There’s nothing about nunchucks that makes C. Alice Newman smile. They’re “violent, flashy, and outmoded,” she told me last week over pie. When her stepson, Ben, buzzed her doorbell, Alice saw him on the security camera, saw his plastic nunchucks, and pressed the intercom. “I told him to get rid of them before he came up,” she reported, “and get rid of anything else violent while he’s at it. He knows better.”

Alice is a member of a book group composed solely of stepmothers; they meet twice a month to discuss literature that treats their particular role. “We’re basically always the bad guys,” says Shea Stetson-Brown, the group’s founder. “And it’s a relief to look at these stereotypes, and say, hey – that’s not how I see myself.” Last month’s title was “Warm and Wonderful Stepmothers of Famous People.” At our meeting, Alice had the novel “More Than You Know” tucked in her purse. Though the margins were full of her left-leaning slant, Alice confessed that most sessions are spent dissecting more personal narratives. For instance: nunchucks.

Ben receives a weekly allowance of $10 from his mother, Claudia. This money is deposited in a savings account in Ben’s name (he’s saving for a Nintendo DS). Last month though, to Alice’s dismay, he got his hands on some discretionary cash. Claudia’s dog Soupy got sick and puked under the kitchen table, and Claudia heard the retching, saw the mess, clutched her pregnant belly and started to cry. Ben ran in and offered to help, and she felt guilty about her ten-year-old doing such a thing alone until he proposed a $5 bonus. (And, Alice adds, “He says he couldn’t smell anyway on account of a cold, which I do not believe.”)

The nunchucks were $1.99 and Ben bought them at Jack’s World on the way to Alice’s apartment. The rush of his solo trip to the counter and pulling the bill from his pocket must have momentarily overwhelmed his judgment, because it’s true, Ben should have known better. He’d been in trouble with Alice before.

“He took my bra and he tried to hang my cat,” Alice said.

It soon became clear that the only evidence Alice had of Ben’s attempt was flimsy at best. She had left Ben alone in the apartment while she went to the UPS store to ship a Christmas gift to her sister. The store was closed, and she turned back. Ben must not have heard Alice return, because she entered her bedroom and saw Ben standing in front of her open closet. The top drawer of the dresser was open, Ben was holding a bra and the cat by the scruff of her neck, and he was looking up at the clothing rail. “I know what I saw,” Alice said when I challenged her conclusion. It was hard for me to think of what Ben might have been doing, but I thought messing around was a finer bet than hanging the cat. Alice remains convinced – and her group supports her. I spoke with Nedra Tomasino, who sees the situation as “fucking classic.”

Nedra’s tormentor is named Rougie, and she is fifteen and a winker. “Everything nice, everything sincere from her, is like, followed by this,” she groaned, and executed an overexaggerated wink, accompanied by a slight shoulder shimmy. “I think I’m doing something nice for her, and then there it is.” Nedra winked again. It all stems from a chat they had shortly after Nedra married Rougie’s dad. Apparently Nedra told Rougie that she’d never try to take the place of Rougie’s late mother, but she hoped that they could be friends, and she felt lucky to be a part of Rougie’s life. Then Nedra had winked. And now she can’t escape it.

Another group member who supports Alice’s interpretation, Joanna Clemmens, has encountered real violence from her stepchildren, Genny and Andrew. Genny is six and clings to Joanna during the day but at night screams and slaps at her, crying for her mom, who’s across the country in Washington State. Andrew, 17, just breaks things. He’ll idly pick up a decades-old china egg and let it slip through his hands. He’ll knock over flowers, and spill a gallon of Hi-C on the kitchen floor, and apologize for it all. “But he never breaks [my husband] Carl’s stuff,” Joanna explained.

With the blessing of her book group, Alice responded to the cat episode by eliminating Ben’s unsupervised time and axing his kitchen privileges. (“No knives.”) So Ben really should have expected Alice’s nunchuck decree. He didn’t. Over at his mom’s, those nunchucks meant he’d been a good boy. Here with Alice, they were proof of his delinquency. What did he think about as he sat out there on the stoop with those $1.99 nunchucks, waiting until it got dark and his dad got home? Alice says he opened his backpack and did his homework, but he kept the nunchucks tucked in the back waistband of his pants, so they would be visible on the security camera. After he finished the homework, he beat the stair railing with the nunchucks for an hour.

I asked Alice why she didn’t go downstairs and grab the plastic weapon and haul Ben inside. “I thought about it,” she replied, and dragged her fork through a few final wisps of whipped cream on her plate. “But he was sleeping at Claudia’s that night. I can only go half-way with this kid.”

We should establish two things right off the bat.

First, R. Kelly has been arrested and accused enough times for us all to accept the basic idea that he has deep, ingrained pedophilic tendencies.

Second, there is no hard evidence, grainy internet film notwithstanding, that R. Kelly ever urinated on anyone.

But this isn’t an indictment or a defense of R. Kelly. I don’t pretend to know anything about him as a man, or as a singer either. My sister has a soft spot for R&B, but it always struck me as the honey dripper bullshit that Chuck D once proclaimed it to be. I took it that if you appreciated the crisp diction and streety rawness of hip hop you were honor bound, as it were, to thumb your nose at R&B and the endless sloppy crooning of it all.

That was before I saw Trapped in the Closet, which broke me down and rearranged me as a man. There is no way to describe Trapped in the Closet properly. It’s a long R&B song. It’s some kind of opera/soap opera/TV drama. It bears some vague genetic resemblance to the Hip Hoperas of the brilliant Prince Paul from a few years back. It’s sort of like a music video.

But as much as it is all these other things, it is simultaneously, incredibly unique.

The story starts with a character, played by R. Kelly, who wakes up in a woman’s bedroom after a one-night stand and immediately has to hide in the closet as the husband arrives home unexpectedly. From there, the R. Kelly persona morphs into two or maybe three semi-distinct characters: the character in the story, the singer of the song, and the meta-narrator who is sometimes also to be found hanging out in other closets all around town. The story then immediately splits into several more complicated sub-plots, all of which end up being interconnected in various streams of adultery, deceit, sex, and, violence. So, the material is good (I would mention something here about the guy who comes out of the kitchen cabinet but you really need to experience that moment for yourself).

The song is simple and loosely structured with no chorus, allowing R. Kelly to use his patented ‘rhyme-a-word-with-the-exact-same-word-repeatedly’ technique. Though there are various characters played by different actors, they all lip-sync to the voice of R. Kelly, who sings each part himself with gusto. The tension points in the story, of which there are quite a few, are punctuated by R. Kelly’s lyrical flourishes in what amounts to a remarkably effective drama heightener. The thing is extremely frickin’ watchable. Indeed, it is a rare occasion when I pop Trapped in the Closet into the DVD player, as I have done repeatedly in the last weeks, and witness anyone drifting out of the room before it’s over. It grabs you in some strange concoction of melodrama and lyrical flow. It has a hypnotic quality, without robbing the viewer of self-awareness. In fact, that is one of the oddest things about Trapped in the Closet. You can’t believe you’re watching it, and you can’t stop. You have no idea exactly what it is, even, that you’re watching or how such a thing could possibly have been created . . . and you want more.

Somewhere around the fourth viewing I decided, reluctantly, that R. Kelly is some kind of genius and that he’s spewed out something so utterly singular that a person simply has to give in to it. And it struck me, further, that I couldn’t admit this simple and irrefutable fact without also acknowledging that this accomplishment has something to do with R&B. As much as Prince Paul’s Hip Hoperas are infinitely smarter, more clever, and more sophisticated, they are also, maybe, too much all of those things. R. Kelly comes along with his complete, almost utterly naïve lack of just those qualities and creates something that is a genre unto itself. Whatever the failings of R&B as a musical style, there is something direct and immediate about the way it portrays human emotions that is difficult not to relate to. R&B is not afraid to lay it out on the line. However you’re feeling, that’s okay, man. Just sing about it. Nothing complicated here, you’re hurtin’ or wantin’ or missin’ or something like that. Just, you know, tell us about it. The thing I used to hate about R&B is also a kind of strength, if you look at it a little differently. And it struck me even further that the straightforward narrative simplicity of R&B lyrics are just another way to portray the complexities of human experience. It is the emotions that are complex. The language and syntax that expresses, however inadequately, those emotions, doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, it was while watching Trapped in the Closet for the eighth or ninth time that I recalled a conversation with a friend of mine, Alan Fishbone, who runs the Intensive Latin Program at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and has often had occasion to think about how language works. He once remarked to me that there is nothing but syntax, only syntax exists. He was in an extreme mood, and the comment has the ring of exaggeration to which Fishbone occasionally succumbs (I recall that it was also around this time that Fishbone started talking about stockpiling weapons and canned goods out in the woods somewhere. His beard had grown particularly scruffy and his eyes were sunken even deeper into an already cavernous skull. I started to worry that he might have joined some Humanist Militia, Juvenal-and-AK-47s-type outfit. But the phase passed). The comment, however, stuck with me. He meant, basically, that semantics gets you nowhere. Meaning comes out of the arrangement of words, not out of the individual meanings of individual words. There’s a perfectly respectable school for this type of ‘meaning holism’ among philosophers of language, but it somehow seemed more impressive coming from someone who’d gotten there solely in long, dark nights’ labors with impenetrable sentences in Tacitus that suddenly revealed themselves as if in a magical flash. Syntax is like that, he said, like some weird kind of magic with language.

Pushing this a little bit further (indulge me for a moment), if it’s true that it all comes down to syntax, then you could also say that human thought can be divided into two basic categories, paratactic and hypotactic. They are the two most elemental ways of putting thought together. In paratactic arrangement, you just keep adding something more. The greatest ally to parataxis is the conjunction. Such and such happened and then such and such happened after that, and next was a little episode of this and that, and then it all came to a head with this particular series of events, and then after that a whole new thing started. That’s pretty much how parataxis works. Epic poetry tends to unfold in parataxis and no one did it more paratactically than Homer. It just keeps coming, line after line, thought after thought, event after event. There’s barely a subordinate clause to be found in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Parataxis works, in a sense, in real time. It unfolds as experience unfolds, in a narrative line. It’s thick with the relentless forward push of lived temporality.

Hypotactic arrangement, by contrast, nestles thoughts within thoughts, steps to the side, qualifies, alters, and modifies. It has the structure of reflection and argument rather than that of lived experience. It is thus no accident that when one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Parmenides, wanted to appropriate the dactylic hexameter of epic verse for his complicated ontological argument about the necessary logical structure of all that is, he dropped the parataxis. Parmenides’ poem, despite its first-glance resemblance to epic poetry, is a mess of complicated hypotaxis.

The thing is, you can’t really choose one over the other; parataxis or hypotaxis. It doesn’t make any sense. That would be like saying that Homer is better than Parmenides or vice versa. They’re both great, they’re both doing amazing things. But when you start analyzing it you realize that they’re doing completely different things. Parmenides is messing around with the very structure of language, going inside of it in order to pull out inferences about the logical structure of Being. Crazy, maybe, but somebody had to see where that would go. Homer is riding on a sea of language, completely comfortable in it, surrounded by it, happily willfully drowning inside it. Homer doesn’t even say things like “I ask the Muse to help me sing such and such” like some of the later epic poets do. He just says “Muse, sing,” as if the difference between Homer, the Muse, and language itself is swallowed up in the great gush of the telling. By the end of the first few lines of the Iliad you are so much inside the narrative that there is no time to sort anything out. You just have to keep moving forward, adding more and more layers of experience. I always thought that Matthew Arnold got it right when he advised those attempting to translate Homer that, “he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas.”

Now, I’m not saying that R. Kelly is Homer. Trapped in the Closet will not be studied and revered by armies of scholars three thousand years from now (though you never know). But I am trying to say something about the power of parataxis. In that, at least, Homer and R. Kelly share something. There’s an amazing feature to the Trapped in the Closet DVD where R. Kelly gives his commentary to the episodes as he’s watching them. This should be the hypotactic moment where Kelly busts open the immediacy of the narrative and analyzes it, breaks it down, fills it with parenthesis and reflection, etc. But he can’t do it. He doesn’t think that way. So, basically, he simply ends up telling you the exact same story he is singing on the screen. He’s paratactic all the way, baby. It’s his only register. He has nothing to say about the story whatsoever except to reiterate it. That is goddamn amazing to me. It’s like he’s a traveling Rhetor from the sixth century BC to whom the very idea of ‘commentary’ as we generally think of it is completely foreign. When I watched that DVD commentary I was truly sold. People like R. Kelly don’t get produced all that often. I’m a changed man.

“If you’re addicted to alcohol, if a faith program is able to get you off alcohol, we ought to say, hallelujah and thanks…”

George W. Bush
Boston Globe
March 10, 2006

Well, hallelujah back at ya: the Boston Catholic Archdiocese, seeking to deny gay couples adoption privileges in violation of Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws, decided to get out of the adoption business altogether. They are foregoing their $1 million in state funding for adoption services, and have fired their 15 adoption service workers.

The cause is religious freedom – yes, religious freedom. Because the Vatican in 2003 called gay adoptions “gravely immoral,” Massachusetts’ four Roman Catholic bishops decided on February 28, 2006, to seek regulatory relief from state anti-discrimination laws so that Catholic Charities can begin discriminating against potential gay adoptive parents. Though the agency had successfully placed 13 children with gay couples over the past 20 years with no reported ill effects, Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley announced that the Archdiocese would insist that Catholic Charities desist in order that the exercise of Church’s religious freedom be preserved.

The Archbishop did not give up without a fight. He ascended Beacon Hill in his ever-present Franciscan drag to convert the First Mormon, Governor Mitt Romney, to his cause, surely a delicious irony for anyone who has been accosted by black badge-bearing Utah boys in city streets and subways. An easy mark was the First Mormon, a presidential candidate and co-religious freedomist, but sadly for our proselytizers, the law is against them. Romney has promised to propose a bill guaranteeing the Archdiocese the right to discriminate against gay and lesbian couple adopters, and to do it with state funds.

The Archbishop’s band of four does not appear to be speaking for others connected with Catholic Charities. Its 42-member lay board voted unanimously to continue adoption to gay and lesbian couples. Eight of its members resigned in protest when the Archdiocese announced it would press on nonetheless for the right to discriminate. A Charities’ law firm declined to handle an exception-seeking lawsuit.

Nothing prevents Catholic Charities of Boston from discriminating and doing adoptions in the future. They just can’t have state money that subsidizes their efforts, or, it seems monies from other foundations and charities such as the United Way that practice non-discrimination against gays and lesbians. The deep reliance of Catholic Charities, like other charities, on government monies discloses just how faith-based our do-it-yourself welfare system already is. Consider that about 60% of Catholic Charities of Boston’s funding comes from government sources, roughly the same proportion true of the national Catholic Charities USA.

The Boston Catholic Archdiocese could do what do what other religious organizations have done, freeing their charity arms from church control, thus leaving the churches to believe and the agencies to serve, subsidized by state funds. Given that the curates created this crisis all by themselves by making their right to discriminate a test of their religious freedom, this path seems unlikely. Or, another family agency that obeys the law could hire the 15 fired Catholic Charities workers, and a cooperative and agile state bureaucrat could funnel the subsidy money to them. A little God-given common sense, one might say, could solve this problem in a jiffy.

Don’t count on it. The curates are on a mission. The American Catholic Church has long been committed to getting the states, federal and the 50, to fund the exercise of their religious freedom, as historic campaigns for state funding for Catholic schools, school bus and textbook subsidies for Catholic kids, and tuition tax deductions and vouchers, among other ventures, testifies. They now seek a radical extension. They seek to enforce Catholic norms and beliefs upon non-believers while acting as the direct agent of the state.

A strange, seemingly odd notion of religious freedom, you might say. Yet it is consistent with a kind of Orwellian double-speak that binds and blinds public discourse in so many aspects of American life today. The great French historian of capitalism Fernand Braudel wrote that capitalists, contrary to their professed love of competition in a free marketplace, actually despise competition and all of its attributes. What real capitalists prefer is monopoly status so they can set usurious prices, corrupt the state in their favor, and annihilate any potential competitors by whatever forces they possess (that’s where the state comes in). Remember: Halliburton is not a fish, unfortunately, even in Boston.

Boston’s Catholic clerics answer to a Church in Rome that is religious master of all it surveys on its home grounds. No grasping mullah, imam or rabbi could ask for more. Roman Catholicism in Italy is recognized as the paramount national religion, its priests paid for by the state, as is their ministry in public school classrooms. Its churches are recognized as part of the national patrimony and repaired at state expense when frequent earthquakes befall the peninsula. Religious instruction is mandatory in state schools: the odd Jew, Muslim, or Protestant may ask to be excused from priestly intellectual benedictions, but many I have known over the course of working in Italy for 25 years, just suck it up, as they say in the army, so as not to reinforce their pariah status. In sum, this is the Church that wants the European Community to pronounce itself a Christian nation.

In one sense, then, seeking some domain over state power and authority is part of the Catholic Church playbook. But in the United States, where Catholics are a religious minority, it means joining up with like-minded Protestants who, not to put too fine a point on it, compose the religious right. In fact, from many perspectives, including my own, the John-Paul II revised American Catholic Church now forms part of the religious right. Armed no less than their Protestant brothers with the truth of Jesus Christ, they seek to put real teeth into expression “one nation under God.” If national norms conflict with theirs, they must be changed. Their religious freedom, and its “free exercise thereof” is diminished if its access to state support is diminished. Like Braudel’s good capitalist, they seek guarantees and a good fix. Their institutions need feeding, and state funds in support of their mission – well, things couldn’t get any better, except perhaps than a state religion itself, which isn’t in the cards in America. The Catholic clerics, after several thousand years, are experienced card players.

This little case is our canary in the civic coal mine. It alerts us to the deeply dangerous zone into which America has entered. And it nicely coincides with a new propaganda campaign this week by the Bush regime to gin up support for expanding so-called “faith-based initiatives.” The administration whether by stealthy recounting or by actual distribution claims that $2 billion of a total of $20 billion in health and welfare expenditures currently goes to religious organizations in our do-it-yourself welfare state. The Big Brother in Christ makes it clear that he supports legislation that goes beyond the current authorization of faith-based program grants, and that will enable religious organizations to evade equal opportunity laws that currently prevent them from using religious preference as a hiring criterion. When government gives support to religious people providing social services, Bush says on the White House faith-based initiative website, “charities and faith-based programs should not be forced to change their character or compromise their mission.”

Somewhere deep in the antediluvian folds of my mind, the phrase “soldiers of Christ” resides, and some conjuring of Ignatius Loyola lurks. The White House would allow a Catholic Charities, say, to choose only Catholics for its social workers, and presumably Catholics of whom the clerics would approve for its state-supported work. This is a clever business: first, get the structure and the money right, and then the hearts and minds will follow. The grace of monopoly power could surely work wonders.

A final note. When one puts the machinations of the Christian right, composed now of the Catholic Church and many Protestant sects, in perspective, it forces consideration of the question of why American imperialism, so open to a kind of religious governance at home, is ostensibly so chary of religious governance abroad. The happenstance of building an imperialist majority at home, as in more Christians, more Catholics, more majority? Or perhaps it is the peculiar US hypocrisy of imperialism as foreign policy. Hypothesizing that constant oil flow and nationalist religious fervor don’t mix, the US becomes agnostic and universalistic abroad, while ignoring its Christian identity at home. Imperialism does seem to induce a somnolence at home about the degree to which we become what we pretend to abhor.

Or is it the case that we have met the mullahs, and they are us? If so, let’s stop killing the rest of the world in such great numbers and hold a great domestic inquisition instead. At least, we would be killing each other rather than annihilating substitutes.

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.

