who gets the thing that makes you tick
The world goes round. One day
you find someone who knows—
who gets the thing that makes you tick
gets it right and gets it quick
No words can tell the joy in this
You might as well be mute before a fire,
rapt in its flame—
Enjoy its heat
Listen to its embers hiss
.
by Jim Culleny
from Blink
11/28/12
We crossed through the Midlands early in the month of June stopping off at the Bog of Allen, a fine though now of course greatly diminished raised bog, which generation after generation of Irish folks have burned as peat to heat their damp and somewhat chilly homes. And as we approached our destination we stopped several times at sites of scientific interest. As groups of hushed botanists whisperingly conferred over the relative hairiness of sepals, the flexuousness of petals, the lanceoloation of leaves and so forth, I swept the margins of small steams with my net with giddy abandon. The art of sticking one’s head into a net of agitated insects to retrieve one’s prizes, and to transfer them to a small vial of ethanol, has not received its due attention, but we shall have to reserve that meditation for another time. Once back on the mini-bus I’d stow the net under the bus seat and we’d be off to the next venue.
As we approached Co Clare a mild clamor emerged from the botanists, upon whose finely pubescent legs — need I point to the genderlessness of this observation? — ticks were now promenading. By the time my net was recognized as the tick delivery mechanism, the little blighters has already made their greedy ascent to the humid and agreeable habitat of the nether-regions that seem to be their preference. The ticks were painstakingly removed that evening, a process, the self-administration of which I can admit to having a certain fondness. The trick here is patience, a steady hand, and the graduated amplification of pulling force. Ticks relent.
Now, a point I want to make here is metaphorically a rather small one. Ticks, not always noticed when in the field become a nuisance when they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had inadvertently transported these ticks from their point of immediate origin, and their impact was uncomfortably felt in a manner that demanded attention. These ticks that so afflicted my botanists were not, of course, themselves invasive species, nevertheless they can serve to illustrate the rudiments of invasive species biology. Invasive species are those spread by human agency outside their typical range and have an impact in the host location significant enough to warrant management action. Setting aside, for now, the terminological skirmishes over distinctions between non-natives, exotics, invasives and so on, I simply ask you to bear in mind as important the factors of transportation between locations and an impact in a new range that is assessed as consequential.
by Quinn O'Neill
To be clear, I’m not saying that each or any of these compounds is necessarily harmful. Certainly, most of the media reports are sensational and unreliable. If you go straight to the scientific literature to do your own investigation, you’ll generally find this: some papers will claim that the substance is perfectly safe and some will suggest that it may cause a variety of undesirable health effects. Many of the papers suggesting safety will have been done by industry-funded researchers and there’ll probably be a few reviews that purport to consider all of the studies and conclude with a statement like this: “When all the research on aspartame, including evaluations in both the premarketing and postmarketing periods, is examined as a whole, it is clear that aspartame is safe, and there are no unresolved questions regarding its safety under conditions of intended use.”
Well, I think there are still a few unresolved questions, like can the NutraSweet company be trusted to evaluate the safety of a substance that makes them megabucks? And can we trust our regulating agencies to look out for us while they employ people with ties to industry? I’d say no and no to those questions, and maybe I’m a bit neurotic, but if there’s any doubt about the safety of a particular substance I’d rather not eat it. The most obvious alternative would be to buy organic, but this is a pricey option and there may be residues of potentially harmful pesticides, like copper sulfate, in organic food too.
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have
a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
~William James
I recently went to a food security panel held by Columbia University’s Earth Institute. There was, as is customary with the Earth Institute, both much to celebrate – such as a nuanced understanding of climate change and its responses – and bemoan – such as the casual dismissal of organic agriculture and a whole-hearted endorsement of GMO crops. While the subject was the very real phenomenon of food insecurity of the developing world, I became curious about how our perceptions of food security in the developed world – and what constitutes a desirable food system – inform our views of the developing world. One small detail from the afternoon, concerning a specific kind of fragility, was especially striking, and forms a convenient basis for the following critique of certain institutional worldviews.
