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A specter is haunting America — the specter of financial apocalypse. Record-breaking current-account deficits, plummeting regional housing markets, a weakening dollar, and news that major central banks around the world are beginning to diversify their currency reserves have made the possibility that the U.S. could soon experience what happened to Mexico and Southeast Asia in the 1990s newsworthy even to the reliably rah-rah American corporate media. With Time and the Atlantic Monthly examining the cases for alarm and calm, respectively, in recent weeks, the time has come for the WAAGNFNP to consider its stance on global capitalism.

Flashback: It’s Fall 1997 and I’m teaching a course called Globalization and Its Discontents in the Princeton Writing Program. The course, which examines the processes and discourses of globalization, is a challenge for my students, who come from all over the western hemisphere, but they really get into it and work incredibly hard. After surveying attempts to define globalization in the context of major post-Cold War-paradigm-shift candidates, from Fukuyama’s “end of history” to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” from Barber’s “jihad vs. McWorld” to Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” we turn to debates over globalization of manufacturing, agriculture, trade, finance, labor, racism, civil society, and culture: is it really happening? is it new? is it a good thing? for whom? can and should it be stopped? why or why not?

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Warning, this post is acronym filled, and may contain nefarious allusions, probably inappropriate but nevertheless, they exist.

UNITED NATIONS Copyright - A new treaty designed to promote and protect the rights of the world’s 650 million persons with disabilities opens for signature at the United Nations on Friday.

At its core, the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ensures that persons with disabilities enjoy the same human rights as everyone else, and are able to lead their lives as fully-fledged citizens who can make valuable contributions to society.

Forty years ago, as an upper-division undergraduate student, I was offered one of those scholarship jobs that go to jocks and related others. These were legacy-based inheritances, passed along to the next class of student athletes by graduating seniors, eagerly anticipated by the younger, who have heard-it-through-the-grapevine that this or that is the coolest chance at getting paid to do nothing, or close to it. My offer was not for one of those cushy roles (lifeguarding the women’s gym pool {only male allowed}, or driving the little tractor that picked up golf balls), but rather a heritage role for those of us in a special and unique club (the fish lane). Ours was the strand that provided support staff for the Education and Psychology departments’ on-campus education environments.
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This is a shot I took last month of my older and younger daughters outside the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. I blog about them here and there every so often. This is one of those times.

Imoto’s stroller is almost exactly at the hypocenter — what Americans are more accustomed to calling Ground Zero. With my caption, I’m trying to capture something of the effect that the museum’s opening exhibit had on me. It was a small, dimly-lighted room filled with photos of everyday life in Nagasaki the morning before the blast and items large and small that testify to its force, including beams from a school water tower, remains from a church, and a clock stopped at 11:02 am, all staying still to the beat of an ominously ticking clock.

It wasn’t only that this simple exhibit made me replay the all-too-typical “imagine you and everyone you love disappearing in an instant” nuclear disaster fantasy scenario anyone who, like me, grew up near a U.S. military base during the Cold War has probably run through their heads a million times by now: it wasn’t quite the imaginative empathy of identifying with the victims or putting myself and my family in their place. It wasn’t only that standing at the second place in human history where this fantasy became reality confronted me with its limits: it wasn’t quite the ethical recognition of the impassable gulf between witnesses-thrice-removed and victims. And it wasn’t only that I was nevertheless forced to reflect on my tangled ties to Nagasaki, as an American citizen married to a Japanese citizen whose two daughters are dual citizens (until they turn 21, under current laws, at least).
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