Five days ago I mentioned that I did not know enough about Gaza to have a detailed or nuanced judgment about the immediate circumstances of the Israeli effort against Hamas.
But I have seen, read, reported, thought, and written enough over the years about the strategy-tactics tension in many realms, from politics to business to technology to war planning, to recognize a situation in which short-term tactical victories may lead to long-term strategic defeat. This is how the Gaza operation looked early on, and how it looks more starkly with every passing day. Gee, if only there were a popular saying that conveyed the idea that you could win many battles and still lose the war.
Now someone who knows a lot about the details and nuances of Middle East conflict has stated this concern in blunt and authoritative terms. I am referring of course to Anthony Cordesman of CSIS, he of the unending flow of detailed papers on the military balance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere. Two days ago he issued an analysis called "The War in Gaza: Tactical Gains, Strategic Defeat?" In light of his argument, the question-mark in the title seems superfluous, or merely polite:
The growing human tragedy in Gaza is steadily raising more serious
questions as to whether the kind of tactical gains that Israel now
reports are worth the suffering involved.... This raises a question that every Israeli and its supporters now needs
to ask. What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting?
I won't quote further from his analysis, which is short enough to be read easily in its entirety and long enough to make a reasonable case. Please go see for yourself. But I will quote the way it ends:
As we have seen all too clearly from US
mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical
gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and
Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and
damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time
to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved.
The aptly titled And Winter Came... explores themes of the season and the passing of time.
"It
has to do with that reflective time of year," Enya says of the title.
"The spring, summer, is quite a hectic time for people in their lives,
but then it comes to autumn, and to winter, and you can't but help
think back to the year that was, and then hopefully looking forward to
the year that is approaching."
From an NPR report that includes samples of new Enya songs like "My! My! Time Flies!" Harold Arlen, * Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, eat your hearts out in awe and envy of such word-magic artistry.
(*Erratum: Arlen wrong for this list, since he was a composer only; the rest wrote lyrics only or -- like Enya! -- both words and music. Thanks to MF for the reminder.)
UPDATE: To end on a more positive note, which is of course always my goal, in this same current weekend in which it's carrying the Enya story, NPR also has a wonderful 56-minute session of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz with John Pizzarelli, the guitarist / singer / bandleader who, as McPartland says in her notes, has "an ultra-cool style that's both modern and rooted in the jazz tradition." The whole program is strong and ends with a rendition of Route 66 that suffers only by comparison with the spectacular version Pizzarelli performed on his Dear Mr. Cole album.
That great version can be found as the fifth song listed here, on Rhapsody, available to Rhapsody subscribers or for visitors on a free trial. Or, you could buy the CD!
I hate, hate, hate the lazy modern presidential habit of ending all major addresses with the phrase "And God bless the United States of America" or simply "God bless America."
I love the Irving Berlin song. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. But a little chunk is hacked away from the national brain each time a president gets out of a speech not with a thought or original phrase but with this mindless pablum. This has become the political equivalent of "Have a nice day!"
Isn't this how presidents have always talked? God, no. You didn't get it from George Washington. You didn't get it from Abraham Lincoln, either in the hands-down winner as Greatest Inaugural Address Ever, his second or in that work of political haiku, Gettysburg Address. You didn't hear it from FDR.
Many of these titans spoke of God -- but when they did so, it was with some actual thought-content. For instance, from the close of Lincoln's Second Inaugural:
Fondly do
we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every
drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments
of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in...
As I know first-hand, you didn't hear this from probably the most sincerely religious president of recent times, Jimmy Carter. To choose an example of a speech I was not involved in, his "crisis of confidence" speech in the summer of 1979 -- often called the "malaise" speech, though he did not use that word -- touched on spiritual issues but ended this way:
I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard.
Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With
God's help and for the sake of our Nation, it is time for us to join
hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the
American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.
But then Ronald Reagan began using the phrase to mean "The speech is over now," and ever since then politicians have seemed afraid not to tack it on, perhaps out of fear that we'll have the aural equivalent of phantom-limb pain if we don't hear the familiar words.
