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Section 56 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 July 28 Monday.
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Today I was up really early in the morning and, before heading off to work, was able to hunt up some more information about the extradition treaty which the British government signed recently (in secret, apparently) allowing the United States to extradite people from Britain without any evidence of guilt being placed before a court of law.
As stated earlier,
this extradition treaty still needs to be ratified by the US Senate before it goes into effect.
When I first heard about this unequal treaty, I was really taken aback. Why would Britain compromise national sovereignty by signing such a document? One nation shouldn't agree to surrender its citizens to another on demand, with no questions asked.
I started thinking that maybe there was a psychological explanation for this, and I was tempted to write something very rude. The thought that went through my mind was something like this:-
"These guys are power-worshippers, guys who have been conditioned to go down on their knees and suck the toes of anything bigger and stronger."
However, I was too busy to get the insult online, so let the thought lapse.
This morning, then, I was really surprised to read the following:-
A few months ago, Paul Johnson, ancient custodian of our independence, wrote in the Spectator that the world "needs hero states, to look up to, to appeal to, to encourage and to follow". A sole superpower, he argued, "is a much safer and more responsible step towards world order than a corrupt pandemonium like the UN or a rapacious and blind bureaucracy like the EU." It is better, in other words, to humbly obey another country than to participate, with negotiating rights and voting powers, in a system of regional or global governance.
Big, strong America: let me suck your toes!
The quote is from a truly magesterial article on the online site of the British newspaper The Guardian.
The article,
dated Tuesday July 8, 2003, is by George Monbiot. It is headlined "Our fake patriots" and has a subtitle saying "Britain is fast becoming Bush's doormat - so why isn't the British right saying a word?"
It says, in part:-
A month ago we discovered that our home secretary had secretly concluded an extradition treaty with the US that permits the superpower to extract British nationals without presenting evidence before a court. Britain acquires no such rights in the US. The response from the rightwing press was a thunderous silence.
And that's the puzzling part: why was there so little response? I'm generally reading my way through a newspaper a day plus checking headline online twice a day, and I would have expected a piece of news this big (and to my way of thinking it is big) to make a splash large enough for it to automatically come to my attention. However, I entirely missed the news when it broke, and was only alerted to it a month later by a passing reference in an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune.
In his article, George Monbiot dissects the politics involved, arriving finally at this conclusion:
perhaps most importantly, our fake patriots know where real power lies. Having located it, they wish to appease it. For the very reason that the United States is a greater threat to our sovereignty than the European Union, they will not stand up to it.
My own perspective on this is conditioned by having grown up in New Zealand, a very small country. The big news in the last year or so was that the population of New Zealand finally reached four million. Once political question that New Zealand has faced in my lifetime is this: can you forge an independent foreign policy even if you are just a small country which doesn't have nukes or aircraft carriers? And the answer has been, yes, you can.
Now, when it comes to heroes, it's fair to say that in New Zealand heroes have a legitimate cultural function. New Zealanders tend to be very proud of their heroes, such as Sir Edmund Hillary, who was voted onto the five dollar bill on account of his various exemplary exploits (such as being, along with Sherpa Tenzing, one of the first two people ever to make it to the summit of Mount Everest.)
However, the New Zealand conception of a hero is someone you strive to emulate, not someone you want to bow down to. (New Zealand is not a nation of toe suckers.)
Anyway, as noted above, I came upon the Monbiot article early this morning. I was in my usual morning rush, so, having downloaded a copy of the Monbiot article for later dissection, I finished my museli, put out the garbage, changed into office clothes, made a liter of hot coffee, got my boxed lunch out of the refrigerator (plain rice, fried pork and mushrooms), then exited the house and hurried to the train station, which was already swirling with human activity.
I was fumbling with small change, looking for a hundred and fifty yen with which to buy my daily copy of the International Herald Tribune, when into the uncalculating disorder of my mind there fell a seed crystal, this being the words "the Renaissance conception of hierarchy."
In England in the Renaissance (which we could think of as being, very roughly, the 1500s, though I wouldn't like to take a stand on this) authority flowed (as it did in the medieval days) from God (the all-powerful) down through the king, and thereby (eventually) to the head of the household, the alpha male who was sovereign over (and, let us presume, hero to) all the lesser beings under his dominion. (And before Henry the Eighth broke with the Church of Rome, of course, power flowed from God to the Pope, in theory if not in practice, and then to the king.)
Now, England is a country which has never experienced a proper revolution - the Civil War, the killing of the king and the rule of Oliver Cromwell didn't really do any truly revolutionary damage to the English system.
So it seems not unreasonable to me to argue that what we are seeing here, as England goes down on its knees in front of America, mouth open, is a really ancient habit of looking upon the all-powerful as being the omni-legitimate.
