A Pom et la pomme

[Written on Tuesday, but posted early Saturday morning at PDX, to which I give three hearty cheers for free wireless Internet access.]

I know this isn't exactly what's meant by moblogging, but all the same I feel pretty mobile. I'm writing this at an altitude of many thousands of feet somewhere above the west coast, heading north to Portland. Thankfully so far it's a smooth flight, otherwise I'd be way cranky.

Though actually I've only just calmed down after being very very cranky indeed. Been a long, busy day, full of errands, meetings (okay, just the one meeting, but it was a full one), and then a mad dash through rush hour LA traffic to the airport. By the time I got to the electronic check-in machine, there was about an hour to go before the flight time. But it seemed cool. About half a dozen machines were open, so I got my boarding pass and such quickly.

And then waited. Six open machines apparently translates to two harried staff handling the checked luggage, and in this case they were more than harried. Everyone ahead of me in the line to check baggage seemed to have their own arcane problem, and the check-in staff had the furiously panicked look of those who work on the front line of customer relations with technology that they barely understand. (Here's a suggestion, which airlines can have for free - no need to credit me with it or anything. They should wire up additional monitors facing the passengers checking in, so that they can see what the endless tap-tap-tapping away is for. Never mind that they probably won't understand it. Seeing it might at least give them a reason to feel empathy when things seem to be taking forever. Flying is a process of self-imposed complete powerlessness for a few hours, and anything that could be done to give back some power - or at least the semblance of power, or at least at least an awareness that the staff often feel powerless too - would be sterling PR. We could all share in the byzantine software they get to use, and laugh convivially as our planes take off without us.)

So there I was, standing as knowledge-free and powerless as I used to be as a kid when I wanted to peer over the high wooden counter at the local fish and chip shop, but was just too little. I've a reasonably placid soul, but eventually I started doing the smoke-out-of-ears thing, charged to the front and asked if I could check my bag, since it had been forever (at least) since the machine had checked me in. The harried lady took a look at my documents and asked, in what seemed to me to be an unreasonably suspicious tone, why I was checking my bag so late. For a moment I think I channelled Bill Bryson. I explained how long I'd been waiting. She went through a long spiel concerning 'what she would do for me', pathetic supplicant that I was. What she would do for me apparently consisted of the choice between not checking my bag after all, and checking it late, but signing something to the effect that if the bag didn't make the same flight that I did, I understood that they wouldn't deliver it for me. Perhaps she'd mistakenly thought that my name was Hobson.

I do a good annoyed customer if I'm pushed far enough on a bad day, and I did one then. I stomped off loudly toward the security check, knowing full well that there was Something in my unchecked bag which might well Cause A Problem. Also the stomping had something to with the fact that I had about twenty minutes before the plane was due to leave. It was fast stomping.

Backpack went through security. Mac went through. Unchecked bag went through. I went through. And then the unchecked bag was being held up so that it could be claimed. I claimed it, knowing what was coming. 'Is there anything in this bag that's long and sharp?' asked the, in the circumstances, rather nice security man. 'Yes,' I replied, 'an apple peeler'.

He dug around, pulled the thing out, took its complex bits from its box. I was as baffled as he was. It's essentially a small hand-cranked lathe for paring, slicing and coring apples. Lots of spikey metal bits. I told him that, since I'd meant to check the bag, but had been comprehensively thwarted, I would completely understand if the apple peeler couldn't make it. It didn't seem much to jettison if it meant the balloon could stay in the air. But no, he took the thing to show to all of his colleagues, brought it back, packed it away in its box, and the box in my bag, and waved me through, pausing to thank me for showing the apple peeler to them. Apparently none of them had seen one before, so it was useful for them to know what one looked like - for next time, you understand.

Of course they'd not seen one before, thought me. Anyone in their right mind would put an apple peeler in checked baggage.

Oh, in case you're wondering, it's for making apple pies for Thanksgiving. But now it's OFFICIAL: mechanical apple peelers are OKAY in unchecked baggage in the continental United States. I feel like such a pioneer.

Spooool!

