The White Peril 白禍

I only comment on the stories that move me to do so, but it would be madness to let today pass without mentioning the Iraqi elections, even though I usually leave general WOT commentary to people who are better qualified. Reuters understandably, being a news organization, is stressing the attention-grabbing element of conflict in its lead story:

Insurgents threatened a bloodbath on Sunday when Iraqis go to the polls in an election intended to unite the country and quell violence but which could instead foment sectarian strife.

Does anyone seriously intend today's voting to unite the country in the tidy, cut-and-dried way that sentence makes it sound? I haven't heard anyone talk as if the thrushes will warble with joy and crocuses will bloom tomorrow just because there's been an election. Of course, the insurgents (you're catching me intone that word the way I might refer to myself as a "confirmed bachelor," yeah?) are going to go literally ballistic. Even if the new native Iraqi government is more symbolic than substantive at first, what it symbolizes is change in a direction reactionaries have to resist at all costs. It won't turn into Malaysia overnight, but here's hoping that the attacks today are contained and minimized as much as possible. Congratulations to the Iraqis.

How very strange. Look at this Yomiuri story. The headline says, "Pakistan opposes UNSC seat for Japan," which makes sense. This is a Japanese newspaper reporting things from the vantage point of local importance. The beginning is fine:

Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri and other English-language newspapers in Asia on Thursday night that his government would not support the envisioned permanent membership of Japan on the U.N. Security Council.

[There are two reform proposals. Under Model A, more UNSC permanent memberships would be created for countries such as Japan. Under Model B, permanent membership would not be expanded.]

"(With Model B), nobody gets on (the Security Council) permanently, but everybody has a chance to represent its own region," he said. "It is very clear that the Security Council does need reform...but we oppose anything being done to create another permanent class of countries...It has to be done on the basis of equity, justice and in a democratic way."

That sounds nice. Who knows? Maybe Aziz even means it, even if Pakistan itself is not a world-class beacon of democratic transparency in government. It's interesting, though, to note a word that the Yomiuri reporter fails to mention even once: India.

I like John Corvino's latest article posted to IGF, but, then, I like his writing in general. I could have done without the Rosa Parks analogy, which he crashes through the guardrail and follows in flames as it rolls down the ravine (just to be gallant and cover his bad conceit-making with my own). His priorities are in the right place, though, and I join him in wondering how other people can possibly fail to see this stuff:

Is that name difference silly? Yes, it's silly � maybe even insulting. But when health benefits are denied to committed same-sex couples, when a person can't get bereavement leave upon the death of her same-sex partner; when loving couples are split apart because one partner is a foreigner and can't get citizenship, that's far worse than silly or insulting � it's downright cruel. I contend that we have a fighting chance at ending such cruelty, and that once we do so we'll have an even better chance at ending the silly name-difference (again, see Scandinavia).

I still don't agree that attaining marriage under that name must, must, must be the goal. Even if we accept that legal and social circumstances are unequal now, it's possible that opening marriage to gays is not the solution in the best interest of the larger society (including us gays). If the child-rearing function really is central to marriage, perhaps it needs to be reemphasized through stiffened divorce laws and greater penalties for parents who make spurious accusations at each other in custody battles, for example.

The interference in individuals' ability to make contracts that dictate the disposal of their possessions and persons if they're incapacitated isn't even a given everywhere; as Corvino says, we need to start there. Forget even the part about "recognition of our relationships" in the general sense, or at least, hold it in abeyance. Accusations like the one in the hate mail with which Corvino opens his article can only come from people who don't see the current social and political climate for what it really is, a phenomenon that may be partially explained by their tendency to reach for invective when they should be assessing and countering arguments.

Along those lines, I'm sorry to see that Maggie Gallagher is the latest columnist who took pay by the Bush administration to plug programs and is only now disclosing it. Gallagher is not my favorite person, as you might imagine. She has always struck me as principled, though, and I've cringed whenever I've seen someone from my team decide that the way to provide a witty and substantive refutation of one of her pieces is to call her a bitch. What she's done isn't an ethical infraction of epic proportions, but it doesn't speak well of her--how does one forget about a contract for two grand, exactly? And even if her support for the program was there for the asking, anyway, is it impossible to believe that she might have been inclined not to publicize such flaws as it might have had once she and the government had an understanding?

What this does do is give people who could learn from Gallagher's arguments a new, easy reason to dismiss her as a bankrupt thinker. That's not exactly what we need on either side at the moment. (The Gallagher story was foreshadowed by Instapundit and Drudge.)

I don't mind all the searches asking whether country singer Kenny Chesney is gay, but I also don't have an answer. With the physique, the tan, the easily-removable outdoorsy clothing, the cat-like, angular features, and the lonesome tenor, he has plenty of our boys panting after him. That doesn't say anything about the man himself, though.

I also don't know anything about Atika Schubert, though no one seems to be interested in whether she's a lesbian. I know she's the CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief, and that her reporting style, while not conspicuously illuminating, isn't as twinkly and annoying as some other people's (at least to me). I assume lots of people are interested lately because she did a great deal of tsunami reporting? Or maybe there's a campaign going to pitch her as CNN's new star anchor, now that the word is Anderson Cooper is supposed to be it.

This fictional letter on Diplomad reminds me of that classic Bloom County sequence in which Steve Dallas is defending an elderly axe-murderess and, at the arraignment, so overzealously argues that she's harmless ("She's a lamb, your honor") that the bemused judge releases her into his personal custody. Priceless.

(Via biased Susanna.)

