Spencer Ackerman reminds us of one important Reagan legacy:
" [F]or a large portion of those under the age of 30 (I'd push that up another decade, though my high school was far from normal. - Martial), their portrait of Reagan emerged through another of Reagan's gifts to the country--one that went almost completely ignored throughout [the] memorials. ... [N]o accounting of Reagan's cultural legacy is complete without noting a simple truth: Ronald Reagan is responsible for some of the best punk rock ever recorded. ... If Reagan embodied everything sunny and inspiring about the United States to his supporters, to the preternaturally angry punk rockers of the early '80s, he represented anomie, arbitrary authority, and an ignorance that was socially acceptable, even valued. "
But punk rock wasn't the only of Reagan's artistic legacies to go unremarked.
Cyberpunk - genre, style, sensibility - forced its way into the mainstream during the 80s, largely because its examination of contemporary capitalism hit the right notes both high and low1.
Under Reagan, capital's long, cold truce with American labor ended. Framing corporate responsibility as narrowly as possible, managers self-righteously deferred to the concept of "shareholder value", and the business community began a much needed (if almost entirely unthought out) reevaluation of priorities and practices - but did it in a way that shocked the public imagination. Ruthless corporate downsizing in manufacturing emphasized that this was no longer our parents' friendly capitalism; corporate conglomeration built larger and larger entities, each of which seemed poised to dominate all of our supermarket options - and perhaps more; corporate greed at the management level plundered companies for personal gain and divorced the company from the satisfied customer, the loyal worker, and the very concept of stewardship. The rules were changed, were in fact effectively set aside, in the name of market efficiency and a horrified, fascinated public was simultaneously bombarded with propaganda about the golden future and daily headlines about sharks in a frenzy.
Also contributing to our anxiety - and to the wild thrashing of America's corporations - was the new, burgeoning fear of global competition. America's economic preeminence was no longer assured. While this was enough to provoke a mild and electorally convenient xenophobia among many, some of us with a longer term view saw Reagan's laissez faire inclinations paving the way for a decentralized, global capitalism in which America would be just one more source of cheap, alienated labor.
These economic currents were combined with (and in part led to) a heartlessness that turned away from people on the ragged edge between hope and despair, that turned thousands of mentally ill onto the streets, and turned a blind eye to the epidemic of AIDS. Homelessness became a feature of the American landscape and no urban center was without its wandering population of the muttering, the begging, and the hopeless.
When we read Neuromancer it didn't look like the future. We could see it on any channel, on any street, right now. The cyberpunks were the only ones writing realistic fiction.
" I never felt that I was writing about the future. I always felt that I was squinting at the present in a peculiar way and describing what I saw. Reality has become such a deeply problematic situation that we can't comfortably look at it as it really is, and the tool kit of science fiction includes something like a set of oven mitts with which we can pick up our red-hot, protean, ever-changing and worrisome present and look at it objectively. "
. . .
1 Union rules say that if I'm going to discuss cyberpunk and capitalism in the same post then I have to include Frederic Jameson's authoritative 1991 footnote that cyberpunk fiction is "the supreme literary expression ... of late capitalism itself".
It is being suggested to us that Anonymous, author of the forthcoming Imperial Hubris, is writing in order to promote a perspective shared by professionals in the intelligence community (from The Guardian: " The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken. "). This perspective is being spun as though it represents yet another disagreement with Bush's foreign policy team by someone who "knows" what he/she is talking about. However, if what we have seen so far reflects a common wisdom within the intelligence community, then the job of fixing American intelligence is bigger even than the pessimists think it is.
Spencer Ackerman quotes Anonymous as saying:
" To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing....Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world. "
and apparently from Imperial Hubris:
" America is in a war for survival. Not survival in terms of protecting territory, but in terms of keeping the ability to live as we want, not as we must....we can act to preserve our way of life what Mr. Lincoln said is mans last best hope for self-government by engaging in whatever martial behavior is needed. We owe this to ourselves, our heritage and our posterity. We protect none of these by cloaking cowardice with canting words about international comity, civilized norms, and high moral standards. Such words are proper only in a suicide note for the nation. "
This is not realism. It is defeatism. It is a wholesale effort to avoid responsibility and to avoid making difficult choices. This is the cynicism of forward momentum, the damnable suggestion that since we're here, here was inevitable and only pushing the unalterable course to its conclusion will get us through. War may sometimes be necessary, but not genocide.
