Jane Jacobs attained a certain degree of fame after she published her iconoclastic approach to city planning in The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Subsequently she wrote two more books about cities that eclipsed The Death and Life in their level of iconoclasm; sadly, those books are still exceedingly off-mainstream. The first of the two, The Economy of Cities (1970), introduces the ideas that the basic unit of macroeconomics is not the nation but the city, and that economic development always begins in cities. The second, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), takes the idea to the next level and talks about broader city regions, inter-city trade, the rise and fall of cities’ economies, and cities in relation to nations.

Jacobs’ ideas are sufficiently unknown that I am going to spend half this article just summarizing the two books. If you’ve read them, feel free to skip to the second half, though the first half might still give you a glimpse into how I mentally organize those points before I critique them.

The starting point of The Economy of Cities is that development comes from cities. It begins with a (weak) archeological argument that even the agricultural revolution was an urban renovation, with small trading posts functioning as cities in the preagricultural age. From there, Jacobs builds her points into a considerably stronger thesis that a certain level of population density is necessary to sustain economic development. It ranges from very difficult to impossible to put a factory on the ground without a network of urban suppliers. When Henry Ford tried producing every part of his automobiles at one site, he failed. Only when he changed his operation to assembling car parts produced in other factories, which formed part of Detroit’s manufacturing network, did he succeed.

At the same time, Jacobs makes it clear that development can only happen in one way: import replacement. A city develops by having entrepreneurs and inventors take apart imported goods and learn how they work and how to produce parts for them until they can produce them more cheaply than they can be imported. The example she keeps referring to is Tokyo’s bicycle industry, which replaced American imports with local production. Once a city replaces an import, it can use the extra money it gets to import other, typically more expensive goods, triggering further import replacement. This process is coupled to the full cycle of division of labor, in which division of labor involves adding new work, which in turn triggers more division of labor, and so on.

Finally, Jacobs warns, these processes can never work outside cities. Programs meant to develop agricultural countries by creating jobs in rural areas, most spectacularly the Great Leap Forward, invariably flop. This includes many softer programs for rural development, notably the green revolution and birth control. The green revolution’s productivity increases displaced the rural poor without creating city jobs to compensate, Jacobs says. And birth control does not matter so much given that Japan, Western Europe, and the eastern US have high population densities without widespread poverty.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs broadens her theory. First, she defines a city region, a penumbra of a city that appears to reach somewhat beyond its metropolitan area. Within that city region, the city’s economic development spills over without wrecking society too much. This is based on five factors: the city’s thirst for supplies of primary goods, job creation, productivity increases, transplants, and capital formation.

The most interesting factor, supplies, contrasts cities with supply regions—for example, oil-producing states—which are temporarily wealthy due to their richness of primary goods, and then crash once the goods run out or are replaced with alternatives. That, Jacobs says, is what places Saudi Arabia in the third world. It is economically passive, while the US is not.

More in general, she divides the world into productive and passive regions. Productive regions, i.e. vibrant cities, are in the first world; passive ones, including all rural areas as well as economically dead cities such as Pittsburgh, are in the third world, and only appear comfortable because of subsidies from Jacobs’ first world. In that third world, stagflation, defined as high prices and not enough work, is endemic. She gives the example of Portugal, where unemployment is high and the prices, while low by American standards, are out of the population’s reach. The problem, then, is that mainstream economists mistook the boom of the 19th century and much of the 20th century for a constant economic condition, not realizing that stagflation was perfectly normal.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out her earlier ideas more in full. She talks more about how productivity increases can hurt rural areas by making too many people redundant. She integrates trade into city development, showing how cities grow by not only replacing imports but also exporting goods. She continues her historical narrative, skipping from the agricultural revolution to medieval Europe; her main argument is that Venice developed by trading not only with Constantinople but also with other cities in then backward Europe, and in general cities should not become colonies to bigger cities by only trading with them but also create their own mini-networks of cities.

While she gives some examples of how cities can stab themselves in the back in The Economy of Cities, it is only in the later book that she develops that into a coherent idea, which, incidentally, is also where she is weakest. First, currency feedback is crucial in telling cities when to import and when to replace imports, so national currencies at best depress all cities but one—London in Britain, Paris in France, Milan in Italy, and so on—and at worst create a total disharmony of economic feedback, as in multi-city countries like the US. In developing countries, national currencies are pegged to rural goods or primary supplies, which tend to strengthen the currency beyond what the cities can take without deindustrializing. One major reason Singapore developed so fast is that it was kicked out of Malaysia for political reasons and subsequently used its own currency. The US and Japan needed explicit tariffs to protect local industry; in Singapore (and Hong Kong), this tariff was called the national currency.

Further, cities can stifle themselves by engaging in various forms of discrimination, including against small businesses. Caste systems and racial and gender inequality rob the city of needed talent. Regulations such as ground rules established in New York in the 1960s, wherein the city let firms bid on the redevelopment of 37 buildings in Harlem but only if they could bid on all 37 at once, ensure blighted neighborhoods cannot develop their own talent. In the US it is so egregious that in The Economy of Cities, Jacobs quotes a civil rights activist who says government interference with slum development causes so many problems it would be better if it left black neighborhoods alone entirely.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs also introduces the idea of transactions of decline. These are forms of spending that on paper increase GDP but in practice never produce any innovation or further growth. She identifies three such transactions: military spending, subsidies to rural hinterlands, and trade with backward countries. Military spending can help the economy when it is temporary, but otherwise it is a drag since it produces nothing. The same applies to subsidies to the hinterland and loans to third world countries that can never pay them back. All three are preoccupations of great empires, which is why cities tend to have cycles of growth, followed by imperialism, followed by decline.

