Inflection Points And Catastrophies
In the mathematical field called differential equations, we can calculate the points when a system changes its behavior. In the field of catastrophe theory, we look for these inflection points because some of them will show us when the system itself will transform into something new, and never be able to go back to its previous form. In politics we don't have the benefit of a mathematical description to guide us.
But we can still look for inflection points and anticipate catastrophe points. In the next 80 days, I am anticipating our political system will hit a catastrophe point and inviting others to look for it as well. I certainly could be wrong. Nevertheless, the next 80 days will be interesting in any case, and looking at events through this perspective will not be a waste of time. We are looking for the point of no confidence by the People in this Administration.
Point Of No Confidence: On or before March 21, 2007
Point Of No Return: When Bush announces a surge of troops in Iraq
The morning of September 11, 2001, I was on the road to my client site when the first airplane hit. I was listening to a tape in my car, so the news did not come to me until I was walking from the elevator to my cube and my wife called on my cell phone to tell me what was happening. I turned the corner and, as I passed the consultant in the cube next to me, he looked up from his screen (with CNN's web page open) in anguish and asked me, "Have you heard?". I said, "Yes, my wife just told me." He shook his head in shock and awe, then asked softly, to no one in particular, "Who could have done this?"
"Osama bin Ladin," was my immediate reply, without pause, as I put my laptop bag on the counter in my cube. He stood up and looked at me over the wall of the cube, a surprised expression on his face, and asked, "Who?".
Catastrophe points are not always this easy to anticipate. Points like this one, however, had been signaling their potential for decades. A politics wonk, I had read the Iran Contra transcripts and watched the hearings, so my first signal was when Ollie North told then Senator Al Gore, in response to a question about why the CIA had paid for an expensive security system around his home, told Senator Gore the system was to protect him against the person he feared the most. When pressed for whom that would be, Ollie replied, "Osama bin Ladin." (UPDATED -- see comments below).
I knew Ollie had flown to Iran with a birthday cake in secret, coordinated with Don Rumfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in Iraq and shadowy meetings with arms dealers/drug dealers all over the world as part of Bill Casey's insane "off-the-shelf, privately-funded covert operations". I knew Carter's support of the mujahadin against the Soviets in Afganistan had been morphed into arms shipments to the Iranian militants, brokered by Israel. I certainly suspected, and still do, that then-candidates Reagan and Bush had made a secret deal with the Iranian hostage takers to move the hostages in October, 1980, so Carter could not pull a last-minute rescue right before the elections. When the hostages were released at the very moment Reagan was sworn in that January, I knew a deal had been made with the devil somewhere on Cheney's "dark side", in any case.
When the first President Bush pardoned his compatriots on Christmas Eve a few years later to bury the news in the holiday black hole for news, I was incensed because no investigation would provide us any more facts from what that deal was and what fruit was growing from that evil. Over the next several years, I looked for more glimpses into that netherworld, and saw it emerge in the first World Trade Center bombing, in the interview with Peter Bergen in which Osama deigned to "declare war" on the United States -- to me, it was arrogance mixed with guerilla public relations meant to elevate him to the status of an adversary to a whole nation when in reality he was just a criminal.
But then I saw the Project For A New American Century manifesto emerge, and the grinding of Saddam Hussein's citizens into the dust and sand of Iraq, "sortie by sortie". I saw more criminal attacks without finding and trying the perpetrators.
By the morning of 9-11, I did not know what would happen, but when it happened I recognized the handiwork. It was obvious the lax and arrogant Administration of this Bush had let a petty criminal attack us, like Timothy McVeigh attacking the children in a day care center to prove his manhood -- a pitiful, evil criminal act by a man whose only avenue to fame was killing the defenseless and innocient. I thought this act would be a simple inflection point. Little did I know our Administration would render it the power to become a catastophe point, completely independent of the efforts of the criminals who committed the act.
A Moment Forgotten Too Soon
Pause for a moment and put yourself in the days of September 11 and the immediate aftermath. As I walked around the floor that day, people were huddled in cubes that had TVs, staring wordless at the images of the towers, listening to the voices of newscasters speculating about how many more planes were out there; about what landmarks would be "taken out" next; voices of fear, faces in shock, awe at evil writ large on the tiny screens.
As the day progressed, new terms entered the lexicon: the New Normal being the most incidious and destructive to our common weal. All airplanes were ordered to the ground (except for all Saudi citizens of any political importance, as we found out later). The towers burned and everyone hoped the firefighters could get people out.
Then a physical catastrophe point became a psychic one: a tower collapsed, smoke and dust laced with toxic chemicals and shards of microscopic glass billowing down New York streets. Rudy Guliani seeking refuge and gaining undeserved immortality. The dawning knowledge those firefighters had died. Images of people jumping to their death, tastefully only glimpsed in mid-air and not hitting the ground. Then the Pentagon hit. Then the doomed Flight 93. Waves of psychic assault, delivered in chaos, inflection points passing in sequence, pumping the system of our world view past more and more limits of belief and despair.
