Democracy on the line

In the London Review of Books, discussing a study of contemporary civil conflicts, James Meek asks "What are you willing to do?" Yes, he is referring to the ongoing Republican insurrection against inclusive democracy.

One of the strange things about the reaction to the invasion of the Capitol was how few of those dismayed by it speculated that they might one day long for just such an assault to succeed. Might a different mob storm into Congress to save democracy, rather than attack it? If an autocrat who has stolen an election is about to have his trashing of American democracy hallowed by Congress, all other recourse having failed, shouldn’t Democrats – or democrats, at least – take direct action? Liberal opinion in North America and Western Europe has tended to be gung-ho about pro-democracy protesters storming ruling institutions in other countries, notably Ukraine in 2014. ... 

But it’s one thing to imagine, as [author Barbara] Walter encourages her readers to do, the gradual spread of white supremacist, anti-government terrorism across America against a democratic framework, until one day the progressive left, and the people of colour she suggests are likely to be targets of violence, arm and organise for self-protection. It’s another to wake up one morning and find that without any bloodshed or violence, without any seeming change in the smooth running of traffic signals and ATMs and supermarkets, without, even, an immediate wave of arrests or a clampdown on free speech, your country is run by somebody who took power illegally. Something must be done! But what, apart from venting on social media? And by whom? Me? ... Who, I wondered, would do for the truth what these [Capitol attackers] were ready to do for a lie?

Unfortunately a pertinent question. Because Joe Biden so clearly did win the presidency in 2020, in that year we didn't have to find out. But it would be a mistake to assume a seizure of power by Republican fascists sheltered by corrupted institutions might not be in our future. So who and what might stand in the way?

The grassroots progressive coalition consists of three pillars -- three semi-organized groups of people who work together in significant numbers who might act if need be. The strength and capacity of the various elements waxes and wanes, but I find thinking about this triad useful. I'm not alluding to elite media and academic writers and talkers here -- I'm assessing who might do something in an unfolding crisis. The elite elements will come along if we make space for them.

I envision the triad of democratic actors like this:

1) Organized labor. Yes, unions continue to dwindle, successfully neutered by aggressive bosses. But the desire for organization to humanize workplaces surges wherever and whenever it finds an opening. And most unionized workers are a progressive force, despite ugly exceptions like the cops.

And sometimes (cribbing from myself here) even national union leadership mobilizes its considerable remaining resources in defense of majority rule. In 2020, in the run-up to November 3, mass Zoom meetings of union staff and activists prepared for an attempt by Trump to steal the election. Union leaders aimed to create a disciplined cohort of leaders and members who could understand what was happening and be roused to turn out to defend the process. They never had to put the full plan into practice, but leaders of the hospitality union, UniteHERE, effectively protected the vote in contested Philadelphia by assembling a dance party in the streets around the count. They were ready to take to the streets in disciplined action.

2) Nonprofits. Yes, the non-governmental organization sector (the NGOs) is a morass of competing, overlapping, ideologically incoherent groups which sometimes amount to nothing more than tax shelters for the rich. Within this stew, however, people do experience community and develop bonds which are essential to engaged citizenship. The NGOs are the vessel for much progressive social capital; though the nonprofits, we channel our hope for better communities. Both Left and Right act through NGOs.

In 2020, various coalitions of progressive NGO forces sought to prepare for the worst. Alexander Burns described their preparations:

... Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period...

Stifling would not be the right course in James Meek's dystopian vision. Can the more functional NGOs get themselves together to lead disruptive, though tactically nonviolent, actions? The 2020 experience make this seem more possible than it might once have; for a season, the nonprofit activist sector resolved not to hang separately.

3) Democratic Party. Now there's a mess, too often a short-sighted aggregation of the mediocre and the power hungry -- except when it is something better. People who identify as Democrats really are a representative slice of the country's whole people, unlike Republicans who are becoming more and more just disgruntled, usually old, white people. In fortunate spaces and moments, the Democratic Party can be a vehicle for mass, principled activism: anyone remember Obama's 2008 campaign or notice the current Wisconsin Democratic Party trying to organize itself out of gerrymandered oblivion? Democrats can act as a mass progressive force when gifted with good leadership. And if we believe in democracy, the Democratic Party is what stands between us and white nationalist authoritarianism so we need to make the best of it. It is us, after all.

Enhancing any of these forces is doing the work of democracy in this embattled republic these days. And all of them have to be prepared to act if needed.

Now I know for sure we're living in a failed state

The Ford Foundation, the occupant of this glowing New York City headquarters, has chosen to issue bonds, payable in the far future, in order to increase its grants in this moment of pandemic, economic collapse, and necessary uprisings. According to the Times:

In 2019, the Ford Foundation handed out $520 million in grants. [Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation,] quickly realized that was not going to be anywhere near enough in this crisis-engulfed year.

His solution: Borrow money, spend it quickly and inspire others to follow Ford’s lead. The Ford Foundation plans to announce on Thursday that it will borrow $1 billion so that it can substantially increase the amount of money it distributes.

Walker has lined up four other old-line, extremely affluent, charitable foundations to follow his lead. This is old money stepping up.

Walker at Ford is doing exactly what every progressive and even conventional economist has urged governments to do since 2008: when interest rates are near zero, borrow and push out that cash to build up social capital as well as needed infrastructure. This is what a functional government would do. Unhappily, Republicans have only been willing to allow the government to borrow to give a $1.4 billion dollar tax cut to their rich buddies -- and to their plutocrat in the White House.

So here we find private wealth doing what government ought to be doing. I guess we're lucky there's a Ford Foundation. (This was something I was less sure about back in the day when I was a supplicant. These institutions are awfully satisfied with their own virtue.) They could be doing far worse things with their $13.7 billion dollar endowment. Hitler-loving Henry Ford must be rolling in his grave. Give some of that money to the people who are setting the agenda in the streets!

Where's the money for journalism to come from?

As anyone who has been reading journalists knows, US journalism has been suffering huge hits to reportorial muscle as thousand of people have lately been laid off by remnant print outlets like Gannett newspapers and online power houses like BuzzFeed and HuffPost.

People who want journalism to survive as a component of a healthy democracy and society have been struggling to come up with a sustainable new model. It must pay for serious news now that the local and regional advertising monopolies that were once your daily newspaper have been displaced by the internet.

I'm among those who worry that too many outlets will reinvent the tack taken by progressive social movements losing their steam in the 1980s and 1990s. Many tried to transform vigorous insurgent entities into plausibly "charitable" non-profit organizations in order to be attractive to institutional funders. That is, they/we went shopping for grants. They shied away from "politics" -- the contest for actual power. This reinforced a bias that the nitty-gritty pulling and hauling of local democracy was somehow dirty. This turn kept a semblance of grassroots activity alive, but, by professionalizing it, distanced it from the people who ought to have wanted and needed it most. The internet has to some extent brought back small donor fundraising and that has helped revive a more disruptive politics.

