In recent days the world has been given an opportunity to weigh for itself some of the statements made behind closed doors in the halls of power, in those places where the diplomats dwell. Thanks to yet another technological advance, and a few committed souls taking it upon themselves to disinfect foreign policy discourse with what they call sunshine, the good people at Wikileaks have dropped into our laps an unprecedented chance to take a considered look at what not only American power means abroad, but its reach, scope and implications for us all in a world that is quite nuclear and very close to the brink of war in more hot spots than we would care to think too deeply about.
Much of the current discussion in the media (mainstream and alternative) centers on the salacious details of palace intrigue – which one is a sex fiend, who is a lush, how big is this one’s ego or the other one’s paranoia – and all of that is perfectly good fodder for late night monologues. But there is a bigger picture here, one that may or may not be brought into more stark relief by the release of a quarter million discrete pieces of diplomatic backchannel chatter and that is: the people running the big show on the big stage are simply people with petty, human failings and peevishness, no matter how lofty the title or perch.
Everyone’s got an ass to cover, in plain terms, and the latest Wikileaks debacle just goes to show it’s the mass of humanity whose ass is really on the line when we let vain, cruel, backstabbing, catty, vicious little men and women make decisions in boardrooms that play themselves out in trenches and on desert sands or the waters of the Pacific.
Think what you want about the right or wrong of the document dump now available in the morning newspaper, the larger question is whether now that some honest talk is on the table our leaders can get to the heart of the matters of war and peace and will they (as our proxies, elected or designated) choose peace. In the Middle East, the Saudis are publicly suing for peace with a soon-to-be nuclear Iran while secretly calling Crazy Mahmoud and his ayatollahs the serpent that needs a hoe taken to its head simply to save face on the Arab street. In the meantime, the U.S. will be the best candidate to take up the damn near inevitable fight, since we already have forward operating bases all over the region, as a result of the last Administration’s headlong and immoral rush into a destabilizing, debilitating, bankrupting series of conflicts that had no legal or logical justification in the first place. On top of that, in China we have our de facto bankers and creditors wishing to topple their former puppets in North Korea and no credible missile defense below the 38th parallel or for the rest of our allies in the region. And who benefits? The Chinese, it would seem, as they gain new markets and a foothold on swaying the tide of economic cycles toward their side of the hemisphere while we unload the arsenal of democracy on their behalf.
The treason committed here in the current Wikileaks release by Americans and others in the name of truth-telling is almost unimaginable and cannot be compared with the noble disclosures that helped wake up America and the world to the injustice of Vietnam when the Pentagon Papers came out. The two aren’t comparable because in the case of Vietnam, American presidents and European leaders had been deceiving their countries for years about the “dangers” of Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to Communism (a result that was unlikely in the best case and one that could have been mitigated by the fact of mutually assured destruction on the superpower level in the worst). The situation the developed world faces now is much more fractured with threats so diffuse and wide-ranging that to release backchannel documents that raise suspicion of American motives on every front has the real-time effect of overturning every diplomatic applecart we’re pushing around the world.
Perhaps in the end we’ll all look back on this episode as a turning point in the way foreign policy is conducted and we’ll start demanding more basic openness in confronting what we as nations really think of each other. At this moment, however, it’s hard to believe that an Administration that can’t keep Army privates from throwing open a trove of secrets to the world has the credibility to lead the way toward lasting peace, economic security and a future with more than ten minutes to midnight left. The truth is an absolute good and in most cases, the sooner we learn it the better, but this may be one time where propping up what passes for trust in the modern world of realpolitik is in fact a greater good for all concerned.
End. Rev3. 29 November 2010, 11.39 p.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Monday, November 29, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
An Autumn Chill in the Air
Fall brings on a drier, more existentially honest air here in the Northeast, the kind that braces you every morning, and you have to brace yourself against it. This last weekend before Thanksgiving is one of those periods it seems, where everyone is busying themselves with some distraction or another but the air is crisp and cold enough to make you know that autumn is just a transitional period, not a state where one can long linger no matter how pleasant or tempting that prospect may seem.
We all have to get ready for the approach of winter and share to some degree relief that comes from the harvest, as metaphorical or as real as such reaping may be for any, for all. There is a bleak time soon to come -- as it has always come – and will pass away again into the mists of memory. How we get there, the story we tell ourselves along the way, well, those are the things that go to make up a life, aren’t they?
