Do Nothing Foreign Policy

The American response to the ongoing atrocities in the Middle East and North Africa continues to sicken me.  William Dobson has a well-written article in Slate.com addressing the issue in response to the apparent chemical weapons attack in Syria.

 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/08/barack_obama_is_failing_in_the_middle_east_syria_s_bashar_assad_and_egypt.html

Once again, the administration has demonstrated a bent for the practical and ethically indefensible.  As Dobson notes,

The Obama administration isn’t responsible for preventing this massacre in Syria. President Obama cannot control what happens in Damascus or Cairo, and it’s unfair to suggest otherwise. But he must also own the policies he creates and the messages those policies send. And here’s the truth: The president will run out the clock on the problems he likes least. In Egypt, while Washington fretted over the definition of a “coup,” the Gulf’s monarchies happily stepped in to fill the void. In Syria, the administration hemmed and hawed about arming the rebels for 18 months. When they finally came around to the notion, the “good rebels” were buried in shallow graves. As it turns out, there is a cost to slow walking a foreign policy crisis... 

The Middle East’s autocrats understand how to turn a president’s “judiciousness” into an effective weapon for murder. These strongmen—be it Assad, Sisi, or a host of others—recognize that when an American president demands proof, evidence good enough to stand up in court, to make foreign policy decisions, he is effectively turning a blind eye to their crimes. So, for every peaceful protester who is gunned down in Cairo, the regime gives us an armed mob of Muslim Brothers. As Assad’s death squads go from house to house, Damascus issues denials and counterclaims. If that’s all it takes, then it is easy enough to create the fog of war, even when it’s truly a massacre.

In this way, the administration's inaction makes it culpable.  Perhaps not complicit because American power is not absolute, but still culpable.  Culpable of what?  Culpable of tolerating criminal behavior of autocrats and dictators when the autocrats and dictators in question appear to be more sympathetic to U.S. interests than the alternative.  Culpable of hypocritically abandoning commonly held principles of fairness and justice so as to not rock any boats.  The administration should denounce the coup in Egypt, denounce the Assad massacre, and take appropriate and forceful steps to develop an international coalition to force an end to the Egyptian coup and the Syrian civil war.  Doing nothing is unethical and amounts to condoning the deaths of innocents in Syria and Egypt.

So what can be done?  How about less lawyer-speak and more frankness?  How about calling a coup a coup?  How about telling Egypt that democracy requires elections for regime change?  How about telling Assad that the U.S. will do everything in its power to stop him from slaughtering Syrians?  How about telling Assad that the U.S. will do everything in its power to assist with the orderly transition to a representative democracy, including combating any party who would use violence and terror to subvert the will of the people?  How about acting in away that does not give ammunition to every anti-democratic nation in the world to call attention to our hypocrisy when we advocate for the rule of law, peace, and democracy elsewhere?  How about we just try something other than to sit on our hands?

In Dobson's words:

I used to think that, in the long run, when the memoirs are written and the minutes of the White House meetings are known, the 100,000 people who died in Syria would be one of the worst stains on this administration. Not because they failed to stop it, but because they failed to try. But I was wrong. One hundred thousand was the floor.  

This sickens me.  It should sicken you too.

"30 Americans," A Response

I recently went to the Milwaukee Art Museum ("MAM") and viewed, among other things, the current exhibit, 30 Americans.  The Art Museum describes the exhibit thus:

30 Americans is a dynamic exploration of contemporary American art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, video, and more made by African American artists since 1970 raise questions of what it means to be a contemporary artist and an African American today. Whether addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, politics, or history—or seemingly remaining silent about them—these works offer powerful interpretations of cultural identity and artistic legacy.

 A number of things struck me during and after the exhibit.  I found myself able to access the pathos, frustration, disgust, rage, powerlessness, pride, confidence, bravado, sorrow, joy, ebullience, and other feelings that the works inspired.  For example, there is a take on the Mastercard "Priceless" advertising campaign showing a scene at a funeral of a young black man who was shot and killed for jewelry he was wearing.  The final line of parody, "Picking the perfect casket for your son.  Priceless" stirred powerful emotions in me.  The elegaic quality brought tears to my eyes; the senselessness angered me, etc.

