by Ruth Crossman

The first round in the French presidential election is less than a week away, and the top contenders are still running hard. The neo-Gaullist Interior Minister Sarkozy enjoys a commanding lead in the polls, but the fate of Socialist Ségolène Royal is less certain; she has spent the last several months trailing behind third-party candidate François Bayrou in the polls. Bayrou’s performance was been the surprise of the campaign season. The self styled outsider and Third Way maven has superseded the radical populist Jean-Marie Le Pen as the official ‘Third Man’ of French politics. But the question is whether voters truly prefer Bayrou’s policies, or if they have simply bought into his packaging.

Bayrou comes from the center-right UDF (Union for the Defense of France,) the faction associated with the liberal policies of former President Valery Giscard D’Estaing, in opposition to the RPR (Rally for the Republic,) the party of neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac. The relationship between the two parties is been complex. In general, they compete during presidential elections and ally during legislative elections. The RPR was dissolved in 2002 (after the indictment of party leaders on corruption charges) and replaced by the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), which was established as an electoral vehicle for Chirac, before succumbing to a friendly takeover at the hands of his former protégé, Nicolas Sarkozy. Bayrou, who garnered only 6% of the vote in 2002, has used the ascension of Sarkozy to reinvent himself. Historically, one of the defining splits between the UDF and the Gaullists was the economic role of the state. But Sarkozy has completely effaced this cleavage by running on a platform of aggressive neo-liberalism. This has allowed Bayrou to run to his left, positioning himself as a ‘Third Way’ candidate in the mold of Clinton and Blair. By promoting economic reform coupled with continuing social protection, Bayrou attracts those (and there are many) who feel that Sarkozy is too extreme.

Given the historical rivalry between the UDF and the RPR, Sarkozy’s loss of support to Bayrou is understandable. What is more remarkable, and more telling, is the level of defection from the left. On February 22 the left-leaning newspaper Libération carried an endorsement of Bayrou penned by 30 high ranking Socialist functionaries. Even schoolteachers, who have historically been a bed rock of support for the Socialists, are now split, with 45% supporting Bayrou. Royal now faces the possibility of being the second Socialist candidate in a row to be eliminated in the first round.

The general consensus in the French media is that Royal ran her campaign badly. It is true that she has made several gaffes (such as calling for Québécois independence during a visit to Canada,) and has suffered from her association with Socialist “elephants” such as Jack Lang and Lionel Jospin. But many of her problems are actually structural. Politics in France have undergone a series of realignments, and the ‘Old Left’ has become more and more irrelevant. The Socialist Party itself is becoming increasingly fractured over questions of economic policy, and the presidential campaign only highlighted the lack of party unity. In February, Party Secretary Eric Bésson resigned his post after a public dispute with Royal over the cost of her social proposals. Royal refuses to discuss specific figures, a strategy which has only deepened the public’s suspicion that she is either economically irresponsible or politically disingenuous. At this point in time, hard core leftists are likely to opt for smaller and more extreme parties in the first round (as they did in 2002), while moderates are increasingly likely to support Bayrou. If it continues to bleed votes from the left and the right, the Socialist Party will be doomed.

It is still unclear what Bayrou’s popularity signifies. Are the French finally willing to quit treating ‘liberalism’ like a dirty word? Does Bayrou’s promise of a balanced budget carry more weight than Sarkozy’s nationalism and Royal’s appeal to equality? If Bayrou defeats Sarkozy in the second round, a scenario which is becoming increasingly likely, will the government finally be able to carry out economic reforms without triggering protests? Or is Bayrou merely a highly polished and processed protest candidate?

Environmentalists have been writing apocalyptic books for decades, but in recent years, more mainstream figures have written about the possible decline of current civilization. Jared Diamond’s Collapse concentrates on environmental pressure; Jane Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead (largely motivated by the same work as Collapse—Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) is more economic. Yet other works moralize about the fact that Western civilization may be heading the way of Islamic and Chinese civilizations in the late Middle Ages.

When you come right down to it, the main issues are not overarching narratives about population pressure or economics, but concrete social problems. Not coincidentally, Jacobs and Diamond, who proceed from almost diametrically opposite approaches, end up talking about very similar pathologies in American society: specific failures of government responsibility, failure to adapt to changing conditions, bad economic planning.

Jacobs starts by listing five problems in American society, corresponding to the erosion of five basic pillars: family/community, higher education, science, governmental responsiveness, and self-regulation of expert organizations. As it turns out, none of the five is really the problem. Rather, Jacobs applies her work on cities and economic growth to all of those factors. For example, when talking about the decline of the family and of communities, she never goes into any of the problems mentioned in any number of books moralizing about the future of the American family; instead, she writes about how car culture constricts economic development.

