More Hunger Blogging!

Ah booooooooooooooooooo.

Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE and (Product)RED, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

What a disgrace. Anyone would be better. Give the space to Lanny Davis or Dick Morris. God damn this guy and his Serious Commitment To The Poor and his namedropping and his Bloomberg endorsements and his G-8 globetrotting and his Embrace Of Social Media and his deep respect for Angela Merkel. He no doubt hangs out with Richard Branson and they fast together For Darfur and Tweet about it together. I'm not going to fact check that, because if it isn't true it might as well be. Also, has he won the Nobel Peace Prize yet? If not, it's overdue.

I'm glad I don't have to rank the NYT's Development Boys (they're all in effect this Sunday, so look out, Global Problems) from Worst to Less Worst; deciding whether Tom Friedman or "Bono" is more terrible would be tough. Nick Kristof would get Less Worst, no contest, but he's still guilty as hell. I guess if it came down to it I could put them through a battery of tests: who has more youtube videos of themselves acting a donk somewhere in Africa, who can drop the most names in a minute, who can carry the white man's burden with the stiffest upper lip, etc.

Saviors and Survivors the Video Game

The Virtual Army Experience:

SCENARIO
A well-armed genocidal faction in the notional city of Nradreg has surrounded a group of humanitarian aid workers and refugees, who face starvation and imminent attack. This enemy faction has rejected all diplomatic efforts to negotiate safe passage of relief supplies. As part of international relief efforts, a combined U.S. Army air, sea and ground task force has been ordered to use appropriate force to reach the remote compound. The Army will employ artillery and electronic warfare assets to suppress enemy air defenses while a Special Forces team parachutes deep into enemy territory. Then, AH64 Apache attack helicopters will destroy hostile coastal defenses to permit the entry of an Army Theater Support Vehicle (TSV) into Nradreg’s harbor. The Army ground task force, mounted in Strykers and HMMWVs, will come ashore and fight through fierce resistance to rescue the trapped aid workers and refugees, and deliver vital supplies.

One can only hope that the game itself is as excellent as this Virtual Army Propaganda, a truly beautiful, concise encapsulation of contemporary American imperialist discourse. The ugly racialized eastern-southern Otherness of "Nradreg"; the genocidal wolves preying on those supremely passive sacrificial lambs named "humanitarian aid workers and refugees"; the "reject[ion]" of "all diplomatic efforts" (we try ever so hard, but--sigh--those barbarians only understand the language of force); and of course, the U.S. warmachine's vital mission:

I suppose the author(s) could have included more about the oppression of the Nradregi women, but that might have been overkill: the gendering of "humanitarian aid workers and refugees" is not exactly too subtle: when is the last time you've seen a picture of a male refugee (particularly, a male refugee who is neither prepubescent or elderly); and is the humanitarian aid worker not the feminine to the masculine imperialist, whether soldier, scientist, or entrepreneur?

The "Army Experience" cited at the beginning of this post unfortunately exemplifies a very serious problem of contextualization--of the "framing of war"--encountered by those of us who would like to resist, or at least think critically about, the endless aggressive war that envelops us. In a sense this should not be so hard: what do we expect from actual war propaganda? Complexity? Critical analysis? The enemy is going to be presented as vicious, opaquely evil, racial Other--when has this ever not been the case? One cannot concede the framing of the question to one's opponent: the formulation of the question is infinitely more important than the answer.

I'm currently reading a recent book by Judith Butler called "Frames of War"; in an early chapter she states (p. 37):

How do these brief reflections on the perils of democracy affect our way of thinking about global responsibility in times of war? First, we be wary of invocations of "global responsibility" which assume that one country has a distinctive responsibility to bring democracy to other countries. I am sure that there are cases in which intervention is important--to forestall genocide, for instance. But it would be a mistake to conflate such an intervention with a global mission, or indeed an arrogant politics in which forms of government are forcibly implemented that are in the political and economic interests of the military power responsible for that implementation.

Butler is "sure" that there are "cases in which intervention is important." The humanitarian emergency in the city of Nradreg would undoubtedly be such a case. What is wrong here? Surely it has to be the concept "genocide" as privileged "frame of war," as master signifier of cultural anti-politics--violence that is not so much perpetrated on a racialized Other but by a racialized (irrational, savage, inhuman) Other. It is this Other (the "anal object") who is then thrust out of the human community in order to reestablish social harmony--harmony which is ahistorical and unafflicted by socioeconomic antagonism but occasionally threatened by the intrusion of violent, inhuman outsiders.

