Refinery Flightseeing

For an example of technological wonder alloyed with terrible consequences, consider the refinery. On the one hand, this is the drug lab of the oil addiction of the world. The stuff it makes is bad for the world's health, and the money it makes move around causes hellacious trouble. On the other hand, a refinery takes sticky smelly black crude oil and turns it into the stuff of plastic bags and medicines, pantyhose, gasoline for the infernal combustion engine, Jet-A, brilliant paints and dyes, computer components, cheap toys and cheap furniture, lubricants that keep the moving parts of machines moving…. Note the intricacy of the pipes in the cracking towers. The camera didn't register, but the eye could see, hundreds of lights glinting in the towers. At night from an airplane at low altitude, this thing is a fairy castle of glittering lights, vapors, and fire. What happens in there is genuine magic – not benign white magic. But magic.

Texas City refineries.

A Personal Perspective on ISAAC ASIMOV'S UTOPIAS and others

Part Three

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien threatens Smith with Room 101, “the worst thing in the world” (p.228), which, as he admits, “varies from individual.” Creating situations that are generally accepted as unpleasant or even horrific situations is easy enough for most writers, but even Dante might have hesitated at the idea of creating a one-size-fits-all ‘worst thing in the world’. Similarly, the harder a writer tries to describe a society in which he or she would be happiest, his or her personal best thing in the world, the greater the risk of creating a ‘utopia’ from which many people would find boring or unpleasant: personally, I’d much rather live in Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World than Rand’s Galt’s Gulch.

Not that Galt would be likely to raise the forcefield that protects his pocket Utopia and let me in. A rather worrying feature of many fictional utopias is that they rely on excluding or even eradicating disruptive elements, including new ideas. Plato’s Republic, which ruled that artists would be unnecessary once the perfect society had been achieved, is probably the earliest of these. In both of the George Turner stories above, the guardians of the earthly utopias prohibit space travellers from returning to Earth. In ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, Libary tells the crew of the Starfarer:

“you are conditioned against serenity. You would only be an eruptive force in a world seeking a middle way. You would debate our beliefs, corrupt our young men by offering toys they do not need, tempt the foolish by offering domination over space and time - and in a few years destroy what has taken six centuries to build.” (Turner 1997; p.216)

When the contact officer, Nugan, asks for a “small piece of land, isolated, where we could live on our own terms” (p.215) in which they can settle, Libary replies,

“You will live sequestered? Without travelling for curiosity’s sake, without plundering resources for your machines, without prying into our world and arguing with it?… Set your colony on a hill, and we will surround it with bushfires, a weapon your armoury is not equipped to counter.” (pp.215-217).

Like Huxley’s Brave New World, where ninety percent of the population is mentally subnormal, or Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, where men from outside Women’s Country have to be kept ignorant of the women’s eugenics program (an ignorance enforced, when necessary, with summary execution), Turner’s Utopia is founded on the majority having an unquestioning faith in the system and only a very small minority, akin to Huxley’s Mustapha Mond, knowing the truth. Heinlein’s Luna, while more tolerant of outsiders (the protagonist even intercedes to prevent the lynching of a tourist, settling for fining him for ‘not having common sense to learn local customs’, p. 121), is secretly a cybercratic dictatorship with only a façade of democracy, in which the computer who ‘counts’ the votes is also the winning candidate. (It may be argued that this is not very different from elections in some countries in our own world, but few people would describe those as utopian.)

Does this matter? If everyone is happy, would it matter if they are also ignorant, or even stupid? Huxley certainly thought so when he wrote Brave New World; why else would the Savage “claim the right to be unhappy”? The creators of Star Trek also thought so, when they had Captain Kirk destroy communities where people were happier than he was, in ‘This Side of Paradise’ and ‘The Apple’. And most science fiction readers and academics would certainly think so: after all, how could a society be perfect without good libraries and intelligent conversation with informed people? We could never possibly be happy there, and therefore -

And there’s the rub. The problem with most science fiction utopias is that writers try to design worlds in which they would be perfectly happy, which is making an unreasonable demand on the future. And the fault does not lie in the future, but in ourselves. As Alfred Bester said in ‘Hobson’s Choice’:

Through the vistas of the years every age but our own seems glamorous and golden. We yearn for the yesterdays and tomorrows, never realising that we are faced with Hobson’s Choice… that today, bitter or sweet, anxious or calm, is the only day for us. (p.144)

Or as Gully Foyle, the protagonist of Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!, asks “Who are we, any of us, to make a decision for the world?” (p. 242).

