Mango Madness

It strikes me that we don't talk enough about George W. Bush. He remains an erasure even as we all reap the fruits of his legacy.

The signal foreign policy achievement of the Bush administration was allowing the importation of mangoes from India.

Ghanaians will point fondly to the George W. Bush highway (fruit of the Millenium Challenge Accounts). As for the rest of Bush's legacy?

Recall that in 2005, the editors at CNN and Time magazine declared Bush the "fourth most fascinating person of the last quarter-century"

The headline on July 3rd 2007 read "Bush Commutes Libby Sentence, Saying 30 Months 'Is Excessive'" but it was the small things that rankled.

There were so many "last straws" under George W. Bush that I suppose this Great Recession (or Lesser Depression) remains an afterthought.

Gil Scott-Heron's band used to be called the Amnesia Express, proof of how keenly attuned he was to that deep vein of the American zeitgeist

The defense mechanism to George W. Bush's tenure has been amnesia and nostalgia. I had rather expected tissue rejection. The USA confounds.

Incidentally Indian mangoes have faced stiff competition from Latin American mangoes in the US due to transport costs. A race to the bottom.

George W. Bush has indeed proven to be a hard act to follow. Discuss this paradox among yourselves.

An elephant which is lean is still fatter than a cow. Ga proverb, Ghana.

Let's celebrate George W. Bush's brand of mango madness. Soundtrack: Mango Meat by Mandrill.

Alternatively: Legend In His Own Mind by Gil Scott-Heron

File under: politics, America, Bush, USA, culture, observation, amnesia, perception, Fallen Angels, hatchet job, toli

On George W. Bush

I. On Knowledge

His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.

— Tom Sharpe - Porterhouse Blue

I turned to Tom Sharpe expounding on knowledge a quarter century ago for insight on the 43rd President of the United States. At first glance, I thought his bons mots were a succinct and definitive summary of what we have seen of said President's attitude towards knowledge. Some have speculated about oedipal reasons or ice queen mothering for his essential incuriousity. I demur; one should give him the benefit of the doubt and ascribe his outlook to conscious decision. He has asserted after all that he is "the decider". Also as Sharpe explained, incuriousity can be a deliberate policy, indeed one founded on conviction, if not an instinct towards self-preservation. This is only human and it is clear that there is a lot of conviction in the President. Upon reflection then, Sharpe's formulation can only be a partial rendering.

Knowledge is all the rage these days. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld even proposed a taxonomy of knowledge, iconic in recent memory, in one his jawboning press conference performances — said taxonomy was incomplete as it turned out, he forgot the unknown knowns, and in the war policy he implemented, he discounted even the known knowns. Robert Waldmann recently added a few prescriptions on the matter. Political discourse in the United States of America has thus been all about knowledge: who knew what, when did they know it, should they have known it and so forth. There have even been acrobatics: "If I knew then what I know now, I would etc."

Well, who knew?

II. On Ignorance

It seems to me that one should turn to the other side of the coin in search of insight on the 43rd President of the United States. Thus we'll consider ignorance. For this we'll go back to 1907 and to Hilaire Belloc's delightful essay On Ignorance. As an avid proponent of the collage and remix, let's see how well a sampling of his toli can flesh out our portrait...

On Ignorance by Hilaire Belloc

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known. Is it not wonderful then, that we should be so sensitive upon the discovery of a fault which must of necessity be common to all, and that in its highest degree? The conviction of ignorance would not shame us thus if it were not for the public appreciation of our failure.

... the biting shame of ignorance suddenly displayed conquers and bewilders us. We have no defence left. We are at the mercy of the discoverer, we own and confess, and become insignificant: we slink away.

... Note that all this depends upon what the audience conceive ignorance to be... Among very young men to seem ignorant of vice is the ruin of you, and you had better not have been born than appear doubtful of the effects of strong drink when you are in the company of Patriots...

Ignorance is an everyday occurence, something that affects every man. It isn't surprising that those who affect to be Everyman would not be immune from its effects.

One wonders about the moods of crowds. Why do people turn when they do? What is it that causes reassessments and shifts in the cultural zeitgeist? Tipping points are only part of the picture. I continue to ponder the essential difference between those two fables: the boy who cried wolf and the emperor's new clothes. This is not to suggest that the 43rd President of the United States is a wolf or indeed an emperor, although there may be latent aspirations to both characterizations. Rather I wonder about the reception to the messages of those boys in the fables. The one was ignored (he cried wolf too often) while the other was celebrated (everyone laughed at the emperor). When does danger or hubris become plainly evident to all? Perhaps everything is local and our evolutionary make-up conditions us accordingly.

But I digress. Back to ignorance...

Nevertheless... we should rather study the means to be employed for warding off those sudden and public convictions of Ignorance which are the ruin of so many.

These methods of defence are very numerous and are for the most part easy of acquirement. The most powerful of them by far (but the most dangerous) is to fly into a passion and marvel how anyone can be such a fool as to pay attention to wretched trifles...

No one can fault the 43rd President of the United States for lack of passion. He is focused. He is a compassionate conservative. He is a war president. Passion and focus on big, serious and era-defining issues are his concern. War by definition is as big an issue as humankind faces. Would it that small things were considered; that however would reek of Clintonian microsteps, trivialities in essence.

