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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.
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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
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It seems grotesque, in a manner, to rank and compare catastrophes, particularly when they involve the loss of human life. To do so often enough appears to buy into the sentiment of Stalin's cruel quip that a single man dead is a tragedy, but a million dead is a statistic. Still, there are comparative scales of suffering, and it is enough to note that the suffering attendant to Katrina is immense. Even if we do not arrive at the feared toll of thousands dead, the dozens we know were drowned or crushed in the storm's course is a heavy burden in itself.
All of this is by way of acknowledging that there are already comparisons being made between Katrina and 9/11. It is quite possible that Katrina may yet be known to exact a higher toll than that day. From this, policy conclusions are being drawn. There's little sense in going through them, except to note that they are policy conclusions meant almost exclusively to further the loathesome and strenuous efforts to blame the Administration for this act of God. The line goes that the American political leadership chose to focus upon the actual and possible lives lost due to terrorism at the expense of the actual and possible lives lost due to natural disasters like Katrina. As has been noted elsewhere here, governance is an exercise in prioritization; those advancing the aforementioned line presumably adhere to the premise that the determinant of priorities is plain quantity of lives lost.
This is wrong.
The major killers of Americans are, of course, neither terrorism nor hurricanes. Rather, they are, in no particular order: automobiles, fat-laden burgers, the flu, other Americans, etc. We do not, as a rule, reorder life and policy for these things as we would for terrorism or hurricanes. There is a school of thought, mostly in the ranks of public health professionals, that argues we ought to do precisely that. Most people disagree, as they recognize on some level that there are differing moral qualities to deaths: every human life is equally precious, but the moral context of each life's end varies. It is traditionally the concern of government to address only specific moral contexts of death. Murder is the primary example, and while Western governments have moved ever-further into involvement in the contexts of deaths by other means -- acts of God and disease-related most notably -- it remains the prime example.
This, then, is the fallacy at the heart of the emerging comparisons between 9/11 and Katrina. The Bush Administration was quite right to orient policy and priorities toward the former. The latter, too, was and remains a just concern of government (even if we have long since established that the ideal scenarios called-for by the left in the past 48 hours would not have saved New Orleans): but it is of necessity a lesser concern. We all live with acts of God and the specter of disaster. We do what we can; but some of us choose to move to major earthquake zones; some of us choose to build homes in natural lahar pathways; some of us choose to live in walled cities precariously below sea level. Government cannot protect us wholesale from that danger we court. It cannot thwart the aptly-named act of God.
It can, though, pursue a band of fanatical murderers to the ends of the earth, in implicit recognition that the deaths by their hands, unlike the deaths at the hands of the anthropomorphized Katrina, are something irretrievably foul, base, and -- murderous. God save those who would have a numbers game obscure that.
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Wed 09:56 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Who or what is the enemy in the appalling HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa? Is it the fearsome virus? Is it the squandering, corrupt governments? Is it the sunken mores that transmit the plague like wildfire? Or is it the political bete noir du jour of the cosmopolitan left?
It is a familiar enough spectacle: a hard-left transnational official denouncing the destructive extremism of the United States, which is itself apparently a theocracy bent upon the slaughter of millions in the developing world. In this case, the official is one Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. While it's de rigeur for American conservatives like me to denounce the likes of Lewis in such terms, his history makes it easy enough. It is, perhaps, unfair to note that he's the father-in-law of Naomi Klein; but it is fair to note that as a leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party he was an active member of the Socialist International. It is fair to note that he helped found the fringe leftist media outlet IWT, a sort of Indymedia of television. It is fair to note that he authored the bizarre June 2000 "Rwanda Report" which blamed the 1994 genocide there in equal measure on the United States, France, and the Catholic Church. (The reality was rather different.) It is fair to note that during his 1995-1999 tenure as UNICEF chief, he steered that organization decisively to the left, to the point that the Vatican suspended its contributions, and the organization itself put forth decidedly pro-abortion themes. And it is fair to note that overwrought hyperbole is a regular feature of his press coverage, as evidenced by this 2003 hagiography from the Globe and Mail:
[G]overnments ignore him [in his role as the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa]. Rich nations commit pitiably small funds to fight the pandemic. Mr. Lewis pleads for intervention to stave off the total destruction of societies. No one listens. And this job, this role of latter-day Cassandra for the 21st-century plague, is driving him from despair into something approaching madness."What is driving me crazy, and making me emotionally unhinged, is that we're losing too many people," [says Lewis,] "....I wake up regularly in an absolutely incensing rage at not being able to break through."
