Syzygeist

"Walking Papers" by Sandra Hochman

Take this as a slice of New York Life, where just about everything interesting that happens is unexpected. 
I am in an East Side Hospital, waiting for my turn with the physical therapist to work over my recently operated-on arm. They have reattached a detached bicep tendon (thank you, Little League, for your demands on aging fathers) without which you have no working bicep muscle. 
Overheard down the hall is an ever-so-New-York-kinda-voice of an elderly(?) and possibly Jewish woman complaining of pain in her foot and imminent steps to be taken with a podiatrist to make shoe inserts that will alleviate the agony of her Plantar Fasciitis.
Wanting to help the world - one painful step at a time - I intervene to confess that I have had that condition, tried the useless podiatrist and inserts, then benefited from counsel from an internist I met sailing in Maine who said Forget the Podiatrist. The answer to your condition is Birkenstocks. 
I wear them almost all the time now to occasional odd looks which I ignore because my foot is no longer killing me, thank you. In fact the bad foot in Birkenstocks now works as it once did. Birkenstocks work!
I deliver this news to the woman in the hallway and soon discover she is not just any random woman of New York but a highly accomplished writer - Sandra Hochman, Pulitzer nominee for poetry, author of "Walking Papers" (Viking, 1971), the first of six novels, several books of avant-garde poems (Earthworks, Love Letters from Asia), Year of the Woman ((1973), an early and controversial documentary about the early women's movement, and most recently author of an imminent Broadway production based on her children's story, "Timmy the Great."
Some weeks later Sandra invites me to her 75th birthday party in a towering but small apartment on East 79th Street. By then she has read "Into My Father's Wake," the book that I sent her as sort of a get-to-know-me present between writers (and hoping she might offer some helpful advice). She responded like the teacher and mentor she has often been to others (she started the "You're an Artist Too" foundation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach poetry and song writing to children aged 7-12 and ran it for 15 years) generously saying she admires my book and wants to help me get it published.
I do not make a point then of saying that it has been published (Amazon) because she comes from a world where only real publishers (Viking et al) count. "Self" cannot be a valid publisher in the world in which she came of age - despite the advent of the New Economy. 
And as I will learn over our first lunch together, she has been very close with poet Robert Lowell and novelist Saul Bellow and other prodigious writers (including Philip Roth) of the officially published world. I am coming to believe that this rare literary woman's life should be made into a movie (what about a musical?) about women who have lived three-quarters of a century but seem to have had half a millennium of experience in that time, and remain far, far from dead. 
By now I have secured a copy of "Walking Papers" from the New York Society Library and what do I discover? A tour-de-force of language and imagery and a highly independent woman's consciousness, often delivered in poetry-as-prose, lyrical commentary on ideas and feelings that spill out as vivid experience. This is a wonderful, rare and often very funny book that was way ahead of her time. 
"Walking Papers" should be dusted off and read by any woman who thinks her own deeper feelings of post-divorce rage and fear and scars of a lonely custody-fight childhood and frustration and despair regarding the ways of men, lovable and treacherous as they can be, or the elusiveness of enduring love are unique to themselves. And men should read it to learn that yes, women think about those things too.

Moreover, "Walking Papers" stirred me to remember break-through writers who moved me when I was a much younger student - Alain Robbe-Grillet comes to mind, whose rule-breaking style made his work uniquely modern and changed the way many people thought about fiction. 
So I marvel at this chance encounter in a hospital hallway that brought me to a breakthrough novel of its time that still has the power to inspire after all these years. How did I miss "Walking Papers" the first time around? Why weren't students of fiction like me forced to read it? (Some issues of feminism might be at work here.) 
Thanks to a couple of sore feet, New York life gave me a second chance.

9/11 Threat? Looking back, not ahead!

Despite the attention being paid to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the past may well be beside the point. What is in front of us is much more important than what is behind us. 

The Twin-Towers attack, notwithstanding its individual tragedy and economic and political impacts, both domestic and international, distracted us from the future that we wish to create and put us at risk of not being able to create it. "It" is, broadly speaking, a better world than we found when we got here - inside and outside our borders.