No. Crusades. Mushroom clouds. War. Terror. Big picture. Serious.

There are other and better defences. One of these is to turn the attack by showing great knowledge on a cognate point, or by remembering that the knowledge your opponent boasts has been somewhere contradicted by an authority...

The 2004 US presidential election campaign is perhaps a great illustration of this technique, and in this Karl Rove, sometimes labeled Bush's brain, was in full concurrence. John Kerry knows this all too well.

Yet another way is to cover your retreat with buffonery, pretending to be ignorant of the most ordinary things, so as to seem to have been playing the fool only when you made your first error. There is a special form of this method which has always seemed to me the most excellent by far of all known ways of escape. It is to show a steady and crass ignorance of very nearly everything that can be mentioned, and with all this to keep a steady mouth, a determined eye, and (this is essential) to show by a hundred allusions that you have on your own ground an excellent store of knowledge.

This is the true offensive-defensive in this kind of assault, and therefore the perfection of tactics...

The steady mouth, the determined eye, the repeated calls for resolve, the swagger, the obsession with fitness, the cowboy photo opportunities, the outdoors pose of a "Texan" stand in stark contrast to the Connecticut patrician upbringing. This is deliberate it would seem.

The notion of buffoonery is trickier however. The public gaffes during the Queen's recent visit are a case in point. One should ask: is the steady flow of homespun awkwardness calculated or genuine? Dwelling on bushisms as many do, only serves to lower everyone's guard and cause misunderestimation as the 43rd President of the United States so candidly and memorably put it.

This is a theme Belloc covered a decade earlier in The Modern Traveller, a book whose toli I'm a year behind in addressing (real soon now).

Note the name, Blood, and the reaction to his shrewd manoeuvers:

It saved the situation.
"If such a man as that" (said they)
"Is Leader, they can go their way."

That is an efficient take on ignorance, who has the time to scrutinize closely in this fast-paced world? By and large, our decision-making is done on gut feel and liminal signals, with only lip service paid to due diligence. Most of the time things work out, right?

Lastly, or rather Penultimately, there is the method of upsetting the plates and dishes, breaking your chair, setting fire to the house, shooting yourself, or otherwise swallowing all the memory of your shame in a great catastrophe.

I fear that this is the terrain of the current moment; the aircraft carriers ominously deployed in the Gulf, the saber-rattling on Iran, Syria and such bode ill for all of us. Setting fire to the house, whether to its finances or its foundations is a real temptation. One school of thought on the Middle East misadventures is that if you break eggs over there, the natives will be scrambling amongst themselves. "We fight them over there so that etc". This Scrambled Egg Theory of Mesopotamia is a rather dubious historical legacy I must say. I rather thought that blood was precious for most human beings but it seems that a powerful cohort, and the 43rd President of the United States is among equals in these elite ranks, are determined to provide existence proofs of the quantity theory of insanity. This young century is on course to equal the butchery of its predecessor.

But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company: I shall therefore beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."

This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.

The closest we have come to this last method was when newly elected Congressman James Webb refused to shake the hands of the 43rd President of the United States. Decorum sadly did not allow the two to come to blows and thus provide catharsis one way or the other. Thus one must hold one's breadth until January 2009 keeping in mind, as his putative replacement has noted, that "the last throes can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution".

The great contribution of American capitalism to the world is the notion that the customer is always right. In a London shop over the weekend, I was reminded that such a sentiment is not a cultural universal (don't ask). Indeed rhetoric can often be alienated from practice, witness no child left behind, heckuva job and so forth. In this vein, the popular majority that the 43rd President of the United States received in the 2004 elections causes me to discount the buyer's remorse that is the current, apparent collective hand-wringing. I actually agree with his notion that we've had an "accountability moment". Moreover, he was indeed clear about his intention of spending that capital. So yes, capital is being spent — in all forms. As to the rest, others can add their assessment. I omitted the dialog that Belloc provided out of a sense of dismay, it predicted too closely the discourse we have been treated to.

So, the 43rd President of the United States leads with his notions on knowledge and seems to be assiduously applying all of Belloc's playbook on ignorance. In this respect, he seems to be crossing the line from genial, if miscreant, rogue to fallen angel in the eyes of the American public. I suspect that this judgement, a fallen angel, is one he would be comfortable with. For my part, I only see Blood, but I have a jaundiced outlook on these things. All power to him I suppose, and history will tell the sorry tale. And that is all I have to say on George W. Bush.

Soundtrack for this note

• Gil Scott-Heron - A Legend in his own Mind
  No comment.
• Manu Dibango - Bush
  A little Afrobeat and jazz-funk excursion taken from the maestro of Makossa's 1975 original soundtrack to Countdown at Kusini. It's nothing too light nor indeed too deep. The bassline and driving horns are augmented by some demented guitar as the band steadily ratchets up the tension building towards the inevitable crash at the end.

