Real Time Thoughts on Meet the Press (November 29, 2009)

(I’d think that Meet the Press will be starting off with some discussion about Pres. Zardari slowly relinquishing powers he inherited from President Musharraf.  But this is the tolling bell on Zardari’s tenure in office.  Any theorist of democratic transitions knows that it is not rational for an autocrat to liberalize, if he is motivated by tenure in office.  The only explanation of liberalization of regime is the wrongheaded assumption on the part of the autocrat that appeasement will ensure survival; but that move is viewed by the opposition as weakness.  The opposition parties–in this case, the Pakistani military and the opposition party led by former PM. Nawaz Sharif–are the anchors that are holding Zardari’s adminstration at bay.  This move only ensures that Zardari will be departing from office.)

Today’s broadcast of Meet the Press promises to be interesting.  As before, the quotes are approximations to the words spoken, but are close to the spirit of the truth.  Passages in parentheses, are my thoughts on the exchange between David Gregory and his guests.  (Okay, I was wrong, Rick Warren is talking on faith and charity; Bill and Melinda Gates is talking about public health.  Yes, its interesting, but not as interesting as I would like the conversation to be on Meet the Press.)

Rick Warren (whose book is the second most translated book in history, next to the bible): Love is spelled G-I-V-E.  We’re most like god when we’re giving. (He gives away 90% of his earnings.  I wonder if this is the case)

DG: citing a Rabbi, We are good not when we think good thoughts, but when we do good deeds over and over.  (This is a bit of Aristotlian ethics, that I find a bit too harsh)

(The thing about this talk is that I cannot shy away from the idea that in listening to Pastor Rick, he strikes me as a egoist who gets his ego rent by professing self-sacrifice.  He does not draw a pay check from Saddle Back Church, nor does he wear an expensive watch.  He does not profit much from his books, etc.  All with the intention of insisting that what he does he does not for money, but for the love of god.  I do think that his works do point to good outcomes and better life choices for the individuals so affected.  I just think that his claims to self-sacrifice are egoistic.  Does the psychological basis of his behavior matter much, in the long-run.  No, probably not.)

DG: Proposition 8.  This might be interesting.  Do you think that money spent have been better spent on the fight for AIDS.

RW: I think we spent too much money on most things.  You know the biblical teaching, teach a man how to fish.  I think that’s too little.  You have to teach a man to sell a fish; you have to teach a man to build a boat.  Its all about free enterprise.  This is a well-thought out argument for free-marketism.  The right should jot down talking points from this gentleman.

DG: Would you fight for anti-gay legislation?

RW: My beliefs on gay marriage are biblical.  (That’s a honest take, of course)  But I think my job is to love everyone.  (This is a dodge.)

(Rick Warren is citing a Solomonic prayer that he gain power and influence to help the poor and the helpless.  Rick Warren just said that the supposed 46 million who are not here, because they were aborted fetuses, have suffered a holocaust)

DG: Is there a moral equivalency between the abortion debate and health care coverage?

RW: I’m not pro-life, I’m whole life.  Expand the agenda, care about the child after she’s born.

RW: There are fundamentalists in all and no religions.  Meanings change.  A Fundamentalist used to be a good thing: he was someone who believed in the fundamentals of the Bible.  But now I would say that a fundamentalist is someone who has stopped listening.  (I would agree with this assessment; I think in so far as I can take a Evangelical leader, I’d have to say Rick Warren is as smart and as respectable as anyone within the current leadership can be.  That is to say, he is the heir to Billy Graham.)

RW (To some question, I’ve forgotten, because RW’s response is so compelling):  Something like 70% of Americans are in the wrong job.  They are not wired for what they do, and are unhappy doing it. SOme people are wired to do deals, to be accountants, to be oceanographers.  I say do the thing that makes you fruitful and gives you sustenance.   Do what you would do for free.  I don’t draw a paycheck.  You’re net worth is not hte same thing as your self worth. Your value is not the same thing as your valuables.  Sometimes you might not even know what it is that you’re good at; someone might actually point out that you’re good at this one thing. (That is a damn good answer.  Very convincing. No wonder he’s sold the number of books as he has)

DG is talking to Bill and Melinda Gates.

