by Michael Blim

The Democrats are running scared and triaging their Congressional majorities for salvageable seats, according to the Sunday New York Times lead story. The President may be confined to quarters, but they are going to impress Michele Obama, last seen by photo yesterday with two really nice heads of fennel fresh from the White House garden, into campaign work.

Let’s hope that the Democrats don’t send her out to talk about victory gardens. Combined with her husband’s “be patient” counsel after the bad unemployment news last week, I’d almost feel obliged to start building a Hooverville by the Washington Monument, or at least toss around a medicine ball by the White House in remembrance of one of America’s greatest humanitarians and technocrats who saved Europe from starving after the First World War, but couldn’t bring himself to save his own people from the ravages of the Great Depression.

The present occupant of the White House is no Hoover, I guess, though I do reserve the right to second-guess myself another time. After all, the President has avoided telling us that prosperity is just around the corner, which nobody believed in 1932 and no one believes now. Yet his approach to our grave economic situation seems almost as passive and bloodless as was Hoover’s.

Patience is no answer to the problem of 25 million unemployed. There is nothing on the horizon from factories to banks, workplaces and federal programs that has the remotest chance of putting 25 million Americans back to work within the next five years. The unemployed are suffering terrible damage with the promise of more. Whole chunks of people’s lives are being written off for which there is no recompense, no recovery. Some years back a sociologist compared the annual wages of people from identical backgrounds and work histories. The only difference among them is that one group had spent a year in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. Decades later, the one year gap in their job records had left the Vietnam veterans earning less than those who were identical to them, save for the fact that they did not spend a year of their lives fighting the Vietnam War.

Imagine the impact of this recession as it rips through people’s work lives, makes short work of people’s careers, prevents other people from starting, and diminishes their livelihoods. Imagine their lives as a series of little Vietnams. Where does patience fit in, exactly?

This Administration is running backwards. Its response grows more pallid and miniscule by the day.

Perhaps like Hoover, there are just some things it cannot bring itself to do.

Read more »

by Randolyn Zinn

“This week we are remembering things too terrible…”

Note: In the first week of September of 2001, I enrolled in the MFA graduate program in Creative Writing at the New School in New York City, excited to finish a collection of short stories set in the world of dance. A few days later, the city was thrown into chaos by the attacks on the World Trade Center, and I, like many other writers and artists, struggled to find what, if anything, was relevant in my work. Who cares, I wondered, about the vicissitudes of dancing when the world can so easily shift towards catastrophe? After much soul searching, and nearly abandoning the project altogether, I formulated a question that would sustain me through the writing of this story: Has world history and dancing ever converged? “Mera,” set a few days after 9/11, imagines a Cambodian-American teenager living in Brooklyn who learns the deeper truth of her mother’s ordeal at the hands of the Khmer Rouge nearly thirty years earlier. Sometimes, when living through unbearable circumstances, only the imagination can be trusted.

MERA

Tran is crying again. Her hands are shaking. There are things she hasn’t told her daughter.

“Turn it off,” she says, and Srey rolls the TV stand into the corner, steadying the plastic Buddha that sits on top. Channel Two is the only station left with a local signal and for the last four days has shown the same shaky video over and over: a tilting plane crashes the outline of its shape into the north tower and a fiery wound of orange flame and black smoke erupts from the gash. The next clip shows the south tower burning down. “Like a cone of incense,” Srey’s grandmother keeps saying, “but with a thousand souls inside.” Srey wants to tell Grandma that it wasn’t like that at all, but Cambodian teenagers do not disagree with their elders — at least not openly.

On Tuesday, just after it happened, large ashes like dry snow blew across the channel and settled on their Brooklyn sidewalk. Lots of papers blew over too, scraps of shredded computer printouts and numbered columns, nothing really personal except for a few torn memos with hand-written signatures, but Srey didn’t feel right about throwing them away, so she stashed them under her bed in an old shoebox.

