While working on a freelance infotainment assignment during the small hours of Thursday night, er, Friday morning, a friend alerted me to the presence of free tacos nearby. After engulfing a few, I happily tweeted:
This started innocently enough.
I asked who my taco benefactor was. Friend points him out: that guy over there talking philosophy. One of my BA majors was in philosophy, so I go over and talk up my taco benefactor on the subject, which we quickly hone in on Hobbes.
In 1651 Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:
I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
The conversation gets mildly heated and a bit more interesting when he says he voluntarily chose to fight for the US military in Iraq. I asked him how he reconciled his philosophy studies with, you know, invading another country that didn’t do anything to the United States. My taco benefactor tells me that, metaphysically speaking, he thinks of reality as permeated and constituted by violence.
Kill them before they kill us, he says, because otherwise they will kill us — that sort of thing. I bring up nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr., Zen Buddhism, etc. and win temporary favor with him by acknowledging the US MIL culture is at its best educated, sophisticated, etc., not easily rendered by broad brushstrokes (speaking of rendering things, the CIA renditions innocent civilians extra-legally, knowingly; then there’s the torture). My taco benefactor is assuaged enough by my token respect for military culture to carry on the conversation outside over a cigarette, but I carefully bum one (rare & for social purposes only) from my friend, not from him.
He (Chad Wood) tells me he worked as a communications analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command. JSOC, you know, black ops. Said he was integral to missions that led to the capture of AAM (Abu Ayyub al-Masri), for example. Said, a few times, “I don’t know if I should trust you” — I’d made my activism supporting WikiLeaks clear from the outset and that I was adversarial to his beliefs. In fact, I let him know that a few hours prior I’d been calculating bus fare to attend a protest at Fort Meade to support Bradley Manning, who was, like Chad, a military intelligence analyst. (It turns out the bus fare cost is prohibitive; the USA really needs some high-speed public transit.)
Chad philosophically justifies US aggression and treating people as expendable by reference to the grand historical project of democracy. Look, I like Madison-Jeffersonian democracy, too, but the approx 120,000 dead civilians in Iraq (due to the War since 2003) aren’t the price for that. It seemed to me Chad argued for the goodness of US foreign policy by an attempt at inference to the best explanation: Look around, he argued, things are fine, aren’t they? Don’t you think there are some really smart people making sure you and I can have this conversation, and that we should let them have their secrets? I’ll let Howard Beale reply to that one:
Well, if there’s anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me: That man is full of bullshit.
He pointed to a truck at a stoplight. He said if he saw such a truck overseas, a computer could give him the last 8 months on that truck in seconds. Exact maps of its past movements, actually. I asked him if they do that on domestic soil. He shook his head No.
He told me the NSA (No Such Agency National Security Agency) has a guy called “Crypto ******” — Crypto something; I didn’t catch the second part of the NSA man’s name, and when I asked Chad to repeat it, he wouldn’t. I do recall that the other, second part of the name was a dactyl (metrical foot: three syllables, stressed on the first syllable) and alliterative (starts with the same sound) — I think it was “Crypto Codekeeper” or “Crypto Keykeeper” or “Crypto Keymaster” or “Crypto Codemaster” or something like that. This guy, Chad said, arrives at top-secret meetings with a briefcase containing physical tape — like cassette tape — that’s used to communicate one-time cryptographic keys and is burned as soon as possible. This guy, Chad said, will be watched for the remainder of his life.
Chad also said he worked with CIA black sites. I’m not sure if he meant worked at them geographically or worked with them remotely (or both).
He posited a “hypothetical”: Why not a submarine vampire-tapping the communication cables that cross the oceans?
Another “hypothetical”: Why not a building here in Fort Worth — or any other major US city — with 6 elevator shafts and only 4 elevators, the other 2 used as antimissile silos or for other interesting purposes? I asked which building. He said I should have asked which buildings, plural. He didn’t specify any.
He said Obama personally authorizes dronekills (or at least the significantly controversial ones) and in general, the extrajudicial assassinations (my phrase). Said it’s public record that the Commander-in-Chief authorizes them, but that he has the experiential knowledge that it’s so.
Said AES-256 OTR properly done cannot be brute-forced yet and contains no backdoors.
Really, he asked me, if I’m so interested in this stuff, why don’t I join up? “The ultimate Assange is already working for the NSA,” he said. Get involved, he said, and get better health insurance than hippies currently have. I’d have access to all sorts of cool technology, he said, and since I’m an ace humanities guy, they’d even have stuff about metaphors and narratives for me and all that kind of stuff!
On Saturday October 15 2011, Stay Wired! Coffeehouse & Computer Service (Website, Twitter, facebook, 2918 W. Berry Street, Fort Worth, TX 76109) hosted an awesome party, organized by Ted Wick and Travis Hildenbrand as the production team Canadian Caveman. Cover was $6 and beer upstairs was free (tips suggested).
Kari talks about burlesque history
The night’s main attraction proved to be Christopher Walker‘s CYBERPUNKS Burlesque. Here are the members’ names in the order pictured above, left to right.
KARI KALVIG, Associate Artistic Director
LUCY GUNN
MYSTICAL TEMPTRESS
MISSY LEMURE
NEVAEH ROGUE
AMBER ROMANCE
MAGENTA D’LITE
MAX VALENTINE
The burlesque troupe performed twice, once before the bands, and a second time after either one band or two had played (I can’t remember for sure).
Nevaeh Rogue was extremely confident. Definitely the star.
NEVAEH ROGUE
Mystical Temptress was a very fun performer, clearly having a good time.
MYSTICAL TEMPTRESS
Max Valentine was entertaining as well. I think he has a pretty good job.
Singing, Rebecca never met a tied whole note she didn’t like; her voice glid well over the dreamy, reverb-heavy atmosphere Brian brought with his guitar. Darby’s drumming created the right stoner-rock framework, and Sybil’s bass, strong as a piano’s bottom strings, undergirded it all.
