Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteFinally, from Kenya by way of Reuters, something solid on which to hang the looming threat of civil war: an assembly against the government, predominantly nonviolent on the part of the protesters, and banned by the government, which has backed up its refusal of permission with measured force.
One protester said, "This is dictatorship now," but, one may say happily today that the state administration overall seems an awful long way from adopting the tactics of, say, the junta in Burma.
I've seen the intractable posturing that leads to positioning for unmistakable war twice this past year--at Lal Masjid in Islamabad, Pakistan and at Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon. There's a done-wrong romance to it: I/we have been cheated; the government is illigitimate and not to be trusted; I/we will fix things with our sticks, our Kalashnikovs, our machetes.
In Kenya, instead of sending a disputed election into the courts--open to the public and on the record--at least a few leaders or politicians, so-called, have whipped themselves and their constituencies toward violent confrontation. Because the process is so dumb and transparant, practically predictable, one expects a certain zeal for confrontation or revolution from students: they're wired for it, and, perhaps, student protests and assorted actions tending toward mayhem have a refreshing effect on cultures overall, old men and women having to hand it over, whatever it is, some time.
In complex and sophisticated societies, however, the reduction to "my side vs. your side" in discourse accompanied by interest in doing violence to others has the effect of a cancer: it threatens and shuts down the systems all rely on for succor; sponsored by those emboldened to take lives, it spreads to take innocent life and produce misery for those least connected to or concerned with the politics that serves primarily as an excuse to discover and indulge in the experience of an absolute, if momentary, power.
1. "Kenyan police battle Odinga supporters." Reuters, January 3, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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