Fools Rush In: the Accelerating Libya Crisis - David Loftus

Five weeks ago, I wrote in this space that the U.S. should stay on the sidelines as the crisis in Libya unfolded. President Obama has gone in anyway with missiles blazing, but I don’t see any reason to change my advice.

It can be very satisfying to watch an armed conflict from the far side of the globe and feel one has helped to even the odds if not boost the underdog to victory with massive firepower. It’s a little like seeing a slice of an ongoing Xbox game every night on the evening news. We’re safe and comfy in our homes, nobody’s brother or father or son is being sent off to die (we’ve seen how well that’s worked in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, so Obama has assured he won’t be doing that this time), and so far, we haven’t had to look at any gruesome photos of dead ragheads.

I haven’t seen any polls of the American public’s attitude toward our involvement in Libya, but I’m guessing it’s mostly indifferent to apathetic. The average American probably doesn’t know enough about Libya to have a strong opinion. I suspect the basic response would be “yah, Gadhafi looks like a real nutcase and a meanie, so it’s probably good that we’re shutting him down.” (It’s been interesting to watch the Obama-hating commentators respond to this latest crisis: Bill O’Reilly is all for sending in troops with guns blazing to save lives, while Glenn Beck is urging caution and wondering whether it’s a good idea to meddle in Libya, and Rush Limbaugh is decrying our knee –jerk dash to protect Europe’s oil—apparently to make sure they don’t run the risk of actually approving something the President has done.)

The problem (for the average American) is: We’re NOT shutting Gadhafi down. Just as the first President Bush did in the 1991 Persian Gulf War with regard to Saddam Hussein, we’ve joined in airstrikes to stop oppression but will not remove the oppressor from power. In this particular, Obama’s chosen the correct course, and most of our international partners (especially the five who abstained from voting for the UN resolution that approved the no-fly zone—Russia, China, Germany, India, and Brazil) don’t wish to set a precedent for invading a foreign country for the express purpose of toppling its government, however illegitimate or oppressive. Ultimately, that’s a justification for meddling in any nation’s affairs and even terrorism.

But going in at all was a mistake on our part, I would contend—for two reasons. First, it sets us up once again as traffic cop to the world, and if anything goes wrong (and trust me: most likely it will), we will be blamed as a bully, especially by the Arab and Muslim nations who have so far remained quiet, and in one or two cases actually supported action against Gadhafi. (The Arab League approved of the no-fly zone, and news reports say the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar has contributed planes to enforce it as well as recognized the rebels as “the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people”—something not even Obama is willing to do. If we had hung back, perhaps more Arab and Muslim nations would have rushed in to assist the French who were so eager to get in there. They would have their own reasons, probably having to do with oil—who has it, and to whom it will get sold.)

The second and bigger reason is that if the rebel forces prevail, we probably don’t know who would rule in Gadhafi’s stead or how. The CIA has candidates and theories, I suppose, but in the past Gadhafi was one of our allies, as were the Mujahideen, some of whom would later become the Taliban, in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The U.S. sold military weapons to both—armaments they later used to oppress and kill their own people. As for “armed humanitarian missions,” consider the CIA’s and U.S. military’s (and therefore our, as in all Americans’) past record:

·      Nearly 60 years later, Korea remains a divided nation, after a war that killed 33,000 Americans and roughly a million Koreans, with a succession of tyrants starving and bankrupting their citizens to the north of the 36^th parallel. It is as if we, as Britain, had intervened in the American Civil War, such that the South fought Lincoln to a standstill, and thereby earned separate nation status, with slavery and capital punishment, well into the 20^th century.

·      Vietnam is now our peaceful trading partner, after nearly 60,000 Americans and 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed in battle 40-50 years ago

·      In Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans and locals continue to die violently every day, with no stable native government in sight for either nation

·      On a much less vivid level, one could trace economic and sociological fallout from all these wars back home: boom fortunes for a few (contractors and weapons manufacturers), recessions and depressions for the rest of us, a legacy among veterans of divorce, spousal abuse, random violence committed by sufferers of PTSD, etc.