Of course, at the time this interview was given, it was well-known in the international AIDS community -- and hence certainly to Stephen Lewis -- that the United States government was shortly to announce the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the single most generous anti-HIV/AIDS effort by a single government ever. That same year, the United States asserted itself by orders of magnitude as the single largest funder and pledger to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Let us be charitable and assume that Lewis was incompetent at his job, and did not know that the United States would shortly make a happy Cassandra of him. That having been done, why the hyperbolic attacks on American policy now?
The question answers itself. This is par for the course from the international development elite where America and AIDS are concerned. No effort is enough; no effort is in good faith. It is a form of obsessive paranoia that drives its sufferers to bizarre extremes; viz. one Stephen Lewis, an otherwise educated man who confuses an alleged indirect factor (abstinence, no less!) with direct causation. It is a pitiable phenomenon made the moreso by the fact that should the object of their ceaseless derision simply give up and walk away, the resultant human suffering might, for once, justify their endless screeds.
Stephen Lewis is in the news, but Stephen Lewis is not alone. He is a symptom rather than a cause -- and the illness itself is deep-rooted and pervasive. Not a year past, I was in a small van hurtling across the sunstruck vastness of the Transvaal veld. With me were an American movie star, a British charity doyenne, and a hanger-on. We were all there, driven by our respective concerns for AIDS in Africa. The women in the car began complaining about how the Bush Administration makes NGOs receiving aid sign a pledge that they don't support prostitution. The charity doyenne fumed, "That's f------ ridiculous!"
"Why," I asked, "do you think it's ridiculous?"
"Because it just stigmatizes and denies aid to a whole class of people, and it's an absurd precondition."
"You don't have to eschew prostitutes," I said, "just prostitution. It's not like you support that, right?"
"Of course we don't support prostitution, Josh."
"Does it deny aid to anyone or restrict your work?"
"Well, no."
"Then why not sign it if it's just pro forma?"
The movie star whipped around in her seat and barked, "Why don't they ask them to sign pledges that they support gender equality? Equal pay for women? Education for women and little girls? Huh? Why?"
I could not see what that had to do with anything: but it illuminated the relevant mindset quite nicely. They don't support prostitution, and they don't support disease. They also don't support the Bush Administration -- or more specifically, their charicature of it -- and that preening hate overrides all else. Who or what is the enemy in the appalling HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa? Well. What is the President espousing today?
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Mon 03:14 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Most Americans are fortunate to have never seen a Class 5 hurricane or its effects. I have.
In fall 1998, I deployed with my US Army Engineer battalion to Nicaragua to conduct relief and reconstruction missions as part of Operation Fuerte Apoyo in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. That tremendous storm packed enough ferocity to smash Central America, drench the Yucatan, hit Florida, and and persist as an identifiable weather system north of the British Isles. Tens of thousands, mostly in Central America, were left dead in its wake.
When we arrived in Managua, there was trash and debris strewn in the streets of the capital city. Some houses had visible debris lines marking the height of the water in the neighborhood. In the countryside, vegetation was broken and scattered across wide fields. Trees with snapped trunks and limbs; grasses lain flat by mighty winds; scrub plants uprooted and thrown far afield at crazy angles: all greeted us as we progressed inland to our area of operation. Huge bridges lay on their sides, broken cleanly at their concrete bases. Shells of houses, sometimes single walls, recalled the ruins of antiquity.
We saw tremendous gorges carved where tiny streams once flowed. One day I traveled with my platoon sergeant down a deep, wide, and steep dry riverbed, and we noted the houses perched precariously on the banks' edge. Finally we came across a well emerging from the riverbed towering fifteen feet in the air above us; and we knew that this was not an old, dry riverbed at all. Beside us, a tiny trickle of streamwater burbled toward the Pacific, its damage long since done. That well was inaccessible; others were simply erased from existence. I spoke with some children playing in a sandbank at a worksite where my platoon was building a river-crossing; they showed me a featureless shallow depression where el pozo used to be. They also spoke of how all the known land mines were now moved about. This made it unsafe to play.
The most affecting sight of catastrophe came when a Nicaraguan soldier took me to see a bleak landscape of hardened mud. He related how there were once towns on this deathly vista. The hurricane hit and blew the buildings down. Then the rains flooded the fields and carved rivers through the streets. Then the long-slumbering volcanic crater above, filled with water, burst open, and the pitiful survivors were themselves slaughtered by the hundreds as a mountain's worth of hot mud, water and stone entombed them all. It was the Casita lahar.
I've seen what a Class 5 can do. That's why I pray for New Orleans now.
Sun 11:36 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
