College Diplomas and Jobs: A Relatively Quick Comment

On a college diploma being needed for most jobs in the US:

      1. I'll recycle the old joke that most jobs can be performed by anyone with a decent high school education — which is why so many American firms now require an MBA.

      2. Back in the 1970s or so, the Sears company — "Sears Roebuck" after Roebuck was purged — required for its management training program "A Bachelors Degree." Never mind from where, never mind in what, never mind your grades or if you had learned anything: A. Bachelor's. Degree. And they had a point. That bachelor's degree requirement was a filter — and a lawful one — cutting down the number of applicants and certifying that for three or four or five years (or more) applicants could mostly stay out of jail, stay out of trouble, follow instructions, and work their way through various complex educational bureaucracies. And applicants would have picked up some skills useful for working at Sears, paid for by the public and not Sears.

Being an effective citizen requires an education. Working as an effective employee mostly involves training, and the immediate question is who will pay for that training. It's highly efficient to have firms training people for the actual jobs they're going to do; it is inefficient to offer generalized training in school. US firms, however, are more than happy to socialize the costs of basic training: their taxes will pretty much remain the same whoever pays to train potential employees.

Back when public schools in the American sense of "public school" were a controversial American idea, Thomas Jefferson thought they'd be good for commerce and all, but that was to boot. The main reason the American Republic (starting back home in Virginia) should have public schools was to preserve the American Republic. Like, if the people are to rule — though who "the people" would be got messy, and bloody — if the people were to rule, the people would need education. On at least one occasion (Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782), Jefferson would have history central to a basic education.

Shopping: Regulated Monopolies vs. Competition (19 Jan. 2013)

           I frequently ask the question, "Do you enjoy shopping?"

          The occasion for me here is the discussion of 6 December 2012 on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR on the "Future of Landline Telephones" and the allusion made a couple of times to the regulated monopoly of Bell Telephone of much of the 20th century vs. our current system of competition. The general tone was that competition in a free market — my formulations here — was on the whole better than the old days of the Ma Bell monopoly. I'll go along with that, but only as a proposition to be examined and debated, not just unconsciously accepted.

           Competition is better than monopoly, right? Well, yeah — but.


           But first let's get some other issues out of the way.

    I dearly, truly, perversely love my iPhone, but I must admit it's not very good as, well, a telephone. Certainly as a phone it's inferior to the old Ma Bell land lands.

                  * My iPhone will probably be useless when my part of California gets hit by a quake and fires and a tsunami and major power failures; copper-wire, landline technology will be more reliable.

                  * I brushed up my "Radio Alphabet" for talking on my iPhone because I damn well needed it when dealing with sales agents and others who just couldn't understand the letters I was giving them. (Right, before I forget: everyone else in the world with a cell phone: learn already the goddamn radio/NATO/"International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet" so we'll all have it down long before cell phone voice quality gets to where such primitive work-arounds are unnecessary.)

          So there are some additional reasons why I kind of miss the old regulated monopoly of Ma Bell, reasons beyond its being a regulated monopoly.

          The main reason I miss it, however (sort of), and what's relevant here, is that there was no choice. You had your phone installed, and that was that.

         Now there are obvious disadvantages to that system, many of them summed up in the old joke where the phone company guy — or Ernestine, Lily Tomlin's power-crazed telephone operator — told you that if you didn't like Ma Bell's service you could "take your business to another phone company."

        There's much to be said for being able to take your business to another phone company.

        On the other hand, an underappreciated hand, there was much to be said for having reliable basic phone service and not being forced to shop around initially, and then not being bugged by people offering better deals.

        If you enjoy shopping, great: shop around for phone deals. If you don't enjoy shopping, your shopping time is unpaid labor that has pretty much zero social value.

        Similarly, though to a less extreme degree, with airlines, banking, mortgages, and, most crucially as a political issue, health insurance.

        A couple days back I made contact with my former travel agent to find out about again using her services. I'd just planned my second complex trip in a row, and I'd had it. With all those choices, I still couldn't find non-Baroque routes from here to there, and the changing prices were really, really annoying me. I don't do business with people who pressure me into making quick decisions, and it seemed like all the sites really pressed for MAKE THAT RESERVATION NOW!!! (before we raise the price on you … again).

        There is something to be said for regulated airline routes and a whole lot to be said for returning US banking — emphatically including mortgage banking — to something closer to its utterly boring, over-regulated past of ca. 1956.

        I do like having a bank card, but I only need one: a reliable one; one where people aren't being gouged and a debt-adverse person like me won't be nicked and dimed with service charges.

        If you like shopping, fine: shop for credit cards. Shop around for frequent-flyer miles. Get coupons.

        I don't like shopping. For me shopping is unpaid, unpleasant labor.

        And I really, really don't believe that all those deals will save me money in the long run: the more clever business model gets me spending more money in the long run, and probably quite soon.

       Well, and finally (and yet again), I'm far from the only person who doesn't like high-stakes, high-risk shopping in areas where it would take a major amount of work for me to get even close to competence as a shopper.

        As in health insurance.

       Health insurance is going to be managed bureaucratically, and I want to deal with only one bureaucracy and a bureaucracy there to serve — at least in theory— to serve me and people like me, not come up with ways to get money from us for stockholders.

       There's much to be said for being able to take your business to another phone company or to another post office, airline, or insurance company.

       There's more to be said for good and reliable service which can often be helped by market discipline but sometimes is — all the time investments considered — far more efficient if handled by a limited number of companies, very tightly regulated by efficient government.

       So libertarians take note: When you've finished learning the radio alphabet, start applying the philosophy of freedom to time-demands on what our corporate manipulators think of as — and as only — "consumers." For those of us who don't get our rocks off shopping, the hucksters' "free market" is too bloody free with our time. There are costs to competition, including cost in subtle conscription of people's time and effort.

A Tale of Two Commercials: "1984" vs. "Agent Smith" (5 May 2013)

            Super Bowl Sunday, 22 January 1984, saw the one-time airing of one of the most elegant pieces of cinematic art of which I am aware: Ridley Scott's TV ad for the Apple Macintosh, "1984."

            Into a gray, Orwellian, almost entirely male world runs a woman in color, including red shorts. Into a world of robotized/roboticized people and Stalinist-Modern semi-high-tech, she brings a hammer. And into a very literally Orwellian view-screen out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, she throws that hammer.

            Right on, lady!

            To combine a couple ads for the Macintosh, and add one widely held prejudice, the athlete in red helps introduce "for the rest of us" a computer — never named — that will free us from, say, IBM products, "So 1984 won't be like … 1984."

            As anyone who knows me and/or my writing knows, I really despise advertising and urge all and sundry to turn away from commercials, and warn that every time ads get even a microsecond of our attention, that much the hucksters have won. Still, Ridley Scott's "1984" ad is freaking brilliant.
            It is also, looking back — and allowing for a whole lot of contradictions and ironies and hypocrisies — a cultural marker of some significance.

