Build It and They Will Come: Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance

Michael Blim

Last time, I wrote about a world without the rich. Among other things, I pointed out, not too originally I thought, that the rich do as much as they can to make society work for them, the effect of which is to make things worse for everyone else. They also are pretty successful at getting everyone else to think as they do. This includes getting us to believe that they are superior beings and deserving of their money and power.

For them to be superior, the rest of us by default must be inferior. Since we do not want to believe that we are inferior, we dedicate great energies to prove we are not by aping the rich and passing along the stigma of inferiority to any other persons or groups we can. Emulating the rich, the middle classes, for instance, press their brief that they are among the more superior after the rich, and thus they deserve their cut of the money, power, and privilege that they have been able to garner. Those below them, just as the rich figure themselves, are the less or not deserving. Working class and poor people have what little they have because they don’t deserve better.

This is the common sense of American society, and other societies such as our own with enormous economic inequality. It is also good, if banal sociology.

Most people forget the premise of the argument: that the rich make society work for them in part by getting us to believe that they are more deserving of everyone else. There is the indispensable and buried – and false — premise. Every comedian knows that a joke is only as good as the absurdity of its premise. The trick is the audience accepts the premise because they expect a good joke. If the audience buys the premise, they’ll buy the bit, and the joke is funny. “So, there were these two geese standing by the drinking fountain, and one says to the other…” Think New Yorker cartoon.

The problem with the belief in the deserving rich and the undeserving poor is that it is factually false, and when it is used to deny persons the fundamental necessities of life, it is pernicious.

Working class and poor people live in an American society that begrudges them basic necessities. To cover the malice entailed by this stance, the society following the cue of the rich and the institutions they control argue that working class and poor people are fundamentally undeserving. The rich and others who consider themselves superior conclude that these same working class and poor people are so deluded or incapable that they don’t look after their own interests. They don’t seize upon opportunities for betterment. They trap themselves in a cycle of poor education, low salaries, no savings, no benefits, and poor housing.

So, what is one to make of the fact that when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offers anyone who cannot afford health insurance subsidized premiums and access to basic health care, the program becomes over-subscribed with persons who want to improve their health status and avoid financial ruin? Why have they grabbed the Commonwealth’s helping hand in such numbers and with such enthusiasm?

The Commonwealth originally hoped to enroll 136 thousand people in the new program that comes into force at the end of this year. It now estimates that at least 180 thousand persons will enroll by next June – a 32% more than the Commonwealth had expected. As one state senator remarked: “It’s a good problem to have – people are getting insured and hopefully getting care.” (Boston Globe, 11/18/07, 1)

Massachusetts, as the Globe reports, has committed itself to subsidizing insurance for persons who do not receive coverage on the job and who earn less than 300% of the federal poverty level. This means that a person earning less than $31,000 is eligible for subsidy. The state pays for the total health insurance build for very low income residents.

Over-subscription has the state agency responsible for the program worried about funding and cost increases, which is to be expected.

But there are several points that should be underscored.

First, if we build it, they will come. Massachusetts is providing universal access to health insurance, and by doing so, to health care itself. Everyone is eligible for help if they need it. People responded immediately and participated far above expectations because they were convinced that the program would meet one of their most fundamental needs.

Second, the Commonwealth wanted the program to succeed. So, it did what any other vendor with a product would do: it hired an ad agency that got the word out to people in need. You can apply on line. You can link to insurance providers for enrollment. You can do it all by phone too.

Third, the new law contains “incentives.” Every Massachusetts citizen must have health insurance. The key is that the Commonwealth enables citizens to meet the insurance requirement by connecting them with insurance plans that could meet their needs. People are offered assistance in sorting out insurance plans, benefits, and their ability to pay.

Fourth, because the Commonwealth recognizes universal access to health care is a paramount responsibility of government, no stigma is attached to participation. Quite the opposite: it is your civic duty in Massachusetts to participate, and you are rewarded – not denigrated – for doing so.

There will be no head shaking and muttering in the emergency room as when people on Medicaid seek treatment. No eye rolling as when a grocery store customer pays with a Food Stamps credit card. No implicit condemnation passed on persons for living in public housing or being on income support.

Honoring people’s rights, treating people with dignity, AND providing them access to the human necessity of health care liberates one crucial part of people’s lives from the blame game of a class-biased society whose motto is that if you are not rich, you are lacking something. In the case of working class and poor people, they are adjudged to lack the good sense to secure their necessities, to take advantage of opportunities, and to seek better lives. Working class and poor people by virtue of their infirmities and collective inferiority are told over and over again that they get what they deserve — fewer resources and poorer life chances.

In Massachusetts as regards health care, everyone regardless of privilege has the hope of getting what s/he deserves – health care and a better chance of a decent and fulfilling life.

Changes of this sort, as fundamental to human happiness as they are, will not bring forth in a burst “a world without the rich,” the subject of my last column. I will have more to say about how to make that world in the future.

But there can be small blessings along the way – as I hope Massachusetts can provide in the coming years for all of its citizens.

Finally, thanks to all of you who wrote in about the “world without the rich” column several weeks ago. You added immensely to the discussion for which I am just glad to have so briefly started.

This post is dedicated to Asad Raza, the first 3QD foodie to ask me about truffles.

Elatia Harris

The two images above come from distant eras when that rare and coveted underground fungus, the truffle, was in more abundant supply than at present. The gatherer on the left, in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval herbal treatise at the Bibliotheque Rouen (thanks to BibliOdyssey), seems to have happened upon a trove of squash ball-sized truffles, positioned conveniently above ground. More realistically, the 19th century diggers on the right, aided by poodles, search among the roots of an oak, where a black truffle — the ultimate prize of French gastronomy — may occasionally be found about six inches below the surface. (Readers interested in a 4000-year overview of human/truffle relations, including the truffle’s extensively documented use as a love food, are referred to my earlier 3QD article.)

Since the truffle harvest of today is down more than twenty-fold from 100 years ago, down incalculably from the time of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the hunt is nothing like so easy as it appears in either scene above, and is conducted according to very different rules. Typically, hunters go out before dawn accompanied not by humans but by trained dogs or pigs — who cannot tell what they know about the spot, or come back to it on their own when the hunter is no longer about. With the exception of the legendary truffle-hunting virgins of Perigord, who ceased to flourish in the early 20th century, a human has not quite the nose for finding truffles, however violently she desires to eat them.

I used to see tiny tins of conserved truffles — about the diameter of napkin rings, under lock and key at fancy grocers — long before I saw a fresh one, and am deeply delighted to report that I lost no time eating the first fresh one I ever saw.  Read about what that felt like here. Fresh or conserved, there are about 60 varieties of black and white truffles in Europe. Most of them, you want to watch out for — they are mildly pleasant at best, occasionally nasty and always pricey. The only truffles of earth-moving gastronomic interest are T. Melanosporum, the black truffle of Perigord that is never far away when you’re nearing the summit of French cuisine, and T. Magnatum, the white truffle of Alba that adds such mystery and wildness to the simple but luxurious ways of northern Italian cooking. Look hard at the photos, for it’s truffle season again, and by the end of this article, you will know how to choose and prepare one for yourself.

Civetta and Kiki

First, however, meet the four-footed finders.

There is no truffle dog in the sense of a breed dedicated to that pursuit. Any trainable dog will do.  Looked at a certain way, truffling is but an exercise in advanced obedience training, since dogs are not naturally attracted to truffles but can be worked up into a passion to obey. Nevertheless, some breeds show a faster aptitude than others.  Since the 1700’€™s, poodles have excelled at the training, as detailed by Doebel in his Jaegerpractica, 1746.  Whatever its breed, the dog must be praised feelingly when it does find a truffle, rewarded not only with a display of love but with a bit of cheese. For much in the way of a natural orientation to the outdoors is taken from the truffle dog; to effect its unswerving focus on truffles, it has been systematically desensitized to squirrels and birds and other distractions that make up a full life for a hunting dog.

The Lagotto Romagnolo, a water dog that is a poodle cousin, is the truffle dog of choice in Piedmont and in the white truffle country of Tuscany, around San Miniato. A curly-haired, medium-sized dog of unusual avidity and good nature, the Lagotto is best embodied by Civetta (cheeVETTah), the current All-Italy champion truffle dog whose face may recall, to some dog lovers, that of an enraptured German Renaissance madonna.

A truffling pig like Kiki — the fourth pig owned by the famous Marthe Delon of Perigord to be so named — may only with care be compared to Civetta or any truffle dog. Pigs need no training to find truffles.  In fact, humans probably owe the discovery of truffles to pigs rooting around for them, and almost certainly first started to go after them in imitation of pigs. Mme. Delon has gone on record saying that she rewards Kiki — actually, all her Kikis — with truffle-scented suppers, but never with the real thing. And soon, it will be time for Kiki IV to join her namesakes on the family table as ham — the ultimate fate of most truffling pigs.

There are truffle hunters in the South of France who prefer hunting with dogs to hunting with pigs — it’€™s really a personal matter, and either beast is regarded as hugely valuable. The female of the species is in both cases the better finder.  And I have not read that at the end of a successful hunt it is necessary to make much of the sow, showering her with love and gratitude to keep her going. She has, after all, obeyed her instincts, not her master.

Is Now the Time for My Truffle?

Every year about this time, intense curiosity about the taste of a fresh truffle can propel a foodie into a zone of true bewilderment.  How to tell whether you have trained your eye on the right kind? Who to buy it from? How to optimize your possession of it?

First and worst of all, it is necessary to confront the brute fact of cost: buying a truffle the size of a medium dog’s nose is no less expensive than buying a horribly good wine. We’ll break it out later, but think high two digits just to deal yourself in. Like that bottle of wine that lets you murmur, Oh! So this is what it is — oh!, like that sunset on Santorini, the true truffle is epiphanial, one of those things that leaves you not as you were before. If you believe this kind of experience is sometimes free and sometimes very costly, but always worth it, then you will enjoy taking your preparedness for the truffle up a notch by reading the interview below.

Meet Greg Troughton

Imagine my delight when right in my backyard I met a professional foodie, Greg Troughton, who knew more about truffles — and many other food items — than I did. 

Greg grew up in New England, which he loves for its history, landscape and  culinary offers.  He has a BS in Biochemistry, and spent his years in school working in restaurants. After a stint in biotech, the food industry called to him, and he does often approach food from a scientific perspective.  Five years in restaurant kitchens gave way to Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, where he concentrated on local produce and specialty imports.  He has lived and traveled in Europe, and is currently at Whole Foods Market.  In February, he begins work on an MBA, with a focus on the food industry, in particular the market for local producers and food supply chain management.  He and his wife, Annie, live in Newton, MA, with their large mutt and shy cat.  For the last couple of years Greg has been the go-to guy for truffles in my neighborhood, cheek by jowl to Harvard.

In talking with Greg, I wanted a fresh perspective on some of the truffle lore I’ve been gathering since the night of my first encounter with T. Melanosporum. At that long ago time, truffles tended to be paired with lobster — oh, it’s not wrong — or foie gras, or chopped into a sauce madere.  Today there are truffle treatments both simpler and more interesting than those.  And, as scarcity and price increase, there is more truffle fraud. So it’s especially important now to be an informed consumer who knows just how far a truffle will go. Although Greg and I do not touch on history’s most formidable truffle-fanciers, I’ve included visuals of eight of them, from Khufu to Proust.

ELATIA HARRIS: Provided you constructed the right dinner around a truffle, how would you describe the difference a truffle could make?

GREG TROUGHTON: At a base level truffles impart a complexity of flavor to food that is so rarely experienced in everyday eating.  Add to that the long history of the hunt, the exotic terroir and the expense of truffles, and you stage an unusual element of excitement at dinner. 

EH: Tell me a little more about terroir.

GT: An expression of place, this term has come to reflect not only the land on which the food was grown or raised, but the culture and history behind the food.

EH: Then you can taste terroir? Do certain truffles taste like where they’€™re from in that way?

GT: Magnatum pico, often known as the white “Alba” truffle, and Melanosporum, often known as the black “Perigord” truffle, are not exclusively gathered in those places. What is really important is that the truffle you are purchasing is of the true Latin variety.  Northwest Spain, southern France, Italy — Magnatum and Melanosporum can be found all over these regions. “Alba” and “Perigord” have become marketing jargon.

EH: So, for example, the Tuscans and the Piedmontese warring over who has the true white truffle is kind of pointless if both regions produce T. Magnatum.  I’ve read about Carlo Vittadini, the Milanese physician who classified truffles into almost 60 varieties in the mid-1800’s.  When he called something a T. Magnatum, that’s a specific morphological type, and nothing to do with a market. How do you know you’€™re getting that?

GT: Find a distributor who understands that the quality lies in the variety, not just the locale, and you’re on the right track.

EH: Assuming you can examine a fresh truffle up close and personal before you buy it, what should you be looking for?  Or, should I say, sniffing for? First white, then black…

GT: Freshness is key.  I want to see my vender bring out an airtight sealed mason jar and I want to see the truffles wrapped in dry paper towel — not stored in rice.  The truffles should be dry and free of many holes.  Broken sides are fine — sometimes that is where the truffle was cut.  White truffles should be creamy to slightly yellowish brown depending on the tree from under which they were harvested.  Some of the most popular are oak, linden and chestnut.  But most important is smell.  Again, depending on the tree, each will have a distinct aroma.  Naturally it takes a long time to distinguish among particular “trees,” but you should try to smell a few.  As a vender I work with my suppliers to provide customers with a “€œbest guess.”  As a buyer, if a seller were to offer this information, it tells me they have done their homework.  All white truffles are extremely heady — open a jar in a crowded store and you will sure get some stares.  You’€™ll know then who’€™s a fan and who’s not.  White truffles from under oak trees are more dominant in aroma, while the linden and chestnut are subtler.  White truffles are more perishable than blacks and go soft faster.   Again, freshness is key.  Black truffles are more difficult to discern.  Find those that are firm with few holes and give a pleasing aroma.  I like my black truffles to smell complex — chocolate, spice, a slightly headiness. I steer clear of those that have a stringent or chemical smell.  Make sure your vender lets you handle them and smell them right up to your nose€ — after all, if a four-legged beast can dig these up, I’€™m sure your nose isn’€™t the health hazard!

EH: If you’re not going to use the truffle the night of the day you buy it, how do you keep it in tip-top condition for a while?

GT: It should really be eaten ASAP, but it can last a while under the right conditions — I’€™ve seen truffles go 2 weeks.  Store them in an airtight container, wrapped individually in paper towel, in the fridge.  Change the towel every day or two.  Add a few farm eggs to the container and because of the porous nature of eggshells you’ll get truffle-flavored eggs as a bonus.

EH: What are some of the best uses for the white truffle? Can it ever be overwhelmed?

GT: White truffles are generally kings when it comes to dominant flavors. Think eggs, simple soups, some game. My perfect truffle dinners, black or white, are big, winter food. Given their utter in-your-face aroma I prefer to pair white truffles with more subtle flavors — an egg course is great. Simply scrambled farm eggs with white truffle is divine.  Soups of parsnip and potatoes are great pairings as well.  White truffles also go well with foie gras — two big flavor champs battling it out I guess, but it’€™s a lot to handle. You either love it or hate it. 

EH: I saw an Orson Welles look-alike in Rome having white truffles grated over a slab of rare roast beef.  It seemed like a better idea to grate them over pasta — once I’d had that, I couldn’t think about anything else for a week. I also had them in a salad with a rather lemony vinaigrette — very tender lettuces, sauteed artichoke bottoms, and lots of chives. Astonishing.

GT: Food and the meal experience in particular are subjective to person, place, history and, importantly, to present company. The very idea that dinner will be served with such a rare, historical and pricey accoutrement lends a note of the astonishing to the event. A white truffle is going be astonishing whatever you grate it on.

EH: But simpler is better?

GT: I think so. And remember — don’t cook it. Just let whatever you’€™re adding it to warm it gently.

EH: Now what about the black truffle?

GT: While the white truffle is the billboard star, the black truffle plays the supporting role, but without that role the show wouldn’t be such a hit. It depends what you are in the mood for. I like black truffles paired with roasted meats, potatoes, game, some rich seafood like scallops.  Black truffles can enhance the meatiness and roasted flavor of meats — they are aromatic and bold while at the same time complimentary to other flavors.  Some of my acquaintances who are more intimately involved in the trade say that while they are less expensive, true connoisseurs prefer black truffles to white.  You decide. On the plate, truffles are all nose — a steaming short rib with black truffles gives off an intoxicating, heady aroma. Black truffles shaved over sizzling meat is perfect.

EH: At L’Astrance, Pascal Barbot does a celery soup with black truffle puree and Parmesan foam.  I haven’t tried making foam yet.  And Alain Passard does slow-poached Breton lobster with sauce vin jaune, smoked potatoes and shaved black truffles.  But I’€™m getting carried away.

GT: Would you have wanted those things your first time with a truffle?

EH: Um, no. And the emphasis here is on what you could make with truffles for yourself and your friends that wouldn’€™t be so complex you couldn’t have fun, too.  As long as we’re menu-planning, are there some wine recommendations for dishes involving truffles? Let’s talk about this on the plane of the ideal, and then on the plane of the approachable, OK?

GT: I have a very basic approach here — if it grows together it goes together.  Get wines from the region and make them dish-appropriate.  White truffles are generally from Piedmont, so think big — like Barolo.  With black truffles, being sourced from France to North west Spain, I usually like burgundy and some Rhone wines.  Some Bordeaux can over do it with the truffles.  Ask your truffle vender where these particular truffle come from.  Can they tell you, or did they come from a distributor? This would mean they’€™ve been out of the ground longer and are less fresh.  Because I buy directly from one family, they can tell me per delivery where they sourced the truffles. With some vagueness that I won’t ever understand — like I can actually quit my job and responsibilities and go to Europe to pillage their secret site. Then, take this information to your trusted wine guru and get a wine from the same region.

EH: I’ve seen truffle-slicers in restaurants in Italy — if you can’t get your hands on one of those, what should you do?  And how should you do it?

GT: Truffles should be sliced ultra-paper-thin. If you try it with a knife and get thick pieces you are wasting money.  Truffle slicers are nice, but expensive and singular in their use.  I use a Japanese mandolin, the same tool with an adjustable blade that you use to slice potatoes thin. They are cheap, good all around tools that should be found in any kitchen supply store.  Just get simple one with a sharp adjustable blade. You don’t need 20 attachments.

EH: I see truffles priced by the ounce.  How far does an ounce of truffles go — used in some of the ways we’ve been discussing?

GT: An ounce goes a very long way. You could truffle one course for 10-12 friends with a whole ounce.  My advice is to get 4-6 friends and truffle two courses.  Better yet, store the truffle for a day with eggs and get three courses out of it.  You can spend only $75 to $100 and get the real thing for a bunch of people.

EH: Let’s talk about some of the considerations that influence price.

GT: My take here is that given all the recent press, the food world producers have seen a real potential in a growing market of young foodies. This has been great for artisan producers — it has allowed small vineyards to grow and market their products, it has supported long-standing traditions of wine making and truffle hunting.  But it does have its down side.  On the truffle end, the introduction of inoculated  trees to natural habitats, currently supporting dwindling supplies of Melanosporum and Magnatum pico has led to new crossbreeds of truffles that out-compete for nutrients and space.  So the truffle market has been flooded with inferior grade truffles that are identical in appearance Melanosporum and Magnatum pico being passed off as such to unknowing consumers looking to experience truffles at a slightly lesser cost.  Who am I to judge when it comes to spending a premium for, let’s face it, a rather ugly looking mushroom rooted by a pig or dog under some tree in a far away country?  But, as with champagne and caviar, I advocate the less is more strategy — you don’€™t need to have every course truffled. Get the real thing once in a season on one dish. You can get other varieties of truffles that grow naturally in season during the summer — they are lighter in aroma and simpler in complexity of flavor. As the saying goes, they are what they are.  My personal tastes for truffles revolve around winter nights, red wine, fireplaces, good friends, slowly simmered cuts of meat, and potatoes.  I’€™m not a summer truffle guy.  So I get the real thing when I can, usually once a year. Best to get it from someone you trust — at $1600-$3200 a pound, mistakes are not allowed!  Opt to cook at home instead of going out — you’ll see what you’ve been missing, and you’re sure to come out on top.

EH: Would your life be diminished if you didn’t know the taste of these things? 

GT: No, it would not.  It would just be different.  My grandparents have lived long, rich lives, and have never tasted such things and probably never will, but I’d be eternally happy to experience the fulfillment and pleasures that they have enjoyed.  That said, food is my thing.  I make my living in the industry and I enjoy it after work — it’€™s what gets me up in the morning.  So, if I didn’t know the taste of true truffles, caviar, foie gras, real French Brie, fresh bread, New England corn, local strawberries and on an on, I’€™d be doing my career and my life’s journey a disservice.  While many of these items are expensive, they don’t have to be exclusive to the wealthy.  As an example, when I got out of professional cooking, after about a year or so, I got a phone call from my old chef asking me if I’€™d be willing to do a shift that night for a meat cook who had to leave for a personal matter.   Anyone who has worked in a high end restaurant knows that working the busy station on the line during a Saturday night is hard enough, but after a year out of the business, that’€™s plain stupid.  Overcooking a VIP steak and having the entire service come to a crashing halt doesn’€™t make you a popular guy, especially when you’ve abandoned the profession for greener pastures.  With this in mind I was about to decline the offer when the chef made it a bit more enticing — I wouldn’t be getting paid in dollars, but my 10 hours of backbreaking, under-appreciated, adrenaline-addled, high heat cooking would be rewarded with a freshly dug 1 oz white truffle.  I was in that kitchen setting up my station in 20 minutes.  The point is — make some friends in the food industry, take some wine and cheese classes.  Bring a six-pack to your local gourmet food guys — they will remember you and maybe, just maybe let you in on the good stuff.

EH: Great! I’€™m waiting a few weeks till T. Melanosporum is here, however. That’€™ll give me some time to plan.  Also, I don’t want people turning me down, and getting the right 6 people on any given night is worse than air traffic control. What should I be thinking when I go shopping?

GT: Know what you want, how much you want to spend and what dishes you will be serving.  Talk with your local grocer, be it at a large store or a small gourmet operation.  Trust is key and trust comes with a personal relationship.  In my time I have seen very few if any intentional rip offs — just people who don’t necessarily have all the facts.  Watch how they store the truffles — how many do they have?  Do they “€œalways”€ have them? That’€™s a bad sign, because it usually means extra inventory.  Stay away from mail order — would you mail order fresh fish?  A personal, trusting relationship with your grocer is the key to getting any quality product.

EH: OK, let’€™s make it happen. Thanks!

