Here’s a several trillion dollar question: what really happened in Ohio in November? But it’s also a dangerous question, because it leads to: does anyone know? Is the bramble of tales of what went on too overgrown for us ever to know? And the answer to those is, of course, hopelessly uncertain.

Epistemological certainty is utopian: trying to achieve it gets us exactly nowhere. Specifically, it takes us to the scene of philosophy (to borrow from John Guillory), timeless and contemplative, whereas politics unfolds historically, socially. Sometimes too much philosophy replaces the political with the sophistical, and induces quietism. And if I’m sure of anything, it’s that quietism, keeping your head down, is exactly the wrong response to the current political situation. Citizenship requires us not only to debate, but eventually to stop debating and to act. The correct metaphor here is not the thickets of interpretation but something more combative: taking arms against a sea of troubles.

The cover story in Harper’s magazine this month is an article by the media critic Mark Crispin Miller, ‘None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press,’ illustrated by a drawing of three monkeys seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. What’s coy about the whole thing is that Miller doesn’t exactly call it stolen either, at first. He finds direction by indirection, leading with the casual: ‘whichever candidate you voted for… you must admit that last’s year’s presidential race was–if nothing else–pretty interesting.’ Indeed, indeed. Miller has spent his career fighting indifference (I studied film with him at Johns Hopkins), the narcotic effects of television and advertising, and the depressing intractability of U.S. politics. In his view, mass culture promotes ironic detachment, which in turn prevents meaningful action. According to him, the stupidity of beer commercials, sitcoms–the whole of USA Today, you might say–is a trap: it makes us feel lazily clever, flattering us into a meaningless, vegetative sense of superiority. In the realm of politics, at least, I think he’s right: engagement is the crucial fight. Whether it’s the leather armchair of philosophy or the couch of the potato, get on up!

I made five trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania in October and November, driving Downtown for Democracy volunteers overnight to Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Philadelphia. We staged concerts and art shows and and brought celebrities to town and registered the people who came to vote. We threw parties and registered the people who showed to vote. We stood around on college campuses and registered the people who walked by to vote. We typed their information into a database and called them to remind them to vote. We discussed the economy and the war and the environment and abortion and gay rights and tried to get people to care. It was exhilarating but evangelical: a missionary crue of artists, writers, curators, actors, and hipsters converting on the street. It was tiring but addictive work. Registering hordes of 1s and 2s (code for Kerry voters) on a conservative Catholic campus was thrilling, being called ‘Osama’ by gangstas in Dayton, not so much. But our efforts seemed to be succeeding even beyond our nutty optimism. New voter registration in the districts we targeted went up by 250%. Post-election data showed we increased young voter turnout in our precincts by 125%. We were in love with our work.

Still, ominous obstacles of the kind detailed by Miller appeared. The narcolepsy of the media was frustrating. A few of us were interviewed by the Washington Post. We spent two hours with the reporter discussing our attempts to awaken the apolitical, our theories of the role of art in politicizing young people, and the arcane details of our database system. She went on to write a satirical fluff piece about iPods and the slogan on my Gilbert and George t-shirt (‘Are you angry or are you boring?’). More seriously, Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, worked tirelessly negate to progressive efforts, to the extent of trying to declare registrations printed on the wrong paper invalid. Simply finding out which polling place in which to vote was made as difficult as possible. Someone was passing out fliers in black neighborhoods saying ‘Remember to Vote November 5!’ (the day after election day). All of this provided us with more rhetorical ammunition, though: after all, if one party is attempting to keep turnout as low as possible and the other as high, that does imply something about their differences.

On the eve of election day, Zogby opined that Ohio would be the hinge, and that the youth-voter turnout in Franklin county might well determine Ohio. This was astounding music to me: we were based in Franklin county and had succeeded drastically in registering young voters from the colossal undergraduate population of the Ohio State University. I giddily felt, that Monday night, a historical sense of being in the right place at the right time. We were going to determine a national election! (I hadn’t slept for days.)

It rained in Ohio on November 4th. Rain depresses turnout, and combined with the strategy of drastically undersupplying voting machines in Democratic precincts, made for a soggy wait to vote of up to 7 hours. Still, when Ohio was the last state showing on the board, I felt a shaky confidence. All day, the exit polls had justified my faith. As Miller puts it, “twenty-six state exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry, a statistical failure so colossal and unprecedented that the odds against its happening, according to a report last May by the National Election Data Archive Project, were 16.5 million to 1.”

