The Algerian Winter 2014-2015

ALGERIANTHE

After Ferguson Treating WoundsThat Never Heal

Man of the HouseChasing DarknessTigers and FliesPromise and Poverty in Brazil Breaking the Language BarrierSouth Korea and the Sewol

Featuring Glimpse from the Globe and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective

By Ilhan Dahir

Winter 2014-2015ALGERIANOSU.COM

2 | Winter 2014-2015

The Algerian is named in loving memory of Dr. Chadwick Alger (1924-2014).

4Dropping Tigers

Like Flies Reexamining China’s anti-

corruption campaign.By Jayan Nair

24All I See Are Dead

Presidents Why is there so little diversity on

America’s money, and what should we do about it? By Peter Giblin

32After Ferguson:

Identity, Race, and Justice

Taking a long look in the mirror.By Ilhan Dahir

26Brazil: All Talk and

No Game?Age-old domestic troubles rooted in poverty and inequality could

undermine Brazil’s recent bid to a serious global player.

By Sarah Montell

22Man of the House Speaker Boehner’s Legacy hasn’t been without its critics, but his

legacy is still intact.By Adam Pohlabel15

Big Government: An Enemy Until You

Need a Friend Big government isn’t always the

great evil it’s made out to be.By Dr. Steven Conn

9Opposing

ViewpointsShould the US cut aid to Thailand? By Jayan Nair and Nathanial Haas

29Chasing Darkness In today’s urban landscape, too

much light poses a greater threat than the dark.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

8Seeing Red Again

By Robin SmithSouth Korea and Sewol

By Hyeji Kim

12The Allure of Technocrats

By Max MauermanBreaking the Language

Barrier By Shannon Fillingim

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THE ALGERIAN | 3 l

After nearly half my college career this is the last one of these I’ll ever have the privilege of making.

Max and I started bouncing ideas of one another for The Algerian in April, 2013 - the end of my sophomore year. The project was always going to be massive and ambitious. It had to be. It had to be worthy of those people who came before us in this club, which by then I already knew would turn my college experience on its head. They were giants, the big kids on the playground who went on to do the things most of us dreamed of do-ing. The Algerian, in turn, was a dream of theirs, so in the space they left behind it only seemed right to approach it armed with the Big words like “endeavor” that hardly ever deserve to be used in place of the more down-to-earth everyday words like “attempt” and “try”. So it came to pass.

Since then we’ve had plenty of head-aches. We’ve seen whole months disap-pear to writer’s block epidemics, and only

Editor’s Note:

A special thanks goes out to Origins and USC’s Glimpse from the Globe for collaborating with us to bring you something even better.

when we had writers who could come down with writer’s block at that. Dr. Conn, editor of the History Department’s Origins, whose work we’re lucky enough to showcase in this edition, told me the first time I met him that there are times when the trials seem insurmountable, and that the only answer as an editor in those times, he said, was to “pedal faster.”

On certain days this project has driven me to do just that, and occasionally even to be that “best self ” we all desperately hope to be. Some days, as we measured our worth in Facebook likes and Twitter favorites, I’ve wondered whether “peddle faster” might actually be the thing to do. And then there have been others, when I’ve watched disappointment wash over the faces of the people who were brave or silly enough to stake some loyalty in this project and known perfectly well that I was the cause of that disappointment. I’ve been a walking caricature of “trying to do too much”. I’ve seen countless personal deadlines come and go.

The most lasting thing I’ve taken from this, along with the grey hairs maybe, is that people’s simple belief in those mo-ments is enough to keep the dream afloat. As long as a few people believe, we can still approach those existential questions we have to grapple with: How can we be worthy? Of Ohio State, of CCWA, of those writers and editors who’ve put so much time and efort into making this magazine a reality. And maybe more importantly: Why would any Average Joe on the street bother to read our stuf?

This year we adopted a new slogan, “Read On.” It could come of as one of those happy, self-help proverbs, along the lines of “An apple a day” and the like. But sometimes it takes a humbler tone, and it becomes almost a kind of prayer. “Read On”: May you find something here that means something to you. May you find a reason.

Paul PetersEditor in Chief

Senior Editors:

Ilhan Dahir

Max Mauerman

Jayan Nair

Associate Editors:

Shannon Fillingim

Hyeji Kim

Robin Smith

ContributingAuthors:

Adam Pohlabel Amelia SpencerClayton SharbDeAnna Miller

Emmanuel DzotsiJoe Staf

Keegan ScottMiranda Onnen

Natalie Davis Peter Giblin

Sarah MontellTodd Ives

Tyler ParkerWesley Swanson Yehia Mekawi

Yuliya Vanchosovych

twitter.com/algerianosufacebook.com/algerianosu

Marketing:

Avanti Krovi

Finance:

Sharan Pillay

The Algerian is a publication by The Collegiate Council on World Affairs.

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It’s been over a year since I wrote my analysis of the Bo Xilai afair that set the China-related blogosphere abuzz. The ensuing twelve months have seen

the comprehensive anticorruption cam-paign rapidly pick up pace. Now nearing the end of its second year, Xi Jinping’s pet project has dramatically changed the face of Chinese domestic politics. Analysis of the past year of new scandals and purges can provide some significant insights into Xi Jinping’s political calculus.

The campaign started in early 2012, be-fore Xi even officially took office, with the ouster of Chongqing public security chief Wang Lijun. Wang ostensibly stepped away from politics of his own volition, but the story was fertile ground for rumors that higher-ups had strong-armed Wang into resignation. Later that year, an investiga-tion into Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai was announced, and after a protracted legal battle, Bo was sentenced to life im-prisonment. Ph

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Dropping Tigers Like FliesReexamining China’s anti-corruption campaign.

by Jayan Nair

4 | Winter 2014-2015

THE ALGERIAN | 5 l

From there, The Xi-Li administration moved on to tackle Xu Caihou, then vice chairman of the Central Military Com-mission. Xu was the highest official to be targeted since the Deng Xiaoping era following the Cultural Revolution. Then, this past July, the government announced an investigation into Zhou Yongkang, member of the Politburo Standing Committee and former leader of China’s state-owned petroleum company. Zhou is the highest-ranking official ever to be in-vestigated on corruption charges, and his likely conviction will stand as a landmark in Chinese political history.

This most recent phase of the Xi’s quest against corruption is remarkable on multiple levels, not the least of which is its sheer scale. Upheaval so widespread that not even the highest officials are immune to criticism has not been seen since the power struggle that followed Mao’s death.

This anticorruption campaign is also significant because of the connections between the purged party members. The first target, Wang Lijun, was a devotee of Bo Xilai, having followed him from Liaoning to Chongqing. Bo Xilai, in turn, was Zhou Yongkang’s protégé, rumored to be Zhou’s chosen successor. And Zhou Yongkang had his own alliance with Xu Caihou. But the ties binding these fallen political figures go beyond personal connection: all of Xi’s targets have been aligned with the Chinese New Left. This seems to indicate clearly that Xi’s “anticorruption campaign” is a deliberate efort to root out the New Left.

The New Left’s political agenda crit-icizes many of the policies that are core to Xi Jinping’s strategy, threatening to undermine his authority if the New Left gains traction. Informed by a neo-Maoist ideology, the New Left preaches a return to peasant-led, rural-based development, emphasizing popular involvement and mass movement. New Left thinkers criticize what they see as the haphazard application of capitalism to China’s econ-omy, calling attention to ever-worsening inequality. They call for more selective application of capitalism to a fundamen-tally centralized economic policy.

To combat the leftist threat to his authority, the economically liberal Xi Jinping needed a strategy to quickly neu-tralize the New Left without calling at-tention to his political maneuvering. This strategy has been realized as his two-

pronged anti-corruption strategy: sweep-ing out the “tigers and flies”. This strategy has enabled Xi to target and eliminate New Left leaders who challenge his authority, all under the guise of rooting out high-level corruption, the so-called “tigers”. By removing those opponents, he has consolidated his control over the civil

service (Bo Xilai), military (Xu Caihou), and economy (Zhou Yongkang).

At the same time, Xi Jinping has used the campaign against the “flies” to coopt the New Left’s agenda. By declaring war on local-level corruption, Xi has mobi-lized mass public participation in politics and channeled it into frenzied support for his anticorruption campaign, keeping it from mobilizing against his own administration. In essence, he has used the New Left’s tools against them, gaining the public support he needs to secure his hold on the political elite.

The finesse with which Xi has con-ducted this purge is truly remarkable. We have seen none of the Cultural Revolution-style hyperbolism that has historically surrounded power struggles within the Party’s highest ranks. Instead, this battle against corruption has served to unite China under Xi Jinping as he quietly and methodically eliminates his enemies one by one. If there has ever been such a thing as political genius, I dare say this is it.u

This strategy has enabled Xi to target and eliminate New Left leaders who challenge his authority, all under the guise of rooting out high-level corruption.

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Jayan Nair is a third year pursuing a B.S. in Political Science and Chinese. He is a Senior Editor and consistent contributor for The Algerian.

With midterm elections around the corner and the battle for the Senate dominating the head-

lines, few in the media are paying much attention to the House of Representatives. And who can blame them? Republicans are virtually assured of an increase in their already solid majority, and the House leadership – other than a rather shocking primary loss by former Ma-jority Leader Eric Cantor – seems fairly secure. Years of intraparty battles within the G.O.P. appear to have finally subsided to a manageable level and Republicans

are poised to seize the initiative if the Senate changes hands. All in all, it looks like business as usual in the House.

At the head of it all is Speaker of the House John Boehner. Few politicians have taken as much flak from both the left and right – depending on who you ask, he may be a heartless con-servative elitist or a spineless Republi-can-in-name-only – as Speaker Boehner and been able to hold on to power. The Ohio Republican needs to lead the G.O.P. in an increasingly partisan and divided Congress. Not only that, but the Tea Party wave that he rode to his gavel

has turned into a source of frustration and often outright hostility as Speaker Boehner, a man made wise through years of experience, has been forced to herd conservative firebrands to manageable positions. Now, after over twenty years in Congress and many predicting that he may step down after the next term, the media is still trying to figure out the Speaker’s future plans and whether or not his legacy will be one of success.

Only Speaker Boehner and his family could speak to his personal plans, and he’s keeping fairly quiet on that ques-tion. The only hints he’s dropped have Ph

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Man of the HouseSpeaker Boehner’s tenure hasn’t been without its critics,

but his legacy is still intact.by Adam Pohlabel

6 | Winter 2014-2015

THE ALGERIAN | 7 l

come in the form of denying ambition for the presidency, notably telling Jay Leno, “I like to play golf, I like to cut my own grass…drink red wine. I smoke cigarettes. And I’m not giving that up to be the President of the United States.” Having attained the pinnacle of legis-lative power and becoming one of the most influential men in D.C., the Speaker is content without seeking the highest office in the land. As far as his future in Congress is concerned, Speaker Boehner faces the choice of retiring in 2016 or sticking around for another few terms. If he decides to stay, he likely will have little real trouble keeping the Speakership, assuming Republicans retain control of the House. Most of the ultra-right rep-resentatives who have posed a threat in the past have either been mollified or si-lenced; though he is more moderate than some, it’s difficult to paint the Speaker as anything but a solid conservative – some-thing his longshot primary opponent J.D. Winteregg learned the hard way, and most members of the Republican caucus stand with him. If Republicans take the Senate in November, it would allow the party an opportunity to present President Obama with a unified legislature and give them a much stronger position at the negotiating table. On the other hand, Speaker Boehner has been in elected office for a long time. His years at the ros-trum haven’t been easy: Congress since 2011 has been characterized by extreme partisanship, intra-party warfare, and political brinksmanship. Few would covet such a stressful position.

