QDR Blogging: Acquisition Reform and the Civilian Workforce

While the 2006 QDR talked a bit about problems in acquisition and the need for acquisition reform, and a bit about the need to hire and retain the right skills in the DoD civilian workforce, but didn't really draw any connections between the two. The 2010 QDR (p.76):

The Pentagon's acquisition workforce has been allowed to atrophy, exacerbating a decline in the critical skills necessary for effective oversight. For example, over the past ten years, the Department's contractual obligations have nearly tripled while our acquisition workforce fell by more than 10 percent. The Department also has great difficulty hiring qualified senior acquisition officials. Over the past eight years the Department has operated with vacancies in key acquisition positions averaging from 13 percent in the Army to 43 percent in the Air Force. There remains an urgent need for technically trained personnel-cost estimators, systems engineers, and acquisition managers-to conduct effective oversight.

On the next page, the QDR calls for the hiring of 20000 additional acquisitions personnel to make up for this shortfall. I suspect that the major reason that we see this in the 2010 QDR and not in the 2006 is that the Obama administration has rejected the idea that essential DoD responsibilities can be privatized and out-sourced. The downsizing and outsourcing of the acquisitions workforce isn't entirely the responsibility of the Bush administration, as it was also pursued under Clinton. Lead Systems Integrators, in which civilian contractors managed major programs such the Coast Guard's Deepwater program and the Army's Future Combat Systems, were part of this project. LSIs were also one of the very, very few "privatization" initiatives that failed so abjectly that pretty much no one wants to try them again.

See also Spencer on this point.

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QDR Blogging: You've Come a Long Way, Baby!

2006 QDR:

India is emerging as a great power and a key strategic partner. On July 18, 2005 the President and Indian Prime Minister declared their resolve to transform the U.S.-India relationship into a global partnership that will provide leadership in areas of mutual concern and interest. Shared values as long-standing, multi-ethnic democracies provide the foundation for continued and increased strategic cooperation and represent an important opportunity for our two countries.

2010 QDR:

As the economic power, cultural reach, and political influence of India increase, it is assuming a more influential role in global affairs. This growing influence, combined with democratic values it shares with the United States, an open political system, and a commitment to global stability, will present many opportunities for cooperation. India's military capabilities are rapidly improving through increased defense acquisitions, and they now include long-range maritime surveillance, maritime interdiction and patrolling, air interdiction, and strategic airlift. India has already established its worldwide military influence through counterpiracy, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief efforts. As its military capabilities grow, India will contribute to Asia as a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

In just four years, India acquired 48 more words, a 70% increase. If this trend continues, the 2074 QDR will consist entirely of one long paragraph about India.

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And the Ann Althouse Award for Contentlessness in Blogging goes to...

... Ann Althouse!

It seems to me that the President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value! Bush—despite his reputation for simplicity—did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world.

Shorter?

The President suffers from the delusion that he wants to do things differently. If he had just wanted to continue doing what Bush had done, he wouldn't have wanted to do things differently. Bush understood that stuff is hard, and he solved different hard stuff the same way every time. Obama said he wanted to solve different hard stuff differently during the election, and once he won it, he suckered himself into believing that he could wield the power he won to solve hard stuff his own way.

Second-order shorter:

It seems to me that Ann Althouse often writes about ideas she does not have. If she had ideas, she would write about them instead of the having of them, but because she only writes about the having of them, no one ever knows what they are. Her posts are like pictures of laptops idling on tables at which no one works: ideas could potentially be communicated through them, but for now they deliver no actual content, only the low hum of pointlessly cycling hard drives.

Warning: Because her name has appeared three times in this post, she will, of course, show up in the comments and claim that her vacuousness is actually a vortex into which someone has been sucked. (Someone should alert her to the definition of "vacuum" that doesn't involve suction.)

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Etiquette Lessons

I'm still going to stick with my contention that the key variables in claiming that Obama's banal criticism of a Supreme Court opinion was somehow an "unprecedented" outrage are 1)President Obama, and 2)a Supreme Court decision the outraged parties strongly support on the merits.

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Ack

Personal to all Flames General Managers: No more multi-player deals with the Leafs in which you give up the best player. Ever again. What the hell.

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QDR Blogging: Domestic IEDs

This is odd, from page 20 of the QDR:

Enhance domestic counter-lED capabilities: To better prepare the Department to support civil authorities seeking to counter potential threats from domestic improvised explosive devices (IEDs). DoD will assist civil authorities with counter-IED tactics, techniques, and procedures (TIPs) and capabilities developed in recent operations.

This is the first I've heard of serious concern about domestic IEDs. Something that intel picked up? On the one hand, the idea that some notional domestic terror cell (whether Islamic, right wing, or otherwise) might utilize IEDs is a good deal more believable that the usual stuff about taking down a jetliner with a Stinger or cutting down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. On the other hand, good IED production does require skill and some resources, and I don't imagine that successfully blowing up a couple of SUVs on I-70 would really be worth the time and risk to any domestic terrorist org.

UPDATE: To be clear, I appreciate that Timothy McVeigh's Ryder truck and the aircraft used on 9/11 were technically "IEDs." However, the QDR isn't using the term in this sense; it's fairly clear from context that the more road-specific meaning of the term in intended (with the inclusion of car bombs possible, but not necessary.)

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QDR Blogging: The Long War is Over

• References to the "Long War" in 2006 QDR: 31, not counting the 10 pages in the chapter titled "Fighting the Long War"
• References to the "Long War" in 2010 QDR: 0

The 2006 QDR was explicitly structured around the concept of the "Long War," which is essentially another name for the War on Terror. The Long War is more or less defined as follows:

Since 2001 the U.S. military has been continuously at war, but fighting a conflict that is markedly different from wars of the past. The enemies we face are not nation-states but rather dispersed non-state networks. In many cases, actions must occur on many continents in countries with which the United States is not at war. Unlike the image many have of war, this struggle cannot be won by military force alone, or even principally. And it is a struggle that may last for some years to come.

The chapter "Fighting the Long War" then includes references to the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, operations in the Horn of Africa and the Trans-Sahara, tsunami relief, earthquake relief in Pakistan, "stabilization" operations in Haiti, assistance to the government of Colombia, and domestic initiatives such as bio-terror preparedness and civil support. The Long War concept provided a unifying framework for thinking through a multi-continental strategy for fighting "terror," epitomized not simply in terrorist networks but also in terror-supporting states and in the conditions that allow terror to grow. Re-reading this chapter, I find it striking the degree to which the Cold War could easily be substituted for the Long War, with communists playing the role of terrorists. This is to say that the threats to the United States and its interests were represented in a fashion that's not quite monolithic, but is nevertheless singular. Rather than responding to multiple, quite different crises around the world, the 2006 QDR wanted us to understand US military operations as part of a coherent strategic response to the threat posed by terror, much in the same way that the various forms of Containment were responses to the threat posed by the USSR and international revolutionary communism.

