“I saw a man on a stage

scream, “Put me back in my cage!”

I saw him hanged by his tie;

I saw enough to make me cry.”

— “Planet Earth,” Devo

As a young child, I had a pronounced morbid streak (much to my mother’s dismay), devouring anthologies of ghost/horror stories from the library, and willingly paying the price of the inevitable bad dreams that followed my on-the-sly viewings of midnight monster movies. Once, after watching the classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf while sleeping over at a friend’s house, I awoke in terror in the wee hours, convinced there was a werewolf at the foot of my bed. (It turned out to be a poster of David Cassidy.)

But nothing was more tantalizing than the Alice Cooper record collection owned by my friend’s teenaged brother. Long before I began buying records of my own, I would sneak off to my friend’s house and beg her brother to play Billion Dollar Babies, School’s Out, or Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Thus, by age 12, I knew all the lyrics to “Generation Landslide,” “No More Mister Nice Guy,” and “I Never Cry,” and naively sang along to the catchy, but decidedly off-color, “Blue Turk,” with no idea of what the lyrics actually meant. Yet it was the narrative-driven, staged theatrics of Welcome To My Nightmare (WTMN) that resonated most with my budding neo-Goth soul.

Many years later, while living in New York’s East Village, I rediscovered Cooper’s music, and found it still had that same resonating power, especially WTMN. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that I found the “story” of Alice so compelling, given that we both hail from a religious background. Alice Cooper was born Vincent Furnier in Detroit in 1948. His grandfather was an ordained “apostle” of the Church of Jesus Christ, and his father was a deacon. The Judeo-Christian mythos was thus ingrained in young Vince at a very early age. Not even the worldly trappings of rock superstardom could erase that early imprinting.

Superstardom didn’t come overnight. As a teenager in Phoenix, Arizona, the future Alice Cooper was on the track team, dabbled in surrealist art, and formed a band for the local talent show with some fellow cross-country teammates. Evincing a fondness for insects, they first called themselves the Earwigs, then changed it to the Spiders after graduating from high school, then (briefly) switched to The Nazz, before finally settling on Alice Cooper. (Rock legend has it that the name came out of a Ouija board session in which Vince learned he was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch of the same name, although Cooper himself later debunked that story. It was meant to conjure up an image of “a sweet little girl with a hatchet behind her back.”) The name originally referred to the band as a whole, but gradually became associated with the group’s flamboyantly androgynous lead singer, with his demented Kabuki-style makeup and penchant for wearing tattered women’s clothing onstage.

From the start, theatrics were a big part of Alice Cooper’s live act, but they didn’t become notorious until September 1969, when a chicken ended up onstage mid-performance at the Toronto Rock ‘n Roll Revival concert. Figuring that chickens should be able to fly, Cooper picked it up and tossed it back into the crowd, where it was ripped to shreds. After the incident was reported in national newspapers, rumors flew that Cooper bit the head off a live chicken and drank its blood onstage. The group’s mentor, Frank Zappa, encouraged the rumor, and the band’s theatrics became increasingly violent — and legendary. (To this day, Cooper is widely credited with being one of the first to bring storylined theatrics to the concert stage.) The more loudly politicians and churches denounced the band and called for the shows to be banned, the more wildly popular they became. Sex and violence sells, a maxim that was true then as it is now. By the 1973 Billion Dollar Babies tour, it had become a full-fledged rock opera, with highly advanced special effects, many designed by magician (and future notorious pseudoscience debunker) James Randi, who even appeared onstage as the executioner during some of the shows.

A consistent (thematically speaking) storyline was also emerging, one with a surprisingly strong moral center. “Alice” became a stage villain, committing all manner of vile acts (complete with live boa constrictors, fake blood, and the lewd fondling and chopping up of baby dolls during the tune “Dead Babies”), and finally being “punished” for his crimes in the climactic scene via some form of onstage execution: hanging, electrocution, or the guillotine. The audience ate it up, in fine Aristotelian cathartic fashion. But Alice didn’t stay dead: during the encore he would re-emerge triumphantly, this time in white tails and top-hat — almost a figure of salvation and redemption. Somehow, Cooper had turned the stage show into a modern day rock ‘n roll Passion Play, with himself as the central Anti-Christ figure who is sacrificed and resurrected from the dead.

Christians in medieval Europe would have grasped this immediately. So-called “mystery plays” were all the rage in the Middle Ages, most likely originating with the staging of Bible stories in churches, often with accompanying songs or musical performances. Thematically, the passion and resurrection of Jesus were among the most popular stagings, especially around the Easter celebration. Although they started out simply, the plays gradually became more elaborate and embellished, eventually spreading beyond the churches to become a mainstay of traveling troupes of players. According to Wikipedia, in later centuries, such plays “were often marked by the extravagance of the sets and ‘special effects….'” Papier-mache masks were often worn to better delineate the stock characters, often grotesque when depicting Satan or his minions. One suspects Alice Cooper would have felt right at home in a medieval mystery play.

He might also have felt comfortable with commedia dell’arte (“comedy of humors” in Italian), a form of traveling improvisational theater that was hugely popular in Renaissance Italy. Despite the improvisational nature of the format, there were set characters — each with its own telltale accompanying masks and costumes — and situations that influenced literature and theater (even music) for centuries to come, from Shakespeare and Moliere, to Rostand’s Cyrano and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The Alice Cooper stage shows featured the same elaborate costumes, props, even a few slapstick elements, albeit of a darker variety than one would have found in 15th century Venice. And Cooper’s trademark painted face is a version of a mask, now forever associated in the public mind with that particular demonic character.

Masks predate modern theater, of course, and have played many symbolic roles throughout human history. In ancient Greece, they were used to depict mythological gods, and belonged as much to religious ritual as to drama. In such diverse cultures as Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, China and Mexico, they were used as a protection to ward of evil spirits. And among some New Guinea tribes, masks were seen as living demons or spirits: they were treated with great respect, with natives conversing with them as if they were alive.

Something of that anthropomorphic character of masks seeped into Cooper’s colorful stage persona. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being an act. The stage “Alice” — the fictional character — began to take over, as the Man Behind the Mask (Vince Furnier) sank further and further into chronic alcoholism to cope with the mounting pressure of having to “be” Alice Cooper 24-7. He split with the group in 1974, releasing his first solo record, WTMN, in 1975. It told the story of a young boy named Stephen’s nightmare, and featured narration by Vincent Price and the most elaborate stage effects to date. The tour was a spectacular success, even being filmed live for a concert film that remains popular with the midnight movie crowd today.

Yet despite his spectacular solo success, Cooper was drinking more than ever, even founding his own drinking club, The Hollywood Vampires. (There is actually a cocktail named the Alice Cooper, a blend of vodka, whiskey and lager, that originated in Australian bars.) He was rumored to be consuming up to two cases of Budweiser and a bottle of whiskey a day at one point, and the habit soon had a deleterious effect on his performances. His 1976 follow-up album was appropriately titled “Alice Cooper Goes  To  Hell,” and it was clear from the wretchedly shambling live concerts that the rock superstar was on the road to ruin and professional (if not spiritual) damnation.

Like a 52-car- pile-up on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it was impossible to look away; one stared in horrified fascination at the spectacle of a performer clearly hellbent on destroying himself for his real or imagined sins — a super-slo-mo, public suicide, performed to a driving rock beat. It was enough to break your heart, even at the tender age of 12. Like everyone else, I couldn’t look away, but inside, I ached for Alice, at the site of such obvious psychological turmoil and pain. Because for all his naughty shenanigans, there was always something likable about Alice, something that made us root for the “bad guy” — and it was the part that belonged to his “creator,” Vince Furnier.

Sometimes even Mega-Villains can be saved. In 1977, right after concluding a disastrous Lace and Whiskey tour, Cooper checked into rehab and cleaned up his act. He used his experiences inside the sanitarium as fodder for 1978’s From the Inside, featuring “How You Gonna See Me Now,” a rather touching ballad whose lyrics centered on his trepidation about how his long-suffering wife would react to him after his hospitalization. Alas, while his health was on the upswing, his musical career was on a downward spiral, and subsequent albums failed to achieve much success. By 1983, he was back in rehab — and this time, the treatment took. Vince made his peace with Alice, learned to set some critical boundaries between himself and his demented stage persona. The two have co-existed ever since, each in his own realm: Alice on stage, Vince in private, and never the twain shall meet.

Isn’t that a compelling tale? All the more so because, well, it’s real. Cooper still performs regularly, still releases albums, even hosts his own nationally syndicated radio show, Nights With Alice Cooper. He’s still playing out that age-old story, finding new mythological variations on the Mystery Play. For instance, in 1994, he released The Last Temptation, a concept album dealing explicitly with faith, temptation and redemption, accompanied by a graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman (the Sandman series, American Gods). He remains one of rock ‘n roll’s most magnetic stage presences, his shows still visually striking, except now they lack that edgy, self-destructive desperation of his shows during the Uber-Alcoholic Era. Some might mourn the loss of the intensity, but it came at such a huge personal cost to the performer one can hardly begrudge the man his inner peace. (What is it about rock ‘n roll culture that demands we sacrifice our rock gods on the alter of our continued entertainment?)

I’m glad Cooper has battled back his personal demons and emerged triumphant from his own private nightmare. These days, he plays golf at his local country club. He’s served on the PTA. He owns a couple of restaurants, and makes the odd cameo guest appearance, most recently as a murder suspect on the USA Network’s Monk. He even (gasp!) votes Republican. (Okay, that one’s hard to forgive….) But as far as his many loyal fans are concerned, his place in the modern musical pantheon is secure.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette blogs about science and culture at Cocktail Party Physics. Her latest book is The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

In Act Three of Jules Massenet’s opera Manon, the Chevalier des Grieux, now an abbé, attempts to cast off his passion for Manon Lescaut. He prays for equanimity. But the aria, ‘Ah! fuyez, douce image‘, leaves him broken. However, his passion is soon rekindled. Beauty has him in its grip. Tragedy ensues. Manon dies on the road to Le Havre and des Grieux is left despairing.

The Chevalier has taken beauty seriously. And who has not been subject to its predations? There have been repeated efforts in recent times to explain beauty, meaning the entirety of apprehended life, in all its diversity and configurations. Life is adaptation, due process. A starlit sky: fortuitously reflective random astral matter; a rose: petals, stamens, bees; you have a conversation with your dog after a hard day at work: spare me this anthropomorphic dog delusion. A great love: sexual instinct, add oxytocin; whales rearing out of the ocean: they need air, dominance behaviour, clearing parasites from the skin—anything but ‘the beautiful’, you dolt. We can’t even greet someone affectionately now without another piece of reductive scientism getting its paw jammed in the wheel: we embrace one another on first meeting, an article in Nature proclaims, to assure one another ‘we have no hostile intent’, musings about spider monkeys, ostensibly the subject of the article, providing the corroborative Q.E.D.

Thus is everything limited to the level of explanation. If I ask what you—or I—know about brain surgery, aeroplane mechanics, the geomorphology of Poland, Romania’s political history, Caesar’s eating habits or corruption in Haiti, for example, the answer is, probably, close to absolutely nothing. And yet some people, who can’t predict which nag will win a race in five minutes, or what a stock price will be at the end of the day, with their very little knowledge pumped up to universal wisdom, now hector us with Delphic certitude about the meaning of existence, consciousness and the purpose(lessness) of the universe. Beauty fits in with this bulk disposal lot as just another adaptive response to be ticked off, along with truth, goodness and death. In recent times, philosophy, as far as I understand it, also seems to have let down the side badly, beauty being a stretch too far for protomodern sensibilities. We are now supposed to take seriously the ideas on aesthetics of someone like Heidegger who couldn’t see that Hitler wasn’t exactly a good thing. 

I guess these people haven’t been reading Faust recently, wherein a pact with Mephistopheles has the scholar dabbling on the further shores of hubris. Goethe knew humility before the greatness of the world was essential for any real insight into meaning and purpose. The brave new future, where everything is going to have explicatory pins put through it, is only going to end in tears before bedtime if we do not stay open to, and accept, the strangeness and marvellousness of our residence on Earth—’the beautiful’, in other words. This does not entail appeals to the higher superstition, throwing off scientific method or contracting intellectual discourse—the scientific imagination is beautiful too—but it does require an acknowledgement that one’s understanding is finite and that this circumscribed knowledge of the world leaves the vast whole, largely, a terra incognita. A great deal of our knowledge of the world comes to us through our feelings and how they perceive beauty, the gift unsought, and often importunate, but insisted upon.

Happiness, I read elsewhere [Scientific American Feb. 18, 2007], has something to do with accepting ‘declining marginal utility’—whatever that might be—as part of the human lot. As if you could ever define what is going to make any individual happy in any particular instance. Would des Grieux have been happier, known more, or less, beauty, if he had never met Manon? These ‘what if’ questions are beside the point. We encounter beauty, often in the form of eros, unexpectedly, and precipitously. If it is a profile, a Greek vase, the morning light, that sets the heart racing, so be it. Accept it, rejoice in it. It may leave you alone soon enough.

There are people who need to play Cassandra, perpetually rediscovering the fact that the world can be a very bad place—’India to set up orphanages to curb aborted female fetuses’ is one headline I read recently. Some Modernism belongs to this miserabilist school of hand-wringing. You read a book, see a play or go to an exhibition that is saying, basically, I don’t much like the world, or myself, but please, love my work. But why should we love the work if it only offers negativity. This negativity has gone hand in hand with the kind of utterances noted above, though these, unfortunately, are just as numerous in the arts. Eliot says in ‘Burnt Norton’ that ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’. Tell them that at the entrance to Auschwitz or in the slums of Manila. History teaches that human kind has been bearing mountainous reality forever. Eliot wrote one of the great poems of the twentieth century—’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’—but that doesn’t excuse this kind of holding forth. 

When spider monkeys start performing the Appassionata, come and let me know, will you. In the meantime, I’m content to accept the world with its gross imperfections, the beauty in the human and in nature that I don’t pretend to understand, but which is the best truth I’ve found. Like des Grieux, we are perplexed by beauty and sometimes wish the cause of our perplexity to leave us. But we cannot do that. We accept our perplexity and incomprehension, and that is our joy, our greatness.

                                                                *
          Take Me To The People Who Know

Quickly, take me to the people
Who have found the truth
Of the way this world is
And what the human means.
I want to sit before them and give thanks
For showing me the error of my ways.
Before, I believed in the heart
And the mystery of being,
That love was the greatest truth
In an inexplicable world.

The millions who pray each day
To their deities—
Why can’t they see their folly,
Like that crowd who showed up
When the Pope expired.
They were certainly in error,
As much as composers like Bruckner,
That peasant from Linz,
Who wrote all his work for the glory of God.
Talk about the future of an illusion.

The torrent of generations
Is turning at my shoulder,
Dust in a glitter of hope.
How miserable their lot,
Not to have had the chance
To know they were wrong, and adjust
Their beliefs to genetic sutras.
Those disinherited led to us,
An evolutionary triumph,
Since progress is always upwards.

But this net of consciousness
Is really due chemical process.
So, quickly then,
Take me to the people who know,
For I need wisdom now.
I am humble before their greatness of mind
That has fathomed the final meanings
And brought from ignorant time
This evidentiary might.
O Beauty! O Truth! O delight!

Written 2005

You can hear Marcelo Alvarez singing ‘Ah! fuyez’ in Paris, 2001 here. 5′ 40” 

Hameed Haroon, CEO and Publisher of Dawn, the largest English-language newspaper in Pakistan, has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish this introductory note to a dossier (see Appendices at the end) that he has compiled about recent assaults on freedoms of the press in Pakistan:

Dear Madam / Sir,

I am writing to draw your attention to an important matter that indicates the rapidly worsening environment for the freedom of press in Pakistan.

It has always been difficult for governments to coexist with a free and independent press in Pakistan. Of late, however, the government headed by President Musharraf has become increasingly intolerant towards criticism in the press and towards the publishing of news that reflects poorly on the performance of his government on security matters.

One of the intended casualties of this swelling hostility between government and press in Pakistan is the DAWN Group of Newspapers, the country’s largest independent English language newspaper and magazines publishing house.

Since December 2006, the DAWN Group is facing massive advertising cuts equivalent to two thirds of total government advertising. This has occurred primarily as a consequence of a decision ostensibly taken by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s government, but in reality ordered by General Musharraf and engineered by several of his advisors that constitute the government’s inner cabinet.

It is clear that objections to the propriety of the DAWN Group’s editorial policies emanate mainly from President Musharraf’s office and his stance is heavily influenced by key advisors who have been entrusted with responsibility for implementing crisis management and conflict control in flashpoint areas. Particularly sensitive for the agreement are the escalating developments in Pakistan’s western province of Baluchistan, and in the tribal agencies of North & South Wazirstan on the Afghan border. Also irksome have been the DAWN Group’s related attempts to monitor a recurring tendency toward covert militancy among responsible decision-makers in government.

While preparing this dossier, I have attempted to include details and supporting documentation wherever possible, to facilitate your assessment as a key practitioner in the press rights movement internationally. Recent events in Pakistan indicate that attempts by the government to curtail the autonomy of the judiciary have been on the increase. This may have facilitated a temporary unintended pause in the government’s relentless campaign to muzzle the press. But such pauses presage a return to more coercive methods by government against the press, once the messy business of the executive – judicial conflict is brought to a successful halt.

If you peruse the documents accompanying this letter, you will find a chronology of events that cover the continuing conflict between the DAWN Group and the Government of Pakistan in the critical years 2004 to 2007. (Refer Appendix A 1.0) and that reflects some of the main causes of the present breakdown of communication between the government and the DAWN Group.

In the first phase, approximating with the years 2004 to 2005, the Government of Pakistan essentially worked by attempting to exert pressure on the Dawn Group by proxy – the proxy in this case being the Provincial Government of Sindh. It is in Sindh’southern metropolis of Karachi, that the headquarters of the DAWN Group of Newspapers are located.

This period first witnessed the government’s exerting of harsh pressures on our daily evening newspaper – The STAR – by attempting to intimidate and harass journalists with false cases and concocted charges, and by a failed attempt to implicate the writer of this letter, as CEO of the Group, in a totally fabricated incident of terrorism and illegal weapons possession. (Refer Appendix A 1.1.1, to, 1.1.4 and 2.1.2)

This attempt culminated with a complete ban on advertising on DAWN Group newspapers and magazines by the Government of Sindh. However, in response to a petition filed by DAWN’s lawyers, the Sindh High Court ruled in DAWN’s favour. The Sindh Government sensing an impeding debacle withdrew the advertising ban in advance of the Court’s final verdict.

