by Alyssa Pelish

I.

“He brought out the five objects and studied them. The green strip of cloth. The code key. The ticket stub. The parcel receipt. The half poker chip. Strange, that little things like that could be important.”

—“Paycheck,” Philip K. Dick

If people know just one thing about Proust, it’s the madeleine. And why wouldn’t that be just exactly what catches in the popular imagination? Whether you read it yourself or hear of it secondhand, there’s a great deal of wish fulfillment in that scene: one small cookie[1] that seems to contain the entirety of a grown man’s childhood. The moment it occurs is marvelous. This is that famous moment, more cited than any other, when our narrator at last recognizes the taste of the tea-soaked madeleine as that of the morsels that his aunt would give him, and

immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea .[2]

“From my cup of tea.” The tea in which he’d dissolved the crumbs of that madeleine. That very small cookie. What impossible relief, that. To find that all is not lost – that, in fact, all has been neatly contained and preserved in a small object not a bit subject to the vicissitudes of one’s own moods and mental lapses. See it splendidly unfurl and bloom like a paper flower come alive in water.

Most people are concerned at least a little about remembering. This is largely why shops sell souvenirs and we snap photographs and save ticket stubs and keep diaries. Most people are at least a little bit worried about losing the past. Memory is messy; it’s most of the time hopelessly inexact and fragmented. It’s unreliable – if it’s there at all. So to be able to stash the whole of one’s experience in a small object, retrievable (as it was not even for Proust) at will, sounds very reassuring. It does to me, at least.

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by Akim Reinhardt

During the 1990s, there was much hand-wringing in some quarters at the prospect of America’s beautiful mosaic fracturing into an unworkable, divided society. Doomsayers fretted that Americans were no longer identifying themselves as, well, Americans first and foremost.

Critics claimed that identity politics were the culprit in this emerging crisis. That too many people’s allegiances, identities, and agendas were based on their membership in various sub-groups of ethnicity, gender, and/or class. None other than Arthur Schlesinger, an eminent American Historian and former adviser to President John Kennedy, complained that America was suffering from “too much pluribus and not enough unum.” Another term that became popular among critics was “hyphenated Americans,” a jab at those who were supposedly not content to simply be “American.”

Of course identity politics were nothing new to the United States. Indeed, the very term “hyphenated Americans” was first popularized by former President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1915 when he gave a Columbus Day speech in which he derided anyone, whether immigrant or nativist, who did not identify solely as American. “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American,” he decreed. “The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

The issue girding identity politics in Roosevelt’s time was foreign immigration. Immigrants had been washing over America’s shores by the millions for 35 years when TR gave his speech at a Knights of Columbus meeting in New York City, to an audience comprised mostly of Irish immigrants no less. But identity politics in American history go back much further than that.

Historians, though they don’t necessarily use the term in this context, are keenly aware that Andrew Jackson’s rise to the presidency came as he rode a wave of unprecedented identity politics. Although their candidate was a wealthy land speculator who owned a cotton plantation nearly two square miles in size and over 150 slaves, Jackson’s campaign presented him as an every man. They starkly contrasted him against and even mocked the well-heeled, blue blood elitism of his main rival, John Quincy Adams.

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by Kevin Baldwin

I've been told many of you stopped paying attention to much of anything after the 2010 midterm elections, so here's an update. The “shellacking” of the Democrats extended into 2012 and swept Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell into the oval office.

The real tipping point was peak oil, which was actually reached in early 2011, but couldn't be confirmed until just before the election. Saudi production fell off a cliff and nothing could replace it. Gasoline shot up to $5, $10, and then $15/gallon. The world suddenly seemed both smaller and larger at the same time.

A rehabilitated Ted Haggard (who since stepping down from his church in 2008, received a JD from Regent University) was nominated and confirmed to replace a retiring Chief Justice John Roberts just last year.

