Self Indulgence Alert!: Africa Blogs

I've been working away at the Foreign Policy Association's Africa and
South Africa blogs, with Zimbabwe, perhaps not surprisingly, getting lots of play. Go read away if you're so inclined.

Hypocrisy Watch: Crazy Religious Figure Edition

Is there a galling double-standard when it comes to the ravings of Jeremiah Wright and the usually even more insane, offensive and bothersome ravings of a vast swath of white religious figures on the right? Of course there is.

Resolving the Mess of the BCS

At the online newsletter of The New York Times' sports magazine Play Dan Shanoff proposes a pretty brilliant solution to the intransigence of those conferences that refuse to establish a playoff system for college football's highest level:

Personally, I would like to see [SEC Commissioner Mike] Slive take his ball and go home: "SEC-ede" from the B.C.S. and create his own playoff; as the nation's strongest conference (by far -- it boasts the past two national champs), he has the juice to do it.

Invite more playoff-friendly conferences, even individual teams, into the mix (and don't be afraid to go it alone). Create room for the non-B.C.S. schools to participate. Generate billions in revenue from TV networks and advertisers. And isolate the Big Ten and Pac-10, daring them to try to proclaim one of their member schools -- even an undefeated one -- as "national champ" while the rest of the country has turned its attention to a thrilling 8- or 16-team playoff. Any school that doesn't want to participate doesn't have to; I imagine that resistance will be short-lived.

Incremental measures won't work. Obstructionist colleagues need to be marginalized.

To save the B.C.S., they need to destroy it.

The idea that the BCS is worth saving, that a playoff system is somehow going to violate the academic integrity of college football, or anything else is patently absurd. The BCS is irredeemable and always has been. The fact that every other division of college football has a championship tournament and that every other NCAA sport has either a tournament or a meet to establish a champion on the field, court, pools, track, field, or ice should be enough to reveal the BCS for what it is: A naked grab for cash from a cabal of self-interested parties.

Swift Boating Obama

Evan Bayh has stated the obvious: The Republicans are likely to Swift Boat Obama over the absurd Reverend Wright fiasco. But before we point fingers, however deservedly, at the Grand Old Party, it is probably only fair to say that it is not as if the Clinton camp and its supporters have tread lightly on this issue. The Wright issue manifests itself equally as crude racism, politics as usual, kabuki theater, and media lightweightedness. The republicans operate effectively in this world, but let us not pretend that this is a partisan affliction.

Two Reviews

Two pieces in the newest Times Literary Supplement caught my eye. Mark Mazower, whose book Dark Continent is one of my favorites on modern European history, reviews Bernard Wasserstein's Barbarism And Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time, and John Keay has an essay on three books on China's cities, especially Beijing.

The Wright Stuff

I am not responsible for anything my mentor says. You are not responsible for anything that your mentor says. If you are close to your mentors, as I am to mine, you would not be likely to abandon that person even if they said something absolutely batshit crazy. Doing so would probably reflect worse on you than simply saying nothing. This all assumes, of course, that your mentor does not persist in saying crazy things that can actually harm you.

It also assumes that you are not dealing with the triple factors of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their imperturbable sense of entitlement, the well-oiled conservative attack machine, and a media culture as intellectually shallow as one can possibly imagine. In that case, you're Barack Obama, who somehow is being held to account for things that he clearly does not believe, has never advocated, and that someone else said.

So what does Obama do in this latest round of the ongoing cavalcade of idiocy surrounding the increasingly tedious Jeremiah Wright who, if he was taken out of context earlier has happily allowed his narcissism to shine while he provides the fullest context imaginable about ideas ranging from the justifiable (if angry) to the utterly inane to the dangerously misguided. You make it clear, crystal clear, that you denounce everything the mentor has said. There really was no need to make such denunciations of course, because the person who made those statements WAS NOT YOU, but that's the culture in which we live. And then we move on to focus on your views, not Wright's, because you are running for President, and Wright is not.

