The Postcolonial Complexities of the Heavy Gear Universe

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heavy gear blog

After ranting previously about the horrors of ‘Awareness Movies‘ I then presented, with the example of DS9, how popular entertainment and science fiction allegory is much more effective at dealing with the subject of International Relations and politics than all the pearl clutching of Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, and NPR reviewed movies combined. It is a theme I would like to explore further.

I know that previously I suggested that the next time I would delve into great fictional settings which overlapped with international relations I mentioned Battletech would be the next post on this topic. That is not to be so. Battletech is a setting which I have loved since I was a kid, and it is a great example of the theory of offensive realism and balance of power in action. However, it, like the previously covered universe of Star Trek Deep Space 9, is a great-power focused setting. Having done that last time, I feel that something else is in order. After all, most nations today on Earth are not great powers, and it is intra-state conflicts such as civil wars which are the most typical forms of strife in our present era. Additionally, many nations around today are the products of colonialism and are still dealing with the aftermath of that. Many are divided into hostile factions because of this, even if the factions share hatred of common foes from the past.

Now let me introduce you to the world of Heavy Gear, one in which all of the above descriptors of conflict in our world strongly apply. Heavy Gear, a product of Dream Pod 9, began as a tactical tabletop board game in the 90s. It reached its peak fame with two games released at the tail end of the mech based land simulator craze in the late 90s. Heavy Gear I and II were games which I found by far the most fun (if challenging) to play as a kid in this genre, and the second one in particular became my favorite land combat simulator of all time. It still is. Though getting it to run on any computer system from any time period after Gary Condit’s congressional career is notoriously difficult. In fact, I was only recently reminded of its existence full-force after a long time of neglect due to finding out about the upcoming Heavy Gear Assault, which reminded me of my love for this often under-the-radar series.

In addition to the fluid and unique control scheme, the setting offered a lot of new stuff to a then-over-saturated genre. Gears were small (about three humans high on average), using maneuverability and tactics along with the flexibility of going prone, crouching, and launching mortars from their backs to bombard enemies from ambush. They had a kind of ‘stealth-mode’ in the form of passive sensors (vs active ones) and in the second game you could customize camouflage patterns-though this had no real effect on the game, it was still a cool touch. Gears effectively functioned as elite warriors and special forces, but were by no means the sole core of military forces. Many large tanks in a stand-up fight were more powerful than gears, and hover vehicles, APCs, infantry, and even floating hover-battleships all worked together in combined-arms fashion. Given that Gears had the most interesting missions and versatility (not to mention skates for moving over flat land fast), that was what you played as in the games. And it was a blast. It also made sense. Sure, anthropoid combat vehicles make little sense in an era of heavy firepower with those high target profiles, but the gear felt much more feasible if less awe-inspiring than the conventional mechs of other series’ when it came to imagining future warfare.

But what really interests us right now is the setting. Heavy Gear does not traipse across the galaxy chronicling the rise and fall of massive star empires. Its setting, in fact, is a single planet. Terra Nova, once the jewel in the crown of Earth’s expansionist empire, now a world divided into two hostile geopolitical alliance networks made up of multiple nations. With its focus on a single world, the Heavy Gear setting allows geography to matter once more. Strange anomalies in magnetism enable massive floating battleships and carriers to act as navies on a world where most water is underground. Most of the population is clustered near the more temperate poles of this warm planet while the equator is a desert band with few people but much in the way of resources. It is this that forms the rough border (and primary disputed territory) of the Northern and Southern leagues (more on this later).

Once Earth’s empire went into decline, its outlying colonies were abandoned. Cut off from support of the mother world, Terra Nova had to effectively start from scratch. The chaos of sudden and rapid decolonization coupled with that the planet was largely just exploited for resources under Earth meant that it did not have the requisite stability or infrastructure to thrive in the short term. Needless to say, this is a familiar story for many parts of our own world in the mid-20th century. Eventually, after much strife, coalitions were built around the poles. In the North, a common religion and political ethos facilitated an almost-equitable confederation, The Confederated Northern City-States. In the south, the rise of one particularly successful and powerful state, The Southern Republic, gave rise to a more autocratic system of alliances, where said republic dominates the other nations as vassals and proxies through the Allied Southern Territories alliance network. The setting, being well developed however, does not make the north the good guys and the south the bad guys. The more one looks, the more complicated the situation becomes. The North may be a more political success, but it is heavily influenced by a somewhat militarist and very morally strident religion and society priorities some fields much higher than others to its cultural detriment. The South is less unified, but its dominant state is a culturally dynamic place where people have many (non-political) freedoms that those in the north lack. Just as in most conflict zones today, it is impossible to declare a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ faction as an absolute, and rather your feelings as an outsider will be guided by your personal preferences. Certainly, neither side could be easily glorified. Even if my personal loyalties are always going to reside with the faction which deploys the excellent Black Mamba gear.

SnakeEyeBM

Especially the sweet Snake Eyes Mamba variant!

Between these powers, many smaller nations still continue to eke out a dangerous and fragile existence. Some, like the officially neutral autonomous arms manufacturer, Peace River, successfully exploit these niches to make lots of money off of perpetual frontier warfare between the northern and southern leagues, others find themselves courted or fought over by the larger powers.

From South Asian partition to the more recent splitting of Sudan and South Sudan, to the division of Korea, we in the real world are very familiar with such narratives. In many more cases we are also familiar with officially unitary states which are anything but in practice, much like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Largely, on matters dealing with space in the future, it seems there is little focus on planets having multiple hostile political entities-but on Terra Nova this is a reality. I see no reason, in a hypothetical future of human expansion off-planet, that this would not be the case. It is certainly in line with human history. Division and unity come in cycles, not linear narratives with clear ending points.

But what is most interesting about Terra Nova is that multiple conflicts over the Badlands have not dampened the general sense of Terra Novan solidarity when it comes to the old colonial master of Earth. When a resurgent Earth attempted to reconquer its old abandoned colonies centuries after it gave them up, it used its superior wealth and technology to take a few of them. But Terra Nova was a different story.

The defiant planet unified against the invaders. And using the Gears they had invented (originally for mining) as re-purposed war machines, they defeated the ‘Earthers’ and drove them from the world, leaving only a small cut off remnant behind, which quite fittingly is named Port Arthur.

