Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Hard Port Cornography

Dubai is not the problem. 

Dubai is a gleaming modern city, an avatar of what the Arab world could be if it wanted to.  It’s the Venice of the Mid-East, a harbor capital founded on principles of profit and commerce, not prophecy and containment.  It wants to be our ally because that’s where the money is.  I suppose they’re as well-suited to run a port or six as anyone, including Britain, which hasn’t really ruled the waves for a century.  Dubai is our soldiers’ R&R destination, the site of a major tennis tournament.... The Amazing Race even filmed a segment there.  It’s more of a team player than many of our European allies. 

Given the facts, I don’t think we’d expect any worse from them than from anyone else.  Okay, so they supported the Taliban and two of the hijackers used them as a base of operations.  Maybe better relations with us would have chilled those indiscretions, and let’s face it, the last time before 2001 that our national shrines were hit by foreign operatives, it was the British burning down Washington DC.  They eventually came around.  I really don’t think the problem was Dubai.

The problem that’s hanging like an albatross around the President’s neck is what I call the “foie gras syndrome.” That’s the way they get that delectable gooseliver paste.  The best fois gras is the result of cramming so much corn down a goose’s gullet that its liver becomes grotesquely swollen.  Of course, the bird suffers by this treatment and is eventually so unhealthy that its slaughter is an almost humane end to its discomfiture.  But we do it because we love that rich, pungent pate.

When I hear, revelation by revelation, about this Dubai ports deal, I’m beginning to feel rather like a pate goose.  I suppose it started back in 2000.  I didn’t want George W. Bush as my president, and neither did a majority of Americans who voted - but the Supreme Court ruled that disputed ballots should not be recounted, and thus a minority-elected president was foisted upon me.  His tenure since then has been distinguished by two primary qualities: a condescending and paternalistic manner of pronouncing policy in short, declarative sentences that lack the sophistication and subtlety demanded by the subjects he addresses, and by a greater level of manipulative secrecy than any president we’ve ever had. 

I’m not just talking about twisted pre-war intelligence, though that’s a good place to start: what about environmental policy, fiscal policy, or torture?  The litany of US policies that this administration has cobbled together out of sows’ ears and half-baked analysis is enough to turn my stomach - and, increasingly, I’m not alone in my nausea.  What was once solid support for the Chief Executive, in DC and across the nation, is crumbling like so much of our infrastructure.  We didn’t need a botched response to a national disaster to bring it into unmistakable focus, but now it’s impossible to ignore: our government is crippled by a fatal combination of self-confidence and incompetence.

What’s worse, it’s petrified that we’ll discover this obvious fact.  Rather, they try to distract us with a steady diet of hot-button quick fixes, and pat reassurances that they know what they’re doing.  That’s what got W elected in the first place: his cool, calm confidence that he could handle the problems we couldn’t deal with ourselves.  He knew what we wanted, and he knew how to get it for us.  Now it seems we’ve given the keys to the national minivan to a man who’s too full of himself to ask for directions, and too distracted to read the road-signs.  He’s getting us loster, faster, than we’d ever imagined.  And the worst part is, he’s still telling us he knows exactly where he is and what he’s doing, even as it becomes increasingly obvious to all of us back here that we’re going to run out of gas or off the road before any of us get where we need to go.

All we want is to be kept in the loop.  If the Coast Guard says the DPW takeover of ports could cause security problems, that assessment should have been divulged, considered publicly, and addressed or dismissed as the facts warranted.  If the administration wanted to avoid the controversy about this deal in which it’s now mired, it should have operated more transparently and less clandestinely.  It seems no one in the White House (with the exception of the President himself, who was apparently kept in the dark like the rest of us) anticipated an uproar over this proposal, just as they didn’t anticipate resistance in Iraq or disapproval over social security reform or a category five hurricane hitting New Orleans.  What we want is input, advice, the opportunity to make up our own minds.  What we’re getting is corn, and plenty of it, jammed down our throats.  And though the fois gras may be tasty, we geese will never get to enjoy it. 

Sunday, February 26, 2006

I blog, therefore, I am (a geek)

I was sitting on a beerhall patio one friday afternoon in early 2002, nursing an Anchor and chatting with my new friend about this and that and random things.  She mentioned in passing that she’d written something about something on her.... her something, I didn’t catch exactly what.  I nodded into my beer and the conversation rolled along.  A few minutes later she mentioned it again and I called her on it.  “You posted it where?” “On my blog,” she explained with the patience with which one demonstrates superior sophistication to a small child with a learning disability.  She explained the phenomenon of having one’s own website, for sharing ideas and communicating with friends and even the occasional stranger.  I was intrigued.  She gave me her url and I checked it out the next day.  It was as she’d said, a simple static page of her thoughts, opinions, and self-expressions.  She occasionally linked up information from other sources, too, or a photo she’d found on the web.  I could even leave her a comment and join some sort of on-line conversation.  How very new millenium, I thought.  I was impressed. 

