P D Smith

Reden nur dort möglich ist, wo man lügen will.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self – a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

It brings to mind Kafka’s story “In the Penal Settlement” with its glass punishment machine and its teeth-like rows of gleaming needles. The offender is strapped into this sadistic device and the laws he has broken are slowly and painfully incised into his skin. The operator praises its redemptive effects on the criminal: “how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.” [1] After twelve hours of agony and of learning the meaning of the law through his skin, the coup de grâce is administered to the prisoner and the emblazoned body dumped in a ditch. “Like a dog,” as Josef K. says at the end of The Trial.

It is one of Kafka’s most grotesque stories, one that swings sickeningly between cruelty and humanity. As ever with Kafka, paradox and ambiguity are fundamental. I remember how, as a student, some of my friends were utterly repulsed by this story, unable to see past the horrific details to the chilling vision of human strangeness beneath. As I read it again today I am reassured to find it has lost none of its disturbing intensity. I can’t say that it is my favourite Kafka story, although it is uniquely Kafkaesque, to invoke that tired old cliché.

“The Judgement”, “Metamorphosis”, “A Country Doctor” – all wonderfully strange stories that share the sense of being caught up in a nightmare, where normal expectations are shattered and nothing seems to make sense any more. Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Kafka has been in the news recently. His friend and executor, Max Brod, died in 1968, leaving a suitcase of Kafka’s writings to his former secretary and lover, Esther Hoffe. Ever since then she has guarded it jealously in her Tel Aviv flat. The conditions were far from ideal. Warnings that the documents might be damaged by damp went unheeded. Until two years ago she shared her flat with a menagerie of cats and dogs. Then her neighbours finally complained about the stench and they were removed by health inspectors. Now, at the age of 101, Hoffe has died, leaving the Kafka cache to her septuagenarian daughters.

Among the papers are Brod’s diaries (sold to a German publisher for a five-figure sum in the 1980s but as yet undelivered), letters by Kafka as well as his travel journal, postcards, sketches and some of his personal belongings. A decade ago Hoffe sold Brod’s manuscript of The Trial for £1 million at auction. How much the remaining documents are worth can only be guessed. But obviously this is a gold mine for Kafka scholars. Josef Cermak, author of several studies of the Czech-Jewish author, told the Guardian: “There are so many mistruths which have been written about Kafka. For academic purposes it is crucial that we get to see what the unpredictable Miss Hoffe has kept from us for so long.” [2]

I’m as intrigued as everyone else by what the Kafka suitcase contains. Indeed its history has something delightfully Kafkaesque about it. I’m sure countless TV producers have spotted this and are at this very minute flocking to Tel Aviv to make their documentaries. (Part of me hopes that when they open the case, no doubt on live TV, all it contains are a few startled cockroaches.)

The private lives of famous writers and scientists are fascinating. Reading Einstein’s correspondence gives you an astonishingly detailed picture of the man behind relativity. And anyone can do it now thanks to the Princeton University Press’s superb edition of his Collected Papers. Of course, you don’t need to read Einstein’s letters to Mileva (his “sweet little witch”, as he described her in 1901) to understand relativity, although they do place the science in a wonderfully human context. But people will read whatever the Kafka cache contains looking for clues that might explain his fiction.

And why not indeed? Literature, I hear you say, is different from science. It’s subjective and personal, for a start. Sure, but it’s also a public activity in the sense that most of Kafka’s writing was meant to be read by other people. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”. [3]

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. [4] Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka’s life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).” [5]

Hawes spent ten years writing a Ph.D. on Kafka. Now he is on a mission to deconstruct the “hagiographic myth” surrounding the Prague author in order to expose the real Kafka. His works are “wonderful black comedies written by a man soaked in the writings of his predecessors and of his own day”. Indeed, Max Brod provides some evidence of this comedic dimension to Kafka’s works. He recalled Kafka reading aloud from The Trial. At times, he said, Kafka “laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further”. This Kafka has been somewhat obscured, but he’s certainly there, struggling to free himself from the chitinous, beetle-like skin into which fate and literary fame has sealed him.

It was always a challenge teaching first year classes on Kafka, but rewarding too. Undergraduates rarely did any preparation for German lit classes (wie immer) and so they turned up knowing very little about him apart from a general expectation that the man who gave us the term Kafkaesque had to be pretty weird. They weren’t disappointed on that score. We had three hour-long sessions dissecting the short story “Das Urteil” (“The Judgement”), reading it in German, line by line, often word by word, slowing down the process of reading as if you were analyzing a film frame by frame.

At some point, usually towards the end of the sessions, I would explain some details from Kafka’s life. For many of the students, the biographical information transformed what was a deeply strange, even incomprehensible, reading experience. Suddenly, as if by magic, it all seemed to make sense. Why didn’t you tell us this before, they wanted to know. Kafka’s writing was psychology in action, a cathartic release. Kafka, frantically scribbling in his room late at night, was assuaging his guilt for failing to live up to parental expectations, doing penance for breaking unwritten laws, and so on.

The process of reading a text, line by line, is hard work. Not quite as hard work as writing it, perhaps, but almost. Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation. That was why I spent three hours reading ten pages of Kafka with my students.

It’s only through this intense engagement with a text that a reader can feel what Terry Eagleton has memorably called that “moment of wondering self-estrangement” which is unique to the aesthetic experience. [6] It was the Russian Formalists who first proposed the idea of defamiliarization, or ostranenie in Russian. In “Art as Technique” (1917) Victor Shklovsky explained what this meant:

“Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.” [7]

This is one of the most perceptive and powerful statements about the purpose of art and its ability to transform our way of seeing that I know. As in metafiction, the defamiliarizing artwork places the reader centre stage: you are no longer a passive decoder of signs but actively interpreting, constructing theories and being challenged. And it highlights something which is so often lost in today’s qualification-driven education system – reading literature can actually change people, change how they see the world. It can make the stone stony.

I was reminded of this recently when reading neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. In her fascinating book, Wolf shows how learning to read changes individual brains forever, both intellectually and physiologically. Indeed, different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from that needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Indeed, doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.

Of course, Kafka didn’t need lessons from Shklovsky or anyone on how to make the world strange. In a wonderful comment, he once disagreed with a friend who accused Picasso of distorting reality. “I do not think so,” said Kafka. “He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes ‘fast,’ like a watch—sometimes.” [8]

Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-folk” explores this idea. I first read it at university when I was studying German literature and it has haunted me ever since. (I even named my website after it.) It was written in March 1924, three months before Kafka died. He was in the last stages of tuberculosis of the larynx, and was unable to speak – a poignant background for a story about a singer. But it was Kafka’s writing, not his tragic life, that made such an impression on me.

The story is about a singer and her place in the community. The fact that Kafka chooses to make this a community of mice can itself be seen as an example of making strange: what better way to explore the role of the artist in society than to defamiliarize the artist by turning her into a mouse? In fact mice are only mentioned by name in the title and if this is ignored, then the world described could easily be our own. Similarly, although Josephine is described as a “singer” in the title, she does not sing in the story, but whistles, pipes or squeaks, depending on your translation (“pfeift” in the original German), thus defamiliarizing the act of singing itself. Subtly and with immense skill, Kafka’s language begins to change our perceptions from the very first words.

The unnamed narrator is writing about Josephine in order to understand why she played such an important role in their society. For Josephine has disappeared and despite the narrator’s evident ambivalence about her, it is clear she has left a hole at the heart of their community. As he thinks critically about Josephine, the narrator begins to wonder whether the fascination he feels for her art lies not in the art itself – the singing or “Pfeifen” – but rather in its context, in the fact of it being set apart from everyday life:

“To crack a nut is truly no feat, so no one would ever dare to collect an audience in order to entertain it with nut-cracking. But if all the same one does do that and succeeds in entertaining the public, then it cannot be a matter of simple nut-cracking. Or it is a matter of nut-cracking, but it turns out that we have overlooked the art of cracking nuts because we were too skilled in it and that this newcomer to it first shows us its real nature, even finding it useful in making his effects to be rather less expert in nut-cracking than most of us.” [9]

The concept of art formulated here has much in common with Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie. According to the narrator, the act of cracking a nut does not in itself amount to Art. Yet if one were to call it Art and repeat the same act in front of an audience, then, although it would still be someone cracking nuts, the act itself would be transformed, and the audience would see an aestheticized and gesteigert version of nut-cracking. By taking an object out of its usual context and rendering it strange, the viewer is granted a heightened awareness of that object and its significance within the scheme of things.

In his attempt to deconstruct Josephine’s art, the narrator reveals the paradox that lies at its heart: that essentially it is nothing more than their everyday speech. Her audience may know that her voice is nothing special; but there remains an undeniable yet elusive quality to her performances that commands attention and moves them all profoundly: “Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated.” As the narrator finally understands, her singing-piping is “set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while.” [10] Mundane her voice may be, but what Josephine does is art, and without it her community feels bereft.

As the novelist Alice McDermott has said, fiction is “the way to enter into another universe, a way to see the world anew”. [11] The singing of Kafka’s mouse set her people free, if only for a few blissful moments, and with his writing Kafka offers readers a similar intellectual release. You don’t need a suitcase of yellowing documents to know that. Just a dog-eared paperback copy of his stories will do.

References

1. “In der Strafkolonie” (1919), “In the Penal Settlement”, tr Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Penguin, 1980), p 180.

2. Kate Connolly, “End of a Kafkaesque nightmare: writer’s papers finally come to light”, Guardian, July 9, 2008.

3. Martin Swales. “Why Read Kafka?” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 357-66

4. Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman”, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 12, July 17, 2008.

5. “The week in books”, Guardian, July 26, 2008.

6. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), p. 89

7. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917). Originally published as “Iskusstvo kak priëm.” In Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, trs., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12.

8. Cited by Zadie Smith, op.cit., from Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, p. 143.

9. Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories, tr Willa and Edwin Muir (Penguin 1982), p 176. The original German text:

“Eine Nuß aufknacken ist wahrhaftig keine Kunst, deshalb wird es auch niemand wagen, ein Publikum zusammenzurufen und vor ihm, um es zu unterhalten, Nüsse knacken. Tut er es dennoch und gelingt seine Absicht, dann kann es sich eben doch nicht nur um bloßes Nüsseknacken handeln. Oder es handelt sich um Nüsseknacken, aber es stellt sich heraus, daß wir über diese Kunst hinweggesehen haben, weil wir sie glatt beherrschten und daß uns dieser neue Nußknacker erst ihr eigentliches Wesen zeigt, wobei es dann für die Wirkung sogar nützlich sein könnte, wenn er etwas weniger tüchtig im Nüsseknacken ist als die Mehrzahl von uns.” (“Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse”, in Ein Hungerkünstler, 1924)

10. Ibid., 184.

11. Carole Burns (ed), Off the Page: Writers talk about Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between (Norton, 2008), p. 73.

by Adrienne Hyat

Since my recent return from a lengthy stay in Pakistan, I’ve been asked numerous times about my safety while I was there. My standard reply is something like, “It was a tumultuous year–and I could have done without all the headlines–even encountered a few anxious moments–but for the most part I felt pretty safe and welcome.” But that reply often is met with puzzled and doubtful looks. It’s difficult to convince people that there is another side to the place that has been called, “the most dangerous nation on earth.”

To those with first hand knowledge, the reality on the ground is in sharp contrast to the image the media presents:

Father Daniel Suply, 75, is a missionary priest with the Roman Catholic order of Belgian Capuchans. He has resided in Pakistan for nearly 45 years. When asked about his safety, Father Suply spontaneously replies, “I feel absolutely safe.”

He teaches in a seminary and performs religious services in a parish. Except for one brief incident in the early 1990’s which was quickly snuffed out thanks to Father Suply’s fluency in Punjabi, he has never felt threatened here.

Nevertheless, he finds it difficult to convince people back in Belgium to the contrary—until, that is, they come and see for themselves,

“Over the years quite a few people have come to visit us from Europe.” He says. “Of late, many of these people are often advised not to travel to Pakistan because it’s[considered to be] such a dangerous place. When they do come here, they say, ‘…no, no, no it is totally safe. We are totally safe…That was a very negative picture we got from the people.’ A very negative picture… which is not just, actually. Not correct. Not the reality. Of course, Waziristan, that is a dangerous place. I would never venture to go there. The Taliban are there.”

Father Suply is quick to point out that Pakistan is facing some deeply critical issues which could lead to the destabilization of the country. However, he does not dwell on those issues. Instead, he focuses on his “very meaningful ministry” in which he finds great reward and which, he adds, “is very much appreciated” by his students.

Alan Cheshire, 52, is a former United Nations Field Officer. He is currently working on a bio-fuel project in Pakistan. Cheshire has done stints in Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. He finds Pakistan much safer than any of the other places he’s been.

“In those places,” Cheshire says, “I could not go out without an armed guard. But here in Pakistan, I go into the villages on my own.”

He, too, finds it difficult to convince people back home to the contrary, “They think Pakistan is full of terrorists,” Cheshire says, shaking his head. “ …they’re actually lovely people. The only problem I’ve got is too much tea. They’re always offering me tea.”

Cheshire has felt threatened here, once, on the night of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. He and two Norwegian friends were in a restaurant in the inner city of Lahore when they heard the news. Riots broke out, shops closed and they rushed to get home. On their way, some local shopkeepers lifted up the shutters of their shops and invited them in. “These people were prepared to risk their lives for Europeans. Now that”, says Cheshire emotionally, “is friendliness.”

Laura and Dale Sinkler are from Kalkaska, Michigan. They have lived in Pakistan with their children for several years. Their first stint was from 1996-2001 in a remote area in the outskirts of Multan where they worked on construction of two power plants. In 2001, they left Pakistan to work on power projects in Bangladesh. In 2006, Dale returned to Pakistan this time working for his own power generation firm. Laura and two of their children, a third is in the US Army, joined him in Lahore in 2007.

They speak fondly about Pakistan and the people they’ve met here. They say that coming back to Pakistan the second time around, “felt like coming home.” What has impressed them the most has been the generosity and hospitality of the poor villagers whom they befriended while working in the outskirts of Multan.

“We would go to their homes and have lunch or dinner with them.” Dale Sinkler says. “Oftentimes, we’d feel very uncomfortable because they would be serving us food that we knew they couldn’t afford to serve us. We’d go there and sit on a charpoy [a wooden framed straw bed] and they’d treat us like royalty out of a tin cup.” Even now, years later, when the Sinklers go back to visit their friends in the villages they are treated “like royalty”.

As for their security, the Sinklers say they have felt safe and comfortable during their time in Pakistan despite the risks, which they don’t necessarily consider to be any greater than the risks that exist in other places. And, as experience has shown, some things they perceived as threats actually turned out to be friendly encounters.

Laura Sinkler amusingly recalls a nervous encounter she once had while horseback riding in a village with some female friends “… my horse got away from me, I couldn’t stop it, so I pulled it’s head back to get it to stop and it ended up turning and I actually ended up in a little yard of one of the mosques. I was afraid I was going to be in trouble because you know, that’s their holy ground, so I hurried up and got it out of there but instead of getting in trouble they invited me in for tea.”

The Sinklers have found that the secret to their success here has been tolerance. “If you treat them with respect” says Dale, “ultimately they will return that two-fold.”

Gillian Thornton, 48, is a school teacher from England. She came to Pakistan in 2006 to work for a year as a volunteer teacher trainer in the government schools in Lahore. Thornton explains her reason for coming to Pakistan, “I found the idea of working in a Muslim culture very interesting…from the perspective of a single woman, I wondered if I could fit in and how.” Thornton admits, however, she was apprehensive about the decision of whether to come to Pakistan in light of media coverage about the country.

Two years, and a second contract later, Thornton believes she does, indeed, fit in here, thanks to her willingness to respect the culture. Her experience has been so positive she now has plans to stay on for a third year. She says the best thing about her time here has been the way she’s been received by the Pakistani people and the friendships she has made with them.

As for the apprehensions she had before coming here, she says, “The reality of living and working here has been very different than the media coverage. I’ve never been threatened, I feel very comfortable here…I’m living proof that Pakistan is not the place the media has portrayed it to be.”

Thornton credits her experience in Pakistan for broadening her horizons and understanding of the world. She and some of her fellow former volunteers, who originally came to Pakistan through the UK-based Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), have joked about VSO’s motto, ‘Sharing skills, Changing lives.’ “It was, undoubtedly, the lives of the volunteers,” says Thornton emphatically, ”that changed the most!”

To be certain, there are parts of Pakistan that are very dangerous and especially hostile to foreigners—parts of the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan, as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA, which is reportedly the current home of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. And even the major cities throughout the country have had their share of violence. Earlier this year, Lahore, which was historically peaceful and quiet, experienced several suicide bombings. And attacks specifically targeting foreigners have also occurred throughout the country.

But to consider these events as an accurate reflection of the whole picture is a gross misperception. Just as it is wrong to assume that the extremist views held by a few represent the many. And the irony in adapting these views is that it tends to fuel anti-Western resentment. As Dale Sinkler put it, “If you treat people like that is what they’re made of than that’s exactly what you’re going to get in return.”

Ms. Hyat is an attorney who has lived and taught law in Pakistan.

It is impossible for me to express what I feel about the passing of Mahmoud Darwish. Like many Palestinians, I had grown up reading his poetry in order to express how I feel about whatever significant events happen to Palestinians. I turned to his writings to understand the periods of Palestine’s history that happened before I was born. If ever anyone in history deserved the title of a Poet Laureate, it was indeed Darwish, who spoke the mind of his people in a way I doubt anyone has ever been able to do for any other people. Today, I wake up missing my voice. The real travesty of Darwish’s death is that it revealed to me that he is no longer there to eloquently express to me how I feel about such travesties.

An often underemphasized aspect of Darwish’s life is how he truly lived every single episode of modern Palestinian history, and lived in all the significant locations and periods of Palestinian life. He was born in 1942 in Al-Birweh, Galilee, before the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine that made him a refugee in Lebanon in 1948. His father decided to return his family to Palestine in 1949, risking murder by Zionist militias that had murdered countless Palestinians who attempted to “escape home”. Somehow, Darwish succeeded in returning, and thus lived the years of his youth as a second-class Israeli citizen. He would then leave to study in the Soviet Union in the early 1970’s, joining the growing Palestinian Diaspora in Europe. His political activism lead to Israel stripping him of his second-class citizenship, and thus returned him to the ranks of Palestinian refugees and the Diaspora. He would then live in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, getting to savor the experience of the homeless Palestinians wandering across the Arab World.

Darwish witnessed the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—one of the pivotal points of his life, his poetry and of Palestinian history—and left with the Palestinian resistance on the boats headed to Tunisia. From then on, he lived the quintessential Palestinian nomadic life; the whole world was home for this stateless nomad. In 1995, he finally returned to Palestine with the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords, and attempted to build his life there. He again witnessed another brutal Israeli siege of Palestinians, this time in Ramallah in 2002, which inspired his powerful poetry collection, ‘Haalat ‘Hisaar (A State of Siege). Since the 1980’s Darwish had serious heart problems, and had a very close encounter with death in 1998 after heart surgery, an experience that inspired his monumental work, Jidaariyyah (Mural).

Throughout all these episodes of Palestinian history, Darwish was there, the voice of the voiceless Palestinians to the world. His peerless poetry and striking emotion were enormously successful in drawing world attention to the plight of Palestinians, galvanizing Palestinian to their cause, and rallying millions of Arabs around the cause. All the countless millions spent on PR campaigns by the Israeli Foreign Ministry were never a match to any of Darwish’s powerful poems.

For me, the most striking and admirable thing about Darwish’s poetry is how it remained so resolutely humanist and universalist in its message. Never did Darwish succumb to cheap nationalism and chauvinism; never did he resort to vilification of his oppressors or the usual jingoism so common in political art and literature. Never did he forget that his oppressor too is human, just like him. The magnanimity, forgiveness and humanism he exhibited in his work remain the ultimate credit to this great author.

Throughout ethnic cleansing, living as a second-class citizen, being placed under house arrest, having his second-class citizenship revoked, being chased and hounded from one exile to another, being bombed in almost each of these exiles and living under countless sieges, Darwish’s humanism never succumbed. One of his most popular poems, Rita, spoke of his love for a Jewish Israeli woman by that name; and about the absurdity of wars coming between lovers. This poem was made into a popular song by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife.

In his powerful 2002 poem, A State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah, after talking of the sixth sense that allows him to skillfully escape shells, Darwish takes time to address the very Israeli soldiers shelling his neighborhood:

You, standing at the doorsteps, come in
And drink with us our Arabic coffee
For you may feel that you are human like us;

…

To the killer: If you had left the fetus thirty days,
Things would’ve been different:
The occupation may end, and the toddler may not remember the time of the siege,
and he would grow up a healthy boy,
and study the Ancient history of Asia,
in the same college as one of your daughters.
And they may fall in love.
And they may have a daughter (who would be Jewish by birth).
What have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow,
and your granddaughter is now orphaned?
What have you done to your scattered family,
And how could you have slain three pigeons with the one bullet?

