Don't Let Your Pet Look Like A Pet In Public.

"The worry is that the more Maliki is seen as our puppet, because he is abiding by our timelines and deadlines, the internal political dynamics will become so fragile that the whole government would collapse," said one senior official participating in the internal review. "That would set us back a year."


How is it possible that the White House and the State Department can issue statements about their strategy to prevent Nouri Al-Maliki from being viewed as a U.S. stooge? Wouldn't that, by definition, imply that he's their boy? That he's owned from the balls up?

Is it not clear that this administration's goal is now to saddle the next administration with a morass? It seems (from my perspective, anyway) likely that a Democrat will win the next election. Would it serve Republicans to allow a Democrat to figure out the actual "exit strategy" for the U.S. from Iraq? It seems likely, doesn't it?

Lighter-Than-Air: Individualism As An End-Game of Democracy

For the longest time, I've felt that there's got to be a better way. A way that allows more of us to have more, to be happy, and to help us cut away so much of the bullshit that holds us back in our everyday life. I'm not talking about some kind of hippie mumbo-jumbo. I'm talking about concrete things that we can do, that we can adopt, and that will make a difference in how we live. And there's also a big batch of stuff that keeps us from doing it. More on this in a moment, though.

So some of you know, I'm an idea guy. I have tons of ideas. I also (as some of you are painfully aware) share them. The bad ones...well, when I mention them, they get shot down. The better ones tend to get reinforced (especially when beer is being consumed), and so I try and propagate those. And the absolutely crazy ones...ah. See, I have a big fucking basket full of changes I want to make to the world that would...absolutely must...effect huge change. Egotism taken to an extreme, but just hear one of them out, ok?



We'll get back to the point of the first paragraph in a moment.

My first big crazy idea that would impact the entire world economy in a very positive way, overall: get rid of airplanes. Or at least, minimize their use as much as possible.

And...

Replace them with lighter-than-air vehicles.

Ok, ok, this is not exactly MY idea. It's been around for ages, but thanks to a rash of accidents in the 1930's (culminating with the Hindenberg), the airship / dirigible / blimp has gotten a very bad rap, in spite of being far and away the most efficient, luxurious, and yes, safe, mode of air travel.

First, my case against airplanes:

They are horrendously inefficient.

They are not inherently safe. In fact, they are inherently unsafe. It is a testiment to modern engineering, systems, and federal civic effort that they are as safe as they are.

9/11/01. We all know this the hard way now: they are very easy to turn into big guided missiles.

As mass-transit vehicles, they are very uncomfortable.

But then there's this alternative.

Imagine this, if you will: you are flying from DC to San Francisco, but instead of paying $500 for a tiny, cramped seat, with a transfer in Houston and a tiny bag of pretzels to hold you over while the Boeing you're in guzzles thousands of gallons of fuel...instead you cruise to the West Coast in something more akin to a flying resort. The trip takes 24 hours, but you don't have a seat. You have a shopping mall. A movie theater. A food court. A veritable flying city, or at least a small town! And your huge vehicle burns 1/8th the fuel of a comparable jet-engine powered airplane.

Imagine these things serving as freighters, helping developing nations without railroads or road infrastructure ship goods and manufacturing services to remote areas.

Imagine a flying cruise ship, and taking a dive into a glass-bottomed pool over the clear turquoise waters of the Carribean.

Do you like this dream? I do. I am madly, passionately in love with it. I want it so bad I can taste it, sometimes.

And happily for me and people like me, these guys are trying to do it.

There are plenty of cases against airships, but they're technical obstacles. Mountain ranges are a problem, as are high winds. Helium is expensive, and not as efficient for producing lift as hydrogen. But these are minor sticking points, compared to the potential for changing how we move about the planet!

Ok, so there's that. Now, to my first paragraph, which is tied to this very obliquely / obscurely, I know. But bear with me.