The second stage involved the direct exerting of pressure by the Federal Government itself. After a series of fumbling measures and half-hearted advertisement bans by the Federal Government with respect to DAWN in 2005, a turning point was reached when one of our influential current affairs magazines, the HERALD, published a series of controversial stories and articles from June 2005 onwards on topics such as the Pakistan Government’s war against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in North and South Wazirstan; a possible resurgence of covert government support to Kashmiri militants; and also on the mushrooming policy debacle for government with respect to the Bugti insurgency in Baluchistan. (Refer Appendix A 1.2.1, to, 1.2.4 and 2.2.2)

In September 2006 when the government approached DAWN in its attempt to seek a news blackout regarding Baluchistan and the troubled FATA agencies of North and South Wazirstan, the editor of DAWN, Mr. Abbas Nasir, and the Directors of the Board of the DAWN Group, concluded that the government’s ‘request’ was unreasonable and needed to be firmly turned down. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2 September – December 2006)

As a consequence, the government imposed an almost comprehensive ban on Federal Government advertising. (Refer Appendix A 2.2.2t) with an intent to provoke the financial collapse of the DAWN Group.

The DAWN Group had somewhat anticipated events from the increasingly strident tone of government criticism of its news policies and from the subsequent escalation in unreasonable informational demands from the government. As a precautionary measure aimed at reducing large financial deficits, we were forced to suspend the publication of our newspaper, the STAR, an important, but financial deficit generating newspaper, which has existed for over half a century and had been founded by working journalists of the DAWN Group.

Financial conditions within DAWN now became even more vulnerable to outside pressures as a consequence of our decision to commence work on a new TV channel – DAWN News. The grant of television broadcasting licences by the government towards such end is farmed out to a government organisation – the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) set up courtesy of an Ordinance passed in 2002. The President of Pakistan had on three different occasions in the last three years publicly announced that the controversial cross-media ownership rule (illegally tagged onto the PEMRA Ordinance as a subsequent rule/regulation by the authority) would be withdrawn and the large resource of talent available in the print media would be allowed to participate in the burgeoning electronic media revolution in Pakistan. Public opinion expressed itself in the widely held conviction that with the entry of the mainstream print media in the electronic media profession, discriminatory attitudes and the repressive stance of PEMRA with respect to press freedoms in the electronic media (Refer Appendix B & Appendix C) would be rolled back. However, the government’s current position in the courts with respect to DAWN’s application for a television broadcast licence (Refer Appendix A 2.3.2) has forced a rapid reassessment of public opinion with respect to the bonafides of government intention and clearly demonstrates that President Musharraf’s government is bent on pursuing a policy of blatant cronyism vis a vis the inclusion of selected and preferred print media houses in the electronic media revolution, and the rejection of others considered as hostile or non-compliant to government needs.

The government also appears determined to continue the domination of all news content on TV channels and on FM radio through harsh and repressive regulatory directives from PEMRA, evidenced in the grant of temporary uplink permissions in place of valid broadcasting licenses to selected channels of PEMRA’s preference.

The recent spate of programmes banned on television by PEMRA and a physical attack engineered by government on the offices of a prominent TV news channel-cum-newspaper office, clearly demonstrate the prevalence of government’s excesses in this matter.

In early December 2005 when the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Shaukat Aziz summoned the undersigned to a meeting at Governor House (Sindh) to announce the Sindh Government’s decision to withdraw its advertising ban on the DAWN Group, he clearly informed me that the government was keen that DAWN should go ahead and set up a TV channel for the broadcast of English language news. The President’s constant public declarations regarding the withdrawal of the notoriously exclusionary cross-media ownership clause in the PEMRA rules and regulations and Parliament’s decision to finally withdraw this rule have not resulted in the licenses promised to newspaper publishing houses outside of government favour- this despite the passing of the legislation by both houses of Parliament . Such permissions have only been granted arbitrarily to selected groups by the government. This has led to a situation where we, at DAWN, in anticipation of the government decision to implement the new law have set up an entire organisation in Pakistan, employing over 350 journalists, technicians and managerial personnel and are anxiously awaiting the promised government license, all the while being forced to squander large financial outlays in anticipation of this.

The government’s refusal to give us a license mainly stems from our refusal to submit to its unethical pressures while reporting events in Baluchistan and North & South Waziristan. This refusal has become an acute cause of concern for the future financial viability of our publishing group.

Clearly the government would dearly like to see us lay off our journalists as they are viewed as a potential source of unwelcome criticism of government policies, rather than as compliant sheep to be hurriedly shepherded by PEMRA according to government whim.

Our colleagues in organisations devoted to protecting the freedom of the press throughout the world have always been a source of moral inspiration and help to us in our struggle for press freedoms in Pakistan.

We therefore urge you to extend your help in this matter and would appreciate if you address your concerns to the authorities in Pakistan regarding the following areas:

1. That the advertising ban by the Federal Government on the DAWN Group’s advertising is both unwarranted and unethical and a transparent mechanism to exert pressure on the newspaper group’s policies in contravention of the internationally accepted norms of objective news reporting.
2. That the decision to withhold a television broadcast license to the DAWN Group by the government is in violation of the judgments of the High Court of Sindh and the consent declarations made by PEMRA and the Federal Minister of Information in the Sindh High Court. Such right should be granted to other applying media groups as well on the same terms .
3. That the Government of Pakistan continue to submit its policies in Baluchistan and its agreements with the pro Taliban tribesmen of North & South Waziristan to the rigorous assessment of public and media scrutiny.
4. That the Government of Pakistan desist from abducting and arresting journalists in the judicious performance of their duties, and desist from physically attacking newspaper offices as has occurred last week in Islamabad.

Your concerns in this respect may be addressed to:

• The President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf,
• The Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Shaukat Aziz,
• The Acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Justice Rana Bhagwandas,
• The Federal Minister for Information Development, Government of Pakistan, Mr Mohammed Ali Durrani.

In addition your concerns should also be expressed to other key decision makers in the Government of Pakistan, urging all of them to desist from repressive, illegal and unethical practices deployed in their effort to subvert press freedoms.

For your ease of communication, I am including relevant fax contact details:

• General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan +9251-9221388
• Mr Shaukat Aziz, Prime Minister of Pakistan +9251-9212866
• Justice Rana Bhagwandas, Acting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan +9251-9213452
• Mr Mohammed Ali Durrani, Federal Minister for Information Development, Government of Pakistan +9251- 9203740

Thank you in anticipation for your much needed support in this matter.

Appendix A — SUMMARY & CHRONOLOGY: 2004-2007
Appendix B — MEDIA CONTROL THROUGH THE PEMRA ORDINANCE
Appendix C — EXPLANATORY NOTE ON THE PEMRA RULE ON CROSS MEDIA OWNERSHIP
Appendix D — SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION

The Yamkut

Justin E. H. Smith

We all know the deer: a beast formed of grace and terror. She is graceful because all the visible terror, at being shot, at being torn by claws, is concentrated in the eyes alone; she is terrified, in her eyes and in her soul (which is invisible), because the world is cruel to whatever does not prey.   Throughout the serpentine empire of the river Yam, the deer (or more precisely, capreolus pygargus) is a ubiquitous enough zoological entity to make its presence felt cartographically, in place-names both Russian and native.  The capital and business center of Yamkutka is called by the Russians ‘Olen’sk,’ (‘Deerville,’ if you will).  The Yamkut name for the city, ‘Yum,’ also honors the region’s second-most common large mammal, and first-most among the ungulates. 

In contradistinction to most self-descriptions of indigenous peoples, which are usually very nearly translatable simply as ‘the people,’ Bocharov and Ginzburg report in their groundbreaking 1958 study, Perspektivy na iamkutskoe obshchestvo: primitivnyi kommunizm ili paleoaziatskii men’shevizm? [Perspectives on Yamkut Society: Primitive Communism or Paleo-Asiatic Menshevism?], that the elders of the tribe sometimes offer as a translation of the Yamkut word for ‘Yamkut’ [jam’çïa]: “Those who are not cloven-hoofed, shit not pellets, and are neither graceful nor –though they certainly ought to be– terrified.”  If you are a Yamkut (which you assuredly are not), deer and life are as one. A Yamkut creation myth tells of Mother Deer, a doe whose udder grew and grew until it gushed forth seas and lakes and rivers of fatty and clotted milk, and of how in the dreamtime before the time we know the mighty Yam flowed thick and white.   

In the golden age of Mosfilm and Lenflim, after the Georgians had founded Gruzfilm and the Turkmen had founded Turkmenfilm and even Tadzhikistan had its own studio of some renown, the Yamkut became determined to convince Moscow that they too needed Yamkut-language films created at their very own Yamkut studio. True, they were just an autonomous oblast and not a Soviet Socialist Republic, but, they thought, it was worth a try.  The red tape took no more and no less time to cut through than for any other project under communism, and after a number of years, Yamfilm was born, with technical consultants arriving daily from Moscow and Kiev, workers diligently constructing a movie set on the outskirts of Olen’sk that, for some as yet unknown reason, had slowly begun to resemble the Reichstag.

It would turn out that the elders among the Yamkut had been forced to cut a deal with the bureaucrats in Moscow in order to gain approval for the Yamfilm project. The Yamkut could have their studio, but the first five films, to be completed in the first five years of production, were to depict the Soviet victory in the Great War for the Fatherland, with a particular emphasis on the enemy camp.  Now the Yamkut would much rather have made films depicting their way of life, films about what interested them, what they spent all their time discussing, which is to say, most importantly, the deer-hunt.  In fact, most Yamkut found it difficult even to act, before a camera and under pressure from Mosfilm supervisors, as though they cared about anything other than deer, such as heroism, medals, and the purported difference between Stalin and Hitler. To the Yamkut, it was just two men with moustaches, enormous moustaches, having it out over issues that ought to have had no bearing on the lives of scraggly-whiskered, Mongoloid hunter-gatherers such as themselves. 

But a deal’s a deal, and so the first Yamkut film made it into production.  Some particularly memorable footage I saw on a recent visit to the Yamkutka oblast‘s historical archives shows rejected takes of a scene in a conference room at the Reichstag.  A crucial strategy meeting between all of the highest ranking Nazis was about to begin. Yümat keeps screwing up his lines, slipping out of character, while lead actor Yügd has failed to show altogether.  Here is the translation T. L. Vainshtain provided me of the outtake’s dialogue (I decided to pay her to come along with me from Moscow to work as my interpreter):

Goebbels: Heil Hitler, Herr Speer.  Where’s Goering?

Speer: Heil Hitler, Herr Goebbels. Goering comes. (Goering enters). Oh, Herr Goering, Heil Hitler… Hey, where is Hitler, anyway?

(Tense pause.)

Goering: Hitler out in tundra. Hunting deer. Back at sundown.

Yes, the Yamkut know deer. But it is the Yamkut alone who know the mysterious çüm’t.  The name might roughly be translated out of Yamkut as “That which wreaks pure terror, and perceives not grace, with glowing quills and without a face.”  Bocharov and Ginzburg (ibid.) describe it variously as “a Yeti for the steppe,” “a spectre haunting Siberia,” “the opium of the hunter-gatherers,” “a running-dog for idealism,” and, more to the point, “a big lie.” 

But whatever the çüm’t is, it’s no Yeti, and it’s no lie. Unlike the mythical mountain-bound snow monster, the çüm’t is a river-dweller, or, more precisely, a Yam-dweller, its habitat extending no more than 100 meters from the banks of this great flow. Moreover, the çüm’t is a quadruped, if you can call those things feet.  In all the world, these are the only feet, if you can call them that, that are both webbed and clawed. The webs help the çüm’t propel itself as it wishes, upstream or downstream, through the Yam’s swift currents. The claws help the çüm’t to subdue its prey, though this is seldom necessary, for its prey is the docile deer. Its face, which is to say its mouth, is located somewhere beneath that mass of glowing quills. Some Yamkut elders say the teeth glow as well. Some even say there is no real difference between the quills and the teeth at all, that other than its webbed, glowing-clawed feet the çüm’t is nothing more than an enormous mouth. 

The çüm’t’s existence has not gone entirely unnoted by the scientific community.  In his largely forgotten 1934 field guide to the wildlife of Siberia, Die Tierwelt Siberiens, Macarius Müller mentions the Hystrix candens Mülleri or ‘Müller’s glowing porcupine.’ He notes: “Just as the people of Jamkutka might be said to exhibit in an exaggerated form the physiognomic and behavioral traits of their cousins to the south, the Dravidians of the southern tip of India and the island of Zeylon, with eyes that bespeak an indifference to suffering and defeat: at the hands of the Indo-Aryans, in the case of the black-skinned Hindoos, and of the Slavs, in the case of the Jamkut; with a communal life as much bereft of concern for basic hygiene as of interest in the profounder things; with a single-minded lust for the steaming blood of the graceful deer they claim to love, and perhaps for the blood of a curious traveller such as myself, so too the glowing porcupine is but a fiercer, more savage cousin of the Hystrix indica or Indian porcupine. Whether it has a face –or not, as the Jamkut claim– I have not been able to approach close enough to determine. But that it glows like an ember, that I can see quite clearly from a safe distance.”

Müller, a young, adventurous soul, lusting for a bit of blood himself, rushed back to Europe at the first promise of war and died a few years later in a so-called fox-hole. Within a few years of his book’s publication, “going East” would take on a new meaning, and few after Müller would ever try to track down the glowing porcupine. It was the fate of the Hystrix candens Mülleri to remain but a çüm’t.  And so it has, right up to the present day.

When Tanya and I paid a visit on our way back from Olen’sk to the Kazakhfilm archives at the brand-new national history museum in Astana, we came across a notebook of the legendary Kazakh director Mubarak Zhubaikanov.  Assigned in the early 1960s to make films based on the national epics of each of the Soviet Republics, in alphabetical order, he had scarcely begun production on the Armenia installment when he found himself in prison for promoting (i) idealism (i.e., Italian neo-realism), and (ii) the corruption of Socialist values (i.e., homosexuality).  Say what you will about the Azerbaidjanis (alphabetically first, in Cyrillic terms), the Pravda editorialists reflected, it is simply not like them to lounge about pointlessly on interminable island holidays, gazing at one another’s youthful torsos.  The notebook contained what looked to be a sketch of a movie he hoped to make, someday, about the Yamkut, though for the life of me I can’t imagine how he thought this material could ever be translated into the medium of film. “The çüm’t takes a claw-footed/web-footed hike, or swim, or something in between,” Zhubaikanov writes, “against the current of the mighty Yam, in search of a deer.”  He continues:

“The çüm’t makes its way upstream.  It seems as though the icy water ought to extinguish the glow of its quills, and yet they only seem to glow brighter the more fully they are submerged by the current. Soon enough, the beast spies what it’s looking for, a six-year-old doe with white spots, drinking gently at the side of the river. The doe spots the çüm’t, in turn, and freezes, not out of fear, or at least not out of fear alone, but out of awe at the sight of this waterborne fire. No deer that’s seen it has ever lived.  None has ever had the chance to teach the fawns how to survive this terrible beauty.

“The çüm’t draws nearer, and the remaining awe in the doe’s eyes transforms quickly into terror; the terror concentrates in her eyes alone and, however much she would have it so, cannot be communicated to her sinewy legs. The frozen doe watches the glowing beast draw nearer, and as it draws nearer she sees what no Yamkut has ever seen: she sees the mouth of the çüm’t begin slowly to open.

“Located at the front of the torso, at least if we wish to determine front and back in this case by the direction of motion, the quills part down the center of its body and reveal something of a hole, a hole doing something quite the opposite of glowing. Around its rim, there appears a ridge of tiny, sharp, only lightly glowing quills, which would have to be identified as the teeth if anything were to be. The hole is floating in the middle of the fiery light, more powerful than the hottest flames, the sharpest quills, as if ready to devour the deer whole.

“Presently, the çüm’t opens its mouth as wide as it can be extended and plunges the ridge of teeth into the neck of the motionless doe.  The çüm’t leans with all its weight into the deer’s body. The deer, much to her own surprise, finds herself leaning in as well. The çüm’t pushes toward the deer and sucks, and the deer pushes toward the çüm’t as she feels her blood flow out into her partner’s mouth.  She kneels –the first motion we’ve seen from her since she caught sight of the glowing beast– in part because she feels weak, in part because she longs to be closer to her squat attacker.  Just to be closer, just for now, whatever this may bring.  For they are partners, and they are conspiring.

“The deer says to her partner: ‘I am a deer, and I have no defense. Those who are not cloven-hooved, and shit not pellets, and ought to be terrified, but are not, believe that I am formed out of grace and terror. But as you now know, çüm’t, I am formed out of blood, which fuels the fire in your quills, and I am covered in soft velvety hair, which is of a kind with your quills, however different these may seem.  I am formed out of taut muscles and lightning-fast synapses, and I dart across the tundra away from the bang of the clumsy unterrified ones’ weapons, until I am ready to give myself to them.  I haven’t given myself to you, çüm’t. You have taken me.  My blood feeds the fire in your quills, and I cannot keep it from flowing.  My only weapon is my fecundity, which flows like blood throughout the generations of deer, which flowed into my fawn and will flow from her to other fawns still, into generations without end. My own blood will cease to flow when it has all flown into you, but it does not matter, for my own blood would have flown into nothing had you not come to take it. It is sweet to flow like this, for just a few moments more, my çüm’t, though the life flows out of me and into you, sweeter than the soft flow of the rivulets of the mighty Yam, sweeter than the mighty flow of time, and of the soft rivulet of time that was my soft and sinewy life. This is no longer my life flowing, my çüm’t. This is your life flowing, and you are everything.’

“And the çüm’t replies: ‘I am a çüm’t and I cannot help what I am. Those on two legs, who keep their distance, and who know that I glow like embers, but know not that I have a face, say that I am evil itself.  But they are mistaken.  As you now know, deer, I am appetite itself.  I kill in order to live, and I glow because I live, and I cannot help but live.  Evil has nothing to do with it. Some may think that I am evil, but I am only appetite, and appetite is love, and love is all there is. If I am evil, then, all is evil and it says nothing to point this out. You, deer, are feeding my appetite, for now, for this morning. This afternoon, I will feed on another.  You, my deer, know that I love you as much as one creature has ever loved another, my love grows as you cease to be another creature altogether, as you become me, and we become more.  I am all there is, and through me all is one.’

“The çüm’t plunges onward, upstream, and the deer’s carcass lies still at the side of the Yam, flaccid from bloodlessness, one eye underwater, one eye staring expressionlessly toward the overcast sky. And the maggots and flies will soon come and take what the çüm’t did not want. And a Yamkut may happen along, and consider peeling off the velvety hide, but, with a pang of shame, an evolved aversion to vulturism, decide not to. And off in the forest, the bear will say to the rabbit: let us conspire.  And the leaf will whisper to the humus: shall we conspire?  And the fairy ring will ask the deer pellet: why not conspire?  And the sunbeam will beseech the maggot: let us conspire.  And the mighty Yam will cry out: all things conspire.”

*

For Chingiz Aitmatov.

An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing may be found at www.jehsmith.com.

About 98.000 people die every year in the hospitals in the USA due to medical errors. The experts calculated this in 1997, after they studied reported adverse occurrences in hospitals in New York, Utah and Colorado in previous years. The data for the rest of the world is not available. If we assume similar incidence in the world and extrapolate, it turns out, every year over 2.1 million people would die in the world, or over 42 million people may have died in the past 20 years because of medical errors. (This shocking number is not based on any hard statistical evidence. The purist may ignore this extrapolation and the cynic can argue that in many countries people die due to lack of medical care and not because of it.)

