Posted by Benjamin on: 03.13.2008 /
My very own home town newspaper (by far the better of the two Seattle newspapers) did an interview today with Samantha Powers–she of the recent infamous “Clinton is a monster” comment which led to her resignation from her position on Obama’s staff as a foreign policy advisor. I found the interview delightful and humanizing. I loved the way she so genuinely and thoroughly said “I blew it, and I’m sorry!”
What is so abhorrent about my comments is not only are they hurtful and hateful; they don’t reflect my real views of Senator Clinton. These are not thoughts I had been having alone in my own home, storing up to vent over these 14 months.
I really just had one of those bad moments when you lose your temper and you say something that sticks. It sticks out there as something associated with Senator Clinton and also with me — all because of me.
I love the the idea of the two book she’s written: one about genocide and a new one about Sergio Vieira de Mello, the late U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights. She said of her book on genocide, which won a Pulitzer prize
The genocide book was personal. I had been in Bosnia in my early 20s and I had been shaped by the carnage and emotion, especially the fact that there were NATO planes flying overhead and not doing anything. I felt that I had not acquitted myself as aggressively as I should have in writing about those things. And I wanted to understand the act of bystanding — how good people can do nothing in the face of very bad things…
She is referencing the idea of the banality of evil, an idea I find almost mesmerizingly compelling. All the bad crap making it’s way through the rotary oscillator isn’t *nearly* so much about the people actually feeding it in as it is about all of us standing around failing to unplug that puppy.
and of the subject of her recent book
Sergio, a U.N. official, seemed to me like the opposite of a bureaucrat; he may well have been the most compelling international figure of the last half-century, the most important person that no one had heard of. My sense was that, if given exposure, he would prove compelling. And we are all in need of good shepherds in this juncture of history, people who provide models of dealing with violence. …
And of lessons from Sergio’s life?
I think there are two. One is that dignity has to be central to our foreign policy in a way it never has been. I know it sounds cliché, but Sergio had an amazing ability to see individuals and put himself in their shoes and imagine what it feels like to live in occupied Iraq, or be governed by the U.N. in East Timor.
The other is being acutely aware of 21st-century challenges but not being immobilized by that. We in the United States, especially progressives, have been turned off by what has happened in the last seven years. There’s such a crisis of confidence that there is an urge to “let’s not engage anywhere in the world at all.”
But the lesson of Sergio’s life is: It’s not a question of whether to engage but how to engage. Humility without paralysis is incredibly important.
How very … emergent of him. How enormously anti-modern. How excellent. Humility without paralysis. How nearly impossible. I think I’ll have to get the book. Sergio sounds brilliant.
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