Unfit to Rule: After Me the Deluge

The phrase (attributed to Louis XVth and refering to a flood, storm, or political disorder) is usually interpreted to mean "If you think I was bad, wait until you see what is coming." Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, known more for bluster and buffoonery than for memorable contributions to society, has definitely been channeling his inner Louis XVth of late.

In the multiple populist uprisings currently ricocheting across the Middle East and North Africa, Libya's scenario has got to be the worst, and the most grotesque. With his universe of ineffable gaudiness now under siege and blood everywhere in the streets, Moammar Qadaffi has offered the Libyan people a deathlike embrace: "I am a warrior. I am not going to leave this land, and I will die here as a martyr."

This is a man who travels everywhere with a luxury tent (which he once pitched on the White House lawn), and whose bodyguards are all women. His normally constant companion and confidante, a Ukranian nurse, has recently fled his side for the safety of her home town, Kiev. In Qaddafi, according to Bobby Ghosh in Time magazine, "the Arab youth revolution faces a foe unafraid to push back brutally--and the watching world sees a ruler immune to reproach or reason." Today Qaddafi is a caged tiger trapped in his own palace, issuing orders to paid militias to shoot at random into protesting crowds, and making incoherent speeches about how much his people love him.

Years ago when I still lived in London, I was friends with the painter Francis Bacon, a man who championed colorful eccentricity and outrageousness. Asked once by an interviewer who, among the world's most famous people, he would choose to spend a night with if he could, Bacon sent shock waves across Britain when he unhesitatingly replied, "Muammar Qaddafi." Remembering this story now, I can only wonder, if Bacon were alive today, whether he would still give the same answer.

Each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, says Steve Coll (paraphrasing Tolstoy), but surely having a national leader whose long-term derangement has escalated up the ladder to delusional insanity beyond reclaim, must be a source of monstrous horror for the Libyan people. Commentators on the scene have described being reminded of the last mad days of Hitler, hiding out in his bunker. "Can't repeat the past!" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" History has an inbuilt preposterousness and its own self-reflexive arc.

Meanwhile pundits around the world are on edge, chewing over the question of whether or not the Arab world is ready for freedom, concerned that revolutions can result in worse tyrannies than the ones they overthrow. A scarcity of democratic institutions in that part of the world--especially in the case of Libya--and the potential for protracted violence, has elicited fear, skepticism, and exhilaration in equal measure, depending on where you look or who you are listening to. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who spent weeks live-blogging from Tahrir Square) tackled the issue head-on in his regular column on Sunday. "Are Arabs too politically immature to handle democracy?" he asked. And then, holding the victory banner high, he gave his answer:

"The common thread of this year's democracy movement from Tunisia to Iran, from Yemen to Libya, has been undaunted courage....I've been humbled by the lionhearted men and women I've seen--defying tear gas or bullets for freedom that we take for granted. How can we say that these people are unready for a democracy that they are prepared to die for?...The record is that after some missteps, countries usually pull through...I'm awed by the courage I see, and it's condescending and foolish to suggest that people dying for democracy aren't ready for it."

Kristof claims that he is feeling more hopeful about the world than at any time since 2001. And he credits "Obamaism"--i.e. its themes of nonviolence, youth-driven social media as engines of change and limiters of autocratic brutality, and the universality of rights as listed in his post-presidential speech in Cairo--for having planted fertile seeds that took root in what is happening now. In June 2009, Obama declared in Cairo: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from people; the freedom to live as you choose.”

I've got both fingers and toes crossed that Nik Kristof is right: that young people in the Middle East are going to succeed at overthrowing decades of oppressive autocracy. I'm on an email list that sends inspirational quotes by Andrew Cohen once a week, and this week's quote seems synchronistically relevant:

Breaking through Gravity:
"A human being trying to catalyze the emergence of a higher level of consciousness is like a rocket ship trying to break through the gravity of the Earth's atmosphere. The gravity that we are endeavoring to release ourselves from is the historical weight of our conditioning, both personal and cultural. If we can generate enough vertical momentum to propel us beyond the boundaries of who we have been, we will find ourselves in uncharted territory."

