tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23145385748337957272024-03-05T04:04:36.793-05:00Outbound to WonderlandAs anyone who's ever ridden the Metro in Boston knows, there's a sign on the wall along the blue line route that reads, "Outbound to Wonderland." Must be one helluva train, I thought to myself when I saw it. In that spirit of exploration, this is a blog of short essays on art, literature, law, economics, music, history, international relations, science...and everything else, too.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-22107542219361478462016-01-04T12:08:00.000-05:002016-01-04T12:08:46.677-05:00Why Weren't You Zusya?A bit of Jewish wisdom to start off the new year and perhaps get the old blog rolling again after a hiatus in the second half of 2015. Paraphrasing from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber" target="_blank">Martin Buber's</a> <i>Tales of the Hasidism</i>:<br />
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<i>Rabbi Zusya dies and as he waits to come before God, he frets and frets,
fearing that God will consider him a failure, will ask him, Why weren't
you Moses, or Why weren't you Solomon, or at least, Why weren't you
Maimonides? But when the Rabbi reaches God, the Almighty asks him
simply, Why weren't you Zusya?</i></blockquote>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-7388089616621511682015-05-27T10:05:00.001-04:002015-05-27T10:05:35.306-04:00My Grandfather's JobI promise I'll leave poor Ian Bremmer alone soon, but couldn't help noticing this Tweet of his from a few weeks back:<br />
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If TPP passes, <a href="https://twitter.com/EurasiaGroup">@EurasiaGroup</a> will add 10 US jobs. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GoBigOrGoHome?src=hash">#GoBigOrGoHome</a></div>
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) <a href="https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/597180401384353792">May 9, 2015</a></blockquote>
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On the scale of national policy, of course, 10 jobs is nothing, not even a blip. A bliplet. But Bremmer's Eurasia Group is a relatively small, narrowly-focused consulting firm. If the increased volume of trade and investment attributable to the Trans-Pacific Partnership will give him cause to add 10, how many will McKinsey add, and <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/109505151862855978736" target="_blank">+Deloitte</a>, <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/100980668534684158363" target="_blank">+PwC</a>, <a class="g-profile" href="https://plus.google.com/114185589187778587509" target="_blank">+KPMG</a>, etc.? To say nothing of the banks.<br />
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And even though all of them together may only number in the thousands, still a paltry total in the context of the entire economy, increased trade is about two things: 1) real people, and 2) ripple effects. However many (or few) jobs are created by trade policy, those jobs are opportunities for real people, often young people who've just graduated with a very, very expensive professional degree, and who had previously been staring down the barrel of student loan defaults; defaults which would damage their credit and thus close them out of housing and new car markets for years, depriving those sectors of new customers, growth and cause to make new hires of their own. In such circumstances demoralization quickly segues to a permanent lowering of expectations, and a generation of talent disappears into bleary mediocrity. <br />
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The answer is sure to come that this is all very dramatic, but that it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands if not millions of middle-class manufacturing jobs lost over the last 40 years or more. Fair enough. But the truth is that those jobs were not lost because the U.S. signed free trade and investment treaties. Rather, free trade and investment treaties were signed because both U.S. companies who'd begun to manufacture outside the U.S. and U.S. consumers would benefit if the products now being made in Latin America and East Asia could be imported into the U.S. at lower costs.<br />
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To reiterate: jobs didn't follow free trade overseas; free trade followed logically when manufacturing moved out of the U.S. for its own reasons. And in most cases, when the FTAs did follow, they did so either with countries of minimal impact for U.S. labor, or very late in the game, well after the exodus of manufacturing -- one of the oldest U.S. FTAs is with Israel (29 years), hardly a mass destination for formerly American-based jobs, and the so-called DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic - Caribbean Area Free Trade Agreement), encompassing much of Latin America, didn't come into force until 2006. As I pointed out in a <a href="http://outboundtowonderland.blogspot.ca/2015/05/and-just-for-hell-of-it.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>, the lodestar of cheap manufacturing is China, and we have no FTA or investment treaty with China.<br />
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In the end, the simple fact is that manufacturing jobs are gone from the U.S. (with the slight caveat that lower utility costs in the U.S. resulting from the availability of unconventional natural gas and oil supplies may be making America an attractive destination for some manufacturers in high-cost regions such as Europe). And even if those jobs were to return, they would neither be nor support the kind of upper-middle and middle class jobs that my grandparents' generation knew. My grandfather, a WWII B-17 pilot with a business degree from Northwestern, raised five children more or less comfortably as a regional manager for National Cash Register (NCR, later bought by AT&T), a company which made and sold cash registers to the American retail sector. The 21st century equivalent of his job has nothing to do with manufacturing or selling anything to America's retailers. It has to do with the kind of analysis done by international firms in the financial and service sectors. These new jobs pay a lot better than his did. There just aren't enough of them. Yet. But if we can generate more of them through intelligent trade policy, isn't it all but a moral necessity to do so?<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-51275825347732269932015-05-26T08:37:00.000-04:002015-05-26T08:53:00.858-04:00Whither Strategy, or On the Uncertain Value of PosturingA recent <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=Ian%20Bremmer%20stop%20pretending" target="_blank">Tweet </a>by the always penetrating and incisive Ian Bremmer may be the ultimate justification for limiting oneself to 140 characters:<br />
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"Assad Must Go
ISIS Must Be Destroyed
N Korea Must Give Up Nukes
Russia Must Leave Ukraine
If We Can't (or Won't) Enforce, <b>Stop</b> <b>Pretending</b>." <br />
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Has the crux of an entire era ever been more pithily summed? Hard to imagine.<br />
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Yet while Bremmer's formulation cuts to the heart of the present historical moment, it's not clear that his closing admonition is readily translatable into policy (as I'm sure he himself knows well -- if his tweet is the justification for Twitter, then this post is the illustration of its limitations); because the question, of course, is what exactly are we to offer instead of our protestations? <br />
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The late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping is supposed to have said, "If you have an ugly face, there's no use in pretending to be handsome." On the other hand, fans of Aaron Sorkin will readily call to mind another punchy aphorism (apparently attributable to the Episcopal Priest and early AA supporter Sam Shoemaker): "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkTQ7sbXecw" target="_blank">Act as if ye have faith, and faith will be given you. Put another way, fake it 'til you make it.</a>"<br />
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So, which one is it? Which approach must guide the conduct of international affairs in this profoundly uncertain time? Should we admit to our ugliness and make explicit our unwillingness to meet these challenges to international order with the full force of all our civilization's resources? Or should we hold doggedly to every principle until by the sheer force of intention and endurance, we can will them into reality?<br />
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Well of course the answer is both. This is why we elect leaders, not slogans. When to invoke unavoidable realities and when to insist that apparently dreaded circumstances can in fact be resisted is perhaps the primary question leaders are required to answer. Balancing these approaches in order to produce stability is the singular skill of the statesman (or stateswoman).<br />
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Thus, back to Mr. Bremmer's original quote, surely his position is not so much that in any one of these cases we (the West, the U.S., the President) would be wrong to voice our grave and adamant objections. What he's surely suggesting is that there comes a point at which a critical mass of knee-jerk proscriptions can coalesce into a demonstrable and near comprehensive impotence, from which too many international actors can draw too many frightening conclusions about their freedom to act as they see fit. In this, he's undoubtedly correct.<br />
