There is a swelling of agreement among the peoples of the world on the threat and the need to act. It is an incipient mass movement. The necessary acts required of us and how they are to be coordinated has to become universally clear, and in this task sociologists have a part.

Start with a simple idea of the social order within which this heating-cooling process is taking place.

First, the people (seen as a mass of individuals, families, kin groups, neighbors, circles of friends) whose energy use affects the earth’s temperature.

Second, the technical cadres of scientists, engineers, mechanics, whose willingness to instruct and share with the rest of us provide the concepts upon which we can act.

Third, the governing cadres whose legislation, executive decision, police, and propaganda have had mixed results so far.

Fourth, there is the fossil fuel institution made up of those who benefit from and actively support and work this socio-economic order. The success of this way has been acclaimed since its modern introduction perhaps two centuries back. But now the down side has become obvious and the social edifice and the profits and power and employment and the way of life it represents are directly challenged. They resist, block, obfuscate, confuse and in general do not consider cooling it is the right way. They form the line of contention against the emerging people’s cool it cadres.

So far the fossil fuel gang has continued dominant but with some contrary moves by government, commercial interests, and ordinary people in Europe, Japan and in some U.S. states. But the heavy weight tips in favor of the hots. In China and India the coal powered electric generating stations continue to be built. The world-wide search for fossil fuel accelerates. The beginning of the development in the USA of more efficient combustion engines and cars begun in the 1970s was quickly reversed. The American people actually elected loyal members of the fossil fuel gang to positions of leadership in the federal executive and legislative branches.

Fossil fuel interests in control at the top regardless of the type of political-economic order is shocking, makes the novelist Orwell (Eric Blair) seem even more a genius. Neo-capitalist, neo-communist, and personal dictatorships all belong to the fossil fuel camp. So the possibility of the independent mass action of the world’s peoples is even more critical. With water rising in your life-boat every cup bailed over the side is a valued contribution. Don’t let the captain blowing smoke up his own nose distract you.

Presume the mass movement exists and you are part of it. Let that be the field within which your pro-cool decisions and actions find their larger meaning. Each contribution counts. The sum total of all the acts is the social measure.

So the obvious: electricity is only another form of energy. Manpower and horsepower are still possible. If everyone on earth walks an extra mile we save five or so billion miles worth of transportation fuel. And it is the healthier way as well. Use foot, bike, rowboat, horse or mule as a first step. Reduce the foot-print in the sky.

This is the essential principle: when there is a reasonable choice go alternate energy and go green. The media have been reporting these acts for years. We are well started.

Be aware that energy always comes from energy and we have to evaluate the true cost in terms of energy and not only money. The engineers tell us that the hydrogen fuel cell to power cars is made by using coal. A greenhouse spewing process is required to get a clean fuel. When you see a hydrogen car, think of coal burning.

All garnering of natural energy like moving wind and water and the sun’s rays and the heat bubbling up from under the earth’s mantle requires the use of a prior energy. Sometimes it is a natural ecological or geological process. Sometimes energy is factory made with energy. In any case there is always a collecting cost. In comparing one type of energy against another we have to use this energy metric. This is the possible downside in all of our energy actions. The real cost of any clean energy gain can be estimated by technicians. We all should be aware of this kind of evaluation. The new electric car has to be charged from the grid which continues to be supplied by mainly fossil fuel burning generators. Again a balancing of advantage and its opposite.

We argue incremental change instead of large jumps–not as a preference but as a realistic registering of what is likely to happen. Any one of us who powers his house or business with a solar panel system and gets off the mostly fossil fuel grid has joined the process. Use the more efficient electric tools and gadgets and join the process.

There is a rolling division of labor (everyone who rolls in can play a part) among the institutions where the energy saving and cleaning has to take place–transportation, housing, tools and gadgets, manufacturing, electric power generators. Think of them together as the social system whose product is a rising or a lowering of heat.

