September 2002 Archives
Reading and travelling
I’m in Washington this week, for the IMF annual meetings. I took the train down here, and, as is often the way with trains, there were lots of cancellations and delays, and I had quite a bit of time on my hands.
Desperate to read something other than Credit Suisse First Boston’s 104-page Latin America Quarterly, it didn’t take me long to get engrossed in a back issue of the New York Review of Books which I’d never got around to finishing. (Where others keep reproachful piles of New Yorkers by their bedside, I generally manage to read most of what I’m interested in every week. My guilty consciences – the magazines I desperately want to read but never quite get around to doing any more than dipping into – are the New York Review and Foreign Affairs.)
As the train shuffled laboriously down to Union Station, I recalled an amazing issue of the magazine about a year ago, which I took on a trip with my girlfriend to California. It was full of fascinating and impeccably-written essays on all manner of topics, and I found myself sneaking off to my bedroom to read a couple of pages before dinner, rather than schmoozing in a friendly manner with Michelle’s family.
And then it occurred to me that a vastly disproportionate number of my great experiences as a reader have been while travelling. If I think of many of the books I enjoyed the most – The Comfort of Strangers, Requiem for a Dream, Foucault’s Pendlum, Infinite Jest – all were read on holiday. I would say of the last two that they have to be read on holiday – it’s only in such a situation that one ever gets the chance to read them in an amount of time short enough to be able to remember everything that went before. But the McEwan novel is compact enough to be read just about anywhere; capable of being fit into the busiest of schedules. It’s not the time-available thing, I think, it’s the guilt thing.
For the fact is that with the exception of an occasional half-hour between going to bed and going to sleep, it’s very rare that any of us have time over the course of the day to read a book or magazine without feeling a little guilty – without thinking that we ought to be doing something else.
When on holiday, however, or stuck in one of those gaps-between-meetings on business trips, we relax a little. Reading, then, stops being a guilty pleasure and starts being simply a pleasure.
So let me share with you now one of the best paragraphs I’ve come across in a very long time. You won’t have any difficulty identifying the author (Alan Bennett) – here his voice is so distinctive it verges on the self-parodic. But he has such a wonderful ear that he can get away with it. I don’t know if you’ll enjoy it as much as I did down here, but I’m sure you’ll love it all the same.
So, then, the opening paragraph of Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, from his latest collection of short stories, The Laying On of Hands:
Bit of a bomshell today. I’m pegging up my stocking when Mr Suddaby says, ‘I’m afraid, Miss Fozzard, this is going to have to be our last encounter.’ Apparently this latest burglary has put the tin hat on things and what with Mrs Suddaby’s mother finally going into a home and their TV reception always being so poor there’s not much to keep them in Leeds so they’re making a bolt for it and heading off to Scarborough. Added to which Tina, their chow, has a touch of arthritis so the sands may help and the upshot is they’ve gone in for a little semi near Peasholme Park.
Posted by Felix at 11:05 EST | Comments (0)
Dick Armey, intellectuals, and the Jews
I doubt that House majority leader Dick Armey is going to go down in history as a great intellectual heavyweight. His weapon of choice is more the sledgehammer than the scalpel, and his less-than-subtle pronouncements on the Palestinian question have got him into trouble in the past.
In an interesting twist, however, the man who was accused just a few months ago of calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is now being accused of anti-Semitism. In a discussion in Florida in front of a largely Jewish audience, he said that there were two types of Jewish Americans: those with "deep intellect", who work in "occupations of the brain" like engineering, science and economics; and liberals, with "shallow, superficial intellect", who work in "occupations of the heart". He meant artists, not cardiac surgeons.
Florida is the center of the fight between Democrats and Republicans for the Jewish vote, which has historically been overwhelmingly Democratic. Over the past year, however, the Republican rhetoric of pre-emptive action against Arabs who want to kill us has resonated with many in the Jewish community. Hence Armey's presence at the discussion, and hence the Democrats' gleeful response.
Much of the debate is extremely boring: just as socialists used to call anybody who disagreed with them a "fascist", now Republicans and foreign-policy hawks are using "anti-Semite" even against prominent Jewish Zionists such as Gerald Kaufman. So if the tables are being turned and Dick Armey is getting a taste of his own side's rhetoric, I don't really mind, even if it's clear that he's no more anti-Semitic than Kaufman is.
