Truth, Justice and the American Way

The United States Government has a fetish for large political communities. Its actions in the world demonstrate a belief that big is beautiful; we cajole our friends and enemies alike to align in ever larger groupings, federations, unions, blocs.

This is perhaps a consequence of our attachment to the highly profitable status quo. Large and established groupings almost necessarily abandon radicalism, they are less costly to negotiate with or deter, and the U.S. still believes that it can maintain economic and military primacy in a world of great powers.

These explanations do not go far enough to explain our obsession however. The real reason has to do with the core functions of the state, functions that are at odds with the political philosophy that shapes American thought on so many issues.

We can talk abstractly about the state as a guarantor of rights, a purveyor of public goods, a benevolent and civilizing force in the world, but these noble goals ignore the reality that the primary tool of the state is violence or the threat thereof. The cognitive dissonance that results from these facts – particularly under an American government founded on the idea of natural rights and which selectively and consistently ignores them – can only be calmed by a “great cause,” a purpose more important than the hopelessly violent rat race of human existence.

Call this mythical purpose God, call it Manifest Destiny, call it Democracy or the American Way, it is psychologically necessary if the nation is to persist. The large state and its great cause reinforce one another, they are complementary and inseparable.

And yet, stripped of its regional coloring and ideological twists, the nationalist lie is essentially the belief that “we” are different from “them.” That is to say, it is right and just and good that certain freedoms are exercised by patriots but denied to non-believers.

A political community is a responsible (justice must be left aside for this discussion) user of coercive power only to the extent that respect for natural human rights is central to decision-making and that its institutions provide for transparency and accountability when abuse invariably takes place.

Large political communities like the United States become dangerous on all three accounts when they begin to believe their own propaganda. The grand lie is used to justify widespread use of force and coercion. The fiction of the homogeneous and unified nation is used to silence dissent. The distance between the people and their agents obscures responsibility.

Individual citizens of the United States are carefully insulated from the violence committed on their behalf. Our television anchor men drone on about the trials and tribulations of war, but the networks are practically forbidden from showing glimpses of its true horror. We see cannons firing into the air, we see bombs explode from a distance, we see tanks rolling through the street. All very impressive, all calculated induce the catatonia of trust and security.

What we do not see however is where the shells land, the scene after the smoke clears, the human faces crushed beneath the tracks of the M-1. We do not see the smoking piles of human meat, we do not smell blood spray in the air, we do not watch the howling families tearing at mangled corpses.

When we hear of “bad guys” being tortured, we are not permitted to watch as the masked and ghoulish men that WE EMPLOY attach car batteries to their screaming victims.

We cannot see, we do not kill, our hands our clean . . . or so our government tells us.

The truth is at your fingertips if you can bear to look.

The Legitimacy Problem

It is amazing to me that a country called into being by cries of “no taxation without representation” can be so oblivious to the international implications of its actions.

The central contradiction facing western democracies, particularly the United States with its global presence and neo-imperial pretensions, is the fact that the people who vote a particular government into office represent a tiny minority of the people directly impacted by the resulting policy change. Taxes do not need to be paid by personal check to the Internal Revenue Service to be very real.

A commitment to democracy, to true rule by the governed, would seem to make our situation untenable, but the west continues to simultaneously argue in favor of democracy and increase its coercive power over non-citizens.

The ability to sustain such a glaring logical inconsistency is almost impressive. It represents a feat of doublethink on par with the old favorites “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Launching wars against distant peoples not just with democratic approval but in the name of democracy itself is perhaps the height of such absurdity, but countless other examples present themselves if we begin to scrutinize the actions of our state.

Even policies that appear purely domestic, subsidies to farmers for instance, have measurable and dramatic effects on non-represented people across the globe. Quotas and restrictions on the flow of goods, people, and money are even more destructive. The provision of foreign aid through multilateral organizations and bilateral arrangements is overtly and obviously an effort to shape policy outcomes abroad, to govern by remote control, if you will.

