Been wondering why I spent two journal entries in a row ranting about how to prevent global warming, if I don't believe in anthropogenic global warming and don't particularly mind if it turns out that I'm wrong? Notice at all how greedy, money-grubbing, or at the very least overtly practical my suggestions were for how to "fight global warming" and "save the planet?" Did it strike you as at all odd how often I went out of my way to call global warming something that somebody, ideally Americans, could make one heck of a lot of money off of preventing?

A week or so ago, specifically June 25th and June 26th, I was struck by something that seemed kind of out of character, but definitely funny, about Jerry Scott's syndicated comic strip Zits. Summary, for posterity: Jeremy Duncan has just turned 16, after having been 15 for the last ten years; his parents are aging and now highly respectable ex-hippies. Jeremy has been consistently portrayed, ever since the strip began, as just barely short of pathologically lazy, and nowhere more so than with regard to chores around the house. So imagine his parents' surprise when he lectures them about trash that should have gone into the recycling or the compost heap, and then mentions in passing that he checked and fixed the air pressure in the family car's tires on his own initiative, so "you should see better gas mileage." Jeremy then goes on to pile up all the newspaper in the house, put it in the recycling bin, and roll the recycling bin out the curb without being asked. The kicker in the second strip is when Jeremy says to his dad, "A green lifestyle isn't just a fad to me ... it's real! My generation's job is to rescue the planet from damage caused by your generation!" Walt defensively replies, "We baby boomers got a few things right." And what he's thinking to himself after that, mentally finishing the sentence, is, "... like raising you guys, for instance."

And what struck me, especially after just having re-read Generations and having blogged about it a couple of weeks ago, was the generational politics of that strip. Since Jeremy, like a lot of comic strip characters, ages at a fraction of human speed, he has now been effectively retconned as a trailing-edge member of the Millennial Generation; his parents, though, apparently are and always will be Boomers. In the strips for 9/25/08 and 9/26/08, Zits' author Jerry Scott has written a moment of intergenerational bonding: despite any innate conflicts between parents and children, the one thing an aging hippy and a naive young kid of today can have in common is that they share an innate interest in the morality of environmentalism, and in using debates over the moral issues of global warming in inter-generational competition. Which is, of course, enough to make a cynical old Gen Xer like me want to gag. But then I got to thinking about something else Strauss & Howe wrote about in Generations: the Crisis of 2020.

As I alluded to in that column two weeks ago, Strauss and Howe predicted back in 1989 that like every other generation in American history that's gone through a massive "spiritual quest" in their teenage years, it is pretty much inevitable that just as their oldest members begin to reach retirement age, the Baby Boom generation of Americans will seek to find some cause with which to rally the nation behind their moral leadership. If we're lucky, it'll be something that the Biblical fundamentalist half of that generation and the liberal humanist/New Age half of the generation can agree upon; otherwise, they'll be tempted to make their generation's old-age fight be one between Americans. Strauss & Howe predicted (based on when they were going to be the right age) that it would start no earlier than 2000, probably not before 2010, and be at its absolute peak no later than 2020; that somewhere around 2020 will be the year that the Baby Boomers, and America, declare victory over whatever "monstrous evil" that "cannot be compromised with" the Boomers collectively decided to elevate (artificially, if necessary) to that status. They had at least four suggested scenarios, back in 1989, for what the Crisis of 2020 would be about, without expressing any confidence in any of them, just offering them as hypothetical examples: a war between the Christian and secular west and Islam, a global depression brought on an energy crisis, some kind of religious civil war between the secularists and the fundamentalists, or ... environmental collapse (actual or hypothetical), as in, global warming.

For decades now, I've scoffed at that last possibility. For one thing, I predicted with a high degree of confidence that the fundamentalist wing of the Baby Boom generation was wedged so far up the Republican Party's backside that there was no way you could persuade a broad majority of that generation to care about the environment. One of the joint projects in the fundamentalists' effort to fake up a form of twisted, anti-Christian "Christianity" that would be compatible with the Republican Party platform was a determined effort to "prove" that it was okay if we wreck the planet in our lifetime, because any second now Jesus is going to give us a new one. See my previous (moderately famous) essay series "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God," parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. And in particular, remember Reagan administration Secretary of the Interior James Watt's famous answer when a reporter asked him if he thought we owed it to the next generation to leave them any natural resources at all. He answered that it was "the position of the Reagan administration" that Jesus was going to return to Earth "during fiscal 1988" (I always adored the fact he tied it to the fiscal year), "at which time God will hold us accountable for any resources we haven't used" (based on a very twisted interpretation of the Parable of the Talents). That it's God's will that we destroy the planet as fast as possible after the Jews' return to Israel, so we can use up all its natural resources in the same generation, so we don't get blamed by Jesus for having let them sit idle, has been the official doctrine of pretty much every fundamentalist Christian denomination for so long that I took it as inevitable that it was permanent.

So imagine my surprise when, this year, polls started showing that evangelicals, including fundamentalists, are suddenly turning environmentalist? That the devastation that will be wrought on the low-lying areas of the Third World (where, admittedly, those same denominations have missionaries) by global warming is now ranked by them as one of their top 2 or 3 issues? It would appear that I was wrong: it may well actually be possible to broadly unite both halves of the Baby Boom behind a Holy War against Global Warming. And I will admit, it suits them perfectly, in some ways. Like so many other "spiritual" generations before them, there is nothing your average baby boomer loves more than to get into a "dick-waving" contest with another baby boomer over which one of them is more moral. These various websites that make it possible to calculate your "carbon footprint" may have been the best idea anybody's ever come up with, no matter whether they're right or not: they give Baby Boomers a measurable way to compete against each other, in a competition of spiritual austerity and virtuous strength, for the coveted title of Holier Than Thou. I could just easily see them semi-secretly loving that to death.

And, as Jerry Scott reminded me in Zits, you don't have to convince a member of the Millennial Generation that it's his or her moral duty to save the world from global warming. Even the parts of that generation who have figured out that they were lied to by their DARE officers haven't even begun to consider the possibility that the "global warming experts" of their college years aren't any smarter or any more honest than the "anti-drug experts" of their childhood were. Not least of which because the whole global warming "thing" plays perfectly to their generational vanity, and to their other defining generational personality traits like fierce conformism and a habit of wanting to do things in huge groups or teams. (Anybody born between roughly 1982 and 2000 truly who considers themselves to be a highly independent individual knows the true meaning of the word suffering.)

So where does that leave us in what the marketers call Generation X and Generation Y, what Strauss and Howe called the Thirteenth Generation? Exactly where our "reactive" type generations have always been during great moral crusades. In every great national civic crisis (except for the one that was a national disaster, the Civil War), the "generational constellation" has been idealists in elderhood, reactives in midlife, civics in young adulthood. The idealists take advantage of the fact that the nation is used to being harangued by them over matters of principle to unite the nation against evil, the civics band together in obedient and cheerful teams to save the world from evil, and the reactives tell the civics how to do it. In part it's because reactive, neglected, abused, "lost" generations tend to get conservative once they outgrow their youth. In part it's because no matter how conservative they get, to a reactive generation, life is cheap enough that they will tell a bunch of young civics to march and die if that's what's needed. But another reason is clear: to the "winners" among a generation like mine, throughout human history, to the ones who make and get to keep their fortunes, rule #1 has always been, "anything for a buck!" Where it isn't "for a buck," it's, "anything for glory!" And being the CEOs, the managers, the generals, the officers during a national crisis (whether you personally believe in it or not) is a great route to glory, fame, and big bucks.

