Chapter 4 of IF I WERE A TERRORIST

Note: see the blog post for Monday, October 3, 2016, for an explanation of how and why this manuscript came about. If it seems dated in places, especially chapter 3, it’s because most of it was written about 10 years ago. You are welcome to copy this material, use it for any non-commercial purpose, and distribute it as widely as you want, so long as you give me author’s credit and indicate the copyright date. The chapters will be posted periodically, I hope once every week or two, but a couple of them might take a little bit longer. Thanks for reading this material; it’s my personal response to the political craziness that seems to have swept our great nation. JJJr

Explanation for IF I WERE A TERRORIST – See blog post for October 3, 2016

Foreword – See blog post for October 10, 2016

Chapter 1. Why I Wrote This Book – See blog post for October 10, 2016

Chapter 2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon – See blog post for October 11, 2016

Chapter 3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters – See blog post for October 17, 2016

__________

IF I WERE A TERRORIST

John Janovy, Jr. © 2016

Foreword

1. Why I Wrote This Book

2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon

3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters

4. Energy: The Achilles Heel

5. The Human Factor: The Individual vs. The Mob

6. Hero Worship: Stupidity in High Places

7. Fear: The Mother of Fundamentalism

8. Distractions

9. American Vulnerability

10. The Ultimate Fate of the United States of America

11. Solutions and Options

Appendix:

I. Evolutionary Principles Summarized

II. How to study evolution

III. Sources and Resources

__________

4. Energy: the Achilles heel

Like a strutting player, whose conceit lies in his hamstring . . .

—William Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida)

Only a complete fool would ever deny that the United States of America is highly vulnerable to defeat and destruction, or at best rapid decline, for one reason above all: our consumption of energy, especially as that consumption is integral to our national image, our sense of American identity. We talk about energy economy, and as individuals we may try to reduce our energy costs, but we don’t do anything, as Americans, as a nation, to promote energy economy. Our very rights, our freedoms, that seem to be the hallmarks of Americanism, are tightly linked to energy consumption, especially by that ubiquitous and pervasive symbol of freedom and choice—the automobile, ideally one driven on the quintessential Western landscape, itself a traditional symbol of American grandeur.

Back in small town Iowa, however, corn farmers pool their life savings to build an ethyl alcohol plant. The product is also known as ethanol, the basic gasoline additive and intoxicating component of booze. These hyper-practical ultra-conservative Republicans clearly understand that we talk about ethanol made from corn as a “renewable energy resource.” But they also know, to a person, that without government subsidies, they’d all go broke trying to make alcohol from hybrid corn because ethanol is not necessarily a replacement for oil; in the United States, hybrid corn and the resulting ethanol are, in large part, made from oil.

Hybrid corn must be planted by tractor (using diesel fuel), sprayed with pesticides and herbicides (made from petroleum delivered by tractors or airplanes using petroleum-based fuel), dried (either with electricity made from coal or with heat from methane fires), harvested by combines running on diesel, and driven to market in trucks, also using gasoline or diesel. Thus ethanol is made by consuming fossil fuel, like human beings who consume food resulting from “Green Revolution” technology and production methods, in the sense that nowadays, a large supply of it does not exist unless one also expends a very large amount of petroleum to make the supply. If you had to make trees out of grass, for example, trees would not be a replacement for grass except where you absolutely needed trees instead of grass, specifically, and nothing else but trees would suffice. In this case we’re not talking about the fact of energy so much as about the form of energy. And that is the basic science lesson that should inform not only our elected representatives, but also, and even more importantly, the voting public. The energy wars today are not about the fact of energy but about forms of energy.

Every petroleum geologist alive in the 1950s knew, simply knew, that our oil supplies would eventually run out. The issue was never whether, but when. As a nation we’ve squandered a half-century of time in which to prepare for the ultimate crunch; more on why we’ve behaved this way as a nation later. Over the past decade, virtually everyone associated with the oil industry could tell you that oil prices would climb as supplies became relatively scarce, or competition for them increased (first day’s lecture in Econ 101), and that eventually those prices would have major economic and political consequences. If any of us reviewed all the interactions, both direct and indirect ones, between crude oil and the American economy, we’d quickly discover that petroleum use so fully permeates our business, pleasure, politics, and military that disruptions in the supply, or significant increases in the cost, have significant potential—indeed rather obvious potential—for completely unraveling the fabric of American life and what we call “American culture.” It’s not only the truckers who suffer when fuel prices go up, it’s also the people who buy food, water, clothing, and shelter, i.e., 320,000,000 Americans.

A second reason for our vulnerability, however, and one that compounds the first is scientific naïveté in high places. Only recently have the highest elected officials ever admitted what every reasonably educated person knows about energy: we use too much and depend too much on others for what we use. But none of our so-called options for self-sufficiency are truly viable ones. For example, if all the corn—yes, all—produced in the United States were converted into ethanol without fuel expenditures for planting, harvesting, and processing, such a conversion would provide only 3% of our annual motor fuel “needs.” We could get another 3% by somehow turning all—yes, all—the standing crop of American forests into ethanol, again provided we had the biochemical means to do that cheaply. Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), i.e. tapping into our strategic reserves, would buy us another 6 months of petroleum at current pump prices, although delivery would take about a decade. Politicians who claim, even by inference, that drilling in ANWR is a key to American energy self-sufficiency are simply telling lies. Alternatively, they are victims of pathological delusion.

