prod & ponder

… a change of scenery for Thanksgiving. When I left DC this morning, it was wet, cold, and miserable. Phoenix, not so much.

Thanks also go to Evan for the top-down tour and his generous hospitality.

I’m also thankful for the wonder that is fried Turkey:

Delicious.

Like most international conflicts, the present situation in Iraq has spun off a domestic conflict around the language and metaphors we use to describe our situation and actions. This isn’t about a rational pursuit to describe things accurately; denotation has nothing to do with it. This is about the the semantic battleground for claiming connotations and the narratives they evoke. And what’s puzzled me lately is the tremendous amount of perceived negative baggage around the phrase “cut and run.” Where did that come from?

Now, forget whatever you might think about the present situation in Iraq and the relative merits of different American foreign policy options. Let’s just look at the “cut and run” narrative in general. I suppose what confounds me is that I read the word “cut” there as “cut your losses.” In short, I read it as a general statement of sound critical thinking. It’s avoiding the pitfall and wrongheaded general strategy of chasing after sunken costs. Cut and run is the welcome antithesis to the mistake of “throwing good money after bad.” So, again, when did “cut and run” get to be an inherently negative label? And, for that matter, when did “stay the course” ever survive so long without anyone flipping the connotation to be that of rigid inflexibility and dogma? Military commanders and politicians all cite terrorist networks’ ability to learn and quickly adapt as one of their key strengths, and yet learning and adapting is precisely what’s precluded by foreign policies grounded more in repetition than constant, considered change.

All this isn’t to say that we should immediately withdraw from Iraq. If you’re curious, my own take is that a sudden and complete withdrawal would be bad move, both strategically and ethically. But I do wish we could have a better national discourse around US options, one that didn’t jump to cast change itself as the greatest failing of all.

Here’s a vantage point and context you might not have considered.

Personally, I appreciate the point the creators of the site are making. The profound degree of wealth disparity in the world just isn’t something that’s deeply understood and felt by many living on the affluent side of the global wealth divide.

And to really drive that home, after you’ve done your own yearly income, here’s another number to enter into the website: $9,800. That’s the designated poverty line in the continental U.S.–the average threshold point an individual needs to reach in order to just secure the basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter.

You’ll see that being just at the poverty line in the U.S. puts you in the top 13.35% of the world’s income level.

Moreover, it’s not just the global system of wealth distribution that shows such start contrasts. The L-curve of income distribution at the global level is mirrored by the L curve of income distribution within the US itself. Moreover, the economic disparity/divide created has been steadily rising.

So, while Marxism, communism, and their ilk may for the most part have been (rightfully) retired as seriously considered prescriptive models of governance and economic ordering, the question of how to address economic disparity and the inevitable social conflict it creates sure hasn’t gone away.

What are you doing reading this blog? You should be out there casting your vote. Along with the summary of voting resources I gave during the primaries, there’s the one-stop-shop of www.vote411.org.

Clifford Geertz died on Monday.

I vividly remember the first time I ran across Geertz’s writing. I was hunting through books on culture in the ever-musty stacks of Strozier Library. I started leafing through The Interpretation of Culture, leafing turned to browsing, and browsing turned into total obsession. I never checked the book out. I just plopped myself down at the foot of the shelves and went straight through it, ditching a whole day of classes in the process.

When I consider what it is I love about academia, that’s one of the memories that first comes to mind. And while I never had a chance to meet Geertz, I’m heavily indebted to him for the ideas and inspiration I’ve drawn from his scholarship.

A closing reflection on his work? Well, Geertz offered that himself:
A Life of Learning.