On A Calm Day

Today officially marks the half-way point of my summer vacation.

A plumber came by in the morning to fix the dilapidated network of pipes in my cellar. I celebrated the return of a functioning water system by taking a long shower, shaving, spiking my hair, and drinking a tall glass of Code Red poured from a freshly opened two liter bottle. Code Red is lightly carbonated and loses its fizz within a couple days after being opened. It's best to drink it fresh.

After eating lunch I took the dog (there is a distinct dissimilarity in referring to him as the dog as opposed to my dog, which tells you something about how I feel about the dog living in this house) for an afternoon walk. The heat that had been oppressing the northeast had subsided after a series of storms that came through on Thursday, leaving Friday and Saturday sunny and beautiful. I walked down past where Washington Road turns into Scott Road, a stretch of street lined with trees on both sides. We clipped along at an even pace.

When I returned I took time to water the plants around the house, refilling the small watering can several times to make sure the soil around the base of each of them was properly saturated. It'd be more efficient to use a larger watering can, perhaps, but I think there's a Zen-like quality to taking your time with a smaller one.

As the sunlight coming in through the windows began to dim I picked up the Saturday edition of The Wallstreet Journal and read an article by Lucette Lagnado, a Jewish expatriate from Cairo. Her family fled Egypt when Nasser came to power in 1954. She was writing about how she had recently returned to Cairo to see how much the place had changed. Apparently it had--a lot. Lagnado lamented how the city had lost its glamour and prestige since the demise of the colonial era and the exodus of its European population. It included pictures of street scenes in Cairo during the 1940's. Something about the article appealed to me.

When I finished reading it I thumbed through the rest of the newspaper. Nothing else caught my eye.

Then, as I was sipping the last drop of Code Red and beginning on a bottle of Snapple, it struck me to walk outside to take a few pictures of the scenery around my house before the sunlight became too faint. It was fitting, in a sense, to have something that would remind me of calm summer days in Connecticut. Just a token of a moment in time, and nothing more.

Basement Disaster

The long white pipe laying on the floor in the foreground use to be attached to the ceiling along that wooden beam, connected to other pipes.

Imagine my dismay when, after using the toilet while getting ready for bed last night, I heard the sound of what could've been a fountain running in the basement. "This," I thought to myself, "cannot be good."

I went downstairs and was greeted by this sight: a large section of pipe, clearly not where it should be. At the time the water was gushing from the broken end seen in the upper-righthand corner of this photo. I called my father, who is out of town at the moment, and asked him what the purpose of this long white pipe was. That's when I learned that it happens to be the main sewage line for my house (or was, up until the point that it detached itself).

The good news is that I still have plenty of running water, and there won't be any issues with the well drying up. The bad news is that anything that goes down a drain in my house will end up on my basement floor.

Worse plumbing disaster in living memory.

Lessons from Orwell's 1984

This afternoon I finished reading George Orwell's 1984, a novel that describes a negative utopia, a police state that controls everything: your day-to-day life, history, the laws of science, everything right down to your own thoughts. It is a horribly depressing read, and by the end it's tempting to dismiss the whole thing as being impossible of ever happening, if only to rid yourself of the image of the dark future it depicts.

And it seems so easy to dismiss on first glance. "Wow, living in a police state sucks. Right then. Democracy and freedom all the way, huzzah!" and call it a day. In the afterword, however, Erich Fromm takes special pains to point out to the reader (the reader that has bothered to look at the afterword anyway) that Orwell's nightmare scenario of a Big Brother-esque government can just as easily happen in a Western-style democracy as it can in a communist or fascist state.

Today the message of Orwell's 1984 is more prevalent than ever because in some ways you can already see aspects of his novel in today's society (or more accurately, in America).

