Monday, September 24, 2012          1:53 PM

Dear Daniel Mayes:

I’ve just been reading your excellent article  “Are We Heading Towards A Big-Brother World?” regarding the use (or over-use?) of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) camera systems in modern cities.

By and large I must agree that this is a ‘balancing act’ issue, with security and surveillance on the one side and an invasion of personal privacy on the other. But there is a larger issue being overlooked here. The once-a-decade National Census (an attempt to get an accurate-as-possible head-count of all US citizens) is written into our Constitution. It, along with voting (another data-sampling activity) are both minimal attempts at determining some information of the people’s presence and wishes with regard to ‘self-governing’.

Self-governing is an ideal that cannot be realized—even working towards an exact head-count is an attempt to determine how many people are in which location, so that their congressman can represent them in numbers proportional to the number of people in the state, for example. But no tabulation can count all the people in the United States at one instant of time—even if we had the manpower and resources to physically count every person in the country, people would be born, people would die, in the time it takes to tally the numbers, they will have already changed. So the ideal of self-governing, of a government that responds to every want and need of every single citizen is, like all ideals, something that can only be imagined.

In the voting process, we encounter ‘hanging chads’, voter suppression, voter turnout (especially ‘voter turn-out’–there are only 20% or 30%, at best, of eligible voters participating in any election). So this, too, is an ideal that we should not hold our breath, waiting for its realization in reality. Fortunately, we have mathematics.

Sociology is the study of humans as groups–the smaller the sample, the less accurate the results–and even in large-sample studies, the results cannot be expected to predict the behavior of a single individual. But as a group, humans are incredibly predictable–and whenever huge samples of data-sets are available, they can predict with uncanny certainty the percentage of the group that will go this way, the percent that will go that way, and how many are left undecided and standing pat.

When polls first came into everyday use, in the 1950s, most of the applications were commercial–sales and marketing jumped right on the new miracle science, and have stayed riveted to consumer-testing, market research and back-end analysis ever since. Both politicians and news outlets soon saw the inherent entertainment value of releasing survey results on current trends in the opinions, politics, and tastes of the masses.

But there were other, more sensible, uses to be had. Traffic surveys in high-traffic urban arteries allowed for more efficient design and maintenance of freeways and intersections. Foot-traffic surveys of mall-shoppers changed the designing of malls and parking lots. Supermarkets use their inventory turn-over to determine future shelf-stock purchases. Lawyers use medical-symptom-mapping to prove high-risk ‘cancer cells’ located near places of pollution. The list goes on.

Many are the benefits to business and commerce—but even so, the individual also benefits from some sociological data-sampling. In a world of terrorism, radiation, and bio-safety concerns, a data-set of every pedestrian within a particular ten-block-radius might hold vital clues to emerging threats or illegal activities. But it can also aid in the search for a lost child or pet (if the pet doesn’t already have a sub-dermal LoJack device), or rescue operations during a natural disaster.

Many people seem to think that only ‘bad-guys’ require surveillance—when the truth is that, as we become a faster-moving society using synthetic signposts to organize the flow of us, the provisioning of us, the educating of our children and the protecting of our weakest, we need to keep tabs on what’s happening. Is blanket coverage of CCTV cameras the right method for collecting this data? Perhaps not. But, is there a built-in need for record-keeping in our high-tech, high-speed global village? I’m afraid so.

I find something strange in the waves of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Where were these outraged Muslims when the Soviet Union banned religion throughout Eastern Europe? And what is all this talk of ‘respect’ without respect for life? If we were to ask the Syrians or the Libyans or the Egyptians for ‘respect’ we’d be accused of high-handedness; ‘the Great Satan demands respect, does it?’ We give billions in financial aid to some Mid-East nations, well, most Mid-East nations. Isn’t that respect for our fellow Peoples? Does the money not count, all of a sudden, because we built an Internet that allows the Middle Easterners to forget that we are an ocean apart?