WEB RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

Staying Informed

New York Times RSS feed on truffles

Never miss another world-historical truffle story again. Register with NYT.com (free), key “truffles” into the search box. The topic page will come up, with compendious news about truffles, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. Go to the bottom right, where you will be invited to click on the truffle feed. Do so, and monitor developments from your homepage or reader.

http://www.nyt.com

Food blogger extraordinaire Pim of Chez Pim goes to Perigord

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2007/03/marthe_delon_th.html

Pim encounters the Truffle Don in Italy

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2005/11/the_truffle_don.html

My earlier 3QD truffle article, “Shrooming in Late Capitalism: The Way of the Truffle”

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/shrooming_in_la.html

Cooking Vacations in France, with Truffles

Patricia Wells

http://www.patriciawells.com/cooking/truffle-class-schedule.htm

Cooking with Friends

http://www.cookingwithfriends.com/the_news/the_truffle_hunt/the_truffle_hunt.html

US Truffle Venders I Personally Know and Trust

Formaggio Kitchen (Cambridge and Boston, MA and Essex Street, NYC)

http://www.formaggiokitchen.com

http://www.southendformaggio.com

Whole Foods (locations throughout USA)

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com

By Edward B. Rackley

The Crowned Crane is Uganda’s national symbol. A majestically feathered, noble bird with piercing grey eyes, it moves with an erect, nervous strut. It is difficult to spot in the wild, yet all Ugandans know its features. Its crested silhouette is visible as the watermark on banknotes of every denomination. Its profile graces the nation’s red, yellow and black-striped flag, which is painted, pasted or flying almost everywhere one looks in Uganda.

As an index of state presence, a national flag incorporates the symbolic and the concrete. In the north of the country, a twenty-year insurgency by the Lord’s Resisistance Army saw Acholi extremists terrorizing their own people, ostensibly to radicalize or awaken them to the necessity of LRA ‘liberation’ of all Acholis. Then the national flag served only to remind Ugandans in LRA areas that they lived in a phantom state subjected to the terrors of mystical despotism. Today, the LRA have retreated and security is improving. A corresponding increase in local trade and mobility suggests lasting normalization is underway. The national flag, once an empty signifier, is now associated with the central government’s return and, by extension, with the tangible dividends of peace.

Insurgencies and rebellions have a long history in Uganda, some more violent than others. In the case of the LRA, dismemberment, sexual slavery and other atrocities were common; most were inflicted by Acholi child combatants on other Acholi children. Bringing mute agony upon innocent victims, especially children, exceeds the grasp of many a sentient mind, but insofar as many insurgencies in Uganda (and elsewhere in Africa) share an elemental grievance as their catalyst, there’s nothing exceptional or irrational about them. In each case, one or another region/ethnicity is marginalized from decision-making or the national budget. A saturation point is reached; it is time to act. Some strongman or another succumbs to delusions of political messianism. Visited by ‘laundry detergent dreams’, the rebel/messiah must now cleanse the state of its sins.

Your cattle, my guns

Under colonial rule and since independence, the Ugandan state flag has rarely flown over Karamoja, the remote and semi-arid northeastern region bordering Kenya and Sudan. Armed violence was first documented there among resident pastoralist tribes in the early 1900s. Muskets and rifles gradually replaced spears, bows and arrows. Violence spiked to new levels when automatic weapons flooded the area after Idi Amin’s local armories were abandoned in his 1979 flight from power. At the same time a regional arms market encompassing seven local nations saw escalating armament and munitions stockpiling among Karamoja’s disparate clans.

Today, few Ugandan flags are flying in Karamoja; there are no Crowned Cranes in the sky and little currency in circulation. Perched on the rim of the Great Rift Valley, Karamoja’s expanse of rugged low plains is hemmed in by gorgeous massifs, the occasional extinct volcano, and solemn stone monoliths. I first learned of Karamoja as a teenager, reading The Mountain People by British anthropologist Colin Turnbull. It described a small, vulnerable and cruel tribe, the Ik, living high on the mountainous terrain along the Kenyan border. The area has fascinated me ever since.

Karamojong warriors inflict violence indiscriminately on women and children. Boys as young as twelve carry weapons to protect their herds or to participate in inter-communal raiding. In cattle-raiding, the loss of life and destruction of property that ensues are neither religiously inspired nor ideological; Karamoja’s militant pastoralism shares nothing with the self-appointed messiahs of the LRA and their extermination of non-believers. And given the amount of firepower in Karamoja, a single large raid may result in the deaths of hundreds of people. Children are often abducted along with the cattle.

Much of the armed raiding is reportedly directed by seers and shamans, who divine immediate futures from the spilled intestines of slaughtered goats. They are said to share in the spoils of a successful cattle raid, compensation for their accurate prophecy. To ensure repeated success of the warriors or a successful planting season, children are reportedly abducted and sacrificed. Everyone I met to discuss the costs of militant pastoralism for women and children mentioned child sacrifices, genital cutting of pre-pubescent girls as a widely practiced maturation rite (girls are only then ‘available’ for marriage), and the occasional forced marriage of young girls for bride price–an attractive, hard-working and unschooled girl can bring 40 to 60 head of cattle. Even primary education is rejected by parents as it takes time away from herding and housework, and ‘makes children lazy’.

From the perspective of local communities, life is characterized by many features typically associated with armed conflict. These include large-scale military operations employing helicopter gunships, tanks, armed personnel carriers, heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, proliferation of UXOs, regular clashes between local “warriors” and government troops, frequent forced displacement, and military courts martial in place of civilian courts.

With estimates of between 30,000 to 200,000 illegal weapons in a region of almost one million people, President Museveni sent in the army to disarm the Karamojong and to restore order. The job was judged too great for the region’s 130 police officers, each armed with a pistol (that’s a ratio of 1 cop to 7300 citizens—the  international standard is 1:450). This Reuters photo captures a dejected Karamojong warrior caught in a cordon and search exercise.

The Black Spot

My travels around the region are escorted by military convoys of government soldiers. Based in Moroto, I spend equal time in Kaabong and Kotido districts where raids, ambushes and sniper attacks occur daily on the rocky roads.   

The natural environment is inhospitable to those unschooled in its extremes. Karamojong live in their own ‘gated communities’, called manyatta, a collection of mud and thatch huts surrounded by an imposing barrier made of local thorn bushes, which serve to protect inhabitants and livestock from external raids. Looking out over the plains, manyatta are invisible to the untrained eye; from the air they are unmistakable and iconic.

Despite the physical harshness of the place, a surprising variety and number of bird species thrive in the region. Their migration patterns are local and reflect the transhumance patterns of Karamojong pastoralists, who lead their cattle to grazing lands and watering areas according to seasonal fluctuations in rainfall. I managed to spot some of my favorite species on this trip: the African Hoopoe, the ever cheeky and curious ‘Go Away’ Bird whose raspy call sounds like ‘go away!’ barked through a megaphone. The Lilac-breasted Roller was another regular sighting, as were varieties of Kingfisher [click here for photos of these species].

But besides the heightened military presence, there is little sign that we are in Uganda. The landscape is identical to that of southern Sudan and northern Kenya, whose borders are nearby and unguarded. The region’s pastoralists have been crisscrossing between Kenya, Sudan and Uganda since long before these colonial demarcations were established. Transhumance patterns lead livestock and herders great distances in search of water points and grazing land. Protecting kin and assets on the move requires armed self-defense, given the cycles of raiding and counter-raiding long been practiced in the region.

Late one morning, I left Kotido for Kaabong with twenty or so soldiers in a three truck convoy. The landscape was lunar yet green from recent rains. My eyes scoured the landscape for birds, animals, people. It was also infamous raiding and ambushing country; one of the region’s well-known ‘no go zones’ where shepherds and their livestock dare not tread for fear of attack. Crucifixes marked the road where aid workers, priests, military and civilians had been killed in such activity. As we passed an extinct volcano I spotted a water point about 50 meters from the road. There was my all-time favourite raptor, the Secretary Bird, immobile and observing as our convoy broke the quiet of the thick heat and brilliant sunshine. 

A colleague I was riding with announced that we were entering the ‘black spot’. Crucifixes stood like goal posts marking the entrance and exit of this stretch of road, a gauntlet for us and a playing field for lurking snipers and would-be ambushers. I tried to keep a conversation going to distract us but no one would engage. The end of the gauntlet was an army detach on a hilltop after the last crucifix; after that ‘we were safe’.

No one else was on the road as we picked up speed, our body armor weighing heavy and hot inside the vehicle, our kevlar helmets bouncing up and down over the bumpy road. I spotted the huts and radio antenna of the detach on a rocky hilltop. As we approached, a commercial lorry stood parked in the middle of the road, a few people were milling around it. Soldiers were running down the hillside, apparently to meet those in the road. Relieved to be exiting the black spot, we slowed and asked what the matter was. Lots of gesticulation ensued, pointing at the truck with agitation. They had been shot at, repeatedly, about a kilometer earlier on the road.

Nothing we could do, so we drove on. Days later we passed through the same spot, stories of many such attacks and ambushes in our heads. Kevlar helmets bobbing, all of us sweating profusely under the body armor. About half-way back through the black spot, we got a puncture and had to pull over. I had to smile–this was the perfect ambush moment. We all stood in the sun, accepted our possible fate, some of us nonchalantly unzipping and peeing in the breeze. No one counted the crucifixes dotting the sides of the road.

In all my visits with locals, an estimated 75% of all rights violations or abuses involving children and women occurred during inter-communal raiding; only a minority result from government disarmament operations. This was significant, and underscored a bias in international human rights reporting that has long made me crazy. Recent reports and analysis from Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, and the Feinstein International Center (Tufts University) focus exclusively on government violations, passing over the slaughter of innocents by Karamojong in silence. This creates the unhelpful and unbalanced impression that all abuses are government, leaving those at the hands of Karamojong undocumented. Why this anti-government bias? Is the senseless carnage of Karamojong raiding to be condoned because somehow sacrosanct as ‘indigenous culture’?

Western liberal bias against African regimes as despotic and venal is most palpable in our human rights community, whose condemnations are a convenient luxury as they dont have a full time presence on the ground. For those of us who have to deal directly with such governments and their armies, as I often do, I see how discredited the moral high ground of the human rights movement is in the eyes of its intended audience, the Ugandan military in this case.

Getting information on abuses against children in Karamoja is near impossible. Because few people know their exact age or possess identification, only when a victim is manifestly pre-pubescent or a very early teenager can the term “child” is used in rights reporting. Traditional rites of passage, like genital cutting, serve to delineate the adult from the child; age in years is not used.

A long-term view

Emergence from the cycle of poverty and violence in Karamoja will not come from aid agencies but from a robust state presence, whose services must be widely available and tailored to the pastoralist social economy. State presence and services are exceedingly weak in both material and human resources; Karamoja does not attract government talent, most Ugandans fear the place as a certain death trap, and Karamojong are viewed as Neanderthals, as Pygmies or other indigenous folk are seen by majority populations elsewhere.

Spending time here and learning how the performance of local culture is warped through decades of armed violence, one appreciates how fragile social orders can be. As Valéry once said: “A civilization has the same fragility as a life.” What other commercial opportunities are there for people who’ve never been to school or learned a trade apart from armed survival, herding and raiding others’ livestock?

Perhaps Karamoja needs a political insurgency to make the depth of its crisis heard in Kampala. A fanciful notion, I realize, as for the Karamojong the Ugandan state does not exist. Their lives revolve around their herds, as is the case for other ethnic pastoralist groups in Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Nor is there evidence that a successful insurgency leads to accelerated development: it’s not the Kampala government who’s rebuilding former LRA areas now that security has returned. The international community is doing it.

On a final note, I was not able to visit the Ik, although I did get close to them. I met aid workers and locals who encountered them regularly; apparently there are only 2000 or so left of the Ik. As a coping mechanism to deal with successive raiding and looting by larger more powerful groups, the Ik have stopped keeping livestock entirely, and do not bear arms. With nothing to steal, why stop over to kill and loot? In such a dire place as Karamoja, adopting extreme poverty as your self-defence mechanism is a desperate act indeed.

Prashant Keshavmurthy

Abdul Qadir Khan Bedil Dehlavi was among the most famous representatives of the so-called sabk-e hindi or “Indian style” of the Persian ghazal. Born in Patna or Azimabad in Bihar in eastern India in 1642, he spent much of his professional life in Mughal Delhi and died there in 1720. His style and imagery shares with others who practiced this kind of ghazal-composition an ingeniousness of metaphor and elaborateness of conceit, features that continue to endear his poetry to Persian-speakers in many Central Asian countries but disqualified him in his own lifetime in Iran.

Although barely read or even known in India today, Bedil has had a long afterlife in the brilliance and complexity of phrase of Ghalib’s Urdu and Persian poetry on which he exercised an influence. However, his poetry remains distinguished from that of others of the sabk-e hindi style of the ghazal in its thematic and Aristotelian preoccupation with the wonder aroused by the created world, a wonder that is inexhaustible by the desire that accompanies it to interpret that world. This hermeneutic inexhaustibility derives from the divine origins of creatures. Our gaze, arrested by these creaturely and defective mirrors of their superior creator, leads away to the thought of that creator and, by analogy, to an understanding of the act of human poetic creation, of Bedil himself as a poet-creator.

Bedil Dehlavi with my own translations:

bar nemiayad ba joz hich az mu’amma-ye hubab
lafz-e ma gar vashikafi mani-e harf magust

The bubble’s riddle throws up nothing at all.
Crack open my words and look-
it means ‘Don’t say it!’

*

safha-ye sada-ye hasti khatt-e nayrang nadasht
khiragi kard nazar-ha raqami paida shod

The world’s plain page
bore not one wondrous line.
The eyes started in surprise and
behold- a mark!

*

Bedil sokhanat nist joz insha-ye tahayyur
ku ayina ta safha-ye divan-e to bashad

Bedil, your poetry’s nothing but the creation of astonishment.
Show me a mirror that aspires to a page of your Divan.¹

[¹Divan is a collection of a poet’s complete works.]

*

keshti-e chashmam ke hayrat badban-e shawq-e ust
ta za khod jonbad mohiti az gohr avarda ast

My eye’s ship,
the sail of whose desire’s astonishment,
draws an ocean out of a pearl
that it might swell.

*

nahoft-e mani-e makshuf-e bi-tamolli-am
nabastan-e muzha afaq ra muamma kard

Unhesitatingly, I conceal unconcealed meanings.
Not blinking made a riddle of the world.

*

zang-e rukh-e ayina gasht ba safai badal
anbar-e afaq zad ghuta ba kafur-e nab

The mirror’s clouded face grew
suddenly clear.
The world’s ambergris plunged suddenly deep
into the purest camphor.

*

Prashant Keshavmurthy is a doctoral candidate in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature in Columbia University, New York.

What Philosophy Can Learn from Anthropology

Justin E. H. Smith

*

Books Consulted or Discussed in this Essay

Scott Atran, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Barbara Duden, Der Frauenleib als öffentlicher Ort. Vom Missbrauch des Begriffs Leben (Munich, 1994).

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Ernest Gellner,  Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

Maurice Godelier, Métamorphoses de la parenté (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, 1983).

Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

Colin Scott, The Semiotics of Material Life among the Wemindji Cree Hunters (McGill University Thesis, 1983).

S. J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, 1984).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

*

I have gradually become convinced that historians of philosophy –my colleagues, and by training myself– are going about a cluster of very interesting questions in entirely the wrong way.  These questions, I think, may be much more adequately answered from within the discipline we call ‘anthropology’.

According to one widespread account, modernity came into being as a consequence of the sacrifice of nature.  The Scientific Revolution literally killed nature by transforming it from a living and holistic system of interconnected entities, human and non-human alike, acting intentionally in accordance with their natures, into a dead system of atomic particles being moved about, without intrinsic purposes, but only as a result of extrinsic physical forces.  This new scientific cosmology would also bring with it, the story goes, a new philosophical anthropology, as humans came to see themselves as radically separate from, and opposed to, a natural world in which they as thinking intelligent agents could have no part.  The world, which now operated according to entirely different laws than those that governed our own thinking, was ‘disenchanted’, as Max Weber would later put it, literally gutted of any cosmological significance –where cosmology is understood as some model of the interrelatedness of the heavens, the earth, animals, humans, super-human spiritual entities, and perhaps also God– and reduced simply to extended particles endowed with mass, figure, and motion. 

It is in broad outline this transformation that Carolyn Merchant bemoaned in her influential 1980 book, The Death of Nature, and it is this transformation that much recent ecological thinking aspires to undo.  One way out of the perceived dead-end of mechanistic thinking about nature has been to argue that mechanism is in fact inadequate to the task of scientifically explaining the systems in question. The study of certain implications of post-Einsteinian physics, or of certain problems of complexity in ecological systems, are examples of this.  Another way out of the dead-end has been to turn attention to models of nature generated by cultures that never explicitly adopted the basic assumptions of the scientific revolution that so transformed the West.  Indigenous science, in short, has presented itself to some as a possible source of lessons for thinking about nature that may help to correct some of the shortcomings of the mechanistic model we inherited from the 17th century.

But the legacy of the Scientific Revolution is of course, by now, everywhere, and it takes a strong and nostalgic imagination to see indigenous cultures as if they had preserved their ways intact since the pre-contact era.  As Marshall Sahlins writes: “Certain things of European provenance — not only horses, tobacco, bush knives, or cloth but even Chistianity — are still locally perceived as ‘traditional’ culture.” Living as we are long after the initial contact, 1492 and all that, it is very difficult –even in the light of excellent work by historical anthropologists– to separate the elements of an indigenous culture that pertain to it deeply, as a sort of cultural constant, from the elements of that culture that emerged adaptively in response to new, externally imposed circumstances.   There is also no shortage of compelling arguments to the effect that performing such a separation is either impossible or disrespectful to the contemporary indigenous culture’s effort to carve out a place for itself in the modern world.   

Thus development, or cultural adaptation to new realities, renders the project of Western self-criticism much more difficult than it may have appeared in the days when Montaigne could call upon the ‘Cannibals’ to measure the degree of conventionality of his own culture’s norms.  What thus  often happens when lessons are sought from indigenous cultures is that the difference between world-views is grossly exaggerated, with the indigenous world-view highly romanticized as one that is fully ‘in touch’ with the natural world, and with the scientific world-view facilely condemned as being the opposite of this, ‘out of touch’. 

These exaggerations stem, I think, from both a failure to take the role of development, as defined above, into consideration in thinking about comparative cosmology, as well as a general misunderstanding, both of the philosophical roots of the modern scientific or mechanistic model of nature, as well as of the extent to which this model is both continuous with those it follows upon in Western history, and overlapping with those in other parts of the world with which it has long co-existed.  The contrast between the West and the Rest, in sum, has generally been overstated, even if this contrast is not one with which we should hope to dispense altogether. 

The perceived immensity of the contrast turns on an overestimation of the difference between literal and metaphorical discourse, of the difference between absolutism and relativism, and of the uniqueness of scientific rationality among ways of conceptualizing the world.  Philosophers tend to assume that these differences can be investigated without stepping back from the culture that itself considers them important. It seems to me however that if philosophers wish either to critique or to defend and promote scientific rationality, they are going to have to dare to look closely, which is to say empirically, at the sort of practices with which it supposedly contrasts.  One way of stepping back from one’s own culture and getting a broader view is that of the historian, and this is why in my view historians of philosophy are already ahead of the curve among academic philosophers.  The past is a foreign country, and historians of philosophy are the worldly cousins of the small-town yokels doing strictly systematic philosophy.  Historians of ancient philosophy and science –unlike, for the most part, historians of the early modern period– have in general been ready to look at the origins of Western thought in context with an eye to just how much what has been called ‘the Greek miracle’ in fact overlapped with other, pre-Greek, supposedly merely mythological systems of thought in other eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. 

For G. E. R. Lloyd, to cite one prominent example of this trend, to the extent that there was a ‘Greek miracle’ at all, this was a matter of a growing concern to distinguish between the different criteria for truth in different registers of speech, with an ultimate preference for the most literal register.  Thus Aristotle criticizes earlier philosophers, most often Empedocles, for saying things that may be, as he puts it, “acceptable for the purposes of poetry,” but not strictly speaking true.   Recently, Christian Wildberg has also argued that the fragment of Anaximander that has long been held up as the very first foray into natural philosophy in Western history was in fact a bit of poorly paraphrased poetry, referenced by Simplicius centuries after it was written.  That is, a supposed early attempt to explain the world as it actually is was in fact just another description of it, familiar from countless native traditions, in captivating, subjective images.  Eventually, anyway, at least one important component of the modern Scientific Revolution was already in place in ancient Greece: the distinction between literal and metaphorical claims, and the valorization of the former at the expense of the latter.  The former have the final say, whereas the latter are at best of use in certain local, circumscribed contexts.  In fact, it appears every culture makes some sort of distinction between different registers of speech that roughly maps onto this one; that of the Eastern James Bay Cree, for example, is between aatiyuuhkhaan and tipaachimunn, or myth and ‘tidings’, respectively.  But what appears to be novel in the Greek case is the exclusive identification of truth with the latter sort of speech.  That is, what Ernest Gellner called ‘the world of regular, morally neutral, magically unmanipulable fact’ came to be the only world to which true utterances pertained, while any other sort of utterance had to be either translated (demetaphorized), or discarded. 

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century one-upped Aristotle by in turn denouncing many of his preferred descriptions of the world as mere poetry.  Thus Robert Boyle insisted in the 1660s that nature could not abhor a vacuum, since nature is not a person and so can’t abhor anything.  Yet not long after the minimalist program of mechanism was put into place, it started to come clear that perfect description of the natural world in terms of the mass, figure, and motion of fundamental particles was a pipe dream, and correlatively that there could be no description without some degree of what Aristotle would have wanted to relegate to poetry.  In such projects as botanical taxonomy, it was quickly recognized that grouping principles must be to some extent arbitrary, that is, based on morphological features of interest to us, rather than on some hidden affinities. It was just such hidden affinities that the new science had insisted on eradicating, so the only choice was either to stop describing nature altogether (at least beyond the level of the motion of particles– which may be the truest account but is seldom the most interesting one), or to acknowledge a degree of arbitrariness. 

Of course, none of this is news to philosophers. Yet they have been all too reluctant, in light of this old news, to turn their attention to the empirical data as to how different cultural groups throughout the world go about arbitrarily carving that world up, in the hopes of arriving at some understanding of the universal parameters of all possible world-carvings. Philosophers, unlike anthropologists, remain too committed to the Greek miracle to be able to allow such evidence to interest to them.  In my own work on the intersection of philosophy with the experimental life sciences in the 16th and 17th centuries, I have been intent to show the way in which cultural and historical context imposed limits on the range of philosophical positions taken up in the early modern period, and also to show how folk-scientific beliefs continued to play a role in the most refined philosophical and scientific debates about such questions as the nature of animal generation and fetal development.  Let me expand a little bit on this latter example.

