Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

As I sit in front of my computer blogging, I wander a small, friendly world of hobbit-y bloggers. But if I pick up a newspaper, the real world is run by Republican orcs. Don’t we want to change that? If so, we have to get beyond Tolkienesque wishful thinking about how powerful we already are.

Yes, webloggers “outed” the Republican astroturf scam. But Republicans are still running our country and scaring the heck out of everyone else’s country–and Bush is very popular with voters. James Moore’s vision of bloggers as a second superpower is a lovely fantasy we’d like to make true. (Of course, there are some bloggers scarier than Dick Cheney, but in a fantasy, I get to choose which bloggers end up with power.)

Even in our little web-world, who is winning–bloggers or the orcs of PR-advertising-spin? The bloggers I know all agree those spin-orcs tremble at our power:

“…the Internet provides the public relations profession with the opportunity for a rigorous self-examination. Straightforward practices based on full disclosure, genuine participation, honest listening, and real contributions to the net community will earn the community’s trust and permit a high level of useful two-way communication. Anything else will provide the net community with an opportunity to trash some manipulative PR people, which it will happily do. The choice is up to you.”

That reads like today’s consensus on the future, but in fact it comes from a 1995 online journal, The Network Observer. The “manipulative PR people” are still making money and plenty of it–the Network Observer died in 1996.

Check out James Surowiecki’s analysis of the Battle of Helms Deep: most battles are won by the side with power, not people with cleverness and “heart.” There are elections coming up, elections which will result a gigantic transfer of real-world power. Big business is throwing big dollars into Republican campaign funds, hoping to make the world safe for extended copyright, unregulated corporations, and even more tax breaks. The Left needs money too. We need to build infrastructure. And could we please stop telling each other how great things already are?

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Go, Mikhaela!

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A Wolf on a hillside was drinking from a spring when he suddenly spied a Lamb further down the stream. “There’s my supper,” thought he, “if only I can find some excuse to seize it.” Then he called out to the Lamb, “How dare you muddy the water from which I am drinking?”
“But, sir,” said the Lamb, “if the spring is muddy, how can it be my fault? The water runs downhill from you to me.”
“Even so,” said the Wolf, “it was you who called me bad names this time last year.”
“But, sir,” said the Lamb; “I am only six months old.”
“Is that so?” snarled the Wolf. “If it was not you, it was your father;” and with that he rushed upon the poor little Lamb and—”WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA”—ate her all up.

But before she died she gasped out—”ANY EXCUSE WILL SERVE THE POWERFUL.”

Aesop’s Fables (Sixth century B.C.)

The lamb in the fable is upset that the wolf says she’s “bad”–so she argues instead of running away. Few of the powerful people running our world care about being good. (The wolf wants to seem “arguably” good–that’s very different.) We who want to do more to defend the lambs need to get power as well as morals on our side.

Did I mention today that I’m working for Howard Dean? Political action is a legitimate and honest way to put our beliefs to work.

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Public service announcement: have you, like the lamb, been brainwashed into the cult of the “good little girl”? Yes, you–whatever your age, whatever your gender–are you knocking yourself out day after day after day to dodge criticisms you think other people might make? If so, give yourself a break–and give yourself more of a chance to accomplish some good in this unhappy world. Pick some worthy goal and go after it–knowing the wolves will question your motives, your methods, and your honesty. And when you hear them telling the world how terrible you are, remember what they’ll be saying if they win.

“WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA.”

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Peter Arnett deserved to be fired for his propaganda boost to the Iraqis:

“The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance….Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces.”

Furthermore, Peter Arnett is wrong about US problems. Seymour Hersch, in the April 7 New Yorker, has the ugly details:

According to a dozen or so military men I spoke to, Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles….Much of the supply of Tomahawk guided missiles has been expended. “The Marines are worried as hell,” the former intelligence official went on. “They’re all committed, with no reserves, and they’ve never run the lavs”—light armored vehicles—”as long and as hard” as they have in Iraq. There are serious maintenance problems as well. “The only hope is that they can hold out until reinforcements come.”

Hersch’s article details how Rumsfeld gave our trained military leaders the same rude brush-off he handed to France and Germany. Rumsfeld’s arrogance endangered our troops much more than Arnett’s idiocy–and Rumsfeld deserves to be fired just as publicly as Arnett.

