Episteme

Election day in SF was amazing. I went to vote in the late morning and there was an elementary school across the street with kids playing outside and walking by on the sidewalk. Looking at the line of voters across the street, they started yelling Obama! Obama! Vote for Obama! I was amazed to see that nine-year-olds, or whatever they were, could be so politically enthusiastic. I can't help but think that it's a great thing for the country, whatever people's leanings are, to have a generation of children who have been engaged in civic life from elementary school. I had no idea who my parents were even voting for at that time! I think the amount of enthusiasm felt by people of all ages during this election is going to energize our typically apathetic country and help us to get on a path that more people feel comfortable with.

San Franciscans were very, very happy with the presidential outcome, and I can't imagine anyone who supported McCain was saying much about it last night. Cheering could be heard from apartment windows right after the results were called, and hipsters packed into bars to revel the night away.

But local propositions were a different story. Up to now, it looks as if gay marriage will be banned by a proposition defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Many gay couples were married in the days running up to the election anticipating this change, and sadness was in the air today from that camp. Proposition H, another big one for SF, would have had the city run by renewable energy by 2040, but the majority opposed it. So it felt a little contradictory that our country, usually known as center-right, elected a democrat and its first African-American president, while the state of California, known for its groundbreaking lefty moves, seemed to shift right.

Posted by Kim at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the 11th of this month, I was going to meet with a leftist group that still supports last year's unsuccessful presidential candidate, so my mind was on getting there on time. I am always late so that is a big challenge for me. I wasn't really thinking about the 6th anniversary of 9/11 at all, but it was unavoidable, even outside of the US. In the taxi on the way to the meeting, a Mexican radio correspondent in New York was commenting on the atmosphere there, and I remembered what it was like for me when I watched the second tower fall from the viewpoint of a tall apartment building on the Upper East Side. It didn't look real at all when the tower seemed to turn into a column of dust, then nothing but empty sky.

Continue reading "Far away is right nearby" »

Posted by Kim at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week I made progress on two completely different books, Secrets of a Fire King, a book of stories by Kim Edwards, and Nemesis, a political manifesto on empire by Chalmers Johnson. Aside from needing a little brain food, both in the form of lovely fiction and in-your-face airing of political dirty laundry, I needed to digest some anti-American venting that people are usually tactful enough to spare me.

I'm no dummy - I mean, I know people don't like the US right now. But I realized that they don't even remember the good parts about us anymore, like how we are supposedly one of the cradles of modern democracy, how we have this great constitution with checks and balances, the civil rights movement, women's rights before people in other countries even admitted women had brains...

All that nice stuff doesn't seem to matter anymore -- the antics of the Bush Administation have pushed it all into ancient history. Great fun for those of us living abroad, of course! (Read on for a case in point.)

Continue reading "Hating on the evil empire" »

Posted by Kim at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The federal elections court said today that there will be no vote by vote recount of all the ballot cast in the July 2 Mexican elections. For the past week people have been camping out over miles of the city's main thoroughfare in order to pressure the government to count the votes in the case that correcting fraudulent votes would reverse the 240,000 vote lead that gave Felipe Calderon an apprent win over Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. That was this morning, but the campers are still there, begging the question - What the hell is going on? Something is clearly happening here, complete with nighttime partying with cover bands singing Beatles songs, with even police crowding around to listen. But what is it, exactly? It's a popular movement, it's a political coup -- no, it's.... AMLO!

Continue reading "Join in the Pachanga" »

Posted by Kim at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the things that is going on now in Mexico is that supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) are staging huge demonstrations asking for a full vote-by-vote count of the ballots in the July 2 presidential election because they think that there was enough fraud to invalidate the roughly 240,000 vote lead of Felipe Calderon. 240,000 votes just isn't that much.

So my two questions are - are peaceful protests really worth anything, can they really create change, and, not that I'm suggesting it, but isn't violence more effective? There was Ghandi, you'll say. But how many Ghandis are there? The recent student protesters in Chile got most of their demands by creating havoc for days. The violent riots in France finally caused the government to cave in and listen to the needs of minorities. So what's the good of the peaceful, law-abiding protest, really? Does anyone really listen, even if a significant portion of the population is unhappy with recent events?