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The problem, as always, is what the alternative looks like. Mr. Bremmer has said in various fora that the U.S. has no foreign policy strategy (and in at least one forum that almost no country in the world other than China has one right now). But to say that a unified, coherent global strategy is the alternative to our current set of ad-hoc remonstrations, is still to replace one empty vessel with another. What would it look like not to wag our finger at Russia, North Korea, ISIS, Assad, etc? It would look like a cogent foreign policy strategy. Fine. And what, in this chaotic age, does a cogent foreign policy strategy look like?<br />
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Well...<br />
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To be clear, Mr. Bremmer may have, in one of his myriad books or articles, a very cogent foreign policy strategy indeed that he could recommend to the President, which I just haven't read yet. But if he does, well, then, can we get him on a ballot somewhere?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-44326636755411680782015-05-22T14:55:00.000-04:002015-05-22T14:55:46.281-04:00Russia, China, and the Power of Institutional HabitsReading this week about joint <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/are-chinese-russian-military-excercises-effort-to-offset-us-primacy/2782818.html" target="_blank">Russian-Chinese naval exercises</a> in the Mediterranean, I thought of something I read a little over a year ago. In April of 2014, while visiting Hamburg with my wife, I was flipping through the Financial Times at breakfast, and saw an article about a new Russian natural gas sale to China. At the time, Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea was very recent, and debates about sanctions raged in Washington and Brussels. Disapprobation, in any case, was being heaped on Russia from all sides (and deservedly so, of course). Except from Beijing.<br />
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Whatever this sale of natural gas was (I, and everyone else, have long forgotten the salient details of the particular deal), it was a blip, and was not necessarily caused, or even occasioned, by the prospect of shrinking markets for Russian gas in Europe. What struck me at the time, rather (nor would it have taken a PhD in the history of international relations to pick up the scent of this trail), was not the potential economic impact of Western sanctions against Russia, but the potential geopolitical consequences.<br />
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As analyst <a href="http://www.ianbremmer.com/" target="_blank">Ian Bremmer</a> pointed out on <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60563816" target="_blank">Charlie Rose</a> recently, it is nearly always a mistake to divide international relations into discrete sectors -- economic, political, military, cultural, etc. -- as if each has no effect on the other. For example, as Bremmer pointed out, failure to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, particularly as a result of myopic political jockeying in Congress, would have not only economic repercussions, but geopolitical resonance as well -- it would make explicit that which is surely already sensed in friendly and unfriendly capitals around the world, namely that the American government is near paralysis. (See my earlier comment on the TPP, <a href="http://outboundtowonderland.blogspot.ca/2015/05/senator-elizabeth-warren-was.html" target="_blank">here</a>.) <br />
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My premonition in early 2014 regarding the implications of expanded natural resource links between Russia and China was very much about the possible bleed-over of institutional habits from any given sector (in this case energy) into the mindset of the parties generally. It was, in essence that without hard work to tend the U.S.-China relationship, a chill between the West and Russia would provide an impetus for Russia to begin building the kind of broad and deep working-level and administrative-level relationships that can solidify into habits of thought. In this sense the very forgetability of whatever Russo-Chinese gas deal I read about was what made it a signal -- for such are the kinds of institutional arrangements that gradually become normative in the collective thinking of national bureaucracies. And if you doubt the ability of bureaucracies to influence national policy by means of sheer intransigence, well, read pretty much any political leader's memoir and you'll see. As Henry Kissinger has quipped, Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat denied his prerogatives.<br />
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Because international relations do not proceed in direct causal lines, it is not the case that this week's naval exercises are the result of a Chinese-Russian relationship strengthened by the West's economic sanctions against Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, China and Russia have maintained all manner of relations, including military relations. Russia has sold China tremendous quantities of arms, and the two countries have even worked together on civilian nuclear power projects. These joint exercises are not the first instances of naval cooperation, nor are they, apparently, on a scale like anything the U.S. might conduct with its NATO allies.<br />
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The question instead is whether there is developing between Russia and China a pattern of habitual cooperation that could result in new assumptions about the shape of the international situation among their leaders, their bureaucracies, and their general populations. As well as among the rest of the international community. Those habits, those assumptions, those defaults, precisely because they are subconscious, are tremendously powerful. It is the task of leaders to intuit these implicit realities, and then to shape them.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-87294940634443997862015-05-20T18:59:00.000-04:002015-05-20T19:15:14.192-04:00CosmosisWhat I know about cosmology: precisely squat. Take everything hereafter, therefore, for what it's worth.<br />
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<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/science/has-cosmology-run-into-a-creative-crisis/" target="_blank">This </a>article is surely some of the best, if not the best, writing on cosmology ever. Lucid, well-paced, a little ecstatic, it's everything writing (on any topic, really) should be.<br />
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Another extraordinary source of cosmology-writing (who'd have thought there'd be two?) is John Updike's 1997 novel, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/12/reviews/971012.12atwoodt.html" target="_blank">Toward the End of Time</a>. But that book was devastating; it's black and expanding universe was icy and tended fundamentally toward annihilation. I despaired for weeks after reading it. Though Updike's prose was as luminous as ever, no mere opalescence can endear to us that great and final wave of oblivion which (the book's cosmology held) is our fate.<br />
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But how about this: "Science owes its epistemological gravitas to its stern insistence that
every idea faces the firing squad of experiment...That’s the methodology that gifted us the
shimmering, intricate, expansive cosmos we live in today."<br />
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Or this: "Galaxies were also giving off a special kind of light, a downshifted hue that suggested they were speeding away from Earth."<br />
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In this telling, by the science writer Ross Andersen, the cosmos is all wonder and hue, all mystery, interplay, distance, light. And science is that giddy thing it was for Einstein, who began our century of relativity by wondering what it would be like to ride a beam of light. Who wouldn't want to live in this realm of elaborate crystalline grace and power?<br />
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So what's the lesson? Hard telling. Updike wasn't generally a pessimist. And, though I've never read anything else by Andersen, it seems clear from this article that he's as devoted to rigor and process as he is to dreamy metaphor. Nor is it a contest. Rather, in every case, doesn't the lesson have ultimately to do with imagination itself? As Andersen's article discusses, cosmologists face the problem that they're not yet able to observe our own galaxy (or any other, for that matter) from <i>outside </i>of our galaxy. And isn't this the problem, in microcosm, of cosmology generally? Cosmology, precisely because its subject is so comprehensive ("all of space <i>and </i>all of time," as Andersen points out) is fated to measure, more than anything, our ability to imagine a plausible cosmology. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-72460679882572806822015-05-18T16:24:00.000-04:002015-05-18T16:28:38.381-04:00Rock Stars, Serious and Otherwise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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New album out today by Brandon Flowers, front man for The Killers (once described by none other than Bono as 'the swankiest rock band on the planet'). While I don't exactly share Mr. Flowers' 80s nostalgia, I do appreciate his insistence on mining that otherwise plastic-y territory for the depth of spirit and feeling that must surely have been there, however synthesized and neon green it may have been. Similarly, though I've no affinity for Las Vegas, Flowers' invocation of his home city's glitzy pathos feels fresh and serious.<br />
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Apropos of the video below, though, here's the thing I'm finding I really like more and more as I get older: I like it when serious people are light, and loose, on purpose. <br />
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I suppose one might raise doubt as to whether rock stars get to count as serious people. I don't know. Serious enough for me.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-84036569859033837962015-05-17T15:56:00.000-04:002015-05-17T15:56:53.801-04:00The Life of the (Russian) Mind<br />
