Podcast • January 8, 2008

Anthony Barnett on What’s Changed

Credit Anthony Barnett with making the link between the Barack Obama campaign and Will Smith’s box-office smash, “I Am Legend.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3) ...

Credit Anthony Barnett with making the link between the Barack Obama campaign and Will Smith’s box-office smash, “I Am Legend.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3)

anthony barnettopenDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett

In the movie it’s the lean and gorgeous family-minded, brown-eyed man (the scientist Robert Neville, played by Smith) who’s “the last human” in New York and maybe on earth. He’s immune from the virus that has turned the rest of us into zombies, and he’s in a mad dash to share whatever it is that’s protecting him with a colony of survivors. “I can help you,” he shouts in the last self-sacrificing moments of the film. “Let me save you.”

On our polluted political playing field it’s the Hollywood-handsome Senator from Illinois who stands alone — the slim, still mysterious stranger who’s come to rescue us, who said in his Iowa victory speech “in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” See Gary Kamiya‘s fine piece today in Salon.

In the film we’re told that the killer virus was a human accident, the work of a dotty, donnish English lady who thought she’d compounded a universal cure for cancer. Anthony Barnett’s distillation of the filmic-political parable is: “In short, the world is saved from Mrs Thatcher by Barack Obama.”

There are church-state resonances here: “God didn’t do this, we did,” says Dr. Neville, in the weedy ruins of Manhattan. And there’s a gender riddle: how is that in both versions the plausible savior is a youngish African-American man, while his fumbling foil is a very smart woman contriving to do good?

Suffice it to say we have one of those delicious convergences or “visual rhymes” to remind us that no event, and surely no trend, stands alone in this mediated world. And further that there are depths and resonances of the Obama boom that haven’t been measured yet. Anthony Barnett’s reading after Iowa and a family night at the movies was: “He is not just a potential president, he alone has the combination of skills to save mankind. Every single seat sold for “I Am Legend” makes Obama more electable and puts Hilary on the wrong side of the great plague.”

I’ll engage Anthony Barnett in conversation tomorrow (Wednesday) not as a film critic and not as an expert particularly on American politics, but as an off-shore wiseman — “a torchlight procession of one,” as a friend describes him — on most of the grander question we care about. I hope we’ll get this chance often again. Anthony Barnett is a model of thinking and doing: writer, editor, reformer and entrepreneurial radical from the Labour Club at Cambridge in the Sixties and the New Left Review in the Eighties, a hold-out from Tony Blair’s New Labor movement in the Nineties, and then founding editor (months before 9.11) of the compendious site openDemocracy. Here’s the bouquet that friends tossed at him on his 65th birthday last November. When I met Anthony Barnett in Greece last July, I noted here that he speaks with that experienced, curious, post-imperial English voice that we waited for and never heard on the way to Iraq.

I want to ask him for the Big Picture — at least a big picture frame — for 2008.

Podcast • November 29, 2007

Pakistan for Beginners: 3, with Omer Alvie

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Omer Alvie (17 minutes, 8 MB MP3) But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in… How much real-life material ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Omer Alvie (17 minutes, 8 MB MP3)

But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in… How much real-life material might become compulsory! — About, for example… the attempt to declare the sari an obscene garment; or about the extra hangings — the first for twenty years — that were ordered purely to legitimize the execution of Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; or about why Bhutto’s hangman has vanished into thin air, just like the many street-urchins who are being stolen every day in broad daylight; or about anti-Semitism, an interesting phenomenon, under whose influence people who have never met a Jew vilify all Jews for the sake of maintaining solidarity with the Arab states which offer Pakistan workers, these days, employment and much-needed foreign exchange; or about smuggling, the boom in heroin exports, military dictators, venal civilians, corrupt civil servants, bought judges, newspapers of whose stories the only thing that can confidently be said is that they are lies; or about the apportioning of the national budget, with special reference to the percentages set aside for defense (huge) and for education (not huge). Imagine my difficulties!

Salman Rushdie, in his “modern fairytale” of Pakistan, Shame, 1983… p. 67 in the Picador paperback.

