The Silence of the Lambs

The United States Supreme Court recently, by its ubiquitous 5-4 vote, struck down a provision of federal election law that forbids corporations and unions from spending their gains, ill-gotten or otherwise, to support or oppose candidates for federal office. Apparently the majority of the Justices felt that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have wanted business interests to have unlimited influence on the electoral process in America. I don't even think that Alexander Hamilton, poor shot that he was, would support that conclusion. I must confess to not having read the text of the Court's reasoning on the matter, and probably won't, since it would likely either dangerously elevate my blood pressure or put me in a coma, or both, so I may not know what I am talking about. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has not recently impressed me with either their legal acumen or philosophical wisdom.

I'm not going to bore us by generating a primer on the legal concept of "corporate personhood", but it certainly makes sense to provide that commercial entities be able to acquire and hold property, enter into contracts and obtain licenses and permits. It also certainly makes good sense for there to be a protection of commercial speech such that goods and services can be made known to potential consumers, but affording the same right of political speech to amorphous and malleable commercial phantoms as are enjoyed by real living and breathing human-beings is a bit troubling to me. If you are a two-legged Homo Sapien (or, pardon my insensitivity, an amputee) and you engage in inflammatory or abusive political rhetoric, I can punch you in the nose and know full well I got the right guy. You may return the punch or have me arrested, but that's freedom. On the other hand, if a corporation talks nonsense, all I can do is throw a stale cabbage at their local sales representative, who may not even agree with the corporate position. The lack of personal accountability attendant to corporate persons makes them poor candidates to pervasively broadcast their corporate opinions with the massive resources available to them. Freedom without responsibility is a teenager, and we all know how that works.

Corporations are extremely diverse and have a broad range of concerns and objectives, but for the most part, they want to make some money. I have no objection in principle to making money; I'd like to make some myself someday, but the economic benefit of a corporation and the public benefit of a nation may diverge dramatically. Even the most hardened capitalist would not suggest that corporations should control the government; that's called Fascism , unlike when citizens control the government, which is called democracy, or sometimes a cluster-fuck, or both. However, I am still way more inclined to trust the aggregate instincts of my fellow Americans, no matter how apathetic, ignorant, distracted or flatulent they may be, than the denizens of the corporate board room. I read an editorial on the issue, the source of which I have forgotten, which made the very interesting point, which I shall liberate for the use of the people, that we have (and I paraphrase) no idea what sort of madmen, perverts and foreigners may comprise the boards of the various corporations. While I am the last person to raise the paranoid specter of xenophobia, I am also not completely naive about the ways of the world and what people will do for money. With flesh and blood American citizens, however they come by said citizenship, we can at least start with the tenuous assumption that they want to promote the best interests of the nation, even if they may be too dim-witted or filled with the spirit to recognize what is best. Corporations are increasingly multi-national and have no allegiance to anything but their own self-interests. I'm not saying this is morally wrong, I'm just suggesting that Toyota of North America, Inc. may not support legislators who want to bail out Detroit. Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view, but I really don't want corporations helping to decide who gets elected in this country.

Even if you're not prepared to accept my jingoistic and provincial scare-mongering over foreign influence, the corporate record on racial and gender equality, the environment, truth in advertising and generally responsible corporate citizenship is pretty crappy. The corporate board rooms that are not full of inscrutable Orientals or eastern European Mafioso are predominately the province of white, American males over 40. Being a white America male over 40, I can tell you how limited a perspective you can sometimes have. I'm not saying that these individuals are not entitled to an equal voice in the political life of America, but with corporate resources at their disposal the volume of their political speech is increased to where it runs the risk of drowning out us poor middle-class slobs with our $25.00 campaign contributions. Certainly this is not what Patrick Henry had in mind.

I am, after all, just a humble wormhole repairman and not a Constitutional scholar, but the Federal Government is given the power to regulate interstate commerce by Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. Article I, Section 18, Clause 18 gives the Congress the power to make laws that let them do all the stuff the Constitution says they have the power to do, so what am I missing? Corporations can't vote; they can't run for office or die on foreign battlefields. They don't have life, can't enjoy liberty or pursue happiness, and since we are their creator, they are endowed only with the rights we give them. The Libertarian author James Bovard is quoted as saying that "democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner". Thanks to the ineffable wisdom of our Supreme Court, you can now make that three wolves and a sheep.