These figures are not from secret documents; they are fairly easy for any American to obtain from the Internet and calculate. I am not bringing aid and comfort to the enemy by pointing out our vulnerability with respect to energy. The enemy already knows this fact, probably better than you do. Instead, I am being a responsible citizen, and furthermore, a responsible scientist, by reminding you of what you already know but would like to ignore, namely, that we are vulnerable to complete economic and social collapse because of our dependence on crude oil. Regardless of the [generally falling, or comfortably low] price of gasoline at the pump, in 2015 the United States imported about 9.4 million barrels of petroleum per day, nearly 80% of it in the form of crude oil. Yes, million and per day. The sources? Eighty-two different countries, including Venezuela, currently (2016) in a near state of political, social, and economic chaos and collapse, and Saudi Arabia, a nation probably second only to the terrorist group ISIS in terms of its constraints on human freedom.  

As the author of a book entitled If I Were a Terrorist, written for all the reasons outlined in Chapter 1, my main challenge during the first decade or so of the Third Millennium is to get the book finished before the energy wars heat up to the point of ignition. A strong case could be made, of course, that such ignition has already occurred in Iraq. As of this writing, the global disruption is not so much in the energy supply as in the political, social, and cultural aftermath of that war. In general, the Muslim nations of the Middle East are so different culturally from the United States as to be easily misunderstood in every conceivable way. They might as well be from alien star systems. Any well-educated science fiction aficionado could probably have told George W. Bush what would happen if he invaded Iraq with the expectation that a year after the bombs stopped falling, Iraqi citizens would be thriving in a fully representative government and strolling through American-type shopping malls. Alternatively, somebody in the administration could have done a Google search on “Sunni-Shia conflict” and used the results to evaluate the long-term effects of this truly stupid military adventure.

The American love affair with petroleum shows little sign of souring, at least officially, although in recent years we’ve seen a surprising growth in solar and wind-generated electricity. Some industry experts predict at 119% growth in solar power during 2016, with 16 gigawatts of equipment installed, an amount essentially double that of 2015 (7.3 gigawatts). The wind power industry in the United States, fueled by production tax credits, is not far behind. Globally, wind generated a little over 50 gigawatts in 2014; industry estimates for 2015 are as high as 60 gigawatts. China alone installed 23 GW of wind power generators in 2014 and was expected to install another 25 GW worth in 2015. But there are certain things that wind and sun cannot accomplish, for example: flying a jet aircraft, powering tanks across a battlefield, and harvesting 94 million acres of corn or 50 million acres of wheat in the USA alone.

Fortunately, if you like company in potential misery, we are not alone in this predicament of an eventual shortage of petroleum. China is getting there in a hurry; Russia is likewise, although it is blessed with abundant petroleum reserves. France has forestalled its energy crisis by getting in bed with nuclear power, something the United States citizenry would do if we had any real sense of the relative socio-economic dangers of extreme dependence on foreign crude compared to fissionable materials, especially since we already possess—stored on American soil—most of the world’s supply of highly radioactive substances. But the French were paying $4.20 a gallon for gasoline in early 2004, at the same time Americans were paying about $1.50, and by May, 2006, when Americans were paying $3.13 a gallon, the French were at $6.27. So maybe there is an economic stimulus for the French to develop their supplies of enriched uranium. We already produce truly monumental amounts of the latter, except instead of putting it to work for us—heating our homes, running our subways (in those cities smart enough to build subway systems), and keeping our school lights burning—we turn it into weapons of mass destruction that in recent years have come to appear rather ineffective against a highly dispersed and fanatic enemy, namely, those multitudes of Islamic people who find us so offensive that they would kill us just because we are, among other things, either Christians or not their kind of Muslims.

As a scientist, I am always amazed at how fearful we can be of a nuclear power plant, how blasé—even proud—we can be about a thermonuclear arsenal in our own back yard, and how blind we can be to the power of human beings acting either as dedicated individuals or en mass. Fear, pride, and blindness simply do not make sense, except in evolutionary terms. For some reason known only to woolly mammoths and cave bears, we evolved this propensity for believing our leaders; if power corrupts, this corruption is, in my view, an intellectual one that equates position with wisdom. Thus today, perhaps driven by our genes doing what they’ve done for a million years, we obediently elect officials who in turn promise security by building truly dangerous weapons, all the while fearing common citizens who are well educated enough to understand the technology of nuclear power, and at least until very recently dismissing as irrelevant—or worse yet, as “wrong”—a religious movement that now encompasses nearly half the world and is growing rapidly.

Never could any anthropologist have envisioned a document more revealing of human nature than your daily newspaper. The United States has more military power than any nation in history, yet we cannot control and hearts and minds of those who are uncomfortable with the cultural artifacts so familiar to Americans. We are perceived as drinking too much, worshipping too little, and letting our women do a whole lot of things that seem to inspire fear in a large fraction of our species spread across much of the planet. If I were a terrorist, I would be out there promoting such typically American behaviors but at the same time finding some terrorist friends to viciously condemn those same habits. Then I’d sit back and watch while we fought amongst ourselves over indecency, sex, and Hollywood instead of truly putting our creative talents into reducing our consumption of energy while at the same time multiplying the sources and means of producing electricity.

