Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Extraordinary soul and originality from the Malian vocalist and guitar player, Rokia Traoré. All of the songs are originals, except for The Man I Love, made famous, of course, by Billie Holiday. I should say that in Rokia’s care this becomes an original, too. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard this song made new in such an interesting way. This is a great recording.

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Copyright The New York Times

By MARGARETT LOKE
Published: March 30, 2009

Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.
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© Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt in 1963.
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Bubbles capture the attention of four girls in a photograph by Helen Levitt, who had an eye for the vignettes of New York streets.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 29, 2009

For many who survey an African landscape strewn with political wreckage, nowadays merely to raise the subject of European colonialism, which formally ended across most of the continent five decades ago, is to ring alarm bells of excuse making.

SAVIORS AND SURVIVORS
Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror
By Mahmood Mamdani
398 pages. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region, Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scholar at Columbia University and the author of “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,” is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror,” he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles. It is a brief, he writes, “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”

Mr. Mamdani does not dismiss a record of atrocities in Darfur, where 300,000 have been killed and 2.5 million been made refugees, yet he opposes the label of genocide as a subjective judgment wielded for political reasons against a Sudanese government that is out of favor because of its history of Islamism and its suspected involvement in terror.

At his most provocative Mr. Mamdani questions the distinction between what is often labeled counterinsurgency and genocide, saying the former, even when it kills more people, is deemed “normal violence” while the latter is considered “amoral, evil,” and typically it is the West that does the labeling.

Although he uses the United States war in Iraq as an example, with the International Criminal Court recently issuing an arrest warrant for Sudan’s leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Mr. Mamdani’s most compelling example is the treatment of a crisis in neighboring Uganda.

In Uganda, long one of Washington’s closest African friends, Mr. Mamdani traces the history of ethnically targeted “civilian massacres and other atrocities” against the brutal insurgency known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. In 1996, under President Yoweri Museveni, a second phase of that war began “with a new policy designed to intern practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts in northern Uganda,” Mr. Mamdani writes. “It took a government-directed campaign of murder, intimidation, bombing and burning of whole villages to drive the rural population into I.D.P. (internally displaced persons) camps.”

In 2005 Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan ambassador to the United Nations, denounced the government’s tactics, saying, “An entire society is being systematically destroyed — physically, culturally, socially and economically — in full view of the international community.”

But as elsewhere in Africa, Mr. Mamdani says, the International Criminal Court has brought a case against only the enemy of Washington’s friend, the Lord’s Resistance Army, remaining mute about large-scale atrocities that may have been committed by the Ugandan government. In this pattern the author sees the hand of politics more than any real attachment to justice.

Many argue that what makes Darfur different from other African crises is race, with the conflict there pitting Arabs against people often called “black Africans,” but here again Mr. Mamdani takes on conventional wisdom. “At no point,” he states flatly, “has this been a war between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs.’ ”

Much foreign commentary about Sudan speaks of its Arabs as settlers, with the inference that they are somehow less African than people assumed to be of pure black stock. If whites in Kenya and Zimbabwe, not to mention South Africa, vociferously maintain their African-ness, what then to make of the Arab presence in Sudan, whose slow penetration and widespread intermarriage, Mr. Mamdani writes, “commenced in the early decades of Islam” and “reached a climax” from the 8th to the 15th century, “when the Arab tribes overran much of the country”?

More interestingly, the author maintains that much of what we see today as a racial divide in Sudan has its roots in colonial history, when Britain “broke up native society into different ethnicities, and ‘tribalized’ each ethnicity by bringing it under the absolute authority of one or more British-sanctioned ‘native authorities,’ ” balancing “the whole by playing one off against the others.”

Mr. Mamdani calls this British tactic of administratively reinforcing distinctions among colonial subjects “re-identify and rule” and says that it was copied by European powers across the continent, with deadly consequences — as in Rwanda, where Belgium’s intervention hardened distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi.

In Sudan the result was to create a durable sense of land rights rooted in tribal identity that favored the sedentary at the expense of the nomad, or, in the crude shorthand of today, African and Arab.