(Maybe it’s captious to criticize, but the addition of eccentric fills from Brian and Darby would bring greater detail to their soundscape.)
Thanks for the Burnett’s Whipped Cream Vodka, Sybil!
You can hear DJ NOiCE in this video compilation (video montage? I can never keep the lit-crit terms straight). This was the first time I’d ever used my (DSLR) camera to record video, and the first time I’ve ever edited video by computer. What strikes me about the video is how much uninhibited fun everyone’s having.
Travis is a talented drummer. But all and all what this instrumental band did was stare at the floor and play progressive rock to one another. They were talking to themselves, but at least they seemed to enjoy it.
Downstairs by the coffee bar Hyung-Joo Kim tore it up on cello for passersby. He’s a graduate music student at UT-Austin.
Stereo Type Writers faced a diminished crowd since by then the burlesque troupe had left. It was also their first real gig; each member earned a dollar. They deserved that $3, though, since they persevered bravely despite minor equipment problems and overall venue exhaustion. Their straightforward music was at its best when their enthusiasm radiated. Kevin Brown’s confidence on his fuzzily distorted bass drew my attention the most. It’d work well for this group to find an exciting singer who, not bound by an instrument, could move into the crowd.
The weekend was also the 28th birthday of Stay Wired!’s leader, John Campbell. His birthday and his role as host earned him plenty of applause, which he totally deserves.
Birthday Boy John Campbell
Stay Wired! holds an open-mike night every Thursday; arrive at 8:30 p.m. to sign up for a slot; it ends at midnight or so. Events such as the Oct 15th party happen on many weekends. Awesome, right?
The Celestial Jukebox by CynthiaShearer. Multicultural small town tries to get along; when I first donated to Occupy Dallas, the site made me think of the grocery store in this book.
descant Summer 2007 (Volume 46) issue, which includes “The First Death of 2057” by me. A short story about punishment, capital and otherwise, in the future.
The City & The City by China Miéville. Detective story set in two cities in the same place; it’s taboo for one to observe the other; quite fitting.
Night Shift by Stephen King. The earliest short story collection from this horror-meister. I figured if you’re reading in a tough place these stories, for some, might actually be comforting, simpatico.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Dystopian novel about a world where people don’t read. On Nov. 15 police destroyed about 3,000 books from NYC’s Occupy Wall Street Library (video; article).
Bag: water sealant for the bookcase and various new batteries.
The books went into the tent above; the guy who received the donations told me they’d probably use the bookcase elsewhere. I wonder who read the books and what they thought and if it made a difference.
Occupy Sesame Street comment, in the voice of Cookie Monster:
Yes, there always going to be rich and poor. But we used to live in country where rich owned factory and make 30 times what factory worker make. Now we live in country where rich make money by lying about value of derivative bonds and make 3000 times what factory worker would make if factories hadn’t all moved to China.
Capitalism great system. We won Cold War because people behind Iron Curtain look over wall, and see how much more plentiful and delicious cookies are in West, and how we have choice of different bakeries, not just state-owned one. It great system. It got us out of Depression, won WWII, built middle class, built country’s infrastructure from highways to Hoover Dam to Oreo factory to electrifying rural South. It system that reward hard work and fair play, and everyone do fair share and everyone benefit. Rich get richer, poor get richer, everyone happy. It great system.
Then after Reagan, Republicans decide to make number one priority destroying that system. Now we have system where richest Americans ones who find ways to game system — your friends on Wall Street — and poorest Americans ones who thought working hard would get them American dream, when in fact it get them pink slip when job outsourced to 10-year-old in Mumbai slum. And corporations have more influence over government than people (or monsters).
It not about rich people having more money. It about how they got money. It about how they take opportunity away from rest of us, for sake of having more money. It how they willing to take risks that destroy economy — knowing full well what could and would happen — putting millions out of work, while creating nothing of value, and all the while crowing that they John Galt, creating wealth for everyone.
That what the soul-searching about. When Liberals run country for 30 years following New Deal, American economy double in size, and wages double along with it. That fair. When Conservatives run country for 30 years following Reagan, American economy double again, and wages stay flat. What happen to our share of money? All of it go to richest 1%. That not “there always going to be rich people”. That unfair system. That why we upset. That what Occupy Sesame Street about.
2011 article from Rolling Stone: Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? Bankers commit economy-destroying crimes — actual crimes — and remain on the loose; meanwhile, many anti-Occupy folks (especially cozy liberals) are interested in nitpicking park regulations … WTF?
Occupy Dallas footage uploaded to YouTube (by someone else) on Nov 19, 2011:
On October 11 2011, with the help of a friend’s warehouse club card, I purchased 392 20-oz bottles of water (and elsewhere, some gas) using donated money entirely, for the purpose of bringing bottled water to the Occupy Dallas (Twitter) group. I was going to make a table of the ten donation amounts, complete with mean, median, and mode, but my other friend who’s a whiz at statistics told me that with such a sample size, I’d be making a complete fool of myself to post anything other than gross and net. Here you go: $100, $100.
Even the Honda Fit groaned under this water’s weight
Occupy Dallas is part of the larger Occupy Wall Street (Twitter) movement protesting genuine grievances, primarily income inequality and the unethical merger of governments, mega corporations, and big banks. I’ll throw the surveillance shadow state in there as well. If you’re so cozy within your white picket fence that you don’t see a problem, gander at these graphs from Business Insider.
The 99% aren’t asking for equality of opportunity or results.
Still voting Republican? No? Okay, good. Because the right-wing works by convincing enough people who have the resources to take off work and go vote that they, these voters, are the 1%. You too will own yachts! Actually, no, you won’t. Most you might be able to pull off is maintaining your white picket fence (if you have one), or rather, maintaining the bank’s white picket fence — banks own more home equity in the US than individuals do. Meanwhile the Democratic left, that is to say, more or less, everyone else taking traditional politics seriously, gets divided and disorganized arguing over how to best compromise with the 1% to achieve minor reforms — until populism such as Occupy Wall Street gains a loud enough nonviolent voice to bring about real change.