Perhaps fortunately, that power is rarely if ever given to science fiction writers. The future will make its decisions: all science fiction writers can hope to do is to suggest to our descendents some possible roads they can choose between. They may choose none of them - or, in time and in different communities, they may try many or even all. They have time. And worlds enough.

The Tick-Tock of the Doomsday Clock, part 2

When I was four years old, I asked my mother if the atomic bomb would fall on us. At the time we lived with my grandmother on a small farm in Alabama, and Mom answered, "It won't happen here because we're out in the country." But a year later we moved to Columbus, Georgia, which was adjacent to Ft. Benning, the largest infantry training center in the free world and definitely a target if the Soviet Union ever lobbed nuclear weapons at the United States!

Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has registered a graphic guess at the risk of nuclear war. The minute hand of the clock flicks back and forth in response to world events. It stood at three minutes to midnight in 1984 when I happened onto a replica of the clock at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. The Bulletin was worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Peace activists in Berkeley were worried too, and they staged protest actions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons were being designed. The Doomsday Clock backed up to 11:43 when the Cold War ended. It presently shows 11:53, and the Bulletin's Board of Directors is keeping a wary eye on North Korea.

Cosmologist Martin Rees discusses the Doomsday Clock in his book Our Final Hour (Basic Books, 2003.) Rees believes we now have Doomsday Clocks, plural. Terrorists or rogue states might explode a nuclear weapon somewhere, but "bioterror and bioerror" top Rees' extensive inventory of plausible dooms.

For a question about whether to fear the future, "It won't happen here because we're out in the country" felt like the wrong answer when I was four. Now I can count the ways it's wrong. First, some doomsday scenarios imperil the whole Earth. Second, there can be local midnights: the world goes on, but with a mushroom cloud or a toxic flood where a city used to be. Given Doomsday Clocks, plural, who can say where is safe? Third, finding yourself in a safe place does nothing to alleviate the anxiety of living in a world where Doomsday can happen to someone, somewhere. And fourth: asking whether to fear the future or not is too blunt a way to approach it. The future – which is already here: the 21st Century – is more nuanced than that. Technological terror and scientific wonder are mixed and welded together at every scale from lumps down to the fine grains – like breccia, which is rock that consists of sharp fragments cemented together.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is still in the business of designing nuclear weapons. LLNL also collaborates with NASA to peer into the dawn of creation with state-of-the-art instruments analyzing extraterrestrial material samples. I hear that the LLNL campus looks drably institutional, except for flocks of yellow free-range bicycles. There are enough bikes for any employee to grab one and ride to any other building as desired. If a bike needs repair, it gets parked belly-up as a signal to the maintenance department. Inventing new hells on Earth, doing dawn-of-creation science, and having free-range yellow bicycles. A man-made breccia with bright yellow flecks.

The Noriega Playlist

A Christmas story of how Billy Idol defeated Manuel Noriega and ended the 1980s.



Fifteen years ago, on Christmas Day 1989, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega sought refuge inside the Papal Nunciatura (the Vatican equivalent of an embassy) in Panama City. American troops quickly formed a perimeter outside. While the idea of the 75th Rangers going commando on the Vatican has a certain alt history elan, cooler heads prevailed and negotiations for Noriega's surrender commenced.



President George H.W. Bush had initiated the invasion, styled Operation Just Cause, five days earlier. (Originally, the code name was "Operation Blue Spoon," incorporating elements of "Operation Nifty Package" and "Operation Acid Gambit," all derived from earlier Panama invasion plans maintained in the "Prayer Book," including "Operation Purple Storm" and "Operation Bushmaster." For an obsessively detailed studied of the peculiar etymology of Pentagon code names and what information is encrypted within them, check out William Arkin's Code Names or his killer blog Early Warning at The Washington Post.)

(As dramatic as the invasion sounds, it had a lot of competition for 1989 holiday viewers' attention. The Iron Curtain was dramatically crumbling, and the preceding week had also carried dramatic coverage of the revolution in Romania, which included amazing footage I vividly remember of a bunch of armed civilians taking over the live studio broadcast of the Romanian national television network, picked up real-time by CNN. Bush and Gorbachev declared the end of the Cold War, free elections were held in Mongolia, and the Simpsons premiered.)