This path, laid out wide and straight by Anonymous, tacitly supported by members of the US intelligence community, this is the suicide note for our nation.
From yesterday's Boston Globe, Ideas Section, "Off to the $pace races":
" This summer, the X Prize may finally achieve its Lindbergh moment. Tomorrow morning, Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., the leading competitor among the 27 teams from seven countries currently registered for the competition, will launch its first test-flight to the X Prize-mandated altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) over the California desert, which if successful will make its pilot the first civilian to fly a nongovernment vehicle into space. "
" If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. " - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It is even worse when, if you are a dog, some damn "humid bean" steals your identity. Chigger of Blogdogs explains how to prevent identity theft.
In addition to practical advice, Chigger is also a noted semiotician (be sure to check out her master's thesis, "The Semiotics of French Dog Signs"), while her colleague Woody focuses on the whirlwind of pop and political culture.
Unfortunately, the Blogdogs seem to be off chasing squirrels. Throw Chigger and Woody a bone so they'll come back to the keyboard.
(via somerville dog)
The fight against drugs is the fight for Afghanistan
I heard this several times while I was there. I've suggested that making wheat a viable crop again will help, though I don't imagine that it will replace poppy cultivation.
" 'Law enforcement needs to target traffickers and disrupt trafficking routes and clandestine laboratories,' said [the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria] Costa. 'Farmers, including those affected by the government-sponsored opium eradication campaigns, should be supported by development assistance.' "
He forgot to add, "and not undermined by humanitarian efforts", but we can't get everything we wish for - and such a comment would have set off a nice round of bureaucratic squabble in the UN.
A crucial issue left unspoken in this article and left completely out of Mr Costa's remarks - for obvious reasons - is that people in the government, both at the province level and the national level have been implicated in the drug trade. Law enforcement has an especially difficult task, especially when they are also being pressured to adopt an approach that, in the current environment, will almost certainly lead to violence and more instability rather than less.
" The local go-slow approach has frustrated US officials, who advocate military-style raids on poppy storage facilities and slash-and-burn techniques on an additional 10000 hectares of poppy fields. "
As I said above, wheat is not the only answer, but making sure farmers could get a fair, "living" price for it is something that could be done immediately. It might also keep a few farmers from picking up their guns and going after the lawmen.
This a long overdue shout out to RiverStone. She is a thoughtful woman of faith, struggling day by day to build some meaning in this mixed-up world. She isn't like me at all, but her posts often touch something in me and spark reverie. RiverStone is one of those who wrestle with the angel - and she's terrified about what it might mean to win or to lose. I know it isn't any comfort that the match will last a lifetime, but it is easier to get up every time you're thrown if there are others to give you a hand. Go, give her a hand.
Tex of UnFairWitness has been shipping me readers on a regular basis for a couple of months. I've got way fewer than he does, but all of you should go over there and get angry. At what, whether the war, the warriors, tex, or me, is up to you. Tex is two-fisted, so once you're in his world, you're on your own.
" [T]he procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done. "
Somehow, I've managed to acquire a reputation for getting a lot done, but I have definitely been going about both my procrastination and my work in exactly the wrong way. All that will change on Monday.
Furthermore, I now have a strategy to address all those people who owe me things . . .
Mrs Martial is something of a mosquito magnet. I might not even notice that there are mosquitos, all the while she is being devoured. Last night, sitting on the couch, she was fidgeting something fierce, and desperately trying not to scratch.
"What's wrong?"
"Here, feel this." She guided my hand across her shoulder and the back of her neck. She had three bites, all in a row.
"That's awful. Can I do something for you?"
"You can call me 'Eudora' - because I'm all welty."
Coalition forces endanger humanitarian action in Afghanistan
Kenny Gluck has forgotten more about humanitarian work than I'll ever know. He also knows how to toe the line on the concept of neutrality. The piece linked above is a classic demonstration of neutrality in action.
