I don’t have 4,000 Facebook “friends.” I don’t even have 400 Facebook friends, nor do I necessarily aspire to have that many. It’s not that I am an ardent devotee of “Dunbar’s Number“—I think people can have a wide circle of friends, in varying degrees of connectedness—but I do think that there are limits to how much information one can truly absorb about people within these different circles, and how close those relationships can actually be.

So to the extent that Facebook, too, has recognized this issue (in light of the ease-of-use of Google+‘s “circles” approach), I’m irritated by the change but can get on board with it. It’s fine to define people as “friends” versus “acquaintances,” and certainly there are a couple of Facebook friends I have “met” only through other friends and would surely place in that latter category. But there’s something irritating about the retroactive nature of this process—of having to go back and reestablish your connection to each of the (in my case) 194 people with whom you have a connection, in order to sort out the flow of information you will see from them. Facebook thinks it can do this automatically, but it can’t—not accurately, anyway.

Which leads me to my other complaint, one that is not a mere irritation but has actually brought me to the point of using Facebook less and less frequently: the over-curation, rather the automatic curation, of the timeline. This sounds silly, no doubt, especially if you’re a Facebook user with several hundred or even a few thousand friends: no one can wade through that much stuff, so having a set of filtering mechanisms is surely useful. I get it.

But let me turn them off. Because I don’t want them. And while you’re at it, Facebook, bring in someone new, someone with some common sense to help you with your user interface and control mechanisms.

With 194 friends, I can stay on top of things quite efficiently—when “stories” are chronological. Even as my network has grown, I have been able to manage that. I hide a few friends’ Farmville posts, I know I can usually (but not always) skip items from some other people. It’s very easy to scroll through a chronological list and see what’s there and what’s not. It’s much harder to do this when information is out of order—especially posts from the same person, where subsequent, more commented posts wind up as “Top Stories,” but have no evident antecedent because Facebook has decided to bury them. Or they wind up as posts in this ridiculous secondary timeline Facebook created, in the sidebar.

Reading this interview by Liz Gannes on AllThingsD with Facebook’s “Timeline product manager” Sam Lessin left me cold—and I think Facebook’s efforts are misplaced. All these “powerful” tools they’re talking about will make an already-too-complicated ecosystem even more complicated and harder to manage. It seems to me what people want to do is share information, and so to the extent that Facebook (and Twitter, and other systems) encourage that, well, great. But when it starts to become too complicated to share your own information, or to find other people’s information, then that system loses its power. In other words, Facebook is starting to turn into the Windows of social networks: it may be the dominant platform of its genre, but it’s poorly constructed, badly organized, and unnecessarily difficult to manage even simple tasks.

Why do I care? Perhaps I care more than many folks because I went through such a conscious exercise to get myself engaged in these systems in the first place. Maybe it’s because I work in communications, in a field that has come to rely on these tools as important mechanisms for sharing information. Maybe it’s because, as I type this on my MacBook Pro, drafting it in Evernote, getting ready to publish it through WordPress, and eventually to promote it through Twitter … it’s because Facebook has just become so damn inelegant.

Life is too short. I’ll keep using Facebook—I’m not quite ready to go cold turkey, though Sam Lessin is giving me reasons to reconsider down the line—but I already look at it much less than I used to. And I’m finding, in spite of myself, that there are indeed other engaging and valuable things I can do with my time.

***
UPDATE (10/14/11): Time Magazine has an essay from last week’s issue (subscription required) by Harry McCracken about Facebook. The subtitle says everything: “Will Facebook’s shift toward data sacrifice it’s soul?” McCracken is off on a slightly different argument–more focused on the underlying mechanisms than the user interface–but in my view they’re clearly related. There is a balance between data wonkiness and user satisfaction. Apple (as one example) strove hard to get that right. Facebook now seems to be leaning in the other direction.