When talking about higher education, she identifies the problem as one of “credentialing versus educating”—that is, university education is more about getting a degree than about learning. That in itself, she says, is really just a problem of flooding universities with people who aren’t serious about learning, partly because of the GI Bill. Her complaint about science is that engineers and social planners aren’t practicing it seriously, so for example traffic controllers talk about road closures by analogizing them to blocking the flow of water rather than by gathering real-world evidence. Her complaint about governmental responsiveness boils down to mistreatment of city resources. And her comments about self-regulation are most applicable to Enron.

So in fact, what she says is that the United States has a large supply of incompetence, greed, corruption, and bad government. Essentially, that’s exactly what Diamond says. Collapse is largely about why societies decline—they can fail to adapt to changing climate conditions, or deplete their natural resources, or promote decision-making procedures that encourage the elites to ignore the people, or increase their population beyond what is sustainable—but Diamond can’t resist concluding by evaluating the United States and the world based on the same criteria. Globally, he talks about environmental damage in the standard terms that are climate change, habitat loss, overpopulation, and so on. But within the US, the social problems he identifies are almost the exact same ones Jacobs’ boil down to. For example, when talking about the way the American upper class segregates itself into gated communities he is basically repeating Jacobs’ points about self-regulation and responsiveness.

Now, you could make a convincing case that the US is indeed in decline. But such a case would necessarily have to involve new problems, rather than problems that didn’t prevent the country from keeping ascending in the robber baron era and that it ultimately weathered in the 1970s. For example, take a recent example neither Jacobs nor Diamond uses: the breakdown of public health in the US, exemplified by the e. coli outbreak in US spinach products. That indicates that the US is falling behind the rest of the world, even regressing to third-world status (in the normal sense of lack of social and economic progress, as in Delhi, rather than in Jacobs’ sense of economic passivity, as in rural areas everywhere), but not that it’s about to collapse or go into a dark age.

A distressing number of the books I’ve looked at try to interpret decade-long trends in modern times in terms of centuries-long ones in history. To some extent it makes sense, insofar as things are happening a lot more quickly lately than they used to. But still, a trend isn’t something that happens on a ten-year scale—at least, not on a scale that determines a civilization’s fate. Between 1500 and 1800, China clearly fell behind Europe, in a gradual process that bears little to no resemblance to what Jacobs and Diamond describe. It just happened that technological advancements helped Europe more, and in the very long run, Europe’s fractured political system and inhospitable environment proved more conducive to growth than China’s unified government and good climate.

I tend to have little trust in people who extrapolate from short-term trends. A good system of predicting civilizations’ fates should at least be good enough to, for a start, retrodict the Soviet Union’s collapse. And yet so far I haven’t seen anyone tackle what must be the greatest failure of the modern prophets.

Look, no matter whether you are religious or an atheist or some other thing, no matter what you believe, I expect you’ll agree with me about the importance of this question: why do so many people believe the wrong thing? The reason I can be fairly sure that this is a question which has deep meaning for you, as well as for me, is that none of even the religions with the greatest number of adherents (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) comprises anything even close to a majority of the world’s human beings (and atheists, of course, are no more than a drop in the bucket of humanity). So, as long as you have some sense of curiosity about other humans, you probably wonder why most people don’t share your correct beliefs. (And this is not even to take into account the many rifts within each religion: Catholic v. Protestant, Shia v. Sunni, etc.) Atheists and the faithful are alike in this: they all hope, sometimes rather desperately, that one day everyone will share their own salutary views. But we’ll come back to this question a little later.

Today, I would just like to set down a few loosely related observations about the debates that have recently raged around the publication of several very high-profile books attacking religion. The most prominent of these have been Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, as well as his Letter to a Christian Nation. (Yes, I’ve read all of them.) What has been remarkable to me is the degree of harshness of the polemic that has been directed at these books by eminent intellectuals as well as journalists and laypeople. Many of these criticisms seem to me to fall roughly into three broad categories, each of which I’d like to examine a little more below:

1. These views of religion themselves exhibit a sort of fervid faith (in rationality, in science, etc.).
2. These are theologically naive views of religion from individuals unqualified to examine it.
3. These views of religion miss the important political underpinnings of recent religious resurgence.

