by Chris Bacas

I asked my friend about April weather in Siberia.

“You will need jacket” he said evenly and without article.

Part of a festival celebrating Victory in the “Great Patriotic War” and the incredible efforts at the Far East factories, our gig was booked for springtime. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the trip was rescheduled for late November. To prepare, I read Solzhenitsyn's “Gulag Archipelago”; its' sweep encompassing a full history of the Soviet Police state and camps, detailed etymologies of prison slang, the geography and anthropology of a vast territory and hundreds of individual tales so grim and heroic each merited a film. After more than a thousand soul-burning pages, I could recite countless camp torments in the author's majestic, ironic voice, but was unable to order a dumpling and a soda in his mother tongue, nor read nyet and da in Cyrillic. I had a full beard and hair I could tie in a two-foot ponytail. Friends pointed out my resemblance to Rasputin. Other than a valid passport and some skills as a musician, my qualifications for this trip were slight.

The itinerary filled out with dates in St Peterburg, Moscow, and a few more in the East. We left after Thanksgiving. My colleague, a Russian-born musician who long anchored the most accomplished and well-known jazz band in the USSR, arranged the tour. He'd left his homeland and wife, for work, during the tumultuous months of perestroika; an American musician as his visa sponsor and host. The two men proved incompatible and I offered our second-floor as an alternative. Sharing the Siberian invitation came more of reciprocity and true friendship than musical or entrepreneurial designs. There were plenty of players more well-known or skilled to make the trip. I was lucky.

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by Holly A. Case

Attila Kiss

Attila Kiss speaks beautiful English. He has been a simultaneous interpreter—from Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian—for various intellectual and spiritual luminaries, among them the Dalai Lama, and for the European Union. When he speaks of interpreting, it is with uncanny precision, betraying an awareness that even speech is an act of simultaneous translation from thought to word.

Ten years ago, Kiss (pronounced “Kish”) was on an interpreting assignment for the EU in Brussels. One evening after work, he attended the screening of a new film on the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Heading back to his hotel he crossed through a park. Someone approached him, said “Good evening,” and then stabbed him with a knife. A struggle ensued. The man fled. Kiss spent a week in intensive care and underwent periodic operations for years thereafter. His attacker has never been identified or apprehended.

Interpretations of the episode began even prior to Kiss's release from the hospital. Initially the Belgian police thought he had gone to the park for a homosexual hook-up that went sour; they found no evidence to back up this hypothesis. Another of their theories involved a disgruntled student, upset about a grade. Their attention focused on one man, who was indeed a former student, but had not received a low grade from Kiss, and in fact counted as a family friend. And thus another narrative bubble burst over the case. One explanation remained. In the police report, Kiss had indicated that he believed his assailant to have been “an Arab.” The police ultimately concluded that he had been attacked by one of a group of young Moroccan fundamentalists who had been targeting EU officials. Given that Kiss was wearing a suit, carrying a laptop case, and walking in the vicinity of the EU Parliament, he may have been mistaken for a Union official.

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by Libby Bishop

Happy Fourth of July. This is the United States holiday that celebrates the American colonies throwing off the shackles of undemocratic rule by a controlling European power and purports to honour freedom. I am an American, living in the now-less-United Kingdom, where, on the 23^rd of June, 37% of the electorate voted to free itself from the European Union, or so it believes. It is impossible to say that the result was about a single issue, be it immigration, xenophobia, European Union bureaucracy, or anti-elitism. But there is no doubt that the Leave campaign promised freedom. The campaign fanned fears that Britain was being controlled by Brussels, and voting Leave would free Great Britain to be Great again. Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Leave movement, even called the 23^rd of June Britain's Independence Day. In the referendum, the issues were framed in simplistic and binary terms: in or out, controlled or free.

This idea of sovereign freedom is a potent elixir. Its synonyms connote positive associations such as liberty and emancipation, whereas most words that describe limitations on freedom are negative: restriction, dependence, weakness, subjection, suppression, slavery, and as in the referendum, controlled. I have come to question this bipolar perspective of free versus controlled. Indeed, rather than being opposites, I claim that freedom and control co-exist, indeed, that authentic freedom can exist only in finely honed tension with control.