Added on 25 January: One reader (I forgot to ask whether I could quote him) thinks I'm suggesting here that people who have issues with our treatment of prisoners are a monolithic bunch of idiot leftists. To me, Diplomad's letter was pretty clearly targeting only the most volubly inane cultural-relativist types, who would complain about our treatment of prisoners if we set each of them up in beachfront property in Antibes. Those who question whether our personnel are acting in arbitrary ways that violate our own ideal of the rule of law, or worry that serious rusty-pliers-and-electrodes stuff may be worked on people because of possible failures in the chain of command--they were not, unless I read Diplomad incorrectly, the satirical target.

People with legitimate arguments to make do not, after all, rely entirely on vague blather about "cultural differences." And as for torture, the fictional addressee is someone who has complained specifically about treatment at Guantanamo Bay, where I don't believe anyone has been accused of torture.

Added on 27 January: My reader was tenacious (in a good way) and pointed me toward this article from The Baltimore Sun, in which torture allegations are, in fact, made about Guantanamo Bay. Sorry for speaking in ignorance. I still read the letter Diplomad cites as satirizing coarse leftism and not pooh-poohing actual prisoner abuse, but if an extra link will avoid possibly misleading people, here it is.

The spirit of international cooperation hovers, dove-like, over the end of the World Conference on Disaster Reduction (WCDR). Or not:

An international disaster conference ended over the weekend with participants agreeing on the need to help strengthen developing countries' ability to deal with disasters, but some critics were already questioning the action plan adopted.

Not only does the broadly worded document lack achievable numerical targets, but it also largely ignores the input of developing nations, they say.

"The conference has tended to be about what ideas developed countries had and could do for the affected (tsunami) region," said a delegate from India. The delegate said that it was important for the affected nations to take a central role, and that "existing systems in those countries be utilized."

I wasn't there, obviously, so I can't verify the accounts of the delegate from India quoted above, or those from Senegal (drought-stricken) and the Marshall Islands (worried about global warming). However, not much imagination is required to conjure up a picture of first-world delegates--high on their own compassion and the possibilities of fancy, whiz-bang techno-fixes--talking right over people with actual knowledge of the different local circumstances disaster-relief programs are up against in the large and varied "developing world."

The recent Sumatra earthquake and tsunami overshadowed everything, naturally. In the weeks since the initial emergency passed, the tsunami has evolved into a heightened version of the usual sexy, telegenic media story: a visually-impressive force of nature, the emotional trauma of sudden loss of friends and family, the occasional unexpected joyous reunion, the noble struggle to return things to normal. It's the sort of thing that would be rejected as implausible if it were submitted as the script for a fictional made-for-TV movie.

Am I being cynical here? Well, only partially. I don't doubt for a second that reporters feel the same compassion as the rest of us, and when they point out that they're telling the stories of people who have no other public voice, they're not just rationalizing. But it's hard to keep covering something like this without falling back on stock disaster-drama clichés and thereby trivializing it.

The complaints about the WCDR indicate that, sadly but not surprisingly, the same sort of thing is happening among aid agencies. The tsunami provides the perfect opportunity to say, "You see what can happen when you don't flood us with cash and make sure we have safeguards against everything?" To the best of our knowledge, though, the Indian Ocean disaster was (thankfully) a fluke. It is not representative of the issues facing the third world.

The problems that most poor countries are dealing with are mundane and un-dramatic. Much of what needs to be done is education, teaching everyday people how to evaluate their own circumstances and adjust their behavior accordingly. Technology is certainly useful in making it easier for developing countries to anticipate, weather, and respond to disasters, but in ways well-heeled do-gooders do not seem to have internalized:

During the meeting, big players from the developed world-including Japan, the United States, Germany and France-pushed their ideas for a tsunami warning system.

This did not sit well with some groups from the countries hard-hit by the tsunami. They felt their voices were not being heard when they suggested upgrading systems they already had for warning systems.

So the countries with non-tsunami problems did not see those problems addressed, and the countries actually hit by the tsunami felt that their knowledge of their own homelands was not taken into account by eager-beaver first-world technocrats. A toast all around, then, for a job well done.

Right Side of the Rainbow is understandably pissy about the face-value content of this Reuters article:

Mistrust also runs deep among ordinary people. Some 58 percent of people surveyed in a British Broadcasting Corporation poll in 21 countries said they believed Bush's re-election made the world a more dangerous place.

"Negative feelings about Bush are high," Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes which carried out the study, told the BBC. "This is quite a grim picture for the United States."

People in three countries surveyed -- Poland, India and the Philippines -- said the world was now safer, while Israel, which was not part of the survey, also remains a big supporter of the 58-year-old president who took office four years ago.

I don't know that I would take it at face value, though. I mean, when an individual is quoted, you kind of have to assume he means what he says:

"I think 2005 should mark a new start in our relations ... based on listening to each other, having a more regular dialogue and mutual respect," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said last week, reflecting the view of the European Union.

Bureaucrat endorses useless hen-party approach to politics? Okay, I believe him. But 58% of people over 21 countries leaves a lot of room for country-by-country aberrations, and the data themselves are not linked by Reuters. They are, however, on the Program for International Policy Attitudes' website, here. Japan's results mesh with those derived from an Asahi poll before the election.

The reason I'm cautious about interpreting the BBC poll as a Major Statement is not that I don't want to believe it. (I don't know whether 58% is the number, but overall, I do think Bush probably has more opponents than supporters in the global population.) Nor is it even just that polls are notoriously squishy. It's just that, given that the way the non-US media covered Kerry's campaign--a modern family man with an outspoken wife, anti-war beliefs, and Democratic Party affiliation just like our buddy Clinton!--a "Yes" to "Has Bush's reelection made the world a more dangerous place?" could imply a range of things.

