High-Tech, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

This afternoon, overcome by a mounting frustration at being unable to get two monitors working on my new single-graphic-card-equipped home desktop personal computer, I blurted out the following on Facebook (only a couple of minutes before I entered a plaintive plea for help on the same forum, which resulted in several responses, and indeed, even a phone call from an old friend):

Nothing quite sums up our relationship with some kinds of high-tech better than the fact that in order to get it to work, you have crawl around on your hands and knees.

I’m not exactly a naif when it comes to high-tech; indeed, to invoke the spirit of Walter White‘s claim that he was the one “who knocks on doors,” I’m often the person asked for technical help by my friends. But over the years, I’ve lost my patience with the promises of the high-tech world: all too often, to interact with high-technology is to be left fuming, spluttering, hypertension and cortisol levels spiked. Many interfaces still remain counterintuitive, trouble-free interoperability between different kinds of devices–and the software they run–remains a distant mirage, and day by day a bewildering alphabet soup of formats, protocols, decimal-annotated versions, and their various misbegotten cousins rains down on our heads like a malevolent anti-manna.

I know, I know, I sound like an old fart. Fair enough. I’m not that young anymore, and it’s been years since I wrote my last line of code (whether in a lowly scripting language or in a more exalted programming language.) But the funny thing is, I used to bitch and moan like this even when I was a ‘techie,’ a programmer and systems analyst at Bell Labs, or later, a UNIX system administrator. I’ve always felt vaguely resentful of the discordance between the promises of high-tech and the stress it induces in our lives. (My complaints about the ‘fragility of the digital’ are another dimension of this unease.)

Yes, I’m well aware that I’m getting this message out using a writing and distribution platform on a computer connected to a gigantic worldwide network, which I use daily for communication, entertainment, and accessing vast stores of information relevant to my ongoing learning and education. Respect. Much respect. I am staggered by the ingenuity and brilliance and labor that makes this thing–or things–work. But this same friend and aide, the one dispensing benefactions which make our lives so much easier, also exacts a fairly high psychic cost. (I have, on many an occasion, felt like hurling my computer monitor at the wall.)  And, yes, I’m aware, my complaint today this is not a particularly new complaint. But it remains interestingly persistent and finds newer forms of expression as our technological ‘gifts’ and ‘burdens’ grow in seemingly equal proportions. Perhaps that’s the sobering part of this giddying rush onwards to the ever greater technologization of our lives.

Note: I have still not managed to get my two monitors to work. At one point in the afternoon, I decided I had had enough of looking up help forums on the net and banging my head on my desk, and decided I would get to work instead. On a computer, of course.

On Male Brazilians And Revealing Ethnic Origins Through Cussing

Today was a painful day; twice, I encountered good old-fashioned physical pain. None of that fancy, dark night of the soul, melancholic stuff. You needed topical balms for this, not therapy. (Though I suppose opiates would help both varietals.)

Incident Numero Uno (in which I inadvertently receive a varietal of a Male Brazilian): Shortly after I had finished working out at my gym this afternoon, I collected my sore body and my gear, and began the walk back to the subway station to catch my train back home. On the way, I stopped to talk to a friend of mine; she was crossing the same street. We commiserated about some bureaucratic nightmares she is currently experiencing, and as we talked, I began removing a pair of taped straps from my wrists. I had been using these while performing two sets of heavy front squats a little earlier, and had forgotten to remove them. This procedure is always a little painful, thanks to the presence of hairs on my wrist–I am not unusually hirsute and carry a standard complement in that location. As usual, I moved gingerly and slowly, an action which did not fail to catch the attention of my friend who offered to help by delivering a short, sharp yank to the remaining part of the white tape. She did so, perhaps adding an emphatic flourish, and I let out an agonized yelp.  We both stared in some astonishment at the strip of tape that had just been torn off my right wrist: it was flecked with many a hair that had formerly adorned my wrist. At that moment, I felt deep empathy and sympathy for all those countless women who have undergone the agonies of a Brazilian to prepare for a season at the beach. How do they ever do it? Why do they? Patriarchy has a lot to answer for.

