3quarksdaily

for malcolm :)

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his? Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger. Would you attract a comparable crowd of shepherds plus livestock and anything upwards of three kings from the East? In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger. Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right? Wrong.

more from Craig Brown at Vanity Fair here.

Nabokov, Meet 50 Cent: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind

Zach Baron in The Village Voice:

Those who have been paying attention to Zadie Smith since her White Teeth debut likely already know about her affinities for E.M. Forster, Lil Wayne, George Eliot, Kafka, and Fawlty Towers. She's one of probably three working writers capable of smuggling a riff on the perils of "keeping it real" into The New York Review of Books. And who else is near versatile enough to credibly compare the oratorical tics of novelist-philosophers Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley to those of Morrissey, circa the Smiths? Like her rhetorical comrade Barack Obama, Smith doesn't just speak for her variegated experience as a 34-year-old critic, rap fan, global citizen, comedy connoisseur, cinema dilettante, black woman, reluctant professor, and, lest we forget, virtuoso novelist—she speaks the experience itself.

The last novel Smith published, On Beauty, made explicit homage to Forster and gave a main character the name Zora, as in Neale Hurston. And so in Changing My Mind, Smith's new book of occasional essays, both writers get critical evaluations. In an appraisal of her own first novel, Smith once copped to some "inspired thieving" from Nabokov—he, too, receives extended consideration in Changing My Mind. "This book was written without my knowledge," the author admits in the foreword, meaning it was written piecemeal, unintentionally. In a drawer somewhere still sits "a solemn, theoretical book about writing," entitled Fail Better. The next novel, which would be Smith's fourth, remains unfinished. This is what was written instead, along the way.

More here.

Drop of water

Abbas Raza

The Loitering Presence of the Rational Actor

Karl Sigmund in American Scientist:

Humans are social animals, and so were their ancestors, for millions of years before the first campfires lighted the night. But only recently have humans come to understand the mathematics of social interactions. The mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern were the first to tackle the subject, in a book they were planning to call A General Theory of Rational Behavior. By the time it was published in 1944, they had changed the title to Game Theory and Economic Behavior, an inspired move. The book postulated, as did all follow-up texts on game theory for generations, that players are rational—that they can figure out the payoff of all possible moves and always choose the most favorable one.

Three decades later, game theory got a new lease on life through the work of biologists William D. Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, who used it to analyze biological interactions, such as fights between members of the same species or parental investment in offspring. This new “evolutionary game theory” was no longer based on axioms of rationality. Anatol Rapoport, one of the pillars of classical game theory, characterized it as “game theory without rationality.” Herbert Gintis was among the first economists attracted by the new field, and when, 10 years ago, I wrote a review of his textbook Game Theory Evolving, I described it as “testimony of the conversion of an economist.” Gintis has not recanted in the meantime—indeed, a second edition of that book just appeared. But a new companion volume, titled The Bounds of Reason, shows that he certainly has not forgotten his upbringing in the orthodox vein.

More here.

End of Whose History?

Kishore Mahbubani in the New York Times:

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has just been celebrated. For many, that momentous event marked the so-called end of history and the final victory of the West.

This week, Barack Obama, the first black president of the once-triumphant superpower in that Cold War contest, heads to Beijing to meet America’s bankers — the Chinese Communist government — a prospect undreamt of 20 years ago. Surely, this twist of the times is a good point of departure for taking stock of just where history has gone during these past two decades.

Let me begin with an extreme and provocative point to get the argument going: Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay “The End of History” may have done some serious brain damage to Western minds in the 1990s and beyond.

Mr. Fukuyama should not be blamed for this brain damage. He wrote a subtle, sophisticated and nuanced essay. However, few Western intellectuals read the essay in its entirety. Instead, the only message they took away were two phrases: namely “the end of history” equals “the triumph of the West.”

Western hubris was thick in the air then. I experienced it. For example, in 1991 I heard a senior Belgian official, speaking on behalf of Europe, tell a group of Asians, “The Cold War has ended. There are only two superpowers left: the United States and Europe.”

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Wednesday Poem

Wan Chu's Wife In Bed

Wan Chu, my adoring husband,
has returned from another trip
selling trinkets in the provinces.
He pulls off his lavender shirt
as I lie naked in our bed,
waiting for him. He tells me
I am the only woman he'll ever love.
He may wander from one side of China
to the other, but his heart
will always stay with me.
His face glows in the lamplight
with the sincerity of a boy
when I lower the satin sheet
to let him see my breasts.
Outside, it begins to rain
on the cherry trees
he planted with our son,
and when he enters me with a sigh,
the storm begins in earnest,
shaking our little house.
Afterwards, I stroke his back
until he falls asleep.
I'd love to stay awake all night
listening to the rain,
but I should sleep, too.
Tomorrow Wan Chu will be
a hundred miles away
and I will be awake all night
in the arms of Wang Chen,
the tailor from Ming Pao,
the tiny village down the river.

By Richard Jones

from The Quarterly, 1990
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY

dilemma 89

Leipzig is a very good place from which to approach eastern Europe.[1] For those coming from further west the city is a halfway stop, even if the train connections are not as good as perhaps one might have hoped twenty years ago, when the Iron Curtain disappeared. Leipzig is connected to eastern Europe and its history by a thousand threads – one need only think of the foundation of its university, or of the long-distance trade routes. At their intersection arose the trade fair, which during the Cold War became a sluice chamber, a contact yard between the hemispheres that opened for a moment every year. And consider the renewed interest in eastern Europe in Leipzig today, its book fair and its academic and research institutions, which have become trademarks of the city. So why should anyone from outside take the trouble of essaying an approach to the East in a place which is already so close – geographically, culturally, and academically? All the more so, since the topic of this conference is general and does not imply a question to which one must provide an answer. The chain of ideas "History of memory, places of memory, strata of memory" is more a set of associations and is intended to delimit an area.

more from Karl Schlögel at Eurozine here.

the fusion illusion

Fusion has been the Holy Grail of energy since long before anyone ever worried about global warming or strategic dependency on OPEC. Since the dawn of the atomic age, armies of scientists and researchers and government officials have invested billions of dollars and countless hours of toil and labor to replicate, in a controlled environment, what the sun is constantly doing: converting matter into energy through a fusion reaction. To figure this out would be to solve humanity’s energy needs once and for all. The development of successful fusion power plants would put an end to all the economic, environmental, and foreign policy troubles that plague the current global energy regime. Unlike windmills and solar panels, the potential of fusion energy is virtually limitless. This vision has spurred a movement of would-be discoverers lighting out for the fame and glory that would accompany the breakthrough of controlled fusion. A recent book chronicles this wild, oft-contentious scientific pursuit. Charles Seife, a former Science magazine writer and the author of the heralded 2000 bestseller, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, has written a lively account of the history of fusion research—“a tragic and comic pursuit that has left scores of scientists battered and disgraced.”

more from Max Schulz at The New Atlantis here.

Prescribed reading: medicine in literature

From The Guardian:

Last night I attended the prize ceremony for the inaugural Wellcome Trust book prize, awarded to "outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine". I was attracted by its slightly barmy mixing of literary disciplines. And I was impressed by the calibre of the judges, among whom were Jo Brand (chair, and 10 years a psychiatric nurse) and Raymond Tallis, one of the few people whose writing clarifies, rather than further muddles, my understanding of neuroscience.

The shortlist, which can be viewed in full here, comprised two novels and four non-fiction books ranging between autobiography, investigative journalism and biographical essays. The winning book, Keeper, Andrea Gillies' memoir of caring for a relative with Alzheimer's, hasn't received a single review since its publication in May – something this award will, one hopes, remedy.

Speaking with Brand and Tallis before the ceremony, I wondered which books they thought best demonstrated the qualities they were looking for. Interestingly enough, they both chose novels. Brand described Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as being about "a very specific time in American history, when psychiatry was very unsophisticated and nurses were really no more than prison warders". Tallis opted for Mann's The Magic Mountain, which "brilliantly fictionalises medicine, the thrill of science, and the mystery of the human body."

The prize's website plays a similar game, suggesting García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Ian McEwan's Saturday as likely nominees from the past. But the possibility exists, of course, to reach back much further in the literary record than this. Illness, certainly, was present at the birth of western literature: just think of Apollo, angered by Agamemnon's insulting of the priest Chryses, sending a plague to ravage the Greek army in the Iliad. Medicine is present, too, albeit in primitive form: the many wounds Homer describes are anatomically accurate, while Machaon's herbal remedies and palliative care are doctoring of a sort.

More here. (For Dr. Alvan Ikoku who is sure to win this prize in the future.)

Report row ousts top Indian scientist

From Nature:

The first appointment in a scheme to recruit expatriate scientists to senior positions in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) — India's largest science agency — seems to have misfired badly. A US scientist of Indian origin has been dismissed just five months after he was offered the position of 'outstanding scientist' and tasked with helping to commercialize technologies developed at CSIR institutes. Shiva Ayyadurai, an entrepreneur inventor and Fulbright Scholar with four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was the first scientist to be appointed under the CSIR scheme to recruit about 30 scientists and technologists of Indian origin (STIOs) into researcher leadership roles. "The offer was withdrawn as he did not accept the terms and conditions and demanded unreasonable compensation," Samir Brahmachari, director general of the CSIR, told Nature.

Ayyadurai denies this. In a 30 October letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is also president of the CSIR, he claims that he was sacked for sending senior CSIR scientists a report that was critical of the agency's leadership and organization. The report, published on 19 October, was authored by Ayyadurai and colleague Deepak Sardana, who joined the CSIR as a consultant in January. Ayyadurai says that the report — which was not commissioned by the CSIR — was intended to elicit feedback about the institutional barriers to technology commercialization. "Our interaction with CSIR scientists revealed that they work in a medieval, feudal environment," says Ayyadurai. "Our report said the system required a major overhaul because innovation cannot take place in this environment."

More here.

a kind of all-purpose novel-killing novel

We now have everything in place to convert two texts into a game of chess: we simply feed the program the two novels, asking it to play one text as “white” and the other as “black”; the program searches through the white text until it finds the first tuple corresponding to a movable piece (in the case of an opening move, either a pawn or a knight), and then, having settled on the piece that will open, continues searching through the text until it encounters a tuple designating a square to which that piece can be moved. When it has done so, the computer executes that move for white, and then goes to the other text to find, in the same way, an opening move for black. And so it goes: white, black, white, black, until—quite by accident, of course, since we must suppose that the novels know nothing of chess strategy (and our program cannot help them, since it knows only the rules of the game)—one king is mated.  Such a set up would be close (there turn out to be interesting differences, but put that aside for now) to permitting two monkeys to play chess against each other by giving each a keyboard and permitting them to jump about on them: send the resulting string of letters to our program, and it scans this string of gobbledygook for tuples that constitute legitimate moves, makes them, and voilà, monkey chess. 

more from D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter at Cabinet here.

To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy

One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of the new group calling themselves Naturalists, he was already well known in Paris; three years previously, he had made his first appearance – as ‘le petit Maupassant’ – in the Goncourt Journal, delighting a company of already famous writers with a long story about Swinburne’s decadent behaviour in Etretat. He had written poems, stories and journalism, coauthored a lewd play, and was working on his first novel, Une Vie. He was socially and sexually successful, and physically very fit: the previous summer, having bought a small boat on Zola’s behalf, he had rowed it the 50 kilometres from Bezons to Zola’s house at Médan. Yet on 3 August, two days before his 28th birthday, he made the following complaints to Flaubert about life: ‘Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence.’

more from Julian Barnes at the LRB here.

Tuesday Poem

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
"this year somebody tutched me
on the sholder"
and turned his paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of "o" and "d"
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

from New American Poets of the 90s;
David Godine, Publisher, 1991

On Myth

Marina Warner in The Liberal:

WRITERS don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.

In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double.

Borges liked myth because he believed in the principle of ‘reasoned imagination’: that knowing old stories, and retrieving and reworking them, brought about illumination in a different way from rational inquiry. Myths aren’t lies or delusions: as Hippolyta the Amazon queen responds to Theseus’ disparaging remarks about enchantment: ‘But all the story of the night told o’er, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of great constancy’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.24-7). One of Borges’s famous stories, ‘The Circular Ruins’, unfolds a pitch-perfect fable of riddling existence in the twentieth century: a magician dreams a child into being, and then discovers, as he walks unscathed through fire in the closing lines of the tale, that he himself has been dreamed.

More here.

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

From The New York Times:

It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

More here.

WE ARE ALL AFRICANS

by Tolu Ogunlesi

To the outside world, we are all “Africans”.

‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert.

As Africans – and by extension African writers – we’re supposed to be united by geography, culture and experience (mostly of the negative sort), and thus a herd of interchangeable entities. There is after all such a thing as African literature, written by African writers, dealing with African issues – poverty, wars, AIDS, Aid, military dictatorships, coup d’états, corruption, civilian dictatorships, and very lately, dubious power sharings.

Never mind that Nigeria and Uganda are no more similar (in my opinion) than America and Russia. Or that Nigeria’s religious dichotomy (and the resulting tensions) confers on it a greater similarity with India than with South Africa. Or that Nigeria and fellow English-speaking Ghana are separated by two impregnable walls of language known as Benin and Togo. Or that a conference proclaimed as a “Festival of Contemporary African Writing” will very likely be no more than a Festival of Anglophone African Writing.

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, Jumping Monkey Hill (first published in Granta 95, and which appears in her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck) – which William Skidelsky, writing in the Guardian (UK) calls “the most obviously autobiographical (and funniest) of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck” – tells the story of an “African Writers’ Workshop” for which the British Council has selected participants.

The workshop is overseen by Edward Campbell, “an old man in a summer hat who smiled to show two front teeth the colour of mildew.” Campbell is British, with a “posh” accent, “the kind some rich Nigerians tried to mimic and ended up sounding unintentionally funny.” He is also the final authority – using what one might call his “Africanometer” – on the quality and plausibility of the stories produced during the workshop.

At the workshop are a Ugandan, a white South African, a black South African, a Tanzanian, a Zimbabwean, a Kenyan, a Senegalese and Ujunwa, a Nigerian. East, West and Southern Africa are represented, the North is not, as is often the case in real life reporting about the continent where the term ‘Africa’ is used to refer to “sub-Saharan Africa” and North Africa is somewhat set apart like some entity off the coast of the real Africa. And, needless to say, the workshop is conducted in English, not French or Swahili.

One of the more interesting scenes in Adichie’s story is when all the writers (except for the Ugandan) gather to drink wine and make fun of one another, and make comments such as: “You Kenyans are too submissive! You Nigerians are too aggressive! You Tanzanians have no fashion sense! You Senegalese are too brainwashed by the French!

This scene took me right back to Crater Lake, venue of the 2006 Caine Prize workshop, in which I participated. NM, a young South African novelist and I were roommates at the Crater Lake resort where the workshop took place. As ‘African writers’, we should have instinctively known everything about each other’s countries. We should have been able to complete one another’s sentences.

But not exactly. We were different people, with little experience of each other’s daily realities.

I, as a Nigerian, had only encountered the ‘A’ word in theory. I had read about apartheid in books and in songs (the late Nigerian music icon Sunny Okosun was famous for his ‘Free Mandela’ campaign) and in history lessons. But it did not honestly exist in Nigeria in Nigeria. Our own inequalities or repressions were of a different sort.

And I was astonished when NM told me that growing up in the melting-pot that is Soweto made it possible for him to speak more than half a dozen local languages. I speak only one Nigerian language (two, if you include pidgin – the corruption of English that, in the absence of an indigenous lingua franca, approximates one.)

In a 2008 interview with Renee Shea (published in the Kenyon Review), Chimamanda explained: “Race is a very complicated thing in Africa and I think that I, as a West African, don't feel equipped to fully understand it. I grew up not really understanding the concept of race while my contemporaries in Kenya and South Africa were very much aware of race because they grew up in countries that were racialized in ways that West Africa was not—and this is not to say that West African countries did not have their own problems, race was just not one of them…”

I agree. There are white South Africans and black ones, white Zimbabweans and black. As far as I know there are black Kenyans, and a sizeable number of Kenyans of Indian origin. But to the best of my knowledge no one is ever referred to as a “white Nigerian”, even though every year a sizeable number of white-skinned foreigners are officially conferred with the citizenship of Nigeria; even though the Lebanese for example have been settling here for decades.

At the workshop I met a Gambian novelist who bore a Yoruba name. The Yoruba form one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. I am Yoruba. I was intrigued. She explained that there were many Yoruba migrant groups all along the coast of West Africa, all originating from the original stock. But at that moment the coloniser’s language was the only language we shared in common, and arguably the most potent ‘cultural’ bond between us.

Since NM and I had never been to each other’s countries, stories became our shared medium of exchange. Founded on nothing more than news reports and hearsay, these stories were largely overblown, and told with the intent of being sarcastic. NM recalled how a Nigerian novelist (and mutual friend of ours) had told him that in Nigeria, persons intending to become policemen were required to bring along their uniforms for the screening session. Now that was funny, and it hit me below the belt.

One morning, the sound of gunshots filtered into our camp. It must have been hunters or guards in the nearby mountains. I told NM to take it easy, there was nothing to get scared about, after all, this was not Soweto. No it wasn’t. For wasn’t Soweto the place where gunshots were like sunlight – awaited, necessary, unremarkable?

This was to become the pattern of our conversations. Vicious, yet lacking in malice. South Africa contending with Nigeria, not in a game of soccer (The Bafana Bafana versus the Super Eagles) but in a game of wits carried on by two ambitious writers. Post-Kenya, our email exchanges have taken on the spirit of our face-to-face encounter. When I sent NM an email informing him that I won a poetry contest, he good-naturedly asked for some of my “voodoo” (apparently the rest of Africa is aware, courtesy of Nollywood, that Nigerians are the most ardent practitioners of voodoo on the continent), and promised in return to buy me an AK47 rifle from Soweto. “[T]hey are cheap you know…” he added.

And in a postscript to another email in which I told him I’d be travelling to Sweden on a writing fellowship, he advised me: “[D]on't take drugs to Sweden...I know you Nigerians.”

Later on in Jumping Monkey Hill, the Senegalese writer (who, by the way is lesbian), has to endure being told by Edward that homosexual stories of the kind she had written “weren’t reflective of Africa, really.”

Instantaneously Ujunwa retorts “Which Africa?”

Which is the trillion-dollar question for which I desperately wish I had an answer.