                                    UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE June 28, 2007

In the middle of a hot Australian summer, a new Cross City Tunnel forcing motorists to use its subterranean tendrils, road closures making drivers either succumb to its expensive ease or find new ways about, tempers at breaking point, one suddenly caught a glance of the Sydney Opera House, out of the corner of the eye. There, centring the whole city of Sydney, this amazing building still had the power to overwhelm with its leaping shells, its suggestion of ascent to an empyrean. Fruit rinds, sails, wings—each person chooses their own imagery. How far removed from the sweat and fury on the roads below. What Platonic perfection, in contrast to the swearing and rising blood pressure of infuriated drivers. How different a response, at least from me, to grotesque outrages on the spirit such as Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

But then, not wholly, for the history of the Sydney Opera House also reveals failure and tragedy. The physical splendour of those gleaming shells which has contained so much artistic splendour hides great bitterness and grief.  [Photograph by Darren Helsby.]

Most Australians think of Joern Utzon, the architect of the Opera House, as the great Dane, the architect who gave us this building which seems to draw all the horizontals and verticals of the city about its rinds. Yet this man was forced to leave mid-construction after cost blowouts and design problems ran up against philistine government policy. A great deal of dirty pool was played and Utzon’s reputation was besmirched. Another team of architects took over the completion of the interior of the building leaving its artistic integrity compromised and in need of an expensive makeover. Where the money is to come from is the problem. This icon requires plentiful supplies of it, and always will. Recently, the State government has re-established links with the architect and there are now long-term plans for renewal, some of which have already been implemented.

I have been attending performances there since its opening. Even as a student I went on the occasional tour when it seemed as if one had strayed onto some gigantic Mayan temple. There are some evocative photos of the Opera House in this early pupating phase by David Moore. The first performance took place when Paul Robeson sang ‘Joe Hill’ in 1960 at the invitation of the Building Workers Industrial Union, prophetic intimation of the necessity for blood sacrifice on the temple steps.

Utzon left Australia, eventually taking up residency in Majorca, after being given the thumbs down not only by the New South Wales state government, but also by his colleagues back home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were about, waiting to dispatch Hamlet at the first opportunity. The Queen eventually did get round to opening the building in spectacular style in 1973, but the excited crowds, the flotilla of vessels on the harbour, the planes overhead, hid the shadow side of this architectural leap to the sublime. However, one could go back further in history to come up with an even greater tragedy than Utzon’s.

In the foyer of the Concert Hall there is a bust of Sir Eugène Goossens, the man who first proposed an opera house for Sydney, a home for the performing arts. He fought for it, charmed politicians who eventually came up with the competition that brought forth Utzon. Goossens’ energy, persistence and foresight brought the Sydney Opera House from idea to reality. He had come to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and head the NSW Conservatorium of Music after brilliant work with Stravinsky and other moderns in Europe and America. All was going swimmingly until Goossens was intercepted on arrival at Mascot airport, back from one of his overseas trips, and found to be carrying with him rather mild forms of pornography that would hardly raise an eyebrow today. Revelations about a relationship with a local celebrity, Rosaleen Norton, the ‘white witch’ of Kings Cross followed on from an orgy of splenetic baying by the press, and Goossens lost his job as Chief Conductor. Exiled in England, he died six years later. As I said, human, all-too-human, the Nietzschean imperative part and parcel of the building down by Circular Quay.

What one has seen and heard there in the decades since its opening: muck-against-glory Strindberg in the Drama Theatre, Bette Davis with her trademark ‘what a dump’ mannerisms, a superb concert-version Ring cycle under the direction of Edo de Waart. And there were plenty of surprises too: the USSR State Symphony Orchestra with Yevgeni Svetlanov tearing through Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, Leonie Rysanek transforming herself into a teenager as Sieglinde, the young French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin setting the Concert Hall ablaze with Bruckner when we expected an also-ran after Maazel cancelled. And the great missed opportunities. Ella Fitzgerald! She’ll be back—she never was. What a susurration of the soul has threaded its way beneath and around those shells with theatre, ballet and opera; political demonstrations, recitals and readings; conferences, music, music, music; eating and drinking, dancing, tourists; the solace of the great performance to renovate a spirit at the end of its tether; the weeks of the Olympics, a special feeling, the air like champagne, a general feeling of goodwill.

And yet. There are things still worse than exile, more joyful than sporting celebrations. Go beyond the towering, powder blue sky with its Brancusi curves, back beyond the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, past the old Tram Shed on Bennelong Point where the Sydney Opera House now stands, beyond colonial hard times when floggings, leg irons and rum ruled the roost, to a dusty evening, just as afternoon’s rose fades before the ghosts of spirit ancestors. Aboriginal people—the Cadigal, the Cammeraygal—are fishing around the harbour’s edge. Thousands of years of cultural adaptation are about to undergo severest trauma. Over the horizon sails are approaching—Dutch, French, and British. Dispossession is on the way.

And then again to the present. A performance has finished. The wind drops and evening’s purple dissolves into the swirling waters of the harbour. Crowds have dispersed and you are left to your own devices. John Olsen’s mural tribute to Kenneth Slessor’s poem ‘Five Bells’ stretches out into the darkness beyond. Suddenly, the whole panoply of human endeavour raises its mighty yearning edifice before you with its intolerable cruelties, its inexplicable greatness, imagination’s parallel universe moulding itself through the sculpture whose stairs you descend towards home. Mahler and Shakespeare are echoing in the shells, lithe limbs reaching apotheosis in the Rose Adagio, with cheering, waves of applause, first visits and last glimpses. Before you, above you, around you, is the winged victory of human aspiration made visible in concrete, steel and tile. The Sydney Opera House stands, not phantasmagoric, something inspiration, technology and sheer hard work brought forth at the cusp of city and ocean, yacht sails and ferry lights disappeared in evening.

A glimpse of the Sydney Opera House from a mess of traffic. The spirit is refreshed and your blood pressure eases, architectural lines tracing from paper the nervelines of our best intentions, metamorphosing into reality, not dissolving into thin air. Silence is best then. The heart, vexed but not yet cynical muscle, is too full to say anything more.

                                                                        *
                                  Sydney

A kookaburra’s blubbering laugh
Skids above the gumtrees’ lean,
Shards of light rekindling
Harbour’s blue acetylene.

And blossoms large as bruises fall
In supplication where a swirl
Of wings divide this limping air,
Cresting over beachs’ foil,

Roundabouts of coastal wrap,
Sandstone blocks and bitumen,
Miles of terracotta roofs
Sloped to sheer oblivion.

Flesh abrades in shower and bed
Geographies for loving,
Hillside muscles slumped
On salted sheets’ revisions.

Cockatoo headline of Opera House sails
Flashes its crest near the Quay
As night’s shenanigans up at the Cross
Dwindle to weak cups of tea.

Pulseline of buildings mortgages trains
Where Heralds flap into position,
Row upon row of white collars creased,
Timetables laughed at by larrikins.

Westwards to afternoon, reaching at bush,
Grids sweat time from the crowd,
Circling emerald’s eucalypt swash
Strking sunset down.

Then, past backyards, over the mountains,
Images float to the brain,
Tethered by dreaming in suburbs
Beside the Pacific’s black sheen.

Heralds: The Sydney Morning Herald  Written 1993
Lines 17 and 18 from this poem were used in a booklet (poetry and photographs) given to official guests at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, along with work by Henry Lawson, Douglas Stewart, David Campbell, Judith Wright, Judith Beveridge and others.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Since our incarnation as a destitute and sometimes diligent academic, we haven’t possessed a TV, much less cable. We lead a wonderfully Spartan life here in Cambridge, reading, writing, braving the Massachusetts winter. Like hermits, ascetics, Eskimos, or those lost natives of the Amazon with dangling members, it seems we have also lost the talent for chit-chat, small talk. Consequently, the opening episode of “The Sopranos” Season Six presented us with a project. We had to call up old friends, mend tenuous if not severed relationships, invest in wine, crackers, a pricy lump of cheese. It was an awkward encounter, a bona fide production.

Had Tony been in a similar predicament, he would have done things differently: the balding, bearish, flinty-eyed Soprano antihero would have showed up unannounced, yelled at his host (arguably Arty), consumed the six-pack he brought for himself, sprawled on the couch, hand jammed in trousers, cradling his testicles. Strangely, we understand the impulse. In fact, we have a visceral appreciation of Tony’s likes and dislikes, his aspirations and motivations, his rages, his lusts. Even Tony’s theme song, the moody, bluesy A3 number, resonates in quiet cantons of our head most mornings during Soprano season:

“When you woke up this morning everything you had was gone/
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong/
Ringing like a bell from your head down to my toes/
Like a voice telling you there was something you should know/
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low/
Ain’t it times like these that make you wonder/
If you’ll ever know the meaning of things as they appear to the others…”

Typically, we’d consider having our head checked. After all, identifying with a sociopath is always a troubling development. And Tony is not a mere sociopath; he’s serial adulterer, a misogynist, a man who considered murdering his own mother. He has no real friends and has people he calls friends murdered. He is a very, very bad man.

We have, of course, empathized with such men before, from Richard III to Patrick Bateman, American Psycho. In American popular culture, the antihero has a rich heritage. The protagonists that populate the canon of film noir, for instance, are real pieces of work. Mike Hammer, the antihero of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), is, as his name suggests, not a charming rogue but a brute. A commentator characterizes him as a “cheap and sleazy, contemptible, fascist private investigator/vigilante.” Hammer’s doppelgangers populate other genres of cinema, from the cool, squinty, monosyllabic and violent Blondie in the late Western, “The Good, Bad and Ugly” (1967) to the raging, foul-mouthed Cuban gangster, Tony Montana in DePalma’s gangster film, “Scarface” (1983).

Interestingly, David Liao makes the case that Scarface has even influenced gangsta rap:

“Perhaps no movie has had as conspicuous an impact on hip-hop, and more specifically the genre’s gangsta variation, as ‘Scarface’…Since its release, [it] has lent its dialogue, music, fashion and  imagery to countless rap artists and their songs, such as Notorious B.I.G’s ‘10 Crack Commandments’ and Mobb  Deep’s ‘It’s Mine.’ One rapper has even gone so far as to adopt ‘Scarface’ as a stage name, and build an entire career around references to the movie.  Indeed, two decades later, it seems as if the very essence of De Palma’s film has been assimilated by the hip-hop community, or at least a highly prolific segment of it. Evidence of this can be seen in the 2003 album ‘Def Jam Recordings Present Music Inspired by Scarface,’ a compilation of songs by artists including Jay-Z, N.W.A, Ice Cube and even Grandmaster Flash.”

There may be some resonance of the classic American antihero in the rage of old-school gangsta rap but its ethos is informed by a different variety of disestablishmentarianism. Institutional racism dates back not more than a couple of generations and continues to exert itself. NWA’s beef with the police has little to do with Hammer and Blondie, Tony Soprano or Tony Montana. Their anthemns concern certain ground realities; in particular, the reality of being a young black man on the streets of Compton, LA:

“*uck tha police comin’ straight from the underground/
Young *igga got it bad cuz I’m brown/
And not the other color so police think/
They have the authority to kill a minority…

*uckin with me cuz I’m a teenager/
With a little bit of gold and a pager/
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product/
Thinkin’ every *igga is sellin’ narcotics…”

Of course, this raw sentiment has since been appropriated and cheapened by hip-hop, repackaged and marketed for an audience of young white men who wear baggy jeans and tilted caps and furiously mouth manifestos while listening to their I-Pods. Faraway, in the banlieus of urban France, young North African men find meaning in hip-hop, in what Staley Crouch calls the “thug-and-slut minstrelsy,” and roving child soldiers in Sierra Leone also listen to it while hacking off limbs.

But perhaps we shouldn’t treat this generation with too much sarcasm. After all, back in the day, we listened to NWA as well (and can spout lyrics on demand). Why, boys and girls, are we all drawn to the antihero, black, or white?

Montana sagaciously mulled this question before us and arrived at the following conclusion:

“Whattaya lookin’ at? You’re all a bunch of *ucking *ssholes. You know why? ‘Cause you don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your *ucking fingers, and say ‘that’s the bad guy.” So, what dat make you? Good? You’re not good; you just know how to hide. Howda lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth–even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy. Come on; the last time you gonna see a bad guy like this, let me tell ya. Come on, make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through; you better get outta his way!”

In this rather brilliant discursive philosophic pose, Montana seems to be suggesting the symbiotic duality of good and evil, an echo of the Zoroastrian creation myth, the Sufi malamti tradition, the business of Yin and Yang. Also inherent in his response is an allusion to Freudian tension, the Ego grating against the Id. (We here must note that we agree when Nabokov when he says, “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.”) Parsing Montana’s pithy treatise is a project for a bigger, better man. We return, then, to our initial impulse, Tony Soprano, and pose a different, perhaps more interesting question altogether: why does “The Sopranos” command such popularity in America today?

That Tony is a sociopathic leader may have some resonance among a segment of the voting populace but this variety of exegesis seems somewhat facile to us (and as a young Muslim male in America today, not at all advisable.) No, we suspect that apart from being an intelligent, dramatic show (when every other critically feted production these days seems to be peculiarly undramatic, whether we’re talking “Capote,” “Good Night and Good Luck” or “A History of Violence”), “The Sopranos” evokes nostalgia for a simpler time, for simpler violence.

After 9/11, America, indeed the world, changed. The scourge of international terrorism suddenly threatened civilization. A “War On Terror” was waged. Now, there are different ground realties. Iraqis are daggers drawn, their country teetering on civil war. The Afghans have a smart new leader but continue shooting themselves in the foot as they have throughout their bloody history. And somewhere in the southern Afghanistan, in and around Helmand, lurks Osama bin Laden, and his one-eyed pal, Mullah Omar (who corroborates the proverbial theory that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”). They are figures we cannot identity with. Tony Soprano may be a very bad guy but he’s goodfella. He whacks some people; he scratches his balls; he’s the sort of antihero we get. It’s kind of like the sage once said, “All I have in this world is my balls, and my word, and I don’t break ‘em for no one. Jou understand?” We do.

Arif Abid of Karachi, Pakistan, has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish his fascinating short study of Nawab Tafazzul Hussain Khan. If anyone knows of further primary sources of information on Nawab Taffazzul Hussain Khan, Mr. Abid would appreciate an email at [ arifabid at cyber.net.pk ]

A POISONED CHALICE

By Arif Abid

“……he taught mathematics in the morning to students in Calcutta, then visited English friends until noon. In the afternoon he taught Imami law, and after supper expounded Hanafi law. In the evenings he read philosophy alone”.

      –Abd al-Latif Musawi Shushtari

Alas! The zest of Learning’s cup is gone;
Whose taste ne’er cloy’d, tho’ deep the draughts;
Whose flavour yet upon the palate hangs
Nectareous, nor Reason’s thirst assuag’d
But yes; – rent is the garment of the morn;
And all dishevell’d floats the hair of night;
All bath’d in tears of dew the stars look down
With mournful eyes, in lamentation deep:
For he, their sage belov’d, is dead; who first
To Islam’s followers explain’d their laws.
Their distances, their orbits, and their times,
As great Copernicus once half divin’d,
And greater Newton proved: but, useless now,
Their work we turn with idle hand, and scan
With vacant eye, our own first master gone.

      –Verse from an elegy written by Mirza Abu Talib in praise of Tafazzul Hussain Khan

These extracts refer to Khan-e-Allama Nawab Tafazzul Hussain Khan (1727-1800), a man who embraced and promoted modernity and the scientific outlook in the formative phase of British imperialism in the sub-continent. In his lifetime he was acknowledged as the harbinger of a new age and given the high accolade of Khan-e-Allama. However, his legacy was still born. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the contemporary sub-continental psyche was formed essentially during that period when we made our first substantial contact with a new civilization which brought with it an altogether different world view, a world view with which we still have an uneasy and disjointed relationship. Two hundred years after his death we still find ourselves adrift in this world because of the absence of a scientific outlook and our own vision of modernity. It is critical that we study that period and find out what factors brought this about and what it has made of us. Was it that, as a colonized people, we imbibed the draught of modernity from a poisoned chalice?

We are still living in an age of imperialism. In these straitened circumstances, with our backs to the wall, there is still a reluctance to learn from history. This is an opportune moment to look back at that earlier age of imperialism and the life of a man who tried to build bridges between traditionalism and modernity. Tafazzul Hussain Khan was of Kashmiri descent where his grandfather was a highly ranked Mughal official. Born in Sialkot, his father moved to Delhi when he was around fourteen. In Delhi “he studied rational sciences by the Nizami method”. When his family moved to Lucknow, he “had an opportunity to study at Farangi Mahal itself, working with Mulla Hasan. He asked Mulla Hasan so many difficult questions that the Farangi-Mahalli finally hurled his book to the ground in exasperation and expelled him from the classroom. Tafazzul then studied on his own, mastering difficult philosophical works by Avicenna in Arabic”.

He later came to the attention of Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab Vizier of Oudh, who appointed him as tutor to his second son, Sadaat Ali Khan. During this period and when the capital moved from Faizabad to Lucknow, Tafazzul made friends with some of the British settled there.

This was the beginning of a new phase in his life. While he continued with his work in mathematics and philosophy he ‘……began the study of the English language…..in two years he was not only able to understand any English mathematical work but to peruse with pleasure the volumes of our best historians and moralists.’

In 1788 he was appointed as Ambassador to the British capital at Calcutta.

It is time we hear directly from the man holding centre stage, and what would be more appropriate than doing so in one of the languages recently learnt by him – English. Here is an extract from a letter to his friend David Anderson in Edinburgh.

‘I have’, he says, ‘been unfortunately compelled to supply the place vacated by the death of Raja Govind Ram. It was not without reluctance that I accepted the offer…… Had Lord Cornwallis not encouraged me to hold my connections with public affairs, it would have proved very difficult to me to manage the office in which I was put by the imprudent importunity of my superiors.’

The final phrase –’imprudent importunity of my superiors’- elegant yet strong, kept coming back to my mind and I try to imagine the person who wrote it: independent, passionate and at odds with his ‘superiors’. This conflict would grow and have disastrous consequences.

In the event, Tafazzul’s move to Calcutta proved to be a fortuitous one; he was to spend the next ten years of his life there. Sir William Jones had already founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal where linguists and mathematicians had gathered to study the literature and sciences of the sub-continent. Tafazzul made friends in this circle and it was probably now, if not earlier, he began the study of Latin, the language of classical learning in Europe. He would later add Greek to his repertoire.

Tafazzul’s interests were in both modern and ancient literature, but his first love would always remain mathematics and astronomy. Reuben Burrows, the mathematician, writes: ‘ Tofuzzel Hussein continues translating the Principia of Newton (from Latin to Arabic) and I think we shall soon begin to print it here in Arabic….He has likewise translated Emerson’s Mechanics, and a treatise on algebra (that I wrote for him) in Arabic. He is now employed in translating Appollonius de Sectione Rationis. The fate of this work is singular; it was translated from Greek into Arabic, and the Greek original was lost; it was afterwards translated from Arabic into Latin, from an old manuscript in the Bodleian library; the Arabic of it is now totally lost in Asia. I translated the Latin version into English and from the English Tofuzzel Hussein is now rendering it into Arabic again.’

William Jones would write to a friend “….Tafazzul Hussain Khan is doing wonders in English and Mathematicks (sic).”

Apart from his work in the rational sciences he ‘contributed a number of discourses on works related to the Hadis, the tradition of the Holy Prophet and jurisprudence and on Islamic philosophy and sciences; these studies were so numerous and varied that something of their kind had rarely been attempted by other scholars.’

Learning also involved a process of un-learning and the new scientific verities were publicly discussed and debated. One recorded instance concerns Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the earth being the centre of the universe. Tafazzul publicly stated that Copernicus was right, leading to the orthodoxy raising a hue and cry when their traditional beliefs were disputed. Tafazzul’s response was that the Prophet had said that you must seek knowledge even if you have to go to China. Such was his standing that the matter rested there.