            Fast-forward thirty years, then back up a bit.

            April 2013 saw wide-spread airing of what Lewis Murphy of a couple respectable ListServs describes as "the latest in a sequence of SF themed commercials from GE," that's General Electric, each featuring "various famous robots (or A.I.), including the Lost In Space robot and Data from Star Trek: TNG" — that's The Next Generation, the one with Patrick Stewart. "There is another [commercial] featuring KITT from Knight Rider."

            The recent commercial appears to be titled "Agent of Good" on the GE home page as of 4 May 2013 and is listed as "GE Commercial — Agent of Good: Connected Hospitals" in its most popular YouTube incarnations. I just went with "Agent of Good" in my wiki on "The Human Machine Interface" and described it like this:

Agent Smith from the Matrix series […] pushes General Electric hospital products. Significant for recycling a major virtual/cybernetic villain into a spokesbeing who is believed by the GE advertising people appropriate to offer lollipops to a boy as Neo is offered the red pill or the blue pill by Morpheus in the initial MATRIX film: a scene of potential child seduction older viewers might find highly creepy. Smith, opening lines: "I have found software that intrigues me; it appears it is an agent of good," connecting GE hardware and software allowing virtual multiple-presence and connecting patients via data (sic) to "software, to nurses to the right people and machines." Images feature multiple Smiths (as in the later MATRIX movies) roaming a hospital, where we also see impressive contemporary medical machinery, with visible, but not stressed, GE logos. This technology, Smith tells us, is "Helping hospitals treat people even better, while dramatically reducing waiting time. Now a waiting room" — nearly empty waiting room shown — "is just a room." Title card: "BRILLIANT MACHINES ARE TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE WORK."

             I commented to Lewis Murphy and the others on the Science Fiction Research Association List, that General Electric's SF commercials make sense as an advertising campaign aimed at middle-age/middle-management folk who order Hospital-size medical devices and at the secondary target of old-fogey doctors and patients who are uncomfortable about technological take-over.

            The commercials' message, which I'll her format suitably for relatively subtle, subliminal screen titles: Machines Are Our Friends (like Robbie and Data and KITT); Even The Really Scary Threats Are Our Friends Now, or at least not too scary anymore (maybe like the comic Nazis on Hogan's Heroes).

            Some politically trivial geeks and academics aside, few people think much about commercials. Among those in the target audiences who know and remember Agent Smith, the warm and fuzzy nostalgia of the Matrix memories will mostly overpower any worries about the technologies that Agent Smith quietly endorses and powerfully symbolizes.

            In its way, the Agent Smith commercial is as technically brilliant as Ridley Scott's "1984 (For the Rest of Us)" pushing Mac v. IBM. That Agent Smith/GE is the hero of this latest one indicates important changes, a couple of which are good.

            Scott and the folk at AppleCorp had a large supply of gonads, gall, and chutzpah to appropriate George Orwell's dystopic vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four — and more gall to directly rip off the telescreen in Michael Radner's 1984 film Nineteen Eighty-Four (either that or Radner ripped off Scott or both followed Orwell very carefully — or there was one hell of a coincidence). Still, allowing for all those contradiction, ironies, and hypocrisies, AppleCorp and Scott were on the side of the angels in 1984 in pitting user-friendly, decentralized, and relatively democratic — in 1984 — little Macintosh against IBM-style computers and the IBM business model.

            Today we know that web-based, "iTech," Little Brother technology is a major threat, but there is still much to be said in favot of attacks on Big Brother, and that is what we see in Scott's "1984"; however hypocritically, Scott's female little-David-Macintosh symbol smashes the telescreen of IBM-ish Big Brother.

            The "Agent Smith" commercial supports GE — the Corporate Person and human people who gave us the politicized Ronald Reagan — and big-machine technology. The recent commercial "normalizes" technology that is omnipresent and invasive and eases us over our fears.

            Medical software can indeed be "an agent of good": in a sense a "recuperated," rehabilitated Agent Smith. Big GE medical machines can also be good — and rationalizing and making more efficient the connections among the machines, software, and humans is mostly a good thing.

            Mostly.

            We should still fear Agent Smith and all he stands for and remain very, very cautious in dealing with the medTech wonders from GE and other huge corporate entities.

            Big Brother still needs the occasional hammer-throw hammer thrown into his telepresent face. Agent Smith will never be unambiguously "an agent of good," someone to trust offering candy or life-determining decisions to children.


            We may be fogetting such lessons, and the Agent Smith commercial may be a sign of that dangerous amnesia.

Remembrance of Horrors Past (18 May 2013)

         I'm going to start sidling toward my topic with bragging about a relative of mine you probably have never heard of. My cousin (of some degree) Joy Erlichman Miller organized the Holocaust memorial in Peoria, Illinois, and tried to make the body-count more understandable by collecting buttons: eleven million of them. The strategy of collecting buttons is brilliant, and, more to the point I'm slowly moving toward, the number is correct. Humans aren't wired to understand deaths in even the thousands, but the sight of millions of buttons can aid our imaginations. More, having kids collect everyday items like buttons is a good way to get them to relate to the extraordinary human costs of slaughters such as the Nazi Holocaust.

         The number, though, may also be unfamiliar to you. The Peoria committee used the figure of approximately eleven million murders, and they were wise to do so: both truthful to the best estimates, and politically prudent. Some five to six millions Jews were murdered in the Nazi extermination programs, plus some five to six million Roma ("Gypsies"), Communists, homosexuals, unionists, and other "inferiors," or real or imagined enemies of the Reich. That adds up to eleven million people, approximately, not the more frequently heard figure of six millions. Some six million Jews died, and even if the actual figure is "only" five million, it is a number to remember in itself and is central to the exterminations: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the impetus for large-scale, systematic, routinized massacres. Still, if the Shoah is uniquely Jewish and unique in more than just the technical sense applicable to all historical events — if it's literally and absolutely unique, "sui generis," one of a kind — then the Shoah is of only limited usefulness for historical understanding: There aren't many lessons to be learned from a literally unique event. If it is "The Holocaust," and that is that, there is little to be learned beyond "Sh*t can really happen to the Jews." Using the eleven million figure teaches that once a program of genocide gets started, all sorts of people can be sucked in and destroyed. And that point is crucial; if the Shoah just happened to Jews, there's no reason non-Jews today should do much more than sympathize. Fitting the Hitlerian Holocaust into a larger pattern of massacres, as Hannah Arendt does in detail in Origin of Totalitarianism, makes it historically and politically relevant for many people, and aids building "Never Again" coalitions.

         Outside of the Peoria Holocaust Memorial and the reference to my cousin Joy, I expect most of what I've just said will be familiar and, with most folk who read a column by a Left-leaning Jew, unexceptional. It's also stuff I've said before (I did once teach a course titled "Massacres").

         What's been getting to me lately is watching the last few episodes of the first season of The Borgias, listening a couple times each to Neal Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE books and to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined — even going so far as to buy a Pinker's book in paperback — plus reading and consulting hard-cover hard copy of Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.

