Iraq, Katrina, and the war on terror (or is it now “war on Islamist extremism”?), displaced the G8 summit’s and Live 8’s stated focus on poverty in the Third World, especially in Africa. Perennial problems never bring a sense of urgency, only occasional bursts of concern which then quickly subside like one’s conscience when others stop looking.  Of course, many do work on the issues regularly and in sustained ways. And by and large, global poverty has been on the decline—largely due to rapid growth in India and China.

The bombings in London among other things managed to abort what could have been a fruitful discussion of global poverty, even if both the G8’s agenda and Live 8 had cast it in terms that avoided perhaps one of the deeper causes of global poverty—agricultural subsidies for farmers in the developed world—in favor of solutions that could be categorized under bourgeois charitablism, even if some of these have merit. 

The link between farm subsidies in the West and poverty in the Third World is fairly straightforward, even if many don’t quite see the linkage. It’s no secret that farms subsidies in the West are enormous. Excluding subsidies in the form of research and development, food inspection and welfare support for poor citizens (mostly, the food stamp program in the US), subsidies in the OECD averaged 30% of farm receipts, meaning 30 cents of each dollar of revenue from farming in the West comes from state transfers, on average. Nearly, US$290 billion was spent by OECD member in direct support to farmers.

The funny-disturbing figure in these discussions is $2.50 a day in subsidies per cow in Europe; compare that with this one–nearly three in four people on the African continent live on less than $2 a day. And the connection is more than coincidental.

Subsidies, especially on these scales, encourage considerable over-production, allowing farmers, or agro-business, to effectively dump food in poor economies. (Yes, people are made poor because there’s too much food in the world.) Local farmers are unable to compete with the (subsidy distorted) prices of imported foodstuffs. In the last decade, major crops, such as sugar and cotton, have seen a fall in prices by as much as 40%-50%. Sugar subsidies, for example, make it difficult for Mozambican producers to compete with European or American ones. (Moreover, quotas and tariffs in the West add additional costs to poorer producers when they try to export to the West.) Commodities prices fall below the costs of production in many locales. In most of these places, local farmers are among the poorest; pushed out of the market by subsidies, they are often unable to gain a livelihood. And more than 2 billion people on this planet depend on agriculture for their livelihood.

Delegations from poorer countries to talks on trade regularly point this out, and politicians and trade representatives in the West are hardly ignorant of the dynamic. Nor are they so callous as to be indifferent to poverty on this scale, or at least I’d like to think that they are not.

Occasionally, someone makes the case that a nation doesn’t really want its food supply to be at the whim of global markets, and subsidies insure that it preserves the capacity to produce at home. Others treat it as a way of having their nation’s farmers command a larger share of the world’s food market. Of course, it’s unlikely that agriculture in the West would disappear without subsidies and further impoverishing millions in the world’s bottom tiers is a rather sickening price to pay for market share.

For most governments in the Western world, electoral politics makes it difficult to end farm subsidies. Rural, agriculture-dependent populations may be small, but they are a strategic voting block who feels the issue intensely. Moreover, the rest of us benefit from cheap food. Even if it is the case that very large producers, and not small farmers, benefit most, the symbolic power of the Japanese rice producer or the French farmer (or the American one, for that matter) is considerable.

Not too long ago, I was having a discussion with a friend who has worked for a long time in developmental economics. Her work mostly concerns Africa, and she’s extremely critical of the subsidy system in the West, but entirely for the havoc it wreaks on the poorest in the world. But she asked a question: what’s wrong if a society tries to maintain a way of life for cultural reasons? (The Japanese and French often give this answer when criticized for providing lavish assistance to their farmers.)

And make no mistake, we are taking of ways of life here and not merely support for a job. Farming brings with it more than simply income. Various aspects of life are tied to it: extended family structures, communities, schools, and broad elements of what we would call culture. My grandmother, a small farmer in the rural backwaters of India, continued to work the land into her 80s, long after her children did reasonably well.

When entire ways of life are under threat, people do make strong demands on their societies and governments that these ways of life be maintained. When the company-towns along what became the rust belt (and is now post-rust belt) fell into economic distress, others felt the pull of their demands to have their communities preserved, and preserved through the maintenance of the companies that were the integrating and constituting force of the communities and culture.  The reaction is understandable.

There are two objections. First, even if we choose to help maintain these modes of life, there is no good reason why we should permit the consequence of the impoverishment of millions. But second and perhaps more important is the fact that we don’t owe others the maintenance of their way of life. This is as true of the farmers in the Third World as in the first. (I do think that we should provide assistance to those dislocated in our economy so that they can adjust themselves to new circumstances.)

But it’s clear that despite the reduction in some farm subsidies over the last decade or so, farmers in the Third World will not be enjoying a leveled economic playing field anytime soon. And as much as many people in the West want the end of subsidies, the strategic voting position of farmers makes it unlikely that subsidies will disappear, though some Western societies have managed to get rid of them. Perhaps then it’s time to focus energies on how to keep much of the food produced in the First World off of local markets in the Third World, or to allow tariffs that raise the price of Western foodstuff to market levels. But it is most certainly time to discuss how something this seemingly innocuous is immiserating some of the world’s more vulnerable in ways that are not about making us feel good and which also take into account that (at least some) farmers in the West have more at stake than their income.

I just started in on the third volume, Master of the Senate, of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. I read the other two over the last six months or so, between a number of other obligations. The problem is that once you really get going on them it’s hard to do anything else. I find myself missing subway stops and glancing at the clock expecting to see midnight and realizing that it is 4:00am (at least I know Abbas is still up).

That in itself is, I guess, something of a tribute to how amazingly good the volumes are. I’m not the first one to say this. They’ve been lauded to the skies; compared, rightly, with the works of such world historical notables as Gibbon and Tacitus. They’ve been recognized as an amazing fusion between high level scholarship, top notch writing and some less tangible quality. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a feel for what is important, for the way that the story of Johnson is both a story of one particular, strange, compelling, monstrous, brilliant, singular individual and also the story of a nation and a time period and all that kind of stuff too.

That is really why he is being compared to the Gibbonses and Taciti. Who knows what the exact formula is, but some history writers get kissed by their particular muse, I believe it’s Clio, and manage some kind of fantastic fusion of the particular and the universal. The more they tell us about this one thing, the more the thing they are talking about touches on everything else.

There are things that Caro keeps going back to and as he weaves them through each volume the impact of one man, one family, one little place in the Hill Country of Texas takes on global proportions as Johnson gains more and more power. That’s an old story, probably. There’s a version of it for Napolean, or Alexander the Great, or Suleiman, or etc., etc. But it’s another thing entirely to be able to suss out all the most relevant particulars and show them, to reveal them in such a way that they become obvious and clear in light of their greater implications. The very first page of the very first volume starts like this:

On the day he was born, he would say, his white-haired grandfather leaped onto his big black stallion and thundered across the Texas Hill Country, reining in at every farm to shout: “A United States Senator was born today!” Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout, but they do remember the baby’s relatives saying something else about him, something which to them was more significant. And old aunt, Kate Bunton Keale, said it first, bending over the cradle, and as soon as she said it, everyone saw it was true, and repeated it: “He has the Bunton strain.” And to understand Lyndon Johnson it is necessary to understand the Bunton strain, and to understand what happened to it when it was mixed with the Johnson strain—and, most important, to understand what the Hill Country did to those who possessed it.

In a way, the entirety of Caro’s book is spun out from those few lines. The fact that “Nobody in the Hill Country remembers that ride or that shout” isn’t a side note. It’s central. Because it’s a bold faced lie. Johnson was one of the most lying sons of bitches, seemingly, ever to live. He lied and he cheated and he stole his way out of the Hill Country. He made up the story about his grandfather because he was already creating the aura that he would use to make it true retrospectively. At the same time, in order to truly escape the Hill Country he had to make the Hill Country disappear. He had to make the Hill Country into something new so that it could be a platform for his own ambitions.

And in doing that he accomplished something remarkable, and whether it was as an ancillary to his quest for power or not becomes irrelevant. He worked with a mad, driven abandon as a nobody Congressman and he tried to gain every advantage for his county that he could from the New Deal. For the Hill Country, it meant electrification. Caro writes about it thusly:

As late as 1935, farmers had been denied electricity not only in the Hill Country but throughout the United States. In that year, more than 6 million of America’s 6.8 million farms did not have electricity. Decades after electric power had become part of urban life, the wood range, the washtub, the sad iron and the dim kerosene lamp were still the way of life for almost 90 percent of the 30 million Americans who lived in the countryside. All across the United States, wrote a public-power advocate “every city ‘white way’ ends abruptly at the city limits. Beyond lies darkness.” The lack of electric power, writes the historian William E. Leuchtenberg, had divided the United States into two nations: “the city dwellers and the country folk”; farmers, he wrote, “toiled in a nineteenth-century world; farm wives, who enviously eyed pictures in the Saturday Evening Post of city women with washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners, performed their back breaking chores like peasant women in a pre-industrial age.” . . .
But then one evening in November, 1939, the Smiths were returning from Johnson City, where they had been attending a declamation contest, and as they neared their farmhouse, something was different.
“Oh my God,” her mother said, “The house is on fire!”
But as they got closer, they saw the light wasn’t fire. “No, Mama,” Evelyn said. “The lights are on.”
They were on all over the Hill Country. “And all over the Hill Country,” Stella Gliddon says, “people began to name their kids for Lyndon Johnson.”

Real power grows from little episodes like that. And episodes like that were part and parcel of the real transformation of American life. And the transformation of American life happened in the specific way it did because, in part, particular mad, power hungry, odd and gangly political geniuses like Lyndon Johnson clawed their ways out of places like the Hill Country with insane dreams in their heads. He cheated his way to the Senate partly by being the first man to ride around in a helicopter from town to town and partly by buying every vote he could. What a strange sight it must have been to see LBJ descending, arms agoggle, stupid smile on his face, from a whirring mechanical bird onto your front lawn. He couldn’t pass anybody up. He was an asshole. But he understood people.

The beginning of the third volume, Master of the Senate, is an amazing short history of the powers of the Senate up until the mid-twentieth century when Johnson arrives. In a relatively brief dash, it gives one a greater sense of the institution than probably ninety percent of the specific studies of the Senate one could pick up. Which brings me to my last point on the subject. America is a pretty interesting place, really; grand and dumb, inspiring and depressing all at once. Given its immense power in this, our era, there is probably something like a vague global civic duty to understand it as best we can. And so it’s pretty frickin great that we have Caro.

When Cardinal Ratzinger was elevated to Pope, my standard joke to relieve the tension in liberal company involved pointing out the fact that the title of Ratzinger’s memoirs, Milestones, was exactly the same as the title of the terrorist primer of the Egyptian radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb, who Paul Berman has called “the philosopher of Al Qaeda.” I was indulging in gallows humor, of course, not because I thought that Ratzinger was planning to unleash new Crusades against the infidels, but instead because I’ve grown tired of hearing the sweeping and ignorant claims about the “sickness” or “rot” at the heart of Muslim society from pundits who seem unaware that their own fundamentalist worldview overlaps at many points with that of their declared enemies.

I’m not proposing a knee-jerk argument of “moral equivalence,” as Tariq Ali did in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, which suggests that both sides of this equation are equally pernicious. The unique aims and methods of Al Qaeda, with its emphasis on maximum civilian deaths, open season on Americans and Jews as a blanket ethnic license to kill, and willingness to pursue catastrophic terrorist attacks, tend to make any such comparison trivial. Even the likes of abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, whose vile beliefs share an equally vicious fundamentalism and similar murderous tactics, do not, of course, represent the same scale of threat to the state as bin Laden. When Timothy McVeigh indulged himself in a death-bed turn to religion by taking the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, which involves a confession and the absolution of sins, it showed the humanity of the Catholic faith, in the person of an unidentified prison chaplain, more than anything else. Even the Branch Davidians at Waco seemed content to wait for the apocalypse rather than bringing down the government. That said, as House Democrats complained in April, internal Homeland Security Department documents indicate a mystifying lack of interest in the potential terrorist threat of right-wing hate groups, while oddly listing the Animal Liberation Front as a group that might potentially support Al Qaeda. It was these right-wing extremists, of course, in addition to some well-known Christian fundamentalists, who welcomed September 11.

If there is a real comparison to be drawn, however, it is not between Muslim and Christian terror groups, or “who to worry about more.” It’s about the nature of the ideas underlying fundamentalism, which in their radical forms are worrisome to opponents of theocracy everywhere. When it comes to ideas, the splinter in our eye is curious; the United States is prosecuting what it perceives to be an ideological war of ideas with fundamentalist Islam abroad, while the ruling party largely turns a blind eye to religious fanaticism at home. Christopher Hitchens, for example, referred to the election of 2004 as “Bush’s Secularist Triumph” in Slate, mocking the Catholic writer Garry Wills for worrying over Bush’s Armageddonism. (Wills compares Ratzinger to Ashcroft.) Hitchens stretched contrarianism to new levels by declaring that the left was “making excuses for religious fanaticism” by sympathizing with suicide bombers and Iraqi insurgents. As it happens, there remains a large legion of committed liberals who understand the necessity of fighting terrorism. They shouldn’t be intellectually bullied into ignoring the entirety of the domestic political scene, where rampant theocons are giddy with power.

When Andrew Sullivan, in a New Republic essay “Crisis of Faith,” calls America’s homegrown theocrats a “milder” form of fundamentalism, he seems to de-emphasize the fact that in the wake of the Schiavo case, prominent Republicans were making highly emotive attacks on Federal judges that seemed to question the Rule of Law or threaten to overturn it. Similarly, one of the first proclamations made by the new Pope was a threat against Catholic clergy who helped enforce Spain’s new and more liberal marriage act, which allow legal rights for homosexual couples. Here it was again: a sense that the Rule of Law was subordinate to religious dictates (a notion which, incidentally, flies in the face of Christian doctrine). Since then, the new Pope has backed down and tried to present a more inclusive face.

When I went back to the experts, I found that I was not mistaken to wonder whether radical Islam and fundamentalism Christianity shared similar worldviews. Extrapolating from the work of Karen Armstrong, in The Battle for God, and Gilles Kepel, in The Revenge of God, it’s plausible to draw connections, though not identities, between the thought of Ratzinger and Qutb. Kepel, in fact, mentions them both in his book. The reason is that both thinkers had their intellectual life-worlds formed in basic opposition to liberal, pluralist, capitalist modernity, in an era dominated by Western secular humanism and the expansion of American culture. Armstrong and Kepel agree that contemporary fundamentalism, while deploying the rhetoric of returning to a simpler past of traditional faith, in fact is modern through and through. Yes, it’s a kind of modernism that rejects and despises modernity itself, but while it cries out for humanity to turn back the clock to a time before birth control, AIDs, working women, and biological theories of homosexuality – though not, interestingly enough, a time before the discovery of germs or antibiotics – in reality its aims are modern, a highly politicized form of authoritarian control over personal morality and privacy.

A comparative investigation of Ratzinger and Qutb must focus upon their shared horror of modern life and its putative ethical decay. For Qutb this involved the “hideous schizophrenia” he saw at the core of modernity, which broke apart the sacred and secular realms of existence, disrupting a meaningful view of creation, the individual’s role in life, and his or her relationship with God. Thus Islam, which in Qutb’s native Egypt had begun rapid modernization under Nasser, must radically reject “the European mentality,” because it cannot provide salvation. Thus Islamists are encouraged to get free of freedom, at least the pernicious model of freedom offered by the tempting but vacuous illusions of consumer capitalism. Ratzinger’s views strike a similar chord. “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism,” he warned fellow cardinals before they elected him in conclave, “which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” In fact, either man could have written these lines. Qutb’s own remarks are: “This religion is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires.”

