Death is a handy reminder of how many environmental problems aren’t simply problems, they’re costs. Population pressure, for example, is the cost we pay for not being dead. Harvard population expert Nicholas Eberstadt has pointed out that the twentieth century’s population explosion was “entirely the result of health improvements and the expansion of life expectancy.” Imagine the kind of regulatory actions needed to curtail this ecological threat. Hitler and Stalin already did. Global warming, too, is a cost we pay for certain things we want, such as staying warm. How do we manage these costs? Many of us have done extensive experimental work bouncing checks and juggling credit card balances in an attempt to answer the question of cost management. Unfortunately, the solution to paying our bills never turns out to be going to a jolly gathering of like-minded individuals and hugging them. We need money.
Money buys research. Money buys technology. Money buys rain forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and even—as you may have noticed if you followed the campaign fund-raising scandals—Al Gore. Most of all, money buys the kind of comfortable, prosperous life where we can get time off from hunting mammoths to extinction and trying to make greenhouse gas–producing fuels stay lit in damp caves and celebrate Earth Day instead. Not that I did. There was no Planet Picnic for me. Even though April 22 fell on a weekend this year, I worked. I wrote a piece poking fun at Earth Day and made some money.
“I can’t baby-sit today either,” said the teenage baby-sitter. “My mom got arrested again. She was protesting George W. Bush’s missile defense plan and she chained herself.”
To a missile? I asked.
“She couldn’t actually find a missile so she chained herself to the stack of cannonballs in front of the Arlington County courthouse.”
Did the police take her to jail?
“No, the police decided to just leave her chained to the cannonballs. I’ve got to take her some sprouts on the Metro.”
I’ve been thinking about making some sort of missile-defense protest myself, I said, after the baby-sitter had left.
“You could go into your office and chain yourself to making a living,” suggested my wife. “Moral Majoritarian magazine only paid you seventy-five dollars for the Earth Day article.”
I need a forum that’s more public than working in the den, I said. I’d like to do something that would make the entire nation sick with fear at the prospect of an attack on America using missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Unfortunately I don’t know how to perform this stunt. The missile attack part is easy enough. There are scientists, generals, and irrational zealots all over the world who know how to do it. But the sick-with-fear aspect of the feat is daunting.
If I write something that says Washington, D.C., is the target, readers say it’s about time. The way our politicos have been acting, something had to be done. A mushroom cloud consumes Manhattan? Considering recent NASDAQ performance, it’s probably just an e-commerce stock crashing—another “dot.bomb.” When Palm Beach County, Florida, gets nuked, the dimwit residents will think the flash of light comes from more television cameras outside. If they do figure out what’s going on, they’ll be dialing 991 or 119 or P*A*T*B*U*C*H*A*N*A*N.
There we are in a pile of rubble, bleeding profusely. Everything we have is gone. You and Muffin scream in agony. If we don’t die, we’ll die anyway—from hideous radiation sickness. How did this get to be a joke?
Well, it’s remarkable what a small group of dedicated activists like the baby-sitter’s single mom can achieve. For forty-some years the ban-the-bomb bums, unilateral-disarmament goonies, nuclear-freeze sleaze, peace creeps, and no-nukes kooks bragged about the horrors of atomic war. There was no end to their end of the world. They painstakingly detailed Armageddon, polished the Apocalypse, rubbed and loved a radioactive holocaust that made the Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sound like a vacation postcard from Cozumel. “Better red than dead!” they shrieked. They could have gone to Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia and been both.
This PR for extinction had a dramatic effect on popular culture. There were books, movies, plays, even Top 40 songs about how we were all going to die, plus at least half a dozen Twilight Zone episodes where people emerged from their fallout shelters to find the world ruled by three-headed mutants in a bad mood. It scared the dickens out of us. But so did being late for work for the third time in a week and that ominous clunk in the car’s transmission and the kid having a temperature of 103 degrees. Extremely bad things might happen, maybe, in the future. But fairly bad things will happen, definitely, right now. We could expend only so much of our adrenaline being panicked “on the come.” Frankly, we got pooped with the horrors of atomic war. And then one day in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and it was over. No more On the Beach, no more Dawn of Destruction, no more nuclear winter that would be a hundred times worse than global warming—plus colder.