These actions are usually justified with the following traditional realist argument: because certain states are able to exercise power in the world and because this exertion seems to be of material benefit the states and their citizens, it would be irresponsible not to act. It would be a serious violation of the public trust. These theorists truly believe that “might makes right.” Take the argument or leave it; their consistency at least is admirable.

The new and more insidious face of this old position is shaped by a belief that western democracies are so manifestly and completely correct in their method of government that whatever policy they choose to pursue is necessarily a just one. I will let my previous postings make the argument that this view is incorrect.

To justify a policy by the mechanism which produced it is to go against the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment and to cast aside the notion of a limited sphere of legitimate state action. The very core of our democracy is the idea that certain rights are fundamental and inherent in human beings regardless of their class or location.

The fact that people happen to reside outside the borders of the United States makes them no less human, no less deserving of protection, no less qualified to claim their rights. How then can we justify the exercise of coercive power over them?

Although it may be practically difficult to extend equal rights to the people of the world, we can certainly refrain from actions that have demonstrable negative consequences for them.

We cannot yet afford to forget what the liberal mission was about.

If we accept that our power confers license to act as we please, we do not just profane the name of democracy. We may also discover to our great misfortune that power used is power lost.

Truth and Politics

A professor of mine, an avowed anarchist and 1960’s activist, once said to me “politics is the battle over the definition of reality.” At the time, this struck me as a profound observation, but years and experience have changed my understanding of the matter.

As a description of the way some idealistic political agents view their careers, I think Professor Ward was quite right. As a description of fact, an epistemological theory if you will, I can think of few things more disturbing than the idea that the political process itself is a truth-producing enterprise. Collective bargaining, dispute resolution, mobilization of resources, these are problems which can be solved through politicking.

To suggest for even a moment that politicians are or should be engaged with defining reality strikes me as not only incorrect but terrifying in its implications. Political acts are by definition divorced from the truth; they are inherently deceitful.

To make themselves palatable to diverse audiences, politicians abuse our language and our psychological weaknesses to make us believe that we share their opinions; on the basis of this “popular consensus,” they claim a mandate to wield power.

Upon closer inspection, the apparent consensus dissolves immediately.

Political agents not only do but must conceal their true beliefs from the pubic at large to attain and maintain power. Even if their parties did not openly demand it of them, the subjective nature of most political questions renders true consensus technically impossible. National consensus is a convenient fiction that has propped up the governments of the world for generations.

Asserting true national unity is akin to claiming in philosophical debate that one has once and for all proved the triumph of free will over determinism. Both assertions are usually accompanied by appeals to some deity or other and arguments that loop back on themselves with dizzying speed.

Truth is the result of conflict only in the sense that it is arrived at when the exhausted combatants see the absurdity of their battle and lay down their arms. Far from troubling, I find voter apathy in the U.S. a heartening sign that most people have noticed just how petty and pointless the political discourse in this country has become.

Now if everybody would just stop paying their taxes as well we might get somewhere. . .

Fun with Crack

Hey Crackhead

While this rant is set in San Fran rather than DC, it is still hillarious.

Enjoy.

A Kinder, Gentler Fascism

http://bureaucrash.com/blog/could_it_be_true

The Next World War

With people like Newt Gingrich announcing the beginning of World War III, the current conflict in the Middle East deserves at least some comment.

Let us for a moment concede that World War III is real. None the less, the interpretation of the conflict that America’s Republicans advance is all backwards and upside down.

What we are seeing is not the “Islamo-Fascists” against the “Free World.” These terms themselves are devoid of content; the vocabulary is purely persuasive rather than descriptive.

Fascists evil. Terror bad. Islamists wrong.

Freedom good. War necessary. America great.

Ya, ya, we all get it already.

The forces arrayed against the United States Government certainly do reject the “U.S. model,” but this rejection has very little to do with rejecting the values that supposedly define us. For some time now, our politicians have paid lip service to the values of market capitalism and representative democracy while increasing the role of the state both at home and abroad in allocating resources and directing economic activity. The state does these things poorly, and as a result, most of the world has stayed poor.

