OK, now...

I want to follow up on my Saturday comments about Ron Paul. Again, I do not support his "philosophy" (libertarianism is arbitrary and unrealistic), but he reminds me of, well, myself.

I'm a software developer with an MBA who has worked in quite a few industries on different problems. While I don't profess that this background grants me great wisdom (just a little, maybe), it does allow me to comment on things from a fairly broad perspective. I've seen various issues arise, and seen (and participated in) various solutions, some of which have worked better than others.

So, in a meeting, I'm frequently going to be the person bringing up the larger issues ("if we want to support the needs our customers have, we will have to restructure the database access to allow users to query it directly"). A huge proportion of the time, the response, from people ostensibly concerned with the same situation, is stark uncomfortable silence, followed by, "OK, now..." ("what color should the splash screen be?", a topic which then consumes the rest of the hour).

I don't think I'm particularly strident in bringing up these matters; quite the contrary, there are people close to me who say I'm far too quiet and unassuming. What I think is happening is that the room is simply not prepared to discuss such things, no matter how true or significant they may be. It takes a long time for most people to accept that the world is not the way they want to assume it is, that the status quo may be downright wrong.

From my standpoint, however, the worst thing is not that the problem is going to go on, possibly fester, until it becomes so obvious that change is needed that action is finally taken. (Managers, who ought to be taking the longer-term view, tend to be the leading proponents of the conservative, backward-looking approach.) That should bother me the most, but I'm human, and what frustrates me is the is-he-an-alien look that the other people tend to have before moving on to another, far less critical, issue. I want to go Close-ian on all these people who are neglecting what ought to be a major part of their responsibility ("I'm not going to be ignored, Dan").

And this is Ron Paul in a meeting of candidates.

Does terrorism against the West result from the actions of the West in Muslim countries? Does our "occupation" of holy Saudi Arabia inflame anti-U.S. passions (and "they asked us to be there" is no defense; many Muslims feel that the sheiks are as bad in their decadence and embrace of Western ways)? Is our historical interference in their politics a rallying cause? Do our actions come out of a need to prop up a failing, petroleum-based lifestyle?

These are valid issues to discuss, and discussing them would seem to be extremely pertinent in the changed post-9/11 world. (An interesting book on this is Imperial Hubris by intelligence official Michael Scheuer; regardless of how you evaluate his ideas and solutions, it struck me as an important contribution to the literature.) Being simplistic would seem to be the worst thing we could do.

Yet it is exactly what the candidates do. Ron Paul is trying to bring up these issues, albeit in a quasi-lunatic style that does not serve him well. And he gets the look (particularly from Romney, who strikes me as a supercilious smarm-master), that look that says we're not just going to disagree with you, but that you're insane to try to discuss such things.

But we have to discuss such things if we're going to reach a long-term accommodation with Islam. Sound bites like "they hate us, they hate our way of life" may sound tough on the stump, but will not assist the next President in actually engaging the problem. We all fear terrorism and the uncertainty it brings to our lives, but reducing the causes to individual pathology will not illuminate the situation, nor will it lead to a solution.

So I wonder how frustrated Ron Paul is getting, as he tries to be the adult in a room of intellectual children. I suspect that Paul's support, which has surprised a lot of pundits, comes from people who suspect that the issues we face are more serious and complicated than the other candidates are letting on. Blathering on about change is meaningless unless the change is meaningful (and kudos to Huckabee for at least acknowledging that), and meaningful change should only result from a deep understanding of the forces involved, not from focus group-tested, simplistic slogans.