The Horror of the Ambiguous Years

Matthew Yglesias excerpts what he considers an interesting point from David Brooks's latest column ("Why I Read David Brooks," 10 July 2007"; The New Lone Rangers," The New York Times, 10 July 2007).

Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

It's an interesting point — and one that I first encountered, in a much more snarkie form in Dan Savage's book, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family:

Think about the way many straight people live today. After college, straight men and women move to the big city. Their first orders of business are landing good jobs and finding cool apartments. Then the hunt for sex begins. Most young straights aren't interested in anything serious, so they avoid dating and look for "friends with benefits," or they just "hook up," a.k.a. engage in no-strings-attached sex with anonymous or nearly anonymous partners. Some want to have relationships, but find it hard to make a commitment, so they engage in what's known as "serial monogamy," i.e., they have a series of sexually exclusive, short-term relationships. When they're not having sex, they're going to gyms, drinking, and dancing. And since they don't have kids, these young, hip, urban straight people have lots of disposable income to spend on art, travel, clothes, restaurants, booze and other recreational drugs.

And do you know what all of that hooking up, drinking, and partying used to be called? "The Gay Lifestyle." Substitute "trick" for "hook-up," and "fuck buddies" for "friends with benefits," and "unstable relationships" for "serial monogamy," and straight people all over the United States are living the Gay Lifestyle, circa 1978. The only difference is that social conservatives don't condemn straights for being hedonists or attempt to legislate against the straight version of the Gay Lifestyle. (pp. 147-148)

It's strange that Mr. Savage would make this last point since he has been so vociferous about the ambition and breadth of right-wing anti-sex activities and their extension to include straight sexuality as well (e.g. the "Straight Rights Updates" at the end of the following Savage Love columns: "Worry Warts," 19 May 2005; "Stepdad Seeking," 10 November 2005; "Ford Puff," 15 December 2005; "Downers," 23 March 2006). But it would seem that at least the public face of fight-wing anti-heterosexual sex is not demagoguery so much as sentimentality and weepy attempts to talk youngsters out of their errant ways. And this brings me back to David Brooks.

The problem with Mr. Brooks's social commentary is that he is an interesting, observant, sensitive man who happens to have his intellect polluted by an ideology to which he clings too insistently. He has a way of starting with a very interesting social observation, chasing it about a quarter the way down the path of analysis, but before he can unpack the phenomena in all its complexity, he then ever so gingerly hammers it into the standard right-wing social categories, at which point analysis dies.

I can't help but gag myself with a spoon every time a read one of these wilting flower articles by David Brooks or Leon Kass or Harvey Mansfield. Will young women be permanently emotionally scarred by their ordeal with an ambiguous social situation? How can they possibly recover from a few "lost years"? Will young women be able to endure the trial of uncertainty about the future? While right-wing social intellectuals put the back of their wrist to their forehead and look to the sky over these burning questions, others might see these situations as vital growth experiences. Would enduring a little disappointment kill a person? Who doesn't have to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty in numerous aspects of their lives?

But the sexual ideal of these men is to be an emotional rock to a woman who sits at a lower station, folds her legs gently to the side and looks up admiringly at hubby. And their sexual ideal should be ours too.

permanent link | printer friendly | 7:21 -5:00 (EST) | Wednesday, 11 July 2007

Alan Greenspan's Memoir

Amazon updated their placeholder with a title, cover image, release date, book description, et cetera for Alan Greenspan's memoir. It will be out on 17 September 2007. It is only going to be 640 pages long. Given the importance of the position he will in all probability come to occupy in the history of monetary economics and U.S. economic history, something more on the scale of Henry Kissinger or George Schultz was more in order. I guess I shouldn't judge a book by its heft though; I will wait and see. Nonetheless, one can imagine the pallet-loads that will be generously distributed about bookstores on the day of release. It's going to be like the last Harry Potter novel for political junkies.

The title, The Age of Turbulence, is odd. To my politically addled ear it reads like Robert Brenner assisted Eric Hobsbawm in bringing his Marxist trilogy on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1789-1991) up to date.

permanent link | printer friendly | 7:33 -5:00 (EST) | Friday, 6 July 2007

Neal Stephenson and Google Earth

Wired has an interesting article on Google Maps / Google Earth this month (Ratliff, Evan, "The Whole Earth, Cataloged: How Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World," vol. 15, no. 7, July 2007, pp. 154-159.). I recall reading an interview with a futurist — in Wired even, I think — who said that the way he works is by reading science fiction novels. He figured that the sorts of kids who end up at M.I.T. and technology companies are also the sorts of people who read a lot of science fiction. They read something that strikes them as particularly cool and then as a technology graduate student or a researcher at a commercial lab, in a position to act on such a fantasy, decide to make it real. This struck me as clever and a little snarky, but it turns out that's exactly how Google Earth came about:

In 2001, [John] Hanke cofounded a company named Keyhole. Inspired in part by the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash — the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, created by the "Central Intelligence Corporation" and containing "a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth" — Hanke and a collection of programmers used their game design experience to create an online 3-D globe by streaming in commercial satellite images stored on the Keyhole servers. They called it Earth Viewer.

...

In 2004, not long after Sergey Brin downloaded a copy of Earth Viewer and interrupted a Google meeting to "fly" to the house of each executive in the room, the company bought Keyhole for an undisclosed amount, renamed it Google Earth, and moved Hanke's team into Building 45.