What's much more interesting is Armey's non-apology apology the following day, when he told reporters he was simply making a broader point about liberals' wrong-headedness. "If you were a southern Anglo Baptist liberal, I promise you I would say you were not well educated and probably not a very deep thinker, because that's what liberals are," he said. "Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people. They don't think deeply, they don't comprehend, they don't understand a partial derivative, they have a narrow educational base as opposed to the hard scientists."
Southern Anglo Baptist liberal? Who could Armey possibly be thinking of? Surely not the world's most famous Rhodes scholar, the man who even conservatives agree was one of the most intelligent presidents ever? Whatever else you might accuse him of, being "not well educated" and "just not bright people" seems a bit of a stretch. But even putting that to one side, it's an interesting piece of rhetoric. It fits into the famous Charles Krauthammer thesis that conservatives think that liberals are stupid. Liberals, of course, don't believe the opposite: we might oppose everything Condi Rice stands for, we might think she's wrong, but we don't think she's dumb. I've even known a couple of bright right-wingers personally: one, a distant relation, was Keith Joseph, the house intellectual of the Thatcher era.
More interestingly, however, Armey has taken the standard Democratic/Republican distinction and overlaid it onto CP Snow's "two cultures" distinction between the humanities and the sciences. In his book, it would seem, the liberal arts are the Liberal arts, and the basic conservative laws of science (mass, energy, momentum) are actually Conservative as well.
It's quite a brave thing to say, especially in this most anti-intellectual of administrations. (Somehow I doubt that George W Bush is a whizz with partial derivatives.) It also goes against the standard dumbbell view of Democratic voters: that they're generally either very smart or very stupid, while the GOP gets the broad mass in the middle.
And, in the final analysis, it's very unlikely to be true. The most left-wing university in Britain has historically always been the London School of Economics. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of nothing but hard scientists, and is hated by all self-respecting conservatives. What's more, scientists tend to work in universities, and universities are generally very liberal places. If voting were confined only to those people who understand partial derivatives, I think the Democrats would be very happy: they could finally make political capital out of the astonishing mess that is president Bush's economic policy.
Does Armey know this, deep down, do you think? Probably not: for all his posturing, he's not really a scientist, he's merely a former economics professor. That's why he chose proficiency with partial derivatives as his metric for whether one belongs on the side of Einstein or that of Shakespeare. I'm sure he's very good at them: economists usually are. But they're also very good at getting into lengthy, heated and incoherent debates with each other. Maybe that's how Armey got his present lofty position in politics.
Posted by Felix at 11:07 EST | Comments (1)
8 Women and True Lies
No review of Barbershop here, I'm afraid, despite the fact that it remained at the top of the box-office chart for the second week running last weekend. It was my girlfriend's birthday, so she got to choose, and she chose 8 Women instead. (She's got a thing about French movies.) As it happened, we'd seen True Lies on DVD the night before, and, to my astonishment, the two films actually have quite a lot in common.
Never mind the fact that both films are chock-full of knowing references for the film-buff crowd, albeit references to very different sets of movies. Ultimately, both films are hugely enjoyable romps which venture deep into camp but which still maintain an extremely high standard in their set-pieces. Pastiche is all too often played for cheap, broad laughs; in these films, it's combined with a genuine love of, and ability in, the genre pastiched.
I'm not sure which film would have been harder to make. On the one hand, François Ozon had to deal with eight superstars, all of whom needed – and received – loving attention. I fear to think, for instance, of how long it took to film the scene where Emmanuelle Béart lets down her hair, transforming herself into a latter-day Marilyn; or of the time spent setting up the lighting for the shot where Fanny Ardant, a wry smile on her face, smokes in the corner by the velvet drapes while watching a classic performance by Catherine Deneuve.
On the other hand, the stunts in True Lies are amazing. Think of Jamie Lee Curtis dangling from Arnold Schwarzenegger's arm, who himself is dangling upside-down off a helicopter silhouetted against the setting sun. Or the pair of Harrier jump jets firing two missiles each at a low causeway, which then explode – one! two! three! four! – each just behind the escaping truck, except the last, which sends the truck flying up into the air along with a section of road. Either of these shots, or any of half a dozen others, probably cost more than the entire budget for 8 Women, and would have taken weeks to set up.
