Category Archives: america

Thoughts on Militarism on Italy’s Day of the Republic

Come visit Italy...

Italy rarely has national holidays that anyone cares about. Milan My building is pleasantly empty at the moment, with most denizens having gone away for a long weekend. Militarism is rarely on display for secular holidays here, although this year has seen a bit more than usual, with the 150th anniversary of unification. Jasmine Tesanovic, born in Belgrade and educated in Italy, wrote that Italy’s alpini crowding into Turin’s public squares last month reminded her of Serbia’s military and paramilitary crowding into Belgrade in the early 1990s:

These volunteer warriors, loud and bold and claiming to fight for a good cause, resembled the Serbian military and paramilitary which conquered the downtown of Belgrade at the beginning of the Balkan wars.

As she notes, the alpini are in Afghanistan along other NATO troops, and whether that war is a “good cause” is definitely worth questioning, especially in these post-bin Laden days. (It should be remembered that Serbia controversially sent troops as well.)  But as anything other than a general condemnation of militaries in general, her comparison rings hollow.  Militaries of any kind have certain things in common, namely, as the saying goes, rough men (and in the American armed forces, increasingly rough women).  And one could argue, although I wouldn’t too forcefully, that violence in Kosovo was done in the loose name of preventing terrorism, in common with the violence being done in Afghanistan today.

...before it visits you?

But there the comparisons end: the Yugoslav People’s Army amping itself up for conquest in Croatia and Bosnia in the early ’90s is extremely different from a crowd of “mostly aging, tipsy men,” as she characterizes them, out to do what Italians do best: celebrate in public.  More broadly, Milosevic’s wars, opportunistic land-grabs that played on ethnic divide, bear little resemblance to American-led efforts to bring Afghanistan into a broader orbit of nations – however misguided and bungled those efforts may be.   This kind of equivocation obscures the politics by other means that is at the root of warfare — a dangerous gambit.

On the level of the personal and the violence of war, this week the Washington Post ran a piece based on interviews with three former Navy SEALs who tried to sketch a portrait of the man who shot bin Laden.  The piece is more along the lines of patriotic entertainment than reporting – there should be no doubt that any qualified solider, much less one in the Navy’s crack troops, would be able of hitting a target at close range – but it included an interesting detail:

Smith, who served in the SEALs from 1991 to 1999, got together recently with five Navy SEALs, some of whom he’d served with and others whom he’d trained. “They were responsible for 250 dead terrorists,” Smith says. “They know their number.”

That’s 50 dead men apiece. One wonders if every special forces solider has statistics like this. Every society has had its elites who exercise state-sanctioned violence in the baldest of terms, from the Praetorian Guard and the Janissaries to today’s “operators”, recently put in the spotlight by the Osama bin Laden killing.  Ruminating on their “number” will show that those who practice it are assuredly of a very different bearing than most of us.

There’s a vivid passage in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in which Carson Wells, himself an ex-Special Forces operator, reaches the end of his life. Curiously, among images of his mother and his First Communion that flash before his eyes, are those who died before him. Although it probably bears little resemble to reality, it’s intriguing.

 

Body Language and symbolism, part 2

One man

In the era of the image, media and spin presentation is ever-important. Avid followers of Premesso will recall a post offering interpretations of an old photo of Berlusconi with a sidearm a few weeks back. This time we turn our attention to Obama’s announcement of American support in the current war in Libya.

What’s interesting about the video is how Obama stands completely alone. Unlike Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, there are no medalled officers or sober government ministers flanking him. It suggest certain things about our individualistic culture, of course, but it’s also profoundly misleading – how often is it that a single leader takes a country to war? Furthermore, is it odd that a country as large and diverse as the United States invest so much power in the office of the president?

Getting Clowned

Italy's man-made aircraft carrier

This week’s l’Espresso features Berlusconi getting ‘clowned’ (as old school hip hop might have it) by the US, via the leaked Embassy cables.  Coverage is running in English as well, and the magazine promises to publish more than 4,000 cables this week.

It’s interesting to see this perspective, and to read it in English, but as is usually the case with Italian journalism, it is so heavily politicized that’s it difficult to know what to make of it.  Published by the same group that puts out the daily la Repubblica, both publications are rabidly anti-Berlusconi.  That is the first issue.

The second, which is more interesting, lies in how Italy sees the US and how the US might see Italy.  There is a component of Italian society that is extremely distrustful of American materialism on both the political left (PCI) and right (MSI), both in some ways informed by Catholicism.  Berlusconi made it acceptable to flaunt wealth, especially if it was made by dint of ingenuity — one reason why the American press, even on the left, is much less reflexively anti-Berlusconi that similar British publications.  In Italy, Berlusconi’s self-made image and aggressive pursuit of material goods give him (and the city he comes from) an American flavor.  Whether heartland Americans would be able to forgive his amorous pursuits or turn a blind eye to rewriting of Italian laws at any opportunity is unlikely — Berlusconi is entirely an Italian creature who could not have come to be or could not have survived in any other political reality.  But in Italy, there is something American about him, as far as Italians see America.

