Now for a warning – this is really, really, really long. Long as in, longer than any blog post I think I’ve written (this whole message is almost 1500 words). Get a cup of coffee and turn on some classical music, because you’re going to be reading for a while.

As for the “personal question,” yes, I’m a cadet (student) at the US Military Academy. Now, the hard part – “what’s it like” has such a broad list of implied questions.

The main problem that I, and most West Pointers, have is that we tend to try to answer that question by describing our routine. I will do that, but I’ll also try to convey the things that actually set us apart, because as I’m about to point out – in terms of what we do we’re not too different. Now, our routine is a bit different from the average college. We have formations every day during the week (breakfast at 6:55am, which means you have to wake up at around 6:30am to shower and get dressed and make it down on time; lunch at 11:55am). Classes run from 7:35am to lunch, and then from after lunch (around 12:45pm) to 4:00pm. After classes end, we have two hours of either drill (I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a military parade, but drill is just practice for those parades) or athletics (everyone plays a sport of some kind – a relatively small percentage play intercollegiate, but everyone has to play intramurals if they’re not on an intercollegiate or club team). Saturdays are a toss-up, depending on the weekend. Sometimes we will have training that goes from about 6:30am to lunch, and other times we will have to go to our home football games (mandatory for all cadets), and other times we will have the day off. Sundays are the only day of the week that we always have completely free.

More routine…during summers we do military training. The summer before our freshman year we undergo our version of basic training, which is about six or seven weeks long. At the end we march back to West Point and go through a week of supply points (getting computers, telephones, rooms set up, etc.). The second summer is more concentrated training that focuses primarily on infantry tactics. In the past it was about seven weeks long, but I they shortened it starting this year to decrease the amount of wasted time so now it’s six weeks. The third and fourth summers are comprised of four activities – CTLT (going to a US army unit and following a lieutenant around to see what the “real army” is like), an MDS (military development school: there are a broad range of them, some of which you have probably heard about, such as airborne school, air assault school, etc.), a West Point detail (taking a leadership position out at one of the first two summer training camps), and an AIAD (advanced individual academic development – a fancy way of saying “internship”). Now obviously all four things are not done in one summer, they are spaced out over the third and fourth, so you might do CTLT and a West Point detail during the third summer, and then do an MDS and an AIAD the next.

So that’s the basics of our “routine.” It’s pretty packed, and depending on the academic major can be quite hectic. In general most students average around 19 to 20 credit hours per semester for their first two years until they start taking their academic major classes. From there the average increases for engineering majors, like myself, to about 21 credit hours on average per semetser. For liberal arts majors the average generally drops to about 16 to 17 credit hours.

Now looking at the routine, the main things is just that: “oh, they’re just busier on average than the typical college student,” which is true. The amount of work we are made to do definitely outweighs the average student, though I know that it’s well within the means of reason to be busier than we are (since it all comes down to the amount of work you’re willing to place on your own shoulders anyways, so oftentimes comparing “work schedules” becomes a moot point because you’re not necessarily busier if you’re not putting in the effort anyways). What really sets us apart is how connected everyone is here, and what that means for us in the future.

There is a bond that exists between all West Pointers, past and present, having graduated or still at the Academy, that I don’t see at other schools. The origins of this bond are found in the way that we live, and the amount of time we spend interacting with each other, as well as in the nature of the profession that we are required to enter (the US Army). I’ll start with the “way we live” and “the amount of time” we spend together, as these two are linked. We live together in a way that requires that we grow close to one another. For starters, every cadet who enters the academy is placed into a company (in case you have no idea what a “company” size unit is, I’ve put together a little list of terms at the bottom so you get the general idea). The company becomes a “family” of sorts. We live on the same floor, we eat at the same tables in the mess hall (yes, we are assigned where we eat, and to an extent where we live). In short, we live together, every day, for the entire academic year. Not only that, but unlike in a regular college where so long as people aren’t killing each other, it doesn’t really matter, at West Point cooperation and unity are goals within a company. The company wants everyone to get along well, and to succeed in academics, the physical requirements (we have physical performance tests), and the military requirements. Cadets are put in leadership positions within the company based on their year (senior, junior, etc.) and their rank within the class (as well as numerous other factors that would take a book to explain, which is what this response is turning into). These leadership positions mean that you have a “stock” in what others think of your performance, and in how you treat them. All of those factors contribute to the bond. Finally there is the bond that comes from the fact that all of us will graduate as lieutenants in the US Army. We all know that, whether we like it or not, we will end up fighting somewhere, side by side with the people we graduate with. Everyone goes, and so it’s that inevitability that also draws us close to one another.

That last paragraph is what, I think, really sets West Point apart. If I had gone to Harvard, or some other Ivy League school, I don’t think I could have such an immediate, deep attachment to someone I had never met who had attended that same school like I do at West Point. If I know someone’s a West Pointer, it’s like I have an instant connection that makes us close in a way that I would have to wait for years to achieve with an ordinary friend. I’m a senior now, and I have come to appreciate that connection more and more as the years have passed.

