Angus MacGyver explains it all for you

I have never watched an entire episode of MacGyver. When it was on TV, I was either living in Mexico or in grad school; it left the air, in fact, before I earned my doctorate. As for reruns, I've not actively sought them out, seeing as the show was never exactly part of my TV-viewing life. But Mrs. M. has used "MacGyver" as a verb in the past, and I'm aware enough of the show that I knew what she meant when she did so. As to the quality of the show, though, color me agnostic in an apathetic sort of way.

Even so, it may be, I realized today, that Angus MacGyver might be more than a simple pop cultural phenomenon. Maybe, perhaps, if we were to give a tug on that particular thread, the whole tartan that is the universal firmament might end up as a big old pile of yarn in our laps . . . that maybe only the man himself could refashion.

Let me explain, lest you think me mad.

Yesterday, via 3 Quarks Daily, I stumbled on to this MSNBC article about crows:

Bird brained they might be, but crows are the MacGyvers of the avian world, able to turn twigs and even their own feathers into tools for getting at hard-to-reach food. But while young crows are born with a propensity for crafting tools, it's only after watching their elders make and use tools that they become truly proficient, a new study suggests.
[snip]
The crows craft tools to specific needs. They examine a problem and then pick or design an appropriate tool. For example, faced with a snack lodged in a small tree hole, a crow will prune and adjust a leafy oak branch to just the right width to poke into the hole.

Cool, I think--about the crows, that is (as long-time readers know, I'm fascinated by crows).

Then today, I run across this post on TPM Muckraker, ostensibly explaining (and mocking) Vice-President Cheney's legal defense for not releasing his office's visitors' logs to the Washington Post in response to a FOIA request:

Mosaic theory has been around for a while, and it's enjoyed a post-9/11 renaissance. It's an increasingly common government argument for withholding sensitive national security-related information, because of "the potential for an adversary to deduce from independently innocuous facts a strategic vulnerability, exploitable for malevolent ends," as a 2005 article in the Yale Law Review described it.

In other words, even if one piece of information appears harmless, if you put it together with other pieces of harmless information, the sum becomes dangerous in enemy hands.

It's kind of like the MacGyver theory of information: this paperclip could be used to make a bomb, ergo, you can't have this paperclip. However, unlike MacGyver, a mosaic-theory proponent doesn't have to come up with the other ingredients necessary; all they have to do is wave the paperclip around menacingly. Perhaps surprisingly, it works.

How does this apply to Cheney's visitor logs? Well, it doesn't. Unless you take a step through the looking-glass, into a world where Cheney's meetings with lobbyists and energy company executives are a dangerous paper clip in the vast repository of vital national secrets. And that, if combined with (fill in the blank), anyone who isn't within the White House's Circle of Trust is an adversary who could exploit the information for malevolent ends.

Is the universe run after all on a principle more accurately named MacGyver Mechanics? When Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter to his wife, "I believe that with a bucket of sand and a wishing lamp I could create a world in half a second that would make this one look like a hunk of mud," was he not just hyperbolizing but, instead, speaking out of a deeper, spiritual hunger to know the beginnings and ends of things that MacGyver satisfies every time he opens his Swiss Army knife?

I have no empirical evidence--yet. Nor do I fear for the condition of my soul. But I feel in my GUT that I should at least rent MacGyver's first full season on DVD to further my investigations . . . before I end up with the Virtuous Pagans in that circle of the Pop Culture Inferno who lack knowledge of MacGyveranity.

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Pop culture, Television, MacGyver