Let's all hope the rocket ship of revolution makes it through the gravity of oppression and fulfills its mission of liberation. A lot is hanging on the outcome.

Twittering Tunisia, Cloning Cairo

I don't think the world has ever seen anything quite like this: whole populations massing and simultaneously rising up against their governments. It seems like every day there's a new "Facebook" revolution somewhere, with chain-reactions that resemble nothing less than the flocking behavior in birds or the schooling behavior in fish. First Tunisia, then Egypt... Bahrain... Iran... Yemen... Sudan... Jordan... Morocco...and now Libya (where, it seems, the regime will do anything to stay in power, including shooting people in cold blood with heavy-caliber weapons). All of it happening at lightning speed--faster than human brains can comfortably process. Nobody can say for sure who is in charge of the program.

Who would have thought that revolutions could self-replicate like computer viruses, leaping from mind to mind, country to country, propagating out of control? Everything now is so hyped up, it's as if the whole world is in an altered state, while long-term systems suddenly diverge into unpredictable thrashing, or simply collapse because they can no longer support themselves.

Is this what the first stage of the "Singularity" looks like, I wonder? The Singularity, by definition, is that moment "when technological change becomes so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history."

I am quoting here from an article by Lev Grossman in the Feb. 21 issue of Time magazine, describing the potential transformation of our species into something no longer recognizable, which supposedly will happen when computers become much more intelligent than humans. (IBM supercomputer "Watson" already proved its superiority by winning the million-dollar prize on the nightly game-show quiz "Jeopardy" last week.) At some future point, according to Ray Kurzweil, a primary guru of the superhuman "intelligence explosion," organic intelligence will have merged with artificial intelligence in ways that usurp what was once the exclusive realm of human creativity. Kurzweil predicts the culmination of civilization as we know it by 2045, 35 years from now.

So how prepared are you to mutate? (I'm not.) The key idea here seems to reside in the fact that human brains are hardwired for linear progress, whereas technology progresses exponentially, which means that as computers increase in speed and power, they will take over their own development and become more autonomous. By contrast, humans will become ever more dependent, unable to function without their symbiotic connection to technology. Not a good equation, when you really think about it.

Eventually, says Kurzweil, we will do really delicious things like scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software. Things that were once fantasized as science fiction (like the possibility that computers may turn on society and annihilate us) will become absolutely real. "Nae. nae," pleaded the antropologists. "Yeah, yeah," shouted the blonde.

By 2045, Kurzweil estimates that the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of human intelligence that exists today--to the point where Singulatarians "cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything."

Meanwhile, in case you're worrying about those Facebook and Twitter revolutions convulsing the Middle East, wondering how it will all end, you might want to consider a stint at the three-year-old Singulatarian University, co-founded by Kurzweil and sponsored by NASA and Google, where interdisciplinary courses for graduate students and executives teach you to evaluate the power and speed of computers, and to track the pace of technological progress in the future.

To grasp the way technology affects our perception of reality and even how we think, Joseph Weizenbaum (in his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason") suggests how technologies from the past, like the map and the clock, became part of "the very stuff out of which man builds his world." Once adopted, he argues, technologies tend to become so indispensably integrated with, and mirrored by, neural structures that they can not be abandoned without fatally impairing the whole system, and plunging society into "great confusion and possibly utter chaos."

Blurring the boundary between brains and machines is an "irreversible commitment." Do you know what that means? Once the double doors screech open and cybernetic blurring renders human brains and computers inseparable, we will no longer know for sure who (or what) is doing the programming. By then, however, there will be no going back. The simply and straightforwardly human will have been lost in the confusion. I can only imagine that some people find the prospect of Kurzweil's 2045 a lot more palatable than I do. Luckily, I will be under the sod by then.

The Winged Victory of Cairo

Hosni Mubarak is gone. The citizens of Egypt rose up, rallied, and successfully ousted their dictator. And as at other times in history, it was the moral force of non-violence--not terrorism or mindless killing--that bent the arc of history.

