First sign of spring: ice cream in New England

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night, as I was driving home at 7 PM in the dark and the cold, I saw some lights up ahead where there hadn’t been any lights for a while. It took a moment for it to penetrate my brain: the local ice cream stand had opened for the season.

One of the sure signs of winter’s approach—right after the brilliantly-colored leaves have finished falling and the barren landscape has turned some monochrome neutral color that defies description—is the annual closing of that ice cream stand. It gets boarded up, and a sad little sign appears saying, “See you next spring!”

The lobster restaurant—the one that boasts the panoramic view of the cliffs and the waves, with just a few tables inside but a host of them outside—shuts down, too. The summer crowds have slowly thinned out, the tourists fade away, and finally, it’s time. Even the gulls that usually hang around each summer evening, waiting for the leavings and the spoils (and sometimes not even waiting, but boldly grabbing a fried clam from a paper plate while the owner’s back is turned for a moment)—even the gulls have gone somewhere else. And the owners probably go south to Florida for a well-earned (and very well-financed) rest.

But like those Capistrano swallows, like the monarch butterflies, like the grass in my lawn that looks as though it’ll never grow again, brown and flat and scraped down to the dirt in spots by the marauding snow plow, it all returns in springtime (although not all at once).

I don’t know why the ice cream stand comes first, but it does. It’s always a shock to see it happen, because it opens in a season that’s really quite indistinguishable from winter—in fact, it is winter. Last night the thermometer in my car read thirty-five degrees when I passed by, and it actually felt colder outside because there was a bit of a wind, and it was so dark.

But that didn’t stop the intrepid customers who formed a line to wait there for their frozen confections: the soft serve and the hard, the sundaes and the shakes, the whatever it was they’d been craving and really could have gotten elsewhere inside an actual heated building. But it wouldn’t be the same, would it? If you can buy your ice cream at a stand, it means that spring actually does begin in March (I never have quite understood why it starts then; I know it has to do with the sun, but even in New York the first day of spring never felt springlike).

So, what’s up with New Englanders and ice cream? When I first moved to New England (Boston) many moons ago, I quickly noticed the ice cream stores that dotted the landscape, far more than I could ever remember seeing anywhere else, somewhat like coffee shops in Seattle (except, of course, I wouldn’t have used that comparison, because those came later). I was told that New England has the highest per capita consumption of ice cream in the nation.

Think about it. Not the South, not California: New England, the coldest part of the continental US. It makes no sense, but it appears to be true. Even Harvard Business School says so:

New England has the highest consumption of ice cream per capita in the U.S….Some experts argue that the large student population in the area drives demand. Others believe the ice cream tradition in New England is strong since the 18th Century when Nancy Johnson invented the first ice cream churn, which led to its mass production. Regardless of what the reasons might be, one thing is clear: New Englanders are obsessed with this frozen treat.

Nowadays, with modern refrigeration and tools, it’s relatively easy to make ice cream. We forget that, back when ice cream was a great and rare delicacy, it required a lot of real ice and a great deal of hand churning to create the dish. Perhaps that’s the secret to how ice cream got such a firm grip on the palates of New Englanders, and became a tradition—in those pre-Alaska days, nowhere in the US was it easier to get ice than here.

In fact, ice itself was a huge and important industry in New England in the 1800s. Here’s a website devoted to the lore of this now mostly-forgotten industry:

Harvesting natural ice became big business in New England during the 19th century. The birth of America’s large scale commercial ice industry began in New England in 1805. Frederick Tudor, a Boston merchant, created the first natural ice business in the United States. He shipped ice harvested on a pond in Lynn Massachusetts to the West Indies. Over the next thirty years Tudor made a fortune shipping ice around the world to places like Charleston, New Orleans, Cuba, Calcutta, South America, China and England. British records show that Queen Victoria purchased some ice from Massachusetts in the 1840’s.

New England ice in Calcutta. Not the sort of thing one would expect, back in the 1800s, before the days of Fedex and dry ice.

And the beginning of the death knell of the ice industry was sounded by a New Englander, too:

In 1834, Jacob Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts obtained a British patent for making artificial ice. He built a machine capable of producing ice in quantity by vaporization.

In my childhood my mother still referred to the refrigerator as the “icebox,” a relic from her own youth, when it was exactly that. We don’t have iceboxes any more, we have freezer-above or freezer-below (my personal favorite) or side-by-side or Subzero ice drawers (I don’t know anyone who actually has them, although they apparently do exist). But we have a relic of those times—at least, I like to think so—in these long lines of New Englanders, braving the cold to toast the long-anticipated return of spring with some ice cream.

Cry havoc: binding up the dogs of war

The New Neo Posted on by

He’s done it again; here’s a must-read post from Wretchard of Belmont Club.

It was sparked by an article by Robert Kaplan appearing in the Atlantic (subscribers only), entitled “The Coming Normalcy.” This, in turn, was a sequel to an earlier article by Kaplan that appeared twelve years ago in the same venue, entitled “The Coming Anarchy.”

The theme of the earlier article was:

…the institutional collapse of Third World countries owing to ethnic and sectarian rivalries, demographic and environmental stresses, and the growing interrelationship between war and crime.

In his new piece Kaplan is revisiting these issues in light of what has happened in Iraq so far. Since I don’t have access to the new article, I went back and skimmed the old one, which I recall reading a couple of years ago. A great deal of it is about Africa and about the role of future environmental pressures causing further societal meltdowns. This may all come to pass, but it’s not the subject at hand.

These predictive bits were interesting in light of later developments:

[W]ar-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more. “From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict” in the West than at any time “for the last 300 years,” Van Creveld writes….

[T]echnology will be used toward primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson didn’t just cut off the ears of President Samuel Doe before Doe was tortured to death in 1990–Johnson made a video of it, which has circulated throughout West Africa…

Sound familiar? It certainly did to me.

