How To Take Up a Whole Day Typing What's Below When I Should Have Been Working

This was written to Brian Lehrer of WNYC regarding the idiotic bombast over the Dubai Ports World trying to finalize a deal to buy New York ports facilities, when much of America's ports' operations are already owned or run by foreign-domiciled companies. This was the last straw for me in allowing the pimps whoring the word "terror" all over the hype-machine to try to rule every waking moment of our lives. This is the day I quit. I simply quit this needless cluttering of my time, the day I ceased thinking anyone could rise above the soulless political calculus to actually make equitable decisions. But I'd like to thank our parliament of street hustlers for helping me forgo the political discourse as a noxious roar of flatulence and utter waste of my time. Kudos.

Brian,

The thick-headed reaction to the fact that the UAE is doing ports business in New York is one more dreadful example of how some of us in the U.S., whether puffed up politicians or riled-up, over-frightened citizens, are ceding themselves to all things deemed "terrorism" or risk thereof. To base every decision we make whole or even half hog on the spector of terror is to cede to it, simply, and is no way to live nor operate in the world. In effect, it enables disaffected cave-dwelling fascists to wag all of our dogs, and raises the spector that we're turning into same. Just to pique the folks who are so taken aback that the U.S. or New York would cinch a deal with a foreign power or firm known to reside in a country with a minority population of spurious characters and criminals, they should answer the following question: What other firms and governments are doing business in New York with similar M.O.s that could also reek havoc upon us?!!!!" Oh my gosh...The answer should send great jolts of fear coursing through the overtaxed nervous systems of every New Yorker, as such transactions are done everyday, and they include every nation in the world, including the U.S.: The spurious are everywhere, cross every boundary of race, nationality, country, language, religion, dress and aversion or lack thereof to asparagus.

All firms with a majority of Arabic-speaking staff are not terrorists, just as a majority of Americans are not delusional, silly tourists. What we're dealing with here is a deficiency of perceptions and context, with reality skewered and skewed to the fun-house mirror. May we speculate about the likelihood that local politicians are using this ports deal to look tough ahead of mid-term elections, in just one example of a time-honored travesty in which reality becomes increasingly distorted as poll time nears? Hmmm, just a ventured guess... Some of the shittiest, most dangerous legislation gets written in such reactionary times.

Where, pray tell, are all the outraged voices now that part of the venerable New York Stock Exchange, that oh-so-American institution, looks increasingly like it will be partially owned by, gulp, the French? (Amsterdam-based bourse Euronext is the result of the merger of the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam stock exchanges; and an NYSE bid for the whole package is pending at press time.) It's part of our national infrastructure for Grasso's sake! Oh Mother Mary!

But let me offer a simple solution to this ports situation: The rational reaction would be to do the due diligence on the deal, and be done with it, or perhaps demand the company hire a U.S. or local expert on staff to act as security or background checker to vet the firm in its daily operations, which would show good faith on both sides. Do that, and then tell the loudmouths to shut up. Simple. Done. Sounds like a rational compromise in a complex, but free,... oh, I'm sorry -- aspiring to be free -- free market world, does it not? Maybe it goes too far. Well then, do the due diligence, distrust but verify, and be done with it.

This unfortunate ports and politics story, though, neatly sums up the problem we face in our reactions to the "terror" dilemma: That by enabling over-terrified citizens and the political hacks who feed their fears and seize on their naivete via the pendulum-swinging momentum 9-11 spurred toward protecting everyone from everything in what is essentially and always has been and always will be an uncertain world, we cede our ability to these same less-than-rational forces, which hold our hands as we yield our right to walk through our lives with any modicum of freedom, rationality, and self-control, enabling the tradeoff, or loss, at least in some degree, of the ways in which we would otherwise choose to live our lives in exchange that the government ensures our physical security, which, when one thinks about it, is essentially impossible. So that's the question. It's not really "what's worth protecting," but "what's worth not losing?"

So pegging to the UAE ports deal a terror risk so high we must refuse to do business with "them," is to show subservience to a fuzzy and bogus dogma that would have us close our ports in these apparent global and "free" markets to anyone but firms with no Arab ties, to put in bluntly. By allowing such overreaching, unctuous reactions to run rampant, we forfeit reason and our self-control to the counterfeit cannons of our enemies. Meaning, we risk taking on all the same jingoistic, clash-of-civilizations bunk and xenophobic rhetoric and malformed mindset of the reason-deficient boobs who believe killing people with different opinions is God's will. Losing ourselves in this way, to those who would have us believe that this is now the way of the world, poses real dangers. Foremost, the ports tempest conflates "UAE" or "Arab" with "terrorist," just as Europeans sometimes conflate "Americans" with "silly tourists," to repeat a prior analogy. The whole thing is making New York, and New Yorkers, of which I am proudly one, look like a bunch of muckering bumpkins, versus the nuanced, smart, most-savvy-in-the-world we know ourselves to be. This willingness to yield our self-control and really, our souls, dare I say, in various immeasurable portions, to loudmouth politicians and by proxy, to the very terrorists to whom we're trying to refuse, defuse, and thwart, the antitheses of who we claim we are, or imagine ourselves to be, is to jump off the bridge because they said so.

