It has been a disastrous week for my country. Two days before it recessed, the Congress passed a statue legalizing torture. At least nine Senate Democrats voted in favor of the bill. Shame, shame, shame. In a hurried few moments, and for purely political reasons, they overturned two hundred and thirty years of moral clarity. Not one Democratic Senator would launch a filibuster. Some in Congress spoke against the bill and then voted for it!
And, the most damning event of all, America just sighed and went on about its business. Nobody seems to give a damn.
Just like the children of Lebanon who were massacred by Israeli jets and helicopters (for a poignant article see here; h/t to MarkFromIreland), this momentous event has already begun to drift off into the mists of history, if that.
Complexity. There has been much written about this subject in the scientific literature. One of the areas that is so fascinating is the ability (or inability, so to speak) of humans to grasp the kinetics of simultaneous events. Let me give you an example: consider a forest that has a population of mountain lions and deer. If you told someone that there were one hundred deer and 20 mountain lions, and the lions killed 5 deer a month, most people could figure out that after a month the deer population would be zip.
What happens when you start putting other, kinetic, variables into the mix? What if lions reproduce at 5 lions per hundred and deer at 20 deer per hundred per year? What if lions are killed by 2 lions per 50 by hunters every three months? Could you figure this out in your head? Could you map out how many deer and lions were present after a year?
It turns out, as the people who created a nifty computer program called Stella have found, that humans are very poor at juggling changing events.
Is it no wonder that America is completely overwhelmed by Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Darfur, the Pope, Tony Blair, a new Prime minister of Japan, you name it? In addition to things like Iraq, Katrina and just trying to live? It is just not possible to think about all these things at once.
This is why Karl Rove and his constantly shouting "terror, terror, terror" is such a successful strategy. It was the same with Hitler and Jews. In a complex world, people will gravitate toward anything that is persistent. After a while, they come to actually depend on this stimulus. The Administration of George W. Bush would fall apart in a minute if there was an end to terrorism. In fact, Rove would invent it if he had to (and the latest ballyhoo is in large part an invention since it has been five full years since the last attack.)
Democratic Government was made for much simpler times. Times when individual citizens could grasp the complexities of the world and vote accordingly. Now we must depend on our surrogates, the politicians. By choice or necessity, they have been almost totally corrupted by the need for money to get elected. It is doubtful if they behave in our interests except in the rare case that they coincide. It is also doubtful that this situation will ever show substantive change. Human nature is built into genes and genes need millennia to mutate. We don't have millennia.
I wish I wasn't so pessimistic about all of this, but this week has been an eye opener. Even if the Democrats win the election, we still have been a country that voted for torture. We might as well hang up our hats and cash in our chips or any other euphemism you might want to employ. We have lost our virginity.
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It was ever thus, Doc. The difference now is that it is out in the open. The Orcs think they control everything, or everythig that matters, to protect themselves now.
Lets hope their vision is sufficiently distorted by their hubris and they don't, in fact, control enough.
As for the Dems, they were never going to save anyone. Kerry "threw" the last election and the people who ran that election for him are still in position.
What's that saying about repeating the same behaviour and expecting a different outcome?
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