Even if we were to disregard all the cynical barbs about oil thirst and manifest destiny, America's ongoing struggle to stabilize the Middle East has still yielded some troubling consequences. We have spent a great deal of diplomatic capital over the past few years in assembling all of our various “coalitions of the willing,” and even leaving aside the important role humanitarian aid should play in our policy, if a real threat were to suddenly emerge (e.g. Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan), we might be left high and dry. Where exactly does this leave President Obama?
Hopefully learning from the geopolitical mistakes his predecessors made—in Africa.
The year was 1994, a lifetime ago in African politics; civil unrest was rampant, social collapse was imminent—and furthermore, had been for some time—and after having given the nasty idea some deliberation and tested it in the international press, the US and the rest of the United Nations member states withdrew their peace keepers as quietly as they could and watched as the region imploded entirely, with apocalyptic results. The lives of at least half a million Tutsi probably could have been saved, Clinton himself admitted later, if he'd sent even a few thousand of the requested troops. The withdrawal from Rwanda was the darkest hour of his presidency, he said, and like many, many others, I won't disagree, but we shouldn't forget that he simply turned around and twice repeated himself, first with Bosnia and then with Kosovo.
And, of course, we mustn't forget about Somalia, the war-torn coastal nation two countries to the east of Rwanda; its infrastructure has been irreparably destroyed by a civil war that promises never to end, its culture is under the hideous spell of Sharia law, and its international significance these days consists mostly of chatter among pundits about its ongoing problem with piracy. Black Hawk Down came out not ten years ago, and already, we have forgotten everything we might have learned about human solidarity. Actually, that's not true—we never learned anything about it in the first place, and the only reason anyone saw the movie is because it gave us a romanticized impression of ourselves, never minding the collapsing scenery of Mogadishu. A century from now, the cities of Somalia will still be getting riddled with mortars, and we will still be watching that movie, clapping as the credits roll.
This isn't to excuse President Bush; whatever he might have been fighting for in Iraq, it seems inexcusable that he didn't notice Darfur, the region of western Sudan in which the government has essentially decided to orchestrate genocide as a matter of public policy. Not that the rest of the world bothered to do anything, either; never before has so much shouting and hollering about injustice from so many disparate sources led to so little. Yet again, while the UN member states quibble about jurisdiction and responsibility, another country in the heart of darkness rots.
So say whatever you wish about our incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan; it's too easy these days to take shots at Clinton and Bush, but we must ask, what kind of legacy have they left their successor? And more importantly, what will be the Obama Doctrine? What can our new President learn from Africa? It is clearly true that borrowing neo-conservatism from Bush will land him in a quagmire, but if he just squirms, spins around and adopts the stupid isolationism of Pat Buchanan, it won't be merely cowardice, but apparently protocol as well. Please choose wisely, Mr. President.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
...but mostly, it's because he dresses his daughter like an American Girl doll.
The Supreme Court ruling in Iowa a few days ago in support of same-sex marriage has since gotten me into more than a few blistering arguments. Why should a private agreement between two consenting individuals I neither know nor care about have anything to do with me, and why exactly should I feel compelled to disagree with it on principle? Intuition is slanted toward the proponent of same-sex marriage, and the opponents implicitly seem to recognize it.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
The savvy opponent is likely to begin by offering a litany of his own intuitionist critiques: same-sex marriage contradicts my religion; it violates tradition; it deprives children of a proper parental cross-section; it isn't natural; it makes me feel uncomfortable. But why are any of these legitimately within the purview of the legislator? Maybe gambling violates my religion; should we ban it? Divorce and one-night-stands often functionally deny children of one or both of their parents, and do so in much larger numbers; should we ban them? Heart transplants aren't natural; should we ban them? Soulja Boy makes me very much more than uncomfortable, and is offensive to the aesthetic sensibilities of every single person I've ever met; should we ban him? Because it's protocol in this country not to concoct tyrannical, ad hoc laws to satisfy the whims of even a majority, these arguments are the easiest to dispatch.