Tafazzul’s influence was far reaching and a contemporary, Abd al-Latif Shushtari, who was the Ambassador of Hyderabad to the British in Calcutta, describes him thus: ‘Tafazzul was respected by the scholars of Europe and people from every part of the country paid respect to his excellence. In fact, his merits, scholarship and learning entitled him to a higher status. It required a lifetime to write about his merits. The entire India and its people were proud of Tafazzul and paid high respects to him and venerated him for his scholarly attributes. It has been since ages that a scholar of Tafazul’s stupendous intellect was born’.

Lord Cornwallis later revealed further dimensions to his thinking on his ‘connections with public affairs’ and in a subsequent letter to David Anderson, written in Persian, Tafazzul says: ‘……. he thought of sending me as Resident, on the part of his government, to the Nizam Aly Khan, but as I had been long absent from home, and found it difficult to even remain at Calcutta, I saw that it would be out of my power to undertake so distant a journey’.

Tafazzul’s life had started taking on some of the elements of Greek tragedy, products of a culture whose ancient civilization he admired and whose language he was learning to enable him to drink deeply from it. His abilities were now coveted by both the English and the ruling family of Awadh and his strengths were to become his Achilles heel. The former, a progressively more ambitious and powerful force in India, both economically and politically, though it had still not gained the strangle-hold that it would in the coming decades. As for the latter, it was a medieval monarchy with limited vision and ambition, which had already partially surrendered its sovereignty to the British after the defeat at Buxar. In this world of volatile and contradictory forces ( a chimera to put it in a nutshell), whose definitive direction had still not fully manifested itself, Tafazzul was having to fend his way. Tafazzul’s own vision, inherent in his life’s work, to facilitate the natural progression of the sub-continent from medievalism to modernity, was not of interest to either side. Each had their specific need of him which they expected fulfilled.

—————————–

Awadh had been a province of the Mughal Empire, but had become independent as the empire entered terminal decline, though they still paid symbolic homage to the emperor. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century it was the richest province in the sub continent and Lucknow was to become the largest metropolis with a population of around a million. In 1764, Shuja ud Daula made the critical mistake of taking on the British and lost a decisive battle at Buxar. After signing a treaty with them that made substantial concessions he regained his kingdom.

Shuja ud Daula was succeeded by his eldest son Asaf ud Daula. One of his first acts was to move the capital from Faizabad to Lucknow to escape the interference in his dissolute ways of his mother, the Bahu Begum. It was an apt beginning for Lucknow as it was to become a world of fantasy and excess, where poetry and sensuality were the ruling spirits. For all its achievements, and there were indeed many, its guiding principle was to escape from the harsher realities of life. However, in all fairness, it has to be mentioned that the British reduced them to the status of puppets and revenue collectors which suited their purposes.

The real world intruded but rarely; and in Asaf ud Daula’s case it was usually when he had to pay the annual subsidy to the British and he found the treasury empty. Profligate, vain, pusillanimous, he allowed the British to impose more and more demands on him and now, apart from conducting the defense of his realm and controlling its foreign relations, he allowed them to have the final okay on the selection of his prime minister. Sir John Shore had taken over from Lord Cornwallis as Governor General and he found the serving prime minister, Jhau Lal, inimical to the British. Moreover, not only were there no funds to pay the subsidy, there were loans outstanding and corruption was rampant. This was 1797 and Tafazzul Hussain Khan was still in Calcutta.

‘….the former must be the object of my choice as he was of the Vizier’s and the Board who so well know his worth, his abilities, his extensive knowledge, and the energy of his character and his high reputation’.

‘….my efforts to persuade Tafazzul Hussain Khan to accept the office, and I feel the sincerest satisfaction as my success was only because I have the highest respect for his talents and integrities’.

‘….he undertakes the office with a reluctance that nothing but my influence and solicitations could have subdued’.

These entries on Tafazzul are in Sir John Shore’s papers regarding his appointment . Shore, in his self-congratulatory mood, is completely blind to his specious reasoning. Whatever Tafazzul’s qualities, none of them point towards his ability to exercise power. In fact, he was a soft spoken, mild mannered man who ‘never changed his courteous and egalitarian behaviour towards the poor and the weak’. Furthermore, what stands out is that not once does Shore show any sensitivity to Tafazzul’s feelings on the matter. Even the editor of the Asiatic Annual Register, who lived in London and had never met Tafazzul, concedes in his obituary: ‘….an appointment not at all suitable to his inclinations, as literary fame, rather than political preferment, was the object of his ambitions’. I have found no record of Tafazzul’s own thoughts on this appointment. He could, of course, no longer use the excuse of having to go far away from home as Lucknow was home, or of already being in the employ of Asaf ud Daulah. Ironically enough, the one oblique reference to it I found is from Shore in his tribute to the man in his obituary. He says: ‘ ….he proved his disinterestedness, by declining to receive the usual emoluments of a most lucrative office, and by confining himself to the receipt of a salary, barely adequate to his expenses. An uncommon instance of moderation and self denial’. Shore’s perceptions seem misdirected; I would have thought that Tafazzul was aware of the situation that he was getting into and wanted to show the Awadhis that self interest was not a motivating factor plus he wanted to maintain a degree of independence. Shore is, apart from everything else, an enigmatic and unreliable witness. He says Tafazzul was ‘between forty and fifty’ when he started to study the English language; he was actually fifty five. Then there is Shore’s Freudian slip in the same tribute: ‘…his honour unimpeached’. What had happened, but was left unsaid, since his earlier statements that he had to assert this point?

Thus we had the strange, even ludicrous, spectacle of the leading mathematician of the country reluctantly making his way to Lucknow to, amongst other things, introduce economies, sort out the account books and produce a surplus so that the subsidy could be paid.

This is not supposed to be a history of Awadh so I will paraphrase. Tafazzul took over the reins of office around April 1797. Asaf ud Daula fell ill in July 1797. Refused to take medicine. Died 21 September 1797. Succeeded by Wazir Ali Khan, his eldest son and supposedly his designated heir. He is 16 years 5 months and 3 days old at the time of his accession.

The ruler and his chief executive could not have been more different from each other. Tafazzul, 70 years old and a Khan e Allama, a scholar used to patiently labouring at every new undertaking, rigorously meticulous, searching for truth in theoretical disciplines and at all times seeking to enlarge and enrich his culture. Wazir Ali, not yet past his teens and suddenly vested with power and responsibility, brash, callow and smarting from all his observations over the years of seeing his father acting subserviently to the British. What exacerbated this situation was that Tafazzul was, after all, the choice of the British and perceived as prejudiced in their favour.

It was a loaded situation, which soured and deteriorated, becoming more complicated with time as other players entered the fray and Wazir Ali made desperate efforts to become independent of British influence. Relations between the two reached breaking point. Tafazzul sent a message to Wazir Ali through a friend to be patient, but it was ignored. A sensitive man, Tafazzul fell ill from exhaustion. Lucknow was rife with rumours that Wazir Ali wanted to kill Tafazzul and when he visited him at his home with 800 armed men the obvious conclusions were drawn. This did not happen, but Tafazzul found himself in dire straits caught in the cross fire between the imperial imperative of a grasping power and the bumbling efforts of a frustrated Nawabi trying to regain its sovereignty.

The mirror, which Shore had never looked at anyway, had cracked. All the contradictions inherent in the situation came to the fore. Tafazzul wrote to Shore: ‘As far as I can judge there is no possibility of remedying and arranging matters without coercion. Wazir Ali bears no resemblance to Asaf ud Daula. He is totally devoid of fear and apprehension and has been led through ignorance and by the instigation of the incendiaries about him…’

This was followed shortly thereafter by this letter to Shore’s Persian translator: ‘In the situation I now find myself….it is absolutely proper and necessary for me at all events to get out of this place. The mode of doing this as soon as possible, is now what employs my thoughts. The Governor General and your coming gives me hope of Safety’.

The matter was not going to be as simple as that, especially since Shore was shortly returning to England and he had his own reputation to think of. Tafazzul met Shore on the way to Lucknow and discussions were held. It was decided that Wazir Ali had to be replaced by Tafazzul’s former pupil, Sadaat Ali Khan. Tafazzul’s role in this episode earned him the opprobrium of Awadhis.

Sadaat Ali Khan ascended the musnad in 1798 and, I believe, also assumed the office of prime minister. Tafazzul briefly stayed on in Lucknow and then went again to Calcutta as Ambassador. He surrounded himself with books and led a quiet and reclusive life. The much admired ‘energy of his character’ deserted him and he had a paralytic stroke and died shortly afterwards in early 1800, in all probability a heart broken man.

Sir John Shore went back to England in 1798 and was elevated to the peerage. He was henceforth known as Lord Teignmouth.

My father, whom I called Bhayya, grew up in the early part of the last century in the city of Lucknow in northern India. This intersection of period and place was perhaps the acme of Urdu-speaking culture, known ever since all over the subcontinent not only for its sublime literary achievements and the refinement of its manners, but also for its high ideals of decency and civility. One of the many ways in which these were manifested in the tehzeeb or culture of Lucknow was in its uncommon aspiration to male gentleness. This can perhaps best be described as something akin to the opposite of machismo. Even the shadow of aggressiveness was to be suppressed by men, with those unable to do so being considered barbarians or, at the very least, riff-raff.  [Photo shows the Husainabad Imambara in Lucknow.]

Bhayya was a near-perfect product of this enviable culture, and hence I never even heard him raise his voice. Ever. Instead, one glimpsed his manliness in random, small ways. For example, I remember once when I was a child we were driving somewhere in our family car when a huge bumblebee flew in through a slightly open window and proceeded to make our driver almost crash the car, so busy was he ducking and furiously swatting at it. As the bumblebee droned loudly, crashing back and forth between various surfaces, with the rest of us (mostly adults) in the car spastically and violently trying to avoid it, my father sat perfectly still. Then with a single quick and confident motion of his hand, he had grabbed the bee and crushed it to death in his fist. He threw it out the window and didn’t say anything, but the bee had been faster than he, and later at home I noticed his swollen hand.

Bhayya also had the simplicity and frugal habits of someone who has grown up without very much. Hence he would use the same basic bar of laundry soap to bathe, wash his hair and face, and whip into a lather with a small brush for shaving. (I have heard that before I was born, in his eccentric attempts at economy, he even once tried to make large quantities of soap at home with the help of his brother and some vats of fairly toxic chemicals, but luckily my mother put her foot down and that was the end of that.) And shaving gives us another rare instance of his appearing somewhat macho: he always shaved with a razor blade (of the kind in the photo on the right) held simply between his forefingers and thumb. Whether he chose not to use a proper holder for the blade as another step in his economizing campaign, or because of some other personal preference or secret to a good shave, I will never know since I never had the courage to ask him while he was alive. It was quite frightening to watch though, because one felt that if he were startled he might accidentally slit his own jugular, but then, as we know from the bumblebee incident, he wasn’t easily startled. (And no, he did not die in a shaving accident.) All I know is that because of him, every time I shave with my fancy Gillette razor, I feel like a bit of a sissy. But we’ll come back to shaving later.

A peacock’s tail presented an obvious problem for Charles Darwin, in that it doesn’t enhance its owner’s ability to survive. Indeed, it is such an expensive investment of precious resources (to grow it), not to mention an unnecessary burden to carry around, making it much harder to flee from predators, for example, that it is actually a significant handicap. And the peacock is by no means alone in possessing such costly ornament. There are countless other species which exhibit similar traits, such as the humongous antlers of male reindeer. Darwin immediately realized that something other than plain old natural selection is involved here, and he called it sexual selection and devoted most of his book The Descent of Man to it. Here’s the basic idea: in species which reproduce sexually, while natural selection works to increase an individual’s ability to survive to an old(er) age, sexual selection works to increase an individual’s chances of mating with a greater number of partners. For sexually reproducing species, just surviving is not enough. One could presumably increase one’s chances of living longer by not fighting over mates and incurring the many costs of pursuing them to mate with them, for instance, but one would not leave many descendants that way, and such individuals would soon be wiped out of the population. Since bringing up young is very costly, especially for the females of many species, since they often bear all if not most of this cost, it is in their interest to make sure that their descendants have the best genes possibles. In other words, they must try to mate with the best males available. (Males of species who do not invest heavily in child-rearing do not have to be as picky about females because they can just try to mate with as many females as possible.) And here is where sexual selection enters the picture. Males who are able to attract more females will leave more descendants, and they attract females by advertising the quality of their own genes. There are many ways to do this, and the peacock’s tail is one of them.

Such ornaments must be costly to function effectively as advertisements of fitness and health, because if they were not, it would be easy to fake them. For example, males of a certain species might start growing fake muscles which only look like real muscles (but are cheaper to grow) to appear strong. If this were the case, females would quickly start using some other criterion (like seeing if the male can actually lift a heavy weight) to make their choices. A costly investment in ornament is more difficult for less-fit males (such as diseased ones, for example) to make, and it is this that makes the ornament an honest display of fitness. (Now you know why men feel the need to buy Porches!) So, while the tail of a peacock may start as an advertisement of health and overall fitness (“look at me, I am so good at finding food and avoiding predators that I can afford to grow and maintain this expensive tail, and am still strong enough to get away from that fox which wants to eat me!”), there is something more that can happen as was shown by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher: runaway sexual selection.

What Fisher showed mathematically was that once such a process of sexual selection (where a male develops a trait that causes at least some females to prefer him) gets started, this male trait and the female tendency to prefer it become genetically correlated in descendants, and will spread quickly through the population in what he described as a “runaway process.” And as they spread, both traits (the male ornament and the female tendency to prefer males who have it) tend to themselves become exaggerated. With peahens unable to resist the sight of an awesome male tail, peacocks try to outdo each other by growing bigger and bigger and fancier tails. Of course, a point is reached where the natural selection costs of the tail actually start outweighing the sexual selection benefits of being able to impress potential mates, and a kind of equilibrium is reached. But not before this process of evolution giving rise to such whimsically resplendent ornaments as the peacock’s tail we see today.

An interesting theory of the origins of the relative hairlessness of humans relies on such a process of sexual selection. In The Descent of Man, Darwin himself dismissed more utilitarian explanations for the human loss of hair in favor of a sexual selection process, believing that in our ancestral men there arose an arbitrary preference for less hairy women, and that was enough (in what we would now call a Fisherian runaway process) to eventually result in our almost total loss of body hair, especially in women. Others, like Alfred Russell Wallace, believed that less body hair, at least initially, arose for actual utilitarian reasons, such as getting rid of lice, and being able to see whether one’s potential mate has lice or other parasites and the condition and color of their skin–an important indicator of health, with a sexual selection process then following. Recent work suggests that Wallace was probably right, and that the invention of fire and clothing to keep warm without body hair made it possible for humans to lose it. (By the way, pubic and underarm hair may have been retained as a way of efficiently dispersing sexual pheromones, whose importance is much underappreciated in our society.)

So what does this have to do with shaving? Well, nothing much yet, though as you can see, our relative hairlessness may have much in common with a peacock’s tail, at least in terms of how they came about. Now, you probably know that in the realm of culture, memes often spread in ways that are analogous to the way that genes spread through populations. This is how fashions, for example, get started. An arbitrary preference for pants that are flared a bit at the bottom gets going somehow, and before you know it a huge runaway fashion-selection process is in full sway, and you see huge bell-bottomed pants everywhere. I believe our present overall cultural tendency to prefer being clean-shaven probably also worked something like this. At some point a century or more ago, when shaving technology was not very advanced, it may have been an indication of success (or “fitness”) for a man to be clean-shaven, just as clean and expensive clothes would be: it meant that he had the resources and the leisure to go to a barber regularly. Or maybe there just spontaneously arose a preference for shaved men among women (they look more youthful, after all), and then the practice (or meme) spread through the culture in a runaway selection process, no different in principle from the cyclical vogue for thin ties, or wide collars, or short(er) hair for men than for women.

And finally, I come full-circle back to shaving technology with a last example of a completely runaway process which came to my attention by way of this year’s Super Bowl show on TV. One of the truly great advances in shaving razors came in 1971 when two blades were put close next to each other on a razor. This resulted in a much smoother, more comfortable shave, and the age of the Gillette Trac II began. But as you may know, the preference for more blades was not to stop there. If two blades were better than one, then three had to be better than two: in 1998 we were given the Gillette Mach 3 with three blades. (This is the razor that I use, though I am not sure if it is really any better than two-bladed ones.) Not to be outdone, a few years ago Schick introduced its Quattro with four blades! Being a sucker for marketing, I immediately bought it, but found that the blade is so wide that it is hard to shave the small areas on one’s upper lip, under the nose, etc. But in an almost unbelievable move, and with a $100 million marketing campaign for its launch, Gillette is fighting back by unveiling its Fusion razor on TV during the Super Bowl. The Fusion is a true peacock’s tail with six blades! I wonder what my father would have thought of that.

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

I’ve always loved borders.  I still have a photo album from a 1978 tip across the United States, and remarkably the great bulk of them –matted, square prints from those old, flat cameras– are of my sister and me in Montessori school T-shirts and short shorts, sporting identical bowl cuts, grinning contentedly in front of signs such as ‘You Are Now Leaving Wyoming’, and ‘Welcome to South Dakota’.  I believed we were making history that summer, in the back of our grandparents’ AMC Hornet station wagon that always smelled like burnt butter.  Who before us had crossed so many borders?  We heard ‘50 Ways to Leave your Lover’ on the AM radio, endured a plague of locusts in Nebraska, saw scattered dinosaur-themed monuments, and, when the outer edge of my right knee would by gravity and heat-induced lethargy drift into contact with the outer edge of her left, she would say ‘gross’ and insert a napkin between them.  The skin too is a border and sometimes must be secured.

Years later, I discovered that I enjoyed travelling to places principally in view of the places my destinations were next to.  In Leningrad, I fantasized about Finland; in Istanbul, I couldn’t stop thinking about what life is like in Bulgaria; in Egypt, I wanted nothing more than to cross into Libya; and in Argentina, it was Paraguay that captured my imagination.  I hate my whereabouts on principle just as I loathe the specious present and yearn for some authentic future. 

Sometimes my curiosity overpowers me and I depart to see what is on the other side.  In Leningrad I pretended I was sick so that the Soviets would give me an exit-entry visa to go to Helsinki for medical care.  I departed on the train with the Kalevala and a russko-finskii razgovornik filled with Finnish phrases written in the Cyrillic alphabet.  From the former, I still remember the opening lines of a spell intended to keep away bears: ‘O bear.  O honey-paws.  O handsome chubby lad of the forest’.  From the latter I can still remember the numbers one through five, which, transliterating back into the Latin alphabet, look something like this: yksi, kaksi, kolme, nelja, viisi.  I spent all the money I had on a hotel room and a vending-machine sandwich, and returned to the Soviet Union the next day, rather less gloriously than Lenin before me.  To the Finland Station, yes, but without even a plan for myself, let alone for world revolution.  This is what always happens when I succumb to my longing for neighboring territories.  I realize I am there for no good reason, and I return.    

In 1978, from some point in Minnesota, we crossed into Canada.  My six-year-old mind struggled to grasp the difference between national and state boundaries.  I knew that on the map the boundary between Minnesota and Canada consisted in dashes followed by two dots instead of one, and this I found significant.  They made us stop at the border, not just to ask us about any produce we might be carrying, but about our very identity.  We ate lunch, I believe, at a border truck stop, and turned right around, and our grandparents announced to us that we were now ‘world travellers’. 

In 1987 or so my mother sent me to sailing camp along the British Columbian coast, but what we didn’t know when I set off from Sacramento was that I would be stuck on a boat run by proselytizing Christians.  The summer prior I had been stuck at a Christian horse camp, but at least when you’re on a Christian horse you can jump off and run to the nearest payphone to demand to be picked up.  When you’re on a Christian boat, you have no choice but to wait it out, which is hard when you are 15 and have recently discovered Trotsky and Kafka, and want nothing so much as to get back to Victoria and find that punk-rock chick who invited you to some show just because you looked cool.  But no, you’re stuck on ‘night watch’ 100 ‘knots’ up the coast of Vancouver Island.  What the hell were we watching for, pirates?  I remember pulling up a bucket of seawater and stirring it to see the bioluminescent sea creatures glow.  ‘Explain that, Christians’, I remember thinking.  No doubt they would have thought themselves capable. 