In each there is a distinction between new and used. Like in the world of automobiles where the current shift in new production seems to be going toward hybrid and electric or, at the least, toward higher mileage per gallon of gas for combustion engines. This is a fractional change. It is not zero greenhouse emissions (our goal) but an improvement, a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile the millions of greenhouse making older autos continue. They have been part of the heat up and will carry-on their nefarious work into the decades ahead unless their owners act with dispatch. Each of them will have to consider converting his toward a better gas mileage rate if nothing else. Just lowering the weight of a car will help. Take out all unnecessary objects and parts and materials. Less weight increases mileage. Ascertain correct tire pressure to maximize mileage gain. Lower speed while driving. Change driving habits–slower stops and acceleration and deceleration. Improving each used car even a modest amount will sum up to a large gas saving and reduced CO2 emission for the world wide fleet.

It would make sense to find as many kit conversions toward gas mileage advantage or conversions to hybrid or all electric. This will be difficult and complex–each make and model will need its own solution-kit. I would suggest asking each automotive engineering school in the world to select a make and model and assign students the task of developing a reasonably priced conversion kit to reduce greenhouse emissions. These young engineers and mechanics are among our most inventive people and they are sure to find a great number of useful answers.

The mass mobilization will take the form of a constant series of small individual steps facilitated by the discoveries and teachings of our engineering cadres. It is a matter of our decisions and actions moving in the same cool it direction. In part we can bypass any regressive do-nothing governing cadres even though some key changes (like electric generating stations) will still remain with them and associated commercial interests.

The necessary decisions and actions required are not simple. We use energy in a variety of ways in a variety of settings. Transportation, shelter, tools, gadgets, generating stations, manufacturing are all different and special. There are further distinctions within each sector. The diversity is encyclopedic in scope. What we have to do, if we accept the task, is knock down several revered, beloved, habitual, valuable, and singular institutions simultaneously and replace them with intrinsically different alternatives whose consequences in practice we can not totally anticipate. It, like all human choice, will be a crap shoot.

Yet the logic of this change is convincing. The greater risk is with staying the same. The polar caps are melting, sea level is going up, the tundra is turning to mush, the winds are ablowing, the floods inundating, the deserts getting dryer and expanding. We all expect a big cauldron of a granddaddy tropical heat wave that will go on and on like Hell itself. We will need a modern Dante to describe it. Surely even enemies in their macabre dance of death must see this shared menace approaching.

The sociology of our situation requires an abstract description of the social order and process that are forming. A new ideology (understanding) based on technical measurements and observations is articulated and begins to be accepted by the people. To the extent that it governs and logically evokes necessary actions a mass movement develops. Eugene Ionescu’s play, “Rhinoceros,” sums up the down side of this experience, but here the angels, we hope, are on the side of the group.

A counter ideology representing the old way is always present. A front of contention and possible conflict is established. Its form and content varies according to actual situation. Leadership and organizing cadres become involved within the governing regimes and within the informal order of the people.

For global warming this is where we are. Now what are we to do?

I have to admit that I have been convinced by the anti-fossil fuel arguments. I am for the rapid conversion to alternate renewable fuels and to the equally rapid reduction of fossil fuel use (along with the associated production of greenhouse gases) toward zero. I am a rhino in what I think is a benign and necessary cause.

We are not giving up objectivity, only seeing its limit. The state of the future of our planet belongs to all of us. The observer is a participant. Think of it as a job of work for us all. So much to do, so little time.

There are three preliminary tasks:

(1) The incipient mass movement is there but I suspect it is not uniformly distributed. Knowledge takes hold as a segmented order. So the scientists and journalists must continue to grind out their packets of reality as they see it. Of course if the heating pattern and the understanding of it change we will want to hear that as well. The ideology should stay as close to the ecological and natural reality as we can approach.

(2) The move from ideology to action is hampered by obstacles. These are beliefs and cultural motifs in place that contradict, deny, minimize, confuse us as we try to find our way through. The contention with the pro-fossil fuel industry and lobby is found in this gray area. Complexity, half-truths, omitted facts get into the discussion. Sometimes we all seem to be on the same side. Exposing and clearing these blocks to action is the job for the intellectual, the critic, and the activist sociologist. The objective is to clear the runway for takeoff.