Hi y’all! You are also the 99%!
I stopped at Pioneer Plaza (the Dallas Occupation is now moving to City Hall Park) and, as a cop watched, hastily deposited my quarters into the parking meter. Activists at the Occupation then ferried water from my Fit to the supply base faster than I could pull my camera out. Peeps were thirsty. :-(
I had a minute to chat with the woman I understood to be Whytney (pictured left?), a leader there who is, I think I overheard, the chief operator of the OccupyDallas Twitter account. (Also: thanks to OccupyDallasCOS, OccupyDallasEMS, and CinnabarSweets for helping me out with some logistics.) I asked for, and quickly received, a list of other items — chairs, C-size batteries, walkie-talkies, shelving, ice, and more — that the 500-or-so people of Occupy Dallas desperately need. Working on that list now, y’all; I’m gathering donors.
Speaking of donations: hopefully, you’re now asking yourself how you can pitch in. There are plenty of ways.
This Friday evening a group of maybe twenty folks have assembled at the corner of Berry and Cockrell to proselytize for Christianity; I happened to pass by and jump into live-blogging mode. The speakers from the group, some using English and one Spanish, have been speaking into a hand-held microphone and through a portable PA for easily an hour counting. They’re passing out pamphlets identifying themselves as The Door Christian Fellowship.
The pamphlet handed to me says, among other things, “Are your hopes and dreams unraveling? Are your finances stretched to the breaking point? We Care! and We Can Help! Join us for Life-Changing Services. Find out why Jesus Is The Answer!” It gives an address — 3011 Lackland Rd, Ft Worth, Texas — along with a phone number: (817) 377-1098.
“Douglas-uh, maybe you should move out of Texas-uh.”
They picked this particular street corner for obvious strategic reasons. It’s catty-cornered by the Texas Christian University strip, where clubs, restaurants, and the like entertain students. I don’t know if the group got a permit, or if they needed to, technically, or not. People walking or driving by have expressed various reactions — mostly happy honks and cheers, but a few jeers and some “SHUT THE F*#) UP”s.
“Can we go home yet?”
Here are some quotes from the speakers, 90+% accurate.
I know there’s [sic] been advances in technology. The answer is not on Facebook, my friends. The answer is not on Twitter, my friends. There is [sic] real answers in God. Before I got saved, I used to look into all those kinds of — Buddhism, and all kinds of new age stuff. But the real answer was right here: Jesus Christ.
On the outside, we’re dressed-up, my friend, we look like we’ve got it all together, but on the inside, my friend, you’re dying because of your sin. You wake up at night and wonder what will come tomorrow. On the inside, you cry yourself to sleep. You go from relationship to relationship because on the inside, you’re dirty. Jesus Christ will clean you. He wants to do that. The Bible says He will set you free. You can be set free from the lifestyle of drugs and alcohol. You can be set free from living for the next party, the next big thing. Jesus Christ can change who you are on the inside, my friend. Jesus can change you. He can change you, my friend, so you don’t have to end up like your parents.
Your parents are paying for you to go to college, probably, and you’re wasting that money tonight by getting drunk so you can sleep with someone, maybe. But you will be free for real if you cry out to Jesus Christ!
Maybe you’re a queer — it takes God to save you.
God commanded us to go forth and preach the Gospel. We go all over the city and preach Jesus Christ. We’re not here tonight because we’re trying to put something on you. I love Fuzzy’s Tacos, my friend; amen, it’s nothing against anybody, my friend. We really care about you. We don’t want to see God put you in Hell.
Accept Jesus before it’s too late. If you reject the perfect and living God, he will reject you for all eternity and send you to Hell.
It’s this same group (different day, different place in the same city):
They’ve just now put away their gear and dispersed. As they were packing up — I was typing this from the patio of Stay Wired! Coffeehouse and Computer Services — a guy and girl walked by, dressed up as Jedis, complete with lightsabers. Works for me.
Used without permission; please don’t go after me, buy Star Wars instead.
Okay. At the time of that post, WikiLeaks was still redacting the US State Department cables they’d published, in conjunction with other media partners. A redaction is a removal of sensitive information from a document — in this case, mostly the names of informants (sometimes whistle-blowing informants, sometimes ill-intentioned informants). The worry motivating redactions was that bad guys (for lack of a better word) would retaliate against informants for their interaction(s) with the State Department. Just a few days after my post, WikiLeaks published all 250k+ of the State Department cables, raw, without redactions. Whoa, what happened?
When WikiLeaks was originally working with media partners on Cablegate, editor-in-chief Julian Assange gave an encrypted file of the cables to Guardian journalist (and confessed phone hacker) David Leigh, who later printed its password in his book (which prompted x7o to remark “#idliketothink that if JA had given me the password for cablegate, it wouldn’t now be the title of a chapter in an international bestseller”). The Guardian denies wrongdoing, claiming WikiLeaks told Leigh the password was temporary, which is technically impossible and not the sort of thing an elite cypherpunk such as Assange would mistakenly say. Other disasters, some not nearly as flagrant, combined and led to the file’s decryption by the dark sub-floor of the Internet.
Pretty soon all of the unredacted cables were springing up on websites (including at least one with a customized search engine), and taking up residence on popular file-sharing services. Therefore anyone motivated enough could locate them; some debate just how easily non-technical people could locate the unredacted cables, but really, it’s not that hard — especially for foreign intelligence agencies, computer-adept terrorists, etc.
In a surprising response to the rise of unredacted cables, WikiLeaks published the entire set of unredacted cables themselves, now known as Cablegate2. They also published a press statement:
PJ Crowley, State Department spokesman on the cables issue earlier this year, told AP on the 30th of August, 2011 that “any autocratic security service worth its salt” would probably already have the complete unredacted archive.