But it is hard to blame any foreigners for speaking so confidently of ‘Africa’ when public debates on issues like indecent dressing and homosexuality in Nigeria always have people arguing that such “immorality” is patently “un-African!” Or when the habit of late-coming at public events is more widely known as “African Time” than as “Nigerian Time”, even when no one has bothered to find out if the phenomenon is equally native to Algeria or Botswana or Madagascar.

At the end of Jumping Monkey Hill, Edward’s verdict on Ujunwa’s workshop story (about a Nigerian girl who gives up a lucrative banking job because she will not condone the sexual harassment from a potential client) is this: “The whole thing is implausible. This is agenda writing, it isn’t a real story of real people.”

Which is perhaps an apt description of much of what is written and told about the ‘continent of Africa’ today.

Health Care

by Zaneb Khan Beams

It’s 4:45 PM on Friday. I’m covering a colleague’s phone calls while she’s out of the country, and there’s a newborn boy who needs phototherapy. This means he needs to be in the hospital in what looks like a miniature tanning bed for at least one night and one day. So, I call his parents and tell them the test results- their baby has a dangerously high bilirubin level.

Bilirubin is the by-product of red blood cells recycled through the liver and GI tract. Newborns’ livers are not efficient at recycling red blood cells, and the bilirubin by-products can accumulate in their bloodstream, cross their fragile blood-brain barrier, and cause kernicterus, ( serious permanent brain damage), or, in extreme cases, death. Neonatal Physiologic Hyperbilirubinemia represents a “bread and butter” pediatrics challenge. High bilirubin levels are easily and cheaply treated with UV light rays.

These parents knew their baby might have high bilirubin. Still, when I tell the baby’s mother he has to go to the hospital, she bursts into tears. I ask her why, and she describes a two year saga of problems with her health insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield. Both parents in this family work in respectable jobs and receive health insurance “through their employer.” In other words, their employer negotiates a bulk rate for health insurance plans, and employees can buy insurance in bulk. Payment for the insurance comes out of their paychecks, and neither the employer nor the employee ends up paying income tax on dollars spent on health insurance. BCBS earns profits of about 30%. Win/ Win situation, right? Wrong. Blue Cross Blue Shield will pay for the medical care in the hospital, but not for being in the hospital. Room and board, at $600/ day, are not considered part of the baby’s treatment, and therefore not reimbursed.

Meanwhile, it’s almost close-of-business on a Friday, and I realize I need to get this baby home phototherapy equipment.

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

Their baby’s high blilirubin put this family in a position where the major issues in the Health Care Reform debate come into sharp focus. This baby’s parents struggle with challenges to affordability, and access. Likely, about one quarter of their income goes to costs associated with health insurance, with premiums increasing annually at a rate that exceeds the rate of inflation. They can not afford the cost of employer subsidized health insurance.

The online Health Care Reform poll, www.voicesofphysicians.org, gives us insight into what doctors know we need in Health Care Reform. Dr. Carey Vaughan of California states she is troubled by “ …the total lack of health care available to millions without insurance, but perhaps more importantly, the lack of health care access to those who are clearly UNDERinsured or covered by sub-quality plans that do not really provide the coverage needed for adequate prevention and treatment.” In other words, Americans with solid jobs, who pay for health insurance, cannot afford the care they need. Cheap, essential therapies become unavailable because of high cost and byzantine regulations aimed at withholding care from all but the most persistent and resourceful consumers.

Access refers to the average American’s ability to see an appropriate doctor and get the evaluation and treatment they need. Some Americans must spend an entire day travelling to get to the doctors they need. Some can not get preventive medication when pharmaceutical companies no longer see certain products as profitable, and stop producing them. Often, patients can not get evaluated in a reasonable time frame because insurance companies set up so many hurdles before evaluation as simple as a CT scan.

I saw a patient several weeks ago with findings suggestive of mastoiditis. This is a potentially serious infection of the temporal bone. It can extend to the brain, and must be treated with IV antibiotics. To conserve resources, instead of sending the patient straight to the hospital, I sent them to get a CT scan of the temporal bones- the most appropriate diagnostic imaging for mastoiditis. The parents’ request for prior authorization was rejected. So, in the meantime, if the patient had mastoiditis that had spread to the brain, the child’s life would be in danger. Two days later, after the patient had seen a specialist, and been started on empiric therapy with fingers and toes crossed in hopes that the infection would subside without IV therapy, the insurance company called to “re-deny” the CT scan. They said the patient had to be in-patient to get the CT scan. Hoping we’d give up before getting the CT scan, the insurance company presented absurd, illogical requirements that put patients’ lives and physicians’ livelihoods at risk.

As Dr. Peter Elias of Auburn, Maine, states in www.voicesofphysicians.org, health insurance is “not designed to provide health oriented care for patients. (It is) designed to provide and reimburse for episodic care and focuses on illness.” He describes an ideal system that “is not volume and profit driven, (and) uses evidence and effectiveness research.” My patient with the high bilirubin needed a very conventional therapy that is proven beyond a doubt to prevent serious long term complications. Based on excellent scientific data, we know that phototherapy for babies with hyperbilirubinemia prevents massive potential health problems. Yet, because of insurance company rules designed to protect their profit margins, I had to take a chance, and coordinate outpatient therapy, or ask the family to risk financial collapse. Dr. Elizabeth Peverall of Burnsville, North Carolina, states in www.voicesofphysicians.org “ I have patients whose lives have been put at risk due to inability to pay for hospitalization, medication, or a simple lab test.”

If a family who pays for health insurance can not obtain routine care for their child, health insurance, and health care, lack affordability and accessibility. Dr. Terry Vik, a pediatric oncologist in Indiana, states in www.voicesofphysicians.org that he is frustrated by “… dealing with insurance company bureaucracy to authorize care for children… (These) families… have so much more to worry about… They do not need the added burden of wondering if their insurance will cover… care.” Physicians are trained to methodically evaluate their patients’ complaints and physical findings, then forced to sublimate our expertise to insurance companies’ un-checked profit motives.

So how does Health Care Reform legislation solve the problems of affordability? Insurance reforms in the bill eliminate co-pays or deductibles for preventive care, rate increases, and coverage denials for pre-existing conditions, gender, or occupation. Bills currently under consideration also ensure guaranteed oral, vision, and hearing benefits for children.

Working Americans not receiving health insurance benefits will be able to purchase coverage at group rates through a health insurance exchange. Individuals and families with an income of up to four times the federal poverty level — an income of up to $88,000 for a family of four — will receive affordability credits to help cover the cost of coverage. The bill limits annual out of pocket costs at $5,000 for singles and $10,000 for families and eliminates lifetime limits on insurance coverage. Today, up to 60% of bankruptcies in the United States are the result of crippling health care expenses. The limits described here ensure that no citizen will face financial ruin because of high health care costs.

Currently proposed legislation further solidifies affordability and access by helping small businesses. Such enterprises, with up to 100 employees, will be able to join the health insurance exchange, benefitting from group rates and a greater choice of insurers. Additionally, small businesses with 25 employees or less and average wages of less than $40,000 qualify for tax credits of up to 50% of the costs of providing health insurance.

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

So, back to the office, it’s not quite 5pm on Friday afternoon, and I have secured the treatment my patient needs. I completed the paperwork according to Blue Cross Blue Shield’s specifications. Moderate medical and financial disasters averted.

As a result of currently proposed Health Care Reform, this infant’s family’s out of pocket costs would have stopped many thousands of dollars ago. Their monthly premiums might have been much lower, as a result of competitive prices created the health insurance exchange. The solutions being considered in Congress reduce deficit spending by $30 billion over the next decade, and fulfill the concept of “paygo”. In other words, they require no new funding beyond current budgeting. If we fail to enact robust Health Care Reform legislation this year, we risk spending 20% of the national budget on health care related costs within the next decade.

Doctors’ groups like the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Cancer Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the grassroots organization, Doctors for America, support current legislative proposals. Doctors support reform because it makes sense. It improves our ability to care for our patients, and improves their ability to get the care they need. It makes sense, and it has to happen.

Dr. Zaneb Khan Beams is a board-certified pediatrician practicing in Maryland.

Lévi-Strauss and Philosophy

Justin E. H. Smith

In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy:

When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being 'advanced'... After years of training, I now find myself intimately convinced of a few unsophisticated beliefs, not very different from those I held at the age of fifteen. Perhaps I see more clarly the inadequacy of these intellectual tools; at least they have an instrumental value which makes them suitable for the service I require of them.

Later, in a 1972 interview, he confesses that his decision to study philosophy was motivated by a sense that this discipline, more than any other, would enable him to remain non-committal, to continue to develop all his other interests, under the big-tent of a vaguely defined cluster of intellectual projects called 'philosophy'. This understanding of philosophy, I think, remains significant for our assessment of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual legacy.

For better or worse, while his approach may have made sense in the Paris of the 1920s, as I can personally attest it certainly would not in the New York or California of the 1990s (when I was a student of philosophy). Here, a different conception of philosophy and its boundaries reigned, and still reigns. As Jason Stanley recently reflected at the Leiter Report blog:

Many academics use the term 'philosopher' not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline - be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term 'philosopher' as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers.

Stanley argues in another post that his own philosophical tradition may be distinguished from a rival tradition, represented by Walter Benjamin, that might better be called 'anthropology' than 'philosophy':

Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Stanley makes two claims in these passages that interest me: first, that not just any abstract or broad-focused thinker may appropriately be called a 'philosopher', and, second, that much of the thinking that is called by some people 'philosophy', might better be called 'anthropology' to the extent that it is principally interested in questions of culture rather than, I take it, in transcultural features of the human mind and its connections to the world.

While I certainly know Stanley is a first-rate philosopher, I do not at all share his conception of what philosophy itself is. If anything, my own understanding of the meaning of 'philosophy' is the one at work not in the United States today, nor in France in the 1920s, but rather in the title of the distinguished journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, which, since 1666, has been featuring articles on everything from the reproductive organs of eels, to the smelting of metals, to the causes of comets, to the nature of the passions, to the existence of God. It seems to me that if Stanley wants to make the case for a narrower conception of philosophy, he needs not only to argue against the misguided deployment of the word that we've certainly all heard at dinner parties, but also to explain why the very most recent self-description of a certain academic discipline in a certain part of the world should be permitted to cancel out so much accrued meaning in a word that has migrated and mutated across so many centuries, languages, and continents.

One problem with Stanley's conception of philosophy is that it leaves out a great number of figures who lived and thrived before the academicization of philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, yet who are universally recognized by current philosophers as having contributed something important to the tradition we've inherited. Descartes, Leibniz, Boyle, Gassendi, Digby, Huygens, Newton: these figures and many more are recognized as having contributed something to what we today call 'philosophy', yet they also contributed a great deal more that cannot be fitted into the current range of interests of philosophers, such as their work on the causes of spontaneous generation, the role of the animal spirits in physiology, the moral benefits of chemical experiments, the question whether corpuscles have gender, and so on. Now, if I were capable of going back in time, I would not be at all eager to tell any of these great thinkers that only part of what they were doing --i.e., the part that would be recognized and valued in the early 21st century-- is in fact philosophy, while the rest is just culture, or tradition, or garbage. I would seek to understand how it all fits together, why what would later be valued was presented together with what would later be ridiculed or dismissed. That's what I conceive my task to be as an historian of philosophy.

It may be that on the prevailing understanding of philosophy a certain kind of historian of philosophy (my kind) is simply not a philosopher. Fine, then, you won't hurt my feelings if you call me a historical anthropologist, studying what is really just another species of pensée sauvage, an enchanted, ridiculous world of substantial forms, hylozoic archaei, and other nescio quods. But quite apart from labelling issues, I find Stanley's conception of philosophy hard to accept because it seems obvious to me that philosophers, good philosophers in the sense understood in mainstream, non-historical, Anglophone philosophical circles today, regularly make use of data furnished to them by other disciplines, and I don't see any prima facie reason why anthropology, even cultural anthropology, should not be one of these disciplines. Stanley is at pains to clearly demarcate the border philosophy shares with other, lower-status humanities disciplines, the ones that threaten to pollute, and so to change the character of, our pristine realm. It's not clear however that he would want to guard the other border, the one it shares with the natural sciences, nearly so vigilantly. But it's also not clear, to me, on what grounds an open border should be permitted with the natural sciences, but not with, e.g., paleography, historical linguistics, biblical exegesis, and even cultural anthropology. Relatedly --and here I'm starting to come back to Lévi-Strauss after a digression that was much longer than I intended-- I don't see why the study of culture should not be expected to furnish insights into the transcultural nature of the human mind and of its fit with the world. And if doing that is not philosophical, then I really don't know what is.

II.

Does anthropology in fact furnish such insights? If it does not, at present, this may be a result not of its intrinsic disciplinary limitations, but rather of our broader, transdisciplinary intellectual climate, which seems divided, broadly speaking, between two camps. On the one hand, there are those represented in crudest form by Richard Dawkins, who think that to believe in fairies, ghosts, river-spirits, God, creation, etc., is simply wrong, and therefore unworthy of interest (Daniel Dennett has by contrast argued that religion should be studied as a natural phenomenon, yet seems largely uninterested in the work that has already been done in this area by anthropologists, and seems oblivious to how much more religion involves than ontological commitment to a transcendent entity, e.g., eating this part of the walrus's body but not that part if you are an Inuit shaman, or eating olive oil on Tuesday but not Wednesday if you are a Romanian Orthodox Christian). Dawkins has said that he declines to learn anything about theology for the same reason he declines to learn anything about fairy-ology: you don't need to know anything about the doctrine, he thinks, in order to know that fairies do not exist. But when did we become so intellectually stunted that the question of the existence of fairies came to be the only relevant branch of fairy-ology? When did we lose sight of the interest --I mean, the scientific interest-- in the variety of ways people conceptualize the world, from which organ meats are taboo, to the causal influence of dead ancestors in our worldly affairs, to the matter of the ultimate transcendent ground of the world?

On the other hand, there are those --for the sake of convenience let us call them all 'post-structuralists'-- who think that believing in fairies and such like entities, under certain circumstances, amounts to defiance of the hegemony of Western scientific rationality, and is therefore 'good'. What gets lost in this rift is the approach that says: Believing in fairies (or in the taboo charge of a certain bit of meat, etc...) is something people do naturally; therefore, the study of beliefs about fairies is the study of something in nature, and is thus worthy of interest quite apart from either considerations of the truth of these beliefs, or of the defiance these beliefs pose to truth-mongering (which post-structuralists believe is always also power-mongering).

It is in this connection that I truly think --rather than just thinking now, for the moment, as a result of my unexpected sentimentality in the days following his death-- that the spirit of the work of Lévi-Strauss, if not all of its conclusions, is worth reviving today. This is a spirit that is there in much human science of the early 20th century: in Vladimir Propp, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, to name a few luminaries. When Propp sought to spell out the morphology of the folk tale by analyzing and formalizing the themes of a number of bits of Russian folklore he had accumulated, this is not because he thought Russians were particularly folksy and needed to be celebrated for it, or because he thought their folk tales were uniquely suited to formal analysis. He fed Russian folktales into his Proppian machine because he wanted to understand the range of possible folktales, and in so doing to understand the range of possible ways different cultures make sense of themselves. This is at the outset a rather tedious, empirical exercise, but the aims are philosophical: to understand how people think, to understand what it is to be a thinking human being in the social and natural world. Lévi-Strauss's life work, the effort to establish a "culturally informed science of mind," in the words of Marshall Sahlins, is, I believe, the pinnacle of this philosophically motivated approach to the human sciences.

I can't hope to give a comprehensive account of his work here; what I want to do rather is to suggest that, in general, Lévi-Strauss shows us an approach to knowledge systems that ought to be of interest to anyone concerned with figuring out how any future philosophy of mind might come forward as a science. To some extent, structuralism might be said to overlap with what is called 'contextualism' in epistemology, according to which beliefs need to be assessed in relation to the background of other, available beliefs in a given community. The principal difference however, between the project of a culturally informed science of mind, on the one hand, and philosophical accounts of belief and meaning, such as contextualism or holism, is that the former wants to empirically survey the range of contexts, and from there to draw lessons about what they all have in common. Consider the well-known example from Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques cycle, of the Peruvian tribal chief who, following upon some misfortune or other, demanded that all the twins in the community repent for having caused this misfortune. Lévi-Strauss wants to know by what rationality that response could have been meaningful, and he believes that in the end this rationality, coming out of brains that are no different from our brains, is going to be governed by the same laws that govern our mental and social lives.

Today, again, one might say that there are only two possible approaches to the cultural significance of twins as harbingers of misfortune: denunciation of it as scientifically misinformed; or defense of it as 'other' and therefore as being as worthy of absolute, solemn respect as it is incomprehensible to the outside observer. Few seem interested anymore in simply trying to decipher what those people are thinking. Again, whatever it is they are thinking is something that is being thought by human minds/brains, and so to map the structure that makes this way of thinking meaningful, along with all the other, different structures available from around the world, seems to me like a pretty good way of empirically establishing how the human mind works.

III.

If sensitivity to culture and the way it is structured by a hidden rationality is potentially useful for resolving questions about human cognition, it is arguably necessary for making progress in many debates in social and political philosophy. Take arguments concerning gay marriage. Philosophers tend to argue for or against opening up the institution of marriage by appeal to supposedly transcultural notions such as justice and equality. An anthropologist of the Lévi-Straussian stripe by contrast, who takes it for granted that meaning in cultures is constituted out of sets of oppositions, and that kinship is among the most elementary forms of social structure in which these oppositions are expressed, will want to know what sort of effect, real or perceived, the decision to abandon a long-held opposition will have on the structure of the society as a whole. If there is any truth to Lévi-Strauss's controversial argument in his Elementary Structures of Kinship of 1949 that kinship systems evolved in the first place as a mechanism for the 'exchange of women', one might predict that it would be hard to convince everyone that it's now time to switch to an entirely gender-indifferent conception of kinship. (It would take a separate essay to make adequate sense of Lévi-Strauss's very complicated account of kinship as exchange of women; suffice it to say here that in providing this account Lévi-Strauss was neither 'endorsing' woman-exchange --as if endorsement had any place in science!--, nor was he saying women are commodities; he was, in any case, saying that the opposition male-female plays an ineliminable role in kinship systems, and this much of Lévi-Strauss's account has been endorsed by at least some of his feminist critics, including, if I've understood her, Françoise Heritier.)