In the end, how will it all turn out? Will the Egyptian people be able to continue what they started and find their way to a fledgling democracy? Will they be able to sustain and build, brick by brick, the necessary institutions for legitimate elections, legislatures, and courts? At this point, nobody knows, not even the Sphinx.

"Perhaps the transformation taking place isn't only for Egypt," writes columnist Kathleen Parker, "but for all mankind. Perhaps we are not doomed after all." I couldn't help but think how recent events in Egypt are a huge vote of confidence for the Desmond Tutu philosophy I struggled with way back in November. "...There is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...[and that] the perpetrators of injustice or oppression...will bite the dust," Tutu has stated this unequivocally, and he truly believes it, so it was thrilling to watch an ideational comment seemingly spring to life, right in front of our eyes.

For Parker, hope presented itself in the form of a single vignette: when unarmed protesters, reacting to Mubarak's refusal speech, raced to his palace and stood in front of the tanks. "It was a stark image of the prolonged battle between good and evil that humans apparently have been fated to fight," she writes. This time, evil did not win.

For me, the iconic moment of hope and victory over evil came later, when fleets of ordinary citizens could be seen, via TV cameras, cleaning up the debris in Tahrir Square after eighteen days of harrowing demonstrations. Men, women, and children were all hard at work sweeping the Square with brooms, hauling bulging black garbage bags, and lovingly repaving the bricks and stones that had been dug up earlier to use as weapons against the police. Most especially for me, the sight of some dozen people carrying aloft the carcass of a burned vehicle with their bare hands had to count as an exemplar of the triumphal human spirit worthy of the Louvre's "Winged Victory," Nike of Samothrace, redrawn for modern times.

My fellow blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who was too ill to man his blog, The Daily Dish, during the past month but is now back at his post, says he can't believe he missed out on a whole revolution. "What I will say," he writes, "is that, as I watched these miracles on television, I found my love of freedom and joy for the people of Egypt and Tunisia (as for the people of Iran) overwhelmed for a few days by my worries about such events spiraling out of control. But revolutions differ in their trajectories. Burke famously opposed the French one and backed the American one. What will make the difference is the character of the people, and the prudence of the statesmen and women who emerge in both countries. And others. In the end, we live in an era where hope is battling fear. Suddenly, hope is winning again. Let us not lose our skepticism. But let us not be intimidated by it either."

At the same time, we have the tide of history interpreted in gibberish by right-wing pundit, Ann Coulter. Like an ill-trained Labrador retriever, she yanks us headlong into traffic: "The way things are going, Obama may want to look into becoming the president of Egypt. Nobody would complain about him being a Muslim then," she said to cheers at the recent Republican CPAC meeting.

Good Lord, what would we do without these succulent Republicans mass-marketing insanity? They continue to illuminate a wider area than that which their maker ever intended. It is sad to think that while Egyptians attempt to establish a viable democracy, our own country is in the mind-boggling, self-destructive process of withdrawing vital government services, encouraging increased pollution, permitting its infrastructure to further decay, fomenting a class warfare not unlike Egypt's, and, bit by bit, letting a real democracy slip away.

Not All Revolutions Are Political

During the same weeks that have borne witness to chaos in Cairo--with the shocking and convulsive events in Tahrir Square aimed at ending the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak--in New York, the fashion industry was on a roll. I should immediately point out that not all revolutions are political--and having been turned on recently to the current revolution in fashion by a new young friend, Alex Harrington, I happened to notice in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, a front-page review on the industry's latest extravaganza: clothes made entirely of FOOD. Unhinging events might be happening in the Middle East that are draining stability right off the planet, but I am going to shock myself and everyone else by writing instead about waffle pants, octopus ski hats, and cabbage dresses.