If there is a resounding success of the capitalist system it is the power of the marketplace to drive innovation, revealed no more strongly than in the video game industry. But if there is a resounding failure of the capitalist system it is this power of the marketplace to drive strategic planning, too, which needs to be driven more by intelligence, insight, the lessons of history, and a secular sense that humans need to live within their biological means, than by dollars. If I were a terrorist, I’d be focusing on efforts to undermine American education, especially in such “unimportant” areas as history and social sciences. I’d be trashing evolution constantly because in doing so I’d be chopping away at the nation’s scientific enterprise, thus its scientific literacy in an age of heavy dependence on science and technology. And I’d be pushing video games big time, and indeed developing a bunch that pitted white American soldiers against all kinds of non-Christian, relatively dark-skinned, enemies. In other words, I’d be using my creativity to lead Americans according to their least flattering, and most irrational, tendencies.

Failure to recognize this distinction between the economics of innovation and economics of strategy is a characteristic of our political system, and it is a failure compounded by the evident lack of words to involve a well-educated public in a meaningful dialog about the American dream. So often, it seems, the narrow and highly ideological vision of men in high places of powerful nations seems to override the facts surrounding life as a highly evolved primate on the only planet known to support life of any kind. Energy is not a gift given to westerners by God because we are His chosen people. Energy is found today where it ended up after hundreds of millions of years of planetary history, including the folding of stone layers and the drifting of continents. The geographic regions where much of this fossil sunlight landed as a result of these geological forces are now occupied by tens of millions of people who consider my common day-to-day activities quite blasphemous, even blasphemous enough to warrant death in the eyes of God (as they currently define the term). I suspect that if you gave these people an impromptu polygraph test you’d discover that they are only marginally, if at all, more educated than the typical American on the finer points of petroleum geology and the trajectories of global change, including both biological and geophysical ones, that plopped them down on a desert somewhere southeast of Turkey.

Thus there is plenty of scientific naïveté to go around. Evidently, early in our evolutionary history there was little demand for scientific reasoning and plenty of need for the kind of transcendence, belief, and blind obedience characteristic of powerful religions. Only in the last century, i.e., the most recent 0.01% of our species’ time on Earth, has public scientific literacy acquired significance as a potential strategic weapon. Yet we Americans are quickly moving into a belief-driven society even as we become increasingly entangled in a world where technology and innovation are engaged in a spiraling pas de deux and a knowledge economy is sweeping over regions once bombed into near oblivion during the time since some of us were born.

But in the Third Millennium C.E., given what our species has learned and built in the past two millennia, blind belief is a dangerous luxury and war fueled by such belief cannot be stopped or controlled by means familiar to historians. Fat Man and Little Boy dropped on Tehran and Pyongyang respectively will not suddenly usher in capitulation, pacifism throughout the Islamic world, 1950s American television script life styles in Saudi Arabia, and a golf-obsessed President. The real question from such a hypothetical event is not how rapidly the oil could start flowing again into Western refineries—we already know, from the experience in Iraq, that war shuts down flow, not speeds it—but how rapidly the web sites and Internet connections could be re-established. In the opening years of the Third Millennium, we are engaged in a war of ideas that only looks like a war of explosive weapons. And guess what: Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, and American Idol are losing.

If there is one factor overriding many of our traditional economic engines—manufacturing, mining, transportation, food production—it is the production and use of information technology to generate money and consequently all that money provides. This phenomenon is described eloquently in Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, mentioned earlier (see also the cover story on India in TIME Magazine for June 26, 2006). What Friedman waits until the last chapters to remind you, however, is that just like a petroleum-based consumer economy, an information-based economy widens the gap between haves and have-nots. In this case, however, the haves have technological skills coupled with a strong dose of what Americans increasingly disdain, namely a good liberal education. This gap also shows up in unexpected places, like Bangalore. And nowhere is the knowledge and information technology gap more evident than in those vast reaches of the Middle East and in the immigrant communities of Europe, where populations of young men are—or at least believe they are—plagued by unemployment, deeply entrenched sexism, fundamentalist religion, and oppressive governments.

This incongruence between the distribution of fossil sunlight and modern information technology—the former a product of geological processes, the latter a product of primate evolution—is a global problem that has all the potential for completely redefining what we mean by the phrase “human being.”  Today, while scientists re-write that definition with their molecular discoveries, American fundamentalist preachers are also re-writing it in Biblical inerrancy terms, agronomists are spelling “human” using the letters “petroleum,” “fertilizer,” and “pesticide,” and artists are re-writing it in images that constitute a language that can be translated a myriad of ways. But my daily cable news shows also have images, in this case, of young men across the sea, staring at me, cursing me for the culture I encounter minute-by-minute, and wishing me death because they believe, just because of where I live and what I look like, that I am a “Christian” (which I am not). And if I were a refugee in an overloaded inflatable somewhere in the Mediterranean, that assumption, based on my blond hair, light skin, and lack of facial hair, would likely get me thrown overboard.

But even though the people sitting beside their Al-Qaeda friends feel this way about me, they are still human beings. Every thousand of their new-born children will include some genetically capable of being, or determined to become, artists, musicians, mathematicians, scientific wizards, geniuses, as well as the mentally retarded, beautiful and ugly, poets, techno-nerds, loving parents, and hetero- and homosexual and every sexuality in between including trans. This mixture of at least partly if not mostly genetically-endowed traits would be distributed among the thousand babies regardless of gender, skin color, or national origin. In other words, although from a statistical perspective they’re not much different, if at all, from us, they now own what we need and want in large quantities, and their human traits provide them with the power and inclination to react just like humans everywhere—including Americans—react when they believe they’ve been affronted and exploited, namely, negatively instead of cooperatively.

