By Chris Eberhardt, May 31st, 2011 
A friend of mine was asking for help in downloading The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers for free. In December, I thought about downloading the book for ten dollars to my iPod, but didn’t think it was worth it. I think I was afraid it would burst me from my bubble.
This morning while watching the movie “The Truman Show” with my students, I realized that like Jim Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, I am living in a similar scenario, “The China Show.” When someone wants to know about the history of the Communist Party, or tries to tell the difference between President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, (even the NY Times can’t), it feels like they want to know about the executive producers behind the scenes who are responsible for making sure that the show doesn’t stop.
Here on the set of “The China Show” we worry about the incredibly expensive price of apartments, and students play the Three Kingdoms game. As my Chinese teacher pointed out, the movies and the television shows in China are harmonious, befitting a harmonious society, a path set by President Hu Jintao. I tell people that the Chinese movies I watch in the United States, outside the television studio, are what might be called “art house films,” often intentionally banned within China to get more viewers in the U.S. and Europe. These movies are about people stealing police uniforms and using them to extort pedestrians on the street, or the woman who is sent to the fields and becomes a one-person brothel in an attempt to regain her old city life. Back within “The China Show,” the movies are about people from an ancient period, quite often with the ability to fly.
Last week, I had a brief moment where I felt like I was teaching, using clips of movies like “Forrest Gump” to talk about school integration and the Vietnam War draft. I asked one of my students what she would do if her friend was drafted and sent . . .
Read more: The China Show
By Gershon Shafir, May 23rd, 2011 
Finally! Finally there is a row between the US and Israel over the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. President Obama found the steel in his backbone to tell off Prime Minister Netanyahu. The formula Obama used was not new, but, significantly, one put forth most recently as part of the Mahmoud Abbas-Salam Fayyad plan to request the recognition of the UN for a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries. Obama zeroed in like a hawk on the borders issue and, lo and behold, he ruined most of Netanyahu’s week in Washington.
It has already been pointed out that Obama himself mocked the Palestinian UN plan as leading to only symbolic results. Or that he left the issues of Jerusalem and the refugees to a later stage of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And, finally, that the 1967 borders is a red herring, a non-issue, since Obama also recognized that the final Israeli-Palestinian border will involve territorial swaps. In fact, it has been suggested that by now even Netanyahu wishes to hang on only to “settlement blocs” and is ready to concede the rest of the West Bank.
This, then, appears to be no more than a spat between those who view the glass empty and those who see it as full. We seemed to be asked: should we focus on the land to be kept or ceded? Focusing on the words, however, would be misleading. It is the tune that makes the music.
Obama has been looking since his inauguration for a formula to jolt to life the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. His first, unsuccessful, formula was a settlement freeze. He received bad advice: experience has shown the settlements can either expand or shrink, but cannot be put in the freezer. This time, he wrapped the settlement issue within the borders controversy and created the possibility for real traction. Obama has broken the ice and herein resides the significance of his statement on . . .
Read more: Going Forward by Going Back to 1967
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 19th, 2011 
President Barack Obama gave a powerful speech today, one of his best. The president was again eloquent, but there is concern here in the U.S. and also abroad in the Arab world, that eloquence is not enough, that it may in fact be more of the problem than the solution. The fine words don’t seem to have substance in Egypt, according to a report in The Washington Post. There appears to be a global concern that Obama’s talk is cheap. Obama’s “Cairo Speech” all over again, one Egyptian declared. Now is the time for decisive action. Now is the time for the President of the United States to put up or shut up. (Of course, what exactly is to be put up is another matter.)
This reminds me of another powerful writer-speaker, President Vaclav Havel. Havel is the other president in my lifetime that I have deeply admired. Both he and Obama are wonderful writers and principled politicians, both have been criticized for the distance between their rhetorical talents and their effectiveness in realizing their principles.
Agreeing with the criticisms of Havel, I sometimes joke about my developing assessment of him. I first knew about Vaclav Havel as a bohemian, as a very interesting absurdist playwright. I wrote my dissertation about Polish theater when this was still his primary occupation, and I avidly read his work then as I tried to understand why theater played such an important role in the opposition to Communism in Central Europe.
