Embracing Chaos

This last week there was a lot of news coverage of a "daring hostage rescue in Columbia."  Fifteen people were freed from the FARC.  Many had been held captive for years, including politician Ingrid Betancourt, and three Americans.  The press has been celebrating the victory along several lines.  How wonderful it is for these people to be set free after years of captivity.  How the US military helped plan and support the operation.  How the guerrillas were fooled into giving the hostages up without firing a single shot.  (Aren’t we smart!  Aren’t they stuipd?)

But there’s a dark side to this rescue that I haven’t seen anybody discuss.  The reason the guerrillas allowed those hostages to get on that helicopter without firing a shot because they thought it was operated by a humanitarian group.  It’s true that the operation relied on intercepted communications and a spy in the FARC’s command structure.  But the operation relied on a having military helicopter painted white and its crew claiming to be apolitical.  The press even describes the acting lessons the soldiers took to pretend to be NGO workers.  Oh those foolish rebels who fell for such a simple trick by trusting aid workers.  What dupes!

Now look at this from another angle.  Imagine you really are an NGO worker, trying to provide some kind of support service to remote Columbia.  How does knowledge of an operation like this make you feel?  Scared, probably.  From now on, rebels are going to doubt the legitimacy of all NGO workers.  They might think you’re in the Columbian military trying to take advantage of them again.  They might even start shooting down Red Cross helicopters.  The negative externality of this rescue is that all legitimate humanitarian work in the area has just gotten a lot more difficult and dangerous.

So as Santos brags that this rescue "will go down in history for its audaciousness and effectiveness" he ignores the fact that he just cashed in a bunch of good will to make this happen.  This stuff doesn’t grow easily like coca plants.  I’m glad those people have their lives back, but I am in no way convinced it was worth the sacrifice.  What’s going to happen next time there’s a public health crisis in the area?  The moral calculus is undoubtedly complex.  But ask yourself, would you trade the freedom of a dozen captives (including three Americans) for risking the well-being of many thousands of needy individuals?  How about for the lives of a half dozen International Red Cross workers murdered by suspicious rebels?

Revolutionaries are idealists.  They have to be.  They risk their lives to fight for what they believe in.  Lenin, Mao, Castro — they all truly and deeply believed that they were fighting for a better way of life for their people.  And to a varying degrees, they accomplished that.  In fact in all three of these cases — Russia, China and Cuba, the early years after the revolution were relatively good for the people.  Wealth was redistributed and poverty decreased.  The second world is generally better than the third world.  When I was living in communist China, I found it to be a lot like camping — everything worked and was possible, but nothing was quite as convenient or comfortable as I would have liked.

But as communist governments age they tend to become corrupt and dictatorial.  Why?  Unchecked power.  Without elections or a free press, there is essentially no way to remove a bad leader.  Highly secretive control structures like the politburo tend to select for leaders that can amass and wield power by any means possible.  These traits tend to become much more concentrated than any traits related to good governance.  This was the undoing of the Soviet block and hopefully soon will dismantle North Korea.  How China managed to avoid this state I won’t ponder here.

Despite what the US State Department would like you to believe, Cuba’s government has not (yet) devolved to this state.  Cuba is still highly egalitarian where top government officials only earn twice what a factory worker might make — not the wretched excess of a corrupt system.  They probably get to drive cars, but are required to pick up all hitchhikers since really it’s the people’s car.  For the most part Cubans trust their government and with good reason.  Cuba is not corrupt.  Of course if you’re smart and ambitious you have much more to gain in a capitalist system which leads to justifiably frustrated opponents.  While their lifestyles are anything but luxurious, Cubans are generally fairly happy, healthy and well educated.  Happiness is subjective, but statistics clearly show Cuba to be on par if not better than the US for healthcare and education in most measures.  It’s not a bad place to live.

The success of Cuban communism should not come as much of a surprise considering what we’ve discussed so far.  Castro was idealistic when he led the revolution, and he’s still on power.  Corrupt leaders have not been able to take control yet.  A problem with communism is that what happens next will depend very strongly on one individual.  Will they be more like Fidel or Kim Jong-Il.  We’ll have to wait to see.

My 14-year old Subaru is on its way out, and since I’m commuting to Kirkland almost every day I really need a new car.  Primary criteria for me are safety and fuel economy / ecological impact.  Safety seems to correlate very strongly with model year so I’m looking at new cars.  In theory running on bio-diesel gives your car essentially zero net carbon impact.  Also, many new renewable organic fuel sources seem to be more like diesel than gasoline.  So I looked at what diesel cars can be purchased new in the US these days.  I was amazed at how slim the choices are.  If you want a new diesel vehicle in this country, here are your choices…

• Pickup trucks — many models, small and large
• Full-sized vans — think church-group van or delivery van, not soccer-mom minivan
• Mercedes — 3 models: E-class sedans, R-class station wagons, and GL-class or M-class SUVs.  All $45k+
• Volkswagen Taureg 2 — VW’s SUV has a diesel option starting at $68k
• Jeep Grand Cherokee — starting at $37k for diesel

Color me underwhelmed.  I might have missed something, but as far as I can tell there is exactly one non-SUV non-pickup diesel car on the market in this country: the Mercedes E-class.  Yowza.   Seriously, what gives?

In Europe, diesel cars are totally common-place.  While here we’re all abuzz about our fancy hybrids that can get 40+ mpg, Europeans can choose cars like the Citroen C4 which gets 46 38 mpg city and 71 59 mpg on the highway!  [Correction: These are per imperial gallon, which are 1.2 US gallons.]  I drove a Citroen (might even have been a C4) from Paris to Tuscany and back a couple of summers ago.  Let me assure you these are not stereotypically crappy French-engineered clunkers, but actually pretty nice cars, and not old-world tiny either. 

That number bears repeating.  71 59 miles per gallon on the highway.  When is this country going to get it together and raise the CAFE standards in a meaningful way and not just for show?  It’s for everybody’s good.

[Photo courtesy of Robert Candelori]