         As The Borgias first season moved toward a final tableaux celebrating traditional family values, Renaissance aristocratic Machiavellian style, we meet Paulo, a definitely non-aristocratic stable hand, who's a nice kid who gets involved with abused-wife Lucrezia Borgia, eventually aiding Lucrezia neutralize for a while her brutish warlord husband, and becoming Lucrezia's lover. Significantly here, even in the more innocent stages of Paolo's involvement with Lucrezia, he worries aloud about getting whipped, and by season's end we see and hear him whipped by his lord and get good indications that he was probably hanged shortly thereafter.

           [CORRECTION (and SPOILER): Paolo was spared as it turned out, to be hanged instructively in the following season.]

Servants ca. 1500 were whipped, and the servants of an ignoble nobleman might indeed find themselves hanged for offenses less serious than conspiracy to cripple and cuckold their masters.

         And not just servants had to fear the whip: soldier and (notoriously) sailors, and to a lesser degree wives and children and, moving toward but not very far into the Enlightenment, lunatics in places like London's Bedlam Hospital. One can argue that it's not entirely progress that we beat children and the insane much less nowadays and drug them more; one can argue that the "smother love" and constant surveillance and supervision of privileged children isn't 100% superior to benign neglect with occasional brutality — but, come on! As Steven Pinker insists, in these areas we've made serious progress.

         What such historical and history-based works as The Borgias and Better Angels make clear is that things have trended toward less violence over human recorded history. Reading them while thinking of what White calls the 20^th-c. "hemoclysm" — i.e., blood deluge, the warfare and atrocities 1914-1945 — one might conclude however, and fear, that the trend is indeed toward a decrease of violence but there can be perverse and sudden "regressions to the norm" (sic) — returns of barbarism — that can produce immense suffering.

         Two points from such cogitations and my occasional fearful twitchings.

         First, Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE covers, more or less, the period from the execution of Charles I of England in 1649 to the beginning of the Hanover dynasty in 1714. Stephenson is very clear that the worst of the human social pathologies he deals with was slavery, continuing in the East and, during this period, increasing in the Americas — and with increasing British involvement. White estimates the suffering in deaths alone of the slave trade alone at 18.5 million for the Mideast slave trade from the 7^th through the 19^th centuries, and some sixteen million for the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. (The two slave trades rank at #8 and #10 of White's ranking of our species' "One Hundred Deadliest Multicides," edging out, for instructive examples, the Conquest of the Americas and First World War, both coming in at 15 million deaths.)

         It is clear, however, that state-sanctioned and enforced slavery was the extreme of a continuum of cruelty, or, changing the image, an extreme area on a web of cruelty that permeated everyday life. Even as Jews should put the Shoah into it a larger context of massacres, African-Americans should put American chattel slavery onto that continuum, or at the center of a figurative web of oppression, exploitation, and cruelty.

         People can argue, and I do so, that racism developed in part to allow continued cruelty to Black people (and, later, Jews and Slavs and Roma) after it became increasingly unfashionable — war excepted — for Moderns to be cruel to people seen as people and even bad form to brutalize sympathetic nonhuman animals.

         Pinker talks of "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4) that slowly came in with the Modern Era and the Enlightenment, increasing humanitarianism that included, eventually, the elimination of slavery. While slavery continued and was profitable, however, it needed justification, and it is no coincidence that racism came along to provide that justification: it was becoming increasingly "unacceptable," as we so weakly say — Not Done — to grossly abuse people (again, war-time enemies excluded); a theory was necessary that made Blacks less than people, and that theory was racism.

         We need to be clear on "racism": that's an "-ism," an ideology, a theory, and one with a history. Bigotry is more or less natural to humans: a subset of the nastier parts of the "amity/enmity complex" to use Robert Ardrey's formulation; or "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Sev-enty-six!" in the formulation of Mel Brook's 2000-Year-Old Man. For seeing the difference between bigotry and racism, and for dating racism in England, note Thomas Rymer's argument against "Othello: A Bloody Farce" in his Short View of Tragedy (1693, ch. VII; reprinted in Frank Kermode's Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism [1974: 461-69]). In Othello, Shakespeare shows ample bigotry against the Moor: that "old black ram," "the thick lips." The bigotry, however, is within the world of the play. Rymer laments that the play remained highly popular with English audiences into his time in the late 17^th century — popular in spite what Rymer saw as its gross errors and absurdities. To start, Othello is not a properly Neoclassic play, but along with that error — Rymer was a militant neoclassicist — and relating to it, it's hero just isn't, well, appropriate. In Othello, Othello is a general of the armies of Venice and, apparently, one of the great military leaders of Christian Europe. Rymer allows that the Venetian Republic hired foreign mercenaries for their armies,

But shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab [= a whore], or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor [Othello' elopes with the daughter of a senator]: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match. […] Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye [=lie]; And, certainly, never was any Play fraught, like this of Othello, with improbabilities. (Kermode volume, page 462).

There was bigotry aplenty in Shakespeare's real-world England, from prejudice against to loathing of foreigners and others, but not enough animosity against Blacks to keep English audiences from sympathizing with "black Othello"; by the time we get to Rymer, something has changed.

         That "Humanitarian Revolution" was getting started, and for screamingly obvious commercial reasons Blacks from Africa, for the consciences of many people, had to be excluded for the circle of humanity. There was a great deal of money to be made from the slave trade and from the stolen labor of slaves to produce high-profit commodities like tobacco, sugar, and rum. If we allow sugar as a "food-drug" — and no less an authority than Sidney W. Mintz says we should do so — then the institution of Black chattel slavery in the New World came about in large part because there was a lot of money to be made then, as now, pushing drugs (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985).

         And, of course, before the more northern European competition got into the tobacco, sugar, and rum rackets, New World enslavement of Indians and, later, Blacks had served a lust for lucre more directly in Spanish America in the mining of gold and silver.

         Most of our European ancestors most of the time dealt with horrors like the slave trade the way we Americans today deal with exploited labor in, say, the manufacturing of our clothing: they ignored it. I don't ask about how I can order on line sweatpants for six bucks a pair; if you had high-flown English ancestors ca. 1692, they didn't ask too many questions about the sugar in their coffee or hot chocolate (or, for that matter, ask inconvenient questions about the coffee or chocolate).

         More important, though — and, finally, my point here — is the one stressed by Steven Pinker: how much cruelty for how long was not actively ignored but seen casually and just accepted as part of the "warp and woof," deeply woven into, the web of everyday life.

         "The wogs begin at Callus," as the stereotypical racist Colonel Blimp's of Great Britain used to say: i.e., the range of the inferior peoples of the Earth began as soon as one crossed the English (by God!) Channel and disembarked at the carefully mispronounced French port of Calais. That attitude, however — hell, racism for some of them! — was progress: for most high-born English for most of their history, inferiors started a whole lot closer to home than France, including in one's home with one's servants or (if male) wife and (for both parents) children. One could feel downright righteous birching one's kids bloody, to beat hell and the devil out of them; and, of course, even the lower orders could watch for entertainment the torture of animals — bear-baiting, bull baiting, ratting — or condemned criminals (if you couldn't afford to pay off the hangman for a longish drop, "hang by the neck until dead" could take a long time).

