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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Monday, 20 September 2004

Topic: The Culture

The Work Ethic: Is the route to sanity to do as little as possible in your job while saving yourself for your real life outside the workplace?

A few years ago, after a second bottle of dry red Tuscan wine, or perhaps a third, with my conservative friend and his wife, we fell into a discussion of the American work ethic, and the way the French seemed to approach work. There is a difference. This was after my fourth trip to France, and he and his wife had just returned from one of their trips to Tuscany.

I recall we discussed the idea of whether one worked to live, or lived to work - and that seems to be the basic disconnect. He said the French just don't take work seriously. They define themselves by their personal lives, not their careers. This was irresponsible.

So he was going on about how the six to eight week summer vacations and the thirty-five hour workweek made France an economic loser. I countered with something about the French doing well with some things - how the Falcon jet built by Dassault in Toulouse had the major share of the executive jet market (our Coast Guard alone has forty of them) and how Vivendi had managed to buy up Universal Studios and their theme parks and music businesses (oops - that didn't work out) and so on and so forth. He wasn't buying it.

He said look at their productivity. I countered with the odd fact that on a unit-of-value-per-hour-worked basis the French workers' productivity far outstrips that of Americans.

He countered with the idea that they have to be productive each hour because they start work at ten in the morning, take two-hour lunches, and have innumerable three-day and four-day weekends all year round. And he added, as he is the CEO of a thriving software company, if someone applied for a job with him and asked about vacation benefits, well, that applicant would never be hired - as that was a sign that applicant didn't take work seriously, and had no ambition.

I seem to recall that when I worked at Hughes Aircraft in the eighties and nineties - later Hughes Electronics, then Hughes-Raytheon, then a new part of General Motors, then DirecTV after shedding Raytheon, then sold by GM and now part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation - the fellow who ran the communications lab (satellite payloads and top secret communications gizmos) was famous because in twenty years he had never taken one day of vacation, ever. By California state law we had to pay him a big chunk of change for that. My conservative friend was impressed - this was the kind of hard worker and ambitious go-getter that made America great. (The fellow was Japanese, by the way.) I was appalled.

So we didn't agree. I asked what was so damned good about productivity? He looked at me like I was from another planet. And we had even more wine and let it pass.

That all came back to me last week when I came across an item in the International Herald Tribune and my friends on line started discussing it.

Meanwhile: Workers of the world, unite and don't work!
Michael Johnson - The International Herald Tribune - Friday, September 17, 2004

First of all, know that Michael Johnson is the author of "French Resistance: The individual vs. the Company in French Corporate Life." And he opens with this -
A few years ago I co-authored a book called "Workaholism: Getting a Life in the Killing Fields of Work." It sank like a stone. Maybe the title was too clunky.

More likely, my timing was off. Both Europe and the United States were living through a mild spasm of anti-work rhetoric in the 1990s, but it was nothing like what is happening today in France and Britain. This new wave goes far beyond downshifting and life balance.

Two best sellers reflect this tune-out culture: Corine Maier's "Bonjour Paresse" in France and Tom Hodgkinson's "How to Be Idle" in Britain. Both authors advise that the route to sanity is to do as little as possible in your job while saving yourself for your real life outside the workplace.
So, in essence, this is a book review with personal anecdotes.

Johnson, who has been a manager in both the UK and France, says that when he arrived in London he was told that "one must not be seen to be striving." And he says that in France, "dodging work and responsibility in my company was an art."

Johnson too says the key difference between Americans and the Brits and the French is that there the work ethic is that work life and private life are separate, and friendships tend to be unrelated to professional life.

But here's the real key -
In the French publishing firm where I worked, employees simply did not buy the argument that their work might be inherently worthwhile and essential to the success of the firm, the source of their sustenance. They resented the fact that shareholders took home unearned income from their daily work.

This disconnect creates a standoff between leaders and the led.
As well it might.

Johnson notes that French workers demand precise job descriptions so that management cannot take advantage of their energies. And that means "initiative and extra hours are out of the question." And he quotes a fellow who worked for him in France saying - "We want you to tell us exactly what you want us to do, and we'll do it if we feel like it."

Well, that makes a manager's job a bit harder.

Corine Maier's "Bonjour Paresse" is mentioned in little detail, although he notes she is "a chipper professional economist with a disarming subversive streak." The book is intended to help you "use your company instead of letting yourself be used by it." And the books does refer to recent polls that indicate only three percent of the French are willing to give themselves to their work whereas seventeen percent are "actively disengaged" - their attitudes are so unconstructive as to "approach sabotage."

Maybe my conservative friend was right. And too, Maier is scheduled for a disciplinary hearing at her job later this month. Perhaps she should not have written this book.

But the bulk of Johnson's item is dedicated to the UK, where "Margaret Thatcher's self-help culture has eroded since her departure from public life, allowing the old slacker malaise to creep back into daily life."

Johnson covers the nascent "chav scum" movement - the Kevs, steeks, spides, ratboys, skangers, stigs or scallies. The workers who don't give a damn.

Read it. It's quite funny.

And Johnson says we are safe over here -
On a recent visit to the United States I watched for signs of erosion of the bootstrap culture Americans have always been proud of. I browsed the shelves at Harvard's Coop bookstore, finding nothing at all on downshifting. Finally I asked the manager where he was hiding these books. "Can't help you," he said. "We're mostly about upshifting here."
We are? Well, a bit of this was discussed previously here.

