Development to Democracy 07/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Afghanistan, Democracy, Foreign Affairs Magazine, Foreign Policy, Politics
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FIFTY YEARS AGO, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out that rich countries are much more likely than poor countries to be democracies. Although this claim was contested for many years, it has held up against repeated tests. The causal direction of the relationship has also been questioned: Are rich countries more likely to be democratic because democracy makes countries rich, or is development conducive to democracy? Today, it seems clear that the causality runs mainly from economic development to democratization. During early industrialization, authoritarian states are just as likely to attain high rates of growth as are democracies. But beyond a certain level of economic development, democracy becomes increasingly likely to emerge and survive. Thus among the scores of countries that democratized around 1990, most were middle-income countries: almost all the high-income countries made the transition. Moreover, among the countries that democratized between 1970 and 1990, democracy has survived in every country that made the transition when it was at the economic level of Argentina today or higher; among the countries that made the transition when they were below this level, democracy had an average life expectancy of only eight years.
The strong correlation between development and democracy reflects the fact that economic development is conducive to democracy. The question of why, exactly, development leads to democracy has been debated intensely, but the answer is beginning to emerge. It does not result from some disembodied force that causes democratic institutions to emerge automatically when a country attains a certain level of GDP. Rather economic development brings social and political changes only when it changes people’s behavior. Consequently economic development is conducive to democracy to the extent that it , first, creates a large, educated, and articulate middle class of people who are accustomed to thinking for themselves and, second, transforms people’s values and motivations.
Photo Credit: The Christian Science Monitor
SOMEONE SHOULD be talking honestly about our democratic project in Afghanistan, a time and battle tested swath of area ruled only by tribal allegiances and faith, and with a literacy rate that is not particularly buoyant for even the most mediocre of standards, which is perhaps the greatest obstacle towards starting the process of development that leads to a sustainable democracy, as pointed to in this 2009 essay by Ronald Englehart and Christian Welzel from Foreign Affairs: We just can’t reach the goal of having a stable, democratic Afghanistan, until its people find a way to develop economically from the rural agrarian and (narco-crop) society it is, to a more modern one.
Yes, there is rampant corruption starting at the very, very top of the country and which filters down through every facet of the society and economy, but the greatest challenge is not really winning the hearts and minds; it seems the greatest challenge is sparking those minds to want something more than what they have now — something they have always known — to something possibly greater but unknown and much more arduous, simply because of the learning curve involved. Until this happens, any real democracy in this mystical land is unlikely to take hold.
‘The Anderson Platoon’ 05/13/2011
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COUNTER-INSURGENT WARS are as hellish as conventional ones. (Perhaps more.) Everything is much more insidious in such conflicts: the enemy is more covert, more aware and exploiting of its surroundings, and much more able and willing to use local citizens to meet its ends. The farmer by day is now a soldier at night, the young man or young woman, obedient and sensitive, is just a personal and familial vendetta and a rifle away from being dangerous. All of which is exacerbated, motivated and inflamed at times, by the mere presence of foreign soldiers in a country, and the unintended consequences of interactions between those citizens and those soldiers. And that was Vietnam.
French director, Pierre Schoendorffer — originally known for his gritty and realistic 1965, French war film on the country’s Indochina excursion, La 317e Section, (clip here), which won a Cannes Festival prize for “best screenplay” — was a war correspondent for the national television station, and was originally embedded with forces in Vietnam’s infamous Dien Bien Phu in 1954, documenting and reporting on the French Army’s struggles there. But those reels and his intended full documentary never saw the light of day, as the material was confiscated upon his surrender alongside the French Army to the Viet Cong.
Photo Credit: EBONY
Following his work with French military forces and their departure from the region, and just months after he finished La 317e Section, Schoendorffer was given a second opportunity to finish his initial 1954 project, that immersive documentary following a military infantry unit in Vietnam, which had been confiscated. Only this time, he’d be swapping the French Army for the United States Army; as the American side of the war was beginning to escalate in the wake of France’s defeat and the Second Indochina War was set to fully ignite.
