Five Amorphous Question Marks

Some shallow impressions of the new America of 2010 before my declarative and non-declarative memories and American sense of etiquette are fully restored:

(1.) My mind meld with the Great Economic Spirit upon entering the country suggests things are back on track.  I now look forward to - instead of dreading - the opportunities for putting bread on the table when I come back here more permanently next summer. 

(2.) For all the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day, this time was actually the easiest I've had it in the last five years, and I've been badmouthing the government and the TSA all over the Internets.  Even though our ESTA information was lost, we were not presumed to be terrorists, my children were not groped, and no one got his or her junk touched.  I attribute this entirely to the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day.  

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9-11 Nine Years Later: The Definition of Insanity

Creating new enemies?This is Part III of a five-part series on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and their effects are the biggest issues of our time, they should not be discussed only briefly on or around that date, but the attacks and their implications should be explored and examined repeatedly until the problems we have created for ourselves are resolved.

It remains unclear whether Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein first said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  If this quote is to be taken as truth, then our policy since September 11th, 2001 is insane.  Two principle direct, observable causes of the September 11th attacks were (1) bureaucratic incompetence - a lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA resulted in the terrorists who perpetrated the September 11th attacks falling off the grid and not re-emerging until mid-flight; and (2) aggressive policy in the Middle East - the Middle East is a fairly complicated place.  By playing politics with the Middle East, basically breaking it up into meaningless nation states - meaningless because the Middle East is largely organized along tribal or ethnic lines - we created power vacuums, which usually we tried to micromanage by supporting dictators loyal to us over the Soviets.  This stirred up grassroots hatred and caused otherwise disparate peoples to organize and unite around mutual anti-Americanism (for example, Iran's fervent support for Palestine, al Qaeda in Afghanistan).  It might have turned out differently if, while maintaining a firm grip on political control of the region, we had also encouraged economic and infrastructure development in conjunction with intra-regional competition (our East Asia strategy under MacArthur).  

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9-11 Nine Years Later: Getting Past "Is"

I was seventeen years old when the Twin Towers fell, in the last year of my secondary education.  I was sitting in front of an iMac managing a stock portfolio of 100,000 imaginary dollars.  It was 8:45 in the morning, and my economics class had reserved the computer lab at Corcoran Library of Boston College High School.  I was looking at Yahoo Finance for stock tips, and my partner for the Stock Market Game was reading CNN.com, trying to translate news stories into investments.  

Minutes after the first plane flew into the North Tower, it was on his screen.  It must have been a computer malfunction, we thought, a tragic accident.  The Y2K hysteria was still fresh on our minds, and it was probably this that led everybody (at least every seventeen-year-old in the computer lab) instantly to such a conclusion.  When the second plane crashed into the South Tower about fifteen minutes later, we thought no differently.  The machines were clearly out of control.  There was never a grounding in reality.  There was never a grand realization.  We were all living in a fantasy world created by the mass media; a world which we didn't know would become even more fantastic.  We were the quintessential children of the nineties: breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed, breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed... 

I'm twenty-six now, and for the past nine years my generation has largely continued to stand on the sidelines and watch a public conversation which seems incoherent.  From our sheltered, privileged, structured childhoods we were suddenly and viscerally exposed to a destabilizing truth.  We suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what happened on September 11th, 2001; and we suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what has happened since; but the world of the War on Terror and the USAPATRIOT Act is all we really know as adults, so we wonder if it isn't perhaps the way things have always been, or whether it is simply beyond our control.  Hence the existential dread.

During our university years, we were called out by old left culture warriors for being apathetic and indifferent, privileged and selfish; but I prefer to think the information generation is simply collecting information to use when it's our turn to build a better world.  Here is some of that information vis-a-vis September 11th, 2001.

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Good Thing We Finally Closed that Barn Door

Ever since I read Jeffery Goldberg’s dismantling of the Transportation Security Administration, I have believed that the TSA was a complete waste of time.  However, it is no use to kick against the goads: of all the worthless crap in our system, airport security has the most glaring cause and the least political gain from change.  It is the ultimate orphan of a cause: if you make airport security less of a pain then everyone benefits, but if anything ever happens it will be your fault.  You would literally have your face on the cover of every paper in the country under a headline blaming you for a terrorist attack.

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