How Sick is Sick?
How Sick is Sick? – Last night in dreams compounded of equal parts fever and decongestants, I planned a series of children’s books starring “Cut Fuckwise, the Brain Counter” (tagline: “He Counts Brains!”). I’m sure we’re all dying to read those. I certainly won’t be subbing them in for the Rainbow Horse stories I am enjoined to make up each night as part of The Littlest Offering’s bedtime routine. (Helpful hint: When making up children’s stories on the fly, there is never a bad time to insert a talking bird.)
All kinds of stuff I’d like to blog about and write about and I just can’t summon the concentration. So here are some things to keep you amused while I chug some NyQuil.
Julian Sanchez and Timothy Sandefur are in a colloquy about mall culture and whether there’s a proper libertarian reaction to it – or even a Proper Reaction All Decent People Should Have. Julian thinks he’s got an esthetic and ethical objection to malls. I think he’s just a guy:
And don’t malls run counter to one of the things Rand (rightly enough) liked about Christmas? The practice of exchanging gifts is most meaningful when you’ve thought about the recipient, gotten halfway into his head, and come up with something that the other person would like, but (ideally) might not have thought to get for himself. The choice of the gift is a statement about the relationship.
Now, I guess you can do that at a mall. But generally, if I’m at the mall in the days before Christmas, it’s because I’ve gotten lazy and I’m wandering around hoping that something will jump out at me for all the various people I’ve got to get something for. It’s tailor made for the generic gift-giving-as-formality that Rand seemed not to like so much.
Pause for this site’s liberal readers to digest the news that Ayn Rand liked the idea of buying gifts for people. Okay, where were we? Ah yes. Julian is a man, and single, so I don’t think he quite gets malls yet. Shopping is a muscle, and generally, women keep their shopping muscle better toned than men do. They work out all year so they’re ready for the Big Game. Women I have known love to shop for themselves, and love to buy stuff, but they also, generally, always have a track in their mind observing, recording and matching up what they’re seeing with a gift list in their head. Window shopping in August prepares them for earnest shopping in December – and that’s the ones who haven’t wrapped up their Christmas purchases before Halloween. (Have you ever heard a guy say, “I’m done with my Christmas shopping” in early November?)
Shopping is gatherer culture without bugs and thorns. It can be done to self-destructive excess, just like any other worthwhile pursuit, but like other abusable pleasures – food, sex, intoxicants – it is one of life’s goods. If you’re into that. I’m not, really, but I’m a guy.
Meanwhile, lots of people have had a crack at yesterday’s Washington Post article about how the Administration has scaled back it’s grander ambitions for Iraqi society to match the sovereignty handover deadline of next July 1. Among other things, the sweeping privatization program that so appalled liberals last summer is stillborn. A few things about the article that jumped out at me:
o As a libertarian I’m all for privatization, but against interventionist foreign policy. So what do I think? Non-interventionism wins here, on practical grounds. I don’t want capitalism to suffer the stigma of Alien Imposition in Iraqi minds. The Third World put itself through political-economic hell for decades by associating free markets with colonialism (ironic in that the European empire’s were the last gasp of mercantilism – if we can imagine for a minute that mercantilism is a thing of the past). That led many postcolonial countries on a left turn into socialism and kleptocracy.
o And come to think of it, that’s basically what we’re going to get in Iraq! Follow the lines of Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s inquiry to their vanishing point and what you see there looks a lot like Egypt II, maybe without the unified culture. You’ll have a nominally-democratic kleptocracy running state-owned businesses badly, with high unemployment and simmering revolutionary discontent. A comparison of the number of Egyptians in Al Qaeda with the number of Iraqis (pre-Gulf War Phase II) is left as an exercise for the reader. Best of all, we’ll be paying for it – in addition to the Summer’s $87 billion, the hundred-odd billion spent in preparation and prosecution of the invasion phase of the war, and the billions we’ll be spending on the troops we intend to keep garrisoned in Iraq after the civil handover, you just know that, as with Egypt, we’ll be sending our anointed crooks a few billion a year for as many years as there are columns in Excel. Your tax dollars at work.
o Chandrasekaran mentions, in an aside, that the Iraqi airport is still closed to commercial traffic (because of security concerns). An inability to secure the airspace around Baghdad International can not have been on anyone’s prewar list of victory conditions.
o Chandrasekeran also pegs Iraq’s unemployment rate at 60%, even with continued over-employment at state-owned enterprises, whch is ten points over Brookings’ October rate of 50%. But I’m not sure that Chandrasekaran is working from up-to-the-minute data here.
o Finally, if you’ve supported the Administration because it “stands up to terrorism,” stop kidding yourself. As the Post article reminds us, the accelerated schedule was itself a response to the wave of increasing attacks throughout the fall. And the CPA and Iraqi ministries curtailed the privatization program partly in response to the assassination of a cooking-oil company manager who was planning to restructure his enterprise. If you were one of those “No More Beiruts” people, you are looking at a slow-motion Beirut right now.
Andrew Olmsted has a useful consideration of the Army’s latest stop-loss orders. Andrew’s solution is to expand the Army. I say, before we do that, let’s pull all remaining troops out of Europe and Korea and anywhere else we’ve stranded them (Haiti?).
Kevin Drum said something curious the other day, about the neoconservatives:
After all, this is the same group that spent much of the 70s and 80s so intent on interpreting everything as part of a war of civilizations between the West and a resurgent communism that they ignored – or in some cases actively encouraged – the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. (Remember Afghanistan and Iran-Contra?) The very single-mindedness that neocons are famous for blinded them to the fact that they were contributing to the rise of an even bigger problem, one that had nothing at all to do with communism.
Now, is Islamic fundamentalism really a bigger problem than the Cold War was? Certainly the Cold War had a minimal gentlemanly aspect to it that the Islamists haven’t copied – the Soviets and their clients never attacked Americans in our own territory. And Islamism is in some ways less tractable than State Communism, which was bound to at least the forms of the nation-state system and circumscribed by the nuclear balance of terror. Still, the Soviets were an existential threat in a way that Iraq certainly was not, and even Al Qaeda is not unless we choose to let it be so. We came way to close to thermonuclear exchanges in 1963, 1972 and the early 1980s (around the time of the KAL 007 shootdown). We lost 50,000 lives in Vietnam, 40,000 in Korea and hundreds more in Central American battles we weren’t supposed to talk about. You might say, the dead in Vietnam and Korea weren’t civilians like the dead in New York City. That’s true as far as it goes, but most of the dead would have been civilians but for the draft. Compare the fiscal costs of the cold war with the bill for the War on Terror and it’s no contest. Then consider that we’re fighting the WoT like idiots – we could be getting more mileage out of a cheaper, more focused effort against Al Qaeda.
Now I could be wrong about some of the above. For one thing, we might be witnessing the death throes of the nation-state concept. Al Qaeda may herald an age in which states can no longer perform their most basic function: securing their own territory and citizens from foreign attackers. But for the time being I think Kevin overreached in his criticisms.
Diana Moon has tons of great stuff. So does Gary Farber. They’ll keep you busy.
Daniel Drezner is guest-blogging at AndrewSullivan.com, which is reason to actually read AndrewSullivan.com.
Max Sawicky has more on the uncanny convergence in Democratic and Republican plans for Iraq. cf. me.
Polytropos is your headquarters for Return of the King blogging. See “Is Peter Jackson Insane?” and his spoiler-rich review. (It turns out Bruce Willis is actually dead.)
And so am I, and everyone else in this house, or would be if we had our wish. Curse this undoubtedly Islamofascist virus. More when I regain my will to live. For now I have an appointment with a dark green liquid.
