ARCHIVE OF WORKING OPINIONS

Hanna Arendt drew a line in the sand between VIOLENCE and POWER. Violence does not equate with power, she said.

Arendt's reflections from the late 1960s in her little book On Violence--which I reviewed in an essay--come to mind because violence has a new lease in our lives since 9-11.

She set out to show that the hoary idea of violence--fortified by the Judeo-Christian tradition of an angry God--is logically flawed. Violence, she argued, is always instrumental in the service of power. (46) It can never be the basis of government. Power, on the other hand, is the ability of a social entity to act in concert (44). It enables people to function together. (52) It is the essence and end of all government. [From my essay]

Arendt wrote:

"Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power." (53)"

Terrorists brought violence to our homeland in an attempt to destroy our power. Realizing that in the extreme their violence indeed could do that, we have mobilized our instruments of violence to destroy their capacity to do violence. We are all becoming newly glib in the rhetoric of violence as we follow our fight against al-Qaeda.

As that fight has heated up, I've felt the rush of desire to see those uglies bite the dust. You've felt it too, perhaps, that feisty primitive flow of feeling. It was a flow that troubled Arendt. She valiantly tried to argue that our biological nature is not at the root of our violence.

Whatever its roots, VIOLENCE is the hottest item on the world's agenda for now. And everyone had better work harder than ever to figure out how to manage its articulation with POWER around the world.

The burning question is not how effective our VIOLENCE will be against terrorists. Surely it will be effective in the short run, given the depth of our resources and resolve.

The burning question is how effective our POWER will be against terrorists in the long run.

When we violently destroy the networks of terror that we have in our cross-hairs, the meaningful long-term campaign against terrorism can legitimately begin.

It will have to involve many hands from many lands. They will have to wield governmental power judiciously in a process that reaches around the world. Governments in the West and in Muslim regions will have to embrace the principle of modus vivendi as never before. They will have to see the need for even-handed justice throughout the world as never before.

Governments will have to exercise their power together to minimize the political, economic, and social conditions that make terrorism an attractive alternative. This use of power, to be effective, will have to be unprecedented in its global reach. It will have to be a large next step in the long, halting attempt of the human race to distribute power equitably around the world.

Can the US join other nation states in a project that for now seems unimaginably difficult--building the basis of a new "concert" on a global scale?

Can we join hands with Muslims and together expand the territory where vastly different peoples are able to function together? Can Muslims reach out to us and join in a reshaping of global power? (Hardt & Negri offer the vision of a new "Empire.")

Can a conservative Republican administration stay the course in a "nation-building" program that it initially rejected?

Can the US and other major powers reform their free market orthodoxy enough to give new priority to social safety nets and the preservation of civil societies and their environments? (Students of globalization offer varying degrees of hope in addressing this question, as a reading of three of them shows.)

Can we demonstrate to the world's underdogs that they can gain bread from global capitalism without losing their souls? ("Working words" from recent reading emphasize how important it will be to create a "viable market society.")

Tough questions of POWER such as these will have to crowd out the questions of VIOLENCE that still are making the headlines. (Smoke 'em out, Dubya.)

hogwarts

HARRY IN HOGWARTS VS. DOROTHY IN OZ

(18 November 2001)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is blockbusting the industry. Promotion of the product is synergistic and ubiquitous. For all we know, the film may even go a man-sized step toward boosting the ailing national economy. That's a heavy commercial load for a kid's story to carry.

Could any old kid's story have been the vehicle for this assault on the global marketplace? Surely not. The current promotional sizzle surrounding the film would be impossible if the smashing success of Harry Potter in print had not preceded it. The story is a grabber, whether you're nine or sixty-nine.

Pre-teen readers must have liked the book so much because they could identify with the plucky little underdog whose destiny it is to champion good over evil in the world of wizardry. They must have empathized with his self-doubts, suffered when he suffered, exulted when he triumphed.

Harry is the fitting hero for this Millennial Generation, which promises to be "the next great generation," according to Howe & Strauss. Holden Caulfield, with your quirky ironies in the rye, step aside. Harry the postmodern straight shooter's come to take your place.

When I saw J. K. Rowling interviewed on TV while promoting her first volume, she talked about mapping out the whole story on a chart before she began writing. She already had accounted for the subsequent three volumes in that grand scheme.

Aside from wanting to put bread on the table for her family, she seemed motivated to make an imaginary world that would be complete enough to be plausible, however fantastic it might be. And clearly she wanted good beings who meant well to drive that world. In Harry, she created a vulnerable little guy whose big heart was in the right place--who also happened to have wizardly powers. He's a good role model for any little Millennial kid (as long as the kid doesn't try to emulate Harry's skill in the air on a broomstick).

If we crank up the critical machinery a few notches, we can discern Harry flourishing in complex dimensions readily grasped by kids brought up in a postmodern culture of simulacra.

In standard postmodern fashion, Rowling created an alternative universe in which to play out the heroic destiny of her protagonist. The world of wizards exists side by side with but separate from the world of ordinary non-magic people, Muggles.

