Resting mule deer bucks. Maybe I will live to see the two state solution as well.
Greetings!
Let me start with a word about images. Almost all the images on Intermittent Signal are taken by me, usually with a phone. Most of the time, and in this edition, the images were taken since the last Signal came out. What I’ve been seeing, thinking, writing in some sort of conversation if not unity. Oftentimes, the images pursue an idea, maybe just pretty. Sometimes, and today, the images are meant to be illustrative, or in dialog with, the text. So please “read” them together.
A number of you have urged me to write about several issues of the day. Gaza, for one. The University today, for another, which I’ve written a lot about, actually. AI in general, and Marc Andreeson’s manifesto in particular. I’m honored that you care what I think.
“Honor” is a good place to start. While there are many reasons to write, and real writers cannot stop themselves, the sort of writing I do here requires some pride, even arrogance (it comes easier when young). To go on, I must believe that I have something to say, and that you should hear it. My text, gentle reader, is worthy of your attention. More brutally: I hope my gift is worthy of your praise. What used to be life and we have since come to call gift economies are all about honor. (Conversely, doubt is the enemy.)
Today I will try to say, indirectly and directly, a few things about Gaza, and about writing and not, and age and the professions have something to do with it, don’t they? With regard to Gaza, I do not really know anything about Palestine; I have no authority to write of those sufferings. I do, however, have some background in international law, and have written and taught it. I have also written about security, and space, and politics, especially in the context of terrorism and non-state actors. So yeah, there is much work I could do. But many of the things I might say are being said, repetitively. Some are being said by friends, at least as well as I could. (Ok, that’s just politesse.) But seriously, what thoughts of mine, today, would be gifts? Do I have anything to add? (Again, doubt is the enemy.)
I’m going skip the University on this outing. I have probably said too much already, and I have an orphan manuscript, still. With regard to AI, I’m working on some big pieces, by no means ready for distribution. But, since some of you asked: Andreeson is another billionaire who wants to be a philosopher. This happens all the time. Rich man gets to a certain age and thinks to himself and anyone who will listen, “Hey I want to be taken seriously, for my mind.” It sounds like the traditional plaint of the model du jour, “I’m more than just my [pretty face or other adored feature], you know.” Or the updated version, “I want to use my celebrity as a platform, to . . . “ Bless your sweet heart. So human. So funny.
I personally know several late middle aged intellectuals who have done much the same thing in reverse, and decided that they want to be billionaires. “I’m more than just erudition, honed judgements, and flashes of insight, you know. Love me for my assets.” Anyway, let me recommend an essay by the formidable N.S. Lyons, The Rise of the Right Wing Progressives. He has more time/patience for Andreesen than I can muster, and the essay is an elegant political typology. In particular, it is the best articulation I know of what “right” & “left” mean today. (With the weaknesses inherent in such schema, snipped the poet, accurately.)
Intermittent Signal prompts great conversations, for which I am grateful. A friend and good lawyer wrote me a fantastic account of “Gaza” as it plays out in an America town. Apart from being true, which is nice, her story expresses and illustrates many things that now I don’t have to. Lightly edited and redacted for all the obvious reasons, and with permission:
But the real reason I was waiting for your missive was to see if you would take on university presidents and the First Amendment. You wisely punted, as you have on Israel/Gaza issues in general. It is a situation that calls for a punt, as getting a first down is impossible and going for it would be bad game management. [Perfect metaphor, if you understand American football.] To be honest, I had largely tried to punt on the issue myself until circumstances put the ball in my hands.
As you know, I sit on our Town Library Board. Like many libraries, we make our rooms available to community groups for use. Scouts, HOAs, craft clubs, etc. all use them. So does a group called “Neighbors for Peace.” They stand in the town center with signs touting doves once a week, discuss “peace efforts,” and occasionally bring in outside speakers. All to little note. They book a room for use once a month, for six months at a time, the maximum booking allowed. These events are their own, they are not library-sponsored events.