File under: observation, profile, knowledge, ignorance, Bush, USA, America, neocons, literature, psychology, culture, Tom Sharpe, Hilaire Belloc, essay, zingers, hatchet job, blood, rogues, Fallen Angels, Things Fall Apart, toli

Ghana vrs USA

Before

This happened to be on my living room table a few days ago. I'll reserve comment until after the Ghana USA match.

Our national anthem is playing. No more blogging...

Later

There is probably a parable to be made about a stick figure made out of spark plugs and improvised bent wire pointing a bow and arrow standing on top of Uncle Sam (a faceless Sam at that albeit with slick production values and glossy magazine accoutrements) but that would be reading far too much into an image...

[Ghana beat the USA 2-1]

Also, in case this was missed in the preceding posts, this was my mother's toli on the previous matches (To The Shout Of "Ghana", You Respond "Respect" and Firmly On The Map). She's heading our eight person family delegation to the World Cup.

The African Nation and The American Dream

I was going to save this photo for a piece I've been working on about immigrants and the diaspora but it seems strangely appropriate here. You can blame this juxtaposition on the journalistic impulse.

The American Dream!

"You've got big dreams, we've got the big money!"

The exclamation point is of typographical importance. This is an advert for a mortgage company on the back page of the March 2006 issue of The African Nation, a free monthly newspaper for immigrants in the US that is often found wherever there's an "ethnic" grocery shop. Published mostly by Nigerians and Camerounians in Silver Spring, Maryland, it features the typical optimism and entrepreneurial spirit of the most vigourous of our West African brethren. The newspaper is billed as

"A success guide for Smart African-Americans, West Indians & Africans in the diaspora".

In short, it's an all-inclusive and expansive production. I will return later to dispense a critique of some of the paper's content (the articles on Nollywood, Green Cards, Obasanjo, corruption, Sudan, Frantz Fanon, the latest society weddings in DC, the latest immigration news, advertisements for lawyers, disquisitions on where we can get authentic comfort food, travel agencies that claim to find the cheapest rate for you to head home etc.). It is worthy of some focused commentary.

The Color of Memory

I first watched the World Cup in 1978 during a trip my mum and I made to Senegal to visit some family friends. It was my first trip outside Ghana and my first time on a plane. My only memories are of the color red in the marketplaces, a vivid red that I haven't seen since, the shimmering cloths the Senegalese wore (they pay attention to their looks to an extent that puts most Ghanaians to shame), the excitement about the Dutch team who played the most beautiful game, and the disappointment at their fate at the hands of Argentina. We watched all the matches on black and white TVs except for the final, and therein lies my other memory: the orange of the Dutch team and their fans. I'm still gutted about that match.

I have been waiting ever since for my team to be at the World Cup. This is something deep inside of me.

And it has been a long wait. Watching my favourite teams disappoint time and again: the Brazilians in 82 (Zico and Socrates slain by a baby-faced assassin named Paolo Rossi), Platini, Tigana and co in 82 and 86 (there was that perfidious Schumacher guy), Hoddle, Waddle, John Barnes and the like (the Hand of God) (and wherefore Gazza and Shearer?), Roger Milla and Cameroon, Gullit and Rijkaard, Nigeria causing ulcers and palpitations to everyone, Senegal exhilarating the last time around... The teams that Abedi Pele and Tony Yeboah led in the 1990s were arguably more talented than our current heroes but they proved incapable of qualifying for the world cup. Thus we had only the memories of Polo and Razak, the legendary Black Stars of the past, glorious in the African Cup of Nations or, of late, our success at the junior level or at the Olympics.

It is a good day to be a Ghanaian, but it has been a long wait.

Identity and Allegiance

I recently calculated that I have now spent more time in Cambridge than anywhere else, what with the university years and the Lotus/IBM years. This beats my stints in Ghana, France or England. Thus I am quite the conflicted soul about who to support and am typically mid-Atlantic in my sensibilities. The Brits have the "cricket match test' to sort out the "good" immigrants from the chaff and I wonder where I lie and whether I'll pass. This is a very difficult test when it comes to football, and especially the World Cup, because any fan of the game (and I am a great football fan) will find some tribal aspect to latch onto in every team.

Until their last match, I thought Ecuador were the best team from Latin America; they were my pick for the tournament since they seemed more "ready" than Brazil or Argentina. They still might come through and I hope they do. Of course I've rooted for all the African teams and, even if the Ivoriens are out of the tournament with the label of the best team not to progress, I can still find favour in those who beat them. I apparently have Dutch ancestry and the good Captain John Vanderpuje (or Vanderpoy as we pronounce it in Ghana) was surely smiling as that free kick rocketed into the Ivorien net and also at the way Arjen Robben played in Holland's demolition of Serbia and Montenegro. When I mentioned my Dutch connection to a friend yesterday, he noted that my allegiance would likely depend on my family history. My reply was that in the mist of the centuries that have passed, it is unclear whether said ancestor was a benign adventurer or a rapacious colonist. Identity is identity and many tribes can claim me. I, in turn, claim all those tribes through victory and defeat.

Note well the use of the deflating passive tense in the headlines that followed in the US, it isn't David beats Goliath, or even Ghana Through... Brazil next, it's rather US eliminated by Ghana. The frame is typical of the big media companies and their prevailing script: the US were the actors, the Ghanaians were the sideshow. This of course would be news to anyone who watched the match, but such is the Great Game of life. How does the song go again?

