elephant-rabbits

2004-03-14T17:23:00.000+01:00

Othellos and Prosperos

I like this article in the Financial Times because manages to show fundamental similarities among apparently dissimilar perspectives. It seems to me that this task is an important accompaniment to the project of learning--as Wittgenstein would have us learn--to see differences.

Otherwise, though, it's also an interesting exploration of the ongoing To Be An Empire, Or Not To Be An Empire discussion.

(Link via Glenn.)

2004-02-08T23:42:00.000+01:00

Cricket and morality

Jeremy's interview is here.

2004-02-08T21:24:00.000+01:00

Collin May’s "France Falling" series, updated

Nicolas Baverez
1. Introduction
2. Three Transformations in Economics and Strategy
3. Society and Politics
4. Failures and Solutions

André Glucksmann: Ouest contre ouest
1. Civilization contre Nihilism
2. Shakespeare contre Sartre
3. The Cowboy contre the Tsar

Alain Finkielkraut on Anti-Semitism
1. Introduction
2. Vigilances
3. le Matin Brun
4. The Provincial Cosmopolitans
5. The Varieties of Anti-Semitism

Stephen Launay on War
1. Introduction, Part One
2. Introduction, Part Two

Jean-François Revel
A review of Revel’s Anti-Americanism

2004-02-08T20:22:00.000+01:00

To whom it may concern:

For the last several weeks, lincoln cat (me and a few of my selves) and Elephant-Rabbits (a group blog, but still a gang of one) have been regrettably inactive. We were in the midst of a labor-intensive move, westward to Maryland. (So long, Belgium, and thanks for all the croquetjes.)

Since we’ve spent the past six years in Europa, and since things have become, of late, rather interesting here and there, the subject of Transatlantica will be making repeat visits to both of these sites over the coming months. For now, we’ll point ya’ll to a thread still spinning out of Davids Medienkritik about German and American culture. (Various other topics have also woven themselves in, and the kite has flown so high there are now three whole rolls of string beneath it: one, two, three.)

Meanwhile, Marc F. Plattner is saying that the EU is trying to get medieval on all our asses (via John Coumarianos).

2004-01-12T18:02:00.000+01:00

Walter Russell Mead on the Bush administration's past year

Gregory Djerijian of The Belgravia Dispatch says that Walter Russell Mead is "pretty much right on throughout" this assessment of the Bush administration's foreign policy record in 2003.

For more from Mead, try this conversation with Harry Kreisler at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley. Among other things, Mead discusses his personal background -- including the impact of the civil rights movement on his life -- and his division of American foreign policy into four strains: Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, and Jacksonian.

If you like that, you'll love his book.

2003-12-04T11:33:00.000+01:00

Vive la différance:

Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and the McDonald's brand, or the more specific brand of the Big Mac, is worth a lot.

Note, however, that the homogeneity of the globalised product is necessarily a relative matter, and belief in its stability may not be supported in reality. Though it is evidently a great secret, I'm told that McDonald's buns have a lot more sugar in Britain than they do in the States; there is, of course, no beef (Hindu sensibilities) or pork (Muslim) in the Indian "Maharaja Mac"; the mayonnaise has no egg in it (for vegans); and, when Bové did his splendid work on the Montpellier McDonald's, the local company representative was at tactical pains to stress difference, assuring the demonstrators that the burgers were an authentically local product, containing only French beef "from the farm".

And what about McCamembert? Does its career work as a metonym for modernity, Steven Shapin asks? (Yes, the same Steven Shapin who's co-responsible for this important book.)

(Link via Oxblog.)

2003-12-04T10:42:00.000+01:00

Human sacrifice

Ideofact links to an article in the Washington Post about tantric human sacrifice in India. (According to a report in the Hindustan Times, in the last six months there have been 25 cases in western Uttar Pradesh alone.) The piece begins with a horrific story which reminded me of this one about one of Louis XIV's mistresses:

One of the women whom the king favored obtained her post by a means unique in modern times. On the road from Paris to Orleans stood a château in the chapel of which a priest named Guibourg officiated from time to time. His notion of the service was peculiar. On a certain day near the mid-century the alter in that chapel, covered with a black cloth, supported the semi-naked body of a woman in her twenties. The priest placed the chalice on her midriff and intoned the black mass, winding up with the ritual kiss bestowed on Satan's new recruit. Then came the sacrifice of a live offering to the lord of Evil, to ensure the fulfillment of a petition shortly to be made. The live victim this time was unusual: an infant who had been bought for a few francs. And the petition was also out of the common: "I want the king's affection so that he will do everything I ask for myself and I want him to give up La Vallière and look with favor on my relatives, my servants, and my retainers." The infant's heart was set aside to be burnt and reduced to powder "for the king's use."

The woman on the alter was Athènais de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan. She became lady-in-waiting to the queen and acknowledged mistress of the king at 27. Her reign lasted 14 years.

During that time she was eulogized in verse by many, and notably by Racine and La Fontaine. They did not know, of course, any more than the king, the unorthodox means by which she had made her way to the foot of the throne. She produced eight children and managed to get two legitimized, inevitably creating permanent dissension between partisans of the true line and of the bastards. Before being supplanted by the formidable (and pious) Mme de Maintenon, Montespan had been converted by Bishop Bossuet--or so he believed--but she still showed a restless spirit and nursed the ambition of recapturing her long-forgotten husband--in vain. He was one of the few who kept away from the circus at Versailles.

(Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, p. 291.)

2003-12-04T02:23:00.000+01:00

Also at Harry's Place, a post about people to people solidarity which ends by expressing a desire to go retro:

I know charities are busy doing their best for people in Iraq and elsewhere but it is a shame that this kind of direct people-to-people solidarity seems to have disappeared.

I am pretty sure a parcel with a letter inside from a far-away family is a better experience than standing in a queue at the charity warehouse.

If anyone knows of programmes of this kind involving Iraq or anywhere else for that matter please leave a comment and I'd be happy to use the blog to publicise such initiatives.

2003-12-04T01:52:00.000+01:00

There's a discussion over at Harry's Place about how to characterize the current split in the left. Has one swath of the left moved to the right over the Iraq war? Is what is happening analogous to the split of 1956? Here's one of the views:

I think the break is between leftists who hold anti-imperialism to be the main action, and leftists who hold anti-fascism to be the main action. These two groups are now markedly at odds.

The anti-imperialists *are* open to the charge of being "objectively pro-fascist" if that's what you mean by "conservative", though they remain philosophically anti-fascist. But the anti-fascists actors are even more open to the charge of being "pro-imperialist", so equally open to the charge of being "conservative"; though they (well, those that actually understand what the term means, and therefore admit to supporting it in current circumstances) would say that their support for imperialism is temporary and in a good cause (of course, that's what Gladstone said).

The question now, I think, is how to reunite the blanket opponents of imperialism with the active opponents of fascism.

2003-12-04T01:44:00.000+01:00

Via Winds of Change, here's BlogAfrica, a collection of links to loads of blogs with coverage of Africa.

2003-12-04T01:14:00.000+01:00

Big picture stuff

Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map

John Lewis Gaddis, A Grand Strategy of Transformation

2003-12-03T23:56:00.000+01:00

France Falling?

Collin May of Innocents Abroad is reflecting on French decline via a discussion of several French thinkers:

The French problem, more or less, is a lack of political moderation. At the same time, there have been exceptions, people such as Tocqueville, Renan and Clemenceau. Similarly today, there are exceptions among French thinkers. It is these thinkers, these moderates that I will consider in this series. Each week, for the next month or so, I plan to present a discussion of a book written by those who inhabit what could be called the moderate centre of the political and philosophic spectrum. This will include liberals, conservatives and moderate socialists. The common link is their reasoned and thoughtful expression of discontent with the state of modern France.

The authors I will cover include: Nicolas Baverez, André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Stephen Launay and Jean-François Revel. Each of these authors deals with an aspect of contemporary France of interest to the non-French observer, ranging from the domestic economic and political scene (Baverez) to the international and ideological (Glucksmann) to anti-Semitism (Finkielkraut), war (Launay) and anti-Americanism (Revel). In addition, I plan to consider a literary example from noted French author Michel Houellebecq. Finally, I will provide some of my own reflections on France after six years working, living and studying among the French.

As the reader can no doubt glean, I tend to share the concerns registered by the authors I treat. My hope is that France will do as it has done in the past and correct its current decline with what Nicolas Baverez refers to as “shock therapy.” If not, however, it will remain vitally important that the other western democracies learn from the French decline, both to avoid it and to understand what happens when democracy parts ways with political prudence.

Here's what's up so far:

Nicolas Baverez
1. Introduction
2. Three Transformations in Economics and Strategy
3. Society and Politics
4. Failures and Solutions

André Glucksmann: Ouest contre ouest
1. Civilization contre Nihilism
2. Shakespeare contre Sartre
3. The Cowboy contre the Tsar

Alain Finkielkraut on Anti-Semitism
1. Introduction

2003-11-26T14:01:00.000+01:00

The Nathan Hale foreign policy discussion group has been talking about the Euro-American relationship. There's a report from the Oxford chapter, suggestions for framing the issues for the Washington chapter's discussion, and finally a summary of the DC discussion.

Meanwhile, at a different level of discourse, Oskar van Rijswijk posts this idea in the comments under a blog post at Winds of Change on dialogue frustration:

If we just stick to facts and some deeper moral values -- and avoid political labelling and bashing and generalizations -- we might very well beable to start some sort of transatlantic connections within the blogosphere and a dialogue on the major issues of world politics.

2003-11-23T10:09:00.000+01:00

Will it be Belgrade 2000 or Bucharest 1989?

Cinderella Bloggerfeller has lots on the situation in Georgia.

2003-11-18T20:44:00.000+01:00

George W. Bush goes to London and a hullabaloo ensues. At Lincoln Cat, you can see how London saw the first Republican president.

2003-11-14T18:10:00.000+01:00

Germans reveal hate of Americans.

2003-11-14T09:23:00.000+01:00

Cinderella Bloggerfeller has translated an interesting article about the grammatical gender of rivers. Apparently, the Danube is a sweet transsexual. Well, after all, it's partly from Transylvania.

2003-11-12T18:48:00.000+01:00

Although it's a few months old now, this column on "Parallel Universes" by Anne Applebaum is still timely, and it struck me with particular force since I am apparently one of the few to inhabit, simultaneously, more than one of them.

America and Britain -- along with America and France, America and Russia, America and Botswana, America and anywhere, really -- live in parallel informational universes. By that I mean that the media produced in different cultures don't merely reflect different opinions about the news, they actually recount alternative versions of reality.

Different countries have always had different perspective on the news, of course. But in the world of globalized information, where just about any newspaper or television program in any language is available at the click of a mouse, this isn't supposed to happen anymore. Nowadays we're all supposed to know what everybody else is thinking, to have access to the same images and information, and some of us do. Peasants in rural India gather around village television sets to watch reruns of "Dallas." In different time zones, Japanese and German bankers watch the same images on their Reuters screens. It is often said now that events are monitored around the world in "real time," or that we all live in a "global informational village," as if such a thing had already come to pass.

[...]

Strangest of all, the availability of alternative points of view doesn't appear to have mellowed anyone's prejudices -- quite the contrary. Nowadays, we all live under the illusion that we are receiving many different types of information, but that we select only the most plausible. In fact, as information multiplies, it grows ever easier to choose to read (or watch) whatever best matches your particular bias, whether national or ideological. If you hate network television's right-wing bias, you can click onto, say, www.globalexchange.org or www.moveon.org. If you hate network television's left-wing bias, you can always watch Fox. Having done so, you'll labor under the illusion that you've picked the most truthful version of events -- but how would you know? Have you actually compared and contrasted the arguments of both sides and come to a judicious conclusion?

I was reminded of this column when I read the following comment on Bjørn Stærk's blog:

Leif Knutsen, New York | 2003-11-08 22:44

There's nothing more American about Bush than there is about Clinton, Gore, Dean, Clark, or for that matter Nadler or Buchanan. And just as most of my Republican friends find Coulter to be distasteful (to put it mildly) most of my Democratic friends have a hard time taking Michael Moore seriously.