On Christmas morning, U.S. Army General Maxwell "Mad Max" Thurman (a/k/a "The Maxatollah") talked mano a mano with Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa at the gate of the Nunciatura. The compound was near several high-rise hotels. As Thurman turned to leave, a reporter hollered from an upper floor window of the Holiday Inn: "Hey, General Thurman, how 'ya doin'? Merry Christmas!"

Fearing reporters could eavesdrop on his negotiations using parabolic microphones, Thurman ordered a music barrier be erected around the embassy. The 4th PSYOP Group rolled in a fleet of Hummers mounted with loudspeaker arrays. Conveniently, this being Panama, there was already an Armed Forces Radio station in the city under American command.



The first day, December 25, it was all Christmas music. By December 27, the PSYOP troops had taken over the Armed Forces Radio playlist, and they unleashed a barrage of the same tools of psychological warfare they deployed back home from the windows of their Chevy Novas: classic rock.

Noriega loved opera. He got Styx.



The station had been playing requests for the troops since the invasion began, as reported in a post-op memorandum:

"When the troops started coming in from the field, the requests became quite imaginative. Canine handlers called asking for Billy Idol, 'Flesh for Fantasy,' the Marine Corps Combat Security Company called saying they were going on a mission and needed a song to pump them up. The song was 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Guns and Roses, a song which had been requested many times already. The Special Forces Combat Divers Team asked for several songs by The Doors, 'Strange Days,' 'People Are Strange,' 'The End'...We played a lot of songs with the word 'jungle' in it as well as such songs as 'God Bless the U.S.A.' by Lee Greenwood, and 'We're Not Going to Take It' by Twisted Sister."



Unsurprisingly, the whole thing took on its own manic momentum, the reporters delighting in the Col. Kilgore meme as the Zeitgeist injected itself into this minor historical moment, speaking volumes to the imminent spirit of the age.

The complete playlist is available at George Washington University's National Security Archive. Among the highlights:

(You've Got) Another Thing Coming - Judas Priest
Blue Collar Man - Styx
Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
Don't Look Back - Boston
Electric Spanking of War Babies - Funkadelic
Heaven's On Fire - Kiss
If I Had A Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin
Iron Man - Black Sabbath
Judgment Day - Whitesnake
Jungle Love - Steve Miller
No More Mister Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
Paradise City - Guns & Roses
Panama - Van Halen
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Refugee - Tom Petty
Renegade - Styx
Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
The Party's Over - Journey
This Means War - Joan Jett
Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi
Wanted Man - Ratt
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC
Your Time is Gonna Come - Led Zeppelin



Noriega surrendered on January 3. He is currently imprisoned in a federal correctional facility in Miami, scheduled for release next September. (Check out This American Life's story of the 10-year-old girl from a small town in Michigan who became Noriega's pen pal.)



The use of rock music as instrument of psychological warfare has evolved since then, as evidenced by the confirmed reports of enemy combatants being tortured with Metallica and the "Barney" theme in a shipping container on the Syrian border (as brilliantly explored by Jon Ronson in his excellent Men Who Stare at Goats). Though revolutionary at the time, and considered excessive by President Bush 41 and General Colin Powell, The Noriega Playlist now seems a kinder and gentler riff from a time when our geopolitical nihilism was young.



I have created an iMix at the iTunes store with the bulk of The Noriega Playlist for your holiday listening enjoyment. We are open for comments as to what might be a likely playlist for Tehran or Pyongyang.

(I will be headed to primeval territory not far from the Nunciatura for the next 10 days, so don't count on another post from me until January 5 or so. Happy New Year!)

Season's Shelf Cloud

Christmas can be so wrong. Commercialism starting in October or earlier, consumerism covering the nation like sticky red and green paint, all leading up to a misbegotten Christian Saturnalia. In the end, store shelves are emptied of merchandise while residential cabinet, closet and garage shelves are full of new clutter and nothing has really changed.

But a few days ago a grand shelf cloud manifested itself over my part of Houston. It loomed to the south, a massive dark bank of cloud with an upper edge like a seam across the sky. Behind it slightly less gray clouds seethed with lightning. Christmas shoppers took one look, said "yipe!" and ran either into the store or out of the store to the car. Minutes later the storm behind the shelf cloud arrived, pouring out wind and ice water.

Shelf clouds are the visible gust front of a thunderstorm. Not the kind of weather you want to encounter while walking across a parking lot or driving your car, and deadly dangerous if you're in a small airplane. As meteorologist Jack Williams states in the December 2006 issue of the magazine Flight Training, "A shelf cloud is as good a sign as you can imagine for not even thinking of taking off or landing it it's within sight of the airport. The gust front will quickly change the speed and maybe the direction of the wind, and it's the last thing you want to encounter close to the ground."

