28 August 2011

Imperialism forms backdrop for recent film, book favorites

One of the advantages of being back in the States is the opportunity to enjoy movies and books that were difficult to find in the developing nations of Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and several which I enjoyed recently share a thematic concern for imperialism.

The City of Life and Death (2009), the first film by a Chinese director that addresses the Rape of Nanking in 1937 by the Japanese military, is a gritty epic shot in spectacular black and white that is at times almost too difficult to watch.

Amigo (2011), the latest by director John Sayles, explores the U.S. occupation of the Philippines initiated during the Spanish-American War, ostensibly to liberate the locals from the colonial rule of Spain and serves as a timely historical primer for the U.S. imperial wars being waged in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya. While not one of Sayles’ best (Lone Star, Eight Men Out, Matewan, and Men With Guns), his films are routinely head and shoulders above the quality of most American screenwriters and directors, in part because his characters are fully developed, have jobs and responsibilities, which makes them unlike the indolent rich engaged in anguished navel-gazing who are the subjects of too many American and British films.

The French film Of Gods and Men (2010) provides a compelling view of a contemporary Christian monastic life in its story of a community of Cistercian (Trappist) monks in Algeria who face the decision whether to stay or flee in the face of a violent Islamic fundamentalist insurgency that will eventually target them. Apparently based on true story, this is a Christian theology that could not be more different from the self-righteous distortions of Christianity peddled on the airwaves by some of America’s most visible politicians and pundits.

The Arabs: A History (2009) by Eugene Rogan improved my understanding of political history of the Arab world, now embroiled in an uneven quest for greater democracy, starting with the Ottoman conquest in 1516-17.

Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009) as told by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano reflects on the creation myths of popular history that justify domination by ignoring or whitewashing the lives of ordinary people and the contributions of earlier civilizations.

The prose of Nadeem Aslam is at times florid, but his novel The Wasted Vigil (2009) is a captivating portrayal of war-ravaged Afghan society in which every character, the good the bad and the ugly alike, comes to know suffering and crushing loss.

In a thematic departure that might appeal to anyone who has even thought about running, I would recommend Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009) in which journalist Christopher McDougall examines the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyons, arguably the world’s greatest “natural runners,” while also making a case that the evolution of the human species was propelled by its superior ability to run long distances and that running barefoot is the only way to go.

27 August 2011

Spirit of Life casts art deco shadow in downtown Syracuse

The headquarters of the Niagara Mohawk electrical power company in Syracuse, New York, embodied art deco design when built in 1932. Six floors above the entrance is the sculpture “Spirit of Light,” which emanates, like wings, from his outstretched arms of stainless steel. The building, considerably less polished today, is an asset of National Grid plc, a multinational utility based in London, but still invokes for me visions of Aryan supremacy as imagined by the late Lini Riefenstahl, the film director, actress and dancer who helped craft the aesthetics of the Hitler's Third Reich.

26 August 2011

Attack where they least expect it, he advised

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Reconnected over a cup of coffee, our conversation moved, as I suspected it would, to strategies of resistance outside electoral politics. A familiar topic lately.

The sanctioned political events have been pitched as the sum total of popular democracy because the forces of capital have infinitely more financial and cultural resources to manipulate the campaign/news discourse and ensure that the interests of poor and working class people will get clobbered again. Victories on behalf of the common good are few; apparent gains almost immediately rendered hollow, yes, Obama in 2008, thank you.

I also figure that it is bad strategy, maybe even stupid, to repeatedly engage the opposition at the point of their greatest advantage. “Never attack when the enemy is powerful,” advised Gen. Sun-Tzu. “Advance when they are unprepared and attack where they least expect it.”

I have been imagining other strategies of resistance, other means of democratic participation, in which the playing field is a little closer to level and the chances of success, even modest, are greater. I suspect that favorable terrain is more likely to be cultural. Local popular culture should be more malleable because it relies more on oral transmission, which can be endlessly rewritten, tweaked or subverted to express popular sympathies and preferences. But I have not lived in Albuquerque for while and if I remain here I will have to listen to and observe what is working and why.

23 August 2011

Afghanistan war exposing U.S. policy failures

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Insurgent strikes are increasingly occurring in central Afghanistan, partly in response to the counter-terrorist surge engineered by U.S-led forces in the Taliban heartland in the predominately Pashtun south. For almost a year, NATO forces under U.S. command have targeted the leadership of what was the original Afghan Taliban associated with Mullah Omar, the “commander of the faithful,” who was born outside Kandahar city.

Against superior western firepower, many of the insurgents shifted their operations, initially into the northern provinces (e.g. Kunduz, Baghlan, and Badakhshan) and more recently into central ones like Parwan and Wardak, both of which are near the capital, Kabul. That geographic shift paired with serious concerns that the Afghan military is ill-prepared to assume increased security responsibilities prompted a commentary in The Huffington Post today that argued against any political decision, like Pres. Obama’s timeline, that “will force a premature transition or withdrawal.”

