The Temptation of St. Anthony

"Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."

Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up.... "Listen--" he said so calmly, "I have read the editorials against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karebekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal--the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

-- from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

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President Obama at the memorial in Newtown

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When love beckons

Twenty-five years ago on a warm Labor Day night, I stopped midway through my run across campus and said--out loud, but to no one other than myself--"I'm gay."

It was an announcement that had been working its way to the surface for a long time... the final statement of something that in the beginning was not even expressed in words. I had known I was different from the other boys since at least the seventh grade. By the time I was eighteen, I was beginning to awkwardly reach out physically. But until I was able to break the silence, there was an unyielding wall between my inner universe and the one I shared with everyone else.

I had no idea that night of the changes that would come; I didn't sense how dramatically the trajectory of my life had shifted. But in that moment there was a perceptible change in my experience of the world. The lights had just been turned on in a darkened room.

Within a month I would be the secretary for GLAS, Stanford's student group for gays and lesbians. In two months, emboldened by my first relationship with another man, I wrote my parents a coming out letter. And a mere seven years later, though decades ahead of the societal curve, Tommy and I were married in San Francisco in front of friends and family including my parents, sister, grandmother, aunt, and cousins.

During my first decade of being out I created a new identity for myself: distinct from the adolescent who didn't quite fit in, different from the young man who'd been teased as "one of the girls" during his first year at Stanford. I was out at work, with friends both straight and gay, in my volunteer work, in my relationships, and with my family. While no one who's lived with a secret for twenty years suddenly becomes an open book, my life was finally integrated. I got to be the same person on the outside as I had always been on the inside.

There are things within each of us that we may or may not share with others; in that, at least, we have a choice. And every choice we make nudges us down certain paths while steepening others. Sometimes we confidently make our way down a long road and end up lost, as uncertain as when we'd begun. None of this is too say that I regret coming out; that was inevitable. It's more a recognition that the future, more likely than not, will not match what we've imagined. It hasn't done so for me. The new life I created in the years after coming out is now frayed and tattered; a lot of dreams remain unfulfilled. On the other hand, I never expected a sitting president to bring tears to my eyes by speaking out for gay rights at his party's national convention.

IN THE DAYS that followed my momentous run across campus, I began coming out to my closest friends. One of them, Robin, wrote me and included a quote from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, which I then included in my letter to my parents:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest
branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them
in their clinging to the earth.

I don't think I've really understood the full meaning of that until today.

RIP, Donna Summer

Who knows why certain songs set up home within us? Who knows why anything, or anyone, does?

This is one of those songs that is magic for me, one that is going to have to be played at some point during my wake. I remember listening to this song one perfect day after a long and eventful canoe trip, sitting next to someone I loved as the sun shone overhead. I've long imagined what it would have been like to have been on the dance floor when Donna's disco version of "Macarthur Park" was first played.


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Depression and Junior Seau

Bonnie Bernstein has a thoughtful post out on Junior Seau and depression:

Depression is a disease. One frequently accompanied by feelings of shame, particularly among men, because society still struggles to differentiate between sadness and a condition that often requires medication to treat effectively. In severe cases, thought processes are so distorted, the only thing in focus is despair. It is incomprehensible that there’s anything positive in life to latch onto or anyone who cares enough to listen and help. Meld the ball and chain of depression with a prideful man like Seau, and it’s no wonder he didn’t confide in friends or loved ones about his inner demons.

It's not too late

I read Kathy Martin's story yesterday, and I have to say... it inspired me:

Life can bestow unexpected gifts, and sometime in her late 40s, Martin, a real estate agent living on Long Island, a busy working mother who had never been in a track meet, discovered a glorious secret hidden away in her body. Not only was she a good runner, she was also an outstanding one. In fact, she was one of the most remarkable female distance runners in the world.

This discovery of greatness in her legs came too late for the kind of dreams a younger woman might have: intercollegiate championships, Olympic glory, being the absolute fastest of the fast. As decades pass, maximum heart rate slows, aerobic capacity wanes, muscle mass tends to dwindle.

But Martin has been redefining what is possible for an older body, setting a string of formidable national and world records.

