By Michael Corey, May 30th, 2011 
On May 6th, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) announced the names of five American servicemen that were being inscribed on the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall), and will be read for the first time on this Memorial Day, at 1 p.m. In addition, the designations of eight names are being changed from missing in action, signified by a cross, to confirmed dead, symbolized by a diamond. The criteria and decisions for being included on The Wall are set by the Department of Defense. With the additions, the total number of names inscribed (killed or remaining missing in action) is 58,272.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was established in 1979 by a group of veterans led by Jan Scruggs, and, over the years, has been “dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D. C., promoting healing and educating about the impact of the Vietnam War.” In July 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized the Fund to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a site near the Lincoln Memorial in Constitution Gardens. The Fund explains that the resulting monument “was built to honor all who served with the U. S. armed forces during the Vietnam War. It has become known as an international symbol of healing and is the most-visited memorial on the National Mall.”
The Memorial consists of more than the well known Wall that was designed by Maya Ying Lin. The other sites for remembrance are the Flagpole that was installed in 1983 around which the emblems of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard are displayed; the Three Servicemen Statue, designed by Frederick Hart and dedicated in 1984; the Vietnam Women’s Memorial designed by Glenna Goodacre and dedicated in 1993; and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commemorative Plaque, also called the “In Memory Plaque, ” dedicated in 2004 to honor veterans who died after the war as a direct result of injuries which were incurred in Vietnam, but do not qualify for inclusion on The Wall. An education center is being planned.
. . .
Read more: Memorial Day Reflections
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 29th, 2011 
I started to write this post at 37,000 feet, between New York and Paris, flying to see my grandson, Ludovic, and his parents Michel and Brina (my daughter). Preoccupied by the private purpose of my visit, I tried to think about recent public events and their meaning. I was looking forward to private pleasures, working on public matters.
My trip is very much a family affair, no lectures, no meetings planned with colleagues. I am not even sure we will see any sites: Paris without the Eifel Tower or the Louvre, maybe a hardware store or two as Brina and Michael are in the middle of some serious home renovations.
But as I hurtled through the sky over the Atlantic, I wondered about how the private is linked to the public, aware of the fact that generally the French and Americans, and more particularly the French and American media, have dealt with this in very different ways, revealed in recent scandals.
Americans are more likely to look for the truth of the public by examining the private. The French are more convinced that private matters are not public issues. Both have important insights and blind spots, apparent in this week’s news and in the discussions here at DC.
Gary Alan Fine welcomed the candidacy of Tim Pawlenty. Fine, who enjoys what he calls pungent political discourse of the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, also recognizes the importance of serious political debate, seeing this possibility in Pawlenty. But there was another such candidate presenting serious alternatives to the Democrat’s positions, with a record of accomplishment. Many informed Republican partisans thought Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana would be an even more significant candidate. But the twice married to the same woman politician with an apparently complicated private life, chose not to run. His family, specifically his daughters, vetoed his run. Fear of public exposure of what should remain private deprived the Republicans of a candidate. Public debate and contestation has been diminished by the apparent confusion of public and private virtues.
![]( "Dominique Strauss-Kahn (official IMF portrait) © Unknown | IMF photographic archives") . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Thinking about Public and Private at 37,000 Feet
By Tim Rosenkranz, May 25th, 2011 
Tim Rosenkranz reports on the significance of a recent article by the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas. –Jeff
On April 7, 2011 Germany’s political news magazine “Süeddeutsche Zeitung” published a piece by Habermas in which he openly attacks Chancellor Angela Merkel for her “opinion-poll dominated opportunism.” While the article focused on the problem of European integration and the continuing democracy deficit of the institutional frame of the European Union, Jürgen Habermas points his finger at significant systemic problems of today’s democratic political process – between civil society, the public sphere, political elites and the media-sphere – the problem being the loss of larger political projects in a process driven by the short-term politics of public opinion polls.
