Letting Your Guide Be History

Doug Mack argues that guidebooks like Fodor’s and Frommer’s “are uniquely effective documents of a changing world—and, more to the point, they have been underappreciated actors in creating social change”:

They … stand out for shaping history, if not always intentionally, because of their authoritative reputation—they have long been the best insight into that which would be otherwise unknown. Most notoriously, the Nazis claimed to have used Baedeker’s guides in a 1942 series of air attacks on English cities, which would become known as the Baedeker Blitz. There’s some disagreement among historians as to whether the Nazis really did use the books, but this was Nazi propagandist Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm’s claim: that Baedeker had unwittingly identified the targets by highlighting Britain’s most beloved landmarks and towns, the places whose destruction would deal the biggest blows to the national spirit, including the cities of Bath and Norwich. More recently, shortly after American troops entered Iraq 10 years ago, Lonely Planet Iraq was pressed into duty for precisely the opposite goal, assisting officials who were prioritizing sites for protection.

Other guidebooks have specifically sought to right societal wrongs, like The Negro Motorist Green Books, a series published from 1936 to 1964, which guided African Americans traveling the U.S. in the era of Jim Crow. As civil-rights leader Julian Bond, whose parents used Green Books, told the New York Times in 2010, “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat … but where there was any place.”

Working Through “Work Ethic”

Midwest Map

The concept comes from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but the term “work ethic” appears nowhere in the text itself. Peter Womack dives in:

The ‘ethic’ Weber described is a complicated mixture of spiritual and practical imperatives, embracing ideas of self-government, the suppression of natural impulses, the search for marks of divine grace, and the purposive ordering of a person’s whole life. It is distinctively Protestant in the sense that it took the ascetic discipline of the monastic tradition and tried to rewrite it for life in the world. It was also, according to Weber, the victim of a historical irony: these particular virtues, promoted for religious reasons, were often conducive to making a great deal of money, and so bringing about conditions of luxury and leisure that threatened to undermine the virtues themselves. In other words, what Weber has to say about work is embedded in a story about how we became who we are.

Many historians have argued that it is not an entirely true story; but it is nevertheless an interesting one. Reducing it to the simple promulgation of a ‘work ethic’ destroys most of its interest, its power to provoke thought. The cliché works, as clichés often do, to make the idea at once more digestible and less alive.

In the process, several inconvenient signs of life drop away. One of them is the class content. As Weber tartly puts it, a ‘bourgeois businessman’, interpreting his bottom line as a mark of God’s blessing, ‘could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so.’ Meanwhile, ‘The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen’. That is, the shared beliefs of employer and employee caused both of them to act in the employer’s interests. ‘The work ethic’ is not the same for everyone: it depends where you are in a system of working relationships. Abstracting the phrase from the system loses that subtlety. A work ethic becomes the attribute of an individual. Some people have it, some people don’t, and all those who have it have the same thing. Society vanishes from the idea.

(Image from an Onion article about the Midwest. The popular Dish thread on the amorphous region is here.)

The Politics Of Human Rights

The founders of the Freedom Rights Project believe that the proliferation of human rights treaties obscures the public’s ability to understand the very rights being protected, thus reflecting poorly on an overstuffed bureaucracy:

The expanded and diluted notion of human rights allows illiberal states to change the focus from core freedoms to vague and conceptually unclear rights that place no concrete obligations on states. Enabled by such rhetoric, no human rights violation can stand scrutiny on its own merits. Instead, human rights violations are relativized — intellectually dismembered and discarded when it is politically expedient. In this world, cuts in development aid can be labeled human rights violations just like torture in North Korea.

Crucially, this unprincipled politics of human rights helps authoritarian states deflect criticism. In 2007, Cuba, which has one of the worst human rights records in the Western Hemisphere, succeeded in persuading a majority of HRC members to axe the specific mandate for monitoring its own human rights record. The praise authoritarian states shower on one another for supposedly upholding new, vague and abstract rights are therefore not just empty rhetoric but can produce real political gains.

Unfortunately, much of the human rights community has not only shied away from expressing qualms about rights proliferation, it has often led the process. But this approach has not helped advance the core freedoms that make the difference between liberal and non-liberal states: According to Freedom House, global respect for basic civil and political rights is in decline for the seventh consecutive year.

Of course, it is exactly those basic rights that non-free states want to neuter. When everything can be defined as a human right, the premium on violating such rights is cheap. To raise the stock and ensure the effectiveness of human rights, their defenders need to acknowledge that less is often more.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Are performing orcas enslaved? I suggest so. Are Tina Brown and Sally Quinn sexist? The argument is here. Who’s the most important author in America right now? Khaled Hosseini. How fragile is the faith of Fox News? As fragile as all fundamentalisms.

We learned that the current Israeli government would rather release cold-blooded murderers from prison than freeze a single building in a single settlement. And that if you really want a good orgy, head on over to Tehran, where the mullahs rule, and the next generation despairs.

