The United States in Iraq: Ethical Implications
October 29, 2007
a talk given at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the Get InFORUMed event put on by the Peace and Justice Center
Formulating an ethical response to the war is difficult because it does not feel like individuals have a voice in what happens. Unless Secretary of Defense Gates is hiding back there in the shadows, I can say confidently that none of us has a real say in the actions taken by our government. The question to be addressed here is “What do we do now?” I am not going to ask that question as if we were president Bush or vice president Cheney. I am going to try to reflect on our own position and the way we as individuals think about this conflict.
I am a religious studies professor. My interest is in older things: Islam in the urban context of medieval Cairo, the Quran, and travelers through the Islamic world during its golden age. I would much rather talk to you about that world, when Islamic civilization was confident, powerful, and even peaceful. I have not been to Iraq.. the closest I got was during a trip to an archeological site in the Syrian desert, and I noted the road sign that pointed the way to Baghdad. It was like a road sign here pointing the freeway direction to Milwaukee.. but this one said “Baghdad”. I give this talk as someone who has lived in the Middle East and who loves this part of the world.. and who is saddened by the destruction that has been unleashed due both to internal forces in the Middle East and our own actions.
Last Monday a student came to my office for an independent study. She is Turkish and was a little upset. She explained that she had just talked to her brother, whose compulsory military service was approaching in December. Since some of his friends had been deployed to the East, it seemed that this might be where he would head as well. If you have been following the news you know that Eastern Turkey is currently a hot spot for conflict with Kurdish factions in Northern Iraq. There is a good possibility that this conflict will widen.. and it goes without saying that this would not be a comfortable place to have a brother stationed.
I was shocked to get a glimpse of the long reach of our national decisions and actions. This girl is not in a particularly unique position; I would bet that there are people in this audience who have loved ones stationed in a dangerous place. But this makes for a good place to start a consideration of the ethical implications of our current involvement in Iraq: the realization that with our international might comes the responsibility to think not only about our own lives, but about those whose lives are destroyed or changed in far away places.
Loss of lives on our own side has been of course significant. As of yesterday the US had suffered 3,838 casualties. We spend approximately 6 billion dollars a month on the war—and remember we have just watched terrible fires burning out of control in Southern California, causing what will be something more than a billion dollars in damage; a huge number but absolutely dwarfed by our monthly war spending.
A disturbingly less examined number is the tally of Iraq dead: between 75,000 and 82,500 confirmed deaths thus far. The refugee crisis is perhaps even more mind-boggling. About 2.2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and another 2.2 million have fled to neighboring countries. That represents a lot of lives turned upside down. The US is of course not directly responsible for much of this loss, which comes from sectarian conflict, terrorism, and other issues. But surely our own neglect and confidence are indirectly responsible for this state of affairs. I wonder sometimes if we will not collectively wake up and say: what have we done?
So what do we do now? Like all of you, I don’t get daily Pentagon briefings.. and it is painfully difficult to form a clear notion of the details of our presence in Iraq. But one clear step in the right direction would be for us to act as if we want to leave. That would mean re-thinking our huge embassy in the heart of Baghdad. It was slated to cost 592 millions dollars, but as was reported earlier in the month it is almost 150 million dollars over budget. I have seen big embassies.. the one in Cairo is quite large. But it is nowhere near this size. Why exactly do we need such a large embassy in Iraq? I have trouble imagining any scenario in which such a presence would be necessary. The easy conclusion.. also drawn by many Iraqis.. is that we plan on staying a long time, and exerting a powerful influence on any ruling government. This embassy is in addition to the construction of military bases that look to be permanent; if they are not, we do not disavow their permanence.
Our actions on the ground belie our stated hope of withdrawal. The war is sold and re-sold to us, the American people, on an approximately six month basis, but the planning, poor as it may be, is working according to a longer timetable. That longer timetable is not clear, although it may well mean we spend a decade or longer in Iraq. Occupation is an inflammatory subject, and we owe ourselves, and the Iraqis—and the rest of the world—absolute transparency as to our intentions. Yet we are a long way from anything like transparency. I would argue that such transparency is an ethical imperative.
The carrot that is being help out in front of us.. which keeps us sending soldiers and OKing money headed for Iraq is the word “victory”. For a country of sports fans that word inevitably maps onto a sports contest. It is as if we are in a ball game that unexpectedly has gone into extra-innings.. we have gotten out of a tight spot or two.. but here we are in the bottom of the eleventh with a chance to win it.. to gain a “victory”. If we score that run, we walk off the field victors.
That is emphatically not our situation in Iraq. The positive outcomes that were touted at the beginning are gone. They are not even on the table. Iraq is no model. Democracy has gotten no shot in the arm. US strength is less respected. Iran is on the rise. I won’t go through all this, but there is no real way to look at our situation and see a “victory” coming out of it. Now, we may be the last ones standing or we may outlast the insurgency, but that is hardly a victory. There should be no champagne in the locker room.
When we talk about Iraq, what we are talking about is not “victory” or “defeat”.. we are talking about damage control. If you listen carefully to the arguments about whether the US should stay in Iraq or leave, these are arguments over damage control. No option looks very good, but what would be best? Will our withdrawal mean that ethnic conflict skyrockets out of control? Or is loss of life and sectarian cleansing inevitable so we best have our soldiers out of the way. There is a real debate to be had here, and I am not going to offer an answer, but it is a debate that is sidestepped by the language of victory and defeat.
