As the Minute Clicks
Jim Culleny

A new night
(as they always are)
and cool —unlike June
in Jersey when I was green
but June anyway

anyway it comes
it’s June
it’s June
regardless of you

June then
June now
in mid-late evening
8:30 by the clock
—the night dark
almost

in the window the sky
glows grey behind
silhouettes of trees

slate-skin clouds
which if seen from a jet
would billow bright
in the light of the torch
that makes us tick

while underneath on
cloud-muffled earth what
makes us tick is a phantom
flame we imagine

we imagine it hints it’s here
right now in June

Brandenburg Concertos
from the other room

fountain water falling
nearby from a stone frog’s lips

cat darting
car passing

makes you wonder how
you’re doing as the minute
clicks

Amelia Vega dancing at Bar Cardamomo, Madrid. All photos courtesy of Randolyn Zinn.

Randolyn Zinn

The way she moves

her slender waist

pleases the eyes

and the soul.

— Abu l-Hajjaj ibn ‘Utba, 13th c., Sevilla

You go scattering,

as you walk,

roses and lilies.

— traditional flamenco Alegrias lyric

In Spain earlier this year, researching a collection of poems I am writing, it occurred to me that my quest to find flamenco puro might be as romantically ill conceived as clambering through the back woods of the Southern United States in search of the blues. A fool’s errand, because both flamenco and the blues share at least one common fate — professional integration into their respective cultures.

Before my trip, I had visions of coming upon a late night impromptu scene of music and dance in some smoky room in an Andalucían town, aficionados yelling their appreciative ¡olés! (the first syllable is pronounced ah for reasons I’ll get into later). In fact, I did stay up late watching all manner of flamenco performances in very smoky rooms to learn that the art has become somewhat of a career path, enjoying renewed interest today from artists and audiences not necessarily born in the Andalucían province of its ancestral beginnings. And the pure flamenco I had fantasized about finding proved elusive.

In the Beginning, Complexity Not Simplicity

Even though the word “flamenco” elicits a variety of images and sounds, perhaps cliché — dark-eyed women in long ruffled dresses clicking castanets and drilling the floor with rapid heelwork, a man hunched over his guitar plying its strings in the plaintive voicings of the ancient Phrygian scale — the art bears closer scrutiny. Born of strife between Christian, Jew, Gypsy and Muslim, whose ancient shared anguish is mirrored by the challenges of our own era, flamenco is one of the world’s first multi-cultural art forms.

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by Michael Blim

The bus Thursday night was late. I slumped back onto the bench as the four-hour trip to New York had just gotten longer. As I settled in, I noticed a young kid waiting too. He had a Sesame Street character sticking out of his pink backpack, and he wore pink tennis and a rainbow-colored belt. On the back pocket of his jeans was written “God loves gays.” He might have been eighteen.

Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it, I thought. There’s still a very good chance you’ll get to New York in one piece. We’re almost normal now.

Four and a half hours later, the bus came bounding off the Williamsburg Bridge into Chinatown. It was one o’clock by the time I transferred at West 4^th Street. The C train was no longer running, the A train was stopping at Jay Street, and lovely shuttle buses were offered from thereon. As I boarded the train to Brooklyn, a bunch of drunken young revelers hopped on. They were a mess of plastered and tinted hair, and a few were prettily painted. Kids of several hues once more with rainbows, and these too were all right with the world.

Finally the shock of recognition hit: the Stonewall 40^th Anniversary was coming up Monday, and New York’s big Pride parade was on Sunday.

I had been oblivious. On the long bus ride, I had been reading the U.S. Justice Department’s June 11 brief supporting dismissal of a suit challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The motion to dismiss will be held this upcoming August 3.

I had been steaming. By the time the A train reached Brooklyn, it was as if I had the taste of Mexican mole negro, the bitter chocolate sauce, in my mouth. Yes, we were free, to which the rainbow kids could testify. But we had not secured our rights. And American society and we had fallen far short of liberation.

The Justice Department brief says it all. The Obama Justice Department brief says it all. I add the adjective “Obama” because even though Andrew Sullivan has noted that the brief’s author W. Scott Simpson is a Bush appointee and part of a trial team that defended the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, Tony West, the Obama-appointed Assistant Attorney General, signed off on the brief. No one has yet called it a mistake.

The brief seeks dismissal of a suit by Andrew Smelt and Christopher Hammer alleging that their constitutional rights are violated by the provisions of DOMA that established for the first time in American history that marriage in the federal system of laws consists of a union between a man and a woman.

The brief is an exercise in deceit and disingenuousness. DOMA merely “codifies” tradition, Justice argues, even if the republic had survived without a federal definition of marriage for over 200 years, and even though marriage is a state and not a federal matter. DOMA, Justice avers, doesn’t prohibit same-sex couples from marrying: it just prevents same sex couples from any claim to benefits based on marriage, and it protects other states from having to provide benefits to same sex marriage partners who leave same sex marriage states and move to states without same-sex marriage.

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By Namit Arora

(A slightly modified version of this article appeared in Philosophy Now, Nov 2011. Here is the PDF.)

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life: how much we subconsciously acquire and call upon to get through life; how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? Can a machine become socially and emotionally intelligent like us without viscerally knowing infatuation, joy, loss, suffering, the fear of death and disease? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ this, and reproduce intelligence in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? Recently, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

Today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s. But despite the big advances in computing, AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have “expert” systems that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and algorithmically learn to adapt their outputs. Examples include chess software, search engines, speech recognition, industrial and service robots, and traffic and weather forecasting systems. Machines have done well with a great many tasks that we ourselves can, or already do, pursue algorithmically—including many yet unbeknown to us—as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, restacking books in a library, navigating our car in a city, or landing a plane. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines—such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a brain-dead state? Is there any hope for it? Let’s take a closer look.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

Akbar Shah had come to meet us. I can still see him, his untucked shirt fluttering in the wind, long arms strung at his sides, careful words, he needed this job. My main work is the rough-cut stone, he said, like you have all over the facade. But I can also do tiling. I'll manage the labor but the blade will be yours. Gurinder and I couldn't see that we had any other go anyways. The last contractor had been a disaster, requiring minute instruction but then sulking on being told what to do. He'd taken his men and tools off the job finally, and sent one of his other malik-s over to us to try and get his account settled. We told Akbar he was on the job and that yes, the blades were ours. Was he squinting in the sun, or did his eyes betray Chengez Khan and Timurlane as ancestors? He said he was from Poonch, one of the most northern districts in Kashmir, fatefully falling on this side of the Line of Control. His bearing and manner seemed sincere, but his eyes danced and he seemed always to be restraining his mustache from breaking out into a sly grin. What a name he has, said Gurinder to me later, and we'd had to laugh.

