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

Noblesse Oblige

A few quotes that have been helping me get through the past couple of weeks...

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that that so few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.

— Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books

The following struck me forcefully with its unerring similarity to the cadences and content of a Bush speech. The sentiment of course is an extremely diluted sense of noblesse oblige. On the prescience of satirists again...

A sermon delivered to the congregation of the Church of the Holy Monument in Boggington by the Chief Constable.

"I say unto you that unless we maintain the bonds of free enterprise and free endeavour we shall be bounden to do the Devil's work," he announced from the pulpit. "Our business in the world is to augment the goodness that is God's love with the fruition of free enterprise and to put aside those things which the Welfare State handed us on a plate and thus deprived us of the need to which we must pay homage. That need, dear brothers and sisters in God, is to take care of ourselves as individuals and so save the rest of the community doing it out of the taxpayer's pocket.

Only this week , I have been encouraged to see how many Watch Committees and Neigbourhood Watches have been set up to augment that splendid work being done by the Police everywhere and in particular by the men under my command. It is not often that I have a chance or, I might say, the opportunity to do the Lord's work in the way he would have me do, namely, like your goodselves, to encourage others to free themselves from the shackles of passivity and acceptance and to go forth into the world to bring the positive and active blessings of health, wealth and happiness to those less fortunate than ourselves.

This is not to say that we must bow the knee to social need or so-called deprivation. Instead we must make of ourselves and our gifts in business and in wealth whatsoever we can. As the Lord has told me, there are as many numerous spin-offs on the way to Heaven as there are handouts on the slippery road to Hell. It is one thing to give a penny to a beggar: it is another to beg oneself. And so I say to you dear friends, assist the police wherever you can in the prevention of crime and in the pursuit of justice but never forget that the way of righteousness is the way of self-service and not the other way around. And so let us pray."

— Tom Sharpe - The Midden (1996)

The shock of reading Jonathan Swift at his best cannot be discounted. The set up is done with a poker face and the exposition is so skilled that, when you realize just how far out of this world he has taken you, you can only laugh.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasse or a ragout.

— Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burthen to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.

As they say, Eating People is Wrong. File under: literature, satire, whimsy, observation, perception, humour, quotes, Tom Sharpe, Jonathan Swift, toli

Proverbial Zingers

Further nuggets for the Toli Scrapbook... ala Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idées Reçus (Dictionary of Received Ideas).

This month's zingers post covers a lot of ground. There has been a veritable effusiveness of jaundiced (and flowery - as my MIT-educated co-worker put it) prose and commentary from this joint on all sorts of topics over the past 6 weeks. I hope these proverbial zingers provide a concise counterpoint or explanation of the threads that weave all of it together.

A skewed outlook on life

He liked his women freshly jilted.

Martin Amis - Heavy Water and other Stories (2000)

See also: Inman Square Still Life

On the advisability (or lack thereof) of sending out withering emails to one's team

..like I just did this past week, and having to deal with the consequent fallout (consignment to the most menial sytem administration duties). Note to self: being right without being judicious is a fool's paradise.

Words are like bullets. When you release them, you can't call them back.

Gambian proverb

An insolent tongue is a bad weapon.

Senegalese proverb

The tongue weighs practically nothing, but so few people can hold it.

Ghanaian proverb

It is a stupid dog that barks at an elephant.

Ugandan proverb

On why I search

Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.

Nigerian proverb

A touch of quasi-religious optimism perhaps

The sun will shine on those who are standing before it shines on those who are sitting.

Liberian proverb

And perhaps a desire for no regrets

The stone that lies at the bottom of the riverbed, cannot complain about feeling cold.

This one from my mother who had a little too much cognac (Christmas day 2003)

On being careful

If you want to improve your memory, lend someone money.

Zimbabwean proverb

When you are surrounded by vultures, try not to die.

Proverb from Cote D'Ivoire

On journalism in Africa

For after all our business is not only to discover wrongdoing, it is our business to expose lies, to expose smears. Not only the lies that public officials tell but the lies that are told about public officials. Much of the instability that has dogged Africa has its roots in the inability of the press to clearly tell the public which of the many rumours are true and which are not true. There is this idea that has taken root that getting access to the facts and making them public will hinder and undermine government, I have heard the argument that much of government is so complicated and so delicate that it is impossible to portray all the intricacies in a newspaper article or radio programme. In an area where democratic practices are yet to take root, I will suggest that it is in the interest of government that things are exposed.