Another thought that went kicking through my head as I hurried down the escalator to catch the train was some words from T.S. Eliot which run something like this (and here I'm quoting from an uncertain memory):-
Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses heels
Over the paving!
Eliot, one of England's most cultured and sophisticated poets, wrote the most wonderfully incantatory but totally inscrutable poem about some kind of parade. As a teenager, I often puzzled over this, and rather wondered what it was about. It was a real shock to find out (as I ultimately did, years later, when browsing through some book of literary criticism) that this was actually a poem of praise (or something perilously close to praise) for the Italian dictator Mussolini, Hitler's junior partner.
If we look back at English history in the years leading up to the Second World War, one of the interesting things is that the rise of Fascist power in Italy and the corresponding rise of Nazi power in Germany found plenty of applauding voices in England - and the applause came not from those who were lowest in society, not from the oppressed and the discontented, but from people who were comfortably embedded in the power structure.
I have two and a half minutes to wrap this up before my lunch hour ends. The keyword is this: feedback mechanisms. If American power is to be absolute, privileged by being unchallenged (unchallenged by, for example, the need to present evidence in a court of law) then there is no way for the suffering individuals who inhabit this planet to supply feedback to the American system. The American system, then, is going to be guided solely by its own wisdom, and, frankly, without wanting to be unduly unkind, I don't think the wisdom of George W. Bush (to name but one) runs particularly deep.
Section 56 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 July 30 Wednesday.
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Is the wisdom of the few sufficient to govern the world of the many? This is a question which has lately been exercising the mind of Paul Keating, sometime prime minister of Australia, and the answer he has arrived at is "No."
The big question is, can the world be run from one city? Does the U.S. Congress have the wit and the wisdom - let alone the resources - to run the globe? I, for one, do not believe it does.
[Quote from a comment "adapted from an address Monday to the Local Government Unlimited Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand" and published in the International Herald Tribune (English-language Japanese edition) on 2003 July 30 Wednesday on page 6 under the headling "When America goes it alone, we all pay".]
This is very reasonable. A handful of minds located in Washington cannot hope to know enough about this multifaceted planet to govern the whole of it without help.
With this in mind, it is pleasing to see that there is a new American initiative designed to seek help from the greater world. Admittedly, it is depressing that the help sought is limited to one very narrow question, the question being "What are the terrorists going to try next, and when?"
Still, a start is a start.
The American initiative, which is headline news right now, involves starting up a kind of online casino in which people will be able to bet as to who gets assassinated, blown up, nuked, hijacked or whatever. Apparently it's an experiment being run out of the Pentagon by a bunch of guys in something called Darpa.
Not so long ago, I read about a lecturer in (maybe) statistics or (maybe) economics who used to take a big jar of jellybeans into a class. He would get the students to guess how many jellybeans there were. Guesses would be sometimes high and sometimes low, but, when the guesses were averaged out, the end result was a pretty accurate estimate.
This is an example of the wisdom of the many - commonly referred to as "the market" - being brought into play.
I think this online casino for betting on terrorism is a really neat idea, a science fictional solution to the problem of predicting the future. However, it seems to me that the numbers being talked of are way too small. Initially, the number of players will be limited to a thousand, and this number will probably not be expanded to more than ten thousand.
While a thousand minds could easily crack the jellybean problem, the planet is rather more complex. More minds, please! Let's put the whole thing on line with reasonable entry stakes so everyone can play.
After all, some extremely angry unemployed Iraqi youth sweltering through a Baghdad summer without air conditioning is probably going to be able to make as good a guess to the future as some financier relaxing with an ocean view and a glass of chardonay.
However, regardless of how big the global prediction system gets, it won't alter the fundamental problem, which is the intellectual complacency of the guys who are currently running Washington: Rumsfeld and company.
At a tactical level, these guys may be ready to look into a crystal ball to explore the technical details of the future. But, when it comes to the business of strategies for dealing with the present, they think they already know all the answers.
In today's International Herald Tribune there's a continuation of a series of Doonesbury strips on this theme. Donald Rumsfeld is giving a press conference, and he's asking and answering his own questions. Permitted input from the great outside: zero.
In today's strip, some troops who have been watching Rumsfeld's press conference on TV are getting ready to move out on patrol. One says:-
"Am I on drugs? If only!"
There seems to be a serious problem in Iraq, the "not enough troops" problem - not enough troops to stop pretty much anything and everything falling victim to the ongoing looting. (And, along with the looting, there seems to have been a fair bit of raping - Iraq is an object lesson which makes it clear why a nation state needs a functioning police force.)
However, Rumsfeld's Washington, the Washington of the "We do it on the cheap" regime, seems singularly resistant to hearing this rather expensive message.