Apparently Obama began sliding down this slope early last year, but in most of the speeches I heard he ended with a composed thought, not a cliche. (I must not have listened all the way to the end of his otherwise-perfect election night speech in Grant Park.) But just now, groan, he ended his economic-stimulus speech, at George Mason University, in this same lame way. Can there be hope for the inaugural?
You are better than this, Mr. President-Elect. Your speechwriter, though more wizened than some who have held the job, presumably still has the vim to come up with a good closing line -- even one involving God. For example, this from John Kennedy's inaugural, six months before Obama was born:
With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final
judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking
His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work
must truly be our own.
All I have left to say is... nah, to hell with further thought. God Bless America
As attentive readers may recall, the air in Beijing through the six months before the Olympic games was almost unbelievably horrible. Lest we forget: this was the view out my window in mid-June, which was not that different from how it had been day upon day through the spring and early summer.
But even as I was wheezing my way around town and truly getting depressed by no view of sun and sky (and being told by a doctor that I should stop smoking, when I'd never started), I was reporting in the Atlantic on plans to get things cleaned up by the time of the Olympics. The first two days of the Games looked pretty bleak -- but then a line of thunderstorms moved through, and the air looked far better, and the environmental threat to the Games was averted.
Since then, the air in Beijing has seemed better -- not all of the time, God knows, but more than before. How much of the improvement is due to factories being shut down because of the recession? (They must have been running 40 hours a day in the spring, given how bad things were then.) How much because of typically strong late-fall winds blowing in from the northwest? How much an actual long-term change? I don't know.
But, courtesy of a tip from an engineer at NASA, here is new evidence that all the anti-pollution steps taken because of the Olympics really did make a difference in air-quality measures in August -- and, it seems, some of the time since then.
The NASA map below will make more sense if you read the full report, here. Highlight version: the deep red west of Shanghai and north of Hong Kong (where Shenzhen and Dongguan are), plus through the central coal-and-factory belt in places like Shanxi province, is a bad sign. The light green around Beijing is relatively good! (The red zone on the coast just east of Beijing is the city of Tianjin.)
As the NASA report says of Beijing's special Olympic anti-pollution rules:
During the two months when restrictions were in place, the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) -- a noxious gas resulting from fossil fuel combustion (primarily in cars, trucks, and power plants) -- plunged nearly 50 percent. Likewise, levels of carbon monoxide (CO) fell about 20 percent.
Why does this matter? Because it shows that corrective steps can improve even the most hopeless-seeming environmental disasters.
It's worth trying to do something, rather than just hunkering down in bed and trying to
take very, very shallow breaths -- my strategy in the months from April
to July.
Webcast of yesterday's interview on Fresh Air available online here.
After we'd discussed the People's Bank of China, RMB/$ exchange rates, the "financial balance of terror" between China and the US, and similar worthy topics, Terry Gross asked me in the closing moments about the deaths of my parents. Specifically, why I'd written on this site about my father's death two months ago today. (My mother died unexpectedly, and relatively young, in her sleep nearly five years ago.)
I didn't know she would ask this but in retrospect am glad that she did. As I fumbled to explain in real time, part of my instinct in making a private matter public was the sense that people with the virtues of my parents -- talented, loving, curious, hopeful people who poured their heart and effort into the betterment of their small community and the well-being of their family -- deserve more celebration than they typically get, precisely because they have chosen not to operate on a broad public stage. My parents were very well known in our home town but unknown outside of it. It gave me heart to think that people who had never encountered them might hear something about the lives they led.
As my siblings have taken turns cleaning out our dad's house, they have come across hundreds of pictures that none of us had ever seen before. Parents are always old to their children. When parents have lived to an objectively advanced age and then physically run down, as my dad did, it is startling to be reminded how vigorous and, yes, beautiful they had once been. My mom and dad's youth is what we are discovering after their deaths.
Thus, and as the real end to this commemorative series, three pictures I had never seen while my parents were living, part of a huge collection that my brother-in-law Bryan Neider is digitizing from old, brittle prints. The first are of my parents in the late 1940s, around the time of their wedding when she was 20 and he was 23. (His wedding ring is visible in the second shot.) Then, one of the rare pictures of my dad in which he's not smiling. Here he is wearing his game face, as the four-quarters, every-play offensive and defensive lineman known as Tiger Jim. These are people we never knew and are meeting now.