This so-called movie (that is actually a ‘trailer’ (a preview) for an imaginary movie) was made by one person, maybe two. The armies of Islam have no beef with those individuals–if they did, they should have gone after those people in particular. Instead, they thought, what a great excuse for murdering the American closest at hand, the one with the best reputation–just so the whole world would know how ‘angry’ these folks are. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was in Libya to help the newly democratic nation transition to a more settled, less chaotic installation of an elected government. I assume he was also there to oversee the transaction of billions in aid. He wasn’t naïve–he knew he was risking his life to be there and to help.

He was not some puppeteer trying to coerce Libya into becoming a pawn of the United States–the world knows this. In all the fighting our armed forces have ever done, we have never taken permanent possession of any real estate–that is our tradition and it hasn’t changed in over two-hundred years. He was there to help, period. Likewise the three other innocent Americans executed by the mob that stormed our embassy.

Respect? We have a tradition in America, a common cause that many Americans have died to protect–it’s called free speech. The protesters say “We never insult Jehovah or Christ, why must you insult our prophet?” Well, first of all–Go ahead. I can call Christ a Pig. I can call Jehovah a Geezer in the Sky–we don’t CARE. Sticks and stones will break our bones but words will never hurt us. Or our gods, or our government. No. What these protestors are against is Free Speech.

They were nice and quiet all through the Cold War, many of them siding with the Soviets in exchange for arms or funds–working hand-in-hand with an enforced-atheism government. Syria still does it today–well, I shouldn’t say Syria, Syrians are being blown up in the streets by their own government–but that Government is still dealing with Communists, just like the good ol’days–as is Iran.

What do they have in common? Repression. They believe in repression of public dialogue–they prefer to keep political discourse as a blood sport. They want their governments to retain the ability to cow their citizens, instead of serve them. Why? Because Islam (again, perhaps not Islam, but it’s figureheads, the ones with the ability to rustle up some gang violence among the population) has a tradition of repression–they repress their women, they indoctrinate their young, and they punish people for speaking their minds. This is not a healthy format for a major religion. We will come back later to the issue of their longed-for dream of committing genocide in Israel.

There are Muslims in the United States–their lives are no different from us non-Muslims–they understand that Free Speech takes precedent over religious dogma, they don’t attack passers-by on the street every time someone takes a swipe at their religious traditions. There are Jews in America–hell, last I heard, there are more Jews in the New York metro area than there are in Israel. But the Muslims here understand that religious freedom takes precedence over some feud the Imams have been stoking the fires of for a millenia.

In America, we know that freedom is more important than dignity. We know that dignity is an illusion, that the Emperor is buck-naked, and that ‘fervent prayer’ is the limit of how far one citizen’s religion can impose its rules on another. When I was a kid, Catholics couldn’t eat meat on Fridays–but there was no pressure from Catholics to close the butcher shops on Friday by law.

And there is another bit of childishness to this Mid East violence–have they no faith? Can one sick guy’s post on an obscure web-site really touch their prophet? Is their faith truly encumbered by this arbitrary input from one stupid foreigner, half-way round the world? Don’t they see that their magnification of this one guy’s bad attempt at satire makes him a world-renowned figure? If they had an ounce of sense, they would have let this guy and his ‘trailer’ fade away like a billion other tasteless web-posts.

The way I see it, all these embassy protests have been orchestrated by Imams jealous of the power they wield in the Middle East that they enjoy nowhere else. They see repression as a necessary tool for their survival as leaders of their society. They see religious freedom as a death knell to their world order. They think that anyone with the nerve to face up to them, and tell their own truth, ought to be put to death.

Well, the terrorists have become very sophisticated. One can hear and read in the media of a new ‘discussion’ over freedom of expression. There is nothing to discuss. If we adopt any new legislation amending the freedom of the press or freedom of speech–I swear I’ll make a hundred videos ridiculing Islam. I’ll devote my frickin life to it.

Ancient Egypt Arts.

via Ancient Egypt Arts.

Trumpeter Hornbill..

via Trumpeter Hornbill..

The thing everyone overlooks is that Karl Marx was right. The desperation of the revolutions that are thought of as Communism were half-baked, seat-of-the-pants efforts to rectify the evils of Capitalism. There is no better example in human history of good intentions leading to a hell here on earth than the Socialist and Communist regimes that transformed into police states before the dust of overthrown palaces had settled. But that doesn’t make Marx wrong—it simply means that the struggle to recover humane principles from a Capitalist world is a complex and difficult thing.