Darwish’s last poem, published a few weeks before his death, tells the fascinating tale of falling into one hole with one’s enemy. Darwish explores the dynamic of enemies facing a common plight; how the past is remembered and yet forgotten when they cooperate to murder a snake; how instinct triumphs over ideology and how a common plight makes the concept of enmity absurd. In a pretty accurate description of the current plight of Palestinians and Israelis, and in a very ominous phrase indicating that Darwish felt his impending death, he concludes:

He said: Would you negotiate with me now?
I said: For what would you negotiate me now,
in this grave-hole?
He said: On my share and your share of this common grave
I said: What use is it?
Time has passed us,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a murderer and the murdered, sleeping in one hole
And it remains for another poet to take this scenario to its end!

But for me, the most memorable of Darwish’s work will always remain his seminal poem, Madeeh Al-Thill Al-‘Aaly (In Priase of the High Shadow). The poem was written on the deck of one of the ships carrying Darwish, along with thousands of Palestinian fighters, from Beirut to Tunisia after Israel’s barbaric destruction of Lebanon in 1982. Darwish recounts the daily realities of living under shelling and under siege in Beirut, the deafening silence of the rest of the world towards the plight of the Palestinians and Lebanese, and the harrowing details of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Acerbic, witty, and powerful, Darwish skewers everyone from the Israeli government murdering civilians while pretending to be the victim (“You stole our tears, wolf”), to the American government (“The Plague”) giving every child a cluster bomb toy as a gift, to the Arab governments (“the bastard nations”) who refrain from doing anything to help their Palestinian brethren, and instead resort to pathetic anti-Semitic rhetoric to deflect attention away from their ineptitude.

Yet through it all, and as dark as the plight becomes, Darwish never loses sight of the humanism at the heart of his cause and at the heart of the Palestinian struggle. He continuously disparages nationalism and mocks its silliness. The ending of the poem, in particular, serves as a sort of Palestinian anti-Zionist humanist manifesto. In it, Darwish addresses the Palestinian fighter with powerful rhetorical questions, asking him about the true nature of his cause, and what he is really after. Mocking the trappings of nationalism and statehood, Darwish—in no uncertain terms—asserts that the cause has always been about humans, about freedom from oppression, about the revolution against persecution, about the lofty ideals of liberty, and most definitely not about petty nationalism and the toys of statehood:

It is for you to be, or not to be,
It is for you to create, or not to create.
All existential questions, behind your shadow, are a farce,
And the universe is your small notebook, and you are its creator.
So write in it the paradise of genesis,
Or do not write it,
You, you are the question.
What do you want?
As you march from a legend, to a legend?
A flag?
What good have flags ever done?
Have they ever protected a city from the shrapnel of a bomb?
What do you want?
A newspaper?
Would the papers ever hatch a bird, or weave a grain?
What do you want?
Police?
Do the police know where the small earth will get impregnated from the coming winds?
What do you want?
Sovereignty over ashes?
While you are the master of our soul; the master of our ever-changing existence?
So leave,
For the place is not yours, nor are the garbage thrones.
You are the freedom of creation,
You are the creator of the roads,
And you are the anti-thesis of this era.
And leave,
Poor, like a prayer,
Barefoot, like a river in the path of rocks,
And delayed, like a clove.
…
You, you are the question.
So leave to yourself,
For you are larger than people’s countries,
Larger than the space of the guillotine.
So leave to yourself,
Resigned to the wisdom of your heart,
Shrugging off the big cities, and the drawn sky,
And building an earth under your hand’s palm–a tent, an idea, or a grain.
So head to Golgotha,
And climb with me,
To return to the homeless soul its beginning.
What do you want?
For you are the master of our soul,
The master of our ever-changing existence.
You are the master of the ember,
The master of the flame.
How large the revolution,
How narrow the journey,
How grand the idea,
How small the state!

Darwish’s legacy will live on as eternally as his ultimate triumph against his oppressors: he never let them succeed in making him dehumanize them. In spite of living through the full gamut of Zionist oppression and the Palestinian plight, in spite of all the murders, the sieges, the shelling, the racism and the oppression, Zionism never succeeded in turning Darwish into a racist, and never succeeded in making Darwish hate his fellow human. His humanism shone through as his ultimate triumph, and the ultimate insult to the chauvinist, parochial, racist, and criminal Zionist project to which he was the quintessential antithesis.

——

The following video is Darwish reciting a part of Madeeh Al-Thill Al-‘Aly (In Priase of the High Shadow):

The following is Darwish reciting part of Jidaariyyah (Mural), talking about his brush with death in 1998:

///
Girl on Trapeze
—Vignette through a windshield
Jim Culleny
……………………………………..
Young chick at a curb waiting for a green.

It comes, she goes head down
checking out the cut of her jeans:
how they lay across her shoes;
the way the inseams hug her firm thighs;
the fine, faded blues.

Sweet on self, she imagines
an approaching guy
sees what she eyes:

sees himself as her squeeze.
Him, turned-on. Her, self-pleased.

She smiles
raises head reins eyes
veers right launches keys
and swings into her car
with beautiful and satisfied
greatest of ease.
….

…………………………………………………
………………………………………
……………………………………..
………………………………….///

…………………………………..
………………………………………………

 Above, Basket of Wild Strawberries, 1761, private collection, and Still Life with Fish (detail),1769, J. Paul Getty Museum, by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

 All food photography below courtesy of Karen Peters. Use the titles to search her blog for the recipes.

Elatia Harris

Recently, I embarked on one of those side trips that committed foodies can be lucky enough to get an invitation to — I became a designated taster for a line of organic blended spices created and distributed by Winnipeg chef Karen Peters. (Warning: Do not attempt to compete with me for this job! It is mine!) 

My first occasion to be useful came in June. Excitedly, I pried open a 250 mg tin of Karen’s Ras el Hanout and sniffed in delighted reverie for several minutes, enjoying the synergy of more than two dozen spices – cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, peppercorns, among many others. Ras el Hanout is a discretionary blend, with ingredients and proportions varying from kitchen to kitchen.  Sometimes, it’s nothing special; other times, its aroma carries with it a civilization.  My vendor of choice for the spices of the Eastern Mediterranean was Maison Hediard, in Paris. But Maison Hediard fell – that’s the only way to put it – and now that it’s been propped up, it’s all different. That was a big loss, for my own efforts to blend those spices – not only Ras el Hanout, but Baharat, Berbere, Mitmita and Za’atar – produced only tragic results. In one whiff, I ceased to worry about all that. Next to Ras el Hanout in my pantry now is Karen’s Baharat – a Turkish rub for meats with cassia bark, cumin, black pepper, mint – and there’s more to come. I am once again confident that when I prepare the dishes of this region, they will create for diners a civilizational encounter.

I could not help wanting to know more about any chef artful enough to get this stuff right. It’s the equivalent of designing a truly great perfume – one that is definitive and characteristic and slots into your mind all the most precise and coveted associations – instead of one that is vaguely pleasant but will never generate a nanosecond’s notice. Or, like being able to write – and not by accident – a melody that people will remember instead of one they will forget. All I really knew about Karen Peters when I became a designated taster for her product line was that we liked many of the same classic food movies, that she had four Russian grandparents and a Masters Degree in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. How did this add up to her taking the Mistress of Spices title?

By coincidence – this does tie in, so bear with me – I had been corresponding with 3QD columnist Justin Smith about the philosophical aspect of food. Justin had put up a new site, Opera Minora, for archiving his professional papers, and had just given a talk at Caltech, “How to Feed a Corporeal Substance: The Metaphysics of Nutrition from Fernel to Leibniz.” In it, I found a line about the “transformation of world into self,” and a fascinating reference to “the process of nutrition within the context of a corporeal-substance metaphysics.” This resonated with my thinking on those immaterial-seeming fragrance molecules that carried with them a civilization – effecting the transformation of world into dish, perhaps – and I made haste to find out if philosophy came into play in Karen’s kitchen.

Elatia Harris: Karen, you have an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. While you are not the only cook I know highly trained to do something entirely other than cooking – there are lots of us – I want to know whether you believe cooking is a vacation from philosophy, or if philosophical ruminations in fact arise from it.

Karen Peters: I first went to Germany in 1989, after the program I had been planning to attend at the Beijing Teacher’s College was canceled. It was a phenomenal experience.  I had Hans-Georg Gadamer as a professor and was keen on studying the philosophy of language, especially examining the ideas of meaning presented by Kant and Wittgenstein. 

EH: What about Food World?  Not yet on your screen?

KP: I was also fortunate to apprentice in a restaurant in Mannheim during my studies.  I find cooking to be very calming, even in the rush of it all for business.  I think about the combinations of ingredients and the anticipated delight of the diner.  From my own philosophical experience, I try to be aware of the good, the true and the beautiful in all endeavors – including cooking.  A lot to ask from an item to be consumed but I hope that I’m paying attention.  I want to be aware of that first sip of good tea, coffee or wine and note that I should pay attention because this is good.  It likely seems like fuzzy philosophy but being open to the ineffable is being open to delight.  Or is that a tautology?  In any case, I don’t see cooking as a vacation from philosophy but the action can put me in a state of mind where thinking is clearer.  In some ways, having the mise en place kind of discipline is very Kantian in that there is a great deal of freedom arising through the discipline.  I can’t have chaos in the kitchen, and I clean as I go.  I hope that because of that discipline that I can make culinary ideological leaps as well.

EH: I should try it your way — every now and then I feel like Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” I am in control of my result, perhaps not so perfectly in control of my process.  The freedom I experience cooking is a freedom from the claims of the verbal imagination.

KP: Although there is great freedom offered in Nietzsche and great process can be learned from Kant, neither would likely be much good in a kitchen – not to trivialize.  It’s somewhere between the chaos and the control.

EH: Are there systems within thinking about food that you subscribe to? 

KP: The Slow Food movement and Hundred Mile Diet tie in nicely with my other degree, a Masters in Environmental Studies.  I did my field work on small-scale fisheries in Kerala, India.  I was so lucky to have met and worked with so many amazing people.  A group of women took me in as their daughter.  I felt quite honored and humbled.  These women would go into the clean canals without fishing gear and catch shrimp just by sensing their vibrations with their hands.  It was absolutely fantastic.  They would later sell their catch in the local markets.  When we didn’t have a translator, we could communicate about food, family and living in simple terms.  Malayalam, by the way, is the hardest language that I’ve ever come across.

EH: That was the language they spoke in The God of Small Things. There was a Western character so put off by it that she said, “I would have thought you’d call this Keralese…”  At the time I remember thinking it must be awfully hard, if the word for the language was itself a palindrome.

KP: Malayalam is indeed the language of The God of Small Things.  The author, Arundhati Roy, is a Keralite.  She’s very controversial in her home state as she demonstrates for human rights.  When I arrived in Cochin, I looked for a simple language book.  Not that easy to find.  I found one that didn’t help me function in the market, but showed my how I could enroll a child into school and read essays on the importance of the elephant.

Meyer lemon and blood orange marmalade, grilled chicken rubbed with Baharat

EH: What will the M. Env. do for your life – in and out of the kitchen?

KP: My M. Env. means that I am trained to work with communities around their resources.  I have done a lot of work around food security issues not only in terms of GMOs vs. organic but in terms of charity and dependency models of food banks vs. self-sufficiency models of community kitchens, gardens and buying clubs.  I am hopeful to get out of the kitchen more and work with those ideas with communities or in policy work.

EH: You and your parents traveled a lot. People my parents knew were usually deterred from going off the beaten track by all the really unfamiliar food involved. But your family sounds different. How did traveling lead you to cooking? Or did it?

KP: All of my grandparents came to Canada from Russia in 1925.  My Dad’s parents were farmers and my Mom’s parents and uncles traveled due to work with immigrants and refugees.  My grandmother traveled extensively throughout her life, and her children and my cousins all seem to have wanderlust.  At one reunion, we discovered that in our family, there wasn’t a single country that hadn’t been visited or lived in.  The foods of those countries are part of the discovery, and a door to their cultures. 

In 1983, after I completed high school, my parents and I went to teach at Chongqing Medical College in Sichuan Province, China.   Sharing food, learning and cooking together was a great way to gain understanding.  When I came home from China in 1984, I tried to share some Sichuan foods with friends and family.  Family members all seemed to enjoy Hot Pot and other spicy foods — but friends were quite a bit more than hesitant.

EH: Did that surprise you? I made a Tuscan rabbit dish for a friend I hadn’t seen in decades, and she acted like it was some kind of a test.

KP: I was surprised — I was not expecting people to be hesitant to try foods from another part of the world.

EH: Well, hm — maybe it’s about rabbit or very hot spices. Still, the principle holds — you don’t expect it when you think how diverse Canada and Canadian cuisine already are. That’s something that can be a surprise to us “other” North Americans.

KP: Canadian cuisine has influences from all over the world.  I live in a medium-sized city but can access excellent world cuisines here.  Toronto and Vancouver have that to a much larger degree as well as the fusion of cultures.  Toronto Chef Susur Lee creates wonderfully inspiring food.  His cookbook is accessible and comprehensive.  Vancouver’s Tojo’s is listed in the book, Top 1000 Places to See Before You Die, and is a great experience. I love the Vietnamese restaurant across the river from where I live, Binh An, where I can get a huge portion of soothing sour soup for $10 with the tip.  The owner tells me with pride that the broth is cooked for over 14 hours.  While the food provides enjoyment and nourishment, a few questions and a little interaction provide warmth, insight and possible friendships.  I guess that you can be open or closed where ever you are.

EH: Canada is way ahead of the US in policy encouraging a multicultural society.

KP: Multiculturalism is a difficult concept in many respects.  I think that a Liberal notion of tolerance is not a desirable concept.  That is, if I’m told that I’ll be tolerated, I’d suggest not to bother.  Of course, there isn’t a war or violent situation going on here.  Also, I am Mennonite and would rather leave a situation than be part of violence. I hope that we are growing up when it comes to addressing “the other.”

Acorn squash soup with lemongrass

EH: You know so much about the food of South Asia — did you learn all that in Kerala?

KP:  For a time, my parents were country reps of a relief and development organization in India based in Calcutta.  They lived there for over 4 years.  I traveled to visit with them for a while with my grandmother. They had a chef, Kasim, who had been a chef for a Maharajah’s family in Kashmir.  I had time to sit and learn from him.  I started to learn about cooking by the sense of smell.  I also learned about biryanis and other north Indian dishes.  I feel very lucky to have these exposures, and I think about the people and places when I cook some dishes.  I taught for a while in South Korea, and came to adore good Korean food.

EH: Then you had more material than most to sort through before deciding what you wanted to be when you grew up…

KP: I really don’t think that I ever knew what I would do when I finally grew up.  I think that I just knew that I would travel. Maybe our language is how we think but the food is how we love.

EH: I’ve heard of getting your chops as a cook in some very unlikely places. But you’re the only one I know who did it on a Turkish boat. Please tell me about that.

KP: I had been home in Canada for a while, kind of floundering as to what to do next. A cousin who set up a thriving tourism business in Bodrum, Turkey, called to say that she needed a chef on her boat right away — and could I come?  A couple of weeks later I was on a boat in the Aegean, learning Turkish and Turkish cuisine, how to be a sailor and a German-speaking tour guide.  Great learning curve, and just a gorgeous place to be.  I learned so much about eggplants, tea, spices, cheeses, lamb, etc.  I learned new cooking techniques as well as different healing properties of foods and herbs. 

EH: When you want to get inspired now, what do you do?

KP: I read, of course. But I really love going to the different markets and trying out unknown ingredients.  We have wonderful fish markets as well as stores for Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Ethiopian, Halal, India and West Indies as well as local foods.  I often go to these markets to see what is new and what could be served in a new way.  I have hundreds of Chinese soup spoons, for example, and I look to how they can be used for delightful purposes.  For one-bite appetizers of cold soba noodles, stuffed pasta shells, sashimi with grilled udon squares, for example. 

EH: If someone wanted to go from being a restaurant habitué type of a foodie to being one who was also a confident cook, would there be a fast lane to that transition?

KP: The economic argument is a great motivator.  I usually ask people what their favorite foods are, and if they would like to learn how to make those.  Then it’s about going back to first principles, just breaking down a recipe to the how and the why with each step. 

I had the pleasure of being a guest chef twice for Les Marmitons, a fine group of gentlemen who gather with the mandate, Gastronomy through Friendship.  No one seems hesitant, and there is a whole range of skill levels.

I don’t want people to get bound up by the recipes always.  I find a lot of grads of the culinary arts programs to be unable to adapt to situations outside of their recipes.  In that regard, the informal learner might have an advantage over the trained chef.  I have done a locally produced public access television cooking show. I want people to be excited about possibilities and not be intimidated by food.  I want people to be brave enough to enjoy making risotto instead of adding water to instant varieties.

EH: I have Heaven knows how many cookbooks, but just a few I really don’t like to be separated from. What about you?

KP: There are some I even travel with. One book that I’ve enjoyed, and have taken with me is World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey.  I found out in traveling just how authentic her recipes are.  They are also great recipes for learning the basics, step by step, such as making yoghurt or paneer. The Larousse Gastronomique offers a great base from which to work.  I use it as a springboard to what I might have locally or could have on hand — wherever I am.  Other great books are Fields of Greens, by Annie Sommerville, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison, Amuse Bouche, by Rick Tramonto, and two books by Jeffrey Alford, Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Mangoes & Curry Leaves. One book of further inspiration that my husband, Desmond Burke – an architect – gave to me is The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, edited by Petra Hodgson and Rolf Toyka.  It’s a series of essays and photos around the idea of the two disciplines.

Stuffed bison tenderloin, elk moussaka

EH: I get from reading your blog that elk is good. When you’re looking for local, organic provender in Winnipeg, what else is good?

KP: The gardens here provide so much great local vegetables in a very short season.  To start in early spring with fiddleheads and morels and then all what the garden grows through the season.  Local fish is amazing with sweet pickerel, Arctic char, Manitoba goldeye and golden caviar. Wild rice, blueberries, saskatoons, rhubarb, crabapples are all local products.  There is a growing organic meat production here with beef, bison, elk, lamb, goat, chickens and rabbits.  The Trappist monks make a wonderful local cheese and there is a small artisanal goat cheese producer nearby as well.  Raw milk cheeses face some regulations but I have found them relatively available.  You can find the raw cheeses more in Quebec than where I live.   

University of Manitoba student garden, where Environmental Studies and City Planning students practice permaculture agriculture

EH: You have an incredible Russian bread recipe. I love the photo of it that Desmond took.

KP: The Russian Easter bread is my grandmother’s recipe, but it was my husband, Desmond, who baked it as well as photographed it.  He’s a gifted amateur baker/pasta maker.  He even takes the Russian Easter bread out and puts it on feather pillows, as per my Großma’s instructions.  Desmond isn’t from my cultural background but he’s really nailed this bread.

EH: When I cook for Russians, I think “mushrooms,” because I remember a scene in Speak, Memory where Nabokov’s mother was made unreasonably happy by them.

KP: There really is something about mushrooms.  Unreasonably happy is quite apposite to how I feel about mushrooms.  I make a porcini mushroom consommé that is reduced and added to and reduced several times.  In the final service, it is a dark and clear mushroom broth with a few porcini slices topped with a drizzle of truffle oil.  I served it for a wonderful birthday party that I felt honored to cater.  When the soup course came out, the formerly boisterous room fell silent.  I asked what was wrong and they said that they were enjoying the soup too much to talk.

Russian Easter bread, shitake mushroom bouches

EH: Ah, a moment that one lives for! Is the mushrooming pretty good where you are?

KP: I had gone mushroom hunting a few years prior to that event of the mushroom consommé.  We found Chicken of the Woods in autumn on the elm trees in certain neighborhoods.  I love mushroom hunting.  In early spring you can find local morels, later chanterelles and in the autumn, chicken of the woods.  To be invited to go mushroom hunting by regulars is something never to be turned down. With morels, you can get quite giddy in the hunt.  You can be looking directly at the mushroom and then have the experience that it has revealed itself to you.   

Salmon on a cedar plank

EH: We have some favorite movies in common. Mainly Babette’s Feast, Big Night and Tampopo. Those are all between 15 and 20 years old by now – yet even people too young to have seen them first time out know them.

KP: I’ve always loved “food movies”.  There is so much delight and passion in them.  Babette’s Feast is very inspiring.  I’ve prepared formal dinners based on that inspiration and its been so enjoyable.

EH: I’ve read some of your menus – they’re spectacular. I don’t necessarily think of Babette as a cook, but as an artiste who has, after long exile, given everything to be reunited with her materials.

KP: I absolutely concur.  Babette is an artist.  There is such a celebration when she comes out of isolation from her materials. 

EH: There’s a strain of fanaticism in all these movies too.  The chef in Tampopo undergoes grueling muscle conditioning to be fit enough to make the best noodles.  When she finally succeeds, her lover/trainer leaves her, having boarded up her bedroom window. Well, that’s the price of perfection. Funny that these “food movies” that are so delightful are also quite dark.

KP: I understand – I tend to be a dark thinker but really need the delight and the “Aha” moments.  I had a whole semester with Gadamer just on “Ach so.”  I am keen on the hermeneutical, that quickening moment of understanding, ach so.  Perhaps, then, I have more Romantic views of food and feeding the soul.  What the Romantic German poet, Novalis, gives us is that every thing, every item and construct is a communication and can be understood.