Though with the withdrawal of the common threat came the resumption of traditional north-south hostilities, a special task force was set up of hand-picked warriors from all sides who would work for a unit that rose above planetary politics and safeguard the world from further revanchist operations directed from Earth. Indeed, being a member of this unit and leading a squad on a special off world mission to sabotage an interstellar mass driver ( I think) weapon being operated by Earth forces is the main story of the game Heavy Gear 2 and its very cool intro shows this pretty well:

This is the element of this fictional setting which I think has the potential to be the most interesting when pondering our real world future. In an era of rising multipolarity and where we can quite clearly see neocolonialist policies from some countries such as France in West Africa or Russia towards some of its neighbors, to name just a few, will we ever see collective bloc alliances among normal local foes on other  as a reaction to bigger more global ones? This will depend of course on the behavior of more powerful countries towards less powerful ones, but it is interesting to think about. The widely divergent Non-Aligned League of the Cold War, though not much of a real actor, is an interesting example of an attempt from the past.

Anyway, have some badass soundtrack music while I ever so reluctantly go back to studying the real world:

Pictures used are from Dream Pod 9.

Tipper Warnings: The Petulant Death Rattle of an Obsolete Liberalism

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I realize this deviates somewhat from the normal topic of this blog, but as an ex-academic who sees many of these issues overlapping I feel it belongs here.

Brian Cox’s decision to boycott Warwick University gives me an idea. The hypersensitives overrunning and ruining academia today are a group of people who generally lack creativity, critical thinking skills, and the capacity for new and original ideas. Largely, they are just parasites badly co-opting the arguments of others and capable only of upholding the conservatism of their suburban backgrounds but with a thin coat of supposedly progressive paint. One does wonder if jealousy motivates them deep down. Not to mention that politicians are getting in on the action too like a pack of vultures.

Like their liberal precursor, Tipper Gore, they believe that the inherent corruption of ‘bad attitude’ in the public sphere will somehow compromise their righteous virtue, ignoring that being exposed to something is just as likely to make one reject it as accept it. It is, ironically, a remarkably evangelical attitude to have. After all, the rising crime rates and youth suicides of the 80s were quite obviously caused by the rampant neoliberal structural adjustment of the decade as well as a rough transition out of the last vestiges of the security of the industrial economy. Not to mention the revving up of the Drug War which did nobody any good. You know, actual real life factors. Politicians helped create that political environment but never once thought to blame themselves but rather shifted the blame to the entertainment industry.

PMRC

Tipper once proclaimed herself indignantly to Jello Biafra as ‘a proud liberal Democrat.’ And she was right. Now, on the internet and festering in certain universities we see the new version of that type of ‘progressive’ stultification. The crisis of contemporary liberalism clearly illustrated. Unable to admit their ideology is now nothing but a group of intellectually bankrupt status-quo centrists trying to defend a philosophical and political program increasingly long in the tooth and clearly running out of ideas, as well as lacking the will to come up with new ideas or admit their mistakes, they resort to greater and greater levels of witch hunting in order to construct the fantasy that they are the only real moral option left. Everyone else is compromised because they don’t acknowledge your feelings like the liberals do. You special, special snowflake you.

But a future filled with austerity, increasing environmental emergency, the failure of populist movements to increase living situations in the post Arab Spring world or bring about actual change in the case of Occupy Wall Street, and little to no remaining desire on both the once euphoric right and left alike for using great power politics to enforce some idealist program of universal human rights, it must be said that the reality of the situation is that liberals of all stripes, right, left, and center, have shot their load. The conditions that enabled their delusions such preeminence in the 90s are passing and what you see now in both the neoconservative remnants of the establishment as well as the youthful enthusiasm of Tumblr is its death rattle. No wonder 90s nostalgia is so popular in my generation-people pine for a time when they could believe they were the center of the universe and ignore all the negatives of such a time period.

So, getting back to the point at the start, what if the ‘ideas class’ boycott universities who cave to hypersensitives en masse? Having no ideas of their own, and being the unwitting dupes of institutions and a political system hostile to different ideas, the student councils and universities would break before the people seeking speaking fees would. And considering how profit motivated universities are these days, that would be the necessary incentive for them to stop kowtowing to middle class teenagers whose life experience consists of pressing ‘reblog’ and thinking its noble to shelter themselves from ideas they don’t like.

Whether one likes it or not, the present consensus is breaking down. That doesn’t mean we can control what comes next. We can’t. We aren’t the center of a ‘narrative’ be it of progress or anything else. We are creatures that respond to external stimuli with instinct that we rationalize later. But what that does guarantee is that the future is full of painful truths who only the adaptable and intellectually self-critical and self-challenging will survive and thrive in.

So let’s end on a note that hypersensitives and Tipper Gore alike would hate!

Beware the Humanitarians

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save_darfur_poster

I can’t help but think that the massive increase of popularity of Syrian refugee issues in media coverage is indicative of some kind of growing future drive for a NATO operation.

If not yet, it now will be unless it interferes with the Iran deal. There is one obvious section of society that is always is pro-war because they are hooting and brittle cro-magnons who think its important to ‘show strength’ through constant macho posturing, but there is another which can always be made pro-war by going ‘ermagerd look at the suffering babiez!’ Neither is remotely interested in dealing with the consequences of the policies they unthinkingly support through their id-derived catharsis politics.

Hopefully the complicated alliance networks that the United States is increasingly learning to navigate with some degree of nuance will derail any further attempts to topple what unfortunately is Syria’s only real hope: the Assad regime. Or as it should be referred to-the internationally recognized Government of Syria. This is a very real possibility of course, but the explosion of media coverage regarding refugees should remind us of past examples were wars of choice were fought for dubious reasons.

While humanitarianism is most often deployed indirectly and often even unintentionally as the propaganda wing of other self-serving interests (Kuwaiti babies being murdered by Iraqi troops in ’91-a fiction invented for the wind up to Desert Storm, Germans raping through Belgium in WWI British propaganda, Kony 2012 stirring up tacit hipster support for the rapid and ongoing expansion of AFRICOM, etc. These are clearly P.R. campaigns that serve a valid, if often debatable, strategic interest for someone, somewhere. Thus, they are understandable whether or not you agree with the objectives behind them.

But there are indeed, as Robert Merry and others have pointed out, wars fought entirely for feel-good purposes. Somalia and Bosnia in the 90s *might* have been these depending on how you view them, and Kosovo in 99 certainly was. Victorian wars of prideful redress such as the British Expedition to Ethiopia or the US retaliatory action in 19th Century Korea also fall under a same ‘conflict as catharsis’ framework.  People (usually Democrats) who called for action in Darfur in the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century were also of this ilk.