In my experience, freedom with control occurs across widely diverse disciplines and practices: horseback riding, music and political economy. I have ridden horses for over fifty years, starting as a horse-crazy girl, riding in jumping competitions in my teens, and as an adult, practicing dressage. Dressage, the French word for “training”, is a method of training a horse in obedience and precision of movement. It is about evoking a particular way of moving—forward, energetic, but always balanced, calm, and responsive. Yet as is so often the case, translation cannot convey the full meaning of the original word. Training implies basic fitness and obedience to commands, but dressage is concerned with training to higher levels of ability, akin to training a dog to be a guide for a blind person. Henry Wynmalen says, “…dressage is the art of improving one's horse beyond the stage of plain usefulness” (p. 4).*

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No Address

—in memory of B.D.

my oldest friend has left us

he now has no address or
his address is now not numbered
there’s no street to be remembered
no place that I can place him and
now ephemeral I miss him

he was a bollard I could tie to
I could call him when I’d want to
I could talk with him of childhood and
the changes that we went through
(how that world seemed less in torment)
and though we knew our days were numbered
we could go there in a phone call but
palpable as past was when we
laughed about our dreaming we
could riff on time still streaming
in the moments we were living, we
could pick up where we’d left off
the last time we were speaking as if
years had lost their meaning,
as if nothing really mattered but the
talk that we were having, which we
owed to long affection and

as we swapped our thoughts in breaths
there was no reason to be grieving
.

by Jim Culleny
6/23/16
.

by Richard King

BEARDED MAN: Could you be quiet please? What was that?

WISEGUY: I dunno; I was too busy talking to Bignose.

SPECTATOR: I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers”.

BEARDED MAN'S WIFE: What's so great about the cheesemakers?

BEARDED MAN: Well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

— Monty Python's Life of Brian, 1979

The scene takes place at the edge of a crowd, which has gathered to hear – or to try to hear – Christ deliver the Sermon on the Mount. The punchline is delivered with a knowing air, as if nothing could be more natural than that Jesus would decide to set out his creed with a certain amount of poetic obfuscation. “Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally …” And yet, as we know, much ink will be spilled over precisely how literally to take Christ's words, and the words of many a prophet besides. Much ink, much blood, and an ocean of tears …

*

As I write this, Istanbul's Ataturk Airport is a scene of devastation and chaos. On Tuesday evening, local time, three attackers armed with guns and explosives laid siege to Europe's third busiest airport in what appears to be a well organised operation, one calculated to maximise casualties. The victims include people from Iraq, China, Tunisia, Jordan, Iran and Ukraine. Most of them, of course, were Turkish citizens. At this moment – around 1 am GMT on 29 June 2016 – the death toll stands at 42, though some outlets put it at 41. Hundreds are injured. Thousands are grieving. The Turkish people are in shock, again.

In the coming hours certain statements will be made. Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan will come on television to say that this was a crime against humanity and an attack on Turkey's national soul, or sentiments to that effect. He will urge unity and resolve in the face of intimidation. Turkey must not give in to terror. He may well say that the dead are martyrs. Such platitudes are to be expected, and not all of them are to be despised.

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by Emrys Westacott

Whether we like or not, whether we admit or not, those of us who live in the modernized world are heirs of the Enlightenment. We know from experience and from scientific studies that there are numerous ways in which human beings are often quite irrational. Nevertheless, rational, informed deliberation in which evidence and arguments are critically and carefully evaluated remains an ideal that most of us subscribe to. It is how we think (and say we think) most decisions should be made, both in our personal lives and when we act politically as citizens, whether we are hiring an electrician or voting in an election.

So when we see people acting, as we see it, out of ignorance, or unwittingly against their rational self-interest, or swayed by emotions we don’t respect, such as racial hatred, xenophobia, or machismo, we are naturally critical. We are also, if not shocked! shocked! often bewildered. How can people not see what is so obvious to us?

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by Carl Pierer

M.C. Escher: Reptiles.

In the first part of this essay, the axiom of choice was introduced and a rather counterintuitive consequence was shown: the Banach-Tarski Paradox. To recapitulate: the axiom of choice states that, given any collection of non-empty sets, it is possible to choose exactly one element from each of them. This is uncontroversial in the case where the collection is finite. Simply list all the sets and then pick an element from each. Yet, as soon as we consider infinite collections, matters get more complicated. We cannot explicitly write down which element to pick, so we need to give a principled method of choosing. In some cases, this might be straightforward. For example, take an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the natural numbers. Any such set will contain a least element. Thus, if we pick the least element from each of these sets, we have given a principled method. However, with an infinite collection of non-empty subsets of the real numbers, this particular method does not work. Moreover, there is no obvious alternative principled method. The axiom of choice then states that nonetheless such a method exists, although we do not know it.

