What have we learned from 911?

Soon after the 9/11 attack, Niall Ferguson wrote a piece in the NYT (Dec 2001) proposing that the event was a marker of certain world trends: 1)international spread of terrorism with its arrival in NYC 2)ECONOMIC contraction of the world economy along with exaggeration of the richer/poorer divide despite efforts at globalization and free trade. He cites the growing wealth inequity across richer and poorer countries as well as the strain of demand on raw materials esp oil as a source of energy and its long term impact on world economy. He specifically cited the dilemma in Saudi Arabia of decreasing prices at the demand of western allies which has contracted the internal economy of the country. 3)The shift from informal to formal imperialism in US foreign policy. He chose to use the term imperialism because he was writing a book comparing US as an imperial power to Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century. 

Ten years later, there have been many reflections on the event. Most are nationalist and self congratulatory about how the US has "survived and prospered" despite 911. And there have been memorials for the slain victims. Fewer are the efforts to evaluate what we have learned in the 10 years since this catastrophe. This reflects the reality that not much has been learned and the destructive effects of the event continue to reverberate through our society. 

 Have we learned to manage our fear of vulnerability? Not very much. The meaningless and ineffective airport screenings continue. Port and highway points of entry are as vulnerable as before. Bin Laden was recently killed, and a great celebration made of the revenge, but it brought no great decrease in anxiety, as "experts" reported that many were ready to take his place as instigators of terrorism, or already have. These experts come, for the most part, from the growing "terror/surveillance industry", the major growth area in the US Economy. Various defense contractors have rushed into the opportunity created by this fear to develop a commercial network of surveillance and analysis of information supposedly making the society safer from terrorism, but certainly enriching themselves and feeding the general fear as a basis for sustaining the industry. The endless pundits who rush to the news media whenever a potential terrorist event is reported are part of their marketing efforts. And it is all paid for by taxpayer dollars. (PBS recently aired a review of this industry based on the work of Washington Post Investigative reporters.) This process is not the agenda of any political party. Torture and rendition occurred in the Clinton administration. It was vastly expanded and confused in the Bush years. And though Obama ran on the commitment to protect Constitutional Rights, no sign of any significant change has occurred in his administration to date. The extent to which individual privacy of the US Citizens has been systematically abridged is, in some ways, more terrifying than the threat of terrorism itself. This encroachment on fundamental liberty both of all US citizens, and especially of Americans of Middle Eastern origins is a long term destructive effect of 911 which shows no sign of correcting and if anything is heading us toward the paranoid world of the Cold War and the McCarthyism of the 1950s (or the more terrifying world of Orwell's 1984). 

 Have we dealt with the potential economic consequences? Coming into 911, the US economy was struggling with the fallout of the "dotcom bust". 911 imposed a second assault to the already weak economy. Measures were taken to help the economy rebuild. We now understand that those measures unrealistically expanded credit and the money supply to temporarily and falsely elevate the capacity of lower middle (and some poverty level) income buyers to contract for mortgages, and then sell the resulting credit, as if it were traditional mortgage investments. In retrospect, an organized system of exploitation of the economic system was developed by financial managers ("wall st") who personally enriched themselves in the process. Some of them understood that this was unsustainable and hedged their companies for protection, while the others, including most major banks, did not, and were caught in a crushing collapse of "toxic asset" capitalization. This was a consciously engineered bubble (Ponzi scheme?). And in the end, the American taxpayer is faced with having to support the de-leveraging of this fiasco, while the engineers of the process have walked off with rewards of hundreds of millions (to billions) of personal fortunes. The recent housing based economic crisis is, in part, a direct consequence of 911 along with the long term structural contractions of the US economy, roughly termed "globalization". Before 911, the developed nations were able to exploit their economic advantages over the under-developed or "developing" world. The inequities of the "north-south" economic disparities were in transition in the decade before 911. With "globalization" in developed countries, the lower tier of the labor market and middle tier of white collar labor was and is being devalued down to a level of world wide labor costs. At the same time, in underdeveloped regions like China and India there is substantial improvement in the economic position compared to the developed countries, and some in other developing nations as well. This is a shift of economic activity and benefits across borders, but in developed countries it is felt as a contraction. One would expect that this would lead to terrorism in these countries, and may eventually do so, but in the meantime we have the classic rebellion of rising expectations: namely, middle classes in developing countries recognize how much better off they would be without the impositions of the G8 and this is a major feeder for terrorist activities. 