The “desires” that seem to bother both thinkers the most are the most sensual and private ones. Qutb argues in Milestones that “if the relationship between man and woman is based on lust, passion and impulse, and the division of work is not based on family responsibility and natural gifts; if woman’s role is merely to be attractive, sexy and flirtatious, and if woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children…then such a civilization is ‘backward’…” Ratzinger puts the same case in another fashion. “What is the woman to do when the roles inscribed in her biology have been denied and perhaps even ridiculed?” he asks. And what if “her wonderful capacity to give love, help, solace, warmth, solidarity has been replaced by the economistic and trade union mentality of the ‘profession,’ by this typical masculine concern?” Funny that Ratzinger should mention his opposition to women working in exactly this context, because the above passage from Qutb rails against those women who take jobs as airline hostesses. St. Paul, on the other hand, asked women preachers only to cover their heads when they were at work in the faith, so that the vision of women’s roles in the faith was more progressive 2000 years ago than it is today.

A troubling picture of resemblances emerges here that cannot be easily denied. Both thinkers are authoritarian fundamentalists operating against the grain of the same modern global culture of tolerance, pluralism, and relativism. Thus their critique of our world has mutual resonance – it sounds similar, it rings a bell. At the very least this ought to give us pause. Rightwing religious pundits busy themselves with vacuous assertions about the need to uproot the inherent sickness of Muslim society – and not just the real enemy, the sinister terrorist groups who take bin Laden as their inspiration, who are a much smaller, much more dangerous demographic that needs to be separated out from even conservative Islamism.

The great difference, of course, is that Qutb’s writings form a direct incitement to violence, although not, it must be said, against innocent American civilians. ”Those who risk their lives and go out to fight,” he says, “and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honorable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.” Qutb’s appeal for Qaedists is based upon this conception of martyrdom. Ratzinger, on the contrary, shifted toward a more conservative outlook at the result of his opposition to militancy. As a young professor at Tubingen University during the 1960s, Ratzinger recoiled from the student protest movement that wished to politicize the Church. Persistent rumors that hostile students once grabbed a microphone away from Ratzinger have been officially denied. But Ratzinger’s distress created a lasting impression of “instrumentalization by ideologies that were tyrannical, brutal, and cruel.” If there is violence encoded in the doctrine of Ratzinger, it involves acts of omission (the cover-up of the sex abuse scandal, for example, in which he directly participated), and the propagation of measures that lead to poverty and war, such as the denial of birth control. But the views are consistent with an absolute protection of life, part of the “seamless garment” of Catholic theology which opposes war and the death penalty as well as the right to choose.

If we found that the person who mailed anthrax to the U.S. Senate was a huge fan of The Passion of the Christ and an owner of The Ratzinger Report, we might blame Mel Gibson for being a propagandist of extremist Catholicism, and revisit his father’s remarks about the holocaust, as well as Ratzinger’s stint in the Hitler Youth. But nobody would advocate the invasion of Vatican City. That would be as silly as invading Iraq to defeat bin Ladenism, or trying to make Qutb, not Atta, the mastermind of September 11. But since such silliness is happening, and since we are going through the full immersion experience in nationalistic zealotry and the degradation of foreign cultures and entire regions of the globe, it’s worth remembering the motes and the splinters in the eyes of the theocrats on both sides who want to make this a clash of civilizations.

[Abbas Raza is filling in for Morgan Meis, who is indisposed.]

Recently someone asked me one of those highly meaningful questions, the answers to which, if shared, are supposed to tell both persons very important things about each other. The question was: “Is there anything you really regret in your life?” I didn’t know how to answer that. At first, I tried to take it pretty seriously and actually catalogue the things I regret, but soon realized that I wasn’t quite sure what to include. The time I hit a guy in a fit of jealousy at a party when I was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins? Should that be included? It felt kinda’ right at the time. How about the time I failed to stand up for a friend of mine in grade school when he was about to be beaten up? Definitely the time I told my mother at age twenty that I no longer needed her. Yeah, that one should surely be in the list. What does it mean to regret something? That you would go back in time and change it if you could? That’s too easy. I would go back and change so many things if that were easily possible: I would even change that time I took too sharp a left turn at the end of our street and skidded off my bike and skinned my knees and elbows. Does that mean I really regret having skinned my knees and elbows? Well, yes, of course, in some sense, but I don’t think that was the sense that my friend had in mind when asking me about what, if anything, I have regrets.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that regret is an oddly neglected emotion. There are volumes of philosophical writings on shame, for example. Anger is studied carefully and documented. Fear is feared, but also cultivated as an odd pleasure in everything from roller coasters to horror movies. Even guilt, regret’s more dangerous second cousin, is explicated, assuaged, overcome. Regret, however, remains unanalyzed. Regret is a sadder, less instructive emotion than guilt. Regret means nothing beyond itself. Regret is completely empty. But regret is real.

“What do you regret?”

As I already mentioned, in some sense you regret everything that has ever caused you pain or even discomfort. But that doesn’t answer our question. What do you really regret? I don’t know. What work is that italicized “really” really doing in that question? I really don’t know. What can we do to figure this out better?

First, let’s explore, a bit more, the idea of going back and changing things if we could. Here’s what I’m thinking (and, yes, I am actually doing the thinking as I write this): what makes the idea of going back and changing things if we could, completely trivial, is that there is no cost to us in doing it, so we are tempted to change even the smallest things that went wrong. So what if we put a price on these time travels? How about if you had to lose a digit each time you went back to change something? That’s silly. We have a better way of valuing things. It’s called money. So, what if it costs $10,000 to go back and change any single hour of your past life? This would surely make one narrow down the things that one wants to change. (Okay, yes, $10,000 may still allow Bill Gates to go back and change even the smallest things he ever has even a slightly negative recollection of, but let’s fix that by assuming that $10,000 means the same to all of us. You can do this by, say, giving all of us the same imaginary income of $100,000 per year, or you can adjust the amount itself to be 10% of the person’s annual income, whatever it may be.) Just stick with me, will you? The important thing is that all of a sudden I am not so interested in spending 10,000 dollars that I have in 2005 to change a skinned knee that I had when I was a child. How about being able to take back what I said to my mom when I was twenty? I’d have to think about it. Because I have responsibilities to my wife now. Okay, this is better. It puts an actual price on regret, quantifies it, makes it understandable in modern economic terms. I would pay $3,556 to go back and erase that terrible comment to my mom. How’s that?

Yeah, it still sounds silly. Why? Because of how arbitrary the amounts are. My friend could have asked me “how many over-$10,000 regrets do you have, but why that particular number in the question? And how could I be sure that I am valuing my regrets correctly? After all, it is all hypothetical. This isn’t a real auction of regrets. All this economics of regret is stupid.

Okay, how about a moral philosophy of regret? Here’s a totally different way of looking at the problem: my erstwhile Ph.D. advisor, Akeel Bilgrami, came up with a convincing concept in moral philosophy, that of fundamental commitments. Let me explain: we normally hold many moral values, such as “don’t tell lies,” or “don’t hurt people,” or “don’t allow those you love to be hurt,” etc. These values often come into conflict, as we all know well. It may well hurt someone if we tell them the truth. (Does my butt look big in this?) We may have to lie to protect people. (Nazi comes to your house in Berlin in 1940 asking, “Are you hiding any Jews in your house?” and you are.) Now, Akeel’s claim is that while we normally constantly assign greater or lesser values to various of our moral values in negotiating ethical space and deciding what to do, there are certain moral values which we hold that are special. They are special because they are constitutive of our identity. Let me explain by an example that Akeel himself gave in class once: while Akeel was a young Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his roommate was a young man who was dealing heroin. Akeel saw this guy ruining many other students’ lives by getting them hooked on heroin, and protested to him, but he was unrepentent. Still, he was Akeel’s friend, and Akeel liked him in many ways.

One day, the police arrived at the door and told Akeel (his roommate was out) that they knew his roommate was dealing heroin. They demanded to be let in to search the apartment. Akeel asked if they had a warrant. They admitted that they didn’t, but if Akeel told them that he believed his roommate was dealing heroin, they would have a legal excuse (“probable cause”) to come and search the apartment, and if they found anything (which they would have), to arrest the roommate. Now, normally, Akeel should have weighed the destructive influence that his roommate was having on so many young people against his loyalty to his friend, but he didn’t have to: instead, he said, “No, absolutely not. He is not dealing heroin.” Why? Because ratting out a friend would go against a fundamental commitment that Akeel held. That of loyalty to a friend. Had he gone against that, he would no longer know who he was. His identity would break down. He would become another person. Essentially, he would have had a nervous breakdown.

So, second, we have this possible way of isolating the experiences that we “really” regret: they are those that caused us to break one of our fundamental commitments. You may not regret having caused harm to countless young students who were harmed by your roommate, but if you turned him in, you will always regret it. (If loyalty to friends is one of your fundamental commitments, that is.) Yes, maybe. I still don’t know.

The third way of looking at regret that I can think of is due to my wife (who just read what I have written so far), and is related to the second. It is this: regrets are what make you who you are. We are not fixed selves, morally or otherwise, and what we regret is the most important ingredient in what constitutes us. By this view, it is meaningless to ask what our regrets are, because by definition we cannot regret what we are, even if we (in the earlier senses) regret what we have done. I suspect this is correctish. The other thing my wife just said, and again, I think she is right, is that the ultimate literary symbol of regret is the road not taken.

But one more last thing. While we are speaking of literary things, check out Hemingway, the greatest stylist of the twentieth century, as he so easily nails down the concept of regret with the infinitely poignant cadence of a single sentence toward the end of A Moveable Feast:

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.

My other recent Monday Musings:
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

2005 is being celebrated as the centennial of Albert Einstein’s miracle year, but it is also the less publicized 50th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a document signed by Einstein and other scientists and intellectuals of the time urging the abolishment of nuclear weapons and war.

The endorsement of the manifesto was one of Einstein’s final acts, performed only days before his death. As Joseph Rotblat, one of the signers of the Manifesto eloquently put it, Einstein’s death “gives the manifesto extra poignancy: the last message from the man who was the symbol of the great heights the human intellect can reach, imploring us not to let all this be destroyed by human folly.”

The irony of course, is that it was another letter, sent by Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt, which helped launch the Manhattan Project. Thus, one letter from Einstein helped to usher in the atomic age, and another became his final warning to humanity of its dangers.

Together, these two letters mark dramatic shifts in Einstein’s attitudes: from that of faith and trust in his government’s ability to use nuclear power wisely—as a deterrent and not as a weapon—to disillusionment and outrage over what he saw as a reckless disregard for human life and a growing nuclear threat to all of humanity.

Einstein’s shock was echoed by many scientists around the world, who watched helplessly as what should have been one of the great scientific triumphs of the 20th century was exploited to carry out two of its most heinous acts.

“A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction,” Rotblat would later say.

The realization that it was their work that made the atom bomb possible lead to a collective soul-searching among many scientists.

Solly Zuckerman, the Scientific Advisor to the British Government during the 1960’s and 70’s, laid the blame squarely on the scientists: “When it comes to nuclear weapons … it is the man in the laboratory who at the start proposes that for this or that arcane reason it would be useful to improve an old or to devise a new nuclear warhead. It is he, the technician, not the commander in the field, who is at the heart of the arms race.”

There were widespread feelings of anger, regret and despair among many scientists, but eventually there also emerged a growing conviction that they could help right the wrongs they helped create. Indeed, many came to believe that they had a moral and ethical responsibility to do so.

“We [scientists] are not fighters,” wrote Leopold Infeld, a physicists and a signer of the Manifesto. “We care little for power; no great political leader has ever arisen from our circle…We are trained in too many doubts to employ force and to express unconditional belief. But in the fight against destruction our words and thoughts may count.”

It was in this spirit that the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was drafted.

On July 9, 1955, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and Russia, the highly esteemed mathmatician and philosopher Bertrand Russell presented the Manifesto to a room full of international reporters in London.

The Manifesto contained the signatures of 11 eminent scientists and intellectuals drawn from a spectrum of political backgrounds. The most notable among them were Einstein and Russell himself, but many of the others were also Nobel laureates.

With Einstein gone, many American scientists were reluctant to publicly lend their support, but his death also proved to be an unexpected blessing.

As Russell later explained, “As Einstein had died since signing it, I could not make any alteration of substance unless I was prepared to sacrifice his signature.”

The text of the statement was fixed, and Russell was saved the hassle of wrangling with its words to accomadate new signers.

Another important figure in the creation of the Manifesto was Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-born physicist who left the Manhattan Project when he learned that Germany had given up its atomic bomb program. After moving back to the UK, Rotblat helped launch the British Atomic Scientists’ Assocciation and worked to spread the word about the dangers of nuclear weapons.

Rotblat’s position on nuclear weapons never wavered throughout the years. “Nuclear weapons are fundamentally immoral,” he said in a recent address. “Their action is indiscriminate, affecting civilians as well as military, innocents and aggressors alike, killing people alive now and generations as yet unborn.”

Rotblat and Russell met when both were invited to a BBC television program to explain the newly developed hydrogen bomb to the public. Russell was so impressed by the young physicists that he shared with Rotblat his concerns about nuclear weapons and his plans for drafting a declaration to be signed by scientists. The meeting would mark the beginning of a lifelong collaboration and friendship between the two men.

Three years later in 1957, the pair co-founded the Pugwash Conferences, a yearly event that brings together scientists from around the world to discuss ways to hasten nuclear disarmament and find peaceful alternatives for settling global disputes. The text of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto serves as the organization’s founding charter.

Since it’s creation, Pugwash has played a role in the drafting of a number of arms control treaties, including the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.

In recognition of their services, both Rotblat and Pugwash were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Russell had died in 1970.

In his acceptance speech, Rotblat made a direct appeal to scientists, urging them to consider the impact of their research on society. Rotblat believed scientists should be required to swear a pledge of ethical conduct like the Hippocratic Oath used by physicians.

Rotblat himself considered the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Pugwash’s greatest accomplishment. Adopted by the UN in 1970, the NPT was almost unanimously approved, collecting 188 signatories, 98% of the UN membership.

The NPT required the nuclear haves and have-nots of the world to each make a promise. The five nuclear weapons states of the time—USA, USSR, UK, China and France—would reduce and liquidate their nuclear stockpiles, while the non-nuclear weapons states would promise not to manufacture or otherwise seek to acquire nuclear weapons.

The NPT was a source of great pride for Rotblat, but also  a source of great frustration. Rotblat was deeply critical of the United State’s actions in particular. In what Rotblat viewed as a direct violation of Article VI of the NPT, the part of the Treaty that provides for nuclear disarmament, the Bush administration requested funds earlier this year to conduct nuclear weapons research and develop a new type of “bunker buster” warhead.

The United State’s also broke promises it made in 2000 to follow a set of 13 steps outlined during the 2000 NPT review to implement Article VI of the Treaty, pointing to the noncompliance of regional states as justification for its actions.

Rotblat died on September 2nd at the age of 97. He was the last surviving member of the signers of the Manifesto. The young physicists who once considered it an honor to join the likes of Einstein and Russell to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons in the end was regarded with their same level of moral authority and did more than any other signer of the Manifesto to help make the group’s vision a reality.

In the 35 years since the NPT, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all joined the ranks of countries posessing nuclear weapons capabilities, increasing the number of nuclear weapons states from five to eight. Israel is also strongly suspected of having a nuclear arsenal and Iran of having an active nuclear weapons program. In light of these developments, the primary message of the Manifesto remains as revelant today as it was 50 years ago:

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We got a tattoo on our back the other day – a serpent wrapped around a large Gothic cross. Then we dropped by the barber’s down the street for a blond Mohawk. In the afternoon, we pumped some iron and went shopping and in the evening, we jacked a car and took out a couple of gang-bangers before retiring to a strip-club for the remainder of the night. You see, for last fortnight we’ve been navigating the streets of Los Santos in a low-rider – with spiked custom rims and a mad stereo system – listening to Eric B. and Rakim, wearing a wife-beater, a green bandana and a sneer.

