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Occasional ZP commenter and SWJ Editor and author Major Mike Few passes the editorial torch to Major Peter J. Munson, USMC author, blogger and occasional ZP commenter:

Dave Dilegge – Small Wars Journal Change of Command

Though a change, it is not one of command. Peter Munson has replaced Mike Few as our editor.  Mike took SWJ to a new level we only hoped to attain and Peter’s vision will ensure we stay on that upward climb. Many thanks to both as we keep on, keepin’ on.

Carl Prine– Small Wars Journal Change of Command 

I’m not sure what this particular change of command entails – perhaps the ceremonial exchange of a mouse pad, followed by light refreshments and the appearance of some brown-nosing First Sergeant to congratulate both of them excessively, all done online of course – but I thought it would be nice to highlight some of the intellectual firepower they expended here as we wish them well.

We’ll start with Few who spent his sentence at SWJ largely making it relevant again after it fell into a fat vat of who gives a **** following the so-called “Surge” in Iraq.  Because Munson also suffers no fools, he’ll take on SWJ’s apparently unceasing flood of submissions with a well-sharpened pencil and a stubby eraser.

Best replacement possible.

Peter J. Munson – SWJ Editor

In my first post here, I would like to thank Dave Dillege and Bill Nagle for taking me on as editor of the Journal and for helping to start getting me snapped in to my new duties.  In the next week, I will be working through the pending submissions and figuring out the website, so bear with me as I get up to speed.  I hope to carry on the great work that Mike Few did during his tenure as editor, getting relevant and timely content to you, the reader.  More to follow this week as I get to work.

Hearty congratulations to Peter and all of us here hope that we will continue to see Mike in a larger role of author at SWJ and elsewhere!

Three articles suitable for an election year where our elite embraces a variety of oligarchic policies because they benefit themselves personally and despite evidence that these policies are inefficient, socially harmful, anti-democratic and corrupting of the body politic.

Charles Murray –The New American Divide 

America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

…..Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation’s other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation’s power elite does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

Pete Kofd – Rise of the Praetorian Class 

….The Praetorian Class includes members of the Armed Services, federal, state and local law enforcement personnel as well as numerous militarized officials including agents from the DEA, Immigrations, Customs Enforcement, Air Marshalls, US Marshalls, and more. It also includes, although to a lesser extent, various stage actors in the expanding security theater such as TSA personnel. The main mission of the Praetorian Class is to keep the order of the day. This requires displaying an intimidating presence in their interactions with the Economic Class.

As the Praetorian Class ascends, the clear, albeit unstated, message that emerges is that actions and events in the Economic Class only occur with its tacit consent. Whether driving on roads, traveling in the air, visiting public land, walking down the street or even living in your own home, every action you take is predicated on its permission. By preconditioning the populace to enforcement of its edicts, most of which are completely arbitrary, the Praetorian Class sets itself up for a high degree of autonomy in its actions. This is confirmed by the fact that consequences for malfeasance within the Praetorian Class are almost never observed, and when it happens, it typically becomes a grotesque spectacle in which one of their own is sacrificed as an example, so as to keep appearances of effective internal controls. 

Daron Acemoglu –Why Do Nations Fail?

….That got me onto a path of research that has been trying to understand, theoretically and empirically, how institutions shape economic incentives and why institutions vary across nations. How they evolve over time. And the politics of institutions, meaning, not just economically which institutions are better than others, but why is it that certain different types of institutions stick?

What I mean by that is, it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense.

If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations.

So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences. This means that, say, when considering some reform, what most politicians and powerful elites in society really care about is not whether this reform will make the population at large better off, but whether it will make it easier or harder for them to cling to power.

Walter Russell Meade – Establishment Blues 

….The American people aren’t perfect yet and never will be — but by the standards that matter to the Establishment, this is the best prepared, most open minded and most socially liberal generation in history.  Unsatisfactory as the American people may be from the standpoints of Georgetown and Manhattan, this is as good as it gets.  Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman could only dream of the kind of sophisticated and cosmopolitan understanding that folks in Peoria have now compared to the old days.

The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before.  Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history.  No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism.  The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead.  It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors.  It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations.  Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. 

[  by Charles Cameron – pop irony for Yemen, requiem for Etta James ]

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There’s a lot of doubling up here: for starters, the lyrics each of the two songs have a significant amount of double entendre, and there’s a terrific parallelism between them – as well as some real differences between the two singers and genres…

But that’s just the beginning.  The linkage between these two songs on the level of their lyrics – up down, stay go – has nothing to do with the fact that I was playing them today.

