Given recent events in Cuba it seems appropriate to post this piece I wrote about a trip to Cuba four years ago. It was published originally in Radical Society.

COMING FROM THE AIRPORT THE CITY creeps up slowly and then it’s street after street, twilight, a kind of beige everywhere, not quite enough light, figures in the streets, shades, building after building, beautiful, post-beautiful, falling away into themselves, into the street that is drifting from itself back into them, constrained slow dissolution, a chaos in which no one is afraid, a sky going quietly black and all the old cars are lonely souls, a yellowish light that might be sad but is there and then not there and then almost there. You wouldn’t say that the streets are alive but they aren’t dead, perhaps they are waiting for something. Everyone is drifting; everyone is drifting in the middle of the streets. The great sea is just behind a tiny wall at the end of these roads and it is flowing and lapping and the city is drifting and the moon is the same color as the crumbling earthy road.

***

Some time ago communists wanted to end history by beginning it. The idea of progress was exploded. This path that we are on is a time bomb, they said, and when it blows itself up we pick up the shards and begin to construct a real history, human history. The previous history of class struggle, they said, bears the seeds of its utter transformation, in which it cannot but leap outside into a new framework for history. It was a balancing act between past, present, and future in which the past prepares the future and the present crashes through them like an ax, freeing them both in the obliteration.

But history moves on somehow anyway, or not history, but worlds organizing and disorganizing, people cutting through times and places to make their lives, the old sea washing past it all, constant forgetting and reremembering and making up other things that are the same and different. These things happen, they’ve happened.

Some time ago, more recently, history started to end for some, but not with the cataclysm of a leap into some Utopia outside of previous history. It has started to end more as the running into a cul-de-sac from which there seem to be no other options. The future has died. This is felt either in terms of exhaustion, fear, or disgust,…or complacency. Our world will no longer envision itself as something else, cannot bear to envision itself as something else and by correlate will no longer risk the loss of its advantage. That is a burden for others to bear now.

***

Cuba is still waiting for something, still preserves itself in an anticipation that makes the whole world here paused and swaying like long strands of seaweed on a cold calm sea, swaying a little and drifting in some kind of pause. This sky is grey and these buildings are blue, yellow, pink, imagine that, but they’re dying too. How can a building die, a neighborhood die? It does it like this in stages that take a lifetime and then die. It jumps forward all of a sudden and then everything is different.

At the museum of the revolution in Havana there is a diorama, life-sized, of Che and Camilo emerging from the jungle in full guerilla regalia and they have smiles that only revolutionaries have when they emerge from jungles. The display is a testament to those smiles, a desperate attempt to do justice to those smiles of the revolution that are surprised smiles and vindicated smiles and terribly otherworldly smiles and the diorama is nothing but a mechanism of death. Nothing could kill those smiles more than this testament to those smiles. They die over and over again on the second floor of the museum of the revolution and yet are never allowed to die partly and simply because they cannot pass. The smile of the revolution is the kind of smile that no one sees, or no one is sure they ever saw, it happens in that one moment of emergence from the jungle when everything is different and such things are never witnessed, they are the kinds of things that cannot be witnessed. These kinds of smiles fly across faces somehow but also they don’t exist at all, they get reconstructed in memory, maybe they never really happened. There is so much memory in Cuba, memory and waiting. The youthful smiles of Castro, Camilo, Che seem to signify something in the old pictures that hang on the old walls. It is clear that they do, but the big sun is shining another hazy day and everyone is out being alive and disappearing into mysterious doorways and courtyards where the passage between inner living and outer living is just a threshold, but you can’t cross it. All things are open and closed.

***

People in Cuba are starting to be driven crazy. They are starting to double. You cannot have two worlds in one place, or perhaps you can but it starts to have effects. One can imagine a situation in which every Cuban has two personalities, they borrow from one another, they both draw from a font of social cohesiveness that is still a wellspring but they are distinct and separate. This schizophrenia will not be the result of some specific trauma for which the splitting is a result, it will be the slow workings of necessity. Thereby, it will be a schizophrenia, a splitting that precedes trauma, that leads up to crisis instead of the more usual reverse.

The moon leads you to Camaguey because it just sits right on the earth down toward the end of the road and is a red orange that fell out of the sky. That is how you get to Camaguey, if you should want to get to Camaguey. There is a man in Santa Clara who is the angel of death, he prepares the way to Camaguey when he says “I am death” and the clouds open up with a rainless storm. he is what got left over when they brought the bits of Che to Santa Clara in a few black boxes and buried them in a concrete mound outside of town that no one ever goes to, no one ever could go to because it was built not for people so much as for the ability to say that it exists. They saved bits of his clothing and letters and personal effects. It is the morbid cataloguing of herodom, it is the bits of a human being assembled and displayed in order to replace humanity with deity. It could make one want to cry. Across the hall is a simple tomb for Che and other martyrs of the revolution. It is eerie and mysterious and wonderful. There is something great in it that could make one want to cry. There is no point in staying, you have to leave it all, those two rooms, two rooms that have everything in them. It wasn’t built for the present and it certainly wasn’t built for the past; nothing, ever, has been built for the past, but is was built for a parallel present that is the constant ghost here and if the sky and moon make magical displays they don’t touch the day with their raving, they stay out beyond the fields in autonomous fury.

***

The islandness of this island should never be forgotten and should be thought about again and again and again. This is an island surrounded by the sea that is a great water among us. Islands are for trying things. Plato went to Syracuse for many reasons that intersect the contingency of the event but he would not have gone there had it not been on an island, he would not have even thought of going. A long time ago Atlantis sank to the bottom of the sea maybe and became the perfect island because it managed to make its boundaries permanent and forever separate from the real. An island is but a brief interruption of the sea. Atlantis had the good sense to make that interruption permanent. This sense of boundaries and their fragility may be why Cuba does not manifest the kind of eschatological visions of other socialisms. It is a kind of true revolution insofar as we take revolution to be the turning around of things. The motto of this revolution could be “We put the poor on top.” It wouldn’t be entirely true of course, privilege seeps into cracks and crannies, but it would be a version of truth. Cuba puts the poor on top precisely as that, as the poor. One can imagine the surprise confronting a more European vision of socialism where the implicit promise lies in the opening up of bourgeois privilege to everyone else. Cuba’s vision is both more honest and more terrifying and one wonders that the projections of human meaning have tolerated it so long, though barely. The Cuban vision is essentially a compact among beasts of burden, a recognition that there is still toil at the heart of the division of labor. Cuban socialism sees limits everywhere, just as all its borders meet the sea. These limits have made it sober, sober and sad, and waiting infinitely for a shifting of limits that only gods hand down.

***

Fidel said that history would absolve him, would redeem him, long before any prophet had dreamed a vision of his celebrating a seventy-fifth birthday as president of Cuba. But history has layers and overlappings. There are so many histories. The genius of Fidel has not been to foretell but to project. The genius of Fidel has been a constant working on past and future. It was a great service to Fidel for Che to have committed revolutionary suicide, it got rid of the temporal constraints and now he is eternally future. At the entrance to a terrifying nickel-smelting factory outside of Moa there is a picture of Che. The hills are stripped and blanched red for miles around. It is a brand new world there somehow. Next to Che are the words “imagine the future.” Perhaps it is meant to say that this can only be endured insofar as we already imagine that it doesn’t exist because it really isn’t part of the present. The future can be used as a negating force and it can be negated. All things are at play here and they amount, of course, to the reproducing of what is already at hand. These are techniques of survival until the new man comes, who never comes.

To move east across Cuba is to move further and further into a social vision and dreamscape in which everything is just as real as it is. It is a social dreamscape in which the symbol of fantasy is simply itself. The inwardly coiled vision is wrapped around itself multiply to the point where one can encounter a billboard proclaiming simply “Cuba si.” In a town like Holguin one finds not so much a cult of the revolution as its dominating everydayness. If it is a cult it is a cult without magic, that is, a cult with no real sense of alchemy or transcendence. Perhaps the genius of this revolution has been to toggle back and forth almost seamlessly between a concept of the present as packed with some transformative power and a future that always just looks like what is already here. Thus both things are preserved in an oscillation that is inoculated from space and time. It is a rounded thing, a capsule, but a capsule that needs constant maintenance and is losing its circularity now at a rapid rate. The spiral is unraveling again into a strip with past, present, and future aligned in their traditional order instead of wrapped round each other in the great blur of the revolution. Cuba is beginning to exchange its history at the global rate again, and this rate is set by a world that Cuba has placed all its bets against.

***

The great waters curl again onto the shores grabbing and replacing, slowly refashioning according to the blueprint of an infinite mind that, because infinite, would not be a mind at all. The young peaks stumble upward directly from these shores and groan, holding their particular storms. The way the streets just go through the day in these small towns can make all things feel connected, in some kind of secret correspondence with the run of green up those cliffs beyond and the blueness that has settled on the sea for now–green and brown and then back out to blue again. The sun has the horrible properties of an eye but one day is laconic and so is the next. It is not clear where came the movements that swept all to change when all got changed. And then again it seems again that all things are working on some form of communication. Such communication always harbors explosions because while meaning builds up it only ever happens all at once, when it ever happens. Are there great stores of energy here and again or is everything seeping slowly away, being stolen infinitely by a sea that slips out under the sun’s eye and guidance? On these streets are found repetition and repetition but something of a restlessness too. It is not clear who is communicating with whom.

In a brief glimpse through a break in the green on a broken road that crosses and re-crosses the same dead rail tracks that shuttle no trains a gaggle of young boys in a brown stream splashing in a circle of joy. Just circling and splashing, circling and splashing, enacting some ritual whose rules are a concoction only of their immediate need. These are the ones who are in some correspondence with their world. They are the best of Cuba and the last to know. You only see them for an instant and then the fields cover it all up again and the road opens up some other vista.

“No man can be said to know anything, until he learns that every day is doomsday,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously observed. By that standard, there is no one more knowledgeable than Jack Chick, the controversial founder of Chick Publications, purveyor of fine evangelical propaganda since the 1960s. For decades, Chick has been a one-man prophet of doom and gloom, seeing Satanic conspiracies  and signs of the pending Apocalypse lurking in every corner.

It’s a safe bet that anyone reading this has encountered at least one example of Chick’s work. He has both rabid fans, and equally rabid detractors, inspiring both the Jack Chick Museum of Fine Art, and an archive devoted to parodies of his signature style. Yet very little is known about the man himself, who is notoriously reclusive (partly from natural shyness, and partly out of paranoia, convinced — like any true conspiracy theorist — that his enemies are trying to assassinate him). He hasn’t granted an interview since, oh, about 1975. But here’s what little we do know.

Jack Thomas Chick was born April 13, 1924 in Los Angeles, California. A sickly child, he was fond of drawing cartoons growing up. He was also a member of his high school drama club, which sparked a long-standing interest in the theater. In fact, he attended the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater on a scholarship in the early 1940s, whose former students also include Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. After a stint in the army, Chick returned to the Pasadena Playhouse, where he met his future wife, Lola Lynn. She was the daughter of fundamentalist Christians, yet apparently agreed to marry him anyway, even though he was, by his own admission, a foul-mouthed heathen. Thanks to his in-laws’ influence, he eventually converted. 

Chick took the biblical exhortation to spread the Gospel very much to heart. He dreamed of being a missionary, or a preacher, but was purportedly too shy for public speaking. That’s when he hit upon the idea of evangelical tracts, inspired by their use as mass-market propaganda by Chinese communists. He worked days as a technical illustrator at Astro Science Corporation, and drew his comics at night. His first, and most popular, tract, This Was Your Life, appeared in 1964, in which a drunken, lustful, godless protagonist dies suddenly and is forced by an angel to view scenes from his “wasted life” before being condemned to the fires of hell. It is still in print today.   

The huge success of that first little tract spawned an entire industry: Chick Publications now has tracts  devoted to every conceivable threat to evangelical Christianity (real or imagined), denouncing premarital sex, abortion, evolution, homosexuality and AIDS (God’s judgment, of course), astrology, Freemasons, Halloween, witchcraft, rock music, and just about every other facet of modern American life. By the 1970s, Chick had conceived of a more elaborate, full-color, full-sized comic series. He teamed up with an African-American painter and illustrator named Fred Carter to produce The Crusaders, detailing the adventures of two men, fighting evil and spreading the Gospel wherever they went. I was addicted to the series as a child: they had all the elements of good horror, and didn’t skimp on the gory details. Carter’s illustrations are so vivid in their depictions of sex and violence that some critics have described the series as “spiritual porn.”

But then Chick made a serious miscalculation. He published a new adventure featuring the Crusaders, this time based on the “testimony” of a supposed former Jesuit priest named Alberto Rivera. Rivera claimed to have left the Catholic Church after uncovering the Vatican’s plans for world domination, beginning with its systematic discrediting of mainstream Protestant churches (usually through sexual temptation of spiritually weak ministers). The first tale, simply titled Alberto, was followed by six others, each more paranoid than the last, accusing the Catholic Church of (among other things) participating in the Holocaust, the Jonestown massacre, and the rise of Communism.

The Alberto series proved too crazed and paranoid even for diehard evangelical Christians accustomed to fire and brimstone. They could accept that record companies and rock bands worshiped Satan, that demon possession was real, and that Halloween was evil, but not that the Pope was out to get them. It didn’t help Chick’s waning credibility that another tale in the Crusader series, Spellbound, turned out to be based on fraudulent allegations by a supposed “former Grand Druid” named Johnny Todd, who claimed there were Satanists in the US performing human sacrifice. And on July 15th, a longtime Chick collaborator, Ken “Dr. Dino” Hovind, was arrested for tax evasion — specifically, for refusing to pay taxes on his religious theme park, Dinosaur Adventureland. (Hovind helped Chick revise the classic anti-evolution tract, Big Daddy, among others.)

In response to the growing outcry, many Christian bookstores stopped carrying Chick’s comics entirely. (When I tried to buy the Crusader series as an adult — in a misguided fit of nostalgia — the salesclerk confessed they usually kept them in a special “restricted” section in the back, and were currently “out of stock.” I ended up ordering them online.) Even Christianity Today, a popular magazine with mainstream evangelicals, denounced Chick Publications for its overly zealous anti-Catholicism. The dislike was mutual: Chick eventually resigned from the Christian Booksellers Association, claiming they had been “infiltrated” by Catholic operatives. Rivera himself apparently died in 1997 of colon cancer, although no self-respecting conspiracy theorist would ever accept an official death certificate as proof of anything other than a massive cover-up. Chick and his followers claim Rivera was assassinated by the Jesuits via a special poison designed to give victims terminal cancer.

Chick has a few scattered fans outside the wingnut evangelical enclave, most notably underground comic artists R. Crumb (whose work Chick would frankly find appalling) and Daniel Clowes, whose screenplay for the film Ghost World received an Oscar nomination. Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning creator of Maus, is far less complimentary, telling The Independent in 2003, “It makes me despair about America that there are so many people who read these things.”

Spiegelman has it right, in my opinion. Chick comics are nothing more than propaganda masquerading as harmless entertainment. Their only purpose — overtly stated by Chick himself — is to quite literally scare the hell out of us. It’s a tried-and-true method of manipulation, used to great effect by evangelical groups in their zeal to “win souls for Christ.”  It certainly worked on my childhood self; even adults find them disquieting. I once loaned my collection of Crusader comics to PUNK co-founder Legs McNeil, whose tastes ran to the extreme, to say the least. They gave him nightmares. Clowes reported that one night in college he read 80 Chick tracts in a single sitting, and admitted, “I had never been so terrified by a comic.”

When I was around 10, I saw a Christian film called A Thief in the Night, about the supposed “end times.” (The title derives from a Biblical verse pertaining to the Second Coming, which says that Jesus will return “like a thief in the night,” when we least expect it.) Chick had nothing to do with the film, yet it followed the same simplistic formula: a skeptical, unbelieving woman is warned repeatedly that the Rapture is imminent, yet even when her husband converts, she puts off making a decision — until one morning she wakes up to find he has been raptured, along with all the other born-again Christians, and she has been Left Behind. The sequel was even more grim: we witness the rise of the Antichrist, who turns America into a police state where everyone is required to receive the Mark of the Beast (a bar code on the forehead or back of the hand). Anyone who resists is rounded up, imprisoned, and summarily executed. The final scene depicts our unfortunate heroine being forced to watch as a close friend is guillotined for refusing the Mark — her final chance to be “saved.” (The implication: accept Christ now, so you can be raptured and not have to go through that whole guillotine bit to get to heaven — or otherwise burn in hell.)

Evangelicals milked the effect on audiences for all it was worth, following every screening with an “altar call” — in which those now scared out of their wits were invited to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Needlesss to say, my ten-year-old self was terrified. Even though I had technically already been “saved” at the age of 8, largely to please my recently born-again mother, I figured I’d better head up for the altar call again — you know, just in case. Nor was I the only one. Practically every single person in the church did the exact same thing. A former college roommate of mine saw the same films as a child and confessed to being equally traumatized.

