Month of October , 2003

The FDA recently announced that meat and milk from cloned animals are safe for human consumption. We all know the FDA is hardly an expert guide these days, and I'm sure someone will have (non-cloned) steaks on his/her table for the rest of his/her life for scratching the agribusinesses' backs like this, but there it is. We also know that this country -- and these same agribusinesses -- is very unlikely to ever mandate a meaningful labeling law. It just goes contrary to the whole spirit of free marketeering (somehow...).

So what hope do we have? I have a suggestion, and a plea for help from what might seem an unlikely political force: America's rabbis. All food, in order to be considered "kosher", must be inspected and approved by a specially-certified rabbi, who declares the food itself and the methods of producing and processing it in accordance with Toraic law. Among the restrictions that must be adhered to are that an animal must be treated humanely, and must be fully healthy at the time of its slaughter -- sick and deformed animals aren't kosher. Now, while the kosher market in this country isn't very large (although add in Muslim "halal" rules and you have maybe 3-5% of the adult market), it's a market that tends to be a) highly visible, b) highly affluent, and c) mostly liberal. Food producers have worked hard in the past to earn and retain their kosher certification.

Although abuses can be somewhat common in the food certification process, I think that Jewish food inspectors might become a powerful ally in whatever happens down the line when cloning becomes an affordable option for food production. I don't know enough about Muslim halal certification, but that might also be an important aspect of this struggle. Cloning could (and probably should) be seen as an inhumane practice (and possibly even a sin in the "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" vein) and its products as deformed -- given the complexity of natural reproduction, it is unlikely that any human-directed process is going to hit the mark consistently. While some might object to the politicization of what is essentially a religious function, I doubt many rabbis will be among them -- Jews know, from our history and from our traditions, that religion is inherently political. The hijacking of our ability to choose what we put into our bodies is an injustice, and at their root, kosher laws exist to assure that both animal and human life is treated justly.

I heard about this on Democracy Now yesterday, but didn't get around to looking it up until this morning. The Department of Justice has released a report on diversity in the Dept. The report has been ready for two years, but the DoJ has stalled its release -- even after several FoIA requests (no surprise there, really) -- andwat was finally released was heavily redacted. All of the policy recommendations and what looks like about two-thirds of the body of the report were blacked out, so that The Memory Hole calls it "one of the most heavily-redacted government documents in recent memory." However, desiring absolute secrecy and having the competence to approach it are two different things -- The Memory Hole performed a small bit of technological magic on the document and managed to extract all of the redacted text! The complete version is available at their site, with all the previously-hidden parts highlighted in yellow (the file is a 5.78 MB pdf; the original version is also available for downloading).

The weird thing is that so much of the redactions seems totally trivial. For instance, section 4.3.7:

In addition to more structured mentoring, each component should have a diversity advocate who is an attorney. This advocate can provide knowledgable guidance to attorneys, serve as an ombudsman to address disputes, and continue to ensure that the component is cognizant of diversity issues.

Not very controversial stuff at all. The only thing I can think of is that this administration has no intention of doing anything to address diversity issues, and felt it would look better if they could say "we're doing all we can" without having their own ignored policy recommendations thrown back at them.

Given that so much of today's DoJ activity is entirely counter to the intended purpose of protecting rights and ensuring justice for all, the deeply ironic nature of this report should come as no surprise. In this least transparent (at least intentionally) of all government documents, one of the sticking points in achieving a more diverse and diversity-friendly DoJ is noted as the lack of transparency in human resource practices (page ES-2):

The Department sufferd from an inadequate human resources management infrastructure. There is widespread perception, especially among minorities, that HR practice lack transparency. This results in attorneys perceiving that practices are unfair. The Department does not emphasize career development, and tools for performanc appraisal are deficient. As a result, attorneys cite poor "people management" by supervisors.(Emphasis in original)

In other words, minorities see white employees who they perceive as less qualified advancing more quickly and/or to higher levels in a seemingly arbitrary way, and because the DoJ is not willing to bite the bullet and publicly reassure them that minorities' interests matter (for instance, by releasing a report that shows what the problems are and how the DoJ intends to go about rectifying them), they feel that it is their status as minorities that is holding them back.

