Well, the prodigal has returned. It seems my blogroll is back, as though it had never left.
I give up trying to figure out the ups and downs of this. I’m just glad to see it again. All is forgiven.
Separated at birth? (if you close your eyes, anyway)
The death of Chief Justice Rehnquist had just been announced on the TV in the den. I wasn’t watching it, though–just listening from the kitchen, where I was cleaning out the fridge.
People who had known him were telling anecdotes about him, and then I heard a familiar voice. Carol Channing.
What could Carol Channing possibly have to say about Justice Rehnquist? I thought, puzzled. What commentary could she possibly give; whatever are they interviewing her for?
The voice went on and on, up and down and all around, mostly scratchy and gravelly but occasionally squeaky. I couldn’t hear many of the words, so I started to walk into the den to get a better notion of what Channing’s connection to Rehnquist could possibly have been.
And then it struck me: it was Susan Estrich I was hearing, not Channing at all. But without the visuals, they sound positively identical.
How could there possibly be two of that voice?
Separated at birth? Nah, couldn’t be. Or could it?
Who are these people, and what do they all have in common?
This–surprised me, somehow. At least, some on the list did.
Apologies to all on my blogroll (but Blogrolling.com should really apologize to me)
When you’ve got a blog, it does seem sometimes that you’ve put all your eggs in one basket. You feel uniquely vulnerable (at least I do) and dependent on the tender mercies of Blogger.com, for instance, not to screw your blog up. And, so far (knock wood) it hasn’t.
Blogrolling.com, responsible for my blogroll, has always seemed a piece of cake. Blogrolling is one of those small housekeeping chores that are important, at least to other bloggers, and I had developed a modestly lengthy one, complete with pithy descriptions of each blog to which I’d linked (note the past tense, by the way).
Last night I was trying to add a new blog, as I’ve done so many times before with nary a hitch, when the screen suddenly read “fatal error,” a phrase I absolutely detest. Why such needlessly hysterical rhetoric on the part of a computer? I always think when I see that. Can’t you calm down?
I figured something had gone wrong with the addition of this particular link for some unknown computerish reason, some sort of little glitch. I thought I’d just come back today and fix it.
Well, lo and behold, when I returned this morning I discovered that my entire blogroll has been deleted. Gone, gonzo, zip, nada, finished, finito. The word “fatal” doesn’t seem to have been hyperbole this time, at least from the viewpoint of the blogroll itself.
I have no idea whether this blogroll assassination was due to some slip of my own fingers (I don’t think so; to delete a blogroll requires two moves, including receiving an alert that this is about to happen, and I remember seeing nothing of the sort), or whether my computer has committed an act of revenge. Probably something in between.
But apologies to all on my blogroll. This may take some days to fix.
[ADDENDUM: Wonders never cease.]
His Honor the Mayor, Edi Rama
Whenever I begin to wonder whether it’s time to hang up my New Yorker subscription, they publish something that’s so good I realize we may just be wedded for life, like some squabbling couple who can’t live together but can’t quite live apart, either.
A June 27, 2005 article that redeemed the New Yorker for me once again was by Jane Kramer, entitled “Painting the Town.” It’s a portrait of a man I’d never heard of, in a country I know next to nothing about (although now I know considerably more, after reading Kramer’s article): Edi Rama, His Honor the Mayor of Tirana, Albania.
Albania was famous when I was growing up for being one of those countries Americans weren’t allowed to visit, behind an Iron Curtain so solid that it was practically a black hole. But lately Albania is starting to become more–well, more colorful, as the title of the article suggests:
Rama is a Balkan original, and maybe the most original thing about him is that he isn’t really a politician. He is an artist who, you might say, took Tirana for his canvas.
Rama has been in office for nearly five years (he was elected in 2000, at the age of thirty-six, and reelected three years later), and the first thing he did as mayor was to order paint. He blasted the facades of Tirana’s gray Stalinist apartment blocks with color–riotous, Caribbean color–turning buildings into patchworks of blues, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, and reds, and the city itself into something close to a modern-masters sampler.
Within a few years, Rama had managed to clear the choked, riverine city center of two thousand illegal kiosks and bars and cafes and shops and whorehouses and sleeping barracks and traffickers’ storeroom “motels”–the detritus of a decade of post-Communist freedom frenzy on city property…He dredged Ritan’s Lana River, seeded thirty-six acres of public parks, relaid old boulevards, and planted four thousand trees. He lit the city–literally, since only seventy-eight street lights worked when he took it over. He cajoled the money for this transformation out of the World Bank and the European Union and the United Nations Development Program and George Soros and the scores of foundations and aid agencies and N.G.O.s that had set up shop in Albania in the nineties. And he cajoled the work out of local contractors: anybody who wanted to build anything in the capital had to “contribute.” People enjoy Tirana now. They stroll and shop on the shady streets of what used to be their Politburo’s version of a gated neighborhood. They read the paper and drink espresso under the white umbrellas of cheerful, sprawling cafes. There is nothing remotely like Tirana in the rest of Albania.
