Coalescing thoughts while waiting for a phone call

As I waited for a phone interview with a professor at California Institute for Integral Studies, the only PhD program I’m interested in applying for, I was attempting to gather my thoughts about the Masters program I’m presently finishing, a program that changed dramatically after I entered it.

Change came when the communication department at CSU East Bay hired Isaac Catt as its chair; he plunged the department in a hard turn towards post-modernism and a strong theoretical emphasis. He described these theories as paradigms, suggesting that they are all encompassing views of communication that must explain all facets of communication. In so doing, he stoked the very embers that he had been hired to cool; the department is now under direct control from the dean’s office.

The department hired a chair from outside in what would prove to be another failed attempt to resolve a clash between mass communication faculty and speech communication faculty. The latter believe that a post-modernist denial of objective reality is sufficient to address the issues of mass communication, but mass communication is largely about pragmatic applications, e.g. organizational communication (known in the corporate world as “human relations”), public relations, and journalism. And the speech communication faculty insisted on theory, even though the theories they offer are not persuasive.

I do not pretend, as positivists would, that a view of objective reality is possible to achieve. All perspectives are necessarily subjective, processed through perception, and partial. But when post-modernists deny any responsibility to objectivity, they align themselves in cliques according to their various paradigms, consisting entirely of people who overwhelmingly agree with each other; it is hard to imagine serious peer review in such a setting. A “scholar” in these reference groups can now publish what (s)he finds in his or her toilet bowl, and there is no one to tell her or him that (s)he is wrong. But of course each such publication counts towards the university’s expectations of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

I’m presently taking a class in research methods that was supposed to assist in the research for my thesis. This has not worked out. But the professor argues 1) that social science is a quest for social change, an improvement in conditions, 2) that any research on other humans objectifies them, and 3) that he therefore turns his gaze upon himself in auto-ethnography. What this means is that he, a privileged person, reports on his experience of phenomena that principally affect others. Yet the very problem we started with is that the political, economic, and military elite prescribe policy and depict the conditions of disadvantaged groups. The only progress here is that the voice now is of a university professor.

He says that in phenomenological research, we must be careful to ask all participants exactly the same questions, as if they were replaceable parts of a machine, presuming that each communication with a participant will be understood by the participant in the same way. But the point of a phenomenology is to learn how people experience a phenomenon. And we are evidently to assume that they as individuals will experience the phenomenon of participation in research in ways that are enough alike as to lend coherence to the results. And this is a speech communication professor making this assumption.

But most damning of all is when we are to make the leap from the evidence we have gathered to interpreting that evidence, making it fit into some theoretical “paradigm,” asserting that certain theoretical relationships exist in an actual situation even when we cannot know that they exist or having any way to verify that they exist. It is an ultimate arrogance that entirely silences those whom we can no longer call participants or “co-researchers,” but must now return to calling “subjects.”

This becomes consistent if we accept an uncomfortable premise, that the researcher’s reality is the only one that matters (subject apparently only to the intrusions of peer review, such as it is, and of an institutional review board). We no longer focus on disadvantaged or stigmatized people, but rather on the researcher’s experience of them and of the phenomena they experience. In the name of not superimposing the researcher’s voice over others, the researcher now wholly substitutes his or her voice for others. Other human beings become as features in a painting, suffused with the meanings that an artist–not a scientist–attaches to them.

So a question emerges: Can such a painting benefit its subjects?

For Somalia Peacekeeping Veterans

The following is the proposal which was approved for me to begin the research in which I have requested your participation. I have modified the research design slightly since I wrote this by enhancing the anonymity and confidentiality options and by using Survey Monkey to handle the interview, which offers SSL encryption to secure your responses. In addition, Professor Kien suggested that I focus on collecting narratives for now and refrain from the comparison. Note however that I am also planning on using this research for my thesis, for which a proposal has not yet been approved. Thank you very much for you assistance.

David Benfell

Professor Kien

Communication 6100

January 27, 2008

 

Missing Voices: Narratives of Veterans in Comparison to Popular Accounts

of Somalia Peacekeeping Operations, 1992-1994

US involvement in Somalia began with an airlift in August 1992 in response to UN Secretary General Boutros-Gali’s criticism of western powers for their focus on Bosnia while rampant theft interfered with relief efforts in a famine in Somalia.  The first Bush administration offered a massive escalation of 28,000 troops in November 1992—after Bill Clinton had been elected president—and newspaper editorials supported the decision.  When peace negotiations among the fifteen armed factions failed, the peacekeeping force adopted increasingly aggressive tactics that increased casualties and undermined US public support, then in a strategy intended to pick off warlords one by one,1 singled out General Mohammed Farah Aidid for demonization, and sought Aidid’s arrest.2  The resulting conflict led to “explosive images on CNN of the body of an American Ranger being dragged down the streets of Magadishu and the pained face of the captured American airman, [that] provoked a strong public and congressional outcry” that purportedly led to a US withdrawal and a humiliation comparable to Lebanon in 1983, the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, and Vietnam.3  General Colin Powell wrote of the operation, “We had been drawn to this place by television images; now we were being repelled by them.”  The US subsequently withdrew, so camera-shy as to seriously constrain a subsequent mission in Rwanda.4

