Robot Nation

America’s national pastime is not really baseball but football. Unlike baseball, which is equally popular in Japan, Taiwan and many Latin American countries, no one else shares America’s pigskin passion, a sport in which collective rage is ritualized and celebrated, a colorful spectacle of cool violence, an American specialty.

There are 246 foreign born players in Major Leagues Baseball, compared to only a handful in the NFL. This is only appropriate in a country that invented the assembly line. Streamlining the production of objects, it also systematized and homogenized the behaviors of men, turned them into seething robots. Manning an assembly line at Boeing, Frank Perdue or McDonald’s, a person becomes just as uniform as the jet engines, drum sticks or freedom fries he’s cranking out. If stockholders had their wishes, he could be switched off at the end of his shift, given a cursory wipe and a pat on the head, then flipped back on the next morning, the costs of his daily upkeep automatically deducted from his debit card. Fuck healthcare.

With his steel head, invisible face and angular, padded shoulders, a football player resembles nothing so much as a robot, a hulking steel humanoid, impervious to pain yet eager to dispense it. Knights in armor also appeared robot-like, but that was only cosplay for the elites. Only the Ringo Starrs and Elton Johns of their days were allowed to dress up like proto-robots. Not so, football players. Even the lowest American could aspire to become a tackling, blocking robot, provided he’s not a wussified, pencil-necked, tanka-composing creep, with barely enough facial hair to not shave.

Like cars, robots are super cool. Tom Brady and LaDainian Tomlinson are also cool. Cool is where it’s at. Americans who lose their cool must do it online, in the dark or out of sight, preferably in another country, while on vacation or in uniform. Criminals or trash, they’re only shown on TV to be ridiculed. Real Americans keep their cool. Stay cool, keep cool, be cool, act cool, even as one is suffering or inflicting pain. It’s only shock and awe, y’all. All football players are cool.

I’d be very surprised to learn of another language that uses cool as a blanket substitute for all positive qualities. Hot also appears frequently in American English, but not nearly as often as cool. Hot’s not really American. Yankees are cool, Latinos hot. If you’re an American man, don’t even think of blurting in public that LaDainian Tomlinson is hot, for example. Humans are supposed to be warm, machines cool. Americans are definitely cool.

Cyborgs, androids, gynoids, American fictional robots include the Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Star Trek’s Data and many, many more. The ultimate American robot is The Terminator, an indestructible killing machine that stops at nothing. Outside of his role, Arnold Schwarzenegger also projects a machine-like hardness and coolness. No reflections, no irony, no moods. No method actor, Schwarzenegger.

The ultimate self-made immigrant, Arnold Schwarzenegger governs the most mythologized state of the union, brightly lit, plastic, hardly real, a self-parody, with San Francisco a foggy aberration. Don’t ever confuse him with that other beef jerky, Sylvester Stallone. Arnold would never consent to mouth such a lame ass question like, “Do we get to win this time?” Sylvester sounded like a hurt little boy asking his mom if he could go outside and play. That’s not American, dipshit. What’s next, approval from congress?! Just kick ass, like Schwarzenegger. Instead of asking stupid questions, The Terminator just threatened, promised, “I’ll be back,” like General McArthur, the last American with truly depleted uranium gonads.

If only America had a mile-long assembly line to crank out millions of Schwarzeneggers, its army wouldn’t be short of robotic soldiers. Desperate, it’s accepting foreigners, middle-aged fatsos, drug addicts, Aryan Nation, Blood, Crisp, Latin Kings and Tiny Rascals members, not to mention borderline retards. One overzealous recruiter even crossed into Mexico, to track down two potential suckers in a Tijuana high school. A female soldier has to be 28-week pregnant before they send her home. On May 23, 2003, a 33 year-old Marine even gave birth to a baby boy on the USS Boxer, deployed near Kuwait.

The Pentagon thought it had landed a poster robot in Pat Tillman, a square-jawed football player who turned down three million bucks to go zap terrorists, payback time, except that Tillman actually had a brain and a heart. Sent to Afghanistan, then Iraq, he said to a fellow soldier as they witnessed the bombing of a town, “You know, this war is so fuckin’ illegal.” He urged other soldiers to vote against Bush, and even asked his mother to arrange a meeting with Noam Chomsky, of all people. No robot, Tillman was morphing into a fire-breathing dissident in front of his handlers’ eyes, so they had three shots blasted into his forehead from ten yards away, then declared him a hero. Case closed. Even after the criminal details had leaked out, the mainstream, corporate media gave this sensational story only a cursory glance, leaving his family and the alternative press to pick through the sordid facts. In the absurd funhouse that’s contemporary America, Ellen DeGeneres’ dog is more newsworthy.

