One World, Many Peaces

Top Five Worst & Best Moves of Obama's First 100 Days

What his aides have called the "Hallmark holiday" of politics, the 100-day mark of a presidency, was celebrated by the US media yesterday in roughly the same proportions as the pending pandemic. Obama, playing along, provided the nation with some much-need distraction.  

Here are my top five worst and best moments of the Obama presidency so far:

The Worst

5. Allowing the inclusion of pet projects, or earmarks, in the federal government's 2009 emergency budget, breaking a  campaign promise and setting a precarious precedent.

4. Mismanaging the appointments of key cabinet posts. Had they been filled, maybe more could have been accomplished in this artificial timeframe.

3. Throwing more troops into Afghanistan without outlining a comprehensive plan including diplomacy,  socio-economic incentives and defining the roles and expectations of Pakistan.

2. Not making all federal bailout receivers, banks and otherwise, to restructure their corporate pay systems, as he did with AIG.

1. Boycotting the UN Racism Conference. I just don't understand how he can look himself in the mirror while and after making this decision.

The Best

5. Showing that, yes, the President can simultaneously be intelligent, articulate and popular.

4. Framing a summit on the reform of healthcare and social security as one on "fiscal responsibility," a brilliant dodge of an inevitable Republican punch.

3. Signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act aimed at closing the pay gap between men and women. Now it's time to close the gap between all human beings.

2. Committing to all American combat forces being removed from Iraq by August 2010, though he never mentioned the words victory or peace. 

1. Affirming that the US will not engage in torture in closing Guantanamo Bay, and indicating the possible prosecution of certain federal agents who authorized torture in the recent past.

Trying to keep the population calm and collected on two fronts now, public health and the economy, Obama is indeed expertly walking the fine line between a) appearing responsible and effective despite uncertain conditions and outcomes, and b) being reasonably hopeful and palatably optimistic despite dire circumstance and outlooks.

This could turn out to be either his greatest achievement, or his greatest setback, so far-- depending on how the health and economic crises work out. With over 11000 days to go, it's still anybody's guess what will happen next and how. Obama, as a current event creating the future, has I believe the country's and the world's scales tipping towards better so far. 

Bioglobalism, Bioterrorism and Swine Flu

Those who are as unconditionally for globalization as others are against it can at least agree on a three points: that it's happening, that it's impact is yet immeasurable, and that it's intensifying. Each faction also shares the tendency to focus on the effects of the obvious: worldwide flows of capital, cultures, commodities and people. And so, what is overlooked by nearly all is what's literally invisible about globalization-- until it's visibility becomes a threat to everyone, everywhere. 

Yet, the closest frame of reference to what may be called bioglobalism, the inevitable flow of microscopic and other living organisms that comes with globalization, may be bioterrorism more than globalization itself. The devastating consequences imported and invasive plants can have on local ecological systems parallels the consequences pathogens like swine flu can have for human communities. However, plant migration is usually done on misguided purpose, while pathogen migration happens despite our best efforts to stop it. Strangely enough strong analogies can be made between both plant and pathogen bioglobalism and bioterrorism.

Bioterrorism, scary as it is, isn't as scary as malignant bioglobalism: terrorist acts are assumed to be limited to a specific location or group, even if with biological weapons they may not be contained; globalization is by definition everywhere all the time, and that means your community right now too. Above all, the fear factor difference between bioterrorism and bioglobalism is that the former usually happens for specific reasons, and the latter for no apparent reason at all. The 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic killed 40 million people worldwide. That's close to the death tolls of World Was One and Two combined, in one year, with no weapons, no enemies and no peace treaties. The last pandemic in 1968, the 'Hong Kong Flu', killed one million people worldwide.