Our broad unwillingness to debate the situation in Iraq in terms of damage control and a failed policy is also at heart an ethical issue. We may be a long way from the Middle East here in Green Bay, but we nevertheless owe it to the people there to speak rightly about this conflict, and to interrogate ourselves as to our own motives. Many of our problems have stemmed from an unwillingness to say the words and call reality what it is. This imperative to think well about the issue calls for a willingness to engage in self-criticism, and not to fly under the cover of words that don’t really make sense for this situation, or that make us feel good about ourselves. “Victory” is one word I think we should dispense with.
I am not sure that we often think of our vocabulary and thoughts as ethical imperatives. But the way we as a nation conceptualize and talk about the war leads to real decisions.. and those decisions change lives—our own and those of people we have never met. That is a great responsibility.
The summer before this last we saw the invasion of southern Lebanon by Israel. I don’t want to discuss the ins and outs of that particular situation, but I was interested in the response given by Condoleeza Rice. She called the destruction a chance for a “new Middle East”.. and at other times she has spoken of “clarifying moments”. The concept that lies behind this way of talking is that peace will come through a crisis.. often a violent crisis. Out of the conflagration will arise something like a “new” Middle East. We have an easy time thinking in these terms.. and our most recent answer for building peace in Iraq is to distribute weapons to the locals who are willing to fight on our side. The sense is: there will be peace as soon as we blast our way over the next hill. But there is always another hill.
Great failures.. and I do believe this war, whatever the courage that members of the military have shown, is a great failure; I don’t think we have a strong enough conception as to how damaging this has been to our interests and our values in the eyes of the international community. Such a failure should get under our skin and prod us to take another look at ourselves, the way we think about the world, and the way we conceptualize conflict.
I can tell you that I have had to do some self-searching as a result of this war. I was living in Cairo when the war broke out.. and I was far too ambivalent, too willing to roll the dice and see what would happen in the attempt to re-arrange the Middle East. It’s not like I had any say in the matter.. but neither did most people. Change begins with ourselves and learning to reassess our ideas about power and the use of force. The unthinkable outcome of this war would be for us to go on as if nothing had happened to challenge our point of view.
The most immediate ethical call is for us to acknowledge and deal with the refugee crisis developing in the Middle East.. which means acknowledging the part we have played in tragically disturbing the lives of millions of fellow human beings. It is a crisis that is ironic for a couple of reasons. First, a war that was supposed to establish Iraq as a model for surrounding nations.. and contribute to long term stability.. has ended up sowing large numbers of refugees in neighboring countries. Especially in the case of a country like Jordan, this has the potential to be destabilizing. Second, a war that was supposed to engage the bad guys over there so we don’t face them here is actually going to end up bringing thousands of Iraqi refugees to our own country. But in all seriousness, we have a responsibility to take in and welcome people who have worked with the military or US companies, and also a generous slice of the refugees who are crowding to nearby countries. That is one obvious imperative for us as a nation; one way that we can begin to own up to the destruction we have wrought, indirectly or directly.
Bjorklunden in Door County, Wisconsin
October 27, 2007
Mitt Romney the Consultant
October 26, 2007
Mitt Romney has been a head scratcher for me. I cannot understand how someone who so clearly re-calibrates his message can be taken seriously by anyone. Various debates occur online as to the least dangerous Republican nominee.. and in these debates Romney scores points for his willingness to bend to popular opinion, but who can really know where he would actually stand?
The recent New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza sheds light on where Romney is coming from. It turns out that his work as a consultant is an important point to grasp. Before reading this I could not have explained what a consultant does, but it turns out a consultant is something like a business structure advisor. This is the person who walks into corporate headquarters and rearranges the corporate model in order to make things run more efficiently/cheaply.
At the end of his article Lizza makes a sharp observation:
In every Republican debate, he glows with the bright effervescence of a born salesman. But a political campaign may not be as susceptible to the strategies of management consulting as a business, where advising a corporation to reinvent itself is standard practice.
One can easily imagine a consultant advising a business to drop this or that emphasis and pushing a more marketable product. This kind of work appears to be ingrained in Romney. If one looks at his campaign in business terms.. i.e. as an attempt to rebrand himself for a new customer base.. then things start to make sense. Corporations that make the kind of about-face changes in advertising and product bother us hardly at all.. but the question is whether a politican can act like a corporation.
This consulting stuff adds a whole new layer of interest to Romney's campaign.. since it is another chapter in the corporatization of American politics. But it also adds for me a new level of revulsion. What must it be like to confuse your self with a corporation? My previous political posts have pointed out the way Barack Obama has received help constructing an identity.. but Romney needs no help: he does with his self exactly what he does with a corporation in need of capturing a target audience.
