—and, consequently, more political loyalty.

The end result is an amplifier of tyranny: Precisely because the undemocratic system unduly empowers legislators from sparsely populated (and hence cheap) media markets, industry cash can more easily purchase tyrannical obstruction from those same legislators. In this case, that means congresspeople blocking health care reform that would most help their own voters.

Of course, there is talk of circumventing the 13 obstructionists and forcing a vote of the full Congress that cannot be filibustered. Inside the Washington palace, the media court jesters and political aides-de-camp have reacted to such plans by raising predictable charges of improper procedure, poor manners, bad etiquette and other Versailles transgressions.

But the real crime would be letting the tyrants block that vote, trample democracy and kill health care reform in the process.

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Obama’s Dangerous Dance With Crowley and Gates

The Rev. Madison Shockley

Let me declare my bias up front. No, I am not a friend of Henry “Skip” Gates, but I had an encounter with the Cambridge police similar to that of the good professor—36 years ago! I was a freshman at Harvard College when I was stopped by the Cambridge police. The officers jumped out of their car and crouched behind the opened doors with hands on their guns at the ready as one shouted for me to “Freeze!”

Following their instructions, I withdrew my hands, slowly, from the heavy coat that I was wearing. Then I slowly reached for my ID at their request. When they saw that I was a Harvard student, they relaxed and began to return to their cars without explanation. Similar to professor Gates, I became more tense as they relaxed. As they were satisfied, I became increasingly unsatisfied. There is a degree of dignity lost when the police treat you like a suspect. It is their responsibility to restore your citizen status. But it was typical for Cambridge police then (and according to Gates, even now) to see and treat black men as only suspects and not citizens. I then had to reclaim my citizen status. I asked why I was stopped. They responded with a flip, “You fit the description of a mugging suspect—a black man in a white coat.” To this day I don’t believe there was a mugging. They saw a black kid wander from the city onto the campus and followed in hot pursuit to make sure I wasn’t there to bother the white kids.

Given the recordings of the 911 calls in the Gates case, it is now known that the caller gave two equally plausible descriptions of what she saw. Either there was a break-in under way or the residents were returning from a trip (she noted the suitcases on the porch). But the dispatcher asked confusedly, “What do the suitcases have to do with anything?” It took a citizen to explain that it just might be the resident of the house having difficulty with a lock and not a break-in at all.

We now know from her statement and the recordings that Sgt. James Crowley manufactured a conversation with the caller that never took place—using words she never said. Crowley wrote in his report that the witness said “she observed … two black males with backpacks on the porch.” Crowley never seemed to consider the other possibility. Informed with both possibilities when he saw a well-dressed, middle-aged man on the other side of the door, Crowley should have considered whether Gates was indeed the resident of that address. Certainly when Gates showed the officer his identification, Crowley should have lifted the suspect status and returned Gates’ citizen status. All this would have required was a simple explanation and a tone of respect. This was the crucial transaction. Since Gates was being “uncooperative,” according to Crowley, the officer didn’t volunteer to restore his citizen status, which left Gates to demand it. It seems almost that Crowley was taunting Gates by withholding the restoration of his status. He refused to even give Gates his name and badge number when asked. The compliance that Crowley required of a suspect ought to certainly be reciprocated to a citizen by an officer.

To show Gates that he had total control over his status, Crowley lured Gates out to the porch, dangling the prospect of restoration with a sly “I’ll speak to you outside.” As soon as he stepped outside, Gates reports, Crowley said, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request.” He then placed Gates under arrest. Crowley had decided to show Gates the enduring truth of the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which the Supreme Court stated that blacks had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” So for one brief moment, Sgt. Crowley shackled Gates with the chains of history.

It is a dangerous dance that Obama is doing with Crowley. The tapes of the 911 and radio transmissions have proved that Crowley is capable of manufacturing conversations that never took place. Given his clear disregard for the truth and his smug glee at having put professor Gates in his place, when Crowley sits down with Gates and Obama, I fear for the worst. If we think Joe the Plumber was a bit much too deal with, wait till Jim the Cop emerges from the White House with both Gates’ and Obama’s dignity securely tucked away in his pockets.