Imperialist intervention cannot be truly successfully contested from within the imperialist frame of genocide and cultural/racial oppression, because the issue is not so much that those who endorse and participate in imperialist war get the answers to their own questions wrong; it's that the questions they pose are themselves wrong, self-serving, and fantastical.

Evidence Generally Points To Evil

David Brooks:

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.

That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other. This narrative causes its adherents to shrink their circle of concern. They don’t see others as fully human. They come to believe others can be blamelessly murdered and that, in fact, it is admirable to do so.

This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere. With their suicide bombings and terrorist acts, adherents to this narrative have made themselves central to global politics. They are the ones who go into crowded rooms, shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” and then start murdering.

This awful writing could have come directly from a 2002 George W. Bush speech. On second thought, I am probably being unfair to Bush and his speechwriters.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. [Huh?  Americans have forgotten their Crusade??] It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

If America was a morally or politically serious nation, America would realize that the answer to questions is usually Evil. Muslim Arab Evil. America would then tent its fingers, sigh, read--or at least at least think about reading--some Edmund Burke, and maybe go to a cocktail party.

A Complicated Problem

I was talking to a nice liberal person at work today who said that voters are idiots, because they had approved some random hateful piece of culture-wars gay-hating legislation. Similarly, "Constitutional rights should not be left up to popular vote" is some advocacy group's phrase. Many "liberals" are technocrats at heart, as are just as many "conservatives." Any ghoul who has studied public policy will know about public choice theory and information asymmetries and the like. Perhaps the most hilarious, extreme expression of this view is the way Free Traders rationalize consistent public opposition to their policies, and the most reasonable, sensitive one is John Hart Ely's concept of "representation reinforcement." Who could have guessed that most people who hold the first view also hold the second? Anyway, since people do not have perfect information, and are "rationally ignorant" (they are busy thinking about the groceries and baseball, right?), and other freshwater economics bullshit, it is always consistent with Democracy to ignore what people think and just rule them: it is in their own best interests, which they would come to agree with you on if they just had more time. Most people probably agree with that last assertion regardless of the information they have--it is maybe the fundamental proposition of Really Existing Democracy.

Constitutional Rights

Most of the liberal-left Constitutional arguments against torture and other Terror War fascism are sad: they are implicitly predicated on the empirical assumption of no more Terrorism. Believe me, if there is more terrorism you will see fascism triumphant to an extent Cheney could have only dreamed: the Constitution is not really a suicide pact; it's more a homicide pact.

Private Justice

Repression is so very effective when privatized in this country, a country that dearly loves private power in all its forms. There are any number of rights that you can exercise without punishment from the State, but the private penal system will convict you without indictment or trial--which is why the State finds it relatively painless to not punish you. Or it will acquit you, but only on the most arbitrary of grounds.

Baruch Hashem, it's an Israel Roundup

The House of Representatives voted to "condemn" the Goldstone report by 344-36. This is a referendum on J-Street (link is NSFW), just like whatever happened in some elections today is a referendum on how much America hates Obama and his liberals. The point is, J-Street and the Democratic party will provide the murder, but not quite enough of the Gusto, and America wants Gusto. Voting BOO on this Abe Foxman crap were, among others, happy little old men Kucinich and Paul, and Barbara Lee, who gets the most respect for having been the ONLY NO VOTE for the post-Sept. 11 2001 Bush "Authorization for Use of Military Force." Where were you then, Kucinich & Paul? Speaking of Abe Foxman, AF to Goldstone: "As a Good Jew, Repudiate Report." AS A GOOD JEW you have got to be shitting me with that language, I don't care whether it is Foxman explicitly or some Haaretz English editor, even if there is subtle irony involved.


I am sick of hearing about J-Street on the internet (nevertheless I am now writing about J-Street on the internet. This is a pattern). Jewssansfrontiers has the right idea, that J-Street is just as fancy and Progressive as Obama. The analogy is really pretty good when you think about it.

Also a representative of the American Task Force for Dahlan finds a new best friend in dear old Jeffrey Goldblog. He is very happy that Representative Berman came to his gala!

