Fear Not

On this sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, I am thinking about how our country has transformed and the direction we are headed.

FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".

George Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... don't get fooled again."

While many have made fun of W's mashup of an old adage and a song by the Who, it is very telling. For a man that has done more to benefit from and exploit the fears of Americans than anyone could dream, this cyclic ramping up of the fear factor has been a constant theme.

But Americans are increasingly saying to W, "you can't fool us with that again".

The terrorists are a small, highly motivated, and completely insane faction. Wrapping a hatred that makes them desire to kill us in a religious mantle and trying to spread it around the world was something of a hard sell in the days before 9/11. Sure, American policy in the Israeli Palestine conflict was bound to keep a certain portion of the Arab population enraged, but as long as most people could make a decent living and not be assaulted with too many atrocities or outrageous actions (in their minds) by the Americans, they could easily dismiss the terrorist factions.

Not any more. The propaganda of the jihadist that America was something to fear, revile, and resist has been cranked up to a fever pitch by our occupation of Iraq. The recruiting floodgates are open now, despite our intentions.

I resent the fact that every time the administration's influence was slipping, suddenly a new terrorist threat would be trotted out and hyped up. The administration has used these fears to prosecute an unjustified war with little interference by oversight bodies, and has consolidated power including the right to spy on Americans under cover of these fears. For an Administration that is incapable of making any decisions without primarily considering the political impact of them, is it any wonder that the public fears these people being given more power? Given their political track record, does anybody feel that they are incapable of using increased surveillance with no oversight to peep into the private lives of political adversaries?

The terrorists are small in number and usually disunified in action. Their acts seem horrific, but in reality are not that significant. That's right, that is exactly what I said so let me explain. The 9/11 attack was not that significant in itself. Only around 3,000 people died, and we lost the World Trade Center, 4 planes, and damaged the Pentagon. While that is the most successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, that is not a huge attack. If you lost someone personally in the attacks, it was very important and significant, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm talking about the impact to the nation as a whole. What was a big impact was the national perception of what happened and the psychological reaction to it. If we had just had a leader that stood up and repeated FDR's assurances to us, explained that the attack was so much more lucky for the terrorists than they had any right to expect, and so easy to thwart in retrospect, people would have understood that they had little to fear personally.

Our society is not too bright about risk assessment and our media is doing nothing to correct these overblown fears and misconceptions. How many people do you know that were afraid that a person was going to wait under their car and cut their achilles tendon in a mall parking lot based on a stupid urban legend? How many people are so fearful that their children are going to be abducted that they don't allow them to play and have a normal childhood anymore? The average American is horrible at assessing risk and seeks to spend an inordinate amount of time defending against or just worrying about events that are so remotely probable as to be virtually impossible.

So looking back on what the terrorists did to us that day, I would say the worst thing that they did was teach us that we have nothing better to do but live in fear. That is the real tragedy of 9/11.

The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty

I made myself "read" this book, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, which I finished this last weekend. Do you get to say "read" when you listen to an audiobook on your ipod? I say that I made myself read it because it wasn't very interesting, you just have to force yourself to keep plowing through it.

This was a favorable, but not blatantly biased (until that last chapter) portrait of the Bush family and their history. I don't know anything about the authors, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, or what their connection or motivation for the book was, but they had access to family members.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I have to admit that last summer I read Kitty Kelley's The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. That book was distractingly biased. After reading it, I assumed that the details were probably not accurate, as it felt too much like a smear job. One thing that Ms. Kelley made clear was that the Bushes were very secretive and that none of them would talk to her. That was one of the few things that stuck in my head.

In this book, the authors had some access, but still, it's not like they got to sit down with 41 or 43 and actually chat.

And it wasn't all flattering, I guess. They kept emphasizing how the Bushes would weep whenever anything emotional happened. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, I'm not sure I'd want that known about me, even if it was true.

I don't like George W. Bush, either personally or how he has run his campaigns or the country. I think he's the worst President this country has ever seen, and maybe will ever see. I think he's against science and dangerous to our security and standing in the world. I've wondered how in the hell anyone could still be driving around with "W '04" bumper stickers on their cars, you'd think they would be embarrassed. However, this book has done more to make me understand where Bush supporters are coming from than anything else.

I can see how they would think that the media is biased against them, but that is also somewhat sour grapes and thin skin. I do appreciate, on one hand, that each member of the family has gone out and made their own money, through their own efforts, but they did get a lot of investment capital from the family, too. So either side can be said to be right, the "It was all handed to them" vs. the "They made all their own money".

