Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 
In the wake of the trifecta of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his colleagues have donned the blue uniforms of first responders, suggesting they are working tirelessly. But despite his efforts to handle the biggest crisis in Japan since Hiroshima, Kan has not won the hearts of his countrymen, whose apprehension and distrust increases each morning when they turn on the news to learn of increasing radioactivity, the plummeting stock market, and the soaring death toll. As it turns out, blue uniforms are not enough.
History has taught us that disasters and mass emergencies can transform a mediocre politician into an inspiring leader. The 1944 San Juan earthquake in Argentina that killed more than 10,000 people, earned Juan Perón instant esteem, as well as a glamorous wife, Evita. Ten years ago, the rubble at Ground Zero in New York City transformed George W. Bush from an alleged illegitimate president to a folk hero shepherding the nation through crisis. For Kan, the challenges of Sendai have opportunities and pitfalls. But so far, Kan’s focus on the rubble has not brought the Japanese together in common purpose.
Where did Kan go wrong? To be sure, there is a Japanese cultural style, But nowadays politicians must be aware of new global expectations, which call for a man of compassion and empathy, a man of the people. Consider Wen Jiabao. Two hours after China’s 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he jumped on a plane bound for the area struck by disaster. Soon he was seen walking around in the devastated community, telling children who were buried in a half-collapsed building that “Grandpa Wen is here with you.” The politics of emotion in action. Hundreds of millions of Chinese watched Wen shedding tears, angrily slamming his cellphone at slacking officials, and hugging wailing orphans. Just as Bill Clinton, Wen realized that a politician must feel your pain. As a result, the Chinese felt sheltered instead of afraid. A few cynics have called Wen “the best actor in China,” . . .
Read more: Post-Earthquake Politics in Japan and China
Tuesday, 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
Monday, May 2nd, 2011 
I find myself puzzled by the response to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Listening to President Obama’s speech, I immediately wondered how this would affect the war in Afghanistan and our relationship with Pakistan. Since it seems to me clear that the terrorist threat has less to do with a specific network called Al Qaeda, more to do with fanatics around the world, I wondered about their response.
I then turned on CNN and was bewildered. Why were all these young people in New York and Washington, and at the Mets – Phillies game celebrating? And why the wild chants of USA, USA! What were they thinking? What were they feeling? Why were they so enthusiastic?
Bin Laden was not a nice guy. He was a master of destruction. He inspired his supporters and his enemies to wage war, torture, attack human rights and civil liberties and the like. He was a global anti-democratic force. Without him, globalized terrorism and anti-terrorism are less likely. But the Arab Spring is much more consequential in this regard, I believe, as it points to promising alternatives for people around the world. Democracy is “in,” fanaticism is “out.” The heroes of Tahrir Square are the real answer to the “Clash of Civilizations.” This confirms for me ideas I had soon after 9/11, leading to the writing of The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times.
Yet, no doubt, I am underestimating and not understanding the response of people here in the U.S. and around the world to the elimination of a force and symbol of mass destruction. Understanding how they see and feel it is important, because these feelings and perceptions are important political realities. An interesting overview of reactions today were posted on Al Jazeera.
I found particularly interesting the contrasting takes of the key leaders in Israel – Palestine:
Ismail Haniyeh – head of . . .
Read more: Osama bin Laden: Thoughts and Questions
Sunday, May 1st, 2011 
“We heard an explosion, through the shattering glass
We looked up at the Asch building
A bundle of cloth came flying out the window
On the way down it opened up in the wind
It was a girl, it was girl.”
(From the Fire)
Today is May Day, “el Dia del Trabajo,” a day in which work and workers are honored around the globe. Today in particular, five weeks after the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, we remember the 146 immigrant workers, most Jewish and Italian girls, who died trying to escape flames that roared through the upper floors of the Asch building, a garment factory near Washington Square. Trapped behind locked doors, many never had the chance to escape. Others jumped out the windows, some hand-in-hand, their hair and clothes aflame.
Saturday, March 25, 1911 was a clear, early spring day. Crowds of New Yorkers strolled in Washington Square and on the streets of the lower East Side. Suddenly at 4:45, many looked up and saw smoke billowing from a ten story building on Green Street and Washington Place. Hundreds rushed to the scene. One observer said he thought the factory owner was trying to save his best cloth by throwing bundles of fabric from the ninth floor. He and so many others realized in horror that they were seeing not bundles of cloth falling from the windows but girls — girls in flame, girls who were landing in broken heaps on the sidewalk in front of them. The fire which lasted less than half an hour, made these invisible immigrant workers suddenly starkly visible. Photographs of the mangled bodies were printed in the morning newspapers but still thousands came to view the open coffins lined up in rows on ‘Misery Lane,’ the makeshift morgue set up on the peer at 26th Street. Some were family and friends desperately searching for missing loved ones but most wanted to just see the dead with their own eyes. Ocular proof.
New Yorkers felt that they knew these shirtwaist makers. They were the girls who . . .
Read more: May Day’s Ocular Proof: A Bundle of Cloth
Saturday, April 30th, 2011 
I have been long impressed by the relationship between theater and politics, and am impressed once again in considering the posts and discussion at DC this week. Theater is the art form, according to Hannah Arendt, that most closely resembles politics, and as such it can be of great political significance, for better and for worse.
I have based my intellectual career on this. Theater opened Polish society to major changes, and in the process, it changed my life. It presented alternative visions; it constituted an alternative space, for the Poles and also for me.
The theatricality of public events, particularly when televised as a “media event,” can at least momentarily express the solidarity of a nation state, as was evident to the British this week in the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, real not only for British subjects, but as well for the global audience.