As for how Americans see Italy: Italy’s key position in the middle of both Europe and of the Mediterranean has made it strategically important since at least the time of Thucydides and probably longer.  The local particulars have varied, of course, and in the last century the existence of West Europe’s biggest communist party set the tone for US-Italian relations from the post-war period until the Berlin Wall fell and with it the First Italian Republic.  Interference from a great power in such a valuable piece of real estate is perhaps not welcome, but certainly not unexpected.

L’Espresso’s coverage is interesting, but it seems basic misprision of the trade of diplomacy flows through it.  After CGIL-led strikes paralyzed FIAT in 1954, American ambassador (and virulent anti-communist) Clare Booth Luce voiced concern to FIAT managing director Vittorio Valetta that communism was continuing to grow in Italy despite millions of dollar in Marshall Plan aid.  What right the ambassador had to manage FIAT is disputable — but that the Marshall Plan aid to Italy was an incentive to stop the flow of communism from the east is not.  That a half-century later Ambassador Ronald Spogli should seek concessions from Italy — a larger base at Vicenza to house the Army’s African Command —  for example is part of the game of diplomacy.  But instead l’Espresso says that “the White House has essentially the same vision as Mussolini: Italy is a natural aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.”  Of course it is; that is a lucky accident of geography.  Invoking Mussolini’s comment —  which was originally intended to explain why fascist Italy had not build an aircraft carrier — adds an unnecessary level of histrionics to the argument.  But this goes with the territory of Italian journalism, whether it’s written in English or its own language (where it reads better, incidentally).

Regardless, I look forward to the rest of their coverage.

I thought it was the USA…

…or just another country?

Damn lies? Or statistics?

I’m not sure what’s more depressing — the amount of ‘worst’ categories that my adopted country is in, or the amount of ‘worst of the worst’ categories that my native country is in. But something about the data seems off to me — was this chart assembled by the paper of record or actually by the IMF? I don’t doubt that other industrialized nations routinely outperform us; some of these categories are quite well-documented (healthcare availability, life expectancy, income disparities) but all the same, this reeks of a certain school of woe-is-me-American declinism that’s of limited use, if not simply tiresome. But: statistics are interesting, as long as one understand their uses and abuses.

Intuitively, I’m not sure what to make of Italian food security being at the same level of Israel (who, incidentally, did not get the dark red ‘worst of worst’ mark that the belpaese did).  Unscientifically, it’s hard to believe that anyone starves in Italy — but much easier to believe that many families find it hard to ‘make it to the end of the month,’ to translate the Italian phrase.  Rising food prices play a role in that, but according to a recently-unveiled Euripes report (quoted here on MSN),  public debt and the cost of energy and housing are the main culprits.

Mortgages and rents are not affordable for two out of five Italian families, and 40% of households have difficulties in paying rates and fees. A worrying picture emerges when you compare the data of 2011 with the previous year: 40% of Italian families has trouble paying their mortgage, compared to 23.2% in 2010, and 38.1% have trouble paying rent, versus 18.1% in 2010.

It Felt Like a Kiss

As I said last weekend, I’ve been on a heavy Adam Curtis kick recently.  Century of the Self is quite a worthwhile flick, but his latest, It Felt Like a Kiss, really pushes the boundaries.  An experimental film commissioned initially by the BBC, Curtis collobarated with the Punchdrunk production company on it.  It certainly has the feel of installation art in terms of disturbing images and disturbing music (special pieces by the Kronos Quartet jumped out at me, as did the frequent use of early Velvet Underground), but it has at bottom messages about politics, power, individualism and consumption that are sometimes ambiguous, often unsettling and always trenchant.  Beware of the super-quick montages.

My one gripe is that Curtis can tend towards the paranoid.  By his own admission, a lot of today’s politics is driven by paranoia.  Fair enough, but I’m not sure about a couple of his assertions, like that the ‘computers that controlled the Cold War and guided the rockets to the moon’ were put to use analyzing the credit data of all Americans, or that the unnamed ‘founder’ of the CIA’s Clandestine Services (formerly the Directorate of Operations) went mad and committed suicide, but as film montage with a message about the politics of consumerism and desire, the film stands on its own.

Italy note: thanked alongside the AP, New York Daily News and ITN archives is Italy’s own Mediaset.