The thing that leaves me bothered is that 41 & 43 wanted to be President for no real reason. They didn't have some great vision for the country or understand what direction they wanted the country to go in, they just wanted to be President. Like it was their right. That's not good for the country. We need people that have a real vision, not a "vision thing".

The other thing that really irritates me is the emphasis on connections and friends. On one hand, that's great. I can see how they forge tight relationships and have and extend a lot of loyalty, but on the other hand, it's a peerage system. Not merit, but friendships. That's no way to run a country.

Reality Check

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that may result from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs.

That's straight from Wikipedia, but it is almost word for word the description given in last week's Science Friday episode where guest Elliot Aronson talked about his new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

The phenomenon of believing something so strongly that any proof to the contrary is simply ignored is easy to see in other people, hard to see in yourself.

He talked about people that had been convicted and sent to prison and then were later exonerated by DNA evidence and how prosecutors were reluctant to reopen these cases and sometimes insisted that they were still correct. This is an excellent example. Of course you aren't going to admit that you are putting innocent people in jail, that would make you a monster and everything you worked so hard for wrong and bad. No wonder people have elaborate mechanisms to support their denial.

Aronson used President Bush's going to war in Iraq as a huge public example of cognitive dissonance. And I have to agree, it fits perfectly. The original reasons have long since been abandoned, and a series of shifting reasons have cropped up as each reason falls apart by its own inherent weakness and incompatibility with reality. You see people on TV talking about what a great success this war is, and the banner moment of cognitive dissonance for this war when the President posed in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner 3 stories tall. The problem with this sense of Presidential disconnect is how many people still buy into it. They want to believe, despite all that has happened since.

The more I think about it, the more I think that conservatives and Republicans are the poster children for cognitive dissonance. And they have their chief Kool-Aid dispenser, Rupert Murdoch and his flagship propaganda platform, Fox News. I guess, "We Make Things Up, You Keep Believing!" doesn't have the ring of "We Report, You Decide." Although "We Distort, You Deride!" is pretty close.

Look at Nixon. He never admitted that he did anything wrong and history judges him as the most corrupt President we've ever had. Clinton eventually admitted his wrongdoing and is now looked back on fondly as a very popular President.

Republicans respect Bush for his "Stay the Course" strength and steadfastness, and they hate Clinton for his wishy washiness. Yet, if you're making a mistake, isn't it better to figure that out and stop it? Who on Earth is not going to make mistakes sometimes? I'd rather have a leader that recognized that his approach wasn't working and corrected himself. That's not indecision, that's a firm grasp of reality.

I found a truly baffling blog called Willisms when I was casting about for some additional material for this posting. It's strange, because it points to the overwhelming success of the Iraq invasion and how Democracy is spreading like wildfire across the Middle East. It says that everyone that supported Bush was right and the rest of the world is suffering from Cognitive Dissonance. Like Jon Stewart said on Bill Moyer's show "we can't even agree on what reality is".

One part of the Science Friday discussion that I thought was very interesting was about Abraham Lincoln. There's a book called Team of Rivals, a recent biography of Lincoln (that I bought and have not yet read) that talks about the fact that many of his cabinet were bitter political rivals that disagreed with him violently. There was a caller to the show that talked about contrition, and how it is the opposite of cognitive dissonance, and how powerful contrition can be at healing the problems caused by stubborn denial. I think Lincoln's power was constantly being in the presence of those that disagreed with him so he was constantly forced to reevaluate his positions. Lincoln struggled with some of the worst conditions a person could ever be expected to see, and yet persisted and triumphed in the end. He changed his mind about things, for instance Slavery. Initially, he was not going to free the slaves, but he eventually came around. He changed positions on many things, yet one thing he never did was give up on the Union. Despite 4 years of horrendous bloody conflict, military failures, and growing dissatisfaction with the war, he persisted and won. He changed his tactics many times over the course of that war, yet we remember him today as someone that stayed the course and finished what he started.

Does anyone believe our President and this situation is analogous to those times?

Count Your Blessings

You may have seen an email going around attributed to Jay Leno. Jay Leno did not write it, it's on www.snopes.com. It's just the most recent fraudulently attributed mass email scam. An ultraconservative columnist probably with ties to the Bush administration wrote it and he probably got paid by the administration for writing it, too.

I was forwarded the email from my Aunt, who claimed that a friend of her daughter wrote the cover letter, but he did not. It's word for word from Snopes, too. He copied it from where ever he got the email. I had already noticed it and read it before my Aunt sent it to me.