Pakistan: All Martial and No Law was the headline on Omer Alvie’s last piece for the invaluable Global Voices Online. In our conversation today he remarks on the comic-opera moment in the news this very day as General Musharraf took his oath as President Musharraf under a constitution he’s suspended, making him — what? — a Suspended President.

Omer Alvie is a Pakistani who works and blogs in Dubai, and commutes now and then to Karachi. He has a talent for the absurd humor and not-so-post-colonial anguish of Pakistani politics. It was all, as Omer says, described and foretold nearly a quarter century ago in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame — a telling in fiction of the ouster and then the hanging of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979. “I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking,” Rushdie writes in the book, “my last words on the East, from which, many years ago, I began to come loose.”

Omer Alvie is of a younger generation that once saw charisma and modernity in the face of Pervez Musharraf. He now feels bitter disappointment and the weight of more than Pakistan’s history on events. He says:

The external influence is so strong on Pakistani politics… I have to go back to the War on Terror. This thing overall is farcical to me… If you want to get to the root cause of why terrorist cells exist, or why terrorism happens, you don’t go around bombing countries or arresting innocent people in hopes of catching a few. That’s not addressing the problem, and that’s what’s happening in Pakistan. I sometimes get the feeling that Pakistan is being conditioned. I believe it’s on the same hitlist as Iraq, Iran and Syria. Actually I should clarify: the hitlist should have the letter S in front of it, because that’s probably how the project of the New American Century and most of the Bush administration sees it… this collosally screwed up foreign policy which is now classified as a “war on terrorism”…

…The whole “war on terror” thing, this 9.11 thing, I think, has screwed up Pakistan more than anything else really, because it’s affected us more. We’re stuck in bookends. The average Pakistani is now stuck being questioned by extremists and militants about how to dress, what to do, when to pray, and being questioned constantly about how they live their lives. This is their experience in Pakistan. The same Pakistanis when they travel outside to the US get blamed and classified in a very generic manner as a terrorist, because they’re a Pakistani or a Muslim. We are squeezed between 2 bookends.

Omer Alvie of The Olive Ream, in conversation with Open Source, November 29, 2007

June 30, 2005

The War in First Person

  Sometimes I feel bad thinking about what could possibly happen to these people (the Iraqis) if this doesn’t pan out. Specialist Ernesto Haibi, 6/30/05 on Open Source In the electronic open letters from the ...

 

Sometimes I feel bad thinking about what could possibly happen to these people (the Iraqis) if this doesn’t pan out.

Specialist Ernesto Haibi, 6/30/05 on Open Source
In the electronic open letters from the troops in Iraq, it’s not a different war exactly, but the details are not what you see on television or in the papers. A medic writes about having to choose which to treat first: a GI or an insurgent. Answer: treat the enemy first, because he’s an Iraqi and we can get information from him. Beth, a Navy corpsman, writes: “Since my last post we had a mass casualty, for those who know what that means. Yet, another image etched in my soul forever. One of the patients had shrapnel go through his eye, another lost legs, and yet another an arm. Pretty scary stuff.” A soldier writes about the constant use of the word “awesome” – part of the numbing effect of war: my wife left me: “awesome.” Somebody dead: “awesome.” Another writes with embarrassment about the bad manners of tracking mud into the Iraqi home he just raided. From the fog of war, these writers in uniform may be the Tim O’Briens and Norman Mailers of this generation. On Open Source: from where we are to Iraq, engaging with blogs of war.

Spc. Jason Hartley

infantryman in the New York National Guard, blogger: Just Another Soldier

[in the studio in Cambridge]

CFO Gordon Cimoli

Helicopter pilot for the 12th Aviation Brigade, blogger: Cimoli.com

[by phone from Detroit]

Specialist Ernesto Haibi

medic in the 23rd Infantry Battalion, blogger: A Candle in the Dark

[by phone from Ft. Lewis, Washington]

SFC Kevin Kelly

sergeant in the 150th Combat Engineers Battalion, blogger: Dixie Sappers

[by phone from Forward Operating Base Dogwood, south of Baghdad]

Sgt. Chris Missick

communications specialist for the 319th Signal Battalion,

blogger: War Blog

[featuring audio excerpts from his podcasts]