The wizard world overlaps with the world of Muggles here and there, notably when the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry recruits the children of Muggles. Harry and his fellow students get to Hogwarts by passing through the railroad gate numbered 9 3/4. Only the magically endowed can see it situated in the solid wall between gates 9 and 10. The existence of the passage, however, serves to highlight the discreteness of the two universes.

When I read Harry Potter, it tempted me to pass through a critical gate and compare it with the Wizard of Oz, blockbuster of another era. Both give us the separation of an innocent child from ordinary reality--Harry from the Dursley household on Privet Drive, Dorothy from a farm in Kansas.

Neither Harry nor Dorothy at first understands the magical forces at work in the alternative reality to which they go. Both catch on to the magical mysteries in the course of the narrative. And their discoveries move the stories toward their respective resolutions.

The resolution of the Wizard of Oz, however, differs markedly from that of Harry Potter. In Oz, Dorothy sees the phoniness behind the magic of the Wizard. This leads her to return to the ordinary world, wiser about the meaning of home and eager to live in the black-and-white world of Depression-era Kansas. The alternative reality of Oz gives her an education in the values of home.

No such transformation takes place in Harry's understanding of the ordinary world of Muggles. The conflict and resolution of his story occur wholly within the wizard world. To be sure, Harry will be a more likely survivor among Muggles as the result of events at Hogwarts. Yet, Harry's destiny lies in the magic world, not in the Muggle world. He is a wizard; Dorothy is a normal girl from Kansas.

That makes for a difference in the relative importance of the respective overlapping of worlds.

In the story of Dorothy, the overlap is essential to an understanding of the events in the land of Oz and in Kansas.

In Harry Potter's story, the overlap matters less. Muggle world is the place where Harry has been living. It is an unexciting, uncomfortable, and morally questionable world, but not one that Harry is bent on understanding better or transforming.

Dorothy, however, when she awakens back home as from a dream, sees the true value of the simple Kansas folk and their rural setting. It took her whirlwind trip to Oz to open her eyes to Kansas. For her, there's no place like home.

If I were granting points for the integrated wholeness of elements in the respective stories, The Wizard of Oz clearly would score higher.

In terms of one theory of postmodern fiction (Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction), the dominant note of Harry Potter is ontological: we see two separate worlds capable of existing apart from the other, with only a shimmering passageway between them. The Muggle world functions as a foil to heighten the excitement and the moral superiority of the contrasting wizard world. The dominant note of The Wizard of Oz is epistemological: what happens to Dorothy in her adventures in the land of Oz contributes to her better understanding of the ordinary world.

Well--there's a heavy critical load for a kid's story to carry. Maybe when I see the movie I'll lighten it up.

story

HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE: THE STORY

Harry's aunt and uncle display the bad values of the ordinary world of Muggles as compared with the world of wizards. They deprive Harry of the truth about himself, that he is a wizard. They treat him like a male Cinderella in their household. He suffers deprivation while his cousin Dudley Dursley is spoiled with every material thing.

When he is invited to enroll in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he is instantly recognized as the boy who resisted the deadly attack of Voldemort, the wizard-gone-bad. He killed Harry's wizardly parents when he was an infant but Harry took Voldemort's bolt on the forehead without dying.

The situation at Hogwarts provides Harry with a challenge commensurate with his talents. Like a traditional old Rover Boy away at boarding school, assisted by Hermione (who rather resembles a witchy Nancy Drew), Harry discovers the big secret, that the Sorcerer's Stone is in hiding at the school. He figures out that one of the teachers has gone over to Voldemort, who is weak but not dead. Voldemort survives on unicorn blood in the forbidden forest while waiting for the Elixir of Life contained in the hidden stone.

Through a series of adventures and misadventures, abetted by Hagrid the amiable keeper at the school, Harry discovers that Voldemort is alive. He thwarts the attempt of Quirrell the teacher to steal the stone and give it to Voldemort for his nourishment.

In the meantime, traditional first-year prep school antics occupy Harry and his friends. But the classes all are on the craft of witch and wizard. The contrast between Albus Dumbledore, the friendly and wise headmaster, and Voldemort shows that Hogwarts is in the domain of good magic, which stoutly resists the black arts of Voldemort and his followers.

Hogwarts even celebrates Christmas, though it is all about presents not religion. This superficial wizardly treatment of the biggest holiday of the ordinary world as well as anything draws the distinction between the two worlds. If you make too much of it, you're forgetting--Rowling wrote a story for kids. Grown-ups should enter with the proper respect for adventure that is innocent of much symbolic import.

announcing

Fifth working thought about 11 September 2001

ANNOUNCING 2 NEW ENGAGEMENTS:

(1) ISLAM WITH USA (2) ISLAM WITH ISLAM

(3 November 2001)

On 11 September 2001 a long engagement started between America and an enemy whose roots lie in the fertile loam of Middle Eastern Islamic culture.

In the short term, the engagement is military. For the infamous hit we took, the US will pursue justice the old-fashioned way.

In the long run, the meaning of "engagement" will inevitably shift from the military to the political, the social, and the cultural.