By now you must be getting the idea that Edi Rama is quite an unusual fellow. And you would be right. Originally an artist and a leftist, from a family that was part of what passed for an elite in Albania, he moved to Paris in his twenties and lived the Bohemian leftist intellectual life there with a girlfriend and no real thoughts of returning to gloomy Albania. How he got back there is a story in itself, but you’ll have to read the article for that.
The reason I’m going on at some length about Rama, though, is not just that he sounds like the sort of person every developing country and every depressed city ought to have, and usually never gets–after all, there’s only one Edi Rama. Something else about Rama intrigued me, and that was the political and attitudinal changes he’s gone through.
One key to Rama is that he was raised in a society so repressive and so life-denying that, paradoxically, he valued things that the rest of us take for granted, and hungered for them. Here, for example, is Rama’s reaction to the saxophone and Cubist art:
Saxophones were banned in Albania, which may be why the day a school friend whispered, “Want to see a saxophone?” is as memorable to him as the day he saw his first nude drawings. He says that the sound of that saxophone–a few notes, played in his friend’s attic, with lookouts posted on the stairs–was “like a strange amplification of the miraculous,” and started him wondering “why all these beautiful things were bad.”…He started hanging around the National Library, staying late to help the maids clean; his pay was five minutes alone with a banned book of Georges Braque’s paintings. “A spiritual sandwich, ” he calls it.
Rama also learned the value of religion in similar way:
His grandmother was a Catholic (most Albanian Christians are Orthodox), and he says that, for him, she was a glimpse into a forbidden world. He remembers her during the Mao years, when religion was a constitutional offense, whispering her rosary at night in the nursery…”After lights out, I would hear that low voice, making her prayers. She was my night music.” He says that she planted the seeds of “an alternative way of thinking in me, an alternative to what the Communist ideology meant by ‘love’ and ‘values.'”
Things that are forbidden take on an extra luster for those who are starved for them. The seeds Rama’s grandmother planted bore fruit much later in his ability to cast off, not only Communist ideology, but whatever didn’t make sense to him or enthrall him–to think outside the box, to think outside all boxes.
So Rama, the radical leftist in his twenties, has evolved in his thirties into Rama, the pragmatic and eclectic can-do man:
He said that the experience of running Tirana had convinced him that there was “nothing left or right in the way I deal with the world,” that the real divisions in Albania had less to do with politics than with honest and corrupt, peaceful and violent, and especially, the “hard-working people and the people who don’t respect work.” Right now, this is his only politics. “If I lived in Germany or France or England, no doubt I’d be totally with the left wing,” he told me. “But there is a huge difference in the situation there. At the end of the day, the ideology we need to embrace is the ideology of work. Right and left are only a question of how you distribute. For us, the key is to have something to distribute.”
According to the article, Rama has recently been reading up on economics. My guess is that, if he continues, he may end up applying his formulation about the ideology of work to western Europe as well as Albania.
Rama’s forays into economic readings have not all been on the left, either:
“I’m reading about economy all the time,” Rama says. Todd Buchholz, Thomas Sowell, Hernando de Soto’s “The Other Path” and “The Mystery of Capital.” Hardly a left-wing list, but Rama, somewhat to his surprise, has become not only a law-and-order politician but an eager disciple of a group of unconventionally conservative economists…
This is Rama’s prescription for Tirana….people who have lived through Communism, where everything belonged to the state, want to take back possession of their own lives–their land, their businesses, their homes. Some Tirana intellectuals call this a fetish of private property, but Rama points out that those intellectuals are not running a city with more than a million people building illegally on its periphery.
Rama is a good example, I think, not only of a man unafraid to change his mind, but of the ways in which experience grounded in reality–with things or with people, or with both–tends to trump the ideas generated when one is thinking only abstractly and theoretically. There were a number of excellent comments on that very point in the recent thread on therapy and liberalism: see this, this, this, and this.
The military response: rescuers
This morning I watched some cable television coverage of the rescue efforts now finally underway in the Gulf. It’s a wonderful and long-awaited sight: the helicopters swooping down to fill up with people and carry them to relative safety, the elderly and frail being pushed in their wheelchairs by the young and strong, a tiny girl carried on the shoulders of large man in uniform.
