Frozen Toothpaste

Source: cursedthing

Former President Bill Clinton was on Charlie Rose last Friday. He said a lot of interesting things, and though they also did a fair bit of rehashing tired arguments about the presidential campaign, it is a pretty good interview to watch.

Without question, the line that most caught my attention was this one: Mr. Clinton said, making what felt like a rather precarious jump, that the American people now know as they never have before that “there is almost no problem we can solve all by ourselves.” That America’s citizenry recognizes that the problems we face as a country: terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, health, and immigration, are all outside of the control of any single government, even the most powerful.

Though Clinton wouldn’t have been a good politician if he regularly denigrated the intelligence of the American people — as I sometimes think is appropriate — I do think he’s overstated the case. One doesn’t have to look very hard in this country to find people as convinced as ever that America has the right to impose its will upon the world. That its policy can and should be to unilaterally do whatever it wants, whenever it judges itself justified.

I have no doubt that those who easily forget that the United States is merely one country in a much larger world is shrinking and continues to shrink. But I find it incredibly hard to accept the argument that the whole populous has come to this revelation.

To be fair, Mr. Clinton is doubly right. More Americans than ever realize that their government doesn’t run the world, and every day a few more do. Further, he’s right in that the world is indeed a less “Amerocentric” place than at any other time since the Second World War.

Certainly, the attacks on September 11, 2001 shook a number of people out of the delusion that they lived in an impenetrable fortress from which they can run roughshod over the whole world and never face any consequences. Unfortunately, from there they went on to allow Mr. Bush to convince them that the wisest course to restore their illusory security was to depose Saddam Hussein — a hideous man no doubt, but hardly a grave threat to American security.

It is in Mr. Bush’s nearly-unilateral, (now known to be) misguided, and poorly executed invasion of Iraq that many Americans realized that they cannot persist as a hegemon. So too has Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Bush’s intransigence on climate change, and the many failed attempts to reform America’s broken immigration laws.

All of this has made clear that Americans do not have sole control over their own destiny. Though I hate the over-simplistic term, “the emergence of China” has clearly changed the world. For one, America’s recent economics hardships have been far more localized than many expected.

There was a time when a devaluation of the American dollar was an absolutely terrifying scenario for world economics, but it hasn’t had the expected debilitating impact. As the world slowly decouples from the formerly-all-important American economy (and thus its government), this country, like Britain before it, will have to recognize that it is not the king of the world.

Love or hate the former President, he is right about that.

By now you’ve probably heard something about a teddy bear in the news. But it seems to me that the way people understood the story had a lot to do with where they heard about it. So in the tradition of this piece, I’ve created two very different interpretations pared down from different news sources.

First we have, edited from Andrew Heavens’s story of last Friday, what I like to call “Crazy Muslims At it Again”:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Hundreds of Sudanese Muslims, waving green Islamic flags, took to the streets of Khartoum on Friday demanding death for the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam after her class named a teddy bear Mohammad.

“No one lives who insults the Prophet,” the protesters chanted, a day after school teacher Gillian Gibbons, 54, was sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation from Sudan.

At least 1,000 protesters shook their fists or waved banners or ceremonial swords and chanted religious and nationalist slogans after leaving Muslim Friday prayers. Banners called for “punishment” for Gibbons, and some protesters burned newspapers that contained pictures of the teacher.

Several hundred protesters made a brief stop at the closed but heavily guarded Unity High School, where Gibbons worked, but did not attempt to go inside. The school was guarded by five truckloads of police in riot gear.

The protesters marched from there to the British embassy where several hundred surrounded the ambassador’s residence, chanting religious slogans. There were no reports of violence.

Gibbons was charged on Wednesday with insulting Islam, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs because the class toy had been given the same name as the Muslim Prophet Mohammad.

Under Sudan’s penal code, she could have faced 40 lashes, a fine or up to a year in jail. But Gibbons was convicted only of insulting religion.