Read more »

Novelist Joshua Cohen is the author of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and now Witz. The new book follows the cross-country (and international, and possibly even interplanetary) journey of Benjamin Israelien, born with a beard and glasses, already nearly a grown man. After a Biblical plague on Christmas Even 1999, Benjamin becomes the last Jew on Earth. He’s first celebrated, then marketed, then turned upon. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I want to — oh god, where do I even start with this book — talk a little bit about the experience I had when I was looking up the reactions to it. Gaving read it, an experience I would characterize as being enjoyably lost in it, I found a lot of people saying things like Dan Friedman said in the Forward: “It's a shame no one will read this book.” That's what you might call damning with faint praise. Is this the reaction you've seen? I can almost not believe that's what people are writing about it.

No, that's not what I've seen. Just like the book itself is a provocation, there have been a few reviews that have sought to provoke as well. I think that was intended more as a provocation than a true statement of Mr. Friedman's beliefs, but you'd have to ask him. I've expected a lot of the responses. Some of the responses have been fear or this begrudged respect, and then, of course, there have been the good reviews that have been heartening. Book reviewing in America today is such a fraught profession where you're paid a few hundred dollars to read a book of many hundreds of pages and then reduce it to 300 words that will go through three editors and eventually find its way in a newspaper or onto a web site. To expect, three months after a book this large, a book ten years in the making, the reactions to be comprehensive or in any have intellectual depth or clarity is a little more than I would expect, and I've worked as a reviewer for years.

Indeed, and the first reaction you mentioned was fear. What is this fear rooted in?

Well, I think it's gigantism. I think people don't want to read things this long. I think people don't want to read things this verbally dense. But also, politically, the subject matter tends to frighten. People feel compromised. When you tell them you wrote a book about the last Jew in the world, they don't know how to take it. They don't know whether it's a piece of propaganda or a satire.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

A woman folds her copy of the paper, looks around at all of us and exclaims: “What an evil opportunist! He was virtuous for her when she took the diamonds from him, and now he’s evil because he’s on trial at The Hague?” Then she pauses—“Well, I suppose really—what is good and what is evil are definitions simply determined by survival. It is the story of survival. No?” She shrugs, “The ones who triumph are good, the ones who don’t are evil. Our model picks the Alpha males.”

Several complementary copies of the newspaper lie untouched on the table. The front page carries the story of the war crimes trial in The Hague for Charles Taylor. The accompanying photograph shows—Jemima Goldsmith, Imran Khan, Charles Taylor, Nelson Mandela, Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow after a dinner party thrown for a charity by Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Everyone smiling congenially posing together, as though boy toys for the actress, the super model and the heiress. The super model and the actress have made appearances at the War Crimes trial in The Hague for Charles Taylor giving the proceedings glamour and an air of scandal that catches our attention more than war and crimes. And scandal sells papers. It is clear that it has been inconvenient for them to be here. They have provided conflicting testimonies about the size of the dirty diamonds and the terms under which they were gifted by Charles Taylor that evening to Naomi Campbell.

Read more »

A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

(read Part I here)

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

SK: In the book, was the “Anthill Chronicles” section the easiest one for you to write? [It describes a war between ant colonies from the p.o.v. of the ants.]

EW: Actually it was. I had just finished with Bert Hölldobler the book The Superorganism. And earlier I’d done many, many—well over 300 scientific papers—on ants. And with Bert Hölldobler, the two of us are about to bring out another book called The Leaf-Cutters, on these ultimate superorganisms. And now they’re one of the best-known group of species in the world in biology because they’ve become a model group to work on, at all levels, from genetics up.

Of course, that was all in my head, so I just rolled it out. And it’s authentic: how they talk to each other, what responses they have, what their cycles are, their constant wars with each other. They’re the most war-like of all creatures we know. Even more than people.

Read more »

Review of Rhonda Byrne, The Power (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010) ISBN: 978-085-720-1706.