Despite the tendency of most pieces to stir a response in me, I found myself sensing something inaccessible in the pieces.  After thinking about the matter, I have concluded that the inaccessible place is a parodic or ironic aspect to the work that derives from a presence to which I will always remain outside because the parodic or ironic aspect is rooted in lived experience.  Even though the art is expressed in shared 'rhetorical' or artistic forms that allow me comprehend aspects of the pieces, I can only sense the deepest or profoundest presence from which they arise, feeling the reverberations of what the pieces mean without having the experiential capacity to understand and articulate what the pieces mean at the felt level.  The Mastercard piece moved me, but I have never lost a friend or a relative to gun violence, particularly of the type of gun violence that often besets impoverished, urban minority communities.  The way this experience resonates with the piece of art is something I can only access through assumption and inference, which has a slightly disconcerting and bewildering effect, a shade of which can almost be described as sadness.

What does it mean that a significant part of the art I viewed is inaccessible to me?  First, that the artist can bring to my attention, in a public space, awareness of the arrest or gap in my experiential capacity to understand is significant.  Communication enables the creation of experiences otherwise not possible.  Through dialog, whether visual or audible, written or unwritten, new presences arise.  The artists creating the pieces exhibited at MAM function as hero-translators (in the mythic or epic sense), bringing news of different worlds to their audience.  Marco Polo brought news of a new culture to Europe, enriching and expanding the experiential capacities of Europeans in the process.  Think of the rich history of culinary delight to which Italians have access simply because Marco Polo brought noodles back with him.  Surely Italians have been enriched in this exchange.

The artists whose works are being exhibited do the same thing.  I may not be able to access the felt reality of urban gun violence, but the poignancy of the Mastercard piece gives me a sense of what it must do to persons and communities that experience urban gun violence.  In giving me (and anyone lacking experiential capacity) this sense, the artist creates a new presence, a new statement that is the acknowledgement f the inaccessible experiential aspect of the work.  When persons like me who have not experienced urban gun violence directly (who are surely the majority of the viewers) respond to the piece, we bring the previously unexpressed or poorly expressed experience into the public sphere and give it voice.  The responses, even when incomplete or inchoate, acknowledge the felt experience of the artist and so gives it space in the broader cultural exchange of ideas.  Once the art is exhibited publicly, it is an utterance of sorts that cannot be taken back, silenced, or otherwise erased.

Giving voice to a a real experience, even one experienced by a minority of persons, is important to recognize the breadth of experiences that persons in our culture have and to legitimize those experiences as valid and public parts of the greater culture.  In bringing a new or poorly disseminated experience to the public sphere, the artist brings us closer as people to acknowledging our common humanity and individual differences, creating a communicative space for respect and learning.  From this platform we become a more integrated but less homogeneous culture, a culture that craves contact with difference rather than suppressing it, running from it, or fearing it.  And so, despite my ability to only glimpse the profound parodic and ironic elements of the many of the pieces, I am better for having seen them and remaining open to the aspects I cannot fully understand.

Democracy Hypocrisy

This will be short:  it is complete BS that there is not more outrage from the West regarding the coup in Egypt.  While I am no fan of Islamism, it is duplicitous of the West to advocate democracy but then balk when a movement or party we don't like wins an election.  If civil unrest is due to the majority trampling on the civil and basic human rights of the minority, I understand that the West may wish to remain neutral or even support those whose rights the majority is abrogating.  However, I understand that deteriorating economic conditions drove the coup in Egypt (at least ostensibly-one may reasonably surmise that this was only pretext for an otherwise naked power grab).

A changing economic landscape is the precise sort of civil problem that democratic elections are uniquely qualified to resolve peacefully.  If a particular policy fails to generate expected or promised results, the electorate will opt for a new party or movement that offers a different policy prescription.  While we may quibble over the efficiency of using democratic elections as the mechanism for choosing policy-makers, it is the only method that allows for a government of the people to remain of the people.  The same ethos should govern our response to Egypt:  we should support the democratically elected government so long as the government is acting within their constitutional mandate.  If Egypt's economy is tanking with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge, then we should simply demand that the next round of elections be administered fairly.  If a majority of the population wants a change in leadership, the majority will oust the Brotherhood through the peaceful and constitutionally mandated form of popular election.  Any other solution to changing policy makers renders the West, as advocates of representative democracy, hypocritical.