But it is interesting how many Norwegian commentators one moment are broadly dismissive of "American" politics and the next use dissenting American views as evidence that Bush is all wrong. They obviously don't believe that Americans are capable of serious political thought unless they completely agree with left-wing Europeans.

Bjørn is right - Norwegians (and probably Europeans as a whole) make very little effort to actually read the American political discourse but have no problems stating very categorical opinion.

Bush was admitted to Yale as a legacy that goes back to (at least) his grandfather. He was admitted to Harvard Business School after having been turned down at the U. of Texas business school at Austin. His career in the Air National Guard included one year being AWOL for no apparant reason. He is certainly a smart man, but not the way Clinton or Carter or for that matter Bush senior were. I think he is the worst president in living memory - possibly in history. But that doesn't mean that a) everything he does is wrong (he has done some things right); or b) he should lose his bid for actually being elected president for the wrong reasons. All the reasons I typically read in the Norwegian media are wrong, and I am so disgusted by it that I find myself overcome with the irony of often having to defend the guy.

There are a lot of things Bush has done that any responsible president - Republican or Democrat - would have done. Destroying Taliban is one; establishing the Department of Homeland Security is another (Clinton was the first one to propose it, but neither went far enough); aggressively pursuing Al Qaeda across the world is yet another (Clinton had this well underway until Condi Rice shut it down between the election and September 11th in spite of - or maybe because of - Clinton officials' insistence that Al Qaeda was a serious threat).

Maybe Bush isn't doing enough to understand the European point of view. But neither are Europeans trying to understand the American perspective.

2003-11-12T15:47:00.000+01:00

Norm Geras has a post on Jeremy's call for papers.

2003-11-12T12:24:00.000+01:00

Ideofact finds the bright side of being sick: revisiting Scooby Doo.

As a kid (a five year old kid -- the same age my son is now -- when the show premiered), several things impressed me about Scooby-Doo. First, the smartest one in the gang was Velma, a gasp...a girl. Remember, this first aired in 1969, and the intellectual of the group was female. I found it odd that Fred was the leader, but it was soon apparent why -- he was the one who could persuade anyone -- even the recalcitrant Shaggy and Scooby -- to go into the scary house, and later, to try to catch the "ghosts". (Plus he drove the van.) He was intelligent, certainly, but not nearly as smart as Velma -- clearly, leadership involved something else, something that couldn't be reduced to SAT scores or IQ points (this is a useful lesson for intellectuals everywhere -- intelligence, in and of itself, does not necessarily make one a leader). Daphne, whom the group occasionally teased for being "Danger Prone Daphne," was nevertheless brave. She was more intuitive than the rest, but at the end -- when the gang had foiled the crooks and offered the explanation to the police -- she always showed that she had gotten it too. As for Shaggy, he's the loyal opposition, the one who questions the wisdom of going into the haunted house. Yes, he's cowardly at times, but he and Scooby draw most of the fire from the ghosts while Velma, Freddy and Daphne go about the hard work of solving the mystery. Scooby was the comic relief (along with Shaggy), but something more as well. The late Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby Doo, put it this way:
I've loved Scooby from the inception, and so has everyone else. I think it's because he embraces a lot of human foibles. He's not the perfect dog. In fact you might say he's a coward. Yet with everything he does, he seems to land on his four feet. He comes out of every situation unscathed. I think the audience - kids and more mature people as well - can identify with Scooby's character and a lot of his imperfections.

I should add that when the chips are down, when things are most dangerous, a Scooby snack is all it takes (well, or two or three) to get him to put life, limb, and tail on the line.

2003-11-11T16:33:00.000+01:00

In Flanders Fields

2003-11-11T11:00:00.000+01:00

As part of the "Conversations with History" series from the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, here's a conversation with Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who wrote Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. There's an hour-long video, and also a transcript of the interview. A lot of important ground is covered.

(But see also Adil Farooq's criticism of Rashid's exposition of the historical meaning of "jihad.")

Here is an excerpt (I think) from Jihad.

2003-11-11T00:13:00.000+01:00

In the current issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, there's an interesting conversation between Samuel Huntington and Anthony Giddens of the LSE about the division of the West and related matters. This bit from Giddens links up with the last post:

To reinforce your point, I would say that the issue of transatlantic divisions, to my mind anyway, doesn't come primarily from disagreements about Iraq. Rather, this disagreement about Iraq-this tremendous fissure-came primarily from unresolved problems which we haven't thought through and which are essentially left over from the Cold War period. I would call these the residual problems of 1989. I think we have only gradually come to realize how thoroughly the Cold War defined our institutions. There are three such residual problems which I consider the biggest: first, the meaning of the West; second, the identity of Europe (because Europe developed essentially in some part as a Cold War formation and now has to face up to a massive process of globalization); third, US military power in relation to Europe.

Now I think that there are two senses of the West which I would separate: I'll call these West One and West Two. In the first sense, the West refers to a constitutional, juridical system, a set of individual rights, the rule of impersonal law, civil liberties and so on. I believe passionately that in this sense, the West is still the West. I believe passionately that the principles which have emerged in Western democratic systems are generalizable systems to the rest of the world, and I believe that you can show that these principles can spread to most societies throughout the world.

West Two, however, is what most discussions about divisions concentrate on. West Two is a geopolitical formation, and here there are serious problems. I still think they are mainly ex-Cold War problems, rather than specific problems about the recent turn of events, but there remain important issues to come to terms with-starting with the fact that Europeans must acknowledge the nature of the new threats, and this has yet to be done sufficiently.

There is a major difference between the kinds of terrorism which we are familiar with here in Europe (local, reasonably confined, with the objective of forming national identities), and the new geopolitical terrorism. This new terrorism leverages the power of civil society.

There are also interesting thoughts on the culture gap and the role of religion.

2003-11-10T23:27:00.000+01:00

Tony Judt has a review of Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography in The New York Review of Books. Here's how he concludes (the emphasis is mine):

Hobsbawm closes his memoirs with a rousing coda: "Let us not disarm, even in unsatisfactory times. Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better on its own." He is right, on every count. But to do any good in the new century we must start by telling the truth about the old. Hobsbawm refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name; he never engages the moral as well as the political heritage of Stalin and his works. If he seriously wishes to pass a radical baton to future generations, this is no way to proceed.

The left has long shied away from confronting the Communist demon in its family closet. Anti-anticommunism —the wish to avoid giving aid and comfort to cold warriors before 1989, and End-of-History triumphalists since —has crippled political thinking in the Labor and Social Democratic movements for decades; in some circles it still does. But as Arthur Koestler pointed out in Carnegie Hall in March 1948,
You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons.... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.

If the left is to recover that self-confidence and get up off its knees, we must stop telling reassuring stories about the past. Pace Hobsbawm, who blandly denies it, there was a "fundamental affinity" between extremes of left and right in the twentieth century, self-evident to anyone who experienced them. Millions of well-meaning Western progressives sold their souls to an oriental despot—"The ludicrous surprise," wrote Raymond Aron in 1950, "is that the European Left has taken a pyramid builder for its God." The values and institutions that have mattered to the left—from equality before the law to the provision of public services as a matter of right—and that are now under assault—owed nothing to communism. Seventy years of "real existing Socialism" contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.

Perhaps Hobsbawm understands this. Perhaps, as he writes of James Klugmann, the British Communist Party's house historian, "he knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public." If so, it isn't a very proud epitaph. Evgenia Ginzburg, who knew something about the twentieth century, tells of blotting out the screams from the torture cells in Moscow's Butyrki prison by reciting over and over to herself Michelangelo's poem:
Sweet is't to sleep, sweeter to be a stone.
In this dread age of terror and of shame,
Thrice blest is he who neither sees nor feels.
Leave me then here, and trouble not my rest.

Eric Hobsbawm is the most naturally gifted historian of our time; but rested and untroubled, he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.

For a rather less sympathetic review of Hobsbawm, there's this one by David Pryce-Jones. A nugget:

Not long ago, on a popular television show, Hobsbawm explained that the fact of Soviet mass-murdering made no difference to his Communist commitment. In astonishment, his interviewer asked, “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Without hesitation Hobsbawm replied, “Yes.”

2003-11-10T23:13:00.000+01:00

I've added an interesting link to the list, Last Superpower.net. Judging by their introductory blurb, perhaps one might consider describing them as part of the left opposition:

The current anti-war movement developed in the absence of serious discussion and analysis. Opposition to a US initiated war in Iraq was more of an intuitive reaction than a thought-out response.
If the US is doing it, then it's bad

This has been the basic rule-of-thumb for as long as most left-wingers can remember - and it has generally worked quite well. But does it point us in the right direction with regard to US policy in Iraq and the Middle East?

That's what this web-site is about. Our aim in setting it up is to initiate a serious debate about whether it is really left-wing and progressive to oppose the US initiated war against the Ba'th regime in Iraq.

If you would like to discuss these issues you can do so on this site. You can explore what we have to offer just by following the links on this page. But better still, you can become a member of the site simply by registering a user name and a password. Signing up as a member will enable you to contribute your own material to the site (documents, links etc).

2003-11-10T15:30:00.000+01:00

Cinderella Bloggerfeller has translated a recent piece by Pascal Bruckner entitled "The Blackmail of Islamophobia." He's responding to a book by Vincent Geisser, La Nouvelle Islamophobie:

...his aim is first and foremost to penalise those so-called moderate or agnostic Muslims who want to free themselves from fundamentalism. It's here that the concept of Islamophobia reveals itself to be a pernicious war machine in the hands of vested interests: it consists in stigmatising those intellectuals, religious figures, journalists and philosophers of North African origin who dare to criticise the principles of their faith, by appealing to a re-reading of the Koran or pleading for a separation of temporal and spiritual powers. This allows them to be exposed to the public condemnation of the extremists within their own religion by establishing a veritable proscription list (in which you will find, to take some names at random, Dalil Boubakeur, Soheib Bencheikh, Malek Boutih, Rachid Kaci, Latifa Ben Mansour, Mahammed Sifaoui, Abdelwahab Meddeb and many others).

Vincent Geisser's book amounts to what we must call a contemptible police operation worthy of the Stalinist era: by treating democrats as villainous Poujadists [right-wing chauvinists], opportunists, careerists, crude secularisers, persecuted figures from operetta, it turns them into quasi-apostates, traitors to their religion, even harkis [Muslims who worked with the French during the Algerian war], collaborators, enemies of Islam (even if these words are never employed).

They are guilty then, the Arab women who want to rid themselves of the veil, guilty all those children of immigrants who demand the right to religious indifference, the right to believe in nothing and who do not automatically feel Muslim because they come from Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian backgrounds? The invention of Islamophobia fulfills several functions: to deny, in order to give it more legitimacy, the reality of an Islamist offensive in Europe, to intimidate and silence bad Muslims, those who impiously seek change and, finally, to block any hope of a religious transformation in the lands of Islam.

So it’s a matter of reintroducing crimes of opinion in order to muzzle the contradictors and to transfer the issue from the intellectual to the penal plane, any objection or reservation being immediately subject to legal action. We are witnessing the invention of a new crime analogous to the one the Soviet Union once created against the enemies of the people *. But confusing the spirit of inquiry with racism is mistaken: just as the latter attacks people for their very existence, for who they are, Jews, blacks or Arabs, so critical discussion is concerned with shifting and variable concepts, ideas, dogmas, principles, always susceptible to transformations.

He concludes:

There's something stupefying in seeing an "anti-racist organisation" criminalising the adversaries of fanaticism and superstition. If Voltaire were alive today, we can bet that certain "anti-racists" would have him thrown in prison.

2003-11-10T14:38:00.000+01:00

The Russian Dilettante comments on somebody else's comments on Tarantino.

2003-11-09T15:22:00.000+01:00

And another: Iraq at a glance.

2003-11-09T11:35:00.000+01:00

Another Iraqi blog--The Messopotamian--has been added to the links, joining Healing Iraq (Zeyad), Baghdad Burning, Where is Raed (Salam Pax), G. in Baghdad (Abdul Ghaith), and Ishtar Talking (Nawar).

2003-11-08T09:15:00.000+01:00

Here's an example of how stories are formulated according to local issues. The Times of India has a piece on Bush's speech entitled "Pak not a democracy: Bush."

2003-11-07T12:45:00.000+01:00

George W. Bush has delivered a speech.