Incident Numero Dos (in which I am reminded of my ethnic origins): I returned home, my wrist still smarting, determined to feed myself well after my grueling workout. I entered the kitchen and set about making some scrambled eggs to accompany a leftover hot Italian sausage from last night’s dinner. After whipping up a rather tasty looking four-egg medley, I moved the pan over to where my plate lay and then, absentmindedly, reached for a serving utensil to begin ladling my preparation out. I had cooked the eggs with a wooden spatula, but forgetting that momentarily, I reached for one with a metallic handle. Unfortunately, this one, lying on the cooking range, had been exposed to the flame of my cooking for several minutes. As I grabbed it, a searing, agonizing, pain shot through my hand. I dropped the spatula, and stared at my hand, which showed two burns forming rapidly–one on my little finger, and one on my palm–even as I cursed loudly and pungently. Two cusswords had emanated. Both were in Punjabi. Modesty forbids me provide any more detail than that. Old instincts die hard. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Step This Way For The Deunionized American Workplace

American unions look headed for another legal beating in the US Supreme Court. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to drop all pretense and just advocate beatings until the morale–of American workers–improves. The Supreme Court is about to hand their overseers a slightly thicker, more knotted, whip.

Ten Californian teachers have sued their union–on First Amendment grounds–alleging that by paying union dues “they are being forced to pay money to support positions with which they disagree.” Their plea will likely find sympathetic ears on the current almost-completely-fallen-over-to-the-right Supreme Court, which has twice ruled that “the First Amendment bars forcing government workers to make payments to unions.” These are no innocent plaintiffs; they are an integral component of a “decades-long legal campaign to undermine public unions.” (Their lawsuit has been organized by the Center for Individual Rights, a libertarian group which enjoys funding from conservative foundations.)

Of course, the plaintiffs will continue to benefit from the union’s work to secure higher wages and workplace benefits–that’s just how collective bargaining works. But the rugged individualist at the head of the lawsuit, Mr. Elrich, will have none of it. As he notes, presumably standing on a cliff overlooking the American West, through which he will roll on his covered wagon, fighting off various governmental depredators:

“I can negotiate for myself,” he said. “I’m a good teacher, highly respected, and I can go anywhere.”

If the experience of American workers in the years following the extensive deunionization of the American workplace is any indication, most teachers will  likely “go” down the ladder of economic and social advancement. But freedom, fuck yeah, so that’s cool.

The plaintiff’s First Amendment concerns appear overblown:

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., representing the Obama administration, urged the justices to leave the Abood ruling alone. Reaping the benefits of collective bargaining, he said, is not the same as being compelled to support a political position.

 “The typical worker would surely perceive a significant difference between, on the one hand, contributing to a union’s legal and research costs to develop a collective-bargaining proposal for his own unit, and, on the other hand, making a political contribution to a union-favored candidate for governor,” Mr. Verrilli wrote.

Kamala D. Harris, California’s attorney general, told the justices in a brief that workers who object to the positions taken by unions suffer no First Amendment injuries because “they remain free to communicate their views to school officials, their colleagues and the public at large.”

Unsurprisingly, there is plenty of market language forthcoming from the plaintiffs

Ms. Cuen said the unions might need to improve to keep their members.

“If they’re worried about not getting forced money from everyone, what does that say about their product?” she asked. “So maybe if we win the case and they’re worried about people leaving in droves, they might need to improve their product and make it a little more user-friendly.”

I’m surprised Ms. Cuen forgot to throw in talk of union ‘brands’ and how they are losing their ‘customers.’ Perhaps she’ll do in her press release following their legal victory.

Workplace Dynamics And The Treatment Of Support Staff

A couple of days ago, my Brooklyn College colleague Corey Robin asked (on his Facebook page):

How many academics would get tenure if the review took into account how they treated the department’s secretarial staff?

A year or so after I had begun work at Bell Laboratories, I told a new hire that she should always strive to keep three classes of co-workers (or ‘staff’) happy: secretaries, computer system administrators, and security guards. Later, I extended this claim to other members of our building’s facilities crew. This imperative suggested itself to me as prudent and moral (and political). It still does in my current location at my academic workplace.

The first two on the list above made our daily tasks much easier; they helped us navigate workplace mazes, administrative, logistical, and bureaucratic; they let us concentrate on our work, which was supposedly technical and creative. The third were the first ones to greet us on our entry to the building, and the last ones to bid us goodbye when we left; being friendly and personable in our interactions with them served to provide a kinder, gentler bookend to our days at work (And if you forgot your ID card on the weekends, in the days before high-speed dial-up connections, you could count on them not blocking your entry to the building in case you desperately needed to get some coding work done in your office that could not be accomplished from home.)