Geraldo Rivera–not ordinarily my favorite–was very good at conveying the emotion of gratefulness to the military. He was positively gushing, and rightly so. Listening to him, I thought of this post of a few days ago, and its discussion about perceptions of the military as rescuers and protectors.
Today in New Orleans and the rest of the devastated area, we see that rescue function in its full and pure form. It’s a stupendous sight to see, and a clear demonstration of why rescue efforts are called “relief.” I can only imagine the emotions those suffering people who have been in the overburdened and undersupplied stadiums for so long feel at the sight of those uniforms and those helicopters. Relief, indeed!
Preparing(?) for disaster in the Big Easy
The horrific situation in New Orleans has spawned the usual accusations: Bush’s fault, the city government is to blame, and what about the state–why didn’t it do more? In this case, I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around. But the blame game is, to a certain extent, an ex-post-facto no-brainer that anyone can play, and the old truth is that hindsight is always 20/20.
That said, this particular horror does seem to feature an entire host of spectacularly bad decisions all coming together to create the nightmare that is now New Orleans. There were apparent errors of planning, particularly on the local and state level (or, seemingly, an almost total lack thereof), errors of evacuation timing, errors of rescue effort timing, inadequate funding for repairs (some of this on the federal level and some more local), rampant city corruption, city and state bureaucracy of an unusually Byzantine nature, poorly-controlled crime (even preceding the hurricane)–but even better planning would only have gone so far.
There is no doubt that evacuation planning could, and should, have been much more extensive. But there are limits to what can be done. Can a city of this size be evacuated in two days, even with planning beforehand and the absolute knowledge that a disaster will happen? I used to live near a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, an area far less populated than New Orleans, and I remember reading that, were an accident to happen and the area evacuated, bottlenecks would almost immediately occur and the roads would become impassable, trapping us all (this problem is, strangely enough, somewhat in line with certain facts about crowd flow in my stampede article of yesterday).
Nowadays we imagine we can plan for everything and that we should be protected against everything, even though we don’t (and really can’t) spend the money to do everything that would actually be needed. And then, when something happens, we say “Oh, of course, that’s the very thing that should have been funded above all the others that compete for our attention.”. But all of this involves cost-benefit ratios and predictions that are partly based on science and partly, quite frankly, a crapshoot.
Another truth seems to be that people never prepare on that enormous and costly scale for something that is merely theoretical–it always seems to take a great disaster to make them realize what should have been done. Such a huge output of funds and energy doesn’t ordinarily seem justified for something that’s only a projection and prediction–we can’t prepare for all exigencies that might happen, and the billion-dollar question is: how to pick and choose among all the competing doomsday scenarios?
And then there’s the issue, not of governmental and community preparedness, but of individual and aggregate human response. Scientists are so fond of predicting disaster that people have learned, for the most part, to tune them out. After all, so many predicted disasters never happen, or are far less disastrous than expected. Remember the Millienium Bug? The Jupiter Effect? Comet Kohoutek? The Swine Flu? Not to mention all the predicted storms and blizzards and hurricanes that ultimately fizzled out, after the big predictions made everyone rush to the grocery to stock up?
So it’s no surprise that, although New Orleans has been described for a number of years as uniquely and catastrophically vulnerable to a category 4 or 5 hurricane, many people stayed put, either through inability to leave, or because they thought the threat was overhyped. But tragically, this is one of those times that the scientists’ predictions have come eerily true, even in some of the smallest details.
Going back in time and reading old articles that talk about what could happen if a large hurricane ever hit New Orleans is a strange experience. While reading pieces that are a few years old, I kept checking the tenses and the dates–surely these weren’t written in the future tense; surely they are describing the events of the last few days, written after the fact? But no, they were predictions that came almost exactly true.
This one, for example, is three years old (via Michael Totten), but it describes what happened in New Orleans a few days ago almost as though reading from a script. This series of articles is similar in its haunting prescience.
In addition to this human predilection to discount dire predictions, there are other reasons New Orleans was ill-prepared: to have protected the city against a Category 5 hurricane would undoubtedly have cost many billions of dollars (estimates differ, but that it would have been in the billions is not in dispute), and the best ways to go about doing so were unclear–as the aforementioned articles, as well as this one and this one, attest. I’ve already alluded briefly to these facts, but New Orleans–the Big Easy–is famous for graft and corruption in city government. The comments in this thread from Chicagoboyz discuss this at some length. This City Journal article (via Ed Driscoll), as well, talks about the sad state of civic affairs in New Orleans even prior to Katrina, and why it will make it doubly hard to rebuild and recover. And this comment on LGF makes some excellent points about “levee boards” and why it may not have mattered even if more federal funds had been given in advance.
