By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 27th, 2011 
 As a rule, we do not post on weekends. But because of the rapidly approaching hurricane and the likelihood of a power outage, I offer today these thoughts inspired by Michael Corey’s last Deliberately Considered post, celebrating the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the Washington Mall, and by Cornel West’s op.ed. piece criticizing the Memorial and Barack Obama in yesterday’s New York Times. -Jeff
I am not a big fan of Cornel West. I liked and learned from his book The American Evasion of Philosophy, but most of his other books and articles involve, in my judgment, little more then posturing and preaching to the converted (I in the main am one of them). He does not take seriously the challenges political life presents. As he shouts slogans, cheers and denounces, I am not sure that he persuades. His and Travis Smiley’s ongoing criticism of President Obama seem to me to be first personal, then political, more the work of celebrity critics than critical intellectuals. That said, I think West’s op.ed. piece has a point, though not as it is directed against Obama and against the importance of symbolism.
“The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy…
As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.”
This is unserious. The two parties are very different, and Obama has clearly been trying to address the needs of the socially and economically abandoned in his battle against the Republicans and so called moderate Democrats in Congress: on healthcare policy, financial regulation and jobs. A debt default would not only have hurt Wall Street and Main Street businesses. It would have profoundly affected the poor and working people for whom . . .
Read more: In Review: Cornel West, Barack Obama and the King Memorial
By Michael Corey, August 26th, 2011 
On Monday, August 22nd, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. was opened for visitors. The official dedication of the memorial was scheduled to take place on Sunday, August 28th (indefinitely posted by Hurricane Irene), the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom before over 200,000 people. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation notes that this is the first memorial on the National Mall “to honor a man of hope, a man of peace, and a man of color.” The memorial, according to the project’s mission statement, honors Dr. King for “his national and international contributions to world peace through non-violent social change.” A virtual tour of the memorial is available on the Foundation’s website.
The 120 million dollar memorial is located on the Tidal Basin adjacent to the FDR Memorial, and its line of sight connects it with the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. The project was launched in 1996 when President Clinton signed a resolution to build a memorial in honor of Dr. King. Groundbreaking for the project took place on November 13, 2006. The origins of the idea for memorial is traceable to January, 1984, when George Sealy met with four fellow Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity brothers to develop a proposal for building a national King memorial. As with most projects of this type, it origins were small and informal. It then had to proceed through numerous associational and institutional gates as public and private support for the project was developed. The bureaucratic and procedural steps involved were formidable; and the long process had many controversial elements, including its design, the selection of Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, the use of Chinese granite, and the $800,000 of licensing fees charged to the Foundation by the King family for the use of Dr. King’s words and image in fundraising materials. McKissack & McKissack/Turner/Gilford/ Tompkins are the design-build team. All the principals are American, and many have strong connections with businesses owned . . .
Read more: Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial: “I Have a Dream”
By Benoit Challand, August 24th, 2011 
A third irremovable Arab president has fallen. Muammar Qaddafi’s final fate, like that of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh currently in Saudi, recovering from an attempted assassination, is still unknown. But one thing is pretty sure: like Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Husni Mubarak, Colonel Qaddafi is the third political victim of the Arab spring. Quite a deed, if one remembers the proliferation of de facto monarchical republics in the Arab Middle East in the very recent past.
While there is much to rejoice in this news, many questions arise concerning the political and military developments of these last months in Libya. In this post, I will focus on the media coverage in and around Tripoli. Next week, I will analyse the emerging Libyan leadership.
It is striking to see how the most recent military developments in Tripoli are mostly portrayed as a “rebel-driven campaign.” To be sure, we are told of how NATO allies coordinate aerial attacks in their support for this the apparently final offensive, but very little is said about the active role that Qatar, France and England have taken in arming, equipping and training the Libyan rebel forces (not to mention intelligence gathering and strategic planning). It is, in fact, probably as much a victory of the Transitional National Council (TNC) as it is of the countries which have thrown in their lots in the hope of securing a substantial share of the (oily) pie and to obtain a prominent role as future regional leaders. Yet, very little has been said about the active role of the U.S. in the unfolding events. “Leading from behind,” Obama’s unique strategy, is perhaps more of a media performance than a military reality. The U.S. has been very much involved.
One can find evidence that the USA is not waiting, arms crossed, to see what will happen in the Cyrenaica and Tripolitana. An article in yesterday’s New York Times reveals pro-active American involvement in planning the future of a post-Qaddafi Libya:
With . . .