1. The Law of Attraction

Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006 best-seller The Secret, has released its sequel. Entitled The Power, it claims further depth into the insights gleaned from The Secret. As she humbly states: ‘You don’t need to have read The Secret for The Power to change your life, because everything you need to know is contained in The Power.’

According to Byrne and her publishers, Byrne’s oeuvre (The Secret movie, released prior to the book; and various cards, sayings and other fashionable accessories) focuses on readers’ abilities to get what they ‘deserve’, using what is known as ‘the law of attraction’. According to The Secret’s synopsis by her publishers: ‘fragments of The Secret have been found in oral traditions, religions, literature and philosophies throughout the centuries … By unifying leading-edge scientific thought with ancient wisdom and spirituality, this riveting, practical knowledge will lead readers to a greater understanding of how they can be masters of their own lives.’ We become ‘masters’ of our lives by invoking the ‘law of attraction’.

To understand the law of attraction would require either a casual or a long glance at the current trend in the self-help industry. This is the factory-produced, standardised answers to questions of human betterment, which elicits a solipsistic attitude as the touchstone for all problems in the world; a tethered link between religious guilt and nihilistic dismissal, self-help gurus claim to walk this fine line over the precipice of our banal existence.

This is how they do it. The three rules of the Law of Attraction – let us capitalise the letters now – according to Byrne are the following: Ask. Believe. Receive. As Byrne says, in The Secret, it means that: ‘like attracts like. What that means in simple terms for your life is: what you give out, you receive back. Whatever you give out in life is what you receive back in life. Whatever you give, by the law of attraction, is exactly what you attract back to yourself.’ If you want good things to happen, be a good person, think positive thoughts. By doing so, you can have many things granted: if one wants a parking-space, simply ask the universe to provide it for you; if you want that career, simply ask for it, believe in it and you will receive it. By this logic, Byrne then went on to state one of the worst sentences any literate, twenty-first century individual can make. She says, in The Secret: ‘The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.’

Read more »

In my last essay “A Rational Approach to Irrationality,” I argued that not all forms of religious criticism are equally effective. Judging from the comments and blog articles posted in response, I seem to have hit a nerve. The respected evolutionary biologist and blogger Jerry Coyne took me to task in his article, “Should religion get a pass?” because he interpreted my position as going soft on religion.

In all fairness to Coyne, I wasn’t clear as to where I stood on the issue of criticism of religion. So let me set the record straight here: my answer to Coyne’s question, “Should religion get a pass?”, is an emphatic no.

I suggested that attacks on religion may not be the most effective approach to protecting secular education. And I argued that verbal abuse may do more harm than good. That I oppose all criticism of religion is an easy, but incorrect, inference. I think critical discourse is a vitally important part of a healthy society; religion merits no exemption.

I’m not surprised that my article precipitated such a passionate response from atheists, since to many it seemed to support the widespread public attitude that religion is sacred territory, and criticism of any kind is akin to a personal attack.

Which raises the question, why is it that the general public seems to think that religion should get a pass, that any kind of criticism of religious beliefs is offensive? Maybe it's because religious people feel that their beliefs are as much a part of who they are as their race or their eye color; something they were born with and can’t change. This feeling probably isn't too far off- to some extent, religious faith is not a choice. Children are born into the religious world of their parents and after years of indoctrination, religious beliefs are not easily changed or abandoned.

The importance of early childhood education is recognized by both sides of the religious debate. This is evident in the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. The secular movement should adopt a similar motto.

The systematic indoctrination of children is unethical and must be stopped. Strictly speaking, religious freedom is a state protected right. But I think we can agree that freedom to choose a religion can be restricted in a more practical sense. For students at a religious school, the choice is free in a legal sense. It’s not a free choice in any practical sense, since all but one of the options have been obscured. If you are only exposed to one option, you don’t have a choice.

Criticism of religion is respectful of people’s freedom to choose. Presenting facts and arguments that people can use to draw their own conclusions doesn’t in any way restrict their freedom to do so. It informs the decision. It’s a good thing.