Powell had his say.  CNN and other news media had their say.  Waltraud Morales employs the story to exemplify the possible pursuit of national interest—geostrategically in the Horn of Africa at a chokepoint between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, and economically in a promise of oil both in Somalia and in Ethiopia—under the guise of humanitarian intervention.5  Mark Bowden, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote the story as a series of articles, which were later published in book form and finally made into a “pro-soldier anti-war” movie6 that “feels more like a memorial for fallen heroes than a mourning of wasted lives and an indictment of U.S. military policy. ”7

But this media vignette on a US humiliation obscures at least as much as it reveals.  David Segal, Mady Segal, and Dana Eyre observe that “successful . . . operations seem to be neither newsworthy nor noteworthy.”8  Lina Holguin suggested “that for Western television news positive news (e.g. stories on redevelopment) is not news and that bad news (massacres, dead soldiers and the like) is not news until it offers good visual material” and criticizes an apparent media apathy.9  For instance, the UN peacekeeping force on the Golan Heights in Syria has been there since 1973 but is largely “unpublicized because it does its job so well.”10  A continuing mission in the Sinai also attracts little notice.11  But the fiasco in Somalia can appear to vindicate those, for example, in the US military Central Command who opposed the operation from the beginning, who argued against “attempting to disarm the clans, or ‘do nation-building and that sort of thing,’”12 the very sort of thing that many scholars and others consider essential, even when problematic.13  And indeed this vignette even obscures the previous successes in Somalia leading up to the fiasco, in which peacekeepers brought food to people who desperately needed it.  Richard Stewart argues that “while the sheriff and his watchful deputies are in town, the local criminals put up their guns and keep out of sight. By limiting the mission in Somalia to establish temporary order, the U.S. got just that,”14 a temporary order that not only did not resolve the conflict but which threatened through disintegration to recreate the very rationale for intervention in the first place.

Bowden offered a gripping adventure narrative of soldiers in a firefight in which they are badly defeated,15 but he does not acknowledge that this is his story of soldiers as objects in a subject-object dichotomy.16  The soldier’s stories—their experiences—not only of an operation gone disastrously wrong but of their reactions to the stories that have been disseminated in the popular media are absent.  Indeed, while so many others tell “their” story, the soldiers themselves are silent, or as Linda Alcoff might suggest, they have been silenced.17

But it is soldiers’ lives and indeed their sanity18, as the battle in Mogadishu of October 3, 1993, so graphically illustrates,19 which were at stake, whether for specific geostrategic interests or against, as then-President Clinton warned, an outcome that “our own credibility with friends and allies would be severely damaged. Our leadership in world affairs would be undermined.”20  More recently, then-President Bush invoked the deaths of soldiers who must be honored to help rationalize a continued commitment to another seemingly futile war.21  Even as soldiers may face “ambiguous, inconsistent, or unacceptable rules of engagement; lack of clarity about the goals of the mission itself; a civilian population of combatants; and inherently contradictory experiences of the mission as both humanitarian and dangerous,”22 public discourse on peacekeeping glorifies the crime of war23 under the guise of peacekeeping, “valoriz[es] the actions of soldiers even when the war they fight is violent and practically purposeless ,”24 asserts US hegemony, and protects corporate interests, while devaluing anything soldiers might have to say.

This proposal advocates a phenomenological study of Somalia peacekeeping operation veterans to learn their experience of the public narratives surrounding an experience that they lived.  What meanings did they bring away from Somalia?  How did these meanings compare to the meanings that domestic audiences had acquired through media coverage and what was it like to discuss their experiences with people who relied on supposedly authoritative media accounts?  How do they experience the continuing use of their story?  And in what contexts do they still experience their story?25

I propose to ask these questions in an open-ended format of veterans I am able to locate through personal contacts, veterans’ organizations, and on line forums, electronically as much as possible.  This will be a convenience sample.  My role will be to pose the questions and to elicit answers in conversations that address the research questions.  My analysis will seek to synthesize these conversations into a coherent composite textural description from an understanding of each participant’s experiences.26  As an anarchist, I will be sensitive to issues of hierarchy, both in participants’ narratives, and in my research and reporting, most closely approximating an ethnic interpretive paradigm.27

I anticipate no ethical issues.  I intend to make this proposal publicly available while I recruit participants and I will omit details from my report that would individually identify them.  They will already know both from this proposal and from an informed consent procedure (see appendix A) what information I am seeking to elicit.  Their participation will be entirely voluntary; my only inducement will be an opportunity for them to tell their stories.  They can easily decline to participate by simply not responding to my inquiries, or by discontinuing the conversations if they find them uncomfortable.  I hope that this study will contribute to a wider conversation about peacekeeping experiences that will inform future media and policy discourse.