Well, this turned out to be longer than a blog post – but that should actually give you a full-bodied view of what it’s like to be at West Point. There are so many facets of cadet culture that I would have to write a book to capture them all and give you a “real view” of what it’s like, but I think that sets out the most prominent points and helps give you a taste of “what it’s like.” I hope.

Anyhow, keep on doing your great work, and I look forward to more blog posts, emails, etc. as you can send them.

Mike

West Point unit sizes:
Brigade – contains 4 regiments (the US Military Academy contains 1 brigade’s worth of cadets, or about 4,000 cadets)
Regiment – contains 2 battalions
Battalion – contains 4 companies (numbers of people don’t really matter at this level, because on the Battalion level people don’t really interact, interaction occurs within companies)
Company – roughly 120 cadets (25 seniors, 30 juniors, 30 sophomores, 35 freshmen, on average), contains 4 platoons
Platoon – roughly 30 cadets, contains 4 squads
Squad – roughly 7 cadets, contains 2 to 3 teams
Team – roughly 2 or 3 cadets

A quick notice of tendencies in relation to the question of deployment thus far: the rhetorical and logical strategy of choice for Harper and his Conservative ministers has been one of apprehending and discerning the will of “the Canadian people”, of the Government leading the charge and suggesting that they have pre-emptively registered Canadians’ collective desires to extend the mission. This strategy operates already in past-tense, which means that the Government’s read of a legible national political sentiment has been properly interpreted; the reading is complete and correct.

But have our sentiments been captured and, if so, how? The suggestion that there is consensus on this, that support is altogether clear and undeniably natural under the circumstances, has a determinate effect on how we may code or conceptualize dissent on this decision, which is to say that, should you oppose, you must be incapable of seeing the writing on the wall. Hence, how could all four federal partiess not support the mandate, how could they hypocritically walk away from the troops, only to trap themselves in the confessional position of, “I support our troops but…”

Further, there’s been an implicit kernel circulating across the field of this argument, one that suggests the automated mandate of the military to fulfill its goals and achieve the dutiful completion of its mission as part of its institutional identity and national obligation. Harper locates the kernel when he says, “Our men and women need to know that we share their goals, support their efforts.” The kernel subsequently settles into a little discursive fold: Harper is in effect asking how the Canadian population would dare prevent and refuse our armed forces fulfillment.

Well, to respond, their efforts – whether fight or roaming dirt tracks in Afghanistan or on-base in Shiloh or Petawawa – are “supported” regardless as they’re a national organ directed by the federal government. Their operation is a result of the complicated ways in which our subjectivity as citizens is conferred and produced; the entitiy of the military is internal to Canada itself, regardless of scope or role. This is not to induge in military mythology but rather to acknowledge that, like other institutions, the military has a small psychic role in constituting the idea of Canada, much like Wildflie and Fisheries or the Ministery of Natural Resourses. The armed forces are tasked with their mandate, applied as force, put into place, orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of Canada’s variable citizenship. Harper implies that not extending the mission will nullify the possibility of goals being completed. Certainly, there are operational goals, part of the mission as such. Yet, the comment connotes a refusal of some grand triumphalist endeavour, which, when one opposes or questions, is seriously retarded and damaged.

But fruition and success are relative. The armed forces will continue to successfully “be” the armed forces; their ontological identity and their structures and relations to a larger public or society will not be diminished. Though Canada’s military culture has received more emphasis under Harper (some suggest there’s been a soft policy coup), the armed forces do not possess the power or clout of the U.S. military-industrial apparatus, whose runnaway resources and sheer scale largely dictate American foreign policy and perpetual military readiness. They prioritize the application of political power, perhaps reversing Clauswitz’s axiom: politics is war by other means in its most profitable and mass-culturally normative form.

Though the ‘long war’ tends to place Western militaries on a similar footing, inducing all the worst aspects of arguments cvilization clash and unified security measures, Canada’s military exists in a different national political universe. Our armed forces members will continue as military operators, military subjectivities, as institutionalized members of an organization with particular social and cultural elements and orientations. Which is why choosing to not extend the mission is no affront to goals but perhaps, instead, suggests some recognition of the precarity of placing bodies in limit-environments and the requirement of sound justification for that decision. Their dutiful performance is no reason to not make a political decision by government in Parliament after debate to stop their activities. We do not betray their desires to meet their goals because their goals are our goals, which are the goals that are supposed to direct their efforts; if they’re not, and if we have little interest, our lack of ‘political will’ (as apathy, opposition, informed dissent, or otherwise) will become apparent, expressed by our members of Parliament…at least (with some naïveté) , this is how democracy in the strict sense, as a representative apparatus of elected officials, is designed to function.

