His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part, in the contemporary world, consuming books and encountering friends and lovers, but their dedication to art seems anachronistic, more of a piece with the romantics, surrealists, or beat poets: these are not the kind of self-branding careerists to show up as writers in residence or guests on Start the Week. As with all great vocations, many are called but few are chosen: suicide, addiction and neurosis are often their lot but, along the way, they partake of a quest which, for Bolano, is the most interesting thing humans can do.

You can read the full text at the Dublin Review of Books.

Flickr image by rocketlass

Good News from Another Universe

Not exactly high-fidelity since I forgot to take the recorder out of my pocket–but I hope you like it.

Thanks to Dermot and Steve for a great night of music, fun, and smart people. The next event is being held on Saturday, November 20th. See their Facebook page for details.

Enter the Colorado River–which kisses the southern edge of the Silver State and keeps Las Vegas alive.

Of course, long ago, when the southwestern states divvied up river resources, little did they imagine that a city of 2 million high-maintenance souls would emerge in the pitiless Desert cauldron of the Las Vegas Valley.

But emerge that city did, replete with mod cons and then some. And then along came Global Warming in the shape of an ongoing drought.

Add to that trenchant opposition to water extraction from rural counties…and you end up with the present situation: a regional water system under severe stress, as evidenced by the dramatic “bath ring” in Lake Mead pictured above.

You can read an article I just wrote for the NRDC’s Smarter Cities website on this topic, as well as listen to a portion of an interview I conducted with Pat Mulroy, the Las Vegan charged with meeting the city’s water needs, by clicking the link below:

Keegan – Ring of Dust (NRDC Smarter Cities)

Thanks to Pat Mulroy, Dr Robert Fielden, Robert Glennon, and Paul McRandle for their help on this article. Flick image by loop_oh.

• Reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Like retracing in detail a long forgotten dream. What is it about? God knows.

RIP Robert McNamara

• RIP Robert McNamara: a life of moral learning, latterly concerned with our morbid ‘nuclearism’. Pity the lessons were so costly.

Dictatorship of the Bacteriat

• Dang ‘flu! You know you’re delirious when you see the face of Karl Marx in the clouds from your bedroom window…

Weather

• Studying an ink-soaked cloud over Westport, a cloud so pregnant with intent it looks like a pantomime villain

Image courtesy of 3ammagazine

Moral perfectionists of the Left (e.g. John Pilger, Noam Chomsky) or Right (e.g. George W. Bush, Silvio Berlosconi) are, however noble their motives, a blight on progress.

Viewed on the political spectrum, they are separated by a gulf that could not be wider. But measure their empathy for others’ positions and you will find them side-by-side, deaf to all complexity and compromise: the net result is that perfectionists make real-world negotiation and progress next to impossible.

Consider this preemptive strike against Obama by renowned reporter John Pilger in the December 11th, 2008 issue of New Statesman:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

First of all let me say that I have nothing but admiration for John Pilger’s record of reporting from the Middle East and his commitment to journalistic truth: the man clearly knows more about the on-the-ground reality of suffering than I ever will.

My problem is with the conclusions he draws. For Pilger, America can do no right, ever.

Ever, ever, ever.

Even when Americans roundly reject Absolutism as comprehensively as they did in November and take a chance on a candidate who seems to be of fine character and who clearly has a highly developed moral sense. And who is not a perfectionist.

(Beyond that, Obama has lived for long periods outside the US, has studied alongside Muslims, and witnessed the anxiety of his mother, dying while beset with worries about her health insurance coverage.)

Barack may be the product of a debased two-party system…but that is the reality we have and, once in a while, it still manages to produce leaders who can do some good for their people and their world.

How, of all people, can we tar Pilger and Bush with the same brush?