The thrust of Kaplan’s new article and Wretchard’s post is the question of how to tackle the problem of anarchy in societies and in nations. Although twelve years ago Kaplan saw the situation as very dark, he now sees at least a tiny glimmer of light.

Most people, of course, see the war in Iraq as evidence of increasing anarchy, whereas Kaplan sees it as a release of anarchic forces that have existed for a long time but were previously contained only by the strong and vicious arm of another pernicious force, a tyrannical dictator (in this case, Saddam). Now, finally, we are actually trying to counter those forces of anarchy; not an easy task, to say the least.

“Rebuilding” Iraq differs from, and may be more difficult than, rebuilding Germany and Japan after WWII. It seems to me that it may have been easier to counter the forces of the latter–political opinions that had been tried and proven wanting, and a population exhausted from fighting and virtually out of ammunition but which had a previous tradition of being law-abiding and cohesive–than it ever would be to counter the forces of societal anarchy in a country such as Iraq, which has been spiraling down for quite some time now, and was never cohesive as a country to begin with.

I remember reading, prior to the Iraq War, that Saddam had released the criminals from his jails. It increased my sense of grave foreboding; Saddam seemed to be saying, “Cry ‘havoc!’ and let loose the dogs of war.”

Havoc. Definition: “widespread destruction; devastation; disorder or chaos.” Unfortunately Saddam had plenty of time during the long buildup prior to the war to plot his course and intentionally amplify havoc (which was increased post-war by the actions of neighbors such as Iran and Syria). But chaos and anarchy were simmering under the surface anyway, and their extent was probably underestimated.

It puts me in mind of the end of the Soviet Union. Back in those days, when I didn’t spend so much time thinking about politics, events there caught my attention nevertheless. When the Soviet Union fell in such a surprising and sudden way, a fair amount of anarchy ensued rather than the more hopeful visions of the future that many had shared. Crime, for instance, had never been a problem in Soviet Russia; now it was a huge and even sometimes controlling factor.

When I thought about it, I went back to my college days as a student of anthropology (yes, I had a minor in anthropology as well as that major in psychology. Just a touchy-feely type, after all). The idea was that, once a society becomes chaotic, it’s a Humpty-Dumpty situation: very difficult to go back and put that smashed egg together again.

But in Iraq, and in Russia before it, the egg was apparently quite broken to begin with. Totalitarian regimes are often both a response to a situation that is somewhat chaotic already (that is how many dictators come to rule) and, as time goes on, a means of increasing the underlying chaos while appearing to contain it. But, as we’ve learned over and over again, that appearance is illusory and temporary.

What are some of the ways dictatorships increase the tendency towards the breakdown of societal cohesiveness, and increase underlying chaos? By stifling initiative and murdering those who show it, or who show bravery and the willingness to speak out; by dismantling local governmental and cultural institutions and replacing them with top-down bureaucracies; and also by fostering suspicion, fear, bottled rage, and the desire for revenge.

So Iraq was already broken, as is much of the third world today. And into the breach has marched a criminal element, as it did in Russia back in the early 90s.

We should not underestimate the prevalence and influence of crime and criminals in the so-called “insurgency.” As Wretchard writes:

Kaplan describes how much of what passes for an insurgency is actually crime which had escaped the modus vivendi it had enjoyed under Saddam but had now been dislocated from its old containing vessel. Reining in this chaos meant constructing a new order to replace Saddam’s.

Here, for example, is how it works in Iraq:

“You’re dealing with a gang mentality,” explained Captain Phillip Mann of Antioch, California, a thirty-two-year-old intelligence officer and graduate of Fresno State University. “There is a pool of young men in Mosul without jobs who sell drugs, and do kidnappings. With a high inflation rate and little economy, being an insurgent pays. You’ve got to make the insurgency a very unattractive profession to these people, who are not motivated by religious ideology.”

And here’s the solution, or at least part of the solution:

“We’ve adopted a gang-tackle approach,” Mann went on. “If we get shot at, like in Palestine [a retirement community for former regime generals in southeast Mosul, which supported the insurgents], we surround the area and go house to house, every time. We keep doing this till people get tired and start helping us. Our message: ”˜We don’t give in””we’re not going away, so work with us.’

According to Wretchard, it’s not just Bush’s fault that our present tools are not always effective in dealing with these problems:

One of Kaplan’s recurring assertions in The Coming Normalcy is that the American shortcomings for dealing with situations like Iraq — which he views as prototypical of an anarchic Third World society — go far beyond any defects in planning for the invasion of Iraq peculiar to the Bush administration. In Kaplan’s view the long-established bureaucratic instruments are simply structured wrongly: they are too monolithic and uncoordinated to effectively transform any typical anarchy into democratic order. He thinks the armed forces, whose lives are at stake, have adapted most by pushing responsibility downward to the brigade rather than the divisional level. “Flattening” the decision-making and intelligence cycle process has helped the Army and Marines get on top of the military aspects of the insurgency, but it hasn’t helped reconstruction much. Everywhere he went, soldiers and Marines asked, ‘where is USAID, where is the State Department?’ And the answer unfortunately, was that neither USAID nor the State Department had the money or the bureaucratic configuration to fight a joint battle with the military against the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.

I can’t improve on the way Wretchard has phrased it, so I’ll quote him (emphasis mine}:

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states… after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained…

It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq . Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue “states” will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.

The answer–the long, hard slog of an answer, although it only takes a sentence of Wretchard’s to state–is, “learning how to use force to allow indigenous order to emerge.”

This, to me, was always the goal of the Iraq War, and the war on terror as a whole. It’s why I have never seen it as a police action, as do those who believe we just need to go after Al Qaeda and Osama and all will be well again.