Afterwards, baffled and defeated, we heard testimony like this:

“A representative from Triad Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the Triad supplied Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system had a bad battery and had “lost all of its data”. He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it and another “spare” tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was.”

Dare we call it stolen? I don’t know, I just worked there. Things happen. But, like Watergate, these last two elections should put the lie to that most pernicious ideology, American exceptionalism. Our republic is no less bananas than any other. Corruption is endemic in the political process. Etcetera. I know, no matter who is reading this, now I’m just directing a sermon to the choir. That’s why the precept I drew from my experience of this war (for that is what this is, a war with the most retrograde forces in our society), is similar to Miller’s: indifference is a greater evil than corruption. Politicians have always used the trope of anaphora (repetition of an initial phrase: ‘We must revitalize the economy. We must give all Americans a chance. We must…”) to incite people to care about stuff they find boring. In that spirit: As deadening as it can be, we must keep repeating that repetition, we must keep socially reproducing the desire to stand up and be counted. As dull as it is, we must inculcate in each new generation the will to participate. As difficult as it is, we must convince each other not to accept the depravity of our current leaders, and to believe we will usurp them. Are you angry or are you boring? Both.

Recent Dispatches:

Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermance

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last night we watched a glamorous cross-dresser in a sari hosting a TV talk-show in which he asked Amin Fahim, Benazir Bhutto’s the right hand man, about love. Fahim – a stolid, mustachioed man with the charisma of Dick Cheney – smiled, and said something like love is a function of fate, a bland but sporting reply. The show, “Late Show with Begum Nawazish Ali,” is analogous to the “Dame Edna Experience,” the popular 80’s show featuring the flamboyant British cross-dresser Dame Edna, or the “RuPaul Show.” Both, however, were short-lived in the States and neither host would have been able to invite Dick Cheney. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is contemporary Pakistan and Begum Nawazish Ali is arguably the face of contemporary Pakistani televsion.

During the last year about thirty-five private television channels have been granted licenses by the government. In fact, more licenses have been granted in the last five years than in the last fifty-three. The effects of this administration’s progressive media policy are manifest in public discourse, commercial interest, and society at large. On talk-shows such as Indus’ “Mujahid Barelvi Online,” ARY’s “Q&A with PJ Mir” and Geo’s “50 Minutes,” powerful sitting generals and prominent politicians are savaged by a new, brazen, no-holds-barred breed of talk-show hosts.

In the May issue of the most widely circulated news magazine, the Herald, Meera, one of Pakistan’s most famous film stars was asked: your next “[Bollywood] venture…sounds like a recipe for some explicit sex scenes…” Meera replied: “I don’t know what the big deal is. What is sex? It is a bodily function similar to going to the toilet and eating. Just look at the population of this country. We have so many people because someone out there is having sex…We have to realize that sex is part of life. God has given the instinct to us, not the mullahs. Haven’t you seen sparrows or animals have sex? It is a natural process. It is like hunger and thirst. Who are we to oppose something that is natural?”

On a breezy Wednesday night last week in Karachi, Ghazanfar Ali, the large, charming head of the Indus television network, hosted us at his Beverly Hills-like residence for drinks and dinner. On the esplanade outside, old Christian rockers – vestiges of Karachi’s jazz age of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s – played Nancy Sinatra’s “Summer Wine.” The soiree was held for a visiting group of Indians from MTV India who is interested in a joint-venture with Indus Music or IM. IM features attractive twentysomething VJs in tank-tops and jeans introducing Pakistani rock bands. An MTV executive told us that “we can’t compete with your rock and roll scene.” Indeed, IM has become not only an institution but a Pakistani cultural export. It has spawned a generation of rockers who have fused native traditions, including Sufi’ism, the mystical variety of Islam, with the influences as varied as Led Zeppelin and Limp Bizket.

