The Casual Blog

Category: public policy

February 27, 2010

War and the unfortunate killers (our children)

We should recognize that the young people we send to foreign lands to kill others on our behalf pay a terrible price.  Killing, even when sanctioned by governments and rules of war, typically leaves soldiers with chronic problems of depression, anxiety, and self-loathing.  They are prone to substance abuse and suicide.  The individuals soldiers themselves often assume these problems are due to their own weakness of character.  At any rate, they seldom care to discuss this issue, and their psychological injuries from their wartime actions is not a popular media subject.

It isn’t surprising that this subject doesn’t get much airplay.  In military recruiting commercials, soldiering is shown as a chance to prove oneself, gain respect, and serve one’s country for the greater good.  Battle is depicted as an adventure, with incredibly powerful weapons.   The meta message is that battle is ennobling, socially beneficial, and also a lot of fun.  Hollywood and major media are complicit in amplifying this message.  Exploding the myths and making clear that killing in battle leaves soldiers permanently scarred would be highly detrimental to recruiting.

Every now and again, the NY Time has  piece about the trauma suffered by veterans who’ve done what they were trained to do.  Last week, it ran an op ed piece titled Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts by Shannon P. Meehan, an Army lieutenant who served in Iraq.  http://tiny.cc/zc2AP Meehan described her rage and self-loathing after calling in an air strike that resulted in several civilian deaths.  She explained that the killing caused soldiers to lose regard for human life, including their own lives.

The NY Times also had a story this month on increasing recognition that veterans who killed in battle suffer post traumatic stress and a variety of psychological problems. _ http://tiny.cc/7Mchz The piece focussed on the difficulty of getting therapy for these soldiers, who are often unwilling to discuss their problems or seek help.  We do need to work hard to help these veterans, who are themselves victims of war.

But we also need to address the larger problem of reducing the incidence of war and politically motivated killing.   I realize that sounds sort of obvious, and at time a bit utopian.  To be sure, universal peace is probably an unrealistic goal.  But what if we tried to have just a little less killing?  Wouldn’t most agree that that would be good?

Here’s a thought experiment:  for every death we administer or suffer, what if we asked, is this act achieving a clear objective worth the terrible cost to all the victims?   We need to devote scholarly effort to study of  the best alternatives to violent conflict.  We need to have some difficult conversations on this subject.  And to sustain us in this effort, we need to learn at an emotional level what war really means.  I highly recommend as one source  the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen, who wrote about the battlefield experience in WWI.  http://tiny.cc/xypcN Owen died at age 25 one week before the end of the war.

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February 13, 2010

Travel, randomness, and good fortune

Last week I spent a couple of days in San Jose and Palo Alto at meetings of the Linux Foundation counsel group.  I did three presentations myself and heard talks on virtualization, open source license enforcement, trademarks and open source, patent troll lawsuits, and other topics of professional interest.  I had a chance to socialize with some very bright and knowledgeable open source legal people and catch up on industry news and gossip.  The days were lively, but long, starting with a working breakfast and ending with a working dinner, and I was ready to head home on Thursday.

The flight from San Jose took me to Dallas.  As chance would have it, Dallas experienced its heaviest snowfall in history that day.  Across the eastern U.S., tens of thousands of flights were cancelled in what was described as the worst travel day since 9/11.  My flight into DFW landed on time, but sat on the runway for almost an hour.  By the time I made it to the gate for the connecting flight, which was due to leave at 3, it was 3 sharp, and too late.  The next flight was in 5 hours.  I claimed a spot at stall with a bar stool and free electricity, plugged in my laptop, and got some work done.

Eventually I came to a stopping place, gave up my precious electrical connection, and looked about for coffee and something to eat.  For some reason, people were more than usually chatty.  I normally keep chats with strangers during air travel to a minimum, primarily because I’m trying to get other things done. Also, with a tendency toward the introvert side of the personality scale, I tend to see the cost-benefit analysis of a one-time talk as more on the cost side.  But in the various lines and pauses on Thursday, I met a photographer from Dallas, a defense department weapons system specialist from Dayton, and a salesperson for highway building equipment from San Diego, all interesting and pleasant.