Read more: Who Won the Libyan war?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 23rd, 2011 
In recent posts, Vince Carducci examining the urban environment in terms of psychogeography, derive and detournment, and the gift and potlatch, explored the art of Detroit, the city at the epicenter of Fordism and ground zero of post – Fordist devastation. While I think his inquiry is illuminating, showing art playing an important role in democratic society, I am skeptical about his political utopianism, as he stands on the shoulders of Marx and the Situationists and Ken Wark’s account of them. I don’t think that the full power of the artwork is captured as a critique of capitalism or that the full political significance of the work is in its message. We disagree, once again, on art as propaganda and how art becomes politically significant.
Artwork, and the world it creates when appreciated, is, in my judgment, more important than context. The art, its independent domain, is where the action is, which is then related to a variety of different contexts. To be sure, Carducci shows how this works. Detroit artists don’t only speak to each other, creating work that communicates for themselves and their immediate audience. They speak to the de-industrializing world, providing insights, suggesting an alternative way of living. But this can work in many different ways, not necessarily tied to political programs of the left or the right or the center.
Take an example drawn from two past posts: Ivo Andric novelistic depiction of The Bridge on the Drina inspired Elzbieta Matynia to reflect on the way that bridge, connecting Serbia and Bosnia, provided a space for interaction between people from elsewhere, at the kapia, the public square on the bridge, enabling civility. Her account, in turn, inspired me to reflect upon the bridges I observe on my daily run through the public park that was the Rockefeller estate, and provided me with critical perspective for thinking about the devastation . . .
Read more: In Review: Democracy and Art for Art Sake (Without Elitism)
By Michael Weinman, August 16th, 2011 
 In a recent post, Jeff frames the troubling inflexibility in contemporary American politics in terms of our fallibility as political actors, and the need to recognize it, concluding: “Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice.” This leads me back to the thought left open at the close of my last post. There, in the context of my skepticism about the deployment of the trope of “growing pains” in political affairs, I called into question the “epistemic certainty” that such a narrative entails. Fairly often, we hear that such certainty is impossible: this position can be called one form of “political fallibilism.” In this first sense, “political fallibilism” means something like the conscious cultivation of not being too certain about things political, about one’s views of what is, but also about what must be done. That is, one knows that no matter how right one is, one is at least a little bit wrong. And one knows that, however much one knows about what is happening, there is even more that one does not know, and probably still more that one doesn’t know what one does not know.
We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility. Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling . . .
Read more: Two Forms of (Political) Fallibilism
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 15th, 2011
On Friday, I intended to use some posts from the past to illuminate the political events of the week, but found myself writing about more private problems, about the human condition and my own incapacity in understanding it. Today, I return to more familiar terrain, thinking about the changing American political landscape.
Viewing the Republican presidential debate in Iowa on Thursday, I was reminded why the 2012 election is so important. What the Republicans propose on the economy, on American identity and principles is strikingly different from President Obama’s promise and performance. Day to day, it has seemed that Obama is losing his focus. But I am convinced that he is accomplishing a lot and that the alternative is stark. In April, I presented my guide for judging his Presidency. I think it still applies.
Trying to figure out the stakes in an election requires understanding the issues, and judgment of Obama’s leadership and the Republican alternatives, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it requires an understanding of imagination. Governor Paul LePage of Maine gave clear expression of the right-wing imagination when he ordered the removal of murals celebrating labor at the Maine department of labor – not fair and balanced. These murals are not even particularly provocative. Images of the banned murals were presented in a post by Vince Carducci.
Cultural works that don’t depict a specific worldview offend the Tea Party imagination. And work that can’t be supported through the market, following Tea Party wisdom, is without real value. The cultural and market fundamentalism present a major civilizational challenge.
While this challenge must be met rationally, politics isn’t and shouldn’t be only about reason. Feelings, along with imagination, also are of telling import, as James Jasper explored in a post last Spring.
I feel strongly about the Tea Party, as the Tea Partiers feel strongly about their commitments. I know this is important. How the . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: The American Political Landscape
By Eugene Halton, August 11th, 2011 
Let us call experience seniority. And let us mean by this that people who work over extended periods of time develop, ripen, face the hard knocks of life day in and day out, and that they usually gain from the experience.
To be experienced is to have spent the time, paid the dues of the job, learned what it takes, put out the raw energies and skills required. And more: to be experienced means that one has internalized all these things, and that one can bring to the everyday situation of work an array of competencies that the inexperienced are unaware of. That is why this precious game of life requires the serious engagement with it. Engagement brings, even if only eventually, an enlargement and a subtilization of competencies, things that one has in one’s hands, in one’s plan for the day, in one’s skill set, in one’s general work habits, all which add up to becoming experienced.
