WhirledView

Gordimer Trashes Absolutes in "The Pickup"

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Some people are shocked! shocked! when a housewife in Calcutta buys a clothes washer and feels liberated. They go into mourning when an Amazonian indigene turns up with a transistor radio in hand. Such people will love the opening chapters of "The Pickup," Nadine Gordimer’s brilliant new novel, a tale of clashing—or maybe just intersecting—cultures in Southern Africa. Above all, until the complications and ambiguities set in, they will deeply identify with Julie.

Julie is in full snooty rebellion against the wealthy upper middle class world of her financier father and his young trophy wife—a milieu which, she notes during a visit for Sunday drinks and dinner (with her own dark, handsome Arab trophy in tow) now includes black notables as well as the whites who cling to power in post-apartheid South Africa. Desperate to find relief from materialism and anomie, Julie ignores the evidence that her lover, an illegal immigrant employed as a mechanic in a Johannesburg auto repair shop, actually aspires to success in the rich, industrialized world. Abdu/Ibrahim, it seems, is determined to escape the world Julie falls in love with when she finally gets there: a tiny village on the edge of the desert in an unnamed African country where life seems to follow age old traditional patterns.

By this time, Abdu/Ibrahim has been kicked out of South Africa, and he and Julie are married, since they can't appear in his ancestral village as unwed intimates. As she ingratiates herself with her new in-laws, she tries not to notice that her husband puts all his energy into obtaining a visa that will permit him to be done with village life legally and forever. Of course, Abdu/Ibrahim has been equally incurious about Julie’s rebellion against the life into which she was born and into which, he had hoped, she would inject him. At least the sex has been good.

This is a spare, elegantly written fiction that takes an unflinching look at the dilemmas we face in a world of fluidity and great inequality. I couldn’t help cheering for Julie and for Abdu/Ibrahim. I wanted them to end up happy and fulfilled—and together. But there is no place where such mutuality can happen, unless both are willing to relinquish their clashing versions of the good life and concede that neither modern urban life nor traditional village life spontaneously meets all human needs. Meanwhile, their paths may be diverging, a poignant and convincing end note for a superb work of fiction.

Only when I was still savoring a fiction-lover’s first reading of "The Pickup" did I realize that there had been a very powerful subtext: this novel is a terrific illustration of the dialogue of the deaf that takes place during debates about development and globalization. No one who wants flawless heros/heroines, easy-to-hate villains or simple answers will be comfortable with this book. It’s full of honest ambiguities, gentle (and not so gentle) ironies, intriguing parallels—much too much to examine here! If you’re sick of abstractions and absolutes, if you’re willing to deliver yourself to the imagination, moral depth and intelligence of one of the world’s greatest living novelists who is still totally in touch, pick up "The Pickup."

Pat Sharpe

Losing the War of Ideas?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Sometime last week, the Pentagon quietly posted a 102 page report called “Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication” on its website (pdf file). This comprehensive report is a stinging indictment of the GW Bush Administration’s ability to convince the rest of the world of the rightness of its policies. It was commissioned by the Pentagon’s advisory Defense Science Board and dated September 2004. Why the delay in releasing to the public? Perhaps the impact it might have had on the November 2 elections? The release of this report could have, or should have, been used as yet another example of the myriad weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration in a close and contentious campaign that hinged on the President’s supposed ability to keep the country safe from the “war on terror.”

Yet Strategic Communication should not be read as a partisan political document. Its contents are valid for whomever won the election. Its committee members are foremost professionals: some with years of experience in the field of international communications. Their report paints a not very pretty picture like it is in their analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the current "winning hearts and minds" capabilities of the National Security Council, the Department of State and the Department of Defense.

The bottom line: not only is the US message questionable, it is garbled, weakly presented and the Administration needs to start listening as well as talking as it crafts its future actions abroad. The US also needs to reconstitute, restructure, up-staff as well as adequately fund the organizations it now uses to relay its message. This report is also a lot about talking and listening to people – a quality the US largely lost after the Cold War. It is not about selling fried chicken via television commercials.

Strategic Communication needs to be taken seriously by this Administration and also in the Halls of Congress. It is the 16th such report on the subject written since 9/11/2001 – all, unfortunately, thus far brushed off by a Bush Administration that doesn’t think it needs foreign policy advice.

Given Rumsfeld’s initial lukewarm reaction to Strategic Communication, the Administration’s continued stingy budgets for and attention paid to "winning hearts and minds" – I don't expect this task force’s recommendations to be considered any more seriously than those of its 15 predecessors. But then, miracles do happen.

NPT Difficulties

by CKR

I discussed the main technical factors that are weakening the NPT in my last post on the subject. The nontechnical factors get more complicated.

The NPT, like most treaties, is an agreement among states. In the wake of 9/11, the concern has grown that organizations like al-Qaeda may acquire nuclear weapons. The NPT does not include non-state organization. Also, with the rise of the neoconservatives, the US has taken the view that treaties take more from the US than they give back. Another neocon assumption, left over from the Cold War, has been that such organizations must operate with the support of some state(s).

While the US has not repudiated the NPT in the same way as it has the the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Kyoto Treaty or the International Criminal Court, it has avoided using it in broad ways. One of the reasons for this is a distrust of the United Nations, of which the International Atomic Energy Agency, the monitor of compliance with the NPT, is an agency.

Israel, India, and Pakistan never signed the NPT and have acquired nuclear weapons since the NPT came into force. Israel’s official policy is “strategic ambiguity,” but all the evidence suggests that it has nuclear weapons. India developed peaceful nuclear energy and a weapons program in parallel. Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan distributed weapons information to anyone who would pay his price. Although the Pakistani government claims to have had no knowledge of Khan’s activities, some of the activities, like delivery of components by government planes, could hardly have taken place without involvement of the government.