But what about our president, the top American?

Rick, The News Guy in Atlanta, muses about that -
Geez, reading about all these French and British slackers gives me pause to worry about the state of the world! In our country, folks with no sense of responsibility and who don't believe in showing up for work, at best, all tend to end up voting Republican, but at worst, are elected President!
Why, then George Bush, by this reasoning, what with the long vacations and inattention to anything like hard work or the silly details of the job, and his life-long history of goofing off and avoiding real work, would be, well, sort of... French? What a concept!

Don't tell anyone.

Nico in Montr?al, the most French of cities in North America, says the American work ethic is an anomaly, and even the Canadians doesn't quite get it -
Lots going on in this article, but the work ethic Johnson talks about an American phenomena.

It is the willingness of many young Americans to do what it takes, and go where they need to be, to have their career. People are constantly on the move across the country. This shows they are keen and, probably secondly, know no one in the city they live in, or rather, near.

A further point is that for every unemployed worker in the US, there are probably two over-worked ones, willingly participating to sacrifice their private lives for productivity gains for companies that would just as soon cast them out than go over budget on toilet-paper.

Most of my American (and even Canadian) friends think it odd that I would choose where to live, then figure out a career or just get a job. Having been "right-sized" a couple times myself, I have stopped trying to include work-mates into my private life. As long as I still live and work in the same city my professional circles are still there and growing with each new job. They are held together by the odd email chain, cinq-a-sept, or run-in's on the street.

At the end of the day, the question is why this "corporate idealism" when most know that American business is more than ruthless when it comes to 'right-sizing' and casting off devoted workers who make the workplace the center of their worlds.
I too have been "right-sized" a few times. One takes care of oneself. Making your job the center of your world? That way lies madness. I agree with Nico.

And the people who have worked for me - and I was a senior systems manager - have become my friends, but always after they left or I left the job. Work is work. Life is life.

Rick, The News Guy in Atlanta, has a response to Nico -
I have no problem with picking a place to live first, then picking a job. Cool enough! Hell, that's what I've been urging Alan to do for years. Then again, I suppose it'd be hard to move to Paris without a work permit, then find some job that suits you.

But the idea of getting hired to work for a company, then trying to get away with working as little as you can, sounds not only like it takes way too much effort, but also insures you'll spend the whole day staring at the clock and wishing you were somewhere else.

And also, the idea of working in an environment in which all your co-workers frown on you if you are "seen to be striving" sounds too much like spending an eternity in hell, turning big rocks into little ones. God help you if you'd actually want to work your way up into management.

And to live in a whole country where this passes for a "work ethic"? How could it avoid having shoddy goods and services? No wonder we see so many things here that were made in China, and very few made in Britain or France. When I first moved to St. Croix [US Virgin Islands], I thought I would like this whole concept of "island time" and the relaxed attitude toward work, but that was before I had to stand a whole two hours or so in line one day (with only one other person in front of me) to get a driver's license.

The truth is, although I'm definitely no flag waver and don't know if the United States is (as all those bean-dip-for-brains conservatives brag) "the greatest country on Earth," I keep getting reminded that, in spite of all its problems, I'd really rather live here than anywhere else.
Well, I'm the Alan that Rick mentions, and I know getting a carte de sejour to work in Paris isn't likely - and Hollywood really is pretty fine.

And in two weeks I start work for an HMO - with the task to expand a department and staff it up, to build a nationwide claims processing suite of applications. And I hope it is not "too much like spending an eternity in hell, turning big rocks into little ones." And I will be in management. I think the idea is to do a fine job, and help others do a fine job, but not take it too seriously, as work is not all of life.

But that aim - doing well but knowing there is more to life - goes against the grain of life here in the United States. Should I stumble there are a thousand, and maybe many thousand well qualified others waiting to take my place, unemployed and unhappy, and more than willing to sacrifice family and health and all spare time to the organization. It is well to remember them.

They may be foolish, given what they can realistically expect in return - mostly nothing. What one gets for disregarding one's family and undermining one's health must come from within - a sense of worth based on career and title and, in my trade, elegant, flawless software. Hey, if that is what defines your worth in this world, well, that is your choice.

But there are other criteria for defining your worth in this world, to yourself.

And as for whether the French or the Americans are using the "right" criteria is an interesting question, but finally personal. Rick is right to point out the limitations of what he calls "island time" - that laid back vaguely French way of living life in the moment and savoring friends and family, but getting nothing much done. And Nico is right to point out the empty shallowness of giving your all-too-short life over to a corporate career, for a handful of dust, and, more often than not these days, a pink slip.

Perhaps the answer is to be a CEO like my conservative friend. From the top the choices are easier. But I do know some petty burnt out CEO's who endlessly think of chucking it all. I know one in San Diego who buys a lottery ticket for each drawing so she can, maybe, one day, sell the company and get some sleep. Maybe being on top isn't always the answer.

So I dream of Paris - I lived with Rick's family in the Virgin Islands for three or four months and I'm over that particular dream - but you make the compromises. You do your best.

__

Reactions -

From Joseph, who used to do film stuff here in Hollywood but now lives in France...
Two items:

Despite the impression pandered in the US media, France is not working toward becoming more socialist; quite the opposite. Sure maybe thirty years ago, but it's been running the other way for quite a while.