Two weeks ago, when it was discovered that information about the Leigh book had spread so much that it was about to be published in the German weekly Freitag, WikiLeaks took emergency action, asking the editor not allude to the Leigh book [...]
WikiLeaks advanced its regular publication schedule, to get as much of the material as possible into the hands of journalists and human rights lawyers who need it. WikiLeaks and its partners were scheduled to have published most of the Cablegate material by November 29, 2011 – one year since the first publication. Over the past week, we have published over 130,000 cables, mostly unclassified. The cables have lead to hundreds of important news stories around the world. All were unclassified with the exception of the Australian, Swedish collections, and a few others, which were scheduled by our partners.
WikiLeaks has also been in contact with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty at a senior level. We contacted the US embassy in London and then the State Department in Washington on 25 August to see if their informant notification program, instituted last year, was complete, and if not, to take such steps as would be helpful. Only after repeated attempts through high level channels and 36 hours after our first contact, did the State Department, although it had been made aware of the issue, respond. Cliff Johnson (a legal advisor at the Department of State) spoke to Julian Assange for 75 minutes, but the State Department decided not to meet in person to receive further information, which could not, at that stage, be safely transmitted over the telephone.
This is getting intense
Though these comments seem clear enough at first glance, they left some things unknown. Did WikiLeaks publish Cablegate2 to protect sources, as GlennGreenwaldstated? If so, how does the publication protect sources? What does Human Rights Watch and what does Amnesty International make of Cablegate2, and what did they advise WikiLeaks? Inquiring minds who have been supportive of WikiLeaks (a risky, though legal, thing in the US) deserve to know the full reasoning behind the Cablegate2 publication, I think, without any big steps in the argumentation left for educated guesses.
Some answers arrived today in a New Scientistinterview with Assange. He specified three independent justifications for publishing Cablegate2.
To protect at-risk people. Assange said: “for harm minimisation, there are people who need to know that they are mentioned in the material before intelligence agencies know they are mentioned — or at least as soon after as possible.”
To establish an authentic version of Cablegate2. Assange “point[ed] to stories published in Tajikistan and Pakistan that have been based on fake cables.” [He said:] “WikiLeaks is a way for journalists and the public to check whether a claimed story based on a cable is actually true. They can come to our site to check. We have a 100 per cent accuracy record.”
To help reformers racing against the corrupt’s clamping down. Assange: “a race commenced between the governments who need to be reformed and the people who can reform them using the material.”
When WikiLeaks first published Cablegate2, I, like WikiLeaks Crowd-Sourceress Asher_Wolf, had (and have) several concerns. Here are mine:
WikiLeaks didn’t call for amnesty for at-risk, whistle-blowing informants.
WikiLeaks didn’t apologize to at-risk, whistle-blowing informants.
WikiLeaks apparently didn’t request public comment from Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International.
You might respond that the first three concerns above can’t be redressed given WikiLeaks’ limited resources and the quantity of the cables, or maybe that redressing the three concerns isn’t WikiLeaks’ proper role as a conduit for whistle-blowing leakers, or maybe that addressing them would cause legal problems or PR problems for their brand (their reputation affects whether whistle-blowers trust them). I can understand those responses, though I’m not sure how to fully evaluate them. I do think WikiLeaks needs to do more for the named, whistle-blowing informants.
But after today’s New Scientist interview, I do feel that on balance, WikiLeaks did the right thing by publishing Cablegate2. I hope, however, that people and organizations of sufficient importance work toward protecting the named, whistle-blowing informants, and that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International weigh in publicly on WikiLeaks’ Cablegate2 publication (in which case I’ll consider their reasoning). After all, WikiLeaks followed the computer security community’s practice of widely publishing threats (viruses, etc.) that are already out in the wild since doing so, despite risk, solves problems more quickly; yet, assuming the same strategy extends to protecting people offline might be a problematic example of what EvgenyMorozovcalls Internet-centrism: relying too much on technical knowledge when addressing problems not adequately described in technological terms.
Actually read this
As Clay Shirky says, in the United States, publishing leaked documents is basically legal (see New York Times v. United States as well as the First Amendment); it’s leaking them that’s often illegal (and risky). Today the Internet has lowered the costs associated with publishing. We with Internet connections are all now publishers, though not all journalists. While instituting legal licensing to determine who gets to be a publisher would be ridiculously bad for freedom, our larger bullhorns — especially those of the more prominent netizens among us — come with more serious responsibility than might be first imagined.
Older generations, I think, see publication itself as some measure of approval of the published content; in this view, WikiLeaks publishing the unredacted cables amounts to the organization approving of the lack of redactions. This view makes a degree of sense in the past world where the process of publication was expensive, time-consuming, and relatively uncommon.
But now, to use two metaphors each from a different science fiction writer (WilliamGibson, then CoryDoctorow), with the Internet the human race has sprouted an information exoskeleton, an outboard brain. If the principle “non-secure, online info available anywhere is available everywhere” isn’t completely true yet, it will be more or less true within a decade or, at most, two. This is the ideology of radical transparency. WikiLeaks is helping to usher in a world where not writing down secrets (or typing them out) will be the only way to keep them. That world, I think, will be one of reduced secrets and, accordingly, a better, more just one.
This week WikiLeaks published thousands more US diplomatic cables as part of its Cablegate operation. Among many other items, Cablegate has confirmed or revealed the following:
Referring to the United States’ secret air strikes in Yemen, Yemen’s president promised US general David Petraeus that “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.” (Original Cable, Salon, BBC.)
Though Canada publicly claimed opposition to the Iraq war “for domestic political reasons and out of a deep-seated Canadian commitment to multilateralism,” it secretly told the United States it was “prepared to be as helpful as possible in the military margins,” using Canadian naval and air forces “discreetly” on behalf of the US. (Original Cable, CBC News.)
The United States ordered American diplomats to secretly and illegally collect top United Nations officials and others’ credit card numbers, biometric data (fingerprints, iris scans, DNA), passwords, and more. (Original Cable, NYT, Guardian.)