The problem is two-fold with these knee-jerk reactions. The first one is that there is rarely a situation where such direct involvement can improve a situation, and when that is so it is often in the context of a greater framework. For example, the ending of Axis war crimes was contingent on the Allies winning the Second World War anyway-just as the removal of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese was tied to the greater geopolitical re-alignment of the Sino-Soviet Split. These were great and beneficial outcomes to be sure, but they did not exist in isolate.

The second is that when enacted by a superpower, these types of interventions can be divorced by more grounding influences which often mean their strategies are half-baked and lead to interventions with a big showy entrance and no exit plan. In effect, advocating such humanitarian interventions has the potential to lead to the same kind of quagmires that neoconservative hawks often inflict on the state and its people.

This is one of the great flaws in societies that often shunt the decidedly old-school field of military history aside. People will jump through any number of increasingly preposterous hoops in order to avoid coming to the stark conclusion that military conflict is dangerous for any power no matter how powerful they are so selectivity is key. But even more tellingly on this theme, many will assume something ‘can be done’ lightly, from the air, and in such a way as to minimize conflict exposure to the actors on the ground as some kind of god-like neutral arbiter of justice.

But that is impossible. An actor in conflict is either in it or not. That means pick your battles. And the only way to do that is to combine national interest with your desire to off a particular force. You want to end the Syria crisis? Extend an olive branch to Damascus and focus on the elimination of Daesh as priority. Winning over the worst faction-not helping everyone suffering-should be the first goal. But already NATO has integrated itself into the wrong dog in this fight. Let us hope this mistaken policy is not given popular support by a media and populace who base their views on their emotional reaction to news stories. Or else who knows what horrible scenario might happen.

Further reading from a somewhat different but still interesting perspective at the Stanford News site.

Basic History Bros: The Scourge of Public Discussion

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historybromeme-college-graduation-truths

I understand late Friday night is the absolutely worst time to write a blog entry, but this realization just came into my head and I feel a very strong urge to write about it as soon as possible.

Assuming you like to discuss the humanities, especially as it relates to political theory and international relations, you should be versed in a few topics. The most important of which is history. Unless of course you are into political theories that begin with the prefix of ‘post’ in which case you base your opinions on your feelings and nothing else. But by and large, before philosophy and theorizing must come history. You must have actual case studies with which to point to in order to justify your conclusions. This world is built on the contexts of the past-so history is also vital to understanding even the most contemporary events. Naturally, a good political discussion on big issues, particularly international ones, should turn to history in order to actually get at the meat of things.

Ah, but here enters the scourge of such discussions. The malignant plague which casts an odious miasma all over such potentially rewarding discussions: the Basic History Bro, abbreviated here on out as BHB. We will be examining the American variant in detail.

What is a BHB? Well, a BHB is a variant of the Edgy Contrarian Hipster we all know who once saw a Michael Moore documentary or read Howard Zinn and now pointedly tells you the most basic and quotidian of ‘did you knows’ (that yes, in fact, you do already know and more) in an attempt to prove their intellectual chops. Many of these kinds go into hiding after the tits-up combustion of their various internet fad causes only to emerge with the next one and we all have enough experience with them not to need further elaboration. But the BHB is something even worse. The BHB is like an Edgy Contrarian Hipster except that its nuggets of wisdom are not even vaguely contrarian or critical in a superficial way-but rather are outright proclamations copy/pasted from half-remembered high school history classes and from History Channel documentaries from back when those still existed as anything other than rednecks in garage sales badly reenacting their alien abductions at the hands of the Reptilian Illuminati commanded Sasquatch armies. (So…pre 2006 then?) The most amount of actual research they could ever be bothered to do is read a wikipedia page. And even then that is only likely to happen for a few select topics such as the Second World War. The BHB in other words, spouts the propaganda of the dominant society and political class without even collecting a paycheck.

What makes the BHB particularly loathsome is that it always sabotages an interesting conversation and requires you to take the time to point out why their points are invalid or simply public mythology instead of history. At which case their brittle machismo will be offended and they will change the topic of the conversation in order to make guesses on what kind of commie queer you are. Some examples:

Bring up the Eastern Front of WWII: ‘The USSR was as bad/worse than Germany.’

Bring up any non-western nation: (insert comment about being backwards here no matter the time period even if its one where the opposite is more likely to be true).

Bring up any decision or action by the United States critically: ‘Yeah well (X nation) is worse.’

Bring up any decision or action by a competing power with approval which existed at the same time as the United States: ‘Yeah well America did it better/got them back.’

Bring up the ancient world and you get a whole slew of fun from ‘Rome is America’ to ‘Spartans OMG Spartans the best warriors ever!!!!!!!’ And always make sure to add ‘when men were men’ to any time period which is so unfortunate as to attract the BHB’s superficial attention.

And yes of course, their most heinous of crimes, the BHB takes ‘Deadliest Warrior’ and ‘Cracked’ history articles seriously. This alone is a crime worthy of capital punishment to anyone who has ever actually done historical research, worked with primary sources, or realizes how you appraise events.

BHBs, in my experience anyway, are uniformly white and male. I imagine that this is not always the case, but I personally have yet to see this categorization debunked with my own eyes. Unlike most bros, however, this one does not fit into a specific age category in the slightest. In fact, the range of its demographic age can vary as wildly as college freshmen all the way to exactly where you would expect.

What motivates the BHB? Why is he the way he is? Why is his toxic and soul crushing basic-ness injected into history more than any other intellectual topic? I believe I have a theory.

The Basic History Bro is lazy and insecure. Too lazy to actually do the work to justify their view point they go to the one which is most ‘sensible’, which just so happens to be the one which can be validated by the largest amount of people in the society where they dwell. Naturally, any non-majority view point can be ganged up in packs so there is little chance of retaliation which can override herd consensus. This also means they do not have to be well read.

The BHB is also-completely at odds with self-proclaimed sensibility I might add-deeply and emotionally invested in the mythology which he upholds. Since he is unwilling to go looking for badasses and ‘good guys’ on his own he must cling to the ones he has already been exposed to by the media and baseline education. Any criticism or questioning of these totems is tantamount to heresy and treason and is a vital threat to this core lazy-insecurity.