I then came to know him as one of the greatest political essayists and dissidents of the twentieth century. At the theoretical core of two of my books, Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind and The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times are the ideas to be found in Havel’s greatest essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”
However, as president, Havel was not so accomplished. He presided over the breakup of Czechoslovakia, a development he opposed passionately, but ineffectually. He sometimes seemed to think that he could right a political problem by writing a telling . . .
Read more: Reflections on President Obama’s Speech on the Middle East and North Africa
By Daniel Dayan, May 17th, 2011 
 Let us compare two events: the Turkish flotilla that challenged the Gaza blockade and the suicide bombing that killed tourists in a Marrakesh café. The Turkish flotilla’s passage in May of last year had been scripted with a clear sense of drama. It resembled an epic, announced ahead of time. Aboard the ships were personalities from various countries, granting generously advertised interviews before, during and after the event. The advancement of the ships was amply covered and reporting further intensified when the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ closed in on the Gaza shoreline. The reporters from two TV channels (Al Jazeera and a Turkish station) had boarded the flagship, the “Mavi Marmara,” the Blue Marmara.
With these actions, journalists had turned this ship into a floating television studio, building a sense of suspense. The situation was carefully scripted, except for its outcome of course. However, in a way, the nature of the outcome did not matter. Either the Israelis would allow the flotilla to successfully challenge the Gaza blockade, which would show a sign of weakness, a defeat, a form of surrendering, or the Israelis would intervene to stop the flotilla. In that case, cameras were at hand to record violent actions: Israeli commandos attacking civilians, soldiers attacking “pacifists,” even if the latter are using weapons. Like in all reality shows, the narrative was built around a confrontation that took place on a small stage surrounded by cameras. The event was constructed as emblematic and endowed with a sustained visibility.
Let us now look at the explosion in the Argana café in Marrakesh, Morocca last month. The bombing occurred without warning. This suddenness is strategically understandable since an advance warning would have undermined its success. However, because it went unannounced, its impact has been enormously diminished. Of course, the number of victims in Marrakesh was much higher. If human lives count, the bombing at the popular Moroccan café should be considered a much more serious event than the odyssey of the Turkish flotilla. Yet, the victims, among them quite a few visiting foreigners, have stayed anonymous. The bombers are unknown . . .
Read more: The Dramaturgy of the Poor? On a Flotilla to Gaza, Suicide Bombings in Morroco and Pakistan
By Rafael Narvaez, May 16th, 2011 
Born into slavery, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey became one of the most influential social reformers of the 19th Century. Better known as Frederick Douglass, this remarkable storyteller bespeaks a childhood with “no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse linen shirt, reaching only to my knees,” a time when his feet were so “cracked with the frost that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.” He and the other children on the farm, he says, were fed coarse boiled corn served in a trough set upon the floor. This runaway slave, whose exploits eventually led him to become an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, tells us of a society where slaveholders more readily remembered the names of their horses than the names of their slaves. He lived at a time when it was not unusual for farmers to father their own slaves, and when local preachers spoke of the divinely designed nature of slavery. The South, as we know, took every pain to take everything away from its slaves: parents and children, their sense of family, their ability to read and add. In the case of Douglass, what the South could not take away was his “capacity for indignation,” to borrow the phrase from Alberto Flores Galindo, a Peruvian Marxist historian interested in colonialism and the nature of the colonized mind. And it was this capacity, which allowed Douglass to squeeze “drop by drop the slave of himself and [to wake up] one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave’s, is flowing in his veins,” as Chekhov put it.
Natural as it seems, this capacity for indignation should not be taken for granted. Additionally, we cannot assume that when we feel it, this moral sentiment will be necessarily proportional to the magnitude of the offense that confronts us. Consider, for example, the story of the slaves who voluntarily joined the Confederate Army. The St. Petersburg Times recounts the story of “a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a . . .
