The new society of individuals is one of the great achievements of the twentieth century, expressed in the spread of human rights and the values of individual dignity. It has challenged feudal and patriarchal structures. It has upended norms of conformity and anonymity associated with industrialized mass society. It has triggered a new era in politics and commerce, a new structure of individualized consumption, and a demand for individual voice. You and I would not be here now, meeting like this, our disembodied voices converging in a global distributed information milieu in my home and yours were it not for the accomplishments of this new human mentality.

    But this new society is also deeply contested. It is opposed by an ancient religious vision newly revitalized and spreading in various forms across the middle east, central Asia, and now throughout the most alienated pockets of the global Islamic community. It is contested by the varieties of fundamentalist and other conservative movements in the US. There are regressive proto fascist groups and extreme conservative factions across Europe.

    Tragically, the newest threat to the fragile accomplishments of late modern self determining individual comes from our own governments, and uniquely the US government under the leadership of the Bush White House and its agents– determined to hijack history and set it on a new course. This would be a fascinating subject for discussion and debate were its not for its immediate, acute, and destructive effects. My children are at risk. So are yours. It’s a technology story, it’s a political story, but most of all it’s a story of a full blown assault on the sanctity of the individual. It all starts with the terror worm.

    Years ago, when we were distracted with grief and dismay, White House hackers stealthily released a destructive “terror worm” here at home. With our societal immune system badly compromised by the shocks of 9/11, our existing fire walls proved no match for this new menace. The terror worm has by now burrowed its way into our public places and our homes. It invaded our bodies and infected our children. Like most worms, this one was concealed in a series of attachments sent by the Security conglomerate of Homeland, Transportation, and National: warrantless wiretapping programs; secret data mining of emails, credit card purchases, Internet searches, and travel plans; rendition, torture, and the abrogation of habeas corpus. More is on the way: GPS tracking, biometric scanners, online indices of suspicious persons, DNA databases. These technologies of control invented to catch the bad guys have become the hosts upon which the worm hitches a ride to its ultimate target: the intimate recesses of our daily lives. Like chronic fatigue or Gulf War syndrome, there’s no official recognition of the anxiety the worm produces. Its presence is only detectable as things we count on, and cherish, unexpectedly vanish (to be continued…)

Episode II:
After Mom died, the only person who seemed to know anything about her–her health and the likely causes of her death–was a man whom she had never met. He was the State Medical Examiner. How could someone who had never laid eyes on my Mom, who had never spoken with her, know more about her health than the doctors with whom she visited regularly? You’d think the State Medical Examiner would be some distant bureaucrat. Turned out to be just the opposite. He returned my phone call with the hour. He was kind and understanding. He spoke with me patiently and answered all of my questions. Later, I thought of more questions, and days later, still more. He rigorously returned my calls and never showed the slightest bit of boredom with my queries. He said that Mom was a ticking time bomb, just the sort of person who could fall over dead at any moment. And that’s exactly what happened. She fell like a tree. He carefully explained why.
Episode I:
My mom is dead. I still don’t know who killed her. There are various hypotheses. Did my mom kill herself? Did I kill her? Was she killed by her primary care physician, her cardiologist, her orthopedic surgeon? Other docs she saw? Was mom killed by her friends? My brother? Was it any one of the myriad pills organized neatly in their containers on a tray she kept on her kitchen table (that tray now sits in my linen closet: a sentinel, a reminder, a tale waiting to be told), or maybe the interaction among them?

My mom is dead. I have passed through the many stages of grief, charted and uncharted, and now I am looking for answers. Why? Knowing who killed my mom won’t bring her back. But whoever killed my mom may also be lying in wait, ready to kill yours. I don’t want your mom to die the way mine did–an unnecessary death. I am a scholar. Such are my skills. I intend to use them to try and prevent your mom’s death. Or your father’s. Or yours. Or that of any of your beloved ones. There is no real fix for health care in this country, or any other, that does not address the agents of my mom’s death.

In the coming days and weeks and months, I’ll be exploring these hypotheses and more in this space.