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I read <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/comparative-law/russian-culture-property-rights-and-market-economy" target="_blank">this book</a> some years back, with an eye to reviewing it for the European Journal of International Law (I never did -- those were somewhat more...<i>irresolute </i>days for me, shall we say). If I recall at all correctly, one of its primary premises was that Russians simply do not arrange their concrete affairs by forming enforceable contracts. What they do instead I don't quite remember -- I seem to think it had something to do with tacit hierarchical agreements that reflected a world-view most fully expressed in Russian Orthodox iconography. I do seem to remember that the writing was very good, and that the premise was based on a very bold, exciting, even sort of shocking characterization of the author's observations of Russian life: an entire civilization that simply doesn't contract? Wow. Fascinating.<br />
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What I also remember is that the author's explanation of <i>why </i>Russians do not contract sort of petered out in the face of the overwhelming strangeness of the <i>fact </i>that they do not. The book (again, as I recall; it's possible I wasn't reading terribly carefully then, and that I would see it differently if I were to read it today) seemed to fall back a bit on bald assertion and a reiteration of amazement at the alien feel of Russian cultural and economic mores, however correctly observed they might have been. Turns out you need more than just a single blinding insight to sustain a book-length explanation of the causes and effects that give structure to an entire society. <br />
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In theory, at least, the blog post is a form more amenable to the announcement of mere insights, <i>per se</i>. Here, perhaps, the initial big bang of an idea's seeming rightness can carry the day, and with any luck begin a process of exploration that might eventually lead to a more fully realized argument about the deepest nature of things. Or, maybe it's just a way for lazy weekend philosophers to absolve themselves of responsibility and cover their desultory theories in a patina of glossy plausibility. Either way.<br />
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Tomorrow I'm to begin an online Russian language course. I've been listening to my wife and her family speak the language for over a decade, and have already picked up some random vocabulary and basic constructions. One of these constructions is the strange (to English speakers) mode of handling personal possession. Where English is straightforward and declarative -- 'I have...' -- Russian is almost unbelievably tentative: <i>U menya yist</i>..., or 'With/near me there is...' The language, at least on the literal level, has no direct means of attributing possession. In Russia(n), it is literally true that no one has anything.<br />
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Obviously there a raging danger here of over-determining a world view on the basis of a linguistic quirk. It's a familiar (and rotten) feeling for anyone who's ever attempted any systematic thinking about broad and complex subjects to have their first impressions -- so vivid and dynamic! -- run to ground on the shore of careful analysis. (I suspect this may have been part of what happened to our author in the book above: the flash of a felt reality on the streets of Moscow seemed to hold the key to a civilizational truth, but, upon further scrutiny, the wattage of the insight dimmed and lost much of its explanatory power.) In the case of my grammatical theory above, there's a whole tribe of cognitive linguists out there who could surely drain it of any analytical value in a heartbeat.<br />
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Still, the intuitive allure of the insight holds, I think (as, for that matter, does the intuitive allure of our author's insight about the instinctive Russian resistance to the institution of contracting). It can't explain everything about Russia's unique economic status, or about the behavior or beliefs of individual Russians. But it can't be for nothing that the minds of a people who have been so resiliently inimical to Western values, have been formed by a language in which there simply exists no category for ownership.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-57033995557026162242015-05-15T16:03:00.002-04:002015-05-15T18:02:48.829-04:00Judgement: Its Problems, Its Fullness, and the Age of Moral Exhaustion<br />
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Stunning, dense, rich, long <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/207217/trials-hannah-arendt" target="_blank">article </a>by Corey Robin in The Nation, on the eternal controversy over Hannah Arendt's <i>Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</i>. Theorists, philosophers, novelists, PhD students, rabbis, and plenty of others have devoted and continue to devote their entire lives to this work, its meaning and implications, so I'll not respond to it in any direct way here. (In any case, I couldn't -- I've never read it.) Rather, I'll take this article's word for it that one of the central controversies of the book's vision has to do with the role of intentions in determining moral responsibility: does it matter what we mean to do, or why we do it; or is the deed all?<br />
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Arendt, according to Robin, spent parts of her career, including <i>Eichmann</i>, developing and elaborating upon the classical instinct that intentions, whatever their meaning, can never be determinative of moral innocence or culpability. Rather, actions are the only salient data when it comes to judging good and evil. <br />
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This subject was a primary question as well in something I read yesterday, a bizarre and bewildering <a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse" target="_blank">email exchange</a> between Noam Chomsky and the writer Sam Harris. (Also very long. If you have the time to read all this, that's great, I think you'll be the better for it, but, as I frequently admonish myself: shouldn't you be working?)<br />
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Chomsky (whose indefensible belligerence throughout the exchange often renders his exact position undiscoverable) seems ultimately to hew to Arendt's view. Muddied as his logic is by the imprecision of his own pique, Chomsky clearly rejects (or at least considers somehow irrelevant) Harris's position that the 9/11 hijackers' <i>intention </i>to kill as many innocent people as possible provides a meaningful way of distinguishing between the moral status of their act and the moral status of (the example Chomsky and Harris discuss) Bill Clinton's 1998 decision to bomb a chemical/pharmaceutical laboratory in Sudan, which Chomsky claims resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of Sudanese deaths. (Note: as best I can tell, this is in dispute.) Chomsky points out (over and over) that intentions, at least declared intentions, have been offered as either justification or exculpation for the most grievous crimes of history, Hitler's included. They are, therefore, no guide to the morality or immorality of acts or actors.<br />
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My question is why so much energy is being spent resisting the felt reality that moral responsibility, both in itself, and as we are capable of judging it, is a composite of act and intention? Every day, when faced with uncertainty regarding the moral status of actions (drone strikes, police tactics, votes in favor of free trade), we take into account both intentions and actions, we go through that complicated but familiar moral process of weighing and comparing, of <i>judging </i>the extent to which any given actor seems culpable. Different cases warrant differing degrees of import assigned to the brute facts of the event and the intentions of the actors involved. And this is fine. <i>We know how to do this</i>. We are capable of looking at a given case -- say Clinton's -- and determining that the relevant actor, whatever the outcome of his action, seemed to be doing his best; we are capable of looking next at a different case -- say Eichmann's -- and concluding that the sheer scale of horrific facts overwhelms any recourse to exculpatory motives. In human lives, both elements are real, the mitigation of benevolent intent, and the conclusiveness of inescapable data. To deny either of them is to deny us the fullness of our judgements about life and meaning. We know how to do this.<br />
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Or do we? Saul Bellow (of whose work I'm a great admirer -- see my rapturous post about discovering Augie March <a href="http://outboundtowonderland.blogspot.ca/2011/12/american-augie.html" target="_blank">here</a>) used to say that a distinguishing characteristic of modernity is that it calls upon us to make judgements almost constantly "about genocide...or about famine, or the blowing up of passenger planes" -- this is from a 1990 lecture Bellow gave at Oxford -- "and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately." Elsewhere, Bellow adds to the list of those imponderables which we still somehow sense we must form the right opinion about: "The new Russia and... China, and drugs in the South Bronx, and racial strife in Los Angeles...the disgrace of the so-called educational system...ignorance, fanaticism...the clownish tactics of candidates for the presidency." Bellow wrote that in 1992. But it seems prescient now -- interested in 'liking' Hilary Clinton or Jeb Bush on Facebook; care to re-tweet a Foreign Affairs article written by a Putin apologist?<br />