This is not at all to say that opening up the institution of marriage to include same-sex couples is not right and just (if I may attempt to channel Stanley Fish, I've said nothing in defense of one side or the other); it is only to say that the inability of arguments that appeal to the right and the just to immediately win over the whole world might have something to do with rather deeply-seated mechanisms at work in the structure of society, mechanisms that it's not going to be at all easy to weed out. It might in fact be the case that it would be easier to dispense with monogamous pair-bonding than with the gender rules governing who may be whose affine, and in this sense it is hard to think of the goal of building a society out of monogamous couples of any gender combination at the heart of nuclear families as something that is timelessly right, and of alternative conceptions of society as motivated simply by hate or intolerance. If it ends up working, for the long term, this might be for hidden reasons, such as that North Americans and Western Europeans just happen to have what Louis Henry Morgan would call an 'Eskimo' kinship structure, as opposed to, say, Hawaiian or Sudanese, which involves relatively fewer differences in the rules governing patrilineal and matrilineal descent. But one could also predict that different obstacles would present themselves in different kinship systems, a surface expression of which, but not a root cause, might be intolerance. We should perhaps keep pursuing the project of modifying our kinship system, but we should also attempt to understand, scientifically, the nature of the resistance, just like we should keep trying to understand why humans keep engaging in ethnic cleansing or suicide bombing (on the latter, see Scott Atran). This is something I think anthropology is better at doing than a discipline that conceives its task as entirely transcultural.

In the 17th century, I hasten to add, understanding and even manipulating the elementary constituents of society would have been conceived as squarely part of philosophy: consider William Petty's 1672 plan to Anglicize the Irish population by inserting English women into Irish households. Petty has gone down in history as an economist and a demographer, yet he himself thought of his Anglicization scheme as a bit of natural philosophy, and conceptualized cultural change on the model of the transmutation of metals-- which was also natural philosophy, or, more particularly, chemical philosophy. Try to fit all that into the disciplinary divisions du jour!

IV.

But to return to the prospect of a culturally informed science of mind: what ever became of it? Many anthropologists are still doing work that, in its piecemeal way, is contributing to the pile of empirical data that could be used for a culturally informed science of mind of the sort Lévi-Strauss imagined, but they do not seem to consider it as anything more than piecemeal work. Cognitive science continues to produce interesting results, but only a very small portion of it is ethnographically informed (and a smaller but very interesting portion of it, being produced, curiously, in Paris and mostly in English by Dan Sperber, Scott Atran, and their circles, is both consciously building on and improving the tradition of the anthropologists, while also communicating with people like Dennett). One result of this lack of interest in ethnographic comparison is that many of cogntive science's findings concerning the innate working of 'modules' for cognizing different domains of the human and natural environment run the risk, as Ian Hacking and many others have noted, of revealing only dispositions triggered by a particular cultural environment. The same point may certainly be made about what is now called 'experimental philosophy', in which social-psychological data about the intuitions of women and men in the street is gathered, in order to confirm or disconfirm philosophical views about which intuitions are right or not. But, obviously, a social psychologist's poll of modern Americans about their intutitions concerning, say, the moral valence of tearing off and devouring the arm of a victim of human sacrifice, is going to come up with different results than a similar poll taken in an anthropophagous society (and yes, there are anthropophagous societies; there might not be any openly doing what they've traditionally done, under the watchful eye of the 'world community', but what a proper human science would seek to understand is not the range of forms human society takes at present, but the range of forms human society can take).

These satellite research programs aside, in mainline philosophy an old and false dichotomy appears to linger, which dictates the range of possible approaches to the question of the unity and diversity of the human mind. One approach says all minds are very much the same. In fact they are all just like my mind, so all I need to do in order to learn what human minds are like is to think (see, for a very recent example, Galen Strawson's Selves). The other approach says that minds are very different, depending upon how they are situated in different kinds of bodies and given different biographies and different cultural worlds, so different in fact that if you don't have that body or belong to that world, you don't have any point of entry at all by which to understand. Understanding is replaced by Mitgefühl, and Mitgefühl comes to require Mitleben. This dichotomy seems to go back at least to a split between two different approaches to philosophy in the early modern period, which might be epitomized by the names 'Montaigne' and 'Descartes': Montaigne, who was fascinated by 'the cannibals' because he thought they revealed the absence of any unity between the world's various systems of meaning and value and conduct; and Descartes, who had nothing at all to say about the cannibals, or about anyone whose difference from himself might call into question his conception of exactly what is or is not among the things that are self-evident by the light of nature.

This split bears some ancestral relationship to the one currently marked in certain provinces by the labels 'continental' and 'analytic'. The former school bears particular responsibility for the abandonment of the Lévi-Straussian project, for at bottom the skeptical games of the post-structuralists are motivated by a rejection of the structuralist effort to comprehend otherness by comprehending the range of possible expressions of sameness. In at least this respect, if Galen Strawson is a philosophical descendant of Descartes (in methodology if not ontology), and Derrida of Montaigne, Lévi-Strauss is a Leibnizian, who believes that everything human beings come up with is an expression of the truth, not in the sense that every proposition assented to by humans is true, but in the sense that every attempt to make sense of the world is an expression of the same natural or rational order. This means, for Leibniz, that all learning is of use to the philosopher. In a stunning passage in the New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704, Leibniz writes:

When the Latins, Greeks, Hebrews and Arabs shall someday be exhausted, the Chinese, supplied also with ancient books, will enter the lists and furnish matter for the curiosity of our critics. Not to speaks of some old books of the Persians, Armenians, Copts and Brahmins, which will be unearthed in time so as not to neglect any light antiquity may give on doctrines by tradition and on facts by history. And if there were no longer any ancient book to examine, languages would take the place of books and they are the most ancient monuments of mankind. In time all the languages of the world will be recorded and placed in the dictionaries and grammars, and compared together; this will be of very great use both for the knowledge of things, since names often correspond to their properties (as is seen by the names of plants among different peoples), and for the knowledge of our mind and the wonderful varieties of its operations. Not to speak of the origin of nations, which is known by means of solid etymologies which the comparison of languages will best furnish. But of this I have already spoken. And all this shows the use and extent of criticism, little considered by some otherwise very clever philosophers who take the liberty to speak with contempt of Rabbinage, and in general of philology.

A big-tent conception of philosophy, to say the least. Or are Leibniz's New Essays not a part of the history of philosophy at all, but only a bit of cultural history?

I recall talking to an American Derrida scholar some years ago who insisted to me, in all honesty, that she did not know whether or not a chicken is a mammal. Such contempt for knowledge! Such shameful, unintentional self-parody! On the other side, I cannot count the number of times I've spoken with analytic philosophers who proudly enumerate all the areas of humanistic learning about which they know nothing (Stanley bemoans this too, but he thinks that members of the discipline need humanistic learning only in order to be more well-rounded people; I think you need it, along with scientific learning, in order to be a better philosopher). On both sides, there's a sort of compulsion to present oneself as pure: an enduring sense, one that has much deeper roots than the history of either analytic or 'continental' philosophy, and that probably takes a certain kind of religious persona as its model, that a philosophus cannot be a curiosus, that all the variety of the world presents an obstacle to the unity of thought. There have also been a few philosophers (or thinkers; whatever) in the past few hundred years, of whom I take Leibniz and Lévi-Strauss to be fine examples, whose respective life-projects might be characterized as a search for the unity that gives rise to, and endures behind, the wonderful variety of the world: philosophy through curiosity, and not just alongside it.

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

Short Takes

by Gerald Dworkin

Hemingway was thought to have written the finest, very short, story. It was a classified advertisement whose text was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I have always been attracted to very miniature versions of linguistic expression. It is interesting to seek the minimum number of words for various categories. So, for example, I have never found a better, shorter sentence that Ring Lardner, Jr’s “Shut up, he explained.” For five words, I have Woody Allen’s “ I am two with Nature.” but once one has that many words available there must be many others. Best short Seder text: "They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”

For many years I have been collecting aphorisms, jokes, witty remarks, etc. for a someday-to-be published Common-Place Book. It is divided into two sections.; one on general Philosophy and the other on Morality. I do not restrict myself just to short passages. But I do tend to favor brief encounters. Ideally the upper limit would be something like Nietzsche’s limit on aphorisms. “ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” One of his best “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?” comes in at ten words.

So today I present a sampling, a taste, a nibbling of very short takes on Philosophy. If there is sufficient interest I will follow up with material from the Morality section. Where I know the source I give it. Where I do not I welcome information as to the original. I divide them, roughly, into categories although they are obvious enough that they could be omitted.

Definitions of Philosophy

You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living.

Sydney Morgenbesser

The ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

David Hills

[Philosophy is] an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.

W. Sellars

Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease.

Jerry Fodor

A Philosopher is someone who worries that what works in practice will not work in theory.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

- B. Russell

Philosophy is the critical examination of other peoples fundamental assumptions.

R. Nozick

Characterizations of Philosophy or Philosophizing

The relation between science and philosophy is like the symbiotic relationship between the countryside and town. The former provides the latter with food receiving garbage in return.

L. Kolokowski

What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic...if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?

Wittgenstein

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

Mencken

It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple/

J.L. Austin

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

Oscar Wilde

If, while making love, a woman says "faster" I will try. But if she says "deeper" she had better be looking for philosophy.

Of course pragmatism is true; the trouble is it doesn’t work.

S. Morgenbesser

In relation to their system most systemizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack nearby. Kierkegaard

There are two styles of philosophers: e.g. philosophers and i.e. philosophers - illustrators and explicators. Illustrators trust, first and foremost, striking examples, in contrast with explicators, who trust, first and foremost, definitions and general principles.

A Margalit

To have a system is to lack integrity.

Nietzsche

Put-downs

This book fills a much-needed gap in the literature.

John Dewey wrote as " God would have spoken, had He been inarticulate, but keenly desirous to tell you how it was."

O.W Holmes

A student asked Harry Wolfson—the Harvard scholar of Jewish Philosophy—whether he thought solipsism was true? Wolfson replied, “Who’s esking?”

When a philosopher announced that the title of his talk was “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?” Sydney Morgenbesser said to the man sitting next to him, “If there was Nothing he would still complain.”

When another visiting philosopher claimed that in no known language are two positive affirmations equivalent to a negative , Morgenbesser said “Yeah,Yeah.”

When Chisolm was once accused of making a circular argument he replied, “ I seem to be accused of the fallacy of affirming the antecedent.”

He is a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time .

S, Morgenbesser

He never opens his mouth without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.

There are three grades of criticism. Wrong. Completely Wrong. Not even Wrong.

His claim was the last.

W. Pauli

His paper has a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

There are two critical responses to any philosophical position. "Oh, yeah!" and "So what!"

Nicholas Sturgeon

That's not a counter-example to my thesis; that's my thesis.

Paul Grice

`For example' is not proof.

Yiddish proverb

Hegel loses a lot in the original.

D. Stove

It cannot be an accident...that thought and language arrive together , in Hegel, at the highest degree of corruption of which either is capable.

D.Stove

He speaks in semi-entendres.

Refutation of Utilitarianism: Utilitarianism is the view that the right thing to do is what will promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. There is no greatest number.

H. Putnam

Any competent philosopher who does not understand something will take care not to understand anything else whereby it might be explained.

David Lewis

Miscellaneous

Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.

Steffi Lewis

Paul Weiss was once lecturing his class in metaphysics about the A'ness of B'ness and a wave of laughter started to spread through the classroom. When he realized the cause of the laughter he immediately switched to talking about the P'ness of Q'ness!

I’d like to make a distinction here. But I can’t think of one.

G.A.Cohen

Shortest Philosophical Book: Our Duties to Others by Ayn Rand

Jewish philosophy

1) Logic: P, so why not Q?

2) Ethics : Can implies Don't

3) Metaphysics_:_This is the best of all possible worlds?

S. Morgenbesser

Causes of the Death of Philosophers

Thales: Drowning

Abelard: Nun

Ayer: Unverifiable

Ockham: Cut himself while shaving

What does the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem prove? Jews are smart.

H Putnam

One rabbi is arguing to another that David wore his hat in temple. He cites a biblical passage. But, the other rabbi replies, all that says is that David went into the temple.

The first replies, " I know but between us would David go into the temple without his hat on."

Too Long but a Favorite

A boy is going out on his first date and is very nervous about talking to his date. His father tells him that there are three topics which are guaranteed to get conversation flowing—Relatives, Family and Philosophy.

The date begins and after an awkward pause the boy asks “Do you have any brothers?” “No.” “Do you like bagels?” "No." " Desperate, he remembers Philosophy. "If you had a brother, would he like bagels?"

Part 3: The Path of Reason

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies,

‘[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.’ [2]

For a flavor of what other notable thinkers of his age thought of him, consider this remarkable passage from the autobiography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980-1037 CE), the Persian philosopher and physician famous in the West as the ‘Islamic Galen.’ Ibn Sina wrote that after a diligent study of ‘the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences’ in his youth, he finally reached the study of metaphysics:

‘I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author’s object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to a point where I had memorized it. In spite of this I could not understand it nor its object, and I despaired of myself and said, ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’ But one day in the afternoon when I was at the booksellers’ quarter a salesman approached with a book in his hand which he was calling out for sale. He offered it to me, but I refused it with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science. But he said to me, ‘Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams.’ So I bought it and, lo and behold, it was Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returned home and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects of that book became clear to me because I had got to the point of having memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted ...’ [3]

On al-Farabi’s works on logic, Maimonides (1135-1204 CE), the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism, had this to say:

‘You should always follow this rule: in studying logic, deal only with what was written by the wise Abu Nasr al-Farabi, for all that he wrote, and particularly his work Madabi al-Mawjudat [The Principles of Being], is a pure meal ... The books of Ali Ibn Sina [Avicenna], on the other hand, although they are very accurate, do not match the writings of al-Farabi.’

Thanks to Alexander the Great and his successors, the memory of Classical Greece had survived in parts of Syria and Iraq, amid both Eastern Christianity and Zoroastrianism. In the cities of Byzantium in the 7th- and 8th-centuries, the language of high culture and theology continued to be Greek (though interest in Classical Greek works was negligible). Even Syriac-speaking Christian scholars studied Greek in order to gain access to theological texts written in Alexandria and Antioch. This changed only when the Umayyad caliph al-Malik made Arabic the official state language (end of 8th-century) replacing both Persian and Greek, which catalyzed translations of Greek texts—as well as Greek works previously translated into Syriac—into Arabic by the Nestorian and Jacobite Christians.

Besides theological texts, a few scientific and medical texts, as well as collections of moral aphorisms ascribed to Socrates, Solon, Hermes, and Pythagoras were the earliest works to be translated into Arabic. However, it was the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, especially al-Mamun, who actively commissioned most translations of the scientific, philosophical, and medical texts of the Greeks, a great many of which we know today only through these translations. [4] Partaking of this new intellectual goldmine in Arabic and extraordinary institutions like the Bayt al-Hikma (‘House of Wisdom’), al-Farabi emerged as the first significant philosopher in Islam.

Not very much is known of al-Farabi’s private life. It’s not even certain if he was of Turkish or Persian descent though he was born in the Farab (now Otrar) district of Turkestan. His father is believed to have served in the Abbasid army. Al-Farabi grew up in Farab and Damascus and later moved to Baghdad. Although a competent physician and a musician, he disdained a career derived from such learning and was intent neither on financial gain nor public position or influence. Before settling down to teach in Baghdad, he worked as a laborer in a garden and vineyard in Damascus, living on a frugal diet and immersed in nocturnal study by the lamps of the night watchman in the garden.

According to two modern scholars, Joel L. Kramer and Miriam Galston, Baghdad was, during most of al-Farabi’s time there,

‘The city of Peace ... the scene of vibrant cultural renaissance ... With its vast number of scholars, its bookstores, its meeting places for learned discussions, its diversified population, the sophistication of its intellectual elite, the ambition and energy of its rulers, this great urban center witnessed a splendor hardly equaled in the entire Medieval world.’ [5]
‘One of the most revealing measures of the intellectual variety of the period ... was the frequency in Baghdad of public debates between members of opposing schools of thought. [For example, one] debate in 932 CE between ibn Yunis and al-Sarafi was on the relative merits of the sciences of logic and grammar ... sponsored by the Caliph’s vizier ... the atmosphere ... was generally cosmopolitan.’ [6]

In Baghdad, al-Farabi learned philosophy, science, and languages from the leading teachers of the day and despite his youth, soon outstripped them in fame. [7] One of his early conclusions was that man could find truth by reason alone and live according to it. Scholars have inferred from his works that he held reason superior to revelation and the ultimate highway to happiness. [8] Here is an expression of his confidence in the rational approach, [9]

‘The attainment of certain truth is aimed at in every problem. Yet frequently we do not attain certainty. Instead we may attain certainty about part of what we seek, and belief and persuasion about the rest ... Or we may become perplexed, as when the arguments for and against strike us as having equal force. The cause of this [confusion] is the variety of methods we use in treating a problem ... So let it be clear to you that before setting out to investigate problems we must realize that all these methods have to be learned as an art ... This [logical] faculty enables us to discern whether what we infer is certain knowledge or mere belief, whether it is the thing itself or its image and similitude.’

Al-Farabi’s attempt to resuscitate and elevate ideas and texts written over a millennium ago was in itself an act of boldness and supreme self-confidence, especially when they came from outside his tradition. One can only imagine his mounting excitement as he discovered and dissected them. Here is, for instance, how he begins his introduction to the philosophy of Plato, perhaps the very first scholarly exposition of Plato in medieval times, [9]

1. First [Plato] investigated ... whether man’s perfection consists only in having his bodily organs unimpaired, a beautiful face, and soft skin; or whether it consists also in his having a distinguished ancestry and tribe, or having a large tribe and many friends and lovers; or whether it consists also in his being prosperous; or being glorified and exalted, ruling over a group or a city in which his command is enforced and which submits to his wish. In order to attain the happiness that gives him his ultimate perfection, is it sufficient for man to have some or all of these? It became evident to him ... that either they are themselves not happiness at all but are only believed to attain happiness, or they are not themselves sufficient for man to attain happiness without having something else in addition to them or to some of them.
2. Then he investigated what this other thing might be. It became evident to him that this other thing ... is [a] certain [kind of] knowledge and a certain way of life.

3. Then he investigated what this knowledge is and its distinguishing mark, until he found ... that it is knowledge of the substance of each of the beings: this knowledge is the final perfection of man and the highest perfection he can possess.

4. Then, after that, he investigated the happiness that is truly happiness, what it is, from which kind of knowledge it proceeds, which state of character it is, and which act it is. He distinguished it from what is believed to be happiness but is not. And he made it known that the virtuous way of life is what leads to the achievement of happiness.