Josh Marshall, who runs a struggling small journalism business at Talking Points Memo, writes thoughtfully about the siren attraction of non-profit status. I've added some emphasis.

A more complicated question to me is non-profit support. To me the first cardinal point is that we should have a diverse news ecosystem – so a lot of different models is key. I think we all agree that Pro-Publica, which I see as the archetype nonprofit news operation, has become simply irreplaceable. But I do not think that’s a general model. The kind of deep diving PP does is very congenial to the nonprofit model.

I have some experience in the pre-PP nonprofit journalism sector. There’s a lot of great stuff. But one key problem is that you tend to follow your funders. I don’t mean that in a corrupt or mercenary sense. I mean that the funder wants to see this kind of stuff or that kind of stuff so that’s what you do.

That means their audience is fundamentally the foundations. That’s a problem. Because the customer and the audience should be the reader. I am not saying this is an unworkable problem. Again, a huge amount of great journalism is produced this way. So I am all for a vital nonprofit journalism sector, as opposed to my deep skepticism of government funding. I just don’t think it works as the dominant or majority model. You want your business to be fundamentally tied to your readers.

Marshall's model is to combine what amounts to small dollar fundraising (tiered subs) with some advertising and a lot of experimentation with various journalism delivery vehicles. So far this is working for TPM.

Another model of funding journalism is to depend on our oligarchs for funding. Think Jeff Bezos acquiring the Washington Post; Marc Benioff buying up Time magazine. (That one is a hoot for those of us who remember the Henry Luce publication.) Even the ascendancy of the younger generation of the Sulzberger family at the New York Times fits this pattern. Meanwhile the Mercers of hedge fund infamy have Brietbart. As much a feudal throwback as all this seems, it is how historically enterprises that didn't turn a profit have been funded: there would have been no great works of Michelangelo without the Medicis.

Marshall's experiment seems as promising as any, though there are probably limits to its scale. He does seem an incubator of journalism and journalists, an honorable role.

We are left to ask: do we want the thing that journalists do? If so, we have to support and more frequently pay for it.

Elders amid the California fires

My friend Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By highlighted the particular sufferings of Puerto Rican old people in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Even if their houses survived, elders are particularly vulnerable in a prolonged period without electricity, or easy access to clean water, and to stocked food stores. The weak response from the Trump administration and from too many mainlanders has made a perilous situation worse.

Bennett's post led me to take a particular look at how Northern California media is covering the plight of elders in our current siege of firestorms around Santa Rosa, Calistoga, Napa, Sonoma, and surroundings. There seem to be two notable themes.

Elders are particularly at risk when electricity and modern means of communication fail. This is not just about elders being not perhaps so decisive or fast moving in an emergency as younger people. According to an account in the Mercury News:

For the hundreds who remain missing, their families are holding out hope that their loved ones are also safe but simply unable to communicate.

That turned out to be the happy case for Nanette Williams, whose 96-year-old aunt Nora Hennings was found alive by sheriff’s deputies in her Santa Rosa home just feet from fire-scorched earth. With no cellphone, no computer, no email and no car, she’d had no way to get in touch but had come through the fire relatively unscathed. ...

[Carmen] McReynolds, like Hennings and a number of people her age, doesn’t have a cellphone, computer or email address. The telephone at her home isn’t working, and authorities won’t let the family friends who have volunteered to drive by her house close enough to investigate.

Volunteers with the Timber Cove Fire Department stopped by McReynolds’ cabin near the Russian River on Friday afternoon. Family hoped she had fled to the cabin, which she’s owned since the 1960s. But she wasn’t there. A neighbor in Santa Rosa told the family that police and firefighters had been in the area when the fire broke out, urging residents to evacuate. “We hope she got rounded up,” said Coke. “But there’s no sign of her.” ...

To be old in a rapidly changing world can amount to falling out of connection in times of extreme societal stress. There may be few practical remedies beyond applied neighborliness, but that seems a scary truth.

The other theme in coverage of elders' vulnerability is the casualty report as tear-jerker. Perhaps I'm being unfair to reporters here. In the midst of a vast, terrifying, ongoing disaster, pulling out human interest stories from the chaos seems an obvious journalistic device. And stunned, grieving relatives make appealing sources. Still these accounts feel over-saccharin and a little too canned. Two specimens of the genre from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Charles and Sara Rippey were the first casualties to be identified. They were also the oldest — he was 100 and she was 98. They had been married for 75 years and they died together during the first night of the fires as flames engulfed their condominium at Napa’s Silverado Country Club. They met in grade school in Wisconsin and married on March 20, 1942. They were so well known in the Napa community that the Napa County Register carried an announcement of their diamond wedding anniversary this past spring. ... Mark Rippey, one of their sons, was interviewed on KPIX television and said Charles died trying to save his wife. “From where they found his body, he was trying to get from his room to her room,” he said. “He never made it.”

... Carmen [Berriz] met Armando in Cuba, when they were 12 years old. They both left Cuba after Castro came to power and met again in Florida. They were married in Miami in 1962 and moved to Southern California the next day.

After 55 years of marriage, she died in his arms. Mrs. Berriz was 75. When the fire came, the Berrizes were unable to escape, so they held hands and jumped into the swimming pool of their rented house. They hoped to outlast the fire. He held onto her, but she died. He was badly injured.

All the deaths (and injuries) in the fires are tragedies. But all deserve to have their stories recounted with as few maudlin cliches as possible. And elder deaths are particularly subject to the temptation among overwhelmed journalists to have recourse to vapid banalities.
***

Meanwhile, my bank is urging me to contribute to the Red Cross. Before I took off for Nicaragua last week, the message was about Hurricane Irma. This week it is fires. I'm skeptical. Journalist Jonathan Katz makes the case that earnest Red Cross appeals may even do more harm than good.

The problem, as Katz sees it, is that the Red Cross is a dysfunctional organization that excels at raising money but has shown little evidence of its ability to spend that money wisely or meaningfully. The Red Cross takes in close to 3 billion annually, refuses to open its books to the public, and, according to Katz, has consistently failed to produce a useful breakdown of its spending after major disaster efforts.

... Red Cross perpetuates a tendency we all have to see disasters as opportunities for charity. As a result, we spend far less time thinking about how to prevent disasters in the first place. “It’s always about relief, always about helping people after it’s too late,” Katz said.

“No one makes the world a worse place when they donate to the Red Cross,” Katz told me, “but if they do donate and assume that’s enough, we’ll keep repeating this cycle over and over again.”

Obviously people need immediate help: shelter, food, clothes and the like. And perhaps the Red Cross is good at this sort of aid. But these horrible fires should also be forcing us to think about patterns of urban/rural development and land use, all in the context of a radically warming climate.

