In a 24-hour news cycle that constantly bombards us with the underbelly of the world--boorish politicians, hyper-partisanship, climate change, tech scandals, xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, fake news, rising income inequality and national debt and more--it is nice to be able to step back, take a deep breath, and look at the bigger picture. Before humanity can address its formidable catalog of problems, it is necessary to get our bearings in a world that feels chronically unsteady and vicious. Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari attempts to provide that big picture perspective, first with Sapiens, in which he tells of humanity's rise as a function of group cooperation fostered by grand narratives (think nationalism, religion) or the stories that people need to hear . Homo Deus looks at humanity's future, one in which we all potentially become cyborgs, more intimately connected to technology than even today. So what about today? Can humanity address what ails us so we can reach the new heights he predicts in Homo Deus? Harari's answer comes to us in his latest work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018).
Like his previous works, 21 Lessons doesn't aspire to being an all-encompassing how-to solutions guide for the biggest problems facing humanity. It is more philosophical, thought-provoking, meant to stimulate the necessary conversations that need to take place globally in a vast population of individuals that do not know everything, let alone the latest advances in AI or cryptocurrency. A variety of subjects are addressed in loosely-connected op-ed-like chapters with characteristic wit and cautious optimism, such as fake news, immigration, terrorism and toxic nationalism, which Harari sees as symptoms of malaise in our current liberal international order. Moreover, while these problems are symptomatic of an ill-equipped system, Harari also sees them as products of technological disruption coupled by continuing advances in biotechnology, something free-market logic and an ever-expanding pie (doubtful nowadays, as we don't have exponential planets to draw from) alone cannot solve.
The algorithms are coming, the algorithms are coming!
Why does technology (both biotechnology and inorganic computer technology) threaten the established liberal order and challenge it with reinvention? Humanity is already faced with trying to stave off the twin existential problems (I call them the Big Ones) of ecological disaster and nuclear war. Those who are at the forefront of the development of technologies like AI, machine learning, Big Data algorithms are profit-driven enterprises not primarily concerned with the ethical, political, and economic consequences of these technologies--like that automation could put a huge segment of the working class out of a job and in need of re-training. A core part of the liberal bargain entails governments looking out for the happiness and well being of its citizens, providing foundational social welfare programs and other services to help citizens prosper in whatever personal and occupational paths they choose.
What happens when automation, machine learning and AI combine to put a good deal of people out of work, while those who invented the technologies are doing better than ever? What happens if all human labor, excepting those operating these technologies (the rich/elites), becomes irrelevant? How do nation-states deal with these tricky issues that involve disillusioned people no longer trusting the grand narratives they were brought up with--whether it be a nationalism, a religious creed, or some other philosophy? The example of automation and significant socioeconomic disruption is just one of the many problems that threaten the liberal dream of a better life for everyone, a life that retains a sense of dignity that comes from being able to control their destinies. People don't particularly enjoy the unknown and the amorphous threats of advancing technology and near-invisible global catastrophes like climate change or nuclear proliferation produce an uncertainty-driven deluge of constant stress.
For all the serious historical and political examination of problems like fake news and terrorism, for Harari it comes down to stories: the stories that inspired ever increasing amounts of people to cooperate for the common good. While it is extremely uncomfortable to realize that human societies must rely on these stories to instill a common sense of identity and purpose in large groups of people (and that disruptions to these stories could potentially undermine the social order as we know it), it is nevertheless mind-expanding, not unusual for works that are audaciously all-encompassing. It is also discomfiting because as with advanced technology, stories can be used for good and bad purposes, powerful tools wielded by those who understand that humans respond more strongly to emotive rather than logical appeals (biochemical paths from evolution better suited to the African savanna--"Move quickly! No time to think!"-than today's over-stimulated world). In the case of nationalism: from "My nation is unique and I celebrate its heritage" to "My nation is superior to yours in every way and I owe it my undying allegiance." Religion? "My religion believes in peace and tolerance and I respect your differing method of achieving spiritual fulfillment" versus "There is only one God and I will fight you to show you the truth." And so on. Then, there is liberalism, the narrative of rational individuals coming together to create a society that believes in democracy, human rights, and the freedom for people to make their own way in life however they choose.
What then is the new story needing to be formulated to help reinvent liberalism to deal with our current slate of problems (whether they primarily stem from technology or not)? Harari's 21 Lessons doesn't provide one. Rather, the overall purpose of the treatise was, like its mind-expanding prose, designed to provoke mass self-reflection and discussion and take people back from the brink of apocalyptic thinking to a more healthy place of cautious optimism, critical thinking and healthy skepticism. That can make it frustrating for readers, but not any less intellectually satisfying. In the end, Harari seems to imply that it is only through a new and urgent worldwide discussion that humanity can find a new story, a new common ideal to organize around that can help society solve its problems and continue to advance. Humanity has done it once before with nation-states and liberal democracy. We can do it again.
Works Cited:
Harari, Yuval Noah. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Friday, December 14, 2018
Saturday, December 1, 2018
Book Review: Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Accessory to War"
There are many advertisements out there on behalf of the military nowadays, featuring soldiers remote-operating drones at a distance, satellites zooming in on battle terrain as stealth jets fly overhead, conveying a sense of futuristic warfare as they attempt to recruit to their cause. Or smiling, yet serious, soldier-scientists--engineers, physicists, chemists, etc.--going about the business of both military operations and groundbreaking experiments and research. "You can be both [scientist and soldier]! Have a career and serve your country! Come, join the future!" is usually how it goes. Flash to an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Raj, Leonard, Howard and Sheldon are wrestling with the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding their project to develop a better guidance system for the Air Force--receiving funding to do this research project, but also realizing the system will likely become another tool of war. This complicated relationship between science and war is everywhere, suffusing our culture, economy, politics, governmental institutions and academia with this uneasy knowledge. To no one's surprise, this complicity between scientific advancements and better technologies of destruction goes way back. Providing a context for our present moment of cyberwarfare, drones and satellites is astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-author Avis Lang's 2018 collaboration Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.
I remember learning in school about the technological boon to society from the NASA space program, from Velcro to infrared thermometers to warmer, better insulated blankets. Being a kid, I was amazed with science's capacity to push society forward with both the gaining of knowledge and development of better technologies. I suppose I was naive enough not to realize the two-way relationship between scientific/societal advancement and military capabilities, just one of the many dualities and paradoxes of humans in general: building by destroying. Empires rose and fell based off of the level of scientific capital and knowledge present in their societies and the ones they conquered. In other words, science was power in multiple dimensions. After all, the emergence post-WWII of the American superpower on the world stage was greatly facilitated by the scientific and economic boons of the war. Tyson and Lang give vivid illustration to this complicated relationship through a historical jaunt from ancient times to the present.
Those forerunners of today's powers started off by relying on the stars for navigation, time organization, and rituals. After all, knowing where and when you were allowed societies to orient themselves, plan ahead, and standardize everything from rituals to tax collection to the sailing that allowed everything from a more interconnected global economy to the conduct of military operations and conquests. Scientists from the beginning had complicated relations with the state, army, and economic interests with astronomers serving as prized court advisers. Recognizing celestial patterns and cycles and learning to predict them, knowledge gleaned from an immeasurable amount of time of patient observation and recording of the heavens was one of the cornerstones of early societies. It allowed Columbus to trick the natives out of their provisions by his ability to exploit the knowledge of a coming lunar eclipse and explorers to circumnavigate the globe and European powers to colonize and establish outposts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The fruits of celestial navigation and prediction gave way to further advances, gained by scientists wanting better observation tools with which to see the universe from and institutionalized armies wanting to see their enemies coming from farther away. The telescope, early message relay systems, the telegraph, photography, spectrography, radar, nuclear power, satellites, GPS and many more such advances flowed from this knowledge.
This perennial quest of constant improvement stemmed from the first stargazers, a quest motivated by humanity's desire to act upon their knowledge of the scale of the world they inhabited, a world that got bigger and bigger the more they advanced, until the seemingly last frontier for which humanity could explore (or conquer) was space. Resources continued their flow between the private sector, academia, and the military, juicing the economy in the process. Society profited from war, while trying to use its newfound knowledge and resources to the common benefit of all, fighting human nature itself.
While countries do engage in scientific collaboration both on Earth and in the emerging dimension of space (think the International Space Station), they also, true to human nature, have started to squabble as each tries to achieve the highest of higher-grounds in space. This is despite the fact that under international law, space is a commons for all humanity, much like the oceans and the air we breathe. [One of the more famous examples of scientific interests (i.e. funding for research and experiments) getting entangled with the geopolitical was the Space Race, an epic Cold War-era fight between communist and capitalist ideologues alike, national pride and international prestige on the line.] Space is getting crowded, full of dual-use, civilian and military satellites and debris from past space missions, making exclusive space control infeasible and space wars with Star Wars-like weaponry of high-powered lasers and the like incredibly dangerous, risking damage to your own space assets and that of your allies and adversaries. Not to mention the astronomical costs of the development of these new and more destructive weapons in the first place, which takes away from other areas of societal investment. Additionally, despite the military investments America continues to make (outpacing the rest of the world presently), China and Russia are closing the gap, developing space programs and capacities of their own and threatening American scientific and technological preeminence (and of course, power).
Instead of doggedly pursuing the doctrine of total command and control (and the development of even more dangerous weapons than the A-bomb) espoused by the American military, Tyson and Lang conclude the well-researched cautionary tale of Accessory to War by making the case for pivoting to more benevolent and economically beneficial space ventures--from space tourism to asteroid mining--that could not only help alleviate the resource disparities that are often the undercurrents to conflict, but open up a new frontier, a glittering future of humanity expanding into the stars. It is a vision of utopian prosperity more akin to Star Trek, where scientific exploration is heavily prioritized because of the alleviation or even elimination of basic need scarcities and embrace of more cooperative means of existence. However, it is a good vision to strive for, especially in a time when science and expertise is often denounced and human capacity for self-destruction is on full display all around us. We may not be able to completely defeat human nature itself, but science continues to give us all a choice to work towards beneficial collaboration rather than mutually-assured destruction.
Works Cited:
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, & Lang, Avis. (2018). Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
I remember learning in school about the technological boon to society from the NASA space program, from Velcro to infrared thermometers to warmer, better insulated blankets. Being a kid, I was amazed with science's capacity to push society forward with both the gaining of knowledge and development of better technologies. I suppose I was naive enough not to realize the two-way relationship between scientific/societal advancement and military capabilities, just one of the many dualities and paradoxes of humans in general: building by destroying. Empires rose and fell based off of the level of scientific capital and knowledge present in their societies and the ones they conquered. In other words, science was power in multiple dimensions. After all, the emergence post-WWII of the American superpower on the world stage was greatly facilitated by the scientific and economic boons of the war. Tyson and Lang give vivid illustration to this complicated relationship through a historical jaunt from ancient times to the present.
Those forerunners of today's powers started off by relying on the stars for navigation, time organization, and rituals. After all, knowing where and when you were allowed societies to orient themselves, plan ahead, and standardize everything from rituals to tax collection to the sailing that allowed everything from a more interconnected global economy to the conduct of military operations and conquests. Scientists from the beginning had complicated relations with the state, army, and economic interests with astronomers serving as prized court advisers. Recognizing celestial patterns and cycles and learning to predict them, knowledge gleaned from an immeasurable amount of time of patient observation and recording of the heavens was one of the cornerstones of early societies. It allowed Columbus to trick the natives out of their provisions by his ability to exploit the knowledge of a coming lunar eclipse and explorers to circumnavigate the globe and European powers to colonize and establish outposts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The fruits of celestial navigation and prediction gave way to further advances, gained by scientists wanting better observation tools with which to see the universe from and institutionalized armies wanting to see their enemies coming from farther away. The telescope, early message relay systems, the telegraph, photography, spectrography, radar, nuclear power, satellites, GPS and many more such advances flowed from this knowledge.
This perennial quest of constant improvement stemmed from the first stargazers, a quest motivated by humanity's desire to act upon their knowledge of the scale of the world they inhabited, a world that got bigger and bigger the more they advanced, until the seemingly last frontier for which humanity could explore (or conquer) was space. Resources continued their flow between the private sector, academia, and the military, juicing the economy in the process. Society profited from war, while trying to use its newfound knowledge and resources to the common benefit of all, fighting human nature itself.
While countries do engage in scientific collaboration both on Earth and in the emerging dimension of space (think the International Space Station), they also, true to human nature, have started to squabble as each tries to achieve the highest of higher-grounds in space. This is despite the fact that under international law, space is a commons for all humanity, much like the oceans and the air we breathe. [One of the more famous examples of scientific interests (i.e. funding for research and experiments) getting entangled with the geopolitical was the Space Race, an epic Cold War-era fight between communist and capitalist ideologues alike, national pride and international prestige on the line.] Space is getting crowded, full of dual-use, civilian and military satellites and debris from past space missions, making exclusive space control infeasible and space wars with Star Wars-like weaponry of high-powered lasers and the like incredibly dangerous, risking damage to your own space assets and that of your allies and adversaries. Not to mention the astronomical costs of the development of these new and more destructive weapons in the first place, which takes away from other areas of societal investment. Additionally, despite the military investments America continues to make (outpacing the rest of the world presently), China and Russia are closing the gap, developing space programs and capacities of their own and threatening American scientific and technological preeminence (and of course, power).
Instead of doggedly pursuing the doctrine of total command and control (and the development of even more dangerous weapons than the A-bomb) espoused by the American military, Tyson and Lang conclude the well-researched cautionary tale of Accessory to War by making the case for pivoting to more benevolent and economically beneficial space ventures--from space tourism to asteroid mining--that could not only help alleviate the resource disparities that are often the undercurrents to conflict, but open up a new frontier, a glittering future of humanity expanding into the stars. It is a vision of utopian prosperity more akin to Star Trek, where scientific exploration is heavily prioritized because of the alleviation or even elimination of basic need scarcities and embrace of more cooperative means of existence. However, it is a good vision to strive for, especially in a time when science and expertise is often denounced and human capacity for self-destruction is on full display all around us. We may not be able to completely defeat human nature itself, but science continues to give us all a choice to work towards beneficial collaboration rather than mutually-assured destruction.
Works Cited:
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse, & Lang, Avis. (2018). Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Friday, November 16, 2018
Book Review: Ben Fountain's "Beautiful Country Burn Again"
Many books on the Twilight Zone-esque 2016 presidential election campaign have been published and many more certainly are going to be written. So far, a majority have chronicled the (purported) lurid details of daily life in the White House, stuff of political theater and scandal (and even comedy). Unhinged, anyone? Others have examined the history of right-wing movements or the rise of certain economic forces like globalization in order to contextualize the Trump phenomenon. Author and former attorney Ben Fountain, in his 2018 entry Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, continues in this tradition, with a heap of psychological examination of the American psyche on top of the usual historical chronicling.
In his account of 2016, Fountain begins each chapter (one per each month of the 2016 campaign) with an immersionary litany of monthly news, rapid-fire summations of the big stories internationally, before zooming in domestically to the dizzying array of forces active in the American political scene that he believes could precipitate a potential civil war or proportionate cataclysmic event of national crisis. A kind of window on the world to the threats brewing abroad to freedom and a contrasting of them with the dangerous political squabblings of 2016 that threaten to undermine from within instead. (A bit of irony there.) Perhaps the claim yet another existential crisis after the Civil War and Great Depression is a bit of a stretch in current conditions, but it definitely is a jolt for readers, a call to heed the social, economic and political forces that are converging and giving rise to not just Trump, but to demagogues like him across the world. Fountain is not shy about shining light on these forces he believes to be at the root of current American woes: a system predicated on white supremacy that has put people (often white) into positions of power to institute a plutocratic system of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination. A common refrain throughout the book is Fountain's core assertion of a base systemic logic at work in our daily lives of "profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation" (Fountain, 2018, p. 4).
Democrat or Republican, no one is spared from blistering (and honest) critique in Fountain's analysis. While he notes that conservative philosophies have had a closer alignment to privileged politicians and tycoons at the expense of the working class they purport to liberate from a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy, mainstream Democrats have also moved closer to this new centrist political position starting in the late 1990s, with more business friendly party planks alongside those pertaining to traditional social justice and environmental protection ones. Oh, and there were many appeals to the near-universal (and universally overused, in my opinion) "middle class values" of hard work and less government dependence (Fountain, 2018, p. 258). In an attempt to gain a broader coalition and re-brand, Democrats may have inadvertently shafted their traditional minority and union constituencies in a time of rising income inequality, uneven globalization, immigration crises, the rise of social media and politics as reality TV, emerging philosophies of subjective reality, and increasing far-right sympathies. Meanwhile, the conservative strategy of "campaign on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, and once you're in power do everything you can to make government dysfunctional and ineffective" does nothing to improve the situation (Fountain, 2018, p. 383). In turn, this leads to corresponding (mostly justified) reactionary responses from both left (the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter) and right-wing (the Tea Party) populists.