Are fear-induced religious conversions sincere or genuine? I doubt it. It certainly didn’t “take” in my case. These days I’m a diehard agnostic, and far happier for it. I prefer cheeky biblical irreverence to evangelical horror, eschewing Chick comics for the far more entertaining Web comic, Holy Bibble.  But like Spiegelman, I am dismayed by the seemingly unquenchable American thirst for the kind of Apocalyptic, fear-mongering garbage being disseminated by Chick and his ilk. There are more than 500 million of Jack Chick’s comic books and tracts in print, and they have been translated into over 100 languages, making him the world’s most published living author. (Technically, he’s self-published, but still…) Then there’s the bestselling Left Behind series of end-of-days novels penned by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, using the book of Revelations in the bible to weave a story of apocalyptic events — again, little more than thinly disguised Christian propaganda, yet hugely popular among the Christian community.

So what? You might be thinking. People like a good scare now and then, and besides, it’s only fiction. But it’s far more subversive than one might realize, especially since the line between fact and fiction is so easily blurred when it comes to things like Bibical prophecies and religious beliefs. For instance, the tragic outbreak of violence in the Middle East  over the last week or so seems to have fanned the flames of Apocalyptic conspiracy theorists. LaHaye has been featured in Newsweek (with the heading “Are These the End Times?”). His co-author, Jenkins, and another Christian author, Joel Rosenberg, were interviewed by Kyra Phillips on CNN in a segment specifically citing the current conflict as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. That’s right: CNN interviewed two writers of fiction as if they were expert scholars on the Middle East. (You can read portions of the transcript here.) That’s right up there with Congress asking Michael Crichton to give expert testimony on climate change.

I confess to puzzlement as to why the mainstream media would give so much prominent space and air time to this kind of unfounded conjecture. It’s probably all about ratings, but that’s no excuse. My objection has nothing to do with sincere personal faith, with which I have no quibble. But this is exploitation of tragic events at its most despicable. Yet once again, people are lapping it up unquestioningly. Perhaps it is more comforting to take refuge in wild religious scenarios and conspiracy theories, rather than face up to the truth: sometimes the worst, most fearsome “monsters” are to be found in the darkest hearts of men.

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

Michael Blim

In Turkey, they call it “the deep state.” Inside their state, Turks believe, is another state composed of key people spread throughout its military and civil administrations that conspire to move Turkish society in directions they prefer, regardless of what the nation or its politicians want. If the deep state considers that Kurds once more pose a threat to Turkish sovereignty, a Kurdish independence sympathizer is killed and his bookstore blown up, as happened in November, 2005. Though persons attached to the state police intelligence division are discovered involved and likely responsible for the attack, the indictment is quashed and prosecutor is sacked. On May 18, a judge against state employment or university enrollment for Muslim women wearing headscarves is shot down in his courtroom. His murderer, though portrayed as a right wing Islamist crazy, is also shown to have had cell phone contacts at the time of the assassination with a low level military official. The military orders a “spontaneous” demonstration of tens of thousands that reaffirms the secular nature of the Turkish state before the Ankara grave of Kemal Attaturk. Provocations, it seems, make for great marches, and for well-aimed warning shots across the bow of the current Islamist government that very much wants women to be able to wear headscarves.

The deep state, then, is not exactly a complete second state. It does not collect taxes, control borders, educate children, and so on. It is a network of well connected persons whose organization acts as a parasite on the official state. The deep state borrows its host’s powers from time to time to redirect both the official state and nation toward courses of action the deep state favors. Precisely because it is not the surface state of post offices and public works, its workings are only partially visible. This murkiness provides it with plausible deniability both as an organization and with respect to its actions. Sometimes a deep state gets lucky when one of its own takes over the official state by election or by coup. Other times, the deep state so batters or usurps state power that it succeeds in what Andrew Bacevich calls a “creeping” coup.

With September 11, the American deep state took over, and the coup galloped rather than creeped. Bacevich writes about the post-September 11 Congressional resolution: “The notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 was a straitjacket compared to this spacious grant of authority.” (London Review of Books, June 8, 2006, 3) The American deep state, that is the organizational network created inside the state among cold warriors located in successive Republican White Houses and the Defense Department since Nixon’s reign, and whose most visible present figures are Cheney and Rumsfeld, received its mandate. State violence in all its forms was their weapon, and they could now use it with impunity. The virtually unlimited war-making powers of an American president were their cover, much as European tyrants long ago used the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Congress and the Judiciary supinely gave up what little of the Magna Charta remained the American constitution.

Still, there were things that a deep state, even in charge and legitimate, chose to hide. Wholesale wiretapping, torture of combatants and suspects, secret torture camps, domestic spying are (thus far) among them. Like war crimes, our deep states apparently realize that it is best to keep one’s plausible deniability in some sensitive areas.

What of other deep state shadow worlds? Is Pakistan’s deep state responsible for the Mumbai bombings, just as it has been so assiduous in creating paramilitary groups in Kashmir and friendly neighbors out of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Is its president, General Musharraf, the successful head of the deep state, or its oft-embarrassed creature? (It begs credulity to think of Musharraf in this context as a victim.) While American deep staters fume, they seem unsure of the state(s) to which Musharraf is a part, or they know and are either powerless or pleased.

In Italy, a deep state thrived throughout the postwar period, abetting the Mafia, suborning bomb-throwing neofascists, and punishing native Communists. For a long while, it seemed institutionally unable to cope successfully with the leftist terrorism. Many people then and now have wondered whether the deep state was using left terrorism as a weapon against the communists themselves (by the eighties, they were its primary victims), and as part of a campaign to turn the country further to the right. American involvement helped the development of the deep state along. The US CIA during the Cold War had organized and bankrolled its own version of a Masonic lodge called Gladio through which key politicians, generals, state bureaucrats and business people stood ready to step in to stop a left-wing takeover and to cover up American breaches of Italian sovereignty. Another self-described Masonic lodge, the P-2, bankrolled by influence-peddlers and most likely the Mafia, struggled to erect a deep state of a more domestic, entrepreneurial sort, though the membership list often overlapped that of Gladio. The P-2 list, however, added a key Vatican banker and illustrious Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian premier, monopolist media magnate, and one-time Mafia money launderer. P-2 was exposed and discredited, and the Gladio story surfaced after the Berlin Wall fall as just another tale of how the cold war had created deep states in many sensitive political outposts of the American empire. Along with the fall of the Italian postwar political elite in the beginning of the nineties, the Italian deep state seemed done for, though ordinary Italians found it hard to shuck the impression that nothing in their country’s political life is what it seems.

But America’s worldwide war against terrorism had need of one once more and began in Italy under Berlusconi to create one, this time based largely (as is known so far) in the intelligence services. The deputy head of the Italian CIA was arrested several weeks ago for helping the US CIA kidnap and deport a certain Abu Omar from a Milan street to an Egyptian jail for torture and possible private execution. Italian magistrates are now trying to figure out how far the conspiracy goes, but no one would be surprised if Berlusconi, America’s self-proclaimed best European friend, were finally shown to be cognizant of the plot.

Omar’s kidnap by the CIA was one of scores conducted throughout Europe. The European Parliament has traced over 1000 secret, unauthorized flights flown by the CIA in European Union territory over the past five years. The purpose of the flights was to kidnap EU citizens or residents like Omar and to deliver them to secret locations worldwide for “rendition,” torture under an Orwellian tag.

So our deep state meets their deep state(s). The tracks between us and them, as in the Cold War, are becoming deep furrows once more. The American war on terror, and the legitimization of our deep state’s coup, have quickened the pace of illegal, undemocratic acts by it among many and fostered the growth or revitalization of deep states around the world.

And finally we return to the Turks, for whom we might thank for the highly ingenious concept of the deep state. In thanks, we might warn them that they had better watch out. For some time, relations between the US deep state and the Turkish deep state were quite cordial. The Turks were the right kind of Muslims (secular), and their military was determined to keep Islamists from weakening Attaturk-inspired secular state. Its military and ours have had strong links since World War II, and our government, overtly but often deep state-wise covertly has supported several Turkish military coups. The Turks gave Americans air bases for no-fly Kurdish zones after the first Iraq War. Turkish generals had developed strong ties with the Israeli military, and had stood against Turkish Islamic movements seeking a more religiously friendly domestic politics.

But the Turkish state refused to open up or permit a northern front against Iraq in the 2003 war, a source of lasting pique among American deep staters. A recent blog reported that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed concern that Turkey was moving toward Islamic fundamentalism. Policy institutes close to the Defense department, it was said, were sounding an alarm that current Islamist premier Recep Erdogan was using the EU admission process to both weaken the deep state-involved military and to make Turkey more Islamic at home and abroad.

One wonders what might happen if Turkish internal tensions increase. Now that America is a unitary state and the deep state is in charge, Turkish politicians probably shouldn’t expect the usual American split-the-difference advice, consisting of the ambassador that supports the government, and the Pentagon general that supports the coup. America now speaks with one voice, and the Turks among others should beware.

Justin E. H. Smith

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

An eighth-grade English textbook published in Bucharest in 1978 begins with an inspiring hortation from President Nicolae Ceasescu: “Let you learn, learn and learn,” he beseeches the pupils. “Let you explore, explore and work. Let you relate tightly education to research and work. Only by so doing can you become good patriots, good revolutionaries, reliable citizens of socialist Romania, devoted champions of her independence and sovereignty.” As we advance through the lessons, we find many such helpful phrases as: “I hope I shan’t get too excited in front of the Union of Communist Youth members!” and: “The umbrella opens and closes by itself. It is an automaton.”

For the past month I have been hidden away in a small village in the Carpathian mountains, attempting, when not writing the book I came here to write, to learn, learn, and learn a bit of Romanian history. We are in the village of Parau, halfway between Sibiu and Brasov, about 50 kilometers to the west of the old boundary between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that part of the world under at least nominal control of the Ottoman sultan. The inhabitants travel in horse carts, wear traditional clothing, and every evening drive their cows home from the fields down the village’s dirt roads.

Picturesque, indeed. But some days, when I long to go to the little shop in the village to buy some near-stale bread or a can of corn without being stared at like some alien, I can’t help but think to myself: this is the last and greatest stronghold in Europe of what Marx dared to call “the idiocy of village life.” Old ladies scurry past the town’s church making the sign of the cross in fear and ignorance. Kinder, Kirche, Küche, as the Germans say, seem to constitute the ultimate horizon of these women’s dreams and ambitions.

The villagers stare at us with absolutely no concern for discretion as we take our nightly post-prandial strolls. It is summer and the weather is fine and we are in need of a stroll after dinner, that is all, but the intensity of the gazes from every nook and, presumably, behind every window-shade always make us feel as though we are doing something terribly wrong, as though we ourselves were the devil incarnate. You’re just lucky I’m not black, I tell my wife.

Half of the population of Romania is engaged in subsistence agriculture. For the most part, the peasants conduct their lives without using money, getting what they need by producing it themselves or bartering what they’ve produced. Most of the people who live off the land, I was told by a member of the Romanian learned class, have no idea what Europe is, let alone anything like a considered opinion on the pros and cons of EU accession.

Yet everywhere one goes one sees signs of Romania’s longing to join. The little schoolhouse in Parau has waving outside of it, from left to right, a Romanian flag, an EU flag, and a NATO flag. This is particularly odd when we consider that Romania is not yet even a member of the European Union, and we certainly wouldn’t find this sort of EU-pride in countries that are members. The EU flag, it seems, reveals no official affiliation, but is rather a symbol of psychogeographical orientation: do not confuse us, it says, with our neighbors to the East.

Americans who, in the PC-frenzy of the 1990s, trained themselves to stop saying ‘Oriental’, would be amazed to observe how that term is employed around here: ‘Oriental’ is whatever the Romanians hate about themselves, whatever is left over from Ottoman domination, whatever cultural contagion the nomadic Gypsies –whose language is closer to Punjabi than to Romanian— have spread to their hosts, whatever it is that is making EU accession so difficult. Corruption is ‘Oriental,’ as are potholes, inflation, and street dogs. The desire to purge the ‘Oriental’ also manifests itself in the form of a general aversion towards Arab, Turkish, and Indian cuisine, and a common belief that this food is prepared unhygienically. One woman I spoke to reported that her lips sprouted blisters within hours after she dared to try a Lebanese restaurant in Bucharest. Another woman told me that, while she has never actually been to Turkey, she believes that Turks are very dishonest, and that the widespread habit of dishonesty among Romanians must be a consequence of Ottoman influence. I lived for a year in Istanbul, I replied, and I experienced no significant instances of dishonesty. In Romania, in contrast, I have experienced a total of one significant instance (I foolishly gave a vendor a large bill and he gave me too little change in return).

Anyone who spends more than, say, five minutes in Bucharest will inevitably hear, blaring from cars and restaurants and homes, some very, very bad music. This music is “manele“, it is the perpetual soundtrack of lower class men in muscle shirts and gold chains and in Mercedes Benzes they ought not be in a position to afford. As in rap, the texts consist principally in boasts and threats. As far as I can tell, it is produced with no real instruments, it is cheap and forgettable, and it sounds to my ear as though it could just as easily come from Egypt or Turkey. And needless to say, the learned classes hate it. An anti-manele campaign that has been picking up steam recently instructs Bucharesters to blast Mozart from your homes and cars in the hopes of drowning out the ubiquitious trashy Oriental synth-pop.

This is meant to be a defense of high culture against the vulgar, but does it not also perfectly reflect the fundamental divide in the Romanian identity: The Ottoman Empire versus the Austro-Hungarian, Istanbul versus Vienna? Tipper Gore may hate the violent and misogynistic content of rap music, but it has been a long time since any respectable American has been permitted to bemoan the popularity of “jungle” music, to speak as though we are under musical siege by the savages. But the anti-manele rhetoric is not just about music. It’s also about geopolitics and history.

More than one Romanian has explained to me that it is simply Romania’s destiny to be ruled by some empire or other. In bad times, the empire is based in the East (Istanbul, Moscow); in good times, it is based in the West (Rome, Washington). A Romanian ambassador I spoke with in Western Europe described the routine visits he paid to other ambassadors shortly after arriving in his new assignment. The American ambassador was warm if busy, as were the Europeans. The Russian ambassador, in contrast, had a succinct speech he was evidently instructed by Putin to give: don’t think you’ve seen the last of us. The threat is not (and probably never was) communism, but Oriental despotism. I have heard more than one Romanian claim that the Russians are the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and that there is a discernible continuity from the days of the Mongol invasions to Russian politics today.

Romania is not the only country with the bad habit of projecting everything it doesn’t like about itself towards some geographical or imaginary East. I’ve heard many Russians describe Chinese food as ‘dirty’, and Turks themselves disdainfully describe their version of manele as ‘arabesk’. Much of the rhetoric of Southeastern Europe as the last line of defense against Muslim invaders turned much nastier during the Yugoslav wars than at its present, irritating din in Romania. But what is interesting about the Romanian version is that, in their case, unlike that of the Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians, there is some solid historical, or at least linguistic, reason why they imagine themselves as more Western than their neighbors.

On the European side of the Bosporus Strait, in a northern suburb of Istanbul, there stands a tower erected in the 15th century. It is called the ‘Rumeli’ tower, this being the Turkish form of the ethnonym ‘Roman’. Romans, in this sense, are not citizens of Rome, nor even directly the one-time citizens or subjects of the Roman Empire. They are, rather, Europeans as opposed to Turks. Until 1453, the Bosporus was understood to be the absolute and final barrier between the two realms, but with the fall of Constantinople and the following centuries of Turkish advances –most famously all the way to the gates of Vienna in 1529–, the southeastern part of Europe was transformed into a grey area between two worlds.

All of this is particularly pertinent for our understanding of avian flu, an odd media phenomenon that may or may not have some distant correlate in epidemiological reality. Avian flu, the story goes, is a plague that encroaches upon the West from the East, and that has as its cause unhygienic Oriental food-handling practices. When we first heard of it, it was wreaking havoc in China. Before long, it had made its way to Turkey, and immediately after that cases were reported from Romania: it had snuck past the Rumeli Hisari as Rome’s watchmen dozed. Soon enough, entire neighborhoods of Bucharest were under quarantine, even though not a single case of human-to-human transmission had been reported, anywhere.

The impression this westward progression no doubt left on readers of low-brow newspapers like Das Bild in Germany or The Sun in England was nothing new, but only the latest reinforcement of a basic feature of European geography since at least the 15th century, according to which civilization as we know it is threatened from the east, and the greater Balkan region is conceived as the buffer zone. Once any menace, whether bird flu or the infidel hordes, moves across the Bosporus from Asia Minor into Europe proper –that is, from Turkey to Romania– the uncontested Europeans in Bremen and London know it’s time to worry.

Every Western scholar who has studied Balkan nationalism inevitably comes back to Freud’s famous description of ethnic hatred between neighbors as ‘the narcissism of minor differences.’ Increasingly, it strikes me that Southeastern Europe is that part of the world where the differences between Christianity and Islam begin to disappear, where the one smoothly transitions into the other. One might propose that the head scarves women wear in the Christian East are an indicator of the proximity of Islam. What are mislabeled ‘babushkas’ in the United States, in an unconscious jump from the garment to its wearer, are said to be merely ‘cultural’, while Turkish head scarves are a feature of ‘religion’. In spite of having read the French government’s report on ‘laïcité’, I dare say I still don’t really understand the difference, since I’m not sure what religion could be if not a set of arbitrary rules that appears, from the inside, to be grounded in the eternal order of things. A Bulgarian babushka will feel just as naked with her hair exposed as any Turk, and she will probably feel that this nakedness is bad for reasons having to do with the moral order represented by her big-bearded priest and his thick-walled house of worship. That sounds like religion to me.

