Reading notes

Thomas Friedman reawakens my on-again, off-again vision-and-hope machinery:

If Bush wants to make anything of his second term, he’ll have to do his own Nixon-to-China turnaround, reframe the debate and recast the priorities of his presidency. … And what should be the centerpiece of a policy of American renewal is blindingly obvious: making a quest for energy independence the moon shot of our generation.

Yes. What have we done instead? Consumed at a record pace, destroyed God’s creation — human and nature — at a record pace. Indebted ourselves at a record pace. Borne false witness, sown strife, division, rancor, violence, death. Queued up deadly consequences for years to come. For what?

What if instead, as Tom imagines —

Imagine — I know it is a stretch — that the president announced tomorrow that he wanted an immediate 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax — the “American Renewal Tax,” to be used to rebuild New Orleans, pay down the deficit, fund tax breaks for Americans to convert their cars to hybrid technology or biofuels, fund a Manhattan Project to develop energy independence, and subsidize mass transit systems for our major cities.

I used to dream like this. I used to expect our elevating people of character to important public offices like president, people of integrity, maturity, wisdom, judgment, and above all, people of vision.

And imagine if he tied this to an appeal to young people to go into science, math and engineering for the great national purpose of making us the greenest nation on the planet, to help liberate us from dependence on the worst regimes in the world for our oil and to help ease the global warming that is heating up the oceans, making our hurricanes more intense and our lowlands more vulnerable. America’s kids are hungry to be challenged for some larger purpose, which has been utterly absent in this presidency. …

A most precious commodity is hope for the future, the knowing we can recover, that we can get better again. If you have this hope, this knowing, even a tiny flickering flame of it, you are a vessel of extreme value. Nurture yourself, protect yourself, keep the pilot light lit.

Heroic deeds of community like evacuating children and the elderly from hospitals, rescuing people stranded on rooftops, distributing food and water to hungry and thirsty people and animals, like first responders of any stripe to an emergency, like doctors and firefighters and utility linemen and carpenters and care workers and volunteers and givers of all kinds — all these kinds of commitment and action are important, crucial, vital.

And alongside — because “where there is no vision, the people perish“ — keeping hope alive, keeping the vision, is important, crucial, vital, too.

I can do that. We can do that.

(Not all of us all the time, of course. I imagine all goes dark with the death of a child in war, or the destruction of a coastal community around you. But at any given moment, surely there’s a critical mass of us who can step up to the plate.)

Man, revisiting Proverbs 29 (the source of “where there is no vision”) is a revealing exercise:

A man who remains stiff-necked after many rebukes
will suddenly be destroyed — without remedy.

When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice;
when the wicked rule, the people groan. …

By justice a king gives a country stability,
but one who is greedy for bribes tears it down. …

The righteous care about justice for the poor,
but the wicked have no such concern. …

If a ruler listens to lies,
all his officials become wicked. …

When the wicked thrive, so does sin,
but the righteous will see their downfall.

A man’s pride brings him low,
but a man of lowly spirit gains honor. …

What jumps out at me is these verses define “righteous” by example, and the examples turn the prevailing [Religious Right] understanding of “Who is righteous? Who is wicked?” upside down.

The righteous detest the dishonest;
the wicked detest the upright.

In one concentrated column Bob Herbert brilliantly captures the dawning realization on ~all of us what some of us have been announcing for years:

Maybe, just maybe, the public is beginning to see through the toxic fog of fantasy, propaganda and deliberate misrepresentation that has been such a hallmark of the George W. Bush administration, which is in danger of being judged by history as one of the worst of all time. …

The body count of Americans killed in Iraq has now passed 1,900, with many more deaths to come. But there’s still no strategy, no plan. The White House hasn’t the slightest clue about what to do. So the dying will continue. …

Even loyal Republicans are beginning to bail out on Mr. Bush’s fiendish willingness to shove the monumental costs of the federal government’s operations — including his war, his tax cuts and his promised reconstruction of the Gulf Coast — onto the unsuspecting backs of generations still to come. …

This is what happens when voters choose a president because he seems like a nice guy, like someone who’d be fun at a barbecue or a ballgame. You’d never use that criterion when choosing a surgeon, or a pilot to fly your family across the country. …

The next time around, voters need to keep in mind that beyond the incessant yammering about left and right, big government and small, Democrats and Republicans, is a more immediate issue, and that’s competence.