I think Richard Dawkins sets a great example. He doesn’t stoop to personal attacks. He isn’t gratuitously offensive in speech or in writing. His recent documentary “Faith School Menace?” draws attention to the rise of faith schools in the UK. It raises important questions, like what’s best for children and what rights should children have in determining their beliefs. I suggest we follow his lead, in both the way we treat people and what we focus on.

Jerry Coyne also sets a great example. In a review of Coyne’s book, Why Evolution is True, Publisher’s Weekly said this: “Additionally, although fully respectful of those who promote intelligent design and creationism, he uses the data at his disposal to demolish any thought that creationism is supported by the evidence while also explaining why those ideas fall outside the bounds of science.

Generally speaking, I think we should pay greater attention to strategy and tactics. More specifically, I think secular education should be our top priority. To this end, non-threatening persuasion tactics may be especially useful. It will be a long battle and we should identify of our most effective weapons.

Coyne closed his response to my essay with this statement: “In the end, the arguments to go easy on religion all boil down to this claim: it’s the most common form of superstition. It’s useless to attack it because it’s ubiquitous and entrenched, and we’ll only alienate people if we try. But I need hardly point out one lesson of history: the ubiquity of bad beliefs does not make them immune to change.” I agree wholeheartedly, and real change may begin when we are able to grant every child their right to an education free from religious indoctrination.

Meditations on Maps

by David Schneider

I'm hunting for an apartment in Brooklyn. It's 2010. I only halfknow the borough; it's hipster havens and borderlands, vacant lots and lofts, new towers and old clapboard – a shredded psychogeography re-folding itself every second, like hyperactive origami.

I take CraigsList to the GoogleMap, stroll a StreetView to the Subway, and race a grey L to a green 6 or brown Jay-Z. Time the walk. Time the trains. Recalc the time –– rush hour, late night –– recalc revised (the new service cuts) –– rush shower, late tight –– and is there a supermarket? A laundromat? Rats, mice, bedbugs, pricepoint? What if the…what if the…what if the roof –– the electric –– the piano up the stairs?

Down to Brooklyn and up the stairs. Down the stairs, out of Brooklyn, sit. Scribble out. Redraw. There's got to be a better way.

•••

The roadmap for Middle-East peace lies crumpled on the floor, an accordion with a compound fracture. Can't anyone fold this damn thing? It's an origami in the shape of a dove. Special Envoy George Mitchell is a courier, shuttling messages back and forth down the 20-mile road from Jerusalem to Ramallah and back again. The origami master is named Möbius of Zeno.

•••

I want to install a CraigsList app on my iPhone so I can get the jump on new Brooklyn apartment listings while mobile. I download the iOS4 app but I don't have iOS4 yet so I've got to download that. But first I need iTunes 9.2 to get iOS4. The download for iOS4 says, “It'll take an hour. Don't interrupt.” My ISP enjoys interrupting me. The pulsing blue bar ticks down to 11 minutes and stops. I have to start from the beginning. The process ends up taking a day and a half. The CraigsList app doesn't work anyway. I rename my iPhone “Zeno.”

•••

I'm rewriting my résumé for the 12th time in six months. As I click homeward to collect the mail, three Yahoos are gibbering through the window, regarding me with expert eyes. One suggests, “Don't use deadening phrases and jargon! Make your résumé unique!” A second admonishes, “Make sure you use common keywords, or the computers will sift you out.” The third waggles its finger, “Here are ten things that will make sure your résumé is never even looked at.” If I had a job I'd hire a résumé writer, I think; I procrastinate the twelfth redraw of selfmap by scanning the opportunities at Catch-22 Incorporated. I think of Dante, in the middle road of life, in that dark wood.

Read more »

Sit back and let me tell you a story: a large professional services firm, let’s call them Firm A, once went up for a large job at the Client. Firm A, which had good reason to think a lot of itself, had excellent qualifications for the work and gave, what they didn’t doubt was a winning pitch. Then, they sat back, waiting for the call that would certainly anoint them as the winning bid.