In 2009 U.S. Senator John McCain promised Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi some American military hardware. (Original Cable, Politico.)
Texas security contractor DynCorp pimped little boys to be raped by Afghan policemen at a DynCorp-organized party. (Original Cable, Houston Press, Guardian.)
Whoops
WikiLeaks initiated a crowdsourcing effort, #wlfind on Twitter, ensuring its latest cable releases would be looked through. Inspired by Furry Girl (Twitter), who put together a post about the latest cables in her area of expertise (sex work), I decided to do something similar for literary topics. If you’re eager to dig through some cables yourself, try this cablegate search engine, and then share your findings online.
I restricted my work to this most recent batch of cables. Here are the search results, and the total number of hits when I first searched, for: literature (665); literary (334); … wow! This is going to take more than one post.
Reading the below, one should bear in mind EvgenyMorozov‘s astute critique of Internet-centrism, a lazy perspective that ignores the importance of local cultures when interpreting material and instead focuses faith on technology. I’m not at all an expert on foreign countries, etc. I can only fish out cables with some literary significance in the hope others might benefit from them.
In April 2006, a few months after gun-firing Chinese police in Dongzhou subdued villagers protesting land confiscations (WaPo), the American consulate in Guangzhou invoked a metaphor of Lu Xun‘s (“China’s most prominent modern author”): the Chinese sense, in the area, of rapid economic growth is that it “eats people.” From the cable (my link):
in his “Diary of a Madman” short story [...] the supposedly mentally deranged narrator has looked at the whole of Chinese history and found its grandeur and power to be founded on the eating of people
The cable claims
there is a conscious attempt led in part by Guangzhou’s most progressive and highly influential magazine, the “Nanfengchuang” (the “South Wind Window”), to revive the spirit of the New Culture Movement of the 1920s of which Lu was a key figure
The cable goes on to advocate for increased injections of humanities programs to teach core American democratic values. These, the cable argues, will make rapid economic growth in the area more humane. After all, the cable says,
there is a very large audience for American literature and thought. American literature specialist Ernesto Suarez, our Fulbright Scholar at Guangzhou’s Zhongshan University, is in demand not only at Zhongshan but also at other institutions every weekend throughout China. Recently, the Shantou University English Language Department approached the Consulate about strengthening the American literature component of its program in line with the desire of students to learn not merely the language but also the values of the American people speaking that language.
The Cold War-style argument that humanities talks and courses (apparently) alone can sufficiently soften the steamroll of global economics makes one worry (especially in light of other cables).
A 2007 cable from the Beijing Embassy summarizes a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference that included China’s suggestion that the US State Department study up on its Confucius.
Spokesperson Qin Gang said at the March 8 regular press briefing that the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006 issued today by China’s State Council Information Office serves as “a mirror for United States to view its own human rights condition” and “understand why it has no right to use double standards in criticizing other countries.” Qin continued, saying the MFA would give the State Department copies of the “Four Books and Five Classics” of Chinese literature as a guide to good governance. Asked if the report constituted a double standard on China’s part by interfering in the domestic affairs of the United States, Qin referred the reporter to his previous statement.
A 2008 cable from Taiwan noted growth in the market for simplified-character Chinese books as government restrictions on the products loosened and more translations of foreign books into Chinese were imported from mainland China.
A survey done by local book dealers in 2006 showed that 50 percent of simplified-character Chinese books sold in Taiwan are on literature, history, and philosophy; 10 percent on social science, law, politics, and the military; 10 percent on Chinese medicine and art; 10 percent on education, finance and engineering; with the remainder on tourism and other topics. As for the consumers, Chu Fu-ming, head of the Eslite flagship bookstore’s simplified-character Chinese book section, told AIT, “those who buy simplified-character Chinese books are mostly intellectuals and academics. Only 20 percent of the buyers are in their twenties, while 40 percent are in their thirties and forties, and the remaining 40 percent are over 50 years old. Older people are especially noticeable because they come in the mornings and spend a long time poring carefully over selections,” Wu observed, with “history books being the most popular.”
The cable worries about simplified-character textbooks supplanting US textbooks more and more, since Chinese college professors were finding the former less expensive and easier to assign.
In the Chinese city of Zhenjiang, readers of Nobel Prize-winning American novelist Pearl Buck (Mike Wallace interview; Nobel write-up), who spent much of her time in China, worried, according to a 2008 cable, that Buck wasn’t getting enough attention in the United States.
Comment: Zhenjiang’s fervor for its long-ago American “daughter” points to possibilities for the upcoming celebrations of the 30th anniversary of U.S.-China relations.
A 2003 cable cited “the latest Human Development Report on the Arab states” as noting
The economic, political, artistic, and literary creativity of the Arab states are being stifled by the exclusion of women, among other factors. As an example, the report notes that Turkey alone published more works of creative literature over the past year than the entire Arab world combined.
A 2003 cable said although “European public opinion may be skeptical about the politics of GOT joining the European Union, [...] civil society has shown that sharing space with Turkey in the
cultural realm is as natural as can be.” The cable cited the European popularity of Istanbul-born novelist Orhan Pamuk as evidence of Turkey’s “de facto integration into European cultural life.”
His recent novel “My Name is Red” won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003; this award was the latest in a series of European honors dating back to his 1991 Prix de la Decouverte Europeenne for the French translation of his second novel, “Sessiz_Ev” (“The Quiet House”).
With a 2005 cable, the American embassy in Tel Aviv took note of an editorial referencing Egyptian playwright Ali Salem:
“We have already seen that both Israel and Egypt generally obey when there is an American scolding…. Why not initiate, for example, the award of an honorary doctorate by an American university to Ali Salem for his contribution to peace between the peoples?”
According to a 2006 cable, staff from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Director-General’s office “held misperceptions” about the World Digital Library, “a project to put rare and remote items on the web.” The staff worried over Google’s involvement, saying it troubled European nations, and that the countries might be more receptive to a UNESCO label.
