www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish
Walter is guest hosting over at Andrew's place. Here's his first post (with my ever-brilliant editorial comment in italics)
TERROR FROM MONTANA: I'll start with something that's been bugging me but that I haven't had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn't let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it's high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already.
Yes and no. You do not retreat under fire lest you embolden your enemies. I agree with changing things because they should be changed not because of what our enemies do or do not do (there are, of course, exceptions).
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There's a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we're paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we'd rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things.
I agree with spreading out for many reasons, not just security. I think the need for large urban centers is passing. There will always be cities and that's not a bad thing, it's just that the need for them is diminishing. More and more people are working from home via the interweb and corporations are finding that they can save buckets of cash by creating corporate centers in exurban areas. My former employer was a VERY large bank that has a corporate campus with several thousand people on site. They pay $16 per sqft versus $64 in New York City. Combine that with the lower salaries in Delaware compared to New York and you start to see some huge savings.
I think environmental impact of mankind can be reduced by spreading out. It sounds counterintuitive but it isn't. If the population of New York City were cut in half, you would cut waste water and refuse by a factor of 2. All that garbage and waste water would be spread out over a much larger portion of the country. I surmise it's better to have many small places to process garbage and waste water than the One Huge Place (aka Arthur Kills, Fresh Kills and that massive ugly pile of crap next to the NJTP.)
Cities are also excellent places for disease vectors. If we had and avian flu epidemic (as many have been fretting about lately). Where would you rather be? On the subway under Grand Central or in Small Town, USA? No brainer.
Walter, hits on the key security issue next:
It's not the de-urbanization of the cities that I'm dreaming about here, it's the re-urbanization of the towns -- places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can't be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.
Yes. Outsiders are immediately known in small towns and rural areas and that's a good thing from a security standpoint. Both against terrorism but also against crime. Assault, theft and the like. Moreover, cities are a disincentive to ownership. Real estate is very scarce and hence, very expensive, often prohbitively so. (I use NYC as my standard example b/c I know it best and it is the exemplar for cities in many respects). Most people I know/knew who lived in NYC were renters. Why? Simply put, cost. A few years ago, one of my friends was renting a two bedroom on the Upper West Side for over $3000 per month. The place was carved up from a formerly very large apartment into two (or three, I can't remember). As such, it had an absurd floorplan. The "front" door, was about a foot off the ground. It was like entering a submarine. This was not the original front door, that was at the back of what is now the coat closet. If you opened the coat closet to put your coat in there, you'd see a door with a lock, chain and peephole in the back of the closet. This often resulted in very confused UPS men, ringing the door to the closet. The rest of the place was a virtual warren. Odd storage room and a kitchen so small that if you opened the oven door, no one could get in or out of the kitchen. I've been on boats with bigger galleys than this place. My lunatic friends were thrilled they were able to get such a great apartment for the price. I had been away from the city long enough to think they needed their heads examined.
IDEAS, PLEASE: Maybe I don't sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn't going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don't invite assault we're not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we're forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes.
Well, how about employers who leverage technology to make remote work not just possible but beneficial. BoingBoing had a link to a conference room at a company that created a virtual conference room. Half the room was a screen and cameras and microphones made it appear that people on opposite sides of the country were in the same room. Same furniture, lighting, everything. The effect was a bit eerie but I'll be it's very good for meetings. I've done countless conference calls and they are laborious and impersonal. They can work but you don't get the same feeling as you do when your face to face (even virtually). How many calls have you been on when you're doing other work, checking email or surfing the web? Too many for me to count.
How about the same technology with cubes? I could have a cube in my house (or satellite site) with a virtual screen across from me that shows my coworkers in their virtual cubes. Perhaps that day is coming. Even a popup window with a person on my screen where I could talk to someone would be an improvement.