Jon Lee Anderson has a great piece in The New Yorker addressing the same thing that is worth reading.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/in-egypt-echoes-of-latin-america.html

Lines Written In Memory of My Grandmother

My grandmother died seven years ago this July.  She was dear to me and I miss her.  These lines are for her:

Hand-tied patchwork quilt

My grandmother’s crooked fingers

Dust in the ground

Seven years hence

Worked the yarn

And turned the scraps into the womb-like warmer

Under which we lie safe in the embrace of her love

Albert O. Hirschman - An Economist We Ought to Know

Malcom Gladwell has a review of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher:  The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell  Prior to reading Gladwell's review, I did not know who Albert Hirschman was.  Now I will probably go out and pick up some of his books to read this economist whose "subject was economics, but whose spirit was philosophical."  Hirschman is an early harbinger of non-conformist approaches to economics, the kinds of alternative approaches to problems that have long vexed neoclassical economists and have landed such original thinkers as Daniel Kahneman, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz Nobel Prizes in economics.

Gladwell notes that Hirschman, an economist by trade, was unique among his peers in that he highlighted the consistency with which economic creativity results from projects gone awry.  In Hirschman's words,

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened.  In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming.  Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is be misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

I find this notion fascinating.  Perhaps this is not surprising since I am drawn to Romanticism and chaos theory, to notions of the lyrical arising out of the indeterminate, to notions of intertextual play.  Although I advocate rationality and pragmatism in matters of policy, it is clear to me that moments of what Hirschman called 'creativity' arise in response to crisis.  Whether it is the environmental crisis that confronted the Karnaphuli paper plant that Gladwell describes in the review or the artistic crisis Bloom identifies in The Anxiety of Influence, creativity represents a departure from the status quo.

The paradox of creativity is that it is inherently unpredictable.  Since creativity depends on the presence of unintended consequences, a creative response is by necessity novel.  Thus, one cannot 'learn' creativity in the sense that one learns grammar or biology or physics.  Though we strive to prepare students and employees to be creative thinkers, we can have little or no foreknowledge of the situations that will arise requiring a creative response and what a creative response might be.  The best we can do is to condition persons to question the assumed parameters of a given problem and to subject her own response to critical analysis, what Hirschman called 'self-subversion.'  Essentially this conditioning would inculcate a mental predisposition to accept uncertainty, vagueness, and ambiguity.  The reason that this may allow for creativity to arise is that creativity is usually plucked from the interstices of convention.

With regard to the necessity of uncertainty as a precondition for creativity, Hirschman was of a mind with his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni who "believed that doubt was creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency."  Despite the reality that creative solutions arise in the context of unintended consequences, Hirschman was prescient in understanding that the idea runs counter to most people's expectations.  In his own words:

While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede--in fact we find it intolerable to imagine--that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social, or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning...  Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry:  we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.

In the words of a psychology, we are prone to a self-serving bias, in which we claim more responsibility for successes than failures.  This was a remarkable conclusion for an economist toiling in a field that über rationalist, neoclassical economists dominated.  We have been conditioned to believe not only in the possibility but also the ascendancy or order.  We have been conditioned to believe, without convincing proof, that humans are rational economic actors who behave predictably.  Hirschman's iconoclasm in challenging the status quo is a refreshing reminder that dogma does not always defeat originality.

Interestingly, Hirschman also addressed school vouchers in response to Milton Friedman's advocacy of them.  Gladwell notes that Hirschman was above all a person of action who volunteered on the side of the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then was active in the French Resistance during World War II.  Perhaps in line with his idea that creativity is activity in response to unpredictable hurdles, Hirschman apparently viewed with disdain Friedman's position that school vouchers were preferable to engaging the public education system directly.  Hirschman contrasted the Friedman solution to a problem, what he called 'exiting,' or [in Gladwell's words] "voting with your feet, expressing your displeasure by taking your business elsewhere, with his preferred solution which he called 'voice,' or [in Gladwell's words] "staying put and speaking up, choosing to fight for reform from within."  In one of the most succinct and coherent critiques of school vouchers, Hirschman wrote:

In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the 'direct' way of expressing one's unfavorable views of an organization.  A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them!  Secondly, the decision to voice one's views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to 'cumbrous political channels.'  But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of those very channels?

This neatly encapsulates my own suspicion that the corporate sponsors of school vouchers and education reform would like nothing more than to remove education from public debate, control, and oversight.

I am off to the public library to pick up a copy of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  I for one prefer engaging the seemingly intractable problems of our post-capitalist democracy to running away and hiding my head in the sand.  Perhaps you do too.