How quickly can a system crumble under pressure? The idea of fragility in food systems can be characterized in many ways, such as crop vulnerability to weather shocks, or falling yields due to environmental degradation or ever-more resistant pests. Fragility can also be more formally defined as the way in which a system is – oftentimes endogenously – vulnerable to disruption or outright breakdown, as defined by Charles Perrow’s important work on complex technological systems. But it was economic fragility that was the focus of the following chart, shared by the Earth Institute’s Jessica Fanzo, from FAO’s “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” (p14):
Although this is only the lowest quintile of the population for each country, it makes clear the extent to which financial fragility is a determinant of food security. Any increase in food prices requires a significant additional portion of a family’s income in these countries, if they are to maintain the same level of caloric intake, let alone nutrition. More frequently, families are not able to spend more money on food, and must employ other strategies to make ends meet: fewer meals; less caloric or nutritional value in each meal; the reallocation of meals away from members who are not income earners; taking children out of schools when a family must choose between education and food (i.e., as a result of school fees); the preferencing of employment for children over education, etc.
This kind of anxiety is inherently difficult for people in the U.S. to envision. Just how foreign is the concept of food security is to us? Simply put, the United States’ citizens spend less of their income per capita on food than any other nation. Setting aside the arguments that have been amply made elsewhere about the fact that we as end-consumers do not pay for the “true cost” of food, there are three things worth pointing out: how little we pay; the consistency with which we pay so little; and the further invariability of how we spend our food money.
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
We are philosophy professors. A large part of our job is reading. Often it’s classics like Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, and Descartes’ Meditations. And it’s even more so books by our contemporaries and colleagues. We read in our offices and at home, but we’ll take a book to a coffee shop or on a plane every so often. We’ve found that funny things happen when we do that, and it’s regularly not what Nozick at eighteen had hoped for.
We’ve been asked to review Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? for The Philosopher’s Magazine (the review will be out in the Spring). Talisse has found that being seen reading the book in public creates unusual interest. Folks at the Starbucks across from Vanderbilt seemed positively befuddled by the book, as if to ask who would ask such a question? One person very audibly muttered, “Yeah, and why tolerate books like that?” Aikin accidentally left his copy on an airplane, tucked into the seatback pocket. When he’d returned for the book, it had been found by a flight attendant. She (only half-jokingly) reprimanded him for reading the book while flying. (The reasoning seems to be analogous to the no-atheists-in-foxholes argument.) Aikin’s story has occasioned some chuckles among our friends and even proposals that we bring along extra copies of similar books. We might, so the thought goes, leave at least one copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian or Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great on every plane we ride.
Different books yield different puzzlement. Talisse was reading Gerald Gaus’s hefty The Order of Public Reason in a coffee shop and someone asked if it was the new Harry Potter Book. Aikin has had multiple conversations with those curious about the symbolic logic book in his hand – what is symbolic logic? What use could it have? Can you really teach logic? Our reading groups are all too regularly confused with the Bible study group. Well, at least until they hear the discussion.
by Sue Hubbard
Founded in 1958, the original New Art Centre was located in Sloane Street, London. Then in 1994 it relocated to Roche Court , a nineteenth-century house in rolling parkland, built in 1804 for Admiral Nelson, reputedly for trysts with his mistress Emma, though these were apparently cut short by his premature death at Trafalgar. Traces of Iron Age and Roman farms and two Saxon cemeteries have been located nearby on Roche Court Down. In the twenty acres or so of parkland and garden with its ha-ha and scenic views, sited amid the walled vegetable garden with its Victorian glass houses or dotted in wooded dells and hollows, are around 100 works by 20th and 21stcentury sculptors. From the terrace of the house a pair of huge bronze hares by Barry Flanagan can be seen leaping in the cleft of the valley. Roche Court also represents various artists' estates including those of Barbara Hepworth, Kenneth Armitage and Ian Stephenson.