While Habermas is still a vocal figure in the academic landscape, at least in the last decade, he limits his editorial participation in larger public debates in the media. If he does speak up, it is mostly concerning the problems of European integration and its democratic process. The recent article “Merkels von Demoskopie geleiteter Opportunismus” (“Merkel’s opinion-poll dominated opportunism”) is not an exception. What caught my attention, however, is that Habermas rarely criticizes German politicians directly in person. It is also unusual in that the article is a theoretical expansion within his larger intellectual frame of “deliberative democracy.”
Very atypical for him, Habermas condenses the larger theoretical problem in one paragraph, which I would translate accordingly:
In general, today’s politics seemingly is transforming into an aggregate condition defined by the abdication of perspective and the will to create (Gestaltungswille). The expanding complexity of issues demanding regulation compels [the political actors] to short term reactions within shrinking scopes of action. As if politicians have adopted the unmasking view of system theory, they follow without shame the opportunistic script of opinion poll dominated (demoskopiegeleitet) power pragmatism.
. . .
Read more: Jürgen Habermas on Power to the Polls
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 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 Gary Alan Fine, May 3rd, 2011 
In a post submitted before Osama Bin Laden was eliminated, Gary Alan Fine poses a question that is especially pressing after this latest development in the ongoing global wars. –Jeff
Coming out of a bar late one night, a patron finds his friend on his hands and knees searching desperately beneath a streetlamp. “I lost my keys under my car and I must find them,” moans his friend. “But why, if the keys are under a car, are you searching under this lamp?” “Well, the light is much better here.”
This is an old chestnut, none too clever, but one that has powerful political resonance, helping to explain flawed policy decisions. Why, if we worry about the menace of Al Qaeda, have we gone to war against two states – Iraq and Libya – that have distant, even hostile, relations with our terrorist foes. The light is better there.
A student of mine, Michaela DeSoucey, currently at Princeton, wrote her doctoral dissertation about the battles to ban foie gras. She asked the question why is it that animal rights activists chose to make the banning of foie gras a central issue, despite the small amount of foie gras consumed by Americans, as opposed to veal, much more common on American tables – or chicken. Neither baby cows nor poultry sleep under 300-thread count sheets. Her argument is that battling foie gras producers is a far easier task than the cattle or poultry industry. Yet, each battle provides a rich vein of publicity. Foie gras is what DeSoucey labels an easy target: it is, if one can pardon the culinary-mixed metaphor “low-hanging fruit.” Activists hope, but do not expect, that such targets can provide a wedge for other bigger enemies. Not yet.
But my concern is not with the pantry, but with the atlas. Here we are battling in Libya, while Syria falls into chaos. Americans and our NATO allies have determined that it is crucial that we overthrow the Qaddafi regime, even though that regime is opposed to Al Qaeda as are we. And, frankly, it is becoming a vexing pattern. We are . . .
Read more: Easy Targets
By Rafael Narvaez, April 27th, 2011 
In the mid-eighties a young woman was hired as a receptionist at a local TV station in Lima, an anonymous and fortuitous circumstance, which set in motion one of those bizarre episodes in Peruvian politics. A possessor of ambition and bodily capital, Susy Diaz was quickly promoted to semi-exotic dancer, working for a prime-time TV show named “Laughter and Salsa Music.” “Salsa,” to clarify, meant women dancing in thongs, and “laughter” meant, in general, men demeaning the women in thongs. Diaz soon took the central stage. Her fan base grew rapidly, and so, almost as with Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “metamorphosis,” one fine morning she woke up to find herself transformed into a tabloid celebrity.
I remember one of those tabloids run by Fujimori with a front page devoted to Diaz’s sexual exploits, photographs of purported anal sex included. Confident with her popularity, she also expanded into picaresque theater, as well as singing. One of her theater pieces was entitled “The Erotic Congresswoman,” and one of her songs was “Let Me Blow Your Horn.” “Catharsis for the masses,” as Adorno would say, “but catharsis which keeps them all the more firmly in line.”