Sounds healthy.

I have no real comment on this article, but am drawn to it merely because of the title: One man's mission to find Atlantis. Like hating Jews, seeking Atlantis doesn't seem like something I would do, but if MSN says it's true, I guess it's true.

Cypress will at least make a nice change from Vegas...

Paul Ford, whose weblog Ftrain.com I've only recently discovered, has written a strange and difficult story, entitled Flash. The story's narrator, a member of New York City's hipper-than-thou tech elite, organizes a flash mob around the sculpture The Sphere by Fritz Koenig, once housed in the plaza at the World Trade Center. At precisely the moment the mob is instructed to surge towards the sculpture, a bomb planted by the narrator in the sculpture explodes:

It is like watching a flower open into the sunlight. The sculpture is the bud; the bodies suddenly falling backwards are the petals, cut open by pieces of brass, everything washed over by a wave of red and orange light. The noise you'd expect is missing, more of a pop followed by creak. A white light lingers on the screen where the flash took place, burnt into the camera's lens, then fades. Hidden behind the ledge, I could not see, but I knew the rivets in the sculpture were flying out, that the welds used to heal the sculpture prior to its rebirth were ripped open first. Silence came, and now, to fill it, screaming.

Like I said, it's a difficult story. I am reminded of Karlheinz Stockhausen calling the World Trade Center bombing "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." If art is supposed to make us feel, to experience viscerally the beauty and terror of life and death, to think about our place in the world, if art is supposed to shape the way we look at and experience the world, then I guess he's right. Even something as horrible as the attack on, collapse of, and aftermath of the World Trade Center (and, as a committed Brooklynite at the time, I can testify to the literal horror I and other New Yorkers lived through those days) can, seen through the eyes of a masterful viewer, become strangely beautiful; witness the Magnum photos compiled for a show on 9/11.

Ford's story reminds me of something else, not quite so lofty. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, my partner was discussing the events with someone who expressed regret at having "missed" the attacks -- because of where she was at the time, she couldn't see what was happening downtown. Having watched the second tower collapse from the roof of our apartment building, I can say there are few, if any, things I wish I had missed seeing more than that, but there's more. There is, perhaps, a hunger for direct experience in these days of mediated reality delivered through television, newspapers, radio. And yet, the mediated world is the touchstone by which we assess and understand our direct experience. After 9/11, we walked around Manhattan shaking our heads and rubbing our eyes, saying to each other "It's like being in a movie" -- not in a good way. For most of us, movies and TV are the only "places" where we experience the extremes of human experience. The narrator in "Flash" witnesses his creation through his videocamera's viewfinder. The identities of his victims are revealing as well -- flash mobbing is already out of vogue, so the narrator deliberately shapes his invitation to appeal to the proudly ironic, the hip urban denizens who will respond to the idea of a flash mob as parody, wearing "their cloaks of detachment, their shields of wit and irony, three layers thick". Those for whom the detachment and un-committed-ness of mediated reality have become icons of their very being -- those who show up do so not to experience a flash mob, but to make fun of experience, to show themselves that they are above anything as plebian as experience.

Finally, Ford touches on the almost magical transformation the 9/11 attacks worked on New Yorkers themselves. Its no secret, though little remarked on, that before 2001, most New Yorkers hated the World Trade Center. Although useful as a way to determine which way was south below 23rd St., they were largely seen as ugly, imposing structures that loomed menacingly over the rest of the city, lacking the grace and style that the rest of the city has. They wouldn't look out of place in some Midwestern capital, maybe, or in some wherehouse district. After 9/11, though, the Twin Towers were transformed in much the way Koenig's The Sphere, the focal point of Ford's story, is:

When they found The Sphere in the wreckage, it was filled with office chairs and pieces of airplane, dented and torn open. And many found that its oversmoothed, inoffensive brass now had a rugged depth, a rawness and emotional immediacy. Much like Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass, which the artist proclaimed improved when its encasing glass cracked in transit.

