Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen, eds.,
Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars. This is a fine and often (though not always) insightful collection of
personal essays, all of which describe how the authors came to their
criticisms of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past
twenty years. All of the authors are veterans of these wars to one
degree or another, and their range of experiences in and interactions
with America's military establishment was probably the most informative
part of the book to me. There are essays by deeply committed soldiers
who fully embraced the bureaucratic realities of managing a global
military presence, and came to oppose America's "forever wars" for
strictly strategic reasons, their own positive experiences leading them
spend a great deal of time explaining the how American generals failed
to understand intricacies of counter-insurgency strategy, failed to
appreciate and account for the logistics and costs of military
technologies, and much more. But there are also essays by soldiers who
were never on board with the rationales given for invading Iraq, or even
Afghanistan for that matter; included in these essays are stories of
the drug abuse, racism, incompetence, sexism, random violence, and
massive waste and fraud on the part of their fellow soldiers--and
sometimes themselves--while supposedly serving America's security
interests and spreading democracy in the Middle East. Some of these
authors look back on their time in these conflicts with pride but also
deep regrets about all that went wrong; others look back with shame and
horror; and others look back just grateful they escaped with their lives
and limbs, when so many others did not. Ultimately, the largest point I
take from these various multifaceted, but always militarily informed
criticisms was simply: George W. Bush's time as president was a moral, a
political, and a strategic catastrophe. By ordering the invasion of
Afghanistan, and then keeping troops there beyond the immediate collapse
of the Taliban, and much worse by ordering the invasion of Iraq, Bush's
administration not only led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, but
ruined millions of lives, and unleashed pathological regrets and
resentments, in the USA and abroad, that may never be put to rest.
Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity. Hauerwas definitely isn't everyone's cup of tea. A born essayist--in the
most fundamental sense of the term, constantly "essaying" new ideas,
rarely completing the one he had before the new one--his radical
Christianity isn't developed carefully and consistently, thus leaving
any remotely suspicious reader capable of dismissing his arguments as
incomplete and unpersuasive. But for any of the tens of millions who
can't help but recognize the radical, even absolutist, character of
Christian teachings and expectations when it comes to matters of
violence and peace, the many kernels of truth spread throughout
Hauerwas's explication and explorations of theses basic doctrines are
enormously valuable. His points about how we are addicted to violence
and war in part because we don't want to cast impurity and guilt upon
heroes of the past; about how violence and war is tied up in the very
structures of state sovereignty and thus politics as we know of it
today; about how American history can't help but associate war with
idealistic causes which having been mythologized into the proper, "pure"
understanding of our own identity...all of it is first rate. Hauerwas's
reflections are, ultimately, an inspiration to Christians who want to
understand a way to find in themselves a true conviction of peace, and
that's a beautiful thing.
Peter Levine, What Shall We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. This is a top-notch work of analytical and practical political and
social theory, one that I've been meaning to read for a year. Through a
sharp analysis of Elinor Ostrom, Jurgen Habermas, and the civil rights
activism of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Levine sketches
out and concrete and deeply thoughtful set of insights and suggestions
for people looking to engage in civic life, and make some democratic
difference in their localities. He identifies key elements of each of
the three above-listed traditions of participatory democracy and civic
action, but also recognizes and explores the theoretical limitations of
each, and from their provides a synthesis of recommendations. This is a
book that, as a citizen and a teacher, I'm going to be pondering a
while, considering how best to set boundaries, engage in deliberation,
and model just behavior as I try to get local action to matter.
Warren Magnusson, Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. I finally got around to finishing this collection of essays by the
political theorist Warren Magnusson, and I loved it. His insights are
scattered, sometimes repetitive and not always well connected, but they
remain brilliant all the same. His reconceptualization of "local
self-government" in light of the "locality" of states in the
international order, and the "locality" of individuals within a
sovereign, contractarian state, is profoundly radical, opening up, to my
mind anyway, all sorts of new ways of understanding the traditional
definition of local government--specifically, its municipal form in
towns and cities. Magnusson in these essays is a profound critic of
sovereignty and subsidarity, seeing both of them as theoretical forms
that define and delimit the kind of democratic mutualism and variability
and practice that characterizes that huge, undefinable range of what
I'll call "governmenting" (I'm definitely being influenced by David
Harvey's use of the term "commoning" here) which takes place in cities.
Magnusson wants us to think hard about a democracy, and right to
self-government, that is not dependent upon territorialization, not
dependent upon constitutional definitions. This puts him very much in
the camp of left-libertarian or anarchist thinkers, but while he's
familiar with the philosophical ideas behind those theories, he
approaches their conclusions with a language all his own, and one that I
find kind of brilliant. This man's thinking is a small treasure.