Robotic soldiers are only a stopgap measure until real robots could be perfected. Although they may not be as well-spoken as Arnold Schwarzenegger, they won’t feel pain, hunger and fatigue. Israel already employs bulldozer robots and, on the border with Gaza, a series of wall-mounted machine guns remote-controlled by female soldiers. South Korea uses SGR-A1 robots along its border with North Korea. According to Samsung, the robots’ manufacturer, “the system is designed to replace a human-oriented guards, overcoming their limitation of discontinuous guarding mission due to its severe weather condition or fatigue, so that the perfect guarding operation is guaranteed.” Leading the field is the USA, of course, with 5,000 robots deployed in Iraq alone, everything from a nine-pound Dragon Runner, a “throwbot” that can be tossed over a wall, out a three-story window or up a flight of stairs, to the Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System (SWORDS), armed with an M249 rifle. All these systems are still controlled by a human, but that will soon change. Noel Sharkey wrote recently in The Guardian:

[F]ully autonomous robots that make their own decisions about lethality are high on the US military agenda. The US National Research Council advises “aggressively exploiting the considerable warfighting benefits offered by autonomous vehicles.” They are cheap to manufacture, require less personnel and, according to the navy, perform better in complex missions. One battlefield soldier could start a large-scale robot attack in the air and on the ground.

This is dangerous new territory for warfare, yet there are no new ethical codes or guidelines in place. I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination is terrifying.

The Pentagon is taking its cue from a 1995 dystopian movie, Screamers, which features a fighting robot called Autonomous Mobile Sword. A self-replicating crawling machine, it tracks a living pulse, then leaps to dismember its target. A small problem: it cannot distinguish between friends or foes, civilians or soldiers, men, women or children, primary or collateral damages. It sounds like we’re already there. Cool!

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating social scape through his frequently updated photo blog, Postcards from the End of America. Read other articles by Linh.

6 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. joe said on November 4th, 2007 at 9:38am #

    Thank you Linh…excellent commentary.

  2. jim said on November 5th, 2007 at 5:15pm #

    Amazing article-beautiful name-piercing insight-great humor.
    Thank you.

  3. brian said on November 5th, 2007 at 5:21pm #

    I have to disagree with this article….perhaps the author is not awre of the following piece:

    ‘NFL great Mark Stepnoski talks about 9/11

    Submitted by Brad Johnson on Sun, 11/04/2007 – 12:13pm.
    Celebrities

    Mark Stepnoski gained fame as a lineman with the Dallas Cowboys, and was with that team for two superbowl wins. In an interview in today’s Erie Times News, Stepnoski gives some reasons for his interest in the 9/11 truth movement:

    Q. Anything else you want people to know?

    A. Well, you asked. I’ve got a lot of things I like to do, I read a lot and travel and all that. I don’t even know if you want to get into this, since it’s a little bit political in tone. But I’m really interested now in the things the 9/11 truth movement is doing. I guess I could spend a lot time talking about that and cover all kinds of policies and statistics, but I don’t know how much people want to know.

    It interests me because I don’t think we’re being told truth about what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001. I’m highly skeptical of government accounts of what really happened. It’s one of those things that really won’t go away. I’ve been reading about that event and studying about it a great deal. I’ve read several books and a lot online pretty much since it happened, just because I’m curious about it and just because of other events in our historical past, like the Kennedy assassination for example.

    Before anyone wants to try and pigeonhole me as conspiracy theorist, it’s like a lot of things. If you’re just willing to scratch beneath the surface and do a little research maybe you can find out some things, maybe more people would be more skeptical about our government’s involvement with 9/11.

    I used to read a lot of things on one Web site called “From the Wilderness.” The site no longer exists. It was run by a guy named Mike Ruppert, who wrote one of the best books on the subject called “Crossing the Rubicon.” It came out right after the 9/11 Commission report a few years ago, and I read it right after it came out.

    We’re being lied to. That’s what bothers me the most. There’s a lot of evidence in almost any area of the entire event, and you can bring up a lot of inconsistencies and unanswered questions just about the event itself. Two of the three steel-frame buildings that day collapsed due to fire, and that’s never happened before, never in history. But that day it happened three times, including one building that didn’t get hit by a plane. Building Number 7 didn’t get hit by a plane and it went straight down in six and a half seconds. In the vast majority of U.S. cities that would have been the tallest building in the city. It had nothing but a couple of small fires on a couple of floors, but it fell down at free-fall speed in six and a half seconds. There are several engineers and architects who have made the argument that it was a controlled demolition because, again, there’s never been a steel building collapse due to fire. So how can it happen three times in one day?