Appendix A

Informed Consent

Dear Veteran,

I am David Benfell, a graduate student at California State University, East Bay.  I am studying the effect of a difference between a soldier’s experience of a peacekeeping operation and the images of that operation held by the general public that he or she encounters upon return to the United States.  To purpose is to increase the sensitivity of the media and of policymakers to the perspectives of those who have been placed in harm’s way.  You can read the full proposal for this research at http://benfell.livejournal.com/ in the entry for [date].

To this end, I will be asking you questions that you are to free to answer at some length.  I do not seek to categorize your answers but rather to understand your experience.  I may ask follow-up questions.  In face-to-face interviews, I estimate the time you will spend to be anywhere from about twenty to about forty-five minutes.  For logistical reasons, however, I am encouraging electronic communication (email), and the time you spend will then depend largely on the time it takes you to compose responses to these questions.  I do not foresee any risk to you.

Remember that you are free to limit your participation.  I am encouraging you to tell your story, but if at any point the process becomes uncomfortable enough that you would prefer to stop, there is absolutely no penalty for doing so.  As a matter of course, and in any event, I will keep your identity confidential, so you may speak with complete freedom.  In my report on this research I will omit identifying information on all participants, including information that could be used to identify specific locations or associations where I find you.

It is important to me that no harm come to you as a consequence of your participation.  I operate under the auspices of the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay.  You may contact me at (510) 931-6550 or david.benfell@csueastbay.edu or Professor Grant Kien at (510) 885-3122 or grant.kien@csueastbay.edu, should any problems or questions arise now or in the future about this research.  You may also use this contact information for any questions about your rights as a participant in this study.  This study is unfunded; you participate at your own risk, but I will do everything I know to minimize or eliminate that risk.  You should not hesitate to ask about any risks you foresee or encounter.

 

Sincerely yours,

 

 

David Benfell

Teaching Associate and Graduate Student

 

If we are meeting face-to-face, please indicate your consent to participate by signing one copy of this letter and returning it to me.  The other copy is yours to keep.  If we are meeting via email or through other electronic communication, please indicate to me that you have read this and that you agree.  Thank you!

 

I have read this letter and agree to participate.

 

Name: ___________________________________________

 

Signature: ________________________________________  Date: ________________________

1Waltraud Queiser Morales, “US Intervention and the New World Order: Lessons from the Cold War and Post-Cold War Cases,” Third World Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1994): 90.

2Ibid., 87-89; Stephen Chan, “And What Do Peacekeeping Troops Do Apart From Burying the Dead, Then?” International Relations 13, no. 5 (1997), 31.

3Morales, “US Intervention and the New World Order,” 89.

4Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, A Soldier’s Way, An Autobiography (New York: Hutchinson, 1995), quoted in Badsey, “The Media and UN Peacekeeping;” see also  Peter Vikko Jakobsen, “Focus on the CNN Effect Misses the Point: The Real Media Impact on Conflict Management is Invisible and Indirect,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 2 (2000): 132.

5Morales, “US Intervention and the New World Order,” 89-90.

6Stephen A. Klien, “Public Character and the Simulacrum: The Construction of the Soldier Patriot and Citizen Agency in Black Hawk Down ,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22.5 (2005): 428.

7Ibid., 439.

8David R. Segal, Mady Wechsler Segal, and Dana P. Eyre, “The Social Construction of Peacekeeping in America,” Sociological Forum 7, no. 1 (1992): 122; see also Steven Livingston, “Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention,” Harvard University, http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/ research_publications/papers/research_papers/ R18.pdf (accessed October 29, 2008), 7.

9Lina Maria Holguin, “The Media in Modern Peacekeeping,” Peace Review 10, no. 4 (1998).

10Marrack Goulding, “The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping,” International Affairs 69, no. 3 (1993): 453.

11Segal, Segal, and Eyre, “Social Construction of Peacekeeping in America,” 128.

12Frank G. Hoffman, “One Decade Later – Debacle in Somalia,” Proceedings, January 2004, http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_Somalia_0104,00.html (accessed January 26, 2008).

