Thoughts on Benazir Bhutto, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan and Western democracy

It’s the Friday after Christmas and before the New Year and I’m still under the weather. I haven’t had a simple cold that knock me out so badly in years. It’s not so much the symptoms as it is pure fatigue and lack of focus. Sleep is difficult though because as soon as I lie down, I try to cough up a lung. And now, I’m stressing out about the work I should be getting done at the office. Anyway, none of that is my topic for today.

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As probably most of you know, Pakistani political leader Benazir Bhutto was slain/died yesterday. No one seems to know what happened and “the word” keeps changing. Currently CNN and the BBC are reporting that the Pakistani government (always a reliable source) says that she died from hitting her head on her car as she tried to duck back into it when shots were fired. Truth is reputedly stranger than fiction and for her to die from hitting her head on her car when people were shooting at her and blowing up next to her would definitely qualify for that. If true, I’m not even sure that it would qualify as an assassination; more like death by accident while avoiding assassination. No matter what, it seems obvious to me that she would still be alive if she had not stuck her head out the moonroof of her SUV. Why would she do that when she knew there were a lot of people who wanted to assassinate her? How can her security detail possibly protect her (from herself) when she insisted on doing something like that? But I digress.

Pakistan is in chaos according to the news with riots, funerals, conspiracy theories, mud slinging, and so forth. Musharraf is, of course, being looked at with suspicion, but he’d be an idiot if he did this precisely because he’s the first one a lot of people would blame. But then again, if he knew that people would think he was too smart to have done something this stupid… and now we look like the iocane powder scene from The Princess Bride. Honestly, I don’t know what to think about all of this. I don’t know these people, their country, their politics, or anything else about the situation aside from what’s contained in the Western press, a suspect source. (For example, consider the amount of sheer press time the Bhutto assassination is getting compared to the press time that the several assassinated pro-West Lebanese politicians got.) And of course, we hear the devil terms Al-Queda and Taliban being bantered about by the various talking heads. We may never know.

I don’t know what the long term effect of yesterday’s assassination will be for U.S./Western interests, good or bad. I doubt anyone else does either. Bhutto was always described by our media as “pro-West” but I’m not sure such a convenient label/sound byte can be easily applied to such a complicated woman. Certainly it is a gross oversimplification. Besides, how often have those “friendly” foreign politicians that we supported become the next decade’s problem children? Didn’t we support Saddam back in the 80’s when we were mad at Iran? Which brings me to Musharraf, our previous fair-haired boy in Pakistan.

For several months now I’ve marveled at the hypocrisy coming out of Washington regarding U.S. aims. If we are to be believed our policy (divine mission?) is to spread freedom and democracy to the world. Mind you no one has made a case that these two things must necessarily go together or that they necessarily constitute what is best for the peoples we are trying to give them to or that giving other people these things is in our own best interest. As a democratic nation, we simply ASSUME these things. Richard M. Weaver would call these “god terms.” Weaver’s “god term” was a word, vague in its meaning or vaguely used, but so laden with positive emotional connotation that its very use imbued the message with a strong positive resonance. (A devil term was the mirror opposite of a god term.) But I digress again.

My question is this: In a country where the majority of populace detests all things Western with, shall we say, a radical religious fundamentalism supports active anti-Western (terrorist) activities, would we prefer a strong, totalitarian, non-democratic, pro-Western leader or would we prefer the government that the majority of such a populace would elect? We ASSUME that any democracy is necessarily going to be 1) Pro-West; 2) Tolerant; 3) Non-extremist; 4) conscious of “human rights” (another Weaverian god term); and good for our interests. Maybe that’s where freedom comes in. We want to foster not just any democracy, but only a free democracy by which we mean “agrees with our values.” Here ya go, freedom as long as it is freedom done our way. It’s almost Platonic: If you aren’t doing it our way, you aren’t doing it right, and, if you don’t agree that just means you don’t understand yet.

What if the best thing for our national interest is for Country X to be ruled by a dictator and not a democracy. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument only, that a democracy is de facto the best thing for the populace of Country X; that doesn’t mean that it will be the best thing for our citizens. The Miltonian counter argument here is, of course, that any democratic nation will inevitably come to share the same value as any other democratic nation and thus they become aligned. Ergo, fostering democracy elsewhere serves our national long term best interest. I’m just not sure I buy it, not in a world of ideological extremism.

