You May Be Able to Get There From Here

On hearing some trivial news this week, that Amazon had pulled Animal Farm and 1984 from the bundle of books that ship with the Kindle, I was reminded of the 60th anniversary of 1984. I also was prompted to read Jeremy Paxman’s recent words about Orwell essays in the Telegraph.

photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkonecny/

In praise of Orwell’s abilities as a writer:

Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights, the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (”a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature”) the baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself, but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell’s dingy Islington flat.

When he produced articles like this, hair-shirted fellow socialists got cross. Why wasn’t he spending his time promoting discontent, denouncing the establishment, glorifying the machine-driven future? It is a mark of his greatness that Orwell didn’t care. They – whoever they might be – cannot stop you enjoying spring. The essay ends: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

What makes Orwell great?

What Orwell’s experiences— both as figure of authority and as scullion— had given him was a lived understanding of the human condition. It was this grounding in reality that bestowed a more profound political instinct than would be available to some sloganeering zealot. He had acquired a capacity to empathise with the foot-soldiers of history, the put-upon people generally taken for granted, ignored or squashed by the great isms of one sort or another. It conferred upon him the remarkable ability to achieve what every journalist and essayist seeks.

An interesting story from James Galloway’s obituary of Robert McNamara:

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.

From Art Brodsky in the Huff Post:

Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of “conservative” and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous.

It’s nice to see comprehensive coverage of this issue on the front page of the Huff Post this week.

I think that I’m in favor of more (Ted Stevens) conservatives making ludicrous claims about the net and net neutrality, because such comments and positions give more publicity to the importance of protecting the rights of all internet users. In other words, democratic candidates will have a reason to fight on these issues because they’ve been aired publicly.

Win or lose, whatever happens next, Barack Obama is now established as one of those rare, courageous teachers who leads the country onto new ground. He has given us a way to talk about race and our other differences with the clarity and honesty that politics does not normally tolerate. Whether this hurts or helps his presidential prospects is not yet clear, but he has done this for us and it will change the country, whatever the costs to him.

His words should discourage the media frenzy of fear-driven gotcha. His speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday may also make the Clintons re-think their unsubtle exploitation of racial tension. But nobody knows the depth or strength of the commonplace fears streaming through the underground of public feelings. No one can be sure of what people will hear in Obama’s confident embrace, beckoning Americans in all their differences, leaving out no one, to a better understanding of themselves.

Wolf Blitzer is the CNN new anchor’s real name, and it is a Jewish name.

Update:

Holy Fuck: Stone Phillips is the Dateline NBC anchor’s real name.

Also, Anderson Cooper really does, among intimate friends, refer to himself as “The Silver Fox” of cable news.

Samantha Power researches the persistence of genocide and other international humans rights abuses. Power was at Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne this week to discuss genocide, U.S. foreign policy and the candidacy of Barack Obama.

In 2003, Power wrote the book Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide. Much of her comment was founded in this work, and her on-going research on the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and genocide.

Power admits that the choice of examining the U.S. role is, in part, arbitrary: she is American; she has better access to American resources. However, a central argument in a Problem from Hell is that the U.S., with its power, influence, and self-projected democracy, is the one- or one-of-few- world power that is geo-politically aligned to prevent genocide. Yet, Power laments that the U.S. did little in the past century to prevent and end genocide.

Why We Don’t Fight

There are many prosaic challenges, in spite of the moral/ethic realization that a country like the U.S. should put forth effort to prevent genocide, that have slowed the U.S. from taken even basic action in response to genocide, says Power. There is the interpretative task of categorizing or defining genocide. There is the difficulty of acting unilaterally or against the interests of other world powers. There is the uneasy specter of military conflict, if other prevention methods fail. There is the real and imagined precedence of other international and domestic issue. (This list, of course goes on, and Power has document the U.S’s many hindrances to action.

There also seems to the sense among many people, that stopping genocide requires military action. An assessment Power rejects. She counts thousands of ways that the U.S. could have cheaply, safely, and effectively slow the forces of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, the Congo, and Burma. She alludes the these powers as a toolbox-of-sorts- a range of different tools the U.S. could implement, and does, in fact, implement in other foreign policy scenarios. Tragically, though, “The toolbox has not been opened,” says Power. (There are exceptions to this complaint, the U.S did act in Bosnia, as Power noted.)

The Promise of Change

In her lecture, Power offered little redemption for past U.S. negligence to human rights atrocities, but she did offer a bleak and conditional hope that things are changing in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world. This is mostly happening with citizens and activist groups, and Power presents the Dafur situation as a case study of this. Activist have learned from past failure, Power offers; and citizens are lobbying like never before for that the U.S., that the Senate and Congress to do something about Dafur.