In its destruction, the WTC finally took on a human element, perhaps some spirit drawn from the souls of the people who lost their lives in it and the tears shed by their survivors and witnesses. Draped with flowers, candles, photos of the missing and the dead, images and models of the Towers became iconic, transforming the spaces around them into holy ground. Like the narrator of "Flash", people had a drive to document, to re-present their experiences and feelings, to tell stories, share photos, blog, sculpt, paint.

I almost feel bad for the architects who will end up replacing the lost Towers. No matter how they try, whatever fills that gap in the NYC skyline will be just office space, nothing more. No matter how they try, their attempts to fix the memories, emotions, experiences associated with 9/11 in concrete, bronze, marble, paint, or glass -- whatever "memorial" eventually is installed in the new complex -- will be a pale reflection of those Towers, hated and reviled as they were when they stood over the New York rooftops. Through the mysteries of human process, those ugly blocks of steel and glass have come to sum up everything we know, feel, and think about 9/11 and terrorism, which is a strange kind of architectural accomplishment, and one which no architect, committee, or panel is going to capture. For that kind of meaning, it takes a mob.

Mac Diva reports on Hasbro's trademark infringement lawsuit against the Asian-American creator of "Ghettopoly", an offensively racialized take-off on Hasbro's "Monopoly". Says Mac Diva:

I am heartened by this responsible leadership from Asian-Americans who understand the pain racist abuse causes its targets and the poison it infuses into society as a whole. Perhaps their message of tolerance will trickle down to Asian-American immigrants who have unthinkingly adopted the bigoted beliefs of many white Americans.

I also welcome Hasbro's lawsuit. Most civil rights groups lack the funds to effectively confront people who engage in appalling acts such as Chang. However, Hasbro has the deep pockets to bring him to heel. Before the process is over, I will not be surprised if Chang has disgorged every cent he made from Ghettopoly. If legal fees don't bankrupt him, a judgment against him likely will.

Like Mac Diva, I'm glad to see Asian-American groups speaking out and condemning the creator of Ghettopoly -- which maligns both African-Americans, in its imagery, and Asian-Americans, in linking them to the game's bigotry. However, I am disturbed by Mac Diva's encouragement of Hasbro's lawsuit, and particularly by the notion of the game's creator being "brought to heel". As with any other published material, David Chang, the mastermind behind Ghettopoly, has a right to free speech and free expression, no matter how offensive. To advocate the use of the courts to crush that expression seems to me a violation of that fundamental principle. It's an admittance of the utter failure of imagination and progressive values -- because we have been unsuccessful in destroying the demand for such racist representations, we will attempt to stem the supply by restricting what they are allowed to say.

And who will benefit from the outcome of this lawsuit? African-Americans? Hardly. Asian-Americans? Guess again. The only possible beneficiary will be Hasbro, who will use a set of laws that are antithetical to progressive values (anti-copyright laws that punish users and prevent innovation) to protect a game which is decidedly not progressive (with it's integral system of class capitalism expressed through its low-rent, slum districts -- the $12/night fleabag motels of Baltic Avenue -- linearly opposed to the glittering mansions of Park Place and Broadway). While worrying about the derogatory black imagery of Ghettopoly is commendable, what about the absent black imagery of whites-only Monopoly?