Teenagers today, whether denizens of Defense or Nazimabad, aspire to be musicians, VJs, newscasters, producers, and actors. The emergent “media generation” spans classes, drawing from the elite as well as the urban middle class: we’ve been to open-air pop concerts attended by several thousands of middle class teenagers – boys and girls – gyrating to bands that include Junoon, Fuzon, EP, Noori, Strings and Jal. In fact, many working at the new channels jump up the social ladder in a matter of years not generations. The administration’s media policy has produced a generation that’s redefining what it means to be Pakistani, a generation confident in itself, unlike, say, the generation produced under Zia-ul-Haq’s conservative regime or even the previous, precarious, democratic ones. And unlike their parents, they aren’t scarred by history, by Partition, the ’71 war. A rare insightful outside commentator notes, “The kids appreciate Musharraf because he’s opened up the country to outside influences and loosened the stifling grip of the clerics – at least in the cities. Even conservative rural areas aren’t entirely immune either – satellite tv has seen to that, with Baywatch and its ilk beamed into the most remote outposts.”

Admittedly, it’s peculiar that Musharraf’s media policy – a dictator’s media policy – is liberal, progressive, indeed more progressive than any administration’s in Pakistan’s history. (Then again, Putin’s a democrat but the Russian press is horribly cowed and pliant.) It may all be a fluke but, more probably, it has to do with Musharraf’s thick skin and particular sensibililty. Salman Ahmad of Junoon says, “We’ve had the most freedom of expression since Musharraf came to power in 1999 – you can say anything, do anything, get up on stage and play anywhere.” Musharraf seems to have become a patron of the arts: he, for instance, recently inaugurated the government funded National Academy for the Performing Arts” or NAPA (a development picked up by the CSM although the reporter puts a peculiar spin on it and is occassionally incorrect: NAPA is not Pakistan’s first performing arts academy). Strangely, despite outside scrutiny of Pakistan in the print and electronic media, in academia, in the insular DC think-tank community, almost no commentator has picked up these trends. In fact, although Pakistan’s political history is documented and catalogued ad nauseam, it’s cultural and social history is not just glossed over but systematically ignored. This gaping lacuna completely skews any political analysis.

We, here, attempt to fill in the blanks.

The contemporary Pakistani rock scene owes much to Nazia Hassan the pigtailed, dungareed pop icon of the 80’s whose death anniversary was on August 13th. In the video of “Dum dum dee dee,” Nazia assumes the role of Alice, Carroll’s prepubescent protagonist, flittingly navigating a cardboard Wonderland set. Like Alice, Nazia at thirteen, fell into a wonderland of fortune and certain fame. The film Qurbani (1980), which featured her song “Aap jaisa koi,” was not only a “runaway success” at the time, transforming pubescent Nazia into a “star overnight,” but has become a modern classic. “Disco Diwane” (1981) sold a record several million copies on either side of the border (and hit number one on the Brazilian charts!), followed by “Boom Boom,” (1982) “Young Tarang,” (1986) “Hotline” (1987) and “Camera Camera” (1992).

Nazia’s oeuvre comprises anthems of love and celebrations of youth, fusing “indigenous melody with synthesized chords and western percussion.” The unfettered mirth in “Aao Na” is contagious, the lyrics silly, the disco beat insistent, like an ABBA number. The catchy “Disco Diwane” and “Boom Boom” demand animation, movement – foot-tapping, finger-snapping, hip-shaking. These songs echo within our generation. Our favorite lyrics are found in the resplendent “Aakhein milanay walay” when Nazia proclaims, “Main jawan/ Main haseen/ Meray paas kya nahin / hay sub kuch?” These eleven words definitively articulate the arrogance of youth.

Nazia’s contribution to pop is much more than a casual survey suggests: in a way, she gave voice to an inchoate genre, a genre without meaningful tradition, much like Rushdie, who established magic realism as the literary voice of South Asia, or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who came to define qawwali. She achieved this at a time when PTV broadcast bathetic patriotic songs and Bollywood churned out shrill hits. And her videos revolutionized PTV in particular, and Pakistani videology in general, by doing away with drab sets, frumpy curtains, expressions of severity, the constraints of immobility, the prerequisites, the code, it seemed, for any singer performing on television in the eighties.