Before I rode in the week long AIDS/LifeCycle five years ago, I'd hardly spent anytime on a bike since high school. And after only putting in the bare minimum amount of training, I wasn't too sure midway through day 2 (my first 100+ mile ride) if I was going to survive the experience. But I got a second wind in the afternoon; by day 5, I was flying. I thought to myself, "This would have been the sport I'd have excelled at had I thought to try it when I was younger."

And now Kathy Martin comes along to remind me that it's not too late.

Making sense of it all

I was pretty down throughout the second half of 2011, and I spent a lot of time beating myself up about decisions I've made over the past ten to fifteen years. Life often felt like I was looking in the rear view mirror and seeing one wrong turn after another...

I took a walk today, and it occurred to me that the vast majority of the bad decisions I've made in my life (with respect, at least, to relationships) were made in an environment that for a long time was my favorite place to be. What a paradox. I wondered what it was that I was looking for at the time, considering that I so clearly now feel like so many things I did were mistakes.

It makes me think that we can't really have it all. We all want many things; some of them require choices that make other things less attainable. No revelation there... but it does make it a bit easier to forgive myself now.

And I also realize that there isn't necessarily any logic to the past: my past behavior, my life as seen in that rear view mirror. Some of it just happened; some of the decisions were made in the heat of the moment. It's unchangeable yet malleable: what I couldn't understand or accept last fall can be reconciled in the bright sunshine of a February afternoon.

One man's experience: living with HIV for 30 years

In today's New York Times, Mark Trautwein shares his experience of being infected with HIV for the last 30 years. From the early days of uncertainty, fear, and death and the years of juggling complicated pill regimens, Trautwein has learned some lessons about life:

The dead don’t have problems, so I was grateful for mine. I was alive and my deathly companion less insistent. AIDS and I have been together for almost 30 years now. My relationship with AIDS is one of my most enduring ones, and has both enriched and beggared my life. It robbed me of friends and loved ones, and with them memories we would have had and repositories of my own history. It ended a career I loved. It cost me a marriage. My intimacy with health care in America has been costly and exhausting. I know these are small prices to pay for life.

What I’ve gained is precious. Above all, the constant companionship of plague has taught me that life is about living, not cheating death. Fighting disease is required and struggling with life inevitable. But I accept the outcomes now, whatever they are. My disease does not make me special, nor does my survival make me courageous.

On that day I walked from the hospital knowing I had “it,” I was given a great gift: the realization that we all dangle from that most delicate of threads and that the only way to live a life is to love it.

I haven’t died on schedule, and I’ve been learning not to live life on one either

Violence and political change

I finished all 483 pages of Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order today. What a great book! I highly recommend it if you're interested in human history and political, social, and economic development.

Given the scope of the book and the many millenia it spans, I don't feel up to the task of summarizing it right now. So I'll just share this quote on the role of violence in political change that I found interesting:

The ability of societies to innovate institutionally thus depends on whether they can neutralize existing political stakeholders holding vetoes over reform....

The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve, but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion that the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. We already noted ... that economic motives like the desire to put in place a large irrigation system were highly implausible causes of pristine state formation. Incessant tribal warfare or fear of conquest by better-organized groups is, by contrast, a very understandable reason why free and proud tribesmen might agree to live in a centralized state.

Fukuyama cites the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. as a conflict that "could not be solved under the Constitution and necessitated a war that claimed more than six hundred thousand American lives." And as a consequence, the power of the federal government expanded significantly.

He also makes the claim that accountability in political systems is not sufficient to support good governance, arguing that the emergence of modern liberal democracies requires "a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that can defend its interests." While the rarity of that condition explains why the English parliamentary case is unique rather than typical, the increasingly free flow of ideas since the Industrial Revolution has allowed other nations to more readily borrow and adapt such institutions to their own needs. Still, the success of externally imposed nation building is limited by the degree to which a society can be mobilized on its own behalf...

Quote for the day

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Thoughts on the world: 9/20/2001

I wrote this nine days after 9/11. Between the death of Osama bin Laden and the mood I've been in the past couple of weeks, re-posting it now seems appropriate.

“New” and “changed” are words getting a lot of use these days, as in “we’re living in a new world,” “the U.S. is facing a new kind of enemy,” and “life will forever be changed.” Tonight, though, I’m reminded that, in so many ways, life—and our world—is neither new nor changed.