My experience is obviously not unbiased, but I know plenty of people who think both Bush and Kerry were unappetizing choices but saw mostly evidence that Kerry was the better option. (Tokyo being a transportation hub, I'm not just talking about Japanese, either.) And those are the people who are even exposed to media outlets from a variety of sources. Who knows what the rank-and-file population saw that sculpted their ideas?

IOW, I'm not ready to give up on the rest of the world just yet. I wish people had more sense of urgency about the WOT, certainly; but minds change slowly, especially in places where de facto state control of the news media is a constant reality.

In the meantime, the inauguration is today, no matter what anyone else thinks of it. Congratulations to President Bush and the rest of America.

Good news! It's safe to eat again. The FDA has released its revised food pyramid, designed to make sure that even we stupid non-dieticians can somehow manage to keep body and soul together. Naturally, the CSPI has reacted with a degree of worshipful pyramidiocy that would embarrass J.Z. Knight:

CSPI Applauds New Dietary Recommendations

Calls for New Government Campaigns to Implement Them

...

Importantly, the guidelines apply to the federal school lunch and breakfast programs. Under the new Guidelines, schools will need to offer less-salty foods and more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

This puts me in mind of something that happened my freshman year in college. Someone--the Vice-Provost of University Life, or the Greek Council, or some bored Trustees--decided that people were (be sure you're sitting down for this) drinking too much at frat parties. The solution? Force the frats to offer non-salty snacks. Yes way! My roommate had joined one of the few funky-renegade fraternities on campus; it decided to offer non-salty snacks in the form of lettuce (plunked as-is into a serving dish with hilarious, baleful irony) and jello (not finger jello, just a bowl of jello with no utensils). I don't remember the others.

Of course, if the CSPI has its way, publicly treating the new food pyramid with playful irreverence will probably be a felony before long:

To support the guidelines� healthy-weight goals, Congress needs to provide the Centers for Disease Control with greatly increased funding for programs that promote nutrition and activity and pass laws requiring calorie labeling on menus at chain restaurants and shielding kids from junk-food marketing. Because industry has done little voluntarily to implement past Dietary Guidelines for Americans, government regulatory agencies need to take such actions as limiting the salt content of processed foods, eliminating the use of partially hydrogenated oils, and lowering the current limits on fat in processed meats.

I know this is nothing new and shouldn't rile me up. But I just never, ever get used to locutions such as "industry has done little voluntarily to implement past Dietary Guidelines for Americans" and "government regulatory agencies need to take such actions as limiting the salt content of processed foods." It is beyond the wit of man how anyone can believe, in 2005, that the reason Americans are not subsisting entirely on raw carrots and cold oatmeal is that they've been hectored to do so in insufficiently direct, dumbed-down terms, or that food processors haven't marketed enough pleasure-free "safe" versions of foods we used to enjoy. Give us a break already, and go do something more useful, like devoting your lives to making rainbow-colored macramé plant hangers. Good grief.

Added five minutes later, 1.5-liter of Coke in hand: Oh, and I almost forgot (so much imbecility, so little time). Our Secretary of Agriculture offered this jaw-dropping bit of psychological non-insight:

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said the popularity of diet books and products shows that "Americans are interested in leading healthier lives, but they want credible, consistent and coherent information to help them make the best possible choices."

No, dear lady, what that shows is that people are interested in leading healthier lives to the point of pointing and clicking on Amazon.com but not to the point of actually giving up Sara Lee pound cake. Ye gods.

Okay, good thing I'm not dressed for work yet, because this crack by Simon made me snarf. He's referring to PRC crackdowns on Chinese citizens who go to casinos over the border:

There's actually no need for casinos in China. If they want to gamble, they've got roads.

That, in turn, put me in mind of an article that ran in Salon last spring by one Linda Baker, whose civil engineering legacy will be to have proffered the following paragraphs without a trace of irony:

As it turns out, I'm far from the first person to think along these lines. In fact, the chaos associated with traffic in developing countries is becoming all the rage among a new wave of traffic engineers in mainland Europe and, more recently, in the United Kingdom. It's called "second generation" traffic calming, a combination of traffic engineering and urban design that also draws heavily on the fields of behavioral psychology and -- of all subjects -- evolutionary biology. Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty*. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play. [Now, what kind of fuddy-duddies could stir up a controversy about that?--SRK]

For the past 50 years, the American approach to traffic safety has been dominated by the "triple E" paradigm: engineering, enforcement and education. And yet, the idea of the street as a flexible community space is a provocative one in the United States, precisely because other "traditional" modes of transportation -- light rail, streetcars and bicycles -- are making a comeback in cities across the country. The shared-street concept is also intriguing for the way it challenges one of the fundamental tenets of American urban planning: that to create safe communities, you have to control them.

Ms. Baker, you will doubtless be surprised to hear, lives in Portland, Oregon, which puts her statements about the "comebacks" made by light rail and other non-automobile forms of transportation in a strange light.

What this has to do with Simon's quip, before I forget to tell you (which is always a danger with my scatty, free-associative mind), is that Ms. Baker spent a week observing the city of Suzhou in China, where the populace is unfettered by "dominant-paradigm" rules expressed through signs, color-coded curbs, and traffic cops. And she didn't see a single accident, even though she was totally paying attention, like, the whole week. Who knows? It's possible that, in all of China, there are enough yearly traffic fatalities to depopulate Peoria, but none of them happens in Suzhou because its traffic non-system really works. But why is it that what Baker describes still sounds like a hopeful dress-up of the usual traffic free-for-all seen in population centers in developing countries?