Nations, like communities and families, must decide how to allocate resources to sustain the present and build for the future. Getting the enemy to mis-allocate resources to a fatal degree is an old and clever strategy. Many in the military and elsewhere believe we caused the Soviet Communist system to collapse by forcing them to overspend on defense when they could least afford it. 

Al Qaeda has effectively done that to the US. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, we overreacted at a time when we could not afford to devote so many resources outside our own domestic challenges. (Defense spending under Bush jumped from 3.6 to 6 percent of GDP). We launched a war into Iraq on a false pretext. Homeland security exploded. And Obama has held to that overall trajectory, upping the ante in Afghanistan against the informed counsel of his own Vice President. (And we continue to fire drone missiles into countries against whom we have not declared war, killing innocents along the way.)

According to the National Priorities Project, the United States has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of that, homeland security spending alone has cost $635.9 billion. Funding for homeland security has risen from $16 billion in FY2001 to $71.6 billion requested for FY2012. Defense spending for 2012, much of it predicated on the terrorist threat, is projected to reach $703 billion, or roughly 5% percent of current projected Gross Domestic Product. That's also a little more than half of the $1.3 trillion deficit.

If even one trillion seems unfathomable, that's because it is. How big is one trillion? Maybe this will help:

If you had started spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars (CNN reports). Actually, you would have spent roughly the equivalent amount the US plans to spend on defense this coming year. A mathematician puts it like this: "1 million seconds is about 11.5 days. 1 billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years."

So $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security in one decade represents an allocation of capital that is unprecedented in human history (the entire US economy in one year is worth about $12 trillion).

Could the US afford $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security over the last decade? It would appear not, on the face of it.

It's not that nothing should have been spent, but the focus outward on the terrorist threat that might arrive here has managed to ignore the inward needs of the US, which are beginning to play out now with greater force. 

Thomas Friedman recently noted the convergence of four negative conditions in the world today: power arrangements radically changing in the Middle East; Europe struggling to save its financial house; China teetering for reasons of its own; and the US in a political stalemate as its currency weakens, its economy grows less competitive and its fiscal order resembles that of an early developing country.

Presently the President and Congress are fiddling, unable to agree on spending or cuts or taxes - the CBO currently estimates a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2011, the third largest in 65 years - or priorities that should guide our actions for a stronger future. 

The US simply has to get its act together if it is to serve as a linchpin of healthy democracy, an engine of growth and a purveyor of freedom in the world. Freedom in this case would mean an environment where individuals are free to pursue and to realize their dreams. And that would mean we are investing wisely and well in our future, not squandering resources out of fear, imprisoned by the force of memories better left behind.

Global Groundswell - "Mad as Hell?"

