Why Do Personal Electronic Devices Hate America?

This past week, there was a report that the National Trasportation Safety Board has taken the dramatic step of recommending that every U.S. state ban the use of personal electronic devices while driving. Here are the details:

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called Tuesday, Dec. 13, for a nationwide ban on nearly all use of personal electronic devices — including cellphones and smartphones — by drivers.

The board’s recommendation came in a review of a highway accident that occurred last year in Gray Summit, Mo., that killed two people and injured 38 others. A review determined the accident likely was caused by a distracted driver who sent several text messages in the moments before the pileup.

The NTSB’s recommended that all 50 states and the District of Columbia ban drivers’ “nonemergency use of portable electronic devices” except for uses that support the task of driving, such as GPS navigation. The board is also calling for the ban of drivers’ use of hands-free calling technology.

Just for the record, I am in total agreement with this idea, even though the corporate interests that profit from the manufacture and distribution of cell phones will no doubt lobby heavily against the effort citing its "curtailment" a people's "freedom" to risk their stupid lives while chattering on and on about nothing. Because it really is Jerry Seinfeld's America, and the rest of us are just living in it.

Nevertheless, this story might have been of only passing interest to me but for this passage:

“According to [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], more than 3,000 people lost their lives last year in distraction-related accidents", said NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman in a statement Tuesday. "It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving."

A press release announcing NTSB’s recommendations cited a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study of commercial drivers that found “a safety-critical event is 163 times more likely if a driver is texting, emailing or accessing the Internet.”

Wait an minute...where have I seen that "more than 3,000" figure before? Oh that's right, that's the number of Americans who were killed on 9/11, the event which in the subsequent decade has caused us to lose our collective sanity, shred the Constitution, spend trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars, kill thousands of our own soldiers and hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, engage in torture and rendition, open an offshore concentration camp and pretty much turn our backs on our long tradition of civil liberties just to make sure such a horrific event never happens again. Yet every year out on or highways and byways, just as many people are killed, and many thousands more are no doubt maimed, because of how collectively self-absorbed and distracted we are. All without a peep of protest.

There is a very simple reason why those of us who oppose the destruction of the personal liberties of American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism feel the way we do. The fanatical efforts to prevent the next potential major terrorist attack have caused far more damage to the fabric of our society than even another successful attack could ever cause.

There is a risk in life's every activity. Clearly, right now in America you are at far more risk of death and serious injury from being struck by a distracted driver than you are from an attack by a Muslim jihadist. But everyone makes a rational decision whenever they leave their house that the nevertheless infinitesimal risk that they will become a fatal auto accident victim is outweighed by their need to go to work, go to school, go grocery shopping, or whatever else they need to do to survive. It's a point that cannot be reemphasized often enough: by crippling our economy and enacting draconian curtailments of the freedom of our citizens, we are doing far more to destroy ourselves than Osama Bin Laden ever could have hoped to achieve.

Is this funny?

Is this New Yorker cover funny? How about this mock Time cover of Bush?

I was reading the new edition of the New Yorker on the M15 bus this morning, going down Second Avenue. It was the New Yorker with the depiction of Senator Obama in Muslim clothes and his wife as a terrorist--a source of much controversy this week. The article I was reading was the leader in which Hendrik Hertzberg defends Obama's flip flopping on policy issues. Hertzberg ends the article with a joke: Flip-flops are preferable to cement shoes, especially in the summertime (is that funny?). Across the isle from me on the bus was a man wearing a button that read: NY (HEART) OBAMA. A pro-Obama publication in a pro-Obama city is trying to defend the candidate from the ridiculous suggestion made by a Fox News reporter that his "fist bump" with his wife was some sort of terrorist symbol. (If this cover were a true New Yorker cartoon, the caption might ironically read: So Fox News was right all along.") In trying to defend Obama, the New Yorker published an "inappropriate" cover. But isn't that the essence of humor? It just so happens that the current issue of the New York Review of Books has an excellent article on the history of humor titled "Isn't It Funny?"

It turns out that Plato and Aristotle were into the chortle and feeling that one was superior to others. I think the cover might fit in this category: Those who know better than to believe that Obama is a "secret Muslim." Here is an excerpt:

Most ancient theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on, saw jokes as an expression of superiority, humor as "mockery and derision," and laughter, therefore, as "a slightly spiritualized snarl." This is fine, argues Holt, for a range of unpleasant jokes at the expense of the other races and religions, of the poor or otherwise unfortunate ("How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read a waffle iron"). It also works for the kind of temporary triumph we might feel if we saw "Bill Gates get hit in the face with a custard pie." It does not seem up to the task of explaining why we might laugh at puns, for example. You might conceivably argue that we are there enjoying a sense of superiority over language itself. "But now," as Holt observes, "the superiority theory has become elastic to the point of meaninglessness."

But more appropriate is the more accepted notion that humor derives its power from the inappropriateness of mixing symbols or meaning:

More popular among modern theorists is the "incongruity theory" of joking, which sees humor and laughter stemming from the inappropriate mixing of categories or registers of meaning ("Work is the curse of the drinking classes," as Oscar Wilde quipped). Or, as Kant put it more opaquely in the Critique of Judgment, a joke arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." Kant's own example of this was a story of an Indian who looked astonished when an Englishman opened a bottle of beer and the contents frothed out. When asked why he was so surprised, the Indian replied, "I'm not surprised at its getting out, but at how you ever managed to get it all in." The problem here is not that jokes trade on incongruity, for almost all of them in some way do. It is why incongruity should give us pleasure, and why some sorts of incongruity prompt laughter and others (such as Oedipus' parenthood) do not. Besides, as Holt goes on to ask, why should the reaction either to incongruity or to a feeling of superiority be "a bout of cackling and chest heaving"?

Reasonable people should know that Obama is a patriot and therefore see the humor in the cover. Right? Well, maybe not. I did a quick poll in my office: No one found the cover funny. I guess there is a fine line between inappropriate and offensive. If I have to ask if it is funny, it probably isn't.

TV Torture on the Rise and Copied in the Field

The number of scenes of torture on TV shows is significantly higher than it was five years ago and the characters who torture have changed. It used to be that only villains on television tortured. Today, "good guy" and heroic American characters torture—and this torture is depicted as necessary, effective and even patriotic.

These facts motivated Human Rights First to launch Primetime Torture, a website investigating pop culture depictions of interrogation. The project looks at shows such as 24, Lost, and Alias. In a video clip on the site, former U.S. Army Interrogator Tony Lagouranis says that official Pentagon rules of engagement encouraged interrogators to "be creative." In the absence of useful training and guidelines, pop culture became a source of such creativity.

It would be overwhelming to debate every day the ticking time bomb scenario and other questions of torture (as the Carnegie Council did in 2005 with an expert panel). But TV and film wield impressive rhetorical power in this debate through their wide reach, continuous broadcasting, and endless reruns and rentals. The danger is that these media are nonparticipatory and not self-reflective—you can't argue with them and they rarely analyze their own coverage and trends.

The "violence in the media induces violence in real life" hypothesis may never be definitively resolved, but art imitates life and vice versa. Our narratives and public discourse define us. Television didn't mature into the educational platform many envisioned, but it is always teaching and it is always on.