A very interesting read in the latest issue of GQ: Robert Baer—the former CIA officer on whom George Clooney’s character in Syriana was based—writes an elegy for the dying art of espionage.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. The debate over healthcare has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.
I’d like to record some thoughts about President Obama’s recent interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier1 before they’re lost down the memory hole.
Above all else, what struck me was Baier’s tenacious fixation on what could be called the process of healthcare reform. Which is to say, the closed-door meetings. The numbers. The kickbacks.
Baier repeatedly asked the President about particular things included in the gargantuan, 1990-page House bill, and did so in the terse insider-speak preferred by insiders and conspiracy theorists. Things like, “So the Connecticut deal is still in?” And, “OK, the Florida deal, in or out?” Obama seemed rankled by this crass oversimplification of things. So was I.
But in the wake of the so-called Cornhusker Kickback, such catchall terms have gained significant currency—especially in the cable news format, where making use of shorthand to describe incredibly complex concepts makes sense. It also makes sense in a blogging format. After all, I’ve done it here. I cannot reasonably expect a reader who has not followed the issue these past six months to understand nonsense like ‘Cornhusker Kickback.’ And I can’t spare the vertical space to treat this post as if it the very first dispatch from the center of the HCR storm.
Which is why the notion that a short television interview—an interview in which journalist and subject spent the full 19 minutes in antlers-fully-locked position—would be sufficient to explain a 1990-page bill, not to mention the flurry of developments that have emerged since HR2932 was unveiled in November, is absurd.
An example. Baier asked Obama to answer some viewer-submitted questions. Here’s one sent by Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: “If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?”
A political science professor could spend a semester lecturing on such a subject, no?
There was a time when Obama would have relished such an opportunity. His professorial bent has been well-documented. He spent much of 2009 referencing how to bend the cost curve, and how to close the doughnut hole. But the 2010 Obama has made a return to the spirit of the bill. He has made an effort to channel the sort of anecdotal electioneering that the Republicans have made famous. Rather than force people to consider an abstract whole, Obama has chosen to ask them to simply consider themselves.
Of course, the Republicans have done the opposite. They’ve turned their focus to the trees, as it were, instead of the forest. Human misery has been displaced by budgetary paranoia.
There was always bound to be a specific point in human affairs when complexity outstripped digestibility. I believe we’ve reached that moment. The healthcare debate has ballooned to a level of complexity at which understanding the stakes requires more effort and time than average people can afford to give.2 It can no longer be unpacked or disentangled.
Where do you go from there?
In essence—and this is the point I’ve been approaching, slowly—the conflict is really over how easily the nuts and bolts of the issue have been slipped into a black box. Republican leaders have been quick to observe that the bill’s deliberations were supposed to have been televised on C-SPAN. Instead, they lament, much of it has taken form behind closed office doors.
It was a nice thought. However, considering the decentralized and often concurrent nature of such meetings, filming it all—and cutting the mountain of footage into a format understandable by human beings—would have been, at best, a logistical nightmare. At worst, it would have been impossible.
Black boxes are inherently polarizing. You either understand the appeals and shortcomings—i.e. average people do not need to replace the hard drive of their iPhone—or you reject the very notion of trusting that there are planets spinning outside the scope of your personal narrative.
Never has that juddering tension been more keenly felt than during Wednesday’s interview.■
Eliot Spitzer wrote a lengthy essay on the the proper role of government in the market1 for the March/April issue of Boston Review.
via TMN
Jacob Weisberg‘s latest piece in Slate (the provocatively titled Down With The People), published this past Saturday, has been in heavy rotation these past few days.
And rightfully so. The subhed:
Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.
At first blush, it’s tough to disagree. And Weisberg offers some pretty compelling (anecdotal) proof of his theory—namely, that many Americans seem to be ruled by their emotional brains when it comes to passing judgment on federal policy. How else to describe the ongoing erosion of the wide-ranging support for 2008′s supremely popular stimulus checks?1.
Not to mention the absurd shift from demanding increased regulation of the financial industry in 2008 and growing leery of it by 2010.
Weisberg offers up the case of Senator Scott Brown, perhaps the most chronologically accessible avatar of this country, materializing before out eyes, that “simultaneously2 demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.”
Weisberg wisely resists speaking in absolutes and offers no remedy. I’m not so sure there is one, short of either (a) leashing public figures with something more potent than implied dignity3 or (b) making hundreds of millions of people smarter.4
Nevertheless, I believe that what Weisberg has offered is a false dichotomy. Far more nefarious than an exploitable, restless, vindictive and contradictory electorate are the people who have managed to yoke it. People like Brown, Sarah Palin and Roger Ailes, who continue to ride the upswell of deranged populism.5
A more immediate example: an editorial in today’s New York Times describes how Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told Politico, with disturbing candor, that he wants to “block financing for civilian trials of terrorism suspects6 so Republicans can brag about it this fall.”
So it’s difficult for me to place the bulk of the blame on Dumb America for allowing itself to be steered, because that allegory requires the existence of coachmen, flailing away with rhetorical whips.
I think that Weisberg fails to give them the attention they deserve. Certainly, a large number of Americans want—paraphrased from Weisberg—for government to address modern issues while simultaneously shrinking, spending less and reducing their taxes.
But you can’t buy a fantasy if nobody’s selling it.7 Can you?
David Brooks speculates about the DNA of the Tea Party:
The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class.
The spooky picture he paints—after a little paranoid extrapolation of my own—is of a movement that fears knowledge itself.
An elegaic essay by Richard Rodriguez:
In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.
Fearing reprisal from angry proles, some employees of Goldman Sachs have apparently begun packing heat.