How we do that getting ready work ranges from packing a suitcase to checking over the pantry or making sure those high thread count sheets kept put away for guests are close at hand. This year, there’s a new question – depending on how new you think such questions really are; that is, “Do I go through the naked machine or let the security guard feel me up?” First of all, I haven’t flown in years and years, so my personal stake in the riveting, burning question on so many minds is quite minimal. For that, I’m thankful.
The answer, however, is harder to come by. If the scanners work as poorly as some recent reports indicate, then the people most benefiting from their installation are the people who sold them to the airports. On the other hand, if running one’s hands (hands paid a starting wage somewhere in the range of $8.50 an hour) up and down a 75-year old man’s inseams can deter a jihadi with nothing left to lose, then we should have been frisking old folks and scanning little children years ago. This is not to say there should be no screening in airports at all, only some common sense applied to who gets what kind of treatment. Also, it is well worth pointing out that no suspected hijackers/bombers have been caught on planes originating from Israel, a country that uses some pretty sophisticated behavioral profiling along with an up-to-date, realistic “ok-to-fly” list to catch a potential criminal before there’s any serious damage done.
So we have these choices to make, and none of them satisfy our particularly American tendency to want to be left entirely alone, to be though of as innocent before proven guilty and all that kind of tripe. The Israeli example is worth noting, and maybe even emulating, if it would cut out some of the whining hysteria about perverts Photoshopping and getting all excited over scanned images or guys getting ready to punch out female TSA agents for touching their mothers inappropriately.
But the profiling, you say. How can we allow this presumption of guilt to hang over all of us, the great majority of whom have done nothing criminal (at least nothing involving a plane, a bomb or any combination of the two that particular day)? Fact is, New Yorkers allow more useless profiling via stop-and frisk on the streets and other approved and intrusive methods of law enforcement within the five boroughs than the informed citizenry of most other cities around the world, and nobody’s really crying too much about civil liberties infringements. The difference is that Israelis and other nationals who have had to make real choices about how much privacy and comfort to give up in exchange for the chimerical notion of security went ahead and made the choices and are living with them.
When a guy tries to smuggle a bomb into the country lined in his underwear, we cried out for scanners that could see underneath the clothes. It seems more than a few companies were lined up and ready to take Homeland Security money and airline money that was magically available in these times of deficit and cutback, seemingly set aside just for this series of upgrades. If the pattern holds, cavity searches are inevitable.
There is no one, easy answer to the problem of making air travel as secure as we believed it to be before September 11th. That’s just a fact, and one we’ll have to live with as we get on with the business of speeding through our calendars to stop every so often at the milestones and markers we set for ourselves so that we remember and perhaps more importantly, truly reflect, on why we are alive in the first place. Answering those big questions will remain a task for each of us, each in his way responsible for the answers we come to and how they come to life through our policy prescriptions, rules and regulations and even the way we think about the question.
As an autumn chill in the air settles in over the city and this seaboard, I can only hope that each and every one of you has the grace provided by a moment to reflect on those things for which you are mindful, as awareness is maybe that most essential first step toward that admirable state of mind we call being thankful.
End. Rev4. 21 November 2010, 3.45 p.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
We all have to get ready for the approach of winter and share to some degree relief that comes from the harvest, as metaphorical or as real as such reaping may be for any, for all. There is a bleak time soon to come -- as it has always come – and will pass away again into the mists of memory. How we get there, the story we tell ourselves along the way, well, those are the things that go to make up a life, aren’t they?
How we do that getting ready work ranges from packing a suitcase to checking over the pantry or making sure those high thread count sheets kept put away for guests are close at hand. This year, there’s a new question – depending on how new you think such questions really are; that is, “Do I go through the naked machine or let the security guard feel me up?” First of all, I haven’t flown in years and years, so my personal stake in the riveting, burning question on so many minds is quite minimal. For that, I’m thankful.
The answer, however, is harder to come by. If the scanners work as poorly as some recent reports indicate, then the people most benefiting from their installation are the people who sold them to the airports. On the other hand, if running one’s hands (hands paid a starting wage somewhere in the range of $8.50 an hour) up and down a 75-year old man’s inseams can deter a jihadi with nothing left to lose, then we should have been frisking old folks and scanning little children years ago. This is not to say there should be no screening in airports at all, only some common sense applied to who gets what kind of treatment. Also, it is well worth pointing out that no suspected hijackers/bombers have been caught on planes originating from Israel, a country that uses some pretty sophisticated behavioral profiling along with an up-to-date, realistic “ok-to-fly” list to catch a potential criminal before there’s any serious damage done.