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Bellow's point was that we can't do it anymore, we don't, after all, know how to judge all this moral flotsam. In Bellow's view, shaped as it was by the social dissolutions of the second half of the 20th Century, the result of our inundation was a violent lashing out, drug use, crime, sexual profligacy, etc. <br />
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Leaving some of Bellow's legendary crankiness aside, and whether he was right or wrong about the causal relationship between demands on our evaluative faculties and the social upheavals of the post-war era -- and those upheavals themselves having become phenomena on which we're called to render judgement -- I wonder if we might not arrive at an understanding of our present age as what I've called it in the title of this post: The Age of Moral Exhaustion.<br />
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Using the Bellovian model where there was at least a correlation (causation? Eh, maybe not...) between our heightened awareness of the universe of morally ambiguous facts, and the shattering instability of the 1960s and 70s, would we be entirely crazy to posit a current state of affairs in which Americans have simply given up moral parsing? Is skyrocketing income inequality the result of surrender? Do Arendt's and Chomsky's arguments against the moral relevance of something so messy and ineffable as intent represent a kind of desperation for starker, clearer means of determining moral responsibility? Is America retreating into the tribal bitterness of partisan politics because it's just easier to pick a side than it is to evaluate every policy argument <i>de novo</i>?<br />
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Well, there's a lot of tangled (and perhaps some facile) thinking in the preceding paragraph, I admit. But this is a blog post, not a dissertation or a legal brief. Analysts could pick apart individual causal propositions, and they're welcome to do so. What I'm aiming at, though (and maybe this is the only thing a blog post can do...if it can even do this) is not analytical accuracy, but an emotional insight, a definitive vision of who we are now. I'm trying to name an epoch. (Because, you know, why not? What else have I got going on, right?)<br />
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The Age of Exhaustion. Moral exhaustion. Should we be arming the moderate Syrian opposition? Can Iran ever be a partner in nuclear non-proliferation? Is it wrong to buy vegetables that have to be shipped all the way from another hemisphere? Shouldn't Europe be allocating more funds to assist in the rescue of refugees at peril in the Mediterranean? We used to know how to make exceedingly subtle judgements about people and their decisions. And maybe we still do, somewhere in our beat-to-hell spirits. But, Lord, we're tired now, <i>civilizationally </i>tired. And we don't want to do it anymore. Am I wrong?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-43701216344537616272015-05-14T08:30:00.000-04:002015-05-14T10:41:27.138-04:00And, Just for the Hell of It, Part III of the Free Trade TrilogyThe textbook defense of free trade (and investment):<br />
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Making it cheaper and easier to sell more U.S. goods in another country, say, for example, Vietnam, means that more U.S. goods are likely to be sold there. Leaving aside entirely the question of hiring more people to manufacture these increased numbers of goods, it's clear that if more U.S. goods are to be sold to Vietnam, U.S. companies will have to hire more salespeople to sell them, more accountants to keep track of the revenue, more lawyers to ensure regulatory compliance and settle disputes; they will have to buy more shipping and insurance services, which means that shipping and insurance businesses in the U.S. will have to hire more salespeople, accountants, lawyers, and so on, in the loveliest of virtuous circles. And remember, this pattern holds, even if the increased sales to Vietnam result in zero U.S. manufacturing hires because the goods themselves are manufactured in China, or Indonesia, or Malaysia, or wherever. Furthermore, even if the new goods are manufactured in China, that means that more Chinese firms and workers are making more money which they can spend on U.S. goods and services. Apple sells more iPhones in China than in the U.S. Which means Apple can hire more product designers and software engineers (and lawyers and accountants, etc.) at its U.S. headquarters. Chinese manufacturers are huge consumers of the accounting and consulting services of U.S. firms. And so on.<br />
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Now, one place where this virtuous cycle breaks down is in the scale. Even a significant uptick in sales in Vietnam (again, just an example) for any given company (or sector) resulting from a free trade agreement, might well result in the hiring of one extra lawyer here, or a couple more accountants there. Efficiency and replicability mean that industries like insurance might absorb large increases in sales to existing clients with practically no new hires at all. And if the new sales are taking place in Vietnam, then the new sales force may well be almost entirely Vietnamese, with only one or two new Americans to supervise and train. Hence the trend that has so bedeviled the U.S. economy since the recession: increased profits accruing primarily to already wealthy shareholders, with no meaningful increase in wages or jobs. And this after the scale of job loss over the previous decades due to overseas manufacturing was so vast.<br />
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For better or worse, though, the golden age of American manufacturing, during which factory wages were sufficient to sustain families in a comfortable and culturally/politically relevant middle class, is not coming back any time soon. The problem of coming to understand new models of economic stability and social cohesion is one that we're going to have to solve without resort to the crutch of nostalgia. We have to use the tools we've got, and whatever its imperfections or inadequacies, free trade and investment, on the model above, is one of those tools.<br />
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Yet finally, I feel compelled to end on a fatalistic note. In all the hubbub, all the current <i>sturm und drang</i> over trade (and investment) policy, it should be recalled that commerce, a human institution, will find its way, will seek its own ends and move by its own logic, no matter what. The U.S, after all, has no free trade or investment treaty with China.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-28469693778413385742015-05-13T10:53:00.000-04:002015-05-13T10:53:29.680-04:00More on Free TradeSuch a dense topic, the politics of international trade and investment -- I feel like I want to follow up on sixteen different things from yesterday's post. But, other fora, including the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/12/the-trade-deal-tearing-the-dems-apart.html" target="_blank">Daily Beast</a>, and the Washington think tank <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/report/are-modern-trade-deals-working" target="_blank">Third Way</a>, are addressing this hot topic, and doing it well. So forgive me if I indulge in my usual abstruse, airy ruminations. Start with this, the human...<i>imperative</i>, let's say (as opposed to <i>right</i>, which is too concrete, and legal and implies enforceability) of free trade and investment:<br />
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While prudence and discretion dictate that I not discuss my circumstances extensively, I can say that I'm in a position to make certain demographic observations about cross-border trade and investment in one of the most robust international commercial relationships in the world. And right away, let's note -- this is a decidedly <i>demographic </i>enterprise. Yes, of course, <i>goods </i>cross borders, in massive, almost incomprehensible quantities. That's a large part of what trade is (trade in services being the other part). But in conjunction with and in addition to goods, <i>people </i>cross borders. Many of them, true enough, work for large corporations, and are moving from one financial services office to another, without a critical quotient of risk, excitement, or personal meaning involved. But many of them, so many, surprisingly many, are individuals, single men and women, brothers or sisters, families. These are people who arrive with, if not quite a song in their hearts, at least a little start-up capital, and something like the conviction that their best selves will be expressed in (or at least enabled by) a restaurant in a warm climate, a factory where technical workers are well-trained, a sales office where markets for their product are expanding. Etc. Their vision and willingness to take risk, it's...it's...Vitality! Dynamism! The fullness of human intercourse! <br />
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Biff! Bang! Pow!<br />
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Look, I'm not an idiot. I know I'm pushing this conception to its limits, perhaps beyond. Nor am I insensitive to the reality of crass exploitation in the world of international business. Or to the seismic rearrangement of the U.S. economy over the past 40+ years of globalization. After all, I spent years -- <i>years </i>-- after law school and a Fulbright fellowship, with no hope whatever of even the most paltry, entry-level professional job. I understand better than I'd like to how devastating an experience it is not to be needed, to feel like a superfluous person. And I understand as well how many people in the U.S. (to say nothing of Spain, or Greece, or, by the way, Africa) have gone through and are still going through that experience. I get it.<br />