One Last Trip Together: Ozu's Late Autumn
October 25, 2007
Late Autumn is a late film for Ozu. It was released in 1960 (his third from final film) and bears close resemblance to two of his previous films. The chief visual debt is to Equinox Flower (1958). Late Autumn returns to many of the same sets and employs pretty much the same cast as that slightly earlier work. I was uncomfortable with the amount of set borrowing; I kept getting the feeling I was in the earlier film. The debt to Late Spring (1949) is more in terms of plot than visual appearance. In that earlier film a daughter is devoted to her father and tries to avoid getting married. The father and daughter take a final trip together and he urges her to get married even though he himself will stay single. This is almost exactly the plot of Late Autumn except for the fact that this time we are dealing with a mother and daughter. The two take a final trip and the daughter learns that her mother will not be getting re-married.
This notion of a final trip is an important scene-type in Ozu. There is a pervasive sense in his films that the pattern of life is always shifting and thus life is filled with last trips. After such a trip people die (Tokyo Story) or get married (Late Spring) or move on to another city (Floating Weeds). Late Autumn comes with a particularly affecting depiction of a last trip. It is set in some kind of hostel that is crammed with school age girls:
This setting will get woven onto the mother-daughter conversation that closes the drama of the film. The joy associated with a passing and ephemeral school experience is likened to the mother-daughter relationship as a whole.
It is at this point that we learn the mother will not be getting re-married. She will remain true to her dead husband, who she feels was enough for her. The position taken by the mother is reminiscent of "The Altar of the Dead" by Henry James.. the past is a presence that will not allow her to embrace a new love.
This brief, and for the daughter disappointing, conversation ends the night. Ozu then gives us a bright morning scene with the school children. The group photograph is an oddly moving film device (it also gets used to good effect in Early Spring). The image of a moment in time captured by a photographer brings to mind the transient nature of life. We know.. even if those schoolgirls do not.. that this is a moment they will never quite have again.
The morning finds the mother (the wonderful Setsuko Hara) recalling the time they spent together as a family in this spot during the war. The father was then alive.. and the mother emphasizes what a good father he was. This opens for us yet another spot of time. We already have a parallel between the school children at camp and the mother-daughter trip.. but now we have a third experience mixed in.. this one a memory of another time.
This memory inevitably strengthens our sense that life is always passing.. that it is filled with last trips. Soon the voices of the mother and daughter grow silent and the chorus of school kids drifts in the window:
Autumn leaves in every hue of yellow and red
float down the stream woven like brocade.
And that could well be a description of time as understood by Ozu. His films are a parade of partings. Life takes a shape only to break apart a little later. His "last trips" of various kinds are perhaps the scene type that is most representative of his work.
Choreographing Movement:
A Look at Hadith
October 24, 2007
The above video is a lesson for Muslims in performing the daily prayers. Each of the steps is clearly illustrated. Most helpful in the video is the way it anchors each of its instructions in an actual hadith (a tradition about the prophet Muhammad). These traditions were collected and arranged into collections in the 9th century AD.. so they are quite old. As you watch this video you can see the hold these Hadith continue to have on Muslim practice: the postures and motions they describe are exactly followed by millions of Muslims.
From the collection of Hadith arranged by al-Bukhari, here are some examples describing the way prayer is to look:
I saw Allah's Apostle opening the prayer with the Takbir and raising his hands to the level of his shoulders at the time of saying the Takbir, and on saying the Takbir for bowing he did the same; and when he said, "Sami a-l-lahu Liman hamida ", he did the same and then said, "Rabbana wa laka-l-hamd." But he did not do the same on prostrating and on lifting the head from it." [vol. 1, bk. 12, #705]
I offered prayer beside my father and approximated both my hands and placed them in between the knees. My father told me not to do so and said, "We used to do the same but we were forbidden (by the Prophet) to do it and were ordered to place the hands on the knees." [vol. 1, bk. 12, #756]
The Hadith are thus a fantastic example of the way written descriptions of actions make their way into our actual world. The hadith as a totality (there are also chapters on "sales and trade" and "gifts" and "wills and testaments") can be viewed as a written arrangement of life. The actual social system in places where Sunni Islam is practiced will reflect this text in a rather direct way.
Now, it cannot be said that al-Bukhari is willing this social world into existence out of nothing. The hadith are a work of the imagination in the sense that they re-create the world of early Medina on the page. But I doubt that these descriptions would have surprised many of his contemporaries. Al-Bukhari is mostly describing what was currently practiced in his own time. So the progression would have been: consensus about lived Islam, then textualization of that consensus in the form of Hadith. All those minute actions and valuations which had grown up around the practice of Islam get set down in words.
That is not the end of the story. Once a social system is textualized to this degree, it gains a new life. The text becomes the canon by which religious and daily practices are judged and amended. The text comes to not just reflect life, but to arrange it. And surely in our own time, more than a thousand years after the settling of Hadith into accepted collections, the movement is overwhelmingly from text to life. Early Medina as presented by Hadith is thus akin to the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Borges. That is, we witness the crossover from an imagined world into the actual world. Words and concepts step off the page and become embodied.
[see also my earlier post on Edward William Lane's exact description of the movements of observed people in Cairo.]
Synthesizers Under Review
October 22, 2007
Tonight I watched Joy Division: Under Review, a recent documentary on the British band Joy Division. The new film Control about Ian Curtis, the lead singer for Joy Division who committed suicide in 1980 as the band was on the cusp of reaching a larger audience, will presumably run through much of this same material. I am of course pleased that the band is getting some renewed attention.
