Jonathan asked:

Of all the millions of people being hurt on planet earth in the early nineties, why were those the ones she saw on her TV?

Answer: race.

Glad I could help.

Note that our Official Friends in your example were also white. But I'll admit the narrative is a tinch more complicated.

Dude,

She's not an activist. She doesn't seek out injustices that aren't in front of her nose and said as much. I'm unclear on what you expect from her. Do you expect her to recognize atrocities, not as an opportunity for career advancement, but as you do - to empathize with strangers, plights, and causes as an activist would?

Most of the time I love your stuff. I think this the most insightful blog on the internets since ol' Billmon shut down. (And thanks for turning me onto IOZ) But every once in a while you write a post that has me scratching my head - what's the point here? that people who rise to the top aren't as humane as you'd like them to be? That powerful people work according to different motives than normal people? I'm really curious how this post measures up to your typical insightfulness into the trappings of power.

Am I just daft? Cause this reads like you just rediscovered for the first time that powerful people work differently. Different motives, different processing abilities, different perceptions, different morals, different psychological make-ups... different different different. I demand an explanation or a refund.

She's not an activist.

?

She's definitely an activist, at least if you go by how she identifies and presents herself. She definitely seeks out injustices. That's her entire shtick.

I find myself picturing an SNL sketch in which her ancient mother keeps begging her to stop writing 'those horrible books' because it'll make it more difficult for her to find a husband.

Samantha argues with her, but we sense that her resolve is weakening as the conversation goes on.

I'm a bit dimwitted myself. The first several times I read this post, I thought your frustration and anger were directed at Samantha Power. Now I realize you are speaking to the institutions here (which include places like Harvard which should be far better) that will only make "insiders" of people who are blind to American injustice, and thus are actually employed to be enablers of further injustice.

Because she is blind to American injustice, she is necessarily ambivalent about the appropriate use of American power, and thus indecisive in a debate about the moral use and ethical role of American power. If she wasn't clearer about this, she shouldn't have been in a debate about it.

Like you, I instinctively distrust all forms of nativism and find the notions of exceptionalism that drive American discourse and action disturbing and abhorrent -- particularly when the only evidence of American exceptionalism is the Bill of Rights, an ancient document which is also the subject of our considerable violence. I'm amazed by the irony (and saddened by the ignorance) of a country that proclaims to love the Bill of Rights, but abhors the ACLU.

I know how far corporatism has taken us into darkness, and how deeply corrupt (alien and inhuman, actually) a philosophy that gives human rights to property (if it's corporate) while stripping rights from real people, including even the voice of those who actually labor in corporations and must sign non-disclosure agreements about the very dark sins of those very corporations. I just don't know how much responsibility to lay at corporatism's door.

Most of this country, not just its leadership, has embraced torture. I never thought I'd see that. Some people I meet know we bombed Laos a bit during our Vietnam incursion -- none know we dropped something like 2.4 million tons of bombs on Laos, more than the allies dropped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. None I've met know how methodically we stripped England of her empire as our price for our delayed support during World War II. It's considered unpatriotic and traitorous to even make the argument that America and Americans are not different -- exceptional -- from others.

I'm beginning to feel I'm so far outside the norm of discourse in this culture that I have no shared reference, no Archimedean standpoint from which to move in this world. I'm so far left I'm almost a pacifist, which is, I think, actually a very violent stance, and one that requires a different kind of certainty. Dr. King was not a quiet man. Another of my personal heroes is the poet William Stafford (1914-1993), who was interned as a conscientious objector from 1940 to 1944. Imagine the courage of that.

I suspect one of your heroes was Mark Twain, who mastered a method of telling people how ignorant and violent and mean they are while getting them to laugh at the same time. And they paid him for this.

Since I'm now far off topic, I'll finish with my main point; gratitude. You have an extraordinary dead-on accurate political blog that is my second read every day (after 3quarks). I've learned more from your writing here than I can measure. I've certainly done more research as a consequence of things I've read here than anywhere else on the net. Thank you.

I guess this is why Chomsky and Herman set out to describe a model of US propaganda(*) If only CBS had made a documentary about it that Power could have seen.

(*) It's most descriptive of media from the 1950s to early 1990s, though still somewhat applicable.

Powers: "all three networks!"

Practically a sign from God, eh?

{Sigh.}

I thought those images just came over the air waves automatically, like water or electricity. Like, the antenna or something pulls them in, or it's through a cable thingy you have to pay for.

Isn't that right?

Aren't you being a little harsh? Power is talking about how her personal experiences shaped her career. I agree that the commencement address is cringe-inducing because it's pompous and full of cliches, but there's nothing dimwitted about the story of how she became a war correspondent.

Power says she was moved by pictures of starving Bosnians. She explains that these images motivated her to cover the war as a freelance journalist. That experience altered the course of her life. Covering a war, any war, could do that to a person.

Part of the reason we know how Bosnian oppression ranks on the global atrocity scale is that journalists like Power risked their lives to get the facts.

Great post; it's sad that people like Power aren't as enlightened, committed, articulate and all around brilliant as we are.

In other news, I won my 400th straight game of Jeopardy from home yesterday. God, those contestants on the TV are morons. They also have no fashion sense, and their banter with Alex is never as witty as the things I would have said.

I find myself picturing an SNL sketch in which her ancient mother keeps begging her to stop writing 'those horrible books' because it'll make it more difficult for her to find a husband.

Samantha argues with her, but we sense that her resolve is weakening as the conversation goes on.

I just had to see that again.

* * * * * *

The prickly response by some here is amusing, if predictable.

Not too terribly long ago, there was no shortage of teary-eyed, indignant neocons howling about the horror of all those burqa-donning Muslim women. And, dear God, the torture of Iraqi dissidents at the hands of Sadaam's sadistic goons.

But now that we're the ones torturing the same population, it's a different story. Why, torture is as American as apple pie, and only terrorist sympathizers are critical of torture and rendition and the outright murder of innocents. Perfunctory criticism of the methods is tolerated, but not the policy. Those who actually perform the rendition, the torture and the murder - the individuals with whom Americans share our citizenship and income - must also be insulated from criticism. Everybody's a victim.

The Iraqi women who managed to survive being liberated from their secular state lost homes, families and dignity. And if they're among the many thousands forced into prostitution and slavery in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, their own country and who knows where... well, at least they don't have to worry about Sadaam's degrading rape rooms.

Empathetic wonkishness is all well and good on the surface. But when the wonk is fetching water for empire, concern takes on a perverse character due to the myopia required for the position. For the wonks though - and all who lap up their selective compassion like kittens at a bowl of warm milk - well, a certain amount of pragmatism goes with the territory.

God save us from the white man's mercy. Better to have his wrath.