The fact that we now live in a marketing wonderland of totally surreal objects called "clothes," is for me just another parable for life in "end times." That said, however, the kale collars and cherry necklaces featured in Barney's holiday catalogue are undoubtedly more fun to ponder than what is happening in the Middle East. Maybe it all started when MTV gave its Video Music Award to Lady Gaga, who shocked everyone by wearing a dress and shoes made from strips of flank steak. But if you want to check out this latest fashion phenomenon further, Google "Hunger Pains" on the Internet. It's the title of a photo shoot by Ted Sabarese, documenting the young avant-garde designers who make dresses from chocolate or fresh croissants, create astounding shoulder pads with loaves of challah--or, as in the photo here, invent an evening gown fabricated entirely of artichoke leaves (by Wesley Nault).

As for my new friend Alex, he is a young fashionista living in Brooklyn and working as a stylist. I met him recently at the home of his parents in Roanoke, when he was visiting them over the holidays. We bonded over the fact that I took serious note of his spirallng pants, which, it turns out, came from one of the most esoteric clothing boutiques in New York, Comme des Garcons. Alex now considers me the only person in this entire region who has ever heard of Comme des Garcons. So he then introduced me to an avant-garde English fashion magazine called I-D (as in, "what's your big I-Dea for the decade ahead?) in which his work has been featured. Quite honestly, the combination of creativity with revolutionary outrageousness just knocked me flat. I loved it.

I went through the magazine just now to pick out some examples of what I mean. The first thing you notice is that many of the models have deliberately blackened spaces between their teeth. In one case, a model is on crutches, wearing checkered bloomers and bra, with one leg encased in a plastic see-through cast. Two hydrangea blossoms cover her ears like earmuffs. Another wears an unbuttoned checkered shirt tucked in to a plaster cast (complete with scribbled get-well messages) that covers the rest of her torso. One model is stark naked except for thigh-high macho black boots and a hat. (You have to love it when a fashion magazine features models who don't wear clothes.) And one in which a strand of Mikimoto pearls spills out from a turquoise condom across two pages.

I wrote Alex to ask about the clothes in the shoot he was a part of, because the sweaters are thickly padded, and most of the models have a mysterious, stuffed object protruding from their backs. I wanted to know what on earth that was or was supposed to be (if anythng). Alex told me the styling had been "inspired by the lumps and bumps Comme collection from 1993, with a little Botero and Puritan thrown in for good measure." Everything was stuffed with pillow batting, he explained, to give it that kind of bloated proportion. A lot of stylists and fashion kids, he informs me, are doing more interesting/conceptual things and I-D caters to that audience.

Is it too far-fetched and quirky on my part to connect the interactions between reality and the imagination by making a link between a Middle Eastern political rally and a Western fashion show? Because that's what I regularly tend to do here: exercise my "smell all the flowers" attitude in unlikely ways and see what comes of it. Could there be a connection, do you suppose, between food shortages predicted to worsen in Egypt after years of long bread lines, and those croissant dresses and challah shoulder pads?

Because, if there is a connection, says Virgil, we are in dreadful trouble. But we're already in dreadful trouble, I say.

Beyond Polarities: Occupying the "Third Space"

Someone sent me a thank-you note recently which contained a quote by William Hazlitt that I quite loved: "The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up." Hazlitt never knew about blogging (obviously), but the quote captures the state of me and my brain cells these days. Sometimes it is really hard to get into writing-wet-suit gear and dive in.

One thing did wind me up this week. I finally got to see "The King's Speech." and went straight to heaven. You wouldn't think the relationship between a reluctant would-be king who stammers with his speech therapist could take you there but, trust me, it does. I used to think Ralph Fiennes had the best eyes in the business, but now, he has been toppled, just like some Middle East despot. The entire center of gravity in "The King's Speech" emanates from Colin Firth's eyes. They allow you to track the agony of a suffocating affliction in a way that will haunt you forever.