The email, in a nutshell, says that people in the country are all dissatisfied, and they shouldn't be, they should count their blessings instead. This email really makes me mad. If you're interested in my take on the email, here is what I would write back to the guy who wrote it:

"Counting your blessings is fine, I believe. However, by this logic, you should be glad when you have a heart attack that your diabetes is under control. Or that the crazed madman cut off some of your fingers, but your toes are in fine shape! We don't concentrate on the positive because things that we fixed, solved, or set up long ago are supposed to keep working right. We concentrate on the negative, particularly the negative that we can control or stop so that we can identify the problems and fix them. That's what it is to be an engineer. I fix the problems. If I walked into a factory that was spewing toxic chemicals on the floor and about to explode and asked them why they were bitching because the lights were working fine, someone should just take away my license on the spot.

"If we can fix the many problems with the country and the direction it's heading right now, then we just have more things to be thankful about. Is the point of the letter to accuse anyone that thinks the War in Iraq is stupid that they ought to shut up and be happy that things aren't worse? How is that a shining example of an America you can be proud of? That sounds like criminal irresponsibility to me.

"People that don't like Bush are not anti-American and they are not against God. Buying into propaganda like this is dangerous. Only through participating in democracy, caring about what's going on, and by being willing to stand up and disagree when things are not going right will we ever be able to fix things. If you are curious about the opinion of another Republican, decorated war hero, and strongly devout conservative and his views to the contrary of this era of GOP Bush apologists, you should look at Dwight D. Eisenhower's speech he gave on January 17, 1960. 3 days before leaving office, he warned about a future situation that is an exact description of the Iraq War. It's his famous "Military Industrial Complex" speech. If he were alive today, he would not be in support of the War, or this administration. I have no doubt about it. He was most proud of the fact that in the opening years of the Cold War, that he did not escalate the world into a real war.

"We do have a wonderful country and we should be proud of it. Many people have sacrificed to make America great. We won't have a wonderful country in the future if we spend more time counting our blessings than securing our liberties and correcting our government when it's leading the country astray."

I finished my response by apologizing to my Aunt for getting on a soapbox. I told her that this patriot bashing drivel really gets under my skin, and that anyone that believes that I don't love this country because I don't agree with them should be ashamed of themselves. However, I didn't send this message to her, because she didn't write it or even take the time to really think about it or research it. My Aunt is a good person that I believe has fallen victim to the right wing ultraconservative Bush defending propagandists of the day. I would say that she is just a victim in this climate, but really, when people start questioning the patriotism of their fellow citizens, aren't we all victims?

Bush visits our Burg

Letter the day before Bush visited our town:

I wonder if he'll fly over in a helicopter and say "Oh no, Riggy! Riggy! What have they done to you?" (Daily Show reference to a Bush flyby of a damaged Oil Rig after Katrina/Rita.)

He's got a health care initiative he sprang out a couple of days ago. I heard something about it last night on the way home on NPR. It involves taxing people's health benefits as income to encourage them to drop employer provided health care and buy it themselves, then give them a tax break for that. It sounded like someone took a corporate wish list, a campaign promise, and 2 tabs of acid and started writing policy.

I think Bush is starting to be more worried about his legacy. Right now he has a pretty good chance of going down in history as the dumbest President ever, but he needs to pad the score to be sure of this illustrious title.

Makes you wish for the good old days where the only thing wrong with the President was that he got a little randy around the interns. And Congress tried to impeach him for that! This President should wear one of those old-fashioned man-sized billboard placards that says, "I'm an Idiot!" on the front and "Impeach me!" on the back.

Brother can you spare a brain?

Truth vs. Opinion

2400 years ago, Plato contemplated in The Republic who is best to govern society. He talked about truth versus opinion and concluded that opinion was something less than truth. He talked about the type of person that loves opinion and concluded that they understand little about any of the things they hold opinions about. He remarked that they should not be annoyed at him for pointing this out, because they have no right to be annoyed at the truth. In a recent NPR interview, Rush Limbaugh stated that he was not interested in anything other than stating opinions that would maximize his advertising revenue. He was not much concerned if his opinions acted to divide the country; he just wanted to sway elections toward his way of thinking. It seems that our society has fallen victim in recent years to the siren song of firebrands that are just saying whatever they want, not what is really true. The sad thing is when such a large portion of the population is susceptible to these persuasions. Human nature hasn't changed much over the centuries. There will always be those who stir up trouble over half-baked opinions. The thing you have to be worried about is when those people are the ones governing your society.