Introversion's a funny thing. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, but maybe some of both. Because people as introverted as me are really quite rare - I typically rate 100% 'I' on the 'I/E' continuum of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - the sense is often of living in a world that wasn't quite built for us, and not feeling entirely sure why that is. It's a kind of psychological left-handedness. Extroverts are, of course, used to being around extroverts, so I imagine that to a certain extent they come to see extroversion as the normal centre of things. When an introvert comes into their world, they might as well be from another planet, so alien must they seem. Introverts - and there are plenty of jokes to be wrung from this - don't tend to hang around other introverts. Introversion isn't a reason for throwing a party. But society and, well, life, throws them up against extroverts all the time. We know very well what they're like, and so I think we also begin to believe that extroversion is the normal centre of things, and that we're the aliens.

To be introverted, but not shy - which I'm not, really - is another odd twist. The combination means that I can get by mostly undetected in social situations, if I have to, but that effort results in a dead battery very quickly. Some things are effectively insurmountable, though. Take me somewhere social that's noisy, or where lots of people are talking, and I can't deal. It's just too hard. So I tune out, listen to the music, or my own thoughts, and pass the time until I can retreat to a quiet place again. If I have to strain to hear what someone is saying, or have to raise my voice to be heard, I might just as well not be there. The fear of this happening, and the frequency with which it does, means that I'm typically reluctant to try again, and risk coming across as distant, aloof, or just plain boring.

Connection with people is something that just doesn't happen for me in groups. If it's going to happen - and that's not often - it'll only happen when I'm alone with someone. Otherwise, if I'm part of a larger group, even one of only three or four, I fade into a passive background, listening but not speaking, responding but not asking. There's probably some laziness there; it takes a great deal of effort and energy to be socially active in a larger group. Also, though, it's a kind of bizarre need for social privacy. Insofar as I ever make social phone calls, I can't make them at all unless I can have privacy - and by that I mean complete aloneness. In the same way, social privacy in person seems to be the only way I can connect. Needless to say, such privacy is rarely practical, the effect of which is that connection rarely gets a chance to happen.

This has some unexpected side-effects. A scary number of years ago, during a long summer at home from university, I wrote about 30,000 words of a terrible, clumsy, lame story, full of all the things that people who are too young to write write about. Later, I realised something about the plot mechanics that seemed significant, and not in a good way. Something was common to each of the scenes, and it was this: they all involved just two characters. Where more characters were involved in a larger scene, I had contrived, without this being a conscious goal, to move them around the stage so that at any one time only two were present. It was like a cheap repertory production in which two actors rush on and off-stage, throwing on costumes and changing hats to fake a larger cast. As a writer, I either could only handle two characters at once, or had a preference for scenes involving only two characters.

This realisation depressed the crap out of me at the time. It seemed yet another way in which the writing was inescapably juvenile. Now, I suspect it has a lot more to do with introversion. There's plenty of lack of writing skill in there too, but mostly I think the reason I can't connect socially unless I'm alone with someone, and the reason I write two-person scenes, have the same psychological root. If I want to write a scene that has some emotional depth, then of course I'm bound to use a template that borrows from my own social strengths and weaknesses.

I used to be terribly awe-struck by writers who could handle scenes involving lots of characters. It was as if they were using a foreign language. I'm thinking Wodehouse here, and perhaps Terry Pratchett, whose character dynamics owe a lot to Wodehouse. It's a mistake, though, and an obvious one: to think that something I can't do is more worthy because of that. The mistake is to imagine that there's a hierarchy of writing skills, and that competence in one implies competence in everything below that: that a facility for group scenes implies a facility for quieter, deeper, smaller scenes. And heaven knows there are plenty of group-scene writers out there who are as bad at them as I'd be if I tried: witness the dead hand of J.K. Rowling's turn-taking exposition in group scenes.

I like to use Beckett as a kind of touchstone in this regard. I could die happy having written something with a hundredth of the surpassing brilliance of Krapp's Last Tape, and yet, I doubt Beckett could have written a multi-character Wodehouseian romp if he'd spent his whole long life on it. There's a space that includes Beckett, Wodehouse, Pratchett, even Talbot Rothwell, but it's most definitely not a single dimension, and that's terribly important.