There is a saying in my language that it is difficult for head lice to prosper on a bald man's head. If one were to take the saying further, even though I acknowledge it is dangerous to try to improve upon the sayings of the elders, head lice prosper the most in thick grown hair. Or to coin another phrase, the mould grows where the sun rays don't get to.

In the Public Eye (November 1998) - Thoughts on the difficulties faced by African journalists in obtaining public information

On The Importance Of Biting Satire

I like my satire savage. It should be vicious, biting and deeply heartfelt. The targets should feel a sharp wound.

The whimsical and comic artefacts of the best satirists are side-benefits; their purpose is really to serve as social barometers and canaries in the mineshafts of our communities.

See also Bolton's Hair: No Brush With Greatness
And 3 days later: Is John Bolton Going Down?

On the prescience of the best satirists

With apologies to Michael Froomkin, this is what I meant...

Sir Edward cheered up... It was worth decanting a really good claret. Besides he had a theory to explain why Lady Thatcher was such a passionate advocate of arming the Bosnian Muslims. Her son was an arms dealer and by backing the Muslims so openly she was bound to help dear little Markie's standing in Saudi Arabia. It was in the discovery of real motivation in politics that Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre found his greatest pleasure.

Tom Sharpe, The Midden (1996)

Gotcha!

Sir Mark Thatcher has pleaded guilty in South Africa to being negligent in investing in an aircraft said to have been used by people allegedly plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea 'coup plot' (January 2005)

Ergo Strange Bedfellows and the Journalistic Impulse

On language

Asankasa: noun.

1. a radio. From the Ewe language of Ghana, literally rendered it means "The bird who sings"; circa 1930s

2. a later sub-sense, circa 1960-63, in which the words from the radio should not be trusted; said new meaning arising when Kwame Nkrumah's true colours were shown e.g. the propaganda of a one-party state

Inept excess

If you no for chop fufu before, you no sabi the sweeticity of life.

Self circa 2000 - my licence to practice pidgin was thereby revoked

Celebrating the beauty of the oral tradition and of the Griot

Il était devenu le Maître de la parole incontestable, non par décret de quelque autorité ou d'action culturelle (seuls lieux où l'on célèbre encore l'oral) mais par son goût du mot, du discours sans virgule. Il parlait voilà... S'il y rencontrait une commère folle a la langue, disponible et inutile, manman! quelle rafale de blabla...

Solibo parlait, il parlait sans arrêt, it parlait aux kermessess, it parlait aux maneges, et plus encore aux fêtes. Mail il n'était pas un évadé d'hôpital psychiatrique, de ces déréglés qui secouent la parole comme on se bat une douce...

On s'assemblait pour l'écouter ... un silence accueillait l'ouverture de sa bouche: par ici, c'est cela qui signale et consacre le Maître.

Solibo Magnifique, by Patrick Chamoiseau

For the french and creole-challenged, here's the english version, slightly less musical to my ears...

He had become a Master of the Unanswerable Word, not by decree of some folkloric institute (the only place where they still celebrate the oral tradition), but by his taste for the word, for speech without commas. He talked, voilà... He talked to everyone, to a woman tattling tongue-crazy, available and useless, oh mama! what a gust of blah-blah..

Solibo talked, he talked ceaslessly, he talked at fairs, talked by the ridges, and even more at parties. But he was not some runaway from a psychatric ward, one of those loons who jerk out words as casually as they put their feet up.

We gathered to listen to him... a silence welcomed the opening of his mouth; around here it is this that signals and anoints a Master.

Solibo Magnificent, by Patrick Chamoiseau as translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (with an adaption by me: ward rather than hospital)

A Manifesto of sorts

We people who are darker than blue
Are we gonna stand around this town
and let what others say come true:
we're just good for nothing they all figure,
a boyish, grown-up, shiftless jigger.
Now we can't hardly stand for that
Or is that really where it's at?