         So Black African slavery was horrific, but its horrors were tolerated as long as they were not only because of racism but also because of a general casualness about cruelty.

         If we are to be serious and effective about "Never Again," Jews should remind all and sundry that the Hitlerian Holocaust was emphatically not limited to Jews and fits into a larger tradition of massacres: far from unique, the Shoah is an instructive extreme on a continuum of atrocities. American Blacks and Africans should remind people that the Atlantic slave trade was part of a long tradition of murderous exploitation of Africans and others: including at one time the enslavement of just about anyone who could be taken prisoner in war or stolen.

         Americans who hear of atrocities and say, "It can't happen here" forget that chattel slavery, for one very big thing, did happen here, until 1865, as did the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan into my lifetime. And this is not frightening so much because we Americans are particularly evil but because we are well within the normal range of humanity. As Stephenson, Pinker, White, and the makers of The Borgias make clear, routine, banal, horrible cruelty is part of the repertoire of human behavior.
         So is the capacity for good, those "Better Angels of Our Nature." If Pinker is right, those Better Angels, our inclinations to the good, have been trending upward since the Bronze Age; as the reintroduction of slavery in the Early Modern period indicates and the 20^th-c. hemoclysm drives home; the tendency is far from inevitable. Indeed, often it's just "Sh*t happens"; but far too often "sh*t" is done to all sorts of people, and emphatically not just Jews and Blacks. So, to repeat a useful cliché, following Pinker: Let us be hopeful, but also ready to aid the exploited, oppressed, and abused not just out of decency, but because, always, any of us can be on the list — and for most of human history, most people were.

Spelling Counts (also Punctuation, Word Choice, and Grammar) [6 Oct. 2013]

"I like cooking my family and my pets."

Use commas. Don't be a psycho." (Writing.com)

"NO RAGRETS" — Highly visible tatoo in We're the millers (2013)

             When I first started teaching back in the late 1960s, students would tell me with some regularity, "I don't need to know how to spell and punctuate; my secretary will take care of that." And I would ask, "And what makes you think you won't be the secretary, and happy to have the job?"

            Secretaries nowadays are a dying breed, and most people realize they're going to be typing (etc.) their own papers and presentations and all, but young folk still sometimes resist the idea that spelling, punctuation, word usage, and just idiomatic English — I taught English — are significant.

            In a way, they're not significant. Not when you realize that much of the time when people say, "That's not grammatical," they mean, "That doesn't conform to the rules in the prestige dialect" or "That's unfashionable." Much of the time it's a snob thing. And such trivial errors are obviously trivial when set against real problems in language like Orwellian twisting of words so ethyl alcohol consumed to get zonked isn't a drug and nerve gas is "a weapon of mass destruction" but cluster bombs are not.

            Still, there are readers who will get upset that I used a sentence fragment in the last paragraph but can accept without comment talk about "alcohol and drugs" and can have a beer in hand while demanding putting people in jail forever and ever for using  drugs; there are people who will get upset by my sentence fragment and Syrian civilians getting killed by illegal nerve gas, but not so upset if any foreigners get killed by legal high explosives.

            Sentence fragments can be useful, and I use them when I think they will be effective. However, I need to be conscious of when I'm using them and consider if I annoy more of my target audience with the sentence fragment than the point is worth. If it's a matter of indifference whether or not I use fragments, most of the time I can do it the way my (imagined) audience wants. Especially if I want to, say, move them to support legalizing marijuana or helping get peace in Syria — or wherever — without the US firing missiles at people.

            Anyway, back when I taught, I would tell my resistant students how MAD Magazine once ran a letter to the editor attacking MAD for its lack of intellectual sophistication. "The Usual Gang of Idiots" at MAD simply ran the letter as they received it, with "[sic]" after each misspelled word.

            Now whether or not the letter-writer could spell was irrelevant to his argument about the intelligence level of MAD Magazine. Ditto for punctuation and such. Still, what I recall is the three of four "sic's" and that the letter-writer not only didn't make his point but also looked ignorant, and a fool. That isn't fair; that wasn't fair; but it was an effective ploy on the part of the staff at MAD. (Satirists are not nice people.)

            "Proper" spelling and punctuation is the writing equivalent of actors' learning their lines. If you're an actor, and your friends' compliment you after a performance with, "Uh, well, you certainly remembered all your lines!" … you can be pretty sure your performance sucked. The same rule applies with spelling and punctuation and what we used to call "Basic Conventions": It's no compliment if people point out you got them right; just don't screw them up.
            For a more powerful if less exact analogy, getting the basic conventions right is like remembering to zip up after hitting the head before The Big Speech. Or for a more woman-acknowledging/unisex example, checking to be sure you aren't entering to the speech "trailing clouds of glory," and toilet paper.

            Trust me on this: Odds are that few people will remember your speech, but your friends will remember and remind you of your embarrassment long after they've forgotten the names of their grandchildren.

            E.g., a really great Shakespeare scholar taught the course I took on tragedy and one day delivered what I'm sure was a fine presentation on … well I've forgotten. What I do recall is that the class puritan had a front-row center seat, and that I was one of the teacher's "eye-contact people" but had to keep my head down because the guy next to me was speculating on whether or not the professor wore underwear (he announced that he saw none) and on possible reactions of Miss Cotton Mather in the front row looking at the prof at crotch level — and if I looked the professor in the eye I was going to crack up laughing.

            That's all petty and immature and, well, totally typical. That pettiness, though, is there, and writers must deal with it, and not just writers in English classes.

            My experience is that most English teachers are educated enough as scholars — and hardened enough as readers of student writing — to sweat the small stuff rather less than the somewhat-educated readers out in what is often called "The Real World."

            I now work on the periphery of the semi-real world of the film business, and I have met one producer with an absolute rule that the third or fourth spelling error he comes on in a script — he tosses the script. Yeah, the scriptwriter may be a Hemingway or a Shakespeare, but the odds are strongly against it, and producers get a lot of scripts and are looking for reasons to reject scripts.

            As I occasionally try to explain, readers of scripts understand the economics here. As Robert A. Heinlein is said to have said — it oversimplifies the quote but makes pithier what he actually advised, and more entertaining — «Don't revise unless an editor makes you.» Even as pulp writers of the mid-20^th century had to minimize the labor they put into each manuscript, so with script writers: the economics of the situation mean that you shouldn't revise a script unless you can get it sold, and different readers will give you different "Notes," and different producers will have different demands.

            But little in spelling and punctuation is debatable, and it just looks bush-league and disrespectful if you don't even bother to run the spell check and get the sucker proofread before you send it in. Look, we know it's an early draft — but don't rub our noses in it.