The great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, who figures on the new Romanian one leu bank note, defended the idea throughout his long and distinguished career that Romania is, in its essence, what is left over of Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II. According to him, “after the transformation of 1453, in many ways only on the surface, Byzantine culture annexed itself to the Gothic world of Transylvania… to the Romanian principality of Moldavia, and, through different means, transmitted itself to the West during the Renaissance.”

Iorga was a nationalist and a chauvinist, who wrote dismissively of “this Stambul of the Turkish rulers, who were not even able to find a real new name for it.” I am an amateur observer of all of this, one who has spent time on both sides of the Bosporus, but always with other, pressing professional obligations that have prevented me from studying the history that interested Iorga in more detail. I have learned enough, however, to have become convinced that the questions of national and religious identity that interested Iorga are of tremendous importance, and that they must be studied by scholars who share none of his allegiances.

The babies are here! Boy (Gwyneth’s Moses), Girl (Brooke’s Grier), Girl (Angelina’s Shiloh), Boy (Gwen’s Kingston).  But where is Suri Cruise?

For me the story starts in March 2005.  I was walking up Third Avenue in the early evening and passed by Katie Holmes. She stood in front of Pop Bar and wore a white trench coat and passed a cigarette in and out of her lipsticked mouth and said loudly to her male companion, “I think it’ll be really good for my career.” She then blew a puff of smoke out the side of her lips toward a floodlight and glanced at the passersby, shifting her weight from right stiletto to left.  I didn’t think much of this.  The last news item I could remember about the WB-star was a terrible picture of her feet in a celebrity rag captioned “Katie has hammer toes.”  But by the end of April, Katie was everywhere, lurching along next to Tom Cruise at this premiere and on that talk show, eyes glistening and mouth either grinning or kissing.  She didn’t say much.  In June she was engaged and planning to convert to Scientology, and in October her pregnancy was announced.  Things moved fast.

That speed was the hallmark of the story, even more so than the sheer strangeness of the coupling.  Tom and Katie were in front of the camera so often, vehemently declaring their love so constantly, that in order to maintain the attention the romance had to progress.  Perhaps it was coincidence that the lovers each had a film to promote during their courtship – perhaps they just happened to be in the public eye during those momentous few months.  I’ve wanted to shout some private things to the entire world on several occasions, and perhaps Tom and Katie just had the chance.  But when the two ran out of vague news (love, religion, marriage, baby) to announce, well, the story slowed, and only the hovering cameras remembered the initial pace.  TomKat won’t announce a wedding date, won’t state whether Katie has converted, won’t show their daughter, Suri, to the world, and won’t answer why to any of it.  That story is stalled, pregnant and overdue, stuck in a long engagement, and the new story is no story at all.

Katie’s well documented pregnancy and undocumented parenting are a remarkable counterpoint to Britney Spears’ painfully public mothering.  Where Katie has seen her celebrity swell along with her stomach, Britney’s post-pregnant physique and baby-related gaffes have invited ridicule and scorn.  Katie exists in a fantasy land – marrying Tom Cruise, joining a top-secret religious organization, giving interviews she could never book before, having a mystery baby – and Britney’s just too awfully real with her wastrel husband and improperly installed car seat and surprise second pregnancy.  Neither woman is working (no movies, no albums). The tabloids go back and forth between them, upstairs and downstairs, and leave American women on the ground floor wondering if a baby’s a good thing at all. 

In fact, the celebrity baby sagas seem to me rather like horror stories.  Owing to her utter absence from the photographic record, Suri Cruise is now akin to something like a unicorn, sea monster, or Rosemary’s Baby.  She’s so mysterious that King of Queens star (and Scientologist) Leah Remini made the front page of CNN.com just by declaring that she’d held the little Cruise, and that Suri was a normal size.  Is Suri older than she should be?  Are there two babies?  Does she exist at all? For those of you who haven’t been following the conspiracy theory, some suspicious evidence:

1.    Katie’s belly: Pictures show it seemingly decrease in size a few weeks before Suri’s birth.
2.    Katie’s walk: Video shows a heavily pregnant Katie walking like someone who isn’t heavily pregnant.
3.    Suri’s birth certificate: It was filed late and is signed by a nurse who never saw the baby and an unidentified friend (on behalf of the parents).
4.    Suri’s name: My sister and I find it strange that Suri is composed of letters found in Cruise.

I think the secrecy is probably the result of a health problem, or a Scientology custom, or just a desire to keep a newborn out of the spotlight.  Or maybe Suri’s a little funny looking. Maybe it’s a PR ploy.  Pictures of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt sold to People for a reported $4.1 million and Suri couldn’t command more at birth.  Could be that TomKat is maintaining the attention by lying low, and is waiting to sell later.  In any case, the whole business gives me a creepy feeling in my neck.  I’ve never seen a celebrity trying so hard to be noticed as Katie Holmes was on Third Avenue last March (it sounds fantastic, but the story’s true), and now she can’t get to a Starbucks in Colorado without paparazzi on her tail.  But what really gets me is this focus on a phantom baby in tandem with all the other baby frenzy.  Now ambivalence about celebrity pregnancy has a name, and it’s Suri Cruise.

The second line of the declaration of independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is ambiguous for a good reason: ambiguity in politics is as rewarding as precision in science. The authors of these lines were aware that only the pursuit was an “inalienable right” but not happiness itself. But this right may be wrong and the pursuit futile. Here is an example from Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain: (960 C.E): “I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my neither call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.”

Dearth of happiness seems to be the nature of existence and considerable human activity is geared to enhance it. What haven’t we done to chase this mirage! Our irrational tools are: war to attain peace; marriage-divorce–remarriage; crime and cocaine and of course Viagra for failing happiness. But the most bizarre is for religion to assert that my-god-is-better-than-your-god and if you agree, you will be happy but if you disagree I will kill you – that will make me happy.

Prophets, philosophers, psychologists, economists, biochemists and cynics have attempted to dish out prescriptions for utopia and their emphasis reflects the bias of their system.

The chase for the happiness mantra started many centuries ago. Buddha’s (540BC-480BC) doctrine of “four noble truths” acknowledges there is suffering, the cause of suffering is desire and the control of desire alleviates suffering. Dhammapada, a Buddhist text gave a prescription for happiness (verses 197–208) more than 2000 years ago “Live without hatred, anger and passion; stay healthy; avoid pursuit of worldly pleasure and possessions, stay tranquil in victory and defeat; seek company of noble and trustworthy kinsmen and avoid ignorant people”.

Socrates who lived a few years after Buddha echoed that a virtuous life was the essential prerequisite. The ingredients of the happiness cocktail have not changed: love, trust, kinship, achievement, money, health, self esteem and engaging activity. While Buddha would extol the virtues of suppression of desire, other disciplines would urge us to pursue them passionately.

Economists would like to inspire us to chase wealth. Fortunately for the uninspired, they have found no constant correlation between income and happiness. We know that the hungry poor are miserable and they are less so when they get some money, but happiness does not increase after a certain level of income. Richard Layard, a British economist calculated that fifteen thousand dollars was the threshold and any richer is not happier The Japanese have six times more money compared to 1950 and the Americans are twice as rich compared to 1970 but the populations are not any happier. (Layard, “Happiness: lessons from a New Science”) Wealth increases consumption but not happiness.

Can a Buddhist economic system increase happiness? Can the notion rooted in Buddhism — the ultimate purpose of life is inner happiness– be delivered by state intervention? Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the king of Bhutan (a Buddhist nation) suggested in 1972 that countries should be more concerned with “Gross National Happiness” than with Gross Domestic Product. His four pillars of GNH are: economic self-reliance, environment preservation, promotion of indigenous culture and good democratic governance. Richard Easterlin, professor of economics at the University of Southern California a supporter of this concept says “We have been misguided in dismissing what people say about how happy they are and simply assuming that if they are consuming more apples and buying more cars they are better off.” But history bears the evidence that economists’ failure to distribute happiness equitably is as successful as their distribution of wealth.

So much for the economists; what do the psychologists say? Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, conducted an elegant experiment with people from various cultures. He distributed pagers to a few thousand people and paged them randomly. He asked them to write down what they were doing and how they felt when the pager beeped. The investigation tried to capture the activity at the moment when people said they were happy. The study showed that people were happy when they were immersed in what they were doing and were oblivious even of the passage of time. They were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”.

Psychologists have even tried to quantify happiness. Interviews with more than 1,000 people has yielded the following: Happiness = P + (5xE) + (3xH). Here, P is personal traits like outlook and adaptability, E is existing health , finances and relationships; H stands for higher attributes like aspirations, expectations, self esteem and humor. Sounds like it is Dhammapda wine in a mathematical decanter.

Other psychologists have shown that happiness is not a formula but an inherited endowment. The level of happiness stays at a predetermined ‘set point’ and alters only temporarily after a life changing event. You would presume that a lottery winner will be eternally happy and a person crippled by an accident sad for ever. Not so. Both return to their original frame of happiness after about a year. Consider this formula: H=S+C+V. Here, H is happiness, S is your set point for happiness, C is the life situation and V is voluntary activity.

A formula can give you understanding of the happiness but cannot enhance it. Enter the biochemists who don’t want to be left behind in the pursuit of joy chemicals. They have matched our glandular secretions to our emotions. Some molecules seem to mirror our emotions:

• Oxytocin – a hormone that augments uterine contractions during labor- is our bonding agent. The hypothalamus exudes it abundantly during bonding, mating, pregnancy and even a sensual massage.
• Endorphins are internal opiates that relieve pain and induce a ‘high’ during strenuous jogging and are also released during laughter and orgasm.
• Dopamine is the achievement and reward hormone; the levels rise not only after an accomplishment and also with the anticipation.
• A passionate romance stimulates neural growth factor but the high levels recede after about two years. Nothing lasts for ever, especially romance.
• And then there shines the star of mind modulators: 5-hydroxy tryptamine (5HT) also known as serotonin. When Marcus Aurelius meditated “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself” he may as well have been referring to 5HT.The vagaries of this single molecule suffuse mirth or misery; this alone decides who to bless and who to punish.

The human body has only 5 to10 milligrams of 5HT, ninety percent of which resides in intestines. Only half to one milligram lies ensconced in small packets, in the nerve cells of medulla, pons and midbrain. With an incoming signal the packets burst into the space between nerve cells and attach to receptor proteins. Scientists have characterized fifteen such receptors and each one modulates a different function like sleep, hunger, body temperature, muscle contraction and depression The quantity of 5HT and its attachment to a specific receptor determines individual’s psychological destiny.

Numerous studies in animals and humans have shown that low levels of 5HT are associated with depression, suicide, aggression, self destructive behavior and poor impulse control. Drugs like Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft increase the levels of 5HT and can alleviate these symptoms. Recreational drug ‘ecstasy’ surges the serotonin level in the neuronal synapse and inordinate excess results in ‘serotogenic syndrome’ a potentially lethal condition. Futile pursuit of happiness sometimes starts as a pursuit of hedonistic sensory pleasure but often leads to a contrary state – unhappiness.

So here we are: from Buddha to biochemists, happiness can not boast of a glorified past but can it envision a promising future? Ray Kurzweil says, “The essence of being human lies not in our limitations but in our ability to transcend them.” And can we break beyond our natural boundaries? Some experts think the answer lies in biotechnology:

The pursuit of happiness and self-esteem—the satisfaction of one’s personal desires and recognition of one’s personal worth—are much more common human aspirations than the self-conscious quest for perfection. Indeed, the desire for happiness and the love of excellence are, at first glance, independent aspirations. Although happiness is arguably fuller and deeper when rooted in excellent activity, the pursuit of happiness is often undertaken without any regard for excellence or virtue. Many people crave only some extra boost on the path to success; many people seek only to feel better about themselves. Although less radical than the quest for “perfection,” the quests for happiness, success, and self-esteem, especially in our society, may prove to be more powerful motives for an interest in using biotechnical power for purposes that lie “beyond therapy.” Thus, though some visionaries—beginning with Descartes—may dream of using biotechnologies to perfect human nature, and though many of us might welcome biotechnical assistance in improving our native powers of mind and body, many more people will probably turn to it in search of advancement, contentment, and self-satisfaction—for themselves and for their children. [The President’s Council on Bioethics, Washington, D.C., October, 2003]

That was the past and future of happiness but what about the present. Well, cynics are the only people who seem to have got it right. As George Burns quipped “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”

Julia is a bright-eyed girl of 14, with shoulder-length chestnut-brown hair and a winsome smile. One recent July morning, she, along with her 16 year-old sister Jane, drive into downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, in their father’s battered F-150 pick-up truck, on their way to fulfilling a dream. She pulls a damp wad of ten- and twenty-dollar bills from the pocket of her jeans, carefully saved from a weekly allowance and regular babysitting jobs. “I’ve been working for this almost a whole year,” she says excitedly, as Jane rolls her eyes in the driver’s seat. “But I’ve wanted it a lot longer–like, since two years ago, when Jane got hers done.” When they reach the corner of Benmont Avenue and Fifth, they pull into a metered parking space and walk the remaining two blocks to Rickys Tattoos, a grimy storefront parlor on the main drag of this sleepy town. Julia is so thrilled she can barely keep herself to a measured pace, which she must do if she doesn’t want to leave her sister struggling alone on the sidewalk. Jane walks with a pronounced limp. “Come on, Jane,” she cries, bouncing on the pavement, half a block ahead. “We’re almost there.” Jane rolls her eyes again, then turns to me and confides, with charming sympathy she conceals from her younger sister, “I was totally just as excited as she is. It’s, like, a really big day for her.”

Jane and Julia are but two of the many thousands caught up in what is fast becoming a fashion craze among American teen-age girls. It’s called “crippin,” and among the few sociologists and psychologists fully versed in the practice, it is one of the more worrisome new developments in a culture of low self-esteem, best characterized by drug and alcohol abuse and rampant sexual promiscuity. Liz Harmon, a developmental psychologist at the University of Rhode Island, who is among the foremost authorities on crippin, is unsurprised at the speed with which American girls are submitting themselves to the quasi-medical procedure. “It’s really the next logical step, isn’t it?” she says. “With the ubiquity of tattoos, and after piercings have become practically de rigueur, why not crippin too? It was right around the corner, but still nobody saw it coming.” She sighs with a depth of fatigue one might expect from someone who makes her living studying the ways of American teendom. “I think nobody really wanted to see it coming: That’s how disturbing it is.” But opinion is not monolithic on the subject. Jack Stiles, a sociologist at UCLA, says the widespread concern is overblown. “Look, it’s difficult to understand, without a doubt, but is there anything about growing up in America that isn’t? These girls aren’t doing long-term harm to their bodies, at least nothing that isn’t superficial. The fact is, much like tattooing, it’s a reversible procedure. Expensive? Sure. Painful? Absolutely. But it’s a correctable thing, and if it answers a psychological need, then maybe we should be focusing on that. Maybe we shouldn’t be marginalizing these gals for just trying to fit in.”

Ronnie Jendick’s left arm is covered with tattoos: a naked woman, Chinese characters, complex circular designs of what looks like barbed wire. He lifts his shirt and points proudly to his ample belly, to a fierce-looking eagle whose wings span a rippling American flag. “Took two weeks for this one,” he says enthusiastically, “and painful as hell. Belly flesh? That’s tender shit, got to be honest. But it was worth it.” Ronnie is the proprietor of Rickys Tattoos. “I bought it a few years ago. Dirt cheap, too.” When asked about the name on the hand-painted sign out front, he says, “Ricky? Croaked on his bike.” He makes a dispiriting sound through the baffle of his thick lips. “Totaled, man. It was ugly. Semi behind him sort of finished him off for good. But it was quick, though. Definitely not the worst way to go out, you know?” He crosses himself in the Catholic style. Ronnie leads me to a back room, the “fracking room,” as he calls it, behind the main floor of his establishment, where body art is commissioned and performed. “This is it, man. I got the chair from some dentist across the street a couple years ago. He was retiring, wanted five hundred for it, but I talked him down. It was pretty easy to modify. I got the leg irons off this freaky sadist dude I know–traded for some body work.” The chair is of the normal variety–red pleather cushioning, a head rest, a welter of hinged metal limbs coming out from both sides, most of them unused in its new function. What distinguishes this chair from one you might find in any dentist’s office are the leg clamps, two on each side, rust eating away at their metal bindings.

