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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright Reuters

BEIJING, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Chinese appear not to have warmed to a
”free hugs” campaign aimed at cheering up strangers by hugging them on
the street, with some huggers even being hauled away by police for
questioning, media said on Monday.
The campaign hit the streets of Beijing, Changsha and Xian this
weekend, with participants opening their arms to embrace passers-by and
brandishing cards saying ”free hugs”, ”care from strangers”, ”refuse to
be apathetic”, the Beijing News said.
In the capital, police moved in and took away four huggers briefly for
questioning, baffled by their wacky, Western activities on a busy
city-centre shopping street.
In the ancient capital of Xian, home to the terracotta warriors, no
more than 20 people, mostly children, had volunteered for the free hugs in
two hours.
”Passers-by showed interest and curiosity, stopped and asked, but
most of them walked away after hearing the explanation,” Xinhua news
agency said, quoting a local newspaper.
”Embracing is a foreign tradition. Chinese are not accustomed to
this,” a man named Li, a Xi’an citizen, was quoted as saying.
The ancient city of Changsha, capital of Hunan province, fared better,
a local affairs Web site reported.
”Though some people refused (to be hugged), I hugged 20 people in one
minute,” one girl was quoted as saying.
The Free Hugs campaign started in Australia and gained fame with a
music video this year.
20061030 105324+0000REUTERS

Posted at 9:43 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Spiegel

In the West, gradual de-industrialization has created a new underclass of the unproductive and intellectually depraved. The spiritual cousin of the American phenomenon of “white trash,” these strangers in their own land have become a serious threat to democracy.

Editor’s Note: The following essay has been excerpted from the German best-seller “World War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity” by SPIEGEL editor Gabor Steingart. SPIEGEL ONLINE is publishing a series of daily excerpts from the book.

The modern-day member of the underclass is not hungry. He has a roof over his head, he is not disproportionately vulnerable to illness and he even has a bit of cash in his pocketbook. In every Western European country, he is both a citizen and a beneficiary of the welfare state, even if the state’s services are no longer as generous as they once were.

Beer can ashtray: Close to 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of the alcohol sold in the country.
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DDP

Beer can ashtray: Close to 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of the alcohol sold in the country.
Such luxuries, bare bones though they may be, are relatively new for the Western proletariat. The best lodging his pauper predecessor could have hoped for was a homeless shelter or a men’s hostel. Food for the poor was meager and it was often delivered only after long waits in bread lines or in soup kitchens. The ill were neither insured nor could they afford to pay for doctors, let alone medication. Old men were, for better or for worse, turned over to the care of the younger generation, or put in the hands of church aid programs.

Still, even if the modern-day proletariat is materially much better off, he is actually in worse shape.

The destitute laborer of old had something that today’s poor no longer have: He knew who the enemy was; he had a class identity; he often even had a well-developed culture. He sang songs, fought his political fights, founded associations and idolized social theoreticians, even if he didn’t fully understand them.

During the days of the German Empire, he could still choose between political groups that, although technically illegal, sought his support. The pauper of yesterday was the subject of history, seen with the sober clarity of hindsight. So far, the pauper of today, in a united Europe, is little more than the victim of circumstances. And while his predecessor may have been on the margins of society, today he is an outsider.

Although they hardly have a voice of their own, we know a lot about today’s members of the underclass. Though they keep largely to themselves, cocooned as they are within their apartment blocks, they are scrutinized by dozens of sociologists — examined to almost the same extent as biologists have researched the common hare. And while they may be strangers in their own land, we have access to a clear typology that allows us to better recognize them.

Intellectual neglect

We know, for example, that today’s proletariat is richer than the worker of generations past. Indeed, with a little skill, he can tap into the coffers of the state’s social safety net, which provides him with access to an income comparable to those of police officers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers. Thus, it is not material poverty that separates him from others.

BUCHTIPP
This essay has been excerpted from “War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity”, Germany’s best- selling book by Gabor Steingart. SPIEGEL ONLINE is publishing a series of excerpts from the book in English.

Piper Verlag, Munich; 384 pages; €19.90. The German- language edition of the book is available online at SPIEGEL Shop.
Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call “Underclass TV.” The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking — a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today’s proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them “white trash.”

European democracy’s greatest threat

The new proletariat as a homogenous class first came into existence in the last 10 years. And it is by no means an exclusively German phenomenon: An underclass is emerging in every self-described leading industrial nation. The modern political economy clearly has nothing to offer to those who possess little knowledge.

It is no mere coincidence that the rise of the new underclass is happening in tandem with the erosion of industry jobs. In Europe, the process of de-industrialization may end up being more influential than the common currency or the effort to forge a shared constitution. The disintegration of society threatens the West today more than international terrorism, even if politicians are focusing on combating the latter.

THE AUTHOR
MARCO- URBAN.DE
Gabor Steingart, 44, heads DER SPIEGEL’s Berlin office. His last book was titled “Germany: The Decline of a Superstar” and, like “World War for Prosperity,” was a bestseller in Germany. Steingart was chosen as “The Economic Writer of the Year” in 2004.
Though bombs can shake a democracy or market economy, they cannot destroy it. But the process of economic erosion deprives the West of jobs, then money and, in the end, democratic legitimacy. What is citizenship worth if people are denied the opportunity to participate in the working world? What use are civil liberties if the right to an independent lifestyle is no longer among them? Would it be acceptable if the rights set down in the constitution were only applicable to the educated classes?

Questions of fundamental importance are forcing their way to the foreground: Can a democracy tolerate having part of its populace continuously shut out from the rising quality of life? And if that is accepted, will this decision come back to haunt us in our lifetimes?

Will nations again face off against one another because boiling anger seeks an outlet? Or perhaps the underclasses will revolt? Both scenarios are possible. The only outcome hard to imagine is that nothing happens at all.

Posted at 4:10 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, October 29, 2006; BW10

MAO’S LAST REVOLUTION

By Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals

Belknap/Harvard Univ. 693 pp. $35

It has been enthralling to read Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals’s exhaustively researched new book on China’s Cultural Revolution — a sensation akin to returning to a Chinese painting in which a mist-shrouded landscape has miraculously cleared to reveal what was obscured beyond. While it was not difficult to feel the tension, even the fear, aloft in the land when I reported from Mao Zedong’s China for the New Yorker during the mid-1970s, being there gave few intimations of the dark complexity of the political struggle playing out beneath the surface. By making sense out of this opaque decade, MacFarquhar (who teaches at Harvard University) and Schoenhals (who teaches at Lund University in Sweden) have provided the most definitive roadmap to date of China’s odyssey through those tumultuous times.

But what happened is still not easy to explain completely. For complex reasons that involved Mao’s political beliefs as well as his own psychological pathologies, the communist leader felt compelled to goad China into an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness that ran from 1966 to 1976. Both to protect his own political supremacy and to wrench China out of its “feudal” past, he made politics and “class struggle” the currency of his revolutionary realm. In his own words, he created “great disorder under heaven.” Proclaiming that “to rebel is justified,” he called on students to “bombard the headquarters” of the Communist Party and thus set in motion one of the most unprecedented upheavals of the 20th century.

“You ask us how to do it,” President Liu Shaoqi, who later died as a political enemy in one of Mao’s prisons, told students as the leftist surge gathered momentum. “I tell you honestly, I don’t know either. We’re mainly going to be relying on you to make this revolution.”

In the name of wiping out “capitalist roaders” (a euphemism for anyone seemingly opposed to Mao’s revolutionary line) and “bourgeois revisionism,” tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed. “Beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought — no matter who they are, what banner they fly, or how exalted their positions may be,” proclaimed one Red Guard poster.

“Whereas party violence had normally been carefully controlled and calibrated, now the rules had been suspended,” note the authors. “Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted. The result was the juvenile state of nature, nationwide, foreshadowed in microcosm by Nobel Prize-winner William Golding in Lord of the Flies .”

A few of China’s more pragmatic leaders did shrink from Mao’s cataclysmic vision of revolutionary extremism. But Mao’s Last Revolution suggests how easy it can be for a mercurial “Big Leader,” operating within a totalitarian system, to throw doubters so far off balance that none was able to organize resistance. And if there is one thing that Marxist-Leninist states do well, it is defoliating the political landscape of checks and balances, as well as watchdog institutions like the press. This is especially true when the media fall into the hands of one faction so that any sense of the actual variety of contending viewpoints is eclipsed, making it impossible for an outsider to discern how different factions were actually struggling against each other behind the scenes.

Mao was a master of keeping all comers in a state of paralyzing uncertainty. He garnered enormous power from his imperial opaqueness: While almost everyone wished “to work toward” Mao and his policies in order to please him, they could never be quite sure whether they were measuring up. Mao was the embodiment par excellence of the advice implicitly given by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov when he chastises Jesus for failing to compel belief by ruling by “miracle, mystery and authority.”

By frequently absenting himself from the everyday sordidness of Beijing politics, Mao conjured up an almost otherworldly authority. And by making conflicting pronouncements that were impossible to factor together, he maintained both deniability and an ambiguity that kept his subordinates “transfixed like rabbits in front of a cobra,” as the authors put it.

Posted at 3:53 PM · Comments (0)

Sunday October 29, 2006
Copyright The Observer

Google is to enter the political arena in earnest this week when it
debates freedom of speech, intellectual property rights and how to
connect Africa to the internet at a special UN conference.
The Silicon Valley giant will attempt to position itself as a force for
change that can finance web entrepreneurs in the developing world,
champion the rights of consumers against ‘over-zealous’ copy-right laws
and use the web to protect diverse minority cultures and languages.

But Google will declare itself unrepentant over the controversial
decision to censor its search engine at the behest of Beijing. At the
first Internet Governance Forum in Athens, starting tomorrow, the firm
will insist its presence in China does more good than harm by getting
more information to more people.

That claim was firmly rejected last night by Amnesty International,
which is five months into its joint campaign with The Observer,
irrepressible.info, which calls for an end to online censorship and the
persecution of bloggers.

The forum will be attended by delegations from more than 90 countries,
including China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam, all of
which have been criticised for curbing freedom of expression on the web.
Amnesty will present a petition, signed by more than 47,000 people,
demanding an end to such abuses, which in the worst cases have seen
people jailed.

A session on openness will feature a panel including Richard Sambrook,
the BBC’s director of global news, Andrew Puddephatt, a human rights
activist, and Fred Tipson, director for international development policy
at Microsoft, who declined to be interviewed by The Observer. Google
will not be taking part but says it intends to tackle freedom of
expression topics in smaller gatherings.

Google’s motto, ‘Do no evil’, has taken a battering in recent months. It
will try to repair some of the damage during three ‘workshops’. Andrew
McLaughlin, head of global public policy at Google, said the first
event, ‘Building local access’, would discuss getting internet access to
more people in developing nations. At another session, ‘Access to
knowledge and free expression’, Google will warn how developing
countries fear that Western intellectual property rights work to their
disadvantage. It will call for a balance to be maintained in copyright
law that respects the rights of the consumer as well as the content
producer.

But Google is bound to be put under pressure over its foray into China.
McLaughlin said: ‘Google.cn is censored but we’ve come up with a
technique for deciding what is to be censored that is basically
technical, not editorial, and very reactive. That leads us to blocking
from our site the minimum that the ISP [internet service provider] level
requires.

‘I’m sure there are lots of people who will say it’s just too
distasteful, it’s too gross, it’s too political, you shouldn’t do it.
That’s a totally legitimate point of view,’ he said.

‘We’ve made an empirical judgment, though, that being able to hire
Chinese employees and have them be part of the Google culture and be
free-thinking, freewheeling internet people … when you add it all up,
we think we’re helping to advance the cause of change in China.’

Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, did not accept the
argument. ‘One of the things we haven’t seen from Google, Yahoo! and
Microsoft is any move by them to use their collective bargaining power
to negotiate with and change the terms in which they operate in
countries like China,’ she said.

‘We do see Google with a search engine in China that gives very
different results from the one for the rest for us. I think the starkest
example is the picture search for Tiananmen Square. We get the man in
front of the tank; in China you get a happy, smiling couple, standing in
Tiananmen Square as tourists.’

Posted at 2:23 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Sunday Times

Shanghai

CHINA has taken a turn to the left just as foreign investors are lining up to place their bets on a capitalist future by buying shares in its biggest bank.
A world record $19 billion (£10 billion) was raised in the biggest flotation ever when the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China sold shares to investors ahead of its debut on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges last week.

The state will retain majority control over the bank, making its partial privatisation a model for the way China’s new rulers see the future.

Significant new policies mean a decisive shift back towards state intervention. This is likely to have important implications for foreign investors and manufacturers and may lead to higher wage costs, stronger unions and stricter regulation.

Denise Yam at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong said: “Administrative controls on lending and capital expenditure in specific industries, as well as stricter rules on land use, appear to have brought down gains in investment.”

She noted that China’s policymakers “all reiterated the need to maintain and even strengthen controls on the economy”.

Two new documents from the Chinese government, disclosed officially but little noticed abroad, left no doubt that “leftist” factions have won the argument to rebalance economic policy after two decades of a dash for growth at any cost.

Even the state news agency, Xinhua, said the new policies responded to “rampant pollution, growing wealth disparity and complaints about the high costs of education, housing and medical services”.

Yan Shuhan, director of “scientific socialism” at the Central Party School, complained to Xinhua that the richest 10% in China controlled more than 40% of the wealth and the poorest 10% had less than 2%.

Reform has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty but now the party’s leaders want to tilt the scales towards equality. The consequences for international capital, labour, trade and investment are only just beginning to be felt.

But they are certain to be on a global scale — almost everything is in China, which has just reported a trade surplus of £58 billion in the first nine months of this year and said that its economy had grown at a rate of 10.7% over the same period.

Among the effects already felt by business are tighter controls on foreign investment, pressure to raise wages, official demands for union recognition in every foreign enterprise, state curbs to cool property prices, restrictions on foreign property ownership and a heavier hand of regulation over commercial activity.

Tax breaks for foreign investors could come under scrutiny next, while the government is already phasing out subsidies for exporters.

“In short,” commented a Chinese financial journalist in Shanghai, “the cost of doing business is going up.”

The reasons range from the Communist party’s fear of rising discontent to nationalism and the renaissance of “New Left” theoreticians. “China has now come to a critical moment in building a comprehensively well-off society,” said vice-premier Wu Yi, a veteran advocate of “reform and opening up”.

The new generation of leaders has reacted to riots and protests with stern repression — but it also sees the need for pre-emptive concessions to stave off challenges.

“If China’s reform doesn’t emphasise socialism, justice and social responsibility, it will fail,” said Liu Guoguang, a professor at Beijing University. “Government must be able to play an intervening role. We should not blindly worship the market and we cannot hand over all the economy to the market.”

All the evidence is that the two men driving policy, president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, have listened to these arguments, which are laid out in the two government documents.

They will make uncomfortable reading for some global businesses and investors, such as manufacturers sourcing ultra-cheap goods in Chinese factories, who have assumed there will always be a huge compliant workforce and suppliers willing to tolerate razor-thin profit margins.

But other companies stand to gain from opportunities presented by a more prosperous workforce as the domestic appetite grows for products and services — insurance, financial services, healthcare and human- resources providers could all benefit.

“Support given to the domestic sector, such as raising minimum wages in cities and handing subsidies and support to rural households, have given a boost to consumer demand,” said Morgan Stanley’s Yam.

One of the government documents summarised the proceedings at an executive committee of the State Council headed by Wen Jiabao. It promised aid for farmers and said the state would intervene to stabilise grain and fertiliser prices.

It ordered local authorities to make sure private employers paid migrant workers on time. And it commanded them to curb soaring property prices by imposing controls over land supply, bank lending and market access.

Anger is boiling in Chinese cities over housing costs — speculators and corrupt officials made fortunes while an emerging middle class has been priced out of ownership.

This led to the biggest purge in recent history when Hu Jintao sacked Shanghai’s party chief last month and used the housing crisis to rout the faction most closely associated with freewheeling capitalism.

“Market order should be further rectified,” said vice-premier Zeng Peiyan, announcing a fresh effort to impose regulations on property last week.

The second document, which emerged from a meeting of the Communist party’s central committee, enshrined the theory that unites all these regulatory moves in a coherent doctrine.

This is Hu Jintao’s pursuit of a “harmonious society” in which grievances are smoothed out under the party’s guidance.

The document called for “co-ordinated development, social equity and justice”— a far cry from the great reformer Deng Xiaoping’s reported declaration three decades ago that “to get rich is glorious”.

The new leaders called for “transforming the economic growth pattern” and the premier stated unequivocally that the eradication of poverty was a top priority.

Since 150m Chinese exist on less than $1 a day and 200m migrants have surged into the country’s seething cities, the regime has a lot on its hands. It has told officials to prepare a tough new labour law to level unequal pay, make it harder to sack workers, curb short-term contracts, enforce collective bargaining and raise workplace standards.

The official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which has already won access to workers at the American retailer Wal-Mart, has called for all foreign companies to recognise Chinese unions. Loud protests from some multinationals are unlikely to win friends or compromises.

In the present climate, many leftists and nationalists are ready to think what seems unthinkable to foreign investors. “I do not mean that we should protect our old industry, but I do mean that if China’s economic lifelines fall into foreigners’ hands, our society will not be able to endure,” wrote Yang Fan, a well-known professor.

Commenting on a popular website, an economist named Jiang Hai said four things struck him about China’s shift to the left on his return after three years abroad.

First, he said dissatisfied young people were leaning to the left “because they have no memories of starvation in Mao’s time”.

Second, ordinary citizens had turned left because they were sick of the bureaucratic corruption that had flourished under reform.

Third, Jiang argued, the barons of state-owned industries were hanging on to their power and trying to stop free-market reform.

And, finally, he said, Hu Jintao and his comrades were afraid of a complicated modern economy but familiar with orthodox ideology.

However, there will be no long march back to socialism. As the official China Daily noted: “The fact that the Chinese Communist party now names ‘building a harmonious society’ as its basic guiding principle suggests that it has abandoned the concept of ‘class struggle’.” And that, surely, must be good for business.

Posted at 8:08 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Associated Press

Washington:
China’s information minister told Americans on Wednesday that claims his country tramples internet and media freedoms stem from a cultural misunderstanding of the role the press plays in Chinese society.

The US State Department’s annual global human rights report accuses China of clamping down on print, broadcast and electronic media and censoring internet content. But Cai Wu, the state council’s minister of information, insisted that Chinese websites “offer probably the most free forum for opinion in the world.”

With more than 100 million internet users and millions of websites, Cai said that when a breaking news story emerges, thousands of follow-up posts spring up within minutes in cyberspace.

“In China, we think that the relationship between the media, the society and the government should be characterised by coordination and cooperation, rather than by confrontation,” Cai said in remarks at a Washington hotel, speaking through an interpreter.

China, he explained, has different “press concepts” than the West. “In some Western countries, good news is not news; bad news or strange news is news. For example, if a dog bites people, it’s not news; but if people bite dogs, that’s news.”

His comments belie regular, often harsh criticism by US government officials, academics and rights groups of China’s treatment of the press.

A survey earlier this year by the Committee to Protect Journalists said of China: “Never have so many lines of communication in the hands of so many people been met with such obsessive resistance from a central authority.”

As local Chinese media test government controls in efforts to capture more readers, Chinese President Hu Jintao’s government has pushed back.

The US government has said that dozens of dissidents are held in Chinese prisons for internet activity. Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times, was cleared in August of charges that he leaked state secrets to foreigners but convicted on unrelated charges of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison.

During Cai’s remarks at an event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, he did not comment about specific journalists’ cases.

“I can assure you that in China no journalist or any individual will be arrested or jailed due to his different opinion or [because] he expressed some opinion against the government. Maybe there are some other reasons” for arrests, he said.

In response to a question on whether media control is a good or a bad thing, he asked a question of his own: “Could you find any country in the world where there is no control at all on press or media? There exists control over media in all the countries, sometimes by government, sometimes by media themselves.”

Posted at 6:55 PM · Comments (0)

http://www.whattheduck.net/

Posted at 10:27 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright allAfrica.com

October 26, 2006
Posted to the web October 26, 2006

Washington, DC

After a professional career spent proving that investing in Africa can be profitable, telecommunications entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim has embarked on a new task: to improve the quality of African leadership. To that end, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has announced a $5 million annual prize for African leaders who were elected fairly, improved their country’s standard of living, and handed over power peacefully to the next elected government.

Recipients of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership will get $500,000 a year in their first 10 years out of office, and $200,000 a year for the rest of their lives. The prize will be the world’s most generous award, according to the foundation.

“The message is that we, Africans, it is time for us to take charge of our issues,” Ibrahim said. “It is our responsibility to look after our continent, to look after our kids.”

Ibrahim told AllAfrica that he hopes the award will spark a debate on the role of governance in Africa, and provide the means for former leaders to stay engaged in the national life of their countries.

“You don’t need the power of the office to do things,” Ibrahim said. “Civil society is so rich. We need to get engaged there.”

More than anything, he said, the prize will be a reward to leaders who deliver to their people. He hopes to make the first award by the end of 2007.

“It’s important that the citizens of Africa take the leaders to account,” he said.

The prize’s selection committee will choose winners with the help of a governance index that is being developed by Dr. Robert Rotberg at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The foundation will spend about $500,000 a year to develop and update the index. Rotberg has previously written on governance indices and has been developing new measurement methods with students for years.

Rotberg told AllAfrica that most existing measures rely on interviews and other forms of documentation for comparison, but that he will use only quantifiable, objective measures. For example, in measuring changes to the national infrastructure, the index may count the miles of paved road in a country. To measure political freedom, team members may identify the number of journalists or opposition leaders held in prison.

Details of the selection process still need to be hammered out, but Ibrahim said he is pushing forward so African leaders will be prepared before next year’s award.

“If you’re going to start a measured competition, you need to tell the players,” he said. “There’s a competition going on and these are the terms.”

Because the prize is awarded over the lifetimes of recipients, initial expenditures will be relatively small in comparison to the amounts the foundation expects to spend in coming years. Ibrahim said his financial models assume that leaders will live 25 years after leaving office, making the estimated net prize worth $8 million. With new winners being added each year, the cost to the foundation will quickly rise into the tens of millions, but Ibrahim said he is not worried.

“I have put all my proceeds and wealth behind this,” he said. “We are fully funded. We are not seeking money from anybody.”

Much of Ibrahim’s personal fortune comes from last year’s sale of his African telecommunications company, Celtel, to Kuwait’s MTC for $3.4 billion.

Posted at 9:21 PM · Comments (0)

This notice about my photographic work on the city where I live ran today on Dan Washburn’s popular site, the Shanghaiist:

Click to read more

Posted at 3:28 PM · Comments (0)

This notice about my photographic work on the city where I live ran today on Dan Washburn’s popular site, the Shanghaiist:

Click to read more

Posted at 3:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006, at 7:34 AM ET

Tourists pose near a beach pavilion at PIFF. Click image to expand.Tourists pose near a beach pavilion at PIFF
BUSAN, South Korea—I’ve been in the southeastern Korean port city of Busan for two days now, and I have yet to meet a single Korean who is unnerved by the fact that Kim Jong-il has conducted a nuclear weapons test a few hours to the north. The closest thing I’ve seen to concern comes from a rosy-cheeked college student named Hae-Min, who I meet along the boardwalk at Haeundae Beach.

“The bomb test made me very nervous,” she says as we wait in line to buy bottled water from a street vendor. “I was afraid foreign reporters would be scared to come to the film festival.” She pauses and smiles, indicating the press pass hanging from my neck. “So, I’m happy to see you here.”

Asian cinema stars at the Pusan International Film Festival. Click image to expand.Asian cinema stars at the Pusan International Film Festival
Hae-Min is talking about the Pusan International Film Festival—PIFF for short (the festival started in 1996, when Busan was still transliterated as “Pusan”)—and for South Koreans jaded by 50 years of provocations from the North, this event appears to be far more intriguing than the notion of nuclear war. Currently the biggest and most influential festival of its kind in Asia, this year’s PIFF boasts 170 feature films from 63 countries. Variety has nearly 20 reporters in Busan to publish a daily from the festival, and over 5,000 industry professionals are said to be in town for the festivities.