A stupid expenditure that saved lives

Worth noting: statistical analysis shows that the 1.3 billion taxpayer dollars in abstinence education insisted upon by conservatives as a condition for funding AIDS prevention programs in Africa under George W. Bush was "largely waste."

The study, done by a second-year student at Stanford Medical School for a professor with an expertise in cost-benefit analyses, caused a major stir in the room where it was presented [in Seattle last week].

The researcher, Nathan Lo, analyzed records showing the age of people having sex for the first time, teenage pregnancy and number of sexual partners in international health surveys that have been paid for by the State Department since the 1970s.

...Global health specialists came to the microphone to congratulate Mr. Lo. Advocates who had long opposed the American policy that sought to prevent AIDS by promoting abstinence and faithfulness applauded.

“That was fantastic,” said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in South Africa.

Staff members from the government program that Mr. Lo had accused of wasting money — Pepfar, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — came up afterward to quietly congratulate him. When they realized a reporter was present, they nervously asked that they not be named.

Guess this just goes to show that it takes an outsider to point out that the emperor wears no clothes. People who lived through the epidemic in this country could (and did) predict this, but it took somebody who didn't need the grant money to prove it.

This is not to say that U.S. AIDS programs in Africa under Bush II were all useless. In fact, they were probably the closest thing to a successful feature of that awful presidency. Here's Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, not usually a Bush fan:

When the Bush administration inaugurated the program in 2003, fewer than 50,000 HIV-infected people on the African continent were receiving the antire­troviral drugs that keep the virus in check and halt the progression toward full-blown AIDS. By the time Bush left office, the number had increased to nearly 2 million. Today, the United States is directly supporting antiretroviral treatment for more than 4 million men, women and children worldwide, primarily in Africa.

This is an amazing accomplishment, especially because it wasn’t supposed to be possible. ... the conventional wisdom was that the drug-treatment regimens that were saving lives in developed countries would not work in Africa. Poor, uneducated people in communities lacking even the most basic infrastructure could not be expected to take the right pill at the right time every day. When the drugs are taken haphazardly, the virus mutates and becomes resistant. Therefore, this reasoning went, trying to administer antiretroviral treatment in poor African countries might actually be worse than doing nothing at all.

The Bush administration rejected these arguments, which turned out to be categorically wrong. Africans are every bit as diligent about taking their HIV medications as are Americans or other Westerners. ...

For World Water Day ...

This video from China Central Television's America service tells the story of Nicaraguan communities that, with the help of foreign non-governmental organizations, are building their own wells and catchment systems to ensure access to clean water.

In poor countries where increasing human population and sometimes drought dry up once more abundant water sources, access to water especially burdens the life chances of women: women become, literally, the essential haulers of water and little more.

The clip features the projects of El Porvenir, the US-founded NGO with which I had the privilege to travel in 2007. That year, we visited the tiny hamlet of Cerritos, kilometers off any paved road, where foreign help had enabled the community to build sanitary latrines. Folks threw quite a celebration for the new facilities.

This news story shows Cerritos seven years later finally completing a clean water supply of their own.

Gender fluidity

Uh-oh. As noted in the previous post, some people wouldn't like this:

These choices were included in a survey sent out by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. They are clearly gathering information to improve their public image and fund pitches. And they get props for noticing some people do not experience gender as binary.

For this "most charitable time of the year ..."

Exuberant art deco mural in City Hall, Buffalo, NY

If you've ever had to raise money from rich people for a cause you cared about, you will love Reuters financial columnist Felix Salmon's article: Philanthropy: You’re doing it wrong. He's obviously not currently having to work the begging circuit, so he tells it like it is.

… since I’m personally feeling very charitable right now, I’ve decided to do you all the favor of telling you that when it comes to philanthropy, you’re doing it wrong.

Interestingly, philanthropy is one of those areas where the richer you are, the more likely you are to be doing it spectacularly wrong. So to make you feel better still, this is aimed mainly at the mega-philanthropists: the people who give away millions of dollars and feel fantastic for doing so. …

… Let’s run down the list of things you’re likely to be doing wrong, if you’re a rich philanthropist:

• You meddle in the internal workings of the charities you donate to, even though you’re not on the board. …

• You set up your own foundation. …

• You fund architecture. …

• You encourage mission creep. …

• You kid yourself that your mere presence on the board, or your “celebrity endorsement”, is valuable. …

• You’re a tease.

• You think that going to to charity balls constitutes charitable activity. …

• ...have some humility. Here’s one idea: for every dollar you spend on overhead and payroll at your foundation, make sure that you donate a dollar earmarked for overhead and payroll somewhere else. Those are the funds which are always the hardest to raise, after all. …

• …Finally, there’s something that all of us can do, whether we’re dynastically rich or really rather poor: volunteering. But weirdly, volunteering is harder for the rich, who can more easily afford the time commitment: they often think that time spent volunteering is wasted.…The problem with this logic is that it ignores the enormous value to the volunteer of volunteering

When I work on political campaigns, I often find myself telling the unfortunate folks trying to raise the money that political donors are different people than charitable donors. (I'm usually fortunate mostly to be tasked with the spending, not the begging, though I try to do my part.) They are not entirely different, but the political giving impetus works slightly differently. Political donors are more straightforward about their ambition to change how the world works. There's more ostensible emphasis on efficacy; a little less about massaging their self-esteem. But most of Salmon's items have campaign analogues:

• Donors are tempted to think they are strategic political geniuses -- but in fact they are less likely than the average person to have a finger on the pulse of what matters to ordinary voters. The lives of the rich are different.

• Setting up a campaign committee and planning a campaign requires some legal and experiential professionalism; the donors need to trust the people who do this work, not think they can replace them. Yes, democracy is a participatory enterprise, even for the rich, but there are rules to know and skills to acquire that no one is born with.

• Don't judge a campaign by whether it has a fancy office. Some of the more effective campaigns I've seen have been run out of dingy holes in the wall; the campaign needs computers and printing facilities, it doesn't need nice furniture.

• Endorsements are necessary to campaigns to signal who is lining up behind them; however even genuinely respected political figures can rarely directly shift votes. And celebrities add almost nothing to campaign's success. Sorry -- politics just doesn't work that way.

• If you decide to contribute, don't dole out the funds over time. Throw down. Early money makes for winners. Money in the last month is much less useful to the campaign and much less likely to make a difference.

• Political fundraising events are the analogue of charity balls: necessary evils that by themselves do nothing to win votes. Give the money and ask your friends to chip in; skip the expensive party.

• Do volunteer on the campaign. Active participation in the democratic process offers an opportunity to meet your fellow citizens without filters. It's educational.

As Salmon says, in politics as in philanthropy,

… there’s no good reason why you should be part of the problem.

