WhirledView

Getting Out the Lead Still Makes a Difference

By Patricia H Kushlis

Whether or not Beethoven died of lead poisoning remains in dispute but with the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, the US required all new cars beginning in 1975 to “contain catalytic converters in their exhaust systems to reduce a range of toxic emissions” including lead.  Before then, lead had been added to gasoline to make car engines run more smoothly and avoid “engine knock.”  Here’s how it happened. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had led the no-lead-in-gasoline charge – persuading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – to remove the lead additive from gasoline but this happened only after lengthy and vicious fights with the lead, petrochemical and automotive industries.  

The goal, according to Dr. Philip J. Landrigan in a recent article in the Boston College Magazine, was to “reduce American children’s exposure to lead and thus prevent silent brain damage.”   The CDC – with which Dr. Landrigan was then affiliated - expected it to take about ten years to get the cars off the road that used leaded gasoline and that, thereafter, the US would witness a modest decline in blood lead-levels in American children.  The result, however, turned out to be a massive drop in those lead levels directly corresponding to the decline of cars using leaded gasoline – a drop of 90% of the lead in blood levels over the past forty years.  

Moreover, acute lead poisoning among American children became a rarity because lead was removed from paint at about the same time thus reducing cumulative exposure even further. 

And what were the other effects of eliminating lead in gasoline?  Several, all good and some surprises, according to Dr. Landrigan. They included a rise in children’s IQ scores by five percentage points since the mid-1980s – not just in the US but in the other countries that eliminated lead from gasoline.  The increases in children’s IQ scores have directly corresponded with the years those countries eliminated lead in gasoline.

But there has also been an uncannily close parallel between the drop in blood lead levels and the decline in murder rates in countries that have eliminated lead in gasoline (“allowing for a 20 year lag because it’s 20 year olds who commit murder, not babies”) likely because the reduction of lead has improved attention spans and increased the ability to control impulses.

Partnerships and Coalitions

The story, however, of getting the lead out of American gasoline is as much political and economic as scientific and health related. In essence, it required building partnerships or coalitions among people in the medical community, parents, public health officials and teachers.  This didn’t happen overnight.  Although neither the article by Dr. Landrigan nor another by Susan Vorkper don’t mention this as a factor, in reality to do so would also have required a coordinated public information campaign using mounting scientific data.

Moving from research to every day practice to policy takes an average of 17 years according to Susan Vorkoper, a global health researcher and policy analyst at the National Institutes of Health, in an interview in St. John’s College’s 2015 winter magazine due in part, as in the case of lead poisoning, to the need to overcome strong industry resistance.       

In this case, the corporate opposition was ultimately overcome for basically economic reasons as a result of the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act which required that all new cars have catalytic converters to reduce a number of different toxic emissions.  Catalytic converters contain platinum, an expensive metal, and lead ruins platinum.  This then caused the auto manufacturers to rethink their support for leaded gasoline and to split from the lead and petroleum producers thereby fracturing a previously united industry-based opposition. 

As this story suggests it takes time, timing, research, political and public affairs skills to build a case and accomplish fundamental change.  Even then, success is not always a foregone conclusion. In this case, however, getting the lead out of gasoline has made a difference.       

Deadly Delhi: Stay Away—Cough! Cough!—If You Can

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Chief Minister of Delhi state has asthma and a perpetual cough.  Recently he received some advice from the Prime Minister of India, who belongs to a rival party.  He should consult a well-known yoga therapist from PM Modi’s home state of Gujarat.  Such counsel would sound good to many residents of my home state of New Mexico, where modern medicine isn’t universally appreciated and many practice one or another form of yoga.  

But, having just come back from Delhi myself—coughing all the way, in fact—I have a better idea for both CM and PM:  Get together and clean up the air in Delhi.  It’s toxic, as you can see from the photo above.  I took it from my hotel window.

I have a touch of asthma, too, so I started coughing within hours of my arrival in Delhi on February 11th, with plans to stay a month.  After ten miserable days (complicated by catching a very nasty virus, though not the deadly dreadful H1N1, which was also floating around), I paid a disgusting flight change penalty to Air France and came home early.  Came home to Santa Fe,  the clean air capital of the USA.  Among cities, anyway.  My coughing stopped.   

I didn’t need the news stories that appeared in the New York Times a week or so before my departure to know that Delhi has air pollution issues.  As long as I’ve been traveling to (and sometimes  living in) Delhi, it’s been a problem, especially in the winter, when the phenomenon that’s known as an inversion occurs.  In such cases, the air over the city just sits there, getting dirtier and dirtier.   

