From Streetcars To Spaceships

About the posturing git who just "bravely walked out on" Goldman Sachs.

So I see that the New York Times is carrying a piece from a senior exec inside Goldman Sachs who's shocked, shocked he says, to find that there are bad people running his firm. And even worse, they're doing it all for their own benefit and not focusing on what's good for the clients!

So, brave tower of virtue that he is, he's walking out on this outrage, to get by on the monkish life allowed by his millions of dollars, to use the might of his rectitude to smite the unworthy. And, you know, maybe do some consulting on the side and take the occasional speaking gig.

Oh, please. Here we go again. There's not a word in this piece that wasn't said about the industry in general and several firms in specific by Michael Lewis in Liar's Poker in 1989. And not a single language usage that John Train hadn't documented as typical long-standing Wall Street culture by the 70's. Hell, you could find spot-on cartoons about this kinda of smug, macho posturing by brokers about fleecing of customers in issues of things like Punch from the late 1700's. The Regency period was filled with this kind of thing.

Investment banking/Wall Street/money managers have been getting obscenely rich and then "suddenly discovering" this "brand new thing" about their companies and/or their industry for a very, VERY long time. But only, of course, once they, themselves are safely rich (or to use their own terminology, have their "fuck you money")

You know what game he's playing? This is the "it's just a few bad apples" ploy again. No, sweetie, these problems go as deep as magma. 

And again, the plays of Voltaire and his English counterparts positively brim with these smug, lecturing hypocrites pontificating from their estates. And more have been popping up ever since. Betcha somebody with the historical research chops could pull an example of this from the literature of the 1500's, if not sooner. I'd guess that the first were born along with modern share-based capitalism in the 1200's in places like Venice. They are a predictable outcome of the system. Like lice outbreaks as an outcome of centralized childcare.

And this, not incidently, is why some of us are so insistent on things like the Tobin Tax, bigger per-transaction fees for the buying and selling of securities and all the speculative paper that go with them. A fee of one tenth of one percent won't mean a goddamn thing to the person who's buying a stock to hold it. But it will play merry havoc with the people who make their money by buying and selling and buying and selling literally billions of shares and making their money on the churn.

And yet we're always supposed to act like we're surprised and take them as virtuous for pulling a Clarence Thomas and simultaneously shitting on the things that got them rich and powerful while spouting crap about how much more ethical things were in their day.

His accomplishments and wealth "have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts"? Bullshit. Plenty have written elsewhere about the logical and ethical bankruptcy of that particular stylish claim of the very rich. I'm not going to dignify it with a point by point refutation other than to ask how much wealth is then "owed" to the slave laborers in Malaysia & elsewhere who built so many of his pretty toys for him and have worked far harder, far longer, under unspeakably worse conditions.

In short, fuck him. I'm glad to see something that may help a few more yahoos to think a little bit but afaic, he's further promulgating protective myths for himself and his rich buddies. "Oh, we were great virtuous benefactors to society. And are entirely blameless now. It's this new crop who are so terrible." Yeah, right.

If he wants me to see him as anything but scum, let him give away his wealth to the people Goldman and the rest of the industry scammed, attacked, and looted and then maybe we can start the conversation about his credibility. Though even that wouldn't begin to touch the vast luxury and privilege that's beribboned and cushioned his every day since he was first in the field.

Or, to make my response even shorter, tell me then, where are the customer's yachts?

Intellectual property laws are supposed to enrich our shared world.

Patents and copyrights were originally meant to give premium profits to the innovator and/or their assigns. These days we see too many products, from high-density car batteries to 90's clamshell subnotebooks, where corporations own it, won't sell it, won't sell the rights. They pull that and they should end up forced to sell their control and tooling to somebody who will. Use it or lose it, motherf*ckers. You don't get government-protected exclusivity so you can IMPOVERISH our shared pool.

Countering more lies of the enemies of the Occupy movement

A web site recently reposted a video of an NYU professor dutifully and smugly rattling off the latest rationalization for modern wealth inequity, as he is likely paid to do by his corporate patrons. His line of patter? That we should be GRATEFUL for wealth inequities since "surely" those are a result of somebody who has done something that improved the world SO MUCH that people were glad to pay a premium to get this unique and wonderful thing. So "obviously", the money these people accumulated is only a fraction of the value they've created, as is testified by their being rich.

Uh, huh.

So here is my response, slightly edited for reposting here.

Professor Epstein’s statements are based on ideology, not facts. Here is the reality.

