GMT is the shit, yo

Happy Norouz (نوروزتان خوش).

Land of the Free

The "he" here is Andrew Russell, the author of the Datamonitor report on which this BBC piece is based:

The problem, he says, is that US companies dictate strict policies for dealing with customers, for instance that people in clothes shops should be asked three times if they want to try something on.

"If they don't ask three times, their manager will want to know why. Anyone left to their own initiative would know that the customer was only wanting to browse, but they don't have the opportunity to say that. There's no room for dealing with customers as individuals, and that's what people in Europe really want," he says.

Incidentally, two of the the "Top UK stories now" are "No rush to war, says Blair" and "Beckham forgives Ferguson." Ah, the garden of forking paths.

Standing Alone

Dave Hickey:

Two nights ago, I was talking with some local artists about things that used to be cool and weren’t anymore--things that we missed. These artists were mostly kids, so they missed some really stupid stuff, I thought, like Adam Ant and giant shoulder-pads in women’s clothes. I told them that I missed “standing alone”--the whole idea that “standing alone” was an okay thing to do in a democracy. “Like High Noon,” I explained, and one of them said, “Oh, you could do that today … (pause for effect) … But first you’d have to form a Stand-Alone Support Group!” Everyone laughed at this, and I did too, because she was probably right, but I didn’t laugh that hard…

"Mexico will poison us"

The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Five years ago, Victor Davis Hanson, known affectionately in certain quarters as "VDH," interrogated the notion that "we are creating a unique regional culture that is neither Mexican nor American, but an amorphous, fluid society that is the dividend on our multicultural investment," a "Calexico or Mexifornia." Dissenting from prevailing orthodoxies, he made a plea for a return to "to an imperfect, insensitive, but honest assimilationist past that nevertheless worked." During the past five years...well, you know what's happened. Now he's revisiting the issue, finding that things have subsequently become even worse than he had foreseen, but seemingly heartened that "the controversy over illegal immigration [has] moved so markedly to the right."

El Tri are currently on a five-city US tour, and last week I ventured out to join the festivities in a momentary Mexico, a fleeting creamy center surrounded by the greater American donut. I was there for the terrifying lows and the dizzying highs, though the balance turned out tilted sharply toward the latter. It wasn't quite the goleada Hugo Sanchez and I had hoped for, but the home team sent the overwhelming majority of us fanáticos home quite happy. (Highlights here, complete with the pitch invader.)

And yes, it's true, it is, if you let Stanley Fish spoon-feed you that "carnival or festival of cultures" goop it goes down more like saccharine than honey. But the organic shit, man, that shit is superb. It was only a friendly, but the exuberance and collective exhilaration manifested there easily exceeded the comparatively impoverished refractions of Absolute Spirit one finds at the culturally hegemonic "native" sporting events:

Supplying Mexican soccer fans with noisemaking equipment is like hauling corn to Kansas. It's so superfluous that it's silly. The Mexican national team in action last night competed to a ceaseless soundtrack of shouts, screams, chants, horns, inflatable noisesticks, matracas and miscellaneous merriment from a record San Diego soccer crowd of 63,328.

Chargers games, by comparison, are like 60 minutes of chamber music; Padres games like poetry readings. Though last night's game was completely without consequence – it was, in essence, cross-border barnstorming – the decibel level was totally indiscriminate.

[...]

College basketball can produce comparable sounds in some places, as can October baseball in the South Bronx. But the typical American spectator, more and more a product of corporate tickets, is mostly mute except for the brief spasms of sound that accompany a significant play. If it weren't for gambling and alcohol, some games could be conducted in a library without palpably disturbing the peace.

I’m not interested here in making a tackle on the whole immigration imbroglio, nor do I wish to get too can't-we-all-just-get-alongy, but I wonder whether there is perhaps an opportunity for real improvement at a different level than that of the policies and arrangements being hammered and beaten and thrashed out by the politicians, the activists, and the special interest groups with dogs in the show.

If “assimilation” really is the best model for immigration, maybe part of the problem is connected to the question, assimilation to what, exactly? Perhaps part of the problem is that the dominant culture is cold, sterile, spontaneously segregationist, and rather boring.