In Israel a social movement aimed at income inequality and housing prices has sprung up from a youth Facebook protest. Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a trip hoping to nip the protest in the bud. Speculation arises that Israel's Left, long neutralized amid concerns for security first, may be in resurgence.
In Japan a woman on a farm confronts the lackadaisical government response to radiation by conducting tests of her own - to discover that some levels are as high as those surrounding Chernobyl. She is joined by an expert who has quit the official government effort in which he has lost faith to get his own answers and help those willing to help themselves.
In Syria a protestor observing government's murderous crackdown on dissidents dismisses the latest brutal violence as "stupid" and points out that government forces, already suffering desertions, "cannot occupy the entire country." 
These are just a few examples of grass-roots reactions around the world to governments that appear out of touch with or indifferent to the lives of the people - and the people are not standing for it anymore. They are standing up. And in so doing they are able to leverage the internet to discover important truths, publicize their efforts, reveal the tyranny or venality of the opposition and draw those of like mind into efforts of resistance and change.
Much is being written about "Arab Spring" and now "China Spring," as populist protests arise in the face of determined state controls. At one time it was axiomatic that certain regimes - Saudi Arabia notable among them - were impervious to disruption from underneath. But here the notion of possible futures is limited by metaphor. If you think about existing government structures as a pyramid, a small top is supported by an enormous bottom and the weight of the structure from the top down seems to keep it inevitably in place.
In the world of the Internet, however, information becomes a universal solvent able to dissolve organizational power structures. We now are hearing more and more about "the cloud." This is the state of things changing from solid through liquid to gas. The internet has come from things that were solid in the past (bricks and mortar and wire) and gone through fluid - the mediated flow of ideas - into thin air (wireless). A rapidly increasing number of free hotspots for wireless internet signals only one element in the shifting power arrangements in the world. The spread of smart phones into ever lower echelons of society will bring new waves of awareness and reactions to the conditions that exist - and pose new challenges to those responsible. 
An intellectual property expert at a film festival I attended not long ago in Nassau noted that, "The good news about the New Information Economy is that you can do it all. The bad news is that you have to do it all." He meant that technology and networks now allow an individual to create, produce, publicize and market a product or an idea, but this also requires direct involvement in every stage of the effort. And it does not replace the bricks-and-mortar necessity of being physically present in the right place in the right way at the right time, and integrating those realities with the virtual. It also suggests a world in which rapid collaboration can occur around an idea faster than at any time in history. And this will make for volatile politics. This should be contemplated by regimes that have lasted this long without attending to the fundamental needs of people - jobs, education, health, opportunity.
Where the governments are failing to "do it all" - and it seems increasingly that all governments are - people are rising up with unprecedented power to do more - if not all - for themselves. As Beersheba Mayor Ruvik Danilovich was quoted saying about Israel's nascent movement, "This was a landmark event. The norms that have been accepted in the past will not be in the future." 
If he is right, the world is still in the early days of a fundamental power shift - toward the bottom of the pyramid - and the turbulence to come in the next decade will be a subject of surprise, if not "shock and awe" to many who thought their positions secure. It is not too much to imagine this will involve the United States, where many are now fed up with its intransigent if not incompetent government.

Figures Don't Lie, But Liars Figure

Recent events including a ruptured bicep tendon and a large research effort put me temporarily underwater - in the non-blogosphere - but an item in the Sunday NY Times forced me to resurface. It appeared as an essay by John Schwartz under the title "Not So Representative Investors," and it caught my eye because I had been thinking about not so representative Representatives.
In an interview I conducted to prepare for a West Coast scenario seminar on Asia and the future, a woman investor - portfolio manager for a certain western state - remarked that since 1975 the US has changed from a democracy to a plutocracy, but has anyone noticed?
She noted that the top 1 percent of the population makes 25 percent of the income and controls 40 percent of the wealth. And, she observed, the US Senate is almost entirely in that top one percent while most of the members of the House of Representatives are as well.
"Do you think that a democracy would have voted to prohibit Congress from regulating derivatives?" she asked (and I was quick to recognize this as a rhetorical question.) "Do you think a democracy would have voted to protect its Big Pharma industry from outside competition? Is that what a democracy would do?"
By now I was fully engaged with her line of reasoning and all I could do was concede her logic.
Her questions (or rather the point behind them) jumped up out of Schwartz's essay as he cited a recent study that found House members earning "statistically significant positive returns" on their portfolios, outperforming that market by 6 percentage points. Senators do even better, according to the research, showing "some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time," beating the market by 10 percentage points a year.
One of the study's authors, Georgia State University's Alan Ziobrowski, an associate professor of business, is quoted saying that these returns are "abnormal" in the sense that they cannot be explained by good fortune or dumb luck.
It is interesting to consider how the Congress manages to outperform the markets in this category of finance as they have driven the country into its fiscal morass and appear unable or unwilling (or both) to get us out. Meanwhile the dollar continues to weaken, the Treasury market is faltering and global markets are skittish at the prospect that the US, manager of the global reserve currency, has lost its way.
Having just read "Exhorbitant Privilege," by UC Berkeley Professor Barry Eichengreen, who lays out prospects for the decline and fall of the dollar, I have reason to think that talk of a dollar collapse is not too extreme, particularly as Congress fiddles while Washington burns. It is little comfort and no compensation to realize that meanwhile they have been on the inside earning outsized returns.

Is This the Way the World Ends?

The purported end of the world came and went last Saturday, and to the surprise of few, "the Rapture" did not come to pass.