Perhaps, in the end, that’s the greatest difference between those who are hawkish on this war and those who oppose it: the former believe the unleashed chaos was not avoidable, and needed to be dealt with sooner rather than later, because dealing with it was inevitable and waiting would only allow those forces to build. The latter didn’t see the problem as systemic or deep, and thought the best approach was piecemeal, sporadic, and should be more or less in line with previous policy but a bit intensified. Those on the left who were against the war thought that any chaos involved was the fault of our government and its actions, and that we had created and were responsible for it. Those on the right who were against the war felt that taking the lid off would be a cure worse than the disease.

In the end, one’s position on the matter probably depends on how one diagnoses the disease. Was it a small set of carbuncles that could be easily lanced (police action), or a chronic illness that just needed some intervention here and there but nothing drastic (isolationist and/or realpolitik)? Or was it a lethal illness that had probably already metastasized, and needed a strong dose of powerful and dangerous medicine to have any hope of cure (neocon, interventionist)?

On September 11, it became to me for the first time–although in retrospect it should have been clear far earlier–that havoc was abroad, and the dogs of war had been loosed. I believed then, and still believe now, that binding them up was going to be a long, hard, difficult, and worldwide effort, one with many hazards along the way, one that would not be perfectly executed–and one that would have to confront the underlying problem of chaos and failed states if it ever was going to be successful.

Sad, sad news: Dana Reeve dies

The New Neo Posted on by

This extremely sad news greeted me when I went to Yahoo to check my email today: “Christopher Reeve’s Widow Dies at Age 44.”

I can’t say I followed the entire saga of the Reeve family all that closely, but I certainly knew the basic facts, and I knew that Dana Reeve was diagnosed with lung cancer not that long after her husband’s death, and that they had a young child. When I read the news today of her death, my first thought was of him and how much profound tragedy he’s had to deal with already in his young life.

Yes, his parents loved him, and yes, they gave him an example of extraordinary courage in their all-too-shortened lives. I’m sure there are relatives who will take him in, and his mother certainly had a lot of time to plan for that and to prepare him as best she could.

But something like this cannot be prepared for, not really.

I know there are worse tragedies on the face of the earth than this, but this one is bad enough. Having watched the family over the years, and admired the classy bravery of this woman, it made my stomach sink when I read the news.

On another note, notice the article’s repeated insistence on the fact that Dana was not a smoker, despite her lung cancer. This seemed important to the writer to state, and I suppose it is.

But I sense a certain subtle subtext here: the notion that we might somehow control our health if we just do it right, if we follow all the rules. There’s a certain smugness, and a whistling in the dark–because of course, as in the old clichés, no one gets out of here alive, and shit happens. Do only the good die young? No, of course not. But we certainly notice it when they do.

And we like to think we have more control over things than is the case. Yes, indeed, smoking is a huge cause of lung cancer, and I applaud everyone who manages to quit and discourage anyone from starting. But it’s not easy for lifelong smokers to stop, not at all.

I have perhaps a special interest in this story because I have a female relative who is currently fighting lung cancer, a woman in her fifties who smoked a long time ago and quit a long time ago, with only the occasional cigarette in recent decades. What category does she fall into: smoker, nonsmoker, hybrid? I refuse to condemn her in any way, or blame her. I simply offer her my love, my prayers, my support, and my hope that she licks this thing.

In praise of spam

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever could be good about spam?

No, not that kind, this kind. The kind I remember not all that fondly from my youth, when every home (including mine) sported a few cans in the cupboard.

In my house, they were placed up high, where I couldn’t reach them–not that I ever wanted to. I’d eaten Spam a few times and found it somewhat wanting, although I wasn’t exactly a toddler gourmet (baloney on Wonder Bread, I seem to recall, was my idea of Awfully Good. And Kraft dinner–macaroni and cheese–my absolute favorite).

Spam has become a pejorative. But if you follow the link you’ll find that during WWII it was a lifesaver, literally. In fact, it may have been responsible for Hitler’s defeat.

What am I talking about? Have I taken leave of my senses? Well, see here:

Nikita Krushchev once credited SPAM with the survival of the WWII Russian army. ”Without SPAM, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army,” he said.

And it’s not only the survival of the Russian army. It may be the secret to the survival of none other than Robert Byrd (although, with its approximately 82% fat content, it’s a bit hard to see how):

Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia eats a sandwich of SPAM and mayonnaise on white bread three times a week.

That’s a lotta Spam. More, even, than I got here before I installed Blogger’s word verification system in my comments section.

Other Spam facts of interest: developed in 1926, it was the first canned meat product that didn’t require refrigeration. But it didn’t take off until 1937, when its old name (“Hormel Spiced Meat”) was changed, as the result of a contest, to the winning classic, “Spam.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

The skinny on the Oscars

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, I watched the Oscars last night, at least intermittently, although I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been invited to a party where Oscar-watching was the stated activity.

And I just need to say this: what’s up with the starvation thing? The women in Hollywood have always been pretty slim, but this is getting ridiculous. For the most part, they looked ghastly and skeletal.

And what’s with the rags, and the bows on the shoulder the size of mini-me?

And please, olive green doesn’t suit hardly anybody, especially for evening wear.

My favorite blog remark on the proceedings was this one:

Manolo loves the Dolly Parton! Even if she is slowly being carved into the simalacrum of Joan Rivers.

Dolly, you’ve jumped the shark, I’m afraid. Please eat something, and stay away from Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon.

Why don’t I write about (take your pick)

The New Neo Posted on by

I often get emails or comments asking me why don’t I write about this or that or the other topic. Every now and then I do take people up on one of these suggestions (for example, this post was written after someone recommended the article in question to me). So I’m not trying to discourage suggestions; not at all. But I only write about things that happen to interest me. I’m funny that way.

A different kettle of fish entirely are comments that challenge me in a very hostile way to take up a certain topic. I get such “requests” rather frequently. They remind me a bit of being called out for a duel; I expect to see the seconds come around any minute with the pistols. There’s certain macho quality of “I dare you, and if you don’t take me up on it, I feel free to consider you to have conceded my point by inaction.”

Same answer to those challengers: if interested, I write. If not, I don’t. It’s really quite simple.