Throughout his career Descartes complained of his embryological efforts that he was unable to produce a comprehensive treatise because it is a subject that simply will not permit him to treat it “in the manner of the rest,” that is, in terms of the size, figure, and motion of particles.   Yet he held boldly to the possibility of someday explaining embryogenesis in just this way:  “I expect some will say disdainfully,” he writes “that it is ridiculous to attribute such an important phenomenon as human procreation to such minor causes.  But what greater causes could be required than the eternal laws of nature?  Do we need the direct intervention of a mind?  What mind?  God himself?  Why then are monsters born?”  Descartes’ commitment to embryology by minor causes was indeed widely disdained.  Thus John Ray writes in his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of His Creation of 1692 that generation “is so admirable and unaccountable, that neither the Atheists nor Mechanick Philosophers have attempted to declare the manner and process of it; but have (as I noted before) very cautiously and prudently broke off their Systems of Natural Philosophy here, and left this Point untoucht; and those Accounts which some of them have attempted to give of the Formation of a few of the Parts, are so excessively absurd and ridiculous, that they need no other Confutation than ha, ha, he.”

We may be able to better appreciate Ray’s dismay by briefly considering the Cartesian embryological program from an anthropological perspective.  Maurice Godelier, in his recent Metamorphoses of Kinship, argues that there is no traditional culture, anywhere, that believes that a man and a woman are sufficient to produce a child. At some point, whether before conception or during gestation, a supernatural force must intervene in the natural process in order to obtain distinctly human offspring.  To cite one of many possible examples from the Christian tradition, in the 12th century Hildegard von Bingen describes the ‘quickening’ of the human fetus on the fortieth day after conception as follows:  “[The fetus is] the complete form of a man which, by the secret decree and hidden will of God, receives the spirit while in the mother’s womb, at the instant justly chosen by God, when there appears a sphere of fire, which has no resemblance to any trait of the human body, and which takes possession of the heart of this form.”

Whether it is a gift of God or a gift of the gods, Godelier argues, a human child’s parents are never capable on their own, through the mere contribution of their respective bodily fluids, of producing a human child.  As Descartes puts it: insofar as I am a thinking thing, I am not my parents’ child.  Among the Baruya of New Guinea for example, the life principle of the group must be passed on through the transmission of semen from older males to newly pubescent ones (through ritualized homosexual fellatio), and when the semen is ultimately transmitted to the Baruya woman it is not just a fluid coming from the father, but indeed a principle produced and sustained by the society as a whole, which in turn can only be explained in relation to the cosmos as a whole.  A hard-nosed analysis could not fail to note that Descartes’s invocation of the immaterial soul transmitted by a Christian God in his account of human reproduction is no less a retreat into the domain of myth, peopled, as Godelier puts it, by invisible entities. 

In this connection, beyond an approach to the history of philosophy that emphasizes the context of discovery, as many already renegade specialists in the history of philosophy now recommend, it may also be fruitful to approach the history of philosophy from the perspective of comparative ethnography. Such an approach would not, of course, be totally new.  Wittgenstein famously took an interest in the difference between life-worlds that made possible claims such as that of the Sudanese Nuer that “twins are birds.”  His interest resulted in a cross-pollination from philosophy to anthropology in the work of Clifford Geertz and others.  Nonetheless, even though a sort of Wittgensteinianism is nearly orthodoxy in much academic philosophy today, today’s academic philosophers, unlike Wittgenstein, almost certainly have nothing to say about Nuer cosmology.  For Wittgenstein as for anthropologists, the interesting task was never to refute the Nuer claim that twins are birds, but rather to seek to understand the conditions under which such a claim could be found compelling.  And it is, I think, exactly in such a spirit that one must approach the claims of the Western scientific as well as pre-scientific philosophical tradition, such as the Anaxagorean doctrine that “the semen is a drop of the brain,” the Aristotelian view that “the sun and man generate man,” or Descartes’ argument that human bodies come into being through “minor causes” alone, while human souls are implanted directly and supernaturally by God. 

Barbara Duden has argued provocatively that, prior to the era of anatomical study, and even perhaps prior to the era of radiography and ultrasound, the fetus belonged to the same class of entities as, e.g., spirits, creatures of legend, and the dead.  It was, that is, invisible, and not part of the world of ‘regular, morally neutral, magically unmanipulable facts’, and hence its subjection to countless superstitious and natural-magical practices.  Here we see that what counts as an invisible entity is not always clear; it is a shifting category.  Nature spirits, creatures of legend, the dead, are on the list of things that, generally speaking, are admitted by traditional societies and excluded by science. 

Claims such as “twins are birds” tend to appear as meaningful only when a broader cosmological context of entities both within and without empirical nature is taken into consideration.  When Colin Scott sums up the James Bay Cree world-view as “a cosmology of generalized sentience, communication, and response,” he sees these relations as encompassing both the entities familiar to the everyday empirical world, and those that lie beyond it.  These relations were once central to the Western tradition, too, in the form of teleology, sympathy, and natural magic, respectively: precisely the three ingredients of Renaissance natural philosophy sought to expurgate in the Scientific Revolution.  It was over the course of the 17th century that belief in nonmechanical links between things in the world –and indeed beyond the world as commonly understood today– came to be seen as superstitious, and it was not until the mid-20th century that philosophers started to see that their modern forebears may have been a bit too hasty.  Thus Wittgenstein’s judgment that Frazer is mistaken to hold that magical rites are “mistakes.”  What counts as a magical rite at all can only be determined against the background of the whole body of knowledge in a culture.  Presumably, the more ultrasound machines there are, the fewer magical potions will be brewed for pregnant women; yet in the absence of such machines, different criteria of rationality must be brought to bear.  This much was obvious to Wittgenstein, yet somehow never really took hold in philosophy departments, even avowedly Wittgensteinian ones. 

At stake is whether there is one standard of rationality –that of exclusive devotion to the neutral, magically unmanipulable fact– and whether this has been, historically, the exclusive mark of cultures that trace themselves back to Greece.  Aristotle, as I’ve said, wanted to replace all aatiyuuhkhaan with tipaachimunn.  Yet he also argued at times for the superiority of poetic truth to historical truth, of Homer to Herodotus.  Thus in the Poetics he says that the historian –the person who collects ‘tidings’– deals only with what is the case, whereas the poet deals with the entire range of the possible.  Aristotle thus seems suspended between the view that myth or poetry contains the more profound truth, and the view that only ‘tidings’ are the sort of speech that can be said to bear truth.  It is in this connection interesting to note that younger more acculturated Cree distinguish between myth and tidings in terms of truth-value, while the more traditional elders refuse to do so.  Scott emphasizes the ‘ecological efficacy’ of myth and ritual, and cites one interviewee who notes that aatiyuuhkhaan “teaches a lesson… often occurs to a hunter.”  It seems that both this Cree hunter and the Aristotle of the Poetics recognize that there is something, if not more true, then at least more interesting than the neutral, unmanipulable fact invoked by Gellner.  And it is interesting not just because it is pleasing to the imagination, or lets one lazily fantasize about supernatural entities, but because it instructs one as to how to act.

It may be that such instruction is felt to be needed principally in the absence of scientific knowledge –again, the more ultrasounds, the fewer magical potions– but this does not necessarily mean that it functions merely as a locum tenens until something better comes along.  I suspect that the two always coexist –concrete empirical facts on the one hand, and on the other rituals that would make no prima facie sense to an outsider– and that if one wants to understand a culture one has to look into the way in which they coexist.  This goes for the culture that happened to produce academic philosophy departments as much as for the hunter-gatherers.   I also suspect that academic philosophy will continue to misunderstand itself for as long as it continues to exaggerate the distance of the brains that produce it from the brains that have spun out the cultural forms of interest to anthropologists. 

(For precise references for works cited, please contact the author.)

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Herbert Muschamp’s recent death has inconveniently coincided with the opening of Beatriz Colomina’s ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X’ at the Architectural Association here in London. Inconvenient, perhaps a glib adjective given a death is involved, because both serve as reminders of the disappointing state of architectural criticism at present.

I should apologize. It’s an industry of which I’m a part. I’m also longing for a days of yore to which I hold no authority or first hand experience. Yes, another upstart whining about the state of such-and-such today. Remember how good it used to be?

But there is proof! Writers like Reyner Banham, Lewis Mumford, Alan Temko, and Ada Louise Huxtable continue to inspire: they disagreed with, and in some cases intensely disliked, one another, but theirs was a generation of dialogue within the industry; of vitriolic diatribes and hold-no-punches arguments, much of which played out on page and for public consumption.

When I was at the Architect’s Newspaper in New York a few years ago, we worked on a feature about architectural criticism. A writer spoke to Alan Temko, who was a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle for much of the latter half of the 20th century, just before his death. He said, ‘The need for good criticism has never been greater, but if you look around, it seems mighty sparse’. It’s a view, as I understand it, shared by many fading giants in the  field, and one that as a young member of the profession I find disheartening.

The power of criticism hasn’t waned: ideally it can bring issues to public awareness and effect change. Rather it’s the criticism itself that has languished. A younger member of staff at my current magazine recently spoke to both Beatriz Colomina, a Princeton-based academic who specializes in architecture and the media, and art critic Hal Foster. He was excited about both interviews, but down because, according to him, the message from both was that architectural journalism has become an insipid PR machine with little in the way of criticism or analysis. Heavy blow, but point taken.

It’s important to note that those days of yore weren’t without flaw. Muschamp, for example, was an over-the-top writer prone to linguistic flights of fancy and with his own set of darlings to whom no amount of praise was excessive. But he was readable and, even further, held a platform to look forward to.

I make no claim to be a Muschamp expert: I’m too young to have followed much of his career. When I first starting reading him (I dimly recall my first exposure as a college freshman: a column on New York’s Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) I found his rather vulgar literary antics tiresome, but soon I realized that it kept bringing me back. He was the sort of Maureen Dowd of architecture—her ‘jaw-jaw about bang bang’ was his ‘supple social fabric’. Muschamp’s was a lexicon of tactility, richness, luxury and excess. It was embarrassing, but it was determined.

Cut to today. I can’t for the life of me think of one architecture critic whose writing I feel in any way inspired or obliged to pick up.

But why?

There are countless reasons, I’m sure. Right now the one I’m trying to stay away from (out of desperate hope, obviously) is a lack of talent present in our generation of writers.

Perhaps I’m just making excuses, but looking through old New Yorker columns by Mumford and reading early Banham, Huxtable etc., there seemed to be something easier about the issues faced in the mid-20th century than now. The advent of modernism was about an easily-identifiable discourse. It was neat—it aspired to specifically laid out ideals and had a straightforward relationship to context. This is not to say that while modernism flourished there were no other architectural styles, but the modern movement was a yardstick and formulated a modernism/other binary: The numerous groups associated with the utopian movement that took off during the 1960s including the metabolists, situationists, the technocrats, the mechanists ad infinitum were still determined by their umbrella descriptor and which most authors compared to modernism.

Urban issues were demarcated by a similar dichotomy. The debates involved divided participants into equally neat schools—Jane Jacobs warred with Robert Moses, Garden City idealist Frederic Osborn with the editors of the Architectural Review (a magazine, no less!)—it was a readily contentious time in which the future of urbanism and architecture were at junctures. The critic’s job, to weigh in on these issues and ideally fall on one side, was thus fairly determined.

Conversely, now architecture and urbanism are increasingly multivalent subjects. The number of aesthetic movements and schools at any given moment is both elastic and organic. Each style addresses a host of new issues, and their cross-fertilization generates innumerable sub-categories each part of a different critical discourse. How one compares neo-modernism with blobism with the rise of digitally generated designs with sustainability has yet to be effectively reconciled. Additionally, with the rise of critical regionalism, most sensible urbanists and architects recognize the importance of bespoke design in a local context—making it harder still to assess the success of a project without intimate knowledge of its place.

There are more forms of publication, too, between countless new magazines and, of course, the internet. The multivalence of architectural types is matched by the polyphony of voices responding. So many blogs, so many sites, so many magazines, so many books. In a recent interview with Richard Meier, Brett Steele (head of the Architectural Association) introduced the topic of architectural monographs. Meier responded by bemoaning the sheer number of monographs now. As the profession wears on it takes less and less to publish your work, and the associated buzz drowns out anything of meaning. The democratization of the metaphorical soapbox has made everyone a critic. This has its benefits, as no longer are we only able to access the opinions of members of the old-boys club, but it also drowns what could be key voices in a sea of babble.

While discussing the issue of climate change, most people now accept that a solution must involve either a tax or a permit system to reduce emissions and create the incentives for lower emission technologies.  Most people also assume that such policies must be coupled with active governmental regulation of certain industries, car-emissions standards, decommissioning of power-plants, alternative-fuel blending specifications, subsidies to research and countless other governmental enterprises.  My opinion is that governments around the world should work hard towards implementing a proper carbon market or tax system, and do absolutely nothing else. 

All government efforts at subsidizing research, mandating blending-specifications or installing emissions standards are probably futile but more likely counter-productive.  Further, even if such measures could potentially prove positive, politically, they are likely to distract from the need to establish a proper market/tax system, which is the only way to solve the carbon crisis we face.  To illustrate this, I will discuss three of the most popular ideas that are suggested as courses of action for governments to take, and outline some problems with them.

1- Subsidizing research:

Everyone suggests that the government should spend billions of dollars researching alternative energy, and trying to find the next clean and cheap energy source that will solve all of our problems.  The analogy has often been made between the quest for new energy and The Manhattan Project.  This analogy is very inaccurate, however. The Manhattan Project aimed at achieving a single goal and appropriating it for the US government; the point was that this aim—a nuclear bomb—would be kept with the American government, and not released onto the market for people to sell and make profit off.  This is very different in the case of energy, where if we come across a new useful technology, it will have to be widely disseminated and applied for it to be effective.  As such, there is an enormous opportunity for profit to be made out of this and consequently, incentives for millions to look into a solution.

Another difference is that we fundamentally do not know from where the solutions to our carbon problems will come.  There are countless potential solutions and scenarios, and millions of people around the world working on devising the next big thing.  Whether this will come from hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear energy, biofuels, carbon sequestration, liquefied gas or any combination of the above remains an open question that no one with any knowledge of energy could ever dare answer with any confidence.  Seeing as such, there are endless possibilities for research agendas that could uncover a sustainable and clean energy path for human use, and a government will simply not be able to know each one of these, or to fund them all.  And of course, no government will ever be able to truly determine when such a research effort is a “success”, since world consumption of energy is an enormous complex system whose complexity precludes it from being analyzed properly in a lab.  For a technology to be truly successful, the only way to demonstrate its success is for it to succeed in reducing carbon in the real world in a cost-effective manner.  Therefore, since the profit motive exists, and the governments of the world need to ensure that markets can capture the negative effects of carbon to produce this incentive, governments would do best to just align the incentives for innovation to “let a thousand flowers bloom” and allow everyone in the world to proceed with their innovation trying to minimize their costs.  When all the energies of every single consumer of carbon emissions in the world is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions and minimize costs, it is probably safe to trust that the collective intelligence of humans will be able to work on such a problem better than any government-funded project, no matter how big.

Finally, those who advocate large government spending forget something very important: governments have indeed spent a lot of money on such research, with results that are mixed at best.  Biofuels, on their own, have received subsidies over the last 5 years alone that match the total amount of money spent on the Manhattan Project.  All that this money has achieved so far is subsidize corn-farmers and allow them to continue producing ethanol from corn; an exercise as prudent as burning $100 bills, though much more harmful to the environment.  We have to remember that government subsidies for research will be directed according to political agendas, lobbies and special interests.  For every good dollar spent on research, there will be 10 spent on Iowa corn and other such white elephants.

2- Fuel-blending specifications:

One of the most popular fads in energy circles today concerns mandates of alternative-fuel-blending specifications.  If only we would mix enough renewable fuels with our gasoline, we are told; we will reduce emissions and solve the energy crisis in one shot.  This is not only wrong, but actually very dangerously counter-productive.  When mandates for such blending are passed, the government is artificially increasing demand for supposedly “sustainable” or “green” fuel and causing an enormous increase in its production.  To begin with, no one can know with much certainty whether such fuels are indeed “sustainable” or “renewable”, but it is highly likely that when demand for them is boosted by such mandates, their production processes will become very harmful to the environment.
The EU directive on biofuels is the best such example.  By mandating a 5.75% biodiesel blend in European diesel fuel, the EU has now increased the price of biodiesel to the extent that whole forests are being cut down in Indonesia and Malaysia to meet the market demand.  While this elaborate hoax is possibly reducing emissions from European tailpipes, it is increasing emissions from the production and transportation of fuels from all over the world, and more importantly, from the enormous amount of deforestation it causes.

Whether biodiesel will ever be an efficient fuel is not the main question here; it may indeed be a good fuel to utilize one day.  The point is: the only way we will ever know if it is indeed useful is by setting a market/tax system that internalizes all the emissions from the production of such fuels, and allows the market to determine what is best. Such a system would surely not result in massive deforestation in order to slightly reduce European tailpipe emissions.

3- Emission standards

The specter of mandating that all new cars be made with a certain level of emission standards is an initially attractive one.  It could, possibly, lead to reductions in the production of CO2.  But without a proper market/tax system that reduces the ability to emit CO2 everywhere in the economy, this effect is likely to be transitory: reduced fuel consumption in cars will probably be compensated with increased consumption of fuel in other sectors of the economy, unless we have an economy-wide tax or cap that limits total emissions of CO2. But once we have such a tax or cap, then it is pointless to waste our time figuring out emission standards for cars, since the tax or cap will reduce emissions all across the economy in a sufficient way, bringing about reductions in car emissions as well, if they were to be needed.  This same argument could be applied to mandates of efficiency on power-plants, airplanes, or any other major source of emissions.  Attempting to address these issues one sector at a time is similar to trying to squeeze a balloon: squeeze one side and the other bulges.

******
These measures, while they might appeal to voters and well-meaning environmentalists, constitute no more than what might be called environmental tokenism—they will show that you care, but they will not make any real difference to the world.

Perhaps the biggest problem with all of the above mechanisms is that they distract from very important and useful political momentum towards solving climate change.    Now that the battle of public opinion has been largely won, and most people in rich countries are sold on the need to act against climate change, we run a serious risk of being stuck in years—or decades—of hand-wringing environmental tokenism, where electorates continuously demand—and get—little incremental token steps that achieve nothing.

A US or European politician could probably pursue a very successful re-election strategy by continuing to give out subsidies in the form of “research funding” for their cronies, while delaying real action on a market or a tax that would force these cronies to act seriously on emissions, all while appeasing the public with all their spending and emissions-standards and meaningless regulations.  As such, a pretty sustainable political dynamic is set in place where different interests are met in different ways, and real action is never taken. 

What we need is to utilize a carbon tax or market that will lead to a sufficient reduction of emissions.  However, designing, implementing and monitoring such a system is by no means an easy feat.  I have so far deliberately blurred the distinction between a carbon tax and a carbon trading systems, though in reality, these are two very different things.  Governments need to decide which is the most effective form to use; what initial prices, quantities or tax rates to set; how to monitor this system, and how to ensure that it doesn’t cause too much economic turmoil. Perhaps even more difficult than all of this is trying to establish an international consensus around making such a system truly global in its reach, and doing so in a way that does not hinder the development of poor countries and make the poor of the world bear the majority of the burden.  These are all serious and complicated problems that will not be solved in a day.  The sooner we start working on them, the better.  The less time, money and political capital we waste on tokenism, the greater our chances of success.

If there is going to be real action on climate change, there is no alternative to reducing carbon emissions, and there is no better way to reduce carbon emissions than by enforcing a proper tax or market for carbon.  Everything else is at best time-wasting, but at worst dangerous fiddling while the planet burns.

For more of my writing, see TheSaifHouse

All cities and towns in the Südtirol (South Tyrol) have two names: a German and an Italian one. Indeed, the Südtirol itself is called Alto Adige in Italian. The largest city in the province (and its capital) is Bozen in German, Bolzano in Italian. The second-largest is Meran (German) or Merano (Italian). The third largest is where I live (and which is my wife Margit's birthplace) and it goes by the names Brixen and Bressanone. Now large is only a relative term. About as many people live in Brixen as work in the Empire State Building every day: ~20,000. Bozen, which is 40 kilometers to the south of us, has a population of a little over 100,000.

The streets in these cities and towns also have two names, German and Italian, and which is to be listed first on street signs has been a divisive and contentious concern in the past, the signs having been changed every few years for some time. (German names are now listed first, in a symbolic Italian bestowal of autonomy on its odd German-speaking province.) Half the Tyrol was annexed by Italy in 1919 according to the Treaty of Saint Germain, after the decisive defeat of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1918. The northern half of the Tyrol remains part of Austria to this day with Innsbruck as its capital. The population of the Südtirol, however, had an uncomfortable relationship with the Italian federal government, especially after the fascists adopted a policy of Italianization in the province after the mid-twenties. After WWII, and up until the 60s there was a small but active armed independence movement in the province. Since then, things have been relatively calm, and the German-speaking majority seems to live without explicit tension with the twenty-something percent Italians now amongst them. The removal of formal borders between Austria and Italy (because of the Schengen Treaty) and the adoption of a common currency have also made it possible for the Tyroleans in the north and the south to feel more united. And Austria provides special privileges to students from the Südtirol who wish to study at universities there, so a large number of students go there rather than attend Italian colleges. The medium of instruction at primary and secondary schools in the Südtirol is mostly German, but there are also Italian schools. But enough recent history. The city I am living in is a lot older than all this.

Brixen lies in the Eisacktal, which is the valley carved out by the river Eisack in the Alps. This basin was populated even in the stone age. The view from the balcony of my apartment in the photo below [all photos here are my own except the one of me, which was taken by Margit] shows the Eisack flowing in the foreground. In the background, the sun is rising from behind Plose, a peak of about 8,500 feet. My apartment is at about 2,000 feet above sea level.

The area was eventually captured by Drusus, the stepson of Emperor Augustus, and then in 15 B.C. incorporated into the Roman province of Rhaetia. (So I guess capture by the Italians is not such a new thing here.) After the fall of the Roman empire, it became part of the Bayern dukedom in 590. In 901 King Ludwig the Child donated it to Bishop Zacharias. The official modern birthday of the city of Brixen is September 13, 901.