The World that Knew Too Much

It's not the detail. We pretty soon forget all of that, and - if forced - have to go back to the manual or the text book or whoever taught us the damn thing in the first place. No, what we truly remember of things we learn consists of general principles wrapped up in phrases, or pictures. We carry them around like religious icons, or perhaps skeleton keys, trying them in every lock we find, hoping that we won't have to force the door with our shoulder. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but they're the first tools we reach for, an establishing shot in the narrative.

I was trying to explain the concept of recursive function calls (or rather recursive predicates - it was Prolog we were using) one time a few years ago in a tutorial to which a single student had come. And he wasn't getting it. The only pictures in his mind were those of iteration, rather than recursion, and they just didn't fit. Clearly he'd been struggling on this for months. In a busier class, I doubt he'd have made his bafflement clear, but it was just me and him, so I could try any way that came to mind to give him an iconic representation of the concept. Eventually, I drew a diagram on the whiteboard of boxes within boxes, and arrows connecting them to show the flow of control, and he had a light-bulb moment. He got it. The difference was simply that between sequences of boxes (iteration), and boxes embedded inside each other (recursion). I could tell it was a getting-it that would stick, too, because he now had a new icon.

Another time a lecturer gave me an icon. The class was a general discussion of knowledge-based systems; these are systems that operate not by obeying a fixed recipe of computer code, but by analysing or manipulating some body of knowledge about the world (or merely their world). Example: the browser you're using to read this post isn't a knowledge-based system, but head over to MapQuest and ask for directions, and underneath the fancy interface you'll be hooking into a knowledge-based system with tons of information about roads, addresses, distances, and so on. Knowledge-based systems do route-finding, task scheduling, medical diagnosis, and a million other things.

Here's the icon he gave me, which is heavily paraphrased: For a knowledge-based system to be effective, the richness of the knowledge is far more important than the complexity of the rules which manipulate that knowledge. With a rich knowledge-base, you can get away with (and one way of getting-away-with would be effectively convincing its user that it possesses a reasonable intelligence) a relatively weak set of rules. And, as a corollary, a complex set of rules can't compensate for a weak knowledge-base. In a nutshell: richness of knowledge is more important for the appearance of intelligence than complexity of manipulation of that knowledge. Rich knowledge is a long lever, which can be moved with a small tug. Poor knowledge is a short lever, which even the mightiest heave might not be able to shift.

I'm sure there was a lot more in that lecture, but I probably stopped listening at that point, happy that I'd picked up one thing that I could use. Like most chunks of iconic wisdom, it's simple, clear, and true across many contexts. It's easy to be dismissive of such iconic wisdom - what appears simple might actually be no more than simplistic - but that's a trap. Not everything that's simple is wise, but a great deal of what's wise is simple.

To Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which I'm having huge amounts of fun with at the moment. This might seem a dizzying change of direction, but it's actually not, because GTA: San Andreas is in effect a vast knowledge-based system. It's also one which supports my icon. GTA:SA is not the best game ever made, as more than one review I've read has claimed. I understand the sentiment, though, because in some significant respects the game is certainly beyond anything I've played, and in one respect in particular. The GTA:SA world - its knowledge-base - is quite astonishingly rich. A couple of nights ago I spent several hours playing pool in a bar in the game's fictive San Francisco - quite irrelevantly to the plot of the game. The sunsets are stunning. The rainstorms make me feel cold and wet.

Distance within the game has a significant effect, too. It's not simply a matter of the game-space being bigger and richer - though it's certainly both of those things. It's a little like the effect of those boring going-places chapters in long fantasy novels, which I contend are necessary and important to the narrative's structure. A quest narrative should be long, and its reading should be long, too. I think it's a mistake to read such a narrative too quickly. A momentous journey, long in the making, is quite properly processed over a long period. The relatively long distances between places - huge cities, tiny towns, lonely shacks in the woods - in GTA:SA, and the way in which those distances are incorporated into the narrative by way of complex, goal-oriented missions, create a sense of place that I find deeply seductive. When I read, some time ago, that the game would include representations of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the desert between those cities, I had visions of it actually taking five or six hours to drive from one to the other. And my very curious response to that idea was: cool. I wish that had been possible. As it happens, the game-space is compressed into a smaller virtual space, but it remains vast for a game.

