-Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Snyder adds:
Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill. It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.
Unfortunately, claiming victim status does not itself bring sound ethical choices. Stalin and Hitler throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they, too, were victims: of an international capitalist or Jewish conspiracy. During the German invasion of Poland. a German soldier believed that the death grimace of a Pole proved that Poles irrationally hated Germans. During the famine, a Ukranian communist found himself beleagureed by the corpses of the starved at his doorstep. They both portrayed themselves as victims. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-firsr century, we see a second wave of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit references to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. The Austrian policeman shooting babies at Mahileu imagined what the Soviets would do to his children.
The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping at their deaths. By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by identifying with the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim, but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander [italics added]. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding intellectuals and politicians -- for example, Edward Benes and Ilya Ehrenburg -- yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet-Jewish writer were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.
To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.
Cleve Loney had had enough. The taciturn Montana state legislator had sat quietly as Democrats criticized Republican legislation that, if passed, would nullify federal laws impacting gun ownership and law enforcement jurisdiction and would state with unadorned, down home common sense that global warming is good for business. Governor Brian Schweitzer described Republican plans as "toxic" and reminiscent of the Civil War. When House Minority Leader Jon Sesso questioned whether Montana politicians could wisely interpret the Constitution, Cleve Loney saw an opening. The quiet man gathered his thoughts (such as they are) and stood tall.
"I don't intend for us to secede from the Union," he said reassuringly. "But I will tell you," he added with sage if wildly wrong determination, "it is up to us. We are the people to decide."
Well.
I -- and I'm certain that President Obama, too -- will certainly sleep better knowing that an obscure Montana politician has decided not to rend the Union asunder. Yet, anyway. Of course, this issue was settled in blood some time ago, and neither Montana nor any other state has the right to unilaterally secede.
Part of me, though, says let them secede if they want to. It would take less than a year for the whole country to discover just exactly how dependent Montana and everyone else is on the federal government.
For starters, Montana would have to be self-sustaining: It has no port, and neither Canada nor the United States would recognize its status. So there will be no way for food and other imports to get in or for exports to get out.
There would be no Social Security or Medicare. The state that ranks 43rd in per capita income but is the 6th oldest in age would be on its own in terms of keeping its retirees housed, fed, and cared for.
There will be no federal support of the University of Montana or Montana State University. Tuition and fees would rise to such levels that the schools might as well close their doors, leaving a state in which less than 20% of its population has a bachelor's degree even worse off. In the process, the lovely college towns of Bozeman and Missoula would wither and die.
Montana does not have a medical school and, under the circumstances, the University of Washington would be unlikely to accept applicants from there. Moreover, health sciences programs tend to have a heavy dependency on federal grants. Montana would quickly lose any semblance of being able to meet the health care needs of its people.
Montana receives $1.58 from the federal government for every $1.00 it contributes in taxes. The teabagger plan to address that 37% dropoff would make for interesting reading.
Equally interesting will be the plan to assume the responsibilities of the 21,000 federal employees in Montana, including national park rangers, biologists, forest management, and fish and wildlife specialists.
Go ahead, Montana -- secede. You'll make for a great object lesson.
Having been caught off guard by President Obama's announcement that he would not enforce the odious Defense of Marriage Act, the right uncharacteristically took a day to articulate a typically incoherent response. But fear not: They've found their footing. The president's announcement, it seems,
is a needless distraction from the pressing business of turning the economy around and creating jobs. Never mind that the first thing the new Republican house majority accomplished was to introduce and approve socially conservative legislation, or that the only thing they've proposed to do about jobs is to eliminate them;
along the same lines, the announcement polarizes the country at a time when we should be acting as one. Never mind that the Defense of Marriage Act polarized by design or that, since Obama's election, every public act and utterance by conservatives has been deliberately divisive;
a cynical political ploy by a cynical president who doesn't care any more about gay rights than...than...well, we do. Never mind that securing a political advantage by supporting gay rights is an impossibility if, as conservatives insist, they represent majority sentiment;
is an arrogant power grab, that unilaterally declaring the act unconstitutional only shows Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Never mind that Obama declared no such thing: The announcement is in response to an opinion issued by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Once an AG -- the executive branch makes such an unambiguous statement, the POTUS had better have a good reason not to follow through;
Moreover, one of the initial actions of House Republicans was to pass a rule requiring that all legislation passed by Congress include a Constitutional justification. The Attorney General's office is certainly better positioned than the legislative branch to make such a determination -- true conservatives would applaud this effort to rein in state overreach.