Obama at Tuscon

After a British colleague thoroughly exhorted me to watch Obama’s Tuscon speech, I did so. The fact that my own family wrote me in praise of it somehow didn’t provide the same motivation. It’s a fine speech; particularly towards the end where he couches his dreams of what American could be in the terms of a child’s thinking — specifically the child slain in the shooting, Christina Taylor-Green. The president’s words were intended to unite, not divide, as is his wont. Much is made of this usually, but to see it in practice is a rare thing, to be appreciated. Which is why I can’t figure out why there are those who look askance at the motives behind his speech, or who decry it as some sort of sign of the weakening of the American psyche — that the leader is expected to give comfort to a wounded nation. The art of the funeral oratory as powerful way to praise the dead while exhorting the nation and the living goes back to at least the fifth century before Christ: “So died these men as becomes Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier outcome.” Finally we have a leader who is able to stand with the ancients on this.

If that’s not good enough for you and if you prefer words to go to the living, then watch Sal Giunta — America’s humblest hero — receive the Medal of Honor from President Obama. Those who feel that the president is not “of the people” should pay especial attention to his off-script asides and the quiet, comforting words he speaks off-mic to Giunta, who is clearly not entirely comfortable at being singled out for his bravery but who wants to do right by graciously accepting the honor.

On Wrestling with Angels

No Need to Reinvent the Wheel

Have you ever wanted to do something difficult, perhaps out of frustration, or to beat fear?  Maybe you ran a marathon, or took up biking, or read a long book or worked out a difficult puzzle.  What you in all likelihood did not do was have men ten years your junior punch you in the face and break some of your bones, while you — of course — were trying to do the same to them.

But this is precisely what J.D. Daniels — pictured dragging a tire to train — did for over two years, and he writes about it in the fall edition (not the winter edition, which is just on the stands) of the Paris Review.  His account, with the decidedly understated title of “Letter from Cambridge” is well worth your time, and I’ll break my non-commercial policy to encourage you to buy the magazine.  As Lorin Stein somewhat refreshingly reminds us, it is not meant to be surfed.  Daniels’ piece you’ll have to shell out for.  You can get a Houellebecq interview for your dozen clams, too.

But most importantly, you will get the sense that you are at home, instead of having someone who puts “Big” in front of his name with zero sense of irony dislocate your shoulder, break your nose and arm-triangle you into submission.  You might be relieved about this at first, but then you might wonder what it means that you are sitting at home.  You may find yourself pondering the words of the Brazilian dojo-master who asks Daniels in one of several explanatory asides, “without fighting, when you feel this in your life?  […]  Two, three times?  It make you a more major person.”

Some people wrestle with their demons.  By his own admission, Daniels wrestles with angels.

The Trap

I first encountered Adam Curtis via 2004’s The Power of Nightmares, which I watched while I was a graduate student. It was an interesting and provocative thesis — that the rise of the neocons had a parallel in the rise of radical Islam, and that both were based in the politics of fear. His style of film collage, often heartily ironic, mixed with unadorned interviews, fit the subject matter well. More than anything I appreciated his quest to see big-picture issues — something rare for the political commentator, who tends to get bogged down in details.

I was excited to have the chance to watch 2007’s The Trap this weekend, another three-part series for the BBC. The unlikely threads he traces here are even more ambitious than those in The Power of Nightmares — and accordingly, are sometimes more tenuous. All the same, the similarities he sees between game theory, pharmaceuticals and the DSM, performance targets in government, and Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative liberty are fascinating, and those are just the bigger issues he touches on.

Initially I disagreed with his characterization of John Nash. I didn’t like the way that he played up Nash’s schizophrenia and played down the rigor of game theory. As anyone who’s every struggled through a game theory problem set knows, it’s a challenging discipline and not merely Cold War paranoia. Nash comes off badly in the first episode but Curtis is more sympathetic towards him in the second, when he admits that the assumptions behind the actors in game theory — that human beings are necessarily always totally rational and coldly self-interested — is flawed.

The greater problem is that this assumption is not limited to merely game theory but is common to all of modern economics. Curtis seems to place the origin of the modern era’s increased control and anxiety squarely on the shoulders of this limited understanding of the human condition. I think most practicing economists realize that the model of human beings as mechanistic and calculating is just that — a model. As Curtis glibly points out, no out actually acts this way, aside from economists themselves and psychopaths. But that’s a shortcoming of a science that tries assiduously to measure utility, the quantification of which has been contentious since the days of J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham. It’s an imprecise science that deals with data precisely.

The problem, I’d argue, is when political leaders base all of their actions on this admittedly limited model, assuming that the model of human beings that it presents must be as rigorous as the methods with which it treats datasets and trends.

At any rate, it’s a fascinating film that tries to cut to the big-picture issues of what ails us in the modern era. Most filmmakers and TV producers skirt such diagnoses. Other 20th-century giants that get an interview include Friedrich von Hayek, James M. Buchanan,Thomas Schelling, R.D. Laing, Malcolm Muggeridge, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Alexander Haig, Samuel P. Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Jeffrey Sachs. How can you go wrong with a cast like that?

