Four people live on the 5th floor at 470 Flushing Ave in Brooklyn.  They either walk the stairs or use the freight elevator, and I suspect that based on the amount of freight in their home the elevator gets quite a bit of use.  Two of the residents are production designers and brothers, and they’ve strewn the apartment with power tools, bikes, furniture, mannequins, electronics, and general crap.  They’ve also built (along with all of the rooms in the space) a stage, and it too is crowded, covered in cables and pedals and drums and keys, and that’s where (the third occupant) Bryan Scary and his band rehearse, adjacent to a fifteen foot long painting of a bleeding Christ.  Scary seems unfazed by the mess, though his bedroom is terribly neat.  When I asked him this morning what he does with his days, when his band is at work, he said he gets ready for Halloween.  “The Shredding Tears,” his first record, will be released then.  It includes the single “The Blood Club .”

BRYAN SCARY: I listen to all kinds of stuff.  A lot of it is older, so I couldn’t have seen some important parts of the band, the performance aspect. I listen to music with the mindset of wanting to know about what was going on around it, historically.  With pop music, it’s just as much about the packaging and the world surrounding the music as it is about the music. 

JANE RENAUD: Who got you into music, got you exploring?

BS: My dad and mom.  They would play me music all the time.  My mom forced me to take piano lessons.  She forced me to practice.  She knew I wasn’t very good at tee ball.  There had to be something else. 

JR: Were you good at piano? 

BS: When I was younger I was good.  But then I lost the track of being professional, and now it’s my own style. I’m not that versatile of a player.

JR: The Shredding Tears is very versatile though, in terms of genre.  It really reminds me a little bit of that Jeff Lynne album –

BS: Out of the Blue?

JR: No –

BS: Armchair Theater?

JR: Yeah, Armchair Theater.  Every song is firmly placed in a distinct context.  But with The Shredding Tears there’s more of a melancholy throughline and some consistent jokes, too.

BS: That’s true, but the genre hopping isn’t that intentional. It’s just what happens.  I listen to so much that I can’t write the same stuff over and over again. It incorporates a lot of my favorite sounds and ideas in pop music. Glam rock to prog rock to psychedelic rock to musical theater. There’s some punkier stuff on there, and there’s some straight rock and roll.

JR: You did musical theater?

BS: I never really had any really big roles.  I was always playing a father or some secondary character.  There was the baritone in The Music Man quartet, which we made a quintet that year because there was not enough vocal power.  Agwe, the god of water in Once On This Island.  These were all in high school.  And that was a ridiculous show because we were in a white Jewish suburb.

JR: Did you ever seriously consider doing musical theater, as a profession?

BS: No, never.  But playing a character on stage, of course.

JR: What’s your ideal performance setting?

BS: I would want to play in nice theaters.  I don’t really like concert venues.  It’s like you’re crammed in, you’re standing up, you’re just supposed to be drinking, people are talking.  They can be good for certain purposes if there’s really like an electric energy, but it’s not the greatest way for me to appropriate music.  I’m often distracted.

JR: You mean appreciate?

BS: What’s appropriate mean?

JR: It means take and use for yourself.

BS: Yeah, appreciate.

JR: Maybe you did mean appropriate.

BS: It sounded good at that moment. 

JR: You know, I went to the recent Flaming Lips show here in New York and it was crazy.  It was the only show I’ve ever been to where I felt like I didn’t have to be watching the band to be getting the full experience of the show.  Everyone was in a great mood and there was shit going on all around. 

BS: That’s exactly what I’m talking about.  You go to a show like that and you’re not just going to watch music.  Rock music isn’t just about the music.  It’s a show.  The music’s not really complex enough for you to sit and just watch what the instrumentalists are doing.  Usually it’s not, for me.  But if there’s other stimulus, it’s nice.

JR: I’m always wanting to dance and am annoyed that it’s not really happening at a lot of shows.

BS: Around here it’s not, yeah, it’s not what happens.  It’s a New York thing.

JR: I have a hard time dancing to your record.

BS: Yeah, it’s not really dancey.  We have a dance song in our set though.

JR: You do?

BS: We have some surprises, yeah. You better dance at the show.

JR: I will definitely dance at the show.  [Bryan Scary and his new band, The Shredding Tears, are playing a show along side The Dozens and The Self Righteous Brothers this Halloween at 7pm at 470 Flushing.] What’s that going to be like, by the way?

BS: I have no idea.  It’s an experiment.  This band has never played before in front of people.  So I don’t know what’s going to happen.  But our set is awesome.  There’s lots of surprises.  And we’re playing with two other great bands.

JR: What’s it like to make a whole record in your basement and then suddenly there are all of these other people involved?  A band, a record label…

BS: It was really nerve wracking.  I’d already finished it. Having to put it in other people’s hands is nerve wracking. I originally did the whole thing myself, played all the instruments.  I used keyboard drums, fake drums.  Then I sort of spread that demo around, and I didn’t really want to go back and redo it.  It was more than a demo, because they were full tracks. But then the label [Black & Greene Records] expressed interest in it and I knew that I shouldn’t release it with the drums like that.  So we decided to have Jeremy Black, the drummer from Apollo Sunshine, to go back and redo all the drums.  It was really hard.  It’s like taking the spine out of a person and trying to replace it.  It’s like taking the whole heart out of the song.  We had to do that in like four days and it was really hard.  Non stop.  And it’s still not exactly what I want, but it’s pretty close, and Jeremy did a great job.  But anyway, we remixed it with Brian McTear at Miner Street Studios and mastered it with Paul Hammond and Paul Sinclair at Fat City Studios.

JR: So this record has been in the works for awhile.

BS: Probably three years ago, I wrote the first songs that I really wrote, and they were intended for this concept album.  Other distractions happened and I never finished it the way I wanted to. And then I wrote a bunch of new songs.  The latter half of the album is all the new stuff, or the newer stuff.

JR: Are you already thinking about your next record?

BS: Yes, the second record is totally written.  It’s different.  I’m going to record it soon with this new band.

JR: How do you see The Shredding Tears fitting into the music scene right now?

BS: There’s some acts out there, like The Fiery Furnaces, that are musically similar.  But I think we’re pretty unique.  And we’re lucky in that it’s sort of the Wild West right now in the indie rock scene.  In the sense that there is no real style right now.  There are certain sounds that people are into but I feel like anything is fair game.  There’s often a 2-3 year period where there’s a dominating style, like the garage rock revival.  But right now I think nobody’s really banding around a particular genre or style or innovation, so there’s a lot of room.  The rock press, the major labels, the fans…they aren’t just doing one thing, one scene.  New York City particularly. Obviously it’s a different story on the broader scale.  In the country at large, rock music doesn’t do much. 

At this point Jon, resident #4 of 470 Flushing, enters, zips his fly sheepishly, lights a cigarette with a  blow torch and switches on some Creedence Clearwater Revival.

JON: The Shredding Tears is the soundtrack for a twisted backwoods theater.

BS: Why’s everybody listening to Creedence right now?  You’re like the third person this week I’ve found listening to Creedence.

JON: It’s that time of year.  It sounds good.

“The Shredding Tears” hits stores on Oct 31. It’s available for preorder here.  Visit www.bryanscary.com to hear tracks and get more information about the release party.

Album artwork by Hunter Nelson and Albert Thrower.

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense

Americans who talk about racism usually think about anti-black racism in the United States, or perhaps about anti-Hispanic prejudice. So do many Europeans, who find it easier to criticize the treatment of black Americans by white Americans than the treatment of Muslim immigrants in Europe by white Europeans. It’s then a good idea to step back and look at racism from an international angle, examining and classifying the many forms of racism that exist in the world. African-Americans and Chinese-Malaysians are both oppressed minorities, but they’re oppressed in very different ways.

As a side note, it’s controversial whether racism requires merely prejudice, that is an “us and them” view, or also power, that is the ability to inflict harm on “them.” I’m going to deliberately circumvent that controversy. One of the points I will argue is that a prejudiced group without power can later come to power and seriously hurt other groups, often its ex-oppressors. At the same time, all examples I use here include both prejudice and power, and my classification is based both on the form of prejudice and on the form of power it uses.

Whereas Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism focus on nationalism in the academia, I prefer to focus on racism in popular opinion, in government, and in organizations that discriminate against individuals. Although academic racism obviously exists, it tends to either provide intellectual cover for real-world racism, or be so detached from real-world trends that its causes are often completely different from these of the kind of racism that really hurts people.

For example, many racial oppressions are the result of a divide-and-rule policy by a dominant elite. Landowners in colonial North America pitted poor whites against blacks; Saddam Hussein stirred Sunni-Shi’a hatred after the first Gulf War; British colonialism divided Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. In all three cases, it’s perfectly possible that longstanding hatred would have erupted on its own, but the deliberate attempt to divide potential enemies of the regime against themselves was a catalyst.

The mention of Sunnis and Shi’as in Iraq should serve as a good example of what racism can operate on. Difference in skin color, facial features, language, religion, and heritage can all become defining features of an in-group, but any of them can be absent, as long as at least one is present. Although the racisms most familiar to Westerners get stronger when more features are present—compare the treatment of white and nonwhite minority groups in the US and Europe—this is not true in general. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were perfectly capable of slaughtering one another in Bosnia over a difference in religion, a feature that 45 years of communist rule had come close to erasing.

It’s not quite true to say that racism is the lower class’s dignity, but it’s a good first approximation of reality. In multiracial societies with complex racial hierarchies, the groups close to the bottom tend to be the most prejudiced against those right at the bottom. It’s standard for people who feel disenfranchised by the system to vent their frustration at those the system designates as inferior to themselves; hence crude racism is most common among the lower class, just like crude sexism is most common among lower-class men. This is in fact how reversal of racism works: oppressed minorities typically adopt similar attitudes to the lower class, so when they get the opportunity to discriminate against others, they seldom miss it. This process is usually invisible because the upper class’s racism is the one that has the greatest privilege backing it, but when it becomes visible, its consequences range from the systematic anti-Tamil discrimination of Sri Lanka to the genocide of Rwanda.