Well, Dubya is clearly a perfectionist because he could not (in the words of Bob Scheer) let Iraqis themselves pursue their own history. Bush wanted a tidy and neighbourly oil-producing state, democratic if needs be, at the heart of a shocked-and-awed Middle East. He was readily seduced by the neo-conservative delusion that Saddam’s replacement by a civilized administration would set a stirring example to the civically moribund Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

John Pilger I see as perfectionist because he simply cannot accept that we have to work with the political realities of the one Superpower we have in the world. Messy and venal though the political and foreign policy workings of the USA are, it is still the best hope we have to stand as guarantor over lasting Middle East peace (remember that it already achieved a continental peace in PostWar Europe by tacitly guaranteeing French and German security from each other’s aggression).

Remember it was a perfectionist Pied Piper, in the shape of Ralph Nader, who made possible the Bush Nightmare in the first place. But for Nader’s determination to break the two party system we would have Al Gore for President, no “war on terror”, and no invasion of Iraq.

To end, a truism: Perfection is the Enemy of the Good.

Adapted from my contributions to a comments thread over at Ready Steady Book.

Flickr image: “Puzzle” by ajgelado

At around the same time as the Monica Lewinsky Affair was dominating the news, he found himself accompanying then-Conservative Party leader William Hague and former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to a function in Manhattan.

Kissinger asked Hague if this sort of brouhaha happened in contemporary British politics.

“With Labour,” Hague replied, “The scandals tend to be about money, while with Tories it’s usually sex.”

“So,” surmised Kissinger, “Your money is safe but your wife isn’t.”

What a week–and the excitement is for good reason. At last, in Barack Obama, we have a leader who promises to be worthy of the name, who has authentic insight into hardship and struggle together with the nuanced grasp of complex issues and of history so absent in the Bush White House.

Worldwide, and throughout the United States, Red or Blue, there has been euphoria, even among those who voted against him, as the achievements of Civil Rights pioneers find some fruition in the 44th Presidency, a symbolic transformation hailed by conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike.

American flags sprouted worldwide as a suppressed love dared to speak its name for the first time since 2001.

Even Jon Stewart had to remind overseas viewers that Obama “belongs to the US” and that other countries “can’t have him”.

The United States, it is said, went from “zero to hero” in the space of a single Tuesday in November.

Zero to Hero? Woah. Hold up there, pardners.

We have to be careful here, all of us, stateside and outside, not to take the simplistic view of America and its position in the world that we were so quick to accuse President Bush of.

Under Bush or Obama there remain several undeniable facts and positions that wishful thinking will not change.

First, Obama’s America will remain the world’s only superpower.

The country carries, as an accident of history brought on by centuries of European/Asian militarism and overreach, a burden of global security on which all of us in the First World and many elsewhere daily depend.

The fuel that gets you to work or allows you to tour charming Alpine villages on vacation would be priced out of your reach if it wasn’t for American military forces guarding the shipping lanes along which supertankers faithfully carry your crude oil from the Middle East day-in, day-out.

In fact that Alpine Village might have been razed to the ground if the US had not guaranteed, by threat of arms, peace between France and Germany after 1945, a security shield which made the EU possible and for which all Europeans owe Americans a debt that should not be forgotten.

Second, America is never going to give up on Israel. Let’s hope that Obama exerts moral pressure on them to the degree that their political class allows itself to empathize with their victims in Palestine and then acts accordingly: it is a blot, a pathological blot, on Israel that a state founded by and for the victims of brutality should repress those in its own care so heartlessly.

Third, Americans are Americans. They boast citizens speaking every language known to man, but they are, by and large, not Spanish or Irish or Bolivian. There is no monarch on their coin. Their interest rates are set by their own central bankers. And, just like Spanish or Irish or Bolivians, they act, and understandably have to act, in their own self-interest: Obama has to worry about American citizens first: the plight of the Spanish, Irish or Bolivian bourgeoisie and their dependants is not his first concern.

Fourth, and lucky for us, the US is a mature nation with a clear understanding of its responsibilities. This sense of leadership was even found, albeit in clouded form, during the Bush administration: it is acknowledged for instance that Bush did more to fight AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than any predecessor. And America’s attitude towards the UN has been patient when you consider the lamentable state of that institution (as the unlucky people of DR Congo are the latest to be discovering). I trust Obama, a true man of the world, will maintain a firm scepticism towards that body.