We haven’t saved anyone. Our muscle hasn’t created new, benevolent, democratic governments for any people anywhere in the world where they weren’t already prepared to take power and rule themselves without help. Armed assistance and incursions only prolongs death and violence, and perhaps even magnifies it over time; it clearly doesn’t end it.

So why do we keep doing it? In this case, the answer is probably oil. To keep proving Obama wrong, even Limbaugh is willing to admit that.

The Campfire in Your Hand: Keeping Warm with Your Mobile - David Loftus

Come on, now. Be honest.

How many times have you stared at your palm today? How many hours—total—have you been poking tiny buttons on a hand-held? How many hours have you spent this year on your mobile phone, informing other persons of meaningless information—where you’re walking or driving at that moment, what shows you’ve been watching—as opposed to work-related, life-threatening, or heart-to-heart sharing?

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” wrote the Canadian philosopher and futurist Marshall McLuhan. With an irony McLuhan might have appreciated, I’m quoting him without ever having read any of his books. I heard the “tools” quote on a record album that transformed his most famous work, the 1967 bestseller The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, into an aural experience. It wasn’t even the LP itself I heard, but a reel-to-reel tape recording of the disk my Dad had copied from a friend’s record.

If you think you’ve never heard of McLuhan, recall a scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is waiting to get into a movie theater and some pompous jerk is holding forth in line behind him. The man is talking about McLuhan’s theories, and eventually Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, gets irritated he pulls McLuhan himself onto the screen so the media critic and communication theorist can say to the blowhard, “You know nothing of my work.” This apparently was a frequent comment by McLuhan about and to people who criticized his writings. Now he can add me to the list, posthumously.

But back to that toy in your hand. Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, iPod Touches, or whatever you’re carrying have become an integral part of our working world, and like most tools, they invaded our lives and took over well before we assessed the role they play in shaping us. For some, they entered as necessary tools for work—I know many corporations and law firms issued them to then-indifferent employees—but I suspect most people were sucked in by the toy and entertainment aspect: being able to surf the ’net anywhere or anytime, having access to video games without being plugged in at home or having to lug around a laptop.

Anyone can cite the obvious absurdities of other peoples’ (mis-)use of them: the person texting at the wheel while waiting for the red light to change; the couple walking or sitting together but both texting or talking on their cell phones (to other folks, presumably); the kid texting, playing a video game, or maybe even watching a movie on his hand-held while sitting at a live play or concert. My state, Oregon, made it illegal to talk on a cellular phone while driving, but when I leave my apartment, I can easily see roughly a third of the drivers on Portland’s streets yakking to their hand-held. I can also witness their illegal turns, and signal-less lane changes and cornering.

I don’t claim to know any more about Zen than about McLuhan, but it strikes me that our over-dependence on hand-held mobiles may be a symptom of, or at least lead to, a diminution of mindfulness, one of the prime goals of a Zen life. In other words, the more you look at your iPod Touch/BlackBerry/Whozis, the less you put yourself in the present moment … the less aware you are likely to be of what’s coming at you on the sidewalk, the trail, and the road (whether it’s an oncoming car, a greenback, a moment of great beauty, a mountain lion, or an idea of your own).

That’s obvious, you might say: it’s an escape, or at least a distraction. That’s why so many states have banned their use at the wheel. But what sort of escape? Perhaps an escape from more than just the boring, inconsequential, impersonal world around you. Ultimately, it’s an escape from yourself—who you are, right now, at this moment in time and space, in favor of seeing and feeling something another person or company wanted you to see and feel, whether it’s to hear your voice instead of their own thoughts, or to remove another dollar from your pocketbook (or more likely, raise the digits on your next credit card statement or electronic billing).

And may I suggest that perhaps we are so constantly trying to escape ourselves through such toys and distractions because, at bottom, we are mortal? We are dying. And any time we suppress the clatter and flash of cell phone calls, texts, video clips, mobile phone photos . . . sooner or later we’ll recognize that sobering fact. We mustn’t see that. So we clap the hand-held to our ear and stare at it hour by hour, like a mesmerizing campfire in our palm, warming us against the surrounding darkness.

