Obama on Afghanistan: All in

President Obama went before the cadets of West Point on Tuesday and told them he knew what time it was.

Obama’s exhaustive 92-day review of his options in Afghanistan — easily the most thoughtful since the Bush administration’s invasion in October 2001 — led to Tuesday’s 33-minute address at Eisenhower Hall, a speech in which 30,000 additional troops were committed to the Afghan conflict, at an estimated cost of about $30 billion, and a possible cost of the president’s standing with the Democratic base that helped get him elected.

In Tuesday’s speech, we finally got what’s been missing from the prosecution of this longest war in our history: a timely explanation on how and when to end it. The president’s commitment to add new troops came just moments before another commitment, startling but welcome: the intent to begin their extraction from Afghanistan in July 2011.

“We did not ask for this fight,” Obama said. “On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women, and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of the passengers on board one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington and killed many more.”

This was no rousing campaign speech, no galvanizing call to arms. Obama gave St. Crispen the night off. What we got Tuesday — what we needed — was an address that laid out, without righteous Manichean thunder, what must be done to finish a mission this president didn’t seek, how best to prosecute a war this administration doesn’t need.

In an oratorically sparse yet richly pragmatic way, President Obama gave this war-weary nation what it’s never had before. We’ve got a timetable now, not one locked in amber, and not one revealed in private councils and in the cloakrooms of Congress, but a timetable surely subject to changes if necessary. And it’s a timetable  announced in public, out loud where it counts, at the institution that may be the best and highest forum for its revelation.

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“We will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan,” the president said. “We must deny al-Qaida a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

“We will meet these objectives in three ways. First, we will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban's momentum and increase Afghanistan's capacity over the next 18 months.

“The 30,000 additional troops that I'm announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 -- the fastest possible pace -- so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers. They'll increase our ability to train competent Afghan security forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

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A great actor chooses the right stage. By making this commitment in this way on this stage, at this academy with its significance to the nation and its history, President Obama has already upped the ante on the political discourse, and raised the pressure on the Kabul government.

With ceremony and purpose, Obama has made clear his fidelity to the men and women he would — he will — put in harm’s way, and done it directly, in a fashion and a forum that’s largely immune from spin.

And Obama indicated that attention to the Afghan war and to the economy are not mutually exclusive concepts. “Having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” he said, “the American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home.”

Though curiously short on the specifics, the president’s speech was at least, and finally, establishing a clear rhetorical linkage between this war abroad and the economy at home.

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But as usual, the devil dances intimately with the details. Implicit in the president’s three-pronged strategy is a maze of substrategies, all of which seem to rely on any number of ephemerals in order for the whole thing to function.

Obama called for more participation from NATO allies; a plan for greater outreach to nuclear-capable Pakistan; pursuit of more involvement by Afghan civilians, including the tribal chieftains and warlords who are often more pivotal to Afghans’ daily lives than the central government; plans to attend to everyday civilian needs in a country with a 17th-century infrastructure; and an intent to fund a Taliban reintegration program, effectively trying to buy off the Taliban insurgents the coalition can’t kill.

“I do not make this decision lightly,” he said. "I opposed the war in Iraq precisely because I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions. ...

“I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

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Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, had praise for the speech and problems with it. “On one hand, the speech is brilliant in terms of the incredible balancing of all these different constituencies that he was trying to talk to: Democrats, Republicans, Afghans, Pakistanis … it’s carefully calibrated,” Friedman said Wednesday morning on “Imus in the Morning” on Fox News.

“On the other hand, my reaction is that there are so many moving parts … how do you get this incredibly complex, perfectly balanced thing to work?”

“So many moving parts” may be an understatement. On Wednesday, on her nightly MSNBC program, Rachel Maddow presented a graphic from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a visual representation of precisely how the various stars of the United States/coalition military and the Afghan government must align in order to succeed under the Obama plan outlined Tuesday night.