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But arguing that the solution to this difficulty is to abolish free international trade and investment is like arguing that we must address communicable diseases by legislating against physical contact. While it may seem to offer immediate protections, it is both impossible, and ultimately undesirable. We are humans, and we have to touch each other. And commerce, international trade and investment, is how we touch each other now.<br />
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Maybe that's grandiose, but I'm convinced there's something to it. Right now, there's a line around the block of men and women looking to cross a border to start or expand a hotel, a grocery store, a bio-tech firm. And when they do, they'll bring with them not only their cash, but their skills, intuitions, memories, personalities, stories. They've got to be as free to do so as we can possibly make them.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-51515250804307726832015-05-12T15:56:00.000-04:002015-05-12T18:41:44.161-04:00Senator Elizabeth Warren and the Values of Free Trade<img alt="Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been a leading voice on the left against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the president's signature trade initiative." class="img" src="http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/05/11/119326073_wide-069aa454bebe6fde7b19f3ad06dccb37fbbb12bd-s800-c85.jpg" title="Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been a leading voice on the left against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the president's signature trade initiative." /> <br />
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Senator Elizabeth Warren was interviewed today on NPR's Morning Edition. Read and listen <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2015/05/12/405950630/sen-warren-on-the-tilted-process-of-asia-trade-bill" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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It struck me that certain aspects of Senator Warren's argument against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade and investment treaty, were, though hardly outrageous, at least worth looking at more closely.<br />
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1) Senator Warren states that 'corporations under this deal are going to get to sue countries for
regulations they don't like and...the decisions are not going to be
made by courts, they're going to be made by private lawyers.' There are a couple issues here:<br />
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First, it needs to be pointed out that companies doing business in another country can always, trade deal or no, sue that country if the company believes it has been unfairly and/or illegally regulated. The difference is that in the absence of a trade agreement they would have to do so <i>in that host country's own courts</i>. This is not a particularly daunting prospect if you're an Asian company doing business in the U.S., where local courts are, by comparison, extremely fair, competent and efficient. But U.S. companies doing business in, say, Vietnam, might not relish the prospect of trying to hold the government of Vietnam to fair regulatory practices <i>in the courts of Vietnam</i>. Thus, the provision of the treaty which grants to companies doing business in a foreign country the right to bring a claim against that host country <i>in arbitration</i>, are in fact far more beneficial to U.S. interests than to the interests of any non-U.S. company doing business in the U.S. Put simply, such arbitration provisions are not being pushed on us by devious foreign countries seeking to circumvent established standards of fair play; rather, <i>we wrote these provisions</i>, and we gain from them far more than we lose.<br />
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This brings up a second point. Senator Warren repeatedly says that 'decisions' in any dispute are going to be made by 'private,' and/or 'corporate' lawyers. She says this enough times to raise the suspicion that her staff must have stressed to her the need to evoke the vague dastardliness of 'corporations' and 'lawyers,' rather than referring to the process of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) as the more or less neutral and procedurally sound process that it is, namely, the process of arbitration. While it's true that arbitrators are paid by the parties to the dispute, and thus in this sense 'private,' they are bound by the procedural rules of the arbitral venue under which they are operating. The most common of these venues are the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, the London Court of International Arbitration, and the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington, D.C. These are hardly the shadowy back rooms where Senator Warren seems to suggest that the protection of American interests will be dealt away for a few dollars by unscrupulous 'corporate lawyers.' In fact, whatever the moral failings of American businesses in recent years, why is it assumed at all that attorneys who work for private businesses (again, those nefarious 'corporate lawyers') are unscrupulous? To insinuate this is to edge up on the kind of inflammatory demonizing that so paralyzes and degrades our national dialogue, and it's surprising to see it come from a dedicated guardian of the public interest like Senator Warren.<br />
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2) Senator Warren expresses reservations about so-called fast track authority ('greasing the skids') for the executive branch to negotiate trade treaties which would then be subject only to approval or disapproval, and not to amendment, by Congress. This reservation is not ideological, but more a part of the eternal American give-and-take between the branches of government. The argument on that count does not begin, nor will it end with Senator Warren. I bring it up here only to point out that especially in the case of trade and investment treaties, with their mind-boggling number of technical provisions relating to individual products, it is difficult to imagine how the USTR could conduct a viable negotiation with other nations if those nations knew that every agreement reached with the American negotiators could later be nitpicked to death and amended to the point of unrecognizability by a Congress with complex motives. Such a state of affairs would undercut any credibility our negotiators would have in making promises, and the resulting unwillingness of our trading partners to negotiate with us would redound to the detriment of American credibility generally; it would be a (further) signal to the world that our house is not in order.<br />
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3) One suspects as well that an effort to conduct a reasonable, viable negotiation is behind the secrecy with which the TPP has been negotiated. Irrespective of other considerations, it seems rather certain that should the negotiating parties' every proposition be shouted about on television in the apocalyptic tones that now characterize our political and cultural climate, basic trust between the parties would be sacrificed, quickly to be replaced by exasperation among our partners, and demoralization among our own negotiators. One struggles to understand how this could be a sustainable, let alone a desirable, state of affairs.<br />
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4) Senator Warren points out that 85% of the 500 individuals comprising 28 working groups that have 'helped shape the trade deal' are 'either corporate executives — senior corporate executives — or lobbyists for the industries that are being affected.' Senator Warren is unarguably right to be concerned that the full diversity of American constituencies be allowed to provide input into U.S. trade policy. However, while I don't know the source of the Senator's statistics, nor how they were calculated, I would make two points. First, the USTR, throughout the negotiating process has opened multiple public comment periods on multiple aspects of the TPP, and received testimony and written submissions from everyone from the United Steel Workers to the World Wildlife Federation to the University of Tokyo (see, e.g., <a href="http://www.regulations.gov/#!searchResults;rpp=25;po=0;s=Trans%252BPacific%252BPartnership;dct=PS" target="_blank">here</a>). Second, though one may assume that industry experts will push for the most beneficial possible terms for their companies and industries, their very expertise is crucial to an understanding of what individual provisions actually mean and of what impact the agreement as a whole will have on various sectors of the U.S. economy. It is difficult to imagine that USTR negotiators will be so in thrall to these experts that they (the negotiators) will be incapable of taking into account the experts' natural biases in favor of their own interests. This is not to say that there are never damaging, improper relationships between government officials and industry insiders, or that undue influence is never brought to bear. At the end of the day, however, government and the private sector have to rely on and complement each other, and the mere fact of private sector involvement in the formation of trade policy is not necessarily evidence of anything untoward or insidious.<br />
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It is true that my personal instinct is to favor free trade and investment. In fact, I'm interested in a line of thinking that holds it as something of a human right -- the right to full expression of professional identity, we might say. (Though there are clearly problems with such a formulation, perhaps chief among them the fact that very large businesses do not possess anything like the nearly sacred 'identity' that persons may be said to have.) But to be generally in favor of international trade and investment that is as free as it can safely and reasonably be is not to be a blood ideological foe of environmental or labor protection. Rather it is to begin from the premise that exchange, of nearly every kind, between the diverse peoples of the earth is good, and that instead of opposing it, those who have righteous concerns about its consequences should work to make it better, more fair, more just.<br />