Look, we talk about the consumption of energy as a problem in this country. Well, why not start by reducing the number of people on the road? It costs me a fortune in my tiny econobox to commute to work. I could be saving several hundred dollars a month by telecommuting. Even if I was in the office once or twice a week that would be significantly different. Mulitply that by 10,000 people in Atlanta or LA and you'll see significant impact on the roads, the air and the community. It is unlikely that would change the price at the pump. For that we need to drill domestically, build new refineries, reduce the number of blends of gas and start deploying pebble-bed reactors.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor They are proven to be safe and scalable. Creating a great number of small (for a reactor that is) pebble bed reactors would have numerous benefits. You could create subsections of the grid that would insulate against terror attack. Perhaps some sort of contingency for connecting subsections could be in place. In case of emergency, two subsections of the grid could then be connected as needed. Imagine if large manufacturing sites (auto manufacturing, steel, mining, etc) could have their own reactors (or a share of one). Their production costs would plummet. Additionally, these reactors could be used to separate hydrogen from water which would allow us to bottle it and use it in cars. Our cars would then emit only pure oxygen and water vapor. Think of what LA or Denver (or even Mexico City) would look like after 10 years of hydrogen powered cars. You'd be able to breathe again. No more ozone/smog warnings. I digress...moving on....
Destroy the red-tape that is holding them up. Scrap the EPA and start over. It has become home to tree-hugging marxists who know they can cripple the energy industry via regulation. They also abrogate property rights with impunity. We can explore renewables but a great many problems exist with them. See here. One of the exceptions may be wind. It is likely it could only be used in select locations like coastal areas and some parts of the Great Plains. But the others are frought with problems of both scaling, efficiency and distribution.
I guess I'm just weary of hearing that beating terrorism means doing what we've always done but a whole lot harder, with more firmly gritted teeth. That's what Iraq's about, it seems to me: fighting the Gulf War over again, but this time with feeling.
Not for me. For me it's about overthrowing a brutal tyrant who made common cause with terrorists. I know we keep hearing about "no known operational link". Perhaps not but there's enough circumstantial evidence to think it's possible, even probable.
It's like rebuilding the World Trade Center and calling it The Freedom Tower or whatever. Why not call it the Lack-of-Imagination Tower? And while we're at it, why not call The Energy Bill that does almost nothing to address the fact that our fuel supply is being pumped directly out of our children's veins and arteries while enriching our enemies' war chest The Out-of-New-Ideas Bill?
We need to rebuild the towers to show we will not be cowed. I've addressed the energy issue above.
I'm a fiction writer and a book critic, not a professional political journalist, and the behavior of our leaders nowadays reminds me of Captain Ahab or King Lear and doesn't prompt thoughts about issues and philosophies. I think I know megalomania when I see it, in literature and also in life, and I think I know too when when a plot has swerved toward tragedy. It happens when events reveal a flaw in the basic approach of the protagonist and he reacts to the bad news by clinging to that flaw more strenuously. Aside from the Bill of Rights, which protects our very ability to change, let's change what we can as quickly as we can and see what works and what doesn't in this fight instead of going all stiff and stern. That's our advantage, after all: we can revise our doctrines and they can't.
Again, yes and no. Appearances are important. If not to us, to them. They need to see that we will not react in fear even if it means doing something that might not be tactically smart. Think long term. We may not need the "Freedom Tower" or whatever they call it in 20 years but better to build it now as a thumb in their eye than to appear meek and humbled.
Ideas, please, the kookier the better. Mine, as I've said, is scatter, reduce our profile, go to work in our homes as much as possible instead of converging every morning on Wall Street and Times Square, and let them try to hit a moving target. And don't build that foolish Freedom Tower thing. Change doesn't mean the terrorists have won. Not changing does. Ask the Redcoats. Or better yet, ask the Native Americans. They stood tall too, once, here on the very spot where I'm sitting now.
The Redcoats were not defeated because they didn't change their tactics. They were defeated because the Americans outmaneuvered them and with Dutch and French help, hemmed them in the waters. The Indians were defeated because they, like the jihadis today think bravery can overcome technology, doctrine and information. Simply isn't so. Never was, never will be. Wacky ideas in subsequent post.
