 A chance to really start over WE ARE TOLD that nothing will ever be the same again, and I am wondering whether we can make that true. I am wondering whether government can change. I am wondering whether the American people can learn. For the past 30 years, America has been caught in a descending spiral of materialism. The materialism has bred corruption. The corruption has entered government (never a particularly spiritual occupation) at an unprecedented level. Elected representatives grub for money. Elected representatives place themselves in bondage to large corporations. The better men and women see what is happening. They resign, or they decline to run again, or they work for private institutions. The dimbulbs and the demagogues oversee the Department of Defense. They demand weapon systems that do not work, but provide jobs for their districts. The Pentagon rewards people who give Congress what it wants, who play ball with the defense contractors. Again, the better men and women leave. We are facing the most complex challenge we have ever faced as a nation, and there is rot in government. Our intelligence services are shameful. The State Department is a mess. The ambassadors to important countries are deep- pocket dopes. This is bipartisan corruption -- Bush One and Clinton both played the game, and Bush Two was gearing up. Even the Supreme Court has become a political tool. It will be the final arbiter in the delicate balance between civil liberties and counterterrorist measures. One is not sanguine. Because the leadership is mostly concerned with re-election and partisan drumbeating, America has become increasingly provincial. We know little about the world and care less. We have been told so long that we are God's green kingdom, we believe it. We have not paid attention as the world has changed. We are still the world's most powerful nation-state. Unfortunately, much of the world no longer cares about nation-states. Borders are meaningless; territory is temporary. Unless we are very smart, this next war could very well be: Watch the lumbering giant try to fight the invisible spiders. Remember Vietnam? At least that was about territory, so we sort of understood it. And we still lost. THERE IS CORRUPTION in the education system. Education is about something other than data and logic. For a while it was about multiculturalism, then it was about Values, which is an American word meaning "fundamentalist Christianity." One is lefty and one is righty, but neither is the primary job of schools. The people in our embassies do not speak the language of their nations. The people in our intelligence services do not speak the language. They have only the most cursory understanding of historical forces. There used to be people who knew what they were doing. Some of them became whistle-blowers and got fired. Some of them just quit in disgust. BUT THEY'RE STILL here. They have the brainpower we need to invent a new way to fight a new enemy. Some of them are security risks -- even as the people who worked on the Manhattan Project were security risks. Some of them have abrasive personalities. Some of them lost their allies by telling the truth. But they are alive. They are patriots. We need them. Intellectuals from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India -- they have come here in unprecedented numbers in the past 30 years. They may have "unsavory" connections, to quote Dick Cheney -- do we have the courage to use unsavory intellectuals the way we plan to use unsavory assassins? We need a critical mass of intelligent humans. We need a crash course in the world since 1970. We need government to open its door once again to the cranky, the brilliant and the free. Just machines to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
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