Curtis Mayfield - We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue - Curtis 1970

See also: Lights Out

Coalition of the Willing

Le recensement de la coalition censée accompagner les Etats-Unis et la Grande-Bretagne a atteint, dans le discours que M. Bush a prononcé à Tampa, le nombre de 48 pays, dont les archipels doublement pacifiques de la Micronésie, des îles Marshall et de Palau, qui n'ont pas d'armée.

Again for the french-challenged... Le Monde's 2003 survey of the members of the Coalition of the Willing that embarked on the Iraq escapade simply noted that such prominent members, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands for example, actually don't have armies.

Existential Defiance and Assertiveness

Just because a lizard nods its head doesn't mean it's happy.

Old Ghanaian proverb

Again that Journalistic Impulse I'm following.

From The Wire

Quotes from Season 2 and 3 of HBO's The Wire which thankfully will return next year. Hooray.

"Damn Calvin! You know I got the bingo tomorrow!" - Caroline

"N---a is you taking notes in the middle of a f---- criminal conspiracy!?!"
- Stringer Bell (wonderfully played by Idris Elba)

"Bring me a Shrek2 slushie an' some Krispy Kreme!"
- Squeek

"Shine that up and put $7.50 on it... Shame to let a good toaster go to waste over a frayed cord"
- Proposition Joe

See also On The Wire a blogospheric parable of sorts...

How to get a feature deferred in the software world

The state of the art is passive-agressive equivocation. I have only reached for those heights once:

Bob and I discussed/brainstormed what we thought were the issues that the current approach that we have started working on needed to address. As to the issue of cost of some of these issues, I think others with greater experience in the Freelance architecture would be better qualified to say.

On the other hand, with some measure of handwaving, we are reasonably confident to be able to get the feature to at least "demo quality" in a timeframe close to our current feature freeze date.

I have listed below the new areas of code we need to write, the issues that we need to address and, if relevant, how our approach would deal with it. I also point out some of the potential risk. In essence this is the incremental cost that is incurred with going from a text-only approach ... to the current proposed scheme.

From a missive to co-workers circa 1997.

See also: "Sharp-elbowed bureaucratic maneuvering".

Psychic Insights

A look at the psyche of a people under stress, the Nigerians, as they took baby steps to emerge from 30 years of military rule - a life of depradations by Unknown Soldiers and the Coffins for Head of State they leave in their wake:

Whatever happened then, I thought to the central Nigerian belief in CAN DO.

The exploits of various preacher men and the extraordinary hold they seem to exercise on the lives of people was to amaze me throughout the three months or so that I spent travelling around the country. I am therefore not too surprised now that the whole of Nigeria has been seized by the "predictions" of another of these preacher men, who has pronounced that the hand over of power from the military to the elected government on May 29th will not take place. According to this particular Pastor, a certain Tunde Bakore of the Latter Rain Assembly, God had spoken to him that not only is General Olusegun Obasanjo the elected president, not Nigeria's Messiah, "he is a ram being kept for slaughter". This prophet speaks in particularly gory details about his vision. According to him, the axe will come down on Obasanjo's head and he will be hewed into pieces, right before our eyes. Two weeks ago, rumours swept the country that the General had died/been killed under strange circumstances.

There were riots in Lagos, property was destroyed and many people were injured when youths took the streets because according to them, "they" have done it again... Who are the "they"? The same "they" that killed Chief Moshood Abiola had done it again. General Obasanjo had to go on television to assure the country that he was still very much alive. In the meantime, it appears the General is not taking any chances, he has gone on a fast and a prayer for good health and success in the job he is about to take on. The General who is said to have become a born-again Christian during his incarceration for alleged coup plotting under the late unlamented General Sani Abacha has not treated all these reports of visions about his impending death with the nonchalance one suspects he would have done some twenty years ago. For the past two months his farm has been the site of constant praying by various groups trying to neutralise Pastor Tunde Akore's vision.

Everybody appears to be a believer. The difficulty comes when you try to pin down exactly what it is that people actually believe in.

The Nigerian Elections - A matter of confidence (1998)

See also: Tradition and Modernity

See further wistful and jaundiced zingers.

See other toli zingers

File under: zingers, satire, , humour, wit, proverbs, language, journalism, gotcha, wisdom, literature, toli, Nigeria, whimsy, Tom Sharpe, Ghana