The recent (and utterly unsurprising) revelation that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not inform Congress of certain covert programs is, or should be, an edifying lesson on the perils of unaccountable executive power.
It must be understood and acknowledged that the very existence of the CIA is a threat to democratic principles. It is the only department of the federal bureaucracy whose operations and budget are not public.
The CIA is, by definition, a criminal international enterprise. CIA agents go to other countries and break the laws of those countries in the interest of soliciting information, or undermining or promoting governments, that will enhance America's position in the world.
This is what spy agencies do, and assuming we all agree on the need for such an agency, the issue then becomes ensuring that our spies are letting the peoples' representatives know what's being done in the peoples' name and with the peoples' money.
What if the CIA didn't need to tell anyone what it was doing? Well, it might try to kill Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. And Fidel Castro might summon Soviet nuclear protection because of these very real threats. And the whole world might be pushed to the precipice of extinction without ANYBODY knowing, quite frankly, what the fuck was going on. Oh wait, that DID happen.
So there, in a nutshell, is why we can't have secret American armies running around the world doing God knows what in our name with our guns and our money.
Enter Dick Cheney who, after 9/11, was recognized as some sort of legitimate arbiter of the sweeping historical forces of the 21st century. This claim may have been burnished, in my opinion, had Cheney ever given an inkling of a shadow of a clue that he had any idea who Osama bin Laden even was before 9/11, but let's just assume that Cheney knew what he was doing.
The story, as being reported now, has is that Cheney ordered the CIA not to inform Congress about a certain program. Three problems.
Problem the first: Cheney was not the president. The Vice-President has constitutional authority to do absolutely nothing other than break tie votes in the Senate. But let's just assume that Bush somehow transferred his authority to Cheney.
Problem the second: Even the president can't break the law. So even if Cheney was acting on Bush's authority, not even the President's authority transcends the law, which explicitly requires Congress to be informed of all covert programs. But let's just assume it wasn't a "real" program and therefore required no notification.
Problem the third: The claim is that the program in question was an effort to capture or assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders, even in countries friendly to America. I have no moral or legal objection to that in principle; if an American had a clean shot at bin Laden in Paris, I wouldn't think twice, and neither should anyone else.
But here's the problem with assuming that that's all this program was: We're already doing that. That's what the war on terror is. So the idea that this aim to capture and kill was a secret does not pass the smell test or any other olfactory standards.
So what was it? I don't know. But I know that if only Cheney knew about it, then it was a) utterly illegal and b) probably pretty bad.
There are things that we know about the Bush / Cheney years. We know about the invidious and insidious arrogance. How Bush walked as if he were on horseback. How Cheney smirked away virtue in between claims of patriotism, and came as close as I'd ever care to see to restoring monarchy on this continent.
We know (sort of) about 9/11, about Iraq, about Katrina. But what this latest story alerts us to is how much we don't know. We don't know how much we don't know, to paraphrase Don Juan Rumsfeld.
"Blowback" is the term used in academic circles. This is when secret actions lead to public retaliations. When American hostages were taken in Iran in 1979 and charged as spies, most Americans felt victims of irrational hatred.
But this was blowback. Americans did not know that "their" government had overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953. "Our" government, of course, was in no rush to admit this after it had fallen prey to the "blowback" in Iran, thereby perpetuating the idea that the action of the enemy was unprovoked and undertaken purely out of hatred for freedom and Jesus and kittens.
The next time something terrible happens to our country, will we KNOW that it was not the response to some horribly misguided and short-sighted skulduggery carried our by "our" government without "us" ever knowing about it? No, we won't.
When most Americans are asked about the founding fathers, they ask, "what does that mean?" Among the nerdy minority who can speak to the question, most mention Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. And all are due praise, but John Adams was the closest the American Revolution could ever come to being distilled in a single person.
Adams, a Massachusetts man, served as the defense for the British soldiers charged with the "Boston Massacre". He got them acquited by placing facts and reason in their rightful place above passion and prejudice and, in doing so, lent inestimable credit and esteem to the Revolution, even if it did not yet exist.