Other roots of the Darfur crisis lie in catastrophic desertification in the Sahel region, where the cold war left the area awash in cheap weapons at the very moment that pastoralists could no longer survive in their traditional homelands, obliging many to push southward into areas controlled by sedentary farmers.

He also blames regional strife, the violent legacy of proxy warfare by France, Libya and the United States and, most recently, the global extension of the war on terror.

This important book reveals much on all of these themes, yet still may be judged by some as not saying enough about recent violence in Darfur.

Mr. Mamdani’s constant refrain is that the virtuous indignation he thinks he detects in those who shout loudest about Darfur is no substitute for greater understanding, without which outsiders have little hope of achieving real good in Africa’s shattered lands.

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My Shanghai photography, along with an essay I wrote, have been published in the newly-released book: China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance, by Kate Merkel-Hess (Editor), Kenneth L. Pomeranz (Editor), Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Editor), and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Copyright The Economist

Feb 19th 2009

TWO plane crashes bookmarked Alison Des Forges’s life. The first was nearly 15 years ago, when a luxury jet carrying two African presidents was shot down by missiles over Rwanda. The second was last week, when a cramped commuter plane crashed in icy weather near Buffalo, New York, killing 50 people. The first crash served as the pretext for the swiftest genocide in history. The second silenced its most dogged witness, a tiny American lady with silver hair.

On April 6th 1994, Mrs Des Forges was at home in Buffalo. The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated at 8.20pm that day, which was lunchtime in Buffalo. Twenty minutes later, a friend telephoned Mrs Des Forges from Kigali, the Rwandan capital. “This is it. We’re finished,” said Monique Mujawamariya, a fellow human-rights monitor.

Mrs Des Forges called her every half-hour, late into the night. She heard her describe steadily more alarming scenes—militiamen going from house to house, pulling people out and killing them. Eventually, they came to Ms Mujawamariya’s door. Mrs Des Forges told her to pass the telephone to the killers. She would pretend to be from the White House, she said, and warn them off. “No, that won’t work,” said Ms Mujawamariya. Then she added: “Please take care of my children. I don’t want you to hear this.” And she hung up.

From that moment on, Mrs Des Forges made a lot of noise. She was steeped in Rwanda’s turbulent history, having written her doctoral thesis about it in 1972. And she had a better sense than most of the evil that was brewing two decades later. She had spent years in Rwanda, investigating political violence for Human Rights Watch. She knew that a 1993 peace accord between the Hutu-dominated government and a Tutsi-led rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), was written in water, and that Hutu military leaders were mulling mass killings to avoid sharing power. She knew something terrible was afoot.
Shouting at the deaf

She made calls, sent faxes and frantically gathered information. By April 17th she was convinced that a full-blown genocide was under way. She was one of the first outsiders to say so. But everyone who mattered ignored her. Africa specialists at the State Department wept with her when she described what was going on, but who listens to Africa specialists? The top bureaucrats at the UN were concerned mostly with evacuating foreigners. President Bill Clinton was anxious to avoid another Somalia (where, the previous year, 18 American soldiers had been killed during a humanitarian mission). Mrs Des Forges could not even persuade the Pentagon to jam the radio broadcasts that co-ordinated the slaughter. It would have cost too much.

The genocide ended when the RPF rebels overthrew the Hutu government and seized power. For the next four years Mrs Des Forges led a team of researchers to dig up the facts. She then wrote the definitive account: nearly 800 pages of scrupulously footnoted horror. Future historians will depend on it. Her testimony helped put several of the perpetrators behind bars. And she made it impossible to argue, as many did at the time, that the genocide was a spontaneous explosion of ancient tribal hatred. She read the plans. She saw the receipts for half a million machetes.

In some ways, she was old-fashioned. Whereas other human-rights activists fuss about an ever-lengthening list of socio-economic “rights” (subsidised housing, fair trade, and so forth), Mrs Des Forges stuck to the basics, such as the right not to be murdered. She took extraordinary risks, rushing to the scenes of massacres and questioning killers when their blades were barely dry. She left out none of the ghastly details: the wives forced to bury their husbands before being raped; the baby thrown alive into a latrine.

