Columbia Political Review: April 2009

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cprapril09

staff

Editor-in-ChieKaren Leung

PublisherSajaa Ahmed

Managing EditorsSara DoskowSara Vogel

Managing Editorso Special ProjectsNicolas Alvear

Eric Lukas

Senior EditorsAyla BonglioCatherine ChongIan CroneJamie KesslerBen Small

Art EditorStacy Chu

Design EditorSarah Cohler

Ideas EditorsKabita ParajuliDavid Zhou

Outreach EditorsDevon GallowayMaisha Rashid

Tiany Tang

Head Copy EditorAnnie Ma

Deputy Copy EditorShayna Sehayik

Campus EditorsErin Conway

Kati FossettSophia Merkin

Business ManagersAlex FroumanMax Mogensen

Fact-checking TeamArun GollakataAdam KuerbitzCaitlyn Malcynsky

THE REVIEW ISSUE


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It Is WrittenObama, the Oscars, and the new American dream

Daniel DAddario

The Slumdog Millionaire

protagonist is a representation

o how Obama exists in the

popular imagination: an inertly

awless savior, bringing hisnovel personal experience to

bear on every issue beore

the group dance sequence that we

all know is coming in the end.

In his review o the Adam Sandler Moss-ad-hairdressing comedy You DontMess With the Zohan, David Denby de-clared mutual acceptance is now thehip mode o humor and called the

lm, like the Harold and Kumar movies,

un texte obamiste: an Obamaist text. Itsunclear what, besides multicultural aware-ness, Obama and Sandler share. The textesare comic and meandering while the muse

is anything but. This was in June 2008, thesame month Barack Obamas primary cam-

paign ended; premature to be declaring anObama era, let alone the art that would de-ne it. Ater Obamas triumph over HillaryClinton, beore the subterranean threatsembodied by Sarah Palins rhetoric andthe knee-jerk mobilization o enraged lib-eral voters against her ticket, perhaps itseemed to Denby that this raucous sub-genreproane, sloppily made, ethnicallyknowing, but good-hearted movieswouldbecome the new American cinema.

Denby wrote beore it was clear what

then-Senator Obama would mean or pol-itics or or art. The President has remainedconsistent, but his unoreseeably rapturouspopular reception has changed the sorts ostories Hollywood will tell. Denbys exam-ples do a worse job o depicting what 2008

the Year o Obama per Times year-end is-sue and popular acclamationwas like thando lms as well-produced and successulas Obamas campaign. Beore the election

and the Oscars, it might have beenpossible to claim a riendly unityas the national mood, rather thanaggressive, deiying parochialism.Among the lms successul with theAcademys industry proessionalsand with moviegoers, though, idleidolatry dressed up vaguely in hopewon out.

Cinema is an eective lensthrough which to analyze politicalchange. Films have always refect-ed their times, and Obama was themedia celebrity throughout 2008 andinto 2009. The annual Vanity Fairand Entertainment Weekly Oscar-season issues put Obama on theircovers this year; a year prior, theVanity Fair cover eatured, amongothers, Anne Hathaway and Jessica

Biel. This is not an incredibly logical shit,until one considers that Obama and the

changes he has engendered play more likea movie than like historical events o con-sequence.

Oscar-ratied lms like Slumdog Million-aire refect that dissolution o political real-ity even urther, surrounding their charac-ters with meaningul tableaux but reusingto complicate either character or tableauwith ideas. Slumdog, which won eight Os-carsincluding Best Picture, Director, andAdapted Screenplayrepresents not a Den-bian triumph in the depiction o ethnicity

on lm, but a ailure to even recognize political complexity. Slumdogs lead characterthe blank Jamal (played by Dev Patel), winsthe grand prize on the Indian Who Wantsto Be a Millionaire? not by knowledge buunique elements o his personal history

Each question on the game show dovetailswith an event in his lie. The only worth-while thing about him is the tide o historythat carries him. In this way he is, nationality aside, the ideal obamiste protagonist.

Slumdog Millionaire depicts modern India but was produced by a British crewand is reinterpreted by American moviegoers as a refection o national myth. Thosestories taking place in America were all either too intellectually strenuous (Milk) otoo obtuse (The Curious Case of BenjaminButton) to represent the American dream

quite as well as did Jamal rom MumbaiThe Wrestler, a brilliant allegory or Americas ading place in the world, was largely lost amid the Oscar-season shufe. Theact that the best-loved iteration o the traditional American dream onscreen in 2008took place overseas either went unnoticedby moviegoers or allowed them to congratulate themselves on their new, acile un-derstanding o India.

It is easy to get carried away by the ro-mantic notion o a poor individual overcoming cinematic travails. However, this movie

relies on a suspension o disbelie greater than that required to buy Adam Sandleas a wacky Mossad agent. In its presumption that personal history is a substitute oability, Slumdog Millionaire is too cute byhal: one is reminded o incantatory paeans such as son o a Kenyan and a Kansan, recited by supporters to dispel therelative brevity o Obamas legislative career, as though accidents o birth were thesame as accomplishments.

Jamal does next to nothing in Slumdog


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Daniel [email protected] Studies, English

CC 10

Obamas election was a victory or demographic groups as specifc as second-generation

immigrants and as broad as the American population, but the electoral win alone was

taken as the million-dollar grand prize.

Milks mid-lm political triumphmighthave won out at the Oscars. Milk never hada shot, though; Slumdog Millionaire wasorecast to win rom early on, just as thepersona o Hillary Clinton couldnt hold up

against the more appealing one o BarackObama. The Oscars, ater all, are somethingo a crystal ball into national mood: Gandhiand Out of Africa in the operatic, symbol-ist Reagan 1980s; Forrest Gump in the pre-vious great wave o hope that was BillClintons rst term andAmerican Beauty inthe defated irony o his second,A BeautifulMind and Million Dollar Baby in the Randi-

an compassionate conservatism o Bushsrst term; The Departed and No Country forOld Men in Hollywoods dark night o thesoul that was Bushs second term. 2007 wasespecially dark, and not just due toJunothe dark insights into American society othe anti-Western No Country for Old Menand the capitalism-vs.-religion saga ThereWill Be Blood were absent in 2008. What adierence a year makes! With the electiono a President whose public image, despitehis worthiness, seems pinned to the notiono luck and timing rather than the tradition-

al Million DollarClinton narrative, its easyto imagine that well see many more lmswhose protagonists are acted upon, lmswith easy happy endings.

Other Best Picture nominees were hard-ly less simplistic than Slumdog: Frost/Nixoncongratulates its audience on being smartenough to know that Richard Nixon wasbad. The message is not that ar o romthe penumbra emitted rom but not nec-essarily by Obama (see his pre-Inaugura-tion concert, at which Hollywood stars sanghis praises while he sat smiling blithely):

that the audience, or voter, is intelligent orhaving voted or the right candidate or seenthe right lm, and that he or she is clearlybeyond manipulation. Then the simplisticstoryit is written, Barack Obama is yournew bicyclecontinues.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonearned the most money and greatest num-ber o nominations o the ve lms, andit certainly has a good hook. As played bythe ortysomething tabula rasa Brad Pitt,Benjamin Button is a man o interestinghealth: he is doomed to age backwards, be-

ing born as an old man and dying a resh-aced youth. The atal faw o Benjamin But-ton is that literally nothing else about itsprotagonist is interesting. You never knowwhats coming or you, Benjamins mother

instructs hima lies like a box o choco-lates obamiste, perhaps, though even For-rest Gump wanted to engage with othersand his nation.

Long stretches o Benjamins lieandthe viewerspass without incident ormeaning. I there is anything worth know-ing rom an American lie lived backwardsover the course o the twentieth century,

Benjamin avoids learning it; whats com-ing or him as he grows younger is a serieso period outts and a mind as untroubledby thought as his ace is newly unwrin-kled. His regression into youth signals lit-tle more than the notion that an externally-determined lie spent avoiding contact withideas is not a lie wastedin act, is per-haps the American ideal. The lm beginsat the end o World War I and ends dur-ing Hurricane Katrina, but neither event hasscopeone a bunch o celebrating citizens,the other a ew rattling windows. Benjamin

lives in the same nice universe as Jamal;he may never know whats coming or him,but, reed rom the constraints o respon-sibility and context, hell always land onhis eet.

Between Buttons Benjamin, SlumdogsJamal, and Kate Winslets HannaThe Read-ers S.S. guard whom the audience is ex-pected to absolve once she becomes, youknow, a readercharacters gliding abovethe political import surrounding them dom-inated this years Oscar ceremony. Viewersgave the Oscar show good ratings, now that

the partisan Jon Stewart has been replacedas host by song-and-dance-y Hugh Jack-man, and they turned out to see BenjaminButton and Slumdog Millionaire in droves.(The Reader, too, has ound unexpectedmomentum in Winslets Best Actress tro-phy.) Perhaps they see themselves, ramedby picturesque political change that makesa good plot twist but that they hope cannotaect them, as Benjamins and Jamals.