It's a shame that Baker and the brothers-in-arms she quotes tend toward the post-structuralist-Mad Libs mode of expression ("subvert the dominant paradigm," "give expression to the suppressed voice," and "communal," "communal," "communal" until I'm going out of my mind), because they're making some points that aren't as risible as they make them sound. When you're accustomed to following the signs and lights, you really do go on autopilot, and that is, in fact, a source of danger. When I'm back at my parents' place, I always have to remind myself on my first day of driving not to get too comfy, because within a ten-mile stretch, you can go from twisty back roads with Deer Crossing signs to a clogged intersection in downtown Allentown to the notorious Route 22, where you're jockeying for position with truckers like a video game come to life. I also take a lot of shortcuts when going through the town in which I grew up, the Borough of Emmaus, which has a population of 12,000 and is almost entirely residential.

Baker is talking about urban areas, but it's neighborhoods with a lot of houses that she seems most concerned with. Speed limits of 25 or 30 mph seem slow to impatient drivers, but they're actually just above the speeds at which a pedestrian who gets hit is unlikely to be seriously injured. Couple that with the fact that most people go a good 5 or 10 mph over the speed limit, anyway, and add in the way marking streets as cars-only territory puts drivers off their guard against a child who bikes or runs out into their lane, and...well, you can see dangers that might be addressed by mixing types of traffic.

Might. I suspect that the sort of intersection Baker is hot on works just fine in relatively small-scale neighborhoods within larger cities where everyone already knows the rules from before (as in the Netherlands) or everyone is used to improvising the rules because the idea of clear, impersonal rule of law is a fantasy throughout the larger society (as in the PRC). It's possible to imagine that it could work in Portland, where I gather residents are in general more receptive to these sorts of experiments. I just hope they get into the habit of warning us visiting Bos-Wash types at the airport car rental counter, though.
* Don't you love this particular polarity? "Certainty"--also known as "having some idea what the motley crew of speeders, pokers, weavers, clinically-diagnosed turnsignalophobes, tailgaters, daydreamers, and let's-play-chicken brakers with whom you're sharing the roadway are going to do and where"--is bad because it separates people from vehicular traffic. Trying to negotiate an intersection of random peds and cyclists and cars and peddlers sitting in lotus position is not "anxiety-provoking" or "nerve-racking." It's "intriguing." Turns commuting into a regular Marlene Dietrich movie.

Today, it's exactly ten years since the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed over 6500 people in and around Kobe. Given the recent catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in developing Southeast Asia, it's sobering to recognize that, even in a country known for its whizbang technology and millennia of dealing with these things, recovery goes in fits and starts. Reason ran a piece a few years after the quake about bureaucratic problems that hampered both immediate rescue and long-term rebuilding, which has an unsettling resonance given the already-emerging charges of incompetence against UN personnel handling disaster aid now.

There are a few other parallels. Kobe is not considered a hot earthquake zone in Japan. Neither is Niigata, which just got hit with a series of big ones in October. That means that building codes and disaster rehearsals were not up to the same standards as they are here in Tokyo, and not without justification. It just isn't rational to expend all kinds of time, energy, and money getting ready for something that's almost certain not to happen.

That's not to say that governments should rest on their laurels--the Mainichi published the results of a survey last week that indicated that many local governments don't feel prepared to deal with disasters. This year saw an unusual series of typhoons with their attendant floods and mudslides, followed by the Niigata earthquake, so the possibilities are very much fresh in the minds of municipal authorities. Many lessons from the Kobe earthquake have also been assimilated and put into practice--the city of Sendai fitted its gas lines with a different shutoff system, and when a 6.9 M quake happened in 2003, it had reason to be grateful. But no matter what the police and fire departments do, people scattered through buildings and streets still have to know how to live through the first strike long enough to be helped. (BTW, if you're reading this from Japan, do you have everything attended to?)

Added on 18 January: Thanks to Far Outliers for linking this post. He went to high school in Kobe (which used to have one of the largest communities of foreigners in Japan, I think), and he offers a few interesting slice-of-life details from what he remembers pre-earthquake.

Okay, last time I linked to something of Joel's, I changed his religion and made him the author of a book he hadn't written. And ended up in a long discussion about green beans. Therefore, I am making doubly sure he says he went to high school in Kobe, because I know he mentioned something about Kyoto in there...um, looks okay.

Amritas, gallantly looking for ways to show solidarity with others of his genetic heritage by sharing their aggrievedness, found a piece on plastic surgery. He can't seem to get too worked up over it, though:

Although I think "racial anorexia" is an exaggeration, I never understood the appeal of eye surgery or hair lightening for Asians. I don't necessarily think eye surgery makes Asians look more Caucasian because there are Asians born with 'double lids'. But I prefer the 'monolid' look (which some Caucasians naturally have!). And I don't think light hair goes well with Asian complexions. It looks fake.

"Racial anorexia" is the Naomi Wolf-ish word the writers of the original piece at Model Minority used to describe...um, I don't know exactly what they're describing, but it sounds like some sort of inferiority complex that makes Asian-Americans compulsively erase their Asiatic features. That's what the rest of us get for recklessly walking around looking white all the time.

I think Amritas is right about the looks stuff. The reason that the Japanese categorize eyes as 一重 (hitoe: "single-layer") and 二重 (futae: "double-layer") is that both kinds of eyelids are common here. And some people, like my boyfriend, have single-layer eyelids but don't have particularly small or sleepy-looking eyes.

He's also right about the hair. When Asians bleach their hair and wear it in a way you might call "decorative"--meaning, punkish and playful and frankly artificial, the way people do when they dye their hair green or purple--it sometimes looks cool. The natural-looking blond shades that can be achieved with today's dyes don't usually flatter Asian skin tones, though.