I’m happy to say that over the years I have followed my directives quite faithfully, and have generally enjoyed good relations with most members of my ‘support staff.’ These have made my workday experiences considerably more pleasant. The exceptions to this have occurred with some security staff who insist on taking their badges and uniforms a little too seriously and adopt the demeanor of the police a little too eagerly.

Despite these fairly self-evident considerations, secretarial staff still remain unappreciated, frequently overworked, and poorly treated. (The sexism and harassment directed at female secretaries is legendary.) In my corporate workplaces–which were mostly manned by folks with technical backgrounds–there was a great deal of patronizing and dismissive behavior too. In response, secretarial staff often scorned the head-in-the-air attitude of those they served, decrying their inability to accomplish the simplest tasks by themselves and directed some scathing disrespect at them behind their backs. To the credit of my colleagues at my two university employers–the University of New South Wales and the City University of New York–I have witnessed fairly pleasant and egalitarian patterns of interaction between them and our administrative staff. (Robin’s question above seems to indicate there is trouble in paradise.)

At academic workplaces the power differential is clear. Faculty might imagine themselves, PhD and all, as the bees knees, with administrative staff, possessing perhaps only a lowly bachelors or associate degree, as mere dust to be shaken off their feet. (This was certainly the case at Bell Labs, which was populated by graduates from the nation’s top science and engineering programs.) Faculty are also often overworked too, and their requests for assistance can be made a little brusquely. Status and class anxiety does not help this already complicated picture.

It might behoove all of us ‘non-management types’ to remember that a more equitable and harmonious relationship among ourselves is one of our primary protections against the impositions of our ‘bosses,’ that there are allies here, if we were only willing to look a little closer.

Freud On Group Production (And ‘Intellectual Property’)

In ‘Group Pyschology’, (Standard Edition, XVIII, 79; as cited in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 150), Sigmund Freud writes:

[A]s far as intellectual achievement is concerned, it remains indeed true that the great decisions of the work of thought, the consequential discoveries and solutions of problems, are possible only to the individual, laboring in solitude. But even the mass mind is capable of mental creations of genius, as proved above all by language itself, as well as by folk song, folklore and the like. Beyond that, it remains unsettled just how much the individual thinker or creative writer owed to the stimulus of the crowd among which he lives, whether he is more than the completer of mental work in which the others had participated at the same time.

The Grand Old Man of Psychoanalysis is, as usual, quite perspicuous here (As Gay notes in a parenthetical remark, his concluding ‘reasonable aside…joins, once again, individual and social psychology.’) His choice of examples of the works produced by ‘the mass mind’ are, in particular, telling: language, folk song, and folklore.  Without the first, there is no language to be used as the medium of expression by the novelist, the poet, the writer; no home, as it were, for them to set up safe camp and experiment, boldly, perhaps striking out where none dared have gone before. Idiosyncrasy must have an orthodoxy to pit itself against. Without the second a giant repository of sources for classical and popular music alike is inaccessible.  Bach, it must be remembered, drew heavily on German folk music for some of his most famous compositions; rock and roll owes its provenance to the blues etc. As in language, folk songs and music provide a foundation upon which many an impressive superstructure, sometimes radically different from its lower levels, may be built up. Without the third, similarly, the wellsprings of stories–long and short alike, plays, novels, dries up. The child hears these at her mother’s and grandparent’s knees; she learns them in school; and again, further sorties into territories visible, but not yet ventured into by them, are suggested.

The ‘individual, laboring in solitude’ is not denied any of the credit that is her due by her drawing upon these sources of inspiration. It is her particular and peculiar utilization and deployment of these source materials that is the cause of our appreciation and praise. Our acknowledgement of the genius’ work only tips over into fantasy–and counterproductive restraints on borrowing and creative amendment–when we imagine that her productions  issued as singular emanations from her, and only her, alone. Moreover, the true value of the genius’ contributions does not lie in the solitary splendor of her literary, visual, or musical creations; rather, it is that those creations, by being poured back into the collective cultural potlatch, become fecund sources of further artistic production for those who follow in her footsteps.

