I meant to blog about Thomas Friedman, and how much I liked From Beirut to Jerusalem, but my none of the commentary I was going to make survived the move from short-term to long-term memory. I even forgot this joke I was going to make about Thomas Friedman and a duck. But for now I'll just say I Heart Tom Friedman, even though I can't remember exactly why.
The news this week is just insane. On most weeks the networks and papers are squeezing diluted drops of stories out of every current event, but this week, there's actually more news than they can possibly report on at once. In addition to the hurricane crisis, there's that "WTF" stampede that occured in Baghdad which is equally disturbing whether you estimate whether there was a real suicide bomber in the crowd or not. There's some funky things gearing up in the West Bank as we see where Netanyahu is going to go. Oil is doing all sorts of crazy stuff and propogating more graphs and diagrams in the newspapers than I can possibly decipher, let alone muster the attention span to read. And now, there's a dead Chief Justice for the cherry on top.
Best. Week. Ever.
My family visited New Orleans in 2002 for New Years Eve. We even went to a football game at the Superdome. I remember the trip being kind of a downer--one, because I wasn't spending New Years with Kristen, and two, because my college deferment letter was still fresh. But New Orleans the city itself was depressing enough. Even though I was only a senior in high school, I could still identify poor people when I saw them. And there were lots of poor people in New Orleans. At the time I couldn't understand how anybody visiting New Orleans could so easily have fun when there was some guy, rarely with more than one leg, begging for money on every street corner. And most of them weren't the cheerful kind who play "The Simpsons" on their saxophone for spare change. So it's not surprising to hear that, what is it, 27 percent of the city lives below the poverty line? I'm willing to bet that there are few US cities that could have been worse targets for a category 4 hurricane.
But that's as far as my expert opinion goes.
My sister is home from college for the weekend after attending her first UGA game. There's a football player who graduated in my class from Milton who is currently supposed to be one of the fastest-rising stars on the Georgia team, currently rubbing it in to the rest of us just to what extent we have done absolutely dick with our lives so far. Nothing like hometown heroes!
I'll just go check out an old Terry Gilliam movie from the library, now, and try to make myself feel cutting-edge.
The news this week is just insane. On most weeks the networks and papers are squeezing diluted drops of stories out of every current event, but this week, there's actually more news than they can possibly report on at once. In addition to the hurricane crisis, there's that "WTF" stampede that occured in Baghdad which is equally disturbing whether you estimate whether there was a real suicide bomber in the crowd or not. There's some funky things gearing up in the West Bank as we see where Netanyahu is going to go. Oil is doing all sorts of crazy stuff and propogating more graphs and diagrams in the newspapers than I can possibly decipher, let alone muster the attention span to read. And now, there's a dead Chief Justice for the cherry on top.
Best. Week. Ever.
My family visited New Orleans in 2002 for New Years Eve. We even went to a football game at the Superdome. I remember the trip being kind of a downer--one, because I wasn't spending New Years with Kristen, and two, because my college deferment letter was still fresh. But New Orleans the city itself was depressing enough. Even though I was only a senior in high school, I could still identify poor people when I saw them. And there were lots of poor people in New Orleans. At the time I couldn't understand how anybody visiting New Orleans could so easily have fun when there was some guy, rarely with more than one leg, begging for money on every street corner. And most of them weren't the cheerful kind who play "The Simpsons" on their saxophone for spare change. So it's not surprising to hear that, what is it, 27 percent of the city lives below the poverty line? I'm willing to bet that there are few US cities that could have been worse targets for a category 4 hurricane.
But that's as far as my expert opinion goes.
My sister is home from college for the weekend after attending her first UGA game. There's a football player who graduated in my class from Milton who is currently supposed to be one of the fastest-rising stars on the Georgia team, currently rubbing it in to the rest of us just to what extent we have done absolutely dick with our lives so far. Nothing like hometown heroes!
I'll just go check out an old Terry Gilliam movie from the library, now, and try to make myself feel cutting-edge.
6 Comments:
The shouts of "Alpharetta represent!" were loud from our little section of three or so ex-Miltonites every time Sean scored a touchdown or made a particularly impressive catch. And he's everybody's new favorite, it seems, so Alpharetta represent indeed.