The axiom of choice entails the Banach-Tarski Paradox, which states that we can break up a ball into 8 pieces, take 4 of them, rotate them around and put them back together to get back the original ball. We can do the same thing with the remaining 4 pieces and get another ball of exactly the same size. This allows us to duplicate the ball. This beautifully paradoxical result casts some doubt about the status of the axiom. Perhaps, if the axiom leads to something as counter-intuitive as the Banach-Tarski Paradox, it should be rejected?

This second part will look at a famous and important lemma, known as Zorn's Lemma, which is logically equivalent to the axiom[i]. Due to its relevance in proofs of highly useful mathematical propositions, this will give some support against the counterintuitive consequence of the axiom.

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by Claire Chambers

Much has been written about Boris Johnson as a politician in recent weeks. But Johnson is also an author of fiction, verse (I won't dignify it by using the word 'poetry'), and journalism. As such, another way of understanding the man's worldview is to scrutinize his imaginative work. I examine Johnson's ​little-known ​comic novel Seventy-Two Virgins (2004), which centres on the attempt by an Islamist cell to attack Westminster Hall during a visit from an unnamed American president.

In this blog post I consider the book's inescapable Islamophobia​, and the light this sheds on Johnson, ​figurehead of the Brexit campaign​. Such Islamophobia is particularly concerning in the context of the post-referendum ​British ​upsurge in xenophobia​, racism​, and religious hatred​.

Seventy-Two Virgins is an unpleasant and unfunny book which has a simile and a stereotype problem. Johnson's similes are usually clunky and sometimes offensive. Early on in the novel, he describes ​West London as being 'spread out … in the morning sun, like a beautiful woman surprised in bed without her make-up'. Not only does this reveal Johnson's patronizing view of women, about which more shortly, but also the image's derivation − unwitting or otherwise − from T. S. Eliot's superior lines, 'the evening is spread out against the sky. | Like a patient etherized upon a table', does no favours to either text. Much later, clapping from the audience in Westminster Palace is compared to 'the spastic batting of a butterfly's wings as it dies against a window'. Here Johnson's verbiage and the imprecision of his image flutter against his outdated and ableist use of the word 'spastic'.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

They say that this year the monsoon will hit the Indian subcontinent hard and strong. They say that we who have been parched by the sun six months and some long, will now cower from the rains, for the next few, and then some. They say that climate change is real. And that we have made it so. That we shall reap what we sow, which is, in this case, the opening out of the heavens, in the kind of bounty that one neither wants nor can handle. The monsoon in this part of the world, that creature of romantic songs, and tea by the window, is a capricious creature of munificent gifts and unbearable fury. Not six months ago, I wrote about a city suffering the monsoon and its unreasonable gifts, brought to its knees by the usual combination of bureaucratic surprise and political willfulness.

And yet, the many years that I was away from these tropical parts, I missed the monsoon. And the fragrance of the first rains. The rains smell, like all writers attempting a description of smell will tell you, like nothing that you may have smelt if you haven't smelt the rain. Its closest description can only be brought about through invocation. Invoke if you will, a morning of semi-darkness, one where the previous night has been spent in heavy argumentation with people you love, where food and drink have flown in equal measure, where one has said things that sound right and ring true, and where sleep has brought dreams of the kind one wishes to remember, but can't. As you emerge from this dream-filled, accomplished stupor, something of the nature of memory winds through your nostrils, and you remember every moment of every happy day that you may have ever lived. Your limbs feel supple, and your mind light, and your body feels one with the bodies of leaves, and tree trunks, and branches, and flowers. And you know that it has rained. Such is the potency of this smell that people have even tried to bottle it up.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I was in the city of Jogjakarta (also spelled as Yogyakarta) in May 2015. It was a short stay: I was primarily visiting Hong Kong, but then had to exit Hong Kong to re-enter because my visa-free stay had expired. Nearby countries would have served the purpose, but I chose Indonesia — six hours south by flight and across the equator — because I'd always been drawn to its size and diversity: thousands of islands in a tremendous sprawl (if the northwestern-most part of Indonesia started in Alaska, the archipelago would stretch all the way to Virginia); 240 million people, 87% of them Muslim, speaking 400 odd languages (even greater linguistic diversity than India); an unlikely national experiment that began in 1940s after centuries of Dutch colonial rule and a short but painful three years of Japanese occupation.

