some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you

[intertribal]

Rivals Split on U.S. Power, but Ideas Defy Easy Labels

"John McCain has said his worldview was formed in the Hanoi Hilton, the jail where as a prisoner of war he learned to stand up to his country’s enemies and lost any youthful naïveté about what happens when America shows weakness.

Barack Obama has written that his views began to take shape in the back streets of Jakarta, where he lived as a young boy and saw the poverty, the human rights violations and the fear inspired by the American-backed Indonesian dictator Suharto.

It was there, Mr. Obama wrote in his second autobiography, that he first absorbed the “jumble of warring impulses” that make up American foreign policy, and received a street-level understanding of how foreigners react to “our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism” and to Washington’s “tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation.”

As the campaigns tell the story, those radically different experiences in different corners of Southeast Asia have created two men with sharply different views about the proper use of American power."

How fucking AMAZING is that.  Weak states my ASS. 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

...sounds about the same as what i've been rambling about how we determine our beliefs. but what about people who didn't have the amazing experiential benefit of growing up "in the back streets of Jakarta"? like, say, the majority of voters?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, then, they don't have that experience. This article isn't about them. What's your point? I just think this is the kind of thing that rules out realism, because Southeast Asia are all considered weak states, but they still form formative beliefs for American leaders on the best way to conduct American power. If anyone in ASEAN got a hold of this article they would spontaneously orgasm.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I didn't see how it was amazing. And probably a lot more than that rules out political realism...but ruling out political realism is not the first thing that comes to my mind, usually.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, of course it's not the only thing that rules out realism, but destroying realism is my goal in life, so I look for instances of that everywhere.

It's amazing (and I think quite frankly would be considered so by many people who study political science) because no one in the U.S., government or otherwise, ever mentions Southeast Asia. Most Southeast Asian countries feel neglected by the U.S., and in many ways they are. McCain's answer is one that can probably be understood by a lot of Americans - Vietnam - but Vietnam is rarely seen as part of Southeast Asia, and putting it in that context is atypical. Vietnam has always been more like it's own special little rice-paddy nightmare, it's "the quagmire" of our history, and unless it's said in passing most people don't even like to discuss Vietnam.

A typical region for this would be the Middle East, where all our conflicts are and all the media attention is. And while Africa would be surprising, Africa is a place that comes up in typical conversation, even if it's in hyperbole: "the starving children in Africa" - Sudan is there, Rwanda is there, AIDS is there. Europe would be odd but not unsurprising - it is Europe, we have very good diplomatic relations with them and they're the other white region in the world, everyone in the U.S. knows what Europe is (although saying Australia would have been bizarre). East Asia would be not surprising either, like the Middle East, because that's where China and Japan are and everybody knows what that is, that's where the government has its economic attention focused. Central and South America would probably be about as surprising as Southeast Asia - they're larger, and include places like Mexico and Brazil and Cuba, but there is extremely little government or media focus on any of these places, probably because the southern Americas sit, like us, isolated from the rest of the world and unable to play much of a role in global strategy. So I'd be even more surprised if they said their formative experience was in Central America.

But, I'm not into that part of the world either, so that wouldn't excite me. It's amazing because Southeast Asia is never on the front of the New York Times unless it involves a tsunami, and it is never picked out for that spotlight essentially by political leaders. Like, my thesis? It's very difficult to find material on it because no one has studied the U.S.-Indonesia military relationship. More often than not I'm reading about people chastising the U.S. government for not paying more attention to the area.

To quote King of the Hill:
So, are you Chinese or Japanese?
We Laotian.
The ocean? What ocean?
From Laos, stupid! It's a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia!
... so, are you Chinese or Japanese?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

but an "understanding of how foreigners react to 'our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism' and to Washington’s 'tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption and environmental degradation.'" can be had in a lot of those places. in that sense, SE Asia seems somewhat incidental. excepting Vietnam, i still don't think it makes that much difference to the average reader that it was SE Asia and not elsewhere.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, of course you can learn about that elsewhere. You can learn that almost anywhere. For me what's amazing is not amazing what was learned (except that I think McCain should have learned something else), but the fact that it was Southeast Asia at all. The sheer randomness of it. It makes a difference in the sense that it is different than what the average reader would read, that it's Southeast Asia ("Huh? Is that a region? Is that part of China?") and not The Middle East - which would probably elicit no reaction, because we're so used to reading "Middle East" and associating it with the war and national interests and foreign policy.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

well...i'm not sure if the average American is a NY Times reader, and anyway, if they aren't familiar w/ it, i think the default reaction is "some obscure foreign place," it gets grouped in together with the rest they don't know.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Okay, see, I think you need to get that I'm reacting to this as someone who is excited because something they study which never gets in the news is in the news, and is being portrayed as important to something that is always in the news (American politicians running for office). That's REALLY all this is.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

oh, i get that. that's why i said it wasn't amazing.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

damn, that was harsh.

it was amazing to me.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm sorry. i didn't mean it to be...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

my point was that something amazing would truly happen if not just one person but many people, like American voters, learned something in their lives about "the proper use of American power"...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

or maybe all that matters are political candidates. grumble.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, at least political candidates can introduce these concepts and places to other people.

I mean, the war on terror did teach Americans geography of the Middle East. I think that's how most of them learned it.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i know, but there should be so much more than political candidates doing that...

we know Middle Eastern geography now?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, at least people have heard of Afghanistan.

No, you're right, people still don't know where anything is. But the thing is that kind of thing was always on news channels during the surges. And if it's all network news is talking about and people STILL don't know anything then... well.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i don't count on television news to educate people. i count on television news to mostly let people react to events in the world based on what they learned growing up (incl. things like "small-town values"). i mean, we didn't even get Middle East geography (not to mention history, politics) in high school. not even in Citizenship Issues. there's something wrong with that, i think.

i was surprised to learn that turkey borders both bulgaria and iraq. had no idea...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, what I'm saying is television news is so generic / people-targeted that if people still don't know geography after having it droned into them by news that's pretty sad. Never mind, this is pointless.

Turkey's a crazy place.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

droning is generally a poor educational strategy. and how much news do people watch, and where do they get it?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Sure, it would be amazing, but I don't know how it would ever happen unless America fell drastically in the power-polls of the world and was constantly cowering under the threat of a megalomaniac China, a nuclear Iran, an anti-American Pakistan, and quite possibly a Mexico that wants to take Texas back. Then I'm sure we would start learning about the proper use of American power.

Either that, or, we start doing really, really egregious things in the world, like cutting off people's hands (King Leopold) or putting entire societies in concentration camps (Britain during the Boer War). Then again some European countries still can't come to terms with the nastiness in their past, and they've basically just learned about the proper use of power through the lens of their own post-world-war weakness. And it is indeed unfortunate that the U.S. learned about being a world power from Britain.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

well, that's one way for us to learn. surely there are others.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Uh... I can't think of any from history.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

well, then, history sucks. :P

"Look, I'm a True Believer (in the traditional concept of the liberal education, in the democratic/republican concept that education is a fundamental good [for the individual as for the society as a whole], [. . .]. I'm [. . .] a Modernist through and through. I've staked my life, in essence, on this set of values."