Our commitment to democracy is also tested in the Middle East, which is my focus today, and must be a focus of American policy for decades to come. In many nations of the Middle East -- countries of great strategic importance -- democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free.

Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This "cultural condescension," as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would "never work." Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany are, and I quote, "most uncertain at best" -- he made that claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be "illiterates not caring a fig for politics." Yet when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.

Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are "ready" for democracy -- as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and every nation can start on this path.

It should be clear to all that Islam -- the faith of one-fifth of humanity -- is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries -- in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America.

More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.

Yet there's a great challenge today in the Middle East. In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has -- and I quote -- "barely reached the Arab states." They continue: "This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development." The freedom deficit they describe has terrible consequences, of the people of the Middle East and for the world. In many Middle Eastern countries, poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling. Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead. These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.

As the colonial era passed away, the Middle East saw the establishment of many military dictatorships. Some rulers adopted the dogmas of socialism, seized total control of political parties and the media and universities. They allied themselves with the Soviet bloc and with international terrorism. Dictators in Iraq and Syria promised the restoration of national honor, a return to ancient glories. They've left instead a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin.

Other men, and groups of men, have gained influence in the Middle East and beyond through an ideology of theocratic terror. Behind their language of religion is the ambition for absolute political power. Ruling cabals like the Taliban show their version of religious piety in public whippings of women, ruthless suppression of any difference or dissent, and support for terrorists who arm and train to murder the innocent. The Taliban promised religious purity and national pride. Instead, by systematically destroying a proud and working society, they left behind suffering and starvation.

Many Middle Eastern governments now understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere. But some governments still cling to the old habits of central control. There are governments that still fear and repress independent thought and creativity, and private enterprise -- the human qualities that make for a -- strong and successful societies. Even when these nations have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest resources -- the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems, and serve the true interests of their nations. The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long, many people in that region have been victims and subjects -- they deserve to be active citizens.

Governments across the Middle East and North Africa are beginning to see the need for change. Morocco has a diverse new parliament; King Mohammed has urged it to extend the rights to women. Here is how His Majesty explained his reforms to parliament: "How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence, and marginalization, notwithstanding the dignity and justice granted to them by our glorious religion?" The King of Morocco is correct: The future of Muslim nations will be better for all with the full participation of women.

He discusses a number of countries on a case-by-case basis, and then continues with this:

Champions of democracy in the region understand that democracy is not perfect, it is not the path to utopia, but it's the only path to national success and dignity.

As we watch and encourage reforms in the region, we are mindful that modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us. Democratic nations may be constitutional monarchies, federal republics, or parliamentary systems. And working democracies always need time to develop -- as did our own. We've taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice -- and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.

There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society, in every culture. Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military -- so that governments respond to the will of the people, and not the will of an elite. Successful societies protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law, instead of selecting applying -- selectively applying the law to punish political opponents. Successful societies allow room for healthy civic institutions -- for political parties and labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media. Successful societies guarantee religious liberty -- the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution. Successful societies privatize their economies, and secure the rights of property. They prohibit and punish official corruption, and invest in the health and education of their people. They recognize the rights of women. And instead of directing hatred and resentment against others, successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people.

There's also this:

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people. The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women's rights, and training Iraqi journalists, and teaching the skills of political participation. Iraqis, themselves -- police and borders guards and local officials -- are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

2003-11-07T11:58:00.000+01:00

Meanwhile, the famous Baghdad blogger describes his family's experience of having their house searched:

Our house was searched by the Americans. That happened almost ten days ago. I wasn’t home, but my mother called the next day a bit freaked out.

They came at around 12 midnight they were apparently supposed to do a silent entrance and surprise the criminal Ba’athi cell that was in my parents house, unfortunately for them our front gate does a fair amount of rattling so my brother heard that and opened the door and saw a couple of soldiers climbing on our high black front gate. When the silent entrance tactic failed they resorted to shouty entrance mode. So they shouted at him telling him that he should get down on his knees, which he did. He actually was trying to help them open the door, but whatever. Seconds later around 25 soldiers are in the house my brother, father and mother are outside sitting on the ground and in their asshole-ish ways refused to answer any questions about what was happening. My father was asking them what they were looking so that he can help but as usual since you are an Iraqi addressing an American is no use since he doesn’t even acknowledge you as a human being standing in front of him. They (the Americans) have a medic with them and he seems to be the only sane person amongst them, my brother tells me they were kids all of them. Anyway so my brother and father start talking to the medic and he tells them what this is about. They have been “informed” that there are daily meetings the last five days, Sudanese people come into our house at 9am and stay till 3pm, we are a probable Ansar cell. My father is totally baffled, my brother gets it. These are not Sudanese men they are from Basra the “informer” is stupid enough to forget that there is a sizeable population in Basra who are of African origin. And it is not meetings these 2 (yes only two) guys have here, they are carpenters and they were repairing my mom’s kitchen. Way. To. Go. You have great informers.

While my family is waiting outside something strange happens, one of the soldiers comes out, empties his flask in the garden and start telling the medic to give him his, the medic shoos him away. They all think that the soldier is filling his flask with cold water from the cooler. Later it turns out that he emptied my father’s bottle of Johnny Walker’s into his flask and was probably trying to convince the medic to give him his to empty another bottle. Weird shit.

Aaaaanyway, they are looking thru my father’s papers by now and their genius translator comes to the commander of operation [Pax House Bust] and tells him he has found “suspicious documents”. They are passes to various conferences he has attended and bank cards for old closed accounts he used to have and most alarmingly for the person in charge was an invitation my father received a couple of days earlier to a meeting with General Abi Zaid to which he and others were flown to the Bakr Air Base north of Baghdad. Now the guy who was in charge starts trying to cover his ass and asks a lot of pointless questions, one of the more surreal ones was “so if one of your sons is writing for a foreign newspaper why are you still here?”. After this goes on for a while he gets the family out of the house again, closes the door and stays in there for 15 minutes. Comes out with the 20 galactic troopers and tells my father that he should inside check everything “I don’t want any complains filed later on”, my father just opens the front gate and tells him that if he wants to file a complaint he will thank you and bye-bye.

They came, freaked out my mother, pissed off my father, found nothing and left.
After refusing to get one my father finally conceded to get one of those cards that basically say you are a “collaborator”, and my mother will be spending a couple of weeks at her sister’s in Amman

2003-11-07T11:08:00.000+01:00

I've updated the entry below about the Iraq contracts conspiracy with a few more links. In the discussion with professor Kelman, a reader asked about the issue of umbrella contracts and wondered, "why aren't these facts reported by the media?" Kelman answered that he suspects that "this isn't reported by the media because it's too complicated a story."

Zeyad of Healing Iraq has a different problem with the media. He begins by complaining about comments on his blog suggesting that he should go out and organize demonstrations instead of blogging from a Baghdad internet cafe. He says that these critics do not understand the situation:

Now today, we are facing terrorist and violent threats against our nurseries, schools, colleges, hospitals, clinics, oil pipelines, power stations, water purification systems, and other civilian facilities. If you think that a peaceful demonstration would deter those criminals from doing harm to us, then you are 100% wrong. Do you think the Syrians/Saudis/Iranians/Yemenis/Sudanese would simply say 'Oh look, the Iraqis don't want us there, lets go home and leave the Americans and Iraqis work it out'? Or if you think we should go out and face the dangers just to prove to you -paranoid Americans sitting in your ivory towers watching tv- that we do not support the terrorists, then you are wrong again.

You see a handful of teenagers dancing in front of the camera celebrating dead Americans, and you judge an entire people, you start whining about pulling the troops out of Iraq and giving the Iraqis what they deserve. Are you people really so close-minded? It is the fault of your news agencies that show you what they want, its certainly not ours. If you want us to go out and cry for your dead soldiers and wave American flags, then don't count on it either. We are losing way too many innocent Iraqis daily to be grieving over dead soldiers who have actually made a decision to come here. What about the thousands of dead Iraqis who were not as lucky to have a choice? Did you cry for them?

According to a poll by an Iraqi agency, only 3% of Iraqis want Saddam back and less than 40% want the Americans to leave immediately. Did you even hear about these results?

If you think that Iraqis aren't doing enough, then you're being mislead by your media. Thousands of people are applying to be members of IP, FPS, and the civil defense force. They are begging for the security to be in their hands. We know how to handle those scum. The Americans are more interested in being nice and all about human rights and free speech and stuff. We have our own Law and court systems which we can use but the CPA won't allow us to. They are being too lenient and forgiving on our expence. If you think that is what is required to build a successful democracy then you're too deluded. You don't know the first thing about the Iraqi society.

Iraqis are providing intelligence to the CPA hourly. Just ask the soldiers here. Iraqis are cooperating in every way they can. They're losing their lives for it goddammit. If you aren't seeing it on tv, it isn't my fucking problem.

Imagine yourself living in a neighbourhood with a large number of ex-Baathists/Wahhabis/extremists like I do. Would you go out and denounce the Jihadis/Ba'athists openly for everyone to see, and then get back from work one day to find your brother kidnapped or a threat letter hanging on your door? A friend of mine was standing in front of his house with his kids when a car drove by and emptied a magazine of bullets into them. You know why? Because he was working with the CPA in reconstructing Baghdad Airport. What do you think he did? He stubbornly refused to quit his job and bravely returned to work after spending a week in hospital. Would you do the same? Of course not. We expected most of the IP would simply leave their jobs after last weeks bombing, well they didn't. In fact there were thousands of parents volunteering to carry arms and protect the schools which their kids attend to allow the IP to do their real job.

He talks about the effect 9/11 had on American society, and says that in Iraq "9/11 is an everyday reality," before concluding with this:

And to the guy who was being sarcastic about me sitting in an internet cafe and blogging or playing games instead of going out and organizing a demonstration. Well maybe you are right. I'm sick of people who don't appreciate my efforts. I'm wasting many hours a day and half my salary just to maintain this blog. I have a job, patients, a family, and friends, in other words I have a life. Maybe I will at one point do as you say and diss this whole stupid blog idea.

And, returning to the issue of conspiracies, his previous post is about "the mindset of ME conspiracy theorists":

This is a vital and important issue that I feel I should explain to anyone who seeks to understand the way many people in the ME think.

I think that anybody who has made a serious effort to understand the salient political realities of this region realizes that he's right in stressing the importance of understanding this particular dimension.

He has translated an article on the subject from Arabic to English (and has made some comments of his own). It won't take you nearly as long to read it as it took him to translate it.

2003-11-06T10:31:00.000+01:00

"This melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of un-narratived representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual modes."

2003-11-05T22:38:00.000+01:00

Rumsfeld doesn't know enough about mojo to know whether or not he's lost his.

George W. Bush would probably know, though.

2003-11-05T11:45:00.000+01:00

In Spinsanity's treatment of the "imminent threat" debate, a clear distinction is made between, on the one hand, "liberal critics," and, on the other, "conservatives." And there's no doubt that there's a reality to that demarcation. Nevertheless, I think it's important to remember that reality is rarely as simple as generalizations about reality tempt us to think it is.

For one thing, there are a lot of people who have involved themselves in current foreign policy debates--and have taken sides--who are neither liberals nor conservatives. For another, there are conservatives who are basically opposed to the Bush administration's foreign policy, and liberals who basically support it.

Zell Miller, a Democratic senator from Georgia, has recently endorsed George W. Bush:

If I live and breathe, and if--as Hank Williams used to say--the creek don't rise, in 2004 this Democrat will do something I didn't do in 2000, I will vote for George W. Bush for president.

I have come to believe that George Bush is the right man in the right place at the right time. And that's a pretty big mouthful coming from a lifelong Democrat who first voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate the 12 cycles since then. My political history to the contrary, this was the easiest decision I think I've ever made in deciding who to support. For I believe the next five years will determine the kind of world my four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren will live in. I simply cannot entrust that crucial decision to any one of the current group of Democratic presidential candidates.

Miller isn't exactly an example of a Bush-supporting liberal since he's a self-described "conservative Democrat." But this endorsement of his has provoked another round of debate about liberals who break with their fellow liberals on foreign policy. Here is a set of links to some of the places where this debate is happening.