The world is not, however, out of the woods if you read Peter Nolan's superb Crossroads - the End of Wild Capitalism and the Future of Humanity. Nolan's thesis is that unrestrained capitalism, its extremes and its contradictions have put China, the US and the world of Islam on a collision course that gives the world "the choice of no choice." Either these three models of culture and capitalism will find constructive engagement or the world as we know it is in extreme peril - either from economic instability and social reaction, military conflict or environmental destruction, or all of the above.

Students of economics and geopolitics will find much that is familiar here in theory but Nolan's formulation of the world's current dynamics, risks to the system and limited options going forward - engage cooperatively or unhinge the world - are elegantly reasoned and argued. As holder of the Sinyi Chair at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Nolan demonstrates great knowledge of and passion for China and its potential to find a harmonious route through capitalism's contradictions, although success here is by no means a given. He also argues convincingly that global capitalism requires global regulation in order not to run amok and roughshod over most of the world's population. 

In this part of his thesis is the intriguing notion that the major oligopolistic global corporations have an insurmountable advantage in the world and are increasingly stateless in their ambitions and interests. Developing economy companies are starting from so far back in some areas that they cannot hope to compete. And then, what?

Readers will also find fascinating economic and political history to suggest that the underlying approaches to capitalism pursued by China, the US and the Islamic world are far more importantly similar than they are different. Property rights, individual pursuit of profits, taxation and a drive to serve the common good all have a place in these systems (and Islam has found a way to embrace interest on capital by another name.) Their differences with regard to capitalism are more perceived and exacerbated by nationalisms and cultural bias than substantive.  But can these systems find ways to constructively coexist before it's too late?

Nolan reaches back as far as Biblical times to report the early histories of China, the Middle East, Europe and the infant United States, which has risen in the post WWII period to dominate the global system (and now spends $2 billion a day on military expenditures!). Moreover, the US, motivated by its thirst for oil, has alienated Islam with its unquestioning support of Israel and tends to view China as a rising threat rather than a potential and natural collaborator in meeting the challenges of global modernization. China's labor advantages will continue to depress advanced economy wages, and we shall have to deal with that.

In the last 30 years, progress has been made on many fronts. Millions have been lifted out of poverty as finance and technology have spread into the developing world. But wealth disparity has grown significantly (Egypt, by no means alone, is one example where one percent of the population controls nearly all the country's wealth); the environment has been severely degraded (decertification growing by great leaps in China, whose organic water pollutants equal those of American, India, Russia and Japan combined); and, global warming has emerged as man's unique threat to the world in which we live. In this the US has been slowest to recognize the threat, let alone take significant steps to address it, Nolan notes. 

The US has fomented an unregulated form of global finance capitalism that led to the great unwinding of 2008, which has not yet played out. This is one factor, along with US dependence on autos and oil, military power and a jaundiced view of the Middle east, that leads Nolan to conclude - quoting former US defense Secretary Robert McNamara, that there has never been a more dangerous moment in human history.

This book is riddled with fascinating facts and also broad arguments to challenge any conventional American view about the legitimacy of our approach to global finance capitalism and to others who may challenge us or require a different political approach on the world's playing field. You may finish reading this book as I did, convinced that if the US is not prepared to change some of our political and economic approaches to China and Islam, we may bring Judgment Day upon the world sooner than we think and in ways not yet imagined. That said, Nolan will help persuade you that nuclear Armageddon, as one way to end the world, is by no means out of the question.

Hillary's Larger Right To Be Seen

Hillary Clinton disappeared from one of the most historic scenes in recent American history and most people would not know it happened. (Perhaps more sadly, many might not care.) Please consider:

Editors of the Hasidic weekly Der Tzitung photoshopped the US Secretary of State and another woman out of the scene in which Mrs. Clinton, seated near President Obama, was watching the progress of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

This was quickly noticed and reported - the vanishment of the U.S. Secretary of State, even virtually, being something to note.  Der Tzitung's editors issued an apology and explanation. They meant no disrespect to Mrs. Clinton or the President, they said, but images of women in their publication are expressly forbidden - to "protect their modesty."

Well now, White House policy expressly forbids the alteration of any official news photo, so the "modesty defense" would appear to fall short here. The editors did not need to run the photo at all - that would have defended Mrs. Clinton's modesty, if indeed it was threatened. 