Now, Pervez Musharraf is not exactly an ideal democratic leader, but he’s not the juntas of Burma either. We keep pushing him to do one thing and then we make it more difficult for him by insisting he worry about something else. We sit over here, half a globe away from his country and, from the comfort of our back seat, try to tell him how to run his country without ever having walked a mile in the man’s moccasins. He must get really frustrated dealing with our arrogant democracy.

So, is Musharraf a bad guy? I don’t honestly know, but he’s a damn sight better than some other guys. Was Bhutto the last best hope for Western democracy in Pakistan? Maybe or maybe not. Would Bhutto have been a better friend to us than Musharraf? We’ll never know. Is the assassination of Bhutto a catastrophe for Western hopes in Pakistan? Time will tell.

At AT&T, the Cart Drives the Horse

I'm recovering from being sick for the last five days (right before Christmas no less) and am not, amazingly, in the best of moods. I got an AT&T bill for the DSL/Phone/DishTV and a day later got a past due notice. This got me angry, not because it was past due, but because I thought I had set it up so that AT&T would be debiting my checking account every month. I do this because, honestly, neither our mail or I am that good at deadlines. I do it with my student loans, with my other loans, with my health insurance, with all kinds of other things. Most folks are happy to have an auto payment in their systems.

So, I called AT&T to pay the past due balance and to see if we can straighten out why my auto-debit is not auto-debiting. Payment is easy, but then we get to the part of things that made me realize that, as far as AT&T is concerned, "customer service" is some strange thing that other companies do.

First, I find that I can't authorize a checking account debit over the phone, to debit my checking account they have to send me a form which I have to sign and send back to them. Mind you, I've set up several other checking account debits without needing to resort to a signed form, but AT&T cannot do that. Their system will not let them it seems. I can however, use a credit card over the phone and set up a monthly debit to my credit card. I have a credit/debit card so this works also. That's when we get to the second instance regarding AT&T's lack of customer service.

After the operator reads through thrity seconds or so of the things I agree to as far as a monthly credit card hit, I asked for one simple thing. I asked that the payment be run on a day between the 15th of the month and the 30th of the month. Complicated huh?

AT&T can't do that; not while doing an auto debit. Say what? It seems the "systems aren't compatible." They can adjust the payment date by up to ten days or they can start to auto debit, but not both.

So you understand why this is important, you need to know that I get paid twice a month on the 15th and on the end of the month. In the first half of the month, I have my student loan, my other loan, and my health insurance coming out of my account. I don't have any play in the first half of the month. I need to pay AT&T the second half of the month. Apparently, AT&T can't help me do that. You would think that it would be a simple software
matter to change the payment date, wouldn't you? Not for AT&T. So, I had to tell AT&T to forget it and that I would continue to pay bills the old fashion way. At least I know handling paper is more expensive for them so, in my own small way, their action helps me hurt them, just a little bit. I'd hurt them more, mind you, if I wasn't under a three year obligation for their services. However, in three years they are likely going to lose this customer.

It did get me thinking though about the cop out that computers give petty bureaucrats. AT&T's reason here was because their systems weren't compatible. That translates to, "The computer won't let me do that." I've heard that before. I got in an argument with an associate circuit clerk once because I had a statute that said I could file something and I had a clerk who would not file it because her computer software did not have a category for it. She told me she could not file it because the computer would not let her. She expected that to decisively end the argument; after all she had to take no responsibility for what the computer wouldn't do. I bit back a reply that my computer said she had to do this and simply pointed out the statute that said they had to file this to the circuit clerk. He made it work somehow.

Which brings me back to AT&T. To AT&T: I don't give a damn if the systems are not compatible. You are the computer OPERATOR and the company who PROGRAMS YOUR systems. The computers do what YOU tell them to do and if there is something they don't do, it is because YOU are not telling them to do it. Don't give me an abstract "The systems are not compatible" line of crap when what you mean is "We haven't bothered to tell our computer how to do this and you, the customer, and your needs are not important enough to us for us to get off our billion dollar ass to accommodate your fairly innocuous request, so piss off and do it our way like a good drone."