On the conservative side, Patrick Buchanan has a relatively new magazine, The American Conservative, which is strongly opposed to the Bush administration. Buchanan was once a speechwriter in the Nixon administration, and was responsible for Spiro T. Agnew's words about "the nattering nabobs of negativism." He's run for president a couple of times (including in the last election, in which I believe he got about half a percent of the votes). In line with his anti-immigration tendencies he has suggested building a wall on the southern border to keep illegal immigrants out, he thinks the U.S. should have stayed out of WWII, he's made some antisemitic remarks, and he once expressed his dismay about seeing guys playing bongos on a Washington street, which he took as a marker of cultural decay.

And, moving from conservatism proper to libertarianism, there's Justin Raimundo and the others at antiwar.com:

From a lone protest against the NATO-crats' brutal war against Serbia, to a website dedicated to fighting interventionism on every front -- Antiwar.com is building an international movement against the would-be overlords of a "New World Order."

2003-11-05T09:10:00.000+01:00

In a similar vein, Spinsanity--"the nation's leading watchdog of manipulative political rhetoric"--sorts out the "imminent threat" debate:

In recent weeks, a debate has raged over the phrase "imminent threat." Many liberal critics have asserted that a central claim in President Bush's case for war in Iraq was that Iraq posed an "imminent threat." They argue that it's now clear that no such threat existed, and thus the President's argument has been revealed as deceptive or illegitimate. Conservatives retort that Bush never actually used the phrase and in fact specifically used language indicating that the threat was not imminent on several occasions.

As a factual matter, conservatives are largely correct and liberal critics and journalists are guilty of cheap shots or lazy reporting. However, the evidence is not completely clear and both sides are guilty of distorting this complex situation for political gain. Specifically, while there's some evidence indicating the Bush administration did portray Iraq as an imminent threat, there's much more that it did not. Those attempting to assert that the White House called Iraq an imminent threat are ignoring significant information to the contrary. Similarly, those who say the Bush administration never used the phrase or implied as much are ignoring important, though isolated, evidence.

2003-11-04T15:39:00.000+01:00

The Center for Public Integrity has published a report on U.S. Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. They found that

More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years... Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush--a little over $500,000--than to any other politician over the last dozen years...

But, in "Fables of the Reconstruction," Daniel Drezner says that Bush isn't really favoring Halliburton and Bechtel. He's got more on his blog, in this post, and this one.

For comments on this story's manifestation at Spiegel Online, see Davids Medienkritik.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner has still more on this, and there are a number of interesting kibbles and bits in the comments section.

UPDATE: Via The Belgravia Dispatch, here's an op-ed in the Washington Post on this topic ("No 'Cronyism in Iraq") by a professor of public management at Harvard who "served as a senior procurement policymaker in the Clinton administration" and describes himself as "rather unsympathetic" to the Bush administration's Iraq policies. He says that

One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded -- whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd.

The premise of the accusations is completely contrary to the way government contracting works, both in theory and in practice. Most contract award decisions are made by career civil servants, with no involvement by political appointees or elected officials. In some agencies, the "source selection official" (final decision-maker) on large contracts may be a political appointee, but such decisions are preceded by such a torrent of evaluation and other backup material prepared by career civil servants that it would be difficult to change a decision from the one indicated by the career employees' evaluation.

There's also an online discussion, with Professor Kelman taking questions from readers.

2003-11-04T15:11:00.000+01:00

FIVE ON IRAQ

Hussein Was Sure of Own Survival

Saddam's New War

Calls to Jihad Are Said to Lure Hundreds of Militants Into Iraq

Rebuilding Iraq

Iraqification: Losing Strategy

Here's a handy trick: for some newspapers that require registration, you can just use "laexaminer" for both the username and the password.

2003-11-04T13:50:00.000+01:00

An English translation of Jean-François Revel's L'obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctionnement - Ses causes - Ses inconséquences has recently been published as Anti-Americanism. The introduction is available online, here. This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

During my time in the United States in 1969, I identified what I believed could fairly be called a revolution. In its narrow sense, "revolution" usually means the replacing of one political regime by another, usually by means of a violent coup d'état accompanied by insurrection--followed by purges, arrests and executions. Indeed, many a revolution conforming to this pattern has led to dictatorship and repression. As I stressed in Without Marx or Jesus, what I meant by "revolution" in the context of America was less a political phenomenon at the highest levels of power than a series of transformations spontaneously occurring within society at a deep level. These radical changes had been born, were evolving and would continue to evolve independently of political transitions at the national level. You can change the government without changing society; conversely, you can change society without changing the government. The American Free Speech Movement sprang forth and continued to grow as vigorously under Republican presidents as under Democrats; it was able to do so largely because it never--or very rarely--regressed into the backward ideologies of the nineteenth century or the Marxist pseudo-revolutionary theoretical straitjackets of the twentieth. In my book, I argued that a revolution in this sense is a phenomenon that had hitherto never taken place, an event that would develop along lines other than the known historical ones and that could not be thought about--or even perceived--in terms of the old categories. It was obvious to me that the real revolution was taking place not in Cuba, but in California.

And here is an essay he has adapted from his book. The first four paragraphs:

"Cultural diversity" has replaced "cultural exceptionalism" in the French-inspired, European rhetoric. But in actuality, the two terms cover the same kind of cultural protectionism. The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.

The proof of this goes back to the old comparison between Athens and Sparta. It was Athens, the open city, that was the prolific fount of creation in letters and arts, philosophy and mathematics, political science, and history. Sparta, jealously guarding its "exceptionalism," pulled off the tour de force of being the only Greek city not to have produced a single notable poet, orator, thinker, or architect; their achievement was "diversity" of a sort, but at the price of emptiness. Parallel phenomena of cultural vacuity are found again in contemporary totalitarian states. Fear of ideological contamination induced the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists to take refuge in an "official" art and a pompously dogmatic literature, sheer insults to the heritage of the peoples on whom they were inflicted.

When, in December 2001, Jean-Marie Messier said that "French-style cultural exceptionalism is dead," he aroused horrified protests, but he was not going nearly far enough. He could have added: in fact, French cultural exceptionalism has never existed, thank goodness. If it had, it would be French culture itself that would be extinct. Let's suppose that the sixteenth-century kings of France, instead of inviting Italian artists to their courts, had said to themselves: "This predominance of Italian painting is insufferable. We'll keep those painters and their pictures out of the country." The result of this castrating démarche would have been to thwart a renewal of French art. Again: between 1880 and 1914 there were many more French Impressionist paintings in American museums and the homes of private collectors than there were in France, despite which--or because of which--American art was subsequently able to find its own wellsprings, and then influence French art in turn.

These cross-fertilizations are indifferent to political antagonisms. It was during the first half of the seventeenth century, when France and Spain were frequently at war, that the creative influence of Spanish literature on the French was particularly marked. The eighteenth century, which saw repeated conflict between France and England, was also the period when the most active and productive intellectual exchanges between the two countries occurred. And between 1870 and 1945, diplomatic relations between France and Germany were hardly idyllic, yet those were the years when German philosophers and historians had the most to teach the French. And wasn't Nietzsche steeped in the ideas of the French moralists? It would be possible to extend indefinitely the list of examples illustrating this truth: cultural diversity arises from manifold exchanges. This applies just as well to gastronomy: only McDonald's-hating lunatics are unaware of the obvious fact that there have never been so many restaurants offering foreign cuisines, in practically every country, as in our day. Far from imposing standardization, international exchange diversifies. Withdrawing behind a wall can only dry up inspiration.

UPDATE: More from Revel's book can be found online here. There are further thoughts on the cultural theme in this bit:

Long before the US, there have been empires and powers of international scope. However, there had never been one with planetary preponderance. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, underscores this fact in his book The Grand Chessboard. In order to deserve the title of world superpower, a country must be ranked first in four fields: economy, technology, military and culture. At the present time, the US is the only country—and the first in history—that fulfills all four conditions not merely on a continental level but on a planetary one. Since the revival of 1983 and until the beginning of the recession in 2001 the American economy has clearly been ahead, with its combination of growth, full employment and the absence of inflation. In technology it enjoys a quasi-monopoly with the spectacular development that it has been able to foster in the field of state-of-the-art communication tools. Militarily, it is the only power capable of intervening at any time in any part of the globe.

Its cultural superiority, however, is more debatable. The question is whether you define the term culture in its narrow or large meaning. In terms of the former definition—the highest creative manifestations of culture in literature, painting, music or architecture—the American civilization is certainly brilliant but it is not the only one nor is it always the best. At this prestigious level its radiance cannot be compared to that of the civilizations of Ancient Greece, Rome or China. One could even say that the American artistic and literary culture has a tendency toward “provincialization.” Because of the dominating position of the English language fewer and fewer of even cultured Americans read works in foreign languages. Even when American academics or critics open up to a foreign school of thought, they do so at times out of fashionable conformism rather than based on original judgment.

2003-11-04T12:50:00.000+01:00

Aristotle, Poetics, 4:

Man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.

2003-11-03T16:00:00.000+01:00

There was an interesting exchange recently between Norman Geras (the guy who sometimes posts on cricket that I was telling Jeremy about) and Josh Cherniss, both of whom are living in the UK. Geras is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. Cherniss is a PhD student at Yale, writing a dissertation on Isaiah Berlin. Geras is a Marxist. His political views are discussed in this interview at Imprints entitled "Marxism, the Holocaust and September 11." Cherniss seems to be a liberal (in the American sense of liberal).

Geras's post (scroll down to "Thursday morning coming down") ends on this dark note:

Is this how it felt living in the Weimar Republic? I don't know. And no, I haven't taken leave of my senses. I'm not anticipating a resurgence of fascism, Britain under the iron heel. All I mean is, is this how it felt to move within a poisoned moral atmosphere? Not some new rough beast slouching towards whatever birthplace, one can only hope. But in all the time since I reached any kind of political awareness I can recall nothing comparable.

To see the context, read the whole thing. Cherniss's comments on it are here (scroll down to Friday, October 31, 2003). Geras then responded with "Americans and Bush (and Jews)," which is on the same web page as the initial post. In between, there are also a couple of readers' responses.

2003-11-03T14:59:00.000+01:00

Hannah Arendt (in The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 1977):

Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs--statistically speaking the most powerful.

Menander, quoted in Philo, De Abrahamo:

The chief beginning of evil is goodness in excess.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincerely ignorant and conscientious stupidity.

Walter Russell Mead:

We were in the South during the Civil Rights era, and my dad was one of the Episcopal clergy who was very active and marched with Martin Luther King. Both my grandfather and my father were involved in desegregation efforts in the places that they lived, and there were some real confrontational situations. A lot of people didn't welcome the changes. I think the experience of seeing that kind of social change, close up, shaped me profoundly, and not always in ways I understand. To see how a society can believe that segregation is right -- and a lot of good, good, honest people absolutely saw nothing wrong with it, yet it was a terrible era in history -- and watch people change their minds and learn; that was something that is always with me.

Somebody once said something to the effect that we never sin so gravely as when we do so out of conscience. I think it might have been a Christian theologian. If anybody knows who it was and how exactly it was said, could you please let me know?

2003-11-03T14:07:00.000+01:00

There is a slogan that is typically associated with conservativism:

Ideas have consequences

But the general notion does not belong to any particular school or camp. Here's Keynes, concluding The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money:

But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

2003-11-03T13:54:00.000+01:00

A JUXTAPOSITION

Quoted here:

Wiggles humbly describes himself as "one individual trying to make a difference" and believes that "one person's seemingly insignificant positive actions can exponentially initiate a rippling of positive energy.

From this book (p. 8):

Youngsters were taught the medieval notion that what they did reflected first on the family, then rippled out to affect the entire community. Whether they became craftsmen, merchants, or farmers, they knew from youth that no man was an island, that their lives and actions were inextricably involved with the welfare of the community. Town fathers regulated the products that citizens brought to market--judging the quality, the weight, the justness of the price--and no one questioned their right to do so. (This is not to say that cheating did not prevail; ideals seldom flourish in everyday life.) When someone died in a seventeenth-century English village, no one needed an explication of John Donne's lines, "Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

UPDATE: Lee Harris, discussing Martha Nussbaum's essay "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism":

Let us now examine how we are to visualize fulfillment of this cosmopolitan ideal. Nussbaum advises us to follow the stoics and to “think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concentric circles. The first one is drawn around the self; the next takes in one’s immediate family; then follows the extended family; then, in order, one’s neighbors or local group, one’s fellow city-dwellers, one’s fellow countrymen — and we can easily add to this list groupings based on ethnic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender and sexual identities. Outside all these circles is the largest one, that of humanity as a whole.” The aim of cosmopolitan education, she writes, is to get the student “to recognize humanity wherever she encounters it, undeterred by traits that are strange to her, and be eager to understand humanity in its ‘strange’ guises. She must learn enough about the different to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in many cultures and many histories.”