For if it takes a lot of skill to pull off the kind of couture-fest which we see in 8 Women, it surely takes just as much to be able to blow things up with quite the aplomb of James Cameron. Great pure action films are rare indeed: Die Hard would have to be on the list, of course, and Speed, but I'm not sure that Raiders of the Lost Ark really counts, or even James Cameron's own Aliens. (I would include Starship Troopers on the list, however.)
Both 8 Women and True Lies pull off a very difficult balancing act: they're ridiculous enough that we laugh, but accomplished enough that we don't laugh at them. We laugh just because we're having a rollicking good time and because the films have transcended the unbelievable. We love to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger play a world-class tango dancer, just as we relish the super-exaggerated plot twists in 8 Women. But we also genuinely admire whoever came up with the idea of Arnold riding a horse up a hotel elevator, just as we can often barely bring ourselves to read the subtitles in 8 Women, the performances are so magnetic.
Both of these films are highly derivative, and both of them are all the better for it. So do what Arnold should have done in that elevator: get off your high horse and enjoy the ride. Have some fun!
Posted by Felix at 11:10 EST | Comments (0)
Good news at the Box Office
The numbers are in for the weekend, and the news is good! At the top of the list is Barbershop, a $12 million-budgeted film which took in $20.6 million over the three days. Next is the unstoppable My Big Fat Greek Wedding, crusing over the $110 million mark in total gross despite a budget of only $5 million. Then there's One Hour Photo, which cost $12 million to make and grossed $8 million in one weekend despite difficult subject matter and the fact that the intelligentsia in New York and LA have already had three weeks of limited release in which to see it.
What's more, each of the top three films was shown in fewer theatres than any of the films in the rest of the top ten. One Hour Photo, for instance, in 1,212 theatres, grossed more than Swimfan, in 2,860; Barbershop, in 1,605 theatres, almost quadrupled the gross of Signs, in 3,061.
Clearly, there's an appetite for quirkier fare, for films which don't slavishly follow the Hollywood rule-book. There's an appetite for blockbusters, too, of course, but look at MGM's films over the past year and a half: Barbershop was the studio's biggest opening weekend since Hannibal in February 2001. It beat out at least three of the studio's would-be blockbusters which turned out to be flops: Windtalkers, Rollerball and Hart's War, which cost over $250 million between them.That's enough to make 20 One Hour Photos, or 50 Greek weddings.
Studios need blockbusters, of course. They're the foundation upon which Hollywood is built, and a lot of the mystique of the movies would disappear if all we were offered was intelligent, quirky films. But this week's box-office chart, even if it is a bit anomalous, points to the fact that there is an audience of moviegoers out there who aren't the lowest-common-denominator adolescent boys at which most of the rest of the list is targeted. Swimfan, Stealing Harvard, xXx, Austin Powers, Spider-Man, Men in Black II – in their attempt to reach a broad consumer base, they ironically end up alienating most of the population. Meanwhile, Igby Goes Down, an $8 million film also from MGM, managed to gross more than $300,000 in just ten theatres last weekend. When it finally goes into wide release, it, too, should have a better weekend than Rollerball ever did.
But the best news of all this weekend was the success of Barbershop outside its "urban" (read: black) niche. The idea of a neighbourhood store where local characters can drop in and pass the time of day is pretty universal, and the film obviously appealed to Middle America as well as the inner cities. I'm looking forward to seeing it myself, after which I'll post a review; for the time being I'm assuming that it's basically Smoke moved to the South Side of Chicago. One thing I am sure of: America is waking up to the fact that rappers can make great actors. Ice Cube takes the lead in Barbershop, alongside Eve; elsewhere, we've seen fantastic performances from Ice-T, in New Jack City, say, or Mos Def, in Top Dog/Underdog on Broadway. Later this autumn, Eminem is appearing in 8 Mile, and already he's received a lot more critical acclaim than Britney Spears or Mariah Carey ever got as actresses.
Cross over, say I! Let the rappers act, let the actors sing. (Think of Michelle Pfeiffer, Jane Horrocks, Nicole Kidman.) Let the whites go to black films, let the teenagers go to indy flicks, let the movie business get shaken up a bit. We don't need to rely on DV to change cinema, all we need to do is break out of our niches.