Walter is guest hosting over at Andrew's place. Here's his first post (with my ever-brilliant editorial comment in italics)
TERROR FROM MONTANA: I'll start with something that's been bugging me but that I haven't had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn't let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it's high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already.
Yes and no. You do not retreat under fire lest you embolden your enemies. I agree with changing things because they should be changed not because of what our enemies do or do not do (there are, of course, exceptions).
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There's a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we're paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we'd rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things.
I agree with spreading out for many reasons, not just security. I think the need for large urban centers is passing. There will always be cities and that's not a bad thing, it's just that the need for them is diminishing. More and more people are working from home via the interweb and corporations are finding that they can save buckets of cash by creating corporate centers in exurban areas. My former employer was a VERY large bank that has a corporate campus with several thousand people on site. They pay $16 per sqft versus $64 in New York City. Combine that with the lower salaries in Delaware compared to New York and you start to see some huge savings.
I think environmental impact of mankind can be reduced by spreading out. It sounds counterintuitive but it isn't. If the population of New York City were cut in half, you would cut waste water and refuse by a factor of 2. All that garbage and waste water would be spread out over a much larger portion of the country. I surmise it's better to have many small places to process garbage and waste water than the One Huge Place (aka Arthur Kills, Fresh Kills and that massive ugly pile of crap next to the NJTP.)
Cities are also excellent places for disease vectors. If we had and avian flu epidemic (as many have been fretting about lately). Where would you rather be? On the subway under Grand Central or in Small Town, USA? No brainer.
Walter, hits on the key security issue next:
It's not the de-urbanization of the cities that I'm dreaming about here, it's the re-urbanization of the towns -- places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can't be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.
Yes. Outsiders are immediately known in small towns and rural areas and that's a good thing from a security standpoint. Both against terrorism but also against crime. Assault, theft and the like. Moreover, cities are a disincentive to ownership. Real estate is very scarce and hence, very expensive, often prohbitively so. (I use NYC as my standard example b/c I know it best and it is the exemplar for cities in many respects). Most people I know/knew who lived in NYC were renters. Why? Simply put, cost. A few years ago, one of my friends was renting a two bedroom on the Upper West Side for over $3000 per month. The place was carved up from a formerly very large apartment into two (or three, I can't remember). As such, it had an absurd floorplan. The "front" door, was about a foot off the ground. It was like entering a submarine. This was not the original front door, that was at the back of what is now the coat closet. If you opened the coat closet to put your coat in there, you'd see a door with a lock, chain and peephole in the back of the closet. This often resulted in very confused UPS men, ringing the door to the closet. The rest of the place was a virtual warren. Odd storage room and a kitchen so small that if you opened the oven door, no one could get in or out of the kitchen. I've been on boats with bigger galleys than this place. My lunatic friends were thrilled they were able to get such a great apartment for the price. I had been away from the city long enough to think they needed their heads examined.
IDEAS, PLEASE: Maybe I don't sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn't going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don't invite assault we're not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we're forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes.
Well, how about employers who leverage technology to make remote work not just possible but beneficial. BoingBoing had a link to a conference room at a company that created a virtual conference room. Half the room was a screen and cameras and microphones made it appear that people on opposite sides of the country were in the same room. Same furniture, lighting, everything. The effect was a bit eerie but I'll be it's very good for meetings. I've done countless conference calls and they are laborious and impersonal. They can work but you don't get the same feeling as you do when your face to face (even virtually). How many calls have you been on when you're doing other work, checking email or surfing the web? Too many for me to count.
How about the same technology with cubes? I could have a cube in my house (or satellite site) with a virtual screen across from me that shows my coworkers in their virtual cubes. Perhaps that day is coming. Even a popup window with a person on my screen where I could talk to someone would be an improvement.