Mac Diva frames Hasbro's case as an extension of the work of civil rights groups who "lack the funds to effectively confront people who engage in appalling acts". I can virtually guarantee that Hasbro is not making this mistake -- they are interested only in protecting a trademark, and would have filed the same suit (and have, I'm sure) if the knock-off's imagery consisted solely of unicorns and fluffy kittens. This is a company that has moved virtually all of its production into Chinese sweatshops and is the target of shareholder action from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility because of its racist protrayals of American Indians -- I'm entirely sure that Hasbro is not the knight in shining armour for civil rights causes Mac Diva makes them out to be.

And even if they were motivated solely by civil rights-related concerns, even without their checkered record in this area, is this what we progressives want? Corporate crusaders to fight our battles in the name of anti-copyright law? I disagree heartily with Chang's vision of African-American culture, and with the cynical detachment that, I'm sure, has him convinced that it's "all in good fun" -- but I disagree more with letting this be Hasbro's fight. Chang is a pissant little nothing who has raised some dust -- Hasbro is a giant corporation that is a near-constant presence in our lives and even moreso in those of our children. So ask me who I'm more afraid of.

Interesting article on homosexuality in the Navajo community. Indian societies have long posed a challenge to Western notions of fixed sex and gender identities. Many have a long history of tolerating, and often holding in high regard, people who choose at some point in their life (usually puberty) to take on the role and identity of the opposite sex. As the article notes, these people frequently married members of the once-same, now-opposite sex, and their marriages were considered as normal and natural as any other marriage. Once referred to generically as "berdaches", the preferred term these days, from Will Roscoe's work on Zuni and other socities, the accepted term nowadays is "two-spirits". The particular term for two-spirits in Navajo is nadleeh

Western conceptions of gender don't apply very readily to two-spirits, and it is difficult to apply the term "homosexual" to them without reservations. But, of course, Navajos don't live in pre-contact Navajo society, they live in a modern Navajo society which has developed for centuries in relation to a conquering Western society. Homosexuality in Western society is a mark of difference, a transgression of the categories we rely on to make sense of human relations. It is also closely related to the modern, Western sense of the self as an individual, driven by private pleasures and passions. Sexuality in Western society is more than a social role, it's a function of identity, and so the Navajo have experienced the emergence of "gay" identities that don't quite fit the mold of the nadleeh, yet aren't quite the same as Western homosexuality, either.

Now gay Navajos are organizing, under pressure from both HIV/AIDS and a social scene, Navajo and Western, that doesn't quite know where to place this new breed of nadleeh. It would be interesting to know the particular experiences Navajos have in dealing with these pressures, and their responses to those experiences.

Coming a little late to the Diebold/Swarthmore story, but I think it's an important enough issue that can benefit from as many voices as possible being added to the mix. Students at Swarthmore are being denied university Internet privileges for doing what I'm about to do: linking to Why War?'s archive of internal Diebold memos and e-mails. Diebold is handing out court orders left and right to get sites hosting these fairly incriminating documents -- which detail the pattern of mismanagement, fraud, and downright contempt for the electoral process and the very idea of a free and fair election -- and Swarthmore's administration has caved to their demands, shutting down sites and penalizing their owners for even linking to Why War?

The material Why War? has posted is scary stuff. Take a look at the highlights on the front page -- there's more just like it in the rest of the archive. In Why War?'s words:

We have in our possession the internal memoranda of Diebold Elections Systems, the company in charge of the electronic voting machines in 37 states, and we intend to share them. These memos prove that Diebold knowingly produced an electronic election system that contained absolutely no security against voter fraud. In fact, the lead engineer from Diebold wrote over two years ago that anyone could change votes without leaving a trail: "Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its contents. That includes the audit log." GEMS stands for Global Election Management System and is the central computer in each county on which the votes are stored after the election.

What is perhaps scarier than the incompetence and disregard for accurate vote-tallying expressed in these archives is the very fact that Why War? got hold of them in the first place. Any security expert worth half a damn will tell you that the most unsecure part of any security system is the people who use and operate it. Major security breaches almost always involve an insider, someone with expert, first-hand knowledge of the system. Someone like whoever leaked these materials to Why War? or Why War?'s source. If Diebold can't even keep its own dirty laundry private, how can we trust them to keep a secret ballot secret?