Early on, before a sleepy post-colonial city became a global megalopolis, it was mainly smoke from cow dung fires that fouled the air.  As time passed, the culprit was dung plus particulate matter from the ever-multiplying, never-inspected exhaust-belching trucks and buses.  At a certain point, Delhi invested in buses fueled by natural gas.  The air got cleaner, for awhile.  What a wonderful inerlude that was!  

But road transport grew and grew and grew, a sign of economic success.  Exhaust-maximizing traffic jams, naturally, multiplied.  There was also another huge environmental cost to economic success: India relies on coal to feed an increasingly ravenous appetite for power.  Maybe the old puff-puff, chuff-chuff trains are electrified now, but they still run on coal, with which India (like China) is all too well supplied.

Dirty Old King Coal

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It was lovely to look at.  A bold white streak caught between blue sky and blue ocean!  A long string of hotels and resorts glimmering in the sun!  We were approaching the Florida coastline, and soon I was gazing down on roofs and terraces as my flight continued due west toward the airport in Fort Lauderdale last week.  

I’m a lover of wild beaches.  Once upon a time my consciousness would have been dominated by thoughts of over-development.  Not last week.  I'd been reading of studies that show how glaciers are melting in Alaska.  Also travel writers’ effusions about a Northwest passage now open to luxury cruises.  Result for Florida: water no longer captured as eternal polar ice has already imposed higher sea levels that Miamians are finding it hard to cope with.

Walking along the beach a few days later, I came upon a yellow earthmover building a little berm in front of one property.  A three foot wall of loose sand!  How long will it last when the next hurricane arrives?  How pathetic!  Like the general response so far to the inexorable warming of the earth.

Florida's Doom

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine what Floridians, who occupy a vast, low-lying sand sprit,  can do about their very real jeopardy.  The challenge of protecting endless hundreds of miles of properties—hotels, resorts, homes, whole cities—makes the task of protecting New Orleans seem like a Legoland game. 

No doubt some of the global warming that’s underway is downright cosmic and beyond human control.  But much has been caused by the industrialization that has so enormously improved our standard of living—and the good news today is that humans can enjoy these benefits without generating the greenhouse gases that warm the earth unnecessarily. (To say nothing of lung-clogging soot.)  Yes, the warming curve can be flattened, and the sooner we humans take that job seriously, the better for the life-sustaining qualities of earth.  Then what’s the obstacle to meaningful action?  Short term political and economic profiteering make it almost impossible to mobilize an effort that is much more effective, locally- and globally-speaking, than the sand-shifting of that poor little bulldozer on the beach at Ft. Lauderdale.

Maybe Floridians can’t protect the entire state from oceanic encroachment, but they can support efforts to save a good bit of the world we love.  It’s in their own interest, after all. Sooner or later, the people of Florida, like the residents of the Pacific isles, are going to need a receptive landscape to move to.  Unfortunately climate issues don’t seem to play the dominant role in Florida politics.

China Wakes Up

At least China seems to have awakened from its smoggy slumber, if only because its own citizens are beginning to demand action and China seeks civic order above all.  Efforts are being made to reduce air and water pollution, and the Chinese have invested so massively in alternative energy that Chinese products dominate the solar power industry even in the U.S.  Doing well by doing good.  Which is not to say that the Chinese don't continue to mine some particularly noxious types of coal.  And cars in Beijing had to be grounded to make the air breathable during President Barack Obama’s visit to China two weeks ago.
 
The highlight of those US-China discussions  was a disingenuously tepid climate accord focused on green house gas emissions.  Critics say it won’t accomplish much  more than what could be expected from existing declarations, treaties and agreements, but (1) it allows China and America to agree about something, which is a good thing, and (2) it forms a useful foundation, a springboard even, for broader negotiations scheduled to begin in Paris next year. Anything on paper is better than nothing.  References to democratic processes in moribund Constitutions have been known to spring alive and unseat autocrats.   

Coal Belt Politics

Among those ridiculing the Obama-Xi accord is the soon-to-be-Senate-Majority-Leader Mitch McConnell, who owes his electoral success to the support of his state’s ultra-powerful coal industry.  If any state is under the thumb of King Coal, it’s Kentucky, though West Virginia comes close.  Coal-mining pollutes rivers and streams; coal-burning pollutes the air with lung-ravaging soot and greenhouse gases, but it’s profitable enough to underwrite supporters’ political campaigns and destroy the electoral chances of environmentally-conscious candidates.  Should the Republicans have gained control of  the White House as well as Congress if and when a climate-protecting treaty is written in Paris, don’t expect the U.S. to sign on, however reasonable or scientifically sound the terms of the accord may be.  