A week later they got the call; the other firm, their bitter, but undoubtedly lesser, rival Firm B had won the bid. Confusion reigned at Firm A. How could this have happened? What did they do wrong? They called the Client and did a postmortem. The Client told them that they had done nothing wrong, their pitch was as compelling and as convincing as they thought it had been. So what happened? To the amazement and bewilderment of Firm A they were told, “You were great, and we have no doubt that you would have done a fantastic job, but they brought muffins.”

Muffins! What did the Client mean, “They brought muffins”? It turned out that the Client had very recently moved offices. They hadn’t unpacked all their boxes yet and people’s desks were still in state of disarray. Firm B had realized that this meant that people probably couldn’t find their coffee mugs, or even the coffee machine and, on the day of their pitch, had brought coffee and muffins for everyone in the office. They had thought about what it must be liked to be the employees of the Client, had put themselves in their shoes and had performed a relatively cheap and minor act that had proved to the Client that Firm B had the emotional intelligence necessary to really understand what the Client needed. The Client had decided that there was little enough between the pitches of Firm A and B that, all other things being equal, they were giving the bid to the company that had the institutional empathy to feel the Client’s pain.

Read more »

Build no Mosque Near Zero

—zero's too near the hole in our hearts: the naught
we know at night when the bogey-man bites, the zip
we feel when we love hate, the nada of exclusion
which seeths in the interstices between faith and fear,
the cipher that numbers the digits displayed in a holy fist,
the nadir of our understanding, the O in no,
the void which deepens our capacity to destroy,
the nil of unknowing, the aught of unloving,
the nullification of our presumptions of God's
will in the midnight of His contradictions;

—no mosque must be built near the silence
of the negative space in which god speaks
his or her or its apparently futile
promise of peace and good will
among men

—no mosque and no church

by Jim Culleny
8/26/2010

Tyler Smith and David Bax host the film podcast Battleship Pretension. For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations.Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

To give people an idea of where you guys are coming from, we should start with your perspectives on film. What do you like? Your favorite filmmakers? Your defining film moments?

David Bax: I was drawn to film for the same reason that the sport I played when I was a kid was swimming: because it's not a team thing. Film is something you do in a dark room alone. It keeps you from having to talk to other people, and I was such an antisocial kid — it's not like they would have had me, that the social groups would have welcomed me in if I had applied. I wasn't a popular kid, so I watched movies all the time. The way I view films is very much personal, individual; I'm not really interested in the community aspect of it, which there is now with the internet. There's very much a community aspect. We're kind of on the outskirts of that, but it's not what got me into film. As far as defining moments, my favorite film of all time is Barton Fink. The reason is, I was at the grocery store video counter and saw the cover, and it had John Goodman on it. I always liked to watch comedies; I'm a comedy nerd as much as I am a movie nerd. I thought John Goodman was funny — I mean, King Ralph, you know —

Tyler Smith: He's very funny in Arachnophobia.

David Bax: He was. So I just picked it up, and it just blew my mind. It was so much more ambitious, otherworldly, and just plain old artistic than I Had come to expect from films. From that moment, that was my search. It was like a junkie looking for that high again. It also helped that this was the beginning of the age when the internet was readily available, so I could find discussions and writings about film. It was easy to research, and I had a library card.

You bring up a good way to frame this, which is that there's usually a film in any cinephile's life that was the one to expand their view of what film can do, that gave them new vistas, that first high you want to reach again. Tyler, what opened up your cinematic vistas?

Tyler Smith: It's odd; I have a very difficult time pinpointing a specific film or a specfic moment where I'm like, “This is what I want to do” or, “This my official passion.” I loved movies growing up. My parents went to a lot of movies. It was one of my favorite things to do. I saw as many movies as I could. I really loved them. Right around middle school, I started becoming very dissatisfied with the films aimed people at my age.

Which, at the time, were, like… ?