    There are many, many other things I could talk about, several inconsistencies we could talk about for a long time. If you read some of the authors like Mike Ruppert and Barrie Zwicker, and look at some Web sites, you can get a fuller account. A whole lot of insider trading occurred beforehand, and that’s a huge red flag that there was foreknowledge of the event. There were large financial transactions made ahead of time, a lot of trades made to buy stock in United and American airlines beforehand with the expectation that those stocks were going to go down drastically. A lot of the hijackers from the list released by FBI — a lot of those guys are alive. Many, many guys on the list are the wrong identity. One guy was a pilot for Saudi Airlines, another guy is living in Lebanon and is suing the U.S. government to clear his name.

    I’m compelled because as time goes on there is a greater and greater growing voice among people in areas involved with different aspect of that day. You have pilots speaking about what would be involved with trying to fly a plane into the Pentagon that day in the way that it was portrayed. You have architects and engineers speaking out over the actual explanation that jet fuel could melt steel and cause buildings to collapse. You have former people who worked in the Bush administration or the military who have come forward to express doubt about the official story.

    Consider the fact that the Bush administration really fought the formation of the 9/11 Commission the whole way. It fought over who was going to head it and who was going to be on it. Initially Henry Kissinger was supposed to be the chairman, but he stepped aside because of conflict of interest issues. The commission didn’t come together until a year and a half after the event. … And you think about how the government spent $15 million on the commission to investigate 9/11, which sounds like a lot. But then you make the comparison that the government spent $40 million to investigate the Monica Lewinsky affair. I certainly share a lot of those views.

    http://911blogger.com/node/12357

  4. brian said on November 5th, 2007 at 5:25pm #

    Its now on Wikipedia:

    ‘In November 2007, Stepnoski expressed support for the 9/11 Truth Movement. In an interview published in the Erie Times-News on November 4, 2007, he stated: “We’re being lied to. That’s what bothers me the most. There’s a lot of evidence in almost any area of the entire event, and you can bring up a lot of inconsistencies and unanswered questions just about the event itself. Two of the three steel-frame buildings that day collapsed due to fire, and that’s never happened before, never in history. But that day it happened three times, including one building that didn’t get hit by a plane. Building Number 7 didn’t get hit by a plane and it went straight down in six and a half seconds. In the vast majority of U.S. cities that would have been the tallest building in the city. It had nothing but a couple of small fires on a couple of floors, but it fell down at free-fall speed in six and a half seconds. There are several engineers and architects who have made the argument that it was a controlled demolition because, again, there’s never been a steel building collapse due to fire. So how can it happen three times in one day?” [2]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Stepnoski

    BUT note what wiki also adds;
    ‘This section contains information of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article’s subject matter.
    Please help improve this article by clarifying or removing superfluous information. (help, talk)

    So it may not remain in wiki long

  5. Linh Dinh said on November 5th, 2007 at 6:44pm #

    Hi Brian,

    I never said that all football players are robots. Pat Tillman was certainly not one, as I pointed out in my article. Among other things, I was pointing out the connection between two American institutions, the assembly line and football. To elaborate further: Of all team sports, football conforms most closely to the assembly line model. Every player is a specialist, with specific skills not shared by his teammates. Only kickers kick field goals, only punters punt, only centers snap the ball, and there are even long snap specialists. In basketball, all five positions share similar skills, albeit with different focuses. They are all expected to shoot, dribble and pass, although the point guard’s primary job is to pass, the center’s main task is to rebound. In football, an offensive lineman is not required to run with the football, like the running back, or catch a pass, like a wide receiver or tight end. (The Refrigerator Perry’s three-touchdown rushing and receiving exploits are freakish exceptions to the rules.) In all other team sports, the players are expected to play both offense and defense, to press forward and retreat, but not football, where two-way players are only seen at the lowest levels. If baseball were organized like football, the fielders would just field, the batters just bat. There would be nine designated hitters.

  6. CH said on November 6th, 2007 at 9:05am #

    Good links, Brian. I like the Cowboys, but have never seen this information on their website or any other NFL site. Like Tillman, Stepnoski grew his hair long during his playing days, and I’ve found that players with long hair tend to have a more independent way of thinking.