Some folks say that the Cold War situation forced our power elites to help the civil rights movement along. Maybe we could use the urgency of the immigration issue--real or exaggerated--as a stimulus for some overdue aesthetic refurbishments in our common culture.

I am not suggesting that some of Victor Davis Hanson’s worries aren’t legitimate or serious. But everybody knows that one man’s poison is another man’s fugu. Apropos of his concern with the Mexican poison, so to speak, and relevant as well to one of his other favorite issues, here is how Ramin Jahanbegloo concluded some thoughts on “Celebrating diversity”:

As the Muslim poet and theorist Muhammad Iqbal wrote: ‘Thou didst create the night, but I made the lamp. Thou didst create clay, but I made the cup. Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests; I produced the orchards, gardens and groves. It is I who made the glass out of stone, and it is I who turn a poison into an antidote.’ It is time for us to turn the poison of violence in Islam and Hinduism into an antidote of nonviolence for the future of peace in the region and in the world.

If you’ve been raised in the culturally underprivileged American-exceptionalist ghetto, the beautiful game is like wine or scotch: a taste you have to cultivate, not a natural one. But I've found it well worth the effort. Moreover, maybe the social cultivation of common pleasures such as this one could help span some of the more problematic cultural gaps within our society, and serve as a good starting point for the alchemical project of transmuting the poison--if it is a poison--into its own antidote.

If you’re in the Bay Area on March 28, try a sip.

Various Juxtapositions 1 (Thomas Pynchon)

Denis Scheck:

[T]he most spectacular party piece of all in this novel whose groaning feast brings to mind a fantastical curiosity cabinet is Thomas Pynchon's tribute to the technological adventure literature of the turn of the twentieth century: the "Chums of Chance," five aeronauts on board the "Inconvenience". Pynchon grants them perhaps the loveliest happy end in modern literature. "They fly toward grace," is the last sentence of the novel. A flight no reader should miss.

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon:

For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know . . . it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.

Sophie Ratcliffe:

This sounds like classic Pynchon, but there is something newly visible. The cadences are so lulling that it would be easy to see this as, if not celebration, an endearing closing sentimentality. But on a closer look, the final scene has disturbing resonances, as if a crew of Boy’s Own suicide bombers were setting out on a self-effacing mission to destruct. Of all the attempted explosions in the book, this is the biggest.

Literature: prolonging the crisis in the Arab world?

Mona Naggar examines the absence and presence of political Islam in contemporary writing in the Arab world. Turki al-Hamad, Alaa al-Aswani, Khalid al-Barri, and Fadhil al-Azzawi make appearances, and several Algerian writers are mentioned: Rachid Boudjedra, Waciny Laredj, Tahar Ouettar, Salim Bachi, and Assia Djebar.

Intellectual Property, Rights and Wrongs

In light of the DJ Drama drama, here is Colin MacCabe on Godard on copyright and freedom (pp. 301-2):

Godard presciently understands copyright as a crucial artistic and political issue. Most legal discussions turn around differences between the French and the Anglo-Saxon systems, with the French being held to favour the author, while the Anglo-Saxon favours the owner of the copyright. What differences there are pale into insignificance beside the fact that neither system allows the audience any rights whatsoever. But in a world where we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue, light and sound, may be the key to both psychic and political health. What is certain is that the work that Godard accomplished with Histoire(s) du cinema would be more or less impossible for any other individual on the planet. When Rod Stoneman bought the first two episode for Channel 4, the head lawyer decided that although one might argue that there were ‘gross breaches of multiple copyrights’, they would be broadcast without clearing these rights under the protection of the ‘fair dealing’ provision of the British copyright act, which allows a limited amount of quotation for the purposes of criticism.

Even if such individual bravery is to be commended, its effects will always be local. It is impossible to imagine broadcasters across the world daring to take on the massive entertainment corporations which understand their copyrights to be their most significant economic asset.

When John Milton wrote Areopagitica, his classic defence of free speech, the only part of the censorship bill he excused from censure was that which preserved ‘justly every man’s Copy to himself.’ It may seem simply an amusing paradox that the first bill in England to introduce copyright is famous for Milton’s attack on its other provisions which prevented the free circulation of ideas. But three and a half centuries on it is neither amusing nor a paradox, for copyright is now one of the major obstacles to the free development and exchange of ideas.

