A couple of days back I came upon this quote from a March 1968 address by Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas. I doubt there is any commentary I could append that would add anything worthwhile to Kennedy’s own words (other than that “the integrity of our public officials” confirms that he was always, bless him, a tad too unworldly to ever make a president). It would be nice to be able to think of America in this way again, wouldn’t it?

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product—if we should judge America by that—counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

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With a mass of things to do today, I’ve frittered away too much of the day looking at CMSs. I’ve had Plone installed locally for a month or two, but only today got around to playing with it. I really rather like it in most respects (though a playful and exploratory spirit is definitely useful in finding out what the darned thing can do). In particular, I’ve figured out (very useful!) how to build a keyword-searchable database of URLs—precisely what I’ve been needing for some while.

Also had another long look at CivicSpace, which I favoured some while ago. It’s got all the advantages of Drupal in terms of content and customisability, and I really do like the collaborative book module; but it fell down on not having (or did I miss something?) any way of building a links database (which apart from its many weaknesses—including security—was one of the things I really rather liked about phpNuke.)

And since I’ve been back working on projects (esp. Prosper), I’ve also been looking at project management groupware. Had a long look at eGroupware, phpGroupWare, and had already looked at dotProject. All good (and maybe usable with my students) but not appropriate for my own projects.

Finally, had a look at KEWL and aTutor e-learning platforms. Both look good; but I’m happy with Elgg, and can’t find the time or face the hassle of installing and configuring anything else at this time.

Conclusion: I’ll do a decent re-install of Plone on top of Apache sometime soon and stick with that.

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I installed the WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin yesterday, in part (I confess) through curiosity, in part as a credible shop-front for distributing ‘free stuff’, in the first instance CDs and DVDs of free and open source software. It seems to me fair and reasonable that I should give it away for free, charging only £2.00 for postage and packing (where ‘packing’ includes burning and labelling disks).

It still remains for me to link it to my PayPal account and to then test it out.

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Tzvetan Todorov, in his Preface to the English language edition of (to use the English title) Hope and Memory (2000, first published in English translation 2003), reminds his reader of what has now become a tediously commonplace mantra:

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many commentators declared that something radically novel had happened, and that history—if not the history of the human race, then at least modern Western history—was henceforth divided into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.

“What”, he asks, “is the content of this novelty?” My natural cynicism suggests to me that the declaration, if repeated often enough, is itself sufficient to persuade us that 9/11 was a turning point in history. Todorov considers, only to reject, other possibilities. “The slaughter of civilians,” for example, “is nothing new”. And although “[s]ome degree of novelty might be found in the fact that America was attacked on its own soil”, the act—rather than the incidental location—of terrorism is one with which the “inhabitants of Europe’s major cities, not to mention those of other continents, have long been familiar”.

Todorov’s conclusion is rather that “the attacks showed the increasing power of individuals and small groups. In the past, only a state—and a powerful one at that—could have organised such a complex action; 9/11 was the work of a few dozen people at most.”

I believe Todorov’s analysis is wrong. Not wildly wrong, yet wrong all the same. But then, to an Englishman such as myself, Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot has three hundred years of cultural pedigree that might well be lost on a French-Bulgarian philosopher for whom 5th November is probably a quiet night at home. While Todorov properly highlights the ‘free enterprise’ aspect of the attacks on American soil, ‘privatisation’—so cherished a shibboleth of Western economies in the 1980s—has long been the hallmark of terrorist organisations. Thus one might also make mention here of the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction, the IRA, ETA, the Brigade Rosse, and many other non-governmental organisations; though I suspect Todorov would counter-argue that they lacked the theatrical panache of the WTC crew.

My personal intuition is that, by the moral equivalent of the card sharp’s sleight-of-hand, 9/11 gave the US (or, to be fair and more specific, the Bush administration and its neo-conservative co-religionists) the opportunity to mould international horror and sympathy into an acquiescence to America’s prerogative to define thenceforth the political and moral agenda and values of the world as a whole. “They hate our freedoms … These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life,” proclaimed Bush to a Joint Session of Congress on 20th September 2001 (presumably not reflecting on the fact that, in so saying, he was giving the perpetrators cause to reflect whether, in that case, more appropriate targets might have been Iceland, Sweden, or Switzerland.) “This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”

“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists“. To voice criticism of the US, and of US domestic and foreign policy, was thus thenceforward to align oneself with those who hate “progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”. Let not the significance of this be lost: the US had emerged at the end of the 20th century, with the implosion of the Soviet empire, as the sole remaining superpower; yet was so by default, and still by default ‘marketed’ under the now deprecated ‘war-on-communism’ ‘brand’. Thus, with the demise of the USSR and the collapse of its satellite states, the US had lost its raison d’être. The ‘war on drugs’ had some minimal mileage, perhaps, but too little to sustain the US as the custodian of the ‘global values’ that would justify its continuing global interference (or, to use that now tired euphemism, its role as ‘global policeman’). A new enemy, stepping onto the stage with the dazzling theatricality of a 9/11, filled the role admirably: the ‘war on terror’ was born! and the superpower menaced with imminent superannuation had been given the occasion and the pretext by which to re-brand itself.