Speculation, while entertaining, is rarely a fruitful exercise in politics. A more worthwhile discussion should be held over whether or not Speaker Boeh-ner will leave behind a legacy of success or failure. There have been numerous reasons to question the Ohio Republi-can’s efectiveness – perhaps most notably that the past two Congresses have been the least productive in our nation’s histo-ry. In many ways, this is due to the rise of the uncompromisingly conservative Tea Party, a group that rarely pays heed to the advice of long-time politicians when it comes to political accommodation or strategy, instead favoring a “my way or the highway” approach. In a time of divided government, with the two houses of Congress being held by opposing parties, the legislative process relies on both sides being amenable to compro-

mise. With the Tea Party controlling a significant portion of his caucus, the Speaker, once considered something of an anti-establishment figure himself with the “Gang of Seven”, is put in the unenviable position of being forced to negotiate legislation with much less room for bargaining.

Speaker Boehner, while steadily

advancing his own beliefs, has in fact demonstrated a remarkable – at least in this day and age – willingness to work to-gether with his colleagues across the aisle in moments of crisis. He has engaged in debt-ceiling brinkmanship to further the Republican cause and oversaw the first government shutdown in over a decade, but the Speaker also has shown true political courage in leading the push to reopen the government against the demands of the far-right members of his caucus, even breaking with tradition to cast a vote himself. The Speaker has also been unafraid to criticize the more intransigent conservative groups that pushed the government to a shutdown, going so far as to say they’ve “lost all credibility” for going through with the obviously futile attempt to eliminate the Afordable Care Act – an accusation that didn’t do much to help his approval within the G.O.P. caucus. Time and time again in the House, he has refused to cave to the more hardline Republicans, instead favoring approaches that couple solid conservative values with the ability to create meaningful, workable legisla-tion. Throughout his career, both as a representative and leader of the House, Speaker Boehner has demonstrated that being a strong Republican does not mean sacrificing the good of the country for your ideology.u

Adam Pohlabel is a first year majoring in Political Science and Economics.

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Though he is more moderate than some, it’s difficult to paint the Speaker as anything but a solid conservative – something his longshot primary opponent J.D. Winteregg learned the hard way.

8 | Winter 2014-2015

US media coverage of Russia over the past few months has been largely disappointing. It’s relied on stereotypes and lacked historical context, revealing a shameful

ignorance of both Russia and Vladimir Putin. This inaccurate coverage has created several common misconceptions about current Russian politics.

Journalists (and readers) have begun to assume that Putin is an idiot simply because they disagree with Putin’s policies and actions. However, Putin, just like most other world leaders, is calculating and meticulous—he knows exactly what he is doing, even if Western onlookers don’t like it. A foreign leader could not veto critical UN Security Council resolutions, ban signif-icant imports, and annex part of a sovereign nation without weighing the costs and benefits carefully.

Through these actions, Putin seems to be appealing to na-tionalist sentiments in order to increase his popularity among Russians. His actions come at a time when the Russian economy is stagnating, so he must find other ways to garner domestic support. On the international stage, Putin certainly has act-ed unwisely, but he has been strategic on the domestic front. Ultimately, what matters most to Putin is not the international community, but Russia.

The portrayal of Putin as seeking to recreate the Soviet Union has reverberated throughout Western media. This statement lacks both nuance and historical accuracy. To begin with, Putin would never seek to recreate the economic system of the Soviet Union. History has shown that the Soviet economic system does not work – imagine trying to regulate an entire economy using an input-output matrix. In fact, because Russia makes money of its “nation champions” (state-owned gas and oil companies), Russia is able to maintain a flat 13% income tax. Keep in mind that most Americans pay about a 25% income tax.

Putin does not wish “to recreate the USSR” in an economic or a political sense; instead, he seeks to exert Russian influence over former members of the Soviet Union, but has failed spectacu-larly thus far. Both Belarus and Kazakhstan have stated they will simply leave the Eurasian Union if Russia ever tries to interfere in their political afairs—which is a mark of Russia’s weakness, not strength. Furthermore, the annexation of Crimea seems to have come from Putin’s desire to increase Russian nationalism in order to garner domestic political support, and perhaps to create the appearance of Russia’s strength, not to recreate the Soviet Union.

Labeling Putin’s desire to exert Russian influence as his desire to “recreate the Soviet Union” is not only a problem of seman-tics; it is inaccurate in its simplicity and laziness.

Few articles discuss Russia’s historical relationship with Ukraine in depth, yet understanding the historical context of this relationship is critical to understanding Russia’s behavior today. Putin’s decision to interfere in a sovereign nation was not made on a whim. Ukraine and Russia have been linked since the late 800’s CE – in fact, many Russians consider Kiev the first cap-ital of Russia. For hundreds of years, however, Western Europe and Russia have played tug-of-war with Ukraine as the coveted prize.

Many Ukrainians, especially those in the western half of the country who have been historically closer to Europe, associate Russia with imperial and later Soviet repression. In the eastern half of the country, tied more closely with Russia, a diferent attitude prevails. Many Ukrainians in that region (who typi-cally speak Russian) see Russia as a cultural brother and more importantly, as an economic protector. In other words, as the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Serhy Yekelchyk puts it, what it comes down to is historical national identity in these two regions. For Ukrainians in the west “a strong national identity and independent state has historically been connected with the European choice” while in the east, “it is not that the Ukrainian identity is weak, but that the pro-Western and democratic choice associated with it does not receive the kind of financial and logistical support from the West that Russia ofers to its propo-nents.”

Yes, entering a sovereign nation’s borders is a flagrant viola-tion of international law, and although the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine is no excuse for this violation, it certainly provides context and partial explanation for Russia’s interference in the region.

In order to understand Vladimir Putin’s actions, both jour-nalists and readers must attempt to understand current events through a culturally sensitive and historically nuanced lens. By underestimating Putin and generalizing Russia, we only perpet-uate ignorance – and move further away from the answers we seek.u

Robin Smith is a Sophomore double majoring in Political Science and Russian. She is an Associate Editor for The Algerian.

Seeing Red

Againby Robin Smith

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Opposing ViewpointsShould the United States have cut aid to Thailand?

in collaboration with Glimpse from the Globe

Beloved newscaster Walter Cronkite once said, “In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.” In keeping with our mis-

sion to provide insightful, well-rounded discus-sion of world afairs, we have teamed up with our sister publications at other universities to foster intermural dialogue and debate about key inter-national issues. In this inaugural installment, The Algerian senior editor Jayan Nair faces of against Nathaniel Haas, a writer for Glimpse from the Globe out of University of Southern California, to debate whether or not the United States was jus-tified in cutting of military aid to Thailand after this year’s coup in the Southeast Asian nation. We invite you to read both arguments for yourself and make your own conclusions.

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When scholars talk about political revolutions happen-ing overnight, they usually

speak figuratively. And yet, at 3am on May 22nd, Thailand suddenly became a military dictatorship.

Yingluck Shinawatra, who was elected Prime Minister of Thailand in 2011, had been removed days earlier by court order. The Thai military, led by Gen. Prayuth Chan-Ocha, took over on May 22nd and created a junta, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), to rule the country. Thai citizens awoke to tanks on street corners.

The most recent takeover is the 18th successful coup since 1932, when Thai-land became a Constitutional Monarchy. This is largely a result of the military’s large role in the political sphere com-bined with the constant failure of democ-racy to flourish in a meaningful capacity.

The United States should maintain aggressive responses to dictatorships like the NCPO in Thailand. The dictatorship in Thailand might not be incredibly vio-lent or pose a large threat to the United States, but as a matter of principle and establishing credibility to deal with actors that are violent and threatening, the dic-tatorship in Thailand should be opposed with equal force.

One of the first things Congress should do upon their return is to revoke all military aid unless things change for the better. Each year, Thailand receives $10.5 million in “security-based” foreign aid, an umbrella term that includes military and direct economic aid. Thus far, the strongest signal the US has sent the new dictatorship is cutting only $3.5 million in “Foreign Military Financ-ing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) funds.” Cutting health, counterterrorism and nonproliferation aid, which the country also receives, is less important. North Ko-

rea, for example, receives food aid from the United States for fear that its people will starve otherwise. But strong reasons remain for the continued suspension of military exercises and aid: it is ethical, re-quired by law and proven to be efective at deposing the military dictatorship.

The ruling military government has shown a complete disregard for demo-cratic freedoms. They engaged in a full-scale censorship campaign that includes removing former leaders’ names from new editions of history books. Addition-ally, The official in charge says the remov-al is an unexplained mistake. The country now joins China and North Korea in the circle of Asian countries who have vied to erase past leaders from the historical record.

Additionally, the NCPO upheld a pro-hibition on all forms of government crit-icism. In the months since, organizations like Human Rights Watch have detailed the detention of over 300 opposition party leaders and activists and the mas-sive censorship over the media. Those detained included Kritsuda Khunasen, an opposition leader who described being beaten until she lost consciousness during her one-month detention at a military camp. Actions punishable under lèse-majesté (a French term that refers to violating the dignity of the sovereign) law by a two-year prison term include play-ing the French national anthem, covering one’s mouth with duct tape and reading 1984 in public.

How can the United States consis-tently and credibly oppose human rights violations at the hands of actors such as IS, North Korea and Syria (none of which receive security-based aid), if we con-tinue to prop up Thailand? Not only will the countries we do decide to forcefully oppose take our actions and threats less seriously, but we will also be unable to convince allies and international partners to join us in that opposition if we selec-tively ignore the actions of small nations like Thailand. Though small, the efec-tiveness of United States diplomacy and soft power will be particularly reduced in the ASEAN region, a critical area for US geostrategy.

Irrespective of the treatment of Thai citizens and ethical questions, the Congressional 1961 Foreign Assistance Act requires the suspension of aid. In section 508, in no uncertain terms, the law mandates that the US cut aid to any

nation where a “duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup,” pending the return of civilian rule. This policy was strengthened to include coun-tries that commit human rights violations by the Leahy Amendments, which were passed in 2008. In the past, the US has evaded the law’s mandate by refusing to dub certain overthrows as “coups,” most recently in the case of Egypt. But even Egypt eventually saw its entire securi-ty aid budget disappear as the nation descended further into chaos, and so too should it be in the case of Thailand.

Proponents of maintaining some aid cite diplomacy as a more credible approach than sanctions, especially with a nation like Thailand, which remains a military partner in Asia for huge naval exercises like Cobra Gold, which plays a large role in East Asian readiness. However, this is a feckless strategy that ignores recent history: the total suspen-sion ($29 million worth, compared to the $3 million that’s been suspended since May) of development and military aid in 2006 (health and counterterrorism aid were some of the few projects that were understandably maintained) led to the end of military rule in just 18 months, and even some scholars say that action wasn’t harsh enough.