2003-11-03T09:56:00.000+01:00

Malaysia after Mahathir

(Via The Belgravia Dispatch).

2003-10-30T12:02:00.000+01:00

It seems to me that this piece, by Tish Durkin, is exemplary. And it gets right to the heart of things:

As it happened, Mr. Al-Shikhly fit right into the piece that I was typing away at when the bomb went off. (Although more than two miles away, it was so loud that it sounded to be right outside; I actually started a little.) The piece proposed itself to me over the weekend, when I flicked on BBC World coverage of the antiwar protests going on in the United States and then, on Sunday morning, of the six missiles that hit the al-Rashid Hotel when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was in it. My piece was about the total disconnect between what matters to most of the people in Iraq and what seems to matter to most of the people elsewhere who are upset about Iraq. Or, as a young Iraqi friend said to me right after I arrived at the end of August: "Everybody in the world is so obsessed with weapons of mass destruction. Nobody in Iraq gives a shit."

Most of the people outside Iraq seem to be obsessed with giving the Bush administration what they think it deserves. Most of the people inside Iraq—i.e., the Iraqis—are fixated on getting what they think they deserve. For all too many champions as well as critics of U.S. policy, this is all about American vindication versus American mortification, and Iraq is a car to be stripped down for its rhetorical parts. Some parts make the Americans look good, so the White House and company take those and wave them around. Other parts make the Americans look bad, so the antiwar crowd takes those and waves them around. Still other parts—most of the car, of course—are harder to classify, or are subject to change from one week to the next. These pretty much get junked.

For the Iraqis, who tend to view this as a place and themselves as people, both sets of analysts are transparent opportunists. Nonetheless, from here, it is disturbing to note the momentum that seems to be gathering behind those who are back home chanting for the U.S. to get out now. It is scarcely less disturbing to contemplate the belief of some leading American politicians that they can go halfsies: keep funding Iraqi reconstruction, for instance, but put the funding in the form of a loan. (Whoever thought of that probably had a cash bar at his wedding.) This is not because the occupation is some sort of triumph. But if this is about the Iraqis, it simply doesn’t matter whether it is in the context of American glory, American gloom or something in between that these people finally get a decent shot at a decent life. It only matters that they do get it, and the only question is how.

And this one, by Johann Hari, complements it nicely. Here are the last three paragraphs:

Yet Iraq has become a magnet for international jihadists who venture across the world, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to Palestine. The notion of an Arab country moving towards the depravity of democracy (as opposed to rule by the Word of God) horrifies them. They care nothing for hospitals or schools. I have interviewed jihadists in both London and the Occupied Territories, and they believe - like old-style Marxist revolutionaries - that it is a good thing if material conditions get far, far worse under the corrupt current system, because this will precipitate a revolution. With these people prepared to make conditions far worse for the Iraqi people, a massive amount of disruption can be achieved with minimal man-power - a few thousand jihadists in a country of 23 million.

These attacks are calculated to undermine our will to carry out a proper transition to Iraqi self-rule, along the path that has already been travelled by the Kurds in the North. A hasty withdrawal would give Islamic theocrats or recidivist Baathists a far better chance of seizing power than free elections. All decent people - including those who opposed the war - must now work to establish a consensus in Britain and the US behind the path that Iraqis, in every single poll of their opinion, are begging us to take: stay for a few years to ensure a transition to democracy, resist the fascistic bombers attacking those who have come to help, and gradually accord more and more power to the Governing Council in advance of elections.

A bomb will always get bigger headlines than a slowly refilling marsh or a burgeoning school, but we must keep focusing on the big picture. Nobody wants the occupation to continue indefinitely. Iraqi democracy is getting closer every day. We must keep siding with the Iraqi people, not the bombers who want to drive away their doctors and peacekeepers.

2003-10-29T23:25:00.000+01:00

And now, a descent into territory more typical for discussions of world politics. James Atlas looks at a batch of intellectuals:

Whether or not the comparison proves valid, there is another historical parallel to the Vietnam War, one that involves a group of intellectuals responsible for articulating the rationale for the Iraq war. Among the enduring legacies of the earlier era was the split between liberals who opposed the war and the small splinter group that would become known as the neoconservatives. The group's decision to support the Vietnam War--or at least to oppose those who opposed it--was a shift that would lead them to a new level of power and influence.

The war in Iraq has shown signs of a similar split: a pro-war faction of the liberal intelligentsia has rejected a reflexive antiwar stance to form a movement of its own. The influence of these voices isn't to be underestimated. The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.

For the liberal intellectuals of this generation, the war in Iraq has required nuanced positions. Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a self-styled "liberal centrist," focused on the human rights issue: if liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein saved opponents of the regime from torture or death, that in itself justified the war.

The political philosopher Michael Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, was ambivalent, but directed much of his anger at the rigid politics of the anti-interventionist left in the face of Sept. 11.

Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair who had disapproved of United States intervention in the first Persian Gulf war, was excited about Americanization as a revolutionary force. Calling himself a "Paine-ite," he saw the new war as an uprising against an illegitimate state.

The writer Paul Berman forcefully expressed the opinion that not only was President Bush justified in his prosecution of the war but that he had dragged his feet. Terrorism, Mr. Berman wrote in his book "Terror and Liberalism," is a form of totalitarianism; the war in the Middle East is a war to defend liberal civilization.

He asks them where they're at these days before concluding with this:

This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views--which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?

Josh Cherniss comments (scroll down to Monday, October 20, 2003):

The reporting seems fair enough; it's good to see that the two Michaels remain their sane selves, even if Ignatieff's comments are a bit more simplistic than I'd expect or like -- there's still a good deal to them. Berman's resolute anti-totalitarian Leftism remains as endearingly quixotic as ever. As for Hitchens, after being a contrarian for so long, he seems to be relishing being able to chain his cart to the course of events for a change. His statements seem one-sided to me (not a surprise), and over-exuberant. But after advocating humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda and having to seethe on the sidelines as the US did nothing, perhaps he's entitled to revel in the novel experience, however dubious, of 'humanitarian occupation.'

Unfortunately, Atlas doesn't leave it there. He suggests that the support of these intellectuals for the war parallels that of the liberals-turned-neo-conservatives for Vietnam, and that they therefore are members of the same intellectual family as present day neo-cons such as Kagan and Kristol -- and indeed may best be called neo-cons themselves. Several points:

1) Of the 4 pro-war intellectuals he profiles, one, Michael Walzer, wasn't pro-war.

2) Though now noted mainly for their foreign policy stances, the neo-cons were always about more than that; they were also defined by their stance on domestic policy, mainly their critique of the welfare state. Of the four supposed neo-neocons, two, Berman and Walzer, continue to identify as socialists, I believe; I'm not sure about Hitchens; and Ignatieff I assume remains a centrist on domestic as well as foreign policy

3) Atlas fails to note that one of the original neo-cons he cites -- Dan Bell -- no longer considers himself a neo-con. The affinity between him and people like Walzer, Ignatieff and Berman I can buy; Irving Kristol is a harder case to make.

4) Speaking of which: aside from a shared anti-Communism and commitment to democracy (the former still at times a bit quirky on Hitchens' part), it doesn't seem to me that the four profiled inhabit the same intellectual geneology or position as those now called neo-cons. Ignatieff and Walzer, at least, inhabit a more skeptical, tragic, pluralistic world, one in which US power is viewed, not as necessarily evil, but as not necessarily good or without price either. (Ignatieff is the biographer and disciple of Isaiah Berlin, Walzer, as discussed here recently, an important pluralist and social-democratic philosopher in his own right; I don't know as much about what philosophical ppositions Berman and Hitchens currently occupy, though last I checked Hitchens' intellectual heroes were still Rosa Luxembourg and George Orwell, and Berman identified with the tradition of leftist anti-Communism and, to some extent, nouveaux philosophes such as Andre Glucksmann; this is a different mental world than that occupied by the neo-cons. Or at least I think so, since it's pretty much the mental world I occupy, and I find the ways of thinking of people like the Kristols and Kagan, while not incomprehensible or wholly unsympathetic, pretty foreign)

5) Liberals have always been divided over foreign policy, and there's a healthy tradition of liberals supporting humanitarian intervention and a resolute defense of democracy (contra Ann Coulter); one doesn't need to go neo-con to support freedom or human rights. In fact, some of us think that -- combined with a commitment to moderation and respect for process -- is what liberalism is all about.

6) Atlas offers the following attempt, I guess, at an aphorism: "A neoconservative, it might be postulated, is one who read and repudiated Marx; a conservative, one who read and embraced Hume, Locke and Hobbes" Now, first, let's say this is true. Of those he sites, I don't think Ignatieff was ever a Marxist, though he did have a somewhat Foucauldian phase at one point I believe. And I don't know if you can say that Hitchens has repudiated Marx (as opposed to Communism) -- or indeed Walzer, who's not a Marxist, but offers a surprisingly sympathetic and attractive reading of Marx in some of his work. So this would seem to undercut Atlas's own characterization of these men as neo-cons, if its true. However, I don't think it necessarily is. After all, most contemporary neo-cons are second generation neo-cons who never believed in Marx. As for the conservative reading list, last I checked Locke was a liberal, and Hume and Hobbes were disputable cases. And what happened to Burke? (Even if we're using conservative and liberal in the American senses of the words, Locke remains common property -- and there are even left-liberal attempts to draw on the insights of Hobbes (as Judith Shklar sometimes sought to do, and Stephen Holmes seems to me to be trying to do. And that emblematic liberal intellectual, Isaiah Berlin -- still despised, so far as I know, by Hitchens -- was, in some ways and for better or worse, one of the most Humean of twentieth century political thinkers)

So, I don't think the thesis of this article holds up very well.
Which is too bad, because if it had just dispensed with the thesis, which isn't really necessary, it'd be a pretty good piece on some very admirable and attractive voices -- voices whose sanity and decency all too often get drowned out in contemporary debates.

There's an update where Josh links to the reactions of some other bloggers, and comments on the commentary. I thought these two paragraphs were especially striking:

Kamm makes a similar point to the one above, though in greater detail, about the oddity of including Dan Bell on the list of neo-cons. He also notes that Paul Berman's anti-Bush rhetoric is a bit, um, strong. I think this is fair, but I also think that liberals and leftists who supported the war on Iraq and other of Bush's foreign policy initiatives, but who don't actually have to live in the US with the political culture that Bush has done so much to create and with his disastrous domestic programs, and who are surrounded by facile and knee-jerk anti-Bushism, tend to give Bush too much of a break. Certainly, whenever I'm away from the US long enough Bush starts to seem, not great, but not SO bad -- and then I return to the US and am reminded both of how much I loathe the man and his policies, and how much that loathing is deserved, and not restricted to me or, indeed, to liberals. I think Bush looks better from a geographical distance; and while Oliver Kamm certainly seems to be very well-informed about US politics -- perhaps better informed than I! -- I get the impression from his blog, which I haven't read as regularly in the past as I shall do in the future, that he views Bush through British eyes.

As for Oliver Kamm's suggestion that we call the position he and other liberal supporters of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein embrace 'militant democracy', this would certainly make my OxBlog buddies happy, and it certainly characterizes Berman and Hitchens' positions well. I myself -- and here I think I again find myself in the same boat as Walzer, and perhaps Ignatieff, though I'm not quite sure about the latter -- tend to be wary of the calling myself a militant anything. And I think that any militancy on behalf of democracy, human rights, etc., needs to be balanced by an awareness of the difficulty, complexity, and often inescapable tragedy of most things in human affairs, at least at a global level, and a consequent, due caution and moderation.

He pursues the theme of the tragedy in human affairs in a subsequent post, WWIBD (What Would Isaiah Berlin Do).