Power also lauds Barack Obama, and other progressives, who have not only acknowledge the problem of genocide and other human rights issues, but have made these issues cornerstones of their campaign and policy platforms. (It’s worth noting the Power has worked for the Senate office of Obama and is an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign. Also, Power says that the Clinton campaign is also progressive on this issue. And that, really, ever major presidental contender has, due to pressure from citizens and advocacy groups, has a sophisticated platform on genocide.)

U.S. Illegitimacy: Torture and the War in Iraq.

If the U.S. is a key part of the international solution to genocide, its conversely appropriate that the U.S. is a problem, as well. While Power argues that the U.S. has the money and power to uphold human rights in the world, she says that the country’s moral and legal legitimacy has suffered due to its current foreign policy and international behavior.

In response to an audience question, Power commented on the U.S’s involment in Iraq- on how 15 years ago the most powerful people in the U.S. government (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) had an opportunity to prevent the mass killing of Kurds in northern Iraq, but instead chose to further invest in Saddam Hussien’s regime. She commented on the irony, or hypocrisy, of using this as a rationale for unilaterally invading Iraq for non-humanitarian outcomes.

Troubling also are black sites, torture, and domestic spying. While selective foreign policy interests are inevitable, according to Power, the U.S. has shown contempt to international human rights laws. In a simple sense, a country that tortures has little leverage to speak or act against other human rights violations. The war on terror, then, has not only damaged the U.S’s national security, it has degraded its moral standing.

Power is currently working on a new book, Chasing the Flame: Viera de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. (I’m not sure when the book will be published.)

Krugman’s piece from monday:

Nor is the demand for change solely about Iraq: there has been a strong revival of economic populism. Democracy Corps asked those who believe America is on the wrong track to choose phrases that best described their views of what’s gone wrong. The most commonly chosen were “Big businesses get whatever they want in Washington” and “Leaders have forgotten the middle class.”

Note: this is the first post in an on-going discussion of Carl Bernstein’s work, including “A Woman in Charge”.

This week, Carl Bernstein spoke at Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Bernstein addressed the dysfunctional state of contemporary politics and journalism. He focused much of his critique on media that lost an appropriate sense of newsworthiness, which he argues is the symptom of a deep problem, the acceptance of untruths, or what Stephen Colbert has mocked as “truthiness”. When the system- the exchange of power between the public, Washington, and the press– works, Bernstein says there is a demand for “the best, attainable version of the truth,” not indifference to it.

Today, Bernstein echoes the warnings of his 1992 piece in the New Republic, “The Idiot Culture”:

“We do not serve our readers and viewers; we pander to them … giving them what we think they want. In this new culture of journalistic titillation, we teach our readers and viewers that the lurid and the loopy are more important than real news,” he noted. Then, he charged that the media — “probably the most powerful of all our institutions today” — wastes that power by ignoring their responsibility to challenge, inform and educate people about what really matters.

Instead, “the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal. The consequence is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.”

But more than mourning the rise of the phenomenon, as he did in 1992, he says that we reached the apogee of a press culture submerged in celebrity culture, in news of the weird, maudlin, inane, and stupid. Along with this lament, Bernstein anecdotally discussed his treatment on a local new affiliate. He says the reports had little idea who we was and what his book about Hillary Clinton is about. Midway through the interview, “I thought, what the hell am I doing here,” Bernstein said.

Bernstein is not a purist about the content of news, he contends that there has always been quirky celebrity news, and that there is a place for this. But he says the dominance of such news, or lack of news, has lead to a state of journalistic dysfunction. A dysfunction that is partly to blame for the brokenness of the system during the Bush administration.

It’s the tragedy- a failed presidency unmindful of the real cost of war and contemptuous of checks and balance- of the last seven years that most troubles Bernstein’s analysis of a broken system. He does not blame the press, alone, for this problem, but suggests that if the real reporting that has been done on the Iraq war had an outlet, the war would be different or would not have happened. Bernstein also says that if real reporting was done on George W. Bush before ran in 2000, than he would not have been elected. This later accusation, while probably true, does seem to be a plug Bernstein’s latest book, “A Woman in Charge: the Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.

I found this interesting video earlier this week.

While one may come to a different deduction, it’s usually difficult to disagree with the metrics and parameters Chomsky uses to analyze history and society. But in the following video, Buckley seems to have little interest in earnest debate. He uses some of his characteristically esoteric words and tries to muddy the argument with aberrations.

In the past, I found Buckley to be witty and engaging. Here, though, he is disrespectful and acts like a common asshole (and imperialist).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PI]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Samvw6Z08]