Back in port, I found the punk-rock chick and she got me into a show.  A group of us spent the night on the floor of some kid’s parents’ home, assured that the parents were away on the mainland.  There was plenty of Southern Comfort and marijuana.  We listened to Crass.  A skinhead girl wearing tennis shoes recounted her recent trip to Montreal, and how when she was sleeping on the sidewalk there some other skinheads stole her Docs.  Montreal’s bad ass, everyone agreed. 

It would be 15 years before I would come back to Canada, and the next time it would be to Montreal, and, apparently, for good.  Earlier in this space I disputed Montreal’s claim to bad-ass status by any interesting measure.  I do see plenty of squeegee punks with tattooed faces lurking about in traffic, accosting drivers, hoping to strike that perfect balance between threatening and pitiable.  I hear they’re on a circuit between here and BC.  Some are old and particularly worn out, and sometimes I imagine I recognize the skin chick sans Docs, now in her thirties, like me, but now of an altogether different species. 

In those 15 years I never once thought about crossing into Canada.  Living in New York, I never developed a trace of the transborder fugue syndrome that brought me to Finland and Bulgaria from Russia and Turkey.  Into my psychical geography I factored New Jersey and Long Island, and a sliver of Connecticut, and most of that mass of land we call ‘Upstate’.  But Canada was as non-existent.  All my fugues in those days were trans-Atlantic.

I do not wish to complain about Canada for a second time, as I had initially planned to do.  I was in a foul mood when I wrote my first essay on the place, and I apologize to all those I offended.  I will say nothing about Stephen Harper, that hair-helmeted, Mattel-doll version of Newt Gingrich, nor about the complacent idiocy that clings, generation after generation, to a borrowed and vestigial queen.  Recently, I’ve been re-reading Montaigne, and this affects my mood dramatically.  You will get off easy if I don’t drift off into a discourse on my favorite sauces.  Come to think of it, that québécois gravy with cheese curd known as poutine is just fine, and so, even, is sirop d’érable.   

It is noteworthy, though, what an important part of Canada’s own psychogeography is its southern border.  The Canadians live pressed up against it like it were a source of heat.  From my 14th-floor window, facing the South, I imagine I can see the Adirondacks of Upstate.  But increasingly it is not, for me, in facing South that I have the sharpest feeling of what it is like to be in Canada.  This I have facing North, or even, with eyes closed, feeling North by I don’t know which sense.  Just as I get settled in a place where the border is all-important, accounting for 85% of the commerce of goods and at least as much of what Leibniz far too optimistically called the ‘commerce of light’, I find that borders have ceased to matter so much for me. 

This country, along with Russia, is one of the only two in the world to habitually leave out a good percentage of its land mass in the maps it makes of itself.  This is a shame, for it is that great mass, like the dark matter of the universe, that gives the place its weight.  Without that great mass that is left off the maps, that never figures into the squeegee punks’ circuit, that is largely neglected in CBC weather reports, I don’t think I could bear the place.  Russia’s vast expanse to the East is cumbersome, and always seems too much for Muscovy to bear.  Canada’s North in contrast is a source of power (literally) and majesty.  Baffin, Kugluktuk, and Vuntut are toponyms charged with life and wonder.  Handsome chubby creatures roam wide up there, I like to imagine.  The very thought of them frees a would-be fuguer, if only for a moment, from this string of makeshift border camps that most are content to call Canada.   

In a peculiar sense, it is okay to refer to our individual selves as “we” without belonging to royalty, yet be scientifically precise since our bodies which have a thousand billion cells harbor ten thousand billion bacteria. Germs are Us. The male of our species may find it particularly hard to accept the idea that it is cooperation and not competition that drives evolution. The story of how we got here is replete with extraordinary examples of networking and compromises over the last four billion years. The question “What is Life?” asked by Erwin Schrodinger half a century ago has been answered in the most concise manner by Lynn Margulis. Life is bacteria. “Any organism, if not itself a live bacterium, is then a descendant, one way or another, of a bacterium or, more likely, mergers of several kinds of bacteria. Bacteria initially populated the planet, and have never relinquished their hold.”

Life on our planet began with bacteria. They precede what you may know as the smallest unit of life or a “cell”. Human and most animal and plant cells have a nucleus which serves as a repository of their DNA, but bacteria (or prokaryotes) are simpler living organisms which do not even have a nucleus. They existed alone on earth for almost two billion years. The greatest revolution in biology was set off when two of these bacteria began a symbiotic relationship, forming the eukaryotic cell; one which has a distinct nucleus as well as pieces of circular extra-nuclear DNA bound in little dark bodies called mitochondria. Mitochondria, it turns out, were once independently living bacteria which apparently fused with another bacterial cell that they invaded. Through a process of cooperative living, different varieties of bacteria came together to give birth to “cells”. These eukaryotes which emerged as a confederacy of bacteria, existed as unicellular organisms for another billion years until they learnt to live in groups or colonies, eventually joining together to form the multi-cellular organism. The proliferation of all the splendid life forms and species we see today has occurred in only the last 600 hundred million years, humans arriving on the scene very recently.

To place the existence of humans into perspective, there is an interesting way to look at the history of our earth in 24 hours as described below:

Or as Lynn Margulis says, “The entire human history from cave to condo represents less than 1% of the history of life.” The great biologist Lewis Thomas had the best description when he wrote, “Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species’ name. The word for earth at the beginning of the Indo-European language thousand of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word meaning simply earth came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also to teach us the lesson, humble, human and humane.”

Here are a few more humbling facts. Microbial life is 25 times the mass of animal life and equals the total mass of plant life on earth. There are 500 pounds of microbes per acre of agricultural soil. There are more bacteria in one human’s mouth than all humans that have ever lived on earth. In fact, bacteria make up 10% of our dry body weight. Some live and replicate in the various organs of our body, and others have become a permanent part of our DNA. The mouth, gut and vagina harbor their own garden of living flora. There is increasing evidence that a balanced existence of these pathogens is critical for the health of the host, and that significant metabolic functions are performed by these microorganisms.

Disease states may occur when the normal symbiotic relationship between pathogens living in one of our organs is disturbed. For example, we often develop diarrhea while taking antibiotics. This happens because antibiotics kill some of the microbes, causing a redistribution of the growth advantage among the many species of pathogens that reside normally in our gut and result in diarrhea. Another example is Crohn’s disease. This is a chronic inflammatory reaction that may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract. Analysis of the mucosa associated bacteria of patients with active disease suggests that patients have a reduction in the diversity of intestinal bacteria. Interestingly, this disease is common in parts of the world where infestation of the gut by the helminthic worms is rare such as in the developed countries, and uncommon in the third world where people frequently carry worms. Exposure to helminths may help prevent or even ameliorate Crohn’s disease. Researchers from the University of Iowa put this hypothesis to test using the eggs of Trichuris suis, the porcine whipworm, to treat patients with Crohn’s disease. All patients ingested 2500 live T suis ova every three weeks for 24 weeks. The eggs hatch in the duodenum, releasing larvae that ultimately grow in 6–8 weeks into adult worms, but cannot replicate in the human host, dying after completing their short life-cycle. By repeatedly giving the eggs by mouth, a constant source of adult worms can be maintained in the gut without causing disease. While in the gut of Crohn’s disease patients, these worms reset the balance of pathogens back to normal and the inflammation disappears. In fact, the trial yielded a response rate of nearly 80% with no side effects. While a disturbed normal gut flora can produce a chronic inflammatory disease, introducing a live worm may reset the balance.

Microbes not only make up 10% of our body weight, a single organism is capable of a myriad of pathogenic manifestations. An example of this involves the virus called Varicella Zoster. Most of us get infected with this virus in childhood where it causes chicken pox. Once the clinical infection subsides however, not all viral particles disappear. Some of them find refuge in the nerves, where they remain in a latent form. As adults, we can experience a reactivation of these viruses, and depending on the competence of the host’s immune system, Varicella Zoster is capable of causing a variety of diseases as shown in the diagram, including the painful disease called Shingles.

Acute diseases are commonly ascribed to pathogens today. It is likely that many of the chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, inflammatory bowel diseases, even mental disorders like schizophrenia have some association with pathogens. Cancers are chronic diseases that reach clinical manifestation after passing through a number of stages including initiation in a single cell, expansion, invasion, evasion of the immune responses and finally metastasis. Already, some 15% of cancers globally have been etiologically linked to pathogens. To name just a few, associations between cervical cancer and the human papilloma virus (HPV), liver cancers and hepatitis viruses, certain types of lymphomas and herpes viruses, adult T-cell leukemia and HTLV virus, and gastric cancer and helicobacter pylori are now proved and accepted. The encouraging news is that if pathogens are identified as the etiologic agents, then preventive measures such as vaccines can be designed. This has already been accomplished for cervical cancer where the vaccine against HPV is quite effective. Below are a few recent examples to illustrate how more and more malignant diseases are being linked to an infectious etiology:

• There is an inordinately high incidence of lung cancer among women in Taiwan who do not smoke. Recently, HPV has been found in their tumors. This is the same family of viruses known to be the causative agent for cervical dysplasia and cancer in women. The same is not true for non-smoking women who develop cancer elsewhere implying that there may be other etiological agents (pathogens) involved. This makes sense if you think of lung cancer like pneumonia. Pneumonia could be caused by viral, bacterial, or fungal agents, but the organ response is quite similar and by looking at an X-ray of the lungs, we cannot say whether the pneumonic patch is viral or bacterial. In the same manner, lung cancer could be caused by a variety of pathogens.
• Aplastic anemia, a potentially lethal bone marrow failure syndrome, is more common in the rural areas of Thailand and has been linked to drinking un-bottled water. Having eliminated the chemical and physical causes, an as yet unidentified pathogen is strongly suspected as the probable cause.
• The human genome sequencing has yielded over 1000 retroviruses that have apparently been subdued over millennia of evolution, and made a permanent part of our genome. Yet only two retroviruses have so far been found to be associated with human diseases (HIV and HTLV). This is not because there are no other retrovirally induced cancers, but rather because of the enormous technical difficulties related to accurately identifying these elusive agents. Using an exquisitely sensitive “Viral Chip” which can screen for the presence of hundreds of viruses, researchers have been able to show just last week that a potential causal link exists between a retrovirus called XMRV and a rare familial type of prostate cancer. “In order to understand cancer, we must understand the microorganisms that reside in and control our body functions just as aggressively as the DNA sequences that make up our genes”. (L. Margulis).

It is high time that we start paying due respect to our formidable microbial fellow passengers on the planet. In the words of Niles Eldredge, “For microbes will not only inherit the earth (should, for example, we complex multicellular creatures fall prey to the next spasm of mass extinction); microbes got here long before we did, and in a very real sense, they already “own,” and most certainly run, the global system.”

What is it with these writers who feel the need to make up significant portions of their “true life” stories? Why do they think they’re going to get away with it (they never do), and why does the literary world feign surprise with each new scandal? At least the much-feted youthful phenom J. T. Leroy had the novelty value of not existing at all; Leroy was invented by the California couple who had supposedly adopted him and promoted his story of childhood abuse to celebrities. The beleaguered James Frey presents the more typical case. The Oprah Book Club chose his memoir precisely because of its depiction of the author’s harrowing real life experiences, and therein lies the rub: the success of this kind of book relies on the public’s voracious appetite for horrible and nasty events, but of course they have to have really happened in order to satisfy our voyeurism. We feel disgusted and cheated by the revelation that the author’s life may not have been as wretched and terrifying as he or she had convinced us it was.

So, is the problem that there is simply not enough interesting reality to go around – in economic terms, there’s more demand than supply, essentially forcing writers to invent it simply because it would make a better story than what actually happened? Is reality, at least the “good” kind that will sell, like oil, a kind of precious and finite commodity? Or is that people who actually have nightmarish lives tend not to have the wherewithal, connections, literary skills, or relentless desire for self-promotion required to please our compulsive need to pry into their suffering? (As a friend pointed out, in such cases it’s often true that the writer’s supporters and promoters have an inkling of the fraudulence to be unmasked later on; part of the attraction of any good con job involves a nagging feeling at the back of head that one is being scammed.)

The current trend to consume reality as entertainment or even art – from Survivor, American Idol, and The Swan to the memoir fad in publishing – isn’t actually new. Daniel Defoe basically invented the English novel when he realized that the public’s demand for shipwreck stories was so insatiable that he could just make something up rather than actually go through all the bother of risking his life on a deserted island. The result was Robinson Crusoe. Defoe, intriguingly, claimed that he hated fiction in his Serious Reflections: “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime…It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.”

Viewing the novel as a form of compulsive lying – the entire story has to be internally coherent and plausible even while every detail is false – is one way to understand why so many memoirs bend the truth. A lot of memoirists are novelists, and novelists lie for a living. William Faulkner, for example, wore a phony uniform and claimed throughout his life that he served as an airman in WWI; he did learn to fly, and his fiction about flying, in Pylon and his WWII short story “Turnabout,” is masterful. The word “fiction” comes from a root meaning “to fashion something.” It’s the magic mechanism of fabrication, the urge to create what Shakespeare, in The Tempest, called “the baseless fabric of this vision.”

Should we care whether it’s made up or not? Clearly, there are some cases where a line is crossed, like The Painted Bird, whose author, Jerzy Kosinski, pretended to have experienced the horrors of WWII up close. (Kosinski’s suicide is often linked to the reputation-destroying revelation that the story was made up.) But most memoirists’ sins are minor: exaggerations, additions, tall tales, and the like. Of course, anybody who puts dialogue of any kind into a memoir is essentially writing fiction. Unless they possess a preternatural memory, they have no choice but to invent what people said. Perhaps there are hidden rules to this sort of thing: everyone understands that it’s possible that not every hilarious comment recorded in a David Sedaris story was actually said, word for word, but nobody would (or should) conclude that Sedaris is trying to trick anyone. The standard, then, is somewhat murky in a similar fashion to the problem of plagiarism, which, it is generally agreed, must be intentional in order to be a serious academic offense. Similarly, it is not enough to misremember the name of the hospital where you were born, you have to be caught making up lies about how you were born with a hole in your lung and how it shaped your later character, by a blogger who looks up your medical records.

Hollywood has taken the lead in parsing the finer distinctions of the reality-based fiction. In addition to the old standby Based Upon a True Story, we now have the brilliant formulation Based On True Events, or the even more interesting Inspired by True Events. These terms have become increasingly all-encompassing. Presumably, if somebody is on their way to get coffee and they witness a mugging, and later turn the incident into a screenplay, that could be “based on true events,” whereas if they only read about the mugging in a newspaper while sitting in the coffeeshop and did the same thing, they have been “inspired by true events.” But these phrases aren’t just so vague as to be meaningless, or studio legalese. They are also statements implicitly acknowledging that a story is far more salable if it can be shown to have some connection, however tenuous, with something that once really happened. The horror movie bomb White Noise, for example, was promoted with a frightening commercial – far more scary than the movie itself – in which (supposedly real) recordings of the voices of dead people had been caught on tape speaking from beyond the grave.

In their movie Fargo, the Coen Brothers already mocked this entire concept by claiming that their film was based on a true story when it almost certainly wasn’t. (“Names have been changed out of respect for the dead,” the opening credits read, surely a fitting ironic prelude to the “respectful” wood-chipper scene.) The Coens hemmed and hawed when they were asked to fill in details about their sources, but the deception was deliberate and satirical. It was a sly comment on our entire obsession with reality, as well as a nod to the implausible “true detective” pulp stories invoked and parodied in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Weren’t the Coens really making a subtle case for fiction, and for art, where receding levels of playful irony operate in ways that true stories, limited to the facts, can only dream about?

The process of inserting fiction into reality can have unexpected consequences. Consider the case of Ted Perry, a professor of film at Middlebury College who worked on a television documentary, Home, about enivronmental issues, in 1972. Perry was asked to write a script about the virtues of environmentalism, but the show’s producers thought that Perry’s words would sound better if some of the text was presented as the wisdom of a respected Native American historical figure, Chief Seattle. The show claimed that Chief Seattle had said, “The earth does not belong to man – man belongs to the earth.” Decades later, the saying is still ascribed to Chief Seattle, and appears in school textbooks and bumper stickers. Perry, in a turnabout from the norm, has spent years trying to get the true story out. (The saying is really an inversion of a line of poetry by Robert Frost: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”) In all probability, however, the phrase would have never become famous without the trickery. Chief Seattle was a profound guy with plenty of wisdom, and someone realized, shrewdly, that the quotation was more marketable as a Seattleism than a Perryism.

I think it was Schopenhauer who once said that there are two kinds of books worth reading, the kind that exposes us to an experience we could never have ourselves, and the kind that is artfully written and constructed. The best kind of reality entertainment, such as Norman Mailer’s “true life novel” The Executioner’s Song – or The Armies of the Night, with its slogan “The novel as history, history as a novel” – combines both dimensions. But the truth is that many books achieve their only salability and public interest because they are true; the plain fact is that they are often so badly written that they could not sell as fiction. If your writing is false, then your story had better be true.

It’s one of the moments in the annual cycle where some of us at 3QD increase our focus on Darfur. Tilting toward the liberal-lefty bleeding heart side of the spectrum, we get incensed by the news, then feel that perhaps we’re being too monomaniacal and strident. Perhaps something by the powers that be suggests that something may be done—Colin Powell calls it a “genocide”, the African Union intervenes, using mostly Rwandan soldiers—lessens the urgency for attention. Then it all goes to pot—the UN puts the Sudan on its Human Rights Commission, really, and the AU decides, of all things, to host this year’s summit in Khartoum of all places and, even worse, considers Sudanese President Omar El Bashir a candidate for chair of the AU. (Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo was elected.)

This has happened a few times now, with the fact that it has happened a few times being the result of the lack of meaningful action by the international community of nation-states. This current rise in our own attention to Darfur resulted from a few disconnected events: a quick back and forth about Darfur in the comments section of a post, a conversation with a friend of a friend at a party about the work she’s been doing to help organize an upcoming call to action on Darfur, and an HRW report that Janjaweed militia are attacking refugee camps in Chad and the Chadian army is no longer protecting many of the camps. The cycle has been iterated often enough that it seems unlikely that anything will be done—suggestions of NATO intervention included.

In the midst of some back and forth in the comments section of the blog, I recalled a questioned posed by Daniel Davies over at Crooked Timber a while ago. Davies was commenting on an editorial about Sir Mark Thatcher’s alleged bankrolling of a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, which is run by a venal and brutal petty dictator—although no one was under the illusion Sir Thatcher was motivated by a desire to liberate the country.

The serious issue raised by this joke is, if we accept the logic of the “strong version” of humanitarian intervention, then why should we also say that it is only the job of states to carry out such interventions? Since, ex hypothesi, any special position for states is ruled out by the strong pro-war internationalist liberal stance, why shouldn’t groups of private individuals take action? For example, Harry’s Place has five main contributors, each of whom could probably raise about $200,000 if they took out a second mortgage; maybe they should be ringing up Executive Outcomes and getting a few estimates in on smallish African states. Why leave this to the government?

Certainly, mercenaries have been used before. Both Executive Outcomes and Sandline International were used in Sierra Leone against the remarkably thuggish Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh, and they were apparently very effective and relatively cheap. (To make it perfectly clear, I’m not a fan of mercenaries, whom I consider slightly better than international arms dealers, whom I consider, by and large, parasites that feed upon the weakest member of our species.) The UN under Annan considered using Executive Outcomes in Rwanda in the face of the unwillingness of the international community to halt a genocide.