But the relationship is not always a happy one, as events of this week and our discussions at DC show. Theater, broadly understood, especially bad, base theatrical entertainments, can present fundamental challenges to democratic life. Rafael Narvaez examined this in his post. Kitsch entertainment created junk politics in Peru. Like junk food, it provides its immediate pleasures, as Lisa pointed out in her response to Narvaez. But it can also have quite serious negative consequences. In Peru, it was implicated in the political culture of corruption. And perhaps it’s not surprising that the role model of the Peruvian exotic dancer turned politician, Suzy Diaz, was Cicciolina, the porn star turned parliamentarian in Italy, the European country that also has been marked by corrupt anti-democratic politics. Of course, these entertaining figures do not cause the corruption, but are manifestations of it.
Matters are in a way worse in the U.S. The reality show star Donald Trump, who has . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Theater and Politics
Thursday, April 28th, 2011 
A rumor is circulating. Someone in our inner circle – a figure we know and trust, a person we believe to be on our side — has cast suspicion over someone else that we know. A doubt has been put in our minds.
Truth be told, the doubt was always there, latent. We had always suspected, deep down, that we were being deceived – that we could be deceived. What we now demand is concrete proof, one way or the other.
“…give me the ocular proof…
…Make me to see’t; or, at the least, so prove it, That the probation bear no hinge nor loop To hang a doubt on” (Shakespeare, Othello 360-66)
Yesterday, President Barack Obama tried to oblige. His staff has posted “proof” – the proverbial missing handkerchief, we might say — on the White House webpage.
Given the personality-driven nature of American Presidential politics, it has always been tempting to see the fates and actions of Presidents (and other world leaders) through the lens of Shakespearean drama. After all, it’s Shakespeare who, as G.W.F. Hegel put it, gives us the finest examples of “characters who come to ruin because of [a] decisive adherence to themselves and their aims.”
For some, George W. Bush resembled the wayward Prince Hal of the Henriad – the man who later became known as the “warlike Harry,” once he took over his father’s position. For others, the Clintons seemed uncannily like the couple in the Scottish Play. In his new book, Shakespeare’s Freedom, the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt even tells of an audience he had with Bill Clinton in 1998, just as the first rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, during which the President himself remarked, “Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”
Barack Obama has been thought by some to resemble Shakespeare’s “moor” Othello. Peter Sellars’ 2009 production of Othello, for instance, sought to reframe the play for what he called “the age of Obama.” . . .
Read more: The Ocular Proof: Othello and Birth Certificates
Wednesday, 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
Tuesday, 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
Monday, April 25th, 2011 
Last week, Harold Garfinkel, one of the greatest sociologists of the second half of the 20th century, died. He was 93. Garfinkel, actually, would have scoffed at the idea of being called a sociologist. When he came of age, sociologists were too engaged in abstractions, in attempts to make sweeping generalizations. Though Garfinkel himself was the student of one of the greatest systematizers of them all, Talcott Parsons, he took a radically different stance.
Instead of allying himself with this way of doing sociology, Garfinkel turned to the New School, and the work of exiled philosopher Alfred Schutz, as a way out of grand abstractions. Instead of looking at society in the abstract, he slowly built up a language that would allow him to study what was going on in the here-and-now, the way people actually made sense of their world as they went along in the business of living. Instead of Society, with a capital “S,” he became immersed in the methods people use to make a situation what it is. In his apt, and often misunderstood, term, he became interested in ethnomethodology.
In the context of the 1960s, ethnomethodology became a banner for studying the actual way people navigate their lives. Intellectuals that were disillusioned with abstract sociology, people like Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Mel Pollner, and even the writer Carlos Castaneda, became allied with what was emerging as a movement on the West Coast of the USA, with its headquarters in UCLA, where Garfinkel did some of his most important work.
Though Garfinkel’s thought is rich and complex, and evolved throughout his life, there are a few themes that he stayed true to since his groundbreaking 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. One is how inherently fragile our world was, how much work went into sustaining it, work that was not natural, but could be always undone. In John Heritage’s terms, order was constructed in the making, like The Beatles’ “Yellow Brick Road.” To show that, and to show how we constantly work to sustain . . .
Read more: In Memoriam: Harold Garfinkel
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 
In my book, The Cynical Society, published in 1991, I had a simple project. I sought to show that along with the manipulation and cynicism of contemporary politics and political reporting, there was ongoing real principled democratic debate in American society. I criticized one dimensional accounts of American society that saw the debate between Ronald Reagan and his opponents, for example, as being about his personality and theirs, the interests he served and they served, and the manipulative strategies of both sides. They didn’t recognize that fundamental issues in American public life were being debated, specifically about the role of the state in our economy. I worried that people who didn’t like the prevailing order of things confused their cynicism with criticism, and in the process resigned from offering alternatives. My posts this week were extensions of that project to our present circumstances.
I attempted to illuminate the ways in which Barack Obama’s Presidency was and still is about fundamental change in my first post, and I tried to illuminate the terrain of principled political debate in my second post, additionally accounting for Obama’s position. America is a cynical society, but it is also a democratic one. A rosy colored view is naïve, while an exclusively dark one is enervating. I insist on understanding both dimensions.
But as the host of Deliberately Considered, I am learning and expanding my understanding. My two dimensional picture is limited and conceals some important matters, specifically the emotional dimension. We should keep in mind that we don’t only act on principle and reason and pursue our interests with strategies that are sometimes manipulative. We also act out and upon our emotions, as James Jasper explored in his posts a couple of weeks ago, and Gary Alan Fine has analyzed as well. Indeed Richard Dienst’s “bonds of debt,” that Vince Carducci reports on, are more emotional than rational, highlighting the connection between attachment, indebtedness and power, making it so . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: The Cynical Society and Beyond
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