The source in fundamental Islam would suggest that the fighters are opposed to all economic development or change. But the recruits are drawn from mostly middle class youth in countries with dictatorial rule and economic stasis. The US focus on tracking down a few terrorist leaders completely misses the problem of rising expectations and economic instability, with the result that the "Arab Spring" has undermined most US allies in the region. All those who preached NAFTA and etc are now reaping the whirlwind of rapid and unstable economic changes. The US response to this is fundamentally wrong. The fundamental issues of north/south economics must be prioritized, instead of concentrating on a hardline imperialist approach. 

 We will never know how much 911 was a reaction to US attempts to dominate the oil production of the Middle East. But the US reaction to 911was an invasion and attempt to secure the control of Iraq's oil production, and prevent a Russian pipeline through Afghanistan, which are a matter of public record. After two wars and a failed effort to recover from the economic changes occurring across the world, the US is in a much worse position economically than before 911. Nothing has been learned here either. 

 How has the US position as a world leader fared? At the time of 911, the US supposed itself to be the new Roman Empire. A NYT magazine cover even headlined this. ("Pax Americana"). We had "won" the first Gulf war almost without a fight, against the supposed greatest army in the middle East. (No matter that they failed to sustain in a recent war against Iran, which we helped support.) English was the commanding language of business and culture across the internet and around the world. US culture in the form of exported media was in great demand and copied or pirated everywhere. Then in 911, a dramatic reversal: The US is vulnerable to using its own technology against it! The US could counterattack the safety zone of the attackers, but not control the complex ground wars of irregular combatants in either country. It is sinking toward another "military Vietnam" now in two countries, and that, despite even more high tech tools of war. US has become fearful and defensive of others coming to study in its universities and working in its country. 

 And it is confused about its alliances, turning its back on old alliances with Europeans, to favor a "coalition of the willing", ie mostly minor nations who curried favor with the US by symbolic support of its military efforts. Rather than the Roman empire, the US is becoming more like the ineffectual Chinese empire before its collapse before barbarian invaders. We have not learned important lessons from 911 about tempering our role in world affairs and how to make ourselves safer by our alliances. The culmination of this error emerged in the Spring of this year, when the "Arab Spring" resulted in popular rebellions in many of the Middle Eastern countries whose dictatorships we had been supporting in the supposition that they would be our best allies in the war against terrorism. Dictators who feared rebellion in their own countries. Did no one in the State Department remember the Shah of Iran? In the words of the great political theorist, Yogi Berra: "its deja vu all over again." No use crying over spilt milk. We have flubbed many chances to learn from 911 in the past 10 years but must recover and move on. 

 Each of these areas offers something to learn from 911: 1) our fear of terrorism cannot be managed by expanding the surveillance of our citizens and creating a loss of civil rights in the name of security. This only leads to a paranoid society that eventually distrusts its government and rebels! The country must be reunited and committed to the MUTUAL TASK of making the country safe. Not delegating it to some supposed agency in Washington spending billions on who knows what. 2) The power and stability of our country depends on its economic stability. This means that "welfare to work" must be instituted in meaningful form. During the 1930s some of the major achievements of our society, including the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge were built. Maybe we do not need to build physical edifices, but we need to find ways to employ our citizens to improve our infrastructure while it is affordable to do so. There will be a lot fewer robbers in prison if they are working to rebuild the society in some way before they ever get to prison. (Prisons, after all, are a particularly inefficient, socially destructive, and expensive form of welfare.) 3) The US must learn from its recent diplomatic and military fiascos that being the most powerful country in the world DOES NOT MEAN that you are entitled to tell every other country what they should do for you. Diplomacy did not change to dominance because we were attacked on 911. And our failures in diplomacy are making another attack more likely. At the end of the Cold War, the US viewed itself as a Superpower antagonist. And in policy Washington continues to look for its opponent (missing) Superpower enemy, instead of developing a new and more relevant international identity.