Before criticizing the specifics of Jacobs’ argument, let me say that I think the basic notion that cities are the basic units of macroeconomics makes some sense. There is no special reason for nations to be the basic unit, especially not in the age of the European Union and the Euro. Urban areas and city regions are natural units defined economically and socially, independent of arbitrary political boundaries. Nations—and, incidentally, city limits—are not. In addition, let me note that there are many sub-issues I cannot address for space constraints. My above summary has 1,100 words; Mark Rosenfelder’s has more than 6,000 and still misses some important points.

The weakest point in Jacobs’ argument is the exact definition of import replacement and when it occurs. She peppers her writing with examples of when cities replace imports and when they do not, without a shred of evidence that this is in fact what happens. It is subtle and remote enough in the two books I am dealing with here, which is why I only noticed it upon reading Dark Age Ahead (2004). In that book, she talks about Canada’s rapid economic growth in the early 2000s as an example of import replacement in Toronto. The sum total of the evidence she includes there is an anecdote of an office chair with “Made in Canada” printed on it. The evidence she gives that some city in the US or Britain underwent a surge of import replacement in the 1840s is even thinner.

In fact, her example of Toronto’s import replacement shows how fragile her analysis is. One of the major factors behind Canada’s recent growth is the fact that Alberta is sitting on more oil than is present in the entire Middle East, albeit in tar sand form, which is more expensive to produce than Saudi crude. Increasing development of tar sands is causing labor shortages in much of Alberta, which then translate to reduced unemployment in other provinces, which send migrant workers to tar sand mining operations.

Second, the three transactions of decline she identifies are not the only or even the most costly types of spending that do not produce wealth. Health spending, debt interest, infrastructure repair, policing and internal security, and even some forms of welfare that go to the urban poor are just as economically unproductive. Much of this is covered by the difference between gross and net domestic product. The rest boils down to how much the city spends versus what level it could theoretically lower its spending to, which is itself a function of its wage level, or its existing level of economic development.

In fact, health spending dwarfs Jacobs’ three transactions of decline in almost every developed country. The US spends 4.5% of its GDP on defense, and New York’s tax imbalance with the state and federal governments, which significantly overlaps military spending, totals 5% of its gross city product. Aid to other countries, including loans, totals 0.2%. That compares with 15% of American GDP spent on health care. Although other developed countries spend closer to 9-10% of their GDP on health, they also spend closer to 1.5-2% of their GDP on the military. The only developed country that spends more on the military than on health is Singapore, which has no hinterland to subsidize (though Israel comes close, and also massively subsidizes settlers above and beyond IDF protection).

There are a few more areas in which Jacobs’ theory is fuzzy. It says nothing of how subsidies to poor regions can in fact produce innovation by investing in education. It entirely misses the fact that population pressure can impoverish countries, and at any rate birth control and family planning are necessary to move women from the production of babies to the production of new wealth. It dwells on manufacturing but says nothing about service economies. It is overall tailored to the 1980s, when the shock of American deindustrialization was at its peak, Germany and Japan were forward-looking innovators, China had barely recovered from Maoism, and Ronald Reagan was busy hiking military spending and running unsustainable deficits.

Two points of fuzziness stand out. The first is that Jacobs leaves cities undefined. It is implied that they all work like London or New York, that is have a core surrounded by rings of decreasingly urbanized areas. But that is not the only way for a city to arise. The biggest urban area in Germany is not Berlin, but the Ruhr, an agglomeration of many relatively small industrial cities, none of which dominates the region. On a larger scale, Jacobs leaves out megalopolises, which severely complicate her proposed scheme wherein each city region mints and prints its own currency. How can New York and Philadelphia have separate currencies when their metropolitan areas overlap?

The second fuzzy point is the definition of the third world. The third world is not defined by economic passivity, but by various social problems centered around poverty. Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Beijing, and Bangkok are perfectly dynamic, and fit perfectly into the third world. Moscow has gotten far more economically active since the fall of the Soviet Union, but its upsurge in poverty and breakdown in public health triggered a painful process of third-worldening spreading in Russia.

To some extent, it is hard to fault Jacobs for consistently preferring anecdotes to data. When the economic mainstream focuses on nations, it is very hard to find accurate data about the economies of cities. Jacobs is by and large forced to talk about import replacement in the almost magical terms she uses, invoking it whenever there is no other explanation for economic growth that fits her theory. And the historical overviews that stay away from handwaved import replacement are strong.

But the solution to problems with data is to look for empirical clues, such as the number of bicycles or cars or computers a developing country imports every year. Import replacement will occur whenever we see a decrease in the imports of a lower-level good without a corresponding decrease in its consumption. Supply-oriented growth will occur whenever increased exports of primary goods account for big enough a fraction of economic growth.

Jacobs’ policy suggestions span the entire gamut from politically insane to extremely cogent. It is not especially hard to divert subsidies to areas where they increase productivity: education, worker retraining, public transportation instead of roads and cars, direct scientific research rather than military research, minimum income as opposed to a mishmash of welfare programs that cost too much and reduce poverty too little. There, Jacobs is completely right. Her suggestion that budding empires not squelch city development in colonies the way Britain did in Ireland and tried to in the US could work, but is politically difficult to implement. In contrast, small currency regions will never work, and neither will ending trade with backward areas.

Make no mistake about it: Jacobs understands macroeconomics. Her theory has a fairly sound core, even if it requires tweaking to account for changes brought in the previous decade and in this one. The problems only start when she heaps onto the theory sundry sub-issues that only detract from it.

