The White Peril 白禍

Mark Alger says that summer has begun its slow glide toward fall in Cincinnati. Tokyo had its moment last week, too. I walked out the door, and--uh, if you've ever had an inner-ear infection, you know how the doctor gives you anti-biotics and pain-killers and you go home and go to bed and you wake up and it doesn't hurt and the relief is so overwhelming you almost cry? It was like that. You felt air--real, lovely, moving air that actually felt as if it contained some oxygen along with the water vapor. Suddenly, you knew you could walk down the street without expecting to run into Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego around every corner.

Fine, so the city turned back into a kiln within twelve hours, but the brief moment of relief was enough to give hope. Today, we had a rain that was actually kind of refreshing. I think I've been compulsively downing less iced tea, at least by a little. It won't be long before guys are no longer walking around in shorts (boo!), but not long after that they'll be wearing sweaters (yum!), so it all works out.

Nick has a handy run-down of left and right positions on major issues. My favorites:

Left
Trade sanctions are good when applied to evil governments like apartheid era South Africa.
Trade sanctions are bad when applied to the suffering people of Ba'athist Iraq or fascist Cuba.

Right
Trade sanctions are good when applied to totalitarian red China.
Trade sanctions are bad when Margaret Thatcher says they are. [Does that just apply to trade sanctions? It's been a firm and generalized tenet in my life for decades.--SRK]

Left
Government interference is bad when the nanny-state tells you not to smoke the weed.
Government interference is good when it tells you to turn your guns in to the police.

Right
Government interference is bad when the nanny-state tells you not to smoke Marlboros.
Government interference is good when, in an ironic move, it throws you in jail for having the gay sex.

Joe e-mailed to ask whether I'd heard about this story from the Lehigh Valley, where I grew up and he has a lot of relatives. I had not. Now that I have, I'm appalled:

KUTZTOWN, Pennsylvania -- They're being called the Kutztown 13 -- a group of high schoolers charged with felonies for bypassing security with school-issued laptops, downloading forbidden internet goodies and using monitoring software to spy on district administrators.

The students, their families and outraged supporters say authorities are overreacting, punishing the kids not for any heinous behavior -- no malicious acts are alleged -- but rather because they outsmarted the district's technology workers.

...

In Pennsylvania alone, more than a dozen school districts have reported student misuse of computers to police, and in some cases students have been expelled, according to Jeffrey Tucker, a lawyer for the district.

The students "fully knew it was wrong and they kept doing it," Tucker said. "Parents thought we should reward them for being creative. We don't accept that."

A hearing is set for Aug. 24 in Berks County juvenile court, where the 13 have been charged with computer trespass, an offense state law defines as altering computer data, programs or software without permission.

"Reward them for being creative"? I know that a lot of hard-working school administrators have to deal with parents who are lax disciplinarians and make every excuse imaginable not to find fault with their own little snoogums, but that didn't ring very true to me. (The felony the kids are charged with, BTW, is computer trespassing.) There's a website to support the thirteen students who are being charged, and on its comments board, the parents of a few of them have posted. There are a lot of questions raised: information and support to the parents about the laptop program was slack from the beginning, parents were not alerted that the district considered their children's conduct serious infractions, and the students who have been charged may have been selected because their parents don't have connections. Of course, none of this is corroborated--I'm only going by what's posted there.

Looking for reasons to sympathize with the school district requires major effort, though, because the facts that do appear undisputed make it look like a warren of dumb bunnies:

The computers were loaded with a filtering program that limited internet access. They also had software that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens.

But those barriers proved easily surmountable: The administrative password that allowed students to reconfigure computers and obtain unrestricted internet access was easy to obtain. A shortened version of the school's street address, the password was taped to the backs of the computers.

The password got passed around and students began downloading such forbidden programs as the popular iChat instant-messaging tool.

The students were clearly breaking rules and deserve punishment. It does seem reasonable to expect, though, that administrators help encourage students in the direction of obedience by not making the rules ridiculously easy to break. Of course, if they don't know how computers work, that may be hard to manage. Maybe sticking to programs that they themselves understand would have helped.

Is there some kind of rule that, now that the word ass is permitted on network television, you have to have characters say it all the time? Like, there's a backlog from all that "ass" that went unsaid until the 90s, and it has to be cleared out? I mean, look--I'm a man who just loves ass, even in expletive form. It's just that it seems so forced.

In a more wide-ranging discussion, Dean has himself and a few others worked into a froth over naughty words. It's interesting to read, but his own take on the issue (that people who chafe at hearing them are just being self-righteous) shows a surprising lack of imagination.

Sophisticated cultures need arbitrary boundaries. In a society in which people move about freely and make agreements by contract rather than blood ties, we need as many ways to establish trust as possible; and it's important that some of them be content-free, or at least symbolic. You can't operate if you have to wait until after you've entrusted your life or property to someone to find out whether he's reliable. The risk is too great.

That's one of the reasons we have all kinds of little rules about how to serve and eat food, how to format certain kinds of letters, and how to express yourself in public. The behaviors themselves don't matter. What matters is that you're showing respect for the prevailing customs of your own culture, which indicates that you can be expected to respect weightier rules when they're operative.

Now, of course, it isn't necessarily true that he who is faithful in little will also be faithful in much. There are plenty of swindlers and sluts with impeccable manners socially. Etiquette has to be supplemented by reputation and credentials if we actually want to draw conclusions, as certainly as we can, about what kinds of people we're dealing with. But I maintain that it's a valuable starting point. A willingness to avoid vulgar expression in public is a signal that you understand the difference between public and private spheres and that you are capable of at least a modicum of self-discipline. Neither quality is to be taken for granted these days.

BTW, my upbringing was as working-class as Dean's was, and there was no cursing allowed in my parents' house. There was no self-righteousness about it--my mother never tsk-tsked over the neighbors' language or anything--and most of it was for religious reasons. I suspect they still matter to more people than Dean thinks. And conversely, if he thinks class-conscious types are the ones who avoid cursing, he hasn't spent any time with social-climby lawyers or bankers in their off hours.

One final point: you won't see me use extreme swear words here, but (as Dean himself...and Connie, and Michael, and a few others who've become friends through the blog here...can attest) I deploy them freely and unblushingly in private correspondence. One of the pleasures of having friends is being able to let your guard down around and say what you think in raw form, and it gets lost if you talk the same way all the time. That may not be the most important consideration related to the issue, but I don't think it's a negligible one.

A conversation I had a few days ago reminded me that it must have been pretty close to exactly five years ago this week that Atsushi and I met for the first time. Sounds like an excuse for a celebration when he's home this weekend. (You knew he was coming home by the fact that there was just an air-traffic screw-up this week, right? Happens every time. Of course, as Atsushi points out, it's probably just that there's an air-traffic screw-up every few weeks lately.)