Knowing is half the battle

As G.I. Joe told me hundreds of times as a young squirt during after school television cartoon sessions.

The International Herald Tribune runs an editorial, today, that tells me that some people are beginning to get things figured out.

Are sanctions the answer?

From that column:

"After a decade of experience, it's clear: economic sanctions on Myanmar may feel right, but they have helped produce the wrong results. Encouraging Western investment, trade and tourism may feel wrong, but maybe - just maybe - could produce better results.

That might be politically incorrect, but at least it wouldn't be politically futile."

That really is the essence of it. The same could be said of Iran. And the same could have been said of North Korea until first South Korea, then China, America and the West recognized that diplomacy and incentives got more results.

That's the problem with politics. Too often people don't look at it as a matter of getting the job done and doing good by people and they look at it, far too often as a matter of rooting for the home team, validating their own notions of the world, and doing what feels right while calling it something else. Universities often work the same way, which is what confuses those discussions more than it should.

But, eventually, you gotta come clean about the effectiveness and/or decency of your efforts. You can't bullshit forever. Because it gets you nowhere. I could tell you that I know more about fixing your car than I know. But, eventually, you'd have to catch on that when your car still isn't running, maybe I don't.

And knowing that propensity about ourselves - our propensity to want to be right even when we aren't, out of our foolish and all-too-common anxiety that if we aren't, especially in politics, that must mean we're less capable of knowing what to do and helping out and, if you have such aspirations, leading, than we do; all of which can and should be said about all of us, rightly, and it's really ok that such is so - as G.I. Joe would say, is half the battle.

It's foolish to engage in politics in such ways. Because it just doesn't get us anywhere. And that, when we're not bullshitting ourselves and others, really is the whole point.