This is how most people I’ve heard talking about the story see it. This is terribly unfortunate because even Heavens’s piece contains some insight into the role the Darfur crisis may have had in the actions of the government in Khartoum and the loyalist protesters.

The second version of the story is stolen from The Economist’s coverage, and I’ll (verbosely) call it “West Misunderstands Khartoum’s Feeble Attempt to Exploit Religious Row”:

FOR anyone who is labouring to improve Christian-Muslim relations, or stop civilisations clashing, it is a painful setback: a well-intentioned Western woman who has volunteered her services as a teacher in a land stricken by conflict and poverty, only to find herself denounced by a local colleague and incarcerated in horrible conditions.

Gillian Gibbons, a 54-year-old teacher from Liverpool, was sentenced on Thursday November 29th to 15 days in prison for “insulting religion”, after allowing her pupils at a school in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

When the story broke in the British press this week, it was widely reported that she might face up to 40 lashes, or six months in jail, if she were found guilty on all three of the charges laid against her. The incident happened in September and caused no protest among parents at the time. At one point the affair seemed to be spinning out of control as groups of angry men gathered outside the police station where she was held.

For Muslims in Britain and other democracies, the story was a deeply depressing one: so many of its features, including the fact that it happened in the run-up to Christmas, seemed almost calculated to resonate with British tabloid readers, who may not know much about Sudan or Islam (or any other faith) but have strong feelings about teddies, tiny tots and motherly teachers.

In more elevated western circles, it is becoming commoner to hear the view that Islam itself (rather than any extremist interpretations of the faith) is posing a challenge to western values that must be resisted. And if that view becomes more respectable, so too does a defensive Muslim reaction, which is often tinged with geopolitical grievance.

To observers who know Sudan, the whole affair seems to have become entangled with the broader stand-off between the government in Khartoum and the Western countries, including Britain, that have pushed for the United Nations to intervene in the appalling humanitarian crisis in Darfur. All diplomatic exchanges between the Sudanese government and Western ones, whether they concern refugees or teddy bears, take place against that background.

The Economist’s admirable piece goes on to discuss the role of capital punishment in Islam — worth reading if you’re interested. I should also point to another responsible (if almost as tardy as my own) perspective on this event form Anne Applebaum’s “The absurd Sudanese teddy bear controversy” at Slate.

What the difference between the two stories above makes clear is the painfully high cost the world pays for ignorance. The gap between seeing the “teddy bear row” as another example of Muslims doing crazy anti-Western things and seeing it as a desperate attempt by Khartoum to get as much leverage as it can to prevent outside intervention in Darfur is a big one.

Those who read the story the first way go away more convinced than ever about the massive threat posed to Britain or America by what many like to call “Islamofacism.” Those who read it the second way are essentially aware that the event, though ugly, is a product of the wishes of a fearful government and a few loyal supporters — nothing more.

I do think reporter for the major news agencies — Reuters, AFP, the AP — could do a much better job moderating the coverage of events like this, since their articles are read by the vast majority of laypeople. But I think it would be both unfair and short-sighted to castigate them for their occasional failings.

Mostly, I just wish that everyone — myself included — were more willing to withhold judgments on the things we don’t understand. And the complex geopolitics of Sudan and the diversity of Muslims are two things I certainly don’t understand. Perhaps hoping we can accept before judging is a lost cause, but I’m pretty sure lost causes are the only ones worth hoping for.

Norman Mailer died two weeks ago, and so I’m slow on the uptake. But I’d rather quote something interesting and out-of-date that timely and uninteresting. So on today’s “Other People’s Words,” what Norman Mailer told Charlie Rose about his country in 1998.

You know, I think we live in the most exceptional country ever for a writer, because there’s so many aspects of it.

I don’t know about other writers but I know that I’ve had an odd love affair with America. As if I were married to this incredible woman who I half loved and half hated. And all through my work I’m always thinking of her, “Oh God! There she’s gone and done it again!” It always happens that you’re so disappointed just as you’re begining to get excited about her.

