“I would never keep my money in the bank. I’d rather keep it in a pot at home. I’ll get a pistol and two hand grenades to protect it.”

That colorful sentiment comes from Shafaq Gebarn, an Afghan government employee, as quoted by the Washington Post today. I highlight it as evidence that though culture makes a huge difference in many cases, there is a “science” to banking which has universal properties, the most important of which is trust. Take away the pistol and hand grenades and Mr. Gebarn is identical to an American stashing money away under his mattresses during the Great Depression.

Banks by definition never have all the money that their depositors have deposited on hand. They take the money and invest it for profit, and then share some of that profit with depositors in the form of interest. In theory, everyone benefits. But if depositors all ask for their money back at the same time, a problem arises. Once a bank loses credibility among the majority of its depositors, that loss becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If an individual fears for his money, he will have no trouble getting it back; but if everyone fears for their money, no one will be able to get their share back.

The Post goes on to explain that this Western concept of banking is alien to Afghanistan’s culture. Afghans traditionally prefer the “hawala” system. I’m skeptical that this has much of anything to do with anything. The Afghan banking crisis is really epiphenomenal to a broader problem we have on our hands. Despite a loya jirga and two elections, the Afghans are losing faith in the leadership of Hamid Karzai, a faith that was only provisionally offered to begin with. It’s only normal that this crisis of trust would manifest itself in something concrete like this.

I’ve been writing essays over at The American Interest Online’s group blog, Cont’d. The deal there was that I’d contribute longer, more thought-out and well-argued pieces. I’m finding myself missing the ability to write shorter response-type posts, though, so I’ll continue to post those here.

Here’s a linked list to the posts I’ve written so far:

Corruption in Afghanistan

The Face of the Taliban

The Ethical versus the Possible

Fighting Islam in Afghanistan

Of Women and Donkeys

The Futility of Partitioning Afghanistan

The West’s Pet Project

The WikiLeaks Phenomenon

Literary Weekend: Modernism, Objectivity and American Journalism

At the risk of music posts overwhelming this blog, I’m posting here four songs by The Oranges Band off their 2005 record The World and Everything In It. The reasons for posting are many, though most are not worth mentioning. Two, however, are:

1) It appears some reunion shows are in the offing. I’m excited, and you should be too. Check their band page on Facebook next week for details, or check back here.

2) It’s been impressively wintry here in DC, and this album is a bit of an antidote for that. It’s not a summer album in the sense that it’s about summer in any direct way, despite the beach photograph on the cover and surfish imagery and guitar work throughout. It’s more that it’s evocative of summers gone by, of looking back with a dose of sadness at being unable to recapture a past that may not have been as great as we remember it. That’s how I experience the album anyway.

Hope you enjoy:

“Ride the Nuclear Wave” - Look into the belly of sharks, past their teeth, to hear the wisdom of the fish inside. Wisdom can be found in unexpected places, after all.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“The Mountain” - Defiance against all odds. Come on, you can’t possibly deny a pop song that samples Winston Churchill.¹

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“Drug City” - Nobody’s ever the same… after the long walk home.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“Atmosphere” - Staring at clouds seemed like a good idea when we were younger. Made us think we could fly.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is a fun person to work with. Yes, it’s probably valid to lay a good part of the blame for Obama’s muddled congressional strategy on health care reform at his feet—as a reporter mentioned to me at a party the other night, it’s not a good idea to have a legislative guy as your chief of staff because you tend to lose sight of the big picture in favor of process. Effectiveness aside, he appears to be a man unconcerned with appearances who has a bit of a penchant for using his foul mouth. In a world of polished, uptight, priggish pols, his loose manner is always entertaining, if not downright invigorating.

And despite the fact that I woke up one morning during the presidential campaign reeling from a dream in which I made out with her, I’ve always had a visceral dislike of Sarah Palin. She, the consummate politician, has applied so many coats of varnish to her personality that she can’t make a move without the veneer starting to crack and peel, revealing just how phony¹ she is underneath it all.

This is all prologue to today’s lovely nugget of political marginalia:

Palin, the mother of a child with Down’s Syndrome, called on President Barack Obama to end Emanuel’s tenure as chief of staff for having allegedly called participants in a strategy session “f—-ing retarded.”

I’m tempted to say that this entire debate is fucking retarded, but I’ll refrain—not in order to spare sensibilities, but rather because it’s not as droolingly inane and cretinous a debate as it first appears.