Despite my press credentials, however, my motivation for visiting Korea’s second-largest city goes beyond an interest in Korean Wave filmmaking or the desire to catch the latest Asian premieres. Rather, I am here because I worked in Busan as an English teacher in the late ’90s, and Korean-born U.S. director Wonsuk Chin has written a screenplay about this experience, titled Expats. Since Chin is at the festival, meeting with possible financiers for his film, I’ve made plans to see him this afternoon at the Grand Hotel.

Chin has been involved with the PIFF organization since its inaugural year, and his first film, Too Tired to Die (starring Mira Sorvino, Jeffrey Wright, and Takeshi Kaneshiro), made its Asian debut here after opening at Sundance in 1998. Three years later, when he came to the festival to promote e-Dreams (a documentary about the celebrated dot-com-era rise and fall of online convenience store Kozmo.com), Chin became fascinated by Busan’s expatriate subculture and decided to write a movie about it. In the course of researching the screenplay, the filmmaker came across an article I wrote for Salon about late-’90s expatriate life in Busan, and he and I have been e-mail acquaintances ever since.

Admittedly, Expats is not literally about my life, though I have enough in common with Chin’s protagonist Jeremy Keller to feel like it could be. As was the case for me 10 years ago, Keller isn’t sure what to do with his life in his mid-20s, so he elects to buy some time (and make some cash) by moving to Korea to teach English. Like I did, Keller finds himself charmed, bewildered, and frustrated with the extremes of expatriate life, as well as the challenges of living and teaching in an unfamiliar culture. Like I did, Keller falls in with an eclectic group of acquaintances, including an international roster of fellow expats.

Unlike my experience, Keller and his expat friends decide to buy black-market guns and rob some Korean gangsters—but I suppose that’s how movies work. Chin describes his new film as a cross between Lost in Translation and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

In his film synopsis, Chin has described Busan as “the modern Casablanca”—a romantic comparison that has aroused some skepticism among current expats in this crowded, workaholic city of traffic jams and concrete high-rises. Still, Casablanca wasn’t a romantic city until the movie Casablanca made it into one. Movies have a way of reinventing how places are perceived, and a big reason I’m back in Busan is to get a last look at its foreigner subculture before Chin’s movie puts the city onto America’s pop-cultural radar.

The recently constructed Gwangan Grand Bridge. Click image to expand.The recently constructed Gwangan Grand Bridge
As I walk along Haeundae Beach to the Grand Hotel, I can see that Busan has transformed since I left Korea to become a full-time writer eight years ago. The most notable change is an elegant white suspension bridge that spans Suyeong Bay (imagine returning to Houston to discover it suddenly has its own Golden Gate Bridge), as well as two new subway lines, one of which connects this beach with the rest of the city. Back in 1998, when PIFF was in its infancy, movies were screened in the gritty port district of Nampodong; now, in an apparent attempt to imitate Cannes, the festival is centered around a hotel-studded stretch of Haeundae Beach—which has itself gone upscale in recent years. The Haeundae I last saw was a bustling tangle of frumpy bars, bathhouses, and motels fringing a half-mile-long stretch of sand; the resort beach has now become a tidy, sanitized strip of luxury hotels and Starbucks franchises, modern-art museums, and aquariums.

For a returned expat like me, the globalized gentrification of Haeundae Beach feels a bit artificial—but I’m sure it’s a welcome sight for international film tourists, who might otherwise find themselves bewildered in this manic city of 4.5 million people. Haeundae’s cosmetic makeover is no accident: For the past decade, the city government has invested huge sums of money in the attempt to transform Busan into a hub for the Asian film industry. Thanks to the British Invasion-style success of Korean Wave films and soap operas across Asia, this investment is paying off. More than 40 Asian films will be shot in Busan this year, and tourist arrivals for PIFF (mostly from other Asian countries) have steadily increased since the beginning of the decade.

Wonsuk Chin. Click image to expand.Korean-born U.S. film director Wonsuk Chin
Since Wonsuk Chin is an old PIFF hand, my conversation with him is punctuated with continual introductions to other film-fest regulars in the lobby bar. With a boyish smile, goatee stubble, and a thinning crew cut, Chin looks younger than his 38 years. He puffs on a cigarette as he tells me about plans for his new film.

“Most Americans have strong cinematic impressions of Japan or China,” he tells me. “It’s easy to imagine samurai, or the Forbidden City. It’s not that way with Korea: People think of North Korean military parades—or maybe old M*A*S*H episodes—but nothing that truly represents the culture. Korean Wave films are doing well in Asia, but there hasn’t been a substantial American movie filmed here in decades. I want to change that. My movie might be an action comedy, but I want American audiences to absorb a real piece of Korea for two hours.”

“So why make a move about expats?” I ask him. “Why not portray something more distinctively Korean?”

“I want to show Korea through an outsider’s point of view, because I realize how strange this country must seem to visitors. The teacher expats who come here see Korea in a unique way. They aren’t isolated like soldiers or businessmen; they’re working right in the middle of the culture. They’re young, and they’re going through a transitional time of life. They’re more likely to throw themselves into new experiences.”

“And you think these experiences would include robbing Korean gangsters?”

Chin grins and lights another cigarette. “I’m not writing about a specific incident; I’m just exploring a possibility. But in researching the movie, I saw this as a realistic plot idea. Gangsters in Korea don’t carry guns; they use baseball bats and sashimi knives. To gun-culture Americans like Jeremy Keller and his friends, Korean gangsters must seem like an easy target if you want to make a quick buck.”

Although the IMDb.com page for Expats lists Chris Klein (American Pie) and John Cho (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) in supporting roles, Chin won’t tell me who he has in mind to play the Jeremy Keller part. Online scuttlebutt has suggested that Jake Gyllenhaal, Jared Leto, and Ryan Phillippe have been approached for the part, but Chin will only concede that he’s in the market for a well-known twentysomething Hollywood actor. “Once we cast the Jeremy Keller role,” he says, “everything else should fall into place. I’d like to shoot it in Busan next spring and debut it as the lead film next fall at PIFF.”

Chin is still curious about what it’s like for an outsider to live in Korea, and he asks me about my own experiences in Busan eight years ago. I tell him I have mixed feelings about my time here, but that I look back on Busan like Ernest Hemingway looked back on Paris—as a “necessary part of a man’s education,” an essential rite of passage in my own life. Since tens of thousands of Americans have made a similar Korean sojourn in the past decade—and since more than 6 million Americans live as expats—I like the notion that indie filmmakers are trying to capture the American expatriate experience on the big screen.

When Chin excuses himself to go attend a meeting, he asks me how I plan to reconnect with Busan’s expat scene. For anyone who’s ever lived overseas in their 20s, the answer to this question should be obvious.

“I’m going to hit the bars,” I tell him.

Indeed, if Busan is really the modern Casablanca, it’s time for me to head out and find the local equivalent of Rick’s Café Americain. Walking outside, I hail a cab and head into the city.
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Posted at 11:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Telegraph

Bombarded by petty rules, bossy advice and celebrity tittle-tattle, we have forgotton how to be adults. It’s time we grew up, says Michael Bywater

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

A lego figure
It’s time to stop behaving like children and face up to responsibilities

Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn’t done or which it hadn’t even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.

Here is a random sample of what is implicit in the assumptions that are made about all of us: We are unable to control our appetites;
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We cannot postpone gratification;

We have little sense of self, and what we do have is deformed;

We have no articulable inner life;

We are pre- or sub-literate;

We are solipsistic;

We do not have the ability to exercise responsible autonomy;

We require constant surveillance and constant admonition;

We are potentially, if not actually, violent;

We have no social sensibilities beyond the tribal;

We have no discrimination.

Do we still want to sign up to this? Do we want to be Big Babies?

My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.

He had a hat and a car and a wife and two sons and a housekeeper and a maid and a nanny for the children, and the housekeeper had a dog and the dog had a canker and lived in a kennel.

My grandfather read Charles Dickens mostly. Sometimes they went on holiday. His house was furnished with furniture.

There were some exotic things in it, brought back from exotic places. The most exotic things were African carvings and Benares brassware. The African carving had been brought back from a war, possibly the Boer one.

The brassware was brought back from Benares by my grand-father’s friend Dr Chand, who lived next door but was a Brahmin from Benares.

Dr Chand didn’t have a lifestyle either. Nobody had a lifestyle then, because there was nobody to tell them to, and anyway they were too busy having lives.

They were grown-ups. They went about their business. In my grandfather’s case, it was seeing patients and making them better, where possible. In Dr Chand’s case, it was the same, because he was a doctor too.

I suspect that my grandfather’s life was real in a sense that my father’s life hasn’t quite been, and my life is not at all.

The crucial difference is my grandfather’s lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.

It is a preparation for a life. The consistently introspective life of the Big Baby is as much a simulacrum as life on Big Brother.

To keep the simulacrum going we need help. And we need that help because that help is available.

It’s the old paradox. We need distraction from our fragmented and solitary lives because the distractions available to us have rendered our lives fragmented and solitary.

And we need lifestyle advice from magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers precisely because we are being nagged about our lifestyle all the time by magazines and websites and newspaper supplements and health advisers and personal trainers…

If one of the markers of adulthood is autonomy, then one of the preconditions of autonomy is being left alone.

My grandfather wasn’t nagged. Once he turned 21, he was a man, and a grown-up, and nobody battered him round the clock with opportunities he was missing, miseries he didn’t know he had, aspirations ditto, inadequacies doubly so.

Nobody told him about being good in bed, grooming tips, what his car said about him, what he should have to eat, how much he should drink, what his house said about him, how Benares brassware was so over, where he should go on holiday, what this season’s must-have product would be, how his suits should look.

He knew some of these things, and didn’t care about the others because nobody was drawing them to his attention. He knew what his suits should look like: trousers, waistcoat, jacket, all made out of the same material.

He knew about grooming: you shaved. He knew what he should eat: breakfast, lunch, dinner. He probably had no idea that good-in-bed even existed, or that furniture did anything except furnish, or that where he went on holiday was of any significance, or that his car said anything about him at all, except ‘Oh, here comes Dr Bywater, I recognise his car.’

But the Big Babies have no such autonomy, and are harangued to death; nor have they learned the adult trick of simply ignoring the fishwife-and-huckster voices. Instead, Baby tries to comply.

Believing it when he is told that he is unhappy, he then believes the cure the same fishwives and hucksters proceed to offer.

The house, the furniture, the car, the exotic holidays, the new wines to try, the squid and worms and foreign muck cooked in jam with the gravy underneath the meat, the peculiar vegetables like weeds or tumours, best thrown away; the uncomfortable places to go, the uncomfortable ways to get to them (‘Travel the Amazon on anaconda-back’), the uncomfortable and dismaying sex (‘Do we have to do buggery?’), the uncomfortable and dismaying life, funded on credit, built on debt, Carol Vorderman smiling as the bailiffs home in and the Official Receiver prepares for another day’s official receiving.

And it is all a world of make-believe, a set of status symbols notable only for symbolising someone else’s status… except that when there is nothing but status for the Big Baby in the Age of Distraction, then our symbols are our status.

We live on a diet of shadows, and we can only imitate them, stuck in the playpen, waiting to be distracted.

Admittedly, it’s tricky, being grown up. The great thing about being a Big Baby is it’s so easy and so rewarding, and everybody else can just bugger off.

Once one has embraced the ‘isms’ that characterise the Baby Boomer’s creed of modernity - individualism, relativism, voluntarism - and lapsed into the hooting, crooning self-validating babyhood that inevitably follows, then one is beyond criticism.

Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t understand us and, what is more, is just plain wrong.

Being grown up is not nearly as comfortable. Let’s, just for a moment, beg the question and say that one of the qualities of being a grown-up is what the Romans called discrimen and what we would perhaps call ‘discrimination’, though that doesn’t quite cover it.

Discrimen is the ability to judge a situation and to take right action without being sidetracked by peripheral considerations. Sailors would call it ‘seamanship’.

Surgeons speak of ‘decisiveness’. In all cases, discrimen is about knowing what to do in the circumstances, even if there is no guarantee of pulling it off.

But if discrimen is a cardinal virtue of adulthood, the tenets of infantilism work against it. Discrimen calls for right judgment; but the idea of something being ‘right’ is in profound conflict with individualism (which says I can only claim my judgment as being right for me).

It is in conflict with relativism (which says others may have different ideas, which are right for them) and with voluntarism (which says that those different ideas are just as valid as mine, because they, too, have been chosen).

Infantility, indefinitely prolonged, is also the indefinite prolongation of (false) promise.

It’s never too late… never too late to stomp, cadaverous, around the stage singing ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’.

Never too late to cast off the old wife and find a new one. Never too late to make the big killing, to score the goal, to find the perfect shoes, to acquire the perfect six-pack, rack, complexion, butt, pecs or thighs. Never too late (hell, someone must be answering the spam) to get the perfect dick, pumped up with a scoopful of mail-order Viagra; never too late to give her the perfect orgasm, get the perfect house, fill it with the perfect furniture, take the perfect vacation, drive the perfect car…

As the body ineluctably decays (the mind’s long gone, of course; who needs it?), perpetual infantility glosses over the rheum, the pains and creaks and flaccidities. As the opportunities dwindle, perpetual infantility offers us illusion on easy terms with pick-‘n’-mix spirituality, self-improvement, angels and goddesses, diversion and aspiration.

As time slides past, doling out its irreversible quanta, perpetual infantility offers us… the perfect wristwatch: shockproof, waterproof, antimagnetic, a perpetual movement which says everything about us except the single intolerable truth: that we have had it and are headed for oblivion, tick by tick.

We have had to make it up as we go along, we Big Babies. And we have not done a terribly good job. We want (don’t we?) to grow up. How? Here’s the simple answer: watch carefully, ask why, and mind our manners. It’s really that simple. How would the world be if everyone did it?

It would be grown up.

How to be an adult

Don’t be affronted Being affronted (or offended, or complaining about ‘inappropriateness’) is no response for a grown-up. Only children believe the world should conform to their own view of it: a sort of magical thinking that can only lead to warfare, terrorism, unmanageable short-term debt and the Blair/Bush alliance

Mistrust anything catchy, whether it’s the Axis of Evil, advertising slogans, or blatant branding (‘New Labour’). Catchiness exists to prevent thought and to disguise motive. Grown-ups can think for themselves

Ignore celebrities, except when they are doing what they are celebrated for doing: acting, playing football et cetera. Skill does not confer moral, political or intellectual discrimination. (Except in the case of writers. Writers know everything and can lecture you with impunity.) If a celebrity is not celebrated for doing anything but being a celebrity, smile politely but pay no notice

We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation

Consider our own motivations. We may rail about being treated like children, ordered about, kept from the truth, nannied and exploited… but are we complicit in it? Could the reward actually be infantilisation itself?

Autonomy is the primary marker of being grown up. Babies, children and adolescents don’t have any. We don’t want to be in their boat

Suspect administration Its purpose is to free the organisation to do what it’s meant to do: but the triumph of the administrators - the lawyers, the accountants, the professional managers - means that too many organisations now believe that what they are meant to do is administer themselves. This is a profoundly infantile attitude

Do not love yourself unconditionally. Such love is for babies and comes from their mothers. Ignore fashion, particularly in clothes. You don’t want to look like a teenager for ever

Never do business with a company offering ‘solutions’ as in ‘ergonomic furniture solutions which minimise the postural strain associated with sitting’ (chairs) and ‘Post Office mailing solutions’ (brown paper). The word suggests we have a problem, but since we are grown-ups, that is for us to decide

Denounce relativism at every turn. Shouting ‘not fair’ is childish. Demanding respect without earning it is childish. Don’t fear seriousness. Babies aren’t allowed to be serious

Watch our language. Is there really much difference between a six-year-old in a fright-wig and his father’s waders shouting ‘I’m the Mighty Wurgle-Burgle-Urgley-Goo’ and an ostensible grown-up demanding to be called ‘Tony Blair’s Respect Tsar’?

Hide Grown-ups are not required to be perpetually accountable, while the instincts of government and big business, both of which are, almost by their nature, great infantilisers, are to keep an eye on everyone all the time

Eat it up There is nothing more babyish than having dietary requirements

Never vote for, do business with or be pleasant to anyone who uses the words ‘ordinary people’
# Taken from’Big Babies’ by Michael Bywater, published by Granta on 2 November. It is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115 john reynolds

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright The BBC

Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.

The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

Race ‘ironed out’

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.

Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.

Receding chins

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

Further into the future, sexual selection - being choosy about one’s partner - was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.

The logical outcome would be two sub-species, “gracile” and “robust” humans similar to the Eloi and Morlocks foretold by HG Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

“While science and technology have the potential to create an ideal habitat for humanity over the next millennium, there is a possibility of a monumental genetic hangover over the subsequent millennia due to an over-reliance on technology reducing our natural capacity to resist disease, or our evolved ability to get along with each other, said Dr Curry.

He carried out the report for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

Posted at 1:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Saturday, October 21, 2006; C01

AGOURA, Calif.

Aluxury station wagon rolls up to the temple here at the Sai Anantam Ashram and everyone stands at the ready, even the little ones, hands clasped in prayer. The door opens, and from it, Swamini Turiyasangitananda, nee Alice McLeod Coltrane — yes, that Coltrane — steps out.

She is tall, mahogany of skin, swathed in a saffron sari, ebony hair pressed smooth, rippling past her shoulders, a long layer of dreadlocks snaking out from underneath. She smiles shyly. A devotee rushes to her side, drops to her knees, and, in the tradition of Vedantic followers everywhere, bows at the feet of her guru.

Inside this temple, located about 35 miles west of Los Angeles, worshipers practice a sort of ecumenical Hinduism: The men sit on one side of the royal blue carpet, the women on the other; Alice presides from a fuchsia velvet armchair. During a Sunday service, she kisses a baby and christens him with a Sanskrit name. Someone announces there will be no services next week, thanks to a rare concert that Alice is giving “back East” — a reference to her show tomorrow at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. She gives a short sermon, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita: “You don’t need any religion to get devoted to God,” she tells them. Some of the 30-plus present wipe tears from their eyes.

Then she sits at the electric organ. Places fingers to keys. Chants “Ommmmmm.”

And begins to play.

Heads nod; bodies sway. They’re singing in Sanskrit — Bolo Bolo Asrita Bolo Om Namah Sivaya — but something else is going on. The deep bass humming from the organ … the funk emanating from tambourines and hand drums … the soulful singing and fervent yeah yeahs … the sister crying out, hands raised, caught up in the rapture …

Hindu gospel?

Indeed, watching Alice on organ, beaming till her dimples pop, it’s not hard to catch a glimpse of the child prodigy from Detroit playing in the Baptist church. To see the young bebop player, the one with whom John Coltrane fell in love, back at Birdland so many years ago.

Another lifetime ago.

* * *

Hers is a life reinvented, in the classic American way of taking sorrow and spinning it into something that gleams brighter than gold. She’s got a last name attached to one of jazz’s all-time greats, and yet few know her for the highly gifted musician and composer she is: an artist admired for her righteously rumbling arpeggios, for the deep vibrancy of her tone, for her dynamism as an improviser. She joined John Coltrane’s quintet in 1965, and together they explored the limits of avant-garde jazz, marinating in the mysticism of Eastern music, improvising their way into a deeply transcendent experience.

Theirs was a brief but intense union — just five years — but one that brought three children and altered her life’s trajectory. John Coltrane, 11 years older, introduced Alice to Eastern religion, meditation and philosophy. He pushed her to take up the harp, at the time a rare addition to the jazz canon. That instrument, along with her ecclesiastical explorations and noodling with North African and Indian instrumentation, formed the musical basis of her solo albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s: “Journey in Satchidananda,” the staple of many a yoga class; “Ptah the El Daoud”; “World Galaxy”; and “Universal Consciousness.”

Her latest, critically acclaimed album, “Translinear Light,” released in 2004 after a 26-year absence from the mainstream jazz scene, looks both backward and forward, traveling between John’s compositions to the gospel hymns of her Christian childhood to the Hindu hymns of her own Vedantic-based beliefs. She’s now at work on “Sacred Language of Ascension,” scheduled for release early next year, an album that incorporates Hebrew devotional chants, Vedic culture, Coltrane jazz, along with orchestral and congregational church music.

“She’s got an incredible strength and direction,” says bassist Charlie Haden, who played with John Coltrane, worked with Alice on “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Translinear Light,” and will be performing with her tomorrow. “She’s always exploring and discovering… . She’s an incredible musician.”

When her one great love died in 1967 of liver cancer after years of alcohol and drug abuse — Alice manages the jazz legend’s estate — she kept on playing, jamming on the piano, harp and Wurlitzer organ in studio sessions with the likes of Jimmy Garrison and Pharoah Sanders, with Rashied Ali and Archie Shepp, and collaborating with Carlos Santana, Laura Nyro, McCoy Tyner and Jack DeJohnette. Music swirled all around her until 1978, when Alice decided that she’d rather pursue all things spiritual. She spent weeks at a time in India, studying with spiritual masters such as her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, and the Indian sage Sri Satya Sai Baba, he of the beatific grin and the splendiferous ‘fro.

Ask her about this change in life direction, and she carefully measures her words, her voice a lyrical murmur punctuated by abrupt, staccato bursts:

“This is what we did, [my children’s] father and I, this is what we did when we were young,” Alice, 69, says of her jazz career, sitting by a burbling stream at the ashram. “We concertized, we were busy and we played in various places and we recorded a lot. I felt that he completed his mission. And I felt that my time had passed on.

“You see where I am today,” she continues, gesturing at the Santa Monica Mountains, the lush trees. “I wanted to spend time in spiritual search.”

So she stopped making music for secular consumption and began recording spiritual music with members of the ashram’s choir. But her second-eldest son, Ravi Coltrane, 41, a talented saxophonist, coaxed her out of retirement, bit by bit, for occasional concerts. Ravi produced and performs on “Translinear Light,” five years in the making, and this year cajoled her to perform in four concerts across the country in the 80th year since John’s birth. Tomorrow’s concert will be her only East Coast appearance.

“The performances for me are really commemorating that Alice wants to get onstage and play a little bit,” Ravi says from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “All my ideas — ‘C’mon, Ma, we should make a record, let’s go in the studio’ — it was me begging her.”

* * *

Growing up in Detroit in the aftermath of the Depression, the second-youngest of six children, money was always tight. Her father drove a delivery truck; her mother, a homemaker, didn’t truck with childish nonsense. Alice learned about music from her older half brother, Ernie Farrow, a bassist. When Alice was 7, she went knocking on a neighbor’s door. The neighbor had a piano; Alice didn’t.

“I decided one day that I was going to ask her to teach me,” Alice says. She learned the rudiments and moved on to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Classical music grounded her in technique. She composed her first song at 10 and played in church choirs, and then music halls, weddings, funerals, didn’t matter. “Music,” Alice says, “was just in my heart, somehow.”

Farrow, who died in 1969, turned her on to the intricacies of bebop, to the genius of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. “He loved music,” Alice says of Farrow, “and umph , he could play .” She fell in love with bebop’s muscular braininess, with its off-kilter chord changes and speeded-up tempos. By high school, she was gigging all over town, chasing bebop’s jagged rhythms. If Cannonball Adderley or Sonny Stitt landed in town without a pianist, she was on their shortlist to call.

After graduating from Northeastern High School in the mid-’50s, Alice passed up a scholarship at the Detroit Institute of Technology and headed straight to New York, with a temporary detour in Paris to study with Powell, legendary even then. Jazz — instrumental jazz — was a macho world, and with the exception of a few, such as Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland, women weren’t exactly welcome. Alice ignored the macho machinations.

“There was no way I was going to be mannish and do the things men did,” she says. She just played, mindful of her Baptist upbringing. She carried herself like a lady, just like her mother taught her, and that, she says, is exactly how she was treated.