Obviously, the added dynamism of political practice makes plastic the function. The infinite calculations required by the play of language games, discursive manoeuvring, and affective remarks where rhetorical procedures unfold in specific argumentative context all load the act of ‘representation’ with the noise that is the political norm. Yet, Harper’s “being out front on this one” places faith in the governmental apparatus to detect the national will, one that is reflected directly by dictate and imposed as such, which is why Harper stated his intent to extend the mission an extra year regardless: “At the whim of the desires of Canadains, how could I not? Our military is in place, the wheels are turning, we don’t cut and run, this is no time for politics…” and so on. His threat about getting a mandate for Afghanistan from “the Canadian people” and subsequently turning it into a testing of the potential electoral waters lays bare the pursuit of partisan political aims. Not that I expect antiquated “objectivity”; rather, Harper’s “straight talk” relies on a lot of other threads to maintain the entanglement of power.

During the press conference in Kandahar that announced the death of Goddard, one of her superiors repeatedly emphasized the self-perceived weight of duty and its inherent pressures considering the territory and practices of the armed forces. Goddard’s death grounds what constitutes duty; death is traditionally presupposed as duty’s logical end, as sacrifice for the cause. The general celebrated the professionalism with which duty is undertaken in the face of diffuse threat pacified not so much by force than by procedure and military habit that attempts to make dutiful death an anomaly. Primary definers, whether the PM or generals, push the duty argument to shame opposition. I suspect the duty will be undertaken regardless. As has been explicitly expressed, military duty here is a predicate of vulnerability. The politicized duty argument takes, in large ways, this vulnerability for granted, as it becomes the hollow leg upon which “duty” is made to stand; duty becomes utility, instrumental in justifying decisions.

The decision to keep troops on the ground is a measure of this duty against the conditions in Afghanistan: the equation follows that Canadian vulnerability in a combat role is worth it, a trade-off for the betterment of intensely vulnerable Afghanistan. Hence the possible benefit of generalized contribution via military presence, which supposedly has been weighed and registered, or at least that is how this version of the narrative goes. Yet, passing off action and participation as an actualization of military duty is problematic, as it automates the legitimacy that the government espouses to make these decisions, deferring to military motivations, denying that legitimacy rests in responsibility and choice on the legislative and administrative insides rather than emanating from elsewhere.

In shutting down media access to the event, Stephen Harper and Gordon O’Connor have stated repeatedly that the return of bodies from Afghanistan is a private affair for family and military officials. The sacred aura of the bodies and the affiliated grief and mourning are off-limits, at least initially, to the interrogative organs of a liberal media and the public it conceptually presupposes and implicitly “represents”. Thus, there is an opposition hatched immediately between, on one hand, some imagined Canadian public who share in this event and, on the other hand, the private desires of the governmental institution (the military) and the families whose members made “the ultimate sacrifice”.

Surely, we could make much of the rhetorical bombast, the cliched utterances, the idotic idioms, and the bureacratized military speak that saturates and butresses the discourse around exactly what is ongoing in Afghanistan, which is to say that this recent thread is bound up in that entanglement of meanings and motivations. In relation to this particular instance, what is worth mentioning is the tension between how these now-dead bodies are not for public identification or consumption whereas, given their prior status less than four days ago, they most certainly were.

The government has no problem in positioning soldiers’ contributions in relation to the wider Canadian public in moments of success or even standard operating procedure whereby death is outside the circle of immediate consideration. See Stephen Harper’s recent spectacle-oriented, image-heavy visit of Afghanistan as a tactic aimed at driving this home. Soldier’s bodies mattered greatly then, especially when the PM performed his best rendition of “out on the frontier” by donning his safari duds and mimicing soldiers by playing dress-up with helmets and flak jackets and head-sets. This is no anomaly: sallying up to the armed forces to legitimize the mission is a standard device based on contiguity and the contact of direct connection, much like product placement.

Recall Chretien’s visit to Bosnia in the mid-1990’s. Standing on the besiged airport tarmac in Sarajevo, his accidental putting-on-backwards of his blue peacekeeper helmet was perhaps the most ironic display of legitimacy: his presence lent support but the backwardness of the helmet screamed of the problematic terms of the recent Balkan wars and the bungling intervention of the UN. These kinds of acts and gestures serve to make political will legible; they’re highly symbolic relays contextualized in specific signifying regimes. Public cultural literacies around aspects of sacrifice, contribution, and the heritage of service of Canada abroad are inexorably excited in these kinds of displays and exhibitions. Hence Harper’s legitimizing visit and on-site endorsement.

Currently, though access has been refused, the returning bodies, out of sight, still signify an absence, which is to say that even in death and even in our seeming lack of access to the return of these bodies, value is still extracted from them by the primary definers dictating the events – the federal government and its political interests. This extraction rhetorically signifies what is appropriate and what ought to constitute the status quo in terms of what we can and cannot access vis-a-vis understanding and reflecting on our role in “the long war” and, further, what is appropriately advanced to champion the public and what is not. Note that access to the bodies departing Afghanistan was offered, as if to safely contain the fall-out of death inside the boundaries of the abject environment of “war”, preventing the leaking of death from militarized Kandahar to the safe and civilian confines of Trenton.