There is an all too frequent rhetorical flourish among the anti-Bush blogosphere and their commenters about the amount of Afghanistan the Taliban control. This benighted landscape, cowering under the stifling cloud of medieval theocracy and modern violence, is variously described as "most of Afghanistan" or "much of the country".
The rhetoric, of course, is trying to equate the ongoing insecurity in Afghanistan with the Bush Administration's failure to deal decisively with the Taliban since November 2001. While both of those remain troubling issues, unifying them into a single, simple image is false.
The Taliban reached their high water mark on September 9th, 2001 with the assassination of the Northern Allaiance's chief commander, Massoud. At that point they controlled about nine-tenths of Afghanistan and they had regained the offensive against their enemies. Since November of that year, they have been on the run and now control nothing.
While the Taliban no longer control any area inside Afghanistan, they do have the capacity to create insecurity and commit acts of violence in parts of the country.
Look at a map of Afghanistan. Kandahar, the major city in the south, has been the heart of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. Follow the road to the south and you'll come to Quetta in Pakistan, another hotbed of that strain of fundamentalist Islam. Follow the road out of Kandahar west to the province of Helmand or east to Zabol and Ghazni and you might be highjacked by Taliban fighters. You might encounter Taliban anywhere south of that road and due east from the city of Ghazni through Paktia province. Go further north than Ghazni city or further west than Delaram and you might still have to contend with bandits of various ilk, but probably not with the Taliban.
Small groups of people can move about the country at will, especially if they are armed. Small groups of Taliban, therefore, can carry out missions of terror pretty much anywhere in the country1. But only if they can avoid the warlords who want to kill them, the patrols of the US and Afghan army who want to kill them, or the normal ordinary citizens who want to kill them. Afghanistan is a violent culture. Taliban who move outside of the regions where they have support are in trouble.
I find I cannot overemphasize this enough to Americans and Europeans: the vast majority of the Afghan people hate the Taliban. There is absolutely no way that they - or any other religiously based movement - could take over the country ever again. The prevalence of such musings in the western press - and among the anti-Bush with whom I began this piece - is unfortunate given how damaging such a misreading can be.
However, I can understand where the beginnings of such an analysis come from. Afghans are among the most religious people I have ever met anywhere in the world. Islam really matters to them and they constantly demonstrate that simple, humble fact in their daily lives. This appears to disturb the equilibrium of a fair number of folks raised in a secular-yet-still-judeo-christian milieu. Worse, these off-balance people don't talk to Afghans (or any Muslims) about what they believe and about what God demands of them. Assumptions are made based upon books written to sell and lurid interviews with extremists, and these assumptions are what gets passed on.
One of the most interesting conversations I have had in Afghanistan was with a young man, Pashtun, Sunni, and deeply religious, who felt he needed to explain to me the difference between true Islam and the Taliban heresy. He quoted me surah and verse from the Koran to demonstrate how the Taliban had misinterpreted. Another man, Shi'a, added and argued on fine points, but agreed wholeheartedly that the Taliban had missed the point completely.
"But then how did the Taliban take over?"
"They promised us peace."
. . .
This is not to say that the policies and actions taken against the Taliban have worked out just fine. They have not and they deserve criticism.
Insecurity in Afghanistan is a product of multiple actors vying to reinforce their own interests at the expense of others'. One reason - indeed the main reason - the Taliban were able to take over much of the country was that they brought security. The anarchic war of warlord against warlord had worn out the population and any possibility of escaping from that terrible cycle was worth grasping. Well, we all know how sadly it turned out. And because of that, I'll say it again, every Afghan I've spoken with about the Taliban hates them. There is simply no way the Taliban could ever take over the country again.
However, as the Taliban have abandoned their strongholds, the security situation in the country has reverted to a less stable one. Banditry and warlordism (not the same thing) have resumed where they left off. The inability (and this is the world's greatest failing toward the people of Afghanistan; something of which we should all be ashamed and working towards changing) of the US or ISAF to provide security across the country (in other words, to arrest or kill the bandits and warlords) is the single most destabilizing factor in the country.
. . .
1 Five aid workers for Medecins Sans Frontieres were killed on Wednesday2 in the north-western province of Badghis. (What CARE said.)