She never went further than the facts allowed. Others might speculate that the genocide claimed 800,000 victims, or a million. She stuck with half a million, because she could substantiate it. Others assumed that if the genocidal Hutu regime were the bad guys, then the Tutsi rebels who overthrew them must be the good guys. Not so fast, said Mrs Des Forges: only one side was guilty of genocide, but both committed war crimes. The RPF killed perhaps 25,000 people in 1994, she reckoned.

Mrs Des Forges’s integrity made her unpopular with the RPF regime that still rules Rwanda. Last year, after she wrote a balanced but critical report about the Rwandan justice system, she was barred from the country. Shortly before she died, she spoke up for an exiled academic she thought was unjustly accused of taking part in the genocide. She never seemed to rest. A report she edited about violence in Congo was published posthumously.

What drove her? One story is revealing. In Burundi, Rwanda’s neighbour, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in 1993. The Western media barely noticed. Hutu officers in Rwanda concluded that they could do the same thing, and no one would give a damn. Mrs Des Forges wanted to document such atrocities so meticulously, and publicise them so persistently, that people would have to give a damn. Her book was called, after a killer’s cry, “Leave None to Tell the Story”. She knew that story-telling matters.

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Copyright The Financial Times

…Yet a huge financial crisis, together with a deep global recession, if not something far worse, is going to have much wider effects than just these.
Remember what happened in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment rose to one-quarter of the labour force in important countries, including the US. This transformed capitalism and the role of government for half a century, even in the liberal democracies. It led to the collapse of liberal trade, fortified the credibility of socialism and communism and shifted many policymakers towards import substitution as a development strategy.
The Depression led also to xenophobia and authoritarianism. Frightened people become tribal: dividing lines open within and between societies. In 1930, the Nazis won 18 per cent of the German vote; in 1932, at the height of the Depression, their share had risen to 37 per cent.
One transformation that can already be seen is in attitudes to pay. Even the US and UK are exerting direct control over pay levels and structures in assisted institutions. From the inconceivable to the habitual has taken a year. Equally obvious is a wider shift in attitudes towards inequality: vast rewards were acceptable in return for exceptional competence; as compensation for costly incompetence, they are intolerable. Marginal tax rates on the wealthier are on the way back up.
Yet another impact will be on the sense of insecurity. The credibility of moving pension savings from government-run pay-as-you-go systems to market-based systems will be far smaller than before, even though, ironically, the opportunity for profitable long-term investment has risen. Politics, like markets, overshoot.
The search for security will strengthen political control over markets. A shift towards politics entails a shift towards the national, away from the global. This is already evident in finance. It is shown too in the determination to rescue national producers. But protectionist intervention is likely to extend well beyond the cases seen so far: these are still early days.
The impact of the crisis will be particularly hard on emerging countries: the number of people in extreme poverty will rise, the size of the new middle class will fall and governments of some indebted emerging countries will surely default. Confidence in local and global elites, in the market and even in the possibility of material progress will weaken, with potentially devastating social and political consequences. Helping emerging economies through a crisis for which most have no responsibility whatsoever is a necessity.
The ability of the west in general and the US in particular to influence the course of events will also be damaged. The collapse of the western financial system, while China’s flourishes, marks a humiliating end to the “uni-polar moment”. As western policymakers struggle, their credibility lies broken. Who still trusts the teachers?
These changes will endanger the ability of the world not just to manage the global economy but also to cope with strategic challenges: fragile states, terrorism, climate change and the rise of new great powers. At the extreme, the integration of the global economy on which almost everybody now depends might be reversed. Globalisation is a choice. The integrated economy of the decades before the first world war collapsed. It could do so again.
On June 19 2007, I concluded an article on the “new capitalism” with the observation that it remained “untested”. The test has come: it failed. The era of financial liberalisation has ended. Yet, unlike in the 1930s, no credible alternative to the market economy exists and the habits of international co-operation are deep.
“I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more,” said Dorothy after a tornado dropped her, her house and dog in the land of Oz. The world of the past three decades has gone. Where we end up, after this financial tornado, is for us to seek to determine. …

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

…Beijing in the Mao years was damaged not only by the razing of old streets and houses but also by the socialist pauperization that had eliminated China’s middle class, causing a generalized dilapidation to set in. Beijing became drab and lifeless, its streets lined by ugly cement housing blocks, its markets pitifully undersupplied. It was a city stripped of the small things that had given it its everyday charm: its numerous delicacies; its hawkers and peddlers, each singing a different chant as they wandered the twisting narrow lanes, known as hutong. The city’s nightspots, theaters, teahouses, and numerous places of sin were shuttered, its restaurants nationalized, not to the benefit of the cuisine.

