The Vendyak

Justin E. H. Smith

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamo of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy. The crunchy stands as the ‘in-between’ class, what cannot be subsumed, what remains forever outside of Aristotelian dualistic logic. It is neither crispy (which is to say, brittle throughout) nor chewy (soft throughout), but manifests something of both of these opposites. (To the criticism that, in everyday speech, what is crunchy is not at all chewy, Pombo responded that these are technical terms we are dealing with, and we should not try too hard to make them match up with our quotidian usages.) The crunchy, she maintained in a Hegelian vein, is nothing less than the Aufhebung or sublation of the crispy and the chewy: a category that simultaneously overcomes and preserves these lower-order concepts.

From Pombo’s extensive field interviews with both male and female members of the Vendyak tribe of the Kamchatka peninsula –the only indigenous people of the former Soviet Union, incidentally, to have been considered by the authorities too distant and too intractable to be worth the effort of forced sedentarization and modernization–, we find the following sort of exchange: “How would you describe this?” (she hands the informant a table-water cracker).
“It’s sort of crispy [li’xak],” answers the Vendyak.
“What about crunchy [at’xak],” Pombo presses. “Do you think it’s at all crunchy?”
“Yeah. I guess. That too.”

Pombo’s 1983 book, Au-delà du croustillant et du gluant, was a solid work of structuralist anthropology, even if somewhat critical –in view of the new wave of feminist theory of which she was a leading exponent– of the theoretical limitations of structuralism’s founding fathers. But in no time Pombo’s findings were taken up by the various poststructuralist schools. Lanier Pippidi, a follower of Alain Badiou and a self-described practitioner of ‘Maoist topology’, thought that the croustillant and the croquant were not sufficiently differentiated categories, and, in his 1994 book, Les surfaces kleiniennes, took to writing instead of the ‘crouquant’. In the recent English translation of his work (Touching Klein, University of Nebraska Press, 2004), this term of art has been rendered as ‘cruspy’: a forced amalgamation of ‘crispy’ and ‘crunchy’.  “Strictly speaking,” Pippidi tells us, “the cruspy is always-already densely imbricated in both the crispy and the crunchy. The double movement of the cruspy inscribes itself in both: it plays on surfaces, it crystallizes meniscuses.” 

Followers in this vein of interpretation grew more radical still; some claimed that the cruspy could not be written about at all, and took to denoting it as the ‘cruspy’. In her monumental 1997 book, Le double mouvement du crouquant, the Romanian feminist philosopher Raluca Mitici argued that “as long as the surface is intact, the ‘thing’ presents itself as impenetrable; once it is bitten into, it is no longer there in its thingliness at all, and the question of its penetrability does not arise. This is why the cruspy cannot be written” (translation ours).  Since then other variants have appeared in print, including ‘cro(u)quant’, ‘cro/uquant’, ‘crouquant’, ‘crXquant’, and, in an uninspired jeu de mots first seen in the memoir of a University of Chicago French professor turned South Side step dancer, ‘Crew Kant’. A forthcoming special edition of Semiotext(e), appearing in 2009 and summarizing the past 15 years of debate on this fraught subject, will be entitled “What Remains of the Cr—-?”*

“I don’t know if it can be written or not,” said Hünn-Tuk, at the time a 25-year-old Vendyak informant for Pombo’s book who, unique in his community, had received a university degree at Ryazan State University, in engineering, before returning to the place of his birth. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m the only one who knows how to write here anyway.”   

Some years later, Hünn-Tuk took part, along with four other members of the Vendyak community, in the aboriginal-peoples contingent of a conference on the anthropology of food at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Their hosts had taken them to a diner a bit out of town called ‘LeAnn’s’. A professor from the Slavic department was along to translate for Hünn-Tuk into Russian, who in turn translated for the others into their native tongue. I was at the conference, and heard about the incident first-hand from the professor (we had been roommates during my years at Michigan). 

The Vendyak were very curious about everything on the menu, as the diner had been played up to them by their hosts for days as featuring ‘authentic’ local cuisine. Just as the Russian professor was struggling to come up with an adequate rendering of the concepts of ‘cheese grits’ and ‘chicken-fried steak’, one of the Vendyak pointed to the cover of the menu and asked to know the meaning of the phrase underneath the name of the restaurant: “LeAnn’s: Home-cookin’ just like granny use [sic] to make.” The professor translated the phrase into Russian, and at once Hünn-Tuk’s face contracted into a worried cringe. He tried to hide it, but the other Vendyak had already become excited, and Hünn-Tuk found himself unable to invent a lie under pressure. They demanded to know what the phrase meant at once, and he gave in: “This food is prepared as if by an elder woman,” he told them sombrely in Vendyak. 

Two of the men ran out of the restaurant at once, right out across the state route, and disappeared into the forest on the other side. The youngest of them dropped to the floor and began convulsing, as if in the early throes of an epileptic seizure. The fourth, a man of nearly 60 with grey whiskers and a few teeth, marched over to the anthropologist who had arranged the outing, an innocent young Melanesianist who had simply taken it for granted that love of granny’s cooking was a cultural universal. The Vendyak grabbed the Melanesianist by his throat and bellowed: “Do you want to poison our people!? Do you want to shrivel our testicles and make our arms too weak to hunt!?”

No, the Vendyak are no fans of granny’s home cookin’. Remarkably, however, there is not a single mention of this central prohibition in Pombo’s supposedly exhaustive study of Vendyak food-preparation practices. Why is this?

My assistant Tanya thinks she knows. She had been the on-the-ground facilitator for Pombo’s fieldwork in the late ‘70s, long before glasnost had got underway and before it was at all common for French anthropologists to learn about indigenous Soviet peoples from any other source than the occasional anthology of translated articles from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In an era when most visitors were shuffled through minutely planned, 7-day tours of the great achievements of the people’s economy, courtesy of Inturist, Pombo wanted to disappear into the field for several months, alone. Tanya had been assigned to take care of Pombo on her way through Moscow before and after her stay in the field (for in those days one could not travel to the Russian Far East via Tokyo), and, of course, to report everything that she had learned of Pombo’s research to the relevant officials. How could you have made such a compromise? I asked her when she revealed this to me. “We all made compromises,” she said.