In the book Big Brother has total control over information. If they tell you something happened there's no way to disprove it. The main character of the story, Winston Smith, has trouble dealing with this concept. His country of Oceania is at war with Eurasia and, according to the government, always has been. Smith knows however that as recently as four years ago Oceania was at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia. There are no records of this except for his personal memory. Anything that says otherwise (old speeches, newspaper archives, books, etc.) have either been destroyed or altered by the Ministry of Truth, which Smith himself works for. He has no way of proving that Oceania was ever at war with anyone but Eurasia. Big Brother says it's true. The rest of the population believes it's true. All written records in existence say it's true. Who's to say it's not true?

This introduces the idea of doublethink, the mentality of simultaneously believing and denying the truth of something. Stephen Colbert coined another word for it: Wikiality.

In this clip of The Colbert Report Colbert explains how anything that a majority of people agree on is considered truth on Wikipedia. In theory Wikipedia works much in the same way as the Ministry of Truth, except instead of a totalitarian system in which information is handed down from a higher authority as being true it's mutually decided on by a popular majority. That's Fromm's point in the afterword of 1984: both democracies and totalitarian governments can produce the same result of elaborately fabricated lies.

The Wikipedia-Ministry of Truth comparison only works in theory of course. Wikipedia has a team of editors and administrators that work to stamp out anything that's not true on its pages. Colbert asks his viewers to change the page on African elephants to say the population has tripled over the last six months, but within hours after his broadcast the Wikipedia page on elephants was locked to prevent any editing. The reason given by the administrators was that people were trying to "hack" the page.

With mindful intervention the Wikipedia staff can prevent most things that are obviously false from making it to Wikipedia entries (or else quickly correct them). But the point is valid: if everyone else accepts something as true, who's to say it's not?

The example Colbert provides of a 14% increase in Americans over the course of eighteen months believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction after the Bush administration hinted that he did over and over again in every possible speech, interview, and news broadcast is sobering. The same was true of the insinuations the Bush administration made that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

The fact is the population of African elephants has not tripled in the last six months and Saddam Hussein did not have anything to do with 9/11. But if a majority of people believe it, who's to say it's not true? As Colbert says, "If you go against what the majority of people perceive to be reality, you're the one who's crazy." The same way Winston Smith was crazy.

Some of the self-contradictions that Big Brother makes in 1984 seem absurd. How can a government completely deny something that it previously stated as being true?

But if there's one thing The Daily Show likes to point out, it's how often members of the Bush administration contradict themselves. Here's a clip revealing a contradiction made by Washington Press Secretary Tony Snow:

In one clip, Tony Snow says that the firing of U.S. attorneys was based on performance. In the other, he states that he has never said that. In that very instance, Tony Snow was using doublethink.

Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning to future generations about the dangers of an all-powerful government. We should be mindful that he was talking about the democracies as well as the dictatorships.

Government Surveillance Never Looked So Good

Yesterday we finished filming a public service announcement for the ACLU's Stand Up for Freedom Contest. The contest is for the best thirty second PSA or five minute podcast on one of the following subjects: due process of the law, censorship, or government surveillance. The one we chose was government surveillance.

Since there are a bunch of legal obligations involved with contest submissions I'm afraid the final video won't be online any time soon (contest winners aren't going to be announced until November 1), but what I do have is this wonderful photo from one of the scenes we shot. Here a surveillance team made up of (from left to right) Mitch Bilodeau, Eric Milne, and Josh Hubbard listen in on a phone call being made by Mike Anderson. Members of our surveillance team are all sharply dressed in business casual attire (on account of the lack of ties), reflecting the more relaxed look of today's government official. Sunglasses were provided courtesy of Holly Lutters.

It was difficult cutting down the ten minutes of footage we had to just thirty seconds, but I like the end result. I'll be working on composing background music before submitting the final product. I'll keep you all updated on how we do in the contest.

Mike Anderson, Mitch Bilodeau, and Eric Milne previously appeared inThe Compassion of Miguel del Fuego. Josh Hubbard was the ping pong ace in JDC Energy Drink!.