In 970, the Bishop Albuin moved his residence from Saben (Klausen) to Brixen, and after the turn of the millennium (yeah, that millennium) a wall was built around the city. This past Thursday, Margit and I rode our bikes from Brixen to Klausen (about 12 km from our apartment) on a lovely bicycle path which runs next to the Eisack all the way, and then climbed straight up 800 feet to Saben (Bishop Abuin's former residence), which you can see at the top of the photograph below. You can also see Margit on her bike in the lower right hand corner.

Brixen became the capital of the province after Emperor Konrad II donated it to Bishop Hartwig in 1027, before most of the province was taken over by the Counts of Tirol in the 1200s. In some form or other, the Holy Roman spiritual princedom of Brixen, consisting of the small towns of Brixen, Klausen, Bruneck and some district courts, survived until its secularization in 1803. Almost all the historical information about Brixen given above was first gleaned (and then rechecked from other sources) from the informational pamphlet provided by the tourism office of Brixen. The pamphlet also states:

Brixen remained the center of art and education throughout the Middle Ages, gained civic self-administration on the threshold of modern times, lived on trade and craft and had to bear the accommodation of mercenaries. After 1803 Brixen became a little province town and its economic position did not recover until the beginning of tourism, favored by the mild climate and natural beauty of Brixen.

Today Brixen prides itself on its good reputation as a health spa, and as a place with a lot of art treasures and valuable collections.

The Rienz river empties into the Eisack at Brixen. The region is self-sufficient in electricity generated from these waters. In the photo below you can see the Eisack on the left (I am standing on a bridge across it) and the Rienz coming down on the right side. They join a couple of hundred meters behind where I am standing:

In the 10th century, a cathedral was built in Brixen, and this building today dominates the town square (known as the Domplatz). The photograph below shows the Domplatz from the south side of it looking north (the building with the green roof is the town hall):

The “Dom” of the Domplatz can be seen here (looking northeast from the south):

The Domplatz has various interesting features, such as this fountain sculpture designed by Martin Rainer:

or this Jesus:

And here is a closer look at the town hall (notice the German first, Italian second):

In 1909 a “Millennium Column” was built to celebrate a thousand years of the city's history. There is a statue of the Bishop Zacharias, and at the top a lamb, which is Brixen's heraldic symbol:

The old city center itself is very pretty with narrow meandering cobblestone streets (closed to motor traffic, but you can go on bicycles) lined with privately owned shops (sorry folks, no Gap Kids, Victoria's Secret, Banana Republic, or even a single McDonald's to be seen anywhere here) and cafes and other places that are clean and well-lighted:

There is a lot of tourism (mainly Germans, Austrians, and Italians) all year round. In the summer there is hiking and mountain climbing, biking, hang-gliding, etc., and in the winter some of the best skiing in Europe. Innsbruck, where the winter olympics have been held twice (1964, 1976) is only an hour away (I went on Friday and saw the outlandish and huge ski jump at Bergisel designed by Zaha Hadid there) by car through the Brenner Pass. The mountain behind my apartment in the first photo, Plose, has a ski run with a five thousand foot vertical drop on it. There are luxury hotels (and some cheaper ones) in Brixen to cater to the tourists. One of the oldest and best-known (and near my house) is The Elephant:

Now, for those of you who read my last column at 3QD, I am extremely happy to report that Frederica is COMPLETELY healthy and VERY happy in her new home:

Freddy pawing at a ball I have thrown, and in her typical nap position on our bed, on the right.

When she was a young girl, Margit received a bike as a birthday present which she apparently did not like because it was not stylish enough for her self-image. She never rode it, but her parents have kept it in good condition for more than a quarter century. It is now mine, and with pride I have named it Red Dragon:

This one-speed girls' bike gets me everywhere. Margit has her own 21-speed new bike, but the Silver Bullet (as she has named it) can never beat the Red Dragon!

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Ich wünsche euch eine gute Woche!

Michael Blim

Can you imagine a world without the rich?

You might say that the rich we have had as long as we have had the poor. As the incredulous swell in an old wine commercial said to the ingénue: “How do you think I got so rich?”

Most Americans today accept the rich as they do death and taxes as another one of life’s annoying basic facts. It is unusual for Americans to realize that we as a society are responsible for their existence. We believe what they tell us. Once again, an old commercial suffices: As John Houseman, bow-tied, and quintessentially the patrician Harvard law professor he once played put it about his client: “At Smith Barney, we make money the old fashioned way – we earn it!”

(Parenthetically, who among the moneychangers would dare run this ad now?)

We need not countenance their existence forever. One need not bring back Stalin to reduce or eliminate the rich. Scandinavian countries do quite well in minimizing their presence. And there is little mystery in how to reduce or eliminate the economic power of the rich. Steeply progressive income taxes, elimination of inherited wealth through estate taxes, and income redistribution along with a robust welfare state can do it.

If Americans examined the deeper damage that the rich do to society, perhaps they might be willing to try cutting the rich down to size.

Let’s look at how the rich damage American society.

First, they burn up resources. Andrew Hacker in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books paid tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society for its scathing critique of the lifestyles of the rich and its condemnation of how they squandered national resources on personal consumption. These resources, Galbraith argued, could be better put to solving the country’s social problems. As noted above, there are remedies that Americans thus far refuse to apply, and they are as obvious as they are ignored.

Second, the rich corrupt the major institutions of American society. It bears repeating that the rich don’t get rich or stay rich simply by making better widgets and saving the profits from their corporate endeavors. They make legislatures dysfunctional, regulatory authorities their watchdogs, and professions their poodles. They corrupt presidents. They even corrupt each other, as corporate heads are bribed with board positions and in turn protect the interests of the company that bribed them.

Consider their corruption of several essential marketplaces for goods and services. What is the recuperative value of a luxury hotel inside a major hospital, complete with chef and concierge services? That depends, I suppose, on what is being recuperated. In the hospital’s case, they recover money, they claim, and lots of it, when compared to serving those Medicaid-assisted poor and the Medicare-dependent elderly and disabled. Instead of lamenting low Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, they are pandering to the rich. Often it is for more than just money for services rendered. There are new hospital wings and prestigious care centers and institutes to think about, and who better to hit on but the rich who have just spent a week at the local Plaza Hotel hospital?

If pampering patients makes them get well, then how can it be denied to others? But that isn’t the point of the white glove treatment, is it?

Even as doctors desert careers in internal medicine owing to perceived lower pay and longer hours, other internists open boutiques, shrink their practices to a quarter of their former sizes, and charge $3000 per person annual membership fees (See my column “Is There a Doctor in the House?”). Every time internists create boutiques, they diminish the number of doctors, already declining, that provide medical care for everyone else.

The rich even corrupt careers like hospital administration. A recent Boston Globe story disclosed that the presidents of Boston’s major teaching hospitals make near or over a million dollars each a year (NB: without bonuses added). The last time I checked, hospitals of this sort were non-profit institutions. One would think that the boards of these non-profit hospitals would blanch at paying them a million, if only for fear of bad publicity. Yet, as the boards are composed mostly of very rich people, they by practically class instinct would acknowledge that someone whom they employ with so much responsibility deserves a comparable reward. This, after all, is their divine right to ungodly compensation too, so the divine right must be defended everywhere, or it will eventually obtain nowhere.

The rich corrupt universities. Elite schools become elite schools because they service the elite. If that seems tautological, that’s because it’s causal, not casual. The rich made elite schools with their money, and the payback for their accumulated billions, according to Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal reporter in his new book The Price of Admission, is legacy admissions for their heirs. The subtitle of his book could be “how George Bush got to Yale,” and perhaps how he managed to actually get “C” grades. (You have heard of the gentleman’s “C” haven’t you?) Golden shows how elite schools take in hefty percentages of legacy undergraduates. He also shows in the case of Duke how the university effectively solicited bribes by admitting rich students with the expectation that endowment money would follow from them and their families.

And we thought we lived in a meritocracy. Horatio Alger was right: the best way to succeed in business is to marry the boss’ doctor – or, it seems, play lacrosse at Dartmouth with his son.

But there is a third and perhaps the most insidious way whereby the rich corrupt American society. They corrupt the nature of society itself by turning their corrupting powers and dubious satisfactions into cultural standards for the rest of America. The great if largely forgotten social critic Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) made this point precisely and with disarming if utterly cynical simplicity. Wealth, Veblen argued, was a source of honor, and thus having it created an invidious distinction. Others emulated the rich to achieve wealth and status. Seeing this, the rich manifest their dominance through conspicuous consumption, which also has the happy effect of controlling and corrupting American institutions, as I have suggested above in the cases of elite higher education and medical care.

Thus, for instance, philanthropy, though universally considered generous and altruistic, has a predatory component. It is, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss would have noted, a gift that demands reciprocation – in this case power – in return. When Mike Bloomberg gives upwards of a billion dollars to the Johns Hopkins medical colossus, he receives respect in return, and probably influence in the future direction of the institution. Bill Gates, to take another case, is now one of a handful of the world’s most influential people directing global world health initiatives. Warren Buffett has decided that his friend Bill, Gates that is, should use his wealth in Gates-sponsored initiatives too. All of this is done without a whimper about the loss of democratic control of our priorities, and without a whisper of the impropriety of handing over state and in Gates’ case global sovereignty to the rich.

The rich also receive sanction for their wealth and the means by which they made it. Gates’ Microsoft may have been found by the European Community to have used monopoly power to kill off its competition, but this fact is buried on the financial pages. His philanthropy is strictly page one. And the rich actually claim their legitimacy from beyond the grave, a power for which every legacy student at Harvard rejoices. Everyone remembers that the great Andrew Carnegie, either out of soulful suffering or by virtue of his attachment to the strictures of Scottish Protestantism, gave away his total fortune. Those beautiful rural town libraries and several foundations are the result. Few remember how his steel company was responsible for the bloodiest and most lethal counterattack on a union strike in American history. With money, the rich not only predate the rest of society, but also produce a sanctifying grace that absolves their sins.

Go thou and do likewise, the rich can be heard to say. Instead of stripping the rich of their predatory and envy-making wealth, several hundred million Americans put their hopes and dreams into a chase after wealth and an orgy of conspicuous consumption. No more just social order emerges. No, instead the rich and their divine right are affirmed. After all, how can you be against wealth and predatory power if you chase it? Millions of American lives are wrecked in emulating the rich and pursuing their path. Millions more may not emulate the rich, but the rich and their wannabees economically and socially run them over anyway in the great chase for wealth and power. The poor, the working classes, hell, everyone in the bottom four fifths of American society are exploited by the rich at the same time they are upbraided for falling behind. You’d have to be a swell not to notice that the rich create a standard of living that only the rich can afford.

Ponder this and this observation of Thorstein Veblen’s:

“The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any innovation….” (Penguin Books, 1994, 200)

Feel stuck?

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

Do they give acting awards to dogs? Perhaps they should in the case of the television program Inspector Rex—Kommissar Rex—an amazing German Shepherd (or series of Shepherds) who helps the Criminal Bureau solve murder mayhem in Vienna. See Rex get jealous when a woman comes onto the home ground of his detective owner. Watch in amazement as Rex uncovers evidence in the grounds of Schönbrunn. Laugh when Rex steals yet another ham roll from one of the detectives who is slow on the uptake that this is one extremely clever canine. Invariably, Rex is told he is wonderful somewhere towards the end of each episode. Which he is. 

Yes, the plots are are often absurd, and no dog can be that clever. However, this is a  show that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an entertainment. It is warm bath television that is enjoyable without getting into Derrick territory, my favourite police series, which seemed to cram an amazing amount of metaphysical speculation into its hourly format.

Some people start foaming at the mouth the moment you indicate that you are not going to spend your entire life getting saddle sore with Sontag or become spellbound before the latest speculations of the Four Strawmen of the Atheistoclypse. Will & Grace. Cue a thousand put-downs. The Sound of Music. Could anything be more banal.

Popular culture can provoke the worst kind of snobbery in some. We know that nuns didn’t stop the advance of the Nazis by mucking around with engine parts, just as we are perfectly well aware that people don’t suddenly burst into song with orchestral accompaniment in the Austrian alps. However, we accept the aesthetic boundaries within which various genres operate, and enjoy them for what they have to give. I might regard Wagner as one of the most interesting representatives of Western civilisation, but I certainly don’t want to go around listening to Wagner all day. I couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘Edelweiss’, and its kind, it must be, more than occasionally.

Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed some episodes of Inspector Rex, went on to direct Der Untergang, the compelling film about Hitler’s last days with a magnificent ensemble cast led by Bruno Ganz. And I have heard more than a few people admit to the cataclysmic effect their first encounter with The Sound of Music had on them. In other words, there is no gap between the varieties of irreligious experience. The Hegel reader can fall for the nonsensical intellectual blather that’s about these days; the ABBA aficionado may be reading Moby-Dick. So far, so obvious.

The digital spread of culture has been a good thing, despite those who want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all cultural product prior to circa 1995 was marvellous. Yes, there’s a lot of indulgence about now, the price to be paid for the new freedoms, but there are still some who try to ignore the fact that culture has become democratised for the first time in history. They don’t like it, but that’s too bad because it’s going to happen at any rate. Serious culture has to earn its stripes, and if people get off on a sitcom rather than listening to some music of the Darmstadt School, that is a choice made freely by free citizens. The fact that I don’t like a great deal of contemporary culture, think that it sells the human condition short, or is simply product manufactured to make money, is really neither here nor there, just as some names in the present cultural diaspora do nothing for me—they can take care of themselves. However, the worst thing is to go around in a state of high seriousness all the time insisting that one must get through on a diet of severities that would mortify a saint.   

‘A crazy planet full of crazy people, / Is somersaulting all around the sky. / And everytime it turns another somersault, / Another day goes by. / And there’s no way to stop it, / No, there’s no way to stop it, No, you can’t stop it even if you tried. / So, I’m not going to worry, / No, I’m not going to worry, / Everytime I see another day go by.’ 

‘No Way To Stop It.’ One of the best songs in The Sound of Music, cut from the film version, but containing the kind of common sense you won’t find in the Solemn Times Weekly or Preaching To The Unconverted Standard.

In the contemporary imagination Salzburg may turn out to be be the place where Julie Andrews sang Maria rather than the city that sent Mozart packing. But you can still visit the place where Mozart lived in Vienna and dwell upon the mystery of greatness. It’s not exactly secret knowledge, yet. 

? . . . !

Bring in my German Shepherd now. . . .

Nice dog. How do you solve a problem like Maria? With some Nietzsche, perhaps? 

Stop licking me. But, oh well, why not.

Amazingly enough, Rex had transformed himself—Tardis assisted— and was now beside me, sitting just in front of the large Anselm Kiefer painting that had taken over my loungeroom wall. You can imagine how taken aback I was.

But then, even more amazingly, Rex began to speak and, what’s more, in perfect English, which is a bit odd for an Austrian German Shepherd, you’ll agree. A poem.

                        Happy is he who has loved,
                        She who has known the hour
                        Of earth’s inexplicable marvels
                        And is content not to want more.

Incredible. (But . . . aren’t marvels explicable these days?)

Oh, that is good Rex. You wonderful dog. I was so stunned I could say nothing more.

But I thought, ‘Gut gemacht, Rex!’

Rex recites his poem hereabouts. 0′ 54”

MVP Mike Lowell and the Boston Red Sox poured down hurt on the Colorado Rockies in the wretched World Series that ended in last night’s mercy killing Game 4 Sweep. Outside of Red Sox Nation, it was surely one of the dullest of Series in recent memory, the sum total of high drama amounting to the pitchers’ duel in Game 2, about two innings in Game 3, and, to be charitable, the final few innings of Game 4. Boston fans, during the 13-1 battering in Game 1, probably took a sort of Imperial Roman delight in feeding God’s Baseball Team to the lions. (The Rockies look for players with “character” and once hosted an event called “Christian Family Day” at Coors Field). The Rockies might be God’s Team, but remember what the Big Guy did to his own Son, after all. As for the Sox, they’re a pretty secular religion: Fenway’s ballpark organ played “Halleluiah” after Carlton Fisk’s 12^th-inning Game 6 Homer in 1975.

The diehard Red Sox fan believes in his or her heart of hearts that if the score is 13-1 in the ninth that they will still lose, or that if the Sox are up 3-0 in the Series the other team will come back even though it is impossible. Tragedy, after all, is older than Christianity, and Fenway Park, as everyone knows, was built before the birth of Jesus. Fans of small market teams should enjoy or even pity rather than fear and loathe Red Sox Nation in their new ill-fitting dominance. Red Sox fans are now a little bit like lottery winners whose minds might teeter into self-destruction amidst so much inexplicable success. They’ll need counseling for post-post traumatic stress. The Sox are in their revolutionary Bolshevik stage: Their red banners have overthrown the joyless autocrats of Yankee Stadium, the power has shifted their way, and they are still honeymooning, no longer underdogs and not yet developed into fully-fledged bullies.

But, then again, see it the Sox Way. Manny Ramirez, asked about the improbability of the Sox getting to this Series at all after being down 3-1 to Cleveland, said, “Who cares? It’s not like the end of the world.” Manny is a Zen Master. Manny Being Manny reminds me of that old commercial for beauty products which said: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Sox closer Papelbon Riverdances in his underwear on the field and sits in the dugout between innings he is pitching in a trance of semi-permanent psychosis. The bullpen clangs spoons and bottles in rhythm on walls and each other. Knuckleballs, dreadlocks, an undone hex, a manual scoreboard and a cranky old ballpark at home. What’s not to love, seriously?

Sure, the contemporary game is a model of conglomerate capitalism, in which not a monopoly but a consortium of big-time corporations squeeze out the competition, buy up anyone who threatens to beat them, and use sheer weight to crush smaller enterprises. Moneyball, the raiding of small market clubs, the bulldozing success of the big payroll teams. The small markets essentially becoming farm-teams, a minor league within the Bigs in which promising youngsters audition in Oakland and Florida for jobs in other cities. In some ways, the Red Sox fan is like the irrational Republican voter described by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas. He or she maintains a fervid belief in the underdog status of a dominant corporation, and is made to feel like helping “the little guy” by shoveling cash into the pockets of multimillionaires. Boston and New York: Not Red and Blue exactly, but a lot like the two-party electoral system.

2007’s World Series MVP Lowell and Boston pitching star Josh Beckett, of course, were on the 2003 Florida Marlins, who beat the New York Yankees at home in the Championship: Somebody up in Boston took note of that series. It’s intriguing to trace out the fortunes of the members of that Marlins team, and realize how many of those players have given propulsion to the playoff bids of other teams since then. I think of those Marlins in part because they were the team that benefitted from the Bartman Play that kept my Cubs out of the 2003 World Series. (Governor Jeb Bush offered asylum in Florida to Bartman, a Cubs fan who accidently spoiled a key out trying to catch a foul ball in the stands.) Your 2003 World Champion Florida Marlins! Catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who made his major league debut and threw out two base runners on the same day he was married, went to the World Series with the Detroit Tigers after leaving the Marlins. Juan Encarnacion won another world series with St. Louis. Derrek Lee helped my Cubs win the NL Central this year. Juan Pierre, who holds the record for lowest strikeout percentage among active baseball players, and Brad Penny, a 2007 All-Star, both went to the Dodgers and even so the team can do nothing in the sluggish smog. Carl Pavano had one of those terrible Yankee pitching experiences that don’t work out. Ramon Castro became a Met, along with, eventually, Luis Castillo, a lifetime .294 hitter who was at bat during the Bartman Fiasco. Dontrelle Willis stayed in Florida, and this year he didn’t seem very happy there (surely the Red Sox should acquire his services as soon as practicable). The fact that all these players – Beckett, Lowell, Rodriguez, Encarnacion, Lee, Pierre, Penny, Pavano, Castro, Castillo, and Willis – were on the same small market team at the same time is wholly remarkable, the fact that the team was in Florida is even more remarkable, and the fact that this particular roster scattered with such velocity and haste after winning the Championship is more than remarkable, it’s sad. Connie Mack did the same thing to  his Philadelphia Athletics when he needed money, back in the day.

I digress, but researching whatever happened to the 2003 Florida Marlins was how I managed some of the dullest, open-laptop innings in postseason baseball for the last ten years. Something about baseball seems to invite all sorts of unsatisfying analogies, templates imposed upon a game that in truth cannot mean anything. Manny is right on the literal level – Who Cares? If He is There, we must hope God does not, he has bigger Fish to fry than answering Rockies prayers, although a sports-distracted Fan-God could be a powerful mechanism for explaining the current state of world affairs. But Manny’s “Who Cares?” is not a fan’s statement, it’s too cosmic and impartial, it’s too calm and wonderful, too blissed out, too correct, too perfect. Who Cares? Then why did we throw so many hours away watching this season? What exactly were we watching or waiting for? Gerald Early wrote in his essay “House of Ruth, House of Robinson,” in The Culture of Bruising, that baseball is a game “inextricably bound to story.” Franklin Foer wrote a witty book about How Soccer Explains the World. How Baseball Explains America has already been done very well by Ken Burns and Co., and, on a more literary level, by Don DeLillo in Underworld, amongst myriad examples. We care, so we make the game mean something it probably doesn’t, except that it does, because it means something to us, right?

All photos courtesy of BibliOdyssey. Click on single images to be taken to the page on which the image appears. Paired and triple images are numbered, with links appearing at the end of the article.

By Elatia Harris

It’s going on 3 a.m., and — quickly! — you need to look at something unfamiliar, striking and truly well presented. Wouldn’t hurt if it were beautiful too.  Oh, just for a minute. You know you shouldn’t get into a whole new Internet thing at this hour.  But you must be optically seduced – you must be!  And then you will sleep.  First, however, some 12th century Egyptian maps that utterly disresemble any known terrain, some delicate German drawings from the 1830’s of Radiolaria and other single-celled organisms, a bit of Chinese garden architecture, various illustrated cosmologies, an engraving of a giant tuba dominating a Flemish townscape…  No doubt about it — you can only be headed for BibliOdyssey, one of the world’s best-loved art blogs.  Earlier this month, the BibliOdyssey book came into being, published in London by FUEL, with a foreword by Dinos Chapman. It’s a big, beautiful book — not just a triumph of the blog-to-book genre, but a triumph, period.  And it’s so exciting to so many that this may well not be the first you’ve heard of it.

BibliOdyssey is the brainchild of Paul K, who lives in Sydney, Australia, and prefers to remain in the background: he is the curator, BibliOdyssey is the show.  In lieu of an author photo, Paul sent me the print on the right. Some know him better by his screen name, peacay, or his initials, PK, but nobody knows much. I first made his acquaintance in my pioneering days of image capture; I didn’t know how to pull an image off the Internet, and Paul told me how the thing was done.  Of this art, Paul is the master, and his meticulous care in matters of attribution is one of the BibliOdyssey hallmarks. If you like an item of the “visual Materia Obscura,” as Paul calls it, that you see on BibliOdyssey, then you will always be able to find out where it came from, and many other precise things about it too. Paul is not an art historian specializing in prints who’s showing you what he knows, but the searcher and discoverer of the images he puts up. Even though a post may take 10 days to a month to prepare, he writes about his finds with a distinctly un-gushy sense of having made a fresh haul. It’s an engaging, conversational style of writing that carries over into the book. And, I might add, a style an art history instructor could employ to keep visual culture newbies from feeling bogged down in class.