Elatia Harris

Until 1967, when the excavations of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos began to bring it to light, the clock had been stopped on the settlement of Akrotiri, on the Aegean island of Thera – better known as Santorini – for about 3600 years. Volcanic ash from the largest geological event of ancient times, several hundred feet of ash that would have taken fully two centuries to harden, had both destroyed and preserved the town, setting it apart from history for a very long time.

The precise dating of the event is a difficulty – one of those problems that arise when there’s a spread between archeological and geological data.  Though the Egyptians – this would have been about the time of Queen Hatshepsut – suffered no damage on record from the eruption, its ashy traces blew northeast to Anatolia, helping to date it to around 1600 B.C.E.  Its effects, including a tsunami that pounded the northern coast of Crete, would have been marked with awe throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and may have made an impact on weather systems as far away as China.  Examining a satellite photo of Thera, it is easy to see the outlines of the caldera, the vast undersea crater around which the present island takes form. The Thera Eruption, as it is called, was not the first from this furious caldera, several hundred thousand years old — only the first to impinge on civilization.

Who, then, lived on Thera?  Not that it was in those days called Thera; the name came into use well after the eruption.  The Therans had much but not everything in common with the palace-dwelling Minoans on Crete.  Thera being the southernmost island in the Cycladic arc, just about equidistant from mainland Greece and Asia Minor and 70 kilometers north of Crete, its roots in Cycladic culture went deep. Of Minoans in general, we know what we can infer from archeological sites, but we cannot read their language, written in the tormenting and fascinating script called Linear A, at which scholars have puzzled ever since the Phaistos Disc was unearthed on Crete one hundred years ago.  Shards covered with Linear A have been found on Thera, too, tantalizing in their mute abundance.

One of the most baffling losses pre-history confronts us with is our not knowing how an ancient people referred to itself, or what its place was called by those who lived there. We don’t know Minoan place names, or what the Minoans called themselves, and the sound of their speech is but a guess. We do know that the time of their late flourishing — roughly the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. — corresponded to a period of internationalism and vigorous trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

This was the Late Bronze Age, and many of its gorgeous refinements were fully present on Thera. In the harbor there were 50-foot ships of cypress, with resinated linen-covered hulls and benches for 30 oarsmen. Thanks to the same geothermal activity that would one day disastrously increase, hot water ran in pipes through multi-storied houses with stone stairs. Ventilation was understood, with light wells sunk in blocks of dwellings. Then as now in the Mediterranean, staples were stored in gigantic ceramic jars – olive oil, grain, dried figs. There was intricate and characteristic jewelry – out-sized crescent earrings, for instance – and there was perfume, of coriander, almonds, bergamot and pine. Weaving was so fine that garments could be woven sheer and then embroidered. There were blue-toned vervet monkeys from Egypt, tall stone vases for lilies, and sufficient paint for many radiantly colored and figured walls — had there not been paint, we would know very little of the rest.

And there was saffron, the dark red thread linking so many ancient peoples.  Saffron is obtained by plucking the stigma — the female parts of the reproductive system of the saffron crocus – and drying it. The dried stigma are called saffron threads, and these are typically ground to a powder before or after being sold.  Harvesting and drying saffron is intensive labor, performed almost everywhere by women. Known and used since Neolithic times, the wild-growing crocus species that produces saffron, C. cartwrightianus, has given over to a cultivated species, C. sativus.  Numerous crocus species, some with mythological associations, bloom in the late winter, the spring and the fall.  C. cartwrightianus and C. sativus, with their petals of violet-blue, bloom in the late fall, a time of tremendous fecundity in both plant and animal life in the Mediterranean. It takes about 70,000 deep orange-red stigma to make a pound of saffron.  Always regarded as very, very precious, it is now mainly known as the world’s most expensive spice.  In its defense as a flavoring for food – the taste is epiphanial, and you only need a little.  More about that another time.  Its 4000-year history includes not only culinary applications, but use as a dye, a medicine, and a ritual substance.

Anyone looking for the cultic aspects of saffron had better begin with Akrotiri. Though history’s most ardent kiss – language that we can read – has not yet been bestowed here, the images on the walls tell us a story of their own.

In the building known as Xeste 3, larger and more decorated than any other in town, is a two-storied chamber of frescoes – true frescoes, painted on wet plaster for a time-defying bond – depicting women and girls gathering saffron crocus blooms, bringing them in baskets to a saffron-cushioned goddess seated on a three-tiered platform. It is by far the most splendid and evocative cycle of paintings from the ancient world to be discovered in our time, and a match for almost any painting from pre-classical antiquity.  Since the Aegean Late Bronze Age was a time of complex cross-currents in artistic influences, striking parallels between the Egyptian and Minoan painting styles are to be expected.  The precision with which landscape elements as large as harbors and as small as individual flowers were imagined and represented on Thera, however, is without peer in either Minoan civilization or Dynastic Egypt.

Xeste 3 was probably a public building – on an ashlar wall there is an altar surmounted by a painted pair of horns tipped and dripping in red and, below, a lustral basin, both too large for domestic use.  If public or semi-public rituals were performed here, then to what end? And in whose propitiation?

Mistress of the Animals

It is hard not to look at the goddess on the saffron cushion. Though her state of preservation is less than optimal, she is the focal point of the cycle. Necklaces with a duck and a dragonfly motif hang in an arc from her throat. Her blue and white costume is richly embroidered with a saffron crocus motif, the easily recognizable silhouette of the wild-growing C. cartwrightianus that is everywhere represented in Xeste 3 – clinging to rocks, garlanding its gatherers, piled into baskets, and patterning the creamy white field on which all the images are painted. The sheer visual inescapability of the crocus on these premises where rituals were enacted may represent its fragrance suffusing the atmosphere. A sign in Greek mythology of the presence of a deity is the scent of flowers, and one thousand years earlier on Thera, it may have meant the same, for the Greeks routinely endowed the Olympians with the attributes of far older gods.