(3) The movement to end the greenhouse effect that we are supposing (with some conviction) supports global warming takes the form of a division of labor. Specialty engineers, activists, participants in each institutional sector are the cadre representatives of the whole (the rest of us.) Their jobs are to find and introduce the best ways to reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term and to eliminate them in the long while maintaining the necessary and essential functions the fossil fuels had been supporting. In the short term, for example, the lighter hybrid car and the more efficient and lighter gasoline powered cars with vastly improved mileage per gallon of fuel would seem an advance over the heavier gasoline guzzlers.

The recognition that we are together, that our positive individual acts contribute to a larger whole, and that with coordination we can exercise our efforts in several directions at once will be salutary in itself.

I feel better already.

More on this topic in our next post.

It is a model of a possible way. The threat–man’s acts have an unexpected ecological consequence. The concept–burning fossil fuels release massive and persistent greenhouse gases that preserve and increase the earth’s surface temperature. The action–we stop using the culprit materials and the crisis abates.

In a contrary way the government (in association with the international system of governing nation-states) acts, supposedly for the benefit of the whole. It outlaws the use of fossil fuels, to be replaced by alternate natural and benign energy sources like wind, sun, water in motion, thermal heat. The greenhouse roof in the sky is dismantled and we all, snug in our long-johns, live happily ever after.

More likely we will find our way into a combination of the two as we did in the tobacco-cancer crisis. The mass movement of the people was in the parallel giving up of the tobacco habit. The government eventually placed exorbitant taxes on tobacco products and outlawed smoking in public indoor spaces. Note that the overthrow of the tobacco monster habit is still not complete, that it has continued for many decades, that a lot of unnecessary early illness and death continues, and that leaders of the tobacco industry along with hard core members of the tobacco cult have resisted the process to protect their investments and their profits and their jobs and their unique culture.

The linking of energy use to increasing earth temperature is a more complex equation. The consequence is not as palpable. Cancer striking kin and neighbors and self like the black death of the middle ages catches one’s attention but this heating trend is more like a rumor–the faint rumble of the Golden Horde approaching. Will it arrive tomorrow or sometime in the next century or will it be diverted? Or maybe it is only a myth and a delusion? So the connection of gasoline to the white roof panes of the greenhouse are forgotten along with the possible catastrophic future. The auto driving habit is only threatened by the rising cost of the pernicious fuel. Our factories, houses, tools, operated by unconcerned humans, spew out (let’s take a chance and call it) death. The Horde is no rumor, it is us.

Yet we are no fools. We are modern and we can understand a long range scientific prediction and we can understand the constant possibility of political extortion by the international oil cartel against our national interest. We might be ready to join the mass move against the fossil fuel habit once we are roused and can see the route forward.

Energy, like Count Guido, goes off in all directions. It requires more than giving up a dangerous act. It points to a radically new way of life. We have to go consistently and constantly toward the more efficient and less destructive ways of energy use. We have to lower our use of manufactured energy to the most essential purposes–change our priorities. And we have to conserve energy as though it were gold and we were all Volpone clones.

The difficult jump to the non-tobacco regime was duck soup in comparison. What is this new threat and way? A change in physical environment (not a fatal disease), it leads to a change in habit and behavior and technical usage that requires the mass to act together in unison to be effective. One person driving an electric car in Mexico City will not make a difference. The mass movement has to be at the social level. A change in a number of sectors is needed and not simply one–transportation, building, tools, manufacturing, power generation, gadgets. The required changeover feels like a loss of power and convenience; feels like the loss of a known economic and cultural order. This is more than a change of one habit, it is a critical change in life style.

It becomes obvious, everything considered, that we might not be able to reach the goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions. Short term self interest is a critical block. We might not be able to get there from here. A conclusion I am reluctantly beginning to reach. The fact that an increase in the price of oil has more influence toward reducing use of the automobile than all the dire scientific predictions of global warming is a bad sign. But one can hope (against the doubt) that it is only a temporary hitch. Who knows, maybe a Goya image will penetrate and dissolve the willful blindness.

The paradigm of the mass movement is there ready to be mobilized, but like a car with caked plugs, a weakened battery, and a near empty tank there is a lot of rhetorical grinding but no explosion.

We need a spark.

Don’t we.

We call it a mass because the internal organization of the grouping can be simple. Individuals are moved to similar actions by the same understanding. Whether a more complex social order will develop or whether certain prior organizational links might exist is open. Each case will have its own unique rolling-out.