I relate to the fanaticism of the chefs in these movies, too. I used to be much more fanatical with people when I cooked for them.  I wouldn’t allow them to come to the kitchen to taste the food, as it was a pure offering that I was creating for them.  They really got offended, so I have to dance around that one a lot.

EH: I’ve learned to be a good sport about it. But I will never understand why, when I am orchestrating a superb experience for them, people would want to jump the gun to take a bite out of it – half-cooked, yet.

No such interruptions blending spices, I should think.  What made you start your product line with Ras el Hanout?

KP: My cousin was in Morocco and brought me back a tajine and some Ras el Hanout.  When I ran out of the spice blend…I just had to have more.  I researched it and didn’t find much that matched my experience.  I also didn’t find anything commercially available.  So I had to make it myself. With a bit of trial and error, I came up with the blend of 28 spices with which I am happy.

EH: Oh, you should be happy with it. What future plans have you for your blended spices?

KP: At the moment, it’s a cottage industry.  The product is in demand, however. How to get bigger while retaining full creative control over ingredients is an intellectually worthy problem to be solving.

To inquire about blended spices, contact Karen via her site.

The US annual health care expenditure is riding a nonstop escalator. The current spending of over two trillion dollars will reach an unsustainable four trillion dollars or 20% of the GDP in 2017. Yet, an estimated 47 million Americans had no insurance for a whole year in 2006 and 89.5 million people under the age of 65 did not have any insurance for one month. And last week, the AMA reported in the American Medical News that middle-income insured Americans have difficulty in accessing care. About 59 million Americans, either delayed or did not get health care in 2007, a problem that only low-income uninsured commonly face.

Current per capita expenditure of $6697 – the highest in the world – has bought financial grief for many but not good health for all. The US health infrastructure is probably the best in the world (probably overbuilt) and technology – even unproven – penetrates early and spreads fast. But each service costs more in the US compared to the OECD countries. Where does this place US in the quality of care? In a study by the Commonwealth Fund comparing six counties (Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, UK, and the USA) in various indicators like quality care, access, efficiency, equity, healthy lives and expenditure, the USA ranked lowest – fifth or sixth- in almost all indicators except ‘right care’ (a subset of quality care) where it was at the top.

The catastrophe of unaffordable care is unfolding like a Greek tragedy before the national audience; the characters sense the looming disaster but the flaccid leaders seem powerless to stop it. The explanation lies in the way we finance health care – a global problem and not particular to the USA.

Nations have used three ways to finance health care: tax revenues, non-profit community health insurance and commercial insurance. They pool financial resources either with a single payer like in Canada, UK, Japan and Taiwan or with multiple payers (pluralistic systems) like in the USA, France, Belgium, Australia, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand and Netherlands. The pluralistic US health care depends mainly on tax revenues and commercial insurance.

These pooled funds purchase health services from providers – hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals and device manufacturers – on behalf of their clients. Allocation of funds (what to buy) and efficiency (for how much) control supply side costs. Currently, 30% of total expenditure goes to hospitals, 21% for clinical services and doctors, 10% for pharmaceuticals and 25% for other services.

A prepayment by individuals into a pool affords an assurance of financial risk coverage in case of unpredictable future sickness. The fund remains solvent by recruiting a large number of consumers with varying health profiles, so a large number of healthy people subsidize the unfortunate 20 percent unhealthy, who use 80 percent of health services.

The US health system – which is expensive and not equitable – has faltered in the mechanics of purchase of health services. McCain wants to rectify it by injecting market competition at two points of purchase: one, to empower individuals to buy less expensive health insurance and second, to encourage them to negotiate the price of services with providers.

This plan is similar to what Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler have expressed in their well-written book, ‘Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise’. They recommend five steps, which I quote below:

1. Health care tax reform
   • Tax deducibility of health care expenses
   • Expanded health savings account
   • Tax credits for low income people
2. Insurance reform
   • Interstate portability
   • Subsidized private insurance for the chronically ill
3. Improve health information
   • Report cards on providers
   • Guidelines for best practices
4. Control anticompetitive behavior by providers and insurance
5. Reform malpractice

McCain intends to drop the tax deductibility of health insurance expenditure of employers and instead give a tax credit of $ 2500 to individuals and $ 5000 to families who will buy their own insurance. The plan will also allow insurance companies to sell products across state lines to encourage competition and offer a ‘no-frills’ insurance to low risk individuals.

As inexpensive insurance does not translate to affordable health care, McCain will popularize individual health saving account (HSA), which frees the consumer of the illusion (moral hazard) that care is free because a third party is picking up the tab. Instead, HSA empowers her to shop for value for money and works as a tool for demand side cost control against ‘moral hazard’.

John McCain, the republican presidential hopeful, believes that a free market will provide the healing touch to the ailing health care system. He has a reform plan: cut off the regulatory hands and let the invisible hand work its magic. Will it succeed? The answer is a two-letter word: no.

McCain’s plan may induce employers to drop health benefits for the employees and encourage individuals to shop for their own insurance across state lines. This will fragment the original risk pool. It is likely that young brawny frolickers on Miami Beach will get cheaper health insurance from some distant company; they will abandon their pool loaded with retirees in Tampa, who now will have to pay higher premiums to cover the higher risk. While the young may find affordable insurance, the total health care cost to the system will stay the same.

McCain has faith in the ability of an individual – armed with free choice – to wade through the maze of health information. The HSA will encourage consumer directed health care, which allows patients to decide which health services to buy. But explosion of medical knowledge leaves a vulnerable consumer – in this case a patient- with an insurmountable disadvantage of knowledge asymmetry with his clinician. Add to that numerous insurance plans (Seattle has 747!), which compound the asymmetry with incomprehensible complex multiple insurance products with caveats and uncovered services, which are more difficult to decipher than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Assuming the unlikely scenario that patients will be able to overcome this asymmetry, the HSA plan still will have distribution distortions; healthy adults and children will spend less leaving the sick with higher expenses.

The world experience of last century tells us that health care is impervious to the free market justice and the system needs both supply and demand side controls. Innovations like co-payment, capitation, pay for performance, evidence based medicine and tax subsidies generate distortions, enough to undo any benefits they accrue. Attempts to correct these distortions require substantial administrative organization and expenditure and have been difficult to implement.

Health care in the US is approaching “The tragedy of the commons” described by Hardin in ‘Science’ in 1968: a group of herdsman can increase their number of cattle as long a common pasture has enough carrying capacity, but as the pasture reaches its feeding limit the herdsman can do irreparable harm by over-consumption. The current health care system comes with built in cost escalation mechanism: expedience guides its operation. Over consumption of the medical commons provides illusionary protection for the patient and profits for the provider.

In an article in the New England Journal Of Medicine in 1973, the author Hiatt asked: “Protecting the medical commons: who is responsible?” He exhorted “It is imperative that physicians and other health providers work closely with professionals from many fields, and with consumers, to ensure the availability and dissemination of information that will permit decisions that are in the best interests of society.” The clinician alone cannot do it, as she works both as an independent businessman and patient advocate simultaneously; she is always treading the boundary between ethics and profits; between imperfect medical science and legal threats. The medical commons will become barren unless all stake holders in the system stop overgrazing.

The solution seems obvious: repair the current pluralistic system with stronger cost cutting measures and provide universal coverage and subsidies for the poor. But considering the hurdles to overhaul of the current system, single payer system may be the only option. Almost all developed nations are moving towards a single payer system, which saves considerable money on administrative costs. While estimates on administrative costs vary in various studies, most developed countries with a single payer spend approximately 10 percent on administration, while the US spends over 25 percent. This saving alone could meet the needs of the uninsured.

No panacea exists when aspirations for health care far exceed the need. And when the constrained resources do not even satisfy the unmet need, it may be the time to concede that the poor, old and the sick need a helping hand and not an invisible one; or they will be at the mercy of a hand that is sure to stay invisible when they need it the most.

///
“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
–Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman

Jazzman Said

I don’t think
I ever was a child

Was I a child?
I don’t think so

If I ever was a child
I’d know. …I don’t
even know, Jazzman said,
if a child ever was

Child, Jazzman said,
I don’t just think
I play jazz man.

……………………
……………………
Jim Culleny
5/08

///

What’s Really Wrong With Bestiality

Justin E. H. Smith

—

Books and articles discussed in this essay:

John Corvino, “Homosexuality and the PIB Argument,” Ethics 115 (2005): 501-34

Cora Diamond, “Eating Animals and Eating People,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 465-79.

Lawrence Krader, Social Organization of the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads (The Hague: Mouton, 1963).

Ruwen Ogien, L’éthique minimale (Bayard, 2006) (contains a fascinating treatment of Kant on masturbation).

Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting” (2001), posted at www.nerve.com. Available here.

Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Cornell University Press, 1995).

Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford, 2004) (contains the essays by Catharine MacKinnon and Richard Posner cited below).

—

I.

It’s exceedingly difficult to know how to broach this interest of mine: if I don’t explain why it interests me, my readers will assume that I have a personal stake in the matter; if I insist that it interests me only as an intellectual challenge, I will no doubt hear that I protest too much. So let me confess at the outset that I am ineed a zoophile, but only in the English sense that I love animals, and not in the French sense that I really, you know, love animals. I believe, much more importantly, that crucial lessons about our conceptualization of animals, and the moral stance we take towards them as a result of the way we conceptualize them, may be learned by an unflinching examination of the supposed moral obstacles to having sex with them. 

Elsewhere, I have argued that most of what we think we may and may not do to or with animals is a result of pre-moral concept formation, and that the subsequent moral explanations we give for why we do x to one species and not another are only ad hoc attempts at rationalizing in moral terms a code of conduct that lies much more deeply in us than any of our commitments to Christian ethics, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, ‘inalienable rights’, or what have you. Clearly, for example, there can be no account in terms of a consistent ethical theory of why one would placidly accept the factory-farming and brutal slaughter of billions of cattle per year, but then find eating dog meat or rat meat morally abhorrent (the fact that we in turn find dog meat and rat meat abhorrent for very different reasons is a problem we’ll get back to soon enough). Similarly, there is no ethical theory (at least not one that takes animals themselves as morally relevant subjects) on which one could consistently hold that it is a moral transgression against an animal to use it for one’s own sexual gratification, but that it is at the same time morally permissible to slaughter that animal and eat it. 

Better screwed than stewed, is how Dan Savage put this same point, attempting to give voice to the interests of a sheep.  Of course, the presumption that sheep can’t have interests –and along with this that they can’t have life projects, preferences, that they can’t give consent or withhold it– is one that underlies much of the anthropocentric argument that slaughtering them can’t count as a moral transgression against them. But it is precisely this same point, that sheep are not the sort of creatures that can give consent, that is supposedly one of the most important grounds of our moral prohibition on having sex with them. Theorists attempting to account for the behavior of non-bestial carnivores –i.e., the huge majority of the human race— seem to want to have it both ways: they invoke the animals’ diminished capacity to have a say in constructing their own life as both a license to kill them –the ultimate withholding of moral concern– and as generating all sorts of particular obligations to animals, including the obligation not to have sex with them. There’s something fishy about this, and I think I know what it is: our explanations in terms of moral theories of what we can or can’t do with animals cannot possibly be made to be coherent, since what we can and can’t do with or to animals has nothing to do with our concern for their status as morally relevant entities, or with their rights, or anything of the sort. 

II.

Not mere things, but not people either, is how Catharine MacKinnon has acerbically characterized the received human view of animals. Certainly, any effort to push animals towards one end of this continuum or the other has generally been rejected as going too far. Thus Descartes’s doctrine of the bête-machine was disputed by nearly all of his contemporaries as extremist and as a violation of common sense, while this doctrine itself constituted a rejection of the extremism of figures such as Girolamo Rorario, the 16th-century Italian author of the treatise That Brute Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans. Aristotle accounted for the animals’ intermediacy by appeal to their possession of the sensitive, but not the rational soul; Leibniz, by appeal to their faculty of perception without apperception; and many today, by appeal to their low-grade cognition, without any grasp of the syntax that makes our own thinking so rich and distinctively human. How the grasp of syntax, or the failure to grasp it, is meant to translate into a measure of moral status remains, however, entirely unclear. As Richard Sorabji has noted, “They lack syntax, therefore we may eat them” is hardly a compelling argument.

Arguments have been proferred for the past two centuries to the effect that such and such things may not be done to animals in virtue of the rights these entities have, and that these rights are traceable to what these entities, in themselves, are, to their very natures. But these arguments come very late in a very long history of human coexistence with animals, in which the various things that we do with or to animals have been held to be significant principally in view of their significance for us.  We think of this significance as a ‘moral’ significance, but it seems to be one that arises prior to any moral reflection at all, one that is built into the very concept of animal.  Lists of rules governing contact with animals date back much earlier than animal rights, much earlier than the concept of rights itself, indeed much earlier than philosophy, and it remains the case today that most of what we consider permissible or impermissible to do with or to animal is pretheoretical, and theoretical elaborations of why we ought or ought not do certain things with or to animals tend to look a good deal like medieval philosophical arguments against ‘sodomy’: ad hoc rationalizations, under cover of deductive argumentation, of what is already largely accepted as the status quo.

We learn what animals and humans are, Cora Diamond argues, through “the structure of a life” in which we are here and do this, and they are there and do that.  For example, “we learn what a human being is in –among other ways– sitting at a table where we [humans] eat them [animals]” (98).  This structure of a life that gives rise to our very concepts of humans and animals is also what defines what it is possible to consider doing to these different sorts of entity.  Thus, there is no concept of a human or an animal independently of our understanding of what we may and may not do in our relation to them. What we may and may not do to a certain sort of entity might eventually be explicated in terms of moral duties, but for Diamond what one may do to a certain kind of thing is simply built into the concept of it, prior to any considerations of a ‘moral’ character in the sense that Singer understands morality.

Concept-formation precedes ‘morality’, and the grasp of a concept just is a grasp of  the various ways in which one may enter into relations with a thing.  The duties we have to human beings, Diamond holds, are a consequence not of the sort of things human beings are, but of the notion that we have of them, and we form our idea of the difference between humans and animals -of the range of things one may do to the different sorts of entity– in full awareness of the relevant respects in which they are similar to us. Diamond is interested here in accounting for why human beings tend to think it is alright to kill animals and eat their meat even though we are aware of the various respects –neurophysiological, etc.– in which they are similar to us. Yet a line of reflection similar to Diamond’s is also fruitful in attempting to account for why human beings tend to think it is not alright to engage in sexual relations with animals. 

What defines the range of what may appropriately be done to animals –and what makes this range something different from the respective ranges of what one may do to or with plants, humans, and artefacts– has nothing to do with the animal’s innate capacities, but only with the valenced position they occupy in a social system that has always already existed once any effort is made to reflect on it in terms of moral philosophy.  The discovery of the irrelevance of capacities arguments in general gives us occasion to reconsider the true sources of our sense of what it is or is not moral to do to animals. This sense, I believe, is not something separate from our very concept of animal: concept formation consists precisely in learning the range of possible relations with the entity in question.

III.

I would like now to attempt to lay out what I take to be the principal arguments against bestiality, in order then to show, in the following and final section, why all of them so far have missed the mark entirely.

1. Impossibility of consent. We generally take the treatment of an entity as a morally relevant one to be wrapped up with the fact that this entity is of the sort that is capable of having projects for its future.  The sort of entity that can form long term projects is the sort we take to be able to give consent to enter into certain kinds of relations, among these sexual relations. We take it to be wrong to enter into certain relations with entities that might, under other circumstances, give consent, that might be able to say, ‘this is consonant with my conception of how I want my life to unfold,’ but nonetheless are unable to do so at present.  Thus child-molestation and necrophilia can be denounced on the grounds that a potentially project-having creature cannot give consent, due to the fact that one person is approaching another with sexual intentions either too soon or too late. (Necrophilia is a more complicated case, since it is difficult to account for how a dead person can have interests at all that might be violated, but I do not want to pursue this difficulty here.)

There has been precious little discussion of bestiality among moral philosophers, other than one succinct notice in the popular press from Peter Singer, of which the purpose seems more to taunt the mainstream for the vehemence of their opposition to it, rather than to inquire after the reasons for this opposition. Here, Singer’s one criterion for the rightness or wrongness of conduct with an animal is, as in his other writings, whether the animal suffers.  Some men, he notes coolly, decapitate chickens in the middle of raping them.  But, Singer asks, “is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.” Moreover, Singer continues, “sex with animals does not always involve cruelty.”

What Singer fails to notice, though, is that cruelty is generally not at issue in the way people assess the moral valence of sex with animals. Having sex with a chicken is no worse for the chicken than what is involved in egg production, yet few will deny that sex with chickens is further from what is generally perceived as acceptable behavior than is support of the poultry industry. Singer believes that current practice is not acceptable, and wants to make our moral commitments vis-à-vis animals line up with a reasoned consideration of what animals are. His reasoned consideration leaves him with the conclusion that sex with animals is fine, as long as it does not hurt them, whereas beating them and killing them, insofar as these hurt them, are always wrong. In other words, considering what animals in themselves are leads Singer to the conclusion that the rules governing our actions with them should be the same as those governing our actions with other humans.

MacKinnon for her part sees the inability of animals to consent as one possible source of our prohibilition of bestiality: “Why do laws against sex with animals exist?… Moralism aside, maybe the answer is that people cannot be sure if animals want to have sex with us.  Put another way, we cannot know if their consent is meaningful” (267). But does anyone really think non-violent sexual contact with a non-consenting animal is really bad for it? It seems much more likely that MacKinnon is off the mark here, and that any effort to account for prohibitions on bestiality in terms of protecting the rights of beasts amounts to a gross overstretching of rights talk into areas of the lives of creatures where it clearly does not have any relevance. Singer, though perhaps the most vocal defender of a comportment towards animals that takes seriously the idea that they are rights-bearing entities, to his credit acknowledges that, even if animals have rights, non-violent sexual contact doesn’t seem to be a violation of these rights.

Yet the very fact that animals react with such indifference to behavior –namely, sexual behavior– that in humans is always accompanied by all manner of questions about how this instance of it fits into our lives, about whether it enhances or diminishes our autonomy, whether it is ‘good’ or not, shows that animals are so very different from humans that it might not be an easy matter at all to extend a concept –that of rights– from its original application in the human domain all the way to sea-anemones.  A sea-anemone can’t be raped, not violently, not statutorily.  It’s just not the sort of entity for which this is a meaningful concept to employ. What about a sheep? A sheep could almost certainly be raped violently, but what the creature itself would find objectionable, if I may be permitted to imagine myself into its place, would probably be the violence of it, and not the rape itself. On MacKinnon’s thinking, a sheep could also be a victim of statutory rape: it could be ignorant of the harm done to it, yet harmed it would still be.  This strikes me as absurd.

2. The Kantian position: bestiality as masturbation. Most animal protection laws, in any case, do not take animals to be rights-bearers at all, but instead are rooted in a Christian-cum-Kantian ethical theory according to which animals are a sort of simulation of morally relevant entities.  Thus in the US, “only Utah categorizes the laws against sexual contact by humans with animals under cruelty to animals” (MacKinnon, ibid.).  For a Kantian, it is not that beating a dog is really a moral wrong committed against the dog itself, but since beating dogs might serve as a gateway to beating morally relevant humans, it is nonetheless forbidden. “Animals are a means to an end,” as Kant says, “and humans are that end.”  If behavior towards animals could eventually impact behavior towards humans, it becomes indirectly morally relevant. 

For a strict Kantian, masturbation with the help of a sex toy and bestiality are wrong for exactly the same reason.  Both involve the use of a mere means to an end for one’s own self-gratification, and for Kant there could be no ontological difference between the artefact and the animal that might make a moral difference.  The simple act of self-gratification, Kant thinks, means that one also takes oneself as a means to an end, that is, one fails to recognize one’s proper human status as an end that cannot be a means.  For this reason, Kant believes that “such an unnatural use of one’s sexual attributes” amounts to “a violation of one’s duty to himself,” regardless of whatever morally irrelevant tools, including animals, might come into play. For Kant, masturbation is so terrible that it does not even deserve to be called by its name. It is worse than suicide, since in suicide one at least displays the fortitude to transform oneself into a non-end once and for all. Masturbation is so infinitely bad that the mere incorporation of an additional tool into the act can’t possibly tip the scale any further.

For anyone who is not a strict Kantian (most of us, I think, as far as this question is concerned), tool-aided masturbation and bestiality clearly are different, for the simple reason that sexual contact with an animal, unlike sexual contact with a vibrator, is unavoidably a sexual relation.  A vibrator is a tool, a means to an end, and this end may be fulfilled alone. Even if we are all in disagreement about whether animals have full moral status, we non-Kantians will all agree that an animal is not like a vibrator. It cannot be a tool, but is always a being, and if one has sexual contact with it, one has sexual contact with some sort of other. 

3. Non-mutuality. Some argue that the problem with bestiality is that, even if an animal is undeniably an other, it is still the sort of other that lacks life projects. Thus a sexual relation with an animal can’t amount to a shared life project, and –it is presumed– any morally praiseworthy sexual relation ought to be such a project. Something like this account is often heard in response to the conservative complaint that to permit homosexuality in our society will lead quickly to an ‘anything goes’ atmosphere in which bestiality, among other perversions, thrives. As Rick Santorum said, once you’ve got man-on-man sex, why not man-on-dog? 