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America The Great … Police State

By Gore Vidal

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.

I was first made aware of this development in 1946 when I was limping around in army uniform in New York City and noticed that the local police (admired by none) were beginning to run wild, possibly because so many of the able-bodied young had, like myself, been serving for some years overseas. I recall that some sort of parade was being held and what looked to be a thousand or two citizens were trying unsuccessfully to cross Fifth Avenue. I waited on a street corner for an hour in my uniform, limping from my disability earned by my service in the war. But after nearly an hour of waiting, I stopped a policeman who was wandering idly around and asked him politely when I’d be able to cross Fifth Avenue. He shrieked at me, “Go call da mayor!” And I said, “Oh I will, I will.” Actually, I did know the mayor at that time, but he was not available on that sacred day. I did make a protest as a veteran who had mustered out with a disability for life, but this seemed to be a cause of great merriment. In any case, that was my first experience of a Nazi-like police force in New York City, a city pretty much home to me from childhood on.

I was also aware as the years passed how often friends would be beaten up in front of what were called “faggot bars.” Meanwhile, the police never seemed to stop an incessant whining about the enormous dangers to which their work subjected them as they gallantly served our great city, even though they were insufficiently paid and admired. I thought then that the whole damn lot of them should be sent to Camp Lejeune to be put through a strong course of basic training by the Marine Corps.

I also propose this as a solution to the problem that they currently pose us, not only on Fifth Avenue but in Harvard Yard, where a young policeman recently distinguished himself by being rude to the president, complaining with the irresistible policeman’s whine that he and the president were just alike in their problems, only he was being particularly bugged by the press, in effect, said, “join the club.” Now that they were becoming buddies in embarrassment, the little corporal said, characteristically allowing his envy to show, “You’ve got a bigger lawn than mine”—Thus, proving how serious daydreaming can place yourself into a position of parity.

But the true meaning of the mess in Cambridge has been carefully avoided by a media incapable of getting the point to anything if they can excitingly change the subject to something else. So here we now have a cast of characters that includes the president himself, a distinguished scholar and a feckless young policeman who on the radio said, when asked why he had behaved so rudely to the “old” scholar, he said because the old guy had been rude about his mother. I haven’t heard this excuse since the playground of St. Alban’s in 1935.

One interesting fallout from the tragic business in Cambridge – and it is tragic, let me tell you – was that the president was forced to speak suddenly in his own voice, and at his very best, and not swathed in the authority of his great rank, but simply as a citizen making a sensible comment about a nobody policeman. Yes, I mean “nobody” literally – I know all human beings, if they are Americans, are highly valued and worshiped, indeed, for their wonderfulness and their helpfulness to fellow citizens. I state this ironically, as you might suspect. After all, why would the young man be armed unless he was a superior citizen, elected, as it were, by his fellows to ride herd on an unruly mob unless he was demonstrably special by virtue of being legally armed, which is how we are supposed to tell them from us?

But there the president was, saying, this is stupid. But he did not say, “How dare you go after a 58-year-old man who is one of the great scholars of the country and think you can get away with it?” Unfortunately, it never seemed to have crossed the president’s mind in this crisis that he is expected to do something about it. I know there is a great deal, as they say, on his plate, but after displays of this sort, he should call together a commission involving every section of the country. Every municipality is complaining about local police forces run wild. And no one does anything about it. And our masters are armed to the teeth and would seem more likely to fire at us instead of at the troublemakers. I can’t think of any civilized country that would allow this, from the look of these bulky guardians of the peace, to whom no right-minded person would allow even a slingshot to be given.

So, we are a weirdly militarized citizenry governed by the worst elements in the United States, and something is bound to blow up, as I have felt for some time now. In my wanderings around the U.S., I talk to people without money, without power, ordinary voters, as well as nowadays, people maimed by war, or time, or life or whatever, and I am convinced more and more that this is a vicious country in which the police are allowed to run amok, absolutely independent of anyone, and that is why from time to time they are allowed to get away with murder. One surprisingly knew that a wrinkle has been discovered in the seamless surface of our troubled state. Policemen are seldom tried for their crimes, or indeed, held responsible for what they do, which disturbs the peace and causes distress among the orderly.