Perhaps Mitch should move to India when he tires (or gets kicked out) of American politics.  King Coal rules happily there, with all the usual ill effects.   Some years ago life in New Delhi was greatly improved when municipal buses emitting enormous clouds of black exhaust gave way to transport powered by natural gas, but it will take a lot more than that to make Delhi’s air salubrious, especially in the winter.  Meanwhile, the forests and waters of Eastern India are being ravaged, thanks to mining permits that are issued with no regard for the environment or the wishes of the surrounding population.  The scale of this politically-corrupt depredation is so enormous that a recent news story merited this title: “Coal Rush in India Could Tip Balance on Climate Change.”   Read the article to learn of the horrendous impact of unrestrained mining in the area of Dhanbad in the  state of Jharkhand

Oddly enough. the article failed to mention another, equally calamitous effect of coal mining gone mad: insurrection.   A long-running Marxist rebellion in the Eastern hills of India was sparked and continues to be fed by irresponsible mineral extraction in areas inhabited by tribal peoples who value their hills and forests as essential to a way of life.  Unfortunately these people are poor and politically impotent.  They can’t compete with the coal cartels that pay for votes, influence and contracts. Hence, the seemingly endless and relentlessly expanding rebellion.

Water Wars

So far as that goes,  I am a bit surprised that the people of West Virginia and Kentucky haven’t taken to direct action to protect their beloved natural surroundings from corporate predators and land-levelers that make those bulldozers in St. Lauderdale look like so many tiny ants.  On the other hand, coal belt politicians haven’t done much to modernize these state economies.  Few alternative jobs exist and most people don’t like to starve.  

From time to time, climate experts express concerns about social unrest and violence should food supplies begin to suffer from repeated or extended droughts caused by global warming.  Globe-spanning competition for scarce agricultural resources will make the water wars of the 19th century American West look like child’s play.  It’s time to stage an irreversible coup against King Coal and replace the politicians beholden to the coal industry with representatives who know that it's cool to keep the earth cool.

         

Seeking CDC/NIH Directors: Housewives Favored, Large Family Experience Desirable

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Wherever I was posted during my quirky tenure with U.S.I.A., my colleagues and I had to take an annual inventory of all our equipment.  It was time-consuming and boring and we grumbled a lot, but the result was worthwhile: we knew what we had and where it was.  We (and Washington) also knew what still functioned, what needed replacement and how the latter would be disposed of.   Tedious, but tidy.

We would also have discovered, fairly quickly, whether anything had been snitched.  Theft was never the case on my watch, which was only partly due to my own vigilance as boss lady.  A system was in place.  I adhered to it, as had (most of) my predecessors.  Their conscientiousness made it a lot easier for me, in turn, to keep the count accurate, up to date and under control.

Are you with me, CDC?  Are you with me, NIH?

Probably not, so let’s look at this mess you guys have made from another angle.  

As a householder I’m regularly confronted with cleaning out the refrigerator, another job I don’t particularly like, but (1) space is limited and (2) spoiled edibles (like some of those microbes you lost control of) aren’t good for people.  A major source of trouble for me is my tendency to throw certain leftovers into the fridge under the rubric “I don’t know whether to keep this or not, so I’ll keep it.”  These items get pushed behind the fast-moving yummier stuff.  They also get forgotten, but not for long.  Periodic fridge cleaning reveals them.  At this point the decision is quick and easy: toss.  Result: the fridge easily passes the sniff test.

Looking at the CDC’s lost-and-found debacle as generously as possible, I can’t help wondering if any highly disciplined approach to storage and disposal might not go against the human grain.  All the more reason for rigor, then, among serious scientists.

But not, evidently, among scientists, high and low, at the CDC.      

Even virologists should know of a mental disorder that leads to hoarding.  String-saving is an amusing, but harmless variant.  Real hoarders can’t get rid of anything, burnt out blenders, tons of junk mail, piles of newspapers and last year’s leftovers included.  Hoarding at this level severely restricts living—and vacuuming—space.  Cleaning (especially the much dreaded spring cleaning) requires moving things from one location to another.  According to certain laws of physics, however, two things can’t occupy the same spot at the same time.  Hoarders get away with their neuroses for years, because no one can bear to visit them

Folk wisdom cuts two ways when it comes to saving things.  You never know when something will be needed and a penny saved is a penny earned.  All well and good, but such admonitions need to be tempered by another ancient insight.  Take nothing to extremes.  (This one might be useful in politics, too.)   

Is it possible that some hoarding-prone scientist, ordered to part with his precious vials of smallpox or bird flu and knowing that his organization suffers from lax inventory habits, purposely hid his noxious babies in the far corner of a bottom shelf in an ill lit place?  Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?  After a certain number of years do you learn to love the  bacterium?   