The richness of the world feeds in here too. Journeys of any distance would be quite comical and perfunctory if the landscape between the game A and the game B were thinly-conceived. As compelling as the spaces of a game like Tomb Raider might be, their strength comes from a cartoony reality, and a compression of tunnels, buildings, platforms and such into a complex puzzle-box. One cannot realistically imagine Lara Croft undertaking a journey of some tens of minutes across her world in order to solve a puzzle. This is mostly because the Tomb Raider world just isn't rich enough to afford that amount of escape from the on-going narrative. GTA:SA's world practically begs to be explored. Being pulled back into the main narrative at times feels like a parent pushing a new toy into one's hand, when the object of greatest desire is actually the cardboard box the toy came in. One could - and I hope that the sense here is understood - actually live in the game-space, and ignore the game's narrative completely. There are bars and restaurants to go to, embedded video games to play. One can drive, ride, or fly any vehicle in the game. Thrill-seekers can go BASE jumping from the tallest skyscrapers, swim in the deepest seas. Or just sit on the beach and listen to the radio.

As compelling as GTA:SA's narrative is - it's good enough, and that's good enough - it's quite possible to take the perspective that it serves as a Macguffin, in an unusually specifically Hitchcockian sense. The plot lays out a trail of jelly beans which leads the player across this vast landscape - North by Northwest, one might say - from the small to the large, from city to desert to city, from set-piece to set-piece, encouraging exploration and discovery. The triumph of the game is that the narrative is almost entirely dispensible, because one doesn't need much of a carrot. The world itself is enough encouragement.

[Update: A small and only tangentially-related addendum to the above. Reading about GTA:SA, I was taken aback to see the game's developer described as 'Edinburgh-based'. Surely not, I thought. Someone must have made a mistake; no way was this environment steeped in SoCal geography and culture made by people in genteel Auld Reekie. So I went and looked and, sure enough, though Rockstar has people all over the world, Rockstar North is indeed in Edinburgh, just on the other side of Calton Hill from where I lived for six years. It doesn't make any sense.

But then last night I started seeing things I should have seen earlier. There's at least one neighbourhood in the game that carries the name 'Calton', after Rockstar North's location. The bridges east from the fictive San Francisco peninsula are the bridges across the Firth of Forth - why I hadn't seen this sooner, I dunno. And then, while flying a stolen jetpack to my lair in a deserted aeroplane graveyard (don't ask), I realised that I was looking down at the Salisbury Crags. So now I'm watching out for more of Edinburgh.]

The Arm

A few blocks from here, along Wilshire on the way to Third Street, there's an empty unit in a commercial building. I walk past it whenever I head down to Barnes & Noble, or the Apple Store, or whatever. It looks like it's not been occupied for some time - black roller-blinds cover the huge glass frontage, but through the gaps I can see that the place is completely clear.

Except for one thing. On the inside of the glass, down by the floor, there's an arm. It might catch a passer-by who wasn't paying attention by surprise and make them jump, but on closer examination it's a crude fake. It's a gruesome one, though. It has a bloody stump, as if the arm was ripped off at the elbow, and a broken bone sticks out. Every time I go past, I wonder what the arm used to be. A film prop? Part of some elaborate practical joke? In any event, it seems to be the only thing that was left in the unit when it was cleared. The place is dark, deserted and lonely now.

Except for one thing. Every time I go past this place that looks as if it's been untouched for months, the arm is in a different position. Sometimes it's lying flat. Sometimes reaching upwards as if scraping its fake fingernails down the glass in a pathetic attempt to escape.

Consonance

I'm amazed no-one else has figured out the real reason that Alberto Gonzales has been nominated for US Attorney General. It's obvious, and all you have to do is look: AG is the new AG. See? Nice and easy for, um, less than intellectually stellar presidents to remember. If he remembers the name, that'll tell him what this funny-looking guy does. If he remembers the name of the post, that'll help him figure out who's doing it these days.

This might also explain some other things that have been a puzzle for years. Example: Dick Cheney hasn't been VP because of his kick-ass diplomatic skills. Realise that would make perfect sense, but, nope. It's cause he reminds the Malaprop-in-Chief of Vincent Price, in an Abominable Dr. Phibes sort of way. It's a nice mnemonic: Dick Cheney, looks a bit like Dr. Phibes, played by Vincent Price, so he's - wait, wait, he's the Vice President! Right, Karen? Can I have a cookie now?

