where are my recent posts? An existential question...

                                           The Generational Identity Myth

                                  Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own

                                  authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic

                                  between man the producer and his products is lost to consciousness.

                                  [This world] is experienced by man as a strange facticity…over which

                                  He has no control, rather than as the [outcome]…of his own…activity.

                                                    Berger and Luckmann, The social Construction of Reality

The codification of the idea that those born into western societies at particular times constitute discrete icebergs of identity known as ‘generations,’ is so pervasive as to be accepted without question. Central to this concept is the notion that generations have a set of identifiable characteristics that distinguish them from previous generations, whose own identities are, by extension, established through their differences with earlier generational constructs. While one can generalize in regards to the cultural similarities of people born within the parameters of a particular segment of time, the very act of calving one of these icebergs of historical specificity from the primal glacier of earlier definitions relies on criterion that must constantly be updated in order for the construct to remain coherent. The problem, of course, is both the tendency to revise the temporal parameters of previous ‘generations’ to fit within the updated conception of the newest version, and the fact that such generalizing—if it is to have any semblance of accuracy—borders on descriptions so vague that they become abstract to the point of dispersing into a crudely conceived exercise in pop-taxonomy.

By criticizing these distinctions as being a new form of stereotyping, I am not suggesting that ‘generations’ do not exist; or, that individuals born in a specific time period do not hold in common a generally defined cultural frame of reference and identity. Rather, I am asserting that the idea that generations have specific themes and practices is undermined by the tendency to extrapolate from those general trends a definitive and circumscribed index of qualities. The latter are subsequently imposed like a pie graph over the messy, overlapping of cultural behaviors and attitudes too varied to be corralled within such a narrowly conceived aperture; invariably, leading to the presumption that the aforesaid qualities constitute a social fact without the mediation of nuances. This is because any acknowledgement of the essentially contingent nature of the concept would stretch and abstract it to the point of syncretistic near-indistinctness.

One illustration of how this process works is the gerrymandering of previous generational boundaries in response to the defining of the recent age grouping known as ‘Millennials.’ These so-called ‘Millennials,’ are the subject of a Time Magazine cover story from May 20, 2013. One may argue, and with good reason, that the sort of sensationalistic generalizations that pass for social facts in the reporting of Time Magazine are too structurally unstable to have any real meaning outside of a critique of hatchet-journalism. However, it is precisely this tendency to exaggerate and caricature that I am interested in because it is emblematic of the intellectual processes at work in these, and related, epistemological constructs.

The article’s author, Joel Stein, asserts—with tongue apparently in cheek—in his opening paragraph that he has “statistics...[and] quotes from respected academics.” And, just in case, one takes these claims too lightly, he adds in the following paragraph that “The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their twenties as for the generation that’s now 65 or older.”(P-28)  There are a number of questions that immediately come to mind when evaluating a statement like this. The first might pertain to how he or, presumably, the source of this un-reflected upon statistic—which is culled from what is apparently some sort of survey done by the National Institute of Health—accounts for those people between the ages of 30 and 65. Moreover, he does not  bother to examine this proposed correlation between age and selfishness by asking about how such questionnaires are structured, or whether the criterion upon which the scoring is based are actually connected to their ostensible object of analysis. Thus, by being taken out of any nuanced context, Stein extracts the kind of factoid that sounds good as supporting evidence, until the reader asks questions that cannot be dealt with in the framework of the article itself.

To that end, the most obvious question is one of value: Do normative categories applied to human personalities really reflect the way in which those ‘personalities’ function and react in the actual world; or, do they reinforce socially defined paradigms, that often disguise themselves as legitimate medical, or scientific, frames of inquiry by reifying the already questionable notion that the contingent epistemological basis for making such evaluations constitutes a transparent branch of empirical study? This is obviously a very complicated interrogative—and one whose full implications cannot be dealt with in this essay. However, it is fair to say that basing an already dubious label—itself part of a category of so-called ‘personality disorders,’ most recently utilized by the military as a way of denying benefits to thousands of Iraq war veterans—on something as thin as a survey purporting to reveal underlying tendencies in large groups of people towards certain generally defined characteristics, without any examples of the sorts of questions asked, or inquiries regarding how such tests are constructed and arranged,  does not quite constitute evidence of anything except that the way in which a questionnaire is constructed will probably determine how the answers are constrained and interpreted. Such misleading agglomerations of evidence are equivalent to asserting that the majority of the American population would rather have ‘security’ than ‘freedom’ based on results from polls that utilize vaguely worded, false dichotomies to turn such speculation into a yes/no binary question. In fact, Time Magazine previously did this very thing; and, its writers have a long history of regularly using statistics taken out of context to bolster already biased and simplistic arguments. 