I have become used to the notion of ideas changing things, and I am beginning to realize as I get older that I am a horrible individualist. As a for-instance, I want everyone else to drive a hybrid car...except me. I drive a G35 that gets 19mpg in the city. Why? Because it's fun, because I like it. Because I want it.

It is this sense of entitlement, within myself, and then within others, that I am fighting. That I think we should all fight. And it is completely, totally at odds with democracy, or at least the American kind, which I am dubbing Democrazy (thanks, Damon Albarn!). We want, and each of us wants something different. In fact, we frequently want BECAUSE it's different. Or at least it's perceived that way.

(And no, I'm not selling the Infiniti just yet. IT's an EXPRESSION OF WHO I AM! OK? Ha!).

In a Democrazy, we indulge our every whim, because our whims make life worth living. Discipline is unheard of, and frequently attempts to instill it are met with hostility, contempt, or accusations of abuse. We consume too much. We attempt to force happiness into our lives by eating it, drinking it, buying it, killing it, fucking it, marrying it, divorcing it, cheating on it, preaching it to others, or smoking and snorting it. And the harder we try, the more noise we make, and the less we find. Graceless creatures!

We're not quite there yet. Not...quite. But goddamn, we're getting close.

So yes. All this to say, I know my airship dream comes from my sense of entitlement. Without people who came before me, I would never dare to think the way I do. I would never think that ideas, propagated properly, would be enough to shape things, and that my ego should be powerful enough to shape the world.

This is what I bring forward to you: it's fine to dream big, and it's fine to change things, but it's time we figure out how to do it so that we are at least respectful about it: of each other, of the planet, and of who came before us and got to this point, where a big enough mind and a big enough lever can move the world.

Did I Do Right?

This is the question that concerns me most frequently, lately. Did I do right? Was that right? As I get older, I seem to take more and more time contemplating any action to see if I can understand all the repercussions, all the potential fallout, and judge whether the end result will be...good.

I'm getting very good at predicting the end results. I'm also generally trying to strike some kind of balance between what I deem "right action" and how I anticipate other people will react emotionally.

It's not fun.

In other news: I am back in DC, bitches. Y'all ready for this? New place, new car, new job. New life? Or old one?

Time will tell, and when it does, I will tell it again here.

Unencumbering

Today I sold my car, my beloved VW Jetta. I've had it for 8 years now. Last week, I sold my motorcycle. I am now totally vehicle-less.

I feel odd about it all. I have become emotionally attached to my vehicles. Seeing them go was painful and also...liberating. I feel loyal to them, because I anthropomorphize them: they've been loyal to me, too. And they've changed over the years (thanks to the few thousand dollars in modifications I've put into each). We're none of us the same as we were when we first met.

This move is so weird. Giving things up, selling them, letting them go. It's a little painful, but each one also engenders this growing sense of freedom. There's that line from Fight Club, which I'll paraphrase: "After a while, the things you own own you."

And much as I liked them, it is nice to not worry about them. No more risk of breakdowns or thefts or door dings and paint chipping that comes from living in a city filled with millions of people who do not know the first thing about driving.

Ow.

I have not been blogging...really blogging...about anything important to me in a great long while. The few of you who read this tiny corner of the Internet know this.

But let me commit this to hypertext: I am so...so...so fucking tired. Not tired because I've been working so hard, or because my life is so hectic. Quite the opposite. I don't get tired when I'm busy or things are hectic. Well, I do. That is, my body does. But my brain catches fire, and so it doesn't matter.

Here and now, though...well. Life's been fairly terrible lately. So rather than heave up some impersonal political rant, or talk about social justice, or think about how cruddy the big picture is getting, I'm going to focus in a bit. Mainly on me. And how I feel, and what I think.

