Saturday, June 24, 2006
Dare pondus idonea fumo
If you believe the media, everything that happens in this country is going to have long-lasting ramifications, effects that will last well into the 2010s and 2020s. People charge the president with ruining the country, with permanently dismantling the American dream, and with diverse varieties of high crime. People call him "the worst president of all time", and they insist that he will be the next Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, or, even worse, John Adams. "The world is laughing at us", is the cry on the street. Republicans fear the fall of the country to terrorists, while Democrats fear the fall of the country in general! Each party, with their associated members and commentators, accuses the other group of crimes, scandals, and, if you believe the papers, the worst case of idiocy since people decided that the world was flat. America, they say, is about to fall. Or not. It depends on who's commenting.
Every couple of weeks, the 24-hour cable news networks have a new scandal for us, or a new horror, which they claim will be variously the downfall of Republicans, Democrats, America, the terrorists, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the president, former presidents, religion, politics, America's sense of decency, our place in the civilized world, and, last but not least, the economy. Political commentators denounce various groups with carefully worded, exquisitely quotable rants and speeches, designed to incense their viewers, who, of course, already agree with them.
People have threatened to move to Canada over it. Computer users spend hours of their lives on the Internet arguing about these topics, as though convincing other Internet users of their political views will change the fate of the world. While I don't personally know of such a case, I would not be at all surprised to hear that people have gone on antidepressant and antianxiety medications, or become alcoholics, because of their addiction to political and religious media melodrama.
And it's getting worse. Listening to the media recite horror stories of war and politics day after day, can lead one to believe that our time is worse than all other times. After all, don't we have more political scandals today than any other time? Hasn't the economy gone downhill for a longer period of time than any other time in history? Aren't world events more ominous than the Cuban missile crisis or World War II? Hasn't the President decreed that habeus corpus is no longer the law of the land, and that national security trumps personal welfare? Didn't somebody who lived next to Hitler's or Stalin's or Mussolini's great-uncle's brother-in-law say the same things?
While you're experiencing the political uproar around an election or war, the three weeks the media spends on each event may seem like a very long time. Sometimes, the period is a bit longer, like the year leading up to the election in 2004. When faced with these tales of political ineptitude, images of death, and predictions of never-ending and uninterruptible woe, it is understandable that some people might become distressed. When these things come back-to-back, as they have recently, the position that we are now living in the worst of times becomes slightly more defensible.
I'm going to ask you a very interesting question. You may be amazed by your own answer to the question. Are you ready? Here we go:
One year ago
What was the media crisis at this time last year (July 2005)? I'll even give you points if you can remember any earlier crises.
Katrina had not yet occurred. The 2005 hurricane season was not looking terrible. Bird flu was a murmur in the wind.
Do you remember? Do you even have a vague idea? Certainly, you might come up with some vague answer involving George Bush and the war in Iraq, and you might be right, but I'm looking for specifics. Do you even remember what the political crisis was in March 2006, less than three months ago? Do you remember thinking that this crisis, unlike all the others, would irrevocably change the landscape of American freedom? Do you remember thinking that it was different in some way from all the other crises? Did you wonder whether this was the one that would finally bring about the inevitable fall of one of those groups mentioned in the first paragraph?
Did you remember the Live-8 concert that was simulcast in 10 countries around the world seeking donations in the fight against poverty? If you're a fan, it may not seem like it's been a year since the sixth Harry Potter book was released. Do you remember the bombings in the London underground that killed 56 people? In politics, Justice O'Connor has just retired and Bush has just nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a reversal of corporate media law from the 1980s, voted that peer-to-peer file sharing application developers can be held liable for illegal actions by their users. Did you remember the election of hardline Iranian president Ahmadinejad or the succession of kings in Saudi Arabia? Did you remember that Bush promised to fire anybody connected with the Valerie Plame leak? Do you remember the imminent domain Supreme Court ruling? How about the life, fame, and death of Terri Schiavo? How about the new Pope's past in the Nazi Youth, revealed at the end of April?