They're all political actors... 'Don't worry'. He says 'Don't worry.'

The only team that leaves me cold in the tournament is Switzerland. I can't figure out the reason for this since they are just as talented as any of the other teams and play fluent European-style football. Whither neutrality? I was hoping Togo would beat them yesterday if only because of the amount of money Eyadema père had stashed in those well-run banks. But it wasn't to be, and such is life. Hopefully Eyadema fils will repatriate some of that loot to Togo. There is a startling statistic about the number of public schools constructed in Togo since independence (less than five in almost 50 years, if my memory serves me right). That is worth pondering at the same time as matters of elation are considered. But that's also for later toli... In any case South Korea might oblige tomorrow and deal with the Swiss tribe.

Hearts of Oak

The Wife called the following photo "working from home" for some reason. I was a little surprised. I didn't pretend to be working for those two glorious hours, and Big Blue couldn't have made me work at such a time. In reality there was no dilemma, there was only ecstasy.

I had dug up my Accra Hearts of Oak shirts since the World Cup is all about tribes and belonging. A good friend was good-natured enough to wear one even though his allegiances were more in line with Uncle Sam. There is no tribe more loyal than the "Phobians", the Hearts of Oak fans. Really. Truly. We dig deep. You Red Sox or Arsenal fans have nothing on us.

There's nothing like a football match to bring out the drama of life, and we see shattered dreams for some, and bite-sized triumphs for others. Michael Essien's second yellow card is the most painful thing he will endure in his life as he'll miss the choicest game we'll face, and it tempers the Ghanaian jubilation somewhat. My American friends might be hurting right now, but rather than devolving into recriminations (as it appeared would be the case judging by the later coverage on ESPN), this Phobian will suggest instead a transfer of allegiance to the Black Stars. I've been told that the latest hiplife rhyme back home is

Black Stars checked the Czechs and cleared the bush.

We play to a different drumbeat and with our own musicality. I'll conclude with the Hearts of Oak motto

Never say die until the bones are rotten.

Next step Brazil.

I nominate this note for the Things Fall Apart series, under the banner of Social Living.

Next: Friends Today, Enemies Tomorrow

See also: On IBM and Africa

File under: Ghana, USA, Africa, America, world cup, collage, art, serendipity, humour, sculpture, juxtaposition, competition, Strange Bedfellows, Things Fall Apart, Social Living, football, soccer, sports, fever, obsession, memory, ingenuity, identity, communities, fun, tribes, allegiance, Holland, funny, history, Cambridge, diaspora, immigrant, life, memory, family, humour, toli

A Nine Dollar Vibe

I was a charter subscriber of Vibe magazine; Quincy Jones was quite the salesman and saw a budding market for a publication on a music and culture that was becoming ubiquitous. Up until 2000 or so, the writing was fairly sharp although it appeared that the magazine was becoming a forum for a so-called "hip-hop lifestyle". The commercial imperative is keenly felt in the USA. Still at $9 or so to renew, I persevered with the magazine even as I would get increasingly irked (and last year they started an offshoot Vibe Vixens which, other than fulfilling an eye candy and titillation quotient, was similarly vacuous). Quincy incidentally cashed out some time ago (like Berry Gordy, he knew exactly when the gig was up). When we moved to a new apartment last year I allowed the subscription to lapse. For the past few months I've been picking up a copy in bookstores and flipping through in the hope of finding a reason to get back on the bandwagon, $9 is a such a low threshold. Sadly enough this email from my archives is still relevant.

To: mail@vibe.com
Subject: September 1999 6th Anniversary issue

Don't start a piece titled "We're on a mission" with a clear error in the second sentence: as we all know "Feels Good" was on Tony Toni Toné's second album (The Revival), not on their first (the aptly named Who?). Or were you over-excited by your sixth "Anniversary" (a song on their third album, Sons of Soul)...

Not to be pedantic though, the appeal of Vibe in its first couple of years was its incisive and informed writing about a fairly wide range of music. I can't help but comment that that aspect of the magazine has been overshadowed of late. A couple of recent issues were clearly devoid of content; I kept turning the page looking for something, anything, and ended at the end of the magazine.

On the other hand, it's obvious that you are a success given the amount of your pages devoted to advertisements, fashion and celebrity eye candy so maybe I should shut up. Or maybe I won't: consider this a plea for you to get back to some sharp writing and keep on your toes; there's still some good music out there. No more puff pieces.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, For now.

A concerned subscriber

I was ignored the first time and have no illusions that anyone will even care that they've lost my annual $9 contibution especially when others seem to tolerate 3 pages of marginal music commentary amongst 180 pages of advertisements and "lifestyle" bluster. Still I'm a little saddened.