In the 2010 QDR, not so much. The United States is fighting "wars" rather than a "Long War" which is a crucial distinction to my mind. "Complexity" is the watchword, and each of the major conflicts involving the United States is treated distinctly, rather than as part of a tapestry. It must be said that this change makes the argument much less fluid; a Long War makes much more thematic sense than a series of not-terribly-related conflicts that involve some interest or other of the United States in some or another part of the globe. What it lacks in narrative, however, it makes up for in general good sense.

More tomorrow.

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Why the QDR Matters

By and large, progressives don’t care so much about the QDR. This shouldn’t be taken as an absolute statement; every progressive think tank has specialists on defense, there are many progressive journalists who take an interest in defense and security issues, and there are plenty of ordinary progressives who do think regularly about things like the QDR. I'm nevertheless confident, however, in the contention that defense wonkish types are found more often in conservative circles than progressive, that conservative organizations spend more time on defense issues than progressive organizations, and that typical, everyday Joe/Jill Conservative is more knowledgeable on defense and military issues than typical, everyday Joe/Jill Progressive. The central reason for this is not difficult to articulate; conservatives (at least in the current American construction of the term) are more likely to favor the use of force, are more likely to favor high defense budgets, are more likely to focus on military capability as a central component of American identity, and (statistically) are more likely to have served or know someone who has served in the military than are progressives.

Moreover, I suspect that there's broad agreement among people who self-identify as progressive that the current defense budget of the United States is wildly oversized relative to the threats that the United States faces. In this context, arcane discussions about preference for this weapon over that, or this capability rather than the other, or the elimination of this platform in favor of that platform, seem like debates either over the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin, or the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. For the former, the QDR and the precise makeup of the defense budget are part of an unfortunate reality of American politics, the details of which aren't particularly relevant. For the latter, the imperial proclivities of the outsized defense establishment and the negative effects of the military-industrial complex on American life make micro-discussion of defense issues essentially beside the point. In both cases, valuable time required for digestion of detail is better spent on other, more important and perhaps more contingent issues.

Both of these perspectives get much more right than they do wrong. Nevertheless, let me suggest two reasons why progressives should pay much closer attention to statements of strategy such as the QDR than they do. The first reason is that debates about the makeup of the defense budget and the construction of the QDR happen whether progressives are involved in them or not. There is something to the idea of granting too much legitimacy to the abjectly idiotic idea that the United States needs to militarily outspend the rest of the world, but check it out; the US outspends (or very nearly outspends) the rest of the world anyway. Progressive engagement with the finer aspects of the defense debate can hardly make things worse. The second reason is that the details really do matter. The 2010 QDR is quite a bit different than the 2006, which was quite a bit different than the 2000. The precepts set forth in the QDR are often honored in the breach, but they nevertheless help structure what the military will look like, and consequently what the military will be good and bad at for decades to come. You could argue that the 2010 QDR pays only lip service to climate change and to the humanitarian potential of military capability, but this lip service will be replicated in policy in ways that will affect how the US military is structured, behaves, and interacts with the real world. The US military is a huge organization of organizations, and by virtue of its size even small course corrections affect the lives of millions of people.

Again, there is a touch of caricature to the picture I'm drawing here. Ideally, however, I'd like to have a community of people who could speak intelligently and passionately about a) whether militarized-humanitarian intervention in Haiti raised the spectre of US imperialism in Latin America, b) what US military platforms and capabilities were best suited to having a positive effect on the situation in Haiti, and most importantly c) how a and b matter to each other.

In any case, over the next few days I'll be going over the QDR in detail, on this blog and elsewhere. I heartily recommend that people give the document a read, keep up with the commentary, and perhaps even read the 2006 version.

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Saturday afternoon visual rhetoric: more on Mad Men (as well as a brief acknowledgment of the magnitude of my wrongness).

In the first comment to my first post on Mad Men, Tom Elrod wrote:

I definitely want an update to this post once you've finished the third season. I can't really respond much to this post until then, because I don't want to spoil anything[.]

Nor do I. If you plan on watching Mad Men but haven't seen the third season finale, stop reading now.

In a fit of remarkable wrongness, I wrote:

So Peter and Peggy are not left behind because, over the course of two seasons, they learn to love and accept modernity in their hearts. They still seek Draper's approval, but they recognize that he's valuable in a way the world soon stop valuing. When the rapture comes, they know Draper won't be numbered among the chosen [...] Nor, for that matter, will Joan Holloway[.]

Had Matt Weiner decided to re-shoot "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." after having read my post in order to maximize my wrongness, he wouldn't have had his work cut out for him. This shot alone refutes much of what I wrote:

There sit Pete and Peggy, toiling into the future alongside Draper and Joan in the temporary headquarters of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Why was I so wrong? I didn't anticipate that Draper would recognize that he belonged to the past. He admits as much when Pete demands Draper tell him why he's needed:

You've been ahead on a lot of things. Aeronautics. Teenagers. The Negro market. We need you to keep us looking forward. I do, anyway.

In one respect, then, my claim that Pete and Peggy belong to the future is validated; but unfortunately for me, my claim's being validated by the very person I had claimed was constitutionally incapable of recognizing its validity. My argument went awry because I failed to account for the complexity of Draper's reaction to Betty divorcing him: without the illusion of a perfect marriage to stabilize his conception of self, Donald Draper is as free to reinvent himself as Dick Whitman had been. I think. More on Draper as a character later. For now I'd like to focus on just how effective Matt Weiner's direction of "Shut the Door. Have a Seat." was.

Mad Men typically uses the angle and level of framing fairly conventionally. Consider the scene in which Betty leaves for her rendezvous with Henry Francis:

The dominant character literally towers over the subservient one. When the shot shifts to them individually, the angle of framing reinforces their respective positions. Dominant Betty is shot from a slightly lower angle—you can tell the canting of the camera by the fact that the ceiling is almost visible:

But although Draper is shot looking up at her, the camera is framed almost level to his head, meaning it is barely even tilted:

In visual terms, he is only barely the lesser party, which is in keeping with the tone of the scene (if not the season): he may not be dominant, but he is never subservient. Because the camera is level with his head and its angle so slight, Draper appears to be in control of the scene, which leads to friction between its formal composition and narrative content. Note also that in neither case does the angle of framing indicate that shot is from the point of view of either character. Instead of reversing the shot and having them look at the viewer, Weiner organizes the sequence by matching their eyelines: she looks down from the left in an angled shot and he looks up from the right in a level one, almost as if the camera refuses to acknowledge that Draper's not the dominant one here. Same thing happens when Draper tries to recruit Peggy:

The extremely traditional staging indicates that he's the supplicant, but even when he resorts to begging, this reverse shot is the weakest Weiner will allow Draper to look:

He looks up from the right in a level medium close-up, although unlike the scene with Betty, he may actually be in control of this scene, meaning the angle of framing would be ironic. He may be the supplicant, as the composition of the establishing shot tells us, but this reverse shot indicates that he already knows how his plea will be answered. This shot is, after all, when he reminds Peggy that they are kindred:

There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me and something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do and that’s very valuable.