This leak calls into question the whole idea of computerized voting -- although fraud was and is possible with paper ballots, the decentralization of the system and the difficulty of changing or forging enough physical ballots to affect any major election made vote tampering difficult enough that we could be fairly confident in the results we got. Computerized voting -- especially Diebold's method, which relies on notoriously unsecure Windows-based software like MS Access -- makes vote tampering significantly easier to accomplish, and significantly more difficult to detect and prosecute. Effectively, what once required a massive conspiracy will, in the dawning Diebold Era, be accomplished much more easily by 15 year old "script kiddies".

Contentious, formerly an e-newsletter devoted to issues of content development and delivery, went blog last week, after a year's hiatus of the e-newsletter. And this reader just isn't interested. The reasons are several: the hurried, unstructured prose that characterizes many blogs; the technical hurdles RSS and blogging software still represent; the difficulty in searching and finding content easily (although I wonder how wrong it is to expect websurfers to know their software, at least enough to use "find in page"?); and so on. What strikes me most, though -- and it's a complaint I've seen in other forms frequently around the web -- is the following comment:

I find blogs to be generally unstructured and difficult to find things in, especially with unchecked and/or unmoderated comments sections. How many megabytes of, "Ooo, me too!" should I be expected to look through to find someone who may have made a useful addition to the conversation?

OK, no accounting for matters of personal taste, but it seems to me that this kind of sentiment is less about taste than it is about a deep-seated fear of conversations. I'm the first to admit that comments can turn into mob scenes, but they can turn into remarkably cogent discussions, bringing to bear expertise that the blog-owner didn't have or didn't know how to bring into play. For instance, an incredible discussion was launched at Alas, a Blog in response to a post (which, alas, seems to be no longer at the URL I bookmarked at the time) on transexuality, feminism, and gender construction. A real conversation developed, with commentators drawing on their experiences as transvestites, transexuals, homosexuals, and heterosexuals from all over the political spectrum in dealing with one of the fundamental -- and thus most uncomfortable -- ambiguities we are confronted with in modern life.

Conversations scare people, I think, for the same reason trans-vestitism/sexualism do -- conversations are ambiguous, shifting, never quite "fixed" in place, maybe -- like the Internet -- always already broken. There is no predicting just what will happen in even the most banal conversation. All over the world, marginalized groups -- African-American urban teenagers, Yemeni tribalists, Brazilian working men, and others -- have raised to the level of an art the practice of raising the stakes in a conversation higher and higher until just before violence erupts. A tricky proposition, to be sure, and if you play the game wrong, you end up with a busted jaw, or worse.

Conversations are, by their nature, not only unpredictible but uncontrollable. We may fool ourselves with etiquette and political correctness, but we know that even within the lines we define as "proper" a lot of damage can be done -- and we also know that those lines are more "suggestions" than real barriers. This unpredictability and uncontrollability are part and parcel of conversation. Although anthropologists recognize a "phatic" function of speech (the exchange of formalities being a good example, where following the form is far more important than the content of the exchange, the intent being to recognize and reinforce social bonds rather than to communicate knowledge; the "me toos" the letter-writier above cites are also an example of phatic speech), most conversation is meant to work through or towards the unknown -- whether that's what we should get for dinner or what kind of society we should live in. Our partners introduce even more unknowns -- we never know precisely what someone might choose to take offense at (try it with your significant other some time...) or exactly what they know or don't know. So conversations involve risks, and danger, and for that they are pretty scary. But consider the alternative -- the one-way flow of information that characterizes most media communication. Is there any less risk or danger? Well, given the results of PIPA's recent study, "Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War", showing a positive correlation between watching Fox News and misunderstanding basic details about the war in Iraq, perhaps the risks are just as great -- maybe greater.