“If you believe that the freedoms and opportunities that we speak about as universal should not be shared by your own people — men and women equally — or if you do not desire to help your own people work and live with dignity, you are on the wrong side of history and time will prove that.”

I stopped what I was doing and went back to the beginning of the story, to make sure I had the context right. I did. It was a news piece titled “Clinton Pushes African Nations To Break With Gadhafi,” in which NPR’s Michele Keleman reported on a meeting at the headquarters of the African Union in Ethiopia.

And so I listened to Clinton again, and all I could think about was the degree to which our government–nearly all of it, both the legislative and executive branches–is opposed to the Palestinian plan to declare independence this September. How do we align this with the view expressed above by our very own Secretary of State? We can’t. We justify a different policy perspective  with Israel / Palestine by declaring that the details are flawed, that the Palestinian’s step is out of sync with broader movements for peace, or by throwing up bogus defense arguments. (In his “Daily Dish” column on Sunday, Andrew Sullivan had a great take on this.)

Searching for consistency in foreign policy is certainly a fool’s errand. After all, the same problem arises if we look at Bahrain, where we quietly support (through our lack of public opposition) that government’s brutal repression of protests–by people asking for the same things as those in Egypt and Libya: a more democratic, representative, and inclusive government. Our excuse here seems to be either that the protesters are Shia Muslims, and therefore implicitly allied with Iran, or that any change would endanger our massive military installation in Bahrain. But again, these are just excuses.

Hillary Clinton is right about the way the world is trending. Syria and Bahrain and other places may be on the longer, slower side of that curve, but change is coming. To Palestine, too. So perhaps the Department of State should take her advice and start getting behind legitimate movements for freedom a bit more energetically. Otherwise, it will be us that winds up on the wrong side of history.

To which I can only say: good on you, Ms. Eisner. American Jews have for too long been stuck in this vicious cycle of permitting outrageous Israeli actions (or outrageous actions by American supporters like AIPAC) without sufficient comment and criticism because of a fear of making their complaints too public. This trend has been on the wane, a bit, thanks in part to a younger generation of people — like Eisner, or Peter Beinart — who are less concerned with this problem and more interested in tackling the issues raised by Israeli intransigence around the peace process with Palestine.

It’s about time. Five years ago, I wrote that I believe “aired laundry dries faster.” Rather than shrink from public criticism, we instead have an obligation to voice it, loudly:

Well, we do have a right to question, and we should. “We” American Jews (and Americans generally, for that matter) provide billions of dollars in aid to Israel every year – billions through the U.S. government, and billions more through charitable organizations supporting the continued growth of the state of Israel – and that financial support entitles us to have a role in discussing how those funds are spent. But we cannot question the actions of the Israelis if we do not first question our own actions and motivations, and if we do not work to better understand ourselves and the needs of our own Jewish community – and this is the part that is missing. The American Jewish community needs more debate, more open discussion about whether our funding of the state of Israel is, in fact, having a negative effect; whether we are enabling Israel to fight instead of encouraging it to make peace; whether we are confusing Israel’s survival with the underlying quality of its existence; whether we are betraying our own Jewish morals and values by supporting an Israeli state that has so often failed to live up to those same values – values which it also espouses in equal measure. We need more voices like Mitchell Plitnick’s, willing to confront the monolith of establishment American Jewish opinion. AND, we need to stop forwarding, blindly and devoutly, every pro-Israel e-mail that comes across our path, because these e-mails contribute to a process of rote emotional response rather than engaged thought.

Keep that laundry out on the line!

First and foremost, the Palestinians deserve independence. They deserve a state—a homeland—of their own, formally, officially, and with the same status and international recognition that the Zionists themselves fought for in 1948. Palestinians also deserve a homeland free of occupying forces, and free from the arbitrary application of laws and civil rights that have characterized the Israeli occupation. Historical arguments aside, Palestinians in the last 40+ years have asserted their identity and taken ownership of it, much the way that Jews themselves created the Zionist movement. Palestinians exist as a people, and they deserve their independence and the right to govern themselves.