Two Fridays ago, they announced that they would be bringing in [a speaker] on the following Tuesday. He is an Israeli who supports the Palestinian cause. I leave it to you to Google him, but you can see where this is going.
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After a weekend of my (and the rest of the Board’s) phone and email blowing up, we held an emergency board meeting for public comment. You can also imagine how that went, though it was peaceful and organized. Lots of emotions running high.
Did I mention that the town has a significant Jewish community including a Chabad a block away from the Library that frequently uses the Library’s various resources?
Did I also mention that many of the people speaking out against it were the most senior members of my office? And one of [my husband’s] best friends?
The lawyer in you knows this is an easy First Amendment question. The library, in this case a government entity, is basically the town square. [Yes, though I think complexities here.] The event moved forward the next day. There were many people who supported that decision based both on the topic and speech issues. But they mainly sent emails to say that.
I attended the event as a member of the Board and to support the three library staff members we left to monitor a few millennia of discord. The presentation also went as you would expect. Lots of people who wanted to listen, lots of people who did not want it to take place, a room at capacity, and a speaker who knew exactly what he was doing, even if the group that brought him in didn’t.
Words were exchanged, phrases were used. Chanting occurred. My husband’s bestie wore an IDF sweatshirt and the speaker pointed to it and said she was supporting a murderous terrorist organization. I took the mike (why I end up with the mike in these situations is definitely a conversation for my therapist) and begged everyone to calm down and use their First Amendment rights to make a formal report of harassment. The police eventually arrived (after declining the library’s request that they attend). The event mercifully ended and no one went to the hospital.
Two days later a man fired shots outside [a local] temple and yelled “Free Palestine.” The pre-school went into lockdown for several hours, as did the nearby hospital. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
Bruegel, joys, threats
Last Monday the library had a regularly scheduled board meeting with lots more public participation. The words “blood on your hands” were used. We voted to suspend the group from using the rooms for a year both for selling the speaker’s books on premises (a sloppy and obvious violation of several policies), and for allowing the speaker to violate the harassment policy (see the pointing at the sweatshirt incident above). All content neutral violations — but I’m also sure there is a recent Harvard grad completing their Skadden Fellowship who’d like to disagree with me.
Sadly, we also voted to close down the rooms for community use (all or nothing) until we develop a path forward. Because we can’t do this every two weeks, and we are a sitting duck for someone or some group looking to really test the limits of free speech. Library-sponsored programs will continue.
Did I mention that the library is about to put up a significant bond we’ve been working toward since before Covid to do the first expansion of the library building in 50 years — mainly to increase community space?
On balance, I think we fared slightly better than the Ivy League presidents. At least we’ve been consistent in the application of the policies. No one has resigned (yet). We also weren’t prepared by your former law firm [ouch!], nor do we get a nice house with our jobs.
University presidents also don’t generally live next door to the people who are affected by their decisions. Nor do they run into them at the grocery store, the Y, the farmers market, or the local coffee shop. Apparently, there is no place I go that library patrons do not also go.
I have many, many thoughts and opinions, of course. But they actually don’t matter. This situation happened and now it, and its long term consequences, must be managed in the best way the Board knows how.
There is so much I like about this story. For those of you familiar with U.S. television, my friend’s experience eerily recalls Parks and Recreation, darkly. Suppose somebody had been killed?
And it is all so predictable. The locals play their expected roles, the conflict unspools. Of course she “sees where this is going.” Irony and mordant laughter, hey, lockdowns!
And a local drama responding to a war thousands of miles away, in which many people feel it very important both to feel in some clear, right way and also that their fellows know how they feel. A community of sensibility . . .
To which the last paragraph is the perfect response.
One of the joys and dangers of being too long in the wasteland, literally and figuratively, is the untethering of the mind. (“Freedom to think” is both too rationalist and too positive.) On a snowy mountain, one might have thoughts that other people do not have, which is a fine thing, from a romantic perspective at least. Politics, however, out in the plains does not work like that. Politics is the art of the possible, said Bismarck, loudly a realist. (Maybe.) But the possible is constrained by what we can think together. And this is sad.
I’ve been thinking about political imaginations, often at the edge of consciousness, for my entire career, first in the context of globalization and European integration. What is thinkable, by us, together, after the Nazis, after the Holocaust, after the bomb – all done in the heart and in the name of “civilization”? City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent
Again, men on mountains dream, and such dreams may be fantasies, may slip the bonds of the possible. For reasons I won’t detail, modern international law has no real way to deal with annexation. When Russia invaded Ukraine, for weeks I fantasized that the war might be relatively peacefully resolved as the US resolved most of its territorial expansions, by purchase. Consider the Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, various deals with Mexico and Spain. Contrary to popular belief, most of the US was bought and paid for, albeit not always through willing arms length transactions. Could Russia simply buy Donbas? But we don’t think like that, and as of this writing, the war grinds on.
After the Hamas attacks of October 7th, I had another dream. Suppose Israel did nothing, or nothing militarily? Suppose, instead, Israel used the incident to discredit Hamas? I read today that Thomas Friedman had a similar fantasy, recalling Indian non-action against Pakistan in response to attacks by terrorists based in Pakistan. One could go further. Suppose Israel unilaterally declared Gaza (and the West Bank?) a state? And held Palestine accountable for its government (if Hamas is that) or, pleading in the alternative as US lawyers do, for harboring terrorists? As I said, a fantasy, and many of you know better than I why that couldn’t happen. We don’t think together like that. True. But I will say two things: too long in the wasteland, and where are we now?
Robins roosting at dawn. Subzero.
Once the war began, with Afghanistan fresh on the mind, President Biden and others asked, how will it end? What happens to Gaza, the place and the people in it? I had another fantasy. Gaza is still legally under the “mandate” of the U.N., as Hamas likes to point out when not taking civilians into its tunnels for shelter from Israeli bombs. Perhaps the UN could take actual control? Maybe all these rising powers in a multi-polar world would exercise some responsibility? Right. Well, maybe regional powers, who loudly espouse the Palestinian cause and yet cannot want unbridled terrorism would . . . My hope has not quite died here. But the road is rocky. Mandates have lost favor. We do not think together like that, either. Maybe the very idea of a mandate is too colonial for contemporary sensibilities, both passively righteous and actively squeamish. Ungenerous and unmanly, actually. In a more honorable if failed age, the “mandate,” here and elsewhere, was designed to be a transitional phase from colonial subjugation to full statehood.
We do think together in terms of states. After all the cosmopolitan, post national talk of the last decades, and I am guilty of more than a little, we see that large scale international order depends on functional, reliable states. We seem to be able to think little else. Again, the political imagination is limited, and anyway, institutional capacity is in fact thin. Here in the U.S., too. We shall come to know, but in the Middle East, the political imagination of the participants may be too limited, their collective resources too paltry, to resolve these conflicts in any intentional, civilized, way. Deaths and time resolve all, even if we can’t do better. Perhaps the situation is essentially tragic, without escape. Nightmares.
I refuse to believe that.
Toddler dancing.
Whether or not the rules based international order is coming to an end, its beleagured state brings its weaknesses, and strengths for that matter, into focus. And one of the things we see is that the modern state, often idealized in Weberian fashion as “rational” and somehow above culture, race, ethnicity, and especially religion, is often something else in fact. Olivier Roy has a nice book about the creation of the Central Asian republics on the basis of peoples put into their places, Uzbeks here, Kazakhs over there. Serhii Plokhy details the twisting history of the idea of “Russia” vis-à-vis Bellarus and especially Ukraine, and any number of peoples. Migrations voluntary and coerced shaped Eastern and Central Europe. After the War, multicultural polities became much less so.