Read more: Two Slaves and the Capacity for Indignation
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 13th, 2011 
Perhaps I am exaggerating, but as I deliberately consider the celebratory response of Americans around the country to the killing of Osama bin Laden, I am coming to the judgment that the kids got it right. They revealed the wisdom of youth. While I am not sure that the chants: “USA! USA! USA!” and “We killed Osama, let’s party” were in good taste, I am coming to understand the outburst better than I initially did, thanks to a number of DC contributions and some reflection.
As I indicated in my first post, I immediately thought of the operation in terms of ongoing wars, about the mission. I thought the question was: How does the elimination of an important enemy leader affect our ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq? While I thought about ongoing military operations, the celebrants seemed to have understood that it meant the war was over. It was time to celebrate, not calculate. And perhaps, in a way, they were right.
I know from abroad, especially from the point of view of those from countries which have in the not too distant past experienced military dictatorship, such as Argentina, that there are serious legal problems. In his reply to my initial post, Emmanuel Guerisoli raised important issues, reminding me of the sorts of observations and judgments of his compatriot, Martin Plot. The US invaded a sovereign country and killed an unarmed man, apparently deciding it was better to get him dead than alive. The president acted more like a dictator than a democratic leader, adhering to the norms of international law. This continued the apparent illegality of much of American foreign policy, especially since 9/11. And the public cheered. This is indeed jarring.
I share the concerns and critical observations of others who joined the discussion here. I worry with Vince Carducci that Obama’s use of the word justice for killing is disturbing. I suspect with Rafael Narvaez, Tim and Radhika Nanda that there is a hyper-reality to the way Americans responded. I am aware with Sarah and . . .
Read more: DC Two Weeks in Review: Obama Kills Osama! Victory! The War on Terror is Over! Let’s Think.
By Benoit Challand, May 12th, 2011 
Unlike recent posts that have analyzed media performances, today I want to present some direct political criticism. Rather than “perform” our distinguished art of analysis, as we have recently been doing on this blog, I want to underscore the notion that powerful media set our agenda and our performing analyses are determined by what is given to us by media as bones to chew, often with quite negative results. Nothing original, but the topic and the circumstances are.
There is a fundamental difference between the way news is produced and read in the United States and Europe. Here, we have one or two authoritative print sources. Thus, much of the reflection presented at Deliberately Considered draws on reports from The New York Times. This is in sharp contrast to European practice. I miss my daily reading of at least two or three newspapers to tap into contrasting opinions or sources of information. The near monopoly in America is troublesome. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I worry that there can develop an unquestioned prevailing commonsense, with the media reiterating the obvious, instead of challenging dominant points of view and generating new areas of debate.
This struck me in the reports and commentary concerning the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal, announced two weeks ago. All of what has been written in the Times columns since the surprise reconciliation announcement in Cairo has re-hashed the usual storyline: Hamas is not a peace partner. Israel has good reason to feel threatened by a national unity government, and Congress should use aid as a threat to push moderates not to accept a deal with the Islamists. This Monday, an editorial summed up the argument.
The only good thing in this editorial was its subtitle, “Continued stalemate with Israel will only strengthen extremists,” but, ironically, this disappeared in the online version. Indeed, the remainder of the piece is just a series of peremptory remarks (“we have many concerns,” “the answer, to us, is clear…”) and hollow statements. Yet, intriguingly, the top ten most recommended replies to the online version were all critical of Israel, showing how people can resist the newspaper’s views.
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Read more: Media and the Palestinians: “Continued Stalemate Will Only Strengthen Extremists”
By Daniel Dayan, May 10th, 2011 
Watching Others Watching
Osama bin Laden has been killed and what do we get to see? A group of distinguished spectators watching an invisible screen. Vice President Joe Biden is close to the screen. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is seen covering her mouth with her hand, perhaps in horror. President-elect Barack Obama is leaning forward. A New York City subway newspaper has speculated that this was “the moment the president watched bin Laden die.” The visibility of an event has been replaced by the image of a group of officials who are watching what is invisible to us.
Bin Laden’s death is one of this year’s major events. Transpiring less than a week after the British Royal Wedding, it reveals the futility of the London bash. It reminds us that from time to time there are events that are truly historic, events that end a period of intellectual and affective unrest. Yet, there is something puzzling about the death of bin Laden. Important events tend to be visible. Can we believe in their magnitude if visibility is missing? In fact, can we believe they truly happened? Why do we feel short-changed, almost disappointed, waiting for the rest of the event to occur? Perhaps because bin Laden’s death was a deed but not a discourse, a blow but not an expressive event. Or perhaps we are not used to events that are both blind and mute.