As an American (and an American Jew) I find sustenance in the universal principles that served to underpin the creation of the United States. Our Declaration of Independence reads, in part: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.” This aptly describes the situations of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, both under the repressive Egyptian and Jordanian regimes in the period before 1967, and under the Israelis in the years since. Americans have a moral obligation to support Palestinian efforts to achieve freedom the same way we sought such support in our own times of need.

At the same time, I believe that Palestinian independence will bring a kind of normalization—either that, or a real and true international isolation. An independent Palestine must find ways to coexist and trade with Israel; there is little choice, since developing into a military and economic equal will take decades. As part of coexistence, a Palestinian state will need to bring under control the most militant, anti-Israel factions within it: this new state cannot afford the reprisals that will come from Israel (or elsewhere) if Palestine is used as a home base for terrorism. In fact, Palestinians in an independent state will have lost their (already slim) justifications for such attacks, and the world will evolve to view these attacks as war, not as a fight for freedom. Palestine will not want to become a pariah state: the costs are too high, and they have too few internal resources to survive such a move.

Meanwhile, independence will also be good for the Israelis, even if current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the disingenuous ambassador Michael Oren, and others are too narrow-minded to realize it. A free Palestinian state will legitimize Israeli military action in the event that such provocations demand it. A Palestinian state will free tremendous Israeli resources—financial, military, and human—for other projects that will strengthen Israel itself. And just as the Palestinians will need to confront and manage some of the most extremist elements within their midst, so too will the Israelis, and their do-or-let-someone-else-die American Jewish underwriters: Israelis cannot afford to continue being provocateurs and agents of regional instability, and American Jews must stop their fear-mongering.

Yet another “Israel Day” parade is on the horizon in New York, and American Jews should use this event to ask themselves what they think they are celebrating, especially in an environment in which Israel has turned the universalist, post-Holocaust message of “Never again!” into a selfish joke: “Never again to us.” The original Zionist dream was one of hope: a homeland for a people seeking the stability of independence and self-governance. In the face of the “Arab spring” and the potential proliferation of freedom and democracy across the Middle East, now is the time for Israelis to confront their own failures of leadership and imagination, and to embrace change.

This is on my mind right now as I sit and listen to the news and read the various social network feeds about the apparent death–can we call it an assassination?–of Osama Bin Laden. Already, I have seen many comments about how this is President Obama’s success, in contrast to Bush’s failure to do the same during the 6+ years that remained of his term after the 9/11 attacks. And I can’t help but wonder: how many of those folks used to bemoan the drone strikes and targeted assassinations policy of the Bush administration? Can we really claim this as a success for Obama, in the midst of a war in Afghanistan that otherwise continues to be a failure?

The news of Bin Laden’s death leaves me cold. I lived in New York on 9/11 and have been here since; I have seen, in person, the hole where the World Trade Center towers once stood, just as I had been in the towers themselves before they were felled. But I cannot claim to be pleased, despite all the death and devastation for which Bin Laden was responsible. I would rather have had him captured and tried in court, in open, civilian court, with a full airing for his crimes.

Bin Laden is not unique as an enemy; there are surely others. Listening to CNN crow about the “electric response” to this news misses the point. The media’s celebratory (as opposed to straightforward) approach to reporting this story is akin to their ability to keep the “birther” movement alive: they find too much satisfaction in the financial returns from these stories to report the news as it is–or to be honest about their lack of objectivity. And we should be careful in adding this to Obama’s balance sheet as a net positive. Bin Laden wasn’t Satan, Bush wasn’t either–and Obama is far from perfect. Murdering a terrorist several thousand miles away does little to change that dynamic.