But to alter the photo and thereby to change the face of history is not fairly an issue of modesty. It is a not-so-subtle repression of women, in another garb. It also has that Orwellian 1984 feel of Newspeak, in which the photos of the news really aren't.

We can all look back to when women were not permitted to vote. Or to garner a fair share of property or wealth gained during marriage. Or to serve in combat military units. Laws have been passed, legal actions brought. Still women fight for equal rights and equal pay for equal work. Arguably they are further ahead in the United States than in much of the rest of the world.

One might argue that this is a tempest in a teapot and we have better things to do than to worry about the photographic exclusion of women - even as important as Hillary Clinton - in sectarian weeklies that few see and perhaps more could care less about. 

I would contend, however, that this is gender discrimination dressed up as something else. Keeping images of women in the news out of the news implies that women don't make or matter to the news. And that is simply wrong. And I would add that if you address the little things, the big things may begin to take care of themselves. (This was the apparent lesson of subway cleanup efforts in New York City, well described in Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point," wherein the battle against graffiti and turnstile-jumping began a trend toward a much cleaner and safer underground.)

Maybe the White House feels it has enough on its hands these days not to react to an item like this. Maybe Hillary doesn't mind, and maybe the orthodox Jewish vote matters more. I would hope the White House enforcement arm for accuracy in media (do they have one?) would react to this in some official way, to say hey, you;re not allowed to do that, and we would like a retraction in the form of the accurate photograph published in the same place of prominence as the doctored one.

Oh, and by the way - there are better ways to respect and protect women's modesty than by distorting their accurate role in history.

Despite the Facts, What Do You Believe?

The incoming, pre-attack helicopter above Bin Laden's compound was noticed and tweeted by a
recluse who said he had come to Abbottabad, Pakistan to get away for a while. The meaning of the helicopter, which he reasoned at the time was probably not local (Pakistani or Taliban), would come clear later. 

But that solo tweet would give the world a precise time of the attack, whatever official story might be told and in case anyone wanted to question it. 

The tweet would also affirm a world in which more people than ever before in history are free enough and able to testify to things as they really happen. Video on phones, Youtube and tweets may be forces for democratization more powerful than any particular U.S. State Department policy you can name.

One effect of widespread spontaneous intelligence is that authorities are under more pressure than ever to be authentic. While there is aways a moral reason for telling the truth, there is also a pragmatic one. The price of being caught in a lie is high and the chances of being caught are growing as communications technologies spread around the world. 

It is noted that some in Arab countries are using Google Earth to observe that their leaders have much, much, much more space to live in than the people they govern. (This tends to make some people believe they are being wronged.)

That being said, not everything that matters is in the public eye. Moreover, belief is important not only in terms of what actually happened - or didn't - but in what should be allowed to happen.

Swiftly in the wake of the attack and execution of Bin Laden the world was treated to online photographs of his bullet-riddled head, photos subsequently (within hours) repudiated as fakes. Our government, we are told, is debating whether the real photos are fit for public consumption. (Have any of them gone to the movies lately, or watched CSI Miami? And what would these new alleged actual photos actually prove?)

Bin Laden's body is gone - buried at sea, we are told, to assure a swift interment that respects Muslim tradition.

Bin Laden is really dead, we are told, verified by DNA our government took from his sister five years ago while she was in medical treatment. (Did anyone actually see them take her DNA?)

I do not make these observations to stoke conspiracy theories or provoke doubts about our government's candor. I do believe Bin Laden is dead, as reported. ('Birthers' may yet wonder.) At some point, the weight of official testimony (and some logic) is good enough for me. 

But questions of authenticity and "so what?" rise swiftly as one reads online debate about the attack, its rationale and timing and aftermath. Much of what people say they "know" or believe seems a function of belief systems already in place and the desire to believe one alternative interpretation over another. 

Some observers - and they do seem generally to be more Republicans than Democrats, though this is not a partisan issue - were quick to suggest that Guantanamo torture, specifically water-boarding, played a pivotal role in identifying the courier who led US intelligence to the compound.

