Pink Floyd

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter away and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

- Mason, Waters, Wright, Gilmour
"The Dark Side of the Moon", 1973

Need job security?

Intrigued?

When there's no way out, the only way out is to give in?

Vietnamisation or Somaliasation?

Once you're knee deep in a pond of quicksand, can you extricate yourself from it without making things worse? Is this the situation confronting the U.S. as the war in Iraq is getting worse by the day? It is true that outright withdrawal of troops on moral and ethical grounds is an inadequate approach to address the mess that has already been made; Somalia - as Glucksmann notes - serves as a frightening example. The question is whether an administration that so enthusiastically propelled its country into war is approaching it prudently and effectively. Can insurgent resistance ever be quelled? Or does U.S. foreign policy around the world feed - for a lack of a better term - a vicious cycle? How does the tension with Iran or the problematic relationship with the Israel-Palestine situation make these problems even more pressing? The short answer to these questions is that these things do not help the situation in Iraq, but are not the central factors behind difficulties the U.S. military face in the region - which for the most part it has created for itself through miscalculations and a lack of foresight in strategy and planning.

True, it would be naive to believe that the U.S. government is utterly unaware of what is happening on the ground in Iraq. It would be too simplistic to say that if U.S. troops withdrew the Iraqi people would be restored to a romantic state of peaceful bliss. Honestly, Andre Glucksmann is absolutely correct that a rash withdrawal would leave Iraq open to civil strife and brutality. But, why has the presence of U.S. military been relatively ineffectual in curbing insurgent violence? Why has the U.S. troops engaged in the slaughter of Iraqi civilians as well - with at least one known incident at Haditha? Gluckmann did an inadequate job in philosophically differentiating between Saddam Hussein's tyranny and the potentially indiscriminate brutality of American "liberators". One was a decades-long regime of terror, or so the story goes. The other is supposedly a temporary price for gains to be made down the road.

Is the incident at Haditha an expression of metaphysical angst, of frustration about the escalating quagmire created by persistent insurgent resistance? Or does the insanity of Haditha reveal the repressed penchant for death and destruction, ingrained in soldiers who are conditioned for brutality - to fight against a homogenized enemy? When the line between insurgent and civilian is blurred, as is often the case in guerrilla war, do innocents appear to simply as enemies or potential enemies? Certainly, the question is not purely philosophical - indiscriminate killing is in essence an irrational act, but the philosophical question casts some light upon the rudderless war effort.

Do you stay or do you go? The dilemma is difficult to think through. Too bad those in the Bush administration have not given it much thought or have considered the paradoxes inherent in such a decision. Or if they have given it much thought, it has not shown in their actions in Iraq, as the American effort has held steadfast to winning a propaganda war at home - the highly publicized capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2004 and the recent "elimination" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on June 7, 2006 - rather than winning the war on the ground. The most disconcerting aspect of the war is the failure of U.S. strategy and tactics employed in waging the war - first, a lack of understanding about street fighting, recon and intelligence gathering, and guerrilla tactics necessary to weed out the roots of insurgent resistance - ironically the same shortcomings that doomed them in Vietnam, and second, the abysmal failure of the campaign for the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis, due largely to the paternalistic assumption that "democracy" and "freedom" means anything for the Iraqi people without some context to their everyday lives and culture. To put it bluntly, they have done a terrible job in selling the idea of a better future.

This first failure of strategy, ironically enough, is because the U.S. effort has overemphasized the ideological and semiotic developments within the insurgence, such as whether these insurgent groups are related to global terror organizations and the preoccupation with the particular acts of terror such as kidnappings, videos of beheadings, and such. The location of Zarqawi was an exception to this, because it revealed a degree of logistical sophistication and espionage. But, of course, a bold symbolic gesture was chosen over a more patient, prudent, and substantive strategy. Rather than capturing Zarqawi and his associates - possibly obtaining leads about the locales of "rival" insurgent groups and invaluable information about the insurgent resistance, the U.S. military resorted to a bold display of revanche by blowing him up and parading pictures of his corpse proudly, like an eight year old showing his playground chums a dead bird he found. What was accomplished through Zarqawi's death, apart from a brief revisit of the feeling of apparent accomplishment and achievement that occurred on that joyous "Mission Accomplished" fighter carrier and the infamous-famous "We got him!" press conference two years ago? If you are at war to reinforce self-esteem, you're in war for the wrong damn reasons.