I read an article this evening about a Neanderthal jawbone that had been recently discovered in France. The jawbone was missing almost all of its teeth and showed considerable bone damage. Because of the lack of teeth, the scientists who found it believe that this individual would have been almost totally unable to chew food and would have had great difficulty surviving independently. Further analysis showed that the jawbone’s owner had lived for at least six months while in this condition, and they concluded that the bone provides the earliest evidence of the human capacity for caring for others—that someone, or some group, was providing this injured or diseased individual with soft food. Perhaps fruit, perhaps food that been chopped or cooked, but likely more food than the individual could have gathered or prepared on his or her own.

Whether or not their theory about this nearly 200,000 year old jawbone is correct, somewhere along the way humans did, in fact, start caring for each other. Perhaps we are touched so much by the efforts of others in New York City, and the willingness of people around the world to give to the relief effort, because caring for one another has such ancient roots. We’ve grown accustomed to rushing through our busy lives and being disappointed by the perceived slights of those around us. And yet when we need each other the most, we’re there; we come through for each other. This past week, whether we looked to our families that we were born with, or the families that we’ve made, we found a depth of love and caring that too often we had forgotten was there. And when we watched those at the epicenter of September 11’s attack, we’re overwhelmed by the selflessness and heroism of those sifting through the rubble in search of survivors—men and women unwilling to abandon those who might still be alive, unwilling to leave behind the bodies of those already dead.

This week is not the first time this summer that I’ve thought about our connection with the past. In July I drove up the coast with a man named Eduardo. We ended up following the Russian River inland, and, stopping in Monte Rio, I was struck by the fact that with all of the technology that we’ve developed and the amusements we’ve built, people still go and simply sit in the water. Maybe the swimmers and bathers were trying to escape from the traffic and computers and phones of daily life. Or maybe when you really get down to it there’s nothing better than just soaking up the sun while staying cool in a river’s slow current. But either way, here they were: young and old; men and women; straight and gay. People enjoying themselves in the most basic way that you could imagine—sitting in the water.

How can we even begin to imagine how many people have done this through the centuries, the millennia? In a way it makes me laugh at the elaborate efforts that we go through to entertain ourselves. But it also comforts me, because it is a tie to our past, to our origins.

Continuity is a great source of security. When I first came out of the closet and began going to gay bars back in 1987, there were several individuals that quickly became fixtures in my world. The first few times I ventured out, I went alone, and it was sometimes scary to walk into that new environment. Somehow it was comforting seeing familiar faces, even when they belonged to people that I never met. There was a beautiful young man named Ronno who entered a wet jockey shorts contest on a Thursday night at the End Up. For two or three years afterward I saw him around town; those being the early years of the AIDS epidemic, seeing the same faces through the months was particularly reassuring. I remember thinking to myself, “As long as Ronno is around, things are okay. Life will be all right.”

As the years passed, I stopped seeing him around San Francisco. Life, somehow, continued. By then I had established a large circle of gay friends, and that familiar but unacquainted face in the crowd was no longer needed for my comfort. Even today, though, I catch myself making eye contact across a dance floor, or on the street, with someone whom I have never met. Sometimes we smile with some strange, shared recognition that we inhabit the same world; it isn’t necessary to connect beyond that.

Connecting without connecting…: another aspect of living in a herd. We’ve lived in groups for as long as we’ve been around as a species; no doubt it is the natural condition for us humans. I suspect that nothing really “new” has happened to us for quite a long time. So what is it for us to be living in a “new” or “changed” world?

When I look around me—and inside myself—the only thing I find that has really changed is… me. This week I feel a little older. I feel a little more for those around me, whether they are next door or across the world. And I feel much more of the desire to give something back to the world. That feeling extends beyond sending money to aid the survivors of those who have fallen; somehow that’s an inadequate response to the magnitude of this. I want to be a better person, mostly in small ways. I’ve found myself waving at firemen and policemen. I’m friendlier with the people who share the routine of my life, whether they are co-workers or salespeople or men and women on the street. My grand plans for my sabbatical have been tempered; maybe I can spend some of that time giving rather than just enjoying. Maybe the opportunity it provides is a chance to share and to learn rather than to just be free from work.