We didn't deserve this, our hearts said. We can't stop this, our heads said. Who did this, we all asked, looking for a shape of logic or reason. Is this a criminal act or the beginning of a war. Even those of us certain we knew who it was were not spared the wider and deeper resonance of that question: What should we do now?
We, as a nation, stood in that balance point. We stood on an inflection point, together, making decisions without enough facts -- the very definition of a catastrophe point. Stand there again, with me now, for a moment. In this place, with information and context we could not have had then, look around and ponder these questions anew. What was possible in that moment? Which ways could we have moved from that inflection point which would not have led to catastrophe? Take a moment, hard as it might be, to see and feel what an inflection point means and where such things can go.
Moments To Remember, For Context
Americans have stood on such points before, many times. Human beings have stood in thousands or millions of these points since the caves. The end of ice ages, the sacking of great cities, the signing of the Magna Carta surrounded by blood and carnage. The birth, and death, of nations and dreams small and large. Closer to us, and within living memory for some of us, are the moments after December 7, 1941, when radio pumped our equation parameters with breaking news from Pearl Harbor. Radio pumped us with Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from London rooftops while bombs fell out of the night, killing randomly and driving fear into hearts there and thousands of miles away.
The assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby, pumping us through the medium of television. The resignation of Johnson, tormented by knowing his decisions based on cooked numbers from the field of battle would mark him for eternity, as long as our civilisation lasts and sustains memory. The panic of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, the weeks of testimony on Watergate and the snapping of Nixon's will and subsequent resignation. The Iranian hostage crisis and the innovation by ABC's Nightline of counting the days every night, holding all of us over the fire and roasting us with despair and cooking Carter's goose.
The artifical relief of Reagan's Morning In America, and the hostages coming home. The evil optimism of his Administration, hiding actions "on the dark side" by puppermasters like Bill Casey, Ollie North and a whole shadow world of our own warriors, forever anonymous. The real optimism of a coupe attempt against Gorbachav dissipated by the Internet; the strikes in Poland; and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The taking of false credit for these inflection points by Reagan and Bush, and their use of that lie to allow military adventures in Granada, Panama and Kuwait while secretly defending pipelines and genocide in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Nigeria and scores of other nations. But we felt good and we had jobs and families and retirement funds to tend.
Now we are being pumped by Internet blogs, television and radio. Together in this blogosphere, we have hoped and despaired and hoped again until the inflection point of the election this last November came over us and gave us hope. Along the way, we have seen the passage of the Patriot Act and its evil children, the cowering of our legislators and the strutting of Administration officials. We have counted the dead of whose coffins' pictures we are not allowed to see. We have hung the leader of another nation through our surrogates and attempted to wash our hands of that act.
We have watched reporters floating in boats in the dark of a bitter night, crying as they hear the pleas of people trapped in attics in a city once great called New Orleans. We have seen a Government unable to help and unwilling to admit mistakes, even in such moments of our common need. We have seen selfishness of other states unwilling to welcome fellow citizens with open arms or spend the money and do the work it really takes to put a city of human beings back on its feet.
In the glow of the moment of the last election, and in the lesser inflection points since, we stand today. In the coming days, we will move off these points and plunge toward others.
If you have lived within any of these inflection points, take a moment to go back now and stand there again. If you know someone else who was there, talk to them and report back what you discover. Talk to each other and be honest with yourself. What were our choices? Which ones did we take? What could or should we have done?
Where are we now?
Taking Command Of These Moments
In this series, we will be counting down to an arbitrary point in time, but over a range of days in which important inflection points will be crossed by all of us, together. Comment on these diaries as both an open thread, for voicing and discussing inflection points we have known or see around us and as a common thread to link to your diaries and blogs and information sources which relate to the memories, ideas and issues we will discuss. Pimp your own work and the work of others without guilt in this diary series' space. I hope to have a thousand eyes watching these inflection points as they pump us toward decisions which will affect the future. Join me in this hope, and in this quest.
I hope for this to be a quest to stand upon the inflection points of our time with eyes wide open, hearts full of hope and minds sifting through "facts" to connect them together in time to make wise decisions together. If the dream of America means anything, it means that citizens of a free nation must choose liberty from among many choices, the wisdom of which will only become obvious in an unknowable future. But wise choices are usually the ones hardest to see and which demand the most tolerance from each of us and deny our immediate lust for vengence and power. If you join me in standing in such moments you have known before, you will find a sense for the wise choices off an inflection point and be able to apply this knowing to the ones upon which we will stand soon.
Stand with me for a moment before 2007 starts in this moment -- before the new Congress convenes, before the President announces his "new strategy for not losing in Iraq" and before politics and news cycles heat up. Let me know what you see. Share your vision with your fellow Kossacks and citizens of the once and future leader for liberty and democracy in the free world on the planet Earth: the United States of America.
See you again in ten days as this Countdown To No Confidence continues. By then the first 100 hours of our new Congress will have passed and a new year will have begun. Let us see where we stand, and where we have stood, between now and then. Be wary. Be wise. Be here now and tell me what you see. This diary series is a thread we can all hold in common because we have the power to make it so, like history itself.
Series introduction: Countdown To No Confidence
Next: T-70: False Doctrines