As for my synchronistic hit this past week, it arrived while reading "Don't Look Back," a profile in The New Yorker (by Ryan Lizza) of the 57-year-old, six-term California Republican congressman recently elected Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa. Lizza refers to Issa as "Obama's tormenter," since he is now the head of a committee which "may at any time conduct investigations of any matter." In the middle of the article there was a cartoon inserted of a homeless (or jobless) man sitting comfortably in a chair on the street, his legs crossed, and holding a saw in his hand. Nearby is a sign which says: "Tattoo Removal, $50." Synchronistically the perfect image, I thought to myself, for Republican overkill. Current Republicans have taken reductionist views to the point where if the government takes any positive action, it is considered bad. To be a Republican now means that the government only takes negative actions: cutting taxes, cutting services, cutting regulations, and the like.

Issa is the man who once described Obama as "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times," who believes climate change is a fraud, and who has publicly made known his intention to harass the Obama administration with endless subpoenas and investigations, as a way to distract and weaken the President before the 2012 election. Meanwhile House Republicans say they want to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year, even if it means throwing thousands of federal and state employees out of work. One Republican Study Committee has called for the elimination of the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help to people who can't afford a lawyer, the elimination of Amtrak, NPR, and NEA subsidies and community development grants, and slashing the federal work force by 15 percent. Darrell Issa intends to be the background music to all this, taunting the alligator and throwing up roadblocks, while Tea Party-backed candidates , in alphabetic order, have served notice that there will be no compromise in matters of federal debt reduction.

One account I read on Ben Smith's Politico blog states that it took less than three weeks for the new Republican Congressional leadership to claim credit for job growth after they had prevented tax increases for the rich. The landslide election, combined with the recent tax vote, they said, had sent a positive signal to businesses and provided the certainty they needed in order to expand.

Right after the midterm "shellacking" that gave Republicans control of the House, New Yorker columnist George Packer predicted that the level of extremism and partisanship would go way up. There would be little mercy and a great deal of rancor, he said, adding that we are facing one of the ugliest political periods in his lifetime.

And then the gun shots rang out in Tucson.

Suddenly, incentives rose for not riding the horses of invective full gallop. Unchecked venom had become a bomb with the fuse lit. I saw the faces of Congressmen on TV that day and the next, and every single one of them looked ashen. The issue of partisanship had taken on a whole new dimension: no one was exempt. Flaws in the democratic system had (once again) revealed themselves as potentially fatal. You could smell the fear in the air. Warfare politics had just produced this sickening testimonial. Yet, in some ways, it was a gift. The President got his unexpected chance, and he took it, and he ran with it.

Stepping into the breach, Barack Obama reverted to his indelible, core posture: occupying the "third space," where people can be civil, exchange ideas, and interweave competitive relationships without rancor. He soothed, he inspired, and in the aftermath, he exemplified the kinds of bridging that will be needed for all future governmental tasks. A lack of civility did not cause this tragedy, the President assured, but only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation. Instead of pointing fingers or assigning blame, he exhorted us to "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together."

I pull an unread book off the shelf, "Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenges of a New Cultural Maturity" by Charles M. Johnston. Tell me something relevant to what I am writing, I ask, opening the book at random and hoping for something useful to reveal itself. Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

"In chapters ahead," it says on p.75 where my hand falls, "we will examine a wide array of major future social challenges: issues of the environment, ethics, education, labor relations, health care, and more. In every case, we will find traditionally liberal and traditionally conservative viewpoints inadequate either for providing the needed solutions or for even fully framing what needs to be asked. Decisions in times ahead will require an increasing ability to think in terms of the whole living picture."
And from the previous page: "The back-and-forth warfare of partisan politics serves increasingly only to mire our good intentions in bureaucratic gridlock. Left opposed to right is simply not big enough to hold the new questions. More and more we should see leaders setting aside party ideologies to propose programs inconceivable from either side alone and inconceivable even through compromise."

So, if the Tucson tragedy can teach us anything, it will be this germinal truth--in today's world, using a saw to cut the mustard is not going to work. Identifying with one half of a polar opposite and disowning the other is not going to work. This doesn't necessarily mean, as Johnston points out and as our President so astutely understands, being friends with everyone. But it does mean entering into a creatively potent relationship with your adversary. And this is something Our Man in the White House knows how to do better than anybody. He knows how to live in Johnston's "third space." He knows this is the place that will offer a new start for putting together a new picture. Only time will tell whether the rest of us are willing to join him there.

