How's that minority outreach program doing?

I took the last month and a half off to move, spend holidays with my family, and enjoy the benefits of non-stop anxiety attacks. While I still don't have a home or a job, my decline and fall has temporarily paused. That means I have to get back to writing. I'm making some progress on the book. Now, I think it's time to get stupid again.

Let's review the rules of The Stupid Files. Inaugurees into the Files must be public figures who say something gob-smackingly stupid. Their stupidity can be factual ("If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.") or politically (such as racial insensitivity so blatant the entire political spectrum cringes). Political figures who bring shame on their parties get preferential treatment.

Today's winner, as is so often the case, is a racist boob, Republican County Executive L. Brooks Patterson of Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Patterson had this to say in a profile published in New Yorker magazine this week:

Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I'm called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough shit.
[...]
Before you go to Detroit, you get your gas out here [Oakland County]. You don't, do not, under any circumstances, stop in Detroit at a gas station! That’s just a call for a carjacking.
[...]
I made a prediction a long time ago, and it's come to pass. I said, "What we're gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn."

Is it fair of me to call Patterson a racist? Of course it is. We can argue about whether his fear mongering over carjacking is a race-baiting dog-whistle aimed a provoking white suburban stereotypes of black urban crime (it is). The concentration camp for Native Americans is not open to question. What the hell do Indians have to do with Detroit? It's not uncommon to hear fearful outsiders and their demagogues snarl about the local metropolis that we should put a wall around it and let "those people" kill each other. And they assure us that they mean "those people" in a totally non-racist way. But, bringing in a third, unrelated group and saying their entire race should be ghettoized (in the historical sense of the word (no, not "slag heap")), there is no other way to read that. In case you're still not sure whether Patterson is a racist, check out the blankets and corn stereotype.

Patterson's spokesman, Bill Mullan, deserves some recognition for obliviousness here. Faced with a social media shitstorm, Mullan pulled a boiler-plate, Republican response out of the file and gave it no more thought. Ignore the actual issue, blame the liberal press for quoting him accurately, and tout his record on something unrelated.

It is clear Paige Williams had an agenda when she interviewed county executive Patterson. She cast him in a false light in order to fit her preconceived and outdated notions about the region. Mr. Patterson’s record on advancing regional issues in a transparent and responsible manner is unparalleled.

Sorry, Bill. This one is going to need a little more than an off-the-shelf press release. "I'm sorry you didn't understand my brilliant humor" isn't going to make it either. You're going to actually have to get off your butt and do some damage control on this one.

"I'm called a Detroit basher," Patterson says. Now, he can also be called an Indian hating, genocidal boob.

Creative, but neglected, cartography

Bryan at Why Now? has a nice post on the gerrymandered borders of Central Asia which led me to reminisce about my own interest in lines on maps.

When I went to grad school in the eighties to study the multinational communist states of the USSR and Yugoslavia, nationalism was considered an old fashioned subject. The hip subjects of the day were social and economic questions. The professor who ran the dissertation writing seminar, and who taught intellectual history, actually cut me off one day when I was discussing my research into the Yugoslav national question with a brusque comment that he found nationalism boring and wanted to hear about someone else's work.

Nationalism, besides being denigrated as part of old school political/diplomatic history, was also in disgrace because of nationalist writing--that is historical narratives being produced as tools of nationalist propaganda. No seemed willing to acknowledge the difference between nationalist history and the intellectual history of nationalism, which was what interested me. Besides, the argument went, all of the national questions had already settled by WWII and decolonization. My peers and supervisors also seemed unaware of the irony of rejecting a topic for historical study because it had happened in the past.

Of course, as the nineties showed, they were completely wrong about national questions being settled. Just because you draw a line on a map and give the people within that line a common name and parliament, doesn't mean they think of themselves as one people. Americans have always combined and confused the two concepts of nation and state. Right up till 1991, historians and pundits were telling each other that people in the USSR thought of themselves as Soviets first and Georgians, Ukrainians, or Latvians second. The Kurds today most certainly do not think of themselves as Turkish, Iranian, or Iraqi first.

Borders, as a subtopic of nationalism, got even worse treatment than the intellectual history of nationalism. Once upon a time, external borders were a major topic of diplomatic history and boundary commissions were covered along with treaty negotiations. That went out of style after WWII, but at least it did get covered up to that point. Internal borders, on the other hand, have never been well studied. As administrative decisions, they don't leave a nice trail of diplomatic dispatches and memoirs by international statesmen. Good examples of this neglect are the volumes of the Hoover Press's Studies of Nationalities series published in the 80's and 90's. The volumes on the Uzbeks and Kazakhs barely mention the establishment of the soviet republics and don't mention changes in their borders at all.