However, this is not the only problem with the thesis promulgated in this article. Stein also arranges the responses to specific questions as proof of his argument rather than examining the context in which such answers occur. For example, he points out that the “development” of ‘Millennials’ is “stunted,” because “more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse.”(P-28)  Such ridiculously narrow extrapolations don’t try to account for such statistics by inquiring about the mediocre economic prospects encountered by that very same age group; instead, the author makes an unrelated assumption to rhetorically bolster a flabby and evaluative argument. While such reckless assertions do not bear well under more detailed scrutiny, they serve the function of reinforcing both the new myth of a totalizing generational narrative, and a set of simplistic assumptions regarding the identities of those who fall within that age grouping.

Finally, the author, finds it necessary to alter the previous groupings of earlier ‘generations’—already dubious, as are all such categories when interpreted as totalizing designations— in order to arrange this newly established paradigm in a way that takes note of certain historical events and cultural shifts. Thus, by neatly situating the so-called ‘Millennials’ as representing people born between 1980 and 2000, he is forced to relocate preceding generations accordingly. Of course, it doesn’t matter much, since how one defines a generation is determined precisely by those historical criterion used to distinguish it as a discrete entity bounded and defined by important events. This raises a fundamental question: namely, how one can be sure that one generation is distinct from the one before it? But such a question is inherently absurd, since these definitions are heuristics to begin with, based on how people born around the same time, adopt their attitudes and react to historical and cultural change. However, by presenting these categories as historical facts, not only does the beholder—In this case, Joel Stein—disregard their largely heuristic purpose, but he is also compelled to make evaluations regarding historical events, as they are now to be perceived as rigidly defining a set of naturalized social categories. But, as everyone who has ever read any sort of historical document knows, events do not happen in neatly arranged 20-years periods; rather history is simply an imperfect and much mythologized record of how events unfold; and like meteorological disasters—which have, especially of late, a disconcerting tendency to occur frequently, even if labeled 100-year anomalies—they tend to pile up regardless of the categories used to constrain their meaning. Hence, the circumscribed boundaries of various ‘generations’ have to obey a fictional historical symmetry which does not exist.

This is because generations are always established in the context of certain historical criterion, whose relative importance changes slightly from era to era. Moreover, the parameters in which one generation is established as a distinct point of rupture from a previous generation, must be constantly retrofitted to allow for the fact that even the most privileged historical events do not occur at neatly circumscribed twenty year intervals, but are widely dispersed in the same way as natural changes, despite their being averaged into an historical indexing of discrete intervals of recurrence. The latter, is of course, an artifact of a rigidly Cartesian way of cutting up historical events and changes into the demarcations of periodicity. These precise fault lines of change are most likely intended heuristically, as a way of orienting and framing an understanding of the historical shifts to which they refer; but, are instead adopted without discerning the hazy boundary between the container and its contents.  Moreover, the extrapolated qualities said to be representative of such designations, are based on averaging from a broad array of data, a specific set of individual characteristics—a logical error, which is, in fact, a product of statistical reasoning, rather than a reflection of subjectively observed qualities. Thus, these concepts are imbibed without regard to the difference between the encapsulating rind and the cheese which it shapes and contextualizes.