With its crazy Rube Goldberg array of spidery points of origin and circuitous, multicolored interlocking connections, the Joint Chiefs diagram makes a circuit board schematic look like a straight line by comparison. But ironically, this maddeningly complex illustration is apparently, among other things, the road map home for American forces bogged down in the longest war of our history.

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Some in Congress already have their doubts. Shortly after the speech, Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California — the lone voice of dissent in the House of Representatives in 2001, against the House Resolution authorizing force against Iraq — expressed her opposition to the Obama plan.

“The stress on our military is just horrendous,” she told CNN. “When you look at the number of suicides, when you look at post-traumatic stress syndrome, when you look at what is taking place with our young men and women, the cost in blood alone should cause us to be very, very concerned.”

Her colleague, Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, was even more downbeat. “I think we’ll be in the same place a year from now that we are today, and I cannot see that there’s any reason to think we’re gonna change it with what’s being proposed,” he told KIRO-TV on Wednesday.

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Writing Wednesday in The Guardian (UK), Simon Tisdale offered a deeply historical perspective. “In seeking to subdue, control, unite and then honourably depart from a country that has defied foreign conquest for all 2,500 years of its recorded history, Obama aims to succeed where Alexander the Great, among numerous others, ultimately and ingloriously failed.”

In the parlance of poker, the phrase “all in” means you’re staking your chips — your assets, your treasure — against an equal amount of your opponent’s holdings.

President Obama on Tuesday effectively went all in on the Afghan war, committing not just the nation’s military resources but also his own political capital to achieving a favorable outcome in Afghanistan.

The signal he sent was as clear and unambiguous to the cadets at West Point as it was to the Taliban, the Afghan government and the people of this country: This is no bluff.

Eighteen months from now, we’ll see how good his hand really was.

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Image credits: Obama at West Point I and II: Reuters/Jim Young. Obama at West Point III: Pete Souza, The White House (public domain). Obama at West Point IV: Still from White House video. Afghanistan graphic: Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Huckabee and Horton

By some estimations, the handicapping of GOP contenders for the 2012 presidential derby has already started. Certain names (Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney) we’ve heard before. Others (Newt Gingrich and [God help us] Dick Cheney) may be no more than stalking horses, conversation starters at the Georgetown cocktail parties where the best laid Republican plans to recapture the White House are being hatched.

One of those possible Oval Office aspirants may have more of an uphill slog than previously thought. Like an earlier presidential hopeful on the other side of the aisle, Mike Huckabee already has some ‘splainin to do.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and one-time Krispy Kreme enthusiast, once made full use of the gubernatorial powers of clemency in 2000 by granting a pardon to one Maurice Clemmons — commuting a 95-year prison sentence for aggravated robbery.

Clemmons has a long rap sheet, including five felony convictions in Arkansas. After Huckabee’s clemency, Clemmons broke parole and went back to prison in July 2001. Clemmons was released in March 2004, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. He moved to Washington state later that year.

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Inexplicably, despite having at least eight felony charges in Washington state — including a third-degree assault on a police officer and a second-degree child-rape charge that ordinarily carries a possible life sentence — Clemmons was released from the Pierce County Jail last week.

He is now the suspect in the execution-style killing of four police officers from the Lakewood, Wash., police department, on Sunday morning. Clemmons is suspected of having shot the four officers as they sat in a Forza coffee shop in Parkland, Wash., before their shift.

One of the officers is believed to have wounded Clemmons before he fled the scene. At this writing, Clemmons hasn’t been found despite an exhaustive multi-agency dragnet and a $145,000 reward for information leading to his capture and conviction.

But for Huckabee, one of the more affable and telegenic Republican candidates last year, Clemmons is already something of a political liability. Those political observers with reasonably good memories know why.

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See, if he runs in 2012, Huckabee will be forced to contend with the specter of one Willie Horton, a convicted rapist who was released from prison on a furlough program in June 1986 by then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, only to return to a life of crime, raping a woman and assaulting her fiancé in Oxon Hill, Md., in April 1987.  He remains in prison in Maryland.