Carrying Concealed Logic - David Loftus

This week the Judiciary Committee of the Oregon House approved a bill to remove the list of concealed weapons permits from the public record. On Thursday it passed the House, 42-18. A similar bill has been put before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I feel I’m missing something here, but I nearly always have that reaction when trying to understand where gun fanatics are coming from. They take a fairly simple proposition—gun ownership gives one the ability to protect one’s own freedom and liberty—and then defend it to the most illogical extremes. In this case, why would anybody who has a concealed weapon permit want to keep it a secret?

It seems to me that if you’re a proud gun owner, you would have no reason to hide it. In fact, if you’re looking for security by licensing your right to carry a concealed weapon in public, your personal security would only increase the more people had reason to believe you might be armed. Possession of a gun permit doesn’t mean you always have a gun on you; you might obtain a permit and choose never to carry a weapon. But the general knowledge that you could have one on your person would make everyone else less apt to mess with you, I should have thought.

Apparently, House Bill 2787 was pushed by the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association, partly in the wake of a controversy in southern Oregon several years back when a female teacher was rumored to have obtained a permit for a concealed weapon so that she might carry a gun to school to protect herself from an estranged husband. The local newspaper requested the list of local permits, the sheriff’s office fought release of the list, saying “disclosure would unreasonably invade the personal privacy of concealed handgun licensees,” and between 2007 and 2009 several levels of state courts ruled the information was not exempt from public disclosure laws.

Kevin Starrett, director of the Oregon Firearms Educational Foundation, which helped fund the court fight against the release of the information, said, “The public records law was intended for public entities and government, not the activities of private citizens. We’re disappointed that the courts and the legislature can’t see the difference.” Now, apparently various interests are trying to shut down that option through the state legislature.

Mr. Starrett doesn’t seem to grasp that the issuance of concealed gun permits is in fact a government function, one that at least tries to ensure that dangerous individuals such as convicted felons with violent pasts don’t get to carry guns around legally—just as the government issues driver’s licenses to people who have demonstrated that they have the training and ability not to endanger the lives of fellow citizens with an automobile . . . and takes those licenses away when they fail to do so.

I try to make sense of this, and the only thing I can think of (besides the notion that some gun owners might possibly be ashamed of having other people know they own a gun) is the fear that perhaps if a list of gun owners were published, their homes might be burgled by criminals who wanted to steal the firearms. But this doesn’t make much sense.

First, the newspaper which sought the list in the southern Oregon case has said it had no intention of publishing it. They just wanted to find out whether this particular teacher might have obtained a permit so that she potentially could be breaking a school district policy that prohibited guns on school grounds. Since the sheriff’s office wouldn’t tell them just that, the newspaper had to go to court to obtain the entire list. Second, if criminals are not deterred by the knowledge that there might be a gun in a house, then the whole IRA-Second Amendment notion of personal security and individual freedom maintained by a firearm gets a little shaky, doesn’t it?

Personally, I don’t know why this country hasn’t banned handguns altogether. When I was police reporter in southern Oregon myself, I had to report the news of a little 4-year-old boy getting blown away by his brother when they found and played with an adult’s handgun in their home. More than 40,000 Americans die every year from gun violence, much of it involving simple accidents as well as passionate outbursts of trigger-happy violence between family members and couples.

Statistics reliably show that far from protecting the home, a gun is more likely to harm one of the residents in a mishap or get stolen by a burglar. How many of those 6 people who died and 13 that were injured in Tucson two months ago would be all right today if Jared Lee Loughner had sought to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords armed with a knife and gotten tackled by bystanders with just that instead of a 9mm Glock pistol? How many thousands of innocent victims of accidents and family fights would still be around if they could only punch or stab one another when they flew off the handle?

Aftershocks from Sendai: thoughts on a world disaster - David Loftus

It is the fourth day following the stunning natural disaster off the coast of Japan, and the aftershocks—by which I mean the social and economic implications for us, no matter where in the world we live, and the details of the original ’quake and tsunami—roll on.

