Entries from January 2004 ↓

It’s hard to go anywhere in the tech industry these days without hearing something about the ongoing crisis of high-tech job migration to India. White collar codemonkeys like myself are seriously spooked about this. Part of the reason for our trepidation is that we’ve been floating along on a wave of society-abetted self-importance for many years now. Despite the fact that more and more people have been easing their way into the IT slipstream of late, it’s still something of a black box to the general populace, a strange and bewildering 2001-style moaning obelisk whose shadowy internals are a mystery best left to the professionals. More than one person with a misbehaving PC has turned exasperated to me over the years and asked why computers have to be so damn hard to use. Because that’s the way we like it, I usually say.

Well, that’s all over with now. Computer programming has been, to some extent, commoditized. Which isn’t to say that your Aunt Esther can do it, any more than she can make a microprocessor or build a carburetor. But lots of people can, and they can do it cheaper, and often better, in other countries. Of all the companies, worldwide, that have received an SEI CMM rating of five (the highest possible), half are in India. A perfect CMM score is a much-coveted and rarely-awarded honor, and indicates a superlative level of maturity in your software-building process. Places like the NASA shuttle program are rated CMM 5, because they have to be: the stuff they do is incredibly complex, and any failure would be catastrophic. You can’t reboot the shuttle. But now Indian software shops that cater to run-of-the mill business ventures are achieving the same kind of quality standards, and doing it a lot more cheaply than their American counterparts.

I have to admit, my first instincts on this issue were almost entirely protectionist. I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for so long now that the thought of my livelihood going elsewhere is somewhat frightening. It’s not the same as getting laid off. Getting laid off is just losing your job, and there are always other jobs out there. The sinking feeling in the pit of the industry’s collective stomach is a reaction to the prospect of an entire sector going elsewhere, floating away across the Atlantic to far-off countries, never to be seen again.

But I’ve been rethinking all of this, lately. Wired magazine just published a great article that focuses on the Indian side of this equation, the people in Mumbai and Bangalore and Chennai who are getting the work we’re losing. It’s quite startling to see the faceless threat of Indian job usurpation suddenly given a face; lots of faces, actually, and they all look kind of like mine; people who share the same aspirations and ambitions as I did when I started out: security, a nice place to live, a steady job that they enjoy. It’s hard to resent that.

But it’s not hard to worry about it. As Robert X Cringely notes, the seemingly inevitable migration of all this work abroad could result in the same kind of brain drain that England experienced after World War II, when many of its luminaries came to the United States to escape the rubble that the protracted war with Germany had made of their economy. We benefited immensely from this hegira, of course, gaining in scientific know-how what we may now be losing to China and India and others in the interests of cost-savings and efficiency. The only Americans who stand to benefit from this state of affairs are the officers of the companies that are exporting their workforce, Cringely argues, and the short-term institutional investors who buy their stock. They don’t have any incentive to take the long view, where the downside to all this relentless upside lies in wait.

But there are others who make the opposite argument: that the long-term implications of these fleeing jobs are nothing but good. Clay Risen of The New Republic says that all of the startling job-migration statistics that have been bandied around recently are largely anecdotal and unreliable: there’s no objective proof, yet, that we’re bleeding work. But even if it does turn out to be true, it can only be a net gain for the economy. In this sluggish post-recession climate, companies have to cut costs: that’s just a fact. “The choice isn’t outsourcing or keeping jobs here,” says Daniel Griswold, an economist at the Cato Institute. “It’s outsourcing or going out of business. Which isn’t good for jobs. This is an absolute necessity for many companies.” If they can’t offshore your job, they’ll fire you anyway, and just build a machine to do the work. Either way, you’re unemployed. Risen goes so far to say that the removal of these kinds of commoditized positions is a necessary component of any healthy economy: in order to progress and create new kinds of work, the drek has to be shed, like skin. Whenever our economy has molted like this, it’s always been a good thing, resulting in more and better jobs over time. It’s no different now. All that’s changed are the specifics.