At one point in the documentary discussion turns to the song "Isolation" by Joy Division. It is a song that makes noticeable use of synthesizers.. which to our '00 ears can sound dated. Three commentators take a crack at explaining why Joy Division used them in a way that is still interesting:
#1
They have dated well because people aren't really making these kinds of records anymore. I think "Isolation" is a great example of that. But also i think it's because when people made electronic music at that time, it suggested a kind of anxiety about the future. Nowadays when people use synthesizers.. you know we're in the future now.. it's much more routine. It doesn't signify as much. For that reason I think tracks like "Isolation" really do hold up.
This was to me an unexpected argument. It seems like he is saying that synthesizer music at one point had a meaning that got lost. Groups who used this futuristic sound were not trying to be positive about the future, but were expressing anxiety. It is a futurism that shuns the future. The futuristic sound of the synthesizer later became normalized and lost its connotation of anxiety, but Joy Division's "Isolation" is still worth listening to since it conveys something of that old-time synth anxiety.
#2
You can still hear that 80s stuff anywhere, and it still sounds great, but in a nostalgic way. Joy Division don't sound nostalgic; it still sounds fresh. "Isolation" sounds as fresh as it did then.
This is a different, and more expected, argument. The under-lying assumption seems to be that Joy Division does have a sound that could be grouped in with 80s bands, but somehow it escapes the charge of nostalgia. Perhaps that means there is a level of authenticity in the music that ends up redeeming the synthesizer? We have moved into much vaguer territory.
#3
I think any record that has a genuinely emotional kick to it can never go out of date because these feelings that Ian Curtis was singing about are feelings that people have now and will have in 100 years.
This final argument I am most unsympathetic to. This argument has an element of tautology: why is this music popular today? Because it is universally popular. This kind of analysis does not really get us anywhere.. and shunts aside the need to find specific elements in a song that carry cultural signification.
Reading as Teaching
October 21, 2007
A few things this week have made me think about teaching.. that is, how I go about doing it.
If I had my choice, teaching would resemble a never ending reading group. The most exciting part is listening to how students take to a text and then asking questions that make them reflect upon the experience of reading that text. These reading groups, in my ideal scenario, would not center around books that I know well, but would involve reading texts I have never read. My role as teacher would not be that of all-knowing expert with every detail at hand, rather that of a fine reader.. someone who has learned numerous patterned approaches to talking and thinking about texts.
This is not actually how teaching at a college works. Students have to sign up for courses.. and those courses have titles.. and since I teach (or will) these courses year after year I will develop a body of texts that I think work well for a particular course. A recent realization of mine is that although part of me would rather be reading something new, it is also a privilege to read or watch certain texts over and over. Teaching thus builds a healthy familiarity with texts.. and these are hopefully rich enough that on every return I have occasion to think a little differently about them. Teaching is the one profession I can think of which has this textual return as part of its necessary rhythm.
So now I have set out two contraries: 1) my ideal to teach as an explorer of new texts, and 2) my sense that returning to the same books is part of the actual work of teaching. The format of college pushes me pretty strongly toward #2, but at the same time I try to maintain a sense of myself as a co-reader. It may just be a personality trait, but the more I feel like I know a text completely, the more I feel bored with it.. and that ends up being communicated to students.. I am sure.
This year in Islam I open each class with 20-30 minutes of framing lecture. Mostly this comes from a conviction that Islamic primary texts are difficult to penetrate without some sort of background. But this does not mean I have abandoned my underlying sense of how learning takes place: through encountering something for oneself and figuring out how to solve the attendant problems. For example, I could stand in front of a class and list specialized vocabulary that they might run into while reading Islamic texts. But I doubt this information would stick. On the other hand one can read primary texts and by repetition, by context, and by asking for help, slowly grasp the terms of discourse and the underlying value assumptions. Learning comes through reading.. and allowing for mysteries that will only be solved later.
So let me just say: what I teach is reading. I teach the subject of Islam and religion more broadly, but my method is to let my subject arise from primary texts. That, at least, is how I am most comfortable. Learning how to read cannot be explained from in front of the class, but can only be modeled. It is a set of questions and angles of approach. That means I am never going to let myself get too far away from open discussion.
When I look back on the professors who have most influenced me, they are the ones who taught me how to look at texts differently.. who had a certain eye for details and oddities. I want to make sure that this marks my own teaching.
Second Hand News:
Documentary Blogging #4
October 19, 2007
These days I get a fair number of brochures designed to get me to buy education products. Many of these feature video documentaries aimed at some religious topic or other. I got a brochure last week from Insight Media. Don't bother looking at the website because it is unhelpful. Titles and a brief description of their documentaries are listed, but nothing in the way of video trailers or even sample photos. It seems one must buy blind.
Insight Media is an example of a business aimed squarely at education. The single possible use for these videos is in the classroom. Many of the videos are in the half hour range and they would work fine for filling half a class period and leaving some time for discussion afterwards. Even a short video will cost you (actually your department or library) about $150.
When it comes to documentary, the preferred use in an educational setting is as supporting visual material. Documentary, in this case, is a strictly secondary literature. It does not peddle original views so much as visualize accepted views. This limits the creativity that is possible in producing these videos. Their subordinate role in an educational context means that they cannot ever express a really interesting idea. Written texts are allowed to be interesting, not documentaries.
