Kristin Dombek's review of The Book of Mormon, in n+1:

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s first feature-length film, Cannibal! The Musical, was a musical. Their third, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, was a musical; it even won an Academy Award nomination for its song “Blame Canada.” For that year’s honors Parker and Stone memorably dressed in drag—specifically in Jennifer Lopez’s green plummeting-neckline number and a satiny pink dress à la Gwyneth Paltrow from the year of her Shakespeare in Love acceptance speech—but they lost to Phil Collins. Their puppet movie, Team America: World Police, featuring the catchy martial pep song “America, Fuck Yeah,” was a musical. And beginning with “Kyle’s Mom Is a Big Fat Bitch,” in episode nine of season one, even South Park, Parker and Stone’s animated serial masterpiece on Comedy Central, has been a musical, for fifteen years running, just about every chance it can get. Notably, a number of these productions had something to do with Mormons. Cannibal was in part about Mormons (and cannibalism). Orgazmo (their second feature) was all about Mormons (and porn). Episode twelve of season seven of South Park bears the title “All About the Mormons.” You needn’t have watched everything Parker and Stone have ever made (as some people have, I hear) to know that the boys (as we still tend to call them) love musicals, and are preoccupied with the Latter-day Saints.

Even so, the early media story about The Book of Mormon, which won nine Tonys including Best Musical early this summer, was about how surprising it was that those naughty boys, those silly brilliant foul-mouthed Colorado boys, wanted to make a musical, and that it was about Mormons. Even more surprising, we found out during previews, was that this show had a “heart that is as pure as that of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show.” That was Ben Brantley’s rave in the New York Times, in which he reported “that a newborn, old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical has arrived at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, the kind our grandparents told us left them walking on air if not on water. So hie thee hence, nonbelievers (and believers too), to ‘The Book of Mormon,’ and feast upon its sweetness.”

It was so surprising, this sweetness, that the very same story was told by reviewers from Reuters (“the defining quality . . . is its sweetness”), USA Today (“the most surprising thing . . . may be its inherent sweetness”), and more than a dozen other news outlets. The Mormon audience members quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune were using the same words (Graceann Bennett remarked on the show’s “sweetness”; Anne Christensen called it “incredibly sweet”). The groupthink that manufactures such a story, the repetitiveness of its language, and the thinly veiled commercial motivations behind it (to save Broadway, we can only assume, from Spider-Man): these are exactly the sorts of dynamics the South Park boys skewer so brilliantly every week on their show.

Julia Bacha: Pay attention to nonviolence

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open The Magazine:

On a Headlines Today programme, the channel head, an enthusiastic Rahul Kanwal, is talking to Anna Hazare, Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal (a former IRS officer who is now a prominent civil society activist). As he begins discussing ‘Ab iske aage kya’ (What now after this?), he turns to Anna Hazare, and asks in Hindi, “You say that those who are corrupt should be hanged, is that not against Gandhian principles?” Anna answers, again in Hindi, “That is why I have said that, today, in many things, along with Gandhi we have to look towards Shivaji. [Unclear] Patel committed a mistake, and Shivaji had the man’s hands cut off. This policy of Chhatrapati, in many ways, we have to think about. Hundred per cent non-violence is not possible. Sometimes, even this has to be done, and that is why I have been saying that these people should be hanged…” Kiran Bedi interjects, “Anna is not taking away due process… he is going by the due process, the point is [that] economic offences today in our country are bailable, [are punished] by fines, minimum imprisonment; [there’s] no recovery of property, it is a joke.”

This is a perfect example of how the Anna Hazare movement has been operating for a while. There is little confusion about what Anna Hazare means: when he says “hang them”, he means “hang them”; when he says “cut their hands off”, he means “cut their hands off”. Kiran Bedi did interject to put a palatable spin on these words, but what she said was clearly not what Anna meant. The accompanying profile in this issue clearly shows these words are in keeping with his past. As a result of Anna’s reformist zeal, the people of his native village Ralegan Siddhi have witnessed the public flogging of those who dare to drink, a ban on all intoxicants, and restrictions on cable TV. It does not take much to see how closely this resembles the ideals of the Taliban, especially if you factor in the idea of a few hands being chopped off. Which is why it is no surprise that the sympathy he has long displayed for the Hindu Right has culminated in his endorsement of Narendra Modi.

The real surprise is that supporters of this movement see what they want to see in the man, belying all the evidence that exists.