And thinking about that kick-started the part of my brain that suddenly remembered that I'm way way overdue to remind everybody else of two things that I need to tell everybody who was born between 1960(ish) and 1981(ish) in America. First of all, if the baby boomers and the millennial generation want to make a great national civic crisis, a national war of good versus evil, out of "preventing global warming," for the love of all holy gods and of your nation, do not stop them. If they don't wage war on global warming, they'll plunge us all into a decades-long war on something, and they could pick something a lot worse than global warming if we talk them out of this one. And secondly? Some of us could make a ton of money off of global warming, and if you were born between 1961 and 1980 and are in the peak years of your life for business, management, entrepreneurship, and investment, and luck breaks your way? It could be you.

Ever since John McCain locked down the Republican nomination, I've been outlining and collecting notes for a 3-part series intended to explain to my younger readers where this guy John McCain came from ("The Making of McCain"), how such a right-wing Reagan Republican became such a darling of so much of the liberal media ("The Myth of McCain"), and finally, how that guy turned into the 180° opposite that we see in front of us this last year and a half or so ("The Mind of McCain"). And frankly, the last one, the most important one, has been giving me fits. I started out with one theory as to what's going on, that it was pure political expediency and desperation, only to find strongly suggestive evidence that it wasn't that, or if it was, it wasn't just that. That lead me to the mental deterioration theory, which I still haven't entirely let go of, but it's not entirely satisfactory. McCain's few remaining friends insist that the sea change came not 18 months ago, but 7 years ago, that John McCain really is one of those guys for whom 9/11 changes everything. But that's not an entirely satisfactory answer, either, because I follow this guy, I used to be a big fan, and no, really, these last 18 months have been different from the 5 and a half years before them. I'm developing a theory that relates it to something that happened to him early in life that he's flashing back to, but that feels like arm-chair psychology. (I will tackle all of these themes in more depth when I finally do get "The Mind of McCain" written, I assure you. Should be no later than another 2 months, could be any day now.)

But after a month or so of wrestling with this, I coincidentally happened to be (as I mentioned yesterday) reading the first chapter on The Future from Neil Howe and William Strauss 1989 best-seller, Generations, aloud to a couple of friends of mine. And after boggling over the opening paragraphs' spot-on prediction to how America would react to a major terrorist attack on New York City if it happened right after the year 2000, I moved along to the sections where they tackled how each generation was likely to live out the next couple of decades, starting with the Silent Generation, born 10 years too young to be war heroes, 10 years too old to be hippies. And then I freaked out all over again at what must have seemed to me like an irrelevant and unlikely trivia item when I last read the book years and years ago: a near perfect forecast of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

I wish I could quote it to you verbatim, but my copy's not here at the apartment. To summarize and paraphrase, they were dealing with the question that's inherently interesting to members of that generation, namely, would they ever get a President of the United States of their own? Comparing them to similar generations who had themselves been too young to be national heroes and too old for spiritual crusades during one of America's chronic Great Awakenings, the authors reminded us that such "adaptive" generations tend to have very short tenure in the White House, and to get what few presidents they do get early in life. They rattled off a long list of might-have-beens, like Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferarro and Michael Dukakis, concentrating especially on the Silent Generation's best chance, the murdered Bobbie Kennedy. They predicted that since no Silent Generation nominee had made it into the White House by 1989, it was pretty unlikely that there would ever be one, that control of the White House would end up passing directly from the GIs to the Boomers.

But they did suggest that there would be one last chance, and here's how they predicted it would happen if it did: late in life, some prominent Silent Generation politician might have a major change of heart, abandoning his generations' instinct towards compromise, negotiation, and bipartisanship, and attaching himself to one side or the other of the Boom Generation's great intra-generational ongoing faction fight so thoroughly that he gets accepted by the public as a member of their cause. They predicted that it probably wouldn't work. They didn't say so in that chapter, but the reasons why not are clear enough. It would mean that politician flip-flopping on an entire career's worth of political positions, renouncing everything he or she ever stood for, and who'd ever trust a politician after they'd did that? Also, in their chapter detailing the consensus life history of the Silent Generation, they pointed out just how many of them had deeply disgusting and creepy personal lives in their 30s, more or less, as they tried so hard to shift their generational allegiance from trying to live up to the G.I. Generation to trying to catch up to the Boom Generation.

And again, coincidentally, the same week I was reading this in Generations, Sharon Churcher of the UK Globe and Mail broke the story of "The wife John McCain callously left behind," as profoundly creepy a story as anything you've ever heard about the Kennedies and, sad to say, all too typical of a disgustingly large number of upper-middle-class and above Silent Generation men in particular. Trust me, the constant public sexual desperation of drunken and/or drugged-out middle aged heterosexuals made the Disco Years a living hell for the rest of us, one long series of gross-outs. Anyway, it made it fresh in my mind again that oh, yeah, John McCain really is a member of his generation, in all of the best and the worst ways together.

And now one last politician of the Silent Generation, John McCain, has abandoned his childhood allegiance to Reagan's generation, and the bipartisan instincts of his own generation, in hopes that he can suck up to the cowboy fundamentalist right wing of the Boom Generation leadership of his party thoroughly enough that they'll overlook how he spent the 1970s, and overlook his bipartisan record and frequent vocal contempt for the Boomers on both sides during the 1980s and 1990s, in desperate hope that one member of his generation will be accepted enough as an honorary leading-edge Boomer long enough to get at least one term in the White House for his generation. Holy freaking cats, Strauss & Howe nailed it again.

There are probably fewer than ten books that I push off on anybody who will sit still for them; it is a mark of how much I suck that I have very mixed luck getting people to actually sit down and read them, even though these are all books that completely changed my way of seeing the world, books that opened my eyes to, and clarified, whole ranges of news stories, historical events, and global phenomena that were previously inexplicable to me. For example, almost nothing about American life and our economy makes nearly as much sense before you read Joel Garreau's Edge City as it does afterwards. It's almost impossible to put current political jeremiads in context without having read the best of jeremiads, once about a generation and time we now remember as heroic, Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers. I don't know how interested I am in hearing almost anything that people have to say about the politics of masculinity, as it is almost certainly shallow and ill-informed, if they haven't read Susan Faludi's Stiffed. I'm pretty sure that if I'm talking educational policy or history with you and you haven't read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, I'm going to be constantly wishing you had. I'm not sure that it's aged well, but for a very long time I wasn't interested in hearing technological or cultural speculation from anybody who hadn't read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. If you have any kind of a pet theory about economics and you haven't read P.J. O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, I really have to wonder why not, and if you'd still think the same thing after you read it. For all the reasons I talked about the other day, Pfeffer and Sutton's Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense is working its way onto my list of books that I think you really ought to have read.

But to get to the point, there's a book I've been hyping for almost 20 years now as the book about American history, the book without you having read it, I don't know how in the heck you manage to either understand anything about American history, or even keep it all straight in your head: Neil Howe and William Strauss, Generations. I know some of the reasons I've had a hard time getting people to actually sit down and read it. It is thick as a brick, and it starts out kind of slow and very, very deliberately. The reason it does so is the other reason why (until recently) you'd heard very little about it except from cranks like me; Strauss & Howe set out to do something that all professional academic historians had declared impossible, namely, identify an easily understandable and completely predictable recurring trend in American history, one with dominating and important influence over how the country's history has turned out, and will continue turning out. Grand Unified Theories of History were, and still are, frowned upon, so the first couple of hundred pages of Generations are grindingly methodical specifically in an attempt to prove to academic historians that no, we're not the only ones who noticed some parts of this, no, they're not all that controversial even within your field, no, we're not making as sweeping a set of assertions as you might think, and no, we didn't pull this out of our backsides without doing a ton of rock-solid statistical analysis first and developing a solid theoretical model.

