Deals You Make in Your Head--The Remix
"I can't be accountable for deals that never really existed."
I keep thinking of Abigail Adams, writing her husband, begging for our rights--"I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. "--while he basically told her not to worry, that not giving women full status as citizens wasn't really a problem; the men would take care of them.
This weekend on Meet the Press, Reuel Marc Gerecht said "In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy."
This makes me so angry that I just can't stand it, this idea that there can be democracy without the participation of women. But tons of bloggers, like Egalia, have already hashed over this part.
What I want to consider is the second utterly tone-deaf sentence: "If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled." Because there's more in that sentence than just "Oh, you know, it's too much fucking trouble to keep the broads happy."
America in the early 1900s was not some utopia of pleasantness, except for the bitchy women. It was a mess of shitty things. Chinese people couldn't be citizens. Black people were being denied the right to vote in all kinds of clever, evil ways. Native Americans couldn't be U.S. citizens. Asian people born in the U.S. found themselves unable to reenter the country. White U.S. women who married non-citizens (even the ones born in this country) were stripped of their citizenship.
Most of this shit didn't get straightened out until the 1950s.
And this, this is what our government thinks is an okay version of democracy to export?
But I've been thinking about Dean Dad's words, letting them rattle around in my head, and I have to say that, again, this is a pretty brilliant move on the part of the administration. To say that we're going to export "democracy" to the Middle East and to let everyone--both supporters and opposers of this venture--assume they meant U.S. democracy as it's currently practiced, when really, they just meant "some" democracy, even that threadbare, xenophobic, nasty shit we practiced back in the early 1900s.
It's enough to make a girl throw back her head and howl with laughter and tears.
posted by Aunt B at 8/24/2005 07:32:00 AM
13 Comments:
See, there you go, getting me thinking again. This time, my thoughts are pretty violent. Guess I need to join you in the howling. God. I'm speechless.
I was horrified at this comment, and am no less so reading it again. What the hell made me ever think having daughters was the way to go? I shiver at the horrible possibilities in their lives. I know that they have more opportunities because our democracy has "evolved" somewhat, but jesus...I'm howling with you.
Another great post, B, and another brilliant point made by the professor.
Wise up, kids. The ass-backward Iraqis are only about 700 years behind us when it comes to having an enlightened, progressive society. In fact, they and their forward thinking neighbors haven't made it to The Enlightenment, yet.
It may not be right and it may make you feel like this democracy talk over there is a lot of crap, but the reality is they don't care about women, especially women with opinions.
Look at it this way, these dopes are still living in the late Fifteenth Century. It is going to take them awhile to get up to speed. It took us almost two hundred years to figure out that women and minorities were more than either property or a cheap, renewable labor resource.
And I say, great, get a circa-1900 democracy for Iraq. Because the sooner that happens, the sooner we get the fuck out of there.
Come now, that's utter bullshit. Listen, I'm no Hussein apologist, but overthrowing a secular despot who took power from a long line of secular military despots who took power from a British puppet king (also secular)who was granted power after the fall of the Ottoman empire--which was much more religiously and gender-ly tolerant than much of Europe at the time--and setting up a theocratic pseudo-democracy and acting like that's the best we can hope for when dealing with Iraqis because they haven't joined the Enlightenment yet is too grave an oversimplification of things to let stand.
They're not "still" living in the 15th Century. The men in power have happily moved the whole country back there with our help.
I'm all for bringing the troops back home as soon as possible, because there's no way to fix this mess that I can see. But to act as if "democracy" is some cure-all for all governmental ills, and that if we just give it some time, they'll work shit out for themselves, is an all-too-convenient way of letting ourselves forget that we're abandoning women and religious minorities to the whims of a bunch of religious nut jobs.
Maybe that's the only option now, but we shouldn't act as if it's always been the only option, because, Christ, before we butted in, they had a secular state. A shitty secular state, but a secular state.
Have we made things worse? I don't know. I guess that remains to be seen, but I suspect so.
And, if we're measuring "success" by whether or not we've made things better for the Iraqi people, I'm afraid the answer is going to be a lot more complicated than we'd like.
I'm not so sure that they actually had a secular state, tho. Can a state which is dominated by a religious minority that actively supresses and murders members of the subjective religious majority really be called secular. Further, in the lead up to our adventure, this same state was cloaking itself in the garb of an islamist state. Doesnt sound too secular to me, but what do I know.