He's telling her that being knocked up by Pete and almost dying during a delivery that left her clinically insane makes her "very valuable" to him. It is, then, an odd but strong bond he appeals to here, but one which he believed would be effective: he may not be able to assume her allegiance, but he knows he can needle her secret trauma to great effect. As it does. They're equals by the next reverse shot:

Or not: the partners occupy the foreground, their juniors and the head secretary the background. They're not equals, but the subsequent camerawork tells us that they're not as unequal as they were before. When it cuts to Peggy and Pete, the level of the camera jumps up and frames them in a medium shot:

The level then shifts down when it cuts back to Draper:

At least in terms of composition, they are close to coequals. (Especially when compared to the ubiquitous shots of Draper pacing behind his desk and looking down at whichever underling happened to be seated before it.) It is at this point that something really remarkable happens. In my first post on the visual rhetoric of the show, I noted that "[n]o contemporary television show employs a quieter camera than Mad Men." So how does Weiner choose to end this scene? Dynamically:

The zoom is all the more effective because of the degree of its departure from the conventions of the show.

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Hot Sexy QDR Action!!!

The 2010 Quadriennial Defense Review is now available.

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And Now for Something Completely Different.

Few things are more entertaining to an academic than to watch two fellow academics go head to head over the meaning of "fellow academic." Will one of those few things be the first episode of post-pilot Season One Caprica?. If you're watching too an hour from now, leave your opinion below.

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Phony political scientist sees morons at fake Independence Hall and is impressed.

With all apologies to J.D. Salinger, I can't resist reading Donald Douglas's account of a Michele Bachmann event at Knott's Berry Farm in Holden Caulfield's terms. This is contemporary conservatism boiled to the bone: some morons convince a phony of their patriotism by speaking before a replica of an actual American institution. Douglas's photo-essay captures what history signifies when you subscribe to Tea Party logic even more starkly than those fake patriots who demonstrate their solidarity with the Founding Fathers by showing up at rallies with tea-bags.

Did I say rallies? I meant "sparsely-attended speeches by purported conservative celebrities in the most conservative county in the country," because as Douglas's own photos attest, David Horowitz and Michele Bachmann have little drawing power within spitting distance of the birth place of Richard Nixon. Not that Douglas would care, mind you, because he can't tear his authentic eyes away from all the ersatz history. Even his grammar becomes ambiguous in the presence of all this fakery:

As you can see, the park's Independence Hall is an exact replica of the original historic landmark in Philadelphia, PA. Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed there.

The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were signed in Knott's Berry Farm's Independence Hall? According to Knott's Berry Farm, they most certainly were:

Douglas then produces:

[a] shot of the [Knott's Berry Farm's replica of the] bell's famous crack.

The faked crack on the fake Liberty Bell is famous? All morons hate it when their grammar reveals that they're morons.

Not that it's just the grammar, as his caption to this picture demonstrates: "[t]he sweeties at the gift counter, in 18th century dress." If you press your ear against the monitor, you can almost hear him declaiming: "That is too an authentic 18th century windbreaker!" But perhaps the best part of Douglas's account is the definitive evidence that Tea Party patriots don't know from English. He notes that Michele Bachmann

came to California straight from Washington and the last night's SOTU. She reminded the crowd that this time last year the big talk was Joe Wilson's "you lie," while this week it's Samuel Alito's "not true," and she turned that into a little chant to fire up the patriots in attendence.

If that chant sounds like Douglas suggests it does—"You lie! Not true! You lie! Not true!"—then those patriots sure told Joe Wilson a thing or two.

Update. If you're going to pretend to be an academic, Donald Douglas, you shouldn't link to something that says I'm a "Doctor of Philosophy of English," then write that I claim to have "a Ph.D. in the 'Philosophy of English.'" People who work in academia should, after all, know what the letters "Ph.D." stand for. Moreover, survival in academia requires the actual refutation of points. It's cute that you noticed I made two typographical errors, but neither error was material to my argument (the substance of which you've yet to refute).

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You Disagree With Tony Kennedy (When He Reaches a Conservative Result), You Oppose the Rule of Law

Paul and I have compiled some examples of conservative academics arguing that Obama needs to be sent to Sally Quinn Reeducation Camp or something for disagreeing with an innovative constitutional doctrine just announced by a bare majority of the Court. At the time, though, I missed an even funnier argument, namely William Jacobson's assertion that by criticizing the Court, Obama was threatening the rule of law itself:

The attack on the Supreme Court exposes the intolerance of this President. The politician who campaigned and allegedly champions the rule of law actually has very little use for the rule of law when it does not advance his political agenda.

This is an...interesting argument. Let's examine some other examples of prominent public officials who, in disagreeing with decisions announced by the Supreme Court, therefore oppose the rule of law:

• "The 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy [sic] was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators — not a single state had such unrestricted abortion [sic] before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation's wars...Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution." --Saint Ronald Reagan, 1983
• "After a day of consideration, the McCain Campaign has decided to come out hard against yesterday's 5 to 4 decision to grant more rights to court review for enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," McCain said. He went on to quote from Justice Roberts dissent in the case, rail against "unaccountable judges," and say that the courts are about to be clogged with cases from detainees."

The 2008 election was contested between two candidates who oppose the rule of law -- shocking! Anyway, I could go on, but since I assume that even Jacobson himself doesn't believe in this ridiculous definition of the "rule of law" cataloging further examples would be redundant.

For further comedy, in attempting to claim that Obama's public disagreement with 5 of the Court's 9 members was "unprecedented," Col. Mustard uncritically quotes someone asserting that "[e]ven President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had a lot of grievances with the Court, never mentioned it in any of his State of the Union messages." This might strike you as implausible in the extreme. Well, I happen to have FDR's 1937 State of the Union Address right here, and...

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Law as politics

Thoughts on Obama getting uppity with the SCOTUS.

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Friday Puppy Blogging

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But Will Terence Stamp Reprise?

Could this be any good?

The original falls comfortably into the "hopelessly flawed yet endlessly entertaining" category. I suppose that the biggest problem I have with the trailer is the implication that Gordon Gecko could actually be broke upon leaving prison...

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On the significance of J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Learning that J.D. Salinger died a day after learning that Howard Zinn had qualifies as a sufficiently surreal experience for that type of person who very much resembles me. Catcher in the Rye taught me how to channel my anger into antisocial behaviors—reading books in my bedroom foremost among them—but as I read it with the same critical acumen that led me to wear out not one but two VHS copies of Pump Up the Volume, the less I say about the book the better. (That and it violates the Five Year Rule three times over.)

Within two years of reading Salinger, I'd affected all the trappings of The Young Punk Who Would Be Vegan and read A People's History of the United States, but unlike Salinger's novel, Zinn's history resonated with me until my sophomore year of college, when I was disabused of its importance by the man himself. I had attended a lecture of his and somehow weaseled my way into a dinner that followed. I told him how significant A People's History had been to my political and intellectual development and that I had read it four or five times and that I was about to start it again when he stopped me short:

"My little book has served its purpose," he told me. "Perhaps it's time you started on the bibliography."

