Jonathan Schell on Reagan and nuclear (non)proliferation

Jonathan Schell's piece in the last issue of The Nation discussing Reagan's legacy of non-proliferation is provocative. His account of Reagan as a committed nuclear abolitionist and the very small opening there was for this idea at a certain moment at the zenith of the Cold War disturbs most understandings of him on the right and the left and gives a good deal of rhetorical force behind the argument that Schell has been making for many decades. As he confesses in an early aside, "It is a perverse pleasure to be able to quote Schwarzenegger, Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn and Reagan approvingly in a single article in The Nation, which normally does not keep company of this kind." It is not just a random exercise in reinforcing his own position to show that Reagan was committed to something with such a widespread public approval, but which rarely gets a hearing in major policy circles. After pointing out the divergent positions between major Democratic candidates for president, he notes that none of the Republicans have any debate on the issue,

So far, Reagan's legacy has found no takers among the Republican candidates, even as they claim with every other breath to be his heirs. The debate question for them would be whether their admiration for their hero extends to his vision of nuclear abolition, and if not, why not?

I found the account very informative, though I'm sure the nuclear hawks who prop up Reagan's image in front of anything they do would, if they found Schell a worthy critic, present their own more equivocal account of the events. On the other hand, I find Schell's continued interest in this issue to be important. Having grown up with nuclear arms as a sort of common sense background to late twentieth century life, discussion about non-proliferation seems like a relic of a time when they made cars with tail fins. It's not for nothing that Kubric shot Dr. Strangelove, made in 1964, in black and white: though we might not all love the bomb, we've certainly learned to stop worrying.

Schell and others help remind us that the current foreign policy crises in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere are not the just random, unconnected headlines, but the historical consequences of a certain decision made by US policy makers to abandon non-proliferation--and a policy that many of the current candidates for US president are likely to repeat. In speaking about Hillary's position, he comments that, "It's hard to imagine a stance more likely to accelerate nuclear proliferation." He goes on to ask, "Wouldn't this matter be as worthy of a few questions in the debates as, say, driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants or Obama's readiness to get verbally tough with Clinton?" The answer of course, is yes, but unfortunately the issue of non-proliferation seems like such a relic. In some ways it's quite remarkable that the current cultural climate is able to make xenophobic claims about being overrun by immigrants seem like a unique, modern narrative while talking about reducing nuclear arms seems like yesterday's news. It isn't, of course, but for some reason the popular discourse in the US makes it seem that way.

For me, it is a reminder of an earlier moment in the US and British Left, a time when one of the biggest issues to unite the left was not labor rights or the war in Vietnam, but the increased production of Nuclear Arms. As Dennis Dworkin discusses in his book on Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, one of the early issues that inspired the New Left "Originating as a force opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons, it came to symbolize a wider discontent with the institutions of modern society. It was the only genuine mass political movement between the Popular Front in the 1930s and the student revolt of the late 1960s." (64) But even the latter was, in part, an outgrowth of the earlier unity in the CND. Specifically, the different factions that eventually became identified with Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson and the journals that they worked on (The Universities and Left Review [ULR] and The Reasoner respectively, which were eventually merged to form The New Left Review) were initially united over the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The ULR, Dworkin contends, "saw themselves as possible mediators between the CND and the mainstream labor movement" while

Even before the founding of the nuclear disarmament movement, Thompson was writing in the New Reasoner about the relationship between nuclear disarmament and socialist strategy: "The bomb must be dismantled; but in dismantling it, men will summon up energies which will open the way to their inheritance. The bomb is like an image of man's whole predicament: it bears within it death and life, total destruction or human mastery over human history."

The issue, in other words, that eventually brought forth the energy of the left that created what became known as Cultural Studies, was the proliferation of Nuclear Arms. Now the latter seem largely to be a hegemonic commonplace and the question is less about whether they should exist than who should possess them. The shift mirrors the shift in the conversation of Cultural Studies more generally. The original concern was with what defined the culture of capitalist democracies and what mechanisms were used to reproduce this culture by the ruling classes of nation states that adopted this as the dominant mode of production. Now this is basically accepted as "the" mode of production; it forms the background of conversations about identity politics which no longer question the dominant organization of commercial media and instead look at the issue of who gets represented and how. This shift is being reversed--or, more accurately, the dialectic of the relevance of the earlier concern with present ones is being realized--but for a time, the acceptance of the status quo was seen as a precondition for critiquing the surface manifestations of more fundamental inequalities.

Whether the issue of Nuclear Proliferation should become some sort of guiding question in Cultural Studies is likely connected to the question of whether one of our major concerns should shift to issues of war--particularly the US war in Iraq (especially for US CS thinkers). Paul Smith said as much at the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference and there is certainly some shift in this direction. Since, for the time being, my work on IPR is dealing with what could be seen as an incidental concern in this kind of global environment I'll defer any grand pronouncement on the issue. But I will note that the current strategy used to counter proliferation faces roughly the same problem which faces interests who hope to create a common worldwide legal regime for intellectual property rights. Namely, that they face a world in which they have done everything they can to tear down states which might protect the interests of their citizens over the interests of the international regime. In doing so they have effectively weakened--both in terms of the institutions of government and their popular legitimacy--the very instruments that might be needed to enforce such a regime. The flipside of this argument could be that the state was never so strong except in the metropolitan center, and either way the attempt to stem what is basically a sort of mercurial flow of knowledge and ideas is a Herculean task even the strongest Leviathan would be hard pressed to execute. Still, it ironically points to the continued need for executive instruments even in seemingly the most immaterial of issues.

Peter Vlach

So it has taken me a few weeks to get it together, but I've finally been able to scan in the photos I had of Peter. I also have something I've written, but I had to do it freehand and will have to transcribe it when I have more time. It was really upsetting to hear the news about him and it took me quite some time to really get my head around why. I don't know that I have, but at least I'm not thinking about it all the time anymore.