The cadre functions (of initiation, instruction, coordination, planning and such) will be present but how extensive, whether centralized or diffuse, whether formal or informal will all be open. The source and recruitment of cadre personnel will be variable.

The pattern in time and space can arise and dissipate quickly like the hula-hoop craze or it can develop slowly as happened with the shift in diet away from saturated fat–stretching out over the years.

The notion of mass movement as we are defining it here is very broad because it is so simple. I like it because it contains, while also ranging beyond, dictatorial and bureaucratic initiatives and their negations. It recognizes the possibility that the people may understand and act for themselves. The paradigm again: individuals in parallel receive (discover, realize, appreciate) the same concept (idea, theory, understanding) and act upon it.

We have to be aware that the social experiences we are calling up here are not all benign. Some mass movements are the devil’s own. Before being swept up into a movement each of us should pause and impose an ethical test. Since we share a received civilization I expect this test will be very similar for us all though with some differences around the edge.

These movements are occurring all the time. We usually do not notice because they have become conventional and institutionalized (made formal and legal). So the children go to school and the rest of us to work or leisure or whatever. We think of these doings in more specific terms and only use the idea of mass movement for our more tricky, more problematic, less established situations.

A lot of our daily lives are riven with mass movements initiated by commercial, religious, ideological, political cadres using advertising, propaganda, laws, rhetorical appeals, monetary inducements, and, in some places, violence. We are hardly conscious of these induced motives to action even though we understand how they operate.

But there are continuing opportunities for benign action minimally guided by altruistic cadres instead of the almost entirely self-interested ones who continually haunt us. I suspect we are well into the early stages of an anti-global warming and pro-greening mass movement.

We’ll move in this direction in our next post.

Such sequences are prominent during political elections. The persona each candidate presents is made up of a collection of significant stories. (The look, the rhetorical style, the manner, the acts and commitments, the judgment and such complete the portrait.) Through emphasis, shading, omissions and exaggerations these stories are stretched into myths that sometimes approximate reality. Through the story we think we know the person.

But opposing politicos search out and publicize events and interpretations that alter the image of the other. So each person’s myth has many possible faces: the multi-sources of information, the multi-perceptions with which the audience takes it up. The myth-image can become fuzzy but it still makes a definite set of probability patterns: Is this war hero a teller of tall tales? Is this scholar a dummy? Is this husband or wife a philanderer? Does this reformer consort with inside operators–the dreaded lobbyists? Does a mind change too readily or is it too rigid?

Beyond politics and elections we, the people, have our own stories and it is only by passing these myths of the politicians through the prisms of our experiences of real face-to-face others that we can bring the candidates’ larger than life, movie screen, overpowering advertising impact down to human scale. If we appreciate our interconnectedness, we will not fall into the cult of the personality or the cult of the demon. Our leaders and our cadres, we must remind ourselves, are real people just like ourselves. To know that is a step toward liberation.

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These stories are interlocked and take us in their infinite detail back to the underbelly of our society, to the bottom up sociology of the people. If alive at the time, every American has a 9/11/01 story, a World War II story and so on. Theoretically there is an interlock here, the many stories of the people and the sovereign story of the collective’s cadre but one sometimes feels that the path through is missing, that you can’t get there from here.

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Every story refers back and refers forward and refers to the sides and even up and down. The parents and the children. The friends, associates, kinsmen. The spouses, companions and comrades. The before and the after. The parallel. Each of us is ego central, the main character in our own stories, yet all those who have parts in our stories are ego central in their own. From story to story we step to stage center or back toward the wing or down to be members of the audience whose part is to hear the tale. Who each of us is depends on who (plus where and when) is narrating.

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This is the first link: the cross participation in the stories of each other as main character, important figure, bit player, witness, or part of the audience to the telling. This pushes toward the concrete–below the myth to the event itself, the who, what, when, where questions that investigative journalists, detectives and historians track. The connects we want are real.