First, I am unhappy. I am mildly unhappy with San Francisco and living in the Bay area. Those of you who know me are not surprised. It's no secret. This city is more foreign to me than the most remote corner of Siberia could ever be. It's foreign because it's so goddamn close to what I want, but it misses so hugely on the things I need. It's like running into your second cousin after 20 years, and finding out that the kid you grew up with is actually a total asshole. He's well-dressed, he does well with the ladies, he has a nice car, and people love him. But the first thing you notice is his stink: his spirit is up to no good.

That's this city to me.

It's so odd because a few of my friends moved to SF from DC at around the same time I did, and their experiences here are so different from mine. They're all off to wonderful fresh starts, and seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. I, on the other hand, got off to a good start--and then that shit promptly ended a few weeks ago. Work, personal life: totally in the shitter.

So yeah, I'm tired.

Then there's this other feeling. This one is hard to describe. I actually let someone matter to me, and didn't even know it. I realized it after she treated me as abyssmally as any person has ever treated me, and I totally wrote her off. It was easy; I've developed that much self-respect that I could walk away and not look back. Well...for a fewweeks. And then I realized I missed her. Because apparently I'm a total wuss. I've stayed away from her, I rationally do not want any contact with her, and I am far far better off without her. But tell that to the part that hurts.

Not that I will ever contact her again. I just don't need that kind of crazy in my life.

The older I get, the more I am able to control how I act. And the more important it is for me that the person I am with be able to control how she acts. But it seems fairly certain that my ability to control how I feel is still...very...very...weak.

And between my work and my personal life, I am doubting myself constantly. The confidence I felt a year ago in my own abilities, in my skills in IT, with people, with my judgement--that's been shaken. I've had worse things happen to me, but somehow, that all this happened in my thirties just makes it so much worse. As if I'm standing still, and the rest of the world is plunging ahead, accomplishing the things it needs to do.

I'm treading water.

And I am very...very...tired.

Can I get a halleleujah?!

Same day's news! Scott McClellan resigns! Carl Rove is backing away from his role as Yoda, and will now focus exclusively on his new line of hair products.

This just after Bush insists Rumsfield is not in trouble, even though his own mother's palms go clammy when he walks into the room.

What's Bolten going to do for an encore? Sign the White House Christmas cards? It's only April! I can't wait that long. I'm sure he'll have something fun for me before then.

Is there anyone else who thinks we should redefine the Axis of Evil as "Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield-Rove-Rice?"

The Rise of the Metanational

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his "Mars" trilogy, decribes in vivid detail an Earth governed in large part by what he calls "metanats," metanational companies that do not exist in a realm beyond national borders, and often have at their disposal resources equivalent to, and sometimes superior to, national governments. Those metanats (and their advocates) pursue their own agendas and policies, largely to the detriment of the world overall, and almost never ask the question, "Why are we doing this?" Global warming, pollution, skewed energy policies, health policies, damaged or destroyed land and indigenous peoples result from their pursuit of profit.



Some people may read accounts like this and write it off as science fiction, as the product of a vivid imagination, and not to be taken seriously. I read Chirac's reaction to what might be one of the most divisive labor laws ever enacted in all of the Western world, and can't help but wonder just how far along this path we already are.

First off, let me say that I am emphatically not anti-business. Business, especially small and medium business, is what America is all about. I will proudly state that I am anti-big business, though. I figure it's okay to be categorical like that if Republicans can claim to be "anti-big government" (I figure that when it comes to organizational entities, big anything is bad news, and I'd like small-to-moderate-sized groups making policy or generating products and services, because they might still retain some level of common sense). I happily reap the rewards that large corporate structures have afforded me: I own mass-produced electronics, an automobile, clothing, and other consumer goods, I eat the products of corporate farming. I work for a company whose clients are other, larger companies.

Corporations, to some degree, make the world go round. I can acknowledge that.

