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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4.30.2003
HATE CRIMES RISE AS GUN LAWS LIBERALIZE: In Rochester and in Minneapolis, hate crimes are flaring up. Now this. Bad timing. Bad combination. Bad everything.
4.28.2003
ELMER ANDERSON WEIGHS IN ON THE CUTS: Everyone gets a chance to name the one thing they don't want cut in the next few state budgets. Our great former governor's choice: the humanities. What a great choice, and what a class act he is.
A TREE IS A FINE EXAMPLE: Alicia Maye, a 15-year-old from Minneapolis, won third prize in the national "Kids Philosophy Slam" with this 500-word essay on (leave it to the adults to come up with a shaggy theme like this) "The Meaning of Life." She got the bronze but her essay reads like gold to me. Check out the last sentence:
I want to seek all that is true to me, and to absorb all that I am meant to see, for this world has so much beauty, mystery, drama and contrast, which invigorates us all.Put a frame around that one.
4.27.2003
PUTTING NORTHWEST INTO PERSPECTIVE: The Strib's Mike Meyers really puts Northwest's woes into perspective for Minnesotans. Bottom line: We'll survive. Check it out:
In 2000, air transportation -- a category that encompasses Northwest and all of its commercial airline rivals, charter carriers and companies such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service -- was a $2.7 billion industry in Minnesota. But the gross state product, the value of all goods and services produced in Minnesota, came to $185 billion. In other words, all air carriers doing business in Minnesota together represented 1.5 percent of the state economy. Air transportation nationally represented 0.9 percent of the U.S. economy.This wonderful piece is from April 7; better late bloggin than never I say.
OVER THERE: Good piece from the Strib's Chuck Haga on how Minnesotan's feel about the war. The same sense of ambiguousness and unease that characterized our prewar thoughts continues to pervade our thoughts now. This nice passage:
For Dick Hagen, an agriculture marketing consultant in Olivia, the war "made me feel better about being an American than ever before because I believe what we're doing over there is noble."That's the question.
"I'M NOT SCARED NOW, BUT I WILL BE:" Toufong Fang writes the most sensible comment I've seen yet on the foolhardy and tragically retrogressive "concealed carry" bill that's poised to pass soon into Minnesota law. He says he doesn't pack right now because he feels safe living in Minnesota. As soon as the bill passes, though, he'll feel fearful as so many thousands of Minnesotans will be packing heat. So he plans to buy a gun at that point.
WHAT'S OUR AMBITION? From Richard Rorty's essay "Global Ambitions" in the Jan. 31, 2003 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry it's password protected):
Only by shifting attention from the question 'How can the United States make itself more secure?' to the qeustion 'How can the world make itself more secure?' can we begin to reverse the tide of events that are sweeping us into the world that Orwell foresaw. Whether our grandchildren feel pride or shame will be determined by whether we become the first great empire to have higher ambitions that to be a great empire.
4.24.2003
AH, MINNESOTA: This line from a Garrison Keillor monologue on Spring caught my ear the other day. It nicely captures a certain local character trait:
When the crocuses and the lillies and the purple gentian finally do come up we feel tremendous joy -- but it's not something we would ever mention.
HOW WALT WHITMAN COVERED A FIRE: Been reading a little of Walt today. Here's a sentence from a newspaper story he wrote about a house fire in Brooklyn:
What comforts were entombed there—what memories of affection and companionship, and brotherhood—what fruition—fell down as the walls and the floors fell down, and were crushed as they were crushed!I'll bet it made quite the mess.
THE IDEOLOGUE OF THE WAR: This WaPo profile of Paul Wolfowitz is encouraging. If the picture it paints of the man is accurate, we can hope that Wolfowitz works just as hard at rebuilding and helping democratize Iraq, as he did at advocating the war against Saddam. It also seems likely, though, that this is precisely where Bush and Wolfowitz could part company. Now that the hawks have got their way, with Wolfowitz's help, they might want to move on to another military "victory" instead of staying in Iraq to finish the job.
4.23.2003
WHY WE SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT THE HALLIBURTON DEAL: Christopher Hitchens explains it all. As a former Marxist he even throws in why the materialist conception of history actually leads you, in this case, to worry about other things than who gets the sweet reconstuction deals.