2003-10-29T23:06:00.000+01:00

For another angle, try Orwell's "Reflections on Ghandi."

2003-10-29T22:43:00.000+01:00

And here's Lord Buckley's rendition of "an incident from the life of the precious Mahatma Ghandi."

2003-10-29T18:05:00.000+01:00

So, there they are, all 17 of them. But perhaps there should be a postscript or two. Here's a poem:

THERE WILL BE NO PEACE

Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colors come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.

You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of,
Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender:
And they do not like you.

What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer;
You will come to believe - how can you help it? -
That you did, you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,
You will long for their friendship.

There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate's sake.

- by W. H. Auden, 1956

Here's how it was introduced where I found it:

W.H. Auden's least-liked poem, "There Will Be No Peace," is making a quiet comeback: Many of its new readers are finding an entirely unexpected meaning in the work in their reaction to terrorist mass murder.

Auden wrote the poem in 1956 as a personal work, indeed he called it "one of the most purely personal poems I have ever written." It was his emotional reaction to the intense animosity he encountered at Oxford when he returned to Britain late in his life.

But as James Fenton wrote in The New York Review of Books in April 2000, "there seems to me to be something universally appreciable" in the work. That universally appreciable something has since emerged.

2003-10-25T19:46:00.000+02:00

Element #17 comes from this article.

Glucksmann believes that the only worthwhile “political” project is the constant, unrelenting, and most probably futile amelioration of obvious suffering. “It’s very odd that the idea of the doctor, and of medicine, predates by thousands of years the actual ability of doctors to help anyone in more than small ways. Why should it be?” he said once in a conversation. “Well, it’s because we recognize the presence of evil as being stronger than the promise of a cure. The simple Hippocratic oath, ‘First, do no harm,’ is a far, far more radical sentence in the history of thought than it seems. It recognizes the existence of evil—illness—that is in many ways beyond our control. It is the opposite of magical thinking, witch-doctor think, which promises to make well, to cure. ‘Do no harm’ is the truly radical sentence; ‘Cultivate your garden’ the unforgivable one.”

Above all, literature is for him the natural model of thought: he sees history through the lens of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky and Aristophanes.

Here's a bit of the oath itself:

I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel...

2003-10-25T19:22:00.000+02:00

Element #16 is "An Art Apart," Nelson Ascher's translation of part of the foreword he wrote for Poesia Alheia, a 1998 book of his translations of poetry into Portuguese. Scroll down to September 1, 2003, nearly at the bottom of the page.

This isn't why I chose it (in other words, read the whole thing), but I liked the way this is built up:

What poets usually say is basically the following: you are young and beautiful and I love you, or you are old and ugly and I don't love you; my son or daughter or father or mother is a wonder or a disgrace; the cat (or the dog, the horse, the lion, the tiger etc.) is mysterious and unfriendly (or faithful, swift, proud, ferocious etc.); life (that may or may not be a dream) is good and short and I am afraid of dying, or life is bad and long and I am tired of it; my village (or city, region, country) is the most lovely of all and I miss it so much, or it is hateful and I want to leave it and never return; Jehovah or Zeus or Allah is good and we should respect him, or is cruel and bad to us, or simply doesn't exist; how competent, honest, just and kind, or incompetent, corrupt, overbearing and sadistic, our king or ruler or leader is; nothing is better (or worse) than war; everything changes in the world, or there is nothing new under the sun. Longer and/or complex poems habitually combine and recombine in various ways those cliches in order to arrive to other, larger ones such as: you are beautiful and I love you, but you are coy as [sic] and don't love me; because of this, life seems bad and long to me, and, being proud as a lion, I am leaving my village, the loveliest of villages, and will go to the war, because it is the best of things; remember, however, that you will soon be old and ugly and nobody will love you anymore.

2003-10-25T18:47:00.000+02:00

Element #15: a few paragraphs from Joseph Addison's essay in The Spectator, No. 10, Monday, March 12, 1711, on the aims of The Spectator.

I would therefore in a very particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour in every morning for tea and bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a part of the tea equipage.

Sir Francis Bacon observes that a well-written book, compared with its rivals and antagonists, is like Moses’s serpent, that immediately swallowed up and devoured those of the Egyptians. I shall not be so vain as to think that where The Spectator appears the other public prints will vanish; but shall leave it to my reader’s consideration whether it is not much better to be let into the knowledge of one’s self, than to hear what passes in Muscovy or Poland; and to amuse ourselves with such writings as tend to the wearing out of ignorance, passion, and prejudice, than such as naturally conduce to inflame hatreds, and make enmities irreconcilable?

In the next place, I would recommend this paper to the daily perusal of those gentlement whom I cannot but consider as my good brothers and allies, I mean the fraternity of spectators who live in the world without having anything to do in it; and either by the affluence of their fortunes or laziness of their dispositions have no other business with the rest of mankind but to look upon them. Under this class of men are comprehended all contemplative tradesmen, titular physicians, fellows of the Royal Society, Templars that are not given to be contentious, and statesmen that are out of business; in short, everyone that considers the world as a theater, and desires to form a right judgment of those who are the actors on it.

There is another set of men that I must likewise lay a claim to, whom I have lately called the blanks of society, as being altogether unfurnished with ideas, till the business and conversation of the day has supplied them. I have often considered these poor souls with an eye of great commiseration, when I have heard them asking the first man they have met with, whether there was any news stirring? and by that means gathering together materials for thinking. These needy persons do not know what to talk of till about twelve o’clock in the morning; for by that time they are pretty good judges of the weather, know which way the wind sits, and whether the Dutch mail be come in. As they like at the mercy of the first man they meet, and are grave or impertinent all the day long, according to the notions which they have imbibed in the morning, I would earnestly entreat them not to stir out of their chambers till they have read this paper, and do promise them that I will daily instil into them such sound and wholesome sentiments as shall have a good effect on their conversation for the ensuing twelve hours.

But there are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world. I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjusting of their hair is the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of a suit of ribbons is reckoned a very good morning’s work; and if they make an excursion to a mercer’s or a toyshop, so great a fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest drudgery the preparation of jellies and sweetmeats. This, I say, is the state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those of a more elevated life and conversation, that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and respect, as well as love, into their male beholders. I hope to increase the number of these by publishing this daily paper, which I shall always endeavor to make an innocent if not improving entertainment, and by that means at least divert the minds of my female readers from greater trifles. At the same time, as I would fain give some finishing touches to those which are already the most beautiful pieces in human nature, I shall endeavor to point all those imperfections that are the blemishes, as well as those virtues which are the embellishments, of the sex. In the meanwhile I hope these my gentle readers, who have so much time on their hands, will not grudge throwing away a quarter of an hour in a day on this paper, since they may do it without any hindrance to business.

2003-10-25T11:05:00.000+02:00

Element #14 comes from Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present (pp. 581-3).

The first thing to know about him is how to pronounce his name. It is Badjet. And the next is that his singular genius derives from his double vision. In any conflict of persons or of ideas he was always able to see that neither side was perverse or stupid, but had reasons for militancy; and he entered not only into these reasons but also into the feelings attached. This is a rare talent, especially when it does not lead to shilly-shallying in the double-viewer’s own course of action. Bagehot could always state the reasons for his choices with the utmost clarity.

In 1851, he was in Paris as the special correspondent of an English periodical and he told its readers that after the disorder of the Republic’s last days a strong executive was unavoidable: trade had stopped, life and property were insecure, Paris and the big cities could not stand it any longer. But while justifying the move toward dictatorship, Bagehot was expressing his private preference by helping the last republicans to build their barricades. Ten years later, reviewing the course of events in France, Bagehot concluded (before the empire’s collapse) that Caesarism is a remedy for the short term and a calamity when prolonged. As things turned out, the Second French Empire saw an increase in manufacture and trade and a beginning of social welfare. But a dangerous foreign policy was required by the regime’s shaky foundation, and this need of vainglory finally brought it down. The new upper crust at the court and in town was showy rather than elegant and intellect was at a discount. The atmosphere is well captured in the excellent comic operas of Offenbach—parodies of the classics in the mood of rather vulgar gaiety.

Bagehot’s due fame has been hampered by his dying too soon—at 51—and even more by the variety of his writings. In each of his domains he is highly prized, but versatility looks like a division, not an addition of powers. He was a political journalist, succeeding as editor of The Economist his father-in-law, who had founded it. For 17 years Bagehot commented on the political and economic affairs of the week. One outcome of this close study was a pair of classic works: Lombard Street, which is a description of the British financial system; and The English Constitution [it is the book to read], which describes in short compass the social and psychological reasons for the successful working of the induplicable English Parliament.

These works alone would justify ranking Bagehot among the original thinkers of the 19C. But every one of the 12 volumes of his writings offers additional proof: the essays on past and present English statemen show the consummate political historian; another collection of articles on particular situations in trade and finance show the economist; the dozen more on literary figures and topics reveal a literary critic, while his reflections on philosophy and religion throw a light on his time not to be had from any other source. To G.M. Young, the master historian of the Victorian age, Bagehot was “the wisest of his generation.”

Bagehot’s ability to make ideas live appears on every page he wrote. A student in an American business school once found in its library a slim volume entitled The Love Letters of Walter Bagehot. It proved to be, once more, the carrier of a double message: sprightly missives to the author’s fiancée interspersed with comments on the current state of certain firms and the stock exchange that would be sure to interest the fiancée’s father. Both recipients were doubtless entertained. Bagehot’s prose is rapid and enveloping, somewhat in the manner of Bernard Shaw; it leaves no uncertainties as it voices also what the opponent or the reader is no doubt thinking. It is humorous and sad, because Bagehot, though an expert in business and politics, never feels his mind-and-heart fulfilled by them. When he says: “Unfortunately mysticism is true,” he means that it is too bad for the man always after the main chance; for himself, Realism is not enough. Bagehot’s gift of double-mindedness appears strikingly in his short work Physics and Politics, which William James called a “golden little book.” It undertakes to apply Darwin to politics, but Bagehot is no Social Darwinist. He begins indeed by showing “Natural Selection” in the early states of the march of civilization—the better organized, more cooperative groups conquer the less unified. But then more and more other qualities, initiatives, and ideas—liberty, free discussion, written law, habits of calm reflection, of tolerance and generosity—conduce to survival, because they make for an ever higher degree of cohesion. These virtues are the strength of the national state, whose power a less developed people cannot successfully withstand. In such a struggle, conquest makes at least possible the enlargement of civilization.

But the New Imperialism of the 19C worked neither all for civilizing nor all for mercenary ends. It civilized by side effect. Missionaries did not merely bring “moral pocket handkerchiefs,” as Dickens scoffed; they were often doctors of the body as well as disturbers of the soul. Colonial officials introduced goods, means of transport, and control of nature; they kept the peace and abolished inhuman rites. Still, it was the application of force, not freedom, which is extremely difficult to restore, and after its installation, to manage. At the same time, the second 19C expansion of Europe took thousands of its natives to the other continents, bringing about a continuous mixing of cultures and a larger scale than before. Language, customs, diet, art, the conception of man and of life—all were modified. Within Europe itself, more people were incited to travel abroad, and this to such an extent that Thomas Cook immortalized his name by inventing the guided tour and bringing to birth that feral creature, the tourist. Lastly, the wide world beckoned directly or by marital connection to a special group, whose public presence changed an eccentricity into a vocation...

Here's a sentence quoted from a letter Bagehot wrote to his fiancée:

"I get tired of either sense or nonsense if I am kept very continuously to either and like my mind to undulate between the two as it likes best."

2003-10-24T18:39:00.000+02:00

Like Element #2, Element #13 is from Richard Wright's Black Boy (pp. 60-62).

My mother and Aunt Maggie cooked in the kitchens of white folks and my brother and I were free to wander where we pleased during their working hours. Each day we were left a dime apiece to spend for lunch and all morning we would dream and discuss what we would buy. At ten or eleven o'clock we would go to the corner grocery--owned by a Jew--and buy a nickel's worth of ginger snaps and a bottle of Coca-Cola; that was lunch as we understood it.