Except it isn’t over. It’s just begun. And the fact that the whole world will not be blown up doesn’t mean our house won’t. There are “rogue states” to be considered, and in the long haul of history it turns out that all states are rogue states sooner or later. We certainly were, from the point of view of the Cherokee. Bland, unassuming Belgium ravished the Congo basin. The boring do-gooders of Scandinavia, when they had their longboats, terrorized everyone from Moscow to Goose Bay, Labrador.
Knowledge of how to trigger fission and make ICBMs won’t disappear like the lost works of Euripides. Too many laptops have been in and out of the Los Alamos Laboratory for that. How will rogue states—or rogue organizations or just plain rogues—acquire this expertise? Here’s a dark side to the free-market sunshine in which mankind has been basking: They’ll buy it. Too costly? The poorest of bad governments seems able to fund large armies, large espionage operations, and very large corps of secret police. Is one missile with the H-bomb option more expensive than snitching on everyone in Iraq? Then there’s logic. The U.S.S.R. had some. Commies wanted to destroy America in order to dominate the planet. But if the planet were destroyed in the process, planetary domination lost much of its value. Ergo, Commies used Cubans, Vietnamese, and The New York Times rather than nuclear weapons. However, what if destroying America is an end rather than a means? Or what if the rogues are theosophists who, due to transmigration of souls, are going to be reborn as those cockroaches that will be the only things to survive? The result, as far as we’re concerned, will be the same as the Cuban missile crisis—if Khrushchev had been drinking more and Jack had doubled up on the back pain medication.
So give a high five—high seven, if you’ve mutated—to atomic war twenty-first-century style. It doesn’t happen only in places like Vladivostok and Chicago anymore. It happens anywhere anyone is mad at anybody, which is everywhere. There’s no one pounding his shoe on a desk at the UN by way of warning. The bombs explode one by one instead of simultaneously. And this continues for…for as long as we happen to live or can bear to go on doing so.
But that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is the Americans who don’t want to prevent this atomic war such as our neighbors and their single mom of a daughter. They’re not a majority, perhaps, but if newspaper editorials and television commentaries are any measure, they’re a minority of gruesomely influential proportions. These Americans say a missile defense would be expensive. Cleaning up the hole where San Francisco used to be is so cheap. They say the technology is imperfect. “Only twelve seconds in the air? Let’s give it up, Orville, and go back to running the bike shop in Dayton.” They say Russia and China will feel more comfortable, psychologically, with the ability to lob a missile our way. They say missile defense upsets the peacemaking efforts of our European allies—allies who, in 1914, 1939, and lately in the Balkans, have proven themselves so adept at making peace. And chief among the Americans who want nuclear weapons to be an option in contemporary international conflicts are the moldy old antinuclear protesters of yore. They have risen from their tombs of policy irrelevanc
e and are marching on our homes in a grisly pack. The shock-wave ghouls, the test-ban zombies, the strontium-90 goblins are at least as good undead as red. They are ready to rip our flesh and roast our bones so that the hell they cherished all through the Cold War may yet prevail on earth.
“Really?” said my wife. “I don’t think the neighbors are as mad at you as all that.”
“I just got in a terrific argument with your assistant, Max,” said the teenage baby-sitter, “about getting free music on the Internet with MP3 file-swapping technology. He says using MP3 helps protect First Amendment rights, while I say it helps expand market freedoms.”
[Kids today may be wizards with virtual reality, yet they seem a little foggy about what makes reality virtuous. I hate to lecture, but…] Young lady, I said, computers are helpful with many tasks, stealing, for instance. If you are adept with a computer, you can filch a Defense Department atomic bomb secret, some Limp Bizkit tunes, and a book report on Moby Dick without leaving your room. This takes less nerve and physical exertion than stashing a six-pack of beer under your coat and being chased down the street by an angry ball-bat-wielding package-store owner. Even if you get caught for the computer crime, the FBI agents assigned to cybertheft cases are polite. They come to you; you don’t have to go to them. And they rarely use armed force, especially if you turn out to be a fifteen-year-old girl who weighs about a hundred pounds.