Continue reading "The right to protest" »

Posted by Kim at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What happens when an election is contested?
We have a pefect example here in Mexico, where long-haired hippies and college students with rattles and drums along with disillusioned crowds of the working class are protesting the closest election in the country's history. Calderon apparently beat Lopez Obrador by 0.6 percent, but Obrador is saying that there has been foul play. Calderon has not been officially, legally declared president even though the Federal Election Commission came up with him as the winner. The country is in this weird state of limbo, although it's beginning to look like it will be a South-of-th-border version of the 2000 election for the US president, complete with a Nader-style scapegoat for the left.

So this is democracy, and it's working, but I'm starting to think that it's it's always, always, always imperfect.

Continue reading "Elections" »

Posted by Kim at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's weird to think about Al Gore having a movie. It was weird to see Al Gore in one. Sure it was mostly of him giving his lectures and reflecting on his life and global warming, but with the financial backing of people like liberal environmentalist Laurie David (wife of Larry David. She's the reason why he drives a Prius in "Curb Your Enthusiasm", the best show ever!) it's meant to be more than a mere documentation of Gore's numerous lecture.

In keeping with the theme of democracy, something Gore said has stuck in my mind. He was comparing fuel efficiency standards for various countries to make a point the combating the problem of global warming is possible and the political does exist in places to do it. He showed a chart of the different standards from various countries, the US at the bottom of course. China, in the midst of economic doom and mass migration unseen in history, has already outpaced the US in its standards. China has mandatory mileage of standards of about 35 miles per gallon (if I'm remembering correctly), while the US is somewhere in the high teens. Gore makes the obvious point that the American motor companies (which are going through a major period of transformation) can't sell their cars in China (that oppressive dictatorship!) because they don't meet Chinese standards.

Gore goes on to say, near the conclusion of his film, that Americans need to use their democratic tools to institute change, namely elect officials who will push for higher standards. To me, implicit in his argument is the question is our democracy capable of making those changes? Is living in centralized state like China more effective for making dramatic changes to environmental policy?

Continue reading "One Vote At The Top" »

Posted by Dawn at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kim and I are taking up the theme of democracy for a few weeks and seeing where we can go with this. With her experiences living in Mexico City and mine pouring through books as a befuddled observer of American politics, we think we can generate some discussion and ideas that will connect what we know with the state of things. That's our hope.

"Peace will arise instead out of the specific nature of democratic legitimacy, and its ability to satisfy the human longing for recognition." So writes Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. As most people educated in the liberal west with an unerring preoccupation with world prosperity, I often wonder if, despite advances in living conditions and general human prosperity, if war, famine, these inequities are inevitable because there's something to the human character that is unalterable.

By recognition, Fukuyama touches on an idea, he argues, has thrived best in liberal democracies. I got into some psychoanalytic stuff recently, so I won't rehash that. But recognition is essentially human dignity through freedom. It is through liberal democracies of the 20th century this has come to fruition. Of course, all societies are beset by racism, homophobia and the like, but legislation like the Civil Rights Act seeks to publicly mitigate that and is a sign of how liberal democracies can, and do, address inherent inequities in society, however imperfectly.

Anyway, I'm nearing the end of the book so ideas are starting to coalesce. Seeing how Kim and I are going to tackle the notion of democracy, I wanted to start (and continue) with this idea presented in Fukuyama's book, "The post-historical world is one in which the desire for comfortable self-preservation has been elevated over the desire to risk one's life in battle for pure prestige, and in which universal and rational recognition has replaced the struggle for domination."

Continue reading "Democracy For Peace" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What are you allowed to know (a function of education and, to some degree, persistence and personal curiosity) is very much a part of the political environment and whether the political leadership and institutions support such thinking is also critical. Maybe that's the burden of democracy, you as a participant in this experiment are required to work diligently to be informed and rational about the information choices before you. Those aren't ingredients for a tedious life but then again exhaustion inevitably leads to defeat and when information is fractured and facts called into question, all information seems like misinformation. Is the "system" like this deliberately or does the proliferation of 24 hour cable news, endless partisan talk shows, customized news aggregates and customized everything, stem from a need in our society to reinforce what we already know regardless of context, historical or present? Hell, The New York Times thinks 24 hours news killed the CIA.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad, in his recent 18-page letter, wrote this to Bush, "Mr. President: Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things."