Meanwhile, the mere slobs shouldn’t be forgotten.  They abandon empty beer cans in the living room.  They leave smelly pizza boxes in the kitchen.  Their dirty clothes never make it to the hamper let alone the washing machine.   The teen-aged slob is notorious for being totally deaf to the parental command: clean your room or else!  Parents tend to lose this war in the short run, but in the long run they usually win.  At some point on the route to maturity many a young slob turns into a neatnik who repeats the process with his own kids.  The sadder cases turn into chronic couch potato slobs.  Why their spouses hoard them instead of tossing them boggles the imagination.

Finally, there’s the slacker who won’t pull his or her weight without constant supervision or peer pressure aka nagging, which is not confined to females.  Work piles up.  The slacker says, “I’m on it!” Enablers take him at his word.  Chores go undone.  The slacker says, “In a sec!”  The enabler believes him.  In the end the errand gets run, by someone else.  “It’s easier,” say the enablers.  

At the CDC, however, the inventory work may not get done at all.

So vile stuff accumulates willynilly in forgotten or mislabeled vials.  Unless there’s been a conspiracy—there’s always a conspiracy theory available—to hoard viruses until they can be loosed on some unsuspecting, non-immune enemy.  In either case, any half competent housewife has the solution.  Systematic cleaning.  Lots of sunlight.  

And yet, even the brightest sunlight is no defense against the ultimate enemy of order, the scapegoat to end all scapegoats: entropy.  What is the chaos of disorder but a failure of cosmic housekeeping?  Note to the great CEO in the sky: time to stop basking in adulation and gilt-edged  bonuses not linked to performance.  Time to get the run-away universe under control. 

Note to CDC/NIH Directors: this also means you. 

On the other hand, maybe a good clean sweep of the under-performing upper echelons at the CDC and the NIH is in order.  And who better qualified to keep everyone healthy while bringing order out of chaos than the underappreciated housewife who does it every day without an MBA or PhD or MD or even a right to Social Security in her own name? 

 

You Think You’re Too Young and Healthy for Obamacare? Don’t Hike!

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Time: a sunny afternoon, blue sky, temperature in the Fifties, no wind to speak of, a perfect day in New Mexico.

Place: Act I: the Dale Ball trail system in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, elevation about 8000 feet. Act II: the hospital emergency room.

Dramatis personae: Just me and the doctors.

What happened? I love to hike and do so regularly in the hills and mountains around Santa Fe. A few weeks ago I tripped on a rock and the doctors had to clean up the mess: contused forehead, black eye in the making, bloody lip, scraped palms and knees, dislocated left elbow, chipped arm bones.

Charges (so far) for emergency room treatment and follow up care: about $6000.

Cost to me: Zero. Sure, I pay for health insurance, but 12 times the monthly fee is much less than $6000 per annum.

Total cost to you, a similarly situated “young indestructible” who listens to Republicans claiming that insurance rates unfairly exploit healthy young people to reduce the cost of covering sickly old people: $6000. You may be young and healthy, but—believe me!—if you fell as hard as I did, on rock, you’d have ended up as I did, with real damage. Consider this: can you afford to lay out $6000 on top of your worrisome college debt and your car payments? (As for the unfairness charge, the whole idea of insurance is that the cost/benefit ratio works out pretty equitably within a population and over a lifetime.)

The Gory Details

The trail head parking lot was in sight, not far below. The distance I had yet to cover was an eighth of a mile, maybe, after a glorious 4 1/2 mile hike. And the trail, as I remembered it, was perfectly smooth. So why shouldn’t I have been scanning the horizon, enjoying the vista? Except, as I discovered when I checked it out a few weeks after the tumble, there was one rock—one rock deeply embedded in the trail!—and yup! That one rock tripped me up, flinging me off and over the edge of the path. I belly flopped facing downward on a 45 degree slope. It took me a few seconds to figure out how best to get to my feet. Trying that, I discovered I’d have to find another way. My left arm was floppy and useless. Broken, I surmised.

Cradling the useless arm, I reached my car, unlocked it, managed somehow to buckle in and drove (slowly, one-handedly) about five miles through light traffic to the hospital. Xrays showed a dislocation in my left elbow plus two small fractures, from bones jammed against one another as I landed. Re the dislocation, I had a choice: bones yanked back into place with or without anesthesia. I chose not to feel the pain, which naturally meant an anesthesiologist and all his paraphernalia added to the cost of getting me back into action. Meanwhile, my upper lip had two wounds that needed stitching, but an MRI had determined that I was not concussed. Thank goodness! No bed rest required.

And so, hour by hour, procedure by procedure, the costs mounted to that $6000, even though I declined the services of a physical therapist to help me regain full range of motion to my arm once it was out of a splint. Oh ho! say the bean counters! Patients need to shop around. Yeah, right. The nearest alternative hospital for emergency care is in Albuquerque, 60 miles away. And which, if any, xray view was superfluous? How would I know?