Pombo had taken a deep liking to Tanya already on her first passage through Moscow, and on her way back had decided to entrust to Tanya a notebook, in a sealed envelope, that, as she explained, she would not be needing during the final preparation of her study for publication.  She did not say why it would not be included, but only that it “didn’t have its place” in the picture of the Vendyak she thought it imperative to convey. When Pombo died in Paris in 2002, Tanya deliberated for some months, unable to decide what to do with this problematic material. She left it in a drawer for six more years, and only now, as I am in Moscow on my way back from my own field work among the Lomi-Ek (likely my last visit, as I have reached forced-retirement age and the granting agency on which I’ve depended for the past thirty years no longer considers me an active researcher), has she decided to turn it over to me. “Do what you want with it. She’s been dead long enough. There must be some kind of statute of limitations. And anyway no one cares about structuralism anymore.” 

If what Pombo wrote in her unpublished notebook is true, the sociocosmic role of the crunchy may be quite different from the picture she gave of it in her published works. From these works, we know that the crunchy is associated with bones and decay, and foods held to be crunchy should only be consumed on one of the two annual feasts of the dead. Outside of these feasts, crunchy foods put the person who eats them at risk of sickness, impotence, and hunting failure.

But what we learn in the notebooks is that nothing has the power to make food crunchy more quickly and intensely than the implication of an old (post-menopausal) woman in its preparation. At the feasts of the dead, the elder women do all of the cooking, and it is for this reason, the Vendyak say, that the dishes that are served all come with such a thick crust: there is a desert resembling crème brulée, for example, made from churned deer milk, that must be hammered with a ritual mallet in order to break through the burnt, glass-like surface. The Vendyak sit and gnaw and suck this delicacy late into the evening. It is held to be very delicious, but also, outside of the context of the feasts, extremely dangerous. They are “eating their own death,” the Vendyak report, “which is something you cannot do every day.”

I suspect that Pombo’s suppression of this notebook had to do with her own personal experience of the Vendyak contempt for older women (she was 61 when she arrived there in 1979), and with a stubborn desire, one that she could never quite get over, to project onto the people she studied only laudable features, features that would present a promising alternative to the ‘dualism’, the ‘linearity’, etc., that she was striving to theorize her way out of. The truth is, the Vendyak treated her execrably, and she could not but have been angered by this.

Almost immediately upon arrival, the elders had placed her tent furthest from the cooking fire at the center of the encampment, and from the second or third day Pombo reported hearing whispers about the deteriorating quality of the food. By the third week of her fieldwork, the elder Vendyak sent Hünn-Tuk to her with a request: during the preparation of meals, might the anthropologist be willing to stand waist-deep in the lake, 50 meters or so from their encampment?
“Why do I have to wait in the lake?” Pombo asked. “There are many other post-menopausal women in the encampment who only have to stay in their tents.”
“The elders say they aren’t as za’laq as you are,” Hünn-Tuk explained to her in Russian, leaving the key concept untranslated from the original Vendyak. “They say that in all the history of the Vendyak, no woman has ever possessed za’laqtak to such a dangerous degree as you.”

Za’laqtak may be roughly translated as “the drying or desiccating principle.”  Many other things in nature possess it, including the sun. But the sun also includes its opposite, linaagtak, the principle of life and growth. Older women possess primarily za’laqtak, but in view of their enduring nurturing and care-giving skills they are thought to keep a portion of linaagtak throughout their lives, even if the overwhelming presence of za’laqtak in them makes it impossible for them to participate in food preparation. But Pombo was held by many to contain nothing but za’laqtak. Some said she was the very embodiment of za’laqtak, and a few elders with shamanic gifts began to mutter after a few weeks that Pombo was Za’laïq herself: the hideous underworld creature from whom all za’laqtak in the universe was thought to flow.

One early morning in the middle of the sixth week Pombo was woken up by Hünn-Tuk with an important message: “They want you to stand in the lake up to your neck today.”
“What?!”
“They say you need to go deeper. The food’s still coming out too crunchy.”
She struggled to recompose herself. “When you say ‘crunchy’,” she asked, ever the thorough researcher, “do you mean ‘crunchy’, or do you mean something closer to ‘crispy’?”
“I don’t know,” said Hünn-Tuk. “It’s just, you know. Hard. Dry… Can’t hunt.” 

Later that morning, as the women began to grind the roots and to tenderize the deer meat for cooking, Pombo dutifully waded out into the lake up to her neck. The water was cold, but in the mid-August heat she found it refreshing. She listened to the girls singing songs of fertility and promise as they pounded the meat on wooden boards strewn across their laps. The problem seemed to have been resolved in a manner acceptable to everyone, but the whispering continued, and Pombo was sure that, sooner or later, her freedom would be further restricted.

“You’re going to have to go in all the way,” Hünn-Tuk announced, shaking Pombo’s shoulder early one morning towards the beginning of the eighth week.
“All the way?”
“Just for the most dangerous period, when the girls are tenderizing.”
“You mean with my head underwater?”
“I brought you a breathing reed.” 

Hünn-Tuk explained that lake water is the most potent source of linaagtak in nature, and that the only way to keep her za’laqtak from reaching the encampment was by submerging her entirely in water. He apologized, evidently sincerely, and Pombo was touched enough by this to abandon the offence she had taken at first and to return her thoughts to the long-term scientific benefits of putting up with all this.  She grabbed the reed and stoically walked toward the lake.