In the autumn of 1998 the architect, Stephen Marshall, added the new gallery that now joins the house and the Orangery which, along with the award-winning Artist’s House, has proved to be a perfect addition to the park and won six architectural awards including the RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize for best small building. This allows for an ever-changing programme of exhibitions. The present show is by Laura Ford.
by Morgan Meis
***
Driving out to Albany Airport (a regional airport if there ever was one) to put Shuffy on a plane to visit her mother in Las Vegas you exit the NY State Throughway and get onto Wolf Road. There is a Hampton Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Holiday Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Moe’s Southwest Grill on Wolf Road. The Cheesecake Factory can be found just off of Wolf Road at the Colonie Center Shopping Mall. There are, needless to say, no wolves on Wolf Road. But there must have been once. Albany was founded in the 17th century. It is a very old city by American standards. On the Department of Environmental Conservation website can be found the sentence, “The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies waged war on wolves in 1631.” It was a successful war. Now, there aren’t even any memories. The wolves were eradicated so quickly that they are not part of the story.
That is something Shuffy brought up one morning while we were sitting on the deck of the second floor of my sister’s house in New Baltimore. The sun was coming up over the trees across the water on Shodack Island. We were drinking coffee from steamy cups. Steam was lifting off the surface of the Hudson River too. Or mist. Physics that morning was acting on the coffee and the river water in the same way. I was musing about how wolves seem to haunt the European imagination. It goes way back, I was speculating. All those old forests. The wolves were always lingering there at the edge of civilization, nipping at its heels. When European civilization wasn’t doing so well, when its defenses were down, it would be time for the wolves again. They could get the taste for human flesh. A frenzy is begun, wolves eating men and men killing wolves. That’s probably where the idea for werewolves got started, I was thinking aloud. There is a line in time and space where the margins of human living and the margins of wolf living overlap. That overlap marks a spot for violence. The distinction between wolf and man blurs and everything collapses into a mutual killing. Is there repressed guilt about that killing in the stories of werewolves? Man kills wolf just as mercilessly as wolf kills man. Does the lingering guilt come back in the idea of the wolfman, the human creature who becomes wolf in order to balance the scales, to do the work of the absent wolf?
By Namit Arora
A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 2 appeared on April 22.
But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may even see positive value in certain aspects of nationalism—its potential to bind diverse groups and inspire collective action, for instance—but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ‘ancient’ origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.
This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as “The Idea of India”, which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.
Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on political unity or a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.
By Elatia Harris
Cover photo of Brief, snow globe and screenshots from Brief, courtesy of Jaded Ibis Press
Alexandra Chasin is a Brooklyn-based writer who turned to fiction with her acclaimed collection, Kissed By (FC2, 2007). Her new work, Brief (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), is an app novel for the iPad — the first-ever literary novel to take the form of an app. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School.
ELATIA HARRIS: Alex, chance and probability are intimately involved in the experience of reading Brief, as well as a truly embodied participation by the reader. You can turn the page, for instance, but you can't turn back to the last page you just read and flipped away from. Its words and images would not be distributed that way again for an interval that it would almost take the 10,000 year clock to reckon. This not being able to go back seems to play with the idea of the personal history of the narrator, about whom we start finding out before personhood was achieved. The narrator has an unusual take on motivation, for someone who grew up and turned art vandal — wouldn't you say?
EH: The narrator is certainly at pains to establish that nothing exceptional occurred at home. Just TV, playdates, the Cold War, and the occasional crewcut — that sort of thing.
AC: The narrator's birthdate is, in effect, the starting point of Brief, and its location in time — that moment of cold-war psychosis, in which televisions made their way into every household, in which pop culture began to achieve truly mass proportions and to infiltrate the bastions of high-art. The nine months prior to the narrator's birthdate and the two years after, are effectively the time of the piece, their developments linked to — shown to be determining of — the development of an art vandal.
EH: The images speak to that era. They are furiously torn up, not to mention randomized, but they're evocative.
AC: Yes, I imagined the images having an evocative relation to the text and era, and also of the atmosphere in the courtroom where the narrative is set. The images are almost all manipulated — either fragmented or composited or abstracted — to exaggerate their oblique relation to the text. Maybe there is a similar obliquity in the relation of image and text in certain books by W.G. Sebald — Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn.