Now all that has famously changed as China has become an international powerhouse, and it is impossible not to feel a mixture of sadness over the transformation and admiration for the vitality of Beijing’s reconstruction, which is itself evidence of a great improvement in the standard of living of millions of its residents. Meyer, in his account of the obliteration of many of Beijing’s old neighborhoods, cites Le Corbusier, who railed against the sentimentality involved in conflating “rotten old houses full of tuberculosis and demoralization” with a medieval heritage whose preservation is deemed a sacred task. Precisely because of the Maoist impoverishment of an already poor city, many of the warrens of small lanes that were, and are, among Beijing’s idiosyncratic charms were beyond repair. So were many old-style courtyard houses, built behind brick walls, usually with four wings on all sides of a rectangular courtyard. Even in those areas where the authorities want to preserve some of the city’s old look, especially in the northcentral part behind the Forbidden City, renovating an old house usually means reconstructing it from scratch. A man who lovingly restored such a dwelling near the Beihai (North Sea) Park told me that the only element left of the original house was the pomegranate trees in the courtyard.

But the leveling of whole stretches of the old city has also had a brutality to it that adds to the sadness one feels over the loss of the features that made Beijing different and special. Like other great projects—the railway to Lhasa and the damming of the Yangtze River, for example—Beijing’s building boom illustrates both the muscular development of China as an emerging world power and the clumsiness of the one-party state. “The hutong disappeared,” Meyer writes. “Developers ‘bought’ entire neighborhoods, and everyone—even those holding full title, not just usage rights, to their homes—had to go.” In 2007, with China observing the slogan “New Beijing, New Olympics,” the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions in Geneva estimated that 1.25 million people had been evicted from their homes.

Meyer spent three years living in a single room of an old courtyard house, using a public toilet and a public bath a few minutes’ walk away, which he shared with several others, who became characters in a group portrait of ordinary people facing removal from their old homes and the lives they were used to. No sentimentalist or preservationist ideologue, Meyer acknowledges that Beijing is doing what many other cities have done in the past, even if it is doing it in exceptionally sweeping fashion. Meyer’s chief comparison is with Paris and the “drastic surgery on the medieval city center” performed in the nineteenth century by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the big and essential difference being that Paris remained ravishingly beautiful, architecturally harmonious, and scaled to human dimensions, while Beijing managed none of those things. In 1929, Le Corbusier noted that it was no longer possible, “as in Haussmann’s day, to throw whole districts into confusion, drive out the tenants, and make a desert in the crowded heart of Paris over a space of three or even five years.” …

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Copyright Indiana University

At the beginning of Thursday night’s talk about China’s growing economic influence in Africa, veteran New York Times journalist Howard French outlined what is a nightmare scenario for some.

“Fast forward 20 years,” French told an audience of about 50 people in the Ernie Pyle Auditorium. “It’s 2026 and China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.”

French was on campus for the talk as well as to participate in this weekend’s “China in Africa” conference organized by African Studies and the East Asian Studies Center, who also co-sponsored French’s talk at the School of Journalism.

His scenario featured a future where the preferred second language the world over is no longer English, but Chinese. A future where Chinese long words make their way into native tongues. A future where the global economy rises, and falls, with China.

While that has yet to be realized on a global level, a glimpse of what Chinese economic dominance would be like can be found on a smaller level in what may seem to be a surprising place: Africa.

“China is flooding Africa in a way the West has failed to do so,” French said. And by flooding, French means Chinese are pumping billions of dollars into projects in places like Nigeria and Ethiopia, Angola and Sudan. In return for their investment in African development, the Chinese gain access to the rich natural resources abundant in many of those same nations.