Horton’s weekend release by Dukakis was used early & often by his principal Republican challenger, George Herbert Walker Bush, in the 1988 presidential campaign as a way of suggesting that Dukakis was soft on crime, and lacking the judgment to be president.



The prison mug shot of Horton was used in a GOP campaign ad pillorying Dukakis for his action; the Horton debacle was widely seen as one of the reasons for Dukakis' fail in his quest for the presidency.

Fast forward 21 years: Another Mike’s doing damage control for a campaign, but this time for one that may not get off the ground.

Huckabee talked to Fox Radio today. :”If I could have known nine years ago, would I have acted favorably upon the parole board’s recommendation? Of course not.”

He said much the same thing again when he was encountered by a reporter from KLRT-TV, the Fox affiliate in Little Rock: “Well, it’s a horrible, horrible thing, what happened in Washington,” Huckabee said. “I just think that the fact that he was ever here breaks all of our hearts that he would kill four police officers in cold blood. … It was my decision based on what was in front of me, not nine years in front of me.”

If only the Republicans in 1988 had been so accommodating, so respectful of a Democratic candidate’s similar inability to predict the future.

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Huckabee isn’t getting any love from at least one of the state officials he dealt with when he was governor. Larry Jegley, the prosecutor for Pulaski County, Ark., where Clemmons was previously tried and convicted, told NBC News that “I think the clemency power was overused by our former governor, and I think this is a bitter harvest we are reaping because of it.”

The Associated Press reported Monday that a study by the Arkansas Leader newspaper found that from 1996 to 2004, Huckabee freed more Arkansas prisoners on his watch “than were freed from all of Arkansas' six neighboring states — combined.”

The AP reported that in 2004, The Democrat-Gazette determined that “9 percent of the prisoners who benefited from Huckabee's clemencies ended up in prison again.”

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It’s way early to know if Huckabee’s gubernatorial gaffe will haunt him in any future campaigns. He’s not a lock to run in 2012 anyway, and right now, polling suggests that the candidate best equipped to be the Republican standard-bearer in the ’12 contest is somebody named “Other.”

If he does throw his hat into a ring that’s sure to get crowded in the next year and a half, Huckabee can count on Clemmons keeping him company all the days of his campaign.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once observed in “Requiem for a Nun.”  “It’s not even past.” Mike Huckabee knows that all too well.

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Image credits: Huckabee: © 2008 David Ball. Clemmons: Washington Department of Corrections. Horton screenshot: Republican Party ad.

Of Time and the latest ‘Decade From Hell’

We knew it was bad, but not this bad.

The first of the valedictories to this fast-vanishing year is in. The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell, written by Time Magazine’s Andy Serwer and published on Nov. 24, is a categorically downbeat overview of the years of the 2000’s, one with much to recommend it, and much to dispel.

“[T]he first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era,” Serwer writes. We’d like to get this one in the books, too. Given the generally depressed mood loose in the nation, Andy Serwer can be forgiven for walking with his head down looking at the sidewalk. But gloom is a relative thing; there’s down and there’s … down.

Much of Serwer’s argument centers on the various aspects of the nation’s precarious financial condition — the foreclosure crisis, corporate bankruptcies and bailouts, average per-capita income, and a general sense of economic malaise. By and large, his argument in this department can’t be argued with. The American economy circled the drain last year and this one in a way unseen since the Great Depression.

Our economic narcissism was certainly the culprit in the devastation wrought by financial markets, which have subjected us to an increasingly frequent series of crashes, frauds and recessions. To a great degree, this was brought about by a lethal combination of irresponsible deregulation and accommodating monetary policies instituted by the Federal Reserve. Bankers and financial engineers had an unsupervised free-market free-for-all just as the increased complexity of financial products — e.g., derivatives — screamed out for greater regulation or at least supervision. Enron, for instance, was a bastard child of a deregulated utilities industry and a mind-bending financial alchemy.