From September to October of 1965, he worked in a two-man crew, on a documentary following a rather unique bunch: the U.S. Army’s 12th Calvary, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon. The group was unique, precisely because of who was leading it, a 24-year-old, black West Point graduate by the name of Joseph Anderson. For six weeks, Schoendorffer followed Anderson’s unit on seek-and-destroy missions, where soldiers would wade through the dense jungle looking for an enemy to fight, and faithfully executing the cornerstone of the United States’ Vietnam strategy. The Anderson Platoon won the 1968 Academy Award in the documentary category. It is an honest meditation on the monotony, tremulous fear and odd experience of war.
Fiona Banner’s Harrier 03/22/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Aviation, Defense, Design, Global.add a comment
Photo Credit: Fiona Banner
EVEN hung by the tail, the Harrier is a symbol of power. But, like the assassinated Mussolini strung up by his feet, it also shows that power is mutable. I couldn’t resist lying underneath, nose-to-nose, sensing the weight and mass and power of it above me, like a stilled pendulum. From this position all I could see was the circular nose cone, filling my vision like a football about to belt a goalie in the face. I am less certain that Fiona Banner needed to draw feathers on the bodywork and wings of the jet, even though she’s done it discreetly; the Harrier is in any case named after a bird of prey. Maybe she wanted us to think of vermin strung up on a gamekeeper’s gibbet, or a game bird hung in Tate Britain’s neo-classical larder. Banner probably also wants to remind us of earlier drawings she has made, using fighter-plane wings as her canvas or paper. Previously she has written moment-by-moment descriptions of war movies – including Apocalypse Now and Black Hawk Down – and of the experience of drawing from a live model. Now she gives us the real thing.
“Fiona Banner’s Toys for Boys Are a Turn-on at Tate Britain,” The Guardian
[...]
‘WE all hate war but these objects inspire a strange enthusiasm in us. When you reflect on their beauty it’s a strange thing, people say surely they are designed with an aesthetic in mind and, of course, they’re not. They are absolutely designed to function and that function is to kill, and that says something questionable about our aesthetic judgement and makes us ask questions about our moral position.’
Visit Fiona Banner’s site [Here]
Read “Fiona Banner’s Toys for Boys are a Turn-on at Tate Britain” [Here]
Read “Tate Britain: Fiona Banner Exhibition” [Here]
Read more about Fiona Banner’s exhibit prep [Here]
C.J. Chivers’s Tumblr: ‘The Gun’ 03/17/2011
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Photo Credit: The Gun
TUMBLR. It’s a micro-blogging platform that changed everything, and “the game,” as they say, making posting text and media easier than ever before. In the ever-democratizing of the Web, where media persons become accessible citizens/commenting civilian and layman/woman/civilian become “citizen journalists,” and both are now a part of the Fourth Estate; the faintly ghosted demarcation between journalist and information consumers is now lighter and less-identifiable.
Except, most citizen journalists have yet en masse covered wars, because, well, insanity and monetary reward are sorely lacking on that point. And so, mainstream journalists are still the primary voice for our understanding conflict, but still, traditional journalism is limited by profit concerns and editorial space issues, and while many of the journos at C.J. Chivers’s New York Times employer are provided blogs to flesh-out their own stories and give their coverage even more depth, sometimes, there are still stray shots from the mind that need to be broadcasted. Much like The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Mother Jones and Newsweek, C.J. Chivers, the war correspondent, and member of the traditional news complex, has joined Tumblr to also provide depth to his coverage which spans print, online, and the New York Times‘s At War blog and a companion Twitter feed.
Chivers has used his Tumblr account as both a personal advertisement for his eponymous book, The Gun — seriously, you gotta move units when you have a book; not even kidding — to producing content for it as another outlet for his coverage of the still-going war in Afghanistan and the newer one in Libya. Recently, Chivers posted on the Ghanzi Province Taliban, and some captured photos reflecting this branch’s use of children for propaganda, and which may also imply their use in actual combat, which isn’t unfounded, and has been the case in every recent modern war there in the region.