Since I don’t normally watch television, I might not have known about the event until Friday morning’s newspaper, were it not for Internet social networks. Within a half hour after the tsunami began to steamroller through the communities of Japan’s east coast, I saw the buzz among my Facebook friends and turned on the television Thursday night to catch the live feed. By 10:15 local Pacific time, all the local stations had interrupted normal programming to follow the growing disaster.

I got up the next morning to watch continuing coverage, particularly since I had grown up on the Oregon coast and now live only an hour’s drive from it. Since then I have bounced between Facebook and the television during my free time to keep up with the situation. My Facebook friends pinpoint the best video clips and still photography, where I go whenever local news shows drearily dwell on domestic disturbances and local scams, and (ALWAYS) spends too long on the weather.

The first couple days, like the live coverage of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/01, the lens was mostly too big to allow you to see individual people, to feel their plight, and that made it kind of unreal. The videos of brown and black ooze driving toy houses, boats, and trucks reminded all of us of just another CGI-driven Hollywood thriller. Occasionally you glimpsed a car racing ahead of the dirty flow, like a rat or cockroach scuttling along a kitchen floor when the ceiling light goes on. Not until Sunday night did we begin to see and hear the stories of heartbreak and miniature triumphs—such as the woman describing how she lost her handhold on her daughter, and the 60-year-old man rescued from a rooftop ten miles out to sea. My wife shuddered to think about all the animals whose awful fates we have not yet begun to learn.

Also like other breaking disasters, local news offered the pathetically hilarious entertainment of reporters tripping over their tongues and committing factual errors because the story didn’t unfold like a typical news event, at a pace they could mentally process. They also walked that tightrope of being reassuringly hopeful while simultaneously pricking our fears so we didn’t stop watching altogether: as Friday morning’s surges approached the West Coast of the U.S., anchors and reporters in Portland repeatedly showed us long footage of calm empty beaches, and assured us this was the best thing we could hope for, but adding ominously: “this could change at any time.” Thank goodness the marinas of Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, and Brookings, Oregon cooperated in giving some good video to keep the thrill junkies happy.

Again, like 9/11, but in a different way, the 2011 disaster will likely raise our level of insecurity and might change how we see and do things in the future. Friday, gas prices fell briefly because Japan is the world’s third-largest importer of oil, but in combination with the incipient civil war on the other side of the globe (in Libya), before the weekend was over they were climbing again.

There will be lots of discussion of earthquake and tsunami preparedness, and most of us will say “boy, I ought to put together a disaster pack” . . . and most of us will do nothing. Or we will put a kit partly together, then raid it within the coming year and fail to keep it maintained.

A Japanese-American businessman who had just returned to Portland from Tokyo a few days before the earthquake said on last night’s news that he was proud there hasn’t been a single report of looting in Japan. Although there’s probably been a little of that, too small to make the news radar, things may be different when the West Coast gets hit with its subduction quake and tsunami, I’m afraid. Japanese citizens are used to thinking communally, to following orders, and cooperating with each other, not to mention having been more experienced with and prepared for earthquakes in the first place.

The Japanese also own no handguns and very few rifles, because General Douglas MacArthur banned individual gun ownership during the post-World War II Occupation. The few gun crimes that occur in Japan today, amounting to about 200 a year, mostly involve illegal possession, not the commission of a violent crime. Kansas City, Houston, even Peoria probably suffer more gun crimes and fatalities than the entire nation of Japan. Lucky for the Japanese we Americans were willing to impose government controls with which we have been unwilling to bless ourselves.

The upshot? No matter how intense or light the actual seismic event, survival of our eventual natural disaster will probably be far more unpleasant than it is turning out in Japan. Those of us who prepared with disaster kits may find ourselves looking down the gun barrels of those who didn’t bother and now think we should “share.” Rather than heroic saves and heartwarming cooperation, looting, bullying, and outright murder may be what the rest of us get to hear about on the news, the next time.