Another cartoon that caught my eye today was one in the "Non Sequitur" series. The copyright credit is to a Wiley Miller, so I presume he's the cartoonist. It's a single-frame cartoon showing a cat presiding over a courtroom of cats. The cat is sitting in judgment on a solitary dog, and the cat is asking:-
"How does the defendant plead ... guilty, real guilty, or really really guilty?"
The difference between the cartoon and reality is that, in the cartoon, the dog has at least made it to court (albeit alone, with no defence attorney anywhere to be seen.) In reality, the dog would still be sitting in a cage at Guantanamo Bay, trial deferred into the infinite future.
I didn't used to take cartoons so seriously. However, these days, on the garish comic book planet I find myself inhabiting, they seem to make as much sense as anything else.
Section 56 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 July 31 Thursday.
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I was surprised and dismayed today to find that one of America's most promising new ideas, a crystal ball to see the future, has been knocked over the head with a large hammer and killed stone dead. This murder appears to have been carried out in the name of good taste, that destroyer of all promising things.
The assassination is announced in the pages of today's International Herald Tribune (as published in Japan). An editorial on page six is headlined "Enough of Poindexter" and starts:-
The latest idea hatched by John Poindexter's wacky espionage operation at the Pentagon - an online futures trading market where speculators could bet on the probabilities of terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups - would be terrifying if it wasn't so patently absurd. The idea was quickly canned by embarrassed Pentagon officials.
It's not clear to me why the idea is "patently absurd." The IHT editorial says that:-
Markets do no always operate perfectly in the larger world of stocks and bonds. The idea that they can reliably forecast the behavior of isolated terrorists is ridiculous.
The flaw in this argument is the "isolated terrorists" statement. It is undoubtedly true that the activities of isolated independently-motivated terrorists operating in a stable society (for example, Japan) cannot be predicted.
However, the terrorism which most concerns the United States is not the aberrant acts of lone individuals. Rather, it is a terrorism which arises out of the political dynamic of specific situations.
As a concrete example, take the case of Saddam Hussein. His sons have been killed, and now he is vowing to take vengeance. Now, taking vengeance may or may not be a practical possibility. The deaths of Uday and Qusay may or may not encourage people to support Saddam.
However, it's not unreasonable to think that, if enough observers pooled their guesses, it would be possible to get some kind of ballpark estimate of the likelihood of Saddam being able to organize some kind of counterstrike.
It's a little disappointing to see that, having dismissed Poindexter's idea as absurd, the IHT launches an attack on Poindexter himself:-
the problem of Poindexter remains. He is a man of dubious background and dubious ideas. A retired rear admiral, he served as President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to the rebels in Nicaragua. He was sentenced to six months in jail for lying to Congress, a conviction overturned on appeal.
And so on.
This ad hominem attack muddies the water, making it difficult for the idea itself to get a fair trial.
Even if Poindexter is not one of the more attractive figures in the Bush administration, that still doesn't disqualify him from coming up with a good idea. A man may be a villain and yet still originate, for example, a better mousetrap.
The Poindexter spyglass, the George Bush Nation Building Kit, the Jack the Ripper safety razor - these contributions to human civilization deserve to be evaluated objectively, without regard to the amount of prison time which has been done by (or which should be done by) the originator of the device in question. Technology should properly be regarded as being character-neutral.
One of the virtues of Poindexter's scheme, as I see it, is that it at least represents a step in the right direction - the right direction being to seek feedback from the wider world.
Suitably expanded to that millions of people could participate, and with its scope broadened, the Poindexter Futuresphere could become a valuable tool of insight.
Question: Will eager tourists be flocking to sunny Iraq for their summer holidays in the near future? The answer of the smart money is ....
Question: Will George Bush economics lead America to a prosperous 2004? The answer of the smart money is ....
And so forth.
Well, it seems that it's not going to happen. However, undoubtedly two or three hundred science fiction writers are already hard at work, right now, exploring various permutations of the Poindexter idea, and presumably we will have the privilege of reading their speculations in due course.
And, of course, there's still room for some vigorous entrepreneur to take the idea online. The IHT may not like a plan which would "allow speculators - even terrorists - to profit from anonymous bets on future attacks." (As mentioned above, considerations of good taste, as much as anything, seem to have contributed to this plan's demise.)
However, if someone out there is ready to bring this idea to the millions, then maybe the millions will prove ready to play.
This crystal ball may not start functioning in my lifetime, but, come back in a hundred years, and I would be surprised if it wasn't one of the leading tools of human civilization.
"The president was going great until his economic policy got Poindextered. He did his best to spindoctor his way out of it, but, hey, you can't rewrite the future ...."
(Isaac Asimov, of course, wrote a series of science fiction stories about the prediction of the future. However, if memory serves - and it's been a long, long time since I looked at anything by Asimov - these stories didn't involve futures-market-style gambling.)
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