Fear of Swimming

We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and boy, do we have a lot of that!

I'm afraid of the Navy's proposed Swimmer Interdiction Security System (appropriately, SISS). This was described as follows in the Seattle Times: "The Navy-trained dolphins would find... threatening divers, then make way for the California [!] sea lions to clamp a cuff around the intruder's ankle. A line attached to the cuff would stretch up to a boat on the surface to snag the diver." Not just any sea lions. California sea lions.

It scares me that I'm supposed to be so afraid of threatening divers. Where did these come from all of the sudden? What does it say about a diver, that, even though he possesses a nuclear bomb he can smuggle to within yards of our coasts, he'd rather attach it to one of our ships in the bay than go the extra distance and blow it up on shore? Sounds like a nut-case to me.

As "proof" that SISS works, the Navy notes it has already been used on the East Coast, where "the dolphins and sea lions have responded to some false alarms but haven't faced a human intruder."

My US Navy, creating false alarms in our ports and meeting them, to keep me safe! -- irony of the week.

Attorney General Eric Holder got Americans' panties in knots last week with a quote about fear. A lot of people missed Mr. Holder's point. They heard him say America is a nation of racists. They countered by saying, "Whoa, hey there Butch! We just voted in a black president! That PROVES we aren't racist." To this I say, you all clean out your ears: he didn't say "racists", he said "cowards."

Not hearing the scary word is the proof that it applies. Americans are totally abjectly scared witless at even the suggestion that they are cowards. If Mr. Holder had said, "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of racists," the headline would just have been, "New Attorney General abuses commas in speech." As it happens, what he said was more like, "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as blah blah blah, YOU'RE ALL YELLAH."

Evidence of American cowardice can be found all over the place without specifically looking at race relations, and Eric Holder, who has opposed the legalization of torture for terrorist suspects, has probably thought about a good deal of that evidence.

For example, you could make a big racial deal about the fact that more than 30 out of every 1000 black men in this country are jailed at any moment, compared to 5 out of every 1000 white men. You could talk about how that exposes racial hatreds. But really, how much a country locks people up is, beyond a certain point, just a measure of how cowardly that country is. The United States has gone far beyond reasonable incarceration rates. We currently locked people up at rates comparable to Stalin's and Mao's, so we are that scared. Yes, Stalin was scared mostly of Georgians and Ukrainians, while we're mostly scared of blacks, but the thing that matters, what needs to be dealt with, is, we're scared.

You have to admit it to talk about it. You have to talk about it to get over it. So come on everybody, say it: "I'm afraid of [name your fear]." Fears you could fess up to include: Large black males, small black males, white men with moustaches, old white men, young white men, women who dress like men, Arabs of all ages shapes and sizes, loud gay people, loud people on buses, people who could do your job, people who know more languages than you do, people who could do your job in another language, clowns, pit bulls, Californian naval sea lions.

Going Gaga for Google

The word of the day: commandeer.

Some sentences using the word of the day: The dictator commandeers the airwaves. The pirate commandeers the gold shipment. During the national emergency, the authorities commandeered private buses to aid in evacuation. Admiral James T. Kirk commandeers a self-cloaking Klingon Warship and flies it to the Seventies. The Bush administration’s Department of Justice commandeers Google.

The word of the day tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with Department of Justice’s subpoena of Google records pertaining to pornographic searches. It isn’t about privacy; it’s about piracy. Where’s the emergency that justifies the commandeering of a company’s one service? Where’s the legislation that permits it? Since when did the United States become a dictatorship whose administration can commandeer any business at will?

Where does government commandeering come from? Exactly where I have told you it comes from, in this very column, before. It comes from fear and cowardice. I said as much in a column for October 17, 2002, at which time I said I thought I was onto a grand unifying principle of the workings of the universe, possibly involving vinyl. I didn’t say so at the time, but I had in mind vinyl automobile seating, rather than recording media. But I will not rule out recording media as a factor in the grand unifying principle.

Let me recall the principle. The principle is that reacting from fear, rather than reason, just gets you more stuff to be afraid of. So, generally, whenever the public is afraid of some so-called threat, even a threat that is non-emergent, that’s been around since the beginning of time, and didn’t just land on our doorsteps today, the public can be induced to look the other way when the government orders everybody but its own employees to do something about it, resulting in illegality.

I illustrated the problem with a practice I learned about in my cab-driving days. When the police in Seattle want to break up a domestic violence situation, they often commandeer cabs and order the drivers to kidnap one of the parties. They don’t call it kidnapping, they call it telling the driver to take them where they (the police) say to take them, but you know it’s kidnapping when the party in question says, “I don’t want to go where the police say I should go, I want to go to the Seven-Eleven, and if you don’t take me there I’m jumping out of this cab while it’s moving and getting a lawyer and suing you from here to Jankistan.”