UPDATE:

A friend posted this quote from Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” column last night: “The pre-eminent symbol of our the multicultural, multiracial society of the future defeated the pre-eminent symbol of the darkest, bleakest throwback to medieval religious fanaticism. Im not ashamed to use the following language: Good defeated evil. And hope rekindles again.“

I find this uncompelling; it is jingoism masquerading as intellectualism. Do symbols matter? Of course. But their value is relative–and symbols are extremely susceptible to abuse. Will Bin Laden’s death end terrorism? No. He was the symbolic leader of a diverse and problematic movement, driven by an ideology that by definition cannot be defeated through the slaying of a figurehead. Will Bin Laden’s death end the “war on terror”? No, of course not; that war is owned and managed by the same military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned us, and it is by definition unwinnable on these terms. Will we now move from the the distraction of foreign wars to a more reasonable response to our domestic political issues? Unlikely; and the symbolism of this situation is equally unlikely to provide domestic political benefits to Obama as he engages with his opponents on these issues.

I am not sorry that Osama Bin Laden is dead, but I cannot join in the rejoicing. The death of a symbol is too easily abused for symbolic purposes.

***

As an employee, I pay significant premiums for health insurance for my family, north of $1,000/month. Although my employer offers a good subsidy, that subsidy is capped, meaning that it continues to decline as a proportion of my premiums with each year. (Healthcare premium increases have been averaging more than 10% annually for the last decade, a number much higher than inflation or any cost-of-living salary adjustment.) Still, the benefits of the program are clear, most notably that the negotiated rate to insure my family is less than I would pay if I bought the coverage myself, directly. After all, that is a large part of the purpose of employer-driven healthcare: cost savings through group buying, along with pre-tax deductions.

However good this is, though, there are limitations. I work for a small company, which means our ability to negotiate rates is limited. Stupidly, the law prevents companies like mine from joining forces with other small businesses to create a consortium—to get more people into a single plan, and therefore more people paying negotiated rates. Whether in a place like Manhattan or on Main Street, USA, this approach undermines the purpose of insurance; allowing businesses to buy plans together easily would deliver more customers and support the overarching health of the nation. Any actuarial issues, such as concerns about different jobs and different health risks, could be accommodated by defining how consortiums can be created, rather than simply ruling them out.

***

If I feel fortunate as an employee, I feel stuck as an employer. We have two household employees: part-time childcare workers, legal employees who pay their payroll taxes, and for whom we carry state-mandated worker’s compensation and disability insurance. It couldn’t be more above-board. We also pay them a salary that averages out to a bit more than $16.50 an hour. According to data from the Center for the Child Care Workforce, that is 70% more than the national average for childcare workers ($9.73/hour) and 44% more than the average wage for childcare workers in New York State. If you factor in more than 4 weeks of paid vacation a year, plus food when they are working, it isn’t ungenerous.

Yet there’s no healthcare benefit. As generous as I would like to be, I cannot afford it, and as a household employer with two part-time employees, I have no bargaining power to command lower insurance premiums, even if I didn’t subsidize them.

That situation is more than just unfortunate. It puts stresses—and costs—on other parts of our economy and our healthcare infrastructure, in ways that are extremely detrimental and short-sighted. For example, when one of our babysitters was sick recently, she had to visit the ER for treatment, and then spent the night in a hospital bed. Ultimately, most of the cost for that will be paid for by us—not us, her employers, but “us,” American taxpayers generally, through government healthcare programs for the un- or under-insured. Unfortunately for our employee, a visit to the ER is cheaper for her than a visit to a private doctor, because without insurance, most doctor’s fees are costly. (That is not even taking into consideration the costs and stresses to us as employers, faced with finding an immediate solution to a childcare need.)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 1.3 million child care workers in the US in 2008, 33% percent of whom were self-employed. The BLS also forecasts 11% growth in this area through 2018, predicated in part on the importance of child care to the overall economy, by freeing parents to work in other jobs. (The BLS does not make clear whether those are 1.3 million employees reporting their income, or if it includes what is likely a significant portion of household / child care workers in the gray economy.) It is difficult to find good statistics on how many of these 1.3 million child care workers have health insurance, but the odds are that most of them do not, particularly if they are household employees like ours.