Popular cinema got in on the game too.Wall-Eand The Dark Knight, two summerblockbusters more widely attended even

than Slumdog Millionaire, were even considered ront-runners or a Best Picturenomination, and won major prizes. Theyeven overshadowed You Dont Mess Withthe Zohan. In Wall-E, humanity has shipped

itsel to the outer reaches o space atedestroying Earththey have evolved intoentertainment-obsessed slobs, controlledby an omniscient computer system aboutwhich they neither know nor care. Theymerely trust it.

In The Dark Knight, Batman and the Joker battle over the ate o Gotham City, butthe Gothamites themselves are believed to

be complicit in their own destruction. Thedirector, Christopher Nolan, sets two Nietzchean gures at play to take charge o thelives o those who cannot or will not aidthemselvesthe very people who allowedGotham City to slide into ruin. The Gothamites need a protector because they are lazyshitless, weak. I looked around my theateto see i anyone else was oended at thelms close, but everyone else was raptin communion with the screen. The DarkKnight became Americas second-highestgrossing lm o all time.

These lms are not good-hearted, noare they heartening. But judging rom theslate o lms at the rst Obama-era Oscarsand the discourserestricted primarily towho loves Obama moston this campusand throughout America, they represent acultural shit. One wonders i, as presidencies tend to ade in popularity over timedisillusionment with Obama will producean Obamaist There Will Be Blood and NoCountry for Old Men. One hardly hopes othe American situation to worsen, but perhaps more critical thinking on the part o

audiences, lmmakers, and Oscar voters iscalled or. Euphoria over Barack Obamaselection has not only conditioned us to waior a happy ending that may long be deerred, but has elevated to the Americanpantheon truly bad art.



Making Globalization Work, and Jagdish Bhagwatis In Deense o Globalization combined.

Instead o getting primed on debates over theuneven distribution o gains rom globalizationreaders o Friedman receive lectures on the unbridled joys o the Wal-Mart Symphony,a Cantatain Supply-Chain Eciency Minorand the somewhat un-rigorous Dell Theory o Confict Prevention, the aphorism that No two countries thatare both part o a major supply chain, like Dells

will ever ght a war against each other It isthis kind o radical oversimplication that makesFriedman so popularhis theories seem childishand his evidence is purely anecdotal, but theyeel like theyre true. I there were some evidenceto suggest readers really were moving up rompop to crunch, excessive cool appeal might beorgivable. But i more than a raction o Freakonomics or The World is Flat readers are perusing Nash on game theory, Ohlin on internationa

trade, or Samuelson on possibility unctions, will eat my economics textbook.

Instead o educating the public, this trend

has created an impression oalse knowledge; instead o

teaching us how little weknow, pop economicseeds us tidbits o act

that buttress us againsthose thinkers who actually seek to conveymeaning, rather thanto entertain. Someauthors, on the other hand, have avoided

the easy trap o triviaNassim Nicholas Taleb

in his 2007 book The BlackS w a n , embraces uncertainty and ar

gues against complacent acceptance o the apparent status quo. He contends that all too oteninductionexpecting tomorrow to be the same asevery other daygets us into trouble, especiallyin nance, where all too oten analysis consistso extending an upward-trending line into the uture. Just because a rm has been protable oa ew years does not mean it will continue tobe; the world does not operate according to con

>Dismal IndeedThe new economicsand how it can destroy America

THE REVIEW ISSUE

olumns by Friedmana guy with no actu-al economics expertise (his degrees arein Mediterranean and Middle East stud-ies)run alongside those by Nobel Lau-reate Paul Krugman in the New York

Times, Americas newspaper o record. But whileKrugmans corpus includes academic articleswith titles like Scale economies, product dier-entiation, and the pattern o trade, Friedman ap-parently conducts research by fying to exotic

countries, eating lunch with businessmen, andexpressing wonderment at the omnipresence oadvertisements or cell phones and ast ood res-taurants. Yes, Tom, they have Pizza Hut in Indiatoo. The juxtaposition on the page seems a bitodd: the sage dispenses sharp insights and can-ny criticism, while the mountebank, a ew col-umn inches over, trundles along rehashing tiredthemes with new window dressing.

Yet Mr. Friedmaneasy as it is to single himout or his preposterous pronouncements and pu-red metaphorsis just the particularly heinousexemplar o an insidious trend. A horde o sel-

proclaimed non-experts, and some academics aswell, have popularized economics, casting doubtand caution aside as relics o Carlyles dismalscience. Amazon.com now has an entire sectiondevoted to pop economics, including StephenLevitt and Stephen Dubners amous Freakonom-ics and a host o copycats books like The Under-cover Economist: Exposing why the Rich are Rich,

the Poor are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a

Decent Used Car! or Hidden Order: The Economicso Everyday Lie, or even, Naked Economics: Un-dressing the Dismal Science.

Meanwhile, TV hosts like CNNs Lou Dobbs orCNBCs inimitable Jim Cramer purport to analyzepressing issues. Dobbss requent rants on im-migration and global warmingthe ormer an in-vasion, the latter a hoax, both threatening truth,justice, and the American wayseem preposter-ous but, according to Nielsen ratings, around amillion viewers tune in nightly to soak up hiswisdom. Cramer, on the other hand, has becomepopular or his investment advice and nancialanalysis, dispensed in the reassuring manner oa spastic orangutan. On March 11, 2008, or in-stance, he advised viewers that Bear Stearns

is not in trouble. The next week, the bank col-lapsed. Smashing things with a hammeras Cra-mer is wont to dois not a sign o accuracy orprophetic ability.

The aim o the exerciseto make a dreary top-ic entertaining and relevant to the common manseems innocuous enough, and i done properly itis indeed a worthy task. But all too oten eco-nomics is not un, anecdotes are not representa-tive, problems are complex, and these commen-

tators do their readers a disservice by suggestingthat things are otherwise. A little knowledge, theclich goes, is a dangerous thing; by skimmingthe surace o topics like nance or immigra-tion when the audience has little knowledge othe underlying principles, they spurn caution insearch o a quick buck.

The counterargument is that this popular-ization prots society by in-troducing econom-ic concepts anda critical modeo thinking to

the commonman. It is anice theory,but one thatdoes not really hold up.It is not that getting the manon the street interest-ed in economicissues is inher-ently bad. Tothe contrary: imore peo-ple thoughteconomical-ly about nation-al issues, wewould all bemuch bet-ter o. Yet all too oten popeconomics replaces, rather thanrei no rce s, more authoritative studies.The World is Flat, Friedmans breathy paean toglobalization, has sold over two million copiesin several editions, more than Joseph Stiglitzstwin tomes Globalization and its Discontents and

Thomas Friedman is making us stupid.

C

StacyChu



Ian [email protected]

Political Science, HistoryCC 10

venient Gaussian distributions or elegant mod-els with clean, simple assumptions. Unlike typi-cal pop economists, Taleb maintains respect orthe complexity o the problems he addresses.

Now, to be air, Jim Cramer did run a suc-cessul hedge und, and Stephen Levitt is a re-nowned economist, and Lou Dobbs really doeshave an economics degree. Its not that oneneeds to be an academic to dispense econom-

ic wisdomTreasure Secretary Tim Geithner isntormally trainedor that those who criticize ac-ademic thought are destroying discourseTalebtakes great issue with economic experts whosenancial models bear no relation to reality, goingso ar as to label the models o Markowitz andSharpe, Nobel winners, as hot air and quackremedies. Theres a dierence between those,like Dobbs and Friedman, who revel in their ev-eryman status and bite their thumbs at exper-

tise as such, and those like Levitt who, thoughexperts themselves, devalue expertise in an at-tempt to reach a wider audience.

The problem with Freakonomicschock ull oascinating actoids as it isis that its almost toosuccessul. The book, which peaked at #2 on theNew York Times bestseller list, does away withmuch o the traditional tedium o economics re-searchendless modeling and revisions o mod-elsin avor o snappy, easily digestible biteso act (how real estate agents are like Ku KluxKlansmen, or example). Stephen Dubner, jour-nalist, and Stephen Levitt, economist behind the

magic, reduce human decision-making processesto pure rational choice mechanisms wherein wemaximize gain and minimize loss (both as cal-culated by the authors). I their data doesnt al-ways add up perectly, as was revealed regard-ing their chapter on ties between abortion andalling crime rates well, who cares, becauseits the principle that matters. Dont trust thosecrusty old economists with their tomes o num-berstheyre boring and old, and did we mentionboring. Freakonomics itsel describes this phe-nomenon; Levitt and Dubner note that an ex-

pert whose argument reeks o restraints and nu-ance oten doesnt get much attention. An expertmust be bold i he hopes to alchemize his home-spun theory into conventional wisdom. Its piti-ul that authors who embrace uncertainty andrebuke economic hubris must struggle to maketheir voices heard over the general din; Freak-onomics isnt helping. Ill coness to having en-joyed much o the book, and others o its ilk

but I wont conuse it with real social scienceresearch.