Serwer rightly points out that a history of malign neglect is partly to blame for our current situation. By ignoring everything from the financial system to the warnings about al-Qaida’s ad hoc terrorism mechanics, from the general infrastructure of the nation’s roads and bridges to the general infrastructure of the levees that failed to protect New Orleans from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, this nation has no one to blame for many of its problems but itself.

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But elsewhere Serwer opens himself up to challenge. “Calling the 2000s ‘the worst’ may seem an overwrought label in a decade in which we fought no major wars, in historical terms,” he says.

It is overwrought, sir. We’ve been at war since 2002, when the Afghanistan incursion began in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That war was followed by the shock & awe invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Between 4,000 and 5,000 Americans have died in those wars since they began.

An estimated 60-70 million people died during World War II. In the Cold War that followed, Russia saw between 10 and 15 million people killed during Stalin’s reign of postwar terror. Between 10 million and 20 million Chinese are thought to have died during the war, and another estimated 50 million were lost during the Maoist postwar era (which included the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution).

For its part, the United States lost 418,500 forces during World War II; 36,500 forces during the Korean War; and more than 58,000 during the Vietnam War.

The 2000s are “the worst”? Not quite, Mr. Serwer. By the perfectly reasonable pain-metric of casualties, both for the United States and the world as a whole, the first years of the 21st century pale in comparison to previous decades, whose body counts outstrip those of the present day by orders of magnitude.

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Serwer’s assertion that “the idea that terrorists can attack anytime and anywhere is new and profoundly unsettling” is just not true. The terrorism that achieved its malignant fruition on Sept. 11, 2001, had its origins in the 1970s and ‘80s, when the Baader-Meinhof crew, the Red Brigades, ETA and other bad actors (state-sponsored and otherwise) hijacked planes with impunity, bombed airport terminals, and pursued the indiscriminate attacks that were a precursor to the terrorism we see today.

How far back do you want to go? There’s the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, in 1988. Or Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi, in 1984. Or the 161 Marines killed in a bomb blast in Beirut in 1983. Or the Korean airliner shot down by the Soviets the same year. Or the bomb-blast murder of the Lebanese president-elect in 1982, or the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. “Profoundly unsettling”? Without question. “New”? Get real.

And Serwer’s sense of the impact of American accomplishment is certainly open to debate. “Sure,” he says, “some amazingly great things happened this decade, from the stunning rise of China to Apple's dazzling array of new products to the feats of sprinter Usain Bolt to our nation rallying (at least temporarily) around its first African-American President. But all that seems more like counterpoint rather than the main act.”

The idea that this nation’s election of its first black president — and its attendant power of beginning to redress a monumental national wrong — should be nothing more than “counterpoint” is a curious assessment of one of the most transformative events in our politics.

More than a feelgood moment, the election of Barack Obama signaled a change in the nation’s self-perception, and by extension a change in the default imagery of Americans that’s communicated around the world. In everything from galvanizing our relationships with our old global partners to being the catalyst for a new baseline of relations with the Islamic world, a President Obama is hardly insignificant — maybe not “the main act” but hardly a sideshow.

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There’s still a lot to be hopeful for. After generations of immobility, the United States stands — just maybe — on the cusp of the most sweeping health-care reform since Medicare was enacted in 1966. We’ve seen quantum leaps in our technology and made breakthroughs in medicine; and we’ve seen those advances move from the laboratory to the world of applied science (read: products and medicines you can buy) with breathtaking speed.

And in the face of the current economy, Americans are increasingly animated by a DIY ethos that’s led to the launch of small businesses and grassroots civic initiatives, projects that show Americans doing what they’ve always done in good times and bad: make a way for themselves on their own terms. That’s hardly bad news.

No question, there’s a lot to be downbeat about. But let’s keep things in perspective. People thought the years of the Great Depression were the worst for America, too, and with good reason (better reason than we have to think that way domestically about the 2000’s). Hot damn it, we’re Americans. Chastened yes, fearful yes, skeptical without a doubt. When you’re used to being a high flier, you’re subject to the humbling from time to time.