In a footnote the his post, Davies clarifies, “By this [“strong version”] I mean the version pushed in the pro-war blogosphere, under which any intervention that removes a bad regime is by that token good. Not the rather stronger criterion used by Human Rights Watch.” That criterion is fairly straightforward:

In our view, as a threshold matter, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. To state the obvious, war is dangerous. In theory it can be surgical, but the reality is often highly destructive, with a risk of enormous bloodshed. Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes.

I don’t think that anyone doubts that the criterion has been met in Darfur. HRW of course is calling for UN-approved intervention carried out by the military forces of member-states, not mercenaries. Davies had raised the question of privatized humanitarian intervention to imply that the strong state-led interventions of the sort seem in Iraq are wrong and wrongheaded by appeal to our intuitions that it would be wrong if carried out by a private force, or at least it seemed so by the tone. (If states have no privileged place in sense that sovereignty is inviolable even if they’re committing atrocious crimes, then states don’t necessarily have a privileged place in the sense of a monopoly in using arms to stop these atrocities, though for many reasons we may want to turn to them first.)

Certainly, on the Left, one of the greater and more heroic images is of the international brigades that came to the defense of the Spanish Republic against fascists. (Yes, they were not mercenaries but idealistic volunteers, but that seems a technical difference rather than an ethical one. Idealist NGOs in this hypothetical would be hiring specialists, who I imagine are better at armed conflict than human rights workers.) In fact, if there was a problem in retrospect with the defense of the Republic, it was the involvement of the Soviet Union.

I’m not advocating that we do so here, that is, have private organizations send in mercenaries. Rather, I’m trying to work out an ethical puzzle or quandary. (The internet is supposed to be an effective tool for pooling information, deliberation and collective problem solving. While that dynamic usually works with technical issues with a right answer, it may help with this moral-technical problem of how should we go about assigning weights to the competing moral principles involved.)

I’m aware of the problems associated with NGOs raising money to hire mercenaries to intervene in humanitarian disasters: unlike with states, there is the problem of weak or absent institutions for exercising accountability, and that fact could thereby lead to more chaos; there is no transparency; there is the problem of precedent, in that do I want some alliance of radical anti-abortion forces in the world to raise money and take out a weak government which allows abortion because it believes it to be mass murder; there is the problem that it encourages mercenaries (parasites) by creating a demand for them; there is the fact that it is a crime in most countries to conduct this kind of private foreign policy; that the further privatization of certain services which are collective goods, the provision of which should be subject to democratic debate and monitoring, is the last thing that the world needs; and there are probably many more that don’t come to mind right now.

Against this there is: the fact that Darfur is a catastrophe; that we are witnessing state failure, in the sense that those who are supposed to stop this sort of thing have failed to do so on enough occasions for us to believe that they won’t do so at all, and perhaps in the same way that individuals have a right to organize their own security if states cannot provide reasonable safety, perhaps we have a right to organize collective security when states won’t; that it is reasonable at times to commit a lesser crime to prevent a greater one; and that it would save a lot of lives. (While the figures come from Executive Outcomes and are probably very self-serving, it’s not unlikely that 1,500 EO mercenaries in Rwanda could have saved tens of thousands of lives.) Perhaps even more importantly, that there are instances which act as exceptions, where other principles weigh enough to suspend in that instance countervailing principles, and that by acting in this instance in violation of the lesser principle, we’re not nullifying it altogether. Darfur may be a reasonable candidate for such an instance. But this last part is just the pro side being the pro side.

In all honesty, I don’t know how to weigh these against each other. I go back and forth, and I find that my best moral reasoning doesn’t seem to yield any kind of resolution to it.

I’ve found myself listening to the much-hyped, Hasidic reggae/hip-hop artist Matisyahu the last couple days. Needless to say, that makes me a confirmed bandwagon jumper. The live recording of “King without a Crown” and the accompanying video shot in Austin TX have been getting heavy rotation. His new CD is due next week and already two shows have been sold out at Manhattan’s sizable Hammerstein Ballroom. Writing this column, I merely join the rubes finally noticing a sub-cultural phenomenon as it percolates up to the mainstream.

Let me say at the outset that I am no aficionado of dancehall or reggae. But for what it’s worth, it does seem to me that the rhythms of toasting and the syncopations of Jewish prayer and song go well together (biddi-bum, biddi-diddi-bum, sounds equally appropriate for Marley or Tevya). And I like the easy translations Matisyahu has made from Jah to Hashem while incorporating elements of Torah, the Psalms, and the like. Still, I don’t really know enough about music to do anything other than listen to it, and so I’ll leave the discussion of the songs to those who can write about them with some expertise. What interests me here instead is the phenomenon of Matisyahu himself. At first glance, he has every appearance of a novelty act, an amusing suturing of Lubovitcher Judaism with West-Indian dancehall. Use whatever metaphor you would like. He’s a jerk pastrami sandwich, Vanilla Ice made from Manishevitz. Except that he’s not. Read over his fawning press, and you’ll see that he’s survived the inevitable skepticism. Indeed, the verdict has come in on the opposite side. Matisyahu is an authentic fusion of two distinct musical, ethnic, and religious cultures: Jewish and West Indian, matzo and roti. He’s a one man, cross-pollinated product of Crown-Heights Brooklyn.

OK, so in other words, one myth has taken the place of another. We are to imagine a yeshiva boy who cut class to run across Flatbush Avenue and spend afternoons spinning and toasting with the boys from the Islands. But that isn’t exactly right either. As is usually the case, the truth is more complicated and more interesting. Matisyahu was born Matthew Miller to a middle-class secular family in West Chester Pennsylvania. Late in his teens, he found God and decided to become Orthodox while staring deeply at the mountains during a camping trip in Colorado. He subsequently enrolled in a Hasidic yeshiva designed especially for converts to Orthodoxy. The young Matthew Miller seems to have had a wide interest in music, but his interest in the particular religious culture of Jewish Hasidism, with its messianic mysticism, its separatist resistance to modern living, and in the particular, Lubavitch sect he joined, its commitment to the charismatic authority of the late Rabbi Menachem Scheerson, was rather late in coming. It is not right to say that he was Hasidic and then found reggae. Rather, the two seem to have fed off each other in a wholesale reconfiguring of his life.

What is interesting about this, I think, is that the intensely religious and observant Judaism that so marks the persona of Matisyahu was something that he chose, not something he was born into. The beard and the side curls, the long black coats and felt hats, the tsitsis and the like, are self-conscious stylings. They are a Hasidic aesthetic, or Hastheatic, if you will. I do not mean to disparage at all the sincerity of Matisyahu’s beliefs. His commitment to the messianic religiosity of Lubovitcher Hasidism is evident in his lyrics and in his life. Even so, the religious persona is clearly as much a question of style as it is of belief. The more so, I would imagine, for his audience. There is something intrinsically appealing about seeing a Hasid perform his kind of music and perform it well. Matisyahu’s Judaism is interesting because it is so visible and marked, so much like the inner city of a mythical old-world. When it is fused with the musical style of his West-Indian neighbors, it is clearly updated to our polyglot and hybrid moment.

Matisyahu’s sudden popularity is owing in part to the role he has taken within a larger resurgence of hipster Judaism in popular culture, a fascination with Yiddishkeit and klezmer and Bar-Mitzvah-Disco and the like.  As it has long been, Judaism is here a sign of urbanity, of knowingness, and of cosmopolitanism. But in this case the urbanity and knowingness and cosmopolitanism dwell in the musical hybridity: the nexus of Hasidism, reggae, and hip-hop as distinct urban forms. Thus I suspect that few of Matisyahu’s listeners are drawn to the religious content of his music, important as that content may be to him. Whether they know it or not, they are drawn to the familiar unity of Judaism and modernity, the ineffably current and relevant something that resonates in the sound of the Yiddish or the Hebrew, the look of the side curls and the tsitsis, when they are combined and overlaid with an unexpected kind of music. So, while there is little in Hasidism one can relate to as doctrine, and even less as a way of life, there is something clearly attractive about it as a contemporary style. So much so that the fusion with reggae and dancehall and hip hop seems not so implausible, and not at all kitsch. Given the alternatives, that is not so bad a use for religion.

In my last column I noted how Political Science, along with most social sciences, has a bigger problem with prediction than seems to be generally acknowledged. This is of course hardly unique to members of this particular tribe; the media are even worse. Take for example the US media’s treatment of Bode Miller in the Winter Olympics. For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past month, Miller was the ‘sure thing’ for the US ski team. After all, he had his own set of sponsored ads, videos, and an interactive website from Nike. Miller was competing in five events and was, according to the US media, the front runner to lift possibly all five gold medals. Quite why this was the case was a mystery to me. Sure, he’s a damn good skier, but if you looked at his world cup results you would see that he was hardly head-and-shoulders above the competition, and in particular events he was well below the top rank.

Now, consider that each event Miller participated in at the Olympics was hardly an independent event due to the psychological impact of each result on the next, and that he is fully entitled (like the rest of us) to have a bad day at the office. Well, he did. He missed in all five events. Needless to say the media are now picking his corpse clean for defying their predictions. As the New York Times put it after his first ‘failure’ – “He is paying the price for misplacing career priorities.” Quite how the writer of this piece knows exactly where Miller left his priorities is unclear. The fact that he did not win is insufficient evidence, and you can bet your last dollar that had he won his next event such concerns would have been completely erased. Moreover, the last time anyone won five gold medals at a Winter Olympics was Eric Heiden in 1980 for speed skating. As far as I am aware, no one has ever won five medals in an Alpine event. Why Miller didn’t win could be a surprise only if one was deliberately ignoring much relevant information. Indeed, taking a select few data points and projecting them forward as an inevitability almost always produces disappointing results.

Two things stand out for me from this nonsense. First, why is anyone surprised that Miller did not win any gold medals, let alone five, when no one has ever done so? Second, and more interestingly for the non-skiers out there, why do people have a tendency to take two or three data points and project them into the future as an inevitable trend? Beyond the hype associated with US contenders, and the sheer myopia of the US media to the possibility of ‘foreigners’ actually beating the home-grown talent, such a tendency has consequences far beyond the Winter Olympics.

Consider Condoleezza Rice and Hamas’ electoral victory. The Secretary of State noted after Hamas’ victory at the polls that “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.” In fact, me, my wife, my cat, and The Economist Newspaper all knew this was coming down the track. Why then didn’t the Secretary of State, with all the resources at her disposal, not have an inkling that such a thing was going on? Perhaps what might be called ‘the Bode Miller problem’ was at work here too?

Consider that on issues as disparate as the invasion of Iraq, Social Security privatization, and energy policy, the Bush administration has never been one to let mere facts get in the way of a good ideology. Disconfirming evidence is screened out and only confirming evidence is admitted. A few supporting data points are projected as a trend while everything else is ignored.

In the case of the election of Hamas, while Fatah had recently done what the US has wanted in terms of halting suicide attacks, holding elections, and playing nice with Israel (all of which was acknowledged (trended) by the US), what Israel had done to Fatah over the past few years, in particular, bombing the PLO’s governing infrastructure into the ground thus cutting off their all important patronage network, was, like the totality of Miller’s results, totally ignored. The trend-line predicting Fatah’s victory was projected forward since only confirmatory data were being examined, and everything that didn’t fit the trend was ignored. Consequently, when a Palestinian voter said at an exit poll “Fatah hasn’t done anything for us,” this seemed to come as surprise; despite it being manifestly obvious to anyone who wanted to look at the totality of the data. Simply ignoring data because it does not fit with a preconceived model can be justified if the data is randomly distributed and constitutes clear ‘outliers’ from the observed trend. But to ignore a clear trend in the data and simply focus on what you want to see is pretty much guaranteed to end up producing a nasty surprise, pace Hamas.

Now this tendency to see trends, ignore data, and pointlessly project into the future is not only sadly common among the media and the political classes, (remember the US government not so long ago predicting budget surpluses into infinity on the basis of three data points?) it has determinate effects on likely future outcomes. When Hamas won the election the reaction of the US, Israel, and even the normally placid Europeans, was swift and condemnatory, and who could be surprised by this? After all, the Hamas Charter of 1988 does call for the destruction of Israel and cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the current “Nazi-Tartar” invasion by the West as reason enough. Indeed, there are undeniably a lot of data points out there pointing to actions by Hamas consistent with that interpretation and those ends. But even here there may be a ‘Bode Miller problem’ at work in that even here the past may prove no real guide to the future.

Consider that until into the 1990s the main body of the Irish Republican Army believed and proclaimed (quite seriously) that the UK government was holding the six counties of the North hostage as part of a colonial struggle, despite the exercise costing the rest of the UK millions of pounds each month with nothing in return except mainland bombings and death. Indeed, some breakaway Republican groups still adhere to the same beliefs. Yet, in order to believe such things one has to filter out massive amounts of data and project the few points that fit the preferred theory into the eternal and unchanging future. But when is the future ever eternal and unchanging? I am sure that much of Hamas is quite capable of continuing to believe in the forgery of the Protocols and act violently towards Israel, but let’s remember that one could have made the same projections about the IRA a decade ago, and yet they changed fundamentally, and quite unexpectedly.

Filtering the data to see only one trend negates potential futures. Seeing Hamas as a trend that cannot be stopped inevitably leads one to conclude that isolation and punishment is the only way forward. But Hamas has only ever known isolation and punishment. As such, proposals to cut-off aid in order to encourage capitulation is to fundamentally misread the data. True, there has been no IRA-like change yet, but to address the situation as an inevitable conflict preordained in the data will surely bring about such a conflict since we are blind to other possibilities.

So is expecting Bode Miller to win five gold medals the same as expecting Hamas to never change? Yes, but with one difference. Whereas Miller ‘failed’ on his own terms given the competition and the randomness of the day (after all, he might win six world cup races in a row in 2007), Hamas may only really ‘fail’ in the eyes of the Palestinians if the West and Israel are seen to make them fail. Key to the West and Israel doing this is to pick the data points they want to see (Hamas as unchanging and violent due to the trend line of the data) and project it forward.

Now, I freely admit that I know more about skiing than I know about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics, but it does seem to me that, as the millions of people who read their astrology every day attest, humans like patterns and can see them in almost anything. Add to this ‘the Bode Miller problem’ that we can ignore much of importance in order to see much of irrelevance since it reinforces the patterns that we want to see, and perhaps it is better to let Hamas run the schools’ budget rather than deprive them of it. After all, something new in the data might be the start of a new trend, both for Bode Miller and Hamas.

Dear Dr. Conley,

You won’t remember me. I took your “Introduction to Sociology” lecture in the Fall of 2001 at New York University; I received a B+ in the course and we never spoke. I liked your class because it was full of good conversation starters and softball assignments and my only complaint was that I was required to buy your 1999 title “Being Black, Living in the Red” (we discussed it for only half of one session and the connection was shaky). I thought of you again when a glamour-shot of you appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine. I experienced a brief thrill. But I can’t say I would have spent much more energy on you had it not been for your New York Times op-ed that appeared on December 1 of last year, “A Man’s Right to Choose.”

By now a rebuttal of your argument is old hat – it’s been four months – but gosh, I was riled up. A few days after I read your statement that “If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create,” I sat in Blue 9 Burger with my boyfriend and struggled, between bites, to articulate a scathing letter to the Times that would use remembered principles from Intro to Soc. to dismember your argument. My basic strategy was to remind you of one Tuesday morning when you asked your class to “Think about bathroom lines. The women’s line is always longer. Why?” By this point, my ears had perked up (conversation starter!). “They do more in there,” you continued. “They have to sit down, they have to use sanitary products, they change babies more than the men do. But the bathrooms are the same size as the men’s, and so the lines are longer.” I was convinced: for all members of society to receive equal treatment, their inequalities must be addressed. The women should have more stalls than the men, so everybody can pee and buy popcorn at intermission. So when I reached the portion of “A Man’s Right to Choose” when you described the “real work” of pregnancy as “morning sickness, leg cramps, biological risks and so on,” and used that reduction to argue that a male lifetime commitment to his child should render that nine-month female commitment fairly irrelevant, I was baffled. It seemed to me that pregnancy alone (forget the kid!) could and often does threaten a woman’s job, support system, and health. Her boss doesn’t care, her family sure does, and not in a good way, and her diabetes can’t handle it. Those problems aren’t solved with soda crackers and a back rub, Dr. Conley. What you glibly called “biological risks and so on” is a exclusively female set of predicaments, and should inform women’s rights accordingly.

I didn’t write that letter, and I didn’t need to. Critics much more intelligent and eloquent than I, namely Longview Fellow Carole Joffe, took you up on your challenge to examine “men’s claims to a role in the reproductive decision-making process” outside of marriage. In her open letter to you, she primarily focuses on the practical (or rather, impractical) implications of your proposal, finding that it “would create havoc in this already over-regulated and unnecessarily chaotic branch of the health care system.” Joffe points to surrogate mothering as an example of what happens when a pregnancy involves two contractually bound parties, and she asks how your proposal would accommodate these documented problems: “What happens when prenatal diagnosis in such a pregnancy reveals severe fetal anomalies? Does the father now have the right to change his mind about wanting the child that will result from this pregnancy? Even if he does relent and free the woman to choose an abortion, he is subjecting her to a later, more complex and considerably more expensive procedure. And will the father also have the right to monitor the pregnant woman’s behavior during her pregnancy? Will he obtain further court orders to forbid drug and alcohol use? If the pregnancy becomes “high risk,” will he ask a court to mandate bed rest, and to forbid sexual intercourse with others during the pregnancy?” I must say that though I was compelled by the anecdotes you shared about your ex-girlfriend’s abortion (against your wishes) and your friend’s ex-fiancee’s pregnancy (against his wishes), I found Joffe’s scenarios of more urgent concern. If you haven’t yet read her letter, I strongly urge you to do so – she also includes information about the “considerable efforts to involve men in the abortion process in appropriate ways.”

I’m imagining you. You’ve just read Joffe’s letter. You’re happy she paid you such attention, and you think she makes some great points. Mostly though, you’re frustrated. She took you too seriously. I don’t think you were actually trying to argue for a society that would subject women to such treatment, I think you were trying to urge your readers to think for a few moments about the incongruity of child support and abortion laws in this country. You’re a pro-choice guy with personal experience with abortion, and all you want to do is have a conversation. “I can accept that it is ‘your’ body but will someone please then just engage the argument that fatherhood should then be voluntary?” you beg of those who responded online to your Huffington Post piece, “Why My ‘Man’s Right to Choose’ Abortion Argument is Made from a Feminist Perspective.” You’ve used the site to admit you oversimplified in your piece, and to clarify your argument, and to say you shouldn’t have written that bit about how a committed dad “should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.” You’re aching for a real dialogue about fathers and mothers and pregnant women and men who impregnate them, and everyone’s focusing on that pesky question: But how would it work?

I’m interested in that dialogue too, and your initial question crossed my mind again today. “…[W]hen men and women engage in sexual relations both parties recognize the potential for creating life,” you wrote in December. “If both parties willingly participate then shouldn’t both have a say in whether to keep a baby that results?” And I wondered why, Dr. Conley, you chose to focus your energy solely on reproductive rights after conception. Unmanageable, Impractical, Outrageous! we scream when you imply coerced pregnancies and abortions. But what about contraception? Manageable, Practical, Sound. I don’t think both parties should have a legal say in whether to terminate a pregancy that results from consensual sex, but I do think both parties should be able to negotiate the potential for creating life on equal terms. And right now, male options – condoms, abstinence, withdrawal, vasectomy – just pale in comparison to the scads available to women. I’ve got abstinence, diaphragms, the sponge, spermicide, the female condom, an I.U.D., Plan-B, tubal ligation. And more significantly, I’ve got the pill, the patch, the shot, the ring, and sometime soon, a spray. If men and women conceive as equal partners, I wonder why you’re not upset about the gross inequality of contraceptive options for men and women, and why you aren’t taking notice of the trial study of a male birth-control ‘pill’ conducted by the pharmaceutical companies Organon and Schering AG that was set to finish the same month that your op-ed appeared in the Times.

