The White Peril 白禍

Damn. So that's how this ends.

"I have to look out for the city as a whole, not just a few people," says Mayor Ernest Hewett, who vacillates between "feeling the residents' pain" and disparaging the neighborhood, which houses a waste water treatment plant. "People were running from the Fort Trumbull area two or three years ago because of the smell. No one would actually buy a house in the Fort Trumbull area."

Yet that's just what Susette Kelo and her husband did in 1997. Not far from Wilhelmina Dery's place, they purchased a delightful pink two-bedroom house on the southeast corner of East Street, that boulevard of broken dreams with a dangerously insufficient radii. Kelo enjoys a view as lively and varied as this traditionally immigrant neighborhood once was, with its auto shops, corner store, factory, café, construction companies, and social club. (As the government lawyers point out, such a mixed-use neighborhood no longer conforms to the city's code and therefore is truly a thing of the past.) In one direction, she can watch ferry boats head to Martha's Vineyard and Block Island. In other directions, she can gaze at petroleum tanks, the stacks of a factory, sailboats parked in a marina, and even the tip of Long Island. The earth-tone-and-glass Pfizer complex is also in view. From her back porch, she takes in the roof tops and thick green foliage of New London.

Kelo arrived home the day before Thanksgiving in 2000 and saw something else: eminent domain paperwork stuck to her door. It gave her until March 2001 to leave the home she loves behind. In the meantime, it demanded she pay rent of $500 a month (in Connecticut, the government technically owns the property once they serve eminent domain papers). The lawsuit, which bears her name, is holding off her eviction for now. But if she loses, she'll be a victim whose dreams have been paved over by progress, government style, in which the rights of citizens to their homes are trumped by the pressing need for increased corner radii.

Read the reasoning behind the New London city government's move to confiscate the Kelos' property. You'll no longer wonder why some people snap and become loony libertarians.

Added on a tea break: I think I've snapped and become a loony libertarian. You know, my parents rented a very small townhouse the whole time I was growing up. We lived comfortably, but our means were straitened.

By saving and planning, they were able to buy a pretty spacious house a few miles outside of town. It was solid and had an acre or two of property with it, but it had been abandoned by tax evaders and not tended to for a few years. In the interim, it had also been broken into by pranksters who spraypainted the place and started a fire in one of the showers and dumped things on the carpets--the sort of non-structural damage that just needs a lot of sweat equity. Nine years of sweat equity later, the place is very nice, filled with furniture my father built (his hobby) in the garage, and well-maintained. So, having grown up in a family that was rising into the middle class, I feel a special sadness and anger in knowing that the door has been opened for a lot of people's fixer-uppers to be treated as, effectively, single-unit public housing.

Of course, if you're a random American, the probability that your property will happen to catch the covetous eye of a "development"-minded municipal official is likely to remain low, no matter how bad the orgy of confiscation that's almost certainly coming actually gets. But that's just statistics. Once you're living in a state in which every county has decided to commandeer just a few homeowners' properties for some cockamamie plan or other, you're not likely to be motivated to fix up a usable but ramshackle old area house, especially if you're in a modest income bracket and will be doing most of the work yourself and on a limited budget. It's neighborhoods of people who aren't rich or influential that tend to get hit with these things, and those who live in them know it.

When I was in high school in 1989, there was a brouhaha over flag burning. I wrote an indignant letter to the local newspaper supporting the ban--or rather, the amendment that would make a ban possible, which I think is what we're actually talking about. Of course, I was 17. I wouldn't now.

Backers argue the legislation is needed to protect a symbol of American democracy; foes warn it would infringe on First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech.

I'm rabid about free speech, but I'm not so sure about the First Amendment argument, however well it may have worked in the past. Expression usually involves gestures of creation: you make words or you make pictures (if you hold with Camille Paglia's definition of images as pagan speech). In making it possible to legislate against flag burning, no one is limiting your ability to shout, "Death to America!" or what have you, if that's what you think needs to be said.