Breathing through a thin straw underwater was not as difficult as she had first imagined, and it even brought back pleasant memories of childhood, snorkelling on the Lusitanian coast, silvery fish darting about her. Mostly she was proud of what she was willing to do for her work. She knew that Klein himself had repaired back to Sao Paolo after just a few weeks among the Yanomamo and a few mosquito bites too many, and after his favorite pipe tobacco had fallen overboard during a crossing of the Amazon in an overcrowded boat. He checked into the Excelsior, the story goes, and harassed the room-service staff until one of them agreed to journey across town by streetcar to Sao Paolo’s only purveyor of imported tobacco.

Pombo was reminiscing about this story when, happening to look up, she saw four or five human figures hovering above her, standing on a sharp rock jutting out over the lake. From his rough dimensions, she recognized one of them to be Hünn-Tuk. He was signalling for her to come up. 

“Your breath is drying out the meat,” he yelled to her in Russian. The other Vendyak did not understand, but they nodded their heads in affirmation.
“My breath?”
“It’s coming up through the reed and blowing towards the encampment.”
“Well I can’t very well stop breathing, can I?”
“That’s what the shamans are calling for. The other elders just want to banish you. They came with me to chase you into the forest.”

Hünn-Tuk was a good-hearted go-between, fully belonging to neither world, believing in none of it. After the banishment (during which the four Vendyak elders walked a few paces behind her, ritualistically shrieking “Get out!” and gathering up pine needles and nuts to throw at her, while studiously avoiding the rocks that were all around them and that could have caused real pain), Pombo waited in the forest. At an agreed-upon hour, Hünn-Tuk came to meet her, bringing her belongings from the encampment, apologizing profusely. He walked with her to a road, and waved down a car headed to Magadan. From there she could fly to Vladivostok, and from there back to Moscow. Pombo proposed jokingly that she just might be so dry as to ruin the Vendyak’s food all the way from the comfort of her Paris apartment. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say that during the banishment,” Hünn-Tuk replied.   

“Well, do you feel it?” Tanya asked me after I had finished the notebook and placed it back in its envelope.
“Feel what?”
“The desiccating principle. Do you feel it emanating throughout the apartment?” Tanya was my age, and was evidently trying to milk the notebook for some self-deprecating, old-lady humor.

She brought a bowl of those puffed shrimp chips from Southeast Asia that, for some inexplicable reason, had become so popular during the Putin years in Russia. We sat on her couch and snacked on the chips for a while in silence. Our teeth sank right through them, as though we were eating nothing at all. 

—

*Certainly, any complete account of the history of the crispy/crunchy debate would not fail to mention that it had its share of skeptics, as evidenced by the so called ‘FAZ hoax’ perpetrated against the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the height of the debate’s intensity. In a book review in the feuilleton of Germany’s paper of record published on August 18, 1997, the critic Benno Bleibtreu heaped unqualified praise on what was supposedly an advance manuscript of a book entitled Jenseits von Knackig und Knüsprig by a certain Rolf Magendarm. It turns out that Magendarm did not exist (indeed, to the less gullible speaker of German, even his last name should have been a clear give-away, suggesting as it does the crude physiology of the lower intestinal tract), and that his book, praised by Bleibtreu as “the most important contribution yet to the debate unleashed by J.-R. Klein some decades ago and sharpened for the new generation by Françoise Pombo,” was in fact only a pastiche of texts from the grand tradition of German moral philosophy with the term ‘crispy’ replacing every occurrence of ‘good’, and ‘crunchy’ standing in for every instance of ‘evil’. Having learned of the mistake from an anonymous telephone call, on the front page of the feuilleton of August 25 the FAZ’s editor-in-chief denounced in the harshest of terms what he saw as a “reckless disruption of the free exchange of ideas that forms the bedrock of a civil society.” He wrote that we may agree to disagree about the importance of this or that scholarly debate, but that nothing could be solved by an “intellectual fire-bomb” of the sort thrown at his newspaper. To date, the true identity of Rolf Magendarm has not been uncovered.

—

To see Imaginary Tribes #’s 1-4, please go here, here, here, and here.

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Edward B. Rackley

Now back in Goma to continue work on these peace talks after a refreshing week in Dakar, on the other side of the continent. Marathon return journey via Bamako, Nairobi, Kigali, then Goma. I’m still in a zombie state—just like the Congolese who are forced to put up with this ni paix ni guerre situation as it drags on and on.

During the three years before national elections in 2006, we used to call Congo’s transitional government an Etat fantome because there was no administrative presence anywhere in the country outside the capital. Things haven’t changed much. Governance is deliberately centralized, with no devolution of power to the provinces—the Mobutu bras de fer model all over again. Yesterday in a closed door session with our group of international representatives to the peace talks, the Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping mission referred to us collectively as ‘a bunch of zombies’.

We march obediently to negotiation sessions, listen to infinite grievances and push for reasoned compromise, visit sulking rebel leaders when they storm out after some minor slight or infantile malentendu. All this zombie-like to and fro in the service of a consensus that no one—particularly the government—has the remotest intention of seriously entertaining or accepting. I had to laugh at the Force Commander’s exasperation: here we are, zombies controlled by phantoms. Hard to get less visceral than that.

But it’s true, we wander from one event to the next, trying to move molehills that the belligerents perceive as mountains. There’s little political will on any side of the conflict, meanwhile money is flowing hand over fist to keep the twenty-two armed groups at the negotiating table. Last night, a visiting ICC representative here to pressure rebel leaders under investigation (or already indicted but not yet arrested) mocked me, saying: “The peace talks are already over, didn’t they tell you?”

An email from home this morning put the dilemma simply: what if western powers just got out and let the cards fall where they may? Well, western powers did not start the war, nor does their departure figure among belligerent demands (contrary to, say, Iraq). But the spirit of the question merits response: why do international efforts to broker peace seem to fail in so many situations? ‘Seem to fail’ is the operative phrase here: the track record for African conflict over the last twenty years shows that perseverance pays a tidy dividend. Sudan, Angola, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, even the Congo itself have experienced peace after years of fitful negotiations supported and prodded by the international community. Congo’s eastern provinces will get there one day, I’m certain. The timeline is just longer, a lot longer, than western taxpayers or casual Africa observers are used to.