The central tension at home seems to be between think tanks and the State Department on one side – who, today, as in 2006, favor further aid restrictions and the cessation of military exercises – and the military, which has historically been vulnerable to threats from the Thai mili-tary to move closer to China in the event of an aid cutof, and thus more willing to support continued military engagement. Those defense officials, and, to some extent, high-level government officials like Secretary of State John Kerry, fear China will exert more influence over Thailand in the event of a suspension of ties. But the US can’t have its cake and eat it too. As long as the historical record shows that the suspension of aid has been successful in restoring civilian rule in Thailand, that is the policy that should be maintained: supporting a military dictatorship and clinging to an outdated, Cold War-era military posturing strategy should not.u

Nathaniel Haas is a third year double ma-joring in Political Science and Economics at the Universiy of Southern Calfornia.

YESThe US should

have cut military aid to Thailand.

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On May 22, 2014, General Prayuth Chan-ocha announced that “in order for the country to return to

normality quickly, and for society to love and be at peace again,” the Thai military would replace Yingluck Shinawatra’s coa-lition as the government of Thailand. The takeover was the culmination of political unrest and continual protests for the better part of a decade. Appointed acting prime minister by a military junta, Gen-eral Chan-ocha established the Council of Reform and laid out a fifteen-month timeline for restoring Thailand’s democ-racy.

Within just a few days, the US State Department responded by cancelling more than $3.5 million in military aid to Thailand. American officials cited the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which restricts “assistance to the government of

any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree”, as justification for terminating the aid.

This law is an anachronism from a bygone era and needs to be cut from our contemporary foreign policy. The policy displays the remnants of a false dichoto-my between democracy and dictatorship: the idea that democracies are inherently pro-America, while non-democracies are innately aligned against the United States. If this heuristic was ever accurate, its relevance died with the Cold War.

Military aid serves the indispensable function of building strategic interstate alliances. That is, it serves a fundamen-tally geopolitical purpose. With the Cold War era of bipolar international politics behind us, geopolitical decisions can no longer be boiled down to simplistic judgments based on political ideology. Instead, we must evaluate the allocation of American military aid through the lens of the current geopolitical climate.

In 2011 the Obama administration announced a so-called “pivot to Asia” (though some officials favored the term “re-balancing”). Subtleties of terminology aside, this policy addressed the grow-ing concern that the United States was neglecting its interests in the Asia-Pacific region. By reallocating its resources to fo-

cus more on Asia, the government would supposedly be able to shore up alliances and reaffirm American commitment to Asian-Pacific security.

This would have been all well and good if the pivot had actually happened. However, the United States has repeat-edly failed to meet its commitments in Southeast Asia. This neglect was high-lighted most conspicuously by President Obama’s absence from the high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 2013 due to the government shutdown. Such signals of flagging com-mitment have given the Chinese govern-ment ample opportunity to strengthen ties in the region, pushing out American influence.

In the context of the quiet but very real power struggle between the US and China, it is clear that the United States cannot aford to lose any friends in Southeast Asia – at least not if it wants to maintain its hegemony in the region. As long as the Thai military junta is not directly opposed to America, it makes no sense to alienate the new Thai govern-ment by withholding aid.

This restriction of aid is born out of the misconception that all military take-overs betray an ideological tilt, that coups are a sort of personal attack on the ideals of democracy. But I would posit that the majority of coups in Southeast Asia are not motivated by any animosity towards democracy in the abstract, but by a very concrete desire for stability. In situations like Thailand’s, a coup d’état replaces a highly dysfunctional government with a temporary, stopgap measure.

The Thai military has taken what was a highly volatile situation, prone to breeding the kind of radicalism that directly threatens status quo powers like the United States, and provided a stable institutional framework from which to rebuild the country. Far from punishing them for stepping in, we should come to their aid and encourage the development of sound political institutions that will be favorably inclined towards our inter-ests in the region. We need to cultivate alliances in Southeast Asia, and as the proverbial beggar we cannot aford to be choosy based on superficial notions about ideology.u

Jayan Nair is a third year double majoring in Political Science and Chinese. He is a Senior Editor of The Algerian.

NOThe US shouldn’t have cut military aid to Thailand.

In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hen-drickson’s gripping portrait of Robert McNamara and the war he helped

shape, the former Secretary of Defense is shown most efectively through the eyes of those he most afected: A Quaker man who was driven to self-immolate on the Pentagon lawn, a helicopter pilot whose grief was immortalized in a Life magazine story, and an artist who almost killed McNamara in a fit of rage during a chance encounter at Martha’s Vineyard. All paint a vastly diferent picture of Mc-Namara than the man’s own biography as Hendrickson shares it. Nothing in the story of McNamara’s working-class Irish upbringing, his academic success at UC Berkeley and Harvard, his star tenure as a Ford Motor executive and his subsequent recognition by the Kennedy administra-tion seems to presage the hubris and folly that would define him as Secretary of Defense. In short, you’re left wondering “Where did a man this intelligent and capable go wrong?

The sickening answer is that in the eyes of the administration, he probably never went wrong. Despite rumors to the contrary, it was most likely McNamara’s conscience that drove him to leave the Pentagon, not any act on Kennedy’s part. McNamara maintained his administra-tion-pleasing façade up until the very end – dispassionate, competent and armed

with quantitative data. He seemed to treat the war like a particularly tricky logistics problem. His failure may seem clear today, but I don’t think we’ve ever gotten over his idea of what a leader should be. Thus is the allure of the technocrats – even when they are proven wrong, we cannot resist the ideal they ofer. When the modern world presents problems too large to grasp, our first instinct is to look for a manager to make sense of them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in my own field, economics. It’s little surprise that McNamara went on to head the World Bank, another organization that’s been plagued by its own certainty throughout history. Economists’ world-view makes it easy to conflate technical solutions and social problems, sidelining ethical and practical issues. I once had a professor whom I otherwise very much admire suggest, straight-faced, that it might be a good idea to transfer fiscal policy to an unelected authority (a la the Fed for monetary policy) if it could pre-vent a recession. That such a profoundly undemocratic idea could survive in the field is a picture of how economists still buy into the idea of a superior political manager.

The dangerous appeal of the techno-crat transcends ideology. Yes, well-de-served horror stories abound of Sovi-et-era “scientific socialism”, but plenty of

examples exist on the other side of the economic spectrum – consider Milton Friedman and Gary Becker’s support of the Pinochet regime in Chile, thanks solely to its neoliberal economic policy. I think the desire for certainty and a clear system lies deeper than political views.

None of this is meant to demonize McNamara – my sense is that he genu-inely regretted his actions in Vietnam, and under his leadership the World Bank made the admirable shift toward poverty reduction and disease prevention. I’m not concerned with exploring the man’s conscience. Rather, I’m concerned with the institutional values that led to his rise and his misuse of power. I think the near-reverent attitude that we Americans tend to have toward managers surely played a part. I see that same attitude reflected today in debates not only over national security but over education pol-icy, public health, welfare, international development and many more areas. The appeal of a totalizing, logical system by which we can manage any aspect of governance will not go away easily. True leadership, however, should come from a place of humility – not just over what we can accomplish, but over what we can know.u

Max Mauerman is a Senior Editor for The Algerian.

The Allure of Technocratsby Max Mauerman

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Though President Roosevelt’s words seem hopelessly outdated, movements within the last two years to make English the singular official language of United States institutions like courts, schools, and government protocol prove that the English-only push is alive and well. Proponents of the theory like the group ProEnglish argue that in a pluralistic nation like the United States, the role of government should be to focus on the similarities that unite Americans and thus preserve English as America’s com-mon, unifying language.

In reality, it’s not uncommon for Americans to be bilingual. In a 2012 article published in Psychology Today, Francis Grosjean noted that while the US Census Bureau does not keep track of bilingualism (unlike other countries like, say, Canada), language questions on cen-suses since 1980 have demonstrated the spread of bilingual Americans. In 2007, the American Community Survey found that just over 55 million individuals in America spoke a language other than English at home; of those 55 million, 51 million also knew and used English and were therefore bilingual. This chunk of 51 million bilingual Americans represents 18 percent of the population—and if we include the number of bilingual chil-dren under the age of 5 in the bilingual calculus, we reach a figure about 20% of

the American population. Yet even this survey falls short of reflecting the true proportion of bilingual Americans; as Michael Erard points out in a 2012 New York Times article, survey questions that ask about languages spoken inside the home miss out on the thousands of individuals who use some language other than English in some capacity in the workplace. A better indicator of multiple language proficiency, suggests Erard, is the model used by the European Com-mission in 2006. In this survey, the Com-mission asked respondents about ability to hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue.

Instead of being united by a single language, we are united by a system of values that necessarily includes the confluence of cultures. It’s not a new idea

that the United States is a nation found-ed on the hope of a better life for those fleeing their home country; by refusing to extend the promise of this same hope to contemporary immigrants, we lose the essential part of American values.

Mario Vargas Llosa echoes this point in his 2006 article “A wall of lies,” pub-lished in the Spanish newspaper El País. Vargas Llosa writes that the worst part of life for an immigrant to the United States was not the physical sufering the woman and her husband endured prior to com-ing to the United States. Instead, accord-ing to the woman herself, “the worst part was that there was no hope that life would get better in the future. This is the main diference in the United States.” This is it, the American dream: when you work hard, life will get better here.

Americans don’t lose anything as a result of cultural exchange. Rather, we deepen our understanding of our own values, the essence of which lie in a confluence of cultures anyway – and with the fall of imperialism and the rise of globalization, we’ve come to realize that “polyglot boarding house” doesn’t sound so bad. In the end, Ariel Dorfman may have put it best: by embracing multilin-gualism Americans don’t lose Shake-speare, but rather gain Cervantes.u

Shannon Fillingim is an Associate Editor.

Breaking the Language

Barrier

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “We have room for but one lan-guage in this country and that is the English language, for we intend to see

that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.”

by Shannon Fillingim

We are united by a system of values that necessarily includes the confluence of cultures.

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One of The Algerian’s goals is to bring together the finest non-academic writing on campus - smart writing that’s also readable. With that in mind we’ve partnered with the Department of History to bring you informed commentary on how we’ve come to inherit our current circumstances, and what history can teach us about where to go now. We’re proud to present Origins in print for the first time.

Big Government: An Enemy Until You Need a Friend

“For insight into the complicated and complicating events... one needs perspective, not attitudes; context, not anecdotes; analyses, not postures. For any kind of lasting illumination the focus must be on the history routinely ignored or played down or unknown.” — Toni Morrison

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We live at a moment in Amer-ican politics when there has never been more anger

directed toward “big government,” and that anger has boiled over during the last several election cycles. For some of those angry Americans, the federal government has usurped the role of state and local governments ever since the New Deal of the 1930s. Others fulminate that anything the federal government does amounts to an existential threat to their liberty.

