Welcome to 2019!
This Week: The New Normal — with Steve Walt and Fintan O’Toole. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Welcome to 2019 folks, and the new normal of extreme weather, extreme inequality and extreme politics.
The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole gave us our headline in a a radio conversation this week and a piece in the Irish Times called “the new dark normal.”
Steve Walt, the Harvard fopo realist, took us on an hour’s walk around the broader whole wide world of new normal, where the picture is much the same. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. If only after the end of the cold war we didn’t think it was our job to spread “liberal values;” if only we didn’t expand NATO and piss off the Russians, if only:
A wiser United States would have let Iraq and Iran check each other instead of attempting “dual containment” in the Persian Gulf, eliminating the need to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. Had Washington also made its support for Israel and the Palestinian Authority conditional on both sides making steady progress toward “two states for two peoples,” the two principal sources of Osama bin Laden’s murderous antipathy toward America would have been removed, making the 9/11 attacks much less likely. And with no 9/11, we almost surely would not have had invaded and occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, thereby saving several trillion dollars and thousands of U.S. and foreign lives. The Islamic State would never have emerged, and the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks that have fueled right-wing xenophobia in Europe would have been far less significant.
A United States less distracted by wars in the Middle East could have moved more swiftly to counter China’s growing ambitions… and could also have made Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization contingent on it first abandoning its predatory trade practices and establishing more effective legal institutions at home, including protections for intellectual property.
Moreover, greater attention to how the benefits of globalization were distributed would also have reduced inequality in the United States and tempered the polarization that is ripping the country apart today….
Finally, a more restrained grand strategy would not have tempted U.S. leaders to use torture, extraordinary rendition, targeted killings, unwarranted electronic surveillance, and other betrayals of core U.S. values. It would also have freed up trillions of dollars that could have been spent strengthening our armed forces, providing better health care for U.S. citizens, rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, investing in early childhood education, or reducing persistent deficits.
That’s the short course on how we got here. So who’s to blame?
Steve calls the foreign policy establishment of State Department, Pentagon, Congressional and think tank bureaucrats who all think alike “The Blob.” And it’s a bi-partisan blob (the only one in town).
So how do we fight back and obliterate the new normal blob before it eats us alive?
With fire extinguishers! Faced with an alien blob that crashed to earth and devoured good citizens in Phoenixville, PA, hero Steve McQueen attacked the oozing mass by freezing it before it could engulf the town. The authorities were then able to send an Air Force cargo plane to airlift the evil mass to the Arctic where the creature didn’t die, alas, but it was stopped. But only, as McQueen warned, for as long as the Arctic stays cold. (Thanks to Susan Coyne for that delicious distraction.)
In other New Normal News: Women and Children First!
What we’re reading:
Sally Rooney’s anticapitalist politics and addictive prose. Mark Burnett and The Apprentice. Work conditions at Amazon. The burnout generation. Legislating women’s bodies, and the crack baby myth. Martha Rosler at the Jewish Museum. Survivor and capitalism. NBC news vet resigns over the network’s hostage status to Donald Trump.
Read:
Ben Fountain is a brilliant political writer. I’d read and enjoyed his novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk but resisted at first another account of the 2016 election. Once I started reading Beautiful Country Burn Again— a collection of pieces he wrote for The Guardian during the campaign, I couldn’t stop. Malcolm Gladwell is a big fan. Here’s a Q&A with Gladwell and Fountain.
This is a staff favorite. A.S. Hamrah writes about movies for n + 1. The Earth Dies Streaming collects his film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper’s, and other pubs.
Support Open Source in 2019!
Our friend Larry Lessig says podcasting will help us out of our political crisis:
The architecture of the podcast is the precise antidote for the flaws of the present. It is deep where now is shallow. It is insulated from ads where now is completely vulnerable. It is a chance for thinking and reflection; it has an attention span an order of magnitude greater than the Tweet. It is an opportunity for serious (and playful) engagement. It is healthy eating for a brain-scape that now gorges on fast food.
If 2016 was the Twitter election — fast food, empty calorie content driving blood pressure but little thinking — then 2020 must be the podcast election — nutrient-rich, from every political perspective. Not sound bites driven by algorithms, but reflective and engaged humans doing what humans still do best: thinking with empathy about ideals that could make us better — as humans, not ad-generating machines.
There is hope here. We need to feed it.
So slow down everyone, and take a moment to feed Open Source, your high nutrient podcast — the first and longest running one on the planet!
Thank you for listening and for all your support and encouragement. Like us, tweet at us, and please do consider donating.
❤ the os team