EH: Being an app helps this along, of course…
AC: What the app does is constantly change the relationship of text to image, which reinforces visually a question the text raises about the radically changing status of the image in the early 1960s. The text argues that the convergence of a paranoid Cold-War psychology, the invasion of television into almost all U.S. households, and the turn from abstraction to pop and op art in the high-culture zone, would absolutely require a renegotiation of the status of the image. The operation of the app represents those historical changes in virtually every screen.
I'm always concerned with that kind of correspondence between form and content, or between content and medium. A great example is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, in which the book's typography and formatting serve the content of the narrative, often tracing the footsteps of the protagonist.
by Omar Ali
Shias (mostly Twelver Shias, but also including smaller groups of Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras, etc.) make up between 5 and 25% of Pakistan’s population. The exact number is not known because the census does not count them separately and pro and anti-Shia groups routinely exaggerate or downgrade the number of Shias in Pakistan (thus the most militant Sunni group, the Sipah e Sahaba, routinely uses the figure of 2% Shia, which is too low, while Shias sometimes claim they are 30% of the Muslim population, which is clearly too high).
Shias were not historically a “minority group” in the sense in which modern identity politics talks about “minorities” (a definition that, sometimes unconsciously, includes some sense of being oppressed/marginalized by the majority). Shias were part and parcel of the Pakistan movement and the “great leader” himself was at least nominally Shia. He was not a conventionally observant Muslim (e.g. he regularly drank alcohol and may have eaten pork) and was for the most part a fairly typical upper-class “Brown sahib”, English in dress and manners, but Indian in origin. 
In short, his position as a Shia was not a significant problem for him as he led the Muslim League’s movement for a separate Muslim state. Twelver Shias were well integrated into the Muslim elite, and in opposition to Hindus they were all fellow Muslims. The question of whether Jinnah was Shia or Sunni was occasionally asked but Jinnah always parried it with the fatuous stock reply “was the holy prophet Shia or Sunni?” This irrelevant (and in some ways, irreverent) reply generally worked because theologial fine print was not a priority for the superficially Anglicized North Indian Muslim elite. Their Muslim identity distinguished them from Hindus (and especially in North India, it was mixed with a certain anti-Indian racism, the assumption being that they themselves were “superior” Afghans, Turks, Persians, etc.). But foreshadowing the problems that would come later as the ideology of Pakistan matured, a Shia-Sunni distinction did arise when Jinnah died; his sister arranged a hurried Shia funeral inside the house, while the state arranged a larger Sunni funeral (led by an anti-shia cleric) in public. 
Since then, things have become much worse. The leaders of the Muslim league in general and the great leader in particular seem to have thought that once a Muslim state had been founded, it would function as a kind of Muslimized version of British India. The same commissioners and deputy commissioners, selected by the same civil service examinations, would rule over the “common people” while a thin (and thinly educated) crust of Muslim landlords and other “Ashraaf” lorded it over them.
Having used Islam to separate themselves from their Hindu and Sikh neighbors, they might occasionally use it to strengthen the spirit of Jihad in Kashmir or carry out other nation-building projects but it was not seen as a potential problem. Some of them probably thought there would be something called Islamic law in Islamic Pakistan, but most of the push for sharia law came from mullahs who had strongly opposed Jinnah’s project on the logical grounds that no one as ignorant of Islam as Jinnah could possibly create an Islamic state…but they soon realized that this pork-eating, whisky drinking Shia had indeed done so, and they were then quick to move in and try to take ownership).
by Rafiq Kathwari
After Iqbal via Nietzsche
My stuff is so vile. I am less than dust.
Your gleam rends the heart’s mirror.
My darkness lights the chafing dish
Before I am incinerated. A miner’s boot
Tramples my head, covering me with ashes.
Do you know the gist of my life?
A condensed sliver of smoke, transformed
Into a single spark, in feature and nature
Starlike, your every facet a splendor,
Light of the king’s eye, the dagger’s jewel.
Friend, be wise, the diamond replied, assume
A bezel’s dignity. Loam strives to harden
To fill my bosom with radiance. Burn
Because you are soft. Banish fear and grief.
Be hard as stone. Be diamond.
Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.
by Mara Jebsen
'No thank you' Sophie said, backing away.—Roald Dahl
Readers of contemporary fiction might do well, from time to time, to dip back through the bookshelves of their childhoods to see what un-boring and un-foolish stuff is patiently waiting there. In my own shelves, there's magic, magic and grimness. Also, adventure. And beneath the magic and the adventure, a dark sort of wisdom that lurks enticingly. It is something like the sea–a blue and salt at the edge of consciousness that pulls–as if all children had the weak, seducible souls of sailors.
One such wisdom: the love between a very young person and a very old person is strange, unsentimental, prickly thing. In the old “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” film, funny-faced Charlie and his sweet grandpa make a poignant pair, but Roald Dahl really explored this dynamic to its most comic and satisfying effect in the Big Friendly Giant. In it, a little bespectacled orphan, Sophie, and a giant hundreds of years old and dozens of feet tall befriend one another. “You mean you don't even know how old you are?” Sophie asks, early in the story. “No giant is knowing that,'the BFG said. 'All I is knowing about myself is that I is very old, very very old and crumply. Perhaps as old as the earth.”
Orphan and giant are two of the loneliest souls, each at the far reaches of life, and of no real use to anyone (though the giant, like Dahl, has elected to amuse himself by blowing dreams through a trumpet into the minds of sleeping children.) Otherwise, each is living a life simply awash in unkindnesses. The girl marks time in a cruel orphanage; the giant bears daily punishment as the 'runt' of a group of human-eating giants who crunch bones and slobber and tease (and seem like mythologized versions of bullies in a boys' boarding school.) Sophie and the giant bark at one another, arguing over proper English, eating filthsome snozzcumbers, and drinking delicious frobscottle that makes them fart until they float.
by Akim Reinhardt
Instead, I first talk about Indigenous creation stories. For example, a Jicarilla Apache story says that in the beginning, all the world was covered with water. Everything lived underwater, including people, animals, trees, and rocks, all of which could talk. People and animals used eagle feathers as torches, and they all wanted more light, except for the night animals who preferred the darkness: the panther, bear, and owl. The two sides competed by playing the thimble and button game. The sharp-eyed quail and magpie helped people win five consecutive games until the sun finally rose to create the first day. People then peered through a hole to see another world above them: Earth. They climbed up to it.
Or there’s a story from the Modocs of California and Oregon, which says the leader of the Sky Spirits grew tired of his home in Above World. It was always cold, so he carved a hole in the sky and shoveled down snow and ice until it almost reached the Earth, thereby creating W’lamswash (Mt. Shasta). He stepped from a cloud onto the mountain. As he descended, trees grew where ever his finger touched the ground, and the snow melted in his footsteps, creating rivers. Long pieces from his walking stick became beavers, and smaller pieces became fish. He blew on leaves, turning them into birds, and the big end of his stick created the other animals, including the bears, who walked upright on two legs. Pleased with what he’d done, the leader of the Sky Spirits and his family lived atop the mountain. But after his 
One reason I begin the semester with Indigenous creation stories instead of scientific evidence about the peopling of the Americas is that, like most people who teach American Indian history nowadays, I look for ways to emphasize Indians’ historical agency. Stressing agency, the centrality of people in manifesting their own history, is an important part of teaching any group’s history. However, for too long, American Indian history was taught (when it was taught at all) through a EuroAmerican lense. Instead of looking at what Indians did, historians used to focus on what was done to them. Indians, they told us, were victims of aggression and/or obstacles to progress. Native people were reduced to two-dimensional tropes, mere foils in the larger story about European empires and the rise of the United States.
Water Snapping Off Your Skin
That water snapping off your skin
in a shower
its warmth is the same energy
stoked in the sun
Its stoker is coy and cruel behind
the mask of creation
behind a bright sunrise
a fierce fire in his fist
Is the one
doing and undoing
damning or undamning
burning and unburning
This fire was
never begun
by Jim Culleny
from Blink
11/12/12
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
So what?