You can too. Rockstar Games’ wildly popular videogame “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” allows you to summon your inner gangsta. You “control the main character…CJ, who has just returned to his old neighbourhood after learning of his ‘moms’ death. However all is not well as he drives into his old town, framed for the murder of a [cop] and unpopular with his old gang CJ must not only win back the trust of the gang but he must also learn exactly what happened to his family and return his jaded gang back to the glory days.” As in most role playing games (RPG), you may adhere to the plot or just hang out.

Unlike most RPG games which are typically set in the distant, mythical past (Diablo) or several millennia into the future (Final Fantasy) – games in which you assume the persona of, say, a barbarian, wizard or dwarf – “San Andreas” doesn’t offer temporal escapism: it’s grounded in contemporary America and in Americana, an unusual premise and conceit. The game, for instance, features the voices of icons of pop culture: Samuel L. Jackson (as a corrupt cop), Ice T (uncharacteristically, a rapper), Axl Rose (a chilled out radio DJ) and even Peter Fonda. When driving, you can turn to one of many radio stations that play country, classic rock, old school gangsta rap and eighties nostalgia. We’ve been listening to Bob Dylan, the Isley Brothers, Kool and the Gang as well as Snoop Doggy Dog and Cypress Hill. There’s even a talk-show station. A reviewer writes that “the most impressive thing about the talk station is that the news breaks update as you play the game…you’ll also hear a sports show, a matchmaking program, and a gardening show, whose host is played by the never subtle Andy Dick.”

Moreover, and more interestingly, much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, San Andreas is a fictional reconstruction of California. “San Andreas’” virtual cantons correspond to L.A.’s Compton, Verona or Beverly Hills and as the game progresses you may venture into San Francisco or Las Vegas. Topographical correspondence aside, the personality of the Los Angeles changes from Compton to Beverly Hills: the cars are bigger and better, the shops chicer, and the barbers have lisps. Women no longer stomp around in tracksuits; they slink around in Sharon-Stone-in-“Basic-Instinct”-like dresses (and, on the beach, they’re clad in thongs). A reviewer claims that “San Andreas’…oozes much more atmosphere and feels far more realistic than anything we have seen before.” We almost agree. “Half-Life 2” is a remarkable, atmospheric game that gives “San Andreas” a run for its money. And Rockstar’s “Max Payne 2” is a masterpiece, a game that possesses the texture and trajectory of a novel.

“San Andreas” is also a commentary on California, Los Angeles, Americana, the gangsta life, popular culture, gender relations, race relations and class, analagous in ways to the satire characteristic of “Simpsons” or even to the sensibility of contemporary American fiction: think David Foster Wallace, Bret Easton Ellis (who has also made his audience empathize with a psychopath), even Don Delillo (circa Mao II or Americana). The meta-commentary is not only explicit on the whimsical billboards, the “Ammu-Nation” storefronts and army recruitment adds on the radio but implicit in the plot and the choices you are presented with as a protagonist. CJ, for instance, overhears the following conversation between his brother, Sweet, and sister, Kendl:

SWEET: I’m tired of you not listening to me, girl.
KENDL: And I’m tired of you acting like you own me. I can see who I want to see.
SWEET: It just ain’t right you seeing some cholo mother-f*cker.
KENDL: Ohhh, what – a no good narrow minded hypocrite gang banger telling me what is right and what is wrong. Let me guess, Sweet – senseless killing right, but a boyfriend from the Southside, wrong?
SWEET: Some things ain’t just meant to happen. I mean what if ya’ll have kids. Leroy Hernandez? That don’t sound good, girl.
KENDL: His name ain’t Hernandez.
SWEET: Or Lopez, either, you racist f*ck! That ain’t how Mom raised us.
SWEET: I ain’t racist. I just know how they feel about you. And look at you, you’re dressed like a hooker!

A commentator notes that “Anyone who has steered away from the series because of its unethical moments will not be surprised to learn that San Andreas is more of the same. With drugs, gangbanging, drive bys and the largest profanity count in console history it’s quite obvious that…San Andreas deserves its 18 certificate. It’s obvious to anyone with common sense that the humour is satirical…” To be expected, “San Andreas” has stirred controversy in America. An 85-year old grandmother has spearheaded a class-action suit against Rockstar Games, citing false advertising, fraud and abuse. As a rule of thumb, grandmothers should not play MA or mature rated games. We believe those quick to offend should stick to activities such as basket-weaving or boulles. But since gaming has become a larger industry than Hollywood, it now attracts great scrutiny. As usual, controversies in popular American discourse – whether it’s about movies (“Team America”) or music (2 Live Crew) – do not concern violence, misogyny or racism so much; controversy mostly concerns sex. The US Congress is investigating the infamous “Hot Coffee” modification. “In the unmodified version of San Andreas, the player sees an exterior view of the girlfriend’s house while hearing the muffled voices of [CJ] and his girlfriend as they engage in coitus. However, the Hot Coffee modification enables a minigame which allows the player to actually enter the girlfriend’s bedroom and control [CJ]’s actions during sex.”

We’ve been weaned on the Amiga – a machine than was arguably two decades ahead of its time – on games that include the seminal “Shadow of the Beast,” the infinitely playable “Xenon 2,” “Speedball 2” and “SWIV 2” and the arcade hit “Ninja Warriors.” We’ve been weaned in simpler times: videogames did not antagonize grandmothers, galvanize the Congress or demands exegesis, philosophical inquiry, then. On the other hand, San Andreas begs the attention of academics and cultural critics as it raises questions about the relationship of the virtual universe and medium to reality, about representations and construction of the self. Our very own Descha Daemgen poses an interesting question about virtual money: “Does this new emergent virtual online gaming economy mark a threshold in how we have come to transmit, to produce, and to imagine value?” You bet. We can answer this question, simply, anecdotally: when we make moolah in “San Andreas,” we feel quite pleased.

Boys and girls, Rockstar Games’ “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” is not merely a video-game. It is, to be trite, a way of life. The thug life. We identity with our virtual Doppelganger. In the virtual Compton, for instance, we’re always looking behind our back because the Ballas, a rival gang, are out to gun us down. Outside Compton, we feel freer. Cruising by the sea at dusk, we aspire to leave the hood, to buy a nice place on the beach and start a family. But we keep getting pulled back in.

In the preface to The Broken Estate, James Wood writes, “Fiction is real when its readers validate its reality; and our power so to validate comes both from our sense of the actual real (‘life’) and from our sense of the fictional real…” In real life, when idling in Karachi traffic or chatting with somebody we’ve just been introduced to at a dinner or before turning in for the night after a few drinks, we find our self mulling whether we should earn our gang’s respect or just cruise around Beverly Hills; whether we should place our hard earned paper on Donner’s Kebab or One-Eyed Warrior (at 10 to 1 odds) at an OTB or earn a pittance shaking down some honkies and crackers on the beach; whether we should put in requisite time and patience to court a girlfriend or just pay for a ho. If self perception contributes to notions of identity, then, boys and girls, we’ve virtually become an OG, an original gangsta. So although we’ve been listening to NWA’s anthem, “F*ck the Police,” since we sprouted chest hair, we only now appreciate the pathos that suffuses the lyrics.

Other Critical Digressions, yo:
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
Live 8 at Sandspit
And the OCD, the original Critical Digression

Prim, preppy, and proper; sometimes stylish, sometimes snobbish; always, to use the marketing term, classic: these are people’s commonly if vaguely held impressions of the game of tennis.  Each new group of rebels, from the tennis brats (led by McEnroe, Vilas and Connors), to the young, peroxided Agassi, to the country-club scandalizing Williams sisters, stand out, according to this view, because they contrast so strongly with the politesse of the sport of the tasteful rich, the sport of whites in white.  This set of received opinions about the social milieu from which tennis came might have some credibility as a remembrance of time past.  It’s also all wrong.  Far from a leisurely and well-mannered display of sporting good cheer, the game is at heart about controlled brutality.  There is much virtuosity and style involved, but if professional tennis resembles any other sport, it’s boxing.  Both consist of a dialectical exchange, a conversation, between two opposed personalities, who are attempting to send the same deep message: “You cannot hope to defeat me, even if your skills are superior, because I won’t stop, I won’t give in, I won’t tire, until I destroy you.”  The significant difference between the two sports is only in their chosen media.  In boxing, the only intermediary between the two combantants is their gloves.  In tennis, the players communicate indirectly, by the sweet science of applying force and imparting spins to the ball; it speaks a poetic language of aggression.

Here’s your chance to appreciate this savage beauty: the U.S. Open, the last of tennis’s four Grand Slam tournaments (the others being the Australian Open, Roland Garros, and Wimbledon).  It begins this morning in Flushing Meadows, Queens, a short hop on the 7 train from Grand Central.  Go in person.  If you’ve only seen tennis on TV, mostly you end up following the ball in a kind of video-game trance, watching it go this way and that, the players themselves materializing only at the last instant to hit it.  What you miss is the movement, the guessing, the psychic uncertainty that plagues each as they attempt to wrong-foot and misdirect the other.  You miss the electric fields that crackle in the air in the decisive moments of a grueling five-setter.  You miss sequences like this one, from the first professional tennis match I ever attended: in the 2001 Wimbledon final, in the absence of Pete Sampras (dislodged by an 18-year-old named Roger, about whom more below), Patrick Rafter and Goran Ivanisevic played an almost unbearably tense final set.  Rafter’s nerve failed first: at the climatic moment, he served a miserably safe ball slowly into play, which Ivanisevic contemptuously lashed past him.  Now Ivanisevic, one of the top servers in history, had only to unleash a decent one to win.  He couldn’t.  A historically great professional, he served five times into the bottom of the net before finally succeeding.  On television one saw only an inexplicable performance at a crucial moment; in person, the devastating pregnancy of the moment made failure seem a perfectly human response. 

Above all, what you see in person is the incredible variety of spins, speeds, and placements of the ball that professionals are able to conjure.  Point after point, you watch and begin to understand the necessity of the unexpected.  The standard groundstroke, hit with topspin, can be struck with booming pace and arc high over the net before curling down inside the line and jumping or kicking back at the opponent.  Yet if she or he finds a rhythm and begins to respond, the all-important ability to dictate play, to make the other essentially reactive, can be lost.  So, variety: every so often a sliced ball, floating low over the net and then skidding, or maybe a sneak attack, coming into the net and pounding away the surprised response.  Or maybe an occasional lob, or other changes in pattern designed to confuse.  The loneliness of tennis tactics, of being out there by yourself and working out what to do, demands a fortitude that inspires the audience and perplexes the person across the net.

The absolute master of this kind of bewilderment is tennis’ majestic young king, Roger Federer.  Federer not only plays every shot with facility, he varies his patterns considerably at important moments, unlike every other player, who stick to their “bread and butter” when it really matters.  Even more remarkably, Federer interprets the unfolding action flawlessly and unconsciously.  Like a conversationalist to whom the other’s speech occurs before it is uttered, Federer knows what the other player will do before he does it – his opponent’s tactics actually seem to occur to him before they do to the other.  For this reason Federer is never out of place, never unbalanced, always smooth, always balletic.  For this reason he can win on any surface, under any conditions, against any player, playing any style.  Unlike Sampras, who seemed to approach breaking records as hard work to be slogged through, or McEnroe, for whom talent was a burden that cut him off from others, Federer seems to play with a pure joy in his miraculous abilities.  Sampras’s goal was to accrue numbers; Federer’s is to express himself in as eloquently as possible, to play in all its senses.  It’s a worthy quest.  The uncanny, almost empathetic anticipation that marks all his play has allowed him to dominate as no one in my twenty years of watching tennis has.  You’d do well to allow yourself the pleasure of witnessing him; without hyperbole, he is a genius.

Playing Henry Bolinbroke to Federer’s Richard II is the piratical young Spaniard Rafael Nadal.  Like Bolingbroke, Nadal is a character of huge confidence and instinctive dominance, whose utter lack of fear and pragmatic brutalism carried him past Federer at Roland Garros in May.  It must be grindingly oppressive to play him: where others stare at Federer’s poetic breakthroughs in awe, Nadal simply clenches his jaw and refuses to let a ball get past him.  It takes three, sometimes four shots that would be winners against anyone else to win a point against the terrifying Rafa (the only player who approaches his defensive abilities is, of course, the chameleonic Federer).   When Federer plays, one gets the sense of a brilliant soliloquy being delivered; the victim is rendered no more relevant than Yorick’s cranium.  By contrast, watching Nadal is like watching a tormenting matador (if you’ll excuse the too-obvious metaphor) generate sympathy for his opponents, who are humanized in their suffering.

If tennis is like boxing, my favorite pugilist is still Andre Agassi.  Now well into his mature elder sportsman role, Agassi still will astonish you with the pugnaciousness of his hitting.  His backhand is a left uppercut, his forehand a right cross.  His quarterfinal with Nadal, should it precipitate, will be a thing of supreme, cross-generational electricity (Nadal is nineteen; Agassi has played professionally for nineteen years).  Andy Roddick, Lleyton Hewitt, and Marat Safin, all former champions, will be in the running.  Look out for the hearthrobbing Felianco Lopez and Robbie Ginepri, too.  On the women’s side is has become very difficult to predict who will do well.  Elegant Venus Williams won Wimbledon in inspirational fashion, but hasn’t played much since.  Lindsay Davenport cannot seem to stay healthy and fresh enough to win long matches.  Kim Clijsters, the hottest player on tour, has a history of vain attempts on big stages, as does Amelie Mauresmo.  Maria Sharapova is capable of winning, and so is Serena Williams, Justine Henin-Hardenne and the defending champion, Svetlana Kusnetsova.  I don’t want to spend much time handicapping the field, though, because I would rather encourage the spectator to take a front-row seat at a small court (this is easily possible in the first week), and watch any two of the best two hundred tennis players on the planet.  Up close, you can appreciate the gorgeous subleties, unthinkable crosscourts, and lonely tactics of the other sweet science.

Recent Dispatches:

Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermance

Sports figures have always held great fascination for me, and over the years I have regarded various athletes with an almost worshipful awe. When I was a child, there was the legendary cricket batsman, Hanif Mohammed, who still holds the world record for most runs in an innings in first class cricket: an unbelievable 499. I met him once along with a bunch of other neighborhood kids when he was having his car air-conditioner repaired at a workshop near our house in Karachi. He was already retired by then, and seemed very ordinary in person (I don’t know what I was expecting). There was Safdar Abbas, lighning-quick left-forward on the national hockey team, who had gone to Habib School where reverential tales of his speed and skill were still oft-exchanged when a little later I attended 4th and 5th grades there. There was Tanveer Dar, penalty corner specialist for Pakistan’s hockey team in the 70s, who had a name too cool sounding to ignore. Tanveer Dar. I still like saying it.

Later, there were three squash players in succession, Geoff Hunt of Australia, and then, Jehangir Khan and Jansher Khan of Pakistan. Another squash player also had a cool sounding name and an unconventional game, both of which took a hold on my psyche: Gogi Allauddin. I played squash against him once at the Lahore gymkhana at a time when I believe he was ranked number 2 in the world. Mutual friends had introduced us and he had no idea how good or bad I was but was arrogant enough that before we started, he said that if I was able to win a single point in a game of 21 points, he would buy me dinner. I bought him dinner. An Austrian skier I was temporarily obsessed with was Franz Klammer, and around the same time I had the severest crush on Nadia Comeneci, even daydreaming about marrying her (I was too young for more imaginative fantasies) when I wasn’t too busy planning my wedding to Miss Müller, my 7th grade German teacher. (Miss Müller once took the whole class out to a German restaurant for a bit of exposure to German culture, and my eagerness to impress her was such that on a dare from another kid I ate a whole candle that was on our table. Needless to say, this stunt did not have the desired effect of making the lovely Miss M. want to marry 12-year-old me, but I did eventually manage to seduce another more susceptible Miss M., also a native German-speaker, into marriage.) I even met Imran Khan once, possibly the most shockingly good-looking man I have ever met, though I was never a great fan of his for some reason. But by far the greatest object of my athletic adoration has always been and remains Mohammad Ali, the greatest of all time.