Stand proud

A colleague who’s been in the region since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide (he is now responsible for rounding up militant Hutu extremists and shipping them back to Rwanda) described the current situation with an historical anecdote from Herodotus. The story goes something like this: Representatives from an occupying power (Athens?) visit a newly conquered but recalcitrant state that refuses to pay tribute. The messengers say, “We are here with the most awesome of gods, ‘power’ and ‘force’, so you must obey and pay us tribute.” Receiving officials in the occupied land respond, “Oh, that’s nice, lucky you. We here are under two other gods, ‘poverty’ and ‘incapacity’.”

The vignette captures how rule of law and military might can be impotent before the inertia of destitution, dysfunction and incapacity. It also captures the inability of the international community to get anything done in Congo, particularly on this peace process. A toxic cynicism is always in the back of my mind; resistance strategies are required. I console myself with minor victories of a different sort.

Most progress here is so slow and glacially incremental, it is wholly impalpable to the short-term visitor. Having been involved with the place for twenty years, I’ve learned where to find signs of hope, of change. It is definitely not in the political realm, in deliberate freefall since I first arrived in 1988. But there is powerful transformation on the personal scale, in the rebuilding of individual broken lives, one by one, one day at a time.

I recently visited a rehabilitation center for child polio victims founded by another American, a long-time ‘Congomani’ a few years older than me, whom I’ve known for some time. Called ‘Debout et Fier’ (‘Stand Proud’), there are about ten such centers around the country. Polio continues to afflict children here because vaccination coverage is so poor. Handicapped children are usually kicked out of the house and become street urchins, and must beg to survive. The Debout et Fier center here in Goma houses about 45 kids from around the region who are either waiting for an operation or recovering from one, and learning to walk with braces and crutches instead of dragging themselves around on the ground ‘like a snake’, as they always describe it. Snakes are particularly despised, because feared, in Congolese culture.

Because they’re Congolese kids, they are amazingly resilient, physically and psychologically. With proper meals, decent sleeping conditions and medical care, their recovery is quick. Also, because they are among equals, there is no shame or stigma, and learning erect mobility becomes child’s play, literally. Even before their surgical wounds heal, kids are struggling to stand in their new braces (made on site), hopping when stepping or walking doesn’t work. There are always makeshift footballs lying around the dusty compound, and whenever I visit the entire group is hopping around madly, chasing the football at which they swing their metal crutch poles. Laughing and sweating, entirely unconscious of their handicap, they’re regaining the mobility they’ve lacked all their lives.

Watching such a match at dusk the other day, the sun’s fading red light caught the dust thrown up by the footballers in front of me. I thought: if the price for this moment is all my personal frustration and anger at Congo’s political mess and its enormous cost to human development here, I am happy to pay.

What’s broken can’t be bought

Even out here in forsaken Goma, images from the Olympics can be had. Coverage is spotty and one cannot actually sit down and watch the Olympics, but visual impressions and reports are getting through in drips and drabs. Watching synchronized diving, or gymnastics, it’s obvious that the Olympic ideal is perfection of form as the pinnacle of beauty. Very few can achieve this ideal, hence the rarefied competition among elite athletes. Echoes of classical Greece are obvious, a vertical society despite its democratic pretensions. Cosmology can do that to a people.

The Olympics are tailored to this particular ideal of beauty as the rarefied perfection of form. No room for fractured beauty, obviously, as that would disqualify. Although pristine beauty is by definition more rare than fractured beauty, I tend to champion the latter because it’s more pedestrian, more democratic because accessible to all of us, if we open our eyes wide enough. I love cosmologies, but only for their literary value. It’s too late to actually believe in one. Fractured, democratic, horizontal: that’s where I’m most comfortable. Zeitgeist I guess.

Of course, fractured beauty abounds here in Goma. As my boss and I bounced along these terrible roads the other day, inhaling pounds of volcanic dust (always in the air) and diesel fumes blasting into the car from all the trucks lumbering by in the other direction, the boss mused that he felt like he was on a merry-go-round. Everybody’s on the narrow road at once, navigating enormous potholes as dozens of moto taxis blur past, honking constantly (think rickshaw madness in Delhi). The 360 degree view is just heads bobbing up and down, some buzzing past, others slow or stationary–pedestrians lost in the melee.

So instead of being overwhelmed by the oozing human morass of it all and thinking cynical thoughts about Congo’s prospects for progress, my boss slips into childhood reverie and comes up with the merry-go-round comment. A kindred soul, I thought: he appreciates fractured beauty too. Goma’s inexhaustible abundance: broken beauty, and the possibilities of redemption. While I appreciate the objective criteria that allow for judgments of Olympian beauty and that raise it above mere opinion or taste, I’ll defend ‘spurious’ or broken beauty any day. First, it’s often accidental, and thus available to everyone. It generally has little or no economic value, and so resists commoditization and the clutches of elitists (notice how contemporary art is the new ‘hedge’?). The human pathos contained in a football match between recuperating polio victims is the perfect antithesis of a Jeff Koons poodle, brilliant critic of the art world though he is.

So the first thing I’ll do when I get off this merry-go-round and make it home: ride my beloved bikes, then open a book of Borges stories and sit by the sea. Nothing could be more pristine … or fleetingly beautiful.

///
Humor and Light
Jim Culleny

Even in gloomy
shuttered rooms one beam
managing an invasion
through impossible slits
reaches to where
shadows rule

one joke, a laugh
one light remembrance
and dis-ease for an instant
disappears

Punch lines and photons
comedians and brilliant suns
take us as close to god
as anyone need be

//

by David Shasha

Ah, those New York Jews.

Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Ed Koch, Alfred Kazin.

Katz’s Deli, Zabar’s, Pastrami Sandwiches, Lox and Bagels, Matzoh Ball Soup, Chopped Liver, Gefilte Fish.