Instead, both parties have been guilty of pandering more to the One Percent than the majority, complicit in maintaining the former's preferred method of control in the "fantasy industrial complex," or "FIC," defined as the "saturation" of our personal and national scene with an "onslaught of media and messaging that...dims our capacity for understanding the world as it actually is" and instead promotes a relentless barrage of fantasy and the simple and lurid (Fountain, 2018, p. 312). In other words, as the chaos of 2016 unfolded, the American psyche was already coping with the trauma wrought by the FIC, designed to enrage and confuse the response to serious problems like income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change. What a double whammy. It becomes easier to understand why Trump's warped and racially-charged perception of the American Dream epitomized in his campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" so easily found its mark, bringing to power a man that has so far raised a middle finger to his working class base with a relentless campaign of deregulation and tax breaks that gutted the New Deal-promoted (relative) stability we enjoy today.
The question left at the conclusion of Beautiful Country Burn Again is whether America can manage the collective will to solve the problems it faces rather than retreating into an alternative reality in reaching a new New Deal, a reworking of the social contract to better align our system of government with serving all and not a few of its citizens. Here, like other authors of the books so far attempting to contextualize 2016, Fountain has difficulty in prescribing a specific treatment for America's ills, rather urging the latter updates of our social contract and calling for Americans to re-realize our common humanity in order to keep democratic governance above the rising tide of globalization and capitalism and other planetary problems like climate change. Perhaps that is unfair, considering the complexity of the project that needs to be undertaken to solve the complex, borderless issues of our era. If anything, Fountain's message of the need to reconnect with our common humanity in order to govern better is enough, a first step in a long journey of national healing.
Works Cited:
Fountain, Ben. (2018). Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.
In his account of 2016, Fountain begins each chapter (one per each month of the 2016 campaign) with an immersionary litany of monthly news, rapid-fire summations of the big stories internationally, before zooming in domestically to the dizzying array of forces active in the American political scene that he believes could precipitate a potential civil war or proportionate cataclysmic event of national crisis. A kind of window on the world to the threats brewing abroad to freedom and a contrasting of them with the dangerous political squabblings of 2016 that threaten to undermine from within instead. (A bit of irony there.) Perhaps the claim yet another existential crisis after the Civil War and Great Depression is a bit of a stretch in current conditions, but it definitely is a jolt for readers, a call to heed the social, economic and political forces that are converging and giving rise to not just Trump, but to demagogues like him across the world. Fountain is not shy about shining light on these forces he believes to be at the root of current American woes: a system predicated on white supremacy that has put people (often white) into positions of power to institute a plutocratic system of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination. A common refrain throughout the book is Fountain's core assertion of a base systemic logic at work in our daily lives of "profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation" (Fountain, 2018, p. 4).
Democrat or Republican, no one is spared from blistering (and honest) critique in Fountain's analysis. While he notes that conservative philosophies have had a closer alignment to privileged politicians and tycoons at the expense of the working class they purport to liberate from a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy, mainstream Democrats have also moved closer to this new centrist political position starting in the late 1990s, with more business friendly party planks alongside those pertaining to traditional social justice and environmental protection ones. Oh, and there were many appeals to the near-universal (and universally overused, in my opinion) "middle class values" of hard work and less government dependence (Fountain, 2018, p. 258). In an attempt to gain a broader coalition and re-brand, Democrats may have inadvertently shafted their traditional minority and union constituencies in a time of rising income inequality, uneven globalization, immigration crises, the rise of social media and politics as reality TV, emerging philosophies of subjective reality, and increasing far-right sympathies. Meanwhile, the conservative strategy of "campaign on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, and once you're in power do everything you can to make government dysfunctional and ineffective" does nothing to improve the situation (Fountain, 2018, p. 383). In turn, this leads to corresponding (mostly justified) reactionary responses from both left (the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter) and right-wing (the Tea Party) populists.
Instead, both parties have been guilty of pandering more to the One Percent than the majority, complicit in maintaining the former's preferred method of control in the "fantasy industrial complex," or "FIC," defined as the "saturation" of our personal and national scene with an "onslaught of media and messaging that...dims our capacity for understanding the world as it actually is" and instead promotes a relentless barrage of fantasy and the simple and lurid (Fountain, 2018, p. 312). In other words, as the chaos of 2016 unfolded, the American psyche was already coping with the trauma wrought by the FIC, designed to enrage and confuse the response to serious problems like income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change. What a double whammy. It becomes easier to understand why Trump's warped and racially-charged perception of the American Dream epitomized in his campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" so easily found its mark, bringing to power a man that has so far raised a middle finger to his working class base with a relentless campaign of deregulation and tax breaks that gutted the New Deal-promoted (relative) stability we enjoy today.
The question left at the conclusion of Beautiful Country Burn Again is whether America can manage the collective will to solve the problems it faces rather than retreating into an alternative reality in reaching a new New Deal, a reworking of the social contract to better align our system of government with serving all and not a few of its citizens. Here, like other authors of the books so far attempting to contextualize 2016, Fountain has difficulty in prescribing a specific treatment for America's ills, rather urging the latter updates of our social contract and calling for Americans to re-realize our common humanity in order to keep democratic governance above the rising tide of globalization and capitalism and other planetary problems like climate change. Perhaps that is unfair, considering the complexity of the project that needs to be undertaken to solve the complex, borderless issues of our era. If anything, Fountain's message of the need to reconnect with our common humanity in order to govern better is enough, a first step in a long journey of national healing.
Works Cited:
Fountain, Ben. (2018). Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.
Friday, November 2, 2018
Book Review: David Patrikarakos's "War in 140 Characters"
At the risk of sounding repetitive, social media platforms have become ubiquitous in our lives for both good (allowing news from dangerous war zones journalists are unable to reach in great numbers) and ill (the Russian social media disinformation campaign). Everything from citizen journalists to the infamous troll farms have been made possible by these technologies, part of what is commonly termed "Web 2.0," websites that offer various tools for Internet users to become active producers of content rather than passive consumers (Partikarakos, 2017, p. 9). Author and journalist David Patrikarakos explores how these technologically-empowered networks of individuals (the homo digitalis) are impacting twenty-first century warfare in his 2017 book War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
Warfare is by no means a novel concept for humanity. However, Patrikarakos sees the emerging breed of tech-savvy homo digitalis as reshaping conflict into both a physical contest on the battlefield between competing armies or militias and a parallel one in cyberspace. In other words, the narrative about a conflict matters equally as much as the battlefield reality. This is made possible by a variety of factors, including the inauguration of Web 2.0 technologies in an era of post-truth or subjective reality, where individuals can at low or no cost network with other like-minded individuals and broadcast to the world. This has had the effect of circumventing or even undermining traditional actors like the state and media organizations when individuals can get various tasks done without the aid of these often slow-moving, hierarchical institutions.
Patrikarakos illustrates the latter decentralizing and destabilizing effect of social media technology and homo digitalis by exploring from various angles the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine. In the Gaza strip, we are introduced to a Gazan teenage citizen journalist named Farah, whose emotive tweets and blog posts helped to galvanize international outrage against Israel during its Operation Protective Edge campaign in July 2014. On the other side of the conflict, Israel's IDF (military) Spokesperson's Unit attempted to contest the narrative space that Farah and other Gazans had utilized to their advantage, by countering their narrative of a people under cruel siege by a superior military force with one of an embattled military doing everything it could to protect their own civilians and Gazan ones from an organization (Hamas) accused of using their people as shields. However, because the Israeli government was largely playing catch-up for much of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fact is is that Palestinians were able to fortify their position in the narrative arena by virtue of having established a strong presence there first on social media (and giving mainstream media enough time and exposure to then pick up their content).
Meanwhile, in a Ukraine destabilized by the annexation of Crimea by Russia utilizing underhanded propaganda and military aid to back-up eastern Ukrainian separatist militias, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman named Anna Sandalova used Facebook to aid the embattled and under-equipped Ukrainian military. In a country beset with corruption issues, Sandalova was able to create a Facebook page as a private fundraising engine to supply necessities to Ukrainian army personnel battling the separatists in the east, bypassing often corrupt and slow-moving governmental institutions leftover from the Soviet days. Up against Sandalova and individuals like her, however, is a massive propaganda machine in autocratic Russia who is admittedly ahead of the game in comparison with Western democracies with embracing a new doctrine of hybrid-warfare. This has aided them in destabilizing both Ukraine and Syria, where a civil war currently rages.
For all the actors both Eastern and Western involved in Syria, ISIS stands out, even as it is currently in retreat from its peak territory and recruitment game. Just as individuals like Anna Sandalova can use social media for good, various non-state actors and individuals like ISIS, who are often out-matched in resources compared to state institutions, can use those same tools for ill. The ISIS siren song created by their cyberspace recruiters was able to cast a wide net, catching both educated individuals and die-hard jihadi ideologues with a message specifically targeted to these disaffected groups feeling like passive spectators in the lives: with ISIS, you can serve various roles (from caretakers to soldiers) in an idyllic caliphate. The call to something bigger than yourself is a universal narrative, inspiring people to serve states and non-state actors alike. Add this social media and the message's reach, serving whatever group, is amplified greatly.
While I enjoyed Patrikarakos's scholarship on this important topic of 21st century war, War in 140 Characters may be prematurely signing the death certificate of established institutions and states. Sure, outmatched networks of people can definitely influence the political dimension of war when they themselves aren't soldiers of the traditional kind. Yes, states and other slow moving organizations like diplomatic corps are playing catch-up right now in terms of embracing the potential of these Web 2.0 technologies. However, states probably will be able to close the gap, using their vast resources to back-up their own teams of cyber-warriors, as Russia appears to be doing to great effect with their troll farms and misinformation campaigns. As for Patrikarakos's concluding assertion that the destabilizing effects of social media embedded in today's globalization-crazed world facing innumerable transnational crises can precipitate WWIII, I'm less able to dismiss this assertion. While social media can bring people together, it often brings together diverse groups that can and often oppose others, spewing out huge tides of often unverified claims that even the best-equipped fast-checkers cannot keep up with. This is how we end up with autocrats inflaming divisions among their peoples and even those of foreign populations, a situation not the most stable or conducive to democratic dialogues and processes.
All in all, War in 140 Characters is a well-written and researched treatise on an important emergent topic in technology-driven warfare. While the jury is out as to whether or not states are a dying breed in the international arena, readers nonetheless will appreciate the intriguing and thought-provoking intellectual discussion found in Patrikarakos's book. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to play out with the conflicts explored in this book and many others, as the implications will certainly be far-reaching.
Works Cited:
Patrikarakos, David. (2017). War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books.
Warfare is by no means a novel concept for humanity. However, Patrikarakos sees the emerging breed of tech-savvy homo digitalis as reshaping conflict into both a physical contest on the battlefield between competing armies or militias and a parallel one in cyberspace. In other words, the narrative about a conflict matters equally as much as the battlefield reality. This is made possible by a variety of factors, including the inauguration of Web 2.0 technologies in an era of post-truth or subjective reality, where individuals can at low or no cost network with other like-minded individuals and broadcast to the world. This has had the effect of circumventing or even undermining traditional actors like the state and media organizations when individuals can get various tasks done without the aid of these often slow-moving, hierarchical institutions.
Patrikarakos illustrates the latter decentralizing and destabilizing effect of social media technology and homo digitalis by exploring from various angles the conflicts in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine. In the Gaza strip, we are introduced to a Gazan teenage citizen journalist named Farah, whose emotive tweets and blog posts helped to galvanize international outrage against Israel during its Operation Protective Edge campaign in July 2014. On the other side of the conflict, Israel's IDF (military) Spokesperson's Unit attempted to contest the narrative space that Farah and other Gazans had utilized to their advantage, by countering their narrative of a people under cruel siege by a superior military force with one of an embattled military doing everything it could to protect their own civilians and Gazan ones from an organization (Hamas) accused of using their people as shields. However, because the Israeli government was largely playing catch-up for much of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fact is is that Palestinians were able to fortify their position in the narrative arena by virtue of having established a strong presence there first on social media (and giving mainstream media enough time and exposure to then pick up their content).
Meanwhile, in a Ukraine destabilized by the annexation of Crimea by Russia utilizing underhanded propaganda and military aid to back-up eastern Ukrainian separatist militias, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman named Anna Sandalova used Facebook to aid the embattled and under-equipped Ukrainian military. In a country beset with corruption issues, Sandalova was able to create a Facebook page as a private fundraising engine to supply necessities to Ukrainian army personnel battling the separatists in the east, bypassing often corrupt and slow-moving governmental institutions leftover from the Soviet days. Up against Sandalova and individuals like her, however, is a massive propaganda machine in autocratic Russia who is admittedly ahead of the game in comparison with Western democracies with embracing a new doctrine of hybrid-warfare. This has aided them in destabilizing both Ukraine and Syria, where a civil war currently rages.
For all the actors both Eastern and Western involved in Syria, ISIS stands out, even as it is currently in retreat from its peak territory and recruitment game. Just as individuals like Anna Sandalova can use social media for good, various non-state actors and individuals like ISIS, who are often out-matched in resources compared to state institutions, can use those same tools for ill. The ISIS siren song created by their cyberspace recruiters was able to cast a wide net, catching both educated individuals and die-hard jihadi ideologues with a message specifically targeted to these disaffected groups feeling like passive spectators in the lives: with ISIS, you can serve various roles (from caretakers to soldiers) in an idyllic caliphate. The call to something bigger than yourself is a universal narrative, inspiring people to serve states and non-state actors alike. Add this social media and the message's reach, serving whatever group, is amplified greatly.
While I enjoyed Patrikarakos's scholarship on this important topic of 21st century war, War in 140 Characters may be prematurely signing the death certificate of established institutions and states. Sure, outmatched networks of people can definitely influence the political dimension of war when they themselves aren't soldiers of the traditional kind. Yes, states and other slow moving organizations like diplomatic corps are playing catch-up right now in terms of embracing the potential of these Web 2.0 technologies. However, states probably will be able to close the gap, using their vast resources to back-up their own teams of cyber-warriors, as Russia appears to be doing to great effect with their troll farms and misinformation campaigns. As for Patrikarakos's concluding assertion that the destabilizing effects of social media embedded in today's globalization-crazed world facing innumerable transnational crises can precipitate WWIII, I'm less able to dismiss this assertion. While social media can bring people together, it often brings together diverse groups that can and often oppose others, spewing out huge tides of often unverified claims that even the best-equipped fast-checkers cannot keep up with. This is how we end up with autocrats inflaming divisions among their peoples and even those of foreign populations, a situation not the most stable or conducive to democratic dialogues and processes.
All in all, War in 140 Characters is a well-written and researched treatise on an important emergent topic in technology-driven warfare. While the jury is out as to whether or not states are a dying breed in the international arena, readers nonetheless will appreciate the intriguing and thought-provoking intellectual discussion found in Patrikarakos's book. It will be interesting to see how social media continues to play out with the conflicts explored in this book and many others, as the implications will certainly be far-reaching.
Works Cited:
Patrikarakos, David. (2017). War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Basic Books.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Book Review: Ronan Farrow's "War on Peace"
"If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately." (Farrow, 2018, p. 273)--Quote by Trump's current secretary of defense James Mattis in March, 2013
The above quote references former General (and now Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration) James Mattis in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2013. For me, this blunt quote reverberates through our current era in which the Trump administration has hurt America's relationships with allies once regarded by many administrations as central to realizing Western-centered goals of facilitating the transformation of the world into a more democratic and free-trade friendly bloc. Under the leadership of Trump's first secretary of state, former Exxon-Mobil magnate Rex Tillerson, the State Department has been gutted, with recruitment down, career officers leaving in droves while Trump trashed NATO, called North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" (one in many derisive nicknames he assigns to people), and lavished Twitter praise on autocrats. Meanwhile, the budget for the military and defense collective was ballooning in an attempt to rectify what Trump viewed as a military neglected and in shambles. It is unclear what Trump's current secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will do about the budget situation at State. But what is clear, according to former State Department official and journalist Ronan Farrow is that this trend of favoring the military over diplomacy in foreign policy is not squarely on the shoulders of the Trump administration. This story of apparent decline in traditional statecraft dates way back before 9/11 to the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farrow argues in his 2018 book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence.