Apropos the publication of the book, Paul and I emailed about the evolution of the blog from its early days in 2005 to its present form, about the passionate nature of the search for images and the surprises involved, about shifting gears to write the book, and about his sense of mission in creating so much beauty and interest, post after long luminous post, four or five times a week.

ELATIA HARRIS:  I’ll start with the obvious question — How did you get the idea for BibliOdyssey? Were you looking for specific kinds of images from the get-go?

PAUL K: One way or another, all roads do lead to the Metafilter (Mefi) community. I had some time on my hands, first in Vietnam, then back here in Sydney, and I was busily looking around for weird and wonderful material to post to Mefi. There were a couple of posts I did  — on the outsider artist Charles Dellschau and the polymath Athanasius Kircher — that really sparked my interest in the eclectic visual material to be found online. There was also a curiosity about blogging in general — why was it such a popular thing? I didn’t want to outstay my welcome at Mefi by continually posting about esoteric engravings and the suchlike, so corralling them at my own site proved to be the logical alternative.

EH: There used to be a line in your About section — “If it looks like I know anything, the mirrors are working.”  It looks like you know a lot.  Could you comment on special knowledge needed for putting up BibliOdyssey?

PK: I arrived with enthusiasm and maybe that was enough to hide my ignorance, at least initially. I have a deep respect for many sites out there that scan, aggregate and/or upload obscure artistic material and I’ve learned a lot by observing their various approaches. One art site I followed closely early on, Giornale Nuovo  — which, incidentally, has discontinued operation as of this week — I considered to have an exemplary overall style and that probably had a positive affect on the way BibliOdyssey has developed over time. But I read widely across the web and am always watching and assessing a lot of people who have excellent technical, artistic or writing talents, so my education — on many levels — never ceases.

That line about the mirrors was meant as a humorous defense of course. I didn’t want people to make the mistake of thinking they had found some kind of authority. I eventually removed the line from the site, not because I particularly felt that I had made any great progress, but because the joke wears a little thin after a while.

EH: So, if there was no very focused preparation, were there influences?

PK: Probably two major influences that bear on the way I approach things. One is a science degree and the other is Joyce’s Ulysses.  Science teaches a person to be a critical thinker and to search for essential features and the truth without regard to prejudices. It’s a background that lets me scan 40 websites, for instance, and quickly identify the salient points and the most reliable sources. Ulysses teaches me that there is abundance in the commonplace and to have a sense of humor in the process of discovery.

So, more explicitly, I rely upon a continuous curiosity and attention to detail to overcome my lack of knowledge and background in all things of an artistic and historical nature.

EH: There was a sort of admiring criticism leveled at Monet –“Only an eye, but what an eye,” I think it went. Do you relate to that?

PK: Isn’t the quote from Cézanne actually? — “His was only an eye, but what an eye!”  And I thought it was not a criticism at all, but an incredible compliment, implying that with his regular human vision he was able to see in a visionary way.

In any event, I relate to why Cézanne would be so deeply affected by Monet, yes. Do I think it relates at all to me or to BibliOdyssey. No. Absolutely not. I seriously do not believe that I have any great eye for identifying beautiful or wonderful or amazing images, or at least, no more than the next person. If I post a series of images from a certain artist, I am quite confident that most other people would make the same or similar choices. The only thing I’ll concede — and this really runs the gamut in terms of unearthing any depth of psychology to the background and practicalities of BibliOdyssey — is that I devote the time and have built up a familiarity with the institutions and to a lesser degree, art history.  My eye has been honed by experience.

EH: What does it feel like to conduct these long, fruitful searches and haul in all these fantastic images?  I want to know a bit about the sorting process, also about the emotional quality of what you’re doing.

PK: I’m not sure I’d call them long and fruitful. The fruit is sporadic at best. I have to scan a lot of rhubarb to find the strawberries!

There are varying levels to the sifting process. First it’s about finding images in numbers that are rare, odd, unusual or have visual qualities that catch my eye or set them apart. At this stage I’m just happy that the net is full. I’m not really looking deeper at the detail or the artistic beauty, save for its initial impact from a quick scan.

Next it’s about extracting, cleaning up  (if needed), cropping, assembling and picking out a selection to post. Looking into the background, reading around, writing and compiling everything for an entry on the site takes from hours to days to sometimes weeks.

Nowhere in this chain of tasks do I have time to be particularly moved, or just contemplate the images in wonder.  That part really comes for me in the same way it does for everybody else, when I return to the site and wander around without time constraints or the self-imposed pressure of constructing a post.

EH: You’re used to surprising everybody with what you put up.  Reading the comments, I see that people are often amazed by your finds. But are you knocked for a loop by what you find pretty often, too?

PK: Absolutely. Not every day perhaps, but regularly and significantly – it’s like the serendipity one experiences wandering around an antiques store. I’m unencumbered by a background in the trade so each new trinket holds a special worth both because of its inherent beauty or novelty and also because I wasn’t aware of its existence.

I suppose 10% of all the images posted continually take my breath away when I see them – they astonish me for their imaginative and artistic magnificence and I hope they always will. That’s not to suggest that I don’t like the other 90% of course, but there’s a certain number for which the allure never abates.

EH: Would I be asking for a trade secret if I wanted to know why the images on BibliOdyssey are always so clear and sharp and radiant? I’ve never seen anyone do it better so it must take all night…

PK: Just staying with the antiques thought, I always try to remember the restorer’s maxim – ‘Do as little as is necessary.’  So I don’t use Photoshop and I only use a small paint program sometimes to downplay age- related damage and stains, particularly near faces. In truth, the image quality is very varied. Other than that, I would suggest that you are being fooled by the beauty of the underlying picture. Success!

EH: How did the idea for the book come about? Did it feel like a natural segue or did you have to be sold on it?

PK: FUEL Design came up with the idea and made a tentative contact. I said I was not averse to the concept but I didn’t think it was necessarily feasible. They allayed my initial concerns by gently encouraging us to take some small steps to see what would happen. So it was probably not a natural progression for me at the very beginning. But my familiarity with the institutions the images came from, and their keepers, meant that the terrain we had to traverse was immediately in my area of experience.

EH: I like it that these images have come full circle – didn’t most of them start out in books?

PK: You’re suggesting that the site concentrates on book art and in fact that’s not quite the case. The spectrum covered is actually print art. That ranges from book illustrations to posters to art books to watercolor sketch albums and all in between — yes, the boundaries are a little fuzzy. It just so happens, quite naturally, that book art — old engravings and  whatnot — is the predominant material. Funnily enough I didn’t know they were the boundaries of the site from day one. I had a notion it would be in that general region, but when the site was posted to Mefi it was described as being a ‘compendium of the printed image’ and I took that as a cue.

EH: You mention a science degree in your background – yet you’ve set yourself an art historical/curatorial task, haven’t you? Do you sweep the archives in a pretty democratic fashion?

PK: It’s the scientific mind at work in the field of art really. I’m not in the habit of attaching labels such as ‘high art’ or otherwise, so the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage – print art – and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that’s not essentially where I come from.  I’m looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking — if, from a sociological viewpoint, that accumulation represents a certain aspect of human artistic history, that is not a characterization with which I would vehemently disagree.

But I would point out that the Web archives are themselves undemocratic. I can count on one hand the number of posts I’ve made about African art for example. So at best we have a curator’s skewed tastes applied to an inherently disproportional online representation of human artistic cultures. I have expended a lot of energy attempting to overcome or at least reduce that sort of bias. Alas, I am not a magician.

EH: I and many others who follow BibliOdyssey think you’ve done something stupendous. It’s hard to imagine it coming totally out of the blue  — is there any way one might say the child was the father of the blogger? Or of the writer of the book?

PK: I had a tremendous ability to become passionately absorbed in whatever I was doing back then – sports, stamp-collecting, reading. I’m an all or nothing kind of guy, always have been.

One of the things that stands out about both the blog and book is that they involve, for the most part, subjects that are outside of my areas of experience. That has been a big part of the attraction: I knew little coding, knew little about blogs in a practical sense, knew little about art, hadn’t formally studied history, and my science background concentrated on the theoretical and experimental of course, so there wasn’t so much emphasis on studying the illustrations as artistic pieces. This whole thing from blog birthing to book making has essentially been about some guy educating himself, but in a very public way.

EH: I’ve heard writers say they write not to be writing, but to be read – I’d have to agree with that.  And you can’t be happy blogging into the uncaring air, can you?  Are you pleased with the sense of audience you get?

PK: I like  — no, that’s wrong  — I need to know that people visit and think that what’s occurring on the site is being curated well and that the content is interesting or enjoyable or wonderful  — take your pick of descriptions. Comments are only one facet of the feedback. Site statistics, citations on other sites and correspondence are the backbone of assessing how the site is perceived. As long as people visit, getting few or no comments would be of secondary concern. But if there were no comments and few visitors, then it would mean that it had become too narrowly self-indulgent. I don’t feel that is likely: the cusp of science, history and art — the domain of the print world, really — is too rich a vein and my capricious whims too significant an influence for lack of variety to become an issue methinks.

EH: And you never worry about running out of material – or do you?

PK: Were all the world’s museums, libraries and galleries to stop digitizing books today, I’m not so sure I could systematically extract the already existing worthwhile morsels of visual materia obscura in my lifetime. That’s one of the satisfyingly frustrating enjoyments — the scope of activity in sifting and collecting in the digitized print world is as large as I want, so that the concepts of perfection or completion are irrelevantly abstract.

EH: Having created and maintained the blog for just over 2 years, how do you see the meaning of the book? It’s a beautiful object, and that’s plenty — but I guess I’m talking about the larger meaning.

PK: You’ll allow that in many ways, meaning comes after the process. There never really was a master guiding principle while we toiled away getting the book project off the ground, or if there was, it was this notion of being respectful to the digital and hard copy elements contributing to the project – truthfulness, proper attribution, accuracy as to facts and fair representation.

There is – for me – no great thesis to be plumbed here, but I suspect that this book is a challenge to the notion that the digital and print mediums are separable entities. You may wish to attach a greater meaning to the “blog about books turned into a book” trope, but I think that’s just a simple chain of irony.

If I must I suppose I would grant that the book is most meaningful as an invitation to discovery. It offers a broad range of accessible material from a large number of repositories and I hope people become motivated to pick up a book or turn on a computer to learn more.

EH: Could you guess which might be the more lasting – blog or book?

PK: We think of these fragile relics being given a new lease of life and protection on the Internet, which is true to an extent, but the ultimate irony in this circular book-to-web-to-book escapade is that the BibliOdyssey book may well outlast the digital files from which it was derived.

EH: It’s taken me years to think of a digital file as having the reality of hard copy… What could happen now?

PK: Well, preservation of digital documents is turning out to be a more complex and costly exercise than the best practices applied to the comparatively robust originals, which have somehow managed to survive wars, weather and the passage of time. The Internet is in its infancy yet its stored resources are already at risk. Websites disappear every day, technologies and file formats change and impose upgrade requirements to maintain compatibility, data integrity and retrieval assurance.

The BibliOdyssey book becomes — inadvertently, in these circumstances — a snapshot overview or sampling of the online cultural resources available at this moment in history. An artifact of our illustrated digital times.

For myself, during the practical development of the book, I was generally less concerned with the big picture and more preoccupied with developing respectful relationships with these wonderful digital repositories and carefully researching the backgrounds. It was a project, a labor of convoluted love and a hard copy back up of my little obsession.

EH: I saw that FUEL asked Dinos Chapman, an enfant terrible of the British art world in the 90’s, to write the foreword.   What did you make of that?

PK: I don’t want to talk about Dinos Chapman’s foreword. I would rather people who get hold of the book discover his writing without my tainting it with a comment or description. If you know Dinos Chapman and the work he and his brother have produced, you will know to expect the…unexpected.

EH: I had quite a fabulous time selecting illustrations for this article from almost 800 long pages of BibliOdyssey posts, most with 12 to 15 or more radiant images of stuff I didn’t know existed – there was nothing I didn’t want to use. But if you were asked to tell someone who’d never seen it about BibliOdyssey – the blog or the book – how would you describe it so that they’d know if they wanted to be involved?

PK: Hm. Take one part circus, one part diorama and one part tutorial. Add comfy chair and blend. Readers can expect a visual parade of science and alchemy, manuscript illumination, absurdist woodcut, ethnographic history and imaginary beings. It’s at once  a kaleidoscope of contrasting imagery and a survey of the illustrative output of humanity across half a millennium. If you aren’t intrigued or amazed by a wide spectrum of eclectic images then you don’t want this book, you want an imagination.

EH: Absolutely!!! Thanks!

                                                      
LINKS TO BIBLIODYSSEY PAGES with info about illustrations for this article (you will have to scroll to find the precise image.)

1. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/08/manuscript-decoration.html
2. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/11/concept-of-mammals.html
3. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=thornton
4. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/07/snips.html
5. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/10/iakov-chernikhov.html
6. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/01/religious-triumvirate.html
7. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=arabic
8. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=murray+gell-mann
9. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=denys+brown
10. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/04/splintered-remainders.html
11. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=palenque
12. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/11/engineering-renaissance.html
13. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/12/pochoir-insects.html
14. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/02/erik-nitsche-graphic-design.html

SEE ALSO “Phantom of the Optical“, an article about Paul K by Damien S.B. English in Edutopia.
http://www.edutopia.org/phantom-optical

Race and Music in America

Justin E. H. Smith

*

Books consulted or discussed in this essay:

William L. Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books, 2002)

Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Belknap Press, 2004)

Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, 2003)

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006)

William Labov et al., Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change (Walter de Gruyter, 2006)

Jason Tanz, Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America (Bloomsbury, 2006)

*

A prisoner in a maximum-security facility in Warren, Ohio, where I once did some do-gooding, or tried, offered me this bit of folk wisdom: “You’ve got your white people, see, and you’ve got your black people; you’ve got your Chinese people, and you’ve got your Puerto Rican people. It’s as simple as that.” He himself was Mexican but for some reason his own people did not make the cut.

Is it as simple as that? 18th-century natural philosophers would have included Laplanders, and placed them at the bottom of the hierarchy (the great Aufklärer Alexander von Humboldt did try in his way to stick up for them, arguing that they are not really swarthy at all, just dirty).  My Mexican felon had probably never heard of Laplanders, let alone Saami, but in any case he was being more comprehensive than Americans typically feel the need to be.  For us, the taxonomy is usually binary: in the beginning, God created Black and White.

In America, the contingent fact that our phenotypes are relatively different has led us to believe that the differing phenotypes are what is causing the racism.  Yet the faintest interest in comparison with other histories in other parts of the world would quickly reveal that interethnic strife is often just as nasty and intractable between neighboring groups with identical genetic backgrounds.

Our differing genetic backgrounds in America do not appear, from a historical perspective anyway, to be what initially made possible the creation of a new nation built on slave labor. At the beginning of the Age of Exploration, the slave trade had long been based in the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. For reasons having mostly to do with the internal politics of the Ottoman Empire, this source dried up, and some adventurous entrepreneurs turned to West Africa. But they did not go there out of any a priori commitment to the subhuman status of Africans, and thus to their eligibility for a life of slavery. Rather, it seems, an economic necessity compelled the slave traders to look to Africa for the natural resource that sustained their industry, and in consequence over time, first an Atlantic, and then a global racial order emerged in which the subordination of Africans came to seem written into the natural scheme of things.

The people being sold and sent off to the New World were not, at least initially, undifferentiated blacks. Rather, they were simply prisoners, sold like the poor Crimean Slavs before them, by dint of bad luck and according to ancient rules of warfare. There is bountiful historical evidence that no single concept of blackness existed much prior to Marcus Garvey and the emergence of the pan-Africanist movement.  Well into the 19th century, slaves continued to be identified in terms of their African ethnic belonging, and not every African ethnicity or social class was deemed suitable for enslavement. A revealing anecdote tells us of an African noble who worked as a slave trader with Europeans on the coast, who through mistaken identity was himself sold into slavery, worked for several years on a cotton or tobacco plantation somewhere in the South, finally was able to have his identity confirmed, received profuse apologies from his owners, was sent to England, and eventually made his way back to west Africa… where he resumed his former occupation as slave trader. Did he not feel any common bond of brotherhood with the Africans he was selling?  Did he not learn a thing during his years of enslavement?  Evidently he did not. The chromosome –or perhaps better, the phenotype to which it is said to give rise– had not yet come forth as a criterion for the perception of bonds of reciprocal obligation and solidarity.

This will be the first in a series of essays on race, with especial attention to the fundamental racial rift in American history, namely, that between ‘black’ and ‘white’. I will let the quotation marks drop in future occurrences of these terms, but the reader is invited to read them back in, and to think of them, specifically, as scare quotes. For to the extent that racial difference exists, it is not interesting; and to the extent that it is interesting, it is in fact just the same thing as cultural difference. I was only able to come to see this very gradually, after having spent years in countries other than my own and becoming convinced that America has no particular Sonderweg. Its internal conflicts may be approached just like those of any other country. They may, that is, be understood. Approached comparatively, scientifically, soberly, the difference between blacks and whites ceases to appear so much as a natural fact, and comes into clearer resolution as a consequence of a particular history. Of course it does. How could it not? And would it have been so hard for just one of the countless adults I encountered in my American childhood to have pointed this out?

1. Danté, Jimbo, and Mr. Disney

I spent my American childhood on a defunct chicken farm in Rio Linda, California: a particularly bleak, trailer-park-riddled exurb to Sacramento’s north, just on the wrong side of a sprawling air force base. It is a town that seems to have been named by someone who did not speak Spanish, and knew nothing of adjective-noun gender agreement. Rio Linda is best known as the butt of a long-running joke on Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show, who, in spite of his usual condescending populism, enjoys following up every multisyllabic or foreign term with a dumbed-down version of the same term, as he puts it, “for you people in Rio Linda.” (I confess that as far as I’m concerned, this is Rush Limbaugh at his best.)

I have seen the stationery of the Minnesota Scandinavians who in the 1930s specialized in convincing their fellow Swedes and Norwegians to buy land in Rio Linda, sight unseen. The letterhead shows a paradisiac scene, of orange trees and bright sun, beneath the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. My mother’s ancestors were convinced, I believe, by that stationery alone. And even if there were in the end no orange groves, but only chicken coops, I believe there was always a certain pride in having made it to California, though they made it there alongside countless Okies and Arkies they would always find a bit beneath them (and that is the other half of my story).

I spent a year at Rio Linda Senior High School before dropping out (I am still waiting for my diploma honoris causa). Most of my memories of that year have to do with the class period I whiled away every morning in Mr. Disney’s print shop, with sundry boys who had long ago been selected out of academic, college-bound classes.  Rio Linda had a strong legacy of vocational training: print shop, metal shop, auto shop, all in high-ceilinged rooms with machines whirring and boys talking tough.

Now it is well-known that prisons and public schools are each other’s mirror images, and evidently they are designed by the same architects, but nowhere is this clearer than in shop class.  A photo of Mr. Disney’s boys circa 1987 would leave you with roughly the same feeling as an archival image of a 1950s reform school, or an 1880s railroad crew: interchangeable, anonymous, cast-off young men with nothing, but nothing, to look forward to, and yet all (or most) beaming with a self-love that would have you believe they are young gods.

There was Danté, for example, with the shiny Lakers jacket, the cubic-zirconium stud, and the corn-rowed hair, whose probation officer would come by every few weeks to check on him, to whom Danté would always respond: ‘Yes, sir.’ And there was Jimbo, who was in the National Guard and had been kicked out of his home by an abusive stepfather, who was rumored to be a young initiate of the Ku Klux Klan, and to know something of the spray-painted swastikas that had recently appeared on campus. And there was me, lost in escapist fantasies of far-away lands, yet recording far more of this scene, in far greater detail, than I ever could have predicted, or at the time would have wanted.

It is thanks to Mr. Disney that I ended up spending only a year at Rio Linda Senior High School. The trouble started when I attempted to reproduce a flyer on the equipment made available in shop class for a Young Communist League gathering, forthcoming in San Francisco (100 miles or so away; in any case a different world). Mr. Disney wasn’t having it, and Jimbo and Danté were squarely on his side.  “Why don’t you just go to Russia?” Jimbo taunted. “Shit. Russia? That ain’t cool,” Danté added. This was the end of what had for most of the year been a fairly secure détente between me and the print-shop boys.

We were permitted to listen to the radio during shop: this was the benefit of having no future.  Jimbo would always turn the dial to KZAP, the rock station, and Danté to FM-102, the “urban hits” station. And it would move back and forth, from ‘Jump’ to ‘Freak-A-Zoid’; from Chaka Khan back to ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’. It was all very cheerful, this endless struggle, but one did get the sense that were it not for Mr. Disney’s iron-fisted control of that print shop, lives could have been lost on the proposition. And still some days, notwithstanding the swastikas and all the external markers of affiliative difference, something transpired during that period that can only be identified as cameraderie. Danté claimed to have a 35 year old lover, and Jimbo was impressed. Jimbo, in turn, had been to Chicago O’Hare on his way to basic training in Indiana, and Danté was enthralled by Jimbo’s account of how large the terminals were.

“One of y’all niggas is fat, y’all!” Danté yelled one morning as he walked by the fifth-period P.E. class I shared with Jimbo.  He had Jimbo in mind, who had been cheating on his push-ups by allowing his gut never to leave the ground. Some mornings Jimbo would burst into shop class and exclaim, “Hey-yo, Dawn-tay,” imitating the way he imagined black people to speak. One would be hard pressed to say whether this was tribute or derision, and into this ambiguity, I think, are condensed centuries of history.

Early that year, before my seditious pamphleteering had become a problem, Jimbo’s sister, a sophomore to my freshman, found me ‘sweet’, and implored her brother to drive me home after school in the back of his pick-up truck, the one –and I am not making this up– with the genuine ‘Bocephus’ sticker in the back window. Jimbo grudgingly agreed. Some days the truck was filled with other rough teens, chewing Skoal, listening to a Charlie Daniels Band cassette, talking about who was going to kick whose ass (I was a cipher: neither in danger of getting my ass kicked, nor eligible for any real experience of fraternity). One day we stopped off at the studio apartment Jimbo was renting above the Quik-Stop across from the air force base’s main gate. There was a mattress on the floor, and a fold-out card table with a box of Frosted Flakes on it. There was an American flag nailed sloppily to the wall, and a hammer hanging on two nails next to the door. Jimbo noticed me looking at it and offered, by way of explanation: “That there’s my nigger beater.”