Paul McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. I found 1964: Eyes of the Storm outside my front door this
morning: a gift from a friend. I tore through the whole thing in a
single day—of course, it's mostly photographs, so no big accomplishment,
but still, it was a delight. I loved Macca's introductory essays; I
felt as though I could see him sliding back and forth between repeating
old stories automatically and being derailed by old memories he hadn't
articulated in decades, if ever, obliging him to put words for the first
time to the thoughts he remembers having had decades before. There's a
good amount of unreflective, unimproved emotionality throughout the
book, I think, in the short essays but also in the labels to his
wonderful, candid photographs: the way he writes about his picture of
George with the girl in the yellow bikini in Miami, for example, or a
shot of a pensive Ringo leads him to write movingly about him as still
the "new guy" in the band. And there's a two-page spread with photos of
John and George where it's not hard to imagine the look of their faces
weighing on Paul with all the weight of 60 years. The historical essay
on 1964 by Jill Lepore is fine, but nothing special; just your standard
coffee-table stuff, I suppose. But the photographs? An incredible
treasure, and a delight.
Bernie Sanders, It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. This is a politician's memoir, and so I expected, and forgave, the many
moments in the book, especially in the first few chapters, in which
Sanders tells the stories of his own presidential campaigns both
uncritically and somewhat simplistically. What I didn't expect, and
greatly enjoyed, was seeing Sanders elaborate upon the things that he is
truly passionate about--most particularly, the fact that contemporary
capitalism makes it impossible for so many working people to not only
get by on what they earn, but to also feel any kind of attachment to or
gain any kind of dignity from their work. For all Sanders's talk about
health care and education and billionaires, it is in regards to work,
and the communities of labor and mutual recognition and respect for
effort which ideally make the world of work something other than just
tragedy which we must endure to survive, where he comes closest to
genuinely and consistently articulating a democratic socialist vision.
There are elements of a true visionary in his otherwise often
boiler-plate left-liberal positions, and that's something that I am
certain that, whether they could articulate it or not, millions of
voters were captured by: that Sanders was presenting not merely a list
of preferences, and not merely a roll-call of enemies, but also a vision
of a better society. It comes through in this book, and that makes it
great.
Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. A brilliant update and expansion of an important book. He's really like a
left-leaning Charles Marohn, someone able to concisely cut through the
complicated institutional realities which have pushed our cities in
directions that are not only unsustainable, but central players in all
sorts of economic, racial, and environmental harms. All of his new
material is wonderful, but because of the genuinely inventive way he
ties terrible road design to invasive policing to basic questions of
freedom, I have to say I liked "More Engineering Confessions" the best.
Paul Thompson and Patricia Norris, Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know. A superb introductory book, which defines and lays out the broad usages
of the ecological language of stocks, flows, feedback, and all the rest
when talking about the environment, business, the economy, governance,
and much more. Not a polemical book, and in fact one that probably bends
too far over backwards to avoid taking a strongly anti-capitalist
stance, but overall, one I can't believe I haven't been using in my
Simplicity and Sustainability classes all along.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. At the beginning of this year, before the school year started up again, I decided to read The Silmarillion, mostly because I was uncertain if I'd ever read the whole thing all the way through before. I still had on my shelf an old, taped with
masking tape, paperback Ballantine edition of the book, which I remember
being on my shelves when I was in high school, or earlier. I still have
battered, paperback copies of LOTR too, but there's no mystery there; they're beat up because I read them to death. But The Silmarillion? Had I ever truly gotten through it? I honestly couldn't remember. Well,
I've gotten through it now, and it's a masterpiece of romance and
religion and myth. Tolkien's cosmology and legendarium includes echoes
of all the great stories, whether humble or cosmic: Atlantis is here,
and Rapunzel, and Oedipus. The rhythm of the writing sweeps you along;
there's no way anyone who isn't an autistic savant can possibly keep
track in their head all the names and places and dates through this
multilayered imagined genealogy of thousands and thousands of years, but
that's honestly not the point: the point is to be carried into an epic
world, a world of a profound and tragic and romantic and heroic saga of
elves and humans, monsters and gods, women and men. Tolkien carried me
along, that's for certain, and I loved the journey.
Thad Williamson, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life. A terrific dissertation-turned-book, stuffed full of good information an
arguments, pointing towards the value (but also the limitations) of a
civic republican perspective on addressing the problems of sprawl and
its unjust, undemocratic effects on our civic life. The conversation
about our built environment and how best to frame the ideological
arguments about it have changed much in the nearly 15 years since this
book was written, but as a primer to the basic theoretical arguments which surround the general topic of city life and transportation patterns and everything that flows from them, its value
remains.