Books Yay!: Journey into America, by Dr. Akbar Ahmed

Most people have belts of life events, when everyone you know is getting married, or having a kid, or buying a house/condo, etc.  For nerds, there’s an occasional Publication Belt, and this is one of my favorite instances of said phenomenon.  I went to American University with Frankie Martin, who worked as a researcher on Dr. Akbar Ahmed’s Journey into America project, which resulted in this book.  I’ve followed the press and the team as they’ve progressed through this project, and I believe that they are doing essential work.  I also appreciate that Dr. Ahmed was wise enough to pick someone so level-headed and rational as Frankie to work on this project.  I cannot imagine a better team member and truth be told, the more I think about it, the more I rue the absence of projects in my life into which I could rope Frankie.  Besides being a top notch academic, he’s also a wonderful friend with a high tolerance for weirdness, which is essential in my relationships.  I remember one day when we were going to a Baltimore Orioles vs. New York Yankees game with him at Camden Yards, and when he met me at my apartment, I was decked out in head to toe Red Sox gear and drinking milk out of a martini glass because all my normal glasses for milk were in the dishwasher (and also because I am super, super classy).  Frankie was completely unfazed by all of this, and still went to the game with me, which turned out to be an eventful one since an End of the World style thunderstorm came up in the middle of the game and we stayed in the stands, watching the water drain off the field before the game resumed.  This is the kind of academic you need – one who stands with his demented friends even in the face of alarming weather and against all sanity.  Perhaps this is why the resulting book is so compelling.

Journey into America seeks to create an anthropological profile of Muslims in America and to pair it with a brief, relevant history of Muslim immigration and origins.  To do this, the team went to over seventy-five cities and more than a hundred mosques, interviewing Muslims, neighbors, other religious leaders, and other “men on the street” to better understand how individuals and communities approach their relationship with Islam.  The depth of this study provides a true portrait of how Muslim life in all its iterations proceeds.  No branch of Islam is left unexplored, and no environment is missing.  The inclusion of non-Muslim voices adds to the work as well, and adds significantly to the cultural and social study of the Muslim community.  After all, no one lives in a vacuum, and it would be a poor anthropological study indeed if it was limited to Muslims alone.

The resulting view of Muslim life is both surprising and completely predictable: Muslims come in all stripes and shades, and they all have complex relationships with their American identity.  Some are traditionally devout, some are devout in a more modernized way.  Some are inclusive, some exclusive.  This is not, however, to say that their Muslim identity is irrelevant.  In all of the cases shown, the subjects showed some tension between their Muslim identity, in which their religious identity stretches into their cultural life, and the American society, which is overall much more morally inclusive and undisciplined.  I think that this would probably be the case for most religious groups; America’s inclusive nature means that pulling out any one group will show that the group has different codes of conduct and ethics, which would generally seem more strict than American society at large.

I do feel that this book suffers from a slight shading of personal morality from two of the main players, Dr. Ahmed and researcher Hailey Woldt.  Dr. Ahmed obviously feels that there are serious moral deficiencies in American society, particularly amongst women, and I do feel that this comes through in some of the writing in an nonconstructive way.  These sentiments are often backed up by agreement from Woldt, an adult convert to Catholicism, whose more conservative Catholic views mirror Dr. Ahmed’s sentiments on American moral consequences.   I think this is a simple consequence of the reality I mentioned above – that any religious group will appear morally disparate from American morality at large – but it is a bit unfortunate that this comes through in the presentation at times.  It makes it a bit jarring for the reader.

I have high hopes for this book, because I think its description of Muslim America can go a long way in normalizing and “de-villifying” Muslims for Americans suffering from post-September-11th Islamophobia.  Dr. Ahmed also emphasizes the importance of dialogue in healing the wounds and misunderstandings that cut both ways.  Indeed, when Dr. Ahmed and his team interacted with more isolated Islamic communities, a clear detriment to their relationship with their immediate community and larger environment could be seen.  This is an important book and an important perspective, and I hope that it comes to occupy a place in our public discourse.

Crossposted at The Outpost

 

Book [Tuesday]!: Straight Man, by Richard Russo

Richard Russo has some kind of character magic. Every one of the people populating his books somehow manage to be true-to-life copies of someone you know at the same time that they are universal representations of the demographics to which they belong. This was the case in his exceptional portrait of small town life, Empire Falls, and he does the same for academe and it's bizarre, brilliant inhabitants in Straight Man. I'm still getting to know my colleagues and teachers at Boston University, but I was lucky enough to get to know my professors at Assumption College very well. As I read Straight Man, I couldn't help but slot in my professors to the various actors' roles, while marveling at the goofy uniqueness of the people Russo had created. I was particularly amused by one key similarity of location; Assumption has this duck pond, full of spoiled ducks and geese (who are taken a warm, cushy location over the winter and returned to the pond on Duck Day, when they waddle down a red carpet and everyone has cookies. Assumption never met an occasion it wouldn't celebrate with cookies), as did the college in Straight Man. You can imagine my juvenile delight when the main character, Professor William Henry Devereaux, throttles one of the geese while on live TV and threatens to kill a duck a day until he gets his budget, leaving the goose with a bad attitude and a tiny, goofy neck brace.

Straight Man is a great book for fledgling academics, as both an enticement towards and warning from the field. It is a vicious portrait of departmental warfare, where all involved are armed with pettiness honed to a razor-sharp edge over years of disappointment. Everyone in a position of power only holds it in theory and is crippled by the machinations of some other vaguely empowered individual further up the food chain. Everyone has an agenda, and those agendas are overlaid with some intensely irritating and quintessentially academic traits - hyper-political-correctness, "I am an ARTISTE!" posturing, chronic ABDism, terminal fussiness. But in Russo's hands, you can also see the charm of these people, and you understand why they would keep you in the field even as they moved you to run screaming from the department. They all mean well, in their own socially crippled way. With education in the decaying state it's in today, it can be hard to imagine why anyone would turn to the life of the mind - and you could be excused for wondering if education, even at the college level, still has anything to do with the life of the mind - but Straight Man and its wonderful cast of characters gives you an idea why.

Russo's books are never just about the narrative thread. There is so much going on in Straight Man. Devereaux is a man struggling to find his own identity in academe. He compares himself to his father while trying to carve out his own identity. He wrestles with his marriage and his relationship to his daughter and son-in-law. More than anything, this is a story about getting older and the changes that come along with it. The relationships in the book are just so wonderfully genuine and rich - not perfect, not pulled out of a Disneyfied fairy tale, but true to life and deeply affecting.

I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone, but particularly to academics. It's a reasonably fast read, but I'd recommend taking your time with it so you can revel in Russo's gorgeous writing. It is super funny, beautifully written, and deeply touching. What more do you want from a book?

Lestranges: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Croc

One night I had something to drop off to my parents, so I called them on my way home from a Sharks game to make sure they were there. Despite normally being in bed sometime around 8, when I finally got my Dad on the phone, he told me they were up at our long-time neighbors', the Lestranges. I pulled into the neighborhood about ten minutes later and found them all in the kitchen, drinking wine and wearing Crocs. The Lestranges' daughter had just started working for Crocs and I guess they give you your own little store's worth of Croc crap to give out to your family and whatever weird neighbors you have on hand, so they'd all been kitted out in black Crocs with the furry liners. It was quite the scene. Because I am an awesome daughter/neighbor, I was like "yeah, everyone stand with your Crocs together and we'll take a picture" so I could mock them at a later date (in context, about a year later).
Needless to say, these deviant humans decided that I not only needed my own pair of Crocs, but also needed a set that had a pair of Bruins...plugs on them. This is not unlike telling me I need a bear trap with ebola slathered on the jaws clamped to my ankle. I hate Crocs, mostly because people insist on wearing them everywhere and this is NOT ACCEPTABLE FOOTWEAR, but also because they are hideous. I will, however, admit that they are extremely comfortable. I now wear them for driving and gardening.