The Lower East Side.

All one big Ashkenazi world.

I was once told a story by Mickey Kairey, one of the patron saints of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, that by now I have repeated many times, about his father’s experience on the Lower East Side in the first part of the 20th century. Mickey’s father was praying in an Ashkenazi minyan and was asked by the man sitting next to him, “Are you Jewish?” Mr. Kairey was praying donned in his tallit and tefillin and thought it a strange question. The “Are you Jewish?” question is a ubiquitous one among many Ashkenazi Jews – especially the Orthodox – and speaks to a sense of ethno-cultural prejudice that is endemic to the Ashkenazi condition. People are seen in gradations of ethnic acceptability: the Ashkenazi-Yiddish identity is central and all else is simply a drifting away from the core. Mr. Kairey made the mistake of not being able to speak Yiddish and was marked as suspect when it came to being a Jew. In fact, it should be remembered that the Yiddish language was even called “Jewish” by its native speakers.

Now in Israel, this idea that Ashkenazi culture is transcendent in the socio-political sense is one that is clear and needs little commentary. But in America, there is still the pretense that Jews – especially the fabled “New York Jew” – are filled with love and tolerance of their fellow Man.

So when I received the new catalog of events from the 92nd Street Y – it does not get more “New York Jew” than that – I carefully filtered out these Ashkenazi prejudices which are often thought by many to be a product of my own imagination.

Before I begin my argument, I should note that many events in the Y’s program series contain a plethora of non-Jewish figures. From the New York Mets’ Keith Hernandez to the African-American academic Cornel West to famed folksinger Joan Baez to Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to media celebrity Martha Stewart, the Y has diversity seemingly covered. It is just that this “diversity” is of a very specific kind; a “diversity” that excludes two critical components – Sephardim and Arabs.

While it is not always easy to prove a negative – that Sephardim and Arabs are not welcome in this place of “civilization” – I will try and outline what seems to me to be an ideological bias that speaks to the current condition of the “Jewish” condition here in America.

The central event of the massive series of programs is a day-long tribute to the Holocaust survivor and Ashkenazi activist Elie Wiesel (10/2). I cannot add much to the reams of material that has been written about Wiesel, who represents so perfectly the problem at hand. Wiesel is a humanitarian whose work is predicated on a single issue – the suffering of the Jews of Europe. Very often he uses this suffering as a means to comment on other events where his moral stance is taken as sacrosanct. As has been noted, Wiesel is quite vociferous on the issue of Zionism and Israel and rarely if ever comments on Jewish violence against Arabs. His voice is perfectly attuned to the orthodoxies and rigid ideological posture of the Jewish community that maintains an almost complete silence about the Palestinian Arabs and their travails. Wiesel has been out front on Darfur and other tragedies in our time, but has remained silent on the Middle East conflict out of his own sense of personal Jewish loyalty. In other words, making a moral stand is acceptable, so long as that stand does not apply to your own community – the very thing Wiesel insistently demands of non-Jews.

There is precious little balance in terms of the Israel-Palestine matter on the program for the season: Rabbi Michael Lerner (10/30) and Gershom Gorenberg (2/5) appear to be the only critical voices that will be heard in the series. Not a single Arab or Palestinian voice is to be allowed into the discourse. From Right Wing ideologues like Bret Stephens and Abe Foxman (3/24) to Ed Koch (10/30) to Cynthia Ozick (10/29) to more moderate Zionists like Aaron David Miller (5/7) and a panel on the new liberal lobbying group J Street (3/16), the basic idea is to appear to be presenting a wide-range of ideas, but in reality only affirmations of Israel will be presented. It is important to note that Gorenberg will be presenting in a series on the media and Rabbi Lerner will be part of a four-person panel where he will likely be the only participant critical of Israel in any way. And by no means should we think that Rabbi Lerner’s voice can truly represent a Palestinian vision, even if it is sympathetic to that position.

Most importantly, the series will have two programs that deal with the hysteria over Israel and the sense of embattlement that is a central part of Zionist thinking at present. There will be (12/8) the now-obligatory panel discussion of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses – a panel loaded with Right Wing ideologues including a member of the U.S. Congress. There will be another panel called “Why Zionism has Become a Dirty Word” (3/24) that will in effect be another uncritical look at the current situation in the Middle East.

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by Ram Manikkalingam

Twenty-five years ago Sri Lanka’s conflict was suddenly transformed into a violent civil war. The Tamil Tigers – then barely more than a couple of dozen – ambushed a convoy killing a dozen soldiers in Jaffna on July 23rd 1983. Instead of targeting those who carried out the attack Sri Lankan state-backed goons went after Tamil civilians throughout the country the following day, leading to a week of violence and bloodletting. Since then, the separatist rebellion has been transformed from ragtag groups fighting a parade army to a high intensity conflict with the use of air-strikes, artillery, naval units, bombings and suicide attacks. While lamenting what we as Sri Lankans have gone through (it is really hard not to), I would like to take a moment to share with 3qd readers what I have learned about ethnic conflict from my direct involvement in political efforts in Sri Lanka, as well as my more indirect efforts in other parts of the world, as an activist and a scholar. I apologise in advance for the slightly dry tone of this article and the links to my research on this topic that I have pulled together.

The lessons I have learned are about two basic questions: what is an ethnic conflict and how do you resolve it?

Three conflicts, not just a single ethnic one
The civil war in Sri Lanka consists of three distinct conflicts: the ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese, and other groups, the armed conflict between the Sri Lankan state and the rebel Tamil Tigers and the political power conflict among the main forces that have capacity to influence political rule in Sri Lanka – the governing Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the opposition United National Party (UNP), and the rebel Tamil Tigers.

Ethnic Conflict
The ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese is commonly considered the hardest to resolve. Most descriptions of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict (or for that matter any ethnic conflict) are variations of the hate-and-greed explanation. These descriptions depict Tamils and Sinhalese (or you can substitute them for Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, or Blacks and Whites, or Hutus and Tutsis, or Israelis and Palestinians) as either hating each other, because of conflicting nationalisms, or competing with each other for resources because of greed.