Attentive readers will recall that this dust-up began with the 2008 release of Tropic Thunder, a wonderfully subversive satire of Hollywood starring Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. The brilliant scene below did the yeoman’s work of offending:

Several groups representing mentally disabled people rose up and protested the film, some even urging a boycott. Most even seemed to understand that the movie’s target wasn’t the mentally disabled, but rather simply objected to the use of the word “retard’. Jerry McCarthy, the Executive Director of North Shore Arc, expressed this most explicitly:

Through the years, we have faced an uphill battle to move away from what we call the “R Word” because the word “retard” has such negative connotations from years of bullying, school yard taunting and general ignorance. I felt we were making great strides — state lawmakers recently distanced themselves from the “R word” by changing the name of the Department of Mental Retardation. As of next year, it will become the Department of Developmental Services. In a ceremony in the Oval Office in July 2003, President Bush signed an executive order changing the name of The President’s Committee on Mental Retardation to the President’s Committee on People with Intellectual Disabilities.

Fair enough, say you? The word’s offensive to many, so let’s stigmatize it out of polite usage just like we do the N-word and, say, the C-word.

Well, it’s right there that we run into trouble, and it’s telling that a thoughtless person like Palin walked right into it:

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

First and foremost, yes, both “nigger” and “retard” are terms of abuse, but only to a historical illiterate or moral degenerate can they ever be equated. Equating them as Palin does casually or as McCarthy does by implication only serves to muddy the waters by expanding the list of uniquely awful words to include merely offensive ones. An uncharitable take on Palin’s angle is that this is exactly what she is trying to do.

Secondly, as a political project for raising sensitivity towards the mentally disabled, tabooing the “R-word” is particularly ineffective. I’ve littered this essay with several synonymous (and presumably similarly offensive) constructions: “droolingly inane”, “cretinous”, even “thoughtless person”. Now I may be insensitive for doing so, but I’d wager that many readers wouldn’t even have noticed had I not just pointed them out. The category “stupid” is deeply ingrained in our language, and while we may want to be more sensitive about how we throw it about, banishing it wholesale is both impossible and undesirable.

Finally, capricious taboos have the unintended consequence of giving the taboo’d word more negative connotations than it may otherwise have had. I wrote about this almost three years ago with regards to “cunt” and feminism, and I largely stand by my musings. Do we really want to give “retard” more power than the juvenile schoolyard connotations it has today?

This is all to say that language is an immensely complicated, living system which both shapes and is defined by our politics. It’s too simplistic to say that we oughtn’t try to tamper with what we cannot fully comprehend. Thinking/writing/speaking is political, and politics is in large part a battle over language. The best we can hope to do is to always mean what we say and say what we mean. If something is so maddeningly stupid that only a schoolyard taunt will adequately express it, well then I’d argue it’s justifiably fucking retarded.²

I bought a Reatards 7” probably around 11 years ago now. Jay Reatard was an angry teenager then, releasing frenetic records which sound like they were recorded on boomboxes. I always assumed that he, like me, had been inspired by his hometown heroes The Oblivians to just go ahead and make music—ability to play instruments be damned. Unlike me, he had heavily imbibed the punk ethos at an earlier and more appropriate age. And unlike me, he kept at it.

His 2006 breakthrough record, Blood Visions, is unmistakably the product of the Reatard I was familiar with from years ago. But it’s something more. Something desperate and sad, not just angsty and frenetic. I’m downloading his much-lauded followup, Watch Me Fall, as I write this.

His passing has struck me beyond expectation. RIP Jay Reatard.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’ve migrated New Contrarian once more, this time off of GoDaddy’s cheap (though decent) servers to a dedicated box over at MediaTemple. I’ve also set it up on a WordPress MU install, which should allow me to start putting together a community of sorts if time and circumstances allow.

Look for usability enhancements to the main NC blog in the coming days, as well as a Pynchon-focused reading group early in 2010.

I’m off traveling in Canada (Niagara Falls, the Las Vegas for Ugly People, right now—Toronto tomorrow), making fixes and updates as best I can due to spotty internet access. Bear with me.

I guess you had to be there. That’s where I always end up when trying to explain the Baltimore music scene from around 1998 to 2001 to my post-Baltimore friends. These were years of reckless abandon and excess, and perhaps my memories of them have taken on this particular warm, glowing sheen due to me having seen the sun come up one too many times with a drink in my hand. These were the years of my early 20s, where some of my strongest friendships were forged. They were not necessarily the closest friendships, but it’s remarkable how easy it is for me to go back to Baltimore and instantly and warmly reconnect with people I haven’t seen for years. We shared in a great long rollicking mess of a party: fighting, fornicating, loving, playing, drinking, (some) dying. You can’t really explain that adequately.