The essential problem, then, is not any partic-ular pop economist, or even the existence o thegenre, but the eects that these pundits have onpublic discourse. Simultaneously, as the Freako-nomics genre elevates the plebeian reader to thestature o erudite economist (as though posses-sion o isolated acts were sucient to decryptthe secrets o the dismal science and then de-

bate public policy), the Friedmans and Dobbsesreduce the value o actual expertise by shrink-ing complex questions down to sketches andsermons. Friedmans blithe condence in Amer-ica (the worlds dream machine), globaliza-tion, and the inevitability o a green revolution(his newest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: WhyWe Need a Green Revolutionand How It Can Re-

new America, might as well be titled Lots, O,The Same: Why Thomas Friedman Needs a New

Houseand How Hell Reprint His Columns in a

Book) mirrors Dobbss paranoid ravings about il-legal immigrants (whom he associates with com-

munists, socialists, and even anarchists) in thatthey eel qualied to dismiss the advice o schol-ars with years o experience based on mere sur-ace scans o cavernous topics.

What were really talking about is devaluationo expertise, and o subtlety and complexity, inkeeping with an all-too-amiliar American tradi-tion: anti-intellectualism. It happens in history,economics, and science alike. Call it the Wikipe-dia eectIm sure Thomas Friedman would loveit. On Wikipedia, saying something, anything, canmake it so, no qualications required. Who needs

to read whole books when one can get everything with a Google search? I treated correctlyWikipedia becomes an invaluable tool or spreading knowledge and spurring urther study. Buwe sometimes treat it as an omniscient cybernetic deity, skipping the ot-excellent bibliographielisted in ootnotes and skimming the content oacts, rather than understanding.

Its the obsession with actoidsor perhaps

with truthiness, to borrow rom the modern philosophe Colbertthats the real symptom. Whawe want isnt actually discourse, but pre-packaged arguments, whether on globalization or education or taxes, primed to unleash on our oewithout regard or intricacy or skepticism. Economics isnt an exact science; very rarely, i at alldoes it possess any absolute truths. The blithesupposition that it does, that one can speak oglobalization or immigration or even human

beings as though such convenient constructscould be meaningully analyzed at the higheslevels o abstraction and their behaviors and eects predicted with fawless precision, is a useless and damaging misconception. Reading jusFriedman, or listening to just Dobbs, or believing, as Dubner and Levitt seem to, that humanaction is purely rational and predictable, missesthe point entirely. Social science is hardly exactbut like real science, it depends completely onslow, measured, data-driven debate and alsication o hypotheses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb manages to be entertaining cautioning against the

Thanksgiving Turkey allacyand careul at thesame time. Its not easy to balance broad appeaagainst useul (read: subtle) analysisbut itstime to tilt those scales back towards sanity.

Oh, and one more thing. I the world is already fat, how can it be getting fatter?

by Ian Cron

All too oten pop economics replaces, rather than reinorces, more authoritative studies.

with apologies to Matt Taib



O Particles and PoliticsFinding sciences rightful place in American life

J. Bryan Lowder

In his Inaugural Address, President

Obama gave real attentionand

respectto science, in the orm o

eight simple, magic words: We will

restore science to its rightul place.

S

THE REVIEW ISSUE

cience has had a rough eightyears. The speaker was Dr.Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureatein physics and outspoken advo-

cate o science education; the topic was thestate o American science on the cusp othe Obama presidency. Outside, the air wascold and (uncharacteristically) still. Leder-mans audience inside Chicagos StetsonConerence Center, though, buzzed withan energy unknown to Americas scienti-ic community since the turn o the millen-nium.

The scientists, policymakers, journal-ists, and other science ans at the annualmeeting o the the American Association orthe Advancement o Science (AAAS)whichworks to promote progressive science poli-cy and education in the United Stateswereenergized by Ledermans speech. But likethe speaker himsel, they were more excit-ed about another, earlier talk: Obamas in-augural address.

On the day he became president, BarackObama gave real attentionand respect

to science, in theorm o eight sim-ple, magic words:We will restorescience to itsrightul place.For scientists, thisdeclaration hadthe eeling o aparent welcom-ing home an es-tranged child, andtelling that child

that she had beenright all along. Frank Press, ormer presidento the National Academy o Sciences, cap-tured the mood in a New York Times articlethe day ater the inauguration. I you lookat the science world, you see a lot o happyaces [Obama recognizes] what science cando to bring this country back in an innova-tive way, he enthused.

The words rightul and back recog-nize that US has long been a major play-er in global scientic research. Yet Obama

and Press statements mask a complex prob-lem: what exactly is sciences rightul placein American society? Obama appreciates thatscience already plays a certain role, yet thequestion o how that role should be denedand by what methods and criteria it will bemeasured remains murky. Science, yes; butwhat kind and how much?

GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE POLITICIZATION OF

SCIENCE

Scientists were not the only ones struckby Obamas pro-science rhetoric. Even Dan

Savage, the celebrated sex advice columnist,commented on the statement in his SavageLove podcast, wryly observing that when thenew President delivered his speech, Bushshot aith-based daggers at the back ohis head. Savage, Lederman and, indeed,Obama allude to a certain mistreatment oscience in the recent pastand connect thisabuse to the policies and outlook o the Bushadministration.

In early 2004, an ad-hoc association o 64top US scientists, including 20 Nobel laure-

ates and sev-eral scienceadvisers topast adminis-trations (someRepublican),published anopen letterto PresidentBush decryingthe adminis-trations ma-nipulation o

science or po-litical ends. In the report, the authors, includ-ing Lederman, accused the administration osuppressing, distorting or manipulating thework done by scientists at ederal agencies,and outlined a number o egregious cases,including the censorship o global warmingresearch by the Environmental ProtectionAgency and the replacement o Center orDisease Control publications on proper con-dom use with a simple warning emphasizingcondom ailure rates.

The most serious oense was Bushspush to politicize the scientic process it-sel. According to the report, the administration instituted a political litmus testor scientic advisory boards, oten eschewing the opinions o public or university-a-liated scientists in avor o those associated with stakeholding companies. The piecealso attacked the administrations restrictiono ederal unding or certain research projectsmost notably stem cells and climatechangeto which it objected on ethical opolitical grounds.

Its easy to see why the scientic community might have elt persecuted during theBush years. In his last State o the Union address, or instance, Bush said, we mustensure that all lie is treated with the dignity it deserves, calling on Congress topass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, ocloning o human lie. This tendency to de-ploy science or a political agenda rustrateda eld that prides itsel on producing knowl-edge through empirical observation, experiment, and proo. From the perspective o

scientists, the last eight years were a period o ear and stagnationa kind o Inquisition. Obamas election, then, may signal anew Renaissance.

YES WE CAN CANT WE?

Now that Bush is out, the mood o the scientic community seems generally hopeulat least with regard to the new Presidentsattitude toward science. Obama has made iclear that he supports stem cell research, actually believes in global warming, and wants

to keep intelligent design rom being taughin Americas classrooms. These positions, inaddition to the much-touted inaugural statement, have cast Obama as sciences champion. But the question is not whether thenew administration will back science generally and abstractly, but which specic re-search projects the ederal government wilchoose to support.

Hot topics like health care, sustainableenergy and climate change make the priority list, while a large swath o the basicresearch sciences, like particle physics and


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uring the moments when the 44th presi-dent o the United States promised abrighter, shinier American uture, the Chi-na Central Television Companys live news-eed o Obamas inauguration became thecenter o media attention in that country.But at 1:17AM Beijing time, CCTV cut romthe simultaneous translation o Obamasspeech back to the hosting anchor. Flus-tered, she conusedly began question-ing her guest political analyst on Obamaseconomic policy. The line skipped in theinauguration speech: Recall that earliergenerations aced down ascism and com-

munism, not just with missiles and tanks,but with sturdy alliances and enduringconvictions. The Xinhua translator contin-ued ater the impromptu Q&A as i noth-ing had happened.

Watching the CCTV speech, and at-tempting to understand the theoretical po-lemics o Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas,who designed the channels headquartersin Beijing, are similar provocations. Kool-haas, a principal o the amed design rmOce o Metropolitan Architecture (OMA),

also inspires an experience o complacen-cy ollowed by alarmed conusion. A nod-ding at a string o acceptable ideas, thena suspension o disbelie so sudden thatyou wonder i his readers are really sup-posed to take him seriouslya reactionboth aesthetic and political.

DISSECTING A BUILDING THAT EXPLODES BE-

FORE THE FIRST CUT

In Koolhaas most recent publication,

S,M,L,XL, an encyclopedia-sized volume ohis theoretical writings, the architect laysdown the oundations o his theory o ar-chitectural Bignessan idea crucial to hisdesign rom the late 90s to now, on theeve o the completion o the CCTV building(which has been heralded as revolution-ary to the concept o the skyscraper). Thetheory o Bigness is intentionally vague, sovague that it verges on sel-deeating. Butsimultaneously, the argument makes itsel

oddly impregnablein its ineability, Big-ness is sel-protective, almost imperviousto critique.