Sure, it's actually the politicians who are making political hay of the day out of this, so those succumbing to their spin can be forgiven (even though it pains me greatly to empathize with P.T. Barnum's braying suckers); the issues involved are not without complexity. But smarten up, will ya? -- those succumbing to this noxious spin.

Because there IS a middle ground here. Like due diligence and vetting. Yet it's just such "a middle ground" that the politicians and self-proclaimed wagers of the "war on terror" have, and are, increasingly stealing from us. Whether knee-jerk, premeditated or not, those deeming themselves our "protectors" (read: "drunk with power") are too often too willing to void nuance from the rhetoric of a debate that's so direly needed for the extremely complex, multi-issued decision-making that needs to take place to solve the difficult dilemmas we face. The subsumption of reasoned, intelligent dialogue to overheated political hackdom and bombast is much like the terrorists we're seeking to defeat would have it, meaning it's dogmatic to the core. It seems 9-11, a hateful, murderous irrational action, has inspired a reaction that's far enough outside the realm of reason that it has us playing foot-servant to our enemies, in effect, jumping everytime they say boo. It's also allowing some of us to feel enough confidence to make empiric decries -- with terror a proxy for everything -- to create a silence where there needs the most debate, a silence that's deafening, and, if isn't a tilt toward tyrrany or weakening or dogma, then I'm not sure what is. One would not be incorrect in presuming that in the aforementioned I was referring to the Administration's (read: Cheney's, Addington's) decision to turn the NSA's ear and data-mining prowess on American citizens while gagging Congress' "gang of eight," in the meanwhile, from knowledge and debate and therefore the constitutionally demanded Congressional oversight of the executive branch that, critics say, a would-be King has deemed unimportant, in the context of deciding to give FISA an ass-fucking, in the name of fighting all things "terrorism," and all terrorists, of which there is assuredly one behind every bush, garbage pale and Starbucks counter. One wouldn't be considered too much of a thoughtless punter or downright boob, if he or she were to wager that in the days or hours after 9-11, every mode of domestic communication, and particularly in major cities, especially New York and D.C.., were lit-up for listening and tapped by whatever agency had the capability. What don't we know, after all? But alas, only silence.

But why not solve the problem where it starts?: Secular politicos in Arab countries need to stop cynically thwarting their citizens from bootstrapping themselves out of educational and economic poverty just to keep power and wealth among a small set of uber-sultans -- the politicos themselves -- who have cast their citizenry off to the bidding of wahhabist, fascist clerics, who create suicide-bombing terrrorists like factories spitting out Volkswagens, though we all hope in less numbers. This is a power-sharing arrangment that the U.S. needs to demand Middle East and South Asian nations stop. These rulers must cease this tradeoff of securing establishment riches via citizen mind-control immediately, or else face consequences, so that the appropriate avenues and opportunities can be created to end this cycle of desperation, despondence, violence and hatred, for which these cast-off citizens are stuck and predisposed. One argument may in fact be to bar economic deals (including the port transaction), until countries deemed not doing enough to clean up their fundamentalist messes, do do enough and go far to keep doing it. Yet that's not how the opponents of the ports deal are framing their argument.

But allowing these clerics to continue to cloak themselves in God's will to brainwash the naive, uneducated, spoonfed and hopeless citizenry who otherwise would be protesting their governments in the streets so the political establishment can continue to lavish themselves with the spoils of the countries they rule is a true crime, a devil's deal of proxy control that must end. That's the real war, in fact. It's a hearts and minds operation that, because it threatens the political establishment in these countries, has been less than successful.

The furor over the political cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad shows just how distracted the muslim masses are, and continue to be, and just how successful those who hold power over them have focused their frustations elsewhere, beyond their borders, away from those who truly keep them disenfranchised, those who do little to nothing to mitigate their economic and educational misery and impoverishment: their own governments. Of course, foreign policy wags will tell you it's a predicament that needs to be solved from the inside, by an educated, establishment player, lest those protests in the streets lend themselves down the path to a toppling that embraces fundamentalism, something truly to be avoided by anyone interested in civil rights and a marketplace of ideas, and security. So it's likely that for security reasons, the U.S. is propping up these same governments who thwart or distract much of the will -- or at least keep it bottled or aimed elsewhere -- of their own citizens. (Pakistan, in all it's scary complexity, comes to mind.) Hence the glacial pace we're on. At least the cartoons started the conversation, though. That these drawings sparked so much violence speaks to how irrational and distracted much of the Arab street has become from being stuck in the mire and the funhouse mirror so long by those that rule them. And by "those that rule them," I mean their own nation's rulers, the rulemaking and systems under which they're governed, who have have made domestic choices, set domestic policy and created domestic frameworks for which no outsider can be justifiably blamed.