One may, of course, speak of generations, in terms of vague characteristics, or more specific, but extremely limited relationships and interests—as one can speak of tendencies evinced by statistical majorities towards certain attitudes, or of how people born between, say 1946 and 1950, probably watched ‘The Mickey Mouse Club’ on television. The problem arises when the heuristic categories utilized to foreground and make sense of a certain cultural gestalt, are reduced to neatly arranged, and itemized, historical facts, no longer subject to interpretation, or necessarily constrained by context. Once freed from their analytical role as tropes used to familiarize one with a time and place, they expand like cartoon floats in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, as caricatures unfolding into rigidly schematic indexes of developmental and historical tendencies. This process may answer a deep epistemological need for new master narratives to replace the certainties that no longer dominate the fragmented mosaic that confronts those who wish to make sense of the larger culture; but, it is also a disingenuous distortion of something much more complicated, which is an outgrowth of specific and peculiar social practices and relationships—themselves subject to rapid transformations rather than being static phenomenon that can be easily gauged and situated in misleading categories.

In consuming both, in their entirety, without regard to such subtle distinctions, historians, media pundits and others, partake of a modern form of mythologizing, which in its distortion of cultural identity creates a malleable demographic fiction that can then be sold back to the same people whom it purports to represent. This form of cultural simulacra would not be the first of its kind, as the marketing system depends on such reductions into type in order to coopt and absorb traditionally hard-to-define populations within the rubric of consumer-categories. The latter, cause-and-effect formulation is itself an heuristic model, intended to contextualize the repositioning of culturally diverse groups as newly gentrified marketing classifications, ripe for further dissection into various sub-headings and gradations of type. This anatomizing of what are, at best, vague designations of different identity constructs, strays into the territory of overt caricature, by emphasizing specifically attributed predispositions and interests at the expense of others for the sake of making it easier for Amazon.com, CheapAir.com, and others, to precisely locate potential customers. While this may seem like a positive effect to many, one should be mindful of other, more far reaching, consequences of such designations. The collating of various types of demographic data into convenient electronic honeycombs to form the basis for a customer data pool—which is itself an eerie mirror to the way in which social perceptions are systematized and then arranged as facts within a larger taxonomical structure—is only the most obvious problem with this tendency toward the reductive streamlining of diverse information.

Less well known is that this methodology is borrowed from the basic structures around which knowledge categories have been oriented since the time of the enlightenment. This ordering of diverse and highly eccentric facts, constructs and ideas, started with Linnaeus and his specific botanical taxa. The break-down of flora into separate species, whose diversity could then be compartmentalized as discrete and measurable qualities, influenced and determined the subsequent categorical reduction and reification of every type of phenomena that could potentially be studied and thus anatomized similarly. Hence, scientists, researchers and statisticians reduced the disordered complexities of speculative theorizing, into an easily reproducible and portable model for even the most abstract conjecturing on the nature of things. This Cartesian approach to organizing knowledge about the world quickly reinvented the existential uncertainties of being, transforming them into a precisely ordered and symmetrical pyramidal sequence of cosmologically and ontologically identifiable gradations of existence. Subsequent generations of researchers, technicians and bureaucrats have accepted this organizational paradigm as a convenient and overarching social fact.  

One article of faith held by all of the above-mentioned, is the conception that meaning itself is modular. Thus, it occurs within the confines of grids, or boxes, very much like those reproduced as artifacts of the analysis of larger epistemic/ontological western cultural phenomenon (collated similarly to records within a filing cabinet, or the Windows and Macintosh systems on computers) and a defining characteristic of ‘Americana’ itself: Everything from the geometricized gerrymandered boundaries of the Midwestern state and county grid, to the electric-utility infrastructure, to the various forms of official architectural modes seen in public buildings in most cities and states( New York being the one glaring  and world-class, exception)—as well as their conceptual equivalents, ranging from the organization of cultural forms of knowledge, to the Fordist ethos, and its restrictive box-like mandala—is structured according to the principles of the assembly-line, the conveyor belt, and its attendant order-of-efficiency.