In war, as Sun-Tzu put it elegantly, you must come to understand the adversary and the conditions of combat as well as you know yourself. The masterful general, as he puts it, is the one who wins the battle before it even takes place. Rather than going into Iraq with any nuanced long-term strategy - contingency plan upon contingency plan, the U.S. military went in to "shock and awe", raise the Mission Accomplished banner for the hometown "folks", and bumbled their way through the rest, resulting in many American soldiers being sent home in body bags and an even larger number of Iraqi civilians perishing.

So once you're there, you can't give in and say "the pinko-commie fuckwad protestors weakened our resolve and compromised our effort" or some other stilted attempt at deflecting blame. If the war is a necessity, as they contend, at least don't fuck it up with constant attempts at justifying being there in the first place. The point is to pacify the insurgency, not to bolster their resolve by creating martyrs. The purpose is to create conditions favourable to victory and stability, not to seek revenge for grudges. The way to victory - take that term with a grain of salt - is one of stealth, patience, and prudence. Arrogance, foolish impudence, and allowing revenge to motivate action leads invariably to defeat. The U.S. venture into Iraq has seemingly followed along the path of the latter rather than the former.

Nepal and Maoists

Nepal: the Maoist transformation's fuzzy logic

When change comes through the barrel of a gun, can the gun ever be laid down? It is difficult to imagine that the civil war dividing Nepal will come to an end without more and more bloodshed. A virulent populism - fostered by Maoist indoctrination of villagers to a culture of violent rebellion - can make peaceful compromise appear to be pathetic capitulation. "The People's War" demands that the means to violence be retained. And if the Maoists are to enter into "legitimate" means of national governance, disarmament appears to be a necessary requisite.
King Gyanendra's ill-advised attempt at seizing power on February 1, destroying the nascent elements of democracy in Nepal, provided further justification for the rebel forces and its populist supporters to justify the continued use of force. But that is the price of waging guerilla war; it becomes something much larger and pervasive than those who lead its efforts. Rebellion rallies around a common target - be it the king or the elites; but ultimately as Robespierre demonstrated during the French Revolution, terror can spin utterly out of control once the target of rebellion is apparently vanquished.

And as the French Revolution demonstrates, modern liberal democracies do not necessarily remove violence from their regimes. Particular claims to the use of violence are repressed; violent force and coercion, as Weber reminds us, is the exclusive domain of the sovereign state. And if one subscribes to Hobbes or Schmitt, the creation of the modern state requires violent means, to command the obedience of its citizens and entrench sovereign authority. Is this the fate of Nepal? Or was King Gyanendra - who inherited the thrown from his brother's massacred royal family - the best unifying symbollic sovereign figure, had he not made a futile grab at power? We must remember - however - that the emergence of the British (and somewhat by proxy, Canadian) parliamentary system went through the beheading of Charles I, civil war, the rise of Oliver Cromwell and his merry men, and a restoration of the monarchy as a largely symbollic figure.

The violent origins of what appears - at least to the general public - to be a rather banal institution are often forgotten. The violence that is perceived to protect it, such as wars in foreign lands to fight hostile forces hostile to "our way of life", is deemed legitimate. And from the arrests of potential plots on the Sears tower and the Canadian Parliament, the extension of state authority in protecting the nation-state can occur so subtly and with such stealth, that one will get used to having Big Brother peering over their shoulder - listening in, watching, or checking out their bank records. "That's how they protect us from external threats...defend our way of life...defend our freedom" is the justification. But at what point will the measures employed undermine and destroy any semblance of freedom? And at what point will the innocous veneer of the Great Protector peel away to reveal the bars of the iron cage?

Ratocracy and Enlightenment

Liberalism has failed to set us free. Indeed, it has enslaved us.

"Liberalism used to be dedicated to doubt, cynical about certainty and, above all, suspicious of power. All I am urging is that liberalism should start applying these attitudes as rigorously to its own powers and certainties as in the past it applied them to everybody else's." - Peregrine Worsthorne

The Enlightenment, as a friend told me, cannot be thrown out wholesale - the unfortunate baby and bath water analogy rears its ugly head here. It is a matter of redefining it - recovering the critical aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather than demonizing and rubbishing it. Rubbishing it requires no thought, no effort - it is the easy way out. Rethinking the Enlightenment and recovering aspects of it demands thoughtfulness and worthwhile labouring.