But we’ve been under the gun before, and we’re still standing. Relatively speaking, we’re no closer to hitting the canvas now than we’ve been in the past —

During previous Decades from Hell.

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Oh — and not to be a party pooper, but since Andy Serwer balances his checkbook in the base 10 number system (like most everyone else) and surely doesn’t start counting from zero, maybe he’ll revisit these sobering assessments and enlarge on them at a later time — preferably closer to when the decade really ends: at 11:59:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2010.

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Image credits: Time cover: © 2009 Time Inc. Survivors, Ebensee concentration camp, 1945: Lt. A.E.  Samuelson, U.S. Army (public domain). Pan Am 103, Lockerbie, Scotland: Via BBC News. Obama: Still from AP video.

War and the economy, 2008 and now

In March 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama, even then approaching a glide path to the White House, spoke to campaign supporters in Charleston, W. Va., and began a unification of seemingly separate events — one with eerie parallels to the present day.

On March 3, noting a shift in the focus of Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war, The Washington Post's Peter Slevin reported that Obama “contend[s] that bringing the troops home would liberate cash for economic investment, infrastructure improvements and ... improved care for hundreds of thousands of war veterans and their families."

Addressing his backers, Obama made the connection between the Iraq War of Convenience and the perilous state of the economy, connecting it where people could understand it: on their everyday bottom lines.

When you're spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you're paying a price for this war," Obama said. "When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war."

"For what folks in this state have been spending on the Iraq war, we could be giving health care to nearly 450,000 of your neighbors, hiring nearly 30,000 new elementary school teachers, and making college more affordable for over 300,000 students," he said, according to The Associated Press.

Speaking to The Post, Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio explained where his constituents were at on the issue of the Iraq war.

"They are starting to understand this economically," Brown said. "They are seeing that, because of tax cuts and because of the immense cost of the war, they aren't getting what they need locally.' "

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Fast forward 20 months later. Now-President Barack Obama is set to announce, on Tuesday at West Point, his long-awaited strategy on how to proceed with the war in Afghanistan. The expectation is that Obama will approve the Pentagon's request for more troops. How many troops we won’t know for sure until the president’s address; various media reports have said about 34,000 more troops will be sent (these in addition to the 21,000 earmarked for deployment earlier this year).

But setting aside for now the huge problem that even a modest escalation in U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would create for Obama’s relationship with his base, the president faces the risk of being hoist on his own petard vis-à-vis the domestic impact of a foreign conflict.



The same unity of foreign entanglement and domestic fiscal instability that Obama wielded on the campaign trail last year now works against him in the White House.

It’s no sleight of hand: just substitute the Afghan war for the Iraq war. One has the potential to be as financially ruinous for the American economy as the other.

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Steve Clemons, the editor of The Washington Note, a noted political blog, writing on Talking Points Memo on Nov. 23, observed that the Pentagon estimates “each new troop addition that the United States sends to Afghanistan will cost about $500,000. The White House is suggesting the price tag will be double that amount - or $1 million per new soldier per year.

“And can I add that these figures do not seem to include the long-term health costs that the U.S. commits to with our soldiers — nor other ongoing benefits.

“That means that a surge of 40,000 troops will cost approximately $40 billion on top of the $65 billion/year the U.S. is currently spending on its military deployments.”

Clemons’ back-of-the-pushed-envelope estimate may be a tad high, or not. Some military planners have been a little more thrifty, placing the extra annual cost — assuming Gen. Stanley McChrystal's troop recommendation of 40,000 forces is adopted intact — at $33 billion. White House officials have said the real amount is more like $50 billion.

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One White House official recently went off message in a way that revealed the conflicted thinking about the Afghan mission. Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, recently cabled Washington voicing his own concerns of the wisdom of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Eikenberry’s concern focuses on Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government and its recent history of corruption and fraud — a legacy that Eikenberry (a former Army lieutenant general) thinks may have contributed to the renascence of the Taliban, which by some estimates now controls about 80 percent of Afghanistan.