U.S. policy both assumes and attempts to create stable and sovereign states with fixed borders and the capacity to control their territory. These states are viewed as the only legitimate intermediaries between the populations they represent, the only legitimate conduits for goods and services, the eyes, ears, and voices of the people. This view has been bypassed by reality. The world is increasingly integrated and interdependent despite the best efforts of nationalists everywhere to maintain the provincial system that they inherited.

The statist/nationalist bent that infects the U.S. policy community is incompatible with true freedom because it implies that there is a legitimate role for the state in restricting the flow of goods, people, and ideas. The state as we know it is conservative and repressive by definition. Its employs violence and coercion as it sees fit, and maintains itself as sovereign to the exclusion of other goals.

U.S. policy is schizophrenic because it claims to want both strong states and individual rights. The tension between these goals is evident in the history of our policy toward the developing world.

We have toppled stable sovereign states because they were not sufficiently free, yet for decades we refused to approve of freedom-augmenting reforms across the developing world because they might have upset the highly profitable status-quo.

This is a vulnerable and hypocritical position. The problem as I see it is not that the “U.S. model” is under siege. In fact, our foreign and domestic policy demand immediate reform. Rather, the problem is that the opposition so far has come from the wrong direction.

The most serious and dedicated critics of U.S. policy in the modern world believe that the problem with the U.S. model is not that it advocates structures that are inimical to human freedom. Rather, they criticize it on the grounds that it does not permit the sort of centralized command and control they deem necessary to overcome poverty and resist foreign influence. They see the strengthening of the nation state, the augmentation of its ability to coerce its citizens and mediate their interaction with the outside world, as the objective of their resistance to the U.S.

The hyper-nationalists have dominated the world stage in part because their tactics and rhetoric are hyper-dramatic (martial parades, fiery speeches, and shiny new government programs). Unfortunately for the vast majority of humankind, the humanists of the world have been asleep at the wheel, unwilling since the 1960’s to say anything truly radical and unable to frame their objections in terms that capture the imagination of the silent majority. Unless we humanists wake up and make ourselves heard, the nationalists may succeed in carving up the globe once again.

This all too seductive path is one of ignorance, war, and decline. The current international order is dysfunctional and will be reformed or replaced one way or another, but we must decide now if we will push forward with the integration of the world or fall back into the comfortable and deadly provincialism that dominated for some many millennia. This is the next World War, and we are losing it already.

Can You Say Gerrymandering Boys and Girls? There, I Knew That You Could.

In this era of shrill partisan bickering, the one issue that draws the politicians of this country together, the one task that is confronted with true bipartisan effort, with sustained and focused attention is not securing the nation’s borders, not Medicare reform, not even increasing Congressional salaries.

No, it is Congressional redistricting that brings our legislators to the bargaining table sober and calm, their wind bags safely at home, their discourse respectful and honest.

Why, you might ask, would something so mundane create this reaction when the threats of economic decline and catastrophic war do nothing to halt the ceaseless point-scoring and self aggrandizement?

The answer is quite simple. However much any individual Congressman might wish to dance on the ashes of the other party’s delegation, the imperative he faces is to preserve his own place in the legislature.

The only way to do this – short of changing one’s views to align with the interests of the district that one represents of course – is for Congressmen to exchange opposition strongholds in their own districts for pieces of territory in their neighbor’s districts that consistently vote against their representatives. This is a true win-win situation for the Congressmen involved.

Even more than the complex problem of campaign finance reform, gerrymandering is responsible for the fact that it is almost impossible to oust incumbent legislators or to win on a third-party ticket in this country.

As one unusually candid and responsible congressman friend commented when asked if he though he would win reelection, “Well, unless they find me in bed with a live boy or a dead girl...”

The terrifying fact is, gross incompetence and bold disregard for the most pressing issues facing the nation are no longer enough to merit removal from state’s highest assembly. Our lawmakers lead long and illustrious careers based on character traits that would have a 7-11 clerk pounding the pavement in a week.