My first girlfriend’s mother liked that word too. She also drove a pick-up truck, and on weekends went with her boyfriend up to Tahoe to see the classic-car shows at John Ascuaga’s Nugget. She had a collection of Patsy Cline wigs that she wore to pairs dancing nights down at the Country Comfort Lounge in Folsom, not far from the legendary prison. “Niggers don’t know nothin’ else but fightin’,” she said to me once. “God damn if my little girl ever gets pregnant by a nigger.”

All of this is to say that this one little lexical item, which for the second half of my life has been utterly unspeakable in the circles I’ve come to frequent, was for the first half standard fare. I admit it had an air of naturalness about it. The way it was said made it seem as though there really was such a class of people: such is the mystifying power of language.

And it is also to say –and this will be a corollary more controversial, perhaps, than the first point– that I take myself to be in a position to conclude a thing or two about race in America. Having spent time with white kids who had “nigger beaters,” and black kids who called the boys with nigger beaters “niggas”, what strikes me most –and what is missing most, say, from the judgments of Northeastern white liberals who meet full-fledged racists even less often than they meet black people– is that it is precisely where racial difference is most stressed that the boundaries between racial groups are most fluid.

This is borne out linguistically: William Labov’s sumptuous Atlas of North American English shows many of the same phonetic traits popping up on the South Side of Chicago as in majority-white counties of Alabama. And when Danté called Jimbo a “nigga”, the only possible parsing of this fraught term’s connotation was as “guy”, which in the search for rough cognates calls to mind nothing so quickly as the Yiddish mensch. To switch, not unconsciously, from Yiddish to German, Danté and Jimbo were Mitmenschen.

For a number of years, I did my best to fit in in the Northeast, to pretend I was all Connecticut neocortex, with none of that swamp-dwelling reptilian American brain left in me. Recently, for whatever reason, I have been called back to trawl the swamp, as it were (from the safe distance of Europe, anyway: you won’t find me conducting any ethnomusicological expeditions into the Ozarks of my ancestors any time soon), to reexamine its sundry life-forms and to see if I can’t say something new about it.

This here’s my attempt: America is not so much divided into black and white, as into those born into the swamp of race (all blacks, and all whites with roots in the South; all who spend time in prisons, or vocational schools, or shop class) on the one hand, and those on the other hand for whom it is a distant abstraction, a part of history but not a lived reality.  If I may be permitted to riff on Stalin’s comment about the ‘Tartar’ who lies beneath any scratched Russian: scratch a racist, and you’ll find a wigger (a term I’ve seen several Northeastern academics –and not all of them Central Asia specialists– misunderstanding as “Uighur”): the ambiguous Eminem figure who is simultaneously as black as a white person can be, yet, somehow, for all that, rightly or not, comes across just as cretinously white as David Duke.

Still, white Americans in search of roots simply have no choice but to look where Marshall Mathers has gone without apology. As Tom Breihan put it recently in the Village Voice: what else do you expect the white kids to be doing?  Listening to Nickelback? They are crossing over to the only thing that’s living and pulsing, the only thing that’s ever lived and pulsed in American folk history. Allan Bloom would no doubt have hoped to convince them of the sublimity of Mozart’s ‘Requiem’, but he is now assuredly as dead as the Salzburger himself, and with him, we may hope, the myth that white Americans are, in their souls, Europeans. We are not. We —except perhaps for a few Mayflower children to whom I, anyway, am not related– are all descendents of the Middle Passage.

2. The Storm-and-Stress of Stagger Lee

In 1895 in the redlight district of St. Louis, a black man shot another black man over a Stetson hat, or perhaps a gambling debt, and so gave rise to the legend of Stagger Lee. The legend passed through a blues permutation at the hands of Mississippi John Hurt and others, and by the late 1950s it had evolved into an ebullient rock-and-roll song. At this point I am going to have to ask you, reader, to be patient, and to sit through a few viewing sessions made possible by YouTube.  Here, to begin, are the Isley Brothers (“America’s most frantic threesome,” the host calls them), circa 1960:

The white teens –London “mods”, evidently– are in ecstasy. Perhaps they are just happy to be on television. The three brothers seem, anyway, to be having fun too.  The one has a toy gun, and the other is laughing as he collapses to the ground, a feigned victim of brotherly murder.  All are dressed up to meet television standards, indeed to meet the standards that rock-and-roll itself enforced until the mid-1960s, until TV and film went technicolor, and LSD replaced chewing gum as something for the guardians of youth to worry about. The brothers all have matching skinny ties, and matching lye-straightened pompadours, about which Malcolm X writes at fascinating length in his autobiography (or perhaps it was Alex Haley). The lyrics are hard to decipher, but if you listen closely all of the elements of the Stagger Lee legend are there: Billy, the .44, the gambling debt, the Stetson hat as what Henry Louis Gates would no doubt call a ‘signifier’.

What strikes me most about this clip is the sheer joy of it. The lead singer, Ronald Isley, is currenty in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, an institution best known as Timothy McVeigh’s last stop. He is in not for murder, but for tax evasion, yet it is a fitting enough blues ending for the life of an American folk musician par excellence, who was there at the inception of all sorts of trends and careers that now are part of history. A sessional musician who performed with the Isley Brothers in the early 1960s, Jimmy James, would soon change his name to Jimi Hendrix and under that moniker would do versions of blues songs that did not hide what they were about: typically, murder, as well as other, familiar paths to ruin. But for a time, under the TV cameras, and the chaperoning gaze of the TV host, Stagger Lee was good fun.

There have been countless other versions of the Stagger Lee legend. YouTube offers up more clips of chubby white lawyers and accountants in places like Columbus, Ohio, imitating Mississippi John Hurt than you will ever be bored enough to watch. There is also a Grateful Dead version, but you, reader, are invited to skip this chapter of Stagger Lee’s history too. Let us instead move forthwith to what I take to be the most significant development in the Stagger Lee legend since its incorporation into rock-and-roll by Lloyd Price in the 1950s, to wit, the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave’s version of the song, from his 1996 album, Murder Ballads:

Where to begin? As an aside, I note I have long sensed that if only I were naturally as thin as Nick Cave, my life would have been just as charmed. To which complaint many might reply, But your life is charmed, and to which I would reply, in turn, Tell it to my flab. I am a tiresome school marm, while he has countless minions of sweet goths lusting after him. In any case race and its representation in art and culture are at issue here, not weight, and in this connection I agree with Will Self, writing in the Guardian (‘Dark Matter’, June 2, 2007), that Nick Cave is among the best and most significant lyricists of our age, and if he chooses to appropriate the Stagger Lee legend, this is with good artistic reason.

In Stagolee Shot Billy, a fascinating if problematic book, Cecil Brown studies the legend of Stagger Lee, and in particular its ancestral relationship to gangsta rap. (I should perhaps confess at this point that I am such a staunch defender of orthographic correctitude as to have long avoided writing about race in America, simply because I have immense difficulty bringing myself to spell certain unavoidable words in their now-accepted hip-hop variation.) He also considers the legend’s attractivess to white musicians. Brown cites William L. Benzon’s argument that “European-American racism has used African-Americans as a screen on which to project repressed emotions, particularly sex and aggression. The key to this insight is the concept of projection.” One aspect of this projection, Benzon goes on, “is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express though music from European roots.”  Cave for his part offers his own explanation of his decision to record a version of the song: “The reason why we [recorded it] was that there is already a tradition. I like the way the simple, almost naive traditional murder ballad has gradually become a vehicle that can happily accommodate the most twisted acts of deranged machismo. Just like Stag Lee himself, there seems to be no limits to how evil this song can become.”

Brown and Benzon are skeptical of the motivations of a white artist like Cave, yet it is worth asking what sort of depths the singer could have scraped had he not had the African American tradition available to him. In a typical love song (‘Do You Love Me?’, 1994), Cave describes the object of his desire as “red-shadowed, fanged/and hairy and mad,” and when he catches sight of her, it is more fear than longing that she conjures in him: “Here she comes/blocking the sun/blood running down the inside of her legs.” Whatever ‘repressed emotions’ are coming out here, they are not being projected onto the screen of black culture. If anything, these images are distinctly rooted in European folk culture, which is to say European folk fears: vampirism, menstruation, female body hair. Let no one then say that white musicians must look to African-American forms in order to bring to light their darker demons.  For Nick Cave, this turn is elective.

Cave is no doubt the first self-described Christian apologist ever to have sung: “I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole.  He claims to have heard this line in an old blues recording by a man identifying himself as ‘Two-Time Slim’ (google this last phrase and you will get nothing but the MySpace pages of insufferable 20-year-olds).  His is a Christianity as far removed from that of the social conservatives as possible: it takes seriously that dogmatic point –which all recite, but few dwell on– that men are fallen, and goes on to describe the pain and terror, and occasional joy, of this fallen state.  It seems to me that his version of Stagger Lee is a sort of pursuit of this fallenness to its most extreme limit.  On Cave’s view, no doubt –and here he is in agreement with the majority of Christian theologians– fallenness is a condition of humanity as such, and not, as it were, those other people’s property.

It may be that Cave is afforded depths of experience by elbowing in on a musical tradition to which he cannot claim any hereditary right. But he also musically conveys depths of experience in my view more forcefully than the great mob of gangsta rappers who owe a similar debt to the legend of Stagger Lee and to the African-American tradition of toasting, or reciting stories in verse.  For Brown, “[t]he screen Cave adds to the Stagolee tradition tells us more about the culture of the singer than it does of the culture of the song. Stagolee as African-American tradition is the screen that allows the projection to take place.”  But what, I wonder, has Brown really learned about Australia by listening to this piece? Certainly nothing about Aborigenes, or the experience of the Scotch-Irish penal colonist. Cave sings Stagger Lee as a trawler and an archivist, though admittedly not as an American.

Why focus on an Australian who chooses his forms of musical expression cautiously, as opposed to an illiterate trailer-park-dweller like Eminem who simply cannot help but do what he does? (And is it for just this oneness of Eminem’s being and language that Seamus Heaney praised our white rapper laureate not so long ago as having “created a sense of what is possible” and “sent a voltage around a generation”?) What I wish to show with the example of Nick Cave is that even a studious Australian can with some effort tap into the vitality of this tradition, and express, as Benzon puts it, a part of himself that could not come out through European forms.  He does not have to, but he can.  And this has always been a fortiori the case for white Americans, and still more, I venture, for those white Americans from the swampier parts, where the word “nigger” is still casually used (in either its ‘-er’ or its ‘-a’ variant).

Benzon and Brown would have it that ‘Europeans’ like Eminem and Nick Cave consciously turn to musical traditions that afford them depths of experience they can not get from their own. (Is Sydney punk in the late 1970s, by the way, a ‘European form’?)  Might it not rather be the case that there are pale-skinned people dispersed around the globe who, by dint of history, fail to find a way to express themselves, or everything they want to say, through European forms?  If I may paraphrase Tom Breihan: What else do you expect them to do? Be Nickelback? Whitesnake? Mozart?

On my humble analysis, American popular music (whether made by Americans or not) has gone through successive cycles of blanchissement, a process that generally continues until it reaches intolerable proportions, and suddenly the floodgates open and the white musicians again are free to acknowledge their debt. The floodgates opened, for the better, when Elvis Presley moved into “race music” territory; and rather less interestingly with the displacement of hair metal by rap metal 15 or so years ago.  My sense is that “emo” is at present over-ready to be blown off the stage by something more vital, something less whiny and irrelevant, which is to say again something that re-taps the roots of American folk culture: a culture which never had any special subdivision labelled “whites only” to begin with.

3. Bing and Time

If you simply need an American, anyway, here is Bing Crosby doing a version of “Old Man River”:

I confess every time I watch this it makes me shiver.  Bing’s delivery is simply perfect.  Still, frankly, there is something about this performance that I find much more disturbing than even Nick Cave’s version of Stagger Lee.  There’s almost a sense that Bing is inhabiting the role of the person who is inflicting the sweat and pain, not the role of the one suffering from it.  Note the diabolical spirit that overtakes him two-thirds of the way through, with 29 seconds left on the clock: it is a mocking and sadistic slavedriver speaking through him; not a slave.  And when Bing Crosby sings about his “aching feet”, one can not help but imagine him kicking them up on the club table after a particularly arduous 18 holes.  The sort of suffering that brought this song into existence, though, was of an altogether different caliber.

The river in question is the Mississippi, though those who first sang the song no doubt imagined themselves on the Jordan, on the Nile, replaying the lives of the long-suffering people of the Good Book. It must have made a great deal of sense, to see the Mississippi as one continuous flow with those ancient, Biblical currents, just as the plight of the slaves in the New World was so easily imagined into the pages of the Old Testament. Obviously, at its most general, the river is not any particular river, but only a metaphor for time.  Aristotle asked long ago: if time is a river, then what is it flowing in?  This is a good question, but for lyrical purposes the metaphor works.  An individual man’s life is short, but the river’s flow is infinite, and this contrast is a source of both succor and dread.

The river represents endless time, unchanging time, just the sheer and continuous flow of generation after generation laboring for nothing.  But there is another kind of time into which Old Man River was eventually to be channeled: historical time, in which the song’s various appropriations and mutations throughout the years would change the meaning of its very words.  Historical time, unlike endless time, can move faster or slower, according to the spirit of the age.  Recently, it has been speeding up exponentially, so that now Bing comes across as coeval with Moses, and the prefix ‘ur-‘ becomes indistinguishable from ‘pre-‘: the origins of things are irrelevant, and only their latest version matters. This process was already well underway when Bing sang.

How can Bing possibly be so callous as to believe that he is in a position to sing the pain of a slave? He believes no such thing.  He likely believes nothing at all about the song he is singing.  He is singing on television, the same medium that allowed the Isley Brothers to transform Stagger Lee into an expression of joy.

*

During my first séjour in Berlin 17 years ago, NWA was all the rage. Clueless German youth would sit in bars, rolling their own cigarettes, entertaining serious conversations about the economics of Reunification, or the need for more transgender restrooms, as in the background Ice Cube, in the role of ‘Dopeman’, instructed a buyer to have his girl get down on her knees, and suck his dick. Only a few of the Germans seemed to have sufficient English to detect that the scene being described bore only the most distant of relations to the poetry of Black Liberation à la Gil Scott Heron, to which they were all, they claimed, ideologically committed. Ice Cube has since moved on to other roles, and in Berlin things are, mutatis mutandis, quite the same.

It strikes me now that what those German kids were missing, in all their political earnestness, was that the music in the background was a toast, which is to say a narrative art, if not its most inspired instance, and not some sort of program statement. Ice Cube and Eazy E had something to say, but they were never exactly the Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg of Black America. I am prepared to say that these white kids in Berlin were fundamentally misunderstanding this black music, and had no business listening to it. I am also prepared to say that American kids are not, for the most part, prone to this sort of misunderstanding.  There is a shared history ensuring that the Urformen of the legends that gave rise to the music will make some kind of natural sense. Others can electively seek to understand these forms, and come to interpret them with genius. A certain broad segment of white America, the one I have been attempting to describe, cannot fail to understand them.

Berlin, 5 October, 2007
In memory of Kyle ‘Tracker’ Brown, 1971-2007

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

By Edward B. Rackley

“These days, we have a saying among journalists,” a radio features reporter in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province told me. “Don’t open your mouth—except to eat.” Disappearances and killings of journalists are on the increase. Diplomats and aid officials characterize the Lankan media as “one of the most closed in the world.” Little wonder that the country’s ongoing civil war rarely makes the international news wires. For those with a vested interest in waging war by any means, a carefully cultivated information blackout is key to sustaining the pugilistic Lebensraum.

An estimated 70,000 lives have been taken by the war since it began in 1983. A ceasefire was reached in 2002 to pave the way for a peace deal between the government and Tamil separatists fighting for a homeland for their minority, but it fell apart nearly two years ago. Renewed fighting has killed an estimated 5000 people. In August Human Rights Watch reported more than 1100 abductions between January 2006 and June 2007, many of them attributed to the government and its armed allies.

Landing in Colombo last month to assess internationally funded efforts to support independent media around the country, I imagined I’d find a Chinese version of censorship, where the state actively polices transmissions, broadcasts and internet use. The Sudanese government uses similar methods of proactive control, even blanketing the population with regular SMS texts to rally anti-western sentiment. On both sides of the Sri Lankan war, censorship in the media is largely voluntary. Unlike Sudan or China, there is no centralized, technical control over the media, in part because there is so little media infrastructure in the first place. Over 70% of registered journalists in the country do not have an email address or use computers or internet.

The ethnic majority with over 70% of the population, independent Sinhalese journalists increasingly yield to government intimidation, threats, disappearances and the pressures of patriotic fervor fueled by a pro-war government. On the Tamil side (less than 10%), a similar mind control is exerted by LTTE authorities using assassinations, abductions, physical threats, accusations of treason and economic strangulation. The LTTE has mobilized the hysteria of nationalism as effectively as the nationalist Sinhalese government. Tamil families must sacrifice one member to the LTTE cause. The emergence of suicide bombers—including children and women—shows its power to impose a suicidal logic on its people. For independent journalists on both sides of this conflict, questioning the war is not only betrayal, it is increasingly suicidal.

Siege mentality

Miraculously, a vestige of independent journalism manages to survive in spirit and practice; their voices audible only in a minor, muted key. Courageous folk they are, all those I met in Colombo and the southern and eastern coastal areas. Government and private radio, television and print media exist across the island, but each defends strident partisan ties and political interests. None are news outlets operating according to any normal journalistic standard.

Another burden on independent media is economic. Besides government-owned media, which is purely propagandistic, private radio and television provide entertainment and distraction from the accrued trauma of twenty years of war. Barely profitable, these operations still generate enough ad revenue to pay their workers a living wage. Independent journalists are squeezed out, both ideologically and economically. They either sell out or drift to other activities in order to survive.

In the southern beach town of Matara I met one such journalist, a former stringer for the national dailies. We chatted in the halls of a private school where he taught English to uniformed school children who pushed their way between us as school let out for the day. A Sinhalese Buddhist and war dissident, he lived a few miles from the president’s hometown, a coastal fishing village.

Since the demise of the ceasefire in 2005, LTTE suicide bombers have been penetrating government army lines to reach deep into the Sinhalese heartland. Popular support for a political solution to the war is at an all-time low. He pulled a sheaf of old newsprint clippings from his jacket, some of his articles in prominent national papers. I was surprised to see headlines on “national unity,” stories on ethnic reconciliation and the “development dividends of the ceasefire.” No such articles would appear today, all these same papers were now government lapdogs.

When no paper would accept his stories, he turned to teaching. He compared the independent media to a war casualty. The national climate was, he lamented, “as ethnically divided and polarized as the conflict itself. The media crisis reflects the political crisis,” he continued, “because the latter created the former.” The cumulative effect of years of discord is that the different communities are completely walled off from one another. The Sinhala share no common language with Tamil or Muslims, as only 7% of the population is Anglophone. Conflict has emptied any previously shared geographical area, increasing communities’ vulnerability to fear and hatred of others—a weakness politicians are quick to exploit.

“The government wants us to think that all Tamil are LTTE, and many people are eager to believe this. All this nationalist fervor has veered into racism,” he sighed, watching the children exit the guarded compound. The primary impediment to peace here are “the politicians, not the people. They set the example of how to behave toward minority communities, and yet they behave the worst of anyone. This is the tone they have set for the nation.” In the absence of balanced reporting and an open media, patriotism was colliding with a siege mentality and had degenerated into racism.

Other journalists I interviewed referenced the country’s long history of foreign occupation to explain the resurgence of militant Sinhalese nationalism and its massive popular support. After over two thousand years of rule by local kingdoms, parts of Sri Lanka were colonized by Portugal and the Netherlands beginning in the 16th century, before control of the entire country was ceded to the British Empire in 1815. The island had always been an important port and trading post in the ancient world, frequented by merchant ships from the Middle East, Persia, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Brought by the British to work on tea estates in the late 19th century, Sinhalese view Tamils as invaders from southern India, the massive neighbor to the north.

Average Sinhalese I spoke with in hotels, taxis and shops firmly believed the war was “their fault, not ours.” The government’s so-called “war for peace” strategy would work with time, many maintained. And what right did the international community have to apply sanctions and try to force us into negotiations with terrorists?

In a government newspaper, the Daily News, I read the most succinct framing of the ‘war for peace’ strategy. I had not yet heard the rhetoric of liberation used in the Lankan context; it is surely convenient if only partially true: “What is wrong with conducting military operations in order to liberate the Tamil people of the north and east from Prabhakaran (LTTE leader), the same way that the Americans wanted to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein?”

Enter, citizen

A Colombo-based reporter who had studied and lived abroad described an experimental approach to keeping independent media alive: citizen journalism. “There is no ‘clash of civilizations’ here,” he told me. “It’s all political manipulation.” His work focuses on recording people’s voices and experiences across ethnic and political lines in an effort to rescue their sense of a common Lankan identity, and ultimately a shared humanity. Tamil, Muslim and Sinhala widows talking, for example, of their losses to the war—sons, fathers, husbands, daughters–each tell a painfully common tale. Examples of citizen journalism can be found at www.groundviews.lk and www.vikalpa.org.

Other obstacles loom large, this reporter conceded. Recording local voices may build momentum, but “the challenge for independent media then becomes how to break people’s adherence to their political masters.” Better information and improved dissemination are obvious needs, but difficult to achieve under current circumstances.

One international media NGO I met, Internews, were conducting “cross production” visits to war torn areas with teams of journalists from different ethnic groups. In a meeting with participants, I asked the Sinhalese, Muslim and Tamil journalists how the visits had affected them. Sinhalese journalists claimed to be more skeptical of government reporting. Others came away questioning the civilian costs of the war: “Even if we destroy the LTTE, how many orphans will be created?”

All were suspect of any lasting peace resulting from a military victory. “Regardless of what becomes of the LTTE,” a Tamil reporter explained, “the political grievances of Lankan minorities need to be addressed if the national government is to exist otherwise” than a hegemonic ethnic majority, the current state of the polity.

by Beth Ann Bovino

September sent me to Scandinavia for work. Assuming that summer lasts through the ninth month, I arrived equipped for the beach. There was no beach and the temperature barely made it to 45 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, even colder at night.

With one sweater and a jeans jacket, I explored the city of Copenhagen, my last destination, wandering through the city streets, buying little, with except an occasional $3 can of Coke. I went walking one afternoon, started following some canals, and before I knew it I found the “FreeTown” of Christiania, Copenhagen.