Over the next few weeks and months I started commenting regularly on her blog, and on a few others that sort of linked up with hers.  Many of these were run by her other drinking buddies, but some were from clear across the country and gave my blog-surfing a rather cosmopolitan air.  I started leaving longer and longer comments, until a few months later I realized that couldn’t keep monopolizing other people’s conversations from their comment boxes but had to start a blog of my own instead.  Blogger set me up with a no-frills account and a weird dystopian template, and I was off and running with short, strange posts that were to literature what exfoliation is to callused feet. 

I really enjoyed having this outlet for the foment of my mind, and as I went along I started making friends of my own - all imaginary, of course, restricted to the unreality of the computer screen, and all of us playing at blogging from across the country and around the globe.  It got to be quite a habit. 

Life ambled onward, as is its wont.  My writing got a bit wordier; my posts, more lengthy.  Some of my “imaginary” friends became quite important to me, even though I’d never met most of them.  The ones I did meet, however, were great people and confirmed the positive impression I’d formed of this new medium.  I blogged high and low, far and wide, and felt a real sense of community doing so.

It was also fun for me to find myself engaged, for a change, in a topical fad.  I’d lived through the summer of love but missed it completely; likewise the cb radio craze, the roller disco freakout, Melrose Place madness and cocaine mania.  I’d always missed the big social phenomena.  But here, I seemed to be on the leading edge of a very popular curve.  Within a few years blogs were everywhere and the curious cybertoy I’d embraced had become an important international phenomenon. 

As the same time, while a few of my imaginary friendships had become truly significant to me, even occasionally infringing into my “real” life, several of my original blog buddies began to ebb away over time.  With the first few, I noticed their absence but didn’t really feel it - the ‘sphere was crowded, and getting crowdeder.  As the ranks of ex-bloggers continued to grow, though, I started feeling as if quitting blogging was the new blogging.  It came to pass that many of my original crowd of drunk blog friends stopped maintaining their sites, and, in an unrelated development, I stopped hanging out with them so much.  As for the others, I found myself sometimes actually losing interest in meandering reportage and rants and harrangues and nonsensicalities.  I had enough of my own to work with. 

Recently I noticed that the woman who’d first told me about blogging hadn’t updated her site for five months.  Over the years I’ve had to switch out most all my links when other people had called it quits.  Several of my remaining favorite sites go months now without new material, leaving me to wonder if I should still keep them among my list of links.  I can’t keep up with most of the others that provide new material regularly.  I rarely comment anymore, and rarely get many comments on my own blog.  Besides that, traffic at my site has been, as of early 2006, on a slow but steady decline.  My parents give me more feedback on this blog than my friends, real or imaginary.  I dont’ know what this community is anymore, or even if it is.

So what’s this all about for me now?  It’s a question I’ve had to think through carefully.  I didn’t start writing when I started blogging - I’d been doing little essays and poems since grade school.  When I look back on them, thumbing through the drawers of stale paper and longhand scrawls, I’m struck by the quantity of material, and how awful most of it is.  Self-indulgent, sappy, clumsy and pointless, almost every page is a lesson in shoddy writing.  And that was fine, because no one but me would ever read any of it.  But here on this site in its various incarnations, I’ve known that other eyes will see my work, and see it as an end product, a piece of literature or at the least of creative expression, not juust as the sublimation of some random burst of mental energy I needed to disperse before I could fall asleep. 

In a sense, having readers I can no longer identify and whom I often don’t know, even if there aren’t many of you, compels me to write better sentences, urges me to find a more meaningful point to make or at least a joke that’s worth your time to read.  My success, I see when I look back over the archives, has been uneven - sometimes I feel like I’ve really articulated something that could have value, even if only entertainment value, which sometimes is value enough; sometimes I’m embarassed by what I’ve somehow deemed fit to post and I can only bear not to delete it because it provides an instructive example to me of my own vanity and hubris. 

But I do know, by the very nature of the internet, some people will stumble across the words I post, just as I know my own nature well enough to be sure that these ideas will keep clamoring in my mind to be reduced to writing.  If I am going to keep writing, I can use this site as a tool to hone my work, so that I can embarass myself minimally and offer the greatest possible incentive for you to return again to read more.  The community I had imagined myself to be a part of may yet exist, or maybe it never really did.  But the constructive value of parading my naked soul here before you has only grown more powerful for me over time.

So, I am drawn to conclude, I write to satisfy some internal compulsion over which I seem to have no control.  I blog because it forces me to give the product of that compulsion greater clarity, better structure.  If I am to tramp around naked in public, I should at least have the decency to present my best aspect.  It is your critical derogation or approbation that provides the whetstone to whatever skill I possess. I respectfully thank you for the motivation towards improved writing.  I will try not to let you down too often.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Redecorating

We’ve replaced your window of opportunity with a doggy door of ambiguity. Don’t let it hit you on the ass on the way out.