This lethal stew of prohibitive cost, corruption, competing ideas about what was necessary, and denial that something so dreadful was likely enough to justify all that expense, proved to be a deadly mixture that led to the shocking lack of preparedness. As blogger “Laurel,” who fled the New Orleans area with her family just before the hurricane hit writes, it was “The day I thought would never come.” And if a day will never come, why spend billions of dollars in a very poor state to prepare against that day?
Laurel describes her own skepticism at the early storm reports, based on prior experience with false alarms:
There are storms in the Gulf all the time and they always get everyone excited around here, especially the media. You’d think the fricking sky was falling every other week. People have pretty much gotten used to their hysteria and don’t pay too much attention to it…
I went to bed that night mad that our fun camping trip had been cut short, and upset that we had to listen to hysterical media sensationalists again. It just seems like they are always crying wolf and it gets a little old.
This is a very understandable mindset. But, fortunately, this time something cut into Laurel’s skepticism, and she got going. As she writes:
But, I guess they were finally right this time. By morning the storm was a category 5 storm and we got a phone call from the St. Tammany Parish president that had a recorded message telling us to evacuate immediately.
“They were finally right this time.” So at least “they” get to say, “I told you so.” But that won’t help the people of New Orleans right now. Maybe later–maybe, if and when the city is rebuilt–but not now.
[NOTE: My post focuses on preparedness. But for an excellent discussion of what may have gone wrong, and why, in the response, see this post by Aziz Poonawalla along with its comments. Found at Dean Esmay’s. And the Anchoress sums it all up with her usual combination of eloquence and strength, and says what needs to be said about the Bush-blamers.]
[NOTE II: Just found another post that goes into helpful and informative detail on why building an adequate system of physical protection against a hurricane of such magnitude would take so very long and be such a complex task. See this by Tigerhawk, who also links to this excellent post from Belmont Club, on the same topic.]
Stampede
As if the deaths from hurricane Katrina were not enough, yesterday brought the news that up to one thousand people, predominately women and children and the elderly, had died in a stampede while taking part in a Shi’ite religious pilgrimage in Iraq. Another horror of nearly unimaginable proportions.
It became clear almost immediately that, although terrorists were not directly to blame, they were an indirect cause, since the stampede was apparently sparked by a rumor of a bomber in the crowd. Such a rumor was given credence by the crowd’s knowledge of previous suicide attacks on Shi’ites at similar religious pilgrimages. So, ironically, a rumor of terrorism has caused more innocent deaths than any single terrorist attack has done so far in Iraq. The terrorists must be extremely pleased to have achieved such a goal with so little effort on their part.
It’s not surprising that the smaller and weaker–women and children and the elderly–would be the most likely to be overwhelmed by the force of the crowd and crushed, and were therefore overrepresented among the dead. I would guess (though I haven’t been able to find information to document it) that most stampedes involve a similar grim statistic, if they occur in crowds that feature any women and children or elderly people.
I hold a vivid memory of being caught in a rush hour crush in a New York subway some years back. Although, fortunately, the situation never reached stampede level, it was terrifying to me because I was holding the hand of my 3-year-old son, who promptly disappeared, thoroughly engulfed in the crowd. I still recall the feel of his small and delicate fingers in mine, and the panic that engulfed me as the force of the crowd started to carry him away. Fortunately, all was well, but ever afterwards it has taken very little imagination for me to realize the dangers small children and mothers face in adult crowds.
Yesterday’s stampede was very big news mostly because it occurred in Iraq. But it turns out that stampede deaths are a regular occurrence around the world, and not just in third world countries, either, although in general they seem to cause higher death tolls there. This website has an exhaustive list of such stampede events, which can be found by clicking on “disasters” in the left-hand sidebar.
On analysis, it turns out there are three main categories of venues that would appear to favor stampedes: the soccer stadium (or other large sporting event); the crowded nightclub in which a fire breaks out; and the religious pilgrimage. They all share the characteristics of having very large and moving groups of people packed into a restricted space. But panic, such as apparently occurred on the Iraqi bridge, is, surprisingly, not a required element to start such stampedes, although it inevitably happens as the stampede begins to take shape, and makes them that much worse. Stampedes can sometimes be sparked in the absence of any panic, when chance events block the flow of traffic in an overcrowded and spacially restricted situation.