Once again, these people show that they don't like government except when they like it. When they do, any effort to contravene them is by definition an arrogant, unconstitutional power grab. To be fair, they know more than a little about arrogant, unconstitutional power grabs.
Police attack striking truck drives in Minneapolis, 1934
With a chilling echo of the days when state governments called out the police to attack striking workers, Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox has urged police to "use live ammunition" in dealing with fellow Wisconsinites. When asked to confirm his advice, Cox replied "You're damn right," no doubt assuring him of heroic status among the peace-loving teabaggers who urged "Second Amendment remedies" should they not get their way via the democratic process and who howled in incoherent rage at Civil Rights hero John Lewis. The Wisconsin demonstrators include school teachers, policemen, and fire fighters.
You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic–the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men.
President Dwight Eisenhower, December 5, 1955
The only good Union is a dead union.
Comment on RSRedState
Months from now, when this is enacted and people realize it’s not the end of the world. Not all, but I think the vast majority, including the vast majority of the public employees, will realize this was not nearly as bad as they thought it was going to be.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R)
In these tough times, I think people are going to feel that this is not that much to ask. Everyone is going to have to pitch in.
Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Naturally) Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly
There's pitching in and then there's Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's undisguised plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights -- only the most publicized latest Republican assault on the democratic process. Governor John Kasich of Ohio has readied similar legislation, and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey openly boasts of the hatred that New Jersey firefighters have for him. Ten years ago, in the wake of 9/11, publicly disdaining firefighters would have been unthinkable. Times have certainly changed.
As Rachel Maddow points out, things have fallen into place for conservatives. With the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision having allowed unlimited campaign contributions to overflow the coffers of Republican candidates, the Republicans can now unleash an offensive against public employee unions, the prime institutional source of Democratic party money. Meanwhile, flush with their success in destroying ACORN, Republicans continue the suppression tactics designed to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting. Combined, the Republicans hope these three tactics will provide near-permanent electoral success even as the demographics of the country shift against them.
The Republican Jobs Agenda has become all too clear: An underpaid, disenfranchised workforce too discouraged and too exhausted for political activism but all too useful in serving the dwindling privieged tier of affluent white collar workers and financiers. The working class victims of the RJA will be uneducated by design, will lack technical and financial skills, and will find themselves in a constant scramble to stay fed by the non-nutritional food choices available to them. Continually squeezed funding for education and public safety and the deregulation of the environment will ensure that they exist with daily stresses of low income, inadequate learning, the threat of violence, and air unfit to breath. In short, their vision for most Americans is a combination of Blade Runner and Soviet bread lines.
Add 1984 to the mix as well: As consumers of unrelenting propaganda, the groups that comprise this "thrifty working class" will each resent the existence of the other and blame the other for their plight, much as today's middle class whites -- what is left of them -- are encouraged to fear minority groups. As always, they will find psychological safety by supporting the Great Lies they absorb as revealed truth.
The end of collective bargaining would be a catastrophe for every person who has a boss and who ever will have a boss. It would devastate an already tottering democratic process. The question, of course, is why anyone -- even Republicans -- would want that. For the answer, look no further than the frozen steppes of ideology. In this respect, Republicanism has become indistinguishable from Stalinism: The party and the country (and, if they have their way, the state) are one, and what is good for one is and should be good for the other. Opposition to Republicanism is opposition to Americanism and therefore unworthy of good faith treatment. Lies and half-truths are not only justified, they're a necessity in dealing with people who attack your way of life.
And the biggest threat to this is the Great Satan of redistribution. Essentially, Republicanists see government as agent created by liberals through which the hard-earned money of white conservatives is redistributed to underserving minorities (often euphemized as the "poor," complete with quotation marks). That's why conservatives claim without shame that the tax rates should be adjusted to collect more from the poor and middle class -- after all, they've been stealing from their betters for years.
Fixation on the supposed redistribution values of liberals illuminates Republicanism's commitment to the distribution of scarce resources to winners and losers, with the losers seen as their political opposition. Thus, politics is no longer a means to attain a greater societal good (however defined) but a strategy for marginalizing opponents economically, psychologically, and politically. Under this perspective, it is desirable to transfer wealth from and to neutralize the power of one's perceived enemies because it prevents them from doing the same to you. There is no concept that the opposition is any more capable or desirous of acting in the general interest than conservatives are. In fact, a critical component of rationalizing the drive toward a divided society of winners and losers is the conviction that "they" will do it if "we" do not, except that then "we" will be the losers. And since "we" equals America, our policies mean a victory for America against the enemy within, whereas consigning "them" to servitude is just desserts.