We'd already been at this, what, three months? There were times it seemed like the biggest sculpture studio imaginable, but also days when wood would be fighting masonry, the electricity would fail, and then it would rain on the pieces of wood just polished and left to glint in the sun. Every other morning, it seemed, a whole side of my brain would cave in at these mundane, minute, coordinations that made up my business at Empire Estate, where I was renovating — gut-rehabbing — two adjacent row houses. This is why I'd hired Gurinder at the outset, a civil engineer who'd know how to manage all this stuff, and he gamely played the man of action, while I turned back to my Heidegger. I remember him once pulling live wires and closing them with his own hands in light rain, which requires the foolish courage of youth as well as insistent engineering will: this circuit will close, the damn lights will come on.

Akbar Shah was here to teach himself stone-tiling on our dime, but even he didn't pretend to know anything about grinding or polishing the stone he laid. For that we hired Kabir Shah and his brothers and nephews from Bihar. Channa Ram, the head-carpenter was from Punjab, but the rest of his team was also from Bihar. Banwari Lal, the painter-polisher was from Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Every time stone abutted wood, wall met floor, and Bihar met Kashmir, Gurinder and I would be called upon to mediate and dispense Solomonic wisdom, to get the teams back to work and this project back on track.

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Edward B. Rackley

Unlike in Latin America, where liberation theology was once an influential force, Christians in Africa rarely confront political oppression. On the surface, African Christian institutions claim not to meddle in affairs of the State. These days, ‘conversion of the heathens’ is passé, as Christianity is now a widespread and entrenched belief system. Churches of all denominations offer manifold development initiatives in education, health and agriculture. In many countries where the State has limited reach into rural areas, churches represent the sole link to the outside world for isolated communities.

But it’s only half the story to say that African Christian institutions are above political interests and the establishment of a modern State. Throughout colonial occupation, the Church completed the political and economic triangle that comprised the massive social engineering project of colonialism. Here was a hearts and minds program that worked—colonial control encapsulated Maslow’s entire hierarchy of needs. From material conditions, social space and into the spiritual realm, colonialism repackaged the indigenous African experience and replaced each dimension with a foreign substitute. Little has changed since independence: neither the school curricula nor the political dispensations (despite elections, ‘Big Men’ reign in a colonial style). Formerly vibrant traditional belief systems are now subaltern and syncretistic, fusing in curious ways with imported Christian ideas.

Where legitimate grievance has erupted in armed conflict, as in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan, the Church has been neither neutral nor salutary. In Rwanda and Congo, the Church actively fomented ethnic divisions (Hutu/Tutsi, Hema/Lendu), ultimately facilitating ethnic cleansing campaigns in both countries. During Southern Sudan’s famines in the 1990s, the Church leveraged its food distributions to starving animist populations against Bible study and conversion.

The failure of Congo’s recently elected officials to improve the suffering and destitution across the country aggravates an already desperate, vulnerable mindset. No surprise then that Congo is a breeding ground for rival evangelical Christian sects, many with massive US support, whose pastors implore their congregations to submit to divine providence. God, not human agency, will resolve Congo’s political morass. The sleep of reason is a powerful drug, and a convenient soporific to distract attention from Congo’s kleptocratic institutions. Political elites welcome the evangelical fervor—as long as pastors keep the population’s gaze focused on the heavens above. Liberation theology would never last a day here, because its proponents would find themselves muzzled in no time. Such is the story of Bundu Dia Kongo, an Afrocentric religiou s movement that dared to challenge State corruption and ineptitude.

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Justin E. H. Smith

A few nights ago I hosted a reception for an old friend, a respected scholar and most recently the author of Citation Techniques in Duns Scotus. We were celebrating the sale of the 100th copy of his book.

Now ordinarily this sort of event is attended by only the dustiest of academics, so you can easily imagine my surprise when a former colleague of mine –a newly minted global-justice theorist who left academic philosophy in order, as she put it, to 'work the Davos circuit'– showed up accompanied by the prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

The two of them had just come from the opening session of the ‘Mini Davos’ forum, which this year my adoptive city had the honor of hosting. My former colleague (let us call her ‘Juliette’) had just led a session on ‘The Universal Right to Clean Water’, in which her performance was judged by Stephen Harper, Desmond Tutu, and Bono alike to be of ‘Oscar calibre’.
“Water,” exclaimed Bill Gates, “now there's something people can get excited about.”
“She's gonna take this act all the way to Switzerland,” Bill Clinton himself was heard to say.

I had already known Friedman to be a small and twitchy man, and was now able to confirm that this is at best a mild understatement. Yet almost immediately I sensed that there was something unusual, that this man, however awkward he may ordinarily be, was at this very moment in a tremendous amount of discomfort.
“It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Friedman,” I said smoothly and, I hoped, with just the right amount of ambiguous sarcasm. “I'm a big fan of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It really captured the moment. When I read it I was like: forget about On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, it's Friedman who's really got his finger on the pulse.”
“Thanks,” Friedman groaned. “Call me Tom.”

This was all he managed to say, after which he just kept standing there, sweating and wincing. I imagined Juliette might be able to bring him back to life if I were to disappear, so I excused myself and went to mingle among the other guests. Things were proceeding as usual. Reginald, it seems, had read Gunther’s new book, Kenelm Digby’s Qualitative Corpuscularianism. The babysitter-deprived and therefore absent Gunther, Reginald reported to the crowd’s amusement and surprise, had based his study almost entirely upon The Nature of Bodies of 1644 while completely ignoring the Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants of 1661.

Thirty minutes in or so, when I simply could not stand to see my most distinguished guest suffering anymore, and when conversation with the others had weakened from Digby to dental insurance to daycare, I leaned in and, in a whispered tone, asked Juliette what was wrong. She knew the man better than I did, after all, and I had long known her to be what Nietzsche would call a penetrating 'psychologist'. Was she ever! Thomas Friedman, Juliette whispered to me discreetly in the elegant Ciceronian Latin she still retained from her years as a scholar of Imperial Stoicism, was in the throes of a fluxus ventris.

