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Among the truly gratifying things that come from writing this blog and more generally pursuing seemingly random interests at the intersection of photography and politics is the excuse all that has provided to make connections with interesting and curious people whom I'd otherwise never encounter. Today in the mail I received a copy of this new book* by Roland Bleiker who teaches international politics at the University of Queensland. While we've never actually met, Roland has graciously tolerated a number of pestering emails from me over the past couple of years. And he has kindly had his publisher send me a copy of the book which ranges across politics, poetry and the visual arts.
Every once in a while people in my discipline get it right. They deploy their fancy quantitative methods to establish - at least as solidly as any piece of social research can establish anything - what grandma knows. In this book* two young guys named Kriner and Shen show that disproportionate numbers of poor and minority Americans are sent off and die when we have a war. And they show too that public opinion about war is inversely related to awareness about this "causality gap." I have spent a bunch of time here complaining about how our so-called liberal media has been complicit in the BushCo war effort precisely to the extent that it failed to report on the casualty numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan. And while I tend to agree with Andrew Bacevich's review in The Nation (he says that we ought not await public outcry based on democratic norms but hope instead for a "pay as you go" policy for wars, essentially hitting the civilian population in the pocketbook) the book nevertheless strikes me as an important contribution.
Photograph © Richard Misrach.
Labor lawyer, activist, and (sadly unsuccessful) Congressional candidate, and all around smart guy Thomas Geoghegan has written a new book* in which he basically seeks to convince Americans that everything they think they know about European Social Democracies is mistaken. The point seems to be that we ought not to prefer the social democratic polities for this or that high-minded moral reason but because, in the first instance at least, we'd all generally be better off ourselves. You can find an brief excerpt/essay that serves as something of an advert for the book here at In These Times.
This is a book that seems extremely promising. I have mentioned Trevor Paglen glancingly here and here. And with Rebecca Solnit, who writes revealingly about landscapes more generally, as a co-conspirator, this is one I will order post haste.
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