What is this paradoxical system? Big-ness theorizes that, as a design reachesa certain capacityKoolhaas, o course,does not speciy what this capacity isthebuilding becomes an autonomous systemthat unctions on its own terms. It cuts it-sel o rom its environment by virtue oits complexity, becoming ahistorical. Kool-haas theory has been seen as emancipa-tory, reeing the architect rom a moral im-

perative to political responsibility. Partlyor this reason, Koolhaas has been ableto justiy his controversial work or CCTVin China, and or a mini-island city withinDubai. And unsurprisingly, Koolhaas OMAhas been barraged by politically con-cerned critics who see his work as com-plicit with such vaguely dened evils ascommercialization and suppressions ospeech reedoms.

Yet Koolhaas architecture is politicalin another sense. His system celebratesthe complexity o human interactiontheoverlapping o personal stories. So even asBigness may appear ahistoricperhaps inthe same way CCTVs omission was ahis-toricKoolhaas work, privileging short-lived micro-histories instead o seekinglarger, more coherent narratives, is alsosupremely political. His system recogniz-es the culture o increasing attention-de-ciency inspired by a post-capitalist globalvillage in which our eyes, hungry or pret-ty shapes, are allowed to feet rom build-ing to building.

CONTROL: THE COMPULSIVE WHITE LIE OF

ARCHITECTURE

In an interview with Wired in 1997Koolhaas commented that People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserablein anything. More and more I think archi-tecture has nothing to do with it. Its bothliberating and alarming. He goes on tosay, Architecture cant do anything that

the culture doesnt. We all complain thawe are conronted by urban environmentsthat are completely similar. We say wewant to create beauty, identity, qualitysingularity. And yet, maybe in truth thesecities that we have are desired. Maybetheir very characterlessness provides thebest context or living. This is Koolhaasconcept o the Generic Citythe contemporary megapolis that announces the nadeath o planning in our age.

O course, this is not to say that Koolhaas believes these citiesamong which

are Tokyo, Singapore, and our own Man-hattanare not planned. In act, he recognizes that huge complementary universes o bureaucrats and developers unneunimaginable fows o energy and moneyinto [the Generic Citys completion]; withthe same money, its plains can be ertilized by diamonds, its mud elds paved ingold bricks.

What Koolhaas takes issue with isthe absurdity o the Modern architectural revolution as proposed by the likes oLe Corbusier, who believed that the in

ormed sequencing o spaces and the creation o sublime constructions would leadto universally understandable orms, andthrough them, an abstract happinessCasting these theories aside, Koolhaas declares that the most dangerous and mosexhilarating discovery is that the planningmakes no dierence whatsoever.

Writing on the modern city-state, Koolhaas instead documents the unpredictability that results rom each attempt toestablish a regime o control. He comes tosee Singapore as a model or the Generic City: divorced rom context, based onnothing but eciency, speed, and mobility, with history reduced to a token themepark. Control only expands the edgeo chaos, he writes. From Singaporethough, you can draw conclusions: historywill disappear; the tabula rasa will be thenorm; control will be episodic, proceedingthrough enclaves, so that it wont generatean overall coherence; the skyscraperBignesswill be the last remaining typology.Its important or us to realize that Kool-

d


22/322 Columbia Political Review| cpreview.orgTHE REVIEW ISSUE

haas is not so much interested in judg-ing Singapore as understanding ithesnot a Utopian architect with a political vi-sion o the idealcity or societyand he doesntbelieve that ar-chitects are ca-pable o build-

ing ideal cities,in any case.And this skep-

ticism over plan-nings power togenerate narra-tives o mean-ingul human in-teraction is whyKoolhaas is wide-ly recognized asamong the mostcynical o con-

temporary ar-chitects. Earnestarchitects like Bernard Tschumi (inciden-tally, the designer o Lerner Hall) seek tounderstand human interactions with eachother and with architecture by positingexperience as a series o episodes thatorm a narrative. Koolhaas makes nopretension o writing Homeric hymns.Bigness is quite unheroic. As Colum-bia Architecture proessor John Rajch-man noted in his seminalArtforum ar-ticle on Koolhaas, it is a theory that is

indierent and impersonalnot colos-sal, not sublime. It is labyrinthineand the point is not to nd a way out,but rather to nd new ways o mov-ing about within its complexities andspecicities, reinventing and reassem-bling its paths. Bigness is thus not anideal, not a master planand that iswhy it denies what urbanism has sup-posed: that we might actually con-struct cities.

CHAOS/COMPLEXITY: MAKING SENSE OF

PLANNINGS VANITY

Rajchman would go on to observe in

Thinking Big, Bigness is a philosophyaverse to the earlier architectural urg-es to control or plan everything, andto work instead with unnoticed pos-sibilities in a situation we realize wecant completely master. It is to acceptthat cities are clashes o orces withunpredictable outcomes, loose assem-blages rom which new things and newconnections derive. It is a celebra-

tion o the most basic, yet most glaringlyoverlooked result o the past 150 years obuildingit is a way o seeing things that

have been un-seen, o releas-ing new possi-bilities in ourways o being.Indeed, as

demonstrated bythe Singapore-as-Generic-City casestudy, Koolhaasgame is one oresigned observa-tion, in the sensethat he believeswe will never un-derstand how this

surely-existent,underlying sys-tem o human

activity works,or how its e-

ects are produced. We will probably nev-er know, and Koolhaas complex designs

point to this. But his cynicism is still colored by a hint o romance: his resolve tocontinue designing despite plannings inherent absurdity suggests hope in the capacity to generate antasy. Arguably, Koolhaas is guilty o the same delusions ograndeur ound in Le Corbusier.

Yet Koolhaas success has been predicated not on his connection to a modern

ist past, but on his subversiveness. HisOMA has been described as a kind o mobilized war machine, engaging in an ongoing struggle with developers, politiciansengineers, government agencies, and proessors to introduce the resh air o a newkind o urbanism, a new way o thinkingabout cities, which analyzes specicitieswhile multiplying possibilities.

But inasmuch as this theory envisionsarchitecture as the mirror to urbanityscomplex networks, it may also be com-plicit with late capitalismthat idea o ou

global economy o which neo-Marxists areso critical. To be sure, Koolhaas has amously called himsel a surer, guringworld culture as a huge ocean and rid

Robert Somol, Director o

the School o Architectureat the University o Illinois,

jokes that Koolhaas is like

Clint Eastwood: You dont

know i hes cool or boring.

In Koolhaas essay Generic City, collected in his 1978 book Delirious

New York, he implied a latent Theory o Bigness that he would explicate inS,M,L,XL. The theory would be a set o qualiers and goals or the contempo-rary structure ounded on ve principles:

1. Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such amass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even byany combination o architectural gestures.

2. The elevator negates issues o composition, scale, proportion, and detail,and thus the art o architecture, through its potential to establish mechani-cal rather than architectural connections.

3. In Bigness, the distance between the core and the envelope o the build-ing increases to the point where the aade can no longer reveal what hap-pens inside. This humanist (and Modernist) expectation is doomed.

4. Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond goodor bad. Their impact is independent o their quality.

5. Together, all these breaks with scalewith architectural composition,with tradition, with transparency, with ethicsimply the nal, most radicalbreak: Bigness is no longer part o any urban tissue.

The Tenets o Bigness



Aaron Hsieh

[email protected], Art History

CC 09

ing the crest.And it would be exactly upon these

grounds that the likes o critic MichaelSorkin would attack Koolhaas. In SomeAssembly Required, he denounces Kool-haas strategies as empty o moral judg-ment, arguing, Global warming, the rapiddisappearance o habitats and ecosystems,worldwide pollution, and the breakneck

homogenization o the built environmentare all symptomatic o a world in whichwe can no more consider ourselves simplyanother species than we can stand raptlyoutside it, shivering at its majesty.

To critics like Sorkin, Koolhaas is cloy-ingly romantic, aspiring to a kind o post-technological sublimity. For him, Sorkininsists, the onrush o globalization wasmerely irresistible, it had an aesthetic au-thority in its deep imprinting o orm. Suchgeneric urbanism represented an un-avoidable deault, a condition growing au-

tonomously, throwing up its endlessnesso reeways and airports, oce towers andgated communities, McDonalds, and KFCs.The surer epistemology panders to thisupdated universality with a canny resigna-tion o agency, and hence responsibility.

Put simply, Koolhaas is a hypocrite whosedesign principle attempts to emancipateitsel rom culture, but actually reproducesit. Is this truly a air reading o Koolhaas?

INDEPENDENCE IS NOT A SPATIAL CONCEPT

SUGGESTIVE OF DISTANCE

Critiques rom the likes o Sorkin cometo underline the dierence between hav-ing a political stance and being political-ly interested. Anthropologist Bruno Latourhas made this point: [Koolhaas is] saidto be cynical, because he is not political-ly correct, in the sense o simply articu-lating the critical idiom, he writes. Sohe is oten accused o being complacentand conniving with market orces, as ihe were sort o enjoying this kind o pow-er in architecture. O course he does nothave a political stance in the sense that hedoes not say what he is supposed to sayor what makes people eel goodwhich isthat market orces are dominated by latecapitalism.

However, Koolhaas handling o the

Koolhaas has amously called himsel a surer, fguring world culture asa huge ocean and riding the crest.

question o non-modernism, secondmodernism, or hypermodernism, as hemay call it, is highly political in the sensethat it produces architecture (such as theCCTV headquarters) that recognizes thepresence o politics. And to be sure, Kool-haas ahistorical architecture is not meantto unction independently rom cultural re-alityinstead, it perorms alongside o it.

