Anonymous Issues

The voice of Dr. Donald Kerr, Principle Deputy Director of National Intelligence, was intercepted recently speaking to a gathering of muckety mucks at an intel symposium held somewhere in the bowels of San Antone, Texas. The knees of some of the more aggressive liberals in the land instantly jerked in harmonic response to an excerpt of his prepared remarks regarding modern anonymity.

“Too often, anonymity is equated with privacy…Anonymity, or at least the appearance of anonymity, is quickly becoming a thing of the past…protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won.”

Ehh…it’s sorta hard to conjure up what the Doc is talking about. Most of the turkey hunters around these parts like to think they disappear when they don their cammy’s in the woods and, well, if you tell ‘em there’s a fight they can’t win then you better stand back because fisticuffs will most likely ensue.

But then, just to stir up even more confusion, Dr. Kerr finished it off with the following bit of wisdom:

“I think people here, at least people close to my age, recognize that those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all. It’s a need to have it be adjustable to the needs of local societies as they evolve in our country. Eventually, we can only hope that people’s perceptions – in Hollywood and elsewhere – will catch up.”

Let’s see, now, that statement should be perfectly understandable to everyone here. People’s perceptions, in Hollywood and elsewhere, need to catch up to…ahhh…catch up with….err-umm…maybe, oh, catch up to the perceptions of the G-man’s perception of what the young folks are thinking.

No, most likely the Doc was trying to say that all confounding and opposing concepts of essential privacy will soon merge into one humongous, new and undeniable perception that spreads across “local societies” like a plague of indiscriminate locusts.

Yeppir. Uh-huh.

Well, rather than relying on an idiot who cuts and pastes little bits of speeches somewhat randomly, to fully gather the context of Dr. Kerr’s remarks, you may need to read the complete text of his talk here.

Some may be relieved to read all of his speech. You may find that his emphasis on the difficult balance of safety and privacy is not nearly as scary as some of the more aggressive among us might suggest.

It’s hard to deny that anonymity is not a factor in our everyday lives. We traded off anonymity, if we ever had it, for something else a long time ago. Once, there was only the paper trails of P.O. boxes, personal checks and credits cards, the antique can of worms which delayed the unfolding of hidden identities and which only true professionals could untangle. Today, with every link, every purchase, every cell phone call, every text message, with every word typed pointlessly and needlessly in every medium, the anonymity of your average American dolt is unveiled forever and it doesn’t necessarily take a G-man to figure that out.

Of course, personal identities are easier to figure out if you are a G-man. Cutting out most of the red tape, a simple signing statement from the Big Guy will expeditiously do the trick.

But even if you’re just a mild mannered CEO, all it takes today is a timely subpoena from your well-paid legal department to get phone company or internet service provider executives shaking in their boots, turning over private membership records and subscription details, ratting out the disgruntled employees, dangerous Libertarians and annoyingly unnamed whistle blowers of the world quicker than you can say, “I didn’t do it, man!”

Taking that object, economical lesson a step further, it seems our CEO’s and Superstars don’t need or want anonymity so why should we little people cry about it? (Really, if they want that, they can take it to the Caymans or Austria or some other UnAmerican place where it belongs, right?) So what makes us so special? Can you imagine if we could all count on a certain degree of anonymity…what the hell would we say?

Some might recollect openly on what privacy once meant in this nation. Some might say without anonymity some good calls might have never been made and some good stories might have never been told.

Then again, based on our history, others might wax on about how old notions of anonymity were rarely bueno anyway. Perhaps the only ones who ever truly enjoyed all the benefits of anonymity were communists, gangster-types, hooded bigots and their legion of innocent victims. Today, sifting through everybody’s trash is the only proper way to ensure the evil doers, wing-nuts and whack jobs will ever be removed from the gene pool and anonymity has naturally evolved into the Dodo bird of personal privacy.

Maybe we didn’t need anonymity amongst our neighbors if we did have it. Hey, the vast majority of us law-abiding citizens who humbly exist somewhere below the CEO/Professional Athlete strata still have nothing to hide and nothing to fear but fear itself. But, Dog, if you ever believed that all Americans once enjoyed that small comfort of individual confidentiality known as the right to anonymity, be advised that they don’t anymore.