John Corvino, in a recent article, responds to Santorum’s reasoning with a lengthy account of the various respects in which homosexuality differs from ‘PIB’, that trifecta of unacceptable relations: pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. Corvino’s argument to keep bestiality in its traditional place, while helping to promote homosexuality from its (recently) traditional place into a preferable one, is based in the claim that sexual contact with an animal cannot contribute to the development of a meaningful relationship with an other, cannot, by definition, contribute to a profound interpersonal interaction, while a homosexual, intraspecies relationship is as well suited to do so as a heterosexual one. This claim is true, as far as it goes, but it presupposes that such profundity is an intrinsic feature of any morally salutary sexual contact. I’m not saying it’s not, but as Corvino himself says, it is the job of philosophers to investigate presuppositions.   

There are all kinds of sexual activity that one could argue are morally salutary, or at least not morally nugatory, that nonetheless do not involve mutual growth and profound interpersonal communication.  Consider Jan Švankmajer’s film, Conspirators of Pleasure. This is the story of people who build elaborate machines with which to masturbate. These count as projects, to say the least, and this is to say that masturbation –a form of sexual activity that cannot by definition involve mutual growth or communication, since there is only one person involved– is not necessarily just a sexual release.  Potentially, one may approach bestiality in the same way in which Švankmajer’s characters approach masturbation, as a project, or even a consuming passion. The rural adolescent with limited options is one thing, the protagonist of Edward Albee’s play, The Goat –who falls in love with a goat after looking into its eyes and sensing, deep in his soul, that the beast undersands him– is quite another.  (We might also consider Roberto Benigni’s character in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, who recounts to a priest his past affairs, and how he decided to move on from a watermelon to a sheep after realizing that a meaningful sexual encounter involves a creature “with a soul.”) We may say Albee’s character is warped, and leave it at that. But –and this is something Albee clearly wants us to consider– the same point has often been made about homosexual desire, and it behooves the philosopher as well as the playwright to provide an account of what it is about this particular class of entities that makes desiring them something only a warped person could do.   

In any case Santorum was comparing apples and oranges (or maybe something more like apples and orange-hood), since what was at issue in the state of Pennsylvania, where he served as congressman, was not whether men were having sex with men (they were), but rather whether men should be allowed to marry other men. For this, there is no analogous debate regarding human-animal relations, which goes to show how very different are the issues of sex and marriage. We do know that among certain groups of Mongol-Turkic nomads, it is possible to marry inanimate objects. Lawrence Krader tells us that “[a]n unwed mother or a pregnant girl who has no husband is often married to a prayer rug, a tree, a terra-cotta figurine (of a lion, etc.)… The purpose of these anomalous marriages is to give a social standing to the child…  Another form of anomalous marriage is that of an unmarried girl with a belt belonging to a guest who is permitted to cohabit with the girl with a family in accordance with the rules of hospitality.” These possibilities do not stem from a prior recognition of the possibility of having sex with the inanimate objects; girls who are married off to statues or to rugs know at the outset that they will not be having sex with their unresponsive spouses. The objects simply function as placeholders in a logic of kinship that requires pairings at all costs, and that makes do with things like statues when there are no men available.

This anthropological datum serves to underline how different the question of possible legal kinship pairings is from the question of possible morally permissible sex acts. This example even suggests the surprising conclusion that we might sooner find a culture that permits marriage to animals than we could find one that permits sex with them. In our culture, of course, marriage is thought (or hoped) to be based on love, and in-love is a state in which people having sex are thought, or hoped, to be. But this is by no means a necessary feature of the concept of marriage in general, or of particular instances of marriage in reality.  At a minimum, to be married is to conceive of oneself, and to be so conceived by one’s society, as being one of the members of a pair. Corvino is right to distinguish the question of sex from the question of legal recognition of a relationship that is seen as ideally involving sex, but again, wrong to presume that the moral status of bestiality derives directly from the objective limits to the reciprocal meaningfulness of an animal-human relationship. Anyway we can grant that sex with a horse will not lead to mutual emotional growth, but Corvino is wrong to take it for granted that such mutuality is a sine qua non of salutary sexual relations (again, it might in fact be a sine qua non, but philosophers don’t take things for granted).

4. Fear of hybridism. There is another argument that we should perhaps briefly mention, one that was once very important but that has fallen out of fashion in the light of increased knowledge of the relevant scientific facts. For much of history, one concern about bestiality was that it would lead to monstrous hybrids. The classical moral argument against bestiality thus resembled the one still commonly invoked against incest: it leads to birth defects, and so our morality is a simple reflection of inflexible genetic facts. Richard Posner notes that “[t]he belief… behind making it a capital offense for a human being to have sexual intercourse with an animal –that such intercourse could produce a monster– was unsound, and showing that it was unsound undermined the case for punishment” (67). Today, we have more or less accepted that it is unsound, as we now know that, for the most part, cross-fertility is not a real possibility. But it is certainly understandable that in the absence of real knowledge of how genetics works, our ancestors might have been truly concerned about the need to police the boundaries of our species by prohibiting bestiality. In this respect, the prohibition on sex with animals would have nothing to do with morality at all, but would simply be an instance of group selection, and the moral accounts given of it simply afterthoughts. 

5. Debasement. Just as Peter Singer had predicted,  the primary mainstream objection to his stance in partial favor of bestiality –if the The New Republic and National Review Online are representative– is that sex between humans and nonhumans, regardless of the circumstances in which it occurs, is “an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.” For Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online, for example, the red flag is any suggestion that “humans ain’t nothing special” (“Peter Singer Strikes Again,” March 8). Singer notes that the vehemence with which people react to bestiality “suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals.” I can also imagine a second version of the debasment argument that would not emphasize the specialness of humans, as does Lopez’s version, but instead would locate the wrongness of bestiality in the fact that it is an instance of promiscuity in general.

To invoke the debasing character of bestiality is hardly to make an argument; it is only to give a gut reaction without explaining why the idea of this deed has this effect on the gut. Gut reactions may be the most we can hope for in issues such as this, but I think I have at least an inkling of an explanation of why we might justly call bestiality wrong, an explanation that does not, I hope, amount to either a mere gut reaction (as does 5), nor to a reliance on false scientific beliefs (as does 4), nor a reliance on an unargued presupposition about the minimal conditions of salutary sexual contact (as does 3), nor a reduction of the animal to a morally irrelevant tool, coupled with an implausible argument against self-gratification as a betrayal of human dignity (as does 2), nor a strained invocation of the animal’s supposed rights (as does 1). 

IV.

I have already argued that most of what we believe it is permissible or impermissible to do with or to animals arises not from moral reflection, but from pre-moral concept formation, from, as Cora Diamond says, the fact that we are here and do this, and they are there and do that. I think this approach can help us to get to the heart of the matter and to determine what’s really so abhorrent about bestiality.

Bestiality is, quite simply, weird. Now I want to make an important theoretical distinction between, on the one hand, the predicate ‘weird’ in this instance, and, on the other hand, predicates such as ‘base’ or ‘vile’ or ‘repulsive’.  ‘Weird’ here means ‘does not fit with our concept of the thing’, a concept that is formed prior to moral reflection.  On this view, then, having sex with an animal is weird in the same way as, say, keeping a watch-pony in the yard, hitching up your German shepherd to plow the field, going to the zoo to look at common house cats, or serving up rat meat. There is nothing ‘morally’ wrong with any of these activities, in the sense that no real harm is done to any creatures (or at least no more harm is done to the rat or the German shepherd than the harm ordinarily permitted when it comes to beasts of burden or beef on the hoof), but they nonetheless make a mess of our usual conceptual distinctions between work animals, food animals, exotic animals, pets, and vermin.

In important respects, pets, vermin, food animals, and work animals are as different from one another as all of them are from human beings. In some cases, the rigidity with which these different conceptual categories determine what we may do with or to animals belonging in them is at least as great as the rigidity with which an entity’s membership in the class of animals determines that we may not have sex with it, or another entity’s membership in the class of humans determines that we may not keep it on a leash. Zoophile pornography is illegal, but largely tolerated, whereas a restaurant that would dare to serve dog meat, in North America, anyway, would be shut right down, even though, I insist again, there is nothing worse in eating a dog than there is in eating a cow. It seems reasonable to suggest, moreover, that the significance of an act of bestiality with a beloved pet is at least as different from, say, one with a sea anemone as it is from one with another human being.  Barnyard bestiality seems already quite different from pet bestiality, and this, we may presume, has to do with the important conceptual difference between food animals and pets. The use of a sea anemone seems barely worth denouncing as bestiality at all, but rather seems more similar to the use of any inanimate sex toy; or to the now legendary purpose to which a cow’s liver was put by Philip Roth’s protagonist in Portnoy’s Complaint.   

Conceptual distinctions between vermin, pet, etc., I think, do the heavy work of determining the range of what we perceive it fitting to do with the differents sorts of animal, prior to any moral reflection about what sort of treatment animals, in view of what they in themselves are, deserve. The conceptual categories into which different sorts of animal are placed have nothing to do with their neurophysiology, their ability or inability to use syntax to generate novel sentences, or their ability or inability to freely give consent. The wrongness involved in an action that betrays a failure to grasp the concept of pet or vermin, in turn, has nothing to do with the perception of harm to the creature.  It has only to do with the perception of harm to the shared conceptual scheme that enables us to give order and meaning to the world around us. No set of rules does more to contribute to this order and meaning than the set that dictates who may have sex with whom or what, when, where, and in what manner. And this is why bestiality is wrong. 

—

Justin E. H. Smith really is a philosopher. For an archive of some of his academic work, please visit www.jehsmith.com/philosophy.

For an extensive archive of his non-academic writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Edward B. Rackley

Once again, Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe made headlines today by issuing a new billion dollar note to keep up with the currency’s free-fall devaluation. The ICC war crimes indictment against Sudan president Omar al Bashir was also widely covered, as was the killing of Rwandan peacekeepers in Darfur last week. No one can accuse the international media of ignoring the human cost of these despots.

And yet, Darfur cannot count a death toll higher than a few hundred thousand. Mugabe would rather kill than feed his people, but how many have actually perished? Very few. Does either context represent a regional security threat? Chinese and Russian vetoes of proposed Security Council resolutions against these two regimes may seem duplicitous and self-interested, but their argument that neither crisis is sufficiently lethal or destabilizing to its neighbors is accurate. Best to let the fire burn out, wait for a coup d’etat or pray for popular intefadah.

Congo’s war is different in every way. Over four million people have died here, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since WWII. It hosts the world’s largest UN peacekeeping force; at one point seven different national armies were fighting on Congolese territory. Neighboring countries continue to support various rebel groups here, and yet regional stability depends heavily on a pacified Congo. After years of foreign-funded peace talks and a tenuous transitional government, in 2006 the international community again forked out over $400 million for presidential elections. While these were generally free and fair, nothing has changed in the country.

President Kabila’s promises of massive reconstruction and reconciliation upon election have proven hollow. Instead he’s obsessed with consolidating and centralizing power, undermining planned provincial elections as his now-defamed party would lose across the board. So it’s déjà vu all over again as he drags the country back thirty years to Mobutu-style autocracy. All this and more, yet Congo’s problems are virtually unknown to the outside world.

Pyromaniac for president

Unfortunately, autocracy does not mean control for Kabila, who is weak and easily manipulated where Mobutu was steely and merciless. So Kabila watches as conflict burns here in the country’s eastern provinces. Twenty different armed groups continue to thrust and parry, murdering, raping, pillaging and displacing the civilians in whose name they claim to fight. Here in North Kivu alone, the number of displaced is estimated at 850,000, with a hundred thousand newly displaced in the last six months. The national army (FARDC) is ragtag, untrained, ill-equipped and must extort local populations to feed itself. Civilians flee areas of FARDC deployment, claiming they are better treated by rebel groups—whose leaders are wanted by the ICC. Talk about desperation.

After several humiliating defeats at the hands of these eastern rebels, most recently last December, Kabila called the US Embassy and asked for help. He agreed to negotiate with the strongest rebel leader, Laurent Nkunda, and international facilitation was brought in to moderate the talks. By end January, concessions were made, amnesty extended, and a political settlement was on the table. The FARDC would absorb rebel troops, whose leaders would be given senior posts in the national army. There would be no ‘surrender’ by rebels, or justice for victims, only ‘integration’ of the forces negatives. Peace on the cheap, African style.

Since then, Kabila has begun to regret the decision. Hardliners who have Kabila’s ear appeal to his national pride, cannot abide negotiating with rebels, and despite repeated humiliations on the battle field, continue to fantasize over a military victory. Over 200 ceasefire violations have been documented since January.

Got BATNA?

One international body for whom Congo is not forgotten is the ICC. Former Ituri warlord Thomas Lubanga is in The Hague right now pending trial. Kabila’s opposant in the national elections, Senator Jean-Pierre Bemba, was recently apprehended by ICC officials while fleeing exile in Portugal for the US. Why the US? Because it doesn’t recognize the ICC, and Bemba thought he could escape extradition once on US soil.

Rebels who had agreed to the negotiated integration plan now smell a rat. The four most powerful groups have pulled out of the process. Everyone is now re-arming, recruiting, and training. So Plan B, the military option—aka the ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’, or BATNA—is back on the front burner. Rebels know they can win any contest, and Kabila cannot stand to lose. The Angolan army, staunch Kabila supporters, is supposedly on call to assist.

Meanwhile, donors are putting together expensive programs to professionalize the national army and police, and to facilitate the integration of rebel forces. Ironically, the best way to kill the military option would be to let Kabila’s army decay to the point where accommodating the rebels is the only way out. More irony: reinforcing state security with massive international funding is exactly how the West propped up African dictators throughout the Cold War.

So while eastern Congo is not quite Somalia in terms of daily carnage and utter intractability, it could very well become Somalia as donors tire of funding false-start negotiations and aid agencies realize they have no access to targeted populations because of ongoing insecurity. If we all got out of here and let the cards fall where they may, anti-interventionists and their Chomskyite variants would have their day. But we would surely have another Somalia in humanitarian terms, and a possible regional war.

by Jason S. Bardi

Approaching 1:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I am wondering if I will get my first blog post finished (’twas due 45 minutes ago). I have that desperation that anyone who is up past midnight has, and because of this, coupled with the fact that the story I am telling concerns a discovery also made past midnight, I am dedicating this column to all the artists, writers, scientists, and other crazy creative people who stay up late troubling over great things.

This is the story of Planet Ceres, the Prince of Dwarves. You may have heard Ceres’ name mentioned about a month ago, when the brouhaha over Pluto’s status erupted again. I am not going to say much about Pluto other than to point out the obvious: its drama is a human drama and has very little to do with the planet itself. Pluto is an inanimate object. It hurtles out there, beyond the orbit of Neptune. It lies so far away from fickle human categorization that even if it had consciousness, a personality (“that Pluto’s a hellofa guy”), it would be safely immune from hurt feelings. Pluto has no personality. It is a rock. How could it care what happens here on Earth?

We humans care a great deal. The big news, about a month ago, was that Pluto was reclassified again. Once a planet, it had been classified a dwarf planet two years ago. This story got an overwhelming media response. Then in June it was reclassified as a “plutoid.” This time around, the story also garnered a fair bit of media attention — if for no other reason than many reporters seem amused that the chosen name was plutoid. “Such a (not) graceful term,” declared MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker, which also summarized the major coverage of the event in the wires and dailies. See here.

ABC’s Ned Potter summed it up well in his blog when he said: “The goal of science is to understand and categorize the universe, and new categories are needed as our understanding of the universe changes…”

“But…Plutoid?”

This is not the story of Pluto. Instead, this is the story of another rock caught in the renaming game — one much closer to earth and with an interesting history of its own.

What you may have heard about Ceres is what the IAU said in its official Pluto release. “The dwarf planet Ceres is not a plutoid,” the release says, “as it is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” (Plutoids are objects further than Neptune).

What you may not have read about Ceres is how it was discovered there, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, more than 200 years ago. By the way, this story is an excerpt (including extensive unused material) from my forthcoming book The Fifth Postulate (Wiley, 2008). Pre-order your copy on Amazon today!

With no further ado, here is a story I like to call:

The Once and Future Prince of Dwarves

One of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century was also perhaps its earliest. It was just after midnight on New Year’s Day 1801, and an Italian monk and astronomer named Giuseppe Piazzi was up late searching the skies from his rooftop observatory in Palermo, Sicily. He saw something that night that would change his life forever. Peering through his telescope, he spotted an object, watched it for several nights, carefully recorded its location as it traversed the sky, and eventually lost track of it.

Piazzi wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Was it a comet? His letters indicated that he thought it could be—perhaps a comet without a tail. He hoped, though, that it was something else, something “better than a comet,” as he wrote. What exactly qualifies as better-than-comet status? Just what Piazzi was intending to find: a new planet.

Finding a new planet was, in fact, one of the great scientific quests of the day. It was a completely new and exciting endeavor, and Piazzi and others were not just looking for any new planet. They were looking for the “missing” planet. The ancients knew of only five planets other than Earth — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But the scientific world had been turned on its head in 1781 when William Herschel at his private observatory in Bath, England, spotted something he thought could be a star or a comet. It turned out to be the new planet Uranus.

This raised the possibility that there might be even more undiscovered planets in the solar system. J. D. Titus and J. E. Bode gave this possibility a firm theoretical basis by forwarding an idea that there logically must be a planet between Jupiter and Mars. The basis of their claim was their observation that the six known planets followed an orderly, even spacing, thus suggesting that all the planets should be so spaced. But the gap between Mars and Jupiter was about twice what would be predicted by their theory. The emptiness was deafening.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, astronomers had been looking for a planet between Mars and Jupiter for several years, and the search was heating up. Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, the court astronomer at Gotha, began a formal, systematic search involving a team of astronomers. Piazzi, in his observatory in Sicily, was one of a group of twenty-four astronomers in Europe who made up this team. With such a large force of astronomers gearing up to look for the missing planet, Piazzi must have been surprised when he hit pay dirt quickly that New Year’s Day, spotting his object in orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter, exactly where the missing planet should have been.

Piazzi continued to track the object as long as he could, but he became ill on February 11, presumably from too many sleepless January nights exposed to the elements. In any case, the object passed behind the sun, and he lost sight of it. Piazzi had already sent letters that January to the directors of the observatories in Paris, Berlin, and Milan, telling them that he had discovered a small comet with no tail—or something—and giving them the coordinates. By then, Piazzi had decided to presumptively name his object. He called it Cerere Ferdinandea, combining the names of a Roman goddess of the harvest with his own Sicilian king. We know this object by its more common name: Ceres. In one of the letters, he was bold enough to suggest that it might be a planet.

By that summer, word had gotten around. The discovery was announced with excitement in a long article in a leading German astronomy journal edited by Baron von Zach. This was “a long supposed, now probably discovered, new major planet of our solar system between Mars and Jupiter,” wrote von Zach.

For the discovery to be meaningful, however, this mysterious new planet had to be located again. The only problem was, nobody knew exactly where to find Ceres. It had disappeared, and this started one of the great hunts in the history of astronomy. Astronomers, professional and amateur alike, began scanning the skies with telescopes to locate the mysterious new rock — all without success. Ceres was still there, of course, rounding its way around the sun. But where?

This was a wonderful problem in applied mathematics. Mathematics alone could (and eventually would) locate the planet if it could be used to compute Ceres’s orbit. Then, given the orbit of Ceres, astronomers of the day could locate the missing planet by simply searching along the path where they knew it should be. But how could mathematicians determine the orbit?

Perhaps the easiest way, in theory, would be to chart enough of it—making careful observations of its exact location in the sky night after night as it made its journey around the sun. If you were able to observe enough positions of Ceres on enough nights, and if you were able to record the observations, you would have enough of a plot of its actual orbit to be able to fill in the gaps.

What if all you had was enough data to fill one tiny gap? How could you determine the orbit of Ceres if there was only a limited amount of available orbital data? This was exactly the situation in which mathematicians and astronomers found themselves in 1801. Piazzi had carefully recorded the position of Ceres on several nights over a period of forty-one days from his observatory in Sicily.

Many astronomers of the day reasoned that it would still be possible to calculate the entire orbit from these observations. They could estimate its orbit, and from that they could determine where Ceres should be by calculating how far it would have traveled since Piazzi last saw it. One would then have to simply point a telescope to the location farther along this path where it should be.

With that in mind, an astronomer named Johann Karl Burckhardt used the tools of “celestial mechanics” as they were known and published a preliminary orbit of Ceres in July. In September von Zach published the complete set of observations made by Piazzi. They were both hopeful that this would be enough. It was not.

The difficulty was that prior to the discovery of Ceres, celestial mechanics had only been successfully applied to predicting the orbits of comets. Comets are much brighter than planetary bodies and may be visible for a longer period of time on their approach to the sun. They are easier to handle, in other words. Ceres is not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, so it had to be spotted with a telescope. This greatly limited the area of the sky that could be systematically searched.

Computing the orbit of Ceres was exceedingly difficult because recording observations taken over just a few weeks only gives you a few closely spaced points on the overall path of the object around the sun. Such a small piece of the orbit confounded any attempt to extrapolate the entire orbit because small errors in the observations could have massive effects on the overall calculation.