Peregrine Worsthorne is correct in pointing out how unfettered freedom - without respect to what Weber called an ethic of responsibility and conviction - leads to a "ratocracy", a meritocracy where sycophantism is rampant. The turn towards the private individual as the site of freedom - individual rights and freedoms as the end all and be all - feeds this ratocracy in business, in politics, in academia, in activism, and even in matters of the heart.

The courage to act is not natural to some and absent from others. It is not simply a matter of nature over nurture. We all possess that potential to learn, to act freely, to innovate, and to create. Education, hence, cannot simply be an accumulation of knowledge - formulae, facts, fictions, and what else. Education is not, as some contend, weeding out the weak and elevating the "strong" to their rightful place of status - guardians of knowledge, if one believes Plato. Education is between I and Thou, between you and me, between persons and the world they share. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment. May we heed Worsthorne's brief, yet inspired, comment and look to recover what freedom means in an age where liberty seemingly is currency for boundless pursuits of power and triumph - as individuals and as nation-states.

Fossil fuel fools

A more substantive list of ten

Some familiar suggestions from the world of popular science on what to do about the energy crisis.

Superstitions

Superstitions for the playoffs:

1) Hockey beard - or the best one can muster, i.e. Jarome Iginla circa June 2004.

2) Avoid uttering the term "bandwagon" or accusing fellow fans of fairweather fandom - no need for infighting.

3) Beer, pretzels, more beer - akin to a consensus builder in response to violations of 2)

4) Absolutely no fraternizing with the "enemy" - unless they offer to buy any of the items listed in 3); in that case, pose as friend, rob, and leave for dead.

5) Don't touch brooms.

6) Don't cross paths with black cats - unless it works for you, then please, do indulge.

7) Wear jersey only on off days or before the game, but never during the game when watching the game on TV. If the team jersey has some mystic connection to the team, do you really want the aura of couch potatoes and drunkards dragging down the crew? I think not.

8) If at the game, always wear the jersey - regardless of the state of its cleaniness or any odours it may produce. The aura is different at the game. It just is.

9) During the playoffs, one should loudly chant "Go (team) Go!" at the moment of sexual climax. Chances are that if your partner can tolerate you during the playoffs - i.e. consenting to any act of intimacy; this would be nothing.

10) For the Flames fans out there, the only thing that truly makes sense when the Flames are out of the playoffs is this particularly profound dictum: Anybody But The Oilers. This is true, even when anybody = Carolina.

And when the journey is done, kick back, down a few brews (hopefully something better than Bud Light), and ask yourself WWMCD?

Identical difference

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1204956,00.html

Theodore Junker, proudly displaying the American flag side by side with that of Nazi Germany, poses the question, if history is written solely by the victors, then what value does history hold? The account he provides is quite evidently derived from lingering propaganda. He found the twilight of his 87 years the best possible time - once the bulk of his life has already passed - to reveal his beliefs, to expose himself to the venomous attacks that are sure to follow. Of course his contentions that Nazi soldiers, according to him, were heroes, his refutation of the Holocaust, and his laudatio of Hitler are not particularly different from similar views expressed by neo-Nazis.

What is interesting is the symbollic value of those two flags hanging side by side at the heart of his supposed shrine to the truth. Each flag is the embodiment of a truth. In the end, only one won out and wrote the definitive account of what happened. The problem this farmer and former member of the SS broaches - apart from his own biases - is whether "history" is only one side of a story; the victorious account triumphs over the vanquished one. Of course, it is hard to think about this problem without finding oneself on the verge of an abyss. One cannot accept the propaganda inspired account Junker peddles, for it is patently false. But should the stilted account of the victors be accepted without question? True, what Junker wants to spread as Truth is indeed false, hideous, and hateful. But the mythology surrounding the flag on the left, is that not a cause of equally hideous sentiments? When the president of the United States publicly chide - or more appropriately, condemn - Mexican immigrants for not singing the national anthem in English, aren't those sentiments threatening to burst forth? Does it not present the possibility of radical exclusion or "necessary assimilation"? The unity and security of a nation is held proportional to the strength of its symbols, the voracity of its mythology, and the unanimous adherence to ritual and tradition. The nation must be believed to be resolutely righteous, the protector of universal ideals.

