NY Times has published an editorial by seven non-commissioned officers in Iraq, which is absolutely piercing in its insight:

...it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

If you've been picking up even a fraction of the current yammering going on over the value of the Surge -- which is going to get a renewal sometime after Labor Day, I'd wager -- the contrast set by this piece couldn't be more stark. Not just in terms of opinion, but in specificity and linguistic clarity as well.

In my business, we'd call the likes of Kenneth Pollack and Bill Kristol "hand wavers." Salesman, essentially, as opposed to people who can actually write code. They understand a lot of things in theory, and they have a good jive, managing to sound credible to the uninitiated. But if you pay very close attention and/or know very much about the underlying issues, you can tell when someone is speaking from a place of direct and real experience, and when someone is speaking from a place of theoretical vision. More importantly, you can tell when they're feeding you a line of BS.

Oh, and this too, from my Sister's (happy birthday brie!) former employer no less:

I've been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It's less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It's been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I've long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that's a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty's book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey's that I've come to know. He's addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it's more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows:

Out last night watching some boxing on the pay per view with The Girth, then over to shoot a little pool at the ACME. The omnipresent question between the two of us is what the hell we're doing with our lives as "careers" begin to take off but everything else stagnates and the world around us seems to veer inexorably toward the ditch. What does it take to get a little satisfaction?

Harkening back to my post on Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs, there's something wired into me and most of my friends that drives us to want to help people out, to look outward with a problem-solving eye. There's a kind of juice one gets from this that can't be replicated any other way, the cheap and generally unprofitable thrill of Doin' Right.

Mark's hooked on this too, via Americorps. There might be more money in being an artisan handyman, building fences from special Japanese cedar boards for the neo-bohemian HC bourgeoisie, but at the end of the day he says it can't touch the rush of helping a kid with a fucked up life steady his or her feet and move in a positive direction as a human being. Even though the latter pays less than minimum wage -- Americorps workers get s "stipend" and instructions on applying for food stamps, something that I find extremely unjust -- he's back again for another tour of duty.

For my part, I don't get this feeling too much from my work. Bootstrapping a business is kind of a cutthroat process, or at least one that requires a primary focus on self-interest. While I got a good charge out of starting the Drupal Dojo, and a healthy portion of our clients are do-gooders of one stripe or another, the main thing for the past 10 months has been figuring out how to pay the bills in a steady and dependable fashion.