A month after Baron von Zach published Piazzi’s full set of observations, he reported the sad news that several astronomers had been looking for Ceres in the previous two months without success. Burckhardt’s efforts to plot the orbit had failed. Such was the desperate state of affairs when the Ceres data reached Gauss sometime in the fall of 1801.

Gauss was not an astronomer in the regular early-nineteenth-century sense. He had neither telescope nor observatory. But, being adept at pushing pencils around on a desk, he was perfectly suited to tackle this problem. In 1801, when Ceres swept across Gauss’s radar, he pushed everything else aside, picked up his pencil, and went to work.

“Could I ever have found a more seasonable opportunity to test the practical value of my conceptions, that now employing them for the determination of the orbit of the planet Ceres, which after the lapse of a year must be looked for in a region off the heavens very remote from that in which it was last seen?” Gauss wrote.

By November 1801, he began making notes on the problem, and by the end of the month he had solved it, working out a solution to a system of seventeen equations that predicted where Ceres would be. He communicated his calculated orbit to von Zach, and in December von Zach published the predicted orbit, writing, “Great hope for help and facilitation is accorded to us by the recently shared investigation and calculation of Dr. Gauss in Brunswick.”

By then, astronomers were already searching the skies for Ceres, looking where Gauss predicted it would be. Winter weather being what it was, they were not immediately successful. On December 7, however, von Zach located the planet almost exactly where Gauss predicted it would be, as Gauss himself wrote, on “the first clear night, when the planet was sought for as directed by the numbers deduced from it, restored the fugitive to observation.”

The secret to Gauss’s success was a technique he invented called the method of least squares, which is a way of minimizing the error of observations. The problem, as Gauss saw it, was to determine the orbit by finding a curve that corresponded with the observed data and then correct the curve to find the best fit. The method of least squares helps by approximating an orbit based on the few observations and then improving, or “fitting,” the orbit to the data. The fitting works by minimizing the differences between the observed and computed points in the orbit multiplied by themselves (thus “least squares”). It was a simple but remarkable discovery.

The truly remarkable thing about Gauss, though, is that when he invented the method of least squares, he didn’t think much of it. He didn’t even bother to publish it because it was so obvious to him that he was convinced some other mathematician had surely thought of it already! In fact, other mathematicians did develop the method of least squares independent of Gauss, including the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, who was also the first to publish the method and was subsequently recognized as its inventor.

Gauss was overjoyed about the rediscovery of Ceres, and his enthusiasm was echoed by dozens of his contemporaries, many of whom had been trying to do just what he had done. In his overly humble way, he was careful not to promote himself too aggressively, and he credited much older mathematicians like Isaac Newton for working out the theoretical foundations upon which he laid his mathematical prediction.

Nevertheless, the calculation launched Gauss to fame and elevated him to a stature on a par with the top astronomers in Europe. When Alexander von Humboldt returned to Europe from the United States in 1804, he went immediately to Paris, cosmopolitan capital that it was. There he was impressed to find a name of a young German mathematician mentioned over and over as one of the great geniuses of the day.

Gauss’s rediscovery of Ceres had a profound effect on his personal and professional life. He soon gained membership in numerous scientific societies, and by the time he died, he would be a member of all the major societies in Europe. He began to spend more and more time on astronomical observations, carefully following planets and comets and watching eclipses. On many nights during the next half century, he could be found late at night observing the stars through his telescope and taking measurements with his sextant and recording all. He named his firstborn son Joseph, after Piazzi.

Ceres, on the other hand, did not fare so well.

Astronomers were astonished by the discovery of a similar object they called Pallas a few months later. Two years after that another, named Juno, was spotted. All three were in orbit around the sun at approximately the same distance. Yet another object like them, called Vesta, was discovered soon thereafter.

These discoveries had a tremendous effect on popular astronomy. Some would watch the skies for years afterward, hoping to make a similar discovery. All of this was in vain. It was decades before more of these objects were discovered. They were not really planets at all, but object we would have called asteroids, a word that the astronomer William Herschel coined because objects like it appeared like stars in his telescope.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, astronomers began spotting them in droves—hundreds more by the end of the century. A single photograph taken in 1900 revealed five entirely new ones. By the early twentieth century, there were so many known asteroids that they were regarded as dull curiosities or worse—annoyances. They stood in the way of observations of distant solar systems and were themselves uninteresting.

Later in the twentieth century this changed again. Asteroids are now the focus of important geological questions because they are representatives of the early solar system. Ceres is a special example of this. It was formed within ten million years or so after the birth of the solar system. It is a throwback to an earlier time in the solar system—a primordial planetoid 600 miles in diameter. It is a remnant of the cloud of matter that collapsed and formed our solar system nearly five billion years ago.

Perhaps Ceres was inappropriately named. In ancient myth, Ceres was the Roman goddess of plants, but there is nothing organic about her namesake. It is a rock and nothing more, with no atmosphere and no life. Ceres is smaller than the Earth and much smaller than Jupiter and the other giant planets, and smaller even than the moons scattered throughout the solar system. Ceres and the rest of the objects in the asteroid belt never really had a chance to pull together because of the gravity of the solar system. Blame Jupiter, the biggest of the planets and gravitationally speaking the most influential. Ceres and the other thousands of asteroids were caught between the gravitational pull of it and the sun.

Ceres is similar to the icy moons of the outer planets. Its diameter is about a quarter that of Earth’s moon, and it circles the sun in 4.6 years. What is most interesting about Ceres is that it is the planetary equivalent of a wooly mammoth frozen in the ice. It may still contain some of this primordial ice. Studying it may give insight into the formation of our own planets and our neighbor planets.

Appreciation of Ceres grew again in the last quarter of the twentieth century because of this possibility. The asteroid belt is something like an astronomical archive, and two of its most ancient and valuable tomes are Ceres and Vesta. These two asteroids have remained intact since the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, escaping severe damage by collisions with other protoplanets. NASA now has a mission called the DAWN spacecraft that will reach Ceres around 2015. See the NASA Fact Sheet.

DAWN uses a flashy technology called an ion drive that relies on charging ions of the element xenon and then firing them out of the back of the engine. This provides very little thrust, and on Earth such an engine would be ineffective against the friction of our atmosphere. But in space, the ion engine can slowly accelerate the satellite for months. DAWN has solar sails, ion thrusters fueled by 400 kilograms of xenon, a satellite dish, cameras, and a payload of scientific equipment, such as infrared and gamma-ray spectrometers, that will map the surface, search for water, and determine the chemical and mineral compositions of the asteroids. Scientists hope to understand some of the processes that were taking place in the earliest days of the solar system, such as the role of water.

Now back to Pluto. Even before DAWN was launched in 2007, the status of Ceres was under consideration when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) set up a committee that would decide on the criteria that defines a planet. Possible definitions rely on the size, orbit, and uniqueness of the orbit. Under these criteria, Ceres was not set to be reconsidered as a planet. The real deliberations were over whether or not Pluto should be given planet status.

Pluto had been declared a planet when it was discovered some seventy-five years ago, but at that time nobody had defined what a planet was. Size alone will not cut it. Judging by size, the Earth’s moon is bigger than Pluto. So are the two largest moons of Saturn and Jupiter. So is Neptune’s moon Triton. In its report, the IAU defined a planet as anything spherical, revolving the sun, and larger than 2,000 kilometers across. Under this definition Pluto would be a planet, but then so would a nearby object discovered in 2003. Some advocated on Pluto’s behalf. Others dismissed it outright. Some suggested waiting. But waiting was the last thing on the agenda, because the confusion had created something of a backlog of small objects that could not be named until astronomers knew what naming convention to use.

Unfortunately for Pluto, planets are not named by organizations like the IAU on the basis of popular culture or history. The stage was set for a showdown at the Twenty-sixth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in August 2006. The matter was simply referred to the entire IAU membership, and the IAU declared Pluto and Ceres dwarf planets.

What is next for Ceres? Right now nothing. Ashley Yeager from Science News reports that if objects similar to Ceres are detected, they will be named Ceroids.

For now, the last word belongs to the International Astronomical Union release says, “Current scientific knowledge lends credence to the belief that Ceres is the only object of its kind. Therefore, a separate category of Ceres-like dwarf planets will not be proposed at this time.”

Among the asteroids, Ceres is the only dwarf planet, which makes it the king of the asteroids. And among the dwarves, it is unique — a prince. There seems to be no other object like it in the solar system, and I look forward to 2015, when the Prince of Dwarves begins to yield secrets of itself and perhaps the earliest days of the solar system.

Further Reading:

– G. Waldo Dunnington, Gauss: Titan of Science (Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 2004).

– C. T. Russell et al., “DAWN: A Journey to the Beginning of the Solar System,” www.ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/dawn/pdf/ACMConferencePaper, last visited May, 2007.

– Donald A. Teets and Karen Whitehead, “The Discovery of Ceres: How Gauss Became Famous,” Mathematics Magazine 72 (April 1999);

– W. K. Bühler, Gauss: A Biographical Study (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1981)

by Ram Manikkalingam

The US is a strange place. How you look really matters. Of course it matters everywhere else too. The clothes you wear, the way you wear them, your hairstyle or lack of it, your shoes and the bag you carry, all of these make a difference wherever you live. But, in the US, the colour of your skin, the shape of your nose and the way your hair curls, really really matters. Now the US is not the only place where lighter skin is considered better than darker (Indian magazines are full of skin whitening advertisements), or the wave of your hair or the shape of your nose is a focus of hairstylists and plastic surgeons. But in the US all this matters in a different way. It suggests not just social ideals of beauty or the social pressure to conform to particular aesthetic and stylistic sensisbilities associated with particular settings – it also indicates where you come from geographically and where your station might be in society and how society ought to treat you.

I observe this difference about the US, when I show photos of my family to my US friends, particularly the white ones. My brothers and sisters vary in shape, size and colour (and yes I am sure we have the same parents who are both Tamil from Sri Lanka). These friends invariably comment on how “racially” different members of my family appear. My brother could be southern European or middle eastern, some of my sisters central Asian, I could be African, another sister very South Asian etc. Those who are not from the US simply express how different we look. And those who are from the US use racial and ethnic categories to describe this difference.

In the American street (as Thomas Friedman would say) I am Black. And we know that in the US they treat you very differently if you are Black than if you are White. Brothers –- from the businessmen to the homeless — acknowledge me on the streets. When I ask for directions from a White person (not all) and I am wearing my sweatshirt, jeans and trainers –- they sometimes speak slowly and enunciate clearly how to go from one subway station to another -– just in case I do not understand. Don’t get me wrong –- nobody is rude to me. Nobody quite ignores me when I make a request. It is just that they treat me so differently on the streets of the US from how they treat me when I present a paper or give a lecture at a seminar, or in other professional settings that it is hard not to notice it. There they put me in a completely different category. They know my name and hear how I speak and suddenly I am not Black anymore. I become a South Asian academic.

Black, White or Foreign?

Barack isn’t Black enough – say some. And he is too Black say others. Or at least this is how his political dilemma is described. He needs to appeal to Whites without alienating Blacks. And his Blackness, particularly after the Jeremiah Wright episode, is viewed as a political challenge he needs to overcome in a racially divided America, because the Republicans will use a series of coded attacks, beginning with Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, as a more subtle and updated version of Willie Horton, to make Obama the Black candidate. And Obama’s strategy must be to avoid that label and become the candidate of both, if not all, racial groups. This anyway is how the racial tightrope that Obama needs to walk is usually described by pundits. Although he has run his race this way, I am not so sure it will continue to work as well for him in the future. Because the more successful he is at avoiding becoming either the Black or the White candidate, the more easily he can be made into the foreign candidate. After all, if you are American you’ve gotta be Black or White. So if you are neither Black nor White, you can’t be American.

Obama ran a successful post-racial campaign in a US that is not post-racial. He ran that for three reasons. The first is a pragmatic political one. As a Black candidate in what is still a White majority America, he cannot win as the Black candidate. The second is a moral one – ultimately for the US to have racial justice they also need to get beyond race –- both as a basis for discrimination and as a basis for redress — to a world where race matters less. And finally he was able to run a post-racial campaign for personal reasons -– his mother is White American and his father is a Black Kenyan . But Obama’s success at running a post-racial campaign in what is perceived as a racial US has made it easier for his opponents to portray him as foreign.

So this group of Americans (mainly White) are wary of him, not because he is too Black (or not Black enough), but because they link his not being quite Black or White to his foreignness – giving his antecedents a whiff of suspicion. In an extreme version, Obama to them becomes the Gay, Muslim candidate born in Africa, (it would be great if he were, except that he would not be able to legally run for President) ,not the post racial candidate of White-Black African-American ancestry. With this group being more Black may actually help, not hurt, Obama. Because whatever else White Americans have said about Blacks over the years –- even the most racist ones –- have never accused them of not being American. And I am optimistic enough to believe that an overwhelming majority of White Americans will vote for a Black candidate. His success as a candidate to date reflects this.

by Syed Tasnim Raza

Michael E. DeBakey died on July 11, 2008 of natural causes, just two months short of his 100th birthday. He was a pioneering, innovative, and world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon, whose surgical career spanned close to 70 years. While his name is most associated with Methodist Hospital of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, his career began at Tulane University in New Orleans in the late 1930s. It is at Tulane that he first described surgery for aortic aneurysms (ballooning of the aorta secondary to atherosclerosis) by cutting out the enlarged portion of the aorta and replacing it with a tube made out of Dacron. This operation has been performed millions of times throughout the world since then with great success.

Dr. DeBakey also described surgical treatment of another condition affecting the aorta, so-called aortic dissection, in which case the inner layer of the aorta (the intima) is torn, thus letting blood enter between the inner and outer layers, and as this condition progresses it shuts off the origins of major arteries coming off the aorta, causing stroke, heart attack, kidney failure and death if it remains untreated in a vast majority of patients. The classification of aortic dissection is named after DeBakey (DeBakey Types I, II and III). In December 2006, Dr. DeBakey himself suffered from Type I aortic dissection himself. He was 97 at the time and refused surgery due to his advanced age. But as the condition progressed he went into a coma and his wife and a long time associate, George Noon, asked for surgery to be performed against his expressed wish. The Ethics Committee of the hospital met, and in a controversial decision, permitted the operation to be performed, which was successful, although the recovery was complicated and he was hospitalized for over eight months, at a cost of over a million dollars. He fully recovered and remained active until his death.

Heart surgery was developed during the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Minneapolis and Rochester in Minnesota. Dr. DeBakey, while working independently and outside of those major centers, made significant contributions in this field also. The heart lung machine was developed by the pioneering efforts of John Gibbon in Philadelphia and first used there in 1952, but it was the roller pump invented by DeBakey as a senior medical student in 1939, which made it much more useable and widely applicable after late 1950’s. Rene Favalaro, a Brazilian surgeon working at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, developed coronary artery bypass operation in 1967 using the saphenous veins from the legs to bypass obstructed coronary arteries in the heart. It turns out that Dr. DeBakey had successfully done this operation as a desperate measure in a patient who could not be weaned off the heart lung machine in 1964 in Houston, but did not report it at the time. It was eventually reported in 1974. Dr. DeBakey developed the first ventricular assist device (VAD), a mechanical pump which can support the heart for weeks or months, 300 of which have been implanted in humans, and newer versions of his device are still being used.

During the Second World War, Dr. DeBakey proposed that surgeons and nurses be deployed on the front lines with army units for providing immediate care to the injured, thus avoiding delays of evacuation to army hospitals. These became the M.A.S.H. units in the Korean war.

Another area in which Dr. DeBakey contributed greatly was making the Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital in Houston one of the great medical education and research institutions in this country. At one time or the other he served there as the Chief Cardiovascular Surgeon, Chairman of Surgery, director of Cardiovascular Center, President of the hospital and Chancellor of the college. He took great pride as a teacher of surgery and trained hundreds of heart and vascular surgeons who are practicing throughout the world. He was known to be very demanding of the residents (though very charming to the patients and medical students), so much so that there are stories about his having slapped a resident on morning rounds, for having missed some minor point.

Another story which circulates among heart surgery residents is that a patient died just before morning rounds and no one wanted to break the news to Dr. DeBakey, so the patient was covered over by a sheet and Dr. DeBakey was told that there was no change in his condition, and they moved on. Another story about his dedication to surgery involves his first wife who died in 1972. Dr. DeBakey was operating when some one came in the room to give him the news. He asked not to be disturbed while he was operating and finished his day’s schedule at 7:00 PM, at which time he asked what was so urgent that could not wait for him to finish! Even if there is partial truth to these stories, they have circulated in the surgical circles for so long that most of us take them as true, since they do reflect his personality. By the time he retired in his late 80’s, DeBakey had performed over 60,000 operations! His former trainees have formed the highly prestigious Michael E. DeBakey Surgical Society.

Dr. DeBakey received numerous awards throughout his long career, including the Lasker Award, United Nations Lifetime Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, The National Medal of Science, Congressional Gold Medal and at least 38 other major awards form various professional medical associations and societies. I first met and heard Dr. DeBakey during my residency training in Buffalo where he came to receive the Roswell Park Gold Medal, an award given by the Buffalo Surgical Society annually to a distinguished surgeon. At that meeting Dr. DeBakey told us that he had interviewed for the position of Chairman of Surgery at the Buffalo General Hospital in 1963, but then decided to stay on in Houston! The last time I heard Dr. DeBakey was in 2000, when he was 92, still vigorous and active, and was given the American Association of Thoracic Surgery Lifetime Achievement Award.

The greatest protégée DeBakey produced was Denton Cooley, a surgeon originally trained under Alfred Blalock in Johns Hopkins Hospital, who then joined DeBakey in Houston. Within a few years Cooley broke from DeBakey and opened a competing heart center, the Texas Heart Institute, across the street form the Methodist Hospital. The two centers competed vigorously and both became internationally recognized centers of excellence.

Once when Dr. DeBakey was out of town, Dr. Cooley stole an early version of an experimental ventricular assist device from Methodist and implanted it in one of his patients. Dr. Cooley to this day says he did it as a desperate measure to save his patient’s life, Dr. DeBakey says he did it to be the first to implant a VAD! This became a national scandal and Dr. Cooley was censured by the American College of Surgeons. The two did not speak after that and feuded publicly at professional society meetings. Finally after 40 years of this widely reported feud last year the Denton Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society gave Dr. DeBakey a Lifetime Achievement Award, and with urgings from mutual friends, Dr. DeBakey agreed to attend the meeting. There he finally shook hands again with his long-time nemesis.

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born in New Orleans to Shaker and Raheeja Dabaghi (Anglicized to DeBakey), Maronite Christians from Lebanon, who immigrated to the United States because of religious persecution back home. He was one of five children and credits his parents for inculcating in him the values of education and hard work and service to others, which led him to his successful career. Dr. DeBakey is considered one of the greatest surgeons of the last century. His name will live on in many patient’s hearts, on many buildings and departments in Houston, with the work of hundreds of his trainees, and in his numerous publications and the devices that he developed, for many years to come.

///

Unworthy Guide
Jim Culleny

………..

This is the fabulous story of Heracleitus, the philosopher of Flux 

This is the very short version, in which super-misanthropic Heracleitus, who has shunned the family of Man, returns to the city from years in the woods a very sick man with bleak prospects.  He returns to find a cure for his misanthropy and decides on a odd remedy to draw out his bad humors.  He resorts to having himself covered with cow dung
………………….

There are two versions of what happened next, depending upon who’s doing the talking. Heracleitus either drowns, weeping in dung that’s too wet; or he bakes to death under a dry Ionian sun channeling Dante

Either way, the old philosopher no doubt suffered from an information gap —a huge hole concerning the effects of a full cow-dung-immersion in certain climates.

Ignorance is an unworthy guide.

But Heraclitus lived between 540 and 480 BC,
and so, might be excused for his decisions.
He was, after all, ignorant of his ignorance.

So why does this sound so familiar, 
and what’s our excuse?

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””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Heracleitus

Who can fathom the odd notions
of philosophers?

Whether to be immersed in flux
and cowed by change to the point
of drowning yourself in cow dung, weeping;
or to bake yourself in cow dung, keeping
with cock-sure Horatio
(teller-true of dreams),
waiting long for Socrates
in the land of flaming sun,
braced and curling his digits
into a fist

That, or to say, “Grow up.
–this is our predicament,
let’s make a list.”

,,,,

To recap an exceptional tournament, tack-sharp tennis mind Lucy Perkins has kindly agreed to take part in another dialogue.  (For our pre-tournament conversation, click here.)  Because of time constraints, we’re going to stick to the men’s final, despite the fact that Venus and Serena Williams produced their best match at a major tournament–it’ll have to suffice to say that we both hope they’ll be repeating the exercise at Grand Slams for years to come. 

Asad Raza: Hello Lucy.  I believe “epic” is the only word that adequately describes today’s events, no?  I can’t think of another match that left me as emotionally drained–I’ve been more devastated (Sampras d. Agassi, U.S. Open, 2002), and more euphoric (Ivanisevic d. Rafter, Wimbledon, 2001), but never has a tennis match seemed… larger, of such scope and importance.  Not only did Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer together produce tennis at a surpassing level, but they produced a match with a dramatic quality unseen since Borg and McEnroe squared off in 1980.  This was tennis as the highest form of controlled, dancelike movement and tennis as exhausting, warlike struggle.  It will be hard to come up with superlatives sufficient to describe it.  How are you feeling?