The Broken Record - The Spuriousness of School 'Reform'

David Sirota has a piece in Salon about the growing body of evidence demonstrating that school achievement is tied to socioeconomic status.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/

Sirota points to a U.S. Department of Education study demonstrating that 20% of American public schools were considered high poverty in 2011 and another U.S. Department of Education study that found, "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding ... leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."  He then asks:

Those data sets powerfully raise the question that the "reformers" are so desperate to avoid:  Are we really expected to believe it's just a coincidence that the public education and poverty crises are happening at exactly the same time?  Put another way:  Are we really expected to believe that everything other than poverty is what's causing problems in failing public schools?

 The overwhelming evidence that has been generated in the last three to five years demonstrates that any problems with public education have little to do with public schools or teachers and nearly everything to do with growing poverty and a shrinking social safety net.  Sirota cites an apt example supporting this point:  "America's wealthiest traditional public schools happen to be among the world's highest achieving schools."  To cap it off, he notes that most of those schools are unionized.

The growing achievement gap in American public schools should horrify everyone, regardless of political stripes.  When the evidence irrevocably demonstrates that socioeconomic inequality is driving the growing achievement gap then the discussion ought to center around what we can do as a society to limit socioeconomic inequality.  We should stop listening to the 'reformers' message, which is, as Sirota points out, funded by the major corporations that benefit from "the dominant policy paradigms in America - tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and budget cuts to social services."  Instead we should be listening to the growing chorus of the impoverished that portends social and cultural failure for America and figure out how we can return to a nation in which success was not wholly dependent on the wealth of one's parents.  Whether we like it or not, this will involve sharing.  Unfortunately I fear that many Americans have failed to absorb that kindergarten message.

NY Review of Books on Guns - A Surprisingly Moderate and Reasonable Take

David Cole has an excellent review of three recent books/blogs relate to guns in America.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

It is worth reading for anyone who is not reflexive in their response to gun ownership.  Put simply, Cole dispels the myths that sustain both gun rights advocates and gun ownership advocates.  In place of myth, Cole offers a rationale analysis of what causes gun violence and what might be done to limit it without resorting to unconstitutional, unpopular, and unrealistic bans on guns.  In a telling passage, Cole notes

[A]s Nocera's Gun Report and any viewing of the evening news illustrates, the media regularly cover gun violence, and as Diaz (a reflexively anti-gun author) himself demonstrates, the toll of death, injuries, and crime inflicted with guns is no secret.  It's true that gun manufacturer's market their wares, but who would expect otherwise?  Guns have become increasingly lethal, but most gun violence is caused by ordinary handguns, not militarized assault weapons.  Diaz devotes almost an entire chapter to a detailed description of the very powerful Barrett 50-caliber anti-armor sniper rifle.  But he then notes that this weapon has been involved in only about thirty-six criminal incidents nationwide over a twenty-three-year period, or less than two a year.  Civilians may not have any legitimate need for such a rifle, but it is hardly the core of the problem.

In a succinct manner, Cole demonstrates that the problem of gun violence is rather pedestrian.  The vast majority of gun violence, as I noted in an earlier post, is perpetrated with handguns.  However, handguns are not going away.  The Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to own handguns and the vast majority of Americans do not support their ban (74% oppose banning handguns per a Gallup poll Cole cites).  In Cole's words, we not "to recognize that there are legitimate competing interests on [the gun rights] side of the ledger, and that many Americans value those interests particularly deeply."  If we are to attack the problem of gun violence, we will fail miserably if the only solution involves banning guns that are popular and constitutionally protected.

Instead of the usual anti-gun dogma, Cole proposes a respectful balancing that takes into account the practical reality that gun ownership is here to stay.  First, he proposes revisiting the push for background checks which, as everyone is aware, enjoy strong majority support among even gun owners.  Second, he proposed common sense safety regulations that would make it more difficult for guns to be shot accidentally. Critically, Cole recognizes that gun owners are persons to whom respect is owed and his proposals are not in any way paternalistic.

Most importantly, Cole recognizes that the rate of gun violence is far more pronounced in urban, poor areas. He astutely recognizes that the only way to really reduce gun violence is to reduce the effects of urban poverty.  This means better social safety nets, better schools, and better living conditions.  We may disagree with the best manner of achieving the goal of reducing urban poverty, but as Cole makes clear, if we want to reduce the number of persons killed or injured with guns, the the only way to do so substantially is to stop poor urbanites from shooting each other.