WHY WE FOUGHT THAT WAR: Ian Buruma's theory is because the neo-cons wanted to enoble their lives by leading a revolutionary war. He points out that many in the Weekly Standard crowd are former Trotskyites. Along the way he makes this nice point:
If the French mission to shape the world is more or less over, the American one is still blasting with both barrels. In many ways, we Europeans should be grateful. Without America, we might well have ended up living in a fascist empire. The world of international institutions that Europeans now rely on owes everything to Woodrow Wilson's dreams. American idealism (as well as enlightened self-interest) was also responsible for the Marshall Plan, the restoration of democracy in Germany and Japan and, probably, the collapse of the Soviet empire.Well, yes.
A SOCIETAL FAULT LINE? OR SOCIETAL GLUE? From the AP this story -- For Many Americans, War News Comes Through Foreign-Language Media.
4.22.2003
A RECORD OF THE IRAQI DISAPPEARED: They are called the "mafqud" in Iraqi, the "disappeared." Here's a web site that archives their names and photographs.
SADDAM WAS HIMSELF A WMD: Human rights groups estimate there are 300,000 disappeared persons in Iraq. In every police station, a torture room. A warehouse filled with corpses stacked to the ceilings. With every new grisly discovery it seems less and less important whether a barrell of anthrax is found somewhere. The government of terror Saddam built was itself a WMD for Iraqis.
THE BIG PICTURES: Our big thinker journalists are publishing overtime these days with tomes that explain it all. To wit:
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and
4.18.2003
EDITING THE HELL OUT OF WAR: The best piece I've seen on why it's wrong not to tell the most depressing stories, and publish the most graphic images of war, is this article from Ellen Goodman. She writes:
By and large, the central narrative of this war has come home as heroes and happy endings; the iconic images have been the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein. Only rarely have we seen blood, like the blood running across a BBC camera lens recording the friendly fire death of 18 people. Only rarely do we read about a soldier who failed to save a buddy from drowning under a Humvee. Only occasionally do we see the image of an armless child.If we don't get the full picture, how can we make good decisions going forward?
OH, WHAT A CONFUSING WAR: Is it even a war? Or is it a police action, or a pre-emptive attack, or a campaign in a larger war? I went back to Leon Wieseltier’s “A Liberal's War” essay today, to try to remind myself why I, too, in the end, had to support the American action in Iraq. It cheered me up, and I will continue to feel good until, in Lebanon 1983-style, a few hundred U.S. soldiers are killed in a suicide bomb attack by Al Qaeda, or Hezbollah, or a freelance terrorist group from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Palestine, or wherever. Reagan’s response to the 1983 tragedy was to pull U.S. troops out of Lebanon immediately. But we can’t do that now. We’re in it for the long haul and it’s then – at the moment of such a tragedy – that our real resolve in Iraq will be tested. Anyway, in the meantime, I pluck these fortifying words from Wieseltier’s piece:
Morally, there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica. Both places were the sites of genocidal crimes that required decisive action by the international community, that is, by an American-led "coalition of the willing." There is a difference in scale, though, and in danger: Unlike the villain of Srebrenica, the villain of Halabja is in the position to perpetrate the same atrocity again, and worse. How can any liberal, any individual who associates himself with the party of humanity, not count himself in this coalition of the willing?And: I cannot imagine any strenuous construction of liberalism that does not include the injunction to fight terror and to fight genocide. Liberalism is not a philosophy of innocence; and it should make tyrants quake, not smile.Damn straight.
4.17.2003
THE VIEW FROM RUMMY'S PERCH: C-SPAN is running a fascinating "average day in the office of the Defense Secretary" (that would be Rummy) piece today. The camera rolls as Victoria Clarke and her staff pick out the photos to be used in the daily Pentagon brieing; the morning planning meeting; etc. At one point, the Def Sec's military assistant, Col. Steve Bucci, is talking to the C-SPAN reporter and he casually drops the phrase "the Afghanistan campaign of the war." In case we were wondering how Rumsfeld sees Afghanistan, Iraq, and who knows where next, there it is.
4.15.2003
WHAT KIND OF STRANGE ANIMAL? I just saw a CNN report about Iraqi children injured in the war. One girl with 60% burns from a kerosene lamp that fell on her during a bombing. A boy who lost two arms and has 40% burns on his chest and abdomen. Two U.S. marines trying to comfort another young girl with bandages that covered her face, which was totally burned in an attack. One of the marines -- his assault rifle still slung around his chest -- found a poncho and wrapped it tenderely around the girl. What kind of strange animal are we humans?