Maybe. My point here is, that, whether or not the economy benefits from this diaspora, I certainly won’t, and this is all about me. Me me me me me me me. So if all these people are right, then it looks like I have a couple of choices: hold onto this line of work for as long as I can, hoping against hope that I’ll be good enough, and lucky enough, to survive the coming cataclysm; or start actively working to define a new niche for myself, a corner of the employment landscape less susceptible to offshoring. All of the articles I’ve read claim that the really creative work — system design, planning, architecture — isn’t going anywhere. That’s all a part of the job I do now, certainly, but I don’t know if I’d enjoy it as much if it was divorced from the actual implementation side of things. I like doing things as much as I like planning to do them.

But whatever. I think I’ve moved beyond the whining stage, too, and am clambering toward acceptance. A change is coming, you can feel it: a slight stutter and jolt in the chaotic hum of the industry in which all of us propellerheads are immersed. If nothing else, the rumblings — and my reaction to them — have revealed a startling aversion to change in my nature. I wasn’t always this way, and I’m not sure when it started happening, but there’s a troubling ossification going on in the aspiration cortex of my brain, a hardening of the mind that is — I imagine — just as lethal as a hardening of the arteries would be.

All of this puts me in mind of the Right View tenet of the Buddhist Eightfold Noble Path: “Right View is seeing things clearly; it is the Middle Path between the two wrong views. Right View means seeing the nature of all mundane reality as being marked with the three characteristics of suffering, impermanence and not-self.” I’m not sure about this not-self stuff, and suffering just isn’t my bag, baby, but I think that turning a blind eye to the impermanence of any situation is dangerous: you strive for stability, of course, but you can’t possibly have enough control to maintain it for long. If you’re lucky, you figure out a way to accept change; if you’re really lucky, you figure out a way to embrace it.

First of all, I hate snow. I don’t like snow at all. I will grudgingly acknowledge that it can be — in its pristine, unsullied, just-fallen state — quite beautiful, all smooth and white and perfect and all; but its perfection (like all perfection) is ultimately a ruse, and its loveliness does not in any way make up for the distress it causes me when I’m forced to drive through it, or walk the dog over it, or shovel it out of the way. I realize that this is a very narrow, pinched, grinchy way to look at the world, but I can’t help it. Snow sucks ass.

But. When I stepped grumbling and bitching out of the house on Saturday morning, bundled up against the cold and vowing for the hundredth time to teach my dog how to use the toilet, I was greeted by a landscape that left me, for a moment, completely breathless. My neighborhood had become a winter tableau, the like of which I’d never seen. It had snowed overnight, just a dusting, a gentle precursor to the blanketing we would get a couple of days later; but the thin layer of white had crusted and frozen over, and, in the fading, lamp-lit dark of dawn, little twinkling points of light spread over its surface like glitter, like tiny diamonds embedded in the ground. It made me think of a snow-washed evening sky, inverted and glowing with the light of a thousand stars.

I can’t do the sight justice, unfortunately; I lack the gifts that others have for describing the beautiful parts of the world. But you’ll have to take my word for it, it was amazing. And, what’s more astounding, in retrospect, is that I came across something so achingly lovely within the staid confines of a standard, cookie-cutter, suburban townhousery. It made the lookalike warren of houses and lawns and sidewalks seem like a a scene from a fairy story. A really good fairy story, the kind that makes you want to step into the pages of whatever book you’re reading and stay for a while. It would be one thing to go to Alaska or the North Pole or the Swiss Alps and see something like this. But to find it just outside my frontdoor … well, that was unexpected, not to say miraculous.

It was all gone an hour later. By the time the sun rose, the snow was already tracked up and grey and dingy, marked here and there by yellowing dog-pee craters. But my memory of what it was has, apparently, survived. My mind isn’t very good at preserving things, as a rule; there really isn’t much room up there, so it either erases stuff immediately, to make room for more stuff, or (very rarely) it enshrines the really good stuff in its Museum of Memorable Artifacts; a quiet, echoing place where, over time, preserved memories are enhanced, touched up, until the good ones becomes great, and the great ones divine.

I hope it decides to save this one. I’d like to go visit it every so often, when things get bad, and marvel at what’s possible, and remember that the world, even on its coldest, nastiest days, always has the capacity to surprise and delight.