The procedure is a simple one, but that simplicity hasn’t stopped sixteen states from outlawing it. Commonly called “fracking,” which is short for fracturing, Ronnie is willing to describe it only because Vermont’s legislature is famously reluctant to curtail the freedoms of its citizenry. “Those laws are about the anesthetic, not the procedure, ’cause they couldn’t even outlaw the procedure, you know. But I bet they tried.” The anesthetic is local, but nonetheless potentially dangerous, and its administration is usually subject to state licensing. Ronnie himself is not licensed, as is the case with most frackers, and so fracking is often performed at night, after normal business hours, in back rooms similar to the one at Rickys Tattoos. He brandishes a large hammer, larger than one you’re likely to find in the local hardware store, and equipped with a narrow, clawless head. “Ready?” He swings it with startling force. “See, you got to come down real hard to get it done right. That little head? It concentrates the force. You better know what you’re doing though, or there’s some serious damage. Shut your ass down quick if you’re not careful.” He mimes the striking procedure again. “I make a little target with a laundry pen, a little x, right there on the leg. It’s the fibula you want, but it’s easy to miss. You crack the tibia instead, you’re screwed.” At the sound of this reporter’s uneasy laugh, Ronnie asks, “You want to hop in, have a try? Give you a special discount.”

There is a distinct look of anxiety on Julia’s face as Ronnie calls her into the back of the store. Jane, who is examining tattoo samples, encourages her. “Let’s go, Jules. We gotta get back by four, and you’re gonna have to sit around for an hour afterwards. Let’s go.” Julia has consented to the presence of an observer, and we walk back to the fracking room together. Trembling, she gets into the chair, and Ronnie locks the clamps around the ankle and knee of both her legs, even though only the right will be fracked today. “Keeps ’em still,” he says by way of explanation. He pulls out a large hypodermic needle, the sight of which elicits a cry of fear from the 14 year-old girl. “Don’t you worry, little honey,” says Ronnie. “I know just what I’m doing.” After injecting the anesthetic and giving it some time to take effect, Ronnie tests Julia’s responsiveness with a few mild taps of the hammer. “You feeling that?” Julia grins up at him from the chair and says, “I’m ready.” With a single fearsome blow, Ronnie fracks Julia’s right leg. The resultant cracking noise is surprisingly sharp and clean, not at all what one expects from such a violent act. Apparently, Julia hasn’t felt a thing. Ronnie sniffs with satisfaction. “Good frack, I can hear it, and I’ve done enough to know when it’s wrong. There’s sort of this chunky sound when you miss. Kinda hard to describe.”

Ronnie insists that all his clients remain in the chair for an hour, to allow the anesthetic to wear off. “There’s no law or anything, but it seems like a safety thing to me. Plus it gives me a chance to put the brace on, teach ’em how to do it, ’cause you don’t want ’em coming back again, you know, demanding another frack. Big waste of time if the bone goes and heals right.” He wraps the effected portion of Julia’s leg in a small plastic brace designed to prevent its setting properly. “You got to keep this on for two weeks, understand? Go ahead and walk around without it, the normal stuff. The more you move the better. But when you sleep you put the brace on. Same in school and everything, when you’re just sitting around. Not my responsibility if it sets right, got it?”

Back on Benmont Avenue, Julia and Jane move at a halting pace, side by side. It’s almost 3 o’clock, and Jane is annoyed. “We’re gonna be late and Dad’s gonna be pissed,” she says, but Julia is unconcerned. She’s crippin now, and happy. “My boyfriend Nick? He’s totally excited. I’m calling him up right when we get home.” Jane rolls her eyes at me. As I watch the girls make their way back to the pick-up truck, I’m struck by the controlled violence of the procedure, the primitive equipment, and I’m reminded of Liz Harmon’s weary words. “These girls,” she said to me, “they’re damaging themselves for the rest of their lives, and it’s a sad commentary. It shouldn’t even be allowed. You have to ask yourself: What does it mean for us, as a society?” Having witnessed the procedure, having seen the result, I’m not sure I have an answer to her troubling question. And yet I confess I can’t help but appreciate the girls’ simple beauty as they struggle down the street. The gentle scrape of their shoes on the pavement, the slight bobbing of their heads as they limp away–there is an appealing vulnerability there, and I am not unmoved. It’s easy to condemn crippin out of hand, without taking time to understand the process and appreciate its aesthetically pleasing outcome. Perhaps we need to look a little deeper before we judge so harshly. As we part, Julia turns to me and says, “Crippin? It’s not about being rebellious, all pointless and everything, you know? I mean, that’s what everyone says, but it’s totally not like that at all. It’s my choice, and it’s got nothing to do with anyone else, right? Crippin–it’s just a way to express myself. It’s a way for me to be me.”

Why do I love Crosby Street?  It inspires in me the kind of preference I remember having as a kid for lucky talismans, strange everyday objects I became attached to and took with me: I have a sentimental feeling of loyalty when contemplating it.  Streets go to work with their parallel neighbors and perpendicular interceptors, sharing affinities and sometimes friendships.  Crosby is friends, in my mind, with Howard Street, and Grand.  It’s cordial with the slightly tony Prince, affable with Mott.  With Houston, it forms a strangely superfluous intersection.  To its grander parallel neighbors, Broadway and Lafayette, it functions as the humble employee, the service road, or the mews, maintaining their emporia’s delivery entrances and fire escapes. 

Those fire escapes: Crosby retains, more than any other street besides perhaps Greene, the trademark look of Soho, all cobbles and rickety rusty iron-rung ladders.  Because so much of it is back entrances, there’s very little flash, and the traffic is mostly of the type given to handcarts and freight elevators.  Its sidewalks meld quickly into metal plates and loading docks.  Food is delivered to Dean and Deluca, which leaves its refuse on Crosby so as not to put off the paying customers with the smell – even when Broadway is at its most oppressively populated, on summer Saturdays, Crosby’s quiet.  Crosby’s an honest street like that. 

Yet there is grandeur, too.  At the very top of the street, at Bleeker, lies the Bayard-Conduit building, New York City’s only work by Louis “Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor” Sullivan, complete with gorgeously ornate plaster facade.  Growing up in Buffalo my favorite building was always Sullivan’s red Guaranty, and I always like glancing up Crosby at its fairer sibling.  To be a little mythopoetic about it, it makes my life trajectory seem more continuous.  But that’s not the main reason for my liking Crosby; if anything, it’s the exception that proves the rule.

No, Crosby’s appeal lies in its steadfast resistance to being pedestrianized, mallified, the way every other street in Soho has – except maybe Wooster below Grand, where street art sanctifies wrecked facades.  Crosby is a living, working street.  The Housing Works used bookstore is nice, but next door the Housing Works itself conserves some of New York’s social diversity.  Where once Houston Street was peppered with gas stations, the only one left is at Crosby.  Accordingly, the Lahore Deli across from it is a permanent cabbie break, and one with excellent samosas, chicken patties and tea with cardamom (which I guess some might redundantly call “chai” tea). 

An alley-ish street, Crosby also crosses one of the most beautiful New York alleys north of Canal: Jersey Street, connecting to Mulberry.  Balancing my chicken patty on my teacup lid, I often look through to the back of the Puck Building, with its beautiful pink iron window shutters.  Back when Keith Haring’s Pop Shop felt like an arty outpost in the dystopia below Houston, the alley had more life: people practically squatted there.  Now it’s free of the homeless and the Pop Shop was too lowbrow to survive next to Triple Five Soul’s seventy-dollar hoodies.  But Crosby has not gone that way completely, yet.  Either that or it has, in a more complicated way.

Crosby Street is both what it is and a stage set at once.  It is a working street of deliveries and tea breaks, recalling an earlier downtown, but that very appearance makes it more desirable as real estate for the wealthy.  Because of its untimeliness, it’s a magnet for loft-dwellers, their places’ value concealed by the tasteful disorder of the street itself.  Some of the most expensive and celebrity-filled co-ops in the city are here.  For these residents, Crosby’s anonymity provides both relief from the paparazzi and a satisfying, faux-hemian sense of keeping it real. 

This may be the time to bring up the great postmodern institution at Crosby and Spring: Balthazar.  Opened in 1997, most first-time visitors would be more likely to guess 1897, so successfully has Keith McNally’s ready-aged restaurant settled in.  At first, it seemed ridiculously contrived, a Parisian brasserie-fantastique composed of cracked mirrors and stained teak, the walls painted the perfect shade of nictotine.  The bathroom attendants were a particularly audacious touch.  Yet over time, Balthazar started to seem less inauthentic, especially by comparison to *actual* classic Parisian brasseries, La Coupole and Brasserie Nord, now owned by the conglomerate that runs the sterile European steakhouse chain Chez Gerrard.  The food’s good, if too buttery (the one false note, like they’re trying too hard), the bakery is just excellent, and the restaurant repopularized of the plateau de fruit de mer.  It’s a set, but one so well art-directed that it makes you question whether no art direction is just one more form of art direction.

Given Balthazar’s confused relation to reality, it makes sense, then, that it’s located on Crosby, which returns me to the question: why do I love Crosby Street?        After all, the things I mention–working life, humility, unreconstructed looks–are things that make it out of place in its neighborhood.  Am I nostalgically romanticizing the street?  Making New York’s industrial past the pastoral idyll and its current incarnation the debased present?  What kind of ethnographer’s lens am I looking through, approving the signs of labor and deprecating idle wealth? 

I don’t want to be the Wordsworth of Crosby Street, endlessly bemoaning lost authenticity.  I just know it will be a more boring city if Crosby turns into Mercer.  And, economically, it makes good sense for me to hope places like the Lahore Deli stick around – I can’t afford their replacements.  And what’s important about Crosby Street is that it renders a diversity that in other places is largely hidden.  Fulton Street Fish Market, like La Pigalle and Covent Garden before it, has been outsourced.  Now it’s free to become another museum.  But we’re poorer for it, culturally.  Likewise, Keith McNally, who hastened the demise of the old Meatpacking District with Pastis, once laughably remarked that he wanted it to be the kind of place where meatpackers might pop in for a croque monsieur and a café au lait.  Sure, Keith, sure.  But I understand his impulse. 

I’ve never been to Beirut but I’ve always held a few romantic, probably somewhat naive, notions about it as the kind of cosmopolitan and complicated city toward which I’ve always been most attracted. The practice of labeling various cities around the world “The Paris of X” has always struck me as distasteful for all the obvious reasons, but calling Beirut the Paris of the Levant sounds more appropriate than many of them. Certainly, given the cosmopolitan ideal that Beirut has represented for some, the traumas suffered by the place in recent decades were all the more heart rending. One wants Beirut to do well. It is a place to root for and the recent attempt’s to find a way for Lebanon to stand on its own two feet, outside the smothering arms of Syria, sounded a note of hope even as they were laced with the dangers that bubble just below the surface of Lebanese life.

Beirut is fragile in the same way that the cosmopolitan mode of life is fragile. It hangs in a precarious balance between mutually coexistent beliefs that must both be robust enough to mean something to people, and flexible enough to give way in the name of tolerance. The glue of this mode of life is that most difficult to define of quasi-institutions: civil society. That’s the transcendental ground, the condition of possibility, and without it the competing sets of traditions and beliefs that somehow manage to negotiate the social space fly apart into the very opposite of the cosmopolitan mode of life. At the heart of urban cosmopolitanism is always that powder keg. It can always go off, as Beirut reminds us. The work of the cosmopolitan mode of life is never over and it never gets any easier. It can’t be solved, it simply has to be lived, day after day, year after year, generation after generation.

Which is why the objection to the current Israeli incursion into Lebanon can step to the side of the political debate about causes and blame. I’m not interested, for the moment, in claims about Israel’s territorial ambitions or the politics of Kadima, about Iran and Syria and the power axis that wields Hezbollah. These are perfectly important things to understand, but they don’t drive to the heart of this particular problem.

And the problem, right now, is that the tenuous fabric of Lebanese civil society is currently caught in a crossfire. There are things that can be accomplished through military force and sometimes military force is necessary. But civil society has never been created or sustained through military force. And the problem, even from the standpoint of Israel’s self-interest, is that a Lebanon without a functioning and reasonably stable civil society teeters toward becoming a failed state once again. And failed states are breeding grounds for further violence, strife, regional instability, political extremism, etc. And thus the terrible cycle renews itself.

The question for Israel is whether its day to day security concerns and military struggles with armed factions in Lebanon and elsewhere are to be waged at the expense of Beirut and its fragile cosmopolitan space. Israel may win this battle in one sense and lose it another. Hezbollah may be suppressed, but Israel will continue to live as an island surrounded by failed states.

It is easy, perhaps, for me to say this but it continues to strike me that there is a road not taken here. It is a difficult road, no doubt, and the political realities on the ground make it difficult to fathom how it would be traversed. But so what. There is a place for imagination in politics, too. In this possible world, Israel would declare itself the avowed ally to the fragile civil spaces of the Levant. We are strong enough, and powerful enough, and confident enough, Israel would declare, not to be goaded into the abandonment of that dream. We do so out of genuine idealism about what the Levant can be, but we also do so out of genuine self-interest. States that can sustain a thriving civil society are states that are naturally less threatening to their neighbors and, by definition, more stable.

And this would not be an acquiescence to the worst aspects of Hamas or Hezbollah, but an attempt to outflank them completely. For extremists in general will suffer in precisely the degree to which the civil society of the cosmopolitan mode of life can thrive.

The one overriding principle of this approach would be a simple motto: “The Levant Must Flourish.” From that perspective, what Israel is doing in Lebanon can only tear apart the fragile fabric that is the very material from which flourishing societies are constructed. And at this moment in particular, I think it is important to take this concept of flourishing very seriously. A flourishing Levant would be a better Lebanon, a better Palestine, and a better Israel too. Israel has shown time and again that it is a strong and powerful state, but that power and strength has begun to feel petty and mean in the paucity of its vision. I think Israel can do better. The little dream that lays nestled in the bruised up body of Beirut deserves at least that much.

This has been an interminably bad summer for movies. Not one of the blockbusters has been interesting or diverting: X-Men 3 was a lackluster addition to the franchise; MI3 was, well, too Tom Cruisey to get me in the theater; and Superman Returns just seems dull. And so in a reversal of the normal order of things, my attention has been drawn lately to the small screen, where the action has indeed been heating up. Back when original programming was limited to the major networks, summer was the worst of all times for television—the season of reruns and never aired pilots. Now that we are fully in the post-Sopranos era, and original programming is a permanent feature of the premium channels and extended tier (HBO, Showtime, FX, and the like), we do not have to wait for the fall for new shows or episodes to appear. While Jack Bauer takes time off to recover from yet another bad day or the team at CSI or House goes on hiatus, we can change channels to catch up with Vinny Chase and his Entourage, or see how the suburban soccer mom-cum-pot dealer is doing on Weeds, or (on my newest favorite) look in on the Irish politico-mobster Road Islanders on Brotherhood.

Of the three I’ve mentioned, Entourage (HBO, Sunday, 9:00 pm) has the largest claim on the zeitgeist. The trick of the series is to blur what is on the show and what is outside the show. Nominally about the exploits of a freshly minted celebrity and his cronies from back-in-the-day, Entourage is “about” the very industry that makes the show itself. And so the real world subject matter of the show is constantly intruding into the fictional world it creates: “real” celebrities play themselves mixing with the “fake” celebrities on the sets of made-up movies shot by real directors. We’ve seen this before, of course, in movies by Robert Altman for example. The difference here is the complete absence of satire. Entourage takes as a given our love of celebrity culture and its industry of images; it just finds nothing in that love to criticize. Rather, it makes celebrity culture all the more alluring for being turned into an aesthetic artifact. After all, what we watch on Entourage is not the tedium of reality itself. Even the “real” celebrities are playing themselves as characters in delicately crafted narratives. Rather, we watch artfully done 24-minute nuggets that serve us our favorite object of interest.

Like many others, I’m sure, I’ve been waiting anxiously for the return of Weeds (Showtime, Sunday, 9:00 pm) for a second season on August 15th. The premise is simple: a recently widowed mother of two from the wealthy “community” of Agrestic California, Nancy Botwin has turned to selling pot in order to maintain the lifestyle to which she and her family have grown accustomed. According to Showtime’s inevitable “behind the scenes” documentary, the creative minds who brought us this series seem to think their insight is to expose the “dark underbelly” of the American suburbs, as if that underbelly hasn’t been exposed time and again (even before the much over-rated and overwrought film American Beauty). What is brilliant about Weeds, in fact, is precisely the opposite. The show takes all the threatening or counter-cultural implications out of dealing and smoking pot. Marijuana blends seamlessly into the give and take of suburban life, with its failing marriages, anxious parents, over-achieving children, and slacker adolescents. The ostensibly outré activity of being a drug dealer is not so much a contrast to the staid and conformist culture of Agrestic as something easy to assimilate to that culture. The result is a very nicely turned comedy of manners, in which selling pot looks a lot like running the PTA.

