24 hours from war with Iraq. And with W's speech tonight
in the Azores, I think I'm finally beginning to understand the USA.
After visiting several times a year since my teens. After experiencing
more of its culture and country than ever most Americans do. From a New York
winter to the heady Silicon Valley summers of the 90s; from the blazing cold
night of a Nevada desert in August, to the cool breeze of a beach on the shores
of Mexico at midnight.
My narrative of America is linked by half a thousand long nights on
Greyhound and Amtrak. A narrative of shopping malls, endless fields, airports
and bus stations and hotels from five star to no stars.
I love that strange place spanning the gap between Atlantic and Pacific,
and have all my life. Which is why I feel so strongly about the situation
there now.
But now, finally, I understand.
I understand that this isn't about Bush Sr, or al-Qaeda, or even oil,
notwithstanding the way the Bush and Cheney families (oilmen all) will benefit
from a more compliant source of oil than Venezuela. This is about a truth
so simple and great it staggers the mind. The USA has realised:
To continue being the USA, there must
be a foe.
Not USA the country, but USA the concept. The concept that it's possible
to build a nation on a few simple, decent ideas of truth and beauty. For that
to exist, there must be an opposite. To maintain those ideas - to maintain
the concept - there must be someone or something to rail against, something
to unite this large and powerful country that might otherwise lust after true
hegemony.
The USSR filled that role for decades. The CIA fuelled a fiction that
this uneasy, ill-matched, rusting set of near-bankrupt lands somehow constituted
a major threat. Next came Castro, but hey, Che-permitting, no small island's
ever going to pose serious issues to 200m people closer than a hundred and
fifty kloms.
In the 90s, many expected China to take its place. But they didn't
understand the Chinese. The Chinese want no influence over what happens beyond
their borders, except that those outside should take no notice of what happens
within them. North Korea? - a posturing encampment of harmless politicians.
Syria? Just making up the numbers; the principle of threes is known to any
speechwriter. The USA searched for a full decade before 911 to find its enemy,
and in retrospect, those ten years were far more dangerous than the times
we live in now.
Because now, thanks to its one true friend Osama, the USA has found
the enemy it needed. Even better, it's an enemy every Westerner can understand,
from a history going back a thousand years.
That enemy is the Muslim world.
Because the USA is basically a good place, with good people. Because
it wants to be continue being good. Power corrupts; as a country - not as
W or the Pentagon or any individual or organisation, but as the kind of gestalt
networked creature we're only just beginning to comprehend may exist - the
USA truly understands how power can corrupt absolutely. And it knows the only
way to avoid a descent into evil is to have a simple, easily identifiable
enemy that everyone can recognise.
In September 2001, it found that enemy.
I used to think that with this war, the UK and USA were playing into
Bin Laden's hands: an unintended byproduct of the war on terror would be to
create a hundred million suicide bombers. But it's deeper than that. The USA
has found its outlet, a nozzle through which to release the pressure that
builds from being the world's only superpower.
And because of Osama's supreme sacrifice, the world is now safe.
For those who don't own a Koran, anyway.
16mar2003: You know a subculture's gone mainstream when books
start appearing on it. The Piccadilly Waterstones, where I'm not today (although
I should be since a British cryonics group is having lunch there) is full
of how-to books on blogging. Radio and Blogger passed me by; I've
never used anything but an HTML editor on my site. (I started keeping a web
diary in 1995, when the New Zealand guy selling HotMeTaL for $11m was big
news, and never got into the habit of using anything else.) I was a blogger
before Merholz coined the term. Now, of course, every Sunday newspaper IT
columnist has an opinion on blogging, and as usual they all miss the point.
Blogging is not some Proudhonian anarchy, where the People own the
means of publication and share their wealth; in fact, most bloggers write
for themselves and a few friends. The thrill's not in other people reading
your work ... the thrill comes from realising they could. Nothing to do with
throwing a big party; more like a private gathering.
Near where I lived in Tokyo, a retired businessman had built himself
a house - with a full licensed bar on the ground floor. It wasn't a business;
it was his hobby. Whenever he felt like it, which was a few times a month,
he'd open the doors, and serve drinks to anyone who dropped by. Blogging is
like that. A essentially private gathering that just happens to take place
in public.
Take my first paragraph today. What does the name of the bookshop,
and who is having lunch upstairs from it right now, mean to anyone - except
me and a handful of others?
This site now gets a few tens of thousands of visits a month; its best
month ever was around 120K pageviews, back when I spent serious time on it.
Which could, just barely, be described as an audience. I've blogged from European
capitals, from Asia-bound 747s, from parks and galleries and by PocketPC from
the thick of an anti-war demo. But now I'm based back in the UK, with a lot
less travel, I'm having less and less fun keeping it up to date. Maybe it's
time to stop blogging.
15mar2003: Blinking into the light. Since Fumi headed
back to Tokyo I've been in complete lockup mode: only three months or so before
the culmination of a year's work goes live,
and and mapping its mass of forms into the app I'm calling Janglegene
is taking serious time. But this little tool, even at this pre-alpha stage,
is awesome. The way it lets me, a non-coder, specify all the walls and edges
of the completed application just works so well. I can do almost anything
with it. I haven't had much success with previous projects, having chosen
the wrong people to work with and given them too many get-out clauses. But
now, there's at least a chance of some success on terms true to myself - and
with this undulating mass of 400 interconnected content types in front of
me, I can taste it.