My evolving philosophy of the documentary is to allow it to have a more primary role in setting out ideas. Documentary is obviously an engaging form since it can show religious practices and convey authentic voices.. but in addition it can be a form for advancing new ideas. I imagine a time in which scholars will be able to present their work in video essays.. which could then be required viewing for students.
The new platforms for video sharing (like YouTube) play a possible role in my conception of documentaries. The website for Insight Media conveys their hostility to any form of sharing.. but even as they resist and maintain their business model, more and more videos are being uploaded every day.. and a certain percentage of these are useful for the classroom since they portray lived religious experience, often from the point of view of a practitioner. In addition a public platform allows for the consumption of documentaries in a setting outside the classroom. Something done smartly on pilgrimage in India could well find a broad audience of interested viewers. Not millions perhaps, but thousands of people would be interested in a video that captures actual religious experience. Getting documentaries outside the classroom should be a push among filmmakers. We don't want or need a captive audience.
Seeing the Earth through Books
October 16, 2007
A cool layer that is now available on GoogleEarth allows you to see the books that mention a specific place. Draw close to a city like Chicago and you see a few rings of yellow books surrounding the place name. This layer provides a wonderful visualization of the way we know places through secondary cultural references. Why do some place names leap out at us with a certain mystique? It is because of the associations that have accrued to those names.
This book layer looks promising, but on closer examination it turns out to be not so helpful. Google has apparently linked all place names to their immense stock of GoogleBooks. Whenever the search machine finds the word "Chicago" that book gets aligned with the city name on the map. The problem is that "Chicago" will occur tons of times and it is not so helpful to have every link to Chicago highlighted. Who wants to wade through all those passing mentions? Pressing on the small yellow book icons I came across some medical journals from the 19th century, along with government publications and educational tracts. "Chicago" came up in these publications, but these are hardly canonical references to the city.
What would be useful is an ordered listing of the important texts that helped to construct Chicago as "Chicago".. and something similar for other places. The end result would be a geographically organized list of travel and descriptive books. Thinking in terms of the globe, this would be an immensely interesting project.. allowing for a glimpse at the underpinnings of human awareness of other cultures and peoples.. and for a sense of when and how certain places became aware of each other. It would be a project that could conceivably further the goals of the Hakluyt Society, with its annual publication of travel narratives.
The bugaboo in projects like this GoogleEarth book layer is always selection and organization. Google is addicted to the mechanized word search.. and who can blame them since they have ridden it to the bank! But when it comes to genuinely helpful academic projects, the interest is often sacrificed on the altar of the keyword. For getting to know a state like Wisconsin, instead of looking at GoogleEarth's book layer, it is a far better idea to get to the Wisconsin Historical Society's website, which provides links to explanatory articles and primary texts that explain different "turning points" in the history of the state. I could imagine a more effective spatial layout of these texts, but the actual material is far stronger than what shows up in GoogleEarth's book layer. And since these are key historical texts they are actually worth wading through.
From City to Style
October 14, 2007
The argument to grasp in Imagined Cities is that literary style is not necessarily the result of a strictly literary evolution. That is the way we like to think about it: writer A in the 19th century led to writer B in the next generation.. and then writer C took that style a step further.. and on we go to writer D. In this model the style of a work is a matter of artistic evolution and sealed off from material considerations. Robert Alter makes the case that the rise of what we think of as the modern novel comes not as a development from literary antecedents, but rather as a response to immense changes in the city. The new urban environment called for a new way of portraying the experience of life.. and this gave rise to the formal experimentation that we associate with modernist literature.
Here is Alter writing about the tactics used by Flaubert and Dickens in portraying the new and chaotic city:
Both writers have a sense that the very dimensions of the modern city dwarf the individual, threaten to subvert the exercise of human agency. Flaubert, faithful to the representational bias of the experiential realism that he perfected, registers this predicament as a perceptual problem... Dickens, deploying with great virtuosity a series of panoramic views of the city, is drawn by the terrific energy of his own metaphoric inventiveness to weave images of the new urban world... [54]
According to Alter's argument (although this is not explicitly stated) if there had been no dramatic shift in urban patterns in the 19th and 20th centuries, then there would have been no push for the representational strategies present in the great modern novelists (running in his account from Flaubert to Dickens to Woolf to Joyce to Kafka).
I am willing to mostly buy this idea. It is attractive to me since it allows for the modern novel to stand as a genuine witness to the historical experience of new urban settings. I also think this central idea about the interrelationship between style and place could be a useful way to think about medieval Arabic writing about cities. It would thus be possible to not simply appreciate the dense weave of sites that al-Maqrizi captures in his Khitat, but also to see in that weave an indication of the way the city—in this case Cairo—was experienced day to day. Alter provides the beginning of a theoretical framework that brings together literary style and the experience of a place.. and this is where his argument allows us to move beyond the European 19th and 20th century authors that he works with in this book.
Corporations and Conservatism
October 11, 2007
I am all about being left alone, and the Republican Party claims that this is what it is all about: getting pesky government out of my way. This is wrong-headed and does not actually contribute much to my being left alone. If I reflect for a moment on the origin of the real intrusions into my personal life, I see that they stem from the private corporate world: the gathering and use of private information, the ability to involve people in complicated contracts which are not fully understood, the ability to downsize or outsource jobs, and finally the ability to degrade the environment through well placed lobbyists and policy makers. If there is anything annoying about life in America right now, it is the general powerlessness of average citizens to challenge the maneuvers of the corporate world.