Thus far I’ve come away with the impression that the United States strongly believes spreading American culture is an effective way to spread its core democratic values, but other countries often see this as hypocritical given the States’ frequent disregard of those values. If you’re interested in reading more about that, I recommend Evgeny Morozov’s book The Net Delusion. Another observation: writers and their work do make more of an impact in international politics than you might suspect.
After Monday’s suicide of Russell Armstrong (a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star’s estranged husband), Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon.com called reality TV “A blood sport that must change.” Seitz said:
The type of so-called reality show represented by the “Real Housewives” franchise is the soft-bellied, 21st century American TV version of a gladiatorial contest. It has no agenda except giving viewers the basest sort of entertainment: the spectacle of people doing violence to each other and suffering violence themselves. Instead of going at each other like gladiators with swords and clubs, or like boxers hurling punches, participants in this kind of unscripted show attack each other psychologically. The show’s appeal is the spectacle of emotional violence. The participants — or “cast members,” as they are revealingly labeled — suffer and bleed emotionally while we watch and guffaw. [...]
Unscripted shows encourage, and sometimes cause, emotional damage. That’s the whole point of their existence — the reason they get on the air, the reason we watch and discuss them. They record intense, bizarre, sometimes ginned-up conflicts during production. They transform the participants into caricatures of themselves [...]
Yesterday I asked a story editor on a long-running dating series who did not want her name used in this story if, during her years of working on these shows, she had ever heard a producer express authentic concern for a participant’s well-being as a person rather than an abstracted “character.” She laughed and said, “No. That just doesn’t happen. If anybody working on this kind of show thought that way, it would make the shows less entertaining, and that person would lose their job.”
Tonight I went to the corner grocery store to buy Wifely some Skinny Cow dessert and me some Mexican Coke. The cashier, a young woman, wore a nametag that, under her name, said:
I LOVE U :)
I thought to myself: that’s an exuberant nametag. Although people who aren’t actually in my skull insist otherwise, I do automatically, non-voluntarily think such words as “exuberant.” If that annoys you, you probably shouldn’t be reading my blog, but rather watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
No one was in the lane behind me, nor was anyone nearing the lane. For a moment I considered saying something or other to the cashier about her nametag. After all, I’ve checked out through her lane enough times for us to share mutual recognition, though just barely. I prefer to interact with a person when checking out, instead of using the self check-out lanes, because something worthwhile, interesting and unique and unpredictable, might happen during my encounter with another human being.
Then for another moment I considered not saying something about her nametag. Because by now the time for exchanging a greeting had nearly ended, she was starting to scan my Mexican Coke, she was about to ask if I’d brought my rewards card (I always lie and say I forgot; cashiers then scan theirs on my behalf, and not only do I not have to deal with signing up for one, but also I singlehandedly defeat the company’s entire research division). But the only word coming to mind during this expiring hourglass time was exuberant.
I decided not to chicken out, to go for it.
“That’s an exuberant nametag,” I said.
Her smile wriggled as happily and confusedly as she did until she stopped to ask what “exuberant” meant. Ah-ha, I thought, a person who doesn’t become angry like so many do when someone else uses a word they don’t know, but instead has the laudable reaction of curiosity. Now it was my turn to wriggle my hand happily and confusedly, trying to pantomime the meaning of exude while telling her, “It means, like, … happiness … like …” I managed to stop stumbling and say “It means something like, ‘Shining out happiness.’”
She said, “I really like that,” and I sensed she meant it. A few moments of silent, shared satisfaction passed as she scanned my items.
Photo ofPhilip K. Dick by Anne Dick “I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities” — PKD
One of the commonplace remarks about reality TV is that it “isn’t real,” that it’s merely “so-called” reality TV. This supposed phoniness is alleged to cover up the “natural” way of being, the “real” way, which is usually not identified by the shows’ deriders.
As I paid for the grocery items, I nervously — as if invisible judges were watching — began to, as they say, “walk it back”: retract and qualify what I said. Anxiously I told the increasingly disappointed cashier the following nonfiction anecdote from a few days back:
I walked down an aisle at this same corner grocery store to pick up some ice cream. A middle-aged female customer was squatting down with a freezer door opened, scrutinizing the vanilla flavors. Without my saying anything, she suddenly started talking haphazardly about the proliferation of vanillas. French vanilla, old-fashioned vanilla, vanilla bean and more. “She told me to get vanilla; I wonder which she meant? There are too many!” In a bad mood, I didn’t want to talk at first; like a person wearing sunglasses indoors, I didn’t want to interact with anyone, didn’t want to engage with people. I resented her a little for introducing conversation. Then I regretted my self-absorption and told her I suspected old-fashioned vanilla would do the trick. The woman half-nodded sorta-assent, and said, as I walked away, “‘Tis a quandary.”
Walking away still, I looked back at her, and she was still squatting, not looking at me. I felt irritated that she hadn’t continued the conversation, that she’d used the word ‘quandary.’ How would she have known I knew what it meant, anyway? Now I was feeling like those who call big vocabulary pretentious. But I guess something small helped her recognize that I’m the sort of odd person who knows odd words. I still feel bad for not engaging with her, for choosing instead to cultivate my sour mood.
I explained all this to the I LOVE U :) cashier who, like I said above, appeared disappointed with me for walking-back the happy shared moment of exuberant. I was disappointed with me, too. But at least when I was driving home I thought up this blog post; I realized there was a big connection between these interactions and the reality TV issue.
At their peak the destructive emotions flaring during these reality TV shows are definitely real. (Perhaps those who decry the shows and miss this point don’t actually see much of them.) Real doesn’t imply good, doesn’t imply that the shows shouldn’t be changed. (I like Seitz’s suggestion of psychologists and better screenings; you can’t eliminate a phenomenon like reality TV; and, to pretend an underbelly doesn’t exist doesn’t help anything.)