(I think the big issue at question is how do you harness individual research projects to arrive at a particular goal: AID’s vaccines for example.  How do you deliver this research product to the poor and the non-empowered.  And how do you entice investors to invest in public health projects.  The Gates’ argue that allowing individuals to seek greater technology but focus it through one or another funding infrastructure. Deliver using technology the poor already have.  The poor now have cell-phones, through the Grameen Bank and other organizations.  Send a text message to a mother to come in to get her child checked, etc.  On the point of getting individuals to invest in public health: Link ego rents to investment opportunities.)

(Its interesting to think that Gates is arguing for health care, innovation and capitalism in the same way that Joseph Schumpeter would have defended each one of these substantive issues)

Aesthetic Pluralism and its Costs

The art of progressivism is also the art of doubt.  If the study of aesthetics is the study of value, then one has to take value in art seriously.  Indeed, the question, whether or not art is engaged with value, lies at the core of high modernism.  Nevertheless, as long as one is sufficiently comfortable with some stance on pragmatic truth or even conceptual truth, then one need not disassociate art making from value promulgation.

If the art of fascism is stringent rule-minded expressionism that refers only to itself, then the art of progressivism would require a supporting idea that would tend to disavow stringent rule-following.  Hence to understand progressive art or art-making–for now, the two co-exist as one!–one must first understand fascist art.   I propose that fascist art is stringent rule following that comes from some avowed interest in the not-self, though expressionism is concerned with just that.  By concern, with not-self, I mean, the artist is not interested in any sense of what it is to be a man or a woman or an artist: the biographical facts of works that are rooted in communal and individual choices are rejected.  What matters is the expression itself of some objective fact, which can only reflect objective things that remain true irrespective of the perspective taken on the work.   As soon as the artist looks upon himself, as person, as subject, all view points become true or false but relatively so.  He makes judgments on pragmatic truth, that is whether he exists or whether he is in love or whether there is today, in some corner of the world, some kind of border skirmish.  But whether or not certain other propositions can be thought conceptually true, for instance, propositions on certain religious beliefs, nevertheless he remains interested in their truth or falsity.

It is only when the subjective vision is disavowed and some concrete value is given priority that fascism creeps into art and art-making.  This concrete vision is merciless, since it cannot respect relative value and requires that its own value supersede all others.  Authoritarians project their own value in just these terms.  The fascists speaks of the way war and machinery as a beautiful march to a new world; man is undone here.  The fatherland is the project of this new world, and with it heralds the cleansing of reason so that the favored, perhaps Aryan, reason (of the dictator) becomes the sole objective reason and hence, running top down, becomes cause.  The dictator and his fascist vision are required to be infallible.  By denying and often destroying every other conception of the good, the dictators proves himself to be infallible.

Liberalism rejects these infallible objective values and seeks to support individual reason and individual cause in a non-interventionist manner.  I know what I want, but you cannot claim to know what I want and vice versa because we have not lived each others lives, though we have lived our way.  I want to seek my good, but you can only legitimately intervene on my aspiration for my good, if you know my claim is faulty or irrational.   Since often you cannot know this, you must stay your hand.  Since this is the case for me as well, I must be committed to stay my hand as well.  Hence, mutual non-intervention is required of us due to the sociological fact of doubt and is sanctioned by the normative acceptance of liberalism.  Hence, through liberalism–and yes, the liberal state–we are each fully able to respect each others own conception of the good.

Liberalism requires that each individual be a person who has claim of choice over his own a certain sphere of actions.  However, those choices can be pluralistic and need not function as a numerical accounting system that functions in a hierarchical manner.  Hence liberalism supports pluralism.   The art of progressivism is then not only the art of doubt, because for sociological reasons we cannot know the objective good for and of another person, but is also teh art of pluralism.