No shit. At some point I’ve got to find a more encompassing way to look at this [than I’ve got now]. Because right now I’m stuck at “Nothing’s visible now that wasn’t visible a year ago or even five years ago. What blocked you all from seeing then — when we had the chance in front of us to correct the problem — what you’re now seeing clearly?”

On the one hand, I’m full of expletives. OTOH, I’m glad for seeing, whenever it comes, to whomever it comes. Because it’s in that Aha! moment of seeing the problem that positive change becomes possible.

Meanwhile what I’ve learned about myself is my so-called “forgiving heart” is stone beneath the surface: I have not the slightest idea how I’m going to forgive those who enabled this mess. But I’m going to spend the rest of my life working on it, if that’s how long it takes. Unforgiveness will kill ya. (Where “ya” is plural — community — as well as singular.)

Wow, Ezekiel’s words surrounding his famous “heart of stone, heart of flesh” passage sound to me as applicable to the U.S. today as to ancient Israel when he delivered them. The accusations still fit; does the message of hope still apply?

[GOD speaking thru Ezekiel]: I’m not doing this for you, Israel. I’m doing it for me, to save my character, my holy name, which you’ve blackened in every country where you’ve gone. …

I’ll pour pure water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. …

On the day I scrub you clean from all your filthy living, I’ll also make your cities livable. The ruins will be rebuilt. The neglected land will be worked again, no longer overgrown with weeds and thistles, worthless in the eyes of passersby. People will exclaim, “Why, this weed patch has been turned into a Garden of Eden! And the ruined cities, smashed into oblivion, are now thriving!”

Now, Bob Herbert, I actually would like to drink a beer with. Bob conveys a powerful image:

The country has put its faith in Mr. Bush many times before, and come up empty. It may be cynical, but my guess is that if we believe him again this time, we’re going to end up on our collective keisters, just like Charlie Brown, who could never stop himself from kicking mightily at empty space, which was all that was left each time Lucy snatched the ball away.

Bob assesses of Mr. Bush that in his “Maybe I accept responsibility” and “we must confront poverty with bold action” post-Katrina persona —

He [is] being Lucy again, enticing us with the football. But before we commence kicking the air, consider the facts.

This president has had zero interest in attacking poverty, and the result has been an increase in poverty in the U.S., the richest country in the world, in each of the last four years. Instead of attacking poverty, the Bush administration has attacked the safety net and has stubbornly refused to stop the decline in the value of the minimum wage on his watch.

You can believe that he’s suddenly worried about poor people if you want to. What is more likely is that his reference to racism and poverty was just another opportunistic Karl Rove moment, never to be acted upon.

If polls are a truthful indication, maybe we are indeed more than a nation of gullible bobbleheads: most of us have stopped being fooled by the same trick.

You got no cred left, Lucy. Mars, anyone?

Beyond the probable opportunism, though, it’s true we’ve got a lot of work ahead to detoxify our culture of subsurface racism and overcome our out-of-sight, out-of-mind epidemic of poverty.

Sebastian sums up a list of red-flag warnings about our present U.S. state of preparedness for Big Events:

Most seriously of all, Katrina exposed the government’s incapacity to prepare for emergencies. The failure of response to a predicted flood in New Orleans is only the tip of the iceberg. Name just about any potential disaster, from a bioterrorism attack to avian flu, from an interruption in the flow of Saudi oil to a crash in the dollar. Are the feds prepared? Of course not. They are not even preparing for problems that are 100 percent assured, such as the coming baby bust.

I’ve been thinking lately that all of us welcome — and usually insist on — competence from every professional service provider we pay for and interact with, whether it’s barber or accountant or airplane pilot or heart surgeon.