I spoke mainly of the American one which I know so well, but 5 years living in the UK means I also know of the British version, which has a particular dress code, a fawning obsession with ole MagsThatch, and devours books on the Falklands War, The Duke of Marlborough, and the Battle of Britain (titles often running into the bombastic ‘Bombers O’Clock! With Rufus Tiddleywinks and the Bally-Ho Squadron Against Jolly Ole Jerry, Wot’) and therefore fancies themselves informed. One thing the US and UK BHBs have in common though is fawning admiration for heroes from antiquity (the European ones, of course) and sometimes also Victorian imperialists who asserted white dominion over Africa (though this is never directly acknowledged as a motivation, but rather wrapped in ‘men were men then’ etc). I am sure other countries have similar creatures. Swedes and Koreans love to troll internet forums reminding everyone how powerful they once supposedly were, etc.

And that takes us to the inevitable question. Why criticize BHBs so much? We have all met them and been forced to speak to them as if they were children, what is the big deal? Basic is as basic does, even when it tries to have political opinions.

The answer is that this group of people, though intellectually marginal, is a dominant consumer of media and a large voting bloc. They are a concern and we can see why in Russia, where the equivalent of BHBs are already being mobilized to serve the interests of the governing class there. The ensuing result of this romantization of basicness in the form of the vatnik is…well…just turn on Russia Today and see for yourself. Sure we can imagine Fox News going there in a future where Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity make bets and host ‘Deadliest Warrior’ duels, but imagine all of the major news networks sinking to that level. If you think they won’t I perhaps must remind you that MSNBC tried to out Fox Fox with Alan Keyes and others before it embraced milquetoast liberalism as a brand.

The bovine simplicity of the Basic History Bro belies something potentially more insidious. In the age of perpetual outrage and pet causes it is only one grumpy brittle ego away from being harnessed as a mass movement.

May I also, while vaguely on the topic, recommend this excellent blog since I already cited something the author wrote.

I was thinking of posting a Smash Mouth song as a troll and to stay in the Bro theme, but even I am not that cruel. So, in closing, let me simply say good night, and keep on defying the basic.

National Interest did a great interview with Henry Kissinger

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Not to be a link aggregate, but in this interview with the former Secretary of State a lot of the themes of this blog get touched upon so I would be remiss not to post it. The necessity of a historical understanding before a theoretical one, the problems of domestic ideology in foreign policy strategy, etc.

And of course the massive underrated brain of Richard Nixon-a subject dear to my heart but which has yet to be discussed here. One day, I am sure, it will be.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the Ultimate International Relations Saga

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Previously, I weighed in on just how terrible I find most explicitly International Relations focused film media (P.S. as predicted ‘Good Kill’ seems to be making chump change and being seen by perhaps a few hundred people). This leads to being asked, ‘well what is a good IR movie?’ The obvious answers to this question is ‘Team America: World Police’ ‘Nixon’ and ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.’ But that is just film. In actuality I think the best visual medium treatment of IR comes from a television show-that of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

Deep_space_9

Now before we get to into this subject I want to make a disclaimer. I am not a person who has encyclopedic knowledge of Trek canon, especially regarding the two series I gave up on early in their runs (Voyager and Enterprise) or any non-show or film lore. Before my 11th birthday I probably could have competed with the biggest of nerds on this topic but I fell out of caring about Trek for a decade and only came back to it in college-and even then only came back to the things I knew I liked (some TOS, TNG, and much more recently DS9 thanks to Netflix, plus the handful of good movies like II, VI, and maybe First Contact). When it comes to science fiction franchises, Star Wars and Battletech defeated Star Trek in my latter childhood and then Alien/Aliens and eventually the rebooted Battlestar Galactica defeated that in turn in my early teens and my late teens respectively. I am probably not the most qualified person to write this in the world-but thanks to a few months recently completed of gorging on DS9 I feel this is something I can indeed talk about.

Star Trek’s strength was always its diplomatic episodes, in my opinion anyway, but the utopian and Wilsonian nature of the setting never accounted for how something like the Federation could thrive in a somewhat hostile environment and a lot of brilliant ideas were half-formed. As we will see, the crisis of the events of DS9 cause the mask the slip-illustrating a valuable lesson in how nations see themselves, and what they really are.

God-tier IR scholar Barry Buzan has written more than one article on the IR of Star Trek, but like many pan-franchise overviews it shafts the grungy sedentary base by the wormhole for the flashy ships of the series, at least proportionally speaking. This is a major problem, because it is DS9 which deals explicitly with the IR-themed oversights of the other more euphoric series. In particular, I wish to make the argument that, probably unintentionally, DS9 is a gateway to view IR through the framework of this blog’s favorite theory: Neoclassical Realism. To put it succinctly, Neoclassical realism, like other forms of realism, recognizes the centrality of states and power politics, but adds to it the dynamic domestic factors and internal cohesion of varying states to explain why some countries follow the policies they do. But at its most blunt, its about regime survival, and how different concepts of regime survival come to arise based on diverged geographic and historical factors which together create the political culture.

The Messy Frontier:

The concept of the show is to move more in a direction of serialization in a sedentary location where the visitors move but the protagonists usually do not. There is no escaping the consequences of the crew’s actions. The storm will be weathered here rather than escaped. In this way, the station itself is a microcosm of the bigger forces which are usually more abstract in other series-the state actors. Having defined territorial boundaries and political cultures, the United Federation of Planets and the other Alpha Quadrant powers do not have quite the episodic flexibility that some of their individual ships might have-and DS9 is in a similar position.

To emphasize this point the static location on international trade and diplomacy which is the station in question is located on what at first seems to be the most peripheral of frontiers. A former slave mining station and HQ of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the station is a joint Federation-Bajoran operation in a place only recently vacated by a hostile power. As it is, it represents a guarantee of security by a major power to a tiny and only recently liberated nation and a long term investment in the hopes that the Bajorans will one day join the Federation.

Everything changes with the near immediate discovery of the nearby wormhole. Inhabitants of powerful non-corporeal aliens who communicate with Commander Sisko and who once apparently inspired the Bajoran religion allow transit into a whole new quadrant of the galaxy which would be beyond reach of the Alpha Quadrant powers otherwise. Now, a postwar backwater has become the single most strategic location in the galaxy. This, however, does not change the remoteness of the posting. In fact, the rapid influx of intrigue from other powers mean this is one Star Trek series where the crew seeks to navigate the muddy waters of compromise and balance rather than principle or self-discovery to a previously unheard of degree. Sisko must guide these waters with minimal oversight and little prospect of immediate backup due to his location. Furthermore the nearest ally in the still unstable and completely weak Bajor. Both sides running the joint administration of the station would be familiar to the description in the introduction to Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro’s edited work ‘Neoclassical Realism and Foreign Policy’:

‘Limitations on executive autonomy in different national contexts, however, may undermine their ability to respond as necessary to shifts in the balance of power. Neoclassical realists consequently view policy responses as a product of state-society coordination and, at time, struggle. Less autonomous actors must frequently build coalitions and make compromises to mobilize social and political actors in order to enact policy […] Most states must also frequently bargain with societal actors in order to secure the provision of national security goods to implement policy. […] Finally, neoclassical realism recognizes that many states or regimes do not necessarily function as ‘unitary’  actors. Elite consensus  or disagreement about the nature and extent of international threats, persistent internal divisions within the leadership, social cohesion, and the regime’s vulnerability to violent overthrow all inhibit the state’s ability to respond to systemic pressures.’