Among the most infuential Koolhaasproponents is Robert Somol, Director othe School o Architecture at the Univer-sity o Illinois, who jokes that Koolhaas islike Clint Eastwood: You dont know i hescool or boring. Somol sees in Koolhaas ajaded view o Critical-Architecture and asubsequent embrace o the late capitalistand supershiny. For Somol, Koolhaas her-alds the advent o antasy architecture.

Somols critiques, commonly labeleda post-critical Projective Theory o archi-tecture, attempt to withdraw rom a per-

ceived theoretical stagnation in contem-porary architecture. Instead, architectslike Somol design buildings that are moreeasily relatable, and hence, more publiceven populist. This action generally triesto make architectural theory more salient

by orging tectonic identity in easily legi-ble shape. The goal is a ranker architec-ture that nally begins to recognize publicconsciousness and imagination in the vul-gar reception o buildings, whether or noteach detail is pregnant with conceptual in-tent. It is or many architects an uncom-ortable admission that sometimesprob-ably most o the timepeople do not carei the CCTV building was designed to be asemi-sel-contained biome whose interiorwas careully planned to act as a mediapo-lis with multiple circulation pathways thatseamlessly and physically bind dierentprogram unctions together. Some Bei-jingers, Paul Goldberger ironically notesin his June 2008 review, have taken tocalling it Big Shorts [ater its shape].

THE VANITY OF RECOGNIZING CONCEIT

It is the question o how people actu-ally interact with buildings that may castKoolhaas spectacular theoretical gymnas-tics as overly idealistic, and Somols praiseas reductive. In the Columbia undergradu-

ate architecture program, one o the mostatal mistakes that a student can make isailing to include a proper silhouette in rendered section or perspective drawings, indicating how people would use the spaceContrary to what Koolhaas might suggestthis is oten quite predictable. You cantdraw a ballerina on the nal drawing oyour bike path and claim that your land

scaping project is going to inspire a danceto get into her tights and pirouette. Peopleact in unexpected ways, sometimes generating Koolhaasian chaos, but theyre notreally that random.

Bigness fexibility, though, mighshield Koolhaas rom the charge that hisconception o unruly human interactiondoesnt describe the way we actually relate to buildings. As a design principleBigness emphatically asserts a rameworkbut allows or individual discovery. Whether the observers reaction is one o com-

placency, awe, or skepticism springs ouo the momentand is thereore, Koolhaaswould probably suggest, unknowable inadvance.

Perhaps Koolhaas hopes to inspire noa grounded period, but a foating ques

tion mark about contemporary architectural practice. Hes very much like Andy War-hol in this respect: a militant avant-gardegure and/or cynical joker whose work isso brilliant that you cant ignore it, butwhom youre not sure you should take seriously or ear that its all just one bigprank at your personal expense. Undeniably though, Koolhaas is transorming skylines. As Richard Lacayo writes in the architects prole or TIME Magazines liso the Worlds Most Infuential People in2008, He may not be a man who wants toimpose his vision on the world, but some-how the world is looking more and morelike he wants it to.



n January 1943 a rail, bookish Frenchwoman in oversized spectacleswalked into the Free French com-mand in London. She had just ar-rived rom Marseilles by way o New

York, and she wanted to be a paratrooper.Her name was Simone Weil. No one knewwhat to do with her, until it was discoveredthat she could write. The French pressedher into an oce job, drating dispatch-

es and sorting through the piles o pro-posals that poured in daily or reconstruc-tion projects in post-occupation France. Atnight, she locked hersel in and wrote, pro-ducing (among other things) a proposal oher own, a 300-page tome titled The Needfor Roots.

The work is remarkable or its contentbut, more than that, it is remarkable or thespirit in which it was conceived. Weil wasunconcerned with rebuilding actories, in-rastructure, or government in the conven-tional sense; what she proposed instead

was a program or rebuilding the spirit othe French people. In Weils view, humancollectivities exist to provide or the needso the soul which orm, like our physicalneeds, a necessary condition o our lie onthis earth. The Need for Roots, then, be-came a program or growing the organs insociety that could eed a peoples soulsroots. The French, as she saw them, hadbeen uprooted.

Though The Need For Roots was writ-ten or a dierent time and place, Weilsthought holds special resonance or us to-day in the particular conditions o the USoccupation o Iraq. The souls o the Iraqipeople have been starved by dictatorship,genocide, three Gul wars, and now a or-eign occupation. Perhaps reconstructionshould be geared not only to inrastruc-

THE REVIEW ISSUE

Iraqs Antiques RoadshowThe past under siege in Iraq and the United States

Lane Sell

ture and industry, but also to that whichmakes public lie and nationhood, econo-my and industry, both possible and neces-sarythe souls o the people o who inhab-it and make the nation. In Iraq, the pastitselits record and its physical tracesis under siege. This has implications notonly or the past o Iraq, but also or theheritage o civilization itsel. O all thesouls needs, Weil wrote, none is more

vital than this one or the past. The pastprovides the raw materials rom which welearn who we are and who we can aspireto beit provides human beings the toolsto create a uture, and it oers the suste-nance o a thousand generations o experi-ence to deal with the ever-new phenome-na o the world.

The range o threats to Iraqs culturalheritage is vast, and the story goes backar beyond the 2003 invasion. SaddamHusseins regime may be best known orits genocidal attacks on the Kurds, but it

was also responsible or subtler assaultson Iraqs Republican past, as well as theintentional environmental destruction othe Fertile Crescentan eort to ethnical-ly cleanse the Shia armers who inhabitedthe region by turning their rich marshlands(also a major world habitat or migratingbirds and the largest wetland in the Mid-dle East) into a dustbowl. Here, a ew ex-amples will have to suce in outlining thecontinuing danger to Iraqs past: the loot-ing and subsequent misuse o Iraqs muse-ums, the pillaging o historical sites and itsdestabilizing political impact in the prov-inces, and the actions o the United Statesmilitary in establishing bases on sites ocultural signicance.

Much ink has been spilled about thelooting o Iraqs National Museum ollow-

ing the capture o Baghdad in March 2003Approximately 17,000 artiacts were lootedincluding the 5,000 year-old Sacred Vaseo Warka, the oldest surviving example onarrative relie. To date, about 10,000 othose stolen objects have been recovered(Warka Vase included) by means rangingrom raids and seizures to voluntary returnunder amnesty to discovery through Syrianreality television; many still remain miss

ing.But the National Museum was not the

only repository to suer, although it hasreceived considerably more attention thanother institutions. The National Museumbenets rom general Western perceptionso the countrys particular historical signicance. We think o Iraq as an ancient landthe site o the o old Mesopotamia and thebirthplace o world civilization. With newso the museums looting came an outpouring o international support and a largescale eort to recover the stolen artiacts

International concern did not extend to thecountrys more recent past and the cultural achievements o later periods, however

In Modernism and Iraq, ColumbiasZainab Bahrani, Proessor o Near EasternArt and Archaeology, notes, This attitudeis perhaps the main reason why the Museum o Modern Art, amous throughouthe Middle East or its extensive collectiono late 19th and 20th century art, receivedlittle attention rom the press or international nongovernmental organizations thamobilized so quickly to rescue stolen arand antiquities o the earlier eras o Mesopotamian antiquity. While it existed, theMuseum o Modern Art in Baghdad poseda real challenge to the consistent and pernicious notion that the ne arts in Mesopotamia or Ottoman Iraq ended just as

The National Museum, once controlled by the State Board o Antiquitieand Heritage, is now administered by the Ministry o Tourism.

I



Modernism began to develop in the West.With its erasure, the primitivizing myththat Iraq has no modern past edges closerto assuming the mantle o truth not onlyor outsiders, but also or a new generationo Iraqis growing up in the shadow o theoccupationthose who will matter mosttruly to the nations uture. Iraqs mod-ern heritage is one o decolonization, a

struggle that cost blood enough in militarycoups against the Hashemite monarchyand later the Anglo-Iraqi War o 1941.Losing the visual and artistic re-cord o this period is a stun-ning blow to the processby which both Iraq-is and Amer-icans mightbegin to thinkabout the pit-alls o that rstdecolonization and

what peace oughtto entail today (ablow that ewin power, Iraqior American,seem to consid-er as such).

Even lessnotice has been tak-en o Iraqs NationalLibrary and State Archive,so thoroughly wrecked byre and looting that no plans re-

main o Baghdads inrastructureits plans or electricity and sewage, togive just a ew examplesnever mindthe documentary history o the nation. Aso late 2007, no appreciable unding hadbeen made available to the Library or re-construction, and none o the major char-itable organizations that traditionally takean interest in education had stepped or-ward (Carnegie, Gates, and MacArthur, orinstance).