We will never again be as ignorant of the idea of Islam or of people who are Muslims as we have been.

Not just the terrorists but most of the Muslims in the Middle East will never again be as ignorant of American values as they have been.

They and we are now like Nietzsche's intertwined eagle and snake in flight. We can no longer separate ourselves from one another and survive.

"Engagement" emphasizes the human connection—it is a coming together. The terrorists precipitated a violent beginning of our engagement. But it will pass beyond violence in the long term. (See my beginning thoughts about "The great global engagement.")

Engaging—as we have not heretofore--with our enemies and with the Islamic culture from which they have emerged, we will change our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Engaging—as they have not heretofore--with the values that drive America, our enemies and the Islamic society from which they come will change their understanding of the world and their place in it.

Even as we are dropping bombs and doing battle today, the long-term engagement has begun.

The West has been trying to sort out the difference between terrorists out to kill us in the name of their religion and that religion itself. That is changing the way we think and act toward the Islamic Middle East.

The US is already reviewing the omissions and errors in its past relations with Islamic Middle East states, in the light of what went so wrong on 9-11. That will change the way we relate in the future.

In the Middle Eastern Islamic world, leaders have already had to re-think their relations with the US in the light of our response to 9-11. That re-thinking will not end when the bombing and battles abate. They surely already are aware that in the future they will not be able to patronize Western oil customers while permitting ideological anti-Westernism to mount in their borders.

Salmon Rushdie rejected the mantra that holds that our just war on terrorists "is not about Islam." Rushdie insisted, "Yes, this is about Islam." (New York Times, 2 November 2001)

If Rushdie has it right, the aftermath of 9-11 for Islam will be more than a long-term engagement with the West. It will be a new engagement of Islam with Islam itself.

Rushdie talks about the deep dissension among Muslim nations. He talks about the Muslim voices rising "against the obscurantist hijacking of their religion." He talks about the new possibility that Middle East Muslims will come to see the futility of merely blaming America for the ills of their society.

Elsewhere, we hear calls to Muslim religious voices to articulate more effectively the Islamic justification for living in peace with non-Muslims. These calls will not end soon.

Meanwhile, we deal here with more anthrax mysteries, more terror alerts, more business busts. Tom Brokaw, an anthrax target himself, said, "Before September 11, Americans were sort of innocents." Our new engagement with the Islamic Middle East makes us more worldly-wise in our homeland, more alert to the tragic possibilities of everyday life.

But you never would have guessed it in the evening hours of late October and early November. The delirium surrounding miracles at Yankee Stadium and then mayhem in Arizona made clear that in some deep core Americans will NEVER agree to grow up altogether and live in the real, cruel world.

If the Islamic Middle East ever half-understands that, we'll know our engagement is going just fine.

manifesto

Fourth working thought about 11 September 2001

A MUSLIM MANIFESTO

(16 October 2001)

The attack on America sent shock waves into every corner of our lives. And minds.

I was shocked into awareness of my ignorance of Islam. Suddenly I was self-conscious about the Euro-American tint of my glasses. When I looked over my list of books to read, the lack of titles touching on the Islamic world spoke volumes.

Mea culpa.

These confessions come easily in part because I feel I'm not the only one.

I've been grateful to the White House and the media for attempting to differentiate between terrorists and Muslims. Since the attack, I've gained an inkling of how much I don't know and should know about Islam.

Tardily starting down a long road to correct the lack, I read a New York Times piece (14 Oct 01) by Robert Worth, "The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror." Worth tried to show the thinking in the Islamic world that has resulted in a linkage between religion and terrorism.

The intellectual trail, according to Worth, leads back to Sayyid Qutb (SIGH-yid KUH-tahb) (1906-1966).

I found the introduction to Sayyid Qutb's work, Milestones, through the "Islam World" webpage (see link below). The work is dated 1964, two years before he was executed by Egypt for inciting resistance to the regime.

My first thought on reading Qutb's text was: Now that the political formulation of Marx's manifesto for transforming the world has died with the death of the USSR, a Muslim manifesto rises up like a specter to assure that the capitalist West continues to have a nemesis.

Qutb's Milestones introduction displayed the same fervent certainty of a new world vision that one finds in the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848. Here's Qutb's opening salvo:

It is essential for mankind to have new leadership!

The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak. The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.

It is necessary for the new leadership to preserve and develop the material fruits of the creative genius of Europe, and also to provide mankind with such high ideals and values as have so far remained undiscovered by mankind, and which will also acquaint humanity with a way of life which is harmonious with human nature, which is positive and constructive, and which is practicable.

Islam is the only system which possesses these values and this way of life. The period of the resurgence of science has also come to an end. This period, which began with the Renaissance in the sixteenth century after Christ and reached its zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, does not possess a reviving spirit.

All nationalistic and chauvinistic ideologies which have appeared in modern times, and all the movements and theories derived from them, have also lost their vitality. In short, all man-made individual or collective theories have proved to be failures.

At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived, which does not prohibit material inventions.