Continue reading "The Mind and Every Where Else " »

Posted by Dawn at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So as I'm plodding through day-to-day existence my mind is weighed down: should sheets match the comforter? did I just hit that person with my car? sugar or splenda? But today I made room in my tin-trap brain for something else, a small space, but something else: "Only man is capable of engaging in a bloody battle for the sole purpose of demonstrating that he has contempt for his own life, that he is something more than a complicated machine or a 'slave to his passion,' in short, that he has a specifically human dignity because he is free."

How I can get my work done when this is what I think about? (This definitely helps....)

Continue reading "Just Like Fish " »

Posted by Dawn at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times Magazine from last week did something I just love: look at historical precedent to explain a contemporary predicament. Today's troubles have their roots in the past, though to hear our politicians speak about it, these are unprecedented problems which require radical, sometimes unlawful, actions at the expense of everything else.

The article postulates that liberals (Democrats) need to look to their 20th century history to see how they can create a compelling, coherent foreign policy to rival the conservatives in this election year and beyond. Undoubtedly, the Democrats are impotent because they are beset by extraordinary problems and have a diverse (ideological, economic) base to appeal to. The legacy Democrats should turn to? That of Reinhold Niebuhr. I made some mention of his ideas before because I too see them as a way of understanding the predicament American now finds itself, one that is hubristic and radical.

Niebuhr said the atrocities of early 20th century in terms of humanity's move away from a doctrine of fallibility to one of extreme idolization of the individual. In the United States’ policies during the cold war he, along with George Kennan, cautioned that Americans cannot lose sight of their own wickedness and injustice and regard themselves as “morally pure” in contrast to their communist enemies. Even democracies are capable of bring great tyranny on their people and others.

Peter Beinhart, author of the Times pieces concurs: "in the first years of the cold war, Niebuhr's emphasis on moral fallibility underlay America's remarkable willingness to restrain its power." The danger, Beinhart writes, of these current times, is America's movement away from this restraint but calling itself a "benign empire" and having grand ambitions of "exporting" democracy to everyone, whether they want it or not. "In other words," Beinhart writes, "the United States would rid itself of external impediments but nonetheless act in the global good, uncorrupted by the temptations of unrestrained power."

Beinhart continues with what I think is a good encapsulation of the problem: "On global warming, an American liberated from international restraint has acted irresponsibly; in our antiterrorist prisons, we have acted inhumanely." Liberals, it seems, have not been able to come up with viable solutions because they have been able to explain this hubris in a way that provides any glimmer of hope for change or convinces people that they would do any different if they were in power. They haven't been able to explain, to a national audience, how the current conservative administration has focused on foreign affairs at the expense of domestic ones. Beinhart provides a good example: "That is the hidden backdrop to the great popular revolt against the Dubai ports deal earlier this year - an isolationist, nationalist spasm by a public that feels the government is more concerned with the interests of foreigners that with its own."

So what is to be done? Liberals have to embrace promoting democracy abroad but like how it was done after WWII: by providing economic opportunity with it as well and accepting that democracy in this country is an experiments and its health is dependent on our belief in the system. They can also talk about bringing the focus back to domestic front because, as Beinhart points out, "America is not a fixed model for a benighted world. It is the democratic struggle here at home, against evil in our society, that offers a beacon to people in other national struggling against the evil in theirs."

Filed under Current Events, History, Politics

Posted by Dawn at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and Jerusalem calls evil banal. She questions the intelligence of Eichmann, who the prosecution claim was a mastermind behind the Final Solution, and even looks at his way of speaking as an indication that he is not only a dullard but too unimaginative, too perfectly suited to the bureaucracy to even truly understand what he was doing.

Continue reading "Something Like Hope" »

Posted by Dawn at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a more than 10 years since the publication of End of History when, as the title suggests, the end of history was declared by Francis Fukuyama. OK, that’s not what he really declared but that’s what’s been written about the book and Fukuyama in all these long years since it debuted. I was really prompted to read this book after reading a review of Fukuyama’s latest book, which The New Yorker reviewer characterized as being an update, a critique if you will, of Fukuyama’s standing as a neo-conservative.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.

Continue reading "The End of History" »

Posted by Dawn at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)