And at the end, it goes further, and it won my heart thereby at the time, by adding, and no, they weren't expecting anybody to believe them yet. Instead, based on their theoretical and statistical analysis, they made not quite 90 years' worth of predictions for American history and said that if their theory was right, more of their predictions than could be expected by chance were going to come true; if substantial numbers of them did not, it would prove their theory false. As I said, it's been just shy of 20 years since Generations came out. And with very few exceptions, those 20 years have been very, very, very good to Strauss & Howe. In fact, their book and the work of its small but devoted cult of follow-on researchers who were impressed by them early on have become mandatory reading for political campaigns this year.

By coincidence, I've been going through it again myself for about a month now, slowly and carefully. phierma and cos_x and I have been getting together Tuesday nights to catch each other up on our favorite TV series and movies for a long while now, a chance to socialize while they get work done on their various projects. When we ran low on TV series and movies that one of us had that the other(s) were eager to catch up with, it turned out that they love to be read to, and I love to read aloud, so we started working on books, and their choice for the second book was Strauss & Howe, Generations. Last Tuesday night, we got to the first of the "prediction" chapters ... and I got halfway down the first paragraph and my own jaw fell right out of my head. You see, this would be my first time re-reading it since 9/11, and one of the things that I had failed to remember was that something very, very like 9/11 was something that they predicted. They completely failed to predict the exact timing; on the contrary, they specifically said that New York City being attacked, and a major chunk of it destroyed, by Islamic terrorists was a distinct possibility at any time. What they were specifically saying was that if their theory was true, how America would react would be different based on whether it happened in 1990, 2000, 2010, or 2020. And as I started going through the paragraph on how they predicted America would react and how America would change if we were attacked in the year 2000 or in the first couple of years thereafter, my jaw dropped right off all over again. They nailed it. In spooky, but in hindsight not astonishing, ways.

This is the point where, in order to make any sense out of the rest of this, I have to oversimplify their theory in an entirely unconvincing way, one that most of you will flatly refuse to believe because you haven't read the book and seen their extensive statistical and historical and scientific evidence for their argument. But here's the best I can do. They define a "generation" as a group of people, born in a consecutive range of years, who can't help having a lot of traits in common because they were all roughly the same age during major world-changing events. A major war, like say World War II, has different effects on elderly leaders and recent retirees, on people in mid-life career, on people of fighting age or people just enter the workforce, and on children. Individuals will differ, but everybody who was (again, same example) a child during World War II is going to have some things in common with other people who were children during World War II. Since a "phase of life" is roughly 20 or so years, they hypothesized, and their statistical research backed them up, that while demographic wobbles don't follow the same pattern, a new generation comes along about every 20 years. And as they statistically analyzed the generations on a wide variety of traits, they discovered that they can be generalized into only four types, and that they repeat in a specific pattern with one and only one important exception so far in American history going back to the 1620s. Because your attention is at a premium, rather than generalize, let me give specific examples, the four generations who made up most of the American population on September 11th, 2001, from oldest to youngest:

• John McCain's Silent Generation were aged 59 to 76 on 9/11. They were the kids who were just too young to be part of WWII, on average born ten years too late to be war heroes or to have made heroic sacrifices on the home front. They spent their young adulthood sucking up to the GI Generation who'd fought that war and who swept into unquestioned political power after the war. Then around 1965 or so, they were (this time) just barely too old to be part of the Consciousness Revolution, their average member just over that magic "over 30" line that the next generation after them, who dominated the Consciousness Revolution, defined as untrustworthy, and their youngest members already young adults with families and too many responsibilities to go chasing off after a cultural revolution. Not that that stopped them; embarrassing numbers of them spent the 1970s in binges of destructive behavior from trying to pretend they were still uninhibited teenagers (when they had been no such thing in their actual teenage years), leaving an amazing trail of broken marriages and substance abuse hospitalizations behind them.
  
  
• George W. Bush's Boom Generation were aged 41 to 58 on 9/11. Their childhood came just as the last of FDR's and Billy Sunday's Missionary Generation were dying off, and if some of them didn't know that, they did grow up noticing that America, while wealthy and powerful, was also smug, self-satisfied about its wealth and power, deeply corrupt, and completely lacking in any meaningful national conversation about values. They grew up as teenagers and 20-somethings to make that their mission, starting an all-out intra-generational war on campuses, mostly between the fundamentalist, reactionary, authoritarian right wing of their generation and the free-spirited, revolutionary, utopian left wing of their generation. The left wing won all the battles but lost the war, not that almost any of them ever admitted that. What really undid them was that by the late 1970s, the wreckage that the Silent generation had made of their kids chasing after the liberal Boomers' Consciousness Revolution, and the even more appalling wreckage the early-wave liberal Boomers had made of their own lives let alone their kids, sparked a massive counter-revolution, splitting them mostly by age: the first half of their generation generally fundamentalist Republican, the last wave (who were too young to see or experience the worst of the wreckage first-hand) still secular or New Age utopian socialists. Per Strauss & Howe, if you think they're the first idealist generation to experience this split, you are 100% wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s this split became known as the Culture Wars. But by the end of the 1990s, they were beginning to reach real positions of power, and it was starting to produce a counter-trend towards trying to find a "third way" within both ideological wings of their generation, a set of ideals they could (mostly) all coalesce upon, that would be the new national consensus. The project was, at best, half complete on 9/11.
  
  
• For Barack Obama's (and Lyndie England's) 13th Generation, aged 20 to 40 on 9/11, the wreckage the Silent and Boom had made of American family life, mostly by neglecting their kids (and sometimes outright despising them as annoying distractions from more important things, as if anything could be more important) during their various ideological and spiritual and religious and political crusades, wasn't something they had to read about in the newspaper. Even the relatively unscarred survivors like Obama knew plenty of casualties first-hand, people whose lives had been no different than their own who ended up dead, crippled, in prison, on the economic scrap heap, strung out on drugs, trapped in criminal gangs, or otherwise destroyed. A few of them, especially some of the ones who were raised on at least a little of the Boomers' early liberal spiritual values, tend to retain the compassion to attribute their own survival and success to luck; the rest, having been raised on a rising tide of reactionary right-wing spiritual values, attribute their own survival to innate superiority over the losers. (Again, if you think they are the first generation to come after an idealist generation and turn out this way, you need to go back and look at the Lost generation or the Gilded generation.) Still, on 9/11, almost everybody in that generation looked at it as their crisis; as young adults and rising adults, it was going to be them who did all the work and took all the risks. Typically, to the disgust of the process-and-fairness oriented Silent generation, they didn't ask "what's fair?" To the even greater disgust of both the left-wing and right-wing ideologues of the Boom generation, they didn't ask "what's right?" No, a generation that grew up fast and hard and mostly on their own cut straight to the bottom line and asked "how much is this going to cost?" Some believed the Boomers who said it wouldn't cost much, would result in power and glory and wealth, and rushed off to any old desert hellhole the Boomers asked them to go to. Some counted the cost a little more accurately, and better estimated the trivial gains, and took firm stands on pure cost-benefit lines: Afghanistan is worth it, Iraq isn't.
  
  
• The Millennial Generation's (no obvious name jumps out at me for an example) youngest members had only just been born on 9/11; their eldest members had just graduated high school. These (mostly) kids were told on 9/11 not to worry, and that everything we as a country was about to do was For The Children. This completely and utterly failed to surprise them; for their entire life, for as long as any of them can remember, everything has been For The Children, in hopes that they wouldn't grow up ill-educated, burned out, jaded, cynical, mercenary, amoral, and nearly unemployable like Gen X and Gen Y. They were assured that years later, it would be their turn to band together in teams with peer-enforced morality, like they had been since their first DARE classes in grade school, and clean up whatever mess the Boomers and the 13th Generation had made of world by then. 100% unshakably convinced that when they do, the whole US government and the entire US population will be on their side and give them everything they need to do so, few if any of them have complained about this.