So we have these choices to make, and none of them satisfy our particularly American tendency to want to be left entirely alone, to be though of as innocent before proven guilty and all that kind of tripe. The Israeli example is worth noting, and maybe even emulating, if it would cut out some of the whining hysteria about perverts Photoshopping and getting all excited over scanned images or guys getting ready to punch out female TSA agents for touching their mothers inappropriately.
But the profiling, you say. How can we allow this presumption of guilt to hang over all of us, the great majority of whom have done nothing criminal (at least nothing involving a plane, a bomb or any combination of the two that particular day)? Fact is, New Yorkers allow more useless profiling via stop-and frisk on the streets and other approved and intrusive methods of law enforcement within the five boroughs than the informed citizenry of most other cities around the world, and nobody’s really crying too much about civil liberties infringements. The difference is that Israelis and other nationals who have had to make real choices about how much privacy and comfort to give up in exchange for the chimerical notion of security went ahead and made the choices and are living with them.
When a guy tries to smuggle a bomb into the country lined in his underwear, we cried out for scanners that could see underneath the clothes. It seems more than a few companies were lined up and ready to take Homeland Security money and airline money that was magically available in these times of deficit and cutback, seemingly set aside just for this series of upgrades. If the pattern holds, cavity searches are inevitable.
There is no one, easy answer to the problem of making air travel as secure as we believed it to be before September 11th. That’s just a fact, and one we’ll have to live with as we get on with the business of speeding through our calendars to stop every so often at the milestones and markers we set for ourselves so that we remember and perhaps more importantly, truly reflect, on why we are alive in the first place. Answering those big questions will remain a task for each of us, each in his way responsible for the answers we come to and how they come to life through our policy prescriptions, rules and regulations and even the way we think about the question.
As an autumn chill in the air settles in over the city and this seaboard, I can only hope that each and every one of you has the grace provided by a moment to reflect on those things for which you are mindful, as awareness is maybe that most essential first step toward that admirable state of mind we call being thankful.
End. Rev4. 21 November 2010, 3.45 p.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Schoolhouse Doors & Executive Washrooms
This week in New York City our third-term mayor, Mike “Mother” Bloomberg, finally announced what he’d known for three months – the schools Chancellor Joel Klein would be stepping down and going back to private life. Since I don’t have any children in the public schools, it might be your first question: why do you care? For the same reason people of sound reasoning opposed the installation of Mr. Klein in the first place, opposed the usurpation of parental involvement by the creation of mayoral control of the schools; mainly that none of these autocratically decreed measures took into account some of the basic tenets of democracy we hold dear. The prime example is the mayor’s third term. After publicly supporting term limits, Bloomberg decided he wasn't finished remaking the city in his own image (or maybe there are some of his corporate real-estate magnate pals that haven’t gotten their piece of the pie yet) and overturned the law that limited elected officials to two terms. That way, Mayor Mike could buy himself another term. Regular citizens asked, “What tha’?” But what do regular citizens know anyway?
When Mr. Klein was elevated to Chancellor, he was given a waiver by the state department of education that took his experience as an attorney and administrative manager as, “good enough” for running the nation’s largest school system, even though he had never once developed a lesson plan, taught a chemistry class or even served government cheesy mac n’ cheese to any of the “customers” – Mayor Bloomberg’s phrasing on his radio show recently in reference to students and parents. So to run the New York City schools you don’t have to have any teaching experience and that precedent is very likely to continue with the mayor’s latest appointee, Cathie Black, who was a Hearst publishing executive until jumping into the public education fray at Bloomberg’s summons. Ms. Black is from Chicago, which again isn’t a disqualifier for heading New York’s schools, but fits with the mayor’s Bostonian tendency to look for his best and brightest from either outside the city rather than from within the five boroughs or the ranks of the agency he’s looking to reform. To be fair, for all the looking down his aquiline nose Joel Klein performed on parents, teachers and students during his tenure as chancellor, at least he was a product of those same New York City schools. According to published reports (ABC News and WNYC radio) Ms. Black herself attended parochial school and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut.