These are the remnants of my Vibe magazine collection. Curiously enough, this is all that survived my last apartment move (at least these are what are in the boxes that I've opened). As you can see these remnants are all eye candy. You have my word that the music reporting was as interesting as the covers. The Maxwell, D'Angelo and Erykah Badu issues were fabulous as was the Chris Rock piece. As regards eye candy the two Toni Braxton issues are collectors items, Toni, Toni Toni! was the title of the middle one. The Foxy Brown, Eve, J. Lo and the two Mary J. Blige pieces were a mixed bag, the music was not as incisive but there was a focus on the culture. The Beyoncé and TLC issues were elegaic while the R. Kelly and Lil Kim bits were pure scandal showcasing the eternal struggle between the sacred and the profane in the music that I love. But that was then, this is now; now there is only eye candy. Thus my hommage to the end of an era and my boycott of the nine dollar Vibe.

It is apparent that best writing on music is now to be found in blogs or various discussion forums. I am old-fashioned enough to like settling down with a good magazine and the occasional meaty book on music or the arts. There are still interesting magazines on literature and the like, why not music? I guess I'm going to have to write my own books since no one wants to cater to my admittedly intense predilection for music.

In all seriousness, what are people reading these days? And if it's not on paper, who should I be adding to my Bloglines' subscriptions?

This is the first part of the Boycott Day Trinity: The Father.

File under: vibe, music, culture, magazine, commercialization, hustle, decline, fall, writing, rant, black, america, hip-hop, soul, lifestyle, Dark Matter, Small Things, boycott, media, Things Fall Apart, toli

Manifest Destiny

A savaging is in order.

I'm already in a vicious mood and more on that shortly but I have to say that I almost had a case of airplane rage while flying back from San Francisco last Sunday. There I was, reading what started out as a reasonable essay by Michael Ignatieff, Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?, when I came across the following:

Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise.

I didn't even know where to start with that last sentence and I still don't. I've written recently about a supremely supine media, but here we have hubris beyond belief from the academy. Still let me give it a little context, lest I be accused of nitpicking his point.

Other democratic leaders may suspect Bush is right, but that doesn't mean they are joining his crusade. Never have there been more democracies. Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise.

The cheek of it. The self-righteous solipsist.

Ignatieff used to write similarly long, ambitious pieces for The Observer in the 90s. I can imagine him content with the ring of those heady sentences but he really should be taken to task. There is a certain class of supposedly "Public Intellectuals" who are simply pernicious because of the palliative cover they provide for Rovian rogues who probably can't believe their luck that they can point to ideological justification for their misdeeds in the pages of the Grey Lady and from Ivory Towers I'm quite familiar with. And from that sentence on, the Great Game of misdirection and bromides proceeds apace.

Now the deification of Reagan is one thing (although there was a little shock on my part in reading the ensuing pablum about Ronnie's supposed prescience), but that deserves a separate post and I've long promised The Governor of Redmonk something on that front. Per Ignatieff, Reagan is supposedly responsible for "the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy". The repeated misadventures in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and almost everywhere else are conveniently skipped over. The dissonance of soaring cowboy rhetoric, garden-variety Iran/Contra criminality, defence industry sinecures, or Savings and Loan cronyism and plain hypocrisy in the Realpolitik that Reagan's cohorts practiced are not commented upon, nor is it anywhere acknowledged that those swarthy developing world types incurred considerable collateral damage when they served as battlegrounds and proxies in that awful Cold War.

In any case, it's understandable that we want to ascribe superhuman attributes to B-movie players, and we should have a little respect for genuinely popular "Great Men" who were in tune with the zeitgeist. The rush to beatify John Paul II is similarly par for the course.

Still Ignatieff's conflation of the Iraq blackhole with the supposed project to spread democracy is even harder to take, but that too is just a post-hoc rationalization of ongoing, ill-conceived follies, or rectfication of errors as Billmon would put it. I understand we'll hear yet another turn of the damage mitigation in the much leaked presidential address on the "resolve" required to "stay the course".

I had just finished reading a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, Optimism fades, but war goes on, which sought out the opinions of those who are bearing the weight of the current imperial overstretch. On the ground in Iraq, the soldiers, who by inclination are not normally the most reflective of types, no longer have the WMD plank of yore as motivation, hence they are falling to either the "Saddam was a bad guy" plank or to the "better we fight over there than in Manhattan" party line. And yes, Uday feeding his people to the lions in his private zoo is awful but we won't mention Rumsfeld visiting Uday's father in the 80s selling him weapons and turning a blind eye to the gassing of those pesky Kurds, all in the name of access to oil or of "containing Iran". There is no moral equivalence but there is a certain axis of hypocrisy at work.

Despite the seeming lack of progress against the insurgency - as evidenced by the rising casualty count of both Americans and civilian Iraqis - it is those scenes that make Wood, a career officer who has been in the army for 19 years, a firm believer in his mission.

Even with all the setbacks, he adds, the war must continue to be waged in Iraq. Otherwise, it will be waged on American soil, he says.

The soldiers don't even know that back home the rhetoric has gone past The Evildoers or even The Neighbour's Grass Theory to the "we can't allow our folly to fail" routine. What a wonderful world I suppose, to mess up other people's gardens.

"But yet, but yet", Ignatief writes. There must be some good to find in all of this, something to make us feel good about what has come to pass. So then we turn to this:

While Americans characteristically oversell and exaggerate the world's desire to live as they do, it is actually reasonable to suppose, as Americans believe, that most human beings, if given the chance, would like to rule themselves. It is not imperialistic to believe this. It might even be condescending to believe anything else.