Strauss & Howe's hypothetical threat of WMD attack on Manhattan took into account the statistically likely lifecycle trends and growing-up patterns of these four generations:

• If the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 1990s: The GIs would still be clinging to power, the Silent Generation would be at their most inclined to dither and debate rather than act, and the mostly still powerless Boom would still be in full-fledged ideological internal warfare, both within themselves and against the (then still mostly hated by the Boomers) GIs. The government would achieve very little, would be accused of lying about the threat, government evacuation plans would be elaborate, sophisticated, and completely unworkable. The few young 13er entrepreneurs who rushed to the scene of the catastrophe would mostly go unnoticed; the only ones who would make the news would be the ones pilloried for scalping the attack survivors during the rescue. We would end up rebuilding the damage sections of New York but doing little if anything else, leaving the main problem to be dealt with all over again decades later.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2000s: The Silent Generation might be in charge; at the very least, they'd make up a lot of the manpower in Congress and in the White House staff. More likely, they predicted, it would be a Boomer president technically in charge. They couldn't predict, in 1989, if it would be a liberal new ager or a reactionary fundamentalist. Either way, they predicted that the Silent generation White House staff and top military brass would draw up for him an elaborate, technocratic reaction, a carefully negotiated and calibrated proportionate response that could be made to look like a bigger response. The Boomer president would present it to the nation as a moral challenge, a war between right and wrong, but be mostly accused by most people of just saying so to shill for his own side in the ongoing argument with other Boomers. A 13er Generation military, seeing a chance to gain quick and easy glory kicking around impoverished third-worlders, would ride jauntily off into the desert. (Strauss & Howe's naive overconfidence in the American legal system is probably what prevented them from predicting how many of those 13er troops would actually be piratical mercenaries rather than in US uniform; an amazing oversight, since they do document the huge numbers of pirates and mercenaries in similar generations before them.) Whatever then went wrong would be blamed on their poor education, surly attitudes, poor morals, and the lawless gang-like behavior of their worst members, not Boomer ideological divisions or Silent generation poor generalship. And since generations like the 13th make rotten soldiers, historically, well, yes the result would be disastrous, so yes, there would be plenty of scapegoating afterwards. Some of it would consist of quests for the worst of the "bad apples" in the military. But the main result would be a re-ignition of the old ideological wars within the Boom Generation, a screaming match between liberals and conservatives over who lost the War on Terror, postponing for years any attempt to build a national consensus behind a single set of shared values. How intense a re-ignition of those conflicts? One possible outcome they present all too much evidence for is the possibility of religious civil war in the US some time in the 2010s, one that would use up and destroy the Millennials' optimism and teamwork habits instead of benefiting from them.
  
  
• If instead the terrorists destroyed part of New York City in the 2010s, preferably late 2010s: A few elderly Silent might still be in Congress and in a few offices in the Pentagon, finding satisfying work making sure that there were good, fair procedures for dealing with captives. But the reigns of political power at nearly all levels would be in Boomer hands. A terrorist attack on American soul would be the final catalyst to end their internal squabble once and for all, and whether the result was called compassionate conservatism or third-way liberalism (two terms Strauss & Howe couldn't predict in 1989, but their description is clear enough) it would be the new American political consensus for decades to come. All internal American struggles over, the country would rally to war against the terrorists and any perceived allies of the terrorists, confident that we were right and broadly unified. Grizzled and old-before-their-time 13er veterans of some early 21st century brush-fire war would find that the new crop of Millennial soldiers were nothing like the grunts they served with, that these kids were great kids ... and enthusiastic and uncomplaining cannon fodder. Cynical 13er business executives, if curbed of their natural instinct to war profiteer, would turn their pragmatic attention to squeezing out maximum productivity to (profitable) national service, churning out a new generation of wonder-weapons (produced by research teams of bright, excited Millennial scientists) in amazing quantities. America would march a multi-million-man army into the Arab world equipped with insane numbers of ultra-tech vehicles and weapons, and Save The World.

That they got the results of 9/11 so eerily right was only the first thing that ran chills down my spine. If I get it done and on the queue before I leave for tomorrow night's party, I'll have the other one for you tomorrow morning; if not, the next night.

Some clever subcontractor for Charter Communications decided, yesterday, that I needed a 14 to 18 hour vacation from having any television or Internet access in order to get some reading done. Well, no. What actually happened is that some dimwit, sent out to disconnect the cable service to the empty apartment below me (so the next tenant doesn't get free cable) misread the order and disconnected apartment 6 instead of apartment 7, and then apparently turned his pager off as he drove away so he didn't get Charter's text message to go back and fix his problem, leaving Charter unable to restore my service until the next day. But it did have the "desired" effect of getting me to finish a book I've been reading at mealtimes for (admittedly) too long now: Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

I wonder how much it would cost, and how we could raise the money, to get a copy of this into the hands of every manager and every politician in America? Hey, here's a suggestion for starters. The book costs about $30. Divide that by the number of people in your department, take up a collection, and buy your direct supervisor a copy for Christmas. Best thing you could possibly do, for yourself, for him, and for the company. And maybe even for the country.

See, here's the deal. Think about how decisions get made, especially in management. The manager needs to make a decision. So he or she makes some assumptions or guesses about how the world works, or applies whatever ideology or beliefs he has about how the world works. He or she then reasons (more or less correctly) from these untested beliefs to the "obviously" correct conclusion, and issues the order that it be implemented. Anybody who questions this decision is punished for stupidity and arrogance. If the manager weren't perceived to be better able to reason from the "facts" then they wouldn't have been put in a position of authority, so if a subordinate is questioning their reasoning, either that subordinate is too stupid to reason correctly from the "facts" the manager "knows," too stupid or too arrogant to recognize the manager's superior reasoning skills and superior knowledge, or (at best, from the manager's point of view) too ignorant of the "facts" from which the manager reasoned. Having convinced himself or herself that his or her decision was brilliant, the manager then invests a great deal of confidence in it; if it turns out badly, the manager will either not notice, or will look for some external factor outside of his or her control to blame, because since the decision was reasoned (theoretically) correctly from (theoretically) known facts, the decision itself can't be at fault.

Pfeffer and Sutton have written a book documenting the results of literally hundreds of studies of both successful and unsuccessful management decisions, in order to hammer home the pitfalls of that style of decision-making and that style of implementation. Let's start from the beginning. Did the manager, in the example above, test any of his or her opinions about how the world works against external reality? Or are they prejudices, ideologies, half-baked guesses? Before reasoning forward from the "facts," this book keeps showing you the benefits of asking yourself how sure you are of these so-called facts.

For example, "everybody knows" that incentive-based pay systems make people more productive; it "has to" be true because "everybody knows" that the only reason that people come to work every day is to get paid, and "everybody knows" that the only thing that could motivate them to work harder is the offer of more money if they do. Really? Ask yourself, they tell the manager, is that actually true of you? Is that actually true of anybody you know well?