But there was something objectively important about that period that I tend to lose in the clouds of my sentiment: the music was very good. The upcoming reunion of the Slow Jets—one of the best pop bands to come out of Charm City—got me feeling archeological. I’ve spent the past two weeks listening to almost nothing but my old friends from that period. It all holds up pretty well—and I daresay that the Slow Jets have aged best of all.

I remember at some point in early-to-mid 1999, my bandmate Hank Baker and I were driving across downtown with this new pal of ours Greg Preston, having just left Mum’s, where we had probably attempted to cure what ailed us from the night before. Greg reached into his pocket and produced a tape he had recently recorded with some of his friends.

Greg had studied music in college and had transplanted to Baltimore a few years before us. He had been in an early version of Roads to Space Travel, the band that for the first part of my Baltimore experience always seemed to be on the verge of breaking bigger. Roads, lamentably, was in the process of folding, and Greg had started playing with two of the remaining members: Roman and Tim, and a third friend of theirs from years ago, Rick.

Hank was immediately enthusiastic. I, always a little slow on the uptake, was intrigued but not necessarily floored. It sounded like jangly, angular pop—catchy enough, I thought to myself. But within a week, I literally couldn’t stop listening.

Consider “Treetops”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Listen to the winding guitar intro which simultaneously evolves and explodes into a completely different melody; the amazing fractured guitar “solo” at around second 58; the absurdist yet nevertheless affectingly melancholy lyrics; the way the song seems to barely hang together, yet actually fits together beautifully.

Or “New Sour”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For a track that clocks in under 3 minutes, it has more abrupt changes than would seem tolerable for a catchy pop song—yet they pull it off! Take note of Tim Baier’s dramatic, plaintive bass lead in and the subsequent staccato breakdown; the way that the different parts of the song seem to almost step on each other; how Roman Kuebler’s drum rolls start at strange times yet end up exactly where you expect them to, in effect outsmarting you.

Or “Run The Company”, Rick Ivy’s lyrically-driven plea for authenticity:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Or “Swan’s Way”, Greg’s shower ruminations on love and longing:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I remember seeing an early Slow Jets show one afternoon at Greg’s house in Hampden. The band set up in the living room, and we all stood around among the busted couches, eating grilled meat and drinking beer cans as this incredibly competent group of musicians ripped through their strange, off-kilter record as the sun went down. It felt like some kind of high-water mark.

A few months later, Roman had left the band to front the Oranges Band, and the Jets brought on one of the several world-class drum talents that seemed to be hanging around Baltimore at the time: the oft-bearded pummeller Marc Berrong. The resulting two albums’ worth of songs were more mature, somewhat longer, more polished and layered, perhaps a bit more straightforward, but no less compelling.

For your pleasure and approval, the anthemic “Margaret Square”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Or the harried “Heartbreak for Socialites”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Or the envelope-filtered yet hard-charging “Make it Sound”:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s remarkable how relevant and fresh these songs still sound today.

Baltimore as a music scene has blown wide open since I’ve left it. I’m pleased to see that it’s finally getting the national attention it’s deserved since at least the mid-1990s. However, the bits and pieces of the music I’ve heard which have brought my erstwhile city this level of national attention have nothing to do with what I found compelling while I was there. Dan Deacon’s collective and its various offshoots seem much more concerned with innovating for the sake of innovating than writing catchy music for the listener to enjoy.

I’m so very pleased that my friends have decided to give it another go.

It’s remarkable how Obama’s speeches are still Rorschach blots one year after he’s been elected president. Everyone sees what they’d like to see, projecting their hopes onto a president who seems to encourage just that. Judging by the commentary flying about this morning, last night’s speech was no exception. The neocons are elated that Obama has embraced a Bush-like military surge, liberal hawks are heartened that Obama is still committed to a muscular support of American values abroad, and the domestic-focused Left are despairing of their president’s inability to stop a war they feel is sapping their ability to achieve anything at home.

Mindful of the projection problem, I came away from watching the speech with an impression that runs counter to most of the conventional wisdom I’m reading today. I watched the speech with my parents who are visiting from Croatia, and all three of us were pleased by it, even moved in parts. Maybe their presence had some skewing effect on my perception, I don’t know. In any case, some thoughts:

1) This surge is not Bush-like. For one thing, there was no wrong-headed talk of victory. Even more so than in Iraq, the term is meaningless in Afghanistan. What would victory even look like? Obama’s no fool, and he doesn’t think we are either.