Now if anything has been oversold in his essay it is precisely his previous exercise in rhetorical overstretch.

Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise.

Really?

America alone? I beg your pardon.

Democracy promotion is not the preserve of Americans, it is a universal struggle. Further it is a struggle that is undergoing many setbacks currently because of proverbial Quiet Americans (and would it that Dubya and co were quiet). That same laudable Reagan was for breaking sanctions on the apartheid regime in the name of not encouraging that dastardly communist Nelson Mandela who was busy breaking rocks on Robben Island. Indeed, if I remember correctly, even the democratic institutions of the US need looking after, and some of us are monitoring the situation here with alarm.

In Ghana we get daily lectures from the State Department about governance, corruption and institutions, lectures on the form of democracy in short. The concern is well taken but all too often these are just a cover for securing very favourable access for American firms to our local markets. In terms of actual aid and strengthening of democracy, those sensible Canadians, those quiet Dutch, the Danes or even the Brits who are quietly doing penance for their colonial past are in fact far more effective on the ground in spreading democracy's promise.

The story of Millennium Challenge Accounts is the correct parable in this respect: announce lofty goals to provide cover during election season and actually don't do anything, wrap the "aid" with red tape, rinse with a touch of quid pro quo a la Haliburton and lecture away about the feel good quotient of the benevolent elephant. Levelling the playing field of global affairs is actually anathema to America foreign policy as we have seen - to be fair the French and others are no choirboys. "But yet, but yet".

Still we sit and listen to the lectures because, in our position, we'll take any help we can get even if it is the incidental backwash of self-congratulation. But that's the thing: the rhetoric is all about democracy when the practice is about exceptionalism. As a piece I read on the same flight put it, it all depends on which side is doing the globalizing. The unresolved issues in the American Dream, the dissonance between perception and reality is something that this young country is still dealing with.

The sadness that came over me as I finished the article was much like the disappointment one has felt reading almost anything Thomas Friedman has written in the past 4 years. Others have taken Chutzpah Thomas to task for his most brazen piece of revisionism from last week. And like Dershowitz, his discourse has devolved into the most unseemly blowhard rhetoric.

Now I've read Isaiah Berlin on Liberty, I read the Woodrow Wilson Quarterly, I've read the canon of both the liberals and the conservatives in the west. You think that by reading the same texts that you've taken away a coherent worldview but, truth be told, there are considerable blindspots and much solipsism in these "world"views. And these blindspots manifest themselves in the contortions of apologia and logical inconsistency borne of hurt pride that we've been seeing especially since 9/11. What's worse is that no one calls these people on it and we are supposed to bear their hot air lectures with a smile.

This reminded me of the way many Africans felt on reading Robert Kaplan in The Coming Anarchy back in 1994. Kaplan at least was embarrassed that his travel journalism came to be construed as policy prescriptions for Bill Clinton and Madelaine Albright in dealing with Rwanda and the madness in the former Yugoslavia. Actually, Kaplan was making a more subtle point than Ignatieff or Friedman ever will and when I see neighbour's houses on fire and worse, I can at least empathize with his concern for the fabric of my society. But I can't wash my hands of my home so I differ on the remedies (cut-and-run) prescribed from this side of the Atlantic.

I read the rest of the article half expecting some Social Darwinist claptrap to emerge and it's quite close: Ignatieff's essay is simply Manifest Destiny revisited as farce.

A Manifest Destiny Soundtrack

The sound of manifest destiny has mostly been a soundtrack of irony because the foundations of the ideology simply dissolve away with the slightest hint of scrutiny. Thus I haven't been able to find much worthy art in the affirmation of self congratulation. Consider this then a passive-aggressive musical take on the theme.

• Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World
  Don't we know it.
• Jaguar Wright - Self Love

  Self Love
  Self Preservation

• Steel Pulse - Babylon Makes The Rules (lyrics)

  You've Had All Night And Day To
  Consider And Pray
  You've Brought Fire On My Head And
  Now You Must Pay...
  
  Babylon Makes The Rules
  Where My People Suffer...

  
• Kurtis Blow - If I Ruled The World
  The original critique
• Nas (ft. Lauryn Hill) - If I Ruled The World (Imagine That)
  Eschewing the bling-bling before the bubble.
• Jamiroquai - Manifest Destiny (lyrics)
  
  

  Every child can learn a different thing
  See I tried a million times
  But I had to change my mind
  Sadness was the best thing I could bring
  On the inside he was dead and this is what he said
  As he took away the blue above the clouds
  "Oh, superiority was clearly meant to be
  So destiny will manifest in time"
  
  So where has all the love gone?
  A troubled trail of tears will tell the tale
  Of how I was put down where I don't belong
  Woman, child and man for sale
  For ethical slavery is just an absurdity
  How can you be alive when you are dead
  With these chains of hypocrisy
  The shame of my ancestry
  Forever strained in blood in which you tread

Update: Lord of the Rings File under: hubris, solipsism, cheek, chutzpah, blowhards, intellectuals, politics, academy, social darwinism, USA, Ignatieff, Friedman, america, exceptionalism, perception, narcissism, observation, rant, toli

Supremely Supine

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That B-Movie meme again

I've written before on how the political discourse in the West is all about nostalgia and reducible to the B-movie aesthetic of politics as theatre. I was struck by this again when watching one of the sunday morning political talk shows this weekend, hosted by Howard Kurtz on CNN, that what seemed to be important was not what the news was, but how it was discussed by the press and the talking heads.