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Rationality as a Sort of Religion

This is perhaps the least damaging of the objections but, not only is it very common, it betrays a very basic philosophical confusion endemic to our postmodern era which I want to try and dispel here. But, first, a quick example of what I am talking about taken from the comments section of a post right here on 3QD about the Harris/Sullivan debate on religion:

…there are several unexamined “faiths” at the bottom of Harris’s rationalism. That the world is rational, for one thing. That ontology and epistemology overlap. That all that is “real” is material, and vice versa. That a thing can be known from the sum of its parts. And many more.

Reason works very well once it has been lifted up to a functional level by foundational assumptions. To attribute the “rationalist” perspective to someone like Harris, allows us to make these assumptions transparent, which goes a long way toward making someone like Andrew Sullivan look awfully silly. It’s a charlatan’s game, and we shouldn’t fall for it.

–Deets, April 5, 2007

Here’s the foundational problem that Deets brings up, stated simply: there is no neutral perspective from which science or even rationality itself can be defended or deemed superior to anything else. This is uninterestingly and tautologically true (but leads to much mischief!), as one must be scientific, or at least rational, to show anything at all. In other words, it is not possible to convince anyone of the truth of anything, unless they share certain background beliefs. This means that if someone tells you that AIDS is caused, not by the HIV virus, but by evil spirits whom we must appease by ritually sacrificing cats, for example, there is no way to convince them otherwise without using science, and presumably, a belief in the overall correctness of the scientific method is not something that one shares with one’s interlocutor in this case. So Deets is technically correct in pointing out the “foundational assumptions” here, but there is no need for the sophomoric conclusion that this makes Harris’s arguments a “charlatan’s game.” Indeed, Deets’s line of reasoning could be used to make any- and everything a charlatan’s game. The Earth is not flat, but round, I say. Nope, says Deets, this requires an unwarranted assumption of scientific method. Potassium cyanide is a poison, I say. Maybe, maybe not, says Deets. Sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt, say I. I don’t think so, says Deets. I nervously ask, does the sun rise in the east? Says Deets (and I ain’t makin’ this up!):

As you well know, the sun only “rises” in the “East” … from a particular perspective, which our culture long ago rejected as illusory. There is no East, and there is no rising.

–Deets, April 6, 2007

What can one say to Deets? Nothing. One can’t say anything because if Deets is responding in this way, then one does not share enough beliefs with Deets to make communication with him (or her) possible. After all, even just using language to communicate requires that the other agree on what “sodium” is, what “chlorine” is, and even what “is” is. Presuming that we agree on what all these things are, I could try to show Deets that I can repeatedly bring sodium and chlorine together and reliably end up with salt, but that would assume that Deets is impressed with the scientific method, an assumption which I am not allowed to make. (Of course, context is always important to meaning, and therefore to truth, so of course there are contexts in which “The Earth is flat” will be true and others where “The Earth is round” will seem a gross over-simplification or false, which is why there is always an element of good faith in communication.) There is really no point in having such a conversation. There is, literally, nothing one could say. (Okay, I apologize to the real-life Deets for turning him/her into a bit of a caricature for the purposes of my argument, but this really is the outcome of his/her line of thinking.)

The good news is that as human beings we share a huge set of background experiences and beliefs that do make communication possible, and we do agree on many things, and most of us can talk to each other. Even Deets actually has rationality in plentiful supply in his (or her) comments, and carefully follows accepted lines of reasoning in constructing clever arguments. Technical and foundational issues in epistemology or even ontology needn’t keep us from making everyday judgments of truth about all sorts of matters, including whether, say, smoking is bad for one’s health, or whether HIV causes AIDS or evil cat-loving (or hating?) spirits do. (One of the things that human beings all over the planet agree on to a remarkable degree, is science itself. It is a truly shocking–and pleasing–thing to me, that for the most part, scientists in Japan, Malawi, Pakistan, Sweden and Indonesia essentially agree on a huge volume of knowledge and even the methods by which it is produced.) So what is the point of debate about anything, you might ask. It is this: what our project becomes, at least with those people with whom we share a basic understanding of logic and enough background beliefs about the world to be able to assert things like “sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt” and have them assent, is an attempt to convince them of something by getting them to be coherent about their beliefs. So if someone says “I agree that sodium and chlorine combine to form salt, but I don’t believe that hydrogen and oxygen gases can be combined to produce water,” I can perhaps try to show that the same beliefs this person shares with me which lead her to believe that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, also entail that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce water. In other words, all of us share so large a number of beliefs, that it is not possible to be aware of all the logically possible statements that they entail, so the purpose of argument and debate is (often) to show someone that they are holding contradictory beliefs, one of which should be given up; this is how, despite Deets’s reservations, it is possible to have useful discussion.