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This is the first in a planned series of articles with the frontispiece title, “Psychological Science:”. To give you an idea of other topics that may develop, here are a few working titles. “Sigmund Freud, a Personal and Scientific Coward”, “Classical Inference, Bad. Bayesian Inference, Good”, and “Fighting Over Combat Related PTSD”. These will not follow in succession, necessarily. Rather, I will intersperse them with other articles under the lead title of, “My Life As a Crime Fighter:”, at least one more on “My Father: A Veteran's Story”, and other creations as the Muses will inspire. Finally, so that the question doesn't have to be asked, I want to establish my blog creds so I might have a shot at a nomination for next year's “The Quark”, a prize for science writing awarded by 3QuarksDaily.com.. My goal is to be nominated by someone other than myself.

In summary

Psychological Test Theory is no such thing. It is a tautology, not a theory. *

* For those who are interested, the remainder of this article is elaboration.

Modern Psychological Test Theory

Modern Psychological Test Theory (PTT) comes in two flavors: Classical Test Theory (CTT), and Item Response Theory (IRT). They are not competing views of psychological assessment, rather, they are complementary. CTT deals with the total test score, and IRT focuses on the individual items that make up the total test score. CTT looks at your total Algebra test score of 81. IRT studies the response choices for the item. For example,

Given the equation, x + 4 = 7, solve for x.

a) x = 11

b) x = 3

c) x = 0

d) x = 1

CTT focuses on average test scores and how they vary across people and groups. IRT wants to know about item difficulty, item discrimination, and probability of guessing. Graduate students in psychological research and psychometrics regard CTT as old hat, and IRT as really cool stuff. Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, NJ makes millions on both, but the real cash cow is IRT.

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by Bryant Urstadt

This is a story about what happened when an artist met a Ponzi scheme. The name of the artist is Billie Mintz, and he is a filmmaker in Toronto. His money disappeared on a January Monday in 2008. Mintz had just sat down to check his email. Monday was normally the day he got his statements from RazorFX, a foreign currency management firm operating out of Northport, New York, on Long Island. On the recommendation of a friend, Mintz had invested his life savings, which was about $20,000.

He loved getting his Monday statements. They detailed the trades his manager, Bradley Eisner, had made, and they were usually up, not by a lot, but maybe by one percent. It was a number not so outlandish as to be unbelievable, but exciting enough to tell your friends about, and it made Mintz feel that he had done something smart and sensible. At that rate, Mintz’s $20,000 would turn into $33,000 in a year.

No statement, however, arrived, and Mintz immediately knew something was wrong. Not long after, a Google search confirmed the worst. Eisner and his partner Michael MacCaull had been arrested in Long Island that morning. They had been running a Ponzi scheme, and had stolen more than $100 million. Mintz was stunned, not only by the loss of the money, but by the questions it suddenly raised about himself, chief among them the realization that he might have just become that guy who loses his life’s savings in a Ponzi scheme.

And, no, it had nothing to do with that Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff wouldn’t have tipped Mintz at the golf club, much less let him into his select circle of gullible millionaires. Mintz had fallen victim to one of the hundreds of other Ponzi schemes that swept the country in the easy credit years.

Mintz didn’t stay seated in shock for long. Where many might have seen pure loss, a shame to be covered up, and a mistake to forget, Mintz saw an opportunity to learn about issues of the human condition, from trust to kindness to greed. “I saw this as a chance to learn something about being human,” he says. “About who we are.”

Mintz is an upbeat guy, 35, who describes his life’s work as making movies that help foster positive change. He is tall, attractive in a slightly comic way, with bushy hair and a goatee, and able to see the humor in just about anything. So, yes, he had lost his life savings, but he had found his next subject for a film. It would be called, “The Ponzi Scheme” and it would be part tragedy and part comedy.

In the next months, he would undertake an odyssey into the heart of the scheme that took his life savings. He would criss-cross the continent, meet victims in Phoenix, stake out accomplices in Vancouver, and, finally, disguised as a pizza delivery man, confront the man who had stolen his money.

“I started out a filmmaker,” says Mintz, “and I ended up a vigilante.”

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by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time.

Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast.

In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles upon piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons.

I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Would she, the question was put to her discreetly, add a small personnel issue to her tasks on this particular field visit? Could she perhaps get a reality check on McMullen? In response, she had raised an eyebrow, conveying that she was intrigued by the request but non committal to an affirmative. It had been about Stan. Stanley McMullen. The Stanley McMullen. Legend extraordinaire in these corridors this side of the Potomac and that side of the Potahar Plateau. Could she look in on Stan and find out what was going on? Might she, probe into why there had been the sudden change of heart? She had agreed at once with a surge of patriotism and curiosity. And of course, because saying no to a superior, was never a good idea or even an option. However, being “seasoned” as was the parlance—she knew that it was always a good idea, to point out how she was over worked and would have to go out of her way to fit in this extra line item on her mission statement, this was after all adding on to her already demanding work agenda and the extra work load, given all the existing stress, would come at a huge cost to herself and her work life balance. This she duly communicated and it was as such noted. Perhaps on her way back she could consider a stop over in Rome or the Dalmatian coast or Istanbul, up to her—on the house so to speak, A little R & R for being the team player and the trooper that she was.

Now here she was in an over air conditioned coffee shop with large picture windows, clay tiled floors and elegant ceiling fans, sitting across from Stan who was going on about the view surrounding them:

Soft purple haze against those hills—like someone took a paint brush and dabbed it in–just look at it. I can never remember the name of those trees—

Jacaranda. Quite the artistic sentiment there, Stan.

Yeah! I'm dabbling in water colors—got someone coming in to give me lessons—a pretty famous guy, a celebrity around here. In the art circles. Those are the perks! You get yourself coaches and tutors who are Olympians or internationally acclaimed just because well the dollar goes the distance here. It really is value for money. Just look at those beautiful purple jacaranda blossoms out there-against the backdrop of those hills—amethyst and emerald. What a sight huh? Love it! Love it! What a location! Should've named this place Cafe Amethyst and Emerald. Damn! Did you hear the thunder last night—the lightning—the storm rolling in over the Margalla hills? Must've been two in the morning—spectacular. Nothing beats that.

He laughed—ah yes—the 70 miles from Islamabad hullaballoo—How the idea has grown! It almost makes me blush. Is it three million people we've managed to make homeless and hungry because of our campaign of screaming that Pakistan was a mortal threat to the world? Threatening them, that if they didn't do something about it, we would! Holbrooke, Clinton, Obama, Petraeus, Mullen! What a team! And boy, if they didn't hate us before—they sure do now! And you're here to show our deep humanitarian concern and to figure out how to feed them and cloth them are you? Don't look at me that way!

