Guilt By Drone

drones1Unless you have the misfortune to live under their flight paths, it’s easy to push drones to the back of your mind.  That’s what’s so perfect from a US military point of view:  remote-control warfare, with the emphasis on ‘remote.’  See no evil, know no evil. What does an operator sitting in a bunker in Nevada know of what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan?

What do you?

Drone3While you might have registered the fact that US drone use in Pakistan quintupled in the Obama years from the Bush years, you’ve probably avoided dwelling on it.  You almost certainly haven’t thought through the personal and political havoc these drones are wreaking.  And you probably don’t want to even consider reading Living Under Drones, a 165-page report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Center at Stanford and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU (that mouthful of authorship is off-putting enough).

Enter Mohsin Hamid, the Pakistani writer whose deliciously wicked novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist touched the raw edge of western anxiety, and whose newly published satire How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia is a well-deserved best-seller.  Hamid has the novelist’s ability to bring you inside experience that otherwise remains… remote.  So it was a savvy move when the New York Review of Books asked him to review the Stanford/NYU report, even if they then published his piece under the almost perversely understated headline ‘Why Drones Don’t Help.’  If you don’t read the report itself (there’s a summary here, and the full report is downloadable), at least read Hamid’s review of it.

Here’s an excerpt:

If there is any misconception that the drone strikes are primarily counter-terrorist in nature, aimed at key leaders of international terror networks, this can be dispensed with [....]  The elimination of ‘high-value’ targets — al-Qaeda or ‘militant’ leaders — has been exceedingly rare:  fewer than 50 people, or about 2% of all drone deaths.  Rather, ‘low-level insurgents’ have been the main targets [....]

In the media, the term ‘militant’ is often used in describing drone casualties.  The report makes clear that this blurs together two legally very different groups of people.  A ‘militant’ who is a member of the Taliban, planning to attack US troops, is not the same as a ‘militant’ who normally herds livestock, carries a rifle, and today is sitting with other members of his clan to discuss a threat top his isolated village from a neighboring clan.

Furthermore, according to the report, the ‘current administration’s apparent definition’ holds that any male of military age who is killed in an area where militants are thought to operate (and where, therefore, drones operate) will be counted as a militant if killed.

In other words, if you’re killed by a drone, the Obama administration says that this makes you by definition a militant.  Your death in a drone strike is all the proof that’s needed of your guilt, and thus of the right to have killed you.

Neither Orwell nor Kafka could have dreamed up better.

Hamid continues:

This has allowed administration officials to make wildly unrealistic claims, disputed by even the most conservative analysts of drone casualties, that civilian deaths are ‘extremely rare’ or have been in ‘single digits’ since President Obama took office.

If you disregard this novel definition and then try to ascertain what category of person was actually killed, you will arrive instead at an estimate that some 411 to 884 civilians have died in US drone strikes in Pakistan, including 168 to 197 children.

This includes so-called ‘signature strikes’ which attack unknown people for gathering in groups or otherwise “behaving like militants” as well as people trying to bring aid to injured victims of strikes.

Hamid goes on to look closer at the harrowing experience of those affected, and at the widespread Pakistani revulsion at the use of drones.  And with the US now intensifying its drone campaign elsewhere, as in Yemen, he cogently makes the case that their use only weakens already weak governments and thus severely undermines America’s own foreign-policy interests.

In other words, this isn’t counter-terrorist; it’s counter-effective.  What’s touted as “clean” technology (for the man in the bunker) is in fact as dirty as ever.  And the depressing conclusion is that the Obama administration is as stuck as its predecessor in the self-defeating meme of a military “war on terrorism.”

Introducing… TheFirstMuslim.com

Activated yesterday:

the website for The First Muslim.

And how can I resist posting this elegant cover…?

My IT guru and I will be refining it over the next few months, adding more content and some cool bits and bobbles.

Meanwhile, would love your reactions/suggestions/comments.

I’m Inaugural!

I am. Really. Just announced. “Inaugural Scholar-in-Residence” at Town Hall Seattle.

It’s that word “inaugural” that does it for me…

Seriously, it’s an honor. Especially since it’s shared with the immensely talented inaugural Artist-in-Residence Ahamefule Oluo (Aham for short).

So what does it mean? Do Aham and I get to sleep in the landmark Town Hall building, which was formerly a Christian Science church and looks kind of like a Pacific Northwest version of a Roman temple? (I bag the top of the dome if so.)