If that’s not enough of a sell, pop addicts should like the soundtrack which features Yo La Tengo, Brian Eno, Morricone, LCD Soundsystem and music from the Godfather, as well as Shostakovich and Sibelius.

Finally, for those interested in Italy, Paul Ginsborg has correctly identified the kind of liberty that the current prime minister is always going on about as Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty.  The third episode is all about how negative liberty has been appraised and unleashed in Britain, America and the rest of the world, so it deserves a careful study.

The Chains are Broken, the Knives are Sharpened, the Glock is Photographed

Morning roundup:

Interesting times in Tunisia.  Is it the Arab’s world Gdansk or is that too much to hope for?  We’ll see.  But it’s something.

I was heartened to see that Yglesias also excused himself from blogging extensively on Tunisia for much the same reason that I did: ignorance.  But he goes a bit further and discusses the incentive for high growth in the country,including a quote from Tyler Cowen as well.

On this side of the Mediterranean, the judiciary is coming out against Berlusconi with knives sharpened, talking about trying him as a sex offender.  I agree with Rodotà writing in the Observer back in November that it’s really tiresome how the man seems to dominate the headlines.  There’s just no escape, even when actual revolutions are happening in the next country over.  Annalis Piras, in London for L’Espresso, astutely points out that attempts to defeat Berlusconi legally just make him stronger during elections — which probably will get called early this year.  How to get out of this Chinese finger trap?

Up in Austria, Mr. Glock’s past tribulations seem like the sort of violent betrayal worthy of a Bernhard novel.  Across the waters in the US, our gun-obsessed culture futiley tries to understand madness, criminality and legislation by zooming in on the weapon itself.   I’m not sure why we have this misprision.  There are many reasons but the most overarching could have to do with David Reisman’s assertion that Americans tend to locate things outside themselves, which Margaret Mead also noticed.  While I dig around JSTOR for the original, here’s Todd Gitlin in his introduction to the 2001 edition of the Lonely Crowd:

Mead herself pointed to a passage noting that other-directed conformism predisposed Americans to project power centers outside the self — a reason the paranoid streak in American life loomed so large, and perhaps also a reason Americans were excessively afraid that the Russians would take them over.

What if we just substitute “immigrants” or “socialists” for Russians?  Does that make it clearer, and take some of the blame away from a pugnacious octogenarian Austrian engineer?  I’d hope so.  The Times piece shamefully ignores much of what is true about human society and economics of supply and demand.  Chekhov’s rule may be true in fiction but less so in real life: just because the gun is there, it doesn’t have to be fired.

The Sacred, the Profane and the Nothing-Based Economy

A friend recently sent me one of those scarcely credible “grosser than gross” stories that both defy and defile the imagination, and that seem to be all the more popular amid the anonymity of the internet. Yet this one was far from anonymous. and written in a style that is, by the author’s own admission, angry, recklessly confessional and contemptuous. Interesting… but who is the person behind the persona?

How journalism became SEO

Maureen Tkacik is taking the pulse of journalism, or what used to pass for it, more astutely than most so-called “real journalists” — or ones with a fancy beat instead of ex-Jezebel and Gawker ranters, although her street cred includes the WSJ as well.  Her understanding of media and of the world as driven by artificial, drummed-up demand that journalists are increasingly complicit in creating is incisive.

In a very different way, her take on journalism’s complicity in creating self-perpetuating systems is similar to Glenn Greenwald’s continuing indignation with journalists who serve and protect the very government they might be actually reporting on.  But that’s a thought for another post.

Whatever you do, make sure you at least read the first 7/8ths or so of “Look at Me” in the Columbia Journalism Review — by way of taking an unflinching look at the state of journalism today, it makes a bigger point about the “virulent new self-obsessed model for journalistic success” that has taken hold of not only the profession, but of wide swaths of Western culture as well. I say “Western” so I can include American Idol along with Big Brother and Uomini e donne.

She’s also thorough in her take-downs of various not-quite-sacred cows such as Malcolm Gladwell and the Wharton School.

Side note: as a reluctant two-time Washingtonian, I was glad to read some history of Wonkette. After two years of often-clandestine blogging from the Balkans, I was shocked to come home on furlough in 2004 and read about how political blogging along the lines of Ana Marie Cox’s, was the “next big thing” in no less than the New York Times. But Tkacik has some words about that, as well as how history repeated itself in 2007 with Emily Gould.

Give the CJR piece your full attention; it’s well worth your time and worth the dread it may instill in you.  If it’s a different kind of dread you seek, then once you’ve checked out Maureen, you can check out Moe.