Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
You have to wonder how they can build any kind of economy. I suppose the 
U.S. could pay them to stop growing poppies, but that's not a real 
solution. They need industry, agricultural diversity, and infrastructure 
to support an evolving business environment. 
  

    

I don't underestimate the trouble in surviving the
modern world without schools, roads and plumbing.
There's a little cash in drugs, banditry, and prostitution,
but running arms requires too much literacy.

There are big patches of Africa that turned their backs on modernity
and walked right off the map, but they never made it
back to any tribal life of village farming.  They marched
straight into the bony arms of AIDS, voodoo militias and blood
diamonds.

You can get into your Wooden Ships on the Water
and try to sail back to the Garden, but I don't know
where the hell you're supposed to land.
  

    
For my global warming piece in the Viridian issue of Whole Earth 
Magazine, I interviewed Jim White, director of Environmental Sciences at 
the University of Colorado at Boulder. I think this exchange is relevant 
to our discussion:

>>>
Jon Lebkowsky: One point that John Firor makes is that with six billion 
people on earth, if everyone had the same standard of living that we 
[Americans] have, there's no way that we could sustain.

James White: Yes, that's very clear.  I teach a course on energy. That's 
just one of the resources that you'd need, and if you do the 
calculations, we use thirty times the energy the average African does. 
We use ten to fifteen times the average energy that people do in general 
developing countries overall. We're 250 million, they're 6 billion 
people. You bring them all up to our standard of living, and the 
multiplication factor for energy, for aluminum, tin, lead, all the other 
resources we need is just enormous.  It's probably on the order of a 
hundred, or something like that - I've never done the calculation. But 
there's no way that I could see that we could support six billion 
consumers of the American type, or even six billion consumers of the 
Western European type, and they use half the resources we do.
<<<
  

    

A standard of living like that of Western Europe is a little rich, don't you
think?  I wonder at what point the birth rate drops to something managable
due to an increase in the standard of living.

I have to take issue with the idea that these suicidal acts are an attempt
to cover up a bankrupt ideology.  That doesn't make sense, and it seems that
this illusion is as dangerous as the back-to-the-land illusion of dropouts
and downshifters.  A revolutionary suicide can galvanize a population -
these acts do not seem like acts of hopelessness and desperation.

Also, the spectre of Western culpability is present in each of those
examples, be it diamond mines, AIDS, or tribal war.  It's there to greet you
as you step off the plane regardless of your destination.  What I find
disheartening is that admission of this culpability is seen as an admission
of weakness when it could be used to initiate dialogue.
  

    




 A standard of living like that of Western Europe is a little rich, don't
you
 think?  I wonder at what point the birth rate drops to something managable
 due to an increase in the standard of living.

*That's a good question.  Demographics are where it's at.

 I have to take issue with the idea that these suicidal acts are an attempt
 to cover up a bankrupt ideology.  That doesn't make sense, and it seems
that
 this illusion is as dangerous as the back-to-the-land illusion of dropouts
 and downshifters.  A revolutionary suicide can galvanize a population -
 these acts do not seem like acts of hopelessness and desperation.

*Well, I'd worry a lot *more* about Al Qaeda if they were Islamic
zealots who were turning Afghanistan into an industrial power.
It's true that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church" and
all that, but nobody is ever gonna be more selflessly dedicated
and suicidal than a Japanese kamikaze pilot, and what did it get them?

*The world's top revolutionary suicides aren't Islamic, they're
from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a crowd that is rather
little known despite many bloody offenses.  The "population" can
get "galvanized" again and again and again, but unless the society
gets some kind of coherent grip on the means of production and
information, it's just an empty spectacle of human sacrifice.

 Also, the spectre of Western culpability is present in each of those
 examples, be it diamond mines, AIDS, or tribal war.  It's there to greet
you
 as you step off the plane regardless of your destination.

*I agree, but "spectres of culpability" can float right through keyholes;
they can go anywhere and cover any issue.  The influence of the West
has been planetary for decades  now.  When a Coca Cola bottler
is the President of Mexico, it's a little late to go chase off the
imperialistas with a righteous machete.  It's like fussing about the spectre
of ancient Greek culpability -- I mean, surely all our
social, intellectual and political difficulties can be traced straight back
to Aristotle and Plato, somehow...  Shouldn't we take action?  Maybe
we should car-bomb Athens!

 What I find
 disheartening is that admission of this culpability is seen as an admission
 of weakness when it could be used to initiate dialogue.

