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| Wednesday, June 25, 2003 |
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IFT 
| | Nice to see conversational progress being made beyond the well-worn disagreements about RSS. |
| | Since there's a call for a new TLA to replace what's been called RSS 1.0, David offers this: |
| | Call the new work "MSS 1.0". MSS would stand for Metadata Site Summary. Make it clear that this is solving a different set of problems than RSS 2.0 solves - I think the wiki already goes a long way to describe the differences, both in scope and in philosophy. Let's let the confusion end, and bring some healing to the weblog technology world. |
Reconstructive suggestions
| | The Bush Pentagon went into this war assuming that it could decapitate the Iraqi army, bureaucracy and police force, remove the Saddam loyalists and then basically run Iraq through the rump army, bureaucracy and police. |
| | Wrong. What happened instead was that they all collapsed, leaving a security and administrative vacuum, which the U.S. military was utterly unprepared to fill. |
| | You know what I think we should do? Send the guys who created Burning Man over to iraq. They build a better society than the one they left behind every year out in the desert and then burn it down, cuz it's not about stuff or money. It's about creating your reality. And you can create a good one. A just one.... |
| | He also provides some helpful reminders: |
| | The Venetian empire lasted for 500 years as a world power even though, or maybe because, they were founded on a fragile series of islands in a marshy lagoon. They were able to do it because 1. They knew they pissed in the pool from which they drew their drinking water and which they used as their principle defense. And 2. They were able to subordinate the display of the male ego into actions that benefited society as a whole; 'I will show you my power with this new library,' 'oh yeah, I will build a new gallery and hospital'.... men's need to strut was channeled, so the boys strutted like roosters in their clearly bounded preening pens and society flourished. |
| | Second, the Dutch trading empire prior to William of Orange had perfected the highest profit and lowest cost international trade of any empire because they figured out how to respect the others they were encountering and do business in a way that both sides found satisfying so that their military expenditures were much less. They were the only ones the Japanese would do business with. Interestingly, these two intelligent empires were both resource constrained, so they compensated with life giving social structures. |
| | The thinker who unsuccessfully lobbied for the Dutch to hold onto their trading IP as a competitive, but ollaborative, differentiator while ceding military power to the rising British empire was Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). He is credited as the founder of international law, which grew into the Hague. |
| | We are an empire. You can have a good empire, with enlightened use of soft power. It's happened a few times in history. We need to make it happen again. Burning Man demonstrates the kind of civil-society-building power we could couple with our military power. We can't back away from being the world's dominant global power. But we can use all the kinds of power at our disposal to bring about the world we need to create in order to survive or maybe I should say ensure our mutual survivability. |
| | Clearly speaking loudly and carrying the biggest stick isn't doing the job. |
What are we doing here?
| | From my brother Severus, to love my kin, and to love truth, and to love justice; and through him I learned to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; and from him I received the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed... |
| | Speak your own convictions, and your own contradictions, he urged. Claim your own ideas before someone else does. "I hate quotations," begins another of the famous aphorisms. "Tell me what you know." Which is what the great bloggers keep doing. |
| | "In all my lectures," Emerson boiled it down, "I have taught one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man." Blogglers, do we recognize ourselves? |
| | We are glimpsing also, through individual voices on the World Wide Web, the fulfillment of Emerson's universalism and his confidence in cultural connectivity. The definitively American thinker was a globalist before there was such a thing. He was anti-racist and anti-nationalist, a student of Persian poetry and Buddhism, an inspiration to Thomas Carlyle and Jawarhalal Nehru. Not because he was a multi-culturalist but because he thought the human mind and heart were capable of immense and innumerable expansions. "There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us," he wrote in the essay: Circles . And now with the Web we understand more nearly what he meant. |
| | Ahead of the evolutionary and cognitive scientists, Emerson believed there was one human brain, one universal mind. |
| | We are, almost all of us, in range of Aristotle's intellect, Emerson fancied. "The mind is one," he wrote in the essay, History: "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent." |
| | Then on Monday Chris visited one of the toughest canaries ever to survive the coal mine of newspaper journalism: Jimmy Breslin. I want to excerpt one representative morsel of Breslin's column (as Dan did — more about that below), but I can't. I want you to read the whole story, not just the conclusion: |
| | On Friday, I rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, whose gray netting went with the sky, and as long as there was tension about the bridge, I was remembering Richard Seaberg, a big cop from Emergency One, who climbed to the top of the bridge so many times and pulled somebody down before he jumped. Seaberg protected the Brooklyn Bridge. |
| | Now there is a charge by the government that terrorists intended to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, or pull it down. Simultaneously, while protecting the bridge, the government was doing frightening damage to the life of the country. |
| | Because of it, I am thinking that it could be time for me to begin thinking about leaving this news business. It is not mine anymore. Let me tell you why. |
| | Friday, the newspapers and television reported the following matter with no anger or effort to do anything other than serve as stenographers for the government: |
| | On March 1, give or take a day, in Columbus, Ohio, the FBI arrested an American citizen they say is Iyman Faris. There wasn't a word uttered. He vanished. No lawyer was notified. He made no phone calls and wrote no postcards or letters. |
| | He was a United States citizen who disappeared without a trace into a secret metal world. |
| | This citizen's proper name was Mohammed Rauf. He took the Faris from a street name in his neighborhood in Columbus. I don't know why he did this for sure. A friend of mine in Columbus, Mike Weber, told me Friday that he thought the federal agents wanted him to use Faris because the real name, Rauf, purportedly would alert others that he had been caught. Who knows? You believe the FBI, you belong back in public school. |
| | They held him secretly in an iron world for the next six weeks. This is plenty of time to hand out giant beatings. Oh, yes, don't gasp. If cops are performing a Fascist act, then always suspect them of acting like Fascists. They have fun beating people up. |
| | In mid-April, again in deep secrecy, the government says Faris was allowed to plead guilty to plotting to pull down or blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. He was in a sealed Virginia federal courtroom. If he had a lawyer, that was some lawyer. |
| | After that, he was sentenced. We don't know what the sentence was because it is sealed. |
| | I don't know what Faris looks like or sounds like or what he thinks and what he was doing. He could be the worst. I don't know. Prove he wanted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and let him paste a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cell wall for inspiration over the next half a century. But first bring him into open court and try him. Pretend you live in America. Even pick a jury. I don't know. What a thing it would be if he comes up not guilty. |
| | What we do know is that this is your country now. |
| | Breslin has opened my eyes. This case is a travesty -- not because Faris is necessarily innocent. He probably isn't. But justice is not supposed to be a game where "probably" is enough to send someone to prison for the rest of his life after a secret arrest, secret detention and secret proceedings. |
| | The travesty is, first, that our government now operates a secret criminal justice system, because Congress doesn't care enough about liberty to stop a power-mad Bush administration from tearing up the Constitution. |
| | The second travesty, as Breslin trenchantly observes, is the spinelessness of my chosen profession. I am ashamed to be a journalist when I realize how far down the road we have gone toward utter deference to power. |
| | Why are journalists not screaming bloody murder about this case? Sloth no longer suffices to explain our negligence? |
| | I cringe for my profession. I fear for America. |
| | In fact, fear has become what America is about. (Remember "fear itself?" It's running the show now.) |
| | On NPR this morning I heard a former diplomat lament the dying of reading rooms in embassies, as America's preoccupations in other countries morphs from cultural outreach to obsession with paranoia and security. |
| | There's a larger thread here. It's still about journalism, but of the extra-institutional sort required to remind civilization what it is fundamentally about — and has been, since our first bloggers started writing about it, and trying to improve it, way back whenever. |
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