Two recent media stories
on the tragic shooting of innocent students in
Virginia and the sex scandal at the World Bank are
linked, in that both represent the decline of
society's values against the forces of untrammeled
materialism.
A purely satirical view on
the first story would highlight the number of dead
against the money paid - at less than US$1,000
spent for 33 killed; the Virginia crimes put the
Pentagon record of spending a few hundred billion
dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq to kill precious
few insurgents under a harsh light.
That's
not the motivation behind this week's title
though, as the
second story wherein the
esteemed Paul Wolfowitz exchanged sexual favors
for monetary considerations appears to better
typify the arrangements. As I wrote in a previous
article [1], societies are always organized around
appropriate economics, which in turn define their
character. Those lamenting the decline of values
typified in these stories obviously haven't been
outside their social cocoons for a while.
Americans cherish the ownership of guns,
with roughly 200 million "pieces" in circulation.
Political support for the Second Amendment rights
to gun ownership depends much on the Republican
Party, which in turn garners financial support
from vested interests such as gun manufacturers.
Much as the employer gets to tell his employees
what to do because he pays them, donors to
political parties expect and demand unswerving
support for their causes.
Meanwhile, the
Democrats who do not benefit from the munificence
of gun makers show putative independence on the
matter. The facts of the case, wherein the
perpetrator was able to freely buy weapons for
money, and use them in the horrific killing spree,
make the Republican defense quite shaky, although
the issue of which political view triumphs is not
quite the point when discussing such tragedies.
American media reaction to the Virginia
carnage is essentially split along political
lines, with the liberal media using the incident
to push for gun control, while the conservative
media predictably lined up behind its paymasters,
the anti-gun control lobby.
In the ensuing
melee, focus has been taken away from a more
important problem, namely the social fears of
discrimination and its associated stigma that have
helped to limit the doctrine of free speech in
public forums. The debate over the Second
Amendment is essentially a mirror of problems that
the media has in coming to grips with the limits
posed on the First Amendment right to free speech.
As the Don Imus case showed, wherein the
talk show host was fired for a racial slur this
month, American society is very much on the
defensive on the issues of racial and gender
discrimination. While society as a whole condemned
Imus for his statement, the radio host quickly
apologized, but even that wasn't enough to keep
his job. Meanwhile, the army of hip-hop artists in
America use derogatory phrases to depict women and
other African-Americans, but have no need to
apologize or withdraw their "works of art".
The economics of the situation plays
directly to the matter. The average American
teenager has no compunctions about purchasing
compact discs recorded by offensive hip-hop
artists, but American corporations that advertise
on radio shows do not want to be caught dead in
the company of people like Imus. They would hardly
support hip-hop artists either, but then again no
one asked them in any event.
American
colleges are also being held to the same standards
as larger corporations, as they attempt to outgrow
allegations of racial discrimination in the past
by over-compensating now. The second factor of
course has been their increased dependence on
overseas students to pay fees. The upshot of all
the above is that it is simply not acceptable for
any institution to be seen as a vanguard of race
or gender discrimination because swift bankruptcy
would be the most likely result.
We will
not know for a while all the gory details of why
the college failed to act on the suspicion of its
own teachers that the South Korean student in
question was off his rocker, but I would dare
venture that the constraints laid out above in
terms of managing perceptions actively played a
significant part.
The second possibility
is that the college and its teachers
over-compensated for the linguistic gap, by
excessive accommodation of his rambling notes as
attributes of cultural differences. In other
words, they must have assumed that "Korean"
culture had a strange sense of humor and satire,
rather than the more direct conclusion that the
student in question was a tad kooky.
This
failure, brought about by the Politically Correct
Mafia, is perhaps the most lamentable, and yet the
one least likely to be addressed. Thus it is that
the liberal media which would rather see a
Virginia Tech than a Imus plays exactly the same
fiddle as the rabid right wing that would rather
protect its Second Amendment rights even if that
causes the odd Virginia Tech incident or two. A
true convergence of the left and right-wing views,
if there ever was one.
World Bank
scandal Meanwhile, the Virginia killings
pushed the story of the sex scandal at the World
Bank to the back pages. In this, as with many
other things, American media have taken a cue from
Hollywood, by reveling in tales of gore rather
than in those involving the old in-out routine -
in other words, sex scandals are a bigger deal
than the odd car bomb or five.
This week
was, then, an exception, and we should expect the
focus to return to the World Bank story by next
week, especially given that Democrats will not
push overly hard on the gun control issue, given
their experience in 2000 when similar
post-Columbine tragedy activism cost them the
election.
The biggest scandal with the
World Bank [2] is that it exists at all. For all
his failings, Wolfowitz had the right ideas about
the institution, namely that its lending policies
must dovetail with improved standards of
governance and transparency on the part of
borrowers. This belated recognition of the most
important problem confronting the usage of free
money may help to perpetuate the current stasis
wherein the bank and its ugly sister, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), throw good
money after bad in perpetuity.
That said,
Wolfowitz vastly underestimated the power of
vested interests. His failure therefore is an
economic rather than political one. Let me
explain. The World Bank and the IMF are populated
almost exclusively by mediocre economists and
bureaucrats from member countries. In other words,
the kind of people that market-driven investment
banks would swerve to avoid hiring.
Despite this obvious flaw, workers are
paid lavishly for their tenure at the multilateral
agencies, a frequent result of a culture without
accountability. Unfortunately, for many employees
the relatively high pay has provided delusions of
adequacy, and indeed many consider themselves to
be members of an elite group. Add to this the
multiple layers of national politics that play
out, particularly between the Americans and
Europeans, and it is some wonder that any business
gets done.
In this context, "Wolfie" laid
down new rules for curbing loans to corrupt
governments, effectively trimming the authority of
many World Bank staffers. His aim was ostensibly
to increase the return on investments made by the
bank. As the fight intensified, speculation within
the bank mounted about his personal conduct, which
is usually a foolproof way of getting back at
Republicans. True to form, staffers quickly
discovered his liaison with Shaha Riza and the the
matter quickly made it to the front pages of the
world's newspapers.
Despite calls within
the bank for his resignation and an open
condemnation from the advisory board, Wolfie has
refused to go; undoubtedly emboldened by White
House support (you can just see President George W
Bush saying "you are doing a heck of a job,
Wolfie") and his own personal value system, which
would have perhaps advised him that he was just
being a rational economic agent by maximizing the
pleasure of paying for useless staff at the World
Bank.
That refusal to resign is also not
surprising, given that he is only accused of doing
to a colleague what the US government has been
doing to Iraq for the past four years or so.
Hardly reason for a megalomaniac to quit, and what
the case also highlights is the continued media
hypocrisy in all matters sexual.
While it
may seem inappropriate for a boss to promote a
subordinate based on sexual favors, the sting is
somewhat lost in organizations like the World Bank
and the IMF, whose existential dilemma renders
personnel infractions moot. Just in case I am
being too subtle, what I mean here is this - why
bother with the details of who runs the World
Bank, when the biggest issue should be to question
why it exists in the first place.
The
wrong Korean As an afterthought to my
views on multilateral agencies, I couldn't help
but think that the wrong Korean went berserk this
week. Perhaps the global community would have been
gladdened had it been Ban Ki-moon, secretary
general of the United Nations, who had gone around
randomly shooting up various floors in the UN
building. At least New York would have seen a
reduction in its parking tickets going forward,
and the redoubtable John Bolton manage a smile for
the first time in a few years or so.
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