Because Cheney Has Gone Unpunished For His Crimes, Someone Else In His Position Will Do Even Worse In The Future

Yesterday everyone was hating on poor little Belgium. It was over that ballgame in Brazil. I'm not in the Ann Coulter camp or anything, but I just don't get any more excited about soccer than I do about baseball or football or bad mitten. And Belgium… well, I have to admit, was always fly-over country for me when I lived in Amsterdam and visited Paris as frequently as possible-- except I drove. When I did visit Belgium in more recent years, I came to appreciate that the food was pretty amazing-- my faves in Brussels being Comme Chez Soi, L'Épicerie, and Les Brasseries Georges-- but I could never get over Adam Hochschild's 1998 historical masterpiece, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa. A few years ago I did a post about how the CIA conspired with Belgium to murder the first elected-- and last I think-- president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, based in great part on Hochschild's work.

Monday Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was Secretary of State, wrote about how the national myths of the "civilized countries" like the U.S. and Belgium "mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do." He was referring too the murder, plunder, slaughter, devastation, torture and massacre the civilized nations, primarily of the Northern Hemisphere, perpetrated against the backward nations of the Southern Hemisphere. And the latest myths about Justice and human rights progress is belied by, for example, the hideous unprosecuted war criminal Dick Cheney. "As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself," wrote Wilkerson, "Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power-- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost-- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney."

Cheney even models Leopold: never in the dangerous fray himself (five draft deferments, e.g.), a master of bureaucratic manipulation and intrigue, in love to a fault with secrecy, willing to undertake any crime under the sun so long as it leads to profit, deeply relishing every moment of evil he is able to engineer, and a master of masking it all through adroit, politically-attuned public relations aimed at people too stupid to question him -- all while paying absolutely no attention to what his past clearly demonstrates he has done, thus thoroughly frustrating the decent folks all around him. Leopold to a "T."

This modern man, Cheney, however needs no kingship, no ornate palaces, no personally-owned colony like the Congo; Cheney's writ is the world. It is all of humankind that Cheney would torture, enslave, murder, or plunder if it were required. And Cheney is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is required. Take a look at that face as he tells the American people and the world in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Now, wait a dozen years and envision the same face, somewhat leaner and-- if possible-- meaner, saying on the editorial pages of his Journal as Iraq implodes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." He is of course talking about President Obama, not President George W. Bush. Leopold, whom the American poet Vachel Lindsay, has "Burning in Hell...", must be yearning for Dick's arrival because no one, except perhaps for Leopold himself, would register such a claim in the face of such self-demeaning evidence to the contrary.

In the same chapter of his book referenced above, Hochschild writes: "The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting." He is right. But it is more than forgetting. It is an abject lack of political courage to hold people accountable.

In King Leopold's case, Belgium and the wider world want to move on and not look back. Holding people accountable would mean holding themselves accountable. That central Africa is today still an unfolding tragedy of exploitation, commercial rivalries, and indigenous incapacity partly an inheritance of colonialism, matters little. The world moves on relentlessly to fulfill its oligarchies' desires for wealth and power. Suitable rhetoric is developed and delivered to keep the masses quiescent. The Leopolds and Cheneys of the world are privately lauded for their hard-headed realpolitik while appropriately tut-tutted in public. Presidents and prime ministers proclaim that it would be nationally disruptive to hold people accountable for their crimes and, besides, they are more concerned for the future than the past.

Which is why most people in America today live in the moment and in the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well. In that respect, Leopold and Cheney are right: wealth and power is all that matters.

Are ballads and epic poems written to celebrate renegades who stand defiantly outside the reach of a mandatory software upgrade?

No, this isn't my office computer -- and it won't
be after I'm mandatorily upgraded either.

by Anonymous
[see? they can't prove nuttin'!]

I thought you folks might enjoy this tale of life in My Company. It even comes with a surprise twist at the end!

Since our office move last fall into the belly of the New York Stock Exchange security-zone beast, we peons who don't have offices are just about completely exposed to everyone's view -- when you walk down the aisle between cubicle row, it's almost impossible not to look in everyone's cubicle as you pass. As a result, I have established that, unless I've missed somebody somewhere, I am the only person in the office still using a CRT monitor, as opposed to a flat panel screen. From which I conclude(rather proudly, I must say) that I have the privilege of having the oldest and crappiest computer still in use on the premises.

OK, "crappiest" is perhaps a bit judgmental. The fact is, it's perfectly adequate to my job needs, and I've learned to live with the limitation that I can't make any changes of any kind to the software on it, all of which would require a password known only to IT. And so, while the rest of the Mac world has marched on through the operating-system world of Tiger (OS 10.4) and on into the paradise of Leopard (OS 10.5), I'm still firmly grounded in yesteryear's Panther (the final version of it, OS 10.3.9). Which also means that I can't use most any current-release software, which increasingly requires OS 10.4 or later -- even if I could install such software, which I can't.

(True, I could ask for luxuries like a more recent version of Flash, to enable me to open Web pages that my old version won't. Yes, I could ask. Maybe the answer would be yes, maybe it would be no, but either way my permanent record would indicate that I was the troublemaker who asked. One of our highest-ranking officers is a gentleman whose principal, er, gift is remembering such things.)

Now, to the story. We began hearing awhile back that we were all going to be upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008. This is actually not much of a deal for me, since I hardly ever use any of the components of whatever version of MS Office I've got. When the HR director circulates attached documents, they're usually in MS Word format -- that's about the extent of my excursions into Office.