The situation, as far as I can determine, is a bit analogous to the elements that go into a tsunami, strangely enough. That is, a huge and extremely powerful force (in the case of crowds, the moving people; in the case of tsunamis, the moving water) is initially spread out horizontally. Then, some sort of blockage impedes that horizontal movement and converts it, at least partially, into a vertical one. I haven’t found a website that explains this too clearly, so I’m not linking to any source for it, but it appears that, in the case of a stampede, people become stacked up and those on the bottom are the ones who are crushed by the force of those above. Of course, in yesterday’s Iraq tragedy, some also went off the bridge and were drowned.
It’s no accident, either, that the Iraqi stampede occurred on a bridge. Any sort of bottleneck or narrow passage through which the crowd must funnel itself represents a grave danger, because it potentially impedes that flow of horizontal movement.
That’s not all that contributed, in this case. Here is a particularly telling description of the Iraqi stampede, from the previously linked Globe article:
General Rawad Rumediam, a military commander at the bridge, said that 3-foot-high concrete barriers put in place to prevent car bombs from entering probably contributed to the crush. Saddoun Dulaymi, Iraq’s defense minister, said the checkpoints at the bridge meant to search pedestrians for explosive devices may have slowed the flow of the crowd across the bridge and contributed to the disaster.
So it seems that terrorists helped the disaster to occur in two ways: by giving credence to the rumor of a suicide bomber, and by causing security considerations to override the implementation of basic crowd control safety measures.
We don’t usually think much about it, but any time there is a large public gathering, the science of crowd control comes into play. The police study crowd control, and there are also other scientists who try to improve on current knowledge and apply it to future situations. This website, on which I found the list of stampedes, is an example of a firm that specializes in such research, consulting with groups around the world to prevent similar disasters. For example, they were hired by the Saudis to supervise this year’s Haj (in particular, they redesigned a certain bridge over which the crowd needed to pass). They seem to have been successful because, unlike some earlier Hajs, this one apparently went off without a hitch.
Crowd control is designed to minimize the possibilities that things will get out of hand. But, sadly, there are no guarantees that they won’t, despite the best of precautions. And often, especially in third-world countries, the expertise and the money to implement the best of precautions are not in place (here, for example, is a description of how a lack of preparedness and resources helped create the conditions for a stampede in India during a religious pilgrimage).
What follows is a description of a stampede which, as far as I can tell, could not have been prevented by any method, other than total redesign of the area. Occurring in an urban setting in a developed country, it was started by a series of chance happenings. It’s another example–as if we needed reminding–of the limits of human control over events. (This passage appears at the same Crowd Dynamics website, but it has no separate URL. It can found there by clicking on “disasters”):
1999 (May 31) Minsk, Belarus. 53 dead, 150 injured, 78 hospitalized when a crowd of 2,500 rushed to get out of the rain at the railway station. From The Daily Telegraph, June 1, 1999. An unprecedented tragedy happened on May 30 in the centre of the Belarusian capital. Over 50 people died and some 300 were wounded in a crush at the entrance to the underground station…The tragedy was caused by heavy rain that started at about 8 p.m….A few thousand Minsk residents, mostly young people, had gathered …The first thunders and rain drops made people rush to find shelter in the underground crossing…Somebody fell down on the concrete floor and the first blood was shed. People were slipping over and trampling those lying on the floor…People were falling at the feet of the crowd. Over two thousand people poured into the 10-metre wide underground crossing thus creating a dense moving jam…there were people literally smeared against the walls, pressed into the floor, …Meanwhile, screams of those who were unable to escape on their own, kept echoing from this hellish meat grinder…”We are soccer fans, so we know what to do in a crowd–cover your head with hands and make your way to the exit.”…”People kept arriving until there was almost no space and then the whole mess started. There was no escape. The people surging in from behind just left the others lying and walked over them,” one of the survivors told Russian television..”About 300 people were lying here, one layer on top of another,” a policeman said “We were carrying out the top layer of people and they were still alive. Those in the bottom layer were either dead or injured.” Two policemen were caught in the crush and also died as they tried to rescue those who had fallen…More than 150 people were taken to 10 hospitals in Minsk as doctors battled through the night to save the lives of the victims in the tragedy. In his speech president Lukashenko said “There is nobody to blame, there is no one to make a claim to, it happened because it happened, even if there was anybody responsible it was the rain that caused the disaster.”
Katrina relief
I’ve not posted on the tragedy that is post-Katrina New Orleans because so many others are already doing the job so well. But I don’t want to ignore it, either. The grief and fear the city and its survivors–both rescued and as-yet unrescued–are enduring right now is horrific, the heroism of the relief workers admirable. I hope, as I think all do, that everyone is evacuated safely who needs to be, and that the death toll does not rise any more.