This position is then best supported by a position of aesthetic pluralism.  This value requires that an artist think that there are no objectively superior ways of painting in one way relative to another.  There simply are ways of painting in one way, relative to another.  If this is the case, the aesthetic pluralist artist is in a quandary: there are no rules to follow, that are designated as the correct rules; there are no facts of the matter that can support a work that he might create, because there is no superhuman authority who might adjudicate between two competing claims of the truth in works.  The aesthetic pluralist artist is a fallibilist.

The fallibilist artist has every route available to him, but no direction in which to travel.  That is the cost of aesthetic pluralism.  It is a price he pays by choosing one of the available routes.  Where he goes, only he can tell, only after he has reached the destination that, plausibly, remains unknown to him.

Kinda Sorta, Real Time Thoughts on Meet the Press (November 22, 2009)

Today while writing on Meet the Press, my computer battery died and I lost the whole thing.

So I’ll just do a round up of the take away points.  Finally I’ll quote Dr. Nancy Snyderman at lenght on the recent fracas with testing and the politics of medical science.

1) David Gregory is saying that in talks with Senate aides, the idea is that if the opt-out and public option doesn’t get enough support, the trigger on the public option will be adopted and in this way Olympia Snowe a Republican might voter for  passage.  (I’d think that since Maj. Leader Reid already burnt Snowe, she might be less than enthusiastic about hitching up with the DEM’s)

2) Dick Durbin would make a wonderful majority leader.

3) Joe Lieberman claims to be against the public option because he thinks it will not be deficit neutral and that it will cost this recovering economy more in higher taxes and greater public debt.  He’s linked up the health care system with the economy in a way that cannot please the Obama adminstration.  When David Gregory asked that for the sake of consistency might be also not support sending more troops into Afghanistan, since that move would not be deficit neutral.  To further question that the escalation in Afghanistan be paid for JL responded that absolutely the war would have to be paid for through new taxes.

4) Kay Bailey Hutchinson is trying to link together Tim Geithner’s supposed unpopularity with the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress.  (I think for the short term, this might be a smart strategy.)

5)  No matter how you cut it, Eric Holder’s admission that failure is not an option in trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammed means that the whole affair will be nothing but a show trial.  This is victor’s justice.  Nevertheless, it is important that the U.S. divise precedent to try terror suspects of high stature in U.S. courts, if only to have good P.R. that our system is more “just” and fair than that of our enemies.

(I think the best segment by far, today was the conversation between Dr. Nancy Snyderman and Ambassador Brinker.  To that end, I’ll quote entire passages from the transcript.)

“MR. [David] GREGORY:  Dr. Nancy, let’s talk about some of the data behind the new guidelines.  And we’ll put them up on the screen.  This is from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.  Cancer deaths prevented from mammography screening, and you see the numbers there for 39 to 49-year-olds, one in 1,904 as opposed to if you’re between 60 and 69, one in 377.

DR. [Nancy] SNYDERMAN:  So, David, let me stop you there.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

DR. SNYDERMAN:  Because that’s a very important number to look at.  That means that over 1900 women screened over a 10-year period of annual mammograms, one life is saved and there are a thousand false positives, which means ongoing, unnecessary tests.  Now remember, the scientists who did these numbers, their role is, as scientists, to take the anecdotes and the passion and the emotion out of it.  And I recognize that’s hard as part of the message.  But they’re to look at the public health issues of how we screen. And we’ve always known that mammography for women in their 40s has been fraught with problems.  It is not as precise for older women.  On that Nancy and I have great agreement.  So what their consensus was is that there are a lot of unnecessary screenings for that one life.  Now, if you’re that one life, it’s 100 percent.  I get that.  But their charge as an independent body was to look at the cumulative research as scientists.”

(That’s brilliant analysis, right there; top notch assessment.  PhD’s in political science have a tougher explaining what stats mean, and here’s this smart woman really making some sense out of an apolitical research report.)

“MR. GREGORY:  But what about the data?