Angels and Demons

I will not likely be moving to Haiti any time soon. In addition to being unfashionably poor, the country lies upon the typical route for Atlantic hurricanes as they develop from the coast of Africa and move towards North America. Most hurricanes don’t decide whether to turn north and crash into Miami or stay the course and pummel Belize until they are in close proximity to Haiti, which means that Haiti gets hit by a lot of hurricanes. Hurricanes are not compatible with poverty and the poorly built structures usually blow away, wash away or simply disintegrate during storms such that the lower economic classes, which apparently comprise ninety-nine percent of Haiti’s population, are left with no roof and no return on their investment. In 2008 alone, hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike all took a swipe at Haiti and over the years hurricanes Jeanne, Flora, Hazel, Gordon and Georges all ripped the country a new one. In addition to being in the wrong place, the people of Haiti have virtually deforested their homeland because they can’t afford oil or coal to heat and cook with, so there is nothing to stop the torrential rains from raging down the mountain sides and carrying the people and all their goats away.

However, as recent events have shown, there is an even greater persistent natural threat to the happiness of Haiti’s denizens. For those of you unfamiliar with Plate Tectonics, Wikipedia is a great source of education and you may want to check them out before reading further. Anyway, the island of Hispaniola (which includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and a number of other Caribbean islands sit upon the Caribbean Plate, which is sliding in an easterly direction. The Caribbean Plate is bordered on the north by the North American Plate and on the south by the South American Plate; both of these are sliding in a westerly direction. The North and South American plates grind against the Caribbean Plate and friction slows their movement and stores tremendous kinetic energy along the fault lines that divide them. Every so often the snag will release violently sending powerful shock waves through the region as the plates briefly lurch past each other. In other words, our planet is designed to periodically and unpredictably shake the shit out of Haiti and her neighbors. Combine this with poverty, poorly regulated construction and rural isolation and you often have unimaginably catastrophic results.

Haiti is principally populated by the descendants of African slaves brought to the island to labor on the sugar plantations. The previous inhabitants of the island of Hispaniola, the Arawak Indians, were a surly lot who were ultimately obliterated by smallpox and Catholicism. In the early 1500’s, the Spanish were the first to import unenthusiastic Africans to labor in the fields and dig for gold. In the 1600’s French pirates began to use the rugged western end of the island as a base of operations. Ultimately tobacco became more profitable than raping and pillaging and the pirate hideout evolved into a settlement which then began importing its own African slaves. Spain, which had nominal claim to the entire island, took a dim view of this usurpation of royal sovereignty and there was constant friction between the French and Spanish aims on the island. The Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the Nine-Years War, was signed in the Dutch Republic in September of 1697 and ceded the western third of the Island of Hispaniola to the French.

Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was originally named by the French, became a fabulously wealthy source of sugar, coffee and indigo and home to tens of thousands of French colonists and even more African slaves. The wealth of the colony was a result of its productivity and its productivity was the result of the ruthless efficiency with which it was run. Records indicate that one-third of all imported slaves would die within the firs t three years of their arrival, which probably reflects the view of the French colonists that African labor was an expendable, and easily replaceable, commodity. Not that the French were the only nation that lacked moral refinement, then or now, but a pretty crappy deal has generally characterized the whole Haitian experience from the get-go. When the French Revolution broke out, the revolutionary fever spread to Haiti, agitation for the universal rights of Man began and the slaves rose in rebellion. Efforts of the French revolutionary government to re-establish control were unsuccessful and the Jacobeans ultimately declared the abolition of slavery to attempt to pacify the colony. Napoleon was somewhat less accommodating and sent 20,000 soldiers to reassert French sovereignty, but most of them died from tropical diseases and Haiti formally declared its independence from France in 1801. In 1825, after over two decades of intermittent conflict and foreign intervention, Haiti’s independence was recognized.

It would be unfair to try and summarize the 185 years of history of Haiti’s existence as a sovereign nation in a few sentences, but the broad framework is persistent despotism, wholesale corruption, 32 violent coups (an average of one coup every 5.8 years), economic exploitation and routine foreign intervention. The United States, which has long had significance influence in Haitian affairs, occupied the country with military forces from 1915 to 1934. There is a large expatriate Haitian community in the U.S. and the United States is Haiti’s principle trading partner. The U.S. government also subsidizes the operations of the Haitian government to the tune of 100’s of millions of dollars each year, which is in addition to massive foreign aid from Canada, the European Union and other nations.