The whens, hows, rights and wrongs of humanitarian intervention

Conor Foley, the author of The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, reminds readers that, in 1999, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan posed a question that must haunt anyone wishing to prevent and relieve human suffering:

"How should we respond to another Rwanda or Srebrenica [massacre]?"

Foley is an experienced humanitarian worker who has served with a variety of non-governmental agencies in disaster and war zones in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this book, he breaks down some of what has helped and what has harmed in the various international forays into war-torn and/or disaster-struck countries over the last 20 years. He is not confident that much good has been achieved, but this book certainly provides a lot of context about these civilian interventions.

British and other internationalists have more nuanced categories for thinking about these issues than people in the United States. I had trouble at first disentangling Foley's terminology. Here's what I figured out: when he writes of "humanitarianism," he means non-governmental organizations that devote themselves to the immediate needs of suffering people and that usually have taken up some rhetoric and practice aimed at sustainable development: think Oxfam or CARE. Writing of "human rights," he means proliferating efforts to bring principles of international law to states and people in distress: think Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. In most of the world, the most significant non-governmental organizations of both types are various United Nations bodies -- in this country we remain largely oblivious to the UN, except when our rulers congratulate themselves on obtaining the fig leaf of UN assent to adventures such as the current war in Libya.

Foley begins by sharing one of humanitarianism's dirty and little discussed insights: the 1970 campaign to feed starving Biafrans in Nigeria's southeast separatist corner -- an intervention that set the template for much subsequent non-governmental work in conflict areas -- was badly ill-conceived and executed.

... the Biafra intervention is also now widely recognized, in humanitarian circles at least, as a huge political error. The Igbo leadership used it to raise money to keep the war going by effectively taxing the NGOs who were delivering supplies. They turned down the offer of a supervised 'land corridor', realizing how dramatic the night flights had become. The flights were also used as cover for bringing in weapons along the same route, in clear violation of international humanitarian law.

...when Biafra finally surrendered in January 1970, the central government was noticeably conciliatory to its defeated foes. ... The conflict was also marked by a willingness of aid agencies and the international media to collude in a skillful campaign by the Biafran political leaders who hired a PR company to promote their cause. ...Most aid organizations now admit that the main effect of their efforts was to prolong the conflict by a further eighteen months ...

One trouble is that relief organizations have to spotlight human suffering and then make their own work highly visible within any disaster context in order to persuade donors to fund their efforts. Any of us who've raised money for a non-profit know this well. In the immediate aftermath of a calamity that happens in a place without major prior ongoing conflict, this necessary dramatization may not have such bad consequences. Foley holds up the response to the 2005 Pacific tsunami as such a relatively benign intervention.

If the tsunami diverted resources from elsewhere it was mainly due to the action of humanitarian agencies who understood its fund-raising potential from a business point of view. Aid agencies need to follow the high-profile disasters because it is what their supporters expect. They may well know they are duplicating the efforts of others, but it would be impossible to ignore a disaster on the scale of the tsunami. ...

... Despite the waste, the tsunami relief operation deserves to be remembered as a qualified success. ... Two million people were displaced by the disaster and there were initial fears of a second catastrophe through the spread of infectious diseases. But no public health emergency occurred and within days the majority of people affected received food, water, sanitation, shelter and healthcare. Within a month, the emergency response phase geared to saving lives was completed, and the focus moved to recovering livelihoods and getting children back to school.

In war zones, efforts that Foley has seen and worked within haven't gone so well, especially those that tried to go beyond relieving immediate suffering to promotion of human rights. Most visibly, in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. invading armies made no secret that NGO work was welcome as a "force multiplier" -- a cheap means of providing some benefits to win over occupied populations. The occupied people were not so happy about that; conflict zones have become death zones for "humanitarian" workers who were too often viewed as just more invaders.

NGO's understand the problems; they work hard to transfer their work to local, native country, staff. That means training them in the values of international human rights -- and that process often has an Alice in Wonderland quality as the norms prescribed have so little to do with the experience and society into which agencies are trying to plant them. Foley recounts the response of Kosovan co-workers to a training on children's rights.

A young Scandinavian lawyer working for UNICEF gave one of the speeches, during which she went through the Convention on the Rights of the Child that came into force in 1989, and is one of the most extensive of the human rights conventions. ... I noticed that everyone took copious notes while she was speaking but no one challenged any of her assertions, though they must have jarred with the cultural ethos of the society in which they were raised.

Walking back to the office with one of my national colleagues, 1 asked her about this. She replied that in order to be appointed to any professional position in the former Yugoslavia it was necessary to pass an exam in Marxist-Leninism. "Everyone knew it was nonsense, but we just learned it off by heart and repeated what the examiner wanted us to say. Then we forgot about it and just got on with our jobs. The communists ruled us then and now you do. It is basically the same thing though," she concluded.

So much for facile assumptions of universal values.

Foley is very skeptical of the International Criminal Court -- and not only because the United States has undermined it at every turn, refusing to allow any possibility that possibly criminal actions by our own military might ever be subject to review by an international body. (That's the content of our beloved "American exceptionalism" in the real world: impunity.) Without genuine assent from all the world's great military powers, the ICC remains a backwater functional only "for dealing with mid-level thugs and warlords or retired dictators" -- yet too often the threat of punishment from this ineffectual body only makes ending local conflicts more difficult.

Even some people in Britain and other parts of the rich world who might be expected to be friends of NGO aid work rather lightly refuse to engage imaginatively with the implications of Annan's question. Foley laments

a long-standing ambivalence by a section of the left towards human rights and humanitarianism. The idea that rights should be defended for their own sake or that interventions should be judged by the criteria of whether they help or harm people is derided as naive. The more important issue, these leftists argue, is 'whose side you are on' in a global ideological struggle. This used to be defined in cold war terms but is increasingly presented as one of 'anti-imperialism' versus 'liberal interventionism'. Traditionally, many on the left and right of the political spectrum were prepared to overlook human rights violations when committed by their allies, or refrain from denouncing them lest it provide 'propaganda' for their opponents.

The UN intervention that didn't happen in the Sudan's Darfur region in the last decade -- despite the diligent urging of some humanitarian organizations that the refugee crisis there amounted to "genocide" -- provides Foley with an example of what he considers culpable political incapacity on the part of humanitarian organizations.

One of the noticeable differences between human rights and humanitarian organizations is that the former err on the side of caution when reporting violations, whereas the latter never knowingly understate the scale of a crisis. Advocacy reporting is not humanitarianism's core business and many organizations often use their reports for other purposes, such as fund-raising. Even with the best intentions, there may be a temptation to dramatize a particular crisis, since the general view is that no harm can come from making people care too much about suffering. This means there will always be potential issues of fact-checking, quality control and manipulation...