Posted by Felix at 11:12 EST | Comments (0)
Koba the Dread
When Tina Brown signed her ex-boyfriend Martin Amis to the nascent Talk Miramax Books, she certainly knew there was a memoir in the pipeline; a collection of reviews and essays was part of the deal as well. But after that, surely, this great British novelist would surely provide — well, a novel. Instead, we get Koba the Dread, a history book-cum-memoir which less than two months after its publication has already sunk to 1,440 on amazon.com's sales ranking. It might have made the front page of the Sunday New York Times book review section, but the American public clearly has little time for a précis of Stalin's purges, interspersed with personal anecdotes and peculiar sideswipes at Christopher Hitchens.
Bizarrely, the genre this book most closely approximates is neither textbook nor memoir, but weblog. It was written, as far as I can make out, while Amis was on holiday in Uruguay with "several yards of books about the Soviet experiment". Sometimes Amis puts all those books to one side and rattles off stories of himself at his father's knee in the company of Philip Larkin; most of the time he'll pull one of the books off the shelf and use it to bludgeon the figure of Iosif Stalin. In keeping with the book's solipsistic tone, thoughts of Stalin bring up musings on Kingsley Amis, Christopher Hitchens and even Martin's own daughter, and so we hear about them as well.
None of it, I have to say, makes a great deal of sense. Amis jumps around a lot, both chronologically and stylistically, and it can be very hard to keep up. One minute he'll be waxing grandly on the "politicization of sleep"; the next he'll quote a gulag survivor's memoir just because a particular passage speaks powerfully to him; and the next his conversational tone will return, and we'll get the feeling that we're eavesdropping on one side of an argument between Amis and Hitchens in which a detailed knowledge of all several yards of books is assumed.
Amis is a much better novelist than he is polemicist, however, and he has picked as an adversary one of the greatest polemicists in the business. Hitchens' demolition of Amis in the Guardian is much more fun to read than the ponderous and slightly incoherent accuasations against which he is defending himself; his book review in the Atlantic starts with a section of over-generous praise before morphing effortlessly into a well-deserved skewering session.
The real weakness of the book, however, is its historical unreliability. Because Amis did no originial research, his prose is littered with paragraphs like this one:
Stalin's aims were clear: crash Collectivization would, through all-out grain exports, finance wildfire industrialization, resulting in breakneck militarization to secure state and empire "in a hostile world." According to Robert Tucker, Stalin was beginning to picture himself as a kind of Marxist Tsar; he hoped to improve and replace Leninism (with Stalinism), and also to buttress the state "from above," as had Peter the Great. What remains less clear is whether his strategy was thought through, or simply and intoxicatedly ad hoc. The Five Year Plan, after all, was not a plan but a wish list. It was certainly Stalin's intention, or his need, to regalvanize Bolshevism, to commit it, once again, to "heroic" struggle. And yet, unlike Hitler, who announced his goals in 1933 and, with a peculiarly repulsive sense of entitlement, set about achieving them, Stalin is to be seen at this time as a figure constantly fantasticated not by success but by failure.
Wow. There's a lot of omniscience here: "Stalin's aims were clear... It was certainly Stalin's intention... Stalin is to be seen at this time as". But there's also that peculiar "According to Robert Tucker" in the middle: is Amis hedging, or simply citing? And he puts quotation marks around "in a hostile world", without any indication of who or what he might be quoting. Then, that bizarre final sentence: "And yet, unlike Hitler..." — why him, all of a sudden? And what on earth does "fantasticated" mean, anyway?
The most withering criticism of Koba the Dread has come not from Hitchens, or from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times ("the narcissistic musings of a spoiled, upper-middle-class littérateur"). It has come, rather, from Anne Applebaum in Slate."Contrary to the reviews," she writes, "Koba the Dread is not, in fact, a competent account of Stalin's reign but rather a muddled misrendering of both Soviet and Western intellectual history."
Amis has failed, in other words, even at the relatively modest task he set himself. If we can't trust his take on Soviet history, the very foundations on which the book is built crumble, and we are left with nothing at all.
Amis says that he's working on a new novel, one which harkens back to the comedy of Money. If I worked at Talk Miramax, I'd be very happy about that: Mart's attempts at genre-hopping only seem to land him in trouble. Bring on the old!