One need only walk into a McDonalds anywhere in the world to see much of this rendered spatially: There is the factory like design of the seemingly transparent kitchen area, the utilitarian arrangement of everything from the seating plan, to the method of food preparation and even the organization of various amenities. This principle is followed right down to the structure of the bins where the extra big-macs and french fries are held, and even to the arrangement of spaces in the parking lot. In fact,  the grid is so ubiquitous in contemporary society as to be almost invisible; it is the overlapping and basic design element in everything from classroom seating to suburban housing developments, and one would be naïve to think that it does not extend directly to those millions of individuals ensconced within its boundaries, right up the asphalt-driveway bends of their spinal cords, through the public-school, and private-home,  hallways of their respective brainstems, medulla’s, and cerebral cortexes—the very psyche’s that then carry this knowledge within them like an invisible and viral organizational principle. Such a principle must have a massive, if still largely invisible, effect upon everything that this, thus affected, American—and by extension now, globalized—psyche comes into contact with.

One problem inherent in such a broad conceptualization of underlying order is that something expressed heuristically, as a method of orienting a certain kind of knowledge, quickly becomes an end in itself. This is the crux of the difficulty here; for, despite the necessity of conceptualizing various phenomena as if they were specialized entities stored in discrete containers, they are in fact fluid and interrelated. Moreover, the very way in which they are framed, packaged and presented creates the basis for how they are perceived. In other words, most of the classifications used in western epistemology since the time of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon—our specific boxes for artificially distinguishing between forms, and gradations, of knowledge—produce results derived from the way they are construed through this very type of analysis. Thus, our augmented categories are artifacts of the aforesaid reasoning, imposed over phenomenon reconstituted into an index of separate data categories. The result has led to a widespread tendency to reify and present as hard, incontrovertible fact, many ideas whose validity is entirely contextual, rather than totalizing or universal. That this is not generally noticed says a great deal about the extent to which such narratives of structure, meaning and value have been enshrined as totalizing epistemological myths.

This tendency is reflected in the practice of reifying particular characteristics from generalized samples. The inherent act of extrapolatory presumption entailed in this, creates a fictional ‘typicality’ whose existence is the final product of a deductive reasoning that excludes the very specifics that would otherwise constrain and contaminate its scope with individual peculiarities. It is, however, those very ‘individual’ eccentricities that distinguish between one person and another, and between various phenomena. Thus, a paradox is created in any form of generalized analysis of data, whereby the actual is supplanted by a simulacral entity borne of the conflation of indexed information, and hypothesized qualities. This is a problem besetting numerous forms of systematic analysis—particularly if they involve evaluative aspects of being and sensibility—as they tend to produce fictional ontologies within hypothesized contexts, behaving in typical patterns, whose overall uniformity undermines their credibility as accurate models for anything other than self-replicating artifacts of methodology.

The assumed correlation between empirically compiled statistics and what they purport to describe is itself enshrined within an often unexamined paradigm that privileges such practices as truth-constructs. In a primal society with few members the outgrowths of such alluded-to constructs would probably occur as a derivation of cultural practices that, in the words of Emile Durkheim, would amount to “organic solidarity.” In a large and diverse bureaucratized society however, like the modern globalized state entity, these one-size-fits all narratives can be wildly inaccurate and impossible to fit within a quotidian urban context coherently. The causes of this disparity between theoretical models of this type and subjective experience stem from the primary assumptions that constitute early enlightenment thought.

One of the simultaneously empowering and mythologizing qualities in the Cartesian discourse on the conceptualization of being, is that it confers on the individual the ability and objectivity to conceive of the world as an entity within which various phenomena are embedded; while constraining any subsequent insight into the problematic contextualization of that knowledge as independent and transparent. Part of the problem here is that it is probably not possible to force certain broad knowledge constructs across diverse spectrums of individuals through the implementation of institutionally validated models without creating an increasing disparity between the fundamentally stereotyped qualities inherent in those constructs and the incommensurable particulars of actual subjective experience. Once the gulf between the two widens sufficiently, it becomes necessary to reconcile the fragmented pieces to the whole by re-constituting the enshrining myths that comprise its mosaic structure as a unity—although this very unity is a theoretical state which only comes at the expense of the necessarily diverse perceptions of its separate individuals. Hence, a dialectic emerges between holistic ontological constructs, and the fissionable outgrowths of the organically conceived differences that contest them.