Yet despite these dangers, there remain the suffering people; in response, aid agencies inevitably undertake compromised missions, at least some of the time.

If a government is deliberately starving a civilian population as a means of waging war, then humanitarian organizations are legally and morally justified in taking the 'borderless doctors' approach in flouting its authority to deliver life-saving aid. Beyond this though, once humanitarians assume responsibility for aspects of state-building, adopt a rights-based approach to aid delivery or the use of such aid for peace-building purposes, they inevitably compromise their principles of independence and impartiality.

There will probably be situations in the future when humanitarian organizations feel that only international intervention will prevent mass killing or where their programme activity can help promote peace, justice and reconciliation, but the experience of recent years strongly suggests that the principle 'first, do no harm' is best preserved by humanitarian neutrality.

Humanitarian interventions are at best a necessary evil since by their very nature they cause harm to the societies they are trying to help. Even at their most benign, relief assistance operations, such as the one following the tsunami, lead to economic and social distortion, weaken local capacity and encourage dependence. Military interventions are even more destabilizing and result in significant costs for both the occupier and occupied. It is noticeable how few places where large-scale humanitarian interventions took place in recent years have succeeded in making the transition to stability. ...

The Thin Blue Line was published in 2008. Reading the book in 2011, I wondered what Foley thought of the current NATO/US campaign in Libya. He is someone who might have a nuanced view. Fortunately, he's told us what he thinks in a post at Crooked Timber. On March 22 he wrote:

... the case for or against a ‘humanitarian intervention’ rests on answering two broad questions: has the level of violence reached such a threshold that the use of counter-force is morally justifiable and is it a practical, strategic option that will actually make things better for the people concerned?

...On balance I am in favour of the current intervention in Libya. ... I think that the UN resolution authorizing it puts the protection of civilians at the centre of its mandate and sends a clear signal to governments of the world that they cannot massacre their own people with impunity.

I do not know what the end game is. I accept that the campaign will result in people being killed by allied airstrikes and I presume that the intervening governments have selfish as well as altruistic motives for their actions. However, I think that the situation in Libya immediately prior to the intervention passed the threshold test that I set out above. I think that the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to protect the lives of civilians in this case.

I wonder whether Foley still looks at the Libya intervention the same way. I've lost any hope I had in the project, in good part because I am watching our president make up transparently flimsy legal excuses for violating our own principles of government in order to carry it out. If jumping in encourages bad conduct here, I tend to think it is not likely to bring good fruit in someone else's country. But maybe I ask too much moral clarity.

The Thin Blue Line concludes by reinforcing that even the most dedicated humanitarians end up living with moral ambiguity.

Tens of thousands of humanitarian aid workers are confronted with [a] moral dilemma every day. They might help individual people in a crisis zone, but they can never be absolutely certain that the overall impact of their presence does more good than harm. While their presence pricks the world's conscience that 'something must be done' it simultaneously reinforces the delusion that humanitarian action can ever be enough. In reality they are just another part of the problem.

Long term humanitarian workers have to be made of tough moral stuff.

Glimpses of Black communities in pre-Civil War Canada

If you approach From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Hettie Jones looking for historical understanding of mid-19th century African American communities in Canada settled by fugitive slaves and free Blacks, you might be disappointed. This little book is more a data dump, a collection of documentary tidbits and pictures of historical sites, than an integrated story of the life these mostly short-lived towns. Blacks escaped the United States to Canada because life under the British Crown was reliably free of slavery and opportunities were somewhat more equal with whites. But most deserted their new homes when the Civil War ended U.S. slavery, many serving in the Union Army before returning to the States.

I grew up adjacent to the Niagara Frontier area (across the river from Buffalo, New York), which, along with the Windsor, Ontario region across the river from Detroit is one of the foci of this book. I remember a few less-than-enlightening historical markers of crossing points and churches that had been used by these Black communities, but little remained that gave a sense of the lives once led there. So I was interested in what these authors had retrieved even though I wished they had made more of it.

Just to give a taste, an ongoing theme of the communities seems to have been a controversy over "begging," the practice and consequences of soliciting support from white allies to help escaped slaves and free blacks get started in a new country. Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave and major abolitionist leader who did not join the exodus to Canada but did run some of the more stable Black newspapers from upstate New York, was drawn into the fray, publishing both sides. Tobin and Jones report the argument he got into with Dr. Martin Delany who later served as commanding officer of Black troops fighting for the Union, but in earlier decades promoted Black emigration back to Africa and self-sufficiency in Canada. He particularly despised white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an extremely propogandistic novel attacking slavery.

In 1856, Dr. Martin Delany, a free black man who had already made a name for himself in the States as a writer and physician, moved to Chatham to pursue his interests under the security of the British flag. ... Delany was outraged that Douglass would embrace Stowe's work yet not even mention his, and wrote several letters to Douglass expressing his views. "I beg leave to say that she knows nothing about us, the Free Colored people of the United States," he wrote about Stowe, "neither does any other white person--and, consequently, can contrive no elevation; it must be done for ourselves."

To his credit, Douglass published Delany's letters, creating a written dialogue that represented, in essence, their philosophical differences. "To scornfully reject all aid from our white friends," Douglass responded, "and to denounce them as unworthy of our confidence, looks high and mighty enough on paper; but unless the back ground is filled up with facts demonstrating our independence and self-sustaining power, of what use is such display of self-consequence?"

Controversies about "the begging" repeatedly divided Canadian Black leaders as they accused each of profiting from donations or becoming dependent. Tobin and Jones quote another author rather than offer their own interpretation of the issues:

Historian Donald Simpson, with a century of hindsight, has suggested that the "whole struggle over 'the begging system' was a philosophical battle of major importance." He writes: Most blacks who had self-emancipated to Canada sought autonomy and self-sufficiency and to be let alone. It was difficult then, and it is difficult now, for well meaning whites to grasp the importance of this concept. Some whites through the years moved from the position of doing things "to blacks" to a point of doing things "for blacks." It remained difficult for most, however, to move further to the position of doing things "with blacks" and undertaking projects only if and when they were asked by blacks for assistance.

All of this seems extremely contemporary: people whose need forces them to ask for and use help from individuals and institutions that belong to the class that holds them down necessarily chew over the implications of "the begging." The anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a fine contemporary example.

Obviously I'm not urging anyone to run out and acquire From Midnight to Dawn, but the authors provide a tantalizing peak at some significant historical by-ways.

In whose interest?

I was impressed by Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. I am disquieted by Mortenson's sequel volume, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace Through Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There's an enormous amount to like about this detailed recounting of the Central Asia Institute's efforts to build schools "at the end of the road" that conventional aid agencies never reach. Again, Mortenson shares his simple and sensible prescriptions for Westerners who want to "help": listen to and respect the people who live in remote places; trust that people who survive in these hostile environments have figured out how to live there; and offer educational opportunity so that people can more easily find their own paths toward development. He truly believes in education for girls and explains why:

Studies from the World Bank indicate that just one year of primary school can result in an income bump of 10 percent to 20 percent for women later in life. ... In communities where girls have received more education, they marry later and have fewer children than their illiterate counterparts. ...

