Monthly Archives: May 2014

If you have no voice, does democracy really matter?

Education, News, Politics, , , , , ,

One of the paradigms of democracy is the idealism that goes along with that institution, specifically that when everyone has the opportunity to vote it somehow translates to a freer society. We know this isn’t really the truth, which can be provided with evidence from Ukraine, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and practically every other dictatorship that requires mandatory voting in which the choices are limited to either the dictator or specific party choices. Whenever we talk about those kinds of nations, we laugh at them and raise our hands in solidarity, voicing our opinion about how great our democracy is.

But is it?

I started thinking about this question the other day when one of the national politicos started talking about the inevitability of Hillary Clinton running for president. And I started thinking, why is it inevitable? And more importantly, why her? Why not the guy who lives down the street from me who waves to me every time I walk by, even though I think he’s kind of nuts? How about the cute girl that works at Starbucks? I’d vote for her. She really couldn’t do a worse job than anyone currently in government. And at least she gets most of the drink orders correct. That means she can take instructions from the guy standing at the register, create the correct drink and bring it to him without totally screwing it up. Most politicians fail at taking the order, and from there you go from ordering a carmel espresso and end up getting an F-35 that crashes because it goes so fast that its pilots pass out when flying the thing.

But back to democracy. Who decides what people are on the ballots? If you read the propaganda that gets put out, we do. But who are we? Most people don’t think about that, yet they will go and vote for one of the names of people they don’t really want. Very few, and I mean VERY few, choose someone that is not from one of the two main parties, even if they don’t who any of the people are from either one of those parties. Basically, most of our elections are decided by attack ads that cause cognitive dissonance about one candidate, or you might vote for someone because you saw more yard signs with that person’s name on it. Or you might recognize the name because the person has served in Congress for so many years that it’s impossible not to mention the name, even though you haven’t heard a single thing about what that person has ever done in the 40 years he or she has been in office. Yet, you’ll vote for him or her because, well, they’re on our team, or some bizarre reason makes you think that somehow this person who has always had the job will somehow change things for the better, even though he or she has never tried doing that in the past.

It’s enough to drive one batty.

The problem with elections is that they serve people who have strong name recognition, which in most cases means someone who already has political clout or a lot of money and economic connections. That means that most of us are unimportant and insignificant. Seriously, we’re insignificant and basically unwanted by those who are in power because talking to us is a waste of time when there are so many important people with power and money they could be talking to.

Part of the problem is that our country is so big that in order to have any influence, you already have to be part of the power structure to even be heard by anyone who might make a difference. Yet, we’re also in a country where more and more people are graduating from college and universities, which means there are more and more people who have the brains and intelligence to possibly change the world for the better but are compartmentalized by those in power instead. So, the only places they have to make a name for themselves are in business or the arts, which for the most part means an alternative route to a place that politicians ignore or condemn as unimportant again.

The real problem isn’t just that so many people have so little voice in government. Well, actually that is the problem, and as in most iterative scenarios, if you crunch those numbers, you end up with a lot of people growing more and more dissatisfied with government, which means people start protesting, and when those protesters are marginalized, like the Occupy Wall Street protests were, people start to look for other avenues to participate in political empowerment, which if you follow the logic, means that it may lead to very dangerous outcomes, because once people give up on the given institutions and look for their own places to have their voices heard, pretty much anything can happen. That’s basically the menu that led to the French Revolution and practically every other overthrow of a social institution in the 20th century. With this much anger festering, I can imagine that when things do happen, those with money and power aren’t going to be the royals trying to find a new position in the new paradigm, but possibly the victims of such anger.

We’re already starting to see this sort of thing in race relations. Sure, we like to pretend that those are just circumstances that got out of control, that everything is really fine, but in reality when you have powder kegs all across the country, and world, ready to explode at the first ignition of trouble, it shouldn’t be all that surprising when you see that sort of thing happening on a regular basis. Which then leads to people in larger cities feeling completely unsafe in their cities because whenever these things happen, the police are completely taken by surprise and overwhelmed. People power has a tendency to do that. But when people no longer trust their government to be the instrument that keeps things safe, they start looking to protect themselves, which makes the next powder keg that much more of a demonstrative explosion.

The real problem (think I’ve said that a few times now) is that people keep thinking that “it can’t happen here” which is usually the last cry you hear before something happens and then you hear “I never thought that could happen here”. Our institutions are being stretched to the limit, and while the solution would have been to stop educating people so they wouldn’t realize they were being marginalized and disenfranchised (and believe it or not, you can vote and still be disenfranchised), but we’re way beyond that, and no one these days could ever justify the idea of saving the state by not educating people, unless you’re Stalin, or a politician in Iran.

But then, no one really cares. There are too many interesting things on television to pay attention to this sort of thing.

That Moment When You Realize the Customer Service Rep Doesn’t Really Want to Talk to You

Business, , , , , ,

I was in a gas station today, buying some milk. I’ve been in this gas station so many times before that I’d forgotten when I didn’t used to go to this little convenience store. Anyway, the cashiers are generally tolerable, meaning that they say hi and that’s generally about it. But they don’t act rude or anything like that. So it’s just one of those normal places that you shop where you wouldn’t consider it to be the best place in the world to shop.

Anyway, when I went to the cooler to get some milk, I happened to notice that the milk was all “Meijer” brand. I was kind of surprised by that because I tend to buy most of my milk at Meijer and didn’t expect a gas station to stock it as well. Well, much to my surprise, right then and there I discovered that the gas station I’ve been frequenting for years is actually a Meijer gas station, although it isn’t as marked as some of the other ones you see in town. So I was kind of surprised by this and started a conversation of that nature with the clerk.