If any of you don’t have a favorite blog or other source of information for Katrina updates, I suggest Michelle Malkin, who is doing an excellent and very thorough job.
Instapundit is organizing a blogburst today, in which each blogger chooses a charity to recommend for Katrina relief donations. All of the charities on Instapundit’s list are worthy, but I’ll suggest the tried and true Salvation Army. They’ve been doing good deeds for over a hundred years now, and one of their smallest and least important recent good deeds was to quietly and efficiently send a truck to my home last time I moved and take a whole load of goods away, to be recycled to help others. Their webpage offers a variety of easy ways to donate to Katrina relief.
Freedom fighters
The picture alone is enough to make you weep: the five Sullivan brothers, all of whom were stationed together on the USS Juneau, and all of whom died together when it was sunk in November of 1942.
Varifrank has posted the photo as the springing-off point for his thought-provoking essay on the nature of sacrifice, noble causes, the military, and the attitude of the left towards all three.
I agree with a great many of Varifrank’s points, although not all–although perhaps our differences are merely a matter of emphasis. He writes:
The left has decided that democracy is not worth fighting for, much less dying for, all the while protesting at the top of their lungs those who are bringing freedom and liberty to those who were once oppressed…We live in an interesting time. We stand within a generation of living in a world where not just the lilly-white privileged people of the western world but all mankind can be free of oppression and live in some form of democracy. There are those who are working to see that day soon come into being, and there are those working to see that it never comes. Don’’t let the left and Cindy Sheehan fool you, they couldn’’t give a damn if the rest of the world is enslaved or not. Remember–they don’’t believe in freedom and democracy in the first place.
I see this a bit differently, because I think the left is not a unitary group. I would make a distinction between what, for want of a better expression, I will call the “hard left” and the “soft left,” and certainly between the hard left and most liberals I know. The hard left is a much smaller and more vocal group than the liberal/soft left, but it’s the latter who constitute the bulk of Americans who oppose the war. Many on the hard left probably fit Varifrank’s description of their position, but those on the soft left and those who are liberals (the two groups shade into each other) are operating somewhat differently, in my opinion.
Most liberals and those on both the soft and hard left have acquired an attitude of great cynicism and distrust towards their own country and the motives of its politicians. This has led them to have a virtually automatic assumption that the government (especially any Republican government) is guilty until proven innocent. Motivated by this belief, which is held as an article of faith, most on the liberal/left side of things totally discount all the rhetoric of the Bush Administration as just that–rhetoric–and believe that the real motivation for the war is greed and power, rather than freedom and democracy.
This belief system of distrust (the template of which was formed, for a great many people of Sheehan’s generation and older, during the Vietnam and Watergate eras) is the operative one for most liberals and soft leftists, rather than any real antipathy towards the concepts of freedom and democracy themselves. The government (again, most particularly Republican governments) is not seen as allied with those abstract notions, but as deviously and clandestinely antagonistic to them, and thus betraying them.
Of course, there are some, mostly on the far left, who really don’t believe in freedom and democracy. But it’s not my impression that they constitute the majority of the opposition, although they may at times be the ones pulling the strings, and the ones most in the media (I’m not yet clear whether Cindy Sheehan is one of them, or is simply someone whose strings they are pulling at the moment).
In addition to this distrust of the government and its motives, there seems to be a knee-jerk negativity towards military action in general on the part of many liberals. Most people–even on the right–tend to see military action as a last resort; but those on the right regard the military as a necessary and integral part of keeping us free, rather than an incidental one. How is it that liberals, on the other hand, can believe (or believe they believe) in freedom and democracy, and be so reluctant to fight for it?
In addition to the aforementioned distrust that freedom and democracy are what we are fighting for, I think that many liberals have a sort of a blindness to the way that freedom and democracy actually work. The hard truth of the famous quote (often attributed to Orwell but whose origins are actually unclear), “Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf,” is one most liberals and leftists, as well as all pacifists, would prefer to deny–too messy, tragic, sad, and morally compromising. The quote is, once again, considered to be “mere rhetoric”–and inflammatory, bloodthirsty rhetoric, at that.
What is the sort of war a hard leftist might support, if a leftist was going to support a war? Again, the answer flows from distrust of our government (and in the case of hard leftists, the west in general), so the answer is pretty simple: any war waged by a third-world nation against a Western one, especially the US or Israel, with the leftists taking the side of the third-world nation.
But a liberal is different; liberals sometimes support US military action, provided it is waged by a Democratic administration (inherently more trusted by liberals to be telling the truth about its motivations for the war) and is waged for strictly and solely humanitarian aims, and thus presenting less messy moral ambiguity.