Susy Diaz’s ambitions grew in proportion to her newfound fame. Inspired by Cicciolina, the Italian porn star turned parliamentarian, Diaz used her popularity to launch a tumultuous, one-of-a-kind political career. Convincing members of the Agrarian Party (a caucus devoted to peasant-related issues) that she would be a good addition to their ranks, she soon found herself running for Congress, with a campaign that was simple and faithful to her style. She first inscribed her ballot number on her buttocks to thus remind fans and cameras of the reasons to vote for her. If it had worked in the domain of tabloids and TV, why wouldn’t it work in the domain of politics?
Naturally, she also . . .
Read more: Junk Politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 26th, 2011 
I am convinced that the success or failure of historic political transformation has less to do with moments of violent confrontation, more to do with the politics that precede and follow violence, or are non violent from beginning to end. If the repressive forces back down before a society is torn asunder, success is more likely. This provides the grounds for political creativity that actually make what seemed to be impossible one day, likely the next. Two pieces by informed scholars I’ve read recently notably still think that this is the case in Tunisia and Egypt. Indeed, I just read a piece in today’s New York Times that seems to confirm their optimism.
Alfred Stepan, a long time student of democratic transitions, reports in a post on the Social Science Research Council blog, The Immanent Frame: “Tunisia’s chances of becoming a democracy before the year ends are surprisingly good.” And that “Democratization in Egypt in the long term is probable, but it does not share the especially favorable conditions that we find in Tunisia.”
Deliberately Considered contributor, Hazem Kandil, gives a precise overview of the historical developments and background of the fall of the Egyptian old regime in an interview he gave to The New Left Review. He paints a vivid picture of the interactive forces that made up the old order and of the forces that are going into the making of the new. He also is realistically hopeful. He concludes:
“So the outcome will really depend on how strong the revolutionary tide is in Egypt. If the movement remains as it is now, moderate and pragmatic, we will have a much better Egypt than existed before, not a perfect democracy. If the movement gains strength and momentum, there is no telling what might happen. For, there is no revolutionary movement with the capacity to take over control of all the institutions that need to be purged. Nasser had the army—he could send soldiers out to enforce his agrarian reform, or to . . .
Read more: Positive Prospects in Tunisia and Egypt
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 21st, 2011 
Amy Stuart in her reply to my response to President Obama’s speech on the deficit pointed out the need to clarify what the political left, right and center mean. I think she’s right. The terms have been used loosely and quite imprecisely. But on the other hand, their continued use suggests that there may be good reasons for the continued use of the schema.
I, myself, became convinced, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the terms left and right were obsolete. I thought (it turns out incorrectly) that since it was becoming clear to just about everyone that there was no systemic alternative to capitalism, to the modern market economy, and since there really were simply alternative capitalisms, that we might best abandon the terms. Then we would pragmatically address the practical problems of the day, and express, identify and pursue various specific political commitments, e.g. individual freedom and social justice, and not put them in the large baskets of the left and the right. I thought that the terms hid more than they revealed, that it was too hard to find and consider specific commitments in these very large bins.
Yet, given the systematic polarization of our political world, I am convinced that I was wrong. These old categories still have life, helping illuminate distinctions and commonalities in the political landscape. And there is an additional benefit as it applies to the present American scene. The distinction between left, right and center provides a way to understand the creative political action of Barack Obama, who in this regard is a leader.
The notion of the political left and right has a history, dating back to the French Revolution: Monarchists, right; revolutionaries, left. It was used to understand the Manichean battles of the Twentieth Century: Communists and their sympathizers, left; Fascists and their sympathizers, right. And it also has been used to understand ordinary domestic politics: Republicans, right; Democrats, left, very conservative Republicans, far right, very progressive Democrats, far left (though I think this is a small group at best).
The notion of center is less sharp. Vaguely, it . . .
Read more: Left, Right and the Creative Center: Understanding the Political Landscape in the Age of Obama
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