The At War blog also published a companion post, about an engagement in January during which three Taliban fighters were killed, and then a pre-teen or early teenaged boy tried to retrieve a dead Talib’s rifle, and was killed, too. Among the captured photographs were the three above, not of teenagers but of very young children in an assortment of martial poses. These images, reminiscent of the pageantry sometimes seen in propaganda from various Palestinian groups, are unusual for Afghanistan. Child soldiering, by its broadest definition, has been common in Afghanistan for decades. But photographs of children this young under arms are not part of the usual Taliban pablum. The boy who tried to pick up the dropped rifle and flee, and these much younger boys copping fighter stances, offer much to think about.
Read more from The Gun [Here]
Underground (Ice Nuke) Ops 02/24/2011
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Photo Credit: BLDNGBLG
WHILE I’d like this title to be used for another historical post (as opposed to this one) dedicated to subterranean warfare and “tunnel rats,” the time hasn’t come yet. So I’m using it here, with the parenthetical, “Ice Nuke.” Recently, the fantastic BLDNGBLG site that has consistently garnered nothing but an enthusiastic-near-religious following and rave reviews from many sectors of the Web, had a post on Camp Century or “Project Iceworm”; the U.S. Army’s Cold War research into the feasibility of creating a web of ballistic missile sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet. According to BLDNGBLG, Camp Century was to be a completely self-contained city beneath the ice that harnessed the power of a mobile nuclear reactor — the Alco PM-2A, according to BLDGBLG’s interview subject, Frank J. Leskovitz, who runs his own Camp Century Web site — to keep it lit.
Photo Credit: Frank J. Leskovitz
Per “Project Iceworm’s” Wiki entry, the web of nuclear missiles was intended to be numbered at 600, and the actual missile locus were to be rotated to different points, periodically. The city at Camp Century featured a shop, a movie theater, a hospital; and water for the camp was provided by the melting glaciers, and was regularly tested. Ultimately, building a network of intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites, targeted at Russia, beneath the ice, failed because of an inability to take into account the shifting of ice in such a tenuous arrangement between man and nature; the modus vivendi between the goals of the U.S. government and Mother Nature were just never ironed-out. On the creation of the network of tunnels that were later filled with more habitable prefab spaces:
Long ice trenches were created by Swiss made “Peter Plows,” which were giant rotary snow milling machines. The machine’s two operators could move up to 1200 cubic yards of snow per hour. The longest of the twenty-one trenches was known as “Main Street.” It was over 1100 feet long and 26 feet wide and 28 feet high. The trenches were covered with arched corrugated steel roofs which were then buried with snow.
[...]
Each seventy-six foot long electrically heated barrack contained a common area and five 156 square foot rooms. Several feet of airspace was maintained around each building to minimize melting. To further reduce heat build-up, fourteen inch diameter “air wells” were dug forty feet down into the tunnel floors to introduce cooler air. Nearly constant trimming of the tunnel walls and roofs was found to be necessary to combat snow deformation.
Read more at BLDNGBLG [Here]
Read more and watch additional media at Frank J. Leskovitz’s site [Here]
Mother Jones: ‘Inside Haiti’s Tent Cities’ 02/05/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Global, Politics.add a comment
NEARLY a year after the Haiti earthquake, one million people live in camps terrorized by rape gangs. At least Sean Penn’s camp has lights, a rare bid for safety when even a walk to the bathroom can be dangerous at night. One “model” tent camp is treeless desert, boiling in the heat. Billions in US aid have gone undelivered, corporations are building sweatshop relocation centers, and crime is commonplace. What happened to Haiti’s reconstruction? MoJo human rights reporter Mac McClelland went to Port-au-Prince to find out. The photos in this essay illustrate what she saw; click here to read her related dispatches from Haiti.