So with another round of federal elections looming, let’s start with three vignettes to help illustrate the problem Americans have understanding the role of the federal government in American life:

1) At a town hall meeting in Simpson-ville, South Carolina hosted by Repub-lican Congressman Robert Inglis in the summer of 2009, an angry senior citizen thundered: “keep your government hands of my Medicare.”

2) In April 2013, Kentucky Republi-can Senator and Tea Party darling Rand Paul traveled across Washington, D.C. to deliver a speech to students at Howard University, perhaps the most venerable of the nation’s historical black colleges. He told them, among other things, that “big government” had failed African Ameri-cans.

3) In July 2008 David Koch, billionaire energy magnate and funder of libertarian political causes, pledged $100 million to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. In return the theater was renamed “The David H. Koch Theater.”

The first of these scenes is a risibly obvious example of the ignorance some Americans have about the place of government programs even in their own lives, and plenty of people have poked fun at that sputtering geriatric from South Carolina. Even Congressman In-glis, no friend of the federal government or of the Obama administration, seemed a little exasperated: “I had to politely explain,” he told a reporter afterward, “that ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.’ But he wasn’t having any of it.”

Senator Paul’s speech in front of a group of African American college students was a breathtakingly obtuse misunderstanding of the role the federal government has played in the history of black civil rights. Senator Paul regularly denounces the reach of the federal gov-ernment as an intrusion on the rights of the states, but he can’t quite acknowledge that “states rights” was responsible for the creation of Jim Crow segregation, nor can he acknowledge that our system of American apartheid was broken, finally, in large part because of the actions of the all three branches of the federal govern-ment.

My third vignette about how we misunderstand government resides in the department of irony. David Koch is ap-parently a big fan of opera and ballet and he has been a regular patron at Lincoln Center over the years. His philanthropy was, at one level, an act of generosity toward the arts that he loves.

At another level, of course, it gave him the opportunity to create his own legacy by putting his name on what is arguably the center of the cultural life of New York, which is arguably the center of the nation’s cultural life. A kid from Wichita, Kansas, Koch wanted to buy himself a piece of New York cultural cachet.

But Lincoln Center itself was created as part of a large-scale urban renewal project in the early 1960s and partial-ly funded by the federal government.

Whether he recognized it or not, David Koch put his name on a pure piece of “big government.”

These three stories – and I could have chosen any of a dozen others from the past few years – demonstrate that there has never been more confusion about what the federal government does, how it does it, and why.

At its root, that confusion is histori-cal: the three people at the center of my little stories – the angry senior, the angry senator, and the angry billionaire – each misunderstand the role the federal gov-ernment has played in creating the nation we inhabit today, whether in health care, civil rights, or cultural achievement.

In fact, the federal government has from its inception been an active force in American life across a wide range of sectors. An activist federal government is as old as the nation itself, and that history demonstrates how seriously the federal government has pursued its Constitu-tional charge “to promote the general welfare.”

In 1996 former Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen (R-Maine) famously quipped, “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.” And for over two hundred years many Ameri-cans—from the largest of businesses to the most dispossessed of citizens—have benefited in all sorts of ways from that friendship.

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Current Events in Historical Perspective

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Government Intervention, American Tradition

When the First Congress of the Unit-ed States assembled in 1789, the

first major piece of legislation it passed involved an intervention in the economy and raising taxes. The Hamilton Tarif, named because it was championed by Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, slapped a tax on a range of imported manufactured products.

The tarif had two goals: first, it was designed to raise revenue so the new government could pay of its debts; and second, it was supposed to stimulate domestic industry by making imported goods more expensive. Call it an eco-nomic stimulus package, 18th-century style. And by and large the Hamilton Tar-if achieved its goals. Money was raised and American producers, especially in northern urban centers, grew.

The Hamilton Tarif was by no means an anomaly. In fact, it is worth remem-bering that the Constitution itself was written and adopted so that the federal government could take a more active role in promoting American economic growth (the Articles of Confederation having proved a miserable failure for the economy).

Just three years later, in 1792, Con-gress created what was then a huge new national program when it passed the Postal Act. The act didn’t merely create a postal system, the most important means of communication at the turn of the 19th century. It guaranteed privacy for our mail and it permitted newspapers to travel through the post.

The Postal Act helped tie a far-flung nation together and permitted news to travel even into the American hinter-land. Our 1st amendment guarantees of freedom of expression and freedom of the press are splendid abstract principles. The Postal Act made those principles real for Americans and allowed them to be put to work.

Across the 19th century, the federal government acted in a variety of ways to stimulate American growth. Once he became president, Thomas Jeferson,

perhaps the founder most suspicious of big government, used the power of the office to expand the nation through the Louisiana Purchase. He imagined that this government acquisition would pro-vide farmland for countless generations of American yeoman farmers.

His ideological successor, Andrew Jackson, used federal authority to remove Native people from their homeland, marching them brutally on the Trail of Tears. Thus did he clear space for south-ern farmers and slave owners to prosper.

The Civil War certainly marks the most dramatic expansion of federal power in the 19th century. As Americans have been marking the 150th anniversary of that conflict, we have been reminded that in order to prosecute the war Presi-dent Abraham Lincoln instituted military conscription, suspended habeas corpus rights, and started printing paper money. It is worth stating forthrightly: this creation of big government was necessary to end the institution of slavery . Had we left the question to the states, as South-erners regularly demanded, slavery might have lasted a great deal longer.

But fighting the war was not all Congress did during those years. In 1862, Congress enacted three pieces of legis-lation intended “to promote the general welfare” that still resonate today.

When Congress wanted to facilitate the expansion of the nation westward and to stimulate the transportation network necessary for this, it chartered the Union

Pacific and Central Pacific railroad corporations. The terms of this charter should strike us today as extraordinary. Congress loaned money to these private corporations on very generous terms. Even more than that, it granted free land to the two railroads—to the tune of 20 square miles for every mile of track laid! —that they could turn around and sell to raise capital.

The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, and it simply wouldn’t have happened without that public support. The railroads did not build themselves.

At the same moment, Congress passed the Homestead Act. That act enabled settlers in the trans-Mississippi to lay claim to 160 acres each. If they farmed it for 5 years, the land was theirs. For free! (The Homestead was joined by other acts that opened up ranching and timbering as well.) The Homestead Act became one the greatest land giveaways in human history.

It turns out that those rugged pioneers of American myth traveled west on fed-erally subsidized railroads to settle land given to them by the federal government. And once out in the west, those railroad networks and those settlers were protect-ed by federal troops who, between 1865 and 1890, engaged in continuous military action against native people. This is how the west was won.

Congress wasn’t finished in 1862. The third of its big initiatives in that year

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was the Morrill Land Grant Act. This act gave federally owned land to individual states in exchange for the promise that states would sell or use revenue from the land to establish universities. Collectively we call them “the land grants” and they amount to nothing less than the greatest democratization of higher education ever.

We can measure the economic impact of those railroad charters and of the Homestead Act, but the value to the nation—economic, social, cultural, and intellectual—of the land grants is incalculable. I say this from personal experience because I am lucky enough to teach at one.

Transportation, agriculture, educa-tion, communication.

All four were profoundly reshaped by the actions of the federal government in the 19th century because the American people, through the elected representa-tives they sent to Washington, believed this was how to promote the general welfare.

The Roosevelt Revolution (TR, that is)

In the late 19th century, the federal gov-ernment continued to help the growth

of American business in any number of ways. Indeed, during this era, the Ameri-can economy grew to become the largest in the world and that would not have happened without the help of the federal government.

In the 1880s the Supreme Court ruled on “corporate personhood,” granting corporate enterprises extraordinary Con-stitutional protections. Titans of industry who preached “laissez-faire” economic dogma did not hesitate to call upon gov-ernment troops to suppress their workers when they went on strike . And, in 1890, Congress passed yet another tarif on im-ported goods, this one a whopping 50% tax in order to protect domestic industry.

They called it the “McKinley Tarif ” after the Ohio Congressman who spon-sored it and it was designed to protect American industry from foreign com-petition. American businesses preferred

their laissez-faire to be situational: no government interference when it suited them; lots of government intervention when they needed it. Six years later, Wil-liam McKinley was repaid handsomely for his service to big business when they funded his presidential campaign.

Theodore Roosevelt was among a younger generation of politicians and reformers who watched the spectacular rise of industrial capitalism, aided gen-erously by the federal government, with real skepticism. When he accidentally became president in 1901 after McKin-ley’s assassination, he brought new ideas

about the role government ought to play to the White House.

Roosevelt looked at the landscape of American life at the turn of the 20th century and saw that ordinary citizens were more or less powerless in the face of enormous corporations that con-trolled everything from their wages to the price of consumer goods. The only force in American life strong enough to push back, he concluded, was the federal government.

So if the private sector was going to receive all kinds of support from gov-ernment, Roosevelt announced that the

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people would also get protection from corporations through the mechanisms of the federal government. Roosevelt called it his “Square Deal” for the Amer-ican people, summarized with three “C’s”: conservation of natural resources (against the depredations of timber, mining and other extractive companies); control of corporations; and consumer protection.

This was the bargain TR laid out: big business could continue to grow and prosper and enjoy all sorts of public sup-port, but in exchange they would accept some measure of legal limitations and regulatory controls. If they didn’t play by the new rules, Roosevelt threatened, they might find themselves in court.

Then as now, big business howled at what they saw as over-reaching feder-al imposition. Most of the rest of us, I suspect, are pretty pleased that our food supply is safe because of the Food and Drug Administration, created by Roosevelt in 1906 after the horrifying conditions of the meat packing industry had been exposed.

Barry Goldwater, Republican Senator from Arizona, and GOP presidential candidate in 1964, famously said that “individual initiative made the desert bloom” in the western part of the coun-try. He was right. Plenty of hard working settlers took that journey (on federally subsidized railroads) to farm hard-scrab-ble land in the west (which they received through the Homestead Act).

In his ringing call to individuality, however, Goldwater neglected to men-tion that without the Newlands Reclama-tion Act of 1902, which created massive and expensive dam and irrigation projects throughout the region and thus provided federally subsidized water to those farmers, no amount of hard work would have made the desert bloom.

Goldwater is regarded as the godfa-ther of today’s anti-government politics because of his angry denunciations of big government and his celebration of indi-vidualism. He is the godfather of those politics as well because of his profound historical amnesia.

The Roosevelt Revolution Part II (FDR This Time)

For those Americans angry at the federal government, Franklin Delano

Roosevelt is a four-letter word.There is no question that Franklin

Roosevelt’s New Deal expanded the scope of government activity and its reach into American life. Nor is there any question that the scale and scope of the crisis he faced when he moved into the White House in 1933 was unprecedented and that FDR had a mandate to do what he did. Americans waited for nearly three years for President Herbert Hoover to do something that might reverse the Great Depression. He failed, and the voters punished him for it.

We can think of FDR’s New Deal—that vast array of initiatives, agencies, and projects they called “alphabet soup” because of all the acronyms—as trying to accomplish two things.