“Eikenberry's last-minute interventions have highlighted the nagging undercurrent of the policy discussion: the U.S. dependence on a partnership with a Karzai government whose incompetence and corruption is a universal concern within the administration,” The Washington Post reported Nov. 12.

For his part, Karzai has expressed doubts about the tango between his country and the United States. “The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan,” Karzai told PBS's “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” earlier this month. “It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after September 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us.”

This is our partner in fighting the Afghan War? Show some love, Hamid.

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President Obama is facing a daunting balancing act of priorities: weighing the impact of any American commitment there, how effective Karzai can be as a leader with so many of his own people arrayed against him; how effective Afghan security forces can be in defending their own country; the role of fractious, nuclear-capable Pakistan as a neighbor; and Obama’s assessment of what can actually be accomplished to stem an insurgency whose repulsion may be a challenge on par with turning back the tide.

And it’s a challenge that the United States faces even as the dimensions of the domestic economic crisis have become frighteningly theoretical.

To this point, the issue of the cost of maintaining our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has been addressed in rhetorical discussions of a seemingly endless river of dollars, in calculator-freezing amounts bearing zeroes that almost run off the page — calculations that suggest the American economy is a source of funds extracted from a bottomless tranche.

A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money. Money that could go to give health care to how many hundreds of thousands of Americans, to hire how many tens of thousands of elementary school teachers, and make college more affordable for hundreds of thousands of students.

When President Obama speaks on Tuesday, in an address already being touted as potentially the most important of his young presidency, he’ll hopefully explain to the American people how he plans to square this maddening circle, reconcile the prosecution of what he’s called a “war of necessity” with the equal necessities of attention to a domestic economy hanging on by its fingernails’ fingernails.

The president has repeatedly proven his ability to bring the big concepts, the irresistible national issues, down to something people can understand, and even embrace. That rhetorical gift of distilling explanation may never be more necessary than now.

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Image credits: Obama top: transplanted mountaineer, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. . U.S. casualties: via NBC News. Karzai: Harald Dettenborn. Obama bottom: The White House.

Mapping the American waistline

You might have missed it a week or so ago, probably busy with the mental checklist of what to buy for today’s Thanksgiving dinner. The Huffington Post featured it recently: a world map with the continents misshapen and swollen in an array of colors, a map that tells a story of the modern world without a word.


The United Nations World Food Programme compiled and produced the map, a graphic illustration of per-capita calorie consumption on a nation-by-nation basis. For some reason, the so-called fat map (created in 2006) wasn’t released, apparently — before earlier this month, anyway.

Dovetailing with the United Nations food summit in Rome on Nov. 16, Princess Haya Bint al Hussein, UN Messenger of Peace and a former Goodwill Ambassador for the World Food Program, wrote a passionate piece in HuffPost on hunger, food losses and overconsumption — an essay illustrated with the fat map.

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Even accounting for the fact that the map is at least three years old, its mute conclusion is inescapable: there’s an imbalance in the world’s caloric consumption, one that’s especially concerning because in this country, there’s both a surplus of food (the United States is one of the more swollen continents on the fat map) and a consumption of the wrong food.


With our tendency to overeat in America, often with fast food; an aversion to physical exercise; a culture that celebrates size and excess; and demanding work schedules that help make nutrition a catch-as-catch-can affair, there’s a kind of malnourishment amid plenty, a full-bellied starvation.

“American society has become 'obesogenic,' characterized by environments that promote increased food intake, nonhealthful foods, and physical inactivity,” the federal Centers for Disease Control says at its Web site.

The CDC recently released a map with its own revelations, one that shows the prevalence of obesity on a county-by-county basis, mostly on an apparently relentless march through the southern states.

The princess, writing about the United States, observes:

”We pay dearly for this overconsumption. Recent calculations set obesity-related health spending just in the United States at $150-$200 billion -- more than all foreign aid worldwide. The cost of extra medical care for the obese runs as high as $1400 per person annually.