Three of the most famous athletes of our time are Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, and Mohammad Ali. Jordan may or may not be the greatest basketball player of all time, but he undoubtably holds the highest value in the psychological economy of basketball fans as well as the general public. Armstrong probably is the greatest cyclist of all time, but bicycling itself has never been very glamorous a sport. Mohammad Ali’s place in the history of boxing is a subject of neverending counterfactual debate of the “What if Tyson and Ali fought when each was in his prime?” variety, but he, of course, more than any other athlete, seized our collective imagination in a way that far transcends his prodigious pugilistic prowess. (We are not similarly obsessed with Pete Sampras, or Ian Thorpe, or Tiger Woods, or Carl Lewis, or Wayne Gretzky.) Why is this? What is it about these three individuals that has arrested our attentions so?

Maybe it is this: each of them is the symbolic embodiment of an age-old human dream. In the case of Michael Jordan, it is the dream of flight. The desire to defy the clutch of gravity is as old as human history: to escape the poverty of Earth’s surface for the rich freedom of three-dimensional air, to have an eagle’s-eye view of tiny Terra. And catching air is what Michael Jordan could do better than any other human, ever. He could float. He could soar. He could fly. He is about as close as anyone in real-life has gotten to leaping tall buildings in a single bound. And he made it look graceful. (High jumpers may be able to jump higher, but the Fosbury Flop is not very balletic; no poetry can attach to a movement correctly called a “flop” onto a mattress. Hop, skip, jump, leap, flop, plop, whatever; it ain’t flight.) On the contrary, Jordan follows an upright and, like all objects in a gravitational field, lovely parabolic arch after leaving the ground. As he approaches the top of the arch, his vertical speed gradually slows to zero, and for an infinitesimal but seemingly-infinite instant he is suspended high in the air, floating in space, frozen in time, legs splayed underneath or treading air, arms reaching up, one hand cocked underneath the ball ready to propel it on its own parabolic path to the basket while the other supports it lightly from the side. This is the moment one remembers, not the moment when the ball inevitably clears the rim. Oddly enough, it is only in flight that Jordan is an extraordinarily compelling figure. Closer to the ground, he often looks awkward with his tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth, and despite his ubiquitous presense in every medium by way of commerical endorsements, he retains an air of shyness. Off the court he seems not very articulate or particularly interesting in any other way.

Lance Armstrong embodies the dream of immortality, and he does it doubly. Unlike car racing, or even the 100-meter dash, bicycle racing is not about speed. It is about endurance. It is about lasting forever. It is about not dying. And Armstrong never dies. He is known to break away from the pack of cyclists behind him, making them expend stupendous effort in catching up, which he encourages by slowing down just a bit, then repeating this process again and again until the buildup of lactic acid in the legs of his hapless competitors causes such excruciating pain that they freeze up. They die. He doesn’t. And he didn’t even die when his testicular cancer metastasized to his lungs and brain. He kept going. He is the ultimate Energizer Bunny, and keeping on going and going is what the dream of immortality is all about. If you can come back from death’s door and win the Tour de France seven times in a row, you are about as immortal as can humanly be. The other interesting thing about Armstrong is his body. Unlike Jordan and Ali, whose stature, size, and shape immediately indicate their difference from you and me, Lance looks like my local pizza-delivery boy (well, I guess there is that bicycle connection). We all feel like we could be Lance Armstrong if we just tried hard enough. There is nothing on the surface to indicate that this man has a heart that is a third bigger than the rest of us, that it can beat at more than 200 beats per minute, that his cancer-scarred lungs can take in more oxygen than a healthy male twice his size, that his muscle-efficiency is 8 percent greater than average, or that his muscles produce half as much lactic acid as normal people. He is ideally built to do what he does. Lance is gonna’ live forever, like we all wish we could.

Mohammad Ali’s most famous fight of all, the Rumble-in-the-Jungle against George Foreman in 1974 in Zaire, is the athletic world’s most powerful instantiation of the David versus Goliath story. It speaks to our dream of the triumph of cunning and skill over brute strength. And this is what Ali’s life has been about, inside and outside of the ring. He is not a big boxer, as heavyweights go, but he more than makes up in speed and nimbleness what he lacks in size. Ali’s hold on our psyches is such that I can remember my mother, who knew and cared nothing about sports, not only getting up in the middle of the night to watch the Rumble-in-the-Jungle live via-satellite, but very earnestly saying a prayer for Mohammad Ali to win. If you have not seen the documentary When We Were Kings, please do yourself a favor: buy the DVD and watch it every Sunday as I used to do until I practically had it memorized. Norman Mailer and George Plimpton were at the fight covering it as journalists, and comment on the fight looking back. There is music by James Brown and B.B. King, and there is the fight itself, along with delightful footage of Ali from before and after the fight, including his reciting some of his poetry, such as this bit to describe what he has been doing to train for the fight:

I wrestled with an alligator,
I tussled with a whale,
I have handcuffed lighting,
Thrown thunder in jail.
Yesterday, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.
I’m so mean I make medicine sick!

The movie, and Ali’s story, is so moving that several of the people I have shown the film to have wept at the end, out of sheer joy and admiration for the man. At the time, Ali was a bit of a has-been fighter in his 30s while George Foreman was the new, young, invincible, 22-year-old heavyweight champion of the world. Foreman was built like a bull with the personality of a pitbull. He was taller, heavier, and had much greater reach than Ali. He was nothing like the amiable teddy bear of a guy-next-door we know so well now from commercials for his electric grill and Midas mufflers. And the sheer force of his punches had already become mythic. The bookmakers gave him 7-to-1 odds againts Ali. Ali didn’t care. Mohammad Ali crushed him in an 8th round knockout in a blindingly fast flurry of punches (see picture), having tired him out earlier in the fight by inventing what we now know as the rope-a-dope trick (leaning back against the ropes in a defensive stance and letting your opponent pound you until he or she gets exhausted). Ali became world champ for the third time that day.

But Ali is such a colossus that his herculean boxing accomplishments can only explain a small part of his appeal. I cannot think of another human being as physically beautiful, as talented, as intelligent, as charming, as articulate, as funny, vivacious, and brave, and as morally principled, as Mohammad Ali. Mohammad Ali has been the greatest international symbol of standing up to overwhelming might that the sports world has ever produced. He is the modern-day David that took on the Goliaths of racism, the U.S. government, even the Nation of Islam–after he broke with it. He gave hope and strength to those who opposed the Vietnam war and American imperialism, not only within America, but everywhere. He refused to run away to Canada to avoid the draft and faced the prospect of jail instead. He was stripped of his title and was not allowed to box for years. He suffered and sacrificed for his beliefs, and he never gave in. Ali is the only sports figure ever with Nelson Mandela-like dignity. As George Plimpton puts it toward the end of When We Were Kings: “What a fighter. And what a man.”

Fame
I’m gonna live forever
I’m gonna learn how to fly
High

My other recent Monday Musings:
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

In December of 2004, a 22-year-old Australian gamer spent $26,500 of real money to buy a virtual island in the online game Project Entropia. Its game developers described the virtual island as containing “…beautiful beaches ripe for developing beachfront property, an old volcano with rumors of fierce creatures within, [an] outback… overrun with mutants, and an area with a high concentration of robotic miners guarded by heavily armed assault robots indicates interesting mining opportunities…” Though the sheer dollar value of the purchase may strike us as a fairly outlandish (pardon the pun) sum to be laying out for a castle in the sky, the virtual real estate market is booming; it’s quite possible that this young Australian gamer will even turn a profit on his virtual property once he has rented, leased, or sold plots of his island paradise to other online gamers. It is not only virtual real estate, however, that is being traded online.

As a result of the wide-spread popularity of MMORPGs – an acronym which stands for massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games – virtual objects of all kinds have begun to emerge as sources for potential profit. Online site No Sweat, describes the trajectory of online trading as follows:

“In these games, as in other role playing and computer games, over time one acquires possessions, skills, rank and so on. Often, moving on in the game is a long, slow tedious process — and many computer gamers look for short-cuts to get beyond the lower levels of the game. In MMORPGs, those shortcuts might involve getting hold of objects (including virtual money) from other players. Those objects can be traded. Which means that outside of the virtual worlds, trading can also take place. Many players seem willing to part with their cash (real-world cash, that is) in order to buy virtual objects in the games.”

The end result of this virtual trading is staggering; as virtual world critic Julian Dibbell points out, the economic yield of virtual commerce is very real:

“[I]n an academic paper analyzing the circulation of goods in Sony Online’s 430,000-player EverQuest…an economist calculated a full set of macro- and microeconomic statistics for the game’s fantasy world, Norrath. Taking the prices fetched in the $5 million EverQuest auctions market as a reflection of in-game property values, professor Edward Castronova of Cal State Fullerton multiplied those dollar amounts by the rate at which players pile up imaginary inventory and came up with an average hourly income of $3.42. He calculated Norrath’s GNP at $135 million — or about the same, per capita, as Bulgaria’s. In other words, assuming roughly proportional numbers for other major online role-playing games… the workforce toiling away in these imaginary worlds generates more than $300 million in real wealth each year.”

Even more alarming, however, is the fact that this virtual economy has begun to employ exploitative methods more commonly found in the “real world.” In a recent U.S. court case, a member of the online gaming world of EverQuest sued Sony Online for its newly enacted ban of virtual object trading. During the course of the case it came to light that the plaintiff had been running a series of Mexican sweatshops in which workers were paid to play these online role-playing games and to virtually farm, forage, and otherwise produce virtual objects that were then sold for real U.S. currency on E-bay and other online trading houses. And this is hardly an isolated incident. According to an article by Tim Guest , in mainland China “people are employed to play the games [from] nine to five, scoring virtual booty which IGE [Internet Gaming Entertainment] can sell on at a profit to Western buyers.” And a California-based company known as gamersloot.net was employing Romanians to play MMORPGs for ten hours a day, earning $5.40 a day, or the equivalent of $0.54 an hour.

Insofar as these virtual worlds are capable of producing objects which seamlessly enter into our real-world economy, items that are priceable, desirable, and scarce, if not exactly material or useful in the ways that we are used to, and insofar as these virtual objects have a real effect on the “real economy”, the distinction between the virtual and the real seems to have become disturbingly attenuated. The fact that these virtual objects are as exchangeable as any other material commodity seems to suggest that, at least from money’s lofty perch, it looks like dollars all the way down.

MMORPG programmers, in fact, have become quite adept at tweaking these online economies. The Economist reports that programmers

“routinely produce the virtual equivalent of an antiquities market, creating overwhelmingly high demand for certain virtual objects that have no other utility within the game, a demand based on nothing more than the sheer scarcity of a given item. They control the inflation rate of their online currency by having players sink huge amounts of virtual gold and platinum into exorbitantly expensive luxury items [according to an online report, neon-colored avatar hair dye has recently become the luxury item par excellance] that can only be bought from non-player merchant bots, effectively taking large sums of money out of general circulation.”

Given the sheer oddness of our increasingly digitized economy, how is it, then, that we still tend to view the world (if we, in fact, still do) as a relatively stable place? From what golden coffer do we pluck out that highly burnished but unfounded belief that our money will be worth as much tomorrow as it is today? As Nigel Thrift has pointed out, “…unlike previous times, there is remarkably little anxiety now about the apparent loss of traditional representations of money. Generally speaking, the system of money is trusted.”

That the value of these virtual items, (including various forms of virtual gold which serve as currency in many of these online gaming worlds, and which seem to function and accrue value as any other “real-world” currency would) is predicated upon nothing more than the online gaming communities acknowledgement of their value is, in many respects, nothing new. A similar epistemological structure – one dependent upon our shared belief in the power of socially produced fictions – seems to underpin all of our monetary and financial instrumentation. This begs the question: Does this newly emergent virtual online gaming economy mark a threshold in how we have come to transmit, to produce, and to imagine value? Or is it merely the case that these gamers are a new type of virtual investor, one whose play happens to yield real monetary value and, consequently, produce real exploitative side-effects?

For the last four years, since the attack on September 11, 2001, the political side of the blogosphere has tossed arguments back and forth about cause, free will, and responsibility. I first noticed it in a piece by Hitchens shortly after the attack. September 11th was also the 28th anniversary of the coup d’etat of the Allende government by Pinochet. Hitchens’ invocation of the coup and comparison of the Chilean left with al Qaeda had a simple point. The US had been instrumental in the overthrow of Allende and the massacre of leftists that followed. The Chilean left had a real and deep grievance against the US, yet, we couldn’t possibly imagine Chilean socialists hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people. The implication was clear: grievances fueled by the sins of the US just aren’t enough to justify the actions of al Qaeda terrorists.

Nothing really followed in terms of the debate from Hitchens’ piece, even though he’d mentioned it a few times. But the question of the role of grievances (in the form of US foreign policy) in 9/11 picked up and keeps popping up. The debate was extended to discussions of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Aqsa Martyr’s brigade terrorism, and a brief but quickly curtailed discussion of the massacre of children at Beslan a year ago. By the time of the bombings in London, the debate had become clarified.

Few, if any, of those engaged in the back and forths were confused about explanation and responsibility. An action or event by victims can causally contribute to an act of terrorism, but what that means for responsibility was at heart of the issue. In terms of the present war, it’s hard to argue that had the US not been involved in Middle East politics—if it did not support Israel, had it not had bases in Saudi Arabia, and had it not been behind placing sanction on Iraq—the acts would’ve taken place anyway. That claim is a causal claim in the “not without which not” way.

Very few responded to any explanation of terrorist attacks by referring to US foreign policy with accusations of being an apologist for terrorism—after all, no one thinks that a scholar of how the Holocaust happened is letting Nazis off the hook. Moreover, the administration itself had implicitly admitted that US foreign policy (support for corrupt governments) had helped fuel extremist movements.

But the debate wasn’t about cause but about “root causes” and what “root causes” meant for responsibility. More sharply, it raised a question about when explanation melds into a justification or apology for terrorism. The issue led to a brief back and forth between Norm Geras (with Eve Gerrard) and Chris Bertram. The former:

“One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob’s path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine’s mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it. Furthemore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won’t necessarily show they bear any of the blame for it. If Mabel borrows Zack’s bicycle without permission and Zack, being embittered about this, burns down Mabel’s house, Mabel doesn’t share the blame for her house being burned down. Though she may have behaved wrongly and her doing so is part of the causal chain leading to the conflagration, neither her act nor the wrongness of it justifies Zack in burning down her house. So simply by invoking prior causes, or putative prior causes, you do not make the case go through – the case, I mean, that someone else than the actual perpetrator of the wrongdoing is to blame. The ‘We told you so’ crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London last week.”

Bertram’s response was simple.

“One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.”

These discussions were about clarifying intuitions and understanding of cause and responsibility (agency, free will). But it was a spike; discussions continued to be peppered with comparisons with historical examples. Juan Cole in a post had pointed to Israeli occupation as the cause/reason for Palestinian terrorism, a post that drew the following from Jeff Weintraub.