DISCOVERY OF CA: FIRST VISIT TO THE DESERT (REDUX 3/8/2011)

     We are in a little cinder block room in a motel on the edge of Joshua tree.  We look out onto sandy desert for miles and in the distance the mountains of the park.  The trip so far has been a great adventure.  We drove out  to an old citrus grove that has been made into a state park near Riverside  in an area that used to be entirely in citrus fruit. The acreage  has gone down substantially to make room for more people, but the total acreage, according to our guide at the park, has gone up in CA mostly in the inland valley farther north. 80% of CA crop was eating fruit as opposed to FLA which is almost all juice oranges. I think this may be the moisture etc, but the main significance for me is that it was necessary to be more careful about fruit quality out here. Also shipping eating fruit is more difficult and it seems that much less is shipped east now. Having navels more of the time is one of the nice benefits of living out here. The experience of the park was seeing what rows of orange trees look like.  These groves were owned by landholders who lived on them in nice homes surrounded by citrus trees.  All the planting,  maintenance,  watering, and harvesting were managed by a farming company,  who took the larger % of the sales and the smaller went to the landholder.  This was the typical way of financing the groves throughout Orange County and east to Riverside.  Most of the landholders were retirees from the midwest.  The park itself had little else, the owners house was still there but not open to tourists.
     On the way there we stopped in Redlands. It is a small town in the "inland empire" on the edge of the San Gabriel Mtns, which was a wealthy residential area at the turn of the century. Kimberly Crest is a small mansion in Redlands and a pleasant short tour. I had expected a place something like the mansions in Pasadena but it was much less:   a nice frame Victorian on a hill looking out at Mt Baldy with a snow cap. At 5 bedrooms or so, it was not big, and had been owned by the head of Kimberly Clark when he retired from the company. Why he didn't build a bigger place or live in Pasadena we didn't hear and didn't feel comfortable asking the tour guide! Their daughter's husband died early in their marriage and the daughter lived there the rest of her life and became involved in the local women's college Scripps and was briefly the interim president.  And she had been a Smithie! So J was quite pleased with the discovery.
     The house did have all sorts of gaming stuff, etc, and despite the elegant downstairs furnishings, which suggested parties and social activities, there was a 50s TV, and a 40s radio between the bedrooms on the second floor and it appeared that this was the main center of family life! It gives a sense of the formality and isolation of the society in this region. Not truly rural for it had roads, railroads, etc, but still very isolated from the rest of the cultural world.  Then we drove back to Riverside and checked into the Mission Inn which lived up to its rep!  It is an old rambling set of buildings, originally a small hotel done in Mission Style Spanish Colonial style to capitalize on the popularity of a Spanish revival in the teens created by the book Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. No one in the gift shop had heard of Ramona and the annual staging of a pageant play is done in Hemet, which is quite a distance away.   The hotel was filled with quirky details: a carillon that played every hour with a mechanical set of moving figurines European style, large patios one of which was decorated in the appearance of a Church exterior (though I dont think there was really a space inside for a service though I think weddings are held there).  There is a wall of Mexican style beaten copper "wings" to honor famous airmen of the 20s to 40s who had stayed there and a long list of presidents and celebrities who had stayed there, too. The "President's lounge" is a bar with a big picture of Nixon since he had supposedly was married there, and it seemed like the place a couple from Whittier would think was a "really swell place" to get married.   Dinner in the Mission Inn Restaurant was an average overpriced meal served at tables outdoors in a courtyard that was surrounded by Spanish style walls with handing twinkling "star lights".  It was movie set surreal! But fun. We had a large nice room off the courtyard that was great.
     Saturday we drove around Riverside. We were staying in a main downtown tourist strip which included a River park and a large building, The Ca Museum of Photog, which had modest show of contemporary photographers and is owned and run by UC Riverside. It has an adjoining art gallery which had a conceptual art show, and seemed also to be under the direction of UC Riverside too. The main town is maybe 20 by 50 streets on the east side of the 91. It is backed by a hill and there is another small residential town beyond that, and of course the town is set beside the Santa Ana River.  There are large mountains in the distance, the San Bernardinos that form a backdrop to the city.