D.A.R.P.A.’s Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Experiment 01/28/2011
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THE IRAN uprising and the parallel media conversation concerning Twitter’s role in it as a means to “get the word out” to the world, were an indication of both the power of the Internet and social media, at least in perception — even if as Malcolm Gladwell argues otherwise in “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” — and their ultimate, long-term usefulness outside of personal expression and commercial applications; as intelligence agencies, hackers, foreign governments and the upper echelons of the American defense apparatus already know. The question is, however, just how powerful and useful are these social media tools? Since, as noted, there is plenty of skepticism as to how well they can mobilize a disparate group. And is this “power” even something able to be “metric-ed”?
As pointed out in Foreign Policy‘s “Misreading Tehran,” it’s hard to spearhead a political revolt through social media and the Net, particularly when those tweeting and updating their Facebook are often not actually in the location of the place they want to start a revolution in, and aren’t necessarily as privy to the spontaneity of the word-of-mouth interactions in crowds, which is what happened with many of the prominent figures behind the social media involved in the Iran protests; many of whom were merely following the demonstrations from the United States.
But, nonetheless, if conditions were made so that most of those using a media platform to air grievances and express dissent against the authority of a state or dictator, were indeed in the area, like a Radio Free Europe; social media helping to grease the wheels and multiply manpower quickly for demonstrations, would be undeniable.
(Example, though a relatively nefarious application, depending on the situation:) Can governments/hackers/terror networks use social media to help foment uprisings in nations already teetering in the balance; particularly when those nations are rocked by economic, political and social unrest; and with a youth population chomping a the bit for democracy? Since Iran seems to indicate so, and even though, that kind of meddlesome approach to other nations’ affairs of the state by Western governments has only been troubled and universally presumed, it is nonetheless an interesting answer to have.
Can social media provide a clearer picture of real-time, on-the-ground intelligence or more likely, accentuate it? Can it help in the spotting of a wayward, priority object, or a high-valued asset or person of interest quicker? Like a suspect on the lamb? Or a downed pilot? After all, status updates and tweets are many times location and first-person reportage of events, which are the very basis of raw intelligence. And can social media tools be effectively used as an open intelligence network in and of itself? Say, if enough were recruited and incentivized, to work as a low risk, multi-eyed intelligence network via social media, in foreign lands, that could augment existing human intelligence and signals intelligence?
In late 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (D.A.R.P.A.) looked to answer some of these questions and identify some blind spots, concerning just how powerful social media are, and at least begin working towards finding some answers on similar questions of what social media tools can be applied to what problems, with some specifically goal-oriented data to back it up. D.A.R.P.A. conducted an experiment allowing everyone who wanted to participate to do so, in an experiment on Web-based “crowd-sourcing” — a term that refers to the application of many anonymous or unidentified parties, or an entire community, to meet a goal through open means — and how it could help in the augmenting of the traditional means of information gathering.
An example of crowd-sourcing is as simple as when you ask the Tumblr community for their “reax” on a movie, or when one asks the Twitterverse about the particularly great restaurants in a city they’re in on vacation: the answers flood in, and your decisions are based on a synthesis and analysis of the information. The experiment wasn’t just a crowd-sourcing endeavor, though, it was a competition known as the “D.A.R.P.A. Network Challenge” that awarded $40,000 USD to the first correct identifier of the locations of 10 “moored,” red weather balloons scattered across the contiguous United States, in areas readily visible. The geniuses at M.I.T.’s Media Lab won the 40K, not surprisingly, and did it in nine hours.
Just how the M.I.T team did it, was through a parallel social network — a pyramid scheme, essentially — which rewarded the participation of everyone who joined the network, geared to finding the balloons, even if they knew that they could not find the red spheres. What this yielded was a singular-minded intelligence unit working over the Web, which could find the balloons’ coordinates and provided a structure where even those who could not find the balloons, would still assist in identifying people who could find them.
How this could be useful, is beyond defense. Everything from Amber Alerts, to use in apprehending the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted; to use in a world-wide hunt for a terrorist, just hours after an incident; or it being implemented as another form of an Emergency Broadcast System, or any other form of dragnet or national early warning system, could come of this, or employ this schema.