Lucy Perkins: I am utterly drained and highly conflicted: highly disappointed for Federer, who deserved to win, unexpectedly pleased for Nadal, who deserved it more, and filled with admiration for both men.  Like you, I watch a lot of Grand Slam tennis, and like you, I can’t remember any final matching this one for importance, for drama, for sheer quality.  Federer-Nadal, the rivalry, often has the flavour of a classical Greek drama, all thwarted ambitions and tragic flaws, but Federer-Nadal, the matches, are often disappointing.  This one, needless to say, lived up to its billing.  I don’t think it could’ve been scripted any better.

Asad Raza: I think the script would have been thrown out on the grounds of crossing over from drama to melodrama.  But this was real.  At nine a.m. this morning, New York time, a small group of mostly casual fans gathered at my apartment to watch the match.  It was all wisecracks and theorizing about Federer’s royalty and Nadal’s peasantry.  By five p.m., there were teary eyes and a shared sense of having lived through something completely unglib in my living room.  Strangely, even though Federer lost, I don’t know if I’ve ever admired him more.  Of the three shots that I remember most clearly from the match, two were hit by Federer: the stunning backhand pass down the line on Nadal’s match point in the fourth set tiebreaker, and the equally stunning backhand return of serve winner on Nadal’s match point in the fifth.  I’ve never seen a better played match, in several senses.

Lucy Perkins: Funny, that.  I can only clearly remember maybe four or five points of the entire match, but that second one you mention, the crosscourt return with Nadal serving at 8-7, 40-30 in the fifth, is the most vivid.  It exemplified exactly what is great about Federer.  Even down match point, facing extraordinary pressure, and after five hours of play, he has the courage and the skill to come up with a blistering angled return.  In the short term, the stories will be – are already – about the fall of the king, but over the long run, in a funny way, I feel like Federer’s involvement in this match will only heighten the Federer myth.  Even though he lost in the most excruciating fashion.

Asad Raza: But this final also demonstrated how the best tennis matches exceed tennis, and reach some kind of sublime human drama–the strongest memories we’ll all have of it, I bet, are faces: Federer’s wan smile as Nadal accepted his trophy, and his regal acceptance of Rafa’s post-match compliments.  The euphoria that was indistinguishable from sadness on Nadal’s face as he reached his parent’s embrace.  The desperate, nearly unglued look Federer had late in the match, unseen at any other time in his televised life, the transparency of Nadal’s determination.  This was a match that seemed to expose the souls of these two.  And maybe the most remarkable thing about about it, was that it exposed both to be competitors who cared deeply for each other after the struggle: the exchange of pats on the shoulder as they circled Centre Court with their trophies showed me that.  It was pretty glorious.

Lucy Perkins: Right, and that, I think, is why it’s so hard to remember the points in the match, because it was so much more than forehands and volleys and service returns.  The mutual regard between them, and the genuinely conflicted response of both, was almost unbearably touching.  This rivalry is unique, I think, in that it’s become almost impossible to like one without feeling at least some empathy for the other.

Asad Raza: Although judging by thousands of partisan comments on our friend Pete Bodo’s blog, many fans of the players have a zero-sum level of empathy–what is given to one is taken from the other.  Pete, by the way, called this “the best match of of the Open Era,” and he was present at most of them.  (Quoted by the excellent Tom Perrotta.)  As a Federer fan, how do you feel towards Nadal at the moment?  Is he the true number one right now?

Lucy Perkins: Well, if Pete Bodo is saying that, who are we mortals to disagree?  You know, I have some difficulty with the notion of “true number one”.  The number one in the rankings IS the true number one, the player who has gained the most ranking points in the past year, as determined within a transparent, consistently applied system.  So no, he is not the “true number one” until the computer damn well says he is.  But if you’re asking if he is the best player in the world right at this minute, I can say, unequivocally, yes.  He’s beaten Federer in two consecutive finals on two anthetical surfaces.  He is, at the moment, the better player.  My emotional response to him is somewhat more complicated.  On the one hand, I remain a Federer fan through and through, and when the two are playing, I seize on any little peccadillo of Nadal’s.  (“He’s keeping Roger waiting AGAIN while he rearranges his water bottles? Is he serious? This is gamesmanship!”)  But after the match, I was, you know, happy for him.  In a way.  Although I was also pretty busy crying for Federer, to whom Wimbledon means the world.

Asad Raza: Spoken like a very mature drinker of Federer Kool-Aid (apologies for those offended by the reference).  And it’s true, I felt much sympathy for Federer too, in his post-match suffering–but then I remembered how blessed he is to have talent of such magnititude, and how much he has achieved using it.  I don’t go in, anyway, for all the sorrow about the end of streaks and consecutive titles and pursuits of Bjorn Borg, who I don’t think could have competed with these two, just as I don’t think William Renshaw, the man who won six consecutive Wimbledons in the nineteenth century, could have tied Borg’s shoelaces on a court.  Maybe that’s just my presentism.  But the paradoxical lesson I draw from it is that the here and now is what’s important, not victories as data points in a historical case being constructed for Best Player Ever.  Finally, I think that’s what this match showed us: that the battle is really about today, and what’s in front of you, and not legacies and arguments.  Today, Nadal and Federer represented tennis played at its absolute highest level and with its most generous and admirable spirit, and that’s why I think they are the greatest rivalry the sport has known, since I’ve been watching.

Lucy Perkins: Yes, in a way it’s a shame to think of this match as anything other than an end in itself, a magnificent example of sport-as-drama, and a reminder of why we’re so willing to get up at odd hours to watch people hit a ball back and forth.  On the other hand, even while I watch a match like this, part of me starts to take the historical view: imagine what we’ll be saying about this when it’s all done and dusted.  And: I wonder what Borg makes of all this? It’s hard not to do that when you know you’re watching history.  I second your “greatest rivalry” nomination, and am a little sad that we might just have witnessed its apex.  Not because I don’t think they have other great matches in them – on the contrary, I am already excited for the next installment – but because I find it hard to believe anything could surpass today’s effort.

Asad Raza: Until next time, Luce!

Lucy Perkins: In the spirit of today’s match, hasta luego!  (Cheers!)

///
The Pool of Buddha’s Eyes
Jim Culleny

The asphalt of the walk to the door is black
but not as dark as the silence
of the concrete Buddha on the porch
as I climb the steps to work.

The Buddha sits center on the top step
with downcast eyes, a nascent nest
in his hands, eyeing bits of straw
a bird has brought and placed
as if it thought the safest site
to build this spring was in the lap
of the grey Buddha upon a porch
in a small town on a planet
in a galaxy among billions
in a small universe swimming
in the pool of Buddha’s eyes.

04/03/08

///

I have been harboring a nagging suspicion about Malcolm Gladwell for some time now. There is a word that keeps knocking at the back of my mind. That word is ‘fraud’. I suspect, in short, that Malcolm Gladwell is a fraud. I finally picked up his book from a couple of years ago, Blink. He subtitles it “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” The book oozes with a slickness, a snake oil salesman’s set of cheap tricks and pseudo-intellectual come-ons. My feeling of distaste is so strong that I’ve come in a perverse way to admire Mr. Gladwell. He has caused me to hate again. I hate Blink.

But allow me to calm down. Allow me to state the case. Allow me to endeavor to prove that Blink is a piece of shit.

Malcolm Gladwell is a good writer and a clear writer. He also knows how to entertain. Blink is driven by a series of anecdotes and stories about people using their “adaptive consciousness,” that faculty of the brain that makes intuitive decisions before the conscious brain has even realized it. Gladwell’s first story is about a kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a young boy) purchased by the Getty museum. The museum hired lawyers and experts and scientists to authenticate the statue. They got the green light for the purchase. But another handful of experts not directly involved in the process didn’t feel right about the statue. They came to a number of snap conclusions just by glancing at it that told them something was amiss. As Gladwell puts it, “In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at Getty was able to understand after four months. Blink is about those first two seconds.”

The stories keep coming. Stories about a marriage expert who can interpret just a few facial expressions during a married couple’s fight and deduce whether or not they will be together in fifteen years. Stories about our worst President, Warren Harding, who looked and sounded so much like a President that first impressions alone carried him to the White House, where he drank and whored around for a couple of years and then died. There are stories about the snap decisions of cops who ended up murdering an innocent man, Amadou Diallo. These stories are inherently interesting and dramatic. Some of them are gripping.

The stories aren’t the problem. The sliminess and outright incoherence comes out when Gladwell starts telling us about what these stories are supposed to mean. He is not shy about his claims. These are not just amusing stories about the complicated and sometimes contradictory ways that human beings make decisions. Gladwell positions himself as more than an observer and as something closer to a life coach or a guru. He is going to teach people how to harness and make use of the power, the magic, of unconscious thinking. He is going to make things that were difficult and well nigh unfathomable a lot easier. And if people listen to him Gladwell predicts that it “would change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted, and on and on. And if we were to combine all those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world.” How nice, how very nice.

The oddest thing about Blink, though, is the disconnect between these transformational claims and the actual arguments to be found inside. Throughout the book, Gladwell sorts his stories and anecdotes into two broad categories. On the one side are the stories about the so-called experts being shown up by the simple power of thinking without thinking. In these cases, we learn about the magical powers we all harbor within ourselves. On the other side, are stories about first impressions that have, in fact, led people astray. In these cases, we learn how to fine-tune and perfect our blinking skills in order not to get it wrong.

The problem, of course, which Gladwell never sufficiently addresses, is that it is extremely difficult to know beforehand whether, in this or that instance, a person’s power of thinking without thinking is working as a strength or a weakness. Here’s an example of the ridiculousness of it all. At one point, Gladwell discusses a musician called Kenna. Kenna grew up in the US as the son of Ethiopian immigrants. His music is hard to categorize. But it has one hell of an impact on all the people who know something about music. Gladwell is very much taken with Kenna. He writes, “people who truly know music (the kind of people who run record labels, go to clubs, and know the business well) love Kenna. They hear one of his songs and in the blink of an eye, they think, Wow!” But for all the high-powered support, Kenna’s albums have so far been a disappointment in terms of sales. Gladwell draws the conclusion that Kenna has suffered from being taken out of context in the market research that goes on in the modern music business. People listen to a short clip of his music without getting the full picture. Gladwell writes,

The people at the Roxy and the No Doubt concert saw him in the flesh. Craig Kallman had Kenna sing for him, right there in his office. Fred Durst heard Kenna through the prism of one of his trusted colleagues’ excitement. The viewers of MTV who requested Kenna over and over had seen his video. Judging Kenna without that additional information is like making people choose between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.

Later in the book, Gladwell brings in another example from music, this time of the classical variety. A long-time problem in classical music has been the gender disparity. Women simply weren’t getting very many jobs in orchestras. Eventually, someone at the Munich Philharmonic came up with an ingenious solution. People auditioning for the job did so behind a screen. Voila! Women started getting the jobs at far higher rates. Gladwell quotes Julie Landsman from the Metropolitan Opera, “I’ve been in auditions with without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don’t affect your judgment. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.” Gladwell notes of all this that, “When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.”

But then, why didn’t the people in the market research surveys see Kenna for who he truly was? None of the music industry experts were claiming that Kenna is making music for the select few, they were claiming that Kenna has what it takes to be a hit maker. Sure, his music might straddle a few categories but there are plenty of stars and hit makers in the history of popular music who’ve done the same. The whole goddamn point of making pop music is that people listen to the song on the radio or wherever and like it. People listen to Kenna’s music and some like it, but a lot more simply don’t care for it. Why isn’t the market research situation a perfect Blink moment for judging Pop goodness? For some reason, in the case of Kenna, Gladwell thinks that we need more information, more time, a more rounded experience. But with the classical musicians you create the Blink moment by taking information away. Of course, even in the classical music example Gladwell never suggests that the judges are making their decisions in the first two seconds. In fact, they are listening to a whole piece, they’ve simply been prevented from making certain presuppositions by the screen. Really, I’m not at all sure why Gladwell calls this a “perfect Blink moment.” It partially contradicts everything he is trying to say about the first two seconds and it is in complete contrast to the Kenna example, which is itself an utterly muddled attempt to apply the Blink lessons to a real world scenario.

Every story in the book falls apart in these ways when you break them down and ignore all of Gladwell’s bells and whistles. They simply do not go where he is trying to make them go.

Really, Gladwell is simply amazed and flabbergasted by how we manage to make judgments at all. There is no shame in this. Human judgment is a fantastical thing. But for Christ’s sake Malcolm, we’ve all known that for a very long time. In an act of hubris, chutzpah, complete stupidity, or a combination of all three, Gladwell comes out and admits as much in the Afterword to the book. I quote the paragraph in its entirety.

What was that magical thing [the ability to make the right decision]? It’s the same thing that Evelyn Harrison and Tom Hoving had when they looked at the kouros, and that Vic Braden had when he watched someone serving and knew if the ball was going to go out. It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgment. And what Blink is—what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to—is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.

What? Judgment is an ability to apply a lifetime of learning and watching and doing to particular instances? That’s the great insight of Blink? That’s what all the portentous talk and self-aggrandizing tone was all about? That’s what the guru wants to tell us? The thing that every single fucking human being on planet earth over the age of twelve has already figured out?

The truly maddening aspect to all this hooey is that Gladwell is not that far away from a respectable point. There is a long tradition in Western thought (and other ‘thoughts’ besides) of puncturing the claims of human knowledge and reminding us that most of what we know comes down to a matter of know-how and the ‘knack’.

One of my favorite figures in the history of marginal thinkers is the ancient Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Sextus was fed up with the lofty claims of the Platonists and the Aristotelians and wanted to show that human knowledge was a more pedestrian thing. He subjected every philosophical claim to a series of withering cross examinations that inevitably exposed those claims to charges of circularity and begging of the question. It was good stuff. Let us cure ourselves, he suggested, of the will to absolute and objective knowledge and let us admit that we do know some things and that we’re not always so sure exactly how we know them. He was aiming for ataraxia, or an unpurturbedness of mind. His favorite story was of the painter Apelles, who, striving too hard to figure out how to paint the foam coming from a horse’s mouth, threw his painting implement in disgust and, lo and behold, it dashed against the wall in a perfect representation of the foam. The point being, when we go outside of ourselves we forget how to do the very things we have always known how to do all along. This is Gladwell’s point as well. Simply living in the world gives us skills, a set of practical tools by which to continue living in the world. Wittgenstein was wont to make the same observation. He says famously that “judgment comes first.” In short, we already know what we’re doing before we do it and the giving of reasons tends to be an a posteriori affair.

That’s the real and only insight (if we can call it that) to Gladwell’s flimsy book. As human beings we do acquire a capacity to deal with the world and we often tend to make the right decisions without fully knowing why. Experience gets embedded. We act. A kind of learned instinct takes over. In our hubris, we try to codify this ability into doctrines and methodologies and systems of thought. Sometimes there is reason to do so. But in the end we shouldn’t pretend that our vast acquisition of data and knowledge has allowed us to jump outside of ourselves. We don’t have a God’s eye view of things. We’re in the mix, in medias res, and the fact that we even manage to survive from day to day is at least weak proof that we know one or two things about the world.

But for the skeptics and empiricists and nominalists and pragmatists, this realization has a melancholy side as well. Not knowing exactly how we know things is part and parcel, so far, of the essence of the human experience. Only a charlatan pretends that there is magic in it. In fact, the human condition, marvelous as it is, is also a depressing nightmare. The crap-shoot of judgment has us perpetually hanging on the edge of an abyss.

Which brings us back to Gladwell the huckster. Gladwell dresses up all of his “realizations” in fancy clothes and too much make-up. He gives himself powers that he doesn’t have. He pretends to have sorted things out that he hasn’t sorted out. He imagines a possible control, and pretends that he has achieved that control. All the while telling people, whispering into their ears, precisely the kinds of things they would like to believe. And then (it must, I’m sorry, be said) he goes on wildly lucrative corporate speaking engagements spinning out the same titillating stories combined with his shoddy conclusions. I even kind of hate, I must confess, the way he looks. His hair all scruffed up just so. His cute little suits. It makes the skin crawl.

***

Frustratingly, Gladwell ends the book with a reasonable and humane suggestion. It even managed to numb my hate for a short time. He suggests, in reference to the blind auditions that have created gender equality in the classical music world, that the justice system might benefit from the same approach. He asks, “What if we put screens in the courtrooms? … we know that what we see—particularly when it is the color of someone’s skin, or gender, or age—does not always aid understanding.” I don’t think gender or age really has much to do with perverting justice in the American judicial system. But color, unfortunately, still does. Reducing the effect of racial bias would go a long way to balancing the scales. And Gladwell’s suggestion for doing so is simple, practical, and damn well might be effective. But it has nothing to do with what he’s been talking about for the previous 250 pages of the book. His judicial solution isn’t about trusting our snap judgments, but about trying to mute them. It isn’t about training ourselves to be clever about detecting the ‘real criminal’ in less than two seconds. Quite the opposite. Certainly he has left room in the book for the negative lesson, for the sense that we have to know when it makes sense to put the brakes on our adaptive consciousness. But that too is disingenuous. Blink is supposed to be about the power of the snap judgment. It is supposed to be about the wonderful things that happen when we think without thinking. And in the end, he tells us, if you want a little justice, best to give yourself some time to really think it through. The nicest thing that can be said about Malcolm Gladwell is that he doesn’t even really believe his own mental garbage. If he is salvageable as a human being, it might be for the simple reason that he’s a bad fraud.

///
Tabula Rasas
Jim Culleny

In our town
new mothers spring up like weeds.
They roll fold-up strollers
along Bridge Street or
tote sleeping babes that loll like
tot marsupials in sacks
strapped across breasts:
gene parachutes
trussed over shoulders
and buckled in back.

A moment ago
these moms were tot
marsupials too.

Now, out of nowhere–
ignorant as saints or
immune from despair, or both–
they come toting or pushing
mute futures as if headlines
had no place in their dreams;
as if their children
were joyful counterweights
to the evening news,
brimming with hope as tabula rasas,
promising as a new day.

///

Elatia Harris

This is the third in an open-ended series of articles about saffron. Part I highlights the culture that produced the renowned saffron-gathering murals dating to the 17th century, B.C.E., on the Aegean island of Santorini. Part II is an examination of saffron in classical mythology, with particular regard to the representation of female Olympian deities.

Today, I’ll be the Saffron Mother. I’ll tell you perilously close to everything you ever wanted to know about sourcing saffron — there’s lots to be wary of — and cooking with it to fantastic effect. If you find you need to know more about saffron than I’ve written here, more even than you can learn from the research materials cited at the end of the post, then you are indeed special.

The image under the title, Still Life, painted by Adriaen van Utrecht in 1644 and now in the Rijksmuseum, depicts not a single thread of saffron unless, as is distinctly possible, saffron is an ingredient in the luxurious game pie spilling its contents onto a tray just below and to the right of the parrot. The brighter tones of the painting, however — from the pale yellow of the tulips to the intense yellow of the lemons to the gold-red of the peaches to the striking orange-red of the outsize boiled lobster — sumptuously evoke the saffron palette. Evoke but do not approach it. If you think a boiled lobster is a vivid orange-red, then you have not made a saffron infusion in a glass pot, and sat spellbound as light passed through it before taking it unto yourself.

Making a Saffron Infusion

An infusion is exactly the place to start a personal investigation of saffron. After all, you might not like the stuff, and if that’s how you are, well…better to know it before you add it to food. A word to the wise — never, never introduce saffron threads into your mouth as you might do a cardamom pod. Oh, no. You won’t know it from crushed Ibuprofen if you take it in that way.

The red-orange tangle in the photo above left shows dried saffron threads many times magnified, but an actual-size photo would fail to instruct.  Above right is the only flower in the world that saffron comes from, the Crocus sativus L., or saffron crocus. Those shriveled yellow things are its stamens, and no one eats them or uses them for dye, because they release neither flavor nor color, newsy looking though they may be. Those satiny red things are its lady parts, called stigmas. It is this, dried, that you will infuse and taste.

To prepare an infusion, take a pinch of dried saffron threads and fling them into a clear glass vessel that will withstand boiling water. A glass teapot is ideal, especially one with an infuser chamber. Failing that, a Pyrex bowl and a strainer will work — just don’t miss out by infusing in porcelain or some otherwise opaque container. Place your vessel in front of a window during daylight. Pour into it about 8 ounces of boiling water.

Immediately, the water will start to color an opulent yellow, deepening over the next few minutes to a clear thrilling orange. About 50,000 years ago, painters in Iraq applied this color to animals on the walls of a cave.  Much later, in the early Bronze Age, it was daubed onto the sacred stones of hilltop shrines throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  This color, made from this substance, has a long, long history of delighting human beings, and you are about to drink of it.

But not just yet. Let the saffron threads continue to infuse for about 20 minutes; while remaining clear, the liquid will gradually intensify in color. Try to sit at your window and look on as this happens — it’s mood-elevating to do so, deeply enlivening, and will contribute to your anticipatory pleasure. More than all that, you will be keeping faith with those distant humans who first teased out the difference between survival and desire, never a wrong thing to do.

