Chicago Boyz

Artist Steve Mumford is back with another installment of his Baghdad Journal. He discusses one conversation with an Iraqi friend, who described his meetings with a western activist:

“We disagreed about everything. She wants to have solidarity with the Iraqis against the American occupation. I said to her, ‘Do you realize that if we were talking this way last year about Saddam we could be executed for it?'”
“Then she tells me something that is really kind of ignorant and offensive. She says that the Iraqis on the governing council are traitors. I tell her, no, I think they are some kind of heroes. I did not get really angry at her; she had been shot in the leg by soldiers in Israel, where she was protesting — for some reason I felt I had to be gentle with her. But you know, at least Israel is a democracy. We could learn some things from it.
“Look, sure the Americans have their interests here,” Naseer said. Everyone has their own interests! We do not ask anyone to be noble. But right now the interests of the Americans coincide with the interests of the Iraqis and we are benefiting from it.

However, Mumford notes that his friend’s views are not universal:

I know that opinions on the streets of Baghdad are wildly divergent, and many resent or at least question the American presence here, particularly in the face of efforts by the army and the nascent Iraqi police force to provide security against the rising tide of crime and terrorism.
Trying to measure the success or failure of the occupation is like the proverbial group of blind men attempting to describe an elephant: each person tends to see the war and its aftermath differently, through the prism of their own ideology and experience. Some people talk about the children who died as a result of the sanctions, some talk about the thousands of Iraqis murdered by Saddam.
Watching the BBC here in Baghdad, I get the impression that the war has left a state of worsening chaos throughout the country. Walking through the streets I often have the opposite feeling. Then a bomb goes off somewhere and I brace myself for worse times ahead.

The whole essay is good, and the pictures are good too.

Sylvain’s post, immediately preceding this one, about a recent Don Luskin article, seems to reflect a growing consensus. The economy is in better shape than our little friends in the mainstream media want us to know about.

Jonathan sent me this article, The Bush Boom, by Brian S. Wesbury, which has all kinds of delightful news:

… the third and fourth quarters are on track for what could be 6.0% real GDP growth. Retail sales show a 12.1% annualized increase in the June-August period. Housing starts are at a 17-year high, new and existing home sales have set new records this year, and disposable personal income is up an annualized 9.4% in the past three months. Productivity growth in the non-farm business sector expanded at an astounding 6.8% in the second quarter, while spending on computers and peripheral equipment jumped 57.5% at an annualized rate.

The worm in the apple, at least for Bush’s political fortunes, is the permanent disappearance of manufacturing jobs. “What the economy is experiencing today is a significant structural shift, not just a cyclical one. While manufacturing output has held steady as a share of GDP, manufacturing employment has fallen from 25% of all jobs in 1970 to 11% today.” Count on the media to focus on these manufacturing jobs going away forever, forever, forever … .

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This WSJ editorial patronizes Republican pols, treating them as too foolish to understand that their interest lies in avoiding reregulation of electronic media.

What’s amazing is how oblivious Republicans are to this stop-Rush game. So eager are Senators Trent Lott and Kay Bailey Hutchison to paste a defeat on their local media enemies that they’re willing to punish all media companies. For their part, House Republicans have fallen for the lobbying of local TV and newspapers that want Congressional protection from takeover bids; Members are too frightened by what kind of coverage they’ll get next election to just say no.

It could be that editorial writers at the WSJ understand politics better than experienced national politicians do. An alternative possibility is that Limbaugh doesn’t serve the interests of Republican pols any more than he serves those of Democrats. Rush doesn’t hesitate to criticize Republicans when they screw up, or to gin up popular enthusiasm for courses of action that most pols would prefer to avoid. He probably helps Republicans as a group but it’s not necessarily in the interest of individual Republican officeholders to come under his scrutiny. A lot of them, particularly pork-addicted jerks like Trent Lott, might find life easier if Limbaugh weren’t around.

Sylvain, in this post quotes British Foreign Minister Jack Straw as saying that “… a significant part of the way in which the French political diplomatic class defines itself is against America, and this has been a continuing neurosis amongst the French political class for many decades.” This is pretty much right. Straw is just off in his timing by an order of magnitude. In fact, French and Continental intellectuals have been defining themselves against America for over two centuries. There is an excellent and enlightening article at the Public Interest website, entitled “A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism” by James W. Ceasar. (This article is a short version of Ceasar’s book Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought, which I bought but haven’t read yet.)

Ceasar tells us that European Anti-Americanism is not about the America which concretely exists, but is directed against an idea, even a mirage:

It is tempting to call anti-Americanism a stereotype or a prejudice, but it is much more than that. A prejudice, at least an ordinary one, is a shortcut usually having some basis in experience that people use to try to grasp reality’s complexities. Although often highly erroneous, prejudices have the merit that those holding them will generally revisit and revise their views when confronted with contrary facts. Anti-Americanism, while having some elements of prejudice, has been mostly a creation of “high” thought and philosophy. Some of the greatest European minds of the past two centuries have contributed to its making. The concept of America was built in such a way as to make it almost impervious to refutation by mere facts. The interest of these thinkers was not always with a real country or people, but more often with general ideas of modernity, for which “America” became the name or symbol. Indeed, many who played a chief part in discovering this symbolic America never visited the United States or showed much interest in its actual social and political conditions.

Ceasar traces the history of Anti-Americanism in European thought, and argues at the end that the Europeans, freed from the fear of the Soviet Union, now are free to indulge in this prejudice in safety. He also suggests that there is a real “Clash of Civilizations” going on between the United States and Europe, in large part because many in Europe see America as a symbol of all they despise. He concludes that Americans cannot use this reality as a way to ignore or avoid legitimate criticism, but that “[a] genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism – a process, fortunately, that several courageous European intellectuals have already launched. ” Bring on the courageous European intellectuals. We need more of them.