From Streetcars To Spaceships

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

The Teabaggers PURPOSE Is To Be Vandals, Bullies, and Thieves.

I disagree with those of you who have been saying, today and in general, that bad spelling, combovers, etc. aren't issues for the new right. Quite the contrary.

The Tea Party and the movements it's interwoven with, whatever their funding and whomever writes their talking points for them, is fundamentally, as far as I can tell, all about being a truculent wave of spite. A collective mass of vindictive assault upon the things that they claim to revere. A blue in the face resentful toddler yelling IT'S NOT FAIR! about having been caught and forced to stop stealing candy or beating up the smaller child who lives next door.

It is a vast pouting child of a movement of people who have been passed by as their various unearned advantages have stopped letting them wallow in unjustified privileges. Privileges of race and sex and position that used to be supported by the very measures that folks like us have spent the past hundred and fifty years fighting.

It is INTENDED to be the voice of losers, liars, and lechers. Of those whose failures in the world, whose diminishing power, are manifestations of ways that the system works. These are, disproportionately, the ones who lost their jobs to somebody else because they never deserved them in the first place.

It's not that they don't care about the evidences of ignorance, slovenly thinking, and cowardice among their mouthpieces. It's that they CELEBRATE how "authentic" those evidences make their chosen representatives. And are determined to believe that those of us who don't litter our houses and speech and thought with anti-intellectual trash are secretly just like them. We just, they tell each other, do a better job of hiding it.

George W. Bush was elected by people who openly admitted that they cared more about having a president who they could pretend would enjoy having a beer with them than about having a president who could do the jobs the Constitution and our society actually expect that person to do.

Don't make the mistake of taking these shambling, evasive, willfully vague People Of Walmart at their word. Never let yourself mistake these people for clueless bumblers who haven't noticed or don't understand that their every project weakens our country. Weakening the things that make our country worthwhile is, in truth, exactly what they want to do.

 

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Grow up. Now. The world needs adults. Not crybabies.

The next time you find yourself looking at the all too many crises out there, then, in addition to corporate fraud and all the usual suspects, you should add another thought to your reflexive response.

When hundreds of millions of adults try to live by a toddler's rules this is what you get.

We've become a nation infested with permanent children who model their behavior on what makes sense to a typical three year old. I've been saying it for years and I plan to go on saying it.

If we intend to get serious about what has caused and is causing global climate change, the rise of the Right Wing, the advancing power of monopolistic corporations, shifts to anti-reason evangelical churches, and a host of other crippling problems, then we need to get serious about this. If we don't successfully address the fundamental flaws in how people think then no number of arguments from reason add up to much more than self-congratulatory mental masturbation.

As far as I can see, ever since the 30's more and more parents have been raising their children to never grow beyond the worldview that is appropriate for a toddler and more and more of society has been adapting to validate that idiocy. Corporations, not surprisingly, love this sh*t and encourage it whenever they can. So do all too many political and religious groups. Dr. Spock played his role. So did the proud spoiling of children that so frequently is done by the first generation of a family to reach prosperity. So has the shifting nature of our schools and other educational institutions.

"We're all special in our own way"? Bugger off.

But the truth is, how it happened matters far less than what it is causing now and what it will take to reverse the trend.

To these "believers" the world is broken up into the world of We Children, which includes them, their friends, and their activities and The Grownups, which includes most property, the government, and all the Big Things done by magical Others whom one addresses with begging, Being Good, tantrums, and the like. Rarely, mind you with actions meant to substantively shift the factors that caused a thing to happen in the first place.

One is then either granted beneficences/gets one's way or is "punished" based on how effectively one has convinced The Grownups to do what one wants. Their lives are lived around the parallel goals of performatively being a Good Child ("but I tried hard!") and getting things with tantrums ("we'll make them do what we want!) And when their typical sloth and ineffectual behavior doesn't work out, they hold up the child's logic of But Don't You Love Me Anyway? and It's Not My Fault!!

To them everything in the world has agency. Somebody caused it. Intentionally. Nothing ever just happens or is an unintended consequence of some entirely differently motivated activity, let alone something caused by, you know, physics. And, as any preliterate child can tell you, if it affects them it was addressed primarily to them. If you are housemates with such a person and your moving to a new city means that they need to find a new housemate, then you are moving, first and foremost, to hurt them. They are far less interested in finding and addressing the true causes of a problem than in assigning blame. After all, if they can pull off the claim that it's somebody else's fault, then they should have a "right" to be kept immune to the consequences.