Look, we talk about the consumption of energy as a problem in this country. Well, why not start by reducing the number of people on the road? It costs me a fortune in my tiny econobox to commute to work. I could be saving several hundred dollars a month by telecommuting. Even if I was in the office once or twice a week that would be significantly different. Mulitply that by 10,000 people in Atlanta or LA and you'll see significant impact on the roads, the air and the community. It is unlikely that would change the price at the pump. For that we need to drill domestically, build new refineries, reduce the number of blends of gas and start deploying pebble-bed reactors.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor They are proven to be safe and scalable. Creating a great number of small (for a reactor that is) pebble bed reactors would have numerous benefits. You could create subsections of the grid that would insulate against terror attack. Perhaps some sort of contingency for connecting subsections could be in place. In case of emergency, two subsections of the grid could then be connected as needed. Imagine if large manufacturing sites (auto manufacturing, steel, mining, etc) could have their own reactors (or a share of one). Their production costs would plummet. Additionally, these reactors could be used to separate hydrogen from water which would allow us to bottle it and use it in cars. Our cars would then emit only pure oxygen and water vapor. Think of what LA or Denver (or even Mexico City) would look like after 10 years of hydrogen powered cars. You'd be able to breathe again. No more ozone/smog warnings. I digress...moving on....
Destroy the red-tape that is holding them up. Scrap the EPA and start over. It has become home to tree-hugging marxists who know they can cripple the energy industry via regulation. They also abrogate property rights with impunity. We can explore renewables but a great many problems exist with them. See here. One of the exceptions may be wind. It is likely it could only be used in select locations like coastal areas and some parts of the Great Plains. But the others are frought with problems of both scaling, efficiency and distribution.
I guess I'm just weary of hearing that beating terrorism means doing what we've always done but a whole lot harder, with more firmly gritted teeth. That's what Iraq's about, it seems to me: fighting the Gulf War over again, but this time with feeling.
Not for me. For me it's about overthrowing a brutal tyrant who made common cause with terrorists. I know we keep hearing about "no known operational link". Perhaps not but there's enough circumstantial evidence to think it's possible, even probable.
It's like rebuilding the World Trade Center and calling it The Freedom Tower or whatever. Why not call it the Lack-of-Imagination Tower? And while we're at it, why not call The Energy Bill that does almost nothing to address the fact that our fuel supply is being pumped directly out of our children's veins and arteries while enriching our enemies' war chest The Out-of-New-Ideas Bill?
We need to rebuild the towers to show we will not be cowed. I've addressed the energy issue above.
I'm a fiction writer and a book critic, not a professional political journalist, and the behavior of our leaders nowadays reminds me of Captain Ahab or King Lear and doesn't prompt thoughts about issues and philosophies. I think I know megalomania when I see it, in literature and also in life, and I think I know too when when a plot has swerved toward tragedy. It happens when events reveal a flaw in the basic approach of the protagonist and he reacts to the bad news by clinging to that flaw more strenuously. Aside from the Bill of Rights, which protects our very ability to change, let's change what we can as quickly as we can and see what works and what doesn't in this fight instead of going all stiff and stern. That's our advantage, after all: we can revise our doctrines and they can't.
Again, yes and no. Appearances are important. If not to us, to them. They need to see that we will not react in fear even if it means doing something that might not be tactically smart. Think long term. We may not need the "Freedom Tower" or whatever they call it in 20 years but better to build it now as a thumb in their eye than to appear meek and humbled.
Ideas, please, the kookier the better. Mine, as I've said, is scatter, reduce our profile, go to work in our homes as much as possible instead of converging every morning on Wall Street and Times Square, and let them try to hit a moving target. And don't build that foolish Freedom Tower thing. Change doesn't mean the terrorists have won. Not changing does. Ask the Redcoats. Or better yet, ask the Native Americans. They stood tall too, once, here on the very spot where I'm sitting now.
The Redcoats were not defeated because they didn't change their tactics. They were defeated because the Americans outmaneuvered them and with Dutch and French help, hemmed them in the waters. The Indians were defeated because they, like the jihadis today think bravery can overcome technology, doctrine and information. Simply isn't so. Never was, never will be. Wacky ideas in subsequent post.
Comments