What is remarkable is how quickly the M.I.T. team achieved the goal, without any kind of prior infrastructure. What if the government and law enforcement employed a similar system, but with a well-developed infrastructure, as a multi-use tool? Though there are the inevitable drawbacks of information overload/bottle-necking, thus creating inefficiency, and then there is also misinformation; something the M.I.T. team had to ferret out and isolate, as there was another team providing them with false locations.
Moreover, there are concerns on the civil liberties front, as this could become a virtual Big-Brother network, where perhaps, citizens themselves have tacitly agreed to their own participation and questionable surveillance, in the name of security. As we saw with the legal ramifications of 9/11, the potential usefulness of this application of social media to defense, law enforcement and the security apparatus, must be hand-wringingly weighed against the potential benefits.
Read the official press release from D.A.R.P.A. [Here]
Read M.I.T. Media Lab’s press release [Here]
Read an interview at CNET [Here]
Burn Bags, Disney, Pizza and Plastic 01/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism, Media, Policy.add a comment
TO TRANSPORT the huge heaps of “burn bags” crammed with discarded secrets, N.S.A. turned appropriately enough to Florida’s Disney World. In Fantasyland and the rest of the Magic Kingdom, accumulated trash is transported automatically by underground conveyor belt to a central disposal waste facility. Similarly, burn bags from N.S.A., the intelligence community’s Fantasyland, are sent down a Rube Goldberg-like-chute-and-conveyor-belt-contraption known as the Automatic Material Collection System. The 6 1/2-foot wide conveyor then dumps the bags into a giant blenderlike vat that combines water, steam and chemicals to break the paper down into pulp. The pulped paper is processed, dried, funneled through a fluffer, and finally, fifteen minutes later, baled. Within a few weeks the documents that once held the nation’s most precious secrets hold steaming pepperoni pizzas. In 1998, the agency took in $58, 953 in profit from the sale of its declassified pizza boxes.
Problems arise, however, when thick magnetic tapes, computer diskettes, and a variety of other non-water soluble items are thrown into the burn bags. Once a week, destruction officers assigned to Crypto City’s Classified Material’s Conversion Plant have to use rakes, shovels, and hacksaws to break up the “tail,” the clumps of hard, tangled debris that clog up the room-sized Diposall. Among the stray items that have found their way into the plant are a washing machine motor, a woman’s slip, and an assortment of .22-caliber bullets. Because this residue, totaling more than fifty-two tons a year, still may contain some identifiable scrap bearing an N.S.A. secret, it is left to drain for about five days and then put in boxes to be burned in a special incinerator.
N.S.A. was able to turn an additional thirty tons of old newspapers, magazines, and computer manuals into pizza boxes as a result of spring cleaning dubbed the “Paper Chase,” in 1999. But paper is not the only thing N.S.A. recycles. It also converts metal from the tiny chips and circuit boards in the agency’s obsolete computers into reusable scrap. So many computers hit the junk pile every year that the agency is able to recycle more than 438 tons of metal annually from the small components.
- James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Read an excerpt from Body of Secrets at Random House [Here]
On ‘Collapse’ 12/28/2010
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COLLAPSE is a screed dedicated to our collective stead; a rant on where humanity lies now, in the cross-hairs. A coda for all, on just how perilous these time of ours are: What with failing governments and the beholden life we live, more so than ever, to systems and the untrustworthy who run them, the swaths of the greedy and the powerful who dominate us beyond our sights, with seemingly no salve from the pain created by their efforts, incompetence, indifference and stubbornness to adapt.
To the pessimistic and cynical among us, Collapse will be a full-on confirmation of the belief that the globe is inching closer to, or is now past the point of the moral justifications for its saving. And beyond that, a realization that it is at a critical “doom point,” [I'm attempting a neologism]; a moment where the recognition of a coming human global catastrophe — in this case, the result of the failings of the international banking economy and the lack of safe and sustainable energy resources — and attempts to stave it off, are looking less reasonable and likely ineffective.
The pessimists (and political realists) see this now in the degradation of the environment, in our always stalled and frustrated search for clean energy technology that would provide security for us all; the rising food prices, and multiplying fiscal concerns that have wrapped around us like a boa constrictor, with the throttling beginning and perhaps irreversible.
