had a good weekend. we went to a few smallish galleries in chelsea, such as the photos of angkor wat at the sepia international gallery and the andres serrano portrait series america at the paula cooper gallery (my wife and i have been serrano fans ever since we saw a larger exhibit of several of his photo series at the museum of contemporary art in chicago several years ago).
on saturday night we finally saw avenue q, a musical that 1/2 the people i know have seen already. and now they can all now stop bugging me to see it. also on the train to new york i finished after jihad. overall a nice relaxing weekend.
"jihad" was an interesting book, essentially arguing that islam and democracy are not incompatable and then advocating how the u.s. could help bring about an islamic democracy. what was interesting was trying to figure out if feldman, the author, would have been for the iraq war. the book was written at some time in late 2002, clearly before the administration had openly admitted that it would definitely attack iraq but when it was pretty clear things were going in that direction. feldman classifies the various arab governments into groups and places baathist iraq in the dictators-with-oil catagory, the catagory he argues is least susceptable to pro-democracy pressure from within or without. he presents violent regime change as a legitimate option for dealing with such regimes. but he also notes that the dictator's oppression of the country's people alone cannot be enough to justify an invasion because dictators are so common worldwide and to overthrow them just for that reason would effectively slippery slope us into war with most of the world. so feldman says regime change to install democracy is justified is you have dictatorship-plus. the "plus," presumably can be the threat posed by WMDs or connections with al-qaeda. but neither of the "plus" reasons cited by bush have panned out in the iraq case. so does that mean that feldman would not think the war was sufficiently justified? the implication i got from the book is that feldman would probably consider the iraq war as unjustified. (he also cleary expected the u.n. to play a greater role than it has). i wonder whether the bush insiders who are working with him now in baghdad have drawn the same conclusion?
so now i'm reading the x president, a science fiction book for political wonks. it takes place in the year 2050 and the main character is the biographer of an 109 year old former president who is only called "bc" and who spends his days hanging around his presidential library in little rock. i'm not that far into it yet, but what i've really is pretty amusing, filled with odd references to minor incidents that happened during the clinton presidency. (as i read the book i keep saying things like "oh yeah, i remember when that guy flew the plane into the white house." its amazing how many big news stories of the day are now so obviously minor bits of history when viewed in retrospect).