Posted by Felix at 11:21 EST | Comments (3)
Holier-than-thou journalism
Jim Romenesko's superlative Media News blog has long been one of the first sites I visit every morning. It's interesting not only for the stories it links to but also as a measure of what's considered important in the US media. Judging by the number of stories written and the number of letters which make it to Romenesko's lively letters page, media ethics is right at the top of the list.
Recently, much of the debate has centred on the St Petersburg Times buying naming rights to a sports stadium in Tampa. There's an obvious conflict of interest there: any damaging news report about the stadium could damage the newspaper itself, both financially and by association.
Such conflicts don't really bother me. For one thing, I'm sure the rival Tampa Tribune is more than capable of digging dirt on the new St Pete Times Forum; for another, we've long since grown used to the fact that media outlets have business interests. You're not going to see an ABC special on dismal working conditions at Disney World, or a New York Post exposé of dodgy accounting at News Corporation. (Hell, you're unlikely to see the New York Post write the Disney story either, if allegations about cosiness between Messrs Eisner and Murdoch are true.)
But I never object to serious-minded US journalists discussing questions of media ethics: its something I'm sure the UK media world could benefit from. At least, I never objected until today, when I saw a headline on Romenekso's site reading "Critic: TV reporter showed awful judgment by delivering eulogy". It linked to an LA Times story by Howard Rosenberg titled "A Journalist Breaks the Golden Rule".
I'm sure that journalists break the Golden Rule the whole time, but if anybody was doing unto others as they themselves would not like to be done to, it was Howard Rosenberg, and not the subject of the story, Anna Song. Song's big mistake was to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of two girls who were kidnapped and murdered in Oregon City. She was not the only one to do so: many others delivered eulogies as well, including the city police chief. But she was singled out for criticism because, in Rosenberg's words, her eulogy "transformed her into an activist, and would fit nicely into the 'Conflicts of Interest' chapter of any book on journalism ethics." He goes on to explain: "However well meaning, in other words, Song crossed a line, violating a basic tenet of journalism by participating in a story she was supposed to be observing as a reporter, as an outsider."
I cannot for the life of me work out what Rosenberg could have been thinking when he wrote those words. How on earth could a eulogy which even Rosenberg says was "earnest, dignified and moving" have transformed Song into an activist? Rosenberg never deigns to tell us what Song is now an activist for, of course. That minority group of people who are opposed to kidnapping and murder, perhaps? Maybe it was that cultish sect characterised by sadness and sympathy when two sets of parents lose their young daughters.
As for the idea that reporters can and should only report on stories to which they have no personal connection, well, maybe that works if you're a columnist on the LA Times. It doesn't work if you're a beat reporter in a city of 26,200 people. If you know your beat, you know your community, and if you know your community, by definition you're going to be personally connected to many of the stories you're reporting on. If you're not, you're not doing your job.
Rosenberg is himself not exactly clean and above-board, either. He uses a sly rhetorical device in his piece: first he mentions that Song "became Miss American Teen in 1993 and represented her high school as a Portland Rose Festival princess two years later"; a bit further down, he refers to her as "little more than a callow youngster". These pieces of deprecation-posing-as-reportage are designed to make us feel that Song is probably just eye-candy hired by her television station more for her looks than for her journalistic abilities.
I hope that Song and her boss, Mike Rausch, will have the strength to refuse to be the slightest bit intimidated by the LA Times' heavy-handed and misdirected criticism. What Song did was both moral and admirable; what Rosenberg did was slimy and wrong.
Posted by Felix at 11:25 EST | Comments (0)
Michael Bloomberg
I was no great supporter of Michael Bloomberg's mayoral bid. His cookie-cutter style of management (all news stories have the same structure, all bureaus have the same fishtank) might work with people who are self-selected for the organisation, but couldn't work in the much more anarchic world of city politics. Worse, who was this billionaire with no political experience to waltz in with the chutzpah to think that he could run New York City? I'm opposed to individuals buying elections, which is exactly what Bloomberg did, at a cost of about $80 a vote.
Eight months after Bloomberg took office, however, I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised at the job he's doing. Here's a short profile of him I've written.
