In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

• I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
• I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.

Good morning.

I’m going to break one of the cardinal rules of rhetoric and confess to the trepidation I felt in giving this speech. Or not in giving it — because, as anyone can tell you, I certainly like to talk, especially when the listener can’t talk back. But writing it gave me pause. Sometimes the only thing harder than doing a thing is doing it again. As Mr. Evans is wont to tell me, something cannot be considered “annual” until it happens the second time a year later. So in a sense, it is this speech that is intended to inaugurate an annual tradition of speeches by the holder of the Distinguished Faculty Chair.

For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the subtext here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

The solemnity of the occasion, perhaps, calls for something weightier — something at once soaring and deep, an exposition on the human soul and our never-ending quest for meaning. But having explored last year the very future of humankind, I found myself somewhat at a loss. When you’ve begun by debating the survivability of the species, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of places left to go.

Considering the date on which we meet, it might be considered by some to be a propos to discourse on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The wrenching events of our time demand that we engage with them, wrestle them to the ground, demand meaning from them. On this subject there will be no shortage today of chattering on the airwaves and nattering in the papers. No one needs one more voice thrown into that cacophony. A native son of New York, I still contemplate the skyline with clenched jaw and clenched fist. It has been six years, and there is still a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. And I find I am not ready to talk about that yet.

Instead, I’m going to talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors. In case you’ve forgotten, Rock, Paper, Scissors is a method of decision between two people, wherein each secretly picks one of the items and they compare. The key bit is that each item ties with itself, loses to one item, and beats the other. The traditional phrasing is, “Rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock”. It’s that last one I want to focus on. Paper covers rock? What the heck does that mean? How is that a win?

{Transition needed.}

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit the national Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Commemorating a naval attack, it is fittingly primarily a naval monument. The two great anchors of the monument are the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri. The Arizona was a battleship sunk during the Pearl Harbor attacks. Though most of the Pacific Fleet was refloated and rebuilt in the years following the attack, the Arizona could not be salvaged or moved. It sits at the bottom of what was once Battleship Row. The Navy operates a tender from shore to the stark elegant observation station that has been constructed above the wreck. From it you can look down on the coral-encrusted hulk of the Arizona, watery tomb for the majority of the servicemen killed that day.

The Missouri was BB-63, the last battleship ever constructed by the United States. Now a museum ship docked at Pearl Harbor, the Missouri is still an intimidating sight. Towering over the shoreline, she bears three turrets each with three 16-inch guns capable of throwing an explosive shell a distance of 20 miles and landing within a circle of radius six inches. The Missouri was a great and terrible engine of war, and everything in her design speaks to the awesome destructive powers that could be marshaled by an enraged industrial democracy. But standing on her deck, I found the most stirring and moving part was not her giant main guns, or the anti-aircraft machine guns still deployed on the side, nor even the capped tubes wherein Tomahawk cruise missiles had been installed in the 1980s. It wasn’t the sweeping bow or the grim turrets or the majestic bridge. It was a simple golden circle fixed to an otherwise nondescript spot on the mid-decks.

In 1945, at that spot on the decks of the Missouri, in the waters of Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the formal documents indicating their surrender to the forces of the United Nations, ending the Second World War. In a brisk twenty-three minute ceremony, a band of perhaps twenty men — Japanese, American, Canadian, British, and Russian — affixed their names to two copies of the surrender documents to enact the armistice. From that point on the Missouri, you can just see the alabaster arc of the Arizona memorial. Between Arizona and Missouri lie a few hundred yards of open water and a few hundred thousand American casualties. They bookend the American involvement in a war that spanned a decade and a half and claimed upwards of sixty million victims — a number that, even living at the dawn of the most dangerous century, must give us pause.

Standing on the Missouri in mid August, I overhead a museum guide relate a story that struck me immediately. It’s one of those little tales that museum guides love, a tidbit that uses the mundane to illuminate the immense. Signing the Japanese surrender document was, as you might imagine, an event of great import in anyone’s life and, as you might also imagine, it could be the source of great trepidation. The representative of Canada, L. Moore Cosgrave, was apparently overcome by his nervousness and, while signing the Japanese copy, signed on the line for the French Republic. This forced everyone following him to also sign on the wrong lines. Eventually, concern over the implications of this error led General Richard Sutherland to cross out the names of the nations and pencil in the correct ones.