Luck and Bucks

What happened to me on a largely benign trail can happen to any hiker of any age who doesn’t pay constant attention to where his/her feet are going—and who does? Just as unpredictable from the point of view of incurring health care costs: appendicitis, with or without complications. And auto accidents happen to the healthy as well as to the chronically ill.

But say you’re one of the truly lucky ones who, for a lifetime, never gets sick and never slips on the ice and avoids every other kind of accident.  So what if you’ve paid for insurance you’ve never had to use! Wouldn’t it be worse to be sick, sick, sick, and get your money’s worth? Meanwhile, your contributions have helped someone else who might otherwise have died too soon from lack of affordable treatment.

That doesn’t seem unfair to me. It seems sane, sensible and compassionate.

Drones—and Worms: Part One

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Until a couple of days ago I’d envisioned a hypothetical piece falling under the rubric of “what goes around comes around.”  In short, if we use drones to kill and worms (or viruses) to disrupt, the people we don’t like will be returning the favor, the sooner or later of it depending on the rate of technology transfer.  And whadyaknow!  They have them already—drones anyway. Bashar al Assad’s regime is using reconnaissance drones in what’s gradually being recognized as a very nasty civil war.  So the future is here.  This means that Americans need to do some very clear-headed thinking about drones—and about cyberwarfare, too—and when I say “we” I don’t mean a few guys in a bunker making decisions the rest of us won’t have access to for 50 years or more.

The U.S. deploys drones (pilotless aircraft) for spying and killing in many places.   When activated from a command center, the killer drones fire powerful missiles at selected targets.  The U.S. has thousands of drones in the air or ready for use. 
 
Many questions pop up when it comes to waging war with drones.  (1) Are these gizmos legal under the rules of war?  If so, what rules? (2) Legal or not, is it moral or ethical to use them? (3) Was it smart for the U.S.  to pioneer this sort of war? (4) What do American citizens have a right to know about drones or any other weapons deployed on their behalf?

The Abuse of Words

For starters, however, let’s get rid of the “surgical strike” metaphor.  The idea that bad guys and only really bad guys are taken out by the lethal drone treatment consoles too many who are otherwise squeamish about remotely controlled slaughter.  Every day surgeons make mistakes that are followed by funerals that shouldn’t have been. Drone “mistakes” fill whole cemeteries.

Excessive mortality from bombing and shelling used to be called “collateral damage,” as if dead people mattered as little as shattered windows.  Today’s equally cynical, but more sophisticated verbal coverup works by redefinition.  We’ve been told that any post-pubertal male who’s killed along with the targeted individual is presumed also to have been a terrorist. What a brilliant statistical coup!  Aim for one.  Get ten. Guilt by propinquity. Probably the dead women and girls should be counted, too.  If they didn’t divorce the guy, run away from home or disinherit a son, they probably hated America, too. Guilt by association. Ker-boom!

There have been many attempts to cover up an inconvenient truth about drones, which is: even when guided by up-to-date from-the-air-and-on-the-ground information, drone management does not yield perfect selectivity.  If a well-known bad guy is driving through a desert on a little used road with no turn-offs, those with him probably are collaborators or comrades-in-arms, and probably the missile can find the right man in the right car.  Roll back the tape and consider this: the subject may actually have been at said address, but it takes mere minutes  to say good-bye a trife early, jump in a car and be a mile away, thereby leaving unfingered people behind to take the taking out.  Ker-boom! 

Here are some other ways in which good info turns out to be useless or mistaken and a supposedly pinpointed strike requires apologies and long-winded explanations that are very bad for the American image: the target changes his schedule at the last minute and never gets to the rendezvous, he suspects a trap, his vehicle breaks down en route, the missile was delivered to the wrong address or was a few dozen feet off target, hitherto reliable informants didn’t know or mention that there was going to be some sort of traditional family conclave in the same place at the same time, etc, etc., etc. Ker-boom!

I can hear it now.  Chuckle!  Chuckle! You can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Which only brings us back to the prison of inappropriate metaphors.  Give me two eggs.  I can beat them into a superb omelet—or I can take the longer view.  I’ll end up with two laying hens and dozens of eggs—or a pair of doves, for that matter. Diplomacy is getting where you need to go without breaking eggs. 

Smugness is Not a Good Idea

More ominously to the present point, given the inevitable ubiquity of drone availability and the likelihood that drone range can only increase, it might be a good idea for all of us heretofore smug and safe Americans to consider the distance between houses in our own neighborhoods.  Would our families survive if the house next door harbored targeted terrorists?  Is the kids’ school a safe distance from any conceivable target?  And so on. And what about incoming missiles that go off course?  From human error.  From mechanical or electronic malfunction.  Either way, someone dies. 

