Anawim

"Irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" (With Apologies to Lionel Trilling)

2007-12-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong:

"As good Millian liberals, we want to promote authentic, articulate, and intelligent advocates of other points of view. Who should we liberals respect--and give a boost to, in terms of reading them, arguing with them rather than mocking them, debating them, and suggesting that others read them?

As far as honest conservatives are concerned, it's a difficult question. Those I usually suggest--economists like Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Samwick and Bill Niskanen, strategists like Richard Clarke and Tom Barnett and Brent Scowcroft, social policy types like Rod Dreher and John DiIulio, unclassifiables like Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat--I find dismissed as "not typical conservatives. We want a representative of the conservative point of view. Someone like Larry Kudlow or Ramesh Ponnuru."

It strikes me that those who reject my advice are (as is almost always true) making a mistake. They are going about it the wrong way. We want an "honest conservative"--a conservative intellectual adversary we can respect, who is also intelligent. But their first move is to define a "conservative" as a public supporter of the Bush regime and its deeds. That means, I think, that they are searching the empty set.

Slavoj Zizek applied this to the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe under the iron curtain:

The Trilemma: Of the three features—-personal honesty, sincere support of the regime, and intelligence—-it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive...

But it applies just as well to the Bush regime. Sincere conservative supporters are not bright. Bright conservative supporters are not honest. Bright and honest conservatives are not supporters--and so are ruled out, and we are left with Larry Kudlow and Ramesh Ponnuru.

I think we should recognize that the intelligent, honest conservatives out there are not Bush supporters, and turn that to our advantage in selecting honorable intellectual adversaries.

What I would like is a list of "honest conservatives" who fit into the following categories--and let me try to give an example of a person whose existence is recognized by the mainstream media for each class:

Class of 2000: People who in 2000 said, "George W. Bush is not qualified to be president, and we should be really worried about this."
Class of 2001: People who in 2001 said, "I supported Bush in 2000, but George W. Bush is not listening to his honest conservative policy advisers, and we should be really worried about this." John DiIulio
Class of 2002: People who in 2002 said, "I supported Bush in 2000 and 2001, but 911 has unhinged the administration; it's detention and other policies are counterproductive; it needs to be opposed." Richard Clarke
Class of 2003: People who in 2003 said, "I supported Bush over 2000-2002, but enough is enough. That's it. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I was certain there was evidence of an advanced nuclear weapons program--otherwise invading Iraq was just stupid. Well, there was no advanced nuclear weapons program. Invading Iraq was just stupid. Plus there's the Medicare drug benefit. These people need to be evicted from power." Tim Barnett, Bill Niskanen
Class of 2004: People who in 2004 said, "I've been a Bush supporter. I'm a Republican and a conservative, but I've had enough: I'm voting for Kerry." Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bartlett, Brent Scowcroft
Class of 2005: People who in 2005 said, "I voted for Bush in 2004. But I made a mistake. A big mistake."
Class of 2006: People who in 2006 said, "I know I supported Bush up to last year, but that shows I'm not the brightest light on the clued-in tree." Rod Dreher, Andrew Samwick

The class of 2007--people who are now opposed to Bush only because they think Bush will drag the Republicans down in 2008--doesn't count. Dead-enders who are still claiming that Bush is Teddy Roosevelt don't count. They aren't honest conservatives. They are only worth scorn, and fit objects for nothing but mockery. One just doesn't joust with them in honorable intellectual combat. It's not done.

I say divide "honest conservatives" into the classes of 2000 to 2006, rank them by seniority according to the date of their public honesty, and use that as a ranking for who to read, who to respect, and who to promote as worthy intellectual adversaries. Refer to them using this citation form:

Brent Scowcroft, Honest Conservative Class of 2004...

Who else falls where in this classification?" (Brad DeLong, "A Proposed Pecking Order for Honest Conservatives," Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal, June 14, 2007).

How To Do Things With(out) Words

2007-12-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

Michael Dorf on free speech and violence:

"As widely reported in the media (see NYT story here), on Tuesday a noose was found on the door of Columbia Univesity's Teachers College Professor Madonna Constantine (who is African American). This ugly and despicable act has prompted a police hate-crime investigation and swift condemnation from students, faculty and administrators at TC and throughout the university, including the following statement from CU President Lee Bollinger:

Tolerance and mutual respect are among the core values of our diverse community, and all of us must confront acts of hate whenever they occur within it. As I said last night, an attack on the dignity of any member of our community is an assault on all of us.

(President Bollinger's full statement appears here. Professor Constantine's statement is currently on the homepage of TC, if you scroll down a bit.)

I fully share the sentiments quoted above, but it's worth noting what President Bollinger did not say. He did not say something like "The hanging of a noose on an African-American professor's office door is symbolic speech of a hateful message. Exposure of the university community to that hateful message in no way implies endorsement of it." And for good reason. In light of the history of lynching in the United States, the message of a noose under these circumstances is not merely abstract advocacy of racism or some related ideology. It is reasonably understood as a death threat. Free speech doctrine rightly treats threats of violence (whether or not racially motivated) as unprotected.

Numerous news stories and blogs have already linked the placement of the noose on Professor Constantine's door---and the university's reaction---to the Ahmadinejad speech. If a university need not permit a threat of violence against a particular faculty member---as it surely need not---why must it permit the speech on campus of one who has threatened to destroy an entire country?

First Amendment doctrine does not, of its own force, apply to TC or Columbia, which are private actors. However, President Bollinger and others within the university have repeatedly argued that because private universities are committed to the exploration of ideas, they should, as a matter of internal policy, be at least as protective of free speech as the First Amendment requires the government to be. And here it reasonably clear that First Amendment doctrine would distinguish between a targeted noose and a general speech. After all, the leading case on proscribable speech, Brandenburg v. Ohio, involved a rally featuring a burning cross and racist and anti-Semitic remarks; yet the Supreme Court held there that the state law, the indictment and the jury charge, in reaching "mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action," impermissibly targeted protected speech.

Now critics of the Ahmadinejad appearance have a fair point in noting that Ahmadinejad is not engaged in "mere" anything. As the President of a country that supports terrorism, attacks on U.S. troops, and more, his views do more than give offense. But that objection---if meant as a point about First Amendment doctrine---misses the point that Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia was not incitement, nor did it put anyone in immediate fear (although it was deranged and profoundly offensive). So I'm pretty confident of the results under free speech doctrine in both cases: Ahmadinejad gets to speak (as even Bollinger's critics tacitly acknowledge in failing to have called for the government to block the speech) and the person who placed the noose on Professor Constantine's door, if apprehended, gets charged with a hate crime.

There remains the question, however, of whether a university community committed to free speech principles ought to voluntarily commit itself to every jot and tittle of First Amendment doctrine as decided by the Supreme Court. The foregoing analysis, after all, would permit a racist student group to hold a rally on campus at which crosses are burned and nooses displayed, so long as the racist students made clear that they were engaged only in "abstract" support for racism. One could reasonably conclude that the ideals of a university community include not only free speech principles but also a robust requirement of respect for other members of the university community. And sometimes even nominally abstract advocacy is so inconsistent with the respect requirement that it can be squelched. That, I take it, was the point of those who opposed the invitation of Ahmadinejad." (Michael Dorf, "The Noose, Brandenburg and Ahmadinejad Revisited," Dorf on Law, Oct. 11, 2007).

What Is It Like to be an (American) Bat?

2007-12-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

Ezra Klein's correspondent, Jason C. writes:

"My impression from talking to people about current events - and I mean reasonably sophisticated, educated people - is that they see the world as divided into a handful of categories:

- Europeans. They are liberal, effete, atheistic, and are constantly having sex and getting drunk. Anything goes in Europe.

- Middle-Easterners, a.k.a. Muslims, a.k.a. Arabs. This includes Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, etc. These people are crazed religious fanatics who do not care about their own lives. They act only to satisfy their unquenchable blood lust. Sometimes they kill each other, but mostly they hate America and Jews.

- Asia. Where communists and very tiny things come from. A continent of industrious gnomes.

- Africa. Where starving people live.

- South & Central America. Where Mexicans come from.

They then interpret events like 9/11 by imposing these categories on them. So when a student says "Why did God let the Iraqs attack us on 9/11?" he's really just saying something like, how come all those crazy Muslims want to kill us? He picks "Iraq" just because it's a prominent example of a Middle Eastern country." (Jason C. in Ezra Klein's blog, "My Commenters is Smarter than I: Broadbrush Edition," Ezra Klein, Dec. 12, 2007).

Intellectual Agonistes

2007-12-13T11:44:00.000-08:00

Another gem from a Philosophy Job Market Blog:

"So last year in the interview I had with a teaching school, I got the question, "Which do you see as your primary focus--teaching or research?" No problem, right? I'd gamed out that question before hand and I had what I thought was a pretty awesome answer.

I launched into my whole thing about how I didn't really accept the dichotomy of teaching and research. I was all about how I want my teaching to compliment my research by always forcing me to sharpen my knowledge of classic texts and ideas in the face of inquisitive young skeptics, and how I want my research to compliment my teaching by giving me fresh ideas to bring into the classroom and allowing me to model for my students the sort of curiosity I want them to learn in my class. So the thing about teaching and research is finding the right balance to make each compliment the other and blah, blah, fucking blah.

And the best thing about this answer is, I really think it's true. Maybe I'm an insufferable asswipe for buying into that shit, but I swear to god, I buy it all. So not only was I giving an awesome answer to the teaching/research, question, I even believed it. Holy shit, right? I figured I was hitting that one out of the park.

As it happens, I wasn't hitting it out of the park. I wasn't fouling the ball off, let alone connecting for a respectable base hit. I wasn't even striking out. No, I was standing at the plate with my eyes closed, swinging wildly at nothing in particular while I peed my pants for fear of getting hit by the ball.

No doubt, some schools would have eaten my answer up, but not the school I was interviewing with. The farther I got into my whole thing, the more the department chair's eyes narrowed and the less interested he got. By the time I was done, I knew I'd lost him. He'd asked whether teaching or research was my primary focus, and it was clear as day I'd lost him as soon the first word out of my mouth wasn't "teaching."

So I fucked up that interview. Oh, well. I'm still not changing my answer to that question." (Pseudonymous Grad Student, "I Made A Lot of Mistakes, In My Mind, In My Mind," A Philosophy Job Market Blog, Dec. 5, 2007).

And in the comments...

This advice to 'be yourself' is simply bad advice, since it presupposes that 'being yourself' with no job is preferable to 'compromising yourself' with some job. And no one thinks that's true -- except for the rare case where the job would actually make you miserable.

If the thought is 'Well there's nothing you could have done; they just didn't like your style," I can see the point. But it's just asinine to console job seekers with the thought that market conditions permit a strategy of such self-weeding.

The people who have good jobs but are drawn to this blog, as I am, by the pathos of reliving their earlier struggles need to remember better what those struggles involved. Don't forget how much you simply lucked into your job. Do remember your smarter, more deserving classmates who got a worse job or none.

The saddest thing about this profession is how normal it feels at each stage to assume that the weeding was warranted. It does look warranted, since some jobs permit and motivate lots of research and some nearly forbid it. (And likewise, in reverse, for teaching.) But we can all see, looking back at the people we know, that the weeding was thoroughly haphazard.

So yes, you do have a 'say' in where you wind up: like anyone, you too can be unjustly passed over for a job. (Anonymous, comment to the above, Dec. 6, 2007).

Conflict of the Faculties

2007-12-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

Via the terrifying A Philosophy Job Market Blog, a line from the Simpsons:

"We are down at the Springfield unemployment office, where we see that unemployment doesn't just affect philosophy majors, it is begining to affect useful people..." (Dec. 10. 2007).

"Wouldn't it be simpler for the Zionists to dissolve Israel and choose another?" (With Apologies to Brecht)

2007-12-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

What do you call a person who accuses other Jews of being involved in a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy?

"Watching Jamie Kirchik accuse Daniel Levy of being an anti-Israel conspiracy theorist is an impressive thing. I think, in the tribe, we call it chutzpah. But it's worth reading the whole five paragraph screed. Read it slowly. Take time to enjoy the scenery. Whistle appreciatively as Kirchik's argument builds, the innuendo stacks. And remember to have a camera out when you arrive at the final, stunning, vista, in which Kirchik places Daniel Levy in the tradition of the John Birch Society.

Who knew The New Republic had begun publishing performance art?

....

But Kirchik's evident mania fits nicely into an interesting, emergent pattern on the Likudnik Right: The need to paint the actual members of the Israeli government as insufficiently pro-Israel. Levy, for instance, was a senior adviser to the Israel Minister of Justice, and a peace negotiator for both Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. He's an individual who, quite literally, has devoted his life to the peace and security of the Jewish state. And Kirchik wants to paint him as the anti-Israel incarnation of the John Birch Society. Similarly, Commentary magazine, where Kirchik also contributes (TNR must be so proud!) recently published an article excoriating Israeli Prime Minister for being insufficiently pro-Israel as if, as Matt Duss put it, "to exhume parody, strangle it with piano wire, and rebury it."

But entertaining as all this is to watch, it's evidence of a deeper insecurity among the American Likudniks: As MJ Rosenberg put it the other day, the Israeli mainstream is coming to accept reality. The center is shifting left, the traditional hardliners, exhausted by decades of war, accepting that tough compromises will be required en route to peace. That's tricky for, as Daniel Davies put it, "nationalists of a completely imaginary [Israeli] state, one which has no meaningful politics of its own, no need to compromise with reality and no national interests other than constant war." In order to keep internal coherency, Israeli politicians with some interests other than war need to be painted as betraying the national interest. As more and more Israeli politicians do this, however, the list of targets grows ever more comical, and this group of Zionist dead-enders grows all the stranger, and all the more unbalanced. Which is how you get Daniel Levy as a John Bircher, and Ehud Ohlmert as an anti-Semite." (Ezra Klein, "The Likudnik Dead-Enders," Ezra Klein Blog, Dec. 11, 2007).

Waiting for the Barbarians

2007-12-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

The problem with history is that it is a little inconvenient. Juan Cole reports:

"I just saw this campaign ad for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. He says that Iran held US embassy hostages for 444 days. Then they were released within one hour. That was the hour after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, succeeding Jimmy Carter. Giuliani goes on to tell us that this incident shows how you deal with "Islamic terrorists." You get tough on them and don't back down.

The problem with this assertion is that it is not true, and indeed the opposite is true. Gary Sick showed in October Surprise that:

' Piercing the shadowy netherworld of international espionage, Sick has written one of the most controversial and disturbing accounts of political intrigue to appear in recent years. In 1980, William Casey, then campaign manager of the Reagan-Bush ticket, without the knowledge or approval of the legitimate government, arranged a deal with the Iranian government that in return for military equipment, the Iranians would not release the 52 American hostages until Ronald Reagan was safely inaugurated. '

So the hostages weren't released because Reagan was tough on the Iranian regime. They were released because Casey promised that the Republicans would sell Khomeini weapons if they kept the hostages for an extra couple of months and denied Jimmy Carter the sort of diplomatic coup that might have rescued his presidency.

Not only was Reagan not in fact 'tough' on the ayatollahs in Tehran, he later on stole Pentagon weaponry from the warehouses, illegally sold this US military materiel to a terrorist regime (that of Khomeini), then pocketed the money from the illegal arms sales to 'Islamic terrorists' and laundered it through shadowy bank accounts, sending it to far rightwing death squads in Nicaragua.

Besides, they aren't "Islamic" terrorists because Islam forbids terrorism. They might be Muslim terrorists, but then not very good Muslims. When will Giuliani denounce the "Catholic terrorism" of some prominent priests who were active in the Irish Republican Army? Would he talk about "Jewish terrorism" in regard to the blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem?

As for Iran-contra, I feel a golden oldie coming on:

'
And, Shultz told both Rumsfeld and Saddam that the US was trying to curb weapons flows to Iran. Yet it is well known that Israel was supplying Iran with weaponry in return for Iranian oil. Only a little over a year later, Shultz double-crossed Saddam by getting on board with the Iran-Contra weapons exchange, which was suggested by the Israelis in the first place. The White House illegally sold Iran hundreds of powerful TOW anti-tank and HAWK anti-aircraft weapons [which Reagan came on television and told us were shoulder-launched weapons!], for use against Washington's newfound ally, the Iraqis, who were being assured that the US was trying hard to "prevent an Iranian victory . . ."

These weapons sales contravened US law, under which Iran was tagged as a terrorist nation. (Even today I can get into trouble for so much as editing a paper by an Iranian scholar for publication in a US scholarly journal, but it was all right for the Republicans and Neocons to send Khomeini 1000 TOWs!) Not only that, but Reagan's team then turned around and used the money garnered from these off-the-books sales to support the contra death squads in Nicaragua. In the US Constitution, how to spend government money is the purview of Congress, and Congress had told Reagan "no" on funding the death squads. So Reagan's people essentially stole weapons from the Pentagon storehouses, shipped them to Israel for transfer to Ayatollah Khomeini, and then took the ill gotten gains from fencing the stolen goods and gave them to nun-murderers in Latin America." (Juan Cole, "Giulian, Reagan, and Kissing up to Ayatollahs with Fancy Cakes," Informed Comment, 12/11/2007).

Defying the gods

2007-12-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

Stephen Danley reminds us that good sports writing is still alive:

"Any player will tell you that there are nights when the basketball gods simply don’t want you to win. They normally come on the back end of a road trip, or the second night of a back-to-back. On those nights career 19 percent 3-point shooters go 5 for 5 from behind the line and players like Shaquille O’Neal don’t miss a free throw. It seems as if everything the other team throws up fall through the hoop and you’re playing in quicksand.

Wednesday was one of those nights, and the Celtics won anyway.

On a snowy night in Philadelphia, the basketball gods blitzed the Celtics from the get go. The 76ers’ Andre Iguodala, who is known more for his athletic prowess in the open court than his one-on-one ability, made five tough buckets to open the game, including two 20- footers with a defender in his face. He finished the game 10 for 17 from the field.

Andre Miller, whose jump shot is an affront to the aesthetics of the game, came out and made six of his first seven shots. Many of those were tough fadeaways from 17 feet and were so ugly that parents should have shielded their children’s eyes from the replays.

As a team the Sixers shot 60 percent in the first half. With 43 seconds left they were up, 57-48.

It was at that moment that the Celtics got back into the game.

With the amount of time left on the clock everyone in the building knew the Celtics would try to get two more scoring opportunities. The problem with trying to squeeze two possessions out of the last 40 seconds, is that it’s easily anticipated. An evenly matched opponent will tighten up their defense and instead of having even one good possession you end up with two bad ones.

The Celtics had no such difficulties. They pushed the ball down the floor and Pierce sliced to the basket quicker than pie disappears on Thanksgiving. His layup fell through with 33.9 secondss left. That virtually assured Boston of another possession.

On the other end, the Sixers showed their inexperience and turned the ball over, leaving the Celtics with 23.1 seconds.

Tony Allen held for the last shot and executed perfectly. He drove into the lane with about 7 seconds left. His layup attempt rolled off the rim but because he made his move with enough time, Garnett had a chance to grab the rebound. Garnett ended the half with a vicious dunk punctuated by a primal scream.

The Celtics went into the locker room down by 5 points, having almost completely negated the outstanding play of the Sixers.

The second half started with more of the same: Garnett dunk, Ray Allen 3-pointer, Pierce jump shot, Sixers timeout.

Just like that the Celtics were back in the lead, and although Iguodala hit a wild scoop shot to momentarily stop the momentum, the Celtics were like sharks circling their prey. Their passes were crisper, their ball movement was better and they had an energy that was absent in the first half.

When James Posey came in for Garnett with 3 minutes 40 seconds left in the third quarter, Garnett went to each of his teammates on the court and pointed at them. Then, coming off the court, he gave a fist pump and let out a yell.

Garnett’s message was simple: They had put the Sixers back on the ropes. Now they had to finish them off.

There was one problem; the Sixers kept throwing punches of their own.

Every time the Celtics looked poised to pull away the Sixers would answer with a tough basket. They simply didn’t miss shots.

The game seesawed back and forth until Garnett took things into his hands once again. With the Celtics up by 89-88, Garnett made a steal.

The Celtics pushed the ball and Eddie House launched a 3-pointer from the right corner. Garnett, trailing the play, swooped in to corral the rebound. He held the ball for a second, letting the offense reset, then waved for both Pierce and House. He sent House into the corner and tossed the ball to Pierce for a pick and roll.

As Pierce drove into the lane he drew both his and Garnett’s defenders. House’s defender slid down to pin Garnett and prevent an easy dunk. There, standing all alone in the corner where Garnett had placed him, was House.

Bang. 3-pointer. 11-2 Celtics run. Game over.

In the end it didn’t matter that the Sixers never really cooled off.

The Celtics won the decisive fourth quarter, even though the Sixers more than 50 percent from the floor.

The Celtics winning formula was simple enough. They did the things any championship team does on a nightly basis. They finished the first half strong, they won the first five minutes of the second half and they executed down the stretch.

On a snowy night in Philly, that simple formula was enough to defy the basketball gods." (Stephen Danley, "Winning when they Shouldn't," NYTimes, Dec. 11, 2007).

The Principle of Universality

2007-12-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky:

"In fact, one of the-maybe the most-elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he'd be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It's not even discussable. Because we don't apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There's a lot of talk about 'terror' and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it's considered highly moral; it's considered self-defense. Now, their terror against us, that's awful, and terrible.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that's accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely." (Noam Chomsky, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," Arts and Opinion, vol. 6, 2007).

Rhetoric as Epistemic

2007-11-27T16:04:00.000-08:00

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond—
Invisible, as Music—
But positive, as Sound—
It beckons, and it baffles—
Philosophy—don't know—
And through a Riddle, at the last—
Sagacity, must go—
To guess it, puzzles scholars—
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown—
Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—
Blushes, if any see—
Plucks at a twig of Evidence—
And asks a Vane, the way—
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—
Strong Hallelujahs roll—
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul—
—Emily Dickinson, (c. 1862)

Generous Orthodoxy

2007-11-26T10:49:00.000-08:00

"I am not one of those Stalin-like secularists who won't rest until the last rosary bead has been ground into a fine dust. Let theology flourish." (Jacques Berlinerbalu, "What's Wrong with the Society of Biblical Literature?" Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 10, 2006).

If They Hadn't Invented the Game, They Would Kill It

2007-11-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

Martin Amis is a thuggish racist. But this article, an analysis of the England-Portugal 2006 World Cup quarterfinal, did make me laugh:

"When Owen scored in the third minute, the euphoria was soon qualified by the following intuition: with time added on, England were now going to spend an entire football match in frazzled defence, dropping back ever deeper, the beleaguerment solidified by ever-more paranoid substitutions. As Rooney limped off, after 20-odd minutes, you felt you were complicit in an act of unilateral disarmament. But by now it was taking some doing not to notice a qualitative difference between the teams: the abysmal gulf in technique.

....

"The days when an England player's first touch could often be mistaken for an attempted clearance or a wild shot on goal — those days are over. The deficit is not in individual skill, it is in collective skill; it is in the apparently cultural indifference to possession. In 2004, football is no longer a dribbling game, still less a long-ball game (and how many balls did we float to our two haring midgets up front?); it is a possession game. The 'clearance', as practised by England, is simply an anachronism. When an international defender heads it away, he heads it to a teammate. When we 'clear' it, we just clear it, for two or three seconds.

...

"During the second half it was a full-time job not noticing what the chasing game does to a side's morale. Pass it to a teammate? We couldn't even throw it to a teammate. A Martian, looking on, would have wondered at the mysterious discrepancy: whenever the ball went into touch, it seemed that it could only be reintroduced to a player in a red shirt. Portugal's equaliser was both completely inevitable and richly deserved. And then the crouched supporter was left to believe that England, this booting, blocking, sliding, nutting, hacking behemoth, this hysterical combine-harvester, was about to transform itself into an instrument of attack." (Martin Amis, "We Have to Face It: English Football is just No Good," The Guardian (courtesy of Eamonn Fitzgerald).

Zionism is Fascism

2007-11-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

M. J. Rosenberg:

"Something terribly ugly is happening in Israel. It started during Yitzhak Rabin's term as prime minister when right-wing extremists and religious fanatics joined in calling for his death and it would seem to have culminated with his assassination.

But the ugliness continues. Yigal Amir, Rabin's assassin, turned out to have been no "lone lunatic," no Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan who acted for reasons that were perhaps psychological and not political.

Not Amir. Yigal Amir was inspired to kill the prime minister by a community which believed that taking Rabin's life was a necessity ordained by God. Rabin was preparing to give up land promised to the Jews, and so it was necessary to kill him. Amir has always been proud of what he accomplished. In his mind, he did it for Israel. A joyous, triumphant smirk can be seen on Amir's face in every photograph for twelve years.

The ugly thing to which I refer is not just the assassination itself. The killing of Rabin was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish State. Its repercussions are felt every day. I believe that had Rabin lived, Oslo would have ended with an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty and a resolution of the conflict. (By the last years of Oslo, there was virtually no terrorism in Israel thanks to IDF-PLO security cooperation.) The assassin and his friends also believed that Rabin would achieve peace which is why they wanted him dead.

But even uglier than the assassination is the nauseating fact that Yigal Amir is today a hero to a portion of the Israeli public, especially the ideological settlers. He has been treated with kid gloves by the Israeli judicial and prison system, which not only allowed him to marry while in jail but also allowed him to father a child. This week the assassin’s son was circumcised in prison so that the proud father could attend.

..............

Last week in Haifa during a major league soccer game between Beitar Jerusalem and Maccabi Haifa, a moment of silence to commemorate the Rabin assassination was interrupted when half the stadium hissed and booed Rabin's name and sang songs extolling the virtues of his assassin.

Most Israelis were appalled. Many commentators said that these fans were a small minority of soccer hooligans. But many observers disagreed, including Prime Minister Olmert who said that the assassination cheerleaders were “not a small group, as some would like to minimize it, but a large, loud, influential and raging group. . .”

To be fair, these extremists have their counterparts here too. Just as Rabin's murderer is a hero in certain parts of Israel, he is also a hero in parts of the New York metro area and Los Angeles. There are people among us who believe that all is fair in the effort to preserve the settlements and keep the Palestinians under occupation -- even murder.

In a sense, it is not surprising that occupation produces this kind of ugliness. By definition, occupation coarsens the occupier.

Furthermore, an occupation that started as the retention of lands won in a defensive war evolved, once the settlement movement began, into a fierce religious nationalist movement that is less about love of Israel than hating those perceived as Israel’s enemies, especially fellow Israelis and Jews.

These new nationalists, for the most part, have little use for the State of Israel and its leaders. Their attachment is to the Land of Israel, a place located in the Bible, in their hearts and in the West Bank settlements. They have as little use for Tel Aviv and Haifa as they do for Cairo and Damascus.

These are the Israeli counterparts of the ballyhooed Islamo-Fascists--although the people so up-in-arms about Muslim lunatics tend not to see the similarities with their Jewish brethren, and vice versa. That is one of the remarkable things about extremists. They never recognize their mirror image in the people they hate most.

One of the many things these fanatics have in common is that their biggest fear is Arab-Israeli reconciliation. That is nothing new. Following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, the far right in Israel organized to defeat Prime Minister Shimon Peres in order to ensure that the Oslo process had died with Rabin. At the same time, Hamas terrorists began a campaign of suicide bombing to achieve the same goal. Hamas succeeded when Peres lost the election." (M. J. Rosenberg, TPM Cafe, Nov. 9, 2007).

Fat Oxen Principle

2007-10-25T18:37:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Cliche Guevara blog, here's some wisdom from Bernard Williams:

“But still, it will be said, subjectivism leaves everything where it was, so far as morality is concerned, though not perhaps so far as muddled feelings about morality are concerned. Even granted the contrast of solidity we cannot draw any practical conclusions. We cannot, in particular, conclude (as some today are obviously inclined to conclude) that since science is objective and morality is not, we are objectively justified in devoting ourselves to science, while only subjectively justified in protesting against injustice. For devoting oneself to science is as much a practical activity as any other, and there is no more reason why that one should be objectively justified rather than any other. Justifications for doing objective subjects are not objective justifications for doing those subjects, any more than the fact that there are deductive justifications of the theorems of Principia Mathematica means that there are deductive justifications of the projects of reading, rehearsing or discovering the theorems of Principia Mathematica. All these are instances of that strangely tempting fallacy, the ‘fat oxen’ principle; who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” (Bernard Williams, Morality).

The Utopian Temper

2007-10-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Wislawa Szymborska's "Nothing Twice". Do readers know if this is a response to Qoholeth?:

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with exactly the same kisses.