Farrow focuses on a relatively modern form of militarized foreign policy that seems to have taken root in American foreign policy circles, fueled by skepticism over the State Department's infamously inefficient bureaucracy in the face of modern challenges--from cyberterrorism to ISIL--to the rise of telecommunications technology that seems to make less special the personal face-to-face dialogues between diplomats. To bypass the ponderous State Department, administrations both Democratic and Republican have been relying increasingly on the military and intelligence agencies to broker the negotiations over everything from treaties to infrastructure development projects to wholesale reconstruction of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. To make his point, Farrow takes the reader on a tour of American foreign policy hot-spots of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Egypt, Colombia, the Horn of Africa, Syria and North Korea. He served under the tutelage of the late diplomatic giant Richard Holbrooke, famous for brokering peace in the Balkans in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 90s with the Dayton Accords.
Holbrooke is painted throughout War and Peace as an annoyingly tenacious and ambitious practitioner of old-school diplomacy and a firm advocate of backing up civilian diplomacy with a dose of American military might. However, over his long career of diplomatic service, ended in 2010 with his death from heart failure, he came to agree with many other career Foreign Service officers (and even some military personnel like Mattis) that it was increasingly dangerous for American foreign policy to over-rely on military-brokered transactional relationships. Moreover, he argued for a restoration of civilian-military diplomatic balance. It was only when this happened that America was able to build beyond surface-level relationships to more sustainable ones with other countries, and with them the necessary capacity to effectively push-back against issues like terrorism. This was the case with Colombia, a rare semi-success story of modern American diplomacy offered in Farrow's book.
In Colombia, a multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia military and development assistance package--reminiscent of America's perilous counter-terrorism alliances with the Afghan and Iraqi warlords and with Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies--seemed to doom again from the beginning American objectives of development, counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics policy in Latin America. Much of the resources went to the funding and training of Colombian army units, who often then were incentivized to practice extrajudicial killings in order to secure a more firm backing by U.S. military and intelligence agencies eager to root out left-leaning rebel guerrilla and drug trafficking groups like FARC. The problem was that many of their targets were innocent civilians rather than the criminals they were supposed to be getting, and these paramilitary groups were often not held accountable. As was the case with many forays into the Horn of Africa and Middle East, the United States created a worsening cycle of violence, that, ironically, made accomplishing their goals of sustainable development, democracy, rule of law and the like increasingly difficult.
However, the tides began to turn with American re-balancing of Plan Colombia's distribution of resources: funds were still going to the military and police to reclaim territory held by the cartels and FARC, but more money was being redirected to peacetime development projects and peace negotiations with guerrilla elements who'd terrorized the country. Notwithstanding the fact that America's over-reliance on military alliances--often anchored by hefty aid packages favoring the building of the institutional capacity of military and intelligence agencies over more democratic ones, like civilian development departments--have often created more problems for us when those armed and trained groups (with no deeper relationship with the U.S. aside from a monetary one) turn on us when their interests no longer align with ours, facilitating a cycle of never-ending violence and defense spending. But modern diplomacy, admittedly, does require a bit of both military muscle and negotiation. It definitely doesn't make sense to follow one path of inevitable cycles of violence with pure military foreign policy ascendant and civilian diplomatic capacity gutted. The loop could continue--potentially decimating us as a nation in the long-run, economically, politically and socially.
While Farrow's book jumps back-and-forth on the timeline often in order to make clear his latter argument, it still works in getting across this message. The prose was otherwise excellent, with the book reading like a novel and presenting erudite historical analyses that echo greatly in today's times, urgently calling for a renaissance of sorts in rebuilding the diplomatic capacity of the United States against a president whose brand of ascendant populism that disdains multilateralism, internationalism and expertise has exacerbated the trends of seeming decline at State. Increasing distrust of the U.S. from both allies and foes alike, borne out of disinvestment in diplomacy and withdrawal from major international pacts/treaties like the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate agreement have created openings for rival superpowers like China and Russia to fill in the void left by America.
However, in the end, Farrow takes a more cautiously optimistic bent. Perhaps the damage to our international standing caused by the latter disinvestment in civilian diplomacy will become increasingly obvious to the Trump administration, resulting in an about-face to rebuild our diplomatic arm of the government. The metaphorical restoration of the olive branch to the eagle's talons beside the arrows, if you will. Farrow writes in the epilogue that "the steady dissolution of the State Department under the Trump administration may appear to be a logical outcome of years of imbalanced foreign policy, but it is not an inevitable one" (Farrow, 2018, p. 295). Rather, the downward trend has been uneven, with development initiatives like the one in Colombia making fools out of those who'd prematurely called diplomacy's death for good.
Rumors of the death of diplomacy may have been greatly exaggerated, where the slow-burn process has still yielded great successes where allowed (i.e. Iran, Paris) and probably prevented immediate and costly military action. To continue in the long-term to yield positive results more often, the balance must be restored. In the modern era, we can't just rely on the military or just on State to conduct our foreign policy. We need both. We need balance to continue to prosper as a country.
Works Cited:
Farrow, Ronan. (2018). War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Book Review: Michiko Kakutani's "The Death of Truth"
Much has been made about our turbulent present moment, especially the rise of demagogic leaders who often disparage the media as a danger to the people and not to trust them and other erstwhile purveyors of objectivity: scientists, diplomats, intelligence agencies. Pundits are increasingly coining this era of rising protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia and distrust of globalization and government institutions as "post-truth," evoking the ghosts of 1984 and Animal Farm. Continuing in this vein is former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, with her 2018 mini-treatise The Death of Truth: Notes of Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
Unlike many of the current collection of published media, Kakutani's analysis focuses on the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of our times, drawing from a comprehensive array of fictional and non-fictional sources (Orwell to de Tocqueville to T. S. Elliot to more contemporary writers like the outspoken Putin critic Masha Gessen) to try and answer the million-dollar question: is Trump's toxic blend of authoritarian tendencies, brashness, inexpertise, pettiness, and distrust of experts unique or is representative of a historical waxing and waning of reactionary sentiment? To this end, Kakutani divides her analysis into nine topical chapters covering the manipulation of reality that comes from the corruption of language, the role of the Internet in our personal and political lives, fake news, and propaganda.
However, like the subtitle Notes implies, the chapters end up reading more like a loosely bound cataloguing of recent trends, almost a recitation of journalists' coverage of Trump's dishonesty sprinkled with literary parallels and corollaries. Kakutani treads familiar ground of President Trump's estranged relationship with the truth, but is covering so much material that the analysis becomes superficial and hurried, jumping from topic to topic. The common thread tying all these varying chapter-essays is Kakutani's interpretation of postmodernism as the driving force behind today's era of Trumpian "culture wars" (Kakutani, 2018, p. 31). A philosophy pioneered by French theorists Foucault and Derrida in the late 20th century, postmodernism rejects the concept of a completely objective reality, as human perception necessarily adds in subjectivity to how one interprets and understands their reality. Examples of variables influencing this interpretation are categories such as race, gender, socioeconomic class, ideology and the larger culture and political moment one inhabits.
Because this philosophical perspective accepts multiple perspectives as correct, more narratives from marginalized groups can be brought into the conversation, correctly so. The downside to this, Kakutani argues, is that postmodernism can be used to justify the dismissal of expertise, with language prone to being stretched and corrupted to fit multiple narratives one feels should be true: from the fact that a shady cabal of globalists is controlling things behind the scenes to the detriment of the common person to the fact that immigration is tanking the economy (both are mainstays of many of today's far-right groups) to the fact that vaccines cause autism (something that is false) or that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya (an infamous strain of dishonest and racist far-right political thought known as birtherism).
I must concede that Kakutani does have a point, that postmodernist perspectives and how they've become ingrained into our cultural and political lexicons have probably played a role in allowing fringe elements (especially those on the far-right) to weaponize it to attack the foundations of our democratic republic and others around the world: politicians are actually puppets of special interests, the federal government nothing but an overreaching, bloated, and inefficient entity, and the other political party an adversary. As with any idea, how one chooses to use it is the problem, not necessarily the idea itself (case in point: the Internet can be used as a democratizing force, to help share ideas across national borders and spark innovation and can-and is-also used to stir up instability via the spread of noxious and false ideas by state-sponsored or lone-wolf trolls alike). To me, postmodernism gets too much of a bad rap in The Death of Truth. Sure, its ideas can be twisted from producing literary masterpieces and to helping to instill a sense of multiculturalism in our society (definitely positives), for the purpose of producing and enabling demagogues by cunning individuals like Breitbart News darling Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the latter, to me, the corruption of postmodernism and its related schools of thought are one factor of many driving today's bizarro world.
Other relevant factors, like income, racial, and gender inequality, the role of technology (from the radio to the Internet) in confusing the truth and inhibiting critical thinking, and the use of propaganda have influenced the geopolitical landscape long before postmodernism emerged, serving to cast aspersions (some of this suspicion was definitely warranted, especially in situations where this was used to fuel reformist impulses to improve those institutions) on objective arbiters of truth and problem-solving. Dictators have always played fast with the truth, promised easy solutions to complex woes, and caused untold suffering. Today's propagandists and dictatorships the world over, from North Korea to Russia to today's alt-right movements have merely co-opted an old playbook used repeatedly throughout history to shape the geopolitical landscape (and their peoples' perception of it) in order to stay in power. Us versus them attitudes and accompanying forms of toxic nationalism and militarism have been evoked repeatedly in the name of vanquishing age-old problems undergirding society that established institutions couldn't and achieving that unachievable, perfect utopia. The Internet undoubtedly magnifies the reach of fake news bots, trolls, and dictators that lead the charge against institutions at all levels of government, allowing the world's Trumps and Putins to reach more people and ultimately end up better following and reinforcing this well-worn script. Therefore, it seems a bit unfair to lay Trumpism and other similar philosophies solely at the feet of postmodernist thought when a bevy of other factors contribute to today's social, economic, political, and cultural woes.
In the end, Kakutani's The Death of Truth comes across as erudite (reflecting her well-read background), yet flawed. It is okay to feel contempt and outrage for what the Trumps of the world are doing, but to rage on about the injustices committed against the people and democratic institutions without offering an antidote merely serves to fuel the very cynicism and apathy that we all need to conquer in order to fight back on behalf of democracy. We need to do better.
Works Cited:
Kakutani, Michiko. (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Unlike many of the current collection of published media, Kakutani's analysis focuses on the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of our times, drawing from a comprehensive array of fictional and non-fictional sources (Orwell to de Tocqueville to T. S. Elliot to more contemporary writers like the outspoken Putin critic Masha Gessen) to try and answer the million-dollar question: is Trump's toxic blend of authoritarian tendencies, brashness, inexpertise, pettiness, and distrust of experts unique or is representative of a historical waxing and waning of reactionary sentiment? To this end, Kakutani divides her analysis into nine topical chapters covering the manipulation of reality that comes from the corruption of language, the role of the Internet in our personal and political lives, fake news, and propaganda.
However, like the subtitle Notes implies, the chapters end up reading more like a loosely bound cataloguing of recent trends, almost a recitation of journalists' coverage of Trump's dishonesty sprinkled with literary parallels and corollaries. Kakutani treads familiar ground of President Trump's estranged relationship with the truth, but is covering so much material that the analysis becomes superficial and hurried, jumping from topic to topic. The common thread tying all these varying chapter-essays is Kakutani's interpretation of postmodernism as the driving force behind today's era of Trumpian "culture wars" (Kakutani, 2018, p. 31). A philosophy pioneered by French theorists Foucault and Derrida in the late 20th century, postmodernism rejects the concept of a completely objective reality, as human perception necessarily adds in subjectivity to how one interprets and understands their reality. Examples of variables influencing this interpretation are categories such as race, gender, socioeconomic class, ideology and the larger culture and political moment one inhabits.
Because this philosophical perspective accepts multiple perspectives as correct, more narratives from marginalized groups can be brought into the conversation, correctly so. The downside to this, Kakutani argues, is that postmodernism can be used to justify the dismissal of expertise, with language prone to being stretched and corrupted to fit multiple narratives one feels should be true: from the fact that a shady cabal of globalists is controlling things behind the scenes to the detriment of the common person to the fact that immigration is tanking the economy (both are mainstays of many of today's far-right groups) to the fact that vaccines cause autism (something that is false) or that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya (an infamous strain of dishonest and racist far-right political thought known as birtherism).
I must concede that Kakutani does have a point, that postmodernist perspectives and how they've become ingrained into our cultural and political lexicons have probably played a role in allowing fringe elements (especially those on the far-right) to weaponize it to attack the foundations of our democratic republic and others around the world: politicians are actually puppets of special interests, the federal government nothing but an overreaching, bloated, and inefficient entity, and the other political party an adversary. As with any idea, how one chooses to use it is the problem, not necessarily the idea itself (case in point: the Internet can be used as a democratizing force, to help share ideas across national borders and spark innovation and can-and is-also used to stir up instability via the spread of noxious and false ideas by state-sponsored or lone-wolf trolls alike). To me, postmodernism gets too much of a bad rap in The Death of Truth. Sure, its ideas can be twisted from producing literary masterpieces and to helping to instill a sense of multiculturalism in our society (definitely positives), for the purpose of producing and enabling demagogues by cunning individuals like Breitbart News darling Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the latter, to me, the corruption of postmodernism and its related schools of thought are one factor of many driving today's bizarro world.
Other relevant factors, like income, racial, and gender inequality, the role of technology (from the radio to the Internet) in confusing the truth and inhibiting critical thinking, and the use of propaganda have influenced the geopolitical landscape long before postmodernism emerged, serving to cast aspersions (some of this suspicion was definitely warranted, especially in situations where this was used to fuel reformist impulses to improve those institutions) on objective arbiters of truth and problem-solving. Dictators have always played fast with the truth, promised easy solutions to complex woes, and caused untold suffering. Today's propagandists and dictatorships the world over, from North Korea to Russia to today's alt-right movements have merely co-opted an old playbook used repeatedly throughout history to shape the geopolitical landscape (and their peoples' perception of it) in order to stay in power. Us versus them attitudes and accompanying forms of toxic nationalism and militarism have been evoked repeatedly in the name of vanquishing age-old problems undergirding society that established institutions couldn't and achieving that unachievable, perfect utopia. The Internet undoubtedly magnifies the reach of fake news bots, trolls, and dictators that lead the charge against institutions at all levels of government, allowing the world's Trumps and Putins to reach more people and ultimately end up better following and reinforcing this well-worn script. Therefore, it seems a bit unfair to lay Trumpism and other similar philosophies solely at the feet of postmodernist thought when a bevy of other factors contribute to today's social, economic, political, and cultural woes.
In the end, Kakutani's The Death of Truth comes across as erudite (reflecting her well-read background), yet flawed. It is okay to feel contempt and outrage for what the Trumps of the world are doing, but to rage on about the injustices committed against the people and democratic institutions without offering an antidote merely serves to fuel the very cynicism and apathy that we all need to conquer in order to fight back on behalf of democracy. We need to do better.
Works Cited:
Kakutani, Michiko. (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Book Review: Kate Andersen Brower's "First Women"
In the realm of politics, especially in Washington, it can be hard to see past carefully-created public veneers and crafted legacies to the often imperfect person behind the legend. This is especially true for the First Ladies of the United States (FLOTUSs), who are often cast as non-controversial supporting figures in their husband's administrations. These women often have less public visibility, often rivalled or overshadowed by the power of their husband's office, even as they become national and international icons. This leaves much to be desired for those like myself who want to know more about the impacts these ladies made on American history and whose school courses more often focused on presidents. Former Bloomberg journalist and researcher Kate Andersen Brower offers readers a chance to sate their curiosity with a peek behind the sometimes obfuscating legends and narratives surrounding the presidency and first ladyship in her 2016 entry First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies.
First Women focuses exclusively on the tenures of ten first ladies in the modern era, defined in the book as the time period between 1960 and the present: Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. (As of the time of publication of the book, Melania Trump was not officially First Lady, but the author includes speculation of what kind of FLOTUS she could be in First Women's afterword). Drawing upon more than 200 interviews with former FLOTUSs and their family, friends, aides and residence staffers (including research from her first book The Residence, an intimate view of the White House through the eyes of residence staffers) along with newly available public materials and scholarship, Brower weaves a complicated narrative surrounding American politics's "most elite sorority" (Brower, 2016, p. 5).
Rather than focus on each former FLOTUS chronologically, Brower chooses to intertwine ten narratives under topical chapters, from a discussion about their political dabblings to their public and private relationships with their husbands and other first ladies. While this jumping back and forth in the timeline can be disorienting and sometimes disrupts the flow of the book, I found it an effective mechanism for showing the carry-over between both Democratic and Republican administrations in terms of the underlying traditions of the ever-evolving first ladyship. An unofficial office, the first ladyship nonetheless demands much of the women who ascend to the position upon inauguration: to take on the public work of sympathetic advocate for the common people and defender of their husbands' political dealings (from tirelessly campaigning to being a confidante), while also providing for their families as mothers and spouses.