Two years ago
Try thinking of the crisis two years ago, twice the length between now and that time in which you couldn't name anything. That would be July 2004. At the time the Swift boat veterans were busy slamming presidential candidates. People were busy calling John Kerry a flip flopper. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was busy with his Indecision 2004 coverage in which he repeatedly slammed both candidates for their ineptitude to the delight (and horror) of his overwhelmingly liberal audience. Space buffs may remember that the Cassini probe finally arrived at Saturn and took some photos of its moon Titan. Hundreds of thousands of people have only six more months to live in Indonesia's fishing villages. Soccer fans may remember that Greece beat Portugal to win the 2004 European football championship. Did you remember that George Tenet, the head of the CIA, resigned? Are you sure that wasn't a few years earlier? Could you have told me that on June 28, 2004, the coalition forces in Iraq transferred power to an interim government?
Did you remember that on February 3, 2004, the CIA admitted that Iraq had no readily available weapons of mass destruction? Did you remember the March 11 bombings on a train in Madrid, which killed 190 civilians? Did you remember the May 19 confession of a soldier involved with prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib? Did you remember the video depicting the decapitation of Nick Berg? Did you remember the July 1st capture of Saddam Hussein, widely touted as an early "October Surprise"? Did you remember the surprise resignation of the Republican governor of New Jersey after he came out of the closet? Did you remember the November resignation of Colin Powell?
Four years ago
Now we're in the year 2002. The mad shoe bomber has just been captured! Nobody has even heard of SARS yet. Saddam Hussein has just rejected another United Nations disarmament proposal. The war in Afghanistan is just beginning. On July 1, the United States accidentally bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan, believing the group to be a legitimate target. Political gears of blame are spinning in Washington DC as the FBI and CIA tried to downplay on their own role in the 9/11 attacks. Somebody tried to assassinate the president of France. The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh (did you remember him?), pled guilty on July 15th. A month earlier, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction for shredding the Enron financial documents.
On June 5th, American's favorite missing Mormon, Elizabeth Smart, is kidnapped from her home. There was a solar eclipse on June 10 of that year, recorded in some scientist's journal, and then forgotten. In August of that year, Europe was traumatized by massive floods. Dozens of people were killed and thousands were moved out of their homes. The space shuttle Columbia is still intact. That newfangled reality show, American Idol, premiered on Fox this year.
Eight years ago
1998.
The children of this year have just been afflicted with the infamous Pokémon cartoon for the first time. Google began its run for dominance in September of this year. The first home broadband connections are just beginning to creep into the marketplace. MySpace is released as a beta this year, a proposition that may seem anachronistic to the Internet's trendy. Nobody is downloading music, because Napster doesn't exist yet. 64 megabytes of RAM is considered astounding and more than enough. DVD players have only been sold in the United States for about a year. Daimler-Chrysler was formed by a merger this year. Exxon Mobil was created by a similar merger in December.
Bill Clinton's administration is at the height of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal in which the president was charged with perjury. The Catholic sex abuse scandal has just begun when nine men were paid $23 million in damages for alleged abuse when the men were altar boys. On July 17 of this year, a tsunami struck the island of Papua New Guinea, killing and wounding nearly 4000 people. In Russia, the ruble has lost almost 70 percent of its value since the beginning of the year leading to the collapse of banks and general mass financial distress in that country. Millions of people lost their savings. Jesse Ventura has just been elected governor of Minnesota.
In the foreshadowing department, Iraq suspended all ties with the UN disarmament investigation team this August. Osama bin Laden bombed the United States embassies in this year, killing or injuring almost 5000 people. On August 28 of this year, the head of the UN investigation committee resigned from his post claiming that the UN was not doing enough to ensure that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed. A month later, the United States Congress passed the "Iraq liberation act" which claimed that the United States wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace his regime with a democratic government!