I don’t willingly put my head under the shears of an incompetent barber any more than I bare my chest to an incompetent heart surgeon. I expect a barber to have spent a long time learning his craft, and a heart surgeon to have spent years perfecting hers.

So why the hell should I tolerate incompetence from my government leaders?

By incompetence I mean services provided by people unqualified for, and untrained in, the areas of expertise for which I’m consulting them. What’s been visible to some all along in the Bush administration’s commitment to cronyism, and what Katrina has now revealed to many more, is that we’re not talking about insufficiently qualified people here; we’re talking people in positions of authority who have no freakin’ clue what they’re doing.

It ought to be an affront to nearly everyone who’s spent years of their lives becoming really good at something — whether blue-collar, white-collar, or no-collar — to have knowledge/training/experience/skill completely dissed like this.

A few hours later: I acclaim the substantial numbers of qualified, committed, and highly clueful people I know are out there, people who get no press but deliver beneficial results day after day. It’s really easy to let highly visible incompetence eclipse a scattered army of hell-and-high-water heroes.

But demoralized competence falls far short of what’s possible. And half-assed leadership that neither knows nor cares about delivering quality results is a demoralizing force par excellence. I notice that Jane Bullock, “a 22-year veteran of FEMA, and former chief of staff to [former FEMA director] James Lee Witt,” says that “even before Hurricane Katrina, employee morale at the agency was at an all-time low.”

In his Monday ComputerWorld column, Frank Hayes addresses one of my longstanding aggravations in the corporate workplace: website designs that are platform- and browser-specific.

This time, in the aftermath of Katrina, the consequences of lazy site design went beyond aggravating perfectionist geeks and telegraphing poor workmanship — in this case a platform-independent, browser-independent design might have saved lives.

I suppose it’s really just a little thing, a footnote in the context of the massive, horrific devastation of Hurricane Katrina. … You have to get far, far down on the list of horrors to come to this one: The Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has set up a Web site for survivors of the disaster to apply for aid, but it works only if they’re using Internet Explorer 6.

But trivial as that sounds, it matters right now — a lot. …

[The World Wide Web is] designed to handle an endless stream of users and handle them efficiently and in large numbers. And it works with old PCs, Macs, Linux machines, handheld computers, cell phones, even video games. It should be a godsend for people struggling to recover from the catastrophe.

So for those who have survived the destruction and are stranded in a community shelter or in the home of a relative, friend or generous stranger, there’s got to be something especially bitter in going to http://disasteraid.fema.gov and reading this message: “In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer Version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register.” …

Ever think that cutting a corner that simplifies development but limits who can use your systems is no big deal? Maybe that’s true if you’re working in a corporate IT shop on a retail Web site or a business-to-business e-commerce application. Then the worst results of your corner-cutting might just be aggravated customers, lost revenue and a reputation for cluelessness.

But for hurricane survivors, the corner-cutting at FEMA is a kick in the throat while they’re down. …

See also earlier ComputerWorld article, To apply for FEMA aid online, Katrina survivors will need IE 6.

I wonder how many in-use computers can even run IE 6? It’s not just Mac and Linux users that are being shut out, it’s people using older PCs running older versions of Windows, too. [And, as Frank hints, handheld computer- and cell phone users were out of luck, too.]

Mark Danner delivers some spectacular wordsmithing:

Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” The answer is clearly no. “We have taken a ball of quicksilver,” says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, “and hit it with a hammer.” …

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in “ridding the world of evil.” We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished — as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show — by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight. …

Power, particularly imperial power, rests not on its use but on its credibility; U.S. power in the Middle East depends not on ships and missiles but on the certainty that the United States is invincible and stands behind its friends. The jihadis used terrorism to create a spectacle that would remove this certainty. …

The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic. …

Lengthy but worthwhile read.

IMO, learning, which is what this piece offers to deliver, is a far smarter use of a U.S. citizen’s energy than slapping a U.S. flag, a “Support the troops” magnet, and an I-am-astonishingly-ignorant “W” sticker on the ol’ SUV. Ignorance ain’t cool, y’all.

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