News for January 13
January 13, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
Closing Gitmo Will Be Among Obama’s First Official Actions | ThinkProgress
The Associated Press reports that advisers to President-elect Obama “say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. That executive order is expected during Obama’s first week on the job — and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers.” The order would fulfill one of Obama’s key campaign promises.
- Related link: Criticisms, Political Pressure and Barack Obama | Glenn Greenwald @Salon
- Related link: Closing Guantánamo | The Washington Monthly
Then and Now | The Atlantic
Since 2000, America has changed in small ways, in big ways, and in ways that seem innocent enough now but no doubt herald some radical disruptions to come. Many more people are poor, uninsured, and in prison. Many more are billionaires. The burden of health-care costs has grown heavier, and so have we. We charge more, save less, and play a lot more video games. Even the things that haven’t changed much—like the amount of oil we consume, or the price of cocaine, or the size of our military—reflect not so much stasis as unsustainable trajectories. For Obama, responding to these problems will require breaking deep national addictions—to oil, to etherealized finance, to profligacy of all kinds—and, somehow, easing the tremens along the way.
Persuasion Industry’s Assault on Personhood | Marginal Utility
Our attempts to rationalize our desires fluctuate between pleasurable surrender (we are serenely impulsive, with the speed with which our impulses are gratified serving as an index to our prosperity and to our autonomy) and medicalized despair (we are addicts who are not responsible for our actions, which we stand removed from but which we can’t alter to reconcile with our other better desires as yet only vaguely formulated but having something to do with conquering impulses). Our inability to know what we really want ends up being either the illusion of freedom, of keeping options open, or it ends up feeling like a pathological condition that we vainly await the cure for.
People of the Screen | The New Atlantis
If enthusiasm for the new digital literacy runs high, it also runs to feverish extremes. Digital literacy’s boosters are not unlike the people who were swept up in the multiculturalism fad of the 1980s and 1990s. Intent on encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, they initially argued for supplementing the canon so that it acknowledged the intellectual contributions of women and minorities. But like multiculturalism, which soon changed its focus from broadening the canon to eviscerating it by purging the contributions of “dead white males,” digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming people of the screen, not people of the book?
Under Seige: On Oscar Grant and Other Victims | Global Comment
Oscar Grant is but the latest victim of a growing siege mentality within law enforcement, one that transcends the traditional boundaries of race, gender, orientation and class (though make no mistake–those factors still greatly affect the conduct of law enforcement officers, on both an individual and systemic level, to say nothing of the marginalized communities forced to live day-to-day with the consequences). Thanks to a pop-cult fetishization of get-tough law enforcement (with new reality TV star Sherriff Joe Arpaio serving as the latest darkly cartoonish personality cult) and the (largely erroneous) notion that “criminals” are increasingly coddled by a too-soft justice system, the general public is often all-too-quick to give the benefit of the doubt to overzealous officials who, whether through malice, fear, or out of a warped sense of duty, cross the line that separates upholding the law and undermining it.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