Where the nationalism comes from – ancient history (we did bad things to each other thousands of years ago), myth (we told stories about what we supposedly did to each other), or recent acts of violence (your father killed my uncle, so I will kill you) – is less relevant than that it exists and manifests itself in mutual hostility between Tamils and Sinhalese. Similarly, where greed comes from – individual interests (that Tamil took the clerk’s job I wanted), group solidarity (I want my kin to get more stuff) or nationalist passion (my people deserve more because they are superior to yours) – is less important than that it ultimately leads ethnic groups to get into conflict.

Existing approaches to ethnic conflict, however sophisticated, converge on hate and greed as the motivations to explain it. They fail to examine how reasonable differences might also cause conflict. If hate and greed are the only motivations of conflict, then we would be living in a very grim world indeed. Prospects for its resolution would depend either on external force (NATO will point a gun at you and make you co-exist) or economic incentives (the World Bank, EU, and other rich westerners will give so much money that you will be bought off and corrupted into not fighting). This is the implicit assumption behind contemporary models of peace building or humanitarian intervention. The failure to secure the support of rich western countries for UN peace keeping efforts in Africa and the abysmally low amounts of aid provided to these countries suggest that mobilising the resources for this approach is simply impossible in most parts of the world. Moreover, the widespread challenge to international efforts in the Balkans indicate how this approach is rarely sufficient – even when billions have been spent and tens of thousands of peacekeepers continue to be present.

Another approach is to focus on how identities are constructed, and to change them from more violent to less violent expressions. This is the implicit assumption behind the plethora of studies about the construction of identities. These studies show (correctly) how what it means to be a Sinhalese or a Tamil, a Jew or a Palestinian, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Serb or a Muslim, today, is quite different from what it meant fifty or a hundred years ago. But the silence about how to change identities for a peaceful future indicates that the latter is too difficult or takes too long. All these approaches invariably lead to deep pessimism about peace in situations of ethnic conflict.

While the explanation that Tamils and Sinhalese are enmeshed in a conflict over ethnic identity and material resources may continue to have relevance, it is becoming less and less plausible today as the only explanation for Sri Lanka’s intractable conflict, or for that matter many others, as well. Most Tamils and Sinhalese desire an end to the war. Many of them have come to realise – whether enthusiastically or reluctantly – that a solution to the conflict will require the central government dominated by the Sinhalese to share political power with other ethnic groups, particularly the Tamils. Whatever the various solutions proffered, they will invariably converge on some form of federalism, in fact, if not in name.

Except for extreme Sinhalese who want to centralise all power in Colombo and deny the presence of an ethnic conflict, and extreme Tamils who want a separate state on the grounds that the only conflict is ethnic, the majority of the people in Sri Lanka are likely to accept such a solution. But if that were the case, why haven’t we arrived at a solution. This is where reasonable differences come in.

Reasonable differences can cause conflict
Even many Sinhalese who are critical of power-sharing are less concerned that it will give more rights to Tamils than they deserve, than that it will enable the Tigers to consolidate their power and establish a separate Tamil authoritarian state. Similarly, many Tamils who are wary of sharing power in a single state – are less concerned about living among Sinhalese and more concerned that the state will actually implement its promises in the absence of the armed leverage of the Tamil Tigers. This reasonable difference can even lead to advocacy of war, belying the common association of those who seek peace with those who are reasonable.

For example, there are many who distrust the Sri Lankan state so much that they advocate violence as a way of pressuring the state to come to a solution that is just by Tamils. These people, mainly Tamils, but also members of other ethnic groups, do not necessarily believe the Tigers are decent freedom fighters. On the contrary they condemn and even oppose its excesses. But they fear that only violence against the state, or the threat of it, can lead to a political solution where power is shared and that is subsequently implemented.

Similarly there are those who advocate military violence against the Tamil Tigers. These are Sri Lankans, primarily Sinhala, but also members of other ethnic groups, who feel that the Tamil Tigers are only interested in consolidating their own power and not interested in a political solution for the Tamil people. They believe that as long as the Tamil Tigers are present a peaceful solution will not be possible. The Sri Lankans who advocate these positions are not opposed to a just solution that treats members of all communities as equals. So it would be a mistake to simply view them as chauvinists, although many do so.

These two political positions – exerting military pressure on the Tigers or on the Sri Lankan state for a just solution – may appear in the heat of war to be on opposite sides of the political divide. But they are ideologically closer to each other and desire the same political solution, than those who may share their views about militarily fighting the other side.

Unfortunately, because reasonable differences are rarely acknowledged in ethnic conflicts, we do not look for ways to reduce their adverse impact on finding a solution. This also leads us to more pessimistic views about the prospects for peace. By contrast, identifying reasonable differences offers a more optimistic alternative by showing how contemporary identities that lead to conflict may also be compatible with just and stable solutions, for which institutions can be designed. Taking these reasonable differences into account can help design a peace process that mitigates the role they can play in exacerbating conflict. Part of the challenge of identifying these reasonable differences in an ethnic conflict is that there are two other conflicts that complicate it further.

Armed Conflict
Addressing the ethnic conflict is complicated by the armed conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state. Although the armed conflict is generally viewed as stemming from the ethnic conflict, it is also distinct in character. States claim a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a given territory. So any state will repress those who seek to oppose it by force. It matters little to the state that those who oppose it do so on the basis of democracy, ethnicity, class or regionalism. And when it comes to suppressing an armed rebellion, it matters little whether the state is capitalist or socialist, authoritarian or democratic. All states have acted with varying degrees of violence and repression in stemming armed rebellions. So also have rebel groups opposing states. There are two ways armed conflicts between states and a rebel group can end – when one side defeats another or when both sides concede that they cannot defeat each other.