I would suggest that the president, if he wants to be useful—and not many presidents do in my experience—he might as well call together a commission in response to citizens of every major municipality in the United States who are complaining to central authority about police forces out of control. And no one dares do anything because the police will say, “Well, you know they are acting like this because they are bad people who hate us because we are good people, rescuing cats from trees and otherwise loved by every decent person in the land.”

What the police in their ignorance have not figured out is that they have lost all credibility since World War II. They are sort of parasites on the fringe of society and do no particular good for anyone except possibly themselves. Certainly to hear them complain—you’ve never heard such whines as from a policeman who feels he’s been wronged! Apparently, all Earth owes him a living, and he’s the bravest man on any block.

One aspect of the events in Cambridge was that the president could have been characteristically brilliant on this subject, as he has been on so many subjects having to do with our general welfare as citizens (and he is also one of the useful, hands-on presidents), but the media, conditioned always to miss the point, went out of their way to miss the point here by many a mile. They blamed it all on – you guessed it – RACE! Well, you can blame anything on race, including Scripture, or the tides and the moon, and this and that, but that president and that professor are by coincidence both black, which to the plain horror of the media, had nothing to do with the brave little corporal who was feeling his oats and wanted to have some fun with an older man who couldn’t fight back. They get very bored in those jobs, and, of course, he was armed with a gun, and able to kill anybody he wanted and probably get away with it—what a temptation!

Anyway, the president has not done what he should have done, which is to have reminded us that the United Kingdom—a more livable nation than the United States, let me say with first-hand experience of both—has disarmed its police. There are no angry men wandering around carrying guns over there. This is a lesson to us, but we’ve armed practically every grange house in the United States because our regular guys just want to swagger around.

Incidentally, it was quite funny to hear one of the favorite adjectives that our new masters use to describe vicious civilians who deliberately mock them, like the professor and myself on Fifth Avenue, and I think they would include the president, too, if the Secret Service was not lurking nearby. Their term for any civilian who criticizes them is “arrogant,” but they are themselves far gone in arrogance and spite.

Let us accept the facts staring us in the face—that demonstrably we are no longer a republic. We are no longer governed by laws, only by armed men and force. This is just like the days of Billy the Kid. You have an armed man going down a dusty street and that is authority. And it has come to this for us.

If the media will ever become alert to real news, they will put paid to their universal cry that no matter what happens of a disagreeable nature in the streets or elsewhere in public, it is due to racial hatred. Both corporal and president made no attempt to clear this matter up. Arguably, you can say that everything is subject to it or tarred by it, but it was not true in this case. The young man with the gun seems to have been correct on these issues; he was training others like himself to put up with the lesser breeds, and to say that this was race-inspired because both the president and the professor were black—am I making too subtle a point?—is a serious, murderous mistake in a country like ours.

As I listened to the fallout from these stirring events, I wondered if this might be a moment when the media would reform themselves and only print actual news; for one thing, not all explosions of temper and so on are attributable to race. It would be nice if the media realized how dangerous they when they begin to falsify motives which, to be blunt, they have no authority to do. If a black person is in any way in a jam of any kind, it is because he is responding to racism or if a white person goes berserk over anything with anybody, racism drove him to it. This is a great, great red herring like some giant whale gliding across the pages of police dockets.

So let me mention the real issue. The real issue is class. We have the greatest divide between the very rich and the very poor of any country on Earth, surpassing even France. And this division gets wider and wider as financial disasters overwhelm us. We were already in pretty bad shape before things began to fall apart a year or two ago. We must acknowledge that our character, never much good in these matters, is now reprehensible, and the police seem to have taken it upon themselves to exact revenge for a full professor and his—plainly, in their view—insulting income, which they figure must be considerable. The days of greed through which we all lived now have not done us much good, nor have they taught us any lessons, but you cannot live long with such divisions, which in my view as an outsider overlooking the scene seems to be a nation of total liars. Everybody is lying. Television lies, candidates lie. And everyone says, “Oh they always have.” I love that excuse. Well they haven’t always done that. Sometimes lying to the people is a great mistake. And it is well-known that the rich will tell almost any lie to avoid paying taxes.