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I'm reminded of a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/31/the-candidate-5" target="_blank">quote in the New Yorker</a> from then-U.S.-Senate-candidate Obama, who opined that most people are ultimately in favor of free trade, whether they realize it or not, because (among other things) they like having affordable, high-quality consumer goods. "They just don't want their communities destroyed" because of it, he said. That is surely the balance we have to strive for.<br />
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There's likely no reason to doubt that Senator Warren's reservations are principled and heartfelt. I write only to clarify some of her statements in my own mind, and to examine as fully as possible whether her outright objection to free trade and investment has merit or ultimately fails to persuade. For the reasons above, I don't think the Senator's argument carries the day.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-37736462619734832012015-05-11T13:39:00.000-04:002015-05-11T13:41:47.975-04:00Power<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, on Charlie Rose last week <a href="http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60556712" target="_blank">here</a>. A titanic interview. One of the more rigorous examinations of world events I can remember anywhere in the popular media (if PBS counts as a popular medium).<br />
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Trying to work out, though, questions of why people like Power can't be, or for whatever reason aren't, <i>political </i>leaders (an Ambassador being, of course, an unelected official). Is it because there's an appropriate distinction to be made between the overwhelming substantive and procedural facility that an Ambassador (or, say, a General) may possess, and the broader mandate for visionary leadership incumbent upon a President? But what is incompatible between substantive mastery and visionary leadership? Surely neither precludes the other. Isn't it more likely that anyone with the kind of moral and intellectual force, purpose and clarity of a Samantha Power is unlikely to see the appalling demolition derby of American politics as a viable application of their ability? <br />
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David Remnick wrote a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/todays-woman" target="_blank">piece </a>in the New Yorker a while back asking why we're likely to be left, yet again, voting either for a Clinton or a Bush for president in 2016. Obviously many of us share in that <i>cri de coeur</i>, and would, for example, find someone with gifts like Power's a thrilling figure on the world-historical stage. But isn't the answer to the question quite simply that there's no new talent in American politics because real talent is running as fast and as far from politics as it can get?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-12800341775300467532015-05-09T16:07:00.001-04:002015-05-09T16:23:17.110-04:00Birdman, or The Continuing Search for Moral Heroism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Watching the Oscar-winning film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2562232/" target="_blank">Birdman </a>recently, I realized that I frequently have the experience of being unable or unwilling to go as far as the creators of a film (usually a film; often a book, sometimes an album, etc.) want to go. I can be with them for the most part, I can be rapt, admiring, but in the end it seems they're always committed to something I instinctively resist. And I think it's this: they insist upon the postmodern, existentialist premise that vice is inevitable and all-pervasive.<br />
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In this they may be right, it's possible that my quibble may only be a question of emphasis. Indeed, the dynamism of narrative art since mid-century (mid-last-century), could be said to derive from our bifurcated consciousness: everything from <i>I can't go on; I'll go on</i>, to <i>Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in</i>. All that exquisite heartbreak, I admit, is only possible if a man (or woman, of course) has his own wretched concupiscence to battle, if he has to wrest his shards of hope from a comprehensive inner brokenness.<br />
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But isn't it possible as well that the establishment of this wretchedness has shaded over into a kind of vernacular orthodoxy, a shibboleth of cool? Isn't it possible that the need to prove our grubby, nihilist <i>bona fides</i> has begun to imprison us within predictable tropes of profligacy, solipsism, and chaos? Isn't it possible that we've become incapable of countenancing the prospect of epochal triumph? That as artists and audiences both, we are absolutely terrified of virtue?<br />
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In other writings that nobody reads, and in conversations with no one but my dauntless wife, I've thought of our era as the Age of Moral Exhaustion. And I've sought a tectonic break from that era, a definitional icon of Moral Heroism, a natural messiah who might, by embodying the heretofore unimaginable thrill and complexity of virtue, liberate us from our compulsion to wallow endlessly in the goo of our anti-heroes' bad decisions. Thus far, though I like to think the effort itself has been interesting, I have sought in vain.<br />
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Which is why I have to point out here (as has an entire spectrum of observers before me), that Birdman is an <i>excellent </i>film. It is not a criticism of a story to say that it does very, very well that which stories in our day tend to do: to limn the pathos of a confused and unhealthy civilization.<br />
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But it is not a film that breaks with our prevailing ethos. It's resolution and final image is one not of salvation, but of escape. In Birdman's world, we still can't do the right thing; we can only fly away from the wrong ones.<br />
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That's fine, even beautiful. It just isn't a vision of moral heroism. So I keep thinking and thinking. Moral heroism. What <i>is </i>that? What could it possibly ever look like? Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-27586991094223905462015-05-07T12:05:00.001-04:002015-05-07T12:05:49.040-04:00Cancer Patients and the Cards We Give ThemAn interesting piece <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/05/06/empathy_cards_by_emily_mcdowell_are_greeting_cards_designed_for_cancer_patients.html" target="_blank">here </a>about the kinds of cards one former cancer patient would have liked to have received during her treatment. <br />
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Most of the cards seem either funny, or heartfelt, or both, but don't they proceed from the same assumption as the more common--though presumably deficient--kinds of sympathy and get-well-soon cards? Namely, the assumption that the kind of person who would give a card to a cancer patient can have (either through the card, or otherwise) a meaningful impact on the cancer patient's experience? </div>
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I guess I'm falling back here on an experience of the disease and of treatment which not every patient has--that it reduces one's world to essentials. During treatment, I needed my wife. I needed the rest, the repose that could be had in the lee of her physical and psycho-emotional shelter. And I needed the tether to normalcy that my parents and other family provided. But beyond that, what could anybody really say or do? It was my job to survive, just to keep breathing until it was all over and I could get on with trying to stand myself up straight again (still working on that, by the way). And nobody else could do that for me; certainly no card could. Cards were more for those who gave them than for me. </div>
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And--a crucial point--there's nothing wrong with that. It's ok that nobody could really help me, or be a part of my experience. And it's ok if someone wants to take action against their own fear or confusion or impotence by the affirmative act of sending a card. I don't mind. </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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Thing is, from the moment of diagnosis, a division arises between the patient and his or her healthy compatriots. And it was nobody else's fault that they had no idea what was happening to me, or to me with respect to them, or to them with respect to me. And so I never needed or expected any of them to come up with a card (or a letter, or text, or email, etc., for that matter) that said the right thing. There was no right thing. The magnitude of the facts overwhelmed the possibility of saying the right thing, or anything at all, really. The brute experience was its own meaning, and it happened in silence, and you can't expect anybody who hasn't gone through that to understand it, with or without a well-considered and deeply sincere empathy card.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-91200503359204665942015-05-06T09:41:00.001-04:002015-05-06T17:58:36.132-04:00Parenting, and AdjectivesBeen thinking a lot about this topic recently, as some friends and readers know. The topic of parenting, that is, not necessarily adjectives (though that subject is surely never far from a writer's mind either). Interesting, then, that <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/from-parent-to-parenting/" target="_blank">this article</a> should turn up, reflecting many of my own instincts and preoccupations. A crucial question might be: if at least part of what one resists about the idea of becoming a parent is the current culture of parenting, to what extent can one resist that culture in doing one's own parenting? To the same, or a similar extent that one can resist other distasteful elements of prevailing culture? Is over-parenting as easy and appropriate to reject as, you know, Facebook, hot yoga, beards?<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think the current culture of parenting is the only thing about the idea of becoming a parent that I resist, anyway.<br />