The financial meltdown that began in the waning months of the Bush II administration accelerated not unlike that of the Arctic ice cap, which is now a memory for much of the year. Inflation got so bad that dollars are now either burned to generate heat in the winter or are stitched together to make fabric. “New Madras” as it is called was created by an Indian fashion designer as kind of a post-post-modern joke, but became a legitimate staple of the clothing industry almost overnight, being both colorful and breathable.

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by Kelly Amis

Early in Davis Guggenheim’s education documentary “Waiting for Superman,” star Geoffrey Canada explains the title’s origin: as a child, Canada was devastated to learn that Superman didn’t exist, because who else would come save his troubled South Bronx neighborhood?

Today, Canada embodies a real-life version of the superhero he longed for, at least for several thousand families in New York City. Canada has embraced an entire community—100 blocks in Harlem—with a multifaceted effort to break the cycles of illiteracy, poverty and crime that have ravaged lives there for decades, including and especially by ensuring that every child receives a rigorous education. The results, so far, have been tremendous.

Success stories like this make me cry, but another story Canada relates in “Superman” made me laugh out loud (in a very quiet theater).

Once he became an adult, Canada explains, he decided to go study what was wrong with the public education system so he “could fix it.” After earning a master’s degree from Harvard, he figured this would take “two, maybe three years.” That was 35 years ago.

I didn’t laugh because this overreached; I laughed because I had thought the exact same thing when I first started working in education reform, in my case, about 20 years ago.

During my senior year in college, posters announcing a new program suddenly appeared everywhere on campus. Created by a twenty-two year-old named Wendy Kopp, Teach for America would send recent college grads into “under-resourced” American public schools to teach for two years, following the Peace Corps model. This struck me as the perfect way to give something back for the privileged educational opportunities I had enjoyed.

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by David Schneider

He'd disappeared. I searched and searched –– nothing but null sets. For the past four days, around the clock, he'd been beaming the news, minute by minute, from Cairo. But Tuesday morning, a vast silence on FaceBook. He'd ceased to exist. They'd just released Wael Ghonim; did they nail my friend Ahmed instead? He was a democrat, a revolutionary; a journalist, a broadcaster, an educator, a link between Arabic and English, a link between Egypt and America, someone I knew. I sent up the flares, waiting. We'd only just met, I thought, and now he's gone.

Where did they take him?

•••

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Two of the most famous suicide sites in the world are the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay and the Aokighara Forest in Japan. Both have been the topic of documentaries: The Bridge and Aokigahara – Suicide Forest.

Eric Steel, director of The Bridge sought a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge, without divulging his real purpose which was to capture suicides. He later managed to capture 23 of the 24 suicides that happened within his yearlong watch. He went on to interview families of the victims, in an attempt to understand their lives before jumping off the bridge. In another controversial move, he didn’t disclose that the suicides had been captured on film.

Aokigahara – Suicide Forest follows geologist Azusa Hayano on a regular suicide watch. He finds an abandoned car near the forest and notes how someone could have gone in there ‘with troubled thoughts’. During his trek, he talks about the history of the place, the men and women who come to hang themselves. He finds a skeleton which he deems to be at least a year old, traces of a human life—food wrappers, crushed soda cans, flowers and food left by relatives and a man in a tent, apparently contemplating suicide.

“I was curious why people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest,” Hazano muses.

Both documentaries try to answer this question, as to why especially vulnerable people are lured to come to these places to commit suicide. The families of the victims in The Bridge speak of problems they have observed, of their loved ones feeling alienated from the world. They try to understand, and bring forth stories, anecdotes, memories. Sometimes their eyes brim with tears. In Aokigahara Forest, Hayano shifts from theorizing about the state of society which leads to annihilation to saying he doesn’t quite get it at all.

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by Sarah Firisen

“Facebook 2, Arab leaders 0”, read a sign held by an Egyptian woman on Friday as the celebrations erupted in Tahir Square. In a sharply ironic turn of events, it seems that American software companies may have done more to bring about regime change in the Middle East than all the trillions of dollars poured into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the resulting deaths and casualties. There does seem to be no doubt that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had a significant role to play in giving a voice to the democracy-seeking citizens of Egypt & Tunisia and helping them to create a community of international supporters. If there ever is a judgement day, surely Mark Zuckerberg’s sins of inflicting Farmville and Mafia Wars on the world will be more than outweighed by the events of the last month of so.