Collapse and its discourse — the entwine of many failing things — places the crux of its story on the down trend of the world systems we so depend on and their interconnectedness, but primarily it looks at our petroleum dependency and the idea of “peak oil.” Peak oil theory is based on the research of Berkeley professor Marion K. Hubbert, who once worked for the United States Geological Survey, Shell Oil and the Board of Economic Warfare, and who also taught at Columbia and Stanford.
Hubbert’s contention was that since oil is a finite thing, its distribution must look like a Bell curve, where there is a maximum amount of oil to be extracted in the world — based on his projections that would be reached at some point in the 1960s or 1970s — and once that maximum limit is reached, oil production would begin to decline exponentially, until there was no more. This is known as “Hubbert’s Peak” or “Hubbert’s Curve.” And the implications of it for an overpopulated planet where almost everything runs on oil becomes rather dire, because there are now more consumers than before and oil resources are gobbled up even swifter than once projected, which would mean that the life we know is close to being no longer. Hubbert’s theory and “peak oil” have been part of “Doom’s Day” prognosticators’ plot-line and conspiracy theorists’ discussions for decades, but that doesn’t mean it should be scoffed at, since it is well-accepted in science circles.
Collapse‘s interview subject, Michael Ruppert, which the documentary solely revolves around in an Errol Morris style, believes in peak oil. What’s important about Ruppert is that he claims to have former ties to the national security apparatus, by way of his father, and he has worked as an L.A.P.D. officer and investigative journalist; his Web site and newsletter were subscribed to by members of Congress, and he has also written for the the Los Angeles Times. Ruppert thinks that he is found evidence that peak oil isn’t just a theory; it’s very real, and that we’ve reached “Hubbert’s Peak,” and are now in the midst of a process of tremendous, catastrophic decline. And while we are not at the tipping point for the chaos, he warns that when oil becomes far too pricey to pay for, our stability and global security will rapidly fall by the wayside.
The problem for the skeptics who see this film and notice Ruppert’s possible emotional instability, if not mental instability, which is perhaps because of his belief and constantly ignored warnings, is that it does seem to be beyond plausible that we are now in the midst of this kind of collapse; when considering all the apparent evidence. (Industrialization is now more than a century old, so resources have to be in decline, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is generally secretive about its production capabilities and there are not just more cars, but more energy-dependent everything, and all of which run on oil.)
The film resonates in the mind, and at our emotional core, because of a number of things, from: the heroin pumped national psyche of America, mired in malaise, but also the doldrums of much of the globe; with all of us depressingly fatigued by wars; by historic monetary crises, and in America, by the increasing cost of life and the three decades of stagnant wages and the confounding explanations of already complex systems of economic manipulation, constantly being given out by officials. We just don’t understand why what used to work, isn’t working anymore.
And then there is the depressing lack of faith in the people who run our governments now, which wants its own special direct-line connection to the warnings in Collapse to be made; a confidence which began to be chipped away through the many high-profile scandals and abuses of power from Nixon on, and which point to the documentary’s “truthfulness” in some way, because it’s focus is a man who is now screaming “fire!” in the movie theater, to use a mixed metaphor, and many of us feel his exact way. And yet much of the political environment is still tangled in trivial battles about culture and personal “morality.” While these multiple issues of governance have no direct connection to the ideas presented in Collapse, we secretly desire and produce their conflation.
And so Collapse strikes a chord, because we all look around and see or believe that no one is doing a real thing about the decay we do see, nor can they. (And so are we wrong?) There is no immediate imperative for the world to get together and solve such big issues as the ones that face humanity in energy (and finance), possibly because the human brain is geared towards dealing in immediacy and the consequences of these issues might not be seen for a generation — much like the very connected issue of climate change — which is just enough time for humans to look past them.