Nazia’s orbit of influence extends across the border. An Indian commentator notes that “…Hindustani film music was never the same after Nazia, maybe accidentally, invaded it…Aap jaisa koi actually set a disco trend.” Nazia has contributed to the development of the present isomorphism of Bollywood music and pop: “She set – well ahead of its time – the personal album trend in India,” spawning the likes of Alisha, Lucky Ali and Shewna Shetty. A disconcerted Ameen Sayani, India’s Casey Casim, prophetically remarked: “Either it’s a fluke or a harbinger of a new trend. Nothing else can explain that a Pak (sic) girl, who’s totally unknown in India, should achieve such super success.” Harbinger, buddy.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Other related Critical Digressions:
Dispatch from Karachi
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Live 8 at Sandspit

It’s hot in New York. Deep summer. Dog days. Somehow it all makes me think of Roman poetry. The mood is languid and personal, stuff happens slowly, even the disasters. I’m thinking of my favorite poet, Catullus. I’m thinking of the way he captured the feel of a lazy Sunday of desperate but indifferent screwing with the side door swinging open in a limp breeze. I’m thinking of how he captured in verse the specific insanities of love, when you’re finding it and when you’re losing it.

It all started in Greece I guess. It started with Sappho and Anacreon and Archilochos. We’re talking lyric poetry here. And with the lyric poetry of Sappho and friends something very different from the heroic dactylic hexameter of the Homeric epics came into being. It was intimate and personal. It was passionate and wounded. It was subjective. Some people, like the Hegelian minded philosopher Bruno Snell, decided that the very birth of the subject could be discovered in the transition from Homeric verse to the lyric poets, to the philosophic writing of Attic Greece. Probably that’s a little heavy handed and speculative. But it is true that Sappho feels new and different and even modern in a way that Homer or Hesiod or the Hymns don’t. Which is not to say that Homer isn’t great. Homer is great. Hesiod is great in a different way. But they don’t write about the here and now of a hot summer day and the passions and stupidities that can occur within. They don’t write, like Sappho does, straight to the heart of subjective experience. The Sapphic strophe bounces along like personal experience.

When Sappho writes the following you feel it in your gut or your balls or the middle of your feet or all of the above.

I just really want to die. She, crying many tears, left me And said to me: “Oh, how terribly we have suffered, we two, Sappho, really I don’t want to go away.” And I said to her this: Go and be happy, remembering me, For you know how we cared for you. And if you don’t I want to remind you ………….and the lovely things we felt with many wreathes of violets and ro(ses and cro)cuses and …………..and you sat next to me and threw around your delicate neck garlands fashioned of many woven flowers and with much……………costly myrrh …………..and you anointed yourself with royal….. and on soft couches…….(your) tender……. fulfilled your longing……….

And that’s without being able to convey the specific rhythm of the Sapphic meter, which relies on the relative length of long and short vowels in ancient Greek and can’t really be captured in English. (If I’m thankful for one thing in my overly studious younger days, it’s that I labored to read ancient Greek at the amazing CUNY Graduate Center Intensive Greek program with Hardy Hansen. Reading Homer in the original with my friends Theo and Dan one summer in the Catskills by a small lake amidst an invasion of fireflies was worth all the bullshit and then some.)

Skip forward a few centuries to the Hellenistic period. Callimachus and his pals are terribly serious scholars. Grammar, rhetoric and that sort of shit is the thing of the day. They’re officially establishing the kind of classical humanism that will be rediscovered in the renaissance and celebrated as, well, something remarkable in human achievement. Which it was, even if we don’t want to get all romantic about it. They call themselves the Neoteroi, the new kids on the block. They don’t write in the epic style. Like Sappho and friends, they’ve got an intimate and personal approach. They like a small moment, an individual experience.

Now we jump from the Greeks to the Romans. Rome: first century BC. The glory days. All the big boys are on the scene; Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Virgil. Catullus and his group of malcontents are trying to bring the style of the Greek neoterics into a Latin poetry. They’ve got various metrical problems to deal with. They want to create a poetic foot in Latin that can compete with Greek lyric. And they want to achieve the intimacy that is in such contrast to the epic feel (though Catullus could do epic very well when he wanted to, thank you). Catullus and his crew think of themselves as the new neoterics.

Catullus creates his hendecasyllables to fit the bill (basically a spondee, a dactyl, and then three trochees).