So, the comparisons of Harper to Bush are not advanced simply via a decision made regarding access to an already-cermenonial and symbolic event: the larger comparison – the one that is most probematic – is the coding of this event as residing somewhere outside the realm of what constitutes normal public desire, where wanting to access the return of caskets and bodies translates to a lack of compassion, a lack of care, a lack of concern and respect, a lack of knowledge as to “what’s really going on here”and how it registers. In all, a lack of emotive comportment and dutiful response.

As most are sure to surmise, this is careful moderation and the subsequent modulation of a jumble of events; or, rather, it is the opportunistic management of an event and its controlled supply to a public that may or may not actually care to attend to this event and its narrative franwork at the outset (i.e., we don’t have the slightest care about what’s happening in Afghanistan) . If the latter is the case, then this is about laying foundations for awareness; if it is the former, it is a matter of how to make these bodies matter. Either way, this is and continues as a political supply of perception.

This is not to suggest that we miss this point nor that we lack the ability to critique. Instead, it suggests the paternalistic conception our administrative handlers have of the infantile “us”.

Totalitarian movements have always featured the same myth: There are people of God, and they have been afflicted by pollutants from within their society as well as cosmic forces from abroad. The good people should rise up in an act of rebellion and wipe out the evil influences. Essentially, it is the story of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.

The pattern played out with Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Russia, with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Hitler in Germany. The people of God were called the proletariat if you were a Bolshevik or a Stalinist. Or they were called the Sons of the Roman Wolf if you were an Italian fascist. Or they were warriors of Christ the King for Franco, or they were the Aryan race for Hitler. As for the polluting forces, they were the bourgeoisie, kulaks, masons, Jews or so-called “inferior” races, depending on the movement.

After the apocalyptic war to purge these elements, a perfect society was predicted, be it a proletarian utopia, or a new Roman Empire, or a Reich to last a thousand years.

In each case, it was going to be a leap into the future that was also a leap into a romanticized past. Soviet communists, for instance, idealized the virtues of the ancient Russian folk who were going to be resurrected as futuristic, perfect communists.

A key feature of each of these totalitarian movements was a cult of death epitomized by the Spanish fascist slogans viva la muerte. This legitimized the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges. These movements were based on the impossible goal of creating a perfect society. The communist vision of a world purged of all capitalist elements was not achievable. But it was possible to kill a lot of Ukrainian farmers. Hitler’s vision of a heroic and pure Aryan race was also impossible. But he was able to murder millions of people who interfered with his hateful vision.

In the liberal conception, people who have human rights, who are free to think for themselves, will make rational decisions about the kind of society they want. But the whole spirit of the totalitarian movements goes against this. It stands against the liberal idea of tolerance and rationality, and instead promotes a mythology devoted to death. This aspect of fascist and communist movements was typically ignored until it was too late. Indeed, the history of totalitarianism’s growth in the 20th century largely depended on the fact that Western thinkers had difficulty comprehending the anti-liberal nature of the movements and the threats they posed.

The major totalitarian movements, communist and fascism, arose in Europe during a very short period of time between 1917 ad the late 1930s. Both quickly spread throughout the world, including the Middle East. We hear so much these days about how the Arab and Muslim worlds are alien to the West. But in regard to the spread of communism, the pattern was one we would recognize. In Iraq, in the 1950s, the single largest political party, the party with the largest ability to bring people into the streets, was the communist party. The communists enjoyed similar popularity in a variety of other Muslim nations.

The spread of fascism was harder to discern. Whereas communists all over the world prided themselves on how one communist party was exactly like all communist parties, spouting the same rhetoric from Marx and Lenin, each fascist movement claimed to be strictly a product of local roots. Yet it is possible to see the connections. In 1922, Mussolini came to power seeking to refound the Roman Empire. He organized his followers into Roman legions. In 1928, a few hundred miles away in Egypt, the Muslims Brotherhood was formed and called itself a fundamentalist Islamic Organization. But it was a political organization as well. It organized itsef into phalanges. Its goal was not the idea of refounding the Roman Empire. But it had an analogous project: refounding the great Muslim empire created by the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century.

One of the branches that emerged from the Muslim brotherhood came to power in Iran in 1979. Another branch came out of the Syrian youths who returned from their studies in Paris to found the Nazi-inspired Baath party in 1943. While Islamists sought to establish what they pictured as a theocracy, which is to say a dictatorship of mullahs or imams, Baathists primarily sought to recreate Mohammed’s empire as an imperial expression of the Arab people. Despite this difference, both movements shared with European totalitarianism one overarching theme: the cult of death. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the drive toward martyrdom became a kind of mass mania, epitomized in the human-wave attacks of the Iran-Iraq wars, in which young boys were sent across Saddam’s mine fields. The entire wave would typically be killed. Mothers all over Iran were hoping, praying, that their sons would be blown up in this kind of attack. Saddam encouraged his own death cult through use of poison gas. And, of course, both of these movements developed the notion of the human bomb.