“Food losses are another reflection of our embrace of excess. Each year … U.S. households lose or discard 14 percent of their food.”

The World Food Programme has done us a brittle sort of favor by showing us, cartographically, what we’ve already known, and what those of us in the United States will celebrate today: we remain the masters of conspicuous consumption. To recognize that, the only maps we really need are the ones we know intimately, the cartography of those personal equators we call our waistlines.

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Image credits: Fat map: World Food Programme via The Huffington Post. Obesity map: Centers for Disease Control. Thanksgiving dinner: Alcinoe (public domain, via Wikipedia)

Culchavox to Kentucky: My bad

Apologies to the people of Kentucky are apparently in order. One of the strangest and ugliest deaths in recent memory, a passing that outwardly bore the hallmarks of another example of American intolerance, is apparently nothing more than an act of cynicism perpetrated by none other than the one who died.

Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old U.S. Census field worker and substitute teacher, was found hanged Sept. 12 in the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. According to witnesses and authorities, Sparkman’s body was discovered naked and gagged, his hands and feet bound by duct tape with the word “Fed” scrawled across his chest with a felt-tip pen.

The weight of available evidence suggested Sparkman’s death was a homicide, one with all the vicious imagery of a hate crime. To this blogger, who rushed to judgment like a lot of people, it had all the earmarks of a classic anti-government hate crime — one I thought was all the more deeply disturbing because of presumed associations between the federal government and the African American president who now runs the government.

Every picture doesn’t always tell a story. The Associated Press reported today that Sparkman's death was an elaborately choreographed suicide. “Investigators said … what they had been hinting at for weeks, that Bill Sparkman's hanging was a ruse to mask his suicide for a big insurance payout. ...

“[I]nvestigators noticed the foot-tall letters scrawled in black felt-tip pen looked like they could have been written by the victim himself, and they soon found out that he believed he had cancer, had two insurance policies worth $600,000, and had an adult son in need of money.

“The key clue was the lack of defense wounds — the only visible marks on his body were a furrow around his neck and insect bites,” The AP reported.

"If there is ever a homicide, a healthy person would put up a good fight and you would see injury and trauma to the neck and to the arms," said Dr. Cristin Rolf, deputy state medical examiner.

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The AP provided this chronology of events:

“On Sept. 12, the Kentucky resident drove his Chevy pickup — packed with a rope, a roll of duct tape and some red rags — deep into the Kentucky woods, where outsiders are mostly treated with distrust and apprehension. He stripped down to his socks and walked to a nearby cemetery.

“He taped his ankles and wrists, but his wrists were bound so loosely that he had considerable mobility, leaving investigators to believe he could have done the taping himself, authorities said. He scrawled the word "fed" upside down on his chest, taped his Census Bureau ID to his head, stuck a red cloth into his mouth and placed another piece of tape over it.

“Sparkman then strung a rope from a tree, placed a noose around his neck, and leaned forward, using his own body weight to cut off oxygen to his brain, investigators said.

“He likely became lightheaded from lack of oxygen, then lost consciousness. ‘It would not be an excruciating death,’ said Mike Wilder, executive director of the state medical examiner's office.

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What makes my assumptions about the character of the state of Kentucky even worse was the attempt to contextualize Sparkman's death against the state’s known but relatively distant history of racialist lynchings:

"In the boom years of lynching, between 1882 and 1930, Kentucky would be the third deadliest state for blacks to die by lynching. Between 1865 and 1940, at least 353 people in the state were killed by lynch mobs; one scholar says 75 percent of them were black."

It was a character assassination by history book, and Kentuckians would be right to object.

Like most anyone in the blogosphere, I take some snarky pride in calling them like I see them. When I get it utterly, forensically wrong, I like to own the admission that I didn’t see what I thought I saw.

Culchavox to Kentucky: My bad.

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Image credits: Bill Sparkman: Source unknown. Rudzinski and Wilder: AP/Brian Bohannon.