Strangely enough, tonight I found myself feeling happier. It’s been a long road this past year as I’ve learned to be single again; learned to live on my own and for myself, and I know I’m happier for having been successful at that. But I’m also happier this week because I feel more alive. I feel more connected with my friends and family and the others around me. I sense the timelessness of human existence that Walt Whitman spoke of when he asked, “What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” I am reminded of the beauty of people simply living their lives; how the same things—good food, falling in love, the rhythm of music—continue to thrill us. I’m trying to be better and to figure out what I should learn from September 11.

And I know that if I saw Ronno on the street tomorrow, I would stop him and say, “hello.”

My life on Venus

When I was in elementary school we had to read a story about a bunch of kids living in a colony on a terraformed Venus. The process of altering the climate still had a long way to go, and the weather was nonstop, driving rain. Once every few years the scientists would adjust the conditions so that the rain would dry up for a day.

All but one of the children in the story had been born on Venus; the one exception was a girl who had arrived from Earth and who had experienced the warmth of sunshine on her face.

For some reason that I've long since forgotten, the native Venusians locked the Earth girl in a closet on the day when the rain stopped. They ventured out and enjoyed an afternoon in the open more than they could possibly have imagined. But when the sun set and the rain began again, they remembered the girl and, of course, felt guilty for their actions.

I didn't think about this story much until I moved to Portland. Now I sympathize with that Earth girl a lot. Especially when driving in the rain.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I did run across one thing that gave me a moment of delight today. A scientist has applied techniques developed for genetic analysis to identify patterns in human languages, and he made this fascinating claim:

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, ... has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: a language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Biology notes

The amazing, tool-making crows:

New Caledonian crows are renowned for their toolmaking skills.

In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees.

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AND on the human sexuality front, research has determined that men think women are most attractive during ovulation... unless the man passing judgment is already in a relationship.

Meanwhile, women who are dating men perceived to be less attractive than them tend to flirt more around the time they're ovulating, even if they have no intentions on walking out on their mate.

More interesting insights into the mysteries of human romance and reproduction here.

Not a very good trade-off

From the New York Times:

Writing in the January issue of The Journal of Gerontology B, the authors conclude that people live longer not because they are less likely to get sick, but because they survive longer with disease.

As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.

For Sally

I haven't been blogging much these past few months. A couple of weeks ago a friend at work said something about it to me and shared that her friend Sally had also asked about it. I said that I thought it had something to do with my giving up on people (the masses in general, not anyone who reads this, of course :-). When she shared that with Sally, Sally sent back the message that I should write about that.

I actually have a folder full of links to articles and stories that I've thought I'd like to write about. And while it would be nice to say that the reason I'm not writing is that I'm too busy, the reality is that I just haven't had much of an inclination to do so. There's some truth in that offhand remark I made when asked why I wasn't blogging. That feeling of resignation is also behind my loss of interest in politics. It's really all so disgusting, the tenor of things... the utter inanity of political debate in our country these days. We're faced with difficult, complex challenges and what do we hear about? Whether this candidate is a witch, which party is ahead in fundraising, and... I'm drawing a blank. Jesuchristo, I can't even remember what was said in the days running up to the election less than a month ago. It was all so pointless and yet so many people in America just seemed to accept and echo it as if it was what really mattered.

In August I read Nixonland, Rick Perlstein's 900 page book about Nixon's political career, the era he lived in, and the environment he left us with. Somehow the book both reassured me and depressed me at the same time. On the one hand, knowing that politics in America today wasn't that different from what it was back then made me feel better. It meant that I wasn't living in the "worst of times" or in the "last days." If it's been like this for awhile, then maybe it can't be that bad? Maybe we'll still muddle through as we always have?

But at the same time I found myself blanketed with something like despair. Because if this really is how it is--if those in power really have no interest in improving our lot and instead it's all just about the fight for dominance and power and money--then, well, that's pretty bleak. There is this froth on top of Washington which is what you first see: the conversation is about climate change or healthcare or whatever. But underneath is something bitter, and like the proverbial iceberg, most of what's actually there is hidden. I send in my contribution for $25 while untold millions are flowing in from corporations. The money arrived in suitcases in Nixon's day... now the Supreme Court has put its stamp of approval on the whole endeavour. Give any amount and do so anonymously. How can that be healthy for democracy?