Be that as it may, let's have a sense of proportion here. It is perfectly possible to shun people who injure the flag, or to point out that their ability to criticize their own society so unequivocally is one of the things it represents. I understand the ire that a lot of people have stored up over the last few decades of PC run amok, but this is a bad outlet for it.

Amritas has a sensible post on how far emergency service providers should go to accommodate people who can't speak English. There's a fire department in Georgia (the state, not the former Soviet republic) that's supplying its personnel with certain useful phrases in the native languages of many area immigrants:

I'm usually opposed to multiculturalism, but I don't see anything wrong with a few phrases (mispronounced, alas) that could save lives. I'd treat emergencies like these as exceptional.  Immigrants to the US should learn English, but should people die just because they got off the plane yesterday and can't answer the firefighters' questions?

The problem is ... what counts as an emergency?  Here's my take: Fires are split-second situations.  Most other situations aren't. So I don't believe in multilingual ballots.  You won't die if you don't vote.  Multilingual welfare?  You want our (tax) money, you learn our language.  But what about medical emergencies?  Your every ache and pain tended to in Whateverese? You want that, you pay for it.

Ah, that brings a soft libertarian-flavored solution to mind: public emergency services are in English only - the language of the majority of taxpayers - but one can pay for private emergency services in the language of one's choice, just as one can pay for Whateverese-speaking doctors, lawyers, etc. (Hard libertarians would of course argue that all services, emergency or not, should be privatized because the government is eeeevil.) So in this scenario, a small, poor community of Whateverese speakers who can't afford private emergency services (which aren't in Whateverese, because there's no money in it), would have to (gasp) learn English or die.

Does that sound depressing?  It's not much worse than what linguistic minorities face in parts of the world which haven't sipped any mooltee-kooltee Kool-Aid yet.  If you are an Iranian in Japan, do you think a 消防士 shouboushi extinguish-prevent-person' will deign to speak to you in فارسی Persian?

Another consideration is that, even if dispatchers and firemen have memorized a few useful questions, will they understand when the person they're talking to says, "My daughter's still in her bedroom--northeast corner of the fourth floor--and she has asthma!"? Ideally, some able-bodied and civic-minded members of the various immigrant communities would be moved to serve as emergency and law-enforcement personnel. Or, at least, some bilingual community leaders would agree to be on-call if they were needed in such an emergency. Those who emigrate to the States as teenagers usually become fluent in English pretty rapidly, even if they retain an accent.

The US Army is still having trouble hitting its recruitment targets:

The U.S. Army, facing recruiting woes and a reorganized force, will relax requirements for new officers, welcoming older candidates and allowing more tolerance of past minor crimes, officials said on Thursday.

Trying to stem the loss of current personnel, the Army also has made it more difficult to kick soldiers out of the military for alcohol or drug abuse, being overweight or "unsatisfactory performance," according to a recent memo.

At least there's no talk of letting in the non-closeted homos, who would clearly spell doom for the Republic.

And that, my dear blogdaddy, is why I still use the word libertarian. Moderate is a state of mind, not a set of political positions. This is not to trivialize the very important philosophical and ethical principle that we should all listen to those with opposing views, deal honestly with the valid points they make, and be willing to change our positions if their counterarguments are strong enough.

It's just that, if what you're looking for is an indication of what the person you're talking to thinks the relationship between government and society should be, hearing him says he's a "moderate" tells you nothing except that he likes to congratulate himself about how fair-minded he is. You still need to find out whether he's a conservative, a leftist, a nanny-statist, a one-world pacifist, or an isolationist; and the only way to do that is to start talking policy.

Of course, libertarian has its downside--especially since all too many people like to hear "gay libertarian" as "gay libertine." But in its implication that someone so labeled is likely to defend the strict delimitation of government power in relation to most issues that come up--which I've actually been known to do pretty immoderately--it suits me better than anything else I've encountered.