Is this remorse, I'm hearing from you? Guilt? Stan, come, come, is this contrition I detect writ across your face? Is that the reason for the request for early retirement?

Just told you—it's time to turn the page—do something different. It wasn't a request, by the way, it was a notification of retirement. It's time for me to notice stuff like the thunder and lightning and call it by its name: a storm. Just that: a storm. Nature's noise and drama. Count that as one of the reasons why I'm going to stay. I love the seasons here.

Love for the seasons? Uh huh.

Do you think the English took to talking so much about the weather after feeling an unbearable burden of unspeakable imperial distortions?

No. They have weather. They talk about it. I suspect they did it before they took to the high seas and took over the planet.

Nah! I suspect I'm right. They used weather to fill in the awkward pauses between why the news of a massacre in some shit hole in Africa or South Asia matched Daddy's sudden wealth in said shit hole. But, you can be funny, Eileen. I liked that about you. I liked that a lot. And just for old time's sake, you know—I'll share my latest secret with you—

Really! A secret! Do tell. I'm always up for a good secret divulged! And one from you Stanley should be just the thing.

Well no, not quite in the magnitude you might be expecting dear girl sorry to disappoint. It is not quite the geo-political seismological nature you might be expecting but rather agronomical in nature. You see I'm going to grow a hybrid new strain of coffee around here something between an Arabica and a Robusta variety. I think we've got the climate here—the high altitude—just enough rain and shine. I'm looking into it.

Uh huh. Coffee. You're going to grow it, here? And you have the know-how by surfing the internet?

Yup. In fact I was doing that before you walked in with your pretty face and got me all distracted again. That's my new project! The Pothar plateau coffee bean! I've been reading up on the internet about it—That is, when I'm not reading up on the news that we've been churning out which the free press of the free world is happily lapping up. Our stuff, is all the rage now: all our imagined goblins and monsters who threaten America—never mind that they are in reality bare foot, unwashed, frightened and hungry.

Coffee to sworn and steady tea drinkers? Your brief stint in Bogota surfacing suddenly?

I see you're not falling for the bait. Not the way you used to anyway. I can see I'm going to have to try harder. Fine.

I'm ignoring your attempts to try to provoke me Stan. So you've put down your stakes here? Is that final or are you sulking?

Yes.

Yes, what?

Yes, ma'am?

No! Which is it—final or making a point?

Yes—it's final. I'm here till they bury me in Murree next to my old, great-grand-uncle Colonel McMullen himself.

And till then it's this coffee thing?

Yup. It's time to change their tastes around here—Change of empire change of beverage of choice for the natives. That's what I think. Hey maybe —Come to think of it I'll look into buying some of the slopes in Swat valley they may be going cheap, now that we've got our minions clearing out the land for us. I could grow coffee there. Maybe—I'll come along with you when you head out for your humanitarian visit tomorrow? Have a look see myself, do a little reccy for real estate. Root around for property. What d'ya say? Yes?

No. So you're calling it quits?

You bet. After buying as many rugs as I possibly could lay out, fold, roll up, stack, give away—and after becoming an expert in kilims—and tribal carpets—and after filing reports, networking —showing around the umpteenth visiting Stateside big wig on his fact finding mission—After making up stories, to fit their needs, I should say our needs and strong arming the big muckimucks around here—after all that and then some—well then—it came time to go.

To do what? To where?

Just told ya. This is the place I've helped make into what it is—this is the place that I'm someone in. I count here, I've grown accustom to it and it to me. I've been here, now how long?

Twenty nine years—

Exactly! Give or take the mismatch in the Andes. Yeah. Wow. That long huh? Half of this country's existence almost: as Pakistan. I've gotten pretty used to people asking me to save them. Please Mr. Stanley save us! Getting that from pretty important people is heady stuff, let me tell you—Generals—Presidents—Prime Ministers! Well I felt responsible. Heck, I still do! Yeah it gives me a high—a buzz a real upper in the morning. It's my daily fix. And I decided to stay.

I know what you mean.

Fact finding missions—god those are the worst—aren't they? Ridiculous—comedy if they weren't so dangerous. Everything one of those fact finders sees becomes a defining fact—every person he meets becomes an important resource person, no matter who, no matter how briefly met, no matter how stupid, nope that person becomes important, providing important data points—to be magnified and extrapolated to whole populations—everything noticed no matter how trivial becomes a feature of the country—They'll sit in their bullet proof cars—yammering on about their gardens in DC, their hotel rooms, the airport business and first class lounges and their upgrades—until they are interrupted by “another fact” which catches their attention as it flashes by along the roadside— which they file away immediately to generalize and extrapolate onto the whole country in their fact finding report. Spending exactly forty-eight hours in bleary jetlag in three spots close to Islamabad usually all three in luxury hotels and perhaps another as a photo op with the natives—makes them an expert on the country.

Now don't be so harsh. You've been quite the fact maker yourself.

Yes.

And now these new facts about yourself…..

Who would have thought that this dead town would grow on me? Look at them those hills—aren't they the loveliest sight. The jacaranda in bloom all purple on Ataturk avenue—against those emerald green hills—

Yes, we've established that Stan. Purple, green, amethyst, emerald, ruby, diamond. They are lovely, but not enough reason to stay.

Cricket in the parks—-In the early mornings –a walk—I go right up the hill nearest to my house—mist—wild monkeys—parrots—its bliss. And late at night—like it was last night — the rain comes in to keep me company with thunder and lightning over the hills—it is spectacular. I love it here. The view. For a guy like me, who's spent his life observing—a view is important, you know. You can say “I've grown accustomed to her face”.

Her?

Islamabad. Pakistan. Margalla Hills.

So I am to conclude that the hills have conspired to keep you here? I think you've lost the plot.

Believe and think what you will, Eileen. It's all plausible, if I say so isn't it? It used to be that way. The hills have conspired? Yes! Conspiracies—Well this is the town for them. And nothing like a café to hear them or hatch them don't you agree? Three just this week I've overheard that will be doing the rounds if they aren't already. You will hear them—Obama is the brainchild of Wolfowitz—then there's the one that Cheney killed Benazir—And of course Hoodbouy and Ahmed Rashid are working for the US Military—writing articles about the Taliban threat. Even though it is a non-existent Taliban threat.