There is speculation that the Taliban were involved. I am skeptical for the reasons above. I have spoken with colleagues who know more about Afghanistan than I do and they share my skepticism. There are many groups in Afghanistan who have an interest in the elections, either to destabilize the situation so that they are called off, or to depress turnout so that they are called into question. Nonetheless, you will see several inexcusably lazy stories tying the Taliban to these murders and very little speculation as to who else might benefit.
2
" Wednesday's was the single highest death toll among aid workers since late 2001. "
CNN is not correct (the story is actually from Reuters - which means that it will appear in hundreds of newspapers, as well as this version on CNN's web-site). Wednesday's equaled the worst attack this year. Five staff of Sanayee Development Foundation, an Afghan NGO, were killed February 26th of this year.
The media have a responsibility to count the lives of locals as equivalent to those of expatriates. You can be sure that Afghans read that story and noticed that five of their countrymen, working for a local NGO, were written right out of the story. Such reporting carries a message about whose lives are really important and which work is truly valued by the international community. I know that MSF, for one, does not share CNN's or Reuters' perspective.
. . .
UPDATE: Grammar fix.
Every day more darkness comes to light. We weep, we rage, we steel ourselves against the cold. And I can't stop thinking about a tiny, insignificant island and what happened there twenty-four hundred years ago.
Once upon a time, a great Empire was stopped in its tracks by a ragged, squabbling mob. But that isn't the story of the island. The story is a part of what came after. After the Greeks beat the invading Persians, two cities emerged as the most powerful. And then, as is too often the way when the number of powers appears to equal two, Athens and Sparta ripped their world apart.
Their struggle forced every other Greek city to choose sides. Or nearly every one. Melos, a city with family ties to Sparta, but surrounded by Athenian allies, decided to sit the war out. It didn't work out so well, as Thucydides tells us in one of the oddest little bits of literature in the entire history of the world.
The Melian Dialogue has been considered the founding text of the "realist" school of international politics. It has been interpreted as endorsing the view that self-interest is the one law of the State and that might-makes-right, as well as a savage critique of that same view. To cut a long story short, Athens, beacon of democracy, fertile soil of genius, imperial power, came to Melos and said, "If you are not with us, then we will consider you to be against us". The Melians wondered if this choice between slavery and death was a true choice. In a debate with the Athenians, they decided that it was not.
Athens overran Melos, put all the men to the sword, and sold the women and children into slavery.
Writing about the Melian Dialogue, Francis Cornford, in his Thucydides Mythistoricus, asks an intriguing question about the form of the dialogue:
" We have already remarked that, as an incident in the Peloponnesian war, the Melian expedition was a trivial affair; the population of a small island was wiped out, and that was the end of it. The significance of the event is only moral, and it is meant to be studied from that side. Our first question is: Why has Thucydides abandoned his practice of writing public speeches, and preferred the dramatic form of conversation? "
Cornford begins directly addressing his question a few paragraphs later:
" Thucydides' first reason for choosing the dialogue form is that this pathological state of mind cannot be directly unfolded in a public speech designed to convince a large audience. Another motive which may have influenced him is that this form is better suited to dramatic irony. "
It is worth noting that the irony to which Cornford alludes here is that in Thucydides' History the Melian Dialogue is placed just before the description of the Sicilian Expedition, the folly which more than anything cost Athens any chance at victory over Sparta. The "pathological state of mind" to which he refers has been outlined in the preceding paragraphs and it is this particular understanding of Melos and Thuycidides' rendering of the atrocity which has been in my thoughts (emphasis in what follows mine, and I can hardly think of a more fitting way to describe most pro-war blather):
" Dionysius, as himself a Greek, feels that the language which Thucydides assigns to the Athenians is 'fit only for an oriental monarch', and that no Greek could have used it;--except, we will add, on one condition: that the speaker be mad. And, in fact, as we read the dialogue, the impression deepens that the Athenian spokesman is out of his right mind. We can, moreover, put a name to the special form of his madness, which shows the peculiar symptoms of a state classed, perhaps rightly, by the Greeks as pathological. The two notes of it are Insolence and Blindness. 'Insolence' is a weak translation of the Greek term, which covered two types of insane exaltation, distinguishable, but closely allied. One is exuberant, sanguine, triumphant, fed by alluring Hope, leaping to clasp hands with unconquerable Desire. The other is cold-drawn, masked, cruel, cynical, defiant of the gods, self-assured of its own worldly wisdom. The former type we shall meet with presently; the latter is portrayed with finished art in the dialogue which leads up to the Melian massacre. Both are blind,--blind to the doom towards which the one speeds exultingly, blind to the vengeance which the other impiously denies. [...] The speaker [...] has lost all sense of the difference between honour and success, dishonour and defeat. He is already smitten with the blindness by which insolent cruelty brings vengeance on itself. "
. . .