The comfort, however, is kind of a problem, because it has in fact caused me to forget they are on my feet. On my weekly journey to Boston this past week, I got to Riverside and realized that I had forgotten to take my Crocs off. This whole Ph.D In Boston thing is a real test of my organizational skills, and I still fail at it occasionally. Here's how it works. I take the commuter rail in from Westborough on Tuesday. I have classes all day on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I stay with my sister in the North End during this time. On Thursday, I have one class in the morning, and then I take the commuter rail back to Westborough and go to work (about 10 minutes from Westborough station, which is FULL OF SPIDERS oh my God so many spiders). This all means that I need to take clothes for school AND work with me, in a conveniently portable manner - this means "my San Jose Sharks backpack" which offends my sartorial sensibilities but can't be helped - but of course I often forget that work happens after school because Thursday is a remarkably long way from Tuesday in my brain.

ANYWAY

There I was at Riverside in my Crocs, and I thought to myself "hooray! I am a slob, and live out of my car." I forgot that I had recently cleaned my car (read: sorted through the landfill that is my back seat as Rich, Dad and I drove from Connecticut after returning a 2010 bright orange Mustang with standard transmission that necessitated my needing to re/learn driving stick within 12 hours to drive it in a parade before ultimately giving up and making Dad do it, and by "sorted through" I of course mean "put the trash in one pile and then shoved all the clothing and shoes into a formal gown I had in there and tied it at the neck for carriage, then forgot said dress-bag in the car numerous times") so rather than having thirty pair of shoes in there, I had three. My options were:
Extremely awesome Dav Peacock Rainboot-Shaped-Like-A-Cowboy-Boot. I nearly peed when I found these, because I have giant calves and most rainboots do not look awesome and adorable on me like they do on all the people with normal legs. I also have a longstanding desire for cowboy boots, but I am a snob and want NICE cowboy boots because obviously I need them to stand up to my busy schedule of cow-wrangling and also because I am a dork. These look like cowboy boots AND have peacocks on them AND are rainproof and therefore are 100% win.
My pink Nike Frees which I wear to the gym, except only a little, since I work out barefoot.
These Walk-Of-Shame-Tastic satin pumps, which are lovely and make my legs look great but do NOT go with my grad student outfit of "jeans and a black shirt with Sharks backpack."

I was concerned that my feet would get hot in the rainboots, because this weather is giving me issues with adjusting to actual temperature, and I didn't want people to think I was screwing people in the Political Science department or T stations or whatever, so I went with the sneakers. I feel like this entire episode probably says something really worrying about me but I am too tired to analyze it thoroughly.

The Phenomenology of Human Interaction

In my last semester at Assumption I took a course called 20th Century Continental Philosophy (that's right, I heard those squees of excitement!), which was mostly a course on major thinkers in Phenomenology, with a side of Georges Bataille, who is mostly noted for being a crazy wackadoo but has some interesting thoughts on taboo and transgression. This was all vastly improved by my poor professor's thrown back, which meant he was teaching some fairly deep philosophy while wacked out on pain meds.

Phenomenology is interesting stuff, but I freely admit that I find it to be a little bit like That Stoner Kid You Know in that it thinks it's deeper than it is. The idea (at least from its founder, Husserl) is that everything is consciousness, and things appear to that consciousness. You then take a step further and stop thinking of them as appearing to YOUR consciousness and understanding yourself as a consciousness that is aware of itself as a consciousness (...yeah, I know). The idea was that racking everything back to a matter of consciousness would give a solid framework for considering all human knowledge, and it was supposed to make philosophy into a "real science," thus making Husserl one of like, three philosophers ever to give a shit about whether or not people thought philosophy was a hard science.

Anyway, I like many parts of phenomenology and if you're interested in reading more I'd recommend Robert Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology, which is a great, plain-English overview of the philosophy. There's lots more to it, but for the time being I'm mostly concerned with the idea of understanding our individual selves as phenomena appearing to the world even as we see other things appearing to us. I think there's value in applying this concept to your everyday life, even if you're not going to be walking around all "I AM NOW ENTERING THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL POSITION" all the time.

The key thing here is being aware that you are appearing to other people, and understanding how you appear.

It seems like appearance, gender and relationships have come up a lot lately. Two examples stand out to me. The first was a discussion with friends involving a local political candidate's oft-worn blazer (tweedy, but short sleeved; 100% mysterious), which lead into a discussion about fashion in politics. Franchie, who is awesome and always very well put together, was saying that if she was in politics, she would always be in a cute dress and heels, etc. I explained that though she might look fabulous, there's a very specific way to dress up for female political figures, and she'd have a hard time getting taken seriously. It's unfortunate, but true. Though she might generally appear well dressed and fashionable, she would also appear to people as an unserious political figure, because dowdiness is to a certain extent de rigeur on the Hill and in politics at large. She'd have to adjust her appearance with the understanding of those perceptions. In this case, the example happened to be politics, but this is true anywhere. It's just as easy to flip it around to Franchie's work clothing. She works at a jewelry store, so she would stick out and be less likely to sell as much as she does if she didn't wear fashionable, feminine clothing, to say nothing of her jewelry choices.

The other instance was a friend of mine who likes to make sure his friends get home okay. This is okay on the face of it, but it's a definite Check Your Appearance situation. I used to have a friend like this in DC, too, and though it came from a caring place, I eventually talked to him and pointed out that I felt fine going home on my own and would in fact prefer if he left me to my own devices. In any case, the current friend was telling me about how he had decided to follow a friend home to make sure she got there okay. They hadn't discussed it beforehand, and though it seemed like a nice gesture, she wound up driving a long way out of her way to get home, and included a buzz past the police station in her route. That to me said that she'd identified my friend as someone of concern, and was trying to send a message. Even though he intended to do something nice, it appeared creepy. Appearances matter.

Let me be clear, men of the world - unless you talk to a woman first about making sure she gets home all right, it's not okay. It might be coming from the most charitable, kind place in your heart, but unless you actually see someone or something menacing that she doesn't, following her home is going to come off as creepy. I was actually just talking with Celia about "privilege" and how frustrating it can be when in discussions about various "-isms," people will tell you that you need to understand that you are privileged and acknowledge their oppression, but when you ask about it to understand it better you get the "it's not my job to explain your privilege to you" response or - even more aggravating - the "you can't understand it" one. It's very frustrating to try and work through your privilege (or perspective; I think "privilege" gets slung around excessively) and have someone stonewall your attempts to do so, even though the "not my job" thing is totally accurate despite being counterproductive, and for all these reasons, I try not to pull the "you wouldn't understand" card, but...the vast majority of men simply cannot understand the latent threat it is possible to feel as a woman from a man. It encompasses such a broad array of personal and secondhand experiences, cultural norms, and other social flotsam that there's just too much that can't be relayed effectively. It's as simple as this: as a man, you can be threatening just by being a man, no matter what you look like. And yes, it's completely unfair, and it shouldn't be that way, but right now, the way gender relations stand, that's how it is. You have to be aware of it and you have to do what you can to offset it.

The great thing is that this is totally avoidable! Just have the conversation, and be aware of how you're appearing. It takes some practice, but it's certainly doable.

Soundtracks and the City

To get home from BU, I take the green line to the red line via Park. There are a lot of things I don't love about the T (starting with the screeching wheels in the morning), but I do like the old feel of the stations. All that cool mosaic work and subway tile gives you such a wonderful feeling of how Boston is. I feel Boston's history whenever I'm in the city, from the cobblestones to the subways to the park space and the buildings - you can't escape the feeling that This Place Is Old, in the best possible way. I harp on a lot about how we need to remember the past and speak often and eloquently about what made us the way we are in order to move forward, and this sense of history in Boston makes that project much easier. It's not so difficult to discuss our Americanness, as it were, in the shadow of buildings that were touched by the Founders themselves.

In any case, I like going downstairs to the red line at Park because it's got this beautiful red tile that was used throughout the red line and there's something about the design of the platform that just feels very...enveloping. There's usually someone playing some kind of musical instrument, and today there was a guy playing guitar and singing. The songs he played just kind of fit the feeling of the station and my mood, and I started thinking about how often that happens. I was out last night with some of the other grad students and the music, again, just fit.