“[I]n 1922-1923 about a million and a half Greeks fled or were expelled from Anatolia (with several hundred thousand Turks and other Muslims ‘exchanged’ in the opposite direction). Most of these people lived in refugee camps for a while, in both Israel and Greece, but I am not aware that they generated terrorist groups with a policy of systematically murdering Arab or Turkish civilians. . . Did these expulsions ‘provoke significant terrorism on the part of the displaced’? Not that I can recall. . . [I]t is not inevitable, or even common, for large-scale transfers or expulsions of populations (which, unfortunately, have been all too frequent during the past century) to ‘provoke significant terrorism on the part of the displaced’.”

I raise this discussion about terrorism, its causes, and moral responsibility not to jump into it. But it did strike me how an everyday form of Mill’s method of comparison plays itself out in partisan debates. John Stuart Mill spelled out an inductive method of causal reasoning. We infer that for a class or set of instances of phenomena we find a common circumstance or element, we infer that the common element(s) cause the phenomenon. Similarly, if we are facing differing outcomes in which all elements were common save one, we infer that difference is causally relevant to the outcome. These can be joined. They can be measured in degrees, in the sense of the degree to which the common element was present and the outcome covaries with its presence. Get enough causal understandings together (pairing up causes and outcomes, being sophisticated to account for interactions, etc.) and we can generate law-like propositions. While methods of uncovering law have become much more sophisticated, this basic approach remains common in the social science, even though deductive approaches, such as those that are based on rationality, are also very prominent.

Mill proposed this methodology largely to understand natural phenomena and they remain a serious element of how we examine natural phenomenon. Statistical inference is a descendant of this technique. But the social world has been far, far less amenable to the objective that the method was aimed for, uncovering laws, or law-like regularities.

Some time ago, the philosopher Jon Elster argued that the social sciences confront a problem in that the same (social) mechanism can operate in different directions, largely due to differing contexts—but in a situation where we cannot fully specify all the elements of the ‘context’. We are faced with a complex interaction of several mechanisms in way we haven’t fully specified. The social “sciences” don’t quite make the “science” cut for that reason.

The tendency in discussions, especially in political discussions, has been to toss in free will, which is hardly unreasonable. But I’m not sure that comparison will get us there. My belief that the dispossessed have a choice over their response and means of their response doesn’t depend on the information that Anatolian Greeks didn’t blow up civilians. Rather, it depends instead on not being able to see what mechanism would get me there in the narrow comparative case. Add a lot more elements—indoctrination, differing organizational capacity perhaps—then maybe, which has been the response.  But if the debate has reached what feels like a dead end, it may speak more of the kinds of arguments we appeal to.

Happy Monday.

It is 10 pm on Wednesday night and a man is screaming on the 1/2/3 platform at Times Square station. His voice gives no clue as to age or race. It’s impossible even to determine the man’s trouble: his tone is shrill and his words are stretched and twisted to accommodate rage. Walk down the platform twenty feet and discover that the man is Chinese, bald, in his mid-fifties. He is 5’6 or so and portly. In different circumstances, you would not think him capable of producing this noise. The subway arrives and the man boards, amply preceding himself. His voice is undiminished inside the metal walls, and his fellow riders immediately flee to other cars. He doesn’t care. Over the train’s clamor you can hear him screaming all the way to Brooklyn.

It’s an important irony that here in New York, in this city that is the finest achievement of modern American urban life, a city that fairly reeks of cool and sophistication, we are reduced (or refined) to our basest fundamental selves. Stringent isolation and the madness of the crowd coexist here, giving rise to New York’s exquisite hybrids–the stone-faced mothers and muttering businessmen and sly derelicts. Had Darwin lived today, he would not have had to visit the Galápagos to induce his theory. Two weeks in the city–at the Pennsylvania Hotel across from Penn Station, perhaps–would serve him well enough to discern natural selection and test its mettle on the street. Indeed, New York is the result of 7,000 years of urban technology, the fantastic product of art, science and political method, and yet nowhere on Earth offers a comparable opportunity to observe human behavior in its purest instinctual form.

We pine in love and we decay in sadness. In shame we cower and from revulsion we withdraw. Fear chases us away. These are retiring emotions. Expressed or simply felt, they are private things, shared and managed among friends, or at least those we know. They emanate modestly, rarely achieving anything like powerful broadcast. Anger is different. Anger is the orangutan’s effulgent orange ass. It exists for its expression, and even in its chastened state we describe it in a way that indicates its volatility: it seethes and smolders, and we step lightly nearby, reasonably fearing its explosion. Internalized, anger is nevertheless evident. The hissed obscenity and the compact jab of an arm (silence! it says, get away!), these are inflections of rage suppressed, and they are obvious to see. They are warnings we heed.

If New York lost Broadway, if thieves looted the Museum Mile and if the observation deck of the Empire State Building were closed permanently for renovation, the city fathers would still have anger to trot out for the entertainment of cash-carrying visitors from the heartland, a sort of ecotourism tweaked for the Ur of contemporary urban landscapes. After all, New York is nothing if not a whore–why not capitalize on its wealth? Colorful pamphlets could be distributed, primers that elucidate the finer points of rage-watching and direct curious visitors to the best blinds in the city. Zagat could compile a survey. Twenty-eight points out of 30 for the corner of 44th and Lexington, where Grand Central Terminal disgorges its fretful loads. Bright red double-deckers could tour the worst traffic snarls and at the same time exacerbate the gridlock, thereby affording their wide-eyed charges the opportunity to be targets of the city’s sporting take on road rage. The Germans and Japanese, the Kansans on holiday, valued, credit-wielding consumers in sherbet bermudas and baseball caps, they would feel a sudden sense of brotherhood twenty feet up as they listened to the narration of their tour-guide (“notice the dents in the hoods of the cabs–bonnets to you Brits–made by the fists of pedestrians”) and pointed out to one another the most fearsome verbal and gesticular threats from these fascinating New Yorkers, ranging free in their preserve.

None is above rage. The extravagantly degreed publisher on his way to work is likely to test his manhood, his courage, by way of the pitch of his shoulders on a construction-narrowed sidewalk. Beneath these skyscrapers and amidst this rush of transit, by God he will not give ground to the slouching thug or the high-heeled secretary as they make their opposite way in the shuffling line beside him. And how many times has he struck another, absorbing the blow of a body as steadfastly as possible, giving nothing away, not even a flinch? Why, every day. Multiple times a day. This is a dynamic city. There’s construction on every block.

Certainly, New York City is a brightly painted streetwalker, vulgar, sexually overt, but it is a debutante and a housekeeper too, and all three ladies are masters of the subtle sneer and the public snub. Rage finds many forms, not least of which are disdain and its underprivileged cousin resentment. The brutality of these expressions takes its cumulative effect, transforming the city into a breeding ground for creeping insanity, making it the de facto capital of lonely mumblers, who quietly suffer the violent discourtesy of thousands in the course of their plodding daily lives. There you go, Chief. No, really, it’s my fucking pleasure. In these poor sensitive souls, whose nerves would be grated by the comparatively mild depredations of a Midwestern city like Pittsburgh or St. Louis, New York effects a paranoia of the chronic, distracted variety. These obscure ghosts, whose eyes remain fixed on the distance or the concrete before them, and whose tolerance for the physical intimacy of subway cars tends to endure for a stop or two at most, these victims are spotted easily for their twitchy gaits and pained faces, and for their hair-trigger shoulders, which tense at the first peal of laughter in the street.

Fifteen years ago, New York received a great deal of credit for its sustained calm in the wake of acquittals for the LA cops who beat down Rodney King. There was wonder in the voices of politicians and pundits, who saw unrest in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia and Newark, and assumed that America’s shameless skyscraping capital would fall in line with the others. It didn’t. Remarkable, they said, an unlikely development. In fact, if not for the pustulating seam of rage running right down the center of this city, we would have been at each other’s throats. We were physically exhausted from the angry contest of our day, and we had no energy left to avail ourselves of the cool relief of riot. Anyway, we have our own infected wounds from which we draw murderous inspiration. It would hardly do to adopt the rage of another, lesser city. Los Angeles can keep its Kings and Furmans, thank you very much. We’ve got Howard Beach and Crown Heights, Yankel Rosenbaum and Al Sharpton, and apocryphal packs of black teenagers, who wild away a lovely evening under the electric lamps of Central Park.

Jed Palmer

[This is posted by Abbas because Jed had some trouble with his own account.]

Here’s a several trillion dollar question: what really happened in Ohio in November? But it’s also a dangerous question, because it leads to: does anyone know? Is the bramble of tales of what went on too overgrown for us ever to know? And the answer to those is, of course, hopelessly uncertain.

Epistemological certainty is utopian: trying to achieve it gets us exactly nowhere. Specifically, it takes us to the scene of philosophy (to borrow from John Guillory), timeless and contemplative, whereas politics unfolds historically, socially. Sometimes too much philosophy replaces the political with the sophistical, and induces quietism. And if I’m sure of anything, it’s that quietism, keeping your head down, is exactly the wrong response to the current political situation. Citizenship requires us not only to debate, but eventually to stop debating and to act. The correct metaphor here is not the thickets of interpretation but something more combative: taking arms against a sea of troubles.

The cover story in Harper’s magazine this month is an article by the media critic Mark Crispin Miller, ‘None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press,’ illustrated by a drawing of three monkeys seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. What’s coy about the whole thing is that Miller doesn’t exactly call it stolen either, at first. He finds direction by indirection, leading with the casual: ‘whichever candidate you voted for… you must admit that last’s year’s presidential race was–if nothing else–pretty interesting.’ Indeed, indeed. Miller has spent his career fighting indifference (I studied film with him at Johns Hopkins), the narcotic effects of television and advertising, and the depressing intractability of U.S. politics. In his view, mass culture promotes ironic detachment, which in turn prevents meaningful action. According to him, the stupidity of beer commercials, sitcoms–the whole of USA Today, you might say–is a trap: it makes us feel lazily clever, flattering us into a meaningless, vegetative sense of superiority. In the realm of politics, at least, I think he’s right: engagement is the crucial fight. Whether it’s the leather armchair of philosophy or the couch of the potato, get on up!

I made five trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania in October and November, driving Downtown for Democracy volunteers overnight to Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Philadelphia. We staged concerts and art shows and and brought celebrities to town and registered the people who came to vote. We threw parties and registered the people who showed to vote. We stood around on college campuses and registered the people who walked by to vote. We typed their information into a database and called them to remind them to vote. We discussed the economy and the war and the environment and abortion and gay rights and tried to get people to care. It was exhilarating but evangelical: a missionary crue of artists, writers, curators, actors, and hipsters converting on the street. It was tiring but addictive work. Registering hordes of 1s and 2s (code for Kerry voters) on a conservative Catholic campus was thrilling, being called ‘Osama’ by gangstas in Dayton, not so much. But our efforts seemed to be succeeding even beyond our nutty optimism. New voter registration in the districts we targeted went up by 250%. Post-election data showed we increased young voter turnout in our precincts by 125%. We were in love with our work.

Still, ominous obstacles of the kind detailed by Miller appeared. The narcolepsy of the media was frustrating. A few of us were interviewed by the Washington Post. We spent two hours with the reporter discussing our attempts to awaken the apolitical, our theories of the role of art in politicizing young people, and the arcane details of our database system. She went on to write a satirical fluff piece about iPods and the slogan on my Gilbert and George t-shirt (‘Are you angry or are you boring?’). More seriously, Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, worked tirelessly negate to progressive efforts, to the extent of trying to declare registrations printed on the wrong paper invalid. Simply finding out which polling place in which to vote was made as difficult as possible. Someone was passing out fliers in black neighborhoods saying ‘Remember to Vote November 5!’ (the day after election day). All of this provided us with more rhetorical ammunition, though: after all, if one party is attempting to keep turnout as low as possible and the other as high, that does imply something about their differences.

On the eve of election day, Zogby opined that Ohio would be the hinge, and that the youth-voter turnout in Franklin county might well determine Ohio. This was astounding music to me: we were based in Franklin county and had succeeded drastically in registering young voters from the colossal undergraduate population of the Ohio State University. I giddily felt, that Monday night, a historical sense of being in the right place at the right time. We were going to determine a national election! (I hadn’t slept for days.)

It rained in Ohio on November 4th. Rain depresses turnout, and combined with the strategy of drastically undersupplying voting machines in Democratic precincts, made for a soggy wait to vote of up to 7 hours. Still, when Ohio was the last state showing on the board, I felt a shaky confidence. All day, the exit polls had justified my faith. As Miller puts it, “twenty-six state exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry, a statistical failure so colossal and unprecedented that the odds against its happening, according to a report last May by the National Election Data Archive Project, were 16.5 million to 1.”

Afterwards, baffled and defeated, we heard testimony like this:

“A representative from Triad Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the Triad supplied Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system had a bad battery and had “lost all of its data”. He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it and another “spare” tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was.”

Dare we call it stolen? I don’t know, I just worked there. Things happen. But, like Watergate, these last two elections should put the lie to that most pernicious ideology, American exceptionalism. Our republic is no less bananas than any other. Corruption is endemic in the political process. Etcetera. I know, no matter who is reading this, now I’m just directing a sermon to the choir. That’s why the precept I drew from my experience of this war (for that is what this is, a war with the most retrograde forces in our society), is similar to Miller’s: indifference is a greater evil than corruption. Politicians have always used the trope of anaphora (repetition of an initial phrase: ‘We must revitalize the economy. We must give all Americans a chance. We must…”) to incite people to care about stuff they find boring. In that spirit: As deadening as it can be, we must keep repeating that repetition, we must keep socially reproducing the desire to stand up and be counted. As dull as it is, we must inculcate in each new generation the will to participate. As difficult as it is, we must convince each other not to accept the depravity of our current leaders, and to believe we will usurp them. Are you angry or are you boring? Both.

Recent Dispatches:

Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermance

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last night we watched a glamorous cross-dresser in a sari hosting a TV talk-show in which he asked Amin Fahim, Benazir Bhutto’s the right hand man, about love. Fahim – a stolid, mustachioed man with the charisma of Dick Cheney – smiled, and said something like love is a function of fate, a bland but sporting reply. The show, “Late Show with Begum Nawazish Ali,” is analogous to the “Dame Edna Experience,” the popular 80’s show featuring the flamboyant British cross-dresser Dame Edna, or the “RuPaul Show.” Both, however, were short-lived in the States and neither host would have been able to invite Dick Cheney. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is contemporary Pakistan and Begum Nawazish Ali is arguably the face of contemporary Pakistani televsion.

During the last year about thirty-five private television channels have been granted licenses by the government. In fact, more licenses have been granted in the last five years than in the last fifty-three. The effects of this administration’s progressive media policy are manifest in public discourse, commercial interest, and society at large. On talk-shows such as Indus’ “Mujahid Barelvi Online,” ARY’s “Q&A with PJ Mir” and Geo’s “50 Minutes,” powerful sitting generals and prominent politicians are savaged by a new, brazen, no-holds-barred breed of talk-show hosts.

In the May issue of the most widely circulated news magazine, the Herald, Meera, one of Pakistan’s most famous film stars was asked: your next “[Bollywood] venture…sounds like a recipe for some explicit sex scenes…” Meera replied: “I don’t know what the big deal is. What is sex? It is a bodily function similar to going to the toilet and eating. Just look at the population of this country. We have so many people because someone out there is having sex…We have to realize that sex is part of life. God has given the instinct to us, not the mullahs. Haven’t you seen sparrows or animals have sex? It is a natural process. It is like hunger and thirst. Who are we to oppose something that is natural?”