And this makes me wonder, will people now stop saying that they don’t see the point of social media and that it’s an absurd waste of time? Of course, many of the things that people choose to spend their time doing on social media – see above comments re: Farmville and Mafia Wars – may not be the most productive things they could be doing. But, the same is true for almost everything; the fact that some people spend their time reading Harlequin romances, doesn’t negate the value of reading in general.

Whether its Second Life, Twitter, Facebook or a plethora of other offerings, there are many worthwhile, often beneficial uses of social media: disease support groups, public awareness campaigns, news feeds, educational programs, and more. Yes, there are an awful lot of videos of cats dancing on YouTube, but YouTube has also become a vital means of communication in and out of Tunisia and Egypt.

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3 Quarks Daily asked a number of scholars, academics, journalists, writers and others to give us brief reactions to the recent events in Egypt. Their responses are given below in the order in which they were received:

• Akeel Bilgrami
• Mohsin Hamid
• Mark Blyth
• Frans de Waal
• Pablo Policzer
• Ejaz Haider
• Mona El-Ghobashy
• Gerald Dworkin
• Ram Manikkalingam
• Jonathan Kramnick
• Amitava Kumar
• Alexander Cooley
• Suketu Mehta
• Justin E. H. Smith

Akeel Bilgrami:

It is far too early to write with any prognostic depth about the spontaneous and ongoing democratic movement in Egypt. But two immediate observations: First, it is interesting to see American pundits on television, despite their pious support for 'democracy', uniformly expressing a subdued anxiety about what worse and chaotic things might befall Egypt now. These very same pundits expressed no such anxiety about worse and more chaotic periods to follow the regime change that came with the American bombing and slaughter in Baghdad, Fallujah…. And second, it seems at the moment that the best thing for Egypt is for this popular movement to prolong itself on the streets for a measurably long time since real political deliberation and genuinely public education occurs (whether in democracies or in dictatorships) only on the site of popular movements, not hugger-mugger in round table negotiations and conferences among leaders and advisers, not in universities, not in the widely read or viewed media, not in editorials…. Even in a democracy like the United States, people got educated into civil rights on the site of popular movements through the sixties, not by the classroom and editorial commonplaces about 'racial equality'.

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Mohsin Hamid:

It's still possible that the old regime will find a way to cling on in Egypt, that the army will find a new front man. But what is clear is that beneath the ossified surface of the US-backed dictatorships and monarchies that span the Middle East, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and from Jordan to Yemen, something profoundly different is waiting to be born. Turkey and Indonesia may already offer us a glimpse of that possible future: a future of modern, moderate, independent-minded democracies, pursuing their own interests, and no longer obsessively shaped by security concerns. If Egypt can do it, then maybe one day Saudi Arabia can follow, and if that happens, so much that is wrong in Muslim-majority countries today, so much that is inegalitarian, sectarian, and stifling, has the potential to be put right. Here, in Pakistan, such a possibility gives me much-needed hope.

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

The plane shudders and groans, forcing me to look up. The rumble of the cabin has passed clear through my body, rattling my stomach. I give up trying to read, or even to think, allowing myself to acknowledge the inchoate signals emanating from deep in my bowels, rising up through layers of nervous networks up into the swirling bowl of consciousness that I carry around with me wherever I go. Yes, I hear you, I tell my mind-body, I hear you. No more cognitive demands — iPad off, eyes closed — let's breath deeply, unclench, and we’ll just ride this thing out.

The aerial maneuvers finally end, and the low rise of Nagpur city’s buildings begin to take shape. The airport is likely to be quite near the rest of the city, I imagine. The conference guys will be there with a sign, I’ll grab my luggage and soon we’ll be off and away. Still, something is happening inside of me that needs my attention. Am I just queasy from the hard flying? Is this maybe a fart? Or is this something more insistent? More certain of its peristaltic beat and rhythm, due to arrive, right on time, this Saturday morning at seven-thirty, as on every other good day? A lot rides on this, and I have to listen carefully to what my mind-body is saying.