I just saw the interview that Dean and his wife Judy gave Prime Time a couple of days ago. Diane Sawyer asked a whole series of really stupid questions, focusing obsessively on the post-caucus rally in Iowa, the scream, and all manner of soft weak-kneed touchy-feely bullshit: why doesn’t Judy show up more often, didn’t Dean say he didn’t want to use her as a prop, does she feel like a prop now, blah blah blah. It was an execrable, muckraking performance on Sawyer’s part, and my previous no-opinion of her has instantly transmogrified into extreme dislike.

Having said all that, I think Dean did brilliantly. He fielded every question with level-headed humility, and he was self-deprecating, abashed, and completely resolute at the same time. No, of course my performance at the rally wasn’t presidential. Yes, I have warts. Yes, I wear cheap suits and am not as polished as some of the others in the field. That changes nothing about my positions on the issues, nor will they change to accommodate your preconceptions of what they should be, or how I should express them.

Even his answers to the inevitable family-life questions were sincere and not at all cringe-inducing. The picture that emerged about his home life was wonderful without being sappy or egregiously heart-warming. His family is more important to him than anything, he said, more important than this. His wife seemed awesome, too. She was shy and hesitant but well-spoken, and not at all false.

Anyway. From a pure relevance point of view, the interview was completely useless; but it was an inspired bit of damage control, some of the best I’ve ever seen. It gives me new hope.

I recorded Bush’s state of the union speech, because I didn’t think I could handle the whole thing in one sitting. But when I sat down to watch, I noticed something strange about the way he was talking; something purposeful in the usual string of odd pronunciations, sputtering cadences, inexplicable stresses: a pattern. So, on a lark, I reversed the polarity on my VCR, and set it to play at twice the normal speed, and then ran the tape backwards.

And, to my considerable surprise, what I heard, instead of the expected reverse chipmunks gobbledygook, was a completely different speech, addressed to a completely different constituency. The real constituency, if you will. I took the liberty of transcribing it.

My fellow rich people,

You know what’s more fun than watching Howard Dean squeal like a stuck pig in in Iowa? I’ll tell you what. Kicking the shit out the nasty Iraqi evildoer that’s been messing with you and your daddy for the last 12 years. Or pissing off the French, that’s fun too. Or the liberals. Or the UN. Or coming up with crazy names for stuff, like “The Healthy Forests Initiative”, for our tree killin’ plan, or “Clear Skies”, for our smog program. That’s fun, boys. It’s good to be President.

And I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. When Rovey told me that all I needed to do to be president was raise a bunch of money and lie about stuff, I thought he was crazy. And you know what? He is crazy! When he told me that I was going to propose a third round of tax cuts, I told him he was out of his cotton-pickin’ mind, and you know what he said? He said stick to the principle, Mr President. So I said, what principle? And he said … well, I don’t really remember what he said. Doesn’t matter. Because, see, the thing is that Karl’s so damn crazy that his craziness has wrapped around and come back on the other end, so he looks sane. And that’s good enough for me.

Take this whole Pickering thing, for instance. When he told me we was fixin’ to appoint ol’ Pickle to be a judge after all, when Congress had left the building, and right after this Martin Luther King holiday, I said won’t that piss people off, because of all that civil rights stuff, and Karl got this big shit-eatin’ grin on his face, and he said Yeah. Crazy. But a genius too.

Anyways … I guess I don’t have much to say here. Thanks for all the money, I’ll be sure you all get a piece of Iraq, or somewhere, whatever we invade next. Haven’t quite decided. There’s evildoers all over. You guys want an apartment on the Champs Eleezus? Then there’s evildoers in France. You want some more rainforest to cut down? Then there’s evildoers in Brazil. Anybody want to get knighted? Evildoers in England. Sir Kenneth Lay. How would you like that, Kenny Boy? Yeah, I’ll bet you would.

But we’ve got real challenges ahead. I know I promised y’all a lot more stuff, and believe me, I’m workin’ on it. It takes time, is all. Take those “environmental regulations”, just for example. Now, we all know that earth is doing just fine, no matter what those global warming freaks keep saying. So what if some glaciers are melting? It just means more water for us, and water’s a good thing. So what if factories are spewing out smoke and smog and stuff? We’d love some smog in Crawford, Lord knows we need the shade. So what if rivers are a little dirtier than they were four years ago? Who drinks right out of rivers, anyway?