What a wonderful thing to see on the brink of Christmas. Visible, electric change written across the sky. A reminder that discomfort and danger are more real than the artificial Christmas bubble. A storm in your personal life at Christmas doesn't mean coal in your existential stocking; it just means that your membership in life is paid in full and extended for another year. All plans and hopes are subject to forcible change in the winds of reality. Yet there are moments of sanctuary. I watched the shelf-cloud storm from a cheerily bustling Whole Foods store with my friend Eileen. We had a comfortable seat in a booth right by the window, two sacks of groceries (i.e., shopping mission accomplished), and cups of hot coffee. It was a good vantage point from which to contemplate the storm and Christmas.

What's Under the Anorak?

When I was a kid, Christmas shopping involved trips to Chicago. After hanging with the in-store magician at Marshall Field's, Dad would usually drag us down to the Abercrombie & Fitch store on Wabash.

This did not involve waxed abs on billboards. It was a time portal into a now lost prewar world of the great white hunter. A gentlemen's excursion outfitter, the kind of place where a 1930s pulp hero would get his gear for an expedition to find a lost city in the Amazon or hunt the killer Yeti on the road to Shangri-La. Guns, mackinaws, and old school snowshoes. A Gore Tex-free zone of leather, fur and cordite. The place where young Hemingway stopped before heading up to Michigan and Teddy Roosevelt shopped for his African hunts. (There was another one on Madison Avenue in New York across from the original Brooks Brothers, enabling one-stop shopping — it even had a shooting range in the basement.)



We all know what the brand is now — half-naked twenty year olds displaying their shellacked, machined Apollonian bodies across every bus stand and billboard in urban America, the ultimate commodification of American teen sexuality. The taciturn WASPs of Ralph Lauren's 1980s appropriation of prep after they take off the ties and more: stoned, liberated and vacant. A consumer culture meme so powerful that its product placement rates its own review by Times TV critic Virginia Heffernan.

"No catalog models were harmed in the making of this film."



The Economist just scratches the surface of what's going on here when it argues Madison Avenue has coopted Continental crit and mixed it in a cocktail with a little von Hayek — "Post-Modernism is the new black." Consider how pop semiotics interrelates with the longstanding American insistence on each individual's freedom to reinvent himself (the founding motive force driving Benjamin Franklin's autobiography), and it starts to make more sense.

How does a place for fat middle-aged white businessmen to buy itchy anoraks morph into an existentially vampiric project to enslave their great grandchildren in a subconscious servitude of hypersexualized consumerism? By selling compelling new identities for all-American weekend hedonists.

There's a self-evident family tree at work here. The original early '80s Banana Republic, where, for a period of time, you could buy an honest to god pith helmet to transform trips to the grocery store into an adventure worthy of Haggard. At the same time, Ralph Lauren sexualized the buttoned down attire of bond traders and their children, conquering Middle America with an invasion of magazine models recruited from an anachronistic Fairfield County of the imagination. And then J. Crew appeared, each catalog a visual narrative of the fantasy weekend chino orgies those kids invented while their dads were away at the Bohemian Grove and their moms at the spa with Martha. Through to today, where we see the complete triumph of surface over substance.



One wonders what the Chinese slaves who make these pre-distressed garments think of it all.

What do you do with a generation of overgrown mall kids weaned on hormonal chicken and Diet Coke, their brains wrapped in stonewashed denim and clogged up with dreams of body wax?



Might they make the perfect troops for our new 21st century wars, next generation ambassadors of our way of life, reinvigorating their frontier hunter heritage with vintage gunmetal? Envision the shirtless wonder boys with night vision goggles and assault rifles, gleefully spelunking the dark corridors of Sadr City and the wintry Stalinist tombs of Pyongyang, collecting each other's beautiful body parts from the battlezone, their post-Teutonic female counterparts interrogating enemy combatants in pink and green Abu Ghraibs, playing pick up soccer with severed heads in the base camp. Imagine the recruiting posters looming over your freeway commute.

If suburban kids dressed in Baudrillard's latest designs can succeed in making it real by starting their own fight clubs, isn't parachuting them in to take it to the Mooj a natural evolution of things? We await the platoons of photogenic special forces in elegantly ragged camo cargo pants, accompanied by their embedded fashion photographers and funded by next generation military-industrial-consumer product placement, bringing a new order to the world: Pax Abercrombie.