That’s really the drift here. How much privacy are we willing to trade for safety? This is the honest, open debate that we need to have in this country. Like Dr. Kerr says, we don’t need to hold back any longer. We can see where this is going. We know everything we need to know about the subject right now and we have no reason to be afraid of speaking privately among ourselves about this. We don’t need to wait for G-men, self-righteous talking heads, Hollywood brow-beaters or our nation’s attention-starved teenagers to show us precisely what essential privacy means to all of us.

But, umm, correct me if I’m wrong, that seems to be exactly what we are doing...makes you wonder why, doesn't it?

Cheers,

Anon

All Together

World War I started in July, 1914, after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

At that time Paul W. Tibbets Jr. was not yet alive. He was born seven months later on February 23, 1915 in Quincy, Illinois.

When Paul was still three years old, an armistice was signed which ceased hostilities between Germany and the Allied powers on the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918.

The Treaty of Versaille, officially ending World War I, was signed on June 28, 1919, when little Paul was just over four years old.

Before Paul was five, before he knew what it really meant, American President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with these words:

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”

WWI was so huge that it was romantically considered “the Great War” to some, optimistically thought of as “the War to End All Wars” by others.

Reflecting the relieved mood of a grateful nation, a site for the Liberty Memorial was dedicated in Kansas City, Missouri in 1921. Today, that towering downtown monument with eternal flame also holds the National World War I Museum. The monument is inscribed with these words:

“In honor of those who served in the world war in defense of liberty and our country.”

With typical speed and after-the-fact thoughtfulness, the U.S. Congress officially recognized the end of WWI by passing a resolution in 1926 which invited everyone to honor and remember November 11^th.

By then, Paul Tibbets Jr. was 11 years old.

In 1937, at the age of 22, Tibbets enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. That same year, Japan’s Imperial Army invaded mainland China, bombed Shanghai and raped Nanjing.

When 2^nd Lt. Tibbets turned 23, Congress happily passed 52 Stat., 5 U.S. Code, Sec. 87a in 1938, which made November 11 a legal holiday, a day called Armistice Day dedicated to the celebration of world peace.

A year later in 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

By 1940, Germany had acquired Denmark and Norway, was engaged in North Africa and across the Mediterranean, and had already initiated the air battle over Britain. Japan had spread across China and attacked into Southeast Asia.

While Germany turned its attention to the Russian Front, advancing Japanese forces caught Pearl Harbor off guard on December 7, 1941.

By then, 26 year old Paul W. Tibbets Jr. was known as one of the finest bomber pilots in the U.S Eighth Air Force. He was in the lead on the first bombing raids over Europe.

About four hard years later, the Germans surrendered to the Allies in May, 1945.

The then 30 year old Colonel Tibbets piloted a shiny B-29 named after his mother, Enola Gay, from tiny Tinian Island in the Pacific. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay with Tibbets in the pilot seat dropped a 500 pound bomb christened Little Boy which brutally flattened Hiroshima, Japan. The estimated death toll from that single bombing attack is still debated but no denying this devastating first military use of a nuclear weapon razed the entire city, instantly vaporized several tens of thousands of the lucky, and painfully maimed a few tens of thousands more.

Two days later, the Russian Army attacked Japanese positions in Manchuria. The next day, on August 9, 1945, the Fat Boy nuclear bomb destroyed Nagasaki, Japan.

The Japanese surrendered on August 15 and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on September 2, 1945.

World War II was over before Paul Tibbets Jr. turned 31 and he’d had a hand in it.

On June 1, 1954, when Tibbets was 39, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 380 renaming Armistice Day as Veterans Day, in honor of all American veterans of all American wars.

In 1966, at the age of 51, Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets Jr. retired from the U.S. Air Force. During his nearly 30 years of service he had been rated as a Command Pilot and earned military awards including the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross (which is only awarded for acts subsequent to November 11, 1918), the Air Medal and the Purple Heart.