Most wealth is not primarily a result of innovation. America’s wealthiest businesspeople from Vanderbilt forward, are mostly successful makers and enforcers of monopolies. America not only doesn’t gain from monopolies (or even oligopolies) it is harmed by them as people are forced and scammed into paying excessive prices for things that they need. And honorable companies who try to succeed based on doing good work get destroyed by unscrupulous slime right alongside of us exploited consumers.

Another disproportionate source of business success is starting out rich. Bill Gates was richer at the age of five than most people will ever be, with a fat trust fund and daddy a hotshot corporate lawyer. Almost every part of Microsoft has always lost money. They still lose money on things like the X Box. Their wealth comes largely from the market power they got from the Windows license. An operating system that Bill Gates didn’t create. In fact, he stole it. But since his mother was friends with the IBM executive choosing their OS, he got the contract anyway.

More wealth comes from using other people’s money and insider connections to buy up companies (or government assets) break them up like a horse butchered and sold by the pound to make glue and dog food. Pay off enough legislators and you can get away with almost anything. America is further and further “stripped for parts” by looters like this every year. They get richer. We get poorer.

Then we get the media fortunes. Most media companies are doing very badly. But the executives are getting richer all the time. They falsify the recordkeeping. They put their friends in sweetheart jobs. Look it up. And ask yourself if America is really enriched by this.

Then we get executive salaries. Which get bigger all the time, even for people who are obviously incompetent or evil. Explain to me how Yahoo’s previous CEO “deserved” twenty million dollars. Or H.P.’s. And this is money that comes directly out of the pockets of the actual workers in the company who create that wealth.

Epstein is bought and paid for. Don’t believe the hype.

And please, do not succumb to the logical fallacy that anybody saying that we need change is just “against somebody being richer than others”. Nobody I know with more than three brain cells is that simplistic. This isn’t some rap song where the world is divided into “playas” and “playa haters”. We’re not opposed to have some be richer than others. We’re opposed to a society where too many people successfully steal, defraud, bully, and scam their way to wealth and then pay *less* in taxes while getting *more* government protection.

We’re opposed to a 1.3 TRILLION dollar savings and loan bailout after which not a single person served a jail term as long or as hard as that of a bank robber who steals a thousand dollars. We’re opposed to companies like Enron having killed people (yes, those rolling blackouts resulted in deaths) by intentionally shutting off power supplies to Americans, all to up their quarterly profits. And then, while we know that dozens of them actively designed and executed these schemes and hundreds or even thousands were knowing participants, three people in the entire multi-billion dollar corporation ever saw any noticeable jail time at all and most of them got to keep most or all of the money they “made”.

I run a small business. I work hard to create excellent products and I expect to be paid for what I create and sell. I hope to some day make a lot of money doing that. I have known millionaires who I'm delighted got millions of dollars for their work. They deserved it. Bully for them. The problem is that in reality most of the people getting rich and staying rich are NOT “creating value.” They are getting rich by hurting people. And the trail of bodies and misery they're responsible for is more than most people can even imagine.

Most of our farmers have been reduced in recent decades to sharecroppers on their own land, with almost no control over what they grow, how they grow it, or how they sell it. As the grandson of a Kansas farmer, I find that monstrous.

Congress required our worker pensions to fork over a percentage of their money to be “invested” by venture capitalists. Venture capitalists who then ignored most of the real entrepreneurs and instead blew it on funding “dot-coms” run by the kind of people they liked drinking with. Almost all these dot-coms went bankrupt, the real businesspeople having to compete for resources made more expensive by these spendthrifts, and money that was supposed to fund the retirement of schoolteachers and factory workers was instead spent on fancy dinners and condos for rich bankers.

Our engineers and scientists have created waves of good products, from old-school Rubbermaid appliances to “clamshell” computers. And then some new executive fad comes along and they’re ordered to cheapen the quality or move the factory overseas or simply replace it with some shoddy garbage. All while customers are BEGGING to be allowed to buy the high-quality goods that our engineers created in the first place. In those cases even the companies lose money. Again, look at H.P. And the executives who do this get millions in pay and bonuses and even if the company fails, and then get even more money to serve on boards of other companies.

And THAT is what we are opposed to. This is a wave of crime against the vast majority of the American people and we have no intention of passively waiting to be told what to think or what to do. We are informed, we are outraged, and we are fighting back. And I can guarantee you that the “Occupy” movement isn’t even close to all that we are doing.