The photo at left, courtesy of the BBC, shows an infusion after several minutes. But, honestly, the camera cannot capture it. To heat the infusion back up, pour in about another 8 ounces of boiling water, and strain the liquid into a glass cup — or a jelly jar. While this liquid is cooling to the temperature you think tea should be drunk at, re-infuse the strained threads in a few tablespoons of boiling water, and conserve this for later, when you will cook with it.

Okay, it’s time. The steaming brilliant liquid in the cup before you will have a gorgeous aroma. It is bitter, it is creamy, it is musky, it is luxurious. People have said saffron smells of so many things: wild honey, fresh earth and new-mown hay. You cannot get near another scent that so perfectly expresses the truth of flowers, the fury beneath the sweetness, nor one that speaks so frankly of civilization’s refinements.

If you have eaten the food of the Punjab, or Persian cuisine, or Sephardic cooking, or some of the classical dishes of the northern Mediterranean, or even just bitten into a characteristic yellow bun in Cornwall, then you have tasted saffron — but not like this, in isolation.  And you need to taste it like this, to discern how much saffron is right for you in the dishes you will use it to flavor. Too much can taste overwhelming or even medicinal, too little is kind of pointless.

So, take a sip. It’s an epiphanial taste, no?  It tastes like it smells, and like what it is — the female parts of an autumn-blooming flower coveted since Prehistory for its frighteningly beautiful stain and magically salubrious properties. Xerxes knew this taste, and Alexander and Aurangzeb. Nowhere on earth is it disregarded.  And now you too have had it.

What If…?

I know — what if you don’t like it?  And don’t wish to finish drinking the infusion or use the rest in cooking?  All is not lost. It may just be that your palate is extremely sensitive to anything that tastes at all bitter.  If you don’t like arugala, artichokes, pomegranates, tamarind, wild asparagus, green tea, tobiko, rosewater, cilantro, Seville oranges, dark chocolate or fresh chilis, then the odds are very great you will not like saffron and should not put yourself out to try it, even though saffron tastes like none of those things, exactly. But if you’ve made the infusion anyhow, and are nonplussed, then stir in some sugar or honey.  Still no go?  Then call almost any good cook living nearby, and make their day. Just say you have about 16 ounces of slightly sweetened bright orange saffron water, with a big pinch of semi-infused threads on the side. They’ll be right over. 

If on the other hand you are transported by the infusion, whimpering with lust to wrap your lip around still more saffron, then finding out how to choose and use it is the route to enlightened consumption. We should look more closely at what saffron is and is not, who produces it and how it is graded, the better to fend off all those vendors ready, in their avarice, to sell us what is not quite saffron.

Punishable by Death

In the Middle Ages in Germany, the crime of adulterating saffron for sale was punishable by death. We know the names of two Nuremberg merchants whose lives ended horribly for that reason. Today, the penalties for the crime are not truly severe, while the motive remains sky-high.  Saffron fraud is lucrative, and widespread. In The Seven Deadly Sins (detail left), painted in 1933, the German expressionist Otto Dix transposes the saffron palette into a sickly key for a political allegory that would have been in large part readable by those nefarious German merchants seven centuries earlier. Avarice is the staring hooded figure at the lower left, Envy with its Hitler mustache rides on her back, and Sloth is the skeleton. If, to plump out their profits several years ago, a few hitherto trustworthy olive oil exporters in Italy adulterated their product with tree nut oil, thus posing fantastic risks to the legions of mainly US schoolchildren who go into anaphylaxis if they ingest tree nuts, then what’s a little saffron fraud? It merely detracts from the splendor of certain rarefied experiences at table, after all — it doesn’t really hurt anybody. It can’t be a deadly sin.

Millennia before saffron was a point of gastronomy, however, it was two conceivably more important things that people were willing to pay a bundle for — a dye for the garments of noble women, garments whose color announced to the world the wearer’s station in it, and a powerful medicine for numerous ailments, kidney disease, difficult labor and melancholy among them. Avarice and saffron are linked, as intimately linked as saffron and luxury, saffron and nobility and even divinity.

It Could Happen to You — and It Probably Has

Cynically benefiting from the general confusion about what saffron is, what its signature taste is, and what its true color must be, restaurant chefs of a certain type, and even some home cooks, are inclined to adulterate their saffron dishes with turmeric, or simply to substitute turmeric for saffron, a purer deception. Turmeric is a marvelously tasty, health-giving spice which makes a brilliant yellow stain. While it is foundational to many cuisines, it is not saffron. In the spice market stall photo to the right, you can see truth in advertising about turmeric, if also poor spelling. In case that’s the color of the last paella you had in a redoubtable Mediterranean joint, the chef did not use saffron.

Paprika, left, the chili-related powder disappointingly sprinkled on the crest of twice-baked potatoes and such, is another popular saffron adulterant, albeit one that backfires on the culpable cook, for saffron and paprika are mutually canceling flavors. This won’t stop anyone hoping to deceive through color alone, however — paprika is a nice red food colorant, both earthy and bright. Delicious, too, as you know if you’ve troubled to make a real Hungarian goulash. But saffron and goulash are two words that don’t belong in the same sentence, and one mustn’t punch up a paella this way.

Dried safflower petals, right, are with disarming frankness called “false saffron,” and “the poor man’s saffron.” Despite their relation to safflower oil, they are not actually a food substance but a dye. In the American South, where I was born and raised, safflower petals find their way into love charm bags, notably for gay men. Also into potpourri. If you are good at blending color with your eyes, you can imagine that a blend of turmeric, paprika and powdered safflower petals would make a highly attractive orange-red that would bleed color on contact with moisture. Alas, others less well-intentioned than you can imagine it quite easily too. For this reason alone — and there are other good ones — it’s prudent to stay mostly away from powdered saffron.

Saffron-on-Saffron Crime — If You Can’t Prevent It, Avoid It

Certain saffron producers have found ways to make saffron threads go further not by adulterating them but by packaging them to masquerade — literally to masquerade — as more valuable and potent parts of themselves.

 
To see how this could — and does — happen, it’s worthwhile to return to the saffron crocus for a closer look at its parts. The graphic in the center above, from the Trade & Environment Database (TED) at American University, schematizes the stalk, called a style, connecting the stigma, the topmost very red part, to the rest of the flower. At its base, the style is white, becoming yellow, then orange, then red, then very red at the stigma. The photo at right, also from TED, shows the actual length of the style. As a cook, you’re interested only in the stigma. But middling saffron — whatever one has been asked to pay for it — may contain much of the rest of the style.  Sometimes, you can see it at a glance, as in the pretty photo, below left, from the Saffron USA site, a gateway to suppliers of Spanish saffron. The ratio of dark red to golden-orange and even pale yellow threads means this is not tip-top quality saffron, as attractive to the eye as the color variations are.

Saffron that looks like this, or that has still more yellow threads than this, demonstrates that a product that is pure is not the same thing as one that is potent. If the style is only two inches long, and the dark red half-inch is the business end, then the remaining golden-yellow-orange inch and a half acts mainly to bring up the weight of the product. So while you may have paid less than for stigma-only saffron, you’ve also bought a lot of filler, because the paler three-quarters of the style tastes of nothing, and releases no color.

There’s an invisible and far more villainous condition to be wary of, however.  Some saffron producers — who shall be nameless — have been known to spray the entire style with an emulsion made from the stigma.  I learned of this outrage from my friend, Juan J. San Mames, owner of Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco, where I lived for many years. He tells me that some of his competitors are using this method of deriving “product x 300%,” and the eye alone cannot detect it.

So, current techniques of saffron fraud are outstripping the ability of even the finest eye to spot them. What does one do? One refuses to buy saffron that lacks the needed science-based criteria in labeling, that lacks a money-back guarantee if it’s not what the vendor says it is. That is, one refuses to buy most saffron.

The Provenance of the Right Stuff

Below left, in the photo by Steve McCurry, is a crocus field in the province of Khorasan in northeastern Iran, where about 55,000 families work in the saffron industry. To the right is a Reuters photo of saffron-gathering in Kashmir. Saffron culture is skilled, intensive labor, driven by crushing deadlines, for the harvest can occur only during a few weeks in the late autumn. The style need to be rapidly separated by hand from the flowers, themselves hand-picked at dawn in a manner that doesn’t disturb their precious cargo. Cropping the stigma from the style is also a job for hands only — sometimes very small hands.  Drying, or curing, happens in special sheds, but it has to start when the style is fresh-plucked from the flower.  There’s not a minute to lose.

Picture a football field planted entirely with saffron crocuses — that’s about 75,000 flowers, yielding only a pound of saffron. The amount you’ve probably seen in a little glass phial in the international section of the grocery store is one to two grams, with slightly over 28 grams to the ounce.  Iran, where saffron culture goes back 3,000 years, is by far the world’s largest saffron producer. Kashmir produces much less than Iran, but is a more significant producer than any other country. Depending on whose expertise you value most, the wild saffron crocus, Crocus cartwrightianus L., originated either in Western Asia or on the Aegean isle of Crete, but the cultivar, Crocus sativus L., by now belongs as much to Ayurveda and the Mughals as to the Persian Empire and Aegean civilization.

People like those you see in the photos, whole families from children around 10 to grandparents, need to be decently paid for their part in the saffron industry, and that is beginning to happen. That consideration — among others such as hotter, drier summers leading to smaller harvests — must be factored into the decidedly rising price.

For many reasons, I buy only saffron from Iran and Kashmir.  That’s what I recommend you do.  But let’s look briefly at other choices.

The storied Spanish saffron industry is in a precarious state at present, as reflected by the most recent price per unit, a multiple of its former self, and in any case, shippers of Spanish saffron seem to me to be fonder of marketing terms than of science. “Mancha,” the classic descriptor, refers not to a grade or category of Spanish saffron, but to an area where it was traditionally grown.  And even so, it tends to be a real misnomer.  Interestingly, compared to Iran, Spain has all these years been a smallish producer of saffron, but a big shipper — of Iranian saffron, which the law has allowed the Spanish to import, package and market around the world as their own.  A drought last year in Iran is behind the price jump in “Spanish” saffron. Greek saffron is marvelous, but it’s no bargain, and one is forced to buy it in too small quantities when one can find it at all. In many places across the world, there is “boutique saffron,” reflecting minuscule local industry.  I would buy saffron on Santorini, say, from a farmer who grew and processed it right there. 

But I’m here, not there. So I stick with superb product that has made it over all the quality hurdles, and that I can purchase in large enough quantities — by the ounce, a little over 28 grams — to benefit from economy of scale.

Zeroing in on Product

I have professional reasons for buying so much saffron, but if I didn’t, I would buy it by the ounce anyway, asking friends who cook seriously — or just a few voluptuaries — to go in with me on the purchase. Everybody would come out far, far ahead, and it’s the smart thing to do.

Below are two photos from the sites of my favorite — my only — suppliers.

Above left is saffron from Iran, sold by my afore-mentioned friend, Juan J. San Mames of Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco, who has been a direct importer for 30 years. (His vanilla can’t be beat either, but that’s another story.) The fully saturated uniform deep red-orange color is one of the visual benchmarks of top quality Persian saffron, which must be graded “Sargol” (the absolute best) or “Pushali” (the top tier Pushali is very, very close.) Above right is Kashmiri saffron from Baby Brand Saffron, a company in India that dates to the 1840’s. The darker red with its blue overtones — almost a blood orange color — and the faint glossiness of the threads are typical of the best Kashmiri saffron. Proponents of Persian saffron tend not to be the same people who worship saffron from Kashmir, and that’s an argument I don’t wish to take sides in, for it is as needless as it is ferocious.

What, then, is the difference between them, that they have such partisans? Price is one difference, with Kashmiri saffron about 70% more expensive than Persian. Aroma is another.  If all you wanted was to sniff at an open 1-ounce tin of saffron — sometimes, that’s all I want — Kashmiri saffron would have considerably more depth and complexity. It’s a knockout. Literal potency is a matter for science to decide, for it can be measured — there’s more about those controls below. But to cook with, do I think one is better than the other? No. If I did, I’d buy that one, and not both. While you can hear the difference between a Stradivarius and a Guarneri del Gesu, and the sound of one instrument might speak to you more, you probably do not believe that one wipes the floor with the other. So it is with the best of the best of Persian and Kashmiri saffron.

A story: recently, I and a group I meet with celebrated the birthday of one of our number with a blind tasting of saffron. We infused Persian saffron from Mr. San Mames as well as Baby Brand Kashmiri saffron, and ultimately murmured an opinion. My friend Lakshmi — writer, statistician and all around terrific cook — who grew up in Bangalore, and whose birthday it was, had the last word. “This,” she said of the Persian saffron, without being told which was which, “is Mediterranean high culture. Whereas this” — the saffron from Kashmir — “is Asia.”  That observation is my guide in choosing which one to use when I cook.

Alice Waters once remarked something to the effect that cooking was shopping. She was talking about salad greens, not saffron — but there you have it.

Terms, Touch and Smell

“Sargol” saffron denotes that the stigma has been cut from the style prior to drying. You cannot find any yellow or gold threads in Sargol saffron, and will find almost none in the best Pushali. Importantly, the cutting accelerates drying, because most of the moisture in a saffron thread is concentrated in the style. Moisture not only brings the weight up, but contributes to spoilage.

Thus, Persian saffron that is not Sargol or the best Pushali may become musty, and feel spongy. Familiarity with the literature about saffron will acquaint you with some adjectives that don’t actually belong there. “Musty” as a term of approval is one such, but it’s possible certain writers, sniffing saffron that has not kept well, pick up on the musty aspect as connoting mystery, the quality of being ancient, a precious thing in a chamber long-sealed. There is, too, an earthy note in saffron which some noses cannot tell from damp.

Touch is a great help in evaluating saffron. When you touch Sargol saffron it it is crinkly and dry, and you can easily crumble the threads between your fingers.  In a mortar and pestle, it grinds to a powder very fast. It will keep for several years at room temperature in an airtight, lightproof container.

If we were talking about European saffron, the term to look for would be “coupe” — or, cut. It’s the same thing as Sargol — stigma only, cut prior to drying. If you’re traveling in Sicily or in the South of France or in Greece near Macedonia, you might find some very local saffron, and it would be sad not to buy it — as sad as failing to buy apples in Vermont — if it were dry and smelled right and crumbled easily. Not every honest small farmer can send his stuff to the lab for photospectrometry.

Regarding Kashmiri saffron, the term corresponding to Sargol and Coupe is “Mogra,” with “Lacha” comparing to Pushali, although Pushali, ranging from excellent to middling, is a more varied category than Lacha. Mogra is as dry as Sargol, with a more satiny feel, as you might expect from its faint natural gloss. But opportunities for being a connoisseur of Kashmiri saffron are indeed scant. There’s a long line ahead of you for the product, as the greater part goes first to the Subcontinent, Kashmir having supplied India with top quality saffron since the time of the Mughals.

Saffron and Hard Science

Depending on where the rubber meets the road for you, scientific controls on how good your saffron really is will be either crucial or not so interesting. To me, they’re fascinating, for in saffron you have a substance wherein flavor, color and aroma break down to three chemical compounds whose potency can be tested for. The Chemistry section of the Wikipedia main saffron article is very well done — according to me and to people who would know better than I if it were — and I hope you’ll consult it to go a little deeper. 

For people mainly interested to cook with saffron, I will greatly simplify the riotous activity beneath the features one looks for.  Aroma, flavor and color come from three compounds in saffron — safranal, picocrocin, and crocin, respectively. For the highest category  saffron — the Sargol, Mogra, Coupe, and the best Pushali — the minimum value of safranal is 20, and of picocrocin 70.  Crocin is measured in “coloring units,” the minimum being 200 for the highest category saffron. There are also minimum allowable percentages for foreign matter, floral waste, moisture and volatile material — all these should be very, very low in the saffron you buy.

These values must be established by third-party testing in an ISO-certified photospectrometry lab, using criteria written by the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, in Basel, Switzerland. Reading a saffron lab report will tell you exactly what you’ve got your hands on, and I only know one vendor who sends you the lab report for the saffron lot your order came from. This is Mr. San Mames of Saffron, Vanilla Imports. Looking at the report on his most recent shipment of Pushali saffron, you will see that its safranal value is 35.14 (minimum for highest category is 20), its picocrocin value is 86.41 (minimum is 70), and its coloring units 238.14 (minimum is 200.) So the information from him is unusually complete, and highly confidence inspiring.  He believes — and I concur with him — that this type of information is what you need to make an informed purchase of the world’s most expensive spice.

Baby Brand Saffron, too, is ISO-certified, with their number on every container, although they do not release a full lab report. Both these vendors give you far more information than any others I know — not to mention a guarantee.

Ready to Cook

The most important thing to know — how to make an infusion — is already in your repertory.

I might be perfectly happy never again to do anything with saffron threads but infuse them and drink the liquid as a tisane. If this is what you want to do too, just think one pinch for every four to six servings. Depending on who’s pinching, a pinch is usually thought of as somewhere between half a gram and a gram. If you want to add sugar, it’s just delightful.  Rosewater too. You can turn this into a cold drink by letting it achieve room temperature, pouring it over ice, adding a lime wedge and a sprig of mint. You will look far before you’ll find a friend who won’t be happy to be offered such a drink. If you’re fond of your own company, make these things for yourself occasionally, too.

Saffron infuses not only in water, but in citrus juice, vegetable, chicken or fish stock, and in alcohol. It all depends on your recipe, but remember it’s water-soluble, so it won’t dissolve in oil. The least effective possible way to use saffron is just to crumble it on top of something you’re cooking, or to add it dry at the last minute. To make your saffron go as far as it can, you want always to start activating the compounds at least half an hour ahead of when you actually cook.  Cooking with an eye to its maximum potency will get you the best results for the least outlay.

If you’re making rice, you will want to infuse the volume of liquid the recipe calls for, but adding saffron to a sauce can be as simple as infusing a small quantity of liquid — 2 tablespoons, perhaps — and adding it in without worrying the tiny amount of liquid will change the chemistry of performing the recipe.

If you would rather not see saffron threads in your dish, you can pulverize them yourself with a mortar and pestle, or just with the back of a spoon, before infusing. Very occasionally, you will see a recipe where powdered saffron is really best — you’re better off if you powder your own.

Even as an enthusiast, I’d never claim a pinch of saffron improves just about any dish. It should be used judiciously, in recipes that are otherwise simple enough to showcase it. It’s a highly complex flavor, and it’s a great pleasure to think about it as you take it in. That said, there are flavor synergies you may want to investigate, discussed below.

Despite its profligate beauty, store saffron away from light.  If it’s visible to you in a glass jar on the kitchen shelf, it’s not going to last as long — but that’s true of any spice.

Saffron and Rice

Cooking with saffron begins — and arguably ends — with learning how to add it to a rice pilaf. The aroma of basmati rice and saffron cooking together is never to be forgotten, and if you made it your signature dish, you could with impunity leave many other cooking lessons unlearned.

You cannot imagine the difficulty of finding photography that does justice to saffron rice. That shows not only the tint a cook needs to look for when she prepares rice with saffron, but that suggests its deep dimensionality, its almost tear-bringing allure. I found the beautiful shot above on the Golden Rice site — not where I would have expected it, since golden rice, thanks to the extra vitamin A in it, is not white but pale, pale gold. (I hope you’ll take the time to read about it, since it’s a route to more complete nutrition for the half of the world for whom rice is the major source of caloric intake.) I would not have imagined that saffron on a pale gold ground could be so vibrant, but this is the most accurate photo of what saffron rice should look like that I’ve ever seen.

The technique for making a rice pilaf in the style of Iran or Central/South Asia is different from what you’d do to produce a risotto, and the rice is different, too. A risotto alla milanese, the saffron rice of northern Italy, is better demonstrated than written about.  For that, you need plump, long grain rice from the Po Valley — look for Arborio. If you simply use whatever white rice you have, you could produce a saffron rice gruel, and that would be keenly disappointing. If you’re going for the Iranian/Asian rice pilaf model, take care to use real basmati rice.  Delving into theory of Persian cooking, I learned that every grain of rice should be separate from every other in a rice dish.  In the photo above, you can count every grain with your eyes — that’s as it should be.

When cooking with basmati rice, remember to rinse it first — just put the measure you intend to cook in a sieve, and run water through it for a few seconds, swishing it with your finger. This rinses off a crucial amount of surface starch. To get a rice pilaf that looks like the one in the photo, I’ve adapted a Goldenrice.org recipe. Executing this recipe with precision and care will give you a heavenly result.  If you’re cooking it for friends, please do it at the last minute rather than ahead — the aroma is too soul-satisfying to deny them.

SAFFRON RICE WITH WHOLE SPICES

Heat 2.5 cups of a rich chicken stock or vegetable stock to a simmer, and infuse in it a big pinch of saffron threads. Set it aside for at least half an hour, or even better, start a day ahead with this element of the recipe.

Chop a white onion, and in a heavy-bottomed, lidded saucepan, sautee the onion over medium heat in a splash of canola or coconut oil, until translucent, golden and slightly browned — about 5 minutes. Stir in 1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced, half a cinnamon stick, 6 green cardamom pods and a bay leaf, and cook over medium heat for 2 more minutes.