There is a certain academic urban legend that all border decisions made by communist regimes were made with Machiavellian divide and conquer principles in mind. That's not entirely untrue, but it's only part of the story. The internal boundaries of the Soviet Union were drawn over a period of about thirty-five years. In some parts of the country, particularly the Russian heartland, old imperial provinces were left in place for convenience sake. Other borders, where there was no national question involved, were shifted about for practical economic and geographic reasons.

When national questions were involved, the decisions were certainly more cynical and got more attention from higher on the Party food chain, but they still involved a variety of criteria. In the twenties a cohort of genuinely idealistic anthropologists had a hand in drawing territories for the peoples of Arctic Russia and Siberia that gave them room to practice their traditional economies. Later these policies were abandoned and the "small nations" were forced to give up their nomadic ways and learn Russian while their territories were flooded with Russian settlers and political prisoners. I suspect--though I don't know for sure--that something similar happened in Central Asia with a mixture of idealistic anthropologists, cynical commissars, and changing state goals being reflected on different stretches of border.

The tragedy of treating internal divisions as administrative minutiae, beneath the attention of real scholarship, is that when empires break up, these administrative lines become national borders. The powers that be are deathly afraid to renegotiate borders for fear of opening the door to questioning hundreds of bad borders around the world. Meanwhile, numerous wars have already been fought in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe over the persistence of lines that were not meant to be borders.

A trifling point, or not

When Bob Kerrey endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday, he offered some kind words for her chief opponent, Barack Obama:

It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal.

Some Obama supporters and liberal bloggers have taken offense at this, seeing it as a sneaky way to keep the Muslim Manchurian Candidate theme alive. Kerry says he meant no such thing, "I know that middle name is seen as a weakness by Republicans, but I don’t think it is. I think it enables him to speak to a billion Muslims around the world.”

Mark Kleiman is inclined to give Kerrey the benefit of the doubt, and, what's more, agrees with him.

It’s entirely possible that Kerrey meant what he said about Obama’s name doing America good in its foreign relations. I’m more inclined to believe that because I also think that what Kerrey said was true: a big advantage to electing Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency is that there are a billion people in the world with relatives named “Hussein,” and they’d be less inclined to be our enemies if our leader had “Hussein” in his name.

James Joyner is also inclined to give Kerrey the benefit of the doubt, However Joyner strongly disagrees with him.

[T]he idea that religious nuts who are willing to murder thousands of Americans would think “Hey, they elected a guy with a Muslim middle name! They must be okay!” is absurd. Hell, they kill plenty of people named Hussein who actually are Muslims; the only thing they hate more than American infidels is Arab apostates.

I agree with Joyner, but in the spirit of playing the "on the other hand" game till I have more hands than Kali, and, more importantly, in the spirit of pointless, academic pedantry that I so love, I do need to point out one flaw in Joyner's statement. Arab isn't a religion. Arab is a nationality and you cannot commit apostasy against a nationality (you cam emigrate, but that's not the same thing). Apostasy is a religious crime. Muslim is a religion. Arab and Muslim are not synonyms. Kerrey's lame point was that having the middle name "Hussein" would give Obama instant credibility with the world's Muslim population, over half of whom are not Arab.

Here let me present it as a handy list that you can print out and give to your friends and kin.

Arab - A nationality, not a religion
Muslim - A religion, not a nationality
Arab and Muslim - Not the same thing
Muslim and Islam - The same thing
Islamofacism - Not a real thing

Sigh. Actually, this is more than a pedantic point. These confusions about Arab and Muslim and about religion and nationality are epidemic among even the best educated Americans. The Bush administration is made up of arrogant, bullying idiots, but another administration made up of people with the best of intentions will still be a disaster in foreign policy if we don't care enough about the rest of the world's people and cultures to learn even the most basic facts about them.

We were here first

New research indicates that the Neanderthals were pale skinned redheads. At least some of them were. This is just one more piece of evidence that supports my theory that the first people were Scots-Irish and that the rest of you are living on our planet due to our good nature and generous spirit.

Some Neanderthals may have had fair skin and red hair, giving them an appearance resembling modern Europeans, an international team of researchers said on Thursday.

The researchers homed in on the MC1R gene linked to hair and skin color and used DNA analysis to find a variation that produced the same kind of pigmentation changes as in humans with red hair and pale skin.

The study, published in the journal Science, comes a week after another set of researchers looking at a different gene said Neanderthals may have been capable of sophisticated speech.

See, sophisticated speech. That means they were redheads who could curse. Now all we need is evidence of whiskey, maudlin folk songs, or lumpy oatmeal to confirm that my people were here first.