* * *
Michael Bloomberg has placed himself in charge of coordinating the memorials and ceremonies on the first anniversary of the attacks on September 11, despite the fact that he is pretty much the only person involved who played no significant role on the day itself. He’s displaying no timidity, either: he says it was “totally my decision” not to allow any original speeches during the memorial service. There will only be readings – the governor of New York will read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, while the governor of New Jersey will read excerpts from the Declaration of Independence.
Bloomberg has yet again demonstrated his ability to take control of proceedings without getting anybody’s back up. Like his predecessor, he’s an authority figure; unlike him, Bloomberg is well-liked.
Rudolph Giuliani was a feisty former prosecutor who loved to pick fights and micromanage everything in his control. Bloomberg, on the other hand, is a former CEO who prides himself on his ability to find the best people to run large areas of the municipal government, and then delegate responsibility to them. He also has no discernible chips on his shoulder, which certainly helps in negotiations. There was a long list of politicians Giuliani refused to meet, while Bloomberg will reach out to anybody. A recent press conference for foreign journalists was the second such event Bloomberg has had in one year; Giuliani did none in his eight years as mayor.
Nine months after he took office, Bloomberg is enjoying the longest honeymoon period in New York mayoral history. New Yorkers, after eight years of the autocratic Giuliani, don’t seem to mind Bloomberg’s paternalism, so long as it comes without Giuliani’s abrasiveness.
Bloomberg’s ability to hop back and forth across political lines no New York politician would dare cross enabled him to take control of the city’s school system – something every previous mayor tried, and failed, to do. And he is now moving on from the welfare of the city’s children to that of its adults: he slapped a $1.50-a-pack city tax on cigarettes, and wants to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants. He looks likely to succeed: New Yorkers loved to fight all of Giuliani’s proposals, but have lost all their appetite for adversarial politics in the Bloomberg era.
New York’s new mayor, a former Salomon Brothers bond trader, is comfortable with numbers and statistics. He boasts of the fact that crime in Times Square is so low that it sometimes becomes hard to measure; when he wants to make a point, he’ll cite the residential occupancy rate in Battery Park City (95%) or the number of different nationalities lost on September 11 (91).
And when asked about the risk of another terrorist attack on New York City, this time using weapons of mass destruction, Bloomberg gives a wholly characteristic response, a combination of his disdain for the incalculable and his determination to make New Yorkers better off, whether they like it or not. “People die because they don’t wear seatbelts,” he says, “because they drive while under the influence of drink, because they smoke.” Better to concentrate on real risks which we know how to deal with, than to obsess over hypothetical attacks which by their very nature will be unexpected.
Bloomberg says the next emergency in New York probably won’t be a terrorist attack, it’s much more likely to be an accident. “The danger is that we let the terrorists win by letting the press sensationalise risks that have always been there and will always be there,”he says.
Bloomberg’s is a hyper-rational view of what happened on September 11. Unpacked, the argument goes something like this: There was always a chance that New York would be targeted by terrorists, as demonstrated by the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and its destruction eight years later. New York had, more or less, a degree of preparation for such an attack commensurate with its likelihood. The city remains a potential target, but the fact that a major attack happened quite recently does not in itself increase the probability that another is going to happen any time soon. We are now better informed as to the risk of a terrorist threat, and the police and fire departments in New York are better coordinated and better prepared. But the best way to save lives is still to get people to stop smoking, rather than, say, investing in radiation pills for all 8 million New Yorkers.
This line of argument is not the type of thing you’re likely to hear from a professional politician any time soon. Most politicians don’t understand probabilistic reasoning; the general public certainly doesn’t. But Bloomberg doesn’t care about being understood so much as he cares about doing the right thing. And weirdly, even when New Yorkers don’t understand the rationale behind his actions, they trust him to be doing the right thing in any case. That’s far from typical for this most loudmouthed and opinionated of cities. In fact, it could be the one area in which New York really has changed since September 11.
Posted by Felix at 11:27 EST | Comments (0)
Kagan's Power and Weakness
If you have a little time to spare, I would highly recommend reading Power and Weakness, Robert Kagan's essay about "why, on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus". My friend Matthew Rose tells me that it's already proving rather influential in what he calls "various policy/commentary circles", and I'm sure you wouldn't want to find yourself in one such unprepared.