We are born into a made world; when we leave, we’ve laid a couple of bricks ourselves. With the mortar and materials of those who came before us.

Mass Incarceration And Teaching Philosophy Of Law

This coming spring semester, as in the just-concluded fall semester, I will be teaching Philosophy of Law. As I get down to thinking about my syllabus, one imperative seems overriding: I must ‘do more’ on mass incarceration (and related topics like the theory of punishment and the death penalty.) No topic seems more important, pressing, and urgent in today’s United States. In the face of the brutal particulars of mass incarceration (and the racism and War on Drugs that animate and sustain it), the highly theoretical particulars of the traditional debates in the philosophy of law–the nature of law according to natural law and positivist theories, legal reasoning, the interpretation of legal texts–seem curiously context-free, unanchored to empirical particulars pertaining to the lives of actual legal subjects. (To be sure, legal realist, critical legal studies, critical race, and feminist legal theories do animate and make concrete these discussions considerably; they also inject a much-needed dose of historical and political perspective.)

With these considerations in mind, a tentative outline for the upcoming semester’s syllabus suggests itself to me: begin with Lon Fuller‘s The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, using it to animate–or as my friend Cathy Kemp likes to say, ‘ignite’–discussions on natural law, positivism, and statutory interpretation; move on to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ classic The Path of the Law; follow this up with H. L. A. Hart‘s The Concept of Law (almost certainly not in its entirety), and then, switching gears, move to Michelle Alexander‘s The New Jim Crow and  Albert Camus‘ Reflections on the Guillotine. (As noted, this is an outline; I will supplement this basic structure with some selected case studies that will help illustrate the central issues at play in reasoning by analogy and precedent, and the dominant theories of constitutional interpretation.)

Needless to say, this is a pretty idiosyncratic syllabus, and I might be accused by many philosophers of law of leaving uncovered a host of topics that have traditionally been of interest to that demographic: rights, justice and equality, responsibility, legal procedure and evidence, torts, property, contracts etc. My syllabus shows a clear bias toward public law and ignores private law altogether; there is no critical legal studies; some traditional philosophers will be appalled to see Camus in this reading list; and so on. (The alert reader will have noticed however, that the first four topics on that laundry list cannot but occur, implicitly or explicitly, in a discussion of mass incarceration like the one undertaken in The New Jim Crow.)

I remain resolutely unapologetic about these omissions though. My syllabus will strike a reasonable balance between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘applied’, and more to the point, it will bring into my classroom, that moral, political, and legal atrocity–mass incarceration–that is not only America’s greatest modern embarrassment but also, in some ways, the most relevant topic of all as far as my students’ lives are concerned.  I’d consider this the strongest reason of all in favor of its displacement of traditional material.

‘Eva’: Love Can Be Skin-Deep (Justifiably)

Kike Maíllo’s Eva makes for an interesting contribution to the ever-growing–in recent times–genre of robotics and artificial intelligence movies. That is because its central concern–the emulation of humanity by robots–which is not particularly novel in itself, is portrayed in familiar and yet distinctive, form.

The most common objection to the personhood of the ‘artificially sentient,’ the ‘artificially intelligent,’ or ‘artificial agents’ and ‘artificial persons’ is couched in terms similar to the following: How could silicon and plastic ever feel, taste, hurt?  There is no ‘I’ in these beings; no subject, no first-person, no self. If such beings ever provoked our affection and concerns, those reactions would remain entirely ersatz. We know too much about their ‘insides,’ about how they work. Our ‘epistemic hegemony’ over these beings–their internals are transparent to us, their designers and makers–and the dissimilarity between their material substrate and ours renders impossible their admission to our community of persons (those we consider worthy of our moral concern.)

As Eva makes quite clear, such considerations ignore the reality of how our relationships with other human beings are constructed in actuality. We respond first to visible criteria, to observable behavior, to patterns of social interaction; we then seek internal correspondences–biological, physiological–for these to confirm our initial reactions and establishments of social ties; we assume too, by way of abduction, an ‘inner world’ much like ours. But biological similarity is not determinative; if the visible behavior is not satisfactory, we do not hesitate to recommend banishment from the community of persons. (By ostracism, institutionalization, imprisonment etc.) And if visible behavior is indeed, as rich and varied and interactive as we imagine it should be for the formation of viable and rewarding relationships, then our desire to admit the being in question to the community of persons worthy of our moral care will withstand putative evidence that there is considerable difference in constitution and the nature of ‘inner worlds.’  If Martians consisting solely of green goo on the inside were to land on our planet and treat our children with kindness i.e., display kind behavior, and provide the right kinds of reasons–whether verbally or by way of display on an LED screen–when we asked them why they did so, only an irredeemable chauvinist would deny them admission to the community of moral persons.

