Category: Politics (implicit)

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C’est Levee, or Once More Unto the Breach

It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.

My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.

Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.

How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.

(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)

I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.

(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)

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Outta touch

Sorry it’s been a quiet week, dear readers. I’ve been busy at work, but I’ve also found myself falling into one of my wheels-within-wheels paranoiac phases. It’s centered on trying to get at an understanding of the power-relations at play in the current Gulf War.

Anyway, I gotta write an article on the benefits of RFID in the pharma supply chain, so I’m gonna get to that.

I leave you with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon / sushi axis.

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Smoking Grass

I wanted to write a long piece exploring the tension of Gunter Grass’ novels with his recent admission that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but I was stymied by the fact that I’ve never read a word he wrote, probably due to my irrational bias that all Germans from that era were Nazis.

Anyway, Grass’ “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,” sez the website for the Nobel Prize, which Grass won in 1999. The site also tells us, “after military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm laborer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin.” Which is true-ish. As is Grass’ own comment in his Nobel lecture, “Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa.” I probably oughtta read that whole lecture sometime.

Now, I’m actually going to cut some slack for the 17-year-old Grass. Given that my dad lied about his age to join the military when he was a 16-year-old in Israel, I can pretty easily imagine a young Grass who wanted to join up, get away from his family and “help the war effort” or something.

I can even imagine a situation where he didn’t really understand that this could lead him into the SS. I don’t know the facts of military allocation during the war, so I can’t say that he’s lying about how he was assigned to the Waffen SS. And it certainly sounds like that unit was more devoted to combat operations than to the running of concentration camps and mass executions that other parts of the SS were engaged in.

War sweeps a lot of people up into decisions that they couldn’t imagine making in other circumstances. For a 17-year-old in a duty-bound society like that . . . well, I’m just saying that I don’t hold that piece of his history against him.

However, I am stuck trying to figure out what’s more unconscionable: not revealing till he was 78 the fact that he was in the Waffen SS, or only revealing it so he could have a sales peg for his new book.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried marketing literary books before and “I served in the SS” isn’t much worse than some of the angles I’ve seen.

(Oh, and to that writer at Time who argues that Grass wouldn’t have been such a good/important writer had he not kept this deep, dark secret all along: you’re a moral imbecile.)

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Hey, Raj, What’s Happ’nin’?

It’s long-ass essay day here at VM! Here’s a piece from the new ish of Foreign Affairs about the economic dynamo in India. I think India’s in a far better position to succeed than China in the long-term. If you read Mr. Das’ article, you’ll see that there are some major reforms India still needs to implement (in order to get itself out of the way), but I think the Indian version of entrepreneurialism trumps the totalitarianism that still lurks over the Chinese model.

I used to think that the main advantage of India was the bureaucracy installed by the British, but Das’ interpretation is that the bureaucracy is a major problem for the country. It’s possible that we’re both right, insofar as the bureaucracy and its focus on education were necessary for India’s development, but have now grown out of control:

Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance — the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system — but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.

The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy’s perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.

Anyway, Das makes some neat points about India’s development, most notably the fact that it jumped from essentially an agrarian society to a service-based one, without spending much time as a manufacturing/industrial power.

Just another example of stuff I find fascinating, but probably bore the crap out of you.

So here’s Tom Spurgeon’s writeup about the just-concluded San Diego Comic-Con. Enjoy.

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Between the lines

In case you’re sitting around bored this weekend, here’s an interview with a book designer who isn’t Chip Kidd.

Here’s a blog post by Dylan Horrocks (a.k.a. one of the finest cartoonists alive and an all-around swell guy who let me crash at his home in New Zealand a few years ago) on science and art.

And here’s the introduction to a new book on Leo Strauss. I found it pretty interesting, especially when it went into the east coast vs. west coast Straussians’ rivalry. It really heated up when they popped Biggie, that’s for sure.

I hope your weekend is exciting enough that you don’t read all this stuff.

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noToryous?

My buddy Mitch once praised the Grateful Dead, not for their music–which he detested–but for their ability to get money out of hippies. He considered that one of the strongest legacies of the 60’s.

Conversely, this writer at the Herald (UK) contends that Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, who recently “came out” as a Tory, is a traitor to the cause.

Of course, people’s views change over time, and there’s no shame in that. There’s nothing more common than for a youthful socialist to evolve into a middle-aged Tory. What is distasteful about Welsh’s apparent volte-face, however, is that he has made his fortune from exploiting a grotesquely picaresque community whose brutal existence has provided the most colourful, horrifying, virulently anti-establishment material for fiction since Balzac’s backstreet Paris.
While with one hand Welsh was guddling a hungry readership, many of whom had scarcely seen a book since school, with the other he was holding a champagne flute at Edinburgh’s New Town soirees.

Moreover, despite the “guddling,” she (sorta) knew it all along:

From the start of Welsh’s career doubts have been raised about just how closely his widely reported wild behaviour matched reality. Former colleagues at Edinburgh City Council remember a dapper, punctual employee who, they said admiringly, “could have gone right to the top of local government”. Even as his novels were being devoured by the poverty-stricken, the addicted and the terminally unemployed, he is believed to have been dabbling in the property market, and we’re not talking council houses.

Needless to say, I think she’s an idiot, even when she concludes that drug dealers are the “most successful capitalists of our time.” After all, Renton doesn’t really want to deal; he just wants to get away to Amsterdam, be a DJ, and live with a model. Is that so wrong?

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Gaza into the Abyss

In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer had a column on the poor Palestinian family that got blown up on a beach in Gaza. After explaining that the explosion could not have been due to an Israeli shell fired in response to nearby rocket launches into Israeli neighborhoods, he writes,

Let’s concede for the sake of argument that the question of whether it was an errant Israeli shell remains unresolved. But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel — and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?

Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians’ classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it’s a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it’s another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel’s preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic “Israeli massacre” picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.

Krauthammer then goes on to ask exactly why terrorists in Gaza are bothering to launch rockets into Israel, since, y’know, Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew behind pre-1967 borders. He sums it up as the same mindset that I always ascribed to Arafat: it’s a lot easier to be a terrorist/victim than a statesman.

In my opinion, one of the key functions of the Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and construction of a wall — besides keeping Palestinians from homicide-bombing inside Israel’s new borders — is to force the Palestinian people to look at themselves as citizens of their own state. Quite early in the withdrawal, we began hearing stories that Palestinians were not happy that Yasser’s cousins had all the good jobs.

My buddy Mitch Prothero commented in a recent article that the foreign press isn’t interested in covering the civil war going on in Palestinian society. He doesn’t say explicitly that this is because it goes against the accepted narrative of the Palestinians as the oppressed victims of the Zionist conspiracy, but I think that’s a big part of it (another big part is that journalists don’t want to get shot at).

Just as Brendan O’Neill has brought up some very-difficult-to-stomach aspects of the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan in his recent columns, there are parts of every story that we gloss over to keep from facing the messiness of reality, or to keep from sullying the purity of our outrage.