Freshman Hillary Combs, who is considering majoring in journalism, said she was surprised to hear how involved China is in Africa.

“It’s definitely something I’ll be following from here on,” Combs said, “but I didn’t know much about it until tonight.”

French places Combs’ lack of knowledge firmly at the feet of the news media.

“No one is really writing about this,” he said.

While Combs may pay more attention to Chinese investment in Africa, that investment could prove to be a double-edged sword, French said. Unlike the West, China typically does not attach strings to its development aid. While that means easier access to ready cash for underdeveloped African nations, it also means there’s no incentive for the less development-minded of the continent’s leaders to put that money to good use for their people.

“I hope for the best,” French said. “I really do. No one wants to see Africa, 50 years from now with 2 billion people and in a worse place than it is right now. That would just be a nightmare.”

Howard French
Photo by Shanna Rottinger
Though he has written extensively on the topic, French said the media largely have left untold the story of China’s investment in Africa.
From fiction to news to photography
French came to know Africa while in college. His family moved there while he was in school and after he graduated in the early 1980s, he moved to Ivory Coast where he taught and worked as a translator.

His dream at the time, though, was not to write about real people and problems.

“I was more interested in writing fiction in that era, right out of college, and while teaching at the University of Ivory Coast, I began doing the occasional freelance journalism piece and found that I really enjoyed it,” French said in an e-mail interview earlier this week. “Things sort of gradually gained momentum and I was able to do a few things for The Washington Post, and eventually became their stringer in the region. Sometime later, the Times hired me and I moved to New York to join the staff of the newspaper there.”

In 2004, French published A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, which chronicles his experience covering conflict, development and social issues on the continent for the Times.

It was while he was working stateside later on that he was assigned to China, eventually becoming Shanghai bureau chief. While working there, French said he found himself most often covering what in essence was the changing shape of Chinese society, the evolving Chinese consciousness.

That seeped into his photo work and led to his “Disappearing Shanghai” exhibit. French said this work is meant to give viewers a glimpse into the “relatively powerless communities in China who are being buffeted by immense change in that country.”

And graduate student Zhao Jingting knows all about that change. A native of China’s capital, Beijing, she said she thought French was spot on with his assessment of what is happening in her country.

“Over the last 10 years or so, a lot has changed in the country,” she said. “There are still a lot of problems, human rights issues, but I think things are getting better there. It’s a little more open. People can do things now they couldn’t do before, like sue the government. They may not win, but they can do it now. They couldn’t before.”

Journalism’s ‘radical reinvention’
It’s not just China, or Africa, that’s seeing major change. The world of journalism itself is currently in a state of flux. And, while it may seem all doom and gloom at the moment, French doesn’t think it has to be. It just means media outlets are going to have to pull a Madonna and reinvent themselves.

“Journalism is in a phase of radical reinvention, and this touches upon everything from the financial basis of the business to the actual workings, methods and routines of the profession,” French wrote in the earlier e-mail. “Although change on this scale is frightening, and inevitably ends up hurting a lot of people, it can also be an incredibly exciting time to be in this business, and we need sharp young minds and people filled with energy, imagination and ambition to make it to the other shore.

“One thing’s for sure: the chances of being able to make a difference are higher today than they’ve been in a good while.”

In addition to his career as a journalist, French also serves as an associate professor at Columbia University’s journalism school. When asked what advice he has to offer students who want to follow in his footsteps and become foreign correspondents, he said he’d tell them to consider freelancing.

Howard French
Photo by Shanna Rottinger
French, who also is an associate professor in Columbia University’s journalism program, took time to talk to students after his lecture.
“The industry is in terrible financial disarray right now, which may be discouraging for many, but I think we’re about to enter a new golden age for freelancing,” French said. It’s an especially attractive option because of low overhead costs, although freelancers would have to be careful to avoid being placed in niches where a limited audience would see their work.

One graduate student asked French how a young foreign correspondent could get ahead of the news.

“You can’t get in front of the news, and if you figure out how you let me know,” French quipped. But he quickly followed his joke up with a story about how, at Columbia, he’s become known for a mountainous reading list that includes a book a week as well as news articles.