I submit an exhibit: Recently, the French government sold a large portion of it's holdings in France Telecom, thereby relinquishing majority control. Quelle dommage. It seems they sold about a sixth of their sixty Billion stake. More is apparently sure to follow. This made me wonder what the complete portfolio of the republique came to, and particularly in relation to the current fiscal deficit. Perhaps Ric Erickson [see MetropoleParis] has a figure at his fingertips, but I invented a figure of about 350 billion euros. If the holdings are in this range, that seems a significant kitty in comparison to the budget deficit. This is the interesting part. While the US has to go even deeper in to debt to meet it's obligations in the future, France may merely have to sell the family silver to cover the shortfall imposed by the looming demographic catastrophe. This one's a no-brainer. Guess which country is going to have the greater tax burden in twenty years time?

Alan, you may want to look for an article from the IHT about eight weeks ago, FP/ATF, about why Europe doesn't have to compete with the US, and why taking so much vacation time is logical; leisure is a luxury good, and as people become more wealthy, the consume more of it. Adam Smith would have approved. Everyone seems to understand this except Americans, who seemingly can never get enough of anything, so long as it's tangible.

By the way, whenever Americans want to pick on Europe for it's "socialist policies", long vacations and generous welfare state, why is the devil always France (Rick has already guessed, no doubt - it's the enemy within) when GERMANY, (ya die vaderland, suck it up, German-Americans) is a better example of this by almost any objective measure.
The IHT item? That would be the International Herald Tribune, the Paris daily essentially run by the New York Times, and the item Joseph refers to, I believe, is this:

Work and leisure in Europe
[ no byline ] - The International Herald Tribune - Friday, August 20, 2004

The opening -
Those vacation-loving Europeans are not pulling their weight in the effort to reignite global economic growth, Americans often grumble, and the International Monetary Fund seemed to agree in a report issued earlier this month. By calling on Europeans to jump-start their economy by working more, it intensified the trans-Atlantic debate over the increasing divergence in work patterns. As their society has become wealthier, Europeans are working less, while Americans are working more.

The longstanding debate over whether Europeans are too easygoing or whether Americans work so hard they miss out on enjoying the fruit of their prosperity - more leisure time - is an interesting one...
Yes, but the author asserts the real issue the IMF is raising is persistent high unemployment in western Europe, and the odd work rules that make that inevitable.

Key paragraphs:
The answer for Europe, in other words, is not necessarily to turn its back on its own culture's balancing of economic productivity and leisure. Americans, as a rule, may derive more satisfaction from working longer hours, though recent social research suggests that one of the reasons Americans work almost one-fifth more hours than Europeans do is a fear that if they don't, someone else will take their job. Surveys show that Americans would prefer to work less and have more time to enjoy leisure and family.

... Europe's problem is not that its workers work too little, but that the system that protects them also makes sure that the unemployed stay that way. High minimum wages, high payroll taxes and laws that make it excessively hard to dismiss workers discourage hiring, and the people who lose out are usually those who weren't around when the rules were written, such as the young, immigrants and mothers returning to the workforce.

... As for the question of working hours, the answer may be simply to give people more choice - to let them find their own balance of work and leisure, now or later - but give them more responsibility for funding their retirement years.
You get the idea.

Rick, The News Guy in Atlanta, does respond to Joseph, of course -
Joe, nicely put.

I think I agree with everything you said, including that "vacation time being a luxury worth living for" stuff, but especially the wisdom of a nation holding a portfolio in reserve to hedge against budget deficits that might come back to bite the country in its collective ass sometime down the road. Perish forbid a U.S. president should look to France - or any other country, for that matter - for better ideas on doing anything, but I have a feeling that a hypothetical President Kerry would do just that, once past the election and emboldened enough not to fear being caught speaking French in public.

Still, I should clarify something you probably already knew, that I wasn't attacking France for its (maybe imagined) "socialist" ways; in fact, I only used France and Britain as examples because those were the two countries addressed in the article I was responding to. In fact, not so much France, but what the guy said about working in England -- and even post-Thatcher, non-"socialist" England -- is something I myself have heard often from some of my friends who live there.

All I meant to say was, although I have little problem with grunts who do their work and get paid for it and go home at the end of the day, I just wouldn't want to work in an environment where there was peer pressure to slack off. I myself would prefer working in an environment where there's freedom to enjoy what I do for a living.
Along with the hypothetical President Kerry, then, we now have this hypothetical workplace full of folks who enjoy their work and still have a life outside the workplace.

Such places are few, and far between.

When I worked for Perot Systems one of their mantras was that at Perot Systems all folks loved their work, and got up each and every day eager to get to the office and do more of it. And Perot Systems made sounds about the importance of vacation - that you had to take your vacation as earned, so you didn't neglect your family and yourself in your enthusiasm. That was the Perot way. But H. Ross Perot got old and retired, and turned the company over to his son, who saw just how cutthroat the economy was becoming. Something shifted. My regional position was eliminated, along with two others, for one manager directing work of forty people in three states remotely from Phoenix - and I was given a project to manage - then was laid off as the overhead was high and the customer wasn't paying Perot enough for all the work. Fifty of us left in the first wave of that - all projects abandoned - and then another fifty got their pink slips a few months later as maintenance service to the customer was cut to the bare contractual minimum. Perot then trained me on HMO billing systems and assigned me to manage an implantation of this software here - and the client suddenly canceled the contract and sixty of us were left with nothing to do. The only thing left? A high priority contract in Boston - and that meant full-time travel, sixty-hour weeks, living out of a suitcase in a hotel on Tremont, and getting home for a day and a half every third weekend. So being somewhat France in my attitude toward work, I resigned. The cost to my own life was far too high at that point. I suppose I wasn't dedicated - and wasn't committed to the career and to success. Or I wasn't buying into the new Perot Systems definition of success.