Speaking of skin, it's weird that no one involved in Amritas's post mentioned it. Meaning, you can make the case that wide, alert eyes and angular features are prized because they look white, but it's only fair to acknowledge also how porcelain smoothness and evenness of tone is associated with Asian complexions. Come to think of it, there's a whole general constellation of this stuff: white guys who generally go for Asian women get sick and tired of having people assume that they like 'em docile, petite, mysterious in manner, and barely-above-jailbait in appearance. I've seen educated urban white girls get really, really worked up over this supposed phenomenon. (I say "supposed" because anyone who thinks Mother doesn't rule the household in Asia just as firmly as she does everywhere else is mistaken.) To the extent that stereotyped standards of attractiveness prod people into changing essential part of themselves, it cannot be said that Asians are always seen as the ones who need to change.

Amritas's mention of white celebrities with features that are usually considered Asian reminded me of something else: several times over the years, I've been at parties where the conversation spontaneously turned to the topic, "What Asian nationality are you mistaken for?" Once, at a dinner party of a dozen people, this was the topic for a good twenty-minute stretch, with guesses submitted about everyone in turn. As in, "Well, Ryu-chan, you have kind of a flat nose, so I think you look Thai." "But his mouth isn't drawn up at the center as much as a Thai person's! He looks more Vietnamese to me. With those earlobes, he could be Indian, though!"

The first time it happened, I was dumbfounded. There's no American equivalent that I've seen. I mean, sure, sometimes people will say they get their cornsilk hair and welkin eyes from their German ancestors, or what have you, but it doesn't become this big group guessing game. (Smug aside: My Atsushi was given what I assume to be the highest possible compliment: "Atsu-chan, you'd never be mistaken for anything except a Japanese." A handsome Japanese. Weary aside: And, naturally, this became yet another opportunity for me to be told, "Are you sure you're American? You look so European! If I didn't know you, I'd guess you were French." No, there's nothing wrong with being French; but I'm not, and I don't like the frequent implication that "looking American" means being pushily fat and having a slightly blank expression.)

[Ten-minute pause while I ogle Robert Conrad, the murderer on this week's Columbo, who is working out in nothing but gym shorts while Peter Falk is questioning him. Woof!]

Amritas is probably right that the only real universal is bilateral symmetry. I think there's a point to be made that, now that cosmetic procedures are more widely available, a lot of people are taking the opportunity to bring their features in line with the perfectly-homogeneous Karen Mulder sort of face, rather than being happy that they have a few distinguishing features. And it's certainly true that that sort of neat-as-a-pin angularity is mostly found in people with Northern European genes. (Mulder herself, for example, is Dutch.) But there are also plenty of white people who don't look like that and get surgery to do so, so whether idealizing it is some special kind of "racial anorexia" strikes me as an arguable point.

You would think that leftists, after 30 years of their hard feminist party-line, could think of something to call a woman they don't like besides "whore." Apparently not.

I don't know what I think of Michelle Malkin's book on Japanese internment; I haven't read it. Whether she's defending the practice wholesale or simply documenting facts that refute the stock interpretation that it was motivated solely by racism, I therefore can't judge. What she has to say on education and immigration policy, I do generally agree with, though I don't read her as regularly as a lot of people do.

Whatever--the idea that she's a Bush shill is ridiculous, especially on...well, education and immigration. The most passing familiarity with her on-line oeuvre confirms that. I think she pushes the tough-chick persona to breaking point sometimes--and as you might imagine, I love tough chicks--but the idea that she's essentially an untalented writer who doesn't know how to think is just ridiculous.

I'm mostly bringing this up because a few people seemed to think that the few stray hate mails I alluded to a few days ago genuinely upset me. They didn't, except as more evidence of the decline in civiliity. They're also why, whenever I think idly that maybe it'd be nice to have more readers, I remember what people like Malkin (and Dean and Connie and Kim and Susanna) deal with. No thanks.

Gay Orbit notes that GayPatriot appears to have cast the apple of discord in our midst with the varying opinions of its proprietors about whether it's the new Daily Dish. Others are already doing all the wrangling necessary, so I will confine myself to two points I don't think are being given sufficient attention:

First, yes, Andrew Sullivan has turned into a wet noodle. It's painful to see, and his opining now frequently ranges from the silly to the outrageous. Let's remember something, though, shall we? A decade ago, he was using his print and television presence to show a rare face of gentlemanly, reasonable gayness. The gay marriage argument has moved beyond his early books, but back then, the opposition really did tend to confine itself to things like, "Gays have sex, not love." At the level to which the debate had progressed, Sullivan was one of the few major figures who made rational arguments that gays were responsible enough to be fully included in society.

This past year or so has been a test of his principles, and he's flunked so far. There's always hope that he'll get it together, but he completely deserves the drubbing many of his current positions are taking. That doesn't change the fact that he made a lasting contribution to gay advocacy; it's unseemly to be slagging him off as if he were a terminally-empty Richard Goldstein type who'd recently found a way, somehow, to become even more tiresome. Show some respect.

Second, Gay Patriot wants attention, and I think it's wonderful that he and his thoughtful collaborator are getting it. I don't like the idea that for eternity there will be a single Andrew Sullivan Chair in Non-Commie Homosexuality that has to be filled, with every other gay who opens his mouth considered leftist until proven innocent; but there's nothing wrong with having one commentator or blog that's the most prominent exponent of right-leaning gay thought.

And yet...I think GP mentioned once that he works in marketing, and, well, I believe him. I mean that in both good and bad ways. GP and GPW are good at soundbites, and soundbites are useful in blogging. They get quoted, and they're attached to a site called GayPatriot, and that does good, necessary work in demonstrating that not gays are not all lockstep leftists who look down on America.