This conflict between a quilted pattern of standardizing unity and the tattered multiplicity of hybridized entities that frays its edges cannot be abstracted into a false symmetry by implementation of the same methodology.  Instead, one must endeavor to rethink the entire paradigm upon which the ‘science’ of averaged generalizations is based, and transform it into a less rigorous model that acknowledges diversity as more than mere statistics. This may be beyond the ken of most forms of systematic thinking, as they are characterized by their heuristic reduction of all phenomena into the corralling structure of data. As data, things are broken down into artificial unities that can then tell stories which are, sometimes, as unrepresentative as they are concise.

Part of this paradox is caused by the tendency for heuristics to be soaked up into the data-specific categories which they define and circumscribe, thus reifying them as actual entities rather than hypothesized constructs. In being so enshrined, the information matrix through which certain categories of knowledge are codified and described take on a life of their own, as organisms within a vacuum. The lack of competing paradigms further enhances and exaggerates their prominence, until they re-emerge as largely mythical, overhanging constructs that distort the basic nature of what they apparently claim to represent. This is the essential problem with the aforesaid category of discrete generational entities; and, the primary reason why I have chosen to speculate on the larger subject of epistemology through that particular prism, since it provides a neatly sequential view of how such a concept has developed and become popularized.

It is the popular enshrinement of such concepts that reduces them to abbreviated flags that serve as emblems for ideas now compacted into misleading molecular sound-bites. This shrinking of a framing device, originally designed to clarify a broader historical period, into a slogan that functions as an end in itself, translates an iceberg fragment into an autonomous entity, which shrouds  its relationship to its parent glacier. And, similar to the connection between the principles in this geo-climatological analogy, a ‘generation’ is an outgrowth of a larger, contingently connected, historical construct. The point being, that none of these entities can exist autonomously once cut up like artichokes and presented as closed and discrete systems without muddying the lines that comprise the complex latticework of which they are but a single part. To consistently slice multifaceted strands, intrinsic to a holistic understanding of any phenomena, into tiny garnishes of painterly color, is just another version of that artifactual Cartesian process that misrepresents byzantine realities by distorting them into constrained categories of being.

Although there exists no simple, or programmatic solution to this epistemological incommensurability—as those are precisely the sort of quantitative methods that created the problem in the first place—this should not prevent scholars and editors from demanding greater adherence from colleagues and writers to more individualized social concepts tailored to specific contexts rather than modular blocks of so-called taxa. Admittedly, as the very language used to asses an idea or concept is constituted within the same Cartesian framework that has culminated in the previously cited methodological distortions, this is not a panacea for the inadequacy of constructs used in forming such ideas. Rather, it is a call for a reconsideration of the way that these constructs are formed and how that leads to popularized journalistic distortions which employ historical tropes like those used in Stein’s Time article on “Millennials.” But, the larger questions raised by this argument are still those of how to speak the world accurately without completely fictionalizing it in the process; or, even whether applying such empirical notions can ever translate into the innate indeterminacy of complex social realities not decipherable within the simple schematics of geometric quanta.

If one has any doubt as to the distorting effects of imposing such taxonomically naturalized categories over the vertiginous array of divergences that comprise the human experience, a quick perusal of the categories used by anthropologists as late as half a century ago will provide a sobering corrective. Sadly, even though certain academic disciplines now devote a good deal of their time to explaining the value-laden nature of their own epistemic assumptions, other areas of the human sciences insist on the “disinterested objectivity” informing theirs. One could, in fact, easily compose an entire monograph regarding any single manifestation of this practice, but only a very generalized view of its ramifications attests to its near universality, and its unfortunate effects on how the so-called modern-mind, forms concepts and ideas. It remains to be seen how future scholars and researchers will react to this widespread set of practices, and what, if any, solutions they might improvise to augment their accuracy; or, lastly, if they would even be open to a new set of evaluative criterion which do not equate certain forms of knowledge with precise quantification.