Eva claims that a robot’s ‘mother’ and her ‘father’–her human designers–may love her in much the same way they would love their human children. For she may bring joy to their life in much the same way they would; she may smile, laugh giddily, play pranks, gaze at them in adoration, demand their protection and care, respond to their affectionate embraces, and so on. In doing so, she provokes older, evolutionarily established instincts of ours. These reactions of ours may strike us so compelling that even a look ‘under the hood’ may not deter their expression. We might come to learn that extending such feelings of acceptance and care to beings we had not previously considered so worthy might make new forms of life and relationships manifest. That doesn’t seem like such a bad bargain.

Reflections On ‘Imagined Communities’ – II: Newspaper Reading As Modern Prayer

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, New York, 2006, pp. 34-35), Benedict Anderson writes:

[T]he newspaper is merely an ‘extreme form’ of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day best-sellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing….creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only this day, not that. The significance of this mass ceremony–Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers–is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by…others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion….the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.

The modern version of ‘mass ceremony’ that Hegel terms a ‘substitute for morning prayer’ is–I suspect, from my vantage, privileged viewpoint–the morning email/social media check-in. Coffee mug in hand, we head over to our desktops, our laptops, our smartphones, hit space bars or tap screens, and get to reattaching the umbilical cord. (Some folks have no time and energy for this ritual and never have had, even in the times that Anderson is referring to above; reading newspapers has always been a luxury of sorts.) The sense of shared community is similar to those of newspapers: as I read shared links, I’m aware that many others have done the same. I sense, of course, that there are many overlapping communities here, just because each of our social media ‘contacts’ is a node in many other social networks besides ours. (This makes for an interesting contrast from the readership of a newspaper.)

Still, my sense of participating in a common, widely dispersed ritual as I interact with my social media feed grows: interactions and notifications are soon forthcoming, informing me that my social media ‘community’ is attentive and engaged. And if a variety of links on some topic of interest soon becomes visible, presenting the varied facets and dimensions of a hotly debated issue, this feeling becomes ever more entrenched. Indeed, I might want to participate in this ‘conversation’ – a possibility not available in the older model of readers reading their newspapers in their personal spaces. Through these interactions, I am reassured my ‘imagined community’ does not just exist and participate in the ritual of the modern morning prayer like I do, but it also engages with itself, with its constituents, about the meaning and significance of the liturgies performed and the prayers chanted.

Social media interactions such as the ones I describe are often not quite as local, provincial, or national, as in Anderson’s formulation of the shared newspaper experience: my ‘imagined communities’ straddle nations.  And yet, no global community, no ‘global village,’ despite the feverish imaginings and speculations of the early net-enthusiasts has emerged; news and issues on social media still bear a distinct national imprint and are still intended, primarily, for ‘local’ consumption. The nation still reigns supreme.

Richard Holmes On Biography’s ‘Physical Pursuit’ Of Its Subjects

In an essay describing his biographical work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Holmes writes:

[A] biography is…a handshake….across time, but also across cultures, across beliefs, across disciplines, across genders, and across ways of life. It is an act of friendship.

It is a way of keeping the biographer’s notebook open, on both sides of that endlessly mysterious question: What was this human life really like, and what does it mean to us now? In this sense, biography is not merely a mode of historical inquiry. It is an act of imaginative faith.

Holmes bases this view of the work of the biographer on two claims about the art, the first one of which claims that:

[T]he serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or traveled or dreamed.

Biography is a famously reviled literary genre–sometimes described as fantasy, sometimes intrusive voyeurism, sometimes ideologically motivated hatchet job. Holmes is right to describe it as being animated by an ‘endlessly mysterious question.’ (He is also perspicuous in describing it as a ‘handshake’ and an ‘act of friendship’ of sorts.) That question’s mystery–which becomes ever more prominent when we think about its unanswerability with respect to ourselves–does not make the attempt to answer it necessarily ignoble or ill-motivated. But it does bid us be circumspect in assessing how much of the biographer’s task is ever ‘complete.’