What I experienced was one of those moments where you realize the person you’re talking to wants to do anything but actually talk to you. A few seconds into the “conversation” I was actually feeling kind of stupid, realizing that I wasted a lot of energy trying to engage this woman in conversation and only got the most brush off of a talk I’ve ever had. It wasn’t like I was asking for a date. Strangely enough, I walked away from that store thinking, wow, I don’t ever want to go back to that convenience store again.

I hadn’t really given a situation like this much thought over the years because most of my interactions with people tend to be quite positive. I’m a sociable kind of guy who likes to talk to people, and as a result, I find a lot of people who are quite conversation in return. But this was the first time in a very long time that I ever came up to someone who I really felt wanted to be in any place but a place where I happened to be standing in front of her.

At least I got my milk. But I’m not sure I’d want to get it from that place again.

Were We Really That Aware of History When It Happened–The Americans

Television, Writing, , , , , , , ,

the americans

One of my favorite television shows is The Americans, which tells the story of two deep cover KGB agents working in Washington, D.C., posing as a husband and wife. It details the happenings of the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, which just so happens to be the final hurrah of the Soviet Union right before it collapsed and became a non-entity. One of the passions I have when watching the show is observing little things that I wonder if they got right, based on the time period where the story takes place. The other week, I was watching one scene where a covert agent was in a room with a bunch of telephones, and I started to wonder “when did the push button phone come into being?” According to a Wiki article, the push-button phone was starting to gain popularity in 1979, which means the show got that one right as well, as there were mainly rotary dial phones, but on the shelf there were a few push button phones. That sort of continuity and clarity constantly intrigues me on a show like this.

What I discover is that they get more things right than I’ve been able to figure they got wrong. But one thing that has been bothering me is a central premise of the whole show, and that’s that the secret stuff the KGB was after might not have been on the radar as much as the show would like us to believe. An example of this is the Internet, or better known as Arpanet back then. The thing about Arpanet is that while it was the forerunner of what was to become the “Internet”, at the time of its creation. For some clarification, the Arpanet started out as a four placed link between  the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah’s Computer Science Department. Over the next few years, it reached the East Coast of the United States by linking to a bulletin board network (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March 1970 and then in 1973 it made its first connection to the Norwegian Seismic Array. In 1975, it was declared operational when the Defense Communications AGency took control of it to handle advanced research. This is kind of where The Americans come in, as in 1983, the U.S. military developed (as a part of Arpanet), the Military Network (MILNET), which handled mostly unclassified communications.

The part I’ve had a problem with The Americans during this part of their focus is that I really don’t think even up to this point anyone took Arpanet all that seriously. Sure, we know what it is today, and the world couldn’t possibly turn again without the realization of how important the Internet is, but even in the 1980s, the people who were “embracing” the future Internet were mostly geeks who were experimenting with a different form of entertainment. The whole beginning of the Internet was a lot of bbs operations with little understanding of how this was going to lead to business, globalization and the future of immediacy politics. The birth of the Internet is the desire of computer scientists to link their networks with each, and until it went mainstream, there was little understanding how this was going to change the world.

Which is why I have a hard time believing that the Soviet Union was jumping in on the rise of the Internet back then. Even our own country didn’t know what it had until it was way out of its own control.

The other “technology” that The Americans have dealt with is “stealth” technology, which is what eventually became the invention of the stealth bomber and fighter. While I can see how the Soviets might have been interested in such a technology, it is important to point out that this technology was first introduced in 1945 when it was revealed that the German U-boats operated under “diffused lighting camouflage”, which is the introduction to dealing with this kind of technology, although the later versions tended to veer more towards fooling radar than people on the ground. As a former intelligence agent myself, I have to say that the one part of the equation that The Americans kinds of glosses over is how difficult it would have been for an operative to understand what he or she was seeing when dealing with this type of technology. Basically, you would need a physics master or an engineering trained agent to be able to recognize what it was he or she was looking at before he or she could figure out if it was ever worth stealing. Chances are pretty good that two scientists staring at the same evidence might have come up with completely different conclusions as to what it’s purpose actually was. We kind of run into the same thing today when we hear “weapons of mass destruction” and a nuclear scientist looks at a chemical weapons dump and thinks it’s relevant, but because of specialized training, he becomes the expert they rely on and he hasn’t a clue what he’s looking at. Same kind of thing.

One thing the show does get right is probably the opposite of what I just said a second ago. There was a great moment where the Soviet spies were looking at schematics and basically were clueless as to what they were looking at. More stuff like that would make the show so much more believable, but they went from that moment to somehow recognizing everything they saw as critical and I kind of lost that great feeling of seeing something done extremely well.

So, I guess my question I’m left with is whether or not we’re reinventing history when we see shows like this, because one thing I’ve noticed in historical narratives is that the narrator often wants to make the characters of his story appear much more knowledgeable about the subject than they might have been. Having dealt with the intelligence field, I can tell you that quite often people don’t get it. They make clueless conclusions because they try to fit everything to a paradigm they already understand, and quite often when dealing with these subjects, you have to go in with a blank slate and tabula rasa everything. But people don’t do that. They want to feel like they have the answers, and they’ll pretend to know until they’re proved otherwise, and sometimes even after that they won’t admit they’re wrong. That’s kind of the problem with science in general and why we have people to this day who still think the Earth is the center of the universe and everything else revolves around it. We think that because we rely on the science of an age when people didn’t know better, and there are too many people today who should know better but never will.