At the same time, I worry. I worry because the guys at GayPatriot don't seem to recognize that you can't stop at marketing. At times, they do make solid, worked-out arguments; but for the most part, when one of their political posts sounds good, it sounds good because you're filling in the gaps between catchy pronouncements with actual facts or logical constructions you've read elsewhere. When GP, especially, needs to make a case that has no evidence to corroborate his--there's the hilarious story of the bottle thrown at his car and the more serious allegation that LCR's Chris Barron may have had divided loyalties up to very late in the election year--he doesn't show much inclination to ascertain and then question his own assumptions in order to strengthen his story. (I suppose it's possible that each of these posts was followed up with more hard evidence, but I read GayPatriot regularly and am pretty sure I'd have remembered; they both made me practically fall off my chair at the time.)

The guys at GayPatriot also don't seem to understand that, while they deserve kudos for publicizing their unpopular political opinions, their mindset about people is stereotypical urban-gay, and not in the good way. Here's GP demonstrating that he's more all-American than Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew's main problem is that he, along with his fellow Clinton Democrats, do not understand Red State (and the majority of) America. He admits he doesn't like or "get" country music, for example. Funny, my iPod continously brings up Kenny Chesney on random rotation.

I know people who grew up in rural Kentucky that can't stand country music; there are also New York music critics who can go off for days about how wonderful George Jones and Loretta Lynn are. But neither of those is really the point--the point is that GP is fixated on the artifacts rather than the attitude. Do you use your music to make a statement about yourself, or do you figure that people's integrity is pretty much unrelated to whether they have Cher or Reba in the CD player? And, if we're going to use the term, which mental framework is more "Red State"? (I admit I laughed at the hockey joke, though.)

There are a lot of nice people in the blogosphere who are looking for reasons not to think uncharitably about gays and who are very receptive to GayPatriot's message, which is great. Some of them have day jobs as journalists and could get the site real exposure, which is also great. For now. But the more attention they get, the more likely it becomes that they will run into skeptical people who hold you accountable for everything you say and expect finely-woven arguments. If they don't start figuring out how to provide them, they'll make themselves and the rest of us look bad.

Alice has a post about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston that manages to make a simple, unadorned point. (I mean, I say "manages" because what's unusual is that a post about those two has a point, not that a post by Alice has a point.)

Perhaps Jennifer Anniston is a career-crazed egotist. Perhaps she suffered in silence for years and is still acting more honorably than many people would expect, despite the media calling her a career-crazed egotist as a result. The Beckhams dealt with rumours about David Beckham's liasons with other women by restating their mutual trust in public, and having a third child. Who knows how things will work out for them. Private life in the public eye seems doomed these days, but life out of the public eye fares little better.

No, the point isn't new, but it does need to be made repeatedly. It used to be that people like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mickey Rooney, or Elizabeth Taylor got married seven or eight times. They had grand, lusty, capricious personalities that fed their art (or, in Gabor's case, her celebrity), they got the attention of millions, and the tradeoff was that the hunger that made it all possible also made their personal lives a wreck. Because everyone knew they weren't like ordinary people, they were presented differently. One of my favorite bars--well, half the gay bars in the world, but only one I'm thinking of--is lined with pictures of stars from the Studio Era onward: Bette Davis, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant. The literal halos aren't there as you move forward, but the poses are still frankly sculptural and larger-than-life.

Nowadays (I don't think I have many gay readers, but for anyone who's inclined to have a spaz attack at the way I'm treating stardom from the dawn of the talkie up to the early 1960s as one soupy, undifferentiated era--I know, I know; the line I'm drawing is crude, but I think it makes a genuine distinction easier to see), celebrity life and ordinary life have become closer together, and they've both suffered.

Everyday people who just want to live responsible, happy lives think they can do so by imitating Elizabeth Taylor. No, of course, no one actually sits there consciously emulating her, but the idea that commitment isn't really commitment if someone who wanders by strikes your fancy is clearly abroad in the land. Also, it's no longer just actresses who are attended to by expensive psychotherapist quacks; self-help for every Borders shopper is a huge industry.

That's not a new complaint, and neither is the one in the opposite direction: namely, that the obsession with making celebrities seem "real" has made them boring. In a way, the change is a moving reminder of the way regular folks have come up in the world. Most people can't afford live-in nannies or drivers, but even people of modest means play golf or go to health spas and what have you. We have unprecedented riches, to the point that movie-star life basically can't be as different from just-folks life as it used to be.

For the most part, though, it just means that stars look as schlumpy as the rest of us. Page through Vogue magazine to see what I mean--they'll try to cover for it by calling referring to it as "relaxed chic" or "bohemian glamour with a modern edge," but it's really just slovenliness of costume and demeanor. I have nothing against Renee Zellweger or Gwyneth Paltrow, but whenever I see one of them referred to as today's Grace Kelly, it makes me want to scream. There was something unassailable about Kelly; despite her composure, there's nothing unassailable about Paltrow, and that goes double for the gosh-it's-nice-that-people-like-my-movies Zellweger. I'm obviously not going to say that the loss of worship-worthy stars is at the same level of tragedy as the loss of the ability to value homely satisfactions. You can always reach into the past to watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but you can't reach into the past and un-screw up your life. I think the issues are related, though.

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday the United States should plan to provide long-term aid to Indian Ocean countries battered by last month's tsunami as efforts begin to shift from saving lives to rebuilding communities.

Powell said he would recommend to President Bush "that we stay engaged, that this is a long-term prospect, that we use our money not just for immediate humanitarian relief but for economic assistance for infrastructure development."

...