The framework of his philosophy had a political science at its apex concerned with happiness realized in this life, and how it could be achieved in cities and nations—without recourse to revelation. He drew a close relation between happiness and knowledge. ‘Happiness is an end attained by virtuous actions, as knowledge results from learning and study...’ [10] This is also the basis for the ‘highest perfection of man.’

‘The human things through which nations and citizens of cities attain earthly happiness in this life and supreme happiness in the life beyond are of four kinds: theoretical virtues, deliberative virtues, moral virtues, and practical arts. [Theoretical virtues are innate in mankind, the rest] are acquired by meditation, investigation and inference, instruction and study.’ [9]

Al-Farabi is regarded as the founder of political philosophy in Islam. [11] He embraced Plato’s philosopher-king as the ideal: just as God rules the universe, so should the philosopher, being the best of mankind, rule the state. He thus relates the political travails of his time to the divorce of philosophy from governance. He decried wars fought for conquest or gain, derided the superstition, mysticism and astrology of the day, advocated an allegorical interpretation of scripture, and declared the pursuit of scientific knowledge a prerequisite for the good life man must seek. For human beings are not only free to choose their actions, they are fully responsible for them.

‘The two areas that appear to have occupied al-Farabi most are logic and political philosophy ... [his] logical theories, in the last analysis, are informed by and reflect a theory of human nature and human happiness. For al-Farabi, the end of human existence includes, if it is not confined to, the effort to understand being in so far it is knowable through reason ...
‘At the same time, the second conspicuous fact of al-Farabi’s political theory is his recognition of the challenge that revealed religion poses to the philosophic way of life. Simply put, revealed religion claims to give a complete and authoritative account of all things—human and divine, natural and metaphysical ... [it] exalts certainty over investigation ... there are no basic truths left to discover, and wisdom becomes a system of rules to be learned and taught. To meet the challenge ... al-Farabi resorts to an ingenious applications of Aristotle’s logical theories according to which religion can be explained as an imitation of philosophy ... a direct presentation of truths for which philosophy provides the proofs ...’ [6]

If the philosopher could live happily by reason alone, what about the non-philosopher? Al-Farabi said that the latter could lead a good life only through the symbols expressed in prophetic faith: heaven, hell, the last judgment, and so on. Different religions employ different symbols to drive home similar truth. Philosophy and the religion of Islam express the same truths in different forms, which correspond to the different levels at which human beings can comprehend it. The enlightened man can live by philosophy alone; those who grasp the truth via symbols but reach a certain level of understanding can be guided by theology; [12] the rest should live by the Shari’a and be governed by a philosopher-king.

Curiously enough, al-Farabi maintained that Muhammad was the kind of ruler Plato had envisaged and that his ideal state could therefore be created within Islam. However, besides the qualities of Plato’s philosopher-king, the ideal ruler must also possess prophetic vision. [13] Realizing the difficulty of finding all these qualities in a single man, he relaxes the requirement of prophetic vision first, even proposes a small council of men who collectively achieve the list, and then enumerates the qualities that can be sacrificed next until reaching a stage where, with further compromise, ‘the city will undoubtedly perish.’ [14] He also classified the character of cities based on their proximity to virtue and knowledge.

Islamic philosophers in al-Farabi’s tradition—the faylasufs—while remaining devout Muslims believed rationalism to be the most advanced form of religion, and which in fact, led them to marginalize the role of God, akin to the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle rather than the watchful and judgmental God of revelation. They also elaborated on the major theological issues of the day: the nature of God (unity or plurality of attributes), creation (ex-nihilo vs. emanation from the One), free will (is man responsible for his actions?) and body and soul (material and spiritual attributes of life). However, in case of a conflict between reason and revelation that could not be resolved by creative interpretation, they acquiesced to the ultimate authority of the Qur’an. As in the Christian West until long after the Renaissance, reason and science were not seen as opposed to revelation. Instead, they were seen as a subsidiary system within revelation’s overarching framework, no doubt with an anxious coexistence at times.

In the last decade of his life when Abbasid power went into sharp decline and Shiite orthodoxy was on the rise, al-Farabi returned to Syria where he died a bachelor at the age of 80. The Hamdani Amir Saif al-Daula, patron of the arts in Aleppo, held him in high esteem, by now a famous writer and scholar with books on logic, metaphysics, ethics, political science, music, medicine and sociology. Al-Farabi, who shunned attention in general, tried to rebuff his favors. Despite his asceticism and modesty, the story goes that he often turned playful showman before his patron and ‘exasperated him with his outlandish attire and boorish manners.’ [15] The circumstances of his death are reported as follows: [14]

‘Al-Farabi was journeying from Damascus to Ascalon, and was met by a company of thieves called ‘the Lads’. Al-Farabi said to them, ‘Take what I have of riding animals, arms and clothing, and let me go.’ But they refused and determined to kill him. Seeing that there was no escape, al-Farabi dismounted and fought till he was slain, with his friends. This greatly displeased the Hamdani rulers of Syria who pursued the thieves and crucified them on tree-trunks close by his grave.’

Al-Farabi lived more like a despairing, retiring philosopher than a flamboyant public intellectual. Scholars have speculated that, having concluded that conscious, enduring happiness is in principle outside the grasp of virtually all but a few, and that revelation is irrelevant for happiness, he wished to conceal this from the non-philosophers. The idea that revelation is unnecessary, if adopted blindly, could lead people to reject scripture with nothing to supplant it with. The fragile social structure would fall apart. Convinced of the dangers inherent in the masses living without structured guidance, he continued to advocate scripture for them. Perhaps what worried him was the transformation of Abbasid society into one with large numbers of badly behaving irreverent people, but this will have to remain our conjecture.

Al-Farabi inspired a great many thinkers including al-Amiri, al-Sijistani, al-Tawhidi, and Ibn Miskawayh, not to mention the polymath Avicenna, who founded the influential Avicennean school of philosophy that advanced the domain of logic, postulated the idea of existence vs. essence, and developed the concepts of empiricism and tabula rasa, giving rise to the nature vs. nurture debate. Avicenna’s attempt to reconcile Greek thought with theology decisively shaped Thomas Aquinas. Also known as the father of modern medicine, he studied the contagious nature of infectious diseases, introduced the practice of quarantine, pursued experimental and evidence-based medicine using clinical trials and efficacy tests, and proposed the idea of the syndrome. He came up with the concept of ‘momentum’ in physics and made several discoveries that make him the father of geology as well. Avicenna attained great renown as an astronomer, chemist, geologist, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, and teacher. [16]

Challenges to Islamic rationalism came from two different flanks: the orthodox theologians (led by Ibn Hanbal, al-Ashari, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Taymiyah) and the Sufi mystics (led by al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, al-Suhrawardi, Rumi, Mulla Sadra). Though the philosophical tradition of al-Farabi and Avicenna continued after them in elite circles—frequently by peripatetic medical men dependent on the whims of their patrons—it was increasingly pursued with caution and often treated with suspicion. The next major crop of Islamic rational philosophers came from Moorish Spain (led by Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd/Averroës). The changing fortunes of these three viewpoints characterize much of medieval Islamic thought. Let’s now turn to Islamic mysticism and examine its pivotal role in shaping the course of Islam.

(Part 4 on Sufi mysticism will appear on December 7.)

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Notes:

1. Shukri B. Abed, Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in al-Farabi, SUNY Press, 1991.
2. Al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and introduced by Muhsin Mahdi, 1962.
3. William E. Gohlman, translator, The Life of Ibn Sina, 1974. After an initial (somewhat bombastic) autobiographical account by Ibn Sina, the remainder is written as a biography by one of his students. It is anecdotal in nature and includes an account of how he died after suffering for many weeks from colic and other ailments.
4. One notable Christian translator was Gerard of Cremona (1114-87 CE), who went to Toledo in Spain after its reconquest by Christians, ‘where seeing an abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and pitying the poverty he had experienced among the Latins concerning these subjects, out of his desire to translate he thoroughly learnt the Arabic language.’ Source: C. Burnett, Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo, p. 255.
5. Joel L. Kraemer, Philosophy in the renaissance of Islam: Abū Sulaymān Al-Sijistānī and his circle, 1986, p. ix.
6. Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence—The political philosophy of Al-Farabi, Princeton University Press, 1990. pp 3-21.
7. These include Nestorian Christian scholars like Abu Bishr Matta Ibn Yunis (870-939 CE) and Yuhanna Ibn Haylan (860-920 CE), from whom he studied Arabic grammar.
8. These scholars include Leo Strauss, Shlomo Pines, Fauzi Najjar, Majid Fakhry and Richard Walzer.
9. Al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and introduced by Muhsin Mahdi, 1962. This book has three parts: the first spells out al-Farabi’s own philosophy and is titled, ‘The Attainment of Happiness.’ The second and third parts deal with the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, respectively.
10. Al-Farabi, Fusul Al-Madani (Aphorisms of the Statesman). Translated, annotated and introduced by D. M. Dunlop, 1961, p. 61.
11. Scholars disagree on al-Farabi’s immediate purpose in turning to classical Greek political philosophy but politics was a central part of Classical Greek thought and certainly compatible with al-Farabi’s concern with happiness realized in this life.
12. In al-Farabi’s time, the major school of theological Islam was the Mu’tazilah. It was liberal in outlook and receptive to reason, although ultimately opposed to Greek rationalism. Centered in Abbasid Baghdad, it was strongest during the progressive reign of caliphs al-Mansur, Haroon al-Rashid and al-Mamun. It was rejected by the Sunnis but found moderate support among the Shi’a. The Mu’tazilah school survived another century after al-Farabi and then got supplanted by Sunni orthodoxy.
13. The qualities of Plato’s philosopher-king: Intelligence, good memory, keenness of mind, love of knowledge, moderation in matters of food, drink and sex, love of truthfulness, magnanimity, frugality, love of justice, firmness or courage. To this list, Al-Farabi added physical fitness and eloquence.
14. Al-Farabi, Mabadi Ara Ahl Al-Madina Al-Fadila (available as ‘Al-Farabi on the Perfect State’), Chapter 15: Perfect Associations and Perfect Ruler; Faulty Associations, sections 13, 14. Translated, annotated and introduced by Richard Walzer, 1985.
15. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, Second Edition, Colombia University Press, 1983.
16. Avicenna in Encyclopedia Iranica online.

Images:

1. An Arabic painting of Socrates.
2. Ark Citadel of Buhkara, Uzbekistan.
3. A conventionally accepted portrait of Al-Farabi.
4. Celestial sphere, Signed by Yunus Ibn al-Husayn al-Asturlabi, Iran, Isphahan? 1144-1145 (source).
5. Bowl, 9th century, Abbasid Iraq, Earthenware, tin-glazed and stained. This ceramic bowl is one of the earliest examples to incorporate calligraphy as the main element of decoration. The Arabic word ghibta (happiness) is repeated in the center and creates a balanced composition when combined with the half-circles decorating the rim (source).
6. A portrait of Akbar, who comes as close to al-Farabi’s philosopher-king ideal as anyone else.
7. Socrates and his Students, Mukhtar al-Hikam wa-Mahasin al-Kalim (‘Choice Maxims and Finest Sayings’) by Al-Mubashshir. Syria, beginning of 13th century. Ahmed III 3206, folio 40a (source).
8. Al-Farabi appears on the currency of the Republic of Kazakhastan (source).
9. A painting of a Muslim philosopher, conventionally Ibn Rushd/Averroes (source: nature.com).
10. A conventional portrait of Avicenna.

perceptions

Katarzyna Gajewska. Against What? 2005

Mixed media on board.

More here, here and here.

Health Care Reform

by Shiban Ganju

Health care begets health; the two are inseparable. Experience of developed countries shows that disease is recession proof while national income is not; demand grows inexorably while funding shrinks. When the resources lag to fulfill the minimum need, health becomes a mere dream.

People of the world are unhappy with their national systems, no matter which country. In a survey done by the Commonwealth Fund in six OECD countries majority wanted either fundamental changes or to rebuild the system.

Adults with health problems; Commonwealth Fund survey 2005

Percent saying:	AUS	CAN	GER	NZ	UK	US
Only minor changes needed	23	21	16	27	30	23
Fundamental changes needed	48	61	54	52	52	44
Rebuild completely	26	17	31	20	14	30

World has evolved four models of health care financing: (1) Bismarck model: where employers and employees contribute into a not for profit fund and providers are usually private as in ‘Sickness funds’ system of Germany. (2) Beveridge model: government is both the payer and provider as in the UK and Cuba. (3) Single payer: government is the sole payer from funds collected though employee contribution and taxes. The providers are both private and public. Canada, Taiwan and South Korea have adopted this system. (4) Out of pocket model: where no organized risk pools exist and individual pay as they fall sick. Most of the low income countries do not have the resources to organize national financing systems for health care.

The US has evolved a pluralistic system. Government funds 46 percent, a private commercial insurance fund 35 percent and 13 percent is out of pocket as deductibles and co-pay. Providers are mostly private. Innovations like HMO capitation and health saving account have not dented the costs.

Lessons from various countries:

In a position paper by American College of Physicians in the Annals of Internal Medicine in January 2008, the following lessons were summarized from international experience.

1: Nations can provide guarantees access, affordability and universal coverage through a funding, which can be public or in combination with private. Access to care should carry no copayments for the poor and cost sharing for those who can afford, based on income. Examples of single payer system are Canada, UK, Japan and Taiwan. The pluralistic systems are Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

2: Global budgets can help cost control. (Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, UK)

3: Government power to negotiate prices with providers can decrease costs (Belgium, Canada, and Japan) but also create shortages, delays, cost shifting and a competing private sector. (Japan, New Zealand, UK)

4: Countries have built incentives to encourage behavior change and take personal responsibility. (Australia, Belgium, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan)

5: Adequate funding of preventive and primary care yields better outcome. (Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands, UK, New Zealand)

6: Incentive to physicians results in quality improvement and performance (Belgium, UK, Australia, and New Zealand)

7: Uniform electronic payment systems reduces costs and improves efficiency (Germany, Canada, Taiwan, UK)

Experts have suggested that the Netherlands model suits US. The Dutch have been trying to reform their system since 1904 and only recently have instituted universal care.

The Netherlands:

The Dutch system mandates everyone to buy a private insurance coverage. It has three other salient features: a central fund for risk equalization of insurance companies, incentives for competition among providers and strong regulations.

Professor Wynand van de Van of Erasmus University has written about the rise of The Netherland health care model in June 2008 issue of ‘Health Affairs’. The summary is as follows.

The current system in the Netherlands has evolved over last seven decades. The Dutch insurance industry worked without any regulation till 1940. Several hundred insurance companies that existed contracted with doctors a capitation fees for their customers. And the doctors had freedom to start their practice and set their fees.

In 1941 a mandatory health insurance was introduced for low and middle income population; it covered physician fees, maternal care, drugs and hospital expenses. By 1965 about 85% of the population had enrolled. But this well meaning insurance model created a problem. Mandatory health care cost increased the cost of labor, making the industry uncompetitive in the export driven economy. The government responded by price control and passed The Health Prices Act in 1982. The physicians were forced to forgo fee for service and the hospitals were given a single bundled payment for all services including the fees of specialists.

Lack of incentives choked the system and innovations suffered. Responding to growing discontent, government introduced a series of market based reforms to give incentives to insurance companies, consumers and providers over the years. Finally, The Health Insurance Act was passed in 2006, which makes health insurance mandatory and induces managed competition in the private sector.

The Netherlands health care system serves a population of about 16.7 million, spends about 9% of GDP, which is about 3,100 USD per capita. Of the total funding, individuals contribute 45%, employers contribute 50% and the government pays 5%. Personal and employer contributions fund the system, while government pays for children under the age of eighteen. Employers contribute an income-related percentage of their employees' salary and citizens pay about 1 to 2000, USD per year in premiums. Government also subsidizes people based on their income. About two thirds of the population got approximately 2,200 USD in 2006 per household as care allowance.

Each insurance company sets a community rated premium, which must cover a government mandated health care package and must spell the details of coverage in a contract, which lasts one year. Insurer cannot refuse an enrollee irrespective of his previous health history.

Individuals are free to choose their insurance company and can change insurer every year. They have liberty to buy a supplemental coverage. Over 90 % of the population buys supplementary insurance. Every individual has an annual deductible. Groups get discounts up to 10 % on premiums and employers, labor unions, patient associations take advantage of the discount.

In an attempt to mitigate risk selection by the insurance companies, the system uses a risk utilization fund, which is funded by the mandated contribution of employers. This fund compensates insurance companies that have high risk enrollees and the companies that have low risk enrollees have to compensate the risk equalization fund.

About 1.5% of eligible population did not buy any insurance in 2006 and defaulted. Government intends to enforce the act by actively tracking the uninsured defaulters, legally enforcing them to enroll, withholding the premium from their salaries or welfare subsidies and penalizing them by increasing the premium up to 130 %.

With all its flaws, some have called it the best health care system in the European Union.

Obama plan:

The current bill passed by the congress has some features from the Netherlands system but not all. The salient features of the bill are:

· A Health Insurance Exchange to provide information about coverage and rates

· A public health insurance option to compete with private companies

· Guaranteed coverage from insurance market.

· Limits for annual out of pocket expenditure.

· Shared responsibility between employer and the individual.

· Government to provide assistance to smaller employers.

· Improving Medicare payment system to cut costs and improve performance.

· Prevent fraud and overpayment.

· Increased funding for training primary care physicians.

· Expansion of community services for health promotion.

The bill lacks the innovative ‘risk utilization fund’ of the Dutch system. But in incorporates the Australian innovation of government owned insurance.

The US system has had two main problems to fix: coverage for 47 million uninsured people and the cost of care. The bill mandates universal coverage but whether it will be able to control hyperinflation in national health care expenditure will be apparent only after a few years.

The history of the US reforms have been mostly repair jobs done with tapes: minor repairs with scotch tape, convoluted repair by red tape and the current repair by duct tape. Hopefully, the current bill is the first step towards fundamental changes to rebuild the system as majority of the American want. Like the rest of the word, it is still work in progress.

That Sara Aziz!

Maniza Naqvi

I wrote this play in 1999. It was published in an anthology in 2005 and as a chapter in my novel A Matter of Detail in 2008.

That Sara Aziz!

Meet Ava, Sonia,

Kulsum, and Shireen in four different levels but

totally connected: From a sidewalk cafe where Ava who is a

lawyer, is seated sipping her caffe latte, magazines scattered on the

table in front of her, text messaging on her cellular phone. In a high rise

building, somewhere down on Wall Street, where Sonia, an investment

banker, is at her desk in an office seated in front of her computer

emailing and next to her phone, In the suburbs of Westchester county

where Kulsum, a housewife, is in her kitchen on a cordless phone. In a

car, Shireen, stuck in traffic on the Triboro bridge, is a real estate agent

and is also attached to her cellular phone by an earphone.

