Effect and cause
In mass politics, strangely, the sequence so often gets reversed. It is not the cause, but the effect that is the real story. Effect often reshapes and fundamentally alters the starting point. Clearly, this proposition needs some explanation,
writes MJ Akbar
One of the most familiar words in the English language is ‘because’, because events are generally ruled by the relationship between cause and effect. If there is a cause there must be an effect. This makes issues, trivial and important, understandable. Examples from mass culture will prove the point. Why do music channels keep showing Adnan Sami songs endlessly? Because that is a reasonably popular way to spend seven minutes of television time without paying a rupee. Why are new songs shifting to Punjabi-soul after years of only Bhangra-pop? They are herding into the Bulle Shah train driven by Rabbi Shergill. Why do murderers get trapped by brilliant detectives in crime thrillers? Because they have a motive. Why does the bikini issue of the American magazine Sports Illustrated (it’s heavily illustrated with a different kind of sport) get thicker each year (224 pages, according to the copy on my table)? Because, despite an inflated price, it sells out faster than bikinis. Why should the editor of this page get tempted to use one of those pictures from the bikini issue as an illustration for this column? Because that damn picture would get an ogle even out of an Edit or Op-Ed page. So why doesn’t that illustration get used? Because there are strict orders on the limits to which an Edit-page culture can go. You get the idea of cause-and-effect. The effect may be obvious but it is the cause that is the real story.
In mass politics, strangely, the sequence so often gets reversed. It is not the cause, but the effect that is the real story. Effect often reshapes and fundamentally alters the starting point. Clearly, this proposition needs some explanation.
This column is being written on the eve of the declaration of results of the Bihar and Jharkhand Assembly elections, hardly the best moment to pontificate on a dicey subject. Elections are also taking place in Haryana, but since the results in this state seem to be a foregone conclusion, we will leave them alone.
What is the situation in Bihar, where Lalu Prasad Yadav has been in power for 15 years? We can leave the scientific business of getting the results wrong to the opinion pollsters. Let us stick to the indisputable. The fact is that every political force, barring a section of the Left, has done everything in its power to defeat Lalu. I say a section of the Left because the most important Leftist group in Bihar are the Naxalites, and they were as determined to end Lalu-Raj as anyone else. The Janata Dal (United) and the BJP were natural opponents, so their mobilisation was on expected lines. In all fairness, the cracks in the Delhi-centric UPA were not unexpected. The logic that keeps partners together in Delhi does not extend to Patna.
If Delhi is the head, and therefore heady, then Patna is the base, and therefore basic. Ram Vilas Paswan cannot sustain his party by telling his followers that the doors of expansion are shut. Neither can the Congress. And in Lalu Yadav’s scheme of things, both Ram Vilas and the Congress were marginal factors, necessary to ensure his victory, but unnecessary in the exercise of power. It was an ideal situation for him, and precisely for that reason could not be sustained. This was a primary cause for the scatter of the Delhi alliance in Bihar. An equally important cause was that every political party overestimates its strength on the eve of an election. After all, elections are a human business. There cannot be precise markers. It is a fluid sum game. It is only in retrospect that the mind clears up. The BJP is still wondering (privately of course) what the tallies might have been if it had given the AGP an extra seat in Assam, Shibu Soren an extra seat in Jharkhand, and stayed with Om Prakash Chautala in Haryana rather than spurning him. If Lalu had felt that the arc of public opinion would steadily move away from him, he might have offered the fifteen extra seats that would have kept the Congress by his side. There was no way in which he could have retained the support of Ram Vilas, since the bitterness between the two is personal. But, in broad terms, when it comes to an analysis of causes, everyone has a story to tell.
No one, including Lalu, knows what the results will be, but the body language of the Lalu camp is edgy. Lalu Yadav himself does not believe in body language. He believes in language. Whether in victory or defeat Lalu Yadav is irrepressible. He has been using a few epithets about senior Congress leaders (apart from Sonia Gandhi) that will never be quoted in their authorised biographies.