Tragedy in Tucson: The Fatal Convergence of Politics and Madness

As a blogger who mostly stalks contrasts and synchronicities, this has been quite a week. The attempt by a lone gunman to assassinate a Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, while she was meeting with constituents in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, instantaneously unleashed predictable and bitter partisan posturing, each side menacing the other with accusations and blame. Was this terrible crime the handiwork of a single "bat-shit crazy" person, as Rush Limbaugh was quick to declare, or had it been torqued by right-wing, excessively violent, anti-government rhetoric? It wasn't long before both political parties were scrambling to control the narrative of what had happened by attributing blame to the other side.

The gunman, Jared Loughner, had already shown warning signs at Pima Community College--of paranoia, jumbled speech, scary outbursts--and believed he was a victim of government mind control, indicating possible psychotic illness. But then, paranoid speeches about government and senseless, inflammatory rhetoric punctuated by scary outbursts festoon the phrase-making of public figures like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck on a regular basis. You could say, as columnist Leonard Pitts did say, that these individuals mainstream a brand of political discourse that is "a national disgrace, hateful, poisonous and coarse," continuously stoking divisions through hatred, lies, and fear.

Palin, however, was quick to proclaim innocence, stating unequivocally that "acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own." and individuals are thus accountable for their own actions. Meanwhile, "irresponsible statements" from critics "incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn." Despite her efforts to exonerate herself, it was hard not to draw certain inferences and parallels. Palin's comments, meant to disassociate her brand from any remorse or blame, reeked anew of the the common Tea Party mantra: "Don't Tread on Me," as she ended up threatening her accusers of committing "blood libel."

Speaking, as far as I can tell, for many people, James Tarantino, a student at a local community college in Roanoke, wrote a commentary published in the Roanoke Times, in which he chastised the media for using the event to discredit Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and to make conservatives look bad. There is no proof, he argued, that current political rhetoric fueled the young man's shooting spree. And of course, he's right: no evidence of such a link has come to light.

But the crucial point here is not whether the killer was (or was not) a proven Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck groupie. The real point is that Giffords herself felt under threat from the "crosshairs" map posted on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, that targeted a list of 20 Democrats running for re-election--with the crosshairs of a gun sight superimposed over their districts--and exhortations elsewhere to her followers to take up arms and "reload," with the suggestion that "if ballots don't work, bullets will." At least three other of the 20 members of Congress on Palin's map had also, like Giffords, been hit with vandalism and death threats.

In March 2010, Giffords openly voiced her disquiet about being "targeted" in an interview on MSNBC: "...we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences of that action," she commented, as it has turned out, rather presciently. So, is Palin's targeting relevant to any discussion of the shootings? You betcha! given that Giffords considered the map a threat to her safety, and had expressed her fears more than once, both publicly and privately. It is hard to see as totally coincidental the fact that the same Congresswoman who had complained about the recurrent use of gun imagery was subsequently shot through the head while holding a small public rally.

Having gotten this far with my thoughts, I realized I was somehow missing the final clincher. Where, exactly, was I headed with this piece anyway? What was I really trying to say? I had not yet experienced the synchronistic buzz (that "Aha" moment) which usually makes the raison d'etre of what I am writing perfectly clear to me. In short, I still had no punch line pulling it all together.

Yesterday being Sunday, I routinely checked out Frank Rich's column in the New York Times. (A friend of mine insists that Rich and I seem to share an inside track when we analyze things, often coming from the same angle and drawing similar conclusions, completely independently.) This time she was undoubtedly right, because waiting there was the precise punch line I had been looking for. It dropped out of the sky on top of me from Rich's opening headline--the title of his article--which was:

"NO ONE LISTENED TO GABRIELLE GIFFORDS." Will they listen now, I wondered?

