War and Defense

I've been thinking a lot about the Cold War recently, and coincidentally also read a number of pieces that critique American foreign policy and the way that war has been framed.

It occurred to me that the Defense Department used to be called the War Department. And it turns out that the name change happened in 1949. Just as the Cold War kicked off and American foreign policy became even more aggressively imperialist (in the name of defending the nation from imperialist Communism).

The particular article that got me thinking about this irony pointed out that the rhetoric of US foreign policy today is based in a language of fear, despite the fact that we have the most powerful military, by far, on the planet. Americans are afraid and politicians feed that fear. In the pre-Cold War era, we didn't have the biggest military in the world, but we had the courage to call our military the war machine which it is, rather than hide behind the language of the cowardly bunker-mentality.

Intellectuals in America part 6

Michael Tomasky’s submission for Dissent’s symposium on Intellectuals and Their America is ultimately disappointing - I feel like too many intellectuals misunderstand their role in American society (as in - they over-estimate their ultimate impact) and over-estimate the importance/role/significance of popular media and its connection to popular culture.

In fact, I would say that most intellectuals would say that popular media defines/creates popular culture, rather than seeing it as a feedback loop wherein popular culture defines popular media which re-emphasizes/redefines popular culture (all of which cuts out the role of the intellectual and disempowers cultural criticism more broadly).

More specifically I am disappointed with Tomasky’s response to question 2 (Does the academy further or retard the engagement of intellectuals with American society?). I mean, as an intellectual I don’t see how you can’t have a take on this question, which means Tomasky (and other commentators) is being disingenuous when he says that he is unqualified to answer the question, which means that he is failing at the number one role of the intellectual, which is to search out and tell the Truth about one’s take on the world. Tomasky’s dissembling is a total violation. I would guess that he is a member of the academy that recognizes that the academy hurts the role of the intellectual because it means that the intellectual has become part of the system; however he doesn’t want to admit it because to admit it means that he has to admit to himself that he has compromised the values that he claims to uphold.

Much of the rest of Tomasky’s reflection doesn’t hold much water for me either. First he suggests that we embrace popular culture/technology as inherently liberating, where it seems obvious to me that culture and technology are tools and not inherently anything - the Internet and the culture spawned by the internet are only as liberating as the people who use it. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. And Tomasky’s embrace of the Internet because of the information that can be accessed ignores the fact that disinformation is also easily (perhaps more easily) accessed. Furthermore, there’s the problem of source material that circles back on itself - a self-reinforcing loop that limits the perspectives to which people are exposed.

Where Tomasky and I tend to agree is when he urges intellectuals to engage with popular culture: to go to Home Depot, Applebees, etc. I agree, since one has to have actual experience in the culture in order to have a basis from which to critique it and be taken seriously. On the other hand, engagement with popular culture cannot be merely consumerist. There are good television shows, but merely because something is on television, doesn’t make it good. And furthermore, we should recognize that the medium has had profound impacts on the way that human beings relate to each other - not all of which are positive.

Making Kids Crazy

So, I dunno if I told you yet, but I've been seriously considering exiting the teaching profession. After all that's happened both personally and professionally in my life, I decided that I just couldn't do it anymore. I mean, I know to some of my friends I've sounded like a broken record - every year I go through a rough patch where I feel like a total failure and want to do something else - but this was on a whole other level. Really.

But, I've started falling in love all over again - it really is kinda like I've just had my heartbroken and sworn off love forever and now I'm swooning again. The problem is that I really do love teaching or, maybe better put - I love making students think.

I'm sorry, but I have to brag a little . . .

My latest indication that no matter all my mistakes, I'm doing something right happened today when one of my students told me I should be a psychologist because I put ideas in people's brains that make them crazy. I'm pretty sure she was joking (even though she said it wasn't a compliment and said it all totally straight), but either way it made me proud. If there's one thing I want my students to believe when they get out of my class it is that there are no easy answers, that life is complicated, that we need to struggle for the right answers, but they are rarely very obvious, that we should forgive those who struggle and get it wrong, but that we should never respect those who don't even try.

My current mantra: I hate my students for making me love teaching again. Stupid kids.

War

I've had conflicted feelings about war since 2001. I was convinced, by the logic of the argument, that the United States needed to go to war in Afghanistan. I've never approved of the war in Iraq and have always been leery of war in general.

I've also had ongoing conflicts over the idea of being anti-war, but pro-soldier. Politically, it makes sense, but to what extent can we truly celebrate a warrior mentality. I have deep respect for the people who make a conscious choice to join the military. I don't have much respect for people who join out of a naive sense of adventure, power, or a glorification of violence. I don't want to generalize because I have met and know too many people who have had a much deeper and complex attitude towards their choice to enlist.

The following video has raised some serious moral questions and disturbed my sense of having found my personal answer to the questions of war and the judgement of those who enlist. What does it mean that the voices are so calm and collected and clearly out of danger in the battle, but so excited about scoring kills? Do they believe they are saving the world for democracy? Or protecting lives? Or is it simply about getting the "bad guys" - the same thrill one gets from first-person shooters? What does it mean for our culture - our sense of humanity - that war has become a video game? This happened in Iraq, but is not particular to Iraq. I still believe that war is justifiable and even necessary at times. I believe that we have a moral duty to repair nations that we tear apart when we must go to war (Afghanistan). I wonder how we can avoid the practice of warfare that leads to these situations, or if it is even possible. The original video is posted by wikileaks.org.