Here is Peter the way many people seem to remember him. As best I can recall I took this picture in the Summer of 1995, after I had just bought my first SLR camera. Peter had already gone to school but had come back to Lewisville to visit. I was hanging out a lot with John, Syd, and Chris who all lived together in some apartments off of Main St. One night peter took John, Joel and I cruising in his awesome red car. I feel like it was earlier that year that John and Peter introduced me to the music of Tom Waits and we had all been listening to him pretty much non-stop for several months. Something about that car just screamed Tom Waits (or maybe Tom Jones and Tom Waits) and he might have gone for a ride with us had he been around that night. I don't think he would have joined John and Peter at the destination, however.

Here's the photo as it appeared in my photo album. I thought it was a good snapshot of a moment. The top is taken of John at his place. I don't know the provenance of the T-shirt, but I know that Peter eventually ended up with it for at least a time as he's wearing it in the photo his brother has of him on his website. The middle, is, of course, Peter and the bottom is Andy from our road trip from TX to OR later that summer. Andy was also hanging out at John and Syd's quite a bit that summer, as was Joel. Speaking of...


I don't know why there's a picture of Cliff on this page, but the other two are of John and Joel in the backseat of Peter's car on the way that night to the railroad trestle. I don't know what inspired the trip, but I know that Pete and John ended up jumping off the top and I got these two shots.

I know that by the end of that summer a lot had changed for everyone. And after I went to school, I lost touch with Peter and John and Syd moved into a new place (the apartments where my Brother lives now and Leah's brother used to live. ) I hung out with them quite a lot when I moved back to TX, but when I went to school in Georgetown, TX, I lost touch with them. I tried to remain in contact, but they were doing their own thing. I can't remember how that little clique parted, but I know that by the following year (maybe the fall of 1997) Syd had moved somewhere to work on acting and John had moved down to live with Peter in Austin. I think the last time I saw Peter was at their place around that time. Here are a few photo's from that night.




the book in the foreground is Umberto Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics." What I remember most about that evening was that we had just discussed Eco in one of my classes and in conversation with Peter I discovered that he was studying semiotics. Thinking that I could therefore hold my own in a conversation on this topic, I started asking some questions. Peter, of course, effortlessly and with no pretense, began speaking at a level way beyond my comprehension. I tried, briefly, to play along, but he was quick to realize that I had no idea what he was talking about. So he gently pulled back the throttle on his big brain and we chatted for a bit longer about something mundane.

I remembered him that way for several years. Hearing about his exploits second or third hand, I knew that this calm, humble, effortless genius, this singular, quirky spirit was traveling East Asia, meeting interesting new people and having adventures. Though I didn't keep in touch with him, there was something comforting in knowing that he was out there, that Peter existed.

Bill O'Reilly: cultural anthropologist

Although I think Bill O'Reilly is, indeed, an asshat, the clip from his radio show that Media matters has picked up as evidence of him being a bigot shows something much more sickening--Juan Williams chatting with him like Bill's as pluralistic and aware as the next guy. I heard Williams on NPR a few weeks ago in a short segment about the role African-Americans journalists play in the news. As an illustration of the pressure he felt as a spokesperson for Black issues he said:

"I remember once I was covering Marion Barry here in D.C. and I remember standing at a bus stop one day [back when I had to ride the bus]. And this guy comes up to me and he says, "You know that White newspaper you work for, The Washington Post, you know that paper goes all over the country, all over the world and it's creating a real bad image of Black people, you know, you should know what you're doing, you know, working for the Man and putting down Black people."

That certainly is a great burden to bear. It's a good thing he's over that. Now he appears on Bill O'Reilly's show, effectively, as a member of the black upper class, assuring Bill's 70+ year old white, male audience that there are some Negros out there who are civilized and well mannered and not corrupting our youth. In the segment he has the keen insight to say that it's really okay for white kids to listen to Gangsta rap because that has no effect on them except for providing them an outlet for rebellion (oh, and creating a certain impression of race relations--but who could that hurt?) It's the Black youths that have a problem here because:

too many of the black kids take it as, "Oh, that's what it means to be authentically black. That's how you make money. That's how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos." And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they're on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it's inauthentic.

It's like it came from the script of a movie drafted by Reaganite propagandists about race. I'm not going to really engage with the argument about the effect a certain set of role models has on young people: obviously it has some effect but since the "black kids" we're talking about here are cardboard cut outs fashioned by the minds of these two stooges I'll leave that to one side. What I will point out is that, as these two guys with their major public presence on the US airwaves forget to mention, is that this image of "gangstas" etc. is hardly new and their widespread promotion isn't just some random, democratic result of us having sorted through all the possible Black entertainers and coming up with these guys. Up at the top there are some White homies that are making plenty of bank off of this--and have been for some time--and their marketing and promotion tactics are keen to the popular impressions they've helped to create.

But all of this is sort of beside the point. Because what Bill begins his segment saying is that he's so unfamiliar with the way that "Black America" (as if such a thing exists) works that a stroll through Harlem is his only source of authority for talking about "Black America." Juan Williams should have called him on that right off. If you're such a stranger to these areas, how do you know so much about the children in them? The answer is that he simply doesn't. And I'd imagine Juan Williams doesn't know much more. The effect they are talking about (kids imitating gangsta rappers) is simply presumed from the content of the media. The ridiculous idea that they can blame the increase in out-of-wedlock births on "Gangsta Rap" would be charmingly back-woods if these two fools weren't having their rap session on a nationally syndicated radio show.

I mean, everyone knows Reggaeton is much more popular than Gangsta rap in most US cities!



MOREOVER...

In thinking a little longer about this, I really do wonder what the larger context for Bill and Juan's little diatribe is and my suspicion is that it was addressing the events in Jena, which, if it was the case, really disgusts me. This lead into the whole discussion makes me suspect that it had something to do with what is going on there, in which case Williams should really be ashamed of himself for playing along:

Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.