And, ya know, here I am writing these marathon responses to Professor Epstein’s trash and maybe I just need to keep it simple. If somebody being rich is “obviously” because they found ways to sell things that made the world even better than what would have existed otherwise, what has he got to say about drug dealers and pimps? After all, they get rich. And they certainly do so by selling products that are in demand.

Check what people like the FBI and business insurance firms say. As far as they can tell, most embezzlers get away with it. And they get away with billions. And frequently they do it by being freelance bookkeepers to many families or small businesses, who they defraud over years, thereby, yes, concentrating wealth. Just as you crowed about.

So tell me, Professor Epstein, if YOUR bookkeeper got rich by stealing YOUR money and that of ten of your friends, would you call that a “gain” to society?

Yet more authorities agree, the jobs are just plain going away and never coming back.

So I see that dear old Slashdot is in a tizzy about a new book from a couple of guys from MIT. The thesis? Just what I've been saying for years now. Most of our jobs are going away forever. Getting replaced by robots. It looks like we're now about two more years away from this becoming cocktail party conventional wisdom. And when that happens maybe, just maybe, people will be willing to admit that there is NO FUCKING WAY TO GET "FULL" EMPLOYMENT IN A FREE MARKET MODERN TECHNOLOGY SOCIETY.

A few years back I laid this out, category by category, for literally every kind of job that there is, using the federal government's own classification system. And the bottom line is that there is no magic new place to look where "replacement" jobs will fill in for those that are gone.

Going along with this is the basic truth, yes, TRUTH, that most of our wealth is a legacy of the innovation and infrastructure that we have inherited from previous generations. Wealth that has largely been a result of the actions and expenditure of government and wealth that has NOT tidily ended up in the hands of the innovators or those who have worked hardest.

There is no magic parent in the sky making sure that the "good" boys and girls end up with a "fair" proportion of the riches. Ask any childcare center worker or first responder now dying from having worked at the WTC site or any crippled combat vet from recent years if you somehow need proof of this.

Funny how we have all these stories that people now tell about the vast immorality of people like Thomas Edison but each case is somehow "just an exception" to the supposed general rule that if somebody is wealthy then surely they've earned it. You know, like the senior exectives at Goldman, Sachs. Though the cab driver who puts in longer days for a microscopic comparative return evidently somehow doesn't undermine that thesis.

And once that has been faced, either people just come out and admit that they're cool with having just about everybody starving and desperate forever while a small minority bask in the incomprehensible riches that they have NOT uniquely earned or they start to concede that a decent and sane society involves EVERYBODY getting some share of that wealth, just for being alive. For life. With no preconditions or limitations. Because, you see, this isn't some form of charity. This is distribution of goods to somebody who inherited them. To "just give" a living wage worth of money and goods to every citizen is not generosity. It's justice.

The best essay on process management ever written.

A document written by a programmer at Google has recently come to light. Here it is. Read it. Memorize it. use it as a catchecism for any management trainees you've got. Download a copy for local archiving in case this link goes down. This, my friends, is the shit. Much more than internal details about Amazon ad Google. Much more than just a review of implications of service-oriented architecture. This is a parable of how operational philosophy shapes behavior and how the consequences of that behavior also, in a competent organization, shapes operational philosophy.

Read it. Read it now. 

The sleazenuggets at Flickr have just about used up my patience.

I just renewed our pro Flickr account and the process was less than delightful. Oh, I am SO glad that I've finally bought us a copy of Lightroom and am preparing to host our own images on our own domains because I am SO not cool with hosting all our images on Flickr by this time next year.

A while back Flickr switched it over so that to have a pro Flickr account you HAD to have a linked Yahoo account, them being the same company now and all. And because, ya know, people who are serious about images obviously will be wanting to do their email through Yahoo.

Fine. I knew that it was bullshit but I went through the mickey mouse then, created a dedicated Yahoo email account for Streetcar Press, and then was able to renew our pro Flickr account. I then tried to use the Streetcar Press Yahoo email account for little things but, ya know having my own FOUR FREAKING DOMAINS AND A BLOG, each of which I pay for, that was kinda stupid, so eventually I stopped.

So I go to renew today and find that since my Yahoo account is "inactive", they've deleted all of my email there (not to mention contacts and other information, of which there was some) and I needed to reactivate the account. Which they will shut down and delete the contents of again unless I start using it all the time.

Unless I start paying for premium service for this account that I never wanted in the first place.