The first division of different forms of racism is into those practiced by a minority and those practiced by a majority, while the second is into those coming from above, by a traditionally privileged group, and those coming from below, by a traditionally oppressed group.

Minority racism from above tends to come from an affluent minority group that views itself as special, and possibly backed by an external power; it also tends to be closely associated with imperialism. Western imperialism itself falls under that group, as does what was practiced in former settler colonies like apartheid South Africa, where whites failed to exterminate the native groups the way they did in North America. This division also includes Chinese nationalism as practiced by the Chinese diaspora, especially in Southeast Asia, which is influenced by a theory of ethnic superiority no different from Western white supremacy. Although Jews are a majority in Israel, Jewish discrimination against Arabs falls under this category, because of the Jewish self-perception of a perpetually oppressed minority group surrounded by a sea of Arabs. The single adjective that describes this group best is “aristocratic,” with “imperialist” a fairly close second.

That imperialist or supremacist form of minority racism contrasts not only with majority racism, but also with minority racism that comes from below. The Chinese racist in Indonesia is sure of his superiority to the Indonesian by virtue of his superior ethnicity; the Arab nationalist in Israel or Tamil nationalist in Sri Lanka has no such pretenses. This form can be as mild as an excessively radical desire for statehood, or as extreme as a burning desire to out-oppress the oppressor. It includes not only racism directed against the majority, but also racism directed against other groups, often of lower status. The example most familiar to Americans is probably the stereotypical mutual hatreds each immigrant group in the United States felt against the others. The single adjective that best describes this group is perhaps “victimized,” or in certain contexts even “nationalist.”

Majority racism from below is typically populist in character, and usually based on racial reversal. This includes Sinhala discrimination against Tamils, the Hutu slaughter of Tutsi Rwandans, the anti-Chinese and anti-Christian riots in Indonesia, and possibly certain anti-Semitic pogroms. In all of these cases, divide-and-rule policies by an external power—British colonialism, Belgian colonialism, Indonesian fascism, and Austrian or Russian elites respectively—caused a dispossessed majority to direct its anger at a more powerful minority group. As crude racism is most powerful among the weak and oppressed, the situation turned bloody in all cases but Sri Lanka’s, with prejudiced elites inciting the masses to slaughter, rape, and loot. Although Rwanda is the canonical and most dangerous example of this type of racism, there are two additional complications. First, the majority only has to believe that it is oppressed; Jews did not oppress gentiles in Europe, and the Chinese did not oppress Malays or Javanese in Malaysia and Indonesia. Second, at times, several groups can harm one another simultaneously, in which case it is best to classify them here: the Iraqi civil war and the Bosnian genocide are more similar to the other conflicts and discriminations in this group than to those in other groups. Although “genocidal” describes this form of racism relatively well, the most important characteristic is “populist.”

Finally, there is majority racism from above, the racism most familiar in the West. The canonical examples are anti-Semitism in most of European history, discrimination against African-Americans, discrimination against native Americans or Aborigines in North American and Australia, and discrimination against immigrants everywhere. This group is also the most diverse; anti-immigrant sentiments are different from prejudice against longstanding minorities such as European Jews or native Americans, and anti-black racism in the United States seems to be a class of its own. The main difference is that anti-immigrant sentiments largely die within two or three generations, as the immigrants assimilate, whereas the other two forms don’t; then, prejudice against established minorities is likelier to take the form of indifference, as in anti-native racism in North America and Australia, than the form of active hatred. Discrimination against black Americans is then unique because not only are blacks established but still more hated than not cared about, but also there are specific connotations of poverty and crime associated with African-Americans, which are more similar to anti-immigrant racism. All subdivisions in this group are best described as “privileged” or “systemic.”

Obviously, these four classes are not equally powerful. Racism is most hurtful when backed by plenty of power, which can come from high socioeconomic status or majority status; indeed, the most systemically harmful form is systemic racism. On the other hand, in terms of people killed, all hate crimes in the United States put together don’t come close to the death toll of a single outburst of populist racism.

There are many interesting insights one can draw, with this division of racism into four groups. For example, aristocratic and systemic racism produce pseudo-intellectual apologetics similar to apologetics for sexism; conservative intellectuals are often all too happy to construct powerful narratives demonstrating their own groups’ supremacy. White supremacists appeal to skewed studies of IQ; Chinese ones appeal to the longevity of China; Hindu fundamentalists, who are almost invariably prejudiced against India’s Muslim minority, have a nationalist narrative of Indian history that contrasts with Aryan migration theory. In contrast, nationalistic Serbs never bothered popularizing Serbian supremacy—they simply murdered Bosnians at Milosevic’s behest. It’s this observation that firmly places Jewish racism in the aristocratic group. Orwell’s description of academic nationalism fits a certain subset of racisms from above, though never racism from below.

I am not going to list all observations of this form, for space constraints. Explaining all the differences among the four groups will fill a thick book. But it’s instructive to consider the fact that not all racism is the systemic discrimination that Westerners are used to. It’s just as instructive to consider the fact that an underprivileged group can gain privilege by declaring independence and becoming a majority, as happened in Eastern Europe both after World War One and after the Cold War, or by becoming wealthy by chance, as happened to Europe’s Jews.

Finally, every prejudice carries some degree of power. Even if a prejudiced group is not powerful enough to engage in full-scale systemic racism, it always can find opportunities to discriminate, or even to kill in hatred. On the large scale, the most effective anti-racist agitation focuses on equalizing power, which also serves to reduce ethnic tensions and hence weaken the forces of prejudice. But on the individual level, prejudice is always harmful, and even collectively it generally causes more harm than it empowers. Even if the most acute racism is committed by the usual suspects that are privileged groups, every self-conscious group can become prejudiced against any other group.

I’m not quite sure how to start this, how to start writing about wrong. I’ve always had a problem calling people on their mistakes—perhaps out of some attempt at courtesy gone wrong, perhaps because I’ve witnessed so many odiously pompous people take pride in shooting others down, perhaps because I was insecure, perhaps to avoid unnecessary offense. But something in me has snapped, one drop too many has fallen into the bucket, and I think just letting wrongdoers and wrongsayers off the hook may be a thing of my past.

First, in a recent conversation about text in art, a grad-level professor asked me if I’d seen “the stones at the Metropolitan Museum with triangles and circles carved into them, the oldest writing in the world, that are actually a recipe for beer.” I replied, “Sure, the cuneiform inscriptions pressed into clay tablets,” as that happens to be one of my favorite galleries in the entire museum. He replied, “No, they’re actually hard little stones with a symbol writing system.” I’ll readily admit that I’m guilty of occasional nitpicking, but that’s just really wrong, especially coming from a sculptor. Anyone who carves stone or has worked with clay should be able to figure out how those marks were made. The crazy part about this exchange is that I didn’t call him on his mistake; beyond a gentle attempt at a more in-depth description of the objects, I didn’t try to prove my point, and didn’t insist when he added emphasis to his error.

Second, a translator colleague of mine whose work I’m reading over had rather innocently mistranslated the Italian word sellino as little saddle,  instead of bustle. Granted, sellino can mean both of those things in English, but that’s where context comes in. If an author is describing a scene set in the late nineteenth century, in a well-to-do neighborhood, in the center of an undeniably urban metropolis where the silhouettes of women can be seen against drawn curtains at nightfall, is it more likely that these women’s profiles are distinguished by little saddles, or bustles? Yes, this is worth a good laugh, but it’s also wrong, and by extension it’s wrong of this man to call himself a translator. I’ve seen and respected his work before, but the sellino slip-up is one of too many such mistakes in the text I’m reading now. The original is a beautiful series of stories, I’m honored to be reading it, and I therefore find it dishonorable that anyone would take it on when it’s so clearly beyond his capabilities.

“How categorical of you,” you’re probably thinking. That’s right, categorical indeed. These are two relatively harmless instances—no one’s dying, no one’s even suffering. But these things pain me, and I really think they are important. See, it’s a slippery slope. It could be argued that these aren’t matters of right and wrong, and are instead a question of imprecision. But they’re imprecisions I can’t deal with because, as I see it, these people approach their professions with imprecision, which implies that they neither respect nor love what they’re doing enough to care about getting it right.

I like how Wikipedia looks at the term: “A wrong is a concept in law, ethics, and science.” The bit about law mentions conscience and morality; the paragraph on ethics names wrong as the opposite of right, and includes the words relativist and behaviour, opening up an enirely different can of worms; and the science entry includes Wolfgang Pauli’s phrase “not even wrong,” a fascinating critique of unfalsifiable hypotheses and experiments if ever I’ve heard one (even better coming from the man who had so much to say about elementary particles). At the bottom of the page are some links that make an interesting little poem of sorts:

See also

Right
Evil
Goodness and value theory
Justice
Victim

Categories: Philosophical terminology | Core issues in ethics | Law | Philosophy of science | Scientific terminology

So I’ve resolved to stop being so inert when I hear such things. In part, it’s just my job; I can’t let mistakes slip by into work I’m responsible for, and I prefer to associate with people who take similar responsibility for what they do. More importantly, though, the accumulation of my passive non-reactions has reached such a level that I can no longer excuse myself as unsure. Of course, I’ll probably still defer to professors and older, wiser folk, but the little voices in my head will be saying what I don’t have the courage to. As soon as I finish typing this I’ll likely revert to being the same old  meek, amenable communicator (or non-communicator, as the case may be), but at least in type, and thanks to your kind patience, I can take issue with these tiny, elementary wrongs.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be seen here; thanks for reading.

Crossposted to Abstract Nonsense

The account of Dominionism given in Kingdom Coming, featuring a massive umbrella of Christian fundamentalist organizations united in their drive to establish a theocracy in the United States and by extension the world, sounds like a very depressing story. This is at least what every review I’ve found says: the reviewers who agree with Michelle Goldberg call her vision chilling, and the few who do not say she is excessively alarmist.