I don’t know about Aham, but maybe I could pull a Marina Abramovic. After all, they’re giving me a key, and a key to a building as grand as this should surely be used appropriately. Does anyone have a canopied four-poster bed that would fit into that dome?

Seriously (did I say that before?), my inaugural responsibilities are delightfully onerous:

– Go to as many events as I fancy (top of my list: novelists Junot Diaz and Paul Auster, Bishop Gene Robinson talking straight about gay marriage, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, Chris Ware and Chip Kidd on graphic novels, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi guiding “a voyage from the brain to the soul,” and an Election Night special where I can whoop or weep as the need may be in good company).

–Post to a Town Hall blog when the spirit moves me (I’ll cross-post here) and invite audience participation both online and face to face.

–”Curate” a couple of experimental evenings (for instance, on October 28 my friend Nassim Assefi will beta-test her plan to crowd-source revisions to her new novel, an idea that fills me with both horror and curiosity).

– Give a presentation in December (am scheming on this right now:  I want to invite audiences to kind of live-Tweet after each event, then document what they write, mix well, and recombine into a kind of crowd-sourced portrait of Town Hall’s fall season).

– And last but definitely the opposite of least, have fun.

Whatever happens, that last one is a certainty.

All That Remains

This is a long post, but then Shi Shi beach is long.  It’s one of the wildest, most forlorn, most beautiful beaches in the world, four hours by car and ferry from Seattle, and then another hour slogging through psychedelically viscous deep mud, ending in an ohmygod slither down a steep cliff, clinging to tree roots as you go, and then…  the magnificent wilderness of the Pacific Ocean.

Usually I come here in winter, after a storm, when the water wells up so high that you swear it’s going to swamp you like a tsunami wave.  The pounding of it makes the sand beneath your feet reverberate like an ongoing earthquake (seriously:  it registers on seismic sensors.)  With the wind high and rain flying at you, there’s no telling where water ends and sky begins.  Spume lifts in huge curtains off the tops of the waves;  giant balls of foam race along the beach as though propelled by some inner force;  the roar of the water drowns out anything but shouting.  To stand on Shi Shi at such times is thrilling and humbling and terrifying all at the same time.

The ocean tosses up whatever it carries here, and some of it comes back home with me.  Buoys torn loose from crab pots;  tangled nets and long lines of rope;  even, once, a blue hardhat that belonged to someone called Beata Riggo.  I know this because the name is there, carefully marked in indelible ink on the mesh webbing inside the hat.  A Norwegian name, I think, though I’m not sure.  The hat must have gone overboard.  But it wasn’t until last week that it occurred to me that its owner might have gone overboard too.

I was at Shi Shi on a sunny summer day, for a change.  Yet there was a certain overcast to the sun, at least in my mind, because now a different kind of flotsam is coming ashore.  The ocean has carried the debris from the tsunami that ravaged the eastern coast of Japan over a year ago, and now it’s beginning to arrive on the west coast of America, ten thousand miles away.  A fishing boat washed ashore this spring on Vancouver Island;  a floating dock on the Oregon shore.  And at Shi Shi?  I kind of didn’t want to know.

But the indomitable Jen Graves, art critic of The Stranger, was braver than I.   Like me, she’d been part of an kind of ad hoc temporary collective of art and tech types convened a couple of weeks ago to explore problems they might collaborate on.  The tsunami debris was identified as one such problem:  how to contain, it, how to handle it and collect it and dispose of it.  But for me, the problem was quite the opposite.  It was how to conserve it.

What Jen and I saw washing up on the Pacific coast is what remains of people’s lives.  It’s what remains of people who died.  There was stuff on the beach that day I’d never seen there before.  Nothing as dramatic as a boat or a floating dock, but small remnants of humanity like a piece of wood that might have been part of a broomstick, but with many layers of multi-colored paint on it, which made it seem somehow ceremonial.  Or matte black spheres that looked at first like mines, but turned out to be plastic floats from Japanese fishing nets.   Or – the bane of our oceans – Styrofoam, brittle and yellowed by salt and time.

This is only the beginning.  More will come.  I can see that it’s an environmental problem, of course, but surely it’s also a cultural one, even an existential one.  This is, after all, more than mere debris.  It’s testimony.  Testimony to other people’s lives, to the power of the ocean, to the conditionality of our own existence.  To treat it as a problem that can be “solved” seems to me insufficient.  Surely a group of artists and technologists could find a more creative “solution”?

An interpretable site?  A memorial?  An installation?  I don’t know.  But another country’s tragedy as our debris?  I think we can do better than that.  And perhaps we will.  We meet again tonight, this time open to the public, and I’ll be wearing Beata Riggo’s hardhat – not because I look good in it (in fact I look idiotic), but as a reminder, at least to me, that we need to conserve not only the environment, but also memory.  That we need to respect the power of the ocean rather than try to control it.  That we need to be thrilled and humbled and terrified all at the same time.

Nuclear Denial

Exactly a month after the humongous 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has finally raised the severity level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant from level 5  to level 7.   That’s the highest there is.

I guess they could no longer deny reality.  Maybe we can’t either.

The decision came after another huge aftershock (6.6) today.  Which followed an identically huge one yesterday.  And another even larger one (7.1) four days ago.  Which makes me wonder what the new definition of “aftershock” might be.  The dimensions of the unfolding disaster at Fukushima seem to have had a devastating effect on, among so much else, our ability to react.

Now it’s true that a 7.1 is nothing compared to the 9.0 one on March 11 (reminder:  a 9.0 is ten times more powerful than an 8.0, which is ten times more powerful than a 7.0, and so on).  But as I write, these ‘aftershocks’ (any one of which would send Seattle into total panic) all seem to be right in the area of Fukushima.  Where things have clearly gone not from very bad to worse, but from very bad to worst.

So how come it’s no longer headline news? Have we gotten used so quickly to nuclear disaster?  Do we seriously think that because it’s “over there” in Japan it’s not quite real?

Take the word “indefinitely” in this April 6 front-page NYT story, for example.  It could mean an indefinite amount of time.  It could also mean a very, very long amount of time.

United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semi-molten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.

Buried in the very last paragraph of the story is this, from the director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists talking about the nightmarish pile-up of problems at Fukushima:

Even the best juggler in the world can get too many balls up in the air.  They’ve got a lot of nasty things to negotiate in the future, and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.

Two days later, and a 7.1 quake hits — a pretty good definition of a missed step –  and yet the story is suddenly not on the front page of the NYT, but on page 14, with the scariest part again buried at the end:

At Fukushima No. 2, extremely radioactive material continues to ooze out of the reactor pressure vessel, and the leak is likely to widen with time, a western nuclear executive asserted.

“It’s a little like pulling a thread out of your tie,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business connections in Japan. “Any breach gets bigger.”

Flashes of extremely intense radioactivity have become a serious problem, he said. Tokyo Electric’s difficulties in providing accurate information on radiation are not a result of software problems, as some Japanese officials have suggested, but stem from damage to measurement instruments caused by radiation, the executive said.

In other words, nobody knows what’s happening because there’s so much radiation — those “flashes of extremely intense radioactivity” — that it’s fried the gauges.

Meanwhile, that “extremely radioactive material” keeps oozing out.  Into the Pacific Ocean.  And into the air.   Which means that in an “indefinite” amount of time, it will reach us, wherever we are.  And that sounds pretty definite to me.

———————

If you want to see just how many earthquakes there’ve been in Japan since March 11, click here for a horribly hypnotic visual timeline of the size, frequency and depth of the ongoing tsunami of quakes (it comes courtesy of a researcher at the University of Canterbury in, no coincidence, Christchurch, New Zealand).  You can follow every one since March 11, when the 9.0 lights up the whole screen, or click on the upper right-hand corner for any date you select.

That Colossal Wreck

Replying to an email from a friend just now, I quoted a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s “Ozymandias,’ written in response to a giant sculpture of a pharoah’s head lying on its side at Luxor, Egypt. Then as I thought of the whole poem, I began to get chills up and down my spine. So with nuclear disaster in Japan uppermost in all our minds, here it is:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far way.

Serious Wind Power, Finally

Back when I was studying for my pilot’s license, I was fascinated by my textbook on meteorology, which was a good thing, since it’s kind of essential to understand weather if you’re going to fly planes.   Call me dumb, but for the first time, I suddenly realized what wind was.  I’d always thought of it as a force in itself, like those old drawings of a puffed-cheeked Zephyr blowing like mad.  It had never occurred to me that wind was simply air in movement — a revelation that became an essential part of flying for me, of feeling the air.

I haven’t piloted a plane in years — I flew away all my savings in the year after I got my license, and have never regretted a single cent of it — but that sense of the power of wind, of air in motion, has stayed with me.   Every time I see a modern windmill sleekly silhouetted against the sky, something in me wants to soar.

