Mark Steyn's only half right
Very interesting column from Mark Steyn about, of all things, the assassination of President Garfield in 1876 and how the national crisis brought out a great groundswell of interest and ingenuity to try to save the wounded President's life. Critics of Steyn's book on the West's demographic crisis tell him that technology is the answer to our problems, but he argues that the spirit of '76 hasn't shown manifested itself in our current, even more grave national crisis.
About the moral and patriotic aspects of the national response, Steyn is, sadly, right. His example of the NFL refusing to run a Border Patrol advertisement during the Super Bowl is the height of disgraceful, milksop shoulder-shrugging. Thanks, football! And the general desultory bureaucratic reshuffling doesn't inspire us with confidence that America is rising to the challenges of the new millenium. That goes double for the sad, empty, Bush-bashing rhetoric of the Democratic candidates, who are focused on the past and nearly blind to any enemy more formidable than Karl Rove.
But as for the technology this crisis has inspired, Steyn is wrong. Partly as a result of media ennui, and partly because a lot of the cool stuff is still secret, we're not hearing about the leaps of technology being drawn up in response to the current crisis. Few things have yet impacted our lives as much as the air conditioning and metal detectors Steyn mentions; but as he points out, those didn't work at first either.
In the meantime the research is underway, and as clever as Steyn's quip might be, it's just not true that
"the Alexander Graham Bells of our day are busy inventing the ''self-repairing condom'' -- a marvel of nanotechnology to be sure, but not one with much strategic use unless you can supersize it and unroll it down every Wahhabi mosque.
Case in point is In-Q-Tel, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm slinging money around for the intelligence community. They invest in private firms which are developing technology with intel applications, and some of the stuff they're coming up with sounds pretty damn cool. I don't see any acid-squirting pens or oil-slick-dispensing Aston Martins being developed among their supported companies, but this investment of theirs is downright nifty: Dust Networks. They make networks of tiny, remote sensors that have some pretty obvious defensive applications, including border security. (No, I don't think they can replace a nice solid fence on the border, but they can supplement it.)
Or look at the biothreat monitoring chips from Seahawk Biosystems. Check out Rosum's equivalent of GPS tracking--inside buildings. And this is just the stuff they can tell you about.
Granted, some of this research will never go anywhere, and a lot of this stuff is far less sexy. Much of it has to do with better data mining and better organization of information. But over the long run those technologies can be no less revolutionary. While a canard of shows like 24 is that dossiers and floor plans can be plucked out of the ether by Chloe and beamed to Jack Bauer's PDA in seconds, it looks like we really are moving in that direction. It's going to be possible to isolate, investigate, and evaluate people and places in an entirely new way and at a much faster rate. That's encouraging but also chilling; security services moving with that sort of efficiency might run down the next Mohammed Atta before he ever touches down in America, but they also make Orwellian population control all the more possible. These things will change the world, just like the metal detector and the air conditioning Steyn discusses have done.
In fact, they already are changing the world. Ever hear of an In-Q-Tel fundee called Keyhole, Inc.? They make 3-d maps of the world, and they were quite good at it. You might have seen some of them, because in fact they were so good that in 2004 Google bought them out, and turned them into Google Earth.
Kind of ironic, isn't it? The CIA started out partially funding this technology, and it was so successful it made it big in the private sector. Now, as I noted at Michelle Malkin's site back in January, Google Earth is so useful that even Iraqi insurgents in Basra were using Google Earth maps to zero in their mortars on British troops.
Yankee ingenuity is rising to the current crisis, and changing the world. But just as our own Boeing jets were used against us on September 11, and just as the "self repairing condom" Steyn points out will only serve to hasten the demographic decline of the West, not all of those changes are going to work to our advantage all of the time.