I believe that Varifrank’s analogy of soldiers in this war to police or firefighters is a correct one. But firefighters, police, and soldiers are distinct from each other. To liberal eyes, each occupies a different point on a morality continuum, with the firefighters the most “good,” the police next, and soldiers much less “good.” Why? It has to do with how much killing each group is expected to do in the service of their supposedly worthy and selfless causes–in other words, how morally “pure” their actions are.
Firefighters only rescue; they never kill, although they do sometimes die in the act of rescuing others. That makes them the most “pure” in the minds of the liberal, and the least morally compromised. Police don’t kill all that often, but it is a part of their jobs, and they have to know they may be called upon to do so. In addition, although the work police do is certainly protective, it is less clearly and directly involved with rescue than that of firefighters, and more connected with the taint of possible corruption. (At times, the radical left has not been averse to regarding police as the enemy. Anyone who was alive during the 60s and early 70s is well aware of name-calling–the oft-used epithet “pig”–and politically motivated attacks on policemen during that era.)
Soldiers are far more closely and frequently involved in the act of killing than even the police–there is simply no way around that fact–and, although they are often involved in rescue and rebuilding efforts (as Varifrank quite rightly points out), this is not their main job description. Whatever rescuing and protecting they may do (and, once again, they do plenty), these motives are less clearly and obviously related to their main activity of waging war. Unless the military is engaged in a response to a direct attack and invasion of this country, those protective and defensive functions of the military can be easily denied, ignored, or twisted by those on the outside looking in.
The hard left is, in my opinion, playing against the soft left and attempting (quite successfully, so far) to manipulate it. For those on the hard left who don’t want people to support the war and thus give the Replubicans, or the US government, any credit at all, all hint of defensive and protective war activities must be suppressed or minimized, or we run the danger of having these “soft” leftists/liberals crossing over to support the Iraq war effort.
These hard left groups who want to prevent that support from ever occurring were handed a great gift in the failure to find WMDs. The WMD argument was considered by many on the soft left to be the only proper defensive and protective argument for the war, and therefore their absence is so important, underscoring this group’s pre-existing sense of governmental betrayal. It’s also why the word “lie” is used so often in relation to Bush and the WMDs–it’s important that Bush be portrayed as mendacious (a la Nixon and the secret bombing of Cambodia) rather than merely mistaken, in order to make sure there is no sympathy for his efforts.
The failure to underscore the rebuilding efforts in Iraq is another example of the a suspicion that, were the public to know the extent and success of such efforts, sympathy for the war and the military would increase among those on the liberal/soft left side of things. So it’s all-important to the hard left that such news be supressed.
Maybe I’m naive and giving liberals too much benefit of the doubt–after all, I used to be one, remember? But I truly believe that most, if they knew some of these protective/defensive facts, would be more sympathetic to the war effort. I also believe that the hard left (and some hard left supporters in the MSM) is well aware of that, and acts accordingly.
[Linked to Mudville Gazette’s open post.]
Reading TeaV leaves in Iraq
Some would call this development just further evidence that Iraq is going downhill, fast. But I consider it an encouraging sign (via Dr. Sanity).
Therapists and liberalism
It’s no real surprise that therapists tend to be politically liberal in overwhelming numbers (therapist-bloggers notwithstanding). I can’t find a poll to back up my statement, but I don’t think too many people would seriously question it, and my own personal observations support it.
It’s funny, but until my own “conversion” and self-outing, I never really thought much about this fact. After all, most of my friends and family were also politically liberal. One thing about moving through life in a bubble is that you don’t tend to notice it that much until the bubble bursts. And then you wonder what it was that sustained that fragile, self-contained world.
So I’ve been thinking about what it is that accounts for the overwhelming liberality of therapists. It’s true, of course, that those in the social sciences, literature, and the arts generally tend to be of the liberal persuasion more often than those in the hard sciences or business; and therapy—despite assertions to the contrary—resembles an art far more than a science, I’m afraid. (It is also a business, but some therapists are in a certain amount of denial about that fact.)
In addition, there are elements within the training and belief system of most therapists that reinforce liberalism in students already predisposed to it anyway. In general, therapists—particularly those who specialize in treating individuals through talk therapy—are taught that they cannot be effective with clients if they start off with a judgmental approach. So they learn to exercise a certain suspension of judgment, a tolerance that even amounts at times to moral relativism, in order to gain the trust of clients and be able to work effectively with them.