Let's give quiet Kulsum the opening line shall we? Scene opens.

She's in her kitchen. She is mixing something in a bowl. Finishes,

washes her hands, and stands looking out of the window drumming her

fingers on the kitchen counter, and goes to the phone to dial. As the

phone is ringing, she goes over to the stove and turns on one of the

burners. Then reaches in the cabinet for a frying pan. (She continues

with the motions of preparing and then frying pakoras through the

following scene. The spotlight goes on at another part of the stage

where Sonia is seated in front of her computer in the office.)

Kulsum: Hi Sonia, are you very busy?

Sonia: Hello my dear, never too busy to talk to you. What's up?

Kulsum: Oh nothing much, the usual.You know. It's so quiet, now

that all the in-laws have gone home. Faraz is off on a business trip, to

California, will be back next week.The kids are out with the nanny. So,

finally, I have a moment to myself.

Sonia: Well I hope you're taking it easy, don't do anything, just sit

back and relax.

Kulsum:Yes, relax, that's a good idea. No, yaar they're all very nice,

they helped out and everything, everyone realizes this is not back

home, you have to do things yourself over here. They are good sports;

they said they actually had fun cooking-shooking, cleaning-sheening.

Sonia: Still, yaar, so many people, just relax.

Kulsum: Noooo-oh, what so many people? If we were back home

I'd be living with them. No? So once in awhile if they come over, I like

it very much...

Sonia: You don't always have to be such a goodie-goodie.

Kulsum: I'm not being a goodie-goodie. I mean it. It's so quiet now

that they're gone, no one to talk to, no one to eat with. I mean it's just

so different here, alone. The kids are missing everyone too. you know

the grandparents and their uncles and aunts...

Sonia: Well, you're going home to Lahore for the winter

holidays. . . . Anyway, how are the little favorite munchkins of mine?

Kulsum: Fine, just beginning to sound a bit too American for my

liking. At 3 and 5 it's becoming why mom this and why mom that on

everything and whining about everything.

Sonia: Well, that's going to happen. They were born here. Try to

keep it to a minimum.

Kulsum: I keep telling Faraz we should go back. We have two

daughters. I mean I don't want to raise them here. At least for a couple

of years we should go back.

Sonia. You're sounding like a total jahil. What are you trying to say

anyway?

Kulsum: Don't get me wrong. I want them to do all the things, get

educated, work, everything, but growing up here, I feel worried.

Sonia: What are you worried about for god's sake!

Kulsum: I mean they are growing up alone, no relatives, no idea of

sharing, no values.

Sonia: That’s bull!.They'll have your values and whatever else you

want to teach them.

Kulsum: I can't teach them everything. The culture. . .

Sonia; Trust me on this one. Whatever you don't teach them, they

don't need to learn.

Kulsum: I don't know yaar. I'm beginning to worry.

Sonia:You have nothing to worry about.

Kulsum: No honestly, yaar. Look, we weren't raised here.

Sonia: I know, I know what you mean.

Kulsum: I don't want them to lose out on that. That's all. Listen,

why don't you come over. Yaar it's been weeks since we've gotten

together, shouldn't we all get together? Why not come over for dinner?

Sonia: Tonight?

Kulsum: Yes, tonight, just catch the train and I'll pick you up at the

station. Why don't you take the 7:05. It'll get you here at about 7:45. I’ll meet you at the station,

Sonia: Can't tonight. How about tomorrow?

Kulsum: (Sighs) Fine.

Sonia: Don't sound so sad! We'll do dinner tomorrow. Why,

what's wrong?

Kulsum: Nothing's wrong.

Sonia: Then why the deep sigh.

Kulsum: It's just so quiet here.

Sonia: You're just having the post-guests-blues-back-home blues.

Kulsum: Guess so.

Sonia: We'll talk up a storm tomorrow night, and I'll stay over, go

straight to work from your place okay.

Kulsum: Sounds good! Tomorrow is fine.

Sonia: Great.

Kulsum: Let’s ask Ava and Shireen too.

Sonia: Okay.

Kulsum: Hold on let me get Ava. Ava?

Ava: Hi Kulsum!

Sonia: Hi, I'm here too.

Ava: Oh Hi, Sonia. Whatup?

Kulsum: Oh please Ava, don't start talking like a hoodlum.

Ava: Oh sorry dear, adab, how are you? What's going on?

Kulsum: Dinner. Tomorrow night at my place.

Ava: Sorry, Kulsum, I can't. How about the day after?

Kulsum: Another quick trip?

Ava: No, I'm suppose to meet a nephew of Faiza Khala, who works

in the city.

All together: Ah hunh?

Ava: Right. I suspect it's a major set up attempt.

Sonia: Suspect?

Ava: No, I know it is-But what the heck, I didn't want to let Faiza

Khala down. I'll just go do dinner and grit my teeth.

Kulsum: Poor Ava.

Ava: I know yaar, this is really humiliating.

Kulsum: Okay, well then the day after tomorrow and we can have

a post mortem of the nephew and dinner.

Sonia: Yes, Ava you can tell us how he tasted, whether you had him

grilled or broiled or...

Ava: (Laughs): Yes, so day after tomorrow?

Sonia: Fine by me.

Kulsum; Okay.

Sonia: Kulsum, should I get Shireen on the line?

Kulsum: Would you? Thanks.

Shireen: Hellol

Sonia, Ava and Kulsum: Hi Shireen.

Shireen: Oh good, my favorite three, what's up.

Kulsum: Dinner day after tomorrow my place, Kulsum and Ava

can make it.

Shireen: Darlings! I'd love too. But what to do, can't, it's my yoga

class night. But I'm free tonight or tomorrow

Sonia: Can't. I have a blind date tonight.

Ava: Can't tomorrow night. I have my book group and then I have

to rush for my tango class.

Kulsum: Can't we ever get together?

Sonia: Next week is all clear for me.

Ava: Can do Tuesday next week.

Shireen: Me too.

Sonia: Me three.

Kulsum: So dinner next week Tuesday. We're on, my place. But

Sonia, come over tomorrow too.

Sonia: Done. Ciao. Mafnana.

Ava: Adios.

Shireen: Bye for now

Kulsum: Khudahafiz.

Sonia turns to her computer. Reads for awhile. As she reads her

email: "Fuck! I can't believe itl What the hell? This is unbelievable. She's

really done it this time, the dumb fuck!" Picks up the phone and

punches in the numbers.

The spotlight on Kulsum lights up, the phone rings and Kulsum

frying something goes, picks up the phone, and walla back to the oven,

Kulsum: Hello. Siddiqqi residence.

Sonia: It's me again.

Kulsum: Look Sonia, I don't want to hear you can't come over

tomorrow!

Sonia: No, not to worry. That’s not why I'm calling. Guess what,

you are not going to believe this.

Kulsum: He asked you and you're getting married.

Sonia: Don't you ever have anything else on your mind?

Kulsum: No, not where you're concerned, no' What else am I

supposed to think about?

Sonia: Anyway, before you really get me angry' do you want to

know what I called you for?

Kulsum: What? Tell me' I hope it's good gossip'

Sonia: Oh yeah, oooh yeah' this is a good one' And it ain't gossip'

Kulsum: Okay, yaar, I can't take the suspense.

Sonia: Guess what dear cousin Sara is doing?

Kulsum: She's getting a divorce? Oh no, not again' No wait, she's

having an affair, Oh no, not again. She got drunk and was found naked

in the garden in the hammock with someone else's husband? Oh no,

not againl

Sonia, Oh no, much better than that. Much, much better' She's

really done it this time. Are you ready?

Kulsum: Do I have to sit down for this, because I'm doing

dangerous work right now. I don't want to hurt myself with the shock'

Sonia: Yeah, sit down' Are you ready? Dear, stupid, hypocritical,

dizzy Sara, has gone into...

Kulsum: Labor, coma, business with the drug mafra, exile,

convulsions, what, what?

Sonia: Hijab.

Kulsum: What?

Sonia: Hijab.

Kulsum: What?

Sonia: Exactly.

Kulsum: What? Where did You get that?

Sonia: Just got an email from Rehana, who saw her at a party last

night. Dear, dear cousin Sara, walked in, covered in a Hijab! And

Rehana said that she hadn't believed it either when people told her,

because a lot of women had seen her around, you know picking up the

kids at grammar school' etc., but last night at the fund raiser for the

Heart Center, there she was, in Hijab!

Kulsum: So what?

Sonia: What do you

mean, so what? It’s

ridiculous!

Kulsum: But many girls

wear hijabs here, don't

they, and in France

and Germany and

England?

Sonia: Yes, here. But not

Pakistan. It's not our thing!

It's not our

culture. I mean it doesn't go with what we wear! It's western for

godssake!

Kulsum: Malaysian and Indonesian women wear it.

Sonia: For god's sake, they're western... compared to us.

Kulsum: You're losing it.

Sonia: You're being stupid, and you know it.

Kulsum: Well you're just being silly.

Sonia: We're talking Sara, here.

Kulsum: So many other women in Pakistan are doing this now...

Sonia: She's not them!

Kulsum: Look Sonia, women need to wear the hijab because

they're going out more to find jobs, working in offices, factories, taking

public transportation. It's just a way of security for them and

acceptance of their stepping out into the domain of men.

Oh wait, I have another call coming in. Hello, han, Ava. I've got

Sonia on the line. You are not going to believe what she just told me.

Hang up, I'll call you right back. Sonia, are you t}rere?

Sonia: Yes.

Kulsum: I'm going to get Ava on the phone with us. Hold on. Ava

Ava: Hi!

Sonia: Hi again, Ava!

Ava: Hi Sonia!

Sonia: Where are you?

Ava: Bus yaar, finally an afternoon off! I decided to just take in the

sun. I've had it with the deposition work. I hate the hours. I hate my

bosses. I hate being on the partner track. I want to drop this whole

thing. I'm telling you, it's just too much. I just got back from bloody

Tokyo over the weekend only to 6nd out I had to go for a day meeting

to London. I just got back last night. I cannot understand why these

things cannot be done through teleconferencing. I mean it's totally

ridiculous. Okay, so one does chalk up the frequent flier miles, but

frankly one doesn't need them (A) because one can never take a

vacation and (B) because one has enough money to buy one’s own

tickets, thank you very much. And (C) again, because one never has the

time to take vacations anyway! Then the first thing that happens this

morning is that my client tells me he's having a panic attack, can't go

through with the damn merger, and I'm saying go take a Prozac, calm

down, do yoga, whatever, but I am not going to listen to not going

through with the merger after I've sacrificed six months of my days and

nights slaving over t}re bloody price earnings ratios parity-bullshit. I'm

really thinking about...

Sonia: Join dating. com.

Ava: What?

Kulsum: What?

Sonia: Dating.com, My blind date tonight, that's where het from.

I'm telling you, it's the best thing.

Kulsum: You're going to get killed by an ax murderer!

Ava: She's right, Sonia.

Sonia: Calm down! It's totally the thing. Since you're doing the

"whatup" thing, you might as well do the dating.com as well.

Ava: Seriously Sonia...

Kulsum: Ava, shut up. Acha, shut up, we've got news for you.

Ava: (bored): What?

Sonia: You're going to love it.

Ava: What?

Kulsum: Sara was sighted last night at a charity ball in Karachi.

Ava: So? So what's the big deal? I thought news would be if Sara

wasn't sighted at a charity ball in Karachi. Sort of like "man bites dog."

Kulsum: In a Hijab.

Ava: Excuse me?

Sonia: Sighted at the ball in a HIJAB!

Ava: I'm assuming it was a fancy dress ball and she was going as the

Saudi Princess off to have her head chopped off, or the love interest of

Mullah Omer.

Sonia: Good, very good. That was funny.

Ava: What the hell is she doing in a Hijab?

Sonia: This is just too good. Let’s get Shireen on the line. Hold on,

everyone. (She dials).

Shireen: Hello.

Sonia: Hi Shireen, I've got Ava and Kulsum on the line as well.

Ku]sum: Hi!

Ava: Hi!

Shireen: Hi, Hi! Traffic is hell on the Tiiboro.

Sonia: What the hell are you doing on the Triboro at this time?

Shireen: Trying to get home to pick up the kids, yaar. Had a

property. I was showing in midtown. Acha Sonia, are you still interested

in that loft in Tribeca, because you really need to let me know pretty

soon.

Sonia: Next week, for sure okay?

Shireen: Is that a pukka okay?

Sonia: Yes, okay, next week, definitely.

Shireen: Fine.

Ava: How's the market?

Shireen: You tell mel You guys are the ones on Wall Street! I don't

get it. It seems like people are just made of money. They don't know

what to do with it. I just showed someone a place on West 72nd which

can only be referred to as a walk-in closet, and some guy is putting down

750 for it. What is going on?

Sonia: What can I say, it's the stock market. It's the

abouttoblow.com. It's crazy and it's about to blow.

Kulsum: You say that everyday Sonia. It hasn't blown yet.

Shireen: Well, until it blows I'm sure making beautiful

commissions and that's fine for me baba. It's going to put the kids

through college yaar. So don't say stuff that's going to jinx things or get

the gods upset.

Ava: Shireen we've got some juicy stuff for you.

Shireen: Prada has a new design out in shoes?

Ava: Well, not as good as that.

Sonia: Well, almost as good.

Shireen: Dirt?

Ava: Oh yeahl

Sonia: Second that motion.

Shireen: It better be good dirt.

Sonia: Oh yeah, babe, like how!

Kulsum: Well, it isn't dirt..

Ava: Oh yeah it is, it's about Sara, not mother Theresa.

Shireen: She's not marrying again!

Sonia: Nope.

Ava: That's not dirt. That's recycled waste.

Kulsum: Whatever that means.

Sonia: Yeah Ava, what does that mean?

Ava: Don't know, just thought I d say it.

Shireen: Okay, get with the program. Not an affair-shafair or anything?

Sonia: No such wimpy stuff!

Shireen: Oh my. This is going to be good' What is it? Naked again?

Sonia: Keep guessing, Shireen.

Shireen: Give up!

Ava: Hijabing it.

Shireen: Hijacking??? She's been hijacked?

Kulsum: (laughing) No! She's gone into hijab!

Sonia: She's gone no where. She's going everywhere as usual only

she's wearing a hijab.

Shireen: Sara's in hijab?

Sonia: Yup.

Shireen: Hijab?

Ava: Yup.

Shireen : Unbelievable!

Sonia: Why? It fits in with all her other crazinesses'

Kulsum: It's not even part of our culture'

Sonia: Exactly!.

Shireen: I mean what's happened to the place since we left' It used

to be normal when we were there. Never heard of the hijab!

Kulsum: Of course dupattas...

Shireen: And chaddars and really if one was from the old city in

Lahore then burqas, but what's with the hijab?

Sonia: It's totally Saudi, and our dear Sara is doing that hijab thang!

Shireen: Yet another one of Sara's fads!

Ava: Only this one's in our faces' This one is real\ making me

throw up and get angry. How dare she do ever)'thin$, break every rule

and then throw this morality in our faces, that bloody hypocritical

bitch!

Kulsum: Hold on, she isn't doing this to you'

Ava: Oh yes she is! For her two days worth of whimsical trendiness

Copycatting somebody else I'm sure, she is causing a lot of harm!

Kulsum: Well...

Ava: Don't say she isn't! You know she's not capable of an iota of

original thinking. I bet some rich woman out there that she hangs

out with, is in hijab suddenly and so Sara Begum decides to don it as

well.

Kulsum: Maybe it's more than that!

Sonia: Why should it be? Over the time we've known her' how

many transformations have we seen, the remaking, the recreation of

Sara Aziz? She went from long hair to short, from fat to thin, from

brown eyes to green contact lenses, from brown hair to blond. From

one husband to a fourth. From poor to filthy rich. I mean there is just

nothing that you can say is constant about her.

Kulsum: That would make for an interesting person.

Ava: Or an extremely vacuous one.

Kulsum: Or perhaps t-here's some Mullah Omer in her life. She

seems to attract men.,.

Ava: Oh for gods sakell

Sonia: She thinks she can suddenly go into Hijab after all that she

has done and become Ms. Saint. As if everyone is going to forget her

past.

Kulsum: Well it's been known to happen.

Shireen: Well I think it's just in keeping with her frame of mind.

Frankly, I think she's anorexic. Did you see how thin she was last time

she was here? And she ate absolutely nothing, and she was on the

treadmill all the time. A spoon of Ben and Jerry's god forbid, and she

would spend the entire night on the treadmill at my place. Honestly

baba, she drove me crazy. Tobahl !

Ava: Ben and Jerry was acquired by Unilever?

Sonia: Yes!

Shireen: Oh nol Does that mean my kids are going to make me

boycott it? I mean years of not eating Hagen-Daz because they invested

in South Africa, now this...

Sonia: It's history, Shireen. Anyway, coming back to the point: Sara,

she! just selfish.

Shireen: Or you know what?

Kulsum: What?

Shireen: I think it may be she's getting older, and you know how

obsessed she is about being young.

Ava: And the hijab covers the thinning hair, the sagging skin around

the jowls and the neck?

Sonia: For god's sake we're all only 40!

Kulsum: But Sara stopped at 29. So she’s 29. Hijab is so much

healthier than Botox!

Sonia: Oh yeah, we're really I 1 years older than her. Give me a

breakl

Kulsum: This year we are but next year, darling, we'll be twelve

years older than her'

Shireen: No I think you are absolutely right' I was going to say the

same thing. You know, I think she is really afraid of getting old and this is

a good way to cover it up. But I think she's anorexic also' And then you

she really got a scare this year with the heart attack that Riaz had.

Sonia: Give me a break' Scare? My ass! It took her exactly one week

after that to start planning her next trip to Europe'

Kulsum: What does that have to do with anything? Doesn't mean it

didn't affect her.

Shireen: I think she really took it to heart! You know she really

loves him.

Ava: Like she loved all the rest?

Kulsum: That is not very fair, is it?

Sonia: Ava, really, it isn't.

Ava: It's my opinion.

Shireen: Poor Sara.

Ava: Why poor Sara? She's a bloody hypocrite' No so choaie kha key

billie kerney chali haj! The cat snarfs down 900 mice and heads off to

perform Haj.

Sonia: Haj! That's it. She went for her Haj, didn't she? Maybe all the

trips for umra and Haj have done this.