I was happy to discover last week that Showtime’s new crime drama, Brotherhood (Sunday, 10:00 pm), is as good as suggested by its advance hype and previews. Here setting is everything. Few places seem more provincial on TV than medium-sized American cities: large enough for anomie and crime, small enough for gossip and tradition. Brotherhood is set in a white working class neighborhood of Providence RI, the kind of moldering, forgotten place that is littered with exposed tar paper roofs and detached lonely bars, where everyone knows not only you but your grandfather, where “mom-n-pop” stores are run by consumptive alcoholics, etc. etc. The show has as its backdrop, in other words, the melodrama of Irish New-England culture on the skids, in Boston’s smaller and less storied neighbor. It would be unfair to call the show an Irish Sopranos, though the comparison is inevitable. To the ordinary stuff of mobster theatrics Brotherhood adds the interesting element of local politics. The show follows the parallel and overlapping stories of two brothers, one an ambitious state assemblyman, the other a ruthless gangster. The point is not just to show that local politics is bound up with the mob (a theme explored to a lesser degree by the Sopranos); it is also to show that local politics is not so far from a gangland activity itself, with deals made through force and money, lives threatened and ruined, coffers plundered. Providence is of course a notoriously corrupt city whose notoriously corrupt mayor now lies in Federal custody. But that only serves to underscore what seems so perfect about the setting. Larger cities and more cosmopolitan locales tend to swallow crime narratives of this type— the vastness of the canvas dwarfs what are ultimately small minds. The not so big city on the decline, however, provides in Brotherhood both an image and context of organized crime and organized politics in the petty provincialism of their sleaze.

For Mother’s Day in May 2002, my husband Harvey ordered Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science for me. Harvey died a few days later and the book arrived after his memorial service. That summer I read the 1200-plus pages of this self-published tome, and I felt grateful to Mr. Wolfram as the book proved to be engaging, exciting, and helped to carry me through the aftermath of losing Harvey.

The British-born Mr. Wolfram has been educated at Eton, Oxford and Caltech, published his first scientific paper at 15, received his PhD in Theoretical Physics at 20 (a student of the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman), won a MacArthur genius grant at 21 and then became independently wealthy through his software “Mathematica”. A New Kind of Science may have been the first science book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species to sell out its first printing on its first day. It took him ten years to complete the book, during which Mr. Wolfram lived as a recluse, working all night long and running his software company for several hours during the day. Mr. Wolfram estimates that while writing the book, he typed 100 million keystrokes and moved his computer mouse more than 100 miles.

The reason this book’s message represents a paradigm shift is because of its potential for filling the gap in science related to the limitations of conventional mathematical equations which are unable to predict issues such as the shape that smoke from a cigarette is likely to take or the manner in which a forest fire will burn. At the heart of A New Kind of Science is Wolfram’s revolutionary idea to replace mathematical equations with algorithms and his assertion that the Universe is better explained on the basis of simple computer programs.

This is from The Economist: “Mr. Wolfram unashamedly compares the potential impact of his work to that of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”, and suggests that his discoveries can answer long-standing puzzles in mathematics, physics, biology and philosophy, from the fundamental laws of nature to the question of free will.”

Wolfram’s work has its origin in cellular automata invented by the Hungarian physicist John von Neumann. Briefly, a complex system can be represented by using squares on graph paper that can be colored either black or white. Starting with one initial black square, a rule can be written which determines how its neighbors will be colored in each succeeding step forward. The properties of cellular automata are best explored using a computer which can generate thousands of iterations instantaneously. Wolfram found that with repeated iterations, complexity can arise out of simple rules.

From Forbes:

At the center of Wolfram’s research was a quest for a new level of simplicity. To do this, he moved from a two-dimensional grid to the one-dimensional world of the line. Why one dimension? Because, like the Universe itself in the beginning, it is cellular automata in their most elemental form. If Wolfram could find complexity in one- dimensional cellular automata, the simplest construction imaginable, then he could find it anywhere. For years Wolfram worked through the night to determine the unfolding of hundreds of thousands of possible rules, typically going to bed around 5:00 a.m. and getting up in time for lunch. Most of the rules quickly devolved into predictable, endless patterns. He began to fear that he had been lured into one of science’s many dead ends. But then one night in May 1984, an epiphany: Wolfram realized his mistake. He had entered into the project with a predetermined idea of how nature worked, assuming that natural systems begin with randomness and move toward order. But, now, he asked himself, what if you turned the whole idea upside down? What if you began with ordered conditions and looked at which rules spun out greater complexity? Through a long night, Wolfram tore through all his past work, papers flying, looking for examples that would prove his new model. Finally, close to dawn, he found it: Rule 30, a pattern that grew more intricate and unpredictable with each step. It was stuffed with what mathematicians call “emergent effects”: events that cannot be predicted in advance. From the simplest of parts, Wolfram had created infinite complexity. The aha! moment had arrived. “The Rule 30 automaton is the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen in science,” Wolfram told London’s Daily Telegraph. “‘Even though it starts off from just one black cell, applying the same simple rule over and over again makes Rule 30 produce [an] amazingly complex pattern.

And again, from The Economist:

This was Mr. Wolfram’s Eurekamoment: it suggested to him that complex systems in nature—be they weather systems, turbid fluid flow, a zebra’s stripes or the human mind—might all be governed by small and simple sets of rules”. Wolfram’s critical realization was that “many very simple programs produce great complexity” leading to his “Principle of Computational Equivalence: that whenever one sees behavior that is not obviously simple—in essentially any system—it can be thought of as corresponding to a computation of equivalent sophistication.

With repeated iterations, cellular automata can produce pictures of great complexity (such as the one shown here).

Many critical problems are not solvable by conventional mathematics, for example, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation which only applies to two bodies in space, but dissolves into chaos with three bodies when the method of first integrals is applied. Wolfram’s “new” idea is that the Universe functions on the basis of an algorithm and not on the basis of mathematical equations. In fact, he confidently predicts, “Within 50 years, more pieces of technology will be created on the basis of my science than on the basis of traditional science. People will learn about cellular automata before they learn about algebra.”

Implications for Biology: Theseus was able to slaughter the Minotaur because Ariadne gave him a golden thread that allowed him to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Wolfram has provided us with the means to solve many complex problems by retracing steps from complexity to simple algorithms. Since I am a cancer researcher, the sections in the book which deal with the implications of this new science for the highly complex biologic systems are the most fascinating for me, particularly Wolfram’s challenge to natural selection as the defining force in evolution. Darwin was able to collect an enormous amount of physical evidence to convince his contemporaries that all living organisms can be traced back to a single origin of life; that species evolve gradually through an accumulation of small changes; and that evolution occurs because there is genetic variation in every generation, and relatively few individuals survive and pass on their favorable genetic characteristics to the next generation. Even if certain genes confer only a very slight advantage, they gradually become more common over a long period of time. Thus, natural selection of favorable traits leads to both survival of the fittest and causes the species to adapt to natural environments. The neo-Darwinists like Dawkins, Maynard Smith and Dennett believe that natural selection is the only driving force in evolution, which occurs gradually over a long period of time. Gould and Eldridge who consider themselves as pluralists (as opposed to the neo-Darwinists who are reductionists) on the other hand, suggest that evolving species should be viewed as complex systems and that evolution is not a slow, gradual process but occurs in short bursts when new species appear, followed by a long period of stasis (punctuated equilibrium). Finally, they also maintain that organisms can often have traits which have no apparent useful purpose, but appear as a mere by-product of evolutionary changes (“spandrels”). In fact, many very important characteristics of humans such as reading and writing are examples of such “emergent properties” since the brain had become large prior to existence of written language. In this debate, Wolfram’s new science supports neither Darwin nor Gould:

One of the most esteemed documents of modern paleontology is Stephen Jay Gould’s doctoral thesis on shells. According to Gould, the fact that there are thousands of potential shell shapes in the world, but only a half dozen actual shell forms, is evidence of natural selection. Not so, says Wolfram. He’s discovered a mathematical error in Gould’s argument, and that, in fact, there are only six possible shell shapes, and all of them exist in the world. In other words, you don’t need natural selection to pare down evolution to a few robust forms. Rather, organisms evolve outward to fill all the possible forms available to them by the rules of cellular automata. Complexity is destiny—and Darwin becomes a footnote. “I’ve come to believe,” says Wolfram, “that natural selection is not all that important.” The more sciences he probes, the more Wolfram senses a deeper pattern—an underlying force that defines not only the cosmos but living things as well: “Biologists,” he says, “have never been able to really explain how things get made, how they develop, and where complicated forms come from. This is my answer.” He points at the shell, “This mollusk is essentially running a biological software program. That program appears to be very complex. But once you understand it, it’s actually very simple. —Forbes

In order to illustrate how complexity in biology arose from simple programs, I will summarize a few of the salient findings from the book here. (ANKS pp383-428)

• In the past, the idea of optimization for some sophisticated purpose seemed the only conceivable explanation for the level of complexity in biology. Take the example of fish which manifest so many beautiful colors. One Darwinian explanation would be that these colors improved survival through either allowing the creatures to evade being hunted by blending with the environment or shocking the predator with their brilliant, contrasting colors. In other words, every one of these colors and patterns evolved for a purpose. But then why do all the multi-colored fish have the same exact internal structures while having such radically different patterns on the outside? Wolfram’s beguilingly simple explanation is that the most visually striking color differences have almost nothing to do with natural selection, but are reflections of completely random changes in underlying genetic programs. On the other hand, the vital features such as the internal organs have changed only quite slowly and gradually in the course of evolution because those are precisely the ones molded by natural selection.
• “The range of pigmentation patterns on mollusc shells (picture) correspond remarkably closely with the range of patterns that are produced by simple randomly chosen programs based on cellular automata. There are already indications that such programs are quite short. One of the consequences of a program being short is that there is little room for inessential elements and any mutation or change in the program, however small, will tend to have a significant effect on at least the details of patterns it produces. Or biologic systems should be capable of generating essentially arbitrary complexity by using short programs formed by just a few mutations” (ANKS).
• “But if complexity is this easy to get, why is it not even more widespread in biology? The answer is natural selection, which can achieve little when confronted with complex behavior. There are several reasons for this. First, with more complex behavior, there are huge numbers of possible variations. Second, complex behavior inevitably involves many elaborate details, and since different ones of these details may happen to be the deciding factors in the fates of individual organisms, it becomes very difficult for natural selection to act in a consistent and definitive way. Third, whenever the overall behavior of a system is more complex than its underlying program, almost any mutation in the program will lead to a whole collection of detailed changes in the behavior, so that natural selection has no opportunity to pick out changes which are beneficial from those which are not” (ANKS).
• In the picture here, one can see the shell shapes generated by the simple model and those actually found in nature. The computerized array shows systematic variations of just two parameters.

Progress in science occurs when a new order is discovered which can unite seemingly unrelated facts. ANKS has achieved just that by showing that it is possible to get complexity from simple programs in any system. The job of a scientist in the conventional sense is to understand how things work and not why. Wolfram has combined the two by asking not only how evolution occurs, but also the meaning of it all. And the answer is terribly disturbing. No meaning at all. “So why do higher organisms exist at all? My guess is that it has almost nothing to do with optimality, and that instead it is essentially just a consequence of strings of random mutations that happened to add more and more features without introducing fatal flaws” (ANKS p398).

Richard Dawkins observed, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. But for the theists, Wolfram has changed the concept of God from being a mathematician to being a software engineer.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram will be the honored guest speaker at the 4th Harvey Preisler Memorial Lecture to be held at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester on July 28, 2006.

Asad Raza has written an excellent commentary here at 3QD today on the Zidane headbutt incident at the World Cup final, and I just want to add my two cents now. We still don’t know exactly what Marco Materazzi said (and did) to Zidane to make him lose his trademark cool, but out of the cloud of rife speculation two candidates materialize repeatedly: that either Materazzi must have hurled racist slurs at Zidane, or that Materazzi insulted Zidane’s family. Before I examine these two possibilities, let me say something about what I do not believe happened.

It is not possible, in my opinion, that Zidane deliberately chose a moment when the referee was busy elsewhere to headbutt Materazzi, believing that the attack would not be noticed. It is absolutely obvious to me from having repeatedly watched the video that Zidane’s actions were the result of sudden rage, which, as I can well remember from my own hot-tempered youth, always takes a few seconds to swell after the moment of provocation. Zidane could not possibly have looked around to make sure all the officials were busy, and if he were calculating so clearly, he would have known that a stadium full of people (not to mention the billion plus around the world) were watching, and he would have remembered what was at stake. No, that was clearly a moment of uncontrollable anger, the kind when the blood rushes to your head, you feel a kind of heat, your face turns red and throbs, and then you lash out. There is nothing you can do about that kind of mental storm. It is a moment of temporary insanity, not something subject to choice. And it is clear, at least to me, from the video that Zidane tried to trot away as the anger rose, but lost control and turned around…

As for Materazzi insulting Zidane’s mother (and all the possible variations on this theme), it is very unlikely that something like that could or would inflame Zidane. The reasons are twofold: first, these kinds of insults have become so common in everyday discourse that they have lost all their teeth. It is now possible to address a close friend as “Yo, Mofo…” But second, and more important, for an insult to really injure its victim there must be an asymmetry preventing the person from just yelling the insult back. It is then, when the person insulted feels he cannot reply, that he replies physically. And this is exactly what racist insults do. If a white man yells the N-word at a black man, there is no equivalent word that the black man can yell back. By using this word, the white man is essentially taunting the black man by reminding him of the abuse that he, his ancestors, his whole race have have to endure at the white man’s hand, and how he is impotent to stop it. It is like someone taunting you that he raped your mother, and you knowing that it’s true! History denies the black man the opportunity of responding in kind, and the only choice left may seem to be to demonstrate that one is not so impotent after all, that one can hit back. This, that it relies on a history of oppression and injury, and on asymmetrical relations of power, is what is so insidious about racial insult, and why we are so careful to avoid its double-injustice in decent society.

Racism is prevalent in Europe. England has its Paky-bashers and the Germans their hateful skinheads. The Italians are routinely prejudiced against their own darker southern citizens. And Spaniards, to their shame, have recently brought racism explicitly to football. This is from Wikipedia:

Luis Aragonés became Spain’s coach in 2004. During a training session with the national team, a Spanish TV crew caught Aragonés motivating Henry’s Arsenal teammate José Antonio Reyes in a strange way (“Give him the ball, and then show that black little shit that you are better than him.”) The incident caused an uproar in the British media with calls for Aragonés to be sacked. When Spain played England in a friendly match at the Bernabéu later that year, the crowd was hostile. Whenever black English players touched the ball, large segments of the Spanish crowd began to make “monkey chants.” The Spanish football federation — the RFEF — eventually fined the coach €3,000.

When I visited France about ten years ago, the helpful guidebook to Paris I had bought pointed out that “If you look like you might be an Arab, expect some hostility on the streets of Paris.” Naturally, this made me a little nervous, and in a ludicrous attempt at not looking Arab (which I am not, but I am brown and Muslim), I went around everywhere wearing a necktie! I can only try to imagine what a lifetime of dealing with racial insults and very real prejudice must do to a person’s spirit. Given the history of what France did in Algeria, is it so shocking that a person of Algerian descent would be sensitive to racial taunting?

As I write this, some reports are already filtering in that indeed Materazzi racially assaulted Zidane. Frankly, nothing else makes sense. If Materazzi had insulted Zidane’s family, Zidane could have replied in kind; but if he attacked Zidane racially, then Materazzi got what he deserved, and should be punished further. Am I excusing Zidane? If he was racially insulted, yes I am. Zidane could not help himself under the circumstances. I would excuse Zidane for the same reason that a prosecutor will, under certain circumstances, decline to bring charges against a man who comes home to find his wife in bed with her lover and, in a moment of temporary insanity, kills him. In this, there is an acknowledgment that there is not always a right and wrong in everything. Sometimes, a man loses rationality. That is just human nature. Deal with it. (Or hate all men.)

And as Western nations continue to dominate and oppress the third world by economic as well as military means and the cynical manipulation of governments, as they continue to wreak havoc on the environment, as the injustices of extreme inequality in the distributions of wealth continue to grow, it is to be expected that some will be driven to irrational anger, and will break the rules. And hit back. You can’t just show everyone a red card.

Lindsay Beyerstein has a great critical response to my argument here.

Have a good week!  My other Monday Musing columns can be seen here.

Shocking, unthinkable, infamous, ignominious: these are the words instinctively grasped for in trying to make sense of the act that irrupted into the World Cup final last night.  Rarely does an athlete, playing atop so high a mountain of adulation, so utterly confound and defy the hopeful symbolism that has been placed upon him.  It was a heavy blow, certainly, to the preformulated narrative about the exploits of multiracial soccer teams repairing the social fabric of European nations.  If Zidane was always a reluctant poster boy for that story, he has now supplied the reason: temperamental unsuitability to turning the other cheek.  The incident, amplified by taking place in the most watched sports event of the year, nevertheless brutally transcended the game in which it occurred.  It will be publicly understood, digested, for days to come.  It will lose force, be neutralized, but not without having revealed much.

What did Materazzi say?  Could it have been so unfamiliarly offensive that it incited a frenzy?  Or was it merely a petty final straw near the end of a long match, a long career, of being insulted for Zidane?  Insulting a player to incite is common enough that there’s a word for it: sledging, from cricket, where it’s apparently done with the greatest skill by the Australians.  Let’s be blunt: racial insults are the most reliable way to sledge. And Zidane, sadly, gets them not only from Europeans, but in 2001, from Algerians, who stigmatized him as a traitor.  Maybe Zidane correctly surmised that no referees were looking, only to got caught by the replay; maybe he was discouraged by Buffon’s save of his last header, and by his injured arm, and went out with some payback.