Tibbets reportedly remarked later in life that he had no regrets about his historic mission over Hiroshima in 1945 and that he “slept fine at night” in spite of the horrific loss of life as a result of that single attack.

He may have been confident in the way he completed all of his duties yet he was dogged by that lone act for all his remaining days. He may have truly believed he was just doing his job well, a job that ultimately prevented even greater tragedy, but other people saw him differently. He was singled out not in the least because he was the first to employ a nuclear weapon. Wild rumors about his sanity chased him. Pointed accusations, confounding historical revisions and “damn big insults” were traded back and forth around him for years.

A week ago, on the first day of the 11^th month in the year 2007, his trail ended. At that age of 92, retired Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets Jr. died at his home in Columbus, Ohio.

According to family and friends, Tibbets requested his remains be cremated. He asked for no public funeral ceremony. He wanted no headstone and declined any monument to his life or any further recognition of his service to our nation. He wished for no gravesite to become a rallying point for war protestors or anti-nuclear activists. As secure as he was with his legacy, he knew others were not. So he made his final sacrifice, that being his right to even a common burial.

Fortunately, Paul Tibbets Jr. doesn’t need a grave or a headstone. He has his day, instead.

Veterans Day: A celebration to honor America’s veterans for their patriotism, love of country and willingness to serve and sacrifice for the common good.

For America’s veterans…remember all of them…all of us.

Cheers,
Mb

The Big Dip

Yes, I like Hitchens’ writing. But I refuse to buy his book. I’ve read what free excerpts I can find on the net, followed his debates and have self-righteously concluded that if his theme is so understandable and personally heart-felt, then he needn’t write a book about it or hold public debates. It smells like selling out to the man to me. I’ll read it entirely someday later, I suppose.

That said, I do think he hit a nerve.

That throbbing nerve has two shared branches. One end points to religion as the cause of or at least an abetting culprit to all humanity’s grinding turmoil. The other points to a kind of American Rebel angle on the Golden Rule: Believe what you want, but please leave me and my children alone.

I read the Freud versus C.S. Lewis series compliments of the Padre a couple years ago. Lewis, like Anthony Flew, had one of those “it must be” moments on a public bus near Oxford or someplace and it changed his views forever. Freud presumably remained in disbelief until his ego disappeared from this earth. I found neither man very compelling.

And I agree with you precisely, again, that a thinking person’s disappointment is always at the end of this story no matter how it’s told. What we’ve laid out among our lives seems like the perfect agnostic argument. As you can tell, I’ve searched long and hard for something to replace my agnostic ways…guess I’ll just have to wait a while longer.

But all of that has had me thinking this past week about God in the same way that I think about something we call luck.

Of course, I can’t just say that luck exists although I know many people want to believe it is real along with their beloved ghosts, leprechauns, ET and Big Foot. Still, I sense in this empirical world that good fortune is a 50-50 kind of deal. Half the time it seems people make their own luck and the other half of the time it seems there is no reasonable excuse for it. That statistic curiously reassures me that even Plato was wrong to call Reason our highest savior.

When pressed, I’ve known nearly as many people who would turn down a healthy dose of good luck as I’ve known true Communists or Christians. That is to say, I have known none. I know a lot of people who like to say, “I’d rather be lucky than good” but I admit I’ve never really understood what the hell they mean by that and I rarely ask for expansion. Any argument about it is pointless. I am forever at a loss to determine who wins and who loses when it comes to luck or God.

Bringing it up to date, this week saw the two best teams in the NFL playing against each other. The incessant hype of this game, like that of luck and God, was such a waste. I felt all along that as football fans we should just keep our mouth shut on this one. Only the players had any business getting in the middle of it. When the sports channels came to the point in the show when they were forced to say something about this game, they should have just shown a picture of the two corporate-funded mascots and breathed a pregnant, heavy sigh. I won’t even mention the teams’ names now. You know damn well who I am talking about. If there was a regular season game that should have been left alone to stand on its own merit, perhaps in the last 5 or 10 years, then this was the game. In the end, when the smoke cleared, we could all then tally up the scorecard and argue about luck versus talent and human skill versus God’s will.