My last view of what looked to me to be parade’s end occurred during a walk in the woods that I took below a Duke University campus building, where I saw a broken bridge over a stream. I turned to what looked to be a local farmer, who realized that I was looking with “suspicious” interest at a vast pile of repair work: bags of cement, etc., and he anticipated my question: “They’re going to rebuild this bridge—it’s something very, very big,” he said. “Why in the middle of the woods?” I asked. “There are no roads here.” He said, “No, there’s a trail, true, it’s not much of a trail.” “So why are they building such a huge bridge,” I wondered, “when they’ve been happy apparently for many years with a very small bridge?” And he said, “Well, we’ve been told by the feds that they fear that there may be civilian insurrections. And they want to be prepared for them, and they need this bridge, no matter how small, to cross the stream in case of an emergency.”

Needless to say, I had no quick rejoinder. But he seemed to want to talk, and so I said, “What was here before?” And he said, “A small bridge which a small pickup truck could go back and forth over.” So I asked, “And who told you that it was in case of civilian problems?” And he said, “Well, everybody told us that and explained the size of it and most people here thought it was better to have a big bridge than no bridge at all, and here we are.”

I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”

A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer.

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Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups

By Amy Goodman

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn’s union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a “John J. Towery II,” who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist “John Jacob.”

Dunn told me: “John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me.”

“Jacob” told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base and would share information about base activities that could help the PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.

Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.

Which is why Dunn’s request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important.

The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: “In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics.” Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: “As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications.”

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.

Demands mount for information on and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA’s alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.

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The Jackson Hoax

By Chris Hedges

In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson’s death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, delusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme.

His memorial service—a variety show with a coffin—had an estimated 31.1 million television viewers. The ceremony, which featured performances or tributes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other celebrities, was carried live on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets. It was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it concluded with Jackson’s daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl could get a few words out, told Paris to “speak up.” As the child broke down, the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. The crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father.

The stories we like best are “real life” stories—early fame, wild success and then a long, bizarre and macabre emotional train wreck. O.J Simpson offered a tamer version of the same plot. So does Britney Spears. Jackson, by the end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million out-of-court settlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony. We fed on his physical and psychological disintegration, especially since many Americans are struggling with their own descent into overwhelming debt, loss of status and personal disintegration.

The lurid drama of Jackson’s personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoing dramas on television, in movies and in the news. News thrives on “real life” stories, especially those involving celebrities. News reports on television are mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a supporting cast, a good-looking host and a dramatic, if often unexpected, ending. The public greedily consumed “news” about Jackson, especially in his exile and decline, which often outdid most works of fiction. In “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged, scripted, given a narrative and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment. And Jackson was a great show. He deserved a great finale.

Those who created Jackson’s public persona and turned him into a piece of property, first as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold-plated casket, are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit. They are the puppet masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries. The producers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles made sure the 18,000 attendees and the television audience (even the BBC devoted three hours to the tribute) watched a funeral that was turned into another maudlin form of uplifting popular entertainment.

The memorial service for Jackson was a celebration of celebrity. There was the queasy sight of groups of children, including his own, singing over the coffin. Magic Johnson put in a plug for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shields, fighting back tears, recalled how she and a 33-year-old Jackson—who always maintained that he was straight—broke into Elizabeth Taylor’s room the night before her last wedding to “get the first peek of the [wedding] dress.” Shields and Jackson, at Taylor’s wedding, then joked that they were “the mother and father of the bride.” “Yes, it may have seemed very odd to the outside,” Shields said, “but we made it fun and we made it real.” There were photo montages in which a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was immediately followed by one of him with Kermit the Frog. Fame reduces all of the famous to the same level. Fame is its own denominator. And every anecdote seemed to confirm that when you spend your life as a celebrity you have no idea who you are.

We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences for our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught us, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal screenplays. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler, who has written wisely about this, argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture.