I’m not here on assignment. That’s one of the nice things about blogging, as opposed to being a journalist or a student: I really only have to write about what I happen to want to write about.

Oh, some topics are more exciting than others. Sometimes I think I’m interested in writing about something and then run out of steam halfway. Some of those posts never see the cyberlight of day; some do.

I often don’t quite know where a post is going when I begin it; sometimes it’s only at the end that things come clear (or at least as clear as they’re ever going to get). But I usually start out with an idea, or a series of linking ideas (often a great rush of them), or a question, or a mystery. There’s some sort of spark, some “aha!” or “hmmm, I wonder” moment that begins the whole thing. I find myself writing on those little notepapers, and/or ruminating while doing other things (especially exercising). A little monologue starts in the brain, and sometimes it can be quite insistent and demanding.

You may have noticed I don’t always write on the topic du jour. I like to do research and look at things in-depth, and I’m especially interested in stories of change. I like to look at things broadly and make connections, sometimes even in ways that (if I may say so) are surprising and original (I think those are often my favorites, although they can be hard to write). I enjoy uncovering some piece of history and trying to connect it to things that are happening today.

So when I get an e-mail asking me why don’t I write about such and such–for example, the port controversy–my answer is that I don’t write about certain things because they just don’t grab me. That’s not to say they’re not important, or that I have absolutely nothing to say about them. It’s just that it all takes a lot of time and effort to research, and I have to feel some sort of inspiration to do so–and, more importantly, I need to believe I have something fresh or unusual or personal or meaningful to say about it.

About that port controversy, I don’t. And it’s not a topic that’s exactly been crying out for want of attention. Nearly every aspect of it has been aired in the MSM and on the blogs, and I just don’t have anything to add that seems worth taking the trouble to say. I’ve read on both sides and, although at first I was against the deal, I now see some decent arguments that go in the other direction.

So, I’m skipping it–and many many other stories as well. I’m not running a wire service, and I’m not a newspaper trying to give readers an overview of everything that’s happening. I’m not even Instapundit, although sometimes I wish I were.

I walk fast for exercise, and if the weather’s not good I go to the health club and use the treadmill. It seems very conducive to thinking about the posts that do interest me. It’s almost as though my thoughts go round as though they’re on a treadmill, too (the treadmills of your mind?–I song I’ve never liked, by the way). When that happens, I know I’ve got my topic. All I have to do is write it.

[ADDENDUM: Dean Esmay, same subject.]

The left and the US: blaming the parent

The New Neo Posted on by

There are certain themes I keep coming back to, and one has to do with the mindset of liberals and those on the left (different, but at times related). It may seem to be an obsession of sorts, but I don’t think so–it’s just something that I encounter a lot, both in my “real” life and in the comments section here.

Many aspects of this mindset continue to puzzle me–like the old Beatles lyric, I could say about the left and liberals, “I thought I knew you; what did I know.”

So, in the constant and ever-evolving attempt to Understand Them (old habits die hard), I wanted to quote a note I received from Marc Danziger, Armed Liberal of Winds of Change, on the topic of why the left seems to act as though the US is the font of all evil:

I’ve thought for a while that this was a form (forgive me for stepping on your turf) of narcissism – they think that we (our culture, the West) are so powerful that we are, in effect, omnipotent. So of course we can get the bad guys without hurting them; of course we need rules to contain our strength. Because we’re so strong that everything that happens anywhere in the world is a reflection of something we do or have done.

I’m sure all of this ties into things I–or Dr. Sanity, or Shrinkwrapped, or SC&A, all of us psychobloggers–have written before. I’m too lazy to search for the links right now, but I’m hoping you’ll take my word for it.

What Armed Liberal says is correct, and at the risk of repeating myself I’d like to say it also reminds me of the relation of a child to parent. To the child, the parent is omnipotent, and perfection is demanded and easily achievable. Everything that goes wrong must be the parent’s fault, that much is clear; otherwise, the world would become a much more frightening place.

Because the truth is that if the parent is not omnipotent, or can’t ever become perfect, then the child is exposed to truly frightening dangers that he/she is unequipped to handle. So it’s far better to preserve the myth of parental omnipotence and perfection, and to get angry at a parent who, after all, (at least ordinarily, in the absence of major pathology) loves the child and is not about to retaliate harshly against that child.

The child knows the parent is strong enough to absorb the blow, so it’s safe to direct the blame and the anger where it won’t be dangerous to do so (if the US were really as bad as extreme leftists say, they’d all be in jail or worse). It’s a win-win situation for the child, who gets to “vent,” and to feel that the world isn’t such a dangerous place, knowing the parent will not strike back and harm the child.

I’m not saying leftists–or those liberals who join the “blame America first, often, loudly, and last” chorus–are children. They are not. But in their relationship to their own government they seem to be acting out a similar dynamic.

Ex-Taliban at Yale: another changed mind?

The New Neo Posted on by

The cover of last Sunday’s NY Times caught my eye with the following teaser: He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?

Okay, I’ll bite. What’s he doing there, indeed?

Well, according to the article, by Chip Brown, he’s doing what most of the students at Yale are doing (or are supposed to be doing): studying.

In Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s case, the subject is mostly political science. He’s a guy who got a lot of on-the-job experience in the field, as the Taliban’s chief spokesperson abroad until the war that brought them down.

Rahmatullah has something to say about that, too:

Some of what I am studying at Yale in theory I think I have already learned in practice. Theory is always distant. Theory and experience hardly ever meet. I was more confident in 2001 than I am now. I was probably a better speaker then, because everything was so new to me. Before I was meeting high-ranking people ”” learning how to interact, how to argue, how to make points, how to write letters. I think I’m forgetting it now. I see myself not being focused enough. It’s easier to learn in practice than in theory.”