Zidane, known for violent outbursts, in a 2004 interview:  “It’s hard to explain but I have a need to play intensely every day, to fight every match hard.  And this desire never to stop fighting is something else I learnt in the place where I grew up. And, for me, the most important thing is that I still know who I am. Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.”

Will that complex and precarious genealogy now be read as a liability?  Does the constant need to “know who I am” make one vulnerable to sledging?  Even the attack itself was curiously controlled, unleashed swiftly but with the choice of target (the chest, the heart, even) demonstrating an intent not to injure.  Certainly French rightists, already on record against the team’s composition, will want to link Zidane’s hyphenated identity with his unrecuperable failure yesterday as France’s captain and leader.  Those defenders of French multiculturalism wishing to argue back will try and explain the matter by a simpler biography: he has a terrible temper.  Already, many defenses of Zidane seek to sweep away the raw, disruptive moment last night.  This event might, then, fade away into the background, stalemated by insinuations and shamefaced silence in the face of them.

That would mark an occlusion of the dark side revealed by this World Cup, with its surface of friendly national stereotypes amounting to not much more than German efficiency, Brazilian rhythm, English bulldoggedness, and so forth.  The sport itself cannot be fully enclosed within the advertisers’ wholesome branding of it: it is deceptively brutal, whatever your opinions on the intentionality of Rooney.  Top players being sent off in important matches is the rule rather than the exception.  Behind national fervor, for many, lies hatred.  And worst of all, of course, is the endemic racism.  From my perspective, it’s shocking that Spanish fans are given to making monkey noises at black players, that certain players, after scoring, give Nazi salutes to the skinheads in the crowd, that a widespread opinion holds France doesn’t “deserve to win” because of all the “Africans” on their team.  I’m not being sanctimonious; this kind of outright racial prejudice is unutterable in U.S. public discourse, however widely it might be held.

Zidane’s act was also an act of contempt for soccer.  It may have clarified his priority for pride and honor over winning.  This is equally unfamiliar in the U.S., where sports are so heavily corporate that there is little tolerance for figures who do not, like Michael Jordan, always place the game above all else.  Clearly, in European soccer, such divisions cannot be maintained: explosive mixtures of nationalism and race invade the soccer pitch in a more direct way.  The celebratory rhetoric of soccer as the global, multicultural sport masks a great deal of ugly nationalist fantaticism, into which the players are necessarily, and unevenly, co-opted. 

With what disconsolate combination of ambivalence and contempt must the man who gave his name to an entire generation of French youth have left the field of play?  Finally, spare a thought for Thierry Henry, Zidane’s most sublime teammate and the player who leads soccer’s anti-racism campaign.  The bravery with which Henry returned from being knocked woozy in the match’s beginning was a sports moment of a kind we are much more familiar with than the astonishing events of the match’s end.  After all, it’s only a game, right?

Abbas has some additional thoughts on Zidane and Racism.

See some other Dispatches.

Unable to make my way home across the city after Italy’s World Cup victory last night, I was delightfully left with no option but to take to the streets of Rome along with everyone else. By midnight everyone else included: cars full of face-painted celebrants; moped drivers and passengers wearing the tricolor flag as a cape; immigrants as proud, joyous, and decorated as native Romans; a young man with his leg in a cast and a broad smile on his face dexterously moving through the crowd on crutches; a bikini-clad babe standing on the back of her man’s moped, waving the flag and her fine figure to the cheers of everyone nearby; babies in car seats, sound asleep despite the constant horn-blowing and clamor of noise-makers of all sorts; and groups of teenagers on the corner, gesticulating and affectionately yelling phrases full of celebratory expletives at anyone who wasn’t contributing to the beautiful chaos.

For the first time in twenty-four years Italy was able to explode in full World Cup celebration. For some it was, in a way, a matter of life and death—driving around Porta San Giovanni I saw several signs done in the style of the obituary announcement posters that appear around towns following someone’s death, this time mourning the French soccer team’s loss: mors tua vita mea. What is a family to do when Italy triumphs? Get everyone into the car—preferably more people than could or should normally fit into it, hence forcing windows, sunroofs, and doors open—and set the kids on the roof while cruising round the neighborhood, of course. Captured out of context, some areas almost looked like war zones, filled as they were by the smoke and flares of sparklers, sweat-covered bodies, and screams. Two days from now the taxi drivers will begin their official strike, following an angry week of unauthorized strikes and protests about deregulation of the trade, but that didn’t stop them from packing their friends and families into the now infamously inaccessible white, SPQR-labeled vehicles for one last joyride. Much like New York, yet in a very different spirit, Rome is a city where I am acutely aware of life’s overwhelming gorgeousness, and of my own deep foreignness. Yet last night any- and everyone who was out on the street was embraced as part of the champions’ extended family.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be read here.

Cockroaches of New York,

I’m sorry.

I’ll understand if you decline to read this letter; that’s why I’ve put what’s important up top.  I’ve said some mean things about you.  I find your little eyes revolting, and your little knot-sized heart makes me panic, and I hate the little click your adult body makes when you fall from the countertop to the floor.  It was horrible of you to move into my microwave last summer, and the time you somehow got into my mother’s bra during a college information session is really unforgivable.  She had to fish you out in a room full of people.  You’ve made me such a paranoid; each time my roommate S. cuts her eyes to the ceiling or a wall I think she’s seen you.  But I’m willing, right now – just now, so I’d take the opportunity if I were you – to extend the beginnings of a truce.

You might have guessed that this letter has something to do with our encounter yesterday (are you smart?  I don’t know.).  You’re correct.  But for this to make sense, you’ve got to get to know me a bit – at least the bit pertinent to this gesture.  It’s important to know that I’m a punctilious traveler, always early, fingering my ticket.  The size or significance of the journey has no impact on my behavior. I suffer pangs of remorse if I’m not on the subway car nearest to my next exit or transfer. On the way home, I root around for my house keys a block before I reach my apartment.  I’m at the airport an hour and a half before departure, always.  I tell you this because I think you might relate (you time your trips across my kitchen wall particularly well).

Being somewhat of a lazy person, this monstrous dedication to punctuality is tremendously helpful.  If I don’t have a schedule, I’m happy to stay in bed until I get too hungry or think a bath sounds nice.  I can see an elevated train and airplanes from my bedroom window; their cycles lend a pleasant rhythm to my inaction.  It’s only the thought of a place to be and a time to be there that prods me out of bed – I look at that train and those planes as if through the face of a clock, and the sweeping hands interrupt their spell.  The tendency has its drawbacks as well: I fight frustration that my boyfriend H. “walks too slow.”  I am overly resentful of latecomers, but I hate being the first to arrive. 

Yesterday morning (you remember), I flew JetBlue from JFK to San Jose.  The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:05 and the weather was clear on both coasts.  I had set the alarm for 4:45, and when it chirped I gave a morning speech to H. about how I would miss him, and then hopped right out of bed and headed for the shower.  There are only a few things short of flood, fire, and family emergency that could derail my travel agenda.  You’re one, and you stood in the curve of the tub.

I really thought I was hallucinating.  You were big that day, as big as my thumb, and so still.  I’d been  waiting for this moment since the heat set in.  I knew you would crawl up some drain, but I didn’t know when.  And you were so unbelievably still.  I must have made some noise, a strangled scream, because H. said my name.  I didn’t see him as I sprinted back to the bed.  My face felt funny; I gave myself a headache from screwing it up so tight.  H. gallantly made his way into the bathroom with a paper towel, and returned to tell me you’d gone down the drain.  Did you look up at me while I took the shower?  Do you have a sense of humor?  I was in limbo position, feet as far from the drain as possible.  I thought you might have gotten behind my shampoo, or in the soap dish, or on the ceiling.  It was the dirtiest I’ve felt while clean. 

I left fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes late.  Any other day, I’d have been running a countdown to takeoff in my mind.  Yet: I didn’t even look at the clock.  I didn’t ask my cab driver if he had heard me properly (JFK, not LaGuardia).  I didn’t count the cash I’d just gotten from the ATM.

I got to the airport a bit after 6.  I didn’t take out the money for the cab fare until we were stopped in front of the JetBlue terminal.  I took my time at the check-in kiosk, though I had arrived well into my usual grace period.  And I stood in line to check my duffel bag, one that would probably have fit in the overhead compartment.  Hungry and on a roll, I got in another line to buy breakfast.  My flight, 169, began boarding while I was in line.  I knew this because of the giant screen above cashier, which flashed, “FLIGHT 169 – BOARDING.” But panic-free, I stayed in line. I bought my berries and cheese, and walked up to the gate and right onto the plane.  I sat in my seat, buckled my belt, and we took off 15 minutes later. 

You spent me.  I had nothing left.  An immutable struggle, me and clock, dissipated unremarkably in your wake.  Do I have a certain increment of anxiety to expend each day?  Did you sap it in less than a second?  Or could my day just not get worse?  Maybe I was in shock, just numb to the clock and the plane.  Perhaps you just did quickly what you do regularly – distract me.  In any case, look – I got on the plane on time.  I did it without being a human stopwatch.  And I want to say thank you. 

This is going to be a long road for us.  I’ve never had a positive thought, even a neutral one, about you before.  And please don’t misinterpret this letter: you are fundamentally unwelcome in my home.  But, cockroaches of New York, I’m ready to think about our relationship.

Sincerely,

Jane (Apt 2R)

[Pictured above: Beetle bracelet purchased to ward off cockroaches.]

While most of the world has been fixated on the ongoing FIFA World Cup tournament, a Hollywood film crew has been gallivanting around the globe shooting the next  installment of the hugely successful James Bond movie franchise: Casino Royale, a remake of the 1967 classic spy spoof, based on Ian Fleming’s very first Bond move. The film marks the debut of British actor Daniel Craig as the tres suave 007.

The original, of course, is considered one of the very first satirical send-ups of espionage thrillers, well before the debut 30 years later of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And it’s every bit as deliciously silly. The incomparable David Niven plays an aging Sir James Bond, who returns from retirement to rejoin Her Majesty’s Secret Service, specifically to head an operation bent on destroying an evil criminal organization called SMERSH.

Naturally, this involves fending off a bevy of nubile beauties desperate for a chip off the old (literally!) Bond block; a double-crossing fellow agent named Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress); a Bond impersonator, portrayed by the always-hilarious Peter Sellers; and a crooked casino owner named Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), who supports SMERSH financially with his winnings at the baccarat tables. All Bond has to do is beat Le Chiffre at baccarat, apparently, to topple a global criminal enterprise bent on bringing about the imminent collapse of civilization. (It is a spoof, people. Work with me, here.) If that weren’t enough to deal with, Bond must also grapple with family troubles, in the form of his neurotic nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen) and an illegitimate daughter, the product of a brief liaison with the late Mata Hari.

In the Bond Universe of 1967, the fictional fate of the civilized world rested on baccarat. No doubt it’s still 007’s favored game, being the cosmopolitan super-sleuth that he is. But these days, the rarefied game of baccarat has been eclipsed by the huge mainstream popularity of that gambling workhorse, poker, especially the Texas Hold ‘Em variety. Some people attribute this in part to the introduction of online poker and the invention of a camera that can show a player’s “hold cards” to a TV audience, thereby turning tournaments into spectator sports. Not only can we tune in for live coverage of World Series Poker and the World Poker Tour, but now we can combine our love of poker with our celebrity gawking fixation by watching Celebrity Poker Showdown.

I hope nobody thinks the less of me when I confess that I’m a diehard fan of the latter series. It’s not just because of the celebrities, although the comedians who participate in particular provide endless entertainment. Nor is it for the pleasure of rattling off the cool-sounding jargon: you can “up the ante,” “see the flop,” “raise the blinds,” and if you’re really unfortunate, you might get “sucked out on the river.” (That’s what happens when you have the best hand until the very last card is dealt, losing the pot in one fell swoop.) Ultimately, the appeal is the game itself. Watching the hands and rounds of betting unfold is oddly addictive, plus there’s the play-by-play commentary by an in-house poker expert (although I mourn the departure of original commentator, Phil Gordon, who has been replaced by the far doughier — albeit knowledgable — “Captain Sideburns,” a.k.a., Phil Hellmuth).

Devoted fans of baccarat might sniff dismissively at my fondness for this rather crass, bourgeois upstart, but poker is has an equally long history, although not entirely illustrious. There’s some debate as to its specific origins, but it most likely evolved out of early games that all relied on betting against ranked card or domino combinations — not to mention the practice of “bluffing” to bamboozle one’s opponents. For instance, around 969 A.D., the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung reportedly played “domino cards” with his wife on New Year’s eve. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Egyptians used playing cards, as did the Persians in the 16th century. In fact, there’s a Persian game called  As Nas — played with 25 cards in five different suits — that could be considered one of poker’s forebears. Poker derives its name from 17th and 18th century French and German games, called poque and pochen, respectively. Those in turn evolved from a 16th century Spanish game called primero, widely believed to be the game most directly related to modern poker.

That should convince the most hardened skeptics that poker is every bit as international in scope as the ongoing FIFA World Cup. Alas, much of its history in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the New World isn’t quite so civilized. We can blame the spread on the French: poker mania began in Canada with the immigration of French colonials, who brought their national card game, poque, to the New World with them. Those French settlers then drifted south to found New Orleans in the early 18th century. From there the game spread West via Mississippi riverboats, growing ever more popular, until it reached the Western frontier, finding a home in the proliferation of saloons that popped up in response to the California Gold Rush.

The riverboats functioned as lowbrow casinos, and back then, poker was largely the province of cheats and outlaws. A Time-Life book on the history of poker, called The Gamblers, relates the story of a night in 1832, when three professional card sharks aboard a Mississippi steamboat attempted to cheat a young man from Natchez out of his money via a rigged poker game. They succeeded, and the financially ruined young man was on the verge of hurling himself into the river in despair, when a mysterious observer came to his aid. That observer, one James Bowie, took on the three gamblers himself, catching one of them in the very act of cheating. He redeemed the lost money at knife-point on the young man’s behalf — although it must be said, he kept $20,000 of the $70,000 pot for himself as a reward. So he wasn’t entirely altruistic.

There were some “gentlemen gamblers,”  like Bowie, who viewed the game merely as a form of entertainment, to be practiced in moderation, and who abhorred the practice of cheating. But this period also saw the emergence of professional gamblers whose sole aim was to fleece unsuspecting players out of their hard-earned cash. In fact, it was the professionals who are responsible for the evolution of the game’s rules, to enhance their profitability, most notably via the addition of “draw cards” and a second round of betting. In the original version of the game, players received five cards face down, with no chance to improve their hands with draw cards. (Random bit of trivia: the Joker was introduced to the deck as a wild card in 1875.)

Modern tournaments didn’t really start to flourish until the 1970s, when the World Series of Poker debuted, prompting the publication of several books about poker strategies to fuel the growing public interest. And now people are flocking to casinos all over the country, hosting games of Texas Hold ‘Em in their homes, and frittering away untold hours playing in online tournaments. Local bars have even started hosting weekly “poker nights.”

Nonetheless, I managed to resist poker’s irresistible lure for quite some time, despite my fascination with Celebrity Poker Showdown. Still, I suppose it was inevitable that I would purchase that first computer game on CD and begin my descent down the slippery slope to moral depravity. Even now, I primarily play against the computer, and eschew the online tournaments. But then I went to Las Vegas in June for the first-ever YearlyKos conference, and, well, my downfall was complete when I summoned the courage to venture into the MGM Grand casino and join a low-stakes 2/4 table.

It was admittedly a bit intimidating at first, forking over $100 in exchange for a rack of chips and sitting down to a table filled with utter strangers intent on taking my chips away from me. Even though I was familiar with the rules of play and a bit of strategy — thanks to My Main Man, Phil Gordon — it took me a few hands to catch the rhythm of the game. I bided my time, playing tight, folding most of my hands before the flop, finally catching a pair of 8s (dubbed “snowmen”). And with trembling hands, I called the blinds. There’s something to be said for beginner’s luck: I picked up an extra 8 on the flop, and played my “trips” out to victory. Then I relaxed and lost myself in the game for the next few hours. In all honesty, I was prepared to lose that first $100, and I did get sucked out on the river a few times. Those are the breaks. But I made up the losses with a few well-timed wins, and ultimately walked away $90 richer, feeling quite chuffed at my modest fledgling success.

Skeptics would say that’s how they suck you in, much like drug dealers provide the first “hit” for free. Undoubtedly some people have been ruined by an addiction to gambling. But for me, the true allure of poker is not the gambling: the stakes are just a sidelight. Poker, at its heart, is an intricate, complex game, steeped in statistical probabilities, which might explain why it holds so much fascination for the mathematically inclined.

I am not so inclined. In fact, I don’t even pretend to understand the underlying statistics, although I’m slowly developing a deeper appreciation for that aspect of the game. For me, the play is made that much more interesting by the unpredictability of the “human factor”: people tend to follow their hunches, even when the conventional strategy tells them to do otherwise. So every hand unfolds just a bit differently, every round.

Poker experts often bemoan those sorts of people, because such players throw off all their carefully calculated odds with their infernally illogical unpredictability. The best players don’t always win,even on Celebrity Poker Showdown. But even the poker experts might admit, when pressed, that it makes a weird kind of sense. You can’t adhere strictly to the rules all the time, after all; every now and then, you have to take a gamble, although I prefer to think of it as a calculated risk. Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Poker is a lot like life, that way. Perhaps even James Bond would agree.