The opponent might then argue—à la Rick Santorum—that legal same-sex marriage leads to legal polygamy, bestiality or any of the other usual silly conjectures. But this is a patent non sequitur. It isn't as if marriage has some kind of universal taxonomical tree denoting its structure, on which a marriage of two men or two women is an intermediate between a marriage of a man and a woman and a marriage of a man, a woman, four goats and a toaster. In reality, same-sex and opposite-sex marriage differ only in that one is already accepted and that one isn't, and opponents have just slipped in a preexisting norm as a piece of its own evidence. Even if there actually were that empirical suggestion of causation—which there isn't, by the way, not the faintest whisper—would this be a reasonable basis to begin restricting rights that are, by hypothesis, otherwise legitimate? Of course not. After all, legal marriages in general are themselves also a prerequisite to legal polygamy, but no reasonable person would argue to ban the former simply to rid ourselves of the possibility of the latter.
In lieu of all of those arguments, the opponents of same-sex marriage are likely to assert that gays can change their orientation, a fact which is neither straightforwardly true nor relevant. They might argue that it leads to the breakdown of the family, a curious assertion to make in a country with a fifty percent divorce rate. They might argue that procreation is the true warrant for marriage, which can only make us question where they place the infertile. They might even support the civil union “compromise,” a seemingly pragmatic position that has gained ground on both sides in recent years but is actually entirely arbitrary and self-evidently unnecessary if it has been properly defined.
But in the end, they are forced to recognize that their position is not rooted in fairness or the earnest happiness of man but rather some kind of selfish predisposition, and that while they might well be decent, ordinary people who don't support visiting gays with violence, they still provide ideological cover for those who do. At any rate, both public policy and public opinion in the United States and elsewhere are clearly moving in the right direction, and, as this proxy war begins to draw to a close, we can realize that although the ruling in Iowa is a big victory for gays, it's a bigger victory for the rest of us.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
2012: A Race Odyssey
Anyone in the habit of talking politics with me knows I have a fascination with the American right.
As a left-leaning person, I feel I can't help it; more than a few of my friends are conservatives, and they seem to have a fundamentally different conception of everything. And yet, despite the yawning ideological chasm, I find nonetheless that I have reached with most of them very much more than a cool détente and that our similarities ultimately far outweigh our differences. So I ask myself: why conservatism? Why was it ever successful? Where will it go from here?
Although I was only a child back in 1994, even I recall the birth of the so-called “Contract With America”—the GOP's post-Reagan hostile takeover of the legislative branch, engineered by Newt Gingrich—and over the following few years, the change in the zeitgeist proved itself to be genuine. Socialism had officially become the political and economic albatross of the twentieth-century, domestic crime was at an all-time low, and Wall Street was abuzz about a 36,000-point Dow and the possibility of a federal surplus. America's moderates—those with a gradual inclination toward social permissiveness, a commitment to foreign humanitarianism and a general trust in laissez-faire capitalism—were now alleging to take a “pragmatic” rather than “ideological” approach, and there was no talk of unemployment and no worry of depression. It seemed we had finally found the Grand Unified Theory of politics; Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of “the end of history,” declaring that we had reached the singularity, and we believed it.
But then along came 9/11, the endless incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the unraveling of the financial system, and the center-left started to get its way in the national elections. Long overdue elements of their agenda—the universalization of our healthcare system, expanded support for public education, more comprehensive regulation of our financial system—are inevitable in this climate. The pendulum has swung back to the left, and it seems to show no sign of slowing; in 2010 and 2012, is the GOP going to regain its proud majority and reassert its existence, or is it just going to sink even deeper into political debt? They must adopt a torchbearer, and he or she must be more lucid than Rush Limbaugh. But who shall it be?
Sarah Palin is a twit, and everyone knows it. I wouldn't trust her to hold an actual torch.
The only other person really getting attention in conservative circles, though, is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. On paper, it's not difficult to see why; he's young, smart, ethnically distinct, memorable, relatively well-spoken, and a proven bureaucrat. Unfortunately, he continues to insist on describing creationism as good science and takes a dogmatic, draconian stance on abortion, both positions that will ensure he gets little-to-no support from the center. He has gotten more recent publicity than any other Republican, but it's been mostly negative: his abysmal rebuttal to the State of the Union Address was aimless and patronizing, and it seemed only to prove that he wasn't the kind of transformative political figure the GOP has insisted he was.
Everyone else recedes into the background, for one or more reasons. Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, is somewhat popular in his state but has little national name recognition. Mike Huckabee is well-known and terrifically charming, but wants to abolish the income tax and change the United States into a theocracy. Mitt Romney also has a strong national presence, but has waffled on key issues in the past and will probably forever be hampered politically by his religion. John McCain declined to endorse any of them, saying he wished to wait for the situation to develop.