I ran across one of these songs today because I’m fascinated by the ways pop culture can model, influence, and even on occasion drive events in the global seriousphere – and the other simply because I had a vague blog-acquaintance at one time with someone who played with Etta James, and wanted to note her passing with sadness, gratitude, and a few minutes appreciative listening.

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So the Middle East Channel over at Foreign Policy featured a mash of Katy Perry’s Hot n’ Cold along with some quotes from Ali Abdullah Saleh today, in which he too doesn’t seem to know whether he’s coming or going — video below.

I also heard Clay Shirky‘s TED presentation Why SOPA Is a Bad Idea today as it happens, and he was saying that every times new recreational tools came along – analog tools like the photocopier, tape recorder and VCR as well as digital tools and technologies like the internet, file-sharing, laptops and tablets – industrial concerns like the publishing, movie and music industries fought them.  Why?

Because it turned out we’re not really couch potatoes. We don’t really like to only consume. We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. And this freaked the media businesses out — it freaked them out every time.

So yeah, someone serious enough about Yemen to mock President Saleh and savvy enough to make a YouTube video of Katy Perry intercut with choice selections from Saleh’s speeches – that’s just what Shirky’s talking about, it’s human nature, it’s creative…

And sometimes stuff like that can go viral – so it’s not just pop music, it’s more than that, as Bob Dylan said, it’s “life, and life only”.

2.

And Etta’s song? — again, video below…

To me, Etta’s song, voice and life between them bring up a whole different set of issues. Here’s where “love” trumps “morality”.

Etta James’ obituary in The Guardian contains this paragraph:

Her approach to both singing and life was throughout one of wild, often desperate engagement that included violence, drug addiction, armed robbery and highly capricious behaviour. James sang with unmatched emotional hunger and a pain that can chill the listener. The ferocity of her voice documents a neglected child, a woman constantly entering into bad relationships and an artist raging against an industry and a society that had routinely discriminated against her.

Is that “immoral” – as one part of my brain would like to conclude?  Or is it glorious — is a voice soaked in whiskey and wreathed in smoke the only voice that can chill us like that, that can bring us to our senses, to our knees, to compassion?

Is this — “and armed robbery’ — the price we sometimes have to pay for artistry?

One way of dealing with this recurring business of those who bless us with extraordinary gifts despite their own lives seeming at times wretched and accursed is – to tweak a well-worn phrase slightly – to hate the sin but love the singer.

I think that’s cheap.  I think Etta – and many others – was hollowed out, and that it’s that hollowing, precisely, that gave her the depth and the voice to reach us so profoundly.  So I lament Etta’s passing today, and have taken time out to let her sing to me.

Etta James: may she rest in peace.

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Katy Perry:

4. Etta James:

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h/t Maureen Lang and taters.

All In: The Education of General David Petraeus by Paula Broadwell, with Vernon Loeb

The official biography of CIA Director General David Petraeus, by Harvard researcher Paula Broadwell, has long been anticipated in the .mil/COIN/NatSec/Foreign Policy communities and blogosphere.  I can hear pencils scrawling furiously away in the margins even as I type this post. 🙂

Broadwell,  herself a reserve Army officer, West Pointer, Harvard grad, doctoral student at King’s College War Studies Department , and by all accounts, an impressive up and coming individual,  had very extensive access to her subject – allegedly, far more than the official Army historian assigned to General Petraeus’ last command. Given the subject is General Petraeus, the precarious state of American policy in Afghanistan and 2012 as a circus of political excess, All In will be one of the few “must read” books this year.

And, I must commend Miss Mrs. Broadwell highly here, she will be donating 20 % of her net proceeds to help wounded veterans.

That said, in terms of reaction to this book, there will be blood.

Reviews of All In will afford the opportunity to tear the scabs off of the well-worn COINdinista/COINtra debate and rub salt in the exposed wounds – I for one am especially looking forward to reading future back to back reviews by Carl Prine and Thomas Ricks and Abu Muqawama vs. Colonel Gian Gentile. In the mainstream press, the opportunity for newspaper columnists to get in gratuitous potshots against figures like Presidents Bush and Obama, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Stan McChrystal and numerous others or grind partisan axes will be too tempting to resist, regardless of how relevant these remarks are to Broadwell’s biography of Petraeus. The looming specter of draconian cuts to defense budgets will also add to the rancor of the discussion of the book within the defense community.

Somewhere in that debate will be the book Broadwell actually wrote and within the book, perhaps, we will come to see David Petraeus. Or not.

Get your popcorn ready!

Right now, I am deep into reading the superb George Kennan biography by eminent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis but All In is definitely next on my list.

And it will be reviewed.