It is important to be clear about the fact that the aim of the Central Asia Institute is not indoctrination. We have no agenda other than assisting rural women with their two most frequent requests: "We don't want our babies to die, and we want our children to go to school." And in the process of addressing those wishes, it is certainly not our aim to teach the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan to think or to act like Americans. We simply want them to have the chance to attend schools that offer a balanced, nonextremist education. In this respect, we're also extremely sensitive to the difference between literacy and ideology. It is our belief that the first helps to thwart intolerance, challenge dogma, and reinforce our common humanity. The second does the opposite. ...

Education is one of the many basic values that Americans of all faiths share with Muslim people everywhere.

Moreover, Mortenson's focus on building schools is the opposite of impersonal. In this book, I was especially impressed by his account of trying desperately to reach and assist friends and staff after the terrible 2005 earthquake in northeastern Pakistan which killed hundreds of thousands, a natural disaster little noted in the West. And his account of learning to pass in Afghanistan, to project a "style" that prevented him from being instantly recognized as a wealthy foreign interloper, is funny and charming.

So what's not to like about Stones into Schools? In this book, Mortenson recounts a growing intimacy between his Central Asia Institute (CAI) and the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He certainly has been a critic of his country's war. For example, as early as 2002, he was questioning whether coming in without real conversation with Afghans and with guns blazing might not be a wrong approach.

Toward the end of 2002, I was given the opportunity to express these views when a marine general who had donated a thousand dollars to the CAl invited me to the Pentagon to address a small gathering of uniformed officers and civilian officials. In the course of my talk, I devoted a few minutes to explaining the tribal traditions that governed conflict in that part of the world-including the manner in which warring parties hold a jirga before joining a battle in order to discuss how many losses each side is willing to accept in light of the fact that the victors will be obligated to care for the widows and orphans of the rivals they have vanquished. ...

"I'm no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right," 1 said. "But as best 1 can tell, we've launched 114 'Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced, nonextremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure'?"

In fact he's still questioning the U.S. war. In a 2010 interview with Bill Moyers, he critiques the Obama administration for asking neither Afghan elders nor the American people to participate in war-making decisions.

But he has also become a cheerleader of the U.S. military's shiny new counter-insurgency theories, a set of prescriptions for "winning hearts and minds" all too familiar to those of us old enough to have watched a U.S. army lose its last big war in Asia. When the generals discover raw firepower won't eradicate indigenous nationalism, they shift to "more subtle" but still lethal efforts to co-opt and subdue the uppity natives. It seems to me that Mortenson found in the U.S. military something that years of work in Central Asia had not previously given him: peers from his own culture, big tough men like himself who were truly immersed in learning about these remote people and places, men who could appreciate what he was doing in building schools where it seemed impossible to accomplish anything. Here's a sample of Mortenson's conversion:

Eventually, I came to understand that a group of people who wield enormous power happen, oddly enough, to espouse some of the very same ideals imparted to me by people in Africa and central Asia who have no power at all. The reason for this, in my view, is that members of the armed forces have worked on the ground--in many cases, during three or four tours of duty--on a level that very few diplomats, academicians, journalists, or policy makers can match. And among other things, this experience has imbued soldiers with the gift of empathy. ...

... as I experienced the equivalent of sharing three cups of tea with the U.S. military, my perspective began to change. In a way, each side had something to teach the other, and we both wound up emerging wiser and enriched by the encounter. In the end, I also came away with the conclusion that the military is probably doing a better job than any other institution in the United States government -- including the State Department, Congress, and the White House -- of developing a meaningful understanding of the complex dynamics on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Actually, I can agree with that. The military is full of smart people who learn from their experiences. But to what end? There's a part of me that has empathy with Mortenson's attraction to the military and military individuals became faithful contributors to CAI. But after ten years of Afghan war, I still encounter reports like this from the Washington Post in late February.

KABUL - To the shock of President Hamid Karzai's aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.

The exact language Petraeus used in the closed-door session is not known, and neither is the precise message he meant to convey. But his remarks about the deadly U.S. military operation in Konar province were deemed deeply offensive by some in the room. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

They said Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, dismissed allegations by Karzai's office and the provincial governor that civilians were killed and said residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces and force an end to the operation.

"I was dizzy. My head was spinning," said one participant, referring to Petraeus's remarks. "This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd."

That too -- that mad cultural chauvinism and belief in Western superiority -- is the face of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

I was horrified by the account in Stones into Schools of Mortenson delighting in giving Admiral Mike Mullen, the U.S. commander, a photo op at the opening of one the CAI schools.

...the Pushgur project--an eight-room structure that would accommodate over two hundred girls--was scheduled to receive its official inauguration at 11:30 on the morning of July 15 with a very special guest. ... Less than an hour after we arrived, two UH -60 Black Hawks and one CH-47 Chinook flew in from the southwest, circled the area, and then landed, creating an explosion of dust that covered everything. The first man to step out of the lead Black Hawk, clad in desert-camouflage fatigues, was Admiral Mike Mullen. "Hey Greg," he shouted over the roar of the engines. "I hope you don't mind that I brought some media with me."

As he spoke, the Chinook disgorged a dozen journalists, including reporters from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC, and ABC-TV, as well as Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial-page columnist for the New York Times. ...

It would be difficult to overstate the symbolic impact of witnessing an eight-room school for girls inaugurated by the admiral who served as the principal military adviser to the president of the United States.

Yeah, sure. It's awfully hard to square that with another assertion in Stones into Schools:

...The Central Asia Institute is not affiliated with the U.S. military, and in order for us to maintain credibility with the communities in which we work, we bend over backward to keep this distinction clear.

Somehow I doubt any Afghan who saw the Pushgur event believes that. They may have made the sensible calculation to get whatever they can from these big, dumb, dangerous invaders, but they are not likely to be confused about who is working for who.

I came away from Stones into Schools saddened. A naive generosity is something we could all use more of. Solidarity with the peoples of the world includes taking on crazy projects in crazy places with unforeseeable results. But naive innocence is not enough.

As Mortenson clearly knows, his country cannot bring solutions to the real problems of the Afghans and Pakistanis he has come to love and respect. Yet he has let his project be drawn into the vortex of the United States' war in the western Himalayas. I find it hard to believe that's in the interest of Afghan girls.

Skills training for the newly employed

The Heritage Foundation sent me a fund appeal today. No, I'm not about to contribute to that fount of destructive right wing policies. But their envelope did remind me of one of my all time favorite books, Sabotage in the American Workplace.