The age of information technology is upon us, and everything of value (other than, maybe, the six-pack) can be digitalized. Fortunes used to be made by means of such things as the Firestone Tire Company—an aggregation of factories, machinery, and products that blow up and roll Mrs. O’s SUV into a ditch. Now fortunes are made by means of such things as Oracle Corp. Oracle is not an aggregation of factories and machinery, it’s a bunch of 0’s and 1’s. Something else that’s a bunch of 0’s and 1’s is the whole world’s banking system, also all the financial markets on earth. Money itself is merely information—0’s and 1’s in a database such as a bank account—and I have checked mine and there aren’t even any 1’s in there, just 0’s.
But when information travels into the global electronic network, the information is, in effect, a rich tourist wandering through the wrong part of town. The computer becomes the handgun of modern mugging. And it’s hard to keep all this bankroll-flashing, Fodor’s-consulting, Bermuda-shorts-wearing information safe from the locals. Encryption experts do their best. But the number of encryption experts is finite, while the number of young people who spend much too much time fiddling around on computers is infinite, if you and Max and my godson Nick are anything to go by.
All digitalized information is vulnerable, in some way, to being swiped. Most of you “hackers” don’t have the skills to manipulate NASDAQ or empty the International Monetary Fund into your bank card accounts. But you can shoplift CDs and read magazines without buying them. If your printers hold out, you can get five-fingered discounts on books. Advances in technology will soon let you sneak into first-run movie houses, jump the Sony PlayStation 2 toy-store lines, and tell the cable TV people exactly where their next rate increase should go.
As more and more of you do this kind of thing, the likelihood lessens that any one of you will be caught or, if caught, prosecuted or, if prosecuted, punished. Thus is spawned a multitudinous generation of white-collar criminals who can’t even be bothered with the collar. You are the sweatpants criminals slouching at your monitors, eating Skittles, drinking Jolt cola, and sacking and pillaging the earth.
This raises two questions: the question of right and wrong and the question Who cares? Let’s leave the question of right and wrong to be settled between you and your conscience. Or, since I’m a political conservative and therefore regard the world as a thoroughly wicked place, let’s just assume you’re a bad person and don’t have a conscience. Let’s leave the question of right and wrong to be settled between you and the bodyguards of Sean “Puffy” Combs after Puffy discovers you’ve been using MP3 to rip him off for royalties.
The more interesting question is Who cares? Possibly, you. If information is free for the taking, available to the masses without cost or risk, then information becomes public property. “All information is public property” has a plummy utopian sound. But how would the fact of information being public affect the quality of that public information? Let me speak two words of caution: Public toilet. And, if all information is to be public, by what means will the public manage its information? Who’ll be in charge? Will a completely open web promote idealistic anarchism? That is, will the plots of novels and casting for movies be decided by riots in Seattle? Or will representative democracy obtain? Will information be the responsibility of elected officials? I offer, for your imagination, the hip-hop stylings of the future group Bone Thugs ’N House of Representatives.
You may resist the idea of property rights on the Internet because, when you think of property rights, you think of the crabby neighbors—your grandparents—with the KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign, who come out on their porch and scream at kids when they ride bikes across their front yard. Property rights, however, mean more than unviolated herbaceous borders. Although not to your grandparents, who were—Max discovered, through information available on the Internet—the people who placed the anonymous phone call to the truant officer when they saw the boy across the street riding his bike during weekday school hours.
But forget about your grandparents. There is no human liberty without property rights. The most important property right is your own inviolable right to self-possession. You own you.
When other people get mixed up about the notion that you are your personal property, when they start thinking they own you, the consequences are horrendous: slave trade, the draft, my first marriage.