Where I diverge with all this big business is when corporations can meddle with actual affairs of state. Legislation should not be the province of companies, contrary to what the Jack Abramoffs of the world would have you believe. Domestically, our political process is becoming ever more tainted and corrupt by legislators kowtowing to special interests that have, at their heart, business interests. We have to fight those entities tooth and nail to enact what should otherwise be common sense; from the gun lobby to the tobacco lobby to energy production to the automobile industry, we're beset on all sides by the propaganda of interests whose sole focus is protecting their bottom line while resisting government regulation as forcefully as possible.

This labor law in France...who are we here in America to sit and watch complacently? Our work products are not our own. We scream very loudly and litigiously for our individual freedoms: freedom to worship, freedom to own a gun, freedom to speak as we choose, marry as we choose, have sex, wear a condom, have an abortion, freedom to do this that or the other thing.

And then for 8 or more hours a day, we chuck all that out the window. Our rights take a backseat to the rights of entities that do not care about us as individuals any more than they care about the rights of the workstations we sit in front of, or the productivity we create for them. The bottom line rules all.

I'm not some huge advocate of labor unions. I don't want to go on strike. I just want to own a fair share of what I produce. I dislike that there exists an elite class in our society whose only claim to their wealth is that they took risks with capital. For that, they are compensated in ways that are hard to believe. They live the lives that Muslim insurgents think they have to blow themselves up to attain in the afterlife: yachts, sexual escapades, their every whim catered to, their every material desire fulfilled.

To what end? Shouldn't we, as workers, look out for what's ours? We work, we produce. But do we stop and think? Are we empowered to take any form of action at all? Can we even protest? No. The least form of action we can take would cost us our livelihoods. The conventional wisdom is that it's better to keep your head down so you can keep what little you do get.

This week, thousands of people took to the streets in France and did all sorts of damage: looting, arson, wrecked cars and shops. They may have gotten some emotional outrage out of their systems, but apart from damaging Chirac politically, I don't really think they accomplished much else. The systems and structures behind it all have not been budged one iota.

As the tagline for a movie in theaters currently goes, "people should not fear the government. Governments should fear the people." Well, I'd personally settle for something milder: our government happens to be ostensibly of the people and for the people--shouldn't it make sense that it then therefore respects the people?

I'm taking it back.

It's time for me to make blogging personal again.

For the life of me, I can't seem to think of anything worthwhile to group-blog about on BI. But there's plenty enough going on in my own personal world that I think it's time I built an outlet. I'm not sure how interested I really am that anyone I know actually reads this thing, since I can already see that I'm going to be venting a lot, and maybe embarassing myself in the process. Whatever--this is for my sanity. Dear reader, your entertainment is very very secondary.



You remember that movie with Michael Douglas, "Falling Down?" It's about this average joe, mildly angry to begin with, and he has this terrible horrible absolutely-no-good day. So he goes on a rampage and in the process winds up wreaking all kinds of havoc on LA and his family. Spoiler: he dies at the end, and maybe the world's not a better place for it, but it sure is quieter.

The reason I bring this up is because this is the world we live in. As Americans we tend not to be able to conceptualize much that could be different; it's just how it is. We're really just not that imaginative. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Al Quaeda hijackers of 9/11 had a lot in common with Michael Douglas' character, and any number of home-grown morons.

See, America is under attack. But not (just) by Al Quaeda. Not by Islam. No, America is under attack by idiots. From within, and from without. We have idiots fighting idiots, and the people who know better are caught in the crossfire, too horrified to react, or maybe too scared, too shocked, too disbelieving. Because, you know...maybe it'll all blow over. Maybe all the idiots will kill each other, and then the rest of us can live in peace, right?

Yeah, good luck with that, friend. The thing about idiots is they don't really much care who they hit. If I were to be completely truthful, I'd 'fess up and say that lately, this has applied to me as much as anyone else, and hey--that might just mean I'm being an idiot.

Well, far be it from me to avoid introspection. What's done is done, but what's done can be undone, or atoned for, or amended. And this is what I seek, personally. I will donate a pound of flesh for the ounces of others'.