To us, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the goddess is not her regalia, but her expression. Head turned in profile, her eye is starry with interest, her lips parted as if in speech with the blue monkey to her right offering a handful of saffron. A gryphon flanks her left, present only in paw and wing. While she commands girls to gather and bring her tribute, her companions are animals, on the same level of the platform as herself. We don’t know her name on Thera, but she is known to us anyhow: this is the Mistress of the Animals — potnia theron — one of the oldest goddesses of ancient times. A mountain deity of the Near East – the mountain here recalled by the three-tiered platform – potnia theron held sway over wild animals, the wild and the holy being, for purposes of propitiation, terribly similar. A fierce Nature Mother, she was allied with the animals, needing to be won over with worship to the side of the hunters. 

In her earliest known incarnations, potnia theron was wild and implacable to look at, anything but easy to sell on the idea that her creatures should be slaughtered to feed and clothe humans, and nothing at all like the luxuriously adorned beauty inclining her head to the ear of the monkey on the walls of Xeste 3.  It is probable that what we see represented here is the priestess of the cult – the most highly stationed woman in the town — standing in for the deity during the ritual, and in a moment of awful mystery, actually assuming her throne.  It was understood as a sacred performance, and doing just this was one of the major functions of cultic priests.  It still is, as, for instance, with the vicar empowered to forgive a penitent in the name of God at the end of a ritual confession, literally to hand out God’s forgiveness in His place.

Saffron from Thera

What role did saffron play here? In the thirty years since scholars began to study Xeste 3, their appreciation of this role has grown, but that is only to say conjecture ranges ever wider, for however lavish the visual clues there is a crucial absence of record. Perhaps, however, visual clues and the inferential processes they stimulate can point the way to an accurate understanding of what is seen.

Most educated guessing about the meaning of the paintings in Xeste 3 has tended towards the interpretation that fertility rites are being enacted, or coming of age ceremonies performed, even that a goddess is overseeing the production of perfume or spice. The youngest looking members of the troop of saffron-gathering girls have curious coiffures not seen elsewhere among Cycladic and Minoan peoples – banded heads with shaven, blue-painted skulls and long black locks at the forehead, ears and crown. Boys on Thera are painted this way too – it seems to have been a youth thing, no doubt fraught with meaning.  Based on documented head-shaving patterns and rituals in Asia Minor, more than one scholar has concluded that Xeste 3 might be where the youth of Thera dedicated its hair to the gods – the offering of hair, symbolic of one’s strength, being in many places in the ancient Near East the maximum offering that one could make. 

These guesses speak to Late Bronze Age folkways in a general sense; initiations were known to take place at childhood’s end, spices were ground, plants were processed for perfume and incense, and what the ancients did with their hair – how they considered it –was deeply meaningful to them. What has been until recently overlooked is the specific focus on saffron in this large chamber.  It’s everywhere, and because the flower that produces it, the saffron crocus, is extremely accurately represented it cannot be a generic flower motif, for lilies, irises and other flowers are elsewhere in Akrotiri painted with the same careful and characteristic attention to plant anatomy. But these others are not shown being handled by humans.

Could the Xeste 3 murals pertain to the dyeing of luxury goods?  Prof. Elizabeth Wayland Barber observes in Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) that yellow was the color of women’s garments in the ancient world, with saffron the dye that produced those tonalities – from radiant warm yellow to deep orange-red – reserved for women of high status.  The use of saffron as a component in pigment goes back about 50,000 years to cave painting in Iraq, so the Therans were more likely simply to have used it as a dye than celebrated it as such. A young, blue-skulled priestess in a saffron robe is found on a wall of the West House, a nearby building at Akrotiri, and a long-haired woman suited in a tight-fitting saffron-colored costume raises her arm – signaling what? – on a wall of the House of the Ladies, also near Xeste 3.  Looking closely, it’s possible to see that the priestess’s lips and ear-tips are colored a deep orange-red, and on the cheek of the woman in fitted saffron clothing, there appears an emphatic red stain. Make-up? It’s probable that these facial markings are cultic, like the smudge of ash on the foreheads of Christians on Ash Wednesday, or the bindi on the foreheads of Hindu women, originally made of saffron paste, and a mark denoting both status and cultic affiliation.

By the time of the Thera Eruption, yet another supremely important use for saffron was known.  It was powerful medicine.  In about 1550 B.C., in the XVIII Dynasty, the Ebers Papyrus, not only a medical treatise but perhaps the first known complete book of any kind, was rolled up and placed between the thighs of a body prepared for burial in Egypt. It consists of over 3000 lines of text written in the cursive script called Hieratic, with 811 prescriptions and diagnoses interspersed with spells and incantations. It recommends saffron powder blended with beer as a poultice for women in difficult labor, and recognizes saffron as a diuretic, as well.

Prof. Jules Janick of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University writes that “the early medical arts were associated with the search for knowledge about healing substances on the one hand and magic and religion on the other.  Plants with strong tastes and odors (herbs and spices) that were seized upon to alleviate illness and enhance food were considered sources of power, and became associated with ritual, magic, and religion. The prehistoric discovery that certain plants are edible or have curative powers and others are inedible or cause harm is the origin of the healing professions and its practitioners — priest, physician and apothecary.  For thousands of years the role of the priest and the physician were combined.” 