Most errors occur due to fault in the “process” of care: switching two similar sounding medications (Hydralazine/ Hydoxyzine), wrong dosage units (mcg/mg), confusing two patients with identical names. Extensive use of information technology (IT) can minimize this tragedy and also provide many other tools to improve the processes of health care in the hospitals, local community and the country. Some such benefits are: avoiding repetitive tests on patients, cost containment, early warning of epidemics, post market drug surveillance, disaster management, health care planning and long distance tele-medicine.

The driving component of the health IT – you could call it the ‘operating system’ of the health care universe — is the electronic health record. (EHR), which is a digitized equivalent of a patient’s chart in the hospital or a doctor’s office. An ideal EHR would record each health care encounter and transaction in the life of an individual, from birth to death. This EHR could reside in doctor’s office, a hospital or a central repository, which can allow secure access to pre authorized persons through the Internet.

Why hasn’t it happened? The use of computers in health care is primitive compared to other industries like banking and airlines. IT entered the hospitals through the back door: financial software, including billing and collections settled in the hospital first without any significant linkage to the clinical work, and within clinical disciplines each department procured software to run only its own functions without any electronic data exchange with other departments. The use of IT in healthcare grew by installation of independently functioning modules in enclosed silos and the unintended result was that the departments could not communicate. Medical fraternity learned the hard way that computers are not amenable to behavior modification and software is like a stern nurse: it may do what you ask but not what you want.

What is true of hospital departments is true of institutions; even neighboring hospitals serving the same population cannot communicate with each other. Since health IT has grown in bits and pieces over the past few years, one will have to first dismantle the current system to install the new interoperable information applications.

Five components are essential for the successful operation of a health information network:

• Common interoperable health IT standards.
• Uniform medical nomenclature.
• Policy and regulations to promote the use of e-health platforms.
• User-friendly interface for clinical workers.
• Early involvement of the end users in development and implementation.

The problem of IT standards and clinical nomenclature is nearing resolution. Over the past few years many voluntary and professional institutions have done remarkable work to delineate IT and clinical standards. For instance, we have Health Level-7 (HL-7) protocols for messaging; Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) for digital images (x-rays) and many other standards have been accepted and vetted. In clinical semantics, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) is gaining popularity as the standard nomenclature, which complements the preexisting nomenclature: International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and Current Procedure Terminology (CPT codes). These common standards will go a long way to solve the problem of interoperability.

In the past, clinical user interfaces were friendly only to the friends of the programmer. In recent times, the EHR has considerably improved, but the medical world is still waiting for the ideal interface — one which would save time compared to a paper chart, make data entry and retrieval faster, connect with ancillary services, provide alerts and prompts, enhance the business processes and provide frequent updates about advances in the medical sciences. In short, it should be convincingly more efficient than the paper chart to ensure easier acceptance by the clinical workers. We are getting there, but slowly and adequate regulations should accelerate the pace.

The regulations have to address three issues about the data of patients:

• Ownership of data and its authenticated flow to users.
• Secure and need based access to slices of data.
• Security, privacy and confidentiality of data.

These policies have to be in place for transaction of data. At present, the patient owns her health information and it resides in the hospital or insurance company’s servers. These institutions have no incentive to share this data with other competing organizations and would rather keep the information to themselves for business advantage.

The US government envisioned in1994 that the communication between the health care entities and the federal government would be streamlined by electronic communication by 2014. A recent survey of the ambulatory medical care revealed that 25 % of doctors’ offices have either a simple or an advanced IT system. Another survey of the hospitals revealed that implementation of an upgraded EHR was a high priority to improve clinical outcomes and cut costs. A study done by the Health Care Information and Management Society (HIMSS) has found “About 62% of the healthcare organizations based in the U.S. have already made a decision about their (EHR) vendors and are starting an implementation or already have a part of an EHR in place, at least the foundation of it.” Recently adopted regulations in the US will ensure that health IT systems become more prevalent in next ten years.

Many developed countries, with mature health care systems, are in some stage of implementing interoperable health information grids. Some counties like Sweden and Finland are ahead and others like UK and Australia are in the process. European Union is planning to connect all the members on a health grid.

Installation of health IT system has proven to be expensive and slow in almost all countries. Starting in 1998, the National Health Service (NHS) in UK began to implement an electronic patient record in all NHS institutions. The target date was 2005 but by early 2007 the venture was still incomplete and had cost £12.4 billions. Now, the revised completion date is 2008.

In Canada, a not-for profit organization, “Canada Health Infoways”, is leading the implementation of an interoperable health information system, with the participation of federal and provincial health departments. The federal government has invested 1.2 billion Canadian dollars and they aim to have EHR systems operational for 50% of the population by 2009.

For the developing nations, lack of any legacy IT systems may be a blessing; they can leap frog to the latest standards and technology without the burden of dismantling the old. Connectivity and costs will, however, remain big challenges.

India has recently started with a vision of connecting the entire country in one interoperable health IT grid to manage health care and medical knowledge. The vision is to capture most health care transactions, when the system is operational in a few years. The proposed grid will be a hub-and-spoke network with interconnected data repositories stationed through out the country. The project is still in the preliminary stages and probably will gather steam in coming years. Other Asian countries, including China, are also in various stages of developing health IT networks.

On the technology side, many new applications will enhance the capabilities of an EHR system. Mobile platforms like the PDAs and cell phones will access clinical data; personal devices like pacemakers and heart monitors will communicate with the EHR; administrative paper work will be streamlined. If and when individual genomic structure becomes part of the EHR, one would be able to predict disease trends and possible preventive measures for individuals and families. Genetic data would guide the choice of therapy; predict the outcome and even help in new drug development research.

Future of health IT systems is exciting. Once we have strong regulations, interoperability of data and efficient user interface, the EHR becomes scalable. Health care institutions, communities, and even whole country can transact health care information and related business on a web based health grid. It is feasible that in next 30 years we could have a worldwide interoperable health IT network.

Imagine this future scenario: Ms Sally, a 49 years old executive from London has traveled to New York for an urgent meeting. She experiences chest discomfort and is rushed to the emergency room. The doctor suspects a heart attack and advises emergency cardiac catheterization. She declares that a coronary angiogram had been done recently in London for similar symptoms and she believed “it was not that bad.” She had received no treatment as she was in a rush to travel.

It is nighttime in London and her personal doctor is not available. She gives the New York doctor access to her EHR on the Internet, who downloads the angiogram. It is perfectly normal.

The ER doctor looks for another reason for her chest pain and orders a CT scan of the chest, which reveals a large life threatening blood clot in the lung. She receives urgent treatment to dissolve the clot.

Immediate access to the EHR helps avoid an error. It prevents an unnecessary procedure, and saves time and probably her life.

Edward B. Rackley

By today’s measures of geopolitical relevance, Uganda would seem an insignificant country. Its name may trigger a few neuron firings among those who’ve read Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, or seen its recent film adaptation starring Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin.

Ugandans who’ve seen the film are less than delighted. Amin’s son allegedly complained to reporters, “He [Whitaker] doesn’t even look like my father.” More clueful viewers writing in local newspapers claim the film relies on the tired reference of African dysfunction to tell and sell a story to an international audience. Much agreed—although I appreciated the film’s portrayal of complicity with evil as a creeping, dimly conscious evolution, capable of crippling the purest intentions.

At the crossroads of ‘species being’

In fact Uganda is at the center of three, if not more, grand experiments of genuine significance to species well-being. The first of these concerns the success of regional peacekeeping: “African solutions to African problems,” as South African President Thabo Mbeki once envisioned. If successful, Uganda’s recent troop deployment (1500 men) to protect the beleaguered national government in Somalia could rewrite how regional insecurity is locally managed, thereby diminishing the current dependency on international institutions (UN, aid agencies) for solutions.

The war on HIV/Aids is a second theatre of action with global import, currently playing out in Uganda. Here the weapons of choice are western science, massive publicity aimed at transmission prevention, and major international funding to provide low-cost anti-retroviral drugs to those in need. Numerous internationally-funded research efforts have joined up with Ugandan universities to collaborate on preventive and curative studies. The result is a boon for Ugandan academic institutions, and sets a precedent for curative research in many of the so-called neglected diseases plaguing the continent (malaria, kala azar, drug-resistant tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc.).

Doomsday predictions in the late 1980s of national decimation if HIV transmission were not arrested immediately have not transpired, thanks largely to Ugandan cooperation with international strategies and recommendations. Uganda’s success in controlling the AIDS epidemic strikes a powerful counterpoint to the South African experience, led by President Mbeki and his cabinet, a cabal of AIDS denialists (their approach is described in Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker article, “The Denialists”).

In South Africa today, a country of 34 million, a thousand persons are reportedly infected daily while 2000 die of preventable and treatable causes. ‘Preventable and treatable’, yes, provided you ignore the government diktat that HIV is a concoction of western pharmaceutical companies to continue the economic enslavement of poor nations to wealthy ones. (I’ve always applauded Mbeki’s reasoned Afrocentrism, but this particular delusion qualifies as criminal.)

The third trial with global repercussions—in which Uganda is more than a random test case but a veritable laboratory under 24-hour observation—concerns the success of recently developed instruments of international justice: the International Criminal Court and a separate set of UN Security Council resolutions protecting children in armed conflict. Whether or not these distinct legal initiatives can deliver their promise of justice and improved protection for victims is slowly unfolding.

Their outcome will have major implications for how the gulf of impunity is addressed in armed conflicts elsewhere—or whether it is addressed at all. Inconclusiveness or outright backfire may encourage conservative fulminations against the ICC, the United Nations, and the human rights regime in general. So-called ‘rogue states’ like Sudan or the US will continue to operate above international law, and rightfully so, because those instruments will have proven themselves pallid in tooth and claw.

I wrote about the ICC and its impact on the gruesome practices of the Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader, Joseph Kony, in an earlier 3QD piece. I wrote there that ICC indictments have triggered a return to all-out war, when in fact a curious stalemate is currently holding sway. LRA forces have for the most part respected a de facto ceasefire with Uganda by retreating to Sudanese and Congolese territory. Khartoum has supported the LRA in the past, and it has not signed the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, meaning the LRA are safe in Sudan. From their camps in southern Sudan and northeastern DRC they attack local villages and health centers for food and medical supplies while negotiations with the Ugandan government drag on.

Could it be that the threat of ICC prosecution prompted LRA withdrawal to territory outside ICC jurisdiction (Sudan), thus disabling it from terrorizing its target population in Uganda? Is the ICC ultimately responsible for the current cessation of hostilities? Kony will not say, nor is the evidence conclusive. Will the Ugandan government forego ICC indictments and the experiment with international justice, and instead promise amnesty to Kony and his men to bring them back to the negotiating table? Ugandans themselves want peace and security; their primary concern is that ICC prosecution will bring revenge upon them from Kony’s residual support base. The ICC may turn out to be just another flashy gadget in the general diplomatic toolbox, occasionally useful when dealing with screwball sadists like Kony. It is a carrot or stick, or both, depending on the context. I doubt this is what its conceivers envisioned, particularly if amnesty ends up trumping justice.

The ‘era of application’

As I happen to be in Uganda to help implement the Security Council resolutions mentioned above, I’ll comment on their impact so far.

Armed conflicts have a devastating effect on children. From direct observation we know that thousands of children are killed, others take part in combat, schools and health facilities are targeted for attack and essential humanitarian aid is denied to children. The increasingly documented phenomenon of child soldiers is but one facet of the many ways that children are manipulated and exploited by adults as cannon fodder, munitions mules, spies and scouts, camp minders, cooks and porters, and sex slaves.

Peter Singer’s book, Children at War, is one of the best accounts I have seen of how accepted conventions on wartime conduct have deteriorated to the point where children are abducted and re-programmed to kill and be killed, while their adult overlords watch from a safe distance. Absence of economic opportunities in many of today’s conflicts means militias and armed groups need no active recruitment or abduction, as youth are attracted by the only apparent exit from destitution and vulnerability wrought by the war raging around them. Yet the true extent of violations against children remains elusive without a mechanism to monitor and record violations in situ. Evidence-based advocacy is the primary aim of data collection on such violations—but what authority can make violating parties accountable for their crimes?

The United Nations system, to cite another observer of philanthropic foundations, is basically “a large body of money surrounded by people who want some.” Absorbing and allocating resources constitutes the bulk of its activities and is responsible for the overwhelming red tape that constrains it. For all its faults, and there are many, it is the sole such body to have embarked on the uncharted path of setting and enforcing standards of treatment towards children in situations of armed conflict around the world. No single state has proposed a solution—many including the US have rejected proposals, conventions and treaties drafted by the UN.

Over the last ten years, with much prodding and cajoling from NGO coalitions specializing in children’s rights, the Security Council has issued a series of resolutions to enhance the protection of children in situations of conflict. As part of this process, in 2005, the Secretary General issued a list of 54 armed groups in 11 different countries responsible for the systematic violation of the rights of children in conflict. The Ugandan national army was included on this list as were the LRA, whose sadism is legion, as well as government-sponsored paramilitary groups called ‘Local Defence Units’.

Much ‘setting of standards’ has gone on; the point now is to enforce them. The most recent UNSC resolution (#1612), now almost two years old, aims to apply the prohibitions and injunctions of the previous resolutions. While these have not halted the practices they decry, they have influenced and improved much of the relief programming aimed at these target groups. Including children in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programs for former combatants is one such shift in policy (before they were simply abandoned with no psycho-social, educational or material assistance).

Here in Uganda we are setting up a system to document and monitor the following violations:

• Killing or maiming of children;
• Recruiting or using child soldiers;
• Attacks against schools or hospitals;
• Rape or other grave sexual violence against children;
• Abduction of children;
• Denial of humanitarian access for children.

A multilateral structure involving UN agencies, NGOs and government human rights bodies has developed a monitoring and reporting process, and has trained over 100 field monitors to document these violations. We cannot report on LRA activities because they are not active here, for the time being, although the war may resume at any time. For now most of the violations are perpetrated by the government army, whose use of child soldiers continues. Soldiers deployed to protect the hundreds of remote camps for displaced persons commit rape and trade sex for food with destitute girls in the camps.

Use the rod and spare the child

Unlike any other African conflict where I have worked, the Ugandan government actually cares about its international reputation, and wants to get off the Security Council’s list of offending countries. This attitude opens doors where, in places like Sudan or Myanmar, there are but walls and denial. For instance, teams here are close to receiving authorization to conduct unannounced visits to army barracks, to observe recruitment processes, and to enter their ‘Child Protection Units’ where they interrogate and sometimes torture children they’ve captured from the LRA. Abducted and forced to serve as child soldiers for the LRA, these former prisoner-soldiers are now ordered to march for days deep into southern Sudan to help the Ugandan army locate LRA rear bases.

Ultimately, however, the fact that Uganda deploys peacekeepers to Somalia but allows the LRA insurgency to fester leaves many here convinced that their government cares more about international opinion than the fate of its own citizens.

The 1612 monitoring system and the accountability of offending armies it envisions is in many ways an act of faith. No Security Council sanctions have issued from previous UN resolutions against child soldiering or sexual violence against children—why should they now? Given the twenty-year marathon of this conflict, these UNSC resolutions come in some ways as an offensive joke. How could anyone possibly have taken so long to notice, to act?

Uganda is a place with over 26 rebel groups in various states of insurgency; some are dormant, some are surely propagandistic fictions of the government, others are quite active. The country also has an enormous law and order problem across its northern borders, irrespective of LRA activity over the years. In one northern province, Karamoja, the national army has been using helicopter gunships to decimate rural settlements suspected of cattle rustling and arms trading. ‘Suspicious activity’ is the army’s excuse; there is no political insurgency afoot. Armed banditry for economic gain (mostly cattle rustling) is what motivates the bandits, yet women and children are often gunned down in the army’s efforts to impose order.

As a result, Karamoja sees a far greater number of egregious violations against women and children than LRA-affected areas, which are now relatively quiet. Yet no 1612 monitoring and reporting is authorized in Karamoja because widespread violent crime is not accorded the same priority as ‘armed conflict’. We are looking at solutions but for the time being the credibility of UN efforts to bring to book the world’s “worst offenders” is in question.

by Ram Manikkalingam

Borat was disappointing – long, tedious, and repetitive. Maybe I had already seen too many clips on TV. So there was nothing new, except a faux plot to link together a series of previous episodes. There were some scenes that made me laugh, some scenes that made me gag, and some scenes that made me cringe. What is remarkable is not how bad the movie is, but how popular it became. Other bad movies have also become box office hits. But they have not been as badly filmed, as repetitive, or as crass as this. There is no doubt that Borat was a “phenomenon”.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the film, and everything to do with its politics. Borat manages to parody Muslims and “expose” Americans at the same time. He caters to both those who are anti-Islamic and anti-American. He allows them the guilty pleasure of indulging in that which is forbidden – portraying Muslims as ignorant, sexist, and anti-semitic – by portraying middle-class White Americans as ignorant, sexist, and anti-semitic. This is a potent combination, capable of drawing together a large audience in the US and Western Europe, resentful of Muslims in their midst and the global pre-ponderance of American power.

Borat takes on ordinary Americans, some who are bigoted, but most of who are not. Unlike Ali G, who takes on the powerful ones – from Newt Gingrich to Noam Chomsky – irrespective of their politics. Borat allows those who are anti-Muslim and anti-American to interpret him in ways that enable them to entertain, and thus indulge, themselves. He even permits, those who are simply anti-American to excuse his anti-Islamic parodies, as just that, and enjoy themselves. And sometimes he even permits those who are simply anti-Muslim to enjoy themselves – by hinting that this is where a multiculturalism gone awry will take the world.

About 15 years ago, I traveled through parts of China for a few weeks with my white middle-class midwestern friend from Ohio, Mark. Neither Mark, nor I spoke a word of Chinese. But we managed to get around China, from Guangzhou (on the border with Hongkong, to Xinjiang, on the border with, yes, Kazakhstan, through Xian and Chengdu. I am still astounded at the extent to which we were able to make ourselves intelligible – so as to buy food, and train tickets, find hotels and restaurants, visit museums and historic sites, and generally get around – without knowing a single word in a common language with our interlocutors. What made this possible?

The Chinese we interacted with gave us the benefit of the doubt. When we used Chinese words and got the pronunciation invariably wrong – they did not take the wrong word we had used at face value and proceed on the basis of what would have been clearly irrational statements. Rather they tried to organise their thoughts in ways that made what we said intelligible to them. Then they proceeded to help us with what we wanted. Mistakes were made, but they were always explicable in the context. And our vulnerability to locals in a foreign land was never exploited – except the one tout who took us for a ride and cost us a fortune in a restaurant. But even that was explicable in the end, and of course quite rational.

The way we get along in strange places is by depending on the interpretive charity of strangers. We expect that they will make amends for our mistakes – linguistic and/or cultural – and assist us in interpreting a different world. What is remarkable is how well this works, seldom leading to complete failure to comprehend each other in the midst of linguistic and cultural difference. It works because when we come across people with whom we struggle to communicate, they also struggle back. And the mutual struggle involves simultaneously holding two contradictory ideas about the person we are communicating with. She is just like us and she is not like us.