Tyler Smith: Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Don't get me wrong; looking back, they are very funny in moments.

Read more »

Intense battles are being waged over religion and its rightful place in society. There are debates over evolution and creationism, conflicts over the teaching of evolution in schools, and disagreement on matters of religious accommodation. People are passionate about their positions and the debates often get nasty. However, I think that the respective sides have more common ground than they realize.

Suppose you could choose either to maximize human rationality or to maximize human happiness. For most of us, even for the most strident advocates of reason and critical thinking, I suspect the choice would be happiness or well-being. Sam Harris, a well-known advocate of reason has suggested that maximizing human well-being ought to be the very foundation of our moral system. What would be the value of reason if it didn’t contribute to well-being?

Let’s assume that the value of reason ultimately lies in its ability to improve well-being. Reason and empiricism have brought us great scientific discoveries, lifesaving medicines, and technologies that make our lives longer and healthier. It’s undeniable that rationality can improve well-being.

It might seem, given these benefits, that improving rationality would improve well-being. But irrationality has its perks. Delusions can provide comfort. They can give us confidence, hope, or a sense of purpose. Superstitions can improve athletic performance, and psychics and astrologers can help people deal with the discomfort of not knowing what the future holds. The most rational objective, then, is not necessarily to have everyone be completely rational but rational to the extent that optimizes well-being.

If we are to be rational and scientific, we ought to appreciate the value of diversity and the role of evolution in shaping our minds. We are predisposed to delusional thinking because our brains have evolved this way; it was evolutionarily advantageous. It is human nature to be somewhat delusional. To expect people to be perfectly rational is to ask us to defy our own nature. It isn’t reasonable.

Read more »

by Michael Blim

The scene is a country cottage about three weeks ago. Family are over for a birthday celebration. Three little nephews are running everywhere with their mother and my sister’s adolescent dog, a Golden Retriever version of Scooby Doo, running after them. Their young adult cousins are absorbed in checking their iPhones and Blackberries. All collide.

Caleb, an incandescent bulb of a boy age five, stops abruptly and turns toward the IPhoners. He starts to rap and vamp to the Travis McCoy’s “I Wanna Be a Millionaire” playing on the IPhone.

In case you don’t know it, the song goes like this (pretty much):

No matter that “Forbes” comes out “Ford’s” Magazine in Caleb’s rendition. He’s got the right idea. He knows who’s a billionaire. By five years old, he already has a little mental list.

So do we all. The rich perform a pageant daily in American life. Their comings and goings, heralded on the TV gossip shows and hawked in the supermarket tabloids and in the (rich and famous) people pages of our dailies, mark our own. Their quotidian facts become our memory sticks. The rich become celebrities, celebrities become rich, and both in disproportionate numbers become politicians and run the country.

From their post at the apex of society, they are the objects of our desires. Or rather having what they have would make us like them, and that put us at the apex of society too. Even a five year old gets it.

Tocqueville found American avarice both remarkable and disturbing. Walden Pond exiles aside, not much has changed since the early days of the Republic. If anything, as Americans generally have become poorer over the past quarter century, their desire for wealth has increased.

As riches are hard to come by for everyone save a few, celebrity has become the Holy Grail. Today’s run-of-the-mill game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are throwbacks to another era when a Groucho Marx joke and a couple grand framed the limits of our aspirations. They are quaint by comparison with the current reality show-contests. Contestants suffer every indignity imaginable in pursuit of fame, as well as of fortune. The hope is that one will deliver the other: even if being the “biggest loser” doesn’t make you rich, the celebrity gained in the contest might.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

For weeks now the crescendo of bigotry has been steadily rising in volume and vitriol on the issue of whether mosques, Muslims and their faith Islam are legitimate in America. In this rising temperature in a country at war with itself and the world, in the season of elections, the practice of citizens of the United States for upholding the constitution is under test as is their tolerance of their American idea of society. However, this vitriol was only inevitable given what it has taken to get to this point. Americans have been marinated since 9/11 in relentless relaying of hatred, misinformation and fear by opportunists of all kinds: the fraudulent celebrity journalists and terrorism experts with their hyena grins and black turtleneck sweaters to celebrity experts on Islam marinated in their own complexities and ambitions. Much profit has been made of this which can only be sustained through prophets of every creed on the make.