Shame on me? I made my choice. No regrets.

And perhaps in two weeks I will be working in the sort of environment the now elderly and frail H. Ross Perot once envisioned. We shall see.

Posted by Alan at 22:13 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 21 September 2004 11:38 PDT home

Sunday, 19 September 2004

Topic: For policy wonks...

A Nation of Victims: The moral basis for redress, retaliation and even revenge in order to right any given wrong - real or imagined

Now and then I mention my conservative friend who argues that FDR is the man most responsible ruining America, for turning us into a nation of victims - actually a nation of people who believe they are victims - who believe the world owes them something, when it doesn't. The evil stared with the Social Security programs in the thirties and continues today with all forms of welfare, unemployment compensation, worker compensation, wage and labor laws, workplace safety laws, and the whole concept of product liability, or any restrictive regulation of industry. Add government-funded healthcare of any kind, and all the environmental laws that hobble heavy industry. Each of these - and all of these, cumulatively - makes people believe they need not take "personal responsibility" for their lives, that the world owes them something. This putative social safety net has turned us into a nation of whiners, not doers.

The self-made man, who creates success, pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, and asks nothing of anyone, but on his own initiative builds wealth and capital and thus makes the world better, is fast disappearing. And the few self-made men who built the industries that makes all our lives better, and built them with no one's help, should they become wealthy, have what they earned on their own taken away from them in taxes to pay for those who get a free ride, or who have the government pay for their cushy retirement, or pay them when they are injured at work or maimed by a defective product. It's not fair. These freeloaders should take responsibility for their lives, and do something with them. They're just whiners.

I'm sure you've heard the argument. And it's not just my friend, or the readers of the late Ayn Rand. George Bush grew up believing this. As someone who knew him as a young man says -
At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism." ...
Bush has softened his words over the years, but the concepts stay with him, as he runs our government for us on these principles.

This is the core disagreement between those now in power, the conservative right, and those now seeking power, the liberal progressives. Is there a social contract, and does it involve the government in any way?

The odd thing is how this "playing the victim is irresponsible" idea is playing out now with the war.

What?

Yes, and here is an analysis that is worth reading in full.

A hierarchy of suffering
Since 9/11, America has used its victimhood to demand a monopoly on the right to feel and to inflict pain
Gary Younge, The Guardian (UK), Monday September 20, 2004

The key points, should you not use the link?

After an introduction specific to his UK readers, Younge gets down to the real issue - (my emphases throughout, and his British spelling) -
Victimhood is a powerful, yet contradictory, force. Powerful because, once claimed, it can provide the moral basis for redress, retaliation and even revenge in order to right any given wrong - real or imagined. The defence of everything from the death penalty to affirmative action, Serbian nationalism to equality legislation, are all underpinned, to some degree, by the notion of victimhood. Contradictory because, in order to harness that power, one must first admit weakness. Victims, by their very nature, have less power than their persecutors: victimhood is a passive state - the result of bad things happening to people who are unable to prevent it.

In the past, the right has exploited this tension to render victimhood a dirty word - a label synonymous with whingers, whiners, failures and fantasists. Revealing no empathy with the powerless nor any grasp of historical context, they wilfully ignore the potential for victimhood to morph into resistance, preferring instead to lampoon it as a loser's charter.

"The left had become little more than a meeting place for balkanised groups of discontents, all bent on extracting their quota of public shame and their slice of the entitlement pie," wrote columnist Norah Vincent three years ago. "All of them blaming their personal failures on their race, their sex, their sexual orientation, their disability, their socioeconomic status and a million other things."
Younge the argues that such arguments were always flawed, and now they are beginning to look "downright farcical." Why? Because the right has now decided to play the victim, and whine.

He notes some UK examples, then adds this -
... Across the Atlantic, the right's new role as victims is even more prevalent and pronounced. Straight relationships are threatened by the prospect of gay marriage, white workers are threatened by affirmative action, American workers are threatened by third world labourers, America is threatened by everybody.

At times, this means the powerful appropriating the icons, tropes and rhetoric of the powerless in their entirety, to hilarious - if disturbing - effect. Last year Roy Moore, the former Republican chief justice of Alabama, led a failed bid to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. Standing before a group of supporters, some of whom were waving Confederate flags, emblem of the slave-holding South, he said: "If the 'rule of law' means to do everything a judge tells you to do, we would still have slavery in this country." Wearing T-shirts proclaiming "Islam is a lie, homosexuality is a sin, abortion is murder", they then sang We Shall Overcome.

In these cases, victimhood serves merely as a pretext for a backlash to reassert, extend or expand the dominance of the powerful. If these people are victims of anything, it is of the threat to their entitlement and privilege.
Well, it's hard being a fundamentalist straight Christian these days. Everyone is always picking on you. Whine, whine, whine....

Younge does point out though that genuine suffering often acts as a precursor to genuine vindictiveness, and explains this is terms of what is going on with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict these last few years. Everyone is a victim. All is justified. Really?