Okay, let's think about this. Our Flickr account that we've put the better part of a thousand images on and use dozens of times a month is "linked" to an email account that is considered "inactive" by the company that runs them both. A company that keeps insisting that they're providing one holistic set of services.

Kinda trying to have it both ways, aren't they?

When it comes to billing me and requiring me to use several of their services to get the single service that I actually want, oh, yeah, all these things are "linked."

But when it comes to measuring if the email account is active or if they're going to shut it down and delete all the contents, THEN suddenly the standards change and each service stands on its own.

Slime.

Okay, fine. For now they've got me. I paid my twenty bucks in protection money to keep the Yahoo account active. And then went back and paid another twenty-five to keep the Flickr account going.

And we can safely assume that by this time next year they'll have come up with some new "extra services" that I don't want but have to pay for anyway. And when that time comes I intend to tell them to piss up a rope and host our images on our own damn domains.

Now keep in mind, if they were facing some kind of financial issues and needed to raise the Pro account fees as such I'd be bummed but, hey, I'll pay for something that I use and clearly get value from. Flickr is amazing. It's got a fantastic set of tools and an umatched userbase is and a hell of a bargain, by and large, though there are ertainly other things about them that I've long found kinda hinky. But really, it's the sleazy way that they're adding "extras" that are actually mandatory that I'm opposed to. It's like all those banks with "free" accounts which then, after the number of accounts gets big, start adding more and more minimum balance fees and ATM fees and you-walked-past-our-branch-wearing-a-shirt-we-don't-like fees and so on.

I don't like liars. And I certainly don't want to do business with them.

And, of course, with Yahoo mail having been caught censoring emails about the Occupy Wall Street protests, and their oh, so superlative managment team, it's not like I was exactly enamored of them anyway.

Time to go. 

Good thing we were planning to leave already, huh?

 

Almost every kind of job is going away. Really. I mean it.

A few years back I wrote about how automation, changing demand, and resource depletion were going to result in far fewer jobs relative to level of prosperity. That for a population of constant size to maintain the same degree of material prosperity will, in the not too distant future, require far fewer hours worked. That even the creation of a new multi-billion person middle class only delays this shift. It doesn't prevent it. And I wrote that this automation would encompass not only "brute force" jobs but also white collar skilled work such as skilled cooking, most legal practice, and service jobs.

Well, look at this article in Slate. And the discussion on Slashdot that it has engendered. The links and refs here should give you more if you want to dive that deep.

This is real, folks. It's happening right now. 

Which, among other things, makes even further hash of the bullshit that the executive class-backed media is trying to sell us that anybody who is unemployed somehow deserves it. If for ten adults to live to the limits of a "middle class" income only involves four of them having jobs then no amount of badgering or sermonizing or even retraining will make that unemployment go away. And, as precictably as gravity, that wealth will tend to concentrate in the hands of a subset of that shrinking percentage who have jobs.

Let me go over each of those again in more detail.

- Assume a world where for ten adults to live "well", ten of them must have jobs.

- Change the means of production and other factors such that only four of them need to work to maintain that same degree of prosperity. Not only does this leave the majority of people unemployed, it also, means (under most forms of government) that a minority of the people will be making most of the choices about how that work gets done.

I'm not only talking about the big decisons here. I'm talking about the ten thousand little ones of which each of those big ones is made. If ten of ten people do the cooking then everybody knows how the ingredients get used. If one does the cooking then there will always, ALWAYS, be a power imbalance where that one person can put goodies aside, give them preferentially to their friends, sell them off for bribes, etc. Try to stop this with thousands of descriptive rules and mostly what you'll do is create black markets and end up micromanaging the person doing the work. Which almost never works out well.

- Therefore, when the percentage of people with jobs decreases, power and wealth concentrates.

- And once power and wealth become unevenly distributed, those who have wealth already will push to even further gather that wealth to themselves and others like them.

And if you think that this can be countered by having everything done by consensus or some such then I recommend that you spend some time working in your local food coop and see how that works out for you. And a food coop, mind you, is a case where participants have the option of withdrawing and so there's constant pressure on the group to not get too caught up in bureaucratic idiocies lest everybody walk out.

It is past time that we admit the truth. Now and more so every year those with wealth need to get used to either subsidizing or at least giving access to land and other resources to a population that is on its way to being bigger than that which is "gainfully employed." It's either that or starvation followed by brutal repression and almost certain violent revolution.