One day, perhaps, some idle tongue
mentions your name by :
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are."

Waiting for the Barbarians

2007-10-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

Steve Bergstein on the Civilization that created "the rule of law":

"In addition to this blog, I also maintain a legal blog covering the civil rights decisions of the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan. Last week, my eyes lit up when I checked the daily decisions and saw that one case involved a guy who claimed he was forced to confess to a crime that he did not commit. This scenario surfaces from time to time for and other crimes, but this case was different because it involved the crime of the century: the 9/11 hijackings which launched this country into a new era.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was ! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on?

I let some other legal bloggers know about this, particulary the How Appealing blog and Appellate Law and Practice. They both ran a commentary on the missing opinion. Then someone sent How Appealing a PDF of the decision (probably very few of them were floating around since the opinion was posted for a brief period of time) and How Appealing posted the decison.

Then things got even stranger. The Court of Appeals actually phoned How Appealing to request that he remove the opinion from his website since it contained classified information. The Court said that a revised opinion would come out the next day without the classified information. How Appealing actually refused to remove the opinion. Through it all, hundreds of people came to my legal blog to see my summary of the opinion. It was either my blog or printing out and reading a 44 page epic.

The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

So the opinion, while interesting, is much less interesting because now we don't know how the FBI extracts false confessions from people. Looking at things from another angle, we don't know how the FBI gets suspected ists to tell the truth. Except that we do know this, because the opinion is still available from the How Appealing website. The horse is out of the barn, and the classified portion of the opinion is embedded in the Internet for all eternity. Not only is this decision not to remove the premature opinion now a subject of debate (people tend to think that How Appealing did the right thing in keeping the opinion available), but now we can see the part of the ruling that the Court redacted:

Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about , sure.”
Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I’m screwed and my family’s in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine.”

Higazy explained why he feared for his family:

The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is —they’re suspicious of being a ist. To give you an idea, Saddam’s security force—as they later on were called his henchmen—a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; , , some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word ‘torture’ comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn’t imagine them doing anything to my sister.

And Higazy added:

[L]et’s just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with ists and by the same token, some people who actually could be —might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn’t going to risk that. I wasn’t going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that’s convincing? And I said okay."

(Steve Bergstein, "A Tale of Two Decisions," Psychsound, Oct. 21, 2007).

Waiting for the Barbarians

2007-10-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

William Dalrymple:

"About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori.

It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.

The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.)

Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values.

Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.

Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.

And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done.

In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden?

In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.

The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: “Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic.

There are lessons here from our own past. European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of s that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, - m and sm.

These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.

Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman.

For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission. The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this “inferior race” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed”. Many were caught in traps, before being d or burnt alive.

The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more.

It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the s looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the West.

For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for allthat is remarkable and beautiful in ourart, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history.

The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for ; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass ual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.

Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the ." (William Dalrymple, "A Lesson in Humility for the Smug West," The Sunday Times, Oct. 14, 2007).

Longue Duree

2007-10-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Wislawa Szymborska, "Reality Demands":

Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There's a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Cheronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmosphere front.

There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on their sunlit decks.

So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal with grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
all grounds are battlegrounds,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch, cedar, and fir forests, the white snow,
the yellow sands, gray gravel, the iridescent swamps,
the canyons of black defeat,
where, in times of crisis,
you can cower under a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can't help
laughing at that.

History, Memory, Silence... And Solidarity

2007-10-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Sean O'Brien's "Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright":

There are miners still
In the underground rivers
Of West Moor and Palmersville.

There are guttering cap-lamps bound up in the roots
Where the coal is beginning again.
They are sinking slowly further

In between the shiftless seams,
To black pools in the bed of the world.
In their long home the miners are labouring still -

Gargling dust, going down in good order,
Their black-braided banners aloft,
Into flooding and firedamp, there to inherit

Once more the tiny corridors of the immense estate
They line with prints of Hedley's Coming Home.
We hardly hear of them.

There are the faint reports of spent economies,
Explosions in the ocean floor,
The thud of iron doors sealed once for all

On prayers and lamentation,
On pragmatism and the long noyade
Of a class which dreamed itself

Immortalized by want if nothing else.
The singing of the dead inside the earth
Is like the friction of great stones, or like the rush

Of water into newly opened darkness. Oh my brothers,
The living will never persuade them
That matters are otherwise, history done.

· First published in Poetry Review

White Men Saving Brown Women from Brown Men (With Apologies to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

2007-10-12T14:51:00.001-07:00

Communication Professor James Arnt Aune indulges his inner misogyny purportedly in response to Ann Coulter's anti-Semitism:

"What is it about Ann Coulter that makes me want to use every unpleasant sexual epithet ever applied to women? Am I a bad person for wanting to do that?"

A day later, Aune links to an article by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie railing against the "misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world."

Chortles Aune:

"No word, of course, from ChomskyWorld on defending [Ayaan Hirsi Ali 's] rights and, literally, her life."

The Rhetoric of Zionism

2007-10-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

But... but...but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler!!! But...but... but Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East!!! But... but... but Arabs are anti-Semitic!!! But...but..but...:

"Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's deputy prime minister is no shrinking violet. In fact, his past as a club bouncer with reputed ties to the Israeli Russian mob have led to long-standing police investigations of his financial links to it.

He has the mouth to prove his gangster connections. Here are a few of his bon mots:

* "At 8am we'll bomb all the [Palestinian] commercial centers…at noon we'll bomb their gas stations…at two we'll bomb their banks."

* Ha'aretz reported that Lieberman called for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel to be drowned in the Dead Sea and offered to provide the buses to take them there.

* "They [Israeli Arabs] have no place here. They can pack their bags and go to hell."

* "World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in [the Knesset]."

To most Israeli Jews these wouldn't be so bad since after all he only slurred Arabs. Now, however he's smeared Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace activist group led by long-time iconoclast Uri Avnery, by calling its members "Nazi capos" in a Channel 1 TV interview.

The group stirred Lieberman's wrath because it urged a boycott of Israeli musicians who performed at a 40th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Gush Etzion settlement in the West Bank. One of the performances happened in Lieberman's hometown of Nokdim and he apparently took personal offense at the call to shun the performers.

Since Israeli peace activists are held in only slightly higher repute than Arabs in Israel, it's doubtful how much fallout there will be among the general populace..." (Richard Silverstein, "Lieberman Calls Gush Shalom 'Nazi Capos,'" Tikun-Olam, Oct. 6, 2007)

Zionist McCarthyism

2007-10-11T00:17:00.000-07:00

Richard Silverstein on the Zionist thought police:

"Last year, the successful London show My Name is Rachel Corrie was to transfer to the US in a New York Theater Workshop production. Then inexplicably, theatre management told the producers they needed a delay. They felt the New York audience needed "preparation" and "context" in order to appreciate the issues involved in the drama. Without further educational work, they didn't feel the community was prepared to give the play the reception it deserved. The English producers saw this as a cop-out and withdrew the rights from NYTW and transferred them to others who mounted a New York run. When asked why he chose not to put on the play according to his contract, the NYTW director said he'd approached a Jewish board member and "colleagues of colleagues" who had expressed reservations about the play; but that he hadn't contacted anyone in the organised Jewish community or anyone with any expertise on the issues. Another example of pre-emptive censorship.

In San Diego, the local al-Awda chapter planned to host a Marcel Khalife concert this month at the Joan Kroc Theater. The theatre was established by a $27-million gift to the Salvation Army from Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. Theatre personnel assured the al-Awda representatives for months that their rental of the hall was guaranteed but then two days before the contract signing the Salvation Army cancelled the concert without any explanation.

During subsequent discussions, the Salvation Army said it cancelled because it viewed al-Awda, a pro-Palestinian group which advocates full implementation of the right of return for Palestinian refugees within Israel, as "divisive" and "unbalanced". Captain John Van Cleef also volunteered, according to the Al Awda representatives I spoke with (though denied by Van Cleef himself), that he might approve the concert if Khalife were to perform with an Israeli musician. The captain also told the group that he feared a hostile reaction by the local Jewish community.

This reminds me of the Pavlovian response - when you ring a bell and feed an animal long enough if you ring the bell but do not feed it, it will salivate despite the absence of food. Similary, the Israel lobby has so conditioned American organisations to its wrath that the latter won't even touch certain speakers for fear of stirring it once again.

The University of St Thomas in Minneapolis invited Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu to speak on campus. Campus administrators for some reason decided they needed to vet the speaker with the local Jewish Community Relations Council (the public affairs arm of the Jewish community). The JCRC told the university that Tutu was anti-Israel and that he had made comments "hurtful" to Jews.

.........

Earlier this year, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs scheduled Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to speak about their then upcoming new book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Mearsheimer, who teaches at the University of Chicago, had spoken previously many times for the council. But this time, after the event had been scheduled, director Marshall Bouton called him last July and told him that he was cancelling it because it was too controversial. They could only speak if joined by their most virulent critic, Abe Foxman (who was unavailable on the date of the scheduled event).

Mearsheimer told me he isn't aware of any other previous talk that has ever been cancelled by the council for this reason. I asked him, when we spoke, whether he thought the local Jewish community exerted any influence on the decision. He did not know the answer, but noted that the council's board includes powerful members of the local Chicago Jewish community - among them Lester Crown, its chair, Michael Moscow, a Federal Reserve Bank governor, and Leah Zell Wagner, daughter of Sam Zell, owner of one of the largest real estate empires in the US. A Chicago Tribune story paraphrases Bouton as claiming "neither council board members who are Jewish nor pro-Israeli groups influenced his decision or pressured him.".

Here is how Mearsheimer characterised the incident:
A council scheduler told him that the council was "feeling heat" over the authors' anticipated appearance before Bouton called to cancel. Bouton confirmed that the council was facing criticism, Mearsheimer said. "The bottom line is that preventing us from speaking before the council is not the way we are supposed to be conducting public debate on important issues in the United States," Mearsheimer said.Even if Lester Crown or the other Jewish board members didn't say a word to Marshall Bouton, the latter isn't stupid and knows how controversial the Walt-Mearsheimer book has been among wealthy pro-Israel donors to groups like Aipac and the Anti-Defamation League. Either Bouton pre-emptively cancelled the speech because he knew his patrons would be angry, or his patrons made their views known and Bouton acted on them. Either way, the decision is a noxious violation of the norms of open discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The council has said it still wishes to do a programme with Walt and Mearsheimer - though they have declined to appear with Foxman because he has called them "anti-semites". They note that many previous controversial council speakers have not been forced to share a programme with their most vehement critic.

Another scheduled Walt/Mearsheimer programme in New York was also cancelled when Jewish Forward editor, JJ Goldberg declined an invitation to moderate a programme with them saying he disagreed too much with the book to do so.Meanwhile, The Israel Lobby has ranked as high as 12 on the New York Times bestseller list and 10 in the Amazon list, and the authors plan a European tour to promote the book.

....

Liberal Jewish bloggers who report on these outrages understand that the Israel lobby retains enormous reach in its ability to pre-empt speech and manipulate the public debate. But our conviction is that the more these incidents see the light of day, the more the power of the lobby to stifle debate will wane. So far Goliath is still king of walk. But someday he will be felled by the giant's own hubris." (Richard Silverstein, "Land of the Free?" The Guardian, Oct. 9, 2007).

Waiting for the Barbarians

2007-03-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Andrew Cockburn reports on a conversation between guardians of Judaeo-Christian values Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on September 11 (taken from the 9/11 Commission Report):

"After a brief discussion with [his acolytes], Rumsfeld finally made his way to the military command center. It was almost 10:30. Only then, as he later explained to the 9/11 Commission, did he begin to gain "situational awareness" of what was going on. After a brief interval he spoke with Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in a bunker under the White House and for the previous forty minutes had been issuing orders to shoot down suspicious airliners.

"There's been at least three instances here where we've had reports of aircraft approaching Washington - a couple were confirmed hijack," Cheney told Rumsfeld in his favored clipped, macho style. "And pursuant to the President's instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out."

Actually, the presidential authorization cited by Cheney consisted, at best, of the words "You bet" from Bush as Air Force One streaked out of Orlando, Florida. In any event, it was Rumsfeld, not Cheney, who was legally in the chain of command and authorized to give such an order.

"So we've got a couple of [military] aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?" asked Rumsfeld, still catching up.

"That is correct," replied Cheney. "And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out."

Together, these two men dominated the U.S. government for six years. They must have had thousands of conversations, but this snatch of dialogue, as released by the 9/11 Commission, is the only known publicly available sample of a private conversation between them. Though brief, it is instructive. Not for the last time, they were reacting to information that was wholly inaccurate - there were no more hijacked airliners in the sky. One of the planes Cheney had ordered "taken out" was United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania ten minutes before he issued the command. The other was a low-flying medevac helicopter on its way to the Pentagon. Neither man seemed concerned that the president was not involved. Cheney was usurping his authority, since he was not in the chain of command. Lacking any experience in the military, the vice president may not have realized that military commanders like precise orders, and will not proceed without them, which was why the fighter commanders chose not to pass on his aggressive instructions to the pilots." (Andrew Cockburn in the book Rumsfeld, excerpted in the New York Times, March 25, 2007).

The Conflict of the Faculties

2007-03-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

Tom DeLay is the former House Republican majority leader known as "The Hammer." Turns out he is now bringing that bludgeon to the Communication discipline:

"Since his forced retreat from power in a corruption scandal, Tom DeLay, the former House Republican majority leader, must have been watching re-runs of “Cool Hand Luke.” That film’s cynical rationalization of life’s conflicts as merely a “failure to communicate” is Mr. DeLay’s approach to explaining the Republicans’ loss of Congress last year.

No, no, he insists in a new memoir, it wasn’t voters revolting against the quid pro quo corruption that Mr. DeLay turned into a dark art. Rather, Republicans “did not communicate their message” and overcome “short-term, media-fed issues.”

Despite Mr. DeLay’s retreat from public office after his indictment for political money laundering, the memoir is, of course, entitled “No Retreat, No Surrender.” Mr. DeLay excoriates former colleagues from Newt Gingrich to the leader of the moribund House ethics committee that finally found the temerity to admonish him. He is furious that Republicans didn’t back his attempt to stay in power after his indictment.

The private sector that the DeLay Inc. machine milked like a political cash cow is defended as if it were an underdog. “We should start recognizing that those who work in that sector have a right to political representation also,” says the former lawmaker as he defends his golf junket to Scotland — arranged by Jack Abramoff, the now-imprisoned lobbyist — as a genuine savings for the taxpayer.

Occasionally, truth peeks through. At one point, Mr. DeLay does allow that voters faced “a general perception of Republican incompetence and lack of principles.” Well, at least that got communicated, Mr. Former Leader." (The New York Times, "Tom DeLay Looks Back," March 21, 2007).

Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

2007-03-22T21:49:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer, fearless consequentialist, writes without irony:

"When we condemn the behaviour of a politician, celebrity, or friend, we often end up appealing to our moral intuitions. "It just feels wrong!" we say. But where do these intuitive judgments come from? Are they reliable moral guides?

Recently, some unusual research has raised questions about the role of intuitive responses in ethical reasoning. Joshua Greene, a philosophy graduate now working in psychology at Harvard, studied how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. In one, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if it continues on its current track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley on to a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say you should divert the trolley on to the side track, thus saving a net four lives.

In another dilemma, the trolley is about to kill five people. This time, you are standing on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realise you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger.

This judgment is not limited to particular cultures. Marc Hauser, at Harvard University, has put similar dilemmas on the web in what he calls a Moral Sense Test (moral.wjh.harvard.edu). After receiving tens of thousands of responses, he finds remarkable consistency despite differences in nationality, ethnicity, religion, age and sex.

Philosophers have puzzled about how to justify our intuitions in these situations, given that, in both cases, the choice seems to be between saving five lives at the cost of taking one. Greene, however, was more concerned to understand why we have the intuitions, so he used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to examine what happens in people's brains when they make these moral judgments.

Greene found that people asked to make a moral judgment about "personal" violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with emotions. This was not the case with people asked to make judgments about relatively "impersonal" violations like throwing a switch. Moreover, the minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge took longer to reach this judgment than those who said that doing so would be wrong.

Why would our judgments and emotions vary in this way? For most of our evolutionary history, human beings have lived in small groups, in which violence could be inflicted only in an up-close and personal way, by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone. To deal with such situations, we developed immediate, emotionally based intuitive responses to the infliction of violence on others. The thought of pushing the stranger off the bridge elicits these responses. On the other hand, it is only in the past couple of centuries - not long enough to have any evolutionary significance - that we have been able to harm anyone by throwing a switch that diverts a train. Hence the thought of doing it does not elicit the same emotional response as pushing someone off a bridge.

Greene's work helps us understand where our moral intuitions come from. But the fact that our moral intuitions are universal and part of our human nature does not mean that they are right. On the contrary, these findings should make us more sceptical about relying on our intuitions. There is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has existed for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new. Blowing up people with bombs is no better than clubbing them to death. And the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. So we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions." (Peter Singer, "Reason With Yourself," The Guardian, Tuesday, March 20, 2007).

Ogged of Unfogged blog with Swiftian modesty appends a footnote of a study indicating:

"Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives."

To which Ogged comments:

"Consequentialism: Like Brain Damage, But Without The Excuse." (Ogged, Unfogged, 03/21/2007).

The Ideology of the Fascist Aesthetic

2007-03-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Frank Miller, creator of the comic book/films 300 and Sin City was interviewed a while ago on NPR:

NPR: Frank, what’s the state of the union?
FM: Well, I don’t really find myself worrying about the state of the union as I do the state of the home-front. It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire. Mighty cultures are almost never conquered, they crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because of everything that isn’t working out perfectly every time.
NPR: Um, and when you say we don’t know what we want, what’s the cause of that do you think?
FM: Well, I think part of that is how we’re educated. We’re constantly told all cultures are equal, and every belief system is as good as the next. And generally that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues. When you think about what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities, and all the good its done in the world, it’s kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.
NPR: A lot of people would say what America has done abroad has led to the doubts and even the hatred of its own citizens.
FM: Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.
NPR: As you look at people around you, though, why do you think they’re so, as you would put it, self-absorbed, even whiny?
FM: Well, I’d say it’s for the same reason the Athenians and Romans were. We’ve got it a little good right now. Where I would fault President Bush the most, was that in the wake of 9/11, he motivated our military, but he didn’t call the nation into a state of war. He didn’t explain that this would take a communal effort against a common foe. So we’ve been kind of fighting a war on the side, and sitting off like a bunch of Romans complaining about it. Also, I think that George Bush has an uncanny knack of being someone people hate. I thought Clinton inspired more hatred than any President I had ever seen, but I’ve never seen anything like Bush-hatred. It’s completely mad.
NPR: And as you talk to people in the streets, the people you meet at work, socially, how do you explain this to them?
FM: Mainly in historical terms, mainly saying that the country that fought Okinawa and Iwo Jima is now spilling precious blood, but so little by comparison, it’s almost ridiculous. And the stakes are as high as they were then. Mostly I hear people say, ‘Why did we attack Iraq?’ for instance. Well, we’re taking on an idea. Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany. It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we’re doing the same thing now.
NPR: Well, they did declare war on us, but…
FM: Well, so did Iraq.

The Ideology of the Fascist Aesthetic

2007-03-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Ahmad Sadri of the Lebanese Daily Star reviews the movie 300, currently making record-breaking profits in the U.S.A:

To my mind, Snyder's 300 drinks deeply at the cauldron of rage that is still boiling over in the United States six years after that bloody Tuesday. Two invasions, a trillion dollars in smoke and three thousand dead Americans have not sated the Achellian anger in a remote part of the American psyche. The movie 300 unleashes that abiding desire to curse, brag and rave at "endless Asian hordes." Bring'em on you barbarian slaves, you, you..., black, gay, effeminate, depraved cowards. Your friends are hunchbacks, deformed giants, midgets, magicians, eunuchs, perverts, lesbians and executioners. To hell with you all and your "mysticism and tyranny!"

Nobody expects historical accuracy from a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel. But using domestic racial and sexual stereotypes to demonize the enemy is breaking new ground. In the movie 300 Persian "immortal" knights are snarling beasts beneath their sinister masks and their king is a pierced and bejeweled androgynous savage. But, more significantly, Snyder's Persians - I am not talking about the disposable extras covered up to their eyes in male burqas - are predominantly black and by implication of mannerism and affect, homosexual. Allowing the widest berth for the genre and medium one still marvels at Snyder's audacity in demonizing the "Asiatic hordes" while morphing the Spartan warrior into the typical white American survivalist. Snyder's Spartans are white guys fighting a sea of racially inferior blacks, yellows and browns. They are staunchly heterosexual and weary of their elected elders (ephors) who are seen as sacrilegious lepers, traitors and scheming politicians.

Lenin of Lenin's Tomb adds:

Already the skies have been filled with such phrases as "gorgeous slaughter", "how fucking cool was that?", "best film ever", "Wholesale human slaughter never looked so pretty", "one-fifth history, four-fifths something that looks cool", "This movie is about the decapitations, severed limbs and blood splattering all over the screen. Yet, it works", "the movie's just too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing. And 'silly' is invoked here, more or less, with affection".

Obviously, I pinched most of those phrases from the thumbs-up reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. Most sympathetic reviewers have focused on how "rousing" and electrifying the slaughter is, how beautiful the machismo is, how alluring and artful the genocide is. At the same time, those who are sensitive to the charge of revelling in celluloid fascism are keen to assure readers that there is nothing ideological involved. That would be dirty and crass agitprop, while this is fun. The slogan that accompanies the film's title is "Prepare for Glory". The glory happens to be the last stand of Spartan "free men" against an anachronistic race of tyrannical mystics, effete warriors, transexuals, biomorphically perverse midgets, black people, lesbians etc. All the characters are digitally enhanced in ways that permit the level of editorialising through physical forms that is usually only available to the cartoonist.

....

It was reported that in pre-screenings, critics booed this movie and walked out in droves because it was such a pile of crap. It has now made record-breaking profits. Frank Miller, the author of the comic that became the film, has not shrunk from the Clash of Civilisations thesis imputed to his dreck: it is about the superiority of Western civilisation against a "sixth-century barbarism" evinced by those who "saw people's heads off" and therefore "do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us". On the one hand, the reduction of a brutal political strategy to "cultural norms" (where do these 'cultural norms' persist or emanate from?) gives the game away. On the other hand, films like this, and television programmes like 24 (in which I believe at least one person has had his sawed off by the hero) do indicate that such 'cultural norms' are eminently sensible to some American audiences. Sensible thus: "We don't like having to do it, but these barbarians come to our country in the hundreds of thousands and try to enslave us. We have infinitely fewer forces, but nevertheless we heroically resist, and if that resistance is brutal, then so be it." The book has an introduction by the Islamophobic neocon, Victor Davis Hanson, which denies a 'political message' but insists that it is problematic for 'multicultural' audiences in that it takes an unequivocally 'moral' stance on behalf of Hellenic superiority. Zack Snyder, the director, is someone who made the fairly commonplace move from advertising to movie-making, and presumably had a fair idea what it was about the comic that would appeal to audiences. You don't get to make that leap without knowing what sells.

It is quite interesting, this spate of historical fantasies, evoking Hellenic, Roman or Christian legacies: Troy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven, HBO's 'Rome' series, for instance. Something is decidedly up with that. There is nothing new in futuristic comic book fantasies saturated with contemporary reference and the worship of technology and fascistic superhuman power. Imagined futures are invariably composed from historical and contemporary bric-a-brac. Nor is the reimagining of history as a contemporary drama at all original. But why the sudden surfeit of it, with all its in-your-face civilisationalist, culturalist metaphors? Why the slew of earnest, fascist fantasy (Batman Begins, Superman Returns etc)? Why did the X-men 'cure' themselves? Why is slaughter 'gorgeous'? Why is genocide dampening crevices and stirring pocket-linings in a cinema near you?" (Lenin, "Gorgeous Slaughter," Tuesday, March 13, 2007).

Fascism and Form

2007-03-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

Long before Paul de Man was exposed as the fascist that he was, Frank Lentricchia had discerned the grammar of the Reichspropagandaleitung:

"Recently in the Hudson Review William Pritchard playfully dubbed Yale's four best-known literary critics the "Hermeneutical mafia." Who could have imagined that the term 'Mafia' would degenerate into a metaphor for avant-garde literary theorists? But perhaps there may be some value in extending a much-assaulted figure to the fearsome Yale group. Assuming there is a Yale mafia, then surely there must be a resident Godfather. One is forced to finger Paul de Man, who exhibits qualities that may earn him the role of Don Paolo, capo di tutti capi. Reading the prefaces and acknowledgments of Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, one is struck by the tone of respect, even reverence, with which the name of Paul de Man is mentioned. It is not difficult to locate reasons. Bloom's latest thesis about literary history was announced by de Man in an obscure essay; Miller's turn from Poulet to Derrida in an essay on Poulet was not much more than a repetition of de Man's earlier essay on Poulet. The question is, why should Bloom, Hartman, and Miller -- potential dons in their own right -- appear to be executing the orders of Godfather de Man?

In the manner of a don whose power is assured and unquestioned, de Man has found it necessary to speak only sparingly; in comparison to his prolific lieutenants he is almost invisible. We know that according to certain dark traditions the don need not speak often, nor elaborately, because when the don speaks he speaks with total authority, and it is de Man's "rhetoric of authority," as I'll call it, which has distinguished his criticism since its earliest days. This is a critic who has always given the impression of having a grip on truth. Even while, in Blindness and Insight, he was telling us that there was no truth, of if there was, that it could never be known, he spoke transcendentally of the "foreknowledge we possess of the true nature of literature." Unlike Hartman, whose prose, in its pursuit of the labyrinthine ramifications of a point, is the very model of the scholar's descent into the inferno of self-consciousness; and unlike Bloom, whose emotionally pressured and strident style gives away a critic not altogether confident of how what he proposes will be received, de Man has not had to speak in anything but a cool and straightforward manner.

The epigraph that I've chosen from one of his latest pieces is representative of the de Man style at its most intimidating: [ "The whole of literature would respond in a similar fashion, although the techniques and the patterns would have to vary considerably, of course, from author to author. But there is absolutely no reason why analyses of the kind here suggested for Proust would not be applicable, with proper modifications of technique, to Milton or to Dante or to Holderlin. This will in fact be the task of literary criticism in the coming years." -- Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric"]. He speaks openly of the "whole of literature" responding to his thesis. But how does he know? Is he making the claim from a transcendental ground, having discovered the a priori form of all literary discourse? In two subordinate clauses, we observe him granting a qualification: he tells us that techniques of analysis will have to be modified from author to author. But the tone of his qualification is set with that tired little scholarly aside -- "of course" -- which in this instance projects the tone of the critics voice, condescending to an elaboration, but telling us, as he does so, that such practical matters are for others to worry about. The final sentence clarifies his stance: "This will in fact be the task of literary criticism in the coming years." If we had any doubts, we know now that de Man is making not an empirical but an idealistic claim. He presumes to tell us not only what literature has been but also what it must be. And, somewhat chillingly (perhaps it is best to drop the metaphor of the Godfather at this point), he tells us not what literary critics ought to be doing but what "in fact" they shall be doing. In one way or another, whether in the philosophical garb of the Sartrean existentialist, or in the guise of the Derridean poststructuralist, de Man has been speaking that way about literature and criticism for many years." (Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 283--284).

"Irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" (With Apologies to Lionel Trilling)

2007-03-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Gary Kamiya on the content of American conservativism:

"It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down. Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable" conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem it worthy of comment.

......

In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic, heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to attack its enemies.

But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.

By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the Know-Nothing movement.

........

The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" -- especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."

Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message." (Gary Kamiya, "The Coulterization of the American Right," Salon).

Rhetoric as Epistemic

2007-01-28T15:51:00.000-08:00

Jane Hirshfield's "Against Certainty":

"There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think "this," it answers "that."
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar's strictness.

If I then say "that," it too is taken away.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside another."

(Jane Hirshfield, "Against Certainty," from After: Poems, 2006).

Yet Words Are Not The End of Thought, They Are Where It Begins

2007-01-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

Jane Hirshfield's "After Long Silence":

"Politeness fades,

a small anchovy gleam
leaving the upturned pot in the dish rack
after the moon has wandered out of the window.

One of the late fredoms, there in the dark.
The leftover soup put away as well.

Distinctions matter. Whether a goat's
quiet face should be called noble
or indifferent. The difference between a right rigor and pride.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins."

(Jane Hirshfield, After: Poems).

When Civilization Is Outlawed, Only the Uncivilized Will Be Civil

2006-10-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

"I ought to go back to my cell. As a gesture it will have no effect, it will not even be noticed. Nevertheless, for my own sake, as a gesture to myself alone, I ought to return to the cool dark and lock the door and bend the key and stop my ears to the noise of patriotic bloodlust and close my lips and never speak again. Who knows, perhaps I do my fellow-townsmen an injustice, perhaps at this very minute the shoemaker is at home tapping on his last, humming to himself to drown the shouting, perhaps there are housewives shelling peas in their kitchens, telling stories to occupy their restless children, perhaps there are farmers still going calmly about the repair of the ditches. If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them! For me, at this moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important above all is that I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of its perpetrators. I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian." (J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980).

Optimism of the Will

2006-10-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

Langston Hughes:

"Sometimes when I'm lonely,
Don't know why,
Keep thinkin' I won't be lonely
By and by."

(Langston Hughes, "Hope," Selected Poems of Langston Hughes).

The Free Marketplace of (Zionist) Ideas

2006-10-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein on Peter Beinart:

"I think Peter Beinart's TRB this week deserves a response. The editorial focuses on the lack of (online) liberal outrage after the Deutsche Oper yanked the opera Idomeneo, which features Muhammad's decapitated head, out of a desire to avoid controversy. The liberal blogs said nothing. Not so with the conservosphere, which erupted in outrage. Many liberals," Beinart writes, "seem unable to conceive of a struggle in which the Republican right is not an enemy but an ally. But there are such struggles, and, without today's activist liberals, they will be harder to win. Free speech is under threat, and Idomeneo should be the last straw."

First of all, free speech is fine. German's politicians -- including its prime minister -- roundly criticized the decision. You can call the Deutsche Oper cowardly, or overcautious -- but speech is no less free because an opera house decides not to run a performance. Happens all the time, in fact.

More importantly, the merry racists over at Little Green Footballs aren't pumping the Idomeneo controversy because they're deeply committed to artistic freedom. These are David Horowitz acolytes, after all. They're doing it because it furthers their other political ends. They're doing it for the same reasons Bush noticed the oppression of Afghani women after 9/11, or the right remembered Hussein had human rights abuses when they decided to attack Iraq. Painting Arabs as beastly and illiberal fits their expansionist political agenda, which calls for sustained, often violent confrontation with the Arab world.

Few liberals want any part in that foreign policy agenda. And so few liberals have any interest in buttressing the administration's supporting arguments. Too many recall how their genuine concern and outrage over abuses in Iraq was conscripted in service of a misguided, heavily politicized, war that included human rights abuses of its own. Given a government that thinks nothing of suspending Habeas Corpus, is criticizing the Deutsche Oper likelier to protect free speech or deploy bombers?

Here's a test: The empty opera house may be a suboptimal outcome, but is it worse than kidnapping children for force marriage in Kyrgyzstan? How about the death of an unjustly imprisoned journalist in Turkmenistan? Or the government-supported death squads in Guinea?

No. It isn't. But that's what the right wing is focusing on. And that's what Peter Beinart is bashing liberals with. Liberals are morally remiss for paying insufficient attention to an opera house's decision, but not for ignoring bride kidnappings, murdered journalists, or marauding governments. The agenda behind that odd prioritization isn't difficult to divine, and it's to the credit of the left that they refused to offer aid and comfort to those seeking its partial assent in their clash-of-civilization fantasies. For liberals to jump at each trumpeted instance of Arab misbehavior in this context, under this administration, with this many modern-day Curtis LeMay's populating government commissions, would be downright irresponsible.

Free speech isn't under attack, but Iran may soon be. And those selectively decrying the absence of liberal outrage should select a more worthy, and less destructive, targent. Unless, of course, it's the outrage, and not the abuse, that interested them in the first place." (Ezra Klein, "PLUS, I DON'T LIKE OPERA," Tapped, Oct. 6, 2006).

Meanwhile in the land of the (Zionist) free:

You might be interested to learn the following:

I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGO, academics, etc, from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan

I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli antisemites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel.

Whatever your views on the Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.

Tony Judt

(Posted by Eric Alterman, "Abe Foxman: Commissar, McCarthyite," Altercation, Oct. 4, 2006).

Shooting an Elephant

2006-10-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Ted Kooser:

"Long ago we quit lifting our heels
like the others -- horse, dog, and tiger --
though we thrill to their speed
as they flee. Even the mouse
bearing the great weight of a nugget
of dog food is enviably graceful.
There is little spring to our walk,
we are so burdened with responsibility,
all of the disciplinary actions
that have fallen to us, the punishments,
the killings, and all with our feet
bound stiff in the skins of the conquered.
But sometimes, in the early hours,
we can feel what it must have been like
to be one of them, up on our toes,
stealing past doors where others are sleeping,
and suddenly able to see in the dark."
(Ted Kooser, "Walking on Tiptoe," Delights & Shadows, p. 5).

Bush's Euston Idiots

2006-09-23T00:46:00.000-07:00

Whoa, after reading Tony Judt's LRB article, I'm not quite sure he isn't moonlighting as one "Elijah" or "Ptochos" on various blogs (if such a thing as a "liberal" or "centrist" Ptochos were possible). This is not likely, though, not least because Judt continues to cling to the myth of a "liberal Golden Age." Still, a good critique of America's intellectual service class:

"Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.

This process was well underway before 11 September 2001, and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy ‘triangulations’ must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.

Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at ‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’

It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31 July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

One of the particularly depressing ways in which liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and ethical responsibility for the actions they now endorse can be seen in their failure to think independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-fascism, or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the willingness of so many American pundits and commentators and essayists to roll over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; to abstain from criticising the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and to stay coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country which for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy on preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redesign the map of the whole Middle East.

Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clear-headed recent account that describes as a resounding failure his country’s strategy of using wars of choice to ‘redraw’ the map of its neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami,[2] a historian and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of a super-power behaving in a similar way – responding to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by flattening another country just to preserve its own deterrent credibility – is odd in the extreme. It is one thing for the US unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behaviour (though in neither country’s interest, as some Israeli commentators at least have remarked). But for the US to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: that is simply bizarre.

Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon – were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose between the tactical logic of America’s new ‘war of movement’ against Islamic fascism – democracy as the sweetener for American involvement – and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft, for which democratic neighbours are no better and most likely worse than authoritarian ones. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7 August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World War Two? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Qana (‘These are not tender times’)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: if American liberals ‘didn’t realise’ why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal over-reaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

In Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern – a coauthor of the 1988 New York Times text defending liberalism – writes of his concern about the condition of the liberal spirit in America today.[3] It is with the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks with authority on this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect right-wingers to care very much about the health of a republic, particularly when they are assiduously engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the ideological left, while occasionally adept at analysing the shortcomings of a liberal republic, is typically not much interested in defending it.

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of modern democracy. The alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the War on Terror, the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: all this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorising endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace – their own above all." (Tony Judt, Bush's Useful Idiots, LRB, 25, Sep. 2006).

How To Do (Unspeakable) Things Without Words

2006-09-23T00:29:00.000-07:00

"Zionist focus only on what is said is disingenuous -- that is, "this is what X (Palestinian terrorist said) about Israel = these people are evil!" Using this rhetorical sleight of hand, Zionists have continued to claim that what Palestinians say reveals their "evil intentions" and conveniently do not engage with Zionist practices (dispossessing Palestinians of their land). Conversely, Zionist murder of Palestinians is explained away in the name of: "But X Zionist military commander said we were not targetting civilians!" while dropping two ton bombs on Palestinians houses." (Ptochos, Blogora, 9/10/2006).

From Haaretz:

"The government is planning to build 164 new homes in three settlements in the West Bank, despite an obligation under a U.S.-backed peace road map to halt such construction on land Palestinians seek for a state.The Israel Lands Administration, a government agency, issued a tender inviting bids on 88 plots in the Ariel settlement, 56 in Alfei Menashe and 20 in Karnei Shomron." (Government issues tenders for 164 new homes in the West Bank, Haaretz.com, Sat., September 23, 2006).

"Never Again"; Or the Righteousness of Evil

2006-09-22T23:43:00.000-07:00

Marx reminds us: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852).

Ilan Pappe on on our new nightmare:

09/04/06 "PC" -- - 09/02/04 - -A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the parts it covets - half of the West Bank - and cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement cannot work in the Gaza enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel - although geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone. Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or another.

The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine’s population, and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are not useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you cannot do it in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum-security prison camp.

As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and government needed a pretext to commence such policies. The takeover of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable local resistance that in turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy, preplanned already in the 1930s. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian resistance. This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new cleansing policy that still is implemented today in the West Bank. The Gaza imprisonment in the summer of 2005, which was paraded as an Israeli generous withdrawal, produced the Hamas and Islamic Jiahd missile attack and one abduction case. Even before the abduction of Giald Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded indiscriminately the Strip. Ever since the abduction, the massive killing increased and became systematic. A daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts.

The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now that one of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israeli airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort missions if within 500 square meters of their target they spotted innocent civilians. Not that these orders were kept, but the pretense for internal moral consumption was there. It is called in the Israeli airforce, the “Lebanon Procedure” [Nohal Levanon]. When the pilots asked a year ago if the “Lebanon procedure” is intact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to the pilots in the second Lebanon war.

The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave a few thousand dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million people in one campaign - the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip - either in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people’s own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will be the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.

Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda. If the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies would be tolerated by the world, it would expand and used even more drastically.

Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue." (Ilan Pappe, palestinechronicle.com, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14830.htm)

The Free Marketplace of Ideas; or The Third Persona (With Apologies to Phil Wander)

2006-09-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

Aaaah, the beauty of archives.... From Atrios:

"Josh Marshall discovers that Republicans love to beat on outspoken black Democrats, particularly outspoken black female Democrats.

well, duhh.

Note to Josh(not that he is reading this, but hey): Whatever you thought of McKinney's actual comments, the real story of that whole affair was how the entire media industry was all too willing to pile hard onto an outspoken black female Democrat, and resort to misrepresenting (as you've come to realize) her comments in the process. I'm not accusing you of being motivated by this particular pathology, I just think you got played. Much ado about nothing. Red meat for the Freepers, and the liberal media aided and abetted.

Consider the rather muted response to Dick Armey's recent suggestion that Israel should forcibly relocate the Palestinians. Or the rather muted response to Jesse Helms' suggestion that Clinton "watch his back" if he comes to North Carolina military bases. Or the continued support by the liberal media for a series of investigations that were basically designed to accuse (if not always in so many words) Hillary Clinton of having Vince Foster killed.

Frankly, McKinney's actual comments were pretty benign compared to those gems.

So, next time an outspoken black Democrat has her words from a 3 week old interview on a radio station with a relatively small number of listeners blast-FAXed throughout the land and then subsequently twisted by the Washington Post, please resist the urge to pile on." (Atrios, Monday, May 20, 2002).

The Ideology of the Anti-Aesthetic

2006-09-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

David Levi Strauss:

"The anti-aesthetic tendency can easily become an anaesthetic one, an artificially induced unconsciousness to protect oneself from pain, and to protect the 'hypocritical frontiers' of propriety and privilege. It is unseemly to look right into the face of hunger, and then to represent it in a way that compels others to look right into it as well. It is an abomination, an obscenity, an ideological crime.

.......

To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of choices but it does not include the choice not to transform, not to change or alter whatever is being represented. It cannot be a pure process, in practice. This goes for photography as much as for any other means of representation. But this is no reason to back away from the process. The aesthetic is not objective and is not reducible to quantitative scientific terms. Quantity can only measure physical phenomena, and is misapplied in aesthetics, which often deals with what is not there, imagining things into existence. To become legible to others, these imagininings must be socially and culturally encoded. That is aestheticization." (David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics).

What Is It Like to Be A (Zionist) Bat?

2006-09-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

In a debate in the RSA's blogora, I argued that the reason an interlocutor thought it self-evident that the hatred of Arabs in Israel is not as pervasive as anti-Semitism in Arab countries was because he (the interlocutor) was not reading Israeli newspapers. So I clicked on Haaretz and this was the lead story:

"MK Effi Eitam of the rightist National Union - National Religious Party said in remarks broadcast on Monday that the great majority of Palestinians in the West Bank should be expelled, and that Arabs should be ousted from Israeli politics as a fifth column and "a league of traitors." Eitam made the statements during a Sunday speech at a memorial service for a soldier killed in Lebanon in the recent war. "We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria," Eitam urged, referring to the whole of the West Bank.

According to Eitam, experience showed that Israel cannot give up the area ofthe West Bank. "It is impossible with all of these Arabs, and it is impossible to give up the territory. We've already seen what they're doing there."Turning to Israeli Arabs, Eitam said "We will have to take another decision, and that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system. Here, too, the issues are clear and simple. "We've raised a fifth column, a league of traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so large and so hostile a presense within the political system of Israel."

(Haaretz Service, "Eitam: Expel Arabs from West Bank, Israeli politics," Haaretz.com 11/09/2006).

Civility and Its Discontents

2006-09-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

Via Mark Scroggins, an excerpt from Richard Davenport-Hines review of Michael Mello's Legalizing Gay Marriage (Temple UP) in the 20 May Times Literary Supplement:

Davenport-Hines writes of the "entrenched animus against homosexuality that has characterized US state legislation":

"Horrible examples of this prejudice, taken from the ranting of neo-con commentators and gleaned from the local newspapers of Vermont, bespatter every chapter. The cumulative effect of this outpouring of hatred – often supposedly legitimated by primitive interpretations of the Christian faith – is battering for the reader. Many Europeans will feel sullied by reading these foul ebullitions, will be shocked by their violence, and dismayed by the mass-psychology and ethical backwardness of a country where such violent, vehement and vindictive language is an acceptable part of daily political discourse." (Mark Scroggins, "Reality Check," Culture Industry, Sunday, May 29, 2005).

The God of Small Potatoes

2006-09-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

Adah in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible:

"So much depends on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water standing beside the white chickens. That is one whole poem written by a doctor named William C. Williams. Chickens white beside standing water rain, with glazed wheelbarrow. Red on! Depends much. So?

I particularly like the name Williams C. William. He wrote the poem while he was waiting for a child to die. I should like to be a doctor poet, I think, if I happen to survive to adulthood. I never much imagined myself as a woman grown, anyway, and nowadays especially it seems a waste of imagination. But if I were a doctor poet, I would spend all day with people who could not run past me, and then I would go home and write whatever I liked about their insides.

We are all waiting now to see what will happen next. Waiting for a child to die is not an occasion fo writing a poem here in Kilanga: it isn't a long enough wait. Every day, nearly, one more funeral. Pascal doesn't come anymore to play because his older brother died and Pascal is needed at home. Mama Mwanza without a leg to stand on lost her smallest ones. It used to astonish us that everyone here has so many children: six or eight or nine. But now, suddenly, it seems no one has enough. They wrap up the little bodies in layers of cloth like a large goat cheese, and set it out in front of the house under a funeral arch woven from palm fronds and the howling sweet scent of frangipani flowers. All the mothers come walking on their knees. They shriek and wail a long, high song with quivering soft palates, like babies dying of hunger. Their tears run down and they stretch their hands out toward the dead child but never do they reach it. Whey they have finished trrying, the men carry the body in a hammock slung betwen sticks. The women follow, still wailing and reaching out. Down the road past our house they go, into the forest. Our father forbids us to watch. He doesn't seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved. In the grand tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him.

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation; admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Savior as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn? I waited for Leah and the other pupils to seize on this very obvious point of argument and jump in with their overflowing brace of words. To my dismay, they did not. Not even my own twin, who ought to know about unearned privilege. This was before Leah and I were gifted; I was still Dumb Adah. Slowpoke poison-oak running-joke Adah., subject to frequent thimble whacks on the head. Miss Betty sent me to the corner for the rest of the hour to pray for my own soul while kneeling on grains of uncooked rice. When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God. The other children still did, apparently. As I limped back to my place, they turned their eyes away from stippled sinner's knees. How could they not even question their state of grace? I lacked their confidence, alas. I had spent more time than the average child pondering unfortunate accidents of birth.

From that day I stopped parroting the words Oh, God! God's love! and began to cant in my own backward tongue: Evol's dog! Dog ho!

Now I have found a language even more cynical than my own: in Kilanga the word nzolo is used in three different ways, at least. It means "most dearly beloved." or it is a thick yellow grub highly prized for fish bait. Or it is a type of tiny potato that urns up in the market now and then, always sold in bunches that clump along the roots like knots on a string. And so we sing at the top of our lungs in church: "Tata Nzolo!" To whom are we calling?

I think it must be the god of small potatoes. The other Dearly Beloved who resides in north Georgia does not seem to be paying much attention to the babies here in Kilanga. They are all dying...."

(Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible).

Land of the Free

2006-08-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

Langston Hughes:

American Heartbreak

I am the American heartbreak --
Rock on which Freedom
Stumps its toe --
The great mistake
That Jamestown
Made long ago.

(Langston Hughes, "American Heartbreak," Selected Poems of Langson Hughes).

Praxis

2006-08-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

From Rusty Berkus:

"Full Circle"

"When I grow up
I'll read poetry in the New Yorker
and it'll be okay if I don't understand it.
I'll not be afraid to ask stupid questions
or challenge authority if I disagree.

When I grow up
I'll turn down a date on Saturday night
if it isn't meaningful.
I'll even stay home on New Year's eve
if I feel like being alone.

When I grow up
I might learn from listening
I might learn from criticism
I might even learn to have an "open mind."

When I grow up
I'll share all the feelings I've always
wanted to share.
I'll touch all those people I've always
wanted to touch.
I'll tell all the people I love
that I love them.

When I grow up
I'll go to the park and slide down slides
swing on swings
lie on the grass without a blanket
and make necklaces of buttercups.
I'll laugh at myself and giggle with others
scream and throw pillows when I'm angry
sing loudly and cry softly, cry loudly
and sing softly.

When I grow up
I'll forget time.
I'll write poetry on paper,
paint it on canvas or mold it with clay,
dance as if it were my last dance
and love as if it were my last chance to love

When I grow up
I'll never feel old again."

(Rusty Berkus, "Full Circle," Soulprints)

Distinction, Or The Ideology of the Aesthetic

2006-08-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Beyerstein is puzzled:

"I've noticed an interesting cultural difference between freelance writers and freelance photographers. Economically, the two groups have similar concerns. Yet, for some reason, photographers are willing talk much more frankly about money.....Why is it that freelance writers (and the staffers who feel their pain) always conceal their legitimate economic anxiety behind endless squishy salvos in the blogger vs. journalist debate?

Anyone else noticed this cultural divide? Any thoughts on why it exists?"

The answer is to be found in the cultural arbitrary that confers distinction (Bourdieu). Photography, by and large, has less cultural capital than writing. Photography functions as a "popular aesthetic," and is thus considered to be based on "the affirmation of continuity between art and life, ... the subordination of form to function, or, one might say, on a refusal of the refusal which is the starting point of the high aesthetic, i.e., the clear-cut separation of ordinary dispositions from the specifically aesthetic disposition." Writers are trained to cultivate a "Kantian aesthetic" of "detachment, disinteredness, indifference"; to distinguish themselves by their "pure gaze," "a systematic refusal of all that is 'human,'.... the passions, emotions, and feelings which ordinary people put into their ordinary existence, and consequently all the themes and objects capable of evoking them." The habitus cultivated in the photographer is the "anti-Kantian aesthetic," that is, functional, easily read/understood, and "gratifying" to the senses rather than "pleasing." (Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste).

The Gramscian Pimpernel

2006-08-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

Now and then they venture out and cause trouble on other blogs. Now you see him/her as "Ptochos," conversationalist, then as "elijah," scourge of the Marxist bourgeoisie. An exchange in the Blogora, the Rhetoric Society of America blog -- the whole exchange can be found here:

http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/?q=node/826#comment :

Zionism and Hegemony

Here's a response:

1. I applaud the fact that you have refused to succumb to your fear and gone ahead to post the letter. Even though I disagree strongly with the contents of the letter, dialogue should not be shortcircuited by fear. It should be noted, nevertheless, whereas I believe your fear is genuine, it should be viewed in light of the overwhelming dominance of pro-Zionist/Israeli-government dominance of public discourse in the U.S. This dominance is often exercised through intimidation and smearing of those who are critical of the Israeli government -- usually by false accusations of anti-Semitism (Also, the statements by Democratic Party politicians on Israel ought to establish this point. Also see, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt paper in the LRB -- even though I disagree with some of their points, their argument on this dominance seems to me correct). The point here is to put in perspective the fact that critics of Israel are more likely to face reprisals; or that the reprisals may be far more severe than pro-Zionists.

Your correspondent pooh-poohs the Qana massacre as a "great media performance." You state that you're posting this letter "here in the hopes that people will stop using body counts and photos as a justification for who's right and who's wrong." But we are not offered any evidence -- from your correspondent or you for that matter -- for the denial of this Israeli government atrocity. Here's a story below that refutes this disinformation:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/2006/08/
the_qana_conspiracy_theory.html

The actual murder of the Qana civilians is of course what is most appalling. Nevertheless, those who deny it are complicit in this atrocity [It should go without saying that Hezbollah war crimes are not justifiable and deserve condemnation as well].

2. Your correspondent argues: "If there are less casualties on the Israeli side it has to do a lot with luck and with the fact that most of the population that usually lives in the north has left the area and is staying with families in other parts of Israel or live in tents on the beaches." She adds: "Reading a bit more on this conflict will reveal that it is a country that is responding to violence in order to exist. For 6 years Israel didn't retaliate on repeated aggressive actions of Hezbollah! just see what happened as a result."

There is so much falsehood in these statements it is difficult to know where to begin. The first is the Israeli claim that this is an existential struggle -- but nobody (except the Israeli right and American neoconservatives) can seriously entertain the notion that Hezbollah can destroy the nuclear power that Israel is. Just yesterday, the NYTimes reported on the party atmosphere in Tel Aviv (contrast this with the terror in Beirut). As for the claim that "Hezbollah" started it all and the Israeli government merely responding, see the following article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story
/0,,1839280,00.html

Your correspondent argues: "Some Christian neighborhoods in Beirut are safer than large areas in Israel." Another false statement. See Juan cole on this":

http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/
bush-islamic-fascism-and-christians-of.html#comments
I could go on and on, but the falsehoods in your correspondents letter are not only numerous, they are blatant and ought to be obvious to anyone who has been following this conflict.
The best solution of the Middle East conflict is the creation of a binational state (wherein Palestinians and Jews hold equal rights). But that is a long-term vision. In the short-term, there should be a ceasefire (of equals) wherein Israel agrees to pull out of Lebanon and Hezbollah ceases its rocket attacks.

By elijah at Tue, 2006-08-08 14:53

The Best Solution of the...

"The best solution of the Middle East conflict is the creation of a binational state"
Well let's see. You don't want to be called anti-Semitic. Ok. Fair enough. But take your little statement there (and your cliche usage of the pejorative "Zionist") and you set yourself up for that claim. When one grants nationalism to every people in the world but Jews - Zionism, in case you didn't know, is the Jewish nationalism - than one is entering into racist territory.

Utter nonsense on your part. Either you are ignorant of the meanings behind the gestures you make, or you are aware. And if the latter, don't be surprised when you get the critique that follows.

Enough with the idiocy. You call for dialogue while basically calling for the elimination of Israel? Get real. That's hardly a dialogue.

By j.rice at Tue, 2006-08-08 19:10

Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, and Platonic Rhetoricians

Those of us familiar with the rhetorical tactics of Zionism will not be surprised by the sleight of hand involved in smearing any and every critique of Zionism as "anti-Semitic" and "entering into racist territory" and the vicious slander that a call for binationalism = the elimination of Israel.

I will nevertheless persist in my Bakhtinian commitment to dialogic communication. So let me try once again:

Zionism is problematic because the notion of a "Jewish state" ipso facto consigns non-Jewish citizens of Israel to second-class citizens. As Tony Judt has argued, "the very idea of a 'Jewish state' -- a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is an importation of "a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law."

The Zionist claim that a binational state = the elimination of Israel is bitterly ironic given that the people actually in danger of elimination are Palestinians whose existence shows clearly that the establishment of a pure Jewish state can only take place if they (the Palestinians) are ethnically cleansed from the land.

You assert that "When one grants nationalism to every people in the world but Jews - Zionism, in case you didn't know, is the Jewish nationalism - than one is entering into racist territory." But, as the Tony Judt quote above indicates, nationalism predicated on religious and/or ethnic separatism is immoral in the eyes of most of the world. Advocates of this kind of nationalism (apartheid-era South Africa, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran) are rightly seen as racist/bigoted/fanatics.

Judt's article can be found here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671

I note that in a rhetoric site, interlocutors are insulted as "anti-Semitic," "racist," "idiots," and accused of advocating genocide. All this without argument. I wish I could genuinely say I'm surprised, but having attended rhetorical studies conventions, this only seems to me symptomatic of the parlous state of the field.

By elijah at Tue, 2006-08-08 22:02

"Blatant and Obvious" is not a Persuasive Label...

Do you really need Gramsci to say, "The Jews control the media"?

By jim at Tue, 2006-08-08 17:20

Gramsci Among the Rhetoricians

No, but Gramsci would appear to be a better resource than reading from the David Horowitz playbook.

Now, while I am leery of the endless handwringing about "civility," it seems to me that slinging an "anti-Semitic" smear is not only unethical, it does a disservice to your field (rhetoric). A lifetime's work attempting to refute Plato and we get this kind of argument-free response?
Let's try again: I am a Gramscian myself, so I'm not surprised he's not understood here in the belly of the capitalist beast (the U.S.). So let's turn to Burke and adopt the comic view, shall we? In which case, one of us is mistaken -- certainly, in our view of each other, but also perhaps on the facts regarding the conflict in the Levant. In which case, Prof., your task would be to marshall the evidence to critique my point of view. Perhaps then if we cannot stop the killing in the Middle East, we may be able to stop writing footnotes to Plato.

By elijah at Tue, 2006-08-08 18:23

I've Never Been Compared to D'Ho Before, But Here Goes....

I suspect that we're past the possibility of reasoned dialogue here, so let me just point out that sometimes it comes down to recognizing which of the following countries would allow this unpleasant exchange:

Israel
The Capitalist Beast US
Canada
The EU (barely, I won't show any cartoons)
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Iran
Shia-controlled Iraq, or the previously Sunni-Controlled Iraq

I think Gramsci would have wished to retain the bourgeois freedoms won by the liberal capitalist revolution rather than let them be trashed by Ba'athism or revolutionary islamism. Sometimes you have to make a choice.

By jim at Tue, 2006-08-08 19:11

Internationalism and the Complicities of Bourgeois Marxism

Prof. Aune shakes his head saying that "he suspects that we're past the possibility of reasoned dialogue here." But why? Unlike the Professor and j. rice, I have not hurled any insults at him (though I argued that his argument-free smear of me as anti-Semitic echoes the Horowitzian style). Even then, I urged him to adopt Burke's comic view and engage me on that plane. For a person whose field preaches civic deliberation, turning away from an argument after the slightest amount of disagreement seems rather...well...anti-democratic.

I must say that the argument the Professor offers as a response to mine is disappointing, not because it represents a particularly bad argument (though indeed it is), but because such a statement would come from a Marxist.

Prof. Aune offers a false choice between capitalist "U.S." and Islamic "Saudi Arabia." I feel almost embarrassed by this argument: does a Marxist have to be reminded of U.S. sponsorship of regimes such as Saudi Arabia? Of its overthrow of democratic governments and its frustration of democratic aspirations that created the conditions such as the one that brought about the Islamic Revolution in Iran?

In contrast to the provincialism of U.S. academics, the Marxist vision -- at least in its academic versions -- has been distinguished by its internationalist perspective. Prof. Aune's jingoism represents an astonishing ahistoricity from the very ideological perspective that arguably introduced history to philosophy. (I'm not sure if this jingoism emerged only after 9/11, though I first heard him give voice to comments such as the above at the 2002 RSA conference, much to the disbelief and dismay of this young radical. Fortunately, Dana Cloud was present at the same conference and in her talk proved just how important an engaged, internationalist Marxist voice was in resisting the smug depredations of bourgeois capitalism).

By elijah at Tue, 2006-08-08 23:38

Are you the Creator of Hi and Lois?

Elijah, pal, what's happening here? I have no argument to use in response to your words, since argument isn't going to change anything. While you've "attended rhetorical conventions," you might be surprised to learn that rhetoric as an action extends beyond high school debate-style arguments. Why the fundamentlist trip over proper Marxist party lines? Why the cliches about "bourgeois capitalism," which is an insult I used to hurl at my parents when I took my first political philosophy class in college?

Most of all, why the sureness in your own beliefs? Is it possible you're not totally right? Is it possible these people you quote (like a good fundamentlist) might not have the whole story? Is it possible this situation is just fucked up--and not just a consequence of Jews acting badly? What's so wrong with not knowing *exactly* the cause of the problems there? What's so wrong with spreading blame around to everyone? What's so wrong with saying that it's not right for a bullying paramilitary group to kidnap young soldiers, launch rockets at folks living on farms, or call for the destruction of a whole people? Do you have something at stake in ignoring that stuff?
Like I said, this is not an argument. These statements I'm making--and the statements that you've made/will make--are simply epideictic. That's okay with me. But I had to say something. The laughter was too great to keep quiet.

By jenny at Wed, 2006-08-09 08:44

Don't look at me, y'all heard the question, proles. Are you the creators of Hi and Lois?

The Structural Transformation of the Howlersphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

2006-07-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

Charlie Brooker muses on the "conversations" going on in our blog cafes:

"Last week I wrote a load of nonsense about flags and idiocy; as well as appearing in print, it also turned up on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" blog-o-site, where passersby are encouraged to scrawl their own responses beneath the original article.

Some people disagreed with the piece, some agreed; some found it funny, some didn't. For half a nanosecond I was tempted to join in the discussion. And then I remembered that all internet debates, without exception, are entirely futile. So I didn't.

Article continues

There's no point debating anything online. You might as well hurl shoes in the air to knock clouds from the sky. The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional "live audience" quickly conspire to create a "perfect storm" of perpetual bickering.

Stumble in, take umbrage with someone, trade a few blows, and within about two or three exchanges, the subject itself goes out the window. Suddenly you're simply arguing about arguing. Eventually, one side gets bored, comes to its senses, or dies, and the row fizzles out: just another needless belch in the swirling online guffstorm.

But not for long, because online quarrelling is also addictive, in precisely the same way Tetris is addictive. It appeals to the "lab rat" part of your brain; the annoying, irrepressible part that adores repetitive pointlessness and would gleefully make you pop bubblewrap till Doomsday if it ever got its way. An unfortunate few, hooked on the futile thrill of online debate, devote their lives to its cause. They roam the internet, actively seeking out viewpoints they disagree with, or squat on messageboards, whining, needling, sneering, over-analysing each new proclamation - joylessly fiddling, like unhappy gorillas doomed to pick lice from one another's fur for all eternity.

Still, it's not all moan moan moan in NetLand. There's also the occasional puerile splutter to liven things up.

In the debate sparked by my gibberish outpouring, it wasn't long before rival posters began speculating about the size of their opponent's dicks. It led me to wonder - has the world of science ever investigated a casual link between penis size and male political leaning?

I'd theorise that, on the whole, rightwing penises are short and stubby, hence their owners' constant fury. Lefties, on the other hand, are spoiled for length, yet boast no girth whatsoever - which explains their pained confusion. I flit from one camp to the other, of course, which is why mine's so massive it's got a full-size human knee in the middle. And a back. A big man's back.

Anyway, if we must debate things online, we might as well debate that. It's not like we'll ever resolve any of that other bullshit, is it?

Click. Mine's bigger than yours. Click. No it isn't. Click. Yes it is. Click. Refresh, repost, repeat to fade." (Charlie Brooker, "Supposing ... There's Only One Thing Worth Debating Online," The Guardian, June 2, 2006).

Hypothetical Grotesquerie

2006-07-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

Charlie Brooker defends evil thoughts:

"The other day a friend told me that whenever he sees someone lingering near the edge of a tube platform, a little voice in his head starts wondering what would happen if he shoved them in front of the train. Don't panic - he's NEVER actually going to do it (at least I hope not) - it's just a fleeting paranoid notion, a darkly mischievous thought about doing the worst thing imaginable.

Article continues

I have a similar thing with small creatures. On the rare occasions I've found myself handling, say, a hamster, part of me marvels at how easy it would be to simply crush its head between my fingers, or toss it in the air and kick it around like a Hacky Sack, laughing.

I've never done it, and I never will. But does hypothetically considering it make me a bad person? I hope not, because I think things like that all the time. It's the same bit of the brain that makes me idly speculate about jumping whenever I look over a high ledge. Some tiny inner demon with nobody's best interests at heart.

Speaking as a fully qualified neurologist, I reckon that demon nestles somewhere within the brain's sense of humour. Pretty much every comedy writer or funny person I've ever met is regularly visited by similar fantasies - transgressive siren-songs perpetually flickering at the fringe of consciousness. One described how, while splitting up with a long-term girlfriend, a minuscule part of him wanted to laugh out loud because it considered her weeping, pleading face faintly hilarious. Does that make him a misogynist psychopath? I don't think so. He was just amused by the very concept of doing something so inappropriately, outrageously detached. And then amused that this amused him. You've got to admire the demon's chutzpah.

It's not just real-life situations. My demon encourages me to think about horrible things that aren't there. A while ago, for instance, I entertained myself by thinking up the nastiest restaurant imaginable. It was in Paris, and only served crucified meat. The walls were lined with live cows and pigs nailed to crosses. They hung there, dying slowly and loudly, while diners sliced chunks off them to cook at skillets on the table. It was so revolting it made me laugh.

Obviously, if anyone actually opened such a place, I'd be outside screaming no with the best of them. I'd boo the bloody roof off. In real life, it's almost never right to nail live pigs to the wall. But in my head, it's always hilarious.

It doesn't amuse everyone, of course. Every so often I'll say or describe something preposterously cruel for comic effect and the person I'm trying to amuse simply screws their face up and looks a bit ill. At which point I feel compelled to say something far worse. Anyone who can't stomach a bit of hypothetical grotesquery needs to toughen up, because the way the world's going, we'll all spend our final days scrabbling through a pile of steaming rubble, desperately scavenging for bits of charred baby to eat with our bare hands. And under those circumstances, a dark sense of humour will be a massive advantage.

So you might as well get in training now. Think of the worst things in the world, then laugh at them. Maybe not aloud, but laugh none the less. It's not time-wasting tastelessness. It's future-proofing. It's good for you." (Charlie Brooker, "Supposing...Bad Thoughts Are Good For You," The Guardian, July 7, 2006).

Jogo Bonito

2006-07-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

John Carlin's piece below is an entertaining primer to the world cup, flawed though it is by racist "national character" nonsense:

"You look at Ronaldinho, the world's most talented and lethal soccer player, and what you see is the smiling epitome of

Brazil

's culture of pleasure. You look at John Terry and you have a deeper understanding of how it was that a small island nation once conquered half the known world. Terry — the captain of the English Premier League champions, Chelsea, and pillar of his national team's defense — has the height, the bulk and the air of cold command of the red-coated British sergeant who in days of empire instilled terror in his troops and enemy forces alike. When the two went head-to-head in a game earlier this year, it was more than a clash between two different ways of playing soccer, of approaching life; it was the proverbial case, or so it seemed, of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.

It happened in March, at a critical moment in last season's clash of European titans, Ronaldinho's Barcelona against Chelsea, in the round of 16 in the Champions League tournament, club soccer's biggest competition. The score was 0-0, and 12 minutes were left in the game. Ronaldinho received the ball in the center of midfield, 15 yards from the Chelsea penalty area. Around him were four Chelsea defenders. Ronaldinho left one of them for dead and avoided two more. The fourth, the last man standing between him and glory, was John Terry. Ronaldinho's response was to do what he does better than anybody else: the unthinkable. Having mesmerized the Chelsea ranks with the speed of his feet and the swerve of his dancing hips, he met brute force with brute force — and won. He shouldered the English Goliath — perfectly fairly — to the ground. And it was from this abject vantage that London's finest looked on, a picture of defeat, as the samba-loving Brazilian whipped the ball low and true, past the Chelsea goalkeeper and into the net.

That electric sequence of events — barely four seconds elapsed between Ronaldinho's receiving and dispatching of the ball — captured, for the watching millions, one of soccer's great truisms: the English invented the game, but the Brazilians perfected it. They found the game brick and left it marble. They patented what has become known the world over as jogo bonito, the beautiful game, a style of soccer that combines exuberance with success and that Ronaldinho, more than any other player alive, embodies. People respect winners, they admire them, but they don't always love them. The bright, canary-yellow shirt of the Brazilian national team — the canarinho shirt, they fondly call it in Brazil — elicits feelings in soccer fans everywhere that unite reverence for Brazil's unquestioned supremacy (it has won the World Cup, held every four years, five times in the last half century) with an affection, a warm sense of personal ownership, that transcends the sport's inherent tribalism. Every neutral fan following this month's World Cup will want Brazil to win, and every soccer-lover with a national stake in the competition will have Brazil as his second team. Soccer is the world's biggest religion, cutting across race, faith, geography, ideology and gender like no other global phenomenon. Brazil is the religion's favorite church.

Why the love? Some of it comes from the fact that Brazil is a country without enemies. That a defeat at home to Uruguay in the World Cup final in 1950 still ranks, in all seriousness, as one of the greatest tragedies in Brazilian history bespeaks a nation without much of a war-making tradition. Brazilians prefer a rip-roaring carnival. More important, perhaps, is the appearance of racial harmony that Brazil's national team projects. Some players are black, some are white, but usually they are a blend of the two, the shades and shapes representing the range of types that come from the Amazon basin, from West Africa and from the European countries that have contributed so much to the genetic cocktail: Portugal, Italy and Germany. The first superstar of Brazilian soccer was the green-eyed, curly-haired Arthur Friedenreich, who scored the winning goal in a celebrated 1-0 victory over Uruguay in 1919. Racial stereotypes — blacks are more graceful, say, or whites more tenacious — break down. Ask any Brazilian who, in terms of pure skill, was the greatest Brazilian player ever, and chances are he'll be torn between the competing claims of the brown-skinned Garrincha and the blond Zico.

All this would be of merely anecdotal interest, however, were the Brazilians not so darn good. For the first six decades after the arrival in 1894 of soccer's first evangelist in Brazil, a handlebar-mustachioed British gent by the name of Charles Miller, Brazilian soccer made few waves beyond Latin American shores. But then, in 1958, when the World Cup was held in Sweden, Brazil's impact on the competition was seismic. Thanks to grainy black-and-white images still replayed on TV today, the aftershocks of a goal scored in the final by a 17-year-old named Pelé, a spindly unknown, continue to deliver their timeless thrill. What Pelé did no one had ever seen before. Wearing the clumpy boots of the era, he flicked the heavy leather ball used in those days over the head of a towering Swedish defender, spun around him, got to the ball before it touched the ground and drilled it, on the volley, into the net.

Brazil also won the next World Cup, held in Chile. This time Pelé was out injured most of the tournament and Garrincha was the star of the show. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano says of Garrincha, in a lyrical little book titled "Soccer in Sun and Shadow," that "in the entire history of football no one made more people happy." Partly deformed from birth by polio (one leg was shorter than the other and both were bent like bows), he possessed such genius with a ball at his feet that each game he played became, as Galeano writes, "a circus ... a party." Clown and juggler at the same time, he entrenched the myth — so much a part of the Brazilian legend — that in his country people play soccer less for victory than for fun.

Brazil's apotheosis, and Pelé's, came in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The consensus is absolute among soccer's intelligentsia that this was the greatest team ever to grace the game. Some debate lingers as to who was the greater player, Pelé or Diego Maradona (who would win the World Cup with — or rather, for — Argentina in 1986, also in Mexico). But no one questions the pre-eminence — the peerless combination of flamboyance and effectiveness — of that 1970 Brazil team, with its supporting stars like Jairzinho, Rivelino, Gérson and Tostão.

A lean period followed: it would be 24 years before Brazil won the World Cup again. But such was the power of the spell cast by that triple-winning Pelé team that the legend not only remained alive but, as legends do, flourished. It didn't matter how strong or weak they looked on paper, no team ever got the pulse racing the way the canary-shirted Brazilians did. Then in 1994, led by Romário, Brazil resumed its dominance by winning the World Cup in the United States. Brazil lost in the final against France in Paris in 1998, but then won again in Yokohama in 2002 as the unstoppable onslaught of "the three R's" — Rivaldo, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho — swept all before them.

This time around Brazil is again the favorite to win, on rational as well as sentimental grounds. A 4-1 crushing of Argentina (a two-time World Cup winner and always among the favorites) in a tournament in Germany last summer has lent force to an idea that has been building since 2002: that Brazil would not only win again, but do so in a fashion not seen since 1970. Ronaldo, the game's most admired striker in recent years and three times the winner of the FIFA World Player of the Year award (voted on by all the national-team coaches and captains), is back. So is Cafu, the captain, and Roberto Carlos, the most offensive-minded left back in the history of the game and the one with the most thunderous shot. Three new young superstars have emerged: Adriano, a bull of a man up front with the touch of a ballerina; Kaká, a midfielder who glides over the grass like Gene Kelly; and the young Robinho, small and doe-like but reckoned by many in Brazil to be a Pelé in the making. And, most exciting of all, this year's team has Ronaldinho, the reigning two-time winner of World Player of the Year and winner of the no-less-prestigious European Footballer of the Year prize last November. In May, he led Barcelona to its second consecutive La Liga title in Spain and to European victory in the Champions League.

Whatever happens at this World Cup (and there are some who worry about the aging legs of Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos and Cafu), Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, an attacking midfielder known to everyone as Ronaldinho, has already done more than enough not only to keep the Brazilian legend alive but also to breathe new life into it. Not so much because of what he has achieved (an enormous amount for a player who just turned 26), but because of the manner in which he has done it. Like Pelé, he scores sublime goals, and lots of them; he is arguably the world's best and most penetrating passer, the master of the assist; he may be unequaled in the dominion he exerts over the ball. On top of all that, he plays with a big smile on his face, even when he misses a shot. Whereas so many professionals in every sport seem to carry the world's worries on their faces as they play, Ronaldinho radiates the fun of a carefree 8-year-old boy. Which happens to be how old he was when his father suffered a heart attack in a swimming pool and drowned. After that shock, which he has never forgotten (following every goal he scores, he looks up to heaven and points a finger that says, "For you, Dad"), Ronaldinho might be excused were he introverted or morose. Yet he seems the exact opposite.

He is courteous, too — one of those "After you," "No, after you" types — and seems to have few of the airs and graces one might expect of a regular superstar, to say nothing of the most globally celebrated sportsman alive. He does not strut so much as shuffle, and when asked to describe that goal during which he sent John Terry tumbling to the ground, he gracefully makes excuses for the Englishman. "I had the good fortune to be coming at him having built up some speed, while he was moving from a standing position," he says, "so I had a big advantage."

While proudly Brazilian — "I just love the way we play the game!" — Ronaldinho acknowledges a debt to Europe, whose faster, more aggressive style of play has obliged him to become a more complete, "much stronger" athlete physically. (And a lot richer: Brazil is a dynamic and sensual country, but also a poor one — in Europe, players can earn 5 or 10 times more money than they can in Brazil.) Still, Brazil provides an edge, in Ronaldinho's view, in the extra degree of obsessiveness with which soccer permeates national life. "It doesn't matter where you go in Brazil, it doesn't matter where you look, there are people playing football. All day and all night, children with children, fathers with their sons, grandfathers with their grandchildren, adults with adults, women or men — everybody, everywhere. And if they're not playing with a ball, they'll be playing with a soft-drink can."

Yet there does seem to be some essential characteristic, something more than mere quantity, that distinguishes Brazilian soccer from that played by everyone else. Juca Kfouri, a leading TV and newspaper commentator in Brazil, likes to compare Brazilian soccer with the English original. The latter, he says, "is more tactical, more disciplined, more rigidly adhering to the rules the coach imposes. In Brazil, methods exist in order to be dismantled. That is why, when Brazil and England have played, Brazil almost always wins by scoring goals that are not out of the book, goals that come as a complete surprise."

Tostão, who played with Pelé on Brazil's team in 1970 (beating England along the way), is a huge fan of Ronaldinho, and he agrees with Kfouri that what sets Brazilian soccer above the rest is what he calls its "daring" imagination.

"Globalization has obviously impacted on soccer, too," says Tostão, who is now Brazil's most respected sports newspaper columnist. "Strategy and tactics are practically the same the world over. In that sense, soccer has become more like basketball. Even in terms of sheer skill, the difference is not all that great between one country and another. And good technique can be taught. Look at a player like Zidane," he explains, referring to Zinédine Zidane, the midfielder for Real Madrid and the French national team. He has as much ability on the ball as any Brazilian. That is why, Tostào says, the difference lies in the mind. "Brazilian soccer has more of the imponderable about it. There is more variation in the Brazilian game than in the European one. Brazilian players have more of the magic of invention."

The English team captain, David Beckham, Tostão suggests, has the skill to do what a Brazilian player might, but he doesn't because he is trapped in his English cultural mind-set. He cannot tap into what Tostão says is "the imaginative unconscious of Brazilian football, transmitted down from one generation to the next."

That collective unconscious is what Ronaldinho perhaps refers to, without quite articulating it that way, when he addresses the conundrum of how it is that all of the top Brazilians play in Europe yet somehow contrive to function as a team when they put on the canarinho shirt. "We left Brazil young but remained there till we were at least 15, usually more," he says. "So we all served the same apprenticeship, and when we meet in the national team, there is an ease of understanding. Also, to be in the Brazil team you have to play football of very high quality, and when you play with people so good, the game becomes easy and things work out naturally." (Ronaldinho is determined, however, as is Tostão, to dispel the myth that Brazilian players are so naturally gifted that victory comes easily to them, no sweat or discipline required. "It's an absolute myth," Tostão says. "We play a collective game, as disciplined as anybody else's." Ronaldinho says: "We prepare for a game a lot more than people imagine. People think that we run out on the pitch, all laughter and joy, and then it's goal, goal, goal. No.")

Ronaldinho may get close to the secret of Brazilian soccer — the alliance of discipline and skill with superior imagination — when he explains his role with the team. "When I train," he says, "one of the things I concentrate on is creating a mental picture of how best to deliver that ball to a teammate, preferably leaving him alone in front of the rival goalkeeper. So what I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he's good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he's stronger on his right or his left foot. That's my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game."

Ronaldinho imagines the game so well that something is happening in the world of soccer that would have seemed unthinkable 10, 5 or even 2 years ago. People are beginning to wonder whether Ronaldinho may be worthy of mention in the same breath as the holy twosome of Pelé and Maradona. "The big polemic is already on here in Brazil," Kfouri says, "and older guys of my generation, we resist making that comparison, naturally. But you know what? There is no way of avoiding it — Ronaldinho is reinventing football. He is the most creative, most entertaining player we've seen anywhere in years."

Maradona himself said much the same thing in an interview with the Spanish daily Sport. "It's impressive how Ronaldinho can combine both technique and speed," the Argentine said. "It's only possible because he has a privileged mind. He's such a quick thinker. He knows what he's going to do before the ball gets to him. ... He's a show on his own."

Indeed, he's such a one-man show that, Kfouri points out, Tostão caused a great flutter in the soccer world when he asked in a recent column in Brazil's biggest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, whether Ronaldinho might be placed on the highest pedestal of all. It was a momentous thought, and mildly shocking, coming from a man who had had the good fortune to play in the Brazil forward line 36 years ago alongside the player known ever since in Brazil as O Rei — the King.

"Yes," Tostão admits, "I have raised this question. I have made the point that in 2002 Ronaldinho was as important a player as any in the Brazil team, and yet today he is more of a footballer than he was then. Look, I played with Pelé. Pelé has always been the greatest for me. And I believe Ronaldinho is still beneath him, but — "

But that goal against Chelsea? That triumph of Brazilian poetry over English prose? Wouldn't Pelé have been proud of that? "Yes. But it's not just the goals Ronaldinho scores. It's those passes he lays on a plate for his teammates. He knocked a great Milan team out in the semifinal of the Champions League that way, delivering a magically weighted assist. His passing is as decisive as his goals are.

"Yes," Tostão continues, pensive, hesitant, flirting with a heresy, "it is possible. Who knows? A year from now, we could be saying that Ronaldinho is as good as Pelé was."

(John Carlin, "Most Bonito," New York Times, June 4, 2006).

Jogo Bonito

2006-07-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

Sport has long functioned as a metonymy of "national character" (in other words, it remains one of the greatest channels of tribalism). Perhaps it is then inevitable that the soccer world cup has triggered a burst of crude stereotyping (from fans and writers alike). Tony Karon shows how:

"I have a pretty good idea where Osama bin Laden will be on June 14 -- and June 19, and again on June 23. Not his exact location, but it's a safe bet he'll be in front of a TV tuned in to Saudi Arabia's World Cup soccer matches with, respectively, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Spain. Legend has it that soccer is one of bin Laden's guilty pleasures. He's unlikely to miss the spectacle of the men from the land of the Prophet taking on the infidels of al-Andalus. He probably has a soft spot for Tunisia too, that country being the only one on record thus far to see one of its professional soccer players attempt to join al Qaeda's martyrs.

Nor will bin Laden be alone among America's enemies in spending June engrossed in the quadrennial spectacle of the World Cup, staged this time in Germany. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad has even threatened to show up if Iran progresses beyond the first round. Seeking to burnish his populist credentials at home, Ahmedinajad recently allowed himself to be photographed in sweats kicking a ball around with the Iranian team during a training session. You can bet Kim Jong-il will watch, too, even though it is South Korea that represents his nation's hopes this year.

President Bush may give the event a miss -- one can only wonder what he would make of a game in which the U.S. has a negligible chance of being world champion; for Americans with qualms about their country's imperial role, by contrast, supporting the plucky and rather well-liked outsiders of Team USA is an opportunity for guilt-free patriotic fervor. But you can be sure that Bush allies like Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, Jacques Chirac, Junichiro Koizumi, and Silvio Berlusconi (who actually owns AC Milan, one of Italy's top teams) will watch their countries' every game.

No global event commands anything close to the attention paid the World Cup on all five continents. As many as 3 billion people are expected to watch some of it on TV, while 250 million more will cluster around radios to follow every play. Having caught the 1974 and 1978 tournaments by radio from a South Africa without TV coverage, I can sympathize with the TV-less Angolans, Togoans, Ghanaians, and Ivoirians of today. (I took in the live drama via the BBC on short-wave, then waited two weeks for the visuals, courtesy of the White House Hotel, a Cape Town brothel that was diversifying its revenue stream by showing imported pirate videos of the games.)

The billions who tune into the World Cup are watching a game that, at the highest level, largely negates all advantages of social class or even physical stature -- the combination of speed, skill, imagination and organization required to prevail is a great leveler. But at the World Cup, soccer is far more than a game.

"What do they of cricket know who only cricket know," wrote the legendary Trinidadian historian and socialist CLR James, insisting that the spectacle of men in white flannels on a grassy oval engaged in a five-day contest of bat and ball, with strictly observed breaks for lunch and afternoon tea, could only be properly understood in the context of the political and cultural conflicts of the British Empire. If James had lived long enough to see the national team of his beloved Trinidad qualify for the elite 32 teams that will contest the 2006 World Cup, he'd surely have made the same point about soccer (even if, like most of humanity, he'd have called it "football").

James recognized sport as a ritualized combat, matching only war in its ability to channel national passions. Those passions are tied, for better or worse, to an almost mythic connection fans make between their team and their national narrative -- when facing Germany, English fans routinely chant lines like: "Two World Wars and one World Cup" (linking their defeats of Germany on the battlefield and the soccer field).

As James saw it, playing cricket matches against England offered its former colonial subjects, at least ritually, a chance to demolish the claims of cultural superiority through which the British had for so long rationalized imperial rule. So, too, soccer: The roar heard across the Irish Diaspora when the Republic of Ireland team scores against England expresses a passion that long predates the game of soccer -- the more jingoistic among the English fans respond with bloodcurdling anti-IRA songs. Millions of Africans walked a little taller that summer's day four years ago when Senegal beat its former colonial master, France, then the reigning world champion.

James also noted the tendency of colonized peoples to develop their own idiom of play, evolving styles based on their skills and patterns of social organization that tended to confound the colonizer even while playing within his rules.

The last World Cup final pitted Brazil against Germany, teams that represent global North-South polar opposites in the way the game is played. As Muhammad Ali was celebrated not just for his unique skills in the ring but for his iconic resistance to the racial order, so the universal popularity of Brazil is based not only on its exquisitely poetic style -- the "Joga Bonito" (beautiful game) -- but also on its role as a proxy representative of the Global South.

The German game epitomizes the industrialized West: physical power, relentless drive, unshakable organization and a machine-like efficiency in punishing opponents' mistakes. It's a kind of Blitzkrieg -- the modern German game, as Simon Kuper has noted, had its roots in Nazi sports culture and the militaristic virtues it lionized -- that overwhelms opponents with physical power on the ground and in the air, often winning "ugly" by a single goal. The best-known German players of the past half century have been goalkeepers, field commanders in defense and midfield, as well as clinical if artless goal-poaching forwards. There has never been a Pelé on the German team; in Brazil, by contrast, each year brings a new crop of awesomely talented teenagers from the favelas whose audacious skill and flair inevitably anoints them as "the next Pelé."

Brazil's style is more akin to advanced guerrilla warfare in which the insurgents have the momentum and the confidence. They combine impossible skill with breathtaking audacity and guile, an ability to shoot from great distances and apply boot to ball in a manner that improbably "bends" its trajectory. The telepathy with which they are able to anticipate each other's movements allows them to dazzle both the opposition and the crowd with the fluidity of their passing movements and their propensity for doing the unexpected. The adversary literally never knows where the next attack will come from, or what it will be. And the smiles of the Brazilians, even in crucial games, tell you that they're enjoying themselves. On the field, you'll rarely see a German player smile.

When Ronaldinho, currently rated the greatest player in the world, spotted the English goalkeeper David Seaman two yards off the goal line in their 2002 World Cup clash, he unleashed a 40-yard free kick that looped over Seaman's outstretched gloves, wickedly dipping and curling into the top corner of England's goal. So thunderstruck were the English TV commentators that they insisted the strike was a fluke, a pass that went fortuitously awry. It's for such moments that the soccer fans of the Global South live.

Globalizing the Local Game

National idioms of play may, however, be on the wane, as Europe's professional club leagues -- housing almost all of the world's leading players -- create nearly year-round the sort of spectacle for a global-satellite TV audience once restricted to the World Cup. In many developing countries today (including Brazil), ever fewer people attend domestic league games, reserving their soccer time religiously for TV broadcasts of the top European leagues where they're more likely to see the best players from their own countries.

Today, a match in London between Arsenal and Manchester United involves players from Latin America, much of West Africa, the Arab world, northern, southern, and eastern Europe, and Asia. The global TV audience it attracts is good news for the marketers of players' jerseys and other soccer paraphernalia, even if it's a tad bizarre for a British army squaddie patrolling Basra in southern Iraq to encounter a Mehdi Army militiaman sporting the shirt of Arsenal, the soldier's "local" London team – a jersey that he and his mates might wear on a night out back home to signify a kind of tribal identity. But there's nothing "local" about Arsenal anymore: When it played Real Madrid earlier this year in the Champion's League, there were only two Englishmen on the field, both playing for the Spanish side.

With this rapid globalization of the "local" game comes a homogenization of styles: England, today, has one or two players who like to run at the defense with the ball at their feet and can bend a shot from 40 yards; Brazil now plays with one or two "holding" midfielders, that traditional European demolition man whose job is simply to break up opposition attacks and win the ball for his more creative teammates.

By some estimates, there are now more than 4,000 Brazilians playing professional soccer abroad, which is why Brazil's starting lineup in Germany will consist entirely of European-based players. (Indeed, Brazil could probably field two teams for the tournament, each of which would feature many of Europe's leading club players.) Germany's squad, by contrast, is almost entirely home grown, although even in the German league, many of the leading lights are Brazilian imports.

This fusing of different styles has been accelerated by the migration of coaches as well as players. Last season, the coaches of the top five clubs in England's Premier League were Portuguese, Scottish, Spanish, French, and Dutch. Three Dutch coaches are bringing non-Dutch teams to the World Cup; most African teams are coached by Frenchmen and Germans, the English team by a Swede, and Portugal by a Brazilian.

Kicking People, not Balls

Despite the urge of fans to invoke national mythologies from a distant past, many European national teams now reflect the continent's increasingly cosmopolitan makeup. Thanks to postwar economic migrations into Europe from former colonies, many of the best players available to a European national team are second- and even third-generation immigrants. France fields a team in which all but one, sometimes two, players are of African or Arab origin. The racist politician Jean Marie Le Pen actually complained in 1998 that the World Cup winners were "not a real French team." Some English fans are more accepting of their cosmopolitan fate, as reflected in one of their chants that extols Britain's new national cuisine: "And we all love vindaloo..."

The world soccer authority FIFA allows players to play for the country of their citizenship or the one of their origins. This creates oddities: Dakar-born Patrick Vieira marshals France's midfield, while Paris-born Khalilou Fadiga stars for Senegal. In addition, the ability of emerging players to make professional migrations seeking fame and fortune sometimes tempts soccer federations to recruit for the national team by fast-tracking the citizenship of promising players. In recent weeks, a Dutch effort to expedite the citizenship process for Ivoirian striker Salomon Kalou fell afoul of that country's new chill on immigration.

If it had succeeded, Kalou would have been in the bizarre position of playing against an Ivory Coast team that happens to include his brother, Bonaventure. Meanwhile, the luckiest Brazilian going to Germany is surely Francileudo Dos Santos, a France-based striker who wouldn't even come in tenth among contenders for his position on the Brazilian team; but fast-tracked into instant citizenship by Tunisia, he is now that country's leading goal-scorer. (Hopefully he will have learned to avoid offending the fans of his adopted country, as he did two years ago by draping himself in the Brazilian flag to celebrate victory.)

Although many of the stars of almost every domestic league from Russia westward are from the African Diaspora (which includes Brazil), an astonishing level of racism persists among fans and even coaches at the highest levels of the game. Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, for example, bemoaned the globalization of his domestic league thus: "The more Ukrainians there are playing in the national league, the more examples there are for the young generation. Let them learn from [our players] and not some zumba-bumba whom they took off a tree, gave two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.''

Then there was the Spanish team's coach, Luis Aragones, caught on TV telling striker Jose Antonio Reyes that he was better than his French Arsenal teammate Thierry Henry. Except Aragones didn't say Henry's name, he said, "that black shit." A few days later, he insisted that there was nothing racist about the remark: "Reyes is ethnically a gypsy," said Aragones. "I have got a lot of gypsy and black friends. All I did was to motivate the gypsy by telling him he was better than the black."

In many European stadiums, today, black players are targeted for racial abuse in the form of ape noises and bananas thrown from the stands. In fact, the World Cup offers a range of opportunities for the racist xenophobes in the ranks of many countries' "ultra" football fans -- those who go to games not only to support their side in a ritual of combat, but to seek actual combat against the ultras of the other side. For years, England's games were a rallying and brawling point for the racist far right. They nonetheless looked positively tame when compared with the Serbian ultras originally grouped around the fan club of Red Star Belgrade. Under their leader Arkan, they became the core of the notorious "Tiger" militia accused by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal of some of the most brutal "ethnic cleansing" violence in Bosnia from 1991 to 1993.

As Europe confronts the challenge of integrating millions of immigrants on whose labor the survival of their welfare economies depend, soccer matches increasingly become the avenue for a political ritual of a different type -- channeling rampant racism. Not without reason do German authorities fear that the country's resurgent neo-Nazis will use the World Cup as an opportunity to announce their presence to a watching world. If they do, they will have plenty of allies in the "ultras" of Serbia, Poland, Italy and even England.

Branding the Game

Although the "national narrative" that binds fans to their teams is open to progressive or reactionary appropriation, it's not the game's driving force any more. Soccer, today, is a multibillion-dollar global industry whose power centers are transnational corporations -- the moneyed clubs of Europe whose financial well-being depends on the ability of their "brand" to sell merchandise from Baghdad to Beijing. Manchester United may be based in a city whose prosperity has declined with that of the British textile industry, but most of the young men sporting its jersey from Gaza to Guangdong would undoubtedly struggle to locate the home of "their" team on a map. And it's a safe bet that the Ecuadorian busboy and the Bangkok cab driver wearing the blue and red jersey of Barcelona are blissfully unaware of "their" team's centrality to Catalan nationalism.

Local icons have become global brands. Mancunians might put away their Manchester United jerseys and don England's colors during the World Cup, but most of their team's stars will actually be playing against England in the shirts of Holland, Portugal, Argentina, Serbia, and France. For Manchester United's management, however, having their stars represent any nation's team is a problem. Wayne Rooney, United's star striker, for example, is being raced back to fitness from a broken foot because England's hopes depend on him. Should he aggravate the injury playing in the World Cup, Manchester United -- which paid close to $40 million to sign Rooney -- could suffer potentially huge financial losses once the league season resumes in September.

That's why Manchester United and 17 other top clubs in Europe are agitating to be given a share of the revenues generated by the World Cup. They argue that it is their "assets" who are generating the revenue, at great risk to the clubs that hold their contracts. As the employers of most of the world's best players, soccer's collective corporate management has considerable leverage in challenging the sovereignty of national federations in the organization of the game.

No such problem exists for the other major corporate interest in the game, the makers of equipment and apparel. Their sponsorship of the World Cup and its teams stands to make them billions of dollars in revenues. Nike has an advantage, sponsoring Team Brazil as it does, as well as Holland, Portugal, Mexico, South Korea, and the USA among others. Adidas holds its own with Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, Japan and Trinidad (whose shirts will no doubt become a nightclub standard, and have already been adopted as the fetish of choice by Scottish fans whose own team failed to qualify). Puma sponsors mostly outsiders like Cote d'Ivoire and Iran, although Italy remains a credible contender.

Adidas could, however, be said to have the killer advantage. It supplies the tournament ball, whose appeal crosses all affiliations. Having already sold 10 million World Cup balls, and expecting another 5 million to bounce out of the stores by year's end, they could rack up close to a billion dollars in sales simply by catering to the desire of the rest of us to kick the "same" ball the stars do.

From contemporary geopolitical and cultural conflicts (or their historic echoes) to the impact of globalization, the World Cup offers a real-time snapshot of the state of our world. This summer, when Portugal plays Angola or England meets Trinidad, colonial history won't be forgotten among the fans of the formerly colonized. Whenever England has played Argentina in the past 24 years, the fans of both countries have been asked to relive the Falklands/Malvinas War -- and I'd be surprised if World War II memories escape a mention when Australia plays Japan. Yet, the game will also be infused with contemporary political drama, should fate decree that the USA meets Iran.

Sometimes more than just a game, the World Cup nonetheless remains a contest whose outcome is never certain. Winners are still determined by an alchemy of balletics and poetics, skill and cooperation, athleticism and sheer luck. Orchestrating the movement of a ball and eleven players across the field with such rapidity would be hard enough, even without eleven other players trying to disrupt them. The power relations that prevail in the real world count for little in those 90 minutes of play -- and, no matter how fierce the "combat," at game's end, in a time-honored World Cup ritual, players from both sides exchange shirts in a mark of respect and friendship. A snapshot, then, not only of a world in conflict, but also of the possibilities of resolution by means other than war. (Tony Karon, "How To Watch the World Cup," TomDispatch.Com, June 8, 2006).

American Civilization, Barbaric Iraqis

2006-07-03T17:13:00.001-07:00

In memory of Abeer Qasim Hamza. My thoughts go out to you, little one, and to your family:

"Fifteen-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza was afraid, her mother confided in a neighbor.

As pretty as she was young, the girl had attracted the unwelcome attention of U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint that the girl had to pass through almost daily in their village in the south-central city of Mahmudiyah, her mother told the neighbor.

Abeer told her mother again and again in her last days that the soldiers had made advances toward her, a neighbor, Omar Janabi, said this weekend, recounting a conversation he said he had with the girl's mother, Fakhriyah, on March 10.

Fakhriyah feared that the Americans might come for her daughter at night, at their home. She asked her neighbor if Abeer might sleep at his house, with the women there.

Janabi said he agreed.

Then, "I tried to reassure her, remove some of her fear," Janabi said. "I told her, the Americans would not do such a thing."

Abeer did not live to take up the offer of shelter.

Instead, attackers came to the girl's house the next day, apparently separating Abeer from her mother, father and young sister.

Janabi and others knowledgeable about the incident said they believed that the attackers raped Abeer in another room. Medical officials who handled the bodies also said the girl had been raped, but they did not elaborate.

Before leaving, the attackers fatally shot the four family members -- two of Abeer's brothers had been away at school -- and attempted to set Abeer's body on fire, according to Janabi, another neighbor who spoke on condition of anonymity, the mayor of Mahmudiyah and a hospital administrator with knowledge of the case.

The U.S. military said last week that authorities were investigating allegations of a rape and killings in Mahmudiyah by soldiers of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 4th Infantry Division." (Ellen Knickmeyer, "Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings," Washington Post, Monday, July 3, 2006).

As Thick As Neoliberal Thieves: J. Bradford DeLong Edition

2006-06-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

J. Bradford DeLong -- with the pretext of discussing a blog post by the insufferable Tim Burke -- attempts a characteristically thuggish smear of J. L. Matory. This is not surprising. DeLong is the grotesque imbecile who labeled Gunter Grass a "crypto-Nazi scum" (apparently because Grass opposes neoliberalism) and is congenitally prone to periodic fits about Chomsky.

DeLong correctly reads Burke's neoliberal/neoconservative handwringing for what it is, the siren song of the "White Man's Burden," and he approvingly bleats forth:

"The question is: How far do you go? What do you do with somebody like Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria--ex-dictator, called by some (according to Wikipedia) the most corrupt man in Africa, who stole more than $10 billion from Nigeria for himself and his cronies? What do you do with those who worked for him? With their families? With those who advocate "culturally sensitive account[s]" of Babangida's rule "as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science cliches"?"

I won't take the time to critique the many enthymematic errors in DeLong's statement. But I am intrigued by the attack on Matory, who is the person that DeLong accuses of advocating "culturally sensitive accounts of Babangida's rule." [Note also the laughable equation of Matory's statement with Babangida's crimes]. In the text that DeLong links to, Matory speaks of his plan to write, in collaboration with his wife, "a culturally sensitive account of the inner workings of the dictatorship that ruled Africa's largest nation from 1985 to 1993. It is intended both as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science cliches about the nature of autocracy and corruption in Africa and as a historical study of the genesis of Nigeria's current political crisis."

The fact is that DeLong's link does not provide anywhere near adequate information to support his insinuation that Matory is an apologist for the Babangida regime -- which Matory describes as a "dictatorship." The link, moreover, is to something Matory states that he intends to write. Absent further elaboration of what Matory means by "culturally sensitive" and how this relates to Babangida's kleptocracy, it is not exactly clear what the "advocacy" alleged by DeLong amounts to. And for a person who frothes at the mouth over journalistic and scholarly errors, DeLong may want to be clearer on why he is incredulous at a proposal to correct "standardized journalistic and political science cliches."

I suspect that what may appear to be a gratuitous swipe is actually deeply-held and longrunning resentment at Matory for his relentless championing of the cause against Larry "a-woman's-place-is-in-the-kitchen" Summers. Summers, you will recall, is the padroni of DeLong's neoliberal friend, Andrei Shleifer.

And thus the circle closes: the Orwellian irony of having neoliberal thieves (a tautology if ever there was one) -- who from all accounts should be serving time alongside Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- preach at us about integrity would be laughable were it not for the destitution wrought by their sheer venality.

Grace

2006-06-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

Bendrix in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is surprised by grace:

"Its a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love." (Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, p. 110).

The Pedagogic Sublime

2006-05-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

'Tis the season for push-back. Charles Weise, Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Gettysburg College and Chair of the department, responds to student evaluations:

"Herewith a response to my critics.

1. Ouch, that’s harsh!

2. “God’s gift to Gettysburg College” is going a bit too far. Let’s just say that I think they’re very fortunate to have me.

3. But every time I slowed down one of you fell asleep.

4. The two of you are going to have to have this out between yourselves. I clearly will not be able to please both of you.

5. At least spell it right – it’s A-R-R-O-G-A-N-T P-R-I-C-K.

6. Why thank you, I believe you’re right. I attribute the fact that I “understand the material” to my 25 years of study in the area, including four years of undergraduate study, six years of graduate study, a Ph.D dissertation, thirteen years doing path-breaking research in the field, and the fact that this is the twelfth time I’ve taught this exact course.

7. I’m sorry you feel that way, but you see I have tenure. Bite me.

8. I cannot help you if you do not ask for help. Next time please raise your hand if you require assistance getting your head out of your own ass.

9. The Provost’s office requires only that I “be in my office” during office hours. Nowhere is it written that I cannot be under my desk with the door locked and my lights out.

10. Boxers." (Charles Weise or "Maynard," "A response to my critics," Creative Destruction, Monday May 15, 2006).

Affirming the Abstract

2006-05-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

Hollowentry on the logic of whiteness:

"There is a tactic on the part of many whites (myself included) to shift an argument away from the concrete to the metaphysical.

So if whites hear: 'racism is institutional', they throw back a seemingly existential parallel: White persyn says persyn of color bad = persyn of color says white persyn bad. Neither recognize each other's authentic humanity. Therefore equally bad.

Way closer to the truth: 'Fanon argues for an end to oppression' =/= 'KKK argues FOR oppression'. When concrete examples are presented, when reality intrudes, the bad faith fake existentialism breaks down.

If whites want to be good existentialists, I'd suggest they read Fanon. He never said whites are bad. He said racism is bad, colonialism is bad. At least my limited reading of Fanon is that anyone subjugated by either, and recognizes themselves and others as people of color whose humanity is not recognized, CHOOSES a solidarity and a recognition with other people of color against dehumanization. This is a creative affirming act. A white too can actively CHOOOSE not to contribute to racism and to colonialism, and live authentically and treat other people authentically, but that means more than doing nothing, it means getting involved in stopping organized systems of racist oppression, and way more than saying 'both sides are at fault' or whatever abstraction." (Hollowentry , comment on Woman of Color blog, 4/14/2006, Monday, April 10, 2006, “Immigration, Blogothropology, and a Day of Protest.”)

Ai Mu

2006-05-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hunter nearly makes lust respectable:

"It's one of those Washington things. You'd know it in a second. It's a "big event," generated entirely by large entities as they lumber through the universe in search of small amounts of leverage to use against each other. "Entities?" The corporations, governments, departments, associations, all those, er, units hiding behind monumental buildings on K or 16th or Massachusetts with their logos and receptionists and discreet plantings and high-end office suites, which never seem to make or sell anything, yet somehow, mysteriously, are at the center of power.

So it is with the "China Film Festival -- 2006 U.S.A.," which has been brokered by a litany of entities: the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Geographic Society, the China Film Bureau, among others, and from which everybody benefits, everybody has fun, everybody experiences a frisson of goodwill. Does it help the prospect of world peace? Probably not, but maybe it cuts down DVD pirating by 0.005 percent. It may also be a part of a Chinese Foreign Ministry charm offensive to coincide with President Hu Jintao's visit.

What can be seen is: important men in well-fitting dark suits dominating one end of an auditorium in a building as solid as Earth itself. All hair is trim. Age: roughly 40 through 65. It is the face of professional Washington. Some are American, some are Chinese; but after a bit you cannot tell them apart.

This is the opening event of the "festival" (most of which was closed to the public): A parliament of speakers was convened and a lot of words were spoken along the lines of this actual quote, "Therefore we can say that the film community is a bridge which can shorten the distance between countries." Blah, blah, or, to make the point more precise, blah, blah and, of course, blah.

However, in all this official celebration and meshing of big gears, the oil of well-paid smilers and handshakers . . . there was a moment when it all went away.

I mean vanished, as if vaporized. The whole entity-oriented assemblage of purpose-driven pilgrims, doing business in the capital of the free world on a rainy Monday morning, doing important work -- bingo. Gone.

Longtime observers are familiar with the phenomenon: As a part of the quest for attention and respect, Entities A, B and C will somehow get Celebrity A to join them, and Celebrity A's presence briefly galvanizes the dreariest, most corporate of events.

In this case, that celebrity is the 27-year-old daughter of an economist and a kindergarten teacher, a slight but not short (or tall) young woman of regal bearing and lively, intelligent eyes who seems almost a little embarrassed that such focus is beamed so brightly on her. Call it good breeding or good genes, but the moment when she enters National Geographic's Grosvenor Auditorium for her part in the "panel" (I can't stop using quotation marks!) you sense an audible gasp, the oxygen level in the room seems to dip as everyone sucks up an extra-large lungful of raw air, and then the flashbulbs start cracking off.

Standing nearby is Dan Glickman in a very nice suit as bespeaks the president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, and, guess what, nobody cares. He's a very important guy, but right now he's just another Joe Doakes with his mouth hanging open. He's also something he's never been before: He's in the way. Get out of the way, big boy, so we can see her!

Standing nearby is also the important Chinese official Zhang Pimin, bearing the exalted rank of China Film Bureau deputy director general, also in a very well-fitting suit, a man of dignity and power and prestige, and nobody cares. And it would help if the general would amscray, too; he's in the way.

Yours truly was sitting about 30 rows back, doing his usual imitation of Adlai Stevenson on a really fat day, and as exquisitely self-tuned as I am, I immediately ceased to notice myself, much less brood on my ample, deeply interesting problems.

For Ms. Zhang had come to Washington.

Star of heaven, star of night, blind us with your wondrous light. And she did.

Western audiences first saw Ziyi Zhang (that's her name Westernized, now permanently, from its Chinese form, Zhang Ziyi) in the phenomenally successful "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," of 2000, in which she was a sprite of martial-arts energy, all adorable, headstrong cuteness and ambition. To see her was to love her instantly, forever.

Oh, it gets better.

No one else from "Crouching Tiger" stayed big for long -- including poor Chow Yun-Fat, once the biggest star in all the world except the Americas -- but Zhang continued to prosper. She zoomed through "Rush Hour 2," she appeared in "Hero," then two years ago she blew the roof off in a romantic knife rhapsody called "House of Flying Daggers," in which she cavorted with a dancer's grace and a wood fairy's magic and a siren's beauty and won the hearts and minds of millions. Hollywood beckoned; soon she was fronting Steven Spielberg's production (Rob Marshall directed) of the phenomenal bestseller "Memoirs of a Geisha," at the very center of a major advertising campaign that featured her perfect features behind a pair of blue contact lenses.

Now she's here, lifting a wan wave and a brave smile in her Washington premiere, offering soporific quotes from behind the dais at the actual event. Other Ziyi obligations of the week included lunches and dinners, a screening of "House of Flying Daggers," standing still for the eternal pressing of flesh and unwanted eye contact that is at the heart of an official public appearance. And somewhere in there a sit-down with all the Johnny Reporters of Our Media Age, of whom there is, for unfathomable reasons, only one.

This lucky fellow finds himself alone with her -- but for a translator and a photographer; and next to her on a couch where she proves surprisingly warm and funny, yet at the same time a committed saleswoman for her client, the Chinese film industry.

She's wearing -- if you must know -- a black taffeta knee skirt, full and billowy, almost like a crinoline petticoat; a kind of tan tunic over a tank top; some discreet diamonds around the neck and on a big-faced wristwatch. Her hair is a thick cascade almost down to the waist, raven black. Her skin is unbearably flawless, her legs lithe and muscular. Are we missing anything? Sigh. Yeah, she also smells really good.

She looks -- well, a humble newsroom hack could try for years and never get her right, so let's turn to poets, who know a thing or two about adjective-slinging.

Ezra Pound, before he went mad as a March hare, played with the Japanese form of haiku and came up with: "Petals on a wet, black bough."

That gets the extraordinary clarity of her beauty, the way it cuts through fog and light and buzz to assert itself. The neck has vaselike grace; the skin must be silk, the face, with its fine porcelain bones, suggests another tiny perfect dynamo, Audrey Hepburn, though intensified by virtue of the Asian DNA information at play throughout. Who knew they made waists that tiny, limbs that smooth?

"Beauty can pierce one like a pain" -- Thomas Mann, expressing in seven words what the above dozen odd paragraphs grope toward.

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?" -- the humorist Jean Kerr.

She knows all this, or at least she must.

We have to speak. It is part of the "interview," is it not, the idea that the reporter throws Q's and the subjects responds with A's?

Of course, my mind goes totally Zen. Empty of all. A perfect stillness, otherwise known as the Big Duh. I am no longer the doughnut, I am the hole.

Then finally a Q: Everywhere you go, lights, attention, flashbulbs, people pressing toward you. Yet there must be another you who looks at all that with suspicion.

Wait a second: She is not asked that. She answers that, but what she was asked was something like, "As a film star, you're a citizen of the world; yet you appear here in an official capacity as a representative of your country. Do you see any contradiction to the roles?"

"When I walk on a red carpet," she says, in English, though at times she diverts to Chinese for the translator to handle the subtler ideas, "and there's all the excitement, I am thinking only, 'It's a part of my job.' But I know: it's not me . It's for my work. It's part of what I do, and what I really enjoy is the process of making film. Every single shot, I give my best effort. That is my true self."

The process is not easy.

"Every time I accept a role, I have to feel I'm right for it. I like to take a long time -- two months, sometimes -- to get to know the character. On paper, it's flat; the character doesn't jump out. I think of it as a dress; you have to find the right person to wear it. Every time I put on a dress, I hope I can carry it well. So it is with a character; you have to try it on, get comfortable with it."

She is not a trained martial artist, but is a trained dancer -- and in her two biggest successes, she says, her dance background has been quite helpful.

"I had six years of dance. . . . I can express myself through movement very well. But it was perfect timing when I stopped. I was ready to find something else."

The something else occurred when she was chosen in a blind audition by the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou for a hair commercial, of all things. But quickly enough, she'd caught the eye of Ang Lee and made her international debut (her second film) in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" as the feisty, young Jen Yu.

She'd work with Zhang Yimou, of course, in "House of Flying Daggers."

But now, "I'm looking for something I have never tried. Something new for me." She has nothing set. Perhaps this is a reflection of fatigue after the rigors of "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Next question: Speaking of things you've never tried, have you ever considering giving up your career and running off to Idaho with a fat, bald man 30 years older than you with a very nice gun collection?

No, no, no. Of course not. It was something hopelessly banal like, "Could you tell me about how hard that experience was?"

"It was a very long-lasting process. There were so many expectations from all the people involved. I could not let them down. There are so many Asian actors and to give us -- three Chinese women [Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh were the other two] -- a chance made us very conscious of our responsibilities."

As for the controversial casting of Chinese women as Japanese, when memories of World War II in Asia have yet to disappear, she says, "I didn't think of the politics. I just thought of it as a great chance for us as artists. It was hard to learn the Geisha ways, to be another person so different from myself. I'm proud of what we did. We did pretty good work."

Since then she's made but one film, a Chinese version of "Hamlet" called "The Banquet."

"I hope you like it," she says.

Big Critic thinks: I will. Oh, I will!

The offers since haven't been fabulous. "They now offer me stereotypical roles -- waitresses, victims, the poor girl who is sold. I want something else, which is why I take my time."

And she's wary of the Hollywood system, where the flattery quotient is higher ("Chinese directors never praise you") but so is the treachery.

"You have to have a balanced view, a neutral view of what's happening. People flatter you. You have to maintain integrity. I don't feel as though I'm a part of Hollywood. I feel like I'm just passing through."

And on that note, the adventure of Ziyi Zhang is over. She is fetched, she must return. Swarms of men and women in suits sweep down like Brooks Brothers ninjas to take her away, and as she steps out in public view again, the flash strobes begin to pop, a hungry public begins to press inward.

I watch her swallowed by the crowd and I think: God, what an adorable pancreas. (Stephen Hunter, "This 'Crouching Tiger' Tames Her Audience," Washington Post, Sunday, April 23, 2006; N01).

Who Is Afraid of Communitarian Decency?

2006-05-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

Amitai Etzioni does not take away the right lesson from the tragicomedy he recounts below, but still.... :

"The University of California recently joined a growing number of schools that have placed a ban on “romantic or sexual” relationships between professors and students. In particular, the rule prohibits relationships between professors and any students that they advise or evaluate in any way, as well as those students who they may be “reasonably expected” to advise or evaluate.

Some students, and even some professors, have claimed that this policy violates their right to engage in a relationship between two consenting adults. However, as one professor argues, the rules are necessary because of the power gap that exists between professors and students, which precludes such relationships from ever being truly consensual.

(Source: New York Times, 10/1/03)

I have been there. I am familiar with the complications that are inherent in teacher-student and employer-employee relationships and how the dynamics of these relationships have the potential to ruin careers. The following passage from My Brother’s Keeper should serve as a cautionary tale:

The communitarian drive was humming right along, when I hit a bump in the road. A young, lanky woman applied for a position as a research assistant. I interviewed Jean in the same format I always follow: door wide open; my secretary within eye-line and earshot. The reason I follow the open door policy is that I have seen professors’ careers ruined after they have been charged with sexual harassment, even if, in the end, the courts or hearings fully cleared them. (I, of course, do not speak of those actually guilty of such actions.) Hence, I bend over backwards to avoid such accusations. For instance, I avoid riding in crowded elevators, just so nobody can claim that I touched them.

Jean brought with her an impressive resume and answered questions brightly. A few days later, when I called to inform her that we were ready to hire her, she informed me, “You ought to know that I am applying for a job at the CIA. However, my security clearance is going to take many months because I used to live in Poland.” This seemed to make sense and Jean started working for us, doing a credible job, although she did not quite click with the other staff.

After a short period on the job, Jean suggested that her work would improve if she could take a course that she believed was germane to her research assignment. She asked that we pay several hundred dollars for the course. I reluctantly agreed but wondered, “What if you do get clearance in a few days?” Jean countered, “In that case, I will pay you back the tuition fee.” She had barely started when her clearance came through, and within a day she packed to leave. When I asked for the refund, she simply refused.

At this point I made a mistake. I instructed the university to hold her last paycheck until the matter was resolved. When she found out about it, she stopped by. She spoke briefly and calmly: “If I do not have my money by five o’clock, I will accuse you of sexual harassment and tell your wife that we had an affair.” I should note that we had no personal relationship of any kind, not even a cup of coffee nor a walk in the campus yard. I realized, though, that I was defenseless, and soon called the university to release the funds. I never heard from or saw her again.

For quite a while I felt violated. True, I was wrong to block her pay. People who work are entitled to their compensation even if they did not abide by some agreement they made. Despite this belated insight, I felt pushed around and unable to defend myself against ludicrous charges. Worse, I had to face the fact that the same thing could be done to me, again, any time, by anybody.

My sense of being abused and powerless festered for a while until I decided that these feelings might help me be more empathetic to other victims of harassment. When a research assistant working at an institute nearby came crying to my motherly secretary, and I mean crying, because his professor was giving him a hard time, I visited with him. I very well may not have done so before Jean taught me a lesson. When one of my colleagues jokingly complained about co-eds rejecting his advances, suggesting that they should enjoy older, experienced men, I did speak up with a little more vigor than I might have done before my short course on what it is like to be at the receiving end of such treatment.

The incident had another lasting effect on my relationship with the young people who work with me. When one of them was mugged and brutally assaulted in Georgetown, I helped her regain her composure over the weeks that followed, but did not feel free to show her how deeply concerned I was. I wanted to give her a shoulder to cry on but I kept her at arm’s length. The same was true when the father of one of the younger staff members suddenly died, and she was grief-stricken. Another young staff member dropped by my office often and unnecessarily, looking deeply into my eyes, and asking to accompany me to meetings to which I was invited, often at the end of the day. I tried to transfer her to another part of the university, but she refused to be reassigned. Luckily, she was accepted into a top medical school, and broke away.

The “communitarian” lesson of all this is far from easily drawn. All too often in the academic world in which I live, young women are pressured to engage in sexual acts by people who have power over them, co-eds by their professors, junior faculty by those who will rule on their tenure. A New York colleague of mine damaged more than a student, which is bad enough. He got her a PhD degree (which was relatively easy, because two other members of the committee had mistresses they had to keep happy), and then an assistant professor post. He really got us all abuzz when he refused to leave the room when her tenure was voted on. In short, there is not and never was any doubt in my mind that those who do so abuse others--and academic standards--should be exposed and properly punished. But there should also be a way for someone to clear his or her name, in full. Currently even those who are found not guilty in various hearings are still assumed to be guilty by many in their campus communities.

There must also be some clarification of the code of conduct. A colleague was charged with sexual harassment because a co-ed claimed that he was staring at her through his goggles in a swimming pool. The charge was brought under the rule that harassment can take the form of creating a “hostile environment” and--that what constitutes such an environment is determined by those who declare themselves to be its victims. These kinds of rules are too fungible, and undermine any notion of due process and fairness that should be extended even to old, white males.

Maybe it is impossible to have a close personal relationship with one’s staff or students--without fearing that it might be misunderstood, mischaracterized." (Amitai Etzioni, Amitai Etzioni Notes blog, October 7, 2003; 04:02 PM).

Illusio, Irony, and Hegemony

2006-05-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

Mark Kaplan wrote a while back:

"You will remember that Baron Munchausen, drowning without hope of rescue, so concentrates his mind that he pulls him self out of the swamp by his own hair. We, lacking the Munchausen option, have only the labour of critical thought.

One of Pierre Bourdieu’s most significant contributions to critical thinking was the notion of ‘illusio’. ‘Illusio’ is basically our libidinal and cognitive investment in a particular – historically contingent – form of life. From a removed point of view, this investment will always appear somewhat absurd:

“When you read, in Saint-Simon, about the quarrel of hats (who should bow first), if you were not born in a court society, if you do not possess the habitus of a person of the court, if the structures of the game are not also in your mind, the quarrel will seem futile and ridiculous to you.”

And so:

“Illusio is the fact of being interested in the game, of taking the game seriously, being caught up in and by the game, of believing the game is “worth the candle”, or, more simply, that playing is worth the effort. [it is] to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes.”

Paradoxically, this means precisely not seeing it a as a ‘mere game’. Once you see it as a game you are already outside it, and the game loses its power to compel. Knowledge changes the thing known. Such ‘games’ would include, say, parliamentary politics, journalism, business meetings and, indeed, academia itself. It is evident that many of the props and rituals of these practices, the customary modes of address, the required rhetoric, the shibboleths and in-jokes, will one day appears as ridiculous as the game of the hats, cited by Bourdieu, does today. Our natural inclination, of course, is to see the game of the hats as quaint and costumed history, but our own way of doing things as just plain ‘natural’ or the ‘way things are’ and therefore just to get on with them. This attitude is illusio at its purest. So it is, that the mere fact that a form of life exists seems to be sufficient proof that it should, or, at least, its mere existence induces instant amnesia that it was ever otherwise.

But, to repeat: once you see such a form of life as a historically specific game with rules, you remove yourself, albeit by a fraction, from the ‘plane of what is'. You pull yourself out of the swamp. There is however a certain mode of removal which is mere lip service – it is of course called irony, and it is nothing more than a device allowing one to participate all the more effectively in the game. At the level of belief you make ironic jokes about it the futility of what you’re doing, but at the behavioural level you continue to act as if it were not simply a historically contingent game at all. Irony is thus a kind of false consciousness, a part of the game masquerading as critical commentary. What is needed today is an irony towards irony - which, i suppose is a bit like pulling yourself up by your own hair." (Mark Kaplan, Charlotte Street blog, Wednesday, August 18, 2004).

I would go further than Kaplan and argue that the genius of liberal capitalism is its inculcation of the illusio of irony. That is, irony is a structurally built into the system -- what with the high stakes gambling that is capitalism as seen, for example, in the stock market.

Let's turn to Lance Mannion for an elaboration:

"When you think about it---and you're not meant to. The world continues on its merry self-destructive but profitable to them what's in on the deal way because we don't think about what we're not meant to think about---the clubbiness of after-hours Washington is a grotesque joke on the rest of us that even Satan wouldn't have the bad taste to perpetrate.

Milton's Satan. Job's Satan would enjoy a good horselaugh over it, being the kind of evil entity that gets a kick out tricking the Almighty into massacring an innocent man's family, wiping out his fortune, and covering his hide in weeping pustules just to prove to the poor schnook, who never doubted it anyway, that He is the Lord God Almighty. Milton's Satan was a sophisticated wit by comparison with the playful, puckish sense of humor of an Oxford College don on Boat Night.

But I digress.

The idea that once they clock out, unzip the coveralls, and gather together at the old brass rail, Senators, Congressmen, Presidential aides, the boys and girls of the Press, and the lobbyists buying the round are, Republicans and Democrats, Liberal and Conservative, really just a bunch of bosom pals forced by circumstances to work in different, rival departments of the same firm and what happens during the day is just the dirty job of earning a paycheck and their real lives begin after the cocktail hour is, I suppose, necessary to their sanity and useful for getting laid.

Whenever I hear a Washington insider bemoan the polarization of politics I know that person is either a Republican about to launch a vicious attack on a Democrat, a Democrat terrified of being viciously attacked, or a journalist who just hates all the muss and fuss because it makes picking which parties to attend a trickier business---choose wrong and some miffed hostess will cross your name off the guest list for a whole month's worth of A-list fiestas.

Insider Journalists seem to have found the path to their self-congratulatory "objectivity" by way of the sports pages. At least when they appear on TV, they adopt the detachment of New York baseball writers forced to cover a crucial series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the San Diego Padres---it's interesting because it's baseball, but it's not the Yankees, so let's not lose our heads here.

This is one of Shakespeare's Sister's themes. They cover politics as if it is a game, as if the people involved, the "players," are players, colorful characters whose quirks and foibles make their stories funnier or more dramatic, but whose political views are no more important than a ballplayer's pet superstitions or diligent pursuit of an arcane record. It's not just Joe Klein. He's the model. That Tom DeLay is a thief and a thug and he posed a real threat to the useful functioning of the government never seems to figure in the coverage of him, even as he disappears back down the sewer from which he crawled. The Bug Man, the Hammer, he's just contemporary Washington's Ty Cobb, isn't he?

(As if Cobb's racism and sociopathy were of no real consequence.)

The assumption underlying and propping up all this chummy let me buy you a drink and we'll call it even bonhomie is that "We're all in this together." Everybody in Washington is there for the same reason. To do a job. And that job is to keep the country moving. We may have different ideas about how to get there, but finally we all want to end up in the same place, don't we?

No.

Not true.

It's probably never been true, except for, maybe, the four years during World War II, when we all wanted to beat the Nazis and whip the Japs. But even then there were serious disagreements about what should happen afterwards.

For the whole history of the country there has been a struggle between two sides. There's the one side that wants a democratic-republic with as much democracy as is possible without disorder. And there's another that wants to re-establish some form of aristocracy with as much liberty for those few who have power and money as they decide they need and with as little for the rest of us as the rich and powerful can be forced to begrudge.

That second side, the would-be aristocrats, keeps switching Party affiliations. At one time, many of them were Democrats. But that was a long time ago. Over the course of the 20th Century the racist aristocrats left the Democratic party and joined forces with the Big Business aristocrats who'd taken the Republican Party away from the Progressives.

These two factions, which control the Republican Party today, believe that the United States should be able to do whatever it wants in the world, that rich white people ought to be able to boss the rest of us around, that men get to boss their wives and children around but those who aren't rich must submit to bossing from those that are, that money and status and power are the definers of worth, and that we should have two goverments---or a government with two faces: A harsh, authoritarian one that keeps the rabble scared and in line, and a genial, tame, complicitly winking one taking orders from the aristocracy.

The American Revolution ended monarchism here but it did not do it by changing the minds of the local monarchists, any more than the Civl Rights movement ended bigotry once and for all. Monarchists will always be with us because it's part of human nature. There are some of us who like to boss, and there are lots of us who like to be bossed.

The Founders got rid of a king but they were under no illusions that they had innoculated the American people against tyranny for all time.

If any of them came back from the grave today they'd be amazed that the democrats had been able to hold out against the aristocrats for so long. But they'd have no trouble recognizing that the two sides are still there, fighting it out. And they'd be appalled to see that so many Washington insiders appear not to see it or be sufficiently concerned about what's at risk.

As Digby says:

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30's and 40's by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren't exercised by this after what we've seen, I can't imagine. Perhaps they just can't see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

History has many examples of societies that enabled radical political factions to dominate, through inertia, cynicism or plain intimidation. It happened in Europe in the 25 years before I was born and almost destroyed the whole planet. I know it's unfashionably hysterical to be concerned about such things, but I have never believed that America was so "exceptional" that it couldn't happen here.

The stakes are incredibly high. Without the cold war polarity, the US has bigger responsibilities than ever. And instead of behaving like a mature democracy and world leader, we have been alternating from adolescent tabloid obsessives to playground bullies. This is serious business.

Which brings me to Steve Colbert.

I'm not surprised that many members of the Club, like Richard Cohen, are tut-tuting over Colbert's performance, calling it "inappropriate," suggesting that Colbert crossed some line of common decency, taste, and tact. He violated the Club rules. He came there and told them that what happens in Washington matters. He told them that they aren't playing a game or watching one. Lives are in the balance.

It'd be amusing to ask the Club members what they think someone like Mark Twain would have said if he'd come to their chummy little hoedown. I'll bet most of them admire Twain. Many of them probably read him and sigh out their wish to write like him with a pen warmed up in hell. It doesn't seem to occur to them to act on the wish, but nevermind. Think Twain would have made a couple good natured cracks about President McKinley's bald pate and called it a night?

My favorite post about the Colbert Affair is John Rogers' at Kung Fu Monkey. Rogers has been a working comic, but he's not being funny when he writes:

As for Colbert crossing the line -- how? Did he make remarks about the President's wife? About his children? His sex life? His draft dodging, his drinking and drug use before he found the Lord? No. Every joke used a well-known fact of public-record. Does anyone deny the poll numbers cited? Does anyone deny that the government response to previous crisises have been deficient? Does anyone deny that Administration officials outed Valerie Plame (hell, even the Administration officials now have to rely on he idea it was accidental)? Does anyone deny that the Administration has actively opposed global warming discussions? Listen -- if the President could do a long routine about not finding WMD's and laughing about it, while US soldiers died in the resultant war ... then to be frank I think he set the bar. Oddly, I think that if Colbert had done the routine the President did a couple years ago, THAT would have been crossing the line for me.

If his sin was incivility, then what the audience/bookers were looking for wasn't comedy. Comedy is by its nature uncivil. Comedy is, in both linguistic structure and overall psychological impact, hostile. Sometimes overtly, often not. But there is no such thing as a joke structured like: "You know what makes me happy? Yeah, that same thing that makes everybody else happy. (sigh)" There is no laugh there.

This is how the Club thinks. Colbert was rude and uncivil when he made jokes that told the truth, but President Bush was being a good sport when he made a joke out of the lies that were getting American soldiers and Marines maimed and killed.

The reason is that Bush's "joke" keeps the game going. Colbert's jokes spoiled the fun of pretending it's all a game. Besides, if the wrong person saw you laughing there goes your big speaking fee and that invite to the beach house next weekend.

Even worse, if the wrong people got Colbert's jokes, your editors and readers if you're a journalist, the voters if you're a politician, they might ask you why you're not doing your job." (Lance Mannion, Lance Mannion blog, Thursday, May 04, 2006).

The Academic Sublime

2006-04-29T18:34:00.000-07:00

He calls himself Dr. Mandrake and his blog "Anonymous Professor" appears to have sparked such a furor that he has taken it down. Thankfully, courtesy of Google cache, here are a few of his entries [caveat lector: Dr. Mandrake uses profane language and is quite often sexist]:

"Note to self 1: Never trust facts in an article funded by the NIH

I just returned from a riviting three day adventure at the National Institutes of Health, an organization I can hardly believe we as taxpayers support. I was there to review grants on epidemiology.

One of the most amazing things I found was that I figured that when the NIH reviews grants, they actually get competent people to do so. But seriously, what has the federal government done lately that resembles competence in any way? So goes it with the NIH. You'd think if you wanted to have a good selection of proposals to fund on questions so fundamental as AIDS and Avian Flu, you would get people who know something about, say, AIDS and Avian Flu. No, not the NIH, and not our government. It went like this:

Mandrake: A sociologist
Reviewer 2: An astronomer
Reviewer 3: A grant administrator at a university with a college degree in English.
Reviewer 4: A theoretical physicist
Reviewer 5: A cell biologist

Isn't it great to know that 4 of the 5 people reviewing multi-miliion dollar grants have no fucking clue about the topic they are reviewing, and that the one who has sort of a clue - the biologist - knows nothing about epidemiology. But the NIH is run mainly by peeople with medical degrees, and we all know how smart they are.

No wonder in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday there is an article about how half of science articles contain serious errors. It's because idiots like me play a role in the process of selecting who gets your money.

Note to self 2: Move to Washington, risk losing your soul.

Seriously, Washington sucks more cock than a thai hooker. I hated it there. I was in what amounted to a shitty suburb, surrounded by high rises and office buildings. I couldn't imagine myself living in this vacuous hellhole, devote of character and identity. But then I realize, the vast majority of people who live in Washington, D.C., either are lawyers, or have something to do with the federal government. So they're soulless.

As I sat in my hotel room, watching the Alito hearings, I realized how much I hate politics. Alito's wife was crying over some pointed questions about him being a bigot. I mean, poor poor Samuel Alito, having to be asked tough questions about why he was a member of a group that opposed women's entry into Princeton. Not that Princeton is a school one should respect in any conceivable way, but I mean, the guy is going up for a job that he will have for the rest of his fucking miserable right-wing life. Oh, too bad, Mrs. Alito, that you're poor husband has to go through this. Why not give him head when both of you get home? Make poor Sam-Sam feel better about himself for having to answer tough tough questions about why he stated that Roe v. Wade was a ruling that should be over-turned? I mean, we are giving him a job he will hold for the rest of his life, right? I hope when I am going up for a job I might hold for the rest of my life, that I will be okay with being asked challenging questions. However, at least in my job, the stroke of my pen can't affect the lives of millions of women.

And I work from January until April to pay for this shit?

Other than there, there is no good food in Washington, only shitty sports bars, soulless whores and frat boys at bars in suits acting like the shallow Georgetown dickheads they are, and a lot of hot air.

The only good thing was that I was able to take a flight out of the damn place six hours earlier than it was scheduled.

Thanks American people for paying for that flight change. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Saturday, 14 January 2006).

Frying Frey

.......

A few weeks ago I was speaking to some women at a shelter for abused women. This one woman was raped by three men, beat half to death, had her throat slit, and was left for dead behind a lumber yard. That's real. That happened. I saw the wound. I saw the results in terms of the trauma she was living through, and working her way out of poverty and addiction the tough way. But this ex-Frat boy from a shitty Ohio University (Dennison) is getting millions off the ridiculous vapid vanilla codependent soccermoms across America whose only joy is to live vicariously through the life of a lying shithead who can't even fucking write a sentence without the phrase "I cried" in it.

I will use this, by the way, as a way for filtering my friends. All you morons who wrote me, saying "You have to read this book" - you are all no longer my friends, an any further emails from you will be ignored. I don't need idiots like you in my life..... (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Tuesday, 17 January 2006).

What's with me and strippers?

So yesterday I taught my first classes for the new semester. My one class has about 150 students in it and is ridiculous. My other class has about 50 and will be fun. The ridiculous class is insane because the topic makes no sense - I can't make heads or tales of it, and I just find it boring to prepare. And I have a million other things to prepare that matter a great deal more than a class for four hundred beady little eyeballs. It is a class about interdisciplinary perspectives on sociology. It seems as if everyone outside sociology has a lot of strong words of criticism about sociology. I find it insulting when some asshole humanities professor writes that "Sociology objectifies individuals, it makes them subjects to their discipline's clinical gaze (Foucalt, 1969) and forces individuals to give up their voice and agency."

Do these postmodern humanities fuckers write these sentences then masturbate to them? I can imagine the person who penned this line reclining in his or her chair, unzipping his or her pants, and going at it. Because that's how full of shit the entire literature of this field is. The clinical gaze of sociology? What clinical gaze? This humanities bullshit is mental masturbation for dickheads who were so afraid of math and statistics and science than they ran towards French philosophers who make about as much sense as Pauly Shore's existence. At least, though, I don't write academic articles about how much you humanities folk suck, I just complain about it here, and when I encounter you, I say, "Yes, YES, YEEEESSSSSS! I agree, I couldn't agree more! Derrida was so right! And Bordieu, with the notion of the habitus, YES, YESSSS, YESSSSSSSSSSS!"

Dipshits.

However, you are dying to know about me and strippers.

In my fun class, a student came up to me and asked me if she could discuss the project she wants to do. I thought this strange, because, well, it's the first day of class. She tells me that she is a stripper, and she has always wondered about the sexual preferences of American men (oh boy, I'm thinking). She wants to study if there is a relationship between breast size and the amount of tips strippers receive.

I can't help but think at this point, "I went to fucking graduate school in a fucking miserably cold town and a postdoc in a even more miserably cold town so that I can help a stripper determine whether breast size is related to tip quantity in a strip club?" I mean, I wrote a 300 page dissertation for a job like this? I can't even afford to go to a strip club on this salary!

I just smiled and said okay. I have a suspicion that she will find a positive correlation. I am fairly certain I am going to make her submit this to the American Journal of Sociology for shits and giggles.

I actually have never gone to a strip club. I find the idea somewhat depressing. I guess I just feel that it is somewhat demeaning. The worst, I believe, are women who go to strip clubs. I spoke with another stripper student about this once, and it confuses me. She told me that women were the worst clients. They didn't tip well, were very demanding, and generally acted stupid. Men, on the other hand, "Are predictable. And they fear an encounter with the bouncer in the back alley. Women don't."

And what the fuck is up with women needing to find their inner whores, anyway? Maureen Dowd wrote a stupid, long, and dull book about this (who among you have actually ever finished one of her long monologues that plague the New York Times Op Ed pages? I'm a liberal, and I just find her about as boring as Oats and Hall.) I am sure those who began feminism would be proud of the acheivements of women today: at my gym, they offer a pole dancing class for women under the guise of being exercise. They have all these temporary poles set up in a room, and these lawyer yuppie 30 something women in yoga pants hugging the damn things, falling, looking ridiculous.

It is the only class that has a waiting list. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog,Thursday, 19 January 2006).

A Sunday Sermon

Its snowing out. This is the kind of day where you want to wake up next to your girlfriend, look outside, smile, go back to bed. Perhaps have some morning sex to keep you warm, make some coffee, throw some eggs on the stove. But I woke up alone this morning at 6:00 AM. I went for a walk, looking for a place that was open and serving coffee. Had to walk seven blocks in foot deep snow. Today, I have to write a paper that I don't want to write. It is on friendship in different cultures. I really don't want to open up that file. I don't care about friendship in different cultures anymore. I don't really give a fuck about anything anymore, and this is beginning to worry me.

I've been down lately, to be honest. A student recently asked me about whether she should go to grad school. I was thinking about it and I don't really know the answer. I gave up a lot. I satisficed a lot. I miss all the people in my life who I left behind to be here. I wish they were still in my life, or more than just fleeting memories that grow more distant. Looking out the back window of a train, the station passes you, recedes into the distance. You give up a lot, if you're not careful, and I was never careful.

But going out in the snow reminded me of my childhood, and being so excited when the snow fell. I would go out with my sister to a field behind my grandparents' house where there was a large hill. Large, perhaps, for a six year old. Nearby there was a cardboard factory that always had scraps - we would jump on them and fly down that hill.

It is all gone, now. The hill is gone, the factory is gone, even my grandparents are gone. My sister is grown and married. The field was bulldozed and turned into houses. But I guess there are new hills, somewhere. I haven't found one yet that I like. And I am tired of looking for them. And I am tired of not looking for them. And I am standing here, and I have no idea what direction to walk. Like this morning, in the snow, randomly turning on unfamiliar streets, the world completely white. Amnesia.

So I don't know what to say. Do it, but realize that you will lose perhaps far more than you will ever gain. You will climb a mountain, only to find yourself, at thirty, waking up alone at 6:00, searching for coffee, coming back home, and opening the file cultfriendship.doc - something you don't want to work on to the last fiber of your being. That's what I got out of grad school.( Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Sunday, 12 February 2006).

Anonymous Professor Gets His Course Reviews Back

So I received my course reviews from last semester. Overall, I guess they were okay. The strange thing is that they all complained that I was too lenient. Crazy. When I give them grades, they all complain to me that they want a higher grade. When they do my evaluation, they say they want me to be harsher. Make up your fucking minds. They also complained that I didn't take attendence. IT WAS A CLASS WITH 100 STUDENTS, that's why I didn't take attendence. What, do you want me to take roll? Come on, people.

But some are worth noting here:

Quite frankly, I think you need to get over yourself. Yes, I am impressed that you are 31 and have a Ph.D. But there are many times when you come off as haughty, and almost condesending to your students. I think your sense of humor is out of line.

I agree with all of the above, except I'm not 31. Maybe he or she is talking about another professor.

Or this one: Too much general and personal information provided.

What is general information? And I'm sorry that I told you that chalk dust makes my crotch itch. It does, and that's why I am always grabbing myself in front of class. You don't want me to sit there and itch, do you?

But very few of them were bad like that. In fact, most were overwhelmingly positive.

We love you, you're so nice.

I love you too.

Very charming and cute. We love you!

I love you also. Maybe you and I and the previous person could have a threesome?

I want to have your children.

Okay, I guess. Now this is getting weird.

But my favorite is this:

Anonymous Professor has enriched my life and experience at Anonymous University greatly. By teaching with honest passion and command of his field he manages to foster a critical yet generous spirited consciousness of the guiding principles of sociological theory. He frames his lectures that encourage an exploration of questions such as: How do we define that which constitutes knowledge? How do we measure and value different kinds of knowledge? How do we preserve and transmit knowledge? Most importantly, how is knowledge produced? And what are the limits of knowledge? Anonymous Professor strives in constructing a kind of map of knowledge, charting various courses using building blocks of methodology in sociology.

Anonymous professor teaches by illuminating the subject of one discipline from the perspective of another, as when, for example, a physicist the acousics of music production. Anonymous Professor manages to integrate methods of sociology with philosophy, poetry, wit, and intelligence. He promotes our potential to think in terms of how we affect the world, frame works, concepts, techniques and vocabulary we have not yet imagined. He evokes a intellectual universe and teaches us to listen to the world around us.

Holy shit! I did all that??? I was only kidding about listening to the world. I think we really should just ignore the world. The world talks and talks and talks, and never shuts the fuck up. Listening to the world is like watching someone's vacation slide presentation - BORING.

You know I'n not being serious, but anyway, I'm glad that some students believe I did a good job. Or want to have my kids, I guess. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Saturday, 18 February 2006).

Mandrake dodges a bullet, learns politics lesson the easy way

Your anonymous professor dodged a bullet yesterday. You see, as a sociologist, I require access to certain databases that require payment. Fuckers. For my research, I needed to purchase access to this one particular data set. It costs $50. Of course, this requires going through about a hundred offices to get the required signatures. There is one woman though, who we will call Lazy Bitch, who kept putting me off. She is the last in the chain that will allow me to pay the company that keeps the data set. She has stalled me, time and time again, for a variety of reasons. First it was that I didn’t have the Institutional Review Board approval for the project. Okay, okay, bitch. The company does not require IRB approval for their data, but I got that after a month of wrestling with the IRB committee. Fuckers. Then it is that the grant that I have did not specify why I needed this data set. I came up with the bullshit excuse of how it fit into the constraints of the grant. Then she sends me an email that the Federal Government does not explicitly say that grants can be used for the purpose of purchasing data from private companies. It doesn’t prohibit it, but it does not specify that one can.

Okay, so after this email I was about to go to her office and challenge her to a fist fight. I really was. I don’t give a fuck that she is a woman. And I could have taken her on, seriously. She is a fat fuck who deserves an ass beating, and I go to the gym pretty regularly and have an Irish temper. I felt that this was the last straw. But I kept my cool, realizing that in academia, coming to blows is usually a poor strategy, particularly when you place a woman in the hospital without teeth. So instead, I sat and wrote a letter to the Dean basically trashing her, threatening that if she continues to act this way I will have to begin looking for jobs elsewhere so that I can accomplish my research. I was about to hit send, but I then decided it would be best to speak to the dean in person, and that I didn’t want the dean to say, “Go ahead, find another job.” He is an asshole and I wouldn’t put this past him.

So I go to the Dean’s office, fuming, and speak to the secretary. She asked me what I wanted to speak to the Dean about. I said, literally, because I am down with her “I want to kill Lazy Bitch. I seriously want to take her out back and pummel her. She is an incompetent idiot that should never have a job above the level of barrista.” It is always good to bring secretaries candy on Valentine’s Day if you are interested in getting things done. A small price to pay for the priceless gem of knowledge she provided me:

The secretary replies, “Uh, Mandrake, do you realize that Lazy Bitch is the Dean’s wife? She kept her original name.”

Gulp.

So the secretary made a few phone calls, and by the end of the day I had access to the data set. I bought her a bouquet of flowers today, with the message, “Thanks for saving my ass.”

This should be a lesson to all of you budding young professors and graduate students. Keep your fucking mouth shut until you learn who is fucking who. Because, after all, it is the Dean who ultimately puts that signature on your reappointment form. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Friday, 3 March 2006).

Politically Incorrect

1. I really hate Nirvana. There. I said it. Fuck you.

Personally, I hate dreadlocked hippies. I have one in one of my classes. One of those white girls who was not pretty enough to be accepted so she decided, apparently, that the way to address this is to never wash her hair or her clothes and carry around an Allen Ginsburg collected works. That is so fucking grunge, which, I believe, went out in 1994 along with Kurt Cobain's parietal cortex.

2. Unfortunately, fundamentalists can't spell fundamentalism

The problem with fundamentalists - of any religion - is that the vast majority of them are illiterate.

3. Feminists got what they didn't want

Woman at local bar:
I think it is totally unfair the way society treats women. I mean, women are not having children because they have to decide between their careers and having a family. And I believe that this is an unfair choice that women have to make.
Mandrake:
Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? This is the fucking price you pay for feminism. Yes, you want to be treated equally as men? Do you think, throughout the period of modern industrialism, than men really LIKED going to factories and spending the day away from home, slaving away meaningless lives at factories or at desks in soulless industrial parks doing entirely meaningless and menial labor? Did you not ever consider the fact that almost any man would give up this ridiculous shit to take care of kids. And you wanted to enter this miserable dog eat dog realm, you wanted to become a lawyer and now you are here, and you gotta take what comes with it. Do you think you are special because you have tits? Do you think you deserve something I don't deserve because you have to make a difficult choice between career and taking care of children? I think it is unfair than men were never really given the option. But you have to take the good with the bad. The enormous joke is on you: Feminists wanted to have equality to men, what they apparently didn't think about is whether what men have is something that is really worth wanting. And now you have it, and you are beginning to realize how much it sucks, and now you are crying that it isn't fair to you because you think you should be treated special because you are a woman. Make up your mind. Either we are equal or we are unequal. Either you want to be a lawyer or you don't.
Woman at local bar:
That you are a professor of anything disgusts me. She gets up and leaves.

4. It's a shame you didn't learn everything you needed to know in kindergarten

(To a student) There is a difference between hearing yourself speak and listening to yourself think. You like to hear yourself talk. You have no idea how to hear yourself think.

Ah, and people never know when I am serious or when I'm joking. Sometimes you have to say something controversial to start a dialogue. But Lawrence Summers learned that this can backfire - the hard way. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Tuesday, 28 March 2006).

I hate my students

I teach a very large class of undergraduates. There are 145 students in the class. I assigned a 5 page essay. My university, realizing that I actually do research when I'm not drowining my sorrows in beer, gave me funds to hire a grader to read the papers. She is an English Ph.D. student who is harsh. I felt this was a good idea because all of them could use a lesson on their grammar. Oh, yeah, and about 15 of them blatently plagairized. I handed back their papers today and low and behold, they noticed that the hand writing wasn't mine. They asked why, and I explained this fact to them.

Holy shit, the class exploded in an uproar.

You see, my students think they are geniuses. They feel that their shitty essays written fifteen minutes before class should earn them the Nobel Prize for literature. They feel entitled to that A simply because they came to 20% of the classes. No, they were having no part of this. I cheated them. I robbed them. I violated their trust. Not to mention I know for a fact that only 5 of the 145 downloaded this week's articles because they don't know I can figure this out using a simple counter on my webpage.

"We have no idea who this person is, and it is unfair that she had complete say in what grade we got."

"You have fundamentally disappointed me."

All this bulldhit simply by having an English ABD grade their assignments. And I'm sorry, but if you are not going to respect me enough to read the articles I assign, then I don't really give a flying fuck if I disappoint you. I really couldn't care less.

Student 1: "I can't believe that you got a stupid grad student to grade these papers. That is so unfair of you. I pay tuition so to have a professor grade my papers. Not some T.A. out of college."

What I said: "I understand your concern. I will be happy to read your paper and give more substantive comments"

What I wanted to say: "You stupid bitch, you can't even string a coherent sentence together and you probably threw together this paper the night before anyway, and you are calling English grad students incompetent? Do you realize that your esteemed professor was a grad student just two years ago?"

Student 2: "I don't understand how you could grade more on structure than on content. I mean, this isn't english comp. I think this is ridiculous."

What I said: "I understand your concern. I will be happy to read your paper and give more substantive comments"

What I wanted to say: "Hey, moron, no one will give a fuck about what content you have when you don't even know the difference between than and then or weather and whether. They will just laugh at you. So shut up and sit down and fuck yourself.

Student 3: "I am really interested in becoming a sociologist and I feel ripped off that you gave not a single comment on my thoughts of sociology."

What I said: "I understand your concern. I will be happy to read your paper and give more substantive comments"

What I wanted to say: "You idiot. Sociology is all such bullshit. Academia is such utter bullshit. Do you know what sociologists do all day? They sit around and give each other the intellectual equivalent of a happy ending massage. And why do you think your thoughts are at all interesting whatsoever. If they were you'd probably be an econ major. Do yourself a favor: econ and sociology are similar enough, switch majors, and end up having a job that will allow you to buy that $800,000 condo in Brooklyn, instead of being a broke drunk from a Tom Waits song who wants to vomit every time you hear the fucking letters AJS (American Journal of Sociology)."

It was one of those days. It was just one of those days. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Thursday, 6 April 2006).

Yet another thing I hate hearing my students say

I really hate it when one of my students says to me that "My wife and I" or "My husband and I" are trying to get pregnant.

Do you think I really give a fuck that you are fucking?

Thank god it's Friday. (Dr. Mandrake, Anonymous Professor Blog, Friday, 7 April 2006).

The Null Persona (With Apologies to Dana Cloud)

2006-04-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence.

(Adrienne Rich, The Dream of the Common Language, 17).

Benediction

2006-04-26T23:55:00.000-07:00

Be an honour to the church, follow Christ’s word, clear in thy task and careful in thy speech.

Be thine an open hand, a merry heart, Christ in thy mouth, life that all men may know a lover of righteousness and compassion.

Let none come to thee and go sad away. Hope of poor men, and solace to the sad, go thou before God’s people to God’s realm, that he who follows thee may come to the stars.

Sow living seeds, words that are quick with life, that faith may be the harvest in men’s hearts. In word and in example let thy light shine in the black dark like the morning star.

Let not the wealth of the world nor its dominion flatter thee into silence as to truth, nor king, nor judge, yea, nor thy dearest friend muzzle thy lips from righteousness.

Alcuin of York 735-804

How To Do Things With Words

2006-04-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Via dsquared, brilliance from Lenin of Lenin's Tomb:

"I think it was the author of the "Lenin's Tomb" blog who gave the definitive account [of moral clarity]:

"Moral relativism" is the completely unacceptable proposition that the USA should be held to a different standard from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"Moral equivalence" is the completely unacceptable proposition that the USA should be held to the same standards as Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
"Moral clarity" is the perfect Zen-like state from which it is possible to excoriate one's opponents for the sins of both moral relativism and moral equivalance." (dsquared in comments, Unspeak blog, 04/09/06).

Why I Am A Christian

2006-04-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Valley Bible Fellowship of Bakersfield California, being the good Christians that they are, would like to apprise you of a contingency plan in case -- God forbid! -- you miss the rapture:

"I would like to introduce you to one of the most important pieces of literature that you may ever come into contact with. It is the opinion of most Bible teachers and prophets that the return of Jesus Christ is imminent. It is my own opinion that this generation will never pass away until we see the return of Jesus Christ for His church. We call this event the “rapture of the church.” I believe that the church can either be raptured at the beginning or in the middle of the seven year tribulation period. After the rapture of the church, there will e a time on the earth like has never been seen before. It will be a literal hell on earth. This time is called the “seven year tribulation period”. Men will pray for death to come to them, for death will be welcomed as a form of relief in comparison to all the nightmare experiences of the seven year tribulation period. My friends, you DO NOT, let me emphasize DO NOT want to miss the rapture of the church. You need to get your life in order with God now! But, in case you do miss it, then this tract is for you. Please hold onto this and make copies of it and redistribute these to everyone you know. I pray that you will find the strength in Jesus Christ to overcome. Here are 14 very important things for you to do...

14 things to do.

1. DO NOT commit suicide, and stay extremely calm if you have missed the rapture. There will be a period of total chaos, suicides, and heart attacks. People all over the world will be in total chaos. Please understand the fact that you who remain here have missed the rapture, and are living in the tribulation period, and nothing you do can change that fact. Listen! Don’t look back. Face the fact you’ve been left, but there still is hope for you!!

2. KEEP A TIME TABLE. Look back and find the date people were reported missing or raptured, mark that date, and put it away. Keep track of the following 7 years. The first three and a half years will not be too bad, but the last three and a half years will be so horrible that human vocabulary is insufficient to describe the events that will take place.

3. GET ALONE somewhere and find yourself a Bible. There is still hope for you. You still have an opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Look in your Bible at Revelation chapter 7, Romans chapter 10:9-11. There is no time element spoken of here, you can be born again, and remember this: The Holy Spirit has not left the earth with the Christians. He still dwells here now.
What you need to do now is accept Jesus in your heart and be born again. Romans chapter 10:9-13 says clearly if you just confess with your mouth that in your own self there is no hope, and you realize you need Jesus to set you free and cleanse your sins to be forgotten, He will hear you and forgive you and the Holy Spirit will come into your life and you will be a new person in Jesus Christ. You will become a tribulation saint.
Realize from this point on that your life will not be an attractive one. Your commitment to Jesus could result in the severest repercussions that you can imagine. Be ready to lose your job, to be persecuted, possibly even tortured and even lose your life. Be prepared to die, it will probably happen!! Ask Jesus to give you strength to face reality and He will.
Endure to the end, Saint. Don’t give up no matter what happens to you. Do not denounce Jesus. Give your life if you have to, but do not denounce Jesus in any way!

4. DISTRIBUTE BIBLES to close friends and family. Hide at least one Bible in a secluded place because Bibles will be hard to come by. Communist agents will be out to burn every bible they can find.
Read the Bible and begin to memorize it. Ask Jesus to help you memorize it. Hide promise scriptures wherever you can: Hebrews chapter10:19-23.
Begin to memorize the entire book of Daniel, the book of Revelation, memorize the 24th chapter of Mathew, the 21st chapter of Luke. These books and verses will help you understand what must take place before the second coming of Jesus.

5. BEWARE OF A WORLD CHURCH. This church is not of God. Do not back this church. It is from Satan himself. Do not associate with any kind of world church. Beware of Communist agents who will play the role of pastor. Beware of any big church movement after the rapture. Ask Jesus for a spirit of discernment.

6. BEWARE OF THE WORLD DICTATOR AND ANYTHING HE SAYS. This anti-Christ will appear upon the scene and become the leader of a ten nation government. He will be an international politician, a worldwide accepted man with all the answers to the world’s problems. He will back the one world church and seem to have an answer for everything, but do not pledge allegiance to this man; if you do, you damn your soul to eternal Hell. Beware of another man called the false prophet. He will more likely lead the one world church. He also will impress the world with his leadership and religious spirit. People will automatically accept him. He will perform many signs and miracles before you, and even raise the dead, but he will support the Anti-Christ and work with him for a one world government. Watch for these two men and do not pledge allegiance to them.
Read about the Anti-Christ in Revelation chapters 13 and 14, Daniel chapters 7 and 11, and read about the false prophet in Revelations chapters 13, 14, and 16.

7. DO NOT accept the mark of the beast (666). The Anti-Christ will control the economic system completely, and he will destroy the money system and install a number system either on your hand or your forehead.
Do not take this mark. If you do, you will be automatically doomed for eternity. Be prepared if you do not take it. You will be tortured or even put to death, but your soul will be saved in the end. You probably won’t be able to buy, sell, or trade anything, but do not take the anti-Christ’s number system. Begin now to ask Jesus for strength and boldness. There will be very rough times ahead.

8. BEWARE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL. The anti-Christ will erect an idol and place it in the temple. Read Daniel chapter 3, Revelation 13:15, Revelation 20:4, and Revelation 15:2.
Stay away from any image created by or for the anti-Christ.

9. STORE UP water, food, and cover, if possible. Move to the mountains and live off the land. Move away from the cities or civilization.

10. BE CAREFUL WHO YOU TRUST. Don’t trust every person who claims they are a Christian. Beware of Communist agents posing as Christians or ministers.

11. STAY IN THE WORD OF GOD. Memorize verses and establish fellowship with true believers.

12 WATCH YOUR GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION. Leave all large nuclear target areas, such as bases, cities, lakes, ship yards, industrial areas, etc.

13. STAY AWAY from earthquake faults.

14. OBTAIN fallout shelter, if possible.

Please Address Any Correspondence To:
VALLEY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP
P.O. BOX 6266
BAKERSFIELD, CA 93386
(661) 325-2251

PDF format available here: http://www.n00bl33t.com/godtestimonials/14%20things%20to%20do%20if%20you%20have%20missed%20the%20rapture.pdf

(via Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise, April 8, 2006)

Why I Am A Christian

2006-04-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education on the cultivation of the Christian mind:

"The campus looks just like the glossy brochure: clean, green, and beautiful. The students are well dressed and well groomed, not a pair of jeans or scrappy goatee in sight. Inside the Commons building, two students engage in a spirited game of Ping-Pong. When one of them misses an easy shot, he cries, "Praise the Lord!"

Pensacola Christian College prides itself on being different, not just from secular colleges, but from fellow Christian ones, too. Some of those differences, like the way students dress, are obvious to any visitor. Others are not. Since its founding, more than 30 years ago, Pensacola has blossomed from a tiny Bible college into a thriving institution of nearly 5,000 students. Along the way it has become known as among the most conservative — and most secretive — colleges in the country.

Not to mention one of the strictest. The rules at Pensacola govern every aspect of students' lives, including the books they read, the shoes they wear, the churches they attend, and the people they date. Many of those regulations are spelled out in a handbook sent to students after they enroll, but there are plenty of unwritten rules as well. Demerits are common and discipline swift.

....

Lisa Morris was walking to class with her boyfriend last October when something happened. At first Ms. Morris, a sophomore music major, is reluctant to divulge the details. Eventually, however, the truth comes out: He patted her behind.

Someone who witnessed the incident reported Ms. Morris and her boyfriend. At Pensacola any physical contact between members of the opposite sex is forbidden. (Members of the same sex may touch, although the college condemns homosexuality.) The forbidden contact includes shaking hands and definitely includes patting behinds. Both students were expelled.

Of Pensacola's many rules, those dealing with male-female relationships are the most talked about. There are restrictions on when and where men and women may speak to each other. Some elevators and stairwells may be used only by women; others may be used only by men. Socializing on particular benches is forbidden. If a man and a woman are walking to class, they may chat; if they stop en route, though, they may be in trouble. Generally men and women caught interacting in any "unchaperoned area" — which is most of the campus — could be subject to severe penalties.

Those rules extend beyond the campus. A man and a woman cannot go to an off-campus restaurant together without a chaperon (usually a faculty member). Even running into members of the opposite sex off campus can lead to punishment. One student told of how a group of men and a group of women from the college happened to meet at a McDonald's last spring. Both groups were returning from the beach (they had gone to separate beaches; men and women are not allowed to be at the beach together). The administration found out, and all 15 students were expelled.

Even couples who are not talking or touching can be reprimanded. Sabrina Poirier, a student at Pensacola who withdrew in 1997, was disciplined for what is known on the campus as "optical intercourse" — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as "making eye babies." While the rule does not appear in written form, most students interviewed for this article were familiar with the concept.

As she tells it, Ms. Poirier was not gazing lovingly at her boyfriend; he had something in his eye. But officials didn't buy her explanation, and she and her boyfriend were both "socialed," she says.

There are three levels of official punishment at Pensacola (four, if you count expulsion). Students can be "socialed," "campused," or "shadowed." Students who are socialed are not allowed to talk to members of the opposite sex for two weeks. Those who are campused may not leave the college grounds for two weeks or speak to other campused students.

Being shadowed is the worst of the three. Shadowed students are assigned to a "floor leader" for several days. A floor leader is a student who is paid by the college and has the power to issue demerits. Shadowed students must attend the floor leader's classes and sleep in the floor leader's room. During this time, the shadowed student is not allowed to talk to anyone but the floor leader. Shadowing is usually a prelude to expulsion.

Ms. Poirier was later told she would be shadowed after being spotted riding in a car in mixed company. She tried to explain that it was an innocent outing, but to no avail. When told she would be shadowed, Ms. Poirier decided to withdraw. "I said 'screw it' and I left," she says.

There are plenty of other ways to run afoul of the rules. Last spring Timothy Dow was caught playing the video game Halo 2. Such games are banned by the college. Movies are also forbidden, including those rated G. Music is restricted to classical or approved Christian ("contemporary Christian" artists are deemed too worldly). Students are allowed to watch television news at 6 o'clock, but that's it. The TVs are controlled by college employees, who flip a switch to black out the commercials, lest students see anything inappropriate.

In the library, books and magazines are censored. One student says she saw a pair of black-marker boxer shorts on a photograph of Michelangelo's David. Any books that students wish to read that are not in the library must first be approved by administrators. Those containing references to "magic," for instance, are normally rejected. The rule book specifically prohibits "fleshly magazines and books."

For playing the video game, Mr. Dow was campused. Later, in the cafeteria, he ran into a friend who had just been expelled. Mr. Dow had been told not to talk to his friend, who had previously been campused. But he figured it would be OK now that his friend was leaving. "I gave him a hug and said, 'See you later, man,'" he says.

Someone witnessed the exchange and turned Mr. Dow in. Students routinely turn each other in for violating rules and are rewarded by the administration for doing so. According to several former students, those who report classmates are more likely to become floor leaders.

Mr. Dow was called to the office of the dean of men, where, he says, he waited for about four hours. Then he was expelled.

Pensacola Christian College is "an idea that came from God," according to its Web site. The college was founded in 1974 by Arlin Horton, who remains its president. It is Baptist but is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or any similar organization. Both Mr. Horton and his wife, Rebekah, are graduates of Bob Jones University. While it appears that he copied his alma mater's demerit system and some of its rules, there is a longstanding rift between the two institutions.

Several years ago, Pensacola publicly criticized Bob Jones University for using translations of the Bible other than the King James Version. (Pensacola's policy is that the King James is the only divinely inspired English translation.) A group of Bob Jones faculty members fired off a lengthy letter responding to the attack.

It is true that students at Bob Jones are permitted to consult other English translations of the Bible. In the letter, however, Bob Jones professors objected to the implication that the university was not faithful to the word of God. "PCC appears to be bent on claiming exclusive right to the higher ground of Fundamentalism — in lofty isolation, not only from BJU, but from virtually every other Fundamental Bible college and seminary," they wrote.

A representative of Bob Jones University declined to talk about the bad blood between the colleges.

When Pensacola opened its doors, it had one building and 100 students. Its mission was to offer an education "based on the Christian traditional approach in contrast to the humanistic, progressive systems of education." Since then, as it has grown to nearly 5,000 students, it has built a large, gated campus featuring an art-and-music center with a 140-seat recital hall and recording studio; a 137,000-square-foot sports center with a basketball court, ice-skating rink, 12-lane bowling alley, four-lane jogging track, miniature golf course, and racquetball courts. There is a cafeteria, an on-campus restaurant, and a 300,000-volume library.

The campus also has several computer labs and wireless Internet access, although there is a catch. In the mid-1990s, Pensacola had e-mail and limited Internet access, but it shut the services down after several students started an online newsletter criticizing the college. (Needless to say, the students who created the newsletter were expelled.) Internet access was not restored until last year, and it comes with significant restrictions. There are a few hundred approved Web sites; students must ask permission to visit any other site. Amazon and eBay, for instance, are reportedly not on the approved list. Several students say they leave the campus to surf the Web.

Pensacola's success can be chalked up in part to its reputation. It is known as perhaps the strictest Christian college in the country, one that has criticized Bob Jones, of all places, for being too liberal. For those searching for a college that is more-Christian-than-thou, Pensacola is it. It has found a marketing niche.

But that is not the only reason for its growth. Along with the college, Mr. Horton founded A Beka Books, acknowledged as the largest Christian-textbook company in the world. A Beka sells textbooks to more than 10,000 Christian schools across the country, offering a complete curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade. It has also won a big share of the lucrative home-school market.

The company brings in about $70-million in annual revenue and is valued at $280-million, according to Dun & Bradstreet. A sizable chunk of that revenue goes to support the college, which does not come close to breaking even on its own. According to its 2003 tax filing, the university collected $20-million in tuition and fees and $3-million from contributions. The filing attributes $15-million in income to "royalties," presumably from A Beka.

In the mid-90s, A Beka paid nearly $50-million in back taxes after the Internal Revenue Service ruled that it should have been classified as a for-profit entity. The college itself remains nonprofit.

Revenue from A Beka helps keep costs extremely low. Students pay $6,000 a year for tuition, room, and board. That's about a third or a quarter of what most other Christian colleges cost. When asked what other colleges they considered, Pensacola students often mention Bob Jones, Cedarville University, Northland Baptist Bible College, and Abilene Christian University. Cost is usually cited as the deciding factor.

Just as the textbook company helps support the college, the college helps support the textbook company. Many of Pensacola's students work for A Beka, operating binding equipment, packing books into boxes, loading those boxes onto forklifts. Some students complain about the working conditions; others say it's a good deal. For women, A Beka is usually the only employment option because they are not allowed to hold off-campus jobs. Or leave the campus alone, for that matter.

So Pensacola is strict. Sometimes very strict.

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Not really, according to Isaac Blakely. "You get tired of some of the rules, but all in all the rules are not that hard to deal with if you have the right attitude about it," he says.

Mr. Blakely, a senior commercial-art major, had a friend who was socialed for "sitting too close to a girl." One semester Mr. Blakely himself came perilously close to getting kicked out by racking up 118 demerits. (A total of 150 means automatic expulsion.) The demerits were for small offenses, like forgetting to empty his dorm-room trash can or failing to properly clean the sink. Rooms are inspected regularly, and students who do not meet cleanliness standards are given demerits.

Even so, Mr. Blakely is loath to complain. "If PCC didn't put restrictions on us, I would wonder about their standards," he says. "I'm glad they're doing it."

Mena Ghobrial doesn't mind the rules, either. "At first I thought it was too strict, but it helps me concentrate on my studies," says the senior pre-med major. Mr. Ghobrial, who is from Egypt, thinks that some of the restrictions, such as making students sign out when they leave the campus and write down where they are going, help keep them safe.

Others are less enthusiastic about Pensacola's approach. Lisa Daxer transferred to Cedarville from Pensacola. Like other conservative Christian colleges, Cedarville has its share of rules. For instance, students may not drink alcohol on or off the campus, even if they are over 21. They are also forbidden to listen to music that comes with a parental-advisory sticker. Most forms of dancing are banned (ballet is OK).

That's fine with Ms. Daxer, who has no desire to attend a more permissive secular college.

Her problems with Pensacola go beyond the rules. Administrators there equate loyalty to the college with obedience to God in a way she finds objectionable. "They used to say that being at PCC is God's will for our lives," she says. "So walking out of PCC would be breaking God's will for our lives. Then I've heard them say that you might end up dying because God can't use you anymore."

Darrell Dow has heard much the same thing. "There is this idea that if you go against us, you're going against God," he says. Mr. Dow graduated from Pensacola in 2003 with a degree in computer science, but by then he already felt disillusioned. (Timothy Dow, who was kicked out for hugging a recently expelled friend, is Darrell Dow's cousin.) He says because rules can be "made up on the spot," it seems impossible to abide by all of them. "There's a feeling of helplessness and a spirit of fear," he says. "Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a very 1984 feel to the place."

Matthew Arnold agrees. He graduated from Pensacola in 1998 with a degree in commercial art and graphic design; his younger sister attends the college "going against all the advice I ever gave," he says. Mr. Arnold is active in an online forum for former students, where many complain about the college and trade their best, or worst, stories. Some even call themselves "survivors" of the institution. Others, though, temper their criticism with fond regard.

Mr. Arnold argues that because the college claims that its authority comes directly from God, students who feel mistreated are put in an extremely awkward position. There is another, more practical fear as well, he says: Getting kicked out might mean starting over because other colleges might not accept unaccredited Pensacola's credits. "You live in terror of losing all the money you've put into the college," he says.

When Adam Peters enrolled at Pensacola, he believed that "the Lord wanted me to go there." But last fall he accumulated 111 demerits and was asked to sit out for a semester. Mr. Peters, a junior majoring in Bible studies, says he has started "to see a lot of the weaknesses" in Pensacola's system. "I can't shut my eyes to those, even though there are strengths," he says.

From his perspective, there are indeed strengths. Christianity is woven throughout the curriculum. Creationism is taught in science courses. Classes begin with a prayer. Along with mandatory chapel services, students must attend the campus church three times every week; they are not allowed to go to another church unless they are from the Pensacola area, and even then they need special permission. Mandatory small-group prayer meetings are held in the evenings.

A strong Christian emphasis is part of what Mr. Peters wanted in a college. But he has become disturbed by how Pensacola exerts its considerable power over students' lives. He is also bothered by how many of his friends have left the college. "One day they're there, and the next it's like, 'Where's Samantha? Oh, she got kicked out,'" he says. "They won't spell things out, and then they'll yank you. There's not always a lot of mercy there." (Thomas Bartlett, "A College That's Strictly Different," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2006).

Deep Play: Notes on the Bourgeois Cockfight

2006-04-07T22:05:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from two reviews of Will Blythe's book, "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry."

First, Edward Cone's review of the book :

"[Blythe's book is the] best book about loving a team since Fred Exley's "A Fan's Notes," just not quite so grim.

....

The narrative at the center of the book recounts last year's national championship run by the Tar Heels. Blythe goes to practices, talks to players and coaches, watches games on TV and in person. His personality sketches are deft, his action sequences exciting, and his writer's eye sharp. Here he is on Carolina's star big man, Sean May: "For a player of his bulk, May had a surprisingly delicate touch. Watching him shoot was akin to watching a bear dine on salmon with a knife and fork."

Wrapped around this story is the rivalry with Duke, its history and folkways and implications for all concerned. Blythe interviews coach Mike Krzyzewski and star player J.J. Redick, and even watches a game at the home of the Blue Devil fan known as Crazy Towel Guy, who forces him to high-five whenever Duke scores a three-pointer. His interviews are smart and fair -- this would be the "occasionally unbiased" part from the subtitle -- and he finds himself liking these guys more than he might want.

Woven through the text are knowing asides based on a deep understanding of ACC basketball and the schools that play it, the kind of thing that comes from watching for decades. Take this quick brush-off of N.C. State, which once vied for supremacy with the Tar Heels. "Now, decades past their glory years and filled with class resentment, the Wolfpack fans howled with fury every time Carolina came to town. UNC was the lover that had moved on and up, State the dumpee that had downsized into a dumpy apartment, where he spent the weekend microwaving frozen dinners and watching network TV."

All of the above is written by Will Blythe, celebrated magazine journalist, former literary editor of Esquire, contributor to the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. But there is another Will Blythe in the book: "the beast," the atavistic uber-fan, the competitor, hatred personified. Blythe thought he might have left the beast behind by middle-age, but no; "I am a sick, sick man," the book begins. "Not only am I consumed by hatred, I am delighted by it." Eventually he interviews an expert on Buddhism to gauge the possible spiritual toll of his hatred for Duke.

Beast and journalist argue as they finish the interview with Coach K, for whom the beast has a litany of rude questions. "The beast was leering at me in a way I didn't much care for," writes Blythe of this inner conflict. "He bordered on insolent." Indeed, after Blythe sticks to his polite script, the beast calls the journalist a name we cannot print in this newspaper -- the same epithet, by chance, that Krzyzewski himself once applied to Redick after a wimpy performance.

Later, when Duke takes a seemingly insurmountable lead in the end-of-season game at the Dean Dome:

"Damn," the beast said.

"Darn," the journalist said, nodding his stunned head in agreement.

All of this stuff is told in a witty, discursive style, like the stories of a smart and somewhat obsessive friend talking far into the night at a bar, and tied seamlessly into Blythe's upbringing and relationship to his family and his lapsed Presbyterianism and failed marriage and the memories of what his late father taught him about this state and its people ("We are modest and immoderately proud of that modesty, a somewhat paradoxical condition"), which reminded me a lot of what my late father taught me about such things.

Let me stress that this is not just a book for Carolina fans. The depth of Blythe's fandom and the skill of his writing make it work for any reader, and much will be recognizable to fans of other teams, too. The way Blythe's mother can't relax, for instance, even when Carolina is torching an outmanned Virginia team by 50 points.

"Mama, they're not going to lose this game. Trust me.''

"I'm glad you're so confident."

"I think we're going to make it."

"Hush," she said.

When it was all over, my mother said, "That wasn't too bad."

Carolina had squeaked by, 110-76.

Then there is Blythe watching an early-season game against Indiana on TV at his girlfriend's apartment. First he orders her son to quit hitting him in the back of the head with a soccer ball, but when Indiana mounts a comeback, Blythe knows what he must do.

Sitting stock-still was no longer working. At moments of extremity, it always seemed wise to tinker with Karma. Move things around a bit, change the narrative.

"Harry," I called. "Get in here. And bring that ball."

"Do you want me to hit you in the head again?" Harry asked. He was a very intuitive boy.

"Yes," I said. "Fire away."

This immediately paid dividends. Sean May put in two free throws...

It's all in here, from Frank McGuire and Vic Bubas to a visit from Michael Jordan, an encounter with Dick Vitale, a gentle post-mortem on the career of Shavlik Randolph, a subplot about a star who never quite shone at Chapel Hill, Melvin Scott, and an explanation of the Triassic geology of eastern North Carolina.

This is not a perfect book. It could use another edit, for example, to remove some odd repetitions. And even though Blythe confesses to -- hell, celebrates -- the perception of class difference between the Duke and Carolina fans, I found his Duke-hating xenophobia a little heavy-handed. The essence of Duke's star of the early '60s, Art Heyman, seems to Blythe to be wrapped up with his New York Jewishness, his otherness, while New York Jews like Larry Brown are just great Carolina players.

Then again, that skewed prism and willful unevenhandedness make for a good part of this book's appeal." (EdCone.com, March 6, 2006).

Second, Franklin Foer on Blythe:

"[Blythe] passionately supports North Carolina, and just as rabidly despises Duke. He describes the Dukies' "Nuremberg-rally cheers." The Duke coach, Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), is "The Rat. Ratface. . . . Satan. The Evil One." When the crowd at a Duke basketball game explodes, he hopes that it might really explode — "you know, blue-painted body parts shooting through the air, cheerleaders spiraling above the city of Durham, all those obnoxious students and that out-of-state arrogance disappearing in one bright blast."

Blythe spends a lot of time hyping the Tobacco Road rivalry as the greatest in sport — a bit too much time, if you ask me, or Red Sox and Yankees fans, or supporters of Michigan and Ohio State football, or anyone who has watched a European soccer derby. But he is, by all objective measures of sporting bile, not far from the mark. These two programs are the hugely successful aristocracy of their sport. They reside within eight miles of each other, a proximity that obviously heightens the ill will. "We share the same dry cleaners," Coach K has explained. There's also a sociological subtext to their games that eludes most outsiders: where North Carolina is a public university and draws heavily from within the state, Duke is private, endowed by tobacco money and heavily populated by imports from the Northeast. At least that's Blythe's partisan understanding.

For an entire season — the glorious 2004-5 championship season, as it turns out — Blythe returns to live with his mother and follow his Tar Heels. He isn't just searching for a pretext to turn his all-consuming passion into a book advance. Hovering over the book — and clearly his prime motive for writing it — is his recently departed father. (In an opening scene, the minister who just presided over his father's funeral continually whispers basketball scores to Blythe.) His dad loved the state of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina, where he taught, but his curmudgeonly character prevented him from joining his son in his highly irrational fandom. And his father considered Blythe's emigration to New York City an act of betrayal. Blythe never explicitly spells out how this book will help him mourn — and there are long stretches where his father doesn't appear. But if I had to guess, Blythe wants to use the book to explain his basketball obsession to his father, to show how, at his core, he shares precisely the same passions and values.

Fans of college basketball will wish that all sportswriters possessed Blythe's ability to describe a game, to translate its tension and render its action. (Writing about the Duke sharpshooter J. J. Redick, he says, "When he missed, North Carolina fans felt spared an execution, as if they'd already been standing blindfolded in front of the wall when the last-minute reprieve came in from the governor.") They will enjoy his impeccable miniature profiles of the corporate conservative Coach K and his longtime liberal Carolina counterpart, Dean Smith. (Do my descriptions inadvertently reveal just how effectively Blythe has spun me?) Blythe tells much of the season's story through a backup North Carolina guard named Melvin Scott, who began his career as one of the most sought-after high school players in the country. We watch Scott suffer through the dashed expectations and travel with him to his childhood home in the Baltimore ghetto.

Fortunately, Blythe goes far beyond the facile John Feinstein "inside a season" formula. As promised in the title, he uses the rivalry to explicate the nature of hatred — "paddling up the Nile of my Duke hatred, looking for its source." In this quest, he visits the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman and meditates on the 19th-century English essayist William Hazlitt. But Blythe provides no dazzling insights into the universality of hatred, let alone its presence in sports. And that's hardly a fault. Rather than formulate broad conclusions, he sticks to the peculiarities of the Carolina Piedmont and his own biography. This leads him to digress on Southern Presbyterianism — whose cool Calvinist tendency leads white North Carolinians to seek more effusive spiritual outlets, like basketball — and the suburbanization of his state — which leads North Carolinians to seek authentic emotional experiences, like basketball. He pulls off these generalizations because he writes amusingly, self-deprecatingly and often beautifully.

Only one part of the book grows tiresome. He keeps returning to a colorful cast of eccentrics, whose entire existences are consumed by the rivalry — we meet, for instance, a Duke supporter named Crazy Towel Guy and an Episcopal priest whose obsessive collecting of Carolina paraphernalia culminates in his divorce. None of this feels fresh, however vividly Blythe depicts his subjects. From Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch" to Warren St. John's "Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer," the crazed fan has received his fair share of attention — and then some." [Franklin Foer, "Tobacco Road Rage," The New York Times, April 2, 2006).

Africa Cursed: George B. N. Ayittey and the Curse of the Africanist

2006-03-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

On January 21, 2006 (see archives) I drew your attention to one George B. (does that stand for "Baskervilles"?) N. Ayittey, an economist teaching at American University. Partly parodying his penchant for melodrama and his militant ignorance, I described him thus: "[Ayittey] is one of those morally grotesque and numbingly mediocre figures that the American Right has the uncanny talent for digging up. Every full moon he is unleashed from the dank caves of the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation his rancid mouth awash with the latest racist pronouncement on Africa." Now it appears its high tide and the 'ound of the Baskervilles is abroad. In what he takes to be a response to the blog post, he offers a full-throated bay at the moon:

"Sir,

Your comment about my interview with Ray Suarez reeks of intellectual astigmatism and it is bereft of serious intellectual analysis. Desperate people who lack the facts to challenge a viewpoint resort to name-calling and ideological demagoguery.

Africa has been oppressed, exploited, enslaved and raped -- not just by the West -- but by Arabs and African leaders as well. If you cannot accept this, then you represent the OLD thinking, which had led Africa to our present quandary.

If you cannot admit of your own responsibility in causing a problem, then NOBODY can help you solve it. This is neither an ultra-right-wing conservative or leftist viewpoint but just plain common sense.

Another common sense principle is this: Before you write something critical about someone, do your own research about him or her and not just base your commentary on just one interview or article. You could have done a Google search on "George Ayittey." Did you?

Have a good day.

George Ayittey,
Washington, DC
March 19, 2006

E-mail: ayittey@american.edu." (posted on Anawim, March 19, 2006).

My response:

Dear Professor Ayittey,

So let me get this straight:

1. On the one hand, you charge that the blog post "reeks of intellectual astigmatism" and "name-calling." On the other hand, you refer to the writer as "desperate" and refer to her/his writing as "ideological demagoguery."

2. On the one hand, you argue that the blog post is "bereft of serious intellectual analysis" and you claim that the writer lacks "the facts to challenge a viewpoint." On the other hand, you offer not one fact or argument defending your racist and Islamophobic claim that Arabs are not Africans and that Islam is a "foreign" religion in Africa. Why are the identities "Arab" and "Africans" mutually exclusive? Why is Islam a "foreign" religion to Africa?

3. On the one hand, you charge that the writer of the blog post lacks "the facts to challenge a viewpoint." On the other hand, you lied through your teeth to Ray Suarez when you claimed that "no other Arab country condemned that [1998 embassy] bombing." Fact: the Arab league condemned the attack; Fact: Tunisian President Zein al-Abidin Bin Ali condemned the attack; Fact: Morocco's King Hassan II condemned the attack; Fact: the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt condemned the attack.

3. On the one hand, you lecture the writer on "the common sense principle" of Google searches. On the other hand, a simple google search could have availed to you the facts laid out above -- see here:
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/980812/1998081203.html

4. On the one hand, you charge the writer with "OLD thiking, which had [sic] led Africa to our present quandary." On the other hand, your fantasy of a racially pure Africa and a presumably authentic African religion is a regurgitation of eugenicist and Nazi politics.

5. On the one hand, you charge the writer with refusing to "accept" your allegation that "Africa has been oppressed, exploited, enslaved and raped -- not just by the West -- but by Arabs and African leaders as well." You continue: "If you cannot admit of your own responsibility in causing a problem, then NOBODY can help you solve it." On the other hand, you irresponsibly do not indicate where the writer argued otherwise.

6. On the one hand, you wish that that the writer would "have a good day." On the other hand, you have made that impossible with your racism, religious bigotry, and ignorant harangues.

Sincerely,

Ptochos."

The Anawim: Iraq

2006-03-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

Hate. Terror. Guilt. Grief. Anguish:

"What happened in the village of Isahaqi, north of Baghdad, on the Ides of March? The murk of war – the natural blur of unbuckled event, and its artificial augmentation by professional massagers – shrouds the details of the actual operation. But here is what we know.

We know that U.S. forces conducted a raid on a house in the village on March 15. We know that the Pentagon said the American troops were "targeting an individual suspected of supporting foreign fighters for the al-Qaeda in Iraq terror network," when their team came under fire, and that the troops "returned fire, utilizing both air and ground assets." We know that the Pentagon said that "only" one man, two women and one child were killed in the raid, which destroyed a house in the village.

We know from photographic evidence that the corpses of two men, four shrouded figures (women, according to the villagers), and five children – all of them apparently under the age of five, one as young as seven months – were pulled from the rubble of the house and laid out for burial beneath the bright, blank desert sky. We know that an Associated Press reporter on the scene saw the ruined house, and a photographer for Agence France Presse took the pictures of the bodies.

We know that two Iraqi police officials, Major Ali Ahmed and Colonel Farouq Hussein – both employed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government – told Reuters that the 11 occupants of the house, including the five children, had been bound and shot in the head before the house was blown up. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police told Reuters that an American helicopter landed on the roof in the early hours of the morning, then the house was blown up, and then the victims were discovered. We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said that an autopsy performed on the bodies found that "all the victims had gunshot wounds to the head." We know that the U.S.-backed Iraqi police said they found "spent American-issue cartridges in the rubble."

We know that Ahmed Khalaf, brother of house's owner, told AP that nine of the victims were family members and two were visitors, adding, "the killed family was not part of the resistance, they were women and children. The Americans have promised us a better life, but we get only death."

We know from the photographs that one child, the youngest, the baby, has a gaping wound in his forehead. We can see that one other child, a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, is lying on her side and has blood oozing from the back of her head. The faces of the other children are turned upwards toward the sun; if they were shot, they were shot in the back of the head and their wounds are not evident. But we can see that their bodies, though covered with dust from the rubble, are otherwise unmarked; they were evidently not crushed in the collapse of the house during, say, a fierce firefight between U.S. forces and an "al Qaeda facilitator." They died in some other fashion.

We know from the photographs that two of the children – two girls, still in their pajamas – are lying with their dead eyes open. We can see that the light and tenderness that animate the eyes of every young child have vanished; nothing remains but the brute stare of nothingness into nothingness. We can see that the other three children have their eyes closed; two are limp, but the baby has one stiffened arm raised to his cheek, as if trying to ward off the blow that gashed and pulped his face so terribly.

These facts are what we know from American officials, American-backed Iraqi officials and reporters for Western press associations on the scene. This is probably all we will ever know for certain about what happened in Isahaqi on March 15. The rest will remain obscured by the murk instigated by U.S. military spokesmen, who are evidently not telling the truth about the body count of the raid, and by the natural confusion that must attend the villagers' description of an attack that struck without warning in the middle of the night. But beyond this cloud of unknowing, there are a few other facts relevant to the case that can be clearly established.

For instance, we know that the American troops who caused the deaths of these children – either by tying them up and shooting them, an unspeakable atrocity, or else "merely" by storming or bombing a house full of civilians in a night raid "with both air and ground assets" – were sent to Iraq on a demonstrably false mission to "disarm" weapons that did not exist and take revenge for 9/11 on a nation that had nothing to do with the attack. And we now know that the White House – and George W. Bush specifically – knew all along that the intelligence did not and could not support the public case he had made for the war.

We know that the only reason that this dead baby has his arm frozen to his lifeless face is that three years ago this week, George W. Bush gave the order to begin the unprovoked, unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. He hasn't fired a single shot or launched a single missile; he hasn't tortured or killed any prisoners; he hasn't kidnapped or beheaded civilians or planted bombs along roadsides, in mosques or marketplaces. Yet every single atrocity of the war – on both sides – and every single death caused by the war, and every act of religious repression perpetrated by the extremist sects empowered by the war, is the direct result of the decision made by George W. Bush three years ago. Nothing he says can change this fact; nothing he does, or causes to be done, for good or ill, can wash the blood of these children – and the tens of thousands of other innocent civilians killed in the war – from his hands.

And anyone who knows these facts, who sees these facts, and fails to cry out against them – if only in your own heart – will be forever tainted by this same blood. " (Chris Floyd, "Children of Abraham: Death in the Desert," Empire Burlesque, March 19, 2006).

Defenders of Western Civilization (Or Our Judeo-Christian Heritage)

2006-03-10T11:57:00.000-08:00

When he is not being the racist fascist that he is, Andrew Sullivan is doing his part in spreading the HIV virus:

"Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay pundit, who is HIV-positive, has been found anonymously soliciting unprotected anal sex on AOL and the Web (bareback is the online term of art -- AOL's censoring of cruder words has helped create a new class of euphemisms).

....

The Sullivan scandal is about hypocrisy (he's a famous scold, regularly railing against the Clinton sexual misadventures as well as all manner of gay promiscuity) or, depending on who's debating, the right to privacy (the Sullivan case was being linked last week with the Bush twins' drinking episodes).

....

Sullivan is the former New Republic editor, the current "TRB" columnist, and a frequent New York Times Magazine contributor

....

There doesn't seem to be much doubt that both Sullivan and Christy have done what they're being accused of doing -- it's an element of any good scandal that the culprit be caught dead to rights.

In each instance, there was a kind of sting operation. Other gay journalists contacted Sullivan through his Web personals to confirm his identity (Sullivan has subsequently admitted to most of the gory details)....

....

In Sullivan's case, he was exposed for something that he discusses freely. He cruises. He's proud of being well known in gay bars across Washington. Before you know it, when you're with him, he'll be talking about leather stuff. He's written, too, about unprotected sex between HIV-positive partners -- he's in favor of it and has a strenuous point of view about its relative safety. He's not keeping many secrets. Of course, his enemies argue that he's intellectually dishonest -- but that's different from being actually dishonest.

Still, the in flagrante delicto Web pages, which were enterprisingly saved and reposted by his detractors, are a fleshy corpus: "killer muscle ass that loves to milk loads with my power glutes." Not exactly gay pride, but strong porn-writing skills. With pictures too: a fabulously muscled, thick-necked headless torso -- which will make an ideal book cover when the story is told. (We may just be on the verge of understanding what an incredible kink-catcher the Web can be -- a Web page becomes the misdelivered letter in a Restoration comedy.)" (Michael Wolff, "Strange Bedfellows," New York Magazine, June 18, 2001).

Gramsci, We Hardly Knew Ye!!

2006-03-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

Prince Charles apparently pictures himself as a lonely dissident. The story's headline in the New York Times, from all appearances, was not intended to be ironic:

"Charles sued The Mail, claiming it had violated his privacy and was guilty of copyright infringement. He also hopes to prevent the paper from publishing seven similar reports he wrote after other trips, which were apparently leaked to it by a disgruntled former palace employee.

But the case is becoming less about copyright law and more about Charles's role in British politics. According to testimony by Mark Bolland, the prince's deputy private secretary from 1996 to 2002, the prince sees himself not as an aristocratic man of privilege, but rather as a "dissident working against the prevailing political consensus."

Charles, he wrote in a statement that is part of the newspaper's defense, had a habit of plying people — members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, influential acquaintances — with letters outlining his unsolicited "views of political matters and individual politicians at home and abroad and on international issues." (Sarah Lyall, "The Dissident Prince: Public, Prickly and Very Political," The New York Times, February 23, 2006).

Structure of Feeling

2006-03-08T21:19:00.000-08:00

Gary Younge on the manufacture of a hegemonic structure of feeling:

"But to others Summers has become a martyr - a man "daring" enough to "challenge the pillars of political correctness", who caused "would-be feminists [to get] the vapours".

In other words Mr Summers's problem was not that he blundered, but that he was brave. Quite what is brave about suggesting women are not as clever as men, supporting the US army or hounding out a black academic is not clear. True Summers lost his job. But he went down defending privilege and power and the ideas that maintain them. In so doing he lost the support of his peers. Shot by his own troops, some are now nominating him for a medal of honour.

But the days when courage referred to those who take on the mighty against all odds and face the consequences are, apparently, over. For, when it comes to attacking the weak and backing the strong, "bravery" has somehow become the mot du jour. A couple of years ago a British journalist won a major award for columns supporting the Iraq war on the grounds that to do so was "brave". Whether the award was deserved is irrelevant; the judges' adjective is the issue.

What, after all, is "brave" about supporting the policies of both your government and the sole global superpower against a country that posed no threat? Likewise, when David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect magazine, published his blueprint for racial exclusion two years ago ("To put it bluntly," he wrote, "most of us prefer our own kind"), he was praised for being "bold". As though maligning diversity constituted an act of courage in a country where black people are overwhelmingly more likely to be stopped, searched, jailed, murdered in jail, unemployed and marginalised. It is not the validity of these arguments that is at issue here but the characterisation of those who make them as audacious that is problematic.

To align yourself with the powerful and then take aim at the powerless takes not one ounce of valour. To prop up prevailing hierarchies and orthodoxies rather than challenge them demands not a scintilla of bravery. True, like Summers, you may run into trouble. But just look who's covering your back. With the prevailing winds of war, prejudice or the state on your side, the odds are with you. Since the privileges you are defending are inherent in the commentariat - how many women, blacks, working-class people or Muslims get to speak, let alone be heard? - your worldview is constantly being reinforced.

It may still be the right thing to do - the weak should not be protected from criticism nor the strong denied praise solely on the grounds of their relative material strength. But those who choose Goliath's corner cannot then claim underdog status once David gets out his slingshot. Take the Danish cartoons. They were first printed in a country that supports the war in Iraq, where the far-right Danish People's party receives 13% of the vote and where, according to the Danish Institute for Human Rights, racially motivated crimes doubled between 2004 and 2005. Barely had the ink dried on sermons extolling western civilisation last month than scenes of colonial barbarism involving British troops beating Iraqis filled our screens. Soon after came more images from Abu Ghraib, showing a handcuffed Iraqi with mental-health problems taunted by US soldiers.

We saw him pounding his head on a cell door and hanging upside down from a top bunk, clothed only in his faeces. These cartoons did not appear in a vacuum. In publishing them the editor of Jyllands-Posten had illustrated not just an insensitive Islamophobic jibe but a racist mindset that has consequences for Muslims worldwide. He had a right to print them. But to do so in this context was an act of bigotry, not bravery. Underpinning this peculiar notion of courage is the feeble-minded obsession with political correctness - the ultimate refuge of the baseless argument and the clueless commentator.

Over the last month "political correctness" has been used in the British press on average 10 times a day - twice as frequently as "Islamophobia", three times as "homophobia" and four times as "sexism". Its ubiquity is due in no small part to its flexibility. During that period it has been used to refer to the ill-treatment of rabbits, the teaching of Gaelic, Mozart's opera La Clemenza di Tito, a flower show in Paris and the naming of the Mazda3 MPS. But it's most commonly evoked to suggest that honest conversations are being curtailed by a liberal establishment intent on imposing its ideological beliefs on an unwilling public.

Quite where this establishment resides (other than in the minds of the right), where it gets its power and how it exercises it is far from clear - given the reactionary state of the world it is doing a terrible job. Since only about 5% of daily newspapers bought by people in Britain could be described as progressive, there is plenty of room in the national discourse for rightwing people to say whatever they want. And they do. But once this straw man has been invented, you need only knock him down to earn your medal of valour. It is true that some ways of behaving and speaking that were once mainstream are no longer acceptable.

There was a time when such words as "darkie", "paki", "puff", "spastic" and "coloured" were common currency. We have abandoned them for the same reason we no longer burn witches at the stake or stick orphaned children in the poor house. We have moved on. That's not political correctness but social and political progress. Not imposed by liberal diktat, but established by civic consensus. Those who are unwilling or unable to move on are welcome to those words and views. But like anyone else who engages in antisocial behaviour, once they act on those impulses they must live with the consequences of those actions. They might be crude, crass or contrarian; insensitive, ignorant or in denial. But whatever else they are, they are not brave." (Gary Younge, "Take a Potshot at the Powerless, and You Too Can Win a Medal of Valour," Guardian Unlimited, March 6, 2006).

Maith

2006-03-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Freedland on forgiveness:

"In Facing the Truth, victims and perpetrators of violence in Northern Ireland met each other under the gentle gaze of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They told and heard stories to break the heart, and sometimes their eyes grew moist, but these men did not cry.

These remarkable films, shown over three successive nights, prompted a whole range of thoughts. First, they were a reminder of the sheer strangeness of the Troubles. Citizens of this country recalled their campaigns to kill each other; how they saw themselves and their targets as "soldiers", how they studied files, drawn up by self-styled "intelligence officers", telling them how to track down and murder their quarry. How they did this while pretending to live ordinary lives. Michael Stone, notorious for his 1988 killing spree at Milltown cemetery, used to rub dirt and sand into his clothes so that his wife would think he was a builder. One of his targets drove a Mother's Pride delivery van. Few described it this way at the time, but these programmes left little doubt: on the streets of the United Kingdom, there was a civil war.

Facing the Truth prompted a question: why has Northern Ireland not had its own truth and reconciliation commission, analogous to the one Archbishop Tutu chaired in South Africa? Why had it been left to television, to the BBC, to organise one? Watching, it became clear the province needs such a process: there is no shortage of pain or people yearning to bear witness.

But the programmes asked a larger question. For what was noticeable in several of the filmed encounters was a subtle, unstated pressure - not on the culprits to show contrition, but on the victims. Those who had lost limbs or loved ones were under pressure - to forgive.

Carefully and sensitively, the grieving relatives were led to a climax: how would they close the meeting? Would they be able to reach out and shake the hand of those who had wrought such havoc? There was something uncomfortable about this, for it is part of a larger pressure, not confined to this TV series, which demands that those who have suffered most must also be the most generous.

Which is why I feel for the Rev Julie Nicholson, the vicar who has quit her Bristol pulpit because she can no longer preach forgiveness - not after her daughter, Jenny, was killed in the July 7 bombings last year. As a Christian, Nicholson clearly felt under enormous pressure to say she could forgive Mohammed Sidique Khan, who had blown up himself and six others at Edgware Road station. But she could not do it.

And now I wonder why we ask such a thing of those who have been bereaved so cruelly. Of course, there are people who are able, somehow, to meet this challenge. The mother of Anthony Walker, the Liverpool teenager murdered by racist thugs wielding an ice axe, somehow emerged from the trial of her son's killers to declare: "I have got to forgive them. I still forgive them." Last year the mother of Abigail Witchells, stabbed in front of her toddler child, spoke of her "enormous sadness" on hearing of the suicide of her daughter's presumed attacker. She said his death was the "real tragedy of the story" - and that she had forgiven him.

I confess to being both in awe of and baffled by the compassion of such people. Of course, none of us can know how we would respond to so desperate a plight, but I struggle to understand how you could forgive the killer, or attempted killer, of your own child. I do not know how it would be possible to hold anything in your heart but rage and pain.

There are philosophical objections one could muster too. Surely the only person who can forgive a crime is its direct victim: Anthony Walker has the authority to forgive his killers - but he is not here. For believers, I have sympathy with those who say that if forgiveness is in the hands of anybody it is, like judgment, in the hands of God alone.

But these are not the prevailing or even popular assumptions. Instead, we exalt those who can forgive and regard those who cannot as guilty of a kind of moral weakness. We demand that those who have been brought low reach highest.

There might be a way through this - and it would begin with an attempt to define our terms. Forgiveness has entered casual parlance as a psychological term, shorthand for "moving on", for no longer holding a grudge, even for feelings of equanimity or empathy towards the person who hurt you.

"If it is that, it can't be done," says Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and author of Christianity and Violence. He dismisses the idea of "loving" the man who has harmed you or your family as "morally perverse, even if I understood what it meant. How could feelings of anger and loss coexist with that love?" That definition of forgiveness, the one we seem to demand from those who have suffered most, is little more than "cheap Christian rhetoric".

No, forgiveness should be a much more realistic, pragmatic business. In Fraser's eyes, to forgive someone is merely to vow that you will not respond to their crime in kind. If they have killed, you will not kill back: you will choose instead to end the cycle of violence. On this definition, forgiveness is the literal opposite of revenge.

This is a move that is much easier to imagine. Sylvia Hackett, whose husband Dermot was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, has clearly moved beyond wanting to do to Michael Stone what he and his comrades did to her. But on Monday night's programme she seemed to feel that was not enough; she forced herself to walk over to Stone and shake his hand. When he placed a second hand on hers, she recoiled and fled from the room. It was too much. She may not have wanted to kill Stone, but nor did she want to be his friend. Yet our present day notions of forgiveness confuse the two.

Not that the eschewing of revenge should be considered something small: it is not forgiveness lite. In most circumstances, we can give up our right to seek direct vengeance in favour of justice: we may not kill the killers, but at least we will see them behind bars. But in some places - Northern Ireland and South Africa among them - there is not even that comfort. Justice has been sacrificed in the pursuit of peace. That is why Michael Stone, originally sentenced to 684 years in jail, is now a free man, released under the Good Friday agreement.

So we should alter what we mean by forgiveness. It is not a syrupy inscription in a greetings card; it is a painful, practical step taken by those who want to end the killing. It is not some impossible ideal: it is, properly defined, achievable - and no less admirable for that." (Jonathan Freedland, "Forgiveness doesn't mean you have to love your husband's killer," The Guardian Unlimited, March 8, 2006).

Litterateur

2006-02-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

Javier Marias conducts a survey of the republic of the literati:

"It's difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits of Rimbaud, Turgenev, Rilke, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes and a dozen other literary eminences. "The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors," writes the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, "is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters."

......

Henry James, he reminds us, took against Flaubert and Rossetti because they received him in their work smocks:

"On the other hand, [James's] enthusiasm for Maupassant knew no bounds, again thanks to a single visit: the French short-story writer had received him for lunch in the society of a lady who was not only naked, but wearing a mask. This struck James as the height of refinement, especially when Maupassant informed him that she was no mere courtesan, prostitute, servant, or actress, but a femme du monde , which James was perfectly happy to believe."

Once Arthur Conan Doyle, who was known to get into fistfights when young and who identified with knights of old, was traveling by train through South Africa:

"One of his grown-up sons commented on the ugliness of a woman who happened to walk down the corridor. He had barely had time to finish this sentence when he received a slap and saw, very close to his, the flushed face of his old father, who said very mildly: 'Just remember that no woman is ugly.' "

......

Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King" was the favorite story of both Faulkner and Proust. "The death of Yukio Mishima was so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life." Joseph Conrad's "natural state was one of disquiet bordering on anxiety." Violet Hunt, at age 13, offered herself to John Ruskin, later refused a marriage proposal from Oscar Wilde, seduced the homosexual Somerset Maugham, was seduced by H.G. Wells and lived for some years as the putative wife of Ford Madox Ford. Marías reminds us that William Faulkner, who once worked for the University of Mississippi post office, hated to be interrupted in his reading by "any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." He goes on:

"Perhaps that is where the seeds were first sown of Faulkner's evident aversion to and scorn for letters. When he died, piles of letters, packages and manuscripts sent by admirers were found, none of which he had opened. In fact, the only letters he did open were those from publishers, and then only very cautiously: he would make a tiny slit in the envelope and then shake it to see if a cheque appeared. If it didn't, then the letter would simply join all those other things that can wait forever."

In his preface, Marías notes that he generally writes with "affection and humour," though he confesses that he feels very little of the former for James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima. The chapter on the self-important Mann is a comic masterpiece:

"Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: 'Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!' "

Most of these pages, adds Marías, chronicle the state of Mann's stomach and bowels or include plaintive entries like: "Sexual disturbance and disturbance in my activities when faced by the impossibility of refusing to write an obituary for Eduard Keyserling." Other entries make clear the married Mann's attraction to muscular youths, such as "a healthy young fellow with golden hair" or a young gardener, "beardless, with brown arms and open shirt," who gave the writer "quite a turn."

According to Marías -- and it's hard to argue with him -- Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano , seems "to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature." An alcoholic, he was known to drink shaving lotion and his own urine. Shortly after their marriage, his first wife started going off with other men, once climbing onto a bus in Mexico "to spend a jolly week with some engineers." He tried to strangle his second wife. Twice. And he had lots of trouble with animals, once punching a horse in the ear so that it fell to its knees:

"Even sadder was what happened to a poor little rabbit that he was absentmindedly stroking on his lap while talking one night to the pet's owner and the owner's mother: the rabbit suddenly went stiff; Lowry had broken its neck with his small, clumsy hands. For two days, he wandered the streets of London carrying the corpse, not knowing what to do with it and consumed by self-loathing."

Isak Dinesen, we're reminded, married Bror Blixen, who promptly infected her with syphilis, though she took a long time before divorcing him. Here the urbane author of All Souls and Your Face Tomorrow injects one of those observations about life that seem so insightfully European: Dinesen's "husband was the twin brother of the man she had loved from girlhood, and bonds formed through a third party are perhaps the most difficult to break." He continues:

"Having syphilis obliged her, early on, to renounce sex, and seeing that there was no help to be had from God and bearing in mind how terrible it was for a young woman to be denied 'the right to love,' Isak Dinesen promised her soul to the Devil, and he promised her, in return, that everything she experienced thenceforth would become a story. That, at least, is what she told a non-lover."

Though he envies the cheerful humanity of Laurence Sterne, the character that Marías most obviously adores is the caustic, illusionless Madame du Deffand, best known today as one of the world's great letter writers, her correspondents including Voltaire and, above all, Horace Walpole. "In both youth and maturity," writes Marías, she "had known no weak passions, only overwhelming ones." He tantalizes with accounts of her early life:

"During her youth, having already been married and almost immediately separated ('Feeling no love at all for one's husband is a fairly widespread misfortune'), she had taken part in a number of orgies, to which she had doubtless been introduced by her first lover, the regent Philippe d'Orléans."

Madame du Deffand's wit is still celebrated in France. When a priest marveled at the miracle of St. Denis, who had managed to walk after his beheading all the way from Montmartre to the church that now bears his name, she answered: "The distance does not matter, it is only the first step that is difficult." She once forthrightly announced, "I find everyone loathsome." She could also be optimistic and trusting, in her fashion: "One is surrounded by weapons and by enemies, and the people we call our friends are merely the ones we know would not themselves murder us, but would merely let the murderers have their way."

...........

Marías closes it with a longish piece about his collection of portrait postcards of writers, meditating on what the various images mean to him: The young Gide, he concludes, looks like "a professional duellist"; T.S. Eliot like "a man who has spent decades combing his hair in exactly the same way." But let me finish with Marías's reflections on a photograph of Rilke:

"Rilke does not have the face one would suppose him to have, so delicate and unbearable was he in his habits and needs as a great poet. . . . His face is frankly dangerous, with those dark circles under deep-set eyes, and the sparse, drooping moustache which gives him a strangely Mongolian appearance; those cold, oblique eyes make him look almost cruel, and only his hands -- clasped as they should be, unlike Conrad's indecisive hands -- and the quality of his clothes -- an excellent tie and excellent cloth -- give him some semblance of repose or somewhat mitigate that cruelty. The truth is that he could be a visionary doctor in his laboratory, awaiting the results of some monstrous and forbidden experiment."

One glance at Rilke's picture and you'll see that Marías's description is exactly right." (Michael Dirda, review of "Written Lives," by Javier Marias, Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2006).