Right. I guess those kids in Jena just didn't take up the challenge those nooses posed with the right frame of mind.

[okay, I admit, I'm jumping to a conclusion here. But since I am not going to pay to listen to the 9/19 version of his radio show, I'm going to assume that, since the story aired the day before the big rally in Jena it is hard to imagine any story about race (especially one that focuses on the age old white problem of having to put up with uppity, yet uncivilized, Negros) not beginning from that point. And if it wasn't starting from that point, then it is even more disconnected from reality than I imagined.-]

Politics in Black and White - New York Times

Krugman says, of the changes that the protests of Jena help illustrate :

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.

I think calling it poetic justice is inadvertently giving the Democrats too much credit for actually doing anything minority issues on their own accord. If the Republicans are still committed to the southern strategy (fully evoking the antebellum meaning of the term) then the Democrats are just as committed to a Northern Strategy (i.e. where race was definitely an issue throughout the 19th century, and where full equality for African Americans was never on the agenda) have done little more than cash in as the "other party." The real justice would be if minorities of all races (and classes) created a third party that was actually committed to the issue of racial equality. It would mean that the Democrats couldn't just wait for electoral windfalls from simply being the "less evil" party. One could say the same at this point for issues of gender (especially reproductive freedom) but I've seen way too many haughty middle class white women lately who seem to think that the Republicans are their party to expect a mass of women to move any closer to protecting their own interests than possibly jumping to the Democrats. I don't know if Hillary makes that any more or less possible, but either case isn't very promising in terms of the issues that should matter most.

On that note, I've been really struck lately at how much women--especially new mothers--will put up with in terms of the boundaries their employers put on them. I guess at that point there is not much that can be done by an individual, but in an earlier age having to use vacation time for maternity leave (as one new mother I know has) or having to quit work altogether because the employer won't work with you on child care issues and flexible work schedules after only six weeks of maternity leave--these are the kinds of things that would get people pissed off and start rallying other mothers for some sort of expansion of maternity rights on a national level. It would seem that the absence of this even in the face of all the "culture of life" bullshit the GOP likes to brand itself with really goes to show how cowed we all are. Maybe there is some "netroots" going on about this somewhere, but most of the energy seems to be channeled into the dead end catacombs of the old party apparatuses, which seem to be committed to the "culture of life" in proportion to the life giving force of Dick Cheney's womb.

All of that will, of course, come to a head in the next few days when Bush commits the rhetorical/PR blunder of vetoing a bill on children's health care. I have no illusions right now about the robustness of the Democrats desire or ability to really change the health care industry, but it is actually poetic irony to have Bush signing such a veto: "Life begins at conception, but our responsibility for protecting it ends at birth." Sign on, you fanatical hypocrite; sign on.

[I suppose I should follow that by saying that the ideological framework of the Republican party is fully able to make this seem completely coherent. The danger, on the other hand, of cornering them on this point, is that the neither of the pure ideologies--19th century capitalism or 15th century theocratic absolutism--are all that appealing, though both find plenty of adherents within different sectors of the US public. If they were to choose one of the two for the sake of consistency, then it might turn off some of the swing voters, but I don't have complete faith that either would be stomped at the polls. There seems to be a genuine longing among a good portion of the US populace for the comforting arms of fascism or totalitarianism of some stripe so I wouldn't put it past them to overturn the rest of the 20th century for the committed adherence of any party to a comprehensive (and easily comprehendable) master narrative. I know this is a fairly cliched thing to say in this post-post-modern era, but I say it as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.]

Alexander Cockburn: On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Cockburn makes a good general case for some of the absence of novelty in Naomi Klein's thesis of "Disaster Capitalism"

The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about "the bloody birth of counter-revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

but even as he is saying this, he really seems to be missing the point. As obvious as this may be to the average leftist with some sense of history, she does have a point in that the rise of American Empire (or, if you want to sound like the more PC Liberal version, "The American Century") has been accompanied by a significant ideology of "freedom" and "democracy." And there is a very clear bias towards remembering the last half century as one of the peaceful progress towards the "End of History."

On the other hand, as vitriolic as 1960s leftists like Cockburn were in their disdain for the welfare state, many of the social wage gains it provided were not just some corporate fleece job. Ditto the gains of civil rights. Yes these were won through struggle, but the international image of the US was in the forefront of the minds of the leaders who eventually had to re-write some of the hegemonic discourse to allow for these new articulations of freedom. No it was not an unmitigated success and yes there was still plenty of problems with the normalizing "regime of truth" through which the institutions of the state produced the ideal national subject.

The change in the 1970s, which Klein seems to be pointing to, is one in which many of those gains were articulated as some sort of special pleading by weenies who couldn't cut it rather than the hard won gains of people who actually contributed to the society--or as social supports for people who the state's actions (in line with the interests of globalizing capital) left in increasingly dire straits.

If Cockburn's argument is that there is never any difference in the relationship between capital and labor or capital and the state, then that, also, is an "interesting perspective" (as he says of David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism). But it seems no more historically specific than Klein's account to say that nothing has really changed. On this point, I have recently been having some fairly unpopular thoughts.

I don't know much about Soviet history. I grew up in the Reagan presidency so my earliest understanding of it was as an "Evil Empire" But it seems like much of what was gained in the 20th century in the US was gained because the Soviet Union was always lurking as a counterbalance. I'm certain that the propagandistic image of that society that I had in the US was as filled with inaccuracies as the official version promoted by the Kremlin, so I can't say anything about how good it was for the Soviet people. It doesn't seem that it was a whole lot better than the social ruptures caused by capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, but in world politics, it was at least there to keep the US (more) honest. The civil rights movement in the US and the anti-imperialism movements throughout the world not only had a friend in the Soviet Union, the possibility that they could be more friendly with the USSR than the USA made the latter pay a little more attention to (appearing) consistent. That, it seems, has been lost.