*That's when the West is at its most overwhelming... when it
shows up with the NGO guys to "initiate" that "dialogue."  If the West just
blitzkrieged in to shovel all the locals into death camps, they'd be
rigidly resisted, but the soft cultural power has turned out to be
by far the better strategy.

*By the time the tribal guy get it about the structure of a rational
political  argument, it's all over.  He can debate the paradigm all he
likes, but
his kids will graduate from Columbia U.

*It turns out that those half-Westernized diaspora guys,
the sons of globalization, are the ones with all the money and all
the get-up and go.  We're not fighting the benighted traditionalists
in bin Laden's home town; we're fighting wannabe-fundamentalists,
a cult of offshore daredevil adventurers, like the Flying Tigers
or the Lafayette Escadrille.
  

    
What looked like the Third World War has devolved into a relatively 
boring media circus, with soldiers in the first ring, politicians in the 
second, and administrative bureaucrats getting set to wander into the 
third, calculators and palm pilots in hand.
  

    

I'm concerned about this teenaged suicide pilot in Florida.  What are we 
to make of this?  Is a trend?  The Trenchcoat Mafia in aviator jackets?
  

    
Salon has a piece about Afghans who are starving:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2002/01/07/bonavash/index.html

U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York that the WFP has received
reports of starvation in remote villages. "The agencies have managed to
get record amounts of food into Afghanistan but then getting it from
depots to remote villages where it is most needed has not been easy," he
said.

"With different warlords controlling different roads, there are some
areas where we just can't go," said WFP spokeswoman Abby Spring. "We
have the food, the cash, the trucks, but what we don't have is the
security which makes it difficult, if not imposible, to provide food to
some communities."
  

    
I forgot to put those last two paragraphs in quotes.
  

    

Samuel Mockbee died last week.  Have you written anything on this guy yet,
Bruce.  What do you think about his architecture?  Here's a Salon article on
the man: http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2001/08/09/mockbee/
  

    


  Well, I liked Mockbee's line about architects having
to be "more than house pets for the rich."  Still,
for every one of those cool recycled bungalows he made
out of used whatchamacallits, the American South
bought about a hundred thousand house trailers.

They're interesting structures in the way of
poverty housing, those house trailers.  I have
no doubt that Huckleberry Finn's alcoholic dad
would be living in one nowadays.

It's kind of the central theme of industrialism -- Bauhaus
guys come up with really cool ideological themes for civilized living,
but by the time they implement one, there are
vast Las Vegas suburbs covered with tickytacky.
  

    



 "With different warlords controlling different roads, there are some
 areas where we just can't go," said WFP spokeswoman Abby Spring. "We
 have the food, the cash, the trucks, but what we don't have is the
 security which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to provide food to
 some communities."

*That's a weird way to frame the problem.  As if "security"
were something you could get off a truck. The road bandits and
the starving people are in a symbiotic relationship, whose very
function is to to keep civilization at bay.

*Some vulnerable grunt with boots and a bayonet has to impose civil order by
wearily chasing wily guerrillas from pillar to post.  You can't just get a
pint of security FedExed in.  Once it becomes a people's war, you'll shoot
them
at night as you feed them by day.

* "Security" implies a pacification program, with road patrols,
secured villages, land mines, ambushes, the Soviet occupation
nine yards...  A lot of guys in zinc coffins, and most likely,
eventual defeat.   The US military doesn't want to face that scenario,
any more than they wanted to install MPs in Baghdad.

*It really is starting to look like Gulf War Two.  The cannon
fodder troops were mashed flat in short order, while the malefactors
live to chuckle on.  Who's taking bets that Omar and Bin Laden will
be lively threats long after Bush leaves office?

* Bin Laden has got the initiative again, it's his move.  He's had a run
of bad luck lately:  he could have massacred the Indian Parliament,
assassinated Tommy Franks in his helicopter, and blown up an American
civilian aircraft with a shoebomb -- but all three schemes crapped out.  If
the odds had favored him, we'd be reeling right now.

*Still, terrorist attacks suffer even more SNAFUs than conventional military
operations, so that's a constraint he'll have to live and die with.

*I'd be betting a new videotape.  Quite likely he's already mailed it.
  

    

Word.  That sounds like a networking problem.  I wonder how long it took to
find all of the car windows to make this civic center
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues01/oct01/images/mockbee_mas
ons_bend_jpg.html
  

    
I'm not betting on bin Laden's persistence. On the latest video, he 
looked like death warmed over. But terrorists as a species are no more 
likely to disappear than serial killers.
  

