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Journalism of Courage
How seriously must India take the sparring in the spotlight on offshoring and immigration in the US political arena? Or would it be better off keeping its eye on the warning signals offstage, of a protectionism generally on the rise?
This week, in Britain’s Financial Times, an editorial lashed out at the mounting restrictions on the immigration of skilled workers to the US. A combination of ‘‘ignorant protectionist nativism, the aftereffects of the technology bubble, and new fears about national security’’ threaten to irretrievably undermine the famed US receptiveness. The FT pointed out that recently, the entire year’s quota of HIB visas for skilled workers was allocated on the first day they were made available. That quota, at 65,000, is one-third of the level it reached during the technology boom.
The FT quoted India’s commerce minister Kamal Nath who told the paper in an interview why it makes no commercial sense for either the US or a country like India to prevent the inflow of skilled workers: ‘‘Stopping the highly educated from coming to the US will only drive more business offshore, further encouraging the growth of wrong-headed protectionism’’.
But getting back to Bush versus Kerry, the Economist compared their trade policies and concluded: ‘‘Neither candidate seems wildly keen on free trade — or on protectionism either.’’ The magazine explained why the popular perception of a race between a protectionist and a free trader may not be entirely sound. Kerry has not actually proposed any real protectionist ideas and his Senate record is that of a ‘‘firm free-trader’’. And Bush has ‘‘not shied from crude protectionism’’. He slapped safeguard tarrifs on steel imports in March 2002. He signed the farm bill which pledged a large increase in America’s trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.
World’s candidate
It is the done thing to talk about a ‘‘50:50’’ America in the run-up to the presidential vote. It is equally uncontroversial that it will be Kerry by a wide margin in November, if only the rest of the world could vote. This week, a poll conducted by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers — including France’s Le Monde, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Canada’s La Presse, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian — confirmed that Kerry does have the world’s vote, two to one. And that ‘‘on balance, world opinion does not believe that the war in Iraq has made a positive contribution to the fight against terror’’.
The poll found that public opinion in 10 leading countries, including some of the US’s closest allies, has become more hostile to the US while Bush has been in office. And that this is a more sophisticated reaction than it is painted to be: a majority of the voters in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Spain and South Korea make a clear distinction between a rejection of the Bush administration and anti-Americanism. On average, 68 per cent of those polled said they have a favourable opinion of the American people.
Beyond belief
The death of Jacques Derrida was occasion to revisit the often vicious derision of his powerful work, mainly the philosophical method he promoted — deconstruction.
In the Guardian, Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester University, Terry Eagleton, took on Derrida’s critics, with a little name-calling of his own. They were ‘‘stuffed shirts’’ he said, probably envious of the radical and photogenic philosopher, hugely popular with his students. Academics who saw him as a man out to destroy philosophy were only thinking of saving their own means of making a living.
But Eagleton’s was essentially a passionate defence of the joys of deconstruction. It means not destroying ideas, but ‘‘pushing them to the point where they begin to come apart and expose their latent contradictions.’’ It means ‘‘reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident truths’’. And prising open canonical ideas and classical texts to the marginal and the aberrant. For the philosopher, it means, as Derrida once admitted to, wanting to ‘‘write like a woman’’.
In the NYT, Mark C. Taylor also rose to defend Derrida, not from his critics on the right, but from his most influential followers on the left. Many of them, he wrote, have manipulated his analyses of marginal writers, works, and cultures and his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences, to work up an identity politics that promotes the very oppositions Derrida sought to break down. Taylor berated Derrida’s supporters for fueling the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades now.
Taylor urged the necessity of reading Derrida in times when the longing for simplicity and certainty has fueled the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism around the world. Derrida understood religion to be impossible without uncertainty. His work can remind us, wrote Taylor, that the great religious traditions are deeply disturbing because they call all our certainties into question.