I had never seen a Jew before and the proprietor of the corner grocery was a strange thing in my life. Until that time I had never heard a foreign language spoken and I used to linger at the door of the corner grocery to hear the odd sounds that Jews made when they talked. All of us black people who lived in the neighborhood hated Jews, not because they exploited us, but because we had been taught at home and in Sunday school that Jews were "Christ killers." With the Jews thus singled out for us, we made them fair game for ridicule.

We black children--seven, eight, and nine years of age--used to run to the Jew's store and shout:

                        Jew, Jew, Jew
                        What do you chew?

Or we would form a long line and weave back and forth in front of the door, singing:

                        Jew, Jew,
                        Two for five
                        That's what keeps
                        Jew alive

Or we would chant:

                        Bloody Christ killers
                        Never trust a Jew
                        Bloody Christ killers
                        What won't a Jew do?

To one of the redheaded Jewish boys we sang:

                        Red head
                        Jewish bread
                        Five cents
                        A Jewish head.

To the fat Jewish woman we sneered:

                        Red, white, and blue
                        Your pa was a Jew
                        Your ma a dirty Dago
                        What the hell is you?

And when the baldheaded proprietor would pass by, we black children, poor, half-starved, ignorant, victims of racial prejudice, would sing with a proud lilt:

                        A rotten egg
                        Never fries
                        A cheating dog
                        Never thrives.

There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.

2003-10-24T14:50:00.000+02:00

For element #12, I clipped the comments under one of Cinderella Bloggerfeller's postings. Scroll down to Tuesday, August 26, 2003. There are a few more comments there now on the word listopad and its meanings in Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Russian.

====================================================

Lévy and Glucksmann, the New Philosophers, are now talking about Civilization vs. Nihilism? Amazing -- weren't they once sworn enemies of all hierarchies and thus nihilists par excellence? Granted, they did it in an anti-Communist context, but their denial extended to all forms of "oppression".

I also wonder which Dostoyevskian killers Glucksmann is talking about. I can remember at least three. Raskolnikov was definitely not an evil man; Smerdyakov was quite an ugly type but note that Dostoyevsky endowed him with a mentality of a European bourgeois, so he doesn't quite fit into this picture. The good folks from The Demons would be the best candidates.

Alex(ei) | Email | Homepage | 08.26.03 - 9:35 pm | #
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I've not read "Dostoyevsky in Manhattan" but I read a fairly lengthy review of it by Mario Vargas Llosa last year. The Dostoyevskians in question are indeed Verkhovensky, Stavrogin et al. I suppose "The Demons", along with Conrad's "Secret Agent", is still the best novel for understanding the terrorist mentality.

C. Bloggerfeller | Email | Homepage | 08.26.03 - 9:57 pm | #
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"The Demons" is an insight into the minds and souls of certain -- but far from all types of terrorists. In fact, it's also a cruel caricature of the whole Russian revolutionary movement. I don't think it offers a hint at the reasons why, say, Zasulich shot at Trepov or Kalyaev threw a bomb into Prince Sergei Alexandrovich's carriage. Note also that Dostoyevsky depicted Westernized liberals like Verkhovensky Sr. with inimitable contempt. His political views sometimes did show in his fiction.

Alex(ei) | Email | Homepage | 08.26.03 - 11:28 pm | #
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what do you make of this Slate reviewer who says the use of Conrad's "Secret Agent" is misconstrued as a model for understanding terrorists?
http://slate.msn.com/id/116220/

Dennis | Email | 08.27.03 - 4:39 am | #
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Unfortunately, I have not read "Secret Agent" so I'd rather stay quiet. Early Russian terrorists (Narodnaya Volya, Zemlya i Volya, Socialist Revolutionaries) typically targeted individual government officials who were believed to be personally responsible for various ugly (and bloody) acts (e.g., brutally suppressing peasant unrest). When the SRs condemned terror in parliamentary countries; Kalyaev disagreed saying he would never throw a bomb into a café but he is not in a position to judge those who do. Obviously, there are major differences between those people and contemporary terrorists who specifically target civilians.

Alex(ei) | Email | Homepage | 08.27.03 - 8:43 am | #
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I think Verkhovensky Jr., the terrorist leader in "The Demons", was based on Nechayev, a considerably more unscrupulous figure, who murdered one his followers, Ivanov, for disagreeing with him, and who really did believe "the end justfies the means".

As for the article on "The Secret Agent", I see the writer's point that the terrorists are really tricked into their action, but that doesn't take anything away from Conrad's analysis of what is going on in their minds, particularly the "human bomb", the Professor. I also think Conrad preferred liberal democracies to the other forms of government on offer, their flaw was they were too naive and trusting.

C. Bloggerfeller | Email | Homepage | 08.27.03 - 10:53 am | #
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The circumstances of Shatov's murder resemble the Ivanov case very closely indeed; Dostoyevsky did have Nechayev in mind as a prototype for Verkhovensky (and even called him Nechayev in a draft), but it was only after the death of both that some crucial details of Nechayev's life and personality came to light. I would say Verkhovensky was only one side of Nechaev; the other, deeper and darker side is embodied in Stavrogin and perhaps some other characters. (Someone remarked Petr Verkhovensky must have looked pretty much like the young Lenin.) The real Nechaev was quite a major figure and deserves much more attention in connection with modern terrorists. An admirer of the Jesuits and Machiavelli and a student of the Paraguay experiment, Nechayev himself was both resented and admired by revolutionaries.

By the way, Daniel Pipes' father, Richard Pipes, wrote a short book on another Russian terrorist (who was also an agent provocateur), Sergey Degayev (Pipes spells Degaev). I haven't read it -- the story must be new only to Western historians who got access to Russian archives in the 1990s -- but I bet it's a good read. The Soviet/Russian writer Yuri Davydov (http://www.penrussia.org/a-m/yu_dav.htm) has produced, since the 1960s, a number of semi-fiction novels on Russian revolutionaries, some of which I would highly recommend ("March" and "Glukhaya pora listopada" -- don't know how this Pasternak line should properly translate -- "The dead season of leaf-fall" or something).

Alex(ei) | Email | Homepage | 08.27.03 - 12:56 pm | #
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I remember Nechayev from Camus' L'Homme Révolté. He sounds like he was ahead of his time from a political and ethical viewpoint (unfortunately for the twentieth century). Shigalyov in The Demons struck me as a precursor of Pol Pot (also a mild-mannered school teacher by profession).

BTW "Listopad" is the Polish word for November.

C. Bloggerfeller | Email | Homepage | 08.27.03 - 2:58 pm | #

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2003-10-24T14:37:00.000+02:00

Element #11 is Matt Welch's gestalt-switching prescription: Optimists and Pessimists: Switch Sides!

2003-10-24T14:24:00.000+02:00

Element #10: a poem by Wallace Stevens.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

                        I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

                        II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

                        III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

                        IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

                        V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

                        VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

                        VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

                        VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

                        IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

                        X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

                        XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

                        XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

                        XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

2003-10-24T14:20:00.000+02:00

Element #9: some Duck-Rabbits join the party.

2003-10-24T14:12:00.000+02:00

Element #8: the elephant goes to America.

2003-10-24T14:08:00.000+02:00

In element #7, the elephant is globalized into Islamic thought.

2003-10-24T14:04:00.000+02:00

Element #6 is John D. Ireland's translation of the Tittha Sutta. If you'd like to read more of the Udana, try this page.

2003-10-24T13:59:00.000+02:00

Element #5 is Thanissaro Bhikku's translation of the Tittha Sutta (Udana VI.4), from the Pali. The elephant is in the house.

2003-10-24T13:20:00.000+02:00

Element #4 is taken from Book Two of this edition of Aristotle's Ethics, 1108a10-1109b26.

The mean is often nearer to one extreme than to the other, or seems nearer because of our natural tendencies

viii. Thus there are three dispositions, two of them vicious (one by way of excess, the other of deficiency), and one good, the mean. They are all in some way opposed to one another: the extremes are contrary both to the mean and to each other, and the mean to the extremes. For just as the equal is greater compared with the less, and less compared with the greater, so the mean states (in both feelings and actions) are excessive compared with the deficient and deficient compared with the excessive. A brave man appears rash compared with a coward, and cowardly compared with a rash man; similarly a temperate man appears licentious compared with an insensible one and insensible compared with a licentious one, and a liberal man prodigal compared with an illiberal one and illiberal compared with a prodigal one. This is the reason why each extreme type tries to push the mean nearer to the other: the coward calls the brave man rash, the rash man calls him a coward; and similarly in all other cases. But while all these dispositions are opposed to one another in this way, the greatest degree of contrariety is that which is found between the two extremes. For they are separated by a greater interval from one another than from the mean, just as the great is further from the small, and the small from the great, than either is from the equal. Again, some extremes seem to bear a resemblance to a mean; e.g. rashness seems like courage, and prodigality like liberality; but between the extremes there is always the maximum dissimilarity. Now contraries are by definition as far distant as possible from one another; hence the further apart things are, the more contrary they will be. In some cases it is the deficiency, in others the excess, that is more opposed to the mean; for instance, the more direct opposite of courage is not the excess, rashness, but the deficiency cowardice; and that of temperance is not the deficiency, insensibility, but the excess, licentiousness. This result is due to two causes. One lies in the nature of the thing itself. When one extreme has a closer affinity and resemblance to the mean, we tend to oppose to the mean not that extreme but the other. For instance, since rashness is held to be nearer to courage and more like it than cowardice is, it is cowardice that we tend to oppose to courage, because the extremes that are further from the mean are thought to be more opposed to it. This is one cause, the one that lies in the thing. The other lies in ourselves. It is the things towards which we have the stronger natural inclination that seem to us more opposed to the mean. For example, we are naturally more inclined towards pleasures, and this makes us more prone towards licentiousness than towards temperence; so we describe as more contrary to the mean those things towards which we have the stronger tendency. This is why licentiousness, the excess, is more contrary to temperance.

Summing up of the foregoing discussion, together with three practical rules for good conduct

ix. We have now said enough to show that moral virtue is a mean, and in what sense it is so: that it is a mean between two vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency, and that it is such because it aims at hitting the mean point in feelings and actions. For this reason it is a difficult business to be good; because in any given case it is difficult to find the mid-point—for instance, not everyone can find the centre of a circle; only the man who knows how. So too it is easy to get angry—anyone can do that—or to give and spend money; but to feel or act towards the right person to the right extent at the right time for the right reason in the right way—that is not easy, and it is not everyone that can do it. Hence to do these things well is a rare, laudable and fine achievement.

For this reason anyone who is aiming at the mean should (1) keep away from that extreme which is more contrary to the mean, just as Calypso advises:

Far from this surf and surge keep thou thy ship.
For one of the extremes is always more erroneous than the other; and since it is extremely difficult to hit the mean, we must take the next best course, as they say, and choose the lesser of the evils; and this will be most readily done in the way that we are suggesting. (2) We must notice the errors into which we ourselves are liable to fall (because we all have different natural tendencies—we shall find out what ours are from the pleasure and pain that they give us), and we must drag ourselves in the contrary direction; for we shall arrive at the mean by pressing well away from our failing—just like somebody straightening a warped piece of wood. (3) In every situation one must guard especially against pleasure and pleasant things, because we are not impartial judges of pleasure. So we should adopt the same attitude towards it as the Trojan elders did towards Helen, and constantly repeat their pronouncement; because if in this way we relieve ourselves of the attraction, we shall be less likely to go wrong.

To sum up: by following these rules we shall have the best chance of hitting the mean. But this is presumably difficult, especially in particular cases; because it is not easy to determine what is the right way to be angry, and with whom, and on what grounds, and for how long. Indeed we sometimes praise those who show deficiency, and call them patient, and sometimes those who display temper, calling them manly. However, the man who deviates only a little from the right degree, either in excess or in deficiency, is not censured—only the one who goes too far, because he is noticeable. Yet it is not easy to define by rule for how long, and how much, a man may go wrong before he incurs blame; no easier than it is to define any other object of perception. Such questions of degree occur in particular cases, and the decision lies with our perception.

This much, then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended. But one should incline sometimes towards excess and sometimes towards deficiency, because in this way we shall most easily hit upon the mean, that is, the right course.

2003-10-24T12:40:00.000+02:00

Element #3 is a poem by Jorie Graham, from The Dream of the Unified Field.