The snow continued to come down throughout the afternoon, and I kept expecting to hear that the Raleigh flight was cancelled.  Instead, AA loaded up in a timely manner, and closed the door.  My seatmate had the Wall Street Journal, and agreed to share it.  Things were looking good, and then they froze.  We eventually spent more than 4 hours on the runway waiting for de-icing, being de-iced, and taking off.  I finally got home about 4:15 am.  The total travel time was 17.5 hours.   Happy as I was to be home, it took me another couple of hours to get to sleep.  I was late for my 9 am interview with a prospective intern.

On the trip I finished The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.  It is an account for non-mathematicians of the history and meaning of the great ideas of probability and statistics.  Mlodinow explains that without an appreciation for probability and statistics, people have an overwhelming tendency to find patterns and meaning where there is none, and greatly overestimate the amount of control they have over their own fate.  This is almost certainly true, but it’s a bit depressing.  It’s therefore possible that people who understand it generally don’t care to talk about it.  One positive point Mlodinow makes late in the book:  success and happiness are more likely if we take more chances.  That is, you can’t win the coin toss if you don’t toss the coin.

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January 10, 2010

Reading the Confessions of Nat Turner

One of the rewarding things about travel is the flip side of downtime:   having substantial chunks of time to read.   Once I’ve made it to my gate and found a spot to stow my roll, I look forward to the part of the journey when there is nothing physical that needs to be done, no problems that immediately need to be solved, and no talking that is strictly necessary.  For lovers of books, it’s an oasis.  And reading makes the time valuable.  I really don’t know how non-readers can stand airplanes.

During our travels over the holidays, I managed to finish William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which gave a shot in the arm to my sometimes shaky faith in the importance of the novel.  Sally read the book long ago and kept it, and it has sat on our various bookshelves as long as we’ve been together (27+ now!).  During all that time, I had no idea it was such a great book.  It turns out Sally always thought it was a great book, but we never got around to discussing it.

The book is based on an actual person (Turner), a slave who led a bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831.  Styron explains in “afterword” essay that the historical record of Turner is slim, and that he consciously made a character different in important respects from what he believed about the historical Turner.  (The real Turner was apparently a psychotic religious fanatic, whereas Styron’s is a religiously inspired poetic and practical genius.)  Styron’s aim was to illuminate slavery and race relations during that period, and his own.  He succeeded brilliantly in bringing to light multiple dimensions and paradoxes of the Peculiar Institution.

It is certainly a beautiful book in its details and its sweep, but also a deeply painful.  There is, of course, the sickening cruelty of some individual slave owners.  (The narrator Turner concedes that there was a wide range of behavior among slave owners, and some of them were thoughtful and relatively kind.)  There is the pain of Turner and millions of others who endured forced servitude.  There’s also the deep pain is that our forefathers with knowledge and intent supported and defended slavery for generations.  The anti-black racism that continues to plague us is proof that this legacy is still with us.

The book is a powerful example of how a work of fiction can bring to light certain truths that cannot be illuminated any other way.  History in its conventional form is distrustful of imagination, which means that undocumented feelings and behaviors can be completely lost.  But combining historical research with imagination and literary skill, as Styron did, opens doors to the past.

Styron’s essay recounts the strange history of the book itself, which was initially a critical and popular success.  It then became the target of fierce attack by a number of prominent black scholars.   By Styron’s account (which is obviously self-interested), most of the attacks missed the larger points of his work.  In any case, the attacks effectively marginalized the book by discouraging the attention of black readers.  It is a sad irony that this great book that could easily have been an inspiration for more great historical and imaginative work and another bridge over a racial divide became a point of division.

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December 12, 2009

Christmas gifts and losses

Shopping is not something I do for fun.  But with the hard deadline of Christmas looming, today I finally faced up to the inevitable:  I needed to focus on buying some presents.  It is hard to think that anyone in my present-buying orbit really needs any material thing that I might give, but tradition is powerful.  I braved the traffic, the lines, and the bewildering cornucopia of goods, and found some things at last.  Whew.

One thing I like about the fall and winter holidays is childhood memories.  How wonderful it was to look forward to a visit from Santa Claus!  What fun to see relatives and friends!   Ah, the sweets and smells of baking cookies!  It is hard, though, to think of those I loved who are gone.

As I slowly made my way through mall-oriented traffic, I heard an unusual radio story on NPR’s This American Life.   A man explained how his mother committed suicide at age 79 with the knowledge of her friends and family and with his support.  She was not depressed or terminally ill, though she was conscious of struggling with dementia.  She read Final Exit and composed a plan involving an overdose of sleeping pills and a plastic bag.  Then she practiced the technique repeatedly, with her son’s supervision.  The composing and carrying out of the plan took place over many years.

