Editorial

I decided to get out of the house, home office. There is no humidity to speak of, the temperature is quite pleasant and I’m waiting for the delivery of a drawing by an artist that painted a painting 2 years ago that I let slip through my hands for good reasons, my wife had just been laid off. The painting was one of those that stayed on my mind all night, a clue that I really wanted it, and just looking at it brought back the memory of the smell, the perfume of the streets of NYC in the early morning when I would be going to The Art Students League. This drawing is the sketch for that painting.

That memory sense, the reality of the past as I remember it, and today all came together the first time I saw it. This brings me to the meat of the editorial, reality and art. Can art, writing, visual representations (film or otherwise) and possibly music, reflect reality or can reality reflect an avant-guard mindset that lays hidden, but yet connected to humans around the globe?

I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that sometimes science fiction, and historical prognostication do at times meld with reality. Specifically I am referring to My story They Never Knew a modern Fairy Tale and the reality of cyber war as we hear about it, and then the parts we don’t hear about.

My story was taken from bit of data that were there in the open for all to see if they had a desire to.-no blame just reality. A few years later the national Academy of Sciences published a study on Net-centric Security issues, which outside the specific aim of the subject-The Navy, read like they used my story as an outline.

That was 2010. It’s now 2015 August and what do we have? I still see no coherent response to one of the main thrust of the subject of my story and the NAS book, the lack of inherent security in the devices we use every day due in a great part to where the devices are manufactured and all that that fact implies.  

My story took the facts at the time and with a bit of crystal balling it, I made some wild guesses as to what could possibly occur in our lifetime. And as I have seen are occurring, here and there, and yet, even though I see the hand wringing, and hear the talking-heads speak to the need of hardening the infrastructure, blah blah blah , I only see more of the same problems and potential problems.

So what’s my point?

My point is that we as artists of different skill-sets sometimes see what those in power fail to recognize because of their stupidity, greed, usually lots of greed, and ignorance. I really wrote that story as a “heads up”. Only one person in the field of cyber war called me and in a humorous but serious manner warned me, and I quote, “I would never hear the bullet that got me.”

As Sun Zi said, the ultimate skill of a general is to win the war without firing a shot.  While shutting down the infrastructure is an act of war, no missiles would be fired. The software and hardware made in China would see to that. Only a few switches would be thrown.

Bring the jobs and technology back home.