            And quite frequently, "we" do know.

            Initial reading of most scripts isn't done by recent-immigrant studio executives from the early days of the talkies nor by over-schooled but undereducated MBA's that fit the current stereotypes. Initial reading is frequently done by over-worked, underpaid, female recent college graduates who are very good at what they do. Do not piss them off unnecessarily, and it will piss them off when an agent sends them what, on the level of the sentence, looks like an early draft by a high-school junior.

            Or, for the lumpen literati out there who don't have agents — or only small-time agents — the script will be read by someone like me: a friend of an Indie producer, a guy with free time and some education who does the first reading. More, exactly: a friend who does the first reading if the producer reads the first few pages and decides it deserves a reading at all.

            Similarly in other fields: There's a fair chance you'll be read by a twenty-two-year old who can't spell either and is occasionally unclear on the meaning of words s/he's heard a few times but hasn't read often in context because s/he doesn't read often.

            That's possible. It's also possible you'll get a very smart twenty-three year old with a good education who knows not to get hung up with spelling errors, but notices them.

            The semi-literates probably won't downgrade you for spelling right and getting your words to mean things within shouting distance of the dictionary definition. With literate readers, those spelling errors (and such) are trivial — but also like showing up to the interview with your fly open / trailing toilet paper caught in your shoe and panty hose.

            Zip your fly; check your hose and shoes; run the goddamn Spell Check; proofread each draft — and get your final draft proofread by someone competent you can trust.

            Spelling does count, and so do punctuation, word choice, and the other "Basic Conventions."

"To Help Us Serve You Better ...." (27 Oct. 2013)

Always have people on the street more radical than you are.

"Sheep have input into the decision-making process of the shepherd."

            There was a time ca. 1967-70 when young people were out on the streets in much of the industrialized world and times of long, hot summers when Black Americans were out in significant numbers, with a number of respectable-size riots. Those were good times for moderate-Lefty activists.

            As we know now, looking back, the "wave of the future" ca. 1970 wasn't with young radicals on the street, but with the Donald Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's, the Karl Roves, Newt Gingrich's and Lee Atwater's: the Young Americans for Freedom sorts who were quietly reinforcing the Backlash that started by 1968 and has been with us unto this day.

            We had an inkling of the building backlash in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. To start with, there was that Man on the Street who formulated the issue as, "What it's all about is 'Who's in charge?'" — and in the couple decades to come Who's In Charge sure wasn't going to be Students for a Democratic Society or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A stronger hint came from the lady in the Urbana bank who bemoaned the fact that only four demonstrators had been killed at Kent State U in Ohio. Less sensationally, but more to the point here, I had one hell of a strong inkling of things to come when I had to address a demonstration on the U of I quadrangle, put on a tie, and then go inside the Illini Union building negotiate: We didn't have enough radicals to fill out a "demo" haranguers program, so I had to fill in as a ringer.

            Fortunately, however, most journalists are borderline innumerate and their bosses thoroughly cynical: "No blood, no news" was a real line from a Chicago TV exec from the period, and with exceptions in the more conservative media, few reporters worked through the numbers on how many students were demonstrating and what their geography and demographics were; ditto for Black people. More fortunately (if one was a moderate-Lib-Leftist activist — and I was), more fortunately, many academic and state-level politicians could get border-line paranoid and come to believe our propaganda and their own about incipient coalitions of radical students, Blacks, and young workers: various officials came to believe that they'd have to work with moderates or face the mob.

            So it was a good time to be a moderate-Lefty activist, 'cause there were radicals on the streets the authorities feared enough to offer to negotiate (even if I was hardly the only one who had to double as one of those radicals on the street).

            So rule number one here, or "Back to Basics #56": Always have people on the street more radical than you are — even if you have to get your ass out onto the street yourself.

            The Powers that Be, however, may get paranoid and panic easily, but you can't count on their being stupid or ignorant of their history. Back in the Time of the Troubles — when the pressure was on to negotiate — what they offered us was "input into the decision-making process." Savor that phrase, since it's better than you're going to get nowadays; savor it, and then repeat over and over, like a mantra, "Sheep have input into the decision-making process of the shepherd."
            I'm stealing that insight, if not the exact formulation, from B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948; ch. 25, I believe), except that Skinner believes that sheep with input is the correct order of things.
Even as engine noises must be taken into account by mechanics and aviators, even as sheep in their noises and behavior have input into decision-making by shepherds, even so the residents, not citizens, of Walden Two have input — through surveys, say, and suggestions — into the decision-making by the Managers and Planners who run the community.

            Now all of us some of the time, many of us much of the time, and some of us all the time would just as soon other people made our decisions for us. I for one enjoy travelling when I'm on the plane or train and the biggest decision I have to make is, on a train, what to have for lunch (in this instance, I like being powerless and without responsibility especially since if we crash, no one will blame me [some people worry about death; I worry more about screwing up]).

            Still, however occasional nice vacations into Lotus Land might be, we should keep in mind that shepherd's take care of sheep in order to fleece them — or make them into lamb chops or mutton. Even if we are in the care and control of The Good Shepherd, a being beyond the economics of real sheep-raising — even as a fat and well-protected sheep, there are problems. It's "species-ist" to say so, but sheep are pretty stupid, and humans should aspire to more control over our lives than exercised by a domesticated sheep. For another slogan: Today's frisking lamb is tomorrow's castrated wether.

            Humans should not aspire to "input" but to clout: having your ideas, opinions, desires, and interests taken seriously.

            Since the Thatcher/Reagan Era, however (ca. 1975 f.), the question of "Who's in charge" has had the answer that, The Powers That Be be fully in charge — and, for now anyway, the best you will get is not effective citizenship but "input."

            And that "input" is becoming increasingly low grade as unions have declined and "collegiate governance" and "employee participation" have become quaint theories of a thoroughly by-gone era. Nowadays you get "input" through surveys and data-mining: today's Managers and Planners' caring about your desires and concerns as necessary to manage your behavior and manipulate your consumption.


            The Great Wheel of Politics turns, though, always. I fear the next turn will bring fascistic mass movements, but perhaps the Idiocracy will not be decisive. Perhaps, just perhaps — possibly — there will be a magic moment when the right blend of radicals on the street will force the Powers That Be into serious negotiations, perhaps, just perhaps, The Powers That Be will have to cede some decent moderate Lefties just a bit of clout.

Flies: Watch Out for Honey / Consumers: Watch Out for Deals

"You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

— Poor Richard's Almanac (traditional)

 
         On the web on 27 August 2011, someone posting as "Jeremy" noted "that you actually attract more fruit flies with vinegar than honey, because the acetic acid in vinegar makes them think they sense fruit," but he (?) was good enough to note also that even if that bit of natural history is true, the proverb is still that you can deal more effectively with people if you are sweet to them than if you are sharp and biting. The upshot of the saying is the same as that of Aesop's fable of the Sun vs. the North Wind (Boreas), competing to get a man to take off his cloak. The more and harder Boreas blows, the tighter the man wraps his cloak; when the sun shines bright and hot, the man, of course, removes it.

