Entries from December 2006 ↓

What do you do when some grand enterprise that you’ve staked your credibility and reputation on goes completely to hell? There are two basic options. You can either (a) claim that your idea was really very good, and it would have totally worked if the morons running the show hadn’t fucked it up; or (b) claim that the idea was good, and it is totally working, and we just need to keep doing the same stuff over and over again, except, you know, more.

You’re seeing both camps springing up in the aftermath of the administration’s inevitable failure in Iraq. The people in charge are going with Door #2. Bush reached into his bag of empty euphemisms and came up with “Surge”, his nifty new name for more of the same: 30,000 more troops hurled into the abyss, to both forestall and worsen the eventual collapse. It looks like he’s going to get his way, too: we’re watching an elaborate piece of kabuki theater right now, where generals who are opposed to the idea, but who take orders from the president, “come around” to Bush’s point of view.

These people would seem to be the more dangerous — and in the short term, they certainly are. But the first variety of war apologists, the ones who regret the outcome but not the decision, are possibly even worse. People like:

1. Richard Perle: “I don’t think [Bush] realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.”
2. Kenneth Adelman: “The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”
3. Thomas Friedman: “Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening”
4. Ken Pollack: “Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start … However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion.”

These guys are strung out pretty much all along the political spectrum, but they’re united in their inability to admit error, or to see beyond their own crumbling ideologies. There were really only two options here: failing competently, or failing spectacularly. Bush went the spectacular route, and in so doing has done the war’s apologists a huge favor: he’s masked the fundamental error of the entire enterprise. He set fire to the house before it had a chance to collapse on its own.

So when this is all over, thirty years from now, and another opportunity arises to sink ourselves into another quagmire, you can bet the descendants of Group B will be back, promising us that, this time, it’ll work out fine.

And the rewriting of history continues …

A senior aide said later that Bush would not let the military decide the matter. “He’s never left the decision to commanders,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so Bush’s comments would be the only ones on the record. “He is the commander in chief. But he has said he will listen to those commanders when making these decisions. That hasn’t changed.

Well, yes it has. The script Bush has been reading from for the last three years is liberally peppered with genuflections to the commanders in the field, who we were told had ultimate authority to decide how many troops we need. Here he is, in May:

I have said to the American people: As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down. But I have also said that our commanders on the ground will make that decision.

This is only slightly less outrageous than Bush’s claim (made by Bush himself this time, rather than some anonymized factotum) that he’s never advocated for staying the course in Iraq:

Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,” George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics. Constantly.

They’re constantly adjusting something, but it’s not tactics.

The following predictions have a guaranteed accuracy rating of 92.5%, on the Revelations/Nostradamus scale. Any deviation from actual events is not the responsibility of this blog.

Professional doomsayers finally become discouraged with the world’s steadfast refusal to end, and switch to a new Tivo-inspired slogan: “The Pause of the World is Nigh!” According to these Pausechatologists, The Pressing of the Cosmic Pause Button will usher in a billion billion years of Not Much Happening, after which everything will pick up and Proceed Pretty Much as It Normally Would Have.

Inspired by the merger-happy world of big business, the less-successful sports decide to merge, producing:

1. Ice Polo: This mixture of polo and hockey puts the horses on skates and replaces those polo mallets with giant hockey sticks, de-pansifying the sport of Polo even as it pseudo-gentrifies hockey. Goalies sit astride giant twitchy buffalo, and fights are allowed, but only after mid-game afternoon tea.
2. Soccer Bowling: Just like bowling, except the bowler (wearing giant lead shoes) kicks the ball down the lane, and the players on the other team stand in as bowling pins. The player-pins are not allowed to move, or duck, or do anything other than attempt to survive the bowling ball hurtling toward them. This will replace football as the most dangerous sport in America, though not as the most silly.
3. Big Bass Badminton: Badminton players turn their skills to the gentle sport of fishing, by luring fish to the surface with shuttlecocks and attempting to batter them to death with their little rackets. They repeatedly fail to do so. Marine biologists, using sensitive underwater listening equipment, record the first-ever instance of a bass laughing derisively.

The Zune, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod, continues to suck so much that each individual Zune’s giant freight of awfulness creates a gravity well of pure suckitude that consumes all iPods in the immediate vicinity and draws them into Microsoft Hades (otherwise known as Windows ME). This is according to plan.

Ford releases their successor to the Expedition, the Ford Leviathan, affectionately known as “Baby Elephant”. It has 45 cup-holders, each of them large enough to hold a two-gallon jug of milk, and gets -5 miles to the gallon, mostly due to the jet engines that are necessary to get it moving at highway speeds. It is large enough to generate its own gravity, much to the chagrin of drivers of smaller cars. You will often see a Leviathan lumbering down the highway with a couple of Mini-Coopers caught in its orbit, spinning helplessly around it.