That was only eight years ago. As you can see, under a constant barrage of crisis, time can become a little distorted. We tend to think that our current crises will go on forever, and that past crises are not relevant. Remember though, there's as much temporal distance between us and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as there will be between the year 2014 and now. If the political and economic details of 1998 are shadowy to us in 2006, the political and economic details of 2006 will probably be murky to the people of 2014. Software companies founded this year could supplant both Google and Microsoft by 2014!
If you wish to keep carrying on this time-span doubling:
16 years ago/from now (1990/2022): There's as much time between the Gulf War and the Lewinsky scandal as there is between the Lewinsky scandal and today. What happened during those 8 years? Do you remember? Were there no political scandals or crises of law until 1998?
The Cold War officially ends in 1990! Manuel Noriega (remember him?) surrenders to American forces in Panama. The Exxon Valdez oil spill pollutes an Alaskan shoreline and lines the pockets of environmentalists everywhere. The Berlin Wall has only been demolished for about a month. East Germany holds its first free elections this year in six decades. People are still raving about the recent Tiananmen Square incident in China. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, infamous for his war crimes during the Clinton administration, is elected on December 9th. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is freed and decades of apartheid are ended after significant international pressure.
You'll notice that I've not even mentioned minor political scandals, media spasms, and other temporary panics. For instance, the Bush administration response to the Valdez spill was less than stellar, fueling several weeks worth of daytime talk shows. I didn't even recognize minor Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes like the one near the Dome of the Rock on October 8th. I didn't note the election of (now overthrown) Haitian President Aristide, which ended three decades of military dictatorship. I neglected George Bush's failure to keep his "no new taxes" campaign promise or his signature of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Admit it - you thought that had been around forever!)
I somehow missed the classified military mission of the space shuttle Atlantis, which probably caused a great deal of suspicious speculation at the time. Also missing are the giant poll-tax protest in London which caused almost 500 injuries, the details of the West and East German merger, and the details of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time Inc and Warner Communications merged this year to become Time Warner.
On the propaganda front, the US began broadcasting American television station TV Marti to Cuba. In politics, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, responsible for covering up the Iran-Contra scandal, was sentenced on multiple felony counts of obstruction, conspiracy, etc. (By 2003, he was leading the Department of Defense's controversial Information Awareness and Policy Analysis Market programs - did you remember those?)
All of these, weighty international issues in 1990, are barely memories today.
Moving to the future: In 2022, people born in 2006 will be receiving their driver's licenses. People who graduated from college in May 2006 will be the parents of those teenagers. People in 2022 will be as concerned with the politics of the present as we are today with the politics of the first Bush administration.
32 years ago/from now (1974/2038): There was as much time between the end of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War as there is between the first Gulf War and today.
In 2038, most people graduating from college in 2006 will be considering retirement. The last of the baby boomers, the parents of those graduates, will be in their nineties. The unruly teenagers from 2022 could be raising their own unruly teenagers in 2038.
In 1974 the OPEC energy crisis is still taking place. American citizens are waiting in line for hours to get gas, and fuel is being carefully rationed among drivers. People magazine is published for the first time this year. Seven people are indicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal; a few months later, Richard Nixon resigns. Much to the dismay of the defeated party, a prime minister is elected in England with fewer votes than his opponent. The last American soldiers are evacuated from Vietnam at the end of April this year.
Fascist supporters are still a worldwide threat and perform terrorist bombings, killing 6 people. The fossil hominid Lucy is discovered in Africa. The town of Darwin, Australia, is devasted by a cyclone. The militant leaders of Greece and Cyprus are overthrown. Chemical explosions kill 28 plant workers. An outbreak of 148 tornadoes kills 300 and injures over 5000 people. In other news, this year marks the 10th birthday of the United States civil rights act that banned discrimination based on race. Millions of people are still immensely unhappy that their children can attend schools with "colored" children.