Since the Earth sequence in Snow Crash is a passage that captivated me as well — one of many in Snow Crash — I reproduce it here:

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro had heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC [Central Intelligence Corporation] software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of special information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

...

Hiro turns his attention to Earth.

The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it, tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit.

It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems — vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans — and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator — the line between night and day — has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the West.

Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.

Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse [cyberspace]. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, sense the change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit. (p. 106, 109-110)

This is from 1992. Twelve years later — reality.

permanent link | printer friendly | 0:11 -5:00 (EST) | Friday, 6 July 2007

The Chamberlain Turn

Lynne Olson, someone in a position to know, says that the neoconservative cult of Churchill that has in absentia induced Bush into their ranks has a membership screening problem ("Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W," The Washington Post, 1 July 2007):

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

permanent link | printer friendly | 0:09 -5:00 (EST) | Thursday, 5 July 2007

Keep Calm, Think

The recently thwarted terrorists attacks in Britain — or perhaps I should say attempted arsons, given the level of competence in execution — beg for reiteration of a few points that in other polities are commonplace. Before I get to that, though, exhibit A in this case comes from Former Scotland Yard Detective John O'Connor commenting on CNN (via Talking Points Memo):

I think that rather than using the all-embracing term of "al Qaeda," I think that you should be using the term "jihadists," which I think makes more sense. Because, though they may share common purposes with al Qaeda, I don't think that al Qaeda has the control to operate something like this. They could operate a major terrorist outrage, but I think it would be more professionally run. I mean this was a hopeless, incompetent terrorist attack.

When you see the ludicrous situation where none of the bombs were able to be detonated and these guys are trying to set fire to petrol, when all they did, they didn't get a detonation at the doors of the airport lounge; all they got was a bomb fire.

They set fire to fuel. Well, that in its own way, is not going to detonate the gas cylinders and it's not going to cause an explosion. It was just a fire. I mean, that is so incompetent as to be almost laughable.

The takeaway is the contrast between, on the one hand, the way that U.S. politicians and the media represent this story and its predecessors and on the other hand, the reality of the story and the much more level-headed response of the British (to whom the attack actually occurred). U.S. hyper-reactivity is playing into terrorist hands. I see three essential counterpoints.

1. We need to be accurate in our comprehension and conceptualization of who it is that poses a threat to the U.S. The administration, the right more generally and the media all want to just run everyone together — overt enemies, potential enemies, fence-sitters, enemies of enemies but not yet allies — and slap a label on them: al Qaeda, terrorists. So now we're going to help the Russians fight the Chechens, the Israelis fight the Palestinians, the Shi'ia fight the Sunni, but at the same time the Saudis fight the Iranians, the French fight disaffected North African immigrants, the Ethiopians fight the Somalis (but not the villagers of Darfur fight the Janjaweed). Witness the trend toward just designating as al Qaeda everyone that the administration deems bad guys (Greenwald, Glenn, "Everyone we fight in Iraq is now 'al-Qaida'," Salon, 23 June 2007), or Mitt Romney at one of the debates running together a disparate list of Muslim organizations: "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood,"

2. We can't go into conniptions or mass panic every time some deranged dimwit inquires about where he can purchase dynamite or stocks up on some incendiaries. We've already rounded up a few batches of half-competent schemers and it is probably only a matter of time before a more hardened team succeeds in some small scale terrorist attack in the United States. When that happens, Americans should keep their wits about them. If we don't panic, if chaos doesn't ensue, than that is a defeat for the terrorists. U.S. leaders should be preparing the American populace for resilience instead of fanning the smoldering embers of hysteria. I imagine that Rudi Guliani was at some campaign event this very afternoon telling a mid-sized group of people that they are all going to die unless we take some ill-conceived and drastic action.

3. A great deal of hay has been made over a recent poll showing some degree of support for suicide bombings of civilians in defense of Islam among U.S. Muslims ("Poll: 1 in 4 U.S. Young Muslims OK With Homicide Bombings Against Civilians," FOX News, 23 May 2007). Of course there are no contrasting statistics on offer about the nonchalance among Americas regarding civilian casualties of our own ongoing bombing campaigns (which killed 45 in Afghanistan this weekend; Salahuddin, Sayed, "Afghan Rights Body Urges Cut in Foreign Air Raids," Reuters, 2 July 2007). The aim of all the arm-waving over this poll is to gin up more xenophobia on top of that already invoked by the immigration debate. The fact that the U.S. does as good of a job as it does in integrating Muslims is to our advantage. Perceiving themselves as respected and as having a path to success is what prevents them from becoming disaffected and shiftless. We need to remember that our lifestyle of quiescent materialist consumption and petit hedonism is what people mean when they refer to the tremendous soft power of the United States. Bourgeois nihilism is the irresistible force that, Borg-like, will assimilate all comers. Or we could pursue a policy of active alienation and ghettoization toward Muslims. Since it is the overt foreign policy preference of many already, adopting it as a domestic policy too is a small step. Leadership is required here as well to resist the natural temptation of tribal politics, especially in the wake of another catastrophe. This is a place where I actually admire President Bush. His post-September 11th efforts at interfaith demonstrations were actually pretty decent (he is a closet-tolerant, if only under the moderating influence of Laura Bush).

Andrew Sullivan has turned this banner into a bit of a theme. It bears passing on.

permanent link | printer friendly | 16:13 -5:00 (EST) | Tuesday, 3 July 2007