Expect this to continue. Stephen Dorff for Secretary of Defence - he's young, sure, but it's not as if the acting is going anywhere, and he's a hell of a lot cuter than Rumsfeld. And the biggest problem facing the Bush Administration following the death of Yasser Arafat isn't the whole 'future of the Middle-East' nonsense; it's finding a replacement chairman of the Palestinian Authority who meets the most important criterion. Paul Wolfowitz is a big fan of Paul Anka (he is Lebanese and all), and believes strongly in the redemptive power of cranking up 'Diana' across the West Bank. Just spreading a little Sands magic across the sands.

Overflow

('Worse than 2000'. Sometimes it sucks to be right, when there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.)

A couple of years ago I found myself working somewhere I'd previously worked about seven years before that, and in close proximity to some software that I'd written then, which was still being used, essentially unchanged from the day I left. Which was cool, but slightly disconcerting - it's not as if the software couldn't have done with some spring cleaning in the intervening years.

Anyway, one day, one of the people using the software came to me with a strange problem - as if, even after seven years away, I was naturally the one to come to first. The job of the software was to process data from an earth-observation satellite, generating products that scientists could then do science with; the products were typically very large, multi-dimensional images or otherwise gridded data, so handling the storage of these products on output media was an issue. I'd set up a simple but reasonably robust system whereby the software would spread the products across a bank of available hard-drives, leaving enough space on each for the other needs of the system.

Some huge new multi-Terabyte drives had just been installed, but the system refused to write any products to them, insisting that they were already full. I did some poking around, and realised, with a combination of amazement and amusement, that the drives were simply too big for the machines the software was running on to handle. There are typically limits, imposed by a combination of the hardware and the operating system, to how large a number a system can represent, without either resorting to using floating-point arithmetic (with a loss of precision in very large numbers), or implementing some very clever software hack. Since these were still 32-bit machines, the largest integer that they could comfortably represent was (2 to the power of 32) minus 1, which is a bit more than 4 billion.

But even this range wasn't available to me, because 4 billion requires an abandonment of the possibility of representing negative numbers - the negative integers can be sacrificed for a larger range of positive numbers if you know that what you're representing is always going to be non-negative, like the available free space on a hard-drive. The system routine I was calling to figure out how much space was available on each drive - the only way to do this job - was returning a signed integer as its result, ranging, potentially, from about -2 billion to about +2 billion.

I remember all of us gathering around the first Gigabyte hard-drives we got hold of, at the time the software was first written, cooing and marvelling at how huge they were. The size of these state-of-the-art hard-drives was so far within the limit of the system to address that size, it was inconceivable (in the Princess Bride sense of the word) that that might not be true of any larger drives we might use later. And yet here we were. Brand-new, multi-Terabyte hard-drives were appearing to the system as full, because it couldn't represent properly how big they were.

The problem is called 'overflow'. It happens when a number gets too big to be represented, and literally overflows in some way the space that's allocated for it. Exactly how the overflow manifests itself depends on how the number is being represented. When it's a signed integer, and it gets too large and positive - as was the case here - the number overflows into the last bit of the word (the chunk of memory) it's stored in. Since the last bit is typically used as a sign-bit, which identifies whether the number is positive or negative, integer overflow often causes the number to flip from large and positive to large and negative. That's what happened with the new drives; they were empty, yet they appeared to have a large and negative amount of free space on them, because their size couldn't be represented in a signed 32-bit integer without overflow.

Since the transition from Kilo to Mega, Mega to Giga, Giga to Tera and so on, is only ever a matter of time in digital circles, you might see our failure to plan for multi-Terabyte hard-drives as a kind of Y2K bug, and I think you'd be mostly right about that. (The solution we implemented, by the way, was to reformat/repartition the drives so that they appeared to be smaller than they actually were - small enough that their size was representable within the 32-bit words the system was built around.)

