Crawling from the Wreckage (10 page)

The notion that the voters might punish a candidate for not owning a gun would seem simply bizarre in most jurisdictions, but it is a serious political reality in the U.S. That’s why hardly anybody in the U.S. is using the latest mass slaughter by some enraged loser (thirty-three dead at Virginia Tech) to argue for more gun control. There’s not even pressure to renew the federal law banning the sale of assault rifles, which was recently allowed to lapse.

Gun control is a dead issue in the United States, and it isn’t coming back. There is a sound political reason for this, and there is also a rational explanation for it (which isn’t the same thing).

The political reason was simplicity itself: the Democratic Party realized that it wasn’t going to win back a majority in either house of Congress if it didn’t stop talking about gun control. The party’s leaders looked at the political map after the 2004 election, a sea of Republican red with a narrow strip of Democratic blue on either coast, and realized that their problem was more than just George W. Bush’s fatal charm. They weren’t winning in “heartland” states because they were seen as trying to take Americans’ guns away.

There are other issues even in Montana, of course, but enough people care passionately about their guns in Montana that it’s hard to get elected there if you are seen as anti-gun. So now the Democratic Party’s national platform commits it to uphold the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—and in the 2006 election, it won both the Senate seat that was being contested in Montana and the governorship of the state, for decades a Republican stronghold.

The campaign manifesto of the new Democratic senator from Montana, Jon Tester, claimed that he would “stand up to anyone—Republican or Democratic—who tries to take away Montanans’ gun rights.” The new Democratic governor of Montana, Brian Schweizer, says that he has “more guns than I need but not as many as I want … I guess I kind of believe in gun control: you control your gun, and I’ll control mine.” It’s a whole new image for Democrats, and it won them control of both houses of Congress in 2006. (Yes, the war helped, too, but by itself it wouldn’t have been enough.)

The Democrats were not going to lose the coastal states (where the effete intellectuals and most of the old urban working class live) even if they did drop gun control. They were not going to win in the heartland (where the born-agains and the Marlboro Men live) if they didn’t drop gun control. So they dropped it, and now no large party supports it. That’s the politics of it, and it’s hard to argue the point.

There is another, quite rational reason why gun control doesn’t get much traction in American politics anymore. It’s simply too late. This is a society that owns approximately equal numbers of wristwatches and guns: around a quarter-billion of each. There’s no going back—and if practically everybody else has guns, maybe you should have one, too.

As various commentators will be pointing out soon, if just one of those thirty-three murdered students had been carrying a concealed handgun, maybe the killer would have been stopped sooner. It is perfectly legal to carry concealed weapons with a permit in Virginia, but not on college campuses. This loophole must be closed.

More fundamentally, the gun control argument may be missing the cultural point. Most Swiss and Israeli households with a male between the ages of eighteen and forty-five also contain a fully automatic weapon, because the national military mobilization model in those countries requires reservists to keep their weapons at home. Yet the Swiss and Israelis don’t murder one another at a higher rate than people in countries like Britain or Turkey, where there is relatively strict gun control.

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is the best-known slogan of the National Rifle Association, the most effective pro-gun lobbying organization in the United States. But it’s really a cultural thing: the British have bad teeth, the French smell of garlic, Americans tend to
have more bullet holes in them than other people. The slogan should actually go: “Guns don’t kill Americans; Americans kill Americans.”

My two favourite types of fiction are alternative histories and science fiction. One genre imagines different ways that the past might have played out; the other imagines ways that the future may unfold. I’m a romantic about the future, and I suspect that the human adventure may have just begun, although I know that there are several ways in which it could end quite abruptly. At any rate, I am living at the right time
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The real wonder of our age is that you can go on the Web, type in Planet Quest: New Worlds Atlas, or The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, or
NASA
Star and Exoplanet Database, and directly access the data on 340 new planets that have been discovered in the past five years.

That number is set to grow very fast now, for last Saturday
NASA
(the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) successfully launched the Kepler telescope, which will find many more planets, including potentially Earth-like ones. It will stare unblinkingly at an area of space containing about one hundred thousand relatively near stars, watching for the tiny dimming of a star that happens when one of the star’s planets passes between the star and us.

I enjoyed writing that last sentence. I couldn’t have written it ten years ago because at that time we still didn’t know whether it was normal for a star to have planets. Maybe planets were very rare, and life a thousand times rarer, and we were the only intelligent life in the galaxy. That always seemed pretty unlikely but you couldn’t prove otherwise.

Well, now we know that planets are as common as dirt. Another new technique, which can see past the blinding glare of the parent star to pick out the faint light reflected from a planet’s surface, has found planets revolving around more than a hundred nearby stars. It’s like spotting a candle burning next to a lighthouse from a thousand kilometres away, but it works.