So how great to pick up the New York Times off my porch this morning (yes, old-fashioned me:  I still have a porch, and still read print) and see that the lead front-page story (but strangely, only in the NYT) was that Google, yes Google,  is investing in an extensive network of deepwater transmission lines for future wind farms off the Atlantic coast of the U.S.

Called the Atlantic Wind Connection, it’s a 350-mile underwater spine 20 miles offshore, running from New Jersey to Virginia — a 6,000-megawatt cable capable of carrying energy equal to the output of five large nuclear reactors.

Wow.  Finally.  Serious investment in renewable energy infrastructure — a system that will support not merely “a wind farm,” but a huge wall of windmills invisible from shore.   So kudos to Google for taking this huge step forward.  It’s huge  A. environmentally (clean, renewable energy),  B. politically (independence from foreign oil), and C. morally (see A and B).

Right now, offshore wind energy is about half again as expensive to produce as energy generated on land, but with an investment the size and scope of Google’s (the major investor along with Good Energies, an investment firm specializing in renewable energy),  serious economies of scale will kick in.

But here’s the kicker.  How come the US government isn’t doing this?  How come it’s a business investment for profit?  I’m not questioning Google’s commitment to green energy.  But I am seriously questioning Barack Obama’s.

“Investment in infrastructure,” Mr President — isn’t this it?   And “a spur to employment.”   And “energy independence.”   And “the audaciousness of hope” –  all those things you kept talking about when you were running for office, and yet here it’s not your administration that’s taking this audacious leap forward, but Google.

Worse yet, with what could hardly be more perfect irony, your White House announced today that it has lifted the ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wind power, Mr President:  it doesn’t mean huffing and puffing like an old-fashioned Zephyr.  It means stepping up and creating the infrastructure.  If Google can do it, why can’t you?

Fear of the Knife

I always swore I would never let any surgeon near my face with a scalpel or a laser – thus my age-appropriate weathered look.   But I’d known for months that I needed cataract surgery.  My right eye had more or less stopped working, so reason finally prevailed:  since I was losing vision in that eye in any case, what more did I have to lose?

I made the appointment, did all the testing (20/240 in that eye, so yes, a new lens just might be called for), made the date for the ‘procedure’… and then went through three weeks of terror.

Everyone I knew who’d had cataract surgery – and only once I started talking about it did I find out how many people had, from close friends to casual acquaintances to my own brother — assured me there was absolutely nothing to worry about.  It’s a snap, they said.  It’s over in ten minutes.  You won’t feel a thing.  You’ll be so glad you did it.

But while reason said that they knew what they were talking about, terror kept yelling “Yes but…“  and “What if…?”

But someone’s going to stick things in my eye.  He’s going to suck the lens out of it.  He’s going to poke a new one in.   What if his hand slips just a millimeter?  What if I move at the wrong moment?  What if…

Then last Wednesday, the day before surgery, I prostrated myself full-length on the floor of the Pilates studio and begged a fellow mat-class student who’d had the procedure to tell me she’d been scared beforehand.  She looked down at me in astonishment.  “But of course I was!” she said.  “I was terrified for weeks.”

It was such a relief.  The terror was still there, but at least I no longer felt a total fool for feeling it.  It was normal.  It was rationally irrational.  I wasn’t a freak of wimpishness after all.

So yes, the surgery took place;  no, I felt nothing (I’d stuck my arm out begging for the sedative the moment I walked in), though I did see some beautiful colored lights;  and now, two days later, I’m experiencing the somewhat disconcerting feeling of having the use of two eyes instead of one.  This’ll take some getting used to, but it feels like it’ll become the new normal in just a few days.

And I realize now why everyone told me not to worry.  They were simply trying to calm me down.  To reassure me.  To tell me it’d be okay.  They were being kind and supportive and doing what friends do.

It’s just that they’d left out an essential  phrase.

If only they’d prefaced everything they’d said with “Yes, I was terrified too, for weeks beforehand, but…”  then I might have believed them when they said there was nothing to be terrified of.  Well, believed them a little bit, at least.

Or maybe they weren’t terrified?  Maybe it’s just me and my fellow Pilatesian (do only wimps do Pilates?).  Maybe everyone else is courageous and/or stoic and/or blithely unaware of the damage scalpels and lasers can do?

Maybe I really am a wimp?

Seeing the Snow Leopard

My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is as tattered as a book can be and still hold together enough to be called a book.   It is the record of a kind of Zen pilgrimage into one of the most remote parts of the Himalayas, undertaken for many reasons, but among them, the hope of glimpsing the rarest of big cats.