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by Vivek Menezes

Our first glimpse of Lou Majaw comes just outside the Guwahati airport – his face is building-sized, emblazoned high above the multi-lane expressway to Meghalaya, on an advertisement for Star Cement. These billboards turn out to be ubiquitous along our route. By the time we’ve wound our way up from the Brahmaputra floodplains into the cloud-wreathed Khasi hills, the legendary rocker of the North-East seems a reassuringly familiar fixture of the landscape, even the toddler in our midst chortling with glee every time his flowing silver hair looms up ahead, instantly recognizable even in the fading light that slowly obliterates the thick pine forests that line the steep, curving road to Shillong.

But when we set out to find him the very next morning, the man seems as elusive as the fast-rising mists that are a permanent fixture of life in his hometown. We knew that Lou Majaw doesn’t go on the Internet, but now we learn that he doesn’t have a permanent contact number, or even a particularly fixed address. Then we discover that you can’t buy a copy of any of his albums in any of the music stores in Shillong either.

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by Namit Arora

On English in India and the linguistic hierarchies of colonized minds

(NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)

The modern era of European colonialism began in the Americas with bands of adventurers seeking El Dorado. Their early intrusions evolved into predatory monopolies like the East India Company and European states exerting direct control over the economic and political life of the colonies. The natives tended to not welcome and cooperate with the intruders, so alongside came great developments in the art of subjugating the natives, through military, political, and cultural means. In this essay, I’ll look at some cultural means of controlling the natives, particularly through language, and its effect on the psyche of the colonized, using examples from Africa and India.

When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, writes Ngugi, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method, explains Ngugi, is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Simply make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. This has been the way of the great colonialists of history, such as the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, and the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,

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by Michael Blim

With each stone thrown, each Molotov cocktail hurled from one side of Cairo’s Liberation Square to another, an Egyptian revolution appears being thrown further away. The Square is a symbolic space, first occupied by people envisioning revolutionary change, and now made a marker in a game of competition among elites for governance. The state is secure. No one has yet set upon storming Cairo’s Winter Palace. No one in the popular movements against the state has set upon taking the state.

It is puzzling. What are the immediate reasons? Perhaps all of the candidate revolutionary state-takers are dead or among the 17,000 political prisoners of the regime. Not to be under-estimated is the 59-year military rule and two generations of stop and go mixes of cooptation and repression. The figure of Omar Suleiman, the torturer, the renditioner, the Israel interlocutor, says much about the center of things in Egypt today. The sheer corruption of Egyptian state power scars his face. He is no Kerensky; he is evil incarnate.

Perhaps Egypt is better off without a Lenin. In any event, it does not have one. Must it forego revolution as well?

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by Rishidev Chaudhury

Five years ago I spent six months working on a farm about an hour outside Bangalore. To get to it I took a city bus thirty miles along the highway to a dusty crossing where it turned onto dirt roads and bounced along them for about twenty minutes before ending in the centre of a small village called Mukodlu. As we left the city behind, the occupants of the bus changed from office staff to farm workers, and eventually included goats and chickens. I once witnessed a heated altercation between the bus conductor and the owner of a goat that was soiling the bus floor. It was eventually resolved when the owner held the goat’s bottom out of the window for the rest of the journey.

The farm was only a few miles off the highway but was also only a few miles away from a game sanctuary. Twenty years ago, when Bangalore was just starting to grow, the area was entirely rural. Now it was an odd hybrid of small villages, smaller farms, urban overflow, the game sanctuary and numerous granite quarries (many of them illegal). Perhaps it was once good for farming, but now the soil was thin, stony and eroded. We grew rice, vegetables and herbs, and had a small shed for breeding silkworms. The farm also hosted an NGO that ran workshops on governance for women from village-level self-governance bodies (Panchayats) and workshops on low-cost herbal medicine for midwives and other community healers.

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