The idea of suicide terrorism began to spread in the 1980s. especially in Lebanon, where Syrian Baathists were working with the Islamist Hezbollah. It became more popular in the course of the intifada of the last few years, which was subsidized on a grand scale by Iraq and carried out by Palestinian Islamist groups. By 2002, Saddam’s military parades featured units of suicide warriors, putting the death cult in full view. For many years, this phenomenon was largely ignored in the West. It somehow escaped notice that we lived in an age of genocide. Under Saddam Hussein, some 300,000 Iraqi Shiites were killed. 180,000 Kurds were killed or went missing. The insane war that Saddam and Khomeini conducted during the 1980s took hundreds of thousands of lives. The Islamist movement in Algeria has produced some 100,000 deaths. Add to that tens of thousands of deaths in Syria. In Sudan, a civil war waged by Islamists is thought to have killed up to two-million people. The scale of these killings is simply staggering. But it’s also staggering to realize how little any of this registered in the West. As in the past, the success of totalitarian movements rested on the blindness of liberal-minded people. We found reasons not to see these things. We told our selves that in the Arab and Muslims worlds, that is simply the way people are – even though much of history suggests otherwise.

The United States has taken every possible position in regard to these movements. During the Reagan years, the United States supported Afghanistan’s Islamist insurgents, as well as Saddam’s regime in Iraq. After 9/11, George Bush attacked both nations. But in his explanation for going to war, he failed to articulate an appreciation of how bloody and deeply rooted the underlying movements truly were. Or a comprehensive strategy for destroying them. Instead, he came up with a variety of rationales. In Afghanistan, it was to capture a single man. In Iraq, it was to prevent Saddam from attaining weapons of mass destruction. These were defensible goals. But Bush wasn’t able to situate them in the larger narrative of fanatical movements devoted to totalitarian ideals, a narrative that should have been recognizable from the history of the previous century. Bush’s lack of historical appreciation helps explain why the United States was not properly prepared for the aftermath of Saddam’s fall. Like those around him, the President hadn’t come to grips with the fact that millions of Iraqis were fanatical adherents of a mass totalitarian movement, and were willing to die for it. In the war of ideas unfolding in the region, the West is hobbled by the same sort of naivete that compromised the battle against totalitarianism in the 20th century.

But this blindness was by no means confined to the United States. Bush at least sought to overthrow Saddam and the Taliban. But a large part of the world persuaded itself that overthrowing Saddam’s dictatorship was a moral wrong. This followed in the tradition of the French socialist of the 1930s who failed to see the true nature of Hitler, or of Western intellectuals who praised Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1950s. And so a remarkable spectacle took place on the streets all over the world in February, 2003. The world witnessed the largest mass demonstration for peace in the history of mankind. Its purpose? To prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrants in modern history. We must be clear about what the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are about. The enemy stands for the principles of Baathism and Islamism, and expresses these principles in the form of human bombs. These are totalitarian movements stemming from the worst European tradition. And yet it has been difficult to rally the world to its side. Most nations seem eager to wash their hands of the whole situation. The United States and its allies are facing the confusion that, history shows, has traditionally plagued liberal-minded people in the face of totalitarian movements. As much as terrorism itself, this confusion remains one of the great problems of our time. And dispelling it remains one of our great challenges.

Emerson’s post-election party switcheroo has been drawing the ire of his constituents, opposition MP’s, and even members of his new party. Emerson’s party-swap, his disdain for his riding’s collective wishes, and his adamant statements about shaking off “trivial” concerns in order to serve “the Canadian people” through an important position in the current government has been a rather stinky affair. Harper’s own endorsement of and flacid support for Emerson has been the stuff of trite rhetorical flourish; apparently, Emerson’s the right man for the job and Harper’s self-celebrated willingness to look beyond party lines – much like Emerson’s “willingness” to serve beyond his old party affiliation – constitutes the real ethos of Candian duty and public service. Harper has made it clear that Emerson has ample Cabinet experience that would only benefit the country and the government’s profile. Besides, according to Harper’s rhetorical sandwich, why would any well-reasoned Canadian stoop to personal attacks in order to prevent Emerson from making this contribution to governance and the common political wealth of Canada?

As Hedy Fry’s line of questioning makes explicit, Emerson has been an opportune target for pinning hypocrisy on a government intent on pushing through ethics and conduct legislation vis-a-vis MP and ministerial conduct, which is to say this is all one more half-arc in the spiral of hypocritical, self-referential, and near-cybernetic discourse of parliamentary political practice. Of course, that the Liberals lead the charge in condemnation is not without some irony, if it can even be called that: perhaps irony ceases when playing and calling the hypocrisy card becomes the very mode of operation. This is the stuff of murky integrity soup.