Continuous and reversible male contraception isn’t a new idea. In 2003, Duke University Press published Nelly Oudshoorn’s “The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making.” In it, Oudshoorn states that the viability of such contraceptives was firmly established as early as the 1970s, and argues that the reason you don’t have a prescription for a male birth control pill is more of a cultural, political, and economic story than a scientific one. Excess testosterone, administered orally, as an implant, or injection, lowers sperm count dramatically. Recent research indicates that when combined with progesterone, the hormones can effectively disable sperm production – and clinical trials of the testosterone-progesterone combination are now under way in Europe and Canada. Alternatively, some researchers posit that rendering sperm unable to reach an egg would do the trick; a study at the University of Washington found that monkeys became infertile when immunized against eppin, a protein found on the outside of sperm that’s necessary for fertilization. Both Planned Parenthood and HowStuffWorks.com have informative and readable articles that support Oudshoorn’s contention that the barriers facing male contraception aren’t technological. Rather, she cites lack of funding, unwillingness of research participants, and larger cultural representations of masculinity that don’t have room for pharmaceuticals that cause male infertility (consider for a moment the ubiquity of Viagra and the total absence of male birth control) as the major obstructions. Nevertheless, Oudshoorn concludes that the advent of male contraceptives is inevitable – as is a reevaluation of gender roles and responsibility.

I think she’s right, and I think you’ll be able to have an equal voice in the bedroom before the clinic and the courts. I think you should focus your attention less on your partner’s body, and more on your own. “A Man’s Right to Choose” rests on the assumption that your sperm is a unavoidable surrender, and that years of child support payment depend on a sea of factors out of your control. Did the condom break? Did we conceive? Is she going to have this kid? If you could use a safe, reliable, affordable, and reversible medication that would allow you to decide whether you were capable of creating life – as women have for years – I doubt you would feel as victimized in this debate. Obviously male birth control couldn’t necessarily prevent situations like yours or your friend’s, but a man should have the right to choose what he’s offering his partner. I think we agree that the ideal number of abortions is zero – and providing men with a way to control their fertility gives them a stake in that number.

Permit me to remind you of the closing words of “A Man’s Right to Choose.” You wrote: “Better to deal with the metaphorical dirty diapers than to pursue an inconsistent policy toward fatherhood and an abortion debate that doesn’t acknowledge the reality of all actors involved. Otherwise, don’t expect anything more of me than a few million sperm.” I’d like you to expect more of yourself, Dr. Conley. I’d like you to consider practically where your agency, both as a prominent scholar with many press contacts and as a male sexual partner, is most valuable and viable. It’s not in the message boards of the Huffington Post, or in court orders. It’s back where you started, in the pages of the New York Times and in the bedroom.

Best Wishes,

Jane Renaud

I recently visited Dien Bien Phu, a dusty nondescript Vietnamese border town near Laos. Here, French fantasies of re-colonialism were dashed by a Vietnamese peasant army. Visiting Dien Bien Phu is not difficult for a progressive anti-imperialist left liberal. There are no mixed emotions, at least politically. Who can begrudge Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party their great victory in Dien Bien Phu? Even the Americans thought the French were a lost cause. They refused to help France directly when Dien Bien Phu was about to fall.

I was taken around by a motorcycle taxi to the different battlefield sites. They included the hills and other the strong points which the Vietnamese inexorably took, despite a heroic French defence, the French Commander’s bunker, and the war cemeteries. The motorcycle taxi driver stopped on the way to the war cemeteries and bought sticks of incense. He made me burn them for the souls of the dead, French and Vietnamese. I was surprised that he wanted me to burn incense sticks for French souls as well. I should not have been.

The Vietnamese did not fight a xenophobic war. They fought an “internationalist war”. This may sound strange in these days of “identity politics” when your ethnic or religious identity is supposed to determine the side you are rooting for, or whether you live or die. In his official memoir of the war, General Vo Nguyen Giap commander of the Vietnamese forces, considered the mastermind of the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu, thanked the French people and the French Communisty Party for their support of the Vietnamese cause. Ho Chi Minh, the first President of Vietnam and founder of the Indo Chinese Communist Party, was also a founder of the French Communist Party.

Ho Chi Minh’s bedroom and study are still as they were on the day he died. The books near his bedside include one on New Zealand Verse, another on the Indian nationalist leader Veer Savarkar, another on the history of Vietnam, another on Marxism and several other titles I could not read clearly. These books were written in English, German, French, Russian and Vietnamese. He read all these languages, and spoke many of them. No party hack, however sophisticated, could have put such an eclectic collection of books together after his death. It had to be his.

The Museum of Women in Hanoi described the support they received from women’s groups in the West opposed to the war. The Vietnamese highlighted, maybe even exaggerated, the international support they got from the people of countries who had sent troops to fight them – from France, the US and Australia. Peace activists traveled to Hanoi, and were welcomed as friends.

Watching the TV news of bombings in Baghdad every night, while visiting Vietnam, it was hard not to think about the current war against another US occupation. There are many reasons for Americans to oppose the US occupation of Iraq. It is leading to the loss of American lives. It is diverting resources away from fighting Al-Qaeda. It is exacerbating hatred of the US in the World. It is making the world less safe for Americans. There are also many reasons for Iraqis to oppose the occupation. It has yet to deliver stability to their country. It is contributing to sectarian violence. It is preventing Iraqis from taking charge of their own destiny. It is strengthening Islamic extremism in Iraq. And it is a foreign army.

These factors together may eventually lead to a parallel with Vietnam, when the costs of occupation – for the occupiers and the occupied – become less bearable than the consequences of a pullout. It is not clear that we are there yet – politically. In all the death and mayhem in Iraq, there is still a possibility that a democratic, secular multinational society may emerge from it. And it is not unimportant that Iraq’s neighbours – Iran and Turkey – still seem to believe that this is preferable to the alternative. This is not inconsistent with arguing the invasion was wrong, not just in international law, but for the people of Iraq. (The UN position.)

Whatever the similarities between the US occupations of Iraq and Vietnam, there is a critical difference in the attitude of the Viet Minh and the radical Islamists resisting the respective occupations. The former fostered and supported the creation of a peace movement from the anti-war movement in the US. They welcomed and highlighted the efforts of peace activists who came to Hanoi. The radical Islamists in Iraq are stunting the development of an antiwar movement. They are kidnapping and executing the very kind of people the Vietnamese welcomed and embraced.

[Last photo shows Harmeet Singh Sooden, a peace activist taken captive in Iraq.]

Well, it’s President’s Day in these United States. And it just so happens that I’ve recently become fascinated with that group of early Americans and Founding Fathers whose names resonate as huge and historical but about whom I’ll confess I’ve never known all that much. I’ve started reading biographies, some studies by American historians and scholars, The Federalist Papers, the correspondences between Adams and his wife Abigail and then between Adams and Jefferson. The latter are particularly amazing; they’ve changed me, changed how I think about Americanness, good and bad. The debate between Adams and Jefferson about what they thought democracy was supposed to look like is mind-blowingly interesting, really. Alexander Hamilton is a huge figure—a huge brain, half-mad, scary son-of-a-bitch, awesome, admirable. And Benjamin Franklin isn’t just the cute and cuddly little tinkerer with his kites and crap you hear about. The man was a polymath giant and pretty funny too. Madison, Jay, some of the lesser-known figures like Paterson and then Monroe—they really are massively fascinating figures.

But there will be no hagiography here. So, in lieu of semi-nationalistic ass-kissing I give you some tidbits from a project I’ve been working on here and there when the time and mood affords. It’s about 80 pages long now and it purports to get into the heads, subjectivity if you will, of some of those figures who are hard to think about in the flesh and blood, warts and passions, failings and complexities sort of way. I pretend no deep insight, just a feel for the ‘mood’ and ‘sense’ of some of these figures. I’ve made them talk and think in a modern-day man-on-the-street vernacular because it was pleasing to me to think of them that way. That is what made them real to me again.

Anyway, it’s my tribute to individuals who were simply extraordinary, other judgments, for the moment, being held aside. Finally, I apologize for the language, this being a family website. But you go where the muse takes you, damn it.

John Adams

Took a walk today.
Shit-ty day.
All the birds must
Be dead or goofing off.

Why do I get so
angry at birds?

Who knows.
But, I do.

We’ll have to get rid
Of all the animals
Sooner or later.
Or most of them.
Immolate them in a
Great fire
Like the early Greeks
And their
Stupid rites for
Worshipping
Pantheons of false
Gods.

Drive the animals into
The sea.

But for now let
Them putter on
The smooth hills,
Unknowingly.

When I move
My left foot
I feel rage.

I walked for
Seven miles.

The smooth hills were
Alive with animals
And their cries,
Crying out laments about
Death and simultaneous
Pleas for more sex.

They wouldn’t dare
Fuck the dead earth
Like I do.

You know it,
I know it,
Abigail knows it.

She cooked a plum pie
Last night.
I threw up when she
Lanced the skin.
It was like war in there,
Pulpy madness.
Tasted fine though,
Sweet and bitter
And fine.

Alexander Hamilton

This coat looks like
Crap and I’m getting fat.

Have the tailor executed,
I quipped,
Then burn his store
And rape the shit out
Of his horses.

It’s so motherfuckin’ boring in
The countryside.

Everybody thinks they
Know something.
Everybody thinks they’ve
seen something.
But they’ve only
Witnessed gleams
On the sides of barns,

Little neuron
Misfirings in the
Frontal lobes.

No one knows shit.
That much I know,
Without even dragging
My tired ass to
Delphi…
Which is simply
A rock, in the
Middle of nowhere,
For the sun to shine
Upon in the morning.

James Madison

Were we really
Like demi-gods
Back then?
Someone said that—
Demi-gods.

Now I can’t feel
my left leg and my
fingers always smell
like Gruyere.

The older I get,
The more I think
There should have been
One senator for
Every person.
That way, each
Person would
Have a senator.
And vice versa.

And we should have
Developed a new language
With a tense just
For lying,
And a verbal mood
For things we utter
Into young boys’ ears
To make them fear living.

And we should have
Designed new clothes
To seem more
American; so when
You put the great suit
On and latched up
the buckles,
tied on the extensions,
inserted the medallions…
The people would say
‘That’s an American coming’.

‘That’s an American suit.’

George Washington

To really fuck
With people,
Just don’t talk a lot.

Act like you already
Know something.
They keep talking
and you’re a
brick house…
It fucks with them.

Everyone is scared,
Everyone wonders whether
They are dumb,
Or ugly,
Or both.

Just stare and think
About something else.

I like to consider
The puckered assholes
Of youngish black girls
When people are
Talking.

Just keep talking
Idiot,
I’m thinking,
continue your prattle;
For me
Every new sentence
Is another black
Flower.

Thomas Jefferson

Just got in
From a long ride.

I wish someone
Would sing to
Me until their throat
Fell out and they died.
Then I would eat
A pheasant and
Some rich sauces.
Then I would go outside
And bury one
Of my goats up
To its head
Until the next morning.
You can blah blah
All you like, goat,
You’re staying in the ground
Until the sun comes up.
Then I would ride
Out to the end
Of the property
And cut my favorite
Tree down,
Unable to stand the
Sound of the
Goat’s cries.
Then I would
Take a bath with
Every fucking nigger
On the plantation.
One after the other,
In succession.
Then I’d write a letter
To France and go
to bed.

Dear France,
You made a pretty
Good frickin’ joke with
Me, didn’t you?
Ha ha.
Now who’s laughing?

George Washington

“How do you
stand so great?”
asked Morris,
“you’re like a
mortal Apollo
or a graceful
rhinoceros.”

“Huge.”

“While we twist
and dangle
like a coterie
of faggots.”

I didn’t answer.

But the truth was
Two stories.

One:
I place a chestnut
Betwixt my
Buttcheeks
Each morning.
I squeeze it all day
Long.
I’ve never ever
Dropped it.
That precious
Chestnut.

Two:
I think of the
Killing.
I think of the
Occasion I
Fucked my own
Sister, and
Without her
Approval.
In short,
I’m a man who’ll
be burning, soon.
I’m a man
Who waits
For the Devil.

Assuredly.

That’s why
I’m great.

James Madison

I’m pretty sure
My wife
Has the biggest tits
In Virginia.

I’m like, what,
Four foot ten.
Her left tit is
My size.

Each of those
Milky glands is like
A brother to me.
And they’re smart,
A dual nippled genius.

We fight and we talk
And we dream,
Usually in the
evenings, best in
The summers, amongst
The fireflies.

“Tell me a story, tit,
I’m feeling sleepy.
Of Tacitus
Or Catiline,
Or Benjamin Hoadly.”

When the sun goes
Down on the shitty
Little prairie, I’m usually
Thinking…

They’re a
Perfect union,
They’re a perfect
Union.

George Washington

I hated to see men
Dying,
I did.
But also I didn’t
Always give a shit.
Go figure.

Sometimes there’s nothing
Funnier than a stone
Dead human.

Sometimes you’re
Quivering to find a
Corpse somewhere,
Rigid, frozen, broken
Human forms.

Completely empty meaningless
Faces aren’t even
somethings.

They’re nothing.

I have a box
Full of shit.
It’s in the attic.
Dead people stuff,
Stripped from corpses.
Nice stuff,
Some silver.
Watches, hundreds of
watches,
Ticking away upstairs
For no reason.

John Adams

Skiddely skoo
Skibbeldy ska
I’m having a good one
Today.

I woke up
And farted right
In Abigail’s face.
You should have
Seen her look.

“I’m still alive,
baby,”
I was saying,
“I’m still alive.”

I grabbed a switch
and went after
John Quincy
With purpose.
“I’ll tan your
hide boy!”

But he’s like
50 now and
he’s bigger than me,
and pretty fast.

We ran around
In the yard
With no pants on.

He’s got a pretty
Big dick
For an Adams.

The sun was
Fine.
Warm and big
And spitting all over
The fields.

“This is something,”
I said to
One of the pigs
Later.
“We did it.”

Alexander Hamilton

I’d like to
Lay this whole gay
Thing to rest.

What is gay anyway?
Is it having
Certain kinds of
Feelings?
Is it a feel for
Fabrics? A certain
Specific inversion?

I loved him.
And when he
Died I sobbed and
thrashed like
Achilles and felt
Similar rages.
I too would have called
Down Apollo’s plague
Had I any sway
Over heaven’s affairs.
But Achilles’ mother
Was immortal and mine
Was just a slut floozy
From the tropics.

Slaves and sugar,
Dysentery and the clap,
Ain’t exactly fucking
Homer.

Truth is,
He had a lust
For death anyway,
He connected it with
Glory.
I remember how
Writhing his sinews
Were to touch them,
How hot his skin
Could get while
Still somehow icy.

In trajectory he
Was an arrow:
No swerving.

There was no
Battle he didn’t try
To die in.

That’s the story.

But I never fucked him,
Not once.

James Monroe

Just dinking around
the house today.
Started in on
Heavy cider at
Sun up.

Now my face
Feels like
It’s sliding off
My body,
Slowly.

The wife fell
Into the fireplace
The other morning,
Another case
Of the shaking.
She’s wrecked now,
Broken,
Over.

My Lesbia,
My Cynthia,
My Laura.
Tanto piu’ di voi,
quando piu’ v’ama

I’m going outside
To douse myself
In rain.

My love.
Somehow,
I failed you.

Benjamin Franklin

I’ve discovered that
It isn’t possible
To mate a warthog
With an earthworm,
Even if the earthworm
Fully enters the warthog
Genitally.

A dog won’t bang
A mouse,
Regardless of how much
you electrically
Shock them.

A cow and a
Horse will
Potentially get it on
In the evening,
Though, mysteriously,
Not always.

You can do pretty
Much anything you
Want with a goat.

If you replace
The innards of
A chicken with
Those of a piglet,
they both stop working,
unless I just
screwed up a few
of the connections.

The world is
Filled with gases,
Different kinds of
Gases, and that’s
about all the info
I have on that
Right now.

The Jews are
Watching everything
We do with great
Interest, no
Pun intended.

I’m gonna measure
The rest of the
Stuff in the house
Tomorrow.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Last month, we packed our bags and headed to Delhi. We flew on a cheap ticket, got in at an ungodly hour, bleary-eyed but excited. Indira Gandhi International airport is typically third-world, featuring ramshackle transit busses, greasy walls, dull immigration officials, who, because we hail from across the border, gravely told us to fill out extra paperwork. Outside, we dryly smoked a Dunhill, spent close to an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the parking lot, traversed the dark swaths of the city by car, and slept at dawn. In the afternoon, wide-eyed, we headed out.

This was our first time in India. We thought we’d be a foreigner in a foreign land but were immediately struck by the obvious, or not so obvious: from the anemic flow of water in taps to the quality of light in winter, India is like Pakistan, familiar territory, terra cognita; the flora, colors, topography, architecture, traffic and beggars, suggested that we had been here before. Delhi seemed like a larger, sometimes grander version of Lahore.

Touring the city on rickshaw, we rattled past the very impressive Rashtrapati Bhawan, the old Viceregal Palace, where preparations for Republic Day were underway. Here, where Lord Mountbatten once determined the fate of the Subcontinent, we now observed posters featuring the visiting Saudi head-of-state, King Abdullah; police with semiautomatics trolling the wide boulevards as the odd monkey scurried by; stands and seating and portable toilets busily being set up for the throngs that would in days observe artifacts of Indian martial identity: ballistic missiles named after the gods Agni and Prithvi, as wells as Russian-built T-90 tanks. On TV later, we also watched colorful folk dancers and elephants participate in the festivities. Strangely, save the animals, it was all familiar, the sort of display we have often seen on the wide boulevards of Islamabad on Independence Day. Although we would have liked to stroll around, our rickshaw-wallah advised us against it.

Next we stopped at the Qutb Minar, the awesome two-hundred-and-forty foot tower constructed in 1199 to commemorate the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan by the Turk Qutbuddin Aibak. A testament to Indo-Islamic syncretism, the tower ostensibly shares the muscular aesthetic of many of the Hindu temples we have visited in and around Karachi but upon closer inspection, is adorned by Arabic script. Interestingly, we happened upon a secret carving of the elephant-god Ganesh on a foundation stone in the north wall of the complex (a must-see). As we ambled about, we were beckoned by a waving middle-aged woman seated reading a newspaper in one of the cupolas. Hand extended, she declaimed: “Photo!” We immediately complied, handing over our camera. She then meticulously documented our visit, taking pictures of us from different angles, framed by different arches, the Qutb Minar sometimes in the background, now on our left, now on our right. We were quite touched by her sense of duty to the solitary ambling tourist which, we figured, had something to do with native pride, patriotism. Having depleted most of our roll, she returned the camera and extending her hand again, said, “Tip please!” Parting with a ten rupee note, we thought, “Hand ho gaya.” On the way out, we mentioned the incident to another tourist who said, “She took me for a hundred.”

Finally, we headed to the Mughal Jamia Masjid, a smaller, duller version of the Badshahi Masjid in Lahore. We muttered some secular prayers in the courtyard then scaled one its minarets. After a vertiginous five-minute climb, we were suddenly upon Delhi; the city spread before us in twilight. And the flat skyline, the Shahi Mohalla, the adjacent squat neighborhoods, the bustle of humanity, reminded us of surveying Lahore from the Minar-e-Pakistan. We felt dizzy and elated and at that moment, claimed the city, and country.

India’s similarity to Pakistan extends further than the glance of the tourist. Both countries are fundamentally similar in significant ways, an obvious, even mundane observation but one mostly neglected in the media, academia, and popular discourse, within and without the Subcontinent. The edifices and detritus that we happened upon are testaments to a common past defined by competing religious, cultural and colonial heritages, repectively: Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh; Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Pashtun, Balouchi, Sindhi; British, French, Portuguese. Many assume that in this common past there is the suggestion of common ground, of the Subcontinent functioning as a cohesive political entity. The vast area, however, has functioned only thrice as such: under the legendary Ashoka circa 273 BCE, under the Mughal Aurganzeb three hundred years ago, and most recently under the British. Regional aspirations have been the rule rather than the exception throughout history. The creation of the modern states of India and  Pakistan is testament to this historical momentum, of competing visions and ideas grating against each other, centralized state structure on one side, federalism on the other. And this dynamic may shape and reshape the Subcontinent in the future as it has for millennia.