Another link, the sharing of the formal pattern of the event. Each event and its myth is unique but it fits into an abstract form with others where there is a similarity. So we can all see the abstract connect in the break-up of intimate pairs. Death, divorce, separation, end dating and relating. The pattern is frequently built into the understanding within the culture and social order, but it may also be an invention or speculation of the sociologist. So the break-up of a business firm and the dispersion of its owners and employees, the end of a limited task for which a special company has been formed like the group that makes a stage play or movie or raises a barn or gathers a farm crop, the demobilized military unit, and so on–all fit this split and scatter pattern. The same end of relationship is visible. Whether this form will lead to a useful analysis or insight is another question. That is the challenge and the risk.

We could go on to the story-myth contexts of institutions, cultural segments, social organizations, types of action (ie. competition, conflict, cooperation or escape, encounter) and so on, but we have framed the topic of the political condidates’ stories back to a sociology of the people. And since this is a blog, not a book, our take on this story is done.

Not likely, a number of POW books and movies assure us. The on-going war continues and the prisoners drag their feet and challenge and discomfit the guards-enemy as much as they can and dare. Most audaciously, the prisoners try to escape and return to active duty. All this is serious business. Violent injury and death are in the offering for guards and prisoners both. Only the most active are up to it. Most do their time and try to come out alive and as psychologically whole as possible.

An international treaty adhered to by most nation-states sets an overarching convention governing behavior in war. The treatment of POWs is part of this legal code. The person has dropped or surrendered his weapon. He is no longer an offensive threat. He is defenseless and though he may be retained in custody he is to be treated in a humane and civilized fashion. It is a peculiar protected status in a world at war. Locked in a prison camp one is safe but escaped one again becomes fair game. The code does not permit torture. The code does not permit the unwilling giving of any but the most simple identity information by prisoner to guard.

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Terrorist organizations and bands, revolutionary armies, kinship and religious militias, criminal groups, rogue states do not recognize nor abide by the war convention norms.

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The long-running Cold War had hot interludes. The Vietnamese War is currently part of the U.S. presidential campaign because one of the candidates was on active military duty there and was captured and spent a number of years as POW under trying circumstances. It is part of his biographical narrative.

The North Vietnamese regime at the time broke the War convention on prisoners of war in at least two ways. (1) It illegally tortured American prisoners. (2) It attempted to indoctrinate prisoners or convince them to broadcast propaganda to a world audience. These two actions are related. Each man was tortured until he gave in and made the false confession.

Under these conditions the informal organization of the prisoner group was an important element in the resistance of its members. They offered emotional and practical support to each other though their means of communication were extremely limited, and they set their own counter-norms of correct behavior.

The jailers used rewards like better food, improved living conditions, hope for early release home in a classic carrot and stick system of conversion. To the minor extent they were successful they split the American group but also strengthened it by offering the example of shame in giving in. The response of the Americans in rejecting, hating, disdaining the non-conforming other in their midst paradoxically reinforced the rule itself by example. You can test the emotional strength of a rule by your response when you witness its breaking.

At the time the now senator felt that the few non-conformists had somehow slipped out from under the American ideology, that they did not have the basic belief of conventional religion and patriotism that could carry them through the cruel prisoner treatment they encountered.

But looking back he was proposing a very narrow elite ideology (as did General Eisenhower in World War II) which in its statement excluded a large portion of the American experience. The American ideology, the American personality needed a much larger tent even then and certainly today. Seeing this clearly and realizing this as a society sets the more inclusive unity and solidarity in which we all participate. It has been there all along though sometimes the man blowing the horn calling it out has been off key.

At the social level knowing the norm or the rule or the law is usually all we need. The fact that the individual is lively and capable of logical thought is about as deep as we have to go. Following the correct way is like following the yellow brick road. There it is, there you go.

But the issue returns. The individual who knows not why-he-does is matched by confusion and disagreement over the correct, right, conventional way. One group’s straight and narrow is another’s twisted and convoluted. So the intra-psychic conflict has a parallel in the ideological disagreements in social life.

In the individual’s life the task and the act versus the motive and the reason are like hands waving and yet not meeting. It is not clapping. So in social life the task and the act may not mesh with the conflicting and confusing ideologies. A social order is there, remember, no matter the ideology.