“Cooperatively,” in this case, as the Third Millennium begins, turns out to mean “you sell me what I want so I can maintain a way of life that you believe to be an insult to the Creator.” In my opinion, every American needs to peruse both the United States Geological Survey web site on energy production (http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html) and the Energy Information Administration web site (http://www.eia.doe.gov/). Such perusal tells you that according to 1998 statistics, our consumption outstripped our production by about 30%, and that we imported three times as much oil as we produced. That number—30%—is now well over ten years old but it has not changed; if anything, it has grown. Remember, also, that nobody really “produces” oil; instead, they find oil. What oil “producers” produce is oil that is changed into a form that you can use in your car or furnace. Thus what most people think of as “produced” oil is actually “discovered” oil, and that “discovered” oil is fossil sunlight that was originally laid down as biomass mostly during the Mesozoic, 150 million years ago, then transformed into what we call “crude oil” by natural processes.

In addition to what we call “oil,” those geological processes of time, temperature, and pressure also converted some of that vegetation into natural gas—mostly methane, CH₄—itself an important fossil fuel, and some of the rest of it into coal. Like oil, methane and coal deposits also are distributed unevenly across continents, providing another component of the highly complex energy problems faced by post-industrial age humans. Finally, fossil fuels are not easily, if at all, inter-convertible, although strategic planning allows nations to shift uses to maximize the life of mineral assets. For example, if a nation has plenty of coal, it can use that coal to heat houses instead of using fuel oil. But coal eventually runs out, just like oil, and you can’t make gasoline out of coal, at least not economically.

Every petroleum geologist on Earth knows these facts; indeed, they make their livings not only by knowing the facts about energy conversion and planetary history, but also by using that information to find and develop fossil fuel resources. For that reason alone, we should jerk the drivers’ licenses of all those Biblical literalists who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old. I don’t have a recommendation for those Catholics who still believe Earth is the center of the universe (Lincoln, Nebraska, Journal-Star, July 16, 2011 and http://www.latimes.com/news); those folks are so willfully ignorant it’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to describe that level of ignorance. Somebody just needs to ask how they can really be so stupid, on purpose.

We humans have also been quite successful at converting oil into people, mainly through our use of fossil fuels in agriculture. The so-called “green revolution” is actually a combination of technological innovations and policy initiatives that together multiplied global agricultural production. In this case, Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the history of this human activity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution). To quote from the web site: “The world population has grown by about four billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and many believe that, without the Revolution, there would have been greater famine and malnutrition.” Although food production associated with green revolution agricultural practices has increased significantly, energy use has also increased, and at an even faster rate. See http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/Green-Revolution.htm for the negative effects of intensified agriculture. We’re making people out of oil and trying very hard to make more people out of oil.

In summary, regarding our American energy vulnerability, the bottom line is this: agricultural production, military needs (especially war), civilian employment and transportation, infrastructure maintenance, heating and cooling, most manufacturing, etc., all consume vast quantities of energy, much of which is currently supplied by fossil sunlight—a limited resource. Yet the typical solution to this problem of increasing use of a limited fossil resource is to seek more of the resource, knowing that whatever is found is also limited. This behavior is so typical of our species as to constitute—almost—a defining human character. If I were a terrorist I would do everything in my power to promote energy consumption in the United States, especially tying that consumption to an “American way of life” as promoted by the Republicans, and at the same time working to reduce my dependence on fossil fuel at home. In other words, if I were really a terrorist, I’d forget the bombs, encourage Americans to do more of what we’re already doing very effectively to ourselves, especially if in so doing we increase consumption, then stand back and watch, or go play soccer with the kids.

Chapter 3 of IF I WERE A TERRORIST

Note: see the blog post for Monday, October 3, 2016, for an explanation of how and why this manuscript came about. If it seems dated in places, especially chapter 3, it’s because most of it was written about 10 years ago. You are welcome to copy this material, use it for any non-commercial purpose, and distribute it as widely as you want, so long as you give me author’s credit and indicate the copyright date. The chapters will be posted periodically, I hope once every week or two, but a couple of them might take a little bit longer. Thanks for reading this material; it’s my personal response to the political craziness that seems to have swept our great nation. JJJr

Explanation for IF I WERE A TERRORIST – See blog post for October 3, 2016

Foreword – See blog post for October 10, 2016

Chapter 1. Why I Wrote This Book – See blog post for October 10, 2016

Chapter 2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon – See blog post for October 11, 2016

__________

IF I WERE A TERRORIST

John Janovy, Jr. © 2016

Foreword

1. Why I Wrote This Book

2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon

3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters

4. Energy: The Achilles Heel

5. The Human Factor: The Individual vs. The Mob

6. Hero Worship: Stupidity in High Places

7. Fear: The Mother of Fundamentalism

8. Distractions

9. American Vulnerability

10. The Ultimate Fate of the United States of America

11. Solutions and Options

Appendix:

I. Evolutionary Principles Summarized

II. How to study evolution

III. Sources and Resources

3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters

Mathematical proof that Women are evil.

—LaMa; Leiden, Holland, June 14, 2005

As a result of a conversation with a colleague while walking across campus one day a few years ago, I ordered a copy of Thomas Friedman’s now-famous book The Earth is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005). For those of you who have still not read this particular best seller, I strongly recommend it as a big time eye-opener. Because I am a teacher and periodically get inquiries from students about important books, I have this reading list that is limited by the fact that it must fit on a single page, 0.75” margins all around, 11-point type. The books on this list are ones that have influenced me deeply and profoundly, and in order to make it on the list, a book has to have the power to do just that. I don’t claim to have the archetypical American mindset, but I do claim to have tried to step outside my own worldview in order to evaluate these books. Right now, the page is more or less complete, so that if something gets put on, something else must be taken off. The Earth is Flat made it on; David Campbell’s The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica (1992) came off to make room for Friedman. What was the major impetus for this move? Janet Jackson’s right breast. Trust me; the subject does have a legitimate connection to Friedman’s ideas about global economics and their impact on the potential demise of our Great American Experiment.