Many of Israel’s Jews were expelled not only from Europe, the dominant narrative, but also from Africa and the Middle East — places which now also are less Jewish, and so less multiethnic. Or, if you will, more pure. In Jerusalem Is Israel's Future, Ben Judah details what might be called the distillation of Palestine, especially Jerusalem, into its constituent peoples, who make exclusionary claims to spaces. “Palestinian,” which had once meant a resident of Palestine, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, came to mean something else (disputed, of course). And so now right thinking people, myself included, call for a “two state” solution. Thomas Friedman, concluding a marvelous interview with Ezra Klein: “And I have a very simple rule. I’m for a two-state solution. I’m for two states for two people. If you’re for that, you’re my friend. And if you’re not for that, you’re not my friend.”
It seems worth remarking that North Atlantic liberals like me rightfully worry about xenophobia. Bluntly, we should welcome migrants, in a generous and tolerant spirit, because we are cosmopolitan, humane. I know I am. Conversely, such folks worry about the rise of the far right, people who seem to want to base politics on native culture, in their own countries. (Having already referred to Bismarck, I am with difficulty avoiding slipping into German here, which would be heavy handed.) But when it comes to Palestine, we argue that the state and territory must reflect ethnic groupings. The Jews need a state. So do the Palestinians. Maybe, but then the state isn’t rational at all, is it?
Maybe that is all that we can reasonably hope. But if so, then we must recognize that the problem of “the state,” which was bad enough, has been pushed back to a supposedly more fundamental, but no more legible, basis, “the people,” the “gens” in “genocide.” The Jews, paradigmatically, but the paradigm isn’t so clear, anymore. This is not just Herzl, the Zionist, but also Herder, the philosopher of das Volk. Sorry. But humanity evidently has not worked through the problems of nationalism brought to a head in the first half of the 20th century. The “suicide of Europe,” the foundation of Israel, and the birth of the Post War international order evidently were not enough. The 19th century isn’t over. It rules us from the grave.
A buddy of mine is a very accomplished ocean sailor. He has been kind enough to take me along on what were jaunts for him but adventures for me, along the coast of England, and across the Channel to France. Recently he mentioned, en passant, that he had cracked a few ribs while sailing off Cape Hatteras, in “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Despite my age, in juvenile fashion I thought this was really, really cool.
Cape Hatteras is in the starkly beautiful Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. My wife and I used to vacation just to the south, on Ocracoke, and to her gentle annoyance, I wrote of the experience. This is a hazard of writing: life, even vacations, become grist for the mill, that is, work. It’s tiresome. To make matters worse, because I was a young professor with artistic ambitions, I tried to say something beautiful, true, and academically credible. I needed the credit, frankly. A text that does all these things may not be impossible to write, but in my case – I just looked back at it, decades later – the result is appallingly difficult. Aesthetics and globalization and post-structural rationalism or its end and Kant and 9/11 and, and, and yes, Ocracoke, an island on the horizon of desire. God I was younger. At least some of it holds up, I think. Triptych: Three Meditations on How Law Rules After Globalization.
While recuperating, my buddy spent time with his father, in his 90s, and once a professor and a formidable sailor, too. The old man could no longer read easily, and so spent his time interrogating ChatGPT. (The ontology of AI, to say nothing of our interactions, is very much on my mind, but for another day, maybe.) I was put in mind of an old Jimmy Buffet song which I’ve known since forever:
As the son of a son of a sailor
I went down to the sea for revenge
Only a few years ago I learned that the line was “down to the sea for adventure.” I’d been singing “wrongly” along for well over a generation. But as every son knows, I suspect even men without fathers, maybe especially such men, the truer line is “revenge,” though not on our sires, except maybe as proxies for our fates.
Yes, I feel the same way. I don't have anything meaningful to add about Gaza. It's all been said, in different ways.