         From the man's point of view, however, either way he's ultimately doing what some minor deity wants him to do, even if in basking in the sunshine he's doing what he immediately wants to do. But let's move to the point of view of the flies.

         I'm not old enough to have ever seen people try to kill flies by putting out honey or vinegar, nor even old enough to remember flypaper. I do, though, remember fly ribbon, also called fly capture tape: "a fly-killing device made of paper coated with a sweetly fragrant, but extremely sticky and sometimes poisonous substance that traps flies and other flying insects when they land upon it. "

         You can spray insecticide and kill flies efficiently (until they mutate and you get immune populations), and you can try to smash flies with newspapers. It's arguably more effective, if esthetically pretty nasty, to capture and poison, or capture and starve to death, flies with sweet sticky stuff.

         I have been thinking about such things because I have a "Rewards!" coupon from Office Depot that expires shortly, one for $24.48, and I will almost undoubtedly go to Office Depot and cash it in and buy computer printing cartridges I don't really need yet.

         And there's a fair chance that while in the store I'll see something I don't need at all but will come to want and will buy.

         That is, of course, the whole idea. If coupons really got customers to spend less money, companies wouldn't give them out.

         Like most people, I prefer to be warmed by the sun on a mild day rather than be blasted by the North Wind. Like most people, more relevantly, I prefer to be bribed rather than coerced.

         Still, I don't like to be manipulated, and I am quite certain that the bribe from Office Depot — or the Kroger Corporation or Bed, Bath, and Beyond — will end up costing me one way or another, even if, to my surprise, the coupons and other deals end up saving me money.

         'Cause unless you're Scrooge McDuck and get your kicks rolling around in money, money itself isn't your goal. What we want are the things money can buy, and for me, one of the major things money buys is some of my freedom and sense of control.

         Mainly, money buys freedom from money worries that are endemic to most strata of capitalist society. Having modest but secure income, and being careful with my money — not cheap but definitely tight — I've been able to live most of my life not having to worry much about not having money. I also haven't had to worry about just how to invest and conserve my fortune since having a modest but secure income I didn't have enough money to invest and conserve.

         It has made little sense, and continues to make little sense, for me to sacrifice any of my time to money issues to save a few bucks.

         Ah, but that $24.48 coupon is a temptation. Cheap people don't want to spend money; we tightwads will spend, but we get very upset if we waste money, and some place buried deep in my brain, probably just north of the limbic system, there's a small set of over-trained ganglia convinced that not cashing in a coupon for $24.48 is wasting $24.48 and — and those brain cells are sending out the neurological equivalent of "The horror! The horror!"

         I finally gave in to the Kroger Corporation, so I have a Ralphs card — Kroger's in the West is Ralphs — and also a card from Von's, another grocery chain; grocery stores make you an offer very difficult to refuse: you either allow them to track your purchases or you pay significantly more for their products. Freedom is valuable to me, but not paying $4 extra per pound of shrimp, which was the bit of extortion that got me to finally give in and get the card.

         I have done this much however, especially since shopping at a supermarket has become a rat-running exercise in figuring out a maze, as the rat: I make a shopping list of basics and try to buy the same basics every time, with only minor variations. So KrogerCorp can track my purchases, but the data, I hope, will bore even a computer program.

         "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" and, all things considered it's better to be bribed than coerced. Still, with all the PR people, advertisers, politicians, and propagandists trying to get our votes and our money and our "hearts and minds" — I'd just as soon do without both for. Or, if I had to choose, I think I might prefer an outright threat (if nonviolent) to a bribe.

         On the other hand, I pass Office Depot fairly regularly, and $24.48 is almost twenty-five dollars ….

Mammal Meat and Octopus (12 Jan. 2014)

            As I will make clear to anyone who will give me a chance, I strongly reject the idea that "All life is sacred" in large part because if that is the case, I'm a mostly unrepentant serial mass murderer: When I was in college, I worked summer lab jobs that included sterilizations of surfaces, instruments, used sputum bottles (testing for tuberculosis), and, most relevantly, of petri dishes loaded up with whole colonies of bacteria.  Billions and billions of living organisms — and I killed them routinely, five days a week. What I mention less frequently is that in the course of my studies and work I also killed a frog or two, two rabbits, one cat, a number of dogs, and a significant number of lab rats. I also used to fish with my father.

            I make no apologies for the bacteria nor for the fish (which my family ate) but rather regret the frog or frogs, and feel guilty about the mammals, especially one dog I failed to kill humanely — but that's a story in itself and for elsewhere. In any event, I've had to think about where to draw ethical lines about killing, possibly more than people who haven't "whacked" rats very literally: for some experiments we couldn't overdose the rats on Nembutal or whatever but had to use what we came to call "shock sacrifice," which translates smashing them across the back of the head with an iron bar or pipe wrench.

            I finally decided that I'd draw the line with the routine killing of mammals and would neither do it myself nor have the killing done in my name except in extraordinary circumstances. So I captured, took back outside, and released a field mouse who'd come into my apartment and danced a little number on my chest while I slept; but I had killed — the euphemism is "euthanized" — two cats who would have otherwise died in pain, and I will use traps, poison, or an exterminator to kill non-lab rats if they infest my home.

            I will not, however, eat mammal meat. Fish yes, chicken oh yes, and definitely nonkosher invertebrates with the exception of octopuses. My sister and I got invited "back stage," so to speak, at a major aquarium (Monterey, CA, probably) and got to see an ill but recovering octopus that kept picking the locks on its containment vessels. As far as the staff could figure out, the octopus was getting bored in its aquatic isolation cage and entertained itself with the locks and moving next door and, it sometimes seemed to the staff, watching their reactions.

            Mammals are cousins of us humans, and any animal — whether with or without a backbone — that gets bored, picks locks, and just possibly gets a kick out of pissing off its jailers is too smart to (casually) eat.

            Two things here for readers who don't routinely kill their fellow critters above the size and complexity of, say, cockroaches.

            First, think carefully when you hear bullshit about academics always and necessarily "living in ivory towers." Indeed, academics usually have clean fingernails in our work — that was one of my career goals given other jobs I had before teaching — but in some fields there may be blood under those nails: less nowadays with computer modeling, which is a good thing, but maybe more than, say, with accountants or advertisers or construction workers (though far less blood than people serving you by working in slaughterhouses).

            Second, there are reasons one might avoid mammal meat, or even go vegetarian, that apply to people with no dead dogs or rats upon your consciences.

            Contemporary raising of mammals for slaughter and consumption is frequently cruel, and irresponsible in terms of worldwide nutrition and public health, and in terms of the environment. (Raising poultry and farming fish are also problematic, but I'm talking here of drawing lines, and I respect the decisions of vegetarians and vegans, but drew mine more selfishly.)