In the Second Iraq War the lean volunteer military combat units have been augmented by civilian firms organized as work formations. The famous Army Engineer battalions have given way to large construction firms on assigned projects. Army mess cooks have been replaced by commercial caterers. The military police have passed on guard and escort duty to bouncers and private eyes. These shifts can be seen as changes in accepted convention. Notice that the same tasks, the same suite of acts, seem no longer to be motivated by duty and public service or, as Durkheim might have called it, by altruism, but instead by an emphasis on profit, a motive extolled to the extreme by the governing politicos.

The specific group of believers can form around the ideology like the gang rallying around the new charismatic teacher; or the group can generate the faith like all other aspects of culture. The agreed correct way is in the going consensus. Over time we forget the origin and simply accept–just as the child adopts the parental language.

But sometimes ideology becomes another disconnect. The conventional reason why becomes a studied blindness. Certain options are made to disappear and with them the possibility of a pragmatic appreciation of reality.

I have been particularly startled by the civilian escort guards for State Department diplomats in Baghdad. The job gets done but the civilian organization and its workers are outside of the military chain of command and have an unclear legal position and are possibly much more expensive than the most obviously sensible military organization for this duty that they replaced. The U.S. Marine Embassy Guards is an established and long standing, specially trained elite force. They guard the American diplomats at their work around the world and the slight extension of the service to trips outside the compound should fall within their competence. And organizationally and legally there are no problems.

Even if the marines were excused from this service for whatever reason, there are other military units and other agencies of the federal government who could substitute for them–the Air Force Security, the Military Police of the Army, the U.S. Marshals Service, all with respectable traditions and reputations.

We have to wonder at the choice that was made to go with profit motive instead of altruistic service. We have to suspect that an ideological bias was at work; a vision that blocked out a range of sensible and moral pragmatic opportunities. The executives in office would argue to the contrary that they have discovered the new and profitable way. Parading as conservative their acts are shockingly radical.

The old altruistic, public service Army is made lean and mean. A lot of its supposed rear echelon functions have been relegated to what we have called the second wave (businessmen and workers for profit, journalists, and eccentric tourists). A change of ideology at the political center finds a new way of doing war.

For me it is a disappointing discovery something like the invention of the designated hitter in American baseball. Some change is unnecessary and dumb especially if it goes against my own ideology. But sometimes the new just doesn’t work as expected. Sometimes it’s a ding-a-ling error.

Old Jock advised the new recruit, “Don’t volunteer for nothing.”

But the taming of the horse was a human discovery and invention. At one time the horse was wild, at another he was part of our domestic establishment. Now he is an entertaining noble beast. Our conceptual and physical control was a giant leap that changed our way of living. We multiplied our suzerainty over that part of nature necessary for our survival. The human over the horse is a cultural event and a significant but now diminishing part of our civilization.

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Yesterday, June 7, 2008, in the Belmont Racetrack on the eastern border of New York City a three year old thoroughbred horse named Big Brown lost a race that he was odds on favorite to win and lost his chance to join the short list of Triple-Crown winners that hasn’t been extended for thirty years. Themes repeated and associated with the horse: fate and power.

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The horse figure is so dense, it gallops off in all directions. Think of the man-horse combo, the centaur of Greek mythology. I like the story of the totemic link, the image of the centaur who assists the human female in her fertility quest, the half-wild lover. The tiger who the vast majority of women think they have dated/married is more probably a centaur. A better deal, two for one, the wild passion and the cultural patina.

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The horse-racing industry and the social forms it takes are significant modern topics. The game is a simple race where small athletic men ride a small herd of horses each of whom strives to cross the finish line first and win the prize.

There is an oval track up to one and a half miles in circumference on one side of which are stands where over 100,000 spectators can congregate.

The audience is stratified socially by the comfort and service available: (1) The enclosed club-house with restaurant, air conditioning, exclusive betting windows, cleaner bathrooms. (2) The stands with reserve seats at higher level and therefore with a better view of the field (3) The standing room next to the track whose only amenities are some barrels for throw-away trash and losing tickets.

The audience in the democratic American mode sorts itself out by the fees it is willing to pay but the symbolism is stark: the blue collar manual and craft employees who work for wages are on their feet; the white collar gang and professionals who work for salaries and fees are seated; and the wealthy and powerful executives, legislators, politicians, and high-rolling investors are dining and drinking at cloth covered tables. We sort ourself, not really troubled by the differences we see as style of life choices. There might be moments of discomfort when one wanders into an unaccustomed section but these are unofficial.