The vast majority of our politicians are not legal scholars, not skilled statesmen, not even wise observers of human nature. Most lack even the most basic understanding of economics, and habitually avoid philosophical debates about the proper role of the state they command. The dirty secret of Congress is that, after all the schmoozing, pandering, kissing babies, and being taken to lunch, representatives haven’t the time to even read legislation before voting on it (much less make solemn deliberations about its merits).

They have become professional election winners who are qualified to do little else.

Allow me to propose a very simple constitutional amendment that will never ever be put into law but which would solve our incumbency problem overnight. Rather than allowing congressmen to carve up the country however they like, the law would state that all congressional districts must approximate contiguous squares with the precise boundaries determined only by state boundaries, major roads, bodies of water, and topographical contours.

These districts would be sufficiently diverse to put the traditional political class out of business. This would allow the return of true representatives, citizens who take a few years from their real careers to serve their fellow men.

This was the idea of a house of representatives in the first place, but without proper control and oversight, the temptation was too strong for our Congressmen to resist.

Mysticism and "The Light at the Center"

As reported by Fox News and others last week, a recent study conducted at Johns Hopkins University found that psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in some types of mushrooms, induces profound mystical experiences in certain takers. I for one am happy that the American academy has made this “discovery” even though people have known it for thousands of years. This recognition by the scientific community - and the federal funding that made it possible - are a huge departure from the beliefs and practices of the last 30 years. The “War on Drugs” made the therapeutic use of these drugs and detailed research about their effects impossible, and that's a damn shame.

Bharati’s book, while at times dry and hyper-academic, is the most lucid analysis of mysticism and altered consciousness I have come across; it represents the pinnacle of such research before it was pushed out of the mainstream. Even as a professor in the hippy era, he took considerable professional risk by tackling such topics. He takes even more risk by freely admitting his experimentation with LSD and his initiation into a Tantric cult. This sort of participant observation is frowned upon in the academy; anthropologists are expected to remain at a safe distance from the people they study, to handle with rubber gloves the traditions of other civilizations.

However, his book is as much a critique of the typical academic’s unwillingness to dive completely into his subject as it is a critique of the modern view of mysticism.

Bharati challenges the idea that the mystical experience is ennobling, that it confers upon us special powers or skills, that it makes us into different people. Bharati calls bullshit on the swamis and mystics who, for selfish or political reasons, try to claim privilege on the basis of their experiences.

He does however assert and explain the existence of a true mystical state, the “zero-experience” as he calls it. This experience consists of temporary ego death, a profound feeling of identification with the fundamental ground of being. In the wake of these episodes, people report them in vocabularies conditioned by their cultures and religious beliefs, but he argues that despite these rhetorical differences, the raw content of the experience is much the same across time and place. Large numbers of people everywhere and for all of recorded history have had the zero experience. Some have sought its recurrence, made careers of discussing it, spent their lives proselytizing. Most have remained silent.

True Conspiracy: You Could Go To Jail For Googling Certain Keywords. It Almost Happened Before

Another blog points out more ways to be watched by the government. Sweet.

My Favorite Obscure Books - Installment 1

I will now quote from The Light at the Center by Agehananda Bharati:

"For our purpose, one theme in [R.D] Laing's work is central: that the true schizophrenic, or more widely, the person labeled mentally ill by any clinical terminology, can make a recovery in clinical terms not by the various professional therapies, but by dismantling his whole person and recreating it from scratch. We have a notable parallel to this in the successful LSD experience. A good trip may not be a strong trip; but trips that are good and strong do just this to the perceptive taker - he casts off all he is, his cognitive, affective, orectic "personality;" his persona, his "mask" or masks are shed one by one. If he sustains the process without capitulating to the alternative, horror and pain, he re-assembles the bits and pieces that make up the total person in the normal state to which he returns - but the bits and pieces have been washed, rinsed, and dried as it were. The world looks different, for a blessed little while at least - not because it its different, which it isn't, but because the instruments by which he perceives it have been cleaned and oiled" (196).

"One of the main objections to Leary's and Alpert's experiments with psilocybin was that they refused to program the participants on medically acceptable lines, in a laboratory setting. Now Leary and Alpert insisted - not yet as prophets and cult leaders, but as scholars - that the laboratory setting was totally dysfunctional, and that it led to "bad trips" almost invariably; that a warm, loving, supportive atmosphere is essential in order to obtain the maximum benefit of the psychosomatic substance. But it was quite clear that such terms as "warm," "supportive," and particularly "loving" were outside the laboratory and research rules – and it was obviously Leary’s and Alpert’s initiatory action that catapulted them into disaster, and into the discontinuation of the Psilocybin Project. Leary and Alpert wrote “the goal of the research sessions run by the Harvard IFIF group was not to produce and study frightening disturbances of consciousness, which was the goal of most psychiatric investigation of model psychoses, but to produce ecstatic experience, to expand consciousness, to provide the subject with the most memorable, revelatory, life-changing experience of his life . . . from the beginning of our research, our attention was directed to the engineering of ecstasy, the preparation for, the setting for, the achievement of ecstasy” (210).

Violent Crime: Not Just for Brown People Anymore

Just last week, Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a "crime emergency" in my home town, our lovely nation's capitol. Fortunately for me and my irrational desire to be on the streets late at night, this city is no longer the murder capitol of the country, but it is still filled to the brim with crackheads and gangsters. It is right and proper that the city government takes 14 murders in as many days very seriously, but I have some nagging concerns about the reaction.

First, the primary response to the crime wave was to lower the curfew for teenagers to 10 pm. This is completely ridiculous. You can't just confine a large sector of the population to house arrest after dark because of a few murders. Human beings under the age of 18 are still human beings with all the rights pertaining thereto. They get stepped on because they have no electoral power, no public voice to defend themselves. These measures mean that people who want nothing more than to socialize and enjoy the summer nights (the only time when any sane person would be outdoors) will be harassed and fined by DC's finest.

Second, the city government enacting these policies is the same one that just this year violently opposed Congressional discussion of repealing DC's gun ban. Firearms are illegal in this city and yet many of the recent murders were committed with them. What does this tell us? That criminals have access to guns through the same black market connections that buy their stolen wares and provide them with drugs. Us law abiding (more or less) citizens are left unarmed, and the criminals know it. Rather than paying for more man-hours and police cruisers, we could allow the city's citizens to defend themselves. I always carry a blade when I go out, but as a wise man once said, "Never bring an knife to a gunfight." I dread the day some junkie decides he likes the look of my watch or my woman and I am powerless to stop him.

Finally, the only reason that these murders are big news is that some of the more brazen slayings occurred outside the poor and rundown black and Hispanic neighborhoods. They took place in the popular bar districts of Adams Morgan and Georgetown, places that are important for tourism, places that are visible, places that are filled with young, rich, white people. As a young rich white person myself, I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about the protection, but I can't help but feel that if all these killings had been in Anacostia where they usually are, there would be no talk of an emergency, just a busy couple of weeks for the cleanup crews.

This city is so messed up, I don’t even know where to begin fixing it.

Electronic Surveilance and You: A Police State of Our Own

Major U.S. news outlets recently broke a number of stories about covert electronic spying on U.S. citizens, and I, like many Americans, am concerned that the government will soon discover all of the illegal things I do and put me in jail . . . No but seriously, I am not happy about these programs, and I fear that, while benign for the moment, they will be used to repress home grown political organization and dissent at some time in the future.

It is clear that the NSA has been monitoring calls between Americans and foreigners with Muslim names. It is not clear how much data mining from domestic sources has been taking place. If you have a computer, use email, or carry a cell phone, you are at risk of surveillance. There is nothing you can do to stop it, and no way to know if you are being watched at any given moment.