As I say, I would highly recommend you read the original essay, even though it's about twice as long as it needs to be. If you simply don't have the time, however, then in a nutshell Kagan's argument is this: that Europeans, with little might to their name, like international norms because they've built some kind of Kantian utopia, where such things trump military might. Americans, on the other hand, with nearly as much military might as the rest of the world combined, are much more inclined to a Hobbesian/Machiavellian view of the world, and, moreover, have provided the security shield which has allowed Europe to develop peacefully over the past 57 years.
The essay is excellent, and there is a temptation to admire this piece’s intelligence and insights to the point at which one overlooks its elisions and oversights. Its broad thesis, I think, is largely correct: Europe is living in a postmodern Kantian paradise whose security is only assured by brute Hobbesian US strength. At least, I think that was unarguable up until the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union constituted a threat to Western European regional security which nobody denied.
Now, however, for all that Europe is a “military pygmy” compared to the US, it still has more than enough firepower to deter any state you might care to mention from a direct assault upon it. Kagan is convinced that the only reason that Europe is secure is that any potential aggressors know that they’d have the US to answer to were they to act. But that’s not the case: while the US is overwhelmingly more powerful than Europe, France and Britain both have militaries (not to mention nuclear weapons) big enough to deter any tinpot dictator like Slobodan Milosevic or even Saddam Hussein from launching a direct attack on the EU.
Which leaves Russia — a country which certainly has enough in the way of nationalistic rumblings to worry the Kantians of the EU. But even in the case of Russia, a direct assault on the European Union is unthinkable: the worst that could happen would be some kind of attempt to expand to the borders of the former Soviet Union. And Germany’s attempts to reach out economically to Russia and start to integrate it into the European economy have to be a more constructive way of bringing Russia to Kantian paradise than would be building more tanks.
Quoth Kagan:
Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of "moral consciousness," it has become dependent on America's willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.
I disagree. I think that Europeans do see the great paradox, but with the emphasis very much on the “deter” rather than the “defeat” of the final clause. As Kagan himself notes, “Europeans generally believe, whether or not they admit it to themselves, that were Iraq ever to emerge as a real and present danger, as opposed to merely a potential danger, then the United States would do something about it - as it did in 1991.” So there’s no need to go in and topple Baghdad now. What's more, Saddam Hussein, a man who has shown a unusual degree of ability on the self-preservation front, is unlikely to suicidally attack Europe, America or anybody else anytime soon.
It’s quite a simple argument: either Saddam’s going to start attacking other countries, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, then we can let him be, following the principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which established the principle of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other states. If, on the other hand, Saddam is going to attack, then we can wait until he does so and then destroy him with the full support of the world community. Meanwhile, any invasion now would mean that it was the US which was making an unprovoked attack on another sovereign state, violating every principle of international peace. Kagan’s justification of such an action as, basically, “well, that’s the way a Hobbesian world works” isn’t good enough. When has a “pre-emptive” attack by one country on another ever been considered moral or justifiable?
The United States, of course, in its role as global policeman, has certainly attacked regimes which haven't marched across international borders: Kosovo being a prime example. But what's being mooted in Iraq goes beyond "humanitarian intervention": the justification here is much more that we should take out Saddam before he's capable of taking out us. I have met one person, a former UN official, who approves of invading Iraq on humanitarian grounds. But there's only one nation whose long-term security is uppermost in the thoughts of the Bush administration hawks, and it's not Kurdistan.
I would also like to take the opportunity to poke a couple of holes in what Rose calls Kagan's "money quote":
The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative - hunting the bear armed only with a knife - is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to?
Kagan then goes on to conclude, at the end of the following paragraph, that
Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed with fixing problems, but it is generally true that those with a greater capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them than those who have no such capability. Americans can imagine successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more than 70 percent of Americans apparently favor such action. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect both unimaginable and frightening.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But actually, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Pretty obviously, bear=Saddam, knifeman=Europe, shooter=USA. But the problem is that the situation never arises where the man armed only with a knife needs to decide whether or not to hunt the bear: he always knows that there’s another man with a rifle who will shoot the bear before it mauls anybody. So he doesn’t need to make any cost-benefit calculations about hunting the bear versus not hunting the bear. He knows he’s not going to be mauled, because the chap with the rifle is right behind him. So there’s no point in going bear-hunting: the minute the bear becomes a real and present danger, it gets shot.