Oliver Roy in The Immanent Frame:

[M]odern forms of religiosity tend to stress individual faith and choices over conformity to any sort of institutionalized Islam. The old motto “in Islam, no separation between religion (din) and worldly issues (dunya)” already turned a long time ago from an academic statement to mere wishful thinking, but it has been definitively undermined by the Arab Spring. What we see, more than secularization, is a deconstruction of Islam, torn between some sort of a cultural identity (there could be, in this sense, “atheist Muslims”), a faith that could be shared only by born-again believers (Salafis) in the confines of self-centered faith communities, or a “horizon of meaning” where references to sharia are more virtual than real.

The recasting of religious norms as values helps also to promote an interfaith coalition of religious conservatives that could unite around specific causes—opposition to same-sex marriage, for instance. It is interesting to see how, in Western Europe, for example, secular populists tend to stress more and more the Christian identity of Europe, while many Muslim conservatives try to forge an alliance of believers to defend shared values. In so doing, many of them tend to adopt an evangelical Protestant agenda, fighting abortion and Darwinism, both issues that have never been relevant in traditional Islamic debates. In this sense, modern neo-fundamentalists are trying to recast Islam as a kind of Western-compatible religious conservatism, a fact that is obvious in Turkey, where, in 2004, the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tried to promote an anti-adultery law that defined adultery not in terms of sharia but by reference to the modern Western family (a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with equal rights and duties, thus making the custom of polygamy, not uncommon among traditional AK local cadres, although illegal since 1926, more clearly a crime). Islam is thus part of the recasting of a religious global market disconnected from local cultures.

The merciless al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington 10 years ago started a cycle of warfare that seemed, for a time, to establish international jihadism as an enemy on a par with the Soviet Union during the cold war – another generational crusade in which the west had to prevail. That was always far-fetched and part of a pattern of category errors through which western powers have repeatedly misdiagnosed the nature and potency of the jihadi phenomenon. But so, too, have the jihadis overestimated their reach. In retrospect, 9/11 was probably the high watermark of jihadi success. Certainly, the unprovoked Anglo-American invasion of Iraq opened up a rich and bloody new arena in which Islamist extremists managed to dig themselves in at the heart of the country. They failed to consolidate their position but their defeats were mainly of their own making. In confronting al-Qaeda after its apocalyptic Twin Towers triumph, the US has been lucky in the uneven quality of its enemies. Prior to and beyond 9/11, the US and its allies found it hard to get their heads round terrorism divorced from state sponsorship. Despite the accumulating evidence that itinerant bands of holy warriors, battle-hardened in the US-backed jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, were fanning out during the 1990s to wage war in Algeria and Egypt, Chechnya and Bosnia, many intelligence professionals were stuck with the model of, say, the Abu Nidal group, guns-for-hire by Libya or Syria.

more from David Gardner at the FT here.

Today’s economy may seem the bleakest in recent memory: plunging consumer confidence, slumping home prices, a stubbornly high unemployment rate. But as Sylvia Nasar reminds us in “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius,” in 1933 a full 25% of the nation was out of work, suicides were rising sharply, and stocks were trading at one-fifth of their 1929 prices. Then, as now, public leaders struggled with solving the spiraling economic crisis. In 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with John Maynard Keynes, a British economist known for his love of art, his taste in young men and his brilliant if controversial theories. He urged the president to spend more on stimulus programs to shake the country out of its stupor. At a New York dinner the next evening, Keynes told some of his colleagues that every dollar spent by the government — deficit or no — would have a great effect on the nation’s economy. “Were the seven wonders of the world built by thrift?” he once asked. “I doubt it.”

more from Alana Semuels at the LA Times here.

Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit. He has been rather famously an aggressive critic of God and his followers, after cutting his sacrilegious teeth on Mother Teresa. He wrote a deadpan argument for trying Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, then was branded an apostate by former friends on the left for vigorously supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He memorably — a lot of what Hitchens has written merits the adverb — shot back that his antiwar critics were “the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”) And he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb. This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.

more from Bill Keller at the NYT here.

Christopher Hitchens in Guardian:

Especially over the course of the last 10 years, the word “martyr” has been utterly degraded by the wolfish image of Mohammed Atta: a cold and loveless zombie – a suicide murderer – who took as many innocents with him as he could manage. The organisations that find and train men like Atta have since been responsible for unutterable crimes in many countries and societies, from England to Iraq, in their attempt to create a system where the cold and loveless zombie would be the norm, and culture would be dead. They claim that they will win because they love death more than life, and because life-lovers are feeble and corrupt degenerates. Practically every word I have written, since 2001, has been explicitly or implicitly directed at refuting and defeating those hateful, nihilistic propositions, as well as those among us who try to explain them away.

The Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan martyrs were thinking and acting much more like Palach than like Atta. They were not trying to take life. They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy. They did not make sordid and boastful claims, about how their homicidal actions would earn them a place in a gross fantasy of carnal afterlife. They did not wish to inspire hoarse, yelling mobs, tossing coffins on a sea of hysteria. Jan Palach told his closest comrades that the deep reason for his gesture was not just the occupation, but the awful apathy that was settling over Prague as that “spring” gave way to a frosty winter. In preferring a life-affirming death to a living death-in-life, the harbingers of the Arab spring likewise hoped to galvanise their fellow-subjects and make them aspire to be citizens. Tides will ebb, waves will recede, the landscape will turn brown and dusty again, but nothing can expel from the Arab mind the example and esprit of Tahrir. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers, and that the aspiration for a civilised life, that “universal eligibility to be noble,” as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it, is proper and common to all.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Arab world is poised for an era of political and cultural renewal. In dramatic succession, popular uprisings have toppled long-reigning dictators even as others cling to power. Amid these momentous events, scholars, journalists and politicians are scrambling to explain how these revolutions came about after years of political stagnation and dashed attempts at reform.

Robin Wright’s “Rock the Casbah,” though it was mainly reported before this year’s convulsions, tackles these questions directly. Wright, a veteran foreign correspondent, argues that the Arab world’s younger generation is at the vanguard of a sweeping and seductive cultural revolution. Setting out to challenge the lazy trope that Islam is incompatible with modernity and democracy, she traveled across the Middle East — with forays into the wider Muslim world — to profile hip-hop artists, poets, playwrights, feminists, human rights activists, TV imams, comic book creators and comedians. Wright contends that these reformers are working toward a “counter-jihad” to reclaim Islam from militants who crave perpetual holy war. “For the majority of Muslims today, the central issue is not a clash with other civilizations. It is instead a struggle within the faith itself to rescue Islam’s central values from a small but virulent minority,” she writes. “The new confrontation is effectively a jihad against the Jihad.”

More here.

You're Missing

Shirts in the closet, shoes in the hall
Mama's in the kitchen, baby and all
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
But you're missing

Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair
Papers on the doorstep, you're not there
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
But you're missing

Pictures on the nightstand, TV's on in the den
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting
For you to walk in, for you to walk in
But you're missing, you're missing
You're missing when I shut out the lights
You're missing when I close my eyes
You're missing when I see the sun rise
You're missing

Children are asking if it's alright
Will you be in our arms tonight?

Morning is morning, the evening falls I have
Too much room in my bed, too many phone calls
How's everything, everything?
Everything, everything
You're missing, you're missing

God's drifting in heaven, devil's in the mailbox
I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops

by Bruce Springsteen
from, The Rising
2002

Wendell and Tanya Berry set apart an area of land on the periphery of their Kentucky hillside property, when they settled there in 1964, as a wild preserve permanently removed from cultivation. It was a usage stemming from the agricultural tradition Berry was born into—self-sufficient domestic diversified farming, as practiced in Henry County by five generations of Berrys. Because the industrialized monocrop agriculture that replaced it prefers large uniform fields, progress came late to this intricate terrain. By the time Berry returned there to settle, Henry County’s economically marginalized status in the new scheme of things made it a likely place to find a pocket of land to reclaim for the practice of a new-style old-style agriculture. On site, up close, paying attention to process and results, learning from mistakes, Berry decided that “gardening is a collaboration between the gardener and nature,” in which “fertility is the survival of natural process in the human order.” “To learn to preserve the fertility of the farm,” he quotes pioneer ecologist Albert Howard, “we must study the forest.” There, nature’s bookkeeping takes everything into account in a diversified system of balanced biochemical exchanges that rise from the soil and return to it in the circulations of the wheel of life.

more from Jim Powell at Threepenny Review here.

There is a hangar at JFK Airport – Hangar 17 – where, until recently, about 1200 pieces of steel and other objects from the World Trade Center site were warehoused. In the frenetic days after the attacks, these remains were selected as tokens of 9/11, so that they might be dispersed to memorials around the US, foremost among them the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero, which opens on the tenth anniversary of the event.[*] The clean-up of the site was as torturous – it lasted nine months – as the sorting at Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island was meticulous. In all, 1.8 million tons of rubble and debris were removed, of which the objects at the hangar comprise only a fraction of one per cent. Much of the tonnage consisted of steel columns and beams, and several of these, buckled and bent, were taken to the hangar – graphic evidence of the sheer force of the strike and subsequent collapse. Most of the material was pulverised, and no human trace is left of more than 40 per cent of the nearly 3000 victims. From the weaponised jets and the fallen towers to the remains at the hangar and the memorial museum at the site: it is a strange circle to contemplate, with grim ironies of its own, but it might bring a measure of closure to some. Long resident in New York, the Catalan artist Francesc Torres was two blocks from the WTC when the first jet struck the north tower, and he witnessed the collapse of both buildings from his studio rooftop ten blocks away. Commissioned by the 9/11 Museum, Torres photographed the 80,000 square-foot interior of the hangar every day in April 2009. His pictures, which proceed from broad views of the hangar to close-ups of individual objects, are now gathered in a book entitled Memory Remains: 9/11 Artefacts at Hangar 17;[†] they are currently on view at the International Center for Photography in New York and the Imperial War Museum (until 26 February 2012).