The truly chilling thing about Kingdom Coming is that it’s actually fairly mild and optimistic. Goldberg pauses every few pages to say that no, the United States will probably not become theocratic, because of the strength of its laws and Constitution and legal system. And she concentrates only on local fundamentalism, without talking about its mutually-reinforcing connections to warmongering and state surveillance, both staples of totalitarianism. She suggests that the gradual discrediting of American neoconservatism will lead to a resurgence of a more populist brand of fundamentalism, complete with Populist-style anti-Semitism. However, apart from that she says nothing about the intersection of neoconservatism and fundamentalism, except for one remark toward the end about a war between Christianity and Islam.

In fact, the most worrying future trends are the ones the book spends little to no time on. The formation of the Dominionist front is crucial to expose, and so is the stealth network of would-be theocrats: Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism, Ralph Reed’s comment about painting his face and operating under cover of darkness, the wink to the religious right inherent in Bush’s “compassionate conservative” comment. The book’s greatest success is in documenting that network without lapsing into conspiracy theories.

But at the same time, it is just as important to explore the analogy between Dominionism and other totalitarian ideologies further, and quoting Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is not enough. The United States has a democratic tradition, but it also has a tradition of ignoring civil liberties whenever it’s at war; now that the view of anti-terrorism as a protracted war has taken root among most of its people, liberal democracy is in especial danger. And while Goldberg is right that most Americans may not want a Christian Taliban, most Germans never wanted the Holocaust, either—most never even voted for the Nazis in free elections.

To look at the prospects of a totalitarian ideology, it’s good to look at the factors that raise one to power, and, separately, the factors that keep one afloat. Economic depression certainly helps extremists come to power, especially if liberal democracy is seen as the source of the problem. The most plausible depression scenario in the United States revolves around defaulting on the debt; this will likely be viewed as the fault of excessive government spending, but the popular solution will likely be gutting social spending rather than raising taxes or curtailing military spending. Alone such a scenario would favor corporatists rather than fundamentalists, but not only are the two groups mutually reinforcing, but also the poverty that will ensue will be a breeding ground for religious evangelism masquerading as charity. Religious charities use poverty to their advantage everywhere in the world; that’s how Hamas and Hezbollah are not right-wing fringe parties in their respective nations.

Goldberg does in fact mention this scenario in passing, although she takes it in a somewhat different direction: she posits a more domestically-minded fundamentalism building on economic populism. This is plausible, but is not how totalitarian governments came to power in countries with strong ties between corporations and conservatives: Germany, Italy, Spain. Her scenario fits a grassroots communist-like movement better, and one of the most important things to realize about American Dominionism is that it’s anything but grassroots.

The other issue, war and its effect on civil liberties, is even more important to any discussion about Christian fundamentalism. Right now, the United States only tortures or imprisons without trial people who it thinks might possibly look like Islamist terrorists. Under an explicitly Dominionist government, this national security apparatus can easily expand to disenfranchise and imprison people of the wrong sexual orientation or active in the wrong political movement.

But when I say Kingdom Coming is optimistic, the single most critical point I’m thinking of is not Goldberg’s neglect of some of the broader angles concerning conservative fundamentalism. Rather, it’s the repeated assertion that no, it cannot be that bad, because the Constitution will still protect freedom. Ironically, the book itself contains ample of evidence why it won’t, documenting the rise of the “Christian nation” myth. And yet, it doesn’t make the requisite conclusion that just like Hitler never abolished the Weimar Constitution, which remained in effect until the end of World War Two with few Nazi amendments, so can American theocrats rise to power without repealing a single word of the Bill of Rights.

In one of the articles I once read about Christian nationalism, I saw a reference to a quote that went roughly, “We can pass unconstitutional laws faster than the courts can overturn them.” Unfortunately, I don’t remember who said it and in what context. But from Kingdom Coming and other articles, I can tell the American right’s sentiments are rarely that explicit; in most cases, it will claim to defend the Constitution, even while it pushes to abolish its self-enforcement mechanisms, especially judicial review. And so far, it has been doing a fairly successful job at that, considering that separation of church and state remains a sham, and the federal courts are still not protecting homosexuals from discrimination.

Indefinite totalitarianism requires three things: a motive, or a suitably totalitarian ideology; a means, or a modern state apparatus able to surveil and thereby oppress its citizens; and an opportunity, or a crisis of democracy abetted by lackluster opposition. Pessimistically, the United States has Dominionism, the national security  state, and the Democratic Party. Kingdom Coming understandably focuses on the motive, which is why it’s so detached from the means and the related issue of warmongering. Its greatest naïve optimism then lies in understating the degree to which the Dominionist movement has the opportunity to advance.

The internationalist note the book finishes on begins with an excerpt from an interview with Iranian secularist Marjane Satrapi, in which she says, “The secular people, we have no country. We the people—all the secular people who are looking for freedom—we have to keep together. We are international, as they are international.” While an international coalition can easily backfire—in Europe, even one-superstate liberalism is ailing, let alone one-world liberalism—an intranational one can be robust.

A good optimistic note to end any discussion of American religious fundamentalism on is this: if it continues advancing, it will reach a tipping point, so that it will be easy for secularists to use its fascism as a wedge issue. The Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, and the rest of the Dominionist organizations in the US are strong, but they can’t achieve anything without allies. The smart anti-fascist will deprive them of these allies by using such historical examples as Nazi Germany to drive wedges into the heart of the conservative coalition. The motive and means of totalitarianism will remain, but this active opposition can greatly diminish its opportunity.

The United States spends 15% of its public monies on education. Yet more of its gross domestic product is spent on providing and consuming private education. It is, in all, a tidy sum.

The overall results, though, are not very consoling. A new report issued this week by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and funded by the Ford Foundation, Pew Trusts, and Atlantic Philanthropies shows that educational progress is stagnating. Here are some of their findings:

• 14% of people under 25 have no high school degree.
• 25% of U.S. 15-year-olds score so low on academic skills that they are unlikely to be able to undertake any studies beyond high school.
• Though 3 in 5 U.S. young adults enter either a junior college or four-year college or university, the number of college graduates in 2003 is equal to only 33% of their generation. Two-thirds of the current young generation, in other words, is not getting a college degree. This proportion grows slightly – to 39% — if one adds in young adults with junior college associate degrees.

The report concludes that the United States no longer leads the world in access to and attainment in higher education. The nation’s overall performance, in a word, is average.

Why? Clearly poor primary and secondary education is a cause. As the report notes, a big chunk of young U.S. adults is effectively eliminated because they drop out of high school or have inadequate skills. Given that many other countries have higher high school and college graduation rates, American youth are not hitting some God-given limits on their educational potential, but are rather under-achieving for reasons of local circumstance.

What are they? Financial need, for one. Another report, this time issued jointly by the Congress and the U.S. Education Department this past Friday, September 22, reports that between 1.4 million and 2.4 million young adults will not earn college degrees in the next decade for lack of funds. These young adults, qualified by the study as academically prepared for college, come almost exclusively from low-income families. Doing a little seat of the pants math, if they went to college, they would increase their generation’s college participation by between 10% and 15%.

Income differences really count. Richard Kahlenberg in the March 10, 2006 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education reports research showing that 1 in 2 students from families making $90,000 a year or more went to college, while only 1 in 17 students from families making $35,000 or less went to school.

As low income in the U.S. is often related to race, many of these potential students are no doubt African-American and Latino. The gap between minority student and white student attendance in four-year colleges suggests this is likely. Consider that 2001 U.S. Education numbers reveal that 37% of eligible white students attend college, in contrast to 26% of African-American and 15% of Latino students. As bad as the figures are for white students, minority students trail much further behind.

Something is going wrong at the colleges too. The proportion of four-year college students who graduate within five years of entry has slid from 55% in 1988 to 51% in 2001. Private schools are holding up this rather dismal percentage, for the graduation rate in public colleges and universities is much worse and has declined noticeably more. In 1988, 48% of public students graduated within 5 years; in 2001, the figure had slipped to 42%. These figures were reported by the American College Testing Service in 2002.

Colleges are expensive, and their costs have risen relentlessly since the seventies, as I reported in “Forget the Pigskin and Follow the Money,” an earlier column here at 3QD. It now costs $11,000 a year for tuition, room, and board at public colleges, and over $25,000 a year at private schools. To be sure, colleges, universities, the federal government, and banks, provide scholarships and loans in apparent abundance. But resources are being out-run by rising costs and student inability to pay the rest of a very large bill. Federal Pell grants that provide actual money instead of loans for students coming from low and moderate income families, cover about 15% of the annual student bill, down from 40% in earlier years.

As colleges have ginned up their little competitiveness race, they have diverted more of their resources into so-called “merit” scholarships. They now put over $7 billion into winning students away from other competitors, up five-fold between 1994 and 2004. Schools still award an enormity of aid based upon financial need – some $39 billion in 2004. Once more, however, Kahlenberg in the Chronicle notes that a Congressional advisory committee estimates that when expenses are balanced against the total financial aid package, a low-income student still faces an annual $3,800 shortfall that must be made up by her efforts or by those of her family. When family income is below $35,000, that can be just enough to discourage college entry.

The final economic clincher is that even as education costs rise, incomes for 2/3 of American workers have not grown since 1973. Here then, in higher education, is another place where the fundamental deficiencies of American economic life are being felt.

There is no gainsaying that the income advantage for the possessors of a college degree continue to grow. The Census Bureau reports that national median earnings for college degree holders was $44,000. College degree holders now make 72% more than persons with high school degrees, up from 68% in 1997. Certainly it pays to go to college, if you can pay for it.

This year’s report card shows that:

• Dramatic improvements are needed in primary and secondary education to increase college readiness.
• More resources must be devoted to student aid, and without exception, to those who by virtue of their family income are most in financial need.
• Colleges need to sort out why their costs run along faster than inflation, and have so for a good quarter century. Could institution-building and “competitiveness” have something to do with it?

Let’s learn from these tough lessons.

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.