I’ve read the book I don’t know how many times, used it when teaching writing (reading and writing being inseparable activities in my mind), and been carried away each time by the way the writing echoes the landscape — the crystalline purity of the air;  the heady sense of transcendence;  the ruthless clarity of perspective on life “down below”;  the sound of silence at altitude.   If you have ever been alone early morning in high mountains and heard the silence ringing, you will know this is no metaphor:  it does, it rings, as though the whole world were vibrating with the energy of its own existence.

Matthiessen never sees the snow leopard, and the last line of his book — “Have you seen the snow leopard?”  “No.” — is one I treasure.  The idea of the snow leopard as simply not seeable works for me in a suitably Zen kind of way:  the more you search for something elusive, the less likely you are to find it.  The snow leopard will reveal itself if and when it pleases.

But I have just checked back in the book itself,  and that is not the last line.  And though my copy is well marked, as all my favorite books, I can’t find the line, and now am not sure it’s even there.

Yet last night I saw a snow leopard.   More than  one.  Several.

Sometimes the most magical things happen in the most mundane way.    I had somehow ‘paused’ my printer and couldn’t figure out how to unpause it.  A paused printer is no great deal, but still, it was annoying me,  so rather than sit in my study and be annoyed, I closed everything up, began making dinner,  and idly turned on the TV, which was set to Mute.  The public-television station came up, and on it, a ‘Nature’ program.  Yawn.  I went on slicing things, then glanced up at the screen and saw a very large feline nosing up to a remote camera, nuzzling and pawing at it, breathing on the lens.   A spotted feline.   With snow underfoot, and stark, craggy mountains all around.  And I stood very still, as though the feline and I were in the same space, and thought “Nah, that can’t be a snow leopard — you never get to see snow leopards.”

I unmuted the TV, dropped the knife, and kind of glided toward the floor in front of the set.  A totally obsessed film crew had apparently spent months on end at 15,000 feet in the Himalayas trying to track the creatures,   They’d laid remote cameras at multiple points along intersecting ravines and had reached the Matthiessen point of zero expectation.  Which was, of course, when the snow leopards appeared.  And very calmly, without big hoo-has, without chest-pounding or yee-ha-ing or ain’t-we-great or anything like that, the crew quietly and, well, reverently recorded them.

I watched open-mouthed, hardly daring to breathe, as a male sprayed his territory.  As a female found the ‘spraying stone’ and rubbed herself against it.  As the male returned and scented the female.  And then, this time on a manned camera and live film, as the female climbed up a high ridge to make her mating call;  as her howls echoed down through the ravines, calling the male to her;  as he slunk up the ridge toward her;  as they nuzzled and rubbed against each other with a kind of ineffable gentleness;  and then, as they finally mated — exactly as one dreams snow leopards should mate, silhouetted against the high blue sky.

I sat completely rapt until the program ended, and then became aware of the big goofy grin on my face.  A beatific grin.  And on the floor beside me, my tabby-Persian cross, a miniature version of the big cats, similarly colored but with stripes instead of spots, may have been grinning too.  She’d sat up and pricked her ears, eyes eager and muscles tensed as the female leopard began her mating call, then paced back and forth before the television set, all excited, it seemed, by the idea of  attracting her own huge slink of a leopard.

I checked on the PBS site this morning, and found that the film is called ‘Silent Roar’ — I don’t know why, since I missed the first half  — but you can read about it here, and scroll down on this Snow Leopard Conservancy page to find some video, including a short clip of the two leopards mating.

There is a coda.  This morning my friend and IT guru Olivier reset my computer, which is when I remembered that the system I am now using, Mac OS X, is called Snow Leopard.   I swore I would never ever sound like a Mac convert, but whether you call this coincidence or synchronicity (or most likely, simply the mind making connections where it would have made none before), it feels like confirmation of my decision to switch from my old PC.

So yes, I saw the snow leopard.  But no, I didn’t really.  The leopard was on TV, and I was in my houseboat in Seattle, and that is why I stay with that line that may or may not be in Peter Matthiessen’s magnificent  book — and why this is my favorite photo of the snow leopard:  just the shadow, and the snow, and the mountains, and the sky.

Scary Photo

Sometimes there’s no mistaking what’s fake — or the effect it has on our sense of what it is to be human.  Here’s a still from Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie ‘Brazil’ (left) remarkably similar to decidedly unbrilliant Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (right, of course), as she explains how to preserve the plastic way of life, immigrant- and  wrinkle-free:

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