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3 January 2010: Northwest Flight 253: Bandaids versus THE CureOne of the Top Ten quotations of the decade is surprisingly accurate despite its source. About midway through the period between 2000 and 2010, Donald Rumsfeld informed the press that from his perspective there are known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, nd unknown unknowns. Something like that.
He was correct, but in a larger context--the future of Western civilization.
Right now termites are munching away at our foundations. They are violent, but that is nothing new. They don't negotiate, but that is also nothing new. They operate all over the world and feel free to enter new countries and settle in them without assimilating but instead intimidating. They are not a nation but a trans-nation, a genuine challenge posed by the twenty-first century to the survival of western civilization. They question our assumptions, the ground that we stand on: such givens as national borders and nationhood, and the taboo against using human beings as weapons.
This is an elevated form of hostage taking. But a hostage can be freed, while a suicide bomber perishes.
And what's the difference between suicide bombers and dying for your country in war? humans, both innocent and guilty, both singly and en masse, functioning as weapons rather than simply using weapons separate from themselves.
The terrorists have us on the defensive. They are the inventors. For each rock they throw that breaks something, we erect a wall, after the fact. Our intelligence agencies crack some of their schemes but not all of them. But more such bureaucracy is not the answer.
The termites keep evolving faster than the terminators can devise new ways to eliminate them.
I'm thinking specifically of the liquid explosive used last Christmas on Northwest Flight 253 that could not be detected by any of the surveillance devices developed to prevent terrorism from invading air travel, one of the underpinnings of globalization, one of the many. Terrorism, by the way, is a negative by-product of globalization, one of the many.
So airlines and airports are stepping up levels of precaution and no doubt scientists are developing mechanisms to detect liquid explosives.
And the cycle will continue as the termites multiply faster than the behemoth's reconstructions and exterminations.
*****
Another gigantic scar that defiles western civilization is the systematic slaughter of Jews and other non-Aryans by the Nazis during World War II. But military engagement quickly defeated them. That's all it took, along with the knowledge that what they were doing was dead wrong.
We know that terrorism is dead wrong and work 24/7 to combat it, because conventional weaponry is worthless. Even nuclear weaponry is worthless because they are ubiquitous and we can't destroy the world. Even the state-of-the-art drones won't come close to solving the problem.
We need something gigantic, in the figurative sense, and unprecedented, like induced evolution. Without the tendency toward violence as a means toward an end, the foundations of terrorism will disintegrate.
I've said this before: we need transcendent creativity to leap us over this gigantic and growing frog, this roaring termite.
We don't need to be preemptive but proactive: we need genius, not violence and greed.
*****
Nothing comes from nothing, the Stoics told us years ago, but we have learned since then that unanticipated mutations can occur. We have to burrow through our layers of assumptions and givens and premises. We couldn't win in Vietnam without the nuke, which would not have solved the problem at all.
Here the nuke can't even be considered.
Many of the most towering figures in the history of western civilization never went to college, as I pointed out in my New Year's blog.
We need to convene the Kilgore Trouts [an inventive, totally unappreciated eccentric genius who appears in several of Kurt Vonnegut's early novels] of the world, away from music, away from art, away from science fiction writing--all activities that can be put on hold without threatening the continuity of anything indispensable.
We need to explore the mines of irrational genius. We need to distract the inventors of rocket gizmos and WMD and add them to our think tank, because their activities put on hold will not interfere with daily existence either.
And together they must enable us to leap over the terrorist frog.
*****
If not the literal form of induced evolution I suggested in a blog back on August 15, then some sort of evolution is needed. By convening these eccentric creators and inventors, we are attempting to induce something. By engineering the successful leap, these eccentrics will materialize, out of the thin air of their imaginations, the needed next step, something new that will not violate what we cherish that already exists.
As activists and Madison Avenue executives say, it must be sexy or it will be ignored.
If induced evolution is sexy, maybe "they" are already working on it behind closed doors in some inner chamber of the CIA.
If not, the assembly of eccentric and conventional creators is imperative. The number of times and ways we can react is limited. We must turn our thoughts toward THE ACT and hope it materializes soon enough.
(c)
