The PenOpticon

For the past few days NATO has been gloating over Sunday’s massacre of 72 Taliban fighters. According to a NATO spokesperson, the weekend battle may have liquidated up to 10% of the Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan. It was a “big blow”, they said. But yesterday, another Canadian soldier was killed and three others wounded after a suicide bomber slammed into a Canadian supply convoy in Kandahar City. These two events are ugly and depressing, but they make sense, I suppose. You kill us. We kill you.

But this does not make sense: after securing the area, the Canadians fired at a motorcycle that refused to stop at a checkpoint. The single round wounded the 17-year-old driver and killed a 10-year-old boy who was riding with him. Given our distance from this chaos and a lack of direct knowledge of what it is really like on the ground, how are we to process these facts? Was it a language problem? A failure to communicate? Whatever caused this tragedy, it suggests that it is time to end the charade that Canada — or any western country — can make a significant difference in Afghanistan right now. Here’s why:

• Other factions. Even if the Taliban are eventually killed off, the miasma of warlords, drug lords and tribal factions operating in the country guarantees continued bloodshed and instability. Much of this squabbling is over heroin — Afghanistan’s most important economic activity — which brings in about half of the country’s foreign currency.
  
  
• Drugs. Apart from a few minor interruptions (such as the Taliban’s brief reign), the Afghani poppy crop has been increasing for decades. Destroying the crop does nothing but foment rage and sympathy for anti-western factions. The solution is to decimate the heroin market which exists outside of the country — not the poppy crop.
  
  
• Corruption. The conciliatory attitude of President Hamid Karzai toward various factions has helped create a climate of widespread corruption among Afghani police, judges and government officials. Does this mean that we are fighting and dying so that a corrupt regime can extract even more from a desperate population that has nothing. Some argue that this dynamic is driving many Afghani’s to support the Taliban.

If Sunday’s battle really took out 10% of the Taliban in the southern half of the country, then one wonders why a country of 30-million people can’t work together to get rid of the remaining 650 fighters. Even with out guns, enterprising Afghani’s should be able to sneak up behind unsuspecting Taliban in order to brain them with axes. As painful as it is to watch a country like Afghanistan lurch toward modernity, our presence there is only making things worse.

Canada has sacrificed eight soldiers in that country so far this August. All this spilled blood is trying to teach us a lesson. Perhaps it’s time we learned it.

Another Canadian dead in Afghanistan from a suicide bomber. Let’s just get the hell out of there. If NATO has to be there, let them put a ring around the goddam place. Don’t let any weapons in. Don’t any let heroin out. Whatever. Trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun either does not work or is just not worth it. There I said it — maybe with more rage than reason. But I said it.

When it comes to public relations and spin management, the Canadian government, under Harper’s watch, is extremely proactive. This is obvious from the DND media relations archive. The Canadian Forces PR group went into high gear yesterday when Master Corporal Jeffery Scott Walsh was killed after a fellow soldier’s gun “discharged”. On the same day six other Canadians were also hurt when their armoured vehicle hit a truck 30km south of Kandahar. Yesterday’s terse announcement does not say much about Scott’s death, however, the military released an additional statement to selected media. This included a short statement from the fallen soldier’s parents: “Jeff believed in his job and felt he could make a change in Afghanistan… We, his parents support Jeff and all the Force’s members in Afghanistan and all our peacekeepers.” According to the Toronto Star, the family also thanked Canadian Forces staff, neighbours, family and friends for their support “at this difficult time”.

I feel for the Scott family and hope they truly believe in the Canadian Force’s role in Afghanistan (though I have my own reservations about the whole project). But, it is a little galling that the DND appears to have pounced on Scott’s family to extract the above statement so soon after their son’s death. Perhaps it is just me, but I would need more than a day to process such tragic news before I could make comments to the media. What was the rush? I would still be seething with anger and would be asking why? and how did this happen? And I sure as hell would not let the Canadian Army filter anything I wanted to say.