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The breeding, care, feeding and training of the horses are the tasks around which the core of the institution forms. The trainers. jockeys, and assorted others setup and present the displays that are the races. The crew are itinerant and follow the circuit from track to track through the year. It is a definite and distinctive way of life, the taste of which is found in the autobiographies and memoirs of owners, trainers and jocks.

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The gambling which interests me because it was my father’s avocation is closely associated with the sport. There is talk of improving the breed but it all feeds back to winning and taking home some money. The cuts in the pool for taxes and administration increase the certainty of the average bettor losing. On the face the random betting odds are unfair. One wins less and loses more. As usual the house is sure to win in the long run and its short run take is pretty certain as well.

The informed, energetic, and hardworking gambler can win by understanding the true odds if he has the patience to wait out and bet heavily against the spotted error of the majority. It is a full time job.

Probably for most of us it makes more sense to ride a horse than to bet on him.

Say hello to the next horse you meet.

(1) The shock. The American Army offensive goes in and overruns the Iraqi Army quickly. The formal classical war is completed in a few weeks. Elements of the Iraqi social order have been destroyed. The tenor of ordinary Iraqi life changes radically.

(2) The camp-followers. Civilian business types, journalists, and a rag-tag of international adventurers and eccentric travelers follow closely. Energetic elements of this grouping meet and interact with curious and responsive Iraqi civilians (most obviously in Baghdad) and together construct an unexpected through truncated and transitional social order.

(3) The rump. A large number of overseers and late witnesses descend for official tours like crows on a corn field. A category of very important persons (VIPs) made up of American legislators and politicians and the famous and the wealthy from around the world who claim to study the situation and see things for themselves. The trip and the tour become (and continue to be) a hot ticket, hosted by the U.S. military and the emerging upper ranks of the Iraqi polity.

It is a mixed metaphor pattern. Each sector is very different yet there they are in the reality of the event and the model we describe is merely a reflection of what was.

In the analysis of the concrete we look for pattern, in this case at a low level of abstraction. We are not sure where it will lead but we make a start. Here is a violent physical strike that disrupts an on-going social order and brings with it elements of a temporary replacement. Social order is as we find it–the seemingly institutionalized and rock-solid (an illusion fostered by certain classical architectural styles) can be replaced by a transitional, temporary, fleeting order and all the mixed states between. We describe and speculate about this passing social reality. The order is in the pattern. The time in place is part of the pattern. Short or long, the pattern is the fact.

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War is interactive, the unit act applies. The sides engage like a violent chess game or a debate. Their actions are contingent, one upon the other, and the unrolling of the event is the concrete consequence. On the Iraqi side the image is a series of beaches.

(1) The first beach is the Army and the regime’s state apparatus. They hold out briefly, spew propaganda and raise an ambush and violent initiative where they can but as soon as they are overrun they close shop. Tutti a casa, everybody go home. The system of order from the top collapses.

(2) The second beach, the people in all their variety, fall back to a combination of ethno-religious-kinship survival forms. They are the ones who gather each morning around the hotels where the America second wave stay and essentially shape up–present themselves as translators and drivers with cars, and skilled workers in government and crafts looking for a connection with the brand new but still unformed regime.

(3) The third beach are the hidden ideologues, the warriors, the intransigents, the criminals and crazies who are to initiate and participate in the terror counter-attack that will end this short moment of an American-Iraqi Eden.

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I am speculating off my recollection of the information offered by the news media over several years. I am trying to find a sociological way into the immediate and the concrete. It is imperfect but, for me, a step beyond the crude political posturing of all of our U.S. political candidates.

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The social make-up of the American waves is starkly different. The membership of each is recruited from different sectors of our society. In my speculation I will be exaggerating distinctions. Social life in its multiplicity thwarts the simple understanding. So think of the differences as a matter of emphasis. In the distribution of a characteristic there will be expected differences in probability for each grouping.