There was no way to capture even a fraction of that complexity in four days, but I wanted to start somewhere. Jakarta, the sprawling capital where I stayed the first night, was too daunting; but Jogjakarta, an hour's flight from the capital and which holds a unique place in Javanese culture, seemed more manageable. Here are some informal impressions: nothing very detailed, just a first take.

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by Sue Hubbard

It seems a long time ago since the Tate Summer party to celebrate the opening of the new Switch House adjoining the original Bankside Power Station. It was a different world then. On the 16th June, the date of the party, we were still in Europe. The architects Herzog & de Meuron, who did the conversion, are a Swiss firm based in Basel. They have worked with Tate for 20 years, originally to transform Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's power station. Since Tate Modern opened in May 2000 it has had more than 40 million visitors, many of them from abroad, coming to sample the unique cultural pleasures of this multi-cultural city. As a result of Tate Modern's presence the surrounding area of the South Bank that includes Shakespeare's Globe, has turned from a web of grey streets into a buzzing cosmopolitan hub filled with street performers and food stalls selling cuisine from around the world. It's become a must-see landmark. To walk across the Thames on Anthony Caro's lightening-flash of a bridge, with its vistas along the river east and west, is to feel that you are at the centre of one of the most exciting global capitals of the world.

The night of the party – despite the inefficiency of the lifts and mounting queues – I went with friends up to the viewing platform on the 10^th floor. The panorama is stunning. The city laid out below in 360-degrees with views of the Shard, Westminster Abbey, the Post Office Tower, Saint Paul's Cathedral and, down river, Wembley Stadium. This is a building designed and built in hope and optimism. A cultural temple that firmly puts us at the epicentre of the artistic world: inclusive, challenging, forward looking. At the opening party the place was awash with the great and the good: royalty, journalists and international art stars. The sense of possibility and optimism was palpable.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Photo by Ayesha Bokhari.

A breathless list of what you’re likely to see fifteen minutes before sunset on my Iftaar table: fruit chaat, a sweet and spicy fruit salad made mostly of apples from my yard, bananas, grapes, orange or lemon juice, chick peas, sometimes guavas and pomegranate seeds, dahi baray, chick pea fritters soaked in yogurt that is spiced with roasted, ground cumin and red chili, cholay, spicy beans, samosay, a deep fried beef- or potato- filled pastry. You’ll also see dates in a small dish and an assortment of frayed, speckled flowers from the yard. On a good day, you’ll see mint chutney, on most days, ketchup, Habanera, Sriracha. On a good day, sweet lassi, on most days, juice. During the countdown to Iftaar, which coincides with the Maghrib (sundown) call to prayer, a dinner item or two are on the stove, water is boiling for tea, and I’m in a frenzy to finish frying pakoray, chick pea fritters which must be served piping hot.

Needless to say, it’s hard to be in a good mood, to not feel drained after a day of fasting and an afternoon of cooking, but I try, as one must. When my children were old enough to reminisce, each of them remarked on how much they enjoyed the aroma and taste of Iftaar food: quite a dilemma for someone like myself who is not particularly in favor of having deep fried treats every day for a month.

If fasting for the month of Ramadan requires patience and stamina, cooking for Ramadan requires stamina plus a sustained effort to keep the home feeling like an island of festivity for the whole month, to keep up the Ramadan spirit against fatigue and a sense of alienation, as we try to meet work and school deadlines while fasting for up to 16 hours. We rarely change our regular routine, still attending meetings, taking the kids for soccer and piano practice, attending open houses and work parties. Self-discipline, and a quiet, unfussy, constant aim to rejuvenate inner peace in Ramadan is part of the Muslim life, but in the present climate of Islamophobia, I find myself needing to do more to shield the family during this time of reflection and private spirituality, from the news of violence and the violence of news, from outrage against being silenced, demonized, and consequent bitterness. Feast-like cooking, I notice, has become an act of self-preservation.

