Please Stop Sharing

Please Stop Sharing

By TIMOTHY EGAN in The New York Times

Last week, there came from the dispiriting clutter of the nation’s capital an extraordinary tale of our times. It concerned aides to Representative Rick Larsen, Democrat of Washington, who broadcast via Twitter how cool it was to be sitting in the seat of power at midday while drinking Jack Daniels and watching Nirvana videos on the taxpayers’ dime.
For good measure, these Aides Gone Wild sent out a couple of bad mots about their “idiot boss.” Within an hour of hearing about the indiscretions, which had continued for months on personal, not Congressional, Twitter accounts, the boss fired all three young people.
The moralists had a field day, complaining about the low standards of the millennial generation. No wonder they can’t find jobs!
But there is only one difference between the knuckleheads of yore — me, for example — who did numerous stupid things between the onset of puberty and a late adolescence lasting to nearly 30, and those Twit-iots of the 21st century.
And that is technology. Facebook, Twitter, cell phone text messages and palm-size appliances yet to sprout from Apple’s labs allow all of us to be banal in real time.
“I’m a moron, Siri,” I can tell my new iPhone 4S robo-assistant. “Please share with everyone.”

Let the counterrevolt begin; the shying of America would be a welcome thing. Sure, social media tools have helped foster revolutions (Egypt, Tunisia), while releasing butterflies of free speech in police states (Iran). And it’s great to get baby pictures from that distant relative living north of Nome.
But enough with the everyday shared thoughts, those half-hatched word products that could use more time in vitro.
People I once admired, even looked up to — smart, literate, funny folks — have gone down several notches in my estimation after they decided to reveal their every idiotic observation via Twitter.
From one (I’ll protect him here, even if he won’t do the same thing for himself by going silent for a day), a man known for daring urban design ideas, came these recent insights on his Twitter account:

Stuck in traffic. OMG, this light is long!
Just had the best burrito of my life!
Saw my first deliveryman on a Segway — how cool is that?

Not very, actually. Where did this compulsion for light confession come from? In part, surely, from narcissism, a trait as ancient as our species. But at least Narcissus could only stare at his own reflection until it killed him. Imagine that handsome Greek with a text finger as itchy as say, that of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, the saddest of the digital exhibitionists.
So I cheered the news from my colleague Jenna Wortham this week that the march of Facebook into every facet of our lives has slowed at last. Of course, with 200 million active users in the United States, Facebook has won the war. It’s all over but the arguing among corporate overseers about how to divvy up our private information for profit. But some brave souls refuse to submit. Hurray for the holdouts!
The most encouraging part of the story were the comments from young people who went cold turkey, saying they realized that Facebook had made them less close to, even alienated from, their friends. The imperative of Facebook — maximum exposure of the personal “brand” — is by itself a form of poison to lasting relationships. It’s hard enough trying to stay close to say, five good friends. Why have surface relationships with a hundred of them?
The fear of those newly proclaimed social-media-phobes is that people will say they disappeared, or that, without regular screen updates, they don’t even exist at all.
But they’ll never vanish — the online graveyard is an oxymoron. Among the haunting consequences of Facebook and Twitter use is the immortality of ill-chosen words and personal pictures. And for that reason, alone, parents now have to give their children “the talk.” No, not about sex. Kids already know enough from the Internet to advise Casanova. The talk is about privacy, and the importance of children keeping to themselves things that could harm them later.
Need I remind everyone that human resource departments have no problem finding captioned pictures of job applicants sharing, um, lingerie reviews from their junior year in college? Cyberspace never forgets.
I hope that those three former staffers fired by Larsen will be given a fresh start somewhere, especially because their Google reputations will follow them forever.
Plus, public displays of stupidity happen at the highest levels. When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to be the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, Newt Gingrich immediately tweeted that she was a “racist,” and should withdraw her name. He was following that paragon of unfiltered verbiage, Rush Limbaugh.
Gingrich later took his “racist” comment back, saying he’d acted in haste. Of course he wants it back. There are 50 million Hispanics in the United States, and they are the nation’s fastest-growing minority. But no matter how many appeals to Hispanics Gingrich tries to make, his digital tattoo can never be erased.
In his youth, Gingrich married his high school geometry teacher. If Twitter existed then (and given Gingrich’s promiscuity with the language, you know he would have tweeted hourly), he most likely would not be the Republican frontrunner today.
The best advice I’ve heard of late is from the actor George Clooney. “I don’t tweet, I don’t go on Facebook,” he said in a profile. “I think there’s too much information about all of us out there. I’m liking the idea of privacy more and more.”
Easy for him to say. He’s famous. But oh, how he wouldn’t crave a bit of the most precious commodity of the digital age — anonymity.