Now consider the situation from the bear’s point of view. So long as there’s a man with a rifle in the forest, he knows better than to go after either man. So what’s the shooter afraid of? Remember that the knifeman, although he doesn’t like the bear, certainly doesn’t want the man with the rifle to shoot it, because that would violate the Rules of the Forest (aka the Treaty of Westphalia). So from the shooter’s point of view, the bear might be a potential danger, but there’s no point in pissing off the knifeman by going after it: if and when the bear actually attacks, it can be shot then just as easily.
Stop and think: why would an American invasion of Iraq be “not surprisingly” unimaginable and/or frightening to Europeans? It would only be so if (a) Europe could conceivably lose a war with Iraq; and (b) Europe would not have the backing of the US in such a war. Neither condition obtains in the real world. Kagan misses his own point, which is that America has taken on the role of Europe’s guardian.
Kagan doesn't take sides on the should-we-or-shouldn't-we-invade-Iraq debate. But it's actually easy to frame it in terms of his forest scenario. The only reason to tear up Westphalia and shoot the bear anyway is because the bear might lend its claws to suicidal rabbits, who can creep up on the man with the rifle when he’s not looking and cause serious damage with them. They certainly die in the process, which is why the bear itself never does such a thing, but they’re suicidal rabbits, remember, so they’re not so fussed about that. The shooter, worried about rabbits bearing bear-claws, then decides that the only way to avoid that threat is to kill the bear and declaw it.
And this is where we get to the Mars/Venus distinction between Europe and the US. Both of them are well aware that shooting bears because of a threat from rabbits violates centuries of international protocol. And because Europeans care about international protocol and Americans don’t, Europeans are opposed to bear-shooting while Americans think it’s actually rather a good idea.
There’s one more hole in Kagan’s argument I'd like to point out, and that's where he says that “although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate.” Someone should remind Kagan that the US is itself a federation, and has been living in its own Kantian paradise for much longer than the Europeans have — in fact, since the end of the Civil War. America’s states have gone so far as to leave their defenses completely open, relying only on the Second Amendment to provide individual citizens with small arms. One Republican pundit told me once that her answer to “who’s in charge here?” would not be the mayor of New York nor the president of the United States, but rather the governor of New York State. States’ rights are a cornerstone of Republican ideology, and many of the most hawkish members of the present Administration would consider the USA a hegemonic power, to be sure, but one constituted of 50 separate units.
Kagan claims that “Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter a "postmodern" utopia.” But surely the reason they feel no resentment is because they’re already in one. Only twice in its history has America been attacked by foreign agents: Pearl Harbor and September 11. Both attacks profoundly changed the American national psyche, but neither of them compare to the kind of invasions that most of the rest of the world’s countries have suffered again and again. Both attacks started — and stopped — right on the very edge of US national territory. Never has the American heartland had to worry that a foreign power would take over the USA.
It’s undeniable that America is very suspicious of the European programme of international courts, laws, treaties, etcetera: it wants the freedom of action to which it feels its role as the world’s policeman entitles it. Yet domestically, it has no problem circumscribing its own states’ rights in myriad ways, through federal laws. Europe’s Kantian paradise, on this view, is simply a recapitulation of America’s, on an international rather than intranational scale. The US should be comfortable with such structures, but of course Kagan provides good historical reasons why it isn’t: its own federal system was set up when it was weak, just as Europe’s looser federation reflected that continent’s military weakness compared to the USA and the USSR. Now that America is by far the strongest country in the world, it has no use any more for such structures.
I'm not saying that there's a nice, clean analogy between US states and European countries. What I am saying is that Americans have long experience of living in a federation where one doesn't need to worry about being invaded by a neighbouring state, and that such an experience parallels the Kantian utopia which Kagan says the US cannot enter.
Kagan's main point, however, rings true.Europeans and Americans need to understand their differences, and America, especially, "could begin to show more understanding for the sensibilities of others, a little generosity of spirit." That way lies a lot of international goodwill. Policemen find it much harder to do their job when those on whose behalf they are working mistrust them. America has a choice between galvanising Europan opinion behind its police work on the one hand, or turning the rest of the world into a police state. The former is in everyone's interest, especially America's.
Posted by Felix at 11:29 EST | Comments (2)
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