I think this explains why I like cities, and particularly why I love Washington, DC. A city always provides you with a soundtrack, be it comprised of street musicians or just the sounds of a lot of people in close proximity. It's more than just sound, too. Anyone who has spent time in a city can pick up on those small shifts in mood or energy that either carry you along or contrast with your own feeling. There's something about being in one place with thousands of other people, all with different things to do and places to go, and the noise that comes along with those people, that makes up a city's character. Boston has always been a special place for me because of its quiet, deep music, but it was in DC that I found a place that played the full range of music in my own soul.

Realization

About nine years ago, I started writing creatively on a weird little website. It's kind of a cesspool of oddity at this point, having gone the way of so many open-source websites, but it's given me some of the best friends I've ever had. This isn't just hyperbole...we're talking about people who wound up being bridesmaids and groomsmen at my wedding, to say nothing of those who attended as guests. These are also the folks who gave me confidence in my writing ability.

When I write for fun, I usually take a moment or image that feels particularly beautiful to me and try to relay what’s beautiful about it to the reader. I think I’m pretty good at this, as I’ve received good response from people about most of what I’ve put out there for public consumption, but you never really know if the reader’s mind is creating the exact portrait you want. This is kind of the tao of art in a lot of ways…the magic of art is its ability to affect people differently, which is why I am never going to like Kandinsky and why people fight over what Andy Warhol was going for. The great gift of art isn’t just bringing beauty into the world but the discussion that it can inspire.

I also think about whether people are actually seeing the same things I do. I might see one color and identify it as blue, and you would agree that it is blue, but we don’t know if we’re actually seeing the same image. You might actually see something that I would call orange. Living in a verbal society, we have to decide what to call things, so of course we have both learned that that particular image is “blue,” but what we’re actually looking at may differ. I think there’s a similar question in play with writing. I can describe something with the most perfect phrases, but reception all depends on your way of thinking. Just look at differences in language use – if I use a certain kind of idiom or a specific word that you wouldn’t select, a whole different feeling can develop.

This is all a long way of telling you that I recently had a story illustrated for the first time. My friend Rose asked me this summer if I would be interested in starting up a small press with her and our mutual friend Bill. I told her I’d be willing to give it a whirl, and we founded Pink Narcissus Press. When we established the website, though, we thought we should have some kind of content on the page so people had a reason to go to it with some frequency. We decided to write a story together about a town called Silence, and I wrote a piece called Ars Moriendi. Rose sent our stories to an illustrator, and when the sketches came back, I was instantly in love. Eva, my main character, looked EXACTLY the way she looked in my head as I was writing her. It was incredibly rewarding to see a solid measure of my authorial success. Eva had come across on paper precisely as I wanted her to.
That's an exciting thing, but what's REALLY exciting is our call for submissions! We have two anthologies in the works, and you should totally write something for them. Head on over to our Submissions page to get the low-down.

The Value of a College Education

I'm going to start a Political Theory Ph.D at Boston University in a month, and I eventually want to teach at the college level. There are two things that scare me about this situation. First, I am concerned that I won't be able to hack it in the program. I think this is mostly neurosis, and it would probably be worse if I wasn't a little scared. More importantly, I'm worried that I won't be able to cut it in the college environment. Not because I am afraid I'm not smart enough or won't have enough classroom presence, but because I'm not sure I'll be able to stand the kids who shouldn't and don't want to be in the classroom with me.

Pretty much every employer asks for a college degree now, which is a great idea as long as you don't think too hard about what a college degree is supposed to represent. Your major should not be arbitrary, it should be something you want to develop expertise in. A bachelor's degree is not a piece of paper certifying that you are now awesome at life. However, this is the read that many employers - and society at large - take on it, and this means that your major matters less and less, allowing for buy-a-degree programs like University of Phoenix and its cousins to spring up offering something much more like a B.A. in Life Awesomeness (though the actual awesomeness is frankly limited). I think that on some level these schools understand that, so they skew their programs toward something more like vocational training. The problem there is that vocational training doesn't require the same kind of school that academic training does, so the end result is of mashing together apples and oranges and calling them the same thing. Crosspollenization has its limits. It's nice of these schools to take the expense and time of training employees off of businesses, but that doesn't make it a legitimate academic pursuit.

You might not care about this distinction, and the "well why not get everyone through college" concept has its merits. The problem is, though, that the reason college degrees were desirable in the first place was because earning one was a badge of academic distinction. You now have a lot of kids in school who Just Want The Degree, and employers who Just Want The Degree, and neither party really cares about academic rigor. Weird, right? The idea of academic achievement - and the work required to obtain it - was so appealing that eventually it removed its own necessity.

The sad thing about the kids who Just Want The Degree (or the parents who push them into it) is that these kids might not be cut out for academic work, and this attitude makes it seem like that makes them dumb. I know a lot of stuff about political theory; my husband knows mainframes inside and out. That doesn't make either one of us smarter than the other, it makes us smart in different directions. But if our entire social posture is geared towards college, then the people who don't care about college and aren't good at it and ultimately can't hack it are going to feel left out and worthless, and that is crap, because the world needs as many different kinds of people as possible to make it go.

It's amazing to me that something so simple needs to be said, but...you need different kinds of people. You need some people to debate big ideas, you need some people to fix your car. You need someone to fight your wars, and you need someone to cook food. A while back, I got into a minor squabble with a friend of mine and he gave me the whole "I didn't go to college but I make three times what everyone I know who went to college does" line, which is great and I do in fact believe him, but that is also possible because not everyone does what he does. If everyone does the same things, eventually it floods the market for that activity and devalues it. It works for everything - going to college, not going to college, whatever - and unless we realize that, academia and all the many fields beyond it are in serious trouble.

Makeup Is Easy [For Men Too]: Make Your Hands Un-Gross

Your hands are one of the primary ways people make contact with you, whether it's a handshake or if you're a hand-talker. People notice them, so you should do what you can to keep them nice. I know it's tough for men to make peace with the idea of going to a salon - it seems to be the last bastion of belief in cooties - so if you get the value of having nice hands to recommend you to the world but aren't quite ready to go, here's a quick spiff-your-hands primer.

1. Drink lots of water. This is a good policy anyway, but your hands and fingernails are all made of skin, and you will want them as pliable as possible. Make sure to drink at least a couple glasses of water well before and up to the time you start working on your hands.
2. Wash your hands. Dirt, smudges, penmarks, whatever, it's better to avoid having gunk on your hands anyway, but if you're going to take the time to clean up your hands the best starting point is with cleanliness. You can clean your hands with soap and water, but for this exercise it's even better if you put a teensy - seriously, TINY TINY TINY - amount of olive oil on your hands and massage it in. Olive oil is a miracle product - it cleans and softens your skin and you probably have it in your pantry right this very second.
3. Push back your cuticles. (Just in case: those are the little rims of skin at the base of each finger nail.) I do this with my other fingernails, but you can also do it with a nail file or an "orange stick," also sold as a "cuticle stick." I don't know why it's called an orange stick, because it's not orange, or orange scented, or any of that. If you're feeling daring, you can trim your cuticles, but you don't have to. It's really, really important to have moisturized hands for this. Push all of the cuticle down, then carefully use a pair of nail scissors or cuticle nippers (both available at CVS) to nip away the excess skin. Always cut LESS rather than more - you can always take off more, but if you cut too much, it hurts like a MOTHER. I should note here that the cuticle plays an important role in keeping bacteria and grunge out of your system, and that's why I say this step is optional. Pushing them back will go a long way, particularly when you follow it up with...
4. Exfoliating your hands. Lots of ways to do this! Exfoliation takes all the old dead skin off the surface and lets new, healthy skin come through. You can always buy an exfoliant like St. Ives Apricot Scrub at CVS, but since we're keeping the men in mind, let's come up with some other ideas, too. Option one: steal your female cohabitant's St. Ives Apricot Scrub. I think every woman in the United States has a tube of this. Option two: take that olive oil you used earlier and throw some sea salt into it. It should be grainy, not goopy. Option three: get the roughest washcloth you have in your stash, and throw some hand soap on it. Whichever option you choose, you want to rub it all over your hands, focusing on your cuticles, then rinse it off. (I like to give my elbows a scrub-down while I'm at it.)
5. Shape your nails (yes, men too). There are two aspects of your nails to consider: length and surface. With length, take a second to think about how you usually treat your hands. If you work with your hands a lot and your nails break constantly, just cut to the chase and keep them short. For longer nails, think about the shape you want and make sure it's uniform. If you can find a glass nail file, that's the best option, but no matter what you use, make sure you file in one direction only! People tend to reflexively use a sawing motion, but this chews up your nail and makes it weaker. Just go one way - it's annoying but better in the long run.
   