It isn’t always easy to do this, because every person we meet triggers some reaction in us. Therapists try to understand these reactions and be aware of them in themselves (traditionally, these reactions are called “counter-transference”), and to block expressing them in a way that would hinder the therapeutic relationship. Imposing the therapist’s own ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong in the moral sense can be too directive and disruptive, and could easily trigger resistance to therapy in the client. Besides, the task of therapy is not usually seen as guidance towards some objective standard of “right” behavior; it’s seen as guidance towards self-actualization and self-expression.
Naturally, though, there are some basic and global notions of right and wrong that therapists adhere to, and that can’t help but influence the way they talk to clients and try to subtly shape behavior. To use an extreme example, no client would be encouraged to murder someone, and in fact at times the therapist would need to inform the proper authorities if the intent to murder were deemed serious.
There are so many schools of therapy–almost as many as there are sects and divisions within the major religions–that this generalization most definitely does not hold true across the board. For example, there are pastoral counselors whose “guidance” is most definitely couched in terms of traditional religious concepts of right and wrong. And over the years therapist/client confidentiality has become less absolute than it once was, since all therapists have come under the force of certain rules and regulations governing their duty to disclose or report to the proper authorities situations of abuse or threats to harm. But still, in general, I believe that I’m describing the basic attitudinal stance in which the majority of therapists are trained.
So therapists are specifically taught to practice non-judgmental openmindedness, as well as to exercise the obviously necessary skill of putting themselves imaginatively into the heart and mind of another person. This emphasis on empathy further extends the idea of openminded and nonjudgmental acceptance of the other person’s point of view.
For talk therapists, this practice is not only recommended, it’s actually required in order to effectively do the work they do. It’s one of the main things that distinguishes a therapist from a friend, a relative, a hairdresser, a bartender, a teacher, a member of the clergy, or anyone else to whom a person might turn when in need of an ear in a crisis.
Advice is easy to come by; anyone can give it. But the special thing a therapist offers is ordinarily quite different from advice. It’s an oversimplification, but ideally a therapist guides the client to see the patterns and connections in his/her own life and then to make choices that lead to a better life. But a therapist only rarely gives direct advice or makes judgments, because that thwarts the ultimate aim of therapy, which is not to tell people what to do, but to foster autonomy in clients. The goal is that clients will graduate from therapy able to solve future problems with the skills they’ve learned there.
But the nonjudgmental stance is an artificial one, adopted by therapists as a tool to be used during the therapeutic hour for the purpose of therapy. I believe some therapists make the mistake of overgeneralizing, and elevate this tool to a way of life and a generalized goal. Originally, the tool was meant to be a corrective for what was ordinarily found “out there”–harsh and punitive judgments galore from family and friends. Originally, therapy was an oasis from all that, a place where, in the absence of harsh judgment, a person could feel free to explore that which could not be explored elsewhere, and to tell truths that could not otherwise be told.
But over the years, as therapy has gone from a relatively obscure activity to a fairly common one, and therapists have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and in the self-help book business, what originally was a limited and circumscribed tool seems to have seeped into our culture and become a prescribed and generalized value. Many people have come to believe that making judgments or expressing any opinions at all about the behavior of others is a form of intolerance, almost as bad as bigotry or racism. Or they think, since negative judgments from others could harm a person’s self-esteem, and self-esteem is considered all-important—that anything that harms self-esteem (even a corrective dose of reality, or of warranted self-doubt or self-questioning) is prohibited. In a sense, the culture has become “therapized.”
I’m not saying this is all bad. But it’s an overcorrection. Opinions and judgments have their place, and without them, self-esteem can become runaway narcissism, and society can become anarchy.
In addition, in order to do the work they do, therapists have to maintain certain general beliefs. They need to maintain an attitude of hopefulness about the human condition, an ability to believe that there is good in almost everyone and that it is not so hard to create the proper conditions to activate that goodness. Once again, it’s not the attitude itself that is at fault, or its application to the therapeutic relationship; it’s the overgeneralizing that causes problems. Sometimes people are too far gone to be helped by such an approach; life, and the world, does not mimic the conditions of the therapeutic hour.
Depending on the school of therapy, some therapists (so-called “insight therapists,” for example) believe that human behavior and feelings can be understood, and, once understood, can be changed for the better by dint of that understanding. So “understanding” can be elevated to much more than an exercise in intellectual curiosity—it is sometimes considered a solution in and of itself, even to something as multifaceted and political as terrorism.
As all therapists are well aware, not everyone is what is known as a “good candidate” for therapy. Even in the very controlled situation of the one-on-one session, some people don’t respond and don’t change. There are sociopaths and psychopaths out there, to name just a few of the many who don’t do well in therapy. Even most therapists acknowledge that jails have to be built to house them and protect society from them. But the dream—of talking, leading to understanding, leading to change—dies hard.