There are many disappointments to living in America because I always think it’ll get better and it doesn’t. It gets worse. The architecture in America, for example, has gotten worse every year for the last 40 years.

Can you think of anything that has gotten better?

Yeah, the MTV has gotten better and better.

I’d planned on writing something today, but when, on rising, I was greeted by four inches of accumulated snow my resolve to do so quickly cracked and eventually crumbled. Already somewhat interested in making Thanksgiving (it’s tomorrow in United States) an extended break, I was unable to do any serious thinking.

So, Americans (and perhaps non-Americans too) enjoy tomorrow. I think it’s just fabulous that we in this country have compartmentalized one of most important sentiments in the world to fit onto a single calendar day on which we worry about little other than food and professional football. I consider it a blessing that on the day we named for gratitude our central societal concerns have become gluttony and sloth. This Thursday is truly a great day to be an American.

You hear the complaint a lot: “too many American live to work when they should really be working to live.” The dichotomy always rang false to me, and I finally figured out why.

The first problem is that this, like most dichotomies, is completely false. To demonstrate this, I’ve compiled a short list of the inane dichotomies created by the rhetoric of modern American politicians. “You’re either with us or against us.” “My opponent is a tax-and-spend liberal while I support tax cuts [but can’t pay for the programs you’re asking for without taking massive loans from China].” “You either support our troops or oppose the war.” “You’re either a patriot or a ‘cut-and-runner.’” “You’re either a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. Come on, pick a side, we’re at war!”

This dichotomy of “living to work” or “working to live” is no less false than the ones above. It divides the world into two camps, neither of which has much basis in fact. It ignores the inherent nuance of life, people, and worldviews. But dichotomies, even false ones, can be useful. This one, unfortunately, is not.

The real problem with this dichotomy is that neither possibility is a very good or realistic one, especially in an America where one’s identity is built in no small part on their work. If you “work to live,” your life is regularly put on hold for 8 hours out of every weekday, roughly half your waking life — wasting half of your life is no way to live. On the other hand, if you “live to work” you’re somehow without motivation or method any time you’re not in, thinking about, or talking about the office — hardly a life worth living.

Because the two options in this dichotomy are both bad ones, the most rational thing to do is opt out. But as I said, we could have better — though clearly far from perfect — dichotomies. Perhaps the most useful one on the topic of work is “for love or money.” This dichotomy has the same inherent flaws of all the artificial binaries dreamed up for rhetorical ease, but I have little doubt that it’s more useful.

There is nothing inherently bad about “working for money,” but it’s hardly as good as “working for love.” To this day, one my biggest hangups about the corporate world is that I feel pretty strongly that most of the people there are “working for money.”

Working for money can be fine, especially if you don’t much mind what you’re doing or find it ethically questionable. But a devout Catholic working at an abortion clinic for the money would probably suffer incredibly because she was “working for money.” Fortunately, for most people “working for money” isn’t half as bad as that.

“Working for love” is, almost without question, everyone’s ideal. If everyone were able to do jobs they loved, I have little doubt that people in this country would be happier. Doing work you love — while making enough money to live comfortably — is what all people would do if they had the chance. Some people probably never have the chance, some people probably never realize they have the chance, and some people probably never want to see a pay cut.

If forced to chose some binary that illustrated people’s relationship to their working lives, “living to work/working to live” is not one I would ever choose. “Working for money” and “working for love” is a better dichotomy. It implies that there is a type of life in which work has meaning without its sole meaning being work.

Having said that, I would prefer that we banned all dichomoies, or at least disclaimed them. Asking: “Given a binary choice between ‘working for love’ and ‘working for money,’ which are you doing?” is far better than asking “Are you a liberal or a conservative?” The first embraces the falseness of the choice while the second denies the existence of alternatives. And there are always alternatives.