            It takes a lot of resources to raise a steer or pig or lamb for food, starting with land to raise them on humanely. Raising them industrially takes less land, but it may require grain — "corn-fed beef" is from cattle fed corn that might've fed people — and definitely requires water and crowding, and crowding itself is an issue.

            Even herd animals need a bit of space between bodies — although humans have selectively bred sheep and reindeer to be neurotically into bunching up — and, more important for humans, if you put a lot of mammals in a small space you risk epidemics among them. And how to prevent such epidemics, and get the animals to put on weight faster and so move them more profitably to market? Antibiotic prophylaxis. I.e., you fill 'em up and/or shoot 'em up with antibiotics, with the inevitable result of breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

            Evolution in action, gang: you put antibiotics into the environment, and they kill off all the susceptible bacteria. The ones who remain can (figuratively) look around and see ecological niches with lots of room for expansion. So they expand, the resistant ones: healthier cattle and pigs, at least for a while, but way more robust bacteria. And those bacteria will not necessarily stay down on the farm.

            Can you say "zoonose"? I can. I lived for close to a decade in the neighborhood of one of the main Illinois zoonose research center: that's the word for diseases that move from other animals into human beings, and you don't want production of new and more potent strains of zoonoses. You don't want antibiotics unnecessarily in the environment anywhere — especially not in a bacterial megaparadise like reservoirs of fermenting pig shit — not even if those antibiotics only help produce resistance in bacteria that attack only humans.

            You also don't want too many cattle standing around burping and farting —although burping, counterintuitively, is the bigger problem — and, additionally, producing manure. The contribution isn't major, and can be offset by using cow and pig … effluents (?) for biofuel and fertilizer, but our bovine and porcine meat-providers also add to greenhouse gasses.

            I miss meat, especially when watching the "food porn" commercials on TV featuring impossibly perfect double cheese burgers with bacon and a side order of spareribs. Still, I will continue to decline to eat anything with a backbone, face, and the potential to produce young that suckle — or eat anything that just may have a brain complex enough to get bored when trapped in a tank.

All We Have Is Time, and Too Many People Want Mine (2 Jan. 2014))

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

A hundred years from now we'll all be dead!

So no matter what is done and no matter what is said,

A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead!

— Moderately traditional kids' song

  

           My mother's three brothers were dead before I finished school, so they had to have died at a fairly young age; my mother lived to 69, and my father made it to 72. Me, I'm about to turn 71, and, I've been thinking about time. "A hundred years from now and we'll all be dead," indeed; but it's going to be a good deal sooner for me.

            Anyway, I'm feeling more up close and personal on a theme I've dealt with before more philosophically: the insightful if overstated teaching, "All we have is time."

            This idea is part of the premise of Harlan Ellison's great dystopian SF story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," but Ellison's take is a Modern one, from the world of railroad schedules and analog clocks, and Charles Chaplin's clown caught in the gears of a giant machine: the world of Big-Brother style totalitarianism. Such threats are still with us, God knows, but I think the long-term danger in the United States is more like what we see in Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013): a kindly, largely free-market, little-brother totalitarianism, where the assaults on increasing number of people's time aren't so much "Fordist" assembly lines as multiple screens and windows of office computers and the repeated demands made upon us over our networks and smartphones.

            The Circle is not a subtle book, and its main concern is with privacy, and the decline thereof, with time usurpation a minor point. So the theme of time is handled quickly and directly. Eggers's  postmodern version of the assembly-line speedup in Modern Times (1936) is a digitalized speedup built into the digitalized workplace. The anti-hero of The Circle is Mae Holland, who starts out in customer relations with one screen in front of her and goals for how many customer contacts to handle with what degree of satisfaction. And, as you can guess, the screens keep multiplying, along with the tasks for her, significantly including tasks to keep up her social life as a member of the corporate community.

            If the community offers all sorts of activities, isn't it one's duty to participate? If one can provide feedback and reassurance and reinforcement to one's colleagues and many Facebook-analog "friends," doesn't it become one's duty to do so?

            Of course it does! And in the chilling parody/appropriation of the three slogans of The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, at The Circle we have the three-part mantra, "Secrets are Lies. / Caring Is Sharing. / Privacy Is Theft."

            Again, and very obviously, the main concern here is with privacy, but "Caring Is Sharing" also has a time component. Mae is overwhelmed by inputs on her screens not just by her business tasks but also in sharing socially. The point is made explicit when Mae's parents explain that they have fled Circle involvement — involvement was the price for their much-needed health insurance — for reasons beyond the surveillance of their lives The Circle demands.

            Mae has gone "transparent" and is on-line and communicating visuals and audios almost without interruption, and she shares with her many followers her parents' medical challenges, and what would correspond to their e-mail address.          On their way off the grid, Mae's parents send her and us the arithmetic calculating that even their cursory responses to all the well-wishes and advice and "Smiles" (= "Like's") sent them would require sixteen hours of labor a day.

            If you can keep in "Constant Contact" with all your "Friends," caring people do so.
            Similarly with offering "feedback" and "input" into the system. Mae and the co-workers of her "pod" (no shit: pod, as with dolphins) really do work hard to serve their customers, and, when it gets down to it, their careers at The Circle depend on getting good scores on the quick surveys their customers are asked to fill out after each contact with customer service. I, for one, used to get paid to take surveys on products — mostly batteries, for whatever reason — but, golly gee, I feel hard-pressed when asked to fill in a survey without being paid to do so if it will help keep employed some phone-bank serf. "Oh, and remember: anything less than 'Exceptional Service' is a bad mark for me" (as I'm told, e.g., when checking out of the Service Dept. at Toyota [at The Circle, they like A+ averages: 98%]); so I take a little extra time explaining in under 200 words on some survey forms that "competent" is quite enough for me, or I take a little extra time deciding to lie rather than risk the job of a perfectly competent, if unexceptional, service rep.

            Well, you get the point; as I said, The Circle is not subtle and shouldn't be, and subtlety has never been one of my strong points. Eggers's main target is indeed mostly increasing violations of privacy through digital technology, but there is also the point of increasing violations of "the right to be let alone" in demands on our time from various government bureaus and agencies — hey, save those receipts for tax time; and classify them; and sort them; and record them — but also and sometimes overwhelmingly by bosses, businesses, family, colleagues, and friends.

            Only governments can throw us in jail for refusing to give them our time — jury duty for a few days, which is OK; a year or so in Vietnam, which is, say, more problematic — and only our bosses can fire us. Still, there are penalties if you don't do the paper work for the people insuring you, and there are different sorts of penalties if you don't get back to family and friends and Facebook "Friends" to share with the group. It is no big deal to throw out the junk snail mail or delete e-mails or text messages you don't want. But there are penalties if you toss something actually important, and deleting the crap may not take much time, but it does take time, and worrying about that missing tax bill or credit card is, well, worry.