End of War in Iraq...It Is Hoped

U.S. War in Iraq Declared Officially Over

By THOM SHANKER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT in The New York Times

 BAGHDAD — The United States military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq on Thursday even as violence continues to plague the country and the Muslim world remains distrustful of American power.
In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in Baghdad, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta thanked the more than one million American service members who have served in Iraq for “the remarkable progress” made over the past nine years but acknowledged the severe challenges that face the struggling democracy.
“Let me be clear: Iraq will be tested in the days ahead — by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself,” Mr. Panetta said. “Challenges remain, but the U.S. will be there to stand by the Iraqi people as they navigate those challenges to build a stronger and more prosperous nation.”
The muted ceremony stood in contrast to the start of the war in 2003 when an America both frightened and emboldened by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sent columns of tanks north from Kuwait to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
As of last Friday, the war in Iraq had claimed 4,487 American lives, with another 32,226 Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics.
The tenor of the 45-minute farewell ceremony, officially called "Casing the Colors,” was likely to sound an uncertain trumpet for a war that was started to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it did not have. It now ends without the sizable, enduring American military presence for which many military officers had hoped.
Although Thursday's ceremony marked the end of the war, the military still has two bases in Iraq and roughly 4,000 troops, including several hundred who attended the ceremony. At the height of the war in 2007, there were 505 bases and more than 170,000 troops.
According to military officials, the remaining troops are still being attacked on a daily basis, mainly by indirect fire attacks on the bases and road side bomb explosions against convoys heading south through Iraq to bases in Kuwait.
Even after the last two bases are closed and the final American combat troops withdraw from Iraq by Dec. 31, under rules of an agreement with the government in Baghdad, a few hundred military personnel and Pentagon civilians will remain, working within the American Embassy as part of an Office of Security Cooperation to assist in arms sales and training.
But negotiations could resume next year on whether additional American military personnel can return to further assist their Iraqi counterparts.
Senior American military officers have made no secret that they see crucial gaps in Iraq's ability to defend its sovereign soil and even to secure its oil platforms offshore in the Persian Gulf. Air defenses are seen as a critical gap in Iraqi capabilities, but American military officers also see significant shortcomings in Iraq's ability to sustain a military, whether moving food and fuel or servicing the armored vehicles it is inheriting from Americans or the fighter jets it is buying, and has shortfalls in military engineers, artillery and intelligence, as well.
The tenuous security atmosphere in Iraq was underscored by helicopters that hovered over the ceremony, scanning the ground for rocket attacks. Although there is far less violence across Iraq than at the height of the sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, there are bombings on a nearly daily basis and Americans remain a target of Shiite militants.
Mr. Panetta acknowledged that “the cost was high — in blood and treasure of the United States, and also for the Iraqi people. But those lives have not been lost in vain — they gave birth to an independent, free and sovereign Iraq.”
The war was started by the Bush administration in March 2003 on arguments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al
that might grow to an alliance threatening the United States with a mass-casualty terrorist attack.
As the absence of unconventional weapons proved a humiliation for the administration and the intelligence community, the war effort was reframed as being about bringing democracy to the Middle East.
And, indeed, there was euphoria among many Iraqis at an American-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. But the support soon soured amid a growing sense of heavy-handed occupation fueled by the unleashing of bloody sectarian and religious rivalries. The American presence also proved a magnet for militant fighters and an Al Qaeda-affiliated group took root among the Sunni minority population in Iraq.
While the terrorist group has been rendered ineffective by a punishing series of Special Operations raids that have killed or captured several Qaeda leaders, intelligence specialists fear that it is in resurgence. The American military presence in Iraq, viewed as an occupation across the Muslim world, also hampered Washington's ability to cast a narrative from the United States in support of the Arab Spring uprisings this year.
Even handing bases over to the Iraqi government over recent months proved vexing for the military. In the spring, commanders halted large formal ceremonies with Iraqi officials for base closings because insurgents were using the events as opportunities to attack troops. “We were having ceremonies and announcing it publicly and having a little formal process but a couple of days before the base was to close we would start to receive significant indirect fire attacks on the location,” said Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the military in Iraq. “We were suffering attacks so we stopped.”
Across the country, the closing of bases has been marked by a quiet closed-door meeting where American and Iraqi military officials signed documents that legally gave the Iraqis control of the bases, exchanged handshakes and turned over keys.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey of the Army, has served two command tours in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, and he noted during the ceremony that the next time he comes to Iraq he will have to be invited.
“I kind of like that, to tell you the truth,” General Dempsey said.