    

Slippage!  My 63 is about Mockbee and recycling!  I've been arguing with
everyone regardign the futility of wasting time thinking about who conducted
these actions and instead concentrating on who stands to benefit from them,
ultimately.  A few years ago I was entertaining the fantasy of the military
as some sort of vestigial limb that society was just about ready to shed.
Gosh, what a pipe dream that seems now.

So, I think that maybe concentrating on who stands to benefit from the
current situation as it has devolved is important.  Does having a Bin Ladin
Boogeyman on the loose give our government an excuse to militarize the
world?
  

    

  I think bin Laden looked like death warmed over because
he'd just spent a month fasting for Ramadan.

   Terrorism tends to be counterproductive, so its "ultimate
beneficiaries" are often the victims.  Bin Laden's a terrorist,
but I doubt that's his first choice as a historical actor;
given his druthers, he'd rather be Genghis Khan.  Back
in the good old days, Luddites had real military advantages;
you could ride out of the hills in a horde, overrun
those pampered merchants in the cities and just stack up
their heads in heaps.
  

    
 The degree to which people "fast" for Ramadan varies.  They don't eat
or drink between like 5am and 5pm, but they oftentimes feast once the
sun goes down.  Of course, I doubt UBL was in able to do much feasting
hiding in the caves of Tora Bora or wherever the hell he was when he
made the tape.
  

    

I think Bin Laden has been wounded and was concealing the wound (his
left arm doesn't appear in the last video).
  

    

Yes.  We think so, too.
  

    
Isn't he supposed to be on kidney dialysis?
  

    
Whatever the case, his health wasn't the best.

Could he possibly become a martyr now? It seems his popular following's 
evaporating.
  

    
What evidence do you see for that, Jon?
  

    

People said Saddam Hussein's following was evaporating too.
He's also commonly said to be sick.  Maybe both things are
true, but that doesn't mean that Saddam is over.

Bin Laden's t-shirt trade would boom immediately,
if he could pull off another slaughter of Americans to rival
September 11.  He needs a tactical victory followed by a taunting,
eloquent video.   He needs another burst of revolutionary charisma,
he needs a triumphant return from Elba.  With those, he'd be big again
overnight.   Probably bigger than before, thanks to the psychological
recoil.

Unless he's deathly sick or the cops are really good, time may be on bin
Laden's side.  His being alive and un-findable is an unscratchable itch.
The British want Tony to go home and fix the railroads.  George W. has given
us the same partial, haunted victory that his Dad did.

The Mujihadeen evaporated because they realized it makes no sense to be
daisy-cuttered when you don't get to shoot any Yankees.   The Iraqis did it
too.  Lawrence of Arabia's following would have done the same thing.  They
discouraged fast, but they could encourage fast, too.

They were hoping to be ritually dragging dead Americans behind the jeeps,
like they did in Somalia.  They never had the opportunity for  Soviet-Afghan
style ambushes, because the US didn't offer it to them.  That doesn't mean
they've forgotten how to do it.

   I would very much like to think that bin Laden really was deathly sick,
or running critically low on charisma, and he decided to blow it all in a
suicide-by-cop.   He'd been at it for a decade or more, so maybe he got
tired, bored or desperate.  But after our best shot at him, bin Laden is
alive, and so is most of his inner cadre.  Even Omar is still on the loose.
The downside of the American war by proxy is that the proxies are buffers
for both sides.  Omar is being protected by people who shaved their beards,
burned their intelligence files and are waiting for the Yankees to get bored
and leave.

    They still have fangs.  The Moodge have still got enough moxie to
brazenly assault the Indian Parliament, and bring the world closer to a
nuclear war than it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.    It's hard to
imagine what Pakistan would look like after an Indo-Pak nuclear war, but
those hardscrabble radioactive wastelands would likely look pretty familiar,
even comforting, to illiterate Afghan bandits on horseback.

        So if bin Laden could do what the net.war guys call "sustainable
pulsing," just create some blood-red, destabilizing major headlines once a
year or so, for the next ten years, then he could still win the War on
Terror.    We would likely never admit the defeat, but his victory condition
is pretty clear.  It's an unlivable, genocidal Israel, a suppurating,
Luddite Islam pockmarked with huge bombs but devoid of CNN and McDonald's,
and enough oil and dope money to keep the mullahs fed.
  

    
Another alternative: assume bin Laden isn't the conceptual victor... what 
does the world look like in that case?
  

    

Isn't the longstanding problem going to be the asymmetry between the
effort it takes to cause terrorism and the effort it takes to prevent it?

Other people besides bin Laden are going to have that insight.