Added on 10 June, Pretenders playing in the background: Alan Stewart Carl has his own take on centrism. It's a good read. I'm still not entirely sure about this part, however:

I have very firm beliefs (free markets, social inclusion, privacy rights, vigorous national defense, etc.) but other Centrists may fall to my left or right on some issues. That doesn't make us mushy.

Indeed? Sounds pretty mushy to me. I'm not accusing these individuals of being mushy, mind you, only saying that any political movement they're all yoked into is going to be, unless you list out policy positions and do a sort of two-from-column-A-two-from-column-B diagnostic kind of thing.

This part also caused my eyebrows to rise a bit:

The current political environment too often serves up only two possible solutions. And too often the adherents to those solutions are unwilling to consider change (just look at the Social Security debate). Centrism seeks to get away from the choice A, choice B or no choice at all method of problem solving. We believe there is often a third way. And we want to find it.

This is attractive on its face; we've all heard the proposals from the two major parties on a given issue and thought, "Wow, those both suck." But surely centrists have noticed that, in the real world, the "third way" that is actually arrived at is frequently a cheerfully schizoid "bipartisan compromise," produced by haggling and deal-brokering and back-scratching and pork-barreling in which coherent policy aims recede from view. If Alan thinks he has a better way that's genuinely practicable, I, for one, would very much like to hear about it.

I doubt that more hand-wringing about "special interests" is going to be of much help, though. By this point every American belongs to a half-dozen interest groups, whether he pays membership dues to any organization or not. Those that are very powerful tend to be those that have a lot of constituents (AARP, anyone?), which makes calling them "special" somewhat misleading. We are the special interests, and if those who self-identify as centrists want to decry the general entitlement-mindedness of the citizenry, I'm certainly on board. But in that case, you have to acknowledge (at least, I think you do) that stern, uncompromising calls for self-reliance are more likely to be effective there than yet more willingness to negotiate or endlessly poke around for more options.

I don't want to sound dismissive, because I do think what he's saying is very important. The models for discourse we're frequently offered these days usually come in two varieties: "politeness" = "namby-pamby PC-ism" and "character assassination/gruesomely gleeful expletive-throwing/screechy overstatement" = "daring truth-telling." Both are tiresome beyond belief.

But both also extend beyond the political realm and into popular culture, the arts, education, and what passes for conversation at dinner parties. Which is to say, a general return to civility, in which strongly-held, fact-based opinions are respectfully aired and heard, is what's called for. Casting it as a move for political reform seems to me misleading and insufficient.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is not an organization I've done much paying attention to. Something one of its spokespersons said yesterday caught my eye, though, and made me wonder anew at how callow some people can be.

Reuters says a Spanish judge wants to haul in US soldiers for questioning over an incident two years ago in which a Spanish journalist was killed:

The Pentagon has exonerated the U.S. soldiers from any blame, but High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz wants to question the three who were in the tank, a court official said on Tuesday.

"Spanish cameraman Jose Couso, who worked for Telecinco, and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsiuk, a Ukrainian, were killed and several people were wounded when the U.S. tank fired a shell directly into the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, 2003.

The Spanish court would have jurisdiction only over the death of the Spanish citizen.

The American soldiers would be questioned as suspects for murder and crimes against the international community, which carry sentences of 15 to 20 years in jail and 10 to 15 years respectively.

...

"It is difficult to conceive of any set of circumstances under which we would submit U.S. military personnel to questioning before a foreign court of criminal jurisdiction regarding the conduct of authorized combat operations," said Navy Cmdr. Jane Campbell, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Hey, I wonder whether targeting journalists is a hate crime in Spain. Perhaps US forces were trying to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. I'm not sure what other "crimes against the international community" [retch! heave!] we could be talking about.