This explains why the right constantly whines about being victims of its own tactics, except that it doesn't identify them as such. Hence, whites are victims of racism and hate speech and Barack Obama is the one who perpetrates violent rhetoric (because out of the total sum of his public utterances, there is apparently one in which he quotes a line from the 1987 movie The Untouchables. Apparently, this easily overshadows every sick remark from Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, not to mention the vile signs and speeches of the teabaggers.)
You may well wonder how someone with $5,000,000,000 under Republicans can be a loser with $4,995,000,000 billion under Democrats. In this case, the interests of society suddenly become convenient: The wealthy man's economic freedom has been diminished by the forced transfer of his money to people who don't deserve it because their poverty is their own fault. Thus, the act of taxing wealth strikes a body blow against personal liberty and encourages indolence like this man's:
It was the summer of 1971. I looked dubiously at one line of the contents of the envelope. No, it wasn't my draft lottery number: This was something of more immediate concern. H. M. King High had sent out fall class assignments, assigning me to Mr. Maddox's American History class. Students -- at least some of us -- derided Mr. Maddox for an approach to pedagogy that was both orthodox and unorthodox, but always in the service of rote learning. I showed the paper to my mother, whose brow furrowed.
Nonetheless, worse things had happened. It was still 1971, I was still 16, I was still exploring rock-and-roll, I was still college-bound, and there were still girls everywhere I looked. Life was good, all things considered. If Mr Maddox wanted to start off the school year by teaching us to memorize the Declaration of Independence by learning to sing it, well, it was only an hour out of a bustling day.
"The Wonderful D. O. I.," he called it, and he performed it with gusto: "WHEN in the course (WHEN in the course) OF human events (OF human events) IT becomes necessary (IT becomes necessary)..." I'll never forget it. How could I?
Having taught us The Wonderful D. O. I., Mr. Maddox set us to work writing an outline of the textbook, which we turned in periodically for a grade. This was the plan for the rest of the year. I don't recall anything about the book itself, but it couldn't have been that bad: Nothing in it made me want to ask my parents, "Is this true?", as so much of junior high history had.
One day about six weeks into class, I received a summons to the office of the school counselor, an ascetic, resentful woman with the unlikely name of Helen Troy. Miss Troy glared balefully (a formidable expression reserved for all students regardless of race, class, color, or creed. Miss Troy was a firm believer in equal opportunity) while informing me that I had been transferred to another teacher's class. My mother, it seemed, had been working assiduously to that end for some time.
I returned to class and gathered my books. Mr. Maddox, with a somewhat defeated look, shook my hand and said that he thought that the other class would be better for me. I nodded uncertainly, and left.
My new American History teacher, Mrs. Cooper, had a reputation for pushing her students to think critically within the limits of the unsettled combination of the 11th-grade intellect and half her class in miniskirts. Her reputation was merited, and in fact she did her job a little too well: At the end of the school year, the school board declined to renew her contract (overruling the school principal). While I was learning The Wonderful D. O. I., she had taught via a simulation that the post-Civil War South might not have been the most hospitable place for black Americans.
Mrs. Cooper, who had roots in Kingsville, was not going anywhere. Plus, she liked her job and wasn't at all understanding about the necessity to fire anyone who raised uncomfortable truths. (Years later my father disclosed that he had heard a local doctor ask "Why did she have to bring up the niggers?") So, she sued and eventually prevailed.Ten years later, she returned to her old job. (You can read a summary of the suit here, under "Academic Freedom," and the legal details here.)
The Coopers were family friends, and I remember her husband angrily pointing out that a well-known reactionary teacher had worn to school -- of all things -- a "Belles for Bush" headband in support of H. W.'s failed 1970 senatorial campaign. This woman was genuinely hateful: I once witnessed her corner a black student and demand to know why she shouldn't call him "boy."
I myself had sat through a long-winded exhortation from a speech teacher about the endless virtues of a book called A Texan Looks at Lyndon, a right-wing screed by one J. Evetts Haley. (John Birch was Adlai Stevenson in comparison to J. Evetts Haley.) Anyway, these teachers "taught" on in no danger of losing their positions.