Well, no. On the contrary, they cite a ton of evidence, based on actual studies of actual employees, that employees are motivated by money, yes, but also motivated by a lot of other things, including a desire to please others and a desire to feel good about the work that they're doing. So, okay, now that we've acknowledged that there might be other ways to motivate people to work harder or smarter, have we tested the theory that the best way to motivate them, the most cost effective and/or efficient way, is via strong cash incentives? At most companies, the answer is no, they haven't tested their theory about how to incent employees, at all. In fact, they could only find large company that did run controlled experiments, using a variety of pay systems and management systems, to see which ones actually produced the most productivity improvements. When they looked at their own experimental results after a year, they concluded that in their company, at least, there were gains, but they were offset by serious negative consequences, such as impaired teamwork and more infighting, so they discontinued it. Which, sadly, only lasted until the next senior management change, because the company in question was HP. Not very long thereafter, then-new CEO (and now, perhaps not coincidentally, McCain economic adviser) Carly Fiorina came in with a firm ideology that strongly incentive-based pay systems "just obviously" work better than more egalitarian ones, a belief she held so strongly and that she was so sure of that she was flatly unwilling to look at any evidence to the contrary, even from within her own company. You will notice that she was a disastrously awful CEO; several times in this book she is cited as a bad example, as someone who never thought to ask if her ideas were right, to ask if anybody had any evidence to back up their suggestions, if anybody had checked if other companies had tried some idea and what percentage of them had failed, if any of the orders she'd given were actually producing good results or not once they were tried, someone who was adamantly unwilling to admit mistakes even when the evidence was overwhelming for fear of undermining her own authority.

Where do these incorrectly assumed so-called "facts" come from? Some of them just plain come from ideology, from religious or political or cultural assumptions about what people are like and about how the world works. But the most pernicious ones are often the ones where managers can cite something they mistakenly think is evidence to back up some theory, because they don't understand the rules of scientific evidence. Never mind the incentive-pay example above, think of any idea a manager has ever had, of every idea any manager has ever had. Odds are, they got it by looking at successful departments or successful companies and asking themselves, "what did they do that made them successful?" Which sounds like a smart question, but it's not. The successful managers did more than one thing. Some of those things were probably smart, some of them were probably dumb. How do you decide which ones were the ones that actually contributed to their success? If you don't understand the rules of evidence-based science, medicine, or management, you do so by latching onto the one that "obviously" mattered. What makes it obvious? That it agrees with something you already believed in, or that you'd already made up your mind you wanted to do. The way that actual science cures this bias is to look at not only successful examples, but also unsuccessful ones. Suppose I tell you that 75% of the successful companies did x. Sounds good, right? Will you think to ask what percentage of the unsuccessful companies did x too? If it's 0%, or 5%, or 25%, that might tell you you were right. If it were 75%, or worse, 99%? That would tell someone who knew how to make decisions based on evidence, not assumptions or guesses, to look for another factor to explain their success.

Based on that kind of thinking and on the results of hundreds of scientific studies, Pfeffer and Sutton do have some very specific half-truths and total nonsense to attack throughout this book. They especially emphasize the half-truths over the total nonsense, because they're harder to deal with. If you can show a manager that one of his favorite assumptions is total nonsense, even he might agree with you, but if he can show you some circumstance under which his favorite assumption is true, he probably won't be at all interested in listening to your examples of times when it's not -- that is to say, unless he's become devoted to actually thinking, unless he's learned to value all of the evidence. Anyway, here are their big examples:

"Work is fundamentally different from life, or should be?" Well, yes, in a few ways, but that doesn't change the fact that in deep and equally fundamental ways, it isn't: being a jerk is still being a jerk and leads to bad outcomes, people are not entirely mercenary and greed-driven, and if it's morally wrong outside of work, it's still morally wrong at work, just to name a few.

"The best organizations are the ones that only hire, retain, and pay the best people?" Uh, no. The best organizations, in example after example and study after study, are the ones that make the best use of the people they have, who are the best at taking ordinary or even poor performers and making top performers out of them. In fact, the ugliest side effect of this belief is that so many companies have concluded that "obviously" even the best team has a certain percentage of "under-performers" in it, so every team must fire or demote (or at least withhold incentives from) that percentage of its people. Really? Actual evidence shows that some teams are already made up of top performers, that applying that dangerous half-truth to such a team only wrecks the team, that it actually lowers performance. Not to mention the fact that pitting employees against each other for the best rewards, while it does do a little to incentivize the top performers, absolutely guarantees that nobody will even try to improve the performance of their worst-performing team members. I mean really, seriously, think about it: when you learn a way to be more productive, do you rush out to tell your competitors in other companies how to do it, too? No, of course not. So what makes you think that your people will share their productivity "secrets" with their internal competitors? Or even with you, if they think you might give away their advantage to someone else who'd use it to compete with them?

"The best way to get people to do what you need them to do is to pay extra for it?" Uh, no, not most of the time. Actual comparisons of which companies did well with what companies did poorly show that many of the best companies offered minor financial rewards to top performers, and the rest none at all; the others, through sheer self-selection bias, attracted only the most greedy, dishonest, and mercenary employees who set out to do, not what is right for the company or the team, but what brought them the most money personally. In study after study, the strongest, harshest, most unequal incentive systems were statistically associated with the most corrupt, dishonest, and destructive behavior.

"Strategy is destiny, it's better to do the right thing poorly than the wrong thing well?" Uh, not so much. Sure, doing the wrong thing is bad, but it's not nearly so hard to tell what the wrong thing to be doing is as is made out; actual strategy for a company or a department can probably be decided in one meeting of a couple of hours' length every year or two. No, actual evidence shows that the best companies are the ones that only change strategy when there is clear and unambiguous evidence that the only strategy isn't working, and who dedicate their actual attention the rest of the time to better and better implementation.

"Change or die?" Depends: is it really that dire? And is there actual evidence that the change is doable, the need is real, that we're going to make the right change as opposed to some random change, and that things really will be better after the change? And will the economic gains from the change outweigh the costs of the change? If not, then no; if not, you're better off with "get better at what you're doing, or die."

"Great leaders are in total control of their companies?" Uh, no; nobody ever is in complete control of their companies. No, from dozens of examples, both statistical of companies in the wild and in laboratory studies of leadership in teams, they show that good leaders are the ones who project confidence, yes (or else they don't get to stay in charge), but who also know that it's more important for them to design company systems, to learn and to teach, and to say the things that set the culture and tone of the organization than it is for them to micro-manage, that it's better leadership (not in theory, but in demonstrated fact) to concentrate on only doing those things and to otherwise get the heck out of peoples' way and let them do their jobs. And no, what the best leaders have in common is not how much control they exercise over the people under them, but how much effort they put into maintaining their own private humility, their own willingness to continue to privately question their own decisions and to keep looking for evidence that they might be wrong and might need to change their minds.

But the actual examples of bad ideas themselves, in chapters 3 through 8, are meant to be merely examples. Oh, sure, for a lot of managers who read this book and who lack the grounding, education, and inclination to actually think, those couple of dozen demonstrably half-true popular myths or demonstrably dangerously wrong classic blunders will be all they take out of it. Probably the most you could hope for, if your boss read this book, is that Pfeffer and Sutton might actually grudgingly persuade them out of continuing with some truly awful management fad or pervasive cultural bias that's wrecking your life. But some percentage of the managers who read this will, one can reasonably hope, have a moment of satori and set out to develop the habit of asking the kinds of questions that result in actual evidence and actually meaningful reasoning. Are my assumptions true, or false? Has anybody actually tried this, and of everybody who tried this (not just the winners, but the losers as well) what were their results? If nobody has tried this, how (and when) will I know if I was wrong, so I can change course? How (and when) will I know that I'm right, so I can share this with other people in the company and everybody can benefit from it? That would be actual thinking. It's hard. It's not obvious. It's unusual. But the companies (and countries) that do it best will be the ones that succeed.

So maybe what you should really hope is that your boss will read it, and he and the other managers at his or her level will take up a collection among themselves to buy their boss a copy, too?