Have you made your funeral plans?  Your son’s?  Your daughter’s? Americans are pretty safe now, but that won’t be the case in the near future—and the big danger won’t come from cells of amateurs manipulated by FBI agents or from adolescents inflamed by internet propaganda.  If we end up on the receiving end of a drone delivery, you might say, given our own way of waging war, that we asked for it.

Worms That Turn

Space is running out here, and I haven’t even begun to describe what could happen if serious cyberattacks were directed at the United States rather than Iran.  I don’t mean the kind of hacking that annoys large institutions with sloppy security or even, on occasion, the Pentagon, which has also had a few embarrassing encounters with cyber intruders.  I mean a worm or virus that shuts down the whole country in this age of massive interconnection.  Evidently it was a Russian hacking genius who discovered the Flame virus and Stuxnet, too.  What if he were working for a an actively hostile Russian government?  Who’d break his code?

My purpose here isn’t to fear monger or start a panic but to suggest that there are some very powerful reasons why the international community needs to do a little updating of the conventions of war and peace now that technology has complicated our mutual vulnerabilities—and our responsibilities as human actors.  Part Two will address these urgencies by looking more directly at the four questions that introduced this discussion. Given attempts to conceal, minimize, mischaracterize and otherwise mislead the public about the use of drones, it is particularly important to determine just how much secrecy is necessary to protect Americans and to what it extent it serves only to deprive Americans of the open debate about means and ends that is necessary to democracy.  Excessive secrecy does not protect.  It infantalizes the many and empowers the few.

Lobsters in the Pot: Is Privacy Still Possible?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Let’s dispense quickly with the contradictions besetting the Republican notion of privacy during this amazing rundown to the upcoming presidential election.  Privacy à la GOP largely involves business and finance, which means allowing the close-mouthed  denizens of the executive suite to connive exorbitant profit-making opportunities free of interference from regulations designed to protect consumers from confusion, manipulation, deception or outright fraud.  Meanwhile, most Republican presidential candidates want to regulate every aspect of the sex lives of consenting adults.  Surely having government tromping around like an elephant in the bedroom is a gross invasion of privacy.

But my primary interest here involves the ever-increasing, ever more pervasive and intrusive  invasions of privacy made possible by modern technology.  At this point, we can be monitored day and night no matter where we are.  Even our private thoughts are in danger.  There is virtually no escape from the watchfulness of the national security state.

The Naked Ape in the Airport

Personal privacy is a thing of the past for those who wish to board an airplane.  We must be scanned or wanded or patted down, and if we are too sassy, we’ll be interrogated in a frightening little room, like criminals, which means the flight will leave without us.  Although we are assured that no other passengers can see our nakedness, the fact is that we are undressed by the machinery operated by TSA personnel, who can view our underwire bras, the titaniam repairs to broken bones, the depth of our fat layers, the subtle details of our posture, thus totally violating our bodily integrity.  Worse, official assurances not withstanding, we have no way to prove that our images are not stored, like fingerprints, for future purposes beyond our control.

Herded along like cattle, we dare not utter a word of protest.  We cannot make jokes. We can’t protest too vehemently when a pat down is too intimate or a person with a colostomy bag is humiliated.  We must simply put up and shut up, even though we know that this supposedly sophisticated equipment routinely misses dangerous weapons and that the regs about lotions and so on have no basis in science.

Maybe the whole purpose of the exercise is to teach us docility.

The Fear that Shuts Us Up

It’s not only the fear of missing a flight that turns us mute, passive, as abject as captives in a slave market. If we say or do something that leads us to be apprehended as possible terrorists, we could lose every liberty and right supposedly guaranteed to every citizen by our Constitution, which has been more or less amended by various incarnations of the “Patriot” Act as endorsed by compliant courts and judges.  If we end up in legal limbo, we might never be tried.   We would, to all intents and purposes, cease to exist. 

So we toe the line, remembering how proud and happy we were when democracy overcame totalitarianism.  Perhaps we need an Occupy Airports movement to reclaim our privacy and our dignity.


Brain-Reading as Non-Fiction

But personally invasive science is offering even more license to those who would control us by taking away our privacy.  The latest wrinkle is this: those thoughts that we keep rigorously to ourselves in the hope that we may pass unscathed through the TSA inspections system may not be sacrosanct much longer.  I’m not talking of old hat truth sera.   I’m not referring to the familiar misuse of the notoriously unreliable lie detector test that terrifies the unpracticed and unsophisticated.  I’m talking about the evolving ability of brain monitoring devices to evoke reasonable facsimiles of images that we have seen and thought of.  At the moment, this technology seems to be tentative and crude, but the usual trajectory of such technology is refinement toward perfection. Maybe words won’t be recovered from our brain cells anytime soon, but imagine this: no longer being able to retreat into the pleasant privacy of your own thoughts. Talk about self incrimination!