On a breezy Wednesday night last week in Karachi, Ghazanfar Ali, the large, charming head of the Indus television network, hosted us at his Beverly Hills-like residence for drinks and dinner. On the esplanade outside, old Christian rockers – vestiges of Karachi’s jazz age of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s – played Nancy Sinatra’s “Summer Wine.” The soiree was held for a visiting group of Indians from MTV India who is interested in a joint-venture with Indus Music or IM. IM features attractive twentysomething VJs in tank-tops and jeans introducing Pakistani rock bands. An MTV executive told us that “we can’t compete with your rock and roll scene.” Indeed, IM has become not only an institution but a Pakistani cultural export. It has spawned a generation of rockers who have fused native traditions, including Sufi’ism, the mystical variety of Islam, with the influences as varied as Led Zeppelin and Limp Bizket.

Teenagers today, whether denizens of Defense or Nazimabad, aspire to be musicians, VJs, newscasters, producers, and actors. The emergent “media generation” spans classes, drawing from the elite as well as the urban middle class: we’ve been to open-air pop concerts attended by several thousands of middle class teenagers – boys and girls – gyrating to bands that include Junoon, Fuzon, EP, Noori, Strings and Jal. In fact, many working at the new channels jump up the social ladder in a matter of years not generations. The administration’s media policy has produced a generation that’s redefining what it means to be Pakistani, a generation confident in itself, unlike, say, the generation produced under Zia-ul-Haq’s conservative regime or even the previous, precarious, democratic ones. And unlike their parents, they aren’t scarred by history, by Partition, the ’71 war. A rare insightful outside commentator notes, “The kids appreciate Musharraf because he’s opened up the country to outside influences and loosened the stifling grip of the clerics – at least in the cities. Even conservative rural areas aren’t entirely immune either – satellite tv has seen to that, with Baywatch and its ilk beamed into the most remote outposts.”

Admittedly, it’s peculiar that Musharraf’s media policy – a dictator’s media policy – is liberal, progressive, indeed more progressive than any administration’s in Pakistan’s history. (Then again, Putin’s a democrat but the Russian press is horribly cowed and pliant.) It may all be a fluke but, more probably, it has to do with Musharraf’s thick skin and particular sensibililty. Salman Ahmad of Junoon says, “We’ve had the most freedom of expression since Musharraf came to power in 1999 – you can say anything, do anything, get up on stage and play anywhere.” Musharraf seems to have become a patron of the arts: he, for instance, recently inaugurated the government funded National Academy for the Performing Arts” or NAPA (a development picked up by the CSM although the reporter puts a peculiar spin on it and is occassionally incorrect: NAPA is not Pakistan’s first performing arts academy). Strangely, despite outside scrutiny of Pakistan in the print and electronic media, in academia, in the insular DC think-tank community, almost no commentator has picked up these trends. In fact, although Pakistan’s political history is documented and catalogued ad nauseam, it’s cultural and social history is not just glossed over but systematically ignored. This gaping lacuna completely skews any political analysis.

We, here, attempt to fill in the blanks.

The contemporary Pakistani rock scene owes much to Nazia Hassan the pigtailed, dungareed pop icon of the 80’s whose death anniversary was on August 13th. In the video of “Dum dum dee dee,” Nazia assumes the role of Alice, Carroll’s prepubescent protagonist, flittingly navigating a cardboard Wonderland set. Like Alice, Nazia at thirteen, fell into a wonderland of fortune and certain fame. The film Qurbani (1980), which featured her song “Aap jaisa koi,” was not only a “runaway success” at the time, transforming pubescent Nazia into a “star overnight,” but has become a modern classic. “Disco Diwane” (1981) sold a record several million copies on either side of the border (and hit number one on the Brazilian charts!), followed by “Boom Boom,” (1982) “Young Tarang,” (1986) “Hotline” (1987) and “Camera Camera” (1992).

Nazia’s oeuvre comprises anthems of love and celebrations of youth, fusing “indigenous melody with synthesized chords and western percussion.” The unfettered mirth in “Aao Na” is contagious, the lyrics silly, the disco beat insistent, like an ABBA number. The catchy “Disco Diwane” and “Boom Boom” demand animation, movement – foot-tapping, finger-snapping, hip-shaking. These songs echo within our generation. Our favorite lyrics are found in the resplendent “Aakhein milanay walay” when Nazia proclaims, “Main jawan/ Main haseen/ Meray paas kya nahin / hay sub kuch?” These eleven words definitively articulate the arrogance of youth.

Nazia’s contribution to pop is much more than a casual survey suggests: in a way, she gave voice to an inchoate genre, a genre without meaningful tradition, much like Rushdie, who established magic realism as the literary voice of South Asia, or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who came to define qawwali. She achieved this at a time when PTV broadcast bathetic patriotic songs and Bollywood churned out shrill hits. And her videos revolutionized PTV in particular, and Pakistani videology in general, by doing away with drab sets, frumpy curtains, expressions of severity, the constraints of immobility, the prerequisites, the code, it seemed, for any singer performing on television in the eighties.

Nazia’s orbit of influence extends across the border. An Indian commentator notes that “…Hindustani film music was never the same after Nazia, maybe accidentally, invaded it…Aap jaisa koi actually set a disco trend.” Nazia has contributed to the development of the present isomorphism of Bollywood music and pop: “She set – well ahead of its time – the personal album trend in India,” spawning the likes of Alisha, Lucky Ali and Shewna Shetty. A disconcerted Ameen Sayani, India’s Casey Casim, prophetically remarked: “Either it’s a fluke or a harbinger of a new trend. Nothing else can explain that a Pak (sic) girl, who’s totally unknown in India, should achieve such super success.” Harbinger, buddy.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Other related Critical Digressions:
Dispatch from Karachi
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Live 8 at Sandspit

It’s hot in New York. Deep summer. Dog days. Somehow it all makes me think of Roman poetry. The mood is languid and personal, stuff happens slowly, even the disasters. I’m thinking of my favorite poet, Catullus. I’m thinking of the way he captured the feel of a lazy Sunday of desperate but indifferent screwing with the side door swinging open in a limp breeze. I’m thinking of how he captured in verse the specific insanities of love, when you’re finding it and when you’re losing it.

It all started in Greece I guess. It started with Sappho and Anacreon and Archilochos. We’re talking lyric poetry here. And with the lyric poetry of Sappho and friends something very different from the heroic dactylic hexameter of the Homeric epics came into being. It was intimate and personal. It was passionate and wounded. It was subjective. Some people, like the Hegelian minded philosopher Bruno Snell, decided that the very birth of the subject could be discovered in the transition from Homeric verse to the lyric poets, to the philosophic writing of Attic Greece. Probably that’s a little heavy handed and speculative. But it is true that Sappho feels new and different and even modern in a way that Homer or Hesiod or the Hymns don’t. Which is not to say that Homer isn’t great. Homer is great. Hesiod is great in a different way. But they don’t write about the here and now of a hot summer day and the passions and stupidities that can occur within. They don’t write, like Sappho does, straight to the heart of subjective experience. The Sapphic strophe bounces along like personal experience.

When Sappho writes the following you feel it in your gut or your balls or the middle of your feet or all of the above.

I just really want to die. She, crying many tears, left me And said to me: “Oh, how terribly we have suffered, we two, Sappho, really I don’t want to go away.” And I said to her this: Go and be happy, remembering me, For you know how we cared for you. And if you don’t I want to remind you ………….and the lovely things we felt with many wreathes of violets and ro(ses and cro)cuses and …………..and you sat next to me and threw around your delicate neck garlands fashioned of many woven flowers and with much……………costly myrrh …………..and you anointed yourself with royal….. and on soft couches…….(your) tender……. fulfilled your longing……….

And that’s without being able to convey the specific rhythm of the Sapphic meter, which relies on the relative length of long and short vowels in ancient Greek and can’t really be captured in English. (If I’m thankful for one thing in my overly studious younger days, it’s that I labored to read ancient Greek at the amazing CUNY Graduate Center Intensive Greek program with Hardy Hansen. Reading Homer in the original with my friends Theo and Dan one summer in the Catskills by a small lake amidst an invasion of fireflies was worth all the bullshit and then some.)

Skip forward a few centuries to the Hellenistic period. Callimachus and his pals are terribly serious scholars. Grammar, rhetoric and that sort of shit is the thing of the day. They’re officially establishing the kind of classical humanism that will be rediscovered in the renaissance and celebrated as, well, something remarkable in human achievement. Which it was, even if we don’t want to get all romantic about it. They call themselves the Neoteroi, the new kids on the block. They don’t write in the epic style. Like Sappho and friends, they’ve got an intimate and personal approach. They like a small moment, an individual experience.

Now we jump from the Greeks to the Romans. Rome: first century BC. The glory days. All the big boys are on the scene; Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Virgil. Catullus and his group of malcontents are trying to bring the style of the Greek neoterics into a Latin poetry. They’ve got various metrical problems to deal with. They want to create a poetic foot in Latin that can compete with Greek lyric. And they want to achieve the intimacy that is in such contrast to the epic feel (though Catullus could do epic very well when he wanted to, thank you). Catullus and his crew think of themselves as the new neoterics.

Catullus creates his hendecasyllables to fit the bill (basically a spondee, a dactyl, and then three trochees).

The great, the amazing thing about the hendecasyllables is the way that Catullus wields them both so lightly and with such an expert touch. There’s an off the cuff feel, extremely important to Catullus, but it actually came about through extremely labored and technical means. Achieving that effect was what it was all about. When it came together correctly, Catullus called it lepidus, a difficult word to translate but best understood as some combination between witty, elegant, and sophisticated. Catullus’ hendecasyllables were a mighty force. He could unleash them in love or in anger or in both. In poem 42 he sends them out against a woman who’s snatched one of his manuscripts. This is Richard Bullington’s translation, he translates hendecasyllables as ‘nasty words’.

Come here, nasty words, so many I can hardly tell where you all came from. That ugly slut thinks I’m a joke and refuses to give us back the poems, can you believe this shit? Lets hunt her down , and demand them back! Who is she, you ask? That one, who you see strutting around, with ugly clown lips, laughing like a pesky French poodle. Surround her, ask for them again! “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” Doesn’t give a shit? Oh, crap. Whorehouse. or if anything’s worse, you’re it. But I’ve not had enough thinking about this. If nothing else, lets make that pinched bitch turn red-faced. All together shout, once more, louder: “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” But nothing helps, nothing moves her. A change in your methods is cool, if you can get anything more done. “Sweet thing, give my poems back!”

And tying us back to our early Greeks, Catullus makes a translation/interpretation of Sappho. Here it is in the Latin, for those with the chops, and in an English translation.

Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identidem te spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
perdidit urbes.

That man seems to me to be equal to a god,
That man, if it is right to say, seems to surpass the gods,
who sitting opposite to you repeatedly looks at you
and hears

your sweet laughter, something which robs miserable me
of all feelings: for as soon as I look
at you, Lesbia, no voice remains
in my mouth.

But the tongue is paralyzed, a fine fire
spreads down through my limbs, the ears ring with their
very own sound, my eyes veiled
in a double darkness.

Idleness, Catullus, is your trouble;
idleness is what delights you and moves you to passion;
idleness has proved ere now the ruin of kings and
prosperous cities.

When Catullus speaks of Lesbia here he is using, with a nod to Sappho, the pet name for his one time love, probably Clodia Metellus, a Roman socialite. His love for her was crazy and short. She seems to have been something of a femme fatale. Catullus writes some of the most beautiful love poems to her that have ever been written (again, and unfortunately, the English translations don’t really capture what is painfully frickin perfect in the Latin).

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has once set, remains to be slept and the sleep of one unbroken night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.

And when the love faltered, Catullus could write poems of heart rending worry and self doubt:

Lesbia always talks bad to me nor is she ever silent about me: Lesbia is loving me, if not, I may be destroyed. By what sign? Because they are the same signs: I am showing her disapproval constantly, I am lost if I do not love.

But there may not be a poem in any language that expresses the intense duality and pain of a love affair that is tearing apart one’s mind than the terse, beautiful odi et amo, I love and I hate. It goes:

odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love: How can I do it, you ask?

I don’t know, but it’s killing me.

Two lines. Everything in two lines. The entire world hangs in the balance of two lines. And when the balance finally broke and Catullus was jilted he could write some of the most vicious and nasty poetry that’s ever been penned.

The lude tavern and you tentmates, the ninth pillar from the capped brothers, you think that you alone have mentulas, do you think that it is permitted for you alone to have sex with whatever girls there are and that it is permitted to think that the others are goats? or, in an unbroken mind, because you fools sit, and 100 or 200 don’t you think that I will dare to rape orally the 200 loungers at the same time? Moreover think, for I shall write on the front of the whole tavern with sopiones for you. For my girl, who has fled from my embrace loved as much as no other will be loved, for whom great wars were fought by me, has settled down there, all of you fine and well to do men love her, and indeed, which is undeserved, all the punks and alleyway sex maniacs; son of the Geltiberia abounding in rabbits, Ignatius, whom a dark beard makes good and tooth scoured with Iberian urine.

In 54 BCE, Catullus disappears from history. Maybe he just died. Maybe he ran off to be something other than a poet. Who knows. But it’s raining like crazy on this humid New York night and I’m thinking of Catullus on his little boat he loved so. I’m thinking of his summer days with Lesbia and the way he burned and suffered and triumphed and failed. He joked that his poems might last for ages. It was an amusing thought because they were poems of the moment. But they did last for ages. Moments last for ages sometimes.

The last thing my wife said to me in person was, “You are not the person you think you are, and you are not the person that others take you to be.” At the time, I thought the only thing harder than having your partner of ten years call you a liar was suspecting that she might be right. I boarded a train in Seattle that afternoon and rode it straight for three days, back to New York City.

The divorce was a nasty and savage affair. We had been in graduate school at the same time and had incurred mutual debts. We had made homes in ten cities and five countries. I was godfather to her niece. Friends and family were forced to choose sides. She was not an American citizen, so there were green card issues to be dealt with. There had been infidelities. We had taken the gloves off long before and our knuckles were bruised by the time it was over. In our last written communication, haggling from opposite sides of the country over details in the divorce papers, I pointed out the unbearable irony of her claiming that particular item, when it was soiled with the very things that had destroyed us; and she notified me that my library had caught fire and that I should expect from her nothing more than the things I had carried with me when I left.

I spent a good deal of the next five years punishing myself, with her memory following me at times like a shadow and at others like an echo; but slowly, because one has no choice in these things, I began to rebuild my life. I finished my thesis. I found a job. I paid my bills on time. I made new friends and reinvested in relationships that had lost capital. My family welcomed me back; and most importantly, I had the City, where one can be or become anything one puts one’s mind to. I moved into a loft in Brooklyn and set myself up as an artist. Despair and self-loathing gave way, under the gentle pressure of passing time, to what I hoped might be the beginnings of wisdom and humility. I had learned something, which was good; but psychic healing, I knew, was in large part a matter of simple forgetting. I waited, and did my best along the way, to forget her.

Then one morning in a November past, after staying up all night helping a friend through a difficult break-up, having a conversation in which she was, for me, a touchstone of loss and letting go, I went into work, sat down at my desk, and listened to my phone messages. I recognized the voice immediately. It was her mother, and she was crying. “This is Y—, X—‘s mother. X—’s had an accident, and it was very bad, and we thought she was going to make it, but she didn’t, and she died. I know you loved her at one time and I know she loved you too and the service is at 4pm on Tuesday…” Her voice trailed off and the crying took over and she put down her end of the receiver.

I learned that day that my wife had been killed because she walked out of her apartment one morning to go for a run and there was a truck reversing up a one way street with a ladder hanging off the back of it. She had looked in the direction of the oncoming traffic but who would look to see if a truck with a ladder hanging off its rear was going in reverse the wrong way up a one-way street? She had stepped into the street and was struck in the head by the ladder, and she had fallen to the ground and struck her head again, and she had died.