“She was a sweetheart, a lady lady , that’s how I would put it,” says vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom Alice played Jewish melodies as part of her New York experimentation. “A good-hearted person.”

And what made her a good musician?

“What makes anybody good? They’re good. She played all the right notes, all the right chord changes. Her timing was perfect. What makes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, good? That cliche ‘good for a girl’ was not true.”

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Posted at 8:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Policy

Zero-sum positional conflict is avoidable in a liberal market society, argues Will Wilkinson

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband—or your co-worker, your next door neighbour, or anyone within the same national boundaries—and proposes that for the purposes of government ‘poverty’ be defined in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation. In particular, he suggests that the poverty line be set at half the value of the median income. ‘If poverty is a relative phenomenon,’ Cassidy writes, ‘what needs monitoring is how poor families make out compared with everybody else, not their absolute living standards.’ [1]

While capitalism does in fact produce absolutely egalitarian results—enabling the poor to own high-quality mobile phones, microwaves, and cars functionally equivalent to those of the wealthy—it cannot, critics say, manufacture more and better ‘positional goods’, to use economist Fred Hirsch’s term, because, basically, it is impossible to fit more than ten percent in the top ten percent.[2] No matter how trusty, safe, comfortable, and efficient your new Hyundai Accent may be, the fact that is within the grasp of so many will keep it from signaling that you inhabit the commanding heights of society. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To be king of the mountain?

Policy arguments like Cassidy’s that pivot on the alleged importance of relative position rather than absolute opportunity and wealth, are now much in vogue—on the left, at least. The politics of relative position is the egalitarian welfare statist’s new favorite game. Richard Layard, head of the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance and member of the British House of Lords, argues that considerations of relative position justify regulating and even censoring advertising, for it makes us feel bad to see people who own things we cannot afford, and even if we can afford them, having them wouldn’t make us happy.[3] British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson claims that low relative income is a direct cause of illness, and that equalising income redistribution ought to be reconceived as a ‘public health’ measure.[4] Cornell University economist Robert Frank argues in rigorous detail for a steep consumption tax designed to dampen the alleged enthusiasm for zero-sum status races through the display of opulence.[5] ‘Every time [some people] raise their relative income (which they like),’ Layard writes, following Frank, ‘they lower the relative income of other people (which those people dislike). This is an “external disbenefit” imposed on others, a form of physical pollution.’[6] The solution? Slap a tax on ‘the polluting activity’—you and me working hard to get a raise—in order to get us to play more and produce less.

Are these arguments any good? Does our taste for relative position help vindicate egalitarian social democracy? The answer is no. A more benign and scientifically adequate picture of human nature, together with a more up-to-date notion of ‘externalities,’ show the politics of relative position to be a non-starter.

Happiness, position and pollution
The politics of relative position encourages us to see life as a competitive climb up a ladder of status. If there can only be one person per rung on any dimension of status or rank, then each step up the ladder for one person logically requires a step down for another. You can’t make space for an eleventh restaurant or university on a ‘Top Ten’ list, just as two runners can’t both come in first. Competition for higher position is a paradigmatic zero-sum game. So if inherently scarce positional goods like ladder-rank are highly valued, then whenever you get a raise, a promotion, or a swank new suit, it will create a shower of negative psychic consequences that rain on those occupying the rungs below. So the story goes.

According to Layard, Frank and others, we fiercely value positional goods because we fiercely value status—the ultimate positional good. This explains, they posit, why average self-reported happiness has not gone up over time, though wealthier people at any time are more likely to be happier. Higher relative standing makes us happier, but the middle of the income distribution is the middle, no matter how big the number. So there simply is no avoiding the positional downside of every positional upside. But, they argue, we cannot simply shrug off the inevitable cruelty of a world in which our interests are in irreconcilable conflict. Policy must take human nature seriously, and do what it can to help. We should take the dismay and anxiety caused by zero-sum competition over positional goods just as seriously as sludge dumped in a stream, the roar of jets at a nearby airport, or other classic examples of negative spillover effects (or ‘negative externalities’) of economic activity.

In addition to the ‘harms’ caused by any upward positional move, Frank and Layard worry about the negative effects of positional ‘arms races’. If I try hard to move up the positional ladder, the people just ahead will try harder still to maintain their lead. In the end, we’re all likely to be about where we started in terms of relative position, but we’ll all be exhausted by the futile dash. As an illustration in several of his papers and books, Frank highlights the signalling function of fashion:

[I]f some job candidates begin wearing expensive custom-tailored suits, a side effect of their action is that other candidates become less likely to make favorable impressions on interviewers. From any individual job seeker’s point of view, the best response might be to match the higher expenditures of others, lest her chances of landing the job fall. But this outcome may be inefficient, since when all spend more, each candidate’s probability of success remains unchanged. All may agree that some form of collective restraint on expenditure would be useful.[7]

Perhaps Frank has yet to hear about Overstock.com, where you can buy a $1,000 suit for $300. In any case, he argues that it is often impractical or impossible for individuals to negotiate a truce, so a trusted third party—the state—must step in and impose a price cap or a tax on fancy suits (or cars, houses, or whatever) in order to mitigate the ‘harm’ caused by the self-defeating attempt to get ahead.

The intractability of zero-sum positional competition for Frank and Layard flows from a rather nasty conception of human nature involving a universal, inflexible, deep-seated, status-seeking instinct together with a remarkably narrow, materialistic conception of how positional competition is culturally mediated. Theirs is a distressingly agonistic vision of the human predicament in which life is irremediably brutish and nasty, if not short. ‘The desire for status is utterly natural,’ Layard writes. ‘But it creates a massive problem if we want to make people happier, for the total amount of status is fixed … If my score improves, someone else’s deteriorates.’[8] Your heel is always on someone’s neck, but you can hardly help it. Primates will be primates.

Status-seeking missiles
In our original evolutionary context, Frank argues, higher rank individuals would have greater access to material resources and the highest quality mates, increasing the proportion of their genes in future populations. Therefore, Frank concludes, ‘it would be strange indeed if the relentless forces of natural selection had not honed a human brain that strongly motivated its bearer to seek high rank.’[9] Mother nature has made us, like other primates, status-seeking missiles.

Layard recognises this line of thought may sound ugly to certain ears, and so imagines a ‘libertarian’ who objects that public policy based on our status-fixation affirms and rewards an ‘ignoble sentiment [like envy] that ought to be disregarded.’ He responds:

This is an extraordinarily weak argument. Public policy has to deal with human nature as it is. The desire for status is after all ubiquitous, and we all recognise it. Greed is also common, and libertarians do not disallow it. Both sentiments are features of human nature. We are not perfect, and public policy should help us make the best of what we are.[10]

Layard is concerned to get us to take the inescapability of status-racing seriously, or else his argument for taxes on positional ‘pollution’ will fall apart. He’s right that we must deliberate about policy ‘taking men as they are and laws as they might be’, as Rousseau put it. And we should not be surprised to find that our theory of human nature will largely determine which laws and institutions seem feasible and desirable. However, while Frank and Layard’s forays into speculative evolutionary psychology are better than ‘extraordinarily weak’, they don’t amount to a state-of-the art conception of human nature ‘as it is’. Taking men as they really are is the downfall of the politics of relative position.

Status civilised
It is true that status is not ideological fancy. Frank and Layard both refer to studies involving vervet monkeys showing that serotonin and testosterone concentrations correlate positively with position in the deference-dominance hierarchy.[11] Status has a real organic basis. In his article on relative poverty Cassidy, too, cites evidence that low-ranking baboons have elevated levels of stress hormones, and that low-ranking rhesus monkeys face elevated risk of arteriosclerosis. And there is some good evidence of similar physical correlates of status in humans. ‘If monkeys enjoy status, so do human beings,’ Layard reasons. He then rushes to explore the policy implications of intractable status competition.

But not so fast! The fact that we are not actually vervet monkeys matters. Species differences matter a lot, even between monkeys and chimps. Pioneering primatologist and psychologist Abraham Maslow first pointed out the vast difference in behaviour between often friendly and tolerant dominant chimpanzees and vigilantly despotic dominant rhesus monkeys.[12] ‘Real and profound differences are glossed over by flat statements that all primates know dominance-subordination relationships,’ writes Frans de Waal, the world’s leading expert on primate hierarchies.[13]

Real and profound differences are also glossed over by failing to acknowledge what is peculiar to humans. For one thing, we are uniquely cultural creatures, and this fundamentally transforms the zero-sum logic of the primate dominance hierarchy. Even universal human psychological traits are highly mediated by diverse human cultural formations. Like monkeys and chimps, we all eat. But some eat with fingers, some with forks, some with a waiter and muzak, some squatting in the bush over a bloody wild pig. All humans signal status and station, but the differences between a silk necktie and a bound foot are not morally trivial. A high-status drug-dealing gangster thug and a high-status barn-raising Amish family man may each be alphas within their groups, but the social consequences of positional competition for power and for upstanding modest piety are hardly the same.

Indeed, a sensible measure of a culture’s quality is the extent to which it can shape potentially destructive natural propensities, such as self-interest, status-seeking, tribal solidarity, and mate competition into benign or even beneficial cultural forms.[14] While our taste for status may be deep, the fact that our cultural capacity mediates our instincts, causing the form and value of their expression to vary wildly, prevents facile extrapolation from tendency to policy.

The turn to culture is not a soft-headed evasion of hard biological truths. Cultural flexibility just is our biological nature. Recent work by Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich (a zoologist and two anthropologists), and others point out the adaptive advantages of a labile cultural capacity that allows human populations to adapt quickly to changing environments, and to accumulate and transmit useful knowledge, norms, and institutions across generations.[15] In a paper on the cultural evolution of cooperation, Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich point out that the common human cultural capacity explains the huge variation in cooperative institutions and norms between societies. Whether we happen to be locked in zero-sum or positive sum games is more a matter of culturally transmitted institutions (norms of interaction and coordination, explicit or tacit) than of brute facts about our genetic constitution.[16] The question, then, isn’t whether we are status-seeking. The question is how our culture and institutions harness, suppress, or amplify our natural tendencies.

Manufacturing status
Henrich, with psychologist Franscisco Gil-White, has argued that the distinctive human cultural capacity creates space for kinds of status based in the positive-sum trade of specialised cultural knowledge and expertise for prestige. Freely conferred prestige is both an incentive to develop excellence in a valued domain, and a payment for the demonstration and transmission of scarce knowledge and skills that benefit members of the group.

In humans, in contrast [to other primates], status and its perquisites often come from non-agonistic sources—in particular, from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force. For example, paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking … certainly enjoys high status throughout the world. Those who, like Hawking, achieve status by excelling in valued domains are often said to have ‘prestige’.[17]

It cannot be denied that prestige based in superior theoretical physics is a far cry from a tyranical vervet monkey keeping its cowering underlings in thrall. Henrich and Gil-White’s conception of non-agonistic prestige based in valued excellence points to the exit from Layard and Frank’s grim, zero-sum world. For sure, the runner-up in the race to cure a disease may be infuriated by the prestige granted to his winning nemesis, but this triviality will be swamped by the benefits that flow to people who may not even know the innovators name, and never paid in esteem.

The logic is basically David Hume’s in his essay ‘The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, where he attributes the advance of knowledge and beauty precisely to a combination of ‘emulation’, the ambition to surpass others (positional competitiveness) and a taste for ‘praise and glory’ (freely conferred prestige). Hume may well have had himself in mind when he said that ‘A writer is animated with new force, when he hears the applauses of the world for his former productions; and, being roused by such a motive, he often reaches a pitch of perfection, which is equally surprising to himself and to his readers.’[18] The world is better, not worse, for Hume’s own avidly status-seeking ‘love of literary fame’, his confessed ‘ruling passion’.[19] We applaud for a reason: to stimulate the supply of excellence by gratifying the demand for status.

Crucially, there is no limit to the possible forms of excellence. So, while the number of positions on any single dimension of status may be fixed, there is no reason why dimensions of status cannot be multiplied indefinitely. It does not in fact require a violation of mathematical law to produce more high-status positions, for it is possible to produce new status dimensions.[20]

New dimensions of excellence and status often open up due to technological innovation. It was impossible to be a chart-topping pop star or a champion triathalete before there were radios and bikes. Liberal market societies not only create new technologies, they create proliferating forms of association, affiliation, expression, and identity at a sometimes alarming rate.[21] Each musical genre, each hobby, each committee, each church, each club, each ideology, each lifestyle provides a new dimension—a new frame of reference—for positional competition. Environmental purists can compete with one another to conspicuously consume eco-friendly products (or conspicuously refuse to consume much at all), while punk rockers duke it out on grounds of anti-establishment authenticity, and economics professors knock themselves dead trying to get articles into esoteric journals no one else cares about.

The cultural fragmentation some critics lament is precisely what liberates us from unavoidable zero-sum positional conflict. Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status. Dynamic market liberal societies create higher-order positive-sum games (for example, the ‘create a new status dimension’ game, or the ‘find the status dimension on which you rank highest’ game) that have lower-order zero-sum games as parts.

Once we recognise the anarchic multi-dimensionality of status, the frequent supposition of Frank, Layard, Cassidy, and others that the distribution of income—whether within the office or within the nation—is the the main dimension of positional competition begins to look bizarre. Struggling artists do not doubt their superiority in the face of successful accountants. And it should not need pointing out that many of us simply don’t know how much our friends make, and don’t much care.

Getting out of the rain
Are the external effects of positional competition really like pollution, as Layard says? Or is positional competition more like the light of the sun: it can burn you, but nothing grows without it? It’s not so easy to tell. Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker and his University of Chicago colleague Kevin Murphy have argued that without the motivating prospect of increased status, there would be ‘underinvestment’ in entrepreneurial activity: ‘Great scientists and outstanding entrepreneurs receive enormous prestige and status precisely in order to encourage scientific and startup activities,’ they write.[22] The benefits of such status-seeking, they say, may more than offset the negative effect of status ‘arms races’. Even if the taste for positional goods is unavoidable, Indiana University economist Richmond Harbaugh argues that fear of falling behind may induce high rates of savings—a kind of stockpiling for future status-signaling consumption races—with positive overall effects on economic growth.[23] There’s no excuse for ignoring the benefit side of the cost-benefit ledger.

Even if some positional competition creates negative spillovers, the best policy solution is rather less clear than Frank, Layard, and others imply. In his seminal 1960 article, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, Ronald Coase destroyed the older conception of externalities. Coase drew attention to the fact that externalities exist only as an interaction of preferences. I may smell of jasmine, to the delight of most who enter my orbit. But if you are allergic, my fragrance may be far from pleasant. A tax on jasmine may benefit you, but at the cost of those who take pleasure in the scent. Coase instructs us to look for the ‘least-cost avoider’. If it costs you least simply to stay out of wafting distance, then that will be the most efficient course.

The cultural variability and open-endedness of status makes it clear that we are not helpless to avoid the harsh side-effects of positional competition. It is within our power to opt out of any particular status race, and to compete for status on a different dimension, those ‘harmed’ may well be the least-cost avoiders. Remember Frank’s example of competing job-applicants in a race to buy an ever-fancier suit? The fact is, you simply don’t have to apply for that job. And even if you really want to, you can always buy your suit on the cheap from Overstock.com, hope nobody notices, and use the $500 you saved to buy studio time for your new indie-funkcore-folk band.

Frank, acknowledging the logic of Coase’s least-cost avoider principle, argues that even people who are uninterested in status may be harmed by others’ positional competition. For example, ‘positional externalities in the housing market,’ Frank argues, ‘also entail far more tangible costs, most notably that failure to keep up with community spending patterns means having to send one’s children to schools of below average quality. The scope for accommodation to such costs seems far more limited’ than in cases where we can simply choose not to let relative position bother us.[24] But this, Frank’s best example of a case where it is hard to opt out, is in fact a strikingly poor example. It turns entirely on the irrational bundling of schools and neighbourhoods in the American public system, a problem that could be entirely alleviated with a system of school vouchers that would allow families to send their kids to fancy schools outside their own modest neighbourhood. This suggests that the most direct policy implications of positional competition may not be higher taxes on work and consumption, but policies, like school vouchers, that make it easier to pick and choose among races. It should be possible to give your kids a leg up in the education race without also buying a mansion.

Conclusion
The argument for the politics of relative position is at bottom an argument about the limits of human freedom. We are, it is alleged, locked into the rat race by the relentless engine of our evolved status-hungry nature. And we are, it is argued, almost helpless to reinterpret the context, the frame of reference, within which we evaluate our own choices. But the unique human cultural capacity—equally a part of our biology—liberates us.

Where benevolence, fidelity, cooperation, innovation, and excellence are esteemed, positional races may produce mutual advantage instead of mutual destruction. And while the game of status may be locally zero-sum, it can be globally positive-sum, as scientific, economic, and cultural entrepreneurs identify new dimensions of excellence in which to compete and earn freely conferred prestige as payment for benefit to others. We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time. We can, like Gauguin, quit law and family to paint naked natives in Tahiti. Or, better, we can move the family to a quieter place where houses are cheap and schools are good. (‘Is this heaven?’ ‘No, Iowa.’) If we are aggrieved by the rigours of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.

Posted at 8:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

Nearly 900 African-Americans fought on the Japanese island but not one appears in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-tipped film, writes Dan Glaister

Los Angeles
Friday October 20, 2006

The portrayal in Clint Eastwood’s film, Flags of Our Fathers, of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.
The portrayal in Clint Eastwood’s film, Flags of Our Fathers, of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.

On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima.

“There were bodies bobbing up all around, all these dead men,” said the former US marine, now 83 and living in San Diego. “Then we were crawling on our bellies and moving up the beach. I jumped in a foxhole and there was a young white marine holding his family pictures. He had been hit by shrapnel, he was bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth. It frightened me. The only thing I could do was lie there and repeat the Lord’s prayer, over and over and over.”

Article continues
Sadly, Sgt McPhatter’s experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island. While the battle scene’s in the film - which opens today in the US - show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.

The film tells the story of the raising of the stars and stripes over Mount Suribachi at the tip of the island. The moment was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the US war effort. Eastwood’s film follows the marines in the picture, including the Native American Ira Hayes, as they were removed from combat operations to promote the sale of government war bonds.

Mr McPhatter, who went on to serve in Vietnam and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the US navy, even had a part in the raising of the flag. “The man who put the first flag up on Iwo Jima got a piece of pipe from me to put the flag up on,” he says. That, too, is absent from the film.

“Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face,” said Mr McPhatter. “This is the last straw. I feel like I’ve been denied, I’ve been insulted, I’ve been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism.”

Melton McLaurin, author of the forthcoming The Marines of Montford Point and an accompanying documentary to be released in February, says that there were hundreds of black soldiers on Iwo Jima from the first day of the 35-day battle. Although most of the black marine units were assigned ammunition and supply roles, the chaos of the landing soon undermined the battle plan.

“When they first hit the beach the resistance was so fierce that they weren’t shifting ammunition, they were firing their rifles,” said Dr McLaurin.

The failure to transfer the active role played by African-Americans at Iwo Jima to the big screen does not surprise him. “One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by. Blacks are not surprised at all when they see movies set where black troops were engaged and never show on the screen. I would like to say that it was from ignorance but anybody can do research and come up with books about African-Americans in world war two. I think it has to do with box office and what producers of movies think Americans really want to see.”

He added: “I want to see these guys get their due. They’re just so anxious to have their story told and to have it known.”

Roland Durden, another black marine, landed on the beach on the third day. “When we hit the shore we were loaded with ammunition and the Japanese hit us with mortar.” Private Durden was soon assigned to burial detail, “burying the dead day in, day out. It seemed like endless days. They treated us like workmen rather than marines.”

Mr Durden, too, is wearied but unsurprised at the omissions in Eastwood’s film. “We’re always left out of the films, from John Wayne on,” he said. Mr Durden ascribes to both the conspiracy as well as the cock-up theory of history. “They didn’t want blacks to be heroes. This was pre-1945, pre civil rights.”

Eastwood and the makers of the film, Warner Bros and Dreamworks, did not comment for this article. The omission was first remarked upon in a review by Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, who noted that the history of black involvement at Iwo Jima was recorded in several books, including Christopher Moore’s recent Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - the Unsung Heroes of World War II. “They weren’t in the background at all,” said Moore.

“The people carrying the ammunition were 90% black, so that’s an opportunity to show black soldiers. These are our films and very often they become our history, historical documents.” Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veterans (2004), wrote to Eastwood and the film’s producers pleading with them to include the experience of black soldiers. HarperCollins, the book’s publishers, sent the director a copy, but never heard back.

“It would take only a couple of extras and everyone would be happy,” she said. “No one’s asking for them to be the stars of the movies, but at least show that they were there. This is the way a new generation will think about Iwo Jima. Once again it will be that African-American people did not serve, that we were absent. It’s a lie.”

The first chapter to James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers, which forms the basis of the movie, opens with a quotation from president Harry Truman. “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” It would provide a fitting endnote to Eastwood’s film.

Posted at 1:58 AM · Comments (1)

An injustly neglected master of hard-bop. I’ve gotten into listening to Mobley’s own sides recently (Workout, which is my favorite, and Soul Station, which is another masterpiece) after have dug his stuff as a session man for a who’s who of giants for years.
Mobley is one of those musicians who may have been too secure and too sure-footed for his own good. He wasn’t the eternal searcher like his visionary peers, Coltrane and Ornette.
But this man didn’t have bad days, and his music is sleek and muscular without ever descending into ths slick.

Posted at 1:40 PM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Published: October 19, 2006
SHANGHAI Visitors to the Korean War museum at the booming border city of Dandong are treated to this précis of a 1950s-era conflict that claimed huge Chinese casualties, which even today remain incompletely acknowledged:

“Ignoring our government’s serious warning, American invaders crossed the 38th parallel in early October, 1950, and brought the war to the Yalu River. Bombarding our Northeastern cities and suburbs continuously and bombing our commercial boats, they purposefully expanded the invasive war.”

In this account of things, China is playing a role at once heroic and fraternal, rushing to the rescue of the Korean peoples, barring the way in this part of the world to American imperialism and leaving in place a comradely Communist state on its border.

So it has been for the last five decades, or at least so it would seem. China and North Korea, each nation the other’s only explicit ally, living side by side in quiet sympathy.

History, when suppressed, has an insistent way of resurfacing, though, and so it is today with China’s long Korean adventure. This country long ago abandoned the ideology the two neighbors once shared, and now belatedly, but inevitably if China is to assume its proper place on the world stage, the ally is beginning to be recognized for what it is: an encumbrance and embarrassment.

The resurgent China of the last quarter-century has always fantasized that it could tiptoe its way into the first rank of global powers. That desire was captured in the still often- cited phrase of Deng Xiaoping, who said “lie low in times of adversity,” as well as in the clumsier more recent slogan invoking the country’s “peaceful rise.”

That the North Korean alliance represents a liability from a more plainly muscular era, that of Mao Zedong, does not mean that it can be shirked. The country’s announcement that it tested a nuclear device recently, along with what appear to be preparations for new nuclear provocations, present the first of what promises to be a suite of difficult choices for China.

The old ally has, in other words, thrust a country that during its reform era has made a fetish of keeping its head down low into the unaccustomed and uncomfortable position of having to face its responsibilities.

China’s silent, steadfast support for North Korea over these many years has left Beijing with nothing but awful, indeed painful, choices. Allowing North Korea to get away with its nuclear romp would almost inevitably mean the start of a new and dangerous arms race in northeast Asia.

None of this region’s major powers will accept to live as they have before for very long. After six decades of official pacifism, Japan was already groping toward a new, remilitarized status, and North Korea’s recent mischief may have freed the hands of the country’s conservative leadership to break with a longstanding taboo involving nuclear weapons.

Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine South Korea opting to remain the only state in the region without a bomb or bomb program of its own.

Less obviously, turning a blind eye to a bomb-wielding North Korea will raise pressure on China farther afield, too. Globally, pressure will rise, not fall, to do something about Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons program, and China, with its growing presence in the Middle East, and its fast-growing thirst for imported oil, will find it harder and harder to avoid taking a meaningful stance.