Democracy, heavy sigh. I'm tired of hearing about how people have the right to carry a gun into a bar. I'm tired of hearing that the Founding Fathers were somehow so akin to Robert (the Rules of Order guy) that they'd be in favor of tying the hands of government with respect to adapting to the times. I'm sickened by state politicians suing over healthcare reform while their constituents go without coverage. I don't want to tune into Sarah Palin's Alaska or hear that there must be a secret plot because Bristol is still on Dancing with the Stars. I look from screen to screen at the gym and marvel at an industry that gives us endless episodes of overweight people eating fried food at different restaurants and stupid people pretending to act naturally while they're on camera 24x7. The debate over deficit reduction? Good luck! Both sides are hostages to their "beliefs," and the public has no hunger for spending cuts. And I'm simply worn out when I think about the environmental changes today's kids will see because we were too slow to wake up and act. A scientific consensus about global warming? Who cares. We know more than ever about the changes that are likely to come and we're burning more coal than ever, even exporting it to China now. Money triumphs principles, apparently always.

Okay, I guess that's enough of that rant.

I had a dream the other night. I saw a group of gay men off in the distance. There was this strange sense that I ought to go join them. But I didn't; I realized that, like with my writing, I really didn't have much of an inclination to go there, to "be in the group," to belong. Wherever I'm going, right now I'm turned inward. I don't know how to solve the world's problems; I'm focused on my own. There are still those people who I reach out to and want to be there for, but overall I feel chastened. Disappointed in myself and for the mistakes I've made over the past couple of decades. Pessimistic about the ability of people anywhere to make a difference.

And yet, the other night, I finally watched Gandhi. I was in high school when it came out and not very sociopolitically aware. It held zero interest for me at the time (I was rooting for Tootsie on Oscar night). But there in his story, at least, seems to be some evidence that even in the midst of millions of people, individuals can make a difference. Though as I write this, I think it likely that the biggest impact I saw depicted in the movie was not the British Empire leaving India but the reaction of the Hindi man being told by Gandhi that he could find his way out of hell by adopting a Muslim orphan to make amends for the one he'd murdered.

To change something you have to be able to touch it, in one way or another. I'll think about that for awhile.

Where America and the Muslim world meet

I just read Ross Douthat's thoughtful column about two different conceptions of what it means to be an American. It struck a chord, particularly as I'm halfway through (and thoroughly engrossed in) Richard Perlstein's Nixonland, a nearly 900 page tome that traces the widening fissure between these two Americas during the Nixon years.

Douthat uses this lens to look at the current controversy over the proposed mosque that would be located near the World Trade Center site:

The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.

But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

The same was true in religion. The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul, eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.

I agreed over the weekend with President Obama's comments about the mosque and its planners' right to build it. The president, however, is also pursuing a course with respect to a mostly Muslim part of the world which I don't support: a secret, shadow offensive against America's enemies--as he defines them--that relies on drones and cruise missiles rather than American boots on the ground. This approach can't be a long term path to U.S. security: it can only recruit the next generation of those willing to attack us.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties....

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

And the more I read about the insanity of the Vietnam war in Nixonland, the more I see parallels in Afghanistan: billions of dollars spent on an objective made nearly impossible by the fact that it's an American, and not Afghani, one.

ONE OF THE MOST INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS I've heard recently about America's security in this post-911 world is this Talk of the Nation interview with former CIA official and historian Graham Fuller. From his book A World Without Islam, which argues that our relationship with the Middle East wouldn't be significantly different in the absence of Islam:

Washington — perhaps as many global powers have done in the past — uses what I might call the "immaculate conception" theory of crises abroad. That is, we believe we are essentially out there, just minding our own business, trying to help make the world right, only to be endlessly faced with a series of spontaneous, nasty challenges from abroad to which we must react. There is not the slightest consideration that perhaps US policies themselves may have at least contributed to a series of unfolding events. This presents a huge paradox: how can America on the one hand pride itself on being the world’s sole global superpower, with over seven hundred military bases abroad and the Pentagon’s huge global footprint, and yet, on the other hand, be oblivious to and unacknowledging of the magnitude of its own role — for better or for worse — as the dominant force charting the course of world events? This Alice-in-Wonderland delusion affects not just policy makers, but even the glut of think tanks that abound in Washington. In what may otherwise often be intelligent analysis of a foreign situation, the focus of each study is invariably the other country, the other culture, the negative intentions of other players; the impact of US actions and perceptions are quite absent from the equation. It is hard to point to serious analysis from mainstream publications or think tanks that address the role of the United States itself in helping create current problems or crises, through policies of omission or commission. We’re not even talking about blame here; we’re addressing the logical and self-evident fact that the actions of the world’s sole global superpower have huge consequences in the unfolding of international politics. They require examination.

