One of the many annoying things about the Iowa caucus coverage is that what's really a faintly absurd and kind of trivial process gets magnified into this huge and all-consuming Event that bumps other, much more important, stories down the queue. Kevin Drum highlights what might be the perfect illustration:
On CNN, Bill Bennett just celebrated the Iowa caucuses because there's been "no violence, no killing." That's way better than Kenya! Anderson Cooper agrees, telling us that Iowans have invited strangers into their very own homes and.....haven't killed them, I guess.
The recent heartbreaking mess in Kenya thus becomes a kind of a footnote to breathless reporting about an event in which about ten percent of the population of a state with one percent of the total US population turned out to express a preference for a presidential candidate in a somewhat arcane process that nobody really understands. It's a brief nod to acknowledge the existence of the rest of the world, before getting back to the serious business of political trivia. And, after the break, Britney Spears does something reprehensible, and Jake Young gets paid.
I realize I'm flirting with concern-troll-ism, here, because I don't actually know anything about Kenya, or have any brilliant suggestions for what we can do to help. And, given our recent track record, I suppose that the best policy is probably to do everything we can to distract the Bush administration from what's going on in Kenya, because they can undoubtedly find a way to make the situation much, much worse. Quick, somebody get Britney to flash a boob on national tv!
Still, I can't help thinking that in a sane world, there are better places to focus the time, energy, and attention of lots of really smart people than Iowa.
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Bennet had the "under" on caucus night crime, puttin his gamblin money where his principles were!
USA. USA. Not a bloody anarchy. USA.
Kenya is finally discarding European colonialism for historic Africanism: Everybody has something to die for and nobody has anything to live for. Central African Hutus and Tutsis stood toe-to-toe hacking at each other with machetes, 800K to 1000K casualties achieved. Uncle Al fervently roots for all sides.
Barack Obama's father is Kenyan radical Muslim Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. A whole old panoply of statecrafty adventurism awaits us, 20 January 2009. Federally-imposed machete control is long overdue.
depp=true
I think tou are racist prof Orzel. As you said you dont know anything about Kenya and you are just referring to a past ideology: the exotism.
You remind me the french pseudo ethonologist Arthur de Gobineau who was also the théorist of Aryanism. The anthropologic and academic propensity to class and
describe differences along racial and geographical lines appears in exoticism.
That's what you are doing mister Professor. You are right, Usa is not is not the looking backward, at least forward in this XXI century.
Respectuously,
- from a french blogger who loves your country