But our need for a narrative to confirm that this is no longer our imaginations: We are now, as a fact, worse off than we thought we ever could be at this time, and sooner than we thought; is bolstered by this film. The problem is, despite the documentary’s paranoia (and odd character study of its interview subject), and even much of our own beliefs, it seems less like a confirmation, than getting what we wished for, and now regretting it. The evidence in Collapse, even to the skeptical mind, should be the greatest red flag of all, because if we do not begin to even accept the idea that we might be in a real bad way; then there is nothing to stop us from letting things become tragically worse. It is a warning, telling us that our time here is finite, but no one is necessarily listening.
Our Next-Door Narco Wars 12/09/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics.add a comment
Photo Credit: The New York Review of Books
I GREW UP in the Los Angeles area, in the capital city of a next-door-to-L.A. county, and the main culprit city, which helped it lead the nation in per capita murders for a span of years, and not just because it was the largest city in the largest county (by size) in the nation, but primarily because of the gang violence that was, in part, fueled by hard times, the city’s drug trade and the revolving door of criminal enterprises between it and Los Angeles.
So when I think back on my upbringing compared to my peers at university, or most of the people I know, I realize that I come from a dramatically different environment and outlook, despite being just as middle class as them; simply because the kids I played basketball with at school, my friends, part of my immigrant family’s struggles with drugs and violence, or the areas I traversed when I first started driving and hanging out after class, were these very blocks where much of this city’s violence occurred. And in that small way, I became part of a larger social theory.
In African-American studies there is a notion known as “linked fate”: the premise that blacks, no matter how much they are physically separated from the “underclass” — this term is fraught with negative connotations to me — of their population, are always connected psychically, psychologically and socially to it; and thus never truly finding a cover from the buffeting of the life outside the middle class, lower middle class and even working class, and particularly knowing that its lot is in some way forever associated to those who are not as fortunate as them. It’s a rather dramatic realization, if one thinks about it, because most social and ethnic groups operate on some level of class divisions that allow for their distancing from typical, categorical lumping, but it’s argued that this is less so for African-Americans for a number of reasons. (Like, say, perhaps, racial profiling providing a reminder, or being just a generation removed from a hard-scrabble life.)
And for Los Angeles, Mexico and the southern border cities of America, my personal story and the social theory of “linked fate” are being played out quite well. Los Angeles, San Diego and all of the conglomeration of areas of California known as the Southland, and the many towns in Arizona and Texas, are never too far removed from the narco-terror problems of Mexico and all of Mexico’s population. No matter the city and its affluence; they are never disconnected from the realities of the ever-gripping hand of the illegal drug trade and its unbridled force of violence and the vortex of lives it enraptures.
It is estimated that 28,000 people have died on the streets of the nation since 2006, the year Felipe Calderon was elected, as a result of the drug trade and perhaps the “drug state.” (The country relies heavily on its receipts from the drug trade, as the cash flow is undoubtedly welcome in a nation with very few employment prospects.) That number of 28,000 is gruesome in and of itself, but it does not take into account just how violent life there is. Surely, the “others” who have been forgotten are the ones who have been raped or kidnapped in the nation, just because of the wanton lawlessness and rule of the drug cartels who hold elements in the government, police and army, it seems. Nor does the estimated figure project those killed across the borders in any of the towns in America from California to Arizona, Texas and the rest of the American southwest, which happen to be perfectly logical points of entry for smuggling operations.
The problem, beyond the most obvious one of how to stop it and prevent it, is how to report it and help others understand its dimensions and scope? With numbers this large and swelling, with violence so absurd that it seems to be a play on a grind-house film (without the sense of humor), how do journalists tell the gruesome, rough-hewn reality without producing disinterest or indifference? Nikolas Kristof at the New York Times once pointed out that in reporting the problems of Darfur, he had to being to personalize the coverage, focusing on individuals within the conflict and how it was personally affecting their lives; else the sheer numbers would produce an abstraction in the mind of his readers.