There is a further irony here: How can a nation like the US, which expresses such powerful outpourings of patriotism and ubiquitous unfurling of the flag on all occasions, seem quite obtuse to the existence of nationalism and patriotism in other countries? Washington never fared very well in the Cold War in understanding the motives and emotions of the nonaligned world; it dismissed or even suppressed inconvenient local nationalist aspirations, thereby ending up pushing a large grouping of countries toward greater sympathy with the Soviet Union. This was a kind of strategic blindness that viewed other nations’ interests and preferences as something that needed to be hemmed in, or isolated. We have been obtuse toward nationalism and identity issues in the Middle East and have lumped it all into the basket of "Islam."

And this:

History did not begin with 9/11. Our dealings with the Middle East go back a long way. The attack on 9/11 was a violent, extremist, and outrageous act, but it was also almost a culmination of a preceding chain of events over many years. If we choose to see history beginning at 9/11 — whereby we suddenly become the sole justifiably aggrieved party, now authorized to bring vigilante justice to the world — then we will continue to do what we have been doing all along, with disastrous consequences evident to all.

Those words--history did not begin with 9/11--stuck in my head even before I began reading Nixonland. I'm a child of the 60s. My parents were hippies. I think I have a decent grasp of history. But over the last few days I've started to flesh out in my mind events that were remarkably hazy for all of their proximity to my childhood. The Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and the '68 Democratic convention, for example, aren't just signposts anymore. And I have a clearer picture now of why issues like gun rights carry so much significance for conservatives.

I've long been familiar with the events of the 60s, yet I think I operated in a common illusion, one that most people experience. It's similar to the one that Fuller describes when he speaks of his "immaculate conception" theory of how governments see the world.

Deep down we all sort of imagine that history began with us.

The new normal... and finding happiness in it

The New York Times has more on the "new normal" (see also this other post which quotes Bill Gross):

But as expectations for the recovery diminish daily and joblessness shows no sign of easing — as the jobs report on Friday showed — a different view is taking hold. And with it, comes implications for policymaking.

The “new normal,” as it has come to be called on Wall Street, academia and CNBC, envisions an economy in which growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, while the government is forced to intervene ever more forcefully in a struggling private sector. Stocks and bonds yield paltry returns, with better opportunities available for investors overseas.

If that sounds like the last three years, it should. Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, who run the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco, and coined the phrase in this context, think the new normal has already begun and will last at least another three to five years.

And not surprisingly (or surprisingly, depending on your level of cynicism), Americans are adapting and re-discovering that what they spend their money on may bring them more happiness than how much of it they spend:

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

If consumers end up sticking with their newfound spending habits, some tactics that retailers and marketers began deploying during the recession could become lasting business strategies. Among those strategies are proffering merchandise that makes being at home more entertaining and trying to make consumers feel special by giving them access to exclusive events and more personal customer service.

While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.

This was a interesting article, well worth a read.

Website of the day

Here's a long list of the cognitive biases to which we're all susceptible. Yeesh.

Quote of the day

On the subject of Pfizer's Boehringer's "female Viagra" and the human sex drive:

It seems simple enough to me in a free society. If it works, whoever wants to use it should be able to. You want more sex drive? Have at it. Personally, I'm somewhat relieved by the abatement of mine with age. The time I spent!

-- Andrew Sullivan

I hear ya, man.

The world that we live in

In a column about the oil spill in the Gulf, David Brooks describes the world we now live in:

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand....

In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.

Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”

Unfortunately, the latest information reported in the New York Times about the behavior of employees at BP in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster show just how fallible human beings are... and why vigorous oversight is so important as the world becomes increasingly complex.

Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

As The Killers sing, "This is the world we live in, maybe we'll make it through."

(Video link)