Maybe we should begin this discussion of woman as evil, particularly as exemplified by Janet Jackson, with a short review of the breast as a natural biological phenomenon. There are only three main points to this short digression: first, all 5,488 known species of mammals have them (breasts or equivalent), and any new species of mammals discovered in places like the Amazon forests also will have them. Many if not most of these species have more than two nipples. Second, a significant number of us have sucked on them as infants, so they’re not particularly strange objects. And third, they’re not very dangerous; to my knowledge, nobody has ever been killed or injured by a breast, although I suppose a fiction writer could envision a person getting suffocated between a couple of large ones. Finally, however, as an additional minor point, even when they’re covered, their existence is quite obvious and anyone with an imagination can, and probably often does, readily remove the cloth, at least in his or her mind.

Breasts also have been depicted in works of art for several thousand years, but art tends to be a liberal interest, and what we’re really interested in here is evil, terror, and sex, which are decidedly conservative interests, especially when somehow related or combined. Eventually I might have to address the issue of seduction, too, as a measure of one aspect of evil as personified by women throughout history, namely, their ability to distract great men from the noble businesses of politics, war, and an obsession with power. Incidentally, for any of you female readers who are still reading this chapter, personally I don’t believe women are very evil, and in fact tend to enjoy their company, especially when they exhibit certain characteristics that are commonly perceived as dangerous (e.g. being able or willing to carry on an intelligent conversation) but in fact have little or nothing to do with evil. More on this particular topic later. Nor do I believe that politics, war, and a search for power are particularly noble businesses.

So what about Janet Jackson’s breast, and what does her breast in particular have to do with terror and the impending demise of the American Experiment? The answer is very simple: extreme religion breeds an extreme view of sex, thus an extreme view of half the human species. And because every human over the age of twelve either knows or learns very quickly that females control the frequency and nature of consensual sex, women become most societies’ symbol of sex, and therefore extremely religious societies’ symbol of evil, or at least of thwarted desire or betrayal, perhaps in various combinations, both of which are major problems for males who need to focus their energies on politics, war, and the search for power.

Furthermore, in virtually all reasonably modern, free, and liberal societies, advertising is heavily sexual, with focus on women in situations or clothing that make them at least interesting, if not outright provocative (flip through your cable channels for a demo). Thus a society’s reaction to female skin is, in my opinion, a sort of barometer for that society’s evolution toward theocracy. Also, the most oppressive governments on Earth today are those in which women must cover themselves completely and live their lives according to rather draconian (at least by Western standards) rules. Your daily newspaper is an excellent source of the names of such places, as well as the theocratic movements within nations that maybe currently don’t view women as such a threat but may be moving in that direction fairly quickly.

My analysis of this general phenomenon—females perceived as dangerous to the established order and common good unless relegated to well-defined roles, with special reference to Janet Jackson—is based on the principle that punishment for violation of social standards should reflect the actual damage done to a society. Capital punishment for a first degree murder conviction, especially when the crime was particularly heinous, seems to be a perfect illustration of this principle at work, mainly because a-life-for-a-life is a rather obvious, easily understood, quid pro quo. Being shot to death for wearing tennis shorts, however, as happened in Baghdad on Thursday, May 25, 2006, to an Iraqi coach and two players, doesn’t seem to fit the quid pro quo punishment for a crime. In fact, most civilized societies would struggle rather mightily with the idea that tennis players wearing shorts were, on that basis alone, guilty even of a small misdemeanor, regardless of how ugly or hairy their legs might have been.

So I need to digress slightly and discuss crime and punishment. Fines and jail terms for corporate malfeasance are a little more difficult to evaluate, as social contracts, than the extremes just described. The crime and its punishment are not such an obvious fair trade because the damage to society as a result of such behavior on the part of business executives, while potentially extensive, is not always easy to assess. The Enron case seems to be somewhat of an exception because employees’ retirement savings loss can be counted, but the hidden cost—a nation’s mistrust of its corporation executives—is difficult to measure. The Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s fraud, bribery, corruption, and money laundering case resulted in jail time, but it’s not likely the American public will ever recover from the harm done to our national culture because this damage also is almost impossible to quantify.

But everyone knows—we just know—that we pay a massive price both globally and at home for our attitudes toward the abuse of power. We just don’t have good ways to describe that price. The Abramoff case, therefore, is one in which the punishment will never match the offense, mainly because we can’t assess the damage to us individually in terms of lost money or bodily injury. The nation, remember, cannot be sued for unspecified damages, loss of trust, or generally stupid actions. We need an individual victim, or a class of victims. So, let us return to the subject of Janet Jackson’s breast.

I challenge anyone in the world to find any serious harm, especially to national security, national interests, or to our moral foundations, that really happened to anyone anywhere as a result of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII wardrobe malfunction. Actually, there was a rather amazing amount of loss, namely, to Janet Jackson herself (the fine), and of time spent on this issue by network executives when they could have been using their talents in a more productive (for the nation) way, a loss made all the more amazing because it was only a breast and you can (or could) get the picture off the web any time. In fact, the picture you can (could) get off the web is of higher quality, and more lasting, than the one you got off the halftime show in 2004. You can also run the digital video clip over and over again if you so desire, something that was impossible during the halftime show.