She is just like us, because the way she understands a person or a situation or an event or an act, is similar to the way we would. And her thoughts cohere together much like mine would, making it possible for her to make her world intelligible to me. And she is not like me, because she may have a belief or a view or a thought, that I would find weird, awkward, queer, or simply wrong. But this can be explained in ways that I understand, precisely because she is just like me, bringing her closer to me, even if neither (she nor I) revise our views leading us to agree about this (weird, awkward, queer or wrong) belief. And so we go around the world taking for granted this human facility to engage with strangers and depend on their communicative charity to successfully navigate very complex terrains of culture and society without a second thought.

Success in communicating depends on the willingness to suspend judgment during those crucial initial moments when you are not certain that you understand exactly what the other person is saying. And this is exactly what Borat exploits to pull his stunt – the human propensity to communicate in ways that make us seek to understand each other better, even if we may not ultimately agree. He does this by exaggerating exactly the kind of cultural difference – accent, gesture, walk and attitude – that would make any interlocutor assume a high likelihood of miscommunication, thus ensuring that they would give him even more latitude in making the most outrageous comments about women, Jews, Muslims and others, who may come to mind.

To me what was remarkable about the movie, were the large number of instances where people either watched in bemused or stony silence (a large fraction of the audience at the Rodeo and even at the country and western bar), or clear, if polite, discomfiture – like the guests in the wealthy Southern home. The instances where people actually went along uncritically – the homophobe in the Rodeo, the frat boys in the trailer, or the audience in the western bar – were relatively few in retrospect. After hundreds of hours of footage, the instances where Americans were sufficiently abusive towards others were reduced to such a short time – and even these cases were not unambiguous.

Borat’s conceit is that it is only ignorant, islamophobic, not to mention sexist and racist, Americans who would behave in this way upon meeting a stranger. But, this way of behaving is not just American, it is human. And it is humanly necessary, particularly if we have to ensure that we are not failing to communicate with someone who appears at first blush to be so very different from us. And it usually works because fortunately there are so few Borats in this world we inhabit together.

Before reading another line, watch the video, especially if you think you’d rather not.

One is hungry for a few facts now.

That was the French street theatre company Royal de Luxe in London last May.  The show was The Sultan’s Elephant, created in honor of the Jules Verne centenary in 2005, and performed that year in Nantes.  Founded in 1979 by Jean-Luc Courcoult, Royal de Luxe has since then made theatre in public spaces in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.  The London engagement, years in the planning by the British production company Artichoke, was the debut of the Little Girl Giant, as she has come to be called, in the English-speaking world.  You could probably just make out the Elephant – at least its trunk — hosing her down.  At around 20 and 40 feet high, respectively, both were designed by a longtime Royal de Luxe collaborator, Francois Delaroziere .  The video, shot by Mike Connolly of Electric Pig, is by far the best document of the event on the Web, and the place to start if you cannot in person see Royal de Luxe.  Les Balayeurs du Desert, a French rock band that has worked with the company since the 1980’s, provided the music.  The song is “Decollage” — their riff on “It Amazes Me” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the vocal sample by a digitally remixed Blossom Dearie.

Those are the bits I would have found it calming to latch onto when I first saw the video last summer.  I needed to be sure it wasn’t Photoshopped, as you do when you see a thing on the monitor that can’t be real.  Attaching a name to the consciousness in control of the event became paramount, no less than had it been a towering crime I’d witnessed.  But none of this helped, ultimately, for I still can’t take it in.  And that, I came to understand, is precisely the point.

Royal de Luxe is both renowned and secretive.  Based in Nantes, it has no Web site, doesn’t go in for ordinary PR, and if for artistic reasons the whole company needs to move to Cameroon or to China for many months at a time, then it does so, appearing there as in the West with permission but without fanfare. Gathering outdoors to make the small marionettes that have been their acting partners since long before the Giants, the actors casually attract local interest, which can at first be skeptical.  By the time of leave-taking, however, the village is ensorcelled, the months-long interlude most often likened by everyone to dream.   

Except in the United States, the fame of Royal de Luxe now outpaces its stealth.  So precautions are taken that, despite high anticipation of an appearance, an audience remains in a condition to be startled by it. Jean-Luc Courcoult is far too much the man of the theatre ever to lose the advantage of surprise.

When Royal de Luxe next appears, at the Reykjavik Arts Festival later this spring, no one there but the functionaries who must know them shall have all the details in advance.  The venue is simply the streets and open spaces of the city — by the lake, by the harbor and in the city center.  Admission is not only free, but accidental, since the show may begin anywhere, even in two places at once, and will overtake its audience bit by bit, for they shall not have known where to assemble and wait for it.  Once it begins, it will keep moving, and people will follow it or even try to run a little ahead of it en route to the next corner it seems bound for, where others shall have started to hear things and look up.  No member of that audience, not even the most avid, will see the show in its entirety – like the London event, it will be structured to make that impossible.  Courcoult has said only that a special story for Icelanders will be enacted, by Little Girl Giant and other familiar figures, that, on the morning of May 10, “something unexpected will happen in Rekjavik.” 

Thus will begin the latest chapter in a Royal de Luxe narrative that spans three continents and fifteen years, The Saga of The Giants.

The Giant Who Fell From the Sky

The inaugural show, The Giant Who Fell From The Sky, was conceived for the people of Le Havre in 1993.  Lying supine, his ribcage rising and falling as he exhaled white dust for his own cloudy atmosphere, the 38-foot carved wood sleeping Giant was laced Gulliver-style to the street.  Baffled onlookers hesitantly prodded him, and he opened basketball-sized eyes in which blood vessels showed, taking on the look of terrible suffering nobly borne that would never leave him. To walk the city, he was hauled up into a scaffolding six stories high; red-liveried actors hanging onto ropes leapt from it to the ground, landing slowly, counter-weighting and lifting his sandaled feet.  He swung his arms, he turned his head this way and that, he parted his lips and gazed down, sweeping the crowd with his eyes as he marched, looking as if he did not quite believe what he saw or the fix he was in, a haggard incredulity being one of his signature expressions. And the faces of the townspeople, from toddlers to the very old, lining the streets six or eight deep and leaning out of windows, were solemn and rapt.

Trucks figured in this — big ones — for here was serious tonnage.  Apart from drivers, more than thirty liveried actors, in choreographed motion all over the scaffolding, were needed to keep the Giant groomed and on the move.  One man turned a wheel the size of a helm to open and close his mouth, another hovered near his shoulder to brush dusty traces of respiration from his lips with a broom. It is one of the paradoxes of the Giants that, seeing an unbelievable thing, and seeing plainly the levers and ropes and pulleys and humans required to make it work – for none of this is ever concealed in a Royal de Luxe performance — you believe in it utterly.

The stories of the Giant, written by Courcoult, are always very simple – just a few lines long, with deep cultural resonances.  To cite a feature that counts heavily with him, you could tell them to a child.  Each is enacted over several days, nights included, it being of the utmost importance that the Giant abide with the town.  During that entire time, the Giant is out in the open, his hair and face getting wet in the rain, sleeping by night in a chair the size of a cantilever bridge, breathing always — and dreaming.

On that first visit to Le Havre, the story goes, the Giant was frightening to the people of the town only when he dreamt; the morning after, cars were found impaled on trees, or pinned to the asphalt with a 10-foot fork, the work of his dreams. And so, on the second night a wall of light – motley thousands of battery-operated headlights mounted on a twenty by thirty foot frame — was erected to prevent his losing consciousness.  Head dropping to his chest again and again in the painterly golden light, the Giant spent a wakeful night.  A blonde singer, Peggy, wearing a long blue opera cape with a stiff collar, climbed out of a white limo and was lifted thirty feet onto the scaffolding to sing to him, the better to divert him from dreaming.  Un bel di vedremo, sang Peggy, a few yards from his face, the anguished and sleepy longing she saw there finally making her turn away.  On the morning of the third day, a hole had been torn in the wall of light, the immense scaffolding was torqued and knocked aside, flattening still more cars, and the Giant was gone.

He returned to Le Havre on two occasions between 1993 and 1998. In that time, he would lose a leg – causing middle-aged Frenchmen ordinarily nothing if not buttoned down to weep openly – acquire a son, a 20-foot black giant, on a trip to Africa, regain the leg, and, in 2000, send a crate of giraffes to Le Havre.  The giraffes, a tender, tree branch-tearing mother towering delicately over the city, and her calf, all legs, were the crane-operated forerunners of the 46-ton elephant seen by more than one million people in London in 2006.

The Giant’s last appearance anywhere was in August, 2006, in the South of France.  Looking as relaxed as his watchful countenance allows, he sat barefoot on a lounge chair anchored to the river bed by the Pont du Gard. Just as it is understood that the Little Black Giant is his son, Little Girl Giant, last seen in Chile in January, when she chased down and caged a rhinoceros, is his daughter.  It is rumored she will face her father in Reykjavik in the spring, and that the meeting might not be friendly.

Telling a Story to an Entire Town
                               
In a conversation with Odile Quirot, Courcoult tells how the idea of the Giants occurred to him.

“For years, I wondered how one could tell a story to an entire town.  On a Plane to Rio, the idea of using out-size marionettes came to me… People have believed in giants since the year dot.  Every culture on earth has stories about them.  I find the giant more powerful than God or religion – because it is more make-believe yet more human.”

Interviewed for Les Cahiers du Channel, Courcoult discusses with Jean-Christophe Planche how The Saga of The Giants works its effects on the grown men who weep, the women of a certain age who lose their composure like maenads.

“Over three or four days I try to tell a whole town something intense which will be talked about everywhere, be it in the bakery or the bar, on the pavement or in the office… I have seen adults crying as the giant leaves.  They have obviously lived other things, sometimes difficult, and yet this makes them cry.  I don’t believe they are crying because [the Giant] is leaving but because of the loss of their imagination.  Over several days, they have dreamt as adults and now it’s finished.  Most adults have difficulty dreaming.”

Courcoult has not gone on record – that I could discover – with more theory-bound observations about his method than these.  While he is almost always described as a visionary, even by people who mean no very good thing by that term, he is entirely direct in conversation. As an artist, he just wants to knock you down, and to see the look on your face when that happens. “How the public reacts is as important as the form of the show,” he says of the highly participatory experiences he creates for audiences.  Music plays a big role in it.  “I am constantly on the lookout for sounds from my era.  Music…directly assails the emotions and feelings.  I take great care with it.  It must not crush feelings by crudely emphasizing the action taking place.”

The closest Royal de Luxe has ever come to an indoor performance is the Roman arena at Nimes.  One reason for this is that Courcoult is a self-described claustrophobe. But he likes to blow things up and smash them to pieces, too.  Open air allows for “poetic risk,” he says, and the light is right: “you can create explosions, hellfire.” A performance in an outdoor public space is by definition a free event open to all comers, and this is key. “By putting on the show in the public arena and free of charge I can reach people as they are, whereas in traditional theatres you only meet those who have dared to cross the threshold…I try to move people, and this ambition will not be restricted by [the audience’s] financial means or their culture.”

Genius Envy
          
It was not wasted on the British that The Sultan’s Elephant came from France, and was many times more prodigious than any homegrown thing.

Julian Crouch, a maker of large site-specific images and co-artistic director of the company Improbable, writes of seeing the Elephant move for the first time. “The thing was real.  It was alive and it was enormous and it was really there.  And in the midst of my pure admiration I could feel something crumble inside me.”  What crumbled, it turned out, was his notion of how unfeasible it was trying to get a large image to do many things at once instead of just one thing – a idea foundational to his twenty years of experience designing and making such. 

With frankness, Crouch tells how it felt to be a maker of theatre watching Little Girl Giant hoisted from the time capsule that had smashed down onto the tarmac in Central London. “When they lifted [her] out of the rocket, the crowd just gasped.  Of course I work in ‘the business’ so I tried to stifle my own gasp, but by the time her flying-hat was off and she blinked and shook out her hair, I was absolutely and completely lost.  She was beautiful.  But really beautiful.  In a deep way… And [there was] a little voice in my head that said, ‘you could never, ever have made this.’ ”

Immediately following the event, LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) sponsored a day of discussion among British theatre makers, educators and arts administrators. Reading the papers given on this occasion, one appreciates both the tone of raddled admiration and the newly hatched catch-up strategies.  A top administrator spoke passionately about “the next Elephant” – presumably an indigenous one – being inevitable.  Some opined that the show had been “about money” or “about power,” as if the lack of those timeless benisons was all that prevented work of similar quality occurring routinely. Julian Crouch attended the conference, as did Helen Marriage of Artichoke, the company that produced The Sultan’s Elephant. That night, Crouch sent an email to Marriage, voicing these sentiments: ”I have no desire to see Britain grow a Royal de Luxe, and will be very irritated if we try.  It was such an honour to see that work, and it is insulting to the company and their long history to suggest that it is in any way replicable.”

This is not to say a hard look at the conditions friendly to Royal de Luxe could never be instructive to the British or to any other people pondering the direction of public art in their lands. 

Conceding that the success of Royal de Luxe is “due to the power of their work, its popularity with the public and their uncompromising attitude in presenting it,” Edward Taylor, a joint artistic director of the Whalley Range Allstars, a British outdoor theatre troop founded in 1982, writes about other factors that provided a crucial nudge. “The development of street theatre in France was helped no end by the levels of financial support in a system which demonstrates what is possible in the arts if you put serious thought into how to sustain the people who make it happen.”

Taylor argues that not only national, regional and local funding are necessary – and did, in the case of Royal de Luxe, unstintingly kick in – but also the setting up of various “regional creation centres (large workshops where companies can live and create work without unnecessary interruption).” And more: that the French national benefit scheme paying performing artists a wage when they’re not working is what enables large-scale groups to stay together during a non-performing period, taking the rehearsal time they need.  It’s all to do, Taylor says, with whether performing artists are regarded as an important asset in a nation’s economic life. In any case, this is exactly the level of support that has led to “larger and more expensive French shows being created over the years.”  Note, Taylor does not insist, superior ones. “Of course, big is not necessarily better,” he concludes, “but when a work of this scale [The Sultan’s Elephant] can convey such strong emotions to large audiences, it has an irresistible power.”

For A Few Good Pieces

Artists beset with frequent interruptions of their work, who live without medical care in poor housing and exhaust themselves with two or three dead-end jobs at a time to keep going until they are next paid to perform, may look on the French system as a Utopia greatly to be desired.  Yet the same model is repugnant to anyone suspecting that money would only be wasted on cheap red wine, exorbitant rehearsals, and plain old hanging out.  Everyone can agree, however, that The Saga of The Giants is no accident, and is anything but the product of social Darwinism in the arts.

The big question, then, is how, in making a policy decision for such as Royal de Luxe potentially to develop and flourish, can anyone be sure the result will not come artistically closer to synchronized swimming than to Royal de Luxe? To the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade than to The Sultan’s Elephant?  One answer is found in mulling over yet another question – why we would expect public funds spent incubating the arts to produce more precise results than like amounts spent on other necessarily speculative programs in the public interest.

Read more »

One thing is clear: Los Angeles is much more interesting than New York, visually.  This is because it conceals more.  In New York the streets are the city, each facade only hiding an array of more-or-less identical, apartmental shoeboxes of space; the triangular Flatiron building on Twenty-Third Street counts as a major departure from the typical.  In L.A., there is a much greater variety of places: not only rectangular blocks, but plazas, gardens, diagonal intersections, parking lots, beachfront estates, strip malls, green lawns, absurdist signage, hills, winding drives, and houses of every conceivable style and shape.  As well, so many private domains can only be glimpsed from the street: not only the movie studios, with their shopping-mall opulence behind abode walls, but even the average U-shaped apartment complexes, which always  include an interior, vine-shaded courtyard only accessible to residents. 

Isn’t it fatuous, you’re asking, to compare the two cities as though generalizations about each can be made from a few limited observations?  Of course.  Let’s get started.  In Los Angeles, the infinity of kinds of spaces constantly makes for sudden, unexpected vistas.  David Lynch has expressed this aspect of the city much more eloquently than I can, with the dark, enigmatic corner in Bill Pullman’s house in Lost Highway that seems to open into a void, or the frightening space around the back of the diner in Mulholland Drive.  The irregularity of L.A. causes this exhilarating anxiety: you literally don’t know what’s around the corner, or what’s inside that gate.  In New York, there’s no imaginative mystery at all to the physical world: everyone lives in an apartment, only cohabiting couples have a spare room, and ten million guidebooks chronicle every square mile of ground-level space.  Hence, in New York, “secret” bars and restaurants (from Lansky Lounge to Milk and Honey to Freeman’s) proliferate, while in L.A. figuring out what is where is difficult enough without intentional concealment. 

Much of the unknowability of Los Angeles starts with its being so spread out.  As a friend philosophically observed, the entire difference between the two cities stems from one being horizontal and the other vertical.  This kind of irrefutable contrast is what makes comparing the U.S.’s two largest cities irresistible.  Horizontal and vertical, slow and fast, early and late, wide and deep–we might as well go whole hog and make a structuralist comparison a la Saussure and Jakobson: Los Angeles is a metonym, where meanings are arranged next to each other, New York is a metaphor, where meanings are stacked and substituted for each other.  Los Angeles is synchronic, about the arrangement of objects in space in the present, New York is diachronic, about the way the same small space changes over time.  Etc.

Maybe a simpler (and simple is better, and very L.A.) way to express this is to compare the cities’  typography.  In L.A., uninhibited by the past, the vogue is for a bold, beautiful, sans serif typeface.  Check out this restaurant‘s menus (which is excellent, by the way) or the aforementioned director’s coffee-selling website for examples.  These typefaces bespeak a commitment to modernism, a desire to invent anew, a lack of anxiety about leaving behind what’s outmoded and traditional.  What could be more opposite than the Jurassic, faux-medieval typeface of the New York Times?  New York scenesters often cultivate an anachronistic aesthetic, compleat (sic) with beard and suspenders – their blogs always use serif fonts.  In L.A., with its lack of comparable history, new vocabularies displace the old, new forms of yoga and therapy console its citizens, new big-box retailers brashly replace yesterday’s disposable strip malls, the casual is preferred to the formal.  New is good, new works.

In keeping with this attitude, a widespread addiction to youth seems is evident everywhere in the culture.  Living with your parents is no mark of shame; it’s a sensible, workable arrangement until you hit it big.  (Can you imagine telling someone you lived with your parents in New York?)  Adulthood is to be resisted, the self-absorbed dream of youth (or at least its cosmetic facsimile) pursued.  When you’re there, it’s somehow hard to remember that there are other people, even other social classes.  As my sister puts it, you’re stoned by the weather.  And yet, at the same time, there is a much greater diversity of people to be seen on the streets of Los Angeles.  Perhaps because the necessities of life (housing, food) are more cheaply obtained, the range of wealth and ethnicity and age of people you see in L.A. puts New York to shame.  Its visual economy may value the cultivation of the body over that of the mind, but in its way it is a much less pretentious, more frank, and yes, more gritty city than the fauxhemian paradise that modern New York has become.  It’s not that it disavows its traditional culture, however; it’s that it has no settled culture, at least of any longevity.