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has been all over the news tonight, everywhere you turn. He has a new book out entitled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Since Politico.com broke the news early of his accusations, he's been under steady attack by his fellow Republicans, accusing him of being brainwashed or confused or dishonest or all three, so he moved up the promotional interviews that were planned for the book's official release date (Monday) to Thursday night, and unsurprisingly found himself welcome on more talk shows than any author of his stature could possibly expect. The long and short of it: he swears he was telling the truth the whole time up at the podium, so far as he knew it, but that everybody else in the White House was lying to him, and until he got out of there, he didn't have enough objectivity to realize that he shouldn't have been giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Uh, yeah. Right.

I took the opportunity to pull out the three times I mentioned Scott McClellan in this blog while he was still White House press secretary: "Good Day for the Good Guys" (Nov 9, 2005), "The first vice president to shoot a man since Aaron Burr" (Feb 16, 2006) and "Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Told You So" under "Sleepy-Time Quicktakes" for March 1st, 2006. Let me refresh your memory. In the first, I referred back to an incident so shameful that I hadn't felt the urge to pile on poor Scotty at the time, when he got caught openly lying out of his own mouth to the press corps, swearing up and down to their faces that the President's video phone call conversation with a group of US troops in the field wasn't rehearsed and that they weren't told what questions to ask, after the reporters already had videotape of the rehearsal, showing exactly that, in hand. From that day forward, he became exactly useless to the Bush administration. Completely. It is an absolute rule going all the way back to the first White House press secretary during World War II that the press secretary may omit any facts he doesn't want to tell, may refuse to answer any question, but the one thing he must not do or the press will crucify him is knowingly lie to a reporter. So, from then on, every single time Scott McClellan went up to the podium, the press got more angry and more dismissive of him and more rude to his face, particularly when he was put in the untenable position of lying to the press some more over Dick Cheney's hunting accident, repeating stories about the incident that had been well documented to be false for at least a day and a half by that point. He also got caught lying about torture in CIA-run prisons even after reporters had actual torture victims on the record, showing their torture wounds. For all of these lies, he was openly booed at the podium. I predicted at that point that he wasn't long for the job; two months later, I turned out to be right, as he was fired by Bush's new White House chief of staff ... and replaced by someone who knew the rules of the job, by someone who (just as importantly) didn't share Scott McClellan's naked and blatant hatred for the White House press corps.

Bush spokespeople are calling McClellan a disgruntled ex-employee.

I'll bet he is. He did his job exactly the way Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the rest wanted him to do it, and he got fired for it. And now he's taking it out on them. Is he telling the truth? For gods' sake, people, this is Scott McClellan. What on earth would possess you to think he's telling the truth? Has he ever? In his life? Told the truth to a reporter? I wouldn't bet good money that the man was capable of telling the truth to save his life!

And this act of flagrant retaliation (whether honest or dishonest), and all the aggravation it's bringing to the White House, and all the aggravation it's going to bring to John McCain by bringing back into the news cycle just how dishonest the war is, right at the point where McCain wants to change the subject to the War on Terror with the usual tired old trope of "vote Democrat and die"? This could all have been avoided, if it weren't for one of Karl Rove's more "brilliant" ideas, the kind of outside-the-box thinking that got him labeled "Boy Genius" by his co-workers. Rove's idea, enthusiastically supported by Cheney, was that one of the mistakes past Republican administrations made was hiring people who were good at their jobs, hiring people based on their proven skills and track record applicable to the job they're being given, only to find out afterwards that they wouldn't consistently and reliably run their new job according to the President's and the Party's political principles. So the word went down: hire based on loyalty, not competence, because (in Rove's "brilliant" opinion) it's easier to teach competence to someone loyal but dumb than to teach loyalty to someone competent and smart.

Yeah, but then you end up with a White House full of people who are loyal and dumb and incompetent, who end up embarrassing themselves and you, and who then write the most bitter, angry tell-all books ever written by White House staffers when they take the blame for it, not you, without even doing you the courtesy of waiting until you're out of office. Not the smartest idea you've ever had, Karl.

Holy cats, I forgot. Yesterday would have been the 100th birthday of Ian Fleming, the man who created the character that (most of you) think you know, British super-agent James Bond 007. Except that you don't, or, alternatively, he didn't. British super-agent James Bond 007 was actually created by the greatest maker of silly cartoonish adventure films who ever lived, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, who made a long series of movies, starring Roger Moore as a character with the same name as Ian Fleming's famous spy, in a series of ultra-tech science fiction adventure stories that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the novels and short stories with the same titles. Cubby Broccoli's James Bond truly is a super-spy: suave, sophisticated, able to talk anybody into anything, capable of fitting in anywhere, expert in languages and in martial arts, able to fly or drive or pilot every vehicle ever made, and an Olympic-caliber pistol shot. On one level, I sort of liked those movies, and sort of still do; they were silly fluffy fun, as long as I forget that there ever were books about a character with the same name. But on another level, I can't stand them, because the perfect super-agent James Bond is much, much less interesting than the "real" James Bond.

Maybe I'm being unfair putting the word "real" in quotes there. Ian Fleming knew spies; during World War II, he ran an entire covert operations branch of one of Britain's spy services, section 30AU (Assault Unit 30) of British Naval Intelligence. James Bond is usually assumed to be a composite character of a couple of the actual spies under Fleming's command during the war. If so, I doubt they felt flattered. Fleming's attitude towards his fictional spy is "realistic" to a level bordering on thinly veiled contempt. But then, here's the thing that Fleming knew that most (completely ignorant) authors of spy fiction don't seem to realize: if James Bond were an actual superspy, he wouldn't have "adventures." Super spies live the most boring (looking) lives of anybody on the planet. They enter some position of trust and access on the other side of a border, and then slavishly and carefully pretend to be someone so boring that nobody thinks twice about the fact that he's there when interesting things are discussed. The only, and I mean only, risky or interesting thing that actual successful spies ever do is send reports home, and under most circumstances even that's a fairly easy bit of routine using techniques perfected all the way back during the Renaissance. I mean seriously, you could train a retarded inbred puppy to make undetectable coded dead drops. (Actual Israeli retired superspy Wolfgang Lotz, widely praised as the most successful spy in the history of the profession, has written two highly-praised books on the subject of what real spy work is like, his autobiography, The Champagne Spy, which I haven't read, and A Handbook for Spies, which I have read and can't praise highly enough.)

So in order for his spy novels to be even vaguely entertaining to read, Ian Fleming had to invent a fictional spy who was too stupid to do his job in the boring, reliable way, but resourceful enough (on some level) to give the books a happy ending by in some way minimally completing his mission. Hence, the actual origin of James Bond, in the first Bond novel, Casino Royale. It's not long after WWII, early in the Cold War, and British Military Intelligence has a problem, and his name is James Bond. He's a former WWII commando, moderately decorated, and from a politically well connected family that wants him to get whatever job he wants if the ruling party is going to continue receiving their support. And what he wants is to be a spy, even though he shows no particular aptitude for it. So "M" sends him on what ought to be the world's easiest mission: spend a week at the Casino Royale in Monaco watching a guy who gambles there regularly, the come back and report on how much money he loses and anything interesting you happen to overhear. Bond, however, being a total idiot, manages to blow his cover in a matter of hours, gets himself captured, gets brutally tortured at length for information he doesn't have ("M" is no fool), and finally gets rescued by more competent spies than himself. He is then offered (and strongly encouraged to take) full medical retirement; as a victim of torture in his country's service, he's certainly entitled. But no, Bond still wants to be a spy, and his family still won't let them retire him. So British Intelligence reluctantly transfers him to the Fuck-Up Division. They maintain a small department of spies so stupid that we know they can't manage the trivial job of maintaining a cover identity, so they only get sent on jobs that don't require a cover identity: mostly assassinations. Hence, the "double-oh" division, and Bond's famous covert "license to kill."