First, FDR wanted to rescue Ameri-can capitalism from its own cupidity by reforming and stimulating it. The Secu-rities Exchange Commission (SEC), for example, promised to bring oversight and honesty to the stock market in order to avoid the kind of disastrous bubble that triggered the economic collapse in 1929.

Likewise, Roosevelt created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) because so many ordinary Amer-icans had lost their life savings when their banks failed. Not only did the FDIC insure depositors’ money, which it still does, but in so doing it restored confi-dence in the entire banking system.

No sector of the economy was stim-ulated more by the New Deal, however, than housing construction. The Great Depression brought the housing industry to a virtual standstill. As a result thou-sands were laid of and a housing crisis grew as virtually no new housing units entered the market.

FDR’s solution was to use public money to guarantee private home mort-gages through the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). This opened up the mortgage market to large num-

bers of Americans who would otherwise not have been able to purchase a home and, in turn, it created a demand for new housing.

And it worked: by 1970 nearly two-thirds of American families owned their own homes, thanks to the largesse of the federal government, and housing con-struction had become a major indicator of the health of the overall economy.

There was much that was “new” about the New Deal, but there was much that continued the patterns set out in the 19th century. HOLC and FHA, in the way they promote private home ownership, can be seen as updated versions of the Home-stead Act.

The second broad aspect of the New Deal was certainly new.

Under FDR the United States began to develop the rudiments of a social welfare state. When anti-government activists rail against the New Deal it isn’t the mortgage subsidies or the SEC they have in mind, it’s the social welfare programs.

We ought to remember that these programs were modest and that FDR re-sisted them as long as he could. Only po-litical pressure brought to bear on behalf of the millions of Americans in desperate straits convinced him to initiate employ-ment programs like the Works Progress Administration .

The most enduring of these New Deal social welfare programs is Social Security. This too was an old idea, and the United States was among the last of the indus-trialized nations to adopt an old-age pension system.

Social Security was denounced by conservatives as paternalistic and insult-ing because it implied that Americans couldn’t save for their own retirement. Never mind that many Americans in the 1930s didn’t make enough each week to set aside for retirement. Or that Ameri-cans over the age of 60 were the poorest demographic group in the nation. Or that many of those Americans had lost all their savings in bank failure.

Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon campaigned in 1936 on a promise to repeal Social Security, though it had only been passed the year before.

Origins


Conservatives still hate Social Security, and when President George W. Bush vowed to privatize Social Security in 2005 he was channeling his inner Alf Landon. As it happens, Landon lost that election by what was to that point the most lop-sided margin in American history.

If many anti-government Americans misunderstand the way the New Deal helped create future economic growth and stability, if they fail to recognize that federal social welfare programs grew only because private charity and local relief funds had all been exhausted, then they also misinterpret Franklin Roosevelt altogether.

FDR was no ideologue, despite the charges leveled against him then and now. He was a pragmatist in the best tra-dition of American politics. Campaign-ing in 1932 he told a crowd, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” And that’s what he did.

The fact that he was elected to the presidency four times is perhaps the most important measure of the New Deal’s success.

The Post-War American Government

There were some very strange mo-ments during the 2012 Republican

National Convention in Tampa, Florida.Candidate Mitt Romney and his run-

ning mate Congressman Paul Ryan made “small government” the center of their campaign and promised to rein in what they saw as the runaway expansion of federal power under President Obama.

Yet there was former Republican Sen-ator Rick Santorum on stage invoking the memory of his father and how he raised a family while working a government job in the Veterans Administration . Not to be outdone, New Jersey governor Chris Christie got teary-eyed while telling the assembled Republicans about his own fa-ther who worked his way through college on the G.I. Bill. When he took the stage,

Paul Ryan promised to save Medicare for the next 100 years.

An observer could be forgiven for mistaking all this for, well, the Democrat-ic National Convention. Each of these Republican heavyweights celebrated initiatives created by Democrats and they all involved the expansion of the federal government.

The post-war expansion of govern-ment was driven by several factors, not the least of which was the war itself and the Cold War which followed it. Funding for scientific research and education, for the study of “strategic languages,” and even for cultural events all had Cold War rationales. Yet as much asWorld War II and the Cold War changed the landscape, the post-war expansion of government represented important continuities as well.

For example, the G.I. Bill so beloved by Governor Christie provided the finan-cial wherewithal for returning veterans to attend college, thus extending the democratization of higher education set in motion when the Morrill Land Grant Act was passed in 1862.

Likewise, when President Dwight Ei-senhower signed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, he continued the pattern of federal subsidy to large-scale transporta-tion projects that started with the Union and Central Pacific railroads and also included construction of the Panama Ca-nal, another project initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt. Through the High-way Act, the federal government picked up the tab for highway construction to the tune of 90 cents out of every dollar.

Most people angry at government, however, don’t complain about the G. I. Bill or the National Science Foundation (created in 1950) or the interstate high-ways. Their anger is directed primarily at the civil rights revolution and at the War on Poverty, launched in 1964. For these people Lyndon Baines Johnson is another four-letter word.

For his part, Johnson saw his initia-tives as firmly in the American tradition.

When he pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), he framed these his-

toric pieces of legislation as completing the process of emancipation and citizen-ship begun during the Civil War.

And when he declared his War on Poverty he saw himself as completing the work begun by his political hero, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR gave the nation a New Deal; Johnson would turn it into a Great Society.

Medicare , of course, was part of John-son’s Great Society, extending as it did the Social Security pension with health care coverage. It’s worth remembering that this was opposed bitterly by Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater among other conservatives.

In fact, Goldwater made his opposi-tion to Medicare central to his 1964 bid for the presidency. “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets” he asked in rhe-torical disbelief, “why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”

In the end, Medicare did not provide free beer to seniors, but Goldwater lost the election of 1964 by an even greater margin than Landon lost his presidential bid in 1936.

The anti-government backlash against the Great Society, which began in the 1960s, has culminated in the Tea Par-ty and related opposition to President Barack Obama and it has crystallized around the Afordable Care Act.

Whatever one thinks about Obamacare as a policy, much of the opposition to it displays all the histor-ical misunderstanding discussed here. Obamacare opponents, with varying degrees of histrionics, have decried it as an unprecedented intrusion of the federal government into the private sector.

In fact, since the turn of the 20th century, health care has been among the most federally subsidized areas of Ameri-can life and at a host of levels.

The federal government provided money for hospital construction, espe-cially in the under-served South, and it has provided the training for countless doctors, nurses, and public health profes-

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sionals. Between 1947 and 1971, to take one example, the Hill-Burton Hospital Survey and Construction Act provid-ed almost $4 billion in federal funds (matched by state money) and added 500,000 hospital beds in almost 11,000 hospital projects.

Likewise, the pharmaceutical industry has relied for years on the basic research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health among other agencies. Between 2003 and 2013, fifteen Americans have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Exactly none of them did their path-breaking research in the private sector. They all received public support of one kind or another.

If you’ve ever wondered why the Cen-ters for Disease Control are located in Atlanta and not Washington, the answer is that they started out in 1946 as a fed-erally sponsored malaria control efort, when malaria was still endemic to parts of the South. It’s hard to imagine that the “Sun Belt” would have taken of in the post-war years if all those new arrivals had to spend their time swatting malarial mosquitos.

In fact, the Afordable Care Act itself is not only an outgrowth of the Great Society or even the New Deal. It can trace its origins back to the health care system created after the First World War for veterans returning from that war .

One might not like Obamacare, but its lineage, like so many other government programs, is all-American.

Why All the Fuss?

Given the history of the federal role in fostering the economy, education,

health care, transportation, communica-tion and more, why do so many Ameri-cans seem to resent our government with such vehemence?

One answer is that Americans like their government hidden from them. Steeped in myths of rugged individual-ism, we don’t like to believe that we’ve had any help achieving what we’ve achieved.

So while Americans have never been eager to support public housing for those who need it, few of them thank the feder-al government for subsidizing the mort-

gage on their own house. Likewise, these people see funding for public transpor-tation as a waste of money even as they drive down interstate highways extrava-gantly paid for with federal money.

When Lincoln Center officials re-named the New York State Theater after David Koch, they not only honored a donor but they hid from the public the public source of the theater in the first place. Come to think of it, perhaps that’s exactly what Koch intended.

Another reason Americans are hostile to their own government is our conflict-ed views aboutrace and class. If we’ve achieved our success all on our own, then those who do need more obvious forms of government help must be failures of some kind. More to the point, they suck up my tax dollars.

Government programs that aid the have-nots appear to many Americans to reward laziness and irresponsibility, like Aid to Families with Dependent Chil-dren. In contrast, programs which benefit middle-class people are seen as some-thing they have worked hard to deserve, like deducting the interest payments on

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your mortgage on your federal taxes. Bluntly put: Americans don’t like govern-ment when it works for the poor (even if Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson thought it should).

Nor, it must be said just as bluntly, do they like government when it is designed to benefit African Americans. Barry Goldwater campaigned just as energeti-cally against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 as he did against Medicare. In so doing he created the coalition that joined seg-regationist bigots with anti-government zealots, the one that helped elect Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan. Now that a black man is the face of the federal government, the worst nightmare for this group of Americans has become real.

Those cheering GOP conventioneers in Tampa point to a final reason why Americans don’t like big government. It has become, over and over again, the victim of its own success. After all, before the Republican Party supported the G. I. Bill and Medicare, it opposed them. Just like conservatives opposed the SEC and the FDIC in an earlier generation, and they opposed the FDA a generation

before that.Despite the rhetoric we are used to

hearing that government programs are wasteful failures, the record of many of them is quite successful. We did create the greatest system of higher education in the world, and we did build 40,000 miles of interstate highway, and we did raise se-niors out of poverty. The list could go on.

Yet because so many of these pro-grams are hidden from sight, and because they have worked as efectively as they have, we have taken them for granted. A kind of familiarity that has bred a bitter contempt.

One Final Scene

On August 28, 2010 media dema-gogue Glenn Beck sponsored a rally

in Washington, a quasi-religious revival to “restore America.”

The ironies were thick on the ground that day, though I suspect few of the assembled thousands noticed them. Beck issued his call for restoration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – the shrine to the man who expanded federal power

dramatically – and he did so on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington . Beck was shame-lessly trying to invoke the moral author-ity of that event, oblivious, apparently, to the fact that King and others came to Washington to demand federal action to advance the civil rights agenda.

Most of all, however, Beck and the thousands who came to restore America all demonstrated a fundamental mis-understanding of the role the federal government has played from the very beginning of the nation: to promote the general welfare as each generation has defined that task.

We can and should have debates over what is and is not appropriate for the fed-eral government to do in American life. But those debates can only be fruitful if we wake up from the historical amnesia we seem to be sufering currently.

In the meantime, keep your govern-ment hands of my Medicare.u

Dr. Stephen Conn is a Professor and the Director of the Public History Program at OSU. He is Co-Editor in Chief of Origins.