Add in a heaping cup of rinsed basmati rice, and cook for 2 more minutes, stirring to evenly distribute the contents of your pan. Pour in the saffron-infused stock, add in a scant handful of sultanas or zante currants, and bring to a boil, stirring. Then, lower the heat and cover tightly, cooking gently for about 15 minutes until the liquid is absorbed. Meanwhile, toast a handful of cashews or almonds until lightly brown, and scatter these over the rice before serving.  Serve immediately!   Serves 4.

Saffron and Fish

Above are photos of paella, left, and bouillabaisse, right, from Beatrice Peltre, a food writer and photographer par excellence who has kindly allowed me to raid her fascinating blog, La Tartine Gourmande, for photography showing the right intensity of saffron color in these two legendary Mediterranean dishes.

The affinity of saffron for fish is hardly a well kept secret. Even so, there is little agreement about how much saffron to use in these particular classics.  I say, use your judgment, starting with about a gram — a big pinch — if you’re cooking paella for 4 to 6, half a gram for bouillabaisse.  A paella involves chicken and sausage as well as shellfish — mussels usually, and often shrimp — with most of the saffron flavor concentrated in the rice. Bouillabaisse, like paella, started off as a rather humble dish — a fisherman’s stew. Both were originally cooked out of doors over an open fire. In making a bouillabaisse, one wants only enough saffron to give depth to the tomato-white wine-stock color, not to turn the liquid bright orange. In Bea’s bouillabaisse, you can easily see the threads, and they are a pretty touch in preparing all saffron fish dishes that are not haute cuisine. If you make a paella, remember it’s about the saffron. A bouillabaisse is a marriage of classical Mediterranean flavors, saffron only one of them. 

My own recipes for both are rather too elaborate for anyone who is not paid to cook. They involve making lobster stock and passing it through a drum sieve. (You don’t want to know…)  But for a first foray into the world of fish cookery with saffron, I have a recipe that pairs saffron and chard, a venerable combination in Provence, where, having fed the green bits of chard to hogs, farmers in olden times were looking for a way to dress up the stalks, which they themselves liked to eat.

TILAPIA with CHARD and SAFFRON

Rinse and cut into ribbons 1 bunch of chard per person for the number you intend to serve. Smash as many peeled garlic cloves as you have heads of chard. Thinly slice a big toe-size piece of peeled fresh ginger root. In a heavy-bottomed lidded skillet, sautee all this over medium heat with extra-virgin olive oil (X-V OO), adding vegetable stock or water as needed, and bearing in mind you want cooking liquid at the end. It will take about 15 minutes for the chard to become soft enough, with you stirring 5 or 6 times throughout, and otherwise keeping the lid on. 

When it’s done, fish out the garlic cloves (you’re done with them, but leave in the ginger), remove the chard with a slotted spoon to a serving dish, and cover. Pour the liquid left in the cooking pan into a small bowl and set aside.

In a fresh splash of X-V OO in the same skillet, quickly sautee tilapia filets that have been dredged in cornmeal, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper. They’ll only take about 2.5 minutes — 1.25 minutes per side for smallish filets.

Check to see if you can get any more liquid out of the chard — it’s probably released some. If so, add it to your small bowl of chard-cooking liquid. Arrange the tilapia on the bed of chard and cover to keep warm.

Tip the chard-cooking liquid from its bowl back into the skillet, and increase the heat to high. Pour in cream (half a cup to a cup, depending on number of people, use coconut milk if you don’t like dairy), and an infusion made a day ahead of saffron (about a gram) in one half a cup of good orange juice. Leave the threads in. You’ll have a really beautiful color, and you’ll need to cook this liquid down, stirring, till it can lightly coat a spoon. Taste for salt and pepper, and add a couple drops of orange flower water if you like. Spoon this over the tilapia filets, dust with chopped cilantro, and serve.

Saffron and Sweets

As the smashing photo of sugar crystals coated with saffron in a market in Iran suggests, saffron has unstoppable synergy with sweets. Until about 10 years ago, I questioned the validity of any dessert that was not chocolate, and if you do too, then saffron could be your true alternative. It marries beautifully with other flavorings used in sweets, such as cardamom, rosewater, fresh lime juice, almonds, ginger and cinnamon.

Combining some of these with saffron will tilt your desserts in a Middle Eastern to Central Asian direction — and that’s a good thing if you feel stuck in the European canon. If you want to punch up that European repertory, however, adding saffron to a souffle au Grand Marnier is a revelation. Likewise to a plain vanilla custard or to a lemon or orange mousse. The amount of liquid for an infusion — a tablespoon or so — will not throw off the chemistry of such recipes.

Baking with saffron is a tradition adored by the Swedish and the Germans, especially at Christmastime, and you’ll find lots of saffron in Cornish and Dutch baked goods. I’m not much of a baker, but I did create a saffron shortbread cookie made with cornmeal that I’m very proud of, that I would probably bake even if no one wanted to eat it — the aroma produced by baking with saffron could help you sell your house.

I’m currently developing a recipe for a saffron-lavender panna cotta — it’s almost up there, but not quite. Also, I’m reviving a plan of last summer, to create a sorbet of saffron and white tropical honey from Hawaii, which I intend to garnish with some Sicilian candied rose petals I know about. This week, for someone daring, I’m working up a saffron semifreddo, which I’ll drizzle with a hot sauce made of Valrhona chocolate melted in chai. Yes, it will be too much — but sometimes that’s the point.

Using saffron in ordinary desserts can be a newsy thing to do, too, and you won’t need to worry about learning an unfamiliar recipe or technique. For instance, a saffron infusion in your favorite rice pudding will dial it up many notches. If you’re bringing dessert to a party, you’ll get almost infinite mileage out of showing up with a tapioca pudding (please use large pearls) flavored with saffron, cardamom and rosewater. One of the very most social capital-enhancing things about using saffron when you cook for friends is that they’ll know you’ve done something lavish for them, but in fact you’ll have spent far less to make the dish in question special than if you’d treated them to a slightly better than usual bottle of wine.

So, what’s a ravishing yet easy saffron dessert?  One that’s summery, and doesn’t ask you to hang over it like a lover all during the prep?  Consider the avocado… In Brazil and Sri Lanka, they think the avocado is a dessert animal. Please try this for yourself!  I have never fed it to anyone who didn’t want a subscription to it after the first bite, appalled as they might have been to contemplate it.

AVOCADO SAFFRON MOUSSE

For a mousse for 8, take 3 ripe avocados, peeled and seeded, and blend them in a processor or blender until smooth.  Add in the juice of 4 fresh, fat limes, in which a big pinch of saffron has been infused for 8 hours or overnight. (Strain it!)  Sift in 1.5 cups (taste to see if this is the right amount for you) of confectioner’s sugar.  Because you are not adding heat, confectioner’s sugar is very important, as any other kind would stay grainy.

Puree everything until very smooth — avocado lumps are infelicitous.  With a rubber scraper, remove this mixture to a large mixing bowl — glass or ceramic only.  Fold in 1.5 cups of stiffly whipped cream, and chill for at least several hours. It will be a beautiful chartreuse color.

Serve very cold, with a few spoonfuls of tropical fruit and berries tossed with lime juice and a little sugar, honey or agave nectar.  Garnish with fresh mint.

Saffron and Dollars

Many, many moons from now, readers happening onto this post and seeing its date, or turning it up through a search, will muse how they wish they’d known to buy saffron way back in the summer of 2008, because it has since become so much more expensive. The price of some things has nowhere to go but up. However, saffron has always, in legend and in history, been valued alongside gold, so modern times are not the problem. I would never blame anyone who, for reasons of principle or finance, just wasn’t interested to experience saffron.  But the people who feel like that are probably not the people reading this post in its entirety. So I’m going to assume a certain level of interest in readers who have come this far, and actually set out the saffron math — with the caveat that the numbers at this writing will not for long be accurate. Also, the prices I’m quoting pertain to saffron threads, not powder.

A quick tour of retailers will be instructive. If you don’t live in a metropolitan area with easy access to stores run by Iranians and Indians, then you may already shop online for spices, and if so you know that Kalustyans.com and Penzeys.com are two of the best spice merchants you can find. Let’s see how fair a deal they’re offering on saffron, understanding that their mission is not to under-price other vendors, only to sell you a very high quality product. As it happens, neither Kalustyan’s nor Penzey’s is selling Iranian saffron at this time, only Kashmiri and Spanish.

So, you can buy 1 gram (a big pinch, the stigma from 190 flowers, enough to cook a dish for 4 to 6) of Kashmiri saffron at Kalustyan’s for $14.99, and 1 gram of Spanish saffron (they don’t say what grade) for $12.99. At Penzey’s you can buy 1 gram of Kashmiri saffron for $15.29, 1 gram of Spanish coupe for $10.89. Shoppers feeling more flush, but in fact getting a far better buy, can purchase 1 ounce (28.35 grams) of Spanish coupe from Penzey’s for $169.99, and 15 grams of Kashmiri saffron at Kalustyan’s for $89.99.

Now, here’s the better way. At Saffron, Vanilla Imports (www.saffron.com), you can buy 5 grams of high quality Iranian saffron for $17.95 — enough for five saffron dishes serving four to six people each. Scaling up, you can buy half an ounce — faintly over 14 grams — of high quality Iranian saffron for $38.95, and 1 ounce (28.35 grams) of same for $72.95. To put the priciest purchase in perspective, you could make 28 dinner parties for four to six people really special by spending $72.95. If you did have 28 dinner parties for four to six, that’s between 112 and 168 servings of something you’ve rendered astonishing for between 43 and 65 cents more per serving than you would have spent anyway. I think this is actually pretty good, and it would still be pretty good if you used twice the amount of saffron we’ve been talking about.  You can see why I like shopping at Saffron, Vanilla Imports.

I like buying Baby Brand Kashmiri saffron, too. The math is not as persuasive, however. But the saffron is, and the math will not be a horrible shock now. To get 5 grams of Baby saffron threads is $35, to get 10 grams is $60, and to get 20 grams is $100. For the difference in price, does it go further so that one can use less? I don’t think it goes so much farther that it all evens out, but I believe the aroma is greater, and the taste meets different demands that are made on my kitchen.  Remember, I am cooking, not working at the ISO.

It’s worth repeating that Saffron, Vanilla Imports in San Francisco and Baby Brand Saffron (through their US resellers, Sahar Saffron in Cleveland, OH) guarantee their products.  I don’t know any other vendors who do. I’ve looked everywhere for the best values in saffron world, and I’ve found them.

Back to the Dutch, and Beyond

It’s time to take one last look at that lobster bigger than the poodle in the still life by Adriaen van Utrecht that may or may not depict saffron. In The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Simon Schama tells us of the tensions produced in 17th century Amsterdam when nimiety in the way of material goods sat badly with a long-established ethic of thrift and virtue. The Dutch were suddenly so positioned as to have anything they could name from anywhere in the known world. Immediately, they began ascribing sinfulness to certain new substances, candied fruit being high on that list.  Saffron had been known in the days before super-prosperity was achieved, so it did not quite qualify as a gruesome luxury.

Dutch painting of the 17th century illuminates a question as familiar to us as it was then to the newly prosperous Dutch: has superabundance no moral dimension? Paintings such as this still life both celebrate and condemn the expanding sensual world, so full of the transient beauty that distracts without sustaining, but that so delights us. Should all such temptation be resisted? Or can one give in, while retaining moral fiber? If yes, then how? We too know that struggle, that makes it impossible to think of the rarest and most wondrous substances without ambivalence.

But the Dutch, as usual, are far ahead of us in matters saffron, and in such matters of virtue that can ever attach to saffron. According to the Dutch Embassy in Kabul, this autumn farmers in Uruzgan Province should be reaping their first full saffron harvest, thanks to a project set up by the Netherlands to train Afghans in raising a premium crop that will make a real alternative to opium poppies. It’s an initiative to make a Golden Age Calvinist proud.

SELECTED RESOURCES for this Post

Sometimes, you write what you wish you could more simply have read. Time was, I could have used a one-stop resource on the culinary aspect of saffron. If you know anybody who could use the same thing, please send them the link to this post. If you read something here you believe not to be accurate, please write to me with information you think is better.

Recommended Suppliers

Persian Saffron: Saffron, Vanilla Imports, San Francisco, CA  http://www.saffron.com

Kashmiri Saffron: Baby Brand Saffron http://www.babysaffron.com/

Off-line Reading

Unfortunately, there is no well written, accurate, entirely up-to-date book about saffron, with instructive and alluring visuals, superb recipes and a convincing bibliography. Each of the books below, written within the last 20 years, meets some of those criteria, however.

The Essential Saffron Companion, by John Humphries, 1998

Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World’s Most Seductive Spice, by Pat Willard, 2002

Wild About Saffron: A Contemporary Guide to an Ancient Spice, by Ellen Szita, 1987

Good reading about the spice trade

Spice: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner, 2005

Stimulating and reliable cookbooks to take you outside the Euro-American box

A Taste of Persia: An Introduction to Persian Cooking, by Najmieh Batmanglij, 1999

Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, by Claudia Roden, 2006

Invitation to Mediterranean Cooking, by Claudia Roden, 2001

The Complete Asian Cookbook, by Charmaine Solomon, 1992 (Has a very good section on Mughlai cuisine.)

Art and excess

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama, 1987

Online Resources

The Wikipedia saffron page — Teutonically thorough and accurate, but not very foody. Tragic photos of saffron dishes.

Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages — Through the University of Graz, Katzer has put up the most comprehensive spice guide on the Web. It’s more oriented to botany and etymology than to cooking, however.  Still, it’s a staggering resource for cooks, and one wishes his taxonomania extended far across the edible world.

The Cooking Inn — Author and saffron expert Ellen Szita with excellent info and recipes, although the pricing guidelines are out of date.

Amanda Hesser wrote this article about saffron for the New York times almost 10 years ago — it’s still highly pertinent, and explores the then-budding question whether Persian or Kashmiri saffron is best.

Elaine Sciolino wrote in the New York Times Travel Section, last year, about this fascinating new spice emporium in Paris.  More Pushali saffron from Iran than you are otherwise likely to see in one room in the West.

The BBC looks inside the saffron industry in Kashmir — an oldie but a goodie. You’ll learn what they do with the petals.

The Trade & Environment Database (TED) at American University case study on Iranian saffron.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a beautifully organized and instructive site for anyone who wants to OD on Dutch still life painting, and much else besides.

About 3600 years ago, saffron was a component in perfume. I found out it is once more, in a scent from L’Artisan Parfumeur, Safran Troublant, by Olivia Giacobetti. I wear it to bed, just for myself and my poodle, because it’s voluptuous yet peaceful too. Read about it in a glorious new book, Perfumes: The Guide,(2008), by Luca Turin, a biophysicist, and Tania Sanchez. This book will start you using your olfactory imagination like nothing else you can read. The prodigious Luca Turin writes a column for the Neue Zurcher Zeitung that you can read in English.

Special thanks to Bea of La Tartine Gourmande. For food photography on the Web, nobody can match her precision and naturalism. Visit her blog and her Flickr Photostream for more definitive food and travel photography.

Edward B. Rackley

Pencils ready? Here’s today’s five-second brain teaser: What incentives succeed in getting autocrats to relinquish power peacefully? The use of sticks and carrots to bring about reform is fertile fodder for political theory, yet in practice the tools of the trade are limited and primitive. Privation of goods or commerce is common in today’s climate; chest-thumping and bellicose posturing, another favorite, is practiced by the entire animal kingdom. Carrots, as opposed to sticks, work wonders with children but see little success between nations. Why is that?

In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, ‘A missile launch pad in Thailand, that’s all we need’. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman’s fantasy. Were regime change so easy!

Western policies designed to weaken the junta have been contradictory, perhaps even self-sabotaging. The State Department claims its trade sanctions have encouraged ASEAN countries to adopt a more critical stance on Burma; this is correlation, not causation. ASEAN countries continue their waffling course of ‘constructive engagement’, meaning: do business and look the other way. The US was alone in pursuing sanctions for over a decade until the ill-fated ‘Saffron Revolution’ last September, at which point the EU implemented similar measures.

Critics of these sanctions, embargoes and other disincentives highlight their feel-good, symbolic character—much like Bush’s declaration of genocide in Darfur being followed by cooperation with Khartoum on terrorist intelligence matters. As with Sudan, sanctions against Burma arguably strengthen the hand of ruling authorities by creating a scapegoat for their own internal policy failures and narrowing the opportunity for Burmese to expand their economic, social, and cultural contacts with reform-minded nations. The conservative CATO institute, for instance, makes a case for re-opening commercial relations with Burma, arguing that investment and trade brings technology, better working conditions, and increased exposure to democratic ideas.

Burmese pressure groups and international human rights agencies have lobbied the UN for Security Council action to target Burma’s gas and oil industries, the junta’s primary source of revenue. Such a vote was never tabled, as China and Russia would surely veto on the grounds of the principle of non-interference, their almighty sacred cow and miracle panacea for any vexing political crisis.

But for those nations who huff and puff and try to blow the junta house down–to what effect? Sanctions that fail to cut off all revenue streams to an offending party are ultimately a non sequitur. And wherever there is oil, there is always political wiggle-room. Extraction rights to Burma’s vast offshore oilfields were accorded to China in 2007, along with contracts to build an overland pipeline leading—where else?—to China.

The junta’s economic ties to China, Thailand and India have grown in recent years, meaning a certain Chinese veto of any Security Council Resolution to pressure or punish Burmese leadership. Because Burma is a strategic nexus—it flanks both China and India and provides access to major waterways—China has focused much of its recent regional diplomatic drive on Burma. The result has been growing economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.

As in other closed countries whose citizens suffer armed conflict (Northern Sudan), political persecution (Zimbabwe), extreme resource scarcity (Zimbabwe, North Korea), populist rhetoric and disastrous governance (Cuba, Venezuela), survival of the ruling regime means trading with countries for which morality, politics and commerce are distinct affairs. Resource-rich Sudan has little business with Western countries now; Khartoum looks like a mini-Beijing with all the cranes and Chinese construction companies everywhere. Even beleaguered old Mugabe asked China to bail him out several months ago.

Me and my money

And so Burma’s military rulers remain solvent despite an array of sanctions and international opprobrium, selling oil and gas to India, Thailand and China, another state willing to kill large numbers of its own people to stay in power. ‘Burma’s generals act as if they are immune from worldwide condemnation because they’re still getting cash from foreign-financed oil and gas projects. It’s time to cut them off’, Human Rights Watch argued in a 2007 report.

Burma’s vast majority lives under great hardship and does not see any tangible benefit from outside investment in the oil and gas industry. Most Burmese homes lack electricity altogether, and urban residents face frequent power outages, even as Burma’s natural gas is used to power Thailand’s cities. ‘Burma’s generals have used the promise of oil and gas supplies to buy the silence of energy-hungry countries, including China and India’ (HRW).

Burma is following the path tread by many African countries run by semi-autocracies or sham democracies. Human rights, democratic reform, and good governance are the sticks that accompany western development aid to developing countries. Tired of being subjected to conditions on foreign aid by moralizing and duplicitous Western countries, many African nations are turning to China, Malaysia, India and Thailand to conduct business. Because if trade and aid are available from partners who claim no moral high ground or pretense of superiority, the door to cooperation and exchange of ideas is wide open.

Severe shortage of carrots

One recent instance of Western contradiction: as the Saffron Revolution unfolded in late September, Gordon Brown effused that ‘The age of impunity is over for anyone who commits crimes against the people of Burma.’ After Cyclone Nargis hit in early May, senior UN relief official John Holmes visited the country’s worst-hit areas. As Kouchner and company weighed in on a possible ‘humanitarian invasion’–airdrops and cross-border smuggling of relief supplies and staff–Holmes defended the UN precedent of working with Burma’s military regime. So on the one hand we hear blustery declarations that ‘the age of impunity is over’, while the usual round of UN Special Envoys continue their humble entreaties at the threshold of the junta’s door. In short: multiple diplomatic strategies, all involving sticks, all perfectly contradictory.

Contradictions that were readily manipulated by the regime. After promises to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to allow more aid workers in, the junta then extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s period of detention. ASEAN country officials offered insight into Burmese perceptions of missteps in the Western diplomatic dance. ‘They are suspicious of humanitarian aid serving as a camouflage for regime change,’ the Singapore Ambassador to the UN explained, ‘a perception that is not entirely unreasonable when some [western] countries have talked about invoking responsibility to protect and mounting relief operations without host government permission’.

One wonders ultimately if sanctions represent the end of influence: so many sticks that a carrot becomes inconceivable. Here in Washington I hear political talk in some circles of ‘going through China or India’ to reach Burma’s junta. Intermediaries become necessary when one’s own efforts fail, do they not, so is it not therefore best to fix what’s broken? Alas, I forget the first rule in politics: save thy face.

Many Burmese dissidents, and its government in exile, are looking to the Olympics as a way to pressure China, as has happened with Darfur. There is the coincidence that the Games start on August 8, 2008, the anniversary of the 1988 uprisings in which at least 3000 demonstrators were killed.

Is Burma on track for a possible implosion? Economic decay is severe following twenty years of gross mismanagement, and oil revenue is not enough to right the junta’s sinking ship. But how long must the Burmese wait and pray? The internal collapse or combustion of autocratic states does occur, as happened in the Soviet Union and its client states, particularly in Africa. Predicting when and how this happens escapes even the best analysts.