(if I were the) King of the Forest

The fact that complexities were over-simplified is part of the format and a necessary evil. However, at the end one of the characters, as a closing remark on the Constitution, read from its preamble. Nice touch – except that they left part of it (many would say the most important part) out. What they read was:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, …. , promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America“.

What was left out, of course, were two of the primary purposes of government, ones which provide the necessary specifics for fulfilling what the Declaration of Independence considered the very reason for government to exist – the protection of individual rights. The missing phrases were:

“… to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, …“.

I fear that in the modern cultural/social/political climate, Mr. Schneier’s plea for more distributed solutions to security problems will, except in the narrowest technical realms where logic and experience generally prevail, fall on deaf ears. Social and political biases of the public aside, our political and cultural leaders benefit from the increased power with which centralized systems endow them, and such systems will continue to be the preferred solutions to most problems which fall, however unproductively, into the political realm.

This sounds to me like a success of ethical government. It sounds to me like a refutation of the clamor we’ve heard for the last six months from the news media and the Democrats that the Bush administration is “in Enron’s pocket”.

Sometimes, it just seems the world has gone mad. At times like those, I write things like this, and hope it makes things better. So far it hasn’t.

I was in the process of preparing this for submission to Newsweek for their ‘My Turn’ section when the attack on the World Trade Center made the topic page one news everywhere. Submitting it suddenly seemed pointless….

Another week, another killing spree, or so it seems.

The issue of gun control seems particularly prone to fuzzy thinking and ill-fitting analogies. Although I generally believe that the solution to gun violence is ethical, not regulatory, and that every freedom we trade for security is a step toward tyranny, I will concede there may be valid arguments for reasonable gun control. I rarely hear them, however.

In a world of boundless resources, where no worthwhile project went undone for lack of funding or attention, we could eliminate arsenic and a host of other environmental poisons to arbitrarily small tolerances with impunity. In the world outside of utopian fiction, however, limited resources must be allocated, and what is used for one thing is unavailable for another….It may be that as a society we conclude that reducing arsenic levels is the best use for those resources, but that conclusion is neither obvious nor unanimous and has nothing to do with science.

Mr. Cohen drew an analogy between ‘youthful’ drunken-driving episodes involving our current president Bush and recent school shootings. His argument –- that we could and should curb shootings by restricting access to guns –- has both merits and pitfalls, but his analogy was wholly inapt.

I have observed over the last few decades a woeful decline in the quality of analogies presented in public debate – and, I would argue, a general decline in the ability of even educated people either to formulate or to evaluate analogies in any context – and it has become one of my pet peeves.

The issue of abortion is once again forming the backdrop for the political show of our election cycle. And, as for the last thirty years, it is the bogeyman in the shadows, obsession of the few, ignored by the many until it is needed by politicians to frighten voters when they seem to be happy with the opposition. Abortion is universally recognized as divisive and intractable, a subject to be used for advantage among partisans but avoided in polite company, a fuse you can light but cannot control.

The case of Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy whose mother drowned trying to get herself and her son to America, illustrated both the sanctimoniousness of the American Left in dismissing concerns about political and economic freedom under socialist governments, and the ineptitude of the American Right in articulating them.

Just as the whole mess was ending, I finally found a short, simple, elegant statement of why I, as so many others, was so angry with Bill Clinton: I detest a smart-ass. Bill Clinton is reckless, cowardly, and arrogant, starting trouble and running away, leaving those who trusted him to clean up the mess and pay for the damage, knowing he can get away with it because he is a smooth talker — and because he is in a position of power. It was distressing to have Bill Clinton as my President; it’s downright galling to have Eddie Haskell.