Intellectuals in America part 5

One of the dangers of intellectualism is that when you take a step back and try to analyze issues from above the fray, you lose contact with reality and end up failing to connect with everyday people, which then makes your analysis an object-lesson in self-entertainment. It's a tricky role to play, since you also can't analyze things from within the fray, which would make a mockery of your claims to Truth. So, what is a poor little intellectual to do? I would start with understanding the Truth about why people do the things they do before trying to analyze concepts in the abstract.

All of which is to abstractly discuss Katha Pollitt's submission to Dissent's symposium, which was a huge disappointment for me. Again, some golden nuggets of thoughtfulness, but the overall thesis is flawed. From jump, Pollitt makes some major errors that then lead her to draw erroneous conclusions. For instance, the way she defines "patriotism" is so facile that it completely ignores why people are so patriotic. It makes "patriotism" into a value that is inculcated in us - in the sense that people who aren't smart enough to get it are just brainwashed. And that it ends up being a knee-jerk reaction of "loving one's country" or even less convincingly, believing that your country is the best - merely because it's been inculcated.

But Jamaicans, French, Japanese and Americans don't believe that their country is "best" in the sense in which Pollitt would have it. Rather, the sense of belonging to a collective - in this case a national collective - brings with it a sense of identity. And identity requires a sense of pride. And pride creates love and love provides us with a sense that where we are from - the collective to which we belong - is the "best" but not necessarily better than all the rest on some objective scale. "Best" when one is speaking of patriotism or nationalism is a subjective term, and no amount of intellectual distance can really change that. "Best" is definitely short for "best for me", which is why patriots want their football teams and olympic athletes to be successful, but it's the extremists that take that feeling and start wars or try to turn it into an objective "best" that leads to xenophobia and genocide.

But we need to be careful not to identify everything with the extremists and ideologues that take it too far. We can't throw out all beliefs, ideas, religions merely because some people have used them as an excuse (or tool) to do great evil. Rather, the moral among us need to be the counterweight, need to control the narrative, need to speak out against injustice and, perhaps more importantly, speak out for justice.

All that said, Pollitt's got some great quips and some interesting points. To wit,

"It may be natural to love one's country, but it's a less noble virtue than a habit, the way people tend to like the food they grew up with, even if it's haggis or lutefisk or roasted rats on a stick."

Which undersells the reasons that patriotism is so powerful - people don't eat disgusting stuff because it's habit, they eat it because of nostalgia, the memories, the emotions - all things wrapped up in identity. But it's a pretty great quote.

Another:

"To us, for example, the detention without charges or trial of some six hundred prisoners in Bagram is a small item in the ongoing and mostly uplifting story of American justice. That's not how it looks in the Muslim world. We're constantly being surprised that the rest of the world doesn't automatically love us. We might see why more clearly if we weren't so in love with ourselves."

Which is a good point, but I think the power of the myth of America is overwhelmingly positive, even if it does blind us to how others perceive us.

A final point:

". . . when the flags come out, people tend to turn off their brains, and the next thing you know, we're at war."

Which points to our responsibility, especially as intellectuals, to be able to dialogue with the wider base, to not get locked up in the ivory tower, to be in a position to be a voice of reason - to understand that the war in Afghanistan was necessary (and perhaps still is), even if the one in Iraq was not. If the intellectual Left had been less wary of Bush and war in general, had been a little more patriotic, then maybe we could have garnered a little more legitimacy by supporting the war in Afghanistan and could have used that legitimacy to lead the American people (or even just the American Congress) to reconsider the war in Iraq.

Haitian Independence

Looks like today will be a busy blog day . . . I'm still planning on writing my scheduled post on the Dissent symposium.

Turns out a long-lost original of the Declaration of Independence has been found in the National Archives in London. Apparently, Haiti had sent copies out all over (and since they were so ubiquitous, nobody thought to keep them for posterity) and the British Governor of colonial Jamaica ended up stashing his copy amongst his other papers.

In any case - from what I hear, the writing is just amazing - here's a taste:

"It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor. In the end we must live independent or die."

True - we've had access to these words, since copies had been made, but finding the original . . . well, for a history guy, it's pretty exciting and a time for celebration.

Here's a link to the archives page where you can see the Declaration in the original French.

Depression and Journalism

You know, every once in a while you read an article that does journalism really well. I was particularly impressed with this article in the Washington Post.

I was drawn to the article by the title: "Democractic operative . . . goes rogue." I figured it would be full of juicy political gossip that would get me up in arms in one way or another. Instead, I found an article that presented a nuanced, humanizing, portrait of a man.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the title is really inappropriate to the article. Maybe the article should have been more about Steve Hildebrand's political roguery - about his ideas. As it stands, it is mostly about Hildebrand's depression.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It's funny how when you stop to consider, and especially, when you stop to put things into words, you change how you think.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Now that I'm writing this post to extoll the article, my opinion has at first subtly and now completely changed. Instead, I think the article had a lot of potential and started off interesting. Unfortunately, I feel like instead of getting the nuanced article I wanted it to be, it ended up defining Mr. Hildebrand by his depression. Or maybe that's the demon in depression, how it can end up defining you and that's what you are fighting against when you are fighting depression.

All of this to say that as I was reading I identified strongly with the debilitation part but then lost sight of the person that Mr. Hildebrand is - he seemed to become a caricature. Perhaps this is the limitation of journalism rather than a novel, where the interior-life can be documented (journalists discourse in the public/exterior world). Or perhaps it is the medications (which is reason #1 why I have serious qualms about anti-depressants like Wellbutrin).

I suppose I should apologize for the disconnected and disjointed nature of this post, but perhaps it's worth putting out there as 1) something that attempts to be totally real and unfiltered, or 2) documentation of a thought-in-process. Oh well, in any case, please forgive me.