Due to widely documented security vulnerabilities in cellular encryption and cooperation with phone and internet service providers, it is possible and in fact quite likely that the NSA monitors millions of phone calls and emails a day without warrants or disclosure.

Although these surveillance programs are highly classified, we do know a bit about how the most basic ones work. Computers known as "dictionaries" are first programmed with a list of words, phrases, voice signatures, email addresses, IP addresses, or telephone numbers. Using speech or pattern recognition software, these machines can scan huge streams of data, marking and recording the correspondence that matches the programmed parameters. The flagged conversations are then forwarded to a human operator who must determine if the conversation constitutes actionable intelligence.

It is also possible for people to determine where a cell phone (and therefore its owner) is at any time, regardless of whether a call is being placed.

Imagine a world where government agents are tracking your online activity, your correspondence, your friends (through social networks and calling behavior) and your whereabouts. Imagine the innocent little lens and microphone on your cell recording and transmitting real time audio and video. Imagine that your worst enemies can find you any time they please.

Are you worried yet?

Join me in opposing the extension and legalization of electronic surveillance before they have us by the short hair.

Cuba Part 2: Life in a Police State

First things first: the U.S. Department of State classifies Cuba as a totalitarian police state and has no formal diplomatic relations with the government of Fidel Castro. However, the U.S. does still operate an “Interest Section” which is housed in the same building as the old embassy (we “gave” it to the Swiss to avoid being thrown out). The building is surrounded by Cuban troops 24 hours a day, and anybody seen loitering around, walking too close, or gazing into the building is promptly shuffled off by armed men. Nobody gets in or out without showing a passport and having his information recorded and forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior.

The Ministry has its own police force, and when our group arrived on the island, we were introduced to our case officer. We were also issued Cuban identification papers which had to be presented for even the most basic transactions (changing currency, using the library, catching a cab). Our little brown booklets marked us as foreigners while Cubans held a variety of colors to indicate party status and rank within the government.

Our case officer explained that he was responsible for knowing more or less what we were doing and where to find us, and he also told us about the rules of our stay. We were to notify him through our program director any time we left Havana, we were to leave the country as soon as classes were over, and we weren’t allowed to have Cubans anywhere near our living spaces or in our building after 10pm. During the day, they could enter our common area, but they had to present ID and be registered. While these rules were ostensibly for our protection, they allowed the government to keep tabs on us and all the people we associated with.

Out and about in the city, there were uniformed police in kiosks at all major intersections and on almost every corner downtown. I can only speculate as to the presence of plain-clothes officers, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Trucks filled with soldiers rolled through the streets frequently, but they represented just a tiny fraction of the island’s defense force. Cuba’s government requires 2 years compulsory military service from all able bodied 18 year olds, and so practically everyone has been trained and prepared to fight in the event of an invasion. Tunnels, fortifications, and weapons caches litter the city, and drills are held periodically so that everyone knows where to report for duty.

Government offices and facilities (the University where I studied for example) have their own command posts, and employees and students on site when the alarms sound are expected to defend these areas.

In the neighborhoods and apartment complexes, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution handle the mobilization.

The CDR has houses on each block across the country, and they are staffed by an elected neighborhood delegate. They organize social and service events in each community, and these events, while "voluntary," are best attended to avoid being singled out for special surveillance or punishment.

In the early days of the revolution, the CDR network was used extensively to enforce ideological conformity and identify potential counterrevolutionaries. I must say that the CDRs I visited seemed quite benign (my local delegate was a friendly and drunken old man), but it is difficult to tell from the outside how active they still are in reporting dissent and policing the population.

With the state presence so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine anything slipping through the cracks, but the illegal migrants, squatters, unregistered taxi drivers, prostitutes, drug dealers, and black marketeers are living testaments to the fact that it is impossible for a government to be everywhere and control everything. To put it bluntly, human beings are smart enough to know what they can get away with under any system.