Who the hell is “Imam” Feisal Abdul Rauf? Why this honorific title of “Imam”? What does it mean? Is Mr. Rauf the scion of a religiously anointed family and therefore referred to by his followers as their imam? Does he have such a following which refers to him as an imam or has appointed him their leader? Shi’as have Imams—but unless he is Imam Mahdi and he is not, he cannot be the Shi’a Imam—and unless he is the Aga Khan he cannot be the Ismaili Imam. Or is he, as the word can also be used, the caretaker of a specific mosque? Such an imam is responsible for the upkeep of the bricks and mortar of a mosque—and is paid through donotions for the job of leading the prayers by simply standing in front of the congregation to say and do exactly what the rest of the congregation is doing in the prescribed way. Such an imam of a mosque leads the prayer—he is not a leader. He does not design a prayer or a sermon. Is Mr. Feisal Rauf referred to as imam in that context? If so then he is not Imam Feisal. He is Mr. Rauf the imam of such and such mosque. In which case, the question becomes: in which mosque in New York is he an imam?

Is Mr. Rauf being referred to as an imam in anticipation of a mosque that doesn’t exist yet? Because he certainly is not a caretaker of any of the dozens of mosques in Manhattan or of any of the hundreds all over New York or in the Tri-state area or anywhere in the United States.

Read more »

By Namit Arora

An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Thomas Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.

As early as 1873, the social reformer Jotirao Phule had criticized the early colonial model of ‘high class education’ for creating a ‘virtual monopoly of all higher offices … by the Brahmins.’[1] These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. In fact, European Orientalists, armed with new theories about the origins of Sanskrit and the influx of light-skinned people into the Subcontinent, saw these caste elites as their long separated Aryan brethren. The latter, only too glad with this association, soon emerged as native informants and collaborators in interpreting ‘Indian’ society and culture, and in shaping a historiography that selectively glorified its past and framed it as largely ‘tolerant’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘nonviolent’, except when rudely disrupted by Muslim invaders.

Later, when these elites opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies. It was this class, led by Anglicized lawyers and bureaucrats, that succeeded the British. In the first Indian Parliament in 1952, Brahmins, who comprise less than 5 percent of the population, cornered almost 25 percent of the directly elected seats; altogether the upper castes, about 20 percent of the population, claimed over 85 percent of the seats.[2]

In a representative democracy, the idea of ‘representation’ implies that a politician, say, an upper-caste Hindu male, can and should fairly represent the interests of the entire electorate, including the lower castes, religious minorities, and women. But one can persuasively argue that this did not happen in the early decades of the Indian republic. Deep disparities along caste lines remained; religious minorities grew alienated and even declined socioeconomically; the vast majority of women remained marginal as before in political and economic realms. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

Since the 1970s, India has seen the rise of caste-based politics. Built on the idea that only a member of your own (or proximate) caste can represent your interests, its primary driver was the failure of upper-caste politicians to represent the lower castes, and the latter realizing the power of their vote. Votes began fragmenting along caste lines, not the least because—besides being central to one’s social identity—caste had long shaped one’s share of opportunity, deprivation, and discrimination in life.