It is this kind of diplomatic grunt work that Sisko and his crew must deal with. Everyone can only be placated so far before it rubs up against someone else. All decisions must ensure the survival of the station and of Bajor’s new independence. And the setting further marks a break with what is usually seen in Star Trek by further adding the variable that humans as a species are not the star of this story. Human characters predominate, sure, but humanity is a background species. The real species whose culture is shown in nuance, detail, and variance in this show are the Bajorans, the Cardassians and their difficult and historically tragic relationship with each other. This has been written about before, and quite excellently too, so we I won’t dwell on it here, but it is part of what makes the show so great and also in some sense, very real. This is not a show about one culture interacting with others, but of many cultures continually interacting over a sustained period, and in turn influencing each other’s decision making process.

But I want to fast forward to the story arc the dominates the latter sections of the show: the Dominion. The Dominion is the monster that lurks on the other side of the wormhole whose existence is only found out about once lots of exploration begins on the far side of that cosmic aperture. A type of almost anti-Federation, it is a state which exists as effectively a web of protection for a species of shapeshifters (the Founders) who uphold their hegemony of the quadrant with an intricate web of multiple genetically modified species to carry out their will. The details of how they govern are never fully explored, but one thing becomes immediately clear-because of their history as persecuted by ‘solids’ they will do whatever it takes to become hegemonic over other humanoid life.  Their brazen expansionism and plots to use their unique abilities to destabilize potential threats from the inside are actually for a psychologically defensive purpose, or so they claim. Most likely, they even believe their claim-as ridiculous as it clearly is to outsiders.

The Dominion is possibly a match for the entire Alpha Quadrant, but not being ones to take risks set on on an indirect campaign to destabilize that region before they launch their official invasion. Shapeshifters lure Romulan and Cardassian intelligence agencies and fleets into a devastating trap (and in so doing validating tragic literature as a concept in a sub-plot way far better than most story arcs I have seen), and then proceeding to use their shapeshifting abilities to infiltrate other powers from within, possibly causing a Klingon-Cardassian war and almost causing a major rift in even the utopian Federation where for the first time in centuries troops are deployed on the streets of the future crime and prejudice free Earth. All the while, the Alpha Quadrant remains as divided as ever. Alliances that should be formed are not, even in the face of knowing quite clearly what the intentions of this new and dangerous foe clearly are:

Cardassia, smarting from its instability and loss of standing decides to throw its weight in with the new power under Dukat’s new government-the kind of vindictive re-alignment in diplomacy which is guaranteed to upset the status quo. This is something on the scale of Sino-American rapprochement in the 70s or Japan joining the Axis Powers. It gives the enemy a foothold for free in the Alpha Quadrant and a large supply of allied ships. When the war finally does break out over Sisko’s mining of the wormhole to prevent further reinforcements to the Dominion, everything changes.

With even the ostensibly pacifist Starfleet forced to launch a pre-emptive strike you know things are going to a bit more hard core in this show. And to its credit, DS9 shows us the evolution of a country used to long periods of peace of security and how it changes over prolonged total warfare.

The loss of DS9 itself, and the awkward political situation which the Bajoran crewmen are put in (not to mention the planet itself) of knowing they will be destroyed if they resist, but also that they will be occupied if the war they are forced to declare neutrality in is lost speaks volumes to the struggles of small states in times of chaos. Major Kira struggles with her past as a freedom fighter and now worries about being a collaborator when a dramatic event makes her disavow her government’s stated neutrality-if not overtly.

The war has many back and forth shifts, as one would, and eventually with the re-taking of the station after some Not Your Father’s Star Trek battles settles into a kind of exhausting stalemate. It is here that the show really develops its spine of steel at looking at the anarchic world of foreign policy head on, and to an extend science fiction perhaps did not do before in this particular medium.

To understand the transformation that Starfleet is undergoing, I actually find the career trajectory of the character Nog the best way to see it in microcosm. He starts off exuberant to be the first Ferengi in Starfleet, becomes a prodigy in training, and then fights in the war with the crew and even falls in with some new cadets who the war has shaped into fanatics far removed from the ideals of the service they most likely joined for very different reasons.

Eventually, Nog is terribly wounded in a ground battle of dubious necessity and has a subsequent entire episode devoted to his recovery from PTSD by temporarily living in the fantasy world of a holodeck. He eventually overcomes the worst of it and when asked if he will is better responds with a frank, ‘No, but I will be.’ Here we see the terrible cost of the war, the tragedy that ensues when diplomacy breaks down or the paranoia of an enemy prevent negotiation. But yet in the end this tragedy must be burdened as the alternative is infinitely worse-enslavement for the entire Alpha Quandrant is something worth any sacrifice to stop. Through the microcosm of Nog’s experience we see what Starfleet itself goes through, a torturous realization that their civic mythology is not enough in a time of extreme danger. A crisis of conscious, self-doubt, but ultimately when faced with the reality, adaptation for survival. If some values must be sacrificed in the defense of others it still preferable to the sacrifice of all of them. The Federation must grapple with how to marshal its options and function in the trauma of wartime crisis situation. As M.R. Brawley states:

‘Neoclassical realists look to the state as the manager of the nation’s resources for competition in the anarchic international environment. The state’s position as mediator between the two realms of politics-domestic and international-gives it a unique role. It must coordinate diplomacy and domestic policies, harnessing economic capacity to generate military power in the defense of interests.’