We wanted to see UC Riverside and finding it was a trick. It is on the other side of the 91, set against a 2000 or so foot mountain, and very sprawling.  There does seem to be a central campus, but surrounding it are bunches of apartments and most of the students live in these instead of dorms (saving the state the cost of the dorm real estate in the construction and maintenance) and diffusing the campus. Close to the main campus is the typical student centered shopping mall, also recently built, and looking like any typical CA mall. Spreading out from the campus toward the road was an increasingly low income neighborhood and it seemed that the town had gone to great pains to isolate itself from the students. There was not a sense of a close integrated campus, which J said was also typical of Irvine, another recently build campus. Building new university settings in contemporary real estate markets must be economically challenging for the state, and it must depend on land gifts for it to be possible. And these are not going to be the most valuable land!
    Then on to Palm Springs. The first stop was at the dates store in Cabazon just before the outlets. We bought some dates, though the fruit quality was mixed. We also had our first "date shake" a combo of vanilla ice cream and blended dates which is a gastronomic marker of coming out to the desert for Californians of the last generation. (We had bought a bag of cara cara oranges in a stand near the orange grove park, and are starting to get the feeling for eating off the land as you travel in CA!) We went into the outlets in the morning and got a wedding gift, and some stuff for ourselves, another ritual of the traveling Californian. The malls are built on Indian land and a big moneymaker for them,  along with the casino down the road.  It was hotter than I expected it would be! It would be hard to do much out here but shop in AC malls!
    Then we drove on to Palm Springs itself which is about 20 minutes east of the Cabazon outlet malls. First stop was the art museum there. It is a small building will several small collections mostly contemporary stuff, and  a large exhibition show gallery which had a show of Baldessari's prints which capture a lot of his verbal/conceptual art, which has become a major element of contemporary art. It was a good show for illustrating the range of his ways of viewing the world, and of using materials of contemporary media. He was born and worked entirely in CA and is a true native spirit in many senses. Along with Ruscha he is a major CA art figure. It gave me a better appreciation of that approach, cf also Heinecken, along with a sense of why this would be central to CA: it comments directly on the consumer marketing culture of this place.  A visit to Moorten's cactus gardens after lunch proved to be a bust. An old house with a yard filled with cactus plants that someone had lovingly collected and organized many years ago, but which had gone to seed and not been well maintained in the subsequent years and was now a minor tourist attraction. Parking on the street! Oh well. This is the other side of tourist CA: little oddities that were the inspiration for someone or other wanting to turn their hobby into an income producer. In this case, it was a botanist with a special interest in cactus who went about collecting them and keeping examples in his front yard.
    The drive out of Palm Springs on the 62 goes up a dramatic hill to begin the climb to the high desert.  29 Palms Inn is a jumble of small cabins mainly duplexes at the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park. There is some scruffy development around the area that supports a giant marine base further east (inland). The hotel had a small restaurant next to the pool,  with white table cloths that tried to be upscale but really couldn't manage, and a singer and trumpet player "band" for Saturday night which appeared to be the major local entertainment.  It was pretty crowded with folks with short haircuts who looked to be out of the base.  We went back to our little room and played cards for a while and then watched part of SOMETHINGS GOTTA GIVE on TV. (It does have great comic timing, and great dialog. And it is the most annoying middle-aged-woman centric viewpoint, which J loved.)
   Sunrise in the desert is beautiful even in this scruffy little enclave.  And the air is clean and pure. After breakfast at the place which was ample and free, we drove into the park and soon saw the main feature of the northwest end: giant boulder piles and the Joshua Trees. A 20 minute drive on park roads to Hidden Valley offers an easy trail through the rocks that J and I could do and both enjoyed the incredible variation in boulder formations. Meanwhile groups of rock climbers were up on the rocks trying to get some climbing experience. This is prime country for them because the rock is all granite. We drove past a series of great rock formations and an array of large joshua trees. There wasnt much blooming in this northern/western part. Too early for that. Then on to Key's View: a drive to lookout that gives you a wide view of the coachella valley, Mt San Jancinto, etc. The wind was blowing at least 30 mph and it was dramatic. You can see the San Andreas fault line clearly across the valley. (This created the park effects by causing granitic rock to form, creating the two opposing mountain lines and then opening the space for the granitic rock to break through.) Then on to White Tank, more boulders,  and a small rock arch on a short trail, and sat to eat lunch on some rocks. By now the wind was quite strong 10-15 mph even down on the plain, though it was warm and I wasn't feeling cold. The Northern Western side has an array of these strange trees, in the Yucca family, which sprout odd angled leaf groups and blossoms on jagged branches. They are like nothing else you can imagine in a tree. There is a modest ground cover of cacti, etc, but the rest is mostly rock and desert dirt. There is about an hour and a half drive down to the South Eastern side which goes through a cactus forest and extensive low desert with broad views of mountains in the distance.  There are lots of off road trails for driving and hiking.  That will be another time.  We came out at the level of the Salton Sea! A place to check out next time too.  It was a short but sweet visit to the park.