Viewed from this perspective the Republican emphasis on getting government out of private life (except when it comes to certain moral choices) is not so much a pro-individual freedom agenda as a pro-corporation agenda. The space opened up by rolling back government services or safeguards is not space that will be re-claimed by individuals, but space that will be taken by corporations. Republicans love to attack the Democrats as some kind of government-loving money-spending taxing-freely collective (which is crazy since Democrats have no recent track record of these actions), but government regulation and policy are the only real curbs allowing for control of the expansion of the corporate world. Push-back against the corporate world is the real battleground for personal freedom. I would entrust my freedom any day to an elected official who is responsible every now and then to the citizenry rather than to corporate leaders whose only responsibility is to stock holders who are looking for a profit. Isn't that a no-brainer?
Reading more about Labor leader Walter Reuther and the struggle to unionize some the largest corporate structures of his day.. such as General Motors.. has made me think more about corporations and their control. Today the international scope of corporations puts their effective control outside the reach of unions.. at least those built on an older model. It would be helpful if there were better historical/sociological work done on corporations so that we knew more about how they grew and how their cultures developed. (I mean works that stretch beyond the CEO hagiographies in the business section of the big corporate bookstore near you.) To this end Old Roads will be keeping an eye peeled for information on corporate history and its interaction with traditional structures of labor and communication.
The strike at the Chrysler plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin ended after only a few hours. If it had been more protracted Old Roads might have gotten to the scene and worked on a video essay.
Algeria on YouTube
October 10, 2007
One result of the rise of the internet is that the work of preservation has been democratized. Photos and memories and songs from the past can be easily posted online and presented in creative ways. A wonderful example of this is the work of Kathleen Woolrich, whose YouTube channel is kwoolr. On her YouTube channel Woolrich has posted 143 videos, the vast majority of which are connected with the history of Algeria.
I have to admit a high degree of curiosity about the motivation for an effort like this. In the video at the beginning of this post she writes: "A love not bound by time ALGERIA my adored and treasured dearest Algeria". Obviously this is no academic interest.. but something with deep personal roots. To me this personal motivation only heightens the interest of the material itself. Now it is a personal construction of Algeria, guided by memory or other mediated sources.
Some examples of Woolrich's work:
This video is a tour through a personal travel journal, complete with photos and drawings. There is no commentary to explain what this might be.. or when it came from.. but it is an example of how YouTube could be used to give tours of rare material.
This video is similar to a podcast. Woolrich (I assume) talks about the village of Honaine, its history and physical setting. A few pictures get used as backdrops to the narration, but these remain mostly stationary. The audio quality could be better.. but that is forgivable since it gives us a voice that is personal and engaged with the material.
This video is a history of Rai music in Oran. Again the narration is by Woolrich. A number of her videos deal with historic musical styles from Algeria.
These web-based labors of love abound. I was reminded of an older website by the the Egyptian Samir Rafaat, whose book on Maadi I admire. The website is not the work that a scholar would come up with.. and not something that would get NEH funding.. but it ends up becoming a testimony to the work of an individual motivated by love of a place. I always enjoy these sites more than the big official ones. Maybe I am just contrarian by nature, but give me something with feeling and I will live with poor audio quality.
Three Years and Counting
October 9, 2007
Three years ago today Emily and I got married. It is impossible for me to express how wonderful a partner she has been. She is the person with whom I talk over every little detail of life; the person on whose judgment I implicitly rely. She has stopped me from making numerous stupid errors and encouraged me on my most ambitious endeavors. This year has seen the addition of our little girl, and tonight we were reflecting on how much we like our little family. I would not call us self-satisfied.. but definitely family-satisfied.
Here is a little video taken during a recent trip to pick apples. I mean it as a tribute to my beautiful Emily.
"I Is Someone Else": Bob Dylan and
His Public Identity
October 7, 2007
After reading the cover article about I'm Not There in today's New York Times Magazine, I can list myself as officially interested in seeing the movie. If it works.. and it is an ambitious film.. it may remind me of Hart Crane's "The Bridge". I make that comparison because the film sounds as if it is an excavation of America by means of the stages in Dylan's career. Crane presents America through significant moments and places in American history.. and achieves a similarly kaleidoscope effect. On the other hand the film could just fall flat.
One element in the article immediately leaped out: the possible relationship between this film and Chronicles. The relationship is not what one might guess, either. The pitch for this film was OKed by Dylan in the summer of 2000 while Chronicles was released in 2004. A leading element of this pitch was a quotation from Rimbaud:
[Todd] Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote, Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan were both familiar with. It was a quote that if he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have killed the project: "I is another."
Now a funny thing is that exactly that same quotation turns up in Chronicles.. toward the end of the book:
To go with all of that, someplace along the line Suze had also introduced me to the poetry of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. That was a big deal, too. I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which translates into "I is someone else." When I read those words bells went off. It made perfect sense. [288]
I wonder if it is not the case that the bells went off much later when he read the treatment of his life that began with these words. What is funniest is that if this is true, even as Dylan cites a line that distances the self, he is citing someone else's reading of himself. The "I" really is other.. or at least constructed by another.