We generally remain in the 9/11 mindset about possible terrorist attacks: they will be spectacular, their messages unsubtle, and quick to be claimed by haters of everything "we" are. Nobody to my knowledge has suggested that the outbreak of swine flew in Mexico was an act of bioterrorism aimed at coinciding with Obama's recent trip there, infecting him and so Washington and the US in the process. I hope the museum worker who died of swine flu a day after the President's visited the place is investigated. And although the fact that Obama was there to speak against drug trafficking makes a plausible motive for the powerful Mexican and  international drug cartels to take action, no facts I know of support this conspiracy theory. But in any case: killing with a bullet is murder, killing with a cough can be genocide.

Instead, what has emerged is a narrative in which individuals unaware of their own vulnerability and of all demographics around the world are at risk of a new strain of the flu virus that combines animal with human genes. Bioglobalism, it seems, is a radical democratization of bioterrorism, whether or not the latter causes the former. SARS, bird flu and other recent pandemic scares are somehow different from the swine flu, if only in how the media is reporting it and how the number of cases in the US remains unannounced. Even if bioterrorism is eliminated as a current event creating the future, bioglobalism may not or cannot be.

Obama's Politics Shift From Unity to Divisiveness

One of Obama's right-hand-men is becoming just that: a man on the right. Not totally in an ideological sense, but rather in presupposing a political opposite which creates just the kind of party-line divisiveness we were promised would not be perpetuated as bitter campaigns turned into productive lawmaking. Or so the pleasant-to-hear line went before it was mistranslated into emails.

Like many who want to feel a part of a political process we are for the most part apart from, I continue to willingly receive several emails per week from the Obama movement. Most often they are requests for money for some reason or other (passing the budget was my favorite so far); sometimes day-old news we are asked to follow-up on (like writing leaders in congress to pass a bill we haven't had time to understand); and occasionally opportunities to provide feedback and "give direction" to the President by responding to a video broadcast explaining what our feedback should be.

All this Unionesque is generally fine with me, as I consider these efforts a huge step towards a more participatory democracy which could make up for some of the many defects of great magnitude of the purely representative kind. Except when I and millions of others like me get a message from David Plouffe that begins with the following line, eerily reminscent of Bush's infamous "with us or against us": It makes you wonder whether they see the same thing we do.

The email goes on to demand that party faithful do all "we" can to get the President's budget passed, because if "we" don't "they" will not only ruin the country, but eat our children and defecate on our ancestors' graves in the process. Just kidding, of course, but my adaptation is not far in spirit from the demonization of the political "other" Plouffe is at great pains to make clear, polarizing where there could be common ground created, and asking for $25 or more to fuel the push. But this far from first sign of the shift in politics didn't stop there.

Still troubled, I received another divisively worded email asking for money to pay off Hillary Clinton's campaign debt, notwithstanding the debts burdening us all now. After announcing this "exciting opportunity to stand up for an important leader in our party," I am told that Clinton deserves my money more because of party affiliation and commitment than her efforts in her current position, in which she represents all the US abroad. So I am yet again being given the exciting opportunity to fund the very divineness that contributes to standstill. Yey, where do I enter my security code?

The shift from a politics of unity to divisiveness on the part of the Obama will most likely climax by year 2.5 of his term, then gradually dilute into the "we are all American" rhetoric that brought him into power just in time for the 2012 election. Just in time not to get enough done, too. A bit of antagonism and dissent can reap great benefits in any political system, but when it comes from the top down through mass media channels it can become a thorn in any system's side. This shift is a current event I hope I am wrong about, because if I'm not then the future it's creating will look all too much like the past.

A 600 Pound Gorilla Dooms the UN Racism Conference

The two reasons given by world leaders for boycotting the UN Racism Conference are as specious as they are biased, if not racist in themselves. First was the rejection without even discussing Islamic requests that curbs on hate speech against their religion around the world be effected. The counterargument was that doing so would limit free speech, one easily used when a cartoon in a newspaper causes laughs domestically and murderous riots abroad. The convenient line drawn here between free speech and hate speech is specious because it parallels screaming "bomb" in an airport you aren't really in.