In Cuba, the enforcement of the government’s complex and absurd laws is quite sporadic. If you are unlucky enough to be stopped at one of the main check points surrounding Havana, if you are careless enough to draw official attention to your business, if you do not tow the party line in conversations with strangers, bad things may well befall you.

However, so many people are employed by the government that it is impossible for an impending crackdown to be kept secret. When something serious is about to happen, the news is spread quickly by word of mouth, and people take action to avoid detection.

I remember one fine day it was impossible to catch a taxi. That’s because the government had decided to start randomly checking licenses. Most of the illegal drivers had gotten wind of it, and they wisely decided to take the day off. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get the memo, and so I ended up having to pay some jerk five times the normal rate for a lift home.

It may not be easy, but people survive, people work around the law to live their lives. The vast majority of casual dissidents, law breakers, and petit capitalists are never caught.

This is the reality of every state.

When governments attempt to change the fundamental behavior of their citizens, they are ignored by most, obeyed by some, and supported by those whose natural behavior happens to align with official policy. The state can play its whack-a-mole enforcement game indefinitely, but it cannot change us.

At the very worst of times, we can be cajoled into apparent acquiescence, displays of allegiance, acts of conformity, but the state can never silence the rebellion that takes place inside our minds when our rights our violated.

In the end, I was struck by the similarities more than the differences when I went to Cuba. Family, work, romance, and rest are at the core of life – and oppression and resistance define every society, even our own star spangled paradise.

Fatherland or Death: A Cuba without Castro

As one of the few American students who managed, despite pain-in-the-ass Treasury Department regulations, to spend a semester studying in Cuba, I put my time to good use asking everybody I met, "What on earth is going to happen when Fidel dies?” During my four months at the University of Havana, I assaulted students, professors, taxi drivers, girls in clubs, and strangers on the street.

The answers I received ranged from “I would rather not stick around to find out,” to the more common “No es fácil” (It ain’t easy) - typically followed by a forlorn headshake and a rambling discourse on the various factions within the National Assembly or some similarly depressing theme.

One professor said to me during a conversation after class: “How can you as a foreigner understand Cuba when we don’t understand it ourselves?” She went on, “Why do hundreds of thousands turn out for marches they don’t care about? Why do we all speak one way about the government in our homes and another way in our offices and on the street? There is no hope for you.”

And yet I keep trying.

Don’t be fooled by people who tell you that they know exactly what will happen when the Máximo Líder ends his career as the world’s longest reigning head of state. One thing is certain however: even Castro cannot suspend biology.

The problem for pundits is that, by design, the Cuban system renders impossible the political forecasting that we practice in the United States. Public opinion polls are illegal and rank-and-file Cubans are prohibited from owning all practical methods of information dissemination.

These and other methods of social control certainly annoy the more politically aware Cubans I encountered, but not everyone is as “counterrevolutionary” as some Americans seem to believe. I heard dozens of Cubans exclaim, “You don’t have to like Fidel, but you can’t help but respect him.” To many, he is still a hero, a liberator, a larger-than-life, imperialist-dog-stomping badass.

He is admired as much as he is feared, and this is why he can hold on to power.

Fidel holds back the various fights that could flare up over differences of ideology or class on the island. When he is gone, there is no telling what factions will emerge. In the end, there will be no choice but some sort of market opening, however controlled and limited it might be. The official economy is badly broken, and the black market has stepped in to fill the significant gap between monthly rations and the necessities of life.

As it stands, the extent of the informal economy in Havana is astounding considering the vigorous official discouragement. Professionals and educated people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the inverted wage structure that dramatically favors black marketeers, the tourism sector, and farm workers while leaving doctors and engineers to subsist on the scraps.

One important point for Americans to consider when trying to imagine a post-Castro Cuba is the perception on the part of many Cubans that free universal health care and education, the core promises of Castro’s government, are every bit as important as the freedoms of speech and press enjoyed by residents of the United States. Any party that attacks these "rights" will be wildly unpopular in Cuba, at least in the immediate aftermath of Castro’s departure.