It is worth noting that Emerson’s move, though, has not been sexualized, gendered, and pathologized like Belinda Stronach’s floor-crossing last year. Throwing off the Conservatives and choosing to become a Liberal, Stronach was the target of sexualized and gendered remarks seeking to connote her move as the work of a slutty and promiscuous philandering bitch. Stronach’s being embroiled with Peter Mackay – now the Minister of Foreign Affairs – only amplified her potential as a target for sexualized comments that questioned her loyalty to the Conservative Party, as if her romantic falling-out with Mackay signified further her standing as a hysterical whore on all accounts. Nasty stuff.

We haven’t heard the voiciferous sexualizing and gendering of David Emerson and that’s no coincidence. Though his motives have been questioned, he retains his manhood, his male privilege, and the ability to frame the switch in terms of procedure and intent. Emerson’s move is rendered, then, as the product of miscalculation and misreading, of improper reasoning on his behalf. It may be scheming, corrupted, and inexcusable but it is still the stuff of decision. He’s right or wrong, good or bad, depending on where you stand. The Stronach incident unfolded in an entirely different way. Her loudest critics defined and reduced her to some naturalized and rudimentary standing as an unruly woman without scruples tied unapologetically to the whimsy of her “innate” feminine drives. Eemerson, meanwhile, retains his normative masculine standing as a political operator.

Hedy Fry may have proceeded in this critical direction to point out these descriptive and conceptual biases; I haven’t checked the transcripts. What remains is that the crux of this scenario is very much the problem of a cultural politics of governance and institutionalized political practice. To simply call Emerson a whore misses the point because it elides the most basic (if abstract) questions we ought to be asking: who gets to become what and in what context? Who is motivated by what and why is that motivation available and attributable? Why do “they” have that determining privilege and power as such?

Statistics Canada recently released its 2005 annual National Balance Sheets and the numbers are certainly worth a look. Three notable figures:

1.) the average net worth of every Canadian citizen is hovering at $137, 000; this puts the national net worth somewhere around the 4.5 trillion dollar mark. whew: we’re fat cats, or at least a segment of the population tends to fatness and is maxing out on the chin ups to reach and exceed the “affluence” bar…

2.) this represents a $5600 dollar increase per citizen from 2004; overall, national net worth grew and expanded just over 5% and national wealth (non-financial assets) grew at a rate of 5.5%, which is down 0.1 from 5.6% from 2004…

3.) as per this study, each Canadian citizen has accumulated 1.08 of debt for every after-tax dollar of income…

I recall a recent interview with on CBC Radio with Addison Wiggin, contributor to The Daily Reckoning and co-author of Empire of Debt, a book-length condemnation of America’s overwhelming financial debt, in public, private, and personal contexts. Wiggin is generally critical of the “keep consumers spending” cultural mantra; it functions as the deferral device/band-aid fix for any and all problems in an economy and society that are overdrawn and overdeveloped, running on virtual fumes and ghostly traces.

Wiggin calculates that the U.S. is running a debt load of approximately 8 trillion dollars. Massive public debt has become the model for private citizens…Certainly we could extend the trajectory here and expound on how and why the U.S. carries such a massive debt, requiring the order of 563 billion dollars for its military budget this year alone. If the previous source is perhaps “too” partisan and problematic, the White House has the Department of Defense sitting at an “outlay” 463 billion dollars. But what’s a 100 billion in the face of 8 trill? 0.0125 %.

Wiggin went on to offer that Canada is doing relatively better but – like many (over)industrialized states that serve as flowing conduits for fluid multinationals and commodity markets – it ain’t sitting pretty.

Canada’s running federal surpluses in relation to the budget, which signifies fiscal responsibility; plus – and I love this – “[We’re] running good debt-to-GDP ratios”. But the stinger: Canadian federal debt (net) is hovering around the 530 billion dollar mark (523.6 billion in 2004). With about 32 million citizens, that puts us at approximately $16, 500 a head.

Further, this is simply federal debt. For an accumulation of federal, provincial, and municipal debt, The Stingy Investor is running a real-time debt clock. At this moment, we’re collectively running a debt of about 805 billion dollars, which works out to about $25, 200 bucks per person.

One more shot to the gut: toward the end of his discussion, Wiggin added that one ought to consider the 74 million credit cards currently in circulation in Canada and that the national savings rate in Canada is sitting at less than 1%…

Self-governing economy, right? Feed in proper inputs? Presto magic outputs. Capital rights these wrongs and the market will naturally – as the endlessly differentiating code of choice for most and many – diagnose, adjust, and rearticulate these tedious details. Debt, it seems, is simply and seamlessly embedded. To borrow from Kurt Vonnegut: “So it goes.”

by Foggy Bottom

The international community has recently been racked by a string of nuclear crises: Iraq, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Iraq again, Libya, and Iran. So far, the US has characterized the problem of nuclear proliferation through the lens of “rogue states.” Rogue states are reckless and tyrannical regimes shun the rules of the international community to amass power and weaponry. The case of Iran is just another chapter in this tragic story. However, the recent crises in nuclear diplomacy may only be a prelude a greater disaster. We will soon witness the collision of two of the great dilemmas of our time: nuclear proliferation and energy security.