Goldman probably deserves a fake award for being on at the forefront of all the most ridiculous stories of our age (see also: H1N1 vaccines, Doing God’s Work, the bubble machine, &c &c &c).
Matt Taibbi, ever a favorite writer of mine, wrote last week on what has become a favorite subject of mine: the media’s endless takedown of Sarah Palin.
It’s worth reading—even (and, it pains me to write, perhaps especially) if you’re of the opinion that Sarah Palin would make a competent political figure.
From Foreign Policy: how to beat your uncle in a foreign-policy debate at Thanksgiving dinner.
In his column today, Roger Cohen spends some time thinking about Jane Mayer’s piece on the CIA’s covert drone program (a subject I have hit on in the past).
Cohen describes how robotics researchers are looking for ways to integrate the simple (yet effective) visual capabilities of fruit flies into unmanned drones.
Somehow, the thought of flying, half-blind, binary-thinking killbots unsettles me.
Gov. David Paterson settled on an interesting campaign message, as seen on this television spot (and this one).
I’m just worried that New York voters aren’t in the mood for nuance—no matter how technically correct it may be.
This Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes featured a segment on cyber warfare. Among a litany of dubious claims was the suggestion that the massive 2007 blackout in Brazil was the work of hackers.
Brazilian officials dismissed the claim.
Two days later—last night—a sudden blackout shut down the Itaipu Dam and left 100 million Brazilians in the dark.
In The Rebellion Within (published in the June 2, 2008 issue of The New Yorker), Lawrence Wright describes the known life of Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif—known in some circles of the extremely secretive jihadist underground as Dr. Fadl.
Fadl, an extremely gifted Islamic scholar, met Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1977 while both were attending medical school in Cairo. Within a decade he found himself at the ground floor of the Jihad movement. As a matter of fact, he literally wrote the book on the subject.
Two of Fadl’s texts, The Essential Guide for Preparation and The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge, became (and probably remain) cornerstones of the training and indoctrination of Al Qaeda recruits in the power vacuum of post-Soviet Afghanistan.
Much happened in the following decade. On the sprawling list of Topics Most Americans Ought to Familiarize Themselves With, 1990s-era Afghanistan is certainly near the top. The meteoric rise of the Taliban and the fast polarization of Islamic politics, I should not need to remind you, remain era-defining issues.
But there are lengthy books for that, written by people with so much storytelling ability that I, in comparison, look like a kid scribbling with crayons. I recommend going all-out with Steve Coll’s excellent Ghost Wars.
Anyway, here’s how Fadl ended up1: In October 2001—seven years after he cut ties with his extremist past and took up supposedly earnest work as a surgeon—was arrested by Yemeni secret police and thrown into an Egyptian prison with a life sentence. Since then, he’s mellowed out, renounced violence and become a vocal opponent of Al Qaeda.
If you’ve got an hour to kill, it’s a great read.
The sun-drenched apartment, perched high in a Midtown Manhattan building looking down on the famed restaurant Le Cirque, is as luxurious as one would expect for space that cost $10.4 million. Lined with floor-to-ceiling glass, the living room features low divans wrapped in rich golden fabric. On the vast outdoor deck, as big as many apartments, the views stretch north and east, all the way across Long Island Sound toward Connecticut.
Yet even a casual visitor would notice that something is amiss. Dozens of bare hooks line the white walls; all the paintings are gone. Boxes of paperwork litter the floors. In the kitchen, the knives are missing. Bags of trash overflow. The dining-room table is strewn with containers of half-eaten Chinese food. In an adjacent nook, an older man slumps on a sofa watching CNN on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. Unpaid bills are piling up. As nice as this apartment once was, it now feels like a $10 million dorm room.
That’s because it’s a jail. Sort of. On the orders of a federal judge, its owner is living here under house arrest. That man watching CNN? He’s a retired F.B.I. agent, one of several who rotate through all week long. One morning I arrive after 11. The owner, the man the security guards are watching, is just getting out of bed.
His name is Marc Dreier, he is 59 years old, and his life is over. A smallish, tightly wound man with red, stubbled cheeks and a silvery pompadour, Dreier was once a hotshot New York litigator with multi-millionaire clients. Then he stole $380 million from a bunch of hedge funds, got caught, and was arrested in Toronto under bizarre circumstances, having attempted to impersonate a Canadian pension-fund lawyer as part of a scheme to sell bogus securities to the big American hedge fund Fortress Investment Group. Now, as he wanders into the living room rubbing sleep from his eyes, Dreier is waiting for the judge to tell him just how many years he will spend in prison.
As part of a collaboration with 60 Minutes, Vanity Fair‘s Bryan Burroughs recently sat down to talk with Marc Dreier—the guy behind a four-year, $380 million Ponzi scheme discovered at the end of 2008. Dreier was fortunate (??) enough to get caught just days before Bernie Madoff’s infinitely more extensive heist was brought to light. Needless to say, everybody but the justice department forgot who Dreier was overnight.
Which is a shame. Because not only is Dreier an extremely guilty man, but he’s a vastly compelling character—the sort of guy who admits that the main impetus behind his thieving nature is his constant yearnings for a newer beach house.
Oh yeah. And there’s the really interesting part, as detailed in the first paragraph of the blockquote above: Dreier was arrested in Toronto after trying (and failing spectacularly) to impersonate a Canadian lawyer at a meeting with the head of American hedge fund Fortress Investment Group.
Got an hour to kill?
Matt Taibbi takes a closer look at the role of Goldman Sachs in, well, just about every American financial crack-up of the past century. As usual, he presents a pretty compelling, if not appalling, case.
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