Over the course of the books, there comes to be a cliché plot that Fleming used over and over again; not in every Bond story, but in almost all of the full-length novels. Bond gets sent to snoop around some suspected threat long enough to verify that the guy really is a threat, then deal with him. Being still an idiot about maintaining a cover identity, Bond every single time and without exception blows his cover by doing or saying something truly stupid. For example, the James Bond martini is one of Fleming's little inside jokes. The kind of upper-class British twit that Bond is usually pretending to be would actually order a gin martini, stirred, not shaken. Bond can't even get that right. And why do you think it's such a cliché about this supposed super-spy constantly introducing himself to suspects by his real name? British intelligence learned early on that James Bond is too stupid to remember his cover name, so they made up a cover using his real name. Not that it lasts past about the 4th book or 5th, I forget. He's also a legendary clothes snob, and a brutally misogynistic skirt-chaser, and frequently finds ways to screw up his missions through either or both of those affectations. (There is no evidence that Fleming intended his characterization of Bond as anything other than an indictment of Bond himself, or of spies as a class; Fleming himself has no such reputation as a misogynist in his other writing or in his personal life.)

But here's the thing, the origin of the other cliché of the Bond novels that Cubby Broccoli did keep and made such a stock plot device that it's widely parodied: this becomes the standard method by which Bond actually finds out what the villain is plotting. Sometimes it's because while the villain is dithering over whether or not to kill a British agent, Bond sees too much. Sometimes it's because Bond finds out from one of the villain's henchmen or one of the villain's captives who knows too much. But what's the cliché? Sometimes the villain can't resist monologuing. And the signature Bond method for saving the day is to reveal to the villains' partners or underlings just how dire a future they're actually in for once the main villain betrays them; usually it's one of them, not Bond, who saves the day by betraying their boss or partner. That, and a legendary ability for taking a beating and surviving, are the real James Bond's only two talents.

(Another of my favorite telling details: all through the series, the head of the "Q division" is constantly after James Bond to get rid of that awful stupid "lady's purse gun" he carries, his beloved .32 caliber Walther PPK. It's ridiculously inaccurate, and prone to jamming after the first shot. Bond himself never denies it, and the unreliability of that stupid gun propels several of the plots. Why won't Bond give it up? Because it's the only gun he's found that fits well in his tux. And besides, as he constantly reminds Q, a real spy shouldn't need to fire his gun very often, it should be enough for a real spy to have one to wave at people occasionally in an emergency. Too bad for Bond that he's not that guy.)

And the thing is, Fleming really did hit upon a winning formula for a great spy novel, one that lets him fit in all kinds of writerly details about stuff that the fans found fascinating, like travelogue bits about the various hot spots of the cold war and various insights into and lifestyle details of the spy, terrorist, assassin, and mafiosi lifestyles of Bond and his various opposition figures, along with plenty of sex and violence, and with two predictable sources of intrigue. You tear your way through the first half of the book trying to figure out the villain's plot (and knowing that Bond won't) and waiting with bated breath to see what stupid mistake Bond is going to make this time, then you tear your way through the last half of the book to see how is Bond going to get himself out of this mess, who's going to bale him out of trouble this time and what's it going to cost him? I love 'em. I'm probably overdue to reread them. Anyway, thanks for the fond memories of some really fun books, Ian Fleming!

P.S. As far as I know, one and only one of the classic Bond movies is an almost scene-for-scene adaptation of the book: Sean Connery as James Bond in Guy Hamilton's 1964 Goldfinger. If you want to get a feel for the real James Bond and don't have patience for or can't stand the books, that's the movie to rent or borrow.

I was expecting a firestorm over Sunday morning's piece. I was a little bit proud of it even before Patrick Nielsen-Hayden and Arthur Hlavety promoted it and David Brin (!!!) showed up to praise it; I put a little bit of work into this one. And I knew that there is no more reliable path to Internet notoriety than mocking the libertarians, who are famously thin-skinned; libertarianism is legendarily one of those "third rail" topics on the Internet, the ultimate sacred cow. If you don't take criticism (and hate screeds) gracefully, mock the libertarians (and especially the "Objectivists") at your peril. (Non-LiveJournal.com readers: I apologize for the occasional lengthy delays unscreening comments; I will say, in my defense, that it was a holiday weekend and I was busy much of that time.)

But the piece really only started as two independent bits of mental fanfic. Yes, fanfic. Sure, I despise Ayn Rand's philosophy. But I'm not a whole lot crazier about Ernest Callenbach's, and I love Ecotopia. I'm generally a fan of political SF that puts some thought into alternate ways the world might be arranged, whether dystopian or utopian. I think Anthem may actually be the best dystopian novel ever written. And even Atlas Shrugged, for all its didacticism, flawed political theory, and utter failure to predict the present, I find better than John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which even shares Rand's horrific recommendation for saving the world: mass die-off. And Zanzibar won the Hugo, for crying out loud. Similarly, Anthem makes most of the same points that Orwell made in 1984. But it makes them in a more plausible way, in a more chilling way, with more compelling language, and in a substantially more concise way.

And, well, when I read almost any novel I like, the book goes on in my head beyond what the author wrote. I think about what I would have done differently than the main characters. I think about what comes afterwards for the characters and their world. If the novel doesn't explicitly say how the world it's set in came about, I think about that, too. It was largely by coincidence that I noticed that the real likely outcome of Atlas Shrugged lined up astonishingly closely with the facts as stated in Anthem. Yes, I know that Anthem was written first. Yes, I know that Ayn Rand's personal vision of how the world of Anthem would come to be would be by steady expansion of communism, liberalism, environmentalism, and political correctness, not as a reaction against techno-libertarian utopians. But by the time I was reading Ayn Rand, anybody with eyes in his head could see that actual communism was in full-fledged retreat everywhere in the world, including in the so-called Communist bloc countries themselves. Heinlein's 1950 prophesy that by the year 2000, the the Soviet Union would be capitalist and democratic, but that they'd still be calling themselves communist, turned out to be more nearly true than Rand's irrational fear that communism would conquer the world. No, by the 1980s, right-wing pseudo-libertarian corporate fascism, sold under the bogus rubric of "the free market" (which is anything but) and "deregulation" (which turned out to be a code word for "legislation by corporations only") was doing an amazing job of discrediting the very idea of free market entrepreneurial capitalism all over the world; by the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000, or if not then, then certainly when the US did to Iraq what Germany did to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the name of "freedom," the idea that the world might sweep in some kind of pious moralistic and anti-capitalist dictatorship in reaction to libertarian rhetoric, that idea was uncomfortably feasible. Hence: "Shrug Harder."

But even while I was thinking about this, other events conspired to cause me to rethink a literally sacred cliché in American politics: "All government is by the consent of the governed." It's an oversimplification of John Locke's hugely influential 1689 2nd Treatise on Government, and where the traditional American interpretation goes far beyond what Locke was saying is this: Locke was arguing that in an ideal society, governmental legitimacy would depend upon the mechanisms of democratic consent, rather than monarchical fiat or other imposition of force. But American thinkers and teachers are more likely to argue it not as a utopian ideal but as a law of nature: not that all government ought to be by the consent of the governed, but that it is always within the power of the governed to withdraw their consent, overthrow a government they no longer consent to, and (in Jefferson's famous words, from the American Declaration of Independence) "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." And, indeed, examples abound, both good and bad, from the French Revolution to both Russian Revolutions to the Iranian Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Polish Solidarity uprising to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, all of them incidents when the people withdrew their consent and government fell, for better or for worse.