more from Hal Foster at the TLS here.

Though he dropped out of Kazan University’s Faculty of Oriental Languages after his first year, Leo Tolstoy’s grades in Arabic and Turko-Tatar were good. It was history, which Tolstoy considered a “false science”, in which his examiners declared him a “total failure”. Tolstoy’s Professor of Turco-Tatar Letters was a Persian from the Caucasus called Mirza Kazem-Bek, who had been converted to Presbyterian Christianity by Scottish missionaries in the 1820s, changing his name from Muhammad to Alexander. Though he had rejected the Islamic way of life and thinking as “too fanatical”, and was a loyal subject of the Tsar, he proudly wore flowing robes and a silk turban in the streets of Kazan, and insisted on the Persian title “Mirza”, meaning “scribe”. Mirza Kazem-Bek embodied the paradoxes of Kazan, a city on the Volga, less than 450 miles east of Moscow, which in its turn embodies the paradoxes of Russian Orientalism. As the Encyclopedia of Islam summarizes, Kazan was a Muslim Tatar khanate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and had become a Russian university town by the nineteenth. One traveller remarked on its “strange blend of Russian sophistication and Asian simplicity, Islam and Christianity, Russian and Tatar”.

more from Rachel Polonsky at the TLS here.

Sean Wilentz in Slate:

A few months ago, the cable-television and radio host Glenn Beck began his Fox News show with one of his favorite props: a pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’ve got my pipe,” he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, “because we’re going to speak about schoolish kind of things.” The theme of the day was “Restoring History,” and Beck, looking professorial in a neat dark blazer and a pink button-down shirt, began the lesson by peering at a stack of history textbooks and pronouncing them full of falsehoods, produced by “malicious progressive intent.” Progressives, he explained—liberals, socialists, Communists, the entire spectrum of the left—“knew they had to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and God.” For the next hour, Beck earnestly explained some of the history that “is being stolen from us”: the depression of 1920, for example, or how conservative economics saved the nation from the “near-depression” of 1946—crises that progressives don’t want you to know about. “You’ve been taught one lie, I think, your whole life,” he said.

For the fractious Tea Party movement, Beck—a former drive-time radio jockey, a recovering alcoholic, and a Mormon convert—has emerged as both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide. One opinion poll, released in July by Democracy Corps, showed that he is “the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters,” seen not merely as an entertainer, like Rush Limbaugh, but as an “educator.” And in the past few months Beck has established his own institute of learning: the online, for-profit Beck University. Enrollees can take courses like Faith 102, which contends with “revisionists and secular progressives” about the separation of church and state; Hope 102, an attack on the activist federal government; and the combined Charity 101/102/103, a highly restrictive interpretation of rights, federalism, and the division of powers.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

If you're looking for something big to mark the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, look again. Yes, there will be ceremonies that day. Politicians will give speeches. Think tanks will issue reports. Terrorists will try to mark the occasion by blowing something up. But the real action won't be on 9/11. And that's because, in these 10 years, so much has changed.

9/11 was a single plot. It involved four hijackings, but they were coordinated. The idea was to hit the heart of the world's most powerful country in simultaneous attacks, sending a global message of power and intimidation. In the months afterward, the U.S. did what we're accustomed to doing after being assaulted. We waged a war. We invaded the country from which the attack had originated. We took down the regime. Two years later, we invaded another country and took down another regime, associating it (erroneously) with the terrorists who had struck us. But in the years since then, we've learned a lot. We've learned that conventional warfare won't defeat our new enemies. We've learned to answer them in a different way: not at once, in an invasion, but in hundreds of discrete—and discreet—operations. Yesterday, in a mission “planned and conducted with technical assistance of United State Intelligence Agencies,” Pakistan disclosed the capture of Younis al-Mauritania, an al-Qaida leader reportedly assigned by Osama Bin Laden to hit Western economic targets. According to Pakistan, al-Mauritania “was planning to target United States economic interests including gas/oil pipelines, power generating dams and strike ships/oil tankers through explosive laden speed boats.” Such strikes are what you'd expect on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. But they might not happen that day, because we didn't wait for the anniversary. The answer to 9/11 happened a week earlier.