But he saves his real scorn for his cousins across the pond.
But nowhere is the abuse of victimhood more blatant than in the US presidential election, where September 11 remains the central plank of the Republicans' strategy for re-election. The fact that their campaign begins with the terror attacks is not only understandable but also, arguably, right - this is the most significant thing to happen in the US since Bush assumed office.

The trouble is that the campaign's message ends with that day also. September 11 has served not as a starting point from which to better understand the world but as an excuse not to understand it at all. It is a reference point that brooks no argument and needs no logic. No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud?" No United Nations authority? "We will never again wait for permission to defend our country." No link between Saddam and al-Qaida? "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time."

This is the real link between Iraq and 9/11 - the rhetorical dissembling that renders victimhood not a point from which they might identify with and connect to the rest of humanity but a means to turn their back on humanity. They portray America's pain as a result of 9/11 not only as unique in its expression but also superior in its intensity.
Well, we are superior - put on this earth by God to spread (enforce) our flavor of democracy and our form of privatized, deregulated capitalism all over the earth, for everyone's good. George Bush actually says that, repeatedly - freedom is God's gift to the world, and we're doing His work.

And people just don't get it, and keep killing our guys in their streets. It's just not right.

I guess the Bush policy argument is no one has ever been wronged as we have been wronged, so we are now free to do what want. So join us, or get of the way, or die. What the argument lacks in subtle and sense, it gains in force and nobility. (Note: That would be the nobility of suffering. It's a Jesus/martyr thing.)

As my late father used to say when amused and exasperated - What is this happy horseshit?

Younge is more detailed than my late father, if less direct -
When 3,000 people died on September 11, Le Monde declared: "We are all Americans now." Around 12,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war, yet one waits in vain for anyone to declare that we have all become Iraqis, or Afghans, let alone Palestinians. This is not a competition. Sadly, there are enough victims to go around. Sadder still, if the US continues on its present path, there will be many more. Demanding a monopoly on the right to feel and to inflict pain simply inverts victimhood's regular contradiction - the Bush administration displays material strength and moral weakness.
Yeah? But we're special.

Yeah, right. And you know, I'm becoming more like my father every day.

__

Note:

You might want to click on a companion piece on the Guardian opinion page....

Democracy: our cause, Iraq's sacrifice
Peter Preston, Monday September 20, 2004

Some clips as a tease...
Freedom, it seems, is to be won by the blood of others. Freedom is our single transferable gift to them, our shield against darkness. But meanwhile, Guant?namo Bay, and umpteen steely sonatas from John Ashcroft and David Blunkett, is our gift to ourselves.
Freedom, though, is also the freedom to ask awkward questions, to inquire of our masters: please, what happens next? And here the rhetoric fades to a mumble.

... The president of the United States, with 140,000 troops on the ground who want to come home, talks about something else. His official campaign website (the one that swing voters can turn to) solves the problem by barely mentioning it.

"Fifty million people have been liberated from despotic, totalitarian regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq," it says. "The brutal regime of Saddam Hussein is gone, and an interim regime is leading the Iraqi people to freedom." And that's it, period. Re-elect Bush and Cheney and what do you get? A blank page.

Try Kerry and Edwards on the big issue, then? Forget that, too. Let's "plan Iraq's future by working with our allies", they say. Let's "launch a massive and accelerated training effort to build Iraqi security". Let's get our boys home by 2008, employing a plan too secret to describe in even vestigial detail.

But there's a terrible mis-match here. We ask the Iraqis to suffer and endure in a cause we hold dear, yet we tell neither them nor our own voters the truth. We hail democracy as some wonder ingredient, yet close the packet closer to home.

... Here is a problem without a solution. And, inescapably in a democracy, it is our problem.
Now go and read the whole thing.

Posted by Alan at 20:31 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home

Saturday, 18 September 2004

Topic: Photos

Paris Culture: This weekend's Techno Parade - and what to do with a really bad movie...

Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis, is our man on the scene.

The Movie:
All the time I was writing 'other' news from Paris, I meant to write about Claude Lelouch and his new film. He didn't like what the critics wrote about 'Les Parisiens,' so on the day after it opened in France - 854 tickets sold in Paris - he offered it free, first-come first-served, at the 19:00 showing on Thursday at 400 cinemas throughout the country. Spielberg's film 'The Terminal' also opened in Paris on Wednesday and sold 2494 tickets. Philippe de Broca tried the 'free' ticket trick in 1966 for 'Le Roi de Coeur' and advised Claude against trying it. For de Broca, the film attracted fewer viewers the day it was free. However, cinema fans had good things to say about the new film, which is part one of a trilogy, 'Le Genre Humain.' Lelouch had to pay for the free entries himself. Happy ending - Lelouch has to pay for full houses. And the manager of the Grand Rex in Paris decided to let everybody in to see the film free at the following 21:30 showing.
Ha.

Here's the opening of the Reuters story -

French Director Shows Film for Free to Defy Critics
Friday, September 17, 8:01 AM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - French director Claude Lelouch decided to show his new film "Les Parisiens" free across France on Friday to try to prove wrong the critics who have panned it.

Lelouch, whose 1966 film "A Man and a Woman" starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee won Oscars for best foreign film and screenplay, said he would bear the costs of the showings at about 400 cinemas across France.

"I've taken this decision following an unprecedented media lynching," he said in a radio interview.