To acknowledge that difficulty note that Holmes adds a variety of physical emulation to the task of the biographer: we must be where our subject has been in order to assess what his experiences there might have been like, and thus evaluate what their contribution to his life’s work were. Thus the Nietzsche biographer must make the hike to Sils Maria and ascend the heights that surround it. There, perhaps, one might investigate what Nietzsche had in mind in his constant invocations of the ‘clean air’ he experienced there, and wonder about the sordid life he might have left behind. Because we are not disembodied intelligences, but rather embodied beings in constant interaction with our environments–physical, mental, and emotional–Holmes’ injunction is a wise one. The biographer who writes of Jack Kerouac without undertaking a long road-trip on American highways, and does not wonder about what effect the sights seen therein–big skies, the black asphalt stretching to the horizon, the lonely houses and farms, the lives of fellow travelers–could have had on an endlessly restless and fertile imagination is crippled, fatally, in his task.

But even as we set to work in this dimension, we realize how much is still hidden away from us, how much remains inaccessible. We are still left to play, unavoidably, with our speculations, distant third-person reports, and autobiographical confessions of dubious fidelity. Perhaps this is why Holmes concludes by describing biography as an ‘act of imaginative faith.’

Notes: This essay begins with what must be a distinctive entry to the ‘not-so-humblebrag’ genre:

By the time I had finished my eight-hundred-page biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1974, I was nearly thirty.

Liberia, Iran, Gautemala et al.: Liberated By Coup D’Etat

In 1981 or so, as a schoolboy perusing my school library’s archives of LIFE magazine, I came upon a set of photos that–like other images in the past–showcased a brutality not immediately reconcilable with my rational understanding of the world: half-naked men, tied tight to poles with green plastic cords that bit into their skin, mowed down by a volley of gunfire from a firing squad. The incongruous backdrop to this summary execution was a sandy sunlit beach, suitable for wading, surfing, and sunbathing on your average tropical vacation. I did not, and could not, fully understand the historical context and geopolitical machinations described in the accompanying article. That was how I first learned of the existence of a land called Liberia, how it came to be, and its peculiar and particular relationship with the United States.

The back story to that execution is worth revisiting–if only as an exercise to see how political and historical patterns may be easily detected:

In 1971, President William Tubman [of Liberia] died and his left-leaning, idealistic vice-president, William Tolbert, took over. Tolbert expanded social services like health care and education and scrapped subsidies on imported rice to encourage Liberian farmers. However, he antagonized the US by renegotiating unfavorable contracts with Firestone and other companies. He also criticized Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, offered support to the African National Congress and other revolutionary groups, and established diplomatic relations with North Korea, Libya, China, the USSR, and other countries on America’s cold war enemy list. He also refused to grant the American military unlimited access to the nation’s main airport, which it had been using to send weapons to cold war allies around the continent.

This should sound vaguely familiar. (Guatemala-Árbenz, Iran-Mosaddegh, perhaps?)

In 1980, Tolbert was murdered in his bed by soldiers allied to Samuel Doe, a young sergeant in the Liberian army. US foreign aid cuts and riots organized by CIA-backed opposition groups over increased rice prices had already weakened Tolbert’s regime. Doe himself also claimed to have been recruited into the CIA in 1973, and according to eyewitnesses he called the US embassy the night of Tolbert’s murder and received its blessing for the takeover. Ten days later, thirteen of Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were paraded around Monrovia in their underwear and then shot dead on the beach before an audience of horrified Western journalists.  [citations removed]

Those ministers were the trussed up men, the sweat and sand and spit visible on their writhing bodies as they died, that I had seen in those photos.

And then, grimly and inexorably, other aspects of the visible historical pattern stand forth:

Doe promptly dismantled Tolbert’s leftist policies, cut ties with Libya, the Soviets, and other enemies of America, renegotiated contracts with US companies, and allowed the US military free rein at the airport. In return, Doe received $500 million in foreign aid from the Reagan administration, far more than any other African country at the time.

And this, of course, is not where it ends. Charles Taylor awaits.