Mumbai Timeline

Reuters has stitched together a partial sequence of events of the guerilla attacks on Mumbai, designed both to kill randomly and receive massive Western media coverage for doing it.

They change nothing about the underlying logic now controlling world events. The logic is sustained by the way leaders sustain conflicts for decades at a time to stay in power, and the grotesque inequality, suffering, and brutality that go with it. The attacks and the carnage simply express that logic.

The carnage is of course completely disgusting and unjustifiable. I feel not only for the victims but for everyone who loves Mumbai in part because it seems like the open and hospitable crossroads of India. And there is almost nothing I abhor more than highly armed religious idiots ushering in the kingdom of heaven by drenching the earth in blood.

But that doesn't mean we have to be stupid ourselves, and regress to the infamous Friedman culture war between the "Lexus" and the "olive tree." A NYT op-ed set it up this way - a Mumbai native defines Mumbai as the center of Lexus culture in India, as gloriously free commerce joining the peoples of the world. He continues like this:

the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

This comment confuses wealth and investment-banker partying with social development for all. It then swallows "dreaming" by this morass. If we don't see religion, even the murderous kind, as about a form of dreaming that is neither about mountains of money nor the good society, then we understand exactly zero about religion.

That's one problem. The other is that Mumbai and India in general - and the United States - are monuments to the nightmarish gap between accumulating wealth and creating the good society. The gap today is vastly greater than that which produced the cycles of violence one can read in the Old Testament.

Thus it's really dumb for the NYT columnist to define Mumbai as a temple of progress and not as also at the same time a swamp of unspeakable squalor that drowns the lives of untold millions. I've written before about how the historical Jesus understood the community of the world that could arise in the absence of tyrants and moneylenders - the heaven-on-earth I associate with the all-welcoming Jesus of the tympanum at Vezelay rather than with the weigher-of-souls at Autun. There's no excuse for our not being at least this intelligent, and seeing nightclub globalization as an atrocity visited on tens of millions of people whom we do ignore completely until they fire their guns.

Mixed Signals

Yes - United manage- ment IS asleep as usual. They think they can over- come "peak oil" and their own ineptitude by charging $15 for checked baggage.

Leaders don't generally pay their way. In fact they cost a lot more than they're worth - generally about 3,400,000 more, by my scientific estimate. People kind of know this, and don't expect much, and try not to think about politics most of the time. Folks I know like Obama because he will bring people together, Whitman style - "and what I assume you shall assume." They don't like him because he will lead them solo out of the wilderness.

The good news this week was a massive reigning-in of leaders - the Guantanamo decision, in which the Supreme Court said in essence that executives can't do whatever they want to prisoners by putting them in off-world limbos like Guantanamo. It was a nice victory for habeas corpus, even if it never should have been necessary. It was also a win for the regular folks - the mass middle class - who either win with law or lose with force.

New Hamphire Primary Results

My basic reactions, based partly on a Los Angeles Times exit poll:
-the NH Dems are split. This is a more important story than Hill's repeat of Bill's "comeback kid." - NHers think that Obama has the best chance of the three major candidates to beat the Republicans. Hillary didn't squeak ahead on the basis of electability (experience, etc.). They think Edwards has the worst chance to beat the Republicans. I think this is completely backwards and don't understand these people at all.

• Voters saw no ideological differences between the candidates. This is too bad, because it means the campaign remains a popularity contest dominated by image positioning and generational identifications (Clinton gets the old, Obama the young).
• Too much college: 54 percent of voters report having a college degree, which is exactly twice the percentage of college degrees in the general population. (These folks skew for Obama).
• desperation time: "change" beat "best chance to win" by an incredible 54-6 percent as the main factor in one's selection.
• the only Dem candidate who would really change foreign policy by, for example, withdrawing troops from Iraq is Bill Richardson, and he came in at 5 percent.
• Forget Iowa and New Hampshire. Iowa is a white state (2.5 percent Black). New Hampshire is, amazingly, even whiter! (1.1 percent Black). Their votes are really not representative of "America," and yet some estimates say nearly half of all campaign media coverage is devoted to Iowa and NH, giving these country states truly illegitimate power.
• No Fear for Tears. It's good Hillary wasn't dinged for having a teary moment when asked how hard it is to get out of bed every morning. Many news stories actually dragged out Edmund Muskie from 1972 to ask if wet eyes could sink her campaign. That's a sign of the empty-headedness of the media, of course, and also of sadly authoritarian foundation of American political life, in which the secret test question is always "are you willing to kill for America." Hillary has repeatedly said yes, and people seem still to believe her.
  

That was one of the few interesting moments in these incredibly scripted and mentally lowgrade campaigns. The question seems to have prompted Clinton to have an unbidden thought about how hard her campaign life is. Maybe she felt, for a fleeting moment, that her life is joyless and sacrificial in general. I think it probably is, in spite of the fame and power. Hard, hard hard - this is a problem with American politics. It shuts down a lot of options before we even know it.