Former Defense Secretary Richard Cheney was quoted saying he thought it reasonable to infer that water-boarding had been vindicated as a technique for securing vital information. This conclusion was quickly challenged by Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein, who seemed to be saying she "knew" the Guantanamo torture had not been effective in this regard.

On these points I have no idea what the torture revealed and I wonder what Cheney and Feinstein really "know." (Might they publicly disclose what they know so we can determine if this constitutes proof of anything that we need not debate further?)

I do not believe in the legitimacy of torture to begin with, not only because the Geneva Convention prohibits it and because seasoned experts say torture does not work (it can produce many lies and half truths and emboldens your enemies to use it on you) but because torture as an instrument of war - like poison gas and nuclear weapons - seems morally wrong to me. So whether torture may extract a key fact from an individual prisoner is beside the point. 

Opposition to torture is itself a belief - an article of faith, if you will, about humanity, even in wartime - that does not submit to proof. Unfortunately it does not seem to submit to reason either because the people who believe in it cannot be talked out of it, notwithstanding evidence and experience and morality. 

While we live in a world in which much more can be seen and reported and known - which hopefully will encourage our government (more than many) to tell more truth and fewer lies -  we remain challenged to do those things that we believe in, despite 'evidence' and claims and counterclaims.  

In terms of our own faith and beliefs, in confronting the dangers of terrorism we would do well to keep asking who we are and who do we want to become. Perhaps in struggling with and within ourselves we will find the real war on terrorism is being fought there, and "winning" will mean we successfully defended America as a moral beacon for the world. 

 

In Dead Bin Laden's Wake

I do not rejoice in anyone's death but I am glad Bin Laden has met his maker and grateful to those servicemen and women who put themselves in harm's way to carry out our country's military plans. In the case of Al Qaida, a non-state terrorist organization willing to target mostly civilians, a war played outside the rules has provoked responses that have been outside the rules as well. 

Victory may be sweet, but we need to be vigilant that provocation does not cause us to abandon the American principles of law and individual rights that we hold dear. That said, I find my mind filled with questions:

If we went into Afghanistan to pursue Osama and deal Al Qaida a death-blow, is our reason for being there now satisfied (having satisfied it in Pakistan)? That debate has been going on for nearly the last decade, and the NY Times reports that it has surfaced again at the highest levels.

How could the Pakistani authorities not have known of Bin Laden's compound, and its inhabitants? (This question was raised Monday on National Public Radio's Fresh Air interview with Lawrence Wright, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road of 9/11)  Pakistan has some explaining to do, as do US officials who manage the relationship and provide military and financial aid.

Is it true of a networked terrorist organization that if we cut off the head, the body will die? History has its share of revolutionary and proto-revolutionary movements that have been effectively crushed by government force. Surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment and the execution of key leaders tend to be effective, but these have tended to be within national boundaries. Both the former Soviet Union and China provide illustrations here, but they are not alone. (Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the US Black Panther Party of the 1960s-70s "the greatest threat" to internal security and used all the FBI's resources to harass and disrupt them, including the alleged use of assassination.) Chris Hedges, who covered Al Qaida for the NY Times, would suggest this is not one of those cases.

What potentially helpful terrorist-fighting information was found on computer hard drives confiscated from Bin Laden's compound, (and is there any chance it might make it onto Wikileaks)?

What role did Google Earth play in identifying the compound for what it was - a refuge not just for someone important and clandestine but for the Most Wanted Man of The Century? Global surveillance of this kind would seem to be a game-changer all its own. Finding the compound on Google Earth certainly happened quickly just after the news broke.

Does Bin Laden's death make terrorist acts against the US more likely? (If we believed that, would it make us wish Obama had acted otherwise in ordering the strike?)  

Some reports have suggested a connection between information gleaned at Guantanamo and identifying the compound as Bin Laden's. Are we to believe that torture (water-boarding or otherwise) played a role here? If we wanted a justification for torture, maybe some would consider this enough. (I favor observing the Geneva Convention.)