At the Continental Congress, Adams more than anyone else pressed for a Continental Army and a Declaration of Independence. Massachusetts was the only state bleeding or paying for the nascent Revolution, so Adams had a certain self-interest in pressing these points.
But HOW did he press them? By proposing that Virginians lead the Army (Washington) and write the Declaration (Jefferson). Adams totally disarmed and won over those who assumed that he was like any other great man, after nothing other than personal and local aggrandizement.
Adams spent the Revolution in Europe, pressing the French and Dutch governments for financial and military assistance. He did this for years as a renegade, a terrorist, utterly exposed to the whims of British spies and assassins. And ultimately, French ships and Dutch loans broke the back of the British. Because of John Adams.
When Adams returned home, he "retired" and wrote the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which today is the oldest continual law on Earth. It was the first Constitution to charge the government with "providing for the education" of ALL people, so as to ensure an educated population, which Adams called the "safest guard against tyranny".
John Adams was elected Vice-President under George Washington. In those days, the Vice-President was the candidate who came in second in the election. Adams finished behind Washington only after Washington's doppelganger, Alexander Hamilton, bribed several electors to inflate the margins.
Adams was elected president in 1796. As president his ultimate accomplishment was avoiding war with Napoleon while Congress and the media were pressing for such a course. Adams was the first man in the history of history to leave office willingly and peacefully in favor of a political enemy and on schedule in 1801, when he left the White House to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a great mind, but Adams was a great man. Adams never went into debt. He never refused assignments. He built his own barns. He harvested his own crops. Jefferson never worked a day in his life. He owned hundreds of slaves and was coddled to the point where he literally didn't even dress himself. His slaves dressed him. And, presumably, they undressed him before he impregnated them.
Because of Jefferson's spoiled dilettante existence, his great mind was addled and compromised by his lack of real-world experience.
Jefferson, the owner and rapist of dozens of human beings, fancied himself more "revolutionary" than Adams, unreservedly supported the French Revolution, and thrilled in the torrent of blood the way well-off leftists are perpetually prone to.
Adams, nearly alone among great thinkers of his day, predicted dictatorship as the inevitable consequence of the French Revolution.
Adams had a perfect mix of faith and reason, of romance and reality. He was a lover of words, of reading, of writing. He spoke and read fluently in Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. He wrote millions of words with his own hand long before white-out, never mind computers. Since all men speak best of and for themselves, let me close with two of my favorite quotes from Mr. Adams:
"I damn nobody. I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel."
"Do justice. Love mercy. That is enough."
John Adams
That is greatness.
The most charitable thing I can say about George W. Bush is that I find him absolutely fascinating. I have honestly sharpened my analytical prowess by studying this man, who is infinitely more complicated and interesting than Bill Clinton, for example.
The most fascinating thing about this man is his belief. When Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", he was full of shit. HE knew he was full of shit. And WE knew he was full of shit. It's just that none of us realized there was a stain to prove what we all knew.
In contrast, when George W. Bush said, in his first post-presidency speech last month, "My legacy is that I kept America safe", he also was full of shit. WE knew he was full of shit. The facts indicated the prodigious extent of his immersion in shit. But, unlike Clinton, Bush sincerely believed HE was telling the truth.
Let's dissect Bush's appraisal of his own legacy. "I kept America safe". Firstly we must stipulate that he means "safe from terrorist attack".
We should take note that Bush does not reference his management of the economy or diplomacy or war or disaster management or social welfare. No, he has a legacy of ashes in all of those fields, so he goes straight for 9/11.
Would any other president characterize their legacy in this way? Why are Franklin Pierce and William McKinley and Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush not credited with "keeping America safe"? After all, there were no 9/11's during their tenures.
They are not praised for preventing 9/11's even though no 9/11's occurred. George W. Bush, in contrast, aims to be praised for preventing a 9/11 even though he is the only president who was in office when the actual 9/11 happened.
