Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 23 of
This Week's Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of June 4.
Enjoy.
The War Against Oil, unlike the Iraq Conflict or The War on Terror, really is a generation-long operation. (Picture from the GKSS Research Center in Germany.)
That's because of how I define "victory":
Carbon and hydrocarbons are completely replaced by hydrogen.
There are two reasons for this, and only one has to do with energy:
The only hope to start reversing global warming (which is what we have to do) is to eliminate carbon entirely from our energy diet.
The only way to solve the world's water woes is with hydrogen energy.
But hasn't this industry yet figured out recycling? All the rare metals we need to make tomorrow's PCs are sitting, right now, in landfills, inside old PCs.
It's true that harvesting these metals is difficult. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it doesn't mean we can't re-design future systems to make recycling materials easier.
This is just one area in which the supposedly clean electronics industry is, in fact, anything but. As I pointed out in my original piece, the real reason why the chip-making business fled the U.S. wasn't our high labor costs, but the environmental damage done by chip plants, damage the vendors simply refused to fix.
The excuse was that if they paid the price, then competitors in other markets wouldn't, and so gain an advantage. This was then the reason why those same companies moved their facilities to those same countries.
Intel, a company I have the greatest respect for, is the leader of this awful trend. They continue to build new plants -- in China.
Here is America's most inconvenient truth. It's the one point on which Karl Rove and George W. Bush are historically right, and all their critics -- me included -- are wrong. (Above, "The War Prayer," a piece by America's greatest writer, Mark Twain, which he chose to hold from publication until after his death.)
For nearly our entire history the American political party which has counseled peace, which has counseled patience, and which has counseled negotiation has been rejected by the voters.
The sin began with our first contested election, in 1800. John Adams worked frantically to avoid open war with France. Thomas Jefferson hammered him on it for weakness, and won the Presidency before Adams could announce he had succeeded.
Notice the code words in Jefferson's famous letter outlining his views:
During a time of political crisis a normal rule of politics is turned on its head.
That rule is, loud side wins.
Go back over the last 40 years and you will find that the side in every political argument which has agitated most loudly has generally had the upper hand. This was also true within the FDR period, the Progressive Era and the Gilded Age.
At the point of crisis, however, this is reversed. The Populists were the loudest side in the 1890s. Most people felt nothing but despair in the early 1930s. In 1969 Nixon gave a name to this -- the Silent Majority.
Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful
nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed
the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be
suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.
And so tonight -- to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans -- I ask for your support.
Nixon's math was right. The majority of Americans had not abandoned the Cold War, despite the enormous, and enormously-loud, protests against the War in Vietnam. Nixon's framing, taking ownership of the Cold War on behalf of the Republican Party, was the key to securing a Republican majority which has now endured a generation.
But suddenly, those rules don't apply. Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans oppose the War in Iraq. Yet it's the Michelle Malkins and Hugh Hewitts who get the TV face time, and mainstream reporters, even this weekend, were claiming that Republicans repeating the frame "support the troops" against Democrats had the upper hand.
The same nonsense is taking place on immigration. Again, the right has the noise, but the left has the people. Americans want working immigrants to get a chance of staying by a margin of 2-1, but it's the "deport 'em all" side which has the big megaphone, and thus, according to many in the media, the momentum.
America has always been a mix of Athens and Sparta.
From the time of our founding, our leaders have been aware of these ancient city-states as representing the contending states of our nature. It's unfair to the reality of those places, yet it came down through history that Athens would represent civilized discourse and Sparta the arts of war.
Many of our greatest words have been penned, as Athenians, reluctantly drawn to the Sparta of war:
As time has gone by, and the benefits of war have made themselves manifest among us, our paranoia has increased. We have become far less-reluctant to go to war.
We have, in fact, been in a state of almost continuous war for 66 years now -- three score and six, if you're counting at home. World War II was followed almost immediately by the Cold War, and as soon as that conflict ended Dick Cheney and his Merry Men began planning the next chapter, the one which began on September 11, 2001.
America today has the greatest military in the world. Not only can we kick ass against any other nation, we can kick ass against any combination of nations. We sit astride the world like a colossus.
But there is one thing we cannot do, something no power can do. We cannot occupy another nation against its will, save through genocide. The weapons of resistance have gotten too cheap, and too good.
I had hoped to get out this Memorial Day Sunday for a nice long bike ride, but my plans have changed.