13David P. Barash and Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002): 29, 315; William Maley, “Twelve Theses on the Impact of Humanitarian Intervention.” Security Dialog 33 (2002),  266; Srdjan Dizdarevic, “Peace or Lasting Truce?” Index on Censorship 1 (2006), 89-93; Boutros Boutros-Ghali, “An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking, and Peace-keeping,” International Relations 11, no. 3 (1992): 204; Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, “Liberal Hubris? Virtual Peace in Cambodia,” Security Dialog 38, no. 1 (2007); David R. Meddings, and Stephanie M. O’Connor, “Circumstances Around Weapon Injury in Cambodia After Departure of a Peacekeeping Force: Prospective Cohort Study,” British Medical Journal 319 (1999), 412-415, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7207/412; Ramesh Thakur, “From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement: The UN Operation in Somalia,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32, no. 3 (1994): 402, 403.

14Hoffman, “One Decade Later.”

15Mark Bowden, “Black Hawk Down,” Philadelphia Inquirer, http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/ (accessed January 25, 2009); Internet Movie Database, “Black Hawk Down,” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265086/ (accessed January 25, 2009).

16John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 2nd Ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007), 59; and Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” in Judith Roof and Robyn Weigman, Eds., Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1995), 98.

17Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 99.

18Brett T. Litz, Susan M. Orsillo, Matthew Friedman, Peter Ehlich, and Alfonso Batres, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Associated With Peacekeeping Duty in Somalia for U.S. Military Personnel ,” American Journal of Psychiatry 154.2 (February 1997): 178-184.

19United Nations Department of Public Information, “Somalia – UNOSOM II,” March 21, 1997, http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/unosom2b.htm (accessed January 25, 2009).

20Morales, “US Intervention and the New World Order,” 89-90; and Douglas Jehl, “Clinton Doubling US Force in Somalia, Vowing Troops Will Come Home in 6 Months,” New York Times, October 8, 1993, http://query.nytimes.com/ gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7DB163BF93BA35753C1A965958260 (accessed January 24, 2009).

21David Stout, “Bush Tells Veterans that Iraq Policy Will Make US Safer,” New York Times, August 22, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/international/middleeast/22cnd-prexy.html (accessed January 25, 2008).

22Litz, Orsillo, Friedman, Ehlich, and Batres, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Associated With Peacekeeping Duty in Somalia for U.S. Military Personnel ,” 183.

23Amnesty International, Peace-keeping and Human Rights (London, 1994) quoted in Thakur, “From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement,” 400-401; Jonas Hagen, “Fighting Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by UN Peacekeepers,” UN Chronicle Online Edition, http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2006/webArticles/121306_unp.htm (accessed July 30, 2008); Chan, “And What Do Peacekeeping Troops Do Apart From Burying the Dead, Then?” 33; Newsday, “Canadian troops visited Serb-run brothel: witnesses,” Montreal Gazette, November 1, 1993, http://www.lexis-nexis.com/;  Paul Higate, “Peacekeepers, Masculinities, and Sexual Exploitation,” Men and Masculinities 10, no. 1 (2007), 99-119; Maria Luisa Mendonça, “UN Troops Accused of Human Rights Violations in Haiti,” Media Development, February 2008, 26-27; Jason Campbell, speech, CSU East Bay, Winter 2008; Barash and  Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies,  418-420; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492—Present, Perennial Classics Ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2005),  421-422; Richard Norton-Taylor, “Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture,” Guardian, April 19, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/19/ guantanamo.usa (accessed August 22, 2008); Rhoda Copelon, “Gendered War Crimes: Reconceptualizing Rape in Time of War,” in Women’s Rights, Human Rights, ed. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York: Routledge, 1995): 197-198; Myriam S. Denov, “Wartime Sexual Violence: Assessing a Human Security Response to War-Affected Girls in Sierra Leone,” Security Dialog 37 (2006): 320; and Lori Handrahan, “Conflict, Gender, Ethnicity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction,” Security Dialog 35, no. 4 (2004), 429-445.

24Klien, “Public Character and the Simulacrum,” 430, 436.

25Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design, 60-62.

26Ibid.

27Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Eds., Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, 3rd Ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 32.

Now, this is bad

National unemployment in the United States jumped to 7.6% last month. By my measure, the employment situation now appears worse than for any year since 1970. The data I have do not go back beyond 1970.

In my effort to avoid distortions introduced by attempts to limit the number of people counted as being part of the labor market, I multiply the average number of hours worked by the number of people the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as employed to obtain the total number of hours worked in the United States. I then divide this by estimated size of the civilian non-institutionalized population.

I calculate that the average member of the civilian non-institutionalized population worked 19.92 hours in January. This is lower than similar calculations yield for any year since 1970, as far back as I am able to go. My calculations fail to account for changes in institutionalization–people who are incarcerated or in the military. They also fail to reckon for changes in the need for employment; as wages have stagnated, more households have required two incomes to make ends meet.