Jackson desperately feared growing old. He believed he could control race and gender. He transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African-American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity. And while he pushed these boundaries to the extreme, he did only what many Americans do. There were 12 million cosmetic plastic surgery procedures performed last year in the United States. They were performed because, in America, most human beings, rich and poor, famous and obscure, have been conditioned to view themselves as marketable commodities. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must remain young. They must achieve notoriety and money, or the illusion of it, to be a success. And it does not matter how they get there.

The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted off any reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show “America’s Next Top Model,” a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities who can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and constant quest for notoriety and attention. And life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are ugly or poor, are belittled and mocked. Human beings are used, betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture, which is pretty much the story of Jackson’s life, although he experienced the equivalent of celebrity resurrection. This has been very good for his music sales and perhaps for his father’s new recording company, which Joe Jackson made sure to plug at public events after his son’s death. Compassion, competence, intelligence and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are commodities. Those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve their fate.

The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Jackson, from his phony marriages to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. This is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the celebration of image over substance.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street banks and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stocks to finance their retirement or the college expenses of their children. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity.

The saturation coverage of Jackson’s death is an example of our collective flight into illusion. The obsession with the trivia of his life conceals the despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destroyed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.

The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true power—corporations and the oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis that will create more misery than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness and keep us from fighting back. And in the end, that is all the Jackson coverage was really about, another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying culture from the howling wolf at the gate.

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The Construct Of Culture

By Chris Hedges

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton’s draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Our economic crisis—despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford’s marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest incarnation, Brüno—barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.

How do we recover what was lost? How do we reclaim the culture that was destroyed by corporations? How do we fight back now that the consumer culture has fallen into a state of decay? What can we do to reverse the cannibalization of government and the national economy by the corporations?

All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.

Stuart Ewen, whose books “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” and “PR: A Social History of Spin” chronicle how corporate propaganda deformed American culture and pushed populism to the margins of American society, argues that we have a fleeting chance to save the country. I fervently hope he is right. He attacks the ideology of “objectivity and balance” that has corrupted news, saying that it falsely evokes the scales of justice. He describes the curriculum at most journalism schools as “poison.”

“ ‘Balance and objectivity’ creates an idea where both sides are balanced,” he said when I spoke to him by phone. “In certain ways it mirrors the two-party system, the notion that if you are going to have a Democrat speak you need to have a Republican speak. It offers the phantom of objectivity. It creates the notion that the universe of discourse is limited to two positions. Issues become black or white. They are not seen as complex with a multitude of factors.”

Ewen argues that the forces for social change—look at any lengthy and turgid human rights report—have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.

“Effective communication requires not simply an understanding of the facts, but how those facts will take place in the public mind,” Ewen said. “When Gustave Le Bon says it is not the facts in and of themselves which make a point but the way in which the facts take place, the way in which they come to attention, he is right.”

The emergence of corporate and government public relations, which drew on the studies of mass psychology by Sigmund Freud and others after World War I, found its bible in Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” a manual for the power elite’s shaping of popular sentiments. Lippmann argued that the key to leadership in the modern age would depend on the ability to manipulate “symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas.” The public mind could be mastered, he wrote, through an “intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”

These corporate forces, schooled by Woodrow Wilson’s vast Committee for Public Information, which sold World War I to the public, learned how to skillfully mobilize and manipulate the emotional responses of the public. The control of the airwaves and domination through corporate advertising of most publications restricted news to reporting facts, to “objectivity and balance,” while the real power to persuade and dominate a public remained under corporate and governmental control.

Ewen argues that pamphleteering, which played a major role in the 17th and 18th centuries in shaping the public mind, recognized that “the human mind is not left brain or right brain, that it is not divided by reason which is good and emotion which is bad.”

He argues that the forces of social reform, those organs that support a search for truth and self-criticism, have mistakenly shunned emotion and rhetoric because they have been used so powerfully within modern society to disseminate lies and manipulate public opinion. But this refusal to appeal to emotion means “we gave up the ghost and accepted the idea that human beings are these divided selves, binary systems between emotion and reason, and that emotion gets you into trouble and reason is what leads you forward. This is not true.”