He smiled and was about to say something else when he was whisked away by some other sycophant eager to bend his ear, but after talking to other people who had very similar conversations with him, I think I know what he was going to say: namely, that his "little book" was meant more as a point of departure than a destination. Treating it the way Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting character did (and every newly-minted hipster firebrand does) violates the spirit of its polemic, because the book isn't meant to replace traditional histories so much as supplement them.

For example, if the significance of the Christian tradition is given short-shrift in the book, it isn't because that tradition's unimportant to the development of the nation, but because a robust canon addressing that issue already exists. Zinn never intended his book to be an education in itself, but many readers—especially non-serious ones involved in any of a variety of Zinn-friendly scenes—inflated its importance until it became the definitive source for the entirety of American history. The extensive bibliography in the back-pages indicates that it had no pretensions of being anything of the sort.

I could prattle on about its faults—foremost among them, Zinn's subscription to a dualism so powerful and pervasive that his accounts of internecine conflicts on the left border on unintelligible—but it is impossible to deny the attraction the book has for young adults whose knowledge of American history comes from the skeletal outlines of a public education. The simplicity of its dualistic worldview appeals to the adolescent in the first throes of rebellion because that worldview is itself adolescent. That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the same sense that Zinn meant what he said to me: A People's History represents a stage in one's intellectual development.

It was never intended to arrest it.

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Isn't All Politics Global?

Dan Drezner is among those who today bemoaned the absence of foreign policy content in President Obama's State of the Union Speech. He's not the only one. Max Boot calls foreign policy "AWOL" from the speech. Eric Ostermeir at Smart Politics has quantified the foreign policy content at only 13.9%. Whether they were very worried or not about Obama's foreign policy message, most commentators agreed it was a weak one relative to the domestic policy content in the speech.

My off-the-cuff reaction to the speech echoed this concern as well. But then I began thinking about the assignment I have my World Politics students doing right now, which is to write about their lives using a global perspective. Lots of them are struggling with it as they always do: if they haven't traveled abroad, served in the military, supported a global social movement, or watched BBC regularly, they don't feel like they are really participants in world politics. I challenge this thinking by asking them to reflect on the ways in which their everyday lives are impacted by, and in turn impact, the world beyond our borders.

The purpose of the assignment is to get them thinking past their identity as Americans and situate themselves globally. However the assignment - and the era of globalization we live in - begs the question about the entire notion of the domestic politics / international politics divide. One way to look at the distinction we draw between domestic and foreign policy is as a boundary-maintenance project that is part of the practice of sovereignty. If we make the choice to suspend this practice for a moment, we might realize that Obama's speech had more foreign policy in it that we may have recognized.

For example Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin, whom I linked to earlier describes the Obama's foreign policy talking points as consisting of "trade, export controls, Afghanistan, Iraq, nukes, North Korea and Iran" and says he touched on all of this for only "a couple of minutes at the end." Rogin categorizes energy policy, jobs and financial reform as domestic issues. So do those who have tallied the foreign policy content of the speech and found it wanting.

Yet what could be more global - in their impetus and impact - than a turn toward clean energy and alternative transportation in the US, which until recently led the world in global carbon emissions per capita? Given the global impact of the US banking crisis, is not financial reform a global issue? And is not a policy of "ending subsidies for firms that ship jobs overseas" a foreign policy as well as a domestic one? Certainly it will impact individuals abroad who rely on manufacturing jobs with US companies as a stepping stone out of poverty. This in turn will affect those individuals' abilities to consume the products Obama also wants to export in greater volume. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that these things are interconnected.

And actually, Obama said as much. Consider his rationale for financial, education and energy reform:

China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

We think of foreign policy as that subset of policy that is directed at relations with other countries. But since so much of what happens here affects (and can be affected by) what is happening elsewhere whether we intend it or not, perhaps this perspective is behind the times. Drezner concludes his post by saying:

"I would have liked to have seen a more robust effort to link foreign policy priorities to domestic priorities - because the two are more linked than is commonly acknowledged."

What would it mean to our practices of citizenship if our policymakers and pundits routinely thought past that distinction entirely? As Drezner himself once said, in today's world "all politics is global."

Or maybe this is all bunk. But it sure is a useful teaching tool. Thoughts?

[cross-posted at Duck of Minerva]

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The Alito/Obama Non-Story

Neither did anything wrong.

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J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger's son has announced that his father has died.

I'm not familiar with most of Salinger's work, but I recently had a striking experience with The Catcher in the Rye. I read it in college and hadn't looked at it in 25 years when I picked up while browsing in a bookstore. I read the first two chapters while standing there, and I had the distinct and rather unnerving impression that I could remember having read every sentence practically word for word. It was sort of like being transformed into the Rainman character or Borges' Funes the Memorious. (link is to original; can't find an English translation on the web).


added by davenoon:

R.I.P. Salinger.


I'm not sure what the Farley twins are reading these days, but Audrey and Imogen are clearly preparing to take on regular blogging duties in the near future...

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The Stakes

Sorry for the lack of SOTU coverage on my end; because a seemingly endless series of random January illnesses culminated in mysterious but excruciating foot pain, I just caught random snatches while waiting for x-ray results, going to the pharmacy, etc. What I was thinking about was how fortunate it was that I had decent insurance so I could get the problem diagnosed and also afford what turns out to be relatively simple pharmaceutical treatment. And so even more I was thinking about the many Americans who could have lost their jobs or had to live with debilitating pain that would be easiy treatable for months because they don't have access to basic medical care. In short, the House needs to pass the Senate bill, a simple majority of the Senate needs to pass the best reconciliation fix possible, and once the policy is in place progressives have to fight to make the policy better. Because the bottom line is that the number of uninsured people in this country is a disgrace.

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SOTU Rapid Reaction

Wow. Perhaps the ghost of Howard Zinn was speaking through our President tonight. In a little over an hour, he called out the Supreme Court for its recent decision on campaign donations, reminded Republicans they are here to serve their country rather than their own ambitions, and chided pundits for reducing serious debates to silly arguments. I don’t know whether to be glad to see him speaking truth to the powers that be around him or worried: he seemed most effective at the parts of his speech where he was reaching out to the opposition rather than staring them down.

And he didn't spend much time on foreign policy, but no surprise. Josh Rogin has a translation of his foreign policy remarks here.

He did, though, end on the right tone:

“Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated… the only reason we are here is because generations of Americans weren’t afraid to do what was hard.”

Well said, Mr. President.

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How to prove you formed a whole opinion after watching half a film.

Over at Big Hollywood, a man who only watched the first half of Steven Soderbergh's Che declares the whole film a work of propaganda. You can tell he only watched the first half because he thinks the whole film is about Cuba—the second half, sometimes called Guerilla, covers events that took place in Bolivia and, more importantly, undercuts the romantic image of Che cultivated in The Argentine, the part of the film devoted to the Cuban revolution. Did Soderbergh omit the years between the Cuban and Bolivian insurgencies—years in which Che grossly mismanaged the Cuban economy, openly insulted the Soviet Union, and failed to exploit the revolutionary potential in the Congo? He did; however, he did so for narrative reasons, not political ones.