News stories on the scope on healthcare in America talk about the roughly 40 million uninsured people, but rarely delve into whether these people are employed in jobs that cannot give them affordable insurance. And those BLS statistics are separate from an exploration of others working at the lower end of the economy, as part-time household employees doing cleaning or yard-work. For example, there are statistics on those working as maids and housekeeping cleaners: 887,890 people as of 2009, with average annual earnings of $20,840. But that is hardly enough to afford health insurance and, in any case, this data does not include those who are self-employed, people who may be even less likely to have insurance, unless they are married to someone who has it.

My modest solution to the insurance problem here would be a law extending coverage through group plans, as directed by members of the group. Not for free, but for the same negotiated rate as part of one’s extended family, or perhaps through an additional, per-individual rate as part of the group. This simple change would make it possible to embrace a huge portion of the uninsured throughout the country. Moreover, it should benefit the insurance companies as well as the individuals: the companies get more people paying premiums, while the individuals get access to healthcare service necessary to keep themselves and the broader population healthy.

We have a national calling to a higher purpose on this issue, one that is conveniently overlooked by all those Tea Party-loving “Constitutionalists” out there. Our failure as a society to tackle this problem—even to enact simple solutions that would support the expansion of health insurance—is not just to my detriment, or that of our childcare employees. It’s a national disgrace.

You’re probably thinking: Congress? They’re not exactly a target for pity. And it’s true—to a degree. Previous incarnations of Congress were complicit in the first two issues, having abrogated so much responsibility to President Bush’s “muscular” executive branch, and permitting or encouraging everything from the Patriot Act to warrantless-wiretapping to unaffordable and unsustainable tax cuts and expenditures. The current 2008 Congress was not much better and the 2010 Congress is not exactly off to a great start.

Yet Congress—the Congress in office at the time of the terrorist attacks and every Congress since then—has not really been itself. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are composed primarily of people who may be elected by the people, but who serve primarily other masters: the people who pay their bills. Yes, in theory that’s us, we the people; but we don’t pay their bills, we just pay Congressional salaries and amazing healthcare and retirement benefits. Their broader bills are paid by the wide range of outside special interests, arrayed across the entire political spectrum. This is not a left or right issue, it’s not a Republican or Democrat issue: it affects every member of Congress on each side of the aisle. I know of no exceptions, including those who are technically “Independent.”

So here’s my modest proposal for 2012: a Clean Sweep Campaign. A nation-wide movement to effect a total cleaning of house in Congress in 2012, in order to elect people whose interests are exclusively in public service and who understand that their election to Congress means they are there to serve us, the people, and no one else. The Clean Sweep Campaign would function like a seal of approval, a verification that the candidate (and elected member) followed these principles:

• Candidates must not accept any special interest funding during the campaign period. This means no money or in-kind support (like campaign staff) from unions, PACs, dedicated special interests such as the NRA or Emily’s List, and no money from businesses or lobbyists of any kind. Period, no exceptions.
• Candidates may take donations from individual constituents—but only from individuals who are able to vote for them, i.e., citizens within their constituency areas. Candidates may take donations from people with affiliations to specific interests—e.g., a voter who also supports Planned Parenthood or the Family Research Council—but no money may come directly from any outside organizations.
• Candidates may not accept bundled donations.
• Candidates may have party affiliations, as a means of describing political perspectives (to the extent that “Democrat” and “Republican” mean anything other than “self-interested”) but also cannot accept any money from them. Again, only donations from constituents may be accepted. (Political parties may provide in-kind support, such as human resource support for office management, campaign positioning counsel, or door-to-door canvassing.)
• Candidates may not have served as a lobbyist within the immediately preceding election cycle, i.e., within the last two years.
• Candidates may fund themselves, but only equal to the maximum donation received from every constituent in their district (or, for Senators, their state). Candidates may fund themselves even if they are able to raise the maximum donation from every constituent but, again, it cannot be more than a 1:1 match.
• Once elected, candidates must subscribe to the same code, including its broader implications: no junkets or trips, no paid-for dinners with lobbyists or other outside interests, and no in-kind support from outside supporters.