Seen from Beijing, the costs of doing something about North Korea must seem even more frightful. As widely noted, China has the means to bring about North Korea’s collapse. Stopping food and especially subsidized fuel shipments would clearly do the trick. Day-after scenarios all resemble truly horrifying nightmares, though.

The sudden outflow of hundreds of thousands or even millions of North Koreans would represent a huge and costly humanitarian burden. More worrisome, the new arrivals could revive contentious territorial questions between China and Korea that have been resurfacing of late.

The current border between the two countries was established by Japan and displeases many Koreans, who cite the presence of millions of ethnic kinsmen on the Chinese side, along with ancient Korean archaeological sites, as evidence they were cheated.

A few years ago, the worry here might have been that a Korean Peninsula united on South Korea’s terms could bring American troops right up to the Chinese border, or at least place a frank military ally of the United States on China’s doorstep.

Today, South Korea is hewing more and more to its own path, steadily diluting its alliance with Washington. There is scant comfort in this for China, though, because this means two rich and assertive neighbors to deal with simultaneously, South Korea and Japan, rather than the deferential clients this country has always preferred to surround itself with.

Whichever route Beijing chooses, painful questions of responsibility lie ahead. Self-serving, make-believe history, like the war museum exhibits at Dandong, which pretend that America started the war and that China flew to the rescue and stood on the side of justice will have to be squared with a reality shot through with atrocity.

Where has China been through the years of starvation, in which millions of North Koreans have died because of capricious policies? What has China said to its ally during decades of a vicious brand of totalitarian rule that this country knows all too well from its own experience, and has fortunately rejected?

It is fine and well to complain about other states behaving as the world’s policeman. But as China steps into the future, its involvement with countries like North Korea suggests that tiptoeing will be ever more difficult. And coupled with the question of what to do, come questions about what you have done.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Tomorrow: Roger Cohen on the U.S. midterm elections.


SHANGHAI Visitors to the Korean War museum at the booming border city of Dandong are treated to this précis of a 1950s-era conflict that claimed huge Chinese casualties, which even today remain incompletely acknowledged:

“Ignoring our government’s serious warning, American invaders crossed the 38th parallel in early October, 1950, and brought the war to the Yalu River. Bombarding our Northeastern cities and suburbs continuously and bombing our commercial boats, they purposefully expanded the invasive war.”

In this account of things, China is playing a role at once heroic and fraternal, rushing to the rescue of the Korean peoples, barring the way in this part of the world to American imperialism and leaving in place a comradely Communist state on its border.

So it has been for the last five decades, or at least so it would seem. China and North Korea, each nation the other’s only explicit ally, living side by side in quiet sympathy.

History, when suppressed, has an insistent way of resurfacing, though, and so it is today with China’s long Korean adventure. This country long ago abandoned the ideology the two neighbors once shared, and now belatedly, but inevitably if China is to assume its proper place on the world stage, the ally is beginning to be recognized for what it is: an encumbrance and embarrassment.

The resurgent China of the last quarter-century has always fantasized that it could tiptoe its way into the first rank of global powers. That desire was captured in the still often- cited phrase of Deng Xiaoping, who said “lie low in times of adversity,” as well as in the clumsier more recent slogan invoking the country’s “peaceful rise.”

That the North Korean alliance represents a liability from a more plainly muscular era, that of Mao Zedong, does not mean that it can be shirked. The country’s announcement that it tested a nuclear device recently, along with what appear to be preparations for new nuclear provocations, present the first of what promises to be a suite of difficult choices for China.

The old ally has, in other words, thrust a country that during its reform era has made a fetish of keeping its head down low into the unaccustomed and uncomfortable position of having to face its responsibilities.

China’s silent, steadfast support for North Korea over these many years has left Beijing with nothing but awful, indeed painful, choices. Allowing North Korea to get away with its nuclear romp would almost inevitably mean the start of a new and dangerous arms race in northeast Asia.

None of this region’s major powers will accept to live as they have before for very long. After six decades of official pacifism, Japan was already groping toward a new, remilitarized status, and North Korea’s recent mischief may have freed the hands of the country’s conservative leadership to break with a longstanding taboo involving nuclear weapons.

Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine South Korea opting to remain the only state in the region without a bomb or bomb program of its own.

For the entire article please see the link below:
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Copyright The Guardian

Joanna Moorhead visited both. She was shocked not only by the vast differences in the quality of care women and babies receive, but also by how easily things could be put right

Tuesday October 3, 2006
The Guardian

A newborn baby holds onto an adult’s finger
A newborn baby holds onto an adult’s finger. Photograph: Rolf Vennenbernd/EPA

It’s 10am on a stiflingly hot Monday morning and I am in a delivery room with one of the unluckiest mothers on the planet. She is Dahara Laouali, and at the moment she is lying on a narrow, dusty hospital trolley pushing her baby into the world. Although the birth is imminent - Insa, the midwife, says that with the next contraction the head will be out - Dahara is making no noise at all. This is Niger, where the tradition is that mothers labour in silence. It is hard keeping quiet in the throes of childbirth: but almost everything is hard for mothers in Niger.

Article continues
Dahara pushes, pain creasing her sweating face, and then pushes again - and suddenly between her legs there is a little boy with the walnut features of newborns everywhere, and a mop of damp, dark hair. Insa gives a delighted squeal, but Dahara is still silent: as her baby is wrapped in a cloth, she turns her face to the wall and sobs quietly. Maybe she is tired after the labour. Maybe she wants to be alone. Maybe she is not ready quite yet to welcome the baby into her heart. But maybe, too, she is remembering other births, and other babies. Because this boy is the fifth child Dahara has pushed into the world and of the others, only one is still alive.

This, then, is Dahara’s misfortune: and it is not just a personal tragedy, but one she shares with every other mother in her country. Niger is officially the most dangerous place on earth to have a baby: in May, a Save the Children report found that, of the 125 nations it surveyed, Niger was where childbirth was most likely to end badly. Statistically, Dahara, who is 26, has a one-in-seven chance of dying during her reproductive years as a result of a pregnancy-related complication or infection, or childbirth injury. Her baby son, lying here on the table, has a 15% chance of not reaching his first birthday and a one-in-six chance of not making it to the age of five. And Dahara is fortunate to have had the skills of a midwife like the cheerful Insa: across the country, only 16% of deliveries are attended by anyone with any training at all.

Dahara lives in a village called Bande, about two hours’ drive from Zinder, the rundown former French colonial capital. To call the birth centre here basic is an understatement: to the western eye, from the outside, it resembles a neglected public lavatory. Inside are two small, grubby rooms: the delivery room, with its trolley and rickety desk, and the recovery room, which boasts a mattress-less bed and a greying cot. Here Dahara and her new son - whose name is to be Mohammed - will stay for a couple of hours. Then, Dahara will tie Mohammed to her back and walk the kilometre or so to her village. There is no aftercare, Insa explains: no midwife will check up on mother or baby, so Dahara will have to use her own judgment if there are any post-natal problems and seek help if and where she can. Dahara’s husband has not been involved in the birth and is unlikely to play a big role in the early weeks with the baby: in Niger, birth is considered to be women’s work and fathers keep their distance.

The only piece of medical equipment in evidence in the entire centre is a plastic bowl into which Dahara has delivered the placenta.

Ten days later, I am in another maternity unit. This one is in the University Hospital at Uppsala, north of Stockholm. Bande is 3,200 miles away, although I feel as if I have travelled from the middle ages to the middle of the 21st century. In almost every way, giving birth in Sweden is light years away from giving birth in Niger. And yet, of course, it is all ultimately about the same thing: a mother and a baby.

The mother and baby I meet in Uppsala are Carmen Helwig and her new daughter. Carmen paints a strikingly different picture of new motherhood. She is older - 38 - but Tess is her first baby. She was was born by caesarean section because of worries over a uterine scar, the result of previous surgery. It might have been fine, the doctors told her, but there was a risk it might rupture. “Why take that risk?” says Carmen, smiling. Tess was born three weeks early and is slightly underweight, but she is being carefully monitored at Uppsala and Carmen knows she will soon be taking her daughter home. Until then, she, her partner Tommy Svedberg, 41 - who was at the birth and is now taking paternity leave to be involved in his daughter’s first weeks - and Tess are staying at the hospital, in a large, hotel-like double room. “Once I’m home, I’ll be able to phone the hospital with any worries and the midwives will come out to see me every day if I need them,” she says.

Carmen is Dahara’s mirror-image, one of the luckiest mothers in the world. The Save the Children report found that, while risk can never be entirely removed from the business of becoming a parent, the dangers for Swedish women are minuscule in comparison with the risks for mothers in Niger. Carmen’s chance of dying as a result of childbirth over her lifetime is one in 29,800 (Dahara’s, remember, was just one in seven). The risk of Tess dying in her first year is one in 333. In Sweden, 100% of births are attended by a skilled, trained midwife. Overall, it is the safest place in the world to become a mother.

More than 99% of births in Sweden take place in hospital but it would be a vast oversimplification to attribute the gulf between the two countries’ statistics to this fact alone. Layer upon layer of disadvantage and deprivation, and advantage and blessing, have meshed together to create the circumstances that divide Dahara and Mohammed from Carmen and Tess. Niger is rated the world’s poorest country by the UN. Around 14% of its under-fives are significantly malnourished (and in the aftermath of last year’s crop shortage and in the face of another shortfall this year, that figure could soon be much worse). Less than half its population has access to safe water.

In Niger, women are more than materially disadvantaged - they are educationally and physically disadvantaged too. Fewer than one in 10 is literate. Most girls marry early and have many children: the fertility rate, at 7.5, is among the highest in the world. Most of the mothers I talked to had had their first baby at 15 or 16 -one had had 11 babies before she was 25. Only 4% use modern contraception and not for cultural or religious reasons - many of the women I asked said they would welcome advice on spacing their children.

Sweden, by contrast, is one of the wealthiest economies on earth. Its people are healthy and well-fed, its shops well-stocked, its communications excellent and its women well-educated, with virtually 100% female literacy. More than 72% use modern contraception and the average age for a first birth is 29. The fertility rate is 1.7. It is, in every way, a happier and healthier place to be a woman.

And its maternity service is second-to-none. Antenatal care in Sweden is free. Women have a legal right to take time out of the working day to attend appointments and take-up is almost 100%. Mothers in labour are looked after with every hi-tech advantage possible; the foetal monitoring system here is among the most advanced and sensitive in the world. Dr Pia Axemo, the senior obstetrician at Uppsala, explains how pethidine - still used in the UK as a form of pain relief during labour - is deemed obsolete in Sweden. “Around 31% of mothers have epidurals but these are mobile epidurals and they can still walk round,” she says. “But we feel strongly about women being supported in labour and we encourage them to try other sorts of pain relief - massage, a shower, acupuncture - before opting for an epidural.”

The impression you get as you chat to mothers in Uppsala is that they feel remarkably well looked after, cared for, listened to and supported. It is not just about technology and machines. In a confident, well-developed, successful maternity unit such as this one, there is a generosity of resources that makes the mother-to-be feel individually cared for. It is something Gunilla Hallberg, the doctor who heads the unit, is particularly proud of. “What makes us successful is that we put women at the centre of what we’re doing,” she says. “We have everything technology can offer but, even more importantly, we treat mothers as individuals.”

Individual care isn’t a phrase you feel gets bandied about much at the main regional maternity hospital in Zinder - the Maternité Centrale, a blue-and-white painted building in the centre of the city. This is what passes for high-grade care in Niger, but it is pitiful in its privations. Where Uppsala’s hospital is white, clean, spacious and calm, Zinder’s is dirty, cramped and chaotic. The corridors are crammed with dusty, ancient-looking equipment. There are open bins and swarms of flies in the quadrangle, and cats roam free. The paint is peeling, there is no air conditioning despite temperatures of 40C and more, and everywhere you look there are people. Because, it transpires, when you come into hospital to have a baby in Niger, your relatives come too: they sleep on the floor by your bed, they help look after you and your baby, and they are here, too, to donate blood if you have a postpartum haemorrhage - you only get blood if you bring your own donors.

It is hard to imagine the hell into which Zinder’s mothers-to-be descend if they end up giving birth here: but if your imagination isn’t up to the job, a tour of the delivery facilities brings sound effects to ram the point home. It may be the tradition in Niger to bite your tongue through contractions, but the women whose complicated labours have forced them to seek help here are clearly past caring about niceties such as protecting their honour. They scream, they shriek, they moan, they writhe: and they do it two to a room because there is no such thing as private delivery space. Nor for the most part is there any such thing as pain relief - a trip round the dispensary reveals empty shelves. Only women who have a caesarean are given anaesthetic.

Mariama Bashir, the general manager of Zinder’s maternity hospital, is a strikingly beautiful young woman in traditional African dress who sits behind a desk in a cramped office with a whirling fan. In between a constant stream of interruptions from harassed-looking midwives, she delivers the statistics with an air of weariness. Of 2,600 babies born here last year, around one in six was dead at delivery or died soon afterwards. In addition, a total of 61 mothers lost their lives. This is shocking stuff: in Uppsala, where there are 4,000 births a year, two to three babies will die annually and one woman will die, on average, every seven years.

But there is more to the horrors of Zinder. Many of the women who come here will have travelled long distances, often in agony, to reach the hospital: some, says Bashir, come from villages as far as 50km away. The commonest problems that bring them here are pre-eclampsia, eclampsia itself (which causes fits) and women whose pelvises are too narrow to allow the baby out (especially common in teenage mothers). For the many women who need instrumental deliveries, the hospital has two sets of forceps and one ventouse. “But the ventouse is not in good condition,” says Bashir. “We need a new ventouse. But then, we need many things.”

More shocking still is the fact that, unlike Sweden where excellent maternity care comes free of charge, Niger’s women have to pay for the privilege of their substandard, inadequate services (while healthcare fees have been abolished in principle, they are still enforced in practice). And, although the sums are paltry by western standards - an antenatal check-up is 1,000 CFA, or £1; a new-baby check-up is 5,000 CFA, or £5; a caesarean is 17,000 CSA, or £17 - the amounts are impossibly large for impoverished families in a country where the average per capita income is 127,000 CFA or £127 a year. In the village of Yawouri, outside Zinder, nurse Abdulaye Hachiou explains that women often fail to seek help in labour because they - or their husbands - fear the expense. “You get husbands who say their wives can’t be brought to the clinic because they don’t want to pay the bill. And then the wife gets worse and they say, well there’s no point in taking her now, she’s going to die anyway.”

Removing healthcare fees, says Save the Children, would save women’s and babies’ lives in Niger. But that is far from the whole solution. The country needs more trained midwives, well-equipped antenatal clinics (one I visited shared its only blood pressure monitor with the district nurse - if she was using it, the blood pressure of mothers-to-be went unchecked), more obstetricians and a modern maternity unit in every town. In a perfect world, Niger would also have a vigilant system of postnatal care and beyond that, but equally important, clean water, a decent standard of living and good healthcare.

But that would be in a perfect world. So must childbirth continue to kill women and babies, on the sort of scale it did 200 years ago in the west, for many more decades to come? Not necessarily, says Save the Children. Anne Tinker, the Washington-based author of the report, says she believes seven out of 10 of the lives currently lost could be saved if a few low-cost measures were put into place. Education, she says, is key. “If we could raise awareness of some of the health issues, we could save many lives,” she says. “Women need to know about the danger signs in pregnancy. They need to know when to seek medical help. They need to know how important it is to get help in labour if things aren’t progressing, rather than leaving it too late. And they need to know how to look after their newborns and when to take them to the health centre.”

In Zinder, Dr Antoinette Awaya, of Save the Children, is putting some of these measures into practice. She runs a health education programme, running training courses for volunteer health workers. The volunteers learn basic information about healthcare, hygiene and feeding babies, and pass it on to other mothers in their village. “Saving mothers’ and babies’ lives here needn’t be expensive,” she says. “There’s so much that can be done through education. Breastfeeding, for example, saves many babies: but the tradition here is that mothers don’t give colostrum, the first milk, because it looks yellow and they think it’s bad. Once you get the message across that this is the best milk, that it can protect their babies from disease, they get on with it and give it: it’s not that mothers are resistant to the things that could make a difference, it’s that the messages aren’t getting through.”

Beyond education, there are other ways of using limited funds to the best possible advantage: immunising pregnant women against tetanus, for example, protects both mothers and babies and it is one of the most effective and least expensive vaccines on the planet. Treating pregnant women for malaria, which is endemic in most parts of Niger, can reduce the risk of prematurity and low birthweight by 40%. Providing postnatal support costs about half the amount of providing care during birth itself, but has the potential to reduce newborn mortality by between 20 and 40%. So, while there is much to be done, there are clearly cost-effective priorities. Until now, says Save the Children, child survival programmes in places such as Niger have tended to concentrate on diarrhoea and vaccine-preventable diseases. What is needed now is an emphasis on preventing deaths in babies, especially those in the early days and weeks of life.

On my final day in Zinder I am at a rural health clinic. It is quiet, the nurse is sitting at his desk, the sun is scorching. Suddenly, across the dusty scrubland, there is a flurry of noise and commotion: a woman is running towards us, a baby in her arms. Even from a distance you can see, from the way the head is thrown back, that this is a child in trouble. The mother, meanwhile, is crying out, shouting for help.

The nurse gets up, runs to her, takes the baby, disappears into his stifling, dark little consulting room. He shouts to the mother, a bit roughly, to stay out of the way. She stands at the door moaning, craning her neck, trying to look into the room to see her baby, to find out what the nurse is doing to him, to check he is all right.

But her baby is not all right. The nurse says he is “très grave”: his only hope is the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital 20km away. The mother is lucky: because there is a Save the Children car here, she can get a lift to the hospital. She and the child are bundled in, her face contorted in panic, the baby’s contorted in pain. This, then, is what infant mortality in Africa looks like when you get close up. This is how it happens. This is how it ends.

And it does end, for this baby, about an hour later. He makes it to the hospital, but dies soon after being admitted. He had an infection. He was just four months old. Not a chance, says the driver from Save the Children later when he returns to break the news. “C’est la vie,” he says, sadly. “C’est la vie, ici”.

A tale of two pregnancies: from a helicopter to a horse and cart

Sweden

Lisa Klercker is 35, and 30 weeks pregnant with her third child. She lives in a Stockholm suburb. Her other children are Ebba, seven, and Max, four. She has monthly antenatal check-ups at the mothercare centre near her home, and she will give birth in hospital. Lisa says that she is quietly confident that the delivery will go well. “We do have friends whose babies have had problems, so I don’t take anything for granted,” she says. If there are problems, she knows she will get the best possible care: before Ebba’s delivery, the baby’s heartbeat dipped suddenly, and she was transferred to hospital by helicopter. “It was quite dramatic but the medical staff were really calm. They made me feel everything would turn out OK and it did,” she says. “What I like about being in hospital is that I know everything I need will be there. I feel I’ll be in a safe place, with the best possible care available.” Lisa expects to go home within hours of the delivery, and will then have visits from a team of postnatal midwives to help with any early problems.

Niger

Salawa Abdou is 20 and expecting her second child in a few weeks’ time - she is not sure exactly when. She lives in Fardun Sofo, a village an hour by car from Zinder. Salawa has had no antenatal care. She dreads the delivery because she endured a very difficult, 48-hour labour with her son, Banani, two years ago. “It was very painful and very long,” she says. “I was at home and we tried everything, but the baby wouldn’t come out. It was terrible. In the end I was lucky, but I worry a lot about what is going to happen this time.” Death is a real possibility for women who get into difficulties giving birth in Fardun Sofo: Zeinabou Abdou, the village’s traditional birth attendant, has years of experience but no drugs and no equipment except for a packet of razor blades for cutting the umbilical cord. If Salawa needs medical help, she will be put on a cart and pulled by horse to the small maternity unit in Matamy, 15km away. So far this year, two mothers-to-be, out of a population of around 400, have died making the journey.

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Jon Stewart’s program is one show viewers take seriously
Copyright The Baltimore Sun
Originally published October 12, 2006
NEW YORK // Hipsters on the streets of New York are wearing “Stewart/Colbert ‘08” T-shirts, promoting a Dream Team presidential ticket featuring the Comedy Central stars. And the subway is plastered with ads for Man of the Year, the new Barry Levinson film that imagines an American public so disgusted with politics that it elects a fake news anchor president.

Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, insists he’s not running. But judging from the reverential reception he received at last weekend’s New Yorker Festival, and the fact that tickets to his appearance sold out in about two minutes, there’s a hunger for something truthful and authentic in American politics. Man of the Year suggests the place to find it is in fake news.

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“I’m a jester. A jester doesn’t rule the kingdom. He makes fun of the king,” Robin Williams’ character (Tom Dobbs) says in the film, which opens tomorrow. Still, he’s persuaded to run for president against a Democrat and a Republican who are indistinguishable. Dobbs is the child exposing the emperors for what they are - scripted, risk-averse career pols who haven’t given a straight answer in so long they no longer remember how.

“If it was unpatriotic to question the government, we’d still be English,” Dobbs says during a presidential debate in the movie.

You’ll never see Stewart in such a venue. He’s a reluctant hero who doesn’t want to shoulder the burden of educating a generation of “stoned slackers” - Bill O’Reilly’s inexact term for Stewart’s audience. He repeatedly insists that he is only a comedian and that his show is about making jokes.

“We don’t have reporters. We have a guy with TiVo,” he said at the New Yorker Festival on Sunday. “There’s no way you can get real news from us. I know. I’ve seen the show.”

Stewart is being too modest. He is watched by 3 million people not just because he’s funny, though that’s essential, but because he tells truths that aren’t often found in other media. When the Bush administration trumpeted its Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, Stewart called it a Coalition of the Piddling and noted the entire contribution of one nation was bomb-sniffing monkeys.

This week Stewart juxtaposed Bush’s statements on North Korea after that nation successfully tested a nuclear weapon (“The United States condemns this provocative act. The United States remains committed to diplomacy.”) with his statements on Iraq three years ago, when it was only suspected of having weapons of mass destruction. (“Our demands are that Saddam Hussein disarm. If he doesn’t disarm, we’ll disarm him.”)

The media has the ability to make such comparisons - it’s a simple matter of going into the archives - but that rarely happened until Hurricane Katrina last year exposed the discrepancy between what the administration was saying and what was happening.

Before Katrina, “The front lines of the media, and in particular television news, which is still the way most Americans get the news, simply did not want to believe they were being lied to, and when [the lies] were blatant, they were lazy,” said New York Times columnist Frank Rich in an interview with The Sun.