A Blind Event
In the absence of images, testimonies and narratives curiously vacillate. They start to stutter. During the raid, bin Laden attempted to resist and was shot in the head. Bin Laden threatened the American commandos with a gun and was shot in the head. Bin Laden hid behind a woman, using her as a human shield, and was shot in the head. Bin Laden’s wife rushed the assaulter and was shot in the leg. Bin Laden was unarmed but shot and killed.
Here is another example of an indecisive account. “Bin Laden was buried at the North Arabian Sea from the deck of a US aircraft carrier at 2 am EST after . . .
Read more: Osama and Obama: One Death, Four Invisibilities
We continue our discussion about the killing and its implications in this, the third post of DC contributors reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden and its aftermath. In the first post, we considered reports from different places, in the second, different perspectives were offered. In this one, Kreider-Verhalle, Narvaez and Carducci, offer compelling judgments, although they are competing. I will add my reflections on these discussions later in the week. -Jeff
Esther Kreider-Verhalle
When President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, I tried to imagine the deadly scene in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan where the elusive terrorist had been surprised by a group of American fighters, most likely while he was asleep. We are accustomed to being continuously exposed to an avalanche of images of what happens in the world around us. The possibility to see happenings, either live or through photos and video, gives us a first row seat at the world’s events, both intimate and distant. Most people also have a bent for fairytale-like stories, with good guys and bad guys, suppressing the confusing complexities of daily life.
Now we have to cope with a lack of images. All media organizations have reprinted and rebroadcast the few available photos and videos of the terrorist leader a thousand times. Because the Obama Administration will not release the material that shows the lifeless body of Bin Laden, we are instead presented with exclusive photos of ransacked rooms in the secretive compound with unmade beds and bloodstained floors. We are offered an inside peek into Bin Laden’s life with some shots of his cooking oil, a couple dozen unused eggs, some nasal spray and petroleum jelly.
We also have been allowed to see the expressions on the faces of President Obama and his team, watching the operation to kill ‘Geronimo’ unfold. Amidst all the secrecy of the operation, the oddest details have become news. The whole world now . . .
Read more: DC Forum: The Killing of Osama bin Laden – Part Three
In this second post of three, DC contributors continue our discussion about the killing of Osama bin Laden and its implications, seeking to formulate critical perspectives, moving toward judgment and political positioning. -Jeff
Michael P. Corey, A Direct Accounting
In simple terms, it appears that a JSOC strike team was dispatched on what was for all practical considerations a kill assignment to eliminate the head of Al Qaeda and retrieve all available documents. The mission was a risky way to accomplish the first objective; the only practical way to achieve the second; and had the potential to cause the least amount of collateral damage. It is unclear if this was done as a military operation or civilian operation. It is also unclear what was used as the moral, ethical and legal foundations for killing. It demonstrated the resolve of the Obama and Bush administrations to seek out and kill Osama bin Laden, and presumably other terrorist leaders. For the most part, the decision making and operation have been represented in the United States as difficult, courageous, and heroic, and as might have been expected, there have been political overtones on all sides.
Euphoric reactions to the mission are consistent with releasing pent up tensions related to terrorism; a national social, economic and cultural malaise, and a loss of national pride. Not releasing the photographic evidence is a good idea. If released, the photographs could have been used as the visual basis for building collective memories and actions by bin Laden’s followers. I’m uncomfortable with a Presidential visit to “ground zero” at this time. The tenth anniversary would have been better as a symbolic mechanism for pulling people together.
Gary Alan Fine, The Human Comedy
Turning on the television last Sunday I was startled to witness boisterous, ecstatic crowds. Americans gathered in the dark outside the White House and in New York’s Times Square to cheer for their team. “U.S.A., U.S.A. “Hoo-yah.” . . .
Read more: DC Forum: The Killing of Osama bin Laden – Part Two
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