These people can be identified, as much as anything else, by the speed with which they will respond to a difficulty, or especially the prospect of work, with what other people "should" be doing instead. By which they mean what they think would be right. With little or no knowledge or interest in why the existing situation is as it is or in how or why the people responsible make the choices they do. After all, the usally rather shallowly hidden subtext is that since that other person "didn't do it right" why should the speaker have to do work to address it? After all, that would be "unfair". I never cease to be amazed at how much these idiots think that they have usefully contributed, in fact, "done their share" of solving the problem by describing, in a callow, off the cuff sentence or two, something like "well, they shouldn't be storing things there anyway."

I always tell assistants of mine that I don't want to here the word "should" coming out of their mouth in a use like that. Each and every moment spent in that kind of thing is obstructive distraction from actually addressing the problem.

On a related front, they will find just about anything acceptable (that doesn't cost them too much) if they've been told a good story about why and how it got that way. Again, I tell my assistants, just because somebody "has a reason" doesn't make it okay. Charles Manson has reasons. Sarah Palin has reasons.

These people, in terms of the issues they're even willing to face, find bare facts to be alien, incomprehensible gibberish. Even, as I said above, hostile things "meant" to hurt them to be fought back into the shadows where they won't have to risk seeing them. But, oh, they sure do love their stories. Or, as we've all grown to call it, a persuasive narrative.

As for the Bigger World out there, that's Parentland, where things are done by a magic and fundamentally unknowable web of processes.

The idea that assets and institutional frameworks are things run by people much like them that can be shifted or even acquired with things like well thought-out work is not only alien, it's anathema since such thinking is a threat to that We Little Kids worldview. Wow, will they get angry fast if they figure out that something you say weakens their structure of rationalizations and appeasements.

In my experience both certain types of Good Little Corporate Citizens and many doctrinaire Marxists tend to remarkably blatant forms of this. "All property is theft" comes naturally to people who believe that all things of value were preexisting, and that therefore anything but an "even" distribution of all material goods, with each person "getting" exactly the same as each other person is "unfair".

It frequently strikes me how blatantly such people will use the language of young children to describe policy issues. Something that is "unfair" obviously should be responded to with a tantrum, oh, I'm sorry, a "protest", to convince the Magic Adult People in government to Fix It and give everybody their Fair Share.

You know. Just like in kindergarden.

Things don't happen for reasons; they Just Are.

And, notably, they're usually real fuzzy on the details of how this collection and redistribution is supposed to take place. After all, that's the territory of Magic Adult People.

As far as I can see, the very core of most Marxist thought fits very well indeed into the Permanent Toddler way of seeing things.

To wit:

-all property is prexisting

-all labor is of equal value, to be measured solely on the basis of exertion and time used. Moving the same rock back and forth all day in a dark room for a year is of exactly the same value as the same time and degree of exertion used to build a set of chairs or succesfully raise a crop.

-therefore, all members of the manager class (i.e. "bad parents") are useless since no literal sweat raises on their brow. And, of course, management accomplishes nothing since all that they do is shift the choices of what labor is done, which we already "know" adds nothing since all labor is equal, and move capital, which we "know" should in a "fair" world just be evenly and randomly distributed anyway.

Note, by the way, that authoritarians like Rudolf Guiliani use different parts of the same logic. To idiots like that, all that it takes to be a good manager is to order people to do something and you've now "fixed" the problem. Organizational actions aren't caused by responses to scarce or ample resources. They're not caused by compensation structures or training or culture. Actions just HAPPEN. So if you want different actions to happen, you just say that you'll beat them up or give them candy based on whether they do what you want or not. Simple, right?

Bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Randites, whatever their problems, are generally utterly and entirely free of this kind of thing. In fact, Ayn Rand's books give all too painfully eloquent portrayals of quite a few aspects of what happens when fools like this get their way. Her endless pages of people competing for who can seem the most pathetic and helpless before various Committees of Distribution only seem exaggerated to those of you who have never dealt with any number of "consensus-based" organizations.