            ("When should I expect my credit card?" / "We mailed it ten days ago." / "What was the return address on the envelope?" / "Nothing specific: That's our policy for your security." / "Well my policy is to throw out unopened any envelope without an identifiable return address." / "We can send you a new card; expect it in three days." / "Okay, I'll spend a week feeling up envelopes. [Hmm … Sorry I put it that way.]")
            In 1976, Thomas J. Remington wrote a beautiful essay on "touch" in the fiction to the mid-70's of Ursula K. Le Guin. He noted that Le Guin (who is a communitarian sort) highly values touch and human connectedness. In my scholarly mode, I agreed with Tom but pointed out that "touch" in Le Guin's works could be bad. It is good to be in touch with family, friends, community, tribe, and outward; it is good to be part of a communal network. But a network can become a net, a trap; touch can be the communication of love; or it can be when you're trapped between your bratty kid brother and sister in the back seat of the car with them seeing how often they can touch you touch you touch you until you go quietly berserk. It is good to spend time together with the family. And then more time, and then you bloody well have to get away from the kids, and they have to get away from you and have time for themselves.

            It is a good thing to get some time off from family and friends, and one of the great gifts of the labor movement was the weekend, when one can get away from work. First, if nothing else, it is a very bad thing to strangle your children or for them to take a baseball bat to you: prudence and decency recommend some time to oneself. Second, though, it is exploitation or even expropriation if your boss or country or loved ones demand "constant contact" and have you on call 24/7.

            A quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde is "The trouble with Socialism is that it takes too many evenings." Whoever said it, the point is a valid one, even for a social democrat such as I. "All we have is time," in a sense, and people should not take any from us without solid payment, including their time returned. We humans are social animals and bonding and family and community and solidarity are good things; we are also individuals, with a right, much of the time, to be let alone, to quite literally seize time for ourselves and hold it precious.


            Not all property is theft, P-J Proudhon's slogan notwithstanding, nor is most privacy theft; privacy and refusal to have our time imposed upon can be taking back that which is most essentially ours. 

Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Threats — Only (24 Jan. 2014)

The makers of our Constitution [* * *] sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts,

their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government,

the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

Louis D. Brandeis, Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).

 
            I'm not going to be handling much of Justice Brandeis's great statement on "the right to be let alone," but I am going to look at one implication of it. I also intend to keep repeating Brandeis's point for the foreseeable rest-of-my-life and to expand it; Americans also have a right to be left alone by people other than the government, people who don't know us, don't give a rat's ass about us personally, and just desire something from us: our votes, labor, and/or, usually, money.
            All I want to deal with here is the very basic idea that if we do have a right to be left alone, especially by the government, then the government shouldn't get intrusive unless they really, really have to, and that those intrusions should be strictly limited.
            Specifically I wish to deal here with the basic principle that extraordinary threats can indeed justify extraordinary intrusions, but only extraordinary threats — not the ordinary kind — and only to the degree necessary to meet the threats.
            What will not be here is my rant on the National Security Agency, or Google, needing to stay the hell away from our transmitted data. I want to go back to older issues with the Government of the United States — and the States and smaller jurisdictions — and the Fourth Amendment in its mostly pre-computer, and both pre- and post-"9/11" applications.
            The Fourth Amendment, as you would recall from high school civics if we still taught such subversive, non-job-training, frills-courses — the Fourth Amendment mandates, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
            Because of the threat of planes' being hijacked, and then planes' being bombed, we Americans submitted to airport screenings.
            All right: extraordinary threats there.
            Along with the searches, however, came the doctrine of what I'll call "What the fuck, if something turns up — anything turns up — in a legal search, we can use it against you." (Please note that I did not do well on the Law School Admissions Test and that it's safe to assume lawyers have more formal labels for the doctrine.)
            Uh, no. By any name, application of that doctrine with required, routine searches is not right.
            If the TSA person thinks s/he sees a half-pound of C4 in your carry-on bag, they have the right to stop you and make you open the bag. If it is not a half-pound of high explosive but only your quarter kilo of cocaine on top of your hotel-room-reading child-porn collection, they should wish you a safe flight and good luck getting through, say, Turkish Customs and Immigration.
            I am serious here: terrorism is an extraordinary, direct, and immediate threat; illegal drugs are not. If you have a kidnapped child with you that you're dragging off as a sex slave: that's an extraordinary, direct, and immediate threat to the child; pornography even of the vilest sort is not.
            Similarly if you want to enter a prison as a visitor. The authorities have the right to put you through a metal detector and even pat you down to make sure you're not smuggling in weapons; they don't have the right to check out your mouth and rectum to be sure you're not smuggling in drugs — not unless they have good reason to suspect you're bringing drugs in for a worker in the kitchen to use as part of a plot for a mass poisoning.
            And similarly the cops have the right to pat you down if they arrest you. They don't have the right to routinely shackle arrested people or to strip search you as part of "Welcome to Jail" routine. Guns are one thing; if you happen to walk around with a condom of heroin in your vagina or rectum, that is another thing: weird, and maybe a threat of some sort, but not an extraordinary threat or a danger to anyone except yourself, if that condom breaks.
            Extraordinary threats, clear and present dangers — oh, yeah! I want the cops and FBI and TSA and the rest of the bureaucratic alphabet to work hard to protect my precious ass. Lesser dangers, though, I want them off of, and out of, my ass, especially literally.
            I also want them out of my computer's information contents if I travel with my laptop. No high explosives in it or what looks like nerve gas or an itty-bitty generator of a massive electro-magnetic pulse? Then pass it through; there's no reason to go figuratively pawing through the files, not even if they are mostly Salafist calls to Jihad and instructions on how to make bombs.
            (If you're pretty sure I have bomb-making instructions, don't stop me from entering or leaving the USA; have me followed to my co-conspirators.)
            I know that there are Americans out there with different value systems; one of my best friends is a good Leftist on most things but a Navy vet strongly into protecting people. How is this, then, at least for airports and as a concrete example for more generalized thinking though the issues?
            Two lines at airport security. Line 1: They do everything they can to keep you safe and secure. Line 2: Back to basics. I want Line 2, where your luggage goes through X-ray (or whatever) and you go through a metal detector and where the plane has a solid door to the cockpit that's locked from the inside during the flight (with plastic urinals for the cockpit crew, female, as well as male). And in Line 2 you're reminded that the rules have changed since the old days when skyjacking was the fear and that nowadays you resist nasty people making threats.
            Hey, if a guy with a nail clipper can take over a planeful of adults — most of us armed with pens and credit cards and a lot of wasted time watching movie secret agents weaponizing pens and credit cards — then we pretty much all deserve to die. If a guy with explosives taped to his scrotum can blow a hole in the plane, hey, Line 2 flying is still safer than driving a car.

            As recent history has shown, Justice Brandeis was wrong about "the right to be let alone" as "the right most valued by civilized men"; at least in the USA, we value it less than marginal increases in safety. The right to be left alone is still, however, "the most comprehensive of rights," and one that we Americans must strive to take back, even when doing so puts us in a bit of danger.