Qutb, S. Milestones. Beirut, Lebanon: The Holy Koran Publishing House, (1964) 1978.

Qutb's manifesto resembled Marx's in two ways. (1) He was aiming at worldwide revolution, affecting all humankind. (2) He would husband the material achievements of bourgeois Western culture even as he overcame the creators of that culture.

Extremist Muslim thinkers like Qutb, according to Worth's article, have taught that "modern Western culture was equivalent to jahiliyya (the word is the Arabic term for the barbarism that existed before Islam)." To terrorists, the logic is clear: we will eliminate jahiliyya by destroying the modern Western culture that embodies it.

I've been coming to think that the notion of modus vivendi offers the best way forward into a new kind of globalization. John Gray in Two Faces of Liberalism makes an appealing case for it. Gray looks to Isaiah Berlin's pluralism for support of it.

A commitment to modus vivendi would be a commitment never to expect our culture to supplant other cultures--and a commitment of other cultures not to try to suppress our culture. This would radically halt the leftover violence of Enlightenment hubris in the West. It would halt the extremist Islamic impulse to destroy the West.

With bombs dropping, Pakistani crowds burning effigies of President Bush, and Americans still grieving over the attack on our homeland, modus vivendi looks like a notion whose time is not now.

But the attack on America started the world down a long road toward some new arrangement, like it or not. When mere destruction of terrorists ends, what will we do? Persuading Islamic extremists--and ourselves--of the virtue of modus vivendi would be one way to proceed.

In the meantime, I'm hitting the books and the web. For anyone interested, here are a couple of references from my tardy (guilty) scramble to begin learning more about Islam.

BOOKS:

1. John L. Esposito, Ed. THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ISLAM. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1999. Ursinus College Library: 297.09/Ox2.

2. Mark Huband. WARRIORS OF THE PROPHET: The Struggle for Islam. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Ursinus College Library: 320.55/H861

WEBSITES:

1. The Islam Page: Introduction for non-Muslims 2. The Islamic Interlink: Directory of Islam on the Internet 3. The Islamic Gateway World Wide Media Network 4. Sayyid Qutb Studies

sensibilities

Third working thought about 11 September 2001

REVISING ARTISTIC SENSIBILITIES

(30 September 2001)

In a bright and clever essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," David Foster Wallace in 1990 observed that irony and rebellion, those staple strategies of the avant-garde, had faded away.

The postmodern "televisual establishment" had sucked them in and regurgitated them as "mere gestures, schticks."

What were earnest writers to do? he wondered. Well, he concluded, with a certain desperation, the next thing in writing might come from "some weird bunch of anti-rebels." They might have the gall to eschew double-entendres. They might "treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction."

He seemed to see these anti-rebels pursuing the only kind of rebellion left. He thought they would be "willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh how banal'."

In the eleven years that followed, the anti-rebels failed to appear. Instead we saw throughout the 1990s the further "waning of affect," virtualization of the subject, trivialization of tragedy, assumptions about "the end of history." We saw the technological simulacrum come to be (or seem to be) more real than the real.

That was all before 11 September 2001.

In my hours of brooding on the images of Ground Zero, I found the face of Walt Whitman in my mind's eye--the celebrant of "Manahatta" and the laureate of our epic national trauma, the Civil War. Then John Steinbeck came to mind, and I could see the Joad family again in their beat-up truck, heading for California and destiny. And the gnarled characters of Sherwood Anderson rose up out of Winesburg, Ohio, along with the meaningfully dead from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River. A whole parade of the fictional population of an earlier America came marching in then, Hemingway's disillusioned bravos, Fitzgerald's glittering tragicomedians, Faulkner's universal yokels, Cather's impassioned heartlanders, Thomas Wolfe's insatiable nomads.

In the decade of the 1990s, these had slipped into the background. Their reality-drenched fictional world had dimmed--along with its absolutes of good and evil, its bridges between the temporal and the timeless, its portents of significance for the earnestly involved.

The shimmery subjects of postmodernist imagination--signifiers unhinged from a signified reality--took center stage, slipping in and out of focus while goofing around and indulging in mock-panic attacks. In this company, with its hi-tech delights and historical pastiche, the high seriousness and dark perspectives of those old imagined Americans would have looked, well, banal.

The epistemological subtleties of characterization from the old days melted away in the sizzle. That left the burnished surfaces of humanity to be presented by the likes of David Foster Wallace in books such as his massive novel, Infinite Jest.

As of 11 September 2001, think of that state of affairs as gone.

The attack on America brought more than death and destruction. It revived a tragic sense of life and took the tongue out of our cheek. Out of the ashes of the trade towers rises a newly forming American subject and style, a revised sensibility for the first decade of the new millennium.

No, it will not come into focus as if postmodern irony and pastiche never existed. The newly found poignancy of our lives has a sharper bite precisely because it burst into being while we were busily pursuing the "infinite jests" of postmodern existence.

So the seeming opportunity to flee backward into an older American authenticity will be illusory. Our newly found seriousness and realism will find expression in a postmodern setting of global dimensions, not in the rail cars and dustbowls and barrooms of twentieth century modernist America.