You also have property rights in your actions. You own your efforts. Otherwise labor unions would be good for nothing but softball leagues.
You own what you do. And there’s the rub in the age of information technology. You don’t do anything. Well, that’s not true. You babysit. But eventually, when you grow up and get a career, you won’t do anything. I know I don’t. Hardly any of us adults have jobs where we actually make stuff. Most of us don’t even provide a service in the traditional sense. Information technology means that what we do is think. And what we think is the information that the information technology runs on. Do we own our thoughts? Do we have property rights in the information that is available on everyone’s computer? If we don’t, it’s back to screaming at the neighborhood brats for doing wheelies on our lawn. And if we do have property rights in the information, then we’re sneaking up behind ourselves and stealing our own wallets.
“Gee, Mr. O, you might be right,” said the baby-sitter. “I’ll have to run some numbers on my computer and see if what you say makes sense from an econometric standpoint.”
My God, read this! I said, waving a page of The New York Times at my wife. I promised myself I’d read the Times every day, no matter how mad it made me. And now I’m glad.
“That newspaper is a year old,” said my wife.
I’m a little behind. But this article is still wonderful. It seems the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 11 to 0 to ban discrimination against fat people. The District of Columbia already has such a law—no Ted Kennedy jokes, please!—and so does the state of Michigan, as well it should. I was in Michigan not long ago, and at least two-thirds of the inhabitants beep when they back up. But San Francisco is a famously thin and wispy place. There’s hardly a dirigible gut to be found within its city limits. Obviously the Board of Supervisors is acting from simple trendiness. Bless them. The trend comes just in time for me.
I’m not a complete dessert scow. Yet. But I’m looking a bit like Brazil where I used to resemble Argentina. Well, I say it’s a poor man who can’t build a shed over his tool. Prejudice against us wide-loads should, by all means, be made illegal—especially the very strong prejudice that cute young women seem to have when we ask them “Do you c
ome here often?” or “What’s your sign?” I’m happily married myself, so of course this type of insensitivity to People of Pudge does not affect me directly. But I’m thinking of my fellow middle-aged slobs and how their rights are being violated in Hooters franchises every night, nationwide. Also, I presume that these new rotund rights apply to cute young wives, and that henceforth it will be a hate crime for a certain particular cute young wife to laugh out loud when I emerge in a Herman Melville–inspiring manner from the hot tub.
Government protection of pie wagons is law-giving at its most noble, legislation worthy of a Solon—assuming that he was a porker too. But the San Francisco Board of Supervisors does not go far enough in its concern for oppressed minorities. Or majorities, as the case may be, since current National Institutes of Health statistics indicate that everybody in America except Calista Flockhart is overweight. Yes, fatsos need the help of elected officials. For instance, any elected official who wants to come over to my house in the mornings and help me reach my shoelaces would be a plus. But the help of elected officials is also needed by boneheads. Of course, many elected officials are boneheads, but there is hardly room in Congress, state legislatures, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and so on, for all the country’s nitwits. Meanwhile, numskulls lag woefully in college admissions, employment opportunities, career advancement, and remembering to open the garage door before backing the car out. (Don’t those garage-door repairmen charge like the dickens?) How long can America bear the shame of its bigotry toward the dim? When—at long last—will we make bias against stupidity punishable by law?
Think of all the things our nation owes to birdbrains. The very voyage to America in the Mayflower itself was a pretty dumb idea, not to mention the settlement of the West with its log hovels, Indian scalpings, and San Francisco Board of Supervisors. What would be the state of professional athletics in the United States without hockey-score IQs among players, fans, team owners, and businesses willing to pay for Super Bowl television advertising time? Indeed, our entire entertainment industry depends upon a monumental unintelligence, the likes of which is…wearing a tone-on-tone shirt-tie-suit combo and asking people with hockey-score IQs monumentally unintelligent questions on a quiz show. The stock market depends on it too. And without mental retards, Internet chat rooms would be empty and instant messaging would go unused. Then there’s politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 22