Each FLOTUS interpreted the latter mandates in their own way, producing an interesting spectrum of political involvement and personal relationships. Some FLOTUSs were highly influential in the crafting of policy (Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, and Lady Bird Johnson with their most famous work in healthcare reform, mental health and human rights, and civil rights and environmental causes, respectively), while others preferred to be more traditional, utilizing domestic charisma and soft power in supporting their husbands' political agendas (like Pat Nixon, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy, who dabbled more often in White House preservation projects and FLOTUS-traditional social causes like literacy and education). Despite their different conceptions of the role of FLOTUS, unlikely friendships and lifelong bonds were formed along the way, even between spouses of presidents on opposing sides of the political spectrum, like that between Laura Bush and Michelle Obama and Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy. These relationships often were formed for good or ill during the traditional tour of the White House given by the incumbent FLOTUS to the incoming first lady.
First Women shows each of these women at their worst and best and allows the readers to come out with a greater appreciation for how each FLOTUS navigated the tightrope of political (and sometimes feminist) icon and supporting player roles and the continuing gendered expectations of the office. Add in a healthy dose of public scrutiny, political attacks, and scandal, and one cannot help but admire how tough these women all were, regardless of political persuasion. However, at times the impartiality of the author was strained by gossipy chapters focusing on the bad blood and feuds between first ladies (for example, Barbara Bush's disdain for her much younger successor in Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama's lingering resentment of Hillary Clinton for her personal attacks against the Obamas during the heated 2008 presidential campaign) and seeming harshness towards some first ladies (Michelle Obama, for example, who was repeatedly reported as being highly unhappy as FLOTUS). The sisterhood isn't perfect, but the author sometimes lost focus on the overall unity of the first ladies forged from shared experiences.
Despite these flaws, readers of First Women emerge with a greater understanding of the humanity of these complicated women, a greater appreciation for their service to the country, and their places in history and the American political pantheon. While Brower's book is a more general biographical look at these women, it nonetheless is able to give readers a better look at the under-appreciated power brokers in our nation's first ladies.
Works Cited:
Brower, Kate Andersen. (2016). First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies. New York: Harpercollins.
First Women focuses exclusively on the tenures of ten first ladies in the modern era, defined in the book as the time period between 1960 and the present: Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. (As of the time of publication of the book, Melania Trump was not officially First Lady, but the author includes speculation of what kind of FLOTUS she could be in First Women's afterword). Drawing upon more than 200 interviews with former FLOTUSs and their family, friends, aides and residence staffers (including research from her first book The Residence, an intimate view of the White House through the eyes of residence staffers) along with newly available public materials and scholarship, Brower weaves a complicated narrative surrounding American politics's "most elite sorority" (Brower, 2016, p. 5).
Rather than focus on each former FLOTUS chronologically, Brower chooses to intertwine ten narratives under topical chapters, from a discussion about their political dabblings to their public and private relationships with their husbands and other first ladies. While this jumping back and forth in the timeline can be disorienting and sometimes disrupts the flow of the book, I found it an effective mechanism for showing the carry-over between both Democratic and Republican administrations in terms of the underlying traditions of the ever-evolving first ladyship. An unofficial office, the first ladyship nonetheless demands much of the women who ascend to the position upon inauguration: to take on the public work of sympathetic advocate for the common people and defender of their husbands' political dealings (from tirelessly campaigning to being a confidante), while also providing for their families as mothers and spouses.
Each FLOTUS interpreted the latter mandates in their own way, producing an interesting spectrum of political involvement and personal relationships. Some FLOTUSs were highly influential in the crafting of policy (Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, and Lady Bird Johnson with their most famous work in healthcare reform, mental health and human rights, and civil rights and environmental causes, respectively), while others preferred to be more traditional, utilizing domestic charisma and soft power in supporting their husbands' political agendas (like Pat Nixon, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy, who dabbled more often in White House preservation projects and FLOTUS-traditional social causes like literacy and education). Despite their different conceptions of the role of FLOTUS, unlikely friendships and lifelong bonds were formed along the way, even between spouses of presidents on opposing sides of the political spectrum, like that between Laura Bush and Michelle Obama and Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy. These relationships often were formed for good or ill during the traditional tour of the White House given by the incumbent FLOTUS to the incoming first lady.
First Women shows each of these women at their worst and best and allows the readers to come out with a greater appreciation for how each FLOTUS navigated the tightrope of political (and sometimes feminist) icon and supporting player roles and the continuing gendered expectations of the office. Add in a healthy dose of public scrutiny, political attacks, and scandal, and one cannot help but admire how tough these women all were, regardless of political persuasion. However, at times the impartiality of the author was strained by gossipy chapters focusing on the bad blood and feuds between first ladies (for example, Barbara Bush's disdain for her much younger successor in Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama's lingering resentment of Hillary Clinton for her personal attacks against the Obamas during the heated 2008 presidential campaign) and seeming harshness towards some first ladies (Michelle Obama, for example, who was repeatedly reported as being highly unhappy as FLOTUS). The sisterhood isn't perfect, but the author sometimes lost focus on the overall unity of the first ladies forged from shared experiences.
Despite these flaws, readers of First Women emerge with a greater understanding of the humanity of these complicated women, a greater appreciation for their service to the country, and their places in history and the American political pantheon. While Brower's book is a more general biographical look at these women, it nonetheless is able to give readers a better look at the under-appreciated power brokers in our nation's first ladies.
Works Cited:
Brower, Kate Andersen. (2016). First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies. New York: Harpercollins.
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Book Review: Michael Isikoff and David Corn's "Russian Roulette"
Back in December of last year, I reviewed Luke Harding's Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, coming out of reading it with the conclusion that there is a lot of smoke, but that the fire hadn't been located in all the obfuscation. And many allegations made were as of yet not verified. As the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in the 2016 election has steamed along surely but slowly, new revelations and evidence has been revealed that shed a bit more light on Trump-Russia ties and has benefited subsequent authors of many current (and probably many future) books on this subject. New events include the Helsinki summit in which Trump and Putin met in secret (no communique ever appeared after the summit as to what they talked about personally) and Trump publicly rebuffed U.S. intelligence's strong assertion that Russians meddled in the 2016 election while continuing his praise for the Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin (which even raised the hackles of some of Trump's supporters). Investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn definitely have an advantage over Harding's Collusion by virtue of the inevitable coming to light of further evidence in the public square over time that comes from careful investigation. Their 2018 entry Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump indirectly utilizes early works on the subject like Collusion and adds a crucial dimension to the narrative by taking advantage of insider accounts of the fight and controversies around shoring up America's vulnerable election infrastructure.
While Isikoff and Corn do explore more in depth about Trump's past in Russia, including previously undisclosed meetings that some of his colleagues (former and present, like Flynn or Manafort) engaged in, there is largely nothing new from what has been reported in the media this past year. Such as the fact that Trump's involvement in 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was not the first contact he had with Russia, with his drive to do business with Putin and the Kremlin in the Russian real-estate market going back at least a decade or so from the Miss Universe event. Shady deals with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials ensued between Trump and within his inner circle, with some still shrouded in mystery. What makes Russian Roulette stand out in the latest wave of Trump-Russia centered books is its exploration of new dimensions to the story in that of cyber espionage, troll farms, and campaign and election systems hacking as part of a larger geopolitical strategy, and the fact that the authors don't cringe from showing both the Clinton and Trump campaigns in sometimes unsavory lights.
Both campaigns were wary of the intelligence community, with the Clinton email investigation seeming ill-timed on former FBI director Comey's part and the Trump campaign viewing the FBI's counterintelligence operation probing suspicious dealings between members of his camp and Russia as a witch-hunt. However, as Isikoff and Corn assert throughout Russian Roulette, this wariness on both sides in cooperating with federal officials may have hindered efforts to defend against an ongoing wave of Russian cyberattacks on American public and private entities, including election infrastructure. To put events into their larger geopolitical context, Isikoff and Corn explore the emergence of what is termed the "Gerasimov doctrine" in 2013, named after a Russian general who described that a strong tilt towards the conduct of war in the cyber realm could be as effective at achieving the national interest as conventional warfare (Isikoff & Corn, 2018, p. 44). These operations could range from the actual targeting of the electrical grid to the social media operations revealed to have happened during the 2016 election campaign, with Russian hackers and bots using fake social media accounts to spout out inflammatory and untrue stories about both campaigns. While these operations aren't new, with Chinese and North Korea also taking stabs at the U.S., the Russian actions in America seem to have been of a much larger scale.
Around the time the DNC was first believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (the most infamous organization being the Internet Research Agency) in September of 2015, with parallel hacks happening to GOP computers, it was not taken seriously right away. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a suspicious Clinton campaign wary of assisting FBI investigators and a Democratic Party largely occupied by the bruising presidential campaign, with emails coming out apparently showing disdain and hostility towards the Sanders campaign and causing intra-party divisions. When DNC leadership learned about various hacks on DNC organizations and the Clinton campaign, they were advised to keep news of the hacks on the down-low while cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to oust the Russian intruders, the FBI investigated, and the Obama administration mulled how to respond to the blatant intrusion, worried that further sanctions under the Magnitsky Act or a counter cyber-operation would jeopardize their attempts at a diplomatic thaw with Russia that could prove fruitful in terms of counter-terrorism or arms treaty negotiations. (It wouldn't be until December 2016, after the election, when the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russian intelligence arms-the GRU and the FSB-and three related Russian companies, close Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, and kick out 35 Russian diplomats suspected to be spies.)
With the 2016 election over and a seemingly Russia-friendly administration in office, speculation over whether Trump was compromised by Russia grew during the first year of his office, which saw early attempts to ease or eliminate Obama administration sanctions (this was thwarted by Congress over Trump's veto threat), his firing of FBI director James Comey seemingly over the continued Trump-Russia investigation, his friendly summit meetings with Putin (two of which were covered by this book), revelations of previous Trump Tower meetings to get dirt on Clinton, and continued GOP efforts to discredit the special counsel appointed to oversee the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller. Where we go from here is anyone's guess at this point. Undoubtedly, future volumes will be able to present a better timeline of all of these events.
Sure, the promise of the subtitle was never satisfactorily explored, as the evidence presented in Russian Roulette remains far from definitively proved, insofar as the Mueller investigation remains in progress and a final verdict on the subject has yet to be rendered on this unbelievably complex story. That's the inevitable result of ongoing investigations combined with the bureaucratic secrecy surrounding such cases, where the appearance of political impartiality and protection of top-secret intelligence information and sources involved is paramount. However, all the minutiae is frustrating. Throw in the time-honored tradition of reporters protecting their sources, with anonymity both helping to persuade individuals who might not otherwise want to talk (but recognize something is wrong or needs to be said) but frustrating efforts to fact-check and verify a source's credibility. There were multiple anonymous sources cited in Russian Roulette and one cannot be sure a source is always credible and presenting "the facts." Moreover, I was concerned about how Isikoff and Corn used their information and sources to present what at times seem a simplified and monolithic portrayal of Russia as the villain and the U.S. as the hero, largely ignoring that there are Russian dissidents who genuinely want to work with the United States and help Russia transition back to democracy.
Overall, Russian Roulette is a smart piece of investigative work, despite the flaws I described above, with its helpful exploration of a new dimension of geopolitics in cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare and careful (i.e. detailed) chronological portrayal of events helpful to general readers like myself not intimately involved in American political inner circles. If anything, the main message from this is to remain vigilant and to keep watch on what seems to be a new and expanding geopolitical frontier in cyberspace along with the progression of Mueller's investigation. As they say, stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Isikoff, Michael, & Corn, David. (2018). Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Wintour, Patrick. (2018, July 17). Helsinki Summit: What Did Trump and Putin Agree? Retrieved August 13, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/helsinki-summit-what-did-trump-and-putin-agree.
While Isikoff and Corn do explore more in depth about Trump's past in Russia, including previously undisclosed meetings that some of his colleagues (former and present, like Flynn or Manafort) engaged in, there is largely nothing new from what has been reported in the media this past year. Such as the fact that Trump's involvement in 2013 with the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was not the first contact he had with Russia, with his drive to do business with Putin and the Kremlin in the Russian real-estate market going back at least a decade or so from the Miss Universe event. Shady deals with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin officials ensued between Trump and within his inner circle, with some still shrouded in mystery. What makes Russian Roulette stand out in the latest wave of Trump-Russia centered books is its exploration of new dimensions to the story in that of cyber espionage, troll farms, and campaign and election systems hacking as part of a larger geopolitical strategy, and the fact that the authors don't cringe from showing both the Clinton and Trump campaigns in sometimes unsavory lights.
Both campaigns were wary of the intelligence community, with the Clinton email investigation seeming ill-timed on former FBI director Comey's part and the Trump campaign viewing the FBI's counterintelligence operation probing suspicious dealings between members of his camp and Russia as a witch-hunt. However, as Isikoff and Corn assert throughout Russian Roulette, this wariness on both sides in cooperating with federal officials may have hindered efforts to defend against an ongoing wave of Russian cyberattacks on American public and private entities, including election infrastructure. To put events into their larger geopolitical context, Isikoff and Corn explore the emergence of what is termed the "Gerasimov doctrine" in 2013, named after a Russian general who described that a strong tilt towards the conduct of war in the cyber realm could be as effective at achieving the national interest as conventional warfare (Isikoff & Corn, 2018, p. 44). These operations could range from the actual targeting of the electrical grid to the social media operations revealed to have happened during the 2016 election campaign, with Russian hackers and bots using fake social media accounts to spout out inflammatory and untrue stories about both campaigns. While these operations aren't new, with Chinese and North Korea also taking stabs at the U.S., the Russian actions in America seem to have been of a much larger scale.
Around the time the DNC was first believed to have been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (the most infamous organization being the Internet Research Agency) in September of 2015, with parallel hacks happening to GOP computers, it was not taken seriously right away. Isikoff and Corn paint a picture of a suspicious Clinton campaign wary of assisting FBI investigators and a Democratic Party largely occupied by the bruising presidential campaign, with emails coming out apparently showing disdain and hostility towards the Sanders campaign and causing intra-party divisions. When DNC leadership learned about various hacks on DNC organizations and the Clinton campaign, they were advised to keep news of the hacks on the down-low while cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike attempted to oust the Russian intruders, the FBI investigated, and the Obama administration mulled how to respond to the blatant intrusion, worried that further sanctions under the Magnitsky Act or a counter cyber-operation would jeopardize their attempts at a diplomatic thaw with Russia that could prove fruitful in terms of counter-terrorism or arms treaty negotiations. (It wouldn't be until December 2016, after the election, when the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russian intelligence arms-the GRU and the FSB-and three related Russian companies, close Russian diplomatic compounds in Maryland and New York, and kick out 35 Russian diplomats suspected to be spies.)
With the 2016 election over and a seemingly Russia-friendly administration in office, speculation over whether Trump was compromised by Russia grew during the first year of his office, which saw early attempts to ease or eliminate Obama administration sanctions (this was thwarted by Congress over Trump's veto threat), his firing of FBI director James Comey seemingly over the continued Trump-Russia investigation, his friendly summit meetings with Putin (two of which were covered by this book), revelations of previous Trump Tower meetings to get dirt on Clinton, and continued GOP efforts to discredit the special counsel appointed to oversee the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller. Where we go from here is anyone's guess at this point. Undoubtedly, future volumes will be able to present a better timeline of all of these events.
Sure, the promise of the subtitle was never satisfactorily explored, as the evidence presented in Russian Roulette remains far from definitively proved, insofar as the Mueller investigation remains in progress and a final verdict on the subject has yet to be rendered on this unbelievably complex story. That's the inevitable result of ongoing investigations combined with the bureaucratic secrecy surrounding such cases, where the appearance of political impartiality and protection of top-secret intelligence information and sources involved is paramount. However, all the minutiae is frustrating. Throw in the time-honored tradition of reporters protecting their sources, with anonymity both helping to persuade individuals who might not otherwise want to talk (but recognize something is wrong or needs to be said) but frustrating efforts to fact-check and verify a source's credibility. There were multiple anonymous sources cited in Russian Roulette and one cannot be sure a source is always credible and presenting "the facts." Moreover, I was concerned about how Isikoff and Corn used their information and sources to present what at times seem a simplified and monolithic portrayal of Russia as the villain and the U.S. as the hero, largely ignoring that there are Russian dissidents who genuinely want to work with the United States and help Russia transition back to democracy.
Overall, Russian Roulette is a smart piece of investigative work, despite the flaws I described above, with its helpful exploration of a new dimension of geopolitics in cyber-espionage and cyber-warfare and careful (i.e. detailed) chronological portrayal of events helpful to general readers like myself not intimately involved in American political inner circles. If anything, the main message from this is to remain vigilant and to keep watch on what seems to be a new and expanding geopolitical frontier in cyberspace along with the progression of Mueller's investigation. As they say, stay tuned!