Conclusion
Things you consider exceedingly crucial today will probably be meaningless historical artifacts to your children and their children in 2022 and 2038. So don't pretend that every new political crisis is the end of the world, or that it will finally bring about the downfall of your particular political enemies. They thought the same thing in 1974.
Every couple of weeks, the 24-hour cable news networks have a new scandal for us, or a new horror, which they claim will be variously the downfall of Republicans, Democrats, America, the terrorists, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the president, former presidents, religion, politics, America's sense of decency, our place in the civilized world, and, last but not least, the economy. Political commentators denounce various groups with carefully worded, exquisitely quotable rants and speeches, designed to incense their viewers, who, of course, already agree with them.
People have threatened to move to Canada over it. Computer users spend hours of their lives on the Internet arguing about these topics, as though convincing other Internet users of their political views will change the fate of the world. While I don't personally know of such a case, I would not be at all surprised to hear that people have gone on antidepressant and antianxiety medications, or become alcoholics, because of their addiction to political and religious media melodrama.
And it's getting worse. Listening to the media recite horror stories of war and politics day after day, can lead one to believe that our time is worse than all other times. After all, don't we have more political scandals today than any other time? Hasn't the economy gone downhill for a longer period of time than any other time in history? Aren't world events more ominous than the Cuban missile crisis or World War II? Hasn't the President decreed that habeus corpus is no longer the law of the land, and that national security trumps personal welfare? Didn't somebody who lived next to Hitler's or Stalin's or Mussolini's great-uncle's brother-in-law say the same things?
While you're experiencing the political uproar around an election or war, the three weeks the media spends on each event may seem like a very long time. Sometimes, the period is a bit longer, like the year leading up to the election in 2004. When faced with these tales of political ineptitude, images of death, and predictions of never-ending and uninterruptible woe, it is understandable that some people might become distressed. When these things come back-to-back, as they have recently, the position that we are now living in the worst of times becomes slightly more defensible.
I'm going to ask you a very interesting question. You may be amazed by your own answer to the question. Are you ready? Here we go:
One year ago
What was the media crisis at this time last year (July 2005)? I'll even give you points if you can remember any earlier crises.
Katrina had not yet occurred. The 2005 hurricane season was not looking terrible. Bird flu was a murmur in the wind.
Do you remember? Do you even have a vague idea? Certainly, you might come up with some vague answer involving George Bush and the war in Iraq, and you might be right, but I'm looking for specifics. Do you even remember what the political crisis was in March 2006, less than three months ago? Do you remember thinking that this crisis, unlike all the others, would irrevocably change the landscape of American freedom? Do you remember thinking that it was different in some way from all the other crises? Did you wonder whether this was the one that would finally bring about the inevitable fall of one of those groups mentioned in the first paragraph?
Did you remember the Live-8 concert that was simulcast in 10 countries around the world seeking donations in the fight against poverty? If you're a fan, it may not seem like it's been a year since the sixth Harry Potter book was released. Do you remember the bombings in the London underground that killed 56 people? In politics, Justice O'Connor has just retired and Bush has just nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a reversal of corporate media law from the 1980s, voted that peer-to-peer file sharing application developers can be held liable for illegal actions by their users. Did you remember the election of hardline Iranian president Ahmadinejad or the succession of kings in Saudi Arabia? Did you remember that Bush promised to fire anybody connected with the Valerie Plame leak? Do you remember the imminent domain Supreme Court ruling? How about the life, fame, and death of Terri Schiavo? How about the new Pope's past in the Nazi Youth, revealed at the end of April?