Next to them, Mr. Maddox wasn't so bad. His students were, at least, memorizing the most resounding sentence in American political prose:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
He didn't qualify it, nor did he seek to minimize it. No, Mr. Maddox unabashedly told his students -- most of whom were Hispanic unaccustomed to hearing Anglo adults call them equal -- that this sentence was "wonderful," when there were no doubt many residents of Kingsville who secretly found it subversive. You couldn't fire anyone for teaching The Wonderful D. O. I., though.
Mr. Maddox must have known that most of his students were not college bound and that anything they took away from his class would be a plus. He didn't have the skills to teach as Mrs. Cooper had, but he stayed within his game and didn't stack the deck. I carried the parting look he gave me in the recesses of my mind until recently, when I realized I had sold him short. Hey, if someone is going to make a fetish of something, better "all men are created equal" than the Second Amendment.
The New York Times has a useful interactive graphic on President Obama's 2012 budget here. It doesn't include percentages, so I've provided them below. Also, the graphic misleads regarding Social Security: The program also pays for itself, meaning that while it is part of the budget, it does not contribute to the debt. Key areas of expense by percent of the budget (rounded):
Health and Human Services: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: 30%
Social Security Administration: 22%
Treasury: Interest on the National Debt: 13%
Defense - Military Programs: Operations and Maintenance: 8%
Defense - Military Programs: Military Personnel: 4%
Defense - Military Programs: Procurement: 3.5%
Agriculture: Food and Nutrition Service: 3%
Labor: Employment and Traning Administration: 3%
Agriculture: Farm Service Agency: 2.5%
Office of Personnel Administration: 2%
Transportation: Federal Highway Administration: 2%
Treasury: Internal Revenue Service: 2%
Veteran's Administration: Benefits Programs: 2%
Other Defense Civil Programs: Military Retirement: 1.5%
Veteran's Administration: Veteran's Health Administration: 1.5%
All other departments are budget at less than 1%.
I'm no financial analyst, but this looks to me as if (a) we're for some reason armed to the teeth, and (b) we're getting older without preparing for it (or the debt wouldn't be so high while Medicare costs increase). Plus, it appears that for every dollar we spend on weapons, we spend more than two maintaining them.
The debate -- such as it is -- over our aging population is all wrong. Conservatives see it as opportunity to gut Social Security and Medicare, two programs they've been sharpening their knives for since becoming law. The real question, though, is this: How will we as a nation deal with the requirements of an aging population while keeping the social contracts implied by Social Security and Medicare? Is the answer really to put elders on their own at a time when the next generation of Americans faces the possibility of limited prospects?
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...
From Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
The latest gambit from conservatives eager to start gutting the Fourteenth Amendment and its unambiguous elevation of the federal government over the states with guarantees of equal protection and due process is, of course, to deny citizenship to American-born children of undocumented workers.
The argument goes that the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment is to secure citizenship rights for newly freed slaves, and that it was never meant to apply to anyone else. The more erudite conservatives might add that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott Decision and that it was also aimed at curbing southern abuses of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Therefore, it's a minor matter to edit the amendment to exclude any U.S.-born child of illegal immigrants from the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.
However, there are some problems with the conservative position. In the first place, the Supreme Court has already held (United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that the citizenship clause does apply to anyone born in the United States and may not be interpreted as limited to former slaves. Moreover, Wong specifically holds that Congress may not act to override the Fourteenth Amendment, which renders bills as those introduced by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) as so much grandstanding. (For the record, Deal's legislation bears such august titles as the "Citizenship Reform Act," and the "Birthright Citizenship Act.")
Then there's the nature of the conservative position itself, which unsurprisingly reveals the right as either intellectually incoherent, cynical opportunists, or both.
Conservatives oppose the Affordable Care Act as being unconstitutional, in part because the Constitution is silent on the question of health care. (No doubt, as there was no such concept in 1789.) In the case of the ACA, conservatives hew to a strict originalist line that permits determination of constitutionality only on the basis of the text of the document.
Unfortunately for conservatives, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is silent on the matter of intent. It doesn't use the words "slave" or "slavery," much less refer to the Dred Scott Decision or the Thirteenth Amendment. If you want to overturn the ACA on the basis of a strict textual reading, then you can't suddenly claim to divine framer intent behind Section 1 and hope to maintain any notion of integrity. (Unless of course you are a cynical opportunist and don't give a rat's ass about intellectual honesty as long as what you say suits your purpose.)
