Crawling from the Wreckage Read online

  The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro Men live) if they didn’t drop gun control. So they dropped it, and now no large party supports it. That’s the politics of it, and it’s hard to argue the point.

  There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn’t get much traction in American politics anymore. It’s simply too late. This is a society that owns approximately equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: around a quarter-billion of each. There’s no going back—and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

  As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those thirty-three murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun, maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It is perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses. This loophole must be closed.

  More fundamentally, the gun control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of eighteen and forty-five also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilization model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don’t murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries like Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

  “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organization in the United States. But it’s really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to have more bullet holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: “Guns don’t kill Americans; Americans kill Americans.”

  My two favourite types of fiction are alternative histories and science fiction. One genre imagines different ways that the past might have played out; the other imagines ways that the future may unfold. I’m a romantic about the future, and I suspect that the human adventure may have just begun, although I know that there are several ways in which it could end quite abruptly. At any rate, I am living at the right time.

  March 9, 2009

  WE ARE PROBABLY NOT ALONE

  The real wonder of our age is that you can go on the Web, type in Planet Quest: New Worlds Atlas, or The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, or NASA Star and Exoplanet Database, and directly access the data on 340 new planets that have been discovered in the past five years.

  That number is set to grow very fast now, for last Saturday NASA (the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) successfully launched the Kepler telescope, which will find many more planets, including potentially Earth-like ones. It will stare unblinkingly at an area of space containing about one hundred thousand relatively near stars, watching for the tiny dimming of a star that happens when one of the star’s planets passes between the star and us.

  I enjoyed writing that last sentence. I couldn’t have written it ten years ago because at that time we still didn’t know whether it was normal for a star to have planets. Maybe planets were very rare, and life a thousand times rarer, and we were the only intelligent life in the galaxy. That always seemed pretty unlikely but you couldn’t prove otherwise.

  Well, now we know that planets are as common as dirt. Another new technique, which can see past the blinding glare of the parent star to pick out the faint light reflected from a planet’s surface, has found planets revolving around more than a hundred nearby stars. It’s like spotting a candle burning next to a lighthouse from a thousand kilometres away, but it works.

  The Kepler telescope mechanizes the search. If any of those one hundred thousand stars have planets that orbit in a plane that causes them to pass between the star and us, Kepler will spot them by the dimming they cause as they pass in front of the star. Probably thousands of the stars have planets orbiting in that plane, so now the tally of “exoplanets” (planets orbiting other suns) is going to rise very quickly.

  Even in that tiny section of sky, Kepler will probably miss tens of thousands of other planets whose orbits don’t bring them between their star and the Earth. Moreover, the great majority of the planets it does find will be gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, because gas giants orbiting close to their stars are the easiest planets to spot. But those are planets that cannot support our kind of life; the real triumph will be finding planets like Earth.

  The closest astronomers have come so far is a planet called Gliese 581 c. It’s the middle planet of three orbiting Gliese 581, a star about twenty light-years from here. It may have other planets, but we can’t see them, and it’s only one-and-a-half times the diameter of Earth. It is a rocky planet like our own, not a gas giant, and it is in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold to permit liquid water on the surface.

  Gliese 581 c is not another Earth. The gravity is much higher; it is very close to its sun (which is smaller, dimmer and cooler than our own); and it whips around its sun every 13 days compared to our 365 days. But it could potentially support our kind of life—which makes it, for the moment, the second most interesting object in the universe after our own planet.

  We still cannot see if it has an atmosphere, and if so, whether it contains the telltale gases that indicate the presence of life, but a new generation of orbiting observatories planned for the next decade—NASA‘s Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency’s Darwin project—could give us the answers. Darwin, for example, is going to survey one thousand of the closest stars, looking for small, rocky planets and seeking signs of life on them.

  Two big consequences are going to come out of all this. One is a long and tempting list of Earth-like planets in our own stellar neighbourhood, with, quite likely, evidence of life on many of them.

  Unless we can discover some loophole in the laws of physics, we may never reach them—the distances involved are immense—but they will always be there, beckoning us to come and visit, even to come and settle them. The knowledge that there is a destination worth going to can be a powerful spur to innovation.

  The other consequence is a huge question about intelligent life in the universe. If planets capable of supporting life are so commonplace—last month Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that there could be a hundred billion such planets in this galaxy alone—then where is everybody?

  Is intelligence a rare accident in the evolutionary process, or such a self-destructive attribute that intelligent species don’t usually survive more than a couple of centuries after they industrialize? Are they all observing radio silence because there is something dreadful out there? Or have we just not figured out yet how mature galactic civilizations communicate?

  I enjoyed writing that paragraph, too.

  I feel compelled to write a piece about the “war on drugs” every year or so because it’s the stupidest war of all and by far the easiest one to end. Doing so would also save more lives than any other war we might end, but writing about it usually feels like shouting down a well.

  Occasionally, however, a little bit of hope breaks through.

  September 4, 2009

  THE LONGEST WAR

  It’s too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” the United States has been waging for the past thirty-nine years, but something significant is happening. European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal consumption of many of the banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it’s different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.

  Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The U.S. can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing j
ust that. But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

  In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about four lines), five grams of marijuana (around four joints), fifty milligrams of heroin or forty milligrams of methamphetamine.