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Here's an article from last fall by Michael Kelly, reporting on a long interview with a "senior White House official." Have a read. Can you figure out who the "official" is? Turns out it was none other than W himself. Just a little insight into the games Washington plays.
4.14.2003
A WAR BEFORE ITS TIME: Michael Walzer says the Iraq war is unjust because it was fought before its time. And he defines the liberal intellectual's job right now as two-fold: to critique unilateralism, and to critique European irresponsibility. Good marching orders.
BUSH'S BOY SOLDIER SALUTE: Presidents saluting their military officers is childish, impolite, and a sign of the "militarization of the Presidency," says John Lukacs:
This gesture is of course quite wrong: such a salute has always required the wearing of a uniform. But there is more to this than a decline in military manners. There is something puerile in the Reagan (and now Bush) salute. It is the joyful gesture of someone who likes playing soldier. It also represents an exaggeration of the president's military role.If that don't describe W to a T.
4.11.2003
THE REAL WAR HASN'T STARTED YET: The WashPost gathers Arab reaction to the downfall of Saddam. Two favorites:
"No, no, no," yelled Shaaban Mohamad, watching television at a Cairo bookstore. "If the U.S. really wanted democracy, they would have taken out just about every Arab leader we have. This is very suspect. The U.S. just wants to protect Israel and wants the riches in the region."
"AN ENVIOUS [SIC] AND TERRIFYING PROSPECT": The China press has been skeptical of the war in Iraq while refraining from all-out propagandizing against America. This piece from the People's Daily is typical -- emphasizing America's economic purposes, especially as regards oil, the hot button issue for China. An interesting and probably unintended piece of honesty in this passage (where the translator surely meant "enviable" instead of "envious"):
The United States long ago established special relations with Saudi Arabia, and if Iraq is included into its sphere of influence, then the oil that may come under U.S. control will make up half of the world total, this is both an envious and terrifying prospect.
LET'S HOPE THEY ARE WRONG: There is nothing in what Bush says -- forgetting for a moment the insincerity he communicates as a public speaker -- that suggests he's ready to back up this military victory with a meaningful long-term committment to Iraq. Jeffrey Sachs weighs in with:
President George W. Bush is presiding over the ruin of US foreign policy. A world united against the war in Iraq is only the start, since US diplomatic failure and neglect extend to virtually every area of foreign policy.And Mike Kinsley with: The psychological challenge of opposing a war like this after it has started isn't supporting the American troops, but hoping to be proven wrong. That, though, is the burden of pessimism on all subjects. As a skeptic, at the least, about Gulf War II, I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn't happened yet.And William Pfaff says the neoconservatives have reached their moment of truth and: This is not good news. There are three things to be said about the neoconservatives and what they want.I hope these guys are wrong, wrong, wrong.
THE AMBIGUITIES: No war is morally straightforward, and this one is more morally labyrinthine than most. Gary Kamiya, the executive editor of Salon magazine, really nails it with this essay on the "schizophrenia" he feels as an Arab-American.
4.9.2003
MICHAEL KELLY WAS NOT A JEKYLL-AND-HYDE: It's sad to see in the tributes to Michael Kelly, how many of them start with the "Two Mikes" cliché -- that there was the wonderful liberal friend Mike and the angry conservative writer Mike.
Most times, the eulogists carefully state how dearly much they loved Mike #1, and how distasteful they found Mike #2. Pete Hamill went so far as to say Mike Kelly had "demeaned his considerable talents" by writing so scathingly about Bill Clinton, Norman Mailer, the United Nations, and other liberal icons. I sincerely doubt if Mike Kelly himself, or those closest to him, ever for a moment saw him as such a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. Rather I think they saw him for what he was, which was a complex and passionate man who was honest to himself, above all in his writing. Therefore, if his thinking turned against Bill Clinton for his nonstop lies -- as opposed to overlooking them because the President supposedly represented liberalism at the pinnacle of power -- then that's the way Mike would write it. If the liberal poo-bahs all liked Mike because he was a mensch but hated his politics, why did they give him so many prized seats at their publications (The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, etc.)? There are plenty of mensches around who are conservative; there are even some brilliant conservative mensches. But none of them get hired to write the “Letter from Washington” for The New Yorker. So how come this brilliant mensch strode like a colossus through the liberal media? My theory is that it's because Mike Kelly was not conservative. He was a moralist, which sometimes made him seem conservative. But in his convictions and sympathies he was a tough, tough liberal. He believed in progress, liberty, tolerance, good government, and economic justice. Time and again, Kelly was called a "conservative" when in fact he was tough on liberals for not being liberal enough. His attacks on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill is just one example. He hated the bill, not because he was against labor unions and environmental groups, but because he believed it would make it tougher for them to get their message into society. I believe that deep down the liberal media knew this. They respected him for it, and recognized him as a true leader for it. As a liberal with a strong moral core. I just wish, now that he's gone, that even one of them would own up to it, instead of peddling the disingenuous "Two Mikes" theory that for all posterity partitions the man from his deepest beliefs. Because it’s obvious Mike Kelly didn’t live that way, and he didn’t die that way. He died because he thought the war was a legitimate way to advance humanitarian goals. He thought Saddam was so brutally illiberal that he needed to be forcibly removed. He died because for him, action had to follow belief. If there was ever a man who was just One Mike, it was Michael Kelly.