Ava: Give me a break, Haj and umra. You know I don't buy that at all!

She goes there only to buy gold. It's t}re best Place to buy gold y’know!

Kulsum: Don't be cruel. That's really unfair! She has always been

religious. She has always done these things'

Shireen: That's true. That is something she has always done since she

was a child. She has always prayed five times a day.

Ava: Well, you know what? I wish she hadn't' Because all her life

she has done whatever she pleased, hurt whoever she pleased, broken

every rule in the book, lied through her teeth, and made sure she

absolved herself five times a day. So don't give me that shit!

Kulsum: I don't think we should sit in judgment of her that way!

She has had a hard life. Seen a lot of pain!

Ava: Hard life? Hard life? She has caused endless suffering' She has

lived for herself. Done only as she pleased, got her way in every*ring'

and never given a damn about anyone'

Sonia: I second that motion!

Ava: How dare she? How dare she under the circumstances in this country do thisl

Kulsum: What?

Ava: What do you mean,,what," Kulsum?

Kulsum: What circumstances are you talking about?

Ava : The situation in the country!

Kulsum: What do you mean?

Ava: Kulsum, women are being hlled in the name of honor!

Kulsum: What does that have to do with Sara?l

Ava: Everything! Women are being killed in the name of honor, for

demanding a divorce or wanting to exercise their choice in marriage. All in the name of honor and chlrdivari. Women over there work, just like they do here. They need to be able to move around, interact wit-h other people. And she, she of all people, of all the people, Sara, should have the audacity to take this up as a badge. To actually become a part of that. Now that she has all she wants by doing exactly what she wanted all her life, she wants to take that away from everyone else.

Kulsum: She's doing it herself. She’s not inflicting it on anyone else.

Ava: Oh yeah, if she walks into a room with all of us, and she is in

a Hijab while the rest of us aren’t, what does that say for us?

Kulsum: Why should it be about you or us? It’s

about her. Why are you reacting this way?

Ava: Don't you dare call me a reactionary to that bloody hypocrite.

Don't you know what happened next door with the Taliban. Don’t you read anything ever Kulsum?

Kulsum: Well, I do know my geography darling. It’s not next door,

next door is Scarsdale, quite frankly.

Ava: Do be serious!

Kulsum: Why don't you be less so? Do you really think I don’t

Know what’s happening in Pakistan or the world? But around you, I really feel like just giving it all a rest.

Shireen: Bibiyonl Bhainon! HazratllWomen! Girlsl Kidsl Dollsl For

god's sake!

Ava: No, I can't let this just go. I can’t let it rest. It has to matter.

There’s a country of women *who are being buried alive in their houses,

behind chaddors, even their footsteps cannot be heard. They are dying

of suffocation. And this bitch thinks; she can fool around with the Hijab because of whatever.

Sonia: Well, I think there's a bit of exaggeration there. And I'm not

ready to condemn the Taliban. They've at least controlled most of the

country, and if they can stop the fighting and the killing then let the

women be in chaddar, for peace, so be it. And it can't last forever. It's

only a phase. For peace, it's worth it.

Ava: Oh my god. I cannot believe what I'm hearing! Are you crazy?

What's happening to everyone? It's all about the drug trade, the

pipeline for oil. And women and children are paying the price.

Kulsum: Frankly, Ava, I don't think you want to hear anyone

except yourself.

Ava: Frankly, Kulsum, I have something worth saying. It's hard to

hear someone prattling on about with who, what, why all the time!

Kulsum: Well excuse me!

Shireen: Time out!

Ava: Why time out? Why should we try to even explain Sara's

behavior. We ignore her. We ignore what she is all about. Suddenly this hijab

should make her worthy of being above board, requiring our respect.

Kulsum: No one said that.

Ava: Sure, they did, maybe it's anorexia, maybe it's Riaz's heart

attack. Bullshit. She is thin because she thinks she can attract the next

fat cat with her sexy body and frankly should someone richer come

along, Riaz dropping dead would only facilitate the matter.

Shireen: Don't be stupid, Ava. Watch your mouth. God forbid.

Kulsum: Really, Ava.Toba. God Forbid.

Sonia: Ava, cool it. Okay?

Ava: Fine. God forbid anything should happen to Riaz bhai.

Kulsum: I mean, if Sara, who has always been inclined toward

religion all her life, should choose to do this, why is it such a terrible

thing?

Shireen: We don't seem to have a problem with women wearing

long skirts one day and short skirts in another season when the

magazines dictate it so, so why be so overcome with anger over a hijab?

Sonia: C'mon guys, Sara has to manage her garment business. She

does travel to the inner city areas, where people are conservative. All

her workers are men and they are pretty conservative. She probably

earns a lot of their respect by dressing that way and it probably allows

her to stay around them for longer periods of time without question

and without hassle.

Ava: I just cannot believe this shit. I cannot believe you guys.

Kulsum: And if you are going to follow the words in the Koran

then...

Ava: Don't you dare say what you're going to say.

Kulsum: It's in the Koran.

Ava: It is not, it is not. This is exactly what an absolute ignoramus

Iike yourself will say.you've never bothered to read anything?

Shireen: Ava, watch it!

Kulsum: Are you telling me that it isn’t in the Koran?

Ava: I am telling you that the Quran does not say wear a hijab or

to hide yourself. There is only one reference -O prophet tell

your wives and daughters and the women of the faithful to draw their

wraps a little over them. They will thus be recognized and no harm will

come to them." That's it. In a state of war, it's in a contextual frame.

Think about it, in a war, when men are animals...

Kulsum: Are you sure that’s the only reference?

Ava: Positive.

Kulsum: Wow Ava, I didn’t realize you were such an ….lslamic.,,

Ava: See! For you that’s an exogenous feature. I have to be

something to do that. To me, reading the Koran is not a big deal! And

in any case I have to, to be able to ward off fools like you!

Kulsum: Wow, I'm very proud of you. But are you sure? Can I

quote you?

Ava: Of course I'm sure. I'm not you! And you’re not quoting me,

it's the Koran

Sonia: Ava, I'm not so sure yaar, it,s all over the place.

Ava: Where is it? Show me. Tell me. Where?

Sonia and Shireen: In Sura e Nisa.

Ava: I knew it! I knew it! You guys are so damn predictable.

Women, in the section labeled women. you bloody affirmative action

freak heads! Turns out gals, no. Not a word about any hijab, a whole lot

about sowing fields and guess what them fields are... us, us

being the fields, but not a word about the hijab action. And by the way while I'm at it, that business about

two women equal to one man is also bullshit. One reference only in the Koran under a business

transaction only, again contextual because women didn’t deal with

financial matters in those days.

Kulsum: Oh no you don't! Caught you! His wife Khadija was a

business woman!

Sonia: Yeah, but she did hire him to take care of her financial

matters! Okay, so we've come a long way baby.

Ava: Exactly and again contextual. Although I wish we could be

more like her. A forty-year-old marrying a 29-year-old guy and doing

the proposing as well. Talk about a woman of the 21st century. You go

gal. Love that gal.

Kulsum: Sonia learn something!

Sonia: If she were here, she'd be one of us! And Kulsum, do you

think she was in a hijab when she did that? If she were here, I tell you,

she'd be like usl

Shireen: Stuck in traffic on the Triboro, after closing a fabulous

deal.

Sonia: Meeting Mohammad on dating.com.

Kulsum, Shireen, Ava: Toba, toba, god forbid.

Kulsum: Really Sonia!

Ava: I think she'd be sitting here sipping caffe latte, sitting here with

me. She'd be the head of some corporation and right now would be

appreciating the great abs that just walked by. Mmm-Mmm-Mmmm.

Lord have mercyl

Kulsum: Tooba, tooba, tooba. . .

Ava: . . . and telling Kulsum to shut up and dialing Sara to tell her to

get a life!

Sonia: Any second now we're all going to be struck down by

lightning. I can feel it.

Kulsum: Please don't blaspheme Ava!

Shireen: Han baba, please, watch it. I think lightning travels and I

certainly don't want to be zapped for you having a mouth on you.

Ava: Honestly. You guys are too much. Sara and her vacousness

seems like holy devotion to you, while what I say is blasphemy!

Kulsum: She prays.

Ava: How the hell do you know what I do?

Sonia: Yeah Kulsum, Sara is not the only one who prays you know.

She may be the only one who manages to be such a conspicuous

performer.

Shireen:Yadan Aiyan, aiyan, loki panjwaley, usan her waley, yadan

aiyan, aiyan. I remember you, everyone else remembers at allotted

times, five times a day, me I remember you all the time.

Ava: Well sung darling.

Kulsum: Okay, everyone, bye.

Sonia: Ciao.

Shireen: Later.

Ava: Hasta Ia vista babes.

Sonia: Stay on the line Ava. I want to talk to you.

Ava: Okay. Look I'll call you right back okay. Bye everyone.

Sonia: Okay. Bye everyone.

Ava: Hi, it's me.

Sonia: You sound much better. Are you?

Ava: Yeah, I guess I'm much better. You haven't told anyone, have you?

Sonia: No, of course I haven't. But are you okay?

Ava: Well you can't really feel sympathy for me can you?,.

Sonia: You went into this knowing the full picture.

Ava: Yes. I place bets with myself that I'll hear from him the

moment the weekend ends and he gets back to work. And so far I'm

winning my own bet. I'm just one of his bad travel habits: cigarettes,

quick gulp downs of bloody Marys; surfing the cable channels

mindlessly.

Sonia: Ava, listen to me you can't possibly be thinking of

continuing this. There is nothing in this for you. What are you trying to

do Ava? Why are you bent on hurting yourself like this?

Ava: I am amused that he now wants to be friends. Now that he has

declared me a friend, does that mean I fall into the waste bin? His

calling me a dear friend, I wonder why that makes me wince?

Sonia: Ava, what's the point? You knew there was an end as you

were going into it in t}le first place.

Ava: I just don't get this. What an asshole. What a user!

Sonia: Look, leave it for what it was. Don't demonize him. you

were both in this. Just leave it.

Ava: I can't. I can't disengage that way. What have I done here? There’s

no recognition of me. I need some recognition from him that this meant

something to him. I feel like I'm walking in a silent invisible form.

Sonia: What is it that you wanted? What is it that you expected? He

was going to leave you. You knew that going in. He told you that straight

off the first time. You know the 6rst thing men say is usually honest and

truthful.

Ava: To not be acknowledged, that's what hurts. I've got to at least

say this to him.

Sonia: No! Let go please. You've had two weeks of a break and he hasn't communicated with you during

this whole time, so why even think of starting again?

Ava: No point there. I tested the hypothesis, and it tested

positive. Pursuit, conquer, demolish, move on' All this is so pointless!

POINTLESS.

Sonia: No, you needed to get that out o[your system' It's done! Not pointless for that Purpose.

Pointless if you do anything more!

Ava: So for him it was just a continuation in a way of the big

acquisition battle. So this must have been war all along? I wonder' I'm

trying to wonder if he really did consider me the adversary all

along. That it was him who had me pegged for the other' the one that needed to be defeated. I

was the one who wanted to be a friend. I said that, we could be friends. He was so bent on

"wanting!

Sonia: Be honest with yourself, Ava. You were doing the same thing

as well! It was that whole merger thing.

Ava: But for him, wanting me translated into destroying and

conquering, unraveling and unpacking. I even said that to him' don't

unpack me, don't unravel me. But he wouldn't listen, just focused on

wanting. How strange indeed that he should think that since now that

he no longer values, no longer cherishes, he can be a dear friend' Now

that the demolishing is done that he should think he could be a "dear

friend." How does that work? It makes Iife like being at war. At war like

this, engaging only to destroy, viewing the other as a danger, always

despising the other as an enemy? Only able to deal with people on the

basis of demolishing them?

Sonia: Ava, all you are doing is validating all the worst notions

about yourself to yourself. Thinking his thoughts for him' Thinking

everyone's thoughts for them. Validating your suspicions'

Ava: I get that from my therapist. I don't need that from you'

Sonia: Ava, it's true. This is one more reason for you to continue to

be angry with yourself, with everyone! To remain an outsider; remain

as cynical. He acted as you feared he would' And you acted

you feared you would.

Ava: And Your Point is?

Sonia: Break this cycle you're in. Ava, is this helping at all? Promise

me you are not going to call him again!

Ava: It's over. Don't worry. I'm done.

Sonia; Promise.

Ava: Khuda ki Kasum. Okay?

Sonia: Okay, Ava, okay.

Ava: You have to admit though, Riaz bhai married Sara. She’s lucky.

Okay, she's his fourth wife. But he married her.

Sonia: Ava!

Ava: I'll give her that. I'll give him that.

Sonia: You're sounding totally ridiculous.

Ava: Perhaps.

Sonia: Trust me. Dating.com. Try it!

Ava: Don't be ridiculous!

My Life As An Observer: Target Practice – Part 2

By Norman D. Costa

Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

Part 1 of this story can be found HERE.

The story so far: I learned to hit a bull’s eye with an M14 rifle in U. S. Marine Corps officer training at Quantico, Virginia, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college. I still remember, and have recalled throughout my life, my thoughts at hitting a long range target on my third shot, using only two rounds to adjust my aiming point. I had the immediate realization that I just put a bullet through the head of someone who was 100 yards away. And it was easy. It also brought up a memory from six years earlier – a memory that had been entirely repressed, and now overwhelmed me on the rifle range. I had spent my early teens hanging out with Felix Crimmins, a mildly retarded neighbor boy, and hero-worshiping his father, Fred. Mr. Crimmins carried a 38 caliber revolver on his job as an armed toll booth collector in New York City. Felix’s mother, Lena, was to my naïve eye an embarrassing religious fanatic, sometimes neglecting to leave supper for her children while rushing out to her weekly meeting of the Holy Rosary Society. The scope of Lena’s hypocrisy, her betrayal, and the desperation it engendered in Fred, were beyond my ability to comprehend, though not to observe.

The Final Trip to the Farm

Felix (he was 16, and three years older than I) got permission from his mother, Walena (Lena) Crimmins, to invite me to come with the family on a long weekend visit to his grandparents. I had been there before, and going to the farm was like landing in our own personal theme park, except we made our own adventures, and the food and desserts were much better and free. Put a kid on an old farm with 112 acres, and a rain free summer day, and it's like dying and going to heaven. Felix's grandmother had been a pastry chef, and still supplied two restaurants and the one hotel in town. The confections at the farm were nonstop and the best in the world. The milking barn, tool and tractor sheds, wood shed, long unused pig sty and chicken coop, and farm equipment idle for years were made to order for discovery, preoccupation, and play. The woods, the hay fields now harvested by a neighbor farmer, and a creek with a swimming hole, were gifts from God Almighty for young explorers on safari.

The best part of the trip, itself, was sitting in the rear-facing back seat of the Ford station wagon with Felix. We were entertained by the panorama of things gone by, and making eye contact and getting a wave from the driver behind us. The front hood of a car is a huge obstruction to your view. Facing forward you adopted, unintentionally, some of the attentiveness and stress required to drive a car, like keeping eyes AND mind on the road. The rearward view was easy and relaxing on the eyes, and free of the stress of watching where you were going. In the days before car seat belts, seating arrangements could be as fluid as in the TV room at home. Fred and Lena Crimmins were in the front seat, Felix and I were in the back seat, and Penny (13) and Maureen (10) were in the middle seat, always. It was a different story with Tommy (7), Harry (3), and Michael (6 months). Tommy and Harry, at different times into the trip, could be in front with their mom and dad, in the middle with their sisters, or in the rear with Felix and me. The baby, Michael, was freely passed back and forth between the front and middle seats, but he never made it all the way to the back seat. The inside of the car was like a room at home with kids coming and going, and occasionally stepping on each other.

That Friday when we departed from the Crimmins's house, the only thing that seemed to be not normal was Mr. Crimmins. Fred was distracted and unfocused. He appeared a little sad. He didn't even offer a token rebuff to Lena who was complaining that he didn't know how to pack the car for a trip. “Stupido,” she used to call him. At another time he would be, at least, attentive to his children either to make sure everyone was all right, or issuing the usual threat to turn the car around unless good behavior was restored in the family vehicle. He had always been a very good driver, and took great pride in his car, which he kept in tip-top condition. Felix and I were always helping Fred Simonize his car on the weekends. For effect, he would throw water on the hood to impress upon someone, proudly, how the water beaded and danced. None of that pride in owning and operating a car was apparent the day we left for the final trip to the farm.

On the road, I didn't pay much attention to Fred's other-worldly demeanor. No one else seemed to notice, or care either. Lena started caring when Fred passed other cars across a double line while going into a curve. Twice I heard Lena say something scolding, and Fred dismissed her with, "There was no one coming." I didn't see what was going on, a result of rear-facing backseat oblivion, and thought there was nothing new in this exchange.

Horns blared, brakes were applied, screeching came from the tires of several vehicles, disorienting g-forces threw us left and right in our seats!.Screams from the children transformed quickly into loud crying from fright! Fred had made another attempt at passing multiple cars on a curve. We were back in our lane, and there were no sounds of collisions, or vehicles running off the road. Lena was yelling at the top of her lungs at Fred. "What are you trying to do? Are you try to get us all killed?”

"I didn't see him," was Fred's equally dismissive, but sneering reply. Lena gave it to him for a few more moments. She turned around to Penny and said, "Here, give Michael to me. I want to make sure he's OK." Tommy was sitting up front between his mom and dad. "Tommy," she said, "get in the middle seat with your sisters. I want Harry up here with me." Only Felix said anything about what just transpired and showed some concern. "Dad, are you OK?" "Your father's just fine," answered his mother. Fred never gave an answer to Felix.

The approach to the farm was scenic and designed by nature to get all of us eager and build excitement as we got closer. We drove up a long hill with a winding road. We crested on a long plateau with a large farm on the left and another on the right. As we started a downhill run after the plateau, we could see the farmhouse, apple orchard, and barns across the valley and halfway up the facing hill. Whatever was going on in the car – sleeping, game playing, crying, and parental discord – was immediately dissolved. "There's Grandma's and Grandpa's house!" was motioned and seconded several times. "I get the tree swing first," someone said. "You got it first last time. Now it's my turn," answered another someone. "Yeah, but I said it first," came the rejoinder.