This brings me to Cockburn's example of India. I don't have sources handy on this, but I recall accounts of the pressure placed on India with the fall of the Soviet Union to transition quickly to an alliance with the US. I believe the discussions were related to the recent Nuclear alliance between the US and India, but the point was that there was a crisis that led to the Indian adoption of the neo-liberal model: the loss of its key strategic ally in the world. And clearly the Indian elite--like the Soviet elite, the Chilean elite, and the "global North" in general--were the greatest champions of this model at the time and its greatest beneficiaries. But there was certainly a cataclysmic change that took place.

It is in this context that the adoption of these policies appears to be natural and where people like Jeffrey Sachs can present a striking unawareness of the history of where the good stuff in the US came from in the interest of establishing a model that has rarely, if ever, existed in human history. The intervention Klein is making is to inform a new generation of the "global north" that it isn't just "brand bullies" we have to contest, but the entire model itself. And to do this sometimes requires the expulsion of some nuance from the argument in order to focus on some other nuances. Since her other recent work--such as the documentary The Take--is focusing precisely on the resistance to the model, I can't help but think Cockburn's critique is basically just another crusty leftist trying to retain his authority.

For even the most well organized, grassroots change in Latin America could be easily branded as some communist (or "terrorist") campaign by the sympathizers of global capital, which, because the repressive arm of the US state is currently tied may not result in the kind of intervention we saw in the cold war, but can let them legitimize local thuggery in its interests. This has been the tack taken, for instance, in the recent dealings of the Ecuadorian state with the indigenous movements there when they try to resist oil or mining on their lands--and they have one of the most well respected movements in Latin America. In other words, it is very public condemnations of the current model of capitalism that help provide the counter-hegemonic lens through which people in the North can better understand what their Southern neighbors are up to. In the end that may not help much since many of them wouldn't bother to stop some rent-a-cops from shocking an unarmed student five feet away, but every little counts, right.

Cindy Sheehan's resignation

I won't say that I followed all her movements these long three years, and maybe she wasn't the most stable person to begin with. But I can't say I'd have done much better than she did under the circumstances she describes. On the one hand there is the party politics that are intractable yet almost indistinguishable (as the recent war funding bill is further evidence). It is a little naive to think that we could sort out Then there is the anti war movement which she describes in this way:

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Over the weekend we watched Children of Men. Though the decent into fascism in that film is as obviously the end point of the present trajectory of the state (made, again, ever more evident with the banal xenophobia displayed in conversation over the most recent iteration of the immigration bill) the really depressing part of the film is that the people most able to help change things--or at least who we often look to to change things--seem to be identical to the group Cindy speaks of, only with the added ingredient of violence and armed struggle. Likely, we could look closely at the Iraqi insurgency and see pretty much the same thing: the people positioned to fight against the occupation are corrupt and driven by their egotistical desire to hold some pitiful piece of the country their helping to destroy. In this, though Children of Men was meant to be tragic, there were moments when it really just seemed like a black satire of our own present circumstances.

And most important of all, it seems, is Cindy's observation that,

Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance.

I fully agree even as I'm guilty of this crime. I don't pay as close attention as I should be to the actual events on the ground in Iraq. It becomes a dull hum in the background that is much easier to ignore than confront head on. All that I start to notice is when the deprivation gets particularly bad--such as the story today in the NYT with the headline


Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria

to quote from the story:

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

Aid workers say thousands of Iraqi women work as prostitutes in Syria, and point out that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.

Iraqi Freedom indeed. And, compared to this, watching American Idol is a lot more fun. On the other hand, I don't necessarily fault people for doing that. Many of them work hard all day--many of them much harder than their parents did with a lot less hope of getting ahead--and it seems like, as decadent as it sounds, sitting down in front of the TV for a few hours at night is a reasonable thing to do. This reminds me of Walter Lippmann who, in his pessimistic anti-democratic polemic The Phantom Public, says

The socialist scheme has at its root the mystical fallacy of democracy, that the people, all of them, are competent; at its top it suffers from the homeopathic fallacy that adding new tasks to a burden the people will not and cannot carry now will make the burden of citizenship easily borne. The socialist theory presupposes an unceasing, intiring round of civic duties, an enormous complication of the political interests that are already much too complicated. (27)

In other words, as per Lippmann's solution, people are tired and overwhelmed already so how does adding more things for them to consider solve the problem. And besides, most of them are incompetant: better to leave it up to the experts. In effect, the two party system that Sheehan talks about in her letter is the end result of the solutions to the crisis arrived at by Lippmann's generation. The issue became less about asking people what they thought in order to make decisions than it was telling them what they should think through press agents, advertising and "news" and then sponsoring polls to make sure the propaganda was working--and that people still felt that, despite the fact they were even further from the decision making process than before, the were still included in it.

In theory, I don't completely reject certain aspects of this model. In fact, much of it makes sense. It would, indeed, hinder much decision making if there had to be a mandate for every decision made. This is all the more onerous because, in many cases, you have to wrench people's opinions from them. I definitely see the point he's making, but it takes present circumstances to be natural and, in some ways, inevitable. The contemporary answer to this criticism by the closest thing we have to what Lippman refers to as the "socialist scheme" would be that voter turnout would increase if people felt like it actually mattered.

I'm not completely confident of this and I think it is on par with a free market mentality in terms of its idealism ("Democracy hasn't worked yet because we've never really had democracy!"). But I think both are fairly entrenched as ideological fundamentals in the American polity and I'm more inclined to think that, in the long run, we would likely come up with structures of state similar to the ones we have now in order to streamline some of these processes. It doesn't make sense for us all to be expected to examine the evidence presented in a case for approving a drug or food product for the market. As Lippmann himself points out, in most cases, only the interested parties would form "The Public" here. In other words, instead of the version of "The Public" described by John Dewey (Lippmann's contemporary), where it would be described as anyone effected or potentially effected by a transaction, Lippmann said it would more likely just be anyone who understood their interest. Unfortunately, this means that, for instance, the businesses who create the drugs (or, more importantly and accurately, market, sell, and profit from the drugs) would have a much greater understanding of its interest in the drug's approval (and, incidentally, in its being protected by patent laws).