Beautiful, casual, young, stoned by the sun: am I just reciting a litany of cliches about Los Angeles?  What next, an assertion of how bad the traffic is?  Well, sometimes a city performs as advertised.  The impossibly tall, slender palm trees of Santa Monica; the bookstores devoted to auras and chakras; the tennis-playing lotharios drinking mineral water at bars with skateboarders and stylists; bronzed limbs and smoggy sunsets; maitre’d’s who greet you with “What’s up?”; the presence of Richard Gere; and, yup, infuriating traffic jams that break out at random; these all really exist, to the wonder of a New York-based correspondent.  At the Getty Center, above their surreal and gorgeous landscape garden, there is a certain outdoor walkway overlooking the city.  As you approach its end, there is a low stone wall beyond which you can see nothing but a nebulous, blue haze.  It goes on forever, it’s impossibly beautiful, and it gives you vertigo.

The rest of Dispatches.

I’ve not been reading much about art lately, as I often find reading/analyzing and doing fairly incompatible acts when attempted simultaneously, but I have just read an old essay that turned out to be unexpectedly timely. Published in German in 1766, and first translated into English in 1853, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie (Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) is a delightful rumination on the limits of two sister arts. He ultimately ends up praising these limits, which is why I find the work so timely, now that we’re in an age that seems to let any medium try to become any other. A few months ago I’d first tried to get through a remarkably inelegant, almost incomprehensible English translation of it that appeared in 1898, and gave up—it was atrociously faithful to the German, to the point of becoming an absurdist text in English, curious but insufferable. The McCormick translation published in 1962, on the other hand, is a gem. In the spirit of Herr Lessing I’ll digress for a brief moment only to note that, no, Gotthold isn’t any direct relation of our contemporary writer Doris; for several years—after reading her Golden Notebook and long before reading anything of his—I’d thought (or wanted to think) that was true. In terms of lucidity and sharp critical thought I’d claim that they are related, but that’s the extent of it. Those who feel deceived by my title are welcome to quit here.

But back to the essay: his exploration of the respective limits of painting and poetry is, to a certain degree, a response to the Horatian simile ut pictura poesis (as painting, so poetry) and a potential misinterpretation of it. While Lessing’s work as a translator is clear in his analysis of language, his later point that a work’s poetry may well lie in concision is exposed by this first reaction to the (likely unintended) assertion that poetry should be as painting is.
    Opening with a comparison of how poetry and painting affect amateur, philosopher, and critic, he seeks to establish a balance between the two types of art. The amateur equates the two—both proffer absent things as present and appearance as reality, and both create a pleasant illusion. The philosopher looks instead at the nature of the produced pleasure, and names the source as beauty, with its subsequent rules applicable not only to artistic form, but also to thought and action. Finally, the critic takes these general rules and examines their application in various art forms with differing and often complimentary roles.
    Mentioning in passing Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” it becomes clear that Lessing will continue his predecessor’s preference for classical antiquity. Noting that a still, deep soul can be expressed even in its moments of stirred passion, he claims that, contrary to modern German (or European) traits, the ancient Greeks held up the paradigm of artist and philosopher as one, and condoned the depiction of beautiful bodies to the exclusion of any other sort. The end purpose is the highest goal: of knowledge, it’s truth; of art, it’s pleasure. The reciprocal nature of what we might term “artistic culture” is outlined here: good (beautiful) men produce good (beautiful) work, and vice versa. Beauty is the supreme law of both visual and poetic arts. The expression of passions, and degrees thereof, is circumscribed by certain limitations; the depiction of unpleasant or upsetting passions should be limited, or at least portrayed with some beauty. In the Laocoön, the pain was too great to be shown with beauty, so it was tempered, hence the discomfort inspired by the pain is transformed, through beauty, into pity. Beauty is transformative.

Lessing’s observation that his times have expanded (or even abolished) the classical limits placed on art, and beauty is but a small part of art’s newer priority of depicting nature in all its sorts, carries echoes of Caravaggio et al. and the scandalous idea of working directly from nature, which was so highly criticized at the time. Art’s aim at truth and expression places beauty below these primary goals, and they in turn transform even the ugliest bits of nature into what Lessing Romantically terms “artistic beauty.” Despite this, artists must nevertheless restrain their depictions, and never show an action at climax. Here he addresses the key difference between painting and poetry, or visual versus verbal arts. Painting carries with it material limitations and the ability to show only a single moment of time from a single vantage point (cubism, anyone? Might Braque have been egged on by this essay?). Additionally, the most “fruitful” or effective point of view is the one that is well thought out for long-term contemplation and leaves the imagination free. Needing to choose one moment of an ongoing action, that action’s culmination is generally the least suitable, weakest moment from which to imply the whole in painting or sculpture, as it limits the imagination by showing the most extreme point, forcing the mind and eye to focus on the lesser aspects. Permanence comes into play here—the chosen single moment depicted, although it should hint at the rest of the action, mustn’t have anything fleeting about it. Returning to impassioned art, Lessing cites the late Byzantine painter Timomachus, whose work is known through the writings of Pliny the Elder, as an artist paramount for his ability to combine two major things in his work: the precise moment that most fires the viewer’s imagination, as opposed to exposing all to the viewer’s eye, and a visual approach to the passing moment that keeps its pleasantness even when captured forever, perpetuated as a frozen object in art. Lessing discusses Timomachus’s superiority over another, unknown painter; the former depicted the murderous Medea before she commits infanticide, whereas the latter shows her in the act; what might he have had to say about Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes?

Lessing goes on to consider whether or not both painters and poets enjoyed real freedom in their work, or if it was constrained by external dictates like religion (that word freedom does warrant a digression about autonomy and heteronomy, which I don’t dare go into here). Whereas pleasure is the ultimate goal of the work of art, religious demands and superstitions often confined the artist. Lessing opts for unfettered art as the true art above those done for religious aims, which focus more on meaning than on the pure depiction of beauty. And conceptual art? Though perhaps a loss for us, yet luckily for him, he wasn’t around to have witnessed the past sixty-odd years. His mention of artists who “create for art’s sake” is dubiously credited in a note from the translator as “possibly the first use of the expression ‘art for art’s sake.’” I’m not so sure about that, but it would be radical.
    Citing a statement by the British writer Joseph Spence marveling at poets’ brevity in describing the muses—goddesses to which, after all, poets owe their very art—Lessing in turn critiques Spence’s seeming obtuseness in not recognizing that the name and function of a character, expressed in poetry with words, serve the same purpose as the visual attributes, in lieu of words, with which a painter is forced to depict a character. Here Lessing is simply pointing out that it would be redundant, not to mention a betrayal of each art’s respective strengths, for poetry to describe a character as she would be visually depicted in painting. While I don’t quite follow his differentiation between the “allegorical beings” of painting and the “personified abstractions” of poetry, as it seems to me that these are the same things merely expressed in different media, his point is quite clear: poets can concisely use words, painters must rely on visual clues. Neither should worry about mimicking the other art, and both should focus on the strengths of their own means of communication. He returns to this later when discussing his surprise at seeing a painter use the poet’s device of cloaking something in a cloud when it is meant to be invisible to the other characters in a scene. Just as it would be silly for poets to adopt verbal descriptions of things as seen in painting, it’s equally absurd that a painter would adopt so literally the poet’s device of rendering things invisible with a shroud of fog or darkness, something quite effective when described in words, yet odd when converted into paint.
    These limitations—painting’s need to visually depict, poetry’s need to signify in words—determine the very nature of each art. Continuing to take examples from classical antiquity, he imagines how a painter could go about showing Minerva as stronger than several men combined. In Homer’s Iliad she is described as such, and the listener’s or reader’s mind conjures this up in the imagination, whereas a painter, forced to depict her visually, inevitably loses that advantage. In choosing to show her several times larger than a man and hence convey her strength through size, the “marvelous” disappears and is replaced by an improbable and ineffective rendition that seeks to engage the eye rather than the imagination. Here Lessing returns to the cloud comments I noted earlier, pointing to such a device as “not what the poet intended. It exceeds the limits of painting…” by becoming a hieroglyphic symbol, a visible key to make us read something as invisible, and therefore one step removed from the poet’s direct statement of something’s invisibility.
    He then returns once again to an earlier passage and reiterates that where poetry can describe an event unfolding in time, painting can only suggest an event’s course by choosing a specific moment and portraying actions through bodies and their implied movement. Painting is limited to the “single moment of an action,” and poetry is limited to “one single property of a body.” Each much choose the most effective moment and property, respectively, to communicate its story. The essential rule, clarified in Homer’s epics, is that “harmony in descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects” are necessities. Lessing elaborates this idea of harmony in adjectives later on, and for the moment moves on to the potential objections that could be raised against this rule. Poetry’s symbols may be successive, but they are also arbitrary, and as such should be able to depict bodies in space—like the shield of Achilles, for example. This is dismissed by agreeing that the “symbols of speech” are indeed arbitrary, but that this applies to speech in general, not poetry specifically. Essentially, it’s a question of style; yes, language doesn’t prevent a poet from describing everything, including space as a succession of bodies and actions, but the artistic demands of poetry (i.e., to make things strongly felt, as opposed to just understood or dryly conveyed) make it impossible. We need to be rapt at the “moment of illusion,” rather than distracted by how the poet created the illusion through words.

Lessing digresses for a moment to indulge the idea that even Homer succumbed to a dry laundry-list approach in his descriptions from time to time, casting doubt on his clear-cut line dividing painting and poetry, but he follows it with the clearest summary of his thesis—namely, that the poet reigns over the succession of time just as the painter reigns over the succession of space. Poetry is a verbal, temporal art, pain ting a visual, spatial art. For the two to encroach on one another’s realms is sheer bad taste. He uses the analogy of two friendly neighbors who have a mutual respect for each other’s terrain and maintain a tolerance for any eventual transgressions. Here Lessing is quite indulgent, pardoning artists like Raphael who combine two moments into one as evidenced in a curious fold of drapery, and sees this error as minor, committed in the name of capturing more prefect expression. I wonder what he’d have to say about Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel scenes, wherein Saint Peter is shown in quaint continuous narrative, foreshadowing Muybridge’s startlingly non-static stills….

Forebearance is Lessing’s main mood here: forgive the painter who occasionally shows more than one moment at once, pardon the poet who occasionally uses more words then the strict minimum. His earlier mention of harmony in the use of adjectives returns here, as he dispenses pardons specifically for those extra words that a poet can use according to the lucky structure of his language. Comparing Greek, German, and French, he points out that what Homer could get away with in describing the shield of Achilles, its forging and figurative details, cannot be excused in its less scintillating translations into German and French, which “give the meaning but destroy the picture.” This is made slightly more complex with the addition of the temporal aspect: Homer chooses to describe the shield not as it exists when complete, but rather as it’s being made. The details that are statically coexistent on the final armor, described as they’re being formed, become consecutive in time. Hence Homer perfectly adapts this description to the strength—time, not space—of poetry; a painter would have to approach it quite differently, emphasizing space rather than time.
    Lessing concludes with a reaffirmation of limits’ benefits for each art. By not allowing poetry to use infinite descriptions, poets are forced to focus on the effect their words have on listeners and readers. While Homer doesn’t go into vivid description of Helen’s beauty, he makes her beauty clear through the circumstances and surrounding events, with a jury of elders deeming it worthy of the wretched war they’d endured. By verbally conveying the results of beauty, poets “paint” the beauty itself. The confining lines Lessing has worked to establish between painting and poetry are blurred by his choice of words here, bringing us back to the present. How he pulled this off 241 years ago I can’t begin to imagine.

So, admit it: if you’ve read this far, or if you even read past the first paragraph, you’ve also read Lessing’s essay, along with Greenberg’s and everyone else’s additions, and likely know a lot more about all this than I do, which confirms my suspicion that I’m probably one of the last people to get round to this piece. My interest in current visual works blending theater and more static visual arts aside, anyone working in poetry, painting, sculpture, video, or anything else would likely enjoy having a look at Lessing’s little essay. I won’t pretend to have any new insights about it—what is most striking is that such a potentially old, musty musing about such old, musty arts and ideas can remain so pertinent today.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

Although I swiped my title from the media coverage of this story:

SCIENTISTS have created “miracle mice” that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when [fetal liver] cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate […]

there are a number of important caveats missing from the “miracle mouse!” version.  (Whenever you hear “miracle”, especially in science, think of David Hume).  Nonetheless, I do think this research marks the point at which regenerative human medicine becomes not just possible but entirely probable.  The article to read is The scarless heart and the MRL mouse by Ellen Heber-Katz (who runs the lab responsible for most of these discoveries) et al., and a good primer on regeneration, including non-mammalian models, is Andrea Rinaldi’s The Newt in Us.

The mouse strain in question is an inbred strain called MRL, and has been around since 1979. It was originally selected for large size and has a lymphocyte (white blood cell) proliferative disorder which gives rise to a variety of immune problems, including autoimmune symptoms. For instance, the MRL mouse is a common model for systemic lupus erythematosus.  The regenerative abilities of this mouse were discovered by researchers marking mice by punching small holes in their ears; within 30 days, the MRL mice healed the ear holes closed whereas other mice retain the holes for their lifetimes (mice live about two years).  The figure above is taken from the linked paper and shows healer and non-healer mice at the time of marking (the authors don’t say when, but typically you do this at about 3 weeks of age) and 30 days later.

Further investigation revealed that the MRL mice can regenerate almost all tissues except brain. This regenerative healing is fundamentally different from normal mammalian wound healing, and takes place without scar formation (which is of particular interest to cardiologists, since scars formed in response to heart injuries, including infarcts, are probably the primary cause of subsequent chronic heart disease and failure). Such healing is known in mammals, but only very early in development — interestingly, prior to the development of certain immune, especially inflammatory, responses.  Heber-Katz et al. report that T-cells from nonhealer mice do inhibit the ear wound closure response. It doesn’t seem, however, that their immune dysfunction is the only mediator of the regenerative response in MRL mice. For instance, matrix metalloproteases 2 and 9 and their specific inhibitors have been shown to be differentially activated in healer vs. non-healer mice (MMPs and MMP inhibitors are primary players in tissue remodelling, including wound healing). In fact, at least 20 genetic loci (chromosome regions) have been shown to be involved in the MRL regenerative phenotype. Importantly, many of these show no overlap with the loci mapped to the autoimmune disorder. (In very plain English: it is not likely that the primary cause of the regenerative capacity is also the cause of the immune disorder, although there may be some overlap; this means that we may be able to replicate the regenerative ability without causing immune dysfunction.)

It is also not clear exactly which cells are doing the healing. In bone marrow transplant/transfer experiments, healing in both heart and ear tissue followed the recipient not the donor phenotype, meaning that bone marrow derived stem cells are not likely to be driving the healing response (although some involvement of donor cells was observed). Moreover, in these model systems recipient hematopoiesis is destroyed by X-ray exposure, so the cells responsible for the healing must be resistant to such treatment. It’s also possible to reconstitute irradiated hematopoiesis using fetal liver cells, which contain a population of hematopoietic stem cells. Heber-Katz’ group has tried that too. The results were somewhat surprising: in the heart, healing followed the donor phenotype (i.e. the fetal liver cells transferred the regenerative capacity or lack thereof), whereas in ear injuries healing followed the recipient phenotype (as seen with bone marrow transplant/transfer). Once again, donor cells are seen in the healed heart but the mechanism of their involvment is not clear, nor is it clear why cardiac but not ear tissue could regenerate in this model.

Here’s the thing that jumped out at me: because non-healer liver cells transferred that phenotype, it appears that scarring inhibits regeneration in mammals. In the MRL animals, something is holding back the formation of scar tissue, and (therefore??) regeneration is taking place. In non-healer mice which received healer fetal liver cells, high degrees of chimerism (~60-80%) were seen, whereas non-healer into healer transfers showed an average of only 12% chimerism. Why was 12% non-healer enough to cause normal healing and scarring in that transfer, but 20-40% non-healer was not enough to stop MRL-type healing without scarring in the reciprocal model? The authors offer one clue: “We do not know which cell population is responsible for [scarring with only 12% chimerism] and it may be different than the population that allows for a regenerative response in the reciprocal chimeras.”

This much at least is already clear: the MRL mouse model will provide profound insights into mechanisms of wound healing (including opportunities for regenerative medicine) and the functions of hematopoietic stem cells.  Let me finish with a direct quote from Dr Heber-Katz, forecasting the future from late last year in New Scientist magazine:

I believe that the day is not far off when we will be able to prescribe drugs that cause severed spinal cords to heal, hearts to regenerate and lost limbs to regrow. People will come to expect that injured or diseased organs are meant to be repaired from within, in much the same way that we fix an appliance or automobile: by replacing the damaged part with a manufacturer-certified new part. Advances in heart regeneration are around the corner, digits will be regrown within five to ten years, and limb regeneration will occur a few years later. Central nervous system repair will occur first with the retina and optic nerve and later with the spinal cord. Within 50 years whole-body replacement will be routine.

….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Tony Blair says he is leaving before the summer is out, and the race for the Labour party leadership, and the assessment of the likely contenders in the next general election is already generating column inches. There’s every expectation of a bit of (all in good fun) back stabbing in the race for the Labour party leadership, but nobody seriously expects Gordon Brown to lose. What is much more fun is considering  how he will stand up to the Tories now that their new leader, David Cameron, is infusing the Tories with a fresh faced kind of posh boy sexiness (he took cocaine! he wears converse trainers! he listens to the Killers!). What is even more fun is considering how the female swing voters will choose between them.

It doesn’t surprise anyone that David Cameron is exciting more interest at this stage than the normally, intensely serious, and generally dour Mr Brown. None of the previous leaders of the Tories –  Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith, William Hague – has excited this much hope of finally facing down New Labour. What is annoying, however, is the way the public, and specifically, women, are viewed as reacting to the new Tory leader. Recent polls show that David Cameron owes his lead in the polls mostly to women’s votes. But is this because we women like his policies? Because they are sick of the present administration’s conduct in Iraq? Because they would like a change after ten years of New Labour? Hell, no, it’s because we all have the hots for him!

The press in the Tory camp base their campaign on the premise that the female vote is always susceptible to a strong chin, and a full head of hair (read Bill Clinton). There are constant references to Mr Cameron’s looks, charm, and sexiness. We are told how he cooks, he cleans, and that even some of his best friends are women. All in all we are persuaded that David Cameron is new age, young, and passably handsome ergo we must fancy him. As long as he gives us a cheeky grin, and a bit of laddish humour, we’ll be gagging to stuff our votes into his ballot box. Enough of a twinkle in his politician’s eye, and a photo of him on the school run, and he can have us over a soapbox anyday.