Iraq was a mistake and he called it early–but Obama is desined to be Commander-in-Chief of US occupying forces in the Middle East for some time to come.

Depend on Russia, an increasingly irresponsible state, to test Obama in his first term. And Obama will put Medvedev and Putin firmly in ther place when that time comes.

America, in short, is not going to turn into the world’s poodle come Inauguration Day in January. It is and will always remain an exceptional country with exceptional powers and resonsibilities. Obama, I believe, understands that. You don’t get black-and-white thinking, in any sense, from this man.

He gets it.

The question is: do we?

Image by January20th2009 on Flickr

Does the hapless response of the Bush Administration to the financial crisis–the inability to grasp the scale of the problem, the sheer lack of preparedness and of ready resources to deal with contingencies–remind you of something?

Hurricane Katrina, perhaps? Or post-invasion Iraq?

In each case the government’s response has been essentially the same: a failure to grasp the scale of the disaster together with a dearth of contingency plans.

In the case of Iraq, the CIA’s major concern was ensuring enough US flags were in hand for the welcoming crowds to welcome their “liberators”.

When it came to Katrina, FEMA chief Mike Browne was showered with congratulations from President Bush while an American city was drowning.

Now, with the US investment banking system not only in trouble but actually destroyed, a victim of Wall Street greed condoned by government laissez-faire, we find the authorities flummoxed at the markets’ unwillingness to act on their assurances.

Contingency planning is something we expect of governments. It is one of their primary functions: to plan for the worst. Governments, not private firms, invest in defenses against chemical or nuclear attack or take steps to avert the consequences of climate change.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party discovered, through Ronald Reagan’s success, that attacking, belittling, and demoralising government had the perverse effect of ensuring power: from 1980, the GOP have been adepts of this strategy.

Small government is good, particularly for free-market economies: this truth was at the kernel of the “Reagan Revolution”.

But the public sector should not be shrunk to the extent that it cannot come to the rescue when needed. Nor should public funding be misdirected or cut to the point that there is no Plan B when the best-of-all-possible-outcomes fails to materialize.

For proof you no longer have to ask the people of Baghdad or New Orleans.

Flickr Image by Christian et Cie

Unfortunately many (blue-state) Americans and (Western) Europeans seem to take this notion as axiomatic, forgetting that in fact the United States is a remarkable and successful meritocracy, in which origins generally count less than performance.

It is true that poor people in the US suffer and that a large proportion of black people are poor. It is difficult to succeed if you are born in the underclass, far harder than it is for everyone else.

But let that reality not blind us to the emerging and meaningful fact that a black man is shortly to become leader of the country, an outcome inconceivable in any other majority-white democracy.

I have lived in three American states, two Democrat, one Republican. I have met citizens from all walks of life and of all income levels. Americans are race-conscious, yes: that is the natural legacy of American history.

But is America a racist nation?

No.

Flickr Image by emdot

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

The Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.

But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.

In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.

At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.

The principle is not the issue: we are.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

What I like about their plan (linked below) is the implicit distinction between “rich” and “poor” dollars, i.e. the acknowledgment that one’s ten-thousandth dollar has a different meaning, and hence value, from one’s ten-millionth dollar.

However, I think we should go further: continued progressivity to tax saturation. In other words: a universal salary cap.

Why? Because there is nothing, beyond single-handedly curing premature death, that any human being can do that merits earning on the current level of our billionaire class.

We’ve become so used to the endless pursuit of personal wealth that nobody thinks it odd anymore but, as any Martian will tell you, no mortal, American or otherwise, has any true need (or actual want, indeed) of their twenty-seventh million dollar wad.

Therefore I propose that the tax rate kicks in at the level suggested by Kotlikoff and Goodman ($46,000 for families) and thencefrom progresses at an evenly growing tax rate until, at $4.6 million, say, the rate terminates, necessarily, at 100%.

Granted, there will be a challenge to society (for one, how to re-allocate the money without bloating government) and the makers of fine shower curtains and umbrella stands might notice a dip in sales–but we would, on the up-side of my plan, be spared the obscene and ultimately damaging kink of our current system: wealth obesity.