The Surveillance Octopus

Other surveillance technologies have already reached high levels of reliability.  Heat detectors can tell if we are home, even if the car isn’t outside and we aren’t standing in front of a window.  Sound monitors can pick up conversations from considerable distance, and there isn’t a single electronic communications device that can’t be turned against us.  What’s more, anything hacking doesn’t reveal, documents may, and the courts are all too happy to ask IPOs and phone companies to supply them.  To make the invasion of privacy even more pernicious, it may be illegal for those who supply the records to tell us that the documents have been seized. 

How much more naked can we be?  How much privacy is left to lose?

Oh dear!  I forgot about the spies in the sky. And, not only are there geosynchronous satellites that can watch us 24/7, there are spies in our cell phones and rental cars that reveal to those who have the right equipment exactly where were are whenever we’re away from home.  Finally, spy cameras are becoming a commonplace part of the urban landscape.  To foil criminals and terrorists, of course.  But how convenient for other purposes, too.  Talk about 1984! 

You can monitor your baby from afar, too, which may be a good thing.  But that's the trouble with technology.  It's two-faced, and too many people abuse it too frequently.

Lobsters in the Pot

In the era of voluntary self-revelation on Facebook and given the data-mining to which all users of the Internet are willynilly subjected, it may seem silly to worry about privacy.  Furthermore, many Americans would say that a little erosion of freedom is the small price we pay for increased security.  But I’m not sure that everyone has reflected on the extent to which privacy has become all but unattainable.  Nor, I fear, have they thought of the implications for extreme social control in a not so distant future.

It’s said that creatures who are immersed in a stew pot filled with cold water don’t realize that they are being cooked until it’s too late. The process is too slow.  The increase in heat is too gradual.  Just so, our freedom is eroding degree by degree as our opportunities for privacy fade toward zero.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the human lobsters who read this piece guffaw and decide I’m over-reacting. 

I guess they haven’t felt the heat yet.  If they don’t wake up soon, we’ll all be cooked.

 

     

       

 

Preoccupied with Occupation: Seeing Cairo in Santa Fe

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The question under discussion, over a pot of New Mexico green chili stew, at the Occupy Santa Fe site at the Railyard Park (see photo) was sustainable agriculture in Northern New Mexico, where local chili farmers, small farmers by any measure, are under pressure.  People who know anything about chile line up to watch the local Chimayo chilis being roasted at the  famers market in late summer and fall.  Then they buy a year's supply (a lot!) to keep in the freezer.  Without seed banks and strong local support these precious heritage chiles will be gone, their genetic material dead-ended by flavorless cheap and easy to grow varieties pushed by commercial interests.  The occupy movement in New Mexico is trying to call attention to this problem.

Because I take some interest in things like this, I was invited, a week or so before Thanksgiving, to a dinner meeting that turned out to be a fund raiser for Russ Baker’s blog WhoWhatWhy.   Grateful as I am for all evidence-based muckraking, the blog’s style is too steeped in conspiracy theory for me to throw money at, but I got into a great conversation with another guest who was deeply involved with the Occupy Santa Fe movement, which, I told her, I support mainly through membership in the local MoveOn group. 

In the course of our conversation, I expressed my gratitude to the occupiers for their brilliant consciousness-raising.  The supremely important issue of economic inequality, with all its consequences, is now a highlighted entry on the political agenda and the stroke-the-rich Republicans are on the defensive.  I also complimented the occupiers for the inspired use of anarchist theory to broaden support for economic reform, while avoiding the wholesale destruction that has marred demonstrations at WTO meetings, where supposed anarchists in black masks have gone on the rampage.  When the concentration of economic power has reached the level we now experience in the U.S., my new acquaintance and I agreed, there’s a lot to be said for a strategy of  leaderless basic democracy. Good government can’t be a spectator sport. 

Occupation, Politics or Both?

My OSF dinner partner loved the positive feedback.  But only the accolades.  She radiated instant hostility when I tacked on a few reservations having to do with scale and institutionalization.  