AMB. BRINKER:  Well, the data are important, and that’s why we look at it all the time.  But, David, part of this is that it was very clumsy.  You know, this–the way this task force information was revealed, it was very clumsy. And the other part of it is, let’s not forget, mammography saves lives.  And I would argue, you know, I wish my sister, Susan Komen, had been able to have a mammogram 30 years ago when she died.  I had one when I was 37, and, and I’m living today, and I credit a lot of that to early screening.  A lot of women have different circumstances.  What we want to protect is continued access to this technology until we have something better, until we know more.  We just shouldn’t change what we’re doing now, because it’s working.  Yeah, we have to screen a lot of people, but one out of 1900 being diagnosed with, with breast cancer is still a lot of women.  It’s still a lot of women.

DR. SNYDERMAN:  But at the same time, it’s interesting.  We–this task force did not look at the economics.  Their job was to look at the pure science. And I think in some ways we hear from the scientists, don’t like the message, and this week I believe we threw the scientists under the bus.  We in this country have three hot button scientific issues.  We have stem cells, vaccines, cancer screening.  We need to step back as a society and let the scientists present their data and then, as an informed populace, look at it, talk about it.  And what happened on Monday was that the headlines then ran with the weak…

AMB. BRINKER:  Right.

DR. SNYDERMAN:  …instead of intelligent people saying, “OK, what does this mean and how do we mean it?” And the task force basically said to women in their 40s, individualize yourselves, talk to your doctor.  This is all about, and I think Nancy and I agree on this, better technology.’

 

 

On the U.S. Commitment to the Afghan and Pakistani People

Political theory is more than just the theory of politics: unlike a purely empirical evaluation of probabilities and feasibility, this branch of political study involves the examination of normative claims that we all make on our institutions and on our brothers who live on the other side of the river.  The way we take in the world is not, then, a simple metric of all that can happen between two or more contracting parties– though this is a very important move– but all the things we should want to have happen, judged, preferably, from a fairly coherent normative standpoint.

I have tried to think about our commitments in Afghanistan and Pakistan from exactly this perspective.   The U.S. is involved in a war in a region of the world that looks more implacable than ever.  Part of the explanation of the public dissension that seems so palpably charged  in those countries is surely that the U.S has a formidably large footprint in that part of the world.  We have left behind a ruinous political legacy that has contributed to the vastly shrunken opportunities from which Afghans and Pakistani’s suffer.  But I’d argue that the people of those countries have a right to demand political and social correctives to the prospects they see of a short and miserable life.

A cold-state, rational evaluation of public opinion would show that just as there are those who choke at the thought of a creeping colonization by an uninvited guest, as, say, Pakistanis are wont to think, so there are those, like weary Northern Afghanis who think that the presence of U.S. soldiers is the only secured bond they have against being overrun by the influence and violence of the Taliban.  Yet we remain mired in this sandtrap, because the American leadership and voters think, correctly, that Afghanistan and Pakistan are net importers of radical ideologies and fearsome ideologoes who could commit some heinous act on our shores.

So say American leaders of both parties, and so we’ve condoned acts of political cowardice and the socially myopic views of tin eared dictators who have steadfastly refused to act upon a strategy that pegs the provision of public goods to the probability of re-election of an incumbent.  Of course, elections have been informal pledges from militias to support to some war lords raids against another, with or without public de jure public confidence.

And here we stand in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The recent news that the expensive infrastructure we have built up will not stand for long is distressing.  As is the obvious fact that our own investments in that country are coming back to us in the form of bombs and combat barricades.   These are questions of plausible political moves and feasible allocations that might make those moves practical.   They do not make our normative commitment any less pressing, nor do they make the demands we make on our partners any less urgent.