One of the only reasons I felt that GB was better than JK was I believed that despite the political cost, GB honestly believed that America had an obligation to do something to change the status quo in the middle east, that it was our duty as the world's great power to make this morass a better place. I believed that he had the strength of his convictions to stick this thing out until Iraq actually became the beacon of the muslim world. It hurts me to now realize that while GB may hve more fortitude in this regard than JK, he doesnt seem to have enough to stick this thing out all the way, just a little bit farther.
The sad fact is, is that we cannot leave until Iraq is actually stable. We cannot leave the mess that we created because that would, actually, let the terrorists win. We cannot have another lebanon or somalia. We cannot leave because oil is the life blood of modern society and they, and the iranians and saudis and bahrainis and kuwaitis and whoever the hell else lives over there have a lot of it. We cannot leave because we owe the people of Iraq to make their country safe for them. We cannot leave because Iraq can become a beacon for the islamic world, if this experiment, of course, works.
For me, this was never really about WMDs although, I tend to think that the media portrayals both before and after the war were skewed (before trumping up how much Saddam had or how close to getting, after trumping up how little and how far). I believed and still believe that we have an obligation to make the world a better place, if only for no other reason than no one else will. The whole region is a mess and no one, prior to our adventure, has really done anything to try to make it better since these countries were created in the division of the ottomon empire after wwi. We have the ability, I hope we have the will, to finish what we started and meet the duty we owe.
thats my 2cents, anyway
LE
I might vote for you if you ran on that platform, because you can whoop up a stirring speech better than most, but I don't for a second believe that there's anyone except Bush left in his administration that believes that we ought to stay and finish the job. The political costs are just too high.
Plus, there's the matter of not even knowing what the "job" is. We want Iraq to become a beacon of what? Bloody chaos? "Hope?"
Please, if you, the man I know and love as a grouchy curmudgeon, is going to advocate for making over Iraq into some "beacon of hope for the middle east" I'm going to need some warning, because I'm going to have to be pretty damn drunk to swallow that from you.
[Sarcastro, if that is indeed what is about to happen, I invite you to drink with me.]
While I am, on occassion, curmudgeonly, I feel that the extent of my curmudgeonliness, is often overestimated. I am one of those very rare, somewhat oxymoronic, hopeful curmudgeons. I dont think anyone who is facing or realistically hoping for reelection is really all that for this adventure, at least not very much for it publically, and most everyone, unfortunately, is signing on to the belief that we can set, at this time, a realistic timetable for our withdrawal. And this makes me sad, because if we leave early, which I am 97% positive we will do, we will have lost a great opportunity to do something that should have been done 30 years ago - take some sort of decisive action to curtail the despotic regimes that dominate the middle east. 30 years ago we were still smarting from vietnam and were much more isolationist than we are now, although that streak still runs deep, and we had the red bugbear that would challenge any unilateral (or mostly unilateral if the brits also came along) on our part.
but now, most of those earlier concerns are gone, the only impediment to doing this thing right is our own gut, and I fear that it is failing. The reality is, that our losses in Iraq, while individually, are sad, in reality are minescule. The reality is that all though not covered as much as it should be, we are doing good works on the ground, schools are being built, utilities restored, lives made better. We are curing the most overt of saddam's environmental abuses and restoring the marshes. these are things that we should be proud of, and for which the Iraq people (I hope) and the internation community should be thankful for our sacrifice.
Instead, we hear daily numbers and far to much time is spent kowtowing to Cindy Sheehan, who blames Israel for the whole mess. I really thought only the arabs still blamed the jews for all of the evils in their world, but apparently americans do as well.
I still tend to believe (maybe its the last remnant of my very short lived youthful idealism) that we had an obligation to start this adventure and once embarking we must continue and see it through to the end, not the most expediant time to extricate ourselves, but until Iraq truly is the nation that its people deserve. I think its a cost that we can bear and that we must bear.
LE
Please, it's utterly beneath you to buy into this line of Cindy Sheehan bashing. Who the fuck cares if she thinks that our relationship to Israel is to blame for the mess in Iraq?
She's not a politician or a political pundent or a member of the media. She's a woman who thought we were doing the right thing, because of the weapons of mass destruction, and supported Bush, to some extent, even after her son died, until she found out that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction and that Bush knew there weren't. Then she got pissed off.