Maybe my irreverence is misplaced; it's possible that the actual journalists who were killed had a clear-headed, philosophical view of the risks involved in covering combat operations and would be displeased at their colleagues' reactions to their deaths.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists obtained the full report under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Among other criticisms, the committee said the report failed to address "the question of why U.S. troops were not aware that the Palestine Hotel — one of the best-known civilian sites in Baghdad at the time — was full of journalists."

The Committee to Protect Journalists (and Reuters) made similar noises at the time, it seems:

"I note that the commander of the U.S. 3rd Infantry has now said that one of its tanks fired a round at the Palestine Hotel," Reuters Editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank said in a statement. "He said it did this after it came under fire from the hotel."

"... the incident nonetheless raises questions about the judgment of the advancing U.S. troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad. (The Reuters cameraman's) death, and the injuries sustained by the others, were so unnecessary."

...

The Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday that the incidents violated the Geneva Conventions and called for an "immediate and thorough investigation," the results of which should be made public.

These people are out of their gourd. The idea of marking off a little Temenos of Innocence in the middle of a war zone, in which journalists can expect absolute safety, is idiotic. Central Command made the common-sense point that such sites become a magnet for dirty-fighting combatants who want to camouflage themselves (and to make the enemy hestitate to strike at them hard). CPJ seems to think that the ground forces involved should have been told that there was a significant press presence in the Palestine Hotel. How that would have changed the fact that those ground forces were being shot at and needed to respond is not explained. As it was, those manning the tank didn't keep firing, or call in reinforcements to help flatten the place, so they clearly didn't mistake it for an enemy bunker.

CPJ keeps its own statistics on journalists who die in the line of duty. Its total for 2004: 39 confirmed, including 13 in Iraq. Considering the risk involved in walking around a war zone without combat training, that doesn't strike me as an outrageously high number.

Miss Manners keeps telling you the little gestures of politeness are important, but do you listen? Of course not. However, President Bush does--at least according to one agency in the DPRK government:

A spokesperson for the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs praised US President Bush for having referred to Premier Kim Jong-il with the honorific "Mister" on 31 May, saying, "If what he said puts a full stop on the conflict between hard-liners and moderates, it will contribute toward the building of an atmosphere [congenial to] the 6-party talks.

It strikes me that, coming from a head of state who's known for his chumminess, the fussy use of "Mister" could just as easily be an expression of chill distance. (Or maybe that's just me, since I deliver expressions of chill distance with some regularity.)

Interestingly, while looking for something about the speech in English, I came across this old CSM article. It's by a Russian diplomat who traveled with Kim for three weeks the summer before 9/11. The more I look at it, the more I think I remember having read it at the time, although I can't be sure:

I was warned that the leader does not approve of the address, "Mister." We were a bit shocked at first, but we got used to [saying], "Could you tell the Great General...." Now it was natural for me to address the North Korean leader as "Comrade Chairman," "Chairman Kim Jong Il."

...

Kim Jong Il expressed regret that, since George Bush came to power, the US approach to Korean affairs has changed. The North Korean leader does not like it that the administration of the American president places [North Korea] on the same shelf as countries promoting extremism, violence, and terror.

If you'd like to nauseate yourself, you can linger over Kim's fulsome praise of Bill Clinton; an icky, borderline-flirtatious conversation with Madeleine Albright during her famous visit; and an interlude of relaxed mateyness with Vladimir Putin.

On returning to the present, remember that, "Mister" or no "Mister," there's still plenty of room for animosity:

DPRK Ambassador to the UN Pak Gil-yon, lecturing at the Toronto Center for International Research, sharply criticized the US: "Not only has the US not changed its posture of frank hostility, but it has left the DPRK no choice but to tackle the task of nuclear arms development." Pak also criticized Japan for its position on historical issues. Asked during the Q&A session after his lecture about [the possibility] of returning to the 6-party talks, he responded, "We are working hard [on a resolution]. We have unlimited time."