September 2005 Archives
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Tax credits for rebuilding is okay. Urban homesteading is okay. The rest of the President's address from New Orleans? Everything one has come to fear within the past five years.
What, then, did we learn from President Bush this evening?
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Fri 03:22 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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The attraction and mythos of the Chinese market is an old one. In the 19th century, it was invoked as a rationale for the American Open Door policy: if China was left uncolonized, its enormous markets could not be closed to American commerce. It was also a rationale for the Opium Wars, fought by the British and French to force the ailing Manchu dynasty to allow all manner of trade - even profound social corrosives - into the country. Finally, the enormous "spiritual" market of China made missionary work there a major focus of American overseas prosetylization efforts.
A near-century of war and repression put an end to the dream of a massive and enduring (and quiescent) Chinese market; but the dream is now resurrected. Morever, it is a dream more rational and realistic that it ever was in earlier days. China is huge, its infrastructure is emerging, and unlike before, it is largely in control of its own terms of trade. This is a story that has been told often enough in recent years: companies are thus flocking to do business in China.
Chinese business comes with a unique price. China is no longer the genocide-minded slave state of Mao's era, but it remains a brutal tyranny. The price of doing business with China is, particularly in the information technology realm, the aiding and abetting of that tyranny. And thus we see Microsoft performing Beijing's censorship for it; thus we see Yahoo directly responsible for the imprisonment of a journalist; thus we see the following from Reporters Sans Frontiers:
This use of new technologies to repress cyberdissent would obviously have been impossible without the support of such international companies as Websense, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Nortel Networks, which have all at one point or another traded or cooperated with the Chinese state apparatus.
We have seen in the Katrina catastrophe, where the corporate response has outstripped the governmental in almost every way, that the private sector is largely a force for good in a free nation. But in an unfree nation, it will seek its own efficiencies devoid of moral calculus: to the point that the dot.coms which were born and thrived in the Silicon Valley culture of democratic capitalism are all too ready to render themselves tools of murderous repression. It is easy for us to state that we ought to impose sanctions upon American companies that engage with such enthusiasm in the quashing of freedom abroad; their ready and rational response is that the Chinese will merely seek alternative providers - from Europe, India, or at home - leaving their capabilities unhindered, and Americans merely poorer.
This is quite true, and quite convincing - if all one cares for is the money.
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Wed 02:48 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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New Orleans is gone. Do not rebuild New Orleans.
The arguments for New Orleans are self-evident, and will be repeated ad nauseum in the months to come. There are the arguments on behalf of the city itself: It is historical. It is a major port. It is an economic engine. It is the home of many people. Then there are the arguments on behalf of the rebuilding effort per se: that it is somehow a worthy act of defiance, ipso facto noble and American. There is much right with these arguments, but there is more wrong. Sane analysis is frequently absent in crises - and it is no exaggeration to state that this is America's worst since 9/11 - but in the absence of a threatening enemy, we owe ourselves and the people of New Orleans the deliberation that was absent on the eve, and in the wake, of their catastrophe.
Continue reading "Letting Go of New Orleans."TrackBack (0)
Tue 01:39 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-- Milan Kundera
Today is the first day I have seen Ground Zero since fall 2001, when I stood behind a police line several blocks away from the tremendous pile of smoking ruin and corpses, smelled the burnt rubber and ash, and left overwhelmed after a mere minute with the gawking crowds.
What a difference four years makes. One now emerges from a shiny PATH station into the first of several viewing sites, each cordoned with high fences, each curious monuments to the power of euphemism and denial in the face of evil. There is no meaningful marker on the first and lowest viewing level. Rather, as I emerged from the long tunnel leading out from the A/C train stop, I came onto the platform uniting the metro with the PATH, and saw at the far end a missing wall supplanted with a metal grate and a view of the yawning pit of erstwhile destruction. The site is unmarked and clean: there is little hint of devastation, and less of terror.
The first sight to greet me at street level was that of a small band of shrieking protestors. They held aloft a large black banner reading 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB. New Yorkers strode past; tourists listened in stupefaction. I turned toward the absent towers in disgust.
The metal grating keeping viewers away from the massive pit on street level is festooned with a series of placards explaining the events of 11 September 2001. One of the half-dozen or so placards makes a tepid reference to "the terrorists," in the context of explaining just whom the Flight 93 passengers were fighting.
Other than this, there is no mention of the enemy. Other than this, there is no mention of the perpetrators. Other than this, there is no mention of the causes. Other than this, there is no mention of Islamism. Other than this, there is no mention of why. At the very epicenter of its greatest horrors, 9/11 is presented as an acausal event devoid of context, moral content, and historical meaning. The City of New York has seen fit to provide visitors to Ground Zero with a great many facts, and precious little truth.
Moving away from the PATH station, the explanatory placards give way to a series of black placards bearing the names of the dead. They are each emblazoned with the common title: THE HEROES OF SEPTEMBER 11. Of course, in a misfortune without evil and devoid of villains, heroism is a thing conferred by the accident of circumstance, the happenstance of suffering, without reference to word, thought or deed. The prolific award of putative honor and renown strips away both. It levels the final moments of the unknowing officeworker obliterated in a firey second, and the coach-class passenger grappling in mortal struggle with a jihadist. If the studious avoidance of cause or foe is a lie of omission, then this is a lie of comission.
If public monument, commemorative art, and civic spaces are the measure of a culture's self-confidence and vitality, then the state of Ground Zero (independent of the wretched wrangling over its eventual disposition) ought to give us pause.
I went to see it because I remember the day itself; and I went to see it because it is the only American hallowed ground of my lifetime. I expected little: but I did not expect a lie.
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Sat 03:42 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