“A lot of the information that disputed the administration’s version of events was out there - it was hiding in plain sight and sometimes Stewart would just call attention to it,” said Rich, an unabashed admirer of Stewart and Stephen Colbert in his columns and author of the new book The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

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Copyright Reuters

BANJUL, Oct 12 (Reuters) - “My friend from Reuters, how long have you been in Africa?,” asked Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, President and Grand Master of the Republic of Gambia.
It was an unsettling first response to my question about illegal migrants, which Jammeh, fresh from winning his third term in office last month, took as a cue to berate me for Europe’s colonial past in Africa.
“You’re an immigrant too,” the 41-year-old leader retorted at his post-victory news conference.
His may be the smallest country in continental Africa, but the former coup leader, ceremonial sword by his side and Koran in his hand, isn’t afraid to punch above his weight and delights in bellicose rhetoric to match his image.
His declared ambition is “to make this country the best in the world” and he woe betide anyone who gets in his way.
Gambia’s press applauds every comment he makes, even when he reserves the right to ban any newspaper which displeases him and lock up journalists for life.
“Define press freedom,” he growled when one foreign reporter asked about the killing two years ago of a local newspaper editor, shot in his car while under government surveillance.
“Let me tell you one thing. The whole world can go to hell. If I want to ban any newspaper, I will, with good reason,” he barked. The applause turned nervous.
“I don’t believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life. Then maybe at some point we say, ‘Oh, he is too old to be fed by the state’, we release him and let him become destitute.”
Ever the showman, he later cracked a joke to lighten the mood. This, after all, was his victory appearance. “Who cut your trousers? A carpenter?” he quipped to another journalist, winning a burst of nervous laughter.
UNDER THE THUMB
West Africa has its fair share of authoritarian leaders, who inspire everything from violent rebellion to browbeaten resignation among their people. Many use their security forces to make life difficult for journalists.
Gambia, a haven for European package tourists seeking cheap winter sun, seemed less threatening, I thought as I looked through the plane window at Banjul’s palm-fringed beaches and mangrove-covered islets.
But the road from the airport passes by the Mile Two prison, where locals and rights groups say political prisoners are held without charge and some have disappeared.
My hotel, eerily quiet during the tourist low season, is next door to the headquarters of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), whose agents report directly to Jammeh.
The president’s presence permeates every aspect of political life in this former British protectorate. It all seems incongruous in a country otherwise so laid back that it prides itself on running on GMT — Gambian Maybe Time.
Roads close and “fans” (many of them civil servants and soldiers) line the street whenever Jammeh’s six-wheeled stretched black Humvee sweeps past. His entourage closely monitors media coverage of Gambia.
Few Gambians are ready to challenge a man who says God sent him to rule them.
“I have very few friends because I know what I stand for and I will always remain steadfast in what I believe in,” Jammeh said, running prayer beads between his fingers.
“I’m not here to be King, I’m not a ruler, I’m a servant of the people,” he said. Then he turned to leave for a beach party to celebrate the start of his next five years in power. REUTERS Reut16:00 10-12-06

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Tuesday October 10, 2006
Copyright The Guardian

North Korea’s nuclear test is only the latest failure of the west’s
proliferation policy. And it demonstrates the need to return to the proven methods of multilateral disarmament. Far from being crazy, the
North Korean policy is quite rational. Faced with a US government that believes the communist regime should be removed from the map, the North Koreans pressed ahead with building a deterrent. George Bush
stopped the oil
supplies to North Korea that had been part of a framework to end its
nuclear programme
previously agreed
with Bill Clinton. Bush had already threatened pre-emptive war - Iraq-style
- against a
regime he dubbed as
belonging to the axis of evil.
The background to North Korea’s test is that, since the end of the cold
war, the nuclear
states have tried to
impose a double standard, hanging on to nuclear weapons for themselves and
their friends
while denying them
to others. Like alcoholics condemning teenage drinking, the nuclear powers
have made the
spread of nuclear
weapons the terror of our age, distracting attention from their own
behaviour. Western
leaders refuse to accept
that our own actions encourage others to follow suit.
North Korea’s action has now increased the number of nuclear weapon states
to nine. Since
1998 India,
Pakistan and now North Korea have joined America, China, France, Russia,
Israel and the UK.
The domino effect is all too obvious. Britain wants nuclear weapons so long
as the French do.
India said it
would build one if there were no multilateral disarmament talks. Pakistan
followed rapidly. In
Iran and the Arab
world Israel’s bomb had always been an incentive to join in. But for my
Iranian friends,
waking up to a Pakistani
bomb can be compared to living in a non-nuclear Britain and waking up to
find Belgium had
tested a nuclear
weapon.
East Asia is unlikely to be different. In 2002 Japan’s then chief cabinet
secretary, Yasuo
Fukuda, told reporters
that “depending on the world situation, circumstances and public opinion
could require Japan
to possess
nuclear weapons”. The deputy cabinet secretary at the time, Shinzo Abe -
now Japan’s prime
minister - said
afterwards that it would be acceptable for Japan to develop small,
strategic nuclear weapons.
It was not supposed to be like this. At the end of the cold war,
disarmament treaties were
being signed, and in
1996 the big powers finally agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons for the
first time since
1945. The public,
the pressure groups and the media all breathed a great sigh of relief and
forgot about the
bomb. Everyone
thought that with the Soviet Union gone, multilateral disarmament would
accelerate.
But with public attention elsewhere, the Dr Strangeloves in Washington,
Moscow and Paris
stopped the
disarmament process and invented new ideas requiring new nuclear weapons. A
decade ago,
Clinton’s Pentagon
placed “non-state actors” (ie terrorists) on the list of likely targets for
US nuclear weapons.
Now all the
established nuclear states are building new nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration made things worse. First, it rejected the policy of
controlling
armaments through
treaties, which had been followed by previous presidents since 1918.
Second, it proposed to
use military - even
nuclear - force in a pre-emptive attack to prevent proliferation. This
policy was used as a
pretext for attacking
Iraq and may now be used on either Iran or North Korea. More pre-emptive
war will produce
suffering and
chaos, while nothing is done about India, Israel and Pakistan. So we are
left with a policy of
vigilante bravado
for which we have sacrificed the proven methods of weapons control.
Fortunately, there is a realistic option. Max Kampelman, Ronald Reagan’s
nuclear negotiator,
has proposed that
Washington’s top priority should be the elimination of all weapons of mass
destruction on
earth, including
those possessed by the US. At the ongoing disarmament meetings at the UN,
the vast
majority of nations argue
for a phased process to achieve this goal. They can point to the success of
the UN inspectors
in Iraq as proof
that international inspection can work, even in the toughest cases. The
Intermediate Nuclear
Forces Treaty that
removed the missiles from Greenham is an example of an agreement no one thought
possible that worked
completely. This, and other legacies from the cold war, can and should be
applied globally.
A group of Britain’s closest allies, including South Africa and Ireland,
are trying to broker a
deal on global
disarmament. Tragically, Britain won’t be helping. Political parties and
the media are deaf to
these initiatives.
The three main parties all follow more or less the US approach. They know
that no US
government will lease the
UK a successor to Trident if London steps out of line on nuclear weapons
policy. The media
almost never report
on UN disarmament debates. Disarmament has become the word that dare not be
said in
polite society.
Do we have to wait for another pre-emptive war or until the Japanese go
nuclear before the
British political
class comes to realise that there can be a soft landing from these nuclear
crises?
· Dan Plesch, a fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies and
Keele University, is
the author of The
Beauty Queen’s Guide to World Peace
www.danplesch.net
Dp27@soas.ac.uk

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Copyright - The Boston Review

8 In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion … raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful—hell, most alive—when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness … All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.”

The great exception to all this is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love or passion or terrible nakedness. There, critics view emotional responses—if they, or their readers, have any—not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment. When we enter the world of photography criticism we travel far from Baudelaire’s exploration of his pleasure; for there is little pleasure to be had, and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

* * *

Susan Sontag’s On Photography was published in 1977, and it remains astonishingly incisive. It has been, rightly, immensely influential on other photography critics. And immensely influential, too, in setting the particularly reproachful tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag’s description of photography in the first chapter of the book, which establishes a voice, an attitude, an approach that is maintained throughout. Sontag describes photography as, among other things, “grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” “reductive,” and “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” A typical sentence reads, “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” Metaphor indeed! On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic.

So, too, was Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, first published in France in 1980. Delicate and playful, this book is a love letter to the photograph. Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire—or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: “ A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, for Barthes describes photographers as “agents of Death” and the photograph as a “catastrophe”; also as “flat,” “platitudinous,” “stupid,” “without culture,” and—most unkind—‚ “undialectical.” The photograph “teaches me nothing,” Barthes insists: it “completely de-realizes the world of human conflicts and desires.”

Continuing this classic-modern tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most urgent, morally cogent critic that photography has produced. “My first interest in photography was passionate,” Berger has written (as a young man, he wanted to compose a book of love poems illustrated with photos), and when you read him, you believe him. Berger has frequently worked with photographs, producing, among other works, four books with the Swiss documentarian Jean Mohr. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an “opposition to history” by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: “And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.”

And yet in Berger’s canonical photography essays he took a decidedly dark view of the practice. Photographs of political violence, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer not to enlightenment, outrage, or revolution but instead to a sense of “his own personal moral inadequacy.” (In Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she softened her stance toward photography, but she too concluded that photographs of war do nothing to bridge the chasm between victims and voyeurs: “We don’t get it… . Can’t understand, can’t imagine.”) More generally, Berger described the photograph—all photographs—as a form of “violence” and, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atom bomb, as a “fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.” Berger allowed that photography is a “god,” but he called it the most “cynical” one—and one that, he believed, made amnesiacs rather than critical thinkers of us all.

In the 1980s, the postmodern children of Sontag, Berger, and company transformed this skepticism into outright antipathy. Indeed, for the postmoderns, suspicion of the photograph was an ethical stance, though I see it as closer to a pathological one. For these critics, the photograph was simply a tool of late capitalism, exploiting its subject and duping its viewer. Thus, Abigail Solomon-Godeau charged, the documentary photo—or what she grandly called “the regime of the image”‚ commits a “double act of subjugation” in which the hapless subject is victimized first by social forces, then by the photographer and viewer. John Tagg went further: photography, he wrote, is “ultimately a function of the state,” deeply implicated in the ruling class’s “apparatus of ideological control” and its “reproduction of … submissive labour power.” (In an interview, Tagg explained that he drew on the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to formulate his ideas, though it is not clear why these two theorists were the best guides to understanding a photograph.) And it was not fashion or art photographers who incited the wrath of these critics but, rather, socially conscious photojournalists, with their foolish belief in such old-fashioned fictions as progress, truth, and justice. “The liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch,” Martha Rosler scoffed in a seminal, oft-quoted piece. “Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.”

Most important, these critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy—for either photographer or viewer—was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph. To think otherwise was to partake in a sham: “The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,” Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it was impossible to ever see the world anew, for the gaze of both the photographer and his audience was predetermined, and irreparably infected, by reactionary ideological forces beyond our control; in their scheme, we are all simply helpless spiders caught in capitalism’s web, which is spun, apparently, not of silk but of iron. (As Berger would tartly note, “Unlike their late master, some of Barthes’ structuralist followers love closed systems.”) Indeed, Burgin condemned the actual activity of looking—an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: “Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking,” he insisted. In short, these critics regarded the photograph as a prison and the gift of vision as a crime. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” might well have been the epigraph to their books, which are no fun at all to read.

Compare all this—this obsession with victimization and predetermination, this utter refusal of freedom, this insistent moroseness—to the opening pages of Pauline Kael’s essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and for numerous other critics. Here it is:

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can … make you care, make you believe in possibilities again… . The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy of just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

Kael continued, “Because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions”‚ that is, the reactions of the moviegoer sitting in front of the screen—‚ can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.” “ Trash, Art, and the Movies” was written by a brilliant lover.

Kael had two great insights in this piece. One is that trash, far from blinding viewers to art, actually prepared them for it; or, rather, that through understanding one’s visceral enjoyment of trash, a viewer could begin to formulate her own, independent aesthetic that could lead to an equally visceral enjoyment of art. Kael’s second truth was that the only capacious and intelligent way to experience movies was to combine one’s deepest emotional reactions—which should never be disowned—with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such unthinking ways “does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.” But this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had come to when he wrote of seeking “the why of his pleasure”; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he wrote that the good critic combines the “sense of fact” with the “personal truth”; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he wrote that “the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic’s intelligence.” It is this quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling—and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it implies—that photography critics reject. The question is: why?

* * *

Photography is a modern invention—one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories—which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

One thing was clear, early on: photography was, and perhaps still is, the great democratic medium. Baudelaire, who launched his famous diatribe against photography in 1859, hated the new form for many things, one of which was certainly its populist character. “In these deplorable times,” Baudelaire warned, “a new industry has developed,” one supported by what he called the “stupidity of the masses.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he railed,

An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah… . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker—at least in developed countries such as England, Germany, France and the United States—would be able to purchase photographic reproductions. But with the introduction of lighter, cheaper cameras, which began in the late 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, it became clear that the butcher and baker could not only purchase photos but could make them, too. Even more startling: they could make good photos. This is one of several things that sets photography apart from the other arts. Most people, after all, can’t paint a wonderful painting or compose a wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people—with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge—have taken wonderful photos: better, sometimes, than those of the great artists. Yet this, too—and the leveling tendencies it implies—is troubling. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the “disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.”) For where such egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire an activity—much less an art—that so many people can do so damn well? Photography’s democratic promise has always been photography’s populist threat.

Then, too, photography stirs up our anxieties about, our love–hate relationship to, technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling, photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less than 200 years ago with compromised, modern man; and unlike those other arts, it is dependent on a machine. It is, therefore, an impure and highly contingent art, and we have approached it with that trepidatious mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious hope and tremendous gloom, with which we approach the machine age itself.

Yet beyond all this, there is something else at the heart of photography criticism’s peculiarities. Most photography critics—Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and certainly the postmoderns—were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School critics: especially Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was Benjamin’s friend and comrade. In fact, none of these men wrote mainly about photography, but what they did write has been treated with biblical respect—and undergone hermeneutical scrutiny—by late-20th-century critics.

It would be false to say that Benjamin and Kraucauer hated photographs. On the contrary: as great dialecticians, they (and especially Benjamin) believed the photograph held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his now enormously influential essay “Little History of Photography,” originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that photography had created a “new way of seeing” and would enable people “to achieve control over works of art.” Several years later he wrote of the ways that film and photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual… . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.”

Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph, its spooky ability to make us want to enter into the world and even, sometimes, change it. For Benjamin, the photo wasn’t a dead thing; on the contrary, it could embrace not just the past but the future. Looking at one photograph—a 19th-century portrait of a man and his fiancée (she would later commit suicide)—he mused.

Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us… . The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

At the same time, these critics were highly suspicious of photography and the passive, aestheticized society they feared it would help create. Benjamin wrote that mass events—including “monster [political] rallies, … sports events, and … war”‚ were all “intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography.” He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it “can endow any soup can”‚ did he foresee the age of Warhol?—‚ with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.” And he charged—somewhat bizarrely—that with the rise of photography “a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions.” (Instead, “One appeals to the lens.”) Both he and Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of diminution: “The photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her,” Kracauer wrote. “The photograph annihilates the person.” And while many artists and journalists working in Weimar Berlin’s cacophonous, newly uncensored press—notable for its plethora of heavily illustrated publications—viewed the photograph as a harbinger of modernity, Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. “The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” he charged. “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding… . The ‘image-idea’ drives away the idea.”

Most of all, though, I believe it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography criticism. Brecht, it’s fair to say, really did dislike photographs, or at best deeply distrust them; in 1931 he described them as “a terrible weapon against the truth.” In “Little History,” Benjamin quotes Brecht: “Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG” the massive German armaments and electric companies, respectively— tells us next to nothing about these institutions.”

These two sentences have been quoted ad infinitum and launched a million Ph.D. theses. And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs don’t explain the way the world works; they don’t offer reasons or causes; they don’t tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs live on the surface: they can’t burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events. And though it’s true that photographs document the specific, they tend, also, to blur—dangerously blur—political and historic distinctions: a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Berlin, circa 1945, looks much like a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Hanoi, circa 1969, which looks awfully similar to a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Baghdad from last week. Yet only a vulgar reductionist—or a complete pacifist—would say that these three cities, which is to say these three wars, are fundamentally the same cities or the same wars. Still, the photos look the same: there’s a very real sense in which if you’ve seen one bombed-out building you have indeed seen them all. (“War is a horrible repetition,” Martha Gellhorn wrote, and this is even truer of photographs than of words.) It is this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic quality of the photograph—what Barthes called its stupidity—that critics have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.

But the problem with photographs is not only that they fail to explain the world. A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don’t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of monopoly capitalism or the reasons for the genocide in Rwanda. They—we—turn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or suffering, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs, also, to find out what our intuitive reactions to such otherness might be. (This curiosity is not, as the postmoderns have charged, an expression of “imperialism,” racism,” or “orientalism”: the peasant in Kenya and the worker in Cairo are as fascinated—if not more so—by a picture of New Yorkers as we are by an image of them.) None of us is a creature solely of feeling, and yet there is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, on an emotional level.

For Brecht, of course, this was the worst possible approach to anything. Brecht’s entire oeuvre is an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment itself; indeed, for Brecht, the two were synonymous. Brecht regarded all feeling—any feeling—as dishonest and dangerous; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism. As George Grosz once remarked, Brecht “clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric computer instead of a heart.” And George Grosz was a friend.

There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about Brecht’s emotional astringency. Who can not admire a man who, in one of his very first poems, announces to the women in his life, “Here you have someone on whom you can’t rely.” What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht—like Moses—was a particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular things. Brecht’s time and place was Weimar Germany, and he saw—correctly—that his compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their defeat in World War I, of ressentiment against Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht saw—correctly—that this poisonous mix of increasingly hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism.

Like Brecht, we live in dark times, which is to say times of confusion, violence, and injustice. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brecht’s. We do not—unlike Brecht—live in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of Treblinka and Sobibor. Brecht’s relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and facing a very different set of challenges.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Susie Linfield is the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University.

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Copyright The Atlantic

The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China

…..

Korean Soldiers
North Korean soldiers in a training exercise, staged in response to a joint military display by the United States and South Korea

T he abbreviation for North Korea used by American military officers says it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime. It is a regime whose demonization by the American media and policy makers has obscured some vital facts. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, was not merely a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As defectors from his country will tell you, he was also a popular anti-Japanese guerrilla leader in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis. Nor is his son Kim Jong Il anything like the childish psychopath parodied in the film Team America: World Police. It’s true that Kim Jong Il was once a playboy. But he has evolved into a canny operator. Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at South Korea’s Kookmin University, in Seoul, says that under different circumstances Kim might have actually become the successful Hollywood film producer that regime propaganda claims he already is.

Kim Jong Il’s succession was aided by the link that his father had established in the North Korean mind between the Kim Family Regime and the Choson Dynasty, which ruled the Korean peninsula for 500 years, starting in the late fourteenth century. Expertly tutored by his father, Kim consolidated power and manipulated the Chinese, the Americans, and the South Koreans into subsidizing him throughout the 1990s. And Kim is hardly impulsive: he has the equivalent of think tanks studying how best to respond to potential attacks from the United States and South Korea—attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises cleverly instigated by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. “The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” Lankov says.

Yet for all Kim’s canniness, there is evidence that he may be losing his edge. And that may be reason to worry: totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes. The question that should be of greatest concern to the U.S. military in the Pacific—and the question that will likely determine the global balance of power in Asia for generations—is, What happens when North Korea collapses?

The Nightmare After Iraq

O n the Korean peninsula, the Cold War has never ended. On the somber, seaweed-toned border dividing the two Koreas, amid the cries of egrets and Manchurian cranes, I observed South Korean soldiers standing frozen in tae kwon do ready positions, their fists clenched and forearms tightened, staring into the faces of their North Korean counterparts. Each side picks its tallest, most intimidating soldiers for the task (they are still short by American standards).

In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, the South raised a 328-foot flagpole; the North responded with a 525-foot pole, then put a flag on it whose dry weight is 595 pounds. The North built a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom; the South built a three-story one. The North then added another story to its building. “The land of one-upmanship,” is how one U.S. Army sergeant describes the DMZ, or demilitarized zone. The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement about when to take a bathroom break, neither side budged. The meeting became known as the “Battle of the Bladders.”

In other divided countries of the twentieth century—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces of unity ultimately triumphed. But history suggests that unification does not happen through a calibrated political process in which the interests of all sides are respected. Rather, it tends to happen through a cataclysm of events that, piles of white papers and war-gaming exercises notwithstanding, catches experts by surprise.

Given that North Korea’s army of 1.2 million soldiers has been increasingly deployed toward the South Korean border, the Korean peninsula looms as potentially the next American military nightmare. In 1980, 40 percent of North Korean combat forces were deployed south of Pyongyang near the DMZ; by 2003, more than 70 percent were. As the saying goes among American soldiers, “There is no peacetime in the ROK.” (ROK, pronounced “rock,” is militaryspeak for the Republic of Korea.) One has merely to observe the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at the U.S. Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, south of Seoul—which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq—to be aware of this. A marine in Okinawa told me, “North Korea is not some third-rate, Middle Eastern conventional army. These brainwashed Asians—as he crudely put it—“will stand and fight.” American soldiers in Korea refer to the fighting on the peninsula between 1950 and 1953 as “the first Korean War.” The implicit assumption is that there will be a second.

This helps explain why Korea may be the most dismal place in the world for U.S. troops to be deployed—worse, in some ways, than Iraq. While I traveled on the peninsula, numerous members of the combat-arms community, both air and infantry, told me that they would rather be in Iraq or Afghanistan than in Korea, which constitutes the worst of all military worlds. Soldiers and airmen often live on a grueling wartime schedule, with constant drills, and yet they also have to put up with the official folderol that is part of all peacetime bases—the saluting and inspections that fall by the wayside in war zones, where the only thing that matters is how well you fight. The weather on the peninsula is lousy, too: the winds charging down from Siberia make the winters unbearably frigid, and the monsoons coming off the Pacific Ocean make the summers hot and humid. The dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert doesn’t help.

The threat from north of the DMZ is formidable. North Korea boasts 100,000 well-trained special-operations forces and one of the world’s largest biological and chemical arsenals. It has stockpiles of anthrax, cholera, and plague, as well as eight industrial facilities for producing chemical agents—any of which could be launched at Seoul by the army’s conventional artillery. If the governing infrastructure in Pyongyang were to unravel, the result could be widespread lawlessness (compounded by the guerrilla mentality of the Kim Family Regime’s armed forces), as well as mass migration out of and within North Korea. In short, North Korea’s potential for anarchy is equal to that of Iraq, and the potential for the deployment of weapons of mass destruction—either during or after pre-collapse fighting—is far greater.

For a harbinger of the kind of chaos that looms on the peninsula consider Albania, which was for some years the most anarchic country in post-Communist Eastern Europe, save for war-torn Yugoslavia. On a visit to Albania before the Stalinist regime there finally collapsed, I saw vicious gangs of boys as young as eight harassing people. North Korea is reportedly plagued by the same phenomenon outside of its showcase capital. That may be an indication of what lies ahead. In fact, what terrifies South Koreans more than North Korean missiles is North Korean refugees pouring south. The Chinese, for their part, have nightmare visions of millions of North Korean refugees heading north over the Yalu River into Manchuria.

From Atlantic Unbound:

“Location, Location, Location” (July 7, 2006)
A cartoon by Sage Stossel.

Obviously, it would be reckless not to worry about North Korea’s missile and WMD technologies. In August, there were reports yet again that Kim Jong Il was preparing an underground nuclear test. And the North test fired seven missiles in July. According to U.S. data, three of the missiles were Scud-Cs, and three were No-dong-As with ranges of 300 to 1,000 miles; all were capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. (Whether North Korea has such warheads is not definitively known, but it is widely believed to have in the neighborhood of ten—and the KFR certainly has the materials and technological know-how to build them.) The third type of missile, a Taep’o-dong-2, has a range of 2,300 to 9,300 miles, which means it could conceivably hit the continental United States. Though the Taep’o-dong-2 failed after takeoff during the recent testing, it did so at the point of maximum dynamic pressure—the same point where the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and the moment when things are most likely to go wrong. So this is likely not an insoluble problem for the KFR.

The Seven Stages of Collapse

K im Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess is a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim doesn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it’s not North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupies him. Rather, if he does stay up late worrying, it’s about China. He knows the Chinese have always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they have in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they want the regime to survive, the Chinese have plans for the northern half of the Korean peninsula that do not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity is to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appears to be, the better off it is in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which are what really matter to Kim.

To Kim’s sure dismay, the American response to his recent missile tests was a shrug. President George W. Bush dispatched Christopher Hill, his assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, to the region rather than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I was in South Korea during the missile firings, and there were few signs of alert on any of the U.S. bases in Korea. Pilots in several fighter squadrons were told not to drink too much on their days off, in case they had to be called in, but that was about the extent of it.