  At the end of August, Argentina’s Supreme Court did something even bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state,” and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for possessing a few joints.

  In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the federal government to meddle in citizens’ private affairs. It took a constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to prohibit alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol prohibition in 1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize other recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970? Nobody—and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

  Half a million Americans a year went to jail last year for drug-related “crimes” that hurt nobody but themselves, and a vast criminal empire has grown up to service the American demand for drugs. Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the turf wars between the gangs, the police–dealer shootouts, and the daily thousands of muggings and burglaries committed by addicts trying to raise money to pay the hugely inflated prices that prohibition makes inevitable.

  Most users of illegal drugs are not addicts, let alone dangerous criminals. Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and tobacco, would avoid thousands of violent deaths each month and millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive drug use would still take its toll on the vulnerable and unlucky, just as alcohol and tobacco do.

  But what about the innocent children who will be exposed to these drugs if they become freely available throughout society? Nothing that doesn’t happen to them now. There are no cities and few rural areas in the developed world where you cannot buy any illegal drug known to man within half an hour, for an amount of money that can be raised by any enterprising fourteen-year-old.

  Indeed, the supply of really nasty drugs would probably diminish if prohibition ended, because they are mainly a response to the level of risk the dealers must face. (Economist Milton Friedman called it the “Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated that substance becomes—so cocaine gives way to crack cocaine, as beer gave way to moonshine under alcohol prohibition.)

  But there is little chance that American voters will choose to end this longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its casualties far exceed those of any other American war since 1945. The “War on Drugs” will not end in the United States until a very different generation comes to power.

  Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the explanation will then focus on the man who started the war, Richard Nixon—so let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.

  We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on drugs because he believed that they were a Jewish plot. We know this because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug Policy, a Washington-based non-governmental organization, went through the last batch of tapes when they became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking to his aides as follows:

  “You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.”

  Nixon had much more to say about this, but one should not conclude that he was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was an equal-opportunity paranoid who believed that homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were also plotting to undermine America by pushing drugs.

  “Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags … You know what happened to the popes? They were laying the nuns; that’s been going on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual …

  “Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no … You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us.”

  The reason for this thirty-nine-year war, in other words, is that President Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a “Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope” conspiracy, as Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-Latino conspiracy.

  7.

  TERRORISM I

  You will note that I have some difficulty in curbing my contempt for most of the discussions of the “terrorist threat” that have been inflicted on us in the past few years. This is because I remember a time when the military, at least, understood that terrorism is a political strategy, not just “mindless violence,” and that the biggest mistake you can possibly make is to overreact. Doing so is falling into the trap they have laid for you.

  Once upon a time, all of the professional armed forces of the Western world understood that, because they spent the fifties, sixties and seventies fighting various revolutionary movements in the Third World that used terrorism extensively as a tool in their struggle. By the seventies, indeed, all the military staff colleges, where they trained the next generation of senior officers, devoted a large part of the curriculum to guerrilla wars and terrorism. But that generation is gone from the armies now, and so are most of the insights that came at a very high price.

  September 2, 2004

  VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR

  “With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on August 31. “The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable,” repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.

  This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush’s brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely goes unpunished in politics.

  This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure from Mr. Bush’s usual style—“I have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world,” he had claimed as recently as August 30—and his opponents pounced on it at once. “What if President Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?” asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in American history.

  Mr. Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and patriotic lies. “We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win,” he told a veterans’ conference in Nashville on September 1. But it is not “a time of war” for the United States, and it cannot “win.”

  Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial war in Iraq—where there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion—and their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than 1 percent killed per year. As for the three
hundred million Americans at home, exactly as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.

  The rhetoric of a “war on terror” has been useful to the Bush administration, and terrorism now bulks inordinately large in any media where the agenda is set by American perspectives. On the front page of the International Herald Tribune that carried the story on Mr. Bush’s return to political orthodoxy on terrorism, four of the other five stories were also about terrorism: “Twin bus bombs kill 16 in Israel,” “Blast leaves 8 dead in Moscow subway,” “12 Nepal hostages slain in Iraq,” and “French hold hectic talks on captives.”

  In other words, thirty-six of the quarter-million people who died on this planet on August 31 were killed by terrorists: close to one in eight thousand. No wonder the International Herald Tribune headlined its front page “A Deadly Day of Terror,” although it would have been on firmer statistical ground if it had replaced the headline with “A Deadly Day for Swimming” or even “A Deadly Day for Falling Off Ladders.”

  Actually, more than thirty-six people were killed by “terrorists” on August 31—perhaps as many as fifty or sixty. The rest were killed in wars that the United States is not all that interested in: in Nepal, Peru, Burundi and in other out-of-the-way countries, where the local guerrillas are not Muslims and have no imaginable links with the terrorists who attacked the U.S.

  Governments fighting Muslim rebels—such as the Israelis fighting the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories or the Russians fighting the Chechens in Russia—have had more success in tying their local counter-insurgency struggles to the U.S. “war on terror,” and as a result Washington doesn’t criticize their human-rights violations much. But the only terrorists the U.S. government really worries about—and this would be equally true under a Kerry administration—are terrorists who attack Americans. There aren’t that many of them, and they aren’t that dangerous.