Nevertheless, Jackson, her dance partner Justin Timberlake who actually pulled off part of her costume, CBS, MTV, the NFL, and show sponsor AOL all apologized profusely and the NFL returned $10 million that AOL had paid for advertising sponsorship. MTV also lost the right to ever again produce a halftime show for a Super Bowl. Within a few days after the incident, a Tennessee woman named Terri Carlin filed a class action suit against Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, seeking “maximum” punitive and compensatory damages for all Americans for having seen the breast. Think about it. Imagine Mike Wallace interviewing Terri Carlin on 60 Minutes, looking at her with a rather bemused expression, and saying “R-e-e-a-ally!?” We’ll come back to Terri Carlin when we get to the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

Eventually the lawsuit was dropped and “Janet Jackson” became one of the most highly selected search terms used by web surfers over the next few months. In retrospect, the Jackson breast did, however, distract viewers from Kid Rock’s American flag poncho which ended up on the ground, surely a major affront to US veterans. No veterans group filed a class action suit against Kid Rock. All in all, the Super Bowl XXXVIII show was a real mess. However, the Lycos 50 web site (active at the time) stated “Once again we are reminded of the power of a woman” and reports not only that “Janet Jackson” was the most common search term for 2004, but that she also beat out “Paris Hilton” and “Britney Spears” by a long shot. As an aside, after reading a piece by Osama bin Laden’s former consort (Harpers’ Magazine, September, 2006), I found myself wondering whether Mss. Jackson, Hilton, and Spears might be our most potent weapons in the war on terrorism, if we could just figure out how to use them effectively. I’m also guessing that instead of relying on people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney (Secretary of Defense and Vice President at the time) for advice on such weapons, a focus group made up of unemployed twenty-something males might provide the best strategy to maximize the effectiveness of this particular technology (beautiful women doing whatever the hell they want to do).

No deaths were reported from the “Janet Jackson” web search activity (nor has web-surfing for “Paris Hilton” and “Britney Spears” produced any reported deaths, serious injuries, or property damage), but a lot of money continued to change hands as a result of the seething government “outrage” over Ms. Jackson’s accident, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) levying fines all over the place. Howard Stern was dropped from several radio stations by Clear Channel Communications; Clear Channel also was fined for Bubba the Love Sponge; and, Viacom was fined $550,000 (20 stations at $27,500 each), which evidently was not enough because the US House of Representatives quickly passed legislation authorizing fines up to $3,000,000 a day, although for what, I’m not sure, unless it would be continued broadcasting of Bubba the Love Sponge, certainly a massive threat to the Great American Experiment in freedom and democracy, right up there with gay marriage and religious art made with elephant dung.

In retrospect, Janet’s indiscretion produced a lot of work for attorneys, so maybe it was actually a boost to the overall economy, but especially to boat and luxury car dealerships. Now we have wholesome halftime entertainment at Super Bowls, e.g., the Rolling Stones (2006), with no women on stage, at least none in danger of losing their shirts, and there aren’t any rather sensually inferential TV commercials for Cialis and Viagra, either. Not to take anything away from the Stones, one of the most successful entertainment ventures of all time, but by 2006 they were all getting a little long in the tooth. Watching them on international television reminds one that this particular group is much better experienced lying on your own couch with an iPod and your eyes closed than watched as Super Bowl halftime entertainment. On the couch you can listen to the words, study the inflections, absorb the instrumentation, all helped along with recording studio technology.

As a result of watching the Stones at Super Bowl XL I actually decided maybe I should go buy an album for historical reasons. Then I could listen to the full set of lyrics, including those deleted by the ABC censors as a result of perceived sexual innuendo. Such deletion altered my mental picture of “ABC censors.” I had envisioned a censor being about my age, maybe somewhat hard of hearing, dressed in a suit even as he sat in a small room with an old television set, and with an ear untrained to pick up sexual content in something rapidly screamed over and through blasting drums and guitars. Evidently I was wrong. When it comes to sexual content, perceived or otherwise, these people are sharp. The fact that they might also be young enough to actually hear and understand rock lyrics is a touch frightening. The possibility that the Stones might have had to submit lyrics in hard copy prior to the game is a little more plausible, although either case is a study in ridiculousness.

The important thing to remember in this discussion of woman as evil is that the Super Bowl is the quintessential American identity event. Regardless of whatever halftime shows and smarty commercials we see on Super Bowl Sunday, the sexiest things about any modern professional American football game are the cheerleaders, and quite frankly, they can be rather interesting. But remember, these beautiful, suggestively gyrating, scantily clad, un-named and usually working-class women—(unlike Janet Jackson)—are doing something women are supposed to do, namely, “support” our warriors on the field (symbolic, metaphorical, and often heroic, indeed near mythical).

Cheerleaders thus are playing a significant part in our late 20^th Century national morality play, repeated so often as to become ritual that sustains a defining myth, namely, that our men battle adversity and women are dragged along, often serving as spoils, and always accepting of, if not actively seeking, that role, even reminding everyone that this set of activities, struggles, and consequences is the “way things are supposed to be.” It may be an almost Hillary Clinton level liberal dream, but periodically I have this rebellious vision of some Dallas Cowboys cheerleader finding a public address system microphone and instead of giving us her jiggly-boobs-twitch-butt-hair-tossing-smiley-face act, standing straight up, staring directly into the press box and telling the crowd “that was the dumbest fucking play I’ve ever seen called on third and short inside the red zone. Just what in the hell was he thinking? Huh?” Now there’s a real dangerous lady. Terri Carlin take note.