When she finally picked a day, she let those close to her know, and had final visits.  The last person she saw was her son.  She was concerned that he not be exposed to legal risk, and so he left her for some period while she carried out the plan.  He said that he was worried, when he returned, that she might have taken the pills but been unsuccessful.  She was, however, dead.  In recounting this, he was clearly moved and sorry she was gone, but he was neither critical nor admiring of her decision.  It was her decision, he said.  She lived life on her own terms.

The interviewer observed that it was highly unusual for people to be able to talk about death freely and deal with it with such directness.  The son noted that his mother spent time working on it, and it got easier.  They also discussed how unfortunate it was that our legal system makes it impossible for persons who choose the terms of their death to be with family at the end.

I found all this both unsettling and encouraging.  It would be good to be as comfortable with death as with other fundamental facts of human existence.  I’m certainly not there yet.  But it sounded like the mother, and to some extent the son, made it.

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November 15, 2009

Privacy and exposure

How important is privacy?  I ask this question at a moment when I feel more than usually publicly exposed and vulnerable.  In recent times, I’ve come to think that for most of us the concern with privacy is exaggerated.  But exposure to the full glare of modern social media raises the question for me in a new way.

For most of us, or at least for me, the privacy question is usually more theoretical than real.  Most of the time, we’re private by default.  At least for non-celebrities, generally no one cares one way or the other about our (to us) valuable personal views and secrets.  Getting serious attention from one person, never mind the mass audience, doesn’t happen by accident.  It takes effort.

My operating assumption in recent years is that, for an individual, too much seclusion is more detrimental than too much society.  We are social animals; we wither and die without others of our kind.  And socializing means discarding some of our shell of privacy.  I’ve made it a rule to try sharing, rather than hoarding, when I have information or experience that could be helpful and of interest to others.

The possible benefits are:  helping someone, forming a human bond, making the world a little better.  The possible risks are:  risk of being wrong, of seeming ridiculous, of offending or upsetting someone.  And I do an informal cost-benefit analysis before I venture into the public arena on something controversial.  But I try not to let fear be determinative, and to give weight to the possible benefits even when they are somewhat speculative.

Some months back I, along with others, appeared in a video on open source software and intellectual property, where I took a position that challenged granting patents  for software.  Last week the video was posted on Patently-O, a prominent patent web site.  It generated dozens, if not hundreds of comments.  The vast majority of them were critical of my position, and some were critical in terms that were, shall we say, less than kind.  I was left with the firm impression that there are a lot of people who felt angry at me.

Being a target of a large amount of focused dislike is a new sensation for me.  It’s different from being disliked by an identifiable individual, when there is sometimes an understandable reason, and at any rate a finite problem.  It’s funny that it should matter, since I do not know these individuals, and I have never before relied on their respect and goodwill.  It may well be I would not care for their good opinion if I actually knew them.   Even so, it’s surprisingly bothersome.  It caused an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.  There’s nothing to be done.  It might be that with more experience one builds up defenses.  I’m hoping.

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October 4, 2009

Celebrating completion of the Bilski brief with interesting drinks

Last week I finished and filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court for Red Hat in the Bilski case.  The case concerns a difficult line drawing issue in patent law:  the line between a process that is patentable and one that is not.  The Red Hat brief argues that patents on software hinder innovation.   We challenge conventional wisdom on patents in a way that I hope is provocative.  Anyhow, I think it says some things worth saying.  Here is is:  http://tiny.cc/e8XvW

Filing a Supreme Court brief feels a bit different from other projects.  There’s a sense of being a participant in history, of possibly leaving a footprint in the sands of time.  It took a lot of effort to get the thing done, and most of that effort had to be exerted in addition to my normal work routine.  In the end, it happened mostly at night and on weekends.

Sal and I celebrated last night by doing a neighborhood pub crawl and dinner.  We started at Foundation, a tiny, downstairs bar on Fayetteville Street that features handcrafted martinis and has nothing but American ingredients.  There appeared to be at least three dozen types of bourbon, of which Sal tried one.  I tried a cocktail involving moonshine and sparkling wine.  It sounded more interesting than it actually was, but it was worth a try.  We had dinner at Dos Taquitos, where we had fantastic pure agave margaritas.  Afterwards, we stopped by the Busy Bee, where the crowd was mostly young and hip.  Then we walked over to Glenwood and went in Amras.