She shrugged. The door opened and several women walked in. They stood chatting noisily, fussing about which table to sit at until a waiter ushered them to one.

It's a little morning coffee party—we arrange those here. Very popular with the housewives!

Ah! She said, as though searching amongst the group for another reason for Stan's decision. She twisted her body, and turned to take a sweeping glance at the group of women. None, not one of them, would fit Stan's taste for the very fit, young things.

He said: The late evenings are more stimulating. The clientele more erudite. If we made a list, we could fill this café with all the intellectual hoi polloi in this town—in this country—all of whom, by the way have been my willing story tellers—collaborators—willingly expanding on our myths—I call them our list of coffee drinkers—our plot makers. I throw them a sentence and they run with it. Very talented. Most remarkable.

She watched him wipe the surface of the marble topped round table between them–removing the traces of moisture left from the condensation of their tumblers of iced water.

A habit of erasing one's tracks. He said grinning at her.

She managed to smile back uncomfortable that the twist of her mouth felt more like an expression of pitiful contempt then one that played as affectionate indulgence.

As he turned to motion to the waiter behind the counter to come over and take her order, she noticed how Stan's hair had thinned-a bald patch had begun on his pate. And there was quite the beer bulge around the waist. He held the glass with an outstretched arm—his other arm thrown over the back of his chair—legs splayed—still the master of his domain. His fingers grasping the glass, too pale, almost reptilian she thought, pudgy. Had he always been this way–it had only been a few years since she had last seen him. Was lust's inevitable fate loathing? She couldn't remember what she had found so attractive, those many years ago in Islamabad. Must be power she thought. She was a visiting novice—brought in as a USAID consultant for a couple of weeks—and he was the political advisor at the Embassy. The inevitable cocktail party in the big lawn on a sultry summer evening. Just like in the movies—she in something flowing bought that day with a colleague at the bazaar—he in a linen suit. Now, a cafe owner, gone native, wearing a white kurta-shalwar, an image immaculate enough—with a two day bristle on his chin, but simply no contest to the dazzling spy master. Back then she had talked about conspiracies—he had made fun of her. She had sipped on some third rate white wine and he had tossed back whiskey shots one after the next steadily through the evening. Now she said macchiato and he said double espresso. He spoke to the waiter in Urdu. The waiter nodded and moved away.

Nice, she said, jerking her head in the direction of the surroundings around her: You've done a great job going native. A company of your own. No pun intended! A coffee shop, exactly what Islamabad needed, Stan. Why call it The Little Margalla Cafe. Why not Coffee is Stan—or Café Stan? Or apostrophe ‘stan's Cafe?

Very funny. And not to mention that one—stan–is an over-used pun —no jab left in it any more.

Or the Little Coffee Company? Or The Red Zone. You should've stayed within the secure diplomatic zone—-The Green Zone in Baghdad, the Red Zone here, what's the color in Kabul? I mean you have seen the graffiti across the street I presume? It's hard to miss!

You mean the “Go America Go!?”

Yup.

Ah shucks I'm a dumb American I thought they were cheering me on! That's what Holbrooke seems to think! Someone needs to clue in the protesters— —Go means: Yes! OK! The Red Zone—now that has a certain kick to it. If they'd zoned it as amethyst or emerald then I would have gone for it! No, I'm sold on calling my little sanctuary Little Margalla Café. A place in which to be transformed. I sell conversation, ideas injected with caffeine.

Ah yes—staying within your competencies. How should I put it, for transformative information.

And I import coffee—that was one of the perks of my position—I managed to wrangle a little import license. And I'm looking into buying a little land in the hills—like I said, new project. I'm going to try my hand at a little coffee growing. The Generals were quite taken with the idea that I wanted to stay back. Touched —really. They wanted to gift me a piece of property—for my services rendered here. A plot in Chuk Shezad—prime land around here is all called Chuk-this and Chuk-that in this lovely little vipers' nest called Islamabad. Yeah, chuck the poor powerless bastards out of their ancestral villages to make way for villas is more like it! At least two dozen villages leveled, bulldozed to make way for these orderly pretty neighborhoods of gentility—and the Generals so called farm houses and ranch houses. But I resisted giving in to their generosity. Then the hills knocked some sense into me. I wanted to stay. So I insisted on paying for my plot. I asked them to set a price tag and they did.

The offer of land by the Generals at a throw away price was too good to pass up?

At market rate, Eileen, top dollar, market dictates.

Yes. As you know the Internal Corruption Investigation Unit –the ICIU is looking into your little purchase.

Well good for them. Eye See I You. How droll! They'll find nothing. All the papers are in order. Fair and square. They sold, I bought. Market economy, baby. These hills yes these hills are a sight of heaven itself aren't they with that incredible clear sky? Personally give me the view of the hills any day to a view of the sea. Others, including the Generals themselves of course choose to retire on the Mediterranean—Marbella —But not me! I'll take Margalla any day. And I have. So I said yes—give me a couple of acres—of destroyed ancestral homes, a hamlet and village. Ah come off it, don't look at me that way— what's the good of such strict standards, such high morals, Eileen? All you are left with is a list of regrets.

Mmmm.

Every man has a dream and mine is to switch the loyalties of the Pakistani palates to caffeine. I plan to sell them coffee, addict them to double espressos—three times a day all from my little Margalla café—on Ataturk avenue.

Well it's the choice you've made. But we haven't decided if you can. If we let you, then you can stay.

Let me? If I can? I have news for you, doll. I did! My choice.

Don't tell me Stan that you are so naïve. You choose? You choose nothing. It is decided for you pal—you only get to acquiesce. And the day you do not, then that's the day you will have chosen, and will, most definitely, my friend feel a bullet go through the base of your skull.

A reference to Benazir?

No. But it could apply,

I decided to open a coffee shop—at the foot of the foothills—

Sure, Stan. You decided. We haven't made up our mind yet, about your choice. We haven't decided, you see. And that's what matters.

The coffees arrived. She stirred the liquid in the tall glass. He rocked his cup back and forth on its saucer and contemplated her. You know the offer still stands. Come live with me. Retire here with me. Make this choice. You know you would enjoy it here.

At the Conspiracy café? What would I do? Eavesdrop on your customers and send memos out about possible threats?

Yup.

Hmmm.

I heard a great one the other day. Should have sent in a memo. Someone sitting right over here at that table was talking about having read somewhere that Paul Wolfowitz's wife Clare Selgin is an anthropologist specializing on Indonesia. Worked for USAID projects there?