It’s a bit worrying that female voting attitudes are still viewed as this simplistic. If it isn’t the “he’s so handsome” gag, it’s the old “he changes nappies!” routine. David Cameron is supposed to be winning hearts with his caring dad demeanour, and his tie less suit and white shirt combos. He woos us with his talk of the “family”, “work/life balance”, and “saving the planet for our kids”. We see photos of his youthful figure riding a bike to work, while in reality, his Lexus trails behind him carrying his shoes, papers, and a statelier change of clothes. He affixes solar panels to his roof, and talks of sharing childcare responsibilities. And with every pronouncement he affects a posh, but loveable Hugh Grant inspired charm calculated to win over the ladies. Does everyone really think we are that easily swayed?

Granted, men aren’t so likely to be patronised on this front due to the disproportionate number of successful female politicians on the scene. And perhaps the fact that – in the main – older women aren’t considered half as desirable as shiny young political interns. Nobody would have wanted to jump into bed with Maggie Thatcher unless they had fantasies of the whip and leather variety, and most men would have had to close their eyes and think of Mother India before Indira Gandhi would have got a look in. But although every Frenchman worth his salt maybe panting over pictures of Segolene Royal in that blue swimsuit, you are unlikely to hear of the male vote swinging Royal’s way because she is sexy. You’re much more likely to hear that she puts off less capable, more wrinkled, female voters due to sheer female jealousy. As a sex, we’re still considered capricious voters – but the spin doctors approach us on the basis that our emotions are predictable, and our interests defined by childcare, family life, and, at a push, the climate. All grassroots, smaller scale, and domestic (with a small “d”) interests.

I won’t pretend that politicians can’t be sexy. I’ll expose my deviant taste in men by admitting that I think Gordon Brown oddly sexy, with that dishevelled lock of hair hanging over his face. And I even quite like the way he quotes treasury statistics with a sort of smug post-coital smile. But, unlike Cameron, his behaviour is not premeditated to set female hearts aflutter, in fact it is hard to see anything approaching (at least talented) spin in his normally serious demeanour. If anything, women voters have labelled Gordon Brown as “trustworthy” – high praise from members of a normally distrustful electorate, and at least recognition of a proven track record.

But despite the fact that David Cameron’s policies are so far variable, and given his lack of experience, largely untested, the statistics appear to show that Cameron’s play for the female vote may be working. An unproven Tony Blair came into power in 1997 on a tide of women’s votes. That tide seems to be changing. A Guardian/ICM poll last summer reflected women’s discontent with Labour, and swing towards the Conservatives. The Tories were 1% behind men, but scored an 8% lead among women. In a November, a Times/Populus poll showed that while men would vote for Labour and the Conservatives in equal numbers, women gave Cameron 37% of their vote to 31% for Labour.

Viewed through the prism of gender politics, it is fairly clear that Labour comes out miles ahead. It has 95 women MPs, to the Tory’s 17. It has a female foreign secretary, and several female ministers. It has made unprecedented strides in anti discrimination laws, contributed record levels of spending on education, and health, provided all children of nursery school age with guaranteed and quality childcare, and raised the minimum wage – mainly affecting a badly paid part-time female workforce. There is little, apart from the spectre of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories can point to in terms of increasing women’s participation in the political process, or at least easing the burdens of a modern working woman’s life.

If anything surely this would force commentators to a different conclusion on the figures, rather than the effete observation that women must be attracted to Mr Cameron’s kindness to children and puppy dogs. Perhaps that women are not only concerned with “women’s issues”. That perhaps their concerns are much wider, and not just rooted in domestic homebound concerns. Also that, for example, women may have a greater aversion to war, a greater propensity to take risks, or the intelligence not to stick to lifelong party commitments, but to change with the times. Or maybe it’s just because they think David Cameron is a cutie. Go figure.

The progressive left has always been based on a coalition of the oppressed or marginalized; in the West, this is now taken to include the poor, women, racial minorities, and sometimes gays and lesbians. But the actual constituents of the coalition evidently change over time, as after all, originally the coalition only included the working poor and, specifically to the US, racial minorities. More importantly, the groups that are considered working poor or oppressed racial minorities change over time. A good case study for this is the experience of Jews, who the left considered a racial minority on a par with black Americans throughout the West until about the 1960s. Although at least in the US Jews still tend left, the association between them and movement progressivism is weaker for reasons that are indicative of how the left operates as a whole.

The reflexive reason is that Israeli actions became increasingly consistent with right-wing politics. In 1967, Israel turned from a perpetually threatened country to a country so strong that it could destroy its neighbors’ air forces while their planes were still on the ground. Later it also became an explicitly occupying force that funded settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which from a left-wing perspective changed Zionism from an anti-colonialist or anti-racist ideology to an imperialist one. That is certainly the underlying concern of modern left-wing opposition to Israel.

But in fact, something else had to be at stake. When two countries billed as post- or anti-colonialist fight, the left tends to blame historical imperialism. When the Second Congo War tore Congo-Kinshasa apart, the left-wing response was not to blame the Rwandan Tutsis, who invaded the Congo and plundered its natural resources, or the Hutus, who were responsible to the greatest atrocities. Rather, it was to blame Western colonialism for Africa’s problems and to cast the war as a scramble for resources demanded by the capitalist system. Although it was possible to narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict from a pro-Israel, anti-colonialist view, emphasizing Britain’s divide and rule tactics, the left chose not to. Such a narrative would later become impossible to make because of the settlements and the brutality of the occupation, but the Western left broke with Jewish groups in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the first settlements were built.

Therefore, a better explanation for the expulsion of Jewish groups from the coalition of the oppressed has to lie in domestic trends in the United States, which held a plurality of the world’s Jews. The most obvious explanation given that constraint—namely, that discrimination against Jews abated after World War Two to the point that in the US Jews were more like Italians and Poles and less like blacks and Hispanics—is helpful, but it still seems like only part of the reason.

A different part likely comes, ultimately, from different experiences with oppression. In the last six or seven hundred years, anti-Semitism has taken predominantly legal and cultural forms, reinforced by the occasional pogrom. Earlier than that it had an economic dimension—Jews were forbidden to own land—but once Europe recovered from the Dark Ages, the professions that Jews dominated, such as banking, turned them into a prosperous minority. This trend has existed since then almost continuously, with a brief break among Jewish immigrants to the United States around the turn of the 19^th century. But even then, many of the poverty-based experiences that shaped black civil rights activism just didn’t exist among Jews.

Equipped with an intellectual culture closer in its emphasis on book learning to this of China than to this of the West and a skin color that made it possible for Jews to pass as gentiles in certain cases, Jews came to dominate such skilled professions as the law, medicine, and the academia. Discrimination against Jews was therefore more about explicit restrictions than about the economic impoverishment that typified anti-black racism. For example, in the 1920s Harvard moved from a purely meritocratic admission system to its current system in order to reduce the percentage of Jewish students from 25 to 15; at the time, Jews consisted of 2% of the American population. In contrast, only recently have blacks stopped to be underrepresented in American universities in general, to say nothing of elite universities.

As such, Jewish civil rights activism was predominantly legal, consisting of fights against discriminatory laws. Since most Jews at the time also came from a socialist or sometimes liberal political tradition, they naturally lent their groups—the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League—to supporting similar equal rights struggles, primarily those of black people but sometimes also those of labor. As long as that was how left-wing activism worked, the ACLU and the ADL were natural allies of the black civil rights movement. More importantly, once black civil rights activism changed its focus to economic issues, the natural link was severed.

Although in the 1920s and 30s there was a strong socialist element to Jewish thought, by the 1950s and 60s it was replaced with straight liberalism. The most committed socialists were Zionist enough to immigrate to Israel and merge into city or kibbutz life. Anti-communist witchhunts exercised pressure to repudiate socialism. Several decades of life in the United States exercised pressure to adopt one of the two acceptable ideologies in the country, liberalism and conservatism, abetted by the fact that upward mobility plunged most Jews into the middle class. Those trends most visibly affected the ACLU, separating it from the unions.

And perhaps most importantly, after the early 60s, the most pressing legal battles were no longer racial. There was a growing realization in parts of the left, especially but not only the liberal ones, that there were marginalized groups not defined by class or race. Second wave feminism drained many Jewish liberals away from racial civil rights struggles; while within anti-racist activist groups Jews could define themselves as another racial minority, once Jewish liberals diverted their energies to other civil rights struggles the blacks who dominated the civil rights movement could now define Jews as whites. The animosity between feminists and anti-racists over who was more oppressed and therefore had a greater priority certainly didn’t help.

Those blacks were certainly within reason. Jews could change their names and pass for white gentiles while blacks and the new minority in search of civil rights, Hispanics, couldn’t. The Holocaust made racism generally unfashionable, but especially affected anti-Semitism. Especially after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the black civil rights movement had shifted its focus to poverty-related issues, while the ACLU’s civil liberties battles were increasingly class-neutral. Lacking any domestic discrimination to focus on, Jews who wanted to focus on specifically Jewish issues gravitated to support for Israel, which would’ve separated them from the mainstream American left, whose only involvement in foreign policy was anti-war activism, even if it hadn’t entailed support for Republican hawks.

Thence by 1970s the relationship between Jews and blacks had strained to the point that the American left stopped considering Zionism an ally. American Jews have still leaned left since then, but Zionism, which historically was a left-wing movement, was tagged as right-wing.

It’s important to note that it was only after domestic trends within the United States had separated Jews from the anti-racist left that the left started to view Zionism as right-wing. The Six-Day War could provide a suitable pretext for viewing Israel as an oppressor state rather than as an oppressed state, but the right-wing characteristics of Zionism, namely a singular emphasis on military service and discrimination against Arabs, date back to Israel’s independence. Today’s anti-Israeli leftists even trace right-wing Zionism further back than that—for example, Noam Chomsky blames Zionists for the initial friction between Jews and Arabs in the 1920s—but those interpretations only arose after the fact. As long as Zionism was considered left-wing, the left would forgive its transgressions just like it did those of other socialist or post-colonial states.

The significance of this to the left in general is that the answer to the perennial question of which groups are considered oppressed and therefore get the associated fringe benefits is determined by many things that have little to do with oppression. A group that is no longer oppressed may still receive these benefits if politically it’s still aligned with other left-wing movements; conversely, a group that is still oppressed but fails to side politically with the mainstream left, or a group that is oppressed but cannot convince anyone that it is, will be perceived as not deserving any special recognition.

CSI, Law and Order, 24, Cold Case Files, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, The Shield, Crossing Jordan, The Wire. I learn a lot about life. For instance, there is evil, sometimes petty, sometimes monstrous, but always deadly. There is good: the police, the prosecutors, and their beleaguered, but heroic witnesses. Of course, there are the squealers, the snitches, the sleazeballs, or simply the entrapped that help get some portion of evil greater than their own off the street. Defense attorneys have pride of place in the evil paragon. They are sort of the Beelzebubs of the evil operations, scheming, unscrupulous, tricksters that made it so difficult for the do-gooders to defeat evil.

Sebastian Shark of CBS’ Shark, for example, is the most dangerous trickster of all, for he now applies his incomparable skills with the tools of evil to serve the good. He now puts evildoers, sometimes even his ex-clients, in jail. Once evil, he has morphed into someone good. The moral of his story is that the good must learn, or stronger still, must be a little evil to get evil off the streets. Justice is a result, not a process, for Shark. His young and beautiful lawyer posse is often revolted by his tactics, but the lesson they are taught by Shark is that evil must be used to ensure that good will triumph.

I prefer Orson Wells in Touch of Evil. Now there was evil incarnate, three hundred ugly pounds of it. Chomping a wet cigar, unshaven, clearly getting the better of his opponent, the goody-goody cop Charlton Heston whom he transforms into someone evil. Only Marlene Dietrich, the borderlands madam, took pity on Welles’ Hank Quinlan. Dietrich as Tanya was not exactly the hooker with a heart of gold. Instead she was the weary, cynical stable keeper for men like Wells whose peccadillos were her bread and butter. As Wells framed hundreds of suspects throughout his career, he had also hooked up with a sneaky, violent, dark-faced, Spanglish-speaking criminal Mexican gang, that he uses to break the mestizo and obviously uppity Heston, the proud husband of the blond-haired Janet Leigh whom the Mexicans kidnap and torture for good measure. Except for Leigh’s Susie, the damsel in distress, everyone else gets more evil, and some of the worst of them kill, die, or in Heston’s case sober up to the need to do evil in order to do good.

Well, that is the big lie – to do evil in order to do good – that TV tells us is the moral of our version of Crime and Punishment. The good must do evil so that the bad are caught, murdered, jailed, and/or sometimes executed.

What do we learn about our civil rights, good or evil as we are? What does TV tell us about the practice of criminal justice in the United States? More accurately, what does TV portray as everyday practice in our daily battle against crime?

The first lesson is that everyone is a suspect and their rights an impediment to uncovering evil. Your are supposed guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and every attempt you make to clear yourself or help the police out will be turned against you. You can be “liked” for a crime, not a compliment on your character or good looks, and become a suspect without knowing it. If and until you are arrested, they do not need to tell you that their “liking” you makes you a suspect in their book, until they find someone better.

So the second lesson is that it is better to remain silent. Cooperation is a mistake. Request a lawyer. If you have no lawyer (woe betide you if you are poor or like most people in America consider lawyers potential road kill), then ask to go home. Whatever you do, seek to avoid staying at the station house because that is where the tricks often occur.

At home, answer the door cautiously, as guns may be drawn, and never, never invite police into your house. If you do, you have invited them to grab up whatever they need for their case against you.

Suppose you are transformed from witness, to person of interest, to suspect. You are arrested. Take the warning seriously and say nothing once more. Ask immediately for a lawyer. Don’t cop an attitude, or they will clock you. A whack on the head or anywhere else on your body, so long as it leaves no bruises, is practically the duty of a morally outraged cop. It seems that the good cop is never quick enough to restrain the bad cop. Ask for aspirin as soon as you can, as you will bruise more easily, and perhaps shorten the beat down.

The good cop, bad cop routine is still the order of the day, and amazing grace at least on TV, seems to work. The good cop is constantly asking you to help them out, or suggesting you help yourself by getting the evil off your chest. It will go easier if you confess now or if you give up your partner in crime. Beware the prisoner’s dilemma: it works too.

I personally can’t understand how cooperating and confessing makes things easier. The image of the prison with which they threaten the accused is an inferno. Sweet young things, male or female, are threatened with gang rape or being sold as sex slaves for a pack of cigarettes. HIV infection lurks in every sex act. The middle-aged are told they will die miserably in jail.

Most criminal indictments end in plea bargains – 85% of them. You may be surrendering your right to self-defense, but your odds don’t improve through jury trials, which for murder suspects ends 85% of the time in conviction.(If you are African-American, please note that you are three and a half times more likely to be convicted of murder through trial by jury than your white counterparts.) But Law and Order’s “Maximum Sam” Waterson’s .750 batting average does represent reality: crime usually leads to punishment. Much of the success, for better or worse, owes to being incriminated before you are arrested, and according to TV, way before you even know you’re “liked” for the crime.

But who knows about innocence? Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions found in 2001 that of 86 persons wrongfully convicted and exonerated, 53% were convicted on the basis of mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony; 20% were convicted regardless of police and prosecutorial misconduct; another 12% were convicted with jailhouse informant testimony; another 9% on the basis of coerced or false confessions; and finally (take that CSI!), another 11% were convicted with what the center calls false or misleading “junk” science. Illinois in 2003 found so many wrongful murder convictions in their midst that the 17 defendants on death row were exonerated, and then Governor Ryan commuted the death sentences of 160 others. The wrongful conviction movement has spread throughout the country and the convicted in many cases exonerated, but this is seldom seen on TV. Instead, alla Cold Case Files, the past offers up its old murderers for the convicting.

This brings us back to what we learn on TV. It is not the truth of the matter, but a rather well-set and coherent collection of ideas about crime and punishment in America. It is rather like the old westerns with good and evil starkly portrayed, and the Indians vested with few, if any rights. This is no Dirty Harry syndrome any more, as in cops hampered by court decisions, and the guilty escaping because of our fecklessness in the face of evil. No, the cops usually catch the culprit under circumstances of their choosing, rather than those once prescribed by the Constitution. If they get it wrong, there is little recourse. Old Gil Grissom, in the recollection of this CSI-addicted writer, has only once worked to exonerate someone whom his office has wrongly convicted.

Outside of the tube and bumping around the everyday world, people are wrongly convicted through abuse, sloppiness, or the rush to judgment. If you are a person of color, watch out especially. All of you whose income falls beneath that of the well-heeled won’t get a snide, slick, and successful defense lawyer. There is no Shark in your future. Instead, you may get an over-worked and under-paid public defender, or a lawyer whom you cannot pay enough to do a really thorough job, given the endless complications of justice in America. Public advocates can only save the few and the really endangered.

An occasional jury will jump the rails and find for a defendant believed to have been treated badly or wrongly, or who they believe to be innocent. In Boston last year, several juries in a row refused to believe police testimony and found defendants not guilty.

But if the TV is about our beliefs, then it seems that we believe that evil is back big time, and evil criminals are caught and punished, even if by hook or crook, and this is really okay. And most of us, me included when I leave my rational world and head into the realms of American authoritarian fantasies, really enjoy it.

… Did I forget your favorite crime show? I confess. Sometimes during a Thursday night seminar, my mind wanders to the question: Will I get home in time for CSI, the real one in Nevada with Gil Grissom and the rest of the gang? Sometimes, I have to content myself with a killing in Miami or New York.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Poetry is a foreign country: they do things differently there. (Apologies to L. P. Hartley.) And for that very reason I sometimes want to get right away from words, the awful girders and trusses of words, to the freedom of an art form where I don’t have to do any oxyacetylene welding or other territorial revisionism. The world of dance and ballet is one place I can escape to where all of that mental sledging falls away, movement and rhythm in poetry being entirely different things. I’ve always been star-struck by dancers whose abilities I envy and whose ease of movement sometimes seems like the most real poetry.

Dancers would have a good laugh over this, knowing that the apparent ease of movement is down to countless hours of practise at the barre, slipped discs, wretched touring, aching feet, stroppy corps de ballet, partners who were once amenable and now aren’t, and so forth. Yes, I know that, but still—here is an art form where the invitation comes with the possibility of joyfulness that other art forms don’t offer so readily or abundantly.

I can’t think this preference of mine is anything special because I note that one of the most viewed videos on YouTube is Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance which has been seen over forty million times! We would all like to move like Fred Astaire or Beriosova, but we can’t, and so we settle for dance performances where music, light, decor and flesh transform themselves into intoxicating rhythms, visions of transport, gravity temporarily defeated. Film sometimes captures these rhythms—Black Orpheus, the end of Les Enfant du Paradis—but usually it happens after choreography, the slow accretion of movements that work from inspiration to the moment when the curtain goes up and there are no safety nets left to hold off error. How touching it can be at curtain call when dancers, thrilled with their own efforts, and knowing they have touched the stars that particular evening, have to come back down to earth. You feel their shared pleasure, and perhaps also a little of the sadness that must ensue after an attempt at the ideal has to be replaced with the usual ordinariness. The makeup is removed, day clothes are put back on and the street looks penny plain.

