Moment, Linger On

A quick SAT analogy

England::Scotland as The United States of America::?

a. England
b. Canada
c. Texas
d. Oklahoma

Gone again

Headed north to walk the Royal Mile. I'll be back Sunday with some delinquent posting on Richard "American Hero" Clarke and the unfortunate demise of the Invisible Adjunct among other things.

Egyptian beans?

So I'm cooking dinner tonight (even as I write this, in fact) and one of the items on the menu is green beans. Not just any green beans, but trimmed fine organic beans. From Egypt. Yeah, that's right, Egypt.

That we are getting our produce from Africa isn't that surprising. Any summer vegetables in the UK at this time of year are going to be coming from either a warm climate or a greenhouse. Sainsbury's, where I usually shop, seems to get a good deal of produce from Kenya and Guatemala.

But organic produce? From Africa? I always seem to view organic produce as coming from that farmer's market down the road or at least from some farm in California. And I've thought of it as a local product in the UK as well, which shows how little thought I've put into it because we've been eating organic vegetables all winter and they had to come from somewhere.

The thing is, I've always had this naive confidence in organic produce in that I've had this feeling that I could nip down the road and actually check out for myself that they aren't spraying carcinogenic dreck onto my dinner. But I don't think I will be making it over to North Africa any time soon and somehow I just don't have that much confidence in the ability or motivation of the regulatory authorities of Egypt to ensure that their produce is actually organic. And would you?

I guess Sainsbury's has forseen ours doubts, because there is a sticker on the package inviting me to go to their organic food web site to find the origins of my beans. And there's a form where I can put in the code on the package and find out that my beans came from Wealmoors:

Our primary Egyptian source was established in 1977. Certified by the Soil Association they have just under 350ha of organic land. Crops grown include Herbs, Vegetables, Potatoes and Nuts. The excellent location means they are close to European markets but have a unique and stable climate all year around, giving them competitive advantage against other sources and the ability to successfully grow a full range of organic crops.

The farm incorporates the latest technology into their growing strategy including a state of the art weather station, which determines both soil, and crop water needs and controls the irrigation systems as appropriate. See image 1(Weather Station) They are environmentally aware, recycling all waste materials many into reusable composts, provide many natural habitats for wildlife and offer vast job opportunities to local resident. Image 2 (Drilling Crops)

I suppose it could be a complete fabrication but at least I'm impressed by all the troubles they've gone through.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

In the New York Times this morning there is a story describing how Bush hack, I mean campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, accuses Kerry of planning to engage in reckless deficit spending.

Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, released an analysis that he said showed a $1 trillion gap over the next decade between spending increases Mr. Kerry has called for during the campaign and the tax increases he has already supported.

Excuse me, but just for clarification, did the Bush administration acquire a history of correctly costing proposals and truthfully reporting these costs before or after last year's Medicare bill?

A divisive issue

Amy Sullivan has moved her writings over from Political Aims to The Gadflyer, where she is one of the new contributing editors. That, in itself, is reason enough to go there, because she usually has some good stuff to say. Especially interesting is her perspective on the role of religion and religious expression in the Democratic party, which is both interesting and relevant.

I say usually has some good stuff to say, because her column of March 17, in which she takes several Democratic special interest constituencies to task, almost completely misses the mark. I particularly take issue with her upbraiding of pro-choice groups:

Democrats are not going to – nor should they – adopt a pro-life platform. But they would do well to adopt rhetoric that is less stridently pro-abortion. And choice groups would do well to remember that while it is their job to stake out idealistic positions, they need to be patient and tolerant with politicians who recognize the gray areas of this difficult issue, sometimes voting for sensible measures such as parental notification laws.

Parental notification laws are sensible? Parental notification laws are in contention for the worst pieces of legislation ever, in the sense that they are dishonest in their intent and even if they weren't they still wouldn't work like they were supposed to. What they are is punishment masquerading as bad policy. Supposedly existing to "make sure that parents are involved in a serious medical procedure," their true effect is to prevent some teens from having abortions entirely and force others to agonize over their decision to the point at which it is impossible.

The reason that they seem like a good idea to people like Amy is that she grew up in a close-knit family with good parents. To her, it is incomprehensible that there would be some parents who would actually kill their pregnant daughters or, only marginally worse disown them, but this situation does exist and it is ludicrous to suggest that every pregnant teenage girl would be in a situation where they could safely involve their parents.

The next response to this would be that there are usually provisions written in for a teen who is truly in danger to go to a judge to bypass their parents if they absolutely have to. Well, good, but who is to say that a clueless and stressed out teen will have the nerve or the knowledge to do this? At the very least, it throws yet another obsticle in the path of someone who is already facing a difficult decison and who might not be able to cope with this additional barrier. And even if they could, who is to say that they won't just run into a judge like that woman in Texas who simply doesn't believe in teens having abortions and refuses to sign the order. What are they supposed to do at that point? Get a lawyer and appeal. Come on.