                                                
Aboriginal languages

Aranda, Arrernte, Bundjalung, Dharug, Gindavul, Galmahra, Githavul, Gunditjmara, Kukatja, Lardil, Malyangapa, Ngangiwumirri, Ngunawal, Noonucal, Nyulnyul, Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Thungutti, Walmajarri, Weerluval, Wiradjuri, Yankunyttjatjara, Yindjibarndi, Yorta Yorta, Yugambeh

Australian place names

Anglers Paradise, Boggabri, Bullamakanka, Burra Burri, Burrinjuck, Cape Tribulation, Coober Pedy, Dirk Hartog Island, Emu Plains, Glasshouse Mountains, Goondiwindi, Great Barrier Reef, Groote Eylandt, Gulargambone, Kurri Kurri, Mount Kosciuszko, Nurioopta, Orpheus Island, Puckapunyal, Surfers Paradise, Tin Can Bay, Tumbarumba, Wollongong, Yarongobilly Caves

Australian wines

Amberley Margaret River Chimney Brush Chardonnay, d’Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz, Brokenwood Cricket Pitch, Chain of Ponds Corkscrew Chardonnay, Journey’s End McLaren Vale Arrival Shiraz, Milkwood Yarra Valley Chardonnay, Mount Langhi Ghiran Billi Billi Shiraz, Mount Mary Quintet Cabernet, Punters Corner Spartacus Reserve Shiraz, Tin Shed Melting Pot, West End Eternity Botrytis Semillon, Wirra Wirra Church Block

Bands and singers performing in Sydney

Arctic Monkeys, Death Cab For Cutie, Endless Summer Beach Party, Happy Hate Me Nots, Hooray For Everything, Honduras Milk Shake, Howling Bells, I Killed The Prom Queen, Kamikaze Supermodel, Kisschasy, Lime Spiders, Love Outside Andromeda, Midnight Juggernaut, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, Psychedlic Furs, Shy Impostors, Soma For Kinda, The Fiery Furnaces, Zombie Ghost Train

International stocks

American Power Conversion, Apollo Group, Auto Nation, Bed Bath & Beyond, Brilliance China, Cavalier Corporation, Commander Communications, Integrated Workforce, Intuitive Surgical, Marathon Oil, Monster Worldwide, Nippon Meat Packers, Oracle, PETsMART, Prudential, Spotless Group, Torchmark, Urban Outfitters

Paint charts colour names

Aged Driftwood, Autumn Bushland, Bare Bracken, Blue Antarctic, Charcoal Dust, Fireclay, Frosted Breath, Last Chance, Light Latte, Maritime Harmony, Mulberry Desire, Papaya Cream, Pale Vellum, Pearl Pink, Persian Plum, Powder Doeskin, Pure Milk, Rock Oyster, Soft Spice, Swansdown, Tanbark, Tea Biscuit, Teal Hedge, Texas Dust, Venetian Sea, Weathered Copper

Poetry magazines and ezines

Angel Exhaust, Barfing Frog, Bohemian Ink, Collage Bricolages, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Entropy Garden, Freebase Accordion, God Particle, Horror Wood, Ice-Floe, Jumping Cat, Lilies and Cannonballs, Many Moving Mountains, Nerve Cowboy, Otis Rush, Part-time Post-Modern, Quiet Feather, Red Chain, Scissorkicks, Tickled By Thunder, Unpleasant Schedule, Van Gogh’s Ear, Well Nourished Moon, Xconnects, Yankee Pot Roast, Zafusy

The much-anticipated film version of The Devil Wears Prada sparked numerous heated debates (and the occasional bloggorific rant) about its underlying themes and the potentially damaging subconscious “messages” it might be conveying to impressionable young girls. But the scene that caused the most howls of outrage was an exchange between Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and Nigel, the deliciously fey fashion editor of the fictional Runway magazine:

Andy: Doesn’t anybody eat around here?

Nigel: Not since [size] two is the new four and zero is the new two.

Andy: Well, I’m a six…

Nigel: Aha! The new fourteen!

This could hardly be welcome news to the average American woman, who generally wears a size 12 or 14 on the unadjusted scale. For many viewers, that scene encapsulated the frustrating disconnect between the fantasy worlds of the glitterrati in fashion and filmdom, and the stark realities of everyday people. But for me, it also answered a nagging question that had been gnawing at the back of my brain for awhile now: why is it so damned difficult to figure out what size I’m supposed to be when buying clothes? I’ve long suspected the fashion industry of practicing a “sliding scale,” shifting their sizing charts downward to accommodate America’s expanding waistlines — and, more importantly, to make women feel better about themselves (“Hey! Suddenly I’m one size smaller!”) so that they buy more clothes.

Apparently, it’s true: women’s clothing sizes in the US are being progressively “down-sized,” so that what was a size 8 in 1990 is now a size 6, and so on. One assumes the strategy works — unless you happen to work in the fashion industry and are hip to the Big Lie. However, I doubt there’s a broad master conspiracy afoot in fashion circles, with a secret cabal of sadistic, fat-loathing-yet-greedy designers reaching a consensus on what the new sizes will be and then foisting them on an unsuspecting public. I think it’s far more complicated than that.

For one thing, there is clearly no consensus. Even in the fashion world, sizing is inconsistent. My closet contains items ranging from extra small to large, and from size 4 to 8. Further complicating matters, I have one of those inverted triangle body types. So I generally wear size 4 jeans (the new 6!), but given the breadth of my back and shoulders, I’ve never worn less than a size 8 on top — which makes buying dresses a bit of challenge, especially since I’m also short-waisted. (Needless to say, I have learned to love the drop waist.) Short of custom tailoring, there is no good way to address this. But it would make things so much easier if the US fashion industry would just agree on a universal sizing standard and stick to it. Then I’d at least have a consistent framework in which to make the necessary adjustments my body type requires.

No doubt some larger people out there read “size 4 jeans” and immediately thought, “Shut up, skinny bitch! Stop complaining! What do you know about our pain?” I deliberately mentioned my specific sizes to elicit just such a reaction, in order to make my next point: I do feel that same kind of pain. The deeper, underlying issue at work here is our society’s unrealistic expectations regarding what a woman’s body “should” look like. Very few of us have the perfectly proportioned “hourglass figure” touted by clothing designers, regardless of what size we wear. Ergo, no woman is free of body image issues and the pressure to be thin, whether said woman is as full-figured as Camryn Mannheim or the same size as uber-waifs Kate Moss and Calista Flockhart — or, like me, somewhere in between.

So it’s something that adversely affects women of all shapes and sizes. The fashion industry’s admittedly ingenious marketing strategy shamelessly exploits the female insecurity and obsession with weight and clothing size: counting calories and minutes on the Stairmaster, measuring inches, assessing body fat percentage, and ruthlessly comparing all those “numbers” to all the other women in one’s social circle.  We agonize over the slightest extra ounce or inch. We beat  up ourselves, and each other, about it on almost a daily basis.

At least a solution to the practical issues concerning clothing sizes might be within reach, with the emergence of 3D full-body scanners that can take very precise body measurements. These are then converted into patterns from which garments are cut, hopefully one day making custom tailoring affordable and accessible to the general populace, not just to the fabulously wealthy. It’s already available to the well-heeled clientele of Brooks Brothers, which has been using a 3D scanner in its stores for the past three years. Lane Bryant stores in malls across the country began featuring body scanners in April 2005, and Levi’s, the Gap, and American Eagle Outfitters are also experimenting with the technology.

As cool as this is on the nifty gadgetry front, and as wonderful as it would be to be able to order custom-fit clothing in the future, the research application of the body scanner technology revealed far more interesting conclusions. Apparel product development specialist Lenda Jo Connell of Auburn University is part of a collaboration that uses 3D body scanners to study the shapes of American women. (The research is sponsored in part by JC Penney, Target and Jockey.) Over the last two years, she has scanned more than 6000 women, and found that only 8.4% of them had the standard hourglass shape. In fact, it’s the shape women are least likely to have. We are far more likely to have bodies in the shape of a rectangle, spoon, or inverted triangle (yours truly). It’s hardly shocking to be told that the fashion industry is out of touch with what “real” woman look like, but now we have some solid scientific data to back us up.

The fact that so many mass-market clothing manufacturers (as opposed to high-end designers) are interested in scanning technology — and are willing to put their money on the line by providing funding — indicates that their primary concern is not on foisting unrealistic standards onto American women, but on bringing the clothing they offer more in line with the fit customers might actually desire. After all, they’re in business to sell clothes and make money, not to start a cultural revolution. So where do the unrealistic expectations come from? Many people like to blame Hollywood and women’s magazines for concealing or air-brushing away the slightest imperfection in the women being portrayed, leading the rest of us to conclude that we, too, should look like that.

It’s hardly the entire story, but I think there’s some truth to that. That’s why I will be eternally grateful to actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who several years ago (at age 43) allowed herself to be photographed both dolled up for the camera in the typical actress-y glam shots, and au naturel. “It’s such a fraud, and I’m the one perpetuating it,” she said at the time of her own perceived perfection, with refreshing candor. She still looked beautiful (I thought) in the natural shots, but she also looked real: uneven skin tone, slim  and healthy but not perfectly shaped and toned, etc. Since then, she’s become equally outspoken about Hollywood’s obsession with cosmetic surgery, making a conscious choice to stop fighting the visible effects of her advancing years and allow herself to age gracefully. (The tragedy is that she also chose to retire from the big screen, depriving filmdom of her considerable talent.)

Curtis’ courage in standing up to the horrendous pressures of her industry came to mind this past week with the news that the organizers of fashion week in Madrid, Spain, had banned too-thin models from their runways, based on the height-to-weight ratios used by the World Health Organization. Essentially, any model weighing less than 125 pounds would not meet the new Madrid criteria.  The decision caused a media firestorm, and this time the nayersayers weren’t lmited to the usual suspects (women’s health groups, feminist organizations, and the like), but included industry insiders. “What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs,” Allure editor Linda Wells told the New York Times, adding later in the article, “Some of the models really are too thin, but that is such a tricky thing to say.” It shouldn’t be a tricky thing to say, which is why the Madrid decision is so significant. Concerns have been raised before about this, most recently with the “heroin chic” look popularized by Kate Moss in the 1990s. But it’s highly unusual for anyone to take the extraordinary steps of the Madrid organizers and address the issue outright.