In my youth the Australian Ballet seemed—was—terribly glamorous, and there was always a special theatrical intensity in its performances. Australians have always had an interest in dance and we now have contemporary companies providing every kind of dance style imaginable. Robert Helpmann and Peggy van Praagh were in charge of the Australian Ballet in earlier times and regularly starred great dancers from yonder, Margot and Rudolf for starters. I remember Margot Fonteyn slaying everyone in the aisles in an act from Raymonda. There were unexpected delights too such as Lucette Aldous and Alan Alda dancing a spectacular Spring Waters or the pleasure of seeing an all-Australian The Lyrebird, music Malcolm Williamson, choreography Robert Helpmann, sets Sidney Nolan. The first director of the Australian National Gallery purchased a basketful of one hundred Ballets Russes costumes which, now cleaned and restored, still convey something of the excitement of the Diaghilev era. The same kind of excitement can be seen practically leaking from the screen in the balletomania of Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. Anton Walbrook drives Marius Goring’s composer and Moira Shearer’s dancer to the point of self-destruction. Obviously there is a warning in the film, taken as it is from the Hans Christian Andersen story, of the dangers in dwelling too much in pure aesthetic realms, and of seeking perfection en pointe.

For some, it’s breakdancing, or ballroom dancing, the tango, salsa, Indian or African tribal dancing, that is the spellbinder. The body can be made to move in so many remarkable ways. How awkward and unsatisfactory one feels in the face of the choreographed visions of Cranko, MacMillan and Graham or loose-limbed winging it on the dance floor.

If going from the ballet world to the other one we must usually occupy is a little like going to bed as Margot Fonteyn and waking to find yourself Peggy Hookham, that doesn’t invalidate those ephemeral moments when the visionary gleam catches fire. Sluggish limbs recall great transformative dance experiences, whether Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater or a distantly-recalled Ballet Folklorico from Mexico, incense engulfing Her Majesty’s Theatre amongst the leaping and the noise.

I’m not qualified to comment on dance technique, but I know technique is needed to contain and convey emotion. I’ve read that some big names in the past didn’t have have the technique of today’s dancers. Perhaps, but how hard it must have been, for example, for Madam, Dame Ninette de Valois, to build a British company of dancers equal to de Bournonville and Fokine, almost from scratch. And dancers then had personality in spades. Our age seems rather anodyne in comparison. The ballet world can be split by factionalism, as any of the arts, and stories abound of carryings-on and put-downs of various leading lights. That is the negativity you always get when anyone aspires to something beyond the status quo.

Think about the sheer variety of dance styles—Sammy Davis, Jr., Yuri Soloviev, Merle Park, Chita Rivera, Maria Tallchief, Michael Jackson, Leonide Massine, Bob Fosse. These heterogeneous dance styles suggest some mysterious energy, a parallel universe, where movement attains a condition of transcendence, however impermanent. Balanchine especially seems to make his dancers move with a gracefulness and fluidity that can raise whole evenings to a level of exaltation. Stravinsky said Nijinsky didn’t understand music and thus made his choreography too complex for the dancers, but Nijinsky must have had some charisma and ability to have captured his historical moment so acutely. Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, was also a fascinating choreographer. However, Balanchine seems to have worked out the way forward from the classical style of Petipa to the contemporary with a wit and elegance that can encompass Sousa marches and Ravel, the sinew of Agon and the brilliance of Ballet Imperial.

Well, back to poetry country. Silence, exile and indolent strumming may be needed to get along in that place, but there’s always the flight to freedom available over the border in dance land, where words turn into rhythms unavailable to letters, and you can temporarily escape their manacles. 

                                                               *

               Top Hat

   Fred Astaire d. June 23, 1987

Gingering the boredom
Of awkward tribulation,
That near lean on a stick
Spins firecracker variations
With legs in a suave equation.

This is style
Mapping the screen,
Planetary movement
Reducing to top hat, white tie and tails
Stardust of the Milky Way.

It ends with the usual stillness,
Those toe-tapping terrors
Trapped, perfection cracked,
Yet up in the evening sky
A ghostly footprint whizzes figures of eight.

Written 1987 Published 1994 Such Sweet Thunder 69

Maria Bylova and Leonid Nikonov of the Bolshoi Ballet dance Spring Waters here. 2′ 27”

The great, big, fat, extravagant Indian wedding is back, straight from Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire to the Umaid Bhawan Palace and Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. The royalty in nuptial question is none other than an obscure Indian by the name of Arun Nayar (no relative of mine!) and a has-been British actor by the name of Liz Hurley. The seven million pound week long extravaganza has kept the media in India and Britain hooked, even though none but Hello! ,the magazine which paid two million pounds for exclusive rights to cover the wedding, were allowed anywhere near the gates of the Mehrangarh Fort. In fact, in the hurly-burly of it all, some journalists even managed to get beaten up by security (who says that glamour journalists have it easy) as they tried to catch a glimpse of the tamasha, rather foolishly, through the lens of their cameras. Anyhow, it’s all over now as I write, and I have no intention of buying a copy of Hello! to see what it was all about. Suffice to say that it wouldn’t have quite matched up to that other (and earlier) great, big, fat, extravagant, Indian wedding in the Palace of Versailles where the world’s fifth richest man, India’s own Stalin (meant only literally, as in Russian) Laxmi Mittal, married his daughter by spending a mere fifty five million pounds of his vast fortune. After all India’s biggest film stars danced there. And Michelin starred chefs cooked the supper. The only thing in common to the two weddings was that they continued the old Indian tradition of the girl (and her family) funding the festivities. Liz Hurley apparently made up the difference between the actual costs and what Hello! paid. Arun Nayar’s claim to fame is not his riches (he isn’t even in the Forbes list of the richest Indians), but this marriage-Indian Ishtyle! (and my apologies for the Hinglish style, but we Indians are like that only!)    

But that’s just the glitzy side of Indian weddings. There is a side which is darker, but ironically as extravagant. Take the case of Mr. Ram X. (name changed for reasons of privacy). He is a clerk, earning a lowly wage. He married his daughter recently. He spent a lot of money, nowhere near what the Hurley’s and the Mittal’s spent, but in fact much more, disproportionate to his own income. He went to the extent of borrowing money, some from friends, some from exploitative moneylenders. He had to pay for his daughter’s dowry ( a scooter, fridge, microwave amongst other items). And then he spent on the festivities. He would have been happy with the debt had his daughter been happy after marriage. Sadly, her new family harass her, beat her sometimes for more dowry, and constantly demand more money from her father. He can’t afford it. He can’t bear to see his daughter suffer. He will bring her back. Ram X. is just one of millions of fathers-of-the-bride who are arguably more extravagant than the richie-riches (given that they go into debt, compared with the pocket change celebs spend) when it comes to their weddings, but unfortunately don’t get any pleasure out of it. This too is a facet (admittedly negative) of getting married-Indian ishtyle. Incidentally, some believe that dowry is actually an English custom. The British famously received the island of Bombay in dowry from the Portuguese, when an English prince married a Portuguese princess.

And before this gets too teary eyed, let us move to the scenario of Indian marriage where age old tradition marries the new age and all its technology and facility. Yes, I am referring to the ‘Arranged’ marriage now facilitated by the world wide web! It’s now easier than ever for parents (and often young people) to find brides and grooms of their choice on the internet. Shaadi, jeevansathi, bharat matrimony, go4marriage, anmolrishte etc DOT.COM are amongst the innumerable sites where one can find profiles of young people looking to get hitched. There’s big money in it for the web portal owners (as is evident by the number of advertisements they release on prime time television). Everyone who signs up pays a fee. Some of these sites claim up to 700,000 successful matches. Others, in competition, claim 710,000! Whichever way, and whomever you believe, this is a big time activity. These portals are actually quite sophisticated. You can search for a partner by sifting through various categories based on religion, community, caste, region, language etc. The downside of this, of course, is the realization about how parochial we Indians can still be, when it comes to choosing a partner. Marriage across different categories is rare. The other interesting observation is about what is valued as an occupation: H1B US visa, working for a MNC (multinational corporation) in India, and a good job in the elite government services probably top the list.  In a rather ironical twist, it is amazing to see the number of people who want their partner to be ‘fair’ skinned. I thought we were ALL outraged by the racism meted out to poor Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother! Oh, and lest I forget, it’s always better to be a homely girl! Like it or not, all a part of getting married-Indian Ishtyle. Did I hear someone say arranged marriage is outdated?!

So there you are, a very brief journey through the great Indian wedding: that almost impossible blend of tradition, modernity, extravagance, happiness and sometimes sadness. I have to say, that by observation, most Indian weddings these days tend to be great, big, fat and extravagant. This in part due to the influence of Hindi films which depict weddings in the lavish Punjabi style, with all the song, dance and fun. Other parts of India, often have weddings which my Bengali friend in Chicago says resemble funerals more than a celebration. He, and a lot of others, believe in adopting the Punjabi way. Weddings should be fun after all.

Long live the Indian wedding (free of dowry and other such outdated and abominable practices). Lets only hope (and here is where it gets a little mushy!), that like in the Hindi films, there is always a happily-ever-after sort of ending.

Now that nearly every American has access to VHS and DVD and Netflix and Blockbuster, a certain feature of the cinephilia of times past has disappeared: scarcity.  Almost every film one wants to see, one can see – albeit on television.  This has had a major negative effect on the cultural importance of retrospectives, revival houses, film series, etc.  But there is now a retrospective going on that includes truly rare films that are also, in my opinion, unmissable.  The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who is having his first major U.S. retrospective right now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became famous worldwide for a series of meditative, often metafictional films–Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, Close Up, Taste of Cherry (for which he won the Palme d’Or)–that are indisputably part of the canon of cinema.  But prior to that, Kiarostami made a series of films about children that went unscreened and unavailable in the U.S., until now.

In the seventies, Kiarostami was employed by Iran’s Institute of Cultural Development of Children to make explanatory shorts on subjects like the concept of different colors, why one should choose forgiveness over fighting with classmates, how to repaint household objects, etc.  From the first, these films are leavened with poetic insight into their subject matter, an enthusiasm for finding beauty in simplicity, and a playfulness and joyful energy that seeks to inspire the same in their young audiences.  Many of these short works are being screened by MoMA before the longer, sixty-to-ninety minute narrative films Kiarostami made in the same period, also concerning children.  These works are examples of perfect cinema. 

The enforced viewing of these films in MoMA’s excellent projection is a good thing, because with Kiarostami, as with all film artists, it’s imperative to see the movies at the movies.  He relies on big compositions and often gives the crucial details or resolution of a plot in distant long shots, the most famous example being the last shot of Through the Olive Trees.  These early films show that that capacity was an evident talent from the beginning of Kiarostami’s career.  They often detail the most subtle moments of joy, relief, triumph, and despair through beautiful compositions that leave one to infer the rush of internal emotions.  For instance, the climax of one of these films is simply a boy in long shot, watering plants, but with a relief so palpable that the normality of the action turns into an inner celebration.  (Girls, sadly, play a much smaller role in Kiarostami’s children’s films). 

A boy stands in line to buy tickets at Tehran’s soccer stadium.  Around him are grown men, pushing and jostling him and each other.  Still, he moves faster than most, pressing any opportunity to advance.  He is small and vulnerable against this crowd.  Determined, he finally reaches the counter, where the ticket-seller is counting bills.  “No more tickets.”  The boy droops, but, again showing great resolve, presses on, checking other entrances, braving the menace of the police that everywhere surround the stadium, overhearing scalpers.  Finally, he buys a ticket of a man for too much money.  Later he will have to find a way to get back to his village, an overnight bus ride away, with no money or acquaintances in Tehran.  Excitedly entering the stadium, he finds a place in the upper stands.  Nothing much appears to happening on the field of play; the match won’t begin for three hours.  The boy, who is tired, unpacks a small bundle.  It’s a cloth wrapped around some bread, all the food the boy has seen for twelve hours.  Still, with a simple impulse to manners, he taps the man to his right’s shoulder.  “Mister, please, have some!” 

The scene is from Abbas Kiarostami’s 1974 film The Traveler, one of his first feature-length projects.  It  evokes in an almost unbearably moving way the consciousness and travails of Qassem, an indefatigable schoolboy trying to see his first soccer match.  Skipping school, where he is an indifferent student, he tries various schemes to make the needed money, undeterred by beatings from his school principal, the carping of his mother and the utter disregard of his father.  Yet this is no mildly uplifting story of the triumph of childhood optimism and wonder over cynical and brutal adulthood.  It’s much more honest filmmaking than that – Kiarostami observes the boy’s world in a manner that belongs to the neorealist tradition, with sympathy but without overt judgments.  He has a magical ability to summon the emotional world of children, in both its poignance and its selfishness.  And this honesty, in turn, buys him our true emotional engagement with his stories. 

Describing the occurrences of Kiarostami’s plots does not, somehow, communicate the sense of surprise or freshness that pervades almost every frame of the children’s films.  Always, Kiarostami’s plots seem truly simple in a general sense (two boys want to borrow a wedding suit, a man is stranded, etc.) but turn out to be full of revelations, unexpected moments, reversals, setbacks, unforeseen victories and defeats.  They have the vivacity of life, or perhaps more.  The films are kinetic explorations of forward motion.  Never do the characters stop to consider actions for long – they take them, and then react as swiftly to the results.  Because of this, perhaps, the settings are often roads, lanes, alleys, atria.   These boys live in the interstices of home and work, school (if they can afford to go) and recreation.  Comfortable in none of them, they seek relief, fun–basically an escape from the harsh treatment of their bosses, teachers, parents, and older siblings.  Determination is their signature quality. 

Kiarostami’s interest lies very deliberately with working children, hustling to make their way and maybe getting a bit of schooling, which they typically ignore, on the side.  They scheme because they desire, but the desire to escape often traps them further.  The young bully in The Wedding Suit takes the money his older brother saves to send him to school and uses it on karate classes.  Qassem’s trip to the soccer match will no doubt only increase his immiseration when he gets home.  That determination is so often stymied, so often self-defeating, does not entail a retreat into complacency, though – if anything, the failure of a plan only makes the effort nobler.  No false salves or sentimental compensations are provided – only a picture of life that is stunningly convincing. 

It’s a measure of how pure the cinematic quality of Kiarostami’s work is that prose can’t seem to capture what makes his images and journeys so unboring, so endlessly stimulating.  In a short from 1978, we see a man standing by the side of the road.  The din of passing trucks drowns out any other noise.  The man tries, and fails, to hitch a ride.  Truck after truck doesn’t stop.  Rather than compress this sequence, however, Kiarostami keeps the pace even.  Each new truck, we imagine, must be the one to stop.  This is the one!  But they don’t.  The man has a tire with him, and he sits on it idly.  He is high in the mountains; his breath is visible.  A driver stops at the solitary tire shop we see across the road.  Our hero helps him load his new tire, but the driver is going the wrong direction.  Back to waiting.

The road is momentarily empty.  Birds animate the still mountains.  A moment is reached; the man decides he must go himself.  He begins to run, slapping and nudging the tire with him, which rolls along like a animal companion.  The tire and the man make their way – he has determined to get down himself.  The road turns this way and that, a small tunnel is reached, large switchbacks are traversed.  A car stops comically to wonder at the spectacle of a man and his pet tire.  At times the tire speeds up too much, at times it slows, sometimes it looks as if it will go over the edge.  They are descending.  The man is sweating now, he removes his jacket, recombs his hair.  Again the film’s pace does not speed up, we experience time with him, not knowing what will come.  And then, the tire rolls up to and hits a yellow car, missing a tire, on a jack.  The man stops.  He ran down a mountain with his fixed tire.  At best, a momentary victory.  But he made it.

The short’s name?  “Solution No. 1.”  I can’t recommend these films more highly.  The full schedule is here; The Traveler is playing Sunday, March 11th, at 4pm.  “Solution No. 1” and The Wedding Suit are Monday, March 12th at 6pm.  Here’s A.O. Scott’s take on the major films; here, is a properly Kiarostamian anecdote about introducing Close Up from Jeff Strabone. 

The rest of Dispatches.

A couple of months ago, as my debut on 3 Quarks Daily, I wrote about my frustrating experience of being the intended victim of an apartment rental scam on Craig’s List. You can read that piece, entitled Web of Lies, here. Of course, the crooks haven’t been stopped yet. Last I heard the other Beth Ann Bovino has moved to Arizona and cut the rent price, since the apartment had been sitting “empty on the market’” for some time. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, and amazing, is how the story spread so rapidly across the country, enough to catch the attention of regulators.

The morning after it was posted, the Daily News called and asked to interview me about my problem. I agreed and spoke with a journalist on the phone that day. She even sent a photographer by to take my picture. I happened to be dressed up that day, and got ready for my close-up with a big smile. I was asked to stop, given the seriousness of my situation. OK, I can do that, and I frowned. The next morning my frown appeared on the cover of the Daily News.

I thought I ran through my 15 minutes of fame and then some. But the story reached its boiling point. It cascaded into huge headlines nationwide. National Fox News asked to have me on their 8 AM show that day. Associated Press interviewed me over the phone. Another TV network came in for an interview. After over four interviews that morning, I declined local Fox News. They showed up at my office anyway, interrupted a meeting and pleaded that I comply. They said I have been on the news all day and that they had to have an interview. Choosing between sitting in an interoffice meeting or staring in the news, I did the interview. They sent TV crew to the apartment in question, which was my old home as I recently moved. Some asked that I leave work so that they could get a picture of me in front of my (old) home. My name even made it to the 1010 WINS (radio) news loop, in between traffic updates. I was told that my name and issue was raised during a Press Conference with Craig’s List, which was now under investigation because of the event. Inside Edition both called and wrote asking for an interview to use in their investigation into Craig’s List.

Ms. Jordan Lite, the Daily News reporter who first covered the story, said that it’s “a classic New York story (real estate, aggressive renters) with a modern-day (cyber) twist”, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if it got more attention. It did. It was linked to many other web sites, blogs and received countless local and national TV and radio attention, possibly some international press. People called my office or emailed my office to give advice. Sitting at a restaurant in the Miami airport, someone asked me if I caught the crooks. In upstate New York for the weekend I heard “Oh! You’re the girl that…”

How did it spread so quickly?

The surprising impact of Web of Lies was likely an example of a social epidemic proposed in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. The word “tipping point” comes from the study of epidemiology, and refers to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the moment where the line on the graph starts to shoot straight upwards.

Web of Lies hit Gladwell’s tipping point and quickly spread. It received over 12,000 hits in the first hour posted, and soon after, received about several hundred hits per MINUTE. It received over 70,000 hits in 3 days. To give some perspective, a recent PEW/Internet report said that about one in five bloggers (22%) have fewer than ten hits a day in blog traffic, and 17% say they have 10 to 99 hits on a typical day. Just 13% have more than 100 hits a day. In contrast, Web of Lies spread so quickly, that within 36 hours it reached national headlines. In other words, the line on the graph shot through the roof, much like a virus turned epidemic.

Gladwell explains that ideas and behavior and messages sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. He compares it to an epidemic of measles in a kindergarten class, saying how “one child brings in the virus. It spreads to every other child in the class in a matter of days. Within a week or so, it completely dies out and none of the children will ever get measles again.” In this sense, they are seen as social epidemics. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly.