Much as conservatives won't admit it, the Fourteenth Amendment is clearer on citizenship by birthright than the Second is on gun ownership. Language can't be much plainer than this:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States...
"All persons," not "All persons except." Following the conservative line of strict adherence to the text, one can quite plausibly assert that if the framers had meant "former slaves," the amendment would specify "former slaves." As it doesn't, the door is left open for additional possibilities. For example, perhaps the country paid a debt to the foreign-born children of immigrant soldiers who died fighting for the Union. Or perhaps the framers looked ahead as well as back and wanted to ease the path to citizenship for the children of the immigrants they knew would be necessary to ignite the great American economic engine untethered by the Civil War. These possibilities can't be refuted by anyone who relies on a textual reading (other than, of course, by the usual ad hominem attacks on America-hating libtards.) This is the direction you take when you read intent into arguably the most direct sentence in the entire Constitution.
When it comes to the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives are hoist on their own petard -- a position that must seem familiar to them by now...
Can anyone think of a greater or equal sense of dislocation than going from sipping a margarita in Makawao (Maui) to standing in the freezing rain at Sea-Tac Airport a few hours later?...
The lyrics, Ringo, the lyrics! You did write them, after all!...
Last night, we had dinner at Merriman's, one of Maui's premier restaurants. Located in the resort of Napili, Merriman's unassuming exterior belies both its menu and the splendid view of the Pacific from its bar and dining room. As I ate warm crusted surfing goat cheese (Kula strawberries, Maui onions, strawberry and garden mint vinaigrette), Kahua Ranch naturally raised lamb, and white chocolate-filled malasadas (with Maui Oma coffee caramel cream dipping sauce), I glanced around the room at the hundred or so exclusively white patrons.
Have dinner in a place like this, I thought, and you can see who has the money in this country.
This proves nothing, some will object. Maybe Maui isn't a preferred vacation destination for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but there are plenty of native Hawaiians living on Maui: The closest any of them get to Merriman's is as a parking valet. We have a servant class in this country, something that is rarely more evident than when one goes on vacation, where it is always the predominant local ethnic minority that parks car, cleans rooms, launders linen, washes dishes, and carries bags for the white guests.
They're conspicuously absent, though, when it comes to waiting tables in expensive restaurants. When the service job pays well, suddenly the most obvious members of the servant class are nowhere to be found. Perhaps there's something intimate about relationship between the server and the patron about to order an expensive meal that subtly directs high-end restaurants to populate that part of the servant class with smiling, familiar white faces.
And I, I partake in this feast, this American dream meant for the likes of me but not for others. Am I simply enjoying life as should we all, or am I inevitably bowing to the demons of race and class?...
Today, we drove the winding roads along the mountains of West Maui, which is surely one of the most breathtaking and -- with its plethora of dips, sudden rises, and hairpin turns on cliff's edge -- hair raising roads in the country. We stopped often to watch pods of whales that had maneuvered themselves in close to shore, the babies breaching, adults fluking, and everyone spouting, the abrupt boom of an adult fin slapping the water carrying across the surface and on up to us.
In Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux describes Hawaii thus:
Hawaii is hot and cold volcanoes, clear skies, and open ocean. Like most Pacific islands it is all edge, no centre, very shallow, very narrow, a set of green bowls, turned upside down in the sea, the lips of the coastline surrounding the bulges of porous mountains. This crockery is draped in a thickness of green so folded it is hidden and softened. Above the blazing beaches were the gorgeous green pleats of the mountains.
Man, do I love this place! Hawaii even has compulsory employer-provided health insurance for anyone who works at least twenty hours a week. Believe it or not, everyone here seems pretty laid back despite this blatant theft of their "freedoms" by the state. How could they be so blind? They're living in a police state and don't even know it. It's a frightful price to pay for the knowledge that when you're sick you can go to the doctor or the hospital and worry only about your illness...
Eleven years ago, my youngest son came home from school the first day back after Christmas and asked if we could go to Hawaii over mid-winter break. Neither my wife nor I had ever had much interest in going to the 50th state, in part because everyone in the northwest who doesn't ski goes there. But it turned out that I could get tickets and a place to stay on Maui. I still don't know how I pulled that off: Getting to Hawaii from Seattle during midwinter break takes the same degree of advance planning as going to Yellowstone in the summer.