“My students ask me why they have to read so much and my response is that you have to know everything,” he said. “If you’re really serious about doing this, you have to become obsessive. You have to read everything that comes down the pipe and you have to be obsessive about it. How can you report on something if you don’t understand it? If you don’t know what’s being written, what’s being said about a place?”

After the talk, French spoke with a student who was carrying a large camera and gave him the name of a photojournalist working in China.

“I’ll let him know I gave you his information,” French said. “I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”

As for French, he’s off to Africa next week to cover Chinese investment in the Congo for Atlantic Monthly.

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Copyright Dante Stella

From a very affecting essay. Follow the link below.

…When the world is gone, or when I am gone from the world, I will miss a great many things. It could be the smell of rain, the pink light of a northern sunset, or the intoxicating smell of perfume when I was sixteen years old. But what I might miss most is the smell of a roll of 120 film, pushing the paper tongue thumbwise into a plastic takeup spool, or the whirring of an old Rolleiflex.

We don’t have it now, the gelatin or the silver or the sucking sound of a metal shutter flattening reality into a still frame. There is no struggling in the dark with loading film into developing reels or the surprise of seeing that the negatives actually came out. We don’t have the magic anymore. For the would-be chemists and physicists, there was so much documentation, the disintegrating, mildewy Kodak data guides that showed curves in so much precision and told us what to do, at what temperature, and for how long: it was all method to tame the magic. Today you can find those booklets in the free bin at the front of King’s. But for all of the technique, all of the numbers and the graphs, there was always the faith of Tri-X Safety Film: you take the picture, we do the rest…

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Copyright The Washington Post

Last weekend’s book section of the Financial Times contained a capsule review of Stefan Zweig’s “The Post Office Girl,” a novel written in the aftermath of World War I and just recently translated into English. This is an immensely good thing, but really why I mention Zweig comes at the end of the review, when the critic says that the book “is a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives” — in other words, what is happening to most of us today. History, like an animal escaped from the zoo, is again out of its cage…

… A depression, if it amounts to that, is not just an economic crisis. It’s a historical mugging. Those of us who have been accustomed to exercising control over our lives are about to undergo an awfully frightening experience. This will hit the young particularly hard. If you asked almost any of them over the past 20 years or so why they did not read a newspaper or, really, care about the news at all, the answer was that news was irrelevant to their lives. It did not matter to them what was happening in Washington or London or even Baghdad…

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Copyright The New York Times

March 1, 2009

Yokohama, Japan

RECENT events mark Japan’s return to the world’s stage, or at least so it seems. Tokyo was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inaugural overseas destination. Last week, Prime Minister Taro Aso was the first foreign leader to visit the Obama White House. All this suggests that Washington sees Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, as a powerful nation. If only we saw ourselves the same way.

The truth is, Japan is a mess. Mr. Aso’s approval rate recently hit 11 percent, and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party is in open disarray. His predecessor barely lasted a year. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan just offers more of the same. This is largely because we have become a nation of bureaucrats. What passes for national policy is the sum of various ministerial interests, often conflicting or redundant, with jealously guarded turfs and budgets.

There can be no justification for all those mostly unused airports. Or for roads that lead nowhere. Or for the finance minister who appeared to be drunk at the Group of 7 meeting this month in Rome. Our problem is so deep that it sometimes seems that no political party can tame the bureaucracy and put in place a coherent national agenda.

But what most people don’t recognize is that our crisis is not political, but psychological. After our aggression — and subsequent defeat — in World War II, safety and predictability became society’s goals. Bureaucrats rose to control the details of everyday life. We became a nation with lifetime employment, a corporate system based on stable cross-holdings of shares, and a large middle-class population in which people are equal and alike.

Conservative pundits here like to speak of this equality and sameness as being cornerstones of “Japanese” tradition. Nonsense. Throughout much of its history, Japan has had social stratification and great inequality of wealth and privilege. The “egalitarian” Japan was a creature of the 1970s, with its progressive taxation, redistribution of wealth, subsidies and the dampening of competition through regulation. This all seemed to work just fine until our asset-price bubble popped in the 1990s. Today, the hemmed-in Japanese seem satisfied with the knowledge that everyone around them is equally unhappy.

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