Why life in Haiti is, by our standards, so miserable is certainly the result of many things, including history, geography and the functioning of the world economy, and the Haitian people themselves cannot escape their share of the blame, but I doubt it has anything to do with voodoo and making a pact with the devil as the great 14th Century American statesman Pat Robertson has suggested. The idea that well-known Malthusians like Rush Limbaugh have once again trotted out that we should just let the Haitians die and thereby decrease the surplus population is also to my mind a little off base and smacks of tired old racism and imperialist self-justification. If we were truly a Christian nation we would not just text $10 to 90999, but we would open our hearts and our homes to our unfortunate brothers, which much to our credit many Americans have done. If we really took Christ’s teachings seriously, we would also quit believing that just because we are luckier than others that we are better than they are.

I am not aware of any polling data on the relative contentment of the Haitian people, and it is undoubtedly difficult to have any sense of security on two dollars a day while being beaten by unruly soldiers and lashed by tropical storm winds as the very ground beneath you bucks and heaves as if to toss you off, but, ironically, all reports are that the Haitians are generally friendly, optimistic and pleasantly disposed. When they extract a cousin who is barely clinging to life from the rubble after seven days, they thank God for the salvation instead of cursing Him for the other twenty relatives smashed flatter than the American GDP in the earthquake. Meanwhile, we here in the land of fabulous wealth and freedom hide in the basement in case someone who hates us tries to blow us up, and we lose countless nights of sleep worrying that our children will, for the first time in generations, have to make do with the same size television that we grew up with. Frankly, I don’t know who God has cursed more.

Good Morning, Dave

A company in Lincoln Park, New Jersey is marketing what they have dubbed a “robot girlfriend”. The life-sized latex doll is presumably anatomically correct and is probably very enticing if room-temperature rubber is your thing. She comes complete with sexy lingerie and shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes and what appears to me to be a mortified expression on her face. The doll, named Roxxxy, has no moving parts and basically just lies there, which I guess, for some of us, would add to the realism. What makes this doll more than just an upscale inflatable lover is its computer driven interactive speech program and the sensors located at strategic points on the body which initiate verbal responses. For example, the manufacturer’s information says that if you touch the doll’s hand, it will respond with "I love holding hands with you"; unfortunately, the doll’s mouth does not move and the sound is generated by an internal speaker so the general effect is probably the same as might be accomplished by a ventriloquist with a corpse. One can only imagine what other verbal delights might be included for the $7,000 to $9,000 price. Stimulation of the appropriate area would perhaps elicit a throaty “I want your turgid man-pole in my groinal area”, or “oh baby lick the Tartar sauce off my clamshell”. I’m not sure where all the sensors are located, so it is possible that an individual’s anatomical area of interest might be nonresponsive, which would be just my luck, and I don’t know if the programming includes “ouch”, but the manufacturer claims the software can “receive updates over the Internet to expand the robot's capabilities and vocabulary”. That’s certainly more than you can say for the average girlfriend.

The inventor of this horrifyingly titillating play-toy, one Mr. Douglas Hines, says he was inspired to attempt to create “artificial personalities” following the death of a friend and that the sexual aspect of the doll is only a marketing tool that will allow him to fund his pursuit of the interactive technology that will ultimately create a real “companion”. He started out with the idea of creating a “home health care aide for the elderly”, but encountered too much “bureaucratic paperwork”. The bureaucrats probably thought the thing would scare somebody to death. I’m really not sure how something that just lies there and runs its mouth would be of much use to the elderly anyway, although the concept is strongly reminiscent of the daily activities of my teenage children.