Hopefully he doesn't take too long.
As a left-leaning person, I feel I can't help it; more than a few of my friends are conservatives, and they seem to have a fundamentally different conception of everything. And yet, despite the yawning ideological chasm, I find nonetheless that I have reached with most of them very much more than a cool détente and that our similarities ultimately far outweigh our differences. So I ask myself: why conservatism? Why was it ever successful? Where will it go from here?
Although I was only a child back in 1994, even I recall the birth of the so-called “Contract With America”—the GOP's post-Reagan hostile takeover of the legislative branch, engineered by Newt Gingrich—and over the following few years, the change in the zeitgeist proved itself to be genuine. Socialism had officially become the political and economic albatross of the twentieth-century, domestic crime was at an all-time low, and Wall Street was abuzz about a 36,000-point Dow and the possibility of a federal surplus. America's moderates—those with a gradual inclination toward social permissiveness, a commitment to foreign humanitarianism and a general trust in laissez-faire capitalism—were now alleging to take a “pragmatic” rather than “ideological” approach, and there was no talk of unemployment and no worry of depression. It seemed we had finally found the Grand Unified Theory of politics; Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of “the end of history,” declaring that we had reached the singularity, and we believed it.
But then along came 9/11, the endless incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the unraveling of the financial system, and the center-left started to get its way in the national elections. Long overdue elements of their agenda—the universalization of our healthcare system, expanded support for public education, more comprehensive regulation of our financial system—are inevitable in this climate. The pendulum has swung back to the left, and it seems to show no sign of slowing; in 2010 and 2012, is the GOP going to regain its proud majority and reassert its existence, or is it just going to sink even deeper into political debt? They must adopt a torchbearer, and he or she must be more lucid than Rush Limbaugh. But who shall it be?
Sarah Palin is a twit, and everyone knows it. I wouldn't trust her to hold an actual torch.
The only other person really getting attention in conservative circles, though, is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. On paper, it's not difficult to see why; he's young, smart, ethnically distinct, memorable, relatively well-spoken, and a proven bureaucrat. Unfortunately, he continues to insist on describing creationism as good science and takes a dogmatic, draconian stance on abortion, both positions that will ensure he gets little-to-no support from the center. He has gotten more recent publicity than any other Republican, but it's been mostly negative: his abysmal rebuttal to the State of the Union Address was aimless and patronizing, and it seemed only to prove that he wasn't the kind of transformative political figure the GOP has insisted he was.
Everyone else recedes into the background, for one or more reasons. Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, is somewhat popular in his state but has little national name recognition. Mike Huckabee is well-known and terrifically charming, but wants to abolish the income tax and change the United States into a theocracy. Mitt Romney also has a strong national presence, but has waffled on key issues in the past and will probably forever be hampered politically by his religion. John McCain declined to endorse any of them, saying he wished to wait for the situation to develop.
Hopefully he doesn't take too long.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Which Way To the Bastille, Again?
It's a bad time to be a banker, and not just because President Obama said so.
Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Attoney General, recently subpeonaed insurance giant AIG for a list of the names of every single person in the financial division slated to receive a bonus, for the purposes of some kind of “review.” And an internal memo has recently been circulating the AIG offices, warning all its employees to be cautious of suspicious loiterers, to always travel in groups, and to not make obvious their place of employment. In other words, it seems the people of America have returned to claim their republic, and in a big way.
I don't really wish to be an advocate for outright violence, but it seems like the leadership of this fiscally and philosophically bankrupt firm ought to have a little trepidation about flossin' the corporate logo. Why would they want to, anyway? It's embarrassing enough to wear a Royals hat in the middle of downtown Kansas City, and they're just benign losers. Their executives, on the other hand, have planted themselves directly at the center of a worldwide economic crisis with their greed and stupidity, and now their CEO hopes to pacify the growling mob by urging his employees to return half of their bonuses? “Half-assed,” as David Shuster put it, hardly begins to describe it; it's seems at first surprising not that they still have their jobs, but rather that our stores haven't yet run out of pitchforks.