Several of my Atlantic colleagues have explained why they are not writing more frequently about this ongoing war.
My explanation is simpler, and is the opposite of Jeffrey Goldberg's. He says, in effect, that he knows too much about the situation. I know too little. I spent the first weeks of the Iraq war in Haifa and Tel Aviv, mainly working on this article (about the Mohammed al-Dura case, which of course took place in Gaza), and I was at Camp David with Jimmy Carter's entourage when he brokered the Sadat-Begin agreements of 1978. But I understand enough about the politics of the Middle East to recognize that I don't understand enough.
The one relevant thing I do know concerns a repeated source of tragedy in foreign-policy decision making. That is the reluctance to ask, before irrevocable decisions, "And what happens then?" For instance: so we depose Saddam Hussein. What happens then? This question is all the harder to ask when the step in question feels so good. Crushing Saddam. Or, punishing Hamas.
I can imagine the Gaza ground war "working" from Israel's perspective in the short term. The obvious question is, What happens then? I find it very difficult to imagine a sequence of events that leaves Israel -- or anyone -- better off one year from now, or ten.
If I thought the people making Israel's choices were stupid, I could tell myself that they hadn't properly weighed the consequences. But I don't think they're stupid. Instead I think that, like the people who rushed the U.S. into war in Iraq, they are reckless and unwise and will therefore hurt their country. Along with hurting a lot of others.
I had no idea how many readers know about, care about, and have forcefully-expressed opinions about Indonesia! After the jump, specimen reactions on two main points (in response to earlier posts here, here, and here).
One concerns whether Indonesians of all varieties, and not just members of the Muslim majority, are enthusiastic about the ascent to glory of former Jakarta resident Barack Obama. One reader, whom I quoted earlier, said it was a sectarian matter: Muslims loved him, Indonesian Christians and other non-Muslims didn't. Many, many readers have written in to disagree; in fact, everyone I heard from saw it differently. I quote a sample letter below.
The other has to do with the airport tax that surprised me. The theme of many correspondents was: you don't know the half of it! I include a letter concerning the "fiskal tax," a steep levy imposed not on foreign tourists, who are generally richer than Indonesian citizens, but on Indonesians thinking of going overseas.
This is a one-time only update: fight it out among yourselves from here on!
I should probably also say that, ever since my initial visit to Indonesia in 1981, while my wife's parents were working there, I have been enchanted by the place. In the current Atlantic I mention the indelible memory of my wife's and my very first moments in the country, when as soon as the airplane's doors opened on the tarmac we could smell the kretek cigarettes and hear the tones of gamelan. We've been to many parts of the country and always look forward to the next visit there. When I mentioned the incident of penny-ante bribery I encountered at the airport, it was mainly out of surprise that something taken for granted 20 years ago could still be found. Even when this was a lot more prevalent and the Suharto regime was boundlessly corrupt, it didn't make Indonesia a bad or unlovable place.
Here, a short sample of gamelan, which I never get tired of listening to. Once, in Java, we saw a gamelan gong being forged and bought one to take home. The music is this video, by a skillful but obviously non-Indonesian ensemble, starts 45 seconds into the nine-plus minute clip. (For some less traditional but very seductive gamelan, try this; for a more traditional and very energetic music-and-dance performance, here.) After the jump, some recent mail.
It is 4am in Beijing as I type. For good and sufficient reason*, I had to be at a radio studio downtown from 2:30 to 3:30am. When that session was over I went out on the street to find a cab. It is so, umm, crisp in Beijing that I went out with knit cap pulled down practically to my eyebrows, muffler wrapped from my neck up to bottom of my eyes, plus assorted huge overcoats, gloves, thermal underwear, etc. Speak to me not of the joys of winter.
Find a taxi; climb into the front seat, the comradely thing to do in Australia and China alike. Pull off my knit cap and undo the muffler. Driver turns to me, starts to chuckle, and gives a little salute.
