Why We Need Wikileaks - Pt. 1

Jan 2010: It's almost impossible to know the truth.

One day on the web, one of the Australian sites – I think it was the SMH – had an article about the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen late last year. The writer said he'd been in a closed-door session and that the talks collapsed because (impossible to say in the "left-dominated" discourse of mass-media) they were torpedoed by third-world countries – India and China – and not by the wicked imperialists. He went on to say that India and China do not want severe carbon emissions controls because they want a Western standard of living and are using coal-fired power-plants to get it. In this version, India and China calculated that, if the talks collapsed, Obama would be blamed.

Two days later, on the web, I read an article by George Monbiot – the BBC? New Matilda? – saying that he, too, was at the Copenhagen talks and behind closed doors (in a position to know what happened there). Monbiot said the talks collapsed because Obama gave China no option but to walk out. The proposal Obama put, Monbiot said, would have caused China grave loss of face, had been calculated beforehand to cause the walkout, and so to cause the climate talks to fail.

Who am I to believe? How on earth am I to judge between these two diametrically opposed insider reports?

So much of my world is like that. I've lost track of how many times a day I say "I don't know." The public wants to know why "my computer is doing […]." I want to know why management is doing […]. I don't know why General Motors isn't building electric cars, why Obama is raising troop levels in Afghanistan, why Guantánamo and Bagram haven't been closed, why our Central Asia policy and our green energy policy aren't the same policy, why car-repair costs so much, why offices aren't routinely equipped with full-spectrum lighting.

I had some idea of industrial processes from working in a steel-town once and then teaching technical report-writing for several years; I had some idea of farming from working in a dairy-farming district once and having distant relatives who were farmers. But at this point I seem to have very little idea about anything at all – and I'm well-educated, literate, book-reading, and, by most standards, well-informed. I join the dots about current western / global circumstances much better than my colleagues. And yet my ignorance about how the world around me functions is staggering. This is no way to run an adulthood, let alone a democracy.

At the same time I'm aware that steel production has been offshored, that farming is now a corporate mega-enterprise, and so is government. I'm aware that a vast mechanism for obscuring and obliterating the truth now exists: paid proselytizers, presented on the news as independent observers and commentators; corporate mainstream media determination not to report on its own funding of legislation; corporate mainstream media determination to maximize profit / audience by substituting staged and vicious games for investigation of news, politics, education, world affairs, local government, the environment, the climate talks in Copenhagen.

Because corporations now do almost everything that genetic people used to do, the details of almost every process that feeds, transports, houses, and employs us, have become commercial, proprietary information.

I shouldn't be puzzled at my inability to know what's going on. The world, all of it, even the undiscovered creatures at the bottom of the sea, even the things We the People are supposed to own – is now topper than top secret.

It's trade secret.

Dry December

12.9.09. Arctic air, still; the temperatures somewhere between 20 and 30 degrees Fahreneheit. It's cold and whitegold at walking level and blue and calm above.

But yesterday at lunchtime I drove to Fred Meyer because it was windy. I got out of the car and began walking through this unbearably bright silver-white sunlight. I looked down because looking up was painful. Under the SUV I'd parked next to there was an exhaust pipe dripping, and in and around the puddle beneath, three small, black birds chattering and bathing and drinking.

For a minute I wondered if they were bathing and drinking in oil – and then realized the pipe was dripping water. It hadn't heated enough to burn off the overnight condensation.

I looked up. Asphalt, pale concrete, bright hard ground, withered grass; no water between the SUV exhaust-pipe and the river, two miles north.

And then I realized that we, the birds and everyone else, were surrounded by a bright, cold drought.