So what does the Janet Jackson affair and the censoring of Rolling Stones lyrics have to do with terrorism and the demise of the Great American Experiment? If I were a terrorist, I would be working overtime to demonize women who have stepped outside their gender stereotypes, especially women without many clothes on, and I would couple this effort to “the family,” as in “women belong with their children helping to strengthen the family and family values.” “Family values,” shortened in much of our public discourse to simply “values,” is code for a strongly traditional, if not outright suppressed, role for women, combined with a decidedly anti-scientific fear of discoveries made in the last few decades about human nature in general and specific behaviors in particular.

Thus the so-called nuclear family becomes the scheme of things, morphing into the way things are if at all possible, and ultimately evolving, as it has in many other deeply religious societies, into a repressive culture that only looks semi-normal if you were born into it and know no other way to live. I have no quarrel with the nuclear family per se; I am exceedingly fortunate to have grown up in one and managed to help sustain one for fifty years. I am exceedingly uncomfortable, however, with the nuclear family as political framework and justification for national policy. Homosexuality is probably the best illustration of this phenomenon.

The alignment of “Christians” against homosexuality and in favor of marriage-defining legislation at all levels that would deny homosexual Americans fundamental rights enjoyed by proclaimed heterosexuals (no matter how promiscuously or abusively heterosexual) illustrates clearly the power of religious belief to override science and medicine. All scientific and medical evidence points to homosexuality as a combined genetic and developmental phenomenon that is quite undetectable until puberty and is totally uncorrelated with any particular behavior such as criminality. We have absolutely no evidence whatsoever that homosexuality is positively correlated with illegal drug use or sale, violence, theft, murder, failure to obey posted speed limits, running red lights, or corporate malfeasance. This last—corporate malfeasance—has done more to damage the United States of America in the past fifty years than the private intimate behavior of any two adults in the world, regardless of who they are or what they are doing in private.

Epidemiologically, homosexuality is distributed pretty much evenly—although at relatively low levels—across socio-economic, gender, and ethnic lines, and has been, insofar as we know, thus distributed throughout recorded history. Furthermore, recent studies on brain chemistry and reactions to human pheromones, published in the world’s leading—and heavily reviewed—scientific journals show clearly that sexual orientation is a biological phenomenon. Such evidence, combined with that derived from social research, also reveals that whatever is in your mind when you hear or read the word sex, regardless of who is participating, is but a tiny fraction of the overall human sexual experience. For example, see any of the readily available information on, and famous works by, Alfred Kinsey (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male [1948]; Sexual Behavior in the Human Female [with Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard, 1953]), Alex Comfort (The Joy of Sex [1972]), or William Masters and Virginia Johnson (Human Sexual Response [1966]). Or, simply start with Google or the References and Sources at the end of this book.

None of our knowledge about human sex is particularly what you’d call breaking news. A good measure of your own background and perspectives on human intimacy can easily be gained by consulting the 1972 runaway best seller, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, a highly heterosexual manual that has now gone through numerous editions and versions, including a CD and video game. Ask yourself: How much of this book could I have written from personal experience? Your answer is a clear guide to how much you know about human biology, and also probably a warning that anything written in the early 7^th Century BCE (nearly 3000 years ago) by the Prophet Isaiah, or any prophet for that matter, is just as suspect if it involves sex as it would be if it involved cardiac surgery or genetically modified strawberries. If I were a terrorist, I’d be putting Isaiah, and other equally non-enlightened Biblical passages, in front of the public as often as possible, demonizing and dehumanizing those who don’t fit, exactly, our perception of nuclear family parent sex—a sure prelude to violence against a class of citizens—with all my heart.

On the other hand, I would promote as “family” the whole cheerleader business, which incidentally is a multi-billion dollar industry, producing at least $10 million a year in uniform sales alone and supporting ancillary operations from credit cards to cell phones, camps, security companies, and international contests. I might even consider a bumper sticker that claims “My daughter is an honors student and a cheerleader!” If that advertisement survives enough rain storms, and the family van is not traded in on a big SUV, then there is a reasonable chance that in a few years that same mom will need a sign that says “My daughter is a divorced single parent with an entry-level job!” Don’t wait for this particular sticker to sell many copies. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that your divorced single parent former honor student daughter could in fact tell whether the Dallas Cowboys’ coach or quarterback called something really stupid on third down inside the red zone. Football is not so complicated that even a cheerleader, especially one who’s also an honors student, might learn something about it just from being so close to the players and the action.

Back to terrorism. While actively engaged as a cheerleaders’ cheerleader I also would be working overtime to deplore sex and violence in the media, however, with the focus entirely on sex. In contrast to sex, which carries a strong but sometimes subtle subtext of fun, attraction, and possibly even love, violence always carries a strong implication of the battle between good and evil; for example check out your next cop show on TV. I’m probably being unfair to my species to come down too hard on the battle between good and evil as a narrative line in fiction; indeed, a strong case could be made that such conflict is the narrative line in fiction, if not in non-fiction, and especially in the morality-tale, life-lesson-teaching, mythology common to virtually all cultures. But we’ve come a very long way from story-lessons told by Cro-Magnons in flickering firelight. Our current capacity for narration—think Internet, blogs, DreamWorks SKG, digital video, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360—is virtually unlimited, to the point that our stories are, to a large extent, our reality. When soap opera becomes a major vehicle for social change (The New Yorker, June 5, 2006), then we’ve arrived. The issues, therefore, are not the conflict between good vs. evil, but what is okay vs. not okay as a means of telling your story about the conflict and what is our definition of evil.