Hollywood and Broadway and publishing houses are on high alert. They're trying to plot the sine curve of the American psyche as we take up our global campaign against terrorists and pay new heed to homeland security. They can't go back to the jests and gibes of business as usual 11 Sep 01-ante. But neither can they simply repeat the high modern seriousness of the twentieth century.

Like the 'twenties and the 'thirties and other periods in our experience that began with a bang, this decade is going to have its distinctive feel and form. But the managers of our cultural industries won't discover a magic formula next month or even next year.

America--the whole world--is entering a period of esthetic re-definition and re-discovery, a period that will make itself apparent in its own way and at its own pace. The new sensibility that's sure to develop will come into focus a work at a time.

The creative and performing arts in this new period of the great global engagement will bear close study. Even the false starts and off-pitch experiments will have a significance unimaginable in the previous climate of infinite jest.

How will irony and rebellion work in a communitarian milieu? How will heroism and humor converge? How will reverence for human endurance and divine presence meld with irreverence for pomp and circumstance? How will the American psyche look when the depth and complexity that we thought it had lost show up on the electronic page, on the super-slick stage and wrap-around screen?

It will be as interesting to track answers to such questions as it will be to watch the mythical meaning of Ground Zero take visible form while America digs out and builds up, and while the nations of the world take our hands.

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" is found in David Foster Wallace. A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN: Essays and Arguments. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997, pp.21-82

global

Second working thought about 11 September 2001

THE GREAT GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT

(20 September 2001)

Our response to the attack on America needs new words.

"War" connotes conventional conflict between states with defined territories, armies clearly aligned, squaring off and slugging it out. This is not essentially a conflict between states. The enemy lives in shadows below or across states. It is not disposed to stand up like a state and slug it out.

"World War III" is a misleading term. Yes, the struggle will reach everywhere, but not in the conventional military manner. We face an enemy operating under cover of state hosts and in the interstices of a permeable society that encircles the globe.

I'm coming to call it "The Great Global Engagement" of the twenty-first century.

"The Great..." Let's call this thing "the great" in the hope--like that of 1918--that it will be the only one on this scale. "The Great War" only became "World War I" after we had a second one.

"Global..." Let's say "global" instead of "world."

The terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, true. But the WTC had become a node in the network of the post -Cold War economy. That economy, based on a transnational application of laissez-faire capitalist economics, has gained the name "globalization." It is something new, the pursuit of free-market capitalism by transnational corporations and global investment organizations in an increasingly permeable and technologically connected setting.

The terrorists can't tell us what was on their minds because they died with their victims and didn't see any value in leaving us written messages.

But we know a lot about resistance to globalization.

We know that globalization promises to raise living standards of the poor in developing nations. We know this classic promise often is contradicted (or perceived to be) by the uncontrollable effects of globalization.

We know that these effects include unequal distribution of rewards, winner-take-all odds, disproportionate hardship against women in the workplace, disintegration of social and religious values of the poor and marginalized, uncertainty for workers whose lives are disembedded from their familiar culture, the loss of social safety nets under the burden of debt imposed on states, the replacement of traditional material culture by the commodities of global production, McStuff.

We know that these uncontrollable effects of globalization lead to resentment. We know that America's high-profile role in the post-Cold War world makes us the perceived center of privilege--and therefore the chief villain in the eyes of anyone filled with resentment and eager to resist the effects of globalization.

We know that fundamentalist religion has hardened into a form of resistance to these perceived social evils of globalization. It resists the whole cornucopia of postmodern life, with its free and open behavior and material splash. Avoidance and prohibition of secular culture have become key religious strategies to counter globalization.

In the process the fundamentalists have bent mainstream Muslim religion into an extreme form. Someone made a comparison between the "Christianity" of the suicidal community at Jonestown some years ago and the "Islam" of suicidal hijackers. This is useful. Just as Jim Jones practiced a perverted religion that mocked what the world understands as Christian, so the terrorists profess a perverted religion that mocks what the world understands as Muslim.

On top of all that is the agony of Israel, where Palestinians want what Israelis have (took, as Palestinians see it). For Palestinians and their Arab brethren throughout the Middle East, America's solidarity with their Israeli adversary makes America their adversary too.

Mix in finally the capacity of human beings for fervent obedience to ideological leaders, to the point of insanity and self-destruction, and you get Bang!--a global disaster killing not only Americans but nationals from many other countries doing business in the World Trade Center. The terrorists may have thought they were attacking a nerve center of American capitalism. They were actually attacking the world community.

"Engagement" "This is war!" The headline immediately needed clarification.

Well, it won't exactly be war as we used to know it. Long and hard, yes. But different. Not aimed primarily at nation states. War against an enemy weak in armaments but powerfully equipped with cunning and stealth, and emotionally supported by non-soldiers throughout an entire region of the world.

Let's call the complicated struggle ahead an "engagement" instead of a war.