The nuclear proliferation quandary is relatively straightforward. Nuclear weapons are considered dangerous and immoral. The international community agrees that nuclear weapons must be abolished, or at a minimum controlled, at all costs. Nuclear weapons states, paradoxically, also agree that nuclear weapons must be controlled, since nuclear proliferation would reduce their relative clout. However, the same technologies that are used to produce the core elements of a nuclear weapon are also used for peaceful nuclear energy. Therefore the international community has needed to find a way to allow for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy while avoiding the diversion of nuclear technology for the development of nuclear weapons. Up until now, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has served the role of the world’s nuclear watchdog, by monitoring international nuclear facilities to ensure that civilian nuclear means are not diverted to military ends. This system seemed to work relatively well until the 1990s. Following the 1991 Gulf War, it was discovered that Saddam Hussein’s regime had developed a sophisticated nuclear weapons program under the disguise of a legitimate civilian nuclear program. This discovery triggered a crisis of confidence in the IAEA and the set of international laws, treaties, and safeguards that form the so-called nonproliferation regime. The international community reacted by strengthening the monitoring of nuclear facilities. The recent events in Iran, however, sparked a second crisis of confidence in the nonproliferation regime. A seemingly bellicose Iran was seen as developing all the infrastructure needed to develop nuclear weapons, legally, right under the nose of the international community. All that Iran would need to do is too pull out of the Nonproliferation Treaty, within months of developing a nuclear weapons capacity. In response to this second crisis, several states, including the IAEA have suggested curtailing the right to nuclear power. Noting that the capability to produce nuclear fuel could be used to produce nuclear weapons, some have suggested centralizing the production of nuclear fuel in a few trustworthy countries.

Such ways to address nuclear proliferation fly in the face of another great dilemma: energy security. Energy security refers to the secure access to energy supply. Energy security has become a growing concern for the international community, particularly with regards to carbon-based fuels such as oil and gas. Ever since the 1973 oil shocks, oil has been increasingly seen as a strategic vulnerability. The problem with oil can be boiled down to two concerns: security and supply. Western states are increasingly uncomfortable depending on unstable and ideologically hostile Middle East for such a critical resource. Dependence on oil has forced many a democracy to cozy up to unpalatable regimes, and get involved in nasty and distant conflicts. Terrorist organizations, well aware of the West’s dependence on oil have begun targeting oil facilities. However, like two old ladies complaining at their Catskills resort: “The food is so bad…. and the portions are so small;” if dependence on oil is not bad enough, it is also a limited resource. Global energy consumption is expected to double by 2035 and triple by 2055, particularly as the mammoth economies of China and India get on-line. Furthermore, while there is enough oil to last the world for several more decades, the real oil crisis won’t occur when companies extract the last drop from the ground. The crisis in oil will occur when increases in oil production will not be able to keep up with increases in demand (see Chart). There is a lot of controversy and propaganda regarding when exactly peak oil production will occur, but suffices to say that it will happen before the end of the century. At that point, the price of oil will steadily increase, competition for what oil is left will intensify, and wise countries will start looking elsewhere to satisfy their energy needs. Otherwise, concerns over global warming and the associated obligations under the Kyoto Protocol will push certain countries to develop non-carbon based energy sources.

At this point, countries will have a number of options including gas power, coal, hydrogen, renewables such as hydroelectric, wind, solar, and biomass and nuclear power. Gas power suffers many of the same faults as oil. It is a non-renewable resource, which although cleaner than oil, is not evenly spread out in the world. As the recent experiences of Russia turning off the tap of natural gas to Ukraine and Western Europe in the midst of a cold snap vividly illustrated, natural gas is not always in reliable supply. Coal power, even so-called clean coal which reduces acid rain, still produces greenhouse gases and can be fairly expensive. Hydrogen power, oft stated by President Bush in his speeches, is a clean burning fuel, but needs to be produced. This production takes energy. If the energy needed to produce hydrogen comes from non-renewables, then we are back at square one. Wind and solar power are relatively expensive and/or unreliable on a massive scale, and biomass requires an amount of land that simply is not sustainable for most states.