Two years ago
Try thinking of the crisis two years ago, twice the length between now and that time in which you couldn't name anything. That would be July 2004. At the time the Swift boat veterans were busy slamming presidential candidates. People were busy calling John Kerry a flip flopper. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was busy with his Indecision 2004 coverage in which he repeatedly slammed both candidates for their ineptitude to the delight (and horror) of his overwhelmingly liberal audience. Space buffs may remember that the Cassini probe finally arrived at Saturn and took some photos of its moon Titan. Hundreds of thousands of people have only six more months to live in Indonesia's fishing villages. Soccer fans may remember that Greece beat Portugal to win the 2004 European football championship. Did you remember that George Tenet, the head of the CIA, resigned? Are you sure that wasn't a few years earlier? Could you have told me that on June 28, 2004, the coalition forces in Iraq transferred power to an interim government?
Did you remember that on February 3, 2004, the CIA admitted that Iraq had no readily available weapons of mass destruction? Did you remember the March 11 bombings on a train in Madrid, which killed 190 civilians? Did you remember the May 19 confession of a soldier involved with prisoner abuse at Abu Gharib? Did you remember the video depicting the decapitation of Nick Berg? Did you remember the July 1st capture of Saddam Hussein, widely touted as an early "October Surprise"? Did you remember the surprise resignation of the Republican governor of New Jersey after he came out of the closet? Did you remember the November resignation of Colin Powell?
Four years ago
Now we're in the year 2002. The mad shoe bomber has just been captured! Nobody has even heard of SARS yet. Saddam Hussein has just rejected another United Nations disarmament proposal. The war in Afghanistan is just beginning. On July 1, the United States accidentally bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan, believing the group to be a legitimate target. Political gears of blame are spinning in Washington DC as the FBI and CIA tried to downplay on their own role in the 9/11 attacks. Somebody tried to assassinate the president of France. The American Taliban, John Walker Lindh (did you remember him?), pled guilty on July 15th. A month earlier, the accounting firm Arthur Andersen was convicted of obstruction for shredding the Enron financial documents.
On June 5th, American's favorite missing Mormon, Elizabeth Smart, is kidnapped from her home. There was a solar eclipse on June 10 of that year, recorded in some scientist's journal, and then forgotten. In August of that year, Europe was traumatized by massive floods. Dozens of people were killed and thousands were moved out of their homes. The space shuttle Columbia is still intact. That newfangled reality show, American Idol, premiered on Fox this year.
Eight years ago
1998.
The children of this year have just been afflicted with the infamous Pokémon cartoon for the first time. Google began its run for dominance in September of this year. The first home broadband connections are just beginning to creep into the marketplace. MySpace is released as a beta this year, a proposition that may seem anachronistic to the Internet's trendy. Nobody is downloading music, because Napster doesn't exist yet. 64 megabytes of RAM is considered astounding and more than enough. DVD players have only been sold in the United States for about a year. Daimler-Chrysler was formed by a merger this year. Exxon Mobil was created by a similar merger in December.
Bill Clinton's administration is at the height of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal in which the president was charged with perjury. The Catholic sex abuse scandal has just begun when nine men were paid $23 million in damages for alleged abuse when the men were altar boys. On July 17 of this year, a tsunami struck the island of Papua New Guinea, killing and wounding nearly 4000 people. In Russia, the ruble has lost almost 70 percent of its value since the beginning of the year leading to the collapse of banks and general mass financial distress in that country. Millions of people lost their savings. Jesse Ventura has just been elected governor of Minnesota.
In the foreshadowing department, Iraq suspended all ties with the UN disarmament investigation team this August. Osama bin Laden bombed the United States embassies in this year, killing or injuring almost 5000 people. On August 28 of this year, the head of the UN investigation committee resigned from his post claiming that the UN was not doing enough to ensure that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed. A month later, the United States Congress passed the "Iraq liberation act" which claimed that the United States wanted to remove Saddam Hussein from power and replace his regime with a democratic government!
That was only eight years ago. As you can see, under a constant barrage of crisis, time can become a little distorted. We tend to think that our current crises will go on forever, and that past crises are not relevant. Remember though, there's as much temporal distance between us and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as there will be between the year 2014 and now. If the political and economic details of 1998 are shadowy to us in 2006, the political and economic details of 2006 will probably be murky to the people of 2014. Software companies founded this year could supplant both Google and Microsoft by 2014!