First diplomacy failed, then military only options  could only go so far. Now we reach a point in the final two seasons where only special operations of the most delicate kind can turn the balance. This is, of course, the famous moment as well as the best episode of the series-when Sisko and Garak conspire to bring the so-far neutral Romulans into the war by an act so illegal, so dangerous, and so unethical it could cause war with the Romulans if ever found out. The sham is found out by its Romulan target (‘It’s a FAAAAAAAAKE!!!!’), but before he can relay this news Garak assassinates him in a way that covers up the false data and brings the Romulan Empire into the war against the Dominion. This is, to me, the star episode of the series and the peak of the show’s IR themes. Shadows of the Zimmerman Telegram coupled with who knows how many forged intelligence coups in history  tie this firmly into reality and strategy. In the ethics of Starfleet this is the most heinous thing imaginable, and so it took someone without a country and with a strong understanding of the inter-state system to do it for them. And of course, they can live with it:

Furthermore down the dark path of grand strategy, up until this point much has been made of the Cardassian and Romulan intelligence services, but what we find out, and which shatters the myth of Federation success  as values based as a sole explanation for their thriving for the past few centuries, is that Starfleet has an intelligence service so good no one even knows of it. Not only that, it has already used Odo as conduit for which to infect the entire Founder race with a deadly bioweapon before the war even began. This is Section 31, what I imagine to be the most controversial aspect of the show. An organization accountable to no one, filled with dangerous individuals whose very existence compromises the stated goals and intents of the Federation itself. It is precisely this which has enabled Starfleet to be so principled. Aside from that first point, this is Sun Tzu’s fantasy right here.

The main figures have after all never had to get their hands dirty, someone else did it for them-and possibly did so without anyone finding out. Who knows how many events Section 31 pulled off in the past which have never been exposed? A friend of mine postulated the theory that the relatively organized and potent Klingon of the original series seemed to give way to the brittle warrior feuding culture of later renditions precisely because of some kind of Section 31 operation that indirectly backed the most right wing and chauvinistic elements of a country in order to make it easy to manipulate and destabilize much like the United States with organizations like the Gray Wolves in Turkey or military regimes in Latin America in the Cold War. After all, near the end of the series the Federation basically has Worf kill Gowron to get a better strategist in the cockpit of the Klingon Empire-and that little change wasn’t even hidden from public view.

But here is the kicker, love it or hate it the most subversive part of DS9 is not just showing the Federation being a great power out of necessity when the chips are down-just like the others it does what is necessary and hence must forfeit the mantle of moral superiority-that is only part one of the real message. The real message is this: politics is lesser evils. the Federation was worth defending against the Dominion. All those events that showed it at its worse and most fanboy purist upsetting-these are the things that enabled its survival. Naturally with the war over, Section 31 becomes more a danger than a benefit, and the galaxy at the end of the war is left in an ambiguous position with quite possibly the Romulans in the driver’s seat of regional affairs. Political problems will never end, and allies and enemies always change, but in a crisis one doesn’t have the luxury of playing with all considerations in mind, only the most immediate ones. After all, who would have predicted Kira as the leader of the Cardassian resistance? That the ‘bad guy’ races advocating a pre-emptive attack on the Dominion who were portrayed as warmongers would be more than justified as events ensued? That the drive for regime legitimacy in the eyes of its own people would be enough to drive Cardassia entirely into ruin? Well, a world history major perhaps, but few others.

Given all the messy compromises of politics, something that only gets worse as the scales increase, one is never going to get a happy ending in IR, or even an ending barring sentient extinction. But ultimately the prevention of things getting worse must stand as the positive outcome. A rough lesson DS9 and human history alike tell in abundance. Whereas before DS9 Star Trek clearly dealt with power politics without *really* dealing with them, in DS9 we see the darker reality that makes even something like the Federation possible. Just as in real life Wilsonism or other ideals driven foreign policy views can be shown to be a superficial guise for what often really lurks beneath. DS9 brought the realism to Star Trek in more ways than one.

The only thing I felt the series was lacking, as a Jeffrey Combs fan, was a scene where Dr. Herbert West re-animates a Weyoun clone.

I would also like to nominate Garak to be one of the spirit animals of this blog.

Well the next few posts will probably be back to normal after that, but at some point in the future I would like to do something similar-ish for the Battletech Universe, we will see.

The book cited twice in this post can be found here.

Interview

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I did an interview today with a friend of mine who has a locally themed radio show. Despite the fact that the topic of my book had very little to do with the locale, we justified it by the fact that if I ever do a pseudosequel one of the case studies will in fact be very relevant to Michigan.

My more historically and Central Asian tinged interests-arguably the largest part of all of my interests-has largely gone unremarked upon in this blog so far due to the fact that I worked on both a dissertation and a book in that field and wanted to use this to show how I could branch out. Still, I might as well do some self-promotion. I promise not to make a regular habit of it.

Ever since I engineered a month in Mongolia as my graduation present to myself for getting through high school alive I have also always been really into Mongolian, Tuvan, and other regional forms of music from those locations. Throat singing is amazing, as are horse-head fiddles and other things.

But being a metal head the star band to me in this field in none other than Tengger Cavalry. One of the greatest bands of all time as far as I am concerned.

Iranproachment

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The news and the internet is awash with op-eds and coverage of a potential major step in US-Iran relations. I am not going to spend time going into detail about something you can find practically everywhere this week except to state the following as briefly as possible.

No matter what you think of the deal itself, this is in the best interest of both parties. Especially in the hopes of greater coordination against Daesh. If there is going to be an improvement on the situation in Iraq and Syria it can only happen with Iran and the US working together on some issues.

This also adds flexibility to American grand strategy. The United States can loosen the binds that hold it into deep integration with some extremely dubious allies-and this means in the long term that forces and effort can be redeployed to more critical regions-especially East and South Asia and the Pacific Littoral.

In Iran’s case it increases the flexibility towards other Gulf states. Already there are hints that the new primary foe is Saudi Arabia.

So while you obviously cannot expect too much-largely this deal is a win/win. The only losers so far are reactionary nutcases in Tehran and the somehow still lingering neoconservative establishment in the United States.

I don’t know about you, but I drink the bitter tears of neocons like a fine wine.

Kawashima Yoshiko: The Twentieth Century Female Trickster

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Above you is the image of Hong Kong actress Anita Mui. She is dressed in an archaic and masculine style because she is playing the role of Kawashima Yoshiko A.K.A. Jin Binhui, bith name Aisin Gioro Xianyu, a member of the extended family of the royal Qing Dynasty of China and a notorious spy and part time public figure in service of the Empire Japan in the 1930s. A movie, roughly but never completely inaccurately (as long as you are willing to forgive a few obviously fabricated scenes, everyone speaking Cantonese, and a couple kung fu movie style fistfights), based upon what we either know or suspect about her life. In the above image the actress captures a brazen attitude which defies typical East Asian gender and social norms. You can find the movie on youtube in fact.The fact that this role was based on a real person just makes her excellent portrayal all the more interesting.