Small groups can operate as a committee of the whole, I agreed, but you can’t have a town meeting with the entire population of the United States flipping hand signals simultaneously.  At that scale, representative democracy of one sort or another is inevitable.  The solution to bad government isn’t to make common cause with Tea Party types who hate government per se, I said, but to make sure that our representatives represent us, the so-called 99%, not the already rich and powerful, who want only to perpetuate their own privileges.  Similarly, once feelings have been unearthed and expressed, they need to be collated and codified.  Even those prone to demonstrate have only so much time and patience for marching and camping out and brandishing signs.  Sooner or later, demonstration fatigue sets in.  Therefore, while enthusiasm and participation are high, during the peaking and before the decline in momentum accelerates,  it’s crucial to get explicit about what changes are to be demanded, to work out a strategy for achieving those changes, to begin thinking about who would make a good representative or senator to replace those who have sold us out.  As for elections, it’s harder to buy them if turnout is high.  Voting matters, I kept insisting, feeling ever so slightly Pollyannaish in that crowd. 

And so it went.  My dinner companion emphasized alienation; I pushed for using the system to the utmost.  And then it was time for Russ to speak about himself as a journalist and about the blog he was trying to get financial support for.  We arranged cards, but mostly as a matter of ritual, not because a new friendship had sprouted.

The Egyptian Example

Still, in following weeks, I found myself mulling over the dynamics of demonstration vs. the demands of organization as I watched the enthusiasm for the Arab spring congealing into fears of a very long Arab winter in the form of a counter revolution, such as that which seems to be happening in Egypt.  The Army, hailed as a friend to the revolution for not firing on the crowd in Tahrir Square, was enjoying its monopoly on institutional power entirely too much.  I couldn't help thinking that supplanting a tired old dictator with a shiny bright new general had been the prime item on the Army’s agenda all along. What’s more, if the Army weren’t certain of its path to power, it was hard to believe they’d be so brutally beating and torturing those its soldiers had seemed to make common cause with only a few months ago.    

Still, there was hope.  The upcoming election might prevent the army from realizing its most extreme ambitions.  Whoever won might refuse to embed the Army’s supremacy in the new Constitution.  For that to happen, however, the Constitution-writing assembly would need a very strong mandate.  Voter turnout would have to be impressively high.  The Muslim Brotherhood had been working hard to maximize its vote count, but televised interviews indicated that some or many demonstrators appeared to be ambivalent about participating in the election.  Some had even made up their minds not to vote.  On principle, evidently. 

Now, standing on principle feels almost as exhilarating as good sex.  But the no-compromise-with-imperfection approach, as applied to elections, often brings an absolutely-no-influence-on-what-happens-next result. That’s not so good, if you really do want political and economic transformation. 

Those Who Organize Win

In Egypt, while too many secularists in Tahrir Square were basking the light of their clever use of social media, the Brotherhood and even the Salafists were focused on taking advantage of the triumphal deposing of Mubarak by winning the pending elections.  Secularists, meanwhile, had a terrible handicap. During the Mubarak era Islamists had been able to use the mosques for keeping their organizations alive. Lacking that institutional advantage, no secular party lasted very long under Mubarak.  Result: even if they had worked at nothing but forming an election-ready party from day one of the Tahrir Square phenomenon, secularists would have entered the elections at a disadvantage.  So gaining anything close to a majority was unlikely.  But every seat they won would have give them that much more voice in the writing of a new Constitution. Would it be more or less secular?  Would it be more or less Sharia-based.  Would the Army be given a veto on legislation or would the government be whollly under civilian control?  By not maximizing their vote, the secularists would not only cede the future to Islamists, but the smaller vote total would make it easier for the generals to sweep civilians of all convictions aside.

Baghdad: Another Cautionary Tale

Going off in a snit is never a good idea when elections are in the offing.  Consider what happened in Iraq.  Sunni Muslims, a minority that had been disproportionately favored under the Saddam Hussain regime, decided not to participate in elections which would, at best, give them a minority bloc of seats in the new parliament.  This would be the first post-Saddam Iraqi government, and they opted out of the process.  Result of their boycott?  Total powerlessness, politically, for which they compensated by a horrendous outburst of violence.  Quelling the subsequent  Sunni uprising required a surge in American troop levels an d a change of tactics by the U.S. military, too. 

By the time the next elections came around, the Sunnis had learned their lesson.  They participated.  The result is far from perfect governance, but stalemate is better than slaughter.

Occupiers Evolve

Though the cops in some American cities were unnecessarily brutal in breaking up the occupy encampments in their cities, other city authorities, like those in Santa Fe, see no need to do so, and the amazing thing is that people continue to camp outside, even this week, in snow and sub-freezing temperatures.  These are not sunshine soldiers.  Meanwhile, others who sympathize with the occupy movement, an awakening whose goals have never been indecipherable to those who cared to listen, have begun to put particulars in writing.  There's no excuse anymore for not understanding demands whose fulfillment will be good for all of us (even the 1%), if only we can create the politics to make them possible.

As for Egypt, the increasingly trigger-happy Generals should look toward Syria. Whether or not they wish to give way to civilian rule, the wiggle room for distators isn’t want it used to be.

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Cook-Romero.