Another way to read the same information is that the American-led military after almost a decade has failed to defeat or substantially “degrade” the Taliban. Many Afghans are deeply angered by the high rates of civilian casualties generated by bad intelligence or “night raids” on the homes of suspected insurgents. They distrust the government of Pres. Hamid Karzai, which was installed and is funded by the western alliance. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in international aid, much of it squandered, has failed to improve the lives of average Afghans. That’s a record that screams it is time for the U.S. military to leave.

21 August 2011

Welcome rains bring reminder of earlier wildfires

The irrigation ditch water near Albuquerque becomes a gray-black soup after recent rains, which wash down soot from the upstream high country that was charred by wildfires earlier this summer. In a nearby hayfield, a black deposit remained on the ground after the irrigation water had disappeared.

12 August 2011

Path to democracy does not run through the White House

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.— “What happened to Obama?” an op-ed by Drew Westen in The New York Times on 6 August, received a lot of attention from progressives trying to determine how and why the president has failed so miserably to meet the modest expectations of the people elected him in 2008. Westin’s commentary is reasoned, well-written but reinforces a dangerous anti-democratic myth.

Westen, a psychology professor, claims Obama failed in his job as America’s collective storyteller, a role in which former Pres. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded so admirably during the Great Depression.

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred.

He laments what Obama did not say at his inauguration and imagines how he could have explained our nation’s economic meltdown, identified the causes and the responsible parties, and sketched out a broad strategy to use the full resources the U.S. government to solve the crisis.

“But there was no story — and there has been none since,” wrote Westen.

No counter-narrative, no alternative vision, and, even worse, Obama almost immediately after his inauguration began appointing economic advisors, e.g. Geithner, Paulson, and Summers, who championed the very policies that produced the crisis, which was akin to asking the foxes to safeguard the same henhouse they have been plundering for years.

The primary problem with Westen’s argument is that in a modern democracy an elected president should not be a substitute father or parental figure, which is a leadership archetype more suited for a dictatorship or a monarchy. The United States is a nation, not a family, and in a democracy we elect a president as part of a process of articulating a national political vision. I agree that a critical responsibility of an elected president is to help fashion a narrative that clarifies and sustain a political vision. However, if Obama cannot or will not lead, then it is the responsibility of the American people to write the story for him and compel him to speak it.

FDR did not propose vast political changes, nor become a leader, in a vacuum. He became a leader because he listened to the voices from above and below and accepted that he needed to make choices that were guaranteed to infuriate many Americans. FDR may have had a measure of courage that Obama lacks, but he was compelled to act by organized Americans.

Likening a president to a parent diminishes the responsibilities of the public to guarantee a functioning democracy. The administration of Pres. George W. Bush, despite what a lot of liberals believe, did not run roughshod over the Constitution without a lot of help from Democrats, the news media, and the American public. The political landscape is little different today. The key decisions in our political economy are being made by unelected combines of capital that answer only to themselves and fund the political campaigns of our “elected representatives,” including the president. Much of the American public is still passive and the mainstream news media too often reports as truth the self-serving claims of the politicians and patricians.

Democracy cannot be distilled into exercising a vote once every four years. The response to Obama’s failures is not to elect a better president, but to build a better democracy, which requires we organize in our own self-interests as workers, families, retirees, and students. The solution to a faltering democracy is greater democracy.

09 August 2011

U.S., Taliban war strategies show some similarities

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—The war in Afghanistan has evolved into clash of similar military strategies. Counter-terrorism is what the United States calls its program of targeted assassinations of key insurgents, typically “night raids” on their homes, where there is a high likelihood for collateral casualties.

The Taliban factions operate similarly, zeroing in on key members of the foreign occupation, particularly Afghan collaborators in the regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai, like his half-brother, Kandahar powerbroker Ahmed Wali Karzai, and a senior aide, Jan Mohammed Khan, former governor of Oruzgan province.

The United States never implemented a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign, which was envisioned as a joint U.S.-Afghan effort to win the “hearts and mind” of locals by providing good governance, jobs and security. Gen. Stanley McChrystal advocated counter-insurgency, but insubordinate remarks triggered his resignation in June 2010, and the plan implemented by his former boss, Gen. David Petraeus, began shifting toward the more narrow counter-terrorist focus of killing the bad guys.

What is harder to determine is the degree to which the Taliban are also abandoning some earlier efforts to earn local support by the purchases of foodstuffs, a functioning dispute resolution process, security, and compensation for military recruits and their families. This has never been a consistent practice and there are reports in which locals portray the Taliban as ultraconservative foreigners (e.g. Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks), often quite young, who impose their will on their host communities.

The Petraeus counter-terrorist “surge” changed the war by de-territorializing it. The conflict today appears to place less emphasis on the occupation and control of specific geographies, like the Taliban heartland in Kandahar, than on destroying each other’s leadership and inflicting symbolic defeats that reverberate deeply in the public imagination.

The public relations plum for the United States was the assassination of al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May. The following month the Taliban attacked the Intercontinental Hotel, a popular roost for foreigners in Kabul, on the eve of a conference that was designed to address the transition to Afghan rule. Just days ago, Afghan insurgents took down a NATO helicopter, in which 22 Navy Seals, the same special operations unit that killed bin Laden, perished alongside eight other Americans and eight Afghans.