Origins


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About Us:The Alexander Hamilton Society (AHS) is an

independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit orginization dedicated to promoting construc-tive debate on basic principles and contempo-rary issues in foreign, economic, and national

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security

As you probably have noticed, American dollar bills have undergone quite a few changes

over the last decade or so. Along with the addition of various anti-counterfeit features has come a shift away from the traditional green and black of your grandfather’s bills. For example, the modern ten and fifty dollar notes more closely resemble multicolored Monopoly money than anything most of us picture when we think of a typical dollar bill. One thing that has endured, however, is the people who grace our tender – the lineup of Washington, Jeferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant and Frank-lin has remained the same for decades. When one compares U.S. currency to that of another country, the first thing that sticks out is America’s uniform use of political and military leaders. These historical figures simply do not reflect the vast majority of the American populace and should be replaced by a more diverse group of historical figures. This is not to say that we should put Americans of diferent gender and ethnicity simply to have variety; rather, there are plenty of Americans of diferent gender, ethnicity, and historical significance who deserve to be commemorated on our bills. Moreover, certain new faces would be more deserving of the honor than some of the historical figures that are currently appear on our money.

A new lineup of dollars should include a diverse group of individuals who repre-sent a range of achievements in Amer-ican history. Likely candidates could include civil rights activists and social reformers such as Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony or Cesar Chavez. Often you will find literary figures on other countries’ tender; the United States

could honor greats such as Emily Dick-inson, Walt Whitman, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name a few. Scientific and conservationist pioneers such as John Muir, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison (or, if you prefer alternating currents, Nikola Tesla) also deserve a nod.

The main point is that there are plenty of Americans whose achievements merit the honor of appearing on our money even though they were not politicians. Who, then, should be removed from the current cast on our currency? One candidate for being retired should be Alexander Hamilton. Although Hamilton was a celebrated officer in the American Revolution and an influential writer he is certainly dwarfed in terms of overall significance and fame by George Wash-ington and Benjamin Franklin. That is to say, even though Hamilton was an important leader and his contribution to this country should not be forgotten, we already have two founding fathers memorialized and someone from a diferent part of American history should take his place. While Hamilton could be removed for the sake of variety, the next two candidates should be retired when one further scrutinizes their actions.

The first of these two figures would be Ulysses S Grant, who has appeared on the 50-dollar bill since 1913. Though

All I See Are Dead

Presidents

a very successful general during the Civil War, Grant’s presidency is general-ly considered by historians to be below average. For starters, Grant’s adminis-tration was plagued by a series of costly and embarrassing scandals. Furthermore, The Butcher’s inflexible and shortsight-ed fiscal policy is often blamed for the Great Panic of 1873 and the subsequent economic downturn. As a result of these two events Grant lacked the political will to see Reconstruction to its completion–a serious issue when one considers that the racism that returned to the South by the turn of the 20th century is often blamed on this failure. The last candidate who should be removed from our currency and replaced with a more worthy candi-date is Andrew Jackson. As with Grant, in Jackson we see a celebrated general whose presidency seems rather unworthy of being commemorated on our bills, much less one of the most used notes in circulation today. Jackson’s legacy is marred by one of the most heinous and regrettable acts in our country’s history: the Indian Removal Act and the sub-sequent Trail of Tears. To say the least, America’s treatment of the Native Amer-icans has been deplorable, and out of respect Jackson should no longer adorn the 20-dollar bill.

The figures that appears on a country’s currency are demonstrative of a coun-try’s values and the beliefs it holds to be essential to its identity. As it stands, the U.S. shows it only values politicians, thus failing to recognize a majority of its tri-umphs. By changing the faces on a couple of our bills, America could celebrate a wider range of its achievements. u

Peter Giblin is a third year majoring in International Studies.

by Peter Giblin

A new lineup of dollars should include a diverse group of individuals.

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THE ALGERIAN | 25 l

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014. What started out as nor-mal quickly spiraled into a day filled with grief and agony as South Korea experienced one of its worst

maritime disasters in history. That morning, around 9:00am, news articles revealed that a ferry named Sewol, containing 476 passengers, of which 325 were high school students and their teachers, started to sink in the treacherous water areas around Jindo Island. At the beginning, people who heard the news were hopeful that whoever did not escape the boat would be rescued. However, as precious time ticked away without any news of rescues, that small hope quickly turned into despair. The boat steadily sank lower and lower into the sea and each rescue mission to the ferry only brought forth more bodies of students. Everyone was glued to their smartphone or computer screen clicking the “refresh” button, longing for some news about survi-vors. South Korea’s sorrow and desperation could be felt around the world as the unfortunate news of the sinking ferry dominat-ed the headlines.

Desperation turned into frustration, and frustration begot anger. The chaos that ensued made me question how much South Korea has matured since the establishment of its democ-racy.

The media seemed to have lost its freedom of speech while the masses strove to make their – perhaps misleading – voices heard. The truth was hard to uncover. Every news agency burst forth with “breaking news” that seemed neither fact-checked nor carefully planned. Reports that were released one day were dismissed the following day as inaccurate. Meanwhile, testimo-nials from family members at the coast of Jindo expressed their grievance that the rescue missions were not as successful as the media portrayed. The tension between the media and the masses was heightened to the point where conspiracy theorists suggest-ed that the government was controlling the content of released news reports. With the media claiming one thing and the people rebuking it, neither the press nor the public could be trusted.

Amid all the turmoil, extreme tensions began to arise be-tween the government, represented by President Park Geun-Hye, and the bereaved citizenry. In their sorrow, the families of the dead looked for someone to take responsibility. They started to point their fingers at the president, criticizing her and her ad-ministration for their lack of swift and efective response to the crisis. Some even demanded her resignation as a way of taking responsibility. Understandably, President Park did not step down as the events were beyond her control; however, she could not

placidly escape all accusations. The chain of command between the President and the dispatched personnel at Jindo seemed to have been broken as no one knew from whom to take orders. No government official seemed to be in full control of the unravel-ing events in Jindo.

In the end, the question of responsibility quietly dissipat-ed. Prime minister Chung Hong-Won, who quit in April over the disaster, was retained by President Park, who could not find suitable successors. The nationwide manhunt for Mr. Yoo Byung-eun, the owner of the ferry and the Chunghaejin Marine, ended when his body was found decomposing in a countryside orchard.

Five months after the catastrophe, the sinking ferry has brought Congress to a halt. The leading opposition party has in-troduced special legislation regarding the Sewol, creating a con-flict between the ruling party and the opposition. The bereaved families are holding a hunger strike in Gwanghwamoon Square, advocating for this legislation. Meanwhile, the Congress has not passed a single bill in the past five months, with this special legislation acting as a roadblock to any eforts for a regular con-gressional session. The leaders of both parties, unwilling to reach a compromise on the specifics of this legislation, are scheduled to meet soon, and the Congress plans to hold its regular session on the 26th of September.

In Korean, Sewol means “time.” The high school students and other passengers on board lost their time to live out their lives and achieve great things in their future. Through this crisis, South Korea demonstrated that the time of nearly 70 years was perhaps insufficient to fully embed the meaning of democracy in government and public sentiments. I believe that South Korea’s duty now, as it moves forward from the tragedy, is to regain the sewol that was lost. Its duty is to compensate for the sewol that never had the chance to blossom as it sunk deep into the sea.

Many argued that as the ferry of Sewol sank, the ship of the South Korean nation sank as well. Both in terms of the young lives lost at sea and the time that was perhaps insufficient to develop democracy to a satisfactory standard, South Korea must make eforts to compensate for the sewol that is lost and begin a new journey for the sewol to come. u

Hyeji Kim is a second year pursuing a dual degree in Political Science and Economics with a minor in French. She is an Assistant Editor for The Algerian.

South Korea

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An unprecedented amount of in-ternational attention is on Brazil, marking the country as a rising

regional and global hegemon. Brazil is a “country to watch,” – its speculative rise on the international stage has devel-oped a following like that of a young, up-and-coming athlete. The prospect of an emerging power in Latin America is an increasingly attractive one, and it’s led to numerous scholarly articles, new acronyms, Global Gateways programs, and the opportunity for Brazil to host

both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. With the country in the international spotlight the gov-ernment is accelerating economic and infrastructure development to prove that their ascendancy into global leadership is well-deserved. Brazilians themselves were optimistic initially; president Dilma Roussef stated in her inaugural address “We can, in fact, be one of the most developed and least unequal nations in the world.” People agreed: 62 percent be-lieved economic conditions were “good”

in 2010, the second-highest rating of any country that year.

There’s no denying Brazil’s progress over the past two decades, it’s seen record high economic growth rates and over 30 million Brazilians move up to the middle class. But despite it’s rise, Brazil’s future is a precarious one - it still struggles with rampant disparities, crime and corrup-tion, and infrastructure issues that could hinder its realization as a true global player.

All Talk and No Game?Age-old domestic troubles could undermine Brazil’s bid

to become a serious global player. by Sarah Montell

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Brazil’s Rise

Hyperinflation and extreme socio-economic disparities plagued the

Brazilian economy in the 1990s and early 2000s, shortly after the country’s first post-military regime was appointed. The election of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002 (and reelection in 2006) paved the way for long-desired political stability, and with it, economic stability. It was through da Silva’s leadership that Brazil initiated its own development model, combining income redistribution with high economic growth that yielded the macroeconomic stability the country so desperately needed. This economic management decreased massive infla-tion rates, stabilized the currency, and attracted foreign investment, leaving the country in a stable position to endure the global economic downturn. Brazil cur-rently ranks 7th in the world with a $2.5 trillion GDP, a testament to the economic leaps made in just one short decade.

Brazil’s agricultural and industrial exports are an enormous factor in this economic revival. According to Juan de Onis, “No other country has such a large untapped reserve of land, water, and farmers with the technology and exper-tise to add value to natural resources”.

The oil and biofuel industries in particular have seen strong incentives for private investment, and have cemented Brazil’s position as a regional power with-in the LAC countries. It’s worth noting that Brazil achieved full oil self-sufficien-cy in 2006 – quite a feat for a country of over 201 million people – and is the largest producer of liquid fuels in all of South America.

B as in BRICS: Status and Power

It’s clear that Brazil’s jump to the forefront of the rising global power

dynamic has not occurred merely by chance. Inclusion in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) seemed to indicate Brazil’s new glob-al leadership role. Its tenth temporary appointment to the UN Security Coun-cil and intentions for a permanent seat through UNSC reform also signify global leadership ambitions. Brazil is also vying for a decision-making role in the IMF, citing that the fund should reflect the interests and significance of emerging economies. What’s more, Brazil took the reins in creating several South American and trans-continental diplomatic and economic blocs under President Lula alone: the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the South American Defense Council, the South American Summits, the IBSA Dialogue Forum, and the Summit of South American-Arab Countries.

Moving a bit closer to home, The Ohio State University and other large American universities are eager to pursue international partnerships with BRICS nations, with the intention of fostering dialogue on solutions to global and local problems, and to provide increased glob-al opportunities for Ohio State students. These universities aim to build a strong physical presence in countries that seem to “matter” most on the international stage. The selection of Sao Paulo as the third Global Gateway program at OSU, behind Shanghai and Mumbai, is no acci-dent, further exhibiting Brazil’s perceived status as a “key part of the world.” The

power of the BRICS acronym is undeni-able.