For the record, my position on the issue is abortion without apology, by which I mean that, at least for a first or second trimester abortion, the decision should be between a woman, her doctor, and (possibly) her partner. Beyond that, there isn't any more societal interest in the procedure than there would be to have an ingrown toenail removed.

That said, we could learn a lot about how the UK handles the issue. Here, any abortion before 24 weeks is legal. Beyond that, it is legal only in very drastic circumstances, but before that almost anything goes. This is actually stricter than the US, where anything up to about week 26 is legal and later ones are also sometimes permitted. The UK law is a compromise I could personally get behind and I would gladly work within the pro-choice movement to push for such a compromise if it were really on the table.

Spanish-American Relations

I've resisted until now writing about the blatant ignorance and dishonesty displayed by not only bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan and uber-hack Tacitus but also pundits such as Thomas Friedman and the ex-wrestling coach that passes for a Speaker of the House. I'm referring, of course, to the wildly off base assertions that the Spanish people were appeasing terrorists by turning out Aznar's party in this week's elections and the tastless accusations of cowardice on the part of Zapatero because of his statements that he might pull the Spanish troops out of Iraq.

It should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, a desire to inform themselves beyond the shallowest interpretation of the events, and the intellectual honesty to argue truthfully about them, that the following are true:

1. The Spanish voters voted the Popular Party out of office not because of the bombings themselves, but because the PP dishonestly manipulated the investigation and reporting of the bombings to pin the blame on ETA rather than Islamic extremists. Had the PP played it straight with the voters, it is quite likely that they would have won, although probably by a narrower margin than had the bombing not occured.

2. The Socialists were against Spanish involvement in the war from the beginning. They had made no secret of their desire to push for greater UN involvement in Iraq and/or pull their troops out. Zapatero's announcement that he will do just that is not a craven response to the bombings but rather a fulfillment of campaign promises. Given that 70 to 90 percent of the people in Spain (depending on which polls you look at) were against the war, it seems as though he is not acting against the will of the Spanish people, at any rate.

Other people, better writers than I, have pointed this out over the past week. Take a gander at the writings of Kevin Drum or Josh Marshall, for instance. I can't really add anything that they haven't covered.

Instead, let me point out that it isn't odd that Spain would shift its alignment away from the US. Out of all the European countries, the Spanish may like us the least of all except maybe the Russians or the Serbs. I'm not talking about the relationship between our government and theirs, but rather the attitudes of the people themselves. If you've been to Spain it doesn't take long to figure out that a lot of people there really don't like Americans.

If you know anything about Spanish history it doesn't take much to figure out why. The Spanish fought a brutal civil war from 1936-1939. The war was between a weak but democratically elected government that was a coalition of moderate, leftist parties, communists, and anarchists and the Spanish army, led by General Franco and backed by the right wing political parties (including the Falange, the Spanish equivalent of the Nazis), the Catholic Church and many of the large corporations and wealthy landowners. The Nationalists (as the army was known) were backed with money and material support by Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. The Republican side was hoping for support from the west, but aside from half-hearted and ineffectual support by France, the only help they received was from Stalinist Russia. In particular, the US and the UK adopted a position of neutrality and refused to support the Republicans. This was a sore blow to a government that considered itself a fellow democracy and the legitimate government of Spain.

The conduct on both sides was unbelievably horrific. There was no concept of prisoners of war; anyone captured was almost immediately executed. There was mass killings and torture on both sides of civilians caught behind the lines. On the Nationalist side, anyone who was a trade unionist or a member of a leftist party or any of their families risked torture and execution. The Republicans did the same to landowners and fascists. After the Nationalists prevailed the executions and mass imprisonments continued. Several hundred thousand political prisoners were executed into the 1950s. Several hundred thousand more fled to France, where they were thrown into concentration camps by the Germans after France surrendered in 1940. Franco governed in a repressive fashion (although it improved in the 1960s and 1970s) until his death in 1975. The Basques fought on the Republican side, for which they were generously repaid by Franco, and ETA was formed under these circumstances.

If you want to visualize it from an American perspective, think of the US Civil War, only any soldiers captured were killed. Also, after the Confederacy fell, instead of the relatively benign treatment the North gave the South, the political leaders and all the plantation owners and overseers would have been executed or imprisioned. Their lands would have been confiscated and (probably) given to both emancipated slaves and Northern industrialists. If you think that Southerners still have a chip on their shoulders 150 years after the fact, that is nothing compared to how they would feel if they were treated like the defeated Spanish Republicans.