See, I’m an optimist. I run an optimistic administration. When I look at a glass that’s half full, I don’t say, “Hey, we’re running out of water!” No, I just find a smaller glass and pour it in there. There you go! Full glass. Not half-full. Full. See, that’s optimistic. That’s smart.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, doesn’t that just mean you’re taking the water away from the poor people who can’t afford their own small glass? Well, it’s complicated. It sort of looks like that, I guess, if you’re poor. But think about it this way. The more we drink, the more we piss, right? And the more we piss, the more there is for them other folk to drink. That’s what you call “trickle-down economics.” Sure, piss ain’t so great to drink, but all the poor people out there drinking piss live in America, and that means they’ve got the opportunity to pull themselves out of the toilet and join the rest of us at the club, and get their own little glass. That’s America. That’s the optimistic America I live in.

Ok, well that’s it. I’m going to be spending the next couple of months running around the country, saying stuff I don’t mean about immigrants and the environment and poverty and all, but don’t you pay that no mind. That’s what you call “campaigning.” Once I’m elected again, I’ll go back to being the guy y’all paid me to be.

You could sort of feel it happening. After the media blitz, the covers on Time and Newsweek, the crazy dot-com-style hype, you stopped hearing about Howard Dean. You heard about all the money he was amassing, of course, and about his sterling organization in Iowa, and about the way his candidacy had changed everything about the way you run for elected office in this country, etc … but you didn’t hear his message any more. There were verbal gaffes, endorsements from the Washington insiders he continued to position himself against, caricatures and broad generalizations. But that’s it. What happened?

There are lots of theories out there, most of which fall into one of three categories:

• He did it to himself. The voters got tired of his angry, anti-war, outsider shtick, and there was really nothing else to him.
• The others did it to him. He was riding high for a long time, with a big front-runner target on his back, and he took a lot of hits, especially toward the end, when he and Gephart sparred like toothless hockey players. That kind of relentless scrutiny would wear anyone down.
• His main message was co-opted by the rest of the field. He was the first angry Democrat, unafraid to assail GWB even in the face of those crazy post-war approval ratings, but when all the others started beating the same drum he was left with nothing more than a reputation for arrogance and a successful governorship of a very small state.

I don’t know. They all sound plausible. For me, he’s been fading for a long time, and I don’t know why. Maybe the anti-Dean rhetoric starting tweaking my subconscious; maybe his frequent slipups and his tendency to wither in debates started worrying me; maybe it was my own short-attention span. But I clung to him, nevertheless, because it’s easier to believe myopically in something than face the uncertainty of not being sure what you believe in.

Maybe he’ll turn it around. I hope so. There’s a lot to like about him. I don’t think I could get fully behind Kerry’s patrician moralizing, or Clark’s awkward domestic policy apprenticeship. I certainly can’t stomach Lieberman. Edwards. I don’t know anything about Edwards, but he seems nice, has a reputation for being a good campaigner. Maybe Edwards.

But really what I want is my Dean back. And not just Dean — the feeling I got when I went to his rally, that bracing sensation of the possible, of glad tidings. I came home that day on fire, energized, really hopeful for the first time in a long time.

All of that’s sort of gone now, and I miss it.

There are demons all around us, of course, but they’re mostly invisible, and nearly impossible to see. Sometimes you catch one flitting by out of the corner of your eye; sometimes your shadow bulges in strange, unnatural ways; sometimes your reflection flickers and leaves you with an odd impression of fangs and scales, bulk and scars. You think they’re there, but you don’t know they’re there, and that’s the way they like it.

But I’ve found a surefire way to expose the bastards, and it’s really easy. Here’s what you do:

1. Find a small room.
2. Find a very bright lamp, at least a 150 watts; preferably 200.
3. Put the lamp in the corner of the room, and take the shade off.
4. Turn the lamp on, and stare directly at the bare bulb, without blinking, until your eyes dry out.
5. Turn around, quickly, and face the room.
6. Close your eyes.