Rather than during a ride on the public bus, these thoughts all came cascading down on me Sunday afternoon as I watched the vaunted Packers defeat the lowly Chiefs.

I was standing in a crowded little tavern in the blood red heart of Chief’s Nation among a horde of cheese-eating, sausage-grilling, beer-swilling, obnoxious yellow and greenies as Favre worked his magic once again. There were side-bets galore, the man-made arbitration of blind luck versus an all-knowing God if you will, and I sheepishly admit I personally contributed a case of ice cold Bud Light to the contest, but most significant to me was the Vegas-like showdown between a man named Stroke and a man named Earl.

Stroke, 55-ish, works as a grounds laborer for the county and originally hails from some small town near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A simple, single man, he has little to show of his life other than a quick wit and an endless smile. But his pride in the Pack also knows no bounds and he saw fit to bring along a posse of like-minded thinkers with him to watch the game at the tavern. This unquenchable crowd invaded the tavern in a way that for a moment I thought they might actually drink it dry.

(I knew this would happen. I was forewarned. As everyone knows, I typically do not observe The Game with others as I tend to get irritated by obvious inattention to the details. But I made a notable exception in this case.)

Earl, 75-ish, is a revered man among children. Married several times over, he now is known to commute often with a not a few different fair ladies in the town. He is leathery, lean, and fearless to a fault. When asked what contributes to his longevity, he will demurely reply that he made a few wise investments when he was younger. I have witnessed him ride his motorcycle in the fiercest weather, under the most dangerous road conditions. I once joined him and his oldest son for another drinking contest deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The bet that night was that the first man to give in and use the facilities would pay the bar tab. Many hours later, I stumbled down a dark dirt road back to camp beside the ramrod winner, my shallow pockets emptied by the old man’s stamina and pain-defying persistence.

To me, Earl is like a Zorba of the Midwest.

“Earl,” growled Stroke before the game began, “is your oldest son’s backyard pool still uncovered?”

“Why, yes, Stroke, I do believe it is,” replied Earl smoothly.

“Well, then, Earl, I’ll bet you a dip in the pool after the game that the Pack wins.”

With little apparent hesitation, Earl answered, “Stroke, you’re on!”

The crowded tavern heaved and shivered as we looked out on the blustery autumn street, dried leaves blowing in the gusty wind towards a pool of nearby water which surely registered a temperature near the middle 40’s.

Towards the end of the battle, as Favre plunged for the kill, Stroke sat at the bar laughing loudly to himself, clutching a mug of warm beer in one hand while numbly stuffing his mouth with maraschino cherries from a grain-alcohol laced jar, the meaty fingers of his other hand stained and dripping with a vile pink juice.

No sooner than Favre’s business had ended, a giddy throng of gabbing drunks gathered themselves and marched two blocks to the house of Earl’s son. With no kind announcement of our arrival, we barged in through the front door, past the silent big screen tv and the coffee table covered with chips and dip. We poured through the kitchen and into the back yard where we circled the frigid-looking pool of anticipation. A couple of thoughtful cheeseheads dragged an inebriated Stroke from out of the crowd and held his head up so he could maybe focus better on the honest culmination of a wager. Always a quick study himself, Earl’s son picked up a long-handled net and scooped out some of the pesky floating leaves from the water’s surface, careful to not make any waves. Earl’s daughter in law stood cautiously in the kitchen doorway, clutching her bare arms around her middle and trembling at the sudden cool breeze which just blew so rudely through her home.

As the drunken natives bounced in rhythm and chanted his name for all to hear, Earl quickly stripped to his skivvies and took his position on the diving board. He beat his hairy chest like a wild ape, took a short step back then raced forward to the edge where a young man’s daring soul catapulted a 75 year old body high into the air above the chilly water.

It was at that frozen moment in time that my mind—ha!—a wandering thought that now I think one day may just come back to haunt the dreams of this week’s latest proud victors—my mind caught a glimpse of the beaming smile on Earl’s worn face as he dove majestically into the icy pool and a cold confidence splashed in my direction, speaking bold words so clear to me then…

“Sometimes, little boy, losers are luckier than winners after all.”

Cheers,
Mb