Works Cited:
Isikoff, Michael, & Corn, David. (2018). Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Wintour, Patrick. (2018, July 17). Helsinki Summit: What Did Trump and Putin Agree? Retrieved August 13, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/helsinki-summit-what-did-trump-and-putin-agree.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Book Review: Madeleine Albright's "Fascism"
History is remarkably grounding, if one pays attention to it and studies it, especially amid considerably turbulent and uncertain times. This holds true for Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state from 1997-2001 and ambassador to the United Nations, who was both an avid consumer of history and a close participant. A child of WWII and the early Cold War, Albright fled with her family from her native Czechoslovakia in 1939 to London ahead of Hitler's invasion. Returning six years later, Albright subsequently witnessed the early stages of the Cold War, with her homeland falling under the sway of Communist regimes. From America, her family then watched as the Berlin Wall fell, signalling the death knell of the USSR and the Cold War. Having witnessed two governmental extremes in her early life and armed with her historical knowledge (especially about her native Central & Eastern Europe) gleaned in her professorial days, Albright brought an invaluable understanding to her conduct as secretary of state. Reflecting on her life and public service, Albright (along with co-author Bill Woodward) attempts to provide context for our present era of strife-anxiety over globalization, the rise of populism, increased protectionist/isolationist sentiments, concerns over sociocultural change and various immigrant crises, rising racism/misogyny-in her 2018 historical treatise Fascism: A Warning.
Throughout the book, I got the impression that the main message was that, yes, fascism has happened many times before in history, but that for all the carnage and evil, people snapped out of it eventually when they realized that one person or party cannot provide the simple answers they wish for complex problems. And that no amount of catastrophic division can serve as a justifiable means to an end. That doesn't make what happened in the past, or what is happening presently since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 any less concerning or scary. It's just that looking to the past for lessons on how to deal with the present can be grounding, taking away the core of our uncertainty that comes with the perception that things have never been this bad.
Like her readers were students in her graduate foreign policy class at Georgetown University, Albright profiles Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kacynski, Kim Jong-Un and even Donald Trump (as much as it is possible so early into his presidency). From Europe to the Middle East, East Asia, and America, each profile is helpfully situated within the eras they took power in: post-WWI, WWII, the Cold War, post 9/11. Joseph McCarthy even makes a cameo appearance in the second-most recent national turmoil fresh in our collective cultural memories in the Cold War, Red Scare era. These eras were defined by periods of significant social, cultural, economic and political turmoil, from the ravages of war to rising unemployment and corruption that often gave rise to a toxic mix of nationalism and militarism against scapegoated Others believed to be the cause of their problems (and thus stoked by dictatorial figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and present-day leaders like Putin and Orban into incredibly destructive geopolitical flames). Both left-wing and right-wing revolutions were hijacked for this purpose, even in America, where the interwar period saw the rise of sympathetic groups like the America First Committee (AFC) that sought to prevent American involvement in WWII. A harrowing picture of a dog-eat-dog world was often painted, with a zero-sum game of constant international competition defining international relations.
Sound familiar?
Strains of these eras are with us today in our era of despair over the state of democracy, a seeming resurgence of authoritarianism, refugee crises and histrionics over immigrants irrevocably changing a nation's essence. Albright is definitely concerned about how Trump's antidemocratic sentiments erode our own relatively strong democratic institutions and serves to embolden dictators and their wannabes, but doesn't feel as if our circumstances are as dire as they were in the interwar or Cold War years. The foundation for this cautiously optimistic assessment is that socioeconomic and political conditions have markedly improved over the years and average lifespans have lengthened for the average person. Yet, globalization and the inequalities it has generated, combined with refugee-producing intrastate conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and climate change are no trifling matters.
In her conclusion, Albright acknowledges the latter issues of the present day, but counters pessimistic readers (admittedly, like myself) with the fact that, in the past, leaders like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln rose not by dividing, but by uniting people to confront their collective problems in more democratic ways. However, like the dictators and fascists Albright profiles in Fascism: A Warning, no one leader can be our savior; we must also stand up for ourselves and our democracy by being more outspoken participants in our democratic process. Undoubtedly, it will be a difficult fight and the good guys do not always win. But how can we live with ourselves if we don't try to stand up for what's right?
Works Cited:
Albright, Madeleine, & Woodward, Bill. (2018). Fascism: A Warning. New York: HarperCollins.
Throughout the book, I got the impression that the main message was that, yes, fascism has happened many times before in history, but that for all the carnage and evil, people snapped out of it eventually when they realized that one person or party cannot provide the simple answers they wish for complex problems. And that no amount of catastrophic division can serve as a justifiable means to an end. That doesn't make what happened in the past, or what is happening presently since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 any less concerning or scary. It's just that looking to the past for lessons on how to deal with the present can be grounding, taking away the core of our uncertainty that comes with the perception that things have never been this bad.
Like her readers were students in her graduate foreign policy class at Georgetown University, Albright profiles Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Slobodan Milosevic, Hugo Chavez, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jaroslaw Kacynski, Kim Jong-Un and even Donald Trump (as much as it is possible so early into his presidency). From Europe to the Middle East, East Asia, and America, each profile is helpfully situated within the eras they took power in: post-WWI, WWII, the Cold War, post 9/11. Joseph McCarthy even makes a cameo appearance in the second-most recent national turmoil fresh in our collective cultural memories in the Cold War, Red Scare era. These eras were defined by periods of significant social, cultural, economic and political turmoil, from the ravages of war to rising unemployment and corruption that often gave rise to a toxic mix of nationalism and militarism against scapegoated Others believed to be the cause of their problems (and thus stoked by dictatorial figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and present-day leaders like Putin and Orban into incredibly destructive geopolitical flames). Both left-wing and right-wing revolutions were hijacked for this purpose, even in America, where the interwar period saw the rise of sympathetic groups like the America First Committee (AFC) that sought to prevent American involvement in WWII. A harrowing picture of a dog-eat-dog world was often painted, with a zero-sum game of constant international competition defining international relations.
Sound familiar?
Strains of these eras are with us today in our era of despair over the state of democracy, a seeming resurgence of authoritarianism, refugee crises and histrionics over immigrants irrevocably changing a nation's essence. Albright is definitely concerned about how Trump's antidemocratic sentiments erode our own relatively strong democratic institutions and serves to embolden dictators and their wannabes, but doesn't feel as if our circumstances are as dire as they were in the interwar or Cold War years. The foundation for this cautiously optimistic assessment is that socioeconomic and political conditions have markedly improved over the years and average lifespans have lengthened for the average person. Yet, globalization and the inequalities it has generated, combined with refugee-producing intrastate conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and climate change are no trifling matters.
In her conclusion, Albright acknowledges the latter issues of the present day, but counters pessimistic readers (admittedly, like myself) with the fact that, in the past, leaders like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln rose not by dividing, but by uniting people to confront their collective problems in more democratic ways. However, like the dictators and fascists Albright profiles in Fascism: A Warning, no one leader can be our savior; we must also stand up for ourselves and our democracy by being more outspoken participants in our democratic process. Undoubtedly, it will be a difficult fight and the good guys do not always win. But how can we live with ourselves if we don't try to stand up for what's right?
"The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended, and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed." (Albright, 2018, p. 252)
Works Cited:
Albright, Madeleine, & Woodward, Bill. (2018). Fascism: A Warning. New York: HarperCollins.
Friday, August 3, 2018
Book Review: James W. Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me"
In our age of fake news, populist leaders like President Trump have been known to make false statements on a wide range of issues, from history to policy. Especially dangerous are distortions or revisionist interpretations of the former (like declaring human trafficking to be the worst problem in the history of the world, ignoring the obvious injustices of slavery and the barbarity of Columbus towards indigenous peoples), which can dangerously narrow one's worldview and the available solutions to the present world's problems. Trump is not alone in misunderstanding or omitting key parts of American history. Many Americans (myself included) struggle to recall various historical factoids from our high school civics/history courses and what we do recall might be wrong (or the fact that the history textbooks used were back-breaking behemoths!). What has gone wrong with the teaching of American history? Author, historian and sociologist James Loewen sets out to answer this question in the newest (2007) edition of his popular book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
Originally published in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me is out with a second edition, to cover more ground with recent events like 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Most of the book is dedicated at the outset to dispelling myths around events like Columbus's landing in "America" to the post Civil War period of Reconstruction to 9/11 and the role of government in domestic/international affairs as they are portrayed in the major high-school level textbooks (Loewen surveys 18 textbooks for his latest edition). The last few chapters are devoted especially to textbook critique and suggests ways that teachers could improve student engagement in American history courses.
Because Loewen covers a great deal of historical ground, I will focus on the main issues Loewen raises with textbooks. First and foremost is how history is often shaped by the victors (i.e. the dominant culture) to both paint them and their ancestors in a more flattering light and whitewash (some pun intended here) much of the bad done (i.e. African and American Indian slavery, the Spanish conquistadors' brutal exploitation of indigenous peoples in the name of greed). In other words, history is often self-serving to dominant groups and this is reflected in textbooks by the near-deification of figures like Christopher Columbus and Helen Keller, turning them from imperfect human beings into bland and "pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest" (Loewen, 2018, p. 31). Historical figures become archetypes, often used for the purposes of instilling blind patriotism by identifying in them our values: tolerance, forward-thinking, hard-working, industrious, etc. (Perhaps this identification is more the result of the projection of our societal values, specifically Western ones, onto historical figures, rather than the other way around.)
One of the more prominent examples to me was that of Columbus, whose atrocities towards native populations (something I hadn't discovered until my college courses in American government/history and multicultural studies) cannot be overstated (for example, enslavement of indigenous peoples), is more well known for apparently being a progressive, forward-thinking explorer carrying the hopes of Europe with him to the New World. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his famous championing of women's suffrage and the League of Nations, was notoriously racist, segregating the federal government while he was in office.
The second issue is that the textbooks teachers teach from (often because it is easier than devoting more time they don't have outside of their many other duties to radically restructuring the curriculum and lesson plans) encourage the teaching of history in a way that does not invite controversies. Rather, history is presented as a black-and-white string of loosely-connected events, with each event a problem that is neatly resolved with some sort of action, usually on behalf of centralized authorities (like racism being solved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). And with each successive correction of injustice, we get ever closer to perfection as a society (i.e. the ideal of progress as inevitable). This means that it is very difficult to persuade anyone that history has relevance to their daily lives if the past itself was a mess of seemingly unrelated events. Moreover, it prevents students and citizens from seeing how issues like racism and inequality persist in various (yet often different or more subtle) forms today. And it leads to a dangerous trap of apathy: if nothing can be done to understand today's issues in historical context, why bother trying to change anything?
Finally, there's the issue that textbooks aren't written by historians and often stray far from primary sources (letters, photographs, videos, etc.). That really surprised me. Shouldn't the knowledge being imparted to students (students we want to be better, engaged citizens) require the strictest vetting and fact-checking (especially by people trained in that specific subject area)? No wonder there are so many false narratives and misconceptions out there.
What solutions are there, if any, to this complex problem of history teaching? Loewen suggests that to ameliorate the pressures coming from parents, publishing companies, textbook approval boards and more is to teach history in a way that teaches critical thinking and independent learning (rather than rote learning of a pre-approved narrative) with an eye towards teaching backwards (from the present to the past). Because there's so much history out there, this necessitates limitations on what material can be covered, but it might be a vast improvement if people merely learn that today's issues (and solutions) are often in the past. In summation, teaching history by showing its intimate connections with our lives could promote student (and adult) engagement and renewed interest in an important subject. Who knew?!
While I felt that there was a heavy-handed and often repetitive focus on textbook critique in certain parts of the book rather than little-known historical happenings, Loewen overall got across a valuable point to readers: something needs to change in regards to teaching history. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book that everyone should read, providing an eye-opening narrative that not only expands on the good and bad left out in textbooks but also conveys the expansive, complex, captivating, and relevant nature of history.
Works Cited:
Summers, Juana. (2017, August 24). Trump's Muddled View of American History. Retrieved July 27, 2018, from https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/politics/trump-history-facts-historians/index.html.
Loewen, James W. (2007). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press.
Originally published in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me is out with a second edition, to cover more ground with recent events like 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Most of the book is dedicated at the outset to dispelling myths around events like Columbus's landing in "America" to the post Civil War period of Reconstruction to 9/11 and the role of government in domestic/international affairs as they are portrayed in the major high-school level textbooks (Loewen surveys 18 textbooks for his latest edition). The last few chapters are devoted especially to textbook critique and suggests ways that teachers could improve student engagement in American history courses.
Because Loewen covers a great deal of historical ground, I will focus on the main issues Loewen raises with textbooks. First and foremost is how history is often shaped by the victors (i.e. the dominant culture) to both paint them and their ancestors in a more flattering light and whitewash (some pun intended here) much of the bad done (i.e. African and American Indian slavery, the Spanish conquistadors' brutal exploitation of indigenous peoples in the name of greed). In other words, history is often self-serving to dominant groups and this is reflected in textbooks by the near-deification of figures like Christopher Columbus and Helen Keller, turning them from imperfect human beings into bland and "pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest" (Loewen, 2018, p. 31). Historical figures become archetypes, often used for the purposes of instilling blind patriotism by identifying in them our values: tolerance, forward-thinking, hard-working, industrious, etc. (Perhaps this identification is more the result of the projection of our societal values, specifically Western ones, onto historical figures, rather than the other way around.)
One of the more prominent examples to me was that of Columbus, whose atrocities towards native populations (something I hadn't discovered until my college courses in American government/history and multicultural studies) cannot be overstated (for example, enslavement of indigenous peoples), is more well known for apparently being a progressive, forward-thinking explorer carrying the hopes of Europe with him to the New World. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his famous championing of women's suffrage and the League of Nations, was notoriously racist, segregating the federal government while he was in office.
The second issue is that the textbooks teachers teach from (often because it is easier than devoting more time they don't have outside of their many other duties to radically restructuring the curriculum and lesson plans) encourage the teaching of history in a way that does not invite controversies. Rather, history is presented as a black-and-white string of loosely-connected events, with each event a problem that is neatly resolved with some sort of action, usually on behalf of centralized authorities (like racism being solved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). And with each successive correction of injustice, we get ever closer to perfection as a society (i.e. the ideal of progress as inevitable). This means that it is very difficult to persuade anyone that history has relevance to their daily lives if the past itself was a mess of seemingly unrelated events. Moreover, it prevents students and citizens from seeing how issues like racism and inequality persist in various (yet often different or more subtle) forms today. And it leads to a dangerous trap of apathy: if nothing can be done to understand today's issues in historical context, why bother trying to change anything?
Finally, there's the issue that textbooks aren't written by historians and often stray far from primary sources (letters, photographs, videos, etc.). That really surprised me. Shouldn't the knowledge being imparted to students (students we want to be better, engaged citizens) require the strictest vetting and fact-checking (especially by people trained in that specific subject area)? No wonder there are so many false narratives and misconceptions out there.
What solutions are there, if any, to this complex problem of history teaching? Loewen suggests that to ameliorate the pressures coming from parents, publishing companies, textbook approval boards and more is to teach history in a way that teaches critical thinking and independent learning (rather than rote learning of a pre-approved narrative) with an eye towards teaching backwards (from the present to the past). Because there's so much history out there, this necessitates limitations on what material can be covered, but it might be a vast improvement if people merely learn that today's issues (and solutions) are often in the past. In summation, teaching history by showing its intimate connections with our lives could promote student (and adult) engagement and renewed interest in an important subject. Who knew?!
While I felt that there was a heavy-handed and often repetitive focus on textbook critique in certain parts of the book rather than little-known historical happenings, Loewen overall got across a valuable point to readers: something needs to change in regards to teaching history. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book that everyone should read, providing an eye-opening narrative that not only expands on the good and bad left out in textbooks but also conveys the expansive, complex, captivating, and relevant nature of history.
Works Cited:
Summers, Juana. (2017, August 24). Trump's Muddled View of American History. Retrieved July 27, 2018, from https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/politics/trump-history-facts-historians/index.html.
Loewen, James W. (2007). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press.
Friday, July 20, 2018
Book Review: Francisco Cantú's "The Line Becomes A River"
With the heartbreaking situation of separated family detentions continuing at the U.S.-Mexico border (with a gradual re-unification of families taking place), it can be easy for all sides to dig in their trenches. In doing so, we are in danger of dehumanizing everyone around us, and we need reminders of that essential humanity and because of this humanity, issues are not black and white but complex rainbows of gray. No matter if you're an immigrant, U.S. citizen, conservative, liberal, etc. For me, that reminder of our common humanity came when I read former Border Patrol Agent Francisco Cantú's 2018 work The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border, a three-part treatise not afraid to blur the line between the personal and the systemic affairs of politics and governments in the crafting and enforcement of immigration policy.