Stop picking on Belgium - or not

Two weeks ago, The Economist ran an editorial saying it might be time to do away with Belgium. They argued that Belgium had had a good run; they gave the world "Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate" in their years on the stage; and that 177 years, as countries go, isn't anything to be ashamed of, especially when Germany keeps trying to annex you (The Economist failed to mention that Belgium was created after repeated attempts by the French to annex it). Now, like Czechoslovakia, it might be a good time for them to retire while they are ahead of the game, whatever game that is.

Yesterday, Ebay had to stop an attempt by a Belgian journalist to auction the country off, whole or in parts. The spirited bidding had reached ten million Euros before the plug was pulled. The AFP story on the auction didn't quote any of the bidders, so we don't know if they were German or not.

The latter story explains why everyone suddenly seems to have it out for Belgium.

The spoof sale was offered while Belgium is mired in a political crisis which has led to discussion over the country's future as a federal state.

Tuesday marks 100 days since the country's general election with no sign of a coalition government being formed by the political parties in Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

There are many observations one could make about this situation. I'm sure many anarchists, federalists and libertarians will want to point out that the parts of the country are doing just fine without a central government. It's a valid point.

When the European Union finally started to become a reality fifteen years ago, after two centuries of talk, I wondered what kind of future the classical European nation-state had in a larger federation. A graduate school friend of mine had a wonderful wallmap of the various micro-nations in Europe that got me wondering about this.

In the nineteenth century, certain large nationalities in Europe organized themselves as countries based on the sovereignty of an ethnic group--a nation--rather than in countries based on the sovereignty of a monarch. It took a century or so to sort this out, and for a time their were countries that used both definitions, depending which was the more convenient at the time. By the early twentieth century, the nation-state idea was supreme. Even though most modern countries are not true nation-states, the idea that the will of the people matters has become unavoidable. The days when the president of Mexico could sell a province to pay a few bills has long passed.

A quick digression: Americans tend to elide the concepts of citizenship and nationality (or country and nation) into one, while in most of the world the two are seperate. Citizenship describes your legal status as a rights holding member of a country. Nation describes your self-identification as part of a historical community defined by some ethnic characteristic, usually language, but sometimes religion, geography, or some combination. For those having trouble making the distinction, think of Central Europe in the 1930s; German speakers in Poland and Czechoslovakia were part of the German nation but Polish or Czech by citizenship. If Hitler went on the radio and was said to be "speaking to the German nation" it would have been understood that he was speaking to the population of Germany as well as the German speaking populations in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Central European countries. In a more modern example, there is no Iraqi nation; there is a Kurdish nation in Iraq and an Arab nation (at least). Finally, for those who still speak Stalinist Marxism, I do not accept the distinction between nation and nationality and use the two words as near synonyms.

Moving along: Due to the predatory nature of European politics in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, the nation-state was considered as an option only open to large nationalities. For centuries, possibly millennia, Bismark, Darwin, or Nietzsche were born or before the before the terms "realpolitik", "Social Darwinism", or "will to power" were coined, international affairs were governed by a cynical abdication to power and violence. The neo-conservatives represent a retreat to these traditional values. Regardless of their right to do so, small countries were seen as incapable of existing. The same was true for small nations. As the nation-state ideal evolved, the concensus wisdom was that the only future for small nations lay in assimilating into their larger neighbors, or in federating with other small nations.

This idea that some places are to small to be countries continues today even though the security justification no longer is as valid (at least in Europe). This then is my question, what value do the large countries of Europe offer to their minority populations? Yugoslavia only existed as long as the small nations within it were threatened by Germany and the Soviet Union. Once the Warsaw Pact dissolved, Yugoslavia's days were measured in weeks. Does Spain within Europe offer any value to Catalonia, that a direct relationship with Europe couldn't fill better? Or Bavaria to Germany? Or Scotland to the United Kingdom? Or Corsica to France? These territories have some provincial autonomy in their mother countries, but is a three level federalism really necessary. Why not eliminate the middleman and make each territory a full member on the European Union. Some in Scotland have already started muttering in this direction.

When areas that already have some autonomy claim their place in the sun, the next step will be for those tiny nations who have been trampled for centuries to claim their place. This might be the best chance for the Lusatian Sorbs, the West Frisians, the Bretons, Basques, Sammi, Kashubains, Szeklers, and Arumans to preserve their identities. This week, National Geographic released a study on the fate of small languages worldwide. For years experts have predicted that half of the languages spoken worldwide will go extinct this century. One of the best justifications for this kind of administrative balkanization would be to save endangered cultures.

If France and Germany are finally behaving themselves, what is the point of Belgium? I'm not saying that I think Belgium should go. But I think the question should be asked. Maybe there is a very good reason to hold Belgium together having to do with chocolate. After all, an efficient and just management of the means of chocolate production is far more important than any piddlining national asperations.