You’ll see a sort of negative image of your surroundings, bright lines fading against a black background. You’ll see starbursts popping and dwindling like slow flashbulbs. You might see a faint suggestion of the light on the other side of your eyelids, leaking through the skin. And you’ll see throngs of demons, all around you, limned in fire.

I discovered this, quite by accident, a couple of nights ago. I was alone in the house, daydreaming, staring fixedly at the lamp over the stairwell. When I came out of my reverie, I blinked, and held my eyes shut, and there they were. There was a long segmented millipede demon, with the slack-faced head of a human child, crawling up my leg, searing through the leg of my trousers, leaving a line of filth and bile in its wake. There were a billion chigger demons boring into my skin, kicking up tiny geysers of blood behind them. There was a time demon, an eight-legged spider creature with a hundred eyeless faces covering its round black body, and on each face an outsized puckered mouth sucking at the air, drawing away my youth; I could hear it escaping, tearing free of my bones with a sound like nails down chalkboard. There was a misery demon, a winged half-jackel with the back of its body torn off, dangling entrails, whispering sadness and despair in my ear. There was a paranoia demon, an amorphous wriggling mass of limbs and heads and feet and hands that occasionally took the forms of my friends, engaged in various acts of betrayal. And, above them all, looming over everything like an oncoming storm, was the futility demon; it rained hopelessness amid forked bolts of lightning, and raised hurricane winds to tear dreams away from their moorings.

I could only stand it for a couple of seconds, though. I flinched back, and opened my eyes, and they were gone.

But they’re not really gone.

I know that.

I just don’t know what to do about it.

Once upon a time, the Lord of Language created a punctuation mark called the derwit. The derwit was shaped like an inverted cow’s udder, with curved horns on the teats, and was intended to modify melancholy in the same way that a question mark modifies a question. A phrase like “Ah, I remember well that lovely autumn day when first we met, so long ago” would naturally end with a derwit.

Unfortunately, melancholy quickly fell out of favor. The larger & louder emotions like rage and joy and dismay and passion soon eclipsed it, and the derwit was left bereft, and without purpose. And so the Lord banished him from the Land of Language to the Realm of Grunt, where unseemly comic book expostulations like “Eeeek” and “Ugg” and “Aaah” and “Aaargh” roamed. None of these creatures had much use for melancholy, so the derwit, after many failed attempts to fit in, finally retreated to a mountaintop, where he spent his days gazing wistfully across the border toward Language.

With sorrow building steadily in his heart, he watched as words and clauses and fragments formed into phrases and sentences and paragraphs around his brothers and his sisters. He watched Comma slipping confidently between words, almost invariably where he had no right to be; he watched Period sauntering to the end of sentence after sentence, nearly bursting with smug, rotund self-satisfaction; he watched Exclamation Point appear suddenly at the terminus of a host of cheesy melodramatic utterances, bringing them to screechy, crashing halts.

And his sorrow became envy; and his envy became anger; and his anger became rage. The derwit watched, and waited, and plotted his revenge.

And, in the fullness of time, it came to pass that the Lord of Language grew ashamed of what he had done, and sent Semicolon to the Realm of Grunt to fetch the derwit back home. Now, it is well-known that Semicolon is an insecure, uncertain fellow; he never knows where exactly he fits into a sentence, and his role is called constantly into question by Comma and Period, who view their bastard offspring as a chronic interloper and hanger-on. And so Semicolon, preoccupied as he was with his position in the world, was perhaps less than polite when he finally found the derwit, sitting alone in a cave with his back to the entrance, staring listlessly at his own shadow.

“Well; there you are; finally,” said the semicolon. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere; rejoice, little derwit; our Lord has invited you back.”

The derwit sighed, and did not answer.

After a long, uncomfortable silence, Semicolon cleared his throat and said: “Did you not hear me, brother? Why are you not rejoicing; leaping to your feet and dancing; thanking the Lord for his kindness and forbearance? Your long exile is finally at its end.”