Nevertheless, we soon began to hear about commencement of the "mandatory upgrade" to Office 2008 -- are there other companies where a software upgrade can be made to sound like a punishment? The memo drumbeat indicated that the upgrade was closing in on us. From our IT guy in, apparently, San Francisco (we have a SF office?) comes word of arrangements made with Microsoft for free online training courses!

Then came the memo from the IT guy in our Las Vegas office (now, I knew we had one of them!) who is apparently in charge of Mandatory Upgrades, asking us in the New York office please to leave our computers on when we left the next few nights, since it will be easier for him to perform the upgrades while we're out of the office. The procedure should take 20 minutes, Mr. Las Vegas says.

Of course, since the memo wasn't sent till 5:53pm our time, and as the clock ticks down to 6 I don't usually keep checking for e-mail, I didn't see the memo till the next morning. (It's true that I would know I had an e-mail waiting if I kept my "dock" permanently displayed, but unlike all my coworkers with their bigger monitors, I can't afford to give up that chunk of screen real estate, since I'm trying to display magazine pages in readable form.) But I figured I wasn't likely to be in the "chosen" group of First NY Upgradees.

And then it occurred to me: Can my computer even run the "mandatory upgrade" software? I figure there's no way it will run in poor old OS 10.3.9, and sure enough, Office 2008 is a member of the OS 10.4 or Later Club. (OS 10.3 is the now-antique Panther; OS 10.4, the already-aging Tiger; and OS 10.5, the still-current Leopard. Here comes Snow Leopard! And no, I'm not making that up.) And while my mind has detoured into wondering if my computer has enough RAM to handle an OS upgrade (the leaps in memory requirement for successive iterations of the Mac OS have been so enormous that I believe Apple is now measuring it in gazillionbytes), my eye, continuing to rummage through the system requirements for Office 2008, notices that if your computer processor happens to be of the heirloom G4 species, it has to be at least 500 MHz. I have no idea what mine is, but I check and discover that it is -- ta-da! -- a 450 MHz G4!

So now I know: My company has "mandated" a software upgrade that, as best I can tell, won't run on the computer it has mandated me, even if it's possible to run a more nearly current OS on it. I add this newly discovered info to the memo I have begun writing to Mr. Las Vegas pointing out that my computer is still running in OS 10.3.9, and I really can't afford to have it further slowed down by an OS upgrade if I'm to get any work done. I finish the memo by promising to leave my computer on as requested, apologizing for having shut it off the night before and explaining about not having seen the 5:53pm memo.

I don't know how many more nights I'm supposed to leave my computer on, but heck, I'm not the one paying the electric bill. I haven't heard anything more from anybody in IT, in Las Vegas or San Francisco or even New York. (Yes, yes, it has occurred to me that perhaps I should have brought this whole thing to the attention of our IT guy here, who's a good guy. But if he's not already in the loop on this, I'm afraid that dragging him into it may just result in my being ratted out to the Chief Punishment Officer in the head office in Florida.

I can't help wondering if the "mandatory upgrade" is turning out to be perhaps not absolutely, unmitigatedly mandatory.

NOW FOR THE SURPRISE TWIST!

The above was in fact written on Monday of this week -- that is to say, the 16th. I held off posting, or even thinking seriously about whether I really wanted to go ahead and post it, because later that day I got word from our NY IT guy -- who's both a good guy and utterly competent -- that the next day I and a colleague who does basically the same job (putting us pretty near the bottom of our food chain, it seems) would be upgraded to G5 computers. I have to guess that our great IT minds had collectively spotted this chink in the MS Office "mandatory upgrade" project.

There was some e-discussion of when our schedules would make it easiest for the NY IT guy to get at our computers. I explained that I don't really go out at any set time, but could almost surely work around his schedule, provided I knew when it was going to happen. A couple of hours' notice is what I was offered, and I responded that that should work.

So with developments developing on Monday, and theoretically scheduled to finish the process on Tuesday, I shelved the whole question of this post. After all, if and when the promised computer upgrade was to happen, there was still the question of what kind of equipment I would actually wind up with.

For one thing, I already knew that the equipment wasn't going to be new, and around here when we get a recycled computer, there's always the risk that it came from someone, like from the Art Dept., who had been upgraded because he/she had beaten the living daylights out of the old beast by performing the computer equivalent of mechanical-bull-riding.

I was once "upgraded" to one of these poor victim machines, which it turned out our IT folks at that time already suspected of being a victim of such abuse. Apparently it was easier to recycle and hope for the best than to actually check it out. That poor thing was swapped out for a hardier survivor, and presumably set aside for reassignment to some even sappier sucker. (Of course, at the moment the likeliest source of recycled equipment hereabouts would be stuff left behind by the fallen comrades from our January round of layoffs.)

Perhaps more important, while the software would undoubtedly be more up-to-date, there seemed no reason to assume that I would be equipped with stuff that enhances my actual computer use, at least not without asking, and having "troublemaker" notations added to my permanent record etc. etc.

These were all issues it seemed most prudent to deal with after I got my "new" computer. And who's to say that after being so gifted I might not feel churlish airing such unkind sentiments?

That was Monday, you'll recall. By my count this is Saturday. Monday's "tomorrow" has long since gone the way of the emu, leaving me still waiting for that famous couple of hours' notice. I guess I can suspend the wait for today and tomorrow. But starting Monday (again), it could happen at any time, with just those couple of hours' notice.

Meanwhile, I retain my "rogue" status in the face of the "mandatory upgrade" crusade. A rebel, or just a troublemaker?

POSTSCRIPT

Rode down in the elevator with the IT guy. He says Monday, only he can't tell exactly when. Says he'll give me an hour's notice. The old "couple of hours" window seems to have shrunk.

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