O’Rourke on Colin Powell

There’s a nice interview of Colin Powell by PJ O’Rourke in The Atlantic. I particularly like this exchange:

SECRETARY POWELL: Our great strength is the image we still convey to the rest of the world. Notwithstanding all you read about anti-Americanism, people are still standing in line to come here, to get visas and come across our borders.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Voting with their feet?

SECRETARY POWELL: Voting with their feet. So there’s something right there.

P. J. O’ROURKE: Back in Lebanon in 1984, I was held at gunpoint by this Hezbollah kid, just a maniac, you know, at one of those checkpoints, screaming at me about America, great Satan, et cetera.

SECRETARY POWELL: Then he wanted a green card?

P. J. O’ROURKE: At the end of this rant, that’s exactly what he said: “As soon as I get my green card, I am going to Dearborn, Michigan to study dental school.” And he saw no disconnect.

SECRETARY POWELL: He’s there now. He’s not going back to Beirut.

P. J. O’ROURKE: He hated America so much and wanted nothing more than to be an American.

SECRETARY POWELL: They respect us and they resent us. But they want what we have.

BL to provide wireless net for readers

People using the wonderful British Library near King’s Cross will be able to access the net via a new wireless LAN. Hooray! Charges are £4.50 an hour or £35 a month.

Don’t blame us!

Christine Happel sent me this delicious picture.

The subversion of language — contd.

For decades one of the most objectionable aspects of British tabloid journalism has been its sanctimonious determination to ‘name the guilty man/men’ whenever there’s been a disastrous accident or a horrific organisational cock-up. This always seemed to me (and my academic colleagues) as a desperately wrong-headed way to look at complex issues. Often, these large-scale failures reflect not so much the deficiencies of individuals as the complexity of the systems in which they are enmeshed. So (we argued) they are more productively viewed as systemic failures.

But now, guess what? The phrase ‘systemic failure’ has been picked up by the government’s spin machine — and used in a novel way: to ensure that nobody has to take responsibility for what goes wrong. It’s not clear when this started but my colleague Ray Ison thinks it may have begun with the Butler Inquiry into the failure of UK Intelligence services in the run-up to the Iraq war. I’ve just looked at the report and can’t find the word ‘systemic’ in it anywhere, but Ray’s right in one respect. Lord Butler decided that the cock-up over intelligence about WMD was a “collective failure” and then used that to argue that it would be inappropriate to fire John Scarlett, the Chairman of the Joint Intellegence Committee which cleared the infamous (and ludicrous) dossier on which Blair took the country to war.

Whatever its provenance, though, it’s clear that ‘systemic failure’ is now synonomous with “nobody’s responsible, Guv.”