Schmuck of the Year

Inevitably, the arrival of a new year ushers in a cover story for the winner of Time magazine's "Person of the Year." This year it is Mark Zuckerberg, the nerdy lad who invented Facebook while he was still a student at Harvard. Now, at age 26, he has become a multi-billionaire presiding over an online empire that currently boasts some 550 million members, 70% of whom live outside the U.S. This means that one out of every dozen people on the planet is a Facebook user. Personal disclosure: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but I am not among them. (I couldn't even stay the course when seeing "The Social Network.")

By wiring together one twelfth of humanity into a single network--a social entity, according to Time, almost twice as large as the U.S. itself--Mark Zuckerberg has earned the distinction of having changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale; we have entered the Facebook age, and Zuckerberg is the one who brought us here. In his profile on Zuckerberg, Lev Grossman presents a likeable-enough guy, someone who doesn't publicly preen or reveal much about himself. He may be a billionaire, but he's not particularly into material things. He drives what Grossman calls "the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt," ie, a black Acura TSX, and he's already pledged to give away at least half of his wealth over the course of his lifetime to the campaign organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

"The thing that I really care about, Zuckerberg states, "is making the world more open and connected." Facebook encourages revealing your true self, not some anonymous, invented, or disguised virtual double. When you log on to Facebook, it is to meet up with your friends: a world of people voluntarily sharing things, staying in touch, having a voice in the world. All things considered, the enterprise is pretty benign in its intention. The idea of VOLUNTARY sharing is key.

Which is possibly why Time named Zuckerberg "Person of the Year" instead of Julian Assange, the orchestrator of WikiLeaks--even though Assange was the actual front winner in their online poll. Time describes Zuckerberg and Assange as two sides of the same coin, in that both of them express a desire for openness and transparency. As far as I am concerned, the similarities end there. Assange's transparency is totally involuntary, with the goal of incriminating and disempowering big institutions and governments. In his own words, Assange is fomenting "a world-wide movement of mass leaking"--dumping secret documents into the public domain on a scale without precedent--with the intention of bringing about (again in his own words) "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime."

Friends (which includes many of mine) and supporters of Julian Assange refer to him as "a breath of fresh air," someone who is performing an act of great public service. They like seeing government and corporations take a hit, and consider these transcriptions of tapes to be like sacred oracles, giving everyone access to the truth at last. Big exhale. The truth at last! Yeah, but... what they have failed to fathom, in my humble opinion, is that in reality Julian Assange is a malevolent wizard who, much like the sorcerer's apprentice, has built a machine that no one knows how to stop--and loosed it on the world. "If something happens to us," he has baldly declared, "the key parts will be released automatically." This year's breach of containment spilled nearly half a million documents that included classified military documents from Afghanistan and Iran, and a stream of diplomatic cables. The idea of a secure secret is over. Tech-savvy insurgents have unleashed an anonymous, ruthless monster that is seemingly resistant to attack. It could be the beginning of many missteps from which it turns out, we cannot recover.

Where Zuckerberg's world is filled with "potential friends," according to Time, Assange's is filled with "real and imagined enemies." Given that Assange's operative concept consists of anarchy, I personally applaud Time's decision to go with Zuckerberg instead. What is more, for his blood-curdling vein of hostility and nihilism, I relish the chance to designate Julian Assange as my personal "Schmuck of the Year."

This is NOT meant to be construed in any way as an implicit defense, or feigned ignorance, of the multiple war crimes and deceits perpetrated by the U.S. government around the globe over decades. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell made his trumped-up yellow-cake case for going to war in Iraq, I already knew, without WikiLeaks, that it was all lies. Because I happen to think that Julian Assange is a cyber-terrorist creep does not mean I am in support of U.S. foreign policy and its imperial wars. I am not. Nor do I mean to imply that Assange is the only deserving candidate out there for the title of Schmuck of the Year that I have bestowed on him. (Pace Michael Moore, who contributed to Assange's bail and defends him vigorously. I still love you.)