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I knew you would like the book, but Tom Friedman is a bumbling moron. That is all.
You know, I could use a "Way to Go" from one of you people every now and then.
I was going to recreate my entire screed against Friedman for you, but then I remembered how convenient archives are. So, here you go:
http://missselfimportant.blogspot.com/2004/09/skip-down-to-avoid-boring-part-im.html
and
http://missselfimportant.blogspot.com/2004/09/some-unrelated-things-this-weeks-new.html
The anti-Friedmanism is buried somewhere in them.
I thought Friedman's anecdotes gave all the dressed-up reporting and analysis a much-needed human angle... but I guess I could see how you might read it as self-inflating.
And I really don't think he's all that guilty of a double-standard. In his assessment of the Intifada, he's noting that for most West Bank Palestinians it was primarily an expulsion of frustration caused by the fact that they'd been kicked around by everybody--including their own so-called leaders--for years. Which I would actually argue is not the nationalism of the first-order that we use to refer to national identity, which can exist outside a time and place as an ideal. The Intifada, at least at first, was wholly grounded in a specific group of people at a specific time under specific historic circumstances, at least the way Friedman portrayed it. It found its voice in nationalism, but as Friedman shows, it was not Palestinian nationalism that catalyzed it; in fact, non-West Bank Palestinian nationals had nothing to do with it.
And besides, are nationalisms all created equally?
Well, we read the same book, so I guess we're just going to agree to mock the others' opinions.
I think you're ignoring the entire segment on the PLO's being run out of Lebanon, which Friedman saw as a mistake on Israel's part because it sent them into the West Bank to foment a campaign against Israel. If the intifada were an expression of frustration against anyone and everyone involved in governing the West Bank, it does not follow that it should have been directed against Israel alone, especially since prior to 1989, Israeli rule was constituted in military oversight, not day to day civil government, which was Palestinian. The Israeli presence you see today in the West Bank was a result of the first and then second intifadas, not their predecessor.
Moreover, the result of the intifada itself, the disastrous Oslo process, bestowed international credibility on the PLO as representative of the Palestinian nation. If this was antithetical to the original intentions of the intifada, why did the Palestinians not fight this instead of continuing and then escalating their campaign against Israel into a terrorist war?
Friedman brings up an interesting dilemma of Middle East politics in his chapter on Hama, what he calls "Hama Rules." The way politics is played in the Middle East is the brutal way Asad took care of Hama. However, Israel cannot be allowed to play by Hama Rules, because it must be held to a higher standard. One might ask here, why? And Friedman is not alone in his answer. Watch the news coverage of the Middle East enough, and you will find that what makes news is violence between Arabs and Westerners or Israelis, not violence among Arabs themselves. Certainly, to an American audience, it is more relevant when American soldiers are killed in the Beirut bombing than when Lebanese are killed in a car bomb. It is a matter of us vs. them in war. But even large scale atrocities like Hama barely make a ripple here. I had heard of Sabra and Shatila a hundred times before I even came across Hama. And where is Black September in our knowledge of the conflict? Another example is reportage in Israel. For months after Arafat's death, and continuing to some extent today, Ha'Aretz would report the lawlessness in Ramallah and other West Bank cities and teh accounts of Palestinian police killing Palestinian civilians, and it never made the American news. But when one Palestinian is killed by Israelis, it's in the Times. Why? It's not simply that Arabs play by Hama Rules, but that Friedman accepts that they are no better than their Hama Rules. Israel is better, so Israel must exhibit restraint. But the Arabs are little more than animals with their backwards tribalism; let them slaughter each other until kingdom come. This is teh double standard. Perhaps it is good for Israel that it is seen as capable of a higher morality than Arabs can be expected to reach, but in the actual practice of diplomacy and warfare, how can a country exist in a hostile region if it is, for whatever reason, forced to tie its hands and play by "more civilized" rules? Something that Friedman notes is that flattening Hama crushed the rebellion against Asad. Black September ended the Palestinian threat to Hashemite rule. For our academic arguments, we like that we can say Israel has shown restraint, Israel has not committed such atrocities, Israel throws its few terrorists in prison for life and keeps them there. But in reality, Israel is not a political showpiece, it is a country of people who don't particularly want to die to become moral examples to the world. How long can Israel do this and exist?
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