The other reason given was the possibility, not the actuality, of a statement based on one reached at the previous UN conference on race in 2001 that criticized Israel's racial/religious policies towards Palestinians. The conflation of race and religion is precisely what allowed Hitler to turn social Darwinism into genocidal totalitarian policy; but arguing from the flipside of the coin, as Israel and its supports try to do, takes us only slightly less backwards in thought and action geared towards eliminating discrimination based on race or religion today.

Whether or not Israeli state racism constitutes apartheid, its policy towards Palestine is the 600 pound gorilla in the room of global affairs out of which the most influential world leaders would rather boycot entering or walk out of than admit, let alone deal with, its existence. The Holocaust was not denied at this conference by anyone, thankfully; what was denied wholesale is one country's history of systemic discrimination based on race by almost everyone except an albeit extremist Iranian.  Scheduling him to speak at the start of the conference strongly suggests that even the conference's organizer, the UN Human Rights Chief, wanted it to fail and so maybe supposedly favor Israel.

What Ahmadinejad said was "Following World War Two [Israelis] resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless…" and so brought to power a "cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine." To deny this history is tantamount to the idiocy of denying the Holocaust as such.  If the boycott and walkout on a conference on racism by world leaders and so their spectator constituents doesn't make clear the disproportionate global clout of Israel, nothing other than using its "secret" atomic weapons will, in retaliation to those which may or may not be being built by Iran in self-defense.

Obama, who symbolizes the triumph over racism to millions worldwide, has trampled upon and degraded his own image in their, in our eyes. His "regret" at not attending this racism conference would be more appropriate for a cocktail party he is too tired to attend. Vouching not to give in to lobbyist in his victorious campaign, he is now making clear that he is losing the battle against them by bowing to the Israeli lobby-- and the international more than domestic one at that.

Historians of the future may rightly consider this as the biggest high-scale international blunder of Obama's early presidency. Seemingly denying his black identity, the history of which it is a part and of which he has written so passionately, he has now made evident how passionately he wants to be reelected instead. Whereas communism was used as an excuse to turn a blind eye to apartheid is South Africa, now terrorism (or national security or energy interests) is  used to do so in Palestine.

The boycott and walkout of world leaders on a conference on racism is a current event worthy of denying as one creating the future, if doing so wouldn’t bring us back just steps from where we were only a few generations ago, when slavery was also an internationally accepted practice.

Organizing for Healthcare as Social Justice Peacebuilding

Why hasn't healthcare become a civil or human rights issue, such as those that inspired mass movements and radical policy changes in the past? Dying because you don't have a cheaply laminated card issued to you as a profit center rather than a patient cannot be fixed by polarizing documentaries by skillfully divisive filmmakers alone.  As Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar recently pointed out, the healthcare deprived have yet to unite and organize in any significant or pragmatic ways for change, unlike worker, racial and gender groups have done so successfully last century, and immigrants are trying to do in ours.

Organizing the many millions without or with poor healthcare locally, regionally, nationally and globally could very well be the key movement of the 21st century along with that of migrants. Doing so effectively and non-violently would fundamentally change the political arena and the priorities of government spending. Healthcare leaders, not CEOs of HMOS or government bureaucrats but inspirational and skilled devotees, could join the ranks of civil rights and labor heroes. Here's a few preliminary ideas about how:

-Start with information-sharing and social networking: Newsletters, magazines, websites, Facebook Pages and the like can be used among those with access to such technology to connect and share tips, ideas and stories of how to improve their healthcare situation.

-Proven grassroots organizing and mobilization strategies such as those that brought Obama into power can be used just as well for the benefit of those without healthcare and to improve its quality, either as a next step after technologically-based information-sharing and social networking or as first step when and where these are not available.

-Use the very same tactics as healthcare corporations do to advance their agendas: hire lobbyists to compete with theirs, create non-profit organizations where they have profit-seeking ones, seek funding from wealthy donors like they do investors, and above all be superior to them in quality, efficiency, and humanity on each and every point.

