Sunday, September 14, 2008

Babylon 5 (and more Sarah Palin)

In 1993, there was a science fiction television show launched called Babylon 5. It ran for five years. The first 4 years I saw when they ran in syndication on a local UHF station. The last season was on the TNT network on cable and I saw one episode when I stayed overnight in a hotel on a business trip. I remembered being very fond of the series and I have been watching the old episodes on DVDs borrowed from the library or as available online.

The show concerned a space station, Babylon 5, conceived as a meeting place for the various spacefaring humanoid races to settle differences. The events of the show mostly contribute to a preformulated 5-year mytharc in which a series of political developments lead to a galaxy-wide war, among other things. Its structure was virtually unique at the time, it was unusual in its prolific historical references, and it had some very compelling drama.

Re-watching it now, I am much more critical. The use of CGI, groundbreaking at the time, now looks in the early episodes a bit too much like a 20-year old videogame. At the beginning of season one, the sets and lighting are lifeless, the dialogue and performances of the human characters flat and unconvincing. The script is full of exposition. The episodes often coast in to anticlimaxes trying to tie up episode storylines after the big moment is passed. Even the historical references that I enjoyed originally seem trite and obvious. What was seen 15 years ago as a dose of realism to correct the idealistic fantasies and gross internal inconsistencies of the old Star Trek, now seem cheap compared to the almost documentary-like reimagined Galactica.

But it improves. After the show gets going, everything improves. The technology behind the special effects evolved. There was evidently a better budget for sets and props. As the story unfolds the characters that were uninteresting develop somewhat, and the stories themselves develop a depth through internal consistency and allusion. The actors settle into more confortable rhythms. The aliens, who were always the most fun to watch (brought to life by stunning makeup and costumes, interesting accents, and broad threatrical flourishes) see their roles get meatier as their races slide into war.

One thing that remains annoying, however, is the show's flavor of minimal administrative institutions.

The B5 station itself begins with a population of 250,000. It has no industry, but has an economy based on trade, tourism (it particulaly becomes a destination for religious after an angelic sighting), and information technology. In season 3 it declares itself independent of its sponsoring government and becomes a state unto itself. Its own taxation system apparently erects and runs itself after state funds are cut off. It has a security chief that personally knows everyone who might be a criminal, like a small town sheriff. Its number two military officer personally commands the station's defensive fighter squadron. It has the flavor of a very small operation, with a shallow command staff that does little delegating and has few meetings or protocols.

In addition to having the government of Earth withdraw all support for the station, its commander becomes the mostly-absentee leader of a fleet of advanced ships that spearheads one side in a war of galactic scale in which whole planets are destroyed and countless billions are affected.

Over and over, the show commits the embarassing lapse of treating serious matters of galactic consequence in this folksy small-institution way. When the consequences grow to a tremendous scale, big-time institutions simply do not follow. There is no apparent second eschelon of leadership beneath the top command staff. Huge operations simply coordinate themselves. None of the top people possesses a personal security force, and remain vulnerable to small bands of unsophisticated crazies and malcontents. They continue to carry out their regular activities, doing everything themselves. The show is incredibly naive about death and torture and the role of espionage, as if none of the characters has any real experience or serious training or anticipates the extent to which people ordinarily go with much less at stake. The heroes develop a fastidiously honest broadcasting operation not as part of a comprehensive set of war operations but because the captain says one day, "hey, I have an idea -- let's do this." Treaties are forged without any concerns over the details. The captain takes command of the warfleet without asking how many ships there are, what firepower they possess, what their crew complements are... There appears to be no understanding of the questions of bureaucracy and administration, of established ways of doing things, and the millions of unpredicted but extremely predictable things that tend to go wrong when ordering levels of management and control do not exist, and everyone is doing everything by ear. Everything that happens requires a support structure, staff must be recruited and trained, materiel must be procured, advantages that present themselves must be exploited, and mistakes that have been made in the past must be prevented in the future.