Guerilla documents the abject failure of the great revolutionary to accomplish anything in the Bolivian wilds. Che and his dwindling forces spend the entire movie walking in circles—about an hour in, his forces are divided and compelled to walk in circles looking for each other, as if their mothers never told them that should they become separated from her at the mall, they should stay put and let her find them. The already leisurely pace of The Argentine slows to an appropriately Jarmuschian crawl, as it allows the viewer to realize that, as in Dead Man, the protagonist died in the first five minutes of the film and all this pointless wandering through desolate lands is designed to get him to understand as much. Anyone who watches the whole film would know this, but then again, no one who had paid attention to either half of the film would ever write:

[I]n those two years of “ferocious” battles, the total casualties on BOTH sides actually ran to 182. New Orleans has an annual murder rate DOUBLE that. The famous “Battle of Santa Clara,” that Soderbergh depicts as a Caribbean Stalingrad, claimed five casualties total—on BOTH sides.

I'm not touching the reference to New Orleans, and will instead focus on the author's claim that Soderbergh filmed this battle like "a Caribbean Stalingrad," i.e. as the equivalent of a battle in which an estimated 2.7 million soldiers died, because nearly every casualty in Soderbergh's film was an established character. If anything, the film creates the impression that eleven of Che's closest friends were killed during the entire revolution. Then again, I'm not even sure why I'm paying any attention to someone who would write:

Seems to me her tragic story makes ideal fodder for Oprah, for all those women’s magazines, for all those butch professorettes of “Women’s Studies,” for a Susan Sarandon or Sandra Bullock role.

Because honestly, if you write the phrase "butch professorettes," you're clearly confused as to what stereotype you're trying to convey: "These masculine fairies, I mean, feminine meatheads, I mean—I mean—I mean." No sir, you mean no more than your words signify, and they're all sound and fury.

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Zinn

It appears that Howard Zinn has passed. The only work of Zinn's that I've read is People's History; I was both deeply disappointed in it as a work of history, yet glad that it existed.

Rest in peace.

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Obama to ask Congress to repeal DADT

CNN is reporting that Obama will ask Congress to repeal the Don't Ask Don't Tell legislation. Of course "asking" could mean everything from making this a legislative priority to engaging in a largely empty symbolic gesture. Given that Obama almost certainly has the authority to stop discharges based on sexual orientation by issuing an executive order, it will be interesting to see how seriously he pursues what up to now has been perhaps his most egregiously broken campaign promise.

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Powell on Nukes

Colin Powell on nuclear weapons:

Via Wonk Room, this is the introduction to Nuclear Tipping Point, a film put together by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

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The Gendered Politics of Lynching

You will not believe this 1934 New Yorker cartoon my friend Adam Jones dug up. What a difference a few decades makes.





















Jones writes about mass killing and has one of the foremost textbooks on the subject. Apparently a section in the new edition deals with lynching in particular, particularly the phenomenon of mob violence as entertainment. This phenomena is not unique to US racial history, of course, and has been a significant part of atrocity throughout history - the European witch-hunts and persecution of Christians in ancient Rome, to name just a few.

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Next up from Paul Shirley: Why did Polish Jews put up with so much anti-Semitism?

What if Ayn Rand had been 6'10" with a pretty good jumpshot?

Dear Haitians -

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it's possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World

Shirley's nuanced social analysis of the situation in Haiti got him bounced this morning from his occasional gig as an ESPN commentator.

I've heard that his book about his travels through the world of professional basketball is actually kind of interesting.

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Egads

Didn't last long, did it?

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Whole Foods, junk science, healthism, and other stuff white people like

Union-busting, health care reform-opposing, global-warming denying John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has come up with a super idea for cutting his health insurance costs: giving his employees extra discounts on their company store purchases if they maintain or achieve a "healthy" (sic) weight.

The details: employees with a Body Mass Index of between 28 and 29.9 will get a 22% discount on their purchases; those with a BMI of 26-28.9 will get a 25% discount; those with a BMI of 24-25.9 will get a 27% discount; and those below 24 will get a 30% discount (employees must also meet blood pressure and cholesterol criteria and not use nicotine).

How crazy is this? Let me count the ways:

(1) In terms of BMI, the Whole Foods discounts correlate with increasing mortality risk. The most sophisticated study on this subject, published in 2005 in JAMA by Katherine Flegal et. al., used a BMI of 23-24.9 as its referent category for baseline risk of mortality. (This corresponds with the higher end of the government's "normal/recommended" weight range of 18.5-24.9. The lower one goes in the "normal" weight range, the greater the mortality risk becomes, so using the top of the "normal" range as the referent category actually minimizes the risks associated with "normal" weight). It found 86,000 excess deaths per year in the United States associated with "normal" weight when compared to the mortality risk among people with BMIs in the 25-29.9 range.

You're reading that right: Whole Foods' employee discounts based on weight are inversely related to mortality risk. So you have a policy that's not merely discriminatory on its face, but completely irrational on its own terms.

(2) The highest employee discount has no floor, only a ceiling. In the Flegal study, underweight (BMI <18.5) was associated with a stratospheric increase in mortality risk. (This remains true even when the data is controlled for smoking and pre-existing disease). But if you're an underweight college student suffering from an eating disorder and working as a checker at the Boulder Whole Foods (not a hypothetical as anyone who has ever shopped there can attest) you get a 30% discount for maintaining the "healthiest" weight.

(3) Even if one decides to enter John Mackey's Epidemiological Fantasyland, where good health is achieved by purchasing $27 a pound Ahi tuna in order to achieve Optimal Thinness, how much sense does it make to make it more expensive for your non-thin employees to purchase said tuna?

All this is a classic example how the habitus of upper class people in America ends up getting projected onto the broader culture, under the rubric of "a healthy lifestyle." It's also an example of how healthism and junk science are powerful weapons in the fight to avoid that most dreaded thing, a fair and efficient health care system for all Americans. Few myths in that fight are more pernicious than the idea that if you get sick it's your fault, because you didn't make healthy choices, such as searing that Ahi tuna you bought at Whole Foods after lightly coating it in $30 a bottle olive oil.

Relatedly, here's a talk I gave last week on the general topic. The first link is the talk; the second is the Q&A.

Talk

Q&A

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International Criminal Court Redux

Later this year, state parties will get together to revisit the Statute for the International Criminal Court. Definitely on the agenda is clarifying the crime of aggression, which was left hanging in 1998 in order to bring discussions to a close. But governments also have the opportunity to add new crimes to the list of those under the court's jurisdiction (as well as suggest procedural changes). So far proposals relating to jurisdiction include:

1) A proposal by Trinidad and Tobago to try drug traffickers at the ICC. (If in 1989 you suggest a court for this specific purpose, and if nine years later states construct that very court while tabling the issue for which you originally suggested it, instead making it a court to try genocidaires and war criminals, try try again.)