What should concentrate the minds of American strategists is not Kim’s missiles per se but rather what his decision to launch them says about the stability of his regime. Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of North Korea that, within days or even hours of its occurrence, could present the world—meaning, really, the American military—with the greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. “It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations,” Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of 23 million people would be Kim Jong Il’s responsibility; on the next, it would be the U.S. military’s, which would have to work out an arrangement with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (among others) about how to manage the crisis.

Fortunately, the demise of North Korea is more likely to be drawn out. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant and now a civilian area expert for the American military in South Korea, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North:

Phase One: resource depletion;

Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletion;

Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefs informally controlled by local party apparatchiks or warlords, along with widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government;

Phase Four: the attempted suppression of these fiefs by the KFR once it feels that they have become powerful enough;

Phase Five: active resistance against the central government;

Phase Six: the fracture of the regime; and

Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership.

North Korea probably reached Phase Four in the mid-1990s, but was saved by subsidies from China and South Korea, as well as by famine aid from the United States. It has now gone back to Phase Three.

Kim Jong Il learned a powerful lesson by watching the fall of the Ceausescu Family Regime, in Romania: Take utter and complete control of the military. And so he has. The KFR now rules through the army. There have been only individual defections of North Korean soldiers to the South. Even small, unit-level defections—which would indicate that soldiers are talking to one another and are no longer afraid of exposure by comrades—have not yet occurred. One defector from the North’s special-operations forces told me that soldiers in the ranks are afraid to discuss politics with one another.

The North Korean People’s Army is simply too big to be kept happy and well fed, so the regime concentrates on keeping the elite units comfortable. The defector I spoke to—a scout swimmer—told me that while the special-operations forces live well, the extreme poverty of conventional soldiers would make their loyalty to Kim Jong Il in a difficult war questionable. Would they fight to defend the KFR if there were an unforeseen rebellion? The Romanian example suggests that it depends on the circumstances: when workers revolted in 1987 in Brasov, the Romanian military crushed them; when ethnic Hungarians did so two years later in Timisoara, the military deserted the regime.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:45 PM · Comments (0)

From Harpers (Copyright) - June 2006 A letter from Gellhorn, in London, to Hemingway, in Cuba, shortly before their divorce.

Dearest Mucklebugletski; Today I got four letter from you so it is a national holiday.
… I’d like to explain to you about journalist but I don’t know whether I can and am maybe too sleepy. I see perfectly that it is bad for you; as it is not really a good enough trade for you and it has also a faintly or permanent non-grown up thing about it. But it is good for me. It gives me many things for my eyes and mind to feed on, and they need to feed on actual sights rather than reading, simply because they are not first-rate; but that is their best food. It gives me a chance to meet people I would never otherwise meet, and I want to know them. It has been wonderful knowing the bomber boys, the plastic surgeon and those men out there, the slum kids of London. Really wonderful. I would not miss it; I like them and I am fascinated by them. Besides, deviously, everything I have ever written has come trough journalism first, every book. I mean; since I am not Jane Austen nor the Bronte sisters and I have to see before I can imagine, and this is the only way I have of seeing…
… I know it does not harm me to do this work. On the contrary. It tires me physically but as I do not take myself solemnly I have no chance of believing myself to be a prophet or a power. I feel and act like a hardworking stenographer and I feel kind of happy about it in a grubby hardworking way…
… Bug, I am very lucky as a woman to be able to do this becauase most women can walk nowhere and see nothing, and they become mittens characters and their husbands become bored and then where are they…
… You are a great writer, and what you see gets pressed down and compact and one day it becomes a book. I am not a very great writer and function more like colonic irrigation, with things coming in and out at top speed. But I am on occasion very mildly pleased with what I write, I am immensely pleased with what I have understood. My mind feels good now, lively and digesting with ease…

Posted at 3:10 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Published: October 6, 2006
NEW YORK Journalism has always been a game where the adrenalin of the new assuages the loss of the old. Yesterday’s story was perhaps haunting, but it was still yesterday’s. The obligation to move on, to let go of that room full of tears or that look in a child’s eyes, is seldom less than remorseless.

That can hurt, of course, and lead to a cynical hardening. The emotional cycle and professional cycle are out of sync, so you shut out the feeling to produce the news. A deadline met becomes the solace for every undigested epiphany. And so it goes, as best you can and for as long as you can.

Of late, days have become hours. Time, like space, keeps shrinking. No sooner has a piece been filed for the Web than it must be recycled for a podcast and expanded for the paper and adapted for video.

Rapid expertise no longer brings home the bacon. Journalists must be instantaneous, multi-platform purveyors of authoritative “content” - and then stiffen themselves for the inevitable onslaught of countless “citizen journalists” against the jack-of-all- trade running dogs of the mainstream media.

All of which can lead to a certain lassitude, or irritability, and incline the hack to forget the fact that what brought him or her to this unlikely craft in the first place was probably some mixture of idealism, curiosity, wanderlust, insubordination, sentimentality, passion and appetite.

A varied education at someone else’s expense seemed a better lot than a secure accumulation at one’s own. Journalism was not exactly a career, more a journey without maps, and damn the destination.

It was an occupation that passed the time agreeably, or at least circumvented boredom. It could even make a critical difference if you were in the right place at the right time with the right eye.

Which brings me to R.W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. of The New York Times, who died this week with the same lucidity he brought to every transition and ending. Nobody, even in upheaval and turmoil, linked past and present with such an effortless and illuminating touch as Johnny in his detail-by- telling-detail dispatches, built like German machines, every piece in place and the door closing with a hermetic thunk.

His passing at the age of 71 has already prompted an outpouring of fond reminiscences, but I’m not ready to let go, not ready to rush on to the next story just yet, so bear with me as I align emotion and obligation.

The last time we ate together was in Chicago, a city that knows how good- looking it is, just as a woman who turns heads is not unaware of that fact. Johnny loved Chicago, its towers etched against the sky, loved the rakish aspect his friend Ward Just caught when he described Chicago as having “its fedora pulled down over one eye, a wisecrack already forming in its mouth full of nickels.”

The venue was Brasserie Jo, an establishment run by a Frenchman - Alsatian actually - named Jean Joho. Needless to say, he was a friend of Johnny, like any self-respecting restaurateur the world over.

A Midwesterner of German descent, Johnny was drawn to Alsace-in- Illinois; he liked the dry-sweet ping- pong of a Gewürztraminer, an echo of the German-French back-and forth of the wine’s terroir; he liked layered things in general because he was so good at exposing the strata - of food, revolutions, architecture, wine, opera, nations - and so explaining the whole.

The dishes kept coming: American foie gras, a smoky braised tongue, an unctuous choucroute, and these merely the starters. People kept coming, too, drawn to Johnny and his wife, Betsey.

Among them was Hubert Trimbach of the Alsatian winery F.E. Trimbach, who proposed a toast to “French- American friendship” at a moment when that sentiment was singularly unfashionable.

What animated the evening was Johnny’s appetite - for food and drink, of course, but above all for knowledge. Through every pore and all of his senses he absorbed information. The process was synonymous with pleasure and its message clear: Any fool can live badly and in a hurry and in ignorance. His was a one-man campaign against the daily diminishment of the game he loved.

You couldn’t resist. He was as generous a mentor as he was a ferocious competitor. His wrath was unforgettable - I felt it once for “big-footing” (in his words, and he should have known) a colleague - but so was his wisdom. And he wrote like a dream without breaking a sweat.

Jonathan Randal, then of The Washington Post, and William Drozdiak, then of Time Magazine, were with him in Tehran in 1979 during the Iranian revolution. Johnny had set himself up at the Intercontinental and persuaded the manager to dole out the Château Margaux before the mullahs smashed up the cellar.

He had buckets of caviar, too, and some pretty Iranian girls helping out, while Randal roughed it out at the cemetery where Ayatollah Khomeini ultimately landed in his helicopter.

The chopper nearly tipped over as it came down, prompting Randal to comment on his return that “this was almost a case of the Shiites hitting the fan.” The immortal line never got used. Johnny decided that, as he decided most things, while somehow endearing himself to all those in his orbit.

When the shah left, and before Khomeini arrived, Johnny had written of the ayatollah on Jan. 16, 1979: “The central question tonight was this: Having brought down the shah, with whom he has feuded for 15 years, will he demand that the struggle continue until an Islamic republic can be established with him as the strongman, or will he mute his militancy and compromise with the struggling social democratic government of Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar?”

We now know the answer. And we struggle with it, as we do with the loss of a man who saw so clearly, lived so well and proclaimed, against the odds and the times, that journalism done right is also pleasure renewed at every turn in the road.

E-mail: rocohen@nytimes.com


NEW YORK Journalism has always been a game where the adrenalin of the new assuages the loss of the old. Yesterday’s story was perhaps haunting, but it was still yesterday’s. The obligation to move on, to let go of that room full of tears or that look in a child’s eyes, is seldom less than remorseless.

That can hurt, of course, and lead to a cynical hardening. The emotional cycle and professional cycle are out of sync, so you shut out the feeling to produce the news. A deadline met becomes the solace for every undigested epiphany. And so it goes, as best you can and for as long as you can.

Of late, days have become hours. Time, like space, keeps shrinking. No sooner has a piece been filed for the Web than it must be recycled for a podcast and expanded for the paper and adapted for video.

Rapid expertise no longer brings home the bacon. Journalists must be instantaneous, multi-platform purveyors of authoritative “content” - and then stiffen themselves for the inevitable onslaught of countless “citizen journalists” against the jack-of-all- trade running dogs of the mainstream media.

All of which can lead to a certain lassitude, or irritability, and incline the hack to forget the fact that what brought him or her to this unlikely craft in the first place was probably some mixture of idealism, curiosity, wanderlust, insubordination, sentimentality, passion and appetite.

A varied education at someone else’s expense seemed a better lot than a secure accumulation at one’s own. Journalism was not exactly a career, more a journey without maps, and damn the destination.

It was an occupation that passed the time agreeably, or at least circumvented boredom. It could even make a critical difference if you were in the right place at the right time with the right eye.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Posted at 2:50 AM · Comments (0)

This is adapted from Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, and appeared in the May 2005 issue of Harpers (Copyright).

The Americans who fellin Normany in 1945 were tall men measuring 68 inches on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 24 miles. The Germans were tall, too, but the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War, who measured 69 inches, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds, and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertilizer a quare kilometer of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilizers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals instead of manure. And most people in Europe believes the First World War to be a necessary and just war that would bring peace to the world. And many people believed that the war would revive those virtues that the modern industrial wold ha forced into the backgroun, such as love of one’s country, courage, and self-sacrifice. And poor people looked forward to riding on a train and country folk looked forward to seeing big cities and phoning the district post office to dictate a telegram to their wives…
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually began when the war broke out in 1914, because it was the first war in history in whichso many people died, and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships, and artillery could lob shells 10 or 12 kilometers. And the Germans invented gas, and the English invented tanks, and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity. Andwhen the Senegalese fusliers first saw an airplane they thought it was tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of glesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them, which was tmodern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn brightly colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And writers and pets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And the fallen French measures 1,660 miles; the fallen English 961 miles; and the fallen Germans 1,870 miles, taking the average length of a corpse to 67 inches. And a total of 9,636 miles of soldiers fell worldwide.

Posted at 2:33 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Economist

MANY years after the end of the war in the Pacific, a former tail-gunner who had been stationed in New Guinea wrote a letter to a veterans’ magazine. He wished to share his memories of a voice. Every night in the spring of 1944, huddled in a tent with his comrades, he would hear a woman speaking behind the crackle and whistling of the Halicrafter radio. “Hi, boys!” she would say, or sometimes “Hi, enemies! This is your favourite playmate.” She would play swing and jazz, introduce “some swell new records from the States” and then, almost as an afterthought, mention that a Japanese attack was coming: “So listen while you are still alive.”
Click here to find out more!

They listened happily, as did American troops all over the Pacific. It was rare and good to hear a female voice, even through several layers of interference and even with the sneer of death in it. Whether it was one woman, or many different women, did not matter. They could picture her: a full lipstick smile, ample curves, perfect skin, part Hedy Lamarr and part the sweetheart left at home. She was a temptress and a vixen, and her name was Tokyo Rose. For even myths must have names and addresses.

After the war American pressmen descended on ruined Tokyo to search for the girl they had invented. The Hearst empire was offering $2,000 for an interview and, after a while, a slight, pale, smiling young woman came forward. She had worked for Radio Tokyo and, for two years, had part-hosted a programme called “The Zero Hour”. Her name was Iva Toguri: an American citizen, born and raised in California, and now in desperate need of money to get home. She had never called herself Tokyo Rose, on air or otherwise, but there seemed no harm in taking the identity when the Hearst men asked her. Yes, she was “the one and only”, the “original”.

For a while it was glamorous to be this person. Troops mobbed her for her “Tokyo Rose” autograph. She was photographed with them, a schoolgirl figure in white blouse and black slacks amid a sea of beige uniforms. But if she was Tokyo Rose, and an American, then she was also probably a traitor. So, after the fun, she was arrested.

For a year she was kept in a military brig while her broadcasts were investigated. The authorities, finding nothing against her, concluded she was not Tokyo Rose and set her free. Others were not so easily robbed of their chimeras. A populist ranter and broadcaster, Walter Winchell, started a campaign to get her rearrested and retried. In 1948 she was indicted on eight counts of treason, one of which stuck: that in October 1944 “she did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.” She was sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

In fact, Miss Toguri’s story was all innocence. She had gone to Japan for the first time in 1941 to visit a dying aunt; the outbreak of war had trapped her there, an “enemy alien” without money and almost without the language. She was forced, like many other Allied prisoners-of-war, to work in propaganda broadcasting. Unlike her mythical persona, however, she had delivered no threats and nothing to demoralise the troops. Her radio manner was jolly rather than sultry. She was “Orphan Ann”, after Little Orphan Annie, and her theme tune, “Strike up the Band”, had been the fight song of her alma mater, the University of California at Los Angeles.
An alien in Japan

Ostensibly she was working for the Japanese. But she and her mentor, Charles Cousens, a major in the Australian army, had found ways of undermining them. Odd pauses or silly asides (“You are liking, please?”) would make nonsense of chilling remarks. And the records Miss Toguri chose were often British rather than American, entertaining the troops without making them think miserably of home.

As a nisei, the daughter of first-generation Japanese immigrants, she looked thoroughly Japanese. Not so. She was American to her fingertips, a Girl Scout, keen on big-band music and a regular at her Methodist church. Her father, though he ran a Japanese-import store, had insisted on that identity, wanting his children to speak and write only English. Iva—the name she had embraced, casting off “Ikuko”—had set off for Japan in 1941 with her trunks full of American food, and her letters home wailed at the misery of three rice meals a day. Stuck in Tokyo, she was pestered by the military police to give up her American citizenship. She clung to it fiercely until in 1949, as part of her treason sentence, it was revoked by her own country.

The mistake was eventually acknowledged. Gerald Ford pardoned Miss Toguri on the last day of his presidency, in 1977: the first-ever pardon of any American convicted of treason. By then, she had been released early for good behaviour, had paid her fine and had moved to Chicago, to live obscurely and to help out sometimes in her father’s Japanese-goods shop, selling bags of the hated rice to midwesterners.

Her pardon seemed an admission that she was not Tokyo Rose. But the American government still considered she was, even if wrongfully convicted. Hollywood, and the public, still thought so. And for many old servicemen “her” voice, and their dream of “her” face, still fill their memories of war in the Pacific, as real as the kamikaze aircraft plunging into the sea.

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (2)

Copyright Newsweek International

Oct. 9, 2006 issue - China has tried hard to keep Han Dongfang from
communicating with the Chinese people. The democracy activist was
jailed for 22 months and then forced to leave the mainland for
organizing protests associated with the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre. His name has been blocked over the years in Internet
searches and his efforts to broadcast via radio have been all but
thwarted by technology able to scramble radio waves.

Yet earlier this year, podcasts of Han’s Hong Kong-based pro-worker
commentary began circulating on the Internet, opening a new front in
the high-tech battle between China and free-speech activists. In
podcasts—audio and video files circulated online—those advocates may
have found the ideal medium for breaching what critics call the Great
Firewall of China. As yet, nobody’s figured out how to scan such
material for utterances of those telltale buzzwords that trigger the
blocking of Web sites, e-mails and blogs. Filtering audio content is
currently impossible, and a government ban on all audio or video
e-mail attachments would cripple the nation’s Internet communications.

It’s unclear how many Chinese have iPods or other MP3 devices used for
listening to podcasts, but more than 120 million use the Internet and
400 million carry mobile phones, according to government stats.

The new media are helping activists stay ahead in their cat-and-mouse
game with the censors. A series of oral histories about Tiananmen
posted in June on the Human Rights in China Web site (hrichina.org )
has been downloaded more than 17,000 times, says executive director
Sharon Hom. The site plans to roll out other shows based on interviews
with mainlanders about human-rights abuses in coming months. “We know
that many more people have heard these voices because of the
pass-along phenomenon that is very common in China,” she says.
Podcasting is more effective at reaching illiterate Chinese in rural
areas than written material.

Even though the government can’t block podcasts, self-censorship by
many Web sites limits the availability of the more political ones.
“Under this regime, unless there is some serious commitment to
democratic reform, the crackdown will continue,” says Hom. “Podcast is
not a silver bullet, but it is an effort to explore all the
possibilities of technology to keep a trickle of information flowing.”
(c) 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

Posted at 2:37 AM · Comments (0)

>
>Oct. 5 (Copyright Bloomberg) — Andy Xie’s resignation as Morgan Stanley’s chief
>economist in Asia last week followed an e-mail in which he characterized
>Singapore as an economic failure that is dependent on illicit money from
>Indonesia and China.
>
>Xie, who worked at Morgan Stanley for nine years, sent the e-mail to his
>colleagues after attending the International Monetary Fund and World
>Bank annual meetings last month in the Southeast Asian island state. He
>questioned why Singapore was chosen to host the conference and said
>delegates “were competing with each other to praise Singapore as the
>success story of globalization.”
>
>“Actually, Singapore’s success came mostly from being the money
>laundering center for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government
>officials,” said Xie, who was based in Hong Kong before leaving Morgan
>Stanley on Sept. 29. “Indonesia has no money. So Singapore isn’t doing
>well.”
>
>Singapore’s $118 billion economy is recovering from three recessions
>since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and is expecting growth of as
>much as 7.5 percent this year. The city- state is grappling with growing
>competition from China and India, two of the world’s most populous
>nations, where labor costs are less than a quarter of those in
>Singapore.
>
>Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in September that Singapore’s
>economy may sustain annual growth of 3 percent to 5 percent for the next
>10 to 15 years as the country expands industries from information
>technology to tourism.
>
>“To sustain its economy, Singapore is building casinos to attract
>corruption money from China,” Xie said.
>
>`Internal E-mail’
>
>Singapore is ending a four-decade ban on casinos. The government plans
>to triple tourism revenue to $19 billion and double visitors to 17
>million by 2015.
>
>Officials from the public relations departments of the Monetary
>Authority of Singapore and the government’s information service declined
>to comment on the contents of the e-mail. They also declined to be
>identified.
>
>Morgan Stanley confirmed the contents of the e-mail and said the New
>York-based firm doesn’t elaborate on the reasons behind employee
>departures.
>
>“This is an internal e-mail based on personal suppositions and aimed at
>stimulating internal debate amongst a small group of intended
>recipients,” Cheung Po-ling, a Hong Kong-based spokeswoman for the
>world’s largest securities firm by market value, said in a written
>statement. “The e-mail expresses the views of one individual and does
>not in any way represent the views of the firm.”
>
>`Strong Supporter’
>
>“Morgan Stanley has been a very strong supporter of Singapore and has a
>great deal of respect for Singapore’s achievements,” Cheung said.
>
>Morgan Stanley ranks sixth among merger advisers in Singapore this year,
>handling $1.5 billion of deals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
>It advised Temasek Holdings Pte., the Singapore government’s investment
>company, in its purchase of a 9.9 percent stake in Mumbai-based Tata
>Teleservices Ltd. in March. Morgan Stanley, which ranks third among
>stock sale arrangers in Asia outside Japan this year, hasn’t
>underwritten any deal in Singapore this year, according to Bloomberg
>data.
>
>“I tried to find out why Singapore was chosen to host the conference,”
>Xie wrote in the e-mail. “Nobody knew. Some said that probably no one
>else wanted it. Some guessed that Singapore did a good selling job. I
>thought it was a strange choice because Singapore was so far from any
>action or the hot topic of China and India. Mumbai or Shanghai would be
>a lot more appropriate.”
>
>`Fawning’ Guests
>
>At a dinner party hosted by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,
>“people fawned him like a prince,” Xie wrote. “These Western people
>didn’t know what they were talking about,” he wrote, describing the
>praise for Singapore as “nauseating pleasantries.”
>
>Xie declined to comment on his departure when contacted on his mobile
>phone on Oct. 2.
>
>Xie, who said in September that the U.S. economy may fall into a
>recession in 2008, worked at the corporate finance division at Macquarie
>Bank in Singapore before joining Morgan Stanley in 1997. He spent five
>years as an economist with the World Bank, overseeing the bank’s
>programs in Indonesia and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region,
>according to the New York-based firm’s Web site.
>
>Xie holds a doctorate in economics and a Master’s degree in civil
>engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Posted at 5:19 PM · Comments (0)

David Blair in Lusaka*
> (Filed: 03/10/2006)
>
>
>
> Chinese shopkeepers barricaded their properties against gangs of
> looters in
> Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, yesterday as a presidential election
> sparked a
> backlash against Beijing’s growing influence in Africa.
>
> Michael Sata, an opposition candidate, won 28 per cent of the vote
> afteraccusing China of “exploitation” and turning Zambia into a
> “dumping ground”.
>
> Although President Levy Mwanawasa was re-elected with 43 per cent
> of the
> vote, Mr Sata won in areas most affected by Chinese investment. In
> Lusaka,he polled almost three times as many votes as the president.
>
> China has become one of the key foreign powers in Africa as it
> searches for
> raw materials to fuel its economy.
>
> Chinese immigrants have opened many shops in Lusaka, where their
> communityhas grown tenfold to about 30,000 in the past decade.
>
> But their presence has sparked great resentment. Chinese
> businessmen are
> accused of underpaying their workers, ignoring safety rules and
> drivinglocal companies out of business with cheap and shoddy goods.
>
> Last year, 46 miners dies in an accident at Chambishi, a copper
> mine owed by
> Chinese investors. Three months ago, its workforce rioted over low
> wages and
> poor conditions.
>
> Mr Sata, the leader of the Patriotic Front, claimed yesterday that Mr
> Mwanawasa had “stolen victory”. He mobilised these grievances
> behind his
> presidential campaign.
>
> “We want to work with the Chinese, but they must change,” he said.
>
> “Their labour relations are very bad. They are not adding any value
> to what
> they claim is investment. Instead of creating jobs for the local
> workforce,they bring in Chinese workers to cut wood and carry water.
>
> “We don’t want Zambia to be a dumping ground for their human beings.”
>
> When it became clear that Mr Sata had lost the election, riots
> broke out in
> his Lusaka strongholds. Mr Sata said the government had “robbed”
> him of
> victory by “stealing votes” from under the noses of “timid and
> toothless”election observers from the European Union.
>
> Resentment over what his supporters believe was a “rigged” election
> causedthe unrest. But looters soon began targeting Chinese-owned
> shops.
> In Kamwala market, the Chinese owner of a clothes store locked his
> heavymetal door as looters ran down the street, carrying their booty.
>
> As a panic-stricken crowd gathered nearby, he decided to leave.
>
> “Out, out,” he told his Chinese assistant. “We go now.” The two men
> ran out
> of their shop, barricading the blue door behind them, and sped away
> in a
> white car.
>
> All the shops nearby, many of them Chinese-owned, were empty, their
> windowsshuttered, their closed doors reinforced with metal bars.
>
> Clouds of black smoke rose from tyres blazing in the streets in the
> nearbytownship of Garden. Here, people vented their anger over the
> Chinese.
> “Wherever you go — the market, the town centre — the Chinese are
> there and
> they are putting Zambians out of business,” said Joe Mamba, a 27-
> year-old
> cobbler.
>
> “I make shoes with genuine leather. The Chinese people make bad
> shoes very
> much cheaper, so people go to them and I have no business.”
>
> A crowd of youths gathered on a street-corner nearby. Bruno Mwanza, an
> unemployed 34-year-old, said: “We are being robbed of our
> birthright by the
> Chinese.
>
> “Zambians are peaceful people, but when pushed to the wall, they
> react.”
> david.blair@telegraph.co.uk
>
>
> [*The Daily Telegraph, *London, 3 October 2006, web edn., <
>

Posted at 2:21 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Sudan Tribune
Thursday 5 October 2006 00:10.