In fact, the answers have been arriving on many days over many years.

More here.

Apes

From The Economist:

According to a local news story in mid-August in Vietnam, the Vietnamese alphabet will not be receiving extra letters. The Ministry of Education denied a claim by the Department of Information Technology that it plans to add f, j, w and z to the current 29-letter alphabet. The back-and-forth nonetheless started a debate among the literati about language and heritage.

Authoritarian governments are often tempted by language planning, but in Vietnam’s case, fiddling about with the writing system predates the modern regime. The Roman script as used there is based on the work of a 17th-century French Jesuit scholar, Alexandre de Rhodes, who learned the language there in some six months and then transposed into his alphabet.

Vietnam already had a script: chu nom, based on Chinese characters. Given a thousand-year occupation and some time spent as a vassal state of the vast neighbour, Chinese influence has run throughout parts of Vietnamese culture for millennia. Chu nom was the script of the mandarins and literati.

The French introduced quoc ngu (de Rhodes’ work) in the 1920s.

More here.

Avi Steinberg in The Paris Review:

Maurice Sendak is set to publish his first full-production book since Outside Over There (1981). For the past thirty years, Sendak has been collaborating with other writers, illustrating old texts, designing sets and costumes for opera and ballet productions, creating advertisements and book and magazine covers, and making the occasional HBO cameo as an old-world rabbi. But with Bumble-Ardy, Sendak is reemerging in the form that he has, since 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are, come to define: children’s stories.

Bumble-Ardy is a pig, raised by an aunt, who is built like a house and who lives in a house that looks like a ruin. This aunt is doing her best with poor Bumble, a child who was orphaned when his parents “gorged and gained weight. / And got ate.” That tragic turn of events may have been for the best, as Bumble’s lousy parents never once got around to throwing the boy a birthday party (his birthday is June 10, the same as Sendak’s). So, on his ninth birthday, Bumble secretly invites over terrifying hordes of local swine, who arrive in disguise for a bacchanalia of “birthday cake and brine.” The party ends in hoggish chaos, in tears and threats of slaughter—and, finally, with a measure of forgiveness.

Why the decision to go with a pig? Why not a hedgehog?

I’ve always loved pigs: the shape of them, the look of them, and the fact that they are so intelligent. I think I like them more than I like little human boys. The prospect of drawing pigs was something I could look forward to, and I needed something to look forward to. This project was done under very difficult circumstances. Somebody very important to me was dying painfully, horribly, slowly, and it leaves you questioning everything.

More here.

Gregory Kornbluh in The Believer:

Even before actually meeting Duncan, I’d been told about his palindromes. It was early 2009, and I’d just taken a job with Harvard University Press. When I first heard him described as a “master palindromist,” I imagined, briefly, some sort of governing body with an esoteric ranking structure, doling out titles like “grandmaster” in chess. But no. For Duncan the title is self-proclaimed. “When I say I’m a master palindromist, there are two answers for what that means,” he explained. “One is that it means, when it comes to palindrome-writing, I know what I’m doing. The other, slightly longer, slightly more combative answer is that it means you shouldn’t confuse me with any of those garden-variety, ‘Madam I’m Adam’ hacks who couldn’t paint my shadow.” His speech often has a theatrical quality, slowed and emphasized toward the ends of sentences. You learn fairly quickly that he has a tendency to repeat himself. Not the careless repetition of telling you the same thing twice, but the practiced, verbatim repetition of entire anecdotes. And so, when he explains what it means to be a “master palindromist,” and it’s the only time that I see his hackles raised, I can tell that it’s a practiced response, a performed aggravation at the nerve of those who doubt. “I mean, I don’t know what to say. I gave myself the title ‘master palindromist,’ but I’m the one inventing the terminology, and making the rules, so I might as well be giving out titles as well.”

More here.

Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

Collective violence, extending from riots to warfare, presents a challenge to our ordinary understanding of free will. Actions that would rarely be taken by an individual on their own seem to be embraced when supported by a larger group. This can occur in societies ranging from the communist regime of Soviet Russia to the capitalist free market of modern day England. Given this commonality, perhaps the collective violence of a riot can be best understood as a biological event in which evolved cognitive responses encounter a unique environmental threat. And if that is the case, do individuals caught up in such incidents have any choice in the matter?

More here.