Regrettably we do not live in this ideal world in which you are not held to account for things that other adults who are not you say. We instead live in a world in which pundits fatuously, vacuously, and gaseously prattle on about responsibilities that ought not to be considered your own to disavow things you demonstrably do not represent to prove points to people who are never going to support you in the first place but who love the idea of watching you prostrate yourself. It's a form of minstrelsy, but you do it because it's been demanded of you and fulfilling those demands is the only way to try to steer the conversation back to matters of substance and hope that there is a way to make opportunity out of this hopeless muddle that has been foisted upon you.

Increased Democratic Turnout = ???

Voters are registering in record numbers and participation has been at historic highs in the primaries in 2008. The question both parties must wrestle with is what, if anything, this means for November. Does the record turnout and the new registrants represent a turning tide in American electoral politics? Does it mean that people want to be part of what they perceive as a historic primary fight? Does it mean that Democrats in these latter primary states finally see their participation mattering? Does it represent crossover votes from Republicans, whether disenchanted with their own party or interested in shaping the opposition for the fall?

Obviously we do not know the answers to these questions. It seems evident that the historic, perhaps transformative, nature of the Democratic race plays the biggest role in all of this, but my guess is that once the party's candidate is chosen a lot of these newly registered folks will be in play for the general election. McCain is a formidable opponent and will be a popular one as well. What he does not enjoy in support from parts of the base he may well make up for among the so-called Reagan or Swing Democrats, not to mention among those for whom an Obama or Clinton candidacy is problematic.

What is also likely is the the Democrats have an opportunity. By mobilizing so many voters the party has the chance to bring about a sea change along the lines of 1994's midterm elections which shaped the American political landscape for a decade and more. I do wonder if wholesale realignment along the lines of 1932 will ever again be possible in what seems to be such a closely divided electorate and instead if tectonic shifts in the future will be less of the earthquake variety and more akin to temblors.

Dear Diary . . .

Tom has posted a new entry at the Diary Blog. Read it.

Self Indulg . . . Ah, You Know The Drill: ASMEA in DC

I am in my old stomping grounds of Washington, DC for the first meeting of a promising new organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. On Saturday I will be presenting a paper on a project on Darfur on which I have been working for quite some time.

Typical of a lot of my work, this project is not quite scholarly enough for academics and may well prove too scholarly for the general public. By no means am I an expert of Darfur or Sudan, but as someone who writes about Africa I have been asked to contribute to this inaugural conference and was asked some time ago to write a piece on this nightmare scenario. In May I will present a more advanced (I hope) version of this project at a Sudan Studies meeting in Tallahassee and when all is said and done maybe I'll have something worth saying in a couple of venues about the human rights catastrophe that we have helped to countenance through benign neglect and practiced malfeasance.

Illegal Art

A colleague directed me to "Illegal Art," which explores issues such as censorship and self-censorship, intellectual property, trademark and copyright law, and the like. There are some fascinating arguments there, some with which I agree, many with which I take issue, but almost all of which are provocative. Take a look.

Ego Run Amok: More Self Indulgence, Zimbabwe Commentary Edition

I finally received the file from my Cape Argus op-ed (pdf -- it's the middle article on the page) from last month on the Zimbabwe election. I was wrong on some stuff, right on some, I overplayed the role of Simba Makoni, underplayed that of Morgan Tsvangirai, and am as surprised as anyone that we still await the outcome, which I still imagine will come down to Robert Mugabe stealing the election.

Dork Receives Award: Self Indulgence Alert

Yup, that's me, from a picture that appeared in a local paper and is now rotating on the UTPB website.

The B's are Back

Like Sportsguy, I'm back on the Bruins bandwagon. My interest in them waned for many of the same reasons his did, though I never fully left them. Nonetheless, the return to what was once one of the great rivalries in sports, Bruins-Canadiens, coupled with the B's mattering again has me back in a big way. Unlike baseball or football or basketball (or rugby or track or maybe a few others), hockey is a sport about which I cannot now write with any particular authority, but it is in my blood. I am named after a former Bruin great (on and, perhaps even more legendarily off the ice) named Derek Sanderson. My first team jersey was not of the Sox or Pats or C's, but rather was a classic black Bruins spoked-B jersey that I got from my great aunt Joan, who lived in Boston.