“This physical exile, perhaps,” said the derwit. “But my true exile will continue. There is no place for melancholy in the discourse of Language, brother. Even if I were to return, I would be nothing more than a curiosity. I would appear in the appendixes of reference books, or in the theses of English majors, or in the novels of unpopular authors. That is no kind of life.”

The semicolon made an impatient sound, and checked his watch. He had been in the middle of orchestrating his insertion into the transcripts of a series of long-winded, list-laden, pause-heavy speeches, and was anxious to get back to it before Dash usurped his rightful place. “Enough of this senseless drivel, Derwit; come with me; time is of the essence.”

“No, I think not. Thank you, though, Semicolon. I think I’ll just sit here and stare at this blank, featureless stone wall for the rest of eternity.”

The semicolon became nervous. It had no wish to return to the Lord of Language empty-handed. “Well, then,” he said, flustered, “perhaps we could; which is to say; an arrangement could be; reciprocity; chagrin; agreement; small animals; bacon; umbrella stands …”

He sputtered along in this manner for some time, until at last the derwit looked up and said. “There is a gesture that would help to convince me of my worth to you, brother.”

“… jambalaya; broken pottery; loveless pachyderms; …. ” said Semicolon, and then trailed off. “What?”

“If a delegation of all the other punctuation marks were to visit me, then I would know that I was loved, and important, and relevant, and I may consider returning. But all of them would have to come. Period, and Comma, and Colon, and the Quote brothers, and Ampersand, and Dash. All of them.”

“That can be arranged,” said the semicolon, and hurried from the cave.

He spent the better part of the day gathering all of the others, speaking in rapid fragments, cajoling and threatening, warning and pleading. Until, finally, they were all assembled in the cave, staring impatiently at the derwit’s back.

“Look. I’ve got things to do. Deadlines. Important matters.” said Period. “No time. Not for this. Let’s wrap it up.”

“I don’t see, really, why we, all of us, every one of us, has to be here,” said Comma. “Who the hell, and I mean no offense, Derwit, but who the hell, in this day and age, on this planet, uses a derwit anymore, anyway?”

“No one!” cried Exclamation Point. “He’s yesterday’s news! Ancient artifact! Anachronism! Thing of the past! Not worthy of our time! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

And then the Derwit stood, and turned, and said, in his slow, forlorn way: “My friends. Why is it that none of you came to see me in all my years of exile?”

After an awkward pause, Question Mark bounced forward and said: “Why would we? Don’t you know that we’ve got important work to do? Are we not the lynchpins of Language? How can we just walk away from our duties? Even for a moment? Even to visit you?”

“Look. Gotta go. No time,” said Period, fidgeting and looking back over his shoulder. “Chaos back there. Sentences out of control. Situation critical. Gotta go.”

Derwit shook his head, sadly. “My friends,” he said. “None of us will be returning, I’m afraid.” He gestured, and there was a sudden commotion outside. His visitors turned and saw a mob of Grunts sauntering into the cave. They stood in a line before the entrance and eyed the assembled punctuation hungrily, licking their lips.

“Huh,” said one of Grunts.

“Aaaaargh!” said another.

“Hrrnrnrnrnrnr …” said a third.

And then they fell upon the derwit’s family; upon the ellipsis, the parentheses, the square brackets, the hyphen, all of them, and carried them away, shouting and whooping and bellowing and laughing.

“Derwit!” screamed Exclamation Point. “You can’t do this! Language can’t survive without us!”

But the derwit did not answer. He stood, and brushed himself off, and stepped out of his cave, and watched the grunting mob disappear over the hills, carrying his brothers and sisters over their shoulders. Then he climbed to the mountaintop and looked upon the Land of Language.

Everything was devolving into chaos. Sentences trailed on forever, with no pauses, no differentiation, no end. Questions became statements became assertions became proclamations, and then, finally, gibberish. Clauses wandered to and fro, bumping into each other and then jerking away, unable to form any kind of coherent connection. Participles dangled. Infinitives split, then split again. Nothing made any sense. The Land of Language had become The Land of Senseless Babble.

The derwit smiled.