You control you computers; they do not control you.

WHAT IS A PRIMARY

I had a talk with a guy the other day; he was bemoaning how unfair it was that come the Illinois Primary he would be unable to vote for his two favorite candidates because one was a Democrat and one was a Republican.

Why is it that no one seems to know what a Primary is anymore?

People seems to want to look at the political process like it’s a giant tournament bracket. “I hope Hillary and Duke make the Final Four.” They want to pick their team and root them all they way through. Maybe it is because Presidential elections come with the same regularity that the Olympics do. Hell, I’m waiting for the day where the Presidential debates have expert commentators and then we can have judges score the candidates afterward. “Huckabee made a bad landing on that question, Bob, but he recovered nicely with his base by attacking Thompson on the Stem Cell issue. Let’s see what the judges say. Oh, that 4.5 from the East German judge will really hurt him.”

That is not what a Primary is or should be.

Our republic is primarily governed by one of two parties, the Democrats and the Republicans (neither of which was around when the country was founded, I might add). A political party is a bunch of folks who decide that they more or less agree with each other and that they would be stronger mutually supporting each other. So they band together and put forward the party’s candidates for each office and, in theory, the members of the party vote for their party’s candidates. If you don’t agree with a party, you can try to run on your own, but you are usually really hurting without the numerical support of a party. Eventually, you have multiple people wanting a job, even within the same party. If the party were to run two people for the same job, it would split the party’s votes and the party would lose the numerical strength of its numbers, so all the parties use systems to pick which of their possible candidates they want to run as the party candidate. In many places these are called Primaries. Other places are called Iowa.

Did you catch that? The purpose of the Primary is to allow the PARTY to select which candidate the PARTY wants to represent the PARTY in the upcoming election. A Primary is basically an internal decision maker for political Parties. This leads to several logical conclusions.

1. People who are not members of the party really have no business selecting on behalf of a party which candidate will represent the Party. That function belongs to the members of the Party.

2. Political “independents” have no business voting in any Party’s Primary.

3. Whining that it is not fair that you can’t vote for your favorite candidates because they are in two different Primaries makes you a complete moron. If we had a sort of pre-election where we could winnow down the field of possible candidates to just the two or three who gathered the most pre-votes we would not even need parties. Hell, then we could just take the winner and Bob’s your uncle.

It’s a good thing we Americans are so well politically educated.

Mandatory Paternity Leave?

I had to think a bit on what I want to start off with here. On National Public Radio (hereinafter NPR) the other day they had this lady one who was essentially making the following argument: Although we have a more egalitarian society with regard to women in the workplace, we still have problems. Specifically she noted that in many, if not most, companies, men get paternity leave equal to the maternity leave given to their female counterparts. The problem, she felt, was that the men frequently did not take or did not take all of the maternity leave which made their female counterparts look bad. This, she postulated resulted in a promotion bias towards the men. The solution she urged was that men should (or maybe even should be forced to) take their entire paternity leaves. I may be misstating her argument, but this is what I heard her to say.

Now, I don’t want to belittle the problem because I do, honestly, see the issue here. The fact is that women are the ones who carry the child for nine months and thus women are the ones who bear the physical burdens of carrying and birthing the child. And after that ordeal it is the women who need and deserve some rest, and who should not be disadvantaged for doing so when they want to return to work.

But, the proposed solution here is just absurd. If the men want to take some time off to get used to being the father of a new infant and to help Mom who deserves it, great! If they do not however, that should be fine too. They should not have to and should not have to feel guilty if they do not. Further, from a certain perspective this amounts to telling the men they are being too efficient and that they need to be less efficient so that women can compete with them. Something just seems wrong with that to me, if for no other reason that the fact it seems to imply that the women cannot compete unless the men handicap themselves. Women, it seems to me, are quite capable of competing on a level playing field without the men having to take time off so the women do not look bad. There has got to be some other way to address this. I have no idea what it is though.

Then again, I am not even a father, let alone walking a mile in the other girl’s moccasins. This problem may defy easy solution.