At a recent Iftaar-dinner for poet friends, I found myself commenting that an ideal iftaar is a simple, well-cooked, nutritious meal, and that Ramadan is not about elaborate iftaars, but about cultivating the spiritual self and renewing the bond with family and community by sharing in the hunger and the feeding, but I know from experience that it doesn’t work that way, that the Iftaar menu inherited from the culture gives a sense of atmosphere and nostalgia, constructs and punctuates tradition. So I chop the fruits and mix the chick pea paste, deep fry and garnish everything with chaat masala all month long, taking comfort and a measure of delight in the family’s expectation of the the month-long nightly party.

by Michael Liss

On September 19, 1796, less than two months prior to the meeting of the Electors to choose the next President of the United States, George Washington stunned the country by publishing “The Address of General Washington To The People of The United States on his declining of the Presidency of the United States”—what came to be known as Washington’s Farewell Address.

Washington was tired. The office had made him old before his time—compare the ubiquitous Gilbert Stuart “dollar-bill” paintings done in his second term to the immensely vigorous figure you see in Charles Willson Peale’s full length portrait after the Battle of Trenton. Still, the Presidency would have been his to keep, probably for life, if he had wanted. His prestige was immense, his character considered unimpeachable, and his words carried enormous weight.

“Weight” also described the text. In an era where there were no page limits, The Farewell Address just keeps on going—32 densely-handwritten pages and well over 6000 words when set in type. And as to the prose, there is just no lift, no color, no poetry. People think they remember “beware of foreign entanglements,” but even that is incorrect–the exact quote is “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Therein lies the paradox–the famous speech that no one can accurately recall because no one can get through it. My daughter gave me a collection of 40 great American speeches. The Farewell Address is included, but with at least 80% of it “abridged.” Seems as if the editor couldn’t get through it either.

There is something oddly appropriate about this. Washington wasn’t eloquent. Monuments rarely are. At times, it seems he was barely human—he was Flexner’s Indispensable Man, transitioning from warrior-chief to an immovable stone obelisk to which the ship of state could be lashed in any storm. What people get out of the Farewell, after wading through the prolixity, is his strength and steadfastness—his primary bequest to the country. Here, he voluntarily gives up power; there, he reassures that great things have been accomplished by forming a Union; and, finally, he warns of dangers and advises on how to reduce them.

Can we stop with that—is that enough? Do we really need more from Washington, beyond seeing him as a colossus?

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by Paul North

F. Undine in his Brooklyn studio, June 2016

In the third installment of “Current Genres of Fate” I want to think about a mode of fate that has been all the rage for the last 20 years or so. Let's call it “the persistence of the past.” For some time before that, as is well known, it was the rage to remark on the speed with which we were leaving the past behind. Rages come and go. It was oddly pleasurable to discover, in the midst of our progress, that the past had kept right up with us. Now we happily talk about how little has changed. But however cutting edge it has recently seemed, the idea that the past persists within or behind the newness of things is at least as old as our ideas of progress. Darwin tells about a species driven toward innovation that at the same time keeps intimate ties with the deep past. Freud says a new psychic attachment is a guise for a primal ur-attachment.

You will never be rid of the past. This is surely a fateful way of understanding the past's persistence. But this fate does not have to be bad. Just because we are shadowed by the old does not mean we are its puppets or have no freedom at all. What's more, the idea that the past persists can have a salutary effect. It may soften our fetish for change, turn our fever for forward movement to reticence, relax the continual, tortured desire to “move on.” On the other hand, if we admit that the past persists, it does seem unlikely that we will ever achieve total freedom. Accepting this mode of fate ruins the fantasy that we could have no constraints whatever.

An artist named Friese Undine has made it his responsibility to cast shadows on the idea of progress in life as well as in art. Undine proposes to stain putatively current images with blotches of the past. In art this is particularly hard to do, since art, visual art—‘contemporary' art—seems over the last 150 years or so to have signed a pact with progress-lovers in other walks of life, like politics and economics. Art wants to consign the past to the past just like they do. We associate this gesture with “modernism”—waving away tradition, refusing conventional subjects and traditional techniques. With its dismissive wave, modern art kept up with capitalism. “Make it new” was the aesthetic rallying cry of a century, until, at a certain point, the sheen on the plastic packing rubbed off. Newness got old. The only novelty left to plunder was the past. Yet even the return to past forms—in order to quote styles, ridicule out of date wishes, to consciously recycle images or to debase conventions, and all the rest—even this way of doing art that saw the past as a storehouse of gestures to be repurposed, also denied that the past simply persists. Artists could not proceed plundering the past if it were not dead. They could not innovate and renovate and at the same time admit that the past had never actually passed.