The United States establishes the country of Punchingbagistan on a couple of small islands in the Pacific, then promptly accuses it of having weapons of mass destruction and invades. Victory is swift. The President’s ratings rise fifty points overnight, setting up a Republican victory in the presidential elections of 2008.

Under pressure from various arbiters of American moral purity, Las Vegas amends its slogan from “What Happens in Las Vegas, Stays in Las Vegas” to “What Happens in Las Vegas, Stays in Las Vegas, Unless It’s Naughty, In Which Case It Will Follow You Home and Dog Your Conscience Until You Break Down and Confess Your Sins to the Nearest Moral Authority”. In a related development, Las Vegas orders two million hectares of neon to redo all of its signs.

The other day, Bush was asked whether the Iraq Study Group’s report carries more weight than the other Iraq reports he claims to be waiting for. He said this:

Some reports are issued and just gather dust. And truth of the matter is, a lot of reports in Washington are never read by anybody. To show you how important this one is, I read it.

Which I guess puts it on the same level as My Pet Goat in the Presidential Readin’ Stuff Importance Index, followed closely by Mr Caterpillar Makes a Poo and the Gonzales abridgment of the Geneva Conventions.

This latest cringe-inducer from the Decider didn’t make much a ripple in the press, probably because they (and we) are used to it by now.

But still, it’s just mortifying.

Philip K Dick sez:

But I think you show know this — specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are an SF writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is justified fear. People do starve in America. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains have been burned-out by drugs, men who could still think enough to be able to realize what had happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempt to weather that which cannot be weathered … Kabir, the sixteenth century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through it, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

This is what he’s saying, I think: when you decide to shrug off the shackles of a conventional life, when you step off the cliff to become whatever you are meant to be, you will not fly. Nothing in your capitulation to destiny will give you wings. You will fall, and fall, and fall, and it will be terrifying, and all that’ll be waiting for you at the bottom is the impact. No fairy-tale ending here. If life is pain, then a fully-realized life is agony.

But on the other side of agony: transcendence.

Maybe.

So … transcendence is nice and all, but it’s not that nice. Here’s the deal, Destiny: call me when I can order transcendence on Amazon.com. In the meantime, I think I’ll settle for a Nintendo Wii.

Not that you can get Wii’s on Amazon, either.

Or anywhere else, for that matter.

Stupid Nintendo Wii’s.

Bjarne Stroustrup, progenitor of C++, has lots of smart things to say about the current state of the software industry (recently upgraded from “screwed” to “fucked” by the watchdog group Concerned Geeks for Endangered Software):

I think the real problem is that “we” (that is, we software developers) are in a permanent state of emergency, grasping at straws to get our work done. We perform many minor miracles through trial and error, excessive use of brute force, and lots and lots of testing, but–so often–it’s not enough.

Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just “sort of evolved” into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will.

The basic problem is that there isn’t a good enough reason not to write crappy code. The market punishes shoddy products, somewhat, but it rewards fast products more. Sure, capitalism is a meritocracy, but it’s a meritocracy based on expediency rather than quality, short-term gain rather than long-term success. It works because the world is full of smart hard-working people who make it work, but we’re strip-mining the landscape of our potential, and it’s going to come back to bite us in the ass.

Scratch that: it bites us in the ass all the time. The Y2K bug is probably the best example of this, but there are hundreds of others: the failed FAA upgrade project, the Denver Airport debacle , and, of course, Windows ME, may it rot in the colon of a flatulent camel for all of eternity. And those are just the high profile ones. The battleground is littered with the corpses of failed software projects, which we blithely tramp over in our headlong charge toward the set spears of the next challenge.

You can’t stop, because you’ll be overrun. You can’t slow down, for the same reason. You certainly can’t turn around and go a different way, choose a new battlefield, because any victory you achieve on your own terms will likely be overshadowed by the blood-soaked Gettysburgs of all the shops who impaled themselves on the enemy’s bayonets and yet had the wherewithal/luck/brute strength to survive.

It’s not all gloom and doom. We beat on, and stuff gets done, and smart people make impossible things happen — but it’s incredibly inefficient, and it feels like we could achieve so much more if we change the terms of this war. Sit back, think about what we’re doing. Our enemies, for the most part, aren’t going anywhere. They’re holed up in their fortresses, staring at us with dull implacable eyes. This is a siege. We can take our time. We can figure out the best way to win, rather than dashing ourselves against their walls, climbing over the bodies of our vanguard to reach the ramparts.

And that’s all the mixed battlefield metaphors we have time for today. Next week: Hello Kitty allegories! Don’t miss it!