who?
fifth july | noon:thirty
Tacitus Tacitus Tacitus
In my American labor history program in college there was a Quiet Man, who always sat off to the side of our seminar groups, never really taking part. He was probably in his mid 20s, fairly normal and nondescript looking; a nice guy, as far as anyone could tell. For an entire quarter our class read and argued, bitched at each other and drank together, and that whole time I'm not sure I ever heard him say a single word. On our last day, just as the final seminar was finishing, he finally spoke up, right in the middle of a round of friendly goodbyes. "Let's get something straight," he said, totally out of the blue, ignoring the surprised looks on our faces, "I takes money to make money..." and from there he went off on one of the most intense, cliched, and ridiculous Econ101-speak spiels I've ever heard, methodically ignoring everything we'd just learned in favor of a Middle Manager's 101 Points so banal and unilluminating a BusinessWeek intern would've blushed. Now, obviously I have nothing against disagreements, good arguments, rocking the boat, any of that. What fascinated me was that this guy just sat there silently, apparently oblivious the entire term, and then, when it was least appropriate, let loose with a totally determined, very long rant, completely confident that he was 100% right, totally unwilling to listen to anyone else's arguments, unswayable.
Max Boot reminds me a lot of that guy. I picture him as this quiet, respectful, bespecled, ageless man who has sat silently through 500 years of imperialisms, meticulously ignoring everything going on around him, all of the failures and abuses and lessons learned, and then suddenly speaks up, quietly yet confidently serene, to say, "Yes, yes, but what we really need are more viceroys..." What's even funnier is that he's more than willing to admit, here and elsewhere, that the Bush administration was "ill-prepared" for the aftermath of their victory in Iraq - an unpreparedness fantastically inexplicable and chuckleheaded, not least because the subsequent low-intensity conflicts, lawlessness and foreign incursions were publicly predicted by hundreds if not thousands of well-informed people - and yet he maintains total faith in them and their projects. I mean, my mechanic disassembles my car then refuses to put it back together every time I take it to him, but that's no reason not to believe he's doing a good job, right?
We love our political analogies!
And speaking of, a recent article in The Nation invents one far better than my incompetent mechanic:
Clinton may well be justifiably seen by future generations as a particularly intelligent and valuable servant of American imperial capitalism, in a way that went beyond diplomatic cleverness. He seems to have understood three things that the Bush Administration has wholly or partly forgotten: that the American economy is utterly intertwined with the world capitalist order, depends on the health of that order and draws immense benefits from that order. This is indeed likely to be seen by future historians as the central tragic irony of the Bush Administration's world policy: that the United States, which of all states today should feel like a satisfied power, is instead behaving like a revolutionary one, kicking to pieces the hill of which it is king.
Overall this is an excellent article. Perceptive and focused, it thankfully leaves out moralizing asides as to the legitimacy of American imperialism to concentrate on concrete differences in the way that imperialism has been managed. This is unusually pragmatic for the left, and I expect it'll be a good shorthand resource to share with certain people come next year.
Wherever I end up next year, I plan to offer my services, first to this guy, then, should he lose the nomination, to whoever will hopefully run a halfway competent campaign against Bush. I've never done volunteer work for a political candidate before, at any level; I've never even seen a stump speech or put a sign in my front yard. And not out of political apathy either; I've just never felt much responsibility towards elected officials, other than voting for them and then bitching about them once in office. But these last 2 � years have been inexcusable, far darker and destructive than I think even the most pessimistic among us imagined. As a - perhaps ironic - result, a lot of my cynicism about national politics has withered. I feel more hopeful than ever before, since any practical change in Executive policy will feel like an ideological victory. Will feel like. I hope.