While Allied forces are seen as heroes in the eyes of history, there are instances of villainy. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo are the most common examples of this. The polarization of good and evil makes it imperative that slaughter be elevated to the level of heroism, rationalized and justified. Of course, some would ask, why question the story? The story is dangerous if it cannot be retold without variance. An unquestioned account fuels the polarization between good and evil; the elevation of the nation-state as the supreme defender of all that is good. Justify and rationalize - is everything permitted?

Junker has both flags up. He sees similarities between the dreams peddled by each. Freedom contra Will? Democracy and the Volk? Manifest Destiny and lebensraum? The destiny each ideology sees for itself involves a belief that history is ultimately of the side of the righteous, on their side. History, as Junker unwittingly demonstrates, is not truth or reality, but simply an instrument of power - possibly the most effective blow inflicted by victors of a struggle. But this specific blow is substantial; it constructs time and space, writes the story that is reality.

Ideas and Hockey

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-06-14-ochser-en.html

"In many respects, though, sport is a theatrical simulacrum of the socio-economic system that imbues it with such undeserved significance. And in this way, the Latvian obsession with ice hockey reflects their obsession with appearances over reality. The team plays their roles as professional competitors. The fans play their roles as active spectators. The puck plays its role as reified value. And who wins in this scheme of things? That question really isn't worth answering."

Is this piece humourless? Perhaps. Let's begin with the clumsily conceived term "theatrical simulacum", which is at once redundant and obfuscating. If theatrical has already been set out, pulling out simulacrum is a tad excessive. Theatrical implies that the sport is somehow orchestrated and rehearsed and unfolds according to script, a liberal-capitalist script at that. Isn't that a rather crude analogy? What about improvisation? Changing on the fly? Picking off a pass up the middle and walking in to shelf the OT winner? The underdog team pulling a thrilling comeback victory through fierce forechecking, shotblocking, and transition break outs? The brilliant spontaneity of the game is not considered - evident in hockey, even more so than almost any other sport, because - well - sport is simply a spectator distraction according to Ochser.

True, fanaticism - i.e. hooliganism - such as that displayed by the Latvian fans who tossed all sorts of rubbish on the ice when their team were playing Team Canada is demonstrative of passion gone astray. It is indicative of the distraction becoming hyperreal, when the distraction simply exacerbate the baser individualizing impulses of people. But, time and time again, it has been proven that hooligans do not represent the actions of the majority of fans. The emptiness and valuelessness Oscher so easily ascribes to the sport of hockey is to be expected though. The checklist of modern cultural critiques can be ticked off easily. Violent? Sure, sometimes. Overt masculinity? Check. Commercialised? Yeah, hockey leagues need to make money too. Chasing after a "reified value"? Of course, so does basketball, football, baseball, rugby, and so on. Then again, isn't the reified value of the critic the appearance of boredom? Truly a chase for ever greater disinterest.

I appreciate hockey precisely because it makes no claim to aristocracy. It is not the sport of kings, like horse racing. It was a sport, at least in Canada, born on the ponds or home made rink on the farm. It was a sport played by labourers after work, by kids after school. Hockey is a social event, as participants or as fans. It is where people come together, rally around a sense of community. Sure, some may say it is an artificial source of community. But surely it is not a hollow one. It is a space for meeting - yes, for leisure and pleasure, but also to allow fellowship between people to develop and flourish. Hockey is something that is shared. As a Canadian, I know I share in the experience of hockey with others. The contention that sport is simply a simulacrum of a socio-economic system attempts a pseudo-Marxist flourish, borrowing "po-mo" phrases in the process, without thinking how the meeting of fans for a sporting event may bring about spontaneous encounters, to build relationships to deal with the larger and "serious" issues.

Tim Ochser provides an intellectual reflection on why hockey doesn't do it for him. That is fine. But it reveals the perspective he is writing from. It is from above, at least it is a perspective that wishes to be above. It is a space the critic so desperately wants to occupy. But in the process of critique, he neglects to consider that maybe, just maybe, the passion of Latvian fans invested in a supposed "hollow and empty", therefore insignificant, endeavour such as hockey fandom grows friendship and fellowship, the base upon which more substantive engagement comes to being.