The White Peril 白禍

Virginia Postrel links to a true story with the kind of happy ending that can literally make you cry: Afghans get a new industry that provides environmentally-sustainable work and brings cash into the economy...and affluent Americans get access to a broader array of fabulous beauty products!

Anyone who writes to ask which part moved me more will be ignored.

Of course, every narrative like this needs a villain to add drama and make our heroine's eventual triumph sweeter, and this story has a great one:

The letter I received from him a few days later confirmed my premonition. It requested a ream of further documentation, such as a breakdown of the raw-materials cost of a bar of soap and our financial accounts from previous years. “Maybe even more importantly,” the letter went on,

we need to show the real raison d'etre for all of this. It's because there's real demand for your products. Demand is not your problem, Sarah, satisfying it is. You've already established a vibe in the market. You're selling in Manhattan and sundry other swanky places. You've had plenty of free publicity in media with the appropriate reach to capture the attention of the chattering class whose hands you're washing. The wind is now behind you and you've an opportunity to make a significant contribution to establishing Afghanistan as something other than a squalid state exporting only smack and terror. This is what USAID wants to hear.

Peppering this and subsequent communications were colloquialisms like "the first thing we've gotta make plain ..."

I replied, providing the requested information, but also a statement of frustration. I was swiftly scolded for my tone: "unbusinesslike, unmannerly, and just plain unaesthetic."

Ick. No one who uses gotta in a business context--who would, indeed, use gotta for any purpose other than transcribing soul lyrics--should be passing judgments on the aesthetic value of someone else's prose. Especially when he himself appears never to have met a cliché he didn't like. Guy should be sentenced to wash with Duane Reade soap ("Compare to Irish Spring!") for the rest of his life.

Anyway, seriously, Sarah Chayes's piece confirms what you hear elsewhere about funding provided by big-guns organizations for entrepreneurship in developing countries--namely, that it has a way of vaporizing in the pipeline from the West to the target population. It's a very good read.

Tokyo has had the same reaction to the Bhutto assassination as the rest of the developed world:

On the night of 27 December, Minister of Foreign Affairs Masahiko Takamura spoke to the press corps about the assassination of former Prime Minister of Pakistan [Benazir] Bhutto: "We had hoped that free and fair elections would be conducted; there aren't words to describe the heinousness of using violence to decide such matters." At the same time, "We fervently hope that Pakistan will ride out this tragedy and [do us all the favor of] treading a path toward democratization. Japan, too, wishes to support the democratization of Pakistan." *

Rondi Adamson cites Christopher Hitchens's reaction in Slate, in which he even-temperedly examines her strengths and weaknesses:

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in.

...

The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.

...

This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism.

That's just his view, of course, but it squares with what I remember from reports about her second tenure as prime minister: Bhutto was politically progressive by study and reasoning but also had the reflexive sense of entitlement and privilege of the daughter of a super-elite family. Her assassination is a tragedy in any case, but it's doubly unfortunate if she really was beginning to come around to harsh reality.

* Japanese readers who click through to the article will notice that I've translated もらう as if it were くれる. That wasn't a slip--"we will humbly receive the favor of..." didn't quite seem to catch the mood here of dealing with an unstable nuclear power with Muslim radicals in the population.

So the candidates have started pushing the electorate's God button for real now. "What do you think of that?" some friends have asked, adopting a "Gotcha!" tone that seems to assume I managed to reach age thirty-five without noticing that most registered Republicans aren't atheists.

Well, if you care, I think that religion is a repository of genuine wisdom about life that our civilizations have built up over time. If a given religion is the source of a candidate's deepest beliefs and those beliefs are going to be driving policy, I'd kind of like to know about it. That said, I essentially agree with what McQ says at the QandO blog here:

If you're a politician, I don't care what your religion is. I don't care if you are religious. What I care about is your character, your ethics, your public record and your ideas. And while I understand your religion could have a certain level of effect on the development of all of those things, that isn't the point.

It's one thing to explain to voters how your faith contributed to the development of your way of thinking; it's another to imply that simply being religious somehow makes you a better candidate for office.

In reality, I don't think it does. A lot of politicians seem to have found a convenient way to balance humility toward the Lord with high-handed arrogance toward their fellow citizens when using the coercive power of the government. That the humility and the arrogance are probably both genuine in most cases doesn't mean one excuses the other. McQ and a lot of other people are citing Peggy Noonan's latest column:

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.

I hope there aren't really grounds for such worries. Huckabee would have inclined in any case to play up his upright Christian-ness, but my sense is that he's chosen to do so in his current coarse way mostly because there happens to be a Mormon in the race. Most Americans already think Mormonism is slightly weird, and playing on that is an obvious way to get a tactical advantage. (And since most Americans think atheists are weird, playing on that was an obvious way for Romney to try to regain his balance.) Of course, it would have been nice if everyone had refrained from building themselves up by casting slimy aspersions on others' beliefs, especially when they're not directly relevant to policy. But we are, after all, talking about people who think they deserve to be president here.

Added later: Whoa. I thought I'd been on the cynical side, but that was until I saw this article in The Weekly Standard by Kenneth Anderson, a law professor and former Mormon (via Ann Althouse). The argument might have been made more compactly, but every paragraph has something to say.

My former confrères among the Mormons apparently do not count as Christian, yet somehow feel themselves bound by their allegiance to the teachings of the Nazarene to turn the other cheek and meekly suffer these attacks upon their spiritual fitness to participate in the public square. Admirably Christian, I suppose. I myself propose that Huckabee be horse-whipped in the square of public reason and turned out of politics so he can get on with writing The Seven-Day Diet of Creation and Mary Magdalene Got Skinny for Jesus and You Can Too.

...

The "all-out" answer that Romney gave was the denial that citizens might ever legitimately and ethically demand to know the content of religious doctrines professed by a candidate for public office. ("Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance.") It is multiculturalist because it essentially treats all private beliefs as immutable and beyond reason, and because it says that to propose to subject any of them to public scrutiny of reason is an act of intolerance akin to racism. It is a position traditionally asserted by the left on behalf of its identity-politics constituencies. It is dismaying, to say the least, that Romney would claim it for his own to deny the legitimacy of all questions.

It is, moreover, relativist in implication. Toleration is not an assertion of relativism. It is, rather, the forbearance from judging and acting on judgments in the public sphere that one might well believe oneself entitled to make in private. Toleration entails the suspension of public disbelief, or at least political action thereupon, about matters that one might nonetheless consider well within the realm of private moral judgment. Relativism, by contrast, is denial of grounds for judging at all. They could not be more different--and, crucially, relativism removes the possibility of toleration because it removes the possibility of reasoned judgment.

Added still later: Anderson also has an item on his blog about his piece. Interesting comments.