She died neither for her beliefs, which were deeply held, nor for her work, which embodied them. She was not killed by a criminal and she did not take her own life. There was no will, no intent, nothing of any value or meaning or even maliciousness behind her death. It was profoundly, incomprehensibly stupid. If she had brushed her hair out for just a minute longer that morning, or decided to change her socks before she left her apartment, or heard her phone ring on the way out or gotten her key stuck in her door, the truck would have backed up that one way street and passed her by and come to a stop. Instead, it killed her. Her death was a manifestation of the pure negativity of existence.

Ten members of my family came to the service with me. We sat like lepers off to one side of the assembled but our status went unnoticed because there were over 400 people there. The ceremony was an excruciating thing. She was only thirty-five years old; she was beautiful and very much alive. The kind of person that people would describe as being “in control” of her destiny. My impression was that she had been happy.

It was not until halfway through the service that loss—the default setting for forgetting—took hold of me. There was a photomontage projected and everyone sat down to watch. Something cascaded in me then. I had taken most of the photographs there, and I had been excised from many of those I hadn’t taken. Our most private memories were on display, and I wasn’t embarrassed or jealous for that, but it was strange to think that I was the only person in the room—in fact the only person anywhere, in the entire cosmos—who recognized what we were looking at. She was, finally, gone.

Sometimes when I think about it I feel like I’m at a dinner where the guests become more ravenous the more you feed them, or at a poker table where the stakes go up with every hand you lose. First you lose the relationship, then you lose the time and experience invested in the relationship, then even the people playing the game are lost at the table. Life deals a wonderful hand, but existence—the dull phenomenon of being—absorbs your debts, extends your credit, keeps you on and then crushes you out, like a cigarette beneath its heel. Existence is deaf, dumb and blind. Existence never loses.

I held onto the pain for a while, poking and prodding and stirring it, because it was the last thing I had where she was concerned, and letting go of it seemed like just another loss. I didn’t care about forgetting her now; existential terror is a trump card, and to watch Being win everything and move on across the table makes one want to keep a small reserve of cash in one’s pocket. But I was at the table, and if you’re going to sit down you might as well play, so I bet what I had left of her, the pain and resentment, the exhaustion, the bad memories and the good, as well as my fury that existence could just squash another player and take her stake. This time, though, it would be a relief to lose.

It has never been fully clear to me why rocket science has become such a popular trope for intellectually challenging activity. Brain surgery makes more sense to me as a metaphor (as in, “It ain’t brain surgery, you know!”) since it is rather obviously very intricate, requires dexterity in addition to knowledge, decades of training, etc. On the other hand, at least on the surface, what could be simpler than a rocket? Take a cylinder, fill it with a flammable material, leave one end open, and set that end on fire. The expanding burning material will escape out the end, pushing the rocket in the opposite direction by Newton’s third law. That’s it. (A bullet could be considered a small rocket, I suppose.) Moreover, say you are going to the moon in your rocket: all you need to do to calculate the correct trajectories, orbits, etc., is Newtonian mechanics from a few hundred years ago. You needn’t worry about electro-magnetic or nuclear forces, just good old gravity. There are no quantum or relativistic effects to be taken into account, no superconductivity, nothing fancy. A bit of chemistry (for the fuel) and classical phycics will do just fine. Of course there’s a bit more to it, but it must be the irresistably romantic vision of our sailing starward into space that gives rockets their public fascination, however superficial. (Please, no phallo-Freudian explanations in the comments area.)

Quick, name a famous rocket scientist! Did you think of Robert Goddard? That’s good. Yes, Goddard has come to be known as the “father of modern rocketry.” Who else? Maybe Wernher von Braun? Yep, he’s the German guy responsible for the V1 and V2 rockets before eventually settling in the United States and developing many of America’s cold war-era ICBMs, so he has a bit of a mixed reputation here, at least morally speaking. (I suppose inspiring Thomas Pynchon to write Gravity’s Rainbow also counts as a sort of achievement!) If you can think of any others, you’re doing a lot better than most people. Rocket science hasn’t made too many individuals famous, the way, say, quantum physics has. There aren’t many popular books about it either. So, today, I’m going to give you a third name to remember: Arch Chilton Scurlock.

Full disclosure: for years, one of my dearest friends (and my wife’s maid-of-honor at our wedding) has been Margy Scurlock, Arch’s youngest daughter, and through her I also knew Arch and his charming wife Nancy. (My wife Margit and I spent our wedding night in Arch’s amazingly beautiful suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Thanks again, Margy!) True to the stereotype (despite my puzzlement over it) of rocket scientists, he was one of the brightest, most vivacious, and genuinely interesting men I have met. Not only was Dr. Scurlock personally responsible for some of the most astounding advances in rocketry in the 20th century, he was also a remarkably astute businessman, and has even been called the Bill Gates of his day. But let me try to tell his story chronologically.

Arch Scurlock was born in 1920 in Beaumont, Texas. His father served as the district attorney of Jefferson County. His maternal grandfather was senator Horace Chilton (Dem-Texas), whose own grandfather was Thomas Chilton, anti-Jacksonian congressman from Kentucky in the 1830s. Despite this distinguished political background, Arch found that his own passion was science, and he obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and physics from UT Austin. He excelled in college, and was even named “best all-around intramural athlete” in his senior year. (He is supposed to have had a “lightning squash game,” but I never had a chance to play him. Apparently he wasn’t too bad at boxing either.) He went on to MIT and received a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I seem to remember that he once told me that he also held a master’s degree in meteorology from the University of Chicago. In any case, during WWII, Arch was a Navy meteorologist and also flew reconnaissance missions in the South Pacific.

After the war, Dr. Scurlock joined Engineering Research Associates in Arlington, Virginia. This was a company staffed mainly by cryptographers who had broken the “Purple Cypher,” the main Japanese code during the war. William C. Norris, who later founded Control Data Corporation, was also there at the time. The company had a contract from the Office of Naval Research to study ram jets, pulse jets, and solid and liquid propellents. After a short while there, on January 24, 1949, Dr. Scurlock founded the Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC–yes, the first three letters of his name) with $1,000 in capital, and a three-month research contract from Princeton University. ARC would soon become one of the fastest growing science and engineering companies in the world, eventually responsible for the production of dozens of types of rockets (including the Minuteman, the Tomohawk Cruise Missile, and the TOW, Maverick, and Stinger missiles). The company also diversified into very disparate fields, such as producing the inflators for automotive airbags. ARC’s main innovations and work, however, was in producing solid rocket fuels. Dr. Scurlock could be called the father of solid rocketry. (The space shuttle, for example, has one liquid fuel tank, and two solid rocket boosters.)

Some years ago, Dr. Scurlock invited a few of Margy’s friends to the 21 Club for her birthday. Over pre-prandial drinks, I asked him for an example of something interesting that he had discovered in rocketry. He thought about it for a bit, ordered another drink, then with characteristic modesty said, “Many discoveries in science are accidental. You are looking for one thing, and find another. Think of Alexander Fleming‘s discovery of Penicillin. I’ll give you a small example from my field.” He then went on to describe one of the ways in which he solved the problem of burn-rates in solid rocket fuel.

Let me now, in turn, try to explain to you what he told me: the total energy stored in the fuel of a rocket is known as its impulse, and is measured in pound-seconds. This means X pounds of thrust delivered for Y seconds. So, for a fuel formulation that delivers 10,000 pound-seconds of impulse, this could mean a thousand pounds of thrust for 10 seconds, or 100 pounds of thrust for 100 seconds, etc. The problem was that the fuel they were working with at the time, something called Arcite, does not burn fast enough to produce the required thrust. In other words, they needed to increase the thrust (pounds) and decrease the burning time (seconds) for Arcite. While thinking about the problem, Dr. Scurlock and others were doing some preliminary measurements of flame temperatures of various propellent formulations in the laboratory. They were using thermocouples (bi-metallic filaments) embedded in the fuel grains to do this. Now, the way that a rocket fuel grain burns is this: once ignited, the flame at the end melts the solid fuel just behind it, which then ignites in turn, melting the fuel behind it, etc. What Dr. Scurlock noticed was, that the fuel was burning faster with the thermocouple wires embedded in it. He immediately realized that if he inserted a wire made of a material which conducts heat well, like copper or silver, say, into the middle of the rocket grain, then this wire will conduct heat from the flame to the material behind it much faster, melting and igniting it. What results is a cone shape, with the point of the cone pointing inwards along the wire toward the unburned fuel. It would look something like this:

Notice that while normally the area of the fuel which is burning is a circle at the end with an area of ΠR², with the embedded wire it is a cone shaped area with a much larger surface. Suppose the cone extends inwards into the fuel to a length twice the diameter of the rocket. Then, in terms of the radius, R, of the rocket cylinder, the surface area of the burning cone shaped area of the fuel would be:

Surface Area = ΠR sqrt (R² + (2D)²) = ΠR sqrt (R² + (4R)²) = ΠR sqrt (17R²) = ΠR² sqrt (17)

Since the square root of 17 is between 4 and 5, the surface area of the fuel that is burning at a given time in this way is 4 to 5 times greater than without the embedded wire. And indeed, after experimenting with various materials and configurations, Dr. Scurlock was able to achieve burn rates five times faster than before, which is what they needed for the Arcite fuel. By the way, the cone is just molded into the fuel grain at the beginning, allowing high thrust right from …3, 2, 1, ignition. Such are the little breakthroughs and increments with which even rocket science is normally done.

The December 5, 1960 issue of U.S. News and World Report reported the upcoming inauguration of JFK, remarking that he “moves into the White House at 43 to replace a president aged 70,” and then moved on to note that the young are replacing the old in business as well, like Arch Scurlock, age 40, who “heads the fast-growing Atlantic Research Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia, a major producer of solid fuels for space vehicles.” In 1968, Dr. Scurlock went on to form Research Industries, a venture capital firm which invested in small startup companies in the aerospace, defense, and textile industries, including Halifax Corporation, an engineering firm in Virginia. Dr. Scurclock’s obituary in the Washington Post notes that “At his death, he was chairman and chief executive of Research Industries and board chairman of Halifax. He had seen Halifax through rough moments, including a scandal in the late 1990s involving a former controller who pleaded guilty to embezzling millions from the company.” Arch Chilton Scurlock died on December 9, 2002, aged 82. Knowing how much I admired him, Margy passed along various personal items of his to me as mementos, including the hand-tailored blue suit he is wearing in the profile picture above (by a weird coincidence, we happened to be the exact same size), and this globe which he kept on his desk. He is missed.

I think I’ll give Elton John’s old lyricist Bernie Taupin the last word:

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Have a good week!

[Note: I got much information about Arch and ARC from Philip Key Reily’s book The Rocket Scientists.]

My other recent Monday Musings:
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

For me, blogosphere triumphalism is usually just a minor irritant. Don’t get me wrong; I was impressed with the speed and thoroughness with which the blog realm raised questions about the authenticity of the Killian (George W. Bush’s National Guard performance) memo that cost Dan Rather his anchor. (Though, as I recall, it was The Washington Post and USA Today that really disproved the authenticity of the documents.) The sadly non-terminal case of self-love and occasional megalomania you find (“the blogosphere will punish”!) seemed more embarrassing than anything else; it also seemed harmless. But the whole Dilpazier Aslam affair has made me rethink this virtual mob.

For those of you who haven’t been following the story, Dilpazier Aslam, a 27-year old Muslim and journalist from Yorkshire, was a trainee for The Guardian. He had been recruited for a year-long apprenticeship under one of its diversity programs.

The Guardian wound up casting its net wider than it had intended. Following the June 7th bombings in London, Aslam wrote a comment on its editorial pages entitled “We rock the boat: Today’s Muslims aren’t prepared to ignore injustices“. In it, he offered some disturbing lines, but, it should be sadly noted (and with litotes, at that), not wholly uncommon ones.

“If, as police announced yesterday, four men (at least three from Yorkshire) blew themselves up in the name of Islam, then please let us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked. Shocked would also be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own. . . . Shocked would be to say that we don’t understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this. . .Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.”

Needless to say, the implication that the suicide bombing of civilians is a “sassy” way of expressing opinions was not received well.

And in an era with declining search costs for information, it really didn’t take much time to discover that Aslam belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical but legal Islamist group whose chief and predictably tragic-comic-scary objective appears to the reestablishment of the caliphate. (The UK Home Office considers it a “radical, but to date non-violent Islamist group”.) While waiting to undo what Attaturk wrought, Hizb, like many millenarian movements before it, occupies itself by producing conspiracy theories and aiming to be a major player in the growing world market for anti-Semitism.

The story of Aslam’s membership in Hizb was broken by Scott Burgess, a libertarian blogger who lives in London and who oddly had been beaten out for the traineeship by Aslam. (This fact is regularly mentioned in narratives of the whole affair; for my part, I’d like to say that I don’t want to imply that resentment was a factor. Aslam may have been simply brought to Burgess’ attention as a result of the consideration.) Posts from Burgess’ blog (The Daily Ablution) about Aslam, Hizb, the bombings made their way across the Internet and the media. Blogs on the left and right—Harry’s Place, Norman Geras, Andrew Sullivan, and the terrible Michelle Malkin—chimed in and called for his dismissal. And he was dismissed.

For the megalomaniacal wing of the blog realm, the dismissal “has resounded across the blogging universe like a shockwave from a supernova”. And again the blogosphere had triumphed, correcting a crime and a sin. Ablution indeed.

I recall a post, though I don’t recall exactly where, that urged the blogosphere to move into action on Aslam, which it did. And I was suddenly reminded of a mob. Not an SPQR populusque mob; but an Ox-Bow Incident mob. I had read Aslam’s piece and pieces at Hizb’s site and also thought that The Guardian should remove him (unless of course they wanted a radical Islamist journalist, in which case they should’ve come out and said it). But the blogosphere was over the top and was beginning to resemble a drunken bar fight or, rather, frenzy. Its peak (or is it trough?) may have been Dreadpundit’s following statement.

“That’s why I’m issuing a secular fatwah and asking for some loyal Briton to saw off your head and ship it to me (use Fed-Ex, please, so I can get a morning delivery, and do remember the dry ice, also, a videotape of the ‘execution’).”

Though, in fairness, he included a disclaimer in small font, consoling that he was “not really interested in receiving the head of Dilpazier Aslam, nor do I advocate any act of violence against him.”

I raise this whole affair because Richard Posner’s review (as well as my own obsession with cognitive ghettoes, the media, and segmented markets in information) in The New York Times Book Review raised some interesting, if not novel, points, related to it.

“The public’s interest in factual accuracy is less an interest in truth than a delight in the unmasking of the opposition’s errors. Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans, while taking gleeful satisfaction in the exposure of the forgeries on which Dan Rather had apparently relied, and in his resulting fall from grace. They reveled in Newsweek’s retracting its story about flushing the Koran down a toilet yet would prefer that American abuse of prisoners be concealed. Still, because there is a market demand for correcting the errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one’s enemies, the media exercise an important oversight function, creating accountability and deterring wrongdoing. That, rather than educating the public about the deep issues, is their great social mission. It shows how a market produces a social good as an unintended byproduct of self-interested behavior.”

I’m usually wary of willy-nilly extensions of the market to questions of information—Ken Arrow pointed out a long time ago, you’d have to know the value of information already to assess whether it’s worth the cost of acquiring it, and in some cases you won’t know that until, well, you know the information. And I’m exceptionally wary of Richard Posner’s extensions of the market metaphor and market solution, mostly as a matter of taste, like when he suggested auctioning orphans. But this one, like most of what Posner writes, raises interesting questions and it worth following because he extends it (and then something else to) blogging.

“What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public.”

That is, the blogosphere, like the market, acts as an information aggregation mechanism.

“The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise – not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs.”