Note, please, my second option. When I write "giving access to land…" I'm talking about changing zoning codes to allow any number of things that we now consider squatting. I'm talking about not persecuting those who choose to live disconnected from the grid. I'm talking about making it expensive and difficult for property owners to "warehouse" those properties, either to create scarcity or simply because they can't be bothered to keep it in use. I'm also talking about not treating it as a sin to be short on money. About raising our children to understand that a person can be honorable and disciplined and smart and hard working by nature and still not have any money.

This also means a world where the obligations of citizenship are less frequently denominated in money. When a few percent of the people control just about all the money and where our government "does its business" entirely in money then it's very simple. That three or four percent will own the country. And, sooner or later, will reduce most of that other ninety-something percent to peonage. Slavery.

How do we counter that? We should start by admitting that all of us inherited most of the wealth extant now. And that morality alone should compel us to provide basic means of sustenance for everybody, refusing to do so only in cases of severe scarcity.

What does that mean? Again, let's take that part by part.

1.) We have vast reserves of wealth. If one includes the resources that we keep idle or use profligately, we have almost incomprehensible amounts of wealth.

2.) Even correcting for increasing raw materials scarcities, wealth creation is getting easier and the rate of that increase is accelerating. So our children, if we just sit still, will have even more wealth per citizen than we do.

3.) Most of our wealth was here when we got here. We inherited it, as Elizabeth Warren articulates very well in this video clip.

4.) Therefore, nobody now alive can legitimately claim to have created most of it or even found it.

5.) Therefore, we're all, to some extent, living on the backs of somebody else's labor, innovation, and sacrifice.

6.) Therefore, it is morally unsound for some to hold to themselves the resources that none of us "earned."  (Some of you may disgree with this but I'm not going to get sidetracked right now.)

7.) Therefore we have the means and a moral pressure to let loose at least enough of that wealth from private ownership to ensure subsistence for all.  

8.) Such a transfer is not a favor. It is not charity. It is giving property over to people who already have legitimate claims to it.

9.) It is crucial that our citizens, and in particular our children, be taught to see such systematic and permanent distribution of wealth as just, reasonable, and normal.

Obligatory, several year, separated periods of duty national service would also be a damn good start. Not just as people with guns. But serving in the ways that we pioneered quite well in the thirties and forties. As teachers. Park rangers. Builders. Many, many things.

And yes, this would break most of the unions.

But let's be honest please for a minute. As constituted now most of them are dying and/or zombified already.

All of this comes down to one conclusion. Our world as it is shaped now won't work for the circumstances ahead. Either we change voluntarily now, with minimal disruption, tragedy, and waste or we wait. And get to watch something like the French Revolution get enacted with over five billion likely combatants, modern propaganda techniques, and nuclear weapons.

That's the truth. Period.

 

On screen keyboards should be "plastic" in every sense.

On-screen keyboards should be user-scaleable and user-configurable. Not just in size but in proportions of, say, the space key relative to the shift keys. And even to complete redesign of key position. Not just remapping. Redesign.  I've written about this before. And I don't understand how this isn't obvious to everybody. And how can all these millions be getting spent on tablet designs and even special tablet-optimized OSes and not have this be a gimme?

A virtual keyboard is just a skin. Why aren't they treated like skins? Does anybody have a virtual keyboard that provides a toolkit for creating your own layout? Because I've been looking for years now and I haven't seen one. If I want a keyboard sized for a stylus so most of my screen will be free for text, I should be able to have it. If I want my keyboard to be a double row of teeth in a glowing skull, I should be able to have it. If I want a script to automagically swap my keyboard design out once a week, I should be able to have that, too.

Not to mention that a keyboard, ideally, should be able to be set to slowly but dynamically shift proportions to optimize for usage. If I use the number keys all day long for weeks, then those number keys should become a bigger percentage of total keyboard area the longer I keep doing that. Perhaps even bringing up a dialogue box eventually asking if I want a numerical keypad to come up instead or as well. Swype is a great technology. It helps. But not enough.

The first company to sell such a virtual keyboard will make buckets of money. And everybody will say that they knew all along.

Almost all of this could be done with the tools that came with Hypercard back when Reagan was president and OSes fit on floppies. So why aren't we doing it now?

Toes? You're afraid of toes? Really?

The current kerfuffle about a picture in a J.Crew advertisement has caught my attention. Many years back I spent a rewarding and involving year working in the "creative" department (the folks who did the catalog and most of the ads) and I am proud to remember it now. I am proud of them for having run the image. And I am even prouder of them for having stood by it.