We, the people in charge of telling the story, know far too little ourselves about a clandestine upstart society we long viewed as marginal, and what little we know cannot be explained in print media’s standard eight hundred words or less (or broadcast’s two minutes or under). And the story, like the murders, is endlessly repetitive and confusing: there are the double-barreled family names, the shifting alliances, the double-crossing army generals, the capo betrayed by a close associate who is in turn killed by another betrayer in a small town with an impossible name, followed by another capo with a double-barreled last name who is betrayed by a high-ranking army officer who is killed in turn. The absence of understanding of these surface narratives is what keeps the story static, and readers feeling impotent. Enough time has passed, though, since the beginning of the drug war nightmare that there is now a little perspective on the problem. Academics on both sides of the border have been busy writing, and so have the journalists with the most experience. Thanks to their efforts, we can now begin to place some of the better-known traffickers in their proper landscape.
“The Murderers of Mexico,” The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books has an interesting piece on this problem now being ironed-out. As the writer of the piece explained, covering the problems in Mexico is not easy, because of the culture involved: what with the “double-barrelled names” running into each other; the limited time or space to cover the ever-depressing and nuance-needed reporting now, the numbers, the reasons behind the strategic killings, and even how the more random happened, and so on. For years, everyone who could and had the ample courage needed to do so reported on the problems of the Mexican drug trade, but maybe were ill-equipped to do so. And the drug trade and its terrorists’ ways had to have had a chilling effect for even some of the most hardened and experienced. Journalists are intimidated, killed and so forth. Not to mention, the heinous acts of the cartels alone — even without their targeting of journalists — would scare any normal person without icy nerves and an iron stomach. And if these stories were never reported or accurately reported, the political pressure on both sides of the border is somewhat lessened. And so, it is necessary to praise these most undaunted of journalists, who cover the problem now, with great ability.
But moreover, it isn’t just a matter of if the reporting itself is accurate and able to fish out the truth from the convulsion of the details, coming from even those with experience: those reporters who are not struggling with the similar and double-barreled names, the myriad family connections and networks spread across the country and on both sides of the borders, or the weird ritual practices of the killings by some in the cartels, their own mythologies and so on, but also how the narrative is framed. This is not just a problem for Mexico, it is a problem for us, or perhaps more precisely, a problem that is the result of us. For all of the Minute Men Project volunteer sentinels and anti-Mexican rhetoric spewers of the fringe right, they miss the point. This is not about culture, this is about money for both sides of the fence, from the way we Draconianly handle drug offenses for a prison-industrial complex, to Mexico’s healthy economic gains from the drug trade, to the resources our government spends on drug interdiction and the war, that keeps people employed, and probably a host of things I’ve yet to think about .
As most right-wing politicos and a sundry of economists often go to the well of “letting the market being the judge, jury and advocate” for any number of things; if the politicians and policy-makers ever applied such a capitalist model to the drug-enforcement problems of Mexico, they’d be far from wrong. Because the fact of the matter is, if there were no American demand or even a somehow diminished demand for illicit drugs (maybe through de-criminalization and the legalization of some drugs to place better governmental controls and truly focus on prevention), and if our policy makers were more honest about our need to treat and rehabilitate our nation of abusers, as purely a matter of long-term solutions to an ever-expanded, profligate, hopeless “War on Drugs,” then we’d do all of us and our neighbors to the south a great deal of service.
The simple lack of collaboration between our two nations, engulfed in this battle against the cartels with no regard for anything, with each side of the divide looking at the other with plenty of glint-eyed blame, and the Mexican government, for the most part afraid to respond to the cartels, has only made the situation worse, since we are incoherently addressing a rather complex problem. As seen in “The Murderers of Mexico” and the Mexican army’s own fear and reticence to respond to the grotesque massacre of 72 migrants for no clear reason on August 23, of this year, just 100 miles away from their base, by the “Zetas,” a muscle group and franchise employed by trafficking cartels, after hours of a heated affair; the authority of Mexico on this matter has been lost altogether, and the drug cartels now run the nation with carte blanche, able to murder in slews in now even the most absurdly asinine way, doing so just because, with no relevance to their operation, just force of habit.
Read The New York Review of Books, “The Murderers of Mexico” [Here]