The comparison of the blogosphere with the market raises an issue that Posner didn’t fully consider, the question of norms in the market. However imperfect they may be, organizations in the market, in addition to being governed by regulations, also adhere to norms that they have developed over the long haul. There are occasional violators such as Enron, but facets like transparency and accuracy are seen as necessary for its well functioning. These norms have developed partly in response to state regulation or the threat of state regulation, but also in Hayekian fashion—a spontaneous order generated by interactions, which in turn require shared norms to effectively coordinate and execute action. Here, the “contracts” are implicit, not spelled out. And the blogopshere remains in need of them, though the only thing to be done is wait while adhering to deceny and point out when others aren’t

(I was reminded of this problem when I came across this story about the terrible John Lott on Tim Lambert’s blog, and thought that were it not for the decency of the students at the Federalist Society, it would’ve been simply two different accounts.)

Things like a Blogger’s Code of Ethics are not what I’m talking about.  Rather the norms will have to emerge out of actually practices. I hope that self-congratulation is proscribed by these norms, and if so, their emergence can’t be quick enough.  (Fafblog—my nominee for first mover/signaler of the blogoshpere’s self-disciplining mechanism—should make every instance of self-congratulation an object of ridicule.)  But more importantly, calls to gang up on someone should be seen as a “no-no”, even if it did produce the desired results in this instance.

In the meantime, I was struck in the wake of whole Aslam Affair by the feeling that here (the blogosphere) is a thing that I like in the whole but not really so much in its parts—a sort of fallacy of division. (I should clarify, that Brad de Long, Crooked Timber, Majikthise, Three-Toed Sloth and the rest of those on our links page are excluded from “parts”.) But still, blogs, and not just the blogosphere, remain an obsession.

Happy Monday.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Naipaul is brilliant. Indeed, he is one of the finest writers the 20th century has produced. His book covers are often embellished with the following blandishment: “For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul.” We agree. His early comedies – Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, and The Suffrage of Elvira – are perceptive, compassionate, even Narayanesque, evoking, reifying a distant, eccentric island – a world populated by real, colorful characters. The culmination of the early period of his career is in A House for Biswas, which, according to James Wood, issued the most enduring literary character in post-WWII fiction. Subsequently, his superb, dark, Conradian novels that include Mimic Men, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River depict seismic shifts in the short history of the “Third World” like few others before him.

But Naipaul’s prose is not the issue. It’s his politics and persona. In a way, Naipaul has not published a book worth the page it’s printed on since 1979, since A Bend in the River, when he almost exclusively pursued “travel writing,” an ill-defined genre, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither journalism not sociology. In a review of Among the Believers, for instance, Fouad Ajami avers,

“…one gets the distinct feeling of superficiality in this book. Of the holy city of Qom, Naipaul writes: ‘Qom’s life remained hidden.’ It is probably fair to say that much of the territory he covered remained hidden to him. The places he went to confused and eluded him, denied him entry. He was in a hurry; he wanted to see ‘Islam in action.’ But the people he wanted to comprehend were ambiguous and guarded, and under no obligation to reveal themselves to a traveler. Inside the large international hotels, visitors came to talk with him, but his questions frequently seem rigged and their answers canned.”

As Naipaul once said, “We read to find out what we already know.”

In fact, over the years Naipaul has fancied and fashioned himself into what can be best described as a “post-national,” a native so progressive that he can scrutinize himself, his society, and context without prejudice. It seems that Naipaul believes that he has progressed, evolved, by stepping on to an airplane. It’s as if he is awed by order: light-switches that function; taps that pour water; well-stocked grocery stores that carry eight varieties of jam; and clean streets that lead to well-lit avenues and those to broad highways. He’s become civilized by moving from here to there, by severing ties with his past, and consequently, he can claim citizenship of the world.

Yet he is a bigot. Of the bindi that adorns the forehead of married Indian women, Naipaul once said, “The dot means: My head is empty.” Naipaul vitriol for Africa and Africans is spectacular. “This place is full of buggers”; “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?” Mel Gussow notes, “About the influx of Jamaicans into England, he suggested in an article that one way to decrease immigration would be to increase the importation of bananas. His much quoted line was: ‘a Banana a day will keep the Jamaican away.’” Naipaul has managed to package condescension as objectivity.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s pathology intrigues us endlessly. Both post-national and bigot, his persona remains entirely parochial. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his one time friend Paul Theroux comments,

“…[Naipaul] behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to the core – caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about the body being ‘tainted.’ Because he was an Indian from the West Indies – defensive, feeling his culture was under siege – his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.”

Recently, old man Naipaul has come full circle, officially reclaiming his heritage by associating himself with the BJP, the Hindu chauvinist party in Indian politics. None other than Rushdie castigated him for being a “cheerleader for the [BJP].” He added, “When Naipaul writes articles that the BJP can use as recruiting material, it’s a problem.”

Naipaul is, in a way, a bastard, spawned of disparate narratives, a byproduct of the postcolonial world. He’s uncomfortable here and there, in his native Trinidad and his adopted country, Great Britain: “Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth, a Briton by citizenship…He has lived in all three societies, and…has bitter feelings about them all: India is unwashed, Trinidad is unlearned, England is intellectually and culturally bankrupt.” Indeed he has become a sort of archetype, a variety of insider who has adopted the outsider’s methodology and worldview and consequently can corroborate the outsider’s perception of the inside. Strangely and sadly, Fouad Ajami, the brilliant author of the Vanished Imam and one time friend of Edward Saeed, typifies this variety. (It should be noted there are many insiders who are not Naipaulian: Walcott, Mahfouz, Marquez, Coetzee.)

More recently, a character named Hussain Haqqani has joined the Naipaulian ranks. Haqqani, though, is no Naipaul; he’s neither bigoted nor brilliant. Known in Pakistan as a charming, slippery, has-been politician, Haqqani – since he stepped on an airplane – has reinvented himself as pundit in the DC think-tank community. Indeed, amongst the multitude of politicians that populate the political landscape, Haqqani has the singular distinction of having served every major political party: he began his career as student leader of the Jama’at – the fundamentalist party – then served both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, before being dispatched as ambassador to Sri Lanka. Arguably, he possesses the requisite insider’s perspective. He also possesses an eagerness to please. Consequently, Haqqani has been championed not only by Thomas Friedman but by the unsavory Daniel Pipes, as a man who “speaks the truth” (a questionable blandishment, especially as Friedman suggests that “Every quarter, the State Department should identify the Top 10…truth tellers in the world”). Accolades by one are rare and by both, rarer.

Haqqani’s first book, the alliteratively titled, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, has recently been published. To be fair, the book is more substantive than another dissident’s, Hassan Abbas’ horribly written, anecdotal (and alliteratively titled), Allah, The Army and American War on Terror (which apparently is on “the bestseller list in India, where newspapers have carried some of its juiciest tales, but it’s harder to find in Cambridge, where Abbas is a visiting scholar”), but it reads something like Stephen Cohen’s mostly facile, alarmist, (and ambitiously titled), The Idea of Pakistan.

(It’s important to note here that are some intelligent commentators on Pakistan’s politics and history on the inside and outside including the late sociologist Hamza Alvi, Aeysha Jalal, the MacArthur award-winning professor at Tufts; Shahid Javed Burki, an economist; Washington Post correspondent Kamran Khan; BBC’s Pakistan correspondents, Owen Bennett Jones, Zafar Abbas, and Paul Anderson; ex-CIA station chief to Pakistan, Milt Beardon; and possibly, ex-US ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Milam.)

Haqqani’s analysis is reductive and binary as he largely absolves the political establishment of the mismanagement of Pakistan. As Fareed Zakaria points out, democracy and liberalism (or progress, for that matter) are not the same thing. Furthermore, Haqqani uses such constructions as, “if Pakistan had proceeded along the path of normal political and economic development,” which makes us wonder what country is normal, what his comparables are (Argentina? Turkey? South Korea? Malaysia? China? Nigeria? America?), and why his book is hinged on the claim that Pakistan is in some way abnormal. This is the stuff of poor analysis.

Finally and most importantly, Haqqani, like his peers, ignores certain defining characteristics of contemporary Pakistan: the robust economic growth of 8.3% – the third fastest in Asia – has empowered the urban middle class, a class most susceptible to religious recruitment; Musharraf’s startlingly open media policy – not only the freest in the Muslim world but also among countries like Russia or India – which, over a period of three years, has produced a seismic shift in public discourse on matters as varied and previously taboo as the ’71 War or sex; the inability of radical or Deobandi Islam to change the accommodative Barelvi personality of rural Pakistan. Of course, these powerful “counter-mosque” dynamics in contemporary Pakistan do not concern Haqqani as his book’s trajectory is historic. There’s nothing new in it. In that case, his take on history is about as valid as ours. As Naipaul said, “We read to find out what we already know.”

Critics generally praised Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds for its cinematic virtuosity, citing the panache of his staging of fearful chases, narrow escapes, and random annihilation. This may be true, but the movie still struck me as reheated. Spielberg has done these things much more effectively in other movies – a scene in which a serpentine alien probe searches for the protagonists was lifted from Jurassic Park. From Duel through Jaws through Catch Me if You Can, Spielberg has turned nearly all of his films into feature-length chase sequences, with the heroes chasing a Macguffin as well as being chased by the authorities. This lets him indulge himself in his favorite pastime: the creation of suspense as a species of formal game-playing. To which he usually appends his other favorite pastime: wallowing in nostalgic depictions of the innocence and wonder of childhood and family. Both of these thematics saturate War of the Worlds, which jettisons most of the cynicism of Wells’ novel in favor of its director’s obsessions. His films have done this since the 1970s; nothing new there.

What did seem new about the movie, and reflective of current moods, though, was the scale of destruction it rather casually visits on the world. Asking us to feel remain engaged by the story of a working-class dad’s struggles to become a better parent and get over his divorce while around him the great cities of the world are destroyed and millions die seemed a little odd to me. When unthinkable horror is used as the backdrop for domestic drama, one feels a certain sense of proportion has gone missing. Spielberg’s defenders might argue that this is a response to the Age of Terror, an exploration of the effects of fear on ordinary people. Yet, thinking about it, this apocalyptic conceit had already become extremely common in Hollywood before 2001, with the approach of the millennium. Whether it’s done crudely and jingoistically (as with the repulsive Armageddon), cleverly and presciently (as with the gripping 28 Days Later), quietly (the intelligent Last Night), the disaster movie is perhaps the predominant mainstream genre of our time. I use the word genre very specifically to denote the way the destruction of human civilization has become a cinematic trope, one which barely affects anymore except as a generic form. (The Tristam Shandy of the genre, the work that predates it yet brilliantly satirizes all its features, is of course Dr. Strangelove.)

I think disaster movies have less to do with September 11th than with the status of moviemaking in contemporary culture. If the movies were, as James Agee wrote, the privileged aesthetic form of the twentieth century, then many competing media have disturbed that rank. The crown that the movies wore from silent era through the great studio period (detailed in The Genius of the System) through the nouvelle vague now lies uneasily, challenged by TV, video games, and, most importantly, the web. What’s more, these other, more virtual forms of information are difficult to visualize, making the job of representing modern reality onscreen much harder (there’s nothing less filmic than shots of a computer screen). What disaster movies do, then, is simplify the world, return it to a pre-technological state. By doing so they restore the potency of film narrative and reinstall the primacy of human-scale and embodied physical action: the world before computing. The disaster movie as a generic choice erases the changes that have made the movies themselves less capable of summing up human experience. The desire to annihilate the world is, maybe, really the desire to repress modernity instead of face it: thus, the common combination of disaster with nostalgic sentiment.

A final note: the other major genre that has emerged recently is the fantasy epic. The multi-part sagas of superheroes, of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter are the most successful studio productions of today. Poaching talented directors from outside Hollywood (Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi) and giving them vast technical resources, these films have revitalized the box office and in many cases produced superior popular entertainment. Examples include Alfonso Cuaron’s perfectly judged Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Alejandro Amenabar’s superb The Others, or Christopher Nolan’s enjoyable Batman Begins. These movies are intelligently directed but popularly accessible precisely because they rely on generic narratives: heroic quests, etc. They also replace modernity with a fantasy world in which magic, martial arts, or super powers replace technology.  Like disaster movies, then, they seek refuge in the generic in order to abolish the contemporary world.

Previous Dispatches:
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermanence

Babel. Whenever I say the word it’s electric. My fingers tingle. Babel goes to the very heart of things. Babel is at the center of the human experience. As Aristotle once mentioned, perceptively, human beings are the social animal. Humans, therefore, go together with cities in a rather essential way. For cities are ‘socialness’ mapped out, put into play, thrown down on a grid. And they are things you have to build. Humankind: the social animal, the builder.

And in every act of building there is a glimmer of hubris built in too. To build is to take up a little cry against the given, against conditions handed down, meted out, fated. Every act of building is a small fist raised up in defiance of the Gods, or Nature, or the immutable Laws.

Babel: a monument to Hubris.

That’s precisely how the Hebrews saw it and it’s why we have that remarkable passage from the Old Testament.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

What an amazing, utterly stupendous passage. What a terrifying and beautiful idea. And in turns out, in fact, that the story is based in historical fact. There really was a Tower of Babel. It was probably Etemenanki that the Hebrews were referring to, and Etemenanki was the product of the amazing Babylonian/Assyrian empire which, itself, birthed what are almost surely the first urban landscapes human hands and minds devised. We’re talking the Cradle of Civilization here. The Tigris and Euphrates. The great ur-cities like, well, Ur, Nippur, Sippar, and Babylon. The more the archeologists and historians work the more it is clear that the Near East is where it’s at. Greece, Rome, Istanbul, Paris, New York. It all starts at Babel.

In order to manage things with their complex empire and international trade, the Assyrians started playing around with symbols and a few centuries later they had definitively invented writing. It all came out of cities; managing them, trading stuff with other people, fighting within and between them.

Cosmopolitanism is nothing new. It’s a product of the dumb daily shit of cities. The scholar Gwendolyn Leick writes that: “The most remarkable innovation in Mesoppotamian civilization is urbanism. The idea of the city as heterogeneous, complex, messy, constantly changing but ultimately viable concept for human society was a Mesopotamian invention.” Complexity emerges from cities like viral infections. Weird things, idiotic religions, Byzantine political arrangements, the polymorphous perversity of social interaction. The messy stink of the city is like a festering laboratory of human possibility.

Babel.

The ancient Hebrews were enslaved at Babylon and in no great mood to sing the praises of Babel. ‘Wickedness’, they said, and who can blame them? But that’s not the point. The point is that they got the essence of it right. To be able to make a thing like Babel was to announce a kind of arrival. It was to put the Gods on notice, even if unintentionally. It’s the same thing captured so wonderfully by the Greeks in the Prometheus myth. Oh shit, realizes Zeus, give them fire and we’re screwed. They won’t need us anymore. We’ll be written out of the cosmic loop. We’re only a step or two away from the oblivion of the intermundi, complete irrelevance.

Historically, of course, the Babylonians had no such intentions. They built the tower in honor of their own gods. They were thinking of Marduk and their religious pantheon. But the Hebrews, from the outside, saw the problem more clearly, even in their disdain. They saw that the Babylonians were reaching out for something a little more than they bargained for. They were trying to achieve a sort of cosmic autonomy. As punishment, the Hebrews imagined an enormous diaspora, and profusion and multiplying of languages. A Great Babeling. And in a way, they were right about that too. A vast network of cities and civilizational overlaps and urban places with their own languages and customs and cultures now covers the earth. But its founding moment, insofar as every activity is also an idea, has a name. Babel.

Coming soon . . . an explanation of how Babel is related to my obsession with Earth and Land art. This leads to what I see as Flux Factory’s (the art collective of which I’m a founding member) great future project, which will both destroy and redeem us. It will be called Babel: A Monument to Hubris.