If ought implies can, then the fact that we seem unable to bring about the kinds of sustainable changes that are likely to be mutually advantageous to us and our partner government, might imply that we should no longer seek change.  This is too quick a move: we overdetermine our likelihood of failure when we say that X desired policy will not come about.  X might not come about under Y conditions, but that is no comment on its desirability as such, nor on the plausibility of X coming to be under Z conditions.  We should only forsake our duties when we establish that X, say, stability in Iraq or Afghanistan cannot come about under any circumstances.  A proposition that peace will not come under current conditions then requires that we urge our friends and partners to change the circumstances on the ground to those that might bring about peace.  I do not think we have reached that point yet in Iraq–much less in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

I mentioned duties in the passage above.  I mean this to be quite as strong a requirement on actions as might be consequent to any talk of duties.  Hence I think that Afghans and Pakistanis have a right to be served well by our politics and our aid.  I think that for far too long those peoples have suffered under rule by imbeciles and crooks, and through out much of that time, we’ve turned away so many times from their pleading gazes.  So now that we have proffered salvation through development and education, and we have accidentally killed too many sons of too many mothers, we owe those people a serious chance at a serious, forward marching life.

Is the McChrystal tactic the best way forward in achieving the kinds of amormous goals I have laid out above?  I’d think its probably the only set of directed policies that might bring out a change in circumstances, if and only if we have correctly assessed the incentives of our partners in goverment in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  On its own McChrystal’s assessment is not the kind of directive that envisions a quick turn around of conditions in that region.  Everything turns on what our allies are willing to do to establish a lasting, though surely unsteady peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  And here  we seek to relieve ourselves of our duties by insisting that though our partners do not wish to act for the public good, that nevertheless acting contrary to their narrow and immediate motivations, they bring about the public good.  The McChrystal tactic will work to the extent that the incentive compatibility it requires on our partners is feasible.

If our assessments of the feasibility of wholesale changes in motivations of our partners are correct, then the McChrystal tactic might work.  But if the assessment of the motivations of our partners were incorrect, that still would not relieve us of our duty to seek a lasting solution to the daily dilemmas that Afghans and Pakistanis face.

I make these claims knowing well that our obligations are legion and that, if we take value pluralism seriously then we are required to make difficult and irreparably damaging choices.  I just think that damaging or otherwise, our obligations and commitments to the Afghan and Pakistani people are serious and, on the whole, proper.

Photography and the Underdetermination of Art Work

I mean my works to mean different things at different times, depending on how I think of them.  This need not mean that I do not mean my works to mean anything at all; I do not think my work allows that kind of radical skepticism.

However, simply by changing the station point from which I view by works through my camera, I change the plane from which I reproduce my works in photographs (do I reproduce them at all?) and also change the picture plane from what is on the ‘ground’ to what you have seen above, herein.   In so doing, I change the form and therefore the content of my works.

When you try to view my works, you see them as photographs.  Moreover, you see photographs.  And I want to say that those photographs typify, support and underdetermine my works.

Walter Benjamin, Fascist Art and Doubt

Why create art?  Walter Benjamin wrote that it is only when the artist politicizes his art that he solves this most fundamental problem of art-making.

The question unsettles the modern mind; it would have offended the Renaissance soul and the Enlightened heart.  Until the modern era of reproducible art making there was a objective reason to create art, one that had conventional sanction behind its very existence: art served a pedagogical purpose where the artist was called in to marshal the public herd into a cult of ritual.   Though there existed other reasons to create art, they were all internal reasons, objective reason supported only one of those reasons, that of mutual advantage commercial exchange for expression and public salvation.  The buyer-critic allowed the seller-artist to bid up the price of the work only to the point of the natural constraint: neither party to the transaction could leech off the other for fear of assignation to a circle of hell.

With the reproducibility of art the deal was broken; the aura of authenticity and truth was left in tatters.  Neither the artist nor the buyer needed any one particular piece of art to stand for something eternal, and neither needed the other inelastically.  The buyer no longer ruled over his ant hill; the artist could no longer say something true since the concept of truth was run through with doubt.  Nothing specific could stand for something general.  In the modern era, this move to specificity has meant that, in and out of principle, nothing can refer to anything else without some argument.  It is the argument that is doing the work.  It is the choice to import meaning into the work ex poste facto that makes a caption, or an inscription the thing that aestheticizes politics.  A certain drawing of a hooded man can stand for anything at all, including a miserly member of the KKK, as well as a victim of torture in Abu Ghraib.  To make that choice ex ante, is to politicizes the work, and, for Benjamin, a move that, finally, naturally sorts craftsmanship from blind, and therefore manipulable, creed.