No, this is not the Obama-honoring salute I encountered so recently in (balmy) Indonesia. No, not at all. Zongtong Bushi! "President Bush!" Hardee har har. As mentioned previously, to most citizens of China I am apparently indistinguishable from Xiao Bushi, "Little Bush." I do not reply, "Chairman Mao!" or "President Hu!"
Instead I collect myself and make a pun: Wo bushi Bushi! I'm not Bush! It does no good. He salutes again as I get out of the cab.
Somehow I hope this is good for the soul. _____ * Taping of Fresh Air interview, presumably for broadcast on Tuesday.
UPDATE: Via Tim Dorsett, a reminder that he more likely was saying Bushi zongtong, Bushi zongtong, Bushi zongtong than the opposite word order. But when he said them over and over, I could hear it either way!
The most obvious environmental problem in China is air pollution, as I have from time to time -- OK, maybe five million times -- mentioned in this space. But environmental experts consistently stress that the most consequential problems are the related issues of CO2 output, climate change, and water supply. (On Chinese environmental issues in general, here is one article by me and one very valuable blog site.)
The Asia Society's "China Green" project has just posted a riveting and sobering series of videos on how climate change is affecting the once-vast glacier fields of the Tibetan Plateau that are in turn the source of nearly all the major rivers of Asia: Yellow and Yangtze in China, Mekong and Salween in Southeast Asia, Brahmaputra and Ganges in India, Indus in Pakistan, and others. This is an introductory three-minute trailer:
There is a lot more, and a lot that's more dramatic, at the project's main site, here. I recommend spending a minute with the interactive opening-page splash shot, which allows you to run your mouse over a photo of Mt. Everest and watch how its surrounding glaciers have changed from 1921 to 2008.
This past August, during the Beijing Olympics, Michael Zhao of the Asia Society posted a wonderful series of daily shots of air-quality conditions in Beijing in the months leading up to the Games. They showed, among other things, the minimal correlation between what was officially a "blue sky day" and how the sky really looked. (The photo-chronicle is ongoing.) Zhao has also put together the Glacier project and really is demonstrating the potential of online video to dramatize public issues everyone "knows about" but has a hard time visualizing. Making these issues vivid is a necessary though not sufficient step to getting something done about them.
UPDATE: Have swapped a version with English subtitles for the previous Chinese-subtitled trailer. Ever considerate!
Two years ago, I said I was making an exception to the "no active involvement in politics" stance I had maintained through my previous decades of journalistic life. (After leaving a one-time stint in politics in the Jimmy Carter years.) That exception was to support my friend Jim Webb's then-improbable run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia.
Here is exception number two: Tom Geoghegan for Congress. He will be running in the special election for the seat Rahm Emanuel is vacating to become White House chief of staff. This seat, representing the 5th District in Illinois, has a colorful lineage, to put it mildly. Emanuel's predecessor was Gov-for-the-moment Rod Blagojevich. Earlier, for 36 years, the 5th was Dan Rostenkowski's base, before his unfortunate indictment and imprisonment on fraud charges. Tom would continue the tradition of having a difficult-to-spell last name. It's Irish and is pronounced Gay-gan.
The basic background on Tom Geoghegan is here, written by his Chicago friend Rick Perlstein. Having been a friend of Geoghegan's for most of my life, I couldn't be more enthusiastic about his deciding to run.
To the extent Tom is known publicly, it's mainly because of his books, like Which Side Are You On?, The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America's Courts. These really are masterful and original pieces of thinking and writing, which most writers would be content with as their entire contribution to the human endeavor during the period Tom has turned them out. Which Side, which was published in 1991, begins this way:
'Organized labor.' Say those words, and your heart sinks. I am a labor lawyer, and my heart sinks. Dumb, stupid organized labor: this is my cause.
The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan's case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and other employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like "the polarization of America" and "the disappearing middle class." Geoghegan's skills as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.
The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it's an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.
Not living in the 5th district, I can't vote for Tom Geoghegan. But I can give him money, and just did, via his online donation site here. The campaign's mail address is Geoghegan for Congress; PO Box 1145 Chicago IL 60690. Email is GeogheganForCongress @ gmail.com
The race will be wide open, and I have no idea now what Tom's chances might be. It's a winner-take-all, no-runoff contest. I do know that the Congress would be better if Tom Geoghegan were part of it. Check out his record and see what you think.
