Why not?

Jimmy Carter wrote " Why Not the Best?” when he was running for president, 30 years ago. Carter appealed to the best in Americans – and it certainly seemed we could do better than the criminality of Nixon or the tawdriness of Ford's pardon. Nobody doubted the ability of Nixon or the decency of Ford. After 6 years of George W. Bush, the bar has been set on its lowest rung. Presidential candidates can now shorten their appeal to “why not?”

Reagan succeeded Carter in a landslide. The old actor Reagan could not distinguish script from history – he believed, because he had seen a film, that he helped liberate Nazi death camps – but his directors could. They kept Reagan from doing anything profoundly stupid. Sure, they made bad movies, err, moves, such as Granada, Lebanon, and Iran Contra, but they were small budget, indie junk that his hard-core fans loved anyway. They had some lucky timing with big box office hits like the Berlin Wall but just as importantly, no mega-flops.

Bush is the apotheosis of Reaganism. Bush is the cheerleader who wants to be the Gipper, the hero, the decider. In this fantasy, Bush is a self-made man. The actual plot line is more prosaic: prodigal son follows dad into the family business. But he does more than just talk tough, buy weapons, and saber rattle: he starts a war, dons a flight suit, and declares he is bringing freedom to the oppressed of the world. Rewrite! Make that “oppressed-with-proven-oil-reserves of the world”. His agents know the domestic market perfectly. Sadly, they have a weak grasp on reality and, except for one plucky British distributor, have failed in the overseas market. They mired us in a long and draining war because they thought it was a really neat idea. A "high concept" idea can have perfect pitch over brunch then bomb like an improvised explosive device in the marketplace. You can put lipstick on a pig like “no child left behind” but no amount of makeup will make up for the hole in families and communities caused by the Iraq debacle.

Could we do worse? I doubt it. But I thought the same about Reagan.

Seeing Eye to Eye

This American soldier photographed in the home of an Iraqi family looks like a cyborg - depersonalized with amour, helmet, and sunglasses. The armor is indispensable but the sunglasses, inside? The effect is apparently intentional, since Americans in Iraq favor the mirrored type of sunglasses that mask their eyes with metallic shields. Although depersonalization is intimidating and potentially useful. it also increases the separation between Americans and Iraqis. If we want to be viewed as liberators and partners instead of occupiers and exploiters, let them see it in our eyes.

Game Theory

"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton” (attributed to the Duke of Wellington)

How do the games we Americans play influence us? The most popular game in the world is “football”, which Americans call soccer. One of the most popular games in America is “football”, a different game in which the foot rarely touches the ball. Let's compare these games.

• Attention: Soccer has very few interruptions. Football is mostly interruptions. There are only about 5 seconds of activity in every 30 seconds of game time. There are also as many as 12 time-outs per game. A 90 minute soccer game takes about 2 hours. A 60 minute football game takes about 3 hours. Football cheerleaders may help regain flagging attention. The other great American pastime, baseball, is even worse in this respect. A baseball game is an eternity of near-perfect inactivity, interrupted with brief spasms of action by only a few of the players.
• Identity: You can see the faces and bodies of the soccer players. Football players are helmeted and padded to such an extent that they can only be identified by their numbers.
• Initiative: Soccer is free flowing, so individual improvisation and spontaneous cooperation are essential. In contrast, football is highly scripted. The responsibility for a football “play” is distributed among coordinators, coaches, and players.
• Winning: Soccer is low scoring. There is no way to score more than 1 point at a time and even a single score can be crucial. There is no way to score only 1 point in football. Football scores are more than 10 times higher than soccer scores. Most important, soccer accepts a tie score while football goes to great lengths to avoid ties.

Soccer is better training for real life than is football. We need diligence, improvisation, cooperation, and personal responsibility to succeed in life. And success is often really just a battle to a draw against similarly motivated and inspired colleagues and competitors. Americans are trained to engage the world with the goal of winning, quickly, in a discrete round of negotiations or warfare. Instead, a long term, flexible engagement and accepting ties might be more appropriate and productive. And where are the cheerleaders in real life? Football is a great game but it may be poor preparation for life.

King Conscience

One year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King spoke out against America's war in Vietnam “because”, he said, “my conscience leaves me no other choice”. King was compelled to speak out against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.” It was a difficult decision because he alienated President Johnson, who advanced civil rights laws and applied Federal government power to protect civil rights. He also knew that his stance would risk dividing the civil rights movement. But he listened to his conscience.

The parallels with Iraq are striking.

The Iraqis, like King said of the Vietnamese, “must see Americans as strange liberators". We helped liberate the Vietnamese from Japanese imperialism only to allow the return of French colonialism. Similarly, we liberated the Iraq from decades of tyranny under Saddam Hussein only to allow it to descend into violence that eclipses even Saddam's reign.

The people of the Middle East today, just as King said of the Vietnamese then, “may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States”. Our overweening obsession with oil is self evident and morally blinding.

The Bush administration would substitute “anti-terrorism” for civil rights, yielding “peace and anti-terrorism don't mix”. King said those who offer such false choices “do not know the world in which they live”. Bush's blundering misadventures has cost America much of the admiration and trust of the rest of the world. This has made the world a more dangerous place for all free thinking people.

Rename the Baghdad “Green Zone” a big “hamlet” and this quote is accurate today in Iraq:

“Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets.”

You can imagine a Sunni or Shiite leader echoing the sentiment of a Vietnamese Buddhist leader, quoted by King:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

King's invocation of scripture concluded like current opinions of Bush's desperate 'plan' to increase troops in Iraq:

“Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"

In this speech, King explicitly accepted his role as a preacher. He delivered his message with the force of convictions that he lived. Please follow the link above to his brilliant, moving, and still relevant speech. I like this photograph because he seems to be looking at us. Let's learn the lesson our King taught us: listen to your conscience.

iNewton

If anyone other than Apple announced a new cell phone, nobody would pay much attention. Improbably, Apple not only met, but actually exceeded enormous expectations when it announced the iPhone (figure). What CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated was clear evidence that they had thought deeply about how a phone should work. We all have phones with functions that we've never managed to figure out how to use. Or, having finally figured out how to do something by reading the manual or touring the menus, we forgot the trick by the next time. Apple has applied its design magic to the physical form and the human “interface”, making a phone that looks great and works the way you'd expect.

Full disclosure: I own a little – too little – Apple stock. I also own a little – enough – Motorola stock. I've always admired Moto's advanced technology and, lately, its style. Unfortunately, its phones have often been marred by mediocre software. Also, all cell phones have been crippled by the telephone service providers because the carriers want to sell their own services. Apple, in contrast, had the clout to get Cingular/ATT to actually add support for functions. Oddly, the iPhone has been criticized (already) for not allowing even more, "third party" applications. This criticism is silly because the iPhone comes with standard applications that are years ahead of the competition and because nobody adds applications to their iPod or current cell phone, anyway.

I was hoping for an ultraportable tablet computer from Apple. I figured, who needs another phone? Well, the new iPhone is essentially an updated Newton (lower figure), a small tablet/personal data assistant (PDA) that was way ahead of it time when Apple produced it over a decade years ago. The Newton didn't have cell phone, wireless internet, or bluetooth (short range) connections. There's a very good reason why these were missing on the Newton: they either rare (cell phones) or non-existent at the time. I had one and despite its limitations, the Newton was still a very useful device. Now the iPhone is the Newton, perfected. iWant.