October 4, 2006 — The deadly combination of unilateral policy of superpower and totalitarian, authoritarian political culture in the Middle East have created an atmosphere that encourages conspiracy theory to thrive. Where fiction transformed into a reality; illusions become facts, lies become truth, people, elites and media accepted the endless set of conspiracies theories that explain miraculously every thing. In such political climate, where Islamic fundamentalist dominate the political and theological agenda of the whole region, political dogma and terror replaced any meaningful dialogue between competing ideas. Free moderate thinking Muslims, and progressive secular liberal views rejected and terrorized into hiding. Conspiracy theory has been adopted to fill the gap as the theory of every ‘thing’.

The Islamic fundamentalists, Ku Klux Klansmen, and the Christian separatists would seem to have very little in common, but they do in fact share one crucial belief: that the world is secretly controlled by an elite group. It quite revealing to find that the most consistent extremist belief — held is that the world is run by a secret committee of Jews. Where these shadowy elite starts the wars, elects heads of state, sets the price of oil and the flow of capital, conducts bizarre secret rituals, and controls the media.

To consolidate the Jewish conspiracy theory claims, the infamous document of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” adopted as a gospel truth. Although after the World War 2, and the holocaust most of the world has generally rejected claims that these protocols could represent factual evidence of a real Jewish conspiracy. The exception to this is the Middle East, where large numbers of Arabs and Muslims regimes and leaders have endorsed them as authentic.

In general conspiracy theory attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event usually a political, social, or historical event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance of influential people or organizations rather than as explicit activity or as natural occurrence. However, conspiracy theories are always found to be false due to lack of verifiable evidence and not many take it seriously.

Sudan current political leaders and their supporters have followed blindly this particular brand of conspiracy theory that, “Jews is behind every thing”. In case of Darfur “Where Muslim government is killing their fellow Muslims” they have used desperate strategy to shift responsibly and divert blames. In New York Sudan leader displayed all the symptoms that have made this country a laughing stock of the world. Speaking in the annual U.N. General Assembly debate, Al-Bashir claimed that Zionist groups wanted to weaken Sudan and that Jewish organizations were behind dozens of recent rallies. He said Israel was spreading a lie that Sudanese Arabs are killing Sudanese Africans. According to Al-Bashir increasingly paranoid mind the UN wants to colonize Sudan as if the UN is a country; also he accused protesting organizations as plotters and schemers against Sudan.

According to him even Amnesty International could be partner in such conspiracy, the very organization that symbolizes the conscious of the world. AMNSTY humbly and clearly declared herself as independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. Practically proved beyond any doubt that it does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Omar Al-Bashir in his feeble attempt to divert attention from the ongoing genocide in Darfur caused by his own regime action continued his Jewish conspiracy theory rant and said, “It is clear that there is a purpose behind the heavy propaganda and media campaigns … If we return to the last demonstrations in the United States, and the groups that organized the demonstrations, we find that they are all Jewish organizations”. Attention could be drawn to his emphasis when he said “They are all Jewish organization” Al-Bashir was baffled and bewildered that more than 50 cities around the world protesting against his regime policy in Darfur. The president astonished when he told that Darfur caused a political miracle in the history of the USA, never before, Right Wing organizations (Christians), African American organizations, Jewish organizations, Liberal and Left wing organizations, Human Rights organizations get together in a cause similar to Darfur.

The President of Sudan causal anti-Semitic remarks offended everyone and confirmed his evilness to his detractor and especially in the eyes of the liberal New York City dwellers. No wonder his movement restriction could be designed to protect him from everybody in New York (African American, Jewish, White Liberals, Sudanese Diaspora). Al-Bashir brought up in rural area in northern Sudan, nearly most of his generation could never have met a Jew in their life or even knew how the Jew looks like. The small minority of a very successful Jewish community lived in Sudan for more than century especially in Khartoum and other urban centers in Sudan for generation left the country in 1967 after the 5th June war, but their legacy still could be detected in Khartoum. However, the culture of Jewish hatred was enshrined into the daily religious teaching, media propaganda, and encouraged and institutionalized by the education system.

The President lately his danger-sensing ability began to make false predictions, and to be triggered by illusions, and become pathological; the result according to evolutionary psychology is the state of paranoid delusions that hardly differentiate between reality and fiction.

The reality remain that the suffering in Darfur moved the conscious of the world and troubled their humanity, they are protesting simply because they care. The Government of Sudan has consistently failed to resolve peacefully its own problem, the international community has left with no option other than to act to protect civilian in Darfur. If there is a conspiracy needs to be figure out, I guess the nasty mind-set that compels this government to commit such horrible crimes in its own people will be an obvious candidate.

* Ahmed Elzobier is is Director of Communications and Media at Darfur Centre for Human Rights and Development. He can be reached at ahmed.elzobir@gmail.com.

Posted at 4:48 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Agence-France Presse

Sokoto, Nigeria - Sheltered from the scorching tropical heat by a cool breeze wafting from the branches of the mango tree under which he sat outside his old bungalow in the ancient city of Sokoto in northern Nigeria, 68-year-old Shehu Malami declared his resolve to content himself with his four wives after 201 marriages in 48 years.

“No more marriages for me, this is the end. I will retain my four wives to the end as long as another misfortune doesn’t befall me,” Malami, who just recently solemnised his 201st marriage, said outside his home in this conservative, predominantly Muslim city.

In June 2004 Malami celebrated his 200 marriages which coincided with the bicentenary of the Sokoto Caliphate with a promise never to marry again, but he could not keep his vow as he married another wife last week to replace a 40-year-old spouse he divorced recently.

‘No more marriages for me, this is the end’
Short, bald and eloquent, Malami who is popularly called Maisaje’ (the whiskered one), for the gray whiskers he keeps, could be the world’s most married person.

Now living in retirement, Malami’s life has been characterized by “marital adventures”.

“I’m now a groom. I took my 201st wife a week ago, I’m on honeymoon,” Malami said humorously as he adjusted his faded green robe, relishing the serenity of his middle-class old parliamentary quarters’ neighbourhood with its uniform bungalows whose faded yellow colours and dull corrugated roofing attest to their old age.

Alternating between flawless English and his native Hausa dialect, Malami recounted what he called “marital escapades” with ease, displaying a good memory.

He took his first wife, a divorcee, at the age of 20, two years after he had dropped out of secondary school. The marriage, which did not receive the blessing of the couple’s parents, could not survive its first anniversary.

‘They have to bear with me because it is my nature’
His next two marriages, also to divorcees, did not last despite general acceptance this time.

“I have an exceptionally high taste for women and my sexual urge is quite strong. I would always go for voluptuous women because women with sagging bosom would not excite me,” Malami said as he vainly fanned his nose with the back of his hand to ward off choking fumes from a passing truck.

Despite his strong libido, he blames his incessant marriage-and-divorce adventure to misfortune and his older wives who would instigate any woman he married to leave for a younger man.

“All my marriages were done with good intent but I encountered misfortunes. For instance, four of the women I married were already pregnant from other men when I married them and I had no option but to divorce them when I realized it, because I could not live with dubious wives.”

“I later came to understand that my older wives were also responsible for my divorces as they would, out of jealousy, tell any beautiful young woman I married that she did not deserve to marry an old man like me as young and beautiful as she was while young and handsome men would do everything to have her as a wife.”

“Gullible and inexperienced, the young woman would either demand a divorce or would become too nasty for me to keep as a wife”, Malami said in a sad tone.

As Islam allows for a man to marry up to four wives at a time, Malami made good use of this privilege by having four wives at every particular time, finding a replacement as soon as he divorces one or more.

He never hides his pride in his 29 surviving children out of 47 from 25 marriages, and his 39 grandchildren.

Although Islam discourages divorce and the people of the city find his frequent marriages reprehensible, Malami found nothing wrong, “despite the fact that people express disgust”.

“In fact the Sultan (the highest traditional and spiritual figure among Nigerian Muslims) solemnized my 200th marriage, the only wife I married twice among all the 201.

“When I married say five times from a particular area, I would shift to a far community where my reputation had not reached,”, he said mischievously.

“Even my children are not happy and sometimes they come to talk to me about it, begging me to stop.

“But they have to bear with me because it is my nature and Allah does not prohibit me from marrying,” Malami said.

Malami cautions his children not to emulate him, saying times have changed. “I always advise them not to do like me and I caution young men not to engage in these useless marriages especially with the prevalence of HIV/Aids and poverty,”Malami said.

He expressed pride in the experiences he garnered from his marriages adding that if not for the death of a wealthy friend who was to finance the publication of his biography, the book would have been on the market. They had to stop at the 160th wedding.

“My experiences with women are huge. I see myself as a professor as far as women and their psychology are concerned. There is no type of woman I have not handled.”

It remains to be seen whether this time, at 68, he will stick to his word. - Sapa-AFP

Posted at 8:49 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Weekly Standard

Port-au-Prince: A brief summer visit to Haiti—the beautiful, perpetually
tormented tropical purgatory that occupies the western third of the
Caribbean island of Hispaniola—cannot help but focus the comfortable and
well-fed foreign visitor’s attention on two profound issues of the modern
era: the reasons for the persistence of so much misery in an ever more
affluent world, and the practical measures that might permit our world’s
poorest countries to escape from the heart-rending deprivation that they
continue to suffer.

With an area comparable to the state of Maryland and a population (at
about eight and a half million) roughly the size of New York City’s, Haiti
is closer to Florida—just an hour and a half from Miami by jet—than is
Washington, D.C. But in a very real sense, the distance between the United
States and Haiti is almost unimaginable.

By the yardstick of income, Haiti is by far the poorest spot in the
Western Hemisphere, and in fact one of the very poorest places on the
planet. State Depart ment and CIA guesses put the country’s per capita
income at about $550 a year, or about a dollar and a half per day—but
these formal, exchange-rate based estimates are highly misleading, if not
meaningless. (Could anyone in the United States today survive for a year
consuming no more than $1.50 worth of goods and services a day?) A better
sense of Haiti’s plight comes from comparisons of purchasing power.
Perhaps the most authoritative global estimates of this sort have been
done by Angus Maddison, the eminent economic historian. At the start of
this decade, according to Maddison, Haiti’s per capita output was
thirty-five times lower than that of the United States. To get a sense of
what this means: Think how things would go for your family if you had to
get by for the entire year on just ten days of your current earnings.

Haiti looks impoverished even next to other impoverished countries. By
Maddison’s reckoning, per capita purchasing power in Haiti is one third
that of Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. There is no country
in the Middle East or Asia with an income level as low as Haiti’s, not
even Bangladesh. And although sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of
desperate poverty in the modern world, a majority of sub-Saharan countries
enjoy per capita income levels that are higher than Haiti’s.

Income numbers alone, however, cannot convey an accurate impression of the
terrible deprivation that is the inescapable lot of the ordinary Haitian.
For this, one must take a stroll through La Saline, or Bel Air, or any of
the other wretched slums that account for most of the living quarters in
Haiti’s capital, the sprawling city of Port-au-Prince.

From high up in the hills that ring this city by the bay, the place looks
sublime: On the horizon a perfect blue sky meets a shimmering sea to frame
the vast metropolis below. The illusion is maintained only so long as one
is sufficiently removed to view actual human beings. As one makes the
descent into town, the picture quickly changes: The eye of Bierstadt is
replaced by the eye of Bruegel, and then by the eye of Bosch. Once in the
city proper, one realizes that the urban sky is so clear because Haiti is
too poor to have air pollution. Gasoline and diesel vehicles are out of
almost everyone’s reach, and garbage is too precious to be burned on the
street. But Port-au-Prince is not too poor to have sewage: That humid
choking stench is everywhere. Unending makeshift shacks stretch from
clogged “canals,” through which water the color of petroleum slowly
trickles: This is at once the communal latrine and the water supply for
washing the evening’s cookware.

Tiny storefronts, stocked with a few handfuls of merchandise, advertise
their wares with homemade signs in French or Creole (the Africanized
French fusion most Haitians actually speak), but many—perhaps most—of
the thronging passersby cannot understand these because they have never
learned to read. Children are everywhere, many of them painfully
thin—some are clothed, some partially clothed, others not clothed at all;
not a few bear the marks of illness, infections, or growths that have
never been diagnosed or treated. The graying decayed remnants of a few
kites entangled on telephone lines provide the only hint that any of these
children has ever possessed or enjoyed a toy. As for the grown-ups on the
street, some seem agitated, some enervated, but almost all are shrunken
and weathered, aged far beyond their years: Young women here look
middle-aged, middle-aged men positively ancient. And these are the adults
strong enough and healthy enough to be out on the streets: The victims of
Haiti’s chronic life-threatening epidemic afflictions—malaria,
tuberculosis, and (now) HIV/AIDS—are more likely to be out of sight, in
the hovels of the back alleyways, resting and trying to cling to life.

Yet things are even worse—much worse—for most Haitians than this bleak
street picture might suggest. For there is an important qualitative
difference between grinding poverty and utter misery, and Haiti today lies
on the wrong side of that divide. These impoverished Haitians lack more
than money, food, medicine, schooling, decent housing, shoes, clean water,
and regular electricity: They also lack personal safety and physical
security. Haiti is a territory trapped between a state of siege and a
state of nature—a Hobbesian nightmare in which violent and well-armed
crime gangs operate essentially at will, effectively controlling much of
the area in which ordinary people have to live.

The personnel of most foreign embassies simply will not visit many
inhabited regions of the country without armed escort—and are
specifically enjoined from visiting other places (such as the Cité Soleil
slum, home to perhaps half a million people) under any circumstances at
all. The third day of my Haiti visit, word went around that a man had been
not just murdered but deliberately be headed on the same street as the
U.S. ambassador’s residence—an effective message to the island that
absolutely no spot in Haiti is beyond the reach of the crimelords.

The more well-to-do Haitians I met spoke of the daily terror of crime and
violence that they face—robbery, kidnappings, murder just for the fun of
it—and these are the Haitians who can afford safer neighborhoods,
protective walls adorned with barbed wire and broken glass, or perhaps
armed guards. The greatest burden of crime, violence, and lawlessness
falls on the poor. “We can’t even hand things out to people in the
slums—it would endanger them,” explained a foreign social worker with
nearly two decades’ experience in Haiti’s worst neighborhoods. “You know
what would happen if we gave little radios? The bad guys would know about
it right away—and they’d come into those homes to take the radios, and
more.”

Lest there be a thought that Haiti’s poor have nothing to lose from gangs
and crime but their radios, Dr. Jean William Pape, the latter-day
Haitian-born Albert Schweitzer who directs GHESKIO, the country’s leading
HIV-research institute/clinic, told me that the connection in Haiti
between violent chaos and forcible rape was so immediate and direct that
his staff compiles a “rape index” that serviceably mirrors changes in
Haiti’s security environment just by tabulating the number of victims
streaming into his clinics after sexual assaults. In a country where the
government does not even bother to compile crime statistics, this may be
the closest thing to a proxy for local crime rates that exists.

Why is there no physical security in Haiti today? The problem speaks to an
abject failure of both the government of Haiti and the U.N.’s latest
Haitian intervention force (MINUSTAH—the Franco phone acronym for “United
Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti”) in their most fundamental of
charges.

The Haitian government maintains no standing army—merely a police force
of perhaps 7,000. Only some of those police show up for work, and a
troubling proportion of those who do show up are compromised, on the take
from the very predators against whom they are supposed to protect the
public. To put the problem in perspective, consider this: New York
City—with a population roughly comparable to Haiti’s, and an environment
incomparably more stable and secure—employs about 35,000 sworn police
officers, a force perhaps ten times larger than the number of reliable
Haitian police (the latter scattered over a country about two orders of
magnitude larger in area than the five boroughs).

Apart from the occasions when they are identified as abetting kidnappings
or gang rampages, Haiti’s police force is largely invisible. In my first
two days of ranging through Port-au-Prince, I spotted police officers
exactly twice—one of these instances being a spin near the presidential
palace, the Haitian “White House.” In the slums of La Saline I passed a
police station—but no one seemed to be there. Where were the
officers—hiding inside? Possibly so: The téléjiol—Haiti’s national
word-of-mouth grapevine and main communications medium in this
densely-packed, illiterate nation—was saying that a band of police had
just found themselves outgunned in Port-au-Prince in a shoot-out with
local gangsters, and had retreated to their headquarters. The police
situation, however, is said to be improving. U.S. embassy personnel
informed me that Haiti was training new police recruits in classes of
250—at which pace, by rough calculation, Haiti could muster a New York
City-sized police force somewhere around the middle of this century,
assuming zero attrition or mortality.

As for MINUSTAH and their 8,800 soldiers and police, some Haitians have
taken to calling them TOURISTAH. As one explained to me, “We see them in
our best restaurants, dating our women, and on our nicest beaches. The
only place we don’t see them is where the crime and violence are taking
place, where they are needed.” Constrained by extraordinarily restrictive
“rules of engagement,” these U.N. forces remain far from their goal of
“stabilizing” Haiti. Indeed, when U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan
briefly visited Haiti in August to praise progress and call for more
international aid, his advance team—even with the MINUSTAH force at
hand—judged the security situation too perilous to risk scheduling a
visit to Dr. Pape’s model GHESKIO clinic, located in downtown
Port-au-Prince.

In a purely arithmetic sense, Haiti’s poverty today is a consequence of
prolonged and severe economic retrogression—we might even say economic
implosion. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, per capita GDP in
Haiti is roughly 25 percent lower now, at the beginning of the new
century, than it was in 1945. Per capita GDP was nearly twice as high in
Haiti as in Bangladesh back in 1950—but by 2001, per capita output was
higher in Bangladesh than in Haiti (by about 15 percent). And Haiti has
been overtaken by Bangladesh not only in raw economic performance, but
also in basic social performance: By World Bank estimates, life expectancy
today is fully a decade higher in Bangladesh than in Haiti; according to
the U.N., in fact, Haiti’s life expectancy is no higher today than it was
20 years ago.

Indications of protracted decline abound. According to the World Bank,
Haiti’s level of total cereal production is 20 percent lower today than it
was in 1961: this, for a still predominantly rural society whose
population more than doubled in the interim. Likewise, aggregate
electricity generation is lower than it was a decade and a half ago—a
modern record for futility surpassed perhaps only by Kim Jong Il’s North
Korea. Haiti once had a national railway line—but it is missing now,
engulfed and absorbed in the brush. (Haiti has practically no forests—all
the free firewood has already been taken.) Old State Department “Area
Handbooks” speak of Haitian coffee as the country’s main export;
modern-day U.S. agricultural officials talk of “Haitian blue” in tones
akin to the North American bison—i.e., a magnificent species, sadly no
longer much seen.

For any small island economy, international trade is vital—yet Haiti
barely engages in it. According to the World Trade Organization, total
merchandise exports for Haiti in 2005 amounted to $473 million, or about
$55 per person. And as with so much else in Haiti, trends are heading in
the wrong direction. In the capital’s tiny Port Authority, where cargo
from vessels docked in the harbor is still unloaded mainly by hand,
officials tell me that freight volume is down 50 percent over the past two
years. Rough calculations suggest that Haiti—a country self-sufficient in
nothing—is bringing in through its port system rather less than a pound
per person per day of merchandise: food, gasoline, cement, trucks,
clothing, paper, machinery—everything.

Haiti’s other aperture to the world economy is an inland road through the
highlands linking it to the Dominican Republic, its larger and markedly
more successful neighbor on Hispaniola—but for the month before my
arrival, that access point had been closed to all international commerce.
It seems that Haiti had a newly appointed head of customs who entertained
the peculiar idea of actually attempting to collect the statutory import
duties listed on the books for incoming goods. Affronted and incensed,
Haiti’s major smugglers organized a trucking roadblock of the border, and
then enforced it through menace. The government to date has proved
incapable of lifting this self-embargo. There is quite a bit of talk about
the lonely honest Haitian official at the center of this trade crisis. It
is said, for example, that Transparency International is thinking of
honoring him with an award—if he lives long enough.

It is no more than stating the obvious to say that Haiti’s historical and
political saga is intimately entwined with the dismal results we see
today. We need not revisit every sorry stage and tragic step in the
country’s anguished 200-plus years of independence to understand the awful
humanitarian spectacle. Yet the milestones of this historical legacy must
be at least mentioned in passing. The African roots: over 100 tribes or
peoples involuntarily transplanted to the New World to form the workforce
of the French slave plantation system. The colonial interlude: the
briefest, as a matter fact, for any country in the New World (French rule
in Haiti lasted only just over a century). The slave revolt: following the
American Revolution chronologically, but informed by the merciless logic
of the French Revolution, killing or driving out virtually all of the
country’s “white” former masters. And then, with independence on New
Year’s Day in 1804, the troubled triumph of this Black Spartacus nation.

In 202 years of sovereignty, Haiti has celebrated over 20 constitutions;
nine presidents-for-life; a handful of self-proclaimed kings and
emperors—and, if one is counting generously, three peaceful and legal
transfers of presidential authority from one legitimately elected
government to the next, one of which involves the current occupant of the
National Palace, President René Préval, who assumed office under
MINUSTAH’s aegis earlier this year.

Recurring military interventions from abroad are also part of the Haitian
legacy, usually though not always by American forces. Most memorable were
the 19-year Marine Corps occupation of the country that commenced during
World War I; and, more recently, the U.N.-sanctioned American mission in
the 1990s that temporarily restored to power Jean-Bertrand Aristide—the
exiled, vengeful, radicalized, and corrupt, but popularly elected,
president. (In 2004, when Aristide—reelected but by then
disgraced—reluctantly relinquished the presidency of a Haiti in turmoil
and disarray, U.S. Marines returned once again, before handing off
international responsibility for the policing of Haiti to others under the
United Nations flag.)

Haiti’s heritage is so very African (only a tiny fraction of its people
claim to be mixed-blood or “mulatto”) that the West African traditions of
the 17th and 18th centuries—the culture of modern Haiti’s original
enslaved ancestors—have not only survived, but taken on a life of their
own in the New World. Voodoo is a touchstone here (a word, by no
coincidence, that came from a language spoken in the West African country
now called Benin). A local aphorism has it that “Haiti is 90 percent
Catholic and 100 percent voodoo.” Voodoo is, indeed, one of the country’s
two state-recognized religions. In its forbidding supernatural world,
ordinary helpless mortals are at the mercy of a pantheon of loa and lesser
undead beings—zombies, loups-garous (werewolves), and the like—who must
be feared, and may occasionally be traduced, but cannot always be
propitiated.

The correspondence between voodoo and modern Haitian politics is more than
incidental. Indeed, Haiti’s most powerful and arguably most successful
political figure from the past century—François “Papa Doc” Duvalier—was,
literally, a voodoo doctor. “Papa Doc” had an M.D. in modern medicine, and
trained at the University of Michigan—but he also carefully garbed
himself in the dark black suit and the dour, unforgiving demeanor of Baron
Samedi, the voodoo god of the graveyard. His control over Haiti was so
total that his proposal to confer the next presidency-for-life upon his
19-year-old son “Baby Doc” carried a plebiscite by a vote of 2.5 million
to one—so total that his decree to recast the Lord’s Prayer as an appeal
to the Almighty Papa Doc did not evoke laughter from the Haitians obliged
to recite it. Papa Doc ruled through fear, and his agents of terror were
his personal gangs of armed, unsmiling, sunglass-wearing thugs. These were
the tontons macoutes: creole for “bogeymen,” another homage to voodoo.
They were not Haiti’s first criminal marauders in de facto authority,
inflicting misfortune or tragedy by whim on the uncharmed and
unlucky—nor, as we sadly see today, were they the last.