-Unite, unite, unite: People who are sick can hardly participate in a March on Washington or the like, and neither can their caregivers. This fact will require more creative forms of communication with lawmakers, as the tried and true methods of peaceful mass protest may not so readily apply, and require the involvement of those indirectly affected to a high degree, for which their working models such as organizations that work reducing poverty. Why not donate flexible spending dollars you haven't used for dollar-for-dollar tax credit?

We must begin to see healthcare lapses, from nutrition to shelter and sanitation and medical care to education, as a current event to be permanently eliminated as the only way to create a sustainable future of shared peace and prosperity.

'Failing Better': A Beckettian View of Success and Progress

A photographer friend tells me he wakes up every day telling himself: this is the worst day ever. "It usually gets better after that," he jokes. Not far in spirit from this depressingly optimistic  way of thinking is a quote from Samuel Beckett which, if taken more seriously than I do this morning mantra, bears an absurdly great import on popular contemporary thinking and practices of 'success' and 'progress,' personal, local or global:

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

Anyone who has lost or is tired of their job and is trying to find a perfect or just paying one, anyone who is searching for their 'soul mate,' anyone who has been systematically rejected from any application process or pursued any endeavor with any zeal can immediately relate. Any artist,  inventor or entrepreneur will readily identify with this anti-haiku, the rigid form of which would betray what Beckett may be trying on purpose to fail to say. Writing about trial and failure, what he conspicuously leaves out is any mention of success or progress. And there's the rub.

Success must in some way be pre-defined to be achieved, and so what is reached after much or little toil rarely if ever meets exactly what one pre-defines for one's self, one's community or our world. Progress, in contrast, is determined by a future state being 'better' somehow than a past or the present one, and so depends equally on how we preconceive start and end states. What Beckett's notion of failing better allows for that success and progress do not are totally unexpected results of effort that can improve anything without predefinitions or preconceptions, always self-limiting. Unscientific in being unsystematic, failing better is better than success or progress because thereby we can never lose or move backwards.

A serious problem with the whole notion of 'progress' is that it makes the past something to be looked down upon, not learned from. Likewise, 'success' privileges ends over means, which has permitted more disappointment and destruction than needs be recounted here. We are better than those before, or so progressive thinking goes, so what can the past teach us? As success is our goal, or so motivational speakers tell us, who cares what we do to achieve it? Dearth in debate is never in itself proof of affirmative agreement, which thinking in terms of success and progress curtail more than failing better.

In chainging the terms of progress from nothing-to-something (success) and better-to-better (progress), to worse-to-less-worse (failing better), we are freed in mind and action from the dogmas that determine who we can be and what we can make our worlds. As a current event, failing better would create a future where the last are actually no better off than the middle or first because each has an equal distance to go in never resolving Zeno's paradox.  

Anti-Anti/Pro-Pro

Impassioned protestors are usually strongly "anti-"something in the hopes that being so will quickly change what they are against; in actuality, being anti-anything too forcefully and for too long tends to reinforce what it is being rallied against, slowing and sometimes even reversing the change being sought. The contemporary list is long and well-known, as the media seems to favor the anti, whose simplistic slogans often make good soundbites: anti-globalization, anti-tax, anti-war, anti-communist, and so on. But what would happen if, suddenly, every anti became a concomitant pro?

In an example from today's news, protestors in Moldova who are questioning the victory of the first post-Soviet Communist Party in national elections have been labeled anti-communist and so anti-this-government. Inasmuch, neighboring states and the international community seems to have tolerated their vandalism and lauded their use of Twitter in organizing. But as soon as "pro-Romanian" signs and slogans began to appear, affirming the linguistic, cultural and historical links between the countries which used to be united, then Russia issued a warning. Indeed, it can be much more threatening to be for something than against, because negating is all too conveniently ambiguous for each side.

