By Kimberly Spring, November 16th, 2010 ![KSpring[1]](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2010/11/KSpring1-150x112.jpg)
In two previous posts, DC has considered the military in terms of its means and ends. First, I asked about pragmatic pacificsm, and in response, US Army veteran, Michael Corey, discussed the use of war as a political tool. Today’s contributor, Kimberly Spring, is a PhD candidate at the New School. -Jeff
 In my research, I work with military veterans who served in Iraq. For them, this Veterans Day was not a day for parades, but for political action and protests. It may be that many service members find themselves questioning the strategies and tactics of Pentagon privately, but these veterans represent the minority of active duty and former service members who publicly criticize the military.
Protesting in this way has caused them difficulties. Speaking against the military is taboo. Breaking the “code of silence” to talk about abuse and brutality among their fellow service members is a betrayal.
Thinking about the polarizing discourse around the military, I wonder how discussions about means and ends in war can ever achieve any depth. Our portrayal of those who serve in the military remains split between, on the one hand, blanket condemnation of the savagery of men who glorify killing and domination, and, on the other, unqualified, unabashed reverence for the honor and sacrifice of those who serve.
The veterans who I work with struggle between these two extremes. In the US, national discourse has taken an uncomfortable swing toward the latter depiction – any criticism of service members is impolitic, for the left and the right.
But the idealization of soldiers denies the much more ambiguous experience of the men and women who serve.
We should not confuse the economic and personal need that leads many men and women to enlist with the idealism of sacrifice. We should not forget that service members are flawed, just like the rest of us.
That sometimes they act bravely, and other times they act out of fear; sometimes with compassion and other times with cruelty; that they, like anyone, operate in an arena of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Somehow we never fail to be astounded by the My Lais and the . . .
Read more: Means without Ends?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 15th, 2010 
 I had to make a decision about this blog early on.
Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial? I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.
For many people, this decision would be straightforward. For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go. For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear. But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.
Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing. They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.
While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire. I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives. The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and . . .
Read more: “.Org” or “.Com”?
By Lauren Denigan, November 14th, 2010 
 Last week, DC contributor Robin Wagner-Pacifici commented on how Facebook and other social networking sites have changed the language of social interaction. (link)
I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience. Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.
When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members. As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.
That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.
I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook. Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.
Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your . . .
Read more: On Facebook: Real, Everyday Life
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, November 12th, 2010 
 I’ve been brooding about on-line network sites, most particularly Facebook, attempting to get a handle on the nature of relations, commitments, and forces that operate in such virtual worlds.
And this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece titled, “The Crossroads Nation,” that illuminated something about the networked-world phenomenon that I hadn’t clearly seen before. The column’s ostensible topic is the capacity of America to be the most globally networked nation for the 21st century and thus Brooks advocates an economy built on continued digital integration.
Bland and unassailable as a premise (satisfying both more left-leaning infrastructure-building advocates and more right-leaning champions of individualistic success stories)the interesting thing about Brooks’ column is a subtle shift that occurs in the way it narrates human relationships.
“The Crossroads Nation” column is itself constructed by way of interesting shifts in the terminology it uses to label human groupings. Brooks imagines a young person finding her voice and her metier by migrating from a small town to a metropolis and connecting with other creative individuals and groups in the process. Describing this trajectory Brooks begins with traditional words like “country,””place,” “circle,” “group of people,” and switches decisively mid-column to “networks” and “hubs.”
He concludes with a paeon to America’s network capacity: “The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.”
Brooks does not reflect on the significance of this shift, or of the consequences of abandoning these traditional ideas about social and political collectivities. But reading the column made me realize that my diffidence toward on-line social networks has something to do with this transformation in our understanding of groups. I realized that I do not see myself as part of networks, that such a self-identification is actually anathema. Rather, I think about my life as one that is embedded in a world of families, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions and social classes.
This stubbornly off-line relational imaginary may have a generational foundation – born in the mid twentieth century I am . . .
Read more: Facebook has Changed the Language of Friendship
By Michael Corey, November 11th, 2010 
Today, on Veterans Day, I am happy to introduce my friend and US Army veteran: Michael P. Corey. Michael is a New School PhD with a special interest in the Vietnam War and collective memory.