Does she only have a right to be pissed if her politics are unimpeachable?
Again, I think you know my feelings about that. I think it's bullshit that we expect anyone who does anything to be above reproach. We seem to be a nation full of folks who believe that only perfect people ought to act. Well, fuck that; I'm done waiting for Jesus. He's not coming back.
And I suppose I respect your youthful idealism, to some extent, but I don't understand why you think America has an obligation to "make the world a better place."
Plus, what definition of better shall we use? Is it better that it's us anally raping prisoners than Saddam's soldiers? Is it better that all rural Muslims in Iraq can carve off their daughters' labia and not just the Kurds?
Frankly, I suspect we're leaving things just as bad--but bad in different ways--as we found it.
If we know our methods don't work to make things better, why do we keep trying those same methods? And why would you, a reasonable man, trained to think logically, support that?
If they aren't going to "work things out for themselves", just who is going to work it out for them? You and me? Hey, I'm all in favor of imperialism and colonialism, but that strategy has fallen out of favor recently. Self-determinism is the only way for these people to grow up. Part of growing up is being allowed to make mistakes. It took about a hundred years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act before we started removing our collective national heads out of our collective national rectums. Would things have gone smoother if Norway came over and tried to force us to speed up our removing of head from ass?
And when you slap "Allah Is Great" on your flag, even for crass political purposes, can your shitty secular state be considered secular anymore?
See you next Thursday. You are buying.
Are you going to be there?! Well, I hope you like cheap beer, because that's all I can afford to buy you.
Free and Cold is my favorite kind.
I buy into the sheehan bashing because of how she is portrayed and that her moral character and right to speak has been elevated beyond anyone elses, her loss is no greater than anyone elses, her disillusionment, while it certainly gives her the right to her frustration and our constitution gives her the right to speak her mind, jsut because she has lost something doesnt make her special. her son chose the service, he volunteered, knowing that there were risks, risks for which he was compensated (maybe not enough, but there is no question he knew what he was getting). It is not entirely her fault that she has been made into this tortured figure, the media has a large part to play, but this is a position and a role she has cultivated. If she wants to become a public figure, exalted for her martyrdom,we should take a critical eye to the opinions she voices.
I am not so sure that our methods dont work, or if they dont, that we know they dont work. We have never really had a failure in nation building, or rebuilding. we managed to make functional democracies out of japan and germany after wwii, but, that situation was obviously different. even our limited colonial adventures produces viable and stable (if not ideal) nation states. this is the first time that we've meddled like this and not had everything go swimmingly. (vietnam is different because their we embroiled ourselves in an active civil war, here we started the whole thing). Maybe Iraq will bloody our noses enough to where we do not begin these adventures, but I doubt it, our memories are too short.
As to why we have an obligation to make the world a better place, it is, to me, at least, a question of what is our role in the global community, if we are the guardian of freedom and democracy, as we allege, than we must pay the costs of that position.
LE
See, but this is exactly where I think we come back to my original point--deals that don't really exist.
Who says "if we are the guardian of freedom and democracy, as we allege, than we must pay the costs of that position."? Who set the terms of that agreement? Who agreed to it?
We all have these ideas about what the "right" course of action is based on our understanding of what the social contract between a government and its citizens is and what a country's responsibility to the rest of the world is.
But my point is that we're all operating with vastly different ideas not just because we disagree on what might be the "right" course of action, but even on what we understand as the social contract.
Though Taketoshi keeps trying to assure me that we're all done with this nonsense distinction between modernism and postmodernism, I feel like I should say, for the record, that I'm more a modernist in this regard.
I believe that the cacaphony is almost deafening and that every one is going around with their own ideas of what things mean. But I don't believe that the chaos means things are meaningless and/or that searching for meaning is useless.
I believe we can come to an agreement or at least an understanding of what it is we're doing, that we can make meaning.
Now the truth is that it may be that what all these idiots that surround us do--to just accept the proscribed meaning doled out by politicians and talking heads--gets us to the same place as those of us who fret over everything and question everything and really try to get at the heart of things. It may be that the rah-rah non-thinking patriotism of most Americans ends up in no different place than the deep unsettled untrusting love of humanity that I have.
But I have to believe that my way is worthwhile. That it's better to know and question and not be able to do anything than it is to not know and not question and never think there's anything for you to do.
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