For Benjamin, then, being a Marxist art is tantamount to creating art for a social purpose, one that forces the artist to make aesthetic choices that are consistent with his prior beliefs on social justice and the plight– and flight– of modern man.

I want to say that this is a purely pragmatic move by Benjamin.  He admits that all artists are unbound and that pure expressionism is a choice as much as any other aesthetic choice.  However, he argues that expressionism that is given only to itself can be coralled by a autocrat to fit the populist purposes that lie underneath the surface of the artist’s expressionism.  He is afraid that, like the Futurists Boccioni and Marinetti, supposing art qua art a superior expression of one’s life over all other concerns is a step removed from thinking that adherence to any other action that takes that expression seriously, a worthwhile pursuit.  Hence, if an autocrat were to seek to show war as pure experience and that experience could unchain the artist in fits of pure expression, then war could be thought of as beautiful.  As the Futurists thought, movement and material could be placed at the feet of the war machine; the world, cleansed of all other order, would begin anew and this pure expression, where art was thought itself, would, at the limit approach the Platonic Ideal.

For Walter Benjamin, Marxism and its foundational base of political economic equality of welfare would under cut all that.  Marxist art would keep Fascist art at bay.  Nevertheless, I think there remains some doubt whether choosing to politicize art in this manner serves to do something greater than to only short circuit a move toward Fascist art.  Walter Benjamin demonstrated how a drawing in signs does a different thing than a painting in marks; how the way in which we conceive of a work determines the manner of its consumption.  He intimated the ways in which painting and photography that dealt with the real problems and real spaces in which contemporary men lived their hard fought lives was superior to action art that fed the inner genius.  Nevertheless, once the artist settles upon his politicized art, he find himself one step removed from the fundamental problem: though he has an answer to the question, why create art, he is still undone by the question of how to create art?  This question cannot be answered by relying on some deterministic concept of politicized aesthetics.

In a forthcoming piece, I’ll examine the ways in which two of my favorite artists of the 19th Century, Jacques Louis David and Francisco Goya dealt with this problem.  In answering this question, I’ll reach back to the fundamental question of why create art in the first place.  I’ll want to say that there remains sufficient doubt that the artist can determine ways to create art that somehow follows from Benjamin’s politicized Marxist aesthetic.  Hence, I’ll find both sets of answers to the questions wanting.  I will say, however that one of the two artist’s seems to be more compelling as a creator of objects that even now, sometimes, haunts my uneasy nightmares.

Real Time Thoughts on Meet the Press (November 15, 2009)

David Gregory is speaking to Hillary Clinton on today’s edition of Meet the Press.  Further he’ll be discussing the state of the U.S education system with his guests, Secy. of Education Arne Duncan, Former Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

On the prosecutions of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and 3 other alleged terrorists in New York and whether those detainees deserve to be tried as common criminals under U.S law.

Secy. Clinton is saying that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks should be prosecuted under the shade of the missing towers.

(Personally I cannot think that there exists an argument that would support prosecution under unspoken and publicly non-transparent rules that does not take revenge seriously into account. If we want to move away from a revenge motive and seek justice, then I can;t see anyone supporting any other proposition than that because the 9/11 attacks killed mostly civilians who lived in NY, those individuals should be tried in NYC.   NYC has had jurisdiction to prosecute these men, if and when the opportunity availed.  Now that this opportunity is available, I support the move to prosecute in New York)

On Afghanistan

HC is more or less saying the same thing. That fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is a move from a purely American national security viewpoint.  (I think this is a movable goal post: we’ll leave Afghanistan and Pakistan AND argue that staying on no longer satisfies a national security mandate)

On China:

DG: Are we a profligate spender paying respects to our wary bankers?

HC: We have to get back some control over some time to fiscal sovereignty

DG: We know that China has a espionage policy against the U.S.  Is China a challenge to our national sovereignty?

HC: We know that a lot of countries are seeking to take advantage and that when I speak to foreign officials I have no illusions that no one but me stands for American interests.