This may better suggest the nature of the multinational effort to eradicate the structure of global terrorism. It may be a reminder that the multinational coalition will not be out to conquer territory in the old wartime way. It may resonate with White House talk about a multi-faceted agenda involving non-military and military initiatives. It may say that success can be measured by the results of covert actions involving few, not just by tonnage.

"Engagement" is a term of war, to be sure: forces come together to engage one another in battle. But the word "engagement" captures the "coming together" of adversaries as the word "war" does not. In "engagement" we may be able to see the shadow of a bridge to long-term transformation.

"Engagement" emphasizes the human connection. The word is a receptacle for meanings such as meshing, attracting and holding, binding, pledging, involving, holding attention, inducing participation, bringing together (even in combat), taking part, participating (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary).

"Engagement" comes to mind when you conjure up the picture of an old Japanese soldier and an old American GI embracing at the Pearl Harbor memorial. Their separate worlds began to transform the moment they shot at one another in the 1940s. Half a century later they found themselves in a commonly shared world.

"Engagement" comes to mind when you think about the long-term outcome of World War II in the development of Germany and Japan from enemies into allies and partners in a globalization agenda.

Reimagining the human arrangement "Engagement" allows us to think beyond whatever bloodshed lies immediately ahead.

The job of leaders of globalization, governmental and non-governmental, and leaders of Middle East countries and culture will be to reconceptualize globalization.

Who knows what that will mean? It ought to mean a new resolve to introduce pluralism and the values of civil society as primary goals of globalization going forward.

The long-term antidote to terrorism—after we expunge the vitality of its present practitioners—will be to reimagine the human arrangement on the face of the whole earth, politically, economically, and culturally.

By striving toward such an audacious goal, we might begin to see positive meaning in the sudden sacrifice of so many innocent victims in the twin towers, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania.

The first President Bush popularized the phrase "new world order." Under the second President Bush, perhaps we will begin to see what that really means. Somehow or other, in the long run it should have to do with the "engagement" of people around the world.

We'll have a clearer sense of what to call all this after we hear President Bush speak tonight and in the days immediately ahead.

changed

First working thought about 11 September 2001:

"FOREVER CHANGED"

(12 September 2001)

Yesterday American life "forever changed," to borrow a phrase from the Tim Burns PBS documentary about New York.

I was nearly eleven years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 December 1941, that day of infamy.

The detritus of a lifetime has buried my memory of it. I probably didn't know what the fuss was about and went on playing pull-the-peg and running in the nearby woods. It was grown-ups' stuff.

My granddaughter is eleven years old now, on our second day of infamy. I have a hunch Lilly's life is going on today pretty much as it was on 10 September 2001.

Yet, just as World War II forever changed my life, so the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have changed Lilly's life forever.

This is the end of a luxurious interlude after the Cold War, through which Lilly has lived her entire life so far. In that interlude, we gave thought to "the end of history" and the beginning of a world culture with common ground. We saw the rise of a globalized economy and thought it could be the vehicle to a worldwide civilization. Now we soberly revisit that vision.

Lilly and her schoolmates will live a different life than the one that we thought was developing for them in the past decade. This may well be their first call to become the "next great generation," as Howe and Strauss called them in Millennials Rising.

The enemy today is unlike the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese planes had their insignia on the wings. The new enemy flew our own domestic planes and did not identify themselves. That made their impact more deadly. And it makes our military response more complicated.

The dispensers of mayhem, as I write, are not idle, surely. Having wounded the giant, they surely have the will to strike it again. We have a new will to strike them, whoever and wherever they are.

In our dreamy interlude, we half-believed that we could gain military ends without sacrificing lives of our own—hyperwar in hyperspace. That dream died in the Manhattan rubble that buries real bodies. American blood spilled yesterday; and I'm certain that America has now promised whatever bloodshed it will take to assure victory over this enemy.

Because of the unconventional character of this enemy's methods, America has to behave as it has not behaved for years. Our recent pretensions to innocence—when we could allow the dalliances of our chief executive to monopolize our national consciousness—look ludicrous in the haze of Manhattan smoke. Whatever "honor and dignity" the installation of George W. Bush may have restored to the White House, we know now that in his administration the tragedy that lurks in the global saga of humanity reopened for another American chapter.

I am failing to subdue my bias—just this once I'll say it and then hold my peace forever after. I fear that the recidivist rhetoric and unilateral posture of the Bush administration in the past eight months probably heated up the terrorists' resolve to act. With old warriors Cheney and Rumsfeld, abetted by inexperienced Condi Rice, Bush resurrected a militaristic them-against-us way of expressing our role in the world.

My bias, however, does not lead me to blame Bush for what happened. The terrorists were at work before Bush came to the White House. We have to rally with him and move forward.

I grew up emulating the emotional architecture of my elders who fought World War II. As I grew older I saw different attitudes emerge in American life. Those new attitudes in people younger than I tended to marginalize the goal-oriented worldview that defined the GI generation and largely my own. History of course will not repeat itself as America defines its agenda in response to our new day of infamy; Boomers and Gen-Exers think differently, and the 2000s are profoundly different from the 1940s. I expect, though, that the rhetoric and actions in days to come will remind me of official behavior of long ago.