The terms “means” and “ends” bring to mind relations among self-centered nations competing with one another. “A mean to an end.” “The end is worth its means.”
 It is one way of looking at the international political situation. This world looks very different from the top looking down and from the bottom looking up. For many policy makers, it involves judgments made in the name of national interests and security; and in more recent years additional concerns have been about international interests and security. From the bottom looking up, especially among combat veterans, the major concern is simply survival.
In 1927, Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political wrote, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy … The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.” About 100 years prior to Schmitt, Carl von Clausewitz observed, “War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.” These, the view from the top down.
A perspective from the bottom looking up is a passage by William Broyles, Jr. in his often quoted 1984 essay, “Why Men Love War,” “War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since.”
These perspectives pose challenges for veterans of all sorts and for those who have either antiwar or pacifist beliefs. War is a tool of politics, and it has consequences. Alternatively, the unwillingness to use war as a tool also has consequences.
Veterans Day sparked some remembrances . . .
Read more: On Veterans Day: A Reflection on Means and Ends
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 10th, 2010
In an earlier post, I reflected on means and ends in politics as this theme related to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Liu Xiaobo. Those reflections relate to the broader question of whether good ends ever justify undesirable means. Principled pacifists say no.
I remember struggling with this as a young man. Subjected to the draft during the Vietnam War era, being a very early and precocious opponent to the war, I tried to convince myself that I was a pacifist. I read the writings of Gandhi and A.J. Muste. I looked into the pacifist activities of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Although I realized that making the claim of being a Jewish pacifist would be practically difficult, I wanted to explore possibilities. But in the end, I gave up, because I couldn’t convince myself that I wouldn’t fight against Hitler, and I recognized then and see now that there are many other instances where I cannot oppose military action as a matter of absolute conviction.
I was not an enthusiastic supporter of either the first war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan, for example. It was not clear to me that a military response to either crisis was the appropriate one. But on the other hand, I couldn’t in good conscience oppose either war. The slogan “No Blood for Oil” rang hollow. America was attacked from bases that were protected and developed in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein was indeed a brutal dictator who worked to create a totalitarian order, as Kanan Makiya, ably demonstrated in his gripping book, The Republic of Fear.
But, on the other hand, means do have a way of defining political action whether or not the ends are justified. The way we have fought the wars, and the way our allies have ruled, have undermined the arguments for the war in Afghanistan. And indeed the way the Gulf War was fought and the lessons that were drawn from the war cast into doubt its initial justification, especially as this was utilized for the George W. Bush’s war . . .
Read more: Can I be a Pragmatic Pacifist?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 9th, 2010 
I present an analysis of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” seeing the controversies around it as being about the status of fact and fiction in our politics, and making a call to action to DC readers.
I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” I have enjoyed Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows. Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity. In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television. I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in. Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was. There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity but for good cultural reasons.
I was pleased by the turn out. It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor. I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good. But was there any more to it than that?
There indeed was concern in this regard. The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed in Bill Maher’s response.
The left and the right are not equally insane, the critics point out. The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself. The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action. This, of course, just before the midterm elections which promised to lead to broad Democratic losses and Tea Party gains, and which proved to be the case. The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a political event about . . .
Read more: Fact versus “Fictoid” in the Age of Cable
By Elzbieta Matynia, November 8th, 2010 
 Remember the South African miracle? That peacefully negotiated –for the most part — the end of the apartheid system, and the hope it conveyed to people not only in African predatory states, but in so many other parts of the world as well? Yes, dictatorship, even of the most vicious kind, could be dismantled peacefully, people could gain both rights and dignity, and plan a better future for their kids. This began almost 20 years ago.
Remember TV’s incredible bird’s-eye views of people standing in miles-long lines to vote? Remember Mandela with his awe-inspiring gravitas undiminished by TV lights, bringing a new humanity to our living rooms? Remember our admiration for the South Africans hammering out what was clearly the most progressive constitution in the world?
I am not going to tell you that this is all gone, because it is not. But even if it seems to have gotten reinvigorated, democracy here, like any new democracy, whether in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else, is still fragile, and today it faces a major test.