<br />
But, at least the article's author, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Epstein&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8" target="_blank">Joe Epstein</a>, gets the award for greatest curmudgeonly adjective of all time: 'piss-elegant.' Maybe I could stand to be a parent if I still got to use words like 'piss-elegant.' I'll have to think about that...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-24406497539826326132015-05-05T07:44:00.001-04:002015-05-05T07:44:55.372-04:00Wisdom for the AgesFrom a <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-moral-of-Caesar-8152" target="_blank">review </a>in the New Criterion of a book on the assassination of Julius Caesar:<br />
<br />
"Revolutions, as Strauss mordantly observes, are hard on moderates."<br />
<br />
Well, yes. There is that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-47166357786253344022015-05-04T08:46:00.001-04:002015-05-04T08:46:42.666-04:00An Open Letter to Henry Kissinger<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dear Dr. Kissinger,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
have recently been inspired by your descriptions, in your memoirs, of the men—Elsworth
Bunker, George Shultz, Gerald Ford, David Bruce, yourself—who, whatever their weaknesses, attempted to
live lives of service to the ideals of the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some might call these 'Enlightenment' ideals: intellectual
honesty and openness, institutional fairness, personal humility, etc. Ideals which my
own generation of distracted millenials seems often to disdain as
hopelessly outmoded and bourgeois. Ideals which seem to have faded
domestically as a kind of pre-Enlightenment tribalism takes hold of the
national mood. Ideals which are unsustainable when intellectual authority
in our national discussion issues more from sectarian status than from quality
of evidence or argument.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thus, it occurs to me to ask you in particular a question: <i>if today one wished to
live a life of service to the Enlightenment ideals for which the United States
has at times been the standard-bearer in the world, how and where and with
whom might one do so?</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I want to thank you as well, if I may, for the quality and indeed
the beauty of the writings you've left to posterity. I was born years
after you left office, and thus have a limited understanding of the visceral passions
inspired by the policies and personalities of your era. I barely remember
the Reagan administration. But you evoke in your memoirs, and elsewhere,
a world that feels richer than the merely technocratic one in which my
generation seems caught. You evoke a world underpinned by values
thrilling enough to be worth serving; I only wonder if there are institutions
in the world that continue to serve them, and if so, how an intelligent,
sincere young person might come to work on behalf of those institutions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sincerely,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sean Murray</span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-17231772544429330932014-11-12T11:34:00.000-05:002014-11-12T11:36:06.408-05:00Quo Vadimus, or The Long BridgeTwo years ago around this time I had 30 staples in my side after a pair of nasty surgeries. The day before Thanksgiving I had the staples out. One of them didn't want to let go - the doc had to twist and tug, and I almost passed out. Then I rode down a couple floors in the hospital elevator and had a bone marrow biopsy. A few days later I flew from Nebraska to Washington, D.C. to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital. When we landed, my wife and I checked in at our passable extended-stay hotel in Crystal City (Arlington, VA), and went for a walk on the nearby <a href="http://parks.arlingtonva.us/locations/long-bridge-park/" target="_blank">Long Bridge</a>.<br />
<br />
I've no idea why it's called the Long Bridge. It's not especially long. It runs out past the Reagan Airport runways, along a marshy part of the Potomac where Eagles sometimes circle, fish, and land in the trees. The Pentagon sits to the left, across I-395. A glassy, brand-new Boeing facility is set near the start of the bridge, and at the far end is a rise from which one can see the Washington Monument, the Capital building, and much of DC's leafy, northwesterly spread. As I was beginning chemotherapy, I went for walks out to that elevated end of the bridge, and stared off into the cold late-fall dusk coming down on the city. And wondered if I would live.<br />
<br />
This past Sunday I flew to the Washington, DC area again, and checked in to a hotel very near where we stayed two years ago, during my treatment. This time I'd come for the final stage of the Foreign Service entrance exams, the Oral Assessment; if I passed, I'd be (almost) a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps. I passed.<br />
<br />
The next morning, having time to kill before my flight out, I walked to the end of the Long Bridge to look again at the unchanging city. The day was warm and dry. Waist-high native grasses along the side of the bridge rustled in the breeze, and I reached out to touch their bristled tops with my palms. I'd lived after all.<br />
<br />
The overwhelming sensation on this day, however, was of the same unhurried, inscrutable presence of the eternal that I'd had two years prior, in a much more dire condition. Though then I'd been supremely vulnerable and now I was (in my small way) triumphant, I was in each case most aware of the ineradicable uncertainty that underpins all human experience - having now achieved a high goal, I no more knew where I was going, what I was doing, what would happen next, or even if I would live much longer, than I had understood those things back in 2012 when I faced cancer. The through-line of history is precariousness. Around this axis revolves a cycle of aspiration and despair, conviction and dismay, hope and then ultimate surrender to the unknown.<br />
<br />
I am of this human lineage, and I am intimately familiar with these regular orbits of human emotion. And I cannot resist the too-perfect metaphor of the Long Bridge as the defining vector of my personal uncertainties. How many times will I stand at its peaceful terminus and ask, invoking God, and my loved ones, and everybody else too, <i>Quo Vadimus</i>? Where are we going?<br />
<br />
If I'm fortunate, many, many more.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eIf2QAwjGpDAJQSJ2fGZDJ0LlzxRjlDrAq91HioSjOM8T2aL0dSX13a3lyflUFwrVQm1XnH59GO1Xg1rGtXey_XoV_Lnplug_ybIRtUdCuchdygEtTZUVuU4s-DwqnEjP4J8WuEmeRM/s1600/Long+Bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0eIf2QAwjGpDAJQSJ2fGZDJ0LlzxRjlDrAq91HioSjOM8T2aL0dSX13a3lyflUFwrVQm1XnH59GO1Xg1rGtXey_XoV_Lnplug_ybIRtUdCuchdygEtTZUVuU4s-DwqnEjP4J8WuEmeRM/s400/Long+Bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-69764777968725849462014-10-14T12:35:00.000-04:002014-10-14T19:47:09.488-04:00Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, or The Future of New York<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX13JEhnSESiY73-NyeeCa3XAQ5i11wjrtXAHdP315ZAgE1COPm1UiCjATyDUNnwb3yniJolQlhdnkCwNWdVQCnipcYKQQN6f_G7wbOOzuy5wYoPFxVUEEnqcTqHclTA8KkzrgRLfZbKI/s1600/Grand+Central+cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX13JEhnSESiY73-NyeeCa3XAQ5i11wjrtXAHdP315ZAgE1COPm1UiCjATyDUNnwb3yniJolQlhdnkCwNWdVQCnipcYKQQN6f_G7wbOOzuy5wYoPFxVUEEnqcTqHclTA8KkzrgRLfZbKI/s1600/Grand+Central+cropped.jpg" height="395" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
I've heard that various of the rulers of Rome, parading through the streets of that imperial city, would position a subordinate behind them to whisper in their ear, at intervals, <i>sic transit gloria mundi</i>. As best I can tell (and who knows, I may not have it right), this is an ambiguous phrase. It can mean, in a general sense, that the glory of the world is transitory, and will pass away. Or, as a more immediate, concrete, and grandiose admonition, it can mean something like, Look up, O great Caesar, for that which we behold in passing is no less than the glory of all the world. To the wisest of those ancients, this double meaning, the moral reverberations of the duality, surely evoked all the responsibility, thrill and sadness of preeminence.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicWgL5JU4caURicyW9QhLlk5HDOyoe-XdQw501Q_gNuD1tqGp4Vi9tW3_Mppz4eeQRrQw5FessqS-PAoXJw78xuGdnuV0VG6nOjbxQbUfINRPRTMMhoP4TXUPZLH0OD2mT1rDVqOTS_DM/s1600/Chrysler+building+from+Grammercy+Park+cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicWgL5JU4caURicyW9QhLlk5HDOyoe-XdQw501Q_gNuD1tqGp4Vi9tW3_Mppz4eeQRrQw5FessqS-PAoXJw78xuGdnuV0VG6nOjbxQbUfINRPRTMMhoP4TXUPZLH0OD2mT1rDVqOTS_DM/s1600/Chrysler+building+from+Grammercy+Park+cropped.jpg" height="400" width="322" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
Well, whatever wisdom I have or haven't managed to accrue in my time, that ultimate ring of melancholy is what a recent trip to New York evoked for me. Why? Not because of historical parallels with ancient Rome, but because the New York we know, the New York of everyone from O. Henry to Leonard Bernstein, and J.P. Morgan to Joseph Mitchell, Duke Ellington, Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Edward Hopper, and all those Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, etc., the New York of that great early- and mid-century <i>public </i>flowering, has so conclusively passed into the all-consuming <i>private</i> mundanity that is the present and likely future of the city.<br />