Ex-wife. So?

So this guy says Obama's mom, she was an anthropologist specializing on Indonesia—lived there—worked on USAID projects—there and here, in Pakistan.

Uh-huh.

Paul Wolfowitz was an Ambassador there, to Indonesia—His wife and Ann Durham—Obama's mom well they were friends, had to be friends you see—like everyone in Islamabad always is? The Ambassador had at the very least barbeques for compatriots on fourth of July, and so on, and that, you see is when he met Ann's amazing and wonderful boy? So you see, as the story would have it, Paul discovered our young shining new talent!

Ahhh. Plausible. Makes perfect sense.

Doesn't it? I'm telling you, this is my perfect treasure trove, my perfect listening post.

I thought you set it up for hours of languid discussion on art and existentialism.

That too—But after I retired from let's call it the enterprise—and had decided to stay, since everyone knew I had gone native anyway, I decided to open this little café. I thought our sleepy little town in the shade of the lovely Margalla hills could use some espresso and latte. Too bad I can't dissuade the clientele from calling it expresso coffee. But really, this little café is for people like you visiting Islamabad—with too many time zones under their belt—in need of the real deal. And of course, conversations about the latest fiction and discussions on existentialism.

Existentialism. When you sent your final memo saying that you were retiring to set up a cafe in the hope of bringing intellectual discourse Parisian style with cafe charm to Islamabad—I sent out an email to everyone in the office with the subject line: Stan our man in Pakistan: Threatens Existentialism. Do you think I started something?

He laughed. So that's where that idea took off about an Existentialist threat. And we're bombing the hell out of ‘em now. Clearing the land so to speak for prosperity and our way of life! Someday we'll replace Tomahawk missiles, Black Hawks, Chinnoks, and Cherokee helicopters with names of other tribes that they will have destroyed—there will be the Achakzai fighter jet—the Dawoodkhel missile….the Yousafzai drone….

Ah c'mon Stan! Don't you get bored with your predictable outrage—considering that you contributed so much to it? You bore me.

Really? I didn't used to. I thought this was the feisty me that you found attractive. Besides I seem to remember your outrage. I thought it charming.

It's old now. Fifteen years ago—perhaps it was instructive then, now it's just old.

Instructive when you were reading my memos on the Taliban? And when you were a junior to me? Under me and come to think of it over me—most enjoyable back then. Thank you for your service!

Yes, then. Every which way. But now that's done and the game is on and you my friend are old. And so am I. And yes, I have been your boss for quite a while now—longer then I care to remember.

Hard to believe that my one liners about the threat of the Taliban—the threat of madrassas was turned into a strategy for invasion and occupation. Dear God, madrassas: Those negligible numbers of students and religious schools, completely inconsequential! But we didn't present them that way, did we?

You didn't present it that way, you mean. I seem to remember a rather clever one liner from you as a way of defending one of your obscure data points of the day—pandemics begin with a single sneeze. Yes—those not to be sneezed at data blipswere very useful. But it is what it is—if you write well, you create the facts on the ground. And sooner or later someone pulls out the wealth of information you've provided over the years and turns it into something meaningful. The art of brewing I guess. You picked the perfect retirement business. –Anymore conspiracy theories overheard?

Uh huh. They're trying to connect the dots–SARS cropped up just before the Iraq invasion–the Swine flu–just before the Swat valley operation. Keeping the world marinated in fear and therefore, malleable and unquestioning. But hell we don't want to depress everyone too much or have them out on the streets protesting, overturning–raging—

Don't worry about that! They're all too busy pouring their rage into Facebook and Twitter—it's only a cyber- virtual mob, a virtual outrage–not even that. We're safe.

And then there is the injecting of a little hope to keep their minds off of war, recessions and the arrests of innocent guys –so give them a Scottish plump spinster a little off in the head–who sings like an angel. Ah, something to make us all relate to—see the silver lining–feel that this is a just and good world! Everyone can be a star!

Now is that what people coming in here are talking about Stan? Or is that just Stan-speak.

It's the conversations I hear Eileen. And here's another one the guy who swam across the lake to Ang San Su Kyi's home— John Yettaw word around the latte tables is that he went there to warn her that she was going to be assassinated. He was an ex-military guy—what if he knew something about this —about how they killed Benazir? General Stanley McChrystal presided over the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. And now he's heading the show across the border.

Well that one, that rumor was started on our side—Seymour Hersh in search of another go at stardom. Anything else?

Yup–Asif Zardari helped General McChyrstal and got rewarded. He had his innocent child call her mother on the cellphone right after the speech to tell her that she was watching her live on TV in Dubai and to ask mama to wave to her. So then just as Benazir was leaving the grounds after the rally, safely tucked away in her SUV—ring–ring–“Mom–stick your head out of the car and wave to me!” The kid apparently has gone crazy. That's the talk in this cafe.

Uhuh. That's pretty sick.

Yup. Sick are us. Hey here's an idea. Don't scowl like that—I'm making a proposal! You could finally get on with it. Like you've always wanted to do. Here's your chance for getting more than just carpets on this trip. It's a bonanza out there. Go get a kid—a baby—get a dozen for Godssake if you want to. Let's go to the refugee camps tomorrow pick a few. I'd be happy to raise them with you. We could play Mom and Dad. Give some lucky kids a lucky break—The American dream. What do you say? We could be like the Negropontes. I heard he adopted four kids from Honduras.

Lovely! No.

Not buying that? Not interested in saving me? C'mon Eileen—save me. Okay. I'll let it percolate in your head. The idea may grow on you, it has happened before. I've managed to pollinate that fertile brain of yours before with my words.

Pollinate or pollute—poison?

A sudden burst of laughter from the party of women on the other side of the café made her turn to look at them again—chewing the inside of her lower lip as she surveyed the group with a calculating contemplative gaze. The women had grown in numbers—a dozen or so—milling around the buffet table near the far wall. An impression of expensive handbags; glamorous hair; stunning jewelry and yards of pretty, delicate colorful scarves over elegant tunics and pants.

She turned her attention back to Stan as he said: Pollinate! It's a beautiful concept—us using words to make a thousand flowers bloom!

She looked back again and her gaze focused on a slender figure who had her back to them—she must've just come in. A pale peach colored dupatta covered the length of her, undulating over the curves of her shoulder blades and hips, like a chaddar—There seemed to be altogether, too much perfume in the air, she thought.