But, of course, it suddenly becomes a more complicated matter once the apologists arrive. It becomes a matter of “bloodthirsty populism,” “bad risk management,” “socialistic redistribution,” and a million other disingenuous catchphrases from people who are trying to justify the disaster or shirk responsibility for it but don't know anything about macroeconomics. Even Rush Limbaugh slithered from his cesspool long enough to defend the bonuses. (Of course, in typical fashion, he didn't elect to just follow AIG's own propaganda—that they have been forced into payment by some kind of contractual legal obligation—but felt compelled to add that these bonuses for the superrich will actually serve as a positive stimulus for consumption. Rush Limbaugh: chameleon, conservative, champion, devoted Keynesian.) For better or worse, the Treasury itself has suggested that it is unwilling to ever allow AIG to fail, and that it will forever continue to bail them out, numbers be damned. And our venerable media outlets, apparently bored with parroting the “too big to fail” rhetoric but having far too much fun to just shut up, have just taken to babbling one-liners from the French Revolution and fanning the flames. It's all so hopelessly confusing, and the aggregate effect of all of the noise is a kind of intractable agnosticism. Who's to say, suffocating in the data and the chatter, who really deserves what?
Haven't we had enough of this obscurantism? The facts are pretty clear: the situation has nothing to do with retention of top talent, because many of the people slated to get these bonuses have already left, gliding gently back to earth with the softest of golden parachutes. The bonuses themselves are a red herring, a distraction, a pittance compared to the total bill, and our indignation ultimately does us no good. But the anger is certainly understandable. These people have spent the last quarter-century peering down from the heights of the Manhattan cityscape, and now, not only do they need our help, they're perfectly glad to bite our hands as we give it to them. But as we have learned about capitalism, these are ransoms we occasionally have to pay. If we love our system so much, what we ought to be doing is making sure we never have to pay this much again.
Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Attoney General, recently subpeonaed insurance giant AIG for a list of the names of every single person in the financial division slated to receive a bonus, for the purposes of some kind of “review.” And an internal memo has recently been circulating the AIG offices, warning all its employees to be cautious of suspicious loiterers, to always travel in groups, and to not make obvious their place of employment. In other words, it seems the people of America have returned to claim their republic, and in a big way.
I don't really wish to be an advocate for outright violence, but it seems like the leadership of this fiscally and philosophically bankrupt firm ought to have a little trepidation about flossin' the corporate logo. Why would they want to, anyway? It's embarrassing enough to wear a Royals hat in the middle of downtown Kansas City, and they're just benign losers. Their executives, on the other hand, have planted themselves directly at the center of a worldwide economic crisis with their greed and stupidity, and now their CEO hopes to pacify the growling mob by urging his employees to return half of their bonuses? “Half-assed,” as David Shuster put it, hardly begins to describe it; it's seems at first surprising not that they still have their jobs, but rather that our stores haven't yet run out of pitchforks.
But, of course, it suddenly becomes a more complicated matter once the apologists arrive. It becomes a matter of “bloodthirsty populism,” “bad risk management,” “socialistic redistribution,” and a million other disingenuous catchphrases from people who are trying to justify the disaster or shirk responsibility for it but don't know anything about macroeconomics. Even Rush Limbaugh slithered from his cesspool long enough to defend the bonuses. (Of course, in typical fashion, he didn't elect to just follow AIG's own propaganda—that they have been forced into payment by some kind of contractual legal obligation—but felt compelled to add that these bonuses for the superrich will actually serve as a positive stimulus for consumption. Rush Limbaugh: chameleon, conservative, champion, devoted Keynesian.) For better or worse, the Treasury itself has suggested that it is unwilling to ever allow AIG to fail, and that it will forever continue to bail them out, numbers be damned. And our venerable media outlets, apparently bored with parroting the “too big to fail” rhetoric but having far too much fun to just shut up, have just taken to babbling one-liners from the French Revolution and fanning the flames. It's all so hopelessly confusing, and the aggregate effect of all of the noise is a kind of intractable agnosticism. Who's to say, suffocating in the data and the chatter, who really deserves what?
Haven't we had enough of this obscurantism? The facts are pretty clear: the situation has nothing to do with retention of top talent, because many of the people slated to get these bonuses have already left, gliding gently back to earth with the softest of golden parachutes. The bonuses themselves are a red herring, a distraction, a pittance compared to the total bill, and our indignation ultimately does us no good. But the anger is certainly understandable. These people have spent the last quarter-century peering down from the heights of the Manhattan cityscape, and now, not only do they need our help, they're perfectly glad to bite our hands as we give it to them. But as we have learned about capitalism, these are ransoms we occasionally have to pay. If we love our system so much, what we ought to be doing is making sure we never have to pay this much again.
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