Both the United States and France appear to have contributed to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, in breach of the NPT. For example, a shipment of uranium fuel seems to have made its way from Pennsylvania to Israel in the 1970s. The full extent of the collaborations has been kept very quiet and may never be known. Mordechai Vanunu blew the whistle on some of this activity and was imprisoned for it until recently. He has been speaking out and is on the verge of being silenced again. (Much more about Vanunu)

India’s path shows how a peaceful nuclear power program, aided by both the US and the Soviet Union, can support the development of nuclear weapons.

I’ll say more about the US and the NPT in my next post in this series.

Was That in the Job Description....?

by CKR

We Need To Read The Bills

Brian Baird, a Democratic representative from Washington State, observes that most members of Congress did not read the appropriations bill, and some nasty stuff, like Congressional access to everyone's tax return, almost got through.

A favorite trick is for special interests to give Congressional aides little bits and pieces to slip into a must-pass bill at the last minute. It's largely pork, but other things manage to get in.

The stuff is given to aides because the representatives and Senators themselves need to maintain plausible deniability, and sometimes that's even true, with the aides effectively doing the legislating.

It's a dirty system, and Baird must understand that. He just didn't give us the whole story.

Ukraine - Continued

by CKR

Colin Powell, Gerhard Schröder, and Jack Straw have all expressed concern about fraud in the Ukraine election and have called for solving the crisis by peaceful means. Lech Walesa is in Kiev to help mediate.

The blogs say that Russian troops are being brought into Ukraine and are in Kiev now to reinforce or take the place of Ukrainian police and army troops, many of whom are rumored to be loyal to Yukoshenko or unwilling to take action against fellow Ukrainians.

The demonstrators remain peaceful but determined. Vladimir Putin, who has now congratulated Yanukovich twice and who visited Ukraine during the campaign to support Yankovich, has warned that outsiders have no moral right to push the Ukraine into “mass mayhem.” Kuchma's government warns ominously of civil war.

The crisis proceeds much as the late struggles in the Soviet Baltic republics or last year’s revolution of the roses in Georgia did. The blog reports have the same exhilaration as the stories of Estonian independence.

The difference is between Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin, between the Cold War and an uneasy War on Terror. Russia is not opposed to the West in the way the Soviet Union was, but in 1990, that relationship was improving. It’s now been rocky; the US has mostly been silent or approving of most of Russia’s recent actions, the EU more critical. Putin is practical and knows the world is watching. The good news is that he’s not talking about the demonstrators as terrorists.

Snow and Flies

By CKR

We've just had our first snowstorm here, the moisture very much needed. The winter solstice is just under a month away, and the coldest is yet to come. Here's a site that tells you everything you might want to know and more about cold, snow, and ice. And here's another for the northern lights and other stuff in the sky. Nice photos on both sites.

And, just for balance, here's everything you might want to know about flies.

11/2 Election & the "War on Terror"

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Did the “war on terror” decide the election after all?

Winning the “war on terror” may, in retrospect, have been a, if not the, determining factor in George W. Bush’s reelection – at least this is what several media analysts and columnists now suggest. They include John Harwood in his Capital Journal, “Terrorism Worries, not ‘Moral Values’ Decided the Election” in the November 24 Wall Street Journal and Michael Massing a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism review in the forthcoming December 16 New York Review of Books Article entitled “Iraq, the Press and the Election.”

In essence, then, the “values” issue was somewhat of a canard: “values” failed to sway many more voters in 2004 than they did in elections 2000 although one can debate this interpretation since in the closely fought 2004 election a two percent increase (22% vs.20%) over 2000 – certainly had an impact.

Apparently, though, what gave Bush the election more than anything were the images of his “standing tall” and “uniting the nation” in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. In short, his perceived ability to protect the U.S. from terrorists. Or was it terror?

Regardless, these Marlboro-man-images-sans-cigarette were picked up, played and replayed by Fox News, circulated and recirculated among the Christian fundamentalist right and the Republican faithful, and blared incessantly as Bush “authorized messages” – from radio and mainstream TV channels – including the local classical FM station I stopped listening to as a result - throughout the campaign.

OK. But what also threw Bush the election was the carefully crafted Republican campaign message that intentionally and fallaciously blurred and still blurs the “war on terror” – itself a misnomer - with the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. Then there’s the purported link the Bush campaign publicists drew between Saddam Hussein and WMD that bore and still bears no relationship to reality.

All this, in the face of the publication of the bipartisan and widely respected 9/11 Commission Report that clearly separated the three foreign policy issues and discredited the Saddam-WMD link lie; not to mention the mainstream media’s increasing reports of a swelling Iraq insurgency over the summer and fall.

“You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time,” Abraham Lincoln told the people of Clinton, Illinois on September 8, 1858. How long, then, will the majority (albeit slim) of today’s American voters remain fooled?

Perhaps as the Iraq mess drags on, as more and more young Americans lose their lives in that distant and treacherous desert, and as fiscal constraints tighten their grip on the U.S. economy and reach deeper into taxpayer pocketbooks, enough American voters will join the ranks of the already disbelievers to make a difference. Who knows? It takes some people longer to catch on than others. Just maybe enough will - and in time for the 2006 mid-term elections.

Ukraine - Continued

By CKR

It looks like the earlier reports that the US was urging Yanukovich's selection were in error. (Or was that a trial balloon floated by Donald Rumsfeld?)

Colin Powell has made a strong statement that the election should be investigated. (Reuters story) This is more like the role America played in the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Bush has been quite passive in his relationships with Moscow. Will he now disavow Powell's statement, as he has others? We know that Powell is a lame duck.