"It's been years and years that the critics have regularly attacked my films and it's been years and years that the public has come to my rescue." ...
A rescue? We shall see about that!

The Parade:
But do not let this detract from today's marvelous 'Techno Parade,' which launched from Montparnasse at noon. I didn't actually see anything like the 29 'floats' advertised, but the weather confounded the forecast by being sunny and warm - perfect for wrecking Paris' Saturday traffic from Montparnasse to Bastille.

The so-called 'floats' are flat-deck trucks with generators for running the massive sound systems. Most are only sketchily decorated, manned by a few chickies who bump and weave - for eight hours! - and some young dudes. There's a lot of boom boom boom, but not much else.

Contrary to how the beginning of the 'Techno Parade' looked, the middle and the end - thanks to TV-news - seemed to be much more successful. The TV-news reported that between 100,000 and 600,000 took part in the parade. I guess it depends on how many spectators took part in it.

One view of the Rue de Rennes, from Saint-Germain, showed it to be full of techno fans. Close-ups showed many in costumes, who either joined the parade in its rear staging area at Montparnasse or joined it after it started. Many would do this in any case, rather than all trying to gather at Montparnasse at the beginning.

The present Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Varbes, said 'techno' is a good thing, and the forever former Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, who imported the idea from Berlin, said what he usually says. This year's 7th edition was without major causes other than 'faire la f?te,' and to turn Paris into an immense dance club.
Photos by Ric Erickson of MetropoleParis - check his site Monday evening for more.

Note - This three-wheeled winged and bug-eyed sono-Vespa was also shown on TV. Since the photo was first posted on As seen from Just Above Sunset around seven in the evening Paris time (ten in the morning out here in Hollywood), As seen from Just Above Sunset, Ric tells me, actually scooped France-2 TV.







































Posted by Alan at 09:37 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 18 September 2004 13:33 PDT home

Friday, 17 September 2004

Topic: The Economy

Insecurity: It seems to be 1660 again...

The basic goal? End the idea the government should do anything for the public good. Only the private good matters - folks should be free to accumulate wealth and businesses free to do what they want, and individuals who are hurt in process should turn somewhere else if they find themselves in trouble. The government owes them nothing. There's too much of this "mommy" government.

Grover Norquist is clear -
"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Clear enough.

That blunt statement is not new. You will find that comment and more here, in The Nation, April 26, 2001

Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a coalition of taxpayer groups, individuals and businesses opposed to higher taxes at both the federal, state and local levels. And he serves on the board of the National Rifle Association of America, and the board of the American Conservative Union. He was key member of 1988, 1992, 1996 Republican Platform Committees. He is a chief theorist for the Republican Party. He has the ear of the key players, and a BA and MBA from Harvard, where George Bush earned, so to speak, his own MBA.

Bush at Harvard Business School? Imagine that. Or note what Yoshi Tsurumi, now a Professor of International Business at Baruch College, the City University of New York, says here -
At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism." ...
There's much more but you get the general idea. (See the footnote.)

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist who writes opinion pieces for the New York Times, in his collection of recent columns, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century" (Norton, 426 pp., $25.95) has as his thesis that we are now governed by a reactionary party with a radical (he says "revolutionary") agenda, basically that of undoing the legacy, domestic and foreign, of FDR. Bush and his teams even say this - Norquist rather bluntly - even say this, but people, especially the pundits who endless analyze policy, discount it, because they don't realize that, like any "revolutionary power," the folks in power now really do mean it. They aren't kidding.

You might find this amusing - Krugman defending his views on the Fox News "Hannity and Colmes" show on October 17, 2003. He gets beat up.

Anyway, it does seem the current group in power want to change how we think of government. You're on your own now. Grow up.

Josh Marshall in The Washington Monthly points out this has been going on for a long time -
Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans who came to power in 1995 held a very different, neo-Reaganite view. Deriding the whole notion of a federal response for every crisis, they argued that society's problems could be solved only through a radical reordering, both of government in Washington and of America's relationship with the world. This required tax cuts to drain money out of the Beltway; radically scaling back regulation on business; pulling America out of many international agreements; and cutting funding to the United Nations. The Gingrichites were not pragmatists but visionaries and revolutionaries. They wanted to overthrow the existing structure of American governance, not tinker with it.
The whole thing is detailed, and instructive.

But this week the issue is Social Security, specifically, and we find Teresa Nielsen Hayden saying this -
I've been ruminating about a one-liner that's been floating around the meme pool since lord knows when. You've probably heard it a thousand times:

By the time you retire, there'll be nothing left in the Social Security retirement fund.

It's untrue, of course; but for those who aren't aware that it's untrue, it's profoundly frightening.

We're set up to be a cooperative society. We believe that by working together, we can as a people be richer, safer, smarter, and happier. However, this cooperation requires a certain basic level of trust. The belief that you could be left penniless in your old age, after a lifetime of contributing your regular fraction to the public good, creates a huge breach in your sense of trust.

It's not the kind of idea that turns you into a monster overnight. I'm inclined to believe that the commonest reaction to it is dull, low-level grief: you thought life in America would be better than this. Still, if that's what you have to look forward to, you'd better get while the getting's good. You're going to need that money.

Meanwhile, you find yourself resenting calls on your generosity. True, you're probably a lot better off than the people you're being asked to help; but you're not comparing them to your present self. Lodged in your heart there's an elderly, needy, cast-off version of you, whispering that when the time comes, nobody's going to pay to help you. Children stop looking like our hope for tomorrow. Instead, they're the heartless little bastards who're going to let you live on dogfood in your SRO until a heat wave finally does you in.