So be it. But the thought's been growing on me, for a while now, that not everybody's consent is weighted evenly, nor can it be. There will always be people whose consent to be governed is more important than yours or mine, because they have a lot more power to withdraw their consent than you or I ever will. Coups d'etat are, after all, still the most common method by which governmental executives change around the world; anybody who commands an army's loyalty has the power to withdraw the army's consent to be governed by the current government. The Kamalist Democracy model pioneered by Mustafa Kamal Ataturk even institutionalizes this, as the people of Turkey have come to rely upon as a protection against religious sectarianism and the people of Pakistan and Egypt have come to regret. In the US, we institutionalized a long list of measures to prevent this, from the explicit depolitization of the military officer class to intense indoctrination of all American citizens to resist military coup to the intentional cultivation of inter-service rivalries. But even here in the US, there's another group that's even more able than the army to withdraw their consent and bring down the state, or more or less so. And they're the very ones that the first democracy, Athens under the constitution of the divinely-inspired Solon, went to so much trouble to disarm: the wealthy. If nothing else, the very first democracy had to explicitly recognize that as long as wealthy individuals can hire their own mercenary armies, then if those mercenary armies ever become bigger or more dangerous than the people's own army, then the consent of the people or of the people's elected government or the people's army becomes irrelevant. And this did in fact turn out to be no small part of how democracy died in Athens.

It's never come to that in America, although we've had one rather famous brush with it, when wealthy financiers tried to finance their own coup d'etat against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the infamous Business Plot. America's institutional safeguards, and the Commander General of the Marine Corps' personal integrity, kept it from going that far. Nonetheless, by no later than the early 1980s, what wealthy financiers and corporate CEOs did to America, and what they've continued doing since then regardless of which party has ruled the White House or Congress, despite pleas to their conscience and extensive taxpayer-funded bribes to change their minds, can only be reasonably described as virtually all of the owners of American industrial capital withdrawing their consent to be governed by the United States federal government. Overthrowing that government having turned out to be impractical, even after a multi-decade propaganda campaign, they have done what the John Galts of the world can not be stopped from doing: they looted the country of every capital asset that wasn't nailed down and shipped it overseas, preferring to have their actual business operations "governed" in third-world hellholes from Mexico to Thailand where the laws were more to their liking.

I find it absolutely worth reminding my fellow liberal progressives that unless you can, like the divinely-inspired Solon, persuade the wealthy to consent to your laws, it doesn't do you any good to write them. It is entirely within their power to withdraw their consent to be governed, to liquidate every asset they own in this country (roughly 90% of it, I remind you) and send it overseas. That failure to continue to persuade the wealthy that the taxes they were paying and the regulations they were enduring were what protected their profit margins from unprofitable races to the bottom, to persuade them that campaign finance reform and other anti-corruption methods were what protected their own businesses and their own fortunes from the depredations of their fellow rich, that failure deserves to be writ large as the great failure of the Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, and of the Democratic political thinkers of the 1970s.

I don't know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn't explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It's probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between "All You Zombies" and "If This Goes On."

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a "free energy" machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth's own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company's management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn't get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

Because she died without telling anyone, it's not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers' science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors' village, assuming that they'd worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they'd cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We'll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete ... Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.

Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt's strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they're retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.

Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he's a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland ... where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.

---

Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don't think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!

Time for another quick update to this list, since I just discovered another one: I don't mind lending books, but I've lost track of who even has the following eight books from my library. If one of you has one of these, could you let me know, and give me some idea when I can have it back?

• Camden Benares, ZEN without Zen Masters
• Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice
• Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
• James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Wolfgang Lotz, A Handbook for Spies
• P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

All of them books that I really do want back, eventually, and one or two of which may actually be tricky to find even used.

World War Z, by Max Brooks, hardly needs another review. I came late to this party; all of you heard how wonderful this book was back when I started hearing about it, a year ago or more. Presumably all or almost all of you know that it's the sequel to Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide, that it posits that a George Romero-like "zombie" plague turns into a world-wide event, that the first book pretends to be a compilation of useful survival tips from people who successfully fought off or escaped from localized zombie attacks, and that this second book is a deliberate homage to Studs Terkel's The Good War, a compilation of oral histories from survivors as the war is winding down, telling the story of how the zombie war affected not just local communities, but the whole world. You also don't need me to tell you that the book has almost no detractors, that this is one of the most favorably reviewed books in the history of science fiction, and that people who read this book are passing it along to and forcing it on their friends to read faster than, well, faster than a global zombie plague.

All I have to add to that, by way of review, is this. I despise survival horror, but I still loved this book.

The thing about survival horror and me is this. Whether we're talking about proto-survival-horror classics like Ridley Scott's Alien or zombie fiction or psycho killer escape stories like the Saw series or survival-horror themed game shows like Survivor, the survival horror genre gets everything wrong about how to actually survive in adverse conditions, and I just can't get past that. The subject of who lives and who dies, and what makes the difference, when situations go pear-shaped is one that's been subjected to intense scientific and statistical scrutiny over the last hundred years. (I have yet to find a better survey of the subject than Xavier Maniguet's 1996 book Survival: How to Prevail in Hostile Environments, which is both a really fun page-turning read and really thought provoking.) Not the least important by far of the things that the whole genre gets wrong is that it takes it for granted that willingness to triage has to be elevated all the way to callousness. Triage, for the few of you who don't know the technical term, is a technique used in emergency medicine for allocating insufficient medical resources. As you'd expect from the name, it divides all the incoming wounded into three categories. The categories are people who probably will survive whether they get help right now or not, people who probably won't survive no matter how much help we give them right now, and people who probably will survive but only if they get help right now; and only the third group get any medical help until we run out of them. Then the medics turn to group two, in hopes that they were wrong and more people can be rescued; when the last of those dies, they give the remainder the health care they need.

But one of the main conventions of the survival horror genre is that unless somebody utterly callous decides early who isn't going to make it and forces the rest of the group to callously abandon at least half, preferably 3/4ths or more, of the group to immediate death, nobody at all will survive. And scientific study of survival in desperate situations shows that it's just not true. On the contrary, the people who survive the longest are the ones who show the most determination to save everybody who can possibly be saved, who err on the side of keeping the group together and alive rather than on the side of callousness, who wait until it really is inescapably obvious that someone isn't going to make it to give up on them. There are almost no genuinely awful situations that can't be made better by having more help. And this seems so obvious to me that until I read that John Barnes essay I was forwarded the other day and that I linked for you, "The Well-Bitten Hand," I completely and utterly failed to see the appeal of survival horror fiction, let alone survival horror themed game shows. Now I think maybe I get it.

If Barnes is right that new genres and subgenres of fiction arise when society needs new ways to talk about problems, fears, or insecurities that our current fiction didn't equip us with the vocabulary for, then survival horror has almost certainly caught on because it is the perfect genre to talk about Reaganomics. During the Reagan years, American business decided that the only way to save the American economy was to triage out (depending on where you were) anywhere from 20% to 90% of our workers. For almost 30 years now, every American has had to live with the knowledge that he or she is being watched constantly at work for the slightest sign of weakness, that the first time the business hits the tiniest bump in the road they will be abandoned no matter how much help they were being before, and that nobody they worked with will show the slightest sign of grief or remorse that they are gone. When the supposedly unproductive are culled, people in American workplaces tell themselves the same lie that people in survival horror fiction tell each other after somebody they previously liked, and who may have even helped the group as a whole survive some previous attack, tell each other: might as well just accept that they're gone,