The worst thing to happen to this country in a long time happened with this man in charge. That doesn't mean it was his fault. But he WAS in charge. And it happened. And this man wilfully chooses as the highlight of his presidency the fact that the worst shit ever only happened ONCE when he was in charge, as opposed to several times.
Think about that. The man who oversaw this tragedy uses that tragedy as evidence not of unavoidable tragedy, but of his manifest competence. I wonder, did the mayor of Nagasaki run for re-election in 1946 with the slogan "I prevented the 2nd atomic bombing of our city"? I doubt it.
Again, he CHOOSES this association. This man did not mention al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden in public before 9/11, which should serve as indication of the priority this threat held in his mind. Even if we assume that 9/11 would have happened regardless, we can be sure that Mr. Bush did nothing to mitigate the attack.
His response to the attack was to start two wars. Neither war has been won. Both have lasted longer than any war in our history other than Vietnam. They have cost 5000 Americans killed, 50000 wounded, and the loss of Afghans and Iraqi civilians.....priceless.
But Mr. Bush would have us believe that the greatest thing he ever did was preventing the 2nd 9/11. Being asked to prove a negative is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it's a dead end in terms of ethics or morals or practicality.
What if Bill Clinton had said, in his farewell address, "My greatest legacy is that I prevented thousands of Americans from being massacred by Arab terrorists in our country"? He would have been ridiculed. Not because it wasn't true, but because it would have been rightly castigated as a cheap stunt, a rhetorical wormhole.
When Bush does it, it flies in certain circles. Despite the fact that it HAPPENED on his watch. So there were no massacres under Clinton, there was one massacre under Bush, and Bush is the one that prevented massacres. Interesting.
A computer might look at that equation and conclude that Bush CAUSED the massacre. I absolutely do not claim that sentiment, but it serves as a reminder of how ridiculous is W's claim. If he claims to have prevented the 2nd 9/11, that means Bill Clinton gets credit for preventing the 1st. Or that W. gets blame for allowing it.
The danger of Bush and Cheney's pontification of their "legacy" is 3-fold: they are constructing a scenario whereby: 1) 9/11 could not have been prevented 2) there was not another massacre because of their policies such as invading Iraq and torturing detainees 3) if there is another massacre it will be because Barack Obama did not invade Iran or torture detainees
So we see how this rhetorical wormhole can pave the way for all sorts of damage to our psyche and our judgement. Bush's appraisal of his legacy is like Lee Harvey Oswald begging us to remember him for the fact that he didn't shoot the Vice-President as well.
When I gave the eulogy at my grandmother's funeral, I urged everyone to remember her as she lived and as she would want to be remembered, rather than to associate her with her most vulnerable or decrepit state and thereby associate her entire life with a negative portent. Let's do the same for Mike.
Michael Jackson's death has had a pathological effect on me. I mean pathological in terms of the Greek word "pathos", meaning "A quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow."
Perhaps all that needs to be said is that within ten minutes of the announcement, I got calls from friends from Maine to California. It meant something; we all knew that somehow. But it wasn't as if we'd listened to his music in the last decade. But that didn't matter. Because when he died, we remembered...
I am a 30 year old American, and I know no one of my generation who did not think that Michael Jackson was the coolest person alive when he or she was 5 years old. For my generation, Michael Jackson is a pillar of our common infrastructure. There is not a single person in my generation that does not know Thriller.
Think about that. An entire generation, tens of millions of people, who will never meet, but who all know the words to the songs on the same album. I honestly don't think it's hyperbolic to ask, "what parallel exists in our culture other than the Bible?" If there is a single cultural artifact that the most Americans have in their homes, it is probably the New Testament. And second is Thriller.
The man brought people together. Before he became a joke, he was globalization personalized. He compressed races and languages and nations into a rhythm that transcended everything else. And he did all of this before the internet. Or cable.
By the time this man was 10 years old, he was understood to be an eerily transcendent talent. When he put out Thriller at age 25, it became the best-selling album of all time. Every single song became a number 1 single. He won 7 Grammies for a single album. He reinvented dance. He reinvented bass-lines. He reinvented music videos, though we all know it would be more accurate to just say that he invented them.
