Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I know that for some of you this whole laptopping-from-bed-by-wireless thing is old hat, and if so, suck it up, 'cause this is all new 'n' spiffy where I come from, cowboy. I am reveling. I feel like any minute now I'll look out the window and see jetcars speeding by, and out in the street there'll be people strolling by with their wearables on, jacked directly into the wetware shunts. I'm in the future, all of a sudden. I wonder what the weather's like in the future?" -- misia, 2004-05-10

Thoughts I wanted to post earlier but didn't have time or was too sleepy ... From yesterday evening, hearing bits and pieces of the evening news as I was trying to wake up to go to rehearsal: is "crackpot state's attornies" going to be the next Republican content-free political noisephrase to replace "activist judges" for distracting people from what's really going on? ("Activist judge" = any judge who, in the course of correctly doing his or her job, makes a ruling Republicans disagree with; "crackpot state's attorney" = any state's attorney who, when faced with evidence that a Republican currently in office has broken the law, has the gall to actually indict him.)

In addition to the "we don't have to be bothered by little things like laws" message that it's easy to read into current attempts to protect Tom DeLay, I've got a linguistic bone to pick with both phrases: they take meaningful phrases and remove the useful meaning from them. If "crackpot state's attorney" means what whoever I heard quoted on the news wants it to mean, then we have a boy-who-cried-wolf situation ifwhen we ever do get a real crackpot abusing such an office to do crazy stuff. Can't "crackpot" be reserved for folks who actually do act like they've got breaks in the brainpan? And "activist judge" did have a meaning until recently, though not one that came up very often in reality, but now that Chicken Little Republicans have declared that half of the attempts to interpret and apply the Constitution (or state constitutions) are "legistlating from the bench", the term is diluted so that when the next real activist judge comes along, we'll have to throw in parenthetical comments and footnotes to explain what the phrase used to mean.

(And it's an essentially random half of the judgements, at that, since (as a Washington Post editorial this week pointed out, nobody currently complaining about judges doing their jobs has a consistent test, a definition that can be used to determine which judges are "activist", beyond "they issued a ruling we disagreed with". How about we just call them "judges we disagree with" and their decisions "mistaken", both reasonable descriptions of opinion? Oh wait, that doesn't raise the spectre of a grave threat from a vague conspiratorial enemy that must be defeated with campaign contributions and support for really activist legislation. Gotta tell the constituents that the sky is falling instead. *grrrrr* You see, I do understand the propoganda rhetorical reasons politicians speak the way they do; I just don't like it.)

And I just realized that the other thing I wanted to write about probably wants to be its own entry, so I'll put that off for a little while...

/I/'/m/ /n/o/t/ /o/n/e/ /t/o/ /t/e/l/l/ /t/h/e/ /S/e/c/r/e/t/ /S/e/r/v/i/c/e/ /h/o/w/ /t/o/ /d/o/ /t/h/e/i/r/ /j/o/b/s/,/ /b/u/t/... Wait, let me start over.

I'll try to refrain from criticising people for simple caution in these troubled times, but ... No, I'll try again.

Let maugorn and others beware: singing old Bob Dylan songs now constitutes a potentially terrorist act. With all due respect to the Secret Service, last week, as in the case of the LiveJournal user who got a visit from the Secret Service last month, they came out in response to someone else's tip, said, "Hey, we have to investigate any time someone says there's been a threat," determined that no actual threat existed, and left. So my real complaint is against all the people who called the Secret Service in the first place. But fercryinoutloud people, there is so much wrong with this one.

First, I suppose this is a sign that we need to better educate people in the classics of our popular culture, lest they fail to recognize the work of an established performer just because it's a few decades old; or at least give people enough of an American History education to have a clue what protest songs in the 1960s were like. But the problem is deeper than a failure to recognize a Vietnam-era Bob Dylan song.

In both cases, the words in question amounted to a wish that harm would befall someone, either by an act of God or in a completely unspecified manner. There was no threat (as the Secret Service determined), nor was there even anything that could be construed as an attempt to incite others to act on the speaker's behalf. In the case of "Masters of War", the proposed victim is not even clearly specified -- listeners inferred that it was supposed to mean the president. (In fact, in light of the first verse and the title, the "you" specified in the final verse could well be plural.) I compared Republicans to Chicken Little in my last entry, but perhaps these "concerned citizens" are more deserving of that title.

Or is this part of a larger plot? Are various agents of a conspiracy deliberately wasting the Secret Service's time by "informing" on such irrelevant tidbits to consume resources so that an actual assassination plot can sneak through, masked by the "noise" of the bogus tips? Naaah, it's probably just idiots making extra work for the Secret Service -- either out of well-intentioned diligence marked by abysmally poor reading comprehension; or deliberately using the intimidation factor of an official investigation to pester anyone whose views they disapprove of, with callous disregard for the fact that they're wasting the time of agents with real jobs to do.

It is clear from recent events that if I were to write simply that I wished Bush would drop dead, there is a significant chance that one of my readers would feel the need to inform the Secret Service, even if I were to restrict my wish to his death being caused by didease, accident, or act of God. But what if I were to go further and make that restriction explicit by saying, "but it can't be an assassination, because that would make him a martyr to many people," would someone still report me for "wishing the death of the president"? Would the Secret Service need to come to my house to find out what I'd said (even though the full text would be online)? If I were to examine the probable repercussions of Bush's death and conclude that as much as I wish him out of office, his death in office would be worse than his completing a second term, would someone report me for thinking about the premature death of the president? After all, if a complaint is made, the Secret Service has to investigate to find out whether the threat is credible..."

If the very making of those statements is hypothetical -- if, as above, I merely ask "what if I had posted such sentiments" -- do I have to worry about there being someone with such a poor grasp of language that they will fail to understand the context and the hypothetical nature of the questions? Can I even write about this subject at all without budgeting some time for answering questions from Secret Service agents? Do we need to include a disclaimer on any such message, saying, "The author does not actually wish to harm, incite others to harm, or pray for any deity or supernatural entity to harm, the president of the United States of America"? Would a disclaimer help, or will a malicious troublemaker just snip off that bit when forwarding the message to the authorities?

Hey, can I give someone I don't like a scare and a bad day by falsely reporting to the Secret Service that they made a threat against the president in a LiveJournal entry but then deleted it? (No, I am not going to perform that experiment.)

theferrett pointed out the awkward position Secret Service agents are in with regard to these sorts of tips, and the futility of Monday-morning quarterbacking to try to tell them what they should have done. But some of this stuff is just stupid. Maybe the agency has to follow the policies and procedures it's got, but we the public need to be less stupid about wasting their time.

<action description="put on tinfoil hat"> Or maybe the government wants us to be that way, reporting any incidence of "incorrect speech" so that dissidents can be catalogued and investigations can be justified willy-nilly on the grounds that "we have to check these things out when there's been a complaint", and these examples are merely side effects of that? <action description="remove tinfoil hat"> <action description="put on 'cynic' hat"> Nah. That'd be too clever and demonstrate too much long-term thinking.

Or maybe we should all take turns posting the lyrics to "Masters of War" in our journals and see who wins the "visit from the Secret Service" lottery each week, until the Secret Service decides to investigate people who file malicious or patently silly compaints instead.

If you're a musician, comfortable with reading unfamiliar music without a lot of prep time (it should be mostly pretty easy music, if that helps), are planning to attend the Darkover science fiction convention, and might enjoy playing for some dancers, please drop me a line at my main email address or my LJ address. Thanks.