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

Do women deserve the same prize money at Wimbledon as men?  I’ll get back to that – first, a meandering introduction.  Feminism, since at least Mary Wollestonecraft, has always maintained a productive tension between agitating for gender equality and elaborating gender difference.  The very fact that equal rights for women as subjects and citizens is the legacy of feminist thought opens the ground for a philosophical argument about gender difference itself: what is its “nature,” what are its features, and how do these features affect a political program?  These issues, largely irresolvable products of the collision of activism and philosophy, play out as conflicts within feminist thinking between schools, generations, nations, etc.  In the academy, for instance, a theoretical split was seen to develop between French feminists such as Cixous and Irigaray, who argued for the intrinsic difference of women and their language, and those who argued, with Butler, that gender difference is always inessential and ideologically produced.

In more mainstream U.S. terms, in what I think of as “magazine feminism,” a similar argument has been understood as one between two generations, the “Second Wave” of the 1960’s and 70’s and the “Third Wave” of the 80’s and 90’s.  (Incidentally, the “First Wave” mostly concerns the suffrage movement: 1919, remember?)  Here’s the generational conflict in a nutshell: venerable figures such as Gloria Steinem were seen to derogate femininity in order to make the case for women’s equal abilities – their idea being that traditionally feminine traits were imposed upon women as a form of domination.  It’s all a bit unfair to the Second Wavers, since of course the Third Wave rehabilitation of femininity was made possible by the argument over capabilities having been won already.  All the same, by a dialectical movement, we find ourselves in a moment where femininity, having been cast aside in the fight for Title IX and other equal rights, and then diagnosed by high theory as nothing but a social construct anyway, is now being championed again.  (I know, I know, I’m oversimplifying and begging many questions in this little peanut of a summary.)

Let me try and illustrate these shifts using fashion.  Think about it: during the Eighties, while the Second Wave was still dominant in the mass, we had Amazons, tall, striking, intimidating women like Elle MacPherson or Grace Jones.  Just physically they were much larger than the models of other eras, and with the angular shoulder pads of their double-breasted jackets their sillouettes emphasized a masculine strength.  In the movies, overly jocky men were often rejected, while when little geeks like Corey Haim in Weird Science tried to invent the perfect woman, what happened?  Kelly LeBrock showed up and scared the crap out of him: this is the model system for a female identity concerned with appropriating equal power.

By the nineties, with Judith Butler on every sophomore’s dorm desktop, gender was fictive and boys and girls differed only in their ideological software.  What did fashion give us?  Androgyny, duh.  CK One was a unisex scent.  Read that again; is that even imaginable, let alone saleable, today?  Grunge-era Kate Moss and Jenny Shimizu dressed in white tees, combat boots and jeans, while guys dressed in…  the same.  Non-tomboy femininity, where it existed, had to do with ironic appropriations of extreme girlhood: Hello Kitty, little backpacks, Japanese animé.  The one place where extreme femininity was accepted was on men, in drag culture, which by its nature points up the mutability of gender.  The idea of young actresses glamming it up in makeup, heels and dresses every night, a la Jessica Simpson, would have seemed totally anachronistic, premodern. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly where mainstream taste did go, back towards female sexuality considered as power/agency rather than a concession to the male gaze.  First, fashion just dipped a toe in, with the mid-Nineties fetish for artisanal Italian shoes, pace Manolo Blahnik, and then gradually the entire female body was resexualized, through an alliance of endless red carpet shows, lad magazines, and “sex-positive” feminists.  Katha Pollit recently recalled Steinem comparing women who liked pornography to Jews who liked Mein Kampf; nowadays that view is less likely than a young feminist having made some of her own.  Being comfortable as the object of a sexual gaze, anathema to an earlier generation, have become the potential sign of an embrace of femininity, especially for younger women.

And here we stand.  It’s hard at the moment to tell feminism from its backlash, or maybe I should say that which is which depends on who you ask.  Anyway, recently the issue I started with came up in the popular press that brings a lot of this stuff into relief.  In case you forgot: do you think women deserve as much prize money as men at Wimbledon?  No, seriously, it’s a real question and I want your opinion on it.  Cause to be honest, it seemed like a no-brainer to me for a long time: of course they do!!!  But discussing it, several female tennis-fan friends made the case to me that they don’t, and the whole thing started to seem like an object lesson in the philosophical transformations of feminism.  But let me give you the facts first.

Wimbledon, conserver of tennis tradition and requirer of tennis whites, is the last of the four major tennis tournaments (the Grand Slams) to award different amounts to the male and female winners.  This year Roger Federer (whoops, I mean whoever the winner is) will get 655,000 pounds, while the female winner will get 625,000, for a paltry difference of 30,000 pounds, or less than five percent.  The U.S. Open has paid equally for decades (hey! something to be proud of this July 4th, damn it!), Roland Garros (the French Open) began just this year.  But the All-England Lawn Tennis Club hangs on to their petty disparity, infuriating lots of female players and much of British society, and contributing generally to worldwide distrust of old red-faced white men having clubs.  American Venus Williams is the leader of the player’s movement for equal pay, Tony Blair and John McEnroe have come out in support of it, and the Times of London (hardly a bastion of leftism) had this to say: “And by its mean-spirited defence of an anachronism well beyond its sell-by date, the All England Club has forfeited any vestige of quaintness.”  So what’s the problem?

Well, pointed out my interlocutors, for starters, women only play best of three set matches, not best of five as the men do: this means the men are already being paid less per game played (a set is up to six games) than the women.  Secondly, the women’s field is clearly less competitive than the men’s leading to a great number of easy matches in the early rounds.  (And, ugly irrelevant truth though it is, the respective levels of play are not close.)  Now, you might say (and I did say) that tennis is a sport, and sports are entertainment, and we don’t pay entertainers based on how long the album or movie or play is (if so, Andy Warhol might be the richest filmmaker of all time).  You might say that the competitiveness of the respective tours is irrelevant; they are evolving differently, and the principle of equality doesn’t change based on that evolution.  You might say, as Venus Williams did: “It has nothing to do with our campaign for equality. The time spent on court or the sets played is a moot topic. We are not arguing about that. It’s about being treated equal as human beings.”

You might also realize that this is a cosmetic issue that’s easy for politicians to look good decrying (new maxim: the cosmetic is the political?).  Women are underpaid relative to men in all the smaller tournaments, earning about 66% of their counterparts (even though both sexes play best-of-three sets in those), just as they earn less in every other industry (except modeling!).  They even get less as a per diem at many tournaments, which is despicable.  Yet the symbolism of Grand Slam prize money overrides all this: tennis is the most visible womens sport in the world.  And the U.S. Open’s equality on this has rightly and for a long while been a great source of pride: here in the nation of Billie Jean King, Second Waver extraordinaire, we do symbolic equal rights right. 

Yet here’s another difference between Billie Jean and her modern descendants: the sexual marketing of female tennis players (males too, for that matter) has accelerated considerably.  And just as in the world of fashion, modern women tennis players quite consciously trade on their appearance for major endorsements.  The tennis/fashion crossover means that Stella McCartney makes outfits for Maria Kirilenko, and Serena Williams designs clothes with Kimora Lee Simmons.  Of course, the queens of the scene still tend to be not so much beautiful as possessing all the signifiers of commercial beauty: blond hair and long limbs.  (Meanwhile, the truly gorgeous female tennis players, such as Ana Ivanovic, are ignored by the marketers in favor of the Sharapovas and Kournikovas.)  Does this sexualization constitute new-style feminism, or a backlash?  And how does this affect the drive for equality of paychecks?

The several people (all women) who argued with me that women don’t deserve equal money argued that to take the same pay for (shorter, easier) labor is unfair to men, and an unnecessary politics of gesture.  Perhaps this is the sign of truly consolidated strength, a confidence in one’s power and security that means one doesn’t have to accept merely symbolic gifts.  Okay, but the equal-pay movement going on right now is possible because the women’s game is nearly as popular (and occasionally more, in the ratings) as the men’s game now.  And in part, this is because of the women knowingly playing up to tennis’ image as an sanctioned arena in which to watch beautiful female athletes.  If sports are profit-seeking entertainment, and sex helps sell tickets and commercials (“Make every shot… a PowerShot”), then shouldn’t women demand an equal share of the pie, even if it’s for unequal on-court labor?  Or does that demean the principle of equality that women have fought for, as my opponents argued?  Which is capitulation, and which steadfast determination?  It’s a conundrum.  My gut is still heavily with equality, but what do you think?

Here’s the rest of dispatches.

At first, I thought it was an item from that old underground favorite, Tales of the Weird. But no, it was from the Boston Globe, under an April 18 byline by Globe staffer Carolyn Johnson:

Three hundred “pet waste removal” companies are reported to be operating nationwide. They have formed their own trade association, have annual meetings, and an annual “Golden Shovel” award. Poop-scooping has even been franchised by an outfit named “Doody Calls.”

A Boston-based poop-scooper cleans a backyard once a week for $10-15. Business, as he puts it, picks up in the springtime as people put their dogs out in the yard, and “the aroma starts hitting the open window.” Apparently friendly client-provider relationships are formed: 90% of this scooper’s clients come out and talk with him while he scoops their dogs’ poop.

You can chalk it all up, this pooper-scooper story, to another instance of how markets work to satisfy the needs of both buyers and sellers. Yes, it is about dog shit. But poop-scoopers wouldn’t offer the service if they didn’t want to, would they? And, after all, think of how many people make their living, and a good one, off of shit, from the plumber to the sewer worker to the sanitation works supervisor. You might reply that they worry about human, not dog shit. But let’s not forget where all of that Tidy Cat stuff goes…. As someone’s father always says, it is a free country. If people want to scoop up dog shit for a living, well, Godspeed. Or as the Godfather says, as long as their interests don’t conflict with mine, good luck.

Let me switch the context a bit. You are an untouchable in rural India, and your job is to clean the shit out of upper caste people’s outhouses. Lacking baggies, you use your hands. The horror, the outrage your plight ignites in western readers. How can Indian society tolerate your humiliation, your degradation?

Of course, it could be the species shift. Perhaps dog shit is cleaner than human shit. Of course, I forgot salvation by baggie. When picking up my dog’s shit, I myself prefer the blue New York Times wrappers to the Globe transparent plastic wrappers: it places a micro-thin membrane between me and the shit.

However, I don’t know whether the average Westerner would feel that much better if somehow Shiva would shower baggies on the rural untouchables, or even New York Times wrappers for that matter. The degradation is done, not by contract, but by caste.

The contract, that great leveler of social difference, stands between buyer and seller of doody scooper-power in the USA. It saves the seller from degradation and the stigma of being a poop-scooper and the buyer from the responsibility of having degraded the scooper. As long as the doody-scooper scoops up some cash, most moral doubts are resolved. A cancer cure it’s not but not everyone can have interesting, life-affirming work. And if everyone is happy, far be it from me…..

Their mutual consent to a contract prevents us from asking: why is there a market for poop-scooping anyway? Here I would argue that Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor applies: the cheaper labor becomes, the more degrading it becomes. Look, poop-scooping is never going to become my favorite job or yours. When I get the short straw at home, my partner puts the Globe bags in my hand (no blue Times bags are left, the cost of having cancelled our subscription on account of the Iraq War), and hustles me out the door with the injunction: “Let’s be careful out there. It’s a minefield.” Of course, I wish he had drawn the short straw. Does any young child wake up in the morning with the fantasy that she is going to grow up to be a poop-scooper?

Of course not. Two conditions transform my weekend nightmare – and perhaps yours – into a world where mine or your dog’s shit can be picked up for a fee. First, to avoid picking up your own dog shit, you need to have some money. If I had some money, poop-scooping services would not be high on my list, but if a person has a lot of money, my preference-ordering, and my scruples for that matter, become irrelevant. Let us suppose for a minute that everyone would hire a poop-scooper, if they could. The second condition then becomes the key. The cheaper poop-scooping is, the more likely a person would be to hire a scooper.

But what determines the cost of poop-scooping? The supply of poop? The number of scoops(ers)? Only in part. The fact that America has more rich and well off persons as a proportion of its population now than even in the Gilded Age over a century ago counts for something. There are a certain number of people, not just the Buffetts and the Gateses mind you, that have the cash. Examine your own bank accounts, and at least to thine own self be true.

The general cost of labor also weighs in. Poop-scooping labor is cheap. If you can get your yard done for $10 a week (my dog does it 2-3 times a day, so let’s call it 15 poops at 67 cents a scoop), eyeball it. That’s cheap. Economists would say it’s cheap too because people are able to replace the $10 they spend on a poop-scooper in less time that it takes the poop-scooper to scoop up the dog shit. If poop-scoopers charged as much per hour as their clients made per hour, you can bet there would be more people out in their back yards with those Times or worse Globe bags scooping up dog shit.

Don’t believe me. A recent analysis of the Swedish economy by the McKinsey Global Institute, meant to be the business guide to economic policy in social democratic Sweden, laments that high wages protected by government unemployment and welfare policies means that fewer people avail themselves of personal services and fewer frequent restaurants than any other rich society. Why? Because the services and restaurants cost so much, labor being, ahem, much more expensive than in other societies that people end up doing things for themselves. A Stockholm lawyer must reflect on whether she wants to spend $400 dollars on a meal for two at a restaurant, roughly twice her after-tax hourly wage, or stay home and cook it herself. Or per chance, pick up her dog’s shit herself. When labor is more expensive, people degrade workers less. Or it must cost them significantly to do it.

As Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor would predict, as the cost of labor in America slips, more workers do degrading labor.

With July Fourth, summer vacations really begin. If you travel abroad and find yourself in a poor country, notice how so many people do so many things, often embarrassing and degrading things, for a pittance. Or travel in America for that matter, and ask why that hotel room is a bargain, and the maid is so friendly. In both cases, you have entered lands where labor is cheap, Blim’s law applies, and cleaning someone else’s shit, and the degradation it implies, is cheap too.

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.

If Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoirs are to be believed, Stalin was listening to Mozart before he died. And Mahler had a secret passion for The Merry Widow. And Hitler liked The Merry Widow too. And Mahler was a great Wagner conductor. How easy it is to get all worked up about the chance encounters historical figures can make. Are we to enlist Mozart as the avenging angel of Stalinism. Was Mahler a proto-Hitlerite: you know he liked The Merry Widow too and was prone to dictatorial mannerisms just like . . .  The absurdity of thinking in this way is clear. In the case of Wagner, such false historicism seems to be the only way that some people manage to cope with complexity. An important artist is always going to be misunderstood at first. With Wagner the misunderstandings show no sign of diminishing. If only Wagner hadn’t written Judaism In Music or any other of those interminable essays he cooked up in between bouts of supreme creativity. That is just the point. Artistic grandeur survives the unedifying spectacle of an advancing anti-Semitism. Even as Wagner died he was trying to give theoretical shape to the enormity of existence so convincingly conveyed in his music. The theory fails, the art succeeds. Art does not seek to explain. It expresses our mystery, our tenderness and joy, our beauty, and our destructive capacity too. When we listen intently to Wagner’s music we undergo an aesthetic experience which transcends our usual gravitational urge to banality. That some find the experience tedious or incomprehensible is no criticism of Wagner. The art waits for us; if we are not worthy of it there is always some cultural product that will be.

To call Wagner a Romantic does not get us very far. The so-called Romantic poets—Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth—are often lumped together despite the fact that each has an independent sensibility. The mania for classifying performs no useful function for the artist concerned. After all, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin get called Romantic composers too, but does that label really help us to come to terms with each of their unique oeuvres. The appeal of Wagner to modernists as diverse as Baudelaire, Eliot and Joyce should warn us of the dangers inherent in this unsatisfactory label. Wagner belongs to the world of Freud and Ibsen as much as to that of Heine and Caspar David Friedrich.

There are some who regard all this concern with Wagner as so much antediluvianism. They look to Pound, Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Pollock or whoever as the way forward. The concept of cultural heritage does not figure prominently in their attitude. They favour the approach of the tabula rasa, like Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh, murdering all the professionals and starting up from primitive scratch. A wholly new approach can sometimes yield worthwhile cultural results—Rimbaud, for example—but most artists know that the inheritance of the past must sit on their shoulders and bear down on them with its splendours. Wagner knew that. The regular readings from the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Goethe tell us as much as the concern with Beethoven and Weber. Wagner was honest enough to admit that his great bête noire, Mendelssohn, would have been horrified to see how he composed. In other words, Wagner was an artist who cared about musical technique and the degree to which he could use that technique to convey the cultural heritage of the past to the future. If a critic today looks on the basilisk face of Wagner and sees only overweening arrogance, how little do they find of the real Wagner, the Wagner whose insecurities and bad dreams still reach out to us today. We have our bad dreams too. Only now our bad dreams are realities. If we could listen to Wagner with open ears we would hear the voice of an art that, to use Grillparzer’s phrase, transfigures what it consumes. If darkness is visible in this art, so much more truthful is it in portraying the human element in its entirety. The ideal can only be approached after an exhaustive struggle with reality—Parsifal’s lonely years of wandering finally allow him to understand the significance of the Grail. Name calling of the Jews and the French might have been a popular pastime at Tribschen and Wahnfried, and Alberich, Mime, Beckmesser and Klingsor may have begun life as Jewish caricatures—Wagner knew perfectly well that art had to get beyond chauvinism and prejudice if it was to take its place in the great chain of cultural being.