While she may be as the mayor put it, a “world-class” executive, and an obviously talented and somewhat privileged part of the ruling class, I can’t for the life of me see how running Good Housekeeping and Popular Mechanics magazines really qualifies anyone to manage a school system. Then again, there is an antecedent for this, and it runs deep in a certain strata of American plutocracy – the idea that public service through politics is best performed by people of such immense wealth and social standing that they are not beholden to special interests (heck, they are the special interests) and more likely to throw the full weight and thrust of their innovative, entrepreneurial and managerial powers into simply getting things done, unions, teachers, parents and their lousy knot-headed children be damned.
The Kennedy Administration was filled with the best and brightest. That gave us Mr. McNamara’s war, and there are many other examples I could cite of situations where our government or some function thereof was hijacked by a cabal of those who know better than all the rest of us by virtue of their having made more money than they’ll ever spend in the private sector. There is some good to be gleaned for this kind of call to service, if it can be called that. We do know that Ms. Black might be a short-timer in the chancellor’s office because there are only three years left in the mayor’s term and she may want to fly off to some other challenge or call to serve in another profit-making enterprise.
Any argument of this type would be stupidly one-sided if I didn’t point out that without such philanthropists as Carnegie and Rockefeller, all across the country we wouldn’t have many of the public institutions that are the bulwarks of American democracy such as libraries and children’s hospitals. No one of good faith with an interest in vibrant, active public education would say that involvement from people with financial savvy, managerial prowess and proven corporate leadership ability is a bad thing, but it’s certainly not the only thing. That’s where the selection of Cathie Black for schools chancellor seems out of balance. New Yorkers will get a chance to see who our dear leader has chosen for us in action and we’ll like it because what do regular citizens know anyway?
End. Rev2. 13 November 2010, 11.03 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
When Mr. Klein was elevated to Chancellor, he was given a waiver by the state department of education that took his experience as an attorney and administrative manager as, “good enough” for running the nation’s largest school system, even though he had never once developed a lesson plan, taught a chemistry class or even served government cheesy mac n’ cheese to any of the “customers” – Mayor Bloomberg’s phrasing on his radio show recently in reference to students and parents. So to run the New York City schools you don’t have to have any teaching experience and that precedent is very likely to continue with the mayor’s latest appointee, Cathie Black, who was a Hearst publishing executive until jumping into the public education fray at Bloomberg’s summons. Ms. Black is from Chicago, which again isn’t a disqualifier for heading New York’s schools, but fits with the mayor’s Bostonian tendency to look for his best and brightest from either outside the city rather than from within the five boroughs or the ranks of the agency he’s looking to reform. To be fair, for all the looking down his aquiline nose Joel Klein performed on parents, teachers and students during his tenure as chancellor, at least he was a product of those same New York City schools. According to published reports (ABC News and WNYC radio) Ms. Black herself attended parochial school and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut.
While she may be as the mayor put it, a “world-class” executive, and an obviously talented and somewhat privileged part of the ruling class, I can’t for the life of me see how running Good Housekeeping and Popular Mechanics magazines really qualifies anyone to manage a school system. Then again, there is an antecedent for this, and it runs deep in a certain strata of American plutocracy – the idea that public service through politics is best performed by people of such immense wealth and social standing that they are not beholden to special interests (heck, they are the special interests) and more likely to throw the full weight and thrust of their innovative, entrepreneurial and managerial powers into simply getting things done, unions, teachers, parents and their lousy knot-headed children be damned.
The Kennedy Administration was filled with the best and brightest. That gave us Mr. McNamara’s war, and there are many other examples I could cite of situations where our government or some function thereof was hijacked by a cabal of those who know better than all the rest of us by virtue of their having made more money than they’ll ever spend in the private sector. There is some good to be gleaned for this kind of call to service, if it can be called that. We do know that Ms. Black might be a short-timer in the chancellor’s office because there are only three years left in the mayor’s term and she may want to fly off to some other challenge or call to serve in another profit-making enterprise.
Any argument of this type would be stupidly one-sided if I didn’t point out that without such philanthropists as Carnegie and Rockefeller, all across the country we wouldn’t have many of the public institutions that are the bulwarks of American democracy such as libraries and children’s hospitals. No one of good faith with an interest in vibrant, active public education would say that involvement from people with financial savvy, managerial prowess and proven corporate leadership ability is a bad thing, but it’s certainly not the only thing. That’s where the selection of Cathie Black for schools chancellor seems out of balance. New Yorkers will get a chance to see who our dear leader has chosen for us in action and we’ll like it because what do regular citizens know anyway?
End. Rev2. 13 November 2010, 11.03 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer
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