The theory that diseases had natural rather than supernatural causes would not be expounded until Hippocrates, more than 1200 years after the Thera Eruption.  The notion that healing properties inhered in plants with or without divine intervention likewise belonged to a later, more rational era.  In the long meanwhile, medicine was magic assisted by careful observation.  And on Thera, the magicians were women.

In 2004, Dr. Gordon Bendersky, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan Ferrence, an art historian at Temple University, published in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine an acclaimed article, “Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess of Thera,” in which they propose that the Akrotiri frescoes suggest the Therans had developed saffron as a versatile medicine.  Citing not only that the women in the frescoes are picking crocus flowers and emptying their elaborately detailed stigma — where its medicinal phytoactivity is concentrated — from small baskets to large ones, but that facing the goddess there is a seated girl with a bleeding foot and her hand to her head in the gesture that, in the Egyptian painting that influenced the artists of Akrotiri, indicates suffering, Bendersky and Ferrence hypothesize that “the program of Xeste 3 does not merely include the secondary medicinal value of saffron, but in fact emphasizes its primary therapeutic function, and exhibits the production sequence in cultic recognition of its precious curative value. The frescoes express a divinely encouraged concept – the medicinal healing that is the major function of saffron.”

Since ancient Eastern Mediterranean healers and worshippers often invoked a deity to potentiate a medicine, the paintings may promote the belief that the goddess depicted has conferred curative properties on the saffron. Benderski and Ferrence argue for the interpretation that saffron as a medicine could have originated on Thera at a slightly earlier time than the Ebers Papyrus catalogues its use, or at the very least, that Akrotiri was a major production center.  Interviewed for the New York Times about the findings presented by Bendersky and Ferrence, Dr. Ellen N. Davis, a professor of archaeology and specialist in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, said, “It’s the most valuable and convincing study of the medicinal uses of saffron in the ancient Mediterranean world.”

Over the next three and one half millennia, there would be written records from many cultures and countries about the use of saffron to treat over 90 illnesses – among these, menstrual disorders, melancholy, libido loss, eye diseases, liver diseases, wounds, joint pain and headache. Saffron appears in the botanical dictionary at Ashurbanipal’s library and in the Song of Songs. Alexander the Great bathed his battle wounds in it, Cleopatra bathed in it before meeting her lovers, Ayurvedic and Tibetan physicians prescribed it, and Western researchers have begun to study its active ingredients to determine whether its Bronze Age reputation as a curative substance is supported by modern science.  In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, saffron or its derivatives – crocin and crocetin – were shown to have anti-tumor activity against different malignancies in humans and animals both in vivo and in vitro. The potential success of saffron against many of the ills it was used to treat in antiquity has been confirmed by phytochemical studies and experimental evidence.

Was a Bronze Age island town capable of processing and packaging enough saffron to make it a major manufacturing center?  Bendersky and Ferrence point out that very little saffron would be necessary to achieve a therapeutic dose – just a few milligrams – and that there is such a thing as too much saffron, as the ancients would have known.

In 2006, two years after Bendersky and Ferrence had published their paper, a 3200-square-foot perfume factory dating to 2100 B.C.E. was discovered by an Italian team of archeologists at Pyrgos on Cyprus.  The complex had been destroyed by a major earthquake in 1850 B.C.E., but perfume bottles, mixing jugs and stills were preserved underneath the collapsed walls.  This discovery has enlarged once again our already impressive understanding of Bronze Age manufacturing and trade capabilities, and suggests that several hundred years later on Thera there would have been few technological obstacles to producing commercial quantities of saffron-based medicines.

The Thera Eruption

In the three decades that the world has been aware of it, Akrotiri has seen inevitable comparisons with Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  But the accuracy of the comparison is for many reasons imperfect. The Pompeiians were famously caught by surprise, the devastation occurring in the middle of normal town life, as the ash-preserved fallen figures attest.  Quite plainly, people dropped what they were doing and fled for their lives, with no time to gather up their valuables.  At nearby and slightly wealthier Herculaneum, they ran to the sea, where many of their bodies were found huddled along the coast.  Yet it was a much, much smaller eruption that caused all this destruction than the one 1600 years earlier on Thera. For the Theran Eruption, there had been years – perhaps decades — to prepare.

On the satellite map of Thera, two small islands in the crater can be seen – these are Nea Kameni and Palaia Kameni, and one may sail out to them to be closer to where the catastrophic eruption was centered, on a small island now vanished that was just to the north.  Here, the eruption that many times surpassed Vesuvius occurred.  It was four times bigger than even Krakatau in 1883, and roughly commensurate with the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, which occasioned the well-documented “Year of No Summer.”

A geological event of this size cannot have gone unheralded, and it did not. A series of warning earthquakes must have prompted a mass evacuation from Thera. Only one body relating to the eruption has been found, on the island of Therasia just off northernmost Thera. If, as at Herculaneum, there are human remains on the coast of Thera – people who were not evacuated in time – they have yet to be found.  The kinds of metal artifacts that gave such a vivid picture of life at Pompeii have not been unearthed at Akrotiri – neither jewelry, nor weaponry, nor even a frying pan. Items of this kind were carried away by the Therans.  All they left, really, were their jars of grain and their painted walls.

It is not known where they went, or what kind of life they made as migrants to foreign shores, only that they got away in fairly good time.  While there is no reason to suppose that, panic-stricken, they plied their oars through hissing seas, there is the awful pathos of their foreknowledge: the mouth of hell would open to swallow up their world, and no Mistress of the Animals or Saffron Mother endowing plant parts with the magic to heal was any match for that.