My only question is why hasn't anybody interviewed Rena Delevie about this yet? She used to be the operations manager of J.Crew's creative department, she stayed there for years, worked in other parts of fashion and publishing for more years, and knows plenty about the decisions made about what does and does not run in a catalog or an ad. And she's now doing a documentary about motherhood for which she's been interviewing moms for ages now. Not to mention that she's funny, very smart, clear thinking, and vivacious as all get out. And of course has spent tons of time on the other side of the mic and so knows what an interviewer needs. I'll bet that she gives killer sound bite.

Okay, and yeah, she's really cute.

Anyway, as for this whole gender thing, I dunno. In my experience all those years back J.Crew was amazingly rational and full of smart, capable people who had plenty of funny things to say (Jeff Grewe, I'm thinking of you) about narrow-mindedness but they were actually less indicative of norms in the New York media world than you might think. Or at least among many of the people outside editorial.

Later I had a long-standing gig at ad agency DDB Needham. I'd been working there on and off for around two years. One Monday morning we started talking about men wearing nail polish and I pulled off one of my loafers and showed that my own toenails were painted. (A wonderful turquoise from Bendel's, if I remember correctly). The barrage of homophobic comments and actions that day left me entirely gobsmacked. (For example, "I'm afraid to be alone in a room with you; how do I know that you won't rape me?") Later that week my gig got unexpectedly canceled and I never got work there again. To this day I wonder if part of it was simple shock on their part. After all, I was this perennially sweaty, aggressive, bearded guy who was constantly trying to pick up various cute women and now and again dating them. (Ahh! Stacy Turner!) I guess that when they saw my tiny little bits of color I was messing with their handy-dandy stereotype. Strange. And kind of sad, actually.

A few years after that when my similarly bedecked toes were noticed poolside after an Americares day with the staff of This Old House Magazine I found myself the subject of snotty and nasty remarks ("should we start calling you Rustina?") and general static, including some from my boss. Interestingly, the people who responded negatively then and in the days after were all women. Women who always wore makeup every day and were very gender conventional in their presentation. And again I suspect that part of it was that I was the same guy I had been at DDB, though now with a shaved head and a manic gamer friend in a beat up leather jacket who would drop by and hang. Though sadly, since I was by then the IT Director, I had reluctantly stopped asking the cute women out. ;->

This stuff has always seemed chowderhead to me, at best. What's your deal, folks? Why are you so threatened by this? What makes you so timid that you need to have everybody fit into little labeled boxes? We can do better. In fact, given the force that gender roles exert on things like norms for executive behavior ("the department needs to come across as strong so we're going to refuse to give in on that budget proposal") we need to remember that these forced dichotomies actually impede things like our ability to pass treaties or address international debt. Let alone to accept things like greenroof as serious. Even now I still see residual bits of contempt for those in architecture and engineering who work in "less manly" specialties like landscape design. And a tendency to muddy up otherwise clear proposals for things like swales with ungainly chunks of superfluous jargon and obstructively precise specifications that only serve to increase costs and pressure the implementors into trying to force living things into a degree of linearity that just can't ever work.

I used to have a friend, Janet Pascal, who was prone to saying that in 1600's Europe a gentleman's perfect day was putting on makeup, lace, high heels, and brocade, wading into bloody sword fights on a smoky, chaotic, mud-covered battlefield littered with the bodies of his enemies and loud with the screams of the dying and the horns and drums of the victorious. And then back home, where he would bathe, put on a nice lacy robe and perfume, and write flowery poetry about it all. Of course, it's crucial that one's lace, pen, and robe all have just the right sweet, diaphanous fragility. Shows one's quality, you see.

Yes, let's not forget that all this mahooah from "conservatives" about "how things have always been" is just yet more proof that they are, let's come out and say it, ignorant and foolish. Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, the military genius who whipped the colonial army into shape (sometimes literally) and wrote the field manual that our military used throughout the Revolutionary War and for decades after was, by any rational definition, a man's man. A combat-hardened, tough, strong survivor and commander in a time when even just normal life for a person who traveled the world required considerable hardness. And the men who were his lovers would all have agreed.

Can we please just grow up already, admit that people vary greatly, that gender is a multi-variable and complex thing, and move past the second grader's need to divide the world up into primitive, simplistic, crayon-bordered categories of This or That?

 We can, we must, do better.

 

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin