The Third Presidential Debate in Maps

Tonight’s final presidential debate was only about foreign policy only so much as “foreign” is defined as “a handful of countries in the Middle East . . . and maybe China.” The headline of a Josh Barro headline at Bloomberg sums it up: “Foreign Policy Debate Omits Most of Globe.” Ezra Klein noted prior to the debate that the foreign/domestic policy divide breaks down in an interconnected world, leaving the term (and the topic) with an anachronistic specificity: “‘Foreign policy’ means, broadly speaking, our policy towards the countries we are already at war with, or are considered likely to eventually go to war with.” Writing for the Times, former State Department official and Atlantic publicity-monger Anne-Marie Slaughter observes:

This really wasn’t a debate about foreign policy or world affairs. It was the projection of the American electoral map onto the globe. All discussion of Israel and Islam was targeted at Florida; all discussion of China was targeted at Ohio.

Slaughter runs through the (long) list of topics unmentioned by either candidate, and it reads like a seventh-grade tour of world geography: NATO, Europe, Asia, India (“a mere billion people,” snarks Slaughter). Climate change and the continuing economic meltdown in the Eurozone received zero airtime, and issues that would top the agenda for most countries — poverty, hunger, energy — didn’t even warrant a throwaway line from the men contending to lead the world’s richest nation. Among the many perks of superpower status, it seems, is the ability to ignore the pressing concerns of 90% of the “foreign” world that the “policy” portion of the debate was meant to address. The debate, scolds the editors at Bloomberg News, “left five of the seven continents — most of them populated, and at least one in dire crisis — barely mentioned.”

Ezra Klein provides this infographic on how the conversation stacked up:

At Slate, Matt Yglesias publishes a hastily Photoshopped map that reminds me of the classic New Yorker “Flyover Country” cartoon. His caption: “Those are all the countries out there, as I understand it.”

The Internet has unfortunately swallowed up the aforementioned New Yorker (at least I think it’s from the New Yorker) cartoon of a map of America, as seen from the East Coast: blue regions, like New York and the west coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco), are sharply delineated, while the vast middle of the country is shrunken to an empty red strip in the center of the country. The closest I can find is this 1976 New Yorker cover:

It’s not nearly as funny, but it’s close. The debate’s geography also brought to mind this 2006 map, attributed only to “grog,” from the liberal website DailyKos:

George W. Bush may no longer be in the Oval Office, but the American worldview is hardly more complex than that Dubya-era stereotype. There’s the U.S., and then there’s everyone else. If we want to get more specific, “everyone else” can be divided into the good guys who are “with us” and the bad guys (think Axis of Evil) who are “against us.” The trope still holds today, as Romney in particular classifies mildly hostile countries like Russia as “our number-one geopolitical foe” and lumps even ostensibly copacetic nations like the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt together with the Islamist radicals of Iran.

Riffing on Romney’s geographically challenged remark that Syria provides Iran with “a route to the sea,” New York Magazine’s Dan Amira offers his own poke at the Republican:

Iran, of course, has 1,500 miles of its own coastline, so it’s hardly dependent on Syria for beach access. Alec MacGillis tweeted: “Let’s just agree on the good news that the night brought: Iran lacks a route to the sea. We can stop worrying about the Straits of Hormuz.” The Washington Post’s fact-checker calls the claim “puzzling,” observing that “a puzzling claim, considering that Syria shares no border with Iran — Iraq and Turkey are in the way.” Romney has made this Iran-Syria link before, and to be fair, his campaign notes that it’s not as outlandish as it seems: “It is generally recognized that Syria offers Iran strategic basing/staging access to the Mediterranean.” However, despite knowing little about the Middle East, I would wager that the ties between Iran and Syria likely rely less on any oceanfront property than on the two nations’ shared support of terrorists, common Shiite heritage (Syria’s Bashar Assad is a member of the Alawite heterodox Shiite sect), and mutual hostility toward Sunni-majority countries like Saudi Arabia.

Besides, as Amira writes, “Americans are bad enough at geography already; they don’t need a presidential candidate confusing them even more.”

Then again, if you were hoping for any level of clarity, the third presidential debate was surely the wrong place to look. Matt Yglesias bluntly laments the myopic perspective: “Foreign policy is all about angry Muslims.” He goes on to say that “these days, the various conflicts in the Middle East often seem to have eaten the entire field of vision of American foreign policy.”

Throughout the encounter, the president accused Romney of being “all over the map” on foreign policy. Actually, the one thing the debate was not was “all over the map.” Romney’s positions may be Etch-a-Sketchy, as Joe Biden would say, but the larger problem with last night is that neither Obama nor his opponent expanded the map beyond Israel, Iran and Libya. To the rest of the world, the message was plain: Wait your turn.

Someday, the rest of the world will get tired of waiting.

Making the Past Present

“Digital Maps Are Giving Scholars the Historical Lay of the Land” (NYT, 7/26/11)

“Spirits of the South Pole” (NYT Magazine, 7/21/11)

“A Whiff of History” (Boston Globe, 7/17/11)

Three recent articles delve into new ways of exploring history. None of them are exactly Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine, but once the stacks of books have been written about battle tactics and 18th-century politics, I suppose researchers start looking everywhere for new material. Those dissertations won’t write themselves, you know.

As part of its occasional “Humanities 2.0” series, the Times explains how digital mapping software — think Google Earth and GPS devices — helps historians recreate the minutiae of the past. Want to know exactly what General Lee could see as he surveyed the battlefield at Gettsyburg? It’s cliche, but yes, there’s an app for that. The new field is called “spatial humanities,” and it leverages technology to provide a new look at historical events in much the same way that some scientists are applying pattern recognition software and computerized authorship verification to quantify literary criticism. Some of the supposedly revolutionary uses of technology seem like things that could have been done by less flashy methods fifty years ago; indeed, one wonders if there is anything unique about the research beyond its pretty graphs, and if the embrace of technology is anything other than jumping on the iEverything bandwagon. By mapping the spread of witchcraft charges across Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, historian Benjamin Ray noticed that ““It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.” The article goes on to say that, “after adding church affiliation to the map, he saw there was also a correlation between church membership and the accusers, which reflected a rift in the village over support for the minister.” There is nothing new about such a conclusion, and Ray hardly had to employ snappy mapping software to reach it. Disagreements over the ministry of Reverend Parris have long been implicated in the outbreak of witch hysteria in Salem Village.

Of even less practical import is the research detailed in a Boston Globe article entitled “A Whiff of History.” Reporter Courtney Humphries marvels that, “despite [scent’s] primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history.” We look at museum dioramas of wagon trains and listen to scratchy recordings of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, “but our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized.” True, but our ignorance of the way history smelled hardly constitutes a gaping hole in our knowledge of the past. Science has allowed perfumers to capture previously-ephemeral scents, but do we need to recreate the precise aroma of Sinclair Lewis’ hog factory to know that lots of pigs produce a big stink? Historians are replicating old perfumes based on written descriptions, much as brewers are attempting to recreate the taste of the whiskey left at the pole by Sir Ernest Shackleton. At least the whiskey enthusiasts, described in a recent article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, are up front about their desire to turn a profit. Science may be a nice side effect, but it’s hardly the motivation behind the fact that, “for $160 or so, collectors in America will shortly be able to buy, nestled in a little crate made in China to look authentically Scottish, not a rarity, exactly, but a replica of one.” By contrast, the scientists interviewed for the Boston Globe article speak of the historical significance of recreating an ancient Egyptian perfume or the stench of a Viking village. It’s a relief when one researcher, who is working on the Viking project, points out that a smell, even one engineered to match an ancient aroma, is nothing without context. “The smell of a Viking latrine may disgust us,” Humphries writes, “but it doesn’t tell us how the Vikings experienced it.” Furthermore, she continues, smells carry different connotations in different groups of people:

[F]or instance, wintergreen became popular in chewing gum and toothpaste in the United States after World War II, but to the British, the smell would have evoked sickness, since it was used in ointments to treat the wounds of soldiers. If we don’t understand these meanings, we’re just smelling the past as we would now – not as people did at the time.

It’s a caveat worth remembering. Bringing technology into the humanities department can produce interesting results, but “interesting” is not the same as “meaningful.” The best history teacher I ever had — the one who introduced me to Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine — was as computer-savvy as the average eighty-year-old. In class, we watched film strips, the kind that featured droning narration over a series of still pictures that advanced with a click-whirr sound of a projector straight out of the 1960s. There weren’t even dry-erase boards in the room; this was a man who preferred old-style chalk. And yet — without the aid of digital maps or Smell-o-Vision technology, that teacher could bring history to life because he understood that the past is not a foreign country: it is a slightly off-kilter version of today, a world that is nothing if not a dirty, confusing and ultimately fascinating story.