The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone, Ewen says, make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis we must also communicate in new forms. We must appeal to emotion as well as to reason. The power of this appeal to emotion is evidenced in the photographs of Jacob Riis, a New York journalist, who with a team of assistants at the end of the 19th century initiated urban-reform photography. His stark portraits of the filth and squalor of urban slums awakened the conscience of a nation. The photographer Lewis Hine, at the turn of the 20th century, and Walker Evans during the Great Depression did the same thing for the working class, along with writers such as Upton Sinclair and James Agee. It is a recovery of this style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion, which will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda.

We may know that fossil fuels are destroying our ecosystem. We may be able to cite the statistics. But the oil and natural gas industry continues its flagrant rape of the planet. It is able to do this because of the money it uses to control legislation and a massive advertising campaign that paints the oil and natural gas industry as part of the solution. A group called EnergyTomorrow.org, for example, has been running a series of television ads. One ad features an attractive, middle-aged woman in a black pantsuit—an actor named Brooke Alexander who once worked as the host of “WorldBeat” on CNN and for Fox News. Alexander walks around a blue screen studio that becomes digital renditions of American life. She argues, before each image, that oil and natural gas are critical to providing not only energy needs but health care and jobs.

“It is almost like they are taking the most optimistic visions of what the stimulus package could do and saying this is what the development of oil and natural gas will bring about,” Ewen said. “If you go to the Web site there is a lot of sophisticated stuff you can play around with. As each ad closes you see in the lower right-hand corner in very small letters API, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group for ExxonMobil and all the other big oil companies. For the average viewer there is nothing in the ad to indicate this is being produced by the oil industry.”

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.

“As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized,” Ewen said. “You can’t do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian.”

Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which “balanced and objective” journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.

“It is very important for people like us to think about ways to present the issues, whether we are talking about the banking crisis, health care or housing and homelessness,” Ewen said. “We have to think about presenting these issues in ways that are two steps ahead of the media rather than two steps behind. That is not something we should view as an impossible task. It is a very possible task. There is evidence of how possible that task is, especially if you look at the development of the underground press in the 1960s. The underground press, which started cropping up all over the country, was not a marginal phenomenon. It leeched into the society. It developed an approach to news and communication that was 10 steps ahead of the mainstream media. The proof is that even as it declined, so many structures that were innovated by the underground press, things like The Whole Earth Catalogue, began to affect and inform the stylistic presentation of mainstream media.”

“I am not a prophet,” Ewen said. “All I can do is look at historical precedence and figure out the extent we can learn from it. This is not about looking backwards. If you can’t see the past you can’t see the future. If you can’t see the relationship between the present and the past you can’t understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said. This is a succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.”

“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be. We have a lot to learn from the history of rhetoric. We need to think about where we are going. We need to think about what 21st century pamphleteering might be. We need to think about the ways in which the rediscovery of rhetoric—not lying, but rhetoric in its more conventional sense—can affect what we do. We need to look at those historical antecedents where interventions happened that stepped ahead of the news. And to some extent this is happening. We have the freest and most open public sphere since the village square.”

The battle ahead will be fought outside the journalistic mainstream, he said. The old forms of journalism are dying or have sold their soul to corporate manipulation and celebrity culture. We must now wed fact to rhetoric. We must appeal to reason and emotion. We must not be afraid to openly take sides, to speak, photograph or write on behalf of the disempowered. And, Ewen believes, we have a chance in the coming crisis to succeed.

“Pessimism is never useful,” he said. “Realism is useful, understanding the forces that are at play. To quote Antonio Gramsci, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ ”

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We Is All Huckleberry Finn

Economist

AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson
A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.