Among hundreds of others, Reggie, a Heritage Foundation mailroom clerk in the 80s, told his story.

It's a group of attorneys, columnists, whatever, who crank out - daily or weekly or whatever - information. It's printed downstairs, in the xerox room, and distributed to senators, congressmen, and other influential people. ...My basic duties were to collect mail in the mornings from the post office, sort it, distribute it, and so on. ... I got the job right after high school. I had never heard of the organization, and just found the job through the newspaper. When I was working there, I would occasionally glance at what they were putting out; the more I read, the more I thought about it and realized they were doing fucked-up things ...

They have a big fundraising deal, and when they sent out fundraising requests, people would mail in checks. Sometimes they'd be huge amounts, and sometimes they were piddling. Checks came in from individuals as well as companies. So I'd randomly take an envelope, open it, see how much it was for, and throw it in the shredder. I started doing it more and more. I could tell if it was a check by holding it to the light. If so, I'd toss it, dump it or shred it.

Here's to learning initiative on the job!

Diane Ravitch has changed her mind

When I was employed during the 1990s working for racial equity in public education, Diane Ravitch was one of the leaders of what we saw as the enemy camp. A veteran of George H.W. Bush's Education Department, we saw her as part of a cabal of "reformers" who wanted to impose homogenous high-stakes testing, privatization by way of vouchers and charter schools, and authoritarian management practices on messy, but democratic, institutions that we too thought needed changes. There were people with good ideas out there like testing skeptics at FairTest, the progressive practitioners at Radical Teacher, and the academic advocates like Linda Darling-Hammond then at Columbia and Christopher Edley, then at the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Ravitch was then a heavy hitter against their ideas.

So when I heard she'd changed her mind on most of that I figured I should read her new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Her rejection of past enthusiasms is thorough. Some specimens:

• On the "No Child Left Behind" federal law that sets the framework for education reform: "

  ...To date, there is no substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. ...
  
  Its remedies did not work. Its sanctions were ineffective. It did not bring about high standards or high accomplishment. The gains in test scores at the state level were typically the result of teaching students test-taking skills and strategies, rather than broadening and deepening their knowledge of the world and their ability to understand what they have learned. NCLB was a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools.

• On charter schools:

  Charter schools in urban centers will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.

• On the mania for standardized tests:

  The problem with using tests to make important decisions about people's lives is that standardized tests are not precise instruments. Unfortunately, most elected officials do not realize this, nor does the general public. ...
  
  The consequence of all this practice is that students may be able to pass the state test, yet unable to pass a test of precisely the same subject for which they did not practice. They master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself. In the new world of accountability, students' acquisition of the skills and knowledge they need for further education and for the workplace is secondary. What matters most is for the school, the district, and the state to be able to say that more students have reached "proficiency."

Most of Ravitch's new views are conventional among progressive reformers, but novel coming from her.

The part of the book from which I learned the most concerned the big foundations that have moved into educational policy in the last 15 years. Ravitch calls Gates, Walton and Broad "the Billionaire Boys' Club" and her attitude toward their interventions is scathing.

Each of the venture philanthropies began with different emphases, but over time they converged in support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches. These were not familiar concepts in the world of education, where high value is placed on collaboration. The venture philanthropies used their funds assertively to promote their goals. Not many school districts could resist their offers. ...

And so it happened that the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations came to exercise vast influence over American education because of their strategic investments in school reform. As their policy goals converged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education.

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don't like the foundations' reform agenda, they can't vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.

I have to wonder whether these epiphenomena of our present age of growing inequality will ever mellow in their philanthropic enthusiasms? The residue of the previous Gilded Age (such as the Ford, Mott, and Carnegie foundations) have moderated their arrogance to some degree, noticed a few failures, incorporated some diverse influences. But the new outfits are still feeling their oats, ricocheting around in the enormously complex arena of our kids' education with lots of money and without any need of exercise any of the less dramatic virtues such as prudence or doubt. I pity the kids (and teachers) who are the butt such well-intentioned experiments.

Calling out foundations' autocratic interventions is not something that most policy analysts can afford to do -- literally. Ravitch has the standing to speak truths that would cost less prestigious advocates their jobs. She does the vision of a public education system a great service with this denunciation of destruction passing as reform. Unfortunately, in public education the Obama administration is augmenting the failed policies of its predecessor so such voices are needed as much today as ever. ***For all my gratitude for the stance Ravitch has chosen to adopt in this book, I should add that, as in the 1990s, Ravitch subsumes any attention to the lack of racial equity in all phases of the school experience under the category "achievement gap." When many children of color are still (within the law) relegated to schools without textbooks, enough chairs, or even heat in winter, while white students attend gorgeous modern facilities and meet less harried, better paid teachers, race still matters in public education. She must know this, but it still doesn't seem to have penetrated to the center of her educational concerns.

The making of an innocently generous philanthropist

The story of John Perkins is dispiriting. The story of Greg Mortenson, a mountaineering adventurer turned builder of schools in remote valleys of Pakistan and Afghanistan, is inspiring. One young American's resentments made him easily manipulable by people who wanted to exploit his talents for their profits; the other fellow turned an accident in the mountains into a respectful passion for helping people, while apparently retaining his modesty and ability to meet others with curiosity and authenticity.

Since Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin has been a huge best seller, I don't feel the need to retell much of its story. Suffice to say , since 1996, under the nonprofit umbrella of the Central Asia Institute, Mortenson has been responsible for the building of 90 schools that provide education to over 34,000 children, including 24,000 girls.

Mortenson clearly got off to a good start for a person who would end up working with people from other cultures. He spent much of his boyhood in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania where his father worked to establish a hospital and his mother a school. In this book, Mortenson describes his father's pride that the institutions would soon be run by Tanzanians.

In 1993, having spontaneously promised the Pakistani villagers who took him in after a failed climb of K2 that he'd return and build a school, Mortenson lived as a San Francisco Bay Area drifter,working shifts as an ER nurse, living in his Buick on climbing weekends, and trying to learn how to raise money. He didn't have a clue how he was going to come up with the $12000 he needed. The story of his visiting a copy shop, getting upgraded from hunt and peck manual typing to a computer, and fruitlessly mailing off 580 begging letters should resonate with anyone who has ever tried to scrounge up the cash for a project she truly believes in. And, improbably, he did find a mountaineering benefactor who came up with the money.

And so he managed to return to Pakistan and keep his promise -- and more. And along he way, Mortenson learned from the recipients of his gift essential truths about how to live. Here's the incident that gave his book its title:

When the porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands, Haji Ali spoke. "If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways," Haji Ali said, blowing on his bowl. "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die," he said, laying his hand warmly on Mortenson's own. "Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time."

"That day Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life," Mortenson says. "We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thrity-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could even hope to teach them."