The most popular post of the day was my reflection from last night on “This Extraordinary Pope.” The second? My update on the fantastic hypocrisy and chutzpah of the Clintons.

See you in the morning.

When Lights Conceal

dish_artificiallightmap

Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, considers the quality of darkness as a diminishing natural resource. He speaks about the connection between artificial light and public safety:

Ironically, what has happened now is that we have so much light that we can no longer see. We’re blinded — sometimes literally, by the brightness and glare of our security lighting — but also metaphorically, which is to say that when we light everything up, there is really no reason to look over and notice something, and say, “Wow, that’s a weird thing.”

When everything is so brightly lit, why should we look? It’s light, so it’s safe, so we switch off. And, while no one is looking, we’ve actually made life easier for the bad guys. Some studies even show that criminals actually prefer well-lit areas. I had several policemen and security consultants tell me that criminals are as afraid of the dark as we are. They don’t want to go in the dark. The light makes them feel safe, just as it does us.

(Image: Maps of artificial night sky brightness by P. Cinzano, F. Falchi, and C. D. Elvidge)

No Honor Among Cyber-Thieves

Patrick Howell O’Neill tells the tale of a Deep Web defector:

Before he gutted and nearly destroyed one of the most influential criminal markets on the Internet, a man using the nickname Boneless published a detailed guide on the art of disappearing. “I have some experience in this area,” he wrote, detailing how fugitives should best go about buying phony passports, dodging cops, and keeping their stories straight.

The guide was just one of many contributions Boneless made to HackBB, a popular destination on the Deep Web, a group of sites that sit hidden behind walls of encryption and anonymity. Back in 2012, the forum was a top destination for buying stolen credit cards, skimming ATMs, and hacking anything from personal computers to server hardware. And thanks to Tor’s anonymizing software, members were shielded from the ire of law enforcement around the globe. It was one of the safest and most popular places on the Deep Web to break the law.

Then one day in March, HackBB simply vanished, its databases destroyed. One user likened the events to burning a city–its library, market, bank, and entire community–to the ground. It wasn’t hard to guess who’d done it. A few days earlier, Boneless had disappeared–and with him, a serious chunk of the market’s sizable hoards of money.

Nitasha Tiku marvels at the story:

The strangest twist seems to be the staying power of Boneless’ reputation as a stand-up guy–to a point. Even OptimusCrime still believes Boneless didn’t orchestrate the heist as much as “sold his powerful administrator account to the highest bidder.” They say the greatest trick a hacker ever pulled was convincing his peers he’d sell them out rather than hack ’em himself.

The Inimitable Otis

On the release of a new singles collection, Jack Hamilton pays tribute to Otis Redding:

Like all of the greatest singers, Otis Redding was utterly unique. He lacked the technical virtuosity of his idol, Sam Cooke–another ’60s musician whose death came much too early–but made up for it with flawless taste and musical intellect. Despite his well-earned reputation for incendiary live performances–most famously on display in his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival [seen above], six months before his death–Redding was never the frenzied pyrotechnician of later “soul man” parodies. In fact, his greatest gift may have been his command of restraint and understatement.

The best singers are also masters of silence: The moments that Ray Charles doesn’t sing–when he’s just about to sing, just finished singing, or taking a breath (especially when he’s taking a breath)–can be as electrifying as any notes coming out of his mouth. Otis Redding understood and used this power as well as anyone. Critic Dave Marsh once wrote that Redding’s performance of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” sounds “as though each line is coming to him only the instant before he sings it, quavering notes as if in the grip of an undeniably exquisite passion that must be consummated–now!” a description that itself dwells in pauses, anticipation, the thrill of ensuing discovery.

Stephen M. Deusner marvels at the voice:

“The Glory of Love” is not a very good song. … With its twin melodic lines—“That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love”—and its oppressively chipper tempo, it’s certainly catchy in a nursery rhyme sort of way, yet it’s supremely saccharine and just plain dopey. So why would someone like Otis Redding, at the height of his esteem, choose to cover this song out of the thousands in the American pop canon? It’s hard to imagine anyone save [songwriter Billy] Hill himself thinking it was worth the great singer’s time, even if they didn’t know how limited his time was.

But here’s the catch:

Otis Redding absolutely kills it. He transforms “The Glory of Love” into something moving and even sublime. As Steve Cropper’s guitar traces tears down your cheek, as Isaac Hayes and Al Jackson Jr.’s snare clicks out a tempo about twice as fast as the song demands, and as the horns offer sympathetic punctuation, Redding testifies mightily to the glory of love. It’s soul music, but the process of repetition, variation and elaboration is more akin to jazz. He teases out the song’s central ideas, however corny they may be, until they yield something meaningful, but as the song builds and builds, it never reaches a climax or epiphany. Rather than cut loose, the musicians hold back.