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The Disease Of Permanent War

By Chris Hedges

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”

In “Pentagon Capitalism” Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule. Our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war—who have corrupted Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution—must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junkyards where they are left to rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Melman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Melman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Melman found that 92 were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Sen. J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion-dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote “Notes From the Underground” to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in “Notes From the Underground” carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

“I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect,” the Underground Man wrote. “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems—economic, social, environmental and political—that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

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The War Lovers

By William Pfaff

There is an important current in conservative U.S. opinion that believes Western Europe to be under something like a siege, or a potential siege, by its large Muslim immigrant population. I should actually say that it’s not just American conservatives, although they write alarmed books about the impending Muslim domination of Europe, and the collapse of European Christianity and identity. They fear the Decline of the West.

They fail to understand that African and Central Asian Muslims are not drowning in the Mediterranean in desperate attempts to reach European shores in order to overturn Western civilization. The Muslim sons of immigrants in Paris ghettos don’t riot and burn apartments to overturn democracy but to protest that they can’t find jobs.

Concern over the enormous problem of assimilating or integrating Muslim immigrants is a very serious one, most of all in Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where the idea has been that these people should be in self-segregated communities in a “rainbow” nation, preserving their native customs, looked after by the welfare state. This has not been a great success, and will change.

The U.S. government, a liberal one, has a different idea about Muslims, whom it sees as a military threat. It is continuing to wage George W. Bush’s war against the Taliban and their fellow-religious radicals in Afghanistan and Pakistan, justified as keeping them from fighting Americans in Peoria or Santa Barbara—a worthy idea if it were not pure hysteria.

You could (and they do) argue that the Islamist movement has momentum behind it in much of the Middle East and a part of South Asia, and conclude that unless it is “stopped” in Afghanistan and Pakistan it will propagate itself elsewhere in the region, acquire nuclear weapons and destroy America.

The evidence suggests the contrary: that the more it is fought by foreign troops in military interventions by “Christian” Western governments, the more the radical movement will spread, assuming the roles of religious and nationalist resistance to foreign “crusader” invaders. The 9/11 attacks were revenge for American troops in Saudi Arabia.

However, the American (and NATO) determination to fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan is much more complicated in motive than national defense. It has been nearly eight years since a group composed mostly of alienated and Western-trained Saudi Arabians blew up the trade towers in New York and attacked the Pentagon. In the U.S., nothing of terrorist note has happened since.

The attacks on the London Underground and on Madrid’s rail terminal did not originate in Taliban or Middle Eastern circles, but in European immigrant communities, involving young and Westernized Muslim residents of Europe, as has been the case with all the would-be terrorist activity picked up by European police intelligence. “Stopping” the Taliban in the Hindu Kush won’t change that.

All of this is a hangover from the age of imperialism, which provoked nationalism (a Western phenomenon) in Asia and radicalized religion by well-meant but naive attempts to convert the Asian “heathen” to Christianity. (This continues; there are repeated reports of American Army chaplains of evangelical Protestant persuasion slipping copies of the New Testament in Arabic into the hands of American soldiers, to be pressed upon their enemies, should the occasion arise—something for them to read at Gitmo or at one of the overseas U.S. prisons, to pass the time between waterboardings.)

The United States has become war-addicted. Since the Korean War, it has been permanently at war, with the Communists in Southeast Asia, with Balkan aggressors, with Central American leftists, with Colombian drug growers, with Saddam Hussein (twice), with radical Islamists everywhere. I leave out Panama and Grenada.

War has become part of the national identity, as well as the national economy, which turns out more weapons and more military high technology than all the rest of the world combined.

At present, our newest war has hardly begun. We are sponsoring the Pakistan army’s drive to push the Taliban out of territory they have occupied in the northwest of their own country.

The push is on in Washington to send into Pakistan a shadow government of Americans, to show them how to run their country and their struggle with Islamic radicals. Under Barack Obama, we are also going to expand our civil presence in Afghanistan and, according to the press, we have in mind a replacement leader for Afghanistan. The U.S. clearly intends to be there for a long time.

Back in Iraq, sectarian rivalry is getting out of hand since the U.S. stopped paying the Sunni tribes to keep the peace. We’ll apparently be staying there for quite a while, too.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the Russians who knew the most about the U.S., Georgi Arbatov, then head of the Soviet Union’s Institute for USA and Canadian Studies, said to an American, “We are about to do something terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of your enemy.” He did not realize how simple it was going to be for us to find replacements.