Here’s the point. I think that in our postmodern world, people are so hungry for authentic moments of human experience that, even it means havoc or worse for the participants’ lives, they’ll take what these shows offer, if that’s all they know how to find. Because sincerely engaging with other people during the day, even through a good work of art, and sincerely emoting, is a scary risk.
On the first of August, as debt deal details emerged, GlennGreenwald brought his magnifying glass to bear on the progressive anthill (of which I’m a member), and out boiled ants looking for their President. Maybe that leader has never been there in the first place.
for a long time, the standard progressive narrative was that Obama wanted a clean debt-ceiling hike but was being forced (by the Tea Party and bad negotiating) into unwanted budget cuts. The evidence — beginning with Obama’s own repeated statements — is that that’s just not true: he affirmatively wanted these cuts and more as part of the debt ceiling hike.
In 2009 moderate conservative David Brooks wrote that newly inaugurated President Obama was a big-spending liberal. In response, four unnamed “senior members of the administration” met with Brooks to reassure him the administration took a hawkish stance on cutting long-term debt. In a follow-up column Brooks said the four told him:
[Obama] is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending.
Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices–particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare – should be made on his watch. “We’ve kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road,” he said.
That’s half of Greenwald’s “[Obama] affirmatively wanted these cuts and more as part of the debt ceiling hike.” As for the other half, tying the debt ceiling hike to deficit reform wasn’t exclusively a Tea Party idea. According to TIME, Obama and Boehner secretly collaborated to tie deficit reform to the debt ceiling for a crisis that’d force a right-left compromise by — the theory went — shutting out the more extreme members of their respective parties, as no one (the two men apparently figured) would really allow the United States to default.
On April 13, Obama called on Congress to cut $4 trillion [including by raising tax revenues] from the budget over 12 years [...] an astonishingly large number for a Democrat. [... shortly thereafter, Boehner indicated] Republicans would hold the full faith and credit of the U.S. hostage to deeper cuts in federal spending. [...] Instead of knocking down this offer, the White House was noticeably quiet.
[Obama and Boehner] began to talk about the truly epic possibility of using the threat, the genuine danger of default, to freeze out their respective extremists and make the kind of historic deal that no one really thought possible [...] It would include deeper cuts in spending, the elimination of all kinds of tax loopholes and lower income tax rates for all[?!]. “Come on, you and I,” Boehner admitted telling Obama. “Let’s lock arms, and we’ll jump out of the boat together.”
They agreed to begin meeting together at the White House, alone, without aides. [...] Obama slipped away to call Boehner. They were now talking once a day or once every two days.
Of course the Tea Party was crazier than either Obama or (presumably) Boehner realized, and the Partiers took the situation to the brink, nearly instigating what many said would have amounted to a global economic disaster.
It’s important to make sense of Obama’s motivations in all this. NYT:
The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. [...]
policies [...] would naturally have flowed from [a coherent, memorable, passionate narrative President Obama could have presented]
We on the left or left-ish — who disapprove of cuts to the Medicare, (solvent!) Social Security, and Medicaid safety nets, and favor as a solution instead increased taxes on the super-rich and decreased military spending overall — hear multiple views on the Obama Administration’s 2009 comments and on this month’s debt deal in general, some of which were discussed in the (popular!) ant frenzy after Greenwald’s column. Views such as: a progressive Obama’s bluffing or blundering or getting in some triangulation, the reportage is messed up, a pragmatic and slightly moderate Obama just wants small cuts for whatever purpose (triangulation, some deficit reform, a transformational return to the spirit of compromise), whatever. At any rate, especially before the debt deal, very few on the left or left-ish took Obama’s stance in favor of safety net cuts seriously, preferring to cling to what Greenwald accurately called the standard progressive narrative.
In the scramble of worried ants (again, I include myself as an ordinary member of the anthill), Joshua Cohen of the BostonReview met Greenwald’s indictment of Obama with a different stance:
critics like Greenwald and Krugman, who have zero political sense or experience, have been much too quick to be dismissive of the constraints. (I think Krugman is more careful on this issue than Greenwald.)
I agree, but when I have “zero political sense or experience” myself, how can I? Well, evidence says a president’s preferences are hugely constrained not only by the wise separation of powers, but also by powers we rarely see fully explained. For instance, candidate Obama supported a public option as part of healthcare reform; but, according to many on the left, President Obama chose to drop it as a spineless concession to Republicans. Yet consider former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s (D-SD) comments:
[The public option] was taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others. [...] premise was, you had to have the stakeholders in the room and at the table. Lessons learned in past efforts [such as Clinton's attempt at healthcare reform] is that without the stakeholders’ active support rather than active opposition, it’s almost impossible to get this job done. They wanted to keep those stakeholders in the room and this [the public option] was the price some thought they had to pay. Now, it’s debatable [...] but that was the calculation. I think there is probably a good deal of truth to it.
Consider also: the pharmaceutical and health product industries lobbied the US Congress $1.2 million per day in the first three months of 2009 to oppose healthcare reform. Thus, instead of politicians deciding democratically (after all, multiple polls showed most Americans preferred a public option), we have politicians negotiating with wealthy corporations that are hugely powerful players effectively in the same league as governments (for example: Apple has more cash on hand than over a hundred countries’ combined GDPs). Thus one plausible possibility is not that candidate Obama was deceiving us about his support for a public option, but rather, once he became President Obama, he discovered just how much he has to deal with these powerful dudes constraining what he can do. Ya think?
So maybe similar powerful, behind-the-scenes constraints restricted his possible debt deal maneuvers. “A constrained progressive Obama” makes more sense in the case of healthcare reform, sure; Obama made overtures to a “Grand Bargain” that would cut Medicare and Social Security even before his inauguration. George Stephanopoulos:
I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”
“Yes,” Obama said.