I’ll chart the characteristics of each group with an emphasis on differences…

Army

Rural-small town, Younger-older, High school–Jr. College, Employee for wages, Physical, Fundamental faith, Hierarchical, Practical, Local, Get by financially.

Camp-followers

Urban, Younger, University, Self-employed-contract, Secular, Intellectual, Egalitarian, Theoretical, International, Comfortable financially.

Evaluators (Rump)

Suburban, Older, Law School, Professional practice, Political, Waffling on religion, Collegial, Self-centered, National, Financially secure

The parts the members of each wave play are determined by the career lines their families and local communities tend to emphasize and make real. The direction one takes has some relationship to where one starts. This is not perfectly determined but the vaunted social mobility turns on directed energy and mentors. Most of us are comfortable in following the way of family and friends. With an all volunteer military the distribution of the three kinds of activists suggested by the chart would seem to make sense. With the decades of draft mobilization these differences in career lines were obliterated though over time the pressures that distorted the mass mobilization of the 1940s and 1950s to the biased and twisted mobilization later were in response to the different career lines of different sectors of our society. The history of draft avoidance by so many of our political leaders now is a reflection of what we could call our social class and status career patterns.

In this Second Iraq War the majority of the American people are not involved actively. The three waves have volunteered and opted in. On this prior choice we have another question. The avoidance of a mass mobilization is historically determined. The experience of Vietnam with a biased mass mobilization for an unpopular war leading the radicalization of an entire generation has set the limit. So against the three waves we have the unmobilized rest of the U.S. society. The current political rejection of the inept and error-prone leadership is about as radical as we are likely to get now.

Altogether we can think of them as similar to the traditional camp followers found around military camps and posts. The pattern: the military action establishes a social space that is filled by a different order of invaders whose existence is totally dependent on the military.

This second wave in Iraq was involved in four functions: (1) Information and propaganda (journalists and photographers), (2) Commerce and construction (salesmen, traders, business representatives), (3) Education and belief. (ideologues, missionaries, teachers), (4) Tourists. (adventurers, excitement-seekers. Those seeking a second chance.). From the other side another stream of visitors were the Jihadists and Suicide-nicks seeking to confront the Great Satan. These fed into the terrorist groups that emerged later.

The Iraqi people came out to greet this second wave. They sought jobs and contacts, were curious about the new ways, and invited these strangers into their homes and lives. On the fringe were the loud voiced nay sayers, they came up on every American TV screen as part of the street crowd. We thought of it as free speech but it was the start of systematic intimidation that later became terror explosions in markets and stores and restaurants and against American troops in transit or on patrol.

In commerce the local stores were full of merchandise from around the work. The street markets were busy. Auto traffic and extensive travel based on cheap petrol and a developed road system was very active. Students were back at school at all levels.

This second wave was extended and enhanced by the extreme capitalist ideology of the American political regime. Military supply and food service and engineering services and even guard functions were contracted out to connected corporations and companies who sent in a whole layer of civilian mercenaries. Repairs that should have been temporary until a viable peace was in place were contracted out and at great cost either never completed or proved shoddy. Accountants now complain that they can’t trace the money spent.

This second wave process was stopped by a sustained Iraqi counter-offensive that went on for several years. It was a three sided conflict. Sunni and Shia activists each attacking the ordinary civilian population of the other and each separately attacking the occupying American Army. Americans struck back episodically at the militants in both groups.

Within the past year what we might call the Sunni and Shia centers each turned on its own crazies and supported by the new American resolve to deny these same crazies any secure base seem to be approaching a resolution of the conflict.

^^^^^

The sociological interest in any form and process is in the possibility of finding a discovered form in one setting repeated in another. I hope that some of you will join me in thinking this through by considering other historical cases.

I would suggest a similar pattern in

(1) The American Civil War. The invasion and occupation of the U.S. South involved different orders of second wave.

(2) Gold Rushes. For an American audience the California and the Alaska Rushes are most familiar. The prospector/miner mass occupation of the presumed gold fields disrupt the local social patterns and set the space for the second wave.

(3) Natural and man-made catastrophes. The rescue and intervention groups following could be thought of as the second wave.

There was a third wave in Iraq which I have been thinking of as the rump. I’ll share a few notes on it in my next post.