More Bad History, Writing and Thinking

I had only half finished reading Bissell's takedown of Kaplan. I continue.... I won't quote the discussion of how Kaplan turns his laser-pointer-like gaze and nineteenth-century racial and sexual sensibilities on the US and Canada: it has to be read in full to be believed, anyway. I'll move on to his most recent work:

“Indeed,” he writes, “by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.” To say the least, the notion that the United States effectively rules the planet is an emaciated one. Does Kaplan not remember the endless haggling the United States was forced to do on the eve of the Iraq War to enable its use of other nations’ airfields? Do other nations’ desires and integrity really mean so little to Kaplan? But at the Pentagon, we learn, Kaplan gazed upon a Mercator projection of the US military’s areas of responsibility and saw a planet chopped up into jagged rectangles of command (CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, and so forth). He “stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the US not constitute a global military empire?” But sometimes a map is just a map.
...
To be sure, there are certainly imperial aspects to US involvement around the world, but to argue that US goals are “exactly” like those of the Soviets, Persians, French, British, or Spanish is analysis along the lines of History Channel voiceover.

Then you get to the point where, as Bissell says, the book becomes a "thesaurus of incoherencies"

So what is Kaplan’s understanding of imperialism? “Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world.” Okay. But then: “The grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.” Got that? And: “America’s imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren’t really countries.” It is? They aren’t? “Imperialism was less about conquest than about the training of local armies.” Oh. “All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute.” But you just said— “The Americans wanted clean end-states and victory parades. Imperialism, though, is a never-ending involvement.” Before long you’re wondering if taking a good old-fashioned American dump in a US-dug latrine in Yemen is not also “imperialism.”

The US Military, especially our men (and women? Doesn't seem to be) in uniform is the subject of Imperial Grunts

“The American military is a worldwide fraternity,” Kaplan writes, filled with “singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes.” The soldiers “talked in clichés,” he informs us. “It is the emotion and look in their faces—sweaty and gummed with dust—that matters more than the words. After all, a cliché is something that only the elite recognizes as such.” That is surely why, Kaplan says, “these guys like George W. Bush so much. . . . He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it.” Besides, those cliché-conscious elites are yellow anyway. As one soldier tells Kaplan, “I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks.” Kaplan himself seems to have come to share this harsh essentialism.
...
Kaplan argues that Evangelical soldiers, whose entire worldview is founded upon accepting that everyone who is not a Christian will roast on Beelzebub’s spit, is in actual fact the US military’s strongest asset, seeing that “morale could not be based on polite subtleties or secular philosophical constructions, but only on the stark belief in your own righteousness, and in the inequity of your enemy.” God will just have to sort them out.

In soldiers, according to Bissell, Kaplan sees the antithesis of "elites" whose subtlty, education and sensitivity are ill-suited to the simplistic world which Kaplan sees. If it sounds one-sided and unrealistic, there's a reason

After quoting one National Guardsman as saying, “We’re like tourists with guns,” Kaplan writes: “While the media was filled with lugubrious stories about the great sacrifices being made by reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan, these guys were having the time of their lives.” Last summer I was embedded with the Marines in Iraq, and I certainly noticed some of soldiering’s satisfactions, even a few of its hard-won joys. I also saw men and women tensely grinding their dinner between molars and crying while talking to their loved ones back home; I saw equal amounts of frustration and confusion, and, in one particularly awful occasion, some wounded Marines brought into a surgical ward. A screaming, burned Marine is not having the time of his life, and neither are his friends. I am sure the US military has its share of cheerful characters—the burned Marine may have been having a ball until the day our paths crossed—but Kaplan continually, and in my opinion criminally, refuses to dig beyond his baseline feeling that soldiers are super. It is both a literary and moral failure.

I would like to end, in fairness, with the one line from Kaplan quoted by Bissell that actually strikes me as worth consideration:

“Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world.”