The other thing about believing there'll be nothing left when you retire is that it makes you far less likely to scream in outrage over the long-term looting of the national treasury. After all, you already know you're not going to get any of that.

It's not inevitable. I think we need to say so, early and often.
Well, Brad DeLong, the noted government economist now on the faculty at UC Berkeley, explains here in precise terms just why it is not true that after paying into social security for a lifetime we all will now get back nothing at all. It doesn't work that way.

But that is beside the point.

Hayden has latched onto something else that is the inevitable byproduct of the political theory, and policy practices, of those in power - and of the uninformed sneers of the current president about those who are not as rich is he is.

And it is far larger than social security. As before, we are carrying an enormous federal deficit that will impoverish us for decades, or end most government social programs. Forty-four million of our people are without any health coverage, and millions more out of work. And the Social Darwinists have been given the power to do what they think best.

The result is Hayden's idea that this slowly turns us into monsters, all of us. The idea that we're set up to be a cooperative society is tossed away - as useless trash. Believing that by working together we can as a people be richer, safer, smarter, and happier is derided as stupid - as "personal responsibility" is posited as the only value.

And trust is for fools.

And life is poor, nasty, brutish and short - just as Hobbes said it was back in 1660.

This is progress?

Assume we are neither a purely communist society, where the individual doesn't matter but only the good of the collective matters, nor a purely Darwinian survival-of-the-strongest-and-most-vicious society, where you look out only for yourself and anyone else be damned.

What happened to the middle ground, where "personal responsibility" is fine and dandy but when some of us stumble we make sure they are okay - out of common decency if nothing else?

We are no longer all in this together? I guess not.

__

Footnote:

Mary Jacoby of Salon.com interviews Yoshi Tsurumi

See The dunce
His former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological liar.
September 16, 2004

Key paragraphs -
The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA students in Tsurumi's macroeconomic policies and international business class in the fall of 1973 and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a professor of international business at Baruch College in New York.

... "He [Bush] showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that." A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.

In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, "made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, 'The government doesn't have to help poor people -- because they are lazy.' I said, 'Well, could you explain that assumption?' Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, 'No, I didn't say that.'"

... Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. "In class, he couldn't challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that's how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy."

Many of Tsurumi's students came from well-connected or wealthy families, but good manners prevented them from boasting about it, the professor said. But Bush seemed unabashed about the connections that had brought him to Harvard. "The other children of the rich and famous were at least well bred to the point of realizing universal values and standards of behavior," Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came late to class and often sat in the back row of the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber jacket from the Texas Air National Guard and spitting chewing tobacco into a cup.

... Tsurumi's conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. "He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion," he said.

... He said other professors and students at the business school from that time share his recollections but are afraid to come forward, fearing ostracism or retribution. And why is Tsurumi speaking up now? Because with the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq and Osama bin Laden still on the loose -- not to mention a federal deficit ballooning out of control -- the stakes are too high to remain silent. "Obviously, I don't think he is the best person" to be running the country, he said. "I wanted to explain why."
Yoshi should make sure his life insurance premiums are paid up, in full. He's living dangerously.

Posted by Alan at 15:54 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 17 September 2004 19:05 PDT home

Thursday, 16 September 2004

Topic: Iraq

Trends: The rolling stone gathers speed...

Previously here the suggestion was that this week a new narrative started gathering momentum - a new meme, a newly accepted axiomatic sense of what is an actual fact.

That is the idea that we have lost the war in Iraq. You saw it one the blogs, and then more and more in the major media - and it got a major push from Newsweek and media interviews its editors. And this does not seem to be coming from the Democrats assailing Bush - but seem rather a simultaneous awakening by news folks and military folks. Things are bad.

Thursday we see a major leap. The White House has been sitting on an internal report since July - a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate - that says that there are only three possible scenarios now. The best? That would be "a tenuous stability" - but that's unlikely. The second? That would be where "increased extremism and fragmentation in Iraqi society impede efforts to build a central government and adversely affect efforts to democratize the country." The third is an all out civil war in Iraq by 2005, where the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds have it out and we have to deal with that. The document was first reported by the New York Times on its web site Wednesday night.

The Associated Press summary is here - and it is not pretty.

Much of this comes from, of course, a highly placed US official, who, late Wednesday, spoke on the condition of anonymity. I wonder who that was, and if he or she has good insurance? It does, after all, seem unwise to say this -
It "would be fair" to call the document "pessimistic," the official added. But "the contents shouldn't come as a particular surprise to anyone who is following developments in Iraq. It encapsulates trends that are clearly apparent."

The intelligence estimate, which was prepared for Bush, considered the window of time between July and the end of 2005. But the official noted that the document draws on intelligence community assessments from January 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deteriorating security situation there.
So. We shouldn't be surprised, even as day after day the president tells us we are making progress in Iraq.

Well, if you say it again and again, and really believe it to be so, and if you keep your resolve and never waver, then you can magically make it so. It's that Tinkerbell thing again - clap loud and long enough and Tinkerbell won't die, and a little fairy dust and you really can fly, if you believe strongly enough. No wonder Bush will easily win the election. We all want to fly off to Never-Never Land with that sexy little Tinkerbell. We want to believe. And we'll toss aside that Kerry guy who says we should be realistic. This is America, where, with hard work and never giving in to self-doubt, and with belief in yourself, you can be or do anything you want. Anyone can be president, even George Bush.