Dewey's feeling, on the one hand, was that people would simply need to be informed better of their interests. I agree with this completely, so long as it isn't the Drug Company doing the informing. But I can't help but think that, over time, the people who knew the most about this , the people who were most passionate about controlling the harmful effects of bad drugs and harnessing the benefits of good ones, would end up being the only ones at that hearing objectively countering the more subjective interests of the drug companies, whatever their size or configuration; and, in so far as they were interested in protecting the public (in Dewey's terms) The Public, in so far as it could be represented, would likely elect those people to watch over that process for them, as their representatives and in their interests. In short, over time, I can't help but think even the most anarchic or libertarian society would eventually develop some form of bureaucracy simply because, once one figures out some of the things that need to be done with a highly specialized knowledge but in the general interest of society, one will not leave it up to the free market alone.

In fact, it is even more likely that something like this would develop with the free market: if consumers are going to act with any confidence, they will want to know that the labeling of items as safe has some assurance. And outside of a completely monopolized marketplace, where the only people allowed to present new products are well known, even new players would likely welcome some sort of inspection protocol (provided it wasn't so onerous as to be unreachable.) I suppose the label of "organic" is undergoing just such a controversy at the moment and, since the state is not doing its job correctly (or is charging people a prohibitive fee for the label) there is emerging a general argument that "it's organic, but..." the labeling is too expensive. (I actually heard this in Starbucks the other day in Portland. The Barista told me that all their coffees were fair trade but the suppliers couldn't afford to get the labeling. This seems completely off the mark to me and if I'd had more information at the time, I probably would have probed a little deeper here.) In any case, this is not a very good analogy because it is not necessarily a life and death issue. Telling people it is "organic" or "fair trade," despite the possible health consequences of the former, is basically a way of placating consumers guilt rather than informing them of whether or not something will kill them. It is best if it is true, but unless they are really committed, most people--like myself--wouldn't probe too much more into it, particularly since it the reason given for the lack of labeling is actually fairly in line with the politics of the consumer anyway: we are supporting local farmers and farmers who are in impoverished areas so it seems completely logical that they might not have the extra funds to get the labelling. That this should also lead us to wonder just how stringent they might be about it often doesn't enter the equation.

On the other hand, I've heard similar claims about drug treatments or other kinds of non-western medicine that isn't approved by the FDA. But the people who begin to agree more with these kinds of claims are also the ones who begin to disengage with those bureaucracies, refusing, for instance, to take an asprin for a headache, despite the fact that this is a pretty old remedy, not some big-pharma ploy to push pills. Still, the problems that we're encountering here have more to do with casting doubt on these supposedly objective institutions. On this, I'm not exactly sure what to make of China's announcement this morning that they have sentenced their own former FDA head to death.

Outside of initially horrified about the death sentence for a corruption charge, I was puzzled this morning when I heard two different reports of what prompted it on NPR. In the morning edition segment, there was the sense that this was in response to the poisoned dog food and other products that had effected consumers on a global scale. As the report was given, there was a kind of breezy account here of the fact that someone was being put to death and this was a particularly problematic form of justice. Instead, the news was reported along just the lines it seems the Chinese government wanted it to be: namely that it was taking action to keep the food supply safe. That this kind of action is condemned by most of the civilized world was downplayed, it seemed, in favor of making people feel a little better about feeding their dogs and cats (and babies and kids) food shipped from halfway across the world.

There was no condemnation from the following segment on the Business focused "Marketplace" but they at least pointed out that this was ostensibly supposed to be in response to the Chairman's role in approving a drug that ended up killing 10 people in China. I guess I can see this logic and, if you're going to have the death penalty, it seems much more just to have it for the administrators who knowingly make decisions that lead to people's deaths as much as you do for poor psychos who go on rampages (or poor minorities who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.) It doesn't make the practice any less barbaric, but it does make it more sensible as a form of justice. If we made administrative corruption a capital offense, I think we'd have less of it here as well. On the other hand, I'm sure that even in this case, pinning it on one person is problematic and an old school Communist PR move so it is only effective for reductive twenty second news bites. Hence the US media will likely gobble it up without checking how healthy it is for civilized consumption.

I could try to bring this back round completely to Cindy Sheehan but I think that would be a bit too contrived. What I will say is that I don't think the answer to the seemingly intractable problems she articulates is to simply smash the state. But I do think that this quote from Dewey's book on the subject holds some insight. It is, perhaps, as idealistic about the possibilities of using rational, experimental methods in the formation of political institutions as it is in the possibility that people will always be able to tell that they are being stifled or moving away from their ideal) by their continued presence and, hence, prone to revolution (pace Sheehan's complaint). In all of this, he's a product of both the progressive era in the US, and the rising public outrage around the world that eventually led to fascism in a majority of countries of the world (at least according to the way Polanyi defined it). Still it is a good quote to end on:

In no two ages or places is there the same public. Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the knowledge of them different. In addition the means by which a public can determine the govenment to serve its interests vary. Only formally can we say what the best state would be. In concrete fact, in actional and concrete organization and structure, there is not form of state which can be said to be the best: not least till history is ended, and one can survey all its varied forms. The formation of states must be an experimental process. The trail process may go on with diverse degrees of blindness and accident, and at the cost of unregulated procedures of cut and try, of fumbling and groping, without insight into what men are after or clear knowledge of a good state even when it is acheived. Or it may proceed more intelligently, because guided by knowledge of the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is still experimental. And since conditions of action and of inquiry and knowledge are always changing, the experiment must always be retried; the State must always be rediscovered. Except, once more, in formal statement of conditions to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth. it is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in the creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly, less at the mrecy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may learn from their errors and profit by their successes. The belief in political fixity, of the sanctity of some form of state consecrated by the efforts of our fathers and hallowed by traditions, is one of the stumbling blocks in the way of orderly and directed change; it is an invitation to revolt and revolution.