Faced with these difficult choices, many countries are taking another look at nuclear power. Despite the living memory of the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, nuclear energy is making a big comeback. Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, India, Finland, France, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and the US have all begun to plan, at times massive, construction of nuclear power plants. China, for example, will have 26 nuclear power plants by 2025. Indeed many states are starting to see the environmental risks associated with nuclear energy as manageable in comparison with the environmental and political costs associated with oil. For example, the world’s two largest uranium producers are Canada and Australia, which seem appealingly benign in comparison to Saudi Arabia and Russia, the world’s two largest producers of oil. Nuclear power does not emit carbon dioxide. Nuclear plants can be built in large numbers close to the populations they serve. Nuclear reactors could be used to produce hydrogen, which could then be distributed in clean fuel-efficient vehicles and utilities. Certain types of nuclear reactors, known as “fast breeders” even produce plutonium fuel as a byproduct to be used in another reactor.

As a growing number of nations come to see nuclear power as a sustainable power source, they will seek to develop so-called fuel cycles of their own. States will become weary of relying on other states for their nuclear fuel, since they understand this would only recreate the strategic liabilities posed by carbon-based energy sources. Therefore, there will be a greater number of states that will develop the necessary infrastructure to manufacture nuclear fuel. Of course, this same technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons, should the state’s security situation demand it. Indeed, in a world where a new nuclear power plant will be built every month, we can expect several more crises regarding the peaceful intentions of states. Today it is only Iran and North Korea, yet tomorrow it could be Syria, Brazil, Nigeria, Poland, or Indonesia. The IAEA, swamped with a ballooning number of facilities to inspect, may become a less reliable tool to prevent nuclear proliferation.

The diplomatic crisis in Iran is therefore only the tip of the iceberg of the coming disaster. How the international community handles this tough case has implications that will reach much further than the Middle East.

Foggy appeared out of nowhere and started submitting some hard hitting policy pieces. We know his name, Foggy Bottom, seems to refer to a neighborhood in Washington and that he seems to have a perspective shaped by governmentality. He’s taught us some things about assumptions and interpretation already, so he’s living up to the great tradition of Anonymous journalists of the 19thC so far and I’d like to keep him around. So welcome Foggy B.! and thanks to One Neck for doing this Deep Throaty depiction of him.

check out the Core Contributors page. from there you can get to all posts by or about Mr. Foggy B.

1: Shinichiro Watanabe directed and storyboarded Samurai Champloo. This is the show we are currently watching. Before this we watched seasons 1 and 2 of NYPD Blue. Samurai Champloo is glowingly, astonishingly beautiful. It’s about hiphop-flavoured and brazenly anachronistic Samurai rebels, traveling with a funny and tough girl to find the Samurai who smells of Sunflowers. In each episode of Samurai Champloo there are scenes that I’d like to hang across my wall, and out my window, and across my front and back.

A few days ago I interviewed Barbara Layne, an artist-researcher in the Fibres program at Concordia University and director of Hexagram about wearable technology. She showed me a huge Mimaki printer that she uses to print photographs of storm clouds and lightening onto huge stretches of cloth, which she and her grad assistants then electrify with their bioluminescent thread. The wearable technology article and the interview with Barbara Layne will appear in the next issue of Worn, but I bring it up here because all I could think about yesterday was using that printer to print scenes from Samurai Champloo. I also thought about scenes from Nausicaa, and Spirited Away- (remember the train running through the water and the reflections of the white clouds?) But in these films, by Miyazaki, the moments of beauty are more intense, religious almost, less funky. Today, I want to hang out with funky.

2: In Samurai Champloo episode 11, Gamblers and Gallantry, one of the main characters spins off from the group into a mini plotline with a woman who is forced into prostitution to pay off her husband’s debt. The law has her trapped- she gets sold to her husband by her parents and now gets mauled by perverts because women aren’t allowed to get divorced. The system does not treat men and women equally, and our soft-spoken Samurai hero rebels. I never get tired of seeing good guys (or ethical badasses) defending human rights. Warms the cockles of my heart it does, and fuels my desire to hang out with Watanabe.

3: The music is so genius in Samurai Champloo: the long musical segments between episodes are actually increasingly pleasurable. Tsutchi, a hip hop artist who worked with Watanabe on Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, says :

“There are similarities between some aspects of a director’s work and a DJ’s work, you know? Choosing which song to use in which scene is similar in feeling to how a DJ selects a record by watching the reaction of the audience. (…) During some magazine interview some time ago, he said: “I re-did the editing because the music was distorted. I decided to do that only by listening with my ears” (…) Rather then saying he did something because it was OK according to the meter, he valued the point at which he felt thoroughly good. That is an extremely important thing. That part of about him that creates while valuing that kind of a sense is musician-like or music-like, and I feel that’s what’s different from regular filmmakers.”
(from the liner notes for DVD volume 4.)

I don’t know much about dj’ing or editing film, but I know that feeling when something is good. And I also know it’s hard to stop and recognize that feeling when you’re in the midst of creating. Once you get a ball rolling, it’s hard to stay objective- or maybe what’s hard is staying quietly inside yourself (extra subjective?) so you can really feel the feeling of a good thing when it comes- either way, Watanabe knows something about it, and I want to meet him.