NOTE: Several typos now cleaned up in what was originally a very late-night post -- including, unfortunately, a mistyped email address for writing to the Geoghegan campaign. The name is hard to spell, but not THAT hard.
On New Year's Day I mentioned an Indonesian military policeman's heartening response when he heard that my wife and I were Americans -- not Australians, as he had assumed. I also mentioned the traces of the top-to-bottom corruption of Indonesia in the old Suharto era that can be seen even in its spiffy new airports these days.
From reader Aaron Connelly, of Georgetown U., this amplification and reality check.
It seems the government must have upped the departure tax since I left in late November,
when it was a mere 5,000 rupiah. [For me, it was 150,000.] I suspect this is related to the 20% decline in the value of rupiah vis-a-vis the dollar since October. If it is, this might
be a land speed record for an Indonesian government policy change.
I also wanted to spoil your excitement, just slightly, with regard to the
Indonesian airport official's enthusiasm for the President-elect. It is likely
that this gentleman was either "orang sekular," ["secular person'] or a Muslim. While I
was in Jakarta and Yogyakarta for the three months leading up to our elections,
opinions on Barack Obama were very neatly divided along sectarian lines:
Muslims and secular Indonesians [the great majority] were generally enthusiastic; Christians were
uniformly pessimistic or wary of Obama.
When asked why, Christian Indonesians would tell me that they believed Obama
was a Muslim, or that they were suspicious because their Muslim friends or
coworkers were "too excited" about Obama. I was always surprised to
turn on TVRI [the national network] week to week and hear another "investigative report" on
Obama's Muslim school days. Unlike in the American press, in the Indonesian
newsmedia the "Obama was a secret Muslim" accusations were never
off-limits, though there they were treated as a much more cheerful sort of
intrigue than they were by the Jerome Corsis back in the States. Muslim
Indonesians were fascinated by the possibility, even if they ultimately doubted
the substance of the argument.
The effect of this sort of coverage, however, in the context of Indonesia's
sometimes tense sectarian politics, was to turn off Indonesian Christians to
the President-elect. Asking natives of North Sulawesi and Flores about American
politics in Jakarta, I learned to settle in for a long diatribe against Obama,
our "Muslim Senator," and for a very strangely impassioned, wholly
superficial defense of the virtues of John McCain. It was amusing at first,
frustrating and tiresome by the end of my time there-- because it says nothing
positive about the direction of sectarian politics in Indonesia.
In a followup note, Connelly said he wanted to make clear that when referring to Indonesian Christians he was talking about that country's counterpart to America's "low information voters" -- people who followed US politics hazily if at all. He did not mean the very sophisticated cadre of Christians in think tanks, academia, etc.
In any case it makes you wonder whether the anti-Obama Indonesians found this information on their own, or whether instead Roger Ailes has quietly reached a new target audience.
When traveling in Indonesia in the early 1980s, I used to
marvel at the way the high-level mega- corruption of the Suharto family had
filtered down to every level of life. The airports were somehow the most
impressive example, since you assume them to be connected to international
standards. In those days, the Garuda Airlines agent at the Jakarta airport might
sorrowfully announce that your reservation had been canceled - until a bunch
of Rupiah notes, passed discreetly across the counter, made the bookings re-appear. Bags suddenly
became "overweight" and impossible to fit onto the airplane, only to slim back down to an acceptable poundage through the same
person-to-person magic.
On this promising first day of 2009, my wife
and I walk into a vast modern-looking Indonesian airport. After we've
been
through all the check-in rigmarole, we are directed upstairs to the
departure gates. At the top of the stairs we find - surprise! - a
departure-tax toll booth, where each departee must pay 150,000
Indonesian
Rupiahs (about $13.75) in cash.