Shoshana Nyree Johnson signed up for the US Army as a cook. While Shoshana and her unit prepared to risk their lives in Iraq, Dennis Hastert and other Republicans on the House Budget Committee raced to show their support by funding those tax breaks for stockholders with billions of dollars in cuts from Veterans’ benefits. An outcry from veterans’ organizations saved their benefits–for now. Dennis Hastert treated US soldiers and their families like dirt–and Hastert deserves to be fired just as publicly as Arnett.

Dennis Hastert and Donald Rumsfeld still hold their comfy jobs. Peter Arnett has a new, less-comfy job with a British tabloid. Shoshana Johnson is a POW. In El Paso, Texas, her two-year-old daughter is waiting for mom to come home.

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People speaking out for peace came peacefully together yesterday–Dave Winer’s pix show the scene in Harvard Yard. Elsewhere, war protestors trying to shut down “business as usual” riled commuters and scared police trying to control them.

That was yesterday, this is today. Demonstrators, encouraged by their success, will be going for bigger effects. Police around the country will be getting out their mace, tear gas, and stun guns. And, as my friend Manny Krasner once pointed out, those little black objects on their belts can propel lead pellets over large distances.

An orderly protest shows support for peace. A mob makes your cause look ugly–and mobs are dangerous. When police are angry and scared, bad things can happen. Being arrested by an angry cop, in company with a lot of other people who are excited and scared, is much more scary than exciting. OTOH, nasty as it is, it is more fun than being crushed or trampled by a mob running away from tear gas. If you go to a protest, stay far from the “center” of action.

Better yet, stay home and sign up to work for Howard Dean. That would bring us closer to sane government than we are now.

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Democratic candidate round-up

Pro-war: John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt
Voted last fall to authorize Bush but says he’s against *this* war: John Kerry
Anti-war: Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Carol Mosely Braun

American Prospect on California convention:

“HOWARD DEAN….Delivering the most tumultuously received speech in several years at a California convention, Dean, who said he is “running to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” repeatedly brought the delegates to their feet. Excoriating every aspect of the Bush agenda, Dean thundered to an explosive finish, denouncing the Iraq war and shouting, “I want my country back!” as the delegates screamed. Afterward, Dean’s literature table was rushed by delegates who took every one of his buttons and signs.”

DENNIS KUCINICH. The House Progressive Caucus chairman has taken to opening speeches with snippets from patriotic hymns such as “America the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This most militantly anti-war of candidates uses his singing both to startle the audience — it does — and to juxtapose his sense of patriotism with what he sees as a sinister right-wing takeover of America….What will he do when the Iraq war starts? Not what other ranking Democratic war critics say they’ll do. “I will keep on speaking out and protesting,” Kucinich said before his speech. Even with troops in harm’s way? “Yes.”

So why did I just send $100 to Dean rather than Kucinich? This AP story yesterday:

Response to Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s anti-war speech to editors of the National Newspaper Association Thursday in Washington does not bode well for his presidential aspirations. Members of the association, who represent small community newspapers, were then polled on his performance by secret electronic ballot. The moderator asked them to chose how likely Kucinich is to win the Democratic nomination, with one being very likely and five being very unlikely. “Can you vote six or seven?” an audience member yelled. Next they were asked how likely their publications are to endorse his candidacy, and the room erupted in laughter.

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Robert Wright has a good article in Slate: “What you should and shouldn’t worry about as we go to war.” Says Wright, “Brace yourself for a round of I-told-you-so’s from Iraq hawks. And blame it partly on Iraq doves. In trying to head off war, some doves have warned of nightmarish consequences that are in fact not all that likely, thus setting the stage for a postwar public relations triumph by hawks.”

He’s right. Yeah. I’ll feel smarter next week for reading his piece. But tonight I don’t care that much about feeling smart. I just feel sad. The war has started. No, I don’t even want to talk about it.

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I last quit smoking in 1995 or so–and it worked. (unlike all the billion other times I quit.) My doctor got me into a free-trial study with a nicotine patch.

“They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
(18th century English folk poem)

In Medieval England, villagers shared the rights to a common pasture. Your cows, sheep, or geese could wander and feed there freely. Slowly, in village after village, commoners lost the rights they had enjoyed, because powerful families asserted exclusive ownership of the once-common land. The rich were few, but they had or could buy friends on the judicial bench. Hence the metaphor: “enclosure of the commons.”

I am feeling inspired by The World of Ends to fend off the loss of the Internet it describes. David Weinberger and Doc Searls write about the Internet as it can be and should be. But I see enclosure ahead for our Internet “commons”–not just in the future, but already starting right now.