Adam Curtis' new Documentary "The Trap"

Adam Curtis (the British documentary filmmaker that brought us /The Century of the Self/ and /The Power of Nightmares/) has a new film that just aired its third of three segments last Sunday night. It is a very provocative text, strining together many arguments about, as is his usual method, the way ideas are used by people in power or in resistance to that power.

This is, I think, his boldest undertaking yet, trying to string together, in the first episode, the ideas of John Nash in game theory and James Buchananan on Public Choice to those of Isaiah Berlin and the US Neo-Conservatives like Fukuyama with ideas of negative liberty in the third episode--all posed in opposition to the concepts fo freedom (and revolutionary violence) posed by Fanon and Sartre which are then adopted by one of the architects of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and then other Shia revolutionaries afterwards. It is a sweeping attempt at addressing the role of ideas in world history, even if it is a bit prone to ideologism at times, and I'm sure he has pressed some events too much to fit his hypothesis, but this is hard not to do when you're trying to compress fifty years of history, theory and world politics into three hours. Definitly a case where the medium determines to some extent how complex the message can be, but it is a useful alternative to most documentaries like this which show, inevitably, the best side winning in the end (I think here of the PBS documentary /The Commanding Heights/ which takes a similar swath of time.)

I also see that, though there are things he is working out in a synchronicity between the three documentaries, there are many moments when he could be seen to be contradicting himself. But as interested as I am in
the text, I'm also interested in how it is playing in Britain, which, so far as I know, is the only place it's been officially released thus far. I know on the web, Curtis has quite a following around the world, and his films have been exchanged vigorously via vorrents and now, as seen below (at least for the time being) via Google video and you tube. But his popularity seems a bit more muted in his home country.

Anyway, I think people on these lists would enjoy the films and I'd be interested to hear what people think about his assertions. I have been trying to work out the origins of these ideas of negative vs. positive freedom in writing on my dissertation so his argument was particularly interesting for me. For those in the Cult Studs list, I'll note that I was pleasantly surprised to see an interview with Stuart Hall in the last episode explaining the ideas of Fanon (or a 30 second snippet of him doing so.)

It so happens that I'm currently reading Jessop, et. al. critique of Hall et. al.'s thesis of "Authoritarian Populism" from /Policing the Crisis/ and I'd say Curtis, while stimulating, has very little alternative explanation for what drives events other than a sort of ideologism and a will to power; there is no sense of an alternative version of human nature except as a different political project and it seems that whatever the leaders say or think simply trickles down into the population and also defines their world view (though the destruction of social institutions many of these theories
are founded on seems to make it a little less hierarchical: even if people don't believe that they should be free in this way, when the government is quickly dismantled, that's the reality they live with.) I'm still working a lot of this out. I will say that, if nothing else, it is an entertaining set of films, in particular when he counterposes the Bush and Blair govenments with images of the Jacobins. It is hardly an apt comparison but I know of many people who would be more than slightly upset by this.

See what you think (all links are to streaming video, but the MVG group should have torrents on mininova or TPB if you do a search. I think their rip of part two has a progressive audio glitch but it seems only to bother purists):

Part one: Aired 3/11/07
here:
http://www.veoh.com/videos/v307015829gh4cB
or here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372545413887273321

Part Two: aired 3/18/07
Here: http://www.veoh.com/videos/v3148379a35jXxp
or Here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7849982478877371384

And

Part three: aired 3/25/07 (for some reason this one doesn't have as neat a packaging)

Here (broken into six segments)
1- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUYkCktEalA
2- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJfRngggTBI (with Stuart Hall interview a
few minutes in)
3- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiK_cN19lek
4- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozLwgqEns0M
5- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcSSw8CISS4
6- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nQc91Xyf0

And here (Broken into 3)
1- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3291992041130722257&hl
2- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-121006630030775636&hl=en
3- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1343199130780182696&hl=en

I'll also give this interview by the UK website "Blairwatch" w/ Curtis, which also includes links to the author's synopsis of the first two episodes.

http://www.blairwatch.co.uk/node/1704

and these two critiques of the film which were recommended by Isaiah Berlin's estate via their website http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,,2042945,00.html#article_continue

http://liberalpolemic.blogspot.com/2007/03/trap-whatever-happened-to-our-dreams-of_1716.html


And of course there is always the wikipedia entry on the series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_%28television_documentary_series%29

Arjun Appadurai and my fear of his popularity

I picked up Arjun Appadurai's book this evening, which I had bought as an impulse buy on Amazon last week. I really shouldn't have bought it, I realize now, but I hadn't heard of it when it came out and the topic (subtitle: "An essay on the geography of anger") seemed to be promising, perhaps as a corrective to his academic version (in Modernity at Large) of Thomas Friedman bombast about, 1. the existence of something called globalization 2. its essentially progressive and unstoppable nature. I really should know better than to make an impulse buy on a book like this, even if I can see myself producing the equivalent of Barthes S/Z on the text itself. It is much better to take it from the library and use it while i can.