The talk was all very meta, ironic and all about the imagery and spin. The realities of another bloody weekend in Iraq didn't even impinge on the discussion in any way, nor was there any policy analysis of the issue du jour, the presidential debate. The implication was that we are all too sophisticated to discuss substance, what mattered was how these politicians came across, how they looked, whether they picked their nose. They might as well have been baying sheep for all these commentators cared.

In much the same vein, here is Tom Engelhardt commenting on the first Bush-Kerry debate:

Presidential fiction on the morning after

"One irony did strike me as I watched a rare only half-controlled Bush performance where he did not look like his usual relaxed, folksy self: The Republicans love to denounce Hollywood, but they have proved the most fabulous purveyors of fiction and seductive imagery in our recent political history. Reagan may have been our official actor-president, but George has been much underestimated for his ability to act out both the roles of 'George Bush' and of the President. Even the debate agreement document itself, all 32 pages of it, had the detail of a Hollywood agent's contract with a big studio -- and Bush family consigliere James Baker was that agent.

Normally surrounded by blanketing 'security,' the President's campaign road events -- with their carefully reserved tickets, their choreographed chants and softball questions, their air of private theatrical performances only open to invited (or paying) guests -- have all the easy, repetitive smoothness of a Little Mermaid-like stage show at Disneyland. Far more than in any other campaign of our lifetime, the Bush campaign, until tonight, has really been a fabulously successful cartoon version of politics, buffered from any reality whatsoever. Unscripted realities have generally been kept well out of sight in blocked off protest zones and when anyone has crashed the campaign's space -- anyone, that is, wearing the wrong t-shirt or protesting in any way -- that person has almost instantly been airbrushed away. Who else has ever created such a self-enclosed political universe, so -- as everyone likes to say -- 'on message'? (And imagine that, at any given moment, there are not one but two performances taking place -- the second being a carefully coded set of signs and signals for the President's fundamentalist Christian audience.)

And what about the President himself with that wonderful walk of his -- not on display at the debate this evening -- slightly bow-legged as if he had just dismounted from a horse before striding on stage, the shoulders curved forward, the head held just in front of the body, the hands hanging at (but off) his sides as if he were indeed a mythic cowboy, a gunslinger ready to draw. (Never mind that, just out of sight, the outlaws have taken over the sheriff's office and are performing their own version of A Fistful of Dollars.)

Of course, this country's greatest and most seductive export has always been imagery (and the fictions that went with it): whether films from the Hollywood production line, TV shows that have sometimes turned much of the world into the equivalent of couch potatoes, or ad mini-dramas that travel the planet as our ambassadors, outdoing every other form of alluring fiction.

As it happens, the Bush administration's skills have been dazzling and attractive only domestically. As a Hollywood extravaganza, their campaign would be an instant failure because there would be no foreign box office. But if your goal is power at home and the world be damned, then the George machine has been a remarkably effective image producer, given the minimalist materials at hand. (Think Iraq, the price of a barrel of oil, jobs in America, or the economy generally.) Whether or not that was changed by the first debate I don't know, but it's enough to drive you bonkers. His 'ranch' in Crawford isn't actually a ranch; his 'Texas' youth happened mostly in the East; his 'military service' wasn't really military service; his 'success' in business was a sham; little that he said in his last debates against Al Gore bore any relation to the policies he's since pursued (remember his humility about 'nation-building efforts' back then); his Iraq, of course, isn't Iraq; his version of war, learned in the movie theaters of his childhood, bears no relation to war; and so on into some clean, well-lighted nightmare of the soul.

The flamboyant enemies he's preferred -- Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and now Abu Musad al-Zarqawi -- have themselves been fascinated by our image-making skills and have been into making their own images and fictions in imitation of the Hollywood that turned out Predator, Alien, and any number of catastrophe films."

These days, I'm more concerned with the campaign my mum is waging in Ghana for the Ho West constituency. Politics in Ghana, and espcially the region she is campaigning in, is still very primitive. People are so poor, living barely above subsistence that all incumbents had to do to in the past to get their votes was drop a few bags of rice and a couple of chickens, if that. Slogans or policies mattered for naught. And yet there was no tangible reward for these people for their 95% votes. No infrastructure, no roads, no running water or electrictity. And still there would be those who would vote 6 times in row if there was any difficulty with the polling - much to my uncle's disgust in the last election. At least in the US, your senator would throw some pork your way, some highway contracts or bridge, some pet scheme of some sort.

There's a heady challenge in trying to reverse 18 years of absolutism and incumbency let alone if you're trying to elevate the political discourse. So you need the printed t-shirts, the bicycles, the megaphones. You need to look good, you need to be almost a charicature, your message almost doesn't matter.