In its strategically foolish pursuit of unachievable goals of dubious value, the war in Iraq is shaping up to be America's "Sicilian Expedition". It may, in its ruin of our values and our reputation - and perhaps even our restraint - turn out to be our Melos as well.
" I romanticize America. I can't help it. I've always been head over heels in love with Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Tubman and Emily Dickinson and Robert Johnson and roads that go on and on through big, empty spaces, and Walt Whitman's sentences that go on and on, creating their own mental spaces, and the lovely insanity of a bunch of rich, white guys founding a country on the idea that everyone had equal rights, even if they didn't really believe it. In the beginning were the words and the words were so damn good we're stuck forever after trying to make something of them. "
It is often said that a stopped clock is still right twice a day. However, in my experience this is not always the case. When the battery on my travel alarm dies, I am faced with a blank screen and a mounting horror that I am late.
I find myself feeling something similar as I watch the approving propagation across the anti-Bush blogosphere of Robert Novak's latest trifle. The propagators appear to be operating under the "right twice a day" principle,
I find I must offer two cautions. First, bluntly, Mr Novak is not occasionally "right". He is, in fact, that dead battery and blank screen and mounting horror. He has demonstrated that he is less than honorable as he pursues his journalistic outrages against the Republic. He is not suddenly worth the benefit of the doubt when he confirms your prejudices.
Second, and a more general point, any article about the situation in Afghanistan (or in Iraq, or anywhere) that fails to quote actual Afghans is not in fact offering you anything real about the country in question.
I am sure that some American soldiers have been quoted accurately as to their feelings and even their observations. Nevertheless, this is clearly just-so journalism for the homefront: the story is a simple and often told one of incompetent commanders supporting corrupt foreigners in the service of ever more confused policy. The Roman Legionnaires wrote such letters, as has every army ever stationed far from home, and this article by Mr Novak merely reproduces the template. It adds nothing to our understanding of the policies in question, nor to our understanding of the actual difficulties faced by Afghans trying to rebuild their country.
. . .
Why does this bother me so much? Across the political spectrum in America, Afghanistan has ceased being an actual country with actual people struggling to build better lives and has turned into a rhetorical device. One side uses the "failure" in Afghanistan to beat the President, while the other touts "success" to beat the President's rivals. Sure, everyone nods in the direction of how complex the situation really is, but then they don't bother to learn how to see through the complexity.
Falsehoods abound, most of them serving as shorthand for political positions rather than as honest attempts to explain the reality. But these falsehoods have now been repeated so many times that people believe that they do reflect reality. Assumptions never challenged and easy falsehoods often repeated are exactly how we got into the current foreign policy mess.
We owe it to Afghanistan and to the Afghans to be realistic. We owe it to them to try and understand what the situation actually is.
. . .
What falsehoods? I'll offer a few examples as I get the time, but I'll start with this one: Hamid Karzai is corrupt.
Novak writes that US troops believe that Karzai is corrupt. It is an easy belief to hold. Lots of people believe it. It is also not based on any evidence. Let me state this clearly: there is no evidence that Hamid Karzai is corrupt. Caught in a nearly impossible position, yes. Forced to make unsavory compromises, yes. A puppet of the US, nearly always. A nice guy? I have no idea. Corrupt? No.
Karzai is no richer now than he was when he took office, and, more importantly, by all appearances he is making every effort to rebuild his country. What Hamid Karzai is, and I base this on having observed his actions since he took office, is a patriot. Whether he will be a successful one is still an open question. Whether he will eventually conclude that Afghanistan is a lost cause and so begin to loot the country is also still open. And we, in the US, have some influence on the eventual success of Afghanistan or its failure.
Learn the messy truth and tell it like it really is.