Sonny's BarBQ is back.
Sonny's BarBQ is the name I give smoke from the wildfires which began in South Georgia a month ago, then spread into Florida, where it's called the Bugaboo fire. But it started here so it gets the name of the Governor of Georgia, a Republican named Sonny Perdue.
Atlanta is over 200 miles from the fire, but for the second time light winds have settled it over our heads. Don't breathe too deeply. Hope for a cold so you won't smell it. Lower the window shades as you would against a winter storm. It won't do you a lick of good.
Sonny's BarBQ is going to get you, no matter what. It seeps in under the door, it comes into your lungs no matter how softly you breathe. It gets into your clothes, the drapes, the crevices. It strangles your baby in its crib. It shortens your life.
The challenge of separating the warrior from the war has been around for ages, and is told memorably in The Americanization of Emily.
It’s
not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are
always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest
destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity...As long
as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach
cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.
James Garner's Charlie Madison is preaching cowardice during World War II, in the days leading up to that most valorous of American battles, D-Day, which is the centerpiece of the plot. This took a lot of courage on the part of playwright Paddy Chayefsky. Especially given that it was written near the start of a far less-honorable war, in Vietnam.
In a recent post I decided to ask, "Who was Kos in 1967?"
It was a flip question, with no simple answer. Because Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is a unique individual, a unique man created for a unique time.
What you need to understand about Kos is that he is not really a politician, or even an activist. He's an entrepreneur. He built his web site, Dailykos.com, as the first of what he hoped would be several communities, scaled and active, built around different subjects. He has a hankering for sports. There are, in fact, three other Kos sites -- Mother Talkers, Sports Blogs, and Street Prophets.
Markos also has a unique life story to tell. Born in Chicago, but raised in El Salvador, returning here during that country's civil war. An Army veteran who served in Germany during the Gulf War. A graduate of Northern Illinois University (Go Huskies). Also, by the way, a lawyer, Boston University. (Go Terriers.) Not the kind of places you expect to find the political elite.
Yet, in the context of his time, in the context of this time, that's just what he has become, not only a member of the political elite but the de-facto leader of the Netroots, the rising tide of our time, the political equivalent of Republicans in the 1850s, of Populists in the 1890s, of liberals in the 1930s and of movement conservatives in the 1960s.
That last bit was a big hint. So who was Kos in 1967?
Despite a lot of rhetoric, and some government action, the forces of copyright absolutism remain in a long, slow retreat.
The alliance to kill webcasting, in which radio broadcasters married themselves to music companies, seems to be coming apart. CNN and The New York Times are retreating from the paid firewalls, waking up to the idea that lower influence and circulation can't be made up in incremental revenue.
All these acts have a common theme, the economics of abundance. We don't need CNN's videos, or the Times' writing, or the music companies, for that matter. The idea that sharing music increases CD sales, which was heretical a few years ago, is now proven true. If music isn't heard inside its shrink wrap it doesn't exist. Yet a purchased song can be heard hundreds of times without becoming stale in a collection.
The same is not true for video, of course. We have a better memory for movies than for the written word, and a lower tolerance of repetition than for music. Some of my favorite movies, like The Americanization of Emily, I've seen barely a half-dozen times, yet I can recite whole scenes from memory. Unless the price is super-cheap most people find that buying a DVD is a bad economic deal.
Michael Dell's second stint as CEO of Dell Computer is failing.
This should not be a surprise. Most business comebacks fail. Most entrepreneurs have just one act in them, one twist that separates them from the pack. In the case of Dell, it was mass customization.
But under new CEO Mark Hurd, H-P has copied that trick. Their sourcing is better. For a variety of reasons, slower innovation in the server space has given China ever-more control of the hardware market.
Dell's attempts to appear innovative have been all show and no dough. Putting Ubuntu Linux on a few PCs is not innovation. Pushing Dell hardware in Wal-Mart is actually a step backward.
Dell's failure also demonstrates just how unique a man Steven Jobs has turned out to be. Like Dell, Jobs was pushed out. Like Dell, he came back. But Jobs has re-invented Apple as a consumer products giant, and in this decade he has ridden the wave of change rather than paddled against it. It's this decade, not the 1970s, that will make Steve Jobs a legendary business leader.
The War Against Oil, unlike the Iraq Conflict or The War on Terror, really is a generation-long operation. (Picture from the GKSS Research Center in Germany.)
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