In 2006 I wrote a bit of a note on one aspect of this that got reproduced here.
(My letter starts right below the first image.)

This article in the Atlantic (once you get past the title) does a pretty decent job of covering a major example of how it can utterly permeate a subculture. And has. And then damage all of us through the consequences of their ill-considered actions.

And please don't say, "oh, that's magical thinking" and then dismiss it on the logically fallacious ground that by having described it (poorly, by the way), you've now put it entirely under a Somebody Else's Problem field. To describe a thing is not to "reduce it to a problem already solved". If you really think that, then say it to my face, go out there, cure a few dozen people of these behaviors, and come back to me with proof. Unless and until you can do that, pay attention. This applies to you. We are all subject to the damage this causes.

People like this, in my experience, are also real fast to judge their own work and that of their friends by the standard of "it's good enough" while judging things like products in the supermarket by a standard where any perceived inadequacy is the same as complete failure. And why bother to write in complete sentences or spell correctly? "You know what I meant!" and intent is all, you see. But a product on a store shelf that isn't perfectly vegan, and organic, and entirely free of all chemicals, GMO organisms, and on and on and on, is just the same as a factory farmed beef patty from Walmart. Unless it was made by somebody they know, a punk band, or some other variation on Little Kids Like Us, in which case all sorts of things are forgivable.

And stealing isn't bad if it's done from a large institution. Or, in fact, doing anything you want to such an institution is morally fine. After all, they're just Magic Adult People and hence have infinite resources and can't be hurt by the actions of Little Kids Like Us. Which is, of course, logically inconsistent with the stated reasons that many will give for actions like ecosabotage ("we'll hurt them so bad that they'll give up and leave!") but entirely consistent, as I've written above, with protests that are, ideally, as loud and obstructive as possible and for which coherent messages about why and what are trivial or even counterproductive. It's a logic for tantrums that any two year old would respect and agree with.

I think that we all know some of the more obvious other symptoms of this way of seeing and interacting with the world. Emo, anybody? People who have children of their own walking the streets in fuzzy pajama pants in patterns a ten year old should be ashamed to be seen in?

I have trouble even trying to explain to people under the age of thirty that the idea of walking around in costumes in the ways that so many now do (ooh, look at my authentic military camoflage shirt! Ohh! I'm wearing a jersey just like Michael Jordan's!") was, from ancient times until the 1980's, the kind of thing that people were expected to outgrow about the time they gave up bedwetting. In fact, when a show from the seventies or earlier wanted to make entirely clear that a particular child was Just A Little Boy or Little Girl, (say, as the innocent potential victim in a bank robbery) one of the classic quick signifiers was to have the child "still" wearing a cowboy hat or a pretend army jacket. After all, what surer proof could one need that this kid is barely more than a toddler?

Oh, we certainly do have our carefully worked out rationalizations these days (I'm supporting the team!) but funny how those rationalizations always neatly correlate with opportunities to Play Pretend. And, when folks are drunk or tired or simply don't expect to be judged, they sure come out with plenty of admissions of "this makes me feel like I'm a pilot in the Top Gun program" or whatever.

Personally, I wanted a leather jacket for years. For somebody who lives the life I do, they've ungawdly practical. But I did without for years because I had no willingness whatsoever to buy one with patches from some unit I've never been in, let alone a fake map as a liner meant to help the owner fantasize about being a daring pilot over WWII China.

Oh, and fwiw, I fucking well did contract work for Avirex.The co-inventors of the "bomber jacket". They offered me access to their company store and insider discount. But I had no willingness to do that sort of thing.

It's fantasy, folks. And unless you're in the business you should be ashamed of yourself.

And no, you're not a goddamn pirate. Or a ninja. Or a pro sports celebrity.

I'll come back to this subject again. As I keep saying, I'm convinced that this pattern of behavior is central to why so many people keep making such terrible decisions. I'll probably come back at some point and expand this piece. But for now I need to go out and get back to work.

Because if you're not creating useful results, you're just wanking.

Happy holidays.

-Rustin

 

Much later addendum: I just love this video. It does a wonderful job of showing that "I must be profound because I throw tantrums all the time" ethos of much of the supposedly "radical anarchist" crowd.

I also think that this article about Black Bloc does a very good job of laying out some of how these dynamics play out in practice within the Occupy movement.