 

JZRothstein (most recent revision of draft) 2/17/2014

I'm getting strange yellow-boxes on the monitor screen informing me that there has been some unspecified 'error' and that unexpected things may happen. This is in addition to a message telling me to get a new 'server' every time I log on. I have no fucking idea what any of this means; although, I can say with some certainty that I have often experienced problems similar to this on web-sites, e-mail servers etc., and they are never elaborated upon or explained. Am I being paranoid; well, I don't think this is the result of any conspiracy, rather it signals the limitations built into a technology that has become so complex that the number of variables that effect its workability are too byzantine for anyone to be certain that a quirk in some distant connection inside a mainframe, or a synapse within the virtual brain controlling the entire system, hasn't somehow caused some chain of subliminal--meaning barely visible--events that culminate in these ridiculous and largely incoherent system messages. Then again, maybe it is a conspiracy. Hopefully, I won't be plagued by these glitches on a continuous basis. Best of all, the systems manager doesn't actually tell you how to get in touch with them to complain about said glitches, although one can hit the reply button, and more than likely have the message get bounced back with a largely indecipherable and irrelevant reply from another computer in the same system...Welcome to the 21st century where the misfires, malfunctions and mis-readings are as comical as they are ubiquitous...I am sure that there is a Philip K Dick story with a similar scenario, perhaps one that grows more sinister or at least insidious over time. I hope my virtual shell comes away unscathed...
PhlegmTurtlePalace--steward

Why thought systems leak

“May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” William Blake

 

Your fat coconuts of love

they rise above me like spoons

erect with bloated kites of wind

and amygdalae carcassing with the

stuttering syntax of social scientists

caned into a discipline of whiskey

dripped dragonflies in amber and time,

and 582-years of pre-Renaissance manuscripts,

and simple animals hiding within lines

and song stories of extinct laughter,

in episodes of brief herring—storms

fall like trees in the battering of

foreign alphabets and moon-ice

and liquids made from the metal

of an elephant’s secret naval academy

of chess-boards, generated into one

single theory of unspooled wheels;

Its laundry bundle of thoughts

now dust-mited across galaxies

of a million books

telling me nothing in a darkening

shroud of quasi-intuitional armpits,

which speak so slowly

that they must remain as color

along a spectrograph, like paper

in sequential chains of illegible punch-lines;

religious objects and diverse appetites

stretched, tanned and counted like hides

before being disguised as poems,

when hunger cries out for

senseless shapes and

momentary patterns of mangrove

muds articulated as

a Joycean diction

channeling the quick flash of a face;

and hearing a joke

for an entire lifetime

translated into a condensate

of cellular intoned prawns, inching

forward in tiny traces

of lipsmeared mucous.

 

JZRothstein (final edit) 2/9/2014

The post below is a copy of a letter I wrote in response to a "commentary" by Fareed Zakaria in Time Magazine's February 3rd issue. the subject was government surveillance, and Zakaria attempted to justify the recent extremes in such practices, at least to some degree, by using hyperbolic and somewhat dubious statistics in a context designed to incite a certain amount of fear in less discerning readers. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA, or HUAC) would have been proud of this broadly-brushed-through-a-bullhorn approach to Chicken-Littleism. For my part however, I felt compelled to point out that the sloppiness of the argument and its hysteria-driven 'facts, were perfunctory even by the standards of Time Magazine--who, in many cases, tend towards over-generalization and broad-brush social-reductionism. This is surprising, not because Zakaria--who is Time Magazine's "Editor-at-Large"--is usually more sober (although this is an imaginative screed in comparison with his usual passionately-middle-of-the-road, didactism), but because he at least attempts to pay obligatory lip service to the opposite side of the coin. Of course, given the multifaceted nuances of most arguments, this dichotomizing--so popular in the media since the advent of the 'Fairness Doctrine'--is not entirely accurate, although it frames certain political rants in a deceptively 'objective' way. In this case, however, he simply threw caution to the winds of authoritarianism, and dove into the arms of the NSA with both arms open...I hope this isn't the beginning of a new revisionist trend, especially now, as the sentiment to pardon Edward Snowden--regardless of where his 'libertarian sympathies' may actually lie--and to commute the sentence of Bradley (now, Chelsea) Manning, is beginning to pick up steam. Only time will tell.
PhlegmTurtlePalace Steward 

It is obvious that the beltway has fastened it grip around Fareed Zakaria’s neck so tightly that it has begun choking off the oxygen supply to his brain. How else to explain Senator McCarthy’s—I mean Mr. Zakaria’s—wild, hyperbole ridden claims, in Time’s February 3^rd issue, about the “millions of daily cyber-attacks”, etc., etc., which certain secretive government institutions claim to be suffering on a sustained basis. Moreover, he seems intent on trying to muddle the issue by introducing all sorts of new villains into the fray. Now, the phantom terrorists who some government officials, like the “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” claim are quite literally peeping through our Amazon.com electronic shopping carts, and our junk mail, have been joined by a cabal of “criminals and foreign governments.” Perhaps there is also a hairless species of humanoids, from the center of the earth, with the heads of possums, who burrow through the soil like mole rats and are presently massing for an attack on the Pentagon. Of course, such hysterical nonsense would normally be the province of science fiction films or fodder for the pages of the Weekly World News; and maybe—given its occasional penchant for overblown and exaggerated stories—Time magazine has one foot in that camp already; but surely they should notice when one of their usually sober columnists begins acting as a human bullhorn for fantasies that wouldn’t even make late night viewing in the  Corporatized foliage tangle of Dick Cheney’s over-taxed grey matter.

For example, Zakaria simply assumes that the Nuclear Security Agency’s claim that they suffer “10-million cyber-attacks daily” should be taken at face value. Gee Fareed, that’s a lot of espionage activity aimed at a single very secretive agency for one day, hmm. I wonder if you were actually shown any evidence at all to back this claim—probably not, given the level of secrecy at NSA (and, such familiar initials too)? One would have to envision literally thousands of Chinese cyber-techs manning computer banks, in some cavernous underground facility in Shanghai, all hooked right into the innards of the aforementioned agency’s main-frame, to even get a sense of the sort of effort that goes into such sustained activity. Obviously, a very plausible scenario; and just how many ‘sunshine units’ of radiation did the source of this information absorb in the hours leading up to these terrifying revelations?  It is far more likely that someone is disseminating data that has been radically divorced from its original context, perhaps in support of some pro-government secrecy agenda. In fact, there may even be a kernel of truth in these hyperbolic revelations, although taking this dubious statistic at face value, as a reflection of actual “terrorist activity,” seems completely absurd (perhaps Time Magazine’s columnists should start footnoting their information, but of course, that might compromise the privacy of their sources; how ironic).

By analogy, one would be far closer to ‘truth,’ asserting the popular claim that home burglaries cost millions of dollars in damage and stolen property—which, they obviously do—but you wouldn’t necessarily invite the police to take up residence in your living room, simply because someone twelve blocks away reported a robbery.  And, the fact that such things happen does not make them statistical probabilities for most people most of the time. Arguing that the NSA (The National security Agency, I mean) has the right to vacuum up huge amounts of personal data simply based on the statistical chance of using some miniscule portion of it to theoretically stop a terrorist plot, is tantamount to stopping the occasional robbery by putting surveillance cameras on every street in every city in the United States, and then adding new ones festooned from telephone poles and lamp-posts facing in the direction of people’s windows. I mean, it’s not like anyone will be looking at the monitors every minute of every day; and of course, they have no interest in whatever it is that you might be doing inside your house. But these sorts of explanations miss the point.

A Supreme Court Justice once said that living in a society with Fourth Amendment rights, means that one should never have to close one’s window blinds just to ensure that they aren’t being watched—it should be assumed that one is, in fact, secure in one’s possessions  when in one’s own home. People feel extremely uncomfortable when they become aware that all sorts of information about them is being saved in electronic files by a secretive agency only responsive to the secretive edicts of a secretive court apparatus. In fact, it’s downright creepy. It is also interesting that Mr. Zakaria assumes that information moves in a linear fashion through the various interception mechanisms that have been used to extract it. It is far more likely, that various bits of data about an individual can be utilized in ways not always immediately apparent, especially, when an organization, like the NSA has the capacity to save such data indefinitely. This might be cited as a potential example of the ‘law of unintended consequences.’ One should be mindful of such variables, and their broad and unpredictable ramifications. This, in itself, should at least inspire one to ask if it is really advisable to put blind trust in a system that allows for no transparency and provides ample ammunition for the misuse of information by hypothetical future leaders, whose motives we cannot conceive.

