Of course, everyone under the sun is either running the story or linking to it. Try the Christian Science Monitor for updated information on Jill Carroll's release.
I'm left wondering what the point is for all these abductions. For the perpetrators, it's a low-cost, low-risk maneuver, I suppose. But a maneuver to accomplish what? Make money? Sometimes, apparently, To further a political goal? Sometimes. It's low-risk for the perpetrators, perhaps, but it seems like it has a fairly low success rate, too -assuming that the stated goals of the abductions really are the goals. I know this much, though. Until we understand it, we can't stop it. And besides, making meaning from evil subverts the evil; Viktor Frankl taught us that.
Just possibly, the military is starting to figure that out, too. Apparently, they have gathered a circle of military "intellectuals" (What does that mean? People who study the military or people who teach at the military academies?) to help them understand the history of protracted occupations. NPR has the story here: Army Studies. They're just now doing this???
I get tripped up on this point frequently. I forget that many (most?) people see a chasm between their lives and the academy, between themselves and intellectuals. But really now! When you want to know something that you don't know, don't you instinctively go to someone who does know? I don't know how to build a house, so when we wanted to add on to our house we called an architect and a contractor. I don't understand how or why my car works. So when it doesn't, I call a mechanic. They, God love them, know things I don't, and I pay them for their expertise. Why do people see academics differently?
That's a rhetorical question. The short answer is that people probably don't think that intellectuals have answers. The stereotype (and I don't always want to refute it, I concede) is that academics have a lot of talk on both sides of any question, but no real conclusions. The bad press that intellectuals get, though, is not the major problem we have here -although I think I can make a case for it being a serious problem. I think the administration didn't call people who understand insurgencies and occupations because it didn't occur to them that they themselves didn't. They were working from an ideological template and misreading reality long after it was ridiculous, attempting to force events to fit the template.
I don't think I'm exactly revealing national secrets when I suggest that George Bush is no intellectual. It's not a crime to be dumb, although it's a shame not to care. But in this case, an anti-intellectual bias actually threatens all of us. Could we stop working from meaningless scripts, please? Could we move forward in our thinking, for the love of all things decent? As a body-politic, we obviously didn't think before we acted in Iraq. But thinking late is better than not thinking at all.
OK, ok.... Possibly I shouldn't have turned Jill Carroll's homecoming into a rant about anti-intellectual bias in general and the Bush administration in particular. Really, I'm just delighted that she's home. And being me, I will feel safer and happier if I understand the whys and wherefores of her abduction.
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