But consider: “senior” in America typically means old people, not only not at the top of their game, but also not necessarily competent. In the right-wing attack on seniority in the public sphere, and unions more generally, seniority translates into deadwood. Now every institution has some tiny percentage of deadwood in it, people who have disengaged from their work experience. But to assume, for example, as Republican state legislatures are in the process of doing, that teachers with years of experience are the deadwood whose seniority rights have to be eliminated (meanwhile ignoring the administration deadwood), is sheer folly. It completely ignores how those experienced teachers incorporate a reservoir of potential mentoring and actual “how-to” knowledge. It is a way of promoting inexperience at the cost of experienced professionals. And isn’t that what the mad-hatters’ Tea Party celebrates in politics as well: lack of political experience as a qualification for office?
Seniority in the workplace means that the years and decades you have put in paying your dues to the job count for something in the work community, and that a larger and deeper outlook and ability is something . . .
Read more: Have You Ever Been Experienced?
By Rafael Narvaez, August 10th, 2011 
The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
 As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.
De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than . . .
Read more: Thinking like a Terrorist
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 9th, 2011
I have been on the road much of the past month. This weekend I was involved with my son’s wedding. Sam and Lili Lu were married on Sunday, now off to Oslo and points north for their honeymoon. I have been in deep family mode. It has been hard to fit in a week in review post, but now I can offer some thoughts about the past few weeks at Deliberately Considered and in the world.
Oslo. I was in Wroclaw at the time of Anders Behring Breivikis’s atrocious act, ironically, the city where he may have bought chemicals for his bombing. A Polish visitor to the Institute, an alum, had worked in Norway. His first concern was to confirm that a friend, who called and left a message on his cell phone the day of the massacre, was ok. Upon speaking to his friend, our Polish colleague reported that “everyone” in Norway is relieved that the despicable act wasn’t the work of an Islamic radical. In my class on media and crisis, we discussed this judgment. A majority thought this relief was based on an understandable desire to not have Norway drawn into the conflict of civilizations narrative, but then a student from Albania (an historically Muslim nation) spoke. For her, the early reports of the fanatical anti-Muslim commitments of Breivik were deeply troubling, part of a larger civilizational whole.
When I came home, I discovered that the talking heads on conservative talk radio and Fox News were denouncing the idea that Breivik was a Christian xenophobe, representative of a deep cultural problem. I also heard about the new project to build the “ground zero Mosque.” The absurd side of our academic discussion was revealed.
Economic Crisis. Trying to explain the American debt ceiling crisis to Europeans is next to impossible. In the Euro zone, the economic crisis is the result of a fundamental problem. One currency is being used in a diverse set of nation states, each with independent economic . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Democracy in Crisis
 This past weekend, the second group of students graduated from the 4-month intensive course at the Film and Journalism School Haiti Reporters in Port-au-Prince. The school opened its doors in October last year. It is the brainchild of the Dutch documentary filmmaker and journalist Ton Vriens and is sponsored by the Dutch human rights group ICCO, the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Turtle Tree Foundation, and American companies such as Tekserve and Canon USA.
The school offers hands-on media training that gives students the skills to handle professional video- and photo cameras, and editing software. In addition, the curriculum offers courses in entrepreneurship, web design, writing, and media ethics. One of the goals is to prepare students to become community journalists, enabling them to tell the stories of the small communities around them. Ideally, the graduates would not only witness the development and reconstruction – or lack thereof – of their country, but also investigate and critically reflect upon it. Not only as community journalists, but also as civic journalists they could start making products that can function as forums for discussion and that can build up both their own as well as others’ social capital in the process.
In the daily practice of Haiti, this is all easier said than done. While it would be a challenge to give a similar 4-month crash course to any group of young people, trying to do it in Haiti exposes one to the country’s idiosyncratic trials.
Haitian media – they mainly exist in the form of radio and newspapers – have a long history of being mere tools to earn and secure political power. Only in the 1970s, still under Duvalier’s dictatorship, did one radio station start to air local and international news in Creole, the language of the majority of Haitians, instead of French, the language of the elite. It took until 1986, the year of Duvalier’s fall, before journalists enjoyed a meaningful freedom of the press and played a supporting role in the newly developing civil society. The military coup of 1991 . . .
Read more: Haiti Reporters
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