6. File your nails. I actually really like those little four part files, but you can get them in blocks too, which form to your nails a little better. Even out any ripples, then give it a smoothing once-over. This will remove any cuticle residue and give you a polished look.
7. Optional: Strengthen your nails and apply polish. I have weak nails, so I use a nail strengthener. You want the Sally Hansen stuff in the gold bottle - it's at any drugstore. If you're a man and don't want shiny nails, no problem! Just put on two coats of the nail strengthener, then take a file and buff the tops of your nails so they're a matte texture. If you want to apply polish, put it on now, starting in the middle and moving out allllllmost to the edge of the nail.
   
8. Finish with moisturizer. Finally, give your hands a once-over with a moisturizer of your choice or another round of olive oil. You could also use a different type of oil here - I like the Body Shop's Monoi Miracle Oil (which really is miraculous; you can use it for ANYTHING), and Rich seems to like Dr. Hauschka's Lemon Body Oil, which has a nice zippy scent that picks you right up.
   

Tada! You have soft, good-lookin', good-feelin' hands, using the very basics and without going to a salon. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments!

Scheduling and some fun stuff

First of all, exciting news:

I finished my undergrad degree and graduated cum laude from Assumption this past weekend, which was very exciting and completely draining. Friends and family were loose all over the place and the weather was spectacular. I'm so grateful for all of those wonderful people being there for me, and to Assumption for the top notch, enriching education they gave me, particularly in the Political Science and Philosophy departments. I'll be going on to Boston University's Political Theory Ph.D program in the fall. Summer assignment: figure out how to pay for it.

I've been thinking about how to rework this blog so I am more inclined to update it regularly, even during the school year. I have settled on a more routine schedule which I think will work out well. Here's how I'm hoping it will work.

• Mondays will be floater days because I am rarely motivated to do anything. Monday posts = bonus posts. Ditto Saturdays and Sundays. I'm not saying it won't happen, I'm just saying it's not guaranteed.
• Tuesdays will be open topic days, either for whatever I want to talk about or something other people want to talk about. You can email any topic requests, but I reserve the right to pick and choose with extreme prejudice because I cannot promise to like what you like or care about what you care about. Nothing personal.
• Wednesdays will be book review days. I have abandoned the Cannonball Read, having read 100 books but not the sticktuitiveness to write reviews for all of them. A book and review a week seems more reasonable, so I'm going give that a whirl.
• Thursdays will be a new feature, suggested by my friend Val, called Stuff In Josie's Closet. People seem to like and be mystified by my personal style, but the secret is pretty simple - Ijust use a lot of cool accessories. I'll be posting pictures of various shoes, jewelry and other items, with some commentary on how I would wear them, etc. Also, my shoes are cool.
• Fridays will be reserved for Makeup Is Easy posts. I feel like a lot of my makeup is generally the same basic technique, and I'd like you to get something more out of it than "and then I did this same thing but with a different color." This way, I can focus on doing one superawesome face a week and post that.

Suggestions are always welcome! Thank you for reading, I really appreciate your taking the time to pop by.

Lady Gaga and the Dangers of Equality

Everyone's high school experience is different. I never really felt the extreme pressure to fit in that movies and TV tell us we should have. I think it's partly because my parents taught all of us to be ourselves and to not worry too much about other people's petty opinions, and partly because my high school was a great one whose student body was generally accepting and positive. None of this is to say that I never yearned for some thing that would let me fit in better or that I never questioned myself because my decisions didn't match the majority of my classmates. I also measured myself up against the magazines I read, because they promised to speak to some universal girliness. As with most people, the older I got, the more I realized the pointlessness of trying to be like everyone else, particularly at the expense of things I actually liked.

We tend to think of politics as a hobby and not as something that involves us all equally and requires our attendance. Your level of participation is variable, but we're all involved in politics because it sets the parameters within which we live our everyday lives. In America, we have a particularly dangerous political system because it empowers all of us, and this requires that even more attention be paid in order to hold up the greatest possibilities of the system and quash the hazards. We learn the Declaration of Independence early in our lives; we learn that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans cling fiercely to their equality, but it is frequently taken to mean that even nature must endow us equally, and that is unrealistic. It's also the kind of hyperequal state of mind that leaves us with only majority opinion to guide us, and while that has some legitimacy in politics, it's damaging in society at large. We understand that the majority is to be conformed to - whether or not we decide to do so is our choice, but there is significant large-scale pressure pushing us towards majority social rule. This is why we have cross-generational types. Cheerleaders do this. Nerds do that. Punks do another thing. Each type tends to fit a mold because it's what is expected by the majority. It's given us an emotional and social shorthand for understanding human relationships. I believe this is to our immense detriment, because a lack of pressure to understand each individual qua that individual leads us to lose our ability to do so.

I think fashion is important for many reasons, but mostly because it is a way to show our personalities and to show what we think is important. When it's done thoughtfully, it can remind us of and comment on our pop cultural traditions and make us think about what they mean.

And that's why I nearly peed my pants when Lady Gaga showed up on the red carpet dressed like the Soviet space program.

Lady Gaga at the Grammys (Image from Getty, via Jezebel)

I love Lady Gaga, and I love her for many, many reasons, not all of which are explainable, but chief amongst these is her declaration that she is a performance artist and the zest with which she sets about living up to that name. She takes insane risks, not only with fashion or politics (she is an outspoken activist for many causes, not least gay rights), but with her principal source of fame, her music. When she showed up on American Idol, a glorified karaoke show, watched by people who enjoy hearing reasonably competent karaoke, and completely broke down and restructured her biggest current hit, "Poker Face," she risked weirding out a major section of her audience, but she did it anyway. That takes serious balls. I just love that she's willing to play with every social norm she can get her little monster hands on, and I think it's possibly the healthiest social experiment that has come along in ages. She's talented, but focuses on an often-disposable genre. She's pretty, but she's not classically beautiful, and she changes her look so often with glasses and makeup it hardly matters. She has a great body but her fashion choices dramatically shift the shape of her body (see exhibit C, the Snow Miser outfit she rocked after this one).

Maybe it's a stretch to say that Lady Gaga could be great for a healthy American democracy, but I hope that people can take cues from her and experiment with the way things are, have been and should be. Dispelling some of our long held stereotypes and rickety beliefs could go a long way towards restoring our ability to discuss the state of America productively and clearly.

And that's why I'm proud to hold my little monster hand high.

Darn Bookstore Screwed Up My Book Order

The Cat Book of Cats is NOT on any of my classes' reading lists.

By the way, I have found the Assumption College Bookstore to be unfailingly competent and efficient. I have always received my books promptly and the staff is friendly and helpful. I would like to see a larger "fun" book section - I was spoiled by American's two floor bookstore - but having great customer service makes everything better. High five, Bookstore! (And the cat thanks you for the bonus toy.)

High School Seniors of the World, Relax

I was talking with a friend of mine about college as part of my ongoing plan to convince everyone I enjoy to move to my immediate area and I realized as I was talking to her that the bulk of high school guidance offices are failing students as they work to get them in to colleges. It's certainly not intentional and there is a lot of stuff that these offices are doing right, but I think high school kids are applying to colleges without really understanding what they do and don't need to have figured out, and doing so with far more anxiety than is necessary. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on college that I hope will help.

