Politics: Greenwald Portends the Right

TORONTO, ONTARIO - On the busiest travel day of the year, pretty much every program that I listen to, short form or long form, news, talk, or entertainment, American, Canadian or British, brings up the topic of the new invasive security procedures at airports in the United States. If I hear one more comment using the word "junk" I think I will go crazier than those personally assaulted by the procedures.

The media boom surrounding this story is remarkable. At the beginning of the month, right after the election, Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald seemed like a lone voice on the topic. In a speech in Madison, Wisconsin (available on-line), Greenwald framed the civil liberties debate somewhat differently than I had heard before. He made the case that civil liberties were a well-defined thing that it doesn't take a lawyer to explain. On the other hand, terrorism is fundamentally an undefinable thing to the point that just about anyone can be considered a terrorist from some warped frame of mind, and pretty much any terrorist could be considered a patriot from a different warped perspective. Greenwald's point was that it is insane to give up a definable quantity, civil liberties, in order to prevent an undefinable quantity, terrorism.

While that expression of the idea resonated with me, it didn't attract much media attention--a friend who reads the on-line magazine had to point me to Greenwald's speech. Instead, what resonated with the media was the video taken of a libertarian's encounter with the Transportation Security Administration in San Diego, in which he ends up accusing them of sexually assaulting him. Everybody has seen that now, along with even more offensive tales of stripped seven year-olds, punctured urine bags, and removed prosthetic breasts.

All of the sudden, instead of the far-left like Greenwald talking about the topic, the same anger that fueled the fiscal-oriented TEA parties is leading the charge from the right. Dave Ross of CBS has even suggested that TEA now stands for "Touched Enough Already" instead of "Taxed Enough Already." The rational amongst us are asking why Israeli-style security has not been implemented, and the irrational are calling for protests to slow down security lines.

Sometimes, the far left and far right both go so far that they meet. In this case, though, the discontent is pretty much universal across the political spectrum. It's only a matter of time before these security measures are dropped, or the Obama administration can forget about ever being re-elected.

Culture: Why Not Market to Potential Terrorists?

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This blog has spent a rather substantial number of electrons contemplating the "emotional world" nature of culture in the United States, including the primacy of marketing in that culture. The country has favored VHS over Beta, extreme politicians over centrists, Windows over OS/2 or MacOS, and brand names over generics not because they were better products, but because their marketing was more aggressive or simply more effective.

Yet, when it comes to the task of selling the culture itself as something to be respected or at least left alone, instead of an object for destruction, marketing suddenly takes a back seat. Military action (and the threat thereof) has been the preferred mode for defending the country against mostly Islamist extremists who profess the desire to destroy the United States and have been identified by most analysts as the greatest threat to the country's future.

Marketing to Osama Bin Laden and committed members of Al Qaeda is likely fruitless, but at some level they're not the long-term problem. The real problems are young potential recruits for Al Qaeda and similar groups who need to choose whether to devote their lives to an organization dedicated to destruction, or live their lives as most of the rest of the world does, without a focus on violence. If nobody wants to give up their lives for Al Qaeda, then it won't have enough people to pose a long-term existential threat to the United States.

By choosing military action as the principal means of containing terrorist organizations, the United States has taken actions that have included substantial collateral damage, making the victims of that damage more amenable to becoming terrorists. The more known enemies have been eliminated, the more potential enemies have been created, in too many cases.

The best marketing minds in the world operate in the United States. They should be enlisted to come up with campaigns to present how Muslims are integrated into American society, how Islam and the US Constitution are aligned, and how the United States is not a threat to a young man in a place like Yemen or Afghanistan. It should go beyond rhetoric. There ought to be viral marketing campaigns, "astroturfing," "walking around money" and other more covert and subtle techniques used.

American marketing firms can sell tap water for $3 a bottle even if they can't quite sell ice to the Eskimos. It seems hard for me to believe that they cannot be a much stronger component of efforts to contain terrorism by convincing young people that it isn't in their interest.