Courtesy of Danny O'Brien's characteristically sarcastic account [scroll down to 'The Voting Machines'] of this piece in the Palm Beach Post, here's basically the very same effect, on a smaller scale: integer overflow in electronic voting machines. The reason that the overflow occurs at about 32,000, rather than about 4 billion - and the source of Danny's sarcasm - is that the programmer had allocated only 16-bit words to the integer vote tallies, and (2 to the power of 15) minus 1 is 32,767. Why only 16-bit words, now that even 64-bit machines (with integer ranges somewhere in the billion billions) sit on desktops? No idea. It's obviously spectacularly clueless programming - and would remain so even if the problem hadn't been known as early as 2002.

I don't have the heart to try to present this in some eloquent form. Voting machines shouldn't use software, because software fucks up, and software fucks up because people fuck up. Moreover, software hides fuck-ups within the density of its code and the blithe confidence with which it presents results both correct and incorrect, and treats those two impostors just the same. The solution isn't software engineering rigour. It's not more programmers, and it's not more funding. The solution is to ditch machines entirely for this job. It matters too much to compromise.

So why are electronic voting machines becoming more and more popular? As with most questions one might ask about America, dig deep enough and the answer will be a simple one: money. No-one's going to build a successful business from paper ballots and stubby pencils.

The Elephant and the Hummingbird

[There's a web-site I was intending to write about tonight, but, despite my poking and prodding at it pathetically all day, it stayed stubbornly down, so that one'll have to wait for another time. No rush. In its place, here's a bit of apropros-of-nothing nonsense.]

I used to carry around a factoid in my head that I'd whip out from time to time. I've no idea if it's true or not. The point is that it feels true, it feels right, and if it isn't true it damn well ought to buck its ideas up and try harder, because we need factually dubious but fascinating concepts to get us through the day. Turn those scepticism dials up to eleven, because here's the factoid: To an order of magnitude or so, the number of heartbeats in the normal lifespan of every animal species is the same. African elephant. Bee hummingbird. Same number of heartbeats.

The point that I always liked to leap to from the shaky foundation this factoid provides is this one: No matter how long the temporal life of an animal, the number of heartbeats - representing in some way the clock whose fastest-moving hand splits the life of the beast into indivisible packets, like the clock which pulses the CPU of the machine I'm writing this on - carries with it the concept of perceived time, rather than the absolute time that we insist on wanting to believe in. It's the measurement of the length of a film by the number of frames, rather than by the actual time it would take for the Keystone Cops to bash each other silly. I like this idea, whether it's true or not. It seems to confer an equality - in this case of time - and therefore of life, that's all too rare in the ratcheted randomness around us. It's comforting to think that the fleetingness of the hummingbird's life needn't have to be justified by emphasising the beauty and intensity of that life. Why shouldn't it seem every bit as calm and peaceful and long to the hummingbird as the life of an elephant or a giant tortoise does to us? (Or, indeed, as fraught and short as our own lives often seem.)

Hang on for the key change, because I've often wondered if there's anything to the idea that this sort of equivalence of perceived experience - or, at the very least, a relativity of perceived experience - applies not just to length of life between species, but also intensity of life within a particular species. That particular species being, of course, us. Last week at work I wrote up the case study of a young woman - the fact that she's profoundly paralysed isn't really relevant - whose life is a constant search for new experiences and thrills. She skydives and skis and parasails and travels all over the world. Always something new; always something intense. The obvious inference would be that she has a hunger for life, that some spirit inside her pushes her to the new, the different, and the edgy. That her capacity for life is somehow larger than most people's.

But what if her capacity for life is larger than most people's in the same way that the elephant's life is longer than that of most species: that is, in only a superficial and misleading way. What if her perception of intensity is such that all of that thrill-seeking only pushes her to a point that's equivalent in her perception to that of, say, my grandmother as she sat on the promenade at Scarborough on a nice sunny day-trip with her friends. The elegant claim that I'd love to make, but can't - but will still describe - is that, like the equivalence of perceived lifespan across species according to heartbeats, there's an equivalence of perceived intensity of life across all humans, according to - well, some neural analogue of heartbeat, I guess.