That we share a common history is not an interesting claim. What is interesting, or rather, peculiar, is that in recent history, India and Pakistan have rarely occupied the same space in discourse. The only notable academics that have made a syncretic effort are the Harvard professor Sugata Bose and the Tufts professor, Ayesha Jalal. In Modern South Asia they note that they

“…aim at breaching the spatial and temporal divide which that moment has come to represent in the domain of scholarship. Despite a much longer shared history, marked as much by commonalities as differences, post-colonial India and Pakistan have been for the most part treated as two starkly antithetical entities. Only a few comparative analysts have risked trespassing across arbitrary frontiers demarcated at the time of partition, preferring to operate within the contours of independent statehood, even when these fly in the face of overlapping developments…Such scholarly deference to the boundaries of post-colonial nation-states in the subcontinent is matched by the attitude of Indian and Pakistani border patrols…”

Regionalism and other varieties of centripetalism continue to inform both states. In a rare article comparing the two countries, The Economist, notes

“India…sometimes wonders whether it really is one nation. Many of its 25 states are big enough and different enough from each other to be large countries in their own right. Bids by various regions for more autonomy were accommodated (most of the time), bought off or suppressed by the Indian government with varying degrees of finesse. Clashes of caste, class and creed periodically undermine order, if not India’s territorial integrity. India is pocked with small wars, from the tribal insurgencies of the north-east to the caste wars of Bihar, where upper-caste private armies slaughter dalits (formerly known as untouchables), and Naxalite (Maoist) militias murder landlords in return.”

Interestingly both countries – one with democratic credentials and one with sporadic and spotty democracy – resort to the army when regionalism threatens. The Pakistani army has crushed movements for autonomy in Sindh and Balouchistan while the Indian army has crushed those in Kashmir, Punjab, and Assam. Both countries also invariably accuse each other of aggravating these movements when in every case, regional anxieties are local matters. For instance, the present phase of the independence movement in Kashmir – which the wonderfully erudite Pankaj Mishra has examined in a series of articles on Kashmir in the New York Review of Books – can be traced to a single bullet fired by an Indian soldier into a peaceful student demonstration in early 1990.

Both countries share the same parliamentary system of government (and the same archaic bureaucratic apparatus), a legacy of our shared colonial past. During our trip, the uneasy relationship between the center and periphery was highlighted by the Buta Singh episode: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came under attack for not sacking the controversial governor of Bihar who had been indicted by the Supreme Court for a “politically motivated report recommending Central rule in the state.” Other debates taking place in the parliament seemed familiarly silly: elected public officials arguing about the fate of Sourav Ganguly, the captain of the Indian cricket team (and the fact that Musharraf has managed to resist American pressure to vote against Iran in the IAEA when Manmohan had not.) Similarly, in Pakistan, a strident and ineffectual committee was convened last year to examine the functioning of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

We also share an unfortunate feature of the postcolonial nation state: systematic corruption amongst the political class. Pakistan’s corrupt politicians – Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, in particular – are infamous but in recent memory, at least one major scandal has rocked every India administration: the Bofors arms deal involved $30 million in kickbacks and implicated Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi himself; the $138 million sugar contracts scam in 1996 implicated another Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao; the screwy deregulation of the telecom sector under communications minister Sukh Ram; the dramatic “Operation Duryodhana” which featured eleven members of parliament caught in tape taking bribes for the release of development funds; and most recently, the Volker report on the Oil-for-Food scandal brought down the External Affairs minister, Natwar Singh. A BBC reporter observed, “Corruption pervades nearly every aspect of Indian life. Even mundane procedures such as applying for a driving license, school and university admission, and getting a telephone connected often need to be accompanied by a pay-off to an official to speed up the procedure.” Familiar indeed.

Not everything is familiar though. In the shadow of the mosque, we dined at Karim’s, a much celebrated restaurant: National Geographic called it a “magic little restaurant”; BBC raved about it; and various Indian newspapers employ only hyperbole to describe it: “every time [sic] on the menu is a celebration of special mughlai cuisine that fed and probably enslaved the Royals to their cooks, who in turn have been making parallel history by making their ways into people’s hearts through their stomachs.” We trembled with anticipation reading these elegies displayed in cutouts on the walls. As a discerning culinary tourist, we ordered three very different items: Jahangiri chicken, chicken liver, and paya, or goat trotters. Tragically, ladies and gentlemen, we were disappointed. The chicken had no kick, the liver was served soupy, and the paya was doused with haldi. In fact, save one exception (the rather amazing Kakori kebob in Lucknow), over the course of our jaunt we realized that Northern India cuisine doesn’t quite compare with Pakistani cuisine: you can’t go wrong in Pakistan whether you eat paya in the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, tak-a-tak in Chandi Chowk, or nihari on Burns Road in Karachi.

After dinner, we strolled through the Shahi Mohalla with an uneasy stomach. Unlike the Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla, the neighborhood does not features beautifully frayed (and restored) havelis, harmonium music, the tintinnabulation of ghungroo, but money exchanges for Pakistani currency, small restaurants, dim stalls, and a decidedly troubled bustle. We purchased a Jinnah hat, searched (and found) Razia Sultana’s forgotten grave, and then amid the squalor, happened upon the bright entrance to a subway station. As if entering the security gate at an airport, we passed through a metal detector while armed guards inspected our camera. Once inside, we were quite taken; Delhi’s spanking new subway system is very impressive indeed; Pakistan does not have anything like it. We descended underground via escalators as a young couple looked on, marveling at the march of technology, then followed, hesitantly, one foot at a time; riding the escalator was for them an act of supreme balance. We got off the train during an exodus and found ourselves at Connaught Place. Reminiscent of Mall Road or Liberty, Connaught Place is a vibrant market planned around a large roundabout. We purchased a saffron-colored T from the Lacoste shop to celebrate our Indian excursion, and then sat outside chewing on spiced yam, observing the Indian middle class.

Indian’s middle class is definitely larger than Pakistan’s although its size and purchasing power (or even moderntity) is disputable. Writing in The Hindu, novelist and columnist Shashi Tharoor writes,

“Whenever I hear foreigners talking about the Indian ‘middle class,’ I wonder what they mean…Conventional wisdom is that this middle class is some 300 million strong…and together with the very rich…has both the purchasing power and inclinations of the American middle class…Today’s economic mythology sees this new Indian middle class as ripe for international consumer goods…[but] manufacturers, I hear have been dismayed by the weak response of the market…the Indian middle class is not quite it’s cracked up to be.”

Tharoor scrutinizes the numbers citing a somewhat dated economic survey, perhaps, not be the best way of going about this sort of analysis. But if, say, mobile-phone users can be thought to be a proxy for the middle and upper classes, then as of 2005, combined, India’s middle and upper middle class number 60 million. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that 5 in 100 people own mobile sets in India in comparison to 10 in 100 in Pakistan, 29 in 100 in China, and 47 in 100 in Brazil.)

Later that night, clad in our newly acquired Jinnah hat and saffron Lacoste T, we met a friend at a chi-chi bar called Shalom (which of course reminded us of the Karachi nightclub, Virgo Legacy). At four hundred rupees a cocktail, Shalom was outside the purview of the middle class. The dimly lit room had an exposed finish and was populated by fifteen, perhaps twenty people huddled around small tables. The crowd was young, affluent, and the music loud and loungy. We ordered a couple of very tasty Mojitos. A recent law-school graduate informed us with edgy pride that she is becoming a corporate lawyer to contribute to India’s GDP. Our conversation turned to the modern veneer of Delhi. We were told that bars such as Shalom have sprung up within the last couple of years. On the table besides us, we heard a rake coo to a Caucasian, perhaps another tourist, “You could be anywhere in the world in here.”

India’s recent spurt of economic growth after the “lost nineties,” the anemic 3% “Hindu rate of growth” that characterized the eighties, and its previous experiments with socialism has inspired many with certain confidence. The celebratory mood permeated the celebratory articles by New York Times reporter Amy Waldman late last year. South Asia Bureau editor of the BBC avers, “The new mood is summed up and also being shaped by the country’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. His book The Argumentative Indian encourages the liberal middle class to reclaim pride in their country and culture from the worst of the Hindu nationalists who hijacked them in the 1990s.” Sen’s wonderful project is a function of this turn-of-the-century mood. Arguably, then, The Argumentative Indian could not have been produced in the eighties (when Naipaul found India to be a Wounded Civilization, a step up, we suppose, from An Area of Darkness).

Across the border there is also a celebratory mood. Vishaka Desai, the President of the Asia Society in New York, observed, “I think there is a level of confidence because of the economic takeoff of Pakistan…I also think people feel that in the last five-six years, since Musharraf has come to power, there is a moderation that has taken place. Where it seemed before that it was going in the direction of more Islamisation, it is quite different and is something we should respect.” Last month, the stock market crossed the 10,000 rupee mark, a few weeks before India’s managed the same. Shaukat Aziz’s macroeconomic stabilization has resulted not only in a skyrocketing stock exchange but 8.3% GDP growth in 2005 (7% in 2004). In turn, cheap credit has flooded the market, availed of by the middle class (who are estimated at 30 million) who have purchased cars and houses with loans for the first time in decades. The newly economically enfranchised middle class has clamored for schooling, an interesting demand push phenomenon. Harvard economics Professor Asim Khwaja has documented the explosion in private school growth in the last few years in a surprising report. Manifestly, economic growth, whether in India or Pakistan, has real social (and political) implications. Fareed Zakaria astutely notes, “Compare Pakistan today—growing at 8 percent a year—with General Zia’s country, and you can see why, for all the noise, fundamentalism there is waning.”

A dated issue of The Economist (a few months before Musharraf took power and before the present Congress administration) posed the following question:

“Secular, democratic India v sectarian, coup-prone Pakistan: no question, surely, which would win a political beauty contest? Set India’s $30 billion of foreign-exchange reserves against Pakistan’s near-bankruptcy, India’s world-class software engineers against Pakistan’s outdated cotton mills, and awarding the economic prize looks just as easy. Yet the comparison is not as lopsided as it seems at first. Travellers to are often surprised to find its people looking more prosperous than Indians. Pakistan’s income per head is indeed higher than India’s, even leaving aside the giant black-market economy. Pakistan also appears to be a more equal society, even though most members of parliament still belong to the landed elite. India may boast that democracy has churned the social make-up of its political class, yet the caste system, despite half a century of deliberate erosion, still blights Indian society. In Pakistan, you would not see a scene witnessed by your correspondent on a railway platform in: a small, dark-skinned man being shooed off a bench by a corpulent, lighter-hued woman as though he were a stray dog. As for Pakistan’s fabled lawlessness, Delhi’s murder rate last year was roughly the same as Karachi’s.” 

Of course, India is roughly seven times Pakistan’s size by population; its economy is three times Pakistan’s; and its labor force has an edge in magnitude and education. The million man strong BPO industry may be small in a nation of a billion but a million remains a large number, and its skill-set is noteworthy; and since Y2K, a number of these BPO shops – Wipro and Infosys, in particular – have become international players. Moreover, India’s democratic tradition and institutional infrastructure might prove to sustain future growth more effectively and evenly than in Pakistan.

A few drinks into the evening, we wondered, why did we expect India to be any different? We then remembered back to December 2003, when a large contingent from Bombay arrived in Karachi to attend the Kara Film Festival. The first such a delegation to cross the border in a very long time, our guests  – including the charming film director Mahesh Bhatt and his beautiful daughter, Pooja – were not only blown away by their reception but by Karachi’s cultural and nightlife, and infrastructure. At the rollicking closing party at a warehouse in Korangi, an Indian confided to us after a few drinks that he thought that “women here are veiled and men have beards. That’s what the newspapers say.”

While we were in India, we had the misfortune having the Times of India delivered to us daily. Every day the newspaper ran a front page article on Pakistan – not China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, but Pakistan. And the headlines were rarely newsworthy. We don’t think that any English-language Pakistani paper fetishizes India like the Times. When we had asked a friend what the deal was, he told us that we should read The Hindu, which is published in the South; the establishment resides in Northern India.

Of course, the news bulletins the state run Pakistani channel, PTV, for example, features damning reportage on Kashmir. The state run news channels, PTV or Indian Doordarshan, also represent another problem: newscasters speak languages that sound foreign, made-up, because the Indian state machinery has worked hard at Sanskritizing Urdu, while official Urdu in Pakistan has become increasingly Persianized and Arabisized. The establishments of both countries have put great effort in defining us as each other’s “Other”; put simply, being Indian means not being Pakistani and being Pakistani means not being Indian.

The state also selectively excavates history: whereas many Pakistani textbooks commence with the Indus Valley Civilization and jump to the Muslim conquest of Sind by the teenager, Bin Qasim, ignoring the preceding Hindu dynasties and Buddhist civilization, many Indian textbooks feature the fictional “Indus-Saraswati civilization” and exclude the fact that Mahatama Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist. Rewriting Indian history has become not just a cottage industry but a serious endeavor and matter. Although such revision is associated with the previous administration of the fundamentalist BJP, we were unsettled to learn from the intrepid weekly, Tehelka, that Macalester professor James Laine’s work on Shivaji has been banned in Maharastra. And we were shocked to learn that state issued textbooks in Gujrat praise Hitler and the “internal achievements of Nazism”! Of course, the curricula of Pakistani madrassas (attended by about 1% of Pakistanis), are also horribly and ludicrously retrograde; the Hindu is often the enemy. Indeed, “The Idea of India in the Popular Pakistani Imagination” and the “The Idea of Pakistan in the Popular Indian Imagination” could make for fascinating doctoral theses.

Mercifully, the youth in either country watches Indus Music and MTV Asia, not the state-run television channels. We speak the same language because we watch Indian movies (our favorites being, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, Tridev, Yashwant, Lagaan, and Saathyia) and listen to Pakistani music (music shops in Delhi are stocked with CDs of Junoon, Noori, Fuzon, Strings, and Hadiqa). We, the generation, generations removed from Partition, travel light; we don’t carry much baggage. A sense of the familiar, not nostalgia, informs our sentiments. We want to move on. In Twilight in Delhi, one of the first novels in English from the Subcontinent (the first being Mulk Raj Anand‘s Untouchable), the great Ahmed Ali depicted the decline of old Delhi. Like millions of others including our family, Ali fled India at Partition for Pakistan. During twilight in Delhi, however, we had a different vision than Ali; one of a common past and future, of the celebration of commonality. That’s why it’s our generation that will breach the divide. We returned home that night, slept easily, anticipating the morning after.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Beyond Winter in Karachi (or the Argumentative Pakistani)
Dispatch from Karachi
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
And, the original Critical Digression

Professor Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given 3 Quarks Daily permission to publish the text of a speech he gave at a memorial service for Edward W. Said on September 29, 2003. Professor Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanties at Columbia University.

Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor’s degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has published a book in the Philosophy of Language and Mind in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell). He has two forthcoming books from Harvard University Press — Self-Knowledge and Intentionality and Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity. He has published various articles in Philosophy of Mind as well as in Political and Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology.

Edward Said: A Personal and Intellectual Tribute

There are a very few intellectuals ––Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world— whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

I.

Edward was, as they say, ‘many things to many people’, and though he was too vast to be contained by a mere university, even one as uncloistered as Columbia, he was a teacher and took great pride in being one. So let me say something about that first.

To put it seemingly frivolously, he was deeply ‘cool’. I say ‘deeply’ and mean it. One day, the best undergraduate I have ever taught and my very favourite student, said to me “Prof. Said is really cool”. Now I, who have been trying to be cool for decades, was mildly annoyed by this, and said, “Look, I can understand that you think he is a great scholar and intellectual and a peerless public figure, but why ‘cool’? He doesn’t wear black, he despises popular music, he hangs out with well-heeled professors and other rich and famous people, and he is preposterously handsome –how uncool can you get!” She looked at me dismissively and said, “All that’s really not a big deal. It’s –like– really on the surface.”

Edward’s influence on the young came from his refusal to allow literature to offer merely self-standing pleasures. The connections he made in even our most canonical works, between the narrations of novels and the tellings of national histories, between the assertions of an author and the assertion of power by states, between the unconscious attitudes of a seemingly high-minded writer and some subtle illiberal tendency of social or national prejudice, drew to the study of literature numberless students who, out of a quest for worldly engagement, or more simply out of a cosmopolitan curiosity, demanded just such an integrity of words with morals,. Not long ago while giving a lecture in Honkong, I found that students were passing around a faint and barely readable photographed parchment of one of his unpublished manuscripts — a contribution to a symposium held ten thousand miles away — as though it were a handwritten poem by a Renaissance courtier. No other literary critic has had such a, literally, planetary influence.

And he achieved this without any of the heart-sinking, charmless, prose of the literary avant-garde, nor the natural, unaffected dullness of the old guard. His writing, like his speech, had the voltage of dramatization and (it has to be said) self-dramatization, which no young person could find anything but cool.

II.

Because of his great political courage, because he repeatedly broke his lion’s heart in the cause of Palestinian freedom, because so much of his most familiar and famous writing was intellectually continuous with those political themes and struggles, and because it was expressed with a ceaseless flow of political ardour, Edward’s intellectual legacy will be primarily political, not just among the young, nor just in the popular image, but also in the eyes of academic research. There is no gainsaying this. And it must be so. It will be right to be so. This side of him was of course manifest to his own people, but it was also central to so many others for whom the Palestinian struggle is a reminder that the fight for the most elementary of freedoms is not yet over. Since so much has rightly been written about it, I want to briefly situate that most vital part of his life and thought in the larger setting of his humanism, of which we often spoke in our conversations inside and outside the classes we taught together, and on which he had just completed a book, when he died. It was perhaps the only ‘ism’ he avowed (he was, despite being in the midst of an anti-colonial struggle, consistently critical of nationalism), and he avowed it with a stubborn idealism, in the face of its having been made to seem pious and sentimental by the recent developments in literary theory.

Underlying the civic passions and the charged impressionism of his political and literary writing was a deep and structured argument of greater generality than anything that is usually attributed to him. (He was always impatient with arguments, and would tell me that it was a philosopher’s obsession, keen to find philosophers as bad as lawyers on this score. But he was wrong about this, and came around to saying that something like this argument was indeed a thread in his work.)

Two elements of frameworking breadth have abided through the diverse doctrinal formulations of humanism, from its earliest classical hints to the most subtle surviving versions of our own time. They can, in retrospect, be seen as its defining poles.

One is its aspiration to find some feature or features which sets what is human apart –apart from both nature, as the natural sciences study it, and from what is super-nature and transcendental, as these are pursued by the outreach of theology and metaphysics.

The other is the yearning to show regard for all that is human, for what is human wherever it may be found, and however remote it may be from the more vivid presence of the parochial. The dictum, ‘Nothing human is alien to me’, still moving despite its great familiarity (and despite the legend about its trivial origin), conveys something of that yearning.

These two familiar poles framed the argument that Edward presented throughout his life as a writer.

At one pole, to explore what sets the human apart, he invoked early on in his work a principle of Vico’s, that we know best what we ourselves make –history. Self-knowledge thus becomes special, standing apart from other forms of knowledge. And only human beings, so far as we know, are capable of that self-knowledge.

At the other pole, to make urgent the Senecan dictum, he plunged into the topical, warning us of the disasters that will follow, and which indeed are already upon us, if we conduct our public lives as intellectuals with an indifference to the concerns and the suffering of people in places distant from our Western, metropolitan sites of self-interest.