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by Humera Afridi

I want to hear her: bold; questioning; insistent, refusing to compromise her ideals. I want to understand; to see, her: this woman of deep faith, with a distinctive laugh, who “had no equal among either the women or the men of her century.” Possessed of a brilliant mind and exceptional memory, she was controversial—beloved, reviled, envied, not averse to taking risks in the service of truth and justice. Falsely accused of adultery, she was publicly defended by her husband, Seal of the Prophets and a political leader, who took to the minbar and challenged the men bent on sullying her name and that of his household. At 42, she led an army against the fourth Caliph—the infamous Battle of the Camel in the mid-seventh century—in which she suffered devastating losses. Mother of the Believers, yet herself childless. Youngest wife of Prophet Muhammad. Transmitter of two thirds of his sayings, the Hadith or traditions, that are treasured keys to a deeper understanding of the Quran and the commentaries written on its divinely revealed verses.

But: where is Aisha today?

When we speak of Muslim women, or the status of women in Islam, harking back always to that distant past—seventh century Arabia—which through a prismatic lens continues to determine our present, why are the Mothers of the Believers silent, invisible, absent? Asked whom he loved the most, Prophet Muhammad, magnificent warrior against misogyny in egregiously patriarchal Arabia, unhesitatingly declared, “Aisha!” Aisha in whose lap he breathed his last breath before he passed into the Realm of Beauty.

All this to say, Aisha was far from flat. She was refreshingly complex, multi-dimensional, a “round character”—to borrow a literary term from E. M. Forster—filled with the breath of God. And she wasn't the only one. Well before her, there was Khadijah, the Prophet's first wife—with whom he had monogamous relationship for twenty-five years until her death—savvy business woman, older than him by over a decade, a former widow, who on discerning his gentle and upright character, qualities she deemed attractive in a man, proposed marriage to him when he was a lad of 25 and in her employ.

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by Dave Maier

As someone who lived through the surreal drug-war dystopia of the 1980s, I have always assumed that the collected forces behind it (right-wing authoritarianism, progressive nanny-statism, the law enforcement, private-prison, and Big Pharma lobbies, general aversion to other races and/or dirty f’ing hippies, inertia and lack of imagination, etc.) would render it a permanent fixture of our political landscape, at least in the USA. So even after two states re-legalized marijuana in 2012 (and two more since), I didn’t pay much attention. It simply remained inconceivable to me that it would go beyond that.

Nowadays, however, one hears frequently that re-legalization of marijuana and perhaps even all “illicit” drugs is inevitable and in fact will happen sooner rather than later. The thought is that young people (i.e. new voters) are strongly in favor of re-legalization and only older people (i.e. those preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil and thus off the voting rolls) are strongly against – and even the latter are discovering, perhaps to their surprise, the apparently wondrous utility (if anecdote be any guide) of medical cannabis. The latest nationwide polls on the issue show Americans favoring the end of marijuana prohibition by wide margins (58-39, 56-36, numbers like that), suggesting a cultural shift as momentous and sudden (at least to those not paying attention, such as myself) as that which has led to today’s widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage.

So I thought I better get up to speed and hit the books. I don’t have a tightly argued, persuasive essay for you, and I am still only halfway through a fairly tall stack of relevant literature, but I can at least pass on some recommendations and share some speculation over the next couple of columns.

I'd start with Dan Baum’s authoritative study Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1996). This will fire your outrage and keep you going through some of the more pedestrian public-policy issues, as well as dauntingly complex psychopharmacology, on offer later on. Baum insists that the book is not a manifesto for legalization, but rather an examination of the genesis of the war, which he traces to the election of 1968, and its escalation into “a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government gets.”

A recurrent theme in Baum’s story, as he notes in his introduction, is that “[t]he War on Drugs is about a lot of things, but only rarely is it really about drugs.” Notoriously high on President Nixon’s paranoid list of enemies were “the blacks” and “the hippies”, and by fomenting drug war he saw a way to attack both at once. When his hand-picked Presidential Commission on Marijuana (a.k.a. the Shafer Commission) failed to provide the desired denunciations of drug use (Nixon had demanded “a goddamn strong statement about marijuana … one that just tears the ass out of them”), Nixon simply ignored it. In any case Congress had already passed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which still determines government policy in this area to this day. The drug war – or at least its modern phase – had begun.

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