"The ships can't stay on station forever because there are other requirements and missions," Powell said in a series of television interviews from Nairobi, Kenya, where he attended the signing of a peace deal for Sudan, Powell said the reopening of roads would allow vehicles operated by international relief organizations to replace U.S. military helicopters in delivering food and water to victims.

...

"What we have to do is to make sure that we're providing assistance based on what is needed and providing money based on what is needed, not just flooding* all of these places and accounts with supplies that may not be needed, or financial assistance that may not be required yet," Powell said.

One can only hope that our Secretary of State is using "other missions" to refer to the military protection of US interests and, you know, stuff like that. On the other hand, that final "yet" is disquieting. Perhaps it's better for the mental health of all of us that the money spent to rebuild the rim of the Indian Ocean will be given out in dribs and drabs so that we'll never know how much of the taxes we've disgorged went to it.

Just so the distinction I'm making is clear: I support the use of our equipment and personnel for rescue operations and the providing of emergency food, water, shelter, and medical care. Normally when someone refers to the "international community," I retch, but the term really does apply on occasions such as this. It makes me proud to be an American and a resident in Japan that we're helping out.

The problem is that these long-term rebuilding projects have a bad habit of getting out of hand. Once you get past the initial state of exigency, your construction and telecommunications projects tend to come more and more under the sway of native old-boy networks, with their attendant bid-rigging and graft. (Just about everything the UN touches ends up that way, and it's not entirely the UN's fault. Big, boffo undertakings require cooperation from the locals, and getting it often requires that one adopt a "cooperative" mindset oneself.)

Furthermore, the money that does go to new roads and dams and not to country retreats for provincial governors is not well spent if the locals don't have the mindset to use them. I am not, I assure you, taking off in the loathsome direction of saying that peoples near the Equator are inherently clannish and primitive. People are people, but acculturation counts. In fractious Aceh, at least, fingerpointing between the rebels and Jakarta over disaster relief has already begun. I haven't read as much about the Tamils vs. the Colombo government in Sri Lanka, but I'm sure it's not entirely a lovefest there, either. Once again, I am simply talking about conflicts that in fact exist in the relevant regions, not generalizing about anyone's genetic inability to get along.

The resilience we enjoy in the West comes of our valuing individual initiative, imagination, experimentation, and mobility. It seems reasonable to figure that the process could work in reverse to an extent--which is to say, when roads, bridges, and telecommunications networks are provided, people will begin to use them because they're there, and they'll pick up the values that produced them. On the whole, though, social progress has to happen as people's attitudes evolve. Sudden dislocations may make some people more open to change, but they make others cling all the more to known ways of life for security. You can't produce a dynamic society by dropping rebarred concrete from on high. In a few years, this could prove to be a real tar baby.**
* Is that really the most diplomatic metaphor to be using when discussing this subject, Mr. Powell? ** Speaking of metaphors, appositeness of: Before anyone points it out, I'm aware that the tar baby is from an African, not Asian, folktale.

Mrs. du Toit also said something in a comment on this post that crystallizes a point I've been thinking about for a while:

I don't think it's endemic to gays particularly, just any group who have activists who make their living convincing people that potty training isn't necessary when there is always someone else to wipe your bum for you.

When people compare the gays rights and civil rights movements, I become very uneasy, because the way they tend to do it is sweeping and lacks (forgive the word choice) nuance. Homosexuality and blackness (or other ethnicity) are not in and of themselves comparable.

The reason I don't think we can throw out the comparison entirely is that the dynamic between each group and its sympathizers is the same, and it's the same in illuminating ways. John McWhorter wrote a few years ago--well, he's said this multiple times in different wording, but I think this was in a review of a book on depictions of blacks on television--that it's a cruel fact that, however horrible racism has been historically and still is in places, black Americans cannot expect to live cushioned lives as a way of making up for it. You work to fix the problems, but you can't expect any kind of cosmic payback.

The failure to understand this is the main problem with gay, feminist, and minority activism. It's one thing to sympathize with people who suffer--I probably had an easier time coming out than most people, but it sure did suck, and I have no objection to people's feeling sorry for me about it--but another thing to let sympathy be the engine that forever drives how you treat them. My experience fits Connie's: gay people aren't any more or less naturally self-pitying than anyone else. There is, however, a part of coming out that involves acknowledging that it was wrong for people imply that you're sick and evil, and when you're not encouraged to move beyond it, it's easy to freeze there and think all your problems come from other people's nastiness. Too many of those who sympathize with gays don't know when to be warmly supportive and when to knock it off and let us learn necessary lessons through bruising experience.

And now that our own crew of activists has made itself an industry in most urban areas, the problem has become self-perpetuating. In order to avoid driving myself crazy, I persist in thinking that no one is willfully trying to turn us all into a bunch of dependent ninnies. Nevertheless, the overall effect of gay advocacy is to tell people they can always think in "How can you fix this for me?" terms and still be regarded as sovereign adults. And, however different the issues addressed by feminist or minority advocacy may in fact be, it does the same damned thing.

All this talk about warning systems for the Indian Ocean is no longer theoretical, apparently:

A government-envisioned system to help Asian nations facing the Indian Ocean construct a tsunami early warning system will utilize around-the-clock satellite monitoring of water pressure in the sea, government sources said Wednesday.

Any abnormal changes in water pressure would be relayed to an alert center to be set up in the region. On receipt of an alert, the center would inform regional governments of the threat, enabling them to issue evacuation orders.

...to those well-to-do people in a position to hear them. Don't misunderstand--I have nothing against affluence or the affluent. It must also be said that the planners seem to understand that the method of transmission is going to have to be basic and low-tech:

The evacuation advisory would be passed on at the local level by radio-linked loudspeaker systems similar to those used in Japan by local governments for public announcements.