(On a tangent here, I've really enjoyed taking the Hayek and Von Mises books out of the GMU law library. There is something ironic and almost counter culteral about borrowing their books from a public institution so committed to the destruction of public institutions using justifications hewn by these very theorists. I may have to summon all my strength not to treat the texts as my own and perform a tragicomedy of the commons in the margins of the books, saying exactly what i'd like to about their inane apologetics that, despite sounding high minded are basically the most stultifying ideological rantings I've ever read. They make some interesting observations from time to time, but they do so with such pride and conviction, such a sense of novelty and insight, that it's like, despite having read many things in their lives, they've forgotten how many other thinkers have said precisely what they are saying, save a very important exception: the thinkers before allowed some sense of human feeling and literary flair to creep into their prose. For the most part, they were also embatteled by a very different set of circumstances. when you consider that the things Hayek is trying to caution against and overturn aren't popular movements to abolish property rights, expropriate the expropriators, or communism or totalitarianism in any real sense, but social security, welfare and progressive taxation, it is really hard to envision him as anything more than a cranky uncle whose pearls of wisdom are lost in his generally smug self satisfaction at cynically evaluating anything you enjoy as the root cause of the eminant fall of western civilization. That the main foil of their argument--Marx or anyone remotely inspired by him--remains almost completely unexplored except as a straw man makes their desciples's animosity towards socialism almost comical. It also makes me very happy not to shell out the $100 or so it would cost me to buy the three very slim volumes of Hayek's work on "Law, Legislation, and Liberty" and pleased with the fact that the only way his ideas are then made available to me or anyone who won't pay this extraordinary price is through a public institution. Since I'm on a tangent, i've noticed the same thing with Milton Friedman's more technical/historical work--i.e. not his major ideological centerpieces like Capitalism and Freedom but the /monetary history of the united states/--and with Hernando De Soto's /Mystery of Capital/. Not only are they fairly expensive by publishing standards (the former more than the latter) but, no matter how many are available on the "Used" menu, the people selling them seem to want to defy any of the rationality of the market and keep their price high despite an obvious oversupply. Though de Soto's book--which seems to be assigned by someone somewhere in a class or just the product of even more impulse buys than my own--often has well over thirty or forty copies available for sale, the people selling them seem to really get behind his ideology and see their book as a real source of capital for them, refusing to accept anything less than an ideal price. Of course, unlike the small land owners that de Soto thinks would be the vanguard of capitalist led development in the "everywhere else" of the world where capitalism isn't "triumph"ing, they don't find themselves compelled to sell their books. Thus, though today there are 87 copies of the book available through used or new sales, only 10 or so are listed underneath the Amazon price for a new copy of the book. And only two or threee of those even approach a 50% discount of amazon's new price. I used to look at it to see if the price would ever go down to the $1 the book is really worth in terms of the wisdom it provides (which is to say, it is really important to see what bill of goods the World Bank and Corporate do-gooders are being sold): now I just go to the page to witness what has become comic evidence of both the irreconcilibility of these theories with actual real markets and the stubborn will to power of the people who think that they, finally, at last, have found the answer to saving people from poverty--and in the most unlikely of places: in a restatement of that genius of expropriation and "improvement" of private property, John Locke. Super stuff, really. The only thing that saves it from sounding like a sequence from a Kurt Vonnegut book is that the guy's name is Hernando de Soto: it is just way to obvious to not come off as contrived. Shame on the Cato institute for not being more literary about this.)

Back from the tangent...I bought Appadurai's book. I started reading it. And so far I am, unfortunately, disappointed and surprisingly unsurprised. After reading Fukuyama's mea culpa after the botching of the Iraq war I thought certainly his cosmopolitan cultural studies equivalent would have to make a bit of a concession to the far from rosy world we've inherited from him. At the very least, not having looked at the number of pages, I thought it would be on par with Castells volume on "The Power of Identity," if not in its breadth, at least in its attention to the issue. In some ways the analogy is apt, as Appadurai places this book in between his earlier theoretical celebration and an extensive forthcoming volume on those pillars of democratic society "NGOs" and how they step in to help people work through the problems of globalization and, one must assume, to help assauge their geographically bounded anger. I look forward to the two sentance caveat in that book about how NGOs aren't actually democratic. In the meantime, I have "The Fear of Small Numbers" which he assures readers, is merely a "transition and a pause in a long-term project" which "seek[s] to make globalization work for those who need it the most and enjoy it the least." This book is basically just the gunmetal and baby's blood sorbet to clear your palate of the good stuff in the first book about globalization and make you all the more ready to savor the even better stuff in the next book on globalization.

Like Hayek above, I sincerely wonder if he's aware of his own location in the intellectual field he inhabits. I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt and say that much of his value is in synthesizing his own ethnographic data, in being able to bring me anecdotes from the frontlines even if they support his basically rosy view of the world to come, with a few tweaks here and there. But he presents his perspective as if it is a watershed, as if he has something original to say about it and then describes the thin book in this way:

This study is concerned with large scale, culturally-motivated violence in our times.

"culturally-motivated violence"? What is that you ask? It is the violence that comes from deploying hundreds of thousands of US troops to protect our 'way of life," to use one of Raymond Williams's definition of culture? No that's not it. Even if it is much more "large scale," the people they kill, the houses and infrastructure they destroy, the chaos they cause has no organic link to our way of life whatsoever except that deep in the ground underneath all of this lies a fermented pool of dead dinosaurs and peat bogs that we could use to power the inefficient food, shelter and transportation systems that we identify with our "culture," thus this is not culturally motivated violence. No, by culturally motivated violence he means two things: on the one hand, Rwanda and Yugoslavia and on the other, in his words, "the war on terror" (though he's just being sloppy here in trying to deploy contemporary lingo: what he really means is "terrorism" which, just for a program note, is not large scale.)