His Yale experience isn’t the first change for Rahmatullah. He’s twenty-seven years old, but he’s already lived several lifetimes. One of seven children born to a Pashtun family that exiled to Pakistan during the Soviet invasion, his childhood wasn’t easy. He had to drop out of regular school at the age of ten, but he did manage to enroll and learn English in a training school for Afghan refugees established by an American charity.

This knowledge of English proved to be the ticket to the rest of his life, which involved a return to Afghanistan when the Taliban came to power at the end of the bloody civil war that followed the Soviet invasion and pullout. Like many, he originally saw the Taliban as a force for order and peace in a nation torn by decades of strife and death:

“I went with my father to see Kandahar and our village,” he recalled in the late-afternoon hush of the Commons dining hall. “The reason why the Taliban were so successful at first was they were seen as the ultimate good guys. They stabilized the country. The areas they controlled were unique for peace and security. I said to my father, ‘I really want to join them.'”

So at sixteen Rahmatullah got his wish: he became an English translator for the Taliban. As such, his attraction to the group never seems to have been especially ideological–at least as he now tells it. There is, of course, no way to know whether he’s just spinning things again, for an American reporter and an American audience.

At any rate, this is his story:

Truth be told, Rahmatullah was beginning to wonder about some aspects of life with the Taliban. He was appointed to the position of diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, and when Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil became foreign minister in 2000, he made Rahmatullah a “roving ambassador.” The international image of the Taliban was increasingly dominated by the Vice and Virtue busybodies who were checking the lengths of beards and thrashing women with leather straps and herding crowds into the Kabul soccer stadium to witness lashings amputations and executions. Even among ordinary people, he was increasingly reluctant to appear in his black turban. Before long he found himself wrapping on turbans of a less controversial color.

“I felt better not being distinguished,” he said.

These doubts didn’t prevent young Rahmatullah from going abroad in 1999 as a translator and a sort of roving ambassador to try to improve the Taliban’s image. He managed to visit the Gulf states, Switzerland, France, Holland, Denmark, and Germany–and then in 2000, through an American he’d met in Afghanistan named Hoover (who later was instrumental in helping him go to Yale), the US.

The article describes an interesting exchange in terms of how minds change, or begin to change, or might begin to change. The following incident occurred when Hoover and Rahmatullah were first in Afghanistan:

Over the next three weeks, Hoover and Rahmatullah traveled around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and formed a deep friendship. One night, a week or so into the trip, Hoover was sitting on the floor of the foreign office guest house in Kandahar, drinking tea as Rahmatullah and some other Taliban peeled potatoes and onions. Rahmatullah asked him a question.

“Do you believe people are related to dogs?”

Dogs are not favored in Afghan society; the question dared him to contradict common sense.

“Yes,” Hoover said.

The Taliban all laughed in amazement.

“How can you possibly believe that? We are so different.”

“You see only differences. I see similarities.”

“Similarities! Like what?”

Hoover wanted his first example to be an intellectual bunker buster, so he thought carefully.

“Bilateral symmetry,” he said. The laughter stopped, which pleased him.

“What does that mean?”

“It means dogs have eyes on either side of their nose, just like humans. Dogs have two nostrils, just like humans. They have two lungs. They have toenails. They have a heart in the center of their chest. Dog blood and human blood are indistinguishable.”

Recalling the exchange not long ago, Hoover said: “Now you could hear a pin drop ”” and it was a dirt floor. They were starting to get uneasy. There was a dog right outside. It was scraggly and covered with sores; I think the appropriate word for it would be ‘cur.’ When I finished laying out how they might be genetically related to the cur outside, they went off and started talking among themselves very intently. What they were discussing and what they wanted to understand was if what I was saying was true, would it fit within the teachings of the Koran. After a long time they came to the conclusion that it would.”

In this case, the new thought was absorbed into the old system; I assume without a change in basic beliefs. But it’s still an example of the ways in which beliefs can begin to change, an example of some flexibility when confronted with new information, and a willingness to listen to that information and not reject it out of hand.

In his US tour, Rahmatullah ended up lecturing and trying to defend the Taliban, despite what he says were his own doubts at the time. Audiences were often quite hostile; the majority of the verbal attacks he tried to counter (mostly unsuccessfully) were about the Taliban’s curtailment of women’s rights and their religious intolerance, particularly around the planned destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

In fact, a clip of one of his unfinest hours ended up in the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It featured a woman in the audience accusing the Taliban of crimes against women, and Rahmatullah answering, “I’m really sorry to your husband. He must have a very difficult time with you.”

But as Rahmatullah reports things, his doubts had increased about these aspects of Taliban rule, aspects he’d never really cared for in the first place. When he returned home, he says:

I nearly got into a fight with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Mullah Saqib, who had verified the edict to demolish the Bamiyan Buddhas,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why can’t we have women’s education?’ And he said, ‘We’ll have it later.’ I said: ‘There isn’t any time. Why are we waiting?’ He said to me, ‘I think you were really indoctrinated by America.’ That really ticked me off. I wanted something good for Afghanistan. I was saying what I was saying because it was for the good of Afghanistan, not because I was being paid by the C.I.A. He was a sycophant ”” he didn’t want to upset the conservatives.”

After the events of 9/11 the writing was on the wall and Rahmatullah’s entire family left Afghanistan soon after, leaving for the old haunts in Pakistan. Rahmatullah lay low for quite a while, then in 2003 took his high school equivalency exam and ended up returning to Afghanistan and undergoing an interrogation process that cleared his name with American authorities there. After that, Hoover resurfaced and started a long chain of events that ended up with the somewhat startling result that Rahmatullah came to Yale as a special student studying political science.

Here’s how a friend describes him now:

When you see him, you wouldn’t believe he’s the same guy. He chills with us, he cracks jokes with us. He’s a fundamentalist in the way he believes in the essence of religion, but he’s not an extremist at all. He gives you intellectual answers versus dogmatic answers. He’s very serious and disciplined about his education. He missed a class once and was horror-struck. I said, ‘Dude, we miss classes all the time!’ You can tell he’s seen a lot just by the aura around him. But even though he’s seen a lifetime of experience already, he’s young. He’s thirsty for the innocence of life without war, emigration, bombs, politics, danger. Everyone needs a time to be young.”