This statist bias is reinforced by the powerful nationalism that pervades the island. Cubans are deeply committed to self-determination regardless of their feelings about the current activities of their government. Cubans of all political stripes view the U.S. embargo as nothing short of economic war whose implied goal is re-colonization, not liberation.

Remember, we did attempt to invade the island during the lifetime of many Cubans. Americans should not believe that the U.S. Government will exert the sort of influence seen in post-Soviet Eastern Europe as Cuba undergoes its transition from Castro.

In fact, a high-profile U.S. government presence during the transition in Cuba could endanger reforms because conservative elements would be able to paint progressive Cubans as U.S. stooges, just as they have since 1959. If we forget about this history, the knee-jerk rejection of U.S. backed policies may doom real reform.

Cubans have no desire to go back to the 1950’s when Americans interests ruled Cuba and the streets of Havana were lined with casinos and hookers instead of clinics and bureaucrats.

Finally a use for treason

Article III Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution limits the definition of treason to those acts that "consist only in levying war against [the United States ] or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid or Comfort." However, in the modern world of well-funded and powerful non-state actors, the face of war has changed. As we have learned at such great cost the last few years, our enemies need not be foreign governments.

They are just as likely to be transnational or domestic agents who seek to pervert this nation's democratic processes for their own ends. In the most basic sense of the word, these agents wage war on our country, though their weapons and tactics are more refined than the enemies of old. Islamist terrorism is the most stunning and public form of this new war, but it is conducted on many fronts and without regard for race or creed.

In light of this new reality, the Abramoff scandal – a matter that to our collective shame has been fading from public attention – bears implications that go far beyond the bribe taking and corruption of a few dozen Congressmen. The scandal is another piece of evidence demonstrating that our political system is penetrable by moneyed and motivated interests that would usurp the formidable powers of our state.

The powers to tax, confiscate, imprison, appropriate and put to death are so dangerous in their misapplication that our forefathers erected an intricate institutional structure intended to tightly constrain the behavior of government officials and safeguard against abuse.

And yet, for all the "checks and balances," all the oversight, all the required disclosures, the ultimate and only safeguard against corruption is a solemn oath taken before God and country. It is the sacred honor of our legislators and leaders which defends our state from its enemies.

When this honor is compromised, when the oath of office is broken for the benefit of some special interest or other, an official has committed the most heinous crime our country recognizes. It is the only offense thought important enough for inclusion in our founding document, and it is punishable by imprisonment and even death.

The acts of these officials damage our society more than cold-blooded murder, a crime for which we execute hundreds each year. These official traitors hide behind their offices while causing and permitting the machinery of the state to grind countless innocents to dust. The violation of the public trust is more perverse than any rape because, far from a momentary act of weakness, it is a continued, conscious, and calculating disregard for the rights of all citizens.

People, where is your outrage? Are your legislators above the laws they create for you?

When these criminal parasites feed on the guts of a democracy that millions have died to protect, will you leave them with slaps on the wrist?

The power that state officials exercise requires them to be spotless in their honor, steadfast in their commitment to good government. They must be held to a higher standard.

This means that they must be tried and convicted for the crimes they commit. When they violate their oaths, when they violate our trust, when they are guilty of treason, they must be publicly and swiftly punished.

Proponents of the death penalty speak of its deterrent effect for violent crime, a claim that is difficult to verify and complicated by the fact that the truly brutal criminal seems to bypass the moral and rational faculties required to respond to such disincentives.

The Congressman or bureaucrat has a much more refined sense of self-preservation and, one would hope, a more rational mind than the violent criminal. For these leaders, the knowledge that corruption is equivalent with treason and that they will be executed if they are caught might actually accomplish the deterrent function that is intended by the death penalty.

Perhaps this measure appears extreme, but the honor system has not been working particularly well of late (in case you hadn't noticed).

This much is certain: we must put our own house in order before we can continue telling other states how to manage their affairs. These politicians of ours leave us with no choice.