Sri Lankan governments and the Tamil Tigers oscillate between these two approaches. Sometimes promising outright military victories, and at other times agreeing to ceasefires. Which option will ultimately prevail is still not clear. The current Sri Lankan government continues to give deadlines for defeating the Tamil Tigers – the latest is yet another year. And the Tamil Tigers continue to assert that they are militarily secure. In the next few months, the fighting capacities and political sagacity of both sides will provide the answer to this question. I do not intend to speculate about the military outcome of Sri Lanka’s war. Rather I simply want to point out another element to the conflict – that of an armed group versus a state – that is distinct from the ethnic conflict – with its own dynamic – one that cannot be reduced to ethnicity alone.

Political Party Conflict
Addressing the armed conflict is complicated by the political power conflict among the main contenders for political power in Sri Lanka – the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Opposition United National Party (UNP) and the Tamil Tigers. While there are many other smaller political parties and paramilitary groups contending for political power – it is only these actors that have the capacity to unilaterally transform the political context. There is a distinct power conflict among these three contenders that is derived from competition over the business of rule. The main political parties compete over who gets to rule the Sri Lankan state, while the Tigers seek to rule a separate Tamil one.

This competition cannot simply be reduced to varying ideologies of nationalism or competing policies over how to resolve the ethnic conflict or, for that matter, different socio-economic policies. Political parties are built around the express intent of securing political power. They may have different ideological leanings or social bases and therefore wish to carry out different programmes. Still, one of their central goals is simply to rule, not rule in order to do something else. Clearly, all three parties – the SLFP, the UNP, and the Tamil Tigers – do not contend for power the same way. The two main political parties in Sri Lanka do so through more or less democratic means. The Tigers do so through more or less violent means. Yet, an important part of what they all contend for is power.

The position taken by these parties helps illustrate the distinction between policy on the ethnic conflict and political alliances to secure power. During the last Presidential elections, the candidate of the current ruling party the SLFP who is the current President, was considered to be a hardliner. During the campaign his manifesto condemned the ceasefire agreement and opposed a joint mechanism to work on post-Tsunami reconstruction. He also opposed a federal solution in favour a unitary one. Yet the President said he would be willing to talk directly with the Tamil Tigers to resolve the conflict, even when he took hard-line positions on a political solution for the Tamil people.

This kind of contradiction between political deal-making and ethnic policy is not limited to one or the other ruling party in Sri Lanka – or for that matter only to Sri Lanka. During earlier two parliamentary elections, the current opposition UNP opposed the government’s political proposals for resolving the conflict – saying that it granted too much autonomy to the Tamils. At the same time, the UNP supported a ceasefire and talking to the Tamil Tigers, who were asking for a separate state.

These seemingly contradictory positions – opposing Tamil autonomy, but supporting a dialogue with the Tamil extremist Tigers – can be reconciled. The two parties competing for the power to run the state, wanted Tiger support to obtain Tamil votes or block them, in areas under Tiger domination, while keeping their Sinhala base satisfied. Similarly, the Tigers seeking a separate state were implicitly supporting a political party that sought to dilute measures granting autonomy to Tamil areas. The Tigers expected one party, and then the other, to be more conciliatory towards them. All three – the Tamil Tigers, and the two main political parties have been disappointed by the outcome of their pre-electoral dalliances after the elections.

The Tamil Tigers attribute this disappointment to opportunism on the part of the political parties, and the governing political parties to deception on the part of the Tamil Tigers. But this explanation is too simplistic and ignores instances where mutual commitments have been adhered to by different sides. Rather once political parties secure power, they are now running the state, and the logic of the armed conflict between a state and an armed group takes over – making it harder for these parties to unilaterally fulfil political commitments they may have made in the past, when they were parties, operating outside the constraints of being office bearers of the state.

So if there is one thing I have learned about what an ethnic conflict is, it is that ethnic conflicts are never about ethnicity alone. This does not mean that ethnicity is not a central element of the conflict or that ordinary people often experience the violence as ethnic. It is simply that failing to take the other two elements of the conflict – the armed and the political power – into account and seeing how they are inter-related, can lead to a mistaken view of what the conflict is and can befuddle efforts to resolve it.

How do you resolve ethnic conflict?
The toughest part in resolving conflicts, in general, and ethnic cones, in particular, is not about finding the correct solution, or even agreeing on what it ought to be, but actually getting to a situation of peace, from one of war, once the political solution becomes clear. For example in the case of Sri Lanka, there is little doubt that the political solution will be federal in nature, if not in name. Similarly, in December 2002, the Tamil Tigers and the then Government of Sri Lanka agreed “to explore a federal solution”. Now clearly agreeing to explore is not the same as actually agreeing to such a solution, but the key point is the common understanding that any future solution to the ethnic conflict will be along these lines. The challenge we face lies less in intellectually figuring out what the solution should be, but in actually getting there politically. And these challenges can be better understood once we get beyond the broad goals such as reducing levels of violence and protecting rights, to actually seeking to implement these goals through practical mechanisms.

In Sri Lanka, as in many other situations, a solution requires that we move from a situation of violent polarisation to one of peaceful co-existence. And this usually entails doing the following simultaneously – reducing violence, protecting human rights, working out a political solution and reconstructing the war affected areas.

Ceasefires are not always helpful to peace negotiations
Ceasefires are an integral part of all peace processes. How and when does a ceasefire help negotiate an end to violence and how and when does it hinder such a process? While most mediators work to secure a ceasefire prior to political negotiations, they often find the ceasefire becomes the focus of the talks, rather than the political settlement, itself. Mediators involved in resolving a conflict, usually make an effort to secure a ceasefire agreement between the two parties before they do anything else. The implicit assumption is that a ceasefire will be helpful both in humanitarian terms as well as in political terms.