I don't normally feel the need to, basically, mouth the words of Noam Chomsky with regard to the violence of the US in its actions around the world, but in this case I had to make an exception. On the other hand, my real exception to the book so far--and, admittedly, I've barely gotten through the intro and first pages of the first chapter--is that he is already being completely non-sensical in his use of the term "culture." I could get behind his definition of the "violence" in Rwanda as "Culturally Motivated" if what he meant was that there were key aspects of the culture that were involved in pushing the political conflict into a genocide. If he was talking about how the "cultural" division of the society into Hutus and Tutsis--a product of the colonial era--had created circumstances in which the World Bank and IMF programs (which first advised they stop growing any food for domestic consumption [a major cultural change] and to grow only coffee for export, advice they replicated across the globe, helping to reduce the price of coffee and thus significantly reducing the possible livelihood of Rwandan coffee farmers,
arguably creating the economic crash which, then, was exacerbated by several IMF devaluations of their currency) had an important, if not determining effect on creating the famine conditions in Rwanda, which made for a lot of angry, hungry people who could easily be enlisted in, first, the ongoing civil wars in the region and, then, using a fairly novel media of mass communication (i.e. the radio) a genocide; well then, yeah, I could see how that could be called "Culturally Motivated"

But he doesn't mean any of this. Though he promises to draw a distinction between himself and the likes of Samuel Huntington, I do wonder how much of a difference there will be in this distinction. My prediction, having not read the book, is that his major quibble will be that civilizations aren't unitary in the beliefs of its peoples, especially within the global "mediascape" of what he terms "high Globalization." I will try to withhold judgement, but for the most part, his first steps are down a very tedious and politically suspect path which, in the end, will likely shed very little light on either culture or the motivations of violence.

What I can say is that reading his characterization of this helped me to see that, in addition to m redefining the concept of culture in a more rigorous way, it is very important for me to set it in motion within a field of other kinds of efficacy, to be able to talk about culture itself as a motivating force--or at least address arguments of those who try to do so. My first instinct is to say that my main objection to Appadurai's use of this construction is a good indication of how i feel about it. In the first place, by using this construciton, he seems to be directly subverting his own stated goal, which was to talk about why this violence is related to globalization. But the upshot of his argument in its broad sweep seems to be that this "culturally motivated violence" is best understood as the result of people not understanding the process: if we can just get those NGOs in there to spread the good news, well then that violence might stop.

I'm being very unfair here. He stakes his position far from this; but it is just a bit further down the slope he's on and I think this has much to do with his flawed notion of culture here. Culture, for him, is progressive and worth having mostly when it emanates from the center: the periphery should accomodate its quiky traditional ways to this new reality and, perhaps, jazz it up a bit by performing their traditional cultures for the core in ways that can be pleasurably consumed. Again, a slippery slope. I'm tired and shouldn't be arguing right now, but I think I'm giving myself good advice here about the project and I'll probably still agree with my assessments when I get up in the morning. We'll see...

Race and the Housing Boom and Bust

I thought this was a particularly relevant example of the way racism is still alive and well--and a particularly problematic one considering that much of the recent boom in the financial sector
around these high interest loans and in the housing construction sector around new construction is related to practices like these. Here is the most damning statistic in my mind:

Even more troubling, real-estate industry analysts say, is an alarming proportion of blacks and Hispanics who received subprime loans by predatory lenders even when their credit picture was good enough to deserve a cheaper loan.

In six major U.S. cities, black borrowers were 3.8 times more likely than whites to receive a higher-cost home loan, and Hispanic borrowers were 3.6 times more likely, according to a study released this month by a group of fair housing agencies.

"Blacks and Latinos have lower incomes and less wealth, less steady employment and lower credit ratings, so a completely neutral and fair credit-rating system would still give a higher percentage of subprime loans to minorities," said Jim Campen, a University of Massachusetts
economist who contributed to the study.

"But the problem is exacerbated by a financial system which isn't fair," he said. In greater Boston, 71 percent of blacks earning above $153,000 in 2005 took out mortgages with high interest rates, compared to just 9.4 percent of whites, while about 70 percent of black and Hispanic borrowers with incomes between $92,000 and $152,000 received high-interest rate home loans, compared to 17 percent for whites, according to his research.

The article says that this is largely because the predatory lenders felt they could more easily prey on black and latino buyers because they had less knowledge about the process. The GAO of the US realized this many months ago but instead of regulating these kinds of loans, decided that they would just create an information sheet. I have a longer discussion of this on the lbo list here. In short, the GAO was less concerned with the fact that this might make a bunch of people lose their homes and incur massive amounts of debt from which they would never recover. It was more concerned that this might create instability in the banking sector: they do have a certain class interest to look out for, after all. Thus it is likely that stories such as this Reuters piece will get far less play than the news last week about New Century Financial Corp, which seems be the kind of thing the GAO was actually worried about: that investors wouldn't get their money out of the securities markets fast enough.

Poor, poor investors. They really do have it rough. Now Fannie Mae and the state of California are fueling the flames by banning New Century Mortgages. I smell a bailout coming if this thing gets much bigger. People might be kicked out of their homes, they might have to live in privately funded (mostly church) shelters for years trying to dig themselves out of this, but they will get little help from the government: that would defy the free market logic that we are now told is the essence of human interaction. Besides, as many of my students say, the poor are always with us--even the poor who weren't poor a few years ago but will be soon because they got scammed by inethical lending practices and the nascent racism of US society. It's just the breaks and, if we try hard enough, we can probably figure out a way to place most of the blame on the people who are the most fundamentally fucked by the meltdown. As Hayek says, this system of the market is a moral system and therefore we can always assume some proper morality to the dispossession of the poor, so much so that it is hardly news.

But if the investor class faces a slight chance of having a fraction of their assets liquidated, well that, my friends is news. And though just a few months ago the government regulation of these subprime lenders would have been an unjust meddling in the economy by the state, as the crisis widens there will inevitably be a call for government intervention in the form of bailouts. The poor (and newly minted debtor nation) can be blamed for their moral failures, but investors just got a bad break. Besides, the story goes, if these investors don't get bailed out, who's going to run the economy? Where's the capital going to come from? Surely not the government! Why that's inefficient and creates incentives for people to abuse their power and exploit the uninformed--things the market, in all its phantasmic, orgasmic ideal perfection, protects us against.

If it sounds like a bedtime story for the upper class that's because it helps them sleep better at night.