Whether other fashion show organizers will follow suit, and whether these and other efforts will be sufficient to stem the tide of malnourished underweight models, remains to be seen. But it’s bitterly ironic that an industry whose main focus lies in promoting images of health and beauty is simultaneously fostering all manner of eating disorders and associated health problems behind the scenes. It’s nothing new or surprising, mind you — but it’s still bitterly ironic.  And now everyone is scrambling, once again, to cast blame: Is it “Society”? The designers? The fashion magazines? There are a mind-boggling number of variables contributing to the problem; it’s impossible to isolate any single one as the primary cause.

And to what extent can we lay partial blame on the models themselves, who willingly sacrifice their own long-term health as they strive to reach the industry ideal of a size 0? Yes, these girls literally aspire to be nothing, while many of their petite counterparts in Hollywood are striving to be less than zero. (Paula Abdul is reportedly a size 00, and the frighteningly emaciated Nicole Ritchie should disappear entirely any day now.) Some fashion industry insiders have defended the models being held up as exhibits for the prosecution as being “naturally slender,” but give us a break: no woman is “naturally” so thin that her ribs, hip bones, and shoulder blades jut out. Some of these ultra-thin models have so little body fat or muscle mass, they could be medically described as “wasting.” Small wonder the New York Times article quotes former model turned actress and fashion designer Milla Jovovich that the industry needs more rules and regulations when it comes to ensuring the health of its models.

It’s easy to blame the fashion and entertainment industries, but we must also take some responsibility for propagating negative attitudes toward food and weight ourselves.  We buy into the message, day after day, whether we’re directly involved in those industries or not. Andy Sach’s colleague at Runway magazine in The Devil Wears Prada, Emily, isn’t a model, yet she is perpetually on a diet, and at one point confesses her secret to stayng ultra-thin: “I don’t eat anything, and then when I feel I’m about to faint, I eat a cube of cheese.” Later she exults, “I’m one stomach flu away from reaching my goal weight!” What’s sad is that the intended satire is dangerously close to the truth: how many of us have heard women express envy that a friend’s illness has caused her to lose weight: “I wish I could have a tapeworm (or cancer), too, just for a week or so to get rid of those nagging extra 10 pounds!”

New technologies like the body scanner can help with our difficulties in finding our proper size and fit. And as Katie Couric recently discovered, we can still lie to ourselves and ensure flattering photos with some creative photo-shopping, or via the new “slimcam” digital camera from Hewlett-Packard, which can take away an entire dress size with the flick of a switch. But technology can’t save us from ourselves. So long as we continue to buy into the notion that “one size should fit all,” and punish ourselves accordingly for our failure to measure up to impossible beauty ideals, we will never be able to accept ourselves as we are, and see the beauty inherent in women (and men!) of all shapes and sizes.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette writes about science and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

I am most often described by those who know me as venerable, though I am not particularly old. Sagacious, Solomonic and wise are other frequently used descriptors. Once, a lady who lived above me in a beleaguered section of Oakland, California, and whose business it was to know these things, said that I was a judge of some kind in a previous life. This did not surprise me. I have felt myself, from a very young age, standing just above and a bit to the side, perceiving you in your true form, despite your efforts to conceal the raw nature of your soul. I am regularly called upon to settle disputes of all kinds, ranging from the picayune to the momentous, by those who know me and understand the depth of my comprehension, and by anonymous passers-by as well, who are overcome with sudden knowledge of the rarefied workings of my mind. I would make a fine Senator, Supreme, or delegate to the UN, but I would find the duties gravely limiting–to court the benighted electorate, to interpret a relic, to navigate the shoals of global bureaucracy. None of these interests me. Better to remain aloof, I say, a generalist. Better to be a wizard for the benefit of Everyman.

I am sexually adored by all who lay eyes on me, and frequently by those who do not. The blind make clumsy passes, tossing away their canes and leashes so that their hands may be free to caress. The developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed suffer spasmodic fits of desire when in my presence. Autistics are especially enamored of my voice, to which they pay unrelenting attention. Gay men queue at my front door, hoping to interest me in their society, and straight men forsake their wives and children in hope of brief union. Lesbians reconfigure their sexual identities when I pass them on the street, rending their clothes and falling to their knees. In fact, women of all ages and descriptions are powerless to withstand my appeal. I have been assaulted by crones, who employ their walkers to cage me, and by prepubescent schoolgirls, whose ceaseless screams of delight fill the streets after 3 pm.

Animals travel great distances to walk at my side. Dogs lunge and tear at those who would approach without permission. Cats submit their kill for approval, exposing their bellies as evidence of their submission. Birds nest below my window to raise their young in close proximity to my benevolence. Wolves cross mountain ranges to stand sentinel at my door, baying in harmonic fifths to mark my comings and goings. Insects, too, pay me their fealty: Ants construct their colonies at the foot of my stoop, and bees renounce the biological imperative of the hive to fly in formation in my wake.

There is a physical genius about me that captivates professional athletes, whose accomplishments become laughable when considered beside the potentials of my own muscle and sinew. I am known for my grace as well as my ferocity, for the force collected in the clutch of my fist, and for the kinetic beauty of my leaping form. Every major professional sport has petitioned me–not to participate, for that would obliterate parity, but for my talismanic presence, as an object of aspiration, an instance of superiority. Olympic teams from no fewer than 16 countries have requested my peak-performance expertise. Lance Armstrong credits me with every one of his Tour de France triumphs.

I have been offered fellowships at scores of major universities in the United States and Western Europe. Deans and Provosts clamber for my advice on organizational psychology, as applied in academic settings. Professors of English beg me to elucidate the subtleties of Beckett and Gaddis; Professors of Astrophysics humbly request my thoughts on the perturbations of orbiting bodies in distant solar systems. Hawking threatened to throw himself from his chair in a fit of pique at the shining light of my intellect.

I am a master thespian, flawlessly embodying the dramatic roles I undertake. Directors, shame-faced and desperate, request critiques of their conceptual frameworks, and feverishly take notes when I humor them with my insight. Actors weep for the sheer transformative power of pathos in my performances. Aesthetes are driven to suicide. Uta Hagen herself once dissolved into tears in the face of my one-man interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I am regularly accosted by mothers who would have their babies touched with grace from my lips. The maimed and deformed claw at one another in their seething masses, to enjoy the restorative powers of my healing hands. Holy men prostrate themselves on my doorstep, to resurrect their flagging faith.

I am 37 years-old, 5’9, with brown, wavy hair, almond-shaped eyes and an aquiline nose. My complexion is clear. My weight fluctuates between 165 and 170 pounds. I work out four times a week at Crunch, on the stationary bicycle, with free weights, and on the elliptical machine. My pectoral muscles are massive and mobile. My abdomen is corrugated.

DWM

ISO

SWF, 19 – 25 years-old, brunette or blonde, who enjoys films, walks in the park, chinese food, and margaritas. Education unimportant. Appearance primary. The surgically enhanced are encouraged to apply. Respond to box #3678. Your pic gets mine.

Thanx!

–Leonard.

[a bloody tip of the scalp to Joe Frank]

Today 3 Quarks Daily is exclusively devoted to original reflections on the attacks of exactly five years ago. We thank all our contributors. Their various pieces are listed alphabetically below by author’s last name (and linked) for your browsing convenience:

Eating Our Popcorn While We Weep, by Karen Ballentine

Brief Reflections on 9/11, by Akeel Bilgrami

Years of Bullets, Years of Lead, by Michael Blim

Alienation and Violence in Kashmir, by Shiban Ganju

September Song, by Ruth Kikin-Gill

Islamism’s Watershed Moment, by Alon Levy

Three Ways Out of Iraq, by Ram Mannikalingam

9/11: A fragment of Experience, by Morgan Meis

Whatever: A New York State of Mind, by Peter Nicholson

Empty Liquor Gift-Tins and the Horror of the Magyar Moment, by Jed Palmer

A Short Numerically-Flavored Rumination on 9/11/01, by John Allen Paulos

How We Became Important, by S. Abbas Raza

Remembering the World Trade Center, by S. Asad Raza

Perceptions: 9.11, by Sughra Raza

The Self and September 11, by Justin E. H. Smith

A Note on September 11 Fiction, by J. M. Tyree

Abbas Raza:

Would you say a little bit by way of reflections on September 11 five years later?

Akeel Bilgrami:

It’s hard to say anything about September 11 that hasn’t been said before, but some things need to be said again and again, so I am glad you’ve asked me this. In the first few months after that morning, I, like most other people, spoke an awful lot to friends and acquaintances about how we ought to understand that extraordinary atrocity. The great and spontaneous feelings of sympathy for the victims we all felt were expressed in words, in donations, in trips down to the devastated region to keep small shops and eating places going…. But after some months, I began to notice that many people, even including close friends, were quite incapable (actually that is the wrong word, I should say ‘unwilling’ since these are not helpless tendencies) of showing any parallel sympathy for the very much larger number of people being bombed and killed in Afghanistan –a far greater wrong because that invasion amounted to the virtually total destruction of an already parched and hungry nation. Quite apart from the moral disappointment one feels about this, one can take this chance to reflect (since that is what you asked me to do) in a more general way about our insensitivity to the suffering of people who are not in the immediate vicinity.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about ourselves is that we have tended to respond to September 11 or to the terrorist actions in London and other parts of the world, by simply saying that they are so atrocious and unpardonable that they could not be motivated by any serious political motives or any genuine grievance. But when this is not just too quick and reactive, it is at best obtuse and (perhaps more correctly) at worst, self-serving. The words on the lips of terrorists which complain of the American government’s actions in various parts of the world cannot be wholly beside the point and it is our responsibility to pay attention to them, even as we rightly condemn the terrorist acts as unpardonable. The fact is that the words of complaint and criticism on the lips of terrorists are on the lips of many millions of more people on the street, who are not terrorists at all, but ordinary Muslims who have no great love for the terrorists and in fact would be deeply opposed to them but for the fact that they feel that to be critical of them would be letting the side down and capitulating to America’s direct and indirect state- terrorist actions towards their own people for decades.