Is money the most problematic and pernicious influence in politics is money? Yes and no. No to the extent that “influence” covers a much wider terrain than just financing, and no because not every member of Congress is out for direct personal gain.

But yes because, more than anything else, money is the thing that influences the direction of politics. Sure, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina were defeated in California, despite the investments they made in their own campaigns; but those candidates and those campaigns were anomalies. Most of the time, the better funded candidate wins—and stays in office, well-funded, until some more significant demographic trend forcibly knocks them out.

Money is also the most easily identifiable mechanism of control, the thing that voters can use to evaluate influence. And while the Supreme Court has ruled on a few occasions that spending money is a form of expression, and therefore cannot be legally eliminated, this poses no problem for the Clean Sweep Campaign: this approach is not about passing laws regarding spending—it’s a campaign about principles of representative independence, about inviting candidates to adhere to those principles, and about providing a stamp of approval when they do so. No one would force their hand—but every effort could be made by opponents to make clear that a given candidate is not, in fact, an independent representative of their potential constituents.

My motivation isn’t partisan: I’m not looking to elect more Democrats or Republicans, or to bolster the likes of the (equally corrupt and secretly funded) Tea Partiers. Political balance is important, as long as it is functional and effective in representing it’s constituency. But our Congress is not that. They don’t hear—can’t hear—the voices of their own people through all of the outside influences, factors that have little to do with the political realities of their states or districts, or about the long-term future of the country. And when they wave their well-funded flags in our faces, and proclaim their allegiance to our own interests, well … just take a look at the budget deficit, or the failed healthcare reform, or the not-even-failed-because-it-never-got-started effort to address long-term funding challenges for Social Security and Medicare, or shockingly absent prosecutions of bankers and investors who helped cause the financial crises, or … well, I could go on. Just take a look and ask yourself whether you think the people you elected to represent you in Congress are even close to fulfilling their responsibilities to you and your neighbors. I know mine aren’t.

It’s time to clean House (and Senate), and what better way than with a Clean Sweep.

One day, I came in to work and the two of us discussed it again. For me, the Rwandan genocide was reminiscent of American dithering during the holocaust, the kind of inaction so well documented by historians like David Wyman: we can mythologize Franklin Delano Roosevelt all we want, but in the end, addressing the mass murder of Jews (and others) was not a policy priority. For my boss, a producer of the movie Shoah, there was a sense of immediacy to the world’s failure to live up to the “never again” theme. He felt he needed to act, and where his phone calls had little impact, he thought a public platform might: he rounded up some big names, people whose opinions might matter to the Clinton administration, and took out full page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times calling on the US government to act.

This bit of history has been on my mind as I read the news about the attacks on Libyan government troops and military installations, in support of rebel groups that were about to be routed—and as I read the mostly ambivalent comments of people on Facebook, Twitter, and news sites. Suddenly, the United States and a selection of allies (including, shockingly, the typically risk-averse French) are launching another war. Maybe. Or maybe they just aim to degrade Libya’s military capabilities enough to give the rebels a (pardon the pun) fighting chance against Colonel Qaddafi.

I am not comparing Libya and Rwanda; the situations are very different. But the ambivalence people feel (including, it seems, our own president) strikes me as very similar. Especially when combined with the mental and financial exhaustion that comes from all this fighting abroad with uncertain goals, limited investments and thus limited impact, and a weariness over the enduring cycle of bad news.

