Private security companies “have been shooting a lot of people” in Iraq. What’s surprising — though hopeful — is that a prosecutor cares enough to bring cases before a grand jury. How are these groups different from the death squads in Latin America in the 1980s & 1990s? Extra-military, heavily armed political muscle will inevitable be used to eliminate “enemies of freedom.” And why would we expect Iraqis & the rest of the Muslim world to see these thugs as anything other than what they manifestly are? Neoconservative thinkers (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) urged George W. Bush into a disastrous war on the theory that the US could plant democracy in the Middle East; predictably, the opposite appears to have happened. Where were these guys during Vietnam? Or, right. The Bush administration has squandered American influence around the world for at least a generation & permanently damaged our credibility. During Vietnam, one heard a lot from the Nixon administration about staying the course in order to maintain American credibility, all the while squandering that very credibility. The American defeat in Vietnam turned out to be good for Vietnam, which now prospers economically, though it would have been immeasurably better had the US not continued the Vietnam War after the French were finally kicked out in 1956. The best outcome anybody could credibly imagine for the American presence in Vietnam after about 1965 was the ongoing though precarious existence of an American client state requiring indefinite American support. In the end, the American government didn’t even get that. Certainly, the best anybody in the US government can imagine for Iraq right now is a semi-permanent American client state in Iraq, with the Kurds pretty much running their own show & the Shias & Sunnis fighting over the carcass of what is left. A British officer was quoted on NPR yesterday as saying the diminished violence in southern Iraq was the result of British troops pulling out. It seems pretty clear that, despite happy noises in the press about how things are calming down in Iraq, a continued US presence will result in more, not less violence. More importantly for American interests, though, is that a principled withdrawal & recognition of the fundamental errors of judgment on which the war was based, would represent a first small step toward rebuilding American “credibility.” The imperial, fortress-like American embassy in Baghdad would need to be torn down or handed over to the Iraqis with the proviso that it become a university or a museum, cultural institutions decimated by the American war. Such a withdrawal, of course, could only take place under a Democratic president. The bad news is that even a Democratic president, should one be elected, will be unlikely to initiate such a withdrawal. I wonder if in 2010 Americans will watch on Fox & CNN as the last embassy staff are helicoptered from the roof of the embassy in a replay of Saigon in 1975. Seems likely.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
VN Food with Amy
Last night our friend Amy came over & we made Indian food, but last week I cooked Vietnamese: Spring rolls and a crab & noodle salad. Here is picture of my plate of the Vietnamese food. (I think we got some of the Indian dishes we had last night & I’ll post those later.)
I’ve been learning to make Vietnamese food for the better part of a decade — since I came home from my first trip to Vietnam. I’m known among my friends for my spring rolls, of which I can make half a dozen kinds, but I’ve been trying to broaden my range, thus the salad. My most reliable VN dish, which I haven’t made in a while, is thit ga kho gung — chicken with ginger — a dish that uses a good deal of nuoc mam — fish sauce — which is an acquired taste for some people but which I took to right away. Hope I get to go back this summer.
Goodbye to All That
I have been guilty of a certain utopianism when it comes to life on line. For a while I even believed in the idea that we could have “open discussions” about politics on line. IHE‘s discussions disabused me of that idea right quick, though I should have seen it years earlier — sometimes I’m witlessly naive. But what, really, might one hope to accomplish in an “open discussion” in an “open forum”? Those are phrases the editors at IHE used in responding to a couple of my emails about the tenor & tone of the discussions on the site. A tenor & tone of insult & dismissal that I for a while actively participated in, though I like to think I was acting against my better angels. That I in fact have better angels. Where do those angels go when we encounter someone whose politics we despise? In his NYT column the other day Paul Krugman made a remark about partisanship that directly challenges the conventional political wisdom of the corporate media & the pampered & privileged (& bone lazy) political insiders whose fingers grasp the levers of power:
“Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want. We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool.”
There are things, that is, about which it is foolish to compromise. Krugman was writing about Obama’s remarks on the “crisis” in Social Security as an example of trying to find common ground where none exists. A corollary of this is the “both the right & the left are bashing us so we must be doing some thing right” line you usually hear from journalists. No, it just means that you are morally lax, sir.
And that is why the whole idea of the open forum, in which dispassionate adults discuss the issues of the day in the utopian space of the internet is not just silly, but a dangerous fantasy. Which is not to say that no discussion is possible, but that discussion is only productive when those involved share some basic values. A situation that does not prevail, say, in the discussions at IHE, where those who detest academia & academics gather to throw stones & spit at professors & university staff. It’s probably good for business, though, & I don’t expect IHE‘s editors to change their policy; instead, they will perpetuate their fantasy version of free speech. Such speech is certainly free, but it is ultimately empty, useless, unproductive, & perhaps dangerous because of the delusion that communication is actually taking place. It’s not.
Throwing Newsweek Away
I got a subscription to Newsweek as an automatic premium when I contributed to my local public radio station. It has been going straight from my post office box to the trash for two years now, so I am way ahead of the game.
Breaking a Bad Habit
For the last year or so I have been reading the Inside Higher Ed website & contributing occasionally to the discussions, but I’m going to have to stop. Not just stop posting in the forums, but stop reading. It’s sad but necessary, like leaving behind a bar you once loved because it has been taken over by idiots. (Check out the way the rhetoric shifts as the wingnut clowns enter the discussion.) Despite being a useful source of information about my profession, IHE has become a gathering place for anti-academic right-wing trolls. I would go so far as to say it provides a forum for bashing the academy, which is problematic only because the site’s mission is, presumably, to be a resource for those who work in academic setting or are involved with academic policy. That is, the trolls have their own caves, let them retire thence. There is something seriously wrong with the way way the forums are moderated, with virtually every conversation that touches on politics or policy resulting in the stormtroopers of the radical right shouting everyone down, lying about simple facts, and engaging in on-line muggings — all this with the apparent assistance of the site’s editors. I have tried in the past to break this bad habit — I don’t like what it does to me — but this time is for real. And it’s not just that I don’t like the feel of my own gorge rising: I figure the IHE troll corps has plenty of places to express their derision of academia & academics, and to create their gross caricatures of the liberal professor bogeyman, but I don’t have to give the asshats any of my attention. I’ve always liked that word, asshats — it’s nonsensical, but perfectly suited to the sort of people who have swarmed over IHE. With the the complicity of the site’s editors. I don’t have to give them any of my clicks. A shame, really. I used to like that bar.