My conclusion? neither novel nor surprising, I confess. It is that the US, under Bush and his coterie, has packaged, trademarked, branded, and marketed 9/11 as an ideological behemoth, bolstered with vacuous rhetoric and tyrannical laws, to suppress and destroy the real enemy of their America. “There is an emerging second superpower”, writes James F. Moore, of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in March 2003, “but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player … While some of the leaders have become highly visible, what is perhaps most interesting about this global movement is that it is not really directed by visible leaders, but, as we will see, by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants.” Millions, huh? A redoutable adversary indeed. Who are they? Islamic fundamentalists? nuke-toting Middle-Eastern fanatics? In that same month, in the cover story of The Nation magazine, entitled ‘The Other Superpower’, Jonathan Schell wrote: “The new superpower possesses immense power, but it is a different kind of power: not the will of one man wielding the 21,000-pound MOAB but the hearts and wills of the majority of the world’s people.” James Moore again:

“The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights. This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one. … Which brings us to the most important point: the vital role of the individual. The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds—your mind and my mind—together we create the movement. In traditional democracy our minds don’t matter much—what matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them. In the emergent democracy of the second superpower, each of our minds matters a lot. For example, any one of us can launch an idea.”

Although written in early 2003, the words of Schell and Moore, and of Patrick Tyler who had a month earlier publicly identified the new emergent ’superpower’ in an analysis piece on the front page of the New York Times, point to the real turning point in history of which the events of 11th September 2001 have become a convenient bookmark: the moment at which, in the wake of Enron and of a controversial presidential election and of the pernicious G8 Summit in Genoa and of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s disclosure that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for and … but continue the long list for yourself, the ineluctable confrontation between the First and Second Superpowers finally became an acknowledged and inescapable reality. With the impossibility of trusting any longer in the integrity and beneficence of government, and with the consequent disintegration of the Grand Narratives that had dominated and directed our Western world view for a hundred years or more, there has emerged a now powerful, very sceptical, very cynical, and very serious popular challenge to those who rule the world. And that makes us—We the People—dangerous.

So, yes, it seems to me that Todorov is wrong: the ‘novelty’ lies not in the privatisation of terror but in the reclamation of democracy: we are all anarchists now. James Moore was heavily criticised for hi-jacking the ’second superpower’ concept as originally articulated by Patrick Tyler (grassroots popular opposition to the free rein of corporate-controlled government) by identifying it with the new popular ‘technocracy’ of internet users; yet it seems to me that Moore is probably largely correct—it is only in virtue of the ease and immediacy of communication (and hence organisation) afforded by the internet that, in any case, direct action of such scale in the real world has become possible; and it is only in virtue of that same ease and immediacy of communication that the Grand Narratives of the 20th century could be supplanted by the multi-vocal plethora of counter-narratives that characterise the new millennium. Yet unfortunately it is the cacophony of voices that could be its own undoing.

References:
Patrick E. Tyler, ‘A New Power In the Streets‘, New York Times, February 17, 2003
Jonathan Schell, ‘ The Other Superpower’, The Nation, March 27, 2003 (April 14, 2003 issue)
James F. Moore, ‘The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head‘, March 31, 2003

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I suspect I was misled—and unnecessarily so—by linguistics. “To know the meaning of a sentence is to know the way the world would have to be for the sentence to be true”. Yes, indeed, my linguistics has inveterately been truth-conditional, compositional, and model-theoretic; and I have only rarely (e.g. “terrorist” vs “freedom-fighter”) been tempted to review the debate between the correspondence and the coherence theory of meaning. I blame my mentors, Aaron Sloman and Gerald Gazdar.

It should have struck me as obvious, of course, that “to know the way the world would have to be” does not necessarily implicate us in the actual world. There are, as we have known since Leibniz, infinitely many possible worlds; and such worlds are posited rather than ‘discovered’.

A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary and a BBC report, some weeks back (I forget the exact date, but early March seems about right), investigated the evaporation of billions of dollars that apparently went missing during the Jay Garner administration of Iraq; and I confess to having been mightily impressed, at that time, as much by the acuity of the journalists as by the incompetence (or venality, depending on how you look at it) of the administration and its hangers-on. (“THE 50 BILLION DOLLAR ROBBERY. Three years after the start of the Iraq war, where has the 50 billion dollars of reconstruction money gone? Billions are unaccounted for and there have been scams and frauds which make the Securitas robbery look like a hold up in a newsagent’s.”) Greg Palast’s piece in yesterday’s (14th April) The Guardian, however, suggests that it may be interesting to re-appraise those television reports:

Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President’s true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. “It’s their country,” the General told me of the Iraqis. “And,” he added, most ominously, “their oil.”

Let’s not forget: it’s all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq’s economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for “privatization” (i.e. the sale) of “all state assets … especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries.” See it here. The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don’t shine. Garner planned what he called a “Big Tent” meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government—and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds
were on talking terms—knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed “liberation” turned into a hated “occupation.”

But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab.

On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, “Don’t unpack, Jack, you’re fired.”

Rummy replaced Garner, a man with years of on-the-ground experience in Iraq, with green-boots Paul Bremer, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates. Bremer cancelled the Big Tent meeting of Iraqis and postponed elections for a year; then he issued 100 orders, like some tin-pot pasha, selling off Iraq’s economy to U.S. and foreign operators, just as Rumsfeld’s neo-con clique had desired.

What if (let use suppose) the BBC and Channel Four reports were based on disinformation intended to discredit Jay Garner on the eve of the publication of Greg Palast’s forthcoming Armed Madhouse?

There are, of course, as many possible worlds as there are stories in our post-modern universe(s).

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