Since the elephant's heart beats so much more slowly, he must have a longer temporal life to equal in perception the shorter temporal life of the hummingbird, driven by its tiny but manic heart. In a loosely analogous way, perhaps the thrill-seeker - the skydiver, the bungee jumper - must do these things to attain the perceived intensity of life that's satisfying to them - to any human - precisely because without actively seeking thrills life to them seems flat and tedious. Perhaps they seek thrills because life is less intense by some sort of default. And, in contrast, perhaps there are those for whom by-default life is so intense already that they must calm it down to attain the perceived intensity of life that's satisfying to them. To them, life would be a matter not of thrill seeking, but thrill avoidance. The easy, false interpretation of the choices they make would be that they don't enjoy intense experience. And to a degree that would be true, but only because life provides so much intensity in small, everyday ways that jumping off bridges just isn't really an option.

I'm heading toward the story of Andrew Veal today, which, if the stories in the papers are to be believed, is heartbreaking. There's one quote from his lab supervisor that captures exactly what I'm getting at here:

Mauney said that other than the war and the election, she didn't know what might have been troubling Veal.

"I told his mother there are some people so sensitive and intelligent and passionate they don't belong in the world the way it is today," she said.

Veal didn't jump off a bridge because he wanted an intense life. It seems that maybe his life was too intense to deal with as it was, so he climbed over the fence at Ground Zero and blew his brains out.

He Who Must Not Be Named

I read a blog post the other day by the estimable Digby. It's a passionate and incisive piece of writing, but that's not what stood out for me. What stood out was the fact that, after the first couple of paragraphs, he couldn't, or wouldn't, bring himself to use the name of the current US president. You know the one I mean. He took to calling him 'Junior'. And then I realised that only a couple of days ago I'd written an entire almost one-thousand-word post about the election, while scrupulously avoiding his name also. There are others, of course: Eric Alterman (or is it Charles Pierce?) commonly refers to him as 'C-Plus Augustus', and to the great Molly Ivins he'll always be 'Shrub'.

There's more than just a making-fun-of going on here. It's as if putting the words 'President', and 'You-Know-Who', together would be somehow defamatory to the position, and I think that's absolutely true. Knowing that it's an honorific that tends to go with respect for the position itself (and is an American trope generally - it made me smile a few weeks ago when a cute undergrad girl called me 'sir' as I held open a door for her, and not just for the kink angle - though admittedly mostly for that) doesn't make me cringe any less when I hear Tim Russert or some other media toady refer to He Who Must Not Be Named as 'sir'.

Respect doesn't come for free with a post, like a plastic toy soldier in a box of cereal. It's the person who gets respect, so long as it's earned. I can't help but think of the line that Jeremy Paxman claims he thinks to himself when he's about to interview a politician: 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?'. And quite right too. Democracy works when power is challenged, by the formal opposition, by the media, by everyone. What might seem to be disrespect towards individual politicians in Paxman's words is rightly seen as his utter respect for the democratic process and the checks and balances that keep it strong. In order to take that position, appropriate choice of language isn't a bad place to start.

To do and die

Fuck. That's all. Fuck.

The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854),
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

                        1.

        Half a league, half a league,
                 Half a league onward,
        All in the valley of Death
                 Rode the six hundred.
        "Forward, the Light Brigade!
        "Charge for the guns!" he said:
        Into the valley of Death
                 Rode the six hundred.

                        2.

        "Forward, the Light Brigade!"
        Was there a man dismay'd?
        Not tho' the soldier knew
                 Someone had blunder'd:
        Their's not to make reply,
        Their's not to reason why,
        Their's but to do and die:
        Into the valley of Death
                 Rode the six hundred.

                        3.

        Cannon to right of them,
        Cannon to left of them,
        Cannon in front of them
                 Volley'd and thunder'd;
        Storm'd at with shot and shell,
        Boldly they rode and well,
        Into the jaws of Death,
        Into the mouth of Hell
                 Rode the six hundred.

                        4.

        Flash'd all their sabres bare,
        Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
        Sabring the gunners there,
        Charging an army, while
                 All the world wonder'd:
        Plunged in the battery-smoke
        Right thro' the line they broke;
        Cossack and Russian
        Reel'd from the sabre stroke
                 Shatter'd and sunder'd.
        Then they rode back, but not,
                 Not the six hundred.

                        5.