To judge from the buckled stone stairs at Akrotiri, the warning quakes coming five or ten or twenty years before the eruption were hugely damaging, but not so bad it wasn’t worth it patching things up.  Everywhere in town during that interval, the work of repair was undertaken, even continued up to the time of the eruption, and the sheer scope of these repairs would have taken an organized and numerous population considerable effort to effect. In a bedroom of the West House, the location of the young priestess of the red-tipped ears and saffron robe, two vessels full of dried plaster and a third of dried paint were found; this room was in the process of redecoration when Akrotiri was abandoned once and for all.

None of those who left it, or their children, or their children’s children, would make a return trip, for once the ash from the volcanic plume reaching 40 kilometers into the sky had settled over the island, it would be sterile, every last plant extinguished, and uninhabitable for several hundred years.  Akrotiri, a world still striving for order and beauty when it came to its long-foreseen end, would go missing even from memory as the subsequent history of the island transpired.

Around 1100 B.C.E., the Phoenicians came, then the Dorians, the Athenians, the Romans. The island was called Kalliste — “beautiful one”— and Strogyli – “round one.”  In the middle ages, Venetian crusaders called it Santorini, after Saint Irene, a martyr of the Eastern Church.  This is the name that has stuck, although the Greeks call it Thera or Thira, too.  The unquiet caldera, the most active volcanic center in the South Aegean, last erupted in 1956, and will do again; sulphur and steam are often seen rising from Nea Kameni, dead center in the peaceful dark blue bay.  For many hundreds of years now, the saffron crocus has been back. You would find villagers to say it has always been there.  It is gathered every October, the stigma plucked from it and processed – a small local industry, run by women.

Coming: SAFFRON MOTHER, Part II

SELECTED RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, by Joseph Campbell
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion, by Walter Burkert

Online Resources:

http://www.therafoundation.org/
Beautifully designed and well-maintained site, rich in visual content relating to Akrotiri and Thera. Many learned articles posted on the Thera Eruption as well as on topics more specific to art, architecture, religion, social organization, technology.

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/17.html
Lectures on Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean from Dartmouth College. Excellent, readable overview.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/default.html
Lectures on the History of Horticulture, Lessons 1 –26, by Prof. Jules Janick of Purdue University

About a year ago I started working on an article about the use of vertical space in cities, confused over why, beyond the ground floor, most buildings are totally inaccessible except to their occupants. Without much confidence and convinced that I should engage in further exploration, I abandoned the piece and bottled up my frustration over what I perceived as a fundamental problem of urban design. I’ve spent the last year studying cities, and haven’t made much progress regarding this issue, so here we are. I’ve gone public with my complaint.

The problem is simple: most cities contain tall buildings (though, ironically, I’m writing this from Los Angeles), and yet despite sharing scale and parallel planes, these buildings rarely connect or contain any physical relationship to one another. The average city dweller only really enters vertical space for specific purposes, whether to go from his 16th floor apartment to his 42nd floor office or from his friend’s basement flat to the observation deck on the top of Rockefeller Center. That is to say, from private space to private space. This isn’t about rooftop restaurants or mid-building showrooms, but rather the problem of urban circulation that forces pedestrians down a stairwell, across the street, and up an elevator—ultimately and forever bound to move over a singular plane at the feet of the city.

With arguments abound over the state of public space in urban environments, especially in light of the recent mid-brow pop fascination with Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, these discussions have been limited to basic ideas about development, preservation, and the ever-present demand for parks. Why, though, does no one look up in cities to see the wealth of space and potential that looms overhead?

This silly rhetorical question is indeed that. Countless architects and planners have tried to conceive of ways to utilize above-ground space through a diverse range of measures. In the 1950s and 60s, just as Corbusian ideals of modernist planning were stroking the want of our rational selves, smaller movements of frustrated designers were forming across the globe. From England’s Utopianists and France’s Situationists to Italy’s Superstudio and Japan’s Metabolists a diverse array of designers were devising urban forms that proposed new networking systems to connect cities from the ground up.

Buildings would be connected by sweeping, dramatic bridges and pedestrian walkways. Pompidou Center–like stairs would span blocks and would begin at one building’s 20th floor and end at another’s penthouse. Bucky Fuller offered modular cities that could grow with need but within a pre-existing structural system that allowed buildings to float hundreds of feet over the ground. It was the city that might be born of a union between Jacobs herself and the creative team behind the Jetsons. These plans represented simultaneously everything that was right about what are known as “Paper Architects”—intellectuals whose radical designs are seldom realized—and everything that was wrong given their impossibility of execution. But comparable plans need not be so unattainable.

[Projects such as New York’s High Line present dynamic examples of off-the-ground development. An existing elevated railway cutting through 1.5 miles of New York’s West Side, shown in the picture on the right, is presently under renovation and will link to various galleries, apartment buildings, and hotels.]

Two years ago I saw a thesis at Wesleyan University where a student designed a fantastic proposal for a derelict waterfront neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. The project addressed these issues with phenomenal clarity and pragmatic foresight. In it, a public park comprising a pedestrian walkway, gardens, and athletic facilities was incorporated over and through several adjacent warehouses, factories, and office buildings. Park-goers would enter one building and walk through floors of retail and restaurants, onto roofs where basketball and tennis courts were thoughtfully planned, and along (though above) the waterfront.

The simplicity of the proposal was remarkable: the traditional notion of the sidewalk with storefronts and services was stretched and pushed; in a sense rendered three-dimensional. This was no elevated pedestrian system, however. Those exist, without much success, in cities around the world. Two that spring to mind are constantly derided for their detrimental effects on the surrounding neighborhood, those in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles. These systems, though, do not a vertically-integrated city make.