He did all these things before any other person had done them, and he did them as a black man. Michael Jackson played a role that traditional white liberals are slow or loathe to acknowledge due to their investment in the narrative of victimization and the inherent corruption of wealth.
Michael Jackson set a precedent that was followed by Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, and Barack Obama. It used to be that phenomenally talented black folks would aspire for a decent salary, but actual control or ownership of the means of production was a fantasy. Micheal Jackson didn't settle for proceeds from ticket sales; he took charge and reaped his just rewards, even if he subsequently spent it all on feather boas and painkillers.
Because of what Michael Jackson did, Michael Jordan bought the team he played for. And Jay-Z bought the record label he rapped for. And Barack Obama leads the country he believed in.
It may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but people need to sing and dance together before they trust each other. And Michael Jackson created a world where EVERYBODY had something in common. And that something was Michael Jackson.
The only musical artists who can compare to Michael Jackson in terms of impact on society are Elvis Presley (with the huge asterisk that comes from simply singing black music with a white face), Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Michael's reach may not have been as deep as Dylan's, but it was far broader than all others on this list. Michael Jackson sold tickets to people who didn't speak a word of English. Millions of tickets.
He did all these things despite the fact that he was in the end, if not for the entire second half of his life, a self-loathing freak if not a serial child rapist. But do any of us imagine that he was not abused as a child? And do any of us deny that 99 out of every 100 people that ever met Michael Jackson didn't care about anything other than what they could get from him?
All the pathos aside, in a strictly clinical sense, Michael Jackson's voice has been heard by more people that any other voice that has ever been spoken. He sold 750 million albums to 3 generations of people on every in every civilized corner of the Earth. We praise thugs and tyrants that have achieved infinitely less.
The most tragic sins a country commits are those that involve failures of both one's self-interest and one's love for his fellow children of God. In other words, things that are both stupid and selfish. Some things are just stupid, and some things are just selfish, but when they combine....
With the issue of health care, the self-interest or economic component and the moral component point in the same direction. A tax-funded mandatory health plan for all Americans would give everybody health care and lower the cost per person. Period. Yet and still, it is not done.
Right now, the United States pays by far more per person for health care than any other nation. So, we must have the best quality care, right? No, we have 1/6 of our people uninsured and our nation ranks 38th in the world in terms of quality of care. We rank behind Morocco.
So we pay the highest bill in the world to give 5/6 of our people the 38th best health care on Earth. Stupid? Clearly. Selfish? Yes.
So our first conclusion must be that the system needs radical change, unless we think the above numbers are acceptable, which hardly comports with a chest-thumping or even a humble iteration of pride in this country.
Let's think about car insurance. All drivers (essentially every adult in the nation) are required by law to buy insurance. Whenever any American citizen is inside an automobile, he or she is in a vehicle insured against accidents. Should our very bodies not enjoy the same luxury? You'll fix my oil pump but not my broken leg?
Personally, I have problems with a government mandate to purchase anything from a for-profit company, but that caveat aside, let's consider what this requirement results in.
The result of every driver being insured can be interpreted in two ways. The first way, which is both stupid and selfish, is to say, "why should I, a great driver, be paying for all these idiots who are crashing into each other?" This is a very valid point, and should be recognized as such. But it it also very short sighted.
Taking this approach is akin to urging President Obama to somehow intervene in Iran; it might make us feel righteous, but it accomplishes nothing in the short term and guarantees instability in the long term.
The other way to interpret the auto-insurance mandate is to say, "an insurance pool this large creates an economy of scale which makes the product cheaper for everyone. And even if I never crash into anyone, I know that all my fellow citizens have the security of insurance so that if one of them crashes into ME, I won't be screwed."
And maybe, just maybe, I take pride and joy in the fact that my fellow citizens are protected.
So, what if we applied this logic to health care? We apply it to "defense". Rhode Island has never been invaded by North Korea, but Rhode Islanders pay their part to arm and defend South Korea so as to deter North Korea. Quite a stretch. But we do it.