That's a pretty good summary, actually of the world-systems-theory version of Imperialism, the gradual extension of control over economic or territorial peripheries in order to maintain access to raw materials and markets, to stabilize the economy and protect the citizenry of the metropole. The difference, I guess, is in what you do with that knowledge.

Classic. Liberal.

I know of three people (counting me) who've taken this test, all of whom have gotten incredibly accurate results. Pretty cool.

	1.	John Stuart Mill (100%) Click here for info
	2.	Kant (95%) Click here for info
	3.	Jeremy Bentham (83%) Click here for info
	4.	Epicureans (65%) Click here for info
	5.	Aristotle (63%) Click here for info
	6.	Aquinas (60%) Click here for info
	7.	Spinoza (60%) Click here for info
	8.	Stoics (59%) Click here for info
	9.	Prescriptivism (58%) Click here for info
	10.	Jean-Paul Sartre (57%) Click here for info
	11.	Ayn Rand (53%) Click here for info
	12.	David Hume (43%) Click here for info
	13.	Nel Noddings (37%) Click here for info
	14.	St. Augustine (36%) Click here for info
	15.	Nietzsche (34%) Click here for info
	16.	Cynics (32%) Click here for info
	17.	Ockham (27%) Click here for info
	18.	Plato (25%) Click here for info
	19.	Thomas Hobbes (25%) Click here for info

Bad History, Bad Writing, Bad Thinking: Same Thing

Tom Bissell on Robert Kaplan

The bus ride from Tashkent to Samarkand provides some spectacularly rocky and mountainous scenery, but somehow Kaplan notices only “high weeds” and an “achingly flat, monochrome landscape.” Once he reaches Samarkand he remarks on the “battered automobiles, and people in unsightly polyester clothing.” Battered automobiles? Most of Uzbekistan’s people are poor, and this seemed needlessly petty. As for people’s clothing, I have never found Uzbekistan’s city-dwellers to be anything but maniacally fastidious about their appearance. (Shoeshining is practically the Uzbek national pastime.) He gets wrong the 1994 exchange rate of the Uzbek currency by a factor of 100. He visits Guri Amir, the tomb of the fourteenth-century despot Tamerlane, which he spells “Gul Emir.” He says the word uzbek means “independent” or “free.” That is wrong. His translator, Ulug Beg, a young Uzbek, claims to be “ashamed” in Samarkand because it has so many Tajiks. “How can I like them?” Ulug Beg asks Kaplan of the Tajiks. “We must settle Uzbeks here. We must settle many, many Uzbeks in Samarkand.” Problem: Samarkand, though a Tajik-majority city, has many, many Uzbeks. He writes that Samarkand is a “would-be Bangkok,” with its “army of whores.” I asked a friend who lived in Samarkand for years if that description at all rang true to him. My friend was still laughing when I hung up the phone. When Ulug Beg slurps as he eats Kaplan calls him “crude” and wonders if Ulug Beg’s manners might be explained this way: “Could these be pre-Byzantine Turks? Could this be what Turks might have been somewhat like before the great Seljuk and Osmanli migrations to Anatolia”? The Seljuks migrated to Anatolia around 900 years ago. That Kaplan does not understand how offensive such eugenic explanations are for one young man’s eating habits is appalling. That he does not recognize the basic implausibility of such an explanation is beyond reason.

