Misadventures in Myanmar: The Great Man Theory Debunked

If 2008 was charmingly preoccupied with the idea of Barack Obama as a heroic outsider, scourge of political business as usual, and all around harbinger of a more level playing field to come, then 2009 is turning out to be–what?–a refreshingly stiff antidote to such heady optimism.  The YES WE CAN-dust has cleared, and politics has settled once more into what Rahm Emmanuel rightly calls the art of the possible.  The economy is still in the toilet.  America’s still got one (Iraq), two (Afghanistan), three (still at “war” on “drugs,” last we checked)  wars on.  And Obama has turned out (fortunately) to be something both other and decidedly more pragmatic than the angel Gabriel.  Change you can believe in, it turns out, is a slow and fitful process:  Business may not quite be as usual, but it hasn’t gotten all that unusual either.  The financial industry continues to resist restructuring, and reformers continue to be tarred as renegade socialists.  The playing field may have been “leveled” in the more ruinous sense of the word, but it remains safe to say that the meek haven’t exactly inherited America.  The historically marginal are still just that, somewhere subsumed in the grand sweep and process of events that even in topsy-turvy 2009 remain cosmically beyond their control.

You Are Here.

In the US, anyway, but maybe not in Myanmar, where John Yettaw, an American Vietnam vet, Mormon, and armchair psychologist of dubious credentialing, has struck a major blow against the Great Man theory of history.

On May 5, Burmese authorities arrested the 53-year old Yettaw as he was swimming away from the Rangoon home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel-decorated, opposition leader and democracy advocate who has been under house arrest at her lakeside home for 13 of the past 19 years.  In what has to be the single most depressing instance of geopolitics parodying a Wes Anderson film, Yettaw, an asthmatic and borderline diabetic, outfitted himself with plastic bottle floaties and homemade flippers and made the mile-long swim across Inya Lake in hopes of speaking with Suu Kyi about a paper he was writing on forgiveness and resilience.

Suu Kyi, who was up for release this year (when, significantly, the ruling Myanmar junta plans to hold elections), pleaded with Yettaw to turn back immediately but ultimately relented (sympathy being a common flaw in the Nobel temperment) and let the poor bastard stay the night to regain his strength.  The whole bizarre episode ended, of course, with Yettaw being arrested on his return voyage across the lake and being summarily shipped to a Burmese prison to await trial on charges of immigration violations and entering a restricted area.

Worse yet, Suu Kyi is being tried for violating the conditions of her house arrest, and it doesn’t take real a cynic to guess that the junta will be more than happy to extend her imprisonment and cripple the opposition through the slated elections.  Many Burmese are livid or despairing (rightly so, in both cases), and George Packer at the New Yorker has publicly entertained the idea that the whole thing was a set up.  Either way, John Yettaw’s treatise on forgiveness and resilience is shaping up to be a classic on the subject.

John Yettaw: International Man of Mystery

Last week, TIME wondered if Yettaw is “crazy or just eccentric.”  Here’s an idea:  how about we ditch the false dichotomy and call him the single most destructive (and historically significant) idiot that America has unleashed on the world since Bush left office?

Misadventures in Micro-Blogging: The Real Problem with Twitter

New media doomsayers and cultural critics love to quote Henry Thoreau’s famous quip on the first transoceanic telegraph line: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic . . . ; but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Face it: Henry Thoreau doesn't care what you're doing.

As much as anything else, this shows that Thoreau was a classic wet blanket when it came to technology and that, really, he should’ve enjoyed the relative quiet while it lasted. That bit of proto-celebrity gossip, at least, had an element of human drama. Now substitute Nicole Ritchie for Princess Adelaide and “wants a burrito” for “has the whooping cough,” and you’ve drawn a tidy line of precipitously declining urgency from the content of the 19th century telegraph to that of Twitter.

But that’s nothing new. Exhuming Thoreau also proves that since the 1860s, every new development in information technology has been tarred by one authority or another as the one that was finally going to complete American culture’s nosedive into miscellany and irrelevance. So if we’re going to join that chorus re:Twitter, let’s at least recognize that we’re more or less certain to be proved either A) wrong or B) right in a way that’s so historically watered-down and redundant as to not really matter.

Which is not to say that Twitter should be uncritically embraced. It shouldn’t, but not for the reason most folks like to cite (i.e., “it’s making us vapid”). No, ma’am. That’s not they way it works. Twitter doesn’t make us vapid–doesn’t sap our inherent creativity and beam a laser of dullness into our captive minds. Quite the contrary: by being so wonderfully participatory and democratic, Twitter gives us all more chances than we’ve ever had to broadcast our (pre-existing) vapidity. The problem isn’t just Twitter. It’s us, and if critics want to quote something to the correct effect, the old joke about smart fools vs. dumb fools serves better than Thoreau.

A smart fool lets everyone wonder if he’s an idiot; a dumb fool opens his mouth and confirms it.

Subscribe to the Nicole Ritchie Feed.

And in its particulars, Twitter probably sets us up to look like really dumb fools. On the one hand, the format plays to the universal thirst for attention, prompting users for constant reports on their life’s hourly progresses (or lack thereof). And on the other, Twitter requires that those reports be very, very terse. This setup imposes one kind of restraint (140 characters per post) while completely eliminating another (the previously limited number of opportunities in a day to grandly announce what you’re doing/thinking/eating), and the resulting tension creates the real Twitter problem, as most of us just don’t look that good in a barrage of quips.

By way of analogy, the genius of the haiku and the sonnet isn’t that they’re short; it’s in the fact that they force the writer to be judicious and the reader to be imaginative. And there’s no shame in admitting that the sonnet, as a format, just isn’t for everyone. Particularly when you’re churning them out day after day. A Shakespeare might keep the quality relatively high, but the rest of us over time are going to look more and more like really bad poets.

Or in the case of Twitter (where, mercifully, most aren’t writing in verse), the constant temptation / pressure to produce new micro-blog updates eventually brings out the boring, banal, and unappealing in just about everyone. And this, I think, suggests the ultimate truth of Twitter: People are more interesting when you don’t know everything about them.

Critical Failure

[There’s no way to set this story up that doesn’t make me sound like a pompous ass, so I can only ask that you read through to at least the point where I begin to sound more like an idealistic but aloof coward, so as to temper the first impression a bit.  Thanks.]

I’ve been reading critical theory on the train during my commute lately.  This is new.  And old.  Every few years I get the idea that flogging myself through a bit of difficult sociology will pry open some heretofore closed door  in my mind.  This will be like finding Narnia, I imagine, or trying pot for the first time, which is about the same.  These self-guided efforts usually end in failure, and I wind up with one more book I haven”t finished wrinkling underneath a sweaty can of Tecate on my windowsill.

My current attempt hasn’t really found a chance to fail yet (I’ve been busy) in the typical fashion (me growing tired of not “getting it” and simultaneously realizing that I badly need a thicker, more intellectually imposing coaster), but I think I may have managed to fail in a new, different, and more subtle way just the same.

I was riding the train through Oakland last week when a dude got on, sat down across from me, and after (apparently) watching me read for a minute, asked what I honestly hoped to “get from reading those books.”  This was, perhaps, a more difficult question than he intended.  The book in my lap was Henri Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World.  If he didn’t know the book (which seems likely) and was judging by the title, “those books” might have been the self-help genre, and he might have been wondering how my desperate search for coping strategies was coming along.  On the other hand, if he did know the book, then I might be more or less obligated to explain that, honestly, I didn’t “get” even half of what I was reading but that I was, in fact, gamely searching for the door to Narnia.

Instead, I opted to split the difference and end the conversation before it began by mumbling something about how I had to read the book for school, which was a lie.  Even worse, it was a notably lame and cowardly lie when appreciated in context.  I was there thinking, OMFG, do I really want to wade into neo-Marxist social theory with some random dude (who probably won’t “get” it) on BART?  What will he think?  How will I come off?

Henri Lefebvre talks to strangers

All of which fall pretty neatly into just the kind of thinking that Lefebvre (who, even in my stunted understanding, is clearly committed to engaging the world, questioning assumptions, living life as art, and striving for some radical subjectivity) would be 110% against.  Here was another human being genuinely curious about what was going on in my head, maybe looking to pry open a door of his own, ready to go to Narnia, if you will, and I totally and utterly failed him.

Why I couldn’t have told the dude that I was reading some wild Frenchman who was on a mad 1960s mission to take back the social and mental environment is completely beyond me.  But whatever the reason, it’s also why I’m going to keep Lefebvre from the coaster pile, why I’m going to be ready to have it out next time on the afternoon train through the East Bay.  And to a certain extent, it’s why I’m writing this blog.

Too Big to Fail

AIG and the US auto industry are only the newest additions to a brotherhood of seriously dubious distinction.  Historically speaking, the track record for this weight class is less than reassuring.

1)  Roman Empire

2)  Titanic

3)  Goliath

4)  Spanish Armada

5)  Dinosaurs