At the moment, in the American entertainment industry, crime, per se, no matter how grisly, no matter what the motivation, is allowed as subject matter. To whatever extent cable television is entertainment regardless of channel that claim could also be extended to the news side; watch Nancy Grace for an illustration. But the FCC’s reaction to Janet Jackson’s nipple, which incidentally was covered, looks to me like an open invitation to turn our nation into a Bible-thumping mob that willingly endorses censorship in the name of “family values,” feeds off its fear of female anatomy, and thus increasingly distances half its human resources from positions of power and respect.

In such a theocracy, anybody, anybody, who even suggests that women should be in high elective offices, making decisions that deeply affect us all as well as, perhaps, our descendants, would be labeled a “liberal,” such label being delivered with a particularly spiteful sneer and followed by some family values rhetoric. In other words, in a nation desperate for new and creative solutions to monumental problems, any terrorist worthy of the label should be working to disenfranchise half the human resources—the female members of our species—that could easily be applied to such problems. And to what should be the obvious delight of any potential terrorist we already have a built-in system for picturing women as either evil or victims. That system is called the “entertainment industry” and its main vehicle for delivering its message is cable television.

For example, over the past five years, one could find almost 24/7 cable television coverage of the spiraling decline of American morals and values: attractive female school teachers who have babies by 14-year old students, the abduction and presumed sexual assault of young women, and the murder of mothers and mothers-to-be by their sexually frustrated and/or affair-involved husbands. Furthermore, virtually all soap operas, much of the dramatic fare on cable TV, and a large fraction of the “Living” section of any newspaper, especially in the nation’s red state mid-section, involve narrative lines in which women are either evil, or in trouble, or are touting recipes and responding to family crisis situations in columns such as Ann Landers’ (now compiled by her nieces) or Amy Dickinson’s.

As somewhat flimsy evidence to support my picture of our national mindset regarding females, and admittedly editorializing in the grand tradition of early Third Millennium television talking heads, I offer two questions and plausible answers. The first question is: What has Hillary Clinton actually done to justify the kind of hatred and disdain she receives from the conservatives; i.e., what clear and present danger does she represent? I suggest that the answer is: nothing. The second question is: Would Anne Coulter get any attention for her writing and televised commentary if she were really overweight, not particularly attractive, and with splotchy skin? I suggest that the answer is: no.

So the ultimate goal of a good terrorist, of course, is stoning and burning at the stake for any woman accused of anything that might violate “family values” as defined by Focus on the Family. The catch-phrases are already a part of our lexicon: welfare cheat, Hollywood liberal, lesbian, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc. What remains to be accomplished is a complete disenfranchisement of women, especially the smart ones that might have a new and especially effective approach to the solution of global problems. If you read Forbes Magazine for a couple of months, however, you discover immediately that there are plenty of women who are doing just fine, thank you, in the business world, using brains and their abilities to manage human resources and vast sums of money. One potential saving grace for the United States is that the current sources of terrorists, namely, those small cultures-within-cultures have so little understanding of females that they’re incapable of using women as weapons except as suicide bombers. If the Bible has anything at all to say, it’s that women in general, and some in particular, are far more dangerous when they’re allowed to exploit their wiles than when they are blown to smithereens.

As an illustration of this point, consider the words of Fauzan al-Anshari, spokesman for the Indonesia Mujahedeen Council: “People might say that breasts are not pornography because they are used to seeing breasts. . . People might lose their sensitivity. We need the bill [draconian definitions of pornography] so that it will be more specific and thus it will be more repressive.” Al-Anshari said the bill would “protect children from the possibility of encountering women wearing erotic attire.” (Lincoln, Nebraska, Journal-Star, June 5, 2006)  Police called model Andhara Early in for questioning after she posed for Playboy, although she didn’t pose nude. The bill introduced into the Indonesian parliament would make it a punishable offense for wearing a miniskirt. Kissing in public could mean up to five years in prison and dancing erotically could mean seven years. Gadis Arivia, a professor of Western philosophy at the University of Indonesia, says “It will criminalize a lot of women in Indonesia.”

So my final advice to terrorists on the matter of women as natural disaster is to put away your guns, ammo, and bomb-building materials and start promoting “family values” as rapidly and extensively as you can, especially in Texas, where a large number of off-the-scale evangelicals tolerate unwed teenage pregnancy just to avoid treating their young women as responsible adults and providing them with birth control information and supplies. Thus we have a model for how to use female biology as a weapon against the United States: put all your money and efforts into anti-abortion and anti-birth control political activity, and combine that with very strong, conservative, “family values” rhetoric, abstinence-only human biology lessons is middle- and high schools, political reprisals against any male elected official who tolerates a Planned Parenthood facility in his district, and focus most of your efforts on the lower economic classes, especially on single female parents who should be constantly characterized as welfare cheats.

The gap between haves and have-nots in the United States is rapidly widening, and history, including the recent so-called “Arab Spring” history, clearly shows that anything you can do to increase the speed and extent of such disparity is definitely to your advantage. And anyone with even a smidgen of historical knowledge knows well that oppression of the relatively disadvantaged, a major plank in the American ultra-conservative parties’ platforms, as well as a major component of conservative political rhetoric, is the quickest and easiest way to foment rebellion, including a violent one. So go home and play soccer with your kids or friends and give your money to the Tea Party, Focus on the Family, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. Have fun with your children while they are still kids, and let the right-wing elements of American politics destroy the nation for you. They’re doing a better job of it anyway.