The National Museum just reopened onFebruary 23, a act much touted in the pressas evidence o Iraqs slow return to nor-malcy (AP). But a closer look at the mu-seums reopening begs the question: orwhom was the museum reopened, and orwhat purpose? We have ended the blackwind (o violence) and have started the re-construction process, President Nouri al-Maliki declared at the opening gala withan almost brazen optimism. That optimis-tic ront recalls the last time the Nation-al Museum was opened, under the aus-pices o the Coalition Provisional Authority

(CPA) and Presidential Envoy L. Paul Jer-ry Bremer. On July 3, 2003, the museumexhibited a selection o 616 pieces knownas the Nimrud Gold, an Assyrian treasurehorde that stands as one o the muse-ums centerpieces. The exhibit, ordered onshort notice, opened and closed in a sin-gle day, because the CPA eared the trea-sure horde would be stolen i it remained

in the museum. This publicity stunt, orga-nized on a rushed schedule, was a con-servators nightmare that endangered thesaety o the artiacts. Nonetheless, it washailed as a signal o stability and renewedsovereignty in Iraq. In reality, civil confictin the country was kicking into overdrive.Not surprisingly, the gold soon embarkedon a world publicity tour.

Al-Maliki seems to have learned an uglylesson rom the occupying powers. On aar grander scaleone that posed dangerso serious damage to ar more o the col-lectionthe grand opening o the museumon February 29 worked in the same way asthe Nimrud gold exhibition. The decision to

reopen the museum was taken sometimein early February, and it quickly sparkeda wave o reaction in the archaeologicacommunity. (The National Museum, oncecontrolled by the State Board o Antiquities and Heritage, is now administered bythe Min- istry o Tourisma detail telling

enough in and o itsel.)An open letter to al-Ma

liki drated and signedby international archaeologists, art historians, ar

chaeologists, curators andpreservationists on February

8 pled the case succinctly:Opening a museum is not simply

unlocking a door. Preparing a museum collection or opening usually re

quires at least one year o careuwork, even in the best o circum-

stances. From a curatorial perspective, it takes many

months to do this ina proessional and

responsible mannerThe plan to open oneo the worlds mosimportant museums

in a period o two weeksdisplays a remarkable

un- awareness ocultural heritage man

a g e m e n tThe Ministry o

Tourism and Antiquities seemsto be unaware

that there areinternat ion

ally ac- k n ow l ed g e dstandards and disciplines o

museology and cultural heritagemanagementThe museums and

historical sites o Iraq should not all victimto the political whim o the moment, andbe sacriced or the sake o a public relations campaign on behal o governmentThey do not belong to the government butto the people o Iraq.

Their plea ell on dea ears, as the triumphal headlines made clear, and thehouse o Iraqs ancient museum again be-came a propaganda instrument. It revealshow Nouri al-Malikis government thinksabout the museums collectionas primarily a propaganda tool and economic resource, no longer an integral part o thenations past.

But cultural destruction in Iraq was no

HY Kim


26/32 Columbia Political Review| cpreview.orgTHE REVIEW ISSUE

bounded to museums and institutions inthe immediate atermath o the invasion.Throughout the Fertile Crescent, looting hasbecome a ull-fedged industry. As in oth-er countries with signicant ancient sites,Iraqs hundreds o archaeological locationswere protected by armed guards beorethe war. When L. Paul Bremer dissolvedthe armed orces with CPA Executive Order

Number 2 in April 2003, those guards wenthome. Looters moved in immediately, orreasons easy to understand.

The looters in Mesopotamia are the ar-eas armers, impoverished by conditionso both the old regime and the current oc-cupation. Much o theirland was destroyedby Saddams reclamation policies o the80s and 90s, and today their products canno longer nd a market, since occupationorces and international contractors do notpurchase Iraqi produce. These men do notconceive o themselves as looters. In their

minds, they are lords o this land, andas a direct result, the owners o all its pos-sessions, according to Joann Farchakh Bajj-aly in Will Mesopotamia Survive the War?He writes, In the same way, i they hadbeen able, these people would not havehesitated to take control o the oil wells,because this is their land. (Signicantly,oil acilities were the only ones prioritizedby the CPA or protection by American orc-es.) As one looter described them to Bajja-ly, These are elds ull o pottery that wecome and dig up whenever we are broke

Perhaps we will nd something with writ-ings on it, and its still intact, and that willbe sold very ast or USA dollars.

Yet, the looting industry disturbs morethan the material past. The antiquitiesdealers are becoming a major politicalorce, controlling certain areas and actingas go-betweens between ethnic and reli-gious groups. They provide protection andlivelihood to the tribes and villages o theregion, and they protect their interestswith deadly orce. When authorities haveattempted to curb the looting, the resultshave been horric. In 2005, eight customsagents were ambushed and murdered,their bodies burned and dumped in thedesert, ater they had seized a cache o ar-tiacts and arrested several artiact hunt-ers.

How would it be possible to save thehistory o the world rom the hands o loot-ers? Bajjaly asks. It is a good question,though her answer should give us pause.Strict laws, economic alternatives and po-litical approval and cooperation o the trib-

al leaders provide the only possible so-lution to this dilemma, Bajjaly writes.Farming could provide a solution, partic-ularly given that the majority o the loot-ers are themselves armersFarming andindustrial dairy products might replace theillicit excavation o antiquities as a majorsource o incomeor much o the

rural populationin Iraq. There issomething dan-gerously navein championinga return to arm-ing coupled witha stern law-and-order approach,as though Pan-doras box couldbe closed so sim-ply, and as though law enorcement in Iraq

had the power to break the antiquities syn-dicates.

Perhaps there is another alternative thathas so ar escaped consideration. As Bajja-ly notes, By now, [the looters] know howto outline the walls o buried buildings andbreak directly into rooms and tombs wherethe objects, so prized on the worlds antiq-uities markets, are to be ound. The loot-ers have become de facto archaeologistswith real practical knowledge. I an eco-nomic incentive spurred them to work inexcavating and preserving instead o loot-

ing and selling, this would not only pre-serve the treasures o Mesopotamia or theworld, but also give the regions armers achance to see their own land as a real in-heritance, not simply a meal ticket. Such achange would entail more than just inno-vative policy; it would require that arche-ological and academic communities beginto think o antiquities and artiacts as in-dissociable rom the people on whose landthey residecultural property that shouldbenet the people who possess it and orwhich reverence must be cultivated. Itwould mean that the past would cease tobe an amalgamation o objects in our eyesand become, instead, a sustaining organo the peopletheir economic and spiritu-al roots.

There continue to be many mysteriesabout American conduct during the warand occupation with respect to sites ocultural signicance. The looting o Bagh-dads museums, ministries and culturalinstitutions is one o the most inamous.Coalition manpower shortages o course

played a part but, as Ambassador BarbaraBodine explained when interviewed or thelm No End in Sight, the word came romWashington thatwere not going to stopthe looting, were not doing police workthats not what were here or. There isat least some logic here, though it tends

to all apart whenone considers

that the Bush Administration waswarned repeatedly and publiclybeore the war bytop military commanders, notably General EricShinseki in a 2003Cong r e s s i onatestimony, thaseveral hundred

thousand men would be needed to secure

the peace in Iraq. The invasion orce ultimately comprised a paltry 160,000 troopsand even this was a substantial increaseover what Rumseld had originally conceived under his rubric o maneuver warare. Quite simply, rom the earliest stageso planning, US policywhether by deliberate choice or sheer hubris and navetpromoted an atmosphere in which mucho Iraqs past could be ground into dust, obroken up and sold or a quick buck.

More egregious, destructive and seemingly deliberate actions by the military have

also endangered Iraqs cultural heritageTake the ancient city o Babylon. The American military established its largest base insouthern Iraq in the heart o Babylons ru-ins in April 2003, immediately ollowing theinvasion. There, it built acilities and inrastructure or 2,000 soldiers, including a helicopter-landing pad blacktopped betweenthe temple o Alexander the Great and thePalace o Nebuchadnezzar. Extensive sitedamage, including bulldozing, went largely unreported in the media, with the ex-ception o Britains Guardian newspaperThe damage is not only shocking but needless; the Army has never been able to articulate a reason why Babylon was chosenas a major base to begin with. Such explanations as have occasionally been oeredprove fimsy, including the notion that occupation o the site eectively protectedit rom lootersa job that might have required a dozen men with guns, not 2,000with bulldozers.

The base was nally closed at the end o2004, but the damage had been done. The

Freedom is a practice othe spiritit cannot be

given, bought, or sold,

and it never blossoms

rom the barrel o a gun.



Lane Sell

[email protected], Visual ArtsGS 09

United States, wittingly or not, has writtenitsel into the history o the worlds oldestplaces. When the people o the world vis-it the place o the worlds birth, they willsee its aborted ospring, industrial war-are, rotting upon it.

Under the most charitable interpreta-tion, what happened at Babylon (and Ur,and hal a dozen other sites in Iraq) was

a prime case o American uprootedness inaction, a total blindness to the importanceo the past in building a uture. At worst, itamounts to holding Iraqs culture hostageagainst the insurgency, in clear violation othe Hague Convention to which the UnitedStates is a signatory.

When Proessor Bahrani visited Babylonand other important cultural sites in Iraq in2003 and 2004, the requent answer to herprotests concerning American treatment ohistoric locations was: Do you want us torisk the lives o soldiers to protect this site?

Arguments or practical military necessitycolluded with many o the most oolish de-cisions o the period, including torture atAbu Ghraib. According to its own spokes-man, the CPA ranked protecting cultural

property as priority number three, againin the name o practical military necessi-ty. The myopia o such a position is shat-teringa people deprived o their past haslittle reason to hope or its uture, and toomany reasons to turn to terrorism and in-surgent warare. In the short run, lives maybe saved by leveling a mosque, or puttinga sniper in a minaret, or building a basein an ancient ruin. But the damage done

to those sites persists beore the eyes othe people, and the vacuum it leaves sapsthe spirit o the people and uels the insur-gency. In the long term, it costs more inblood and treasure to destroy these placesthan to protect them. Quite simply, practi-cal military necessity has been and contin-ues to be an excuse to commit atrocitiesand degradations that only urther endan-

ger the people they are intended to pro-tectthe occupying soldiers.In a peculiar way, Iraq particularly needs

an ancient past because o its strange po-litical history as a constructed nation. TheBritish Protectorate o Iraq was cobbled to-gether in 1920 out o the detritus o theOttoman Empire, a political unit with noprecedent in the previous past o the re-gion. It incorporated Kurds, Bedouin tribes,and Sunni and Shia Arabs into a nationwhose borders were drawn largely to servethe strategic purposes o the European

powers through the endgame o their co-lonial chess match. Rebellion broke out in1921, and violent power struggles doggedthe Protectorate (the Hashemite Monarchythat was granted independence in 1932)

and the Republic (as the subsequent mil-itary government was called), resulting -nally in Saddam Husseins Baathist near-totalitarianism. To the extent that Iraq hasbeen able to search or national unity, itspeople have had to orge it rom the beau-ty and majesty o their land and the stun-ning achievements o the past. Withoutsome change in the way both Americansand Iraqis handle that cultural heritage

The base was fnally closed at the end o 2004, but the damage had been done. The

United States, wittingly or not, has written itsel into the history o the worlds oldest

places.

both environmental and archaeologicalthat slender resource will not be availableto the spirits o the people as they struggle through what amounts to a second de-colonization.

Uprootedness is a chilling spectre oIraqs uture, but the state o our soulsas the uprooters, also need to be tendedAs Weil observed o the strange mechanics

o rootless people, Uprootedness is by athe most dangerous malady to which hu-man societies are exposed, or it is a selpropagating one. [Uprooted nations] hurthemselves into some orm o activity necessarily designed to uproot, oten by themost violent methods, those who are noyet uprooted, or only partly so. This is noriddle, or only without the benet o thepasts nurture could one nation declarethat it was seeking to bring reedom to another. Freedom is a practice o the spiritit cannot be given, bought, or sold, and i

never blossoms rom the barrel o a gunRestless and immature, cut loose rom thepolitical heritage to which we are heirswe have allen victim to a way o thinkingdivorced rom the wisdom o experience

rom our roots.

[email protected] for the columbia political reviewa publication for people who read



David Berke

Chuck and FriendsSchumerland and the future of the Democratic party

At a Columbia Political Union event lastsemester, Amy Klobuchar, Democrat-ic Senator rom Minnesota, was rem-iniscing about a Halloween costumeshe wore in high school. Her Purple

Rain outt inspired by musician Prince was great,Klobuchar explained, but she lost the costumecontest to someone dressed as a bathroom wall.Klobuchars legislative director, sitting in the rontrow, shook her head at the digression.

No? Klobuchar asked, turning to the staer,who kept shaking her head. The Senator changedthe subject. Moira Campion, the woman who in-tervened to avert the anecdote, is a ormer em-ployee o New York Senator Chuck Schumera actKlobuchar went out o her way to mention.

Schumer was head o the Democratic Senato-rial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the Party orga-nization that oversees Senate races, or the 2006and 2008 election cycles. During his tenure, hebrought Klobuchar andthirteen other newDemocratic sena-tors to Washing-ton, raising hiscaucus roma 45-seat mi-nority to acommand-ing 59-seatm a j o r i t y .(Assuming AlFrankens vic-tory in Minne-sota.)

S c h u m e rwas heavily in-volved in select-ing many Democraticnominees and, among oth-er requirements, mandated ap-proval over the hiring o somestaers including, perhaps, Cam-

pion. She is one o the myriad graduates romSchumers oce now ensconced in the upperechelons o Democratic politics.

Both as legislators and campaigners, Schum-er and his staers have shown an extraordinaryability to secure political victories. As a result,his ethos has permeated the party both throughhis leadership and the ubiquity o ormer sta-ers like Campion. But the same drive or victo-ry that Schumer demands rom himsel and the

cloud o people around him may be a liability orDemocrats.

WELCOME TO SCHUMERLAND

And yet, at the height o the Democratic driveto wrest control rom the Republicans, the valueo his ormer staers to the Partyalways knownin American politics as political operatives par ex-cellencerose higher than ever.

The rule o thumb, explained a ormerSchumer staer, who requested anonymity, is

i they [potential hires] worked or Schum-er, you should hire them on the spot.

Schumers oce operates as a armteam or the rest o the Party, and

the reasons why are well un-derstood. The Senator is

known or selectingthe best young

talent. His in-deatigablework eth-ic is leg-e n d -ary. He

will calls t a -

ers totalk about

news cov-erage well

into the eve-ning and call

again soon atersunrise. Current

spokesman JustinVlasto answers 2,000

email messages a day

and carries two cell phones everywhere.He runs a tight ship, said ex-press in

tern Josh Stein. Its a very intense oce.Though demanding, Schumer is dedicated to hissta. He reers to his personnel as amily, andhes not kiddingSchumers wie is a ormer employee. As a result, his sta becomes a tight-knitgroup. My experience has been that the employees bond together in the same way that soldiersbond through war, said a ormer staer. This ex

tended band o brothers and sisters reers to itselas Schumerland, a term that has become common parlance throughout New York politics.

It is dicult to know to where the borders oSchumerland extend, but the available data is impressive. The chie spokesmen or State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Governor Pattersonand Mayor Bloombergthe three most importangures in New York politicswere trained undeSchumer. His alumni were all over Hillary Clintons Presidential campaign, and at least ve NewYork congressmen, as well as City Council speaker Quinn, have Schumer grads on their upper-levesta. Prospective mayoral candidate and currencongressman Anthony Weiner was a Schumer protg, and at least ve state assemblymen, a statesenator and a ew City Councilmen were Schumeapprentices. Outside o New York, quasi-SenatoAl Franken and Senator Barbara Boxer o Caliorniahave employed Schumerites. These numbers arejust the tip o the iceberg.

As the reach o his alumni has widenedSchumer has become one o the most powerumen in American politics. Ocially, he is the vicechairman or the Senate Demsthe third ranking

Senator in the partybut his infuence is ar greater than that title implies. He has a very close re-lationship with Majority Leader Harry Reid, whomhe talks to our or ve times every day. Schumeis also riendly with Obamas Chie o Sta RahmEmmanuel, whose intensity is oten comparedwith that o the New York senator.

Ive talked to him a ew times already, MrSchumer said to the New York Observerjust vedays ater Emanuel was selected as Obamas Chieo Sta. He is going to keep it ocused. Rahm andI always get along and we think similarly in certain ways. And Sean Sweeney, a top Emmanue

Cassie

Spodak



David [email protected]

English, Creative WritingCC 12

The rule of thumb, explained a former Schumer staffer, is if they worked for Schumer, you should hire them on the spot.

aide with a West Wing oce, worked or Schumer.Schumer has also been a major legislative play-er, integral to the passage o countless landmarkbills since he came to Washington as a congress-man in 1980. While working on these national is-sues, he has remained ocused on his constit-uents. In early February, he brokered a deal so

that Drakes Cakes, a New York sweets company,could emerge rom bankruptcy. His work savedabout 200 city jobs. The joke in the oce was, ithere were three people stuck waiting on line at aphone booth, we would send a representative tohelp them, said ormer Schumer staer and cur-rent State Assemblyman Alan Maisel in an inter-view with CPR.

That small-scale attention is classic Schumer,and his care or constituents has helped him re-main as successul at home as he is within theParty. For his 2004 Senate reelection race, he gar-

nered 71 percent o the votethe least competi-tive race in New York statewide election history.

BUSINESS TIES

One reason Schumer has been so success-ul, both as a politician and a party operative, ishis undraising prowess. Hes not araid to hearno, and he wont take no or an answer, said aormer staer. Schumer has passed that tenaci-ty onto others. In an interview with the Nation-al Journal, Senator Klobuchar recounted an inci-dent where, during the early stages o her race,Schumer shook his nger in her ace and com-

manded, Youre going to raise one million in therst quarter.

Wall Street has always been a ecund und-raising ground. During his term at the DSCC, WallStreet donations to the Committee increased by 50percenttotaling our times the Wall Street moneydonated to Senate Republicans. As an individual,he has received more money rom securities andinvestment rms than any other member o theSenate who has not run or President.

Funding rom his business connections was vi-tal to victories in 2006 and 2008, but they havelet Schumer beholden to Wall Street rmsiron-

ic in light o his recent book, Positively American:Winning Back the Middle Class Majority One Fam-

ily at a Time. Beore the economic collapse lastyear, Schumer, a powerul voice on nancial is-sues due to his seat on the Banking Committee,was arguably the most pro-business Democrat inthe Senate.

In 1997, he opposed new disclosure rules orderivatives, a orm o nancial asset whose loose-ly regulated trading precipitated the current eco-nomic crisis. He was a proponent o the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act two years later, which removed

numerous Depression-era regulations on banks.The law allowed nancial institutions to grow be-yond what the law had previously permitted. Thebills critics asserted that these oversized bankscould be an economic hazard, since the ailure oone o these institutions could cripple the econo-my and require government bailouts.

On business issues, Schumer was also o-ten aligned with ormer Republican Senator PhilGramm. Gramm, an economic advisor or the Mc-Cain campaign, was orced to resign rom thatpost ater he called America a nation o whin-ers or their kvetching about the economy. In theliberal investigative journal Mother Jones, Grammwas criticized or lucrative links with Enron be-ore it went bust, and or pushing anti-regulatorylegislation that may have omented the subprimecrisis. Schumer cosponsored a law with Grammreducing capital taxes to the SEC and electricity

deregulation legislation that greatly benetted En-ron. Schumer received nearly $70,000 rom Enronand their accounting rm Arthur Andersen or hisrst senate campaign in 1998.

As Wall Street money has fooded Democrat-ic coers, the Party and Schumer risk tarnishingtheir middle class image and adopting the pro-business reputation that has been a major lia-bility or Republicans. Thanks to disgraced law-makers like Governor Blagojevich, ailed cabinetnominee Tom Daschle and a shoal o others, Dem-ocrats have already disinherited the anti-corrup-tion reputation vital to recent gains. In addition

to expressing derision at the tarnish rom thesevarious scandals, Americans are unabashedly u-rious with the nancial sector. With Democrats asthe party o bank bailouts, which Schumer ardent-ly advocated rom the beginning, that anger couldbolster Republican eorts to reclaim power.

POST-POST-PARTISANSHIP

Along with their pro-corporate image, Repub-licans have suered rom a reputation as viru-lently partisan, unwilling to work with Democratsand underhanded in their campaign tactics. Thesecharges were exemplied by the advent o Swit-

boating advertisements in 2004. I his past is anyindication, Schumer could bring about a similarview o Democrats, even though he trends Repub-lican on business issues.

Beore elections in 2006, Schumer berated theBush administration or a port security deal with aDubai-based company. Though such contracts areroutine, Schumer made the deal a nationally cov-ered issue, even holding a press conerence with9/11 amilies. The hullaballoo was a clear (andwildly successul) attack on Republicans as weakon oreign policy. Yet Schumers criticism, both

spurious and benecial to big business, began ater an American port company lobbied him to kilthe contract.

Last year, in a move intended to play up -nancial troubles under Bush, Schumer sent a public letter to government regulators about IndyMacbank. In the letter, which his oce provided to

news publications, Schumer wrote that IndyMaccould ace ailure i prescriptive measures arenot taken quickly. The already struggling bankaced a spike in withdrawals ater his letter andailed soon thereater. The press release was by nomeans the primary reason why the bank ell, buSchumer may have hammered the last nail in IndyMacs con. In August, what began as Schumers attempt to discredit Republicans ended withthe Caliornia Attorney General considering an investigation o Schumers role in the meltdown.

Both o these slugs at Republicans during elec

tion years are a ar cry rom the age o Obamapost-partisanship, and i Schumer and ormestaers in other oces continue to employ similar tactics, it could limit the Democrats ability toappear more bipartisan than their predecessorsin the majority.

SUBVERTING SCHUMERLAND

Schumer may have given up his DSCC chairmanship but, thanks to his connections to ReidRahm and his protgs, his political presence hasexpanded, especially in New York. Kirsten Gillibrand, who replaced Hillary Clinton as New Yorks

junior senator, wholeheartedly embraces Schumers mentorship. He has been instrumental in heevolution rom conservative upstate representative to a ar more liberal senator palatable todownstate Democrats, and at least one ex-Schumer staer works in Gillibrands oce.

The rst inklings o Schumer-based attacksbegan last year. During his 2008 reelection campaign, Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell o Kentucky released a video that made therounds in the punditocracy attacking Schumer asa conniving outsider meddling in Kentucky politics.

As Schumers stock rises and other Democratic politicians nd their hyper-political handlers shaking their heads at o-message remarks, Republicans could very well continueto exploit the Schumer persona to their advantage. I Democrats are not careul, the man instrumental to their recent Congressional gainscould dismantle what he spent years building up



Labor laws are broken every 23

minutes, according to a project

of the Institute for

Americas Future.

T

Aaron Welt

Labor DisunionsBringing democracy back to the American workplace

he 2008 presidential election in-

vigorated the American democraticprocess as never seen beore. Butthe economic troubles acing the

nation today refect just how con-ned that process really is. Beneath a broken

commercial and nancial system beleagueredby the poor decisions o an unaccountable

business elite lies an economic inrastructure

beret o workplace democracyworker repre-sentation and worker bargaining power.

The past 30 years have seen the slow ero-sion o workers rights in a context o alling

or stagnant wages, inaccessible or inadequatehealth care cov-

erage, and newextremes inwealth and pov-

erty. The prob-lems that have

come into sharpocus over the

past ew monthscompel us toask: can a coun-

try truly be called democratic i it achieves de-mocracy only in the political sphere?

SEPARATE SPHERES

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Proessor oAmerican History at Columbia University, not-ed that American history is characterized by

a separation o the political and econom-ic realms guided by the philosophy o clas-

sical liberalism. This very oten means eco-

nomic relations are seen as embodying thatarea where government should have as littleintrusiveness as possible, he remarked in an

interview.How it is exactly that the workplace came

under the hegemonic control o management

in the early chapters o the nations history re-mains a question open to interpretation, but

what is clear is that the tradition is deep-root-ed.The labor struggles o the 19th century re-

sulted in extreme violence and unrest (moreso in this country than in other industrialized

nations o the same period), oten as theywere put down brutally. In this sense, the ab-

sence o countervailing orces in the Americanworkplace is not only the product o classical

liberalist ideology, but also o business mobi-lization and raw power.

But the old system came under sharp at-

tack during the Great Depression. The weakoundation o US economic power had giv-

en way, and it took with it the entire nation-al economic structure. 20th century liberalism

came to embrace workplace democracy, high-er wages, and better working conditions out oeconomic necessity. The political establish-

ment accepted an expla-nation or the Depression

in under-consumption,explained Proessor Fon-

er. The real problem waslack o purchasing pow-er American workers sim-

ply could not purchase the

goods produced by Ameri-can capitalism.

With the New Deal came

the expansion o the ederal government,which entered into the economic sphere as itnever had beore, emerging or the rst time

as an arbitrator ready to mediate between thecompeting claims o labor, business and arm-

ing. In 1935, Congress passed the National La-bor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner

Act), which enshrined basic workers rights,at least in the private sector. The National La-bor Relations Board (NLRB) was created as an

independent agency o the US government, abody commissioned to oversee collective bar-

gaining drives and establish ederal unionelection procedures.

During the Great Depression, the US gov-ernment responded to economic turmoil byexpanding workplace democracy, granting US

workers new rights that they were eager to ex-ercise. By the year 1950, 33 percent o the pri-

vate workorce was unionized.Today, according to the Bureau o Labor

Statistics, that gure stands at a mere 12.5

percent, although recent polls conducted bythe Center or American Progress Action Fundindicate that as many as 58 percent o work

ers would join a union i they could. The history o the all o a large unionized workorce is

vast and complex, as is the scholarly analysiso it, but contributing actors include the Cold

War, the growth o corporate power, and theshit toward a service sector economy. Regres

sive laws, such as the Tat Hartley Act o 1948have created especially robust obstacles tounion growth. And even when ederal law pro

tects workers rights, corporate powers haveound ways to exploit the saeguards still in

place. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this better than the usurpation o NLRB union electionprocedures by employers and management.

A LOOK AT NLRB ELECTIONS: COERCION AND

LEGAL MALFEASANCE

It is widespread knowledge among those

who study American labor policy that union

election standards, which are generally overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, donot even closely resemble those we hold odemocratic elections in the political sphere.

Business owners have been able to exploithe cumbersome and inecient guidelines o

the NLRB election process, avoring their interests above anything that might be called ai

representation. Political scientists like GordonLaer have noted that this is accomplishedthrough outright coercion, as well as other

subtler techniques, such as depriving workerso valuable inormation and delaying election

procedure. These trends call or an overhauo NLRB election procedures i union elections

are ever to be truly democratic.The exact process o NLRB elections is

so punctuated and complex (an obstacle to

unionization in and o itsel) that a ull description o it would be excessive here. Brie

ly though, it requires that 30 percent o theworkers at a worksite sign a petition calling

or a union election, the date o which mustbe set by the NLRB. It is then ollowed by anappeals period, a campaigning period, and


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