We know Dylan is impressionable when it comes to figuring out his own past. His great later albums from Time Out of Mind to Modern Times may have been influenced by the image of Dylan cobbled together by Greil Marcus in The Old Weird America.. and perhaps now this seemingly postmodern tale of Dylan from multiple perspectives is giving Dylan a different lens for understanding himself.
As I have written previously in commenting on Barack Obama, celebrities have a constant pack of people out there trying to make sense of their lives.. to put all the confusing strands together. I find the idea of delivering my personal storyline to a public machine horrifying.. but if one is going to be a celebrity then obviously some level of comfort and playfulness with respect to the self is helpful.
I Have Forgiven Jesus - Morrissey
October 5, 2007
Not too many people could get away with a song entitled "I Have Forgiven Jesus".. but it is the kind of cheeky line at which Morrissey excels. Jesus is the forgiver par excellence.. so we laugh nervously to find Morrissey offering to forgive Jesus. If that laugh was all the song offered it would not be worth writing about; it is the undercurrent of serious complaint that we will be examining.
The opening lines sketch a brief portrait of a kid everyone could like:
I was a good kid,
I wouldn't do you no harm.
I was a nice kid,
With a nice paper round
The implication being that the singer was at one point at home in his world: "nice". That idyll is quickly interrupted:
But Jesus hurt me,
When he deserted me,
but, I have forgiven you Jesus
For all the desire,
You placed in me when there's nothing I can do with this desire...
That spiritual loss appears to be the initial cause for anger directed at Jesus. That is followed by a more specific charge: the desire that is felt by the singer, but for which there is no place.. no acceptable end.
I see no use in tip-toeing around the fact that Morrissey is talking about homosexuality. It is true that these lines provide no explicit gender reference, but they reference contemporary discussions about gay marriage and homosexuality broadly. If individuals are gay or lesbian by no choice of their own (which is pretty clearly the case), then why should they be denied relationships which will bring satisfaction and fulfillment to their lives? The church is apt to tell people that they must refuse to act on those desires.. somehow bury them inside. This song strides right into this debate and challenges the perceived authority behind these views: Jesus.
If I had to set a point at which a knowledge of the complexity of sexuality and gender dawned on me, it would be in reading the teeny bop magazines that included interviews and photos of musicians like Robert Smith of the Cure and Morrissey (then) of the Smiths. Robert Smith had the whole make-up and lipstick thing going while Morrissey was oddly cagey in interviews. He claimed to be celibate.. a word which I needed to look up in the dictionary. I took his statement at face value and even turned over in my head images of the gray cool that could come from not worrying about relationships.. from being celibate.
The Smiths' songs are tough to pin down in terms of gender.. but the hints are there, such as in the following lines from "You Handsome Devil":
And when we're in your scholarly room
who will swallow whom?
when we're in your scholarly room
who will swallow whom?
you handsome devil...
If we want a Smiths song that comes close to the sentiment of "I have Forgiven Jesus" we can look to "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side":
The boy with the thorn in his side
behind the hatred there lies
a murderous desire for love
how can they look into my eyes
and still they don't believe me
how can they hear me say those words
and still they don't believe me...
This time we begin with an angry boy.. not a "nice boy" with a paper round. This anger hides an intense desire for love, and the character wonders how people can hear him speak of love and still somehow not believe him.
At first glance the song appears to be free of overt religious sentiment, but that "thorn in his side" is a pretty direct reference to Paul in the New Testament, who writes in 2 Corinthians 12.7-9:
To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
The nature of this "thorn in the flesh" has been debated for a very long time.. commentators have concluded that it is a physical ailment or some struggle with lust. When Morrissey picks up on this image he is settling the character into the position of someone who is involved in a long term unwinnable struggle. The nature of the struggle is undefined, but it could easily represent the struggle of a young gay man. I would argue that given Morrissey's broader body of work that interpretation makes the most sense.
Coming back to "I Have Forgiven Jesus", Morrissey closes with a series of sharp lines:
Why did you give me so much desire,
When there is nowhere I can go to offload this desire?
And why did you give me so much love in a loveless world,
When there is no one I can turn to
To unlock all this love?
And why did you stick me in self deprecating bones and skin?
Jesus do you hate me?
Ostensibly these lines are attacks on Jesus.. but there is nothing in the song that convinces me that Morrissey is really thinking about Jesus. Jesus happens to be the figure that unites believers.. and so he is dragged into the song as a fictional character to attack real positions on homosexual love. The point is to give the listener some feeling for the loss that comes with being barred from love.. for the crime of this denial.
One more note: only Morrissey could call label himself "self-deprecating" in the same song in which he offers to forgive Jesus! One more of those brilliant touches.. which is a central part of the enjoyment of his songs.
The Times and the Imagination
October 4, 2007
A short essay by the novelist Stephen King on the travails of the short story in modern America set me thinking about the importance for the imagination of cultural niches. The following is his description buying literary magazines at a large bookstore:
I can grab The New Yorker and Harper’s while I’m still standing up, without going to my knees like a school janitor trying to scrape a particularly stubborn wad of gum off the gym floor. For the rest, I must assume exactly that position. I hope the young woman browsing Modern Bride won’t think I’m trying to look up her skirt. I hope the young man trying to decide between Starlog and Fangoria won’t step on me. I crawl along the lowest shelf, where neatness alone suggests few ever go. And here I find fresh treasure: not just Zoetrope and Tin House, but also Five Points and The Kenyon Review. No Glimmer Train, but there’s American Short Fiction, The Iowa Review, even an Alaska Quarterly Review. I stagger to my feet and limp toward the checkout. The total cost of my six magazines runs to over $80. There are no discounts in the magazine section.