It was a minor, totally banal detail. Yet it was also a striking, astonishing thing. At that moment, General MacArthur stood in supreme command of the largest, most powerful military forces in the history of the world. Having brought the Empire of Japan to its knees, the Allied Powers held uncontested dominion over East Asia and the Pacific. How truly bizarre – between them, these men standing on the deck of the Missouri had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent millions of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot — that somehow, a misplaced name could unmake the surrender.

And that’s the hidden key. The Missouri, the last and greatest battleship, the apex of naval construction, serves as a very present icon of physical force — standing at the head of an unbroken lineage stretching all the way back to the first rock lifted by a semi-evolved ape in assault upon its brethren. Our long and bloody history attests to the power of that rock. But on that day in Tokyo Bay, it was not the battleship that mattered, or the airplanes or submarines, or even the atomic bombs looming in the background. To the assembled warriors of the most terrible conflict, what mattered was the document. Paper trumps rock.

And isn’t that the way, when you think about it? We often mistake the things as the drivers of history: wheat and salt, gold and oil. But somehow it’s the pieces of paper that seem to truly matter, to truly steer the course of human life. In 1914, a relatively minor Balkan War was transformed into the First World War by German violations of Belgian neutrality, codified in the Treaty of London of 1839. Informed that the British would go to war to defend Belgium’s neutral status, German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg expressed his shock that they would expand the war over what he infamously dismissed as a “scrap of paper”. That scrap of paper shook the foundations of Europe and remade the world order. Its spiritual successor, the Treaty of Versailles, would help engender the next world war.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It was no accident that the Soviets registered every typewriter and made unauthorized use of a photocopier a felony offense, punishable by jail time or even internal exile. They knew in their bones that they faced a greater existential threat from little scratches in black and white than from all the nuclear missiles in the world.

In a very real sense, the most disruptive weapon ever invented has been the printing press.

Words on a page. Scraps of paper. They give form and life to the ideas they contain. Through them we transcend the oral and enter the eternal.

I don’t know what this means, but I’ve discovered something weird with the iTunes Music Store. I wanted to find a particular song by Bob Dylan called “Dignity”. But the search box won’t find it for me, instead returning an error: “We could not complete your iTunes store request. The iTunes Store is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.” But if I type in something else — say, “Political World” — it comes back instantly with the relevant hits.

Is iTunes making a comment on postmodern society?

And is the fact that the iTunes Store lacks dignity as disturbing as the fact that MS Word has no problem with “newspeak”?

Every night, the crew of the Regal Princess find some live entertainment to put on in the grandiosely-named International Show Lounge. Sometimes it’s in-house, like a crew sing-along. Usually, it’s more like a Vegas revue: Sometimes piano, sometimes comedy, sometimes live performance, sometimes old Broadway standards. For the most part, I’ve avoided this like a leper colony. It’s wildly not my usual type of entertainment and is in fact quite explicitly pitched for passengers who have the advantage over me of multiple decades of life experience. Before reaching Hawai’i, I did venture in once to see a so-called comedian, and had my impression utterly confirmed: It was cheap and lazy comedy, based on ancient stereotypes that went well past the border of offensive. It was un-funny.

But tonight I was a little bored after walking around Maui all day and I was having trouble getting the wireless to work smoothly. So I decided to take a chance on tonight’s act, a guy named Greg Kennedy who is, of all things, a juggler. I was not in a receptive mood. I’d more or less written off the hour it was going to occupy. Truth be told, I was ready to be significantly unimpressed. A juggler? In today’s world?

This guy blew me away. I mean, it was one of those scales-from-the-eyes moments. This was not some set of cheap hacks performed by a bored carny at the end of the fairgrounds. Kennedy had artistry, real artistry. It came to me that very little separates his level of juggling from what would be universally recognized as high dance. His fluidity and his choreography were both astounding. From time to time he chided the audience for being slow to applaud, for being unresponsive. I think he really didn’t get it. We weren’t clapping because we were dumbstruck. You don’t clap halfway through the aria, or the soliloquy, or the amazing guitar solo. You soak up the artistry and you let the artist finish. This guy was that good.

