Reflections  

Teenybopper Information Awareness — John McCain has introduced legislation requiring internet access providers to notify the government when they encounter illegal images of minors. (Were McCain considering a presidential bid, a cynic might see this as an appeal to the Right on social issues.)

The law would require ISPs to report indecent images of minors even if they are clothed but in a "lascivious" pose, and even if they are cartoons. Nude 18-year-old cartoon characters: legal. Nude 17-year-old cartoon characters: illegal, to the tune of a $300,000 fine each time an ISP fails to report them.

The obvious question is how the age of the cartoon characters will be determined. Even the artist may not know, if he failed to card his characters after drawing them and before putting their images online. For that matter, how does one discover the age of the subject of a photograph of unknown origin? John McCain's obscene image of a 16-year-old girl may be another man's image of a fetching 18-year-old woman.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous standard for determining what constituted "hard-core pornography" was, "I know it when I see it." I hope John McCain can see the difference between a cartoon character who is 18 years old and one that has only achieved the age of 17 years and 364 days. I don't think anyone else can.

This is a bill "for the children," which gives any proposal, no matter how moronic, a good chance of becoming law. The best hope for relief may lie in the World Trade Organization. Enough successful prosecutions would constitute an unfair trade barrier with Japan. — Patrick Quealy

Moonland security — As someone possessed of both a problem with authority and a taste for the surreal, I feel pretty confident in saying that the rest of 2007 will not offer anything to top the Boston Mooninite saga as the most satisfying news cycle of the year.

It began with the largely unappreciated feat of two starving-artist types, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, making a grand circuit of a tundra-cold Boston, crawling and climbing as needed to install little flashing ads about as electronically sophisticated as a Lite Brite. The entire content of the ad was a picture of a Mooninite, a recurring character in the Adult Swim (late-night Cartoon Network) show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a program every bit as odd as its title would suggest. As there was no other message or text, the ad served primarily to bring a little bit of surreality into everyone's lives: a quick chuckle for those in the know, a moment of bemusement for those who weren't.

The signs stayed up for more than two weeks, until a panicky transit passenger noticed one of the ads and called police to report it (an act later described by a Boston official as a "perfect example of our passengers taking part in Homeland Security"). At which point Boston freaked out: bomb squads were deployed; highways and rail lines were shut down; downtown turned into a ghost zone. Once Adult Swim, through TimeWarner, stepped forward to claim responsibility, and the pair of artists turned themselves in, every fresh pronouncement from a hysterical official or media personality only added to the fun. The police chief promised sentences of two to five years for each device; Boston's mayor called for Adult Swim to lose its broadcasting license; Boston Herald columnists agitated for the deportation of Berdovsky, an immigant from Belarus.

After Berdovsky and Stevens spent a night in lock-up and were bailed out by some kind and less-starving friends, they called a press conference, which the media took for an opportunity to make sure the 20-somethings had a chance (imagine here the appropriate nanny tones) to think about what they had done. But the reporters were denied what would have been an immensely satisfying finger-wag session; once in front of the mics, the artists announced that they were there to talk about the vitally important problem of '70s hairstyles, and they brushed aside all other inquiries with the response, "I'm sorry, but that's not a hair question." (I despair of doing justice to this fine bit of theater: see it for yourself.)

Of course, Boston continues to call the ads "hoax incendiary devices," because that designation is what allowed them to dun up TimeWarner for a few million to cover the costs of the city's feverish, counterproductive overreaction. But it's not as if Boston officials would ever actually admit they'd been stupid, or set about improving their disaster preparedness programs so that a real emergency wouldn't lock up the entire city. They're constrained by genre: such a response would be suited only for a comedy, while American counterterrorism remains a product of the theater of the absurd. — Andrew Ferguson

Nancy the Tuna — The first 100 hours of Democratic control of the House of Representatives have come to an end, with a flurry of bills being crammed through, almost all of them of dubious value, or none. The orgy of legislation was trumpeted in the mainstream media as a glorious sign that the Democrats were keeping the promises they made to the voters.