Not everyone needs to go to college. I hate this whole "Every Kid Should Go To College" culture for many reasons. Making everyone go to college cheapens the actual value of a college degree; as we learned in The Incredibles, "when everyone's super...no one will be." Not everyone is cut out for college work and when you force everyone to go, it means that those people who can't hack it will need somewhere to buy degrees. A college education is not supposed to be on your schedule, or happen in your pajamas. A true education should develop your mind and consume your life - your life should be about your education, not the other way around. If you only want to apply your training to a certain part of your life, then you should go to a training program or vocational school to develop those skills, not waste your time, your professors' time and your classmates' time with classes you don't want or need. Secondly, the push for college makes high school be about college, which is insane. Memorizing dates and passages isn't the most important part of high school - the social development you learn there is far more important and will last much longer than most of what you do in high school - but you should be able to read, spell and add into the bargain. High school now is all about getting kids into college, and the bottom line is that not every kid is going to go to, need or want college. High school education should be appreciated on its own merits, not used as a stepping stone for some higher ideal.

Perhaps most importantly, you do not need to go to college right out of high school. I think that success in college requires at least one of the following things: an appreciation for learning qua learning, a career you have in mind and are willing to work for, or a desire to undertake an academic challenge. Without any of those, you're likely to be unhappy and to fall short of your potential. Go be amazing somewhere else, somewhere you can be who you are and be brilliant at it. College isn't a guarantee and it can't make you love it. Take time off, work, travel, figure out what you think you'd like to do or what you don't like to do. It's okay to do that stuff, and frankly a better use of your time if you're not sure about college.

All that being said, here are a few things to keep in mind if you do decide to go to college.

1. Pick something and go with it. It can be really daunting to look at those giant books of college listings. The analyses of the schools encompass so many things that it seems impossible to figure out where to start. Start with the one thing you care about and go from there. Remember that it doesn't have to be a Serious Academic Consideration...if you don't want to go to a school in a city, knock all the city schools off your list. Sure, there are great schools in cities, but there are great schools in East Jesus Nowhere, PA too. Yale might be one of the best schools in the world, but if you hate being in New Haven (and who wouldn't? Sorry Yale.) then you're not going to get the most out of your college experience. Pick something you care about and roll with it.

2. Finances should never be what stops you from applying to a school. Yes, college is expensive, but there are two things to consider. The first one is the staggering amount of money floating around out there to help you. What you need to do is find it and apply for it. Send in an application to every scholarship fund and grant program you can find. Make those applications great ones - edit them, take the time to format them, and let yourself shine through them - and ship 'em out. The money is out there, even if it's occasionally hard to find. It's worth the effort if you want to go to college. Second of all, you need to accept that debt is a part of life. Of course you don't want a lot of it, but you're going to have it for something, and it may as well be college. A friend of mine was telling me about how she wanted to go to Paris and teach, but she had student loans so she was thinking about staying and working for a while to pay them off. I pointed out that a year of work wasn't going to pay her entire college loan load off, and more importantly that even if she DID through some miracle manage to do it, there would be more debt someday. If it's not college, it's a house. If it's not a house, it's a car. If it's not a car, it's a credit card. Debt comes from everywhere and while you shouldn't carry a huge amount of it, you should be able to appraise the value of it - some things are worth eating Ramen as an adult, you know?

3. You do not need to know what you want to do for the rest of your life. A lot of kids wind up depressed in college, and I have to assume that it's connected to this pressure to know exactly what you want to do on the day of your high school graduation. If you do, great - a friend of mine who I have known since I was six months old told me in fourth grade that she wanted to be a physical therapist and that's what she's doing today. However, that kind of clarity is very unusual in an 18 year old. Here's something that you might not know: pretty much every college has a core curriculum that every student has to take. It's usually broken into subject areas and you have a couple narrow choices to fulfill a list of requirements. Those core classes will probably annoy you at some point in your collegiate career, but they can also help you try some things to figure out what you'd like to major in. You don't usually have to pick a major until sophomore or junior year, and even then, you can always change it. There's a trade off, of course - a major demands that you take certain classes and you'll need time to get them all in - but you should never feel locked in. Do your core classes first (this will also help you avoid being the Lone Senior in English Composition 101, a.k.a. "English for the Marginally Sentient.") and see what you like.

Just remember, it's never too late to try something new, and that can mean changing a major, changing schools, dropping out of school, working for a couple years, whatever. If you're not happy doing whatever you're doing - and that is a broad happiness; no one is happy during exams - reexamine it. I was at American University in a program that didn't resonate with me and left with a 1.08 GPA, which is about .08 above "narcoleptic." When I went back to school at Assumption, where their program is more theoretical, I knew I was in the right place and my GPA is currently a 3.45 (and 3.5 in my major). If you don't love it, you won't thrive, and everyone deserves to do well in life.

The Relevance of Christian Just War Theory in Modern Foreign Policy

I recently opened my big stupid mouth and said that one of my Just War Theory professor's paper assignments did not sound like it would be fun, which made him get all creepily "oh, you want FUN do you?!?" about it. He then assigned us something that was still a weighty paper but was less formal than usual. The idea was to write something that could be printed as an OpEd column in a newspaper, defending the value of Christian Just War Theory in today's foreign policy, even to non-Christians. (I believe the prompt did give you the choice to say it had no value, but I happen to think that's incorrect.) Since the idea was to speak to the masses, I thought it might be worth actually taking to said masses. Feedback welcome!

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Today we find ourselves enmeshed in three wars: the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and a war of opinion. Our public discourse is awash in vitriol but lacks a certain seriousness that would allow us to properly discuss the military wars before us, creating a third war of words. At the same time, our society is secularizing; religion has taken on the feeling of a hobby or pasttime, the Western zest for toleration leads us to place a wide berth around any assertions that one religion more than any other is superior, and misreadings of the American Constitution have fostered a wild paranoia that any religious influence upon government will send our government spiralling into oppressive theocracy. Our troubled relationship with religion has prompted us to abandon certain options available to us in referring to church-influenced theory, primarily those of Christian Just War Theory. Considered rightly, Christian Just War Theory can provide us with a moral language to use to discuss the justice of our military wars and a context in which we can consider them. Christian Just War Doctrine relies on a natural law accessible to all men, which renders worries about strictly religious government influence moot. Finally, our engagement with the Muslim world demands that we address matters of theological doctrine, whether we choose to or not. Though Christianity may not speak for the West as a whole, Christian theorists have made enough of an effort to make their arguments accessible to Christians and non-Christians alike that they provide an effective starting point for the consideration of justice in war.

It is particularly difficult to gauge the justice of a war from the center of it, and it may be impossible for every citizen of the United States to come to an agreement on the status of both the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars. Moreover, there are two aspects of war to appraise for justice – the decision to go to war, and the way we transact it once we are there. These complications do not exempt us from the justice of our wars, particularly if the United States wishes to continue its reputation as a benevolent force on the international stage. The necessity of these considerations demands that we develop a reasoned, methodical approach to apply, and this in turn requires us to subscribe to a more deeply rooted basis for our theories. Modern American politics operate on a somewhat superficial understanding of political urgency; even if these politicians do appeal to a less transient rationale than their emotions, they rarely go deeper than the American Constitution. Though that document is grounded in grand liberal tradition and forms the basis for American life, it is relatively young and restrains our politics to a certain depth. Christian Just War Theory encourages us to look beyond our particular political structures and rely on natural law for guidance.