Then it got me thinking about juggling, in ways I hadn’t before. First of course, I had to analyze it from a physics teacher’s point of view. Can I use this in my classroom? Clearly there’s a lot going on in terms of Newtonian physics: inertia, torque, even gravitational potential. How could I tap that?

That made me look more closely at what actually goes on. And then I understood something I hadn’t before. Most of physics, most of engineering, is about stability and control. We like to live in equilibrium spaces, and we spend an awful lot of time trying to get there or trying to stay there. But juggling is engineering turned on its head. It’s all about disequilibrium – mastering the innate tendencies of objects, that you think should tend to tear the system apart, and tapping those tendencies to stabilize it instead. It’s not about clamping down and exerting control. Juggling relies on letting go of simplistic ideas of being “in charge”. It demands that the juggler work with the intrinsic behaviors of the objects as they are. It requires getting results without dictating pathways.

And then I realized that, at last, I had the nucleating idea for my second Convocation speech, the dust of sand around which I might construct another piece. Juggling is a great metaphor for life in the 21st century. Getting out alive is going to require us to work with subtle touches that tap the intrinsic potentialities of the world we find – we must surrender obsolete dreams of deterministic control. It’s not about dictating paths; it’s about steering outcomes.

For the first time I think I have something I can hang a speech on. And that feeling is a joy in itself.

I was going to write today about my visit to the USS Arizona and USS Missouri memorials and how moving it was. I suppose I’ll get to that, though maybe not today. Right now I’m going to blog about one of the deepening madnesses of the 21st century, the traveler security checkpoint.

Let me say at the outset that I understand why we have these checkpoints and, in their basic incarnation, I agree they’re a good thing. Although I don’t believe for an instant they necessarily stop anyone, they at least make the terrorists have to work harder and be smarter, and that at least reduces the number of incidents, not to mention mindless me-tooistic attacks. Although one wonders if it’s a net positive to breed a harder-working, smarter terrorist.

But since 9/11, this process has spiraled wildly out of control with little check on it. The list of banned items grows daily, follows no discernible pattern, and irritates travelers without adding an iota of actual safety. As with the super-tight security in the months following the WTC attacks, it’s more about appearing to do something to improve security rather than actually doing anything.

Today’s example that set me off: I’m in Honolulu, near the end of my Hawaiian adventure, and I’m trying to wrap up my souvenir gift list. I come across a nice set of hand-crafted wooden candle holders – three concentric rings that each hold a little tea candle. This strikes me as appropriate for one of the names on my list, so I buy the handle, check the name off the list, and take my purchase over to the port security checkpoint, a mere 100 yards away.

You might guess what happens next.

I dutifully empty all of my pockets into the little plastic boxes. I also drop in my hat and, having learnt at Newark/EWR that this saves time, I also unbuckle my suspenders and throw them in the box. Happily today I am not made to shed my shoes or otherwise further disrobe. I step through the metal detector, which remains mercifully quiescent, and start reassembling the bits of my life I’ve passed before the ever-watchful eyes of the Transportation Security Authority. I’ve just able rebuckled my suspenders when a ripple moves through the contracted security workers.

“Sir,” I am asked in a hushed tone, almost of disbelief, “does this bag contain … a candle?”

Actually, no, three candles, tiny little tea candles. I point out as much.

“You’ll have to step over here. Can I see your ID? Where did you get the candle? Is it in this bag?” While rattling off this list, the security person is rooting through my plastic shopping bag and comes across … da da da dum! … the candle holders. They’ve been intricately wrapped, ready to be put into a gift box, but that’s no barrier. The bag is untied, the paper peeled back, and the offending illuminary devices revealed for all to see. Another TSA guy has wandered over. “Did he bring a candle onboard?” he asks, incredulous.

When I ask why exactly this is a high crime, I’m told “security”. Nothing more is forthcoming. I’m also told that the TSA worker is going to have to confiscate the candles, but I can have a receipt. In theory, at least, Princess Cruises will pick up my candles – in addition to whatever other diabolical contraband that other nefarious passengers have tried to smuggle on board – and then return it to me at the gangway in Los Angeles. I take the receipt and watch the candles disappear. I have my doubts as to whether they’ll ever see the light of day. I suspect they’ll end up brightening up some cell in Gitmo.