You might by now have lost track of what this has to do with the “rationality as a sort of religion” objection. What I’ve tried to explain is that while it is logically true that certain assumptions of rationality or even agreement with the methods of science, etc., need to be made, these are not unreasonable assumptions. It is perfectly legitimate of Harris or Dawkins or Dennett to make an argument of the following sort to a religious person, “Since you agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, and you agree that X, and you agree that Y, and you agree that Z, … and you agree that such and such is a good method of deciding these things, and this thing, and that thing, and… then you should also agree that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old.” What if they don’t agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, or even that the sun rises in the east? In that case, yes, there isn’t much to say.

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Theologically Naive Examinations of Religion

This, for some reason, is the objection most dear to the more sophisticated critics of Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris. There are two related ideas here: there is the standard cheap-shot of “What made X an expert in Y?” (As if only astrologists should ever be allowed to judge the claims of astrology!) And then there is the more credible, at least at first blush, idea that important and serious theological ideas and arguments have been completely ignored by these writers. Once again, first some examples. Here’s the very first paragraph of renowned Marxist-and-psychoanalytic-literary-theorist Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins (gently entitled “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching“) in the London Review of Books:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Much of the Eagleton review continues in this vein, getting more hysterical, if anything:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?

And this is H. Allen Orr, also reviewing Dawkins, in the New York Review of Books:

…The God Delusion [is] a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).

These gentlemen do protest far too much, but before I get to them let me say another thing: the problem with arguing with a religious person, say a Christian, or to be even more specific, say a Catholic, is that you have no idea what she actually believes. If I tell you that I believe science is correct, you can be pretty sure about a lot of my very detailed beliefs. You can be sure, just to beat this example to death, that I believe that sodium and chlorine can combine to form table salt. You know that I believe that the Earth is close to four billion years old, that the sun is a star, etc., etc. You can be fairly certain that I don’t pick and choose my beliefs in some arbitrary fashion: “Yes, sodium is real, but uranium is just a figure of speech!” On the contrary, as soon as one begins to corner a religious person about one of their more egregiously silly beliefs, they weasel out with some version of “Oh, but I don’t take that literally!” Transubstantiation may be literally true to some, and only a metaphor to other Catholics. Same with pretty much everything, so it is just not possible to examine every way to conceptualize even just the concept of God, which is just one of the things that theology has spent centuries doing. Religious concepts tend to be slippery as they need not cohere even with each other, much less experience, or dare-I-say-it, reality. The constraints (if any) on how one conceptualizes God, or the afterlife, or hell, or sin, are very loose. No one can be expected to argue with every single one of these conceptions that an army of theologians may have produced over millenia.

But maybe they have produced some particularly significant arguments or ideas worth grappling with. Yeah, sure, maybe they have. What are they? It is remarkable that for all the times this objection, that writers such as Dennett and Dawkins and Harris are ignoring sophisticated theologians, is raised, not a single actual idea or argument due to these theologians is ever mentioned. Why not just say, Mr. Eagleton, what exactly in Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Eriugena, Rahner, and Moltmann refutes Dawkins’s arguments? Unless this is an empty and desperate display of erudition, why not bring up how these subtle examinations of grace and hope might confute Dawkins? Orr can scarcely believe that Dawkins has written a whole book about religion without bringing up William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example. Well, Professor Orr, he chose not to, but you are certainly free to show us how James and Wittgenstein weaken Dawkins’s case. Why don’t you? No, really, just think about it: suppose you are trying to argue that astrology is nonsense, and someone keeps piping up that you haven’t read this or that work by this or that astrologer (especially if there are millenia worth of output from “astrologians”). What will you say? I would say, you bring it up. Show me how what someone wrote weakens my case.

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It’s All About the Politics, Stupid

Actually, this is the only objection to Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris to which I am at least somewhat sympathetic. Roughly, it is really a set of related ideas which go something like this:

1. I am smart and well-educated enough to know what you are trying to tell me about religion.
2. Only people like me will read your book, and you are not telling us anything new, so at the least, your book is boring.
3. The only reason you have written this book now, is that many in the West are fearful of a resurgence of a highly politicized, dangerous, terroristic, and fundamentalist Islam and the infamously imminent “clash of civilizations”, and this is therefore an opportune time to attack religion in general and sell books.
4. Your examination of religion ignores the victory in the West of an economic system which has resulted in such a skewed distribution of not only wealth, but even opportunity for education, access to healthcare, etc., that to ease their noisy lives of desperation, more and more people turn for solace to religion.
5. And similarly, your focus on the violent and evil acts of a minority of religious extremists, for example, in the Islamic world, with no mention of the systematic political and economic violence done to their societies in the name of strategic considerations, oil, spreading the shining light of democracy, etc., allows your readers (at least the less religious ones) in the West to ignore these latter political considerations and blame everything bad happening in, for example, the middle-east, on the evil irrationality of religion. [This doesn’t apply only to the middle-east or Islam, but anywhere there is religious conflict. The idea is that even if religion were to disappear, there are underlying political injustices that would need to be addressed, and too great a focus on religion allows us to ignore these.]