Old-fashioned element #1 in this set up: forking over cash,
rather than building it into the ticket price as in most of the world. In the old days, this was prevalent everywhere. Now it's rare. #2: no
noticeable previous mention of this fee within the airport or from the airlines, so that unless you happen to have
kept 300,000Rp on you for sentimental reasons, you're stuck, as every other foreign traveler we observed was.#3: other currencies accepted, but at
punitive rates (eg,$17 US dollars -
or 170 Chinese RMB, the only cash we had on us, which is equivalent to $25).#4: no ATMs in this part of the airport, but
plenty of little money changing booths offering similar punitive rates. The tax collectors helpfully steer each flummoxed foreigner toward these booths.
Oh well.
But the real continuity with days of yore was #5, the
solution to the problem. I had seen an ATM outside the airport. I asked a
uniformed security guard if I could go out to withdraw Rupiahs there, at a more reasonable rate than from the money changers. He
pointed to the big sign that said, "No one may leave the airport after check
in." Tidak boleh. No can do.
Then he leaned closer and said, "Boss, I help you, you help me!"I said Boleh!
- "can do!" - and slipped out the door he opened for me. I walked the few feet to the ATM, got my 300,000
Rupiahs for departure tax -- and a little more for whatever you would call lagniappe in Indonesian. Back in the
door, a Happy New Year greeting to the guard with a discreet money-passing
handshake, and on to the plane. It was as if we'd never been away.
11 am Indonesia time, January 1, 2009. Present our boarding passes to uniformed military
police supervising the entrance to an international airport in Indonesia, for first
of several connecting flights back to Beijing. For reasons that will be evident after the next posting, I'm not naming
the airport.
"Where you from? Australians?" one of the policemen asks.
It is the most likely guess for people who look like us in this part of the
world. Amerika Syarikat, I reply -
"the United States." We used to live in Malaysia, and after our struggles with Mandarin the Malaysian/Indonesian language feels practically like our native tongue.
The officer pulls himself up to attention and with a huge smile gives
us a snappy military salute. "America - very good!" he said. He lowers the salute and says "Barack Obama!!"
with a big thumbs up.
It's been a while...
(Yes, yes, Obama is a particular favorite in Indonesia because his childhood years in Jakarta make him seem a local boy made good. Still, this is not the spontaneous reaction to the name "America" that traveling Yanks have gotten used to in recent years.)
Like many other people who pay taxes in the US, I am using some of the waning hours of the year to think what worthwhile causes I should be sure to remember (ie, give money to) during the 2008 Tax Year.
There are more candidates than anyone could cover, but here is a note about one that has been important to my wife and me. Several months ago I wrote an article about the Yellow Sheep River/"West China Story" project, which is designed to help poor rural children in China's arid, remote western regions, especially the girls, earn the money they need to stay in school and have a chance to escape the impoverishment to which they would otherwise be fated. For $130 a year, donors can cover one student's expenses for the year -- and in return the students must write regular accounts of the lives, their families, their studies, and their dreams on web sites their schools create.
My wife and I have met students like those our donations have supported, and everything about the project makes us respectful of what it is trying to do. (The kids below are ethnic Tibetans, at a school in Gansu province.)
I mention this now in part to remind people of one more deserving cause (and of the fact that, even during the hard times now besetting the US and the world, there are people for whom $130 will make a bigger difference than it does to most Americans). But also I wanted to mention one quirk of the online contribution process for this fund.
If you log onto the English language donation site for West China Story, you'll see a notice that contributions from US taxpayers will be tax-deductible only if handled by Give2Asia.org, which in return takes a 9.85% cut. That seemed punitive enough to stop me for a minute, and make me consider just continuing contributions in non-tax-deductible Chinese RMB cash when I'm back in Beijing. But on examination. Give2Asia appears not to be some usurious counterpart to payday check-cashing leeches but instead an operation run by the Asia Foundation to manage contributions to small organizations in Asia. Its existence is one of many illustrations of how complicated it can be to manage efforts, including charitable ones, across national borders.
In the long run, I hope this middleman cut can be avoided. But as 2008 draws to an end, I willingly used the service to support another cohort of students. This cause may not mean as much to your family as it does to mine, but perhaps it will make you think of similar efforts closer to your own heart.