Writing About Tom Friedman

I wrote an entire post on Thomas Friedman's column in today's NYT. Then I erased it. I wrote the post in a fit of pique, as usual, directed at Friedman’s centering his column around a group of good respectable Americans he branded as "Warren Buffett centrists." Nothing pisses off a leftish internet writer like praise of "centrism" in the mainstream/corporate media--from reliable rule-of-law civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald to really the entire cast of netroots characters--and generally with good reason. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is maybe the classic exposition of this practice; see also the general criticism of establishment journalism practices of anonymous government sources and reliance on “experts” from biased organizations like AEI or the McKinsey Global Institute; the extreme reluctance of establishment journalists to "take sides" in even relatively simple factual disagreements, e.g., the debate over whether waterboarding is torture; anything related to Palestinians; "death panels"; and on and on to infinity. This critique is clearly all very necessary and satisfying, but at some point it leaves me feeling kind of empty. It is a reactive, negative project involving mockery of some very silly people. It lends itself to a kind of breathless, debate-team, prosecutorial writing characterized by the reckless proliferation of hyperlinked textual citations (I am taking a stand against hyperlinking in this post, even though it is crying out for it) and rampant accusations of hypocrisy. This has really grown into its own genre replete its own tropes and rhetorical forms; its best practitioners are quite fun to read and make some very good points, but it really has its limits.

Praise of Centrism in itself might have been too banal for me to notice; it was really the "Warren Buffett centrism" branding that did it. The constant veneration of Warren Buffett in elite middlebrow circles has always bothered me. I have never heard him say anything that worthwhile. His distinction seems to be that he is a very rich person and that he is Folksy, rather than speaking in the traditional pseudoscientific managerial Harvard-Business-School jargon of the ruling class: he is just like us, only better, because he dominates a large reinsurance entity. He can be counted on to tell us that whoa hey, corporate accounting practices can be self-serving, and that, if the past is any guide, the stock market tends to go up over the long term even if it looks bad now, so let's all put some money in it. And, according to Tom Friedman, Warren Buffett also says that "whatever he achieved in life was due primarily to the fact that he was born in this country -- America -- at this time, with all of its advantages and opportunities." Like the first two Buffett platitudes I paraphrased, this isn't that off the mark (though far be it from me to endorse investing money in the stock market): of course rich Americans owe their wealth to America's military/economic world domination, rather than to some kind of transhistorical divine gift for sucking money out of the rest of the world and making it stick to them. And Tom Friedman’s partially-imaginary but to a large extent all-too-real community of "Warren Buffett centrists" similarly owe their economic privilege to US domination, and their political perspective is informed by the desire to expand or at least maintain this privilege.

This is about where I erased the post I had written. I sort of didn’t want to yell into the void at this guy just for filling the heads of the NYT's readership incrementally higher with this kind of nonsense. The typical American-entrepreneurial-exceptionalist crap followed the Buffett part--the inevitable imperalist argument that whatever increases America’s power also saves the world: "I believe that without a strong America -- which, at its best, can deliver more goods and goodness to its own citizens and to the world than any other nation -- our kids and many others around the world will not have those opportunities." This is terrible, and it has been noted a million times before that it is terrible, to minimal effect. Noting it again on the internet, in the context of this silly little Tom Friedman product, is sort of useless. It's just always bothersome how resilient this propaganda line is. But it probably shouldn’t be. It is totally in the NYT readership’s self-interest--and the broader American public’s self interest--to accept this uncritically, and the American public has been bombarded by it all day every day for the last hundred years.

But since I have in fact been sucked back into commenting on Tom Friedman, I am in fact going to make fun of two things in the column:

First, this passage:

I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.

I defy anyone to put more silly talking points into three sentences. I am actually sort of awed by its grand clattering crescendo of Mosts. If by some unholy power an Organizing For America email blast and Monsanto greenwashing arm producemoreconservemore.com were to copulate and produce an extremely hyperactive child--that child would be this paragraph made flesh. May God have mercy on our miserable souls.

Second, this Expert:

"Obama's election marked a shift -- from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics," said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel, author of the new best seller -- "Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?" -- that calls for elevating our public discourse.

Yeah. Good job, Harvard. That’s some sweeeeeet analysis.

I vow not to devote any more text to Tom Friedman.