Well, we had a great time, and I've been going there off and on ever since. And for me, February is the month to go because that's when the humpbacks migrate to LaHaina Bay to calve. There are so many that you can't help but see them from the beach, from the hotel room, from any boat ride taken. My inner seven-year old comes out, I guess, because they are what I most look forward to.
That, and fresh frozen mangorita from the H'aile M'aile General Store in the part of Maui called Upcountry, near the western slope of the Haleakala volcano. It's not the kind of drink I usually order, but someone talked me into it once and I'm glad they did.
A young friend is currently pursuing an advanced degree in Middle Eastern studies. His take on the events in Egypt:
There are definitely a few interesting observations on consensus opinion among the professors and students in my department with strong ties to Egypt, whether through academic expertise, long-term residency, or nationality. First, most everybody has assumed, or at least hoped, this would not end well for Mubarak since the president of Tunisia abdicated. The vast levels of hatred of Mubarak and his cronies throughout the Arab world cannot be overstated enough. The level of corruption in Egypt is truly astronomical and pervades really all levels of government and business. Likely any remotely decent job in the country is filled on the basis of patronage or corruption (and even if this weren't true, everybody assumes it is true). Egypt also suffers from a huge lack of opportunities for my generation. There are millions of Egyptian recent college graduates with no jobs and no real prospects for future employment. Therefore they delay getting married and continue living in crowded slum apartments well into their thirties. This is a common problem in the region, for example, the Tunisian who set himself on fire and set off their protests was a well educated college graduate who had been selling fruits and vegetables from a cart for years because he could find no other job, and he was protesting a highly uneducated policewoman, appointed to her position because of some patronage connection, confiscating his cart. However, Egypt suffers these problems most acutely.
Another crucial observation is the widespread trust in the military by the Egyptian people. The military is not seen as merely a tool of the regimes' power, like the police (especially the mukhabarat, or secret police) and has a fairy widespread membership in their enlisted and officer ranks. This is in stark contrast to countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia. For example, most key positions in the Syrian military and state security apparatuses are held by Alawites, a tiny minority religion from a specific geographic area of Syria that the president's family belongs to. Furthermore, the military absolutely did not like Mubarak's attempts to designate his son as heir apparent. In an incredibly corrupt society, the Egyptian military is seen as a (relatively) fair arbiter of power and everybody I've talked to seems to trust the military to get rid of Mubarak. Whether or not this will lead to a civilian government or yet another military coup (it is worth mentioning that Mubarak, Sadat, and Nasser were all army officers) is the only question. Many also say the army will never allow the Muslim Brotherhood to lead Egypt.
Finally, the most debate concerns the regional implications. If the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power in Egypt (something that I think is highly unlikely for numerous reasons, its more a threat being wielded by Israeli hawks rather than a serious claim), the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty could be threatened. However, I can't imagine the Egyptian military turning away their multi-billion dollar yearly bribes by the U.S., much of which is diverted by the top military and civilian leadership into their Swiss bank accounts, to keep the peace. The bigger question is will this movement continue in other Arab countries. Lebanon and Yemen barely have governments to be angry at, and any protests you see there are likely from other long-standing country specific problems. People are always obsessed with the possibility of the al-Assad family falling and democracy spreading to Syria. However, Syria has been in the process of progressive reforms for the last seven years and many Syrians see their social and employment prospects improving rather than getting worse. There is also less corruption, or at least obvious corruption, and the president is much better liked among Syrians than Mubarak. Most importantly, the Syrian security service has a much tighter stranglehold on the country than in Egypt, which, while an authoritarian dictatorship, can't really be described as a police state in the same way Syria can.
Where I see the strongest likelihood of this movement spreading is in Jordan, which has a serious demographic problem of tons of angry citizens of Palestinian descent who significantly outnumber the ruling Heshemites. It is also worth mentioning that for all the talk of the importance of Mubarak to the U.S., I think Jordan is significantly more important. We only really support Mubarak because of Isreal, however, our State department, CIA, and DoD have incredibly strong relationships with their Jordanian counterparts and Jordan is of crucial importance to Iraq.
Finally, I'm sure this goes without saying, but do try and watch al-Jazeera English for coverage, and if not, the BBC. AJE easily has the most comprehensive English language news coverage in the whole region. As the major US news agencies have been pulling people out of the Middle East to cut costs, AJE has been investing huge amounts of resources on their bureaus in the region. Reuters also has a good liveblog.
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