Americans can't do good in the world if we don't value our national purpose and defend it with all that we have. That's the message in the dust of lower Manhattan. How eerily familiar that rings to anyone who even half-remembers World War II.

china

MARXIST THEORY TAKES AN INVENTIVE TURN IN CHINA

(19 August 2001)

Chairman Mao has to be rolling over in his grave. Marx too.

Jiang Zemin, now sitting in Mao's seat at the head of the Chinese Communist Party, plans to bring capitalists into the party of the workers.

The 16 August 2001 New York Times reported that Jiang's maneuver reflects his peculiar elaboration on Marxist theory. The party, he says, now must represent "advanced productive forces, advanced Chinese culture and the fundamental interests of the majority."

Practical application: "newly prominent groups such as private-company owners, high-tech innovators and managers in foreign businesses were helping to build Chinese socialism, and so should be welcomed into the party."

So, the bourgeoisie, history's bad guys, are going to get a welcome into the house of the workers, history's good guys, which is under the management of Jiang's party. Marx in his best humor, if he were here, might even enjoy the irony of Jiang's master stroke. It brings the capitalists under control not by killing them but by co-opting them. Their entrepreneurial inventiveness will channel through the state's structures under party domination.

At least that's what we have to assume Jiang hopes to accomplish. Once he allows those foxes inside the chicken coop, how does he know they will behave themselves?

Anyway, this inventive turn has two important implications.

It means that China, as its participation in the 21st century global economic system expands, will be trying to free itself from the constraints of 19th century Marxist class theory. Why be a theoretical purist when the theory's greatest practical experiment, the USSR, lies in ashes?

Second, it means that China's participation in the globalization system will emphasize national priorities. Don't think for a minute that the transnational dynamics of the global economy are easily going to override the power of the Chinese nation state.

Does the new economic globalization system, still emerging, promise to end history as we have known it and lead to a global monoculture? Not if Jiang's theory takes root and lasts in China.

beijing

BEIJING OLYMPICS: PEACE GAMES INSTEAD OF WAR GAMES

(15 July 2001)

The Bush administration made the right decision when it kept silent about China's bid for the 2008 Olympics.

Had it taken either a pro or a con position, it would have injected itself into an issue where it had no official jurisdiction. This could have resulted in an embarrassment to the American government if the Olympic Committee had acted contrary to the American declaration. Either way, a Bush statement on the choice of a venue for the games could not have made an effective contribution to the dialogue on human rights with China. That, after all, was the main point of even thinking about declaring a White House position.

Now that the Olympic Committee has chosen Beijing, the US has ample time to use the prospect of the Olympics as leverage for its agenda with China.

I suspect that the Party people in Beijing will be thinking a lot in the next seven years about the old adage--be careful what you wish for; you may get it.

They will have to pay lip service to international expectations for openness and the rule of law. The question is how far beyond lip service the US and others can press them to go.

Bush people have been getting excited about the "Revolution in Military Affairs," the movement in the Pentagon that lies behind the President's eagerness to launch a new missile defense strategy. According to Nicholas Lemann's account in The New Yorker ("Dreaming About War," 16 July 2001, pp. 32-38), the promoters of this strategy play summer war games set in the future against "a large Asian country."

Now that China has elected to be host to the world's most glamorous and visible sporting event, our government has a new opportunity to think harder about "peace games" with China.

Let the Bush administration get excited about a "Revolution in non-Military Affairs" with the Chinese. That may help dilute the Rumsfeldian zeal to pursue Chinese war games.

judging

JUDGING W.

(22 June 2001)

The following message from old friend Navitsky in Florida is just in:

I was disturbed by the way the Supreme Court decided the outcome of the presidential election in favor of George W. Bush.

I've been disturbed by W.'s presumptuousness. He has governed as if he had a broad popular mandate to turn the course of American policy in an undiluted conservative direction. He has pretended that the opposition of a majority of voters counts for nothing in the way he conducts his administration.

In a few months he has set an aggressive conservative agenda on taxes, the military, international relations, environment, energy, social welfare, and education. This thick-headed resistance to governing from the center has disturbed me.

I've been disturbed by the negative perception of his style at home and abroad. His "hedgehog" approach--to have a few big ideas and persist in trying to "sell" them to the nation and the world--has seemed to me to indicate not persistence but obtuseness in the face of complexity.

Underlying these disturbances has been--let me confess--a visceral dislike for the cut of George W. Bush's jib. That First Smirk has bugged me from day one. He has seemed to quirkily combine a self-righteous sense of class snobbery based on his parentage with the manner of a yokel in a pick-up truck out in an oil field. The incongruity has made me grind my teeth when he has appeared on TV. His penchant for gnomic utterances at his most serious has seemed to me not the reflection of profundity but a strategy for the rhetorically challenged. (Parenthetically, this gut-level animus toward W. has belatedly made me more understanding of the Clinton haters, who just couldn't stand THAT guy.)

That was then. This is now.