Ironically there is a well-advanced effort by the ANC government to introduce a new piece of legislation that would dramatically restrict media freedom , and that — in an uncanny echo of Orwellian doublespeak — has been given the name Protection of Information Bill. The bill endows the ruling party with the power to decide what information is “unfit” for consumption by the larger public. This launch of censorship, which for many reeks of the apartheid era, is effectively designed to stop any state information that could be classified as harmful to the “national interest,” which, as both media and public know, includes potentially embarrassing information about both past and present. If one reads the proposed bill it becomes clear that there is hardly anything in South Africa that could not be defined in terms of national interest. Moreover it is up to politicians to decide what should be defined as a national secret. This legislative initiative is coupled with a newly proposed Media Appeals Tribunal “to strengthen media freedom and accountability,” which recommends draconian penalties: e.g., from 3 to 25 years for . . .
Read more: In Johannesburg: The Struggle for Democracy all Over Again
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 7th, 2010 
The Tea Party reminds me of political movements I have been involved with and studied in the past. The development of this movement well illustrates my conception of “the politics of small things,” a very real and powerful element of political life.
Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra's 1939 political drama "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (Columbia Pictures)
When people meet each other and speak and act in each others presence based on shared principles about common concerns, and develop a capacity to act in concert, they create political power, a kind of power highlighted by my favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future. I saw this in the alternative cultural movement in Poland, and later in the democratic opposition in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc in the 1970s and 1980s.
People on their own, many my friends, reinvented their political culture, and the unimaginable and the hopelessly naïve became the realistic and the practical. Solidarnosc was born. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Empire imploded. These opposition figures changed commonsense. They presented an alternative to newspeak as a public language. The unimaginable became the real. I wrote of many of these issues in my book, Beyond Glasnost.
In the anti-war movement, the Dean campaign and the Obama campaign, the same power was evident. In the aftermath of the patriotic wave and mass support for the policies of the Bush administration, those who dissented started talking to each other, meeting, talking and developing a capacity to act in concert. At first, this was accomplished by utilizing meetup.com and supported by Moveon.org. A dense network of conversation and common action was developed. The man naming himself as the candidate from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, changed the discussion among Democrats. They lost the election, but then won big, in 2008, very much propelled by the social support that was generated by the politics of small things.
Their great success, I should say our great success, was viewed very skeptically by a significant portion of the population. After all, while Obama won decisively, 45% of voters chose . . .
Read more: The Tea Party Goes to Washington: Now What?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 5th, 2010
In my state, New York, thanks to the Tea Party favorite, Carl Paladino, Andrew Cuomo’s election as Governor was never in doubt. In Delaware, thanks to Christine O’Donnell, Chris Coons easily became Senator, when it seemed that he was likely to lose against a mainstream Republican. In Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who started and finished with low approval ratings, managed to be reelected, thanks to the Tea Party candidate, Sharron Angle. On the other hand, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Rand Paul in Kentucky each impressively were elected to the Senate, assuring that there will be a discernable taste of tea in that great deliberative body.
As Paul put it,
“They say that the U.S. Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. Well, I’m going to ask them, respectfully, to deliberate upon this. Eleven percent of the people approve of what’s going on in Congress. But tonight there is a Tea Party tidal wave and we’re sending a message to ’em.
It’s a message that I will carry with them on Day One. It’s a message of fiscal sanity It’s a message of limited, limited constitutional government and balanced budgets.” (link)
The language is ugly, but clear. The political discourse of the Senate is about to be challenged, and this is the body where the Republicans are in the minority. It will be even louder and clearer in the House, which I admit I find pretty depressing, both from the political and the aesthetic point of view. It’s going to be harder to actually deal with our pressing problems, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Indeed, it is in spheres of aesthetics and discourse that the Tea Party has been most successful. It’s not a matter actually of how many races Tea Party politicians won or lost. They won some and lost some, but from the beginning the Tea Party’s great success has been how it changed the public discussion about the pressing issues of the day. In my next post, I will discuss this more fully, comparing the Tea Party with the Solidarity Movement in Poland, . . .
Read more: Rand Paul and the Tea Party go to Washington
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In my research, I work with military veterans who served in Iraq. For them, this Veterans Day was not a day for parades, but for political action and protests. It may be that many service members find themselves questioning the strategies and tactics of Pentagon privately, but these veterans represent the minority of active duty and former service members who publicly criticize the military.