KALAKASHNORA, Gusev — Another one of those strange, toy-sized Earth probes fell out of the sky today. It bounced comically along for a while, encased in its balloon-cocoon, before it rolled to a stop and began to unfold itself. This one looks a little like an unattractive go-cart, festooned with cameras and dirt scoops and various sensory devices. Analysis of the transmissions it has received from Earth indicate that they’re looking for water this time, or some indication that water was once here. It’s a little sad to see how far the Earth scientists’ ambitions have fallen over the years. They used to hope for Martians, strange and wondrous technologies, exotic space creatures. These days, they’d wet their pants over pictures of fossilized plankton.

This vessel appears to be named “Spirit”. Loosely translated, this term is very similar to our own notion of essence-matter, but more billowy, and far less specific or useful. Spirit did a good amount of damage during its clumsy landing in this quiet Kalakashnora suburb, rolling through several backyards, overturning barbecues, crushing fences and frightening small animals. No one was hurt, thank goodness, but several angry residents kept running at it with axes and crowbars, and had to be restrained. A brood of children descended on the craft before the Advanced Earth Detritus Quarantine team arrived, however, popping the balloons with the tips of their tails and sitting on the unfolding go-cart and making vroom vroom noises. Thankfully, no damage was done to the equipment. These probes are primitive, but extremely delicate.

And so now the question is, what will the False Imaging Department show the Earth scientists this time? More tracts of red wasteland? More rocks? More tantalizing holes in the ground? Or will they go further, finally, and give them a sample of some mineral that can only develop in the presence of water? Or better yet, some actual water?

Probably not, according to Chief Deceptioneer Raladab Homestig: “Well, you want to accommodate them, naturally. They’re just so eager. The problem, of course, is that if we show them anything, anything at all, they might be tempted to send one of their own over here, and that would be a disaster. We cannot risk actual contact at this point. Oh, they’d be awestruck at first, and very friendly. There would probably be a period of good relations between our worlds. But eventually they’ll begin to consider us a threat to their safety and well-being. The Red Menace, and all that. They’ll start sending delegations, and then threats, and then ultimatums, and then nuclear weapons. They’re a very insecure, paranoid people.”

But, if that happens, couldn’t we just peel off some layers of their atmosphere, as we did last time they threatened us? “Yes, true,” says Mr Homestig. “That was quite effective. It reduced them to a very primitive state. But it also killed nearly everything on the planet, including those massive, exquisite lizard creatures. We’d like to avoid doing that again, if possible.”

And so the Spirit vehicle will likely just see pictures of the crater it thinks it’s in, until the Deceptioneers decide that it’s reached the end of its plausible life. There’s another probe coming soon, on the other side of the world. Current projections of its probable entry point indicate that it will land in the playground of Glib Gotlobe Elementary School, during lunch; so the EDQ will likely have to destroy it in orbit, as they did the previous one.

But how much longer can we do this? Intercepted Earth newsfeeds today indicate that one of their world leaders (the dangerous, unintelligent one) has proposed a manned mission to our world in a few years. What should we do if actual humans arrive? Manipulate their senses, as we have the senses of the mechanical devices they’ve sent thusfar? Is that possible? Or desirable? Our governments, mindful of the terrible consequences of revealing ourselves to Earth so many years ago, have resisted doing so again. But the humans will force the issue, eventually. Will they have matured to the point where they can handle the idea of other forms of intelligent life in the solar system? Will they have escaped their jingoism, their chauvinism, their xenophobia, their paranoia?

Probably not, says xenosociologist Yortab Gadalab: “Their technological development is far outpacing their mental development, again. They will still be fearful, dangerous warriors when they discover us.”

And what then?

“Well, we’ll just have to hope for the best,” says Ms Gadalab.

Indeed.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Are you listening, Mr President? Of course you’re not. You’re too busy drafting budgets that chip away at the massive federal deficit you’ve created by carving dollars out of the hides of people who can’t fight back:

Facing a record budget deficit, Bush administration officials say they have drafted an election-year budget that will rein in the growth of domestic spending without alienating politically influential constituencies. They said the president’s proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, would control the rising cost of housing vouchers for the poor, require some veterans to pay more for health care, slow the growth in spending on biomedical research and merge or eliminate some job training and employment programs. The moves are intended to trim the programs without damaging any essential services, the administration said.