4.8.2003
LETTER TO A FRIEND IN CHINA: I got an e-mail from a friend in Shanghai recently who said "This war is of course ridiculous, but I have to give some respect to Saddam for standing up to the United States." Here is what I wrote back to my friend:
I am very worried that the U.S. will get the idea it can solve all sorts of problems, all over the world, with military action. I am not a fan of George Bush, who had visited only two foreign countries when he became President and couldn’t even identify Iraq on a map. Also his advisors are too willing to believe that foreign wars are often a valid part of U.S. security policy. 4.5.2003
PROTESTING THE LAST WAR: If this were a debate, it would go to the students hands down. The liberal arts professors of America come off so poorly in the campus debate on Iraq it's embarrassing. In this article they stand up for vandalism, self-aggrandizement, tantrums, and selfish rage. If this is what they're teaching students the Vietnam War protests were all about, God help us. The students, though, seem very sensibly skeptical if not actually pissed.
WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY: As the war rages, the world goes on. What the bad guys -- Mugabe, Castro, others -- are doing when we're busy with other things is something we need to think about.
4.4.2003
IT'S UNBEARABLE: Michael Kelly’s death is one of those moments where you simply stop, your jaw hangs open, tears fall out of your eyes, you feel a rush of existential rage, maybe you look up to the skies, and all you can think to ask is “Why him?"
Jesus, the guy was good. A beautiful writer. A thinker. A journalist of ideas and yet also a journalist with eyes, and a heart, and political passion. I loved him best because he stood outside the conventional categories and it bothered him not a bit. His loyalty was to the ideas that he wrote about and not to any categories of left or right; or to beltway friendships or political alliances. The beneficiaries were his readers. His dispatches from Iraq were models of analytical reporting mixed with sensory details that let readers know at every moment that this is a war … policies have human consequences … like death … Here is the lead from his last dispatch: “Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man -- poor, not a regular soldier -- judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.”He was one of the shrewdest, fairest, and most fearless analyzers of the influence of class on American politics and journalism. The best summary X-ray of the mainstream media’s liberal bias remains his two-part Washington Post column “Left Everlasting.” He was utterly uncowed by the enforcers of party doctrine from the left or the right. In these columns he made it clear that the media was still largely liberal and liberally biased. And he was critical of them for that. Yet his critique had nothing to do with conservatism. It had to do with noticing that the liberal bias of the mainstream media is essentially the remnants of a once-proud politics – not liberal enough in fact. As he told the writer Diana McLellan in the Washingtonian a few years back: “Now at one point in our time, there was a liberal democratic philosophy that represented the interests of those immigrant parents, and that concerned itself with whether or not the school was good enough for them. Now we have a philosophy that calls itself liberal and progressive, interested in the marginal cultural elite but not particularly interested in making the schools good again.It is unbearable to have to accept the loss of Michael Kelly.
4.1.2003
MODELS OF GLOBAL COOPERATION: New from the Brookings Institution, The Puzzle of Governance in an Integrated Global Age. When dictators borrow, who repays the loan? A global patent regime for pharmaceuticals. And other ideas...
GUY #2 AFTER TWO WEEKS OF WAR: The Global Citizen is publishing the views of four friends about the war in Iraq. Guy #2, the only one of us to oppose forcibly removing Saddam, said at the outset: "I am not prepared to support the U.S. going to war with every fascist." Two weeks of military action in Iraq has only increased his doubts:
Arrogance can get you lost in a sandstorm.