And this is what Rahmatullah himself says now about the whole thing:

I regret when people think of the Taliban and then think of me ”” that feeling people have after they know I was affiliated with them is painful to me. When I read that the neo-Taliban are burning girls’ schools, I am ashamed.”

Many distinctions could be drawn between his old life and his life at Yale. But he had seized on one.

“You have to be reasonable to live in America,” he said. “Everything here is based on reason. Even the essays you write for class. Back home you have to talk about religion and culture, and you can win any argument if you bring up the Islamic argument. You can’t reason against religion. But you cannot change Afghanistan overnight. You can’t bring the Enlightenment overnight.”

Well, I’m not at all sure I’d agree with him that everything in the US is based on reason, even at Yale.

And even neocons understand that you can’t bring the Enlightenment overnight to a place such as Afghanistan.

But if one accepts Rahmatullah’s story at face value, or even as an approximation of the truth, one has to believe that change is possible, especially in the young. The force of reason is probably one of the most important tools towards effecting that change. Not for dogs, perhaps (despite the points of resemblance to us that Hoover pointed out to the Taliban)–but for humans beings, whose innate capacity for reason doesn’t seem to vary very much throughout the world, despite cultural differences in the expression of that potential.

[NOTE: I’m fully aware that some may quarrel with affording Rahmatullah the opportunity to study at Yale and to be in this country at all, considering his background. And I’m likewise aware, as I said in the article, that he may be dissembling about his actual point of view, both then and now. In fact, much of the talk around the blogosphere about Rahmatullah is universally against his being at Yale. The point of this post is not to take a position on that one way or the other–I myself have some doubts about the whole endeavor.

I found, on a quick perusal of posts about this subject throughout the blogosphere, that none of their authors seem to have taken the time to carefully read the original article and to analyze what might have gone on with Rahmatullah himself. Because my particular interest is different–understanding political change–I’ve written this post from that perspective. And so I’ve decided to take the article at face value, because if it does in fact represent what actually happened, I believe it’s another fascinating case of change. At this moment, my personal opinion is that it has the ring of truth. Either that, or Rahmatullah is an excellent spin doctor indeed–which is certainly possible, in which case the change would be no change at all.]

War: the why, and the how

The New Neo Posted on by

Dean Esmay has an interesting theory on the bottom-line cause of war. He writes:

I believe that the source for all real wars–not violent outbursts, but wars–is: those who fight believe it is ultimately in their self-interest to fight…. En masse, people fight to the death for something only when they think they have more to gain by killing than by not killing, more to gain by risking death than by accepting the status quo. Everything else is just peripheral.

I think Dean is right about the self-interest part; but I disagree on the “just peripheral” part. The self-interest factor may indeed be a sort of overarcing meta-reason, but it doesn’t stand alone, and the “peripherals” are pretty central, IMHO.

Not that Dean is suggesting this–but no one wakes up one morning and says, “You know, it’s in my interest to fight a war, so I think I’ll start one” (no, not even George W. Bush). There are always other reasons present, and most of the time they include at least one or two of those listed by Dean as the usual suspects: hate, rage, spite, envy, avarice, pride, ethnic tension, and religious tension.

Dean’s post brought to mind a related topic, a somewhat controversial idea I’ve heard of about wars and how they are fought (not the “why” of which Dean speaks,” but the “how”). The principle may not hold true for Western countries fighting highly mechanized wars–but there’s a body of research that indicates that, at least in third world countries, local wars are fought most often in areas in which there is a surplus of young men, preferably unemployed.

How valid this research is, I don’t know; I haven’t studied it in any depth. But it makes a certain amount of sense, especially in economically strapped areas such as Africa where there is a great deal of sectarian civil-war strife.

This is not the same thing as saying “poverty causes war.” It doesn’t. Nor does it cause suicide bombers. But the combination of lack of employment and a surplus of young men provides an especially fertile field for the recruitment of willing participants in a conflict, men who happen to be of just the right age and the right gender, and who have a lot of time on their hands with not too much else going on otherwise that might tie them down.

Here’s a discussion of the phenomenon as it relates to civil wars and localized conflicts in particular (and perhaps these are the ones Dean means by the phrase “violent outbursts,” which he excludes from his definition of wars):

First of all, it is a common feature of livelihood conflicts that the rank and file of most atrocious militias around the world are filled by large cohorts of young men, who have been subjected to a rapid devaluation of their expectations as a result of loss of family livelihoods, and forced to accept a much more lowly situation in society than they had been led to believe they were entitled to, in their position as men.

In such situations, and if they are unable to find alternative livelihoods, in the cities, or in other sectors than agriculture, young men are extremely easy to mobilize in one or another movement, or even militia – particularly if they are promised land, livelihoods, or even just looting…

Every society is filled with fault lines. In good times they may be relatively unimportant. When times get tough, however, they provide an easy channel to pit one segment of unemployed young men against another, and thus to mobilize them.

If you are unscrupulous enough, it is easy to mobilize an ethnic army of discontented young men – provided they have been subjected to the rapid process of loss of livelihoods. When times are good, young men are not that easily mobilized to commit atrocities against a part of the population in their own country.

A book has been written on a related subject, although I haven’t read it and therefore can’t vouch for its quality. It’s entitled Bare Branches : The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population , written by Valerie M. Hudson, Andrea M. den Boer.

Here’s a summary:

…historically, high male-to-female ratios often trigger domestic and international violence. Most violent crime is committed by young unmarried males who lack stable social bonds. Although there is not always a direct cause-and-effect relationship, these surplus men often play a crucial role in making violence prevalent within society. Governments sometimes respond to this problem by enlisting young surplus males in military campaigns and high-risk public works projects. Countries with high male-to-female ratios also tend to develop authoritarian political systems.