There is only one realistic measurement of effect: when topsy and turvy have finished their game, who is in power? No one is getting a majority from the people; power will go to those who can cobble one in the Assembly. Lalu’s problem is that power has only one meaning for him: his wife becomes chief minister again. An ally as chief minister could be as problematic as an opponent in that chair, and a nominee from his own party perhaps the worst of all options. This is a peculiarity of all personality-driven parties. In Lalu’s case there is an added dimension of vengeance. He cannot afford to be out of power.
If Rabri Devi remains chief minister Lalu Yadav will have a vested interest in the status quo. If the dice throws up different numbers, and Ram Vilas, with 25-odd MLAs, can persuade the JD(U) to join his government, rope in independents and get non-participatory support of the BJP then the cracks at the base will turn heads in Delhi.
One nuance has already been established. Alliance in Delhi is no guarantee for a similar equation in the states. In Jharkhand, the Congress and Shibu Soren’s JMM first nudged the third partner, Lalu Yadav, out, and then set about poaching from each other. The aim was not merely to defeat the BJP-JD(U) but also to become the dominant partner of the alliance. This is also acknowledgement of the individual power of a chief minister. That single office outweighs the collective power of a bunch of ministers. This is partly because of the nature of the office, and partly because a chief minister, unlike a Prime Minister, does not have heavyweights as colleagues. This was why the Congress demanded, and got, this chair in Maharashtra, although Sharad Pawar had the larger number of MLAs. The rules were changed because the Congress could use its Delhi muscle.
The Delhi muscle did not work in Chennai. DMK chief M. Karunanidhi took pre-emptive action when E.V.K.S. Elangovan, the Congress Union minister, dared to dream of his party’s return to partial power in Tamil Nadu. The DMK was ready to go as far as to withdraw its ministers from the Central government. It was only a minor coincidence that Karunanidhi called for a meeting of his party on this for Sunday the 27th. This is the Sunday on which the results of Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana will be announced. The difference between Karunanidhi and Sharad Pawar is but this: the DMK’s departure from the UPA rattles the coalition; Pawar’s departure raises a sigh, but nothing more.
Point of order: Guess who was beside Lalu Yadav in Central Hall, enjoying the wit in his customarily restrained fashion, while Lalu rewrote the profiles of senior Congress leaders? Sharad Pawar. This by itself means nothing. Power has very little to do with friendship and absolutely nothing to do with banter. Self-interest is the primary motive; and a brother’s interest is protected a long way later, if at all.
Point to note: If Lalu Yadav defeats his opponents and his friends, not to mention pollsters, crosses the 100-seat mark, reduces the Congress to 15-odd seats, emerges as the largest single party/group and dictates the shape of the next government, then what? That too will have its consequences in Delhi, because he will demand a larger share of power in Delhi. Could he extend his grasp to Ram Vilas Paswan’s portfolio? Logic suggests that he could. There has been no reshuffle of the Manmohan Singh government since it was sworn in, and these results could set the scene for a fresh check on equations.
When effect impacts on cause, there is but naturally an after-effect.
This article first appeared in The Asian Age
No tomorrow
As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow, writes Bill Moyers
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging
Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the US Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent
Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.
That’s right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the “Left
Behind” series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “biblical lands,” legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.
As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I’m not making this up. Like Monbiot, I’ve read the literature. I’ve reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the
Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.” A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to
Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - “The Road to Environmental Apocalypse.” Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we’re not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the US Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture?
And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, “America’s Providential History.” You’ll find there these words: “The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.”
However, “[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don’t know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: “What do you think of the market?” “I’m optimistic,” he answered. “Then why do you look so worried?” And he answered: “Because I am not sure my optimism is justified.”
I’m not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure.
It’s not that I don’t want to believe that - it’s just that I read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration: That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the
Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies. That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration’s friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children’s clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the administration’s friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is “a myth, sea levels are not rising” [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are “an embarrassment.”