GUY #1 AFTER TWO WEEKS OF WAR: Leaning slightly in favor of the war before it started, on the grounds that not dealing with Saddam now almost certainly meant taking him on later at a greater price, Guy #1 now wonders if the U.S. government and people are ready for the sacrifice it might take to finish the job it's now started:
Two of the principal reasons for starting this war were to neutralize a threat to the U.S. and to liberate a people ruled by a facist regime. The nature of the threat is controversial, but certainly more remote than what faced the country in 1941 or more recently in Afgahnistan. Liberating an oppressed people helped to justify the war, when the remote quality of Saddam's threat to America might not have been enough.
WHO IS FIGHTING FOR US IN IRAQ? Answer: the working class. Here's how David M. Halbfinger and Steven A. Holmes brilliantly sum up a few metric tons of statistics and reports on the composition of the U.S. military in the Sunday New York Times:
With minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent, with political conservatism ascendant in the officer corps and Northeasterners fading from the ranks, America's 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston.Don't miss this piece. It's detailed and readable and fascinating with lots of quotes from soldiers, officers, veterans and new recruits. The historic shift from the draft to the voluntary army after the Vietnam War and the subsequent formation of a kind of warrior class, with recruits drawn from lower-class neighborhoods, is especially well described and quantified. Recruitment rates from the Northeast and Midwest have plummeted while those from the West and, especially, the South, have skyrocketed. As of the end of 2000, 42% of recruits came from southern U.S. states. Perhaps more striking is how sharply leadership in the Army idenifies itself as conservative today, compared to 30 years ago. From 1976 to 1996, the number of military officers who saw themselves as nonpartisan or independent dropped from 50% to 20%, which most of them becoming conservative Republicans. The best part of the article for me were the quotes with recruits, soldiers, and officers. What great windows they provide into the thinking of our military today. Remember, once upon a time, and not that long ago, serving in the U.S. military was considered an honorable and worthy thing to do among our nation's elite and, more to the point, to their Ivy League and otherwise expensively-educated offspring. That ended in Vietnam and since then, in the volunteer Army, we have continued down the path of promoting the Army as a full-time career opportunity for the less-well-off. That's as opposed to the idea of the Army as a place for every citizen to spend some limited period of time in service to their country. Here's Jonathan Lewis, of Chicago, who told the Times he was signing up because he had less to fear in Baghdad than on the streets of his city: Being over in Baghdad, you've got a thousand people 100 percent behind you. Around here, who says you can't be going to McDonald's and that's it? Over there, you're part of everybody, you're with your friends and family, you're still safe.Amazing.
MODELS OF GLOBAL COOPERATION (1): The fight against SARS, the severe new flu-like illness that started in China last year and is spreading across the world, is a model for how countries across the global can cooperate to solve mutual problems. Here is David Heymann, the director for communicable diseases for WHO, on the Newshour last night:
What we've seem from this outbreak is a solidarity within the world which has been unknown in public health. There have been laboratories working together, 11 laboratories working together, sharing their data, to decide what's causing the disease. There have been epidemiologists, people who study the transmission patterns of the disease, working together by telephone, through teleconference in Geneva, learning what others are learning and learning how best to prevent the disease, and at the same time we have doctors working around the world linked into WHO and other doctors exchanging information on how to keep people alive with the disease. So we're seeing an unprecedented global response which is necessary for naturally occurring infectious diseases and would also be necessary should there be deliberate use of an infectious disease to cause harm.
GUY #3 AFTER TWO WEEKS OF WAR: A former Vietnam War protestor and man of the left, weighs in today:
As I was before the war started, I remain against the war but also very disenchanted by the arguments and rhetoric of the antiwar movement. I was not at the anti-war march last week in New York City but my sister was and I read numerous reports in the papers. (Favorite slogan, from a group calling themselves Glamerica: “War is so last century.”)
THE ARNETT AFFAIR: Should Arnett have been fired? Two media biggies sound off. First Walter Cronkite:
Under the Constitution, giving "aid and comfort" to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason. So far as I know no one has yet suggested that Peter Arnett be charged with that capital offense. But it seems that Mr. Arnett hangs by a rope of his own weaving.Now Bill Kovach, Chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists: "It's regrettable that a news organization feels compelled to fire a journalist for essentially doing journalism," said Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.More pro and con views from Jim Romenesko here. Interesting that opinions can be so polarized on a question of apparent stark simplicity: is Arnett a traitor or not, and does that matter to his standing as a journalist or not?
 
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