Clearly the literary short story falls pretty far down the list of must-dos in contemporary America. Fresh off a bout of reading short stories for the next edition of The Best American Short Stories, King notes that many of the stories he read felt as if they had been written for a small group of writers and editors.. not for a general audience. But that is the problem.. and the reason why the literary magazines are on the bottom shelf of the magazine stand: there is no public constituency for literary short stories.
So what is a golden age for the imagination? Perhaps an odd question to ask after a Stephen King essay.. but there it is. There have been generations and places in which the level of accomplishment was extraordinarily high. Athens. Baghdad. Florence. Paris. It is tempting sometimes to think that there were more creative people running around during these periods of efflorescence. Another way to look at these periods is to see them as points in which social niches for the arts were stabilized.. and therefore social creativity ran into deeply dug channels and that resulted in lasting works. The artistic accomplishments that marked these periods were closely connected to niches in the life of the community.
In this essay King is pointing out how a specific channel for the imagination is running dry. That would not be his own summary, since at the end he urges more people to read sort stories.. but his portrait is mostly negative:
Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
That is a thumbnail sketch of the decline of a niche. There is nothing sacred—not ever!—about forms. They come and go. Greek dramas flourish and fade; classical Arabic poetry and the American short story likewise. Any form whose social niche is no longer viable, will be abandoned.
Notable about these days is the way sturdy older forms are disappearing.. while new creative forms are yet in flux. The creative energy is the same per-capita as in other periods, but the creative energy is moving in a lot of confusing directions.. and sometimes being invested in forms that have no future. Periods of decisive formal change.. when there is a transition from manuscript to print or oral performance to written texts.. such periods are not generally "golden ages". Our response to our own highly transitional time should be adventuresome.. in the extreme.
No College Remorse?
October 2, 2007
The above picture is from a NY Times poll on student satisfaction with their college experience. There are four ratings, represented here by four colors of sticky notes. The interesting fact is how overwhelmingly positive the response is: the green tags correspond to "good" and the yellow tags to "excellent". The "only fair" and "poor" responses are quite low.
So what to conclude? People mostly get their money's worth in their choice of college? I think that would be wrong. This poll catches what I think of as a vacation bias. Listen to people rate their experience after a trip that they have always dreamed about and what they say will almost always be positive. People want to have a good experience on vacation.. and they also want to be proud of their college or at least make some claim as to its real value. I would set down this rule: the more money a person spends on something, the greater the psychic pressure to have it be a great experience.
Levels of Muslim Identity
October 2, 2007
As a teacher of Islam one of my most difficult tasks is to talk about how Islam has changed over time. What changes is not the five pillars or any essential doctrine, but the psychological experience of the religion. Globalized Islam by Olivier Roy is an important work precisely for its ability to make clear how the global version of Islam that is taking root in both the West and the Islamic world is a fundamentally different experience than that of traditional Islam.
One of the important ways that Islam changes is in the re-alignment of levels of identity. These levels of identity are a key point in my own work, so it is good to see Roy work with these same terms. He describes five levels of identity that coexist uneasily for Muslim immigrants to Europe:
1) kinship/shared local site
2) ethnic or national identity
3) generalized Muslim identity based on cultural values
4) Muslim identity based on purely religious patterns
5) a western subculture [117]
If we imagine an immigrant from Egypt, that person may have strong ties to a village in Upper Egypt, feel a sense of Egyptian nationalism, feel a general pride in being "Arab" and sharing cultural patterns, be a Muslim, and also be a minority group in the new country. For Roy the immigrant experience throws these levels of identity into fatal contradiction. Local ties, national identity, and cultural patterns are often left behind (especially as the second generation comes along).. and what develops in the place of those other levels of identity is a universal Muslim identity.
Roy makes the point that this universal Muslim identity develops certain "lowest common denominator" points:
In fact, the lowest common denominators in defining a Muslim culture are religious norms that can fit with or be recast along the lines of different cultural customs. Halal is a way to kill an animal, not a way to cook it. it is not linked with a culture and could perfectly well fit with global fast food. [131]
An excellent point. What is cultural is an actual cooking style, i.e. tajin in Morocco or curry in Pakistan. Global Islam ditches the cooking style but maintains a religious norm about the method of slaughtering animals. That method is applicable to any style of cooking.. even fast food. The universal Muslim identity is thus supremely able to take root in any culture.. and its ability to adapt makes it a competitor with Western liberalism.. even the flip side of the coin.
Whether the development of a universal Muslim identity (at the expense of local and cultural identities) is a good thing I cannot say. But it is clear that this is a different experience of Islam than the richly localized and particularized experience of Islam in previous centuries. This difference is not caused by any actual disagreements in doctrine, but simply from a new interior alignment of identities.
Octoberfest in Appleton, Wisconsin
October 1, 2007