On Education, Arne Duncan. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich.

A Humean, Posnerian, take on education policy, The Race to the Top Fund, is encouraging states to compete for federal government dollars by improving outcome metrics.  Education is a civil rights issue and the engine of future economic growth.  Now, this is an issue that should be non-partisan.  Newt Gingrich is speaking well of President Obama.  Holy Crap!!

Responsibility and Accountability: The talking points the guests are egging equal, in sum, one word: change,  but have yet to propose a policy that would implement that change.  The President of the American Teacher’s Federation is saying that teachers work hard, but that teh argument of education outcomes should not scape goat teachers.  (But, I don’t quite get why the people talking about the problem can;t speak to the thoroughly negative, cyclical socio-economic trap in which American education and education policy is mired)

Tenure should be maintained, but relaxed in stringency. Teacher discipline must be tiered.  The highest performing teachers have to be rewarded in a manner commensurate with their contribution.  Teachers int eh middle tier should be given support to function in a high performing manner.  Teachers in the lowest tiers should be encouraged to seek alternative careers.

Charter Schools strike the speakers (and me) as an interesting instrument to test out different types of education outcomes.

Dead Men in Pakistan

Seymour Hersh Heralds Doom in Pakistan–Run Away, Run Away

Sy Hersh is back in town and he’s brought to his party a whopper of a piece of news.

Pakistan is in trouble. Yes we all know that.  Beset by political instability and a growing militant insurgency creeping in from its Northwestern tribal regions, the crown hangs heavy on President Asif Ali Zardari’s head.  Just today, another car bomb ripped through a busy market intersection in a town close to Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan; 34 innocent civilians are dead.  100 or more are wounded.  On Sunday, near Peshawar, a suicide bomber claimed the lives of 12 people including the target of the attack, a mayor of a town who had switched allegiances and had raised a militia to fight against the Taliban.

But wait, there’s more.  The 60 to 80 nuclear warheads Pakistan allegedly possesses are  spread around the country and are looked after by the Pakistani military. Unfortunately, writing for The New Yorker Hersh reports that since the 1980’s a growing number of Army officers have adopted Islamist beliefs, and have begun to profess fealty to a Islamic Caliphate.   Whether or not the Pakistani government can keep the Taliban at bay, Hersh argues, the point may be moot: the Taliban have infiltrated the Pakistani Army and there’s a genuine fear in the U.S. government that mutiny at any one of these facilities will hand the Taliban a real warhead and, perhaps, even worse, a workable nuclear weapon.

We’ve put together contingency plans and are working with the Pakistani government; Admiral Mullen is in contact with General Kayani.  However the plan is essentially that if some genuine event takes place, then teams ready and waiting will support and secure the nuclear storage facilities. We are all friends, after all.

Unfortunately, for U.S interests and the non-proliferation regime, the U.S. does not have friendly standing with the Pakistani government, Pakistani military or the Pakistani population.    Uh-oh.  The Pakistani military is lying to U.S. leaders and analysts: in the piece, at least one general admits as much.  They do not want their nuclear arsenal to be subject to U.S. security and inspection.  Pakistani leaders fear that the U.S, aligned with India, wants to decapitate Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

No one needs to marshal game theory to explicate the problem that stands before us.  The Watchmen think the Guardians are their enemies.  Who, now, can watch the Watchmen?

Death of Republicanism, Bullshit

It may be that I am too reticent to speak to the possibilities of the political in art.  All art is political, in so far as the artist commandeers the person of the viewer and flagellates its conduct to only those associative experiences that form a phenomenological patina over the art object.

I take you to do something you are not naturally inclined to do and in so doing I leave behind in you a residue of sorts.    But beyond this, I might say that all art is, at least subject to, bullshit: art seeks to assert itself through a certain representation that can be made to skirt every objection to the representation, itself, being true or false.

And so, I’m left with doubt.  All art is political, sure.  But the art I make may not stand up to the political propositions I wish to represent because representation is, plausibly, run through with bullshit.