Along those lines, state-building as an objective was largely sidelined. The Afghans and their neighbors will have to figure out the contours of the future Afghan state for themselves, and their final arrangement is none of our concern. We’ll try to give them a strong military, which we’ll support for our counter-terrorism purposes, but we won’t get more involved than that. The one time corruption was mentioned, Obama suggested that he would bypass the feckless Karzai government and “support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people.” (Sounds like the McChrystal “Tribes” initiative to me.)

Yes, there’s going to be some applied counterinsurgency going on: cities will be protected from the bearded barbarians, and small-bore agricultural development projects will be shielded from Taliban depredations. But the goal is not to win hearts and minds for a friendly government we’re working to establish, but rather to buy time for the training of the Afghan military. This shift in emphasis is no small matter.

2) The promotion of Western values takes a shellacking. Sorry, liberal hawks, but women will continue to have a vile time in Afghanistan, existing as they do somewhere in between slaves and cattle in the rural hierarchy. Michael Crowley noted the absence of any language pertaining to human rights in the speech, and wondered if we’d be hearing a different speech if we had Hillary Clinton as president right now. I couldn’t think of a better reason to thank our lucky stars that she’s not.

It’s important not to slide into cynicism here, or to lazily elide just how bad the human rights situation is in Afghanistan. The problem is that we’re not doing anyone any good by insisting that the Afghans adopt our modern, emancipated approach. Walter Russell Mead wrote a penetrating post on this conundrum as it pertains to Pakistan a few weeks back on his blog at The American Interest (full disclosure: I work there). It applies double to Afghanistan. As I wrote in the comments:

Throughout the 20th century, Afghanistan’s history has been one of fitful modernizations and liberalizations spearheaded by Westernized elites which have met with varying degrees of pushback, often quite violent, from the rural conservative population.

The situation in Afghanistan is difficult and complex enough without adding these seemingly intractable human rights issues into the mix. The 20% or so of the Afghan population, the very people that reporters and aid workers encounter in Kabul, the people who are broadly most supportive of our efforts to date, will surely feel betrayed by us now. It’s a shame, but it’s unavoidable given the circumstances. Good work on making this hard decision, Mr. President.

3) The retrenching of America. I’m surprised so few people are talking about this, but for me it was probably the most heartening aspect of the whole speech. For the last third or so, Obama explicitly recognized that America’s ability to order the world is finite and limited, and that its still-vast resources are better invested at home than in fools’ errands abroad. “That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended—because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own,” he said. Nicely put.

The threat from Afghanistan is real enough, but the right approach is not to treat it as a problem to be solved, but rather as a crisis to be managed. The goal of the escalation in Afghanistan is to disrupt Al Qaeda enough to set up a manageable situation going forward, not to completely eliminate the conditions under which terrorists breed. This strict problem-solving mentality has bedeviled American foreign policy since George W. Bush came swaggering to power, and I’m glad to see it go.

* * *

None of these points actually address whether the plan is a good or workable one. The speech was quite short on operational details, perhaps because revealing some of these details might be disastrous to achieving our objectives. And though Obama committed to a fairly strict withdrawal deadline, a Catholic female friend of mine reminded me that “a commitment to withdrawal should not be trusted; in the heat of the moment he will want to stay until finished.” So we’ll see on the specifics.

Overall, however, this was a substantively new direction for American foreign policy that Obama has articulated. And it’s quite welcome.

Alex Massie points me to this little piece in the Guardian. It’s about how Croatians in Zagreb have overcome their government’s ban on smoking in bars and cafes by simply continuing smoking. The piece’s author, Euan Ferguson, is commendably enthusiastic about this development, but his traditional British contempt for the region shines through nonetheless:

What have the Balkans ever done for us? Until I saw this picture, I would have said pretty bloody little. Anger, wars, vampires, evil food, poisoned rivers, dictators, distrust, revenge and fear and it still features the only part of the world – mad northern Albania – where I’ve been offered a handgun for protection in a hotel because they’d lost the bedroom key.

Right back atcha, pal—what have you ever done for us? British policy in the Balkans has always been wrong-headed, hatched by the dimmest bulbs in the foreign office, whose understanding of the region seems to have come from a reading of Rebecca West’s disastrous Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and not much else. Stuff your sanctimony, pal, and ponder your own country’s turd-filled legacy to the world (Pakistan, Afghanistan, the modern Middle East come to mind) as you drift into cultural senescence and irrelevance, the distended state teat lolling about your wrinkled lips.