Some of these questions may be answered soon enough. I would like to say that I am confident of our government's account of events in general, but I am not. (Iraq and WMD come to mind). Events surrounding Bin Laden's death, however, will be subjected to as much scrutiny as any events in recent history, if not in all recorded history. The same technology and transparency that enables pervasive government surveillance, also enables relentless citizen inquiry, and I think the important truths here will become known if they are not already. 

As satisfying as Bin Laden's death may be in some respects, I am still hungry for more answers.

Don't Think POM, If You Can't

Go watch "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," by Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought you "Supersize Me" 
and who has evidently figured out how to supersize himself. This smart, tongue-in-cheek, manipulative movie about manipulation via product placement and brand campaigning will send you out of the theater wondering. At least it did me.
Spurlock's is not the self-aggrandizing approach one gleans from fellow documentarian Michael Moore, whose movies seem really to be about Michael-the-Main-Character in the end.
True, Spurlock has built his own brand as a spoofer-satirist-commercial-social critic by leaps and bounds, but he has done it in a way that hearkens back to newspaper columnist James Kilpatrick, who said every piece of persuasion should follow the same form: "Let me take you by the hand and show you a place I know, which for seeing will change you forever." This will.
Spurlock sets out to reveal the world of product placement and brand-building that takes place as a subtext of movie-making, where things appear on the screen not for dramatic intention or even because they belong there, but because a sponsor bought the right to put them there - or even, perhaps, forced them onto a director. This applies to drinks, cereals, cars, clothes, shoes... Major movies, we are told, cannot be made without this revenue stream, about which you as a consumer are told next to nothing.
About the only product not mentioned or shown here were weapons, and I found myself wondering what Winchester and Glock et. al. have to do with shoot--em-up action or war movies where machine guns are required. Spurlock did not go there.
But if you ever wonder why you think about some of the things - I mean, things - that you think about, this movie will give you some new or reinforced ideas. It worked on me like a charm as Spurlock worked his way to a prime sponsor - POM (as in, pomegranate juice) - who ponied up a cool $1 million to be the banner sponsor - for which there is in exchange enough POM consumed onscreen in odd moments to cure your urinary tract of any weaknesses, as we learn it allegedly has the power to do.
If you listen carefully to Spurlock at a key pitch moment before the POM CEO and her underlings, you would believe that this miracle juice can heat up male ardor, if you know what I mean. In an hilarious boardroom scene, Spurlock shows his rendering of an ad for the juice that is too graphic for the company's female founder, but it does evince a knowing smile.
Spurlock ends up using text the company wants him to use, and wonders if he has sold out, or is doomed to be a sellout as he gathers commercial support with Sheetz and Austin Mini to name two. No, one ad executive assures him, he is not "selling out," he is "buying in."
Along the way you learn that Sao Paolo, Brazil has wiped out all outdoor advertising to great aesthetic effect. In the US, sponsors and advertisers now spend slightly north of $450 billion a year to shower and surround us with images of all kinds, of which 75 percent is controlled through four major agencies. If you ever wondered if there is really a "them" organizing our cultural perceptions, you will come away with a sense that yes, they are, and now you know mostly who they are.
The movie also brings along a few academic experts to assert the fallacy of persuading people that their lives can be made richer and better by products, and also by an advocate who wants all subliminal advertising of this kind made transparent via screen popups. You have to see this happening, which you will, to get a feeling for what it would mean and to decide if you think this would be a good thing. I think it might.
I came out of the theater and headed for the men's room, as people of my age tend to do after a couple of hours, and followed a tall, slow-moving gentleman accompanied by two body guards. Soon we were all four lined up at the men's urinals. I found myself wondering about the various potential effects of pomegranate juice, real and perceived, on four guys like us, and wondering if they were also wondering, since we were all clearly over 50 (and the tallest among us was considerably older.)
As we left and exited the building, the two bodyguards ushered the tall gentleman into a waiting black car. I recognized former New York Mayor Ed Koch. Did he feel as a matter of public policy that something needs to be done about this world of image-making and cultural influence Spurlock showed is being somewhat deviously thrust upon us, mostly without our knowing?
I did not get a chance to ask before the black car sped away. But because POM was so on my mind - I thought I might pick up a few bottles to see what I think and see what it does (31 grams of sugar per bottle, about 7-8 teaspoons worth!) - it occurred to me that Spurlock had made his point. For that $1 million, POM had been penetratingly insinuated into my thoughts - and I am sure the former Mayor of New York got it too.