There are two primary sources of Christian Just War Theory and both understand Just War to be a limiting force. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas understand that any political consideration of war must begin with the realities of man's fallen state and that because of this, man's “profound desire for justice” is difficult for him to realize. A just war must be proportionate and narrow, which can sate both the desire for revenge and the desire for justice. As we mentioned before, it is difficult to gauge actions in the thick of war. Considering the justice of a war will limit unjust acts in the heat of the moment, freeing the combatant from later regret associated with the unjust actions. In St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, he explores four essential questions of Just War and provides three necessities for going to war justly. Thomistic Just War requires that the ruler setting out to war have legitimate sovereignty, that there must be just cause, and that the intent of the combatants be rightful (Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 40, sect. 1). The requirements of both men cut a large swath through many of history's wars, so frequently fought over minor slights and mere property. Christian Just War limits the combatants to the pursuit of good and the destruction of evil, not temporal – and temporary – gains. Just War is not for the pursuit of simple victory but of the tranquilitas ordinis, a peace that would allow people to live as children of God.

With this guidance, we can get to war, but questions continue after the initial decision is made. Aquinas carefully analyzes the questions of clergy participation, the laying of ambushes and fighting on holy days to understand how to transact a just war. In the end, clergy may not participate because it is fundamentally opposed to their service to God. It is, however, acceptable to go to war on holy days, because a just war would be in the service of God and there is a precedent for the meting out of religious punishments on holy days. Perhaps most important however is the approval of ambushes in action but not in speech (Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 40, sect. 2-4). This distinction reveals the heart of Christian Just War Theory – ambushes in deed push the war for just cause forward, but ambushes in speech make the tranquilitas ordinis virtually impossible because the trust and honor upon which it depends cannot exist if the peace was forced through lies. We see here that justice must be considered at every step, not just on the path to war.

Though Augustine and Aquinas so refer to the Christian God in their theories, the bulk of the arguments are based on natural law teaching, and this basis allows Christian Just War Theory to reach well beyond Christianity. Natural law is accessible to all men. Americans understood that there was such a law and based their own government on this knowledge long ago at the country's founding. In this way, the relative youth of the American government and its foundation in natural law make Christian Just War Theory uniquely applicable to our foreign policy. In George Weigel's article Iraq: Then and Now, he explains that the Bush Administration referred often to Just War Theory in the much maligned 2002 National Security Strategy, though the aspect that the media clung to was that of preemption (Weigel, p.39-40). Discussed without a serious consideration of Christian Just War Theory, preemption seems a choice more suited to sandbox squabbles, but in context, we may understand the choice to strike first as a blow against injustice rightly understood.

Weigel also takes aim at the idea of the United Nations as an international authority on just war, successfully attacking the claims to sovereignty often raised by its advocates. One part of our fallen state so willingly embraced by Christian Just War Theorists is our mortality and our inescapable connection to the Earth. This means that our political life is necessarily influenced by our connection to and perceived ownership of our territory and property. Sovereignty originates in this physical politics and the United Nations relies on the gift of power from member nations for the mere illusion of sovereignty. Even the United Nations' Charter understands this reality. As Weigel points out, Article 51 leaves an “'inherent' right of self-defense” to the member states (Weigel, p.37), and if this right remains under the purview of individual nations, then the UN has no sovereign authority – it cedes the valuation of war and justice, ostensibly the most important part of statecraft, to individual nations. Without sovereignty, there can be no just war in the Christian tradition nor in natural law teaching. We must abandon the United Nations as anything more than a tangentially useful center for debate, and not allow it to guide our foreign policy.

Christian Just War Theory and its basis in natural law provides an excellent guide for determining the justice of our wars. “Christianity” has become a strangely loaded term in American political discourse, and people may shy away from something they believe requires them to sign on to theological doctrine. It is the natural law foundation to Just War Theory that makes it accessible to all men, not its Christian structure. The Theory demands that we take justice seriously and adopt a complete and operable vocabulary for the application of justice to war. None of this is to say that Christian theory must be stripped of its theological bent to be accepted by a large population. There are certain themes that are reflected across religions, and even atheists can agree that man is not perfect. This is what Augustine found so important to considerations of just war. He called it a fallen state, but that is his term for a universally understood term. A fallen state means temptation from earthly desires, and this is why we need to take such great care in the contemplation of war. Reinhold Neibuhr points ouf that “Even the most 'Christian' civilization and even the most pious church must be reminded that the true God can be known only were there is some awareness of a contradiction between divine and human purposes, even on the highest level of human aspirations (Neibuhr, The Irony of American History, p. 173).” He goes on to remind us that our enemies' unjust actions come from the same impulses that lead us astray to unjust wars both ius and ad bello. It is considering our actions seriously that can keep us from acting in defiance of natural law, and Christian Just War can help us pay these questions the attention they are due.

It is easy to understand how non-Christians would shy away from embracing Christian Just War Theory, but when we examine the teachings thereof, we see that Christian teachings on just wars are some of the only approaches that make a serious effort towards creating a widely applicable, grounded context for the study of war. Its dual justification through both theological and natural law doctrines increases its accessibility and encourages the student of politics to talk about and rightly consider war. Our impoverished political dialogue cries out for nourishment, for something deeper than punditry. Christian Just War Theory offers us this lacking seriousness, and gives us more to work with than the emotions of the moment. In a time of great unrest and a reinvigoration of theological struggles between the Muslim world and the West, Christian Just War Theory's measured approach only gains in value and appeal.

The Right to Not Bear Arms

There will be a chance to sign a Registry of Conscientious Objectors at Clark University this Friday. I believe this is a national registry, but I am having some trouble establishing that definitively, so for the time being let's just call it a registry and carry on from there. I think the event will be interesting and encourage people to attend even if they don't sign the registry. Peace is a tricky subject and whether or not you feel a worldwide peace is attainable, the topic demands discussion in order for us to shape our personal and national approach to foreign policy.

Conscientious objection is an equally difficult matter. According to the Department of Defense, conscientious objection is "a firm, fixed, and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and/or belief," and is further broken into two classes - Class 1-O objectors, whose beliefs prohibit them from participating in war of any kind, and Class 1-A-O objectors, whose beliefs limit them to non-combatant roles in war. There is a question, however, of whether or not conscientious objection is morally and ethically coherent within its motivation and end result.

Of course, if Christian Just War Theory guided US military actions, conscientious objection would become a moot point; presumably the citizens supporting a military and government guided by these principles would be Christian themselves and thus willing to engage in combat under Just War principles. This is not the case in the United States, and we must adjust our thinking accordingly. We are uncomfortable with the use of religion as a justification for war. It seems that in abandoning this justification we are declaring religion an inadequate basis for combat and perhaps for political life all together. This seems clear enough, but we then allow conscientious objection on the idea that religious conviction supersedes the agreement one makes with his nation to serve in the military.

Is it fair to let religion inform our decisions concerning the state when we are meant to function as a secular society? This question concerns both the motivation for joining and the reasons for leaving the service. The refusal to rely purely on religious motivation for war and the reticence to even discuss publicly the idea of letting Christian Just War Tradition inform our discourse on military action would seem to cast off religious determination all together. If this is so, it seems a radical exception to allow religious objection to military service. Given the secular nature of today's military, I can't help but feel that a recruiter would not be wholly comfortable when confronted with someone who showed up to register for military service saying he or she was directed by God to join the US military. Should there not be similar discomfort when one relies on religion for an exemption?

There is also a question of veracity. The simplest way to handle objections to service developed after contracting with the military is in fact the current policy. We can all relate to certain moments which changed the direction of our lives, and the extremities of combat could certainly supply such moments. However, the conscientious objection policy specifically concerns itself with religious belief. Religion is often understood as an all encompassing subscription to a faith; of course people may come to or change their religion later in life, but that an immediate and complete transformation should occur in the midst of combat after having felt strongly enough about the cause to put one's life knowingly in harm's way seems like it would be an unusual reversal. Why religion above all? Why specify that it must be a religious revelation that can release one from a service contract? It seems that we are less ambivalent towards religion than our larger military policy and disregard for Christian Just War Theory may at first indicate.