On two recent trips, one to Shanghai and the other to Istanbul, I found interesting solutions to this problem of vertical space. Shanghai is host to an interesting phenomenon where restaurants, bars, and clubs are located on upper floors of office buildings. Not, like in America, the marketable roof-top venue, but rather on middle-floors, soaring thirty stories over the ground but under twenty others, sandwiched between offices. Here I found a convenient, profitable, and novel solution to the problem of desolate commercial neighborhoods in cities, a subject of constant study and debate. By attracting night-oriented retail, whole blocks that would be otherwise deserted were teeming and vibrant.

Istanbul, situated on a hilly landscape, features amenities and retail on atypical floors as in Shanghai, but complements this integration by bringing pedestrian circulation through buildings, connecting to others above and behind and forming mini-pathways up steep inclines in the topography. These developments have come about through a seemingly organic process due both to the store owners and nature of the urban economy of these cities. This same process has yet to occur here in the US, and likely won’t as the buildings in question are usually operated by corporate owners none too concerned with innovation.

And the issue becomes clear that what’s really preventing the realization of these types of developments is the issue of funding and responsibility. I’m sure many of you figured out this obvious problem from the get go. Barring any unforeseen hullabaloo, however, businesses would do well to let certain floors to retail. New York is a perfect example: while new office buildings continue to languish with unfilled vacancies, empty storefronts downtown continue to rent for far higher prices and are rare to encounter.

Simple policy strategies could finance the infrastructure needed for this type of system, and policy should support these types of endeavors. If you read the strategic plans of most major metropolises—I can say with certainty this is true for London, New York, and Los Angeles—you know that, increasingly, local governments are seeking out measures to encourage and ensure greater density in central urban spaces. In addition, a recent emphasis on the benefits of greenroofs has introduced a new playground, as it were, of experimentation in public space.

Before building taller and taller buildings, however, we should determine better ways to connect them efficiently and in a way that takes acknowledges and takes advantage of scale. While we’re in the midst of enormous construction booms across the globe, now seems as good a time as any to re-imagine how cities can work, how we can reduce sprawl, and how we can realize a future so idealistically conceived in the past.

Mildly desperate, my investment in writing a loss, I decided to get a job.

I was 27. The last person I had worked for, a lawyer, was (long story, I had zero to do with the mess) under indictment. My prior work experience was patchy, cash jobs I had taken for survival or taxable ones to satisfy around six months of a fleeting interest. I had refused to commit to the cruise ship of a discernible career and found no place on the deck of the merry and like-minded who, seeing themselves in me, would give me a chance. My friends were not far along enough in their careers to help and were weary anyway of what seemed like commitment issues on my part. I had no pedigree of any kind to fall back on. My parents were recently divorced and totally broke. I was broke and exhausted from not having enough control over whether I might be broke again. I longed for a quaint steadiness, one that I perceived as being under the governorship of a large relatively anonymous office.

The advice I received from the career services of my alma mater, from my mother, from friends and others, was to take my unrelated experiences as connected by skill sets within each that pointed towards a type of office place I could make a case for having always wanted and long prepared for. I chose law.

(Inevitably, suggestions of law school followed to which I demurred. Many a decent, restless brain grew tired of being alone and set off to law school. Some found a home, others a crematorium. Understanding of the law is useful for practical, social hermeneutics, but as a science it is far broader then it is profound and I disagree with the average lawyer’s only tenet—that all narratives are arguably equal. Besides, I needed money, pronto, not loans.)

I scoured the search engines, met with recruiters and alumni, fine tuned the list of specials called a resume, repeated and repeated my personal pitches and after two months received one offer, which I took.

For $41,500 (I scoffed at the original proposition of $40K), dental and all the overtime I could get, I became a paralegal at a Midtown law firm of some 40 lawyers that specialized in litigation and real estate. I was given a desk and existence as email address and phone extension. Not much happened the first week. I even asked the guy who hired me when I was going to get some work. Shortly thereafter I was swimming in recyclables.

Because our hours were all billed to clients and because I had to keep track of all my hours, I know that out of 125 days at the law firm, 96 were spent filing, 50 were spent indexing and over 25 were spent copying, entering data or running one word searches of pdf files with tens of thousands of pages to them, with considerable overlap of tasks over the course of the day. Occasionally, I was sent out of the office to deliver documents, usually to a court (on 27th and Madison is a tiny marble and wood galleon of a courthouse, free to the public and superlative), once to a kosher steakhouse to get a signature from a couple:

    Wife, “Why’s he interrupting dinner?”
    Husband, “He has something for us to sign.”
    Wife, “Will it get me in trouble?”
    Husband, “Just sign and keep eating.”

The trips out of the office were billed by my co-workers as the major perk to my role; I would be the only one who could get away from the office; I would be the only one who would not always have to engage in dreaded work. I never bought the idea behind this supposed perk, that work inherently sucks and by extension nothing is better than to leave work. The tasks I was given sucked big time for sure, and I did not have to step far back to think of much worse jobs (most of these have to do with killing or jerking off animals, to say nothing of the expedited death that comes with much of the developed worlds forced upon endeavors. My personal soft spot for worst job has always been with the weathered model who poses provocatively with shawarma, white sauce smeared on lamb shreds with gusto, on deli posters; wherever you are, babe, I got an acre on my wide heart waiting for you.). Still, averse as I am to the environment, I have never been convinced that to be in an office was to hand over an essential part of oneself for the duration of the time one spends under florescents. Cubiclitis, in my experience, was never a degenerative disease but a cold most everyone caught.