Cantú served as an agent of the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, patrolling the remote, arid borderlands from Arizona to New Mexico and Texas. In his brief stint with the Patrol, Cantú learned and honed tracking skills more commonly utilized in hunting to track migrants, who were abandoned by their smugglers and lost amongst the violence engendered by the cartel system amid a harsh desert landscape. He helps to deliver those who have survived the crossing (albeit with many scars, visible and invisible) to the authorities for processing and often deportation under a fraught legal regime, but just as often attends to the grim work of recovering the bodies of those who did not. The physical, emotional and spiritual stress of the Border Patrol experience manifests in constant nightmares of wolves and teeth falling out for Cantú, who eventually can't take the strain and leaves the law enforcement agency in 2012.
While The Line Becomes a River is not a purely journalistic affair in its heavy use of emotional appeals, Cantú intersperses tales of his upbringing, time in the Border Patrol and his later civilian life befriending an immigrant (José) at his coffee shop job with historical anecdotes and studies from various experts to give the reader an introduction into the complex history of the U.S.-Mexico border. The latter border was settled on paper by 1853 after negotiations over the terms of the 1848 Mexican-American War peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding "nearly thirty thousand square miles of territory" to the United States by following a "rigid and pivoting line" that would "dip south from Yuma and run east to the Rio Grande" (Cantú, 2018, p. 43). Throughout the book, Cantú decries the cold and arbitrary nature of the border, a tense mediator between two violent systems: that of crime syndicates who pillage, destroy and corrupt the Mexican republic and its people, and that of the rigid, sometimes cruel nature of the U.S. immigration system that separates families and makes it nearly impossible for migrants to attain legal status.
Moreover, the physical border serves as a spiritual dividing line for Cantú in The Line Becomes a River as he struggles to reckon with his complicity in a broken immigration system in light of his simultaneous Mexican heritage and status as a U.S. citizen and his search for redemption in the final part of the book when he comes to the aid of his immigrant friend who's separated from his U.S.-habiting family. While exploring the various perspectives of the immigration tragedy, giving humanity to fellow Border Patrol agents (he argues to his mother that the agency isn't "full of white racists out to kill and deport Mexicans" but rather is a diverse organization filled with those seeking job security) and migrants alike (lamenting the dangers of the border crossing and their desperate quests for better lives and reunion with families across the border), Cantú gives vivid life to the violent history (and present) of the border catalogued in the statistical reports and academic studies of experts and historians he interjects throughout the narrative.
In doing so, Cantú reveals the beauty of the borderlands underneath the ugly, violent realities playing out everyday, with the diverse human communities dotting the harsh landscape giving a defiant vitality to a landscape his former Park Service mother treasures so. Perhaps a kind of perverse beauty, given the death and destruction playing a constant counter-melody to life in the desert.
The Line Becomes a River concludes with a letter from José that speaks to Cantú, but that might as well be addressed to all of us, chronicling the man-made and natural obstacles alike to a desperate border crossing (the monetary and legal extortions of the cartels and smugglers imposed upon their charges, the deadly heat of the summer sun and the dearth of clean water or food, the simultaneous fears of being caught by Border Patrol and the smugglers whom one was often dependent upon for border crossings). With avenues for asylum and other methods of legal entry severely restricted, each desperate crossing adds to one's criminal record, making legal status near-impossible and making migrants ever more desperate, leading to a vicious cycle of exploitation and violence by both sides.
José writes in his conclusion that despite the many dangers "the judges in the United States, if they know the reality, they are sending people to their deaths" because many wanting to leave behind desperate situations "will do anything to be on the other side" in the United States (Cantú, 2018, p. 241-242). This sobering fact is more recently illustrated by the forced family separations and detentions of around 2,900 migrant children underneath the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy towards immigration.
Ultimately, The Line Becomes a River is a desperate cry for immigration reform to remedy the heartbreaking headlines and even more so a call for readers to conduct introspections into our roles in this problem and what can be done to help.
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2018, July 10). US Cannot Reunite Dozens of Child Migrants With Their Parents. Retrieved July 11, 2018, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44785867.
Cantú, Francisco. (2018). The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border. New York: Riverhead Books.
Cantú served as an agent of the United States Border Patrol from 2008 to 2012, patrolling the remote, arid borderlands from Arizona to New Mexico and Texas. In his brief stint with the Patrol, Cantú learned and honed tracking skills more commonly utilized in hunting to track migrants, who were abandoned by their smugglers and lost amongst the violence engendered by the cartel system amid a harsh desert landscape. He helps to deliver those who have survived the crossing (albeit with many scars, visible and invisible) to the authorities for processing and often deportation under a fraught legal regime, but just as often attends to the grim work of recovering the bodies of those who did not. The physical, emotional and spiritual stress of the Border Patrol experience manifests in constant nightmares of wolves and teeth falling out for Cantú, who eventually can't take the strain and leaves the law enforcement agency in 2012.
While The Line Becomes a River is not a purely journalistic affair in its heavy use of emotional appeals, Cantú intersperses tales of his upbringing, time in the Border Patrol and his later civilian life befriending an immigrant (José) at his coffee shop job with historical anecdotes and studies from various experts to give the reader an introduction into the complex history of the U.S.-Mexico border. The latter border was settled on paper by 1853 after negotiations over the terms of the 1848 Mexican-American War peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding "nearly thirty thousand square miles of territory" to the United States by following a "rigid and pivoting line" that would "dip south from Yuma and run east to the Rio Grande" (Cantú, 2018, p. 43). Throughout the book, Cantú decries the cold and arbitrary nature of the border, a tense mediator between two violent systems: that of crime syndicates who pillage, destroy and corrupt the Mexican republic and its people, and that of the rigid, sometimes cruel nature of the U.S. immigration system that separates families and makes it nearly impossible for migrants to attain legal status.
Moreover, the physical border serves as a spiritual dividing line for Cantú in The Line Becomes a River as he struggles to reckon with his complicity in a broken immigration system in light of his simultaneous Mexican heritage and status as a U.S. citizen and his search for redemption in the final part of the book when he comes to the aid of his immigrant friend who's separated from his U.S.-habiting family. While exploring the various perspectives of the immigration tragedy, giving humanity to fellow Border Patrol agents (he argues to his mother that the agency isn't "full of white racists out to kill and deport Mexicans" but rather is a diverse organization filled with those seeking job security) and migrants alike (lamenting the dangers of the border crossing and their desperate quests for better lives and reunion with families across the border), Cantú gives vivid life to the violent history (and present) of the border catalogued in the statistical reports and academic studies of experts and historians he interjects throughout the narrative.
In doing so, Cantú reveals the beauty of the borderlands underneath the ugly, violent realities playing out everyday, with the diverse human communities dotting the harsh landscape giving a defiant vitality to a landscape his former Park Service mother treasures so. Perhaps a kind of perverse beauty, given the death and destruction playing a constant counter-melody to life in the desert.
The Line Becomes a River concludes with a letter from José that speaks to Cantú, but that might as well be addressed to all of us, chronicling the man-made and natural obstacles alike to a desperate border crossing (the monetary and legal extortions of the cartels and smugglers imposed upon their charges, the deadly heat of the summer sun and the dearth of clean water or food, the simultaneous fears of being caught by Border Patrol and the smugglers whom one was often dependent upon for border crossings). With avenues for asylum and other methods of legal entry severely restricted, each desperate crossing adds to one's criminal record, making legal status near-impossible and making migrants ever more desperate, leading to a vicious cycle of exploitation and violence by both sides.
José writes in his conclusion that despite the many dangers "the judges in the United States, if they know the reality, they are sending people to their deaths" because many wanting to leave behind desperate situations "will do anything to be on the other side" in the United States (Cantú, 2018, p. 241-242). This sobering fact is more recently illustrated by the forced family separations and detentions of around 2,900 migrant children underneath the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy towards immigration.
Ultimately, The Line Becomes a River is a desperate cry for immigration reform to remedy the heartbreaking headlines and even more so a call for readers to conduct introspections into our roles in this problem and what can be done to help.
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2018, July 10). US Cannot Reunite Dozens of Child Migrants With Their Parents. Retrieved July 11, 2018, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44785867.
Cantú, Francisco. (2018). The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border. New York: Riverhead Books.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Book Review: Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America"
There is a principle of physics that states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In his latest book, The Soul of America (2018), historian and biographer Jon Meacham invokes the latter maxim of Newton's Third Law to describe the almost perpetual tug-of-war between progressive and reactive forces in America's 242 years of being a nation. In the latest episode of national turmoil inspired by the rise of right-leaning populist Donald Trump to the American presidency, Meacham entreats readers to remember past moments of discord, and that ultimately, the progressive impulses at the heart of America or the "better angels of our nature," always manage to come through for us (Meacham, 2018, p. 19).
Meacham's historical narrative is divided into seven parts, featuring seven scenarios in which the fate of the Union seemed in doubt: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the backlash to the Progressive Era, the emergence of a Second Ku Klux Klan and the parallel fight for women's suffrage, the New Deal era, the age of McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights movement. Carrying the nation forward were primarily its presidents, who used the muscle of the federal government in repeated attempts to right historical and continuing injustices, as well as ordinary citizens become heroes, from Rosa Parks to Eleanor Roosevelt. (While the former is definitely important, setting the national tone, I believe it's equally, if not more important for a parallel grassroots response to emerge in response to top-down policy proposals and appeals to American values. Otherwise, sustained change is made more difficult by the transitions between each presidential administration.)
One of the greatest strengths in Meacham's prose is showing that the heroes of each chapter (Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.) were not the perfect, larger-than-life demigods or goddesses that history paints them as, illustrating beautifully Meacham's point that the "American soul" is constantly torn between contradictions of justice, but also prejudice and injustice, progress and regression. While the latter theme is sometimes frustrating in many works of nonfiction today, at times seeming to gloss over or minimize the suffering caused to whole groups of people in favor of amping up a patriotic narrative, in The Soul of America, I think a balance has been more or less achieved. Yes, it's great to be proud of your nation, but you must acknowledge its imperfections, exceptional nation or no. Meacham walks this fine line between acknowledgement of past injustice and optimistic, effluent patriotism very well in his chronicles of how climates of fear and hate are overcome by those who chose to espouse a contrarian politics of progress and optimism.
Whether it is the Emancipation Proclamation, the first in a series of fitful steps to grant equal citizenship rights to African-Americans, or lawyer John Welch's admonition to McCarthy at the height of hysteria over Communism in the '60s, "Have you no decency, sir?," these national corrections of injustice have not come without cost (Meacham, 2018, p. 201). The constant struggle between forces of progress and stagnancy or regression represented starkly in the various fights to expand the promise and protections granted by American citizenship from white, propertied males to African-Americans to women to minorities and to the LGBTQ community shows us all that, despite how free and open our 21st century America may be, that this progress is always vulnerable. That the American promise and the institutions of our democratic republic are still fragile and injustice still exists, with ancient prejudices taking on new disguises. Kinda like America First, the not-so-original 2016 campaign slogan taken from the annals of history in which demagogues the world over incited similar fears of the Other in order to give a toxic buttress to national identity in the face of social, political, economic and cultural change. Sound familiar? History has that ability to eerily rhyme, if one chooses to listen.
Meacham writes that when we, in the present, condemn our forebears for "slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?" (Meacham, 2018, p. 259). This mindfulness of history is one of several points of advice that Meacham concludes with for American citizens who wish to prove the essential goodness of the American soul rather than exacerbate its darkness. Armed with the knowledge of history and its inevitable cycles of peace and turmoil (or simultaneous periods of both), facts and reason, and a willingness to resist tribalism and engage with all corners of the political world, Meacham is optimistic that this era of Donald Trump can be overcome as well. And it starts with each of us doing our part to help the better angels in their exhausting, Sisyphean fight.
Works Cited:
Meacham, Jon. (2018). The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels. New York: Random House.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Policy Case Study: Drug Testing for Welfare Recipients
{With drug-testing and welfare issues remaining controversial and salient today in a larger debate about the social safety net, this week, I flashback to an analysis I conducted on drug-testing welfare policies and their implications.}
Drug testing for welfare is an issue that has been especially controversial in the wake of the budget tightening many states have had to do in recovering from the economic downturn of 2008. States like Colorado, continuing with their reputation as laboratories of democracy, have pushed forward with laws to limit access to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), or welfare, by requiring drug tests (PBS 2012). However, with any complex policy issue such as welfare, there are many factors that must be considered when developing standards for this kind of drug testing, as 31 states have as of 2011 (HSP 2011). Thus, many evaluative criteria, in this case, must be used in the analysis of this policy, including effectiveness, efficiency, equity, liberty and administrative, social and political feasibility.
To start with, to understand what the policy’s goals are, there is a need to understand how policymakers have defined the problem this policy is meant to target. In most states, the proposal to drug test welfare recipients has mostly been defined in relation to realizing cost savings, although in other states there are a couple of added dimensions, including child well-being and employability, with the overall goal being to reduce the welfare rolls (HSP 2011). Therefore, the problem would be defined under cost savings in that there are simply too many people on welfare rolls for states experiencing economic stress. Those states that emphasize the policy’s need to address child well-being would suggest that the problem is primarily ensuring that TANF funds go to address the needs of children who could otherwise inadvertently be harmed by their parents’ drug use (HSP 2011). Yet others, only focusing on defining the problem of huge welfare rolls resulting from decreased employability, would say that drug testing for welfare benefits would inspire people to get clean and in turn eliminate a major obstacle to employment, which would lead to reduced welfare rolls (HSP 2011).
Now that the problem and its dimensions in relation to the alternative policy have been addressed, it is time to start applying evaluative criteria. In terms of effectiveness, or if the policy will be adequate in addressing the goals laid out (cost savings, ensuring child well-being, increasing employment), my analysis on this front is mixed. I think that the policymakers here were focusing on more proximate rather than root causes of the problem of large welfare rolls (i.e.-focus on cost savings), although it almost seems to hint at addressing potential root causes, which in this case would be increasing employment (reduction of poverty and therefore dependence on welfare rolls) (HSP 2011). One issue I would see with using drug tests is that it would only detect recent drug use and probably not the extent of the problem, such as how often a person uses drugs. Also, alternative drug abuse treatments could be more appropriate in the long run and false positives are possible (HSP 2011). Even considering the latter, I feel like this policy has well-intended goals and is wise to address more than one dimension of the problem (in the states that have all the above as goals in considering this policy), making it seem like a reasonable approach considering resource constraints. Still, I feel that more underlying factors like alternative treatment or therapy should have been given greater emphasis in this policy.
Meanwhile, efficiency and administrative feasibility was definitely more of a problem in considering the drug testing policy. The costs include the population being tested (those that have a recent felony conviction for a drug crime are the ones selected to be tested in most states), purchasing the tests, ensuring that applicants and lab workers are complying with the law, modification of the labs and their computer software, potential drug treatment programs, reimbursement to a person testing negative, and legal fees from potential lawsuits (HSP 2011). Estimates done by the Human Services Policy branch under the Department of Health and Human Services has found that costs in states that have implemented this policy range from $92,487 to $3.4 million and those estimates did not take into account all of the potential cost factors or even all of the states that have implemented such laws (HSP 2011). Moreover, with some states, there is an unknown price tag assigned to the full implementation of this law. In looking at the variability of potential costs, it seems to be a risky approach for a state that could already be undergoing extreme penny-pinching as a result of the economic downturn and that the benefits reaped would seem negligible at the very worst to minimal at best. Studies undertaken on this policy have shown that states, when it came to cost reductions, achieved minimal savings at the most. Testing accuracy can also be variable, bringing more uncertainty into a state’s investment in this kind of policy (Grovum 2014).
Administrative feasibility in this issue is very much tied to the costs associated with the running of such programs in states. The states need to hire competent lab workers, train them to observe laws and lab protocols, and give them the technology they need to accurately analyze drug testing samples (HSP 2011). For states that are pinching their budgets, they might be hard-pressed to train an adequate workforce for all the testing they want to do under the law. If lawmakers wanted to expand their testing population from those with recent drug convictions (from 13%-20%, varies by state) to those with drug convictions up to five years previous (20%+ of TANF applicants), that would mean hiring more personnel and upgrading overall capacity to handle the new demand (HSP 2011). I don’t think that the cost and administrative upgrade would justify the relatively minor benefit a state would get out of that.