The Artist

Silence Is Golden

By MAUREEN DOWD in The New York Times

WASHINGTON
Hello chatter, my old friend.
The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.
As far back as half-a-century ago, the Swiss philosopher Max Picard warned: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence,” once as natural as the sky and air.
As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.
There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”
“In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video,” said Ed Schlossberg, the artist, author and designer who runs ESI Design. “Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.”
Schlossberg said that, for a long time, art provided the boundary for silence, “but now art, in some cases, is so distracting and intense and faceted, it’s hard to step into a moment. Especially when you’re always carrying a microcamera and a screen all the time, both recording and playing back constantly rather than allowing moments of composition and stillness when your brain can go into a reverie.”
In an inspiring throwback, art once more offers a chance to step into a mute and vivid moment of being in “The Artist,” the new silent movie that hit the Cannes Film Festival like a thunderclap.
First, an American writer and director, Woody Allen, created a gorgeous homage to vintage Paris in “Midnight in Paris.” Now, a French writer and director, Michel Hazanavicius, has created a gorgeous homage to vintage Hollywood.
Not being a silent movie buff, I was trepidatious about “The Artist.” And a 23-year-old at the Motion Picture Association of America screening here puzzled over why it needed to be silent. But I loved the clever evocation of a primal fear featured in the many iterations of “A Star Is Born,” as well as “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “All About Eve”: Will you get to the top, only to be devoured by the hot new thing?
“More and more people have that fear because of the financial crisis and how fast the world is changing,” Hazanavicius told me. “You’re at the top one day and very quickly you can fall. In the generation of my parents and grandparents, people worked in the same factory all their lives. Now people work there two months and they put it in China. Now you’re born into one world and you die in a very different world.”
It turns out that all the skeptics were wrong, and it was clever to do a silent movie in 2011, as an antidote to our modern plague of pointless chatter. It’s a weird paradox that the essential feature of technology is talkativeness, but usually without the sound of human voices attached.
In the case of “The Artist,” silence is not only golden, it’s a reminder of how much you can articulate without words. If you take away the language, green screens and 3-D glasses, the feelings — pride, vanity, envy, fear, love — can be more primary and fascinating.
Hollywood rarely makes great movies anymore. They make comics, phrases (“Friends With Benefits,” “He’s Just Not That Into You”) or holidays (“New Year’s Eve,” “Valentine’s Day”) and attach scripts that are often dreadful.
Hazanavicius has made a witty, moving and joyous romance about a dashing silent movie star, George Valentin — akin to John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks — who can’t accept talkies and a jazz-baby starlet who rises as he falls, and loves him as he crashes and literally burns.
The theme of silence is used ingeniously throughout, in Valentin’s relationship with his loyal Jack Russell terrier, in his “Citizen Kane” silent breakfast table tableau with his farbissina wife, and in the climactic Fred-and-Ginger tap dance that substitutes, as it did for Fred and Ginger, for a sex scene.
A moment where the starlet, Peppy Miller, luminously played by Bérénice Bejo, the real-life partner of Hazanavicius and the mother of his two children, sneaks into Valentin’s dressing room and role plays with his jacket is more romantic than anything Hollywood dreams up.
Hazanavicius recalled that at a French screening of the movie, a group of teenagers approached him. “They thanked me for letting them hear the silence,” he said. “It was touching to discover that these young people, always with their iPods, could like real silence.
“I compare it to the zero in mathematics. People think it’s nothing, but actually it’s not. It can be very powerful.”