I heard a bit of its story as it was recommended by friends. I was told that Christiana, also known as Freetown Christiania, is a section of abandoned warehouses and buildings that have been taken over by squatters. Christiania has established semi-legal status as an independent community (later, I learned that it remains in dispute). This little section of Copenhagen can’t help but be a culture shock for most Americans and a surprise to me.

I arrived in the evening, passing by many paisley colored buildings and walking down what I now know as the infamous ‘Pusher Street’. It is a dirt road with colorful signs, reminiscent of Woodstock. Numerous stalls had once been set up, selling marijuana in various modes of being. The stalls are no longer there, but the trade remains. A reviewer on Trip Advisor wrote: “Marijuana and Hash are prevalent everywhere and there are a few selections of Mushrooms, if that’s your trip.”

I stopped for a beer at an outdoor bar packed with dogs and men (the dogs were larger than the men). The picnic tables gave it a campground feel, and outside vendors sold food and/or gifts. But I also watched gangs of men shuffle in, make a deal, and leave. It seemed scary, filled with outlaws, and reminiscent of that bar in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker first meets Han Solo. The tables next to me each lit up cigarettes (not tobacco).

At a table across the bar, one woman sat alone. I walked over, introduced myself and asked to join her. She waved at a chair and looked away. But within a few minutes, she reached into her bag, took out a flask and offered me a sip. She started to talk. Her friend later sat down with a six-pack of beer.

They told me that they come to Christiana often. That you can bring anything into the bar, it’s all allowed. They said that Christiania is self-governing. (Wikipedia says that it is a partially self-governing neighborhood and covers 85 acres in the borough of Christianshavn in Copenhagen). They said they came here every weekend and felt quite welcome and at home. Smoking in public is allowed. So if you have ever wanted to sit at an outdoor bar, smoke a joint and drinking whatever you brought in, you are in the right place. I sat with them for a few hours and left to go to the big “Christiana’ celebration, advertised from a flyer. After a few unfriendly remarks, I didn’t feel so welcome anymore and decided to leave.

Coming back to the States, I wanted find out more about this little town. How is it that Christiania manages to be cute and edgy at the same time? Streets are lined by flowers and gaudily painted houses while little children play in a beautiful park. Just behind them, a group haggles their way through a drug deal. Every 20 yards, or so, oil barrels stood, loaded with discarded wood set aflame. There were no cars (they are not allowed). Neither are photos, which is enforced. One traveler wrote that, “I’ll smash your camera”, could easily be the start of a conversation on Pusher Street in Freetown. I took no pictures, but there are many on line.

Christiania began in 1971 when hippies, squatters and political activists invaded an abandoned military base in the heart of Copenhagen. This site was renamed the “Free Town of Christiania”. The authorities, surprisingly, didn’t storm the place. Instead, they humored them (the situation has changed recently, and police have started raiding the commune). The settlement was legalized and the Christianites were allowed to govern themselves. They even designed their own flag. Christiania is now the third largest tourist attraction in Copenhagen after the Little Mermaid and Tivoli.

Christiana is not a legal haven for the drug culture for which it has been associated with at times over the years from uneducated travelers. The use of hash is illegal in Denmark and possession is punishable. Moreover, the current government has repeatedly trying to shut the area down. The hash booths once considered a major feature in Christiana were removed by the beginning of 2004. Before they were demolished, the National Museum of Denmark was able to get one of the more colorful stands, which forms part of an exhibit.

The people in Christiania have developed their own set of rules, completely independent of the Danish government. The rules forbid stealing, guns, bulletproof vests and hard drugs. Marijuana was sold openly from permanent stands until 2004, though Christiana does have rules forbidding hard drugs, like heroin and cocaine. The region negotiated an arrangement with the Danish defense ministry (which still owns the land) in 1995. However, the future of the area remains an issue, as Danish authorities continue to push for its removal.

The inhabitants have fought the government’s attempts to eliminate them, often with humor. For example, when authorities in 2002 demanded that the hash trade be made less visible, the stands were reportedly covered in military camouflage nets. In early 2004, the stands were finally demolished by the hash dealers a day before a large scale police operation. They decided to take the stands down themselves instead of the police. Still, the police made a number of arrests in the following weeks, and a large part of the trade running Pusher Street was eliminated. However, the hash trade didn’t disappear. It was just relocated outside of the town and changed to being on a person-to-person basis.

In 2004, the Danish government passed a law abolishing the collective and treating its 900 members as individuals. A series of protests have been staged by Christiania members since the summer of 2005. At the same time, Danish police have made frequent sweeps of the area. In January 2006, the government proposed that Christiania would be turned into a residential community, which Christiania has rejected as it would be incompatible with its collective ownership.

Things have gotten worse. In early March 2007 downtown Copenhagen “looked like a war zone”. Over 690 were arrested after a confrontation between supporters of a Danish squat (Ungdomshuset) and the police who had just evicted the squatters. The conflict culminated with several parts of Copenhagen rioting simultaneously, from Nørrebro, where Ungdomshuset is situated, to Christianshavn, where Christiania resides. Jakob Illeborg wrote that police officers have been wounded, as have many protesters, members of the press have been beaten up and cars and houses set on fire. This hurt their cause. Ungdomshuset, the object of all the fighting was demolished. Sadly, the protestors have likely given the government more reason to close down Christiana.

The daily realities of living under an illegal military occupation are unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived under them. No matter how much one writes, it is impossible to convey the ghastliness, injustice, oppressiveness and inhumanity of being ruled over by a repressive military accountable to no one. The death of Iman Al-Hams, however, may provide an illustrative anecdote.

On the morning of the 5th of October, 2004, a morning as rudimentarily awful as any lived under a brutal occupation, 13-year-old Iman, wearing her blue and white school uniform and carrying her schoolbag, left her house in Rafah refugee camp to go to school. Iman wandered a few meters away from her usual route to school and ventured into the large security zone surrounding an Israeli military base, which is, as is common, located near Palestinian civilians’ houses and schools. What follows is a gruesome tale of sickeningly cold-blooded murder.

Iman was spotted by the Israeli military base’s watchtower. She was about 100 yards away from the military base when the following conversation took place between a soldier in the watchtower, an army operations room and a certain Captain R, who remains unnamed to this day:

**************

From the watchtower: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.”

From the operations room: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?”

Watchtower: “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower: “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Captain R—along with another soldier—walks towards Iman, and shoots two bullets at point-blank range into her head to “confirm the kill.” He starts to head back to his base, before turning around again and emptying all the bullets from his machine gun into the body of Iman.

Captain R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

**************

After she was taken to the hospital, doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in Iman’s body, and three in her head, though they were unsure of the exact number since her little body was shattered to the point where one couldn’t accurately count how many bullets had riddled it.

Anywhere in the world, you would expect such a murderer to be tried and to receive a very harsh sentence. Unfortunately, the laws that apply in most of the world do not apply to Palestinian children and their murderers. An Israeli military court, on October 15, 2004, cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior, declaring that “confirming the kill” is standard procedure.

A few of the soldiers serving with Captian R seem to have not been satisfied. They were apparently motivated by racist animosity towards him (he is Druze, they are Jewish), and took the matter to a Military Police court. He was charged not with the murder of Iman, but with “illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice.” He was cleared on all counts.

To add insult to fatal and gruesome injury, Captain R was then compensated with 80,000 Israeli Sheckels (around US$20,000) plus legal fees for the inconvenience of being taken to court over a triviality such as the life of a Palestinian child. The court also criticized the Military Police for investigating the case in the first place. Captain R was then promoted to the rank of Major, and continues to serve in the Israeli Army, where he may well have murdered other children in the past three years.

This is by no means an isolated incident or a freak failing of the “justice” system, but rather one example of many such stories that will shock anyone with an ounce of conscience or humanity in them. One could write whole books with the stories of children like Iman, killed in callous cold blood, whose murderers faced no repercussions whatsoever for their crimes. Since 2000, almost 1,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli Army, and countless other thousands injured. Not a single Israeli soldier has faced any form of punishment, demotion, or even reprimand over any of these murders.

As The Guardian’s Chris McGreal put it back in June 2005:

B’Tselem argues that a lack of accountability and rules of engagement that “encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers” have created a “culture of impunity” – a view backed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which last week described many army investigations of civilian killings as a “sham … that encourages soldiers to think they can literally get away with murder”.

In southern Gaza, the killings take place in a climate that amounts to a form of terror against the population. Random fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis has claimed hundreds of lives, including five children shot as they sat at their school desks. Many others have died when the snipers must have known who was in their sights – children playing football, sitting outside home, walking back from school. Almost always “investigations” amount to asking the soldier who pulled the trigger what happened – often they claim there was a gun battle when there was none – and presenting it as fact.

The tragedy of these stories is not just that these lives of innocent children have been lost, but that the Israeli Army, backed by the government, has made it entirely clear that all Palestinians are fair game to their soldiers. Had Iman’s murder been an isolated incident whose perpetrator was punished, one could argue that the Israeli army was not complicit in it. But by acquitting the proudly self-confessed murderer, along with hundreds of his likes, the army is sending a clear message to anyone who would listen that it is an institution that finds child-murder acceptable.

This is illustrative of the real injustice and tragedy of the occupation. Callow 18-year-olds, drunk on their power, sit behind some of the most sophisticated murder machinery in the world and unleash it on a civilian population. Their trigger-happy guns are the only judge, jury and executioner around. There are no moral imperatives, no accountability, and not even any incentive to attempt to minimize damage to civilians. The lives of those surrounding this murder machinery are dispensable.

This is why it is imperative that the occupation end. It is a fundamental right of the Palestinian people, like any other people, not to have their children murdered with impunity by an occupying army. Only when this happens can there be any prospect for peace. Ending the occupation is not conditioned on what the Palestinians do or how they behave, or whether they resist the occupation or not; it is a fundamental right for Palestinians, on a par with the right not to be enslaved.

Under occupation, every child, woman and man is collateral damage waiting to happen. Three years ago it was Iman’s turn. If the world lets the madness of this occupation continue, we will witness a new Iman Al-Hams every day, and our silence will make us complicit in her murder as well.

Everybody thinks that Neo Rauch is doing something special in his paintings but few know why. They can’t put their finger on it. They are, sometimes, even troubled by what they’re seeing.

This is normal when it comes to Romantics. Romanticism bothers people. They don’t believe that the immediacy they are seeing is for real. And they are right to be suspicious. Romanticism is about coming back to the world and seeing it afresh, as it were, with a new sincerity. But that ‘coming back’ is an important part of the Romantic mindset. The immediacy achieved by Romanticism (an immediacy characterized by a kind of wide eyed astonishment before the entirety of the world’s experiences) is not first level immediacy. It is second level immediacy and periods of Romanticism only come about after ‘mediate’ periods. The first great era of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, for instance, came directly after the Age of Reason. The Age of Reason, to paint with a broad stroke, was about standing at arm’s length from the world and trying to get a handle on it. It was about getting some distance and some objectivity. It was an Age generally suspicious of the ‘dive-right-in-with-your-face-right-up-against-it-all’ attitude characteristic of Romanticism.

These days, we’re in the midst of a Neo Romanticism that comes after an Age of critical modernism. And just as in the nineteenth century, there are those who get it and there are those who don’t. There are those still holding on to the instincts and criteria of the past Age, and there are those who simply don’t have a Romantic bone in their body and never will. But the world is large and Romanticism is generous enough to contain them all. That’s one of its strengths: no exclusions. And that’s why Romanticism can have so many different moods and manifestations. Romanticism is interested in exploring every aspect of experience, from the direct apprehension of the objects around us to the world of dreams and fantasy, the limit areas of the rational mind. Romanticism is a kind of infinity, the infinity of a precocious child, a knowing child.

Neo Rauch is a perfect Romantic for the new age because his Romanticism comes from disturbed reflections on the previous era. This gives it a slightly dazed manner and pushes it to a melancholy region of the Romantic universe. Mitteleuropa is a fundamentally strange and compelling place. Beaten on for half a century of war and unspeakable human atrocity it settled into a Soviet era coma that only just ended a decade and a half ago. History is thus a story of gaps and traumas for Mitteleuropa, things you want to forget but can’t and other things it’s very hard to remember. Simply looking at the reality of Mitteleuropa is already to play in a world of dreams and illusions. It is a landscape littered with memories and fragments of lost time. It is broken open and oozing with things-that-might-have-been and options just barely recognized.

And that’s a pretty good description of what is happening on Neo Rauch’s canvasses. Peter Schjeldahl (The New Yorker art critic) touches on something of this in his review of Rauch’s show at the Met. He says, “I think I’ve never seen an excellent painting that is so masochistically cheerless, to the point of revelling in a contemplation of impotence. I would like to despise the artist for this, but his visual poetry is too persuasive. Present-day reality is a lot more like one of his pictures than I wish it were.”

My only real disagreement with the point is in Schjeldahl’s claim that Neo Rauch is impotent. The paintings, of course, don’t ‘say’ things about contemporary life in ways that critics like Schjeldahl want them to. But that, again, is the nature of Romanticism. It drives people to distraction, especially those who aren’t attuned to it. They know they are seeing something remarkable, a visual poetry that is “too persuasive.” But they don’t have the apparatus to take it up. Usually such individuals, having been raised, without even necessarily realizing it, within the discourse of Critical Modernism, decide that there is something pernicious going on with Romanticism, that they are being duped into enjoying something fundamentally empty. Schjeldahl, for instance, decides that “Rauch’s work provides a cultural moment that seeks legitimacy in art with talismans of rhapsodic complacency.” It’s a nice line, but it isn’t Neo Rauch.

Speaking of the Early Romantics, Jacques Barzun once wrote that, “They [Romantics] were forced, as we know, to take stock of the universe anew, like primitives, because the old forms, the old inter-subjective formulas, had failed them. There was consequently nothing for them to do but report individually on what they saw.” The Neo Romantics are up to essentially the same business. Calling this complacent is strange. It is to ask the Neo Romantics somehow to be doing work that none of the rest of us know how to do either. And it is to ignore what the Neo Romantics are actually achieving, which is working their way back through the elements of experience in the attempt to get in touch with where we are now.

This work is simultaneously difficult and enjoyable. It’s difficult because there is disturbing material to sort through, especially in Mitteleuropa. Neo Rauch’s canvasses are packed full of fragments of Social Realism and vaguely menacing images of war and social collapse. Memory is something you might rather escape, but cannot. But the sense of intrigue in the paintings, the mystery of situation and character is exciting. People are up to things in these paintings, often they are dressed well, and occasionally they carry dangerous objects. Something is afoot, not the game exactly, but something. Perhaps an event is about to occur. In the tension of all this imminence, there is a feeling that Neo Rauch is stitching a world back together solely through the instrument of his painterly skill. And even with the application of all that skill, he cannot get the human beings within the canvass to inhabit the same social space. They are there with each other, and not there with each other at the same time. Again, spend a little time in Mitteleuropa and you’ll see what he means. Space, in Neo Rauch, doesn’t even always live up to its expectations. A wall or a building will suddenly give up on itself and drift off into a smudge or an angle that isn’t strictly possible in the three dimensional world. Since we’re still having so much trouble with time, he seems to be saying, we really shouldn’t be allowed to have space either.

There is a passage from W.B. Sebald’s Austerlitz that probably serves as a better wall text to Neo Rauch’s paintings than anything else.

“Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continents overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a packet watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, cutting myself off from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it, and when I arrive I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and never-ending anguish.”

This is the psychological landscape in which Neo Rauch is doing his painterly work of remembering and re-imagining. I, for one, would get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before October 14th.

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

Following on from last month’s post concerning commitment, politics and poetry, here is a poem written in 1984 and first published in 1991. When this poem was written apartheid had not yet ended in South Africa and East Timor had not achieved independence.

       And The Winner Is . . .

Comrades, citizens,
What has the century brought?
Death’s-head conferences
Laying a brutal hand
Across five continents,
Slating thousands each day.

A résumé of the past
Is sad
For the failed progress of ideals
Means a slight chance for your hopes
And where is your charity then
If history brings bad faith?

After the Great War flung its mud
Over Passchendaele
Countless foreign fields
Bloomed with crimson poppies
And Versailles broke with echoes
Of a bankrupt mésalliance.

Then the will to power got out of hand
When Schicklgruber’s revenge
Ground poor Europe a second time over,
After the night of the hummingbird’s plunder.
At Nuremberg some got their deserts
But too many flew down to Rio

Where they savoured a pleasant surprise:
Model regimes,
Few at first, cruel to the last—
Latin America under the thumb;
Archbishop Romero killed at Mass,
Death squads copying feral attacks.

Midnight panic at oven doors
Revealed the shape of genocide.
Desperate pogroms led to this
With culture’s golden prize:
A hand which grabbed at air
In rictus.

Hammer and sickle, scars and stripes,
Tattered flags;
They flap in the patriotic breeze
Above crowds that parrot yes
For the Kremlin geriatrics
And White House apparatchiks.

Why was the President killed?
Don’t ask.
And what of Stalin’s heirs?
Quiet! Do you want the knock
Of the KGB on your door at dawn
Or the CIA under your bed?

Race was a badge for destruction—
Armenian, Palestinian;
You never saw the flies
Buzzing round piles of corpses
Or felt the colonel’s boot
Kick in your aching ribs.

Yet you lived in your ivory tower
Moralising for all,
Never lifted a finger to help
One amnestied soul from its hell;
People endured
As you read the editorials.

In a free state, accustomed
To the full belly,
How could the hungry mouth
Compare to those sensual lips
Which advertise at night
Remorseless appetites.

You still put faith in a party,
You haven’t learnt;
They’ll sell your ideals from under your feet,
If you’re in the way they’ll sell you.
Stop prancing through the haze
Of right wing journals and Left Bank cafés.

There’s one born every minute
Who thinks he’s found the way,
The truth, the eternal light
(It shines from his fundament),
And when there’s at least one hundred dead
He’ll know he’s got what it takes

To ban books written, ideas expressed—
Finis to that;
The mind which thinks, unbound
By the censor’s pride,
Is likely to find its face
Crushed by the secret police.

And what if I shout in the streets of Berlin
Ich bin ein Australier?
Will the Timorese greet me,
Tasmanians cheer me?
(I mean the original, those Aboriginal);
It’s funny, they don’t seem to answer.

The dust bowls on African plains
Where rhetoric declines
Sift down a mountain of flesh
To a giant bone which seeks
At the door of Marxist states
Its liberal opiate,

While the soul with its body
Tossed in the pit
Receives a furtive requiem
With Shostakovich, Mandelstam
And those who remember at dawn
The disappeared with grief.

It’s depressing to index the crimes
Of political minds;
Their red books and other vain manifestos
Are no good to those who wait at Soweto;
Throw in the towel with that mob
Or you’ll end up a friend of Pol Pot.

This political bird with trick wings,
A decoying duck,
Brute part of the Zeitgeist’s plan,
Should depart our red planet (it won’t),
Follow the path of the Caesars
And become a quark in the stars.

Should we mutter our prayers
In suburban peace,
Be blessed in our righteousness,
Or will the tortured hostage,
Head bent in the final prison,
Atone for fate’s derision?

Will the nuclear winter sweep us
Under radioactive snow
Or can all come to keep
Freedom’s unpolluted vows?
What has the century brought
Comrades, citizens?

After the night of the hummingbird’s plunder: a reference to the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazi SS putsch against the SA, codenamed Operation Hummingbird
Will the Timorese greet me, / Tasmanians cheer me? / (I mean the original, those Aboriginal): Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976. There is disagreement as to why the Aboriginal population of Tasmania declined so precipitously during the nineteenth century.

Written 1984 Published 1991 A Temporary Grace 101–105

Elatia Harris

It’s a day to remember in Cornish, New Hampshire, at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. The sky is the blue of stained glass at Chartres Cathedral, an impossible color too vivid to be entirely without edge. The sun is high, the shadows are deep, the birches silvery white. Mysteriously, though autumn has arrived 150 miles to the south, it feels like high summer here, with a breeze to take away the haze, not a yellow leaf in sight, and everywhere the scent of newly mown grass. Exactly one hundred years and one month ago, on a summer day possibly like this one, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the dean of American sculptors, died at his Cornish home, Aspet, the Federalist house on a hill that was the hub of the artists’ colony he founded in 1885, and a nexus of American artistic and intellectual life for the next quarter of a century.

I am at Aspet to interview the New England-based muralist Holly Alderman about the installation she was commissioned to do at the site – an installation that was both a departure for her and the result of an investigation of digital space that she had begun several years earlier as a Fellow of the National Academy of Design in New York. In a much earlier life, I was a muralist, and have been fascinated by Holly Alderman’s murals, which can be seen in locations from Hollywood to Maine, for as long as I’ve been aware of them.  In an age of photo-realist painting, with muralists and their assistants tracing the contours of representational scenes projected onto a wall by an opaque projector, Alderman draws and paints using free-hand perspective, for compositions in which the eye travels far into deep background or architectural space. Trust me on this one – it’s a highly unusual way to work, and you not only see but feel the difference between an original mural painted in perspective and one that is a perspective rendition from a photographic source. I was astonished, then, when Alderman set out to discover what digital space had to offer her as a painter, and what, as a painter, she might bring with her across the digital divide. For an artist who liked to climb up on huge scaffoldings and paint her own murals as well as design them, how was this going to work?

The Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site is the natural location to debut the new work, which is suffused with the spirit of classicism, a spirit that has spoken deeply to Alderman for many years, as followers of her perspective murals know.  Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was the pivotal figure of the “American Renaissance,” which historians of art and architecture place between the late 1870’s and the beginning of the First World War. In a conversation about the Alderman installation, Russell Bastedo, a historian and the official curator of the State of New Hampshire, pointed out to me the tremendous optimism of the post-Civil War era, founded on an exhilarating fact – that the Republic, having come so close to destruction within only 70 years of its founding, was not, after all, sundered, was instead on the verge of becoming a great world power. According to Bastedo, the affinity for the classical style in architecture and all the arts was especially keen in these years, when Americans saw themselves as the heirs to Greek democracy and wanted their public spaces to look the part.  “Expansion was an optimistic process,” Bastedo told me. “And the technology making it possible to push back the frontier was deeply thrilling to the public. The style that best expressed this was classicism. Nobody would have put it this way, but the ergonomics were right.”