And so there is even now a lot of lingering resentment in Spain. And quite a bit of it is directed at us, for two reasons. First, there was a lot of bitterness that we did not intervene during the Civil War on the part of the Republicans. It was incomprehensible to many people that a fellow democracy would not take their part. (As an aside, there were many individual Americans who went to Spain to fight. Many of them, upon returning to the US and joining the armed forces in World War II, were labeled premature anti-fascists and considered politically unreliable. Go figure.) But also, after the war, there was an expectation that we would do for Spain what we did for Germany and Italy and liberate them from totalitarian fascism. Instead, because Franco was anti-communist, we cynically turned a blind eye to his abuses. In light of this, it is not surprising that many Spaniards have no great love for the United States.

Where the banshees live (and they do live well)

So I'm back from my jaunt south. I got to look at some nifty Georgian architecture and Roman ruins in Bath. We also took a trip over towards Salisbury to see what all the commotion was about over a 5000 year old arrangement of big rocks.

Bigger. I thought it would be bigger, both in size and scope. I envisioned a huge spread a mile from the road with big parking lots and a bunch of tacky gift shops. I also thought there would be loads of people, although a cold weekend in March isn't exactly high tourist season.

Picture this instead. You're driving on a narrow two lane road through a bunch of sheep pastures. You come over the hill and there it is. You think. On the right is a collection of roped off stones with a few people walking around them along a circular path. On the left is a small parking lot. And a small sign that says "Stonehenge." There are sheep grazing right up to the path; apparently some farmer owns all the land right up to the monument.

It is one of about 650 World Heritage sites and I'm glad I saw it, but I was expecting something more impressive. Maybe I'll post some photos when I finally dump them off the camera, but you are really better off with your own imagination if you haven't actually seen it yet.

Short Break

I'm going down south to Gloucestershire tomorrow to do some guest teaching and then take a few days of R&R. I won't have much access to email and so won't be doing much blogging while I'm gone.

If you're lucky, I'll have some photos of Spinal Tap's favorite Celtic ruin. See you next week.

Mors omnia vincit

Alain de Botton is a British writer with an Oxbridge philosophy degree. In addition to writing three fairly interesting novels he has written two "philosophy for the masses" books. The first, the appropriately named How Proust Can Change Your Life, is an in depth look at the works of a single philosopher. His second and, in my opinion, more interesting work on the topic of philosophy is The Consolations of Philosophy. talks about how six philosophers address six fairly universal concerns:

Socrates on unpopularity.

Epicurus on money.

Seneca on frustrations.

Montaigne on inadequacy.

Schopenhauer on love.

Nietzsche on facing difficulties.

Now he has written a new book, Status Anxiety, in which he questions why so many of us are so unsatisfied with our place in the world when most of us have it so much better than out predecessors. He talks about where our worries about status came from and what we might be able to do about it. I haven't read the book (yet), but I had a chance last night to watch the two hour companion documentary that he made for Channel Four.

It was interesting, even if his conclusions were hardly earth-shattering. Like many upper-class Europeans, he seems to assign a decent amount of blame for these societal concerns to us, the Americans. In this case, he blames our introduction of democracy and class mobility for making people dissatisfied with their lot in life. Is suppose so, but is this really such a bad trade? I mean, I'm not sure I'd rather be a poverty stricken but content with (or at least accepting of) my place in the world peasant as opposed to the slightly insecure achievement driven middle class person that I am.

He does point out that this perceived social mobility has allowed some people to misguidedly justify the removal of any sort of societal safety net and I agree with him that this is most certainly a negative consequence. He has a short interview with Grover Norquist in which the Grove is allowed to show himself to be the a**hole that he truly is and the show was worth watching just for this. As an aside, how is it that Grover Norquist is a recognizable figure in the UK, anyway? I would wager that more people in the UK would probably know who he is than in the US. I had to explain to R., who is not clueless about current events, who he is. What a sad commentary about us.

At the end he talks about whether there is a solution to this. He draws on Schopenhauer (he is a philosopher, after all) to argue that in the end we all arrive at the same state: death. Therefore, we shouldn't worry about our status with people who, not only will we never meet, but ill also end up at the same place anyway. Instead, the only people we sould worry about impressing are those who are close to us and stay with us through the difficult moments of life as well as the person whose good opinion should be most important, namely ourselves. In de Botton's opinion (as I interpret it), we should focus on what satisfies us even if it doesn't earn the recognition of others.

And to those of you who were worried that irony is dead, you will be happy to know that it is alive and well and living in the UK. Immediately following this two hour documentary on status anxiety was an installment of Channel Four's latest reality show:

9.00 Regency House Party Reality series in which five aspiring Mr Darcys and five Miss Bennets live in a Herefordshire country house exacly as it would have been in the early 19th century...

UPDATE: Post edited to correctly spell de Botton's name. Spelling counts, after all.

There are worse places to be

You're Sweden!
After years of trying to rule the world around you, you've finally put aside violence in favor of advocating peaceful resolution.  There's still a little Viking in you, but mostly you like Nobel Prize winners and long nights by the fire.  And safe cars.  You always read the safety manual in airplanes, and you're just a little cold.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

I also provide affordable healthcare for all my household residents...