I did not make any major friends at the law firm, but I got along well enough. Denise from accounting told me about her daquiri infused weekends. Marcus, a fellow paralegal, a neocon with a flaccid Masters in German literature, was good for political talk in a two North ends of a magnet meet kind of way. I got a workplace nickname from a lawyer who trusted my efficiency, Alexcelente.  I had my water cooler conversations, was pulled into some important projects and emailed silly forwards. My workplace enthusiasm was drenched after I followed loud laughter to a cubicle with three people around a screen watching what turned out to be cat bloopers. This, the cat bloopers, happened a number of times, with different people, at all hours, cat bloopers. I bore the machine gun fire of the cultural epitaphs, “you’re fired”, “that was easy” and quotes from Goodfellas. I was condescended to more then I care to be and regularly kept late, far far past my tolerance for my dull tasks.

The lawyers were hardworking and generally cordial, with one requisite jerk screamer who, outside of his office, was pretty contained. They were almost all men and all white except for one black lawyer who lived with his door shut and a well-aged blond who was the sole member of their booming divorce practice and always had her door open. The secretaries were almost all women and fell into two categories: young mamacita’s surrounded by pictures of their kids and faded Mediterranean beauties consoled by pictures of their grandkids. A good portion of them kept candy I lived off of on their desks and almost all of them were nice as well.

For most, the community seemed to be the major draw of the office. Where the repetition of tasks and conversations stunted me and made me anxious, most were comforted by the familiarity of their roles and the personalities around them. Even many of the cases I worked on followed formulas so pervasive—fighting over a dead relative’s house, one brother ruins a family business but keeps all the money, the building of malls—and central to human nature that it was hard to tell them apart sometimes. This community seemed a decent enough attraction for the employees. On its best days the large office was a cousin of, two or four times removed, the kind of personalized neighborhood whose looming extinction people often point to but rarely offer winning solutions for. The office had policemen and mailmen, sports leagues and boards and local representatives, drunks and idiots. The Mom n’ Pop store was the old secretary who helped with the copy machine and in passing compared the easy-to-handle-once-you-get-used-to-them pitfalls of the machine with navigating a long life. This community, complaints of Monday aside, the general longing for a vacation or just taking in how emotionally engorged people would become with a long weekend on the way, kept the majority of my co-workers contented, if not quite fully so.

I was nowhere near content and in my entire time there learned only two things, both on the same occasion, one month into the job. On that occasion I attended a commercial real estate closing for a lawyer who could not be present or did not care to be. My assignment was to deliver checks and wait until the money went through. People have told me that residential real estate closings can be exciting, touching—a young couple buying a bigger apartment or, not long ago, flipping one for the money afforded by our faded housing boom. Commercial closings are bureaucratic affairs. One waits, hands over a check and waits some more; $50 million might be exchanged, but it could just as well be $50.
So, I was sitting in this conference room, checks in hand, on the 38th floor of a Midtown office building, with a long wait on the way and everyone else jibber-jabbering on their phones about what they were doing the next hour and the hour after that and thereafter, and I was looking out at all the tall buildings around me and I realized.

I realized what architects are getting at when they design these tall buildings and how New York never ceases to provide engaging angles from which to be viewed. Any space can be observed from an infinite number of angles, but life quickly teaches us that the majority of these angles are quite similar to each other. Except in New York, where the viewing experience rarely repeats itself, is often new and generally wonderful. And, I realized that I would never make it to the surface of the sea I had willfully decided to start at the near bottom of.

Five months after my thoughts in the conference room on the 38th floor, I left the firm to incredibly little fanfare. Writing a book for a combined two hours a week while being stuck at an office wasn’t cutting it. Ten months later the novel’s far from done. I’m still broke. I squatted for some time at a girlfriend’s. That ended. I stay at my mother’s. Some days I get a bunch of writing done. Some days I get a blissful amount of writing done. Some days I wonder at the purpose of writing a stupid book and wonder at what I am trying to achieve, devoted to a wilting form. Some days I set aside an hour to masturbate, turn it into three, read through several newspapers and a handful of, ehem, good blogs, and have meandering conversations with friends, some at an office, doing quite well (what was a sea to me is for them more like one of those knotted ropes hanging from the ceiling in gym class. They are scaling the rope quickly).
Which brings me to the trouble-free point of this here break from my writing. Do not take on a job that does not challenge you, no matter what your impression is of how the world works. This applies as much to the individual plying at a desk as to the idealist spinning like Samson in his mill around an art form he or she might be better served leaving for an engaging office. And if you do pick an unchallenging affair, your reasons for doing so must be very strong. In my case they were not.

by Ruth Crossman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—–***—–

Rationality as a Sort of Religion

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

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

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

–Deets, April 5, 2007

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

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

–Deets, April 6, 2007

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

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

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

—–***—–

Theologically Naive Examinations of Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—–***—–

It’s All About the Politics, Stupid

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

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

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

—–***—–

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

My previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robeson and Mahler fit inside.

“I saw a man on a stage

scream, “Put me back in my cage!”

I saw him hanged by his tie;

I saw enough to make me cry.”

— “Planet Earth,” Devo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                *
          Take Me To The People Who Know

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

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

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

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

Written 2005

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

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

Dear Madam / Sir,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your concerns in this respect may be addressed to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yamkut

Justin E. H. Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Tense pause.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

For Chingiz Aitmatov.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward B. Rackley

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

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

At the crossroads of ‘species being’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘era of application’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use the rod and spare the child

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

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

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

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

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

by Ram Manikkalingam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One is hungry for a few facts now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Giant Who Fell From the Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For A Few Good Pieces

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

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

Read more »

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of Dispatches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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