Moreover, a senate committee came out several weeks ago, with a detailed report stating that the NSA data-vacuuming program—and I am not quoting directly, but I implore someone at Time to actually look this up—was wasteful, involved much duplication of effort and was not proven to be effective. In reference to this last item, the report’s authors pointed out, very clearly, that even if some terrorist plots have been foiled since the passage of the so-called ‘Patriot Act,’ the NSA could provide no evidence that any of this had any connection to their hyper aggressive data collection efforts. I guess Fareed either missed that, or didn’t’; think it germane to his column. I mean, it was only reported by the New York Times, National Public radio, and numerous other periodicals—it probably even showed up in Time. But, after all, if Jack Goldsmith—in The New Republic, no less, same journal that printed that interesting, but irrelevant, Sean Willentz piece—says its okay to use “techniques that the New York Times…finds reprehensible,” then what’s the problem?

The real clincher though was when Fareed wrote that “…We all live, bank, work and play in a parallel world of computer identities…But we do not seem to realize that this enormous freedom of activity in the cyber-world…has to be defended. Just as the police need basic information about your life and activities, [italics mine] the government will need information about the cyber-world.” Again, I am astounded at all of these new revelations; especially the one about the “police needing information…” There are several Amendments in the US Constitution—the same document that all of the bureaucratic functionaries quoted in this article, no doubt, claim fealty to—that would put that italicized remark about the police in question; unless, of course, Mr. Zakaria just got overzealous while communing with the ghost of Heinrich Himmler on the Ouija board. Or was it J. Edger Hoover? Perhaps, Fareed just knows something that the rest of us don’t.

In fact, when I read the sentences quoted above, I almost fell off of the toilet laughing. “Performance art, parody,” I thought, before re-reading the name of the columnist. “’Fareed Zakaria,’ a serious fellow usually, but not known for having an outrageous sense of humor. And, yes, I said “toilet.” You see, I read Time Magazine precisely because it raises my hackles; and, in doing this, it stimulates motility in my colon; which is conducive to maintaining healthy bowel regularity. Thus, it has a salubrious effect on my digestive tract. It is also fairly good for killing flies, although a bit thin lately, and with a marked tendency to tear on the first swing (for that purpose, I highly recommend Foreign Affairs, another insular Washington journal that Mr. Zakaria probably reads regularly). I would like to claim that I also use it to wipe what the Chinese call the ‘eye of the fart’ afterwards; but, alas, the pages are too slick, and a good piece of toilet-tissue needs a certain roughness to insure proper penetration of all the little nooks and crannies. This might be something for you guys to keep in mind; perhaps kill two birds with one stone (or is it two liberals with one jeremiad), by advertising that, “in addition to being a good read, Time is also a good wipe.” I can say with all honesty that I regret, to some extent anyway, not having used the paper that this editorial was printed on for that purpose.

In fact, it is far more likely, that I will hang it on my bedroom wall, to remind me of the extent to which authoritarianism is making a resurgence in the annals of pop-journalism. This particular piece of HUAC style hysteria would probably not even make it into the pages of the National Review, although it seems on par with some of the theories I’ve read in the Flat Earth Society News. The fact that a few, or even many, of your readers may take this over-cooked tripe seriously is a sad testament to just how deeply the black-boot of governmental power is already established inside the crease of our collective fundaments. And, needless to say, such placement doesn’t bode well for the regularity of one’s daily evacuations. Lastly, in regards to the Alexander Hamilton quotation used in the summary of this article, one might ask, how a government that “controls the governed,” can ever be “[obliged]… to control itself [?]” If this “control” means relegating the populace to an information vacuum, then perhaps Mr. Zakaria is quoting the wrong text. Next time he should try Mein Kampf..

All scatological remarks aside, I do believe that Mr. Zakaria will eventually be quite embarrassed by the editorial that he has written on this subject. It would be a far greater shame however, if he is not.

Sincerely, Jeffrey Z Rothstein