The apoplexy that erupts whenever ‘Socialism’ is mentioned is part of this misperception. Let’s imagine we did something humane, that we paid for it with tax revenue because it is our responsibility to see to it that our country is a decent, human place to live—and we forgot to label it ‘Socialism’. Would that be so bad? We accept the rightness of keeping kids from going hungry—if our government can bring a more consistent and standardized effort to bear on the problem than local charities and churches, we are all for it. Then, as soon as someone calls it ‘Socialism’, we decide it’s better to let people suffer than to risk our great nation becoming a ‘socialist nightmare’.

I, for one, don’t give a damn about Socialist or non-Socialist—all I know is that we let our country become littered with former human beings who are now something less, something broke (in both senses of the word) and who deserve to be taken care of. This business of criticizing the unemployed for not being employed is total rot. For one thing, these people all had jobs up until the financial crash at the end of Bush’s second term. And our economy may recovery completely—with the one detail—that unemployment will remain.

This makes sense—nobody uses people in factories any more—automation is providing better precision, better quality control, and higher production capacity than sloppy humans who get tired, or sick, or have to sleep at night. Who needs’em? But with great automation comes great responsibility. If we are creating a world of robotic activity then we must deal with the other side of that coin—we have to stop judging people by how tired they get. If an average worker stays home all day because the old job has been automated, that worker has no money to participate in our consumer society.

So, owners who remove any need for human workers are, whether they realize it or not, saying No to consumerism. And without a consumer society, who’s going to buy any of the stuff that gets made at the factory? We can’t pretend that economic action has no equal, but opposite, reaction. We will only survive the robotic revolution by subsidizing unemployment. I’m sure someone can show me all the facts and figures proving that it’s impossible to subsidize the 1/10th of the human race that we simply don’t need labor from anymore. But we should anyway—billionaires don’t just keep a disproportionate amount of the fruits of prosperity, they also get off on being top dog.

But they shouldn’t think of it as something being done for others—that 1/10th of humanity will someday be ½ of humanity, 2/3rd of humanity, all of humanity! Someday in the not so distant future, even board chairmen will get the boot from our robotic AI overlords. Then won’t they be glad they started a systematic separation between employment and consumption!

We are very subjective about employment—we don’t see it objectively. We tend to discount the jobless as people who are too lazy to find work—unless we’ve been subjected to that massive degradation of ego that losing a job inflicts upon us. I have been on disability for years—but I’d do just about anything to have a job—and the sense of self-worth it bestows. And we tend to assume if the economy is healthy, then jobs are plentiful. This is a baseless assumption. It was true back in FDR’s day—a worker could be made useful digging a trench or paving a highway or building a bridge, a dam, a skyscraper. But masses of laborers are no longer the norm at construction sites. We have huge cranes, trucks bigger than houses, earthmoving vehicles and tunnel-digging machines. We still need workers to keep a hand in, but nothing like the mobs of laborers that built everything in those older times.

And what’s so ‘lazy’ about pounding the pavement every day being rejected from job after job, while the employed sit at PC keyboards, talk on phones, and decide about lunch. There are plenty of lazy people with jobs—they don’t add a whit to their employer’s business success, they do just enough to keep themselves from being fired, and in many cases are actually drags on the company’s bottom line. The owner would do better paying someone else to stay home than to support this viper at the breast of their business. What do we do when there are simply no more jobs and plenty of unemployed? Do we continue to blame them for a situation they are victims of? I think (and it’s surprising how often this is true) that charity is good business. If people are being reduced to desperate criminals or ghastly non-persons because our economy has no place for them, it is better to make a place for them.

In the sixties, Americans became aware that, after centuries of throwing trash over our shoulders, there were simply too many of us doing it now and we have to either stop littering or live in an ugly place, piled high with refuse. I believe that now is the time to stop throwing ‘useless’ people over our shoulder—they are capable, we just have no use for them right now. If we don’t take responsibility for all the people in the country we’ll see a decline of empire, and a well-deserved one, at that. If all those people become disaffected, or criminalized, then the super-wealthy will ultimately be surrounded by hungry wolves—and that’s not a very nice neighborhood.

