A World Tour Of The Kafkaesque

Having conducted an anti-thorough and thoroughly unprofessional review of the happenings of the world in the last few weeks, it seems fair to say that recent times haven't been the best of times for common sense and sanity. An amateur would conclude that there's nothing quite so sensible that it can't be contorted into terrible nonsense, provided one has enough idle man-hours and bureaucratic man-power to do so.

Consider this week's column something of a World Tour of the Kafkaesque. Let's begin our journey in the small, yet influential emirate of Dubai. Dubai is famous for its glittering, cosmopolitan skyline, its lenient free-trade laws, its booming tourist economy and, increasingly, its unjust prosecution of homosexual rape.

The ball got rolling when Alexandre Robert, a 15-year-old Frenchmen, took a summer vacation to Dubai. Alexandre was walking in the scorching July sun of the small desert state when an acquaintance of his rolled up in a car and offered a ride. Sweltering, Robert accepted.

Not fated to receive the sort of ride he'd imagined, Robert was instead taken to a deserted patch of desert, threatened with a knife and club and forcibly sodomized by his acquaintance and two other Emirati men.

Robert turned to the authorities for help, but, unfortunately for him, Dubai isn't a great fan of homosexuality; in fact, there is no law against male rape in the emirate, but only the charge of "forced homosexuality" - a charge which, the police threatened, could be applied to Robert himself if he were to speak up.

Robert spoke up and perhaps coincidentally was not informed until two months after the attack that one of his rapists was HIV-positive. The lawyer defending the rapists testified in court that, "[Robert's] symptoms prove that he suffers from a disease which makes him ask others to have sex with him ... he has become an addict to submissive sex. Therefore, he couldn't have been forced to have sex with the suspects." Dubai's handling of this case of homosexual rape dovetails nicely with the case of heterosexual rape in Saudi Arabia, our good friend and woman-hating ally, where an 18-year-old female victim was sentenced to 200 lashes.

Not that Arabs have a monopoly on bureaucratic lunacy, of course. The Brazilians have always been especially good at it, as they so recently demonstrated when, on Oct. 21, a 15-year-old girl was placed in jail on a sentence of ... well, something, though she wasn't exactly formally charged. That didn't stop the Brazilian authorities from placing the teenage girl into the only jail cell in town, however; a cell which she ended up sharing with anywhere from 20 to 34 male inmates in the 26 days she was there.

As one might expect - unless you happen to be a Brazilian prison guard - the teenage girl was immediately violated by her criminal cohabitants. They continued to use her daily for the duration of her stay, even going so far as to force her to bargain for food and water by trading in sexual favors. This wasn't the first time this has happened in the illustrious nation of Brazil, where it seems a higher value is placed on ethanol than on human life. Playing defensively, Brazilian authorities responded that they had believed the girl was not 15, but 20, as if her being above the age of consent would have ameliorated her total lack of consent in her brutal rapes.

Let's bring the whole thing home, now: it's not fair to pick on Third World countries, after all. Hopping on a plane from São Paulo to John F. Kennedy, we make landfall just in time to fall into the midst of the New York Police Department's latest entrapment sting, "Operation Lucky Bag." Looking around the airport, one might well observe an abandoned bag or purse. Being a conscientious citizen, one might well pick up the bag, intending on returning it. One may never get the chance, however, as after a few steps one is slapped into cuffs by the nearby undercover agents and charged with felony credit card theft; did one happen to observe that inside the bag was an American Express Card?

Judges have disbanded a similar operation by the N.Y.P.D. before amidst civil-rights and entrapment concerns. That wasn't enough to stop the department from renewing the program, which snared 220 people the first go-round - though over 110 of the arrested had no prior criminal record. Incidentally, N.Y. criminal law gives slightly more than a few minutes to return found property; in fact, the allowance is 10 days.

What to make of this litany of cruelty, evil and absurdity? One might well deposit their faith in humanity in the nearest waste receptacle, and one would not be blamed in the slightest.

However, there are more constructive options available, when one considers the root of all this evil - that is, bureaucracy itself, and its inherent alienation from action. Under any bureaucratic system, one is bound to have people entirely divorced from the consequences of their actions, leading to rape, murder, embezzlement, and long waiting times at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

What is there to be done, then? The reasonable response would be to seek out a method of consolidating the power of systems in the hand of a single actor, thereby restoring some semblance of responsibility, and, one would hope, morality. Unfortunately, there is the inconvenient truth of absolute power corrupting absolutely; what one wants is an incorruptible source of infinitely capable action.

Is there such a front of power? Not yet, at any rate - but wait a decade or two. In 1955, the first modern computer, the ENIAC, weighed 30 tons and had far less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. By way of comparison, the world's most powerful current supercomputer, the Blue Gene/P, is configured to be capable of performing over three thousand trillion calculations per second. Surely, then, it cannot be long until we have computers with a degree of sentience, and after that, a computer with the capacity to recursively augment its own intelligence. Once we've reached that point, termed "the Singularity" by former San Diego State University professor of mathematics and acclaimed author Vernor Vinge, we'll have an exponentially-increasing source of intelligent command at our disposal. If all goes well, these unfathomably brilliant super-human machines will have been programmed to evolve along lines of judicial neutrality and human-friendly morality. Perhaps, once we've reached that point, we can have a few more trustworthy and impartial robotic judges, and a few less Saudi Ministers of Justice.