2 -- GO LOCAL

The universal celebration of what President Bush is calling the “victory of freedom” in last Sunday’s election in Iraq is prompted, in my view by the rediscovery of one of the most powerful of human forces: locality.

Somewhere in the basalt level of our DNA wiring is a sense of home – safe, ours, to be protected, and source of pride in the collective modi vivendi. Equipping ourselves with the apparatus of ever more impressive nation-states we’ve not paid much attention to this seemingly primitive sense of community. “Get big” has been the watchword for the several centuries of the modern era. The surge of Iraqis into voting queues reminds that “go local” may be a more useful – and even more modern – guide.

Meaning? Meaning that the organizing, civilizing energy of modern communities wells up from local communities – places where people stand in line to cast ballots one by one, places where people feel a personal relationship between their own hardihood and their collective arrangements for food, water, shelter, work, play and transcendence.

Relevance? The entire American gameplan – such as it was, and it wasn’t much – was organized around a colonial idea: an assumption (seemingly automatic and never questioned) that “we” Americans needed to help “them”, these poor, ignorant natives organize themselves. Never mind that Iraqi’s were easily the most modern, educated, emancipated peoples in the region despite Saddam’s depredations. In our automatic superiority we set out, not on a nation-building enterprise, but on a top-down, centrally planned state construction project which Marx would have approved and Stalin could have run with his left hand.

We should have done on Day One what, exhausted and idea-less, we finally allowed to happen of itself on 30 January: Iraqi’s organized and voted in an election substantially on their own.

Lesson: realign our occupation to gently support – from behind – Iraqi community building.

Go Local.