Capitalism is sacred only because the more powerful a person is, the more that person’s security depends on the status quo. Ask a hungry person how they feel about Capitalism—I’m betting they couldn’t care less, unless Capitalism is code for ‘a hot meal’. Bill & Melinda Gates endowed the largest charity ever with half the personal fortune of the richest man in the world—but the poor abide. We have to make charity a part of business. We have to start moving away from the assumption that money must be earned. Lots of people have tons of money they didn’t earn—I hardly think it would be a crime to legitimize government support of the poor.

However, the implementation of such a change has at least as many pitfalls and risks as old-fashioned communism—we would need new perspectives and new approaches to even begin such a process. So, that won’t happen. Still, I think it is a sensible direction, compared to the alternatives.

Two-thousand years ago Christ addressed the problem of the poor. There are no doubt hundreds of institutions in operation today with the sole aim of feeding and caring for the poor. The number of poor has reached such heights that an entire country can be at risk of starvation for years without end.

How has this simple problem continued to grow and thrive in a world with so many people (and lots of them wealthy) trying so earnestly to end famine and homelessness and sickness and misery? Christ proposed that when someone asks for your coat; give him your cloak also. After decades of people giving away free turkeys on Thanksgiving and blankets to the shivering homeless on Xmas Eve, we see no reduction in poverty—but rather expansion, as if our very civilization were a culture for its growth.

So many people are digging wells in drought-ravaged communities. So many people are trying to spread literacy to the third world. So many doctors and nurses, clergy-persons and philanthropists strive to alleviate the preventable diseases and hunger pangs of the needy. What makes the situation an unshakeable constant in our global community?

There is no obvious answer—third world famine is a starker illustration of the problem than the developed worlds’ own citizens—but we can see poverty and homelessness in Appalachia, a not-so-long drive away from the center of commerce, the Big Apple itself. Even on the streets of that city, and most others, we can find deprivation and suffering.

By this we can see that the poor are not from some well-spring deep in the poorest, least-developed nations—the poor come to be everywhere. The sophisticated man-about-town, leaving his Fifth Avenue townhouse, will only walk a few blocks before he must step over someone who is sleeping on the sidewalk.

So the poor are always with us. Despite centuries of well-meaning charitable activism, the poor abide. Why?

They are the price we pay for having the luxury of becoming millionaires. The design of Capitalism is to compete in the marketplace, to outsell, to outdo, to win at all costs and thus become a ‘master of the universe’. That 99% of us are not millionaires (and have no foreseeable prospect of becoming millionaires) yet remain loyal to the idea of dollar-Darwinism is a marvel of misdirection. We are raised to be proud of our nation’s openness to a sharp operator’s victory against the established businesses—the iconic entrepreneur who plows through the marketplace unopposed due to our amazement at an unprecedented operation’s swift encroachment on established culture. A new marketplace to sell a new something that we poor sods didn’t even know we had to have!

But marketing is a side-issue, a symptom rather than a cause. For Capitalism to retain its power to elevate the odd Titan of Industry, it must have an environment of competitive struggle. Ideally, Capitalism would control the elevation of the few through a series of economic levels that never fell below subsistence. In that happy dream-world, the poor would simply be the least rich, the least pampered—the last place finishers in a sporting event, rather than the wasted, diseased, and tortured casualties of all-out, bleeding warfare. But that is an ideal that only the Canadians have manifested in our real world.

For economics to be stable enough to allow such immense disproportions as there are between billionaires and homeless starvlings, it has to be a blood sport. If any legislation were ever enacted that overruled the rules of finance in favor of humane re-distribution of some of that wealth to the ‘inactive players’ of the sport of Capitalism, the rich would simply block the legislation, or shoot the legislator, or (most likely of all) besmirch the bona fides of the proponents of humane reform of Capitalism. We have been victims of lazy thinking—the triumph of the Free World over the Soviet Union is not proof of the unleavened goodness of Capitalism—it only proves that you catch more flies with the honey of personal liberty than with the coercion of a police state.