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Well Entertained Morons

by Frank Schaeffer

I received this email from a priest. At least it was signed! (The misspelling of the President’s name, double question marks, capitalization etc., is in the original.)

Frank, I just read that you are supporting the pro-abortionist Barach Hussein Obama… Now you support a man who is the dream come true of everything ANTI-Christian. Are you no longer Christian?? I was stunned… Please respond, How could you post on the Huffington Post, the most anti-Christian, anti-traditional site?? These people HATE everything Christianity stands for!
In Christ, Father G.

Rant starts here: I can only imagine the steady diet of junk ideology that must have been pouring from right wing web sites, evangelical leaders, talk radio and bizarre newsletters into Fr. G’s head to have pushed him — a priest no less, supposedly a confessor, shepherd and comforter — to put politics ahead of faith and thus berate a complete stranger and question his faith on the basis of who that stranger voted for or what web sites he writes for!

The Religious Right has seduced millions of Americans with titillating hatred and lies, including people like Fr. G. Lies — the Earth was created in six days and is not warming, Obama is a secret Muslim — perhaps the Antichrist! — and wants women to have more abortions, gays are trying to take over America, the United Nations (and/or Obama and/or the president of the European Union) is (also?) the Antichrist, an unregulated free market economy is Christian, guns keep people safe, stem cell research equals infanticide, capital punishment is good, immigrants are the enemy etc., — are accepted as truth by a whole substrata of “Christians” determined to judge their country as “fallen away from God” because they don’t agree with their fellow citizens’ politics.

Appeals to facts get nowhere with these folks because they don’t trust any sources but their own emanating from an alternative right wing universe, so arguments become circular. The more impartial, serious or academic the source, the more suspect it becomes. Propaganda, fulminating (and fund raising), hate of gays, women, our government, big city folks, the educated “elite,” everything-not-like-us-”Real-Americans,” supplants compassion and even common sense. And one is guilty by association. Write for the “wrong” people — “these people” in the words of Fr. G — vote for the “wrong” president, and it’s off to the stake.

It’s not fair to hold fundamentalists, even ones masquerading as priests — I say “masquerading” because nothing could be further from the spirit of faith than Fr. G’s smoldering email — to a higher standard than the rest of us. Fr. G’s lack of connection to reality, let alone the compassionate tradition of his beliefs (or to simple manners) is a symptom of the larger American entertainment-oriented and compartmentalized moron culture we live in and have all been tainted by.

The late Neil Postman, author, New York University professor and prophet, predicted how and why people such as Fr. G would be living in a half-assed dream world cut off from reality. Postman was best known for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he wrote:

Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing….What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

Postman is not the only person to have accurately predicted where we were headed and the sort of society that our disjointed news media-as-entertainment, texting as “writing,” blogging as “news,” would produce. RoboCop (1987) was a mediocre (and nastily sadistic) little movie but director Paul Verhoeven got one thing right: the “news” shows on TV in his futuristic dystopia. His parody of glib, cheerful trivia clips as news has come horribly true, even more so with the advent of the ideologically divided web, wherein people have their “information” filtered by like-minded ideologues and rarely encounter views they disagree with. As Postman predicted, Huxley’s prophetic vision came to pass: we are “a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies.”

We live in the spiritual/political/intellectual equivalent to the 1979 movie Mad Max. Unlike that movie’s post-apocalyptic landscape, the external trappings of our civilization are in tact but our intellectual life is running on inertia. Metaphorically speaking, if Fr. G is all of our “priest,” then his “flock” is made up of the sorts of people that Jay Leno interviewed on the street in his hilarious (and depressing) recurring “Tonight Show” gag where he used to ask questions such as, “who is the vice president?” or “who was Christopher Columbus?” or “finish this saying, a stitch in time saves — “and most respondents could not answer.

We have become a nation of not terribly bright children who essentially have a collective learning disability manifested by an inability to concentrate or defer gratification, hold one thought long enough to see it through to a conclusion or contemplate making real sacrifices for long term benefits. The Fr. Gs of this world are the result.

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The University is Sick

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

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