I do not agree with items 1, 2, or 3 of this list, but feel that there is something to the last two. The first step is wrong because there is much new material in these books (more on that below), and there are new ways of thinking about familiar problems. The second step is clearly not true, as the books have been on best-seller lists and it is clear that a lot of religious people have read them, to their benefit (even if not with full agreement) I am sure. The third step is just silliness, and anytime is a good time to fight irrationality! As for steps four and five, although one cannot dictate to people what their books should be about, given the demographics of religion (at least in America) and the overall salience of religion in the current geopolitical mess, one wishes that these authors would have had something to say about the factors that have produced a resurgence of such hypocrisies as evangelical Christianity, such odious forms of faith as jihadist-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam, etc., or at the very least acknowledged that religion does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped and exploited in reaction to political and other realities. Their not addressing this at all leaves one with the uneasy feeling that an elephant in the room has been ignored.

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So, we come back now to the question with which I started these brief observations: why are so many people wrong? We tend to agree with humans everywhere about most things, after all. This is not just true in the realm of knowledge (because of which science is the same everywhere, as I mentioned earlier), but the other two classical realms as well: the moral and the aesthetic. Leaving religion aside, we find the same things morally repugnant: incest, murder, rape, dishonesty, theft, etc., and we even find the same things beautiful: sunsets, poetry, music, Angelina Jolie, whatever. Why then is religion the exception? Well, because religion can be seen as just one more phenomenon in the natural world, this, I believe, is properly a scientific question, and the greatest value of the books I have been discussing has, at least for me, been to present new scientific work in anthropology, in psychology, in neuroscience, and many other fields, which bears on this question and is suggestive of possible answers. I wrote a short account giving a flavor of some of these developments here, if you are interested.

My previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

UPDATE: In all fairness to Deets, he has a post at his own blog about his views on all this here.

It’s often best to reflect on certain issues once the storm is over and the dust has settled. I’m going to try it on the recent events surrounding two dictators and their dictatorships, much in the news recently: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Both have much in common. Nothing perhaps more significant than the hope and optimism the two generated for their people on coming to power. Mugabe overthrew the colonial British, while Musharraf overthrew the colonial locals (corrupt, decadent, feudal democrats). Both promised freedom and development to their nations. Both glowed and basked in the glory of their place in the sun, until things began to unravel. And with no checks and balances on their power, the unraveling took on a more dangerous form. And their lies the danger of absolute power, never mind the benevolent smokescreen.

Governance is a difficut art and often even the best tend to come up short. Dictators are no different. Except that we can’t change them. Dictators tend to be liberal as long as you agree with them. Any serious opposition, and they tend to want to crush it, never mind the democratic intent. Mugabe hasn’t turned violent or suppressive recently vividly depicted by the press photographs of the battered face of Morgan Tsvangirai. He crushed a revolt by the Ndebele speaking people of Matabeleland way back in the 1980s. Musharraf too has gone about ruthlessly suppressing regional opposition, most famously in the state ordered assassination of prominent Baloch leader Nawab Bugti.

Freedom of the press, or other institutions of the state, like the judiciary for instance, is another sham in these regimes. Freedom is about the same as for an animal in a zoo, okay in confined spaces. Mugabe feels free to expel, intimidate or even kill the press reporters he doesn’t fancy. Musharraf while not so bad (but then he’s been around for less time), too doesnt think highly of independent opinion. The Chief Justice of Pakistan recently found out the hard way, earning the sack for questioning the military regime on its human rights record. The media which backed the judge saw their offices vandalised, and freedom clamped down upon. One of the more subtle methods being the slow withdrawal of government advertisements from prominent anti-government newspapers, thus choking their resources. The state can also put pressure on other private actors like industrialists to follow their No-Ad byline in such a system.