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Now. This is not a political commentary, but a civilizational lament. The terms 'public' and 'private' do not here denote the facile government-business dichotomy now rampant in our political discourse. Instead, what I'm trying to get at is the pervasive sense that the culture which gave us this greatest of art deco and neoclassical cities, has entered an utterly graceless state. This probably happened long ago, it can't really be news. But it took on a special poignancy when a friend who's deeply involved in the New York real estate market described the city as 'out of control.' Where once the pinnacle of industrial success would have led to the construction of a landmark that would become the inheritance of all Americans, the city's elite now bestir themselves only for the raising of steel and glass condo towers with $100 million penthouses. Where once the towering achievements of New York enterprise seemed integral to American life, they now have a kind of archival feel about them. They're still used, in some cases more than ever, at least statistically speaking, but they haunt us now, and shame us. We're not living up to them, and some part of us, however small, knows that the spiritual dynamism which produced the New York everyone is always falling in love with has given way to the mere technocratic mastery which is now ascendant. America can still <i>plan</i> as brilliantly as ever, but it can no longer <i>imagine</i>.<br />
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Or, put another way, New York may still be glorious, but the glory of the world will pass away.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-45993178113284178572014-09-03T08:43:00.003-04:002014-09-03T08:45:21.239-04:00Russian Civilization<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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To the extent that Russia's Ukrainian adventure is a <i>civilizational </i>challenge to the West and the established international order, keep in mind this note:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"According to 2006 figures, “overall life expectancy at age
fifteen in the Russian Federation appears in fact to be lower than for
some of the countries the UN designates to be least developed (as
opposed to less developed), among these, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and
Yemen.” Male life expectancy at age fifteen in Russia compares
unfavorably to that in Ethiopia, Gambia, and Somalia." </blockquote>
Read Masha Gessen's exploration of Russia's century-long demographic catastrophe <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russians/" target="_blank">here</a>. The phenomenon is one of the things careful observers are likely to have in mind when they say that Russia's assertiveness is indicative of weakness, not strength.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-15796947068817515812014-08-08T16:51:00.000-04:002014-08-08T16:52:44.755-04:00Three SentencesThree sentences, from three different sources, each encountered in the course of a single day.<br />
<br />
The first:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The endless struggle of statesmen [is] to rescue some permanence from the tenuousness of human foresight."</i></blockquote>
<i>-</i>Henry Kissinger<br />
<br />
The second:<i></i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"[This book is] one more attempt to freeze the flux of life into the icy permanence of print."</i></blockquote>
-John Updike<br />
<br />
But then, the third:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet does bread come to the wise, nor riches to the discerning, nor favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all."</i></blockquote>
-Ecclesiastes 9:11<br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<i> </i>Is the third a rebuke to the first two? I don't know, I can't figure it out. I've been thinking about it for hours...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-34033241936665987452014-08-08T12:55:00.002-04:002014-08-08T12:56:40.021-04:00Toronto: First Read<div style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://covers.booktopia.com.au/big/9780330301831/in-the-skin-of-a-lion.jpg" height="393" id="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="257" /></div>
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Last summer, having no idea that within a year I'd be moving to Toronto, I read Michael Ondaatje's ethereal novel, 'In the Skin of a Lion,' about the construction of Toronto's Prince Edward Viaduct, and the city's water works. Of course it isn't really about those things, or isn't only about them. It is also 'about' the city's immigrant communities in the early 20th century, and about political greed and convulsively warring ideologies, etc. I can't remember the exact details. But what stays with me is the vision of dreamlike, incomprehensible life. Loosely connected events, randomly beautiful, violent, hilarious, impossible. It's the kind of book which, no matter what time its subject matter is taking place, always seems to be happening at night. I wonder if any of it can possibly mean anything to the present-day city...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-52207341909662242392014-07-30T09:27:00.002-04:002014-07-30T09:29:37.285-04:00Stone Street Interview with Nicolas Ortiz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Nicolas Ortiz has a remarkable past - his great-grandfather was hugely
successful in the tin-mining industry in Bolivia in the 19th century,
his grandfather became Bolivia's ambassador to France, and his father
established one of the world's foremost collections of ancient art.
Ortiz himself attended elite schools in England (Eton) and the U.S.
(Penn), and served in the Belgian military. With his brothers, he came
to Lithuania in 1991, shortly after independence. Together, they
started the first Western-style, self-serve supermarket chain, and
created the now popular 'In Your Pocket' guidebook series. Today, Ortiz
retains some of his business interests and sits on various boards of
directors, but devotes more of his time to charitable and philanthropic
activities. Though he scrupulously avoids media attention, he is
unfailingly generous, perceptive and wise in conversation. He is a
great asset to Lithuania and the region, and I can only hope that I'll have the chance
to cross paths with him again soon.<br />
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You can listen to my interview with him <a href="http://vilnius.usembassy.gov/podcast.html" target="_blank">here</a>, or via the RSS feed on the right-hand side of this page. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-31785326410014416142014-06-14T09:23:00.000-04:002014-06-14T09:39:24.899-04:00Sullivan 1999-2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Sullivan, our indefatigable partner even before Nina and I were married, developed a limp in late winter. Back in Lincoln, at his old vet's after three years away, in Washington and Lithuania, they recommended pain medication. Yesterday, the meds having proved ineffective after 10 days or so, we took him in again. Initial x-rays revealed a pathological fracture, that is, a small break in a left front leg bone caused by a cancerous tumor. When they attempted to reposition him for a second set of x-rays, the fracture separated, making the leg even more painful, and essentially useless. Our choice was to amputate or euthanize. We chose the latter.<br />
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Nina's metaphor for Sullivan's (and all dogs') greatness: an arrow, flying, untroubled by any concern for either bow or target.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08055787337406659115noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2314538574833795727.post-10890819405990813952014-05-24T20:31:00.000-04:002014-05-24T21:57:19.079-04:00CloudsIn the spring and summer the Baltics have a brightness to them, a crystaline quality much like the sharp, cold air one can see out an airplane window at 30,000 ft. This leads to a feeling of being at the end of something, at a boundary or portal. It is also in contradiction to the common conception (in so far as there is any common conception) of the region as dank and gray. To be sure, the low skies of winter are never lower around the world than they are in Vilnius, or Riga, or Tallinn when the great, dense masses of Baltic clouds shoulder in. However, it is precisely this contrast between electric clarity and misty gloom that gives the place its unmistakable if subtle air of drama: there is potential there, and opportunity for outstanding growth, richness, dynamism, but there is also a maddening provincial inertia. During my time there as a (quasi-) diplomat, I witnessed both the heady progress toward real European integration, even leadership, as well as the exasperating intransigence of an often dull and hunkered-down mindset - of course, healthy skepticism is important, but glum disinterest is just unworkable.<br />
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On balance, though, what I will remember about the place are its more exquisite characteristics. The Nordic lines and planes of the people's faces; the bright, defiant streak in the national culture and politics; the white light remaining in the air at dusk in summer. As our departing flight left Vilnius for the last time earlier this week, we ascended through a layer of thin spring fog and rain. After a moment we broke through into a brilliant, hard, clear and open sky. I looked back, but the clouds had closed beneath us, and the city was gone.<br />
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