2) A proposal by Belgium to extend the list of prohibited conventional weapons. (Roger Clark has an interesting essay on Article 8 in a Special Double Issue of the New Criminal Law Review organized by Opinio Juris' Kevin Jon Heller.)

3) A proposal by the Netherlands to include terrorism in the court's jurisdiction alongside aggression, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. (Unlike the drug trafficking proposal, which actually aims to define the crime, Netherlands only proposes to include the crime of terrorism hypothetically, pending an agreed definition. Smart. Also somewhat meaningless.)

4) A proposal by Mexico to include the use of nuclear weapons under the definition of war crimes. (Good luck with that.)

Apparently no "States Parties" have taken up suggestions that piracy be added to the list of crimes under ICC jurisdiction.

[cross-posted at Current Intelligence]

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C. Everett Koop fights to keep Medicare free from government interference

Not the Onion.

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The Hoover Gambit: More Reviews In

For obvious reasons, including the one Rob and Dave mention below, pretty much uniformly negative. If health care reform tanks, the possibility that Obama "could be seen as a failed pre-emptive president in an overwhelmingly Republican era" is now a depressingly likely outcome.

It could, I suppose be argue that the cuts involved will be (in the context of federal outlays) trivial enough to make the Hoover reference unfair. But if the best case is that it's an irrelevant political gimmick, you have to consider the politics, which are pretty much a disaster. Hayes:

That's why this is so inexcusably insidious: because it uses the full power of the bully pulpit to reaffirm and endorse a kind of ignorance that the right-wing has spent years stoking, and in so doing further erodes what little conceptual and rhetorical foundation we have domestically for social democracy. It may be a head fake, the fine print may basically have a lot of loopholes, in which case the policy itself won't be terrible, but again it reinforces the enemy's narrative: that government spends too much on "programs," that defense and "security" spending doesn't count for the deficit and that times of economic misery and widespread unemployment the solution is fiscal austerity.

In addition to this, you have the fact that Democrats continue to play the sucker, believing that they have to "fiscally responsible" so that Republicans can take a better fiscal picture and piss it all away on upper-class cuts. The most charitable construction, reflected in a couple of Matt's scenarios, is that he's trying to expose "deficit hawks" on both sides of the aisle as frauds. The obvious problem is that the actions of Bayh and Conrad, and 6 years of united Republican rule, have already demonstrated that they're complete frauds. It doesn't matter. To the Fried Hiatts who care about this stuff being a "deficit hawk" is about inflicting pain on Democratic constituencies, not reducing the deficit. One more demonstration that many "deficit hawks" don't want to reduce agricultural subsidies won't solve anything.

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Creeping Morgenthauism

There's a passage from Henry Morgenthau's diaries that has been a staple of right-wing New Deal denialism over the years. In it, FDR's Treasury secretary describes a meeting with the House Democrats on Ways and Means Committee in which he bemoans the supposed failures of the New Deal to lift unemployment and restrain the balloon of national debt.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.... We have never made good on our promises....I say after six years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!

As I noted, this is a popular quotation among people who believe that all taxation is theft and all spending draws the nation closer to full collectivization. But Morgenthau was, quite simply, wrong. The New Deal did work, albeit erratically and despite the fact that Roosevelt could never quite jettison the fiscally conservative instincts on which he based his 1932 campaign. But sure enough, between 1933-39, real GDP rose by nearly 50 percent, while private, non-farm unemployment dropped from just above 30 percent to a shade above 15 percent. Morgenthau can be forgiven for not realizing how dramatically unemployment had been whittled away, since he was relying on BLS statistics that have been dramatically revised over the past 70 years. The debt he alludes to was -- as a percentage of GDP -- roughly equivalent to the levels the US would later reach during the 1980s, and they were nowhere near the levels (e.g., ~120 percent of GDP) that the US raised during WWII. The US could have avoided those debts by not fighting, but regardless, the debts were paid off, in true Keynesian fashion, by the 1970s.

But we shouldn't be surprised that Morgenthau -- whose anti-Keynesian views put him at odds with most economists in the Roosevelt administration -- would have overlooked the data. His obsession with spending cuts and balanced budgets (and FDR's willingness to listen to him in '37) helped produce the disastrous recession that marred Roosevelt's second term and inspired Morgenthau's wailing about how the New Deal "does not work." As well, Morgenthau was one of the key figures who successfully persuaded FDR to modify his own advisers' proposal that Social Security be funded from general revenues rather than (regressively) from the paychecks of workers themselves. The result was a social insurance plan modeled differently from those of every other industrial democracy -- a plan that was less generous and more exclusionary, and one that (at least initially) bore no sense that economic security for the aged was at all a "right."

It's no surprise, therefore, that conservatives would celebrate a quotation from someone whose analysis of the economic situation in 1939 was -- as we now know -- wrong on the facts as well as the theory. And we shouldn't be shocked that these same folks would continue to propose ideas that will, if implemented, assure that the US economy fails to recover before my kids are teenagers.

Why the Obama administration would provide any solace to those who echo Morgenthau's 70-year-old error is, however, an enormous mystery.

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Stoopid, Stoopid, Stoopid

Attackerman:

Everyone in Washington who studies the Pentagon budget quickly finds gobs and gobs of wasteful spending. Not some people. Not dirty hippies. Every. Single. Defense. Analyst. If I was so inclined, I could spend my days doing nothing but attending conferences on the latest defense jeremiad or policy paper about how to cut it. I already spend too much of my time reading this stuff on defense-community email listservs.

For the Obama administration to excerpt defense spending from its kinda-sorta-spending-freeze is a position that makes no sense from a policy perspective. None at all. From a political perspective, it only begins to make sense because a brain-dead media would amplify the braying ignorance blasted from a GOP congressional megaphone about Defense Spending Cuts OMG. And even then it doesn’t make sense. A holdover Republican Defense Secretary is now the biggest advocate of an even slightly sensible defense budget in the Obama administration.

Peter Daou:

Rightwing bloggers slamming spending (non)freeze, left hates it-- that convergence bodes poorly for ultimate public perception

As a policy/PR stunt, the spending freeze seems geared entirely around satisfaction of the Washington Post editorial page. In terms of political strategy, this seems odd.

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As I Suspected

At least until Jack Z arrived in Seattle, I always figured that God was on Billy Beane's side.

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Extremely Rare Tuesday Morning Daddy Blogging

Yes, Imogen is "reading" The Economist.

I think she just likes it for the pictures. But it's a start.

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Seems About Right

Remember Laurie Mylroie? The sometime collaborator of Respected Journamalist Judy Miller whose meticulous scholarship has demonstrated that Saddam Hussein was responsible for such events as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombings, and Aaron Small going 11-0 with the 2005 Yankees? Now guess who the Bush administration turned to when they needed an, ahem, expert analysis of Al Qaeda.

I'm very happy these people are no longer in power...

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Sean Wilentz Positions I Can Endorse

Grant is indeed very underrated.