Three Cups of Tea reminded me over and over of Jesus' injunction that those who would live in the Good need the mind and heart of a child. (Luke 18:17) For whatever reason, Greg Mortenson seems to have been able to bring a pure heart to his friends in the Himalayas. More of us should be so fortunate.

Grading OUR 100 days

These Obama votive candles* are readily available in my neighborhood.

This is the week we get to drown in "100 days" assessments of the new guy. I could do one myself, but I'm more interested in assessing us, the citizens. How are we doing at interacting with, responding to and influencing the new administration?

That is our job, after all. In this democracy, we didn't elect a miracle worker or a king, just a U.S. politician. He may be the most intellectually broad, most politically agile, and generally interesting one most of us have ever seen, but he is also the guy we put in office. Our responsibility didn't end when we marked our ballots. So how are we doing?

Many of us are probably just hoping he is doing his job (whatever we think that is; most likely trying to keep our jobs from going down the drain). That attitude can't be a crime. People participate in politics in a democracy mostly in order to keep things from going so sour that they have to participate more. And there is reasonably objective evidence that, despite a seriously worsening economy, many of us think the country is doing better. In December some 70 percent of us thought we were on the wrong track; that's down to something close to 50 percent now.

But how about the fraction of us who think we have to participate all the time on various issues? How are we doing?

On the economy and finance: On this core concern, there have been several levels of citizen effort to have our say. People are mad; we know we have been and are being ripped off by the financial sector through everything from credit cards to bank fees to the bailout with our taxes. The Right's noisy infrastructure for disseminating resentment has had some success in co-opting the push back via its nasty nativist Tea Parties. Not enjoying the same media megaphones, such left efforts as ACORN's foreclosure resistance, haven't commanded the same attention. Meanwhile, just about every publically vocal academic expert on high finance -- Krugman, Stiglitz, Galbraith, Reich, Johnson and Kwak among others -- has charged the stimulus with being too small and the bailout with being inadequate and wrongly executed. The Administration says "we're doing what we can" and spins. We the people get a C for effort; academics get a B for at least creating the need for a response from our rulers.

On war and peace: The urgent need to replace the Republicans took any wind we had out of the sails of those of us who have worked against the Iraq war. And we ourselves have been very tardy at coming to grips with escalation in Afghanistan, with the continued refusal of our rulers to deal with the festering sore of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and with U.S. military might spread across the globe, including the still-escalating war budget. Some of the usual suspects, including Code Pink and UFPJ, have tried to keep a peace movement alive. Commentators including Get Afghanistan Right have tried to lay the intellectual groundwork for the moment when people here notice we're embroiled in another disastrous occupation in Central Asia. Probably the best news on that front is the testimony of veteran Marine Cpl. Rick Reyes in a hearing last week. As usual, it is going to take people in the U.S. feeling the damage caused by our wars to get their attention. For these reasons, we applaud the fact that we have a President who seldom embarrasses us when he goes abroad, gives us reason to hope he's leaving a trashed Iraq to sort itself out, and doesn't cheer atrocities. We're pretty pathetic world citizens: D- in consideration of the faint stirrings in the embers.

On the torture and the rule of law: The usual suspects -- civil libertarians, investigative journalists, competent security professionals and parts of the legal profession -- are squawking like mad about issues on this front. Adam Server has written a convenient scorecard on the multiple rule of law issues the Obama people have confronted -- and frequently flunked. What's hard is to know is how large a constituency cares about these matters. The conventional wisdom is that nobody cares, to the extent of writing false headlines for polling results that show that substantial majorities of the people want some kind of accountability, some combination of prosecutions and/or investigations. (H/t Jim White and the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald.) It's possible to watch the administration gyrate to deflect unwanted calls for fast action from multiple directions. Just possibly the people, quite a few of whom in this instance are somewhat elite people, are pushing the new president around a bit. Give us (and the Prez) a B- so far. Time will tell...

On promoting the general welfare: This is the category that encompasses what most of us, except elites, think is the legitimate work of government: setting the rules and policies that enable the society to function -- the core stuff like health care, labor rights, full civil rights for all, educational opportunity. For historical reasons, we're not as good agitators for our own welfare as we need to be. Since 1980 we've pretty much been on the defensive, trying to prevent a series of robbers and con artists from completely dispensing with a frayed social contract. And we've evolved institutions suited for this kind of playing defense: single-issue, technocratic, professional advocacy groups, usually headquartered in Washington, whose idea of an involved activist base is, at best, a large set of individual donors. This kind of institution has a difficult time adjusting to new political circumstances, to a friendly context outside the experience of all but their oldest leaders. Meanwhile, most of us have gotten used to be being grateful that someone else specializes in understanding health financing or school testing policies; we have learned to abdicate any activist impulses to the pros. For an administration attempting substantive initiatives toward some kind of universal health care and investment in educational quality, these outfits won't serve -- the Obama folks need a mass social movement behind them. Instead they have non-profit silos. Obama for America looks designed to fill some of that void -- but can the person in power also serve as the focus for a movement? On the tough general welfare policy front, I grade the citizens a D.

Two sectors deserve slightly better marks. Labor has a real membership and substantial political capacity demonstrated in multiple elections. But after years of being hamstrung by labor law that turned insurgents into bureaucrats, it hasn't yet shown it can rouse its members to make fierce demands on a friendly government. Labor gets a C+. The LGBT movement is riding an historical wave of change in gender assumptions that give it a rapidly growing base among the new administration's core constituencies. And Obama inadvertently taught it to fire warning shots across his bow before he was even inaugurated (the Rick Warren episode). There's struggle ahead, but give LGBT forces a B+.

On sustainability of the planet: As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in this week's New Yorker,

... Earth Day has lost its edge and, with that, the sense that a different world is possible. Even more than in 1970, what's needed now is an outpouring that organizes itself -- with millions of people and, for good measure, some stinky dead fish in the streets.

The Pew Research Center found that, in the week Obama was inaugurated, concern about global warning had slipped to dead last among 20 policy problems. We, the citizens, can't seem to get interested. Some of the problem is like that with the other policy matters: it all seems incomprehensibly technical, impossible for otherwise responsible people to get involved with. And too many of us have the sneaking suspicion that probably it is all hopeless anyway -- the planet is going to fry and all we can do is mitigate and/or try to get ours. But Kolbert's right; we need to find hope that a different world is possible. So far, the people get an F.

For an overall grade, let's give ourselves a C- for Obama's 100 days. Lots of work to do.

***
*About those Obama votive candles: a quirk of my history makes me aware that the saint's body on which the President's head has been grafted belongs to Martin de Porres, a half-Spanish, half-Black African, Dominican brother in 17th century Peru. He was known for his good works for the poor -- and also for being able to "bilocate," to be in several places at once. I'm sure the President would find that ability useful in his job.