Can't people bump their uglies anymore? Why is cheating on your spouse a fireable offense? A career-destroying transgression? What's wrong with our country? Soon gay marriage is going to be legal all over, and we'll all be lighting joints in the street — thank heaven — but hey, when it comes to banging someone you lust after, and who lusts after you, you can't do that, because otherwise you can't be the head of the CIA.
Says who?
Bill Clinton stuck his cigar in Monica's honeypot, and they tried to impeach him for that, but America didn't give a damn, and he wasn't impeached. You'd think that would show us the way. You'd think that if it's OK for the president to splooge his manbutter on an intern's dress, it would be OK for anyone to go pagan outside their Christian marriage and keep their job.
Like they do in France — where they are somewhat more affable about human nature than we are. There they think a person's private life is their private life, and more important than their public work. Here in America, we think work is something sacred; not even the basic human drive of sex should interfere with our notion of the sanctity of work. Work is holy, sex is dirty. Heaven forbid filthy fun should enter the citadel of serious work. Our work-life balance is so out of whack, we prioritize work over life itself. It's high time our Puritan work ethic went the way of the typewriter and the vaginal condom. In anyone's life, it's just as important for you to trade your bodily fluids as it is for you to render some sterling service to the public. You should be free to do both to your heart's content. Bill Clinton managed that superbly: conducting an important phone call of great national interest while being blown by Monica exemplifies the perfect balance of life and work.
The legendary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was in Beirut in 1980 as Israeli helicopter gunships rained fire down upon Palestinian camps there. He wrote this lullaby as a response. I have translated it by listening to it one line at a time using the video given at the end, below, but then I also found an original Urdu version which I am also giving next to my translation.
LULLABY FOR A PALESTINIAN CHILD
Don't cry child,
your mommy has only
just cried herself to sleep.
Don't cry child,
just a while ago
your daddy took leave
of all his sorrows.
Don't cry child,
your brother has gone
to another land chasing
after his butterfly dreams.
Don't cry child,
your sister has married
and left for another country.
Don't cry child,
in your courtyard
they bathed the dead sun,
and buried the moon,
before leaving.
Don't cry child,
if you cry,
mommy, daddy, sister, brother,
the moon and the sun, all
will have you made even weepier.
But maybe if you smile,
they will one day all return
in a different guise
to play with you.
In Memoriam Patricia Monaghan, poet: your words are flame.
That Benton’s journey was undertaken at time of tension between the indigenous and settler population is reflected in his descriptions of their trip. On the night of August 24th the pair of travelers passed through some oak groves and arrived at a small stream in a little prairie in Southeast Wisconsin and they camped there for the night. As night fell they heard Indians around their camp. Benton hid beside a large tree and at Ouilmette’s suggestion he removed his straw hat since it was “a good mark to shoot at.” Assessing the danger they found themselves in, Louis remarked that “there were occasionally some of the Sauks and Fox Indians wandering about in [that] part of the country, and from them [they] could not expect much mercy.”
Benton didn’t sleep that night. However, even if they had been “in danger of suffering from the power of their tomahawk and scalping knives” it was not fear that kept him awake. He remarked, in fact, there was something about their circumstances “so novel and romantic about it that it dispelled every fear…” He was far from home, everything looked “wild and terrible”, he was surrounded by “savages” and yet it all seemed “lovely and romantic and beautiful”. He felt happy.
So what kept Benton from his sleep? It was the noise! Some of the noise certainly may have emanated from the Indians who “mocked almost every wild animal.” But also there were unfamiliar birds calling, as well as foxes and raccoons. In the distance, wolves howled and the owls hooted in concert with the wolves. The mosquitoes added their part to “the music”. A sleepless, noisy, vaguely threatening night, and yet Benton declared that never before had he “passed a night so interestingly and so pleasantly…”
For insulting the Quran, “'Thousands of people
dragged a Pakistani man … from a police station …
(and) beat him to death,' police said Wednesday.”
Insulting Books
Is it even possible
to insult a book?
Has it a soul within its leaves
a heart that beats
an eye that winks
a cord running through its spine
descending from a thing that thinks?
Is a book of inky lines
(of characters not themselves sublime)
capable of being hurt or ridiculed
or cheapened by critiques
either of the wise, or fools?