Hudson and den Boer suggest that the sex ratios of many Asian countries, particularly China and India — which represent almost 40 percent of the world’s population — are being skewed in favor of males on a scale that may be unprecedented in human history. Through offspring sex selection (often in the form of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide), these countries are acquiring a disproportionate number of low-status young adult males, called “bare branches” by the Chinese.

Hudson and den Boer argue that this surplus male population in Asia’s largest countries threatens domestic stability and international security. The prospects for peace and democracy are dimmed by the growth of bare branches in China and India, and, they maintain, the sex ratios of these countries will have global implications in the twenty-first century.

If the theory is in fact valid in the first place, I still think there are a few things that might make it less operative in China and India than in some other areas of the world: economic development there means fewer of these males are likely to be unemployed in the future; both countries have a mechanized military–as compared to that of Africa, for example; both countries have stable, ancient, and relatively cohesive cultures that would tend to mitigate the sort of local, civil war type of violence that I believe is most associated with these population imbalances; and both countries seem to be in the process of discouraging the selective abortion of female babies (it is now illegal, although that’s not too difficult to circumvent), the practice that had lead to such great imbalance in the first place.

So I’m not at all sure that the Bare Branches premise will pan out, and I certainly hope it won’t. But it’s food for thought.

Fear: charges and counter-charges (the only thing we have to fear is…)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been a bit puzzled as to why neocons have been accused so often of being motivated by fear in taking the policy positions they do (see this, for example).

When I’ve written here about the evolution of my own opinions, I don’t see fear as predominating, or even as taking an especially active role. In addition, I would wonder about the emotional makeup of any ordinary citizen who didn’t have at least a tiny bit of fear after watching the events of 9/11 unfold, or on observing the spectacle of suicide bombers who seem to relish and seek out the murder of women and children.

But now, reading this post at All Things Beautiful, about the lawsuit brought recently by the NY Times against the US Defense Department, in which the newspaper seeks to gain access to documents about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program, I had one of those sudden Eureka moments. Here’s the money quote from Alexandra:

As I have always said, the left hates the President far more than it fears al-Qaeda, therefore any arguments of this nature [that the release of the documents threatens national security] will simply be filed as some sort of phobia, with different words attached to it….that is until the next attack.

Concerns about the dangers posed by terrorists, hesitations about the wisdom of press leakage of possibly sensitive security material, all of these must be labeled as unwarranted fears–as Alexandra explains, “as some sort of phobia”–so that they can safely be ignored to pursue a different agenda. And what is that agenda?

It seems to have two interrelated parts. The first is to have a role in bringing down a detested President–and in this, there is precedent. Apparently, the Times is aching to relive its dragon-slayer days (Richard Nixon being the original dragon): the publication of the Pentagon Papers, when the Supreme Court upheld the Time‘s right to do so despite government claims of national security threats. The aftermath of this lawsuit helped to bring Nixon down–with his own guilty cooperation, of course, since the Watergate burglary was motivated partly by a desire to get the goods on Pentagon Papers leaker Ellsberg (see this).

In 1997, Adam Clymer of the Times wrote, in a review of a new book–The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case, by David Rundestine:

The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the Pentagon Papers case was a monumental victory for The New York Times and The Washington Post and a huge defeat for the Nixon Administration. In practical terms, it meant that the United States Government bears an awesome — perhaps impossible — burden before it can censor the press. But the opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan did not tell courts how to weigh that burden, though it made clear that a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.

So, “a just claim of injury to the national security is not enough.” Think about it: what would be enough? How bad an injury to the national security is sufficient to muffle a story, and how certain does this injury have to be?

The Pentagon Papers case marks the point at which the Court set the bar very high in favor of the press and against the government’s ability to claim national security as a reason to stifle information. In his Times article, Clymer goes on to dismiss the book’s contentions that the Pentagon Papers’ publication represented an actual threat to national security. I’d have to do a lot more research on that subject to venture an opinion as to how large a threat was posed; I simply don’t know. But the book’s author, David Rudenstine, certainly thinks the danger was a bona fide one:

[Author] Mr. Rudenstine, an associate dean at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University, has spent years getting access to secret transcripts and briefs. He uses them to make it clear that Government witnesses like Lieut. Gen. Melvin Zais honestly believed that the country could be harmed by further publication… But Mr. Rudenstine’s most striking conclusion — that there were real threats to the nation in the papers — is debatable….

So Rudenstine came to the “striking” conclusion that the attempt to stifle the Papers’ publication was not just a grudge match by Nixon against the press, but motivated (at least in part) by an honest belief that publication would be dangerous–and that this contention has legs.

And who is Rundenstine? Some Republican party hack, a hawkish Nixon-loving neocon? Apparently not, if you study his bio, here (scroll down a little bit and you’ll find it). He seems to have typical liberal bona fides, with a background in the ACLU, legal services, and the Peace Corps. And here’s another similar bio of Rudenstine, which includes the fact that he is ex-Harvard President Neil Rudenstine’s brother.

I would have imagined that if someone such as David Rudenstine had contended that there was a bona fide case to be made by the Nixon White House of an actual possible threat to national security when the Times published the Pentagon Papers, that Clymer would have paid quite a bit more attention to it than he did. As it is, his dismissal of Rundenstine’s claim seems perfunctory, at best. It’s hard to escape the notion that Clymer’s review is a poorly-disguised a case of butt-covering, by the Times, for the Times, and of the Times.

(As a little aside, while researching Adam Clymer for this post, I was reminded that Clymer himself had a subsequent moment in the sun; apparently, he was the Times reporter whom Bush called a “major-league asshole” during the 2000 campaign, to which Cheney responded “big-time.”)

So, going back to Alexandra’s quoted accusation about leftists–it seems that the NY Times, as well, could be considered to have a history of hating (or fearing?) certain Republican Presidents more than it fears the consequences of its own national security disclosures.