If you wish to keep carrying on this time-span doubling:
16 years ago/from now (1990/2022): There's as much time between the Gulf War and the Lewinsky scandal as there is between the Lewinsky scandal and today. What happened during those 8 years? Do you remember? Were there no political scandals or crises of law until 1998?
The Cold War officially ends in 1990! Manuel Noriega (remember him?) surrenders to American forces in Panama. The Exxon Valdez oil spill pollutes an Alaskan shoreline and lines the pockets of environmentalists everywhere. The Berlin Wall has only been demolished for about a month. East Germany holds its first free elections this year in six decades. People are still raving about the recent Tiananmen Square incident in China. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, infamous for his war crimes during the Clinton administration, is elected on December 9th. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela is freed and decades of apartheid are ended after significant international pressure.
You'll notice that I've not even mentioned minor political scandals, media spasms, and other temporary panics. For instance, the Bush administration response to the Valdez spill was less than stellar, fueling several weeks worth of daytime talk shows. I didn't even recognize minor Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes like the one near the Dome of the Rock on October 8th. I didn't note the election of (now overthrown) Haitian President Aristide, which ended three decades of military dictatorship. I neglected George Bush's failure to keep his "no new taxes" campaign promise or his signature of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Admit it - you thought that had been around forever!)
I somehow missed the classified military mission of the space shuttle Atlantis, which probably caused a great deal of suspicious speculation at the time. Also missing are the giant poll-tax protest in London which caused almost 500 injuries, the details of the West and East German merger, and the details of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time Inc and Warner Communications merged this year to become Time Warner.
On the propaganda front, the US began broadcasting American television station TV Marti to Cuba. In politics, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, responsible for covering up the Iran-Contra scandal, was sentenced on multiple felony counts of obstruction, conspiracy, etc. (By 2003, he was leading the Department of Defense's controversial Information Awareness and Policy Analysis Market programs - did you remember those?)
All of these, weighty international issues in 1990, are barely memories today.
Moving to the future: In 2022, people born in 2006 will be receiving their driver's licenses. People who graduated from college in May 2006 will be the parents of those teenagers. People in 2022 will be as concerned with the politics of the present as we are today with the politics of the first Bush administration.
32 years ago/from now (1974/2038): There was as much time between the end of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War as there is between the first Gulf War and today.
In 2038, most people graduating from college in 2006 will be considering retirement. The last of the baby boomers, the parents of those graduates, will be in their nineties. The unruly teenagers from 2022 could be raising their own unruly teenagers in 2038.
In 1974 the OPEC energy crisis is still taking place. American citizens are waiting in line for hours to get gas, and fuel is being carefully rationed among drivers. People magazine is published for the first time this year. Seven people are indicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal; a few months later, Richard Nixon resigns. Much to the dismay of the defeated party, a prime minister is elected in England with fewer votes than his opponent. The last American soldiers are evacuated from Vietnam at the end of April this year.
Fascist supporters are still a worldwide threat and perform terrorist bombings, killing 6 people. The fossil hominid Lucy is discovered in Africa. The town of Darwin, Australia, is devasted by a cyclone. The militant leaders of Greece and Cyprus are overthrown. Chemical explosions kill 28 plant workers. An outbreak of 148 tornadoes kills 300 and injures over 5000 people. In other news, this year marks the 10th birthday of the United States civil rights act that banned discrimination based on race. Millions of people are still immensely unhappy that their children can attend schools with "colored" children.
Conclusion
Things you consider exceedingly crucial today will probably be meaningless historical artifacts to your children and their children in 2022 and 2038. So don't pretend that every new political crisis is the end of the world, or that it will finally bring about the downfall of your particular political enemies. They thought the same thing in 1974.
# posted by Dev @ 10:32 PM 