Assuming that most of my audience are native English speakers (as stats imply) you most likely came across a portrayal of her in ‘The Last Emperor’ as the opium smoking pilot who bore a blood vendetta against Han Chinese for the disposal of her ethnicity and family from the ruling position of Chinese politics. This version shows effectively how she is viewed in China since the war, an unhinged traitor and a die hard collaborator. It was precisely what her trial for treason after the war sought to establish, and what she was executed for shortly before the fall of the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War. Never mind the fact that Chiang Kai Shek happily employed high ranking members of the occupying Japanese army in his command after 1945-an honest enemy perhaps is easier to stomach than a more amorphous one.

I recently finished the book ‘Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy’ by Phyllis Birnbaum. This post will not be about the book itself, though I did love it and gave it 5 stars on goodreads for thorough research and having equal parts of sympathy and criticism. Dealing with a fascinating character with a record of biographical self-distortion is no easy task. But it got me thinking that Ms. Kawashima would be good segue into the topic of a female trickster figure. Female tricksters are rare in mythology. Lewis Hyde and others have postulated on why this is. Often the conclusion is that the frequency and debilitating nature of pregnancy made such personality types less common in women in the pre-modern world.  They do exist, if rarely, in some tales. The Anasazi and the Navajo have a few female coyote tales, for instance. Almost always, these tales stand out for showcasing the female trickster as simply someone trying to get by in a cruel world-playing off people to get the best deal. This is really not so different from the male trickster in the end. Perhaps more importantly, tricksters of all genders are famous for their ability to walk a divided line, for males to take on female roles and vice-versa. As a subversive figure, tricksters never do what is conventional or safe.

That sums up Kawashima’s life. Her once royal family was devoid of power after the 1911 revolution and fell on hard times. Japanese spies operated throughout the country and set up links with them. To seal the bond she was given to a Japanese agent-one Kawashima Naniwa, to raise in Japan. Spending much of her formative years in Japan, the former princess would become a product of both worlds and also, in a way, of neither. Exposed to Japanese racism and an increasing sense of international chauvanism (not to mention possible abuse from her stepfather), she would return as an young adult to China. There, her accent and mannerisms would also mark her as an alien, not to mention the still virulent anti-Manchurian racism in Chinese society. After an abortive marriage into the Inner Mongolian royal family (or what passed for it) she became a bit of a drifter.

But this culturally liminal status would hardly be the most important factor in her life. In her final years in Japan she had crossed an even bigger barrier. She had decided to become a man. After a botched suicide attempt after a failed love affair she had shaved her head, began dressing as a man, and drunkenly cavorted in the streets using rough lower-class masculine language all while declaring herself to be male. She had decided that the world being what it was to women, that it would be better to make her way forward as a man.

After a few failed starts in Shanghai she ended up falling in with Japanese intelligence. She played some role in setting up the Shanghai incident and abducted the recalcitrant wife of Pu Yi, who was then preparing to be re-established as emperor in the Qing lineage of the then newly born Manchukuo, a puppet state under Japanese rule. Kawashima would claim that she stashed the Empress in the trunk of her Ford V-8 while roaring past the Chinese guards on her way to the docks in a daring night time chase.

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After this, she was redeployed to her ostensible homeland. Crowned by the Japanese press as a ‘Joan of Arc of Manchuria’ she would be given a military commission and an anti-partisan cavalry militia to command around the same time the Kwantung army added Jehol to Manchurian territory. Upon viewing her ex-bandit unit for the first time she commented on how ugly they were and proceeded to drive out to attend a party with them in tow to make the guests uncomfortable.Though she did not fight in any conventional battles, she was supposedly wounded in a skirmish. Coupled with her bullet wound from her previous suicide attempt, this would lead her eventually towards drug dependency.

All this time she received Japanese military titles, Manchu noble titles, and sacks of cash from various well connected lovers and acquaintances. She claimed to perform feats of derring-do behind enemy lines which are not verifiable. No longer a secret agent she became a celebrity instead. She tore around Changchun’s streets in her giant car, hosted wild parties, and recorded her own album of Mongolian folk songs (which, to my immense sadness, I cannot find recordings of).

But as full scale war was launched across China proper the facade of Japanese-Manchurian collaboration broke down and the rampant exploitation of the people to serve the Kwantung Army became harder to ignore. Having fought for and achieved a place where mobs of Han nationalists could not threaten her place in society, she now found that her allies had become her enemies in their place.

Kawashima was no idiot nor a fawning collaborator. Since an early age she had been exposed to Japanese elitism. But as a lone individual who clearly wasn’t going to have a future in China she joined an enterprise she thought might at least benefit her. After all, one strange misfit amongst giant events can only do so much besides look out for herself. But as the situation got worse and her funding dried up she spoke out. According to her Japanese secretary: ‘She wasn’t a bad person, she liked causing a fuss […] She had bad feelings for Japan. She made fools of the Japanese authorities when she had nothing better to do.’

Using her radio program to mock military authorities, and quickly developing a trail of dangerous espionage linked ex lovers who were plotting her assassination, Kawashima took off and left Manchukuo for first Japan, and then Tianjin. There she kept a low profile running a restaurant into the ground and attending film screenings in full military uniform while loudly mocking the films in question. Her immense spy network and her increasing irrelevance protected her from Japanese agents, and she continued to criticize the powers that be. With the outbreak of the Pacific War she felt defeat was imminent and tried without success to open peace talks between Manchukuo and Chiang Kai Shek, who she increasingly came to see as the best hope for China.

The collapse of Japan in 1945 meant that many of her acquaintances urged her to flee there. She did not, spitefully awaiting her fate in Beijing. Having received no sympathy from either world she could not expect her life to be spared by either side. Perhaps she simply thought she had done rather well and led an interesting life despite the many odds against her.

She would still dispute her execution and imprisonment, as a Japanese raised Manchu she probably had a good case. But she had never been officially a Japanese citizen so she was executed anyway.

Those who are poorly integrated to convention are often crushed underfoot by our society. Sometimes they rise higher than expected because the situation is chaotic they can worm their way into places other people would dare to tread. Though working with Japanese militarists is not something which should either be forgotten or forgiven, her tale is one worth remembering. We do not get to choose the sides of struggles we are offered or even the state of our societies. Fate determines where we go more than our own efforts, the claims of fashionable contemporary western self-help dogma aside. But this hardly means we have to give up ourselves or blindly obey the trends of our times.