    We rode back on the 10 to Palm Springs to find our motel for the night: Ingleside Inn. This is a 1950s motel (that is probably from the 50s) in the heart of "old Palm Springs" up against the mountains and a stream. The room looked like the classic 50s motel room that someone from MAD MEN in CA would take his secretary or girlfriend to for the afternoon. The old bellman and woman at the desk seemed the type to ask no questions and the cars out front were all very fancy! Dinner was at Melvyns which is part of the motel and has a faux fancy tone with a formal maitre d' despite the small size of the restaurant. It was a totally faux.. experience! And we were the youngest people in the place except for a couple that came in who did not appear to be a "real couple".
     Palm Springs grew beyond a minor desert stopover to a fancy residential location in the 50s when Hollywood stars moved here to get away from the hustle and air pollution and enjoy the warmer Winters. Beyond that it had no real reason to develop but the housing market boom developed it anyway! Retirement homes and second homes and timeshares for golfers in the Winter and Desert fanciers were built almost willy-nilly as part of the great CA real estate boom of the 60s-80s. PS and environs illustrates one challenge of the CA economy. You gather a mass of people, with limited economic productivity except for serving each other. This provides a sustainable but not a growing economy. So you must find some other basis for growth. The first answer is to invite tourists to enjoy the splendid climate or whatever the region claims. Even a new convention center might be the basis. Then you do new construction for the people who will want to have second homes or move here. Then after all the real estate boom subsides, you realize there is not enough economic activity to sustain the  construction, and the developers move on and leave a declining economic shell for a series of "hermit crab" people to occupy.  In 20 or 30 years the area may sustain and develop a core community.  If not, it becomes one of the many ghost towns in the West that grew up around a boom of gold or water or something, and then dried up, leaving the empty buildings behind.  And that is what we see in most of PS: empty buildings and old tourist accomodations.
     The next stop on this adventure was Idyllwild. This is a little town at 8000 feet, almost on the peak of Mt San Jacinto (13000). The plan was to do the tramway first to get to the North side of the mountain and views, but we decided to go straight to Idyllwild and skip the tramway, both because J is deathly afraid of the tramway, and it was windy and might not even be running (actually it is probably pretty well screened in that valley).  It didnt make much sense to ride up, take a brief walk, ride down and then drive up all over again. This was a good decision because the ride up takes a while and would not have been good in the sunset or dark. Also, it was so cloud covered and rainy that we wouldn't have seen much from the tramway.
   The road up to Idyllwild is one of those CALTRANS miracle roads that skirts the edge of the lower mountain and has some excellent views of the valley on the way.  It is a twisty turning affair, made worse by wind gusts that kept me focused the whole way up.  It plateaus at about 3500 feet and there are a bunch of horse farms. Then you cut off on a second road that goes up to Idyllwild. This is a scrubby little western town, just a bunch of wooden cabins,  and a few stores plus a long row of b & bs to stay. It connects to the walking trails of the state park and on to Mt San Jacinto but it would be a very long way to the top, the faster by far to go by the tramway.  A lot of the peaks in the state are set up for day hike pitches. (Whitney usually takes two days with a camp over.) This is to minimize the need for mountain camping with its special equipment needs, its littering, and excess physical demands on the hiker. The tram makes this possible on Mt San J.
    The town was in fog, with residual snow from a 24" dusting last week. it was the first snow I had seen in a year and the first really cold damp weather. The contrast from being in the desert the day before to being on a pine clad mountain top was amazing. (The road is called the Palms to Pines highway.)  We checked in early at the b&b which was a wood clapboard affair but pleasant. There dont seem to be any marketing chains up here: too remote. We had lunch at one recommended spot: Cafe Aroma: a funky food joint that was loaded with locals. Then came back to the room. The walk was a strain at 8000 feet with no adaptation time! Then a nap, and dinner at Mountain House: a couple run this from Riverside an hour and half drive away. Good food simply prepared. Nice wine.  And we had made a reservation but were the only people in the place on Sunday night!  The quality was much better than Melvyn's but simpler too.
     This was the end of the adventure.  The next day we did the descent down to Hemet and back to the freeways and home.  A quick tour of the various adventures of the desert and lots to come back to.