I suppose we can all agree that Mr. Himes is a fine fellow and that his research will someday achieve something positive, but the whole idea still seems kind of sad to me. I can just foresee the flocks of pathetic losers living in their mother’s basements sitting around on Saturday night with Roxxxy watching Star Wars. What’s sad about it is that if they spent their $9,000 on therapy, or a gym membership or a continuing education class or a dog, they would probably ultimately be much happier. People are lonely for a lot of reasons and almost all of them are controllable. If you are an ass and nobody likes you, quit being an ass; if you’re frightened and insecure, get some help; if you’re horribly disfigured, hang out with blind people. The fact is, there is a pathetic loser lurking inside all of us, but most of us have paid the price and eaten the bitter root of failure enough to know that the great democratic ideal that we are all equally flawed is a profound truth. We know that human relationships are not about control or emotional safety and that seeking respect, admiration or affection from anyone always carries the risk of rejection, betrayal and humiliation; but we also know that Roxxxy is a pale imitation of life and a concession to defeat.

With developments in artificial intelligence and robotics there will almost certainly be a day when the science fiction prophecies of Robby the Robot, the Weyland-Utani Corporation’s malfunctioning Ash and the programmed-with-multiple-techniques Commander Data will be fulfilled. When that day comes, there will be titanic legal and philosophical debates about what is, and is not, a person and our society will be transformed in ways we can scarcely imagine. No doubt there will be social, physical and perhaps even emotional interaction between us and our creations and this will necessitate entirely new psychological and moral adaptations on our part. In this brave, new world, it is likely that companionship will no longer be a problem for the dull, the unattractive or the maladjusted, if such conditions are allowed to persist, but the issue of choice in emotional validation will always remain; without the right of decision and the freedom to reject, any manufactured companion will, like poor Roxxxy, be nothing but a worthless pile of wires, rubber and delusion.

We'll Meet Again Godzillasan

Tsutomu Yamaguchi died a couple of days ago. He was 93 years old. For those who don’t know, Mr. Yamaguchi gained notoriety by virtue of having been present in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were attacked with nuclear explosives by the United States in 1945. He was in Hiroshima on August 6th on a business trip representing the Mitsubishi Corporation when the uranium powered “Little Boy” was detonated with an explosive force of approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. The bomb killed approximately 140,000 people, but, while seriously burned, Mr. Yamaguchi was not among them. He made his way back to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time to be slightly less than two miles from the detonation on August 9th of the plutonium powered “Fat Man” which exploded with a force of approximately 21 kilotons of TNT and which killed approximately 39,000 people. Again, Mr. Yamaguchi was not among them, but he and his wife both suffered radiation poisoning which, one can only assume, shortened his impressive life-span considerably.

In addition to being a tale of O. Henry-esque irony, Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is a quintessential example of the “been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt” wisdom that comes from personally experiencing human failure writ large. Having been near the epicenter of the two most deliberately destructive acts in human history, he had gained a unique perspective on suffering and loss. In the last decades of his life he became an outspoken critic of the world’s thirst for nuclear weaponry and basically concluded that we were (I paraphrase) all nuts for failing to rid the world of our vast arsenals of nuclear death. Yamaguchi, a Buddhist, had resigned himself to the fact that his accidental celebrity was his intended fate and that he should use his remaining time to educate the world’s people on how really inconvenient a nuclear explosion could be.

There are currently 21,500 nuclear weapons on Planet Earth, give or take, with around 20,000 of those equally divided in the possession of Russia and the United States. The rest are spread around among other such reliable democratic and pluralistic societies as Pakistan, Israel, India and China. Virtually all of these weapons are many hundred to many thousands of times more powerful than the two tiny scraps of hell we unleashed on Mr. Yamaguchi in World War Two. The fundamental technology that underlies these weapons is readily available on the Internet and manufacture is primarily limited by access to fissionable material and the equipment necessary to machine components to fine tolerances. The probability that some vengeance-minded ignoramus or spirit filled religious lunatic will lay their hands on a nuclear explosive increases daily, and the likelihood that a cynical, sociopathic and power hungry douche-bag will buy, steal or create such a device is more of an inevitability than a possibility.

Ever since the Soviet Union went out of business we have largely had an unrealistically apathetic attitude about nuclear disarmament, almost certainly because we no longer fear the world-wide, massive nuclear exchange that would in thirteen minutes obliterate all life on Earth. We now complacently fret about beturbaned terrorists taking us out one airplane-load at a time. While the fear of nuclear terrorism may keep many a CIA operative up at night, it is something so abstract that the mind of the average citizen cannot adequately imagine the scale of destruction it implies. We, therefore, dream fitfully of underwear bombs and hooded martial artists beating old ladies at bingo parlors while the United States, and a dozen other countries, continue to manufacture enriched uranium and plutonium and to export to all manner of suspicious characters the electronic and engineering technology necessary to ignite a star.