I found this Via Scott McLemee. Neither Bissell nor McLemee ask what seems to me to be the obvious question: has anyone checked Kaplan's passport and travel receipts? Bissell is a fine writer, full of piss and vinegar in this piece:

• "Bush has gone from an isolationist to an interventionist minus the crucial intermediary stage wherein he actually became interested in other places."
• "Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the extension of politics by other means. Bush and Kaplan, on the other hand, appear to advocate war as cultural politics by other means. This has resulted in a collision of second-rate minds with third-rate policies. While one man attempts to make the world as simple as he is able to comprehend it, the other whispers in his various adjutants’ ears that they are on the side of History itself."
• "In all of his books, but especially in Mediterranean Winter, Kaplan is incapable of making a point about the past without pointing a finger at the present. To wit: “Carthage’s defeat in the First Punic War—like Germany’s in World War I—led to anarchy at home.” But how is the 2,200-year-old First Punic War at all otherwise comparable to Weimar Germany? (In another book he again rolls out this hot rod, slightly modulated, and writes how the Second Punic War has “many resemblances to World War II that seems to warn against the hubris of our own era.” Well, they both have a two.) He also connects, preposterously, a fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian invasion of Sicily with “President Lyndon Johnson dispatching half a million American troops to South Vietnam.” Of course he acknowledges the differences, but they “seemed less interesting than the similarities.” That is because Kaplan is addicted to similarities and blind to differences. “One can write endlessly about the differences between the first and twenty-first centuries A.D.,” he writes in another book. Yes. One can."
• It's not all bad: "Even if the Ethiopian famine did not turn out to have the global ramifications Kaplan projected—wherever Kaplan travels, we are assured that whatever is happening there is going to have vast consequences—his attempt from within one of hell’s inner circles to make others take note of the suffering he has witnessed is salutary, and even moving."
• This is also good: "His take on Afghan’s guerrillas, while somewhat naive (as he himself admits), is, all the same, winningly honest: “Sympathizing with guerrilla movements is an occupational hazard of foreign correspondents everywhere, but the Afghans were the first guerrillas whom journalists not only sympathized with but actually looked up to.'"
• But then it goes off a cliff again: " Kaplan can complain about the unwarranted aftereffects of Balkan Ghosts all he wants, but he is the man who salted his book with statements such as, “while the Greeks and the Macedonian Slavs despise each other, as Orthodox Christians they equally despise the Muslim Kosovars.” The metaphysics of what makes people suddenly garrote and rape their neighbors can be debated from now until the end of time, but to generalize so complacently gives hatred a mask that too many can hide behind."
• "It takes a special kind of man to waltz into a foreign city, tar the entire populace as recessive Nazis, and then refer to them as animals."

I'm not even finished reading it yet....

Compare, Contrast, Contrive

• For your statistical pleasure: Nationmaster and StateMaster [via]
• For your Satirical pleasure: Carnival of Satire, including some truly funny stuff.
• For your Serious Consideration: Ozarque's ongoing study of current despair and search for a solution
• For sheer fun: Panexa, satire, via Ozarque.

Adapted LiveJournal Self-Quiz

1. What does your LivejournalBlogger name mean?
I do not want to be simply a symptom of the times: I want to draw on the strong but neglected histories and I want to be a harbinger and creator of a different future.

2. Elaborate on your default profile photo?
It's Japanese. When I started this blog I wanted an image that was facelike but abstract, and I had this in my collection.

3. Make up a question.
Have you considered going into politics?
Yes, and I think I have the analytical and policy skills, but I don't think I have the presentation (I think when I talk, which is death on speechmaking) and people skills (I hate asking for money, and I hate committing myself to courses of action in which I don't really believe) to succeed in today's political arena. Every so often I say "I could do better" and my spouse reminds me that I'd hate it....

4. What's your current relationship status?
Married.

5. What EXACTLY are you wearing right now?
Not what you think....

6. What is your current problem?
Organization and self-discipline.

7. Who do you love most?
Toss-up: Spouse or child.

8. What makes you most happy?
Doing something for someone that makes them feel loved.
Also chocolate.

9. Are you musically inclined?
In some ways, yes.

10. If you could go back in time, and change something, what would you change?
There's so much to choose from.... I'd prevent the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and preserve the Library of Alexandria.

11. If you MUST be an animal for ONE day, what would you be?
It would be fun to fly: I'd have to be a bird. A seagull, I think.