Now everyone around the Indian Ocean gets to be constantly harangued by Japanese-style public service loudspeakers. This is called "development." (I'm assuming the local authorities won't take long to catch on to possibilities beyond the once-every-500-years imminence of a tidal wave. In Japan, at least, there isn't any greeting or caution too trivial to be blasted at you from municipal loudspeakers.)

Mrs. du Toit's new essay (it's bizarre that I almost never link to posts by the people I read most assiduously) covers an important element of this kind of thinking and why it's a problem. Nature does what it likes, and we can't get the pretty, rousing, life-affirming parts without also taking the cataclysms. People who haven't internalized that are thinking about the tsunami in ways that run together a lot of things that aren't comparable.

Or, if I'm going to be blunt, a lot of people who aren't comparable. Before a new reader ruptures an artery, let me hasten to say that I do believe we're all comparable in intrinsic human worth and that, in societies in which we have choices, it's our choices that distinguish us. I suspect, though, that when people envision a shiny new early warning system, they have visions of people living subsistence-level lives in remote fishing hamlets being saved from the next tsunami, and that's just not going to happen. Indonesia is one of the five most-populous countries in the world; it and the other countries of the Indian Ocean have thousands upon thousands of little islands where people are tucked away. A lot of these places haven't yet benefited from the extensive progress of receiving reliable plumbing and electricity; how likely is it that they'll all be kitted out with a relative luxury like a tsunami warning system?

What will actually happen is that population centers like coastal cities and resorts will get the loudspeakers, which means that we'll just be making it more likely that their relatively rich inhabitants can escape. Once again, my point is not that it's bad to help the well-to-do escape disaster; it's that people seem to be seeking a way to help the truly destitute, and this sort of thing simply is not going to do it. Economic development, in which villages find a way to provide something marketable and use the resulting income to upgrade their standard of living, will do it. But that has to be a thousand local projects, not a single gesture of international mega-magnanimity. In order to think in those terms, you have to have realistic hope for people, not just wishes.

Simon has a post on something I'd been wondering about myself: China. As in, what has it been doing while the great powers of the world are pouring money and personnel into helping its disaster-stricken neighbors to the south? He also gets at something important in a previous post, also on the tsunami and its aftermath:

If warnings were given it is also difficult to see how effective they would have been. Certainly lives would have been saved. But in many areas communications are poor; there is no high land to evacuate to; and there are too many people and not enough roads and ways to transport them out.

The news outlets are right to cover the possibility that a tsunami warning system could have saved lives and the urgency of getting aid disbursed to places that still lack it. But the problems that get repeated mention--lack of coordination on the part of on-the-ground aid providers, little precedent of catastrophic tsunamis in the Indian Ocean--are ultimately less important than the fact that a lot of people outside Westernized population centers are so isolated that it's nearly impossible to get to them except by helicopter. And to do even that, you have to figure out where they are first and resign yourself to dropping things on them if you can't land, which means they'll get supplies but no medical care. The most sophisticated warning system in the world wouldn't have prevented such people from being screwed, and the best teams of planners in the world are still going to have trouble getting food and potable water to them.

That doesn't mean we give up trying to help remote populations, or that we write them off and reserve our compassion for those we feel more similar to. It means that we don't blame human beings for not being able to do the impossible. Furthermore--yes, I'm late to this party, but it's a point that apparently needs to be made over and over--anyone who's followed the real-time development of events right after an earthquake knows that the early reports are close to worthless. If a major facility (shopping center, elevated highway, train station) collapsed, you'll know immediately that at least a certain number of people are dead or injured, but that's about it. You will not know the extent of the destruction, and you'll be getting conflicting and incomplete reports for a good while; thus keeping commitments of funding and labor on the "stingy" side for the time being is perfectly rational for a third party. Now that we're aware of the scope of the damage in southern Asia, it's cheering to see people giving unreservedly.

This is uncharacteristic: the most recent Nikkei headline about the most recent tsunami-related developments says, 成田空港に無言の帰国、スリランカから７遺体 ("A silent homecoming at Narita Airport: 7 bodies of Japanese nationals arrive from Sri Lanka"). Normally, the Nikkei leaves headlines with human-interest hooks to the Mainichi and the news tabloids. The bodies today are all from the same tour group.

The local story that everyone seems to be following most intently is that of Ryohei Sugimoto, 12, who's the only member of his family left alive. They were on vacation on Pipi, an island close to Phuket in Thailand. He identified his father's body by his wristwatch and his little brother by his bathing suit. Mrs. Sugimoto was still missing yesterday, though her body may have been found since then. What's so hard to watch about Ryohei is that he seems shaken but is still composed, and he knows that what he's waiting for is his mother to turn up dead.

That's a Japan-specific story. In the regional media, the attention that isn't going to bottlenecks in the aid distribution chain is being spared to ask, in part, whether it's not just a little weird for people to be going through with their plans to vacation on parts of Phuket that are still intact. One certainly hopes that incoming tourists will not take the opportunity to go across the island and rubberneck, but I can't see the moral virtue involved in making sure that none of the businesses actually left standing make any revenue. Tourism is just about all there is to Phuket, and it's a big part of the overall Thai economy. The Thai Prime Minister has said that his country doesn't need more monetary aid, but that doesn't mean the economy can afford to stagnate while survivors are treated and rubble is cleared. From the point of view of the tourists, it probably takes more strength of character not to switch destinations to somewhere else, in a sense. There are, after all, many inexpensive tropical beach resorts in the region, and those that are away from the Indian Ocean would be the ideal places for people to forget the tsunami and such compassion fatigue as might interfere with a lighthearted good time in the sun.