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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (28941)	9/21/2006 9:40:25 AM
From: Paul Kern	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541235

That's the big difference I always found between those on the sidelines and those who make and carry out policy day to day And the journalists who cover these stories. In fact, the main reason I decided not to become a foreign affairs academic was that I didn't want to sit up in the bleachers and write commentaries after a game. Those scribes serve a purpose, but most of what they prescribe just goes off in the ether for posterity. Rarely do they impact the scoreboard - they wouldn't know how. Not to mention the ongoing academic pissing contests that continue year after year in expensive publication after expensive publication.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (28941)	9/21/2006 10:34:37 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541235

I'm a bit surprised at your reaction to the Timothy Garten Ash piece. It's much more sympathetic to precisely the policy making level that you wish to speak for. Let's treat, he is saying, the issues not, at least first of all, at the level of "Muslims this and Muslims that" but at the level different identities--family, religion, ethnicity, national origin, etc. are played out. At the local level. The level at which official statements of non discrimination are daily contradicted in life (the French case, for instance) Moreover, Ash is sympathetic to the dialogue between the abstractly formulated goal and the local, messily applied application as evidence by his lengthy treatments of who the central actors are in the two books under review. Ash is not Chomsky nor Will nor Broder nor pick your name. His work has been far more concrete than the abstractions you present. Here's a link to his Amazon materials. amazon.com