The Global Citizen |
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We make our friends. We make our enemies. God makes our neighbors. G.K. Chesterton
Is there a great moral nation, The Global Citizen is published in conjunction with The McGill Report, where international news is a good local story.
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1.30.2003
SEE ME ON ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM: I just debuted in the letters column of Sully's site (my chest swells with pride) and as it gets at something that really does puzzle the heck outta me, I'll reprint it here:
It's interesting that we libs supposedly hate Bush because he was the indifferent high school star who got all the babes. That is supposedly why the conservatives hated Clinton. The high school reductionist argument - that we see all our presidents as "the high school guy who ..." - is a little too simplistic for me. I share the gut-level irritation and distrust of George Bush, but it's a grownup thing. I had the same thing with Reagan. I'm amazed that so many smart Republican and conservative intellectuals - David Frum is the most recent - just love their leaders to be not only simple but also so obviously simple-minded, as if that was somehow virtuous. Smarty pants conservatives get all woozy about their inarticulate leaders who bench press, cut wood, and have one or maybe two things on their mind. What gives? Maybe it goes with the conservative view on government - small government, small-minded president, good match. Don't want the President to get any fancy ideas, like, say, helping the weak and the poor and the oppressed, either here or in Iraq. That would really throw a wrench in the works.
THE PROBLEM WITH PACIFISM -- Here's how one former artillery turned Methodist Minister has settled -- sort of -- the question of pacifism for himself.
1.29.20031.28.2003
HIGH-VELOCITY TRAVEL IN METAL TUBES SIX MILES HIGH: A friend responds to my Iraq essay ("A Global Citizen Thinks About War") of yesterday:
THE NEW YORKER'S CASE FOR WAR: After explaining how George Bush is hilariously inarticulate and troublingly vague, David Remnick agrees with his war plans.
"THE BRIGHT SIDE OF WAR:" A really unfortunate Newsweek headline, but the article by the clear-thinking Fareed Zakaria, who here throws in his support for war, is interesting and hopeful. As here:
"As regimes in the Middle East begin performing better and allow their people greater freedoms, people will give voice to their frustrations and ambitions through regular economic and political means—not radicalism and terror. This is not as farfetched as it might sound. Radical communism—which seemed a potent threat in the late 1940s and 1950s in Europe and East Asia—lost its appeal as those countries achieved stability, political freedom and economic vitality."Could radical Islam go the way of Communism? Why not?
FINALLY DONE: I finally published my essay on the likely war against Iraq this morning. I've been working on it for more than a week. It's too dense and choppy to work anywhere but the net, and probably darn few people will read it there, either. Yet I'm proud of this one. It's impossible to think and feel seamlessly about a war, and that texture is reflected in the form of the piece. My insights came in irregular syncopated rhythm, but at least they came, and I tried to write them in a form that gave some sense of the disjointed and yet urgently felt process of thinking about war. Time and again as I tapped away at my keyboard, trying to put some kind of clean and consistent aesthetic wrapper around my unruly ideas and feelings, I felt really helpless and hopeless. Just like after 9/11, when writers around the world threw down their pens, aghast at the suddenly obvious irrelevance of making nicely-formed verbal abstractions. So this time around I just threw it all in pretty much as it came, in chunks and bits and pieces. Maybe I abdicated my duty as a writer by doing that, but maybe not. Must every article published these days be sweetened and greased for fast digestion and rapid expulsion? Well, anyway, let me know what you think, by a gastroenterological metaphor or any other way.
1.27.2003
HAPPY TO HAVE THE YANKS ON BOARD: In South Korea, many folks are very happy to have U.S. military power nearby.
THE LEFT GOES WITH HITLER: Even sadder, but still true. Check out the Star of David on the Donald Rumsfeld character.
TONY BLAIR FOR PRESIDENT! I disagree with Andrew Sullivan on a lot of stuff but not on this: Tony Blair understands America better than many Americans.
THOSE MORALLY UPRIGHT SUVs: Believe it or not, these pigs of the road have their defenders. For the rational view read "Axle of Evil."
1.13.2003
THE TWINKIE DEFENSE: John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker posts this nail-on-the-head illumination this morning. A Muslim woman was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune explaining why terrorism is America's fault: "Unfortunately, what is being exported is fast food, fast movies and fast cars. Those exports create unbelievable havoc in Middle Eastern societies by destroying family values and societal cohesion." Says Hindrocket: "There it is, the ultimate Twinkie Defense: 'You sold us fast food, so we had to kill you!'"
THE VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP: Bill Gates Sr., who's on a book tour promoting the Estate Tax, told this fable he invented at a C-SPAN recorded talk this morning: "God in heaven invested heavily in dotcoms and so now is facing a severely depleted treasury. He goes to two angels who are soon to be born on Earth as the planet's next two inhabitants. He says to them 'I have two slots open, one in America and one in Botswana. I am trying to decide which of you goes to America. So you tell me, upon your death how much of the wealth that you accumulate on earth are you willing to give back to me for my treasury?' Can you imagine either one of those angels giving God any number less than 100%? How much is it worth to be an American?"
1.11.2003
HOW CORPORATE EXECUTIVES HURT THE MINNESOTA COMPACT: Here's a wonderful recent piece from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune explaining why Minnesota isn't acting or voting like it used to, namely Democratic-Liberal. There's one influence the author doesn't specify, but which I have a hunch has played a pretty major role in Minnesota's rightward drift. Namely, all the highly-paid and mostly Republican corporate executives who have been recruited to live in Minneapolis and St. Paul over the past 30 years. They aren't a big percentage of the population but they are economic elites and, sometimes, opinion leaders. Their major impact as citizens is excercised as consumers of housing, health, transportation, and education for their young children. They come to Minnesota with a powerful conservative ideology but with no deep ties to the state, its history, its values, its people, or its nature. Indeed they don't expect to stay here long, but rather to move on to another assignment, in another city or state or even country, after their five-to-ten year tour of duty expires and they're reassigned or headhunted elsewhere. Thus via their votes, their consumer behavior, and especially their support of conservative special interest groups, they tend to support public policy and political candidates that conform to their conservative ideology, more than to the public good as it's been traditionally defined in MN. It's just a theory, but it seems right. Let me know if you have any ideas, statistics, or anecdotes that suggest one way or another. Stay tuned.