Well, in jacking up the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, yes, Pelosi and her Myrmidons were keeping a minor promise — one they could have easily fulfilled in the last Congress, but then the Republicans would have gotten the credit. But they are already breaking two major ones.

First, the Democrats, when they were in the minority, bitterly complained that they were "shut out of the process" by the wicked Republicans. They assured the voters that if they were only entrusted with power, they would govern in a true, love-thy-neighbor, bipartisan way. But no sooner did Grandma Pelosi — what nickname better fits a woman who so conspicuously surrounded herself with her grandchildren for her swearing-in? — pick up the gavel than she completely shut the Republicans out of all discussions on the bills she intended to ram home. That's wielding the gavel to good effect! Especially amusing was the hearing in which überliberal Rep. Barney Frank became hysterical when pesky Republicans kept trying to amend a bill. He was unhinged with rage.

The second major promise already broken by the Democrats is their vow to end corruption. In getting through the minimum wage increase, Pelosi managed to tack on an exemption for American Samoa, because the big tuna-canning companies StarKist and Del Monte (which pay Samoans $3.26 per hour) screamed that they would be hammered by the new wage standard. Of course, many other businesses voiced the same complaint, but Grandma didn't listen to those children. StarKist, by the way, happens to have its corporate headquarters in her home district.

Even worse, from the standpoint of honesty and integrity, was the move by the new Democratic House majority to give voting rights to delegates from the District of Columbia and the territories (American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands) whenever the House sits as a "Committee of the Whole," which is most of the time. So now the delegate from Samoa, who represents 58,000 people, none of whom pay federal income taxes, gets the same power as the representative from Montana, who represents 944,000 people, who do. Amazingly, the representatives of the territories and D.C. are almost always . . . Democrats! Of course, this trashes the constitutional requirement that representatives be elected by citizens of the states. (Indeed, Puerto Rico has repeatedly voted against statehood.) But who cares about "the process" as mandated by the Constitution?

Exempting fat cats who headquarter in your district, and gaming the system to increase your voting power. Yep, that's "restoring integrity." — Gary Jason

Running for cover — Why is Joe Biden considered a serious candidate for president, given all the blots on his copybook? His chairmanship of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 was a fiasco (anyone recall Ted Kennedy congratulating Biden at the finish on a job well done?). His first quest for the presidency collapsed in 1988 when it was revealed, first, that he had plagiarized a speech from (of all people) British labourite Neil Kinnock, and then, that he had flunked a law school course 20 years earlier by plagiarizing (in that case, improperly footnoting) a legal article. (Other peccadilloes, such as "borrowing" from some of Robert F. Kennedy's speeches, and inflating his own academic record, also came out.)

Biden never did learn to shut his mouth, and now it seems he can't help but stick his foot in it. Kicking off yet another presidential run at the end of January, Biden told journalists during a conference call that rival Barack Obama was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

It may not have been as egregious as Michael Richards screaming the N-word in a Los Angeles comedy club, but it was pretty bad. This man is a politician, right? He's supposedly somewhat intelligent, right? So why is he doing this stuff? And how many times can he get away with it before he becomes a permanent national laughingstock?

A serial plagiarist cum racially insensitive motormouth is a serious candidate for president. O Mencken, O Twain, O Bierce and Will Rogers! Would that at least one of you were here! — Jon Harrison