The above examples are clear indica-tions of Brazil’s intentions to flaunt its status as a rising global power. Yet like many BRICS nations, most notably India and China, rapid economic ascension is not predicted to be a sustainable model of power acquisition. In recounting Bra-zil’s recent and rapid successes, the same model of advancement simply can’t be used to predict the country’s ranks in the decade to come. It’s difficult to deny Bra-zil’s regional power given their economic command of South America; but, region-al influence shouldn’t be confused with global influence. Viewing Brazil through a constant comparison with other Latin American countries, as well as measuring its success by its rapid ascent, is viewing the country through an extremely skewed lens. When Brazil’s current domestic issues are examined, extreme doubts arise regarding their future as a rising global power. If Brazil can’t provide for its own people, how can it exercise any real power with nations more powerful and prosperous than itself?

Domestic Disparities

Brazil’s current social disparities are staggering. Despite increased move-

ment into the middle class following the country’s economic spike, Brazilians still struggle with dismal poverty and entrenched inequalities that appear to be issues of structural violence. An estimat-ed 36 million Brazilians live in massive urban slums or shanty towns on the outskirts of major metropolises; another significant portion of the population lives in isolated rural villages plagued by a lack of clean water and almost no access to essential services like healthcare and education. Brazilian sociologist Jesse de Souza approximates that one-third of Brazilians live in precarious conditions, excluded entirely from mainstream so-ciety. These poor, uneducated Brazilians are barred from enjoying the full social and economic benefits of citizenship and instead made victims of unsafe work, social violence, and political exclusion.

The social divide goes even further: an analysis by the Library of Congress states that the skewed distribution of income, “one of the most unequal in the world,” is responsible in part for the endemic pres-ence of nonpolitical crime that gives Bra-Ph

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zil a murder rate four times higher than that of the United States. Urban areas are a breeding ground for drug traffickers smuggling products into Colombia and Venezuela, and they’re victim to alarm-ingly high armed robbery rates. These social ills are tied to racial disparities as well: the Afro-Brazilian and “Pardo” (the Portuguese term for multiracial) popu-lation, especially in Rio de Janeiro and other northern cities, tend to experience greater social and income disparities than white Brazilians with European Portu-guese ancestry.

Brazil’s racial and social inequalities are personified most vividly in their health care system: the maternal mortal-ity rate for black women is a staggering 80 percent higher than white women despite a unified health system ofering comprehensive coverage to all. Brazil’s indigenous population in particular experiences extreme disparities in health outcomes, with the mortality of indig-enous infants more than triple that of the general population. Such health outcomes are indicative of a struggling developing country, not a rising, devel-oped country on track towards becoming a major power player.

Infrastructure Issues

Brazil’s long history of economic fragmentation and limited trade are

reflected in the current status of Brazilian infrastructure. Latin America as a whole has a significantly less impressive infra-structure grid than the United States and Europe did in the mid-19th century, let alone today. Preparations for the World Cup and the Summer Olympics have proven to be true tests of Brazil’s capacity for infrastructure improvements. The country struggled to prepare for the Cup, and hosting the Olympics may prove to be too ambitious for the country to tack-le. Despite President Roussef ’s optimism in her inaugural address, these events may in fact serve as a harsh reminder of the country’s limitations instead of a tri-umphant opening act on the world stage.

A Reuters investigation into the massive $1 trillion construction projects in the lead-up to the Cup ofers a dose of realism:

“[Preparation for the World Cup and the Summer Olympics] now seem likely to fall short of President Dilma Rous-sef ’s ambitions. Numerous high-profile

projects are falling victim to a long list of problems including endemic corruption, red tape, insufficient funds and – above all – a glaring lack of leadership and know-how”.

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Brazil is struggling to lay the ground-work for two major world events. The country spends a mere 1.5% of GDP on infrastructure, compared with a global average of 3.8%. Even one of Brazil’s top independent infrastructure experts, Vance Stewart, holds serious doubts about the country’s ability to prepare for the world spotlight, encouraging global investors to “Stop treating Brazil like an inevitable success story”.

The poor infrastructure also puts a serious burden on businesses that strug-gle to transport their products between cities and to ports to export. Roussef has scared investors away from tackling infrastructure projects by hounding the Central Bank to drastically cut interest rates: gross public debt has increased to 60-70 percent of GDP as a result. With Brazil struggling to maintain efective do-mestic leadership, how can it realistically be called a rising global leader?

A Changing Course

If Brazil seeks to move forward, it must tackle difficult political choices on

spending, taxation, and service delivery to lessen its crippling disparities. Al-though income transfers have helped raise millions out of poverty, far too many Brazilians still sufer from crime and a lack of public service access.

Although the country’s recognition as a major global power presents it with an international platform, it also gives rise to dilemmas for its regional and global role that will be even more at the mercy of the international spotlight come Summer 2014 and 2016.

Given its domestic turmoil and stag-nant economic growth as of late – the 2012 economy grew by only 0.9 percent – Brazil certainly isn’t ready to be a true global power. Brazil’s recent popularity is especially perplexing in light of its present difficulties; upon removing the rose-tinted glasses and looking beyond the borders of South America, Brazil appears significantly less impressive and prepared for a role on the international stage. The aforementioned domestic problems, if not solved within the next decade, will further dilute Brazil’s eco-nomic growth. Crime, transnational drug trafficking, and corruption can divert re-sources into illegal activities and disturb the efficiency and purity of already strug-gling government institutions, afecting a multitude of other aspects of Brazilian society. As the population continues to grow, it can be assumed that socioeco-nomic disparities will grow as well.

Jurandir Fernandes, the Brazilian Transportation Secretary, puts his coun-try’s growth and development into a per-spective commonly shared by supporters of Brazil’s role as a rising global power in an increasingly multipolar world: “Brazil is a democracy…. we may not move as fast as China. Yet we’re growing in ways that we never have before. In the end, isn’t that what matters?”

Ultimately, no; growth is not all that matters. A successful and stable Brazil depends on the strength and vision of its political leadership and the ability for that leadership to forge a consensus among diferent parts of society, all with-in a rapidly changing domestic frame-work. External factors matter as well: Brazil’s path to global leadership will be contingent on its perceived power by other global leaders, which difers greatly from their perceived status. For Brazil to be regarded as a true global powerhouse, a change of course is needed domestically to propel the country back to a trajectory that aligns with the global attention it has received all along.u

Sarah Montell is a third year majoring in Public Affairs.

If Brazil seeks to move forward, it must tackle difficult politi-cal choices on spending, taxa-tion, and service delivery to less-en its crippling disparities.

THE ALGERIAN | 29 l

In the relative stillness of night, the ground shook, and the world seemed to come apart at the seams. Street lights came crashing down as

the sinews of the earth buckled, com-pressed, and then split, ripping apart tarmac and concrete with terrifying ease. A few minutes shy of five in the morn-ing, all the lights went out, and darkness enveloped everything. When the power came back on, the phones were ringing of the hook at 911 Emergency centers, but the calls were not about the earth-quake or about the expected looting. The 911 operators listened as hundreds

told of mysterious lights in the sky, of aliens come to announce their presence in the universe, of the beginning of the apocalypse. By the time the sun rose on January 17th, 1994, a few hours had passed since the Northridge Earthquake had hit the wider Los Angeles area, and the people of Los Angeles set about going back to their daily lives. The earthquake was a predictable side efect of living so close to the previously unknown Northridge blind thrust fault, but for many the legend of the shining lights in the darkness persisted until Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in

Los Angeles, ofered a very simple ex-planation. Without neon signs and city lights to impede its view, the Milky Way, theoretically perfectly seen on the west coast, was easily visible. For the first time in years the people of Los Angeles had seen the stars.

To anyone who has lived in a city, such a story is perhaps not as surprising as it should be. In fact, many people who might have read the last paragraph might have paused inquisitively when I men-tioned that the Milky Way is theoretically perfectly visible on the western coast of the United States. A great number of

Chasing DarknessIn today’s urban landscape, light pollution poses a

much greater threat than the dark.by Emmanuel Dzotsi

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us, two-thirds of the United States and one fifth of the world to be exact, can no longer see the Milky Way.

Let me be clear. The starry night painted by Van Gogh is not an endan-gered species, but rather something hidden by our own obsessive needs, and more specifically, light pollution.

Light pollution, simply put, is the overuse, and often misuse of light. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that cities are the greatest harbingers of such light, and that the stars are more visible when-ever one takes a trip to the country. This is because we tend to use more light than we actually need, often spraying light directly into the night sky.

But let’s be honest. There is something wholly nostalgic at looking up at a night sky full of stars, but at the same time wholly forgettable. So what if I can see a fifth of the night sky my grandparents grew up seeing? My grandfather also calculated logarithms with slide rule via kerosene lamp. In our modern culture, one could argue that the moon has replaced the role that stars used to play in our daily lives, and the many expeditions we’ve made to the moon have only made it more real for all of us. The moon is a constant companion, far more tangible and inspiring than burning balls of light millions of miles away.

The above would be a wonderfully wrought counter-argument to the prob-lem of light pollution, if not for the fact that the side-efects of light pollution are far greater than not being able to see a couple stars at night. The most common activity for many living things during traditional hours of darkness is the act of sleep. And according to many of the leading scholars on light pollution, a truly restorative, efective sleep requires complete darkness.

Perhaps the most famous of these leading scholars on light pollution is Dr. Paul Bogard of James Madison Universi-ty. Dr. Bogard’s bestselling book The End of Night talks extensively about the efects of light pollution on our health, an aspect of the phenomena that he was keen to impress upon me when I interviewed him earlier on this year.

“Your body actually needs darkness to properly produce melatonin, which is the chemical that enables your body to take a break when you sleep”, said Bogard. Mel-atonin, lowers blood pressure, glucose levels, and basically anything else that we

associate with successful sleep.Since most of us don’t even come close

to medically recommended amounts of sleep, sleeping in a room that includes a night light and a laptop still streaming the last thing you watched on Netflix is a recipe for some serious health problems later on in life, including depression. But where light pollution really comes into play is when it is impossible to sleep in complete darkness due to lights outside

your room. That same light shining into your room at night from the outside greatly afects wildlife that depend on well-defined circadian rhythmicity, so it’s basically a lose-lose for all involved.

The solutions that light-pollution advocates are pushing for have already been implemented in certain major cities around the world. Perhaps the best example of responsible and adequate lighting, according to Bogard, is Paris. The French, lovers of art and the tourism it brings, greatly reduced the lighting in Paris due to vanity. “The French realized that the way to make buildings look good at night is not to just bath it in spotlights, but to artfully use just a little light”, said Bogard , “Most of the brightest lights in Paris turn of from 1 to 7am…even the lighting on the Eifel Tower is dimmed down”.

Even though Americans are nowhere near as vain as the French, Bogard argues that in many ways Americans exhibit a subconscious understanding of light pollution. A decent portion of The End of Night is devoted to the idea that the amount of light pollution in certain plac-es directly corresponds to class status.

The people in our society who are typically exposed to light are those that are of lower economic status. Take for example the millions of Americans who work the third shift, and thus are forced to sleep during the day in incomplete darkness, and are exposed to artificial light at night during their jobs. Go much

Sleeping in a room that includes a night light and a laptop streaming the last thing you watched on Netflix is a recipe for some serious health problems later on in life.