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

Over the course of Italy’s search to understand its lengthy encounter with domestic terrorism, people began to characterize the period of its florescence and decline as Italy’s “anni di piombo,” its years of the bullet. In English, however, we have the opportunity to accept the direct translation, while adding a second sense of our own. “Piombo” is lead, the element.

These past five years have been the “years of bullets” for peoples subject to successive American wars in the Middle East, and the “years of lead” at home. Bush and his regime have put great lead sinkers in our pockets, and we are drowning in a pool of death, moral and political decay, and debt.

Let us take account of what we have done since 9/11, on this, its fifth “anniversary.” There is something about anniversaries that summons up a reckoning. Then there arises compulsion to cut time into periods. What has happened? When and why did it happen? Where are we now?

What Has Happened?

Between 42,000 and 46,000 Iraq civilians have died since the 2003 invasion, according to recent estimates.

2,260 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and 19,945 have been wounded. These figures are more precise.

440 non-Afghani soldiers, including 333 U.S. soldiers, have died in Afghanistan from many nations since the beginning of post-9/11 hostilities. The number of U.S. wounded in Afghanistan is 892.

No one is sure any more how many Afghani civilians have died since the post-9/11 war began, interest having dropped off after the 2003 Iraqi war.

2072 wiretap authorizations for foreign intelligence and terrorism surveillance out of 2072 applications were granted in 2005, double the number authorized a decade ago. Since 1993, only 5 applications have been refused. No one knows if this figure represents the total number of taps, given the veil of secrecy drawn over the anti-terror campaign.

The Bush regime has been tracking the phone calls of 350,000 people, both foreign nationals and citizen, that have been culled out of millions of telecommunication intercepts. It has now asked Congress for a law that will allow his government to do legally what it has been doing illegally since 9/11.

25 foreign abductions and renditions, slang for torture, have been documented since 9/11. Amnesty International believes that the final number of abductees will be in the hundreds.

The Congressional Research Office estimates that the cost of the war will have reached $320 billion by now. NBC says the war is costing $200 million a day. Joseph Stiglitz estimates it will cost $2 trillion when all is said and done.

Again, on Afghanistan, no one is keeping close tabs of late, but the war had cost as of September, 2005, $88 billion.

When and Why Did It Happen?

A hard one.

Some say, for very good reason, that it all began when Franklin Roosevelt on his way back from Yalta forged a secret understanding with the Saudi government to provide them with protection in exchange for their oil.

For Osama bin Laden, it was watching Beirut crumble under heavy bombing in 1982.

The first Iraq War in 1991 pretty much put the United States on its way to the present situation.

Bush on September 7 in Georgia says it all began when bin Laden issued a fatwa against the U.S. in 1996.

The 9/11 attack authorized American escalation.

Where Are We Now?

A harder question still. But it feels as if we have passed the mid-point of the play. Duncan and Banquo are dead, the last act has begun, and the prophecies pronounced. Bush’s Malcolm still lives, but Birnam Wood is yet far shy of Dunsinane. Our Macbeth still has blood in his eye: “The war on terrorism more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And we’re only in its opening stages,” he said on September 7.

He seems like Macbeth to believe that more death still will save his position:

Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
Unless the deed go with it; from this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o’ the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool…

Like Macbeth, there will be no pretty ending for our murderous, usurper king.

For us, occasionally vociferous, but mostly silent, even somnolent, the problem is graver. Weighed down by the heavy burdens of guilt, war crimes, disgrace, and economic ruin that threaten to sink us for good, we must stop thinking about 9/11 and start thinking about what went wrong and what we must do to make it right.

Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.
                              –Osama bin Laden, Time magazine, Dec 1998

We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
                              –George W. Bush, September 7, 2003

If I can have nothing to do with the organized violence of the Government, I can have less to do with the unorganized violence of the people. I would prefer to be crushed between the two.
                               –Mahatma Gandhi

Alienation breeds terrorism: so say the experts. Poverty, deprivation, subjugation, discrimination, illiteracy provoke alienation and violence. But, is alienation by itself enough prerequisite? From the example below it seems some other factors are at play. Two communities from the same gene pool and same culture have emerged differently after six hundred years of treading different paths in history.

Kashmir acquired its name after a sage Kashyap who reclaimed the water logged land and settled there with his people about 5000 years ago. Over succeeding centuries it evolved into a seat of Buddhist and Hindu learning and by 1300AD it was a place for scholars and not soldiers. The ethos was of compassion, acceptance and spirituality. Intellectual disputes were settles by debates. The sage was revered more than the king. Wise word was more persuasive that the sword.

And then Kashmir confronted its ‘nine-eleven’ in the persona of a brutal king in 1389AD. Sikander, a fundamentalist zealot, adopted the last name of ‘Butshikan’ because he hated idol worship of the Hindus and proceeded to destroy the culture, religion, music, literature and temples with impunity. Two choices on the table were: convert to Islam or die. Many chose death, some escaped and emigrated but the majority converted to Islam. By the time his reign ended in 1413AD — legend has it– only eleven Hindu Pundit families had managed to survive in the valley of Kashmir. Trained in the thoughts of Upanishads that, “Truth is one, the wise call it by different names” and hence “The world is one family” they were at a loss to come to terms with the notion that Islam and only Islam provided all the answers.

Over next six hundred years with sporadic exodus and attrition their population declined. Kashmir, which had a hundred percent Hindu and Buddhist population, became predominantly an Islamic state.

The Muslim majority of Kashmir has been ill at ease with the secular Indian constitution and has felt alienated for many genuine and perceived reasons. The corrupt politicians and the Indian security forces have added fuel to the fire. The simmer came to boil and culminated in the second ‘nine-eleven’ in 1989, six hundred years after the first: the start of current Islamic militancy. The choice for the Hindus was the repeat of 1389AD: leave or die. 350,000 Pundits were thrown out in a matter of months. Some, who were naïve enough to ignore history stayed back only to face plunder, brutality and murder. Exiled Hindu Pundits – 350.000 of them – struggled and suffered in refugee camps outside Kashmir.

This was the tragic end of an intellectual culture of 5000 years – but not the value system. Without money, food, housing, medicines, do you think they were alienated enough to become terrorists? Here is the answer: in the last seventeen years, from 1989 to 2006, Kashmiri Pundit community, having lost everything, living in subhuman deprivation has not produced a single terrorist. Not one. In fact, in the last 600 years they have not cultivated a single militant.

Here is the question: how is it, two communities from the same gene pool, same cultural background of 5000 years, both alienated for one reason or the other in the recent past, choose different paths to solve similar problems?

Therein may lay some answer to solve prevailing violent mindset of nations and communities.

We can bicker about whether 9/11 changed anything substantial in the politics of the West, but there is no doubt that in the Islamic world, especially among unassimilated Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, it really did change everything. The attacks, and the American retaliation in Afghanistan, will probably turn out to have been as definitive in the history of political Islam as the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Just as the Iranian Revolution produced a regime based on Islamism, catapulting the ideology into the Middle Eastern mainstream, so has Bin Laden’s attack made his ideology respectable among alienated Muslims, inspiring a small minority of them to commit their own terrorist attacks.

In 1999, Bin Laden was a wanted terrorist who could blow up relatively unimportant American targets and who was best-known to the CIA and other intelligence organizations. In 2004, he was a notorious figure who symbolized Islamism and anti-Americanism and who could inspire attacks independent of his own network. 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden’s people; the Bali bombing was the work of a regional affiliate; the Madrid bombing and the two London bombings were the works of local extremists inspired by Bin Laden but not affiliated with his organization.

Bin Laden’s own organization might have been able to carry out its own attacks instead of merely inspire them had the United States not crippled it in the months following 9/11. There is much to be criticized about the way Bush handled the invasion of Afghanistan, but it did in fact succeed in preventing Bin Laden’s operatives from striking. Its main failures were mishandling the political aftermath of the Taliban’s fall, and failing to achieve a psychological victory by killing or capturing Bin Laden.

Al Qaida has then become more of an ideology than a real organization. Bin Laden’s influence extends as far as his tapes go, just like a radical writer’s influence extends as far as his articles and books go.

Writing about 9/11 a year ago, I noted that post-2001 Islamic extremism didn’t work as a military hierarchy so much as as a university biology department, where every professor runs his own lab. In fact, a better analogy would involve an anarchist cell: the Jihadists may have leaders, but ultimately their cell structure is spontaneous, and although there is an overarching Islamistic goal, the immediate goal is to cause mayhem rather than achieve something concrete.

In fact, like anarchism, Islamism has specific goals. First, it wants foreign influence expunged from the Islamic world, especially American military presence but also Western cultural influence. Second, it wants to establish Muslim theocracies in Muslim countries. Third, it wants to subject Muslims worldwide to traditional religious authority. Some visionaries may look forward to a unified Ummah, or even to spreading Islam throughout the world, but most Jihadists have a distinctly local character.

Bin Laden’s distinguishing feature is his global outlook. Al Qaida the organization and Hezbollah are the only two Islamist terrorist groups that operate globally rather than locally. With the severe blow it suffered, Al Qaida is now forced to operate as a distributed network based on shared values rather than as a single hierarchy; however, it merely outsourced its global outlook to local groups.

However, this movement is still more about frustration and violence than about social change. This is what differentiates extremist groups that focus on welfare operations and gaining political support for reactionary legislation, such as Hezbollah, from extremist groups that focus on killing people, such as the Al Qaida movement. Social movements, even violent ones, tend to draw inspiration from events showcasing their own oppression – in the case of Islamism, the War on Iraq could be such an event. But in fact the Al Qaida movement’s main source of inspiration is 9/11, not Iraq; its defiant figure is Bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein. While the origin of this movement is largely in the oppression of Muslims in Europe, the focus is not so much on the oppression as on the fundamentalism it bred.

There is a reason all of these developments have only happened in the last five years. There was plenty of alienation around earlier, and both Britain and France have been harboring Islamist extremists for decades. But up until 9/11/2001, there was no inspiration for violent action, just as before Rosa Parks defied bus segregation, there was no inspiration in the American South for non-violent direct action.