No matter how ugly the circumstances, carving a niche for oneself in eras like the Second World War is something few could do. The challenges for a woman must have been many times greater than that of man. As such an effective renegade, Kawashima deserves to be remembered as a proper real life trickster. Morally neutral and ambiguous to the end, full of boasting behavior and unverifiable exploits, she probably ended up seeing the world much more clearly through her opium haze than many of the unadventurous proper people of her time ever could have. In doing what she did she overturned the expectations of everyone. One cannot guess her motivations, but one can suspect that in the face of tragedy she realized she could not take life so seriously and decided to squeeze it for what it was worth. Just like those rare female trickster archetypes that exist from time to time. It was either that or keep one’s head down and behave.

As she said herself in one of her final letters from prison:

‘I had planned to distance myself from all attachments but I could not do it. Attachments are power and at the same time they are death. Only when you are dead do attachments fall away. While you alive they amount to nothing except to outstanding people, crazy people, and fools.’

She probably ticked all of those boxes.

The Provincialism of Cosmopolitanism

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Living in the information age we are accustomed to increasing rates of urbanization all over the world, especially in the developed world. This is as much of a inevitability bending towards changing material circumstances as anything else. Hardly a conscious policy, today’s rates of a general increase in city-dwellers is simply a process which we react to rather than intentionally shape.

And yet among many it has become a mark of pride. A feeling of being ahead of the times. Above all, a feeling of being *enlightened.* But is it really so?

Cosmopolitanism certainly does exist, for what it is worth. Great cities mean more cultural co-mingling where one can meet others from different language, class, and ethnic backgrounds. Certainly this broadens horizons. Indeed, despite my love of nature and need to escape into it more than most people, I myself am more comfortable living in such settings than practically any other. But what needs to be confronted is this idea that simply living in such a place imbues one with innate knowledge about the world.

Anyone who has traveled in the backwoods, or even the more milquetoast of suburbs (most of them) knows the normal form of provincialism: suspicious of outsiders, addicted to routine, stultifying in its conservative nature, unable to comprehend a different cultural background. None of this is good by any means. But the question is if the big hip cities of the world really are much different? On the surface they overcome these initial hangups, but the core cultural effects remain the same. The desire to conform to a status of good bien-pensants is just as strong-if not stronger-due to the need to establish bonds of regional loyalty which are not lineage-based.

In the cosmopolitan identity a good citizen is at one with all potential people they may come across-unless of course said person is from a rural area or different political persuasion. Now, I am the last person who will ever criticize someone for not wanting to associate with people of certain either boring or outright horrifying political views, but I am honest about this up front. And the key word for me here is *boring*, a term which very much applies to the Enlightened Cosmopolitan.

Many of these people either grew up in the city of their residence or one like it, many more are suburban transplants from Milquetoastia flyover country. Both are as ignorant of wild or rural lands as a small town hick is of the city. The second type is far more militant and far more evangelical on the whole as they are trying to stake a place in their adopted community and overcome the embarrassment of their origin. Commonly we refer to these as ‘hipsters’, though now that they are growing up it might be more correct to come up with a new term for them. What this effect leads to is the assumption that pretty bland (usually center-left liberalism, sometimes libertarianism or social democracy) is radical and enlightened rather than just a stylistic expansion pack to mainstream developed world politics.

The problem of course is that any world view that becomes too insider loses its ability to confront challenges over time. And any group convinced of its own success and status is at the point of heading to its own downfall. If there is any lesson in history it must be this.

In larger cities this cosmopolitan monoculture fits the bill of something so self-assured it has stopped trying to have a future. It is pretty much just one giant blob of self-referencing echo chamber ignorance which over time makes all large cities in developed countries have pretty much the same socio-economic arrangement. But since living in such a place is the pinnacle ideal of the educated in society this merger is extra dangerous-for now there is nothing better to strive to at all. Michael Bloomberg is the best it is going to get. And of course, this view is inherently right, just look at the people who have it! They are just so fashionable!

It is of course an entirely faith based system. One only enabled by large quantities of cheap food, global transportation networks, and of course geopolitical security arrangements. And yet the common belief among its fundamentalist wing is that through the power of their Enlightened Awareness these city dwelling bourgeois have brought it about through their own effort of merely living there and thinking the right things. For a people who love to flatter themselves as critical and logical, it is a remarkably Calvinistic world view to have.

Fad diets, thinking ethical consumerism has an impact on the world, watching Bill Maher, going to restaurants with exposed brick walls and glass mason jars holding ingredients, thinking The New Yorker is funny or that Thomas Friedman or Maureen Dowd are insightful. It is kind of a Californification of the world-an admission that America or any other comparatively successful nation has no actual political or social choice left but a rather boring and superficial liberal-postmodernist hybridization with nothing but empty rhetoric to sustain it. And this attitude is a fundamentalist religion in many big cities, especially among the elite.

Now you would be perfectly right to ask, ‘very well and good, but what on Earth does this have to do with foreign policy and the general topics of this blog?’ Well, aside from the above mentioned naivete about where security and prosperity actually come from (and the implication that those privileged enough to be able to espouse pacifist politics are those who benefit the most from a strong military), I have to return to the central point of complacency.

As this quite conservative-if stylistically progressive-world view increases it’s grip on cities and urbanization continues at rapid speeds the city risks becoming as provincial as the small rural town. It’s more well-traveled citizens often largely just go from one cosmopolitan city to another rather than out in the country of either city or anywhere else. These cities are where, for obvious logistical reasons, the major institutions of learning, policy making, and observation are located. But all those institutions are made up of people.  People who are numerically likely to be slaves to fashionable thinking in any given moment. History shows us that the punchlines of tomorrow are often the era specific tropes of today. Embedding themselves within the sterile context of Cosmopolitan Provincialism it is easy to see why the options and strategies policy makers pursue seem so bland and basic: Either they are doing exactly what is expected of them by their immediate constituents, or they themselves have lost the ability to take an outsider’s perspective. Either way, the contemporary obsession with nation’s branding themselves over having long term strategy seems a direct result of the growing influence of this educated-yet-ignorant clientele.

The city could still be a force of self-challenging and creativity, but only if it got over itself as a political culture and re-learned to accept having many different overlapping but distinct intellectual cultures. We need to acknowledge is that we should value diversity of thought just as much as diversity of origin in order to really strike out against complacency-but one suspects that might be a step too far for a class of people whose entire sense of self-worth is tied to the validation they felt getting good grades in high school and following the right and proper Op-ed columns.

For a great parody of the Cosmopolitan Provincial check out Edgy White-Liberal.

Also have a song: