Recently in the Atlantic Monthly
When I was in grad school I had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly. Later, the magazine would make the majority of its contents available for free online. Not anymore–now the only time I ever manage to read it is when I have a long-distance trip to make (i.e., to Argentina) and I manage to pick up a copy in the airport. I’m usually not disappointed.
One of the standouts of April’s issue is Robert Kaplan’s report from Niger on the training of troops there as a bulwark against a network of militant fundamentalist muslims in sub-Saharan Africa called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. The tone of the editorial summary, which explains that "at the heart of the U.S. military’s imperial venture is the training of indigenous troops around the world," belies the author’s respect for the Marine operation he describes. While he, too, invokes the essentially imperialist nature of the operation at the outset of the article, Kaplan seems to approve of the kind of U.S. military intervention of which the Niger operation is an example:
The U.S. military has the same daunting task here that is has in so many other places where it is deployed: to help make a "country" into something real, against considerable odds. I stress the military here with good reason: the State Department may constitute the official, public front for security-assistance missions, but is is the humanitarian-assistance projects, administered by EUCOM [the U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany] through a defense attaché at the U.S. embassy, that on the ground provide for almost all the charity relief by America to the wild and troubled north of Niger–a region where few NGOs have been able to penetrate until recently.
The rest of the article is worth reading for the evocative descriptions of four Marines in charge of the operation, and serve to remind the reader of the respect that Americans ought to accord those who serve in their armed forces, however questionable their commander-in-chief.
Also worthwhile is a review essay by Marc Cooper, contributing editor of The Nation, which seeks to account for the depressing reality that in the last U.S. presidential election there was no viable alternative to Bush. Cooper uses the occasion to mount a devastating critique of democratic party leadership, which seems to be determined by "Volvo Democrats" who appear to want no part in reconnecting the party with its populist roots, in "blunting the influence of corporate cash, … reversing its estrangement from the white working class, finding some decent candidates, or just about anything else that might require actual strategic thinking…." This so-called leadership appears to be currently enamored of a new political advice book called Don’t Think of An Elephant!, which Cooper argues simply perpetuates the party’s delusions in its reduction of "two different views of the nation" and two different family types ("strict father" versus "gender-neutral, nurturant" families). The situation as outlined by the book, Cooper wryly notes, "couldn’t be simpler, then: redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley."
All this might be laughable were it not for the fact that after the November election House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi invited the book’s author, George Lakoff, to "coach the Democratic caucus on this new way of thinking." A particularly telling illustration of the state of the party is the following anecdote regarding Howard Dean, the democratic candidate who most won my respect in 2004 for his straight talk on the Iraq debacle, despite whatever other differences I may have with him:
You’ll remember that when a loose-lipped Howard Dean suggested the dead-obvious–that he needed to win the votes of guys who drive pickup trucks with Confederate-flag decals–he was all but lynched by his nurturing, caring, gender-free Democratic colleagues. Oh, no, we don’t want those people in our party!
Cooper cites Tom Frank’s latest book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America to further support his argument:
The decline of labor unions and other social brakes on an increasingly unjust market "goes largely unchecked by a Democratic Party anxious to demonstrate its fealty to corporate America, and unmourned by a therapeutic left that never liked those Archie Bunker types in the first place."
Cooper’s conclusion is succinct:
America, now more than ever, needs a vibrant, viable, progressive alternative. The challenge to liberals, then, isn’t to reify their differences with a mythical red America and its strict daddies but, rather, to find common ground. Perhaps they ought to start by taking their own sermons about diversity more seriously. Diversity should be much, much more than a code word for racial affirmative action.
The Nation is lucky to have Cooper on his staff, as its editorial staff and columnists are often out of touch in exactly the ways that his article describes.