Also, I found red flags when I measured the policy up against equity, liberty, political and social criterions. Equity, in terms of public policy, is defined as the population being treated fairly under legislation. I agree with points raised regarding the stigma surrounding welfare and welfare applicants being reinforced as a result of implementation of such policies (Grovum 2014). While it may be an unintended consequence on lawmakers’ parts, it could further discrimination and inequity on those parts of the population most in need of TANF, such as families at or below the poverty line and the unemployed (PBS 2012). However, others argue that this policy would go further in ensuring that those who use drugs can get the help they need and be productive members of society (PBS 2012). A 2011 poll by Rasmussen found 53% of voters nationwide in support of the policy, suggesting somewhat of a divide in public opinion (Rasmussen 2011). Furthermore, there are legal issues that go along with drug testing for welfare benefits. The American Civil Liberties Union has suggested that this law could violate the 4th Amendment provision against unreasonable search and seizures and the right to privacy in those cases where applicants do not have a previous history of drug use or drug related convictions (PBS 2012). Equally divisive is considering the policy from a political feasibility standpoint, with Republicans mainly backing this kind of legislation (as in Colorado), while Democrats, in states like Minnesota, are considering repealing such legislation (Grovum 2014). This policy could face an uphill battle in those states with Democratic majorities or those that could, not to mention the legal challenges from groups like the ACLU looming on the horizon (Grovum 2014).
In conclusion, policy like this is likely to be controversial, especially when it comes to the problems lawmakers are specifically targeting and the segments of the population that would be most affected. My overall opinion of the drug testing for welfare policy is that states with limited resources are trying to get the most for their buck, but a policy like this needs serious re-evaluation to improve its policy outcomes to maximize the return in a state’s investment. Lawmakers should start from scratch or apply this idea in conjunction with other policies that focus on root, rather than proximate causes, of large welfare rolls.
Works Cited:
Grovum, Jake. (2014, March 06). Some States Still Pushing Drug Testing For Welfare. Retrieved October 22, 2014, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/06/stateline-drug-testing-welfare-states/6118111/.
Human Services Policy. (2011, October 11). Drug Testing Welfare Recipients: Recent Proposals and Continuing Controversies. Retrieved October 22, 2014, from https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/drug-testing-welfare-recipients-recent-proposals-and-continuing-controversies.
Kersey, Lori. (2018, June 03). UN expert: 'Contempt' Drives 'Cruel Policies' in the US. Retrieved June 8, 2018, from https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/un-expert-contempt-drives-cruel-policies-in-the-us/article_bd8e1741-172a-5636-aa5f-16292f067b25.html.
PBS. (2012, March 20). To Receive Welfare, Should Drug Test Be Required? Retrieved October 21, 2014, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/to-receive-welfare-should-drug-test-be-required.
Rasmussen Reports. (2011, July 20). 53% Support Automatic Drug Testing For Welfare Applicants. Retrieved October 27, 2014, from http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/july_2011/53_support_automatic_drug_testing_for_welfare_applicants.
Drug testing for welfare is an issue that has been especially controversial in the wake of the budget tightening many states have had to do in recovering from the economic downturn of 2008. States like Colorado, continuing with their reputation as laboratories of democracy, have pushed forward with laws to limit access to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), or welfare, by requiring drug tests (PBS 2012). However, with any complex policy issue such as welfare, there are many factors that must be considered when developing standards for this kind of drug testing, as 31 states have as of 2011 (HSP 2011). Thus, many evaluative criteria, in this case, must be used in the analysis of this policy, including effectiveness, efficiency, equity, liberty and administrative, social and political feasibility.
To start with, to understand what the policy’s goals are, there is a need to understand how policymakers have defined the problem this policy is meant to target. In most states, the proposal to drug test welfare recipients has mostly been defined in relation to realizing cost savings, although in other states there are a couple of added dimensions, including child well-being and employability, with the overall goal being to reduce the welfare rolls (HSP 2011). Therefore, the problem would be defined under cost savings in that there are simply too many people on welfare rolls for states experiencing economic stress. Those states that emphasize the policy’s need to address child well-being would suggest that the problem is primarily ensuring that TANF funds go to address the needs of children who could otherwise inadvertently be harmed by their parents’ drug use (HSP 2011). Yet others, only focusing on defining the problem of huge welfare rolls resulting from decreased employability, would say that drug testing for welfare benefits would inspire people to get clean and in turn eliminate a major obstacle to employment, which would lead to reduced welfare rolls (HSP 2011).
Now that the problem and its dimensions in relation to the alternative policy have been addressed, it is time to start applying evaluative criteria. In terms of effectiveness, or if the policy will be adequate in addressing the goals laid out (cost savings, ensuring child well-being, increasing employment), my analysis on this front is mixed. I think that the policymakers here were focusing on more proximate rather than root causes of the problem of large welfare rolls (i.e.-focus on cost savings), although it almost seems to hint at addressing potential root causes, which in this case would be increasing employment (reduction of poverty and therefore dependence on welfare rolls) (HSP 2011). One issue I would see with using drug tests is that it would only detect recent drug use and probably not the extent of the problem, such as how often a person uses drugs. Also, alternative drug abuse treatments could be more appropriate in the long run and false positives are possible (HSP 2011). Even considering the latter, I feel like this policy has well-intended goals and is wise to address more than one dimension of the problem (in the states that have all the above as goals in considering this policy), making it seem like a reasonable approach considering resource constraints. Still, I feel that more underlying factors like alternative treatment or therapy should have been given greater emphasis in this policy.
Meanwhile, efficiency and administrative feasibility was definitely more of a problem in considering the drug testing policy. The costs include the population being tested (those that have a recent felony conviction for a drug crime are the ones selected to be tested in most states), purchasing the tests, ensuring that applicants and lab workers are complying with the law, modification of the labs and their computer software, potential drug treatment programs, reimbursement to a person testing negative, and legal fees from potential lawsuits (HSP 2011). Estimates done by the Human Services Policy branch under the Department of Health and Human Services has found that costs in states that have implemented this policy range from $92,487 to $3.4 million and those estimates did not take into account all of the potential cost factors or even all of the states that have implemented such laws (HSP 2011). Moreover, with some states, there is an unknown price tag assigned to the full implementation of this law. In looking at the variability of potential costs, it seems to be a risky approach for a state that could already be undergoing extreme penny-pinching as a result of the economic downturn and that the benefits reaped would seem negligible at the very worst to minimal at best. Studies undertaken on this policy have shown that states, when it came to cost reductions, achieved minimal savings at the most. Testing accuracy can also be variable, bringing more uncertainty into a state’s investment in this kind of policy (Grovum 2014).
Administrative feasibility in this issue is very much tied to the costs associated with the running of such programs in states. The states need to hire competent lab workers, train them to observe laws and lab protocols, and give them the technology they need to accurately analyze drug testing samples (HSP 2011). For states that are pinching their budgets, they might be hard-pressed to train an adequate workforce for all the testing they want to do under the law. If lawmakers wanted to expand their testing population from those with recent drug convictions (from 13%-20%, varies by state) to those with drug convictions up to five years previous (20%+ of TANF applicants), that would mean hiring more personnel and upgrading overall capacity to handle the new demand (HSP 2011). I don’t think that the cost and administrative upgrade would justify the relatively minor benefit a state would get out of that.
Also, I found red flags when I measured the policy up against equity, liberty, political and social criterions. Equity, in terms of public policy, is defined as the population being treated fairly under legislation. I agree with points raised regarding the stigma surrounding welfare and welfare applicants being reinforced as a result of implementation of such policies (Grovum 2014). While it may be an unintended consequence on lawmakers’ parts, it could further discrimination and inequity on those parts of the population most in need of TANF, such as families at or below the poverty line and the unemployed (PBS 2012). However, others argue that this policy would go further in ensuring that those who use drugs can get the help they need and be productive members of society (PBS 2012). A 2011 poll by Rasmussen found 53% of voters nationwide in support of the policy, suggesting somewhat of a divide in public opinion (Rasmussen 2011). Furthermore, there are legal issues that go along with drug testing for welfare benefits. The American Civil Liberties Union has suggested that this law could violate the 4th Amendment provision against unreasonable search and seizures and the right to privacy in those cases where applicants do not have a previous history of drug use or drug related convictions (PBS 2012). Equally divisive is considering the policy from a political feasibility standpoint, with Republicans mainly backing this kind of legislation (as in Colorado), while Democrats, in states like Minnesota, are considering repealing such legislation (Grovum 2014). This policy could face an uphill battle in those states with Democratic majorities or those that could, not to mention the legal challenges from groups like the ACLU looming on the horizon (Grovum 2014).
In conclusion, policy like this is likely to be controversial, especially when it comes to the problems lawmakers are specifically targeting and the segments of the population that would be most affected. My overall opinion of the drug testing for welfare policy is that states with limited resources are trying to get the most for their buck, but a policy like this needs serious re-evaluation to improve its policy outcomes to maximize the return in a state’s investment. Lawmakers should start from scratch or apply this idea in conjunction with other policies that focus on root, rather than proximate causes, of large welfare rolls.
Works Cited:
Grovum, Jake. (2014, March 06). Some States Still Pushing Drug Testing For Welfare. Retrieved October 22, 2014, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/06/stateline-drug-testing-welfare-states/6118111/.
Human Services Policy. (2011, October 11). Drug Testing Welfare Recipients: Recent Proposals and Continuing Controversies. Retrieved October 22, 2014, from https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/drug-testing-welfare-recipients-recent-proposals-and-continuing-controversies.
Kersey, Lori. (2018, June 03). UN expert: 'Contempt' Drives 'Cruel Policies' in the US. Retrieved June 8, 2018, from https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/un-expert-contempt-drives-cruel-policies-in-the-us/article_bd8e1741-172a-5636-aa5f-16292f067b25.html.
PBS. (2012, March 20). To Receive Welfare, Should Drug Test Be Required? Retrieved October 21, 2014, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/to-receive-welfare-should-drug-test-be-required.
Rasmussen Reports. (2011, July 20). 53% Support Automatic Drug Testing For Welfare Applicants. Retrieved October 27, 2014, from http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/july_2011/53_support_automatic_drug_testing_for_welfare_applicants.
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Presidential Speech-Making Continued: President Obama's 2011 Tucson Speech
{Part 2 on a series looking at presidential speech-making.}
{While words don't necessarily translate into action, a president's words nonetheless reveals a great deal about how they communicate with and see the world, as well as their policy goals. In an age of 140-character policy announcements and 24-hour media, this week we take a look back at the news coverage surrounding President Obama's 2011 Tucson shooting address to highlight the differences (and the inherent, possibly surprising similarities) in how presidents choose to communicate. For instance, note the emphasis on emotional appeals and appeals to patriotism. Sound familiar? It's a tactic most presidents have used to bolster their more rational arguments and to persuade the audience in the moment. However, one may feel that they more saturated with emotional appeals now in 2018 than in the past.}
The January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona at a constituent meeting by suspect Jared Loughner that killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, prompted President Obama to give a memorial speech eulogizing the victims in the wake of the shooting as is common in times of national crises or tragedies (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2 & 6; OPS, 2011; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the subsequent resulting news coverage of the speech produced diverse framings of the story, a product of constraints on journalists from multiple actors in the political information system as well as editorial favoring of certain themes that may or may not then be used to produce a slight ideological slant based on the news sources’ either mass or niche audience (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, 4, & 5; Pol 304 Lectures). In this paper, I will analyze the framings of the Tucson speech in the context of these journalistic constraints that necessarily lead to manifestations of the four informational biases in four articles by the Washington Times, CNN, FOX, and the New York Times, with a brief conclusion examining the implications of my findings for the informational needs of democracy.
To begin with, I will examine the similarities between the four articles in terms of the general informational biases of fragmentation, personalization, dramatization and authority- disorder bias manifest in the language and construction of the reports concerning President Obama’s speech (Bennett, 2007, p. 40-41). In all of the articles, there was a common thread of dramatization and personalization biases rooted out of the officialdom bias (the President as a federal official having the power to define a situation), with the President’s speech being highlighted in highly emotional and patriotic terms (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 4 & 5; OPS, 2011). In each report, the journalists’ language is highly patriotic, with such themes touched upon in the classic authority-disorder bias plot as (very easily) constructed from the President’s speech: the villain (suspect Jared Loughner), the heroes (both the surviving victims of the shooting, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the fallen), and the need for national unity and healing in the wake of the shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 43-44).
Patriotism aside in the context of a national tragedy or crisis, the articles began to diverge from the transcript of President Obama’s speech that called for national unity (including remembrance of the victims, touting those who survived as heroes, and calling for a less divisive political practice) among numerous broad themes, to emphasize particular aspects of the speech (OPS, 2011). Before we get into that analysis, it is important to note that the transcript itself of the speech was largely taken in emotional terms, and the investigation of the shooting was largely left out, perhaps contributing to the fragmentation biases each news organization presented in their reports on the speech (OPS, 2011).
Looking first at the news articles that seem to have more of a political lean, one can see the more obvious signs of journalistic choices in taking the bits and pieces of the story and putting them into a coherent, summarized narrative. While all articles had common threads and elements, certain articles more heavily featured an emphasis on one story narrative over another, as hinted at in the content of the title and opening paragraph (Pol 304 Lectures). Starting with the FOX (“Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service”), New York Times (“Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”) and Washington Times (“Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy”) news articles, we see immediately in these titles the differences in aspects of the event being covered compared to the CNN article. With the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles, the aspect of the speech that is the most emphasized is from the perspective of, as FOX puts it “tempering the political discourse now polarizing the public square” and in memory of the shooting victims “usher in a new era of civility in their honor” (FOX, 2011, p. 1; NY Times, 2011, p. 1).
Whereas those reporters focused on the political partisanship side of the story narrative, in which the shooting is portrayed almost as a byproduct of a toxic political system with powerful partisan figures clashing together on a daily basis as a backdrop, in the CNN article, the focus from the outset is the strong invocation of a standardized theme of hope or healing (Bennett, 2007, p. 41). However, there are implications hinted at in all of the articles, with the New York Times article manifesting it the most with the following line: “While the tone and content [of the speech] were distinctly nonpolitical, there were clear political ramifications to the speech, giving Mr. Obama…a chance to try and occupy a space outside of the partisanship or agenda” in which the President was noted as “setting aside a partisan health care debate to honor the lives of the victims” (NY Times, 2011, p. 2).
The Washington Times article pushes a bit further with an authority-disorder bias despite the underlying skepticism (and slight ideological bias in use of this bias to implicitly call the President out on the quality of his leadership), saying that President Obama was “under high expectations to calm the [partisan] tensions” as “healer-in-chief,” but to the journalist perhaps failed in “keeping his distance from an often acerbic debate over whether heated political rhetoric by supporters of the tea party movement (perhaps hinted at by the mention of Sarah Palin’s assertion of the media’s “blood libel” or charges that her rhetoric could have helped motivate the shooting) played any role in the attack on the Democratic lawmaker” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 1). Going further into the article, further ritual adversarialism of journalists towards elite actors “not telling the whole story” is seen when the journalist talks about a “raft of evidence” concerning how the suspect was supposed to have targeted Giffords and then contrasting it with a line from the President’s speech that “…none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 2; Pol 304 Lectures). Similar skepticism is hinted at in the FOX article, even with its “national healing” narrative focus, with the line that “Obama bluntly conceded that there is no way to know what triggered the mass shooting” and that a Pima County Sheriff (not mentioned in the other articles) was applauded after he attributed the motives for the shooting to “extreme political rhetoric, bigotry, and hatred” (FOX, 2011, p. 1-2). However, for the most part, while the other articles emphasized the authority-disorder bias as well by standardized mentions of need for healing and national unity post-crisis, the Washington Times especially makes heavy use of this particular slant (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011, NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011).
Although, to a degree, the other articles touched upon similar storylines as well, illustrating the varying degrees of the four informational biases as commonplace reporting characteristics resulting from a variety of factors, such as journalistic dependence on elite sources like the President (officialdom bias) for verifying and approving particular realities and tellings (Bennett, 2007, p. 41, 196-197; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the CNN article exhibited the highest degree of most of the informational biases to me, especially in respect to the officialdom bias, even more than the New York Times, which highlighted the President in a more positive light (CNN, 2011; NY Times, 2011). In fact, looking at the CNN article, from the outset, the focus is on Gabrielle Giffords and the First Family’s visit to her hospital (as first mentioned in the story highlights) and her “opening her eyes” and almost seems to dip the furthest into what could be termed “soft news” that only marginally informs the public about political issues, especially in the context of a national crisis (CNN, 2011, p. 1; Graber, 2011, p. 113-125). Throughout the rest of the article, the journalist chooses to heavily lean on the personalization and dramatization biases, citing the President’s comforting Scripture passages regarding standing against evil along with the happy and miraculous recovery of Representative Giffords (CNN, 2011). Essentially, the CNN article was dismissive of the other aspects of the President’s speech, and it isn’t until the bottom of the fourth page that the suspect, Jared Loughner, is mentioned briefly in one line and the outside details of how many perished in the shooting and where is given a few paragraphs before the Jared Loughner line (CNN, 2011, p. 4-5).