The “anti” position always becomes untenable in the end because if its target does not inevitably change over time (willingly or not, due to internal or external forces), then its surrounding conditions do. The founders of the US were not only strongly anti-British, they were also strongly pro-sovereignty in their own quite novel ways, without which the successful American Revolution would have fizzled into the beer over which they were so fond of conspiring. By holding up the opposing position as static, those who are purely anti are blinded to the pragmatic changes their antagonist are often more willing to embrace in the efforts to thwart their disruptive activities before they become catalytic.

Being anti-war can be a noble and sometimes controversial position, and activism based upon it has been effective in turning tides of public opinion. However, in the eyes of policymakers who can end a war, the anti-war position always appears half baked: thanks for telling us to stop breaking eggs, but how do we cook an omelet with those we have already? Chicago's Jane Addams is a paragon for those seeking to straddle both anti-war and pro-peace. Anti-tax and anti-globalization, which rarely go hand in hand, share the shortcoming of not taking their targets as indifferent instruments that can be used to improve the world depending on local participants and conditions.

If every anti became its concomitant pro, current events would be transformed as if into a global orchard in which past arboreal abortions are replaced with abundant trees the fruits of which, conceptually and pragmatically, create a future in which no needs go unmet and no peaceable hope unfulfilled. 

Marital Rape, Afghan 'Progress' and US Proselytizing

The triumph of law based on the will of citizens is generally considered to be one over barbarity, not over civilization. But an election time political pander by Afghan president Hamid Karzai shows how legislation can and does represent regress rather than progress in Western terms, calling into question the motives of the leader the US sees as its closest domestic ally, and so of the occupying force itself as well as the ideology behind them and pushing ever forward, obstacles and all.

Without even getting into the specifics of the "marital rape" law, its ill conception is apparent in its institutionalization of the predominant division of Muslims between Sunnis and Shiites, as it applies only to the latter, who make up 20 percent of the war-torn population. If a fifty-fifty split between men and women is assumed, ten percent of voting citizens the rights of whom the US claims it is trying to restore in combating terrorists are being violated, legally and corporeally. This recalls the "separate but equal" illusion in America only two generations ago, but takes it a  step farther in creating a gendered division within one of the separated groups. So an accurate tagline becomes "separate but unequally unequal."

The legislation itself stipulates that wives are "bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires" and husbands have "the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night." Further,  "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband." In contrast, woman receive this pseudo-right: "man should not avoid having sexual relations with his wife longer than once every four months." Four days for men, four months for women, let's call the whole thing off. But doing so would run counter to the progressively democratic principles supposedly being replicated by the US (and NATO, sort of) there.

A comparable situation arose when the US supported the Taliban in its fight against USSR occupation: once the Soviets left, the Taliban was left hanging by its former supporters, and proceeded to try to run the country in ways that displeased the US, to say the least. Obama called the marital rape law "abhorrent," but then again so did in his own way Bush Jr. with the Taliban's Islamist regime. The point is that, however defined, progress imposed from the outside in rarely if ever takes deep enough roots to bear fruit immediately or in the long-term. Even in America, democracy, law and policy alike are still trial-and-error processes, and therein lies the progress they can and do bring about, social, cultural, economic, political or otherwise.

If to deny such organic experimentations is regressive, and to overlook them when they fail is unacceptable as the marital rape law makes painfully clear, then the whole "exporting democracy and the rule of law" ideology needs serious reconsideration in order to remain viable. Reproducing a political, economic or other kind of system means reproducing its flaws as well as its benefits, and in this sense the marital rape law can be taken as a metaphor for the US proselytizing in world affairs as a shortsighted, ulteriorly-motivated current event creating a future with severe short-term memory problems.

TV Interview on Peace: A World History by Antony Adolf

My thanks to the WGN Midday News team and everyone who has watched and given positive feedback so far. The interview aired nationally (US) yesterday, and is available on AOL Television now and YouTube soon. To many more...