Already–*Competition among proprietary browsers means that almost any web page is “broken” for someone. *Spam merchants flood your mailbox, spam-blockers struggle to keep up with their tricks, and our government won’t even outlaw deceptive headers and spoofed return addresses. *Instead, our government exerts great effort to punish music-sharing by kids. *Pop-ups and pop-unders have made millions of dollars for advertisers, meanwhile degrading the web for everyone else. *Smarter advertisers pollute the Web community with astroturf (fake grassroots) websites, discussion-group comments, and instant messages.

“It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” said Doc Searls in a Newsweek interview about fake weblogs. The trouble is that exposing the bad guys in weblogs only works sometimes. * Weblogs were credited with breaking the Trent Lott scandal–but that story got legs only when the mainstream media took it up. * The fake republican letters to the editor were a big scandal in weblogs, but few dead-tree papers responded. GOPTeamLeader.com is still going strong.

If we could find a way to work together, we’d have a much better chance of fending off attacks on the Internet commons–or at least giving warning when such attacks get underway. Let’s not end up like the goose in the nursery rhyme, looking longingly back on the “rights” we used to enjoy. Let’s get together like the Roman geese who cackled and squawked and woke up the sleeping Romans when Gauls tried to sneak inside the Capitol.

Maybe we could start by thinking about the web-degrading mistakes described in World of Ends. When we spot someone trying one of these ugly tricks, we could try to get our weblogs squawking together–scare off the attacker!

One thing for sure: if we don’t defend it, the Internet goose is cooked.

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Consider the fax machine: it gets no spam. Consider the cell phone: it gets no spam. Before any fax-spam or cell-spam racket could start, the guys who didn’t want spam got the law on their side.

It’s too late to stop email spam, even if we tried. As spam-merchants piously point out, there are first-amendment rights involved here. (Errr–why did the founding fathers want to protect misleading subject lines and spoofed return addresses….?)

The Rights of the Poor

Third-World farmers plant crops on land they don’t own, and hope to gather a harvest. Third-World fisherman depend on rivers and streams they have no power to protect from pollution. If you depend on the Web of information, fun, or maybe your livelihood–your situation is not so very different.

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Time was on Mick Jagger’s side–what was his secret? Maybe his stint at the London School of Economics? And now another LSE hotshot has worked out the pie charts and standard deviations that might someday free all us overstressed workaholics to join a good loud chorus of “Time is on my side.”

Lord (Richard) Layard of the LSE has been telling the British government–and the world, in a series of popular lectures–that economic growth should learn to play second fiddle to human happiness. To quote the Guardian article:

Lord (Richard) Layard, the LSE’s director of the centre for economic performance, has this week delivered three startling lectures which question the supremacy of economics. It doesn’t work. Economies grow, GDP swells, but once above abject poverty, it makes no difference to citizens’ well-being. What is all this extra money for if it is now proved beyond doubt not to deliver greater happiness, nationally or individually? Happiness has not risen in western nations in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in wealth…

Money does matter in various ways. People earning under around £10,000 are measurably, permanently happier when paid more. It matters when people of any income feel a drop from what they have become used to. But above all, money makes people unhappy when they compare their own income with others’. Richer people are happier – but not because of the absolute size of their wealth, but because they have more than other people. But the wider the wealth gap, the worse it harms the rest. Rivalry in income makes those left behind more miserable that it confers extra happiness on the winners. In which case, he suggests, the winners deserve to be taxed more on the “polluter pays” principle: the rich are causing measurable unhappiness by getting out too far ahead of the rest, without doing themselves much good.

More on this topic:

• Why We Work: US News and World Report cover story on how employers expand work into what used to be leisure. Excerpt:

  “Hours have crept up partly as a consequence of the declining power of the trade-union movement,” says Cornell University labor historian Clete Daniel. “Many employers find it more economical to require mandatory overtime than hire new workers and pay their benefits.”

• The case for happiness (A shorter Guardian article summarizing Layard’s position). Extract:

  What would generate more happiness? Less unemployment; safer communities; more harmonious relationships; and, importantly, much more widely available mental health treatment. Lord Layard rightly emphasised this last in his lectures: an illness which accounts for 50% of all measured disability, but which only receives 12% of NHS funds. The case is made; now for some action.

• Link to download Layard’s lectures. 1) What is Happiness and are we Getting Happier?2)
  What Causes Happiness? Rethinking Public Economics
  3) What would make a happier society?

If this keeps up, people might stop calling economics “the dismal science.” And we might not turn up the volume quite so loud on “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

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