In humanitarian terms, ceasefires lessen the daily pain and suffering caused by war. They allow people to go about their daily lives without fear and anxiety. They create a climate that enables freer travel between areas, the movement of goods to markets and the transportation of the injured, the infirm and the old for medical treatment. No one disagrees that no war is better than war from a humanitarian perspective. Obviously people prefer the peace and the right to go about their daily life without hindrance over the pain and suffering that inevitably accompany war. This is true even when the respites from war are only temporary, since a temporary respite from war is better than no respite.

In political terms, as well, ceasefires are considered to be helpful. The assumption is that ceasefires can contribute to a positive climate for negotiations by improving the lives of civilians and building trust between the two parties. In addition, a ceasefire it is believed helps insulate political negotiations from military fighting, and move the negotiations away from pressing military and humanitarian concerns to longer term political ones. So many efforts to resolve conflict begin with mediators working out a ceasefire and proceeding to monitor parties’ compliance with it.

But the humanitarian and political desirability of ceasefires is not that clear cut, and in many cases, can actually lead to the opposite – more adverse humanitarian consequences and less trust. For example, ceasefires, can contribute to temporary respites, that allow parties to re-arm and re-group and begin another phase of conflict with greater intensity, rather than to engage in political talks. Respites from war that lead to intensified fighting may not be desirable on humanitarian grounds if the subsequent conflict results in even greater pain, suffering and loss of life. Furthermore, a ceasefire that enables parties to attack minorities or suppress dissenting political opinion within their own communities, can also vitiate the humanitarian arguments in favour of it. All of these factors have had a perverse effect on ceasefires in Sri Lanka – where children have been recruited, dissidents killed, and minorities expelled during ceasefires and more intense fighting has broken out after they have ended.

Ceasefires can also have a perverse impact on a peace process because they are not isolated military decisions to cease fighting that take place outside of a political context. Instead in most conflicts ceasefires are expressly political decisions made in the context of political jockeying for power. When negotiations and ceasefires are linked, it is common to find the relative military strengths of the two conflicting parties on the ground affecting their decisions whether or not to support a ceasefire. The party that is militarily gaining ground is unlikely to favour a ceasefire and vice versa. Under these circumstances, for a ceasefire to lead to viable negotiations, the two parties must not only be in a strategic stalemate but also a tactical one. They must feel that neither sides is likely to win the war in the long term, and that neither side can gain a tactical advantage in the sort term that will strengthen their bargaining position at the negotiating table.

Ceasefires can also hinder progress in political negotiations, because parties will, in the absence of clarity about a permanent settlement, prepare themselves for a possible outbreak of conflict. This preparation can lead to increased suspicion among belligerents. And lead them to focus efforts on addressing ceasefire violations, rather than political problems. And ceasefires can reduce the political pressure on parties to a conflict to work out a settlement. Finally, when ceasefires are a precondition for political talks, any violations, however small, can lead to parties dissipating political focus and effort on maintaining a ceasefire rather than proceeding towards tackling the longer term political causes of the conflict. This can not only delay solution, but also lead to the erosion of trust and goodwill.

This suggests that mediators/peacemakers ought to resist the instinct to negotiate a ceasefire prior to political talks. Instead making efforts to de-escalate a conflict with steps to improve the humanitarian situation, rather than a ceasefire may contribute to a more stable peace process. Several peace processes – such as the Salvadoran one mediated by Alvaro de Soto, and the Aceh process mediated by Martti Ahtisaari did not include a ceasefire.

Conflict resolution and human rights do not always go together
We generally expect and would like good things to go together. When conflict breaks out, human rights violations invariably take place. So we hope the opposite is true – i.e., when we protect human rights, we can contribute to ending armed conflict. While this may be the case in many situations it is not always so. In my experience observing Sri Lanka’s conflict closely, as well as studying a number of other violent conflicts – efforts to protect human right do not always contribute to efforts to promote peace. Sometimes these efforts can come into tension with each other in practice.

First the good news, strengthening human rights can be good for resolving conflict. Human rights can contribute to the long-term stability of a society. It can help identify causes of conflict and potential mechanisms for its resolution. It can protect bridge builders between communities in a divided society. It can provide a neutral standpoint for addressing contentious issues, and it can generate international support for a peace process.

But strengthening human rights can sometimes be in tension with resolving conflict. This is particularly true at the initial phases of a peace process. Raising human rights violations with belligerents can reduce trust in a mediator. For example the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government today are accused of widespread human rights violations. Indeed they are also probably guilty of most of these accusations. Nevertheless, unless one or the other is decisively defeated, it is hard to imagine a serious peace process that does not involve these two parties. But is also equally hard to imagine these two parties entering a peace process, if the first issue raised is their violations of human rights. Because this is bound to make them anxious that they will have to face some form of justice and make them skittish about entering a serious process of peace. Similarly they will see protection for human rights as reducing their control over populations. And finally they may be anxious about the prospect of being prosecuted for war crimes. While these tensions between resolving conflict and promoting human rights exist, they are not inevitable and can be reduced through institutional design and political skill.

To summarise my lessons. Ethnic conflicts are not only about ethnicity. They are also about political parties seeking power and armed entities confronting each other militarily – who are not necessarily divided neatly along ethnic lines. Starting with a ceasefire may not be the best way to resolve ethnic conflicts, even if this might give you a temporary respite from the armed conflict. Protecting human rights may not always help with promoting peace, though such tensions can be reduced with political shrewdness and strategic design. These lessons I believe are true not only for Sri Lanka, but for many countries struggling to go from a situation of war to one of peace.

///
Communication
Jim Culleny

A short-haired yellow mutt
standing at the side of the road
wearing a day-glo
orange scarf around his neck
so as not to get whacked
steps boldly out as I approach
as if to test for interspecies respect.

I slow and stop, roll my window down,
and bark, “Cool scarf.”

He looks me in the eye
turns on his heel
lifts his leg to pee on a wheel
then trots up the hill to his house
for a little water and chow
wondering where his day went,
then circles the rug twice
looking for that sweet spot
drops and dreams
and barks in his sleep
thanking me for my
compliment.

///

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.

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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.”

,,,,