        Cannon to right of them,
        Cannon to left of them,
        Cannon behind them
                 Volley'd and thunder'd;
        Storm'd at with shot and shell,
        While horse and hero fell,
        They that had fought so well
        Came thro' the jaws of Death
        Back from the mouth of Hell,
        All that was left of them,
                 Left of six hundred.

                        6.

        When can their glory fade?
        O the wild charge they made!
                 All the world wondered.
        Honor the charge they made,
        Honor the Light Brigade,
                 Noble six hundred.

Yesterday

I'm not sure how I feel. Sad. A bit numb. But above all baffled by this strange, young, wonderful, fucked-up country. It's a tedious truism that America is a country of extremes, but it's absolutely the case. It's the country of the Amish, but also the Castro; it's the home of Gotham, but also of Smallville. Recent US foreign policy has recklessly plunged another country into civil war, but there's a civil war of sorts going on here too. A civil, civil war, if you like, but it's every bit as divisive and poisonous as one fought with guns and explosives. Ultimately it's a war for the hearts and minds of middle America, the vast hinterlands - both social and geographical.

This might be the richest and most powerful country in the world, but it's also desperately insecure about its identity and its position in the world. Those insecurities fed its side of the Cold War. Since the fizzle-out of the Cold War, which was 'won' primarily by default as the Soviets collapsed in exhaustion rather than surrender, US insecurity has flailed about the world like a water-hose without a guiding hand, spraying everything in reach. It finally found its enemy, and therefore its reason to be insecure, in Islamic fundamentalism. When that reason turned out to be so much more than the black-hats of a James Cameron film, the wheels came off. Every ounce of US insecurity turned out to have been justified.

Insecurity was then manipulated to create fear, by people whose methods Orwell would have understood completely: The PATRIOT Act; a McCarthy-ite demonisation of entire countries by the thinnest suspicion, amplified into certainty with the complicity of a lazy and morally corrupt media; perpetual war. A retreat into the false certainty of simplistic ideology followed, the enemies of which were everywhere: abortion; gay marriage; the terror of gun control.

Fear is the only answer that makes sense to the question everyone is asking, in their own way: how can a majority of Americans vote for this man? How can it be possible? Fear. And damn every single one of the bastards who sunk to this cowardly level. Cheney and Rove and all of the blackest éminences noirs. Damn them all. And damn their idiot puppet too, the morally bankrupt, intellectually vacuous man who shores up his own fundamental weaknesses with false ideological certainty, who puffs himself up so much bigger because there's so little inside. Let his karma be infected with all the damage he's done, and coloured by all the blood on his hands. The tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans killed for no reason. Decades of anti-American feeling plugged directly into the brains of those who never needed much encouragement. The suffering of Ken Bigley, and David Kelly, and Margaret Hassan, and all the rest. The British troops who'd calmed Basra sent into the Valley of Death for their troubles. When the pathetic piece of shit smirks at his inauguration, remember the cost, both past and future, and notice how little it penetrates his tiny mind.

I've never voted for anyone who actually won. This time, I genuinely believed that I'd hitched my vote-less wagon to a cause that was not only right, but would prevail. I could see it in the photographs of Kerry rallies. I read it in the bewildering diversity of voices standing up to say, 'no more', from Eminem to Lila Lipscomb. Retrospectives of the past four years were written as obituaries, ready to clear away the diseased old to make way for a new start. I told people to trust me. But there's no doubt. No matter that Ohio might have swung elsewhere with a few tens of thousands of votes, America made a choice this time, and it chose to be afraid.

This wasn't John Kerry's fault. He offered hope, but not enough people wanted it. He stood tall against a shameless barrage of lies and character assassination, against the 'so-called' of the so-called liberal media. He grew as the campaign proceeded, and would have grown further into the job. Never mind. That's not going to happen now.

I miss British politics. In ways both good and bad, it's a game. Play hard, play fair, do your best and then shake hands afterwards. US politics isn't a game, it's a war, and I'm not convinced that the left has the heart to get its hands dirty. And the thing is, I'm glad that it doesn't. That way lies madness. It would become what it despises.

The sky hasn't fallen. The world keeps on turning. It's all we've got. Talk to people you like. Read writers you trust. Remember that you're not alone.