God what a gaggling bunch they are—Stan continued—as she turned her attention back to him. Look at them those women over there–the wives of grade 21-22 officers, attacking the buffet. I mean they've come to a café but they're laying into the food.

Well you're serving it—why do you have a buffet in a café?

They wouldn't come otherwise!

Then don't complain! The customer knows best.

Just look at them—fat—corpulent, thunder thighs every last one of them, like great big pigs at a trough. Oh excuse my cultural insensitivity—cows.

Not all of them Stan.

They are the real problem in this country—if you want to save this country from the great big burden of its own rot and corruption it is not the mullahs or the military or the civil officers that you need to get rid of, its these wives of the bureaucrats with their endless demands and greed—bigger cars, bigger villas—more silk cloth to wrap their bulging bodies into. I say line ‘em up, every last ill tempered heaving bitch and shoot ‘em between those scowling cold eyes.

Really? Come now, that much resentment Stan? Too much expensive perfume in the air——Can we open a window? Air out your air-conditioned café?

Air it out, all you want, He said rising to his feet suddenly. I'm off and I'm staying put. Make of it all what you will Eileen.

Yes, thank you. I will.

(To be continued, maybe.)

By Shiko Behar

1.

A reminder, comrades: Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States of America. Since his Cairo address this simple fact seems to have been overlooked by some commentators who make their living off the Palestine/Israel matrix. Step back for a moment from his Cairo address to remember that despite his name, his parentage and his half-white color – by virtue of being the US president, all of Obama’s words and actions will by definition always be quintessentially “mainstream.”

When Obama’s Cairo address is read from this vantage-point – the only realistic vantage-point that currently exists (irrespective of whether one loves or hates this) – his address is a tour de force of words – and at the moment nothing more than words. Granted, Obama’s 6000 word text on numerous international issues contained many weaknesses, omissions, distortions, shortcomings, simplifications, dishonesties and asymmetries; yet can anyone retrieve a 6000-word text that addresses as many global themes and that is free of such weaknesses? It is more productive politically to test Obama’s text against the prevailing sociopolitical reality – rather than against a sociopolitical fantasy (as seems to have been done by some critical commentators).

2.

Obama’s address neither focused, nor should have focused, on the Palestine/Israel question alone; this is notwithstanding the undeniable global importance of this particular question for ongoing and future relationship between Euro-America, on the one hand, and majority-Muslim states and societies, on the other. For lack of both space and time, the remainder below centers solely on the Palestine/Israel section of Obama’s speech, and is a stream of unpolished reflections in the context of the upcoming Sunday – the day when, in response to Obama’s Cairo address, Benjamin Netanyahu – an intellectual dwarf compared to Obama – will voice his political vision at Bar Ilan University (curiously the university where the law student who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin was educated, socialized and politicized).

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By Siavash Habibi

President Barack Obama's recent speech in Cairo attracted a lot of attention. But an earlier, much shorter message he delivered to Iranians also deserves serious consideration. On March 20, 2009, Mr. Obama congratulated the Iranian people on the Persian New Year with a video address, less than four minutes in length, that rapidly spread on the internet. The gesture represented a new policy spirit toward Iran — a spirit of diplomacy that has been widely expected of him since his campaign days. The Nowruz speech represented the unclenching of the American fist and a congratulation of the New Year, but it also indicated a less obvious policy strategy.

During his campaign, Mr. Obama emphasized the “worthwhile” benefits of diplomacy. Thus, he contrasted himself against President Bush's more aggressive approach to foreign policy. Mr. Obama's Nowruz speech demonstrated follow-through on his campaign promise and showed consistency in his approach of using diplomacy first.

This was important, because Mr. Obama not only established some credibility at home and abroad, but he also completed some of the hard preparation for potentially more aggressive actions against Iran in the future. For if Iran rejects the President's diplomatic gestures, then the United States will have cleared the way for more violent measures, perhaps with the backing of international allies. Military actions will appear more legitimate when President Obama already explored his diplomatic options and proceeded only after they failed.

But this begs the question: Why would the Iranian leaders reject President Obama's gestures?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

First, a note about me.

I am an outsider in the country of my birth.

I am too happy, too trusting, too Canadian. I walk into a shop and expect the shopkeeper to smile. I expect bureaucrats to help me when I seek official documents, and when presented with an idea, I think “why not?” instead of “why?”

For a long time, I chalked this up to personality. I tend to be excessively optimistic at times, and although I always laugh that “I am educated enough to be cynical,” I am cynical when confronting the realm of ideas, but naïve to a fault when confronting the realm of man.

My Polish family and acquaintances have always told me that my behaviour and worldview were deeply rooted in Canada, that although I could speak the language and read the books, I was too foreign in my temperament to fit in in my native Warsaw. After a while, I came to believe this. After all, in some matters, Canada and Poland sit on the opposite ends of the same axis, with Canada’s broad open spaces, easy smiles and obsessive deference to the law contrasting starkly with Poland’s confining apartments, sulking functionaries and a citizenry that dislikes and distrusts the state.

Yet, sometime over the past five years, I came to discover that things are not always so black and white. I began to notice a dark and cynical current that runs through Canada’s continuing struggles with collective identity, and I began to rethink my view of Poland as a place where cynicism triumphs en masse.

The 1980s, the decade of Solidarność, was my first in this world.

I was born in 1981, a few months before martial law was declared, so for as long as I can remember, everything around me was always on an upward trajectory.

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by Olivia Scheck

When Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell began casting his follow up film, Shortbus, members of the gay dramarati flocked. Hoping to set himself apart from the crowd, Jonathan Caouette supplemented his headshot and resume with a gritty montage of dramatic clips, including a drag impersonation of his mother (performed when he was only fifteen, inspired by Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman) and naked footage of himself with boyfriend, David. While this unorthodox film reel did not land Caouette a role in Mitchell’s film, it did earn him several meetings with the director. “We both knew I wasn’t right for the part, but he kept calling me back to meet with him,” Caouette explained in a Q and A at Yale University in 2006. What caught Mitchell’s eye was Caouette’s unique style of editing – a whirlwind of picture and sound, oscillating between the serenity of suburban life and the cacophony of fucked up circumstances that underlie it. Moreover, Mitchell was amazed by the electronic archive that Caouette had compiled throughout his life – everything from B-horror films he made with friends at age 11 to super-8 footage of his delusional grandmother and old voicemail recordings. Unsure of what else to do with it, Mitchell began screening the reel obsessively to friends and colleagues.