In one of its opinion pieces this week, The Economist wrote encouragingly of military intervention in Libya. It included this argument: “Democracies wisely set obstacles in the way of those who seek to put the world to rights by fighting—however good their motives. Bitter experience in Iraq has taught how liberators soon come to be seen as oppressors. … At the same time, democracies shrink from the idea that might is right. After the genocide in Rwanda, nations took on a duty to stop mass-killing if they could. Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Liberia all showed that outsiders can in fact help avert catastrophes. The Arab awakening is all about human dignity and the rights of ordinary people—values that the West lives by and seeks to promote. For the West to turn its back on Libya’s rebels and to stand aside while its allies shoot protesters in Bahrain betrays its own values.”

Of course, The Economist neglects to mention Darfur, in Sudan, where we largely failed to stop the killings until it was too late. Or the multi-year war in Congo, also known as “Africa’s world war,” where more than 5 million people have been killed, and many more raped or brutalized, in another ethnically driven conflict. The Egyptians managed to overthrow Mubarak without outside military interference. Amidst all this, should we really treat the Libyans differently? How do we draw the line between Libya and Syria, where new reports suggest more protests and more crackdowns are also happening? And it must be acknowledged that we do this all while we rationalize military inaction in Bahrain, presumably because it would hurt the Saudi troops on the ground there, and thus our relationship with another major oil producer.

I sincerely wish the Libyan people well, and hope for their freedom amidst desperate circumstances. But consider me among the ambivalent, working hard not to veer much further towards the cynical.

*********
Updates: Some other articles of interest, from a few different sources, supporting reasons to be cautious about our Libyan engagement:

• In the National Journal, Megan Scully writes of the costs of this initiative.
• In the National Review, John Derbyshire writes of some of the criticism of President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron for this whole engagement.
• In my view, the New York Times has been a bit of a cheerleader for this mini-war–but they have a piece by David Kirkpatrick that makes clear how little we really know about what to expect as an end-result in Libya.

Directed by Josh Fox, the movie is disturbing and compelling, a race against an unseen clock to expose the devastation to drinking water and the environment caused by hydraulic fracturing (aka “hydrofracking”), a process for extracting natural gas from underground rock formations. The race is one that affects millions of people living along the east coast and those states just inland, to see whether the process of leasing land for hydrofracking and allowing new wells to be drilled can be stopped before the hydrofracking contaminates the water supply for about 16 million people. (So far, the outcome does not look good for those of us living in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and even Delaware.)

There are many, many problems one can point to in our society, from the financial shenanigans that helped bring about our recent depression, to our fundamental failure to confront “third rail” political issues like the funding of Social Security or Medicare and healthcare. What makes this story about hydrofracking especially powerful is that it connects all the dots on the spectrum: corporate malfeasance, political intransigence, bureaucratic expediency (because, yes, bureaucracies can be efficient when they want to be), hard science, loose medicine, and personal tales of loss in the face of all of the above.

Meanwhile, as if reporter Ian Urbina was watching the movie with me yesterday, the New York Times is running a story today about hydrofracking and its associated problems—though as usual (in service to “objectivity”) the article does what the documentary does not, in pointing out that there are always at least two sides to the story and that questions about “facts” remain.

In this case, it seems to me there are three sides: government officials who say all the right things about being watchdogs for the public good (while clearly failing); energy companies that downplay the known science (and working to hide what isn’t yet known) because it’s better for business that way; and environmentalists and average citizens who are witness to the devastation wrought by hydraulic fracturing, not least through the demonstrably flammable water emanating from the tap. Those scenes are a consistent highlight of the movie. Sadly, the Times neglects even to mention Gasland; this is all the more ironic given the scope of coverage the news organization is dedicating to the Oscars.

