Calling Jack Bauer

There’s a lot of interesting terminology being thrown around about the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect who’s in the hospital. First, there’s “terrorist.” I personally don’t have a problem with that one. But then we have heard calls for this guy to be treated as an “enemy combatant,” which would open the door to long detention without trial and certain interrogation techniques.

That one hasn’t gone anywhere, however, and they gave Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a Miranda warning. But now they say that the bombs these two brothers allegedly used were “weapons of mass destruction.” Really?

The crude bombs, packed with nails and ball bearings, were designed to cause maximum injury, and they did. But are they really WMD? Like chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, whose mythical existence in Iraq caused us to go to war? I wonder. But WMD use brings the death penalty.

The surviving brother, like his deceased sibling, is an American citizen. But he’s also of foreign extraction, and he’s said to be a follower of Islam. Were he a white Christian, I’m wondering if we would be discussing him in quite the same terms.

So when they get around to questioning him, does he have information that would tie him to, say, Al Qaeda training abroad? I would guess most of us profess to be opposed to torture – but then we consider all those bombing victims without an arm or a leg today. And then, we think, well, maybe in this case….

Dick Cheney must be smiling inside right now.

Crime and Punishment: The New Normal

It took us more than 10 years to catch up to the top perpetrators of 9/11. It took less than a week to catch up to the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing. Do we need any more proof that a new day has arrived?

It’s largely about cameras. To paraphrase Allen Funt, we should be smiling all the time. Chances are we’re in somebody’s viewfinder or on a screen. Not a pleasant prospect for many of us who prize our privacy – but then there are times when we need those cameras. The FBI reviewed security camera recordings of two suspicious characters in the bombing. They put out press releases with the best shots, and within hours, they had crystal-clear pictures of the suspects, supplied by the public, because everybody has a camera now, either in their smartphones or as compact standalone equipment. Looks like the days of those police artist sketches are numbered. Funny how the suspects in all those sketches seemed to look exactly alike anyway.

The two suspects in the Boston case knew in short order they had nowhere to hide. Their pictures were everywhere. A convenience market security camera caught them in the process of a carjacking. Confrontations with law enforcement followed; one suspect was killed, the other one was captured alive, hiding in a boat in the backyard of a home. The public were on high alert. In the case of Suspect Two, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a homeowner noticed blood coming from the boat. A police helicopter with a thermal imaging camera determined that Mr. White Hat was in there, and that he was alive, though wounded. Police finally were able to capture him, and when the news got out, citizens lined the streets wildly applauding every law enforcement vehicle leaving the scene.

But it wasn’t simply about good police work. It couldn’t have been done without cameras, the media – social as well as traditional – and alert citizens. We should borrow one of the hands we’re clapping with, and pat ourselves on the back.

As well as the folks who invented smartphones.

Plain Speaking

It was interesting how long it took authorities to start using a certain word following the Boston Marathon bombings (indeed, I got the impression that “device” was a euphemism for “bomb,” which it took a long time for even the media to use, but that’s another program).

But “terrorism”? It took a really long time for authorities to use that one. It’s almost like I heard them trying to get it out, but not quite able to do it: “T-t-t-t-t-t…”

The FBI agent-in-charge, during a news conference, said the investigation was a criminal investigation, but only a “potential” terrorism investigation, if I heard him right. My question is, if even one person plants bombs that end up killing at least two and injuring well over 100, how is that not terrorism?

The reason, of course, is that the T-word seems to imply foreign, rather than domestic involvement – at least that’s how it has been since 9/11. Authorities don’t want angry mobs running around beating up people named, say, Osama (a not uncommon name in the Arab world). Actually, the use of maiming ball bearings in the explosives seems to imply foreign involvement much more strongly. But of course, home-grown folks can plant bombs, and even use ball bearings. The Internet provides the instruction.

There are other words and phrases that bother me when it comes to this stuff. I think I’d much rather be an honest-to-goodness “suspect” than a “person of interest.” I guess the latter is someone the cops really want to talk to but don’t have to charge. But if CNN tells the world I’m a “person of interest,” everyone’s going to believe I committed the crime anyway.

Terrorism, though,  is what it is. It doesn’t require half a dozen guys from the Middle East to do it. One individual, even with white skin – and a big enough grudge -- is perfectly capable of it.