Ordinarily, terrorism aims to engage in spectacular action in order to evoke fear among members of the terrorized group. This is especially true for factional terrorism, which cannot engage in large-scale massacres the way state terrorism can. In that traditional goal, Bin Laden has certainly succeeded, for Americans fear terrorism far more than social ills that kill an order of magnitude more people. But he has also succeeded in a nontraditional goal, in that he got a reputation of someone who could bring America down, and destroy its essential symbols. It does not matter that the actual attack was spectacular but did not kill that many people; when it comes to ideological grandstanding, perception is reality.

Still, in many respects, the 9/11 attacks did not completely change the character of Islamism. As I mentioned before, it remains primarily local. All Islamists hate the United States, considering it the symbol of all that is evil in the world. But British Jihadists evidently blow up the London Underground instead of traveling to New York and blowing up subway stations; even Iraqi Jihadists, including foreign fighters inspired by anti-Americanism, concentrate more on killing Iraqis of the wrong denomination than on killing Americans.

And two possible trends that would have made the attacks even more of a watershed moment did not occur. It was entirely possible for the attacks to scar not the vast majority of Muslims, but a near-unanimous one. In such a case, the focus of Muslim cultural identity in Europe may have been greater integration, despite Europe’s uniformly integration-discouraging governmental policies; any radical fringe could have then turned to non-violent direct action. I suspect a big reason this trend did not happen is Bush’s virulent response, and governments’ not cracking down on subsequent anti-Muslim hate crimes, but it could have also been due to other reasons, such as the lack of a civic tradition in Islam.

The other possible trend is massive radicalization. At present, the most biased neoconservatives say that 1% of all Muslims are Jihadists; the American response, combined with overt racism in Western countries, could have easily turned that number to 15%. The clash of civilizations fundamentalists on both sides have been hoping for did not happen, is not happening, and will almost certainly not happen. Even Samuel Huntington’s more denouement-based conception of a clash of civilizations has not materialized.

So in fact, 9/11 did not change the level of support Jihadi extremism enjoyed among Muslims. Its significance lies in changing the nature of that support, from merely hating the West and being drawn to fundamentalism as a reaction, to admiring and seeking to emulate Bin Laden. In that respect, it really did change everything in the Islamic world, for never before had there been a coherent violent Islamist ideology. Even if that ideology is still based on its believers’ cultural isolation and oppression, it is still an ideology that serves as inspiration to many extremists. And certainly, this is an ideology that only rose after the watershed moment of Islamism that was 9/11.

September in Tel Aviv is never easy. The heat competes with the humidity, and even with air-conditioning, it feels as if the weather is closing in on us. But in 2001 it wasn’t only the weather that was hard to cope with. A torrent of terror attacks all over the country contributed to the distressed and heavy atmosphere, and made it even harder to breathe.

By the hour, the whole country would tune in to the radio, to keep up with the latest events. A routine of twenty-four daily news broadcasts, on every possible wavelength. Being the computer geeks that we were, we usually topped it up with frequent glances at on-line newspapers, just in case some disaster had happened while we weren’t listening. And sadly, tragedies did happen more often than anyone had wished for.

September’s melancholy was a major reason why Erez and I decided to take a break from everything and set off to Barcelona. Sort of “when the going gets tough, the tough are going away” strategy. We booked tickets for September 13th.

Early afternoon at work, everyone in my design consultancy was busy as usual when someone shouted something about crazy happenings in New York and that we should turn on the T.V. It was hard to believe what we saw. Here’s a plane crashing into a tower. And another one. And the first tower thunders down, and then the second. And things changed forever.

The next two days saw me glued to the internet, with the T.V. as a backup, watching the harsh pictures over and over again – the plane-crashes, the collapsing towers, the falling people, the dust over the city, and the ashes in people’s eyes. And the words. Endless piles of words. Coming from the mouths of million experts who tried to explain what has happened, and why. I’ve learned a whole new vocabulary of terms and names in those days. Words I still wish I hadn’t known.

Meanwhile, all the flights were cancelled. We didn’t know if we’ll be able to leave on our vacation. It sounds cold and selfish, I know, but in a way, the horrible events in America just made it more urgent to get away from everything. To relieve the stress that until that moment was local, and from this point onward became global.

Two days later, at the airport, I wasn’t so sure about getting on the plane. It felt spooky, it felt dangerous, not the getaway I had in mind. Security measures, which are always strict at TLV, seemed more meticulous than ever. Endless queues stretched at the check-in counters due to delayed and cancelled flights, and confused passengers were everywhere. And inside, a sense of guilt was gnawing, eating away the excitement of the journey. Is it ok to indulge on a sunny beach while others are suffering in ashen cities? Am I immoral? And if I wouldn’t go, would it change anything in the worldly order? Maybe not, but it might have changed my life, as Erez proposed to me in Barcelona.

This year, on 9/11 we will be landing in Israel, on a short family visit before relocating from gloomy London, where we lived in the past year, to sunny California, which will be our next home, at least for a while. In Heathrow, each of us will be restricted to carrying only one small hand bag to the plane, and I will have to taste the milk I’m carrying for my baby, to prove it is not a liquid explosive.

When we’ll arrive, I don’t expect the weather in Israel to be any different than it was five years ago. Sadly, I also realize that nothing much has changed in the political climate either. We will drive away from the airport and into the city, while outside the car, the heat will continue to compete with the humidity, and though the air-conditioning will be turned on, we will still feel the weather closing in on us.

More than any other issue, it is the US invasion of Iraq that has separated the US from the rest of world after September 11th. It has also divided the United States internally, weakened its capacity to deal with the threat of extremist Islamic terror, and made a mockery of US power. While Guantanamo, Afghanistan, limits on civil liberties in the US, and the US acquiescence in Israeli bombing have set the US apart from the rest of the world, how many countries can really say they have not tortured prisoners, bombed innocents, imprisoned their own citizens without just cause, or over-reacted in their efforts to fight insurgencies and rebellions? However, other than the Soviet Union and Iraq, itself, no other country after World War II has had the power or the chutzpah to invade another, simply in order to remake it.

While the US Administration argues that Iraq is a part of the “war on terror”, most critics argue that it is at best distracting the US from dealing with terrorism, or, at worst, destroying its ability to do so. Still, it is hard not to be sympathetic to the project of a democratic pluralist Iraq, however much a mess the US has made of it. Is there a way, in which this US Administration, as opposed to some imaginary one with perfect information and ideal morals, could have achieved, or still can, a more stable Iraq.

Regime change without an invasion

All advocates of invasion also advocated regime change. But all advocates of regime change did not advocate invasion. So this administration could have mobilized a broader coalition, if it had actually implemented what was clear in its political rhetoric and official policy. It formally sought to end Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, but informally made it clear that it would not settle for anything less than regime change. The problem was the Administration’s insistence that regime change could only be secured through the barrel of a gun. There may have been another option.

Instead of invading on 20th March 2003, the US could have sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad with an ultimatum, two decades after his previous trip to Iraq as a presidential envoy of Ronald Reagan. Rumsfeld could have offered the following deal. Saddam Hussein agrees to an inclusive transitional government, grants formal self-rule to the Kurds, ends human rights abuses, cooperates against Al-Qaeda, and allows in UN inspectors. In exchange, the US would not invade Iraq. With the US forces poised to invade, it would have been an offer that Saddam Hussein would have found hard to refuse. But what if he had? There would be war, certainly no worse than what Iraqis face now. Even if he had stalled after accepting the deal, it would have been the beginning of the end of his autocratic authority.

A different beginning

Having invaded Iraq, what could the US have done differently? First the US could have prevented the looters from looting Iraq. A curfew combined with stringent measures, immediately after the invasion, would have stopped the looting and made Iraq safer. Second the US could have retained the Iraqi Army, an army of conscripts with no personal loyalty to Saddam Hussein, except for certain elite units. Third the US should have retained all former Baathists in professional positions, only “screening out” former Baathists who had committed abuses. Instead the US first expelled them all and then “screened in” former Baathists who had not committed abuses.

The result of such a “screening in” policy was that the entire professional class – university professors, teachers, doctors and engineers – who joined the Baath party simply to get a job were initially excluded from working. They then had to go through a cumbersome process to prove they were innocent before they got their jobs back. This took time, money, and energy on the part of those affected, and kept Iraq from using much needed local talent to reconstruct the country. These three policy decisions required neither new resources, nor prior planning. They only required sensitivity to the ground situation and a political understanding of how people behave under dictatorships and during transitions. Any one of these decisions could have had a significant impact on the post-war situation in Iraq. All three together might have changed the tide.

What can the US do now?

Now the US is facing terrorism, a tough insurgency and a divided Iraq. Bringing Iraq around would require breaking up the problem into three manageable parts. First the US can work with Iran to stabilize the Shia South. This would entail easing pressure on Iran’s civil nuclear program, lifting sanctions and engaging diplomatically, in exchange for better cooperation from Iran in reining in militias and monitoring the borders. Since Iran also has an interest in a stable Iraq over an unstable one, this is not an impossible deal to make. In any case it is unlikely that the UN Security Council will back the US on sanctions against Iran, so the US has little to lose. Of course, if it waits too long, it may also have little to offer.

Second the US can work with the governments of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and even Turkey, to help secure local autonomy and rights for Kurds within each of these countries. The pay off is greater stability in these countries, and more secure borders for all of them. The Kurdish regions in each of these countries, straddling many of the borders, then become better managed and policed, enabling a crackdown on the infiltration of men and arms to the Iraqi insurgency, rather than facilitating it because of unstable borders.

Third the US should negotiate with the ex-Baathist and nationalist insurgents in the central parts of Iraq, while isolating Al-Qaeda elements. This would reduce incentives for cooperation among the different insurgencies, and increase the likelihood of greater stability. To do this, however, the US would have to backtrack from a major plank of its policy after September 11th. It would have to concede that all terrorists are not the same – there are some terrorists you can and should actually talk to. And that Iraq is not just a central part of the war on terrorism, but a country facing a triple transition from Baath party dictatorship to multi-party democracy, US occupation to Iraqi self-rule, and Sunni Arab domination to pluralism. This would not be easy to do.