Oh, and lets not forget the false enemies, the straw men which keep the likes of Mugabe and Musharraf going, well past their ‘best before’ dates. It would be the ‘white man’ or the long gone British for Mugabe, or India and its intentions to nuke Pakistan, for Musharraf. The trouble is that they ignore the trouble within, and deflect attention towards the irrelevant. Yet, some people buy it, I wonder why?! Or maybe it isn’t such a wonder. Its just simple self-interest. Those small groups who profit from the regime within the country are collaborators, and the rest suffer from the age old problem of collective action: who’s going to organise them cohesively? Important actors outside the country are relevant too. Powerful countries back these regimes for their own self-interest. Nigeria and South Africa continue to prop up Mugabe fearing an improbable but possible backlash on their domestic politics, while the US and the West does it with Pakistan, allegedly fighting terror together, more likely like dosuing a fire with oil and then fighting it with more fire. The rest, like in the UN are vetoed, and some like in teh Commonwealth are simply impotent.

So the regimes survive and prosper as the people suffer. Yet the dictator’s unshakable belief in themselves ( hubris if you ask me) to be seen as the ‘true democrats’ doesn’t seem to blinker. The only instrument to prove the point seems to be a sham election ,or a ridiculous referendum, which give people no real choices, either because their is no opposition (or they have tapes on their mouths), or because the questions are so cleverly phrased (in referendums) that they have only two answers: yes and yes!

So don’t ever be fooled by a dictator because he’ll get you by the throat later, if not sooner. It’s only a matter of time before the whole edifice of state begins to crumble. It has already happened in Zimbabwe. One feels that it may be a matter of time in Pakistan.

The only rays of hope: civil society groups. Let’s everyone back the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who have taken the lead in calling for free and fair elections in that country (or alternatively for the incumbent regime to face a mass revolt). Let’s everyone back the lawyers of Pakistan who have taken to the streets demanding greater freedom and accountability for the judiciary and for the rest of the country, from the military regime in Pakistan. A utopian hope probably. They should actually demand that the military return to the barracks or that the people will push them there.

It isn’t all wishful thinking. Nepal has rid itself of an autocratic and dictatorial king through a popular uprising. Ukraine had its Orange Revolution. Georgia had its own Rose revolution. The people must rise, and they must be backed politically across the globe, to restore democracy. Despite its many flaws, it is still the best political system. And despite their many mirages, dicatorships are really an unending desert of hopelessness.

It’s time everyone recognised that. Don’t even spare a second to praise Mugabe, Musharraf, and the like. You give them a hand, they will take your arm, then your limbs, and then everything.

“Going home. Going home. I’m a-going home.
Quiet-like some still day, I’m just going home.

Mother’s there expecting me, Father’s waiting, too.
Lot’s of folks gathered there. All the friends I knew.”

Paul Robeson. The voice was unmistakable. Light snow falling. The comfort of Chicago’s last classical music station waking me at dawn. I was home.

Dad’s stroke, Mom’s dementia, my uncle’s depression. My father, his sister, and my mother’s recently widowed sister the last of this local life’s combatants. The battle continues.

Little houses, little blocks, now pockmarked every seventh house by makeovers and  tear-downs. Still, sixty years later, the plan-book Cape Cods and Georgians, ours now shorn of its two elm trees, form a distinctive neighborhood, gridded with street names like Elm, Memory Lane, and Maple.  All thanks to the GI Bill.

Our house was a Cape Cod with 740 square feet and an unfinished second floor. My father and his father, my grandfather, finished off the upstairs by themselves, only calling in a plasterer who was a fellow Knight of Columbus with my grandfather and the official plasterer for the Archdiocese. We were small potatoes for the plasterer, but he had it done by his men on a Saturday as a favor to my grandfather. 

It was a working-class neighborhood, neat, tidy, and lawn-conscious, but a far cry from the ranches and bi-levels by the country club across the tracks. The men, bricklayers, pressmen, mechanics, telephone linemen, factory foremen, and the occasional drummer, had good jobs, union jobs, but were seldom home. Mr. Hoffman was a traveling salesman for A.B. Dick, the grand dispenser of the mimeograph machine. He turned off most of the other men with his bragging.

My father’s father was a lawyer who had profited from the first suburban expansion after World War I. Attorney for a small town and its only bank, he made a lot of money and drove a Pierce Arrow. But he got mixed up with a Republican governor who went to jail, and crash-landed financially in the Depression. Grandpa was a textbook case of downward mobility, working as a foreman in a defense plant during the second war. But my mother’s parents treated him with deference, as they were working class and considered him middle-class, great fall or no.

My father couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do. With the GI Bill, he tried dental school and law school, and finally found himself writing service orders in a city Buick agency. We had nice cars, always white and with those three holes below the hood, that were probably financed by the dealer at insider rates, as my father’s $100 a week salary wouldn’t have enabled him such largesse.