We apply this logic to schools. I have no children, but I pay my share to fund my neighborhood schools. We apply this logic to fire departments. My house has never caught on fire. Yet and still, I pay my share.
So why don't we apply this logic to health care? Because it will cost too much, we are told. As noted above, we already pay per person more than any other country. So, there's that. Also, aren't some thing worth a trillion dollars?
The Iraq War has cost a trilli so far. In microeconomics, "opportunity cost" represents the loss of the next best thing. So, if I spend 30 minutes blogging, the opportunity cost of that would be the 30 minutes that I could have spent riding my bike or doing something else.
So what if we hadn't invaded Iraq? What would have been the "next best thing"? What was the opportunity cost? Health care for every American?
I'm no communist. I harbor more revulsion for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao than bin Laden and Darth Vader combined times twenty. But I am something of a National Socialist, or a Nazi, if you want to be technical.
The premise of National Socialism was that one's community was important enough to override economic dogma and adopt socialism under certain specific conditions. And before Hitler morphed into the devil, he used this ideology to provide quite a bit for his nation.
I think my nation deserves socialism in certain specific islands. If we adopt National Socialism when we want to pay to kill Iraqis, what does it say about our nation if we refuse to do the same in the interest of curing Americans? Selfish. And Stupid.
First of all, doesn't Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini look like a cross between Sean Connery and someone from Lord of the Rings?
Secondly, quick explanation on the name. Ayatollah is a title, like doctor or bishop. Ruhollah is his first name. Khomeini is his last name, which also tells us where he was born. Khomeini means "from Khomein". The current Supreme Leader of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, since the revolution there have been two supreme leaders, Khomeini (ho-MA-nee) and now Khamenei (ha-men-AY).
The post-election protests in Iran have been fascinating to follow on so many levels. It is the rarest of things: it actually deserves the hype. Even if the protests end today, the implications from what we've seen so far are revolutionary in the truest nature of the word.
The last time massive street protests and emerging technological innovations merged to undermine an autocratic government was 30 years ago in...Iran.
Iran is a fascinating place. The only continuous civilizations which can compare in terms of longevity are China, India, and Egypt. Iranian civilization has been in place for about 3,000 years, and has been Muslim for roughly half that time.
But Iran (Persia is a way cooler and more accurate name) was the first land converted to Islam that was neither ethnically Arab nor Arabic speaking (Persian and Farsi, respectively). Iran has always been distinct from the Arab world to its West the Indian subcontinent to its East.
So Persia is its own distinct place. And 30 years ago it instituted its own distinct form of government. In Farsi it is called the "Vilayet-e Faqih" which means something like the "governance of the prudent". What this means in practice is that religious figures have veto power over every decision the elected government makes. It also has veto power over who many run for office.
So this whole debate over who really won the election is a bit beside the point; since the ayatollahs cleared every candidate, there were, by definition, no real reform candidates running. What has happened here is that the people seem to have leaped far beyond this minutiae and called into question the very legitimacy of the governmental structure itself.
The last time this happened in Iran was 30 years ago. Back then, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and STAYED on the streets, even after many hundreds of them were shot dead. And ultimately, that was all it took. When crowds refuse to disperse, the number of soldiers willing to fire upon them suffers from the law of diminishing returns.
But there was a piece of cutting edge technology that helped the protestors in 1979. Audio cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini encouraging the revolution. Small, cheap, easy, portable, these tapes played a huge role in coordinating and motivating people.
Audio tapes now, of course, are fantastically obsolete, but the Persian public is not. The government has shut down all foreign sources of news, but cell phones, digital cameras, and the internet are creating one of the most democratic spectacles the world has ever witnessed, whether it understands this or not.
When else in history has an expulsion of foreign journalists made a negligible impact on a government's ability to handle a rebellion from a PR standpoint? The people are not only putting their lives on the line, they are taking ownership of their own story, which has never really been possible until now.