More to the point, though, conversation is what makes us us. It is at the same time the source of information about acting in the world and action in the world. Conversation is where we draw the raw material of our selves and is the field in which we shape ourselves from that raw material. This fear of conversation, of "what they might say", seems to me a rejection of our humanity itself -- but that's what scares me. Because as far-fetched as it may sound, it seems to me that their is a faction in modern society that would like us a little less human, a little less active, a little more like machines or robots. And, yes, a little less conversational.

The Columbia Journalism Review offers a special report on The New Age of Alternative Media this month, with several articles on blogs and blogging. Highlights include:

• From "Blogworld and Its Gravity"
  

  [T]hese amateurs, especially the ones focusing on news and current events, are doing some fascinating things. Many are connecting intimately with readers in a way reminiscent of old-style metro columnists or the liveliest of the New Journalists. Others are staking the narrowest of editorial claims as their own ? appellate court rulings, new media proliferation in Tehran, the intersection of hip-hop and libertarianism ? and covering them like no one else. They are forever fact-checking the daylights out of truth-fudging ideologues like Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, and sifting through the biases of the BBC and Bill O'Reilly, often while cheerfully acknowledging and/or demonstrating their own lopsided political sympathies. At this instant, all over the world, bloggers are busy popularizing underappreciated print journalists (like Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn), pumping up stories that should be getting more attention (like the Trent Lott debacle), and perhaps most excitingly of all, committing impressive, spontaneous acts of decentralized journalism.

• "The Media Go Blogging, a short guide to blogs associated with major media outlets.
• "Killer Apps", a too-short examination of the technological forces driving blogging (and vice versa). "In 1999 there were dozens of blogs. Now there are millions. What happened?"
• From "Terms of Authority", a look at the fate of authority in these days of distributed intelligence, comes this description of "the public" as an idea:
  

  The public is an idea because it takes imagination to conceive of such a thing - the great mass of people spread out over the nation but in touch with the same events, leading private lives but paying public matters some attention. It becomes more than an idea when people act on it, as Jay Leno does in his nightly monologue on the day's news: "You all saw this, right? . . ."

I'm not one of these people who salivates over every mention of blogging in the press, or that even cares whether blogging ever achieves "mainstream success" (whatever that is). But the CJR is a smart magazine, and the pieces on alternative media included in this special report show it. Blogging -- and publishing alternative weeklies, and writing 'zines, and broadcasting commercial radio or television -- isn't important as a demonstration of technological proficiency in and of itself. Media is, in our modern mass society, our way of being society. It is literally and redundantly the medium in which we live and the mediator between us as individuals and us as millions of people sharing the world-space we live in. Blogging is exciting right now, in some cases because it's new, but also because it is, finally andafter much, much hype, a way for individuals to actively engage media, to control, even in a small way, the medium of their identities. And that's no small thing.

The infantilization of women is well-enough known to be a cliché, from "protective" male chauvinists to the sexual standard set by Britney Spears and Cristina Aguilera. In the interest of fair play, apparently, a German bar has opened a "Männergarten"--a place for women to drop their men-children off while mommy-wife goes shopping for men:

The living room-sized space at one end of the Nox bar in central Hamburg looks like it's been perfectly equipped as a children's daycare center. There are comic books spread out on tables, comfortable couches, a remote-controlled car, plastic toys and even a playpen of sorts with a construction set. It's only when you catch a glance at the copies of Penthouse and Playboy scattered about that you realize this is not your average kids' area.

In fact, children aren't allowed here; women aren't either. The Nox bar has set aside this room for men only. More precisely, for men who have no desire to tag along with their wives or girlfriends while they look for skirts, scarves and handbags in the designer boutiques in Hamburg's premier shopping district.

For 10 Euros (about $11.65 US), the "boys" get a meal, 2 beers, and all the laddish entertainment their tiny little heads can absorb before they have to go nappy-time.

Bars in Cologne, Munich, and Berlin are planning their own Männergartens.