“We have not released giant badgers in Basra, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river,” Major David Gell told reporters.
Cue the Monty Python references.
Anglosphere
Jim Bennett Reviews Michael Barone’s Book on the Revolution of 1688
Jim’s review is here and is a must-read.
Oren — Power, Faith, and Fantasy
Oren, Michael B., Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present
History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).
By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.
The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.
Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.
Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.
A Very Good Immigration Post
Opponents of the wall genuinely think that sealing the border is impossible–at least those in the mainstream do. Furthermore, if they refuse to even entertain the notion that sealing the border is possible a) they will never be proven wrong; and b) their adversaries will never be proven right. And it doesn’t hurt that their stance will make them the favored choice at the polls for the very vocal hardcore believers who think that any attempt to close the borders is a betrayal of their ideals.
The argument that X is an intractable problem so we shouldn’t even try to fix it is kind of an odd argument for the left to be making, considering their faith in social engineering. Yet it’s become their fallback position in recent years.
I was wrong about immigration, at least the politics of it. I thought the political divisions would force the competing constituencies into some kind of messy but reasonable compromise that would be an improvement over the current situation. Instead, one side used dishonest arguments and raw political leverage to try to impose its preferred outcome on everyone else, which further radicalized opponents and alienated many citizens who might otherwise have been sympathetic to Bush’s approach.
Whether a real compromise, the status quo or some kind of smaller and more incremental reform is now more likely is anyone’s guess.
Zielenziger – Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
Zielenziger, Michael, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
While Michael Zielenziger was the Tokyo bureau chief for the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers during the 90s, he learned of an unusual pattern of reclusive behaviour in young Japanese men — the so-called hikikomori (literally, “pulling away, being confined“). Numbering in the thousands, they were shutting themselves off in their rooms — from friends, family, career, and society in general — for years at a time. As a Western journalist he found himself largely alone, at the time, in taking an interest in the subject. It was all but ignored by the Japanese media.
In talking to Japanese sociologists and health professionals, Zielenziger found that this behaviour seemed to be a relatively new phenomenon. It didn’t appear in the global bible of mental health disorders (the DSM IV). Its particular set of symptoms didn’t appear in Western countries, nor in Japan’s Asian neighbours. Japan’s increasing affluence in the 70s and 80s seemed to correlate roughly with a baffling new behaviour afflicting those most likely to benefit from the country’s economic success. The economic downturn of the 90s seems to increase rather than decrease the incidence of hikikomori.