Das Kapital is just as merciless and bloodthirsty as it was when Karl published his precious treatise. That soviets and red Chinese were perhaps guilty of trying to implement idealism with all-too-human humans does not change the fact that Capitalism is still the foot on the throat of human civilization it has always been, since it replaced monarchies (the only stupider form of society there is for comparison).

The solution, poor, naïve Karl supposed, was to give power back to the people—in the Iron Curtain countries this was ‘collectives’ and non-currency oriented culture; in the United States we thought labor unions had succeeded in stemming the predation of the owners upon the workers that made them rich. In neither case did any real change result. The soviets lost the majority of their internal economy to the black marketers (who had no objection to cash payment for goods). But here in the States, we had the illusion of equity among workers and owners/management—and union workers’ salaries, benefits and working conditions began a steady climb. But there’s more than one way for the Fat Cats to skin the Hoi Polloi.

And the most successful one was Lobbying. When WWII ended, the nation strode towards what we hoped would be a new age, with Fascism vanquished and the Communists content to regroup from the War’s devastation—and with civil liberties growing to include Social Security, Medicare, the right to form unions and to strike, the right to travel the country from coast–to-coast—and the shiny, new means to travel it.

Our country’s laws reflected a sense of fairness and protection from abusers of personal rights. But now the money began to roll in—and not all the hundreds of federal legislators in both houses were sterling saints of their offices. Eisenhower’s valediction to the people, as he left his presidency, was a warning against the ‘military-industrial complex’—a cadre of business moguls who saw huge riches in keeping our country on a war footing, just to create the demand for the arms manufacturers, and every army base, and all the boats, jets, and bombers we would need to ‘make the world safe for democracy’.

So, cutting military funding is the most unpopular idea for a politician to mention aloud. Second to that is speaking in favor of regulation of Capitalism. Those two ideas together will get a politician zero votes—in any state or county in the nation. I am suggesting that our rabid, knee-jerk response to either of those concepts is an attitude that has been carefully cultivated by our Capitalist media-moguls. Hitler, famously, invented Kindergarten as a way to reach his citizens with propaganda at their earliest possible age. And in our schools we have traditionally indoctrinated our American children with the ideals of the United States of America. But now we live in a time where policy-makers and tycoons have discovered that Skinner’s behavior-modification techniques continue to work on people of all ages, not just the innocent tykes of Kindergarten.

Competition is so much a part of who we are that the idea of turning our backs on it seems outright psychotic. But my thought is that competition exists all by itself—and we will always have to struggle to have the lives we work towards. If we placed some regulatory boundaries—not on a cap for fortune-makers, but a minimum for Capitalist-last-placers—then the players could all knock each other around all they liked. But the ones who have lost, the ones who are unable to function in that rough-and-tumble, could be assured that their society would not make them starve to death because they failed at the American Dream. Is the American Dream any less a dream if we admit that it doesn’t always come true?

Why should we? I hear ya. Who says we have to build decent housing and give free food and clothes and furniture and plumbing to a bunch of lazy, no-good goldbrickers? Who says we need to educate their children and give everyone free medical care? Well, the answer is—you do. Think about this—when you go out for a walk, is it nice and clean and peaceful and decent? If you had a choice between giving that up to live in a commercial ‘war zone’, or paying extra to keep everybody’s suffering to a dull roar, which would you pick?

If we want this country to be a nice neighborhood, we have to spend some money on maintenance. The rules of Capitalism insist that winners win at the expense of the losers—so, do we want our society to operate like a casino and try to take everyone’s last dollar before they leave? Or can we adjust Capitalism, as we did, after much violence and struggle, when we realized that it is only fair to let workers unite to protect their interests against the owners?

We should take that concept a bit further and resolve that Capitalism is only suitable for a decent society when it draws a line beyond which we will not sink, a line that guarantees no one will die from being poor—that losing in the marketplace doesn’t condemn a person, or an entire family, to slow, miserable death. We like to look back in horror on the old practice of keeping a Debtor’s Prison—but are we any better for letting our poor starve in broad daylight?