Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice
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| The Private Intellectual Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice |
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Sunday, June 07, 2009 Cairo As is often the case, I agree with Larison's analysis of Obama's speech but not with his pessimistic conclusions: What critics such as Frum keep missing, much as many others missed it during Obama’s time at the Trinidad Summit of the Americas, is that Obama is making it much more difficult for other nations to oppose the United States without marginalizing themselves internationally. With respect to the Cairo speech, it does not legitimize or empower fanatics to acknowledge concerns that they have traditionally exploited to their advantage. On the contrary, acknowledging these concerns deprives the fanatics of their monopoly on paying attention and defining the appropriate responses to these concerns. Better still, acknowledging a past event, such as the U.S. role in ousting Mossadegh, steals the power from those who have made use of a real grievance for their own ends. More than this, though, simple acknowledgment of past error allows for a delay and deferral of any substantive change in present-day policy. Ironically, the more unequal the comparison between U.S. actions and those with which Obama compared them, the less substantive change in present policy there will be. Mild displays of humility make real concessions less urgent, and it makes it more likely that they can be avoided entirely. Since I'm invested, anti-imperial idealism notwithstanding, in the preservation of America's position in the world, I'm inclined to see Obama's rhetorical embrace of even-handedness and humility as a feature rather than a bug. One of the many problems with being a hegemonic power is that you can only survive if you at least attempt to understand and acknowledge the experiences and perspectives of the hinterlands, while at the same time living under an ideology that hysterically tries to exclude any such understanding and acknowledgment. Obama has, in Trinidad and in Cairo, gone after some very low-hanging fruit in the international arena; mere words can do a whole lot, at this low point, to raise our standing in the world. After these days pass and humble words have to be backed with difficult policy choices, things will get much harder, and I hope Larison and others will give Obama the chance to do, at least, a good deal better than his immediate predecessor when those times come. The settlement impasse in Israel is a good early test, and so far Obama has performed better than many such people feared. The fact that such modest moves on Obama's part have been met with such extreme criticism suggests a unified field theory of conservative thought on these issues. The American elite, cossetted in race, gender, and imperial privilege, has confused its parochial viewpoint with a universal one. Anyone, be it a billion Muslims or a Latina judge from New York, who approaches life in the world with a critical perspective is inevitably bombarded with derision and dismissiveness from the aristocratic pride of our nattering nabobs of nationalism. And this only serves to obscure the fact that some of these targets are in fact quite moderate in their critique. Obama's speech in Cairo was intended to preserve our position in the world, just as a Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court helps to legitimate and strengthen American society much as it is. Moreover, I'm just kind of baffled at comments like David Frum's (not to mention the whole clown car full of Sotomayor critics). I'm glad my PC-obsessed multicultural high school got me to read books like Song of Solomon. It introduced me to a perspective on the world--the world I inhabit, after all--that I could not have gained from my own experience or the writing of people who share a similar place in the world to mine. If you look at that sort of thing as an assault on the values of your tribe, which you've confused for eternal values, you have no hope of navigating the world. It's like merely acknowledging, as our news media almost never does, that we had a role in overthrowing Mossadegh and that our relations with Iran are inevitably colored by that event. Without it, Iran's politics with respect to the U.S. looks to be mere stupid prejudice, and while there's probably enough of that (as there is towards Iran, heir of a great civilization, in our own politics), it can't begin to explain our problems in the region. posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:20 PM
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