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose work embodied the classical spirit, rose to fame on his Civil War commemorative sculptures, most notably the monumental bronze bas-relief memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his regiment of black Union soldiers, the labor of nearly 15 years. Unveiled to the Boston public in 1897, the naturalism of the figures and the dignity they achieved without appearing posed were ravishing to those at the new century’s edge. On the strength of this and other great commissions, President Teddy Roosevelt chose Saint-Gaudens to redesign the national currency, producing the high point of American numismatic art – the double eagle $20 gold piece. Towards the end of his rather short life – he died in his 50’s, having been ill with cancer for many years – Saint Gaudens took on Abraham Lincoln, creating for Lincoln Park in Chicago the brooding but kindly image with head inclined and eyes cast down that most Americans think of when they visualize the nation’s greatest hero.  Had he lived, the monumental sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, would have been his, for he had the commission.  Instead, it was done with his blessings, and very much in his style, by his friend and colleague, Daniel Chester French.

Aspet and, a few hundred yards away, Saint-Gaudens’s studio with its clerestory windows and trellised porticoes, pay homage to a life filled to bursting with work that was acclaimed throughout the land, with distinguished and loving friends. In this, his centenary year, many prestigious conferences are taking place to commemorate and look anew at his life and work. Perhaps, contemplating this era that can seem to belong to a much deeper past, an art lover might not be blamed for pondering: what happened? For a bare century ago, the mission of a great artist was to create beauty that every citizen would recognize as beauty, art that met a standard of excellence universally agreed on, that stirred patriotism and optimism, inspiring men to virtue, bringing them to their knees in recognition of the power wielded by beauty, pathos and heroism. To enter the radiant world of Saint-Gaudens, where even the weather is too beautiful be real, to wander among white fluted columns, fragrant lawns, fountains and birch lanes is — most curiously — to think about Modernism, to which the very naturalness people found and responded whole-heartedly to in Saint-Gaudens was a prelude. The classical ideal encompasses a certain large amount of naturalness, although we rarely think of it that way, and though it is a distance, it’s no great distance from there to the immediacy and intimacy found in the figural work of the early European modernists. Anyone in the mood for thinking it all through could hardly do better than to spend a day as I did in Cornish.

Does art with the sheer eye appeal of classicism have meaning not only within the culture that produces it but across cultures? That might depend on whether beauty and order are able to reach us through the “felt axis” posited by Gestalt psychologists, on whether certain proportions and geometries create in us a sense of harmony that is physiologically based. Proponents of the classical style would say that was exactly the case, that shorn of its European “high culture” associations, classicism pleases on a simpler basis – even in an irony-besotted era not so interested in being pleased by its art, compelled more by consumer culture than by high culture. Preparing to go to Saint-Gaudens for the Alderman installation, I spoke with the art historian and Egyptologist Diana Wolfe Larkin about the tension in mid-19th century Europe between classicism and romanticism that prompted so much side taking. From this distance, Larkin remarked, many seemingly contradictory tendencies – represented, for instance, by the painters Ingres and Delacroix – appear reconciled, like two sides of the same coin, so that it is possible to discern a classicizing spirit in a romantic painter, and vice versa. “There will always be a place for classicism,” Dr. Annette Blaugrund, director of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York told me — classicism running as a current through other movements in art, its keynotes a dynamic symmetry and a balance reflecting order, not stasis.

Holly Alderman is inspired not only by the spirit of classicism but also by a long-time interest in synergetics to pursue an ideal of beauty with origins, like all such ideals, in an earlier era.  This is no retreat from our own time, however, for she is passionate and knowledgeable about the modern and post-modern in art, committed to conceptualizing new forms that can arise only from the present. Although she is far from exalting technique over the interiority of a work of art, in her life as a muralist, she has been a ceaseless technical innovator, experimenting with materials to increase the durability of her murals, and, as a printmaker, printing on unconventional substrates from silk to acetate. In the 1980’s, she chaired the Design Science Group, bringing together MIT and Harvard scientists, mathematicians, architects, writers, artists, film makers, dancers and students for a symposium on the materials, media and creative methods used to explore and teach the science of design. Entering digital space to compose there, and developing a way to print on sheer satin for a transparent output are in character for this artist both highly comfortable with new technologies and profoundly reluctant to harness them either as a shortcut to an appearance of old-fashioned skill or a substitute for originality. In a wide-ranging conversation, she and I talked about crossing the digital divide, about site-specific environmental art, about unique materials that express an artistic vision, and about the inspirations for it all.

EH: What did it feel like to put away your paints for a summer, head to New York and explore cyberspace as a painter?

HA: Wild and free! I had a fellowship at the National Academy Museum to work on very large-scale murals in a program about revitalizing mural painting in the U.S. Cyberspace was a revelation, not an intention. The work I started out to do felt a lot like preparing for painting because I was thinking like a painter, trolling the city – especially Central Park — with my new digital camera for images that might be digitally manipulated by me, but which I believed would take their final form in paint.  I actually spent lots of time sketching with a pencil, and Xeroxing historic picture research.  I redesigned three locations including the neo-classical dining room of the National Academy townhouse on Fifth Avenue, with panel murals composed in digital space.  I’d kind of begun wondering what it would be like to paint something that came from the process of image capture, not from drawing… Then I had a moment of hyper-clarity – about not painting it because it really didn’t need to be painted.

EH: What was this “it” that didn’t need to be painted?

HA: Nine composite images built of smaller ones from around Central Park, which I had created with the idea of scaling up to paint on 11-foot panels. Like you see in the maquette. The most familiar figures in it are the traffic signal – the silhouette dotted in light that blinks on to tell pedestrians to cross the street – juxtaposed with the falconer statue from Central Park. These became iconic to me. They arose from digital space and they lived there – I was extremely surprised and intrigued with how they looked on the monitor, and wondered how I would paint them.  Then I wondered — why would I paint them?  It would have been almost like killing and stuffing them.

EH: Quite a moment for a painter…

HA: It was.  On a personal discovery scale, it was like Columbus making landfall or Fermi engineering the first atomic chain reaction.

EH: Were the other Fellows experiencing something similar?  What about the teacher?

HA: People were inspired to all kinds of insights – it was a heady time.  We had a fantastic leader, the painter Grace Graupe-Pillard. Most of the time in design, using a computer is a way to save yourself some wear and tear by making it very simple to try out something new without destroying what you’ve already done.  My father and grandfather were architects who drafted with pencil on paper and before that with crow quill pen on starched linen, on the same drafting board I used until about two years ago, when I left it behind for digital space.  My father the modernist actually made perfect drawings with a pencil every time, and found CAD absurd. When you’re doing mural design, you appreciate the efficiency of composing with whole images, and not having to sketch every detail from scratch to do that. But in making art, you’re much more sensitive to the process itself and what its potential is, so you stop and look at what is in the moment, and set aside preconceived ideas. At least, that’s what I do. My biggest preconceived notion was that I was at the Academy for a summer of enlightenment that would result in new visions for painted murals. That’s just not what happened there. I think I bring with me wherever I go the processes of an artist – one who lives to invent, not to streamline.  I always feel the pull of terra incognita very strongly, and the first thing I want to do is explore it, not bend it to my will.

EH: That comes later…

HA: Oh, yes. It certainly does.

EH: When you realized you were entering a world that might not lead you back to painting on walls – that sounds very difficult.  Was it?

HA: It was very exciting. I knew I was starting on a period of form-finding, and that’s always a great feeling. One day, crossing Columbus Avenue and heading towards the Academy, I realized I was ecstatic about art – as happy as I had been in college.  I was inventing. What especially struck me about digital space were the layers and scale and transparency. I’ve been working with illusions of depth for a long time – nearly all muralists do – and there’s a way to simulate depth in architectural space with a computer program.  But that wouldn’t work for me, since it’s the sort of thing I greatly prefer to finesse by hand for blends and effects. What is really fascinating is how you achieve a feeling of fluidity and depth by layering transparent images that you’ve captured.  This isn’t about speed or efficiency, and it’s very freeing.  I think it’s one of the great gifts of technology to artists because it’s a new metaphor for layers of memory, in a way not comparable with composite images that are not transparent.  For example, I find one image showing with tremendous clarity in the shadow of another – something that has obsessed painters since Pontormo, nearly 500 years ago.

EH: Yet none of this you wanted to take, as a painter, and run with.  What were you thinking about outputting it?

HA: I’ve always thought of myself as an environmental artist who creates many different kinds of environments, and for most of the hours we spend, walls do form our environment. It’s true, I didn’t want to paint onto walls what I created in digital space, yet I badly wanted to see it out in our environment. Inventing how to do that was my new big and daunting challenge. What I was looking for was a fluid support for a fluid medium – a flexible, transparent substrate that would be an analog for the luminosity of the monitor.  This needed to be a fabric – one that could suggest either an enclosure or a window.

EH: This sounds like a big departure in working methods.

HA:  Totally!  It meant a deeper inquiry into materials and techniques than is normal even for me, and I like to experiment. But it was a conceptual shift, too.  I moved my digital studio out of doors to help push that along. There’s a convention in Roman fresco painting that fascinates me. They would paint the walls of a room that gave onto a garden with a view of the very same garden. Or, was the painting on the walls the prototype for the garden? There was an intimate back and forth with gardens and landscape that I was interested in. So when I moved my digital studio outside, right into my garden and in sight of Mt. Monadnock, I started thinking of digital output as both window and wall, and I also started thinking of environmental art as imagery that could be transparently integrated into landscape.

EH: You mounted your first output as big silk banners.  What about printing them? I can’t imagine…

HA:  It’s like printing on air.  That is, that’s the idea.  But for a long time there were technical difficulties — to say the least – in creating that effect. Then my sister Mary Lord, a digital photographer, told me about a genius of a printmaker, Dan Saccardo, and together we started to print my transparent, layered images onto a transparent substrate. It was very important to me that the banners have a surface that would hold color and bounce light back, yet allow light to filter through from behind, too.  The luminosity of the monitor held such an attraction for me – I wanted to hold onto it. So finding the right fabric was a thrilling adventure!  As well as looking right, the fabric had to stand up to the weather.  And so did the ink.  Finally we had a banner that you could hang outside in a rainstorm and let dry in the sun.  Environmental art really has to perform that way. My banners survive giant hailstones and hurricane conditions.

EH: Your palette is so remarkable and intense to find on something so sheer. What was it like changing over to a digital palette?

HA: Like painting with veils of color. I use entire photographs as glazes. Since there are colors you can blend in digital space that you’ll never see in nature or in output, getting the intensity I desire for the images to fuse yet remain clearly recognizable is a patient and delicate process. I love color, and I want to use the palette of nature for works that integrate with nature. And to have presence when backlit by the sun, the banners need highly saturated colors. Color is key to emotional intensity, too. Discovering the right materials and techniques is an adventure in the service of a vision, not a goal in itself. You’re going for an emotional effect, after all.  And an environmental art installation that had only a cerebral appeal would be…oh, empty, for me.

EH: Is that a romantic idea?

HA: Well, maybe it’s romantic by way of classicism. The ravishing, ecstatic relation to nature is a romantic idea – I so relate to that. You sense it in the works of Caspar David Friedrich, who had an amazing way of combining the colors of glaciers and snow with bright colors. But classicism isn’t all about restraint and white and gray marble. It’s also about a feeling of vibrancy and optimism – qualities that are well within the ability of line and form and color to communicate, and that have a re-invigorating effect on people. The archetypes from classical mythology are still very much with us, so much that it’s quite normal for us to recognize them instantly.  So these are powerful images to conjure with, and they have a 2000-year long association with gardens. Classicism is found in a certain touch of civilization on nature — the very light restraining hand that makes the difference between nature and a garden. Although sometimes you do have to detach from a lot of bank architecture to see it that way.

EH: Was it this feeling for the classical style what attracted you to Saint-Gaudens?

HA: Well, my art studio is in southern New Hampshire, where Saint-Gaudens is not just the pre-eminent America sculptor of all time, but a familiar and beloved hero. Saint-Gaudens home in Cornish is the only national historic site in the state. Cornish was an artists’ colony from the time Saint-Gaudens made it his summer home in the mid-1880’s, and it was on the cultural map for visits from many distinguished Americans in the New York, Boston and Washington, DC world of arts and letters.  There were receptions and studio concerts in the summer. Saint-Gaudens created a huge amount of work while being very social and hospitable – he was an awesome genius! As his health worsened, he came to live here fulltime, and remained productive as an artist until the very last few weeks of his life.  He was the son of a shoemaker, born in Ireland, and he had no great education to start with. Yet he lived in and died in this miraculous place, where as you see, there really is something special about the atmosphere, and created a body of work that is profoundly revealing of the American experience.  For all my love of modern art, I can’t imagine who wouldn’t be inspired by this.  I started making photographs here last summer and fall, more than a year before I was invited by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to produce a special exhibition. I was appropriating Saint-Gaudens and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site as my subject, you could say.

EH: It’s a huge installation, isn’t it? The banners are all over the site.  I like the way they move in the breeze.

HA: There are 40 banners here, the biggest ones about 4 by 6 feet. That they have motion from unseen forces is very important to me because it simulates the fluidity of images in digital space. And it adds to their memory dimension, because memory is fleeting – not the same if you look twice.  Also, the banners are soft, not static like a painted wall, and they should respond to changes in light and atmospheric pressure.

EH: I was talking with Diana Wolfe Larkin [art historian at Mt. Holyoke College] about this work, just to get an art historical perspective on an installation that is site-specific in an historic site. She called the banners a study in how to bring memory into art, and said that looking at each one was like looking through time and accumulated memory.

HA: Oh!  Yes, I’ll take that — thanks, Diana!

EH: She also said you were in unashamed, unabashed pursuit of beauty – although she told me it was possible to get into trouble using words like “lyrical” and “beautiful.”

HA: Yes, beauty is crucial – even magical or mystical — to me.  The banners are murals of cyberspace, and cyberspace is very beautiful even just to think about, as the place where so many impossible connections are possible. Here, outdoors in natural light, we see complex images only possible in cyberspace.

EH: Does beauty create its own mood? Is it about a certain mood?

HA: Well, it’s uplifting.  It almost can’t help but be.  And we all know there’s a lot of wonderful art that isn’t uplifting. I read that Brice Marden, whose abstract paintings are so very beautiful, shied away from the word beauty in favor of the term enhancement. But I love the eternal depth of meaning, the aspiration, discipline and courage involved in trying to reach the perception of an aesthetic deliverance – call it beauty.  It’s beyond self-expression, but it’s self-expression too. And the very search for it creates a certain vibrant mood that is artistically sustaining to me. For this body of work, the search came from the classical spirit – it’s pervasive here, as anyone can see, as well as a good fit for me.  But this is a site-specific installation, and it brought out in me a highly specific response.   Any image I create, whatever it may look like, will be created purely for aesthetic adventure, to invent and discover new ways of seeing unique in our time.

EH: Is that the way it is when you’re painting, too?

HA: Totally the way it is.  But, you know, cyberspace has changed everything, and presented us all with the imperative to forge a new aesthetic.

See Holly Alderman’s installation through October 31st, 2007, at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH. Visit www.sgnhs.org for hours and directions.

RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

Holly Alderman

http://AldermanSaintGaudens.com/

http://MonadnockPhoto.com

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

http://www.sgnhs.org/

http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/astg/hd_astg.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Saint-Gaudens

http://americanart.si.edu/education/fellows_interns/2007_symposium/index.cfm

http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/calendar/calendarextra.html

There are two kinds of people: there are the kooky kind who will spend $4,000 on dialysis for their cat whose kidneys are failing (substitute some significant expenditure of resources for individuals in differing financial circumstances—you know what I mean), even if only to extend its life briefly; and then there are the kind who will make fun of the former (or even regard them with moral disapproval—that money could have been used for better purposes, etcetera). Recent events surprised me by showing that I belong in the first category. And now that I know I belong there, I am going to attempt an explanation or at least hazard a conjecture, a speculation, a plain guess, at what puts some people there.

But first let me tell what happened: my wife Margit and our cat Freddy (about whom I have written before here) left New York City to take up residence in the northern Italian alps at the beginning of September. My wife is from that lovely German-speaking area known as the South Tyrol and is now teaching English there, and I will be joining her quite soon for an indefinite duration.

Freddy is a young cat with a unique personality of great beauty, and we went to some lengths to try and make the journey as stress-free for her as possible, buying her an expensive soft mesh carrier and a “cat ticket” so she could travel in the aircraft cabin with Margit rather than be scared alone in the cargo hold. It is a long trip even for humans, including a 4-hour drive at the end.

While Freddy did okay on the trip itself, she stopped eating soon after arriving there. After a day or so of this, Margit noticed that she regurgitated a piece of a thick string toy that she usually likes to just play with. Thinking she may have swallowed more of it from the stress of being in a new environment (cats are very territorial and do not like moving houses) she took her to a vet, who X-rayed Freddy and thought that she saw something blocking her intestines. Surgery was scheduled for the next morning.

Upon cutting her open, the vet found nothing inside. At this point, the diagnosis was changed to something called Feline Adipose Liver, which is something that cats can get by not eating from stress. If caught early enough, most cats can be made to survive this condition by being force fed by mouth as well as by injection for a few days or sometimes weeks. This regimen was started immediately, causing great difficulties for Margit who had started her own stress-inducing new job the day after arriving in Italy, and who kept having to take time off to attend to the cat and her many appointments at the vet’s. Still, we talked about it, and I told her that even if she has to quit her job she should do so to try and save Freddy’s life, and we also agreed that whatever material resources we have would be expended for any reasonable chance of making Freddy feel better. But she got worse.

Her eyes glazed over, she could not move with ease and hardly did, her breathing became labored and loud, and it became clear that she was dying. At this point, Margit was told that the vet she had been seeing was not the most reliable, and was known for operating unnecessarily on animals just to charge the large fees that such surgeries entail. Trust me, you cannot imagine my rage at this thought.

Now, after much research, Freddy was taken to a different vet, who criticized the first one for not having performed a standard series of blood tests to rule out common feline ailments, and when these tests were finally administered, the news was shocking: Freddy’s blood came back positive for Feline Infectious Peritonitis, an incurable viral disease (related to the human SARS virus) which quickly kills cats in a most painful way, causing them to lose their eyesight, and their organs to fail rapidly one by one. She already had many of the symptoms of the disease, especially the labored breathing which is typical of FIP. She was in pain and the vet recommended that she be brought in the next day at noon (a week ago Saturday) to be killed by lethal injection, sparing her (and, of course, Margit) a slightly more drawn out death of terrible suffering and agony. I spoke to Margit on Friday night and tried as best as I could to steel her for this duty and then canceled all posting at 3QD for that Saturday in a private act of mourning. Since the day I started 3QD more than three years ago, we had never had a day without any posts until then. (Did you notice?) And then I felt dejected and disconsolate, even desperate.

Since that time, I have thought a bit about my own reactions which, as I mentioned above, surprised and even embarrassed me. It is obvious that different people feel various degrees of affection for their pets. This can depend upon the type of pet (very few people, I imagine, are capable of feeling very strongly about a goldfish, or a snake, or even a hamster), how much time you have spent with the pet, the nature of your interaction with the pet (how much you play with the pet, whether the pet sleeps with you, how much time you are alone interacting with the pet, whether it is the only pet in the home), and so on. And, of course, it depends upon the type of person you are, and how much empathy you have for other creatures. Now I am not a cat-lover in general. Other people’s cats do not evoke much affection from me and just bore me, and I am mostly indifferent to many animals. (I am also a meat eater, so clearly the slaughter of animals for my consumption has never been much of an ethical problem for me.) So why this reaction, which I might have laughed at in someone else?

Here’s what I think: while you can have various degrees of affection for pets, there is a quantum leap that you can make (and this is a Rubicon that cannot be uncrossed): if in your own psychological representation of your pet, you habitually grant them personhood, then there is no choice but to treat them as you would a person because different parts of your mind which specialize in generating the emotions which allow you to interact with (and love) other humans come into play, and these are irresistible impulses. You might as well try to not care about your children. I believe that some animals, like cats and dogs, have through their long histories of living in people’s homes as pets (more than 10,000 years in the case of cats), been naturally selected to encourage human empathy. Imagine what a survival advantage it is to the household cat that its young behave in such ways and make such tiny, vulnerable (to the human ear) sounds that it takes a particularly monstrous human to harm a kitten. Similarly, they have, I think “learned” (even if they do not have the equivalent emotion–after all, just as I don’t know what it is like to be a bat, I don’t know what it is like to be a cat either) to express emotions that move us and encourage us to conceive of them as persons. I can recognize fine distinctions, I imagine, in Freddy. She appears very much an adolescent (which she is): pouty, moody, angry, playful, lazy, affectionate, awkwardly sexy, etc., in turn. The fact that I work from my apartment and therefore have spent most of my waking days around Freddy since she was even younger doesn’t hurt that I have developed a very fine-grained sense of her moods and feelings. And it doesn’t hurt that Freddy has a bizarrely human and intelligent personality either. She likes to constantly imitate me in a million ways, lying down in a very unnatural (for a cat) position on her back next to me in bed, with her head on the pillow next to mine. Or look at this photograph in which she is copying my pose almost exactly (I am lounging on the other corner of the same sofa with my spread-eagled legs on a table) which shocked Margit so much that she captured Freddy with a camera:

Freddy is an indoor cat and I felt bad that she does not have as much stimulation as she should, so I bought some DVDs made for cats to watch on a High Definition TV. These show birds, insects, mice, etc. Freddy loves to watch, and does so with attentiveness and excitement. Don’t believe it? Check her out:

The objection that one should not waste ones money on things like cats is spurious and basically silly. I am not objecting to someone spending $20,000 on a cruise to the Antarctic, or a set of bigger breasts, or whatever. Is their travel or vacation or how their breasts look so important that they couldn’t spend the money saving childrens’ lives in Africa with it instead? This is crazy and would make it immoral for any human to live a life better than ANY other human on Earth. I’m not stealing the money, after all, I can spend it any way I like! Some might say that since cats have no sense of their future (hopes and dreams for it, for example) and they have no sense of their own mortality, it is not worth it to try and save their lives. Try telling that to the parent of a one-year old child, who also doesn’t have these things! Oh, I’ll stop there with my defensiveness. Ich kann nicht anders.

So what happened to Freddy? As Friday night wore on I became more agitated. I read on wikipedia that 19 out of 20 cats who have FIP will die. And then in the middle of the night here in New York, and only a couple of hours before Freddy’s appointment with eternal sleep, I called Margit and we agreed that there was no reason to rush this. I said that she is such an unusual cat in so many ways, maybe she will be that twentieth cat! We convinced ourselves that she would be. And we decided to let her suffer and die at home and to suffer along with her, rather than kill her.

With Margit’s constant and attentive care, a day later she started eating again, and for the last four or five days, Freddy has been COMPLETELY normal, running up and down the stairs, playing with her ball, eating with gusto, sleeping well, breathing completely normally, and making friends with other humans. And I have my hopes.

This post is dedicated to Ruchira Paul.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!