Our collective failure to confront this and other issues is more complicated than what is, or is not, reported in the news media. (Though that’s certainly one good starting point for a discussion.) Where An Inconvenient Truth may have been more abstract—it’s difficult to really grasp the implications of planetary changes you cannot see with your own eyes, as this recent episode of This American Life (#424, aired 14 January 2011) so ably demonstrated—Gasland is direct and in your face. A hard-to-avoid truth: your drinking water, and mine, may soon be ruined. If that’s not worth fighting for, what is?

“Some French artists and intellectuals such as Jean Paulhan were active in the resistance, but for the most part the cultural elite made no special contribution. Should more have been expected of them? This is the question running through Riding’s book. The fact that writers were more harshly treated after the war than collaborating businessmen or bureaucrats suggests that it was certainly seen that way by many people in France. Sartre, for one, believed that intellectuals had a higher calling than other people. De Gaulle seemed to agree. He refused to save Robert Brasillach from execution (even as real killers, like René Bousquet, went on to enjoy successful careers in government), because, as he put it, ‘in literature, as in everything, talent carries with it responsibility.’ Unlike Americans, the French have traditionally treated their writers and thinkers with reverence. Was this trust betrayed?”

Decades after the war, this may feel like a question that is largely academic (so to speak). Where the issue has relevance is for contemporary situations that are, if not precisely analogous, then at least comparable in raising questions about how intellectual elites (or even mere mortals) respond under pressure. A few pages after Buruma comes David Shulman’s review of “What Is a Palestinian State Worth?,” the new book by Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. Describing Nusseibeh and the environment in which he and other Palestinians and Israelis coexist, Shulman writes:

“Last July I heard Sari Nusseibeh speak at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at an evening honoring its retiring president, Menahem Yaari. … Nusseibeh used the occasion of the academy lecture to deliver a damning indictment of the Israeli academic establishment for its truly astonishing passivity over the past forty-three years of occupation. Although, in general, the government is probably right in seeing the Israeli universities as a natural breeding ground for leftist—that is, liberal and peace-oriented—opinion, Nusseibeh is also right. Like everyone else, Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation and the accompanying colonial project of settling Israelis in the territories. Like most other Israelis, with some notable exceptions, they live within the system and tolerate its misdeeds. The large audience at the academy listened to Nusseibeh’s scathing critique that evening with what seemed to me, for the most part, a stony and impassive silence.”

That observation speaks for itself. And while the Israelis are not engaged in systematic murder in the mode of the Nazis, it is difficult to deny the reality of the oppressive occupation of the West Bank and, previously, Gaza—raising questions of complicity through passivity.

Likewise the interview on NPR last night with Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States. Shoukry was by turns direct (e.g., in response to a question about who is in charge and what has been communicated about it, Shoukry says “…as of yet, we have not received any definitive information related to the process of governing.”) and slightly evasive. He concluded by noting that the future looks bright for Egypt and its children—but, of course, Ambassador Shoukry was appointed by now deposed President Hosni Mubarak, which surely raises questions about his own role in government, past and future.

Complicity through passivity. It is an interesting concept, challenging as much for its lack of nuance as for its wide applicability. Are we, Americans, complicity in the loss of our own civil rights, through Big Brother-esque laws like the Patriot Act, by not protesting more loudly? Yes. (And kudos to the new members of Congress who, in the midst of other, less positive tendencies, have also tried to put the brakes on the renewal of this terrifying piece of legislation.) Are we complicit in the ethically problematic (if questionably legal) tactics—from torture to targeted assassination—practiced by our government? Slavery. Segregation and oppression of minorities, from Native Americans to African-Americans to the GLBT community. Support for dictators, from Marcos to Mubarak.

With Egyptians now optimistically looking to a freer future, after the fall of a regime the United States supported for three decades, we must ask ourselves these questions again. We may not agree on the answers; indeed, we may not come up with much of an answer at all. But the world would—will—be a better place if we confront these issues, ask the right questions about our own actions, and seek to achieve the higher values we espouse rather than the realpolitik that is more easily reached.