In so far as people think of copyright, they imagine (as did the drafter’s of Milton’s bill) an individual handing on to their children and grandchildren a right which then expires. In fact two thirds of global copyrights are now owned by six corporations. Even when the copyright rests with an individual, that individual may in the twenty-first century have amassed royalties beyond the dreams of those early Protestant capitalists trying to define a new property right. Should the Rolling Stones still own ‘Satisfaction’ when they have already earned many millions from it and when, if I wished to make any record of my own life, it would be impossible not to use it and yet impossible to afford the cost of permission? There is little doubt that these questions will become more pressing throughout this century. Godard’s obsession with copyright is not merely an individual idiosyncrasy but rather a real understanding of the contemporary realities of sound and image.

I'm drinking to psychic and political health, not to mention the free development and exchange of ideas.

Yet Another Apocalypse

Benny Morris has recently paraded the present apocalypticism, and this variety doesn't seem very fun or fantastic at all. Writing the history of the near future, he foresees nothing less than a second Holocaust:

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or ten years’ time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will co[n]voke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead. The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel’s anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 8,000 square miles), probably four or five hits will suffice : No more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Fault has been found with Benny from various quarters, but he's not the only one for whom this fearful (but not unimaginable) potentiality seems to be acquiring an air of inevitability. Here's Wolf Biermann:

The Hizbullah leader with the velvety voice preaches in Lebanon that Arab citizens of the State of Israel who are hit every now and then by rockets should be happy because they'll go to paradise as Allah's martyrs. And the lunatic leader of Iran who is bank-rolling the carnage, copies down speeches by Goebbels and Hitler, word for word, like a school boy. The whole world is convinced that Iran will soon have its atom bomb and launch vehicles as flying Persian carpets to boot. Ahmadinejad threatens: We'll do the Jews a favour and turn their Auschwitz lie into truth, then we'll put the final solution to the Jewish problem into action.

Supposing, just supposing, they've guessed it right, the question that follows is, does the dying Samson bring the house down as he goes atomically into that good night?

Apocalypse 1984

In an interview in the tageszeitung (original here), Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten recalls the certainty that the curtains were all coming down in 1984:

Hacke: ...we all said that the world was going to end in 1984. And until 1984 we were completely convinced of this. That's another reason why the Wall didn't bother us. On the contrary: even when the Wall was still standing we wanted it back.

taz: The Neubauten song "Kollaps" (collapse) from 1981 went: "Bis zum Kollaps ist nicht viel Zeit / Drei Jahre noch." (There's not much time until the collapse / Just three years.)

There you have it. We were totally convinced that the world would end. But that didn't worry us.

Was that a spin-off of the omnipresent Orwell paranoia of the time?

It was certainly linked to George Orwell, but the main thing was that in West Berlin we really thought it would've been great to witness the end of the world.

That wasn't what people were thinking in London or Paris in the early eighties. Not for nothing is the Berlin of the time known for a sort of End Time existentialism, also referred to as "Berlin toughness".

We certainly flirted with this mood of doom. But we also had a lot of fun with it. Life was good, we felt fantastic.

(By the way, Blixa's Rede/Speech cannot be recommended too highly.)

Meanwhile, Tariq Ali looks at Iraq

Fred Halliday tells a story about the divergent trajectories he and his old friend and comrade, Tariq Ali, have taken:

Tariq and I have known each other for more than 40 years. We were students together in the ’60s. We were active in the opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. And we’ve continued to cross paths in the British Left context.

About 20 years ago I said to Tariq that God, Allah, called the two of us to His presence and said to us, “One of you is to go the left, and one of you is to go to the right.” The problem is, He didn’t tell us which was which, and maybe He didn’t know Himself. And Tariq laughed. He understood exactly what I was saying, and he didn’t dispute it.

Despite the divergence, though, Ali shares a sense of pessimism about future developments:

In my opinion, the Kurdish areas in the north will separate and come under Israeli/American protection. A major part of the south will become an Iranian protectorate, while the middle will be dominated by the Saudis or by Syria. The times of an independent Iraq with its own territorial sovereignty are over. Like Afghanistan, the country is a veritable time bomb.