Modern Haiti has experienced a “withering away of the state,” to borrow a
phrase from Karl Marx, but not at all in the way Marx anticipated for his
Communist utopia. The government has ceased to provide security and
physical safety in any regular or credible fashion. It no longer provides
regular and reliable postal service. Its provision of electricity and
water is limited and irregular. Health services rely mainly on the charity
of strangers (also known as foreign aid).

Hardly less important, the government has excused itself from the task of
educating the nation’s young. It is only a slight exaggeration to say
there is no public system, or even structure, for primary and secondary
education in Haiti. The Haitian government, as best I can tell, does not
collect and disseminate educational statistics any more—and has basically
no idea how many of the country’s children are in school, or out of it.
There is no question, however, that the educational profile is dismal:
According to the country’s 2003 census, for example, less than a quarter
of all Haitians live in families where the main provider has gone further
than sixth grade, and half of Haiti’s families rely on breadwinners who
have no formal schooling at all.

Knowledgeable Haitians and foreigners with whom I talked guessed that
maybe half or three-fifths of Haiti’s children enter primary school these
days, with maybe one third of that fraction completing their primary
education. They also guessed that the Haitian government provides no more
than a tenth of the spaces for primary school these days—the rest coming
from private-sector “écoles” and “colleges,” most of which are tiny,
store-front for-pay operations whose modest tuitions nevertheless pose a
grim food-or-schooling question to families who wish to see their sons and
daughters get an education.

In today’s Haiti, even a rudimentary education looks to be beyond the
reach of the majority of children; mass illiteracy is the likely prospect
for the rising generation. If the failure to provide security deprives
Haitians of the environment in which material advance is possible, the
failure to educate deprives the population of the tools by which to
achieve such advance.

Where does foreign aid and foreign assistance fit into this gruesome
tableau? In the United States and elsewhere, there are voices quick to
attribute Haiti’s dire circumstances to inadequate foreign generosity.
According to the USAID “Green Book,” however, Haiti received a cumulative
total of about $3.5 billion (in 2004 dollars) in American aid (economic
and security assistance) between 1946 and 2004—that is to say, over the
roughly six decades in which its per capita output achieved a decline of
25 percent. U.S. aid, moreover, was just one of many sources of
concessional official transfers to Haiti. According to the World Bank,
since 1969, Haiti has enjoyed a cumulative total of $8.3 billion in
official development assistance (measured in 2004 dollars).

To put these sums in perspective: The U.S. government places Haiti’s
official, exchange rate-based GDP for the year 2005 at $4.3 billion. While
there are reasons to remain skeptical about that precise figure, as
already noted, we can be more confident about another measure of the
country’s economic performance: merchandise export earnings. In 2004,
according to the World Trade Organization, Haiti generated a little less
than $400 million through international sales of its own goods. Against
that benchmark, foreign aid transfers would amount to over two decades’
worth of Haitian exports. Whatever Haiti’s many problems may be, an
inadequate volume of foreign aid is not one of them.

Although Haiti’s prospects are severely clouded, the picture is not
totally without hope. Haiti now relies upon a million-plus community of
émigrés in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere for remittances that
may be the country’s most effective economic lifeline at the moment; those
same émigrés could be pivotal in reconstructing and developing Haiti if
the business climate warranted the effort, investment, and risk. Haitians
are resourceful and hard-working, as their very survival under current
conditions should attest. The nation of Haiti has capable, dedicated, and
loyal allies, both foreign and domestic.

Some of the good works now underway are truly inspiring (among them, the
Mother Teresa Missionaries of Charity home for abandoned children and the
aforementioned GHESKIO HIV clinic/institute, both of which I had the
privilege to visit). Other projects underway are incontestably beneficial
and worthwhile, such as the microfinance initiative at SOGEBANK, providing
loans of a few hundred dollars at a time to striving market-women who can
put these to good use. And against all odds, some initiatives are bearing
fruit: The nation’s HIV prevalence, for example, has been dropping in
recent years, and may have been cut by as much as half over the past
decade. But all of these individual pockets of promise are as exposed and
vulnerable as sand castles at low tide—every speck of progress could be
swept away, given the wild, unpredictable, and still-uncontrolled savagery
into which this unhappy country has descended.

Haiti will be in a much better place than it is today when we can complain
about corruption there. Haiti will be in a much better place than it is
today when we can focus our policy criticisms on bureaucratic
inefficiency, or wrongheaded economic and financial policies. What Haiti
needs, more than any other single thing, is physical safety and
security—for the sake of the poor as well as the rich. By itself,
physical safety would constitute an immense improvement in the local
standard of living (measured in any real human sense). An environment of
safety and security would make it possible—at least theoretically—to
achieve social and economic development and material advance.

For now, those desiderata are not even remotely realistic objectives. A
cautious political survivor, President Préval now talks of “social
appeasement” (a term that sounds no better in French or Creole than in
English) and of opening a “dialogue” with the gangs that are murdering and
terrorizing his countrymen. Safer streets are hardly the most likely
outcome from such entreaties.

Under current conditions, foreign economic assistance—from the United
States or elsewhere—can serve little more than a palliative function,
akin to changing bandages on an open wound. While some will argue there is
merit and even nobility in such service, we should have no illusions about
what such service can—and cannot—do.

What do we—the fortunate souls holding U.S. passports, with warm beds and
hot meals awaiting us—come home learning from a brief fact-finding
sojourn to Haiti? In a sentence: Security comes first. First in the
hierarchy of human needs. First in the prerequisites for economic
progress. Nothing so elevated as “law and order”—apart from its unfondly
remembered interlude under U.S. Marine Corps occupation in the early 20th
century, it is not clear that Haiti has ever had that, and maybe not even
then. Just physical safety and security.

Without security, efforts to better the national plight will be doomed to
frustration, or worse. Foreign economic assistance will be mainly wasted,
or worse. Humanitarian assistance efforts will find themselves on an
endless treadmill. Economic and humanitarian assistance are no substitute
for security and safety—cannot substitute for it, cannot themselves
create it. And what holds for Haiti holds just as true for other tortured
regions of the world where governments receive foreign aid, but local
populations do not receive safety.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt chair in political economy at the
American Enterprise Institute.

Posted at 2:58 AM · Comments (0)

Sept. 27, 2006, at 4:37 PM ET
Copyright Slate

Dumpling rage, like road rage, strikes without warning. My first attack came in my mid-20s, while dining at Raku, a Washington, D.C., “pan-Asian” restaurant. I made the mistake of ordering something called Chinese dumplings. Out came a bamboo steamer containing what resembled aged marshmallows—dumplings cooked so long they were practically glued to the bottom of the container. Try as I might, I could not pry them loose, until one ripped in half, yielding a small meatball of dubious composition.

It was an outrage. To my friends’ embarrassment, I stood up and shouted at our waiter:

“What are these?”

“Dumplings,” he said.

“These,” I said, “are not dumplings. The skin is too thick. The meat is too small. It’s been cooked too long. The folding is done all wrong.” My friends begged me to stop, and the manager threatened to call the police.

But my anger, if ill-directed, was justified. The Chinese dumpling is a magnificent product of the human imagination: At its best, it is charming in appearance, chewy and savory, and can trigger a head rush like sashimi or blue cheese. Such dumplings are not impossible to find in the United States. In fact, I once worked at a shop that produced such delicacies, called Hoo’s Dumplings, in Charlottesville, Va. For the most part, however, the dumpling has arrived here in bastardized form, as similar to the real thing as Kraft Parmesan cheese is to its ancestors. That’s why it’s time for a dumpling revolution.

Nasty American versions of otherwise dignified foods are something of a national tradition. The Parmesan-in-a-can, mentioned above, is perhaps the best example—the greatest cheese in the world, reduced to sawdust. But I am an optimist. Look at American wine, coffee, and sushi, all of which have slowly climbed to palatability after decades of abuse. The American variations may never be exactly like their originals, but they have slowly become great in their own way.

If dumplings are to follow this path to made-in-America greatness, we must understand what plagues our dumplings. Let’s start with the skin. As any serious aficionado will tell you, the skin makes or breaks a dumpling. It must be sticky, thin, and chewy at the same time—no easy feat. It’s similar to the challenge of making perfect sushi rice or pasta.

Unfortunately, American Chinese and pan-Asian outlets are lazy and suffer badly from a “thick-skin” epidemic, resulting in dumplings that are tough and greasy. A thick skin can also lead to a soggy dumpling, which is the worst fate—imagine eating a sandwich that’s been soaked in water.

The real problem with overthickness is that it destroys what I like to call the “magic ratio”—the science behind the art of dumplings. The magic ratio—a factor in foods from sushi to sandwiches—is the perfect ratio of protein to carbohydrate. The right ratio seems to activate some kind of pleasure center in the brain, bringing about calm and quiet elation. Some dumpling devotees describe dumplings, done right, as mildly orgasmic.

Thick or thin, there is no dumpling magic unless the skins are fresh. Most American restaurants don’t bother with fresh skins because it requires specialized labor, akin to a sushi counter. But any dumpling joint worth its salt needs a chain gang of workers who roll the skins and fold the dumplings on-site, nonstop, since repeated kneading yields better skins. Some places boil the dough before folding the dumpling, and if you know anything about bagels, you’ll know that’s also the secret to the New York bagel.

Chinese people have been enjoying dumplings since at least the first century A.D. when, according to legend, Doctor Zhang Zhongjing invented them. Zhang, a Hippocrates-like figure in Chinese history, supposedly discovered dumplings while researching Chinese medicine. The dumplings, the story goes, were a cure for both typhoid and frostbitten ears, which is why dumplings resemble ears. Try not to think about that when you eat them.

Today, like American barbecue, nearly every region in China has its own dumpling, often reflecting regional character. (China has many dough-wrapped snacks that go by the English-word “dumplings,” including jiao-zi, wontons, and sometimes bao, but here I’ll call them all dumplings.) The Cantonese, clever by nature, are great dumpling innovators. They understand the importance of sticky skin better than any other region, which is why their shrimp dumplings (har gau) are justifiably famous. They are also credited with creating a giant variety of unusual dumplings for dim sum, including what are arguably the best vegetarian dumplings.

Shanghai is the source of China’s most seductive dumpling: the soup-filled xiaolongbao, a dish that can easily become a lifelong obsession. (Here is an excellent survey of the best xiaolongbao places in Shanghai.) Unlike its sister dumplings, a xiaolongbao contains hot soup as well as a pork or crab filling, and it explodes when bitten. Many restaurants advise slurping out the soup before biting (in Shanghai, some places provide a straw), but personally, I eat xiaolongbao whole, despite the danger of injury. Oddly, some of the best xiaolongbao aren’t in Shanghai but Taipei—most famously, Taipei’s DinTaiFueng. As in other areas of the economy, the Taiwanese are selling the dumpling back to mainland China: There are now fancy branches in Shanghai and Beijing. There, the dumplings are in such demand that some people (like my aunt) reserve dumplings days in advance.

Northern China (especially Dongbei and Shangdong), bordering Korea, is a tough place where the people often resemble Koreans and share a similar intransigent personality. Their dumplings are direct and simple but satisfying—comfort dumplings. The skins are extra chewy, and some of the most famous use lamb and pumpkin as stuffing. Xian, China’s ancient capital, claims to be the birthplace of the northern dumpling and offers tremendous dumpling variety. It is not unusual to enjoy a meal consisting of 100 types of dumplings, many folded to resemble animals.

The most decadent dumplings come, unsurprisingly, from Hong Kong. Recently, I sampled the “yellow-river crab supreme dumpling,” the equivalent of Manhattan’s $32 hamburger. Available only in May and June, the dumpling is made in front of you from female crabs whose eggs have been mixed with meat. When consumed, they create a flavor explosion comparable to good foie gras.

What hope is there for the American dumpling? The lessons learned from food battles previously fought is that great food only comes to a demanding audience—a public educated in the scams that sometimes pass for “ethnic food.” For now, your best bet is to seek out tiny shops serving northern-style dumplings like the one I used to work in, boasting simple names like “Tasty Dumplings” or “Dumplings.” Common in New York and slowly sprouting up across America, these shops often cater to Chinese migrant workers with five-dumplings-for-a-dollar deals.

In my days working at Hoo’s, I used to march my co-workers to nearby Starbucks and Japanese restaurants, explaining that once the public gets the idea of quality, they pay more. I’m proud to say that I won a small prize for customer service, mainly on account of my English skills. But I honestly felt we were restoring the dumpling’s tarnished reputation and changing the way Americans eat, one jiao-zi at a time.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2150499/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Posted at 7:11 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

In restaurants I always want to eat whatever someone else at the table has ordered, even if it’s not something I would normally consume. Along similar lines, I find myself thoroughly intrigued by other people’s books. I want to borrow them and read them. Sometimes I go so far as to mimic other people’s collections, adding my own copies of their titles to my shelves at home.

I still remember going to visit a friend in Scotland, long ago. He lived in a tiny house in a back alley in St. Andrews, where I spent many years as a university student. He had a pristine row of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, then and now. I often used to go to his house for afternoon tea, and the conversation was absorbing. But it was hard to keep my eyes off that uniform edition: the colorful spines, the remarkable titles (Ada, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). I liked the elegant typeface, and the sense of a complex international life captured in a shelf of books. Decades later, when I got my own house, in Vermont, I went to some trouble to acquire from British booksellers that exact row of Nabokov, recreated volume by volume at considerable expense.

In Scotland my roommate for a time was an English fellow, and his father, who was a novelist, owned a lovely secluded Georgian house in the countryside of Surrey. I spent one Christmas at that house and returned many times in later years. Apart from the good company, I was attracted by the glass-enclosed bookcases in the sitting room. That collection represents, for me, a fine example of an English gentleman’s library from an earlier era, when there was ample time and space to read and think. The library contained the Sussex Edition of Rudyard Kipling (in 36 volumes), the Vailima Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson (26 volumes), and the novels of John Galsworthy, W. Somerset Maugham, and Hugh Walpole, among others.

In such a library, one also always found a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English verse and poems by Robert Bridges, John Masefield, and Algernon Swinburne. Those were collections redolent of Edwardian England, when every room had a fireplace, and the smell of fires permeated the books themselves. As the British have always been world travelers (and world conquerors, alas), one usually also found an array of travel books — a genre in which the British excelled.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I have similar volumes in my own study, even the Vailima Stevenson — a rare thing indeed, with its sturdy blue binding and thick paper, the typeface large yet dignified, and oceans of white space in the margins. The Sussex Edition of Kipling is beyond me, as most of those were destroyed in the war, and the set costs something like $30,000; but I have a decent set of Kipling, the one with the emblem of an elephant on each cover. I don’t spend a lot of time reading Kipling anymore, although I always return to his first volume of stories, Plain Tales From the Hills, with pleasure, and I do think he’s an underrated poet.

It’s not only the physical aspects of books that attract me, of course. In fact, I rarely buy first or elegant editions, however much I like to glance at them; good reading copies, in hardback or a decent paperback, are just fine. But seeing some of the editions in my living room reminds me of that wonderful house in Surrey, which stirred my imagination as a young man and was part of the reason I became a writer myself.

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

One old friend, a classical scholar, has thousands of books, mostly in his field. When staying with him, I like to get up early and wander among his shelves, learning about the classical world by standing before his endless bookcases. The Greek and Roman writers, of course, are neatly arrayed, according to genre or period. It’s interesting to see the elaborate commentaries at the bottom of the page (which often contain a hidden narrative, as Nabokov understood and put to good use in Pale Fire, his witty novel in the form of a textual commentary), and it’s useful to note the sort of scholarly work done in my friend’s field. I still recall discovering The Greeks and the Irrational, by E.R. Dodds: a staggeringly learned and stimulating book that I’d have probably not found except by accident. As a whole, this collection reflects a broadly educated mind of a kind rarely found these days, a person for whom history — and the humanities — are alive, even ablaze.

My own parents never attended college, and we had few books in our house, apart from the family Bible and a set of encyclopedias designed for children. I never gave a thought to personal libraries until I got to college. There my adviser, W. Edward Brown, who taught comparative literature at Lafayette College from the mid-1920s through his retirement in the mid-70s, invited me (and others in a class) to his large Victorian house one afternoon to celebrate the end of a semester with cookies and lemonade. The occasion stays in my memory.

I have rarely, in four decades of academic life, encountered a more systematic collection, or one that not only reflected the owner’s disposition but that also seemed to offer an intellectual history of the West. Dr. Brown had been first a classical scholar by training, and so he had most of Greek and Roman literature in well-edited editions. All of that was confined to a single room, which he whimsically called “the ancient parlor.” Another room contained European literature, with a large bookcase devoted to Dante and other Italian writers. Two or three walls held the classics of German, French, and Spanish literature. Dr. Brown had read most of those works in the original; indeed, he had translated Rilke’s Duino Elegies — still my favorite translation of Rilke, although quite unknown (as it was privately published). Another room was devoted to Russian and Slavic literatures: Early Russian literature had become a late passion for Dr. Brown, and he managed to publish an erudite two-volume study of pre-19th-century Russian literature before he died. I often think of Dr. Brown’s ample, even exhaustive, library, which stays in my mind as a model, a Platonic ideal of a personal book collection that represents the full amplitude of a learned mind, in potentia.

I’ve known any number of writers and have warm recollections of wandering in their houses, seeing what books they had on the shelves, by chance or choice. Sometimes an anomaly struck me. I remember being shocked, for example, by how few books Graham Greene had in his home in Antibes. It was, of course, an apartment, not a big house, that Greene occupied. And he was by nature peripatetic, shifting among countries, even continents, right to the end of his life. It was, he told me, an inconvenience to own a lot of books, as they’re heavy in one’s bag. So he kept only those authors who really mattered to him: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and, to my surprise, the 19th-century naval hero and prolific novelist Capt. Frederick Marryat. “Now Marryat,” Greene said to me, “there is a writer!”

Another novelist I once visited was Anthony Powell, who actually wrote a novel called Books Do Furnish a Room. Indeed, they did so in his case. He lived deep in the English countryside, in Somerset, in an old stone manor on many green acres. We had tea in his sitting room, which had floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall. There were first editions by his good friend Evelyn Waugh, and countless volumes culled from his decades as a reviewer. “I can’t give a book up, if it’s a book that meant something to me,” he said. “I always imagine I’ll go back to it one day. I rarely do, but the intention is there, and I get a warm feeling among my books.” I wished I could have spent days wandering in that house, as he had books in nearly every room.

I’ve spent a good deal of time in the villa “La Rondinaia” in southern Italy, where Gore Vidal lived for many years. Vidal has a solid collection of modern fiction and American-history books, as might be expected of the man who wrote Lincoln and Burr. The founding fathers are all there in force: Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson. And he has complete sets of those writers who have influenced him deeply, such as Henry James, who dominates his study in the sumptuous New York Edition, with prefaces to each volume by the author. “You don’t need a creative-writing degree,” Vidal once said to me. “You need to study those prefaces. Everything a novelist must know is there.”

Especially for writers living in remote places, such as the Amalfi Coast, it seems practical to have a lot of books on hand. I confess I have no such excuse, as I’m usually within a short drive of a sizable college library, where almost any title I recall can be found within minutes. But there is much to be said for creating one’s own collection. My books remind me of where I’ve been, intellectually, physically — and emotionally. They are like a photograph album, only with more dimensions. I sometimes leaf through an album to see myself in faded jeans and T-shirt on a trip to the islands of Crete and Rhodes in 1972. The unruly long hair and svelte figure amuse my children. But I return more truly to that era when I take a certain weathered volume of poems by Yeats from my bookshelf, and reread the same poems by the Irish master that I first read fully and deeply on that very trip to the Greek isles.

Other people’s books draw my attention, of course. They excite curiosity about their owners and the worlds they inhabit. But it’s finally my own books that matter, as they tell me about where I’ve been, and where I hope to go.

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His most recent book is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (George Braziller, 2005).

Posted at 9:25 AM · Comments (0)

The life of the city on eve of the war. Fantastic writing by a little-known author. In fact, I’d say its the best writing I’ve read so far about Shanghai, out of many, many books.
Alas, it’s out of print. Get it second hand if you can through Amazon, or elsewhere.

Link

Posted at 2:54 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Village Voice

September 26th, 2006 2:01 PM

In The Last King of Scotland, an adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker’s sensational turn as Idi Amin, freshly qualified Scottish physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) arrives in Uganda in 1970, ravenous for adventure. Under the rigorous and vaguely romantic tutelage of a lithe blonde with a flabby marriage and a thick braid hanging delectably over her shoulder (helplessly played by Gillian Anderson in Hollywood shorthand for a help-the-natives do-gooder), young Garrigan, wearing pointy shirt-collars and a me-decade smirk, makes a brief stab at caring for the rural poor. But he’s too feckless for the job, and soon a fateful encounter with a cow, a Maserati, and the new president rescues Garrigan for more glamorous pursuits as personal physician to Amin, who has such a thing for Scotland that he saddles his many children with names like Campbell and Mackenzie. When her prescient warnings fall on deaf ears, the blonde departs with a withering backward glance, and thus do the good times roll for Amin and Garrigan— two men gifted with an unerring talent for saying all the right things and making all the wrong moves. The difference being that one is responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million of his people.

The Last King of Scotland deals with real events filtered through Giles Foden’s 1998 novel, in which Garrigan serves as a composite of numerous white advisers with whom Amin surrounded himself, then mercilessly cut off when they no longer served his purposes. This is the first excursion into narrative features by director Kevin Macdonald, whose Touching the Void, an impressive but hyperventilating tale of mountain survival, and One Day in September , which replayed the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, were basically thrillers in documentary disguise. Working with fictional material seems to have unsettled Macdonald, for the action sequences feel hardworking and awkwardly derivative of Under Fire, Salvador, and other superior thrillers of Westerners entangled in the legacy of imperialism. An audience with even the most cursory knowledge of the Uganda conflict will find itself way ahead of the hapless protagonist, who’s caught up in a bloodbath spinning out of control; yet here, as is often the case with films about the third world, Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock’s expository screenplay doesn’t trust us to have even the most rudimentary familiarity with the rise and fall of one of the world’s most notorious despots, let alone those who put him in place. It falls to a diplomat, played with ferret-like cunning by Simon McBurney, to be the ventriloquist voice of two-faced English colonialism. “He’s got a firm hand, the only thing Africa really understands,” he says, priming us for the imminent volte-face in which the British embassy begins plotting the ouster of a regime so horrific that even the willfully myopic Garrigan, increasingly compromised by Amin’s escalating reign of terror, can’t ignore its excesses. McAvoy’s deftly drawn Garrigan, callow at first, then exponentially freaked by his own unwitting role in the sudden disappearance of dissidents and innocent bystanders, makes a compelling stand-in for the Ugly American growing an eleventh- hour conscience. But this versatile actor, last seen as Tumnus the faun in
The Chronicles of Narnia, gracefully cedes the limelight to Whitaker, whose cunningly chameleonic performance makes us see how the mercurial Amin could so smoothly pull the wool over the eyes of a highly educated young Scot, not to mention an entire nation. Prankish, entranced by a good fart, witty and politically savvy, Whitaker’s Amin can be the capering monkey or wild-eyed tyrant seen in countless television newsreels. But he’s also much more—a high roller overcompensating for a dirt-poor childhood, an astute manipulator of the West who hijacks a Palestinian plane-hijacking for his own political purposes, and finally a madman whose careening paranoia will undo his country and himself. Whitaker humanizes Amin without in any way excusing his manipulative seductions or his appalling brutality, and he emerges as a tragic template for the whole raft of African tin-pot dictators who have followed him, their promise misshapen by a long history of poverty and colonialism, and by the premature acquisition of unchecked power.

Posted at 12:04 AM · Comments (0)

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