This is why Redding was such an immense figure in pop music in the 1960s and why his death was such a tragedy: He could plumb even the fluffiest pop song and locate a kernel of honest-to-God wisdom.

Heard here:

Are We Still Rooting For The Bad Guys?

Heather Havrilesky notices that, whether intentionally or by accident, TV anti-heroes since Tony Soprano are becoming less and less sympathetic:

The trick that David Chase pulled off with The Sopranos was that he made us feel protective, affectionate love for a bad, bad guy, a guy who wanted to grow but couldn’t, a guy who, at the end of the day, just wanted to daydream about the good old days and stuff his face with onion rings. When Tony had a panic attack or missed the ducks in his pool or got beat up or embarrassed, it made us feel terribly sorry for him in spite of ourselves.

That’s not how we feel about Walter White.

But that’s not how we’re supposed to feel about him. Just as Walt wasn’t designed to occupy the same place in our hearts as Tony Soprano, neither was Don Draper of Mad Men. But because Matthew Weiner and the show’s other writers take pains to show us why Don does what he does, it’s more of a problem when we come way from these character sketches feeling unmoved.

In the show’s sixth season, Don didn’t necessarily make bigger mistakes than he ever had, but his hungry ego and his weaknesses were on full display like never before. Aside from being called a monster by Peggy and assuming the fetal position toward the end of the season, Don didn’t register guilt or awareness of his own terrible behavior that often. Even though it may be Weiner’s intention to demonstrate the limitations of Don’s consciousness, even though Mad Men is arguably guided by ideas more than emotions, and Don’s shortcomings are meant to embody the shortcomings of not just an entire generation but also late capitalist American society itself, the exercise can grow tiresome when Don is less likable than the writers seem to believe.

Reality Check, Ctd

A reader writes:

On that new Gallup poll, you said “The new poll doesn’t change much on the generic question as to approval of marriage equality.”  I’m not so sure. These results struck me as an important (even if incremental) shift for several reasons:

1)  Swings to the right in 2005, 2008, 2009, and late 2011 gave social conservatives some hope that an undercurrent against SSM was part of the trend line.  Once the pendulum swings far enough to the left, they reasoned, it swings back again.  After all, there was +8 gap for marriage equality in 2011, and by the end of the year it was once again a dead heat.  It was important, then, that this last Gallup poll showed no such compensatory shift.  After after consistent momentum across the last three polls, the American public no longer seems to be vacillating.

2) This is the first time in the history of the Gallup poll that that gap between marriage equality proponents and traditionalists has been in the double digits.  In electoral politics, those last 2-3 points is the difference between just a lead and a landslide.

3) Disapproval of SSM is at an all time low (43%), and those respondents seem to have shifted into the “I don’t know” column, which has tripled from 1% to 3%.  This indicates to me that there is growing uncertainty on the right.

A Pit Stop On The Road To Democracy? Ctd

Michael J. Totten reports on the disintegrating scene in Tunisia:

My Tunisian fixer Ahmed tells me he’s all but certain the labor parties will win the next election and that [governing Islamist party] Ennahda will be out on its ass. He can’t really know that, but it’s certainly plausible. Ennahda might even fall sooner than that if one of the liberal parties resigns from the government or if demonstrations become an unstoppable tide like they did during the revolution a few years ago. The country’s political center of gravity has been moving away from the Islamists since the day they entered the government, and the only hard power leverage they have is the banned Salafist movement, and even that’s just theoretical.

Tunisia is mellow, even pacifist, compared with Algeria. The army is smaller than Egypt’s, and it is not—or at least it has not been—a political player. So I don’t expect a full-blown Algerian-style insurgency or an Egyptian-style military coup. Nor is a Tiananmen Square-style massacre in the cards. Tunisia is not a police state, and Ennahda admits it’s afraid of the army.

But tensions are rising, the situation is volatile, the country is more dangerous now than even a week ago, and the region is always surprising. Keep an eye out because even the “moderate” Islamists empowered by the Arab Spring are back on their heels. They thought they owned the future, but they do not.

Max Boot sees an opening for fresh neocon meddling as the Arab Spring “sputters”:

This is why it’s vitally important–as Michael Doran and I argued in Foreign Policy  magazine–to develop our capacity for waging political warfare, as we did in the early days of the Cold War, when the U.S. helped various anti-Communist forces. Today we should be helping anti-Islamist forces. Instead, because we have let our capacity for political warfare atrophy, we are forced to either send F-16s and Predators to push regime change (as in Libya in 2011) or sit by ineffectually (as in much of the Middle East ever since).

There needs to be a better way–the U.S. needs to be able to overtly and covertly support more moderate and secular forces in the battle over the future of countries such as Libya and Tunisia, where there is an excellent chance of a decent and democratic outcome. Instead the widespread perception is of American retreat, leaving our natural allies at the mercy of radicals.

More Dish on the Mideast tumult here and here.