Whereas the Greek work of art expressed the spirit of a splendid nation, the work of art of the future is intended to express the spirit of free people irrespective of all national boundaries; the national element in it must be no more than an ornament, an added individual charm, and not a confining boundary.                                                                                                                                              Art and Revolution

Wagner was an arch-hypocrite on the subject of the Jews, displayed nowhere more clearly than in his investment of a 40 000 thaler gift from Ludwig in 1865 with the Jewish banking firm of Hohenmeser in Frankfurt. However, if we are going to look for moral perfection in an artist we have absolutely no hope of finding within ourselves, then we are participating in the very hypocrisy we criticise the artist for. Science tells us that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years before the most enigmatic arrival of all—that of Homo sapiens. Artists of Wagner’s significance do not come along very often. To reduce an art as grand and poetic as Wagner’s to the level of a series of moral failings simply wont do. We all of us have moral failings, but we are not very likely to leave a Ring cycle behind as our calling card to posterity.

What a cast of characters can be called in to witness the Wagnerian biography as it makes it stormy progress from one unsettled residence to yet another, dogs in faithful attendance. It is just as well there are biographical remains for us to look at, otherwise we would be hard put to understand just how the art and the life all got fitted into the space between 1813 and 1883. Aspects of that life still fire the imagination with their drama and passion, perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in that great moment when Ludwig summoned Wagner for the first time. How one would have liked to be a fly on the mental wallpaper of that first encounter. Naturally, this friendship has been trivialised and parodied beyond the point of no return. A sober and detached view would reveal one of the most significant cultural and political relationships in the history of artistic endeavour. To sit in the theatre in Bayreuth and see a performance there is to participate in a poetic ideal, an ideal that still comes to the world across minefields of ideology and propaganda. Wagner once commented that every part of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was stained with his and Cosima’s blood. That is probably true but it is terribly unfair to Ludwig. It is all very well to say that Ludwig was unsuited to the task of kingship or that Wagner manipulated the rhetorical tone of his letters to the king so as to ensure a codependent relationship. Let us remember Ludwig’s steadfastness; without it there would be no Bayreuth ideal, an ideal that goes beyond Wagner and Wagnerism, the fairy-tale castles or the drowning in Lake Stamberg. And let us remember too that Ludwig, who must surely be the most perfect Wagnerite of all time, completely rejected Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Adomo once claimed that attending the Bayreuth Festival was akin to actively participating in one’s own oppression. Ludwig gives the lie to this idea right from the start, because not only did Ludwig occasionally tire of the whole Wagnerian circus, staging works in Munich when he lost patience with the composer’s grandstanding; he actually refused to attend a premiere in the Festspielhaus itself. How annoying for the composer that the king, his great benefactor, should turn out to be so independently-minded. In fact, Wagner’s attempt to get the world to think as he did has failed. We are Ludwig’s heirs as well as Wagner’s in that regard. We can honour the greatness of Wagner the artist, but we do not leave our conscience or our critical faculties at the door of the Wagner treasure trove.

Part 3 of Orpheus Ascending can be read here.

The end of the Ring with the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti and Birgit Nilsson singing in the Culshaw Decca recording can be heard here. 8′ 30”

I’m currently living temporarily in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a state of affairs that has led me to think quite a bit about locality.  My dreams, of course, before coming here were to finally make contact with authentic American folkways, and hopefully foodways, to find local diners and farm markets and maybe even meet a grizzled trapper, a la Withnail and I, who would supply me with rabbits or venison or brook trout.  Ah, Asad, you idiotic city slicker.  The most popular grocery in town is at Wal-Mart, and the diner is Denny’s.  (Though the Georgian fast-food chain, Chick-Fil-A, and their superbly simple chicken sandwich (toasted buttered bun, fried chicken cutlet, pickles), leaves me overjoyed.  When I get back, I think I’m going to open a Chick-Fil-A on, like, Metropolitan and Lorimer and rake it in.)  If anything, the national food distribution system is more entrenched and dominant here in sleepy P-burg, with its forty thousand people, than in New York, where I can choose which season’s milk I want my Parmigiano-Reggiano from DiPalo’s to have been made from, thank you very much.  (I like winter, and I am insufferable.)  But the experience of extreme difficulty finding any locally, sustainably produced food here in WV has gotten me thinking.

A couple of years back, my aunt was kind enough to invite me to a house she rented in Cape Cod during the summer.  Naturally, given my fish obsession, I visited the well-stocked local fish store, excited about the prospect of partaking of the local catch.  Yet upon questioning the honest staff about the provenance of their selection, I learned that while some fish was locally caught, much of the fish was shipped in by truck – swordfish from the Carolinas, bluefin tuna via Boston or even New York’s now-defunct Fulton Fish Market, etc.  I’d had a similar experience in the charming little English seaside town of Aldeburgh, where there was a great selection of fish trucked in from Billingsgate, London’s wholesale market, resting prettily on ice, or being fried and wrapped in newspaper at the delicious fish-and-chip shop on the high street.  (Random aside: I groggily concussed myself one morning there because of the medievally low doorframes.)  Somehow, this seemed wrong, even though in London I would happily buy little vongole shipped from the Adriatic, cause that seems like a metropolitan prerogative.  I was buying into the pastoral myth of the countryside as the authentic source of food.

So, the fish shops of Wellfleet and Aldeburgh are far better than the fish shops in, say equally picturesque mountain villages, yet the fish they stocked was, for the most part, equally accessible to retailers anywhere.  Why the paradox?  Expectation creates demand, and people expect fish near the sea, and like to assume it came right out of that sea, and usually don’t ask if it did.  So fishmongers do business by the sea, often selling farmed fish like cod and salmon that it’s really hard to catch in the sea nowadays, while local fishermen cannot get distribution locally.  Of course, there is wild seafood to be had in Wellfleet and Aldeburgh, it’s just harder to come by in this confusingly globalized day and age.  In the case of Cape Cod, strolling down to the beach revealed thousands of native Wellfleet oysters lying around; I’m happy to report that we gathered and ate at least two hundred, and that my little nephew Sam really liked the tiny crab hitchhiking in our bucket.  The point, however, is that locality is very difficult to ascertain in our current food system, dominated as it is by supermarkets with global supply systems.  Even regional food preferences, where they exist, are largely now maintained for show rather than for the traditional reason that a particular food is in prolific supply in a region, with a few exceptions, such as Maine lobster, Maryland crab and Pacific salmon.

There’s a reason those three items are all, well, seafood.  Fish and seafood are the last wild creatures we eat much of.  But even farmed food’s origins are increasingly unclear these days, as I was finding here in Parkersburg, where my fantasies of connection with the land were being completely thwarted.  By coincidence, the new Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, had just come out.  Really three books in one, it recounts three meals in Pollan’s trademark analytical goody two-shoes style, one following a confined steer to McDonald’s, one from an organic farm, and one foraged and hunted by Pollan.  The McDonald’s meal comes at the end of a long, and utterly fascinating, description of the dominance of subsidized corn production in the U.S. economy, and how the overabundance of cheap corn threatens to ruin our environment and our very selves.  Pollan makes the astute point that industrial monocultures such as the corn, chicken, and beef industries transform the nation’s landscape into a dystopia.  Rather than the aesthetically pleasing little system of a Georgic ode, we have instead literally disgusting operations the sight and smell of which must be kept in quarantine out of sight.  The synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that industrial agriculture requires pollute water tables and turn frogs hermaphroditic.  The addiction to feeding cheap corn to cows, a ruminant that evolved to eat grass, means that harmful bacteria such as E.Coli multiply in their stomachs.  And finally, the transformation of the rest of that pile of surplus corn into byproducts such as oils, starches, syrups and stabilizers means that most of our cheapest food is just corn byproducts (it occurs to me, with horror: et tu, Chick-Fil-A?).  If I was to propose the simplest possible anti-industrial agriculture diet, I’d say: just don’t eat or drink anything with high-fructose corn syrup or vegetable (i.e. corn and soybean) oil.

To my pleasant surprise, however, Pollan’s second meal is a sunny account of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in the nearby Shenadoah Valley.  Salatin is a hero of the “managed pasture” movement, which entails rotating animals on pasture and allowing the grass to recover, rather than separately inputting synthetic fertilizers, corn, and antibiotics.  He pioneered moving chickens in mobile coops after his cows, allowing them to pick grubs and worms out of the cow’s manure, in the process fertilizing the fields, keeping the steer disease-free, and filling their own stomachs.  He has created similarly symbiotic relationships between the pigs, rabbits, and sheep on his farms, all of which rotate around the property while never being allowed to exhaust the pasture.  Salatin’s beef eat only grass, which according to Pollan makes for a much healthier and beefier beef, which is confirmed by my experience of Argentinian grass-fed beef (which, sadly and absurdly, is as illegal here as Pakistani mangoes and unpasteurized French cheese).  And I know for a fact that free-ranging chickens eating a varied diet as Salatin’s do make for much better eating than do your average Purdue broiler.  Salatin is a bit of a nutcase (when Pollan asks how people in New York can get access to food like this, Salatin replies, “Why do we need a New York City?”) but his methods are impeccable, and from 100 acres of farm and 450 acres of forest he produces 30,000 dozen eggs, 11,000 chickens, 25,000 pounds of beef, 25,000 pounds of pork, 1000 turkeys, and 500 rabbits annually.  Of course, this is a drop in the ocean: we’d need thousands of farms like Polyface to feed people this stuff, and food would be much more expensive.

Although, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for meat, at least, to be a great deal more expensive.  Why should we subsidize the cost of disease-ridden meats itself produced from subsidized corn when people spend barely any money on food as it is?  Would less meat and less sugar in the American diet be a bad thing?  Maybe the worst and most objectionable thing of all, though, about contemporary U.S. foodways is the flavor.  Let’s be honest.  The U.S.A. has the worst quality produce in the world.  An apple or a peach or a strawberry from an average supermarket taste like mildly flavored cellulose.  An apple from an orchard, ripe, in October, tastes complex and perfumed; a summer strawberry from an allotment is like an uncloying little sugar bomb; a real ripe peach from, say, Turkey, in summertime is simply absurdly good to eat.  Yet here we are in the richest country in the world, etc, etc, etc, and we eat food that’s fit for the table of some Protestant Low Country in which toil and suffering in this world bring redemption only in the next.  Unpasteurized cheese, which millions of Europeans eat safely every year, is illegal here out of fear.  Yet the FDA would rather irradiate beef, killing its taste entirely, than impose any punishment upon producers whose product is routinely contaminated with lethal fecal matter.  How are we screwing up this bad?

I don’t have an answer, other than to say that I’m going to be heading over to Salatin’s to fill a cooler with grass-fed beef and chickens and eggs soon.  Pretending to be Argentine, by eating that beef with some chimichurri and some Malbec will be nice.  So, I have realized, will eating food that accords with my general philosophy of taste: it’s better to perform labor procuring something that tastes good than trying to redeem something that doesn’t.  A subway ride to a good butcher is better cooking than following thirty-six steps from Eric Ripert’s cookbook with watery scallops and woody rosemary.  The increasing spiciness of American fast food, I think, is tied to an increasing need to camouflage the blandness and insipidity of the main ingredients.  Not that I’m saying spicy food is bad; I’m Pakistani, after all.  But excessive concealment is a sign of bad ingredients – I have my mother’s father’s favorite cookbook, from 1920’s India, and the recipes are amazingly simple: korma has chicken, onions, ginger, red pepper, and saffron. 

New York is as guilty of overcomplexity as anywhere, with its chattering vogues for senseless combinations and magical thinking about this season’s ingredient, be it lotus bulbs or pork belly.  How often do you see pastas or sandwiches that have four or five too many things on them?  And how rarely do you see people with the rigor of gastronomes past, with a steady assurance as to what goes with what, in what season?  Now we ridicule such inflexibility, residing bravely as we do in the great masala of today, where we have  oversweet versions of Thai food served to us by French chefs.  Take that, orthodoxies of yesterday!, comes our adolescent cry.  Meanwhile, we’ve never eaten the simple, decent reduction from which the lemongrass reduction departs, and have no sense of which rules are being broken.  And lest you think that cooking rules are some kind of dead-European-male thing, some sign of domination, remember this: all cuisines are bounded languages in which utterances have a grammar, and Mexicans, Provençals and Indians are equally protective of their regional foodways.  There’s much pleasure to be had from intermingling them, but much to be lost by forgetting that people ate certain ways because long experience and settled tradition embody much more knowledge of their food than we have.

I recently tried to convince my sister that no spices whatsoever are needed to enhance a good chicken, and thusly cooked her the dish whose recipe I’m about to give you, along with some by-recipes that come along with buying a whole animal and using it unwastefully.  But don’t try it with a factory bird from Giant Eagle, as I did recently, the flesh is mushy and dry simultaneously, and the muscle tone is weird, and the bird just doesn’t taste like anything.  So get something good and then don’t do much to it.  Try this if I haven’t convinced you.  All you need is one good chicken; of course, finding one is harder than it should be.

ROAST CHICKEN

This dish is a touchstone of simplicity, and won the argument with my sister.  I like it with mashed potatoes.  I read accounts of roast chickens in food books all the time, and often order it to test a kitchen, the same way you might do with tandoori chicken and naan at a tandoori place.  By the way, Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is one of my favorite cookbooks, simple and methodologically sound and really indicative of a chef’s whole style, and he recounts some great tales of L’Ami Louis in Paris and their roast poulet de Bresse with fries.  Oh man.

Serves 4

One chicken, smallish (free-range essential, organic preferable)
Half a lemon
Butter
Salt
Pepper (don’t even ask; yes, freshly)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Farenheit.  Take the neck and organs out of the chicken’s cavity, reserving for stock, and put the chicken in a roasting pan.  Put the lemon half in, cut side “up.”  Smear butter all over the chicken, leaving a prodigious amount on the breast.  Sprinkle with a lot of salt and pepper.

Put the chicken in the oven and leave it for an hour.  Open up and check if it’s getting too browned, if so, turn down to 350.  If not, leave and check again in fifteen minutes.  Pull the chicken out, and poke a paring knife into the thigh – the juices will come rushing out clear as a bell.  You should have a really beautiful bird with burnished dark-golden, crackling skin. 

Carve the chicken into pieces (drumsticks, thighs, wings and breast) and remove to platter.  If you don’t know how, just do it; you’ll be fine, it’s dead easy.  Now pour off the accumulated juices into a small saucepan, spooning off excess oil, and squeezing the lemon half into the mix, and boil for a bit (you can mix in some flour here if you want a thick gravy – I prefer thinner juices as a sauce).  Spoon over the chicken, or pass around.  Putting these pieces of chicken over mashed potato provides more starch to absorb the reduced chicken jus, which is a great idea.  Make it with a good chicken, and I guarantee this recipe.

CHICKEN STOCK

Roast chicken bones (including what’s on people’s plates – don’t be shy)
Peppercorns
Bay leaf
Onion, halved
Celery stalk, broken in half
Slice of ginger
Clove of garlic

Put it all in a pot, just cover with water, and bring to boil.  Skim, turn down, and simmer for two hours.  At this point, you’ll have a nice chicken-y stock that beats the pants off any can or cube and you can salt it properly and strain it.  But don’t throw away the bones; take the leftover chicken pieces from the stockpot and pick the meat off the bones – there will be a great deal on the back, especially the two little pearly nuggets on the underside.  French people have some sexy name for them, and they are good.

THREE CHINESE CHICKEN SOUPS

A good way to use chicken stock and meat; funny and old-fashioned but comforting and nice.  Another is to use all the meat for a nice chicken salad.  Another is to cook any vegetable in season (asparagus, celeriac, peas, nettles, you name it) in the stock and then puree it, topping with more pepper and a little Parmigiano, if you want.  Another is to braise lamb shanks in it with onion and fennel and top them gremolata (minced parsley and garlic, mixed).  Another is… well, you get it: it’s good to have some stock around.

Chicken stock with extra chicken meat (see above)
Vinegar
Soy sauce

Flake the reserved meat into the pot of stock, which is simmering on the stove.  Add a little vinegar and a little soy sauce.  Simmer away for a while and then pick one of these three options:

1. Egg Drop: Mix about two tablespoons cornstarch and equal water, then mix into stock, stirring vigorously.  Let thickening magic occur for a while.  Beat an egg in a bowl, and pour into soup, stirring.  You’re done.  Serve with thinly sliced superhot little Indian chilies soaked in vinegar in a little bowl.

2. Chicken Corn: Add a couple of ears worth of corn kernels or a can of corn to the stock.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

3. Hot and Sour: Add sliced fresh mushrooms, cubed tofu, julienned bamboo shoots, some sliced pork if you have it, extra soy and vinegar, and a mess of white (or black) pepper.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

The rest of Dispatches.