Even more complicated are the Class 1-A-O objectors. Is it possible to join a military body and refuse to participate in the stated actions of the military? This class further fractures the religious/political distinctions and allows the objector to exempt himself from the principle reality of military service. Even if one serves as a medic, one would be healing soldiers so that they could go again into battle. In an administrative role, one still facilitates the business of war. If one's objection is to killing or war, then the efforts he exerts in his non-combat job still violate his principles. To simply serve his country, there are numerous options for civil service one could choose, but the Class 1-A-O objector remains in the military. Does this detract from the strength of the religious basis for objection? I think it must; rare is the religion that says direct killing is unforgivable but indirect killing is okay.

The matter of conscientious objection points to large scale confusion between we have different levels of commitment just as we have different kinds of love. There is a certain fear in our public discussion of religion, perhaps because religion relies on unprovable faith. We demand clear definitions of our actions, and sometimes it is not that simple. One feels loyalty to many things in his life and how we vet these loyalties cannot be rigidly defined. The US conscientious objector rules certainly make a game stab at establishing lines dividing religion and politics, but we see that these rules are rife with problems nonetheless.

QED.

My Senior Seminar paper assignment for Prof. Dobski:

Allan Bloom claims in The Closing of the American mind that "Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled....If openness means to 'go with the flow,' it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openeness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes ups aware of what is doubtful in it. True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present."

Please write a paper defending this position using any of the readings that we discussed in the first part of the course to support your case...paper is to be 5 to 6 pages in length.

And Coworker Joe's response:

Openness as Closedness
by Josie Brown

Thing X is Opposite-Of-Thing-X [Orwell,1948]. QED.

Is Twitter the New Case for the Philosopher King?

"And to men like him, I said, when perfected by years and education, and to these only you will entrust the State." Plato, "The Republic"

It seems to me that we are unable to have a conversation about healthcare in this country. Regardless of how you feel about the Obama plan, the dialouge surrounding it is flush with inaccuracies, flat-out lies, hysteria and frantic shouting, very little of which gets to the crux of the matter, that being whether or not the United States government should provide medical care to its citizens. Insurance is not medical care, nor is it a wormhole to medical care; in many instances, high insurance co-pays and premiums discourage people from seeking out medical services, to say nothing of the limitations of insurance and the fact that it is a business, and thus driven to a perpetual aim of cutting waste to lean down its expenses. It doesn't make insurance companies good or evil, it just makes them a business. If we adopt a plan that forces insurance coverage, it's really no change at all. The true discussion should be about whether or not a socialized plan is a good fit for the United States and where to go from there. Instead, we're hearing horror stories about the perceived failings of other nations' systems. First of all, the vast majority of these "the government will come to your grandmother's house with guns on her 85th birthday" claims are simply incorrect, as millions of elderly Britons, Canadians, Japanese, French people and Germans can attest. Even worse, all these hysteronics have sprung up while missing a crucial fact: we don't have to adopt an existing system. There is no Healthcare System Store in the basement of the United Nations. There are good things and bad things about all of these systems, and we have the unique opportunity to observe those systems in action and learn from their successes and failures in the process of building our own healthcare system.

(NB: For the record, I am pro-Socialized healthcare. I think that national healthcare ensures people's ability to pursue happiness and preserve their lives, allows businesses to regain losses from illness and chronic disease, removes the burden of insurance payments from said employers, allows people to pursue the healthcare they need regardless of cost and generally encourages a willingness to seek medical care that can stave off more problematic conditions down the road. Christopher Bird and "Strawberry" have summed up the reasons why far more eloquently than I could without getting too far afield. And before you get on me about Evil Socialism, a little socialism never hurt anyone as long as its parameters are well defined. See for reference: United States police, fire and public school systems. Also, Norway's #2 spot on the Human Development Index. I think what people are actually angry about is the ridiculously small return on investment their current taxes are currently seeing. I do not blame anyone who is pissed about this for a second, but that has nothing to do with the moral decision on national healthcare.)

But instead we are talking about death panels and wait times and all kinds of hugely dramatic "inevitabilities," and it's not just about healthcare. We just got clear of an extremely contentious election season that featured some of the most callous and vicious rhetoric in years. Why is this happening?

In the past few decades, our lives have become increasingly based in mass media and the Internet. Paper media are dying, and "mid-modern" media are splitting themselves obsessively to gain control of niche markets in a desperate attempt to preserve their financial and influential lives. There was once "the six o'clock news," and now we can watch dozens of news channels around the clock, all reporting from a different viewpoint. The new media - blogs, social networking sites, etc. - began their lives as archipelagoes and have only continued to split as their popularity rises. I could begin reading nothing but hyperliberal tripe this very moment and still have enough information that I could convince myself I was well and accurately informed about international and domestic policies. I could do the same with neo-con blather. I would be incorrect in either case, but I could do it. We have increasingly moved into a self-centered, self-selected reality and while variety is indeed the spice of life, how good an idea this is in the current context raises several serious questions.

Strangely, I believe that the desire to see news and information relayed in "our" preferred manner stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of political life. Not everything is necessarily liberal or conservative and even if something is of one stripe or the other, it may be passively so, the political leanings being wholly irrelevant to the thing itself. Moreover, our own weltanschaaung limits our understanding of political significance - what is daringly liberal in Tehran would hardly merited a batted eyelash from American conservatives. American media force active political context on every report and this leads us to similar thinking in our every day lives. Fox News, CNN, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, MSNBC...all of them spin all day long, and this perpetual state of abstract politics trains us all to think in these terms at all times and constantly try and pigeonhole all the events we observe or hear about into the same tightly and inaccurately defined terms. The "Liberal" and "Conservative" of today's media have little to do with classical liberal and conservative thought, but the usurpation of the terms have made it nearly impossible to discuss these classical politics without wild diversion.

The Internet, in particular, affords us extraordinary access into each others' lives and into the worldviews of those around us, but it is also singularly isolating. Every day, the number of people getting their news of the world from the Internet increases. On the Internet, the ability to pick and choose our sources and biases increases exponentially, and so does our ability to create our own images. If a person completely immerses himself in an environment of his own choosing, he lacks any shared context whence a viable debate can begin with another person from a different environment. How then can we discuss the challenges of our time...of any scope and scale? If my cocoon of information tells me dyeing my hair blonde is inherently bad and someone else has been told that dyeing hair blond is inherently good, there is no acknowledged gray area and a true debate cannot unfold. Hair dye is minor in the grand scheme of things; what havoc is loosed upon our discourse when the same concept is applied to say, healthcare?

The problems of the Internet as information source are compounded by its univeral volume. I'm sure almost everyone has declared that "Google can find anything" in some way, shape or form, and the problem is that this is true. There is a certain attitude that says any source is a good source - hello, Wikipedia - and this has permeated our lives more than we may realize. You can find something to back up any viewpoint on the Internet and people are increasingly willing to abandon the vetting of sources for the sake of shouting down opponents. The Internet also removes the reflexive politeness that accompanies face-to-face interaction, leaving us with little in the way of civility and a reckless approach to argument selection. Jason Calacanis explained a certain phenomenon he called "Internet Asperger's Syndrome" in a fascinating article here, and much of it rings true to me. People with Asperger's Syndrome traditionally have trouble identifying non-verbal cues from other people, including facial expressions, tone of voice, etc...all things that are removed from human interaction via the Internet. Those with Asperger's frequently have trouble with empathy, and you only need to check out the comments section on any newspaper's website to see the same effect online. We can be whoever we want to be online, but it may be at the expense of our ability to interact with other humans offline.

It is important to note that as so many of us pour our lives into the Internet, we risk abdication of our physical rights and powers. Many of those so invested have begun to equate online action with real world action. Nowhere is this more evident than in the various do-gooder applications on Facebook. I receive about five to ten invitations per week to join certain causes. I know that joining these makes certain types of people feel as though they have Done Something, but the opposite could not be more true. This is actually very similar to my problems with "legal" protests and protestors who do not follow up their appearances at rallies with letters to every representative they have. A "protest" for which permits have been pulled is not civil disobedience, it's a block party. If you don't write your representatives, you are just one face in a relatively well-behaved crowd. You must stand and be counted to make a difference, and clicking a button on your computer doesn't qualify, nor does showing up at an anti-war themed street fair. Decisionmakers will simply not be swayed by online petitions or neutered demonstrations. You have to make physical contact - a letter, a call, a meeting - and persist, on a personal level, for your voice to be heard. No wonder people feel betrayed by the government; the government and the polity behind it are free to do as they please while discounting the wishes of their constituents. If you knew the most opposition you would face would be People Being Angry On The Internet, would you care?