If this fails withdraw

The loss of international goodwill, the erosion of support in the US, the anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the anguish in Iraq, may make it politically impossible for the US Administration to take the above steps, even if it were ready to concede that Iraq may have nothing to do with the war on terror. This may leave the US, Iraq and the world with no option but a withdrawal from Iraq. Whatever its drawbacks, such a withdrawal is increasingly beginning to look like the least bad option available.

There’s an old theory that says experience in general is structured like trauma. Or, to put it another way, that trauma is merely a special or egregious case of what we suffer every day simply by coming into contact with the world. Much of what happens to us cannot be fully processed right away. It is simply too much. And so, experience gets packed away into memory where it sits, waiting for an occasion, intentional or less so, when it can be retrieved and dealt with. In this way of thinking, we are all a little like Proust, sorting through our vast store of barely acknowledged experiences and trying to make some sense of them the second time around.

It’s entirely possible five years after 9/11 to have a great deal of discussion about what the event really meant and what its repercussions have been. Simply pick up a newspaper or a magazine or turn on the television. But what has receded farther away, perhaps, is the actual experience of the day. That day barely exists anymore. This is well and proper in many ways, some traumas, some experiences, need more time than others. But it is also an odd feeling to know that such an intense experience does sit there latent, within us all, waiting to be tapped some day, like a kind of mental time bomb.

What I remember most about September 11, 2001 was the muted almost graceful way that the towers came down in watching them from the roof of a warehouse in Brooklyn. There was no sound. The flames and the smoke were distant enough that they were merely daubs of grey and licks of orange against blue. The sky was as blue and as bright as it has ever been. The city was as quiet as it has even been, waiting. Blue. And then, calmly, as if resigned both to the laws of nature and to the whims of human action that had conspired against it, the first tower came down. Something in the middle gave way and the top of the building seemed to slide down on itself, like a telescope. And in a few long, measured ticks of the clock it was gone. Just a plume of billowy cotton spreading out from lower Manhattan into the Bay.

Days later the smell of 9/11 became its main impression, an acridity to the air that everyone recognized but didn’t want to name. There was a burning in the eyes and a bad feeling on the skin. But the actual moment of the event itself was, for us in Brooklyn, like the very absence of sensation, a living abstraction and then a terrible waiting for the rush of experience to come crashing in again as it did the next morning when we woke up dumb, because we’d forgotten that all worlds are fragile and we’d forgotten that we were so very fragile too. And five years later we’ve forgotten all of that again, except here and there in little bits, when we remember.

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.

Whatever is sufficient unto the human, with glories and miseries—freedom’s torch, the begging hand, aloneness; skyscrapers rearing with aesthetic delights not from a lesser god; acres of parkland where one can not just imagine (pace John Lennon), but have, Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’.

Of course, New York is magnificent, and New Yorkers know it, though naturally there are some who can only whinge about their magnificence. Citizens of Sydney, used to newbie enthusiasm over the city’s physical attractions, and far from immune to aren’t-we-wonderful self-glorification, know the real thing when we see it. From the Time Warner Center atrium to the trickling fountains at the Frick collection; up at the Cloisters, sequestered from development; down to the colossal energies of Times Square; at tony Park Avenue; through the empty space where the World Trade Center once stood, now waiting, yearning, for its Freedom Tower—Manhattan, Gotham City, stands, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island boroughs surrounding, an epic of social integration (‘Give me your tired, your poor’), a dazzling, perplexing, overwhelming city. With very expensive real estate. And with taxi and bus drivers whose skill in getting through the city’s ceaseless traffic can only be compared to the technique of great ballet dancers. Some long-term residents bemoan the changing character of parts of the city, but for the visitor it’s a case of: there doesn’t go the neighbourhood. Surely New York was never greener, cleaner or more attractive than it is now.

It might very well be a cliche to stand at the top of the Empire State Building. One does not run into Cary Grant waiting for Deborah Kerr, testing the limits of their affair to remember. However, the visual consummation at this height is quite something. Everyone who goes to New York should try to get there. Most New Yorkers will tell you to go on a clear day—you might just see forever—but I think it’s better to go after a rainstorm, when the clouds have partially cleared and are scudding across the sky, which is when I went. The crowds have dispersed and you don’t have to wait too long to get through the security checks. Then, up at that imperial height, where even Central Park is reduced to some olive spinnaker, you can see the whole fantastic panoply of the city lit by shadow and sunlight, the wind a bracing tonic against the tiredness that is likely to overcome you if you’re not careful. Don’t try to conquer too much of New York on your peregrinations. You won’t.

If that experience doesn’t send you to your hotel room somewhat chastened, then I suggest a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art might. The collection there is so awesome in its range of paintings, sculpture, furniture, glassware, armour and ceramics, that one could not begin to do it justice in less than a year of visits. Here is a place so vast that you can make a wrong turn, expecting to be looking at Greek statuary, and end up in a complete Egyptian temple or, taking another staircase, suddenly be confronted by an entire Frank Lloyd Wright room. Well, one can only take in so much art at one time. It was amusing to see people, just like myself, wandering in a slightly hypnotised way through the galleries at the end of the day. We had experienced the phenomenon of nervous attrition by artistic masterpiece. That’s a danger not just at MMA. There are MoMA and the Guggenheim to see too, for starters. The David Smith retrospective was on at the Guggenheim when I was in New York, and it was exciting to be confronted by an oeuvre I knew little about. By the way, the tour guides in the museums are unfailingly instructive and knowledgeable. They teach you so much in the short amount of time they have, and most of their work is voluntary. 

When the gold curtain parts at the Met for five hours of great Wagner singing (Hampson, Heppner, Meier, Pape, Putilin in Parsifal) or you sit in The Belasco for Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing!, its socialism on the right side of the agit-prop dividing line, in the very theatre where the play had its premiere, you can experience a rare theatrical frisson. The grandfather in the Odets’ play throws himself off the roof of the apartment block in which the Berger family live—Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, in a fine performance. The hopes of a lifetime perish with a terrible fall from grace. It struck me that we were living through a similar period the play represents. Our dumb celebrity culture, cynicism and irony, our know-nothing knowingness, is different to pre-War New York, but in other ways we are similar. The grandfather’s ideals are under pressure from economic reality, just as we know the reality of torture, war and starvation. New York should confirm us in our ideals too, or at least make us think very hard about what is left of our ideals. Hart Crane invokes the feeling that precedes insight so well in the ecstatic ‘Proem To Brooklyn Bridge’ from The Bridge: ‘O Sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, / Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’ I felt these emotions, these links between architecture and human aspiration, many, many times. The Rockefeller Center, for example, no doubt, for some, a worm of predatory capitalism symbolising all that is worst in the oppression of non-Western cultures, struck me as entirely beautiful, its art works, murals and sculpures, from the Manzù door reliefs to the Swarovski crystal installation (but how are they going to clean it?). For a poet the world may be something like a rose, for the scientist something like a machine to be explained. The future must see the uniting of the rose and the machine in culture, in politics, if we are to at long last fulfil the hopes of grandfathers who gave up and jumped off buildings, or poets who disappeared on ocean voyages.

Parts of the planet may well be rotten to the core, but other parts are marvellous. Sure, New York has problems, the major one being the clear social and economic inequalities between some neighbourhoods. On a mundane level, theatre etiquette could do with some sharpening up—the cannonade of coughing I heard through Act One of Tosca was something to behold. But then there are wonders unlike anything else: the rooftop garden vista at the Metropolitan Museum, the Morgan Library with its unique manuscript and art collections (Anne, Branwell, Charlotte and Emily Brontë manuscripts, Mahler’s 5th, an Edgar Allan Poe story et al), approaching the Statue of Liberty at dusk.

True, there are neurotics, jackasses and wannabes about, but you get those everywhere. Repose can be found in many a quiet enclave, whether that be in any of the numerous bookstores, Bryant Park or in the reading rooms of the adjacent New York Public Library (the library had a superb exhibition on—French Book Art of artists and poets in dialogue—when I visited). On the other hand, if people about you is what you want, The Village Voice can tell you about hundreds of events to go to. New York also means jazz, dogs and food—for cheaper eats try the cheeses in Zabar’s or the hamburgers at Nick’s on the Upper West Side. If you’re cashed up, there’s always Le Cirque. Street fairs are a favourite weekend pastime. Large sections of Broadway, or other thoroughfares, are closed off on Sundays and filled with stands from all over, conspiracy theory booths happily mixing with the corn fritters and pashminas.   

However, in the end, you must come to the one defining moment in recent New York history that centres all journeys in this city, and all one’s subjective emotions. Perhaps it is foolish to look for the spirit of this city in one moment or defining event, but I think you can find that New York spirit in a number: 343. That is the number of firefighters and paramedics who died on September 11 as they tried to control the catastrophe. Every death then was tragic, as are all deaths brought about through violence. But what honour was accrued to the city through their actions. People say the ancient myths were an invention to explain the unpredictable behaviour of the gods, but on September 11 there Hercules fought Antaeus. The golden Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center transformed itself at Ground Zero into stupendous courage and heroism. How proud the relatives and friends must be of those who went to their deaths that day trying to save the lives of others.

Next time you hear about New York’s brashness, financial shenanigans, corruption, its callous disregard for your intentions, look more closely. Beneath the harsh surface lies the greatness of the human spirit, in all of its faltering grandeur.   

                                                                  *

            September 11, 2001

You will remember, under brilliant stars,
The shadows of the burning, falling towers,
The kindness and the malice we receive
Or give to others, fortune’s miseries.

What steadfastness eroded skin will keep
In its griefs, inexplicable;
Dark energy can gather for a killing
Though not all joy is taken by cruel dirt.

When it is done, quickly the darkness comes,
Blood and iron’s mistaken enterprise;
Immortal smiles on future summer nights
Shall hold to reason with grasped photographs.

Time may despatch your broken history
And bid the dead eternal recompense—
Their shades surround you in the morning light
Edging through this silence on the ground.

Written 2003

Line 9 references Macbeth Act 1 Scene 7

‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.’

Lillias White sings ‘Manhattan’ here. 2′ 46”