The usual sequence of events was for all the kids to run for their favorite place, or the tree swing, or spot in the barn, or the white and red current bushes alongside the farm house. Lena would go straight away into the house with the littlest child to greet her parents. Fred would unload the car and carry the family belongings into the house. About forty-five minutes after arrival, all the kids would make their first entrance into the large country kitchen and exchange hugs and kisses with their grandparents and ask Grandma what goodies had she made for them. This gave the grownups time to sort out sleeping arrangements for the kids, match the small satchels for each child with the bed they were to occupy, and then relax for a few minutes before kids and bedlam invaded the farm house. The customary question, after the inquiry about Grandma's baked goodies was, "When do we eat?" The kitchen table was pulled away from the wall, an extension leaf inserted in the middle, and every available chair in the house was pressed into service for six children, one guest, and four adults on the crowded and noisy perimeter – seating for 11.

The hand-off

As Fred pulled into the long gravel driveway, Felix and I knew exactly what we were going to do without even discussing it. We were going to jump out of the car and run down the sloping driveway, past the farm house, to the milking barn. Two-thirds of the height of the barn was the hay loft above the milking level. Although there had been no live stock for a number of years, there was plenty of bailed hay stored in the barn. Several thick ropes were suspended from the high rafters. Tarzan never had it so good. We built forts and tunnels with the hay bales, and swung like buccaneers from the rigging of a Spanish war galleon onto the decks of an English prize ship. The hay loft of the milking barn was THE place to be.

Mr. Crimmins came to a full stop, put the car into park, and pulled up on the emergency brake. The 'crank and ratchet' sound of the hand break was our cue to abandon ship with all dispatch. Felix pushed up the rear window and locked it in place, pulled the handle to drop the tail gate, and was out in a flash, running around the passenger side and down to the barn. I was a bit slow in getting out – probably the stiffness of a long car ride. As the last one to exit the back I had to lift and close the tailgate, and unlatch the rear window to pull it down. This took another few moments. By this time the center seat was already vacated, with the former occupants fighting over who was going to get the tree swing first. I was still a bit stiff so I didn't launch myself into a sprint down to the barn door. I walked around the driver side where Mr. Crimmins had slowly emerged from the driver’s seat. He didn't seem to be paying any attention to me, and certainly wasn't making eye contact.

As I neared him, he took something out of his pocket and held it out to me, all the while looking over my head and past me. My hand went out, instinctively, to take what he was offering, even before I knew what it was. This was the man I trusted, and looked up to – he was the first adult male with whom I identified, other than my father. Without looking directly at me he pressed the object into my hand, and I took it without thinking or comment. Still avoiding any direct eye contact, he said something indistinct about me using it for target practice. He turned away, went around the front of the station wagon, and followed his wife into the house without unloading the family luggage. I was holding in my hands a loaded, 38 caliber police revolver.

Without missing a step, I continued walking down to the barn. My thoughts immediately associated to the uncomplimentary adage about not being able to hit the side of a barn. I thought about putting the revolver in my pocket, but I was afraid it might go off. Give any kid a toy gun and the first thing he does is point it at something and start pulling the trigger. I did no such thing with the revolver. I knew I was in a very dangerous situation, but I was unable to speak or act, or to take in what had just happened. I was very scared. A revolver is a very heavy piece of steel in the hands of a 13 year old, yet I had no perception of its weight. It was as if it were made of unsubstantial ethereal matter. There was a pressing tonnage, though, on my consciousness, disabling a normal assessment of a very dangerous reality. I continued walking down to the barn, a dazed awareness of danger crowding out other thoughts.

I know that I had the revolver with me in my bedroom that night, but I remember nothing after walking toward the barn cradling it in my hands. I don't remember telling Felix or showing him the weapon. I don’t remember anything about what we did in the barn, eating dinner, or playing afterward. The next day remains a complete blank, with regard to both events and feelings. My first recollection of an event in the real world was on Sunday afternoon. I don't even remember a trip to church that morning. In my mind's eye, I can still see Lena Crimmins driving off with her parents and the younger children. They were going to visit her brother at whose house her two sisters would gather, as well.

Target Practice

I must have said something to Felix about the revolver. His mother's departure seemed to be a cue for Felix, and myself to ask his father about our deferred target practice. I still had the revolver, and must have produced it. There was a log on the side of the tractor shed and perpendicular to it. Fred Crimmins seemed to regain his awareness and directed us to fetch some old cans, jars, and bottles and prop them atop the log. He had us stand back about 30 feet and lined up parallel to the log, Felix to my left, and Fred Crimmins to my right. I gave the revolver to Felix who wanted to go first. He had never been shooting with his father, or held a real revolver, mindful of his mother's prohibition against teaching any of the children to shoot a weapon. Felix and I watched enough cowboy movies, though, and played with enough toy guns to know how to aim and fire a revolver -- at least in theory. He took aim at a bottle on the end of the log closest to him.

A police revolver is a single action handgun. A bullet is fired with a single squeezing of the trigger. As you begin to squeeze the trigger, the cylinder, which has separate chambers for each of six bullets, begins to revolve. The cylinder clicks into place aligning the next chamber with the barrel. At the same time the spring loaded hammer with the firing pin is being pushed back from the cylinder and chamber. When the trigger is squeezed all the way, the retracted hammer is released and the firing pin strikes the primer at the bottom of the bullet's shell casing. The gunpowder inside the shell casing explodes, propelling the bullet through the barrel and out the muzzle of the revolver. Felix squeezed the trigger and missed his first shot, hitting the log below his intended target. On his second shot, Felix shattered an old Mason jar.

Now it was my turn. My hand was not very big, or strong, nor my fingers very long. I could not get a comfortable grip on the handle and trigger. My trigger finger was not long enough. So I used my longer middle finger to curl around the trigger. A small weak hand is not very good when it comes to aiming and firing a large heavy handgun. I did my best and fired one round. It was obvious I missed the can I aimed at, or any other target sitting on the log. Where the bullet landed was a complete mystery. My second shot was just as unsuccessful, and the final resting place of the bullet just as mysterious.

I handed the weapon to Mr. Crimmins for his two shots. He said very little to us, not even so much as a few words about gun safety or help in aiming or holding the pistol. He took the weapon, and assumed a demeanor of control, confidence, and command. It was awesome watching him handle a firearm. I even felt proud to be there with him during target practice. Felix was clearly proud at the sight of his revived father with his revolver in hand. He aimed it right away at a bottle on his side of the log and shattered it on his first shot. On his second shot he aimed at a lidded baby food jar, the smallest target on the log. It still had the picture and logo of the Gerber baby on it. He needed a few more seconds of concentration and careful aiming, and then obliterated the target. "Wow!" I said. Felix was in awe. "Did you see that," he exclaimed.

I expected to see Fred putting away his revolver. Instead, I watched as he pushed the cylinder release on the revolver with the thumb of his right hand, and let the cylinder swing out from the barrel, exposing all the chambers. He pointed the pistol up so that the spent casings would fall out of their chambers. With a couple of shakes the casings were on the ground and all the chambers were empty. Even as he pressed the cylinder release, he reached into his left pants pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. He jostled the bullets in his hand, and with fine finger manipulations with his thumb, all the bullets were lined up perfectly in his palm and reloaded quickly into the revolver. It was as if he executed a flawless slight-of-hand that was practiced a thousand times till it was second nature. With a snap rotation of his right hand the cylinder was swung back and clicked fast into its normal position. I don't think it took more than a few seconds to reload the revolver.

Fred handed the 38 back to Felix. Felix emulated his father's demeanor and stance, even imitating his aiming and taking extra time to line up his sights. He scored another one for two as he did in the first round. I was no better on my second round than on the first. Mr. Crimmins closed the repeat performance by making two soda cans jump straight up and spin in the air. "God, he must be a real professional," I thought. With each of his father's shots, Felix again shouted, "Did you see that?" Felix was eager to try again for a perfect two for two score. His father said that was it, that he had no more bullets.

Mr. Crimmins appeared to snap out of his foggy inattentiveness when we began our target practice. However, his demeanor seemed professional and detached, and not like that of a father giving his son tips on marksmanship. He gave no compliments, no encouragement, no advice, and no admonitions. Seeming impatient to get this over, and relieved that it was, he put the revolver into his pocket and went back into the house without a word. I remember thinking that if the entire family were there, including grandparents and children, everyone could take one shot at a target. There was one bullet for everyone, and one left over.

The aftermath

Felix and I saw each other less and less after I started high school in the fall. I had a long commute on public transit to Mount St. Michael Academy, and always had a ton of homework. Felix graduated from vocational school a year later. His father got him a job with the union for building maintenance and custodial workers. He started work right away at the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan. Like his father, Felix had to do shift work, but he loved his job and fell in love with the Chrysler building. He knew the exact height of the building to the inch, how many floors, how many windows, how many toilets, how many offices, and how many door locks. At some point in his career he must have serviced or changed every single door lock in the building.

Fred Crimmins died later that year in a horrible automobile accident. He was driving on East Tremont Avenue, passing under the elevated tracks of the Pelham Bay subway line, and crossing Westchester Avenue. It was in the day time when he hit, head on, one of the steel support girders holding up the elevated tracks. His obituary said that he died instantly. My parents told me that the police report claimed he lost control of his vehicle at high speed. I heard them say to each other that he was too good a driver, and too proud of his car, to lose control. I thought they were simply complimenting Mr. Crimmins on his driving ability. Lena Crimmins remarried about six months later to Patrick O'Connor, president of the Holy Rosary Society. Before the wedding, Felix moved out of his mother's house, and rented a basement apartment in the home of his father's sister. My parents received an invitation to the wedding, but they never replied and never attended.

Six years later at the Marine rifle range

After scoring a bull's eye on my third shot, with only two rounds to adjust my aiming, I lost all concentration on my shooting. The corporal, my personal instructor, didn't know it, but I was preoccupied with my sudden recovery of this long repressed memory. I got 'Maggie's Drawers' on my next two shots with my M14. The corporal took the rifle from me, took out the empty magazine and inserted another magazine with five rounds. He handed me the rifle, coached me on my seated position, the holding of the rifle, my aiming, and told me to slow down and take my time. Then he slid back the receiver, released it, and loaded a new round into the firing chamber. "Now slow down," he said.

I remember everything about the experience of my first three shots. After that I don't even know if I was looking at the target, let alone trying to aim it properly, and control my breathing. All I could think about was putting a bullet through someone's head at 100 yards. During my second magazine of five rounds the corporal kept telling me to slow down, slow down, slow down. It meant nothing to me because I was obsessed with the thought of putting a bullet through someone's head. I missed the target each time. I handed the M14 back to the corporal. As I was getting up to return to the waiting area with the rest of my squad in G4 platoon, the corporal tried to encourage me by saying, "Marine, you just got yourself a bad case of 'buck fever'." I knew better.

I sat down on the ground with the rest of my squad. I put my knees up, crossed my arms over the top of my knees, put my forehead down on my arms, and closed my eyes. I just wanted to fall asleep and dissolve away from the memories of that day of target practice, six years earlier. Sleep or diverting my thoughts was impossible. I kept doing the arithmetic. There was one bullet for each of his children, one for his wife, one for each of her parents, one for me, one for himself, and one left over.

Photo credits:

Ron Rankin,http://www.life.com/image/50669222

George Doyle, http://www.life.com/image/57441018

In Las Vegas, history has a price, not a past

Stefany Anne Golberg in the Washington Post:

Pawn shops thrive in the United States. They are the country's original institutions of consumer credit, offering quick cash (sale or loan) for goods. Giant retailers such as EZPAWN and Cash America offer a Costco-like setting. Since the economy soured and bank loans dried up, Americans are becoming increasingly reacquainted with such stores. Pawn America, a chain in the Midwest, reported a 15 to 20 percent increase in revenue in 2008.

Offering a window into this world is "Pawn Stars," whose viewers watch the amusing ins and outs of pawn shop life and learn about the business. The show is pulling record ratings for the History Channel. In one clip, proprietor Rick Harrison boasts about a 2001 Super Bowl ring once owned by a player he doesn't name with a story he doesn't remember. We learn instead how Super Bowl rings are made and how their worth is determined. In another clip, Harrison shows off two anonymous Olympic bronze medals, explaining that their value is determined by how, where and when they were won.

But why are Gold & Silver's customers pawning their most cherished belongings?

More here.

Sunday Poem

Water be a String to my Guitar

Water, be a string to my guitar. The new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone. It’s difficult to remember my face
in mirrors. Be my memory that I may see what I lost…
Who am I after this exodus? I have a rock
that carries my name over hills that overlook what has come
and gone…seven hundred years guide my funeral behind the city walls…
and in vain time circles to save my past from a moment
that gives birth to the history of exile in me…and in others…
Water, be a string to my guitar, the new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone south as nations who renovate their days
in the rubble of transformation: I know who I was yesterday, so what
will I become tomorrow under the Atlantic banners of Columbus? Be a string,
water, be a string to my guitar. There is no Egypt in Egypt, no
Fez in Fez, and Syria is distant. And no hawk
in my kin’s banner, no river east of the palm trees besieged
by quick Mongol horses. In which Andalus will I end? Right here
or over there? I will know that I perished here and left my best
behind me: my past. Nothing remains for me except my guitar,
O water, be a string to my guitar. The conquerors have gone
and the conquerors have come…

Mahmoud Darwish

translation: Fady Joudah
excerpted from If I Were Another;
Farrar, Straus, and Grioux, 2009

Game, set and match -- Agassi

From The Washington Post:

Agassi was born in Las Vegas to a brutal Iranian immigrant, a former Olympic boxer, who forced his four children to play tennis. As a pre-schooler, Andre began hitting balls on the backyard court for hours every day. School, friends, social life and especially thinking were considered distractions by his father, who terrified the entire family. But while his sisters rebelled and his older brother, Philly, finally lacked the killer instinct, Andre became his father's obsession and whipping boy -- one who was expected to whip other boys and unsuspecting men on court. His father pitted him at age 8 against suckers, including football great Jim Brown, who foolishly bet $500 that he could beat the kid. Before junior tournaments, Mr. Agassi fed his son caffeine-laced pills. Later, he tried to turn Andre on to speed.

At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was "Lord of the Flies with forehands." Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children.

More here.

How power changed a president

James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

One year on from his election victory, how should we judge President Barack Obama? He has passed a $787bn (£500bn) stimulus package and a $3.4 trillion budget, bailed out America’s floundering car makers, and launched landmark legislation to reform healthcare, tighten regulation on a crippled financial sector, and cut greenhouse gases. Against a backdrop of economic chaos and partisan division, and especially if some form of health reform passes by the end of the year, Obama’s early record will look impressive. It’s been a good start.

That said, a president who promised unity has also brought discord. The saner wings of the American right (and some Democrats) worry that his moderate tone hides policies that dangerously expand the grip of the state, and the depth of its debt. The less sane gather in the streets and howl about the road to socialism. Critics on the left, meanwhile, already see a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity. Obama has a thumping electoral mandate, and control of congress. Yet he stimulated the economy too little, and fluffed a perfect moment to bring in radical measures to take on America’s banks and health insurers. Behind these worries, doubts lurk about what the president stands for, and whether the “Obama-ism” implicit in his campaign can translate into governance. Put more simply: has Obama begun to change Washington, or has Washington begun to change him?

More here.

Captives: What really happened during the Israeli attacks?

Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker:

In southwest Israel, at the border of Egypt and the Gaza Strip, there is a small crossing station not far from a kibbutz named Kerem Shalom. A guard tower looms over the flat, scrubby buffer zone. Gaza never extends more than seven miles wide, and the guards in the tower can see the Mediterranean Sea, to the north. The main street in Gaza, Salah El-Deen Road, runs along the entire twenty-five-mile span of the territory, and on a clear night the guards can watch a car make the slow journey from the ruins of the Yasir Arafat International Airport, near the Egyptian border, toward the lights of Gaza City, on the Strip’s northeastern side. Observation balloons hover just outside Gaza, and pilotless drones freely cross its airspace. Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. Between the sea and the security fence that surrounds the hundred and forty square miles of Gaza live a million and a half Palestinians.

Every opportunity for peace in the Middle East has been led to slaughter, and at this isolated desert crossing, on June 25, 2006, another moment of promise culminated in bloodshed. The year had begun with tumult. That January, Hamas, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist group, won Palestine’s parliamentary elections, defeating the more moderate Fatah Party. Both parties sent armed partisans into the streets, and Gaza verged on civil war. Then, on June 9th, a tentative truce between Hamas and Israel ended after an explosion on a beach near Gaza City, apparently caused by an Israeli artillery shell, killed seven members of a Palestinian family, who were picnicking. (The Israelis deny responsibility.) Hamas fired fifteen rockets into Israel the next day. The Israelis then launched air strikes into Gaza for several days, killing eight militants and fourteen civilians, including five children.

More here.

At the Morgan, the Jane Austen Her Family Knew

From The New York Times:

Who would not wish for a close relative like Aunt Jane? In early 1817, the year she died, suffering, perhaps, from lymphoma and beginning work on a novel she became too ill to finish, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her 8-year-old niece, Cassandra.

“Ym raed Yssac,” it begins, “I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.”

Every word in the letter is spelled backward, from that opening New Year’s wish to her dear Cassy to the signature, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” The author, here as elsewhere, does not condescend to her readers, but she also knows who they are and how to give them pleasure. Imagine an 8-year-old girl, perhaps as precocious as her aunt, playfully deciphering these good wishes. The difficulty comes, though, in imagining Austen herself. She was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, so knowing about their flaws and virtues, yet herself so opaque and mysterious a presence that it is hard to imagine her in the flesh. You have to read her the way her most sentient characters read their companions, attending to subtle signs, mannerisms and language.

And for anyone who has even begun to take her measure, there may be no greater pleasure than to visit the new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” Like Austen’s own voice, the show is exquisitely informative while being almost laconic, displaying a wealth of material with careful explication, yet allowing the viewer to tease the writer’s sensibility out of the objects on display. The only thing out of character is a self-conscious, 16-minute documentary, “The Divine Jane,” created for the show, in which contemporary figures speak about Austen’s importance — though little that Cornel West, Fran Lebowitz or Colm Toibin have to say comes close to what the documents communicate on their own.

More here.

the 1989 thing

We make fun of Nostradamus and numerologists, but give editors an anniversary and the floodgates open. We're anniversary-ologists, as USA Today might say. Unfortunately, trying to take the pulse of what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 is more complex than counting back the years. Just as 1865 or 1945 can't be explained without 1787 or 1933, so 1989 -- the year communism either imploded or didn't, the world either changed or didn't and history either ended or kept going -- poses challenges. One can take the "I was there" approach of Michael Meyer, Newsweek's bureau chief for Germany, Central Europe and the Balkans between 1988 and 1992, in his book "The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall." Meyer places the spotlight on what happened -- Hungary's opening of its borders, the Nov. 9 fall of the Berlin Wall, the domino decline of other Eastern European states -- while lacing in accessibly deep, if not Hegelian, historical explanation. Another tack is the "if you knew what I know" analysis offered in Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin's "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment," which frames the story as badly told rather than untold: a fantasy of people power sweeping Europe that's better dissected nation-by-nation, with insight into doomed governments and failed systems.

more from Carlin Romano at the LA Times here.

