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Archives for May 2011

A Consumer Society Seeks Expiation Of Guilt (Memorial Day Edition)

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Expiation: The act of making satisfaction or atonement for any crime or fault; the extinguishing of guilt by suffering or penalty.

(emphasis added)

We celebrate today’s holiday in solemn recognition of the outsized burden we all collectively impose on our professional military, reservists and families. We also believe today’s ostensibly fulsome ‘honoring’ those who served is a transient, narcissistic gesture to alleviate abstract guilt.

The point of the definition, of course, is that the paeans across the Twitterverse, blogs and TeeVee involve no real suffering or penalty (besides stultification). Sincere and heartfelt efforts still unsatisfying because to honor requires deeper understanding beyond responding to retinal impressions.

(Have no fear, Dear Reader, we’re not going to join in the Franzen fracas that to use Facebook is to never know love. The old French New Wave cinema would have known how to deal with that anyway).

Thanks, Charlie Moskos. You’re Missed.

Why a critique instead of treacly obeisance to Memorial Day iconography? Because we remember Charlie Moskos.

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Rogue Client State Part 37

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ISI helped coordinate the Mumbai terrorist attack? India’s RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) has been saying that for years. Of course, RAW also claims ISI is responsible for Justin Bieber. Still, the whole broken clock thing. And it’s not like this court testimony is particularly firm or fact filled. Let’s run with it, shall we?

When In Doubt Consult With True Experts

Face it, talk to a London cabbie and they’ll give the same advice: logistics, logistics and logistics. As long as the Boy King wages a failed war in Afghanistan (now with extra-Petraeus, set to run an excessively militarized, less accountable CIA) we’ve got to try playing low key. 100,000 men without food, ammo and POL? Assume some flyboy will guarantee the Boy King air supply (how novel). 4 months and still it won’t be pretty, even without Italian armies running away.

If you hear anyone talking about ‘getting tough on Pakistan’ without providing a solution to this logistical choke hold that idiot – well, that’s probably a senior Administration official. But you see where we were going. Thus does Obama’s folly of a two-fold escalation come home to roost. Then COIN stupidity blocks other rational, strategic choices. We ‘need’ Pakistan because yadda, yadda, yadda — we’re geo-politically dim. U.S. engagement with the feeble Pakistani civilian government will somehow moderate and curtail the military’s primacy? Vapidity worthy of Cher Condi. Even in the medium term the smallest prospect borders on fanciful.

Throw COIN In The Trash Can

Toss COIN. The stupidest idea since Iraq. The U.S. has no vital strategic stake in who’s the Mayor of Kabul. As for the insanity of building a state out of disparate tribes and clans? We can’t even rebuild Michigan. Hello McFly? ‘Nuff said. Make extra sure Petraeus (and Stan) get three cups of tea when the news breaks.

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Better Them Than Us — David Brooks Lands In London Town

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Poor Old Blighty. Once again a Yank (really Canadian born) “is over-hyped, overpaid and over here.” David Brooks is the darling of what passes for the British political smart set; his new book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting him this week. Steve Hilton, Cameron’s top strategist, has invited him to hold a seminar at No 10 on Friday.

Other Brits across the political and social firmament are tripping over themselves to apply Brooksian thought to everything from clogged drains to dry skin. At last, America has revenge for the Arctic Monkeys.

Why the adulation? Like Gertrude Himmelfarb, wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Willie, Brooks’ book seeks to reinterpret the Enlightenment so as to turn it inside out as it were. Rather than a period of ascending rationality, both Himmelfarb and Brooks focus on certain British thinkers of the era who urged the supremacy of the irrational, emotive essence of mankind. Brooks approvingly quotes Hume “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.”

“When we invaded Iraq we were blind to the social problems that would be involved. We didn’t realise they didn’t trust us.” Hold on – didn’t he write a New York Times column urging invasion? “I did. I was so blind about it. In that column I wondered what Michael Oakeshott [the British conservative political philosopher] would have said. He would have said: this society is very complicated and you should be circumspect in thinking about what you can achieve, and that invading to install democracy without trust is doomed. And then I wrote: ‘Having said that, I think we should invade.'”

Brooks apparently thinks the problem with Iraq was that America was insufficiently irrational with ‘street smarts’ and too rational. And his message to the UK is add some irrationality and street smarts to the government along with vague communal spirits. Don’t the Brits realize they can get all this penetrating insight for free weekly on PBS? In mercifully short 10 minute doses, too.

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