Reference: John C. Goodman: A Kinder, Gentler Flat Tax Forbes, September 29th, 2005

Before they fell, with the second plane having already hit, I went out to buy water and supplies. Our Polish neighbour, a refugee from the war, stood in a smock and hairnet on her stoop. Bewildered, she stared up, over the facing row of brownstones and trees, at the pair of now-chimneys and their pitch-black exhalation.
     She had been laundering in her basement all morning: her industry made of our respective yards a telling contrast. “What has happened?” she asked, both vowels and consonants still shaped by a long-swallowed-up Middle Europe.
     I told her that fires had broken out: nothing about the planes, the express intent connoted by a second strike. How to tell her, of all people, that a new and dreadful chapter of human history had just been opened before our eyes? But I should have–and also assured her of the supplies I was getting for ourselves and the baby.
     At the store Ling, the Malyasian shopkeeper, and I pooled our information. Behind me a child, standing with her mother and little brother, burst out crying: their father worked at the World Financial Center.
     We worked to persuade her that it was the adjacent World Trade Center that had been hit. We all knew, the child as much as the mother and wife, that he was, in any event, gravely endangered.
     A few days later, through smoke swirling in massive arc lights, I saw up close what the titanic forces of hatred had unleashed on our city: savage minds had twisted like pipecleaners the mighty steel and concrete–and confidence–of downtown Manhattan.
     And since? Only a poet could come closer than Peggy Noonan has:

For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar–jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered

Quote: Peggy Noonan The Storm Before the Balm Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005

Contrast [the response to Katrina] with the hurricanes that struck Florida last year, when federal officials pulled off a tour de force, pouring billions of dollars to help distressed residents while tractor trailers with ice, water, and other supplies waited on the state’s borders until the storm passed. As soon as it did, help was rushed to the areas hardest hit, with National Guard troops on the scene quickly, directing traffic, and keeping looters out of damaged neighborhoods. President Bush was on the scene then within 48 hours. The suspicion now will not easily be eradicated that the difference was that it was an election year

Source: M. Zuckerman: Uncalm after the storm, US News and World Report, Sept 7th, 2005

It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now

–Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish Council, Jefferson, Louisiana
Source: Meet The Press, NBC, Sept 4th, 2005

Your performance, Mr President, and those of your appointees in Homeland Security/FEMA, has been a national disgrace, leading to needless suffering and death.

Since January 2000, you, your policies, and your administration, have failed to a degree that, as of this writing, imperils the well-being of the Nation. You are no longer fit to lead us. Once order has been restored–and not only dignity, but basic human rights, have been returned to the innocent victims of this artificially-compounded disaster–you and your cabinet should resign and make way for a restorative, cross-party government

Since resignation is unlikely, the onus falls on responsible Republicans and Democrats to act. And that means impeachment.

(Similarly, the defense posture of the post-war Superpowers was symmetrical, to the point of producing Mutually Assured Destruction, an acronym to savour).

Although our current struggle against Islamo-fascism is assymetrical, Pat Robertson’s ungentle suggestion that the President of Venezuela be assasinated produced another likeness worth noting. One of the few words in Arabic that Westerners know is fatwa: an opinion or injunction promulgated by a religious authority. We first heard the term when the Ayatollah Khomeni attempted to murder a peaceful man, Salman Rushdie, whose only crime was storytelling. Subsequent clerical directives have spiritually underwritten murder the world over, from New York to Bali. And now comes the moral test for us that McCarthyism once posed and which, until decency re-emerged, we failed: an influential religious authority in our own society has issued a call for murder.

In effect, the McCarthys and the Robertsons suggest to our opponents that we are, essentially, their equal in amorality. And, in forfeiting principle, they comfort the Enemy, who relishes moral weakness more than any other.

Such a proposition therefore must be roundly refuted, especially by leaders in those communities (mostly Republicans) to whom Robertson, a tele-evanglist, appeals.

There must be no equivocation: we may kill, but we don’t murder.

Backstory: Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez

Posted: August 22nd, 2005