Just Another Day in the Universe

What on Earth (literally) is going on here? Meteors hitting Russia? Asteroids flying by closer than our communications satellites? Were the Mayans right after all?

Turns out, Earth has seen this movie before. Our lifetimes are so short, and our historical attention spans so limited, that we may think something is “happening,” but it’s all part of a very big routine, occurring on a low frequency that’s at the edge of our ability to process it.

Meteors have hit Russia before, and cosmically speaking, not all that long ago. Something very large hit northern Siberia in 1908, laying waste to vast stretches surrounding the point of impact. It was truly devastating, but it affected a relatively unpopulated area, so few were around to record it – plus, it was before the era of modern communications.

Something very big created Meteor Crater in Arizona long ago. It’s a nice tourist attraction now. Lucky you weren’t camping nearby, right? Another enormous crater, this one the remains of a volcano, is a huge tourist attraction in Oregon: Crater Lake. It used to be Mount Mazama, which erupted thousands of years ago, covering much of the Northwest in feet of ash.

In our recent past, there was a 9-point earthquake in Japan. But what about the historic quakes that have happened in unlikely places? The New Madrid quakes in the early 19^th century featured two bigger than 8 points in Missouri. There have been significant damaging earthquakes in places like Charleston, South Carolina (1886) and Boston (1755).

Don’t forget the enormous 1859 solar flare that caused telegraph wires to burn. If the same thing happened today, what would happen to the North American electrical grid?

I’m sorry that this post isn’t going to help you sleep better at night. It’s not about defending ourselves against these cataclysms – that’s a little above my pay grade, other than to tell you to have the usual emergency supplies on hand.

But these events occur periodically, maybe just to remind us that on a cosmic scale, s*** happens, and that we don’t have as much control over events as we like to think we do. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Historic Proportions

That’s the phrase the forecasters are using to describe Hurricane Sandy. If on the Perfect Storm scale, the 1991 New England event was a Perfect 10, this could be a Perfect 11, or so they say.

I grew up in New York City, and the whole notion of almost 400,000 people being evacuated is a completely foreign concept to me. The only hurricane I remember directly impacting us in Manhattan was Donna. It seemed like a big deal then, but I was young.

The T-shirts tell us (bleep) happens, and our modern (bleep) threshold is pretty low. Where I live, the TV stations go into frenetic STORMWATCH mode if a couple inches of rain threaten. But many of us can pass a lifetime without every witnessing a real cataclysm.

Crater Lake is a beautiful spot in Oregon visited by many tourists. The water fills an old volcanic caldera. The volcano, called Mt. Mazama, erupted thousands of years ago. I read once where this enormous blast covered parts of western North America in feet – FEET – of volcanic ash. But our continent was relatively unpopulated. There were no Eyewitness News teams around to record what happened. The most we have are stories passed down through oral tradition, and whatever after-the-fact evidence scientists are able to collect.

For those who can’t live without their adrenaline fix, the Weather Channel has a show called “It Could Happen Tomorrow.” The fact is, it already has. Just as an aside, the 18th and 19th centuries brought major earthquakes to Boston and to Charleston, South Carolina.

(Bleep) really did seem to happen in the 19th century. A huge earthquake rocked not California, but the central part of the country, along Missouri’s New Madrid fault in 1811 -- again, a relatively unpopulated area, but the quake caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. In 1859, the worst recorded solar flare ever to hit the Earth caused telegraph wires to burn up. A similar flare hitting the Earth the same way today would cause a Biblical-level catastrophe. We wouldn’t need hacker terrorists to wipe out our electrical grid. The sun would have done that for us.

For most of us alive today, the standout natural cataclysmic event may be the Japanese earthquake of 2011, which killed tens of thousands and triggered a devastating tsunami and a nuclear disaster. Contrast that with last night’s partiers gathering on Hawaiian beaches to witness a tsunami a few INCHES high.

As for cataclysmic events, they actually happen all the time, but the slower-moving ones sometimes escape our notice, especially if we’re not directly affected. Famine. Drought. Climate change. The virus-du-jour. But it also seems most cataclysmic events aren’t Mother Nature’s fault. We’re much better at doing these things to ourselves. War. Recession/depression, you name it.

(Bleep) is always going to happen. The story really isn’t about the (bleep); it’s about how we react to it. Sometimes we react well; other times we freak out.

But so far, one thing seems to be constant: We survive.