...Yglesias reminds us of this oldie-but-goodie from Nathan Newman...

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The Internet's own Gary Farber...

...has hit hard times and could use your assistance. The man has been an online institution since before they multiplied the "w" by three and the Internet has been an appreciably better place for it. Help him continue to keep us honest if you can.

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#1

The Wildcats have reclaimed the #1 Men's NCAA Basketball ranking after an absence of six years. The Bluegrass rejoices.

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Chemical Ali Hassan al-Majid Hangs

Apparently Al-Majid's execution by gallows was more "civilized" than that of Saddam Hussein three years ago. No one called him any names.

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Farce of the Year

Harold Ford. I continue to hope he runs; watching him trying to win a closed Democratic primary in New York -- against an incumbent Senator with a strong upstate base! -- by running as a moderate Republican will be comedy gold.

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Now that the Saints have won, we can start discussing the important issues...

...foremost among them, have we seen the last of Brett Favre? Will he be back next year? Will the interception at the end of regulation tonight mate with the Webster interception of 2007 and give birth to his legacy? Stay tuned to all your channels for the latest breaking news on the future of Brett Favre.

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Sunday Puppy Blogging

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Push Poll!

The wife and I were push-polled moments ago by a Family Research Council. As best I recall these were the questions:

Do you support taxpayer funding of abortions?

Do you favor the 50% cut in Medicare that is part of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care plan?

Do you think that your congressman should be cutting deals behind doors?

Frankly, I think I could have done better:

Do you think that the government should be using your hard-earned money to butcher the unborn?

Do you think Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi should be allowed to devour the organs of still-living elderly Americans?

Do you think they should be able to do these things in secret, or should it be a public spectacle?

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Championship Sunday Open Thread

I'll somewhat reluctantly take the Colts -7.5 (pretty sure Colts will win, worry about the spread against the Jets defense, but also see some Sanchez picks if Jets are behind in the 4th quarter) and pretty confidently take the Saints -3.5 (can't see the secondary pf the injury-riddled Vikes standing up to Brees, especially on the road.)

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More Haiti

Cuba has become yoked to the Yankee imperial project is working with the United States in Haiti:

The US government’s Voice of America acknowledged Friday the efforts of more than 400 Cuban doctors and health workers in Haiti.

The move could lead to a collaboration with medicines needed at several field hospitals set up by the Cubans for treating the earthquake victims.

“The massive international relief effort in Haiti has received a boost from Cuba, which has more than 400 health workers, many of them doctors, working throughout the devastated country. The government in Havana has also aided United States relief efforts by opening restricted Cuban airspace to American planes flying medical evacuation missions,” states VOA in an article titled Cuba Aids Haiti Relief.

An unconfirmed report posted by the Miami Herald on Saturday cites a US State Department source as saying Washington “has offered medical supplies to Cuban doctors in earthquake-devastated Haiti, but that the Cubans have not yet formally agreed to accept the aid.”

Havana Times ran a post on Jan. 14th titled “US and Cuba Could Bond for Haiti”, on the earthquake relief effort.

Excellent news, especially as hopes for a US-Cuban rapproachment have waned in recent months.

In other news, I've added a Haiti donation widget to the left sidebar.

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Of all the families in all the world, "Ellie Light" went and married into that one?

I don't find the fact that some inveterate letter-writer who aches to see her name in print is doing what inveterate letter-writers who ache to see their names in print have done for the better part of a century all that interesting ... or I wouldn't, were it not for the person the only Google Book Search return for the name "Ellie Light" suggests she might have married.*

*The first person who says this is a case of me being a hammer and everything looking like a nail is probably right.

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So, the Avatar Thing..

Saw Avatar last week, and apparently I must weigh in. Lot's o' spoilers ahead...

Is Avatar racist?
Sure, but that's not a very interesting question. Back before I saw 300, I was prepared to be irritated by its racism, ethnocentrism, and violence to history, but after watching for about 20 minutes I realized that all of these complaints were simply beside the point. 300 is racist and ahistorical, but seriously, who cares? It's not just that 300 is about abs and spears and gay giants and fat guys with knives for hands, although it is about those things. Nor is it to say that 300 should be treated as off limits for serious literary or philosophical inquiry; "you're over-thinking it" is one of the least useful complaints that one can make about serious criticism. Rather, it's to suggest that the racism and ethnocentrism of the story are among the least interesting, least novel, and least productive avenues of such inquiry.

Now, I will grant that Avatar is more complex than 300, and that the racism/racialism is, in some relevant sense, more deeply embedded in the story. I think that Westerners sometimes like to fancy that imperialism is something that they did to other people, but that's not quite right; the Western experience of imperialism is so deeply embedded in our narratives of self that it's essentially inextricable. In a hundred years, when China and India dominate the world economy, tales of Western imperialism, conquest, and exceptionalism may lose their charm for film-going audiences. For now, the background notion of dominance, modified only by Western forebearance, itself evidence of Western moral superiority, remains a foundational way of thinking about the confrontation between the West and the Other. While there are certainly examples of narratives in which humankind represents the oppressed rather than the oppressor (V, Battlestar Galactica), and narratives which essentially sidestep the question (Star Wars), stories in which human/Western/American dominance is the unproblematic assumption have their own intuitive appeal. Star Trek, in which human moral superiority prevents the full exertion of military superiority, is a science fiction example of this genre; another might be Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Ursula K. Leguin's The Word for World is Forest takes this narrative as a starting point and further problematizes it, but then Leguin is considerably more thoughtful than we have any right to expect James Cameron to be. In any case, Avatar takes this assumption about the relationship between the West/humankind and its subjects as a starting point, and as such is fundamentally about colonialism. Moreover, while Avatar is anti-colonialist it doesn't particularly challenge the basic colonial/imperial structure of the narrative. More on this in a bit.

At the same time, I think it's worth noting that the idea of an alien Messiah was present in Western civilization prior to the colonial period. The story of Miriam, Moses, the reeds, and the daughter of Pharoah can be read as an extended effort to "naturalize" the leader of the Hebrews. Even Jesus Christ is, in some important sense, alien to the population of his ministry. The alien messiah is also present in explicitly anti-colonial ideologies that nevertheless accept the basic narrative structure of Western imperialism; I have no doubt that Che Guevara understood his work in a messianic sense when he tried to draw the Indians of Bolivia into a revolution that they didn't particularly care about. I suspect that there are a few idealistic converts to anti-colonial Marxism that understood themselves as playing the Jake Sully role. Nevertheless, there's considerable synergy between the "alien as messiah" narrative and the colonial/anti-colonial narrative; Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, for example, are based around combinations of these narratives.

So what can we say about Avatar's politics?