His Falstaffian vitalism

Johnson loved literary biography and practiced it superbly in his wonderful “Lives of the Poets” (1779-81). It is appropriate that he continues to be the subject of valuable literary biographies, of which the masterwork will always be his friend James Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791). Boswell’s “Life” is so strong a book that common readers may wonder why more biographies of Johnson proliferate, to which the answer is the spiritual complexity and intellectual splendor of the most eminent of all literary critics. “Reflection” was one of Johnson’s favorite terms, and we need as many accurate reflections of and upon him that we can get. Johnson’s personality was worthy of Shakespearean representation: sometimes I rub my eyes to dispel the illusion that Shakespeare wrote, not Johnson’s work, but the man himself into existence. It delighted Johnson to identify himself with Falstaff, whose deliberate merriment he loved, even as he expressed moral disapproval of Shakespeare’s “compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested.” Thinking of his own dangerous melancholy, Johnson observed that Falstaff made himself necessary to Prince Hal “by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter.”

Saturday Poem

Gift

I took everything from my mother, her liquor, her ghosts,
her sweetness, her heavy lips, her breath of sorrow.
I took her waist and her spools, her ears and her thimble,
I took her green thumb, and the purple cosmos blossoms
that trembled under her kitchen window.
I took her feet and her loneliness, the cities
she lived in, the small towns, their friendless dusks,
her quilts and perfumes and fingers.
I took the sound of her dresses at midnight,
and the goat she kept as a child,
I took the crickets beneath the boards of her first houses
and her lovers; I got lost in their shadows.
I took her hatred of her father,
I ate from her dishes in rooms that smelled of the sea.
I took the war and the horses that pulled the cart
that carried her mother away.
I took the odor of crushed thyme and sweat,
I took a handkerchief embroidered by my great aunt
and the iron in her shoulders and the road signs
of old villages.
I took my mother’s maiden name and her fear of oceans,
I took her bravery and her strangeness,
I took a blessing from her and
the lullabies she whispered, drunk,
and my terror of that dark music.
I took my love for a woman
who walked through a broken doorway
with her eyes closed
following no one.

by Rita Gabis

from The Wild Field; Alice James Books,
Cambridge, MA, 1994

Climate change denial is spreading

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that man-made global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled last year. The Science Museum's Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they've seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1,006 people had endorsed it and 6,110 had rejected it. On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 in the global warming category. Never mind that they've been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

More here.

Pakistan remains its own worst enemy

Manan Ahmed in The National:

The Taliban are indeed a murderous lot, intent on disrupting and destroying civil society and cowing helpless civilians to their particularly offensive version of piety. But their success in finding a foothold and destabilising Swat relied not on any appeal to a religious cause or tribal brotherhood but on exploiting existing political and judicial imbalances in the region. Pakistan’s federally administered areas have never been integrated into the state apparatus – after 62 years, they lack basic infrastructure, any accountable civil administration, working courts or police, and have very few rights in Islamabad. The inhabitants of these regions have long experienced corrosive resource exploitation at the hands of the centre without receiving any benefit to their own communities.

The 3.5 million or more inhabitants of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, of which Waziristan is a component, only received the adult franchise in 1997 – 50 years after the creation of Pakistan. This area, with the highest poverty and lowest literacy rates in Pakistan, is still governed according to the brutal British colonial legal code: a family or even a village can be punished for the crime of a single individual, there is no protection from multiple sentences for the same offence, and most damnably, the state has no obligation to show cause for imprisonment. Most damaging is the utter lack of a judicial system that can adjudicate civil disputes – one reason for the persistent calls to impose Sharia within the region. The Pakistani state has yet to resolve these issues and, in the meantime, segments of the discontented population have resorted to armed aggression against the centre – which has taken both secular and religious forms. Decades of frustration allowed the Taliban a foothold in Swat, and the same conditions exist in Baluchistan.

So when the Taliban flee south from Waziristan into Baluchistan, they will find another populace suffering, denied their share of the national resources and embroiled in a long conflict with the state. They are likely to find sympathetic ears to their message of chaos and hate – and the military is sure to take this opportunity to move in and crush the existing secularist Baluchi nationalist movement, which has been waging a guerrilla war against the state since 2005.

More here.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

Jewish directors challenge Israel

Sakhr al-Makhadi at Al Jazeera:

A series of controversial Israeli films are provoking outrage and plaudits in equal measure at the London Film Festival.

The best documentary award has gone to one of the year's most controversial films.

Defamation is a polemic by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. In his expose of America's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), he claims anti-Semitism is being exaggerated for political purposes. He argues that American Jewish leaders travel around the world exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel.

He gets inside the ADL, which claims to be the most powerful lobby group of its type anywhere in the world. With unprecedented access, he travels with them as they meet foreign leaders, and use the memory of the Holocaust to further their pro-Israeli agenda.

At one point, an ADL leader admits to Shamir that "we need to play on that guilt".

Shamir says his film, Defamation, started out as a study of "the political games being played behind the term anti-Semitism".

"It became more a film about perceptions and the way Jews and Israelis choose to see themselves and define themselves - a lot of the time unfortunately choosing the role of eternal victims as a way of life."

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

On Anthropology and Empire

Robert Lawless in Counterpunch:

In the September 30, 2009, online edition of CounterPunch in an article titled “Country of Constant Sorrow: McChrystal's Afghan Desolation,” Vijay Prashad wrote,

“Enter a war zone with the expectation that the heavy armor will coerce the population into electing a favorable head of state; if this fails, then take refuge in your anthropologists, who will find a quick way to ‘nativize’ the war and help you clamber onto the helicopters. The country you have left behind is now more of a humanitarian disaster than when you self-righteously flew in on the wings of humanitarian interventionism.”

The notion of anthropologists being helpmates in the First World conquest of the Third World seems now to have become embedded in the day-to-day understanding of the Bush-initiated Iraq-Afghanistan cultural-military fiasco. Whether political scientists, philosophers, area specialists, or whoever actually fills the “societal” expert position on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams, anthropologists apparently are to take the blame. And anthropologists themselves are not exempt from furthering this notion.
Perhaps the most notorious anthropologist associated with the U.S. military’s HTS is Montgomery McFate, who writes primarily for military publications and whose pivotal article “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” appeared in the April 2005 issue of Military Review. A hapless mix of shoddy history and misdirected anthropology, her article was, nevertheless, reprinted in the 2007 edition of Annual Editions Anthropology -- along with articles by Conrad Kottak, Richard Lee, and Ralph Linton, and in the 2009 second edition of Classic Readings in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Gary Ferraro -- along with brand-name anthropologists such as Horace Miner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward T. Hall, Richard Lee, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Why McFate deserves to be in this company is unclear; there are many other articles by respectable anthropologists that clearly explained the HTS affair. [Among them have been David Price’s path-breaking contributions on this site and in our CounterPunch newsletter. Editors.] Making McFate’s piece widely available only further sullies anthropology.

Professor Video

From Harvard Magazine:

Near the University of Bologna—the world’s oldest, founded in 1088—is a medieval museum displaying carved memorial plaques that honor great professors of the past. “They all show the professor on the podium, with the students below,” says Thomas Forrest Kelly, Knafel professor of music. “Often the students are asleep, playing dice or cards, or fornicating.” Much has changed since the Middle Ages, but one thing that persists is the lecture. The medieval university invented lecturing—the word comes from the Latin verb legere, to read—to cope with the scarcity of books: a lecturer would read the only available copy of a book to the gathering of students. “That was high technology in the thirteenth century,” says Kelly, “but not high technology for the twenty-first century!”

Now sit in one of Kelly’s lectures in his undergraduate course Literature and the Arts B-51, “First Nights: Five Performance Premieres” (see “First Nights,” January-February 2000, page 52). This morning in Sanders Theatre, he is describing the 1913 Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. He does not read from books. Instead, Kelly punches up audio recordings of Stravinsky reflecting on the tumultuous performance, and projects color slides of oil paintings and photographs of the composer, plus photographs of the dancers and conductor Pierre Monteux. Next come pictures of the ballet’s score and the original costumes, plus paintings by Nicholas Roerich, the set designer. There’s another audio track of Stravinsky, this time disparaging the work of the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, and a modern video of the opening dance performed by the Joffrey Ballet. Next, as the Rite’s primal rhythms and fierce dissonances thump and cascade through the loudspeakers, Kelly breaks down the piece into its musical units, walking the class through the score with a flashlight pointer.

More here.

Firing Bullets of Data at Cozy Anti-Science

Janet Maslin in The New York Times:

“I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood. “But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.” Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.

The term “denialism,” used by Mr. Specter as an all-purpose, pop-sci buzzword, is defined by him as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.” In this hotly argued yet data-filled diatribe, Mr. Specter skips past some of the easiest realms of science baiting (i.e., evolution) to address more current issues, from the ethical questions raised by genome research to the furiously fought debate over the safety of childhood vaccinations.

More here.

Urs Fischer–izing

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It’s set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he’s working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and closed off doors, trying to get the effects he wants in this cold, almost soulless exhibition space. So much so that the curator Massimiliano Gioni mused to one writer, “I have thought a couple of times of killing him.” Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds. Fischer is weakest at smaller discrete sculptures and best when he’s taking over entire spaces or reacting to other artworks nearby. (Also, at a rumored $330,000 to stage, the show is another example of an art world that doesn’t know when to say no.) Had Fischer made a swashbuckling statement by (let’s say) demolishing the museum’s second and third floors, he would have wowed everyone. Instead, thankfully, he took the hard way, putting together multiple ideas: exploring the sculptural-philosophical-experiential qualities of fullness on the fourth floor, emptiness on the third, and a mixture of both on the second floor.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Watteau you know

What kind of people love the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau? I think of them listening to Nick Drake and knowing every Alan Rudolph film. In fact, they are the present-day counterparts of the characters inhabiting Watteau's paintings: young but already scuffed-up by life, dreamers of the exquisite woebegone. I don't know how one can love Watteau without somehow making him one's contemporary. For example, this premier painter of women's necks seemed ever-present in the East Village of yore, with its hordes of women in nape-revealing punk haircuts. Watteau's complex formula has a strong element of verité as it revels in artifice and seeps wistfulness. His sentiments, freshened by some readings on him, can seem eternally present. From what has been handed down through scraps of half-reliable information, Watteau, the son of a rather disagreeable roofer, escaped from the Flemish hinterlands, and the gritty, striving narrowness that appeared to be his inheritance, to Paris as an apprentice decorative painter. After several masters, including the theatre painter, Gillot, he made his mark among the rich intelligentsia who were ultimately only of use to him as a springboard towards creating the imaginative concoction that established him, the fête galante, a discontinuous tableau of love, flirtation and posturing. In most works, playfully-costumed aristocrats pose as actors, musicians, or themselves in the foregrounds of private parks. An elusive, complicated character himself, Watteau moved from one friend's house to the next, often pursued by avid collectors, and died at 36 of tuberculosis.

sontag on Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss—the man who has created anthropology as a total occupation, involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst—is no man of letters. Most of his writings are scholarly, and he has always been associated with the academic world. Since 1960 he has held a very grand academic post, the newly created chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, and heads a large and richly endowed research institute. But his academic eminence and ability to dispense patronage are scarcely adequate measures of the formidable position he occupies in French intellectual life today. In France, where there is more awareness of the adventure, the risk involved in intelligence, a man can be both a specialist and the subject of general and intelligent interest and controversy. Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or damning the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss. Apart from the tireless Sartre and the virtually silent Malraux, he must be the most interesting intellectual figure in France today.

more from Sontag's 1963 essay in the NYRB here.

Hope for the Roma

George Soros and James D. Wolfensohn in Project Syndicate:

Hated, alienated, and shunned as thieves and worse, the Roma have for too long been easy and defenseless targets for disgruntled racists in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and other European countries.
The Roma, as a people, reaped next to nothing from the prosperity that the former East Bloc countries have enjoyed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nevertheless, even before the current economic downturn, right-wing political leaders in Eastern Europe resorted to Roma-bashing in order to win support on the cheap. The message of hate continues to appeal to many people, including a few who are ready to resort to violence.
In the past 14 months, nine Roma have been murdered during a killing spree in Hungary. In August, gunmen invaded the home of an impoverished Roma widow, Maria Balogh, shot her to death, and wounded her 13-year-old daughter. In April, killers gunned down a Roma factory worker as he was walking to his job. In February, a Roma father and his five-year-old son were killed in front of their home near Budapest. The house was burned to the ground.
Last November, a Roma couple was killed in northeastern Hungary. To their credit, Hungary’s police mounted an unprecedented manhunt and, in late August, arrested four suspects, including some who wore swastika tattoos. In the same month, two medical students in Romania killed and dismembered a 65-year-old Roma man and left his body in the trunk of a car.
Perhaps the rash of killings will dampen the racist rhetoric. Perhaps people will see that the underlying message being spun is one of criminal hatred, and perhaps the violence will subside. But it is safe to assume, however, that as long as the Roma are mired at the bottom of Europe’s socio-economic pecking order, it is only a matter of time before racist attacks on them begin again.

Look at the Birdie

Dave Eggers reviews a posthumous collection of stories by Kurt Vonnegut, in the New York Times Book Review:

It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him. Late in his life, Vonnegut issued a series of wonderfully exasperated columns for the magazine In These Times. During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays, later collected in “A Man Without a Country,” were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds. In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question “How are you?” he answered: “I’m mad about being old, and I’m mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K.”

Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again, so it’s tempting to wonder what he would have made of where we are now. Would he have been pleased by the election of Barack Obama? Most likely he’d have been momentarily heartened, then exasperated once again witnessing the lunatic-strewn town halls, the Afghanistan quagmire, the triumph of volume over reason, of machinery over humanity.

For the last many decades of his life, Vonnegut was our sage and chain-smoking truth-teller, but before that, before his trademark black humor and the cosmic scope of “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” he was a journeyman writer of tidy short fictions.

More here.

Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye

Abbas Raza

Ansel Adams in color

Richard B. Woodward in Smithsonian Magazine:

Ansel Adams never made up his mind about color photography. Long before his death in 1984 at age 82, he foresaw that this "beguiling medium" might one day replace his cherished black and white. In notes tentatively dated to 1949, he observed that "color photography is rapidly becoming of major importance."

Yet he once likened working in color to playing an out-of-tune piano. America's regnant Western landscape photographer tried to control every step of picture-making, but for much of his lifetime too many stages of the color process were out of his hands. Kodachrome—the first mass-market color film, introduced in 1935—was so complicated that even Adams, a darkroom wizard, had to rely on labs to develop it. Color printing was a crapshoot in the 1940s and '50s. Reproductions in magazines and books could be garish or out of register. Before the 1960s, black-and-white film often actually yielded subtler, less exaggerated pictures of reality.

Still, Adams' misgivings did not prevent him from taking hundreds of color transparencies.

More here.

The Struggle Continues: An Interview with Wu Ming

Gordon Darroch in The Herald (Scotland):

As Manituana, the latest novel by the Italian writing collective known as Wu Ming, is published, Gordon Darroch probes one of the anonymous quartet on matters of life, war, literature ... and football.
If there’s one thing you can depend on from the Wu Ming foundation, it’s that nothing will be quite what it seems. The Italian writing collective has a short but distinguished tradition of confounding expectations, overturning convention and coaxing readers into viewing history on the reverse-angle replay.
Their third novel, Manituana, recounts the American war of independence from the losing side – the Six Nations of the Iroquois – and employs all the tricks and devices familiar to readers of their previous offerings, Q (written under the name Luther Blissett) and ’54: conflicting narratives, false trails, elaborate games and back-and-forth propaganda. Seasoned throughout with a neo-marxist outlook that throws up dozens more questions than it answers, it’s an enlightening, sometimes infuriating, but always invigorating read.
An interview with Wu Ming is, similarly, far from a run-of-the-mill event. Not least because it’s conducted by email, partly as a nod to the group’s distrust of old-style media manipulation, though also because Bologna to Glasgow is a much shorter distance in cyberspace.
Wu Ming’s ethos is tied in with the 20th-century pranksterist tradition of “art terrorism” and its suspicion of “old” media as being inherently shallow, duplicitous and obsessed with trivia. They refuse to be filmed or photographed by the media and identify themselves by number (there are currently four Wu Mings, known as Wu Ming 1, 2, 4 and 5, the number 3 shirt having been retired recently when a member left the band). Yet they are far from reclusive, travelling around the world to promote their books and diligently tending their website, wumingfoundation.com, where all their fiction can be downloaded for free.
Over the course of a fortnight Wu Ming 1 and I traded more than 4500 words on war, literature, cognitive reality, football and why you should never refer to the group as anarchists. Please note there are a few spoilers here – no drastic giveways, but if you don’t want to know how the War of Independence turns out, or what happens to Dread Jack, look away now.

3quarksdaily

for malcolm :)

Nabokov, Meet 50 Cent: Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind

Drop of water

The Loitering Presence of the Rational ­Actor

End of Whose History?

Wednesday Poem

dilemma 89

the fusion illusion

Prescribed reading: medicine in literature

Report row ousts top Indian scientist

a kind of all-purpose novel-killing novel

To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy

Tuesday Poem

On Myth

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

WE ARE ALL AFRICANS

Health Care

Lévi-Strauss and Philosophy

Short Takes

Part 3: The Path of Reason

perceptions

Health Care Reform

That Sara Aziz!

My Life As An Observer: Target Practice – Part 2

In Las Vegas, history has a price, not a past

Sunday Poem

Game, set and match -- Agassi

How power changed a president

Captives: What really happened during the Israeli attacks?

At the Morgan, the Jane Austen Her Family Knew

the 1989 thing

His Falstaff­ian vitalism

Saturday Poem

Climate change denial is spreading

Pakistan remains its own worst enemy

Once Upon a Time

Jewish directors challenge Israel

On Anthropology and Empire

Professor Video

Firing Bullets of Data at Cozy Anti-Science

Urs Fischer–izing

Watteau you know

sontag on Lévi-Strauss

Hope for the Roma

Look at the Birdie

Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye

Ansel Adams in color

The Struggle Continues: An Interview with Wu Ming

The Loitering Presence of the Rational Actor

His Falstaffian vitalism