Yet it must be realized that we too, the citizens of the U.S., are in our own fun-house mirror when it comes to the issues of "terror" and domestic and foreign policy. But that critical debate, that crucial middle ground, has been taken from us, by political hacks for sure, but by us, in the end. This is a dangerous void that needs to fill and remain filled with voices. It's vitally important to understand, that the world is NOT different, it's the same as it always has been. Meaning, there are always people who will resort to violence and lash out, have been since the time of the caveman: We just got hit really, really hard, on 9-11, by cavemen who have seemingly been left to "thrive" in the 21st century. What is not said enough is that too many Americans make the fundamental mistake of believing that the world truly is fundamentally changed, made forever different by a group of fundamentialists, a gaggle of disaffected men hiding in the dusty borderlands between a failed state and a deeply flawed one; that we need to give up certain of our deeply held notions, our freedoms and rights in effect, because of these men (because they are predominantly men), to continually and forever fight the uncertainty that there are other men out there, or other disaffected people who may want to hurt us. That we must battle what is essentially continual, perpetual uncertainty, when uncertainty is the only truly certain thing there is in life.

Well, this is no way to live. Agreeing to live under fundamental change inspired by fundamentalists in a so-called "war" against said uncertainty which has no end in sight, seems a tyrrany none of us should be willing to endure.



Re: The "were we misled?" show as you moderated Brian, briefly:

Also, look at Iraq as a proxy war, at least for a moment: First, look on the map. Iraq's in the middle of the part of the world in which the 9-11 terrorists came from. Venture that WMD was an excuse and Iraq was an easy target. Most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, yet we didn't declare war on Saudi Arabia. That seemed a non-starter. The only rational force response to the attacks that 9-11 triggered which seems fairly readily apparent was when the U.S. military was sent to Afghanistan, a country which harbored and provided training ground for these terrorists. So back to the root of the problem: while it's the hope of many that at least some U.S. attache made it clear to the Saudi rulers, citing the inordinate amount of Saudi citizens who were 9-11 hijackers, that if they don't clean up their fundamentalist wahhabist mess that led to this travesty, they'll become the 51st state, such a story has yet to be told, if it happened at all. So where is the pressure? The fact remains, Saudia Arabia needs to be pressured to stop and shut down these idiot clerics and their insane asylums, to stem the problem at its root.

But look again at the map, Afghanistan seems less than centrally located, or not enough in the fertile crescent, to achieve multiple policy goals via a single action, goals of which are all pegged on influencing policy in the Middle East overall, which the Administration capitulates now, but not prior to the war, they are after. Perhaps it seems then that the Administration went, again consulting the map, to Iraq to establish a beach-head to influence Middle East policy, just as the U.S. political apparatus deeply involved itself in Latin America during the Cold War to ensure governments toed the line by staying center-right and non-socialist, which surely continues to some degree today, as it did then, via covert or non-direct funding, or in the extreme, via the support of loathsome dictators, or via proxy wars, and sometimes all of the aforementioned, all at once. Hell, the U.S. armed UBL to fight the Soviets. So perhaps then, same story, different part of the globe. The aforementioned theory it should be noted, is one preferred by a wonkish set certainly not devoid of their own agendas and politics.

But say the unwillingness and inability to be honest about this, to tell the American people the "true" reasons for the war, that the aforementioned is accurate. It may be baffling, but it goes to political expediency. That is, to gain majority support for a war with a country that doesn't seem to have committed or be linked in any way to the crime triggering the fight -- 9-11 -- the Administration was forced to sell it by claiming some opposite of the former, and WMD, both of which, it appears, were inaccurate assertions. Did they know that and say otherwise? History may show. Suspicions, even with maps, are not facts. One should never assume, just as they should never lie with people's lives in the balance.

No one likes being lied too, or falsely accused, and one should accept neither. Dishonesty does not stand in a country based on freedom and the rule of law. While hoping that public officials will be honest is like spitting in the wind or swimming upstream in a shitstorm, the only thing keeping the republic together is holding those with power to the proverbial fire to make sure they do tell the truth, otherwise tyrrany, or some unsavory degree of it, reins. So say the Administration has treated U.S. citizens on a need-to-know basis in all this. If true, its critics will point out, it's only part of an all-encompassing M.O. in how this group has been seen to comport itself, wield power and chose to govern. A Straussian, if not a Faustian bargain. Perhaps.

I think the problem of the "misled?" debate was that everyone kept getting mired in the minutaie of puzzle pieces and angles and political hackdom, as well as making sweeping assumptions, to be blind of the forest but for the trees. It left the debate fractious, with lots of premium venting, but without moving the dialogue forward, much. One thing I'm truly grateful for, though, is that there is able to be such a debate, at all. It's unfortunate, however, that this view is not held by all, and particularly by those wielding power.