And this year in a July presser Obama argued, according to Greg Sargent’s slightly edited transcript:
If you are a progressive, you should be concerned about debt [...] because if the only thing we’re talking about over the next year, two years, five years is debt and deficits, then it’s very hard to start talking about how do we make investments in community colleges so that our kids are trained. How do we actually rebuild $2 trillion worth of crumbling infrastructure [...]
[Progressives] should want our fiscal house in order so that every time we propose a new initiative, somebody doesn’t just throw up their hands and say ‘more big spending, more government.’
It would be very helpful for us to be able to say [...] ‘Our fiscal house is in order. So, now the question is, what should we be doing to win the future, and make ourselves more competitive, and create more jobs, and what aspects of what government’s doing are a waste, and we should eliminate.’ And that’s the kind of debate that I’d like to have.
But okay, if Obama believes (contra, say, Krugman or Galbraith) that debt matters significantly enough, why didn’t, why doesn’t, he go after it the way progressives suggest: tax the super-rich more, end the wars? In late July why didn’t he, rather than agree to cut safety net programs and risk the now-real downgrade, choose to knock out the debt-default risk with a 14th Amendment solution? After all, as Senator Sanders points out time and again, if we restored corporate and millionaire income tax rates to 1960s levels, the national debt would be reduced by a third within a decade — better than the current debt deal — without any cuts to social safety nets.
Because: either as Greenwald says, Obama just doesn’t want to maintain safety nets at current levels, or, as Cohen hints, “constraints” (which I take to include powerful and somewhat concealed interests) make doing so (near-)impossible.
Image of Theodore Roosevelt stolen, shh
Powerful, somewhat concealed constraints? If my example of health insurers didn’t convince you, how about this 1912 quote from former President Theodore Roosevelt?
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. [...]
we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. [...]
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The constraints constrain the man who was candidate Obama, and may have in fact changed him. (Think about how quickly he made sure to sign those (later foiled) executive orders on his first day in office — end Gitmo, increase transparency — before, as I recall, he even physically stepped foot into the White House.) Now he’s running for re-election; he was initially elected in part due to a record-breaking treasure chest of over $600 million, with bankers topping the list of big donors. Now for re-election he has to court those same bankers. Although he managed to call them “fat cats” during this first term and criticize their bonuses, he didn’t go FDR on them like so many on the left or left-ish hoped. FDR (warning: link auto-plays audio):
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
So the bankers have Obama fairly well checked, it appears. What about the personality angle? How much of a role does Obama’s personality play in his move to the right? We have this about Obama’s upbringing in Indonesia, around age ten:
“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”
The transformational tack says Obama wants to heal the partisan gridlock that’s stalling America from progressing. In a 2010 interview with (timid?) progressive bloggers, Obama said:
What keeps me up at night is China, Germany, India, Brazil — they’re moving. They make decisions, we’re going to pursue clean energy, and the next thing you know they’ve cornered half the clean energy market; we’re going to develop high-speed rail in the span of five years — suddenly they’ve got high-speed rail lines going; we’re going to promote exports, here’s what we’re going to do — boom, they get going.
And if we can’t sort of execute on key issues that will determine our competitiveness over the long term, we’re going to fall behind — we are going to fall behind.
And we have his erudite civics:
As sensible and as critical as politeness and overcoming gridlock are, sympathy’s difficult to feel when, say, for the debt Super Commission, Obama hints he sides with the Defense Secretary for more cuts to safety nets instead of reduced military spending, and when his invasion of civil liberties is massive — just to take one recent case, his Department of Justice sought 400% more (compared to the Bush DoJ) info, without warrants, from ISPs. And don’t get me started on his Dexter-like assassination order against a US citizen without any due process (due to allegations of terrorism). (A recent Washington & Lee law school graduate — a philosophy major as an undergrad — read the preceding link on my recommendation and said: “due process is overrated.” Ay, caramba.)
What does all this psychologizing mean for the “enduser” activist? Ascertaining Obama’s motivations matters; but, it turns out, we can’t say much. In a world where 1) ending the wars and 2) returning income taxes for corporations and millionaires back to mid-20th century levels are both off the table — where such possibilities don’t even exist — President Obama comes off as a fairly reasonable guy doing the best he can, aside from the civil liberties violations that, if I’m not mistaken, every (esp. wartime) president (unfortunately) indulges in. What does the presence of those two elephants in the room say about our world?
The 19- & 20th century Pragmatists, particularly William James, argued one should take the most beneficial interpretation when confronted with uncertain ones. If it gets you riled up to think of Obama as weak, regard him as such; if you think of him as a compromised progressive trapped by forces he can’t manage, go there. (Meanwhile some of us can try to get him to give more specific information about his aims and the powers that shouldn’t be.)
I tend toward the latter of the two above interpretations, especially as portrayed by this bleak rendering of contemporary world leaders in general:
But regardless of whatever’s going on inside Obama, the buck stops with him, as with every other elected leader. In general, grassroots activists should take them at their word, use the available evidence, and push hard. If you don’t like X, and suspect a politician has been forced into X, that doesn’t prevent you from working to make the politician change X. It’s similar to dealing with problematic people in real life. You can make excuses for them all you want, but you still need to regard them as problematic if they are indeed problematic, and take action accordingly. From the angry anthill roundtable, Tom Sugrue:
Without a well-organized, vocal left, we can’t expect any better. FDR did not tack leftward in 1935 and 36 out of principle, but because he was pulled there.
But too often we grassroots folks don’t give a damn about real strategies. Think of the Super Commission. The final recommendation must be bipartisan. So it does not matter if progressives are able to get Senator Sanders, Representative Grijalva, or any other safety net line-holding leftist appointed if there’s not a line-crossing Republican; and, impossible as it might seem, a few Republicans have indicated they might be willing to raise revenues (taxes). So why aren’t progressives also targeting Republican leadership to appoint a line-crossing Republican? Is it because a petition from MoveOn.org that arrives at a Republican’s office goes straight into the trash?
Is that the most pragmatic assumption?
‘Purple for the People’ Slurpees come from mixing red & blue.
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