12. Ever have a near death experience?
I've come dangerously close to falling asleep while driving once or twice.

13. Name an obvious quality you have.
Size.

14. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
Henry Mancini's Theme for the Pink Panther; we heard an amateur rendition recently, and downloaded a really nice one so the Little Anachronism could hear the real thing.

15. Who did you cut and paste this from?
MochiTsuki

16. Name someone with the same birthday as you.
No, but you can look up your own birthday here.

17. Have you ever vandalized someone's private property?
Not to my knowledge.

18. Have you ever been in a fight?
Not physically.

19. Have you ever sung in front of a large audience?
Yes, several times.

20. What is the first thing you notice about the opposite/same sex?
Whether they are smiling.

21. What do you usually order from Starbucks?
Last time I ordered something in a Starbucks.... it's been a while. I don't remember what they call it, but one of my favorite coffee-shop drinks is the Depth Charge: a cup of coffee with an extra shot of espresso. I don't like to get a lot of calories from creams and flavor shots.... though I will do mocha stuff sometimes.

24. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity?
No.

25. Do you still watch kiddy movies or TV shows?
With Little Anachronism, of course.

26. Did you have braces?
No.

27. Are you comfortable with your height?
Yes.

28. What is the most romantic thing someone has ever done for you?
Overcome their own fears.

29. Do you speak any other languages?
Yes.

30. Do you have a crush on someone on your livejournal or blogroll?
Ummm.... in a platonic bloggerly sense, I suppose so.

Funny things we do....

Kids are funny, I like taking pictures of bugs, and there's a lot of bad history out there.

P.S. It's the Pooflinger's Blogiversary: he flings fine poo; go wish him well!

Murakami's Sofa

Wherein I borrow Bill's format and play with my new toy

We just got a new (second hand; thanks, Dad!) scanner so that both of us have them. Now I don't have to interrupt my spouse or go across the house, etc., to scan pictures or text. I'm going to be doing more of that, now!

My first entry is from Murakami Haruki's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (pp. 44-45). It's good, but a bit .... overly neat, too structured. It's well-done but doesn't have the energy or surprise I expect from his surrealism. Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the last one of his I read, was much better on both scores. Still, it's been good reading. This quotation gives away nothing, but it does help to explain why we still have the same couch we got second-hand seven years ago (thanks, Bro!), and why my parents still have the couch set they bought thirty years ago....

I must have rested two or three times during the old man's absence. During these breaks, I went to the toilet, crossed my arms and put my face down on the desk, and stretched out on the sofa. The sofa was perfect for sleeping. Not too soft, not too hard; even the cushions pillowed my head just right. Doing different tabulation jobs, I've slept on a lot of sofas, and let me tell you, the comfortable ones are few and far between. Typically, they're cheap deadweight. Even the most luxurious-looking sofas are a disappointment when you actually try to sleep on them. I never understand how people can be lax about choosing sofas.

I always say—a prejudice on my part, I'm sure—you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa. Sofas constitute a realm inviolate unto themselves. This, however, is something that only those who have grown up sitting on good sofas will appreciate. It's like growing up reading good books or listening to good music. One good sofa breeds another good sofa; one bad sofa breeds another bad sofa. That's how it goes.

There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may well be worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

Sure, it's a variation on an old theme -- "You can judge a person's character by their...." -- but oh, so true.

Blog Poetry Returns

There once was a poetry carnival
Which was fun, but didn't last very well
Now haiku and sonnets
and free verse (and limericks?)
can be seen at Ringing of the Bards, y'all

Knowledge is Power, even (especially?) for children

As I've said before, withholding information about sex does more harm than good. My favorite bit in his piece is where he notes the disparity between England's age of sexual consent (16) and the age of criminal reponsibility (10).

Were I in a mood to blog...

...I would add this to my Impeachment index. I know, technically you can't impeach him for things he did before he was president. Think of it as a character witness for the prosecution.

I am not in a mood to blog.