These mistakes threaten the integrity of the show and infect otherwise exciting storylines with a distracting problem of complete unreality. You do not feel the weight or inertia of tradition, structure, a large body of professional knowledge and experience and layers of management and administration.


Without exaggerating the point, I would contrast the better handling of this consideration by the current Battlestar Galactica series. Galactica is the story of a struggling remnant of humanity which flees in a ragtag fleet of spacecraft after massive nuclear assault by evil God-crazed robots. The fleet has a civilian president and the one surviving battleship itself has a military commander. The two together are responsible for roughly 50,000 souls, a number which is chopped down by nearly a third due to losses over the course of a few years, mostly during a disasterous period of enemy occupation of a large segment of the population. But even with a much smaller body of people involved, institutions feel weighty and resilient. When there is a task to be done, someone must do it. Three episodes in, prison labor must be recruited to mine ice to replenish the failing water supplies of the fleet. Personnel losses must be compensated by recruitment and training. The overtaxing of the workforce erupts into conflict. Attack plans must be developed, presented, and approved. Meetings are held in which problems are quantified and solutions proposed and debated. There is a maturity in recognizing hard choices.

B5's crew managed to avoid total disaster because it had the advantage of being fiction. With good writers, the logistics will take care of themselves. In real life, what you get is more like FEMA's response to hurricane Katrina, or the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, which lost the initiative, credibility, and uts shirt before it knew what was happening. If you buy something without a plan to deliver or distribute it, you waste it. If you distribute something on an emergency basis but provide no security against fraud, it gets stolen. If you fail to think of people staying in their homes because you won't let them leave without their pets, or because you have not secured the streets, or because they are listening to a religious leader whom you did not understand to have any authority, you lose.

Personally, I've been on the executive board of several organizations, but let me mention three: a metropolitan group representing 25,000 people, a state group representing 150,000, and a national group representing 3.5 million. Because these were groups that represented an interest sector and not all citizen concerns, my portfolio at any of these groups was not nearly what would be faced by a mayor or governor. But there were plenty of issues, budgets to develop and debate, staff to hire, legal issues to confront, internal politics, and external relations. The smallest group was something I worked on full time; the others I had a more ancillary role. Still, I have some impression of the effects of scale and how instututions grow more complex, expectations higher, and a more sophisticated set of protocols involved as one moves up.

I have seen people in my institutional adventures who had a big-time mindset, and those whose views refected small-time, small-organization ways of doing things. It's possible to walk out of Supercorp into a mom-and-pop outfit and not get the small scale of things, to expect a proposal to be circulated and go through comments and legal vetting before implementation, while auntie Jo could just do it before dusk. It's also possible for someone unfamiliar with the larger-scale environment to see a proposal enacted by sidestepping the usual regulatory requirements, political ane social niceties, and create a ripple of small problems and risks of larger ones in so doing. When you just call up someone you know and write them a check, instead of soliciting the proper bids, making the proper records, verifying eligibility and compliance, and paying from the proper fund with proper approval.

There are advantages to both the big-scale and the small-scale ways of doing things. That small-scale mentality can be great for getting things done, breaking away from outgrown and unnecssary limits. But...

But it also means turning a blind eye to the reasons for the limits, incurring unknown risks, creating secondary problems and side effects that must be solved, injuring constituencies, and courting all sorts of predictable failures.

Sarah Palin's credientials include representing Wasilla, pop. 5900, and Alaska, pop. 680,000. Her record is one of both corruption and reform: she basically does not conform to institutions, acts in a small-scale way. Hires cronies, ignores conventions, offends bureaucrats and powers that be, and violates the law. It's all part of the same picture. I've seen this person before. I've seen this style. It has its merits for getting a narrow range of goals accomplished, but as the scale and diversity of operations expands, it becomes more and more risky in terms of all the competing considerations that get sacrificed or distorted, and sometimes this leads to complete collapse of the overall ambition, as we saw in Katrina and Iraq.