Once I have passed the second layer of security and gotten on board, I walk over to the purser’s desk. I show him the receipt and ask how I get my candles returned in LA. He looks at me blankly. “You purchased candles in Los Angeles?” he aasks. No, I purchased them about one football field’s length away, in a tiny dockside novelty store. “I don’t think we have anything from LA. Let me ask.” Ah, good. Happily the one-level-higher purser does know what’s going on and explains to the desk gofer that the insidious candle will be returned at the gangplank. “So I should keep this?” says the desk gofer, holding the receipt I’d offered to him as physical proof of my story. No, no, the passenger needs that.

I’m assuming a copy of the receipt will attend the candle and help explain to Princess Cruise with whom the candle should be reunited. At least, it’s a paper trail in case I’m forced to go all habeuas corpus for the sake of my candles. Before leaving the desk, I ask again, “Why can’t I bring candles onboard?”

“Security.” The magic password. But I’m not taking that at face value any more.

“They’re tea candles. How are they a threat to security?”

“Well, you could light them in your candle. An open flame could set the whole room on fire.”

OK, first off, that means they were confiscated for safety reasons, not security ones. It’s irksome to be lied to. Second, that’s flipping insane! I can bring matches or a lighter on board. I know because I seem to have a spidersense that lets me discover every single nook wherein smokers are allowed to congregate and puff away. The ship crew delivers to my cabin every day a highly flammable newsletter – not to mention, say, the toilet paper provided gratis. Hell, for that matter, they let you bring back rocks – I could strike sparks like a flint. The point is, if I wanted to start a fire, nothing is done to stop me by preventing me from having the candles.

And even if I did want to start a fire, what good would it do me? The rooms are individually wired with smoke detectors and sprinklers. There are several warnings to that effect both in the cabin and during the mandatory safety drill at cruise inception.

What’s my point? It’s twofold. First, we must never get so used to the need for security that we allow it to substitute for thought or honesty. If Princess Cruises is really concerned about the fire potential of the candles, then Princess Cruises should say that. No one should be hiding in the folds of the TSA’s ever present cloak. Second, we have to start getting rational. Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry can do a lot more damage with the common items that are allowed. We need to face up to a disturbing fact: Living in an advanced, industrial, and open society will entail some level of risk. The net cannot be drawn finely enough to eliminate that risk.

Is my candle saga a milestone in the struggle for human dignity and freedom? No. But in its own small way it does plug into that. If we’re not careful, step by step, well-intentioned policy by well-meaning intervention, we’re going to give up everything, and all for the illusion of security.

Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of the population. It’s not the timing, the seemingly-obligatory article near July 4 warning us that it wasn’t all fireworks and oratory. That’s a useful exercise, too, especially in an age of unquestionable jingoism. No, what has me irked is the following statement:

Yet in all, more than 700 people put their names to the parchment — 12 times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence.

“The parchment” referenced here was a petition by the royalist Americans to their king, declaring their loyalty and dismay at the Revolution. Despite the inherent strength of her arguments, Ms. Jasonoff appears compelled (by insecurity?) to puff up the popularity of the Tory case by a specious popularity contest. She must know better: The Declaration was signed by members “in Congress assembled”; it was not an invitational and the grouping was by design small in number. To compare it to an open petition left out in a New York tavern for three days, is simply absurd. How many roaring patriots would have signed the Declaration (had it be a petition) is unknowable but certainly vast… more vast than 700, if one can judge by how rapidly and how widely it was reproduced.

Ms. Jasonoff’s editorial choice doesn’t really undercut the article and in some ways it’s a tiny thing. But it’s another example of a growing carelessness we display with our rhetoric, a growing willingness to compare apples to oranges and act as if the comparison meant anything. It’s intellectually sloppy.

For you to understand this post, there are two things about myself I should tell you — they’re already well-known to any of my friends:

1. I drink a lot of Coke.
2. I have catastrophically bad eyesight.

More below the fold.

Right now Coke is running this promotion called MyCokeRewards, wherein every time you buy a Coke product, you get a little 12- or 15-character code, which (when entered into their ridiculous website) adds points to a running total. Eventually you can exchange the points for “free” stuff (it’s not really free — you have to buy the Coke, after all). For example, I downloaded a DRM-encrusted song which was actually a medley of the themes from Pirates of the Caribbean. The prizes are mostly silly but I figure, I drink a lot of Coke (see point #1) anyway, so why not accumulate points and get something back?