As we all shift into web-based lives, we move into the realm of pure theory and must begin relying on ethereal information to construct our understanding of the world. This is far more revolutionary than we give it credit for. We have all met people who we knew couldn't hack it in college and went anyway; he probably had something he excelled at, too, but going to college was what you did, so he went and did horribly. All paths are not made for all people. This new theoretical and customizable world is unlikely to fit everyone in much the same way. Some people simply do not care or do not know to vet their information and dig deeper beneath the headlines. Yet these people can begin a blog just as easily as I can and can tweet just as easily and I can, and their opinions will hold exactly the same weight. When paired with a decreasing regard for correct use of language, this creates an amorphous blob of competing words, all of equal weight and equal impact. Who should sort out all these conflicting views? Should anyone?

If we give ourselves completely over to the realm of the theoretical, some leading faction must inevitably rise to the top as a guiding influence. Humans naturally seek stability, so even if we take a brief plunge into what one could term informational anarchy, the odds are that we would see some modern form of the Social Contract emerge. It's hard to say how far the pervasiveness of the Internet would have to go before this could happen, or what form it would take. Most of the classical philosophers agree that in one way or the other, a leadership class will emerge. The nature of this class is always subject to both debate and context, but as we progress further into this ethereal state, the case for Plato's Philosopher King seems to rise anew. The dialogue in which this Philosopher King is discussed enumerates a variety of traits and qualities that such an individual must possess. It is understood that each human must pursue their own abilities to their greatest possible fulfillment; for the Philosopher Kings this means ruling the State with their increased faculty for superior perception of truth, justice and beauty, and for the Guardians of Plato's Republic, this means physical protection of these Kings and those they govern. Ultimately, all of us in these online worlds are seeking some form of truth; should not a Philosopher King emerge to guide us towards the ultimate truth, and pull us from the petty concerns with superficial and insignificant "truths" that are merely in the service of our own earthly desires? It is interesting to think that amidst a deconstruction of a centuries-old social order based on human-to-human interaction, the greatest opportunity for the rise of a true Philosopher King may emerge.

I'm not sure if an encroaching online reality demands a Philosopher King, nor if I or anyone else would want such a figure to emerge, but it's an interesting concept to ponder. Much ink has been spilled over the Internet's death sentence for true social interaction but if indeed our lives are to go all the way online and lead to the emergence of such a leader, could we not be on the verge of a chance to go back to the beginnings of society and determine the new face and course of our world? Neither idea is inherently positive or negative, but it is all worth thinking about.

How Not To Study

Dear Guy Sitting in Charlie's Laughing His Ass Off at Some Movie Amidst People Doing Nothign but Studying, Who Has a Star Wars Ringtone and Yesterday Explained to Our Study Group that One of the Problems with British Civic Nationalism Was that "They Keep Invading My Country,"

Stop that.

Cheers,

Josie

Cannonball Read #28: Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger

I recently was introduced to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, who is enjoying a somewhat surprising renaissance, given the long, slow drift towards secularism in the West and the general decay of diplomacy. Niebuhr was a truly fascinating individual, able to blend spirituality and secularism in a way that flattered and accentuated both. I could go on for quite some time here, but will instead advise you to pick up a copy of The Irony of American History and draw your own conclusions. Soon afterward, I was presented with an article from Liam Julien about President Obama's affinity for Niebuhr, which I was to write a 600 word reflection on. Not even the START of being enough to hit everything in that article. I had to forego a couple more complex reactions for the sake of brevity, but one of these discarded topics is a source of constant concern to me, and I think it bears discussion.

*DISCLAIMER: I think Julien's clear bias against Obama interferes with his ability to successfully analyze the situation. It doesn't make his article useless, but I think it makes it weaker. I find that there's a huge problem with commentators voicing dissent with the implication that all liberals/progressives developed their views after some kind of concussion-based accident. To think that anyone who has achieved national office without considering and then shaping their views through serious thought is simply ignorant.*

In the opening paragraphs of Julien's article, he appears to take issue with Obama's declaring certain Republican ideas "dumb." Despite this criticism, Julien later quotes some editorialists in defense of his argument that Obama doesn't quite "get" Niebuhr as calling a certain type of pacifism "dumb" (To be fair, that brand of pacifism is kind of dumb). This might seem like pretty standard juvenile language choice, but I find real cause for concern here. Shouldn't our level of discourse be just a sconch higher than one might find on an elementary school playground? As we have seen since the American Founding, our own domestic policy is immensely difficult to parse out, much less decisions about how to form and enact our foreign policy. Can we ever hope to achieve either objective if our vocabulary is reduced to calling things "dumb"?

As I mentioned before, I have a huge problem with anyone hoping to offer up some objective commentary on the state of American politics assuming that any kind of political philosophy was developed during some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure. Even the wackiest political opinions that make it to the national level are well-considered...perhaps not based on good information, perhaps not in accord with one's own logic, but considered. The difference in approach is manifested in the level of respect afforded to one's political opponents. If you begin a conversation with the presumption that your co-conversant is an idiot, your conversation is over. It's as simple as that. You can disagree, you can talk for years without being convinced, but if you do not appreciate that these ideas don't come from thin air, respect is abandoned and so is the possibility for productive discussion. Kim Jong Il is clearly a nut - we could all riff on this theme for ages - but that doesn't negate the fact that a) he believes what he says, b) he's heavily armed and c) he has transformed the Korean state into his own political tool. We can think he's nuts all we want, but if we can't understand these basic realities, we cannot hope to get him to knock it off with the nukes already.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I worry that diplomacy is dying. One of my biggest complaints with the Iraqi War is not necessarily that we went at all, but rather that the Bush Administration repeatedly said they'd tried that whole diplomacy thing and it didn't work, when in fact the diplomatic offices of the Executive were largely limited in their engagement. Please note - I don't think that diplomacy would have worked with Saddam Hussein, no matter how long we tried. But to SAY that you have been working your diplomatic fingers to the bone when diplomatic measures were abandoned or limited early on tells the world something important about your foreign policy, particularly in the context of the Iraqi War. In this case, it says "we're going to ask you a couple times to do what we say, and then if you don't do it, we're just going to smash you. No negotiation." You might agree that smashing was necessary, but the problem is that it's not just our allies who receive these tacit messages - our enemies do as well, and they may take it as a hint to dispense with formalities and just go with a preemptive strike if negotiation is off the table. There is more nuance and care required for successful diplomacy, and I fear that the patience and consideration required for it is slowly dying off as the business culture increasingly influences our political culture.

Now, one person who has and had this stuff on lockdown is Henry Kissinger. (Side note: Kissinger does not appear to have any plans to die, which I enjoy immensely. I think he has the Philosopher's Stone.) First of all, his book is beautifully written - it's a beast and quite possibly gave me carpal tunnel, but may I say? Worth it. - and that alone sheds light on one of the sources of his success. He is incredibly eloquent. You would be hard pressed to find someone with more diplomatic experience than Kissinger, but the real key is his clear study of history and politics, which ranges far beyond his own personal involvement. This is how true diplomacy should be, if we are to resolve the greatest issues of our time - studied, informed and well-considered. Kissinger takes you through Rooseveltian and Wilsonian world views all the way to the Cold War, but this is also much, much more than a history book. Kissinger manages to make political theory not only understandable, but vibrant and relevant. I have heard so many people complain that political theory is too obtuse and that it's outdated and irrelevant, but Kissinger illustrates brilliantly the many ways in which the politics of yesterday continue to influence and shape our political life.

I know it's 800+ pages, I know you think you don't really care that much about history, or diplomacy, EW, but I really encourage you to do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this (carefully). I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

836 pages