But I mentioned that the “neocons are motivated by fear” accusation has a second (although absolutely related) agenda, and that is fear of the consequences of overreaching by the executive branch of the government. Many conservatives have this fear, too (and libertarians are extraordinarily sensitive to it). But it’s a question of at what point each group draws the line between acceptable intrusions and unacceptable ones, and what they might consider justification for those intrusions. National security is far more likely to be considered a justification by conservatives than by liberals or leftists, who have a history of seeming to actively downplay such concerns.

The legacy of Vietnam is that the left has a lingering mindset that considers national security concerns to almost always be mere excuses for government spying. This is the sort of approach that led to the famous CIA/FBI firewall (I discuss the firewall’s development here)). The left, and many liberals, seem to feel that the raising of security issues in these situations is almost always bogus–a sort of screen, used by a proto-totalitarian government to cover its own misuse of power, with the goal of getting away with domestic spying on its enemies, and the further consolidation of its own power.

If this is the conception, then national security concerns must be downplayed in almost all cases, and the role of fear as motivation for those concerns exaggerated instead. The fear of many leftists/liberals is a different one: the evil Cheney is going to tap their phones and look up their library history, to be used for his own nefarious purposes. (That’s not even too much of an exaggeration: I’ve had friends express as much to me, and it sure didn’t sound as though they were joking.)

There’s an interesting cyclical process going on here: the publication of the Pentagon Papers was one of Nixon’s motivations for Watergate, which in fact did represent an abuse of power by the executive branch, which led to further checks (such as the firewall) on that power, which in turn hampered the government’s capability to conduct surveillance of terrorists, which then was part of the reason 9/11 wasn’t prevented, which later led to Bush’s decision to implement the so-called “domestic spying program” in question, which has taken us to the present-day lawsuit by the Times to compel the release of the NSA documents.

So, how does this all tie into the accusation that neocons and Bush-supporters are motivated by fear? The accusers cannot afford to concede that there are bona fide national security concerns involved, or their argument would begin to collapse. That collapse might even end up reaching back in time to events such as the Pentagon Papers lawsuit–which could end up at least partially exonerating the evil arch-enemy Nixon (for his attempt to stop their publication, not for Watergate). Thus we have the need for Clymer’s airy dismissal of Rudenstine’s research about the Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The collapse might also reach back to the famous firewall, and implicate those who erected it in at least partial responsibility for the failure to prevent 9/11.

Another recent post, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy…About Iran,” by Gerard Van der Leun, touches on some of the same themes, although it concerns a different issue and a different NY Times article. In it, Van der Leun locks formidable horns with Barry R. Posen, the MIT political science professor whose op-ed piece dismisses, with a perhaps now-familiar breeziness, the security considerations that would be involved in Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons.

Dismissing that particular “fear” is quite a stretch, even for the Times. But Posen seems up to the task. And, on reading Posen’s article with my newfound insight about the left’s need to deflect such fears and label them as unfounded, it’s interesting to see how well Posen’s article follows the familiar framework.

Van der Leun writes:

On the one hand, the message of [Posen’s] essay is “Don’t worry. Be happy,” while on the other it is the parallel message of “What? Me worry?”

It’s true; the “stretch” in this case seems to take Posen close to Alfred E. Newman territory.

And note how often Posen explicitly and implicitly mentions fear in the first paragraphs of the article (emphasis mine):

The intense concern about Iran’s nuclear energy program reflects the judgment that, should it turn to the production of weapons, an Iran with nuclear arms would gravely endanger the United States and the world. An Iranian nuclear arsenal, policymakers fear, could touch off a regional arms race while emboldening Tehran to undertake aggressive, even reckless, actions.

But these outcomes are not inevitable, nor are they beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to defuse. Indeed, while it’s seldom a positive thing when a new nuclear power emerges, there is reason to believe that we could readily manage a nuclear Iran.

A Middle Eastern arms race is a frightening thought, but it is improbable…

As Van der Leun points out, the arguments Posen musters for that improbability are not exactly convincing. But Posen, by offering them–and the Times, by printing his article–is following in the time-honored tradition of trying to reassure by downplaying national security concerns. I’m not sure what motivates Posen–perhaps he actually and sincerely believes that he’s speaking the truth–but it seems that the risks of believing him and of him being wrong are rather high, unacceptably high. And that’s not just fear talking; it’s common sense.

If you really want to hear fear talking, you can hear it in the voice of appeasement. This appeasement can be seen most clearly in Western Europe today, although it is not confined to it. It bows down–in the name of “tolerance”–to forces that would weaken freedom of speech and a host of other Enlightenment values so dearly won and highly cherished.

As David Warren points out in his recent column, quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave woman born in Somalia but residing in the Netherlands, who’s not afraid to speak out and to risk her life in the process (emphasis mine):

Publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists, and journalists who wish to describe, analyze or criticize intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe. It has also revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy. These people — many of whom hold European citizenship — have campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new laws to ban ‘Islamophobia‘. ”¦ The issue is not about race, colour, or heritage. It is a conflict of ideas, which transcend borders and races.

In this conflict of ideas, we cannot win if we are afraid to defend our own values against those who would seek to destroy them.

Warren adds (my emphasis, once again):

Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed — when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more.

This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics, whose views and demands are already being parroted by fearful “mainstream” Muslim politicians. We will do anything to preserve a peace that ceased to exist on 9/11.

Of course, it’s not only fear operating–some of the motivation for appeasement is hope (naive and often misplaced, I’m afraid): the conviction that talk, trust, and kindness will prevail, that all people are reasonable and good and don’t really have in mind what they say they have.

And then there’s another hope, the one Churchill labeled as “feeding the alligator in hopes it will eat you last.” At least that hope is a bit more realistic: it recognizes that sometimes you’re dealing with an alligator.

Perhaps the whole disagreement between right and left boils down to this one: who are the alligators, and how hungry are they?