And so if the racial question is only mildly interesting, what else can we say about Avatar's politics? From a foreign policy point of view, it's clearly a very left wing film. Much has been made of the difference between the mercenaries employed by the Corporation and actual marines, but to my mind the distinction didn't mean very much. It's clear that the (genocidal) mercenaries were veterans of the (presumably American) military, and the film gives us very little reason to think that the interventions they carried out while serving under the flag (a couple are alluded to, including a war in Venezuela) are any more just than that depicted in the film. Colonel Quaritch and Parker Selfridge are about as complicated as Billy Zane's Cal Hockley, and the film falls very comfortably into a neo-Marxist explanation of the sources of American foreign policy. Unfortunately, Cameron feels the need to laden the already obvious analogy with relatively direct allusions to the Bush administration and the Iraq War. Cameron doesn't trust his audience enough to make the blindingly clear connection between resource based imperialism and... resource based imperialism. I think that in our rush to interpret Avatar as racist/racialist, we run the risk of forgetting that a fundamentally imperialist/colonial story can also be very left wing in the contemporary political context. This is not to say that the politics of Avatar are particularly liberal; the closest theoretical fit would probably be a kind of left-wing Burkeanism.

I'm surprised that I haven't read more about Cameron's troubling vision of gender relations(and probably has been; forgive me for not fully exploring the literature produced on Avatar thus far); it's true enough that the Na'Vi women hunted, but the gender division of labor nevertheless seemed very traditional, with women maintaining the spiritual health of the community while men manage its temporal affairs. Also, on passing their coming of age ceremony, Na'Vi men get their choice of (lifetime) mate, even though Na'Vi women apparently have to undertake exactly the same coming of age test. I also think that the question of disability could be profitably investigated. There's a potentially productive parallel between Sully's effort to escape disability in Avatar and Lieutenant Dunbar's utter terror of amputation in Dances with Wolves.

Is it Dances with Wolves in Space?

Sort of. It reminded me more of The Mission than of Dances with Wolves, primarily because the tension between the scientists and the Corporation was reminiscent of the tension between the Jesuits and the colonists. The narrative of personal redemption (apparently necessary to any big budget American film) is more reminiscent of Dances with Wolves, although some parallels could be made between Sully and Robert De Niro's character in The Mission. The montage of death near the end of Avatar was also echoes the final scenes of The Mission. On the other hand, The Mission rarely involved serious conversation between Indians and Jesuits, while Avatar and Dances with Wolves both include extended conversation in native language. To explore the comparison more deeply I'd need to watch Dances with Wolves again, which will never, ever happen. I suppose that the extensive use of the oboe in the scores of both Avatar and The Mission may have brought the parallel further to mind.

In any case, though, the three movies clearly sit within the same imperial family. In every case, Western/human/American domination is assumed. In every case, the only thing capable of preventing domination of the worst sort is Western et al moral superiority; the natives are assumed to be morally pure, but their morals and their military capabilities aren't very important to the story. In all three cases, morality essentially fails to limit or modify temporal power. In Avatar and Dances with Wolves, a small group or single individual prevents or mitigates the domination (at least for a while), while in The Mission the Catholic Church is supposed to provide Spanish imperialism with a conscience. I further think that there's some interesting ground to be covered in the comparison of the role of the Church in The Mission and the role of "science" in Avatar. At her other place, Charli wrote:

Other "good" characters too seem all too easily to manage the cognitive dissonance of knowing what is in store for the Na'Vi they consciously respect and love. Grace the xeno-biologist makes a few half-hearted attempts to dissuade when the tanks are already rolling. But surely she understood what was coming sooner? Soon enough to avoid feeding all the relevant facts to "the company," or to warn the Na'Vi, or to engage Jack Sully about the ethics of his duplicitous posturing. If anything this is not a story about assuaging historical guilt but about forgetting the lessons of history. It is as if these characters are blissfully unaware of every mind-numbingly obvious political metaphor in the story.

This is interesting because the conflict between the spiritual authority of the Jesuits and the temporal power of the colonial state in The Mission is historically genuine; Jesuits and Franciscans often resisted state power, sometimes bitterly, in an effort to protect Indian populations in the New World. At the same time, the clerics themselves served as the vanguard of domination, giving the Spanish state a taste of Indian revenue, mapping out the physical and human terrain of native peoples, and in general providing the structure through which the colonial state was able to exert control. Indeed, the clerics themselves regularly engaged in the physical domination of the populations to which they ministered. The Jesuits and Franciscan weren't stupid people, but there was the same kind of tension between their project and that of the Spanish colonial state as there was between the scientists and the corporation in Avatar. To bring this back to the point about Western colonialism made above, it bears mention that the scientific project is both the enabler of imperialism and its handmaiden; science helped make Western armies and navies invincible, while Western armies and navies opened broad vistas of study for anthropologists, biologists, zoologists, and so forth and what not. We shouldn't forget, either, that the work of the scientists in Avatar is underwritten by the Corporation, just as the endowments of many major universities (not to mention the resources that went into the construction of more than a few Catholic cathedrals) were made possible by the wealth appropriated through imperialism.

Is it extraordinary?

Sure. Even more the Spielberg, Cameron is the master of the action-spectacle motion picture. While watching Avatar, it is impossible not to fantasize about the horrible set of punishments that ought to be inflicted upon Michael Bay (hopefully in 3D). I value the kind of spectacle that Cameron creates (I'm more than happy to apologize for Titanic), and believe that it requires an exceptional degree of talent. Avatar is visually remarkable, and its narrative (though deeply cliched) holds together enough for the spectacle to proceed. All of the Ford Pintos that appear in Act One explode by Act Four. The film's biggest deficiency is its extended conclusion, which has several different emotional high points and is poorly paced. The dialogue is also terrible in spots.

Nevertheless, it was a thoroughly enjoyable 2.5 hours.

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Hugo Chavez: Stupider than Pat Robertson?

Apparently, if Hugo Chavez says something stupid, Evo Morales has to follow suit:

President Evo Morales said Wednesday that Bolivia would seek U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. military occupation of earthquake-stricken Haiti. "The United States cannot use a natural disaster to militarily occupy Haiti," he told reporters at the presidential palace.

"Haiti doesn't need more blood," Morales added, implying that the militarized U.S. humanitarian mission could lead to bloodshed. His criticism echoed that of fellow leftist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said Sunday that "it appears the gringos are militarily occupying Haiti."

When asked Wednesday about the possibility of the U.N. General Assembly condemning the U.S., assembly spokesman Jean Viktor Nkolo pointed to previous U.N. statements expressing gratitude for U.S. help in Haiti.

The United Nations will soon sign an agreement with the U.S. stipulating the U.N. as the lead organization for security in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, acting U.N. special envoy to Haiti, said Tuesday.

In fairness to Morales, however, he hasn't gone so far as to accuse the United States of actually causing the earthquake:

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a 'tectonic weapon' to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.

President Chavez said the US was "playing God" by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish newspaper ABC quoted him as saying.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and argue that Chavez' comment is substantially stupider than Pat Robertson's, if only because I suspect that God actually could cause an earthquake in Haiti if He so desired. I suppose we could debate the point, but I also find God's motivation (get back at the Haitians for their Satanic proclivities) considerably more plausible than that which Chavez and Morales attribute to the United States; the single last thing that anyone in the Pentagon wants to do right now is devote more troops and treasure to Haiti...

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