Or Happy New Year, as they put it in the Indonesian language I have been hearing around me for the past week. That week has coincided with enforced separation from the mighty Internet -- not a bad way to spend time with one's family! -- which in turn leaves me behind on various year-end updates still to come.
But I can't let this day pass, nor this moment of online connection, without mentioning that my new book Postcards from Tomorrow Square goes on sale today, with official pub date early next month. Random House's catalog listings here. Random House's e-book format is here, and Amazon's Kindle format is here. A very nice set of quotes, for which I'm grateful, here.
I won't make a habit of book promo, but I include this link to an email Q-and-A that Kate Merkel-Hess, of the influential blog The China Beat, conducted with me about the book and the general process of writing about China. She evoked from me an admission I'd long managed to avoid:
Ahah! You have cruelly revealed the trademarked secret of everything I've ever written for the magazine!
Further details and secrets at the China Beat site. Further promised year-end updates on software, hardware, the press, and China in this space very soon. New Year's greetings for now.
Or Merry Christmas, in the Indonesian language I hear around me at the moment.
In two or three days, the much-anticipated Year End Pensee series resumes, with wrap-ups on software, hardware, publishing (including the virtues of the print version of the Atlantic), politics, and a replacement for the hoary boiled frog analogy. Until then, peace on Earth, goodwill to all. Thank you for reading our magazine and its writers -- on line and in print.
Despite the best efforts of Jeffrey Goldberg in his Atlantic article last month, despite my varied efforts in articles like this and this and this, despite the books by John Mueller and others, despite the precocious academic papers of Benjamin H. Friedman -- formerly of MIT, now of Cato, not the economist Benjamin Friedman of Harvard -- we end 2008 with the rituals of "security theater" still enshrined in American life.
As Jeff Goldberg is the latest (and most amusing) to demonstrate, security routines like those of the TSA gum up travel and cost countless billions in salary, wasted time, and general hassle (not to mention the thrown-away bottled water and cigarette lighters!) without adding much that would thwart a serious terrorist.
My heart sank when I read recently about a truly idiotic last-minute Bush Administration step to lock in security theater. This is converting the "Air Defense Identification Zone," which had been "temporarily" in effect in the skies of the Mid-Atlantic since soon after 9/11, to a permanent federal regulation. (Splenetic background from me, here and here. News of the conversion to permanent status here.) Sigh. And commercial airports in the U.S. still ring with the ignored-by-all announcements warning that the "threat level" is "elevated."
If you haven't spent much time out of the country recently, it may be hard to convey how fraidy-cat all this ritual makes the US seem. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, some group, somewhere, will probably manage to attack the United States again. But many, many societies around the world face an ongoing risk of attack. Life is dangerous. Over the long run, we judge societies by how they bear up under such threats (and, of course, what they do to contain them.) Compared with the Brits, the Indians, not to mention the Israelis and I bet also the Iraqis, our security theater makes us look like chickens. Reclaiming Gary Cooper, not Chicken Little, as our national icon is part of what I argued here.
But given the way politics works, security theater is a ratchet. If a public figure dares suggest reducing some for-show "protective" measure, then when an attack occurs -- as it will, someday, in a country this large and open -- the politician will be in trouble. So it's easy to add extra "safeguards"; almost impossible to remove them.
Except, perhaps, with the general housecleaning that is possible when Administrations change. Here is one very modest place to start. Please, Gov. Janet Napolitano -- please, please, please, for the love of God -- change the name of the department you have been nominated to head. "Department of Homeland Security" is not a term a real American would use. "Homeland" is something that Germans of the 1930s would say. Or Soviet Russians of the 1950s. Not Yanks. "Domestic Security" is dull but not Orwellian. Try that, or something similar.
For more ideas, I hope that everyone who can possibly be in Washington on Jan 12-13, including Napolitano, will attend this conference, at Cato, about rational and non-hysteric ways to keep America secure. (Extra background here.) A new Administration has a chance for a new start.
NYTimes.com is working fine for me once more, and I hear from friends in varied corners of China that it's up and running across the country, after three or four days of (apparent) nationwide blackout. Background here and here, with links to other stories. Who can explain. As I mentioned earlier, it's the miracle and mystery of Christmas.
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun