Politblogo

Resent, Ascent, Assent

Some of you may be wondering what the past 12-15 photo posts without comment were all about. They were photos directly from the grainy imaging of my crackberry about two protests in DC happening today. The ones at the back---ie, the beginning---belong to the anti-health-care-reform Tea Party protesters. There were only 3-4 hundred of them, and you may notice that at least one of them is carrying a sign reminding the remainder not to make racist slurs.

The rest of the pictures come from the March for America, a broad coalition of pro-immigration-reform protesters. I hadn't really paid attention to this and didn't realize it would be there, but I started getting an inkling when I got on the Metro and it was full of Latinos and others carrying signs and flags.

As you can probably see, it was a much larger protest than the Tea Parties, and that makes me quite happy. Liberal immigration policy is a net positive and bulwark for the left, and particularly Latino communities mobilize quickly and easily.

The difference between these protests could not be more stark. The Tea Party protests had a hard edge to them, a small lake of white, largely older faces with visibly petulant or resentful expressions, very "in your face." I stayed well back. The "energy" was, to put it mildly, not inviting.

The immigration protest could not have been more different. There was music, there was dance (including indigenous, I may upload a pic later), there was playing and laughter and picnicking. It was like a little moment of utopia, Latinos and blacks and whites and Asians (there was a small but vocal desi Muslim contingent I noticed). There was also, of course, anger---and why shouldn't there be? And, of course, there were speeches.

It was hard not to be drawn in, and I pulled myself away from it after a few pics. But for a moment it was possible to think that the glory has not transited just yet.

Freedom is slavery, health is insurance: the metabenefits of a bad bill

(To my "regular" "readers": I am writing this blog post in response to multiple brous-haha around the interwebs into which I may have dipped more than just my little tippy-toe on the matter of health care.  It was written at the suggestion of ex cob logger Ian Welsh as a substitute for taking my frustrations out on his impudent commentariat. Don't expect this blog to stop going Billmon after this any time soon, especially since the Noo Typepad now suXX0rz.  Next time you see me blog, it will be on Wordpress or something non-annoying that does not make my browser cry bitter Javascript tears.  But at least thunderpants will be happy that I've satisfied his demand.)

I thought I'd write a long song-and-dance about my opinion on the US health care reform effort, but then I realized that not only would it be highly susceptible to the worst sort of nitpickulation, it would also be better summarized as a table.  Well, at this point in time, there are two legislative options: no bill, or a bad bill.  Here's my assessment of the relative likelihood of good, bad, and ugly outcomes of both options:

	Long-term outcome likelihood
	Good	Bad	Ugly
No bill	Nonexistent	Reasonable	High
Bad bill	Very Low	Reasonable	High

So, as you can see, I've done the math and I think it's better to pass a bad bill rather than no bill. A bad bill has a chance of defeating at least one pernicious meme: that no Congress or administration can alter US health care delivery systems, which are wholly broken. 

I will not get into Nate Silverian attempts at defending anything about the bill as it stands.  It's a terrible bill.  It is completely bone-headed not to simply expropriate the "health" "insurance" "industry" wholesale and immediately institute a Canuckistani single-payer system.  Anything that doesn't lead to this outcome is a lie.  However, if I had a dollar for all the political lies and terrible ideas we have to tolerate, I'd be Warren Buffett.  Am I Warren Buffett?

Nevertheless, the bill should pass.  The only condition under which I would take this statement back is if there is any chance that there are legislators who are willing to scuttle this turkey who also have the wherewithal to bring about a better bill---one that eventually eliminates the desurance industry.  Since this has a hellball's chance in snow, it's better for all the other people who think that they'd rather have no bill to fix that problem---that they have no effective progressive representation in Congress, or that they have no leverage either way---than engage in perverse quests to leave the effort with nothing.

De-front-paged Corrente post: Compounding their error; or, I do indeed enjoy shooting fish in a barrel

The following is a post I wrote at Corrente which continues an ongoing bit of flamewar whose context may be a bit mysterious to my usual readership. Corrente's owner decided it was too flamewar-y for the front page his blog, but I meant to say what I meant to say, because it illustrated the point I wanted to make. I believe those with Corrente accounts can still read it, but I intended to put it on the open Internet and here it is. I mean, it has a high snark level, and I can understand why someone may not want to encourage that level on their site.

The overall context is that while I think that Obama was a somewhat bigger campaign risk than Hillary Clinton, I do believe she lost due to a small number of misapprehensions about why the Obama campaign took off the way it did. And that some of these misapprehensions are reflected in the PUMA movement---which I believe to be real, and reflecting a consequential reality---in a different way.

The specific context is a series of posts about the mortgage meltdown which reveals the kinds of poor ideological and political judgement that mars the PUMA movement. However, the owners of the Confluence blog decided to compound the error with a very interesting set of circumlocutions, which I proceed to take down.

Well! You may recall my recent scathing critique of a Confluence post on the mortgage meltdown that I thought was at best buying into tedious old right-wing saws about anti-discriminatory measures. I am flattered to report that, despite her disagreement with me over the admittedly trolly bit at the end, Anglachel has seen fit to cite my post approvingly in one of her own.

Well, this finally provoked the "Conflucian"* response. And it has appeared as a pair of posts by riverdaughter and by dakinikat (who wrote the post I originally objected to). Needless to say, these are awesome circumlocutions from start to finish. For example:

However, it is the case that sometimes reality is reality and people in the news of all races, class, status, color, gender, you name it, do things that make them look bad. This is an unavoidable fact of like. It is also the case that sometimes programs and federal funds that are created for very good purposes are exploited by people who happen to be of all races, class, color, gender, you name it, who *are*, after all, imperfect humans. Greed and bad behavior is not restricted to Republicans. We have seen that some Democrats are quite capable of it.

Amazing. So, astonishingly, all kinds of people are bad. This is what we have discovered. And thus we are invited to ignore the context of what dakinikat actually said in her post. Bad person is bad.

The comments, oh the comments. They could fill and entire blog's worth of deconstruction. Like the blog posts that precede them, they studiously avoid discussing how exactly we got here. For starters.

And as for dakinikat, it is so tempting to quote the "my black friend" she pulls near the end---it would be like shooting a tuna balanced on a wet thimble. Or the appeal to "peer-review" authority, as though peer reviewed journals do not continuously contradict each other even in real science**. But that's not the important bit. The important bit is right at the beginning, where she reasserts the very article that's at issue, the Liebowitz article that buries a very charged set of ideological claims under an ultimately quite irrelevant discussion and analysis of mortgage typology. And she does so not merely apparently oblivious to the objection, but also forgetting why the objection was raised: an claim about the Congressional Black Caucus.

So, as I recall, commenter Valhalla admonished me in the last post that I did not attempt to engage with them. While I felt I had good reason to critique them from Corrente rather than from their comments, I attempted to correct this by posting the following brief but substantive response to dakinikat:

*BOOP*

Dakinikat insists on repeating the Liebowitz business, which I made the very focus of my own post to which Anglachel links. Its entire purpose is to do one of three things, and probably all:

* Discredit the idea that mortgage approval discrimination exists against minorities (while ignoring subsequent evidence and argument to the contrary).

* Blame the foolishness of mortgage lenders on *gasp* an anti-racist policy, when it's been amply shown that this is not the case.

* Blame the allegedly impending economic collapse on mortgage qualification liberalisation, deflecting it from the actual cause, which was allowing these segments of the credit apparatus to be overleveraged.

These three things are interconnected by ideology, and they bear a number of ideological fruits. One of these begins with "r". Oh no!

Yes, it is sharp and critical, and yes, it is somewhat snarky. But, unlike nearly anything else on either Confluence response posts or their comments, it addresses the point being made directly. What Liebowitz is saying is basic and well-known glibertarian cant (which is sometimes popular with economist-types). But it is an ideological claim no matter which way his data actually falls out. Because economics doesn't really tell us half us much as it claims to do, about the facts, but it sometimes gives us a language to talk about ideology.

And I happen to believe that the predictable result of this type of glibertarianism is a racist result. I'm sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings.

However, I am known there as a "crazed Obama-loon", and my substantive response was quite predictably deleted, and quickly. And the moderator decided to respond with:

fuck off mandos.

Oh, woe is me. But: at least Valhalla should now know why I didn't try the first time.

So, the point is not that PUMAs are burning crosses on their front lawns, or aren't perfectly nice people who wouldn't go out of their way to give a brown guy a break, or don't have dark pigmentation themselves. It doesn't even mean they have no legitimate complaint, or that their complaints are entirely motivated by nefarious intent. Far from it. It is merely that the PUMA movement, at least as represented by quite a proportion of Confluence regulars, has allowed defensiveness and anger over Obama campaign strategy to severely blunt their political judgement, even so far as misunderstanding the actual tactic the Obama campaign used. And, for that reason, we should hope beyond hope that this poor judgement is not loudly echoed in the wider political sphere.

*They apparently have a web radio show called "Conflucians Say". Uhm. I really couldn't resist, sorry.

**Economics is dressed-up moral argument at best, well before it is science, and the Liebowitz paper at issue is no exception.

What follows is a comment thread that I think is also interesting in itself, but I'm still working out what/how to refer to things for which I've written a response comment.

Got inner turmoil?

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe---what you or I might call "reality"---but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one's hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!" 

On the other hand, those who were right are, as Krugman points out, DFHs.  They may have been right in the observable universe, but they weren't right in an ennobling way.  They were right in a childish, "I told you so" way, which only highlights their fundamental unseriousness.  It was easy for them to be right.  When DFHs are right, they are right in a dirty $@#$ing way.

You see, the real distinction between being right and being wrong is not one of verifiability.  It is one of aesthetics.  Was it difficult for you to come to your conclusion?  Did you suffer for it?  Was it dramatic?  Did you sit leaning forward, chin on fist, in pensive repose like that cliché thinker sculpture, only with more clothes?  It's the inner turmoil, and the hard decisions about other people's lives (whether they will live or not) that makes you a Serious Person.

But if the answer was obvious to you, plain as day, well, that's a pretty ugly way to come to the right conclusion.  No drama, no suffering, no inner turmoil.  You didn't even have an interesting pose.  There was nothing tragic about it.  You may as well have been at the grocery store or driving home or doing whatever it is that unserious, unimportant people do.

If you come to conclusions based on evidence, and if you see what obviously is unfolding before your eyes, and you do not have a Deep, Difficult Choice to make to sacrifice the lives of thousands, you are unserious and Serious People should ignore you.  Actually, the choice to sacrifice thousands of lives would prove that you were a Serious Person, because you certainly felt inner turmoil as you did so.

And the inner turmoil is what matters.

Easter Bunny: terrifying

Today I was shopping in a mall which I visit frequently because of its proximity, and I was blissfully walking through the halls which were curiously bedecked with pastel bunting like it was some kind of lavendar Christmas when I chanced upon a truly horrible sight.  In place of the Santa Claus that would be there on a normal Christmas, there was a man in a bunny suit.  Normal, you say?

Wrong, I say!  Since when did the Easter Bunny get his own mall display like Santa Claus so that children could sit on his knee.  What's the Easter Bunny supposed to bring on Easter anyway? What do you bring to a crucifixion?  Flowers?  Condolence cards?  And why is a crucifixion coloured pastel? 

Worse, this Easter Bunny suit was the most horrendous thing you had ever seen.  It had this cruel rictus toothy grin glued onto its frighteningly large face.  All it needed was some tentacles dangling from its mouth, and it could have been the Easter Cthulhu.  There was a little girl in its presumably necessary pen, pushed in by her naive or psychopathic parents like live food pushed, terrified, into a predator cage, and like the prey, she was pressed up against the cute little fence/prison bars as far away from the monstrous thing as she could go as her parents coaxed and prodded her towards the abomination.   I don't blame her.  But then she presumably was being offered the privilege of being eaten first.

So the moral of the story is, having live monstrous Easter Bunny displays in malls is an abomination and should be halted forthwith.  You took the Nativity, O Consumerism, can't you leave the Crucifixion in peace?  And I'm not even Christian.

Epithet ethics

I read a few American political humour blogs and have been doing so for some time.  Many of these blogs spend a lot of time often quite hilariously and skillfully deconstructing the American right.  They are often, yes, Standard American Liberals, although some of them are occasionally able to point out the structural deficits of American politics.  However, with anything that involves the ridicule of an opposing movement, it necessarily involves the ridicule of people in that opposing political movement, if for nothing other than what they say.

You can imagine that it bears some risks.  It can be a fine line and easy to trip up and cause collateral damage.  I have occasionally seen a joke that to which I myself am collateral damage, but I have a thick skin and am willing to overlook a lot.  I am also willing to forgive easily and laugh along with it, if it were clear that the individual making the joke is somewhat sensitive to the damage it caused. 

Lately, there's was a dustup in the American blogosphere when Sadly, No!, a low humour favorite of mine, mocked a conservative for his fat. A lot of American liberals, due to the social geography of the US, for some reason take fat to be a sign of moral and political turpitude in the way that others take poverty, and many of the Sadly, No! commenters and some of its contributors could not bring themselves to grasp the nature of the objection, and thence ensured a flamewar there and at Feministe (continued here and here, the comments on all these threads are very long).

In my previous post, I too might have fallen prey to this problem.  A lot of ridicule is based on disgust, and the things that are most evocative of disgust are physical things.  So it's easy to overlook or rationalize the collateral damage.  At the same time, I still find blogs like Sadly, No! and World O'Crap funny, even when there's collateral damage, because it's so hard to avoid it. I have even encountered some very---for example---radical feminist blogs who occasionally fall into the trap or, perhaps, cross their own line that way. It's also possible to avoid being a stubborn fool about it.   And ridicule is too useful a tool to set aside.

The point of this post?  I'm still not sure how far to rationalize away the collateral damage some ridicule can cause.  I'm not willing to give it up entirely, but that too may be a...lame? rationalization.

Colour, privilege, and self-consciousness

By accident, while looking for something else, I came across this interesting blog post on a blog I'd never seen before.  It's by a women living in Addis Ababa, written a few months ago.  She discusses an interesting aspect of her experience living as a foreign white woman in Ethiopia.   

for the love: a ferenjwa on ferenji (or ferenjoch, however you want to put it: Ferenji don’t want to cause a scene. We get stared at. Two ferenji crossing paths feels more like a social experiment in a closed room with people standing around ready to take notes. People are watching to see what will happen. And so we ignore each other. Observations are made but at least we can be sure the conclusion is not “all ferenji know each other.” The other part of it is the message that ferenji in Ethiopia are no big deal.“We don’t make a big deal about each other so please don’t make a big deal about us.”

The relative privilege of whiteness in the world has an interesting side effect in the way in which white people can interact with each other among the non-white.  A kind of embarassed self-consciousness.

As an aside, I am fascinated to learn that "ferenjoch" is the word for people of European descent in Amharic.  "Gora" is used in Urdu as the normal and perhaps slightly perjorative way to refer to white people, but there's also the word "ferengi," as in, amusingly, the big-eared short people on Star Trek: The Next Generation who had a religion of wealth-acquisition.  However, I am quite certain that both words are transported from Arabic "al-Faranj", which means "Frankish".  That is: "Crusader."

Cuisine, authenticity, power

AradhanaD at the Leftist Looney Lunchbox has an interesting and thought-provoking post on the relationship between cuisine authenticity and cultural and economic power.  It was inspired by a discussion on Pandagon that generally went against a focus on authenticity in food as problematic for various reasons.  Aradhana says:

So, in this post I'm going to go out on a limb to make a case "for" valuing the 'authenticity' of 'ethnic cuisine' and hopefully get you to 'racialize the everyday'. In my search for a meaningful debate about the 'authenticity' of food - I have yet to come across an entry that isn't about 'cultural abstractism', so I am getting my structural-materialist thoughts together to move away from that 'abstract' realm.

And further:

The main question I have to ask is: "Who are these people that are afraid of 'experimenting'? Are they men, women, white, majority? In which case, is their fear of 'experimenting' of any consequence? And if not, at what expense?" And this is how it starts and this is where even I think my 'leftist looneyism' is taking a leap and running with it. So these are just my ideas - I do encourage debate, so please feel free to share your ideas about this if you want.

And once she introduces the debate like this, she goes onto list a number of points and analyze a number of anecdotes about how food experimentation and the ability to avoid culturally authentic processes and ingredients may itself by connected to privilege and oppression.

Included is a very amusing YouTube video which you should all go and watch.  I won't post it here so that you have to actually click through to see it.  I promise you, it's hilarious.  Well, it's hilarious to this desi dude.  Well, maybe it's kind of culturally specific.  But it's funny.  Honest.

Anyway, she makes some very good points among which is the idea that the ability to avoid authenticity in foreign food is partly related to the ability to avoid minority culture in general.  "Eat the curry - don't live the the curry-maker," is what she says is the ethos.

I have to make a couple of points in defence of non-authenticity (that might have been made on the Pandagon thread that is too old and stale and long for me to read in detail now).  A lot of the non-authenticity, I do believe, does make it down to the Oppressed Classes.  Yes, it makes it down in the form of pre-processed industrial food---which, I might add, is not wholly without merits---but there are people in this world who wouldn't imagine that there are other tastes without the opportunity to "bastardize" cuisine. 

Lastly, I have to vehemently disagree with her about Ottawa vs. Toronto restaurants.  I am an Ottawa boy, but I visit Toronto frequently, and when I am in Toronto, I eat at restaurants much more frequently than I would in Ottawa---because I am there to refresh contacts with a large number of friends and family members.  And I have to say that while there is huge selection in Toronto, there is a much much lower signal-to-noise ratio than in Ottawa, so to speak.   That is, you might have a whole block of Chinese restaurants on in Toronto, but only one of them will be good---the rest mediocre.  I don't know where Aradhana had Thai food in Ottawa, but she must have "lucked out" on a bad place; I recommend she go to Siam Bistro on the "other" Wellington.  It is, I believe, owned by an actual Thai woman, and I have never found a better Thai restaurant anywhere, and I've eaten Thai food in many cities.  I think Aradhana is vegetarian?  I don't know how the vegetarian situation looks in Ottawa, because I'm not.

The surprising moral and epistemological relativism of SWC opponents

I shouldn't keep poking, but I guess I will.

In the post immediately preceding this one, I remarked on the political and logical incoherence of those in favour of dismantling Status of Women Canada and similar programmes.  In a nutshell, the primary argument that is used against SWC is that it doesn't fund entities that work to counteract its influence and mandate.  This argument is made by people who apparently believe that the government shouldn't fund things that counteract its influence and mandate.  And who worry about wasting money.

I netted a couple of commenters from the other side of the aisle.  Rather than defend the contradiction, they instead revealed the motive behind the transparently propagandistic incoherence.

The first one, SUZANNE, is a longtime anti-abortion campaigner on the Canadian interwebs.  Her moral position is one held as absolute moral truth delivered from the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.  And yet she writes:

This agency, which operates supposedly operates to better my welfare, operates without any input from me

It used to be "father knows best". Now it's "feminists know best".

It is simply undemocratic for an agency or for a movement to claim to speak in my name or work on behalf of my welfare, without consulting what I want.

From this we can deduce that she holds that government policy on the matter of women should not only be relative, but relative to her moral desire.  This she holds to be the pinnacle of democracy.

Behind door number 2, we have frequent libertarian troll, lrC.  lrC belongs to the wing of libertarianism that holds that the ability of the rich to dispose of their wealth/power is the highest form of liberty.  This form of libertarian prides itself as being grounded in the ultimate in materialism.  It is frequently associated with invocations to the economic axis of the Vienna Circle and their associates and descendents.  Ironically, lrC tells us,

In writing this post, you've laid bare the fallacy underpinning most of what you stand for: the assumption that you and your fellow travellers are equipped to measure utility and good on behalf of others.

Whatever lrC believes---and he could be the very few admitted relativist naive-libertarians---one has to admit that one finds the moral and epistemological relativism in this statement to be quite striking.

This "relativism for me and not for thee" is, alas, a common phenomenon on the other side of the aisle.  No doubt there is some logical contortion that they have to help weasel themselves out of it.

Nations: three vignettes

Some of you will remember "Prussian Blue", the twin girls who are, together, apparently the Spice Girls of the neo-Nazi world.  In a bout of idle Internet-surfery, I occured again upon their web site.  One of the things I discovered is that they have a little sister named Dresden.  I also took a look at their lyrics.  Let's just say that after reading them, you'd become a little more suspicious when someone invokes Norse mythology, and you'd feel more confident in a Wagner-Nazi ideological link!  But: this is a little less fair to Norse mythology than it is to Wagner.

These young ladies get letters of support every time the media gives them a justifiably horrified glance.  Some of these people claim that they'd never say such things in public.  They have jobs like bank tellars and the like.   So, if you're a darkie like me or a visible/seeming Joo, and you're at the bank, and you're being served by a white seeming-non-Jewish person, there's a chance that this person may be a closet neo-Nazi and believe that he'll have to shoot you in the coming race war.  Feel free to profile them as desired.

One interesting one:

I am a Black woman and I have a lot of pride in my race but I don't wish any ill will toward any other race. I think you girls are talented and you should keep your race pride alive. Be proud of your accomplishments and always thank GOD for giving you the gift of musical ability and having the support from your parents to persue your dreams. Your website is really cool and if I were your demographic I would pick up your CD. I read the lyrics and they are really good. Keep up the good work, and don't get discouraged and never forget where you came from. (A fan)

If this person really is black, one really wonders what was going through her head as she wrote this.  Is this some form of rhetorical judo based on fear?  It's normal for beleaguered groups to engage in that sort of thing.  Still, it's odd when the lamb goads the lion's self-pity.

---

Way back when the Web (as opposed to the Internet) was young, I had a slightly diffferent set of obsessions than I do now.  One of the things about which I was obsessed was the Helleno-Turkish conflect, particularly the intractable Cyprus problem.   So I used to follow, in that time, a (now defunct, deleted) Cypriot discussion board that was mostly populated by expats of the region in America.  It was run by Greek Cypriot in the California tech industry (or something), who wanted Ordinary People to discuss solutions to the conflict given the failures of the leaders.

Now that the web is older, it generally knows better.  Or, at least, many people on it do. 

The most striking figure on this forum was this Greek-from-Greece, an ultra-ultra-nationalist, who had only vicious things to say about the innate barbarity of Turks and whose (unwittingly ironic) desire for Cyprus was that the Turkish Cypriot inhabitants be swept from the island or otherwise dissipated (even by "peaceful" means such as obligate assimilation, I assume).  Of course, he desired this regardless of what Greek Cypriots themselves wanted, which, to their credit, involved at its strongest some form of compensation for lost property and an apology.