I have a good feeling about the game that drops puck in 18 minutes. Go B's! Beat those dastards from Montreal.

Bias in the Academy

At Brainstorm, a blog at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein discusses perceptions of bias on the part of professors by confusing two distinct issues -- what goes on in the classroom and what professors do when, say, they write an op-ed piece. The comments are also worth perusing. At the end of the day, my argument here is what it always is: Most of us have far too much to do with our time in the classroom to be imposing a political agenda, what many students may think of as being ideological may be no such thing, and this is an irrelevant question in the vast majority of college classes that have almost nothing to do with contemporary politics. When it comes to the question of bias in the classroom there is lots of sound and fury, sturm and drang, and gnashing of teeth about what is ultimately a non-issue (and for some reason, the accusers never look in the halls of business schools, or anywhere outside of the liberal arts, which I find curious).

Fredericksburg

Perhaps to assuage the fact that I'm a year older, Mrs. Dcat is treating me to a couple of nights down in beautiful Fredericksburg, Texas, where she hopes to find some nice jams and pies and, by extension, I thus hope she finds some nice jams and pies. This old dog has learned new tricks since his betrothal.

Popetastic

"Thank you your Holiness. Awesome speech." - George W. Bush to Pope Benedict XVI.

That's your president, Republicans.

I am going to start a fight with the next conservative who natters on to me about religion: "Thank you your Holiness. Awesome speech."

"Awesome"!?!?

To Go or Not To Go: The Olympic Dilemma

There are no easy solutions to the dilemma of what to do about the Olympics in Beijing. The solution, of course, would be not to award the Olympics to totalitarian states in the first place, but that toothpaste has long since been squeezed and is not going back in the tube. And ending the Olympics hardly seems like a likely or even viable possibility. None of the options that remain are ideal.

Those who argue that the Olympics is no place for politics have no conception that the Olympics have always been politicized if not political. Nearly every Olympics since at least 1936 has been fraught with politics, whether overt or covert. Wishing something does not make it so, and this includes the dream of an Olympics free of the dirty realities of politics. And the irony, of course, is that those who most would screech about not attending the Olympics are those who would also screech about meeting face to face or otherwise engaging with dictators or dictatorships.

I am torn. We don't want to reward China's noxious human rights record, and there is no doubting that any country that attends the Beijing games will be rewarding China in publicity, in tourism, and in legitimacy. One can argue that the Olympics are not the place to make this stand, and I respect that, but no one can seriously pretend that China does not benefit in myriad ways from hosting these games. The country will put its best face forward, and most observers will not know the difference because they will be steered clear of the hutongs, local dissent will have long since been crushed and most anything that does not re-enforce the image China wants to portray will be whitewashed and censored, and once the games actually commence, international protest will resemble an echo chamber. On the home front, any debate about China will mostly be about scoring points and using the issue as a political cudgel rather than constructing an ideal policy.

Perhaps it is the athlete in me that realizes too that while they are a tiny constituency, the athletes for whom Beijing represents the culmination of a dream deserve consideration. For better or for worse, the Olympics are the apex of global athletic competition for the majority (or at least a huge plurality) of athletes in the majority of sports. I hate the idea of taking away one of these opportunities from them that comes only every four years. Compared to the geopolitical questions involved this may be small beer, silly even, but once a jock, always a jock.

One hope I have is that the media will not sanitize the context in which the games will be played and thus will make the best of the situation. the problem with this is that the majority of media members sent to Beijing will be sportswriters whose mandate is not politics, and whose views most of us do not, in the majority of cases, care about. Jay Mariotti, as just one example among many, is a dullard when it comes to his bailiwick of sports. Do you really want his take on global politics? Nonetheless, if NBC and the news networks keep their eye on what China is and what it is not, which is to say, if they are willing to peel away the veneer that China will skillfully present, perhaps daylight really will prove to be the best disinfectant.