We were surprised to find an older crowd there, and a band playing hits of the 70s.  It was good to see people with more gray hair who were still having some fun.  Some even danced.  The crowd as Busy Bee was, of course, more attractive, as young people usually are.

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September 26, 2009

Death is the mother of beauty

Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty.”  The line, read in context in the great poem Sunday Morning, is dense with meaning.  I’ve pulled it from its context (sorry, Wallace)  to illustrate the difficulty of thinking and talking about death.  Doesn’t just saying the line make you feel strange?   Think of saying it to a group of friends.  A conversation killer, for sure.  The point is, it’s hard to talk seriously about death.  Bringing up the subject in polite conversation is generally taboo.  If you insist, you may be viewed as lacking in good taste, morbid, or depressed.

Artists are given special license to deal with death.  Where would art be without it?   Count the crucifixions in the Metropolitan Museum.  Or the great books, plays, and operas in which death is the central event.  And death is very common.   As Lenny Bruce famously said, we’re all gonna die!

It is kind of funny that death is so ordinary and so frightening at the same time, but not laugh out loud funny.  For most of us, death is scary.  In fact, terrifying.  It serves to define the ultimate in fear:  to be frightened to death.  It’s emotional in other ways, too.  To think of the death of someone else causes feelings to sadness or despair.  Death is not to be trifled with.

Even so, avoidance is not the best strategy.   Not thinking about it will not make the problem go away.   Not talking about it will not help anything.  We need to deal with death like grown ups.

The current health care debate provides a case in point.  Right wing opponents of reform cleverly started a false rumor that reform would make euthanasia official policy.  This outrageous and on its face absurd, lie set off a huge panic reaction.  The reaction suggests how hard it will be to address the real problem of our spending enormous sums to put off death when it is inevitable and the amounts spent yield nothing in terms of quality of life.

I was happy to see that last week Newsweek had a cover story entitled “The Case for Killing Granny:  Curbing Excessive End-of-Life Care is Good for America.”  It is possible to discuss this issue and to make good choices.  It is possible to be sensible and courageous.  Both my parents, when confronting terminal illnesses, thoughtfully and courageously refused low-probability-of-success treatments.   Others have done likewise.  Maybe good sense and strength will increase and spread.  One can always hope.

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August 15, 2009

Legitimate healthcare debate, big lies, and lunacy

There’s plenty of room for legitimate disagreement over health care policy.  There’s really no single, objective right answer, and whenever that is the case (which it is on most policy questions), it’s predictable that people will disagree.  It’s even healthy for people to disagree and argue for their positions.  Those arguments may result in better policy.

But in recent weeks, the public discourse on health care has taken a disturbing turn. Opponents of the President’s plan have taken to shouting down proponents in public meetings across the land.  Opposition leaders, instead of addressing the merits, have propounded preposterous lies.  Among other thing, opponents falsely accuse the plan of including provisions on euthanasia and involving a government takeover of all health care.  The leaders (Palin, Limbaugh, Gingrich, etc.) surely know this is nonsense, but their repetition of big lies is fanning anger on the street to the point of danger.  It is ironic that these folks are dropping the rhetorical H-bomb of Nazism on the proponents of health care change.  The angry shouting at the town hall meetings looks uncomfortably close to the populist politics of Germany in the early thirties.

Is there any hope of a civil, rational discourse with the passionate believers?   I hate to say it, but I see little.  It appears that these folks will discard any evidence, no matter how clear and settled, that does not fit with their beliefs.  For example, the opponents of the President include a remarkable number of so-called “birthers” — citizens who have decided to believe that the President is not a natural born American.   The evidence disproving this notion is overwhelming, but the number of birthers remains amazingly high.

How can such crazy thinking propagate beyond a few obvious lunatics and become a movement?  Is there any cure for this form of mass derangement?  Again, I doubt that rational argument will help, because these people have no apparent interest in rationality.   For the moment, they are clearly a minority, but they have an influence disproportionate to their numbers, and those numbers could increase.  There’s just no way for sensible, thoughtful people to match the believers’ level of passionate intensity.  Thoughtful people realize there’s never complete information, always another point of view, and always a possibility their understanding might be wrong. These people, at least while in the grip of their viral lunacy, have no such constraints.  I hope the fever breaks soon.

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