The presence of interfering irredentists and ultra-nationalists from the motherland is not in itself very remarkable.  What is remarkable are as follows:

• A more reasonable Greek or Greek Cypriot once pointed out the fluidity of identity and the futility of establishing a firm definition of "Greek" by pointing out the existence of a Muslim Greek friend of his living in Greece.  Mr. Ultra-Nationalist responded by saying that if he ever met this person, he would kill him.  Because it's a worse crime to blur the definitions than it is to be a Turk.  And this Muslim Greek blurred the definitions---since proper Greeks, no matter whether they actually believe and behave as such, identify as Greek Orthodox Christians.
• Mr. Ultra-Nationalist, like most of the discussion board, was actually living in America.  He had a Chinese-American friend who had converted to Greek Orthodoxy and was learning Greek.  Mr. Ultra-Nationalist believed that this individual was acceptably Hellenic, despite the inconvenient Chinese origin.  A Muslim Greek is a vile concept, but a Chinese Greek is not.  (Actually, he usually used the word "Hellenic" and objected to the term "Greek", because---and this is true---the word "Greek" is what the imperialistic Romans called them.)

---

Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a big fan of science fiction novels.  One notable author that I usually like is Mike Resnick.  But Resnick is quite a troublesome writer in some ways.  He's a man who went to Africa or something on a lot of safaris or worked there or...well, I have no idea.  But he---a white dude---writes a lot about Africa, including very good allegories for African politics, such as Purgatory.

Now I say that he is troublesome, because sometimes he is a subtle defender of colonialism in a Kiplingesque way.  Not always---sometimes he's a clear critic of colonialism---but frequently one is left with the impression that he occasionally mourns the end of colonialism in Africa.  That is actually what makes him a good writer.  (Or maybe he is not mourning it, but trying to tell us that the end of colonialism has consequences too.)

One of his best works, however, is an anthology of a series short stories he published in magazines.  It's called Kirinyaga, and its background is a futuristic, advanced Kenya centuries hence.  In this rich, futuristic Kenya, very little traditional African lifestyles are left.  Most of the tribes have urbanized and modernized and live wealthy, capitalistic lives.  Except one.

And that one remnant of traditional life, kept on a reserve of their own making (one of the troubling theme that Resnick rides) is led by a witch doctor with a modern education.  This man persuades an international council to give him a whole terraformed planet in another solar system (remember, this is far-future SF) to which he can take his tribe and re-establish the cultural life of his tribe in an environment similar to ancient Kenya.

Each of the short stories is thus an episode in the life of this colony as told by the witch doctor.  In each episode, a "leak" in his cultural utopia starts to form, and he must patch it up.  For instance, an old woman, his closest ally, decides that she wants to retain her independence in her old age---and he, in order to prevent the corruption of the traditions he is trying to save, must stop her.  And he uses every power he has, including contact with the terraforming maintence services, to break her spirit.

A young woman wants to learn to read.  But he cannot allow anyone to become literate but the witch doctor. (If they want an education, they can freely leave---forever.)  Otherwise the ideas would poison his paradise.  So she devises more and more devious ways to get what she wants.  And he must thwart her at every turn.  Eventually he wins, with tragic consequences.

And what is most striking about the way that Resnick paints his reaction (and Resnick writes it very well)?  The witch doctor does not feel that any of the consequences are his responsibility.  Instead, he crucifies himself on the gentle cross of martyred self-pity.  The witch doctor communicates with his people through the use of parables---these pervade each story---and the responsibility for the consequences is entirely subsumed by the truth he creates with his parables.  Every episode raises the stakes by raising the potency of the parables he invents---and the potential damage caused by a leak in the cultural dam grows every larger.

I don't know to what extent Resnick's whiteness and mentality afflicts his writing in this story, but he is trying to tell us that there is no single national moment.  The witch doctor's attempts to stop time will always be futile and probably never reflected the ancient reality of the tribe.  His parables were like the ancient parables---but they were all designed not to educate, but to justify.  To screw down the lid of the pressure cooker of human creativity and independent desire. Eventually the parables must rupture.