Sprinkled throughout the report and until the end is the use of language such as “hope”, “tragedy,” and “Gabby opened her eyes,” with the journalist turning Giffords into a recognizable symbol of a hero surviving against all odds and the victims (as in Obama’s speech) as innocents who represented “the best of America” (CNN, 2011). While readers may have gained some passing knowledge if they read far enough into the CNN article about the outside circumstances surrounding the shooting vaguely hinted at in the President’s speech, such as who was killed, who survived, the suspect, where the shooting took place and the Westboro Baptist Church’s planned picketing of a shooting victim’s funeral (although most only read the first paragraph, necessitating the inverted pyramid structure in which the journalist puts the most important and succinct “facts” first), ultimately they would come out confused about the event as a whole (Bennett, 2007, p. 191; CNN, 2011). Thus, the CNN article manifests the fragmentation bias as well, focusing more heavily on the human drama and tragedy aspects it picks up from the speech that the media generally utilize as easily communicable frames to complement their need for summarization and simplicity (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2).
All in all, when taking a look at all of the articles together, all of them manifest significant fragmentation bias, with CNN heavily focusing on the President’s visit to recovering Representative Gabrielle Giffords (CNN, 2011). If we regard the goal of news to report the relevant “who, what, where, when and why” circumstances of events, the articles, depending on the news source the audience member attended to provided a similar, yet different story narrative (Pol 304 Lectures). The audience either got a narrative of the speech focusing on the authority-disorder bias (can the president fulfill his duty to be “healer-in-chief” and reassure a nation?), the standard hope and healing narrative in which Representative Giffords was especially utilized, or the partisanship narrative, in which the aspects of the speech highlighted in the article focused on the toxicity of partisan rhetoric (i.e. political conflict), even while some articles mentioned that the President was trying to be as nonpolitical as possible in his speech (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). The latter political partisanship theme to me especially was indicative of ritualistic journalistic adversarialism in which individuals such as Sarah Palin, the President, the shooting suspect, various individual Congress members and even the Westboro Baptist Church spokeswoman are featured as players in the stories by all four news organizations (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, p. 196-197).
Simultaneously, the latter characters are critiqued by the journalists for their possible roles in the conflict as well as positioned more personally in order to produce an overriding conflict narrative (i.e. attribution of responsibility for political rhetoric especially in the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles) rather than focusing on the underlying institutions or processes at play behind the speech and shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 196-197).
In essence, the articles covering President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech may have provided some hints towards underlying systemic problems (maybe political rhetoric and certain political movements, etc.), but as a whole, the journalistic tendency to summarize based on limited information and produce an interpretation of an event (a story) that people can easily connect with, probably left those same people with very incomplete understandings as to all of the themes that the President chose to utilize in his speech as well as the relevant actors involved in and surrounding the event (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2; CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; OPS, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). For example, while the articles necessarily covered the speech, there were differing degrees of coverage, with many articles sandwiching in between the President’s quotes mentions of outside figures, such as Sarah Palin and other necessarily positioned characters maneuvered in to seem adversarial and create that formulaic political drama narrative (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2). This perhaps signals that the news media are perhaps not fulfilling their needs to inform citizens about underlying processes and issues that may impact their critical decision-making processes about their democracy in the long run, a criticism especially echoed by Bennett (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2; Pol 304 Lectures).
Nevertheless, one needs to consider the pressures exerted on journalists by influences from the rest of the political journalistic system and that some of the articles I examined above are exercising some degree of hopeful independence from elite narratives in the variety of outside information they pulled in and resulting diversity in some narrative frames (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2, 5; Pol 304 Lectures).
Works Cited:
Bennett, W. Lance & Graber, Doris A. (2007). News: The Politics of Illusion (6th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.
CNN Wire Staff. (2011, January 13). Obama: ‘The Hopes of a Nation are Here Tonight.’ Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/12/arizona.shooting.victims/.
Cooper, Helene, Zeleny, Jeff, & NY Times. (2011, January 12). Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/us/13obama.html?_r=0.
FOX News. (2011, January 13). Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/12/obama-visits-rep-giffords-ahead-memorial-service.html.
Graber, Doris. (2011). Media Power in Politics (6th ed.). Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
McDougal, Stephen. (2016, January-April). Pol 304 Lectures: Media and Politics. Lectures presented at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse.
Rowland, Kara and Washington Times (2011, January 13). Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://uwlax.courses.wisconsin.edu/d2l/le/content/3163152/viewContent/19978729/View.
White House Office of the Press Secretary. (2011, January 12). Remarks By the President at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-memorial-service-victims-shooting-tucson.
{While words don't necessarily translate into action, a president's words nonetheless reveals a great deal about how they communicate with and see the world, as well as their policy goals. In an age of 140-character policy announcements and 24-hour media, this week we take a look back at the news coverage surrounding President Obama's 2011 Tucson shooting address to highlight the differences (and the inherent, possibly surprising similarities) in how presidents choose to communicate. For instance, note the emphasis on emotional appeals and appeals to patriotism. Sound familiar? It's a tactic most presidents have used to bolster their more rational arguments and to persuade the audience in the moment. However, one may feel that they more saturated with emotional appeals now in 2018 than in the past.}
The January 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona at a constituent meeting by suspect Jared Loughner that killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, prompted President Obama to give a memorial speech eulogizing the victims in the wake of the shooting as is common in times of national crises or tragedies (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2 & 6; OPS, 2011; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the subsequent resulting news coverage of the speech produced diverse framings of the story, a product of constraints on journalists from multiple actors in the political information system as well as editorial favoring of certain themes that may or may not then be used to produce a slight ideological slant based on the news sources’ either mass or niche audience (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, 4, & 5; Pol 304 Lectures). In this paper, I will analyze the framings of the Tucson speech in the context of these journalistic constraints that necessarily lead to manifestations of the four informational biases in four articles by the Washington Times, CNN, FOX, and the New York Times, with a brief conclusion examining the implications of my findings for the informational needs of democracy.
To begin with, I will examine the similarities between the four articles in terms of the general informational biases of fragmentation, personalization, dramatization and authority- disorder bias manifest in the language and construction of the reports concerning President Obama’s speech (Bennett, 2007, p. 40-41). In all of the articles, there was a common thread of dramatization and personalization biases rooted out of the officialdom bias (the President as a federal official having the power to define a situation), with the President’s speech being highlighted in highly emotional and patriotic terms (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 4 & 5; OPS, 2011). In each report, the journalists’ language is highly patriotic, with such themes touched upon in the classic authority-disorder bias plot as (very easily) constructed from the President’s speech: the villain (suspect Jared Loughner), the heroes (both the surviving victims of the shooting, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the fallen), and the need for national unity and healing in the wake of the shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 43-44).
Patriotism aside in the context of a national tragedy or crisis, the articles began to diverge from the transcript of President Obama’s speech that called for national unity (including remembrance of the victims, touting those who survived as heroes, and calling for a less divisive political practice) among numerous broad themes, to emphasize particular aspects of the speech (OPS, 2011). Before we get into that analysis, it is important to note that the transcript itself of the speech was largely taken in emotional terms, and the investigation of the shooting was largely left out, perhaps contributing to the fragmentation biases each news organization presented in their reports on the speech (OPS, 2011).
Looking first at the news articles that seem to have more of a political lean, one can see the more obvious signs of journalistic choices in taking the bits and pieces of the story and putting them into a coherent, summarized narrative. While all articles had common threads and elements, certain articles more heavily featured an emphasis on one story narrative over another, as hinted at in the content of the title and opening paragraph (Pol 304 Lectures). Starting with the FOX (“Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service”), New York Times (“Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”) and Washington Times (“Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy”) news articles, we see immediately in these titles the differences in aspects of the event being covered compared to the CNN article. With the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles, the aspect of the speech that is the most emphasized is from the perspective of, as FOX puts it “tempering the political discourse now polarizing the public square” and in memory of the shooting victims “usher in a new era of civility in their honor” (FOX, 2011, p. 1; NY Times, 2011, p. 1).
Whereas those reporters focused on the political partisanship side of the story narrative, in which the shooting is portrayed almost as a byproduct of a toxic political system with powerful partisan figures clashing together on a daily basis as a backdrop, in the CNN article, the focus from the outset is the strong invocation of a standardized theme of hope or healing (Bennett, 2007, p. 41). However, there are implications hinted at in all of the articles, with the New York Times article manifesting it the most with the following line: “While the tone and content [of the speech] were distinctly nonpolitical, there were clear political ramifications to the speech, giving Mr. Obama…a chance to try and occupy a space outside of the partisanship or agenda” in which the President was noted as “setting aside a partisan health care debate to honor the lives of the victims” (NY Times, 2011, p. 2).
The Washington Times article pushes a bit further with an authority-disorder bias despite the underlying skepticism (and slight ideological bias in use of this bias to implicitly call the President out on the quality of his leadership), saying that President Obama was “under high expectations to calm the [partisan] tensions” as “healer-in-chief,” but to the journalist perhaps failed in “keeping his distance from an often acerbic debate over whether heated political rhetoric by supporters of the tea party movement (perhaps hinted at by the mention of Sarah Palin’s assertion of the media’s “blood libel” or charges that her rhetoric could have helped motivate the shooting) played any role in the attack on the Democratic lawmaker” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 1). Going further into the article, further ritual adversarialism of journalists towards elite actors “not telling the whole story” is seen when the journalist talks about a “raft of evidence” concerning how the suspect was supposed to have targeted Giffords and then contrasting it with a line from the President’s speech that “…none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack” (Washington Times, 2011, p. 2; Pol 304 Lectures). Similar skepticism is hinted at in the FOX article, even with its “national healing” narrative focus, with the line that “Obama bluntly conceded that there is no way to know what triggered the mass shooting” and that a Pima County Sheriff (not mentioned in the other articles) was applauded after he attributed the motives for the shooting to “extreme political rhetoric, bigotry, and hatred” (FOX, 2011, p. 1-2). However, for the most part, while the other articles emphasized the authority-disorder bias as well by standardized mentions of need for healing and national unity post-crisis, the Washington Times especially makes heavy use of this particular slant (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011, NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011).
Although, to a degree, the other articles touched upon similar storylines as well, illustrating the varying degrees of the four informational biases as commonplace reporting characteristics resulting from a variety of factors, such as journalistic dependence on elite sources like the President (officialdom bias) for verifying and approving particular realities and tellings (Bennett, 2007, p. 41, 196-197; Pol 304 Lectures). However, the CNN article exhibited the highest degree of most of the informational biases to me, especially in respect to the officialdom bias, even more than the New York Times, which highlighted the President in a more positive light (CNN, 2011; NY Times, 2011). In fact, looking at the CNN article, from the outset, the focus is on Gabrielle Giffords and the First Family’s visit to her hospital (as first mentioned in the story highlights) and her “opening her eyes” and almost seems to dip the furthest into what could be termed “soft news” that only marginally informs the public about political issues, especially in the context of a national crisis (CNN, 2011, p. 1; Graber, 2011, p. 113-125). Throughout the rest of the article, the journalist chooses to heavily lean on the personalization and dramatization biases, citing the President’s comforting Scripture passages regarding standing against evil along with the happy and miraculous recovery of Representative Giffords (CNN, 2011). Essentially, the CNN article was dismissive of the other aspects of the President’s speech, and it isn’t until the bottom of the fourth page that the suspect, Jared Loughner, is mentioned briefly in one line and the outside details of how many perished in the shooting and where is given a few paragraphs before the Jared Loughner line (CNN, 2011, p. 4-5).
Sprinkled throughout the report and until the end is the use of language such as “hope”, “tragedy,” and “Gabby opened her eyes,” with the journalist turning Giffords into a recognizable symbol of a hero surviving against all odds and the victims (as in Obama’s speech) as innocents who represented “the best of America” (CNN, 2011). While readers may have gained some passing knowledge if they read far enough into the CNN article about the outside circumstances surrounding the shooting vaguely hinted at in the President’s speech, such as who was killed, who survived, the suspect, where the shooting took place and the Westboro Baptist Church’s planned picketing of a shooting victim’s funeral (although most only read the first paragraph, necessitating the inverted pyramid structure in which the journalist puts the most important and succinct “facts” first), ultimately they would come out confused about the event as a whole (Bennett, 2007, p. 191; CNN, 2011). Thus, the CNN article manifests the fragmentation bias as well, focusing more heavily on the human drama and tragedy aspects it picks up from the speech that the media generally utilize as easily communicable frames to complement their need for summarization and simplicity (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2).
All in all, when taking a look at all of the articles together, all of them manifest significant fragmentation bias, with CNN heavily focusing on the President’s visit to recovering Representative Gabrielle Giffords (CNN, 2011). If we regard the goal of news to report the relevant “who, what, where, when and why” circumstances of events, the articles, depending on the news source the audience member attended to provided a similar, yet different story narrative (Pol 304 Lectures). The audience either got a narrative of the speech focusing on the authority-disorder bias (can the president fulfill his duty to be “healer-in-chief” and reassure a nation?), the standard hope and healing narrative in which Representative Giffords was especially utilized, or the partisanship narrative, in which the aspects of the speech highlighted in the article focused on the toxicity of partisan rhetoric (i.e. political conflict), even while some articles mentioned that the President was trying to be as nonpolitical as possible in his speech (CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). The latter political partisanship theme to me especially was indicative of ritualistic journalistic adversarialism in which individuals such as Sarah Palin, the President, the shooting suspect, various individual Congress members and even the Westboro Baptist Church spokeswoman are featured as players in the stories by all four news organizations (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2, p. 196-197).
Simultaneously, the latter characters are critiqued by the journalists for their possible roles in the conflict as well as positioned more personally in order to produce an overriding conflict narrative (i.e. attribution of responsibility for political rhetoric especially in the FOX, New York Times, and Washington Times articles) rather than focusing on the underlying institutions or processes at play behind the speech and shooting (Bennett, 2007, p. 196-197).
In essence, the articles covering President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech may have provided some hints towards underlying systemic problems (maybe political rhetoric and certain political movements, etc.), but as a whole, the journalistic tendency to summarize based on limited information and produce an interpretation of an event (a story) that people can easily connect with, probably left those same people with very incomplete understandings as to all of the themes that the President chose to utilize in his speech as well as the relevant actors involved in and surrounding the event (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2; CNN, 2011; FOX, 2011; NY Times, 2011; OPS, 2011; Washington Times, 2011). For example, while the articles necessarily covered the speech, there were differing degrees of coverage, with many articles sandwiching in between the President’s quotes mentions of outside figures, such as Sarah Palin and other necessarily positioned characters maneuvered in to seem adversarial and create that formulaic political drama narrative (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 2). This perhaps signals that the news media are perhaps not fulfilling their needs to inform citizens about underlying processes and issues that may impact their critical decision-making processes about their democracy in the long run, a criticism especially echoed by Bennett (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2; Pol 304 Lectures).
Nevertheless, one needs to consider the pressures exerted on journalists by influences from the rest of the political journalistic system and that some of the articles I examined above are exercising some degree of hopeful independence from elite narratives in the variety of outside information they pulled in and resulting diversity in some narrative frames (Bennett, 2007, Ch. 1-2, 5; Pol 304 Lectures).
Works Cited:
Bennett, W. Lance & Graber, Doris A. (2007). News: The Politics of Illusion (6th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman.
CNN Wire Staff. (2011, January 13). Obama: ‘The Hopes of a Nation are Here Tonight.’ Retrieved April 1, 2016, from http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/12/arizona.shooting.victims/.
Cooper, Helene, Zeleny, Jeff, & NY Times. (2011, January 12). Obama Calls for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/us/13obama.html?_r=0.
FOX News. (2011, January 13). Obama Urges a National Dialogue of Healing at Arizona Memorial Service. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/12/obama-visits-rep-giffords-ahead-memorial-service.html.
Graber, Doris. (2011). Media Power in Politics (6th ed.). Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
McDougal, Stephen. (2016, January-April). Pol 304 Lectures: Media and Politics. Lectures presented at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse.
Rowland, Kara and Washington Times (2011, January 13). Obama: May Good Come of Arizona Tragedy. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://uwlax.courses.wisconsin.edu/d2l/le/content/3163152/viewContent/19978729/View.
White House Office of the Press Secretary. (2011, January 12). Remarks By the President at a Memorial Service for the Victims of the Shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-memorial-service-victims-shooting-tucson.
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