Enter point #2. While the codes for 12-packs are printed on the little flap and are easy to read, codes for individual bottles are printed on the individual bottlecaps. For a host of reasons (low light, smudged print, etc.), the bottlecap codes proved impossible for me to read. All told we were talking something like 9 points in a contest where you need something like 3000 to get anything good. On the other hand, I felt entitled to those points, having bought the soda.

So I got out my handy-dandy Vivistar digital camera, threw on “macro” mode, and snapped a shot of each cap. Really. Then during playback I zoomed in and read the codes with ease. Ta-da! Technology to the rescue. This is the sort of unanticipated spin-off effect that drives futurists nuts. No one would predict that owning a digital camera makes participation in Coke give-a-ways easier, and for sure, this benefit didn’t show up on my own pro/con list when considering getting a camera. I wouldn’t have bought it just for this use. But now that I have the camera, a host of unexpected uses have occurred to me, each making my life a tiny bit easier (though none so far afield or as goofy as this one). It’s a lot like “exaptation” in biology

In any event, it’s why I love gadgetry. I love being able to take a device, or several, and get out more than the designers intended. Not as a gotcha-game (“See how much smarter I am than you!”) but as a tiny sliver of creativity, that random thread that keeps the picture interesting.

So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.

Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been rather cool to the whole idea. I think I agree with Danny Concannon: A crime’s a crime and no murder is any worse or any better than another. But I’ll admit that Orcinus’ argument from mense rea is compelling. Moreover, I hadn’t even viewed hate crimes through the prism that they are crimes against the community as well as against an individual. Put a different way: The purpose of a murder is to kill someone. The purpose of a lynching is to divide a community against itself, to undermine the very idea of the community — in short, to attack society in toto. That’s certainly a different crime and, conceivably, a worse one.

I still think I come down against hate crime laws. Once you begin criminalizing what someone is thinking, we start down a very dark and dangerous road, and I’m not sure we come out the other side. But for the first time in a long while, I have something new to chew over. I’m not as sure as I was yesterday.

Matthew Dowd, an adviser to President Bush, today said in an interview that he was disappointed by the President’s stand on the war, on the will of the public, and, well, just about everything. It’s clear that Mr. Dowd is conflicted in taking this public stance. Said Mr. Dowd:

I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things

Those first four words are what have spelled our doom these past six years. More below the fold.

George W. Bush exemplifies the danger of the most dangerous finding in The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. Dr. Levine explores all the ways people influence other people. He comments that various studies have shown that the single most important factor in making a sale is that the salesperson be “likable”. This was much more important than other, seemingly more obvious factors — such as expertise, competence, sex appeal, or even trustworthiness. That is, people will find themselves buying decrepit automobiles from shady used-car salesmen — used car salesmen who don’t even try to hide their shadiness! — as long as the salesmen are also likable in some matter. We’ll purchase a lemon from a screw-up, as long as he’s an earnest, down-to-earth, shucks-ain’t-he-cute likable screw-up.

Indeed, as events have proven, we’ll buy an administration — and sell the soul of our Republic — to a likable screw-up. Take an honest look at George W. Bush’s life history and resume — a resume which is distinguished only by its extreme mediocrity. We picked a low-C student who, shucks, promised to try hard and stuff; and we c got exactly what we should have expected — and exactly what we deserve. And then, after he squeaked into the Oval Office on the slimmest margin possible (one vote, though at least a vote by a justice of SCOTUS), we went and picked him again, after we had four years of his antics and hijinks.

No one can call G.W. Bush deceptive: He lived his mediocrity for all to see, but heck, he seemed like such a nice guy and so likable, especially compared to that stiff and stern John Kerry. Who would ever ask Kerry over to a frat party? The idea is absurd. And since we wouldn’t want him at our parties, it naturally stands to reason we wouldn’t want him in the Oval Office.

It boggles the mind. It literally boggles the mind. This ancient and useless primate instinct launched us into a war of choice and a simultaneous assault on the very fundamental principles of justice and democracy that constitute this Republic. Why? ‘Cause President Bush was likable.

God, please give us someone more awkward but less inept!