THE WAY THINGS WORK

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us;
the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
to illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pully,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head—
I believe in you—
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
They way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

2003-10-24T10:36:00.000+02:00

Element #2 is taken from Black Boy, Richard Wright's autobiography (pp. 246-253).

That afternoon I addressed myself to forging a note. Now, what were the names of books written by H. L. Mencken? I did not know any of them. I finally wrote what I thought would be a fool-proof note: Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy--I used the word "nigger" to make the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the note--have some books by H. L. Mencken? I forged the white man's name.

I entered the library as I had always done when on errands for whites, but I felt that I would somehow slip up and betray myself. I doffed my hat, stood a respectful distance from the desk, looked as unbookish as possible, and waited for the white patrons to be taken care of. When the desk was clear of people, I still waited. The white librarian looked at me.

"What do you want, boy?"

As though I did not possess the power of speech, I stepped forward and simply handed her the forged note, not parting my lips.

"What books by Mencken does he want?" she asked.

"I don't know, ma'am," I said, avoiding her eyes.

"Who gave you this card?"

"Mr. Falk," I said.

"Where is he?"

"He's at work, at the M--- Optical Company," I said. "I've been in here for him before."

"I remember," the woman said. "But he never wrote notes like this."

Oh, God, she's suspicious. Perhaps she would not let me have the books? If she had turned her back at that moment, I would have ducked out the door and never gone back. Then I thought of a bold idea.

"You can call him up, ma'am," I said, my heart pounding.

"You're not using these books, are you?" she asked pointedly.

"Oh, no, ma'am. I can't read."

"I don't know what he wants by Mencken," she said under her breath.

I knew now that I had won; she was thinking of other things and the race qustion had gone out of her mind. She went to the shelves. Once or twice she looked over her shoulder at me, as though she was still doubtful. Finally she came forward with two books in her hand.

"I'm sending him two books," she said. "But tell Mr. Falk to come in next time, or send me the names of the books he wants. I don't know what he wants to read."

I said nothing. She stamped the card and handed me the books. Not daring to glance at them, I went out of the library, fearing that the woman would call me back for further questioning. A block away from the library I opened one of the books and read a title: A Book of Prefaces. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to pronounce the word "preface." I thumbed the pages and saw strange words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at the other book; it was called Prejudices. I knew what that word meant; I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against Mencken's books. Why would a man want to call a book Prejudices? The word was so stained with all my memories of racial hate that I could not conceive of anybody using it for a title. Perhaps I had made a mistake about Mencken? A man who had prejudices must be wrong.

When I showed the books to Mr. Falk, he looked at me and frowned.

"That librarian might telephone you,"? I warned him.

"That's all right,"? he said. "But when you're through reading those books, I want you to tell me what you get out of them."

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words . . . Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

Occasionally I glanced up to reassure myself that I was alone in the room. Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so passionately? Who was Anatole France? Joseph Conrad? Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Dostoevski, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen, Balzac, Bernard Shaw, Dumas, Poe, Thomas Mann, O. Henry, Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Gogol, T. S. Eliot, Gide, Baudelaire, Edgar Lee Masters, Stendhal, Turgenev, Huneker, Nietzsche, and scores of others? Were these men real? Did they exist or had they existed? And how did one pronounce their names?

I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me?

I forged more notes and my trips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an American type. I would smile when I saw him lugging his golf bags into the office. I had always felt a vast distance separating me from the boss, and now I felt closer to him, though still distant. I felt now that I knew him, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life. And this had happened because I had read a novel about a mythical man called George F. Babbitt.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different. And for me, everything was something different. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.

Whenever I brought a book to the job, I wrapped it in newspaper--a habit that was to persist for years in other cities and under other circumstances. But some of the white men pried into my packages when I was absent and they questioned me.

"Boy, what are you reading those books for?"

"Oh, I don't know, sir."

"That's deep stuff you're reading, boy."

"I'm just killing time, sir."

"You'll addle your brains if you don't watch out."

I read Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and they revived in me a vivid sense of my mother's suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.

Steeped in new moods and ideas, I bought a ream of paper and tried to write; but nothing would come, or what did come was flat beyond telling. I discovered that more than desire and feeling were necessary to write and I dropped the idea. Yet I still wondered how it was possible to know people sufficiently to write about them? Could I ever learn about life and people? To me, with my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life, it seemed a task impossible of achievement. I now knew what being a Negro meant. I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

In buoying me up, reading also cast me down, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. I no longer felt that the world about me was hostile, killing; I knew it. A million times I asked myself what I could do to save myself, and there were no answers. I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls.

I did not discuss my reading with Mr. Falk, who had lent me his library card; it would have meant talking about myself and that would have been too painful. I smiled each day, fighting desperately to maintain my old behavior, to keep my disposition seemingly sunny. But some of the white men discerned that I had begun to brood.

"Wake up there, boy!" Mr. Olin said one day.

"Sir!" I answered for the lack of a better word.

"You act like you've stolen something," he said.

I laughed in the way I knew he expected me to laugh, but I resolved to be more conscious of myself, to watch my every act, to guard and hide the new knowledge that was dawning within me.

If I went north, would it be possible for me to build a new life then? But how could a man build a life upon vague, unformed yearnings? I wanted to write and I did not even know the English language. I bought English grammars and found them dull. I felt that I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars. I read hard, discarding a writer as soon as I felt that I had grasped his point of view. At night the printed page stood before my eyes in sleep.

Mrs. Moss, my landlady, asked me one Sunday morning:

"Son, what is this you keep on reading?"

"Oh, nothing. Just novels."

"What you get out of 'em?"

"I'm just killing time," I said.

"I hope you know your own mind," she said in a tone which implied that she doubted if I had a mind.

I knew of no Negroes who read the books I liked and I wondered if any Negroes ever thought of them. I knew that there were Negro doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, but I never saw any of them. When I read a Negro newspaper I never caught the faintest echo of my preoccupation in its pages. I felt trapped and occasionally, for a few days, I would stop reading. But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing, and again I would forge another note to the white librarian. Again I would read and wonder, feeling that I carried a secret, criminal burden about with me each day.

That winter my mother and brother came and we set up housekeeping, buying furniture on the installment plan, being cheated and yet knowing no way to avoid it. I began to eat warm food and to my surprise found that regular meals enabled me to read faster. I may have lived through many illnesses and survived them, never suspecting that I was ill. My brother obtained a job and we began to save toward the trip north, plotting our time, setting tentative dates for departure. I told none of the white men on the job that I was planning to go north; I knew that the moment they felt I was thinking of the North they would change toward me. It would have made them feel that I did not like the life I was living, and because my life was completely conditioned by what they said or did, it would have been tantamount to challenging them.

I could calculate my chances for life in the South as a Negro fairly clearly now.

I could fight the southern whites by organizing with other Negroes, as my grandfather had done. But I knew that I could never win that way; there were many whites and there were but few blacks. They were strong and we were weak. Outright black rebellion could never win. If I fought openly I would die and I did not want to die. News of lynchings were frequent.

I could submit and live the life of a genial slave, but that was impossible. All of my life had shaped me to live by my own feelings and thoughts. I could make up to Bess and marry her and inherit the house. But that, too, would be the life of a slave; if I did that, I would crush to death something within me, and I would hate myself as much as I knew the whites already hated those who had submitted. Neither could I ever willingly present myself to be kicked, as Shorty had done. I would rather have died than do that.

I could drain off my restlessness by fighting with Shorty and Harrison. I had seen many Negroes solve the problem of being black by transferring their hatred of themselves to others with a black skin and fighting them. I would have to be cold to do that, and I was not cold and I could never be.

I could, of course, forget what I had read, thrust the whites out of my mind, forget them; and find release from anxiety and longing in sex and alcohol. But the memory of how my father had conducted himself made that course repugnant. If I did not want others to violate my life, how could I voluntarily violate it myself?

I had no hope whatever of being a professional man. Not only had I been so conditioned that I did not desire it, but the fulfillment of such an ambition was beyond my capabilities. Well-to-do Negroes lived in a world that was almost as alien to me as the world inhabited by whites.

What, then, was there? I held my life in my mind, in my consciousness each day, feeling at times that I would stumble and drop it, spill it forever. My reading had created a vast sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived and tried to make a living, and that sense of distance was increasing each day. My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it.

2003-10-24T10:11:00.000+02:00

Element #1 comes from Cinderella Bloggerfeller. Scroll down to "LITERATURE AND POLITICS." Here's the bit of the interview of Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis that Cinderella quotes. It's at the Center for Book Culture.

BL: Boris Davidovich is very explicitly concerned with political questions. Do politics still attract you as a writer?

DK: I've always been obsessed with politics. But I've been making a great effort the last two or three years to get rid of them in my work. I finally understood the futility of such work. Because of my political obsessions I lost much time, many words; and I gained many enemies.

BL: In France? In Yugoslavia

DK: In both. I finally realized that I'm not the sort of French writer who can make politics a part of his literature and that my political opinions are deadly for my literature. Absolutely deadly.

BL: Were you a political activist in France?

DK: No, never. I was never left wing. It's the French left that made me disgusted with politics.

BL: Were you in France for the "events" of 1968?

DK: Yes. I was an instructor of Serbo-Croatian in Bordeaux at the time. Both in print and in conversation I was opposed to all the protest movements. I finally decided: you're either engaged in political struggle or you're a writer. I don't think the two go together. The literary careers of many French writers ended at the very moment they were being hailed as political thinkers. I'm thinking of Sartre as well as Aragon. In Yugoslavia if you don't act within the framework of the Party, your political opinions are worthless.

BL: Do you return to Yugoslavia often?

DK: I go back regularly. I'm tired of political action there; it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. For years, I've tried to find political solutions, and I'm slowly starting to get rid of the need for that. Nabokov helped me here. I greatly admire his comportment as a writer. He understood: either literature, or. . . . He frequented that circle of Russian emigres and he saw how much intellectual waste it produced, how many people lost their literary or cultural lives in quarrels that ended nowhere. [Kis pulls his book Homo Politicus from the shelf, opens it, and reads one of the introductory citations from Nabokov's story "Spring in Fialta"]: "Now, frankly speaking, I have always been irritated by the complacent conviction that a ripple of stream of consciousness, a few healthy obscenities, and a dash of communism in any old slop pail will alchemically and automatically produce ultramodern literature; and I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash." [Kis then translates from Serbo-Croatian the other citation, from Orwell's essay "Why I Write"]: "And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally."

BL: Evidently you now feel closer to Nabokov [...]

2003-10-24T09:42:00.000+02:00

Study for a Portrait of an Elephantrabbit

Slightly edited, here's what I sent out a few weeks ago with the title "contest, contest, contest. PRIZES PRIZES PRIZES."

Over the past few weeks, since switching to this account with the silly name, I've sent out a number of items. In fulfillment of Thomas Pynchon's assertion that "everything is connected," each has been bound to all of the others in certain ways.

So the contest is for you is to work up an explanation for all of these pieces. Presumably this will be in discursive prose, but if you want to make a play out of it, or the script for a television ad, or an epic drama, it's all good.

There's a prize available for each person who makes this attempt. But there's an extra prize available for the first one I receive, and also the one that I judge to be best. My criteria for which is best will be subjective and post hoc. It needn't be the closest one to what I was thinking when I made my selections. If the one most different from what I had in mind is also the most interesting or the cleverest, that's the one I'll probably choose.

Please indicate whether or not it's okay for me to send your story back out to everybody else, and if so whether you wish to remain anonymous or whether it's okay to include your name.

Here's the list:

#1: Orwell, Kis Nabokov

#2: a sense of life itself

#3: THE WAY THINGS WORK

#4: straightening a woody

#5: Udana VI.4 (Tittha Sutta). Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

#6: Udana VI.4 (Tittha Sutta), Trans. John D. Ireland

#7: The Blind Men and the Elephant in Islamic thought

#8: The Blind Men and the Elephant

#9: Duck-Rabbits

#10: THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

#11: Optimists and Pessimists: Switch Sides!

#12: Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Camus

#13: A rotten egg / Never fries

#14: the gift of double-mindedness

#15: spectators and speculations

#16: An Art Apart

#17: Hippocratic radicalism

2003-10-24T09:35:00.000+02:00

I'll start by posting the series I sent out earlier to the elephantrabbits mailing list.