Has it veins between its covers
salty with the blood of lovers?
Is there something in its pages
(even if put there by sages)
that warrants death to critics?
Is it a thing so lame that priestly brothers
(arrogant, imperious, parasitic)
who worship sheaves of ink on paper
must, for its sake, snuff the holy breath
of others?
by Jim Culleny
11/6/12
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
We see an increase of concern about public ignorance around, and especially after, elections. From the losing party, the complaint is all too regularly that the voting populace was misled by a campaign, failed to appreciate an important fact, or was simply ignorant of what democracy is all about. Witness the Republican post-mortems this year in the United States in the wake of President Obama’s re-election. Mark Steyn at National Review Online darkly intones, “If this is the way America wants to go off the cliff, so be it.” Robert Stacy-McCain at The American Spectator puts it in the clearest terms by declaring, “The cretins and dimwits have become an effective governing majority.”
Public ignorance is disconcerting. But it also poses a serious challenge to democracy. According to the most popular theories of democracy, the government’s legitimacy depends upon the freely given and informed consent of its people. So democracy requires there to be regular free elections; such episodes are supposed to reveal the Popular Will, which provides government with clear directives for the exercise of power, thereby ensuring political legitimacy.
But if ignorance is as extensive as the data suggest (and losing parties comlain), elections could not possibly serve the function of expressing informed consent. Lacking adequate knowledge of how government works, citizens are unable correctly to assign responsibility to particular office holders for public policies enacted in their name, and consequently are unable to provide the necessary directives. That is, under conditions of widespread citizen ignorance, elections do not express the Popular Will; rather, they simply place some in office and remove others, willy-nilly. Elections, then, are exceedingly costly public events that achieve nothing more than what could be accomplished by a coin-toss.
by Quinn O'Neill
Archetypes are universally recognized symbols or patterns of behavior that tend to recur in myths and stories across different cultures. The femme fatale, the hero, and the wise old man are common examples. The leader archetype is also popular. Like Moses or Gandhi, such figures tend to be wise and visionary and able to single-handedly inspire the masses to follow them toward some noble goal.
In reality, leadership often doesn't happen like this. Changing people's behavior and opinions to bring them in line with a particular goal is often best accomplished in subtle and even subliminal ways. Propaganda and media influences, for example, tend to shape opinion more reliably than a single charismatic visionary. A visible leader may not even be necessary to get the job done.
Archetypes may not always reflect reality, but they resonate with us on the level of our own identities. Our desire to see ourselves as heroes or participants in a noble movement can be useful to campaign designers. Portraying soldiers as heroes is a powerful way to encourage people to join a war effort, even when the war is illegal and immoral. Casting a person as a noble and visionary leader may inspire us to follow without even knowing where we’re heading. This brilliant propaganda from the Obama campaign provides a great example:
We see people proudly and enthusiastically joining crowds of Obama followers, which based on the accompanying song lyrics, we presume to be heading “forward”. Forward sounds progressive, like the sort of movement we’d all want to join, but the video doesn’t say where Obama is actually taking us. I would assume that forward means an extension of what’s happened in the last four years – more warrantless wiretapping, extrajudicial assassinations, drone killings, a further rise in income inequality, and a worsening of the fortunes of black people. I’d guess that his supporters are interpreting “forward” to mean something else.
Obama is charismatic, intelligent, and well-spoken but he’s not the enchanting archetypal leader he may appear to be. Someone else is writing the speeches and ads that inspire his followers and his billion dollar campaign has undoubtedly done a lot for a his public image. If he’d run as a 3rd party candidate in his first election, it's highly unlikely that he'd have made it to the debates, let alone into the hearts of voters.
A sigh of relief may be appropriate in the wake of the recent election, which could have turned out worse, but the exuberant love-fest that was triggered by Obama’s re-election has been disconcerting. Many have been swept away by his campaign rhetoric and propaganda. “We love you!” people shouted at his speeches and rallies. Supporters were emotional and teary-eyed, like fanatical preteens at a Justin Bieber concert. But, if not for media spin and propaganda, Obama’s foreign policies might have gotten blood spatter on their rose-colored glasses.