Samantha Bee knocked one out of the park tonight in her Daily Show report on good ol’ Joe Lieberman’s defeat in the Connecticut primary. In her droll way, she articulated the rage of millions of Americans who see the war in Iraq for the sham that it is. She may be Canadian, but Samantha has become Auntie Sam for a lot of Americans. She compared Lieberman’s refusal to admit defeat to male stalking, saying “We just don’t want to go out with you anymore, Joe”. However, Bee’s line of the evening was a riff on the Sherman Statement: “If not nominated, he will run. If not elected, he will serve.” She even suggested that if he loses his seat, he’ll go so far as to form his own Senate. Ouch!

The Discomfort Zone

HarperCollins, 197 pages, $29.95

Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel/memoir, The Discomfort Zone covers some of the same territory as his widely acclaimed Corrections, but does so in a very different fashion. While Corrections is more self-consciously literary and academically hip in its execution, The Discomfort Zone (with the exception of a questionable foray into the realm of German modernism) draws more upon the popular culture of Franzen’s (and, I confess, my own) youth. In Corrections, Franzen boldly expects the reader to “get” (and possibly get rid of) Foucault and the bastions of Critical Theory, but The Discomfort Zone is layered with the gentler – and sometimes more profound – wisdom of Charles M. Shultz’s Peanuts. Even the novel’s opening line “There’d been a storm that evening in St. Louis” is a riff on the venerable Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night”. Unlike Snoopy, however, Franzen follows through with a beautifully written, funny, smart – and sometimes uncomfortable – ramble through a life that was forged “in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class”. Even the protagonist’s neighborhood, Webster Groves, was “in the middle of this middle”.

Growing up in the middle, under the under the watchful eyes of his parents, and figuratively, under the panoptic gaze an entire country, Jonathan does seem to embody the spirit of Charley Brown. He is too young to join older siblings in embracing the 60’s, but old enough record and critique the status quo he is forced to endure. All is revealed through well-executed flashbacks as he faces the bothersome and emotional task of putting his deceased mother’s home up for sale.

It should be noted this is Franzen’s first major work since spurning Oprah (out of fear for his literary reputation) when she tried to select Corrections for her coveted Book of the Month honour. As such, it is tempting to examine The Discomfort Zone as a kind of explication or justification of Franzen’s now legendary million-dollar bit of “Good grief!”. Perhaps, Franzen’s choice of Charley Brown as a kind of patron saint within the novel is a clue to his response. Jonathan is a good egg who makes mistakes, a forty-something man who can still be taken in by the vague promises of a pretty, blonde realtor, an excruciatingly self-conscious man who worries about how a new found love of birding will sit with his friends.

The form of the book may also provide a clue to Franzen’s current thinking about his past literary foibles. Weighing in at just under 200 pages, its brevity and levity seems to blur the line between novel and memoir and contrasts with the much longer Corrections. The brevity of this latest work is also deceptive because its disparate, episodic structure explores many “zones” and provides the reader with many views into Jonathan’s character. The end result depends partly upon how one wishes to assemble the pieces. Admittedly — some of those pieces – such as the narrator’s college memory of an intense exploration of German literature, may be more challenging to integrate than others. After all, not everyone is still wringing their hands over whether Kafka’s Joseph K was innocent or guilty. At the same time, because Jonathan’s life is enigmatic in its own way and emblematic of the late boomer generation, this novel will appeal to twenty-something “children” who stand to learn something new about their ever-so-strange parents. The Discomfort Zone will also hold up to multiple readings and bring a smile to the face of anyone struggling to survive on the frowning side of forty.

Finally, and however unlikely, it would be interesting if Oprah decided to give Franzen another chance. The Discomfort Zone succeeds in prying open a crack or two in the shell of Franzen’s precious literary reputation, but in so doing, the book reveals much that is funny and deep and achingly human.