Even more fascinating was how Gladwell explains the three criteria that diseases must meet in order to become an epidemic. This lends itself, by analogy, to practically every change initiative, such as social ones. The three criteria are:
The Law of the Few: A few people doing something different start and incubate the epidemic. These people, who Gladwell calls “mavens” are the ones who rub two sticks together in such a way that they improbably catch fire. Incubation also requires “connectors”. These are people with contact to a lot of people, enough to get the idea out into other communities and networks. They are the ones who move in different circles, so that the epidemic reaches escape velocity and spreads, much like HIV or SARS.
The Stickiness Factor: This allows the epidemic to endure long enough to “catch”, or to become contagious or “memorable”. Ways to make something sticky include repetition, hooks and triggers and an understanding of the message, some kind of story, and suspense. In other words, ways of “packaging to make it irresistable”.
The Power of Context: This requires that the physical, social and group environment must be right to allow the epidemic to then suffuse through the population. A concentration camp environment, for example, will change human behavior at epidemic speed. In a less austere environment, harsh rules and codes will not be as effective.

The success Web of Lies had in reaching such a large audience was likely because it met these three criteria. To begin with, the story had an inherently sticky message that resonated with many. People who had received numerous emails from scammers with the SUBJECT: URGENT!!! in the header would undoubtedly identify with the story. Moreover, given the popularity of “whodunit” TV show; someone trying to crack his or her own case would certainly be very appealing to many. The audience would essentially be “hooked”. The story caught the eye of a few early enthusiastic readers, likely within the blogospere, who incubated the story. It spread by connectors, such as digg.com and other web sites, which spread the message to other communities. Each new group then adapted the message to the group’s own unique social environment and own social context. Postings from renters searching for a home in Canada, relay operators handling phone calls for the deaf, or those fighting consumer fraud online indicate that the story reached across social circles. Together they may explain why the story spread far enough that I could be recognized in a small town a few hours north of New York City. The original internet real estate scam likely meets the same criteria as well.

What is amazing, and what he makes clear, is how frequently this pattern can be seen. Gladwell notes a number of positive epidemics, such as Sesame Street that started a learning epidemic in preschoolers, turning them onto reading and “infected” them with literacy. To a much smaller degree, the impact from readers of the Web of Lies would be considered a “positive” social epidemic in that readers then pushed for change. Of course, there are also social epidemics that have destroyed, he mentions the spread of teen suicides in Micronesia, for example, or the rash of mass shootings at schools and elsewhere. The wave of internet crimes, costing hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, would lie here. In the end, his book attempts to show people how to start positive epidemics of their own, and, hopefully, help wipe out those that could destroy.

Justin E. H. Smith    

Among Aral-Ultaic linguists, it is widely presumed that no single English word, or any word of any other known language, can adequately translate the Yuktun word nâk.  It may denote, depending on context, reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina), an Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus), an adult Yuktun woman, a Russian, something resembling poetic justice, and, of most interest to many, the life force that runs through every tundra-dwelling creature, through the sky, through the great sea to the North, and, during the short Summer, through the top ten centimeters or so of the ground.

In contrast with Chinese, Yuktun is not a tonal language, and so differences of meaning cannot be extracted from differences in the semimusical ways in which the various forms of nâk are pronounced, for it’s always pronounced in exactly the same way.  Nor is Yuktun a highly inflected language like Russian.  There are no noun cases, no genders, not even any endings to distinguish singular from plural, nothing at all that might give one occurrence of nâk away as involving the sort of nâk it does.  Nothing except context.  So, for example, in the sentence

Ba nâk kuntân-te nûq pœrtyttun
With a nâk trade you always both-eyes-open
(When trading with a nâk, always keep both eyes open)

we can be sure that nâk refers to Russians, since no trade is conducted with lichen or with hares or poetic justice or life forces, let alone with women.  On the other hand, in the sentence

Nâkkantaq nar tôgyœn bir nâk grâgttyan
The reindeer in the valley on nâk graze
(The reindeer in the valley graze on nâk)

there can be no doubt but that the nâk in question is lichen, since no other sort of nâk may be grazed upon.

A semi-legendary position has been carved out in Yuktun society for Narda, an elder Yuktun, said by some (evidently conscious of their exaggeration), to have been alive even in mythological time.  She is, to be sure, old, 105 by the best estimates.  But nobody knows how old exactly, for nobody else was alive when she was born.  The Yuktun simply take her word for it when she says that she was seven when the Russian soldiers came through in 1905, en route, so they said, to fight the Japanese.  Must have been lost, she laughed, exposing the blackened stubs she still used as teeth when the BBC came through filming a documentary in the early glasnost years on “Russia’s Wild Frontier.”

The mid-1930s were difficult years, following the 1933 report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on “Shamanistic Practices and Historical Progress among the Siberian Tribes.”  There, it is reported that “the shaman is usually picked from the most unproductive, most nearly criminal element within Yuktun society, from among those who, in a more advanced stage of history would find themselves members of the Lumpenproletariat.  They are positively hostile to labor, often grand mal epileptics, and prone to the sort of deceitfulness and evasiveness that in a socialist society can only be described as counterrevolutionary.  They practice their art by convincing other tribe members that they are in contact with spirits from the ‘underworld’.  They speak in tongues and beat on drums to invoke these spirits, and their fellow tribesmen watch, spellbound.  It is a magic show and a stunt, all craftily organized by the shaman to gain the maximum respect possible, and, we dare mention, the maximum remuneration in the form of gifts.”   

The report tells of a crafty woman, evidently in her thirties but already hunched over, wrinkled and grey like a tribal elder, who had perfected the black art of shamanistic fraud.  According to the report, she had conned the delegates from Moscow into participating in a ceremony where, by skillful use of smoke, intoxicating herbs, and disorienting glossolalia, she managed, as the report maintained by way of an uncharacteristic colloquialism, to make asses out of all of them. 

Narda had been told that she was to stop her shamanistic performances and to confess, before the delegation of party members, to her own charlatanism.  But she insisted to the members of her tribe that she was no charlatan, but a real shaman, and that she would demonstrate as much to the party delegates.  When they arrived, she invited them all into her yurt.  She began by dancing, beating on a drum and calling to her spirit helpers.  Gradually, she worked herself into a trance.  She called forth a flood, and at once her yurt was filled with water, up to the ankles of all of the spectators.  Next, she called forth a serpent from the underworld, and caught it in her hands, holding it close to the faces of the stunned delegates.  Finally she commanded the men in her yurt to drop their pants and to hold their penises with both hands.  She returned from her trance and commanded them to return as well.  And there they were, standing to their ankles in water, pants down, holding their members like onanistic fools.  They begged her forgiveness, rushed out of the yurt, back to Moscow, and made a concerted effort, in writing up the report, not to look each other in the eyes. 

Narda also appears in Butenko and Vainshtain’s groundbreaking 1938 study, Naknost’ i tavtologiia v predstavlenii prirody u iuktunskogo naroda [Nâk-hood and Tautology in the Conception of Nature among the Yuktun],  There, Narda relates the beginning of the Yuktun creation myth: “In the beginning there was only nâk, but one day the nâk got it into its head to take all the nâk for itself, which naturally made the nâk upset and brought down a harsh nâk to teach the nâk a lesson.”  She broke off, Butenko and Vainshtain report, upon seeing the displeasure the ethnologists exhibited as she told the tale.  The authors report that, when asked to specify which sort of nâk she had in mind in each instance, Narda protested combatively that there is only one sort of nâk .  “Nâk is nâk,” she is reported to have said. “Nâk is always just nâk.”

The authors proceed to observe: “However hard it may be for us to imagine a world-view [mirovozzrenie] in which this could be the case, it may be that in the primitive communism of the Yuktun all the sundry things denoted by the term nâk are seen as bearing certain strong affinities with one another, so strong indeed that, from their point of view, no terminological differentiation between them is needed.  Just as for us noga denotes both the actual foot of an animal, as well as anything that serves an analogous function for an inanimate entity such as a table (though, to be sure, by a much more complicated path of conceptual associations), so too in the case of nâk.” 

The authors conclude that, like the medieval philosophers who appealed to the formal virtues of things, explaining, to use Molière’s famous example, the power of opium to put people to sleep by the fact that it possesses a virtus dormitiva, the appeal to the naknost’ (‘nâk-hood’) of something in nature in the effort to make sense of it is equally vacuous, yet, for the Yuktun, equally satisfying.  In the case of the Yuktun, however, the explanatory power of naknost’, is all the more difficult to comprehend, in view of the fact that it is seen as a virtus of a wide range of entities, characters, and phenomena that would seem to have no obvious connection to one another, unlike the soporific quality that opium clearly shares with anything else said to posses the virtus dormitiva.”

In an unpublished footnote, Butenko and Vainshtain speculate: “It is worth reflecting on our own concept of partiinost’ [‘party-ness,’ i.e., suitability or appropriateness from the point of view of the Communist Party].  Imagine, if you will, a Yuktun struggling to determine what it is that a symphony, the wheat yield at a collective farm, and the knot in a Young Pioneer’s neckerchief have in common.  We tell him that what all these things share is partiinost’, and he looks back at us perplexed.  We are likewise perplexed when confronted with the idea of naknost’.  But we mustn’t assume it does not make sense to him, unless we are equally ready to abandon partiinost’ as meaningless.” 

Sergei Vasil’evich Butenko disappeared in 1938.  The last that was heard of him, he was sent to a camp not far from Noril’sk, in the Taimyr okrug, relatively close, but still a few time zones away from the Yuktun to whom he had devoted his life.  His longtime research partner, Lev’ Abramovich Vainshtain, a physician who practiced ethnology not as a vocation but as an avocation, made it all the way to 1951 before embarking on his first involuntary trip to Siberia. 

On a recent trip to Moscow, I found Vainshtain’s daughter, Tatyana L’vovna, now in her early sixties, a physician herself, a chain-smoker of cigarettes whose packages evoke the American West, and a self-described ‘true communist’, in a dreary grey concrete-block apartment somewhere at the far end of Prospekt Vernadskogo.  She is an avowedly obsessive documenter of her father’s life, and she graciously allowed me to peruse the notebooks pertaining to his work among the Yuktun.  It was there that I found the unpublished draft of the famous article, complete with the speculative footnote about partiinost’ and naknost’. I also found there a curious scrap of paper, on which Dr. Vainshtain had, evidently, sketched out a version of Narda’s abortive creation myth, but in full, and with the appropriate denotandum of nâk substituted in the appropriate place.  If it stands up to expert scrutiny, I believe this scrap may make an invaluable contribution in the field of Aral-Ultaic ethnography, and perhaps even to the study, if I may speak so grandly, of the human mind.  For it shows, as no other study has, that apparently arbitrary ways of carving up the world can, from an internal point of view, make perfect sense. 

Here is what I read on the scrap of paper (translated with the kind assistance of T. L. Vainshtain):

“In the beginning there was only Lichen, soft greyish-green Lichen, extending across the tundra in all directions.  A seven-day journey would not bring you to the end of the Lichen-covered tundra. 

“But the Hare became greedy and got it into his mind that he should steal the Lichen. He placed the Lichen in his ear and darted off.  And he ran for eight days, until he came to the edge of the world, where the land meets the frozen sea in the North.  On the long journey, the Lichen had penetrated into the very depths of his body, and wrapped itself around his leg-bones.  And at the shore of the Northern sea the mother of the Yuktun was born from the Hare’s right shoulder.  She became the Hare’s wife, and from them the generations of Yuktun were born, right down to our own day.      

“One day long ago, in the time before the time we know, a Yuktun Woman came upon a Hare in a trap.  The Hare pleaded with her, saying: ‘Do not kill me, for you are my daughter and my wife.’ But the Woman only laughed and replied: ‘I am the daughter of Nâgvak, and the wife of Sik.  Sik is hunting with the others, and Nâgvak is long dead.’  She slit the Hare’s throat, skinned it, and threw it in the pot.   

“Just then, a Man came along, toward the village.  He was pale as the snow, with a yellow beard as thick and rough as the hair on a Yuktun’s head.  ‘What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’ the Man called out, but the Woman was afraid, and did not speak.  ‘I said, What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’  ‘A Hare,’ the Woman muttered.  ‘I say,’ the Man bellowed.  ‘There’s nothing I like better than a stewed Hare.’ 

“‘Where is your husband?’ the Man asked as he devoured his big bowl of stew, but the Woman was afraid, and again did not answer.  ‘I said, Where is your husband?’  ‘My husband is Sik, the Woman replied softly, ‘and he will be back soon with many more hares, and many ermine, from which I will make him a warm and handsome sark.’  But the Man simply laughed, for he had ambushed the husband and his men as they slept by the frozen banks of the Yob, and sliced off their heads, and taken their tools and necklaces of the smoothest antler.  He took her as his own wife, and that is how the time we know began.

“But Justice makes all things right, and neither the Hare, nor the Woman, nor the pale Russian can escape it.   For the generations that issued from this union would suffer mightily, streaming in from the West and the South, weary and beaten down, some the prisoners of others.  They would build up their heavy grey homes on ground that in its depths never thaws, laying tracks from the great City in the West to the great Sea in the East, frozen limbs amputated unceremoniously by their comrades, up high enough to get rid of the dead mass, which can only mean high enough to cut away living flesh as well; half-starved boys lying down in the snow for a little rest and never rising again, broken men without number, fighting, always fighting against one another and against the permafrost, itself so great, so massive and indifferent, that it never even noticed it had an opponent. 

“But still there is the the Life Force, which sees to it that Justice does not go on unchecked, and for a few months every year softens up the very top level of the ground.  And at least a few varieties of flowers bloom, and it is always day, for these few months, and the tundra is covered, at least in patches, with soft, grey-green Lichen.” 

*

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

Edward B. Rackley

A gripping and maddening slow-motion spectacle, last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Situation in Afghanistan (available on C-Span), drifted predictably to Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan as senators and experts grappled over why Afghans, like Iraqis, could not ‘get it together after all we’ve done for them’. Another exasperated senator demanded, uncomprehending of why the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was still inconclusive: ‘Why not raise the price on Osama’s head by a million USD a week?’ It is currently valued at $25 million. Surely more millions would do the trick.

Among an endless sampling of senatorial hubris and stunning provincialism, the most memorable moment was the testimony of Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin from the Center on International Cooperation at NYU. Asked by Senators why the Afghan state and people could not capitalize on what the US had ‘given them’ in the way of democratic elections and the ‘freedom’ in the wake of Taliban rule, Rubin patiently explained that ‘in some parts of the world, freedom and democracy are not perceived as essential’ to a country’s recovery, stability or even prosperity. ‘Security and order’ are the desired ingredients, which neither the US nor the ISAF forces are providing.

‘And whose policies are to blame for the current state of affairs, then?’ demanded another Senator. ‘The United States, sir,’ came the cautious reply. Water wears out a stone, I thought, when the Committee closed the Hearing by noting the excellence of Rubin’s testimony.

Alongside democratic processes, ‘good governance’ (i.e., anti-corruption measures, accountability, transparency, etc.) and the ever nebulous ‘freedom’, justice is another superpower ideal frequently exported to troubled countries hoping that foreign intervention and aid programs will remedy their ills. As with freedom and democracy, local perceptions of the value and utility of justice are not what its defenders in the West would wish or suspect.

The biggest experiment in the pursuit of justice in countries where probable war crimes abound is currently led by the International Criminal Court, in operation since 2002. Its ratification followed four years of heated diplomacy among the 148 states involved, and intense lobbying by humanitarian agencies and human rights activists. The founding treaty affirms that ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community must not go unpunished’ and promises ‘an end to impunity for the perpetrators of those crimes’.

Unsurprisingly, the ICC is being tested in central African countries with the least economic and political significance to the major powers. Nor are any ICC suspects combatants in wars supported by the world’s major powers: otherwise their indictment would surely be blocked. The Hague-based body has undertaken investigations in Uganda, the DR Congo, the Central African Republic and, most recently, the Sudan. But as the ICC lacks its own police force, its investigation can only proceed as far as the state concerned allows. Despite its potential as a global legal instrument, its local actions and impact are complex, evolving and far from conclusive. Its four initial investigations have thrown up a slew of surprises; some welcome, others not.

Its primary challenge is the pursuit of justice in war zones defined by their absence of political order. Enforcement of legal limits and rights in an ungoverned—or government-sponsored—context of ethnic cleansing, such as Darfur or the Ituri district of Eastern Congo, is one difficulty. The subordination of justice—the arrest and trial of known perpetrators—to the more immediate need for political settlement is another.

Where protection from prosecution is used as a carrot to pacify warlords and thus restore order—as occurred in UN-brokered negotiations in Eastern Congo where the ICC was investigating suspected war crimes—aid workers call the trade-off ‘peace on the cheap’. Arrest warrants have been issued in DR Congo, and one former warlord is now awaiting trial in the Hague (Thomas Lubanga) But the Court’s work is undone when lesser warlords, also war crimes suspects, are offered high positions in the national military in exchange for a ceasefire and troop surrender.

Such is the slow and uncertain course of the ‘giant without arms or legs’. Since 2002, two of the four ICC investigations (Northern Uganda and Darfur, Sudan) have triggered a powerful popular backlash of opposition. Three unintended consequences of its investigations can explain this popular resistance. In the case of Uganda’s ongoing conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army, fear of ICC indictments has led war crimes perpetrators to abandon political negotiations with government forces in favor of their original position: a ‘no exit’ war of attrition.

Second, in Congo, the prospect of ICC indictments had the opposite effect: it stimulated sagging political negotiations when a ‘golden parachute’ of high administrative office coupled with amnesty was offered to certain intransigent rebel leaders. Yet the prospect of justice is undermined by ‘peace on the cheap’, when the cessation of conflict is bought with amnesty: protection from ICC prosecution. At what point is amnesty indistinguishable from impunity?

Third, in Sudan, where ICC jurisdiction is categorically refuted by Khartoum officials, many Sudanese associate the ICC with a supposed ‘colonization effort’ by the UN and its western backers. Concerns that ICC warrants recently issued for two Sudanese officials will result in increased attacks on aid workers and the objects of their efforts, Darfuri citizens, are well-grounded. Should justice be pursued if it entails the withdrawal of the aid agencies’ vital life-support system where more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced?

No one at the ICC could have foreseen the causal chain of perceptions and reactions born from a fear of indictment among those leading civilian massacres in each of these four countries. The learning curve is steep, and the ICC remains unwelcome in two of Africa’s most gruesome conflicts.

But from my experience in all four of these wars, I believe that subtracting the ICC from the equation of variables at play in each context would not diminish the cruelty or shorten its duration. Symbolic though it may now be, the fact that warlords and implicated government officials are investigated and held accountable by outside observers is a moral and legal dimension of the geopolitical kaleidoscope that did not exist four years ago. Reparations for victims may not be immediately forthcoming, but that suspected perpetrators in these otherwise forgotten crises understand that their deeds are documented and monitored is an essential first step in limiting the seemingly boundless human cruelty of such places.