One's personal feelings about the Chief Executive don't matter a hoot. For the sake of the nation's stability, a citizen should affirm the President's legitimacy and forget the Rehnquist maneuver. One should grant W. the right to exercise the power of office as forthrightly as he can, since a drifting ship of state would serve us worse than one moving in a Constitutional if questionable direction. One should also grant that effective presidential leadership can come in many styles.

The authority of office puts the President far beyond the reach of a citizen's personal peevishness. The question going forward is whether he has the capacity to learn and grow in the use of his authority.

Peevishness aside, I'm sure that if he continues to hue to a doctrinaire right-wing line, he will serve his party poorly. He will ensure the capture of the whole Congress in the next election by Democrats and the loss of the White House after that.

At the outset, I thought that W. was an ideologue who would not change his stripes to adapt to public will--or even to party expediency. I thought he would be the opposite of Clinton, whose genius for finding an opportunistic third way is now legendary. I thought he was a sure loser four years hence.

I've changed that working opinion.

W.'s minions have shown that they play the photo-op game with more zeal even than the Clinton White House. W.'s shifts and turns on the environment have shown him to be sensitive to public criticism of his doctrinaire stance. His conciliatory outreach to Europe and Russia on his first Grand Tour contrasted with his initial high-falutin' pronouncements from fortress America. His pas de deux with Ted Kennedy on education--once the hilarity of it passes--has the look of a conciliator hoofing it with a compromiser. His hasty yielding to the protesters of Vieques, straining the loyalties of his military chiefs, showed that he is paying attention to the political process big-time. (On the other hand, the lengthy delay in the effective date of the bombing halt also showed that his capacity for dissembling remains quite high.)

The Cheney-Bush conservative vision reduces the world's complex reality. It fails to acknowledge the full power of new global dynamics--political, economic, cultural, and environmental--to change America for better or worse in unprecedented ways.

Nevertheless, I'm granting here, as a working opinion, that W. may be able to learn and change enough to keep his flawed vision from doing irreparable harm to the welfare of the nation and the world. Considering all that's been disturbing me since last November, that's a bigger concession than I should be willing to grant.

In granting it, I take on the obligation to watch that boy like a hawk, even if that means biting my lip while he curls that First Smirk at the cameras again.

Sincerely,

Ivan Navitsky Skavar

Florida

fools

A NATION OF FOOLS, LED BY INGENIOUS JOKESTERS

(28 May 2001)

Once upon a time, Republican fiscal conservatives believed that the nation should spend responsibly and avoid debt. With the Bush tax cut, "fiscal conservatives" have contradicted that belief for the second time (the first time with Reagan).

The Bush tax cut will spend a decade's worth of national income that has not yet come in. And given the predictable—and justifiable--Congressional pressure to sustain a social and environmental safety net with government programs, it will seriously raise the chances of restoring a big national debt.

Successful passage of the tax cut affirms the political ingenuity of the Bush administration, which pulled this off despite its skin-of-the-teeth entry into office.

Regrettably, it also affirms the Bush administration's art of dissembling and the willingness of an acquiescent electorate to be fooled.

A retired business owner called the tax cut "one big joke they've foisted on the American people."

Paul Krugman in a New York Times column on 27 May 2001 called it the result of "a disinformation campaign unprecedented in the history of U.S. economic policy — misrepresenting who would benefit from the plan (pretending that a tax cut mainly for the rich is actually aimed at the middle class) and understating its effects on revenue."

Continued Krugman: "The pretense that taxes can be sharply cut without undermining the fiscal integrity of the nation has been maintained via financial fakery that, if practiced by the executives of any publicly traded company, would have landed them in jail."

But didn't America's fiscal oracle, Alan Greenspan, bless the tax cut? Sure, but only if it was calibrated to work with actual not projected tax income. The plan that passed ignored Greenspan's qualifier.

The joke of jokes lies in what Congress did to cook the books so that they appear to look fiscally responsible. The bill it passed assumes that the tax cut will EXPIRE at the end of the year 2010!

Fat chance.

The nation has time to amend its foolish acquiescence in this tax cut. But it will do so only after it replaces jokesters with fiscally responsible leaders in the White House and Congress.

silent

SILENT GENERATION LEADERSHIP AT LAST

--ARE WE LUCKY OR WHAT?

(14 May 2001)

The Silent Generation (born between 1925 and 1942) seemed destined for a public life in the shadows of two blockbuster generations--the GI Generation ("the greatest") before them and the Boomer Generation after them.

It looked as if the Silents were going to miss their chance to have a generational representative in the Oval Office. Bush I, the last GI, went out. Boomer Clinton came in, followed by Boomer Bush II, with nary a Silent between.

Tardily starting down a long road to correct the lack, I read a New York Times piece (14 Oct 01) by Robert Worth, "The Deep Intellectual Roots of Islamic Terror." Worth tried to show the thinking in the Islamic world that has resulted in a linkage between religion and terrorism.

The intellectual trail, according to Worth, leads back to Sayyid Qutb (SIGH-yid KUH-tahb) (1906-1966).