The country’s been spilling its treasure into the coffers of your wealthy benefactors, or flinging it into the cauldron of the war you created, for too long now. It’s horrible to watch you turn away from these sinkholes you’ve created to stripmine the people you’ve sworn to protect, all the while chuckling and smirking and telling us about your compassion and your love and your heart. There’s nothing compassionate about your conservatism, and there isn’t much that’s particularly conservative about it, either. You’ve slashed open our economy and laid it on the altar of supply-side voodoonomics; you’ve gutted our environmental laws; you’ve transformed us into a belligerant pariah on the world stage; and you’ve taken away our privacy, and given us fear. That’s some pretty radical stuff.

I don’t know how much of this is you, personally, and how of it is Cheney/Rumsfeld/Pearle/Wolfowitz/Graham channeled through you. It doesn’t really matter, though. You have the power to stop it. You’re the president, and presidents have to lead, as you’re so fond of saying. So lead. Stop lying to us, stop grandstanding, stop playing the political games you tiptoed into Washington decrying. Stop it. Come to your senses. Please.

I’ve just come upon a bunch of Billboard Top 100 Singles lists, one for every year from 1946 to 2003. The recent lists were pretty dispiriting, last year’s especially: it’s crammed with songs I’d never heard of, by artists I know only marginally, if at all. Ignition, by R. Kelly. Get Busy, by Sean Paul. Magic Stick by Lil’ Kim. Worse, I immediately felt my lip curling into a dismissive sneer at their titles. “Is that all these kids can think about?” I thought, geriatrically. “Magic sticks? Getting busy? What they need is some MORAL FIBER! And a good CANING! And above all, some TASTE IN MUSIC!”

The good news is that I managed to pull myself out of that sucktoothed old-person tailspin before it was too late, but only just barely. Another couple of seconds and I would have been sitting on a mental porch with a bunch of imaginary old coot friends, smacking my gums and complaining about how easy the young folk have it these days.

Anyway. I found myself in much friendlier territory when I went back to the 1984 list. Here was some music I could sink my rapidly failing teeth into. Prince. Tina Turner. Cyndi Lauper. Ray Parker, Jr, for God’s sake. Reading through these songs, I felt an ache in the back of my head so palpable, so real, that it had to be something more than imaginary, my nostalgia-thalamus twitching like an electrocuted sea sponge. These were my formative years, growing into and through and beyond puberty on a steady diet of shitty new wave pop numbers. It’s a powerful testament to the susceptibility of the growing mind that this music is lodged so deeply and so inextricably in my consciousness, like gum in the treads of my boots. Every time I hear the one deBarge song, that pile of steaming dogshit about feeling the beat of the rhythm of the night, I gaze wistfully into the sky and think happy thoughts. Ghostbusters makes me want to shake my tailfeather, and Walking on Sunshine brings a smile to my lips every time it comes on.

I’m not sure why that is. 13 through 18 weren’t particularly good years for me. My body was splaying out in odd and surprising directions, my face was an erupting vesuvius of zits, my mind couldn’t figure out what to make of any of it and my libido was constantly straining against the cage of its vessel’s awkwardness, grasping hopelessly at any faintly female-shaped thing that walked by, bellowing like a trapped sea lion. But I still think of those as the best of times, and the music that accompanied them is like a doorway into a lost Eden.

Then again, maybe those were the best of times. I had few worries, and a nice home, and a brother and a mother and a father who were always near me, and a future that beckoned rather than loomed. But it couldn’t last. Youth isn’t wasted on the young, despite what the old would have you believe. It has a purpose, it serves that purpose, and then it’s shed, like a skin you’ve outgrown. Even if the snake hadn’t intervened, Adam and Eve would have moved east eventually. The garden is nice, but ultimately limited. There’s a whole world out there, and it’s worth losing something to see it.

Having said that, I would absolutely kill to get my hands on a copy of Let’s Hear it for the Boy. Let’s give the boy a hand. I know that he’s no Romeo, but he’s my loving one man show, whoa whoa whoa whoa. Let’s hear it for the boy.

Sigh.