CHRISTMAS AT THE CHUSHINGURA CAFÉ

"Joy to the world," the balding man in the houndstooth jacket warbled, "Goodwill to men." Behind him, a holovid of the Chiba-Disneyland boy's choir moved their lips out of synch while neon subtitles in English and Hiragana ran across their robes. I tried not to shudder, and turned to watch Kinnison, the manager, toying with his teriyaki chicken. "Thank Christ for Christmas," he said. "Without it, I'd probably have gone under years ago."

"Uh-huh."

"Suicide rate goes through the roof, you know? Especially when it's winter, too. Shortest days of the year, no sunshine..." He shrugged. "I hate it myself; I catch the same plane back home every January first and play golf 'til Easter."

"Where's home? Hawaii?"

"Queensland. Australia. Lots of Japanese tourists, and you'd be amazed how much more you can charge for fish and chips if you call it tempura - but don't quote me on that."

The man in the jacket - I can't call him a singer - put down the microphone, bowed, and picked up a knife and napkin. I glanced around. We were only a few blocks from Little Tokyo, but I couldn't see anyone who looked Asian apart from the waitresses and the tattooed swordsman. "Tourists," repeated Kinnison. "Where would we be without 'em, ay?"

I shrugged. I'd been a travel writer for about seven years, and if I had a dollar for every tourist trap I'd seen, I could buy the Sphinx and use it as a piggy-bank. The man on stage dropped to his knees and thrust the knife into his abdomen.

"Where did you get the idea for this place?" I asked, as the swordsman raised his katana.

"Chushingura? One of the cooks suggested it; it's a Japanese movie about forty-seven students who commit suicide because they can't get into a university, or something." The man in the jacket was grimacing horribly, but he was mercifully silent; the katana seemed to disappear for an instant, and then something was rolling across the stage. "It's supposed to be a true story, so I've never had any copyright problems - never seen it myself; don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for the Japs, but I can't sit through one of their films."

The swordsman wiped the blade clean, while one waitress picked up the head gingerly with a knife and two figures in black ninja suits carried away the body. "I meant the idea of hara-karaoke."

Kinnison grimaced. "Karaoke seppuku, if you don't mind. Well, I was running a karaoke restaurant in Queensland - probably the only one that served blowfish sashimi. Very ritzy, very popular with tourists and yuppies; we used to get lots of office parties. Anyway, someone got a piece of blowfish that hadn't been cooked quite right, and died. Coroner said it was fugu poisoning.

"Anyway, it seems there's this tradition among Japanese cooks that if your client dies of fugu poisoning, you're supposed to commit seppuku - and he did. Turned up to work the next night, came out onto stage in his whites, put a disc of 'Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word' on the karaoke machine and stabbed himself. Didn't even have a second to cut his head off. I thought I was ruined. Well, I was wrong. People started turning up just to see if anybody was going to die.

"For a few weeks, of course, nobody did; the new chef was being extra-careful about the blowfish, which was more popular than ever. Then one young guy turns up with his girlfriend; wanted to propose to her, even ordered blowfish to impress her. Anyway, he didn't even get sick. He pulled this ring out of his pocket and proposed to her, and she said no. So he asked the DJ to put on a disc, I can't even remember the song, and then he gets up there and sings. Second verse, he sees she's getting up and walking out." Kinnison shrugged. "There's no easy way to save face after making that big a fool of yourself in public, so he pulls out a Swiss Army knife and tries to commit seppuku. Made a horrible mess of it, but we managed to get him to hospital okay..."

"And people started coming back."

"Right. They knew they could make total idiots of themselves in front of their friends and not have to worry about it in the morning. I made sure there was always a sharp knife near the microphone - didn't want a repeat of that catastrophe - and put more TV screens in and started playing lots of anime and Japanese TV game shows for the quiet nights. Eventually, the Health Department found an excuse to close us down, but by that time, I'd bought this place and registered it as a Church of Ninja Buddhism. Haven't had any trouble since, as long as we don't play any heavy metal... except the place isn't doing as well as I'd like, of course." He glanced over his shoulder, where a middle-aged man was tapping the mike and waiting for his cue. "I hope your magazine sells well; there's no such thing as bad publicity, ay?"

"I'll send you a copy," I promised, as the man began wailing 'Only the Lonely'.

Kinnison nodded, and dropped his voice slightly. "I hate to do it, but if things don't pick up soon, I'll have to try some sort of gimmick. Do you think topless waitresses would help?"

First published in Space and Time #87