So far as I know this practice is still going on. No legislature ever authorized it. No cab driver has ever been deputized to do the police’s business and take people places against their will. The police never offer to even pay for the commandeering of the cab drivers’ services, the kidnap-ees are supposed to pay to be kidnapped! The practice isn’t enforced with court orders; it’s enforced with physical intimidation. Or, as in my case, with actual police violence, following a “failure of communication.”

Which is what we have in this instance, with Google. The government demands they turn over their records of searches. Now, farmers farm dirt. Bus companies bus people and luggage. Mercenaries deal in hurt and death, anything but mercy. Search engines store and move information. And here it comes to pass that the Department of Justice demands that they turn such information over, at their own cost and at their own liability, without one stitch of legislation authorizing the commandeering of any company for such purposes. Communism!

Presented with demands from a government that has all the biggest guns and the world’s biggest army in history, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google caved and preferred to risk litigation from the ACLU rather than from the United States. Why not? Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL all wimped out.

But Google didn’t. Way to go, Google!

Bitter Sleeping Pill

Well, here we are. It's the Dawn of a New Day, America Has Spoken, the fat lady has sung, and birds everywhere have flown south for four years.

The good news: expect a resurgence of Fifties-ish-style paranoia to feed a renaissance of the paranoia-genre of horror-scifi movies. With modern cgi technology and the experience of this year's election under our collective-consciousness belt, we can look forward to some terrific movies. Titles like the Attack of the Evangelical Masters, or Night of the Living Neocons, or Invasion of the Constitution Snatchers spring to mind, but I'm sure talented writers could sublimate them way up better than I could. Sublimation was never my forte. Vomit is my forte.

So tell me, do I sound bitter? Good, because I'd hate to sound like I was living a lie or in denial or anything like that. No, unlike 51% of whatever percent of America bothered to vote, I live in the world of Reality, not the world of Bush-Think. So if I'm bitter I'm going to know it, and I'm not going to care if I show it.

I don't mind the country's election choice nearly so much as the transparent mind meltingly bombastic canard of Cheney et al to the effect that George W. Bush now has a significant mandate. He does not. That the numbers of voters that put Bush over the top was a record does not erase the fact that the numbers that voted for Kerry was a record also. For an incumbent running for a second term, 3% is a slim margin. That was no landslide and I would put far more faith in the Bush Administration if it didn't consist of such cowards in the face of the truth that they couldn't even admit it and proceed from there.

If the administration can't rule without propagating fantasy after fantasy, then all of America will get into the act.

Do I sound bitter? Let's see, in news from Texas we've already returned to the days of after-school specials. The decision by voters all across America to affirm the lie that denying marriage to gays is justified has already begun to be followed by orders to require textbooks rewritten to reflect the majority opinion. As if elections determined matters of fact.

The precedent could lead to interesting new forms of oppression. For instance we can expect Texas to hold a state-wide initiative soon to decide Yes On Creationism, bypassing that whole free scientific discussion crap. Then when it passes, they'll announce that the majority has called it true so it's true. Schoolbooks will be rewritten, fools will gloat over the fall of the wise, and it won't be overturned because Bush will have, by then, installed additional fools in the Supreme Court.

In October 2001 I expressed the fear that the terrorists may win, because they might have succeeded in bombing us back to the Fifties. Well, it's happened. "What, Me Bitter?"

Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Sure, a man who's already prosecuted the first totally unprovoked war in American history based on fabrications has his finger on the red button. Sure, an arrogant blasphemer who thinks he's God's all-time favorite president has the power to destroy our environment for the sake of his corporate buddies, and he has the character and temperament to tell us it's for our own good and the Greater Glory of God. Sure, a "servant of the people" that thinks Habeas Corpus, the right to a swift and speedy trial, and the right to be free of unwarranted searches are all obsolete concepts has now got almost complete control of government. But you have to get over it, right?

So in the interest of getting over it, I propose a further slide into irrationality and denial and fantasy. Lets all say black is white and white is black and have us a four-year carnival of lunacy.

The terrorists are on the run. Osama is scared of the terrible visage of George W. Bush, Man of God and Macho Ace National Guard Pilot. If the terrorists do by chance succeed in striking America again, it will have been Bill Clinton's fault. Gays will never endanger our marriages again. Speaking out against a government of liars is an attack on America.

Sweet dreams, one and all.