And who wants to stomp on these dreams? Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and the leaders of the other intelligence agencies who approved this fifty-page intelligence document. Losers, all of them.

Reactions?
In a conference call arranged by the John Kerry presidential campaign, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., called on the White House to release the new assessment. "The American people need to know the truth," he said Thursday.
Do we?

AP does note that State Department officials stressed areas of progress in Iraq since the United States turned over political control of Iraq to an interim government on June 28. They cited advances in generating electricity, producing oil and creating jobs.

Yep. They used the word "advances" as you see. But on the ground?

See We Are Losing The War In Iraq - quick summary from Oliver Willis.

Willis cites the Financial Times (UK) - hardly a lefty organization - saying we seem to have lost control of the one safe place for Americans in the capital, the Green Zone in Baghdad -
US military officers in Baghdad have warned they cannot guarantee the security of the perimeter around the Green Zone, the headquarters of the Iraqi government and home to the US and British embassies, according to security company employees.

At a briefing earlier this month, a high-ranking US officer in charge of the zone's perimeter said he had insufficient soldiers to prevent intruders penetrating the compound's defences.

The US major said it was possible weapons or explosives had already been stashed in the zone, and warned people to move in pairs for their own safety. The Green Zone, in Baghdad's centre, is one of the most fortified US installations in Iraq. Until now, militants have not been able to penetrate it.
Oh well. How did Rumsfeld put it? Stuff happens? This seems to be an indication, with the "no go" zones mentioned previously, that things are getting far worse. Perhaps we should take care of Iraq remotely, from Qatar or Bahrain, using remote drones and calling in air strikes. We could relocate our Iraq embassy to, say, Portugal, where no one pays attention to anything. Nothing much ever happens there.

Willis also cites the Bush-supporting Wall Street Journal as they report those fighting us are merging now into a unified force -
Iraqi government officials are especially concerned that the violence in Baghdad in the past week may be fueled in part by growing support for the insurgents in the capital and growing contact with rebel groups active in the countryside to Baghdad's north.

Many U.S. military and Iraqi government officials are focusing on the stronghold of Fallujah, which they suspect the rebels are using as an operational center to launch attacks west of Baghdad and within the city.

"The insurgents are no longer operating in isolated pockets of their own. They are well-connected and cooperating," said Sabah Kadhim, a senior adviser to Iraq's Interior Ministry, which oversees the police and security around the country.
Well, that is progress, but not the sort Bush is envisioning. The folks who oppose us are getting quite organized.

And Willis points out an AP report that the attacks on our guys are getting far more sophisticated -
The spike in bloodshed - more than 200 dead in four days - has stifled American hopes that the transfer of sovereignty and the prospect of a democratic vote in four months could take the steam out of the uprising and pave the way for a reduction in U.S. troops.

Instead, there are signs the Americans and their Iraqi allies are facing an enemy more determined than ever. Insurgents have learned from past mistakes and shifted strategy, cooperating more closely with each other and devising new ways to put their relatively simple arsenal to treacherous use.
Yep, fewer random car bombs and more trained snipers, and carefully targeted car bombs. Great.

Willis himself says this -
This is the story. Not the memos. Not the medals. Not even the vote to go to war or not (though who got us into this in the first place bears remembering). We are losing the war in Iraq. We can't secure the green zone - which is where all our people are - and the rest of the country is ripe with anti-American sentiment. This nonsense about handing over control to the Iraqis and having elections within the year is a sham. At best we would be handing the keys to a puppet regime with no mandate, at worst there will be a civil war. Either way, because we have never set a real exit strategy for Iraq, any move on our part gives the appearance of capitulation. It's not that the people of Iraq aren't smart enough to have a western-style democracy... it's pretty obvious that they don't want one. Even the moderates seem to have a preference for an Iranian style theocracy (the most powerful person in Iraq is Ayatollah Sistani).

At this point, with all the international commitments we have on our plate and the priority of destroying Al Qaeda and its support network, it may be time to limit the scope of Operation: Iraqi Freedom (elimination of chemical/biological/nuclear raw materials - what ever little bit there may be, and the destruction of the terrorist networks that have taken root in Iraq since we invaded) and set the timetable for our troops to be redeployed against Al Qaeda operating elsewhere, or in the case of reservists, to come home.
Iran and North Korea are fast developing nuclear weapons. The Israeli-Palestinian standoff will explode again and again - and Sharon will bluster, with our help, and Arafat be as foolish as usual. The world is running short on oil, and Putin is doing his Mussolini thing and stopping popular elections in the name of fighting terror. We are carrying an enormous federal deficit that will impoverish us for decades, or end most government social programs. Forty-four million of our people are without any health coverage, and millions more out of work. And of course Al Qaeda is doing just fine and that Osama fellow is nowhere to be found, if he's still alive, which may not matter now as his franchisees are thriving.

So what are we doing in Iraq? We lost, or are well on our way to losing. Of course the odious Saddam is gone, and his two thug sons. But now what?

A line that always gets people from "The Man from La Mancha" is this - The only battles worth fighting are losing battles. So noble, and so romantic. And so stupid.

But we love it. Kerry doesn't stand a chance.

Posted by Alan at 17:28 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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