The Day of Concensue is Gone and it Won't Come Back By Jim Boyd, Mpls Star Tribune, 1/15/2003 A celebrated political consensus has vanished from Minnesota and with it has gone much of the civility in public life. But to fret over this momentous passing, or to attempt to regain the commonality that once held us together, may be a naive, impossible and even dangerous task. The late, lamented Minnesota consensus was quintessentially one of moderation, centered on moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, influenced by a strong strain of community-minded Scandinavian Lutheranism. There was agreement to bear relatively heavy tax burdens to finance schools, highways, parks and the other amenities that made the community function well. Three influences have combined to relegate that consensus to the history books. One of the most important was reported last week in the newest census reports: Minnesota's population has grown by 65 percent since 1950, a much faster rate than any other state in the upper Midwest. Many of those new Minnesotans came from surrounding states, but many others came from farther away. Most have settled in the Twin Cities suburbs; they are weighted toward the professions; they tend to be Republican, and they were not steeped in the old Minnesota compact. The second influence has been the change in the parties, and it's not limited to Minnesota. The Republican Party has systematically rid itself of its moderate wing. It has managed to define its message simply -- economic growth through tax cuts -- while Democrats still struggle with a cacophony of discordant voices. The upshot in Minnesota, as in most states and the nation as a whole, is that conservative Republicans sit in the catbird seat, and likely will for a long time. There is no middle from which a new consensus can be -- or needs to be -- formed. The third influence eroding consensus -- and civility -- is a popular attitude of disdain toward elites. People are better educated and more likely to work in white-collar jobs. They are less willing to defer to such intermediating institutions as the press, unions, the parties, government (including the public schools) and the influential "opinion leaders" of old. They want to have their own say and to be much more in control of their own lives. They want more choices in where they live and how they live, including how they educate their children and how they save for their retirement. Far from being consensus-oriented, they are fiercely individualistic. Unlike the old elites, they also tend to be far less polite in pushing their personal agendas; thus the loss of civility in public discourse that so many -- usually from the old elites -- lament. It's hard to get an accurate snapshot of human behavior or to see where things will go from here. But most difficult of all, and explosively divisive to American society, would be an attempt to get back to the safe port of old-fashioned "consensus politics." It's not going to happen soon, not in Minnesota and not in the United States. Realism requires the recognition that individual choice is especially powerful right now. If any consensus is possible, it should be built around marshaling the power of choice in service to community. It's true in education, and it is probably true in health care, for example. The U.S. health care system is broken, and many are inclined, as Al Gore was, to look to a single-payer system as the answer. Perhaps Gore is right, but it's a totally unrealistic goal in the United States today. It involves going backward -- to large, elite-run government institutions -- and Americans, including Minnesotans, are in no mood for that. So what are the alternatives that harness the power of choice? How can the uninsured be covered and explosive growth in health-care costs be controlled? No one appears to know the answer yet, but it's the right question. However we build on what is, it's better than wishing for what was.
THE VOICE OF EMPIRE: "Our job is power projection. We have guys flying hundreds of miles off this ship to do the nation's business." -- A U.S. Air Force pilot on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, interviewed on National Geographic TV.
1.7.2003
TWO KINDS OF BLINDNESS: One results from being too close, and the other too far, from what's being observed. Good journalists stand in the middle distance where maximum clarity is possible.
HERE AND THERE: The idea that when something happens over here, something happens as a result over there, is well-established in many intellectual disciplines. In classical and quantum physics, it’s axiomatic. Hit the cue ball and the eight ball drops in the corner pocket (Newton's Third Law). Quantum physics demonstrates a linkage, almost to the point of indistinguishability, between hereness and thereness, as electrons can behave as if there were in two places at once. Chaos theory, which finds patterns in waterfalls and stock markets, is based on the idea of small but present, distant, influence: a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing starts the storm that finally smacks Seattle. In human biology, tiny chemical and electrical couriers travel the body nonstop carrying instant messages between the shin bone, the knee bone, and the hip bone; between the eyes and the stomach; the heart and the lungs; the body and the mind. Electrically and chemically speaking, pleasure and pain occur when information is successfully sent across a vast stretch of space and time -- a letter sent through the body’s blood, nerve, endocrine, or lymph systems arrives, is successfully decoded, and a new letter is sent in the return post. Likewise, the notions of the invisible hand in economics; cultural theory in anthropology; and internationalism in foreign policy are all efforts to understand how cause-and-effect works across great distances of time and space. And all, to varying degrees, have generated thoughtful research and literatures; useful if not infallible predictive theories; and powerful metaphors that have seeped deeply into popular thought. My question is: why hasn’t this happened in the realm of simple human relations? Let’s not talk, at this moment, about how a butterfly in Beijing affects the weather in Seattle. Let’s talk instead about how a sick child in Botswana affects the marriage plans of a software programmer in Minneapolis. Let’s talk about how a young girl’s dreams in rural India in 1984 will change what’s played on MTV in 2003. Let's find out how a Chinese factory worker changes the life of a Minnesota architect. Moral imagination will be the exploratory tool in this quest; and great journalism and novels the canvases where the findings are displayed.
 
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