After working sales for a family-run oil company on Chicago’s south side, he set out on his own, selling insurance out of the house and getting into used car sales on Chicago’s Western Avenue, where the competition quickly pushed him out. He went into car repair with a man named Norm, whom he often called Father. Some years later, their second garage burned down. Dad fled into teaching, first shop and then worked his way up to college counseling as he acquired more degrees, mostly through night school. He became a civil servant, in effect, a state employee, and never looked back, though he did continue to sell Christmas trees every year outside the third garage where and his partner had worked. Until he became a teacher, he didn’t want the neighbors to know what he did. He was accumulating college credits; they were not. He bounced form one job to the next; they didn’t. I think he was ashamed.

The neighborhood was a world of women and children. There were many children. Even the Protestants had many children. The women, insular, their mothers and sisters their best friends, nonetheless formed little block bands. As their kin typically lived in the city, they were forced to confront and befriend strangers in their new suburban neighborhood. The churches, den-mothering and bridge clubs offered some sociality, but as their houses were teeming with kids, their need for mutual aid was paramount.

So the weekday summer barbecues. They weren’t much: hot dogs or hamburgers  cooked on small flat grills, with cans of  Green Giant Niblets corn lodged next to the coals. This was no place for play dates. Kids were amassed, mothers indifferent to their children’s needs for friendship; they intervened only in cases of bullying.  We played games like Kick the Can and Mother May I. When it grew dark and the mosquitos came out, we went home, the bands dissolving into households once more where the little conflicts between sibs would flare up, only to resolved by falling asleep.

Race was irrelevant. Parents were no doubt bigoted. After all, we Catholics were informally forbidden to join the YMCA, though the only gym in town, because it was Protestant. Imagine race. Perhaps the “n” word was passed among the adults. Absent  the sometime progressive autoworker in the neighborhood mix, the fathers  doubtless benefited from race prejudice and exclusion. But to me and my sister, race, when we encountered black people in our occasional trips to the city, was a source of wonder. When my grandfather took us to a cafeteria in the city on our way to General Motors’ annual Motorama at Soldier Field, a middle-aged black woman handed my sister a plate of very large french fries. At home, we ate those skinny frozen fries laid out on cookie sheets and baked in the oven. The big fries, deep-fried, made a lasting impression on my sister. Like any good native, the black woman and the tasty big fries were fused in her memory.

My mother never knew of the connection, and thought my sister’s requests for big fries were more symptoms of how this shy little girl, unlike her bigger brother, knew exactly what she wanted. My sister always insisted on lobster for her birthday too. It came frozen from South Africa. Rock lobsters. But no matter. For my sister, they were some sign of the good life, or of her life. A little light glowed behind her shyness.

Food at home seldom varied. Tuna fish and egg salad sandwiches  with Miracle Whip were standard for lunch, though I grew fond of Buddig’s chipped beef,  with which my mother would make sandwiches for my school lunch box. Monday dinners consisted of swiss steak cooked on a stove top. For the rest of the week, we had spaghetti and meatballs, store-bought frozen chop suey, baked chicken and tuna fish casserole alternating with frozen fish sticks on Fridays. Saturdays were for hamburgers; Sundays for steak and the occasional roast. There were always potatoes — the one non-meat dish that wasn’t frozen, except for the nasty frozen french fries. Boiled, baked, scalloped, whipped: though we were Irish, we could have been Russian for our devotion to the potato.

My mother spent those years washing clothes, cleaning the house, and raising five children. She had had dreams of being a ballet dancer, but these were quashed by the war and working in Marshall Field’s. She finished two years at Loyola University along the lake. Like my father, she had gone to Catholic schools and to a Catholic university. We went to Catholic schools too, and I was the first of my father’s family to attend a non-Catholic college. My mother’s sister had married a Protestant, and they had joined the profane world of public schools and public universities. 

My sister and I would bike over to the parish school across the tracks. The Irish nuns equipped with big crosses, white breast plates, and sweet-smelling holy pictures took us up in tow. Sixty to a class, dressed in khaki and blue, we were the soldiers of Christ in what we sensed was a hostile Protestant town. We had no gym, we had no science, little math, and a lot of reading and religion. I was smart, and got in a lot of trouble, I think, out of sheer boredom. My sister didn’t speak for two years. They wondered if she was all right.

Catholic school actually taught us little religion. That was simply memorized, like the Latin I spoke as an altar boy at weekday Masses. The key was comportment, and the only intellectual exercise that emerged was deciding what a sin and its gravity were. Matching the injunctions and your infractions was left for you to parse: after all, no one knew exactly what self-abuse was, and we were left to ponder its meaning aided only occasionally by a priest.