The Kepler telescope mechanizes the search. If any of those one hundred thousand stars have planets that orbit in a plane that causes them
to pass between the star and us, Kepler will spot them by the dimming they cause as they pass in front of the star. Probably thousands of the stars have planets orbiting in that plane, so now the tally of “exoplanets” (planets orbiting other suns) is going to rise very quickly.

Even in that tiny section of sky, Kepler will probably miss tens of thousands of other planets whose orbits don’t bring them between their star and the Earth. Moreover, the great majority of the planets it does find will be gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, because gas giants orbiting close to their stars are the easiest planets to spot. But those are planets that cannot support our kind of life; the real triumph will be finding planets like Earth.

The closest astronomers have come so far is a planet called Gliese 581 c. It’s the middle planet of three orbiting Gliese 581, a star about twenty light-years from here. It may have other planets, but we can’t see them, and it’s only one-and-a-half times the diameter of Earth. It is a rocky planet like our own, not a gas giant, and it is in the “Goldilocks Zone” around its star, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold to permit liquid water on the surface.

Gliese 581 c is not another Earth. The gravity is much higher; it is very close to its sun (which is smaller, dimmer and cooler than our own); and it whips around its sun every 13 days compared to our 365 days. But it could potentially support our kind of life—which makes it, for the moment, the second most interesting object in the universe after our own planet.

We still cannot see if it has an atmosphere, and if so, whether it contains the telltale gases that indicate the presence of life, but a new generation of orbiting observatories planned for the next decade—
NASA
‘s Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency’s Darwin project—could give us the answers. Darwin, for example, is going to survey one thousand of the closest stars, looking for small, rocky planets and seeking signs of life on them.

Two big consequences are going to come out of all this. One is a long and tempting list of Earth-like planets in our own stellar neighbourhood, with, quite likely, evidence of life on many of them.

Unless we can discover some loophole in the laws of physics, we may never reach them—the distances involved are immense—but they will always be there, beckoning us to come and visit, even to come and
settle them. The knowledge that there is a destination worth going to can be a powerful spur to innovation.

The other consequence is a huge question about intelligent life in the universe. If planets capable of supporting life are so commonplace—last month Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago that there could be a hundred billion such planets in this galaxy alone—then where is everybody?

Is intelligence a rare accident in the evolutionary process, or such a self-destructive attribute that intelligent species don’t usually survive more than a couple of centuries after they industrialize? Are they all observing radio silence because there is something dreadful out there? Or have we just not figured out yet how mature galactic civilizations communicate?

I enjoyed writing that paragraph, too.

I feel compelled to write a piece about the “war on drugs” every year or so because it’s the stupidest war of all and by far the easiest one to end. Doing so would also save more lives than any other war we might end, but writing about it usually feels like shouting down a well
.

Occasionally, however, a little bit of hope breaks through
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It’s too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” the United States has been waging for the past thirty-nine years, but something significant is happening. European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal consumption of many of the banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it’s different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The U.S. can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer be a punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about four lines), five grams of marijuana (around four joints), fifty milligrams of heroin or forty milligrams of methamphetamine.

At the end of August, Argentina’s Supreme Court did something even bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state,” and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for possessing a few joints.

In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the federal government to meddle in citizens’ private affairs. It took a constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to prohibit alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol prohibition in 1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize other recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970? Nobody—and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

Half a million Americans a year went to jail last year for drug-related “crimes” that hurt nobody but themselves, and a vast criminal empire has grown up to service the American demand for drugs. Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the turf wars between the gangs, the police–dealer shootouts, and the daily thousands of muggings and burglaries committed by addicts trying to raise money to pay the hugely inflated prices that prohibition makes inevitable.

Most users of illegal drugs are not addicts, let alone dangerous criminals. Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and tobacco, would avoid thousands of violent deaths each month and millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive drug use would still take its toll on the vulnerable and unlucky, just as alcohol and tobacco do.

But what about the innocent children who will be exposed to these drugs if they become freely available throughout society? Nothing that doesn’t happen to them now. There are no cities and few rural areas in the developed world where you cannot buy any illegal drug known to man within half an hour, for an amount of money that can be raised by any enterprising fourteen-year-old.

Indeed, the supply of really nasty drugs would probably diminish if prohibition ended, because they are mainly a response to the level of
risk the dealers must face. (Economist Milton Friedman called it the “Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated that substance becomes—so cocaine gives way to crack cocaine, as beer gave way to moonshine under alcohol prohibition.)

But there is little chance that American voters will choose to end this longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its casualties far exceed those of any other American war since 1945. The “War on Drugs” will not end in the United States until a very different generation comes to power.

Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the explanation will then focus on the man who started the war, Richard Nixon—so let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.

We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on drugs because he believed that they were a Jewish plot. We know this because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug Policy, a Washington-based non-governmental organization, went through the last batch of tapes when they became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking to his aides as follows: