The People’s Green

Listening to Dick Cheney whine about the oft-neglected sunny side of torture this week has left me musing about the theme of “actionable intelligence” and, strangely enough, ecology.

“They didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” Cheney pouted to his friends at Fox News about the newly released torture memos.  What, for instance, of all the information wrought from U.S. torture that, with just a little help from Jack Bauer, has saved hundreds of thousands of American lives from face-eating virus bombs?

Poor Cheney.  Poor me.  We are brothers, he and I — foreigners in a strange land, seeking the same lost treasure.  Of an evening, there is little to distinguish us.  I reclining in my easy chair, and he, hanging in his cave, we both long for what is deep, hidden, cryptic.  Perhaps even (tantalizingly!) nonexistent.

“Actionable intelligence.”  What is the stuff?  Cheney and I both talk a good talk, but at the end of the day I’m not sure either of us would know it if we saw it.

Yesterday, back at my new-found healing spot again (for the first time in a week — work has all but swallowed me), I basked a moment of sheer inactionability.  Lounged out in wild grass now ten inches high, I took a good, four-hour Earth Day break under a canopy of trees I still don’t know.  For a good while I did “nothing” — that is, none of the “somethings” to which I usually default: no work; no emails; no infernal cell phone.  No finding a triple-letter square for my Q.

More to the point, no reading or writing, either.  None of the things I feel so compulsed to “do” even in sacred places, so that the time is not “wasted” or “lost.”

But when it comes to world-changing, what would my doing have actually done anyway?   Would I have “done” any more if I’d spent the time packing my cheeks with another article, another page of scrawled notes, another hour of idle ecotainment?

Is the act of reading go-get-’em social and eco-justice harangues really any more actionable — action packing — than leaning on a tree, joining its undergrowth, and trying to remember the name of the green metallic beetle that just landed on one’s shoe?  (I know, Dad.  Tiger beetle.  And I only got a little help.)

And before I go scrounging around for answers, more important questions still need asking.  When is actionable the right standard to go by, anyway?  To what degree?  And at what cost?