Back to blogging for the first time since early this year, having just witnessed the half-anniversary mark of the Trump presidency and also undergoing a major personal crisis of faith, it is time to turn to my deep Eastern roots for a security and stability that is no longer available to the citizens of the West who continue to live by Western values.
I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.
Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.
And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.
So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.
Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.
Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.
I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.
I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.
So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.
Friday, August 4, 2017
Friday, December 30, 2016
2016's parting lesson: Elites aren't the problem - elitism is
I argued when 2016 began that this would be the year that democracy either triumphs or collapses. Now as 2016 draws to a close, it's time to hazard an initial verdict: democracy has indeed triumphed, but in such a way that betrays both its promise and its peril as opposing faces of the same coin.
We have witnessed over the course of this past year just how difficult the democratic experiment of governance really is, as the fundamental reason for this inherent difficulty has finally been laid shockingly bare: human beings can have very strong differences with each other.
We now live in an openly acknowledged "post-truth" world, where the very facts of life themselves are no longer universally agreed upon. Some would argue that this situation is hardly new: it's always been the case that opposing values, worldviews, and belief systems tend to produce contrasting understandings of particular events or circumstances which impact the common human family. What 2016 has demonstrated, however, is that objectively observed or reported facts are so superseded by the subjective interpretations that establish their context for any particular individual in question, that even the most irrefutable factual contradictions of one's preferred narrative can become so irrelevant as to be practically no better than blatant falsehoods.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.
Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.
As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.
The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.
Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.
As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.
That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.
Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Obama seals positive legacy embracing Trump's rise: Donald take note
Yesterday, for the first time ever, Barack Obama formally met face-to-face with the leader of a counterinsurgency that has placed his legacy squarely in its cross-hairs for much of its stunning ascension to the doorstep of power.
The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.
Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).
Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.
Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.
His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.
As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.
The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.
Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).
Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.
Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.
His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.
As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period
In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.
Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.
It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.
Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:
1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse
There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.
Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.
What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.
If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.
Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.
It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.
Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:
1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse
There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.
Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.
What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.
If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Downed by a big Weiner? If this is politics 2016, who needs reality TV?
Even the most outlandish political satire would have a tough time rivaling the surreal developments now unfolding in the final week of the presidential race.
Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?
And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?
You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.
Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.
So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.
Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?
And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?
You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.
Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.
So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
No, the Philippines isn't kicking America out for China
Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.
But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?
There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.
But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.
In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.
That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.
It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.
There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.
But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?
There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.
But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.
In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.
That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.
It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.
There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.
Monday, October 17, 2016
How America's becoming polarized like Syria
One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.
What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.
Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.
The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.
Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)