The great, the amazing thing about the hendecasyllables is the way that Catullus wields them both so lightly and with such an expert touch. There’s an off the cuff feel, extremely important to Catullus, but it actually came about through extremely labored and technical means. Achieving that effect was what it was all about. When it came together correctly, Catullus called it lepidus, a difficult word to translate but best understood as some combination between witty, elegant, and sophisticated. Catullus’ hendecasyllables were a mighty force. He could unleash them in love or in anger or in both. In poem 42 he sends them out against a woman who’s snatched one of his manuscripts. This is Richard Bullington’s translation, he translates hendecasyllables as ‘nasty words’.

Come here, nasty words, so many I can hardly tell where you all came from. That ugly slut thinks I’m a joke and refuses to give us back the poems, can you believe this shit? Lets hunt her down , and demand them back! Who is she, you ask? That one, who you see strutting around, with ugly clown lips, laughing like a pesky French poodle. Surround her, ask for them again! “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” Doesn’t give a shit? Oh, crap. Whorehouse. or if anything’s worse, you’re it. But I’ve not had enough thinking about this. If nothing else, lets make that pinched bitch turn red-faced. All together shout, once more, louder: “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” But nothing helps, nothing moves her. A change in your methods is cool, if you can get anything more done. “Sweet thing, give my poems back!”

And tying us back to our early Greeks, Catullus makes a translation/interpretation of Sappho. Here it is in the Latin, for those with the chops, and in an English translation.

Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identidem te spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

That man seems to me to be equal to a god,
That man, if it is right to say, seems to surpass the gods,
who sitting opposite to you repeatedly looks at you
and hears

your sweet laughter, something which robs miserable me
of all feelings: for as soon as I look
at you, Lesbia, no voice remains
in my mouth.

But the tongue is paralyzed, a fine fire
spreads down through my limbs, the ears ring with their
very own sound, my eyes veiled
in a double darkness.

Idleness, Catullus, is your trouble;
idleness is what delights you and moves you to passion;
idleness has proved ere now the ruin of kings and
prosperous cities.

When Catullus speaks of Lesbia here he is using, with a nod to Sappho, the pet name for his one time love, probably Clodia Metellus, a Roman socialite. His love for her was crazy and short. She seems to have been something of a femme fatale. Catullus writes some of the most beautiful love poems to her that have ever been written (again, and unfortunately, the English translations don’t really capture what is painfully frickin perfect in the Latin).

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has once set, remains to be slept and the sleep of one unbroken night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.

And when the love faltered, Catullus could write poems of heart rending worry and self doubt:

Lesbia always talks bad to me nor is she ever silent about me: Lesbia is loving me, if not, I may be destroyed. By what sign? Because they are the same signs: I am showing her disapproval constantly, I am lost if I do not love.

But there may not be a poem in any language that expresses the intense duality and pain of a love affair that is tearing apart one’s mind than the terse, beautiful odi et amo, I love and I hate. It goes:

odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love: How can I do it, you ask?

I don’t know, but it’s killing me.

Two lines. Everything in two lines. The entire world hangs in the balance of two lines. And when the balance finally broke and Catullus was jilted he could write some of the most vicious and nasty poetry that’s ever been penned.

The lude tavern and you tentmates, the ninth pillar from the capped brothers, you think that you alone have mentulas, do you think that it is permitted for you alone to have sex with whatever girls there are and that it is permitted to think that the others are goats? or, in an unbroken mind, because you fools sit, and 100 or 200 don’t you think that I will dare to rape orally the 200 loungers at the same time? Moreover think, for I shall write on the front of the whole tavern with sopiones for you. For my girl, who has fled from my embrace loved as much as no other will be loved, for whom great wars were fought by me, has settled down there, all of you fine and well to do men love her, and indeed, which is undeserved, all the punks and alleyway sex maniacs; son of the Geltiberia abounding in rabbits, Ignatius, whom a dark beard makes good and tooth scoured with Iberian urine.

In 54 BCE, Catullus disappears from history. Maybe he just died. Maybe he ran off to be something other than a poet. Who knows. But it’s raining like crazy on this humid New York night and I’m thinking of Catullus on his little boat he loved so. I’m thinking of his summer days with Lesbia and the way he burned and suffered and triumphed and failed. He joked that his poems might last for ages. It was an amusing thought because they were poems of the moment. But they did last for ages. Moments last for ages sometimes.