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent Appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.”
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice? What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: “How do you see the world?” And
Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.’”
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient
Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers’ remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School
Enduring passions
We shouldn’t knock Charles and Camilla for sticking together, writes Peter Preston
Think of life as a twoway Mirror. On the one side, as we shall discover this week, stands the erstwhile editor of the Daily Eponymous, keeping a beady-eyed diary for rapid sale and Fleet Street serialisation. Piers Morgan dubs Cherie Blair “breathtakingly capricious and vindictive” (she’s not much turned on by Piers) - if not “in the grip of personality disorder” (make that totally turned off).
But equally, Mr Morgan tells Daily Mail readers, Tony Blair himself is “inherently charming, nice, polite and well mannered”. Apparently, Piers used to give the PM the benefit of his experience, man-to-man. “She causes you so much trouble,” he’d say. He fears that the true victim of this political marriage is T Blair himself, “because ultimately it’s the Blair brand that’s damaged”.
Well, you can certainly draw some broken-brand conclusions from Labour’s latest internal pollings. There, the leader’s personal popularity with married women voters is down by six points. He’s in almost as much bother as the Prince of Wales, whom only 31% of us now want to be king (when YouGov comes calling).
Step, though, to the other side of the mirror. Look out rather than in, for the difference is instructive. What do Mr and Mrs Blair feel when they stare at the menacing world beyond? Pressure, of course: transient editors preparing to make a quick buck, rivals spreading poison, enemies stoking up every lecture tour or house purchase or personal friendship into some crisis of judgment. And careers - like the prospect of becoming a judge - going down the pan, flushed onward by so much detritus.
For once, though, put all the usual arguments about future privacy to one side and concentrate on what remains - fixed here, today. The fact is that the Blairs are still firmly together, whatever the pressures; and that nice, polite, charming Tony seems as committed as ever. In short, this is a strong relationship toiled for and staunchly defended on both sides.
Is that quite the message as currently conveyed? What about Blair the sophist, the acolyte of Bush, the betrayer of the faith, the quasi-president, the actor and smooth PR merchant? All or some of that may be true. But if marital wobbles at the top matter, then this look through the mirror tells us something useful, something most of us can relate to. Score one for commitment. Score one for not backing away when problems mount.
And so we step inside the walls of Windsor. “All my life, people have been telling me what to do, and I’m tired of it,” Prince Charles wails to Gavin Hewitt in a new book. “My private life has become an industry. People are making money out of it.” (Just so: that’s what books are for.) “I thought the British people were supposed to be compassionate. I don’t see much sign of it.” Typical whingeing from an over-privileged anachronism who betrayed a nation’s sweetheart and still wants it all? Perhaps. But, one more time, look outward through that two-way mirror.
If you do, you may conclude that there has never been anything but public grief for Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles through three decades of disappointment and tumult. The palace, in its uttermost reaches, recoiled at the first liaison. They found the heir to the throne a wholly unsuitable virgin bride and propelled him to the altar: one wedding, two victims. They did nothing to help any sliver of that marriage succeed. They were chill and manipulative throughout - and the prince was weak. But he has been strong about Camilla, when it would have been so easy to slide away.
This is another enduring partnership, because it has endured so much. Now it must endure the careless coldness of a mother and father who don’t grasp what ordinary human relationships are about and the publicity-grabbing cavortions of assorted priests fresh from the latest C of E disaster. Now compassion, in the family or the nation, is off the menu. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, in the YouGov court of public opinion.
Which is where, for a second, we should also pause. Most of us, if we’re honest, know that staunchness and love walk side by side. We know there’s a quality there, a branding that doesn’t fade. And, if we value one quality in a cacophony without much compassion, then it’s good to look through the mirror and see it still intact. Not the whole of the story, to be sure: but some of it. For intrusion, you see, has its uses.
— The Guardian
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