There is now no filter between the Persian people and the world. Not even CNN, which has been reduced, or should I say elevated, to simply reading facebook postings from Persia as a way of reporting the news. This is a remarkably democratic moment.
There is danger, of couse, and I personally doubt that any serious change will result from this. And lest we hope for a revolution, let us remember what happened 30 years ago.
Just as in the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution was won by moderates who were subsequently murdered and replaced by thugs. Successful revolutions must succeed without brutalizing its participants.
Whether or not that happens, I do know this: the ayatollahs will think twice before firing into these crowds. In any previous time, they would not. Now, they must. Because the people have the ability to tell their story to the world. And that should make us all feel freer and safer than people like us have ever been.
There's a lot we can learn about genius from the pyramids. All societies have applied the pyramid concept in one form or another. The United States has been disproportionately successful relative to other nations because it has applied its concept of the pyramid more effectively and broadly than have its competitors. That edge is eroding quickly.
Most elites throughout history have conceived of themselves as being the capstone of society's pyramid, with the vast majority of masonry beneath them, the "commoners" or the "plebs", or however else one might have it, who serve no function other than to support the capstone.
Central to this belief, which dominated the entire world until 1776 and the huge majority of it until 2000 or so, was the surety that no commoner could ascend to the capstone. We can see this conviction manifested to various degrees from the divine right of kings to the underfunding of urban schools.
The flaw in this system is that all progress, all innovation, all civilization must necessarily emanate from the capstone, and the capstone alone. 99% of the pyramid was excluded from any meaningful station. From time to time, people born into the capstone applied their genius effectively, but more often than not the capstone was content with simply being on top. The geniuses and entrepreneurs and prophets from the "lower" 99% were never allowed to contribute to the capstone.
Then America came along and implemented the (at first very narrowly applied) proposition that the capstone should be constructed organically from the best elements of the lower 99%; that there was no "natural" capstone in and of itself. As America progressively overcame exclusionary bigotries, it drew upon ever-larger reservoirs of potential and genius from the lower 99%. And American power expanded accordingly.
Other societies have now caught on, of course, and the American premise has been adopted worldwide. This is good news. But now we must focus on the corollary of the pyramid scheme; if the base is not continually nurtured, the capstone will draw on a shrinking base of talent and will eventually wither into a state of stasis and paranoia.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a phrase I've always enjoyed, coined by Rene Descartes. This quote led to the naming of the Descartes mountains on the moon, where Apollo 16 landed in 1972. The concept of the shoulders of giants is always at play; our task as a society is to keep creating giants whose shoulders will support out progeny.
For example, any scientist who makes a breakthrough in physics, for example, is standing on the shoulders of giants because he or she is simply adding a capstone to the pyramid of knowledge constructed by his or her predecessors. The reason science has advanced so rapidly recently is that the knowledge of the giants has been available to an enormous pool of commoners, a pool whose size alone will guarantee the emergence of more giants.
For the pyramid to continue to aspire to new heights, the manna of every new capstone must trickle down to the entire base, so that the largest pool possible sends its giants up the pyramid to add yet another level to the capstone. But what happens when the discoveries made at the capstone, the new knowledge, does not trickle down to the base of the pyramid? This is what is happening in America today.
In America today, a large portion of the base of the pyramid does not receive the knowledge trickling from the top. If a third of our children do not receive an adequate education, how many giants have we chopped off at the knees?
America has been the world's richest nation since 1880, and it will continue to be so until at least 2080. But what is happening to the American pyramid does not bode well. For wealth alone does not accurately portray a society's health. Distribution of that wealth is far more telling.
This is not a Marxist argument; it is an architectural one. If the base of the pyramid is cracking, what does it matter how smooth or how high the capstone is? For any society to succeed in the long run, it must have a secure pyramid, with a capstone accessible to all and a healthy base. Our country today and in the foreseeable future resembles less the pyramids than it does the Washington monument.
The recent (and utterly unsurprising) revelation that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not inform Congress of certain covert programs is, or should be, an edifying lesson on the perils of unaccountable executive power.