Divided they stand Thus far the effort to bring Iraq under the control of a strong central government seems to be falling far short of the mark, despite the exhortations coming out of the White House and the Green Zone. Sunni and Shia extremists have been successful at creating chaos in many parts of the country and the average Iraqi caught in the middle has lost faith in the present administration to restore order. Creating a functional government under such circumstances, with or without additional U.S. troops, will be an uphill battle. The failure of a "United Iraq" solution has led some to propose the division of the country into three ethnically oriented zones: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd. Unfortunately this alternate strategy poses many problems of its own, including disputed boundary lines, the dilemma of minorities trapped within the "wrong" area, the unequal distribution of oil resources, and the susceptibility of the Shia-designated area to Iranian influence. It would seem, then, that a third alternative is worth considering. What if Iraq were to model its new government not on the representative democracy of the United States, nor the parliamentary democracy of Great Britain, but rather the direct democracy of Switzerland? Despite the obvious physical differences of the two countries, they do share a common characteristic: both are composed of fiercely independent, culturally diverse local communities. And yet this European country has managed to achieve a stable, peaceful, and prosperous society. It would seem worthwhile, therefore, to look at how the Swiss have managed to accommodate the different cultures within their borders and consider which, if any, of their policies are applicable to their violent and destitute near-eastern counterparts. The Swiss system is probably the most democratic on earth. It consists of a federal government and 26 semi-independent cantons (or states). The federal government — more properly called a confederation — provides a political umbrella guaranteeing individual rights, safeguarding property, and overseeing functions that are inherently national in scope, such as defense, public works, freedom of movement, and economic matters. The president and vice president of the Swiss Confederation enjoy only ceremonial duties. Real executive authority is exercised by a seven-member Swiss Federal Council composed of representatives of the major political parties. As a practical matter, the daily life of the average Swiss citizen is more directly affected by the policies of his or her particular canton, for vested there are such matters as education, the choice of a common language, support of religious denominations, business regulation, and law enforcement. Under normal circumstances, then, the Swiss have managed to insulate much of their private lives against interference by their national government. If, however, the national government is seen to have overstepped its powers or otherwise acted unwisely, the people have the power to take corrective action. For example, were the federal government to try to force an onerous tax law upon the country, the Swiss could override it by a simple majority vote provided they mustered 50,000 signatures on a petition within 100 days of the law's passage. Another "people friendly" mechanism allows for a referendum to initiate changes to the federal constitution itself. In Iraq, such an arrangement could assuage the seemingly intractable problems that plague their current government. Imagine that the country, roughly four times as populous as Switzerland, were to be broken up into, say, 100 jurisdictions — let's call them "departments" — and made subject to a constitution comparable to that of Switzerland's. (Swiss cantons vary in size from about 15,000 to 1,200,000 inhabitants.) Assuming the populations of the departments were relatively homogenous, most Iraqis would feel comfortable under their particular administration. As most departments would likely end up being broken up along religious lines, national sectarian conflicts would be diffused, thus paving the way for a return to the tolerant treatment of minorities that had existed in mixed Iraqi neighborhoods for centuries. Further imagine that the Iraqi central government likewise followed the Swiss model by investing executive authority in an elected seven-member council. Assuming that all the major sects were represented on the council, the various segments of the populace would be bound to trust it more than the single Shiite president they have now. Furthermore, because of its narrowed range of activities, the council could better focus on those functions over which it retained control, for example: protecting individual civil rights, guaranteeing freedom of movement, and ensuring free commerce between departments. Implicit in the scheme is a reduction in violence. It is hard to imagine that anyone — at least anyone in his right mind — could invent an excuse to harm another under such a pluralistic, evenhanded arrangement. Methods of enlisting police forces would, of course, vary from one department to the next, but the most direct approach would be to co-opt whatever armed gangs and militia already roamed the streets. Besides the dramatic savings in arms and ammunition, it would seem more practical to put such groups on the payroll than to try to subdue them by force. No doubt trouble spots between departments would emerge that required intervention by the national government, but these localized affairs could be readily handled by the kind of overwhelming force that an army could bring to bear. In addition to enveloping the Iraqi landscape in greater tranquility, the Swiss model would, in time, lead to greater prosperity (and hopefully greater liberalism) through competition. Were one department to relax its business regulations, for example, then commercial activity would naturally gravitate towards it, and its resultant prosperity would act to stimulate commerce elsewhere. Eventually, all 100 departments would be vying with one another to attract money and people — a far prettier picture than trying to corral a restless population into a system in which many bitterly refuse to participate. — Dan Hurwitz

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