Simultaneously, at his Brooklyn apartment, Caouette was busily collaging together recordings of his life to songs by Nick Drake. He was doing this at the prompting of friends who had seen the original montage and with the goal of submitting it to the MIX Film Festival for experimental films by gay directors. The hitch was that the deadline was only two weeks away, and his editing software was a copy of imovie that came with his computer. So, Caouette took leave from his night job as a doorman and embarked on a caffeine binge to compress his life and more than twenty years of footage into a feature film. It would end up taking only three and a half weeks.

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Odder Still
Jim Culleny
……………………..

As odd as it is that a moon comes up
behind the inelegant tree behind our house
over the dark mountain, grey-white
and silver-dollar like –a night eye
crying silver– it’s odder still to think
of a moon that never was
……………………

As odd as spring seems, fresh and green
as the crisp salad before the salmon fillet,
as odd as the salmon fillet itself seems,
pink upon my plate, it’s odder still
to think, no salmon, and spring
never was
……………………
As odd as I live and breathe this night air
cool as a cucumber into my lungs
with a vague taste of pine and
something else, maybe a wood fire
ablaze in a stove down the valley; as odd
as pine and burning wood seems, it’s
odder still to think otherwise, now,
standing upon two feet and good legs
and all the electricity I need to be
sparking, snapping, seeing
—that seems odder still to me

by Evert Cilliers

There is a specter haunting the planet. It is the specter of the failure of Western capitalism.

All that is solid — jobs, homes, retirement savings — melts into air. Our cock-a-hoop capitalism is staring into a pesky abyss which is either Lacan's mirror or the funky Weltschmerz of its own rectum.

Yet far away in communist China, capitalism is alive and well — maybe because China is not a democracy.

In Western democracies, capitalism is in crisis — maybe because capitalism is not democratic.

The fact is that capitalism is a feudal system, which therefore works well in a feudal society like China.

But in modern, highly evolved democracies, capitalism is a handicap.

Why? Democracy has evolved, but capitalism hasn't. It's essentially unchanged from its 18th century origins. Capitalism is so feudal, it's almost medieval. It requires a subservience from its minions that hints at slavery, serfdom, or peonage. It grants its captains of industry the freedom to lord it over everyone else like banana-republic dictators or command-economy Kremlin bosses. It booms and busts with the fervor of a yo-yo being yanked by a spastic on steroids. Every so often it poops itself like a toddler sans toilet training, and sits there bawling in its own excreta until the state steps in to clean its unruly bottom.

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One day back when I was living in Minneapolis, an ice-cream truck came trolling down our tree-lined street. Despite the dearth of children in the neighborhood, the squat beige van came not infrequently, usually tooting something innocuous like “Pop Goes the Weasel” to rally a small crowd. One blistering afternoon it started whistling a different song, no less bouncy but with a tad darker history. Without my wanting it to, the whose first verse played in my memory.

My roommates went bounding down the steps when they heard the tune. They saw the look on my face. “Didn’t you hear the ice cream truck?” they asked.

“Yeah. Didn’t you?”

“What did you mean?”

“Didn’t you recognize the song they were playing?” I hummed. Nothing.

The incident sort of fell out of my mind until a few weeks ago, when two consecutive buses came roaring down the street in front of my DC apartment. After months of construction the street looks a little like some of the harder-hit patches of Dresden after World War II, and there are plenty of metal plates and potholes to crash into. With the buses’ squeaky brakes and clattering mufflers they raised quite a racket. A whole string of car alarms went off in the buses’ wake, like windows exploding. It was a too familiar happening around here, and I was seething over the five-movement symphony-alarm from the grey minivan with the Maryland plates (again!)—when suddenly, beneath it, came rising up the same tinny ice-cream truck song from a decade earlier. No words, just electric synth sound.

“Dixie.”

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by David Schneider

If you're asked, “So, what are you reading these days?” do not under any circumstances reply The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unless, of course, you intend to frighten off acquaintances, old friends, petrified Republicans, pie-eyed Democrats, overstaying guests, job interviewers, potential lovers– heck, just about anyone. Trust me. In this age of Life, Inc., in that mumbled admission you instantly brand yourself: prolix, patrician, and pessimistic. (Yeah, names don't hurt me, but ouch.)

Look, blame Battlestar Galactica for my parade of pedantry. You might remember–– a while back I was thinking about that sci-fi epic as “Romans: Remixed,” so – as part of my new venture, Reading Books So You Don't Have To, Unlimited – I decided to check out the original track recorded by Gibbon. (Decline and Fall must have sounded pretty interesting when it premiered, in London, in 1776.)

I regret to report that, as a literary work of art, it has a few significant defects.

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H. G. Wells lobbied widely in the 1920's and 30's for something he called a “World Brain,” a continuously updated Global Encyclopedia containing the sum total of human knowledge. He described it with terms we might call “cybernetic” now, although Norbert Wiener wouldn't write a book with that name for more than a decade. Did Wells really predict the Internet? Not really. The enabling technology would have been unimaginable for him. But he was on the right track.

Wells was already a pretty damned good forecaster by that point. It's easy enough to check out his predictions for the 20th Century in an uncopyrighted (at least in the 1902 book called Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought For road travel, for example, he predicted use of the “motor truck,” the “motor carriage,” and the “motor omnibus.”

That's “tractor trailer,” “car,” and “bus” to you. From that he extrapolated a new kind of road that “will be very different from macadamized roads; they will be used only by soft-tired conveyances; the battering horseshoes, the perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will never wear them.” And from that he was able to predict that the United States would become the home of suburban sprawl.

He even saw Amazon.com coming … well, almost … together with a continued need for shopping centers. He wrote: “(F)or all such “shopping” as one cannot do by telephone or postcard (okay, okay – I said almost!), it will still be natural for the shops to be gathered together in some central place.” He went on:

Did you catch that? The guy predicted shopping malls, for crying out loud. In 1902! It wouldn't have been surprising if he had foreseen the Yogurt Hut and Urban Outfitters while he was at it. He didn't do as well at global issues. He predicted a disastrous conflict that would eliminate the ruling oligarchies of the 20th Century, replacing them with the more enlightened intellectual meritocracy of a “New Republic.”

So he got a Big Question wrong. But how about those shopping malls? And he predicted dishwashing liquids, too. (I'm not making that up.)

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