The West has shown that endpoint of politics is this sad Kerry-Bush road show. I almost wish that this weren't the future of Ghanaian politics say in 20 years time. But it is. It's that B-Movie theory again, I'm sad to say.

File under: culture, journalism, media, politics, USA, america, aesthetic, war, observation, toli

On Dentistry

As I sit here, my already big lips bloated beyond belief - the left side of my face is still in turmoil from the local anaesthetic the dentist applied a few hours ago - I thought I'd write a piece on dentistry. I've already written about my chewing stick theory of history and bemoaned the loss of Crest Smooth Mint Gel but that was more about teeth not dentistry. In any case, there'll be no conference calls or speaking engagments for me today...

I've seen dentists in 4 countries so far: Ghana, France, England and the US. Surprisingly the French experience was worse than the Ghanaian. Of course that has to do with the 'summer of cavities' (1985 perhaps?) when my two cousins and I were treated at the infamous 'Faculte de Chirurgie Dentaire de Nancy'.

Harken back if you will to seven Wednesdays in a row wherein three children (after the first week my uncle and aunt let us go on our own) would get on the bus in Vandoeuvre and make the hour and a half trek to this teaching college to be human guinea pigs for dental students who would inspect and imagine cavities, proclaim the need for fillings and proceed to botch the procedure. So we'd head back the next week and the filling would not have set or, more likely, would have fallen out in the interim. Repeat and rinse seven times like I alluded to. I can't remember any pain inflicted by these excuses for dentists (my cousins have a different story), but it got tiresome after the third week or so. I can't quite imagine what my uncle and aunt were thinking: perhaps a lesson on the theatre of the absurd, Kafka, or some bonding or character-building something or other. The upside, I guess, was that we learnt the value of brushing teeth and avoiding dentists at all costs especially if they were akin to Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. You don't want to be poor Dustin Hoffman strapped into a chair with no anaesthethic as the Nazi draws closer to pull your teeth...

If France was epic and eventful, and Ghana rudimentary, dentistry in England was a little better - the caveat being that, with the NHS being what it was, you had to wait a little longer for care. It also helped that the Indian dentist I had was very chuffed/impressed by my heading to Harvard - like Nigerians, Indians are much impressed by brand names in higher education. Much ink has been spilt about bad teeth and Englishmen and perhaps poor old Martin Amis with his dental travails is the best exemplar:

Amis spent $30,000 on [his teeth], having a[n American] dentist anchor them to bone with titanium rods. The money came from the $800,000 advance he received for the new novel, "The Information" It was a sum that whipped a sizable portion of the London literary establishment to fury. Some of its pillars seized on that costly dental work to aim wounding remarks at Amis. Someone quoted his famous writer father, Kingsley, as saying he couldn't read Martin's novels because they were too scatological and the language too self-conscious. It was noted with approval that Martin's face fell when he heard this.

"Some said I wanted this money to have my teeth capped so I can look like a South American movie star,"' Martin Amis said yesterday. "Others asked, 'Why isn't he having it done here instead of the United States?' There's a strain of anti-Americanism in it all."

Dentistry is completely different in the US. The stereotypes are all correct: everyone's teeth look straight, shiny white, and healthy or, if they are teenagers, they are wearing braces on their way to dental perfection. You wonder if this is the same dentistry as elsewhere - it's like trying comparing the Premier League to your weekend pickup games in the park; there's just no comparison. I mean take the entire profession of "Dental Hygienists" for God's sake - who'd would have thought it: people devoted just to cleaning and polishing? Americans spend so much on their teeth and their dentists oblige with this amazing professionalism and division of labour. Amis's $30,000 is probably not even an extravagance - think of dentists in Beverly Hills.

Needless to say, I am the happy recipient of the fruits of American dentistry. The whole choreography of wedges, burnishers, smoothers, pastes, explorers, x-rays etc; the exquisite sequences of dentist and assistant operating in tandem once the hygienist has finished with you and made your teeth shine with loving polish; the seriousness of the care, the fussing and fretting about every little nick in your bicuspids...

For some reason when I started at Lotus, I didn't understand that you just had to call up any old dentist and simply ask whether they took your insurance. Unlike primary care, you didn't have to choose a dentist upfront - sidenote: this seperation of medical from dental and optical care is another peculiar Americanism, but more on the scam that is American healthcare later. So I went for something like 3 years without seeing a dentist in America - continuing to visit the UK for that kind of care when I remembered. I can remember the scorn of the American dentist (Dr Yun?) at the quality of work the UK dentists had performed which she proceeded to promptly remedy. Indeed I think the overwhelming fussing that I received was to compensate for the supposed deprivations I had endured at those rank amateurs.

So anyway, all this was passing through my head as I lay in the basement in that lovely brown chair, while Doctor Gordon was doing due diligence on me, making me hold the suction tube - they always like to give you something to do, I guess it mitigates any nervousness - and I looked out through the window at the feet of the occasional passers-by wondering if they could see the intricate engineering tasks taking place on the operating theatre of my bottom molars. I guess this is why Americans feel they live in God's own country.

File under: culture, dentistry, Martin Amis, England, France, America, Ghana, economics, health, whimsy, observation, toli