When the lower castes began mobilizing and putting up their own candidates, the elites grew anxious and began decrying the rise of caste-based politics and ‘vote banks’. ‘So regressive!’ they complained, ‘a betrayal of the spirit and ideals of democracy!’ But of course, being founders and long-time practitioners of a supremacist politics of caste, with hardly an egalitarian bone in their bodies, they had played a rigged game all along, starting with language itself. ‘Vote banks’ were others, created by the new ‘caste-based parties’; the elites didn’t see their own upper-caste folk as a ‘vote bank’, though they all voted for upper-caste parties like the Congress and the BJP. A sense of entitlement prevented them from seeing that they had, contrary to a democratic ethos, long monopolized political power and opportunities based largely on caste. So now, their anxiety over the emerging caste-based politics betrayed, above all, a visceral fear—fear of the ‘impure’ masses, fear of losing their privileges, fear of being overrun by the boors. In no area is this anxiety more evident than in the debate on caste-based affirmative action, aka reservations, in public sector jobs and college admissions.

Writing in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’ These elites, he wrote, ‘simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles.’

Fanon had in mind the post-colonial elites of North Africa, but his remark is no less apt for the Indians. India needed a real program of socioeconomic justice—via, say, land reform, universal education, and fighting caste discrimination. What legislation the elites did pass they didn’t push far enough. Instead, they consolidated their domination over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media—for instance, the richest 10 percent monopolize more land now than in 1951.[3] Having done quite well for itself, self-congratulation has come easy to this class. In an attempt to restore some balance, this insider, dear reader, will now relate to you its benightedness.

Read more »

By Aditya Dev Sood

Brownian motion at a macro-scale. That's what my working week feels like these days. On Monday I flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad, the next day to Bangalore, a couple of days later to Patna via Calcutta. And now, after a tense hour's delay in Patna, while this decrepit Air-India plane was late arriving into that one-room box of an airport, we're finally off and away. We'll land in Delhi with just the right sliver of time for me to catch the only direct flight to Goa today. We'll be going for a friend's 40th birthday bash on the beach this holiday weekend.

There's hardly anyone on the flight, but they've bunched us up in some artificial pattern near the middle of the fuselage. The whole thing is like a too-vivid dream from my childhood, from the yucky yellow-orange of the seats to the squat, curvy stewardesses in saris that remind me of my teachers in elementary school. They're coming around now with a meal cart. Sir, veg or non-veg for your breakfast? shakahari, the guy next to me says, and then leans over me to receive his tray with shaking, uncertain hands. I'm thinking I'll have the parantha-s as well.

How does one open this, he asks me, holding up the micro-package of jam. I demonstrate by separating the aluminum layer from the plastic layer of my own packet and slowly pulling them apart. He's still going at it several times before I offer him my own packet. Now he's got the same problem with the butter serving, but instead of struggling with it he just offers it to me to open for him. I go back to my parantha-s, when a few minutes later he offers me his ketchup packet. I put my parantha down, wipe my greasy fingers and try to find the entry tear in the packet. The slit I'm making curves away from the pulpy body of the packet towards its edge, making no wound in the sac of ketchup. I hand it back to him wearily, knowing I won't be able to do any better. nahin hua bhai, kya karen? He puts it back down on his tray despondently.

Now he turns to me holding up the fruit cup, and I'm wondering if he's for real. I mean it's just a plastic airplane service cup, aged and flecked and speaking of that misplaced parsimony that only Air-India still excels in, but elegantly taped up all round with saran-wrap. iska kya hai, bus phad dijiye, I tell him. He looks at the object like its form, meaning and logic are only now becoming clear to him, his mind is reading it, and his whole body nods, yes yes, I can just tear the plastic and get to the fruit inside!

Read more »

The Space Between Now and Then

A breeze through the window at my back
now that summer has reached its august stage,
is cool, and the apple tree outside another window sways
near the purple plum and I as usual bring you coffee

and you’re still here as the cat springs from floor to sill
still here as crow caws on her breakfast hunt
still here as the conversation of birds begins again
still here as the scent of cut grass seeps through the screen
and I think of all the reasons you might not be;
ones heavy with grief and fear

Your twin wanes like a moon-slim crescent
but you remain still here, still here
against odds, waking, dear as the sun,
which is here again
rising, still warming, still here because
what seems temporal is everlasting
as the space between now and then

by Jim Culleny
August 4, 2010