Being a Catholic, thus, was more about being somewhat holier and superior to Protestants. Oddly Jews were held in much higher regard, the reason stressed that Christ was a Jew, and the faithful called him Rabbi. So glorious, doubtless because it was prefatory, was Jewish history that an ancient and likely arteriosclerotic nun who knew me well over the years in school called me up to the head of the class, and solemnly asked me in a loud voice to write the history of the Jews. I tried to do it. My first unfinished manuscript.

We Catholics were meant to set a public example for the Protestants. When the Salk vaccine was given en masse to the town’s school children, the nuns drilled into us that we must smile, stand straight, take the shot, and thank the doctor. We were supposed to teach those public schoolers, read Protestant children, how to behave.

Yet, there in Catholic school, as Catholics were Catholics before they were middle and working class, I got to know  through my classmates the habits of the town’s new bourgeoisie. In my class, there was my doctor’s son, a dark-skinned Italian-American bespectacled egghead; the Hungarian architect’s son, tousled hair, obviously brilliant, and an a completely oblivious deviant; the Irish downtown restaurant owner’s daughter left with only one eye after an early bout with cancer. There was the Irish town savings and loan president whose son became a big town lawyer. Other fathers were managers or sold complex machinery. No sample cases and retail routes for these men. Some were even small technical business owners.Their houses were bigger, uncluttered, and kids slept one to a room. Their parents were solicitous, and mothers made you lunch at their houses. Their families took vacations.

I thought these middle class classmates had it made. I never had my classmates over. I went to their houses. Except for these occasional sojourns, I played with the kids in my neighborhood. We contented ourselves with baseball.

The boredom was killing, relieved only by childhood sexual intrigues which stopped under the heel of Church discipline by age eight, and by reading. My father would bring me books from the Chicago Public Library: dog-eared renditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, the adventures of Tom Sawyer, and so on. I read easily. Summers, however, were wasted reading endless sports biographies.

My home was in a little world, no bigger than a Catholic parish and a working class  neighborhood. It was often stifling and depressing for me. But it was not an ignorant world . People read newspapers, and you knew right away by their choices which political side they were on. People had opinions. My father by heritage was a Republican, the libertarian type of Republican. He would switch to the Democrats during the Vietnam War, thanks to our persuasion and the anti-war movement of the party’s left wing. My mother was born a Democrat; her mother was a tiny voluntary cog in the Daley machine. They were New Deal Democrats. My mother, sister, and I were thrilled when John Kennedy passed on the town main street in a 1960 motorcade. My father took us to a Nixon rally at O’Hare airport. My sister and I wore our Kennedy buttons.

Most important, as I returned this weekend, is the realization of how unpretentious life at home was, and to some extent still is. Plainness is preferred. Putting on airs and graces isn’t.

Actually, my trip home began 10 days ago in New York. My university faculty is recruiting new members, a time when the humdrum of everyday work ceases, and out come the peacocks and their plumage. Who has the prettiest feathers? Who can show them to advantage in brighter better light?  Better to have strutted in a palace than some rude pasture. After a colloquium finished, and the mating dance of department and candidate recommenced over wine and cheese, I  felt nauseated. Perhaps it was due to the cheese, or the Chinese food I had grabbed earlier to avoid getting drunk, I thought.

Then, I had an impromptu conversation with a colleague whom I like and respect, notwithstanding the fact that he himself was to the manor born, and enjoys the fact. We were searching together for descriptions of how we felt about the colloquium performance of the candidate, when suddenly I blurted out that I found it slick and pretentious. This last judgment, I confessed to him, was based on life with the levellers at home. He agreed with my judgment, choosing slightly different grounds.

Though I grew up calling professors “mister,” even at a prestigious private university in the sixties, I live in an academic world now  where one’s title, fancifully like the “J. Worthington Fowlfeather Professor of…” is longer than the occupant’s name. It is a hall of mirrors, of conversations that reflect themselves or are only reflected in the comments of others similarly caught up in the game. Snobbery is the key to success, and pretension its handmaiden.

Christopher Lasch in The True and Only Heaven (1991) argues that the lower middle class, armed with the ethic of hard work, loyalty, denial, thrift, and equipped with a strong sense of life’s limits were perhaps the only sane and salubrious class left in the United States. Perhaps too trenchant, as he always was.

Somewhere along the way through childhood, I heard Paul Robeson. I heard Leonard Berstein perform Das Lied von der Erde on Chicago’s WFMT. But returning home, I feel the moral strength that stems from the unpretentious life.

Robeson and Mahler fit inside.

“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.

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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”