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repute. Funnily enough, studies done on previously unlit alleyways in safe neigh-borhoods actually show higher levels of crime after the installation of lights, such was the case in a one year observation conducted by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

No matter what the correct course of action with light pollution is- perhaps finding some sort of balance between well-lit areas and efficiently lit areas, it is clear that our desire to light up the dark-ness says something profound about us. I said earlier that the night sky is not an endangered species, and this is true. We will never be able to destroy the starry night that guided the Polynesians across the pacific, or the one that inspired us, in Kennedy’s words, to throw our caps over the wall of space with no choice but to follow. We will never be able to destroy our fear of the dark, but perhaps one day we will have the courage to face it and let the stars inspire us once more.u

Emmanuel Dzotsi is a fourth year major-ing in Political Science and Strategic Com-munications with a minor in French and a specialization in International Relations.

Go into any extremely wealthy neighborhood, and you’ll see lights, but only just as much light as required.

further down the totem pole, in fact, and our usage of light becomes very apparent. Prisoners in maximum-security prisons are often exposed to copious artificial light 24-hours a day. Regardless of your opinion on the justice of it, the exposure of the most hated people in our society to uninterrupted light is an interesting correlation, especially when many in-mates leave such institutions with serious mental health symptoms synonymous with over-exposure to light.

On the other end of the spectrum Bo-gard’s observations ring true. Go into any extremely wealthy neighborhood, and you’ll see lights, but only just as much light as is required.

Still, all of this seems counterintuitive – after all, the biggest reason for well-lit streets is crime. In many respects the an-swer to why we light up the dark is linked to safety, but not in a complete sense, says Bogard.

When primitive people first started using fire, it served as a protection from predators that could be lurking in the shadows. As time passed, however, we ceased to be as concerned with animals, and became more concerned with each

other. Now we use light as a shield, if only subconsciously. Bogard strongly believes that adding light to an area does not lower crime levels, in part because thieves seek light and fear darkness just as much as we do. Bogard may be right, but well-respected academics difer on whether light has any efect when it comes to areas that are already in bad

THE ALGERIAN | 31 l

After Ferguson: Identity, Race, and Justice

Examining America’s reluctance to face the mirror.by Ilhan Dahir

On August 5, 2014, we were reminded that the black body is probable cause for gunfire in

public spaces. On that day, an unarmed man was shot and killed by the police for carrying a toy rifle in a store that sells toy rifles. After protestors demanded a surveillance tape it was discovered that the police opened fire on John Crawford within seconds of encountering him. On September 24, 2014, we were reminded that the courts do not protect us all. On that day, a Grand Jury found that the officers involved in that incident acted justly. On August 9, 2014, we were re-

minded that two black arms raised in the universal sign of flat-palmed surrender is reason enough to die in America. Mike Brown and John Crawford were taken from their families, their communities, and themselves unarmed and surrender-ing like countless others before them and many more to come.

We cannot seem to escape the tragedy. On pavement sweltering with afternoon sun and latent rage, we remember how his body laid empty-palmed and melanin rich. His final cry reverberated through-out the nation. His departure propelled us to march, weep, yell, scream, mourn.

Sigh, again and again, anguished broken sighs lilting with experience – growing weary with every news report. We hurt a deep kind of hurt, way under the surface. A hurt that’s been growing on the fertile lands it took centuries of tears to water. The kind of hurt that feels like betrayal, a lingering injury, a throbbing sensation; this hurt is historic. Even so, our wounds are fresh. This rancid hurt squeezes into the most fragile corners of our psyche and stays there to rot.

The question ailing our conscienc-es begs, why do we refuse to examine the context of this hurt, the treachery Ph

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of these instances? How can a nation genuinely mourn John Crawford or Michael Brown or the countless others when it knows another young black man or woman will be martyred within the month? In short, we cannot. We cannot realize any kind of restorative justice as long as we refuse to admit that we are living in a state of constant injustice, as long as we do not acknowledge that we are seated at the precipice of calamity.

The American psyche has long sidelined colonialism as a European infliction. The occupation of India and strategic dissection of Africa are taught as lessons in euro-centric economics gone wrong. But what is the state of the Black American today if not that of a colonized people? Does the black individual not bear the physical, psychological and institutional apparatuses of a purpose-ful colonial history? But this history is never viewed in its entirety; it is never grappled with honestly. This history’s relevance is stripped away by being made peripheral. We hear it being sidelined in conversations about “post-racial society” and ”historical racism”, as if it’s been left behind, as if we are operating outside of it. Our lessons become sanitized accounts of the ethnocentrism that poisoned our soils with ill-spilt blood. The shattering of the American black and brown body is taught as unfortunate but necessary; our institutions were built on those unnamed backs, but a “post-racial” society is inca-pable of acknowledging such a gruesome past.

Our dark history of subjugation was not simply an experiment in political ex-

ploitation and acquisition; it is a project that rests firmly on the grounds of rede-signed identity. In order to understand the fluctuations of identity, however, it is critical to explore precisely what identity entails. How can such a pervasive term be defined, so elusive as to present itself indefinable? Surely, the behemoth of identity, specifically that of the colonized, enslaved or subjected, must be situated in its proper historic context.

What must that definition contain and how can one adequately scale the complex walls of its labyrinthine interior? The question is not new. It has always been a central preoccupation of the oppressed since the dawn of time – who are we really? And how do we answer any of these questions outside of the false identity forced on us and the false ideal we were made to seek? And when the murder of a black individual is treated with the callousness and inhumanity we have come to expect, how can we begin to see the true humanity in ourselves?

September 24, 2014 cannot simply be a day of mourning it must also be a day of reexamination. In the wake of a jury decision that excused the inexcusable murder of an unarmed man, America must ask herself what the justice she so desperately seeks actually is. This tragedy is holding a mirror up to us and it is every American’s duty to grapple with the face staring back.

Perhaps nothing makes our slow progress clearer than the parallels that can still be drawn between the image in the mirror today and the one that looked back at us just 60 years ago. In 1952 a

young Trinidadian novelist named Sam Selvon penned A Brighter Sun. Selvon’s work chronicles the external and internal shifts that took place simultaneously in an era of relentless change. One of Selvon’s central characters, Tiger, a young Trinidadian man of Indian ancestry, struggles mightily with the changes the colonial gaze has on his view of himself. Tiger’s development localizes the efects of empire and allows the reader to sense the magnitude of their scope. Tiger reacts to the pressures of imperial presence by reevaluating what rightness is and inter-acting with his surroundings accordingly. In this way, colonial reality is not only tangentially related to individual reality, it is intrinsically linked. Whenever I hear minorities speak about dressing to garner respect or excusing racial profiling, I see Tiger. Whenever I am confronted with an individual who wants to “stop making it about race”, I hear Tiger. Everywhere I turn these days I am surrounded by blindfolded Tigers, Tigers wearing the masks of men.

Black Skin, White Masks was pub-lished in the same year as A Brighter Sun, focusing its eforts on the individual reality by speaking to the internal mech-anisms of colonial dominance. Fanon lik-ens the internalization of subjugation to a disease of the mind, “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accor-dance with a neurotic orientation…The Negro’s behavior makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situa-tional neurosis. In the man of color there

How can a nation genuinely mourn when it knows another young black man or woman will be martyred within the month?

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is a constant efort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence” (43).

What is it about this disease that still ails us all? It seems we have not cured ourselves of its perennial hold. Even if the words were not spoken, the mecha-nisms of colonialism make clear a hierar-chical system of power. Since the political landscape was shaped by that hierarchy, so too were the social spheres. Eventually, through the process of navigating these spaces of degradation, the actions begin to afect the psyche to the point where the colonized begins to believe in her own inferiority. The navigation process does not leave the colonizer unchanged, however, after the structures are created the process of creation is largely forgotten and what were once man-made systems of control become the “natural” order of things. It’s “naturalness” becomes its greatest strength, allowing people to act around it and question themselves soon-er than they question the system. In this way, the internal dialogue of the Negro is not with himself but with the system and against himself.

Chela Sandoval posits in Method-ology of the Oppressed, “Many political intellectuals lament the ending of the modern era, when it was possible to apprehend clearly who were the rulers

and who were the ruled and to look clearly into the face of one’s enemy” (22-23). Selvon and Frantz interpret the relationship between the rulers and ruled diferently. The relationship between the two is not linear and proportional; indeed to view the relationship this way is to view it incorrectly. Rather, the walls that separate the two are permeable and shifting and ultimately fail to keep either side completely isolated. In the 19th and 20th centuries, colonialism and international imperialistic action more generally (including economic activity) systematically disassembled existing structures. However, they also left wholly new structures in their place. Outside of the organization of markets, goods and labor there existed the creation of new internalities. Surrounded by a world un-recognizable to them, people were made to redesign themselves. There could be no easy way to tell the ruler from the ruled because in that redesign the ruling principles would have to be internalized. In an unrecognizable world, one would be forced to become unrecognizable even to themselves.

Herein lies the issue both of these authors and many after them faced: rec-ognizing that even when the mask can be named it cannot simply be removed. We live with this legacy of self-denial even

today. After so long, the mask continues to make the face unknowable, even to itself. It is only with a new mirror, one forged in the fire of liberation, that the face can see itself. A mirror that reflects new processes, theories and clear lan-guages through which to reclaim the an-cient truths of humanity, autonomy and self. This process will start only when we can take an unflinching look at ourselves and at the systems we have come to know as normal. The mechanisms that promote subjugation and control should become so impossible for us to bear that we mo-bilize ourselves to uproot them and strive towards a genuine justice. We should let our anger keep us from living contently with systems that mask injustice. We can-not mourn the deaths of those we have lost to a system that values some human lives more than others until we learn to value their lives enough to name their killer out loud. The same apparatuses that are responsible for putting the masks on our faces are responsible for the death of our brethren. We cannot begin this work behind the treacherous familiarity of these masks – we must remove them.u

Ilhan Dahir is a senior double majoring in Political Science and English. She is a Senior Editor for The Algerian.

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34 | Winter 2014-2015

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Michael Ansari, political science alumnus and CEO of MIC Industries, shares his experiences with CCWA students in Washington D.C.

AT A GLANCE

UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS

Major, Political Science

Minor, Political Science

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American Politics Comparative PoliticsInternational RelationsPolitical Methodology

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POLITICAL SCIENCE IN ACTION

My political science education prepared me for a career

in understanding how institutions work. This foundation of

understanding is one which any individual can leverage for their

respective career paths. If that means management consulting - great,

if that means continuing the research of institutions, organizational

systems, institutional relations, etc. in political science - even better!

Michael Cata (BA, political science and economics, 2013), business

analytics consultant, IBM

The Ohio State University Department of Political Science studies governments, public policies and political processes, systems and political behavior. Are you interested in American politics? International affairs? Strategies of war and peace? Political theories of freedom? Gun control, immigration, the environment, civil rights? If so, you belong in political science where you will learn to think critically and globally and acquire the skills necessary to be successful in the world.

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