What Barry Bonds Shrank From (The Truth?)

A trip this past weekend for a book-signing party in San Francisco, city of my post-youth growing up,
brought a flood of associations and memories and in this case a brush with the famous and the infamous.

The party included a predictably amusing encounter with one Lance Williams, the gifted investigative journalist (and co-author with Mark Fainaru-Wada of Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroid Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports) with whom I worked as an editor when the San Francisco Examiner was still a viable afternoon paper owned by the Hearst Corporation.

Lance broke the early stories about Bonds and steroid use. Bonds was just convicted last week of obstruction of justice while being acquitted of perjury. So the jury concluded Barry did not lie to the Grand Jury about whether he knew he was taking steroids. 

This I found fascinating and a bit disillusioning. You mean after all this, the court process cannot establish that Bonds was taking steroids and he knew it and he lied about it?

Lance could only look at me and grin as I suggested a line of questioning that I thought Bonds should have faced.

Prosecutor: Mr. Bonds, when did you notice that your testicles were shrinking?

Bonds: (Unintelligible)

Prosecutor: Had you ever experienced shrunken testicles, or had reason to think that shrinking testicles were normal for an athlete of your age and ability?

Bonds: Uh, could you repeat that question?

Prosecutor: Let me put it this way. As you became more readily angered by small things, as your head and other parts of you grew larger while other, arguably important parts of you grew smaller, did you wonder why? Did you wonder about those injections that Gary Anderson gave you?

Bonds: Uh, I never really thought about it.

Prosecutor: Let the record show that Mr. Bonds is now apparently telling the truth.

Bonds: (Grunt.)

Prosecutor: Am I right in thinking you did not want to take the stand in your own defense because you felt you might incriminate yourself?

Bonds: Yes, I think so.

Prosecutor: So be it. 

Of course, that is how it was. Bonds declined to take the stand in his own defense. We are left with a great(?) athlete thoroughly besmirched. His records and reputation are in tatters, and a jury was unable to conclude without a shadow of doubt that he knew he was being injected with steroids - despite the visible changes in his body and personality, to which Kimberly Bell, a former intimate testified. (For derision Youtube-style, see also this.) 

The jury had to decide whether Bell was telling the truth or doctoring the facts to hurt a former lover from whom she'd unhappily split. Jurors also had to conclude whether Greg Anderson, who has gone to jail rather than testify, really injected Bonds with steroids as Anderson apparently was overheard to say on a locker-room tape made in 2003.

One might ask: who cares, in the end? Barry Bonds has been punished, betrayed by his deal with the Devil. Whoever once thought him a miracle hitter now knows otherwise, and he can take his place with Jose Canseco and Jason Giambi and others who juiced to improve their performance, got caught at it and either confessed or lied or kept quiet.

As someone with a 12-year-old son who plays a good game of baseball and dreams about being in the Big Leagues some day, I would have liked all the Bondsian facts to come out in open testimony, so that young players know what is really at stake here. A larger head (Bonds needed an increased hat size from 2002 to 2003, the clubhouse manager testified) is one thing, but smaller testicles and waning sexual ability are something else (this is perhaps a male view) and as warnings go, I prefer this one to be clear and well known.  

I am not suggesting that injecting Human Growth Hormone (HGH) would somehow be okay if procreative equipment were not compromised. It's a question of which bodily effect is more likely to scare young players away from their own potential performance-drug experiments in a highly pressurized and competitive society.

So Lance and I had a bit of a laugh - ironic and bittersweet though it felt - about questions that were never asked and never answered because, some might feel, they did not need to be. That is, unless you believe Bonds committed perjury before the Grand Jury, as accused, and should have been convicted of it, given the evidence against him.

Was justice achieved here? Maybe so. Whatever is left of Bonds - the man and the reputation, greater or smaller -  is the man he will live with, with full knowledge all his own. 

Does he still have a shot at Baseball's Hall of Fame? Does anyone care?