Elitism and Bitterness

I honestly do not have the intellectual energy or patience to spend a load of time on the idiotic accusations against Barack Obama for saying something that, not to put too fine a point on it, is pretty much fucking true. My "working class" (we were, to put it less euphemistically, "poor") background is clear and is a defining aspect of my character: my parents, who had me when they were still kids, divorced when I was young, and my brother and I lived with a Mom who worked in factories or cleaning floors or waiting tables to keep two kids fed and to keep the lights on in a house where the well sometimes ran dry so we had no water. We spent a large hunk of time at our grandparents' farm, which my dad ran. It was a small, family dairy farm, and it went belly up in the mid-1980s when running a small farm was an almost sure ticket to bankruptcy. In other words, try that elitist liberal Democrat nonsense with someone else, because it isn't working on me. And if you think there is not a great deal of bitterness among the working class, left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat, Republican, and undecided, you are living in a dream world.

Now, I would argue that Obama made an infelicitous linkage between that bitterness and the issues of guns and religion. Not because the ties are not there -- they are, in some ways -- but because the situation is more one of correlation than the causality that Obama implied. I find most amusing the question of Obama being an "elitist," which is one of those assertions so stupid on its face that it would warrant mockery were some people not levying the accusation seriously. First off, anyone at that level of politics is an elite. John McCain has been a Senator for a generation. It does not get much more elite than that. Hillary? Please. If her discomfort around real people were any more palpable she'd spray some sort of warning ink on them like an anti-proletariat octopus. But secondly, how convenient -- how cute! -- to make the black guy in the race, who has served as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago and worked as a civil rights lawyer, the elitist! To make the most demonstrably religious person in the race first a Muslim and then a dangerous uber-black Christian because of someone else's preachings, and now to imply that he is anti-religious! To make an issue of the fact that he doesn't bowl well! Without belaboring the point, I am going to have a hard time buying that race does not play a role in all of this.

So where does this issue go from here? My guess, and perhaps my hope, is that while it will be a lingering subtext that some will use to Swift Boat Obama, most people, bitter or not, won't let it have a major impact on their decision unless they were already leaning against Obama. There is a long race to go. The Democratic convention is three months from now -- what, in terms of specifics, do you remember about the various day-to-day aspects of the campaign that surely seemed like life or death matters from back in January? The general election is nearly seven months away. How much of the dynamic of the races from seven months ago is still relevant? Nonetheless, for now Hillary and down the road the McCain people will try to keep this "elitism" accusation alive, despite its absurdity, for as long as possible. This is the political environment in which we live and in which they operate. Obama's so-called gaffe is today's annoyance. But there is worse to come as the stakes get higher. This is far from as ugly as this race will get. Mark my words on that.

Pottie Mouth

Via Tootle, who beat me to the punch, one of my good friends, David Pottie, got a lot of play in this story (which has for some reason been truncated). here is the quote, again from the Big Tent stalwart:

"Foreign observers of Nepali politics played down the risks of a Maoist participation in the new government. “The stereotypical and unrealistic fear is if Maoists win the election, this will be the one and only election,” said David Pottie, associate director of the democracy program at the Atlanta-based Carter Center. “That is very unlikely.”

The Maoists are likely to be a minority in the new government, Mr. Pottie said, and the political elite in this country, including those among the Maoists, continue to be dominated by upper-caste men. He hoped that would be broadened by the new caste, gender and ethnic quotas imposed on these elections. “It does not appear likely that there will be a return to the People’s War or a dismantling of democratic elements,” Mr. Pottie said.

Even the Indians, who should be the most worried about revolutionary Communists in power on the other side of a long and porous border, say elections are the only way to give the country a real shot at peace by bringing the Maoists under the parliamentary tent. “It does not solve Nepal’s problems at all; it is a door opener,” Shiv Mukherjee, the Indian ambassador to Nepal said in an interview.

“Mainstreaming the Maoists is one of the major achievements of these political party leaders,” he added. “There was a realization that eliminating the Maoists was not the way to go.”"

David is a Canadian with an African Studies PhD in Political Science. But he has branched out based on his work at the Carter Center. He was my best friend in South Africa when we both were based at Rhodes University and he is easily one of the smartest guys I have ever known.

Nearly Intolerable Self-Indulgence Alert

Yeay for Me !!