Relatively fixed poles though they may be in a highly changeable set of ideas we call ‘humanistic’, these two features are not ‘poles apart’. They are not merely unrelated and contingent elements of humanism. They must be brought together in a coherent view. And Edward tried to do just that.

To bridge the distance between them, he started first at one pole by completing Vico’s insight with a striking philosophical addition. What Vico brought to light was the especially human ability for self-knowledge, and the special character possessed by self-knowledge among all the other knowledges we have. This special character which has affected our paths of study in ways that we have, since Vico’s time, taken to describing with such terms as ‘Verstehen’, “Geisteswissenschaften”, or as we like to say in America,‘ the Social Sciences’, still gives no particular hint of the role and centrality of the Humanities. It is Said’s claim, I think, that until we supplement self-knowledge with, in fact until we understand self-knowledge as being constituted by, self-criticism, humanism and its disciplinary manifestations (‘the Humanities’) are still not visible on the horizon. What makes that supplement and that new understanding possible is the study of literature. To put it schematically, the study of literature, that is to say ‘Criticism’, his own life-long pursuit, when it supplements self-knowledge gives us the truly unique human capacity, the capacity to be self-critical.

Turning then to the other pole, how can a concern for all that is human be linked, not just contingently but necessarily, to this capacity for self-criticism? Why are these not simply two disparate elements in our understanding of humanism? Said’s answer is that when criticism at our universities is not parochial, when it studies the traditions and concepts of other cultures, it opens itself up to resources by which it may become self-criticism, resources not present while the focus is cozy and insular. The “Other’, therefore, is the source and resource for a better, more critical understanding of the ‘Self’. It is important to see, then, that the appeal of the Senecan ideal for Said cannot degenerate into a fetishization of ‘diversity’ for its own sake or into a glib and ‘correct’ embrace of current multiculturalist tendency. It is strictly a step in an argument that starts with Vico and ends with the relevance of humanism in American intellectual life and politics. Multiculturalism has not had a more learned and lofty defence. It may in the end be the only defence it deserves.

James Clifford in a now famous review of Orientalism had chastised Edward, saying that he cannot possibly reconcile the denial of the human subject in his appeal to Foucault in that work, with his own humanist intellectual urges, reconcile, that is, his historicist theoretical vision with the agency essential to the humanist ideal. But if the argument I have just presented is effective, if the methodical link between the two poles I mentioned really exists, it goes a long way in easing these tensions. It allows one not simply to assert but to claim with some right, as Edward did, that criticism is both of two seemingly inconsistent things: it is philology, the ‘history’ of words, the ‘reception’ of a tradition, at the same time as it allows for a ‘resistance’ to that tradition and to the repository of custom that words accumulate.

The argument, thus, gives literary humanism a rigour and intellectual muscle, as well as a topicality and political relevance, that makes it unrecognizable from the musty doctrine it had become earlier in the last century –and it gives those disillusioned with or just simply bored with that doctrine, something more lively and important to turn to than the arid formalisms and relativisms of recent years. For this, we must all be grateful.

III.

I first met Edward twenty years ago when I noticed an incongruously well-dressed man at a luncheon talk I gave as a fresh recruit at the Society of Fellows, on some theme in the Philosophy of History. With a single question, asked without a trace of condescension, he made me see why the issues of substance and urgency lay elsewhere than where I was labouring them. I knew immediately that he was a good thing, though I did not know then that I would never change my mind. One had heard so much about him. No person I knew had more political enemies. They did not find it enough to hate him, they wanted the whole world to hate him, and they weaved fantastications and myths in order to try and make it happen. For those who admired his indomitable political will, these scurrilous attacks against him made him seem even more iconic, and for those who knew him well, his seductive, self-pitying responses to them, made him even more dear.

An essential part of his great and natural charm was that friendship with him was not without difficulty, nor without steep demand. He would do his best sometimes to appear a credible swine, if for no other reason than to raise a spark in the conversation. I recall when we were on the stage together at some public meeting, after the idiotic fuss that was made about his having thrown a stone in the air at a site in Lebanon which had just been evacuated by the Israeli army. The person who introduced us began with me, and gave me the modest introduction I deserved, and then went on to poetic heights about him, and concluded by saying that he was the author of over twenty books. As she finished, I leaned into my microphone and said “Over twenty books! Somebody has to stop this terrorist! First he throws stones! Now he is cutting down trees!” He immediately leaned into his own microphone, and said, “My dear fellow, you should worry just a bit that for a man who has not written that much, that remark will come off as bitter rather than funny.” On another occasion, we were sitting in his flat last New Year’s Eve for dinner, with a gathering of his friends from the Modern Languages Association, which had just had its annual meeting in New York City. The talk that evening had had much to do with feminism in the academy, the usual drill about the feminine pronoun, and all of us had self-consciously displayed our impeccable commitments. The conversation came around to whether my wife and I would be moving our daughter from Brearley to the newly started school for the children of faculty at Columbia University, a subject of vexed indecision for us. Edward asked us impatiently, “So are you bringing her to the Columbia School? What the hell is holding you up?” And I said, “Well, I am not sure, she is very happy at Brearley”. And he said, throwing a glance around at the women, “Who cares, she’s a GIRL!!!” This teasing sometimes became willfully, even if delightfully, dangerous. Charlie Rose once asked him on television, if he had read a recent book on Wagner, which had come to the extraordinary conclusion that his music was so infused with anti-Semitism that if someone who was not anti-Semitic heard his operas, he or she would become anti-Semitic by the end of it. What, Rose asked, do you think of that conclusion? Edward, who despised anti-Semitism as much as anyone I know, but perfectly aware of the obvious dangers of the subject for a person with his political commitments, leaned forward and said, as if in earnest: “You know, I tried it. I got all my Wagner out and heard it all day and half into the night.” He then paused, allowing the menace to build up, and then, shaking his head, “ It didn’t work.”

Yes, he was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and he was a great and good and inspiring and beloved man. It is very hard to bear the loss of someone, so large of heart and mind.

As I wrote those last words, I was reminded that that heart and mind were lodged in a body, which, for all its robustness, was cursed with a wretched illness that he fought with such heroism for a dozen years. Reminded too of that more muted and less recognized form of heroism -forbearing and endlessly giving- with which his remarkable wife Mariam stood by his side each day for all those years, and of that obscure and nameless thing she will need now that he is gone, to be without the presence of the most present person she, and his children, and his friends, have known. I wish her vast reserves of it, whatever it is, and of every other good thing.

[See also this remembrance of Edward Said by S. Asad Raza.]

A review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett.

Isaiah Berlin resurrected the line “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, and famously used it to divide thinkers into two camps:

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.

Daniel C. Dennett is a fox. In fact, he is perhaps one of the greatest foxes alive. Dennett has had more great little ideas than anyone else I can think of. And his foxiness has a fractal quality: it exists at every scale. He has written about philosophy, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and much more. Within philosophy, he has written on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, the problem of free will, and much more. Within philosophy of mind, he has written on… well, you get the idea. He is astoundingly prolific in his output of ideas and arguments for dealing with a given issue, and an adept at inventing what he calls “intuition pumps” (thought experiments, illustrative examples, new vocabulary–like “intuition pump!”, you name it) to help us grasp difficult concepts. He has written books for specialists (The Intentional Stance) as well as for the well-educated lay reader (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and everyone in between, but in his new book he targets and reaches out to his widest audience yet, “the curious and conscientious citizens of my native land–as many as possible, not just the academics. (I saw no point in preaching to the choir.)”

Dennett’s project in Breaking the Spell is to use the methods and tools of science to examine religion, just as science examines any other natural phenomenon, and to write about it in such a way that it is accessible to everyone. The book is divided into three parts. Dennett is particularly eager that religious people read his book, and for this reason spends the first third of the book motivating and justifying his project, and even just appealing to his audience to keep reading:

…in spite of my best efforts I will no doubt outrage some readers, and display my ignorance of matters they consider of the greatest importance. This will give them a handy reason to discard my book without considering just which points in it they disagree with and why. I ask that they resist hiding behind this excuse and soldier on. They will learn something, and then they may be able to teach us all something. (p. 21)

Here is Dennett’s own description of his goal:

While I recognize that many religious people could never bring themselves to read a book like this–that is part of the problem the book is meant to illuminate–I intend to reach as wide an audience of believers as possible. Other authors have recently written excellent books and articles on the scientific analysis of religion that are directed primarily to their fellow academics. My goal here is to play the role of ambassador, introducing (and distinguishing, criticizing, and defending) the main ideas of that literature. (p. 23)

Dennett says that scientists study fields like sports and cancer, where miracles are sometimes said to happen. Maybe they don’t and maybe they do, but:

…the only hope of ever demonstrating this to a doubting world would be by adopting the scientific method, with its assumption of no miracles, and showing that science was utterly unable to account for the phenomena. (p. 26)

He says the same goes for religion. And for this reason, even the Roman Catholic Church at least goes through the motions of objective scientific investigation of miracles when considering candidates for sainthood. If believers really want to show that something supernatural exists, they should welcome a scientific examination of the facts. Frankly, this portion of the book may be a bit tedious for those (the choir) who are already convinced that a scientific examination of the phenomenon of religion is a good idea.

The second part of the book is where the real fun starts. Dennett says that there is no reason that religious practices cannot be accounted for in terms of our understanding of evolutionary biology. He begins with theories of the origins of folk religion, and then shows that as human culture grew in scope and sophistication, these ideas developed into fully-fledged organized religions. This is covered in considerable detail, and he makes many interesting points along the way. One of his strategies here is to do with religious memes what Richard Dawkins did with genes thirty years ago: he adopts their point of view. In other words, what characteristics would a religious meme have to have to reproduce itself successfully and spread? Note that memes are:

…passed on to one’s offspring by non-genetic pathways. Speaking one’s “mother tongue,” singing, being polite, and many other “socializing” skills are transmitted culturally from parents to offspring, and infant human beings deprived of these sources of inheritance are often profoundly disabled. It is well-known that the parent-offspring link is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Children grow up speaking their parents’ language and, in almost all cases, identifying with their parents religion. Religion, not being genetic, can be spread “horizontally” to nondescendents, but such conversions play a negligible role under most circumstances. (p. 86)

This method of looking at things from a meme’s-eye point of view makes possible a number of interesting observations, and also explains why so many religious memes share striking similarities, for example, a systematic invulnerability to empirical refutation. It also helps to explain the similarities of various religious practices across different religions, for instance, the ritual of walking unharmed over a bed of hot coals has religious significance in India, China, Japan, Singapore, Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, Bulgaria, and other places. (I know from my own childhood that Pakistan is no exception: walking on burning coals has at least been incorporated into the mourning rituals that are practiced by the Shia, along with self-flagellation.)

Just to give a flavor of the kinds of interesting insight that are made possible by the use of memetics in Dennett’s hands, I will quote him at some length here:

Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance.They even got shelter and emergency medical care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid–losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)–was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives–because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle-mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions (going from less than 1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass ten thousand years ago to over 98 percent today–see Appendix B) there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic–fitness-enhancing to both parties.

What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all [as was the case with folk-religious memes]. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers–meme shepherds–whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses–magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on human guardians to keep going. (p.169)

It is for such inventive ways of presenting ideas that Dennett is such a pleasure to read, and so easy to understand. Notice that in the above passage, wild animals and plants were domesticated by humans because they provided a mutual benefit. So what was in it for the domesticators of wild memes? Dennet examines this question in some detail next, but I must try to refrain from rewriting a short version of his book here.

The last part of the book is an examination of where religion stands today. This is the part of the book that is explicitly motivated by the current tensions that religion is producing in the world, and here is where Dennett urges his reader toward a serious reexamination of his or her own faith. A religious person might argue that for all of Dennett’s reasoning about religion, he is missing the point. Accepting religion and accepting God is not like accepting a conclusion, it is more like falling in love. To which Dennett says:

…it isn’t just like falling in love; it is a kind of falling in love. The discomfort or even outrage you feel when confronted by my calm invitation to consider the pros and cons of your religion is the same reaction one feels when asked for a candid evaluation of one’s true love: “I don’t just like my darling because, after due consideration, I believe all her wonderful qualities far outweigh her few faults. I know that she is the one for me…

But Dennett wants you to evaluate your love anyway, and he is right. He ends by first examining the question of whether morality is possible without religion (guess what his answer is!), and then by considering what our attitudes toward religion should be today. The whole book is marked by a careful attention to documenting sources and studies whenever an empirical assertion is made (this reminded me of Steven Pinker’s books, where hardly a paragraph goes by without his citing of several studies to back up what he is saying!) and, indeed, it also succeeds in being just about as accessible as is possible to a very wide audience while applying sophisticated analytic tools to its subject. Dennett has done what he wanted to do, and it is an extremely important and timely achievement. I strongly urge you, specially if you are religious, to click here to buy the book, and read it, will you?

Have a good week!

My other Monday Musings:
Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding
A Moral Degeneracy
In the Peace Corps’ Shadow
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The sudden ascension of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court within a few short months, time mostly taken up with opposition to their appointments, has precluded deeper reflections on the world we have lost. It is no longer possible to imagine the Supreme Court as a guardian of individual rights against state intrusion. Indeed, quite the opposite is occurring: the new Court is likely to sacrifice civil liberties given what they judge to be a “compelling state interest.” Already, the present Court has deprived aliens, permanent residents or sojourners, of civil liberties as a necessity of our undeclared wars, and citizens are next. Except for Justice Kennedy’s 2003 attempt to enlarge homosexual protections with an appeal to international law, a move Justice Scalia fiercely attacked as submission to the “homosexual agenda,“ the present Court has shown little interest in guaranteeing, let alone extending the rights and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. A solid statist majority, shorn of the libertarian streak of the old American right wing, will see to it that Bush and his successors, in the spirit of their great autocrat predecessor, can say: “L’etat, c’est moi.”

The golden age of what might be called “constitutional liberalism,” begun with the appointment of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937 and ending with the retirement of Justice William Brennan in 1990, is over. During this just a bit more than half a century, justices such as Black, Douglas, Warren, Brennan and Marshall wrote opinions that said in simple, eloquent English that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applied to every citizen in almost every human circumstance. Under their tutelage, the Court became the ultimate protector of individual liberties, a role these justices cherished.

It was not always – in fact – never was thus. This remarkable band of brothers that ruled during the Court’s Golden Age was an historical anomaly. One suspects that students are still taught Chief Justice Roger Taney started the Civil War in 1857 by ruling in the Dred Scott case that slaves were property and their owners’ rights protected by the Constitution. What students are no doubt not taught is that the Supreme Court before the 20th Century was essentially a chancery court for rising corporate capitalism, magically transforming corporations into legal persons and availing them of most 14th Amendment protections, even while depriving African-Americans of same in Plessy versus Ferguson (1896). No greater thefts of civil rights save the Indian treaties have been sanctioned before or since.

Before the Golden Age, there were prophets with honor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, not for nothing known as the Great Dissenter so little did he carry a Court majority from 1902 to 1932, and Justice Louis Brandeis, the Progressive era’s leading legal genius who sat on the Court from 1916 to 1939, anticipated constitutional liberalism but made little law. They along with Benjamin Cardozo, in his short six-year tenure ending in 1938, were the minority that protested the Supreme Court dismantling of the first New Deal.

Flush from his 1936 landslide victory, Franklin Roosevelt tried to add to their number by packing the Court with younger, more cooperative members, and for his hubris, suffered the loss of much of his second mandate’s power. Roosevelt, out of revenge and even out of spite, nominated in 1937 Hugo Black, the senior senator from Alabama and certified fire-eating New Dealer, to the Court. As Roosevelt knew, senatorial courtesy would protect Black, and the Senate confirmed him within days. As New Dealer Harold Ickes put it, the economic royalists, as corporations were known as in those days, would get a good licking now.

Son of a dissolute small town merchant in a hardscrabble, red clay county pushed up against the Appalachians, Black (1886-1971) got his start as a lawyer defending poor people against corporations, and was proud that unlike most of his peers in rural Alabama, he had never taken a dime in retainer or bribe from the railroads and other trusts then cracking open the South for new profits. Instead, he represented clients suing corporations for personal injuries, job-related disabilities, and wrongful separations, the latter often related to union activities. He hated big money and monopolies and became one of the crusading Democrats that brought the political impulses of populism into the party. He became a Klansman too, a fact that got him elected the first time to the Senate but that almost ruined him shortly after being named to the Court.

A radical New Dealer, Black was against Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act because it propped up big business through legalized price-fixing. He was likely the first national politician to call for national health insurance. He originated bills for the minimum wage and the 30-hour week, and was the author of the groundbreaking fair labor standards act. Though Black regretted it, he like Roosevelt gave in to southern Democratic demands that minimum wage protections be stripped from agricultural and service workers, thus re-consigning, in effect, African-Americans in the South to a Jim Crow economy.

Black was the leader, the inspirational force for the Golden Age, serving for 34 years between 1937 and 1971. At first something of an apprentice “Great Dissenter,” Black soon learned the craft of how to put together majorities. With William Douglas as his great ally, he began making law, affirming the right to counsel for poor defendants in federal trials (1938), demanding racial integration of juries (1939) and due process for black defendants in criminal trials (1941). He ordered the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi (1962). He defended freedom of speech, association, press and religion with an old-fashioned, Bible-thumping injunction that the Founders had said that Congress shall make no law respecting these freedoms, and they meant it. He brooked no compromises with the Bill of Rights, seeing in it a citizen’s sole defense against government tyranny. He defended it against all comers, even those liberals like Felix Frankfurter, and by implication so many others since, who believed that the protections of the Bill of Rights must be balanced against other rights and privileges granted in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights contains “absolutes,” that were not mere “admonitions,” in his words, but prohibited prejudicial action of any sort. Unable to get his colleagues to apply the entire Bill of Rights in defense of citizens in altercations with local and state authorities as well as to federal jurisdictions, he painstaking and relentlessly sought over the course of 34 years to achieve the same result piece-meal.

Black defended Communists, pacifists, and said with generosity, pornographers. They were all protected, as were their rights to a living. Tyranny, he said in Chambers versus Florida (1940), was the great truth of human history, and those who suffered the most at tyranny’s hand were almost always “the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless, and the powerless.” The Court’s job was to affirm their rights – to stand up to governments and stop them from taking rights away. This was the kernel of constitutional liberalism, whether the Court found itself deciding for equal protection under the law and equal opportunity, or against extracted confessions, lawyerless suspects, and unreasonable search and seizure by the agencies of the state.

Sadly, the Golden Age began to decay by the late sixties, as a quick look at Justice Black’s last decade suggests. It had gone about as far as these brothers could take it. Black worked hard to put the Court behind equal protection under the law for African-Americans and for desegregation of schools and other public facilities, and for his pains, became anathema in his native South. Integration, on the other hand, was social policy to him, a matter of community preference, not jurisprudence. He stepped down just as the Court began hearing the cases that moved the federal government beyond simply assuring equality of opportunity to toward equality of outcomes. The Court’s many attempts to protect the rights of crime suspects led him to despair that that the Court may be aiding in letting guilty criminals go free.

From early on, he carried forward perhaps the two most crucial flaws of constitutional liberalism, and perhaps of the political liberalism of his time. First, Black treated property rights as sovereign. Picketers on company land were trespassers; even bus counter boycotters raised his ire. Second, the President’s powers in war were virtually supreme. He voted to affirm putting Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens in camps during World War II, because President Roosevelt and his generals had declared it a military necessity. His brothers Earl Warren (also the governor of California who had urged internment) and Tom Clark (U.S. attorney general at the time) later regretted their votes for it; Hugo Black never did. Consider the consequences. Of the first flaw, property, not opportunity or dignity is what our law protects, and we live the consequences daily. Of the second flaw, perhaps the word Guantanamo suffices.

The Golden Age is over, over by a good 15 years, though Clinton’s giddy Gilded Age spread money enough around to help us forget. The Supreme Court now decisively returns to is historic role as the protector of privilege, but this time it adds the defense of autocracy to its brief.