In August of 1939, Albert Einstein, along with physicists Leó Szilárd, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, sent then President Roosevelt a letter suggesting that it would be possible to use nuclear fission to create a powerful weapon and that Nazi Germany was probably already undertaking the research to accomplish such a feat. The resulting Manhattan Project produced the two city-smashing wonders Mr. Yamaguchi had the pleasure of witnessing. Einstein had always been something of a pacifist and his out-of-character admonition to Roosevelt not to be beaten to the nuclear punch was indicative of his fear of the horror that would result if such power fell unchecked into the hands of paranoid and delusional pricks. He and his fellow physicists reasoned that it was acceptable to pervert science to destructive aims if the alternative meant subjugation of the world by poisonous, misanthropic philosophies. It’s a hard point to argue against.

Unfortunately for Mr. Yamaguchi, Japan never made any significant progress in nuclear research and by 1945 they were pretty much bereft of any ability to credibly threaten America. Most of Japan’s population aimlessly drank saki, hid in their basements and waited for the Emperor to perform a divine miracle. No such miracle was forthcoming, however, and Harry Truman’s two-fisted punch in the soul was all Japan got for its troubles. Truman, who had little tolerance for moral ambiguity, figured 250,000 Japanese lives were worth well less than any number of American ones and apparently never lost a minute of sleep over being midwife to the age of nuclear anxiety. From the perspective of sixty-plus years, some of us may take exception to such an attitude, but at the time there were probably not four people in America who thought poorly of the President for vaporizing Mr. Yamaguchi’s quiet little seaside neighborhood.

Now, like all the apples humanity has eaten over the eons, we are stuck with the knowledge of the power of the atom. In light of such knowledge, we are constantly reminded that all our crowning achievements, from molecular biology to robotics, from aerospace engineering to quantum mechanics, and from artificial intelligence to medicine, can be easily turned upon ourselves with more power to destroy than they would ever have to mend. Tsutomu Yamaguchi got a front row seat to the darkness that lurks in the human psyche and he would probably tell us that beating our swords into plowshares will be inadequate if we cannot hammer open our hearts, and that when we gaze sadly at the devastation wrought by evil, we are only looking into a shattered mirror.

Throwing Mangos at Cats

I’ve never been one to give much significance to arbitrary benchmarks like new years, centuries or millennia; for most of my life I never needed any specific reason for being irresponsibly over self-indulgent and my enthusiasm for December 31st lay principally in the fact that I was likely to have company in doing so. Nobody really knows when anything started or where we are on the theoretical time-line that runs from nothing to nothing again, but certainly there are natural cycles which have been of great importance to humans through the eons, though modern delineations of time probably have more to do with the bureaucratic need to categorize and inventory than they do with planting schedules. Time, like the ghosts it creates, most likely doesn’t exist in any real sense, but is just another by-product of our change-obsessed consciousness which allows us to experience discreet events and impose artificial order on the bubbling quantum foam which underlies all.

What the idea of time is good for is forgetting, forgiving and fooling ourselves into believing that personal change is some magical quality that can be found in Santa’s bag or at the bottom of a punch bowl and that all we need do is declare a break with the past and start anew and fundamentals will be transmuted, psychological baggage abandoned, genetic predispositions obviated and inherent flaws corrected. Time is the almighty, universal stain remover which washes away sin and grief and failure and allows us to stand new-born and pure in the face of the impending, if arbitrarily defined, year.

The odd thing is that, my innate sarcasm notwithstanding; there may be some fundamental element of human truth to the concept of a fresh start. Despite the weight of our social and natural sagas, there remains in even the most shallow and traumatized of us the potential to re-invent ourselves, to be more than just a point on a line or the sum of converging history. Genetic determinism is powerful, like dialectical materialism and dual predestination before it, but the entire mechanical structure of the universe defines nothing but probability; reality obeys less well established laws. Perhaps it was Heisenberg who first used mathematics to express the concept that “life is what you make it”, but Schrödinger was definitely the guy who discovered that old cats can teach new tricks and that life really is like a box of chocolates. So pay heed you masses in your quiet desperation; a year is just a year, but a new year is a choice. Get busy.