The whole interview, in French, is here.

Bernard Lewis looks backwards and forwards

Bernard Lewis, at a conference last summer, articulated (WAV) his pessimism about the future:

As you must have gathered, I am somewhat ancient myself, and I have vivid recollections, still, of the year 1940…in England, a year which I began as a very junior teacher at the University of London, and ended as a very junior member of His Majesty’s Forces. I must say that I felt more confident, more optimistic, then, about the future of our struggle, than I do now. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say this, but I feel I should speak the truth.

We were in a bad way. Our French allies had capitulated and, in effect, changed sides. The Soviet Union, which one might have thought of as an ally against fascism and Nazism, had become Hitler’s most faithful and loyal ally. Stalin collaborated in many ways very loyally with Hitler, up to and including the day that the German armies invaded Russia. He refused to believe his own intelligence, as well as what we provided about impending German invasions. (I have been told by Russians that Hitler was the only man that Stalin ever really trusted. And given the many affinities between the two, that’s understandable.) The United States was still neutral, with very strict neutrality laws, which President Roosevelt was able to modify to a limited extent by adopting the principle of Cash and Carry: we sell you anything you want, provided you pay cash and fetch it yourselves. At a later date, when the cash was exhausted, it was switched to Lease-Lend.

At that time, as I say, we were really and truly alone in a hostile world. But, I remember very vividly that we, generally -- the people of my generation, as well as our elders -- had no doubt that at the end we would triumph, that our cause would survive, and this enemy, though he seemed overpowering, so overwhelming at the time, would be defeated. I don’t have that confidence now…

To me and my eye Fred Halliday, although a generation younger, seems to have kept more even a keel than has Professor Lewis in our post-9/11 planet's murky and unsettled waters. But, looking around in the immediate aftermath of last summer's Israel/Hezbollah war, he saw dangers that reminded him of nothing less than 1914 in Europe:

It is in this multidimensional context, rather than in the memory of earlier bilateral, Arab-Israeli wars, that the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict must be seen. In the perspective of a longer history it can be said to resemble the European war that began in 1914 – another regional conflict long-planned even if suddenly, almost casually, detonated; and one which, once started, drew all the major states of the area into its wake, with dire consequences for all and catastrophic for many. It is a sobering comparison, but nothing in the current pattern of events across greater west Asia makes it extreme. There may be possibilities for progress in the present moment, but currently it is the dangers that are far easier to see.

So, if you happen to be a gloom-doomer, this is the time of the fat, and not the lean.

Meanwhile, in Iraq

Over the weekend it was reported that Americans seriously underestimate the death toll for Iraqi civilians. Nor does it seem likely that the situation will improve if US forces leave. In The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (p. 298), Barack Obama recounts a conversation with reporters during his visit to Baghdad in January of 2006, just after the news had come of Jill Carroll's kidnapping, and the killing of her driver:

Such violence wasn't unusual in Baghdad these days, they said, although Iraqis overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi'ites and Sunnis had become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening. None of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement in the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop withdrawal might ease tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative. Instead, they shook their heads.

"My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks," one of the reporters told me. "One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We're the only thing holding this place together."

Senator Obama is presently advocating that American forces withdraw from Iraq by 2008, but Michael Oren warns that

[y]ou cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America.

There are other risks, too, inherent in this proposal. Nearly three years ago, Goh Chok Tong briefly discussed some of the likely consequences:

If the U.S., for some reason or other, has to depart unceremoniously from Iraq, that has a larger consequence than just the defeat of the U.S. in Iraq by the insurgents. All the terrorists in the world, all the rogue states, will know that the U.S. does not have stamina when it gets into a fight. And worse, your friends and allies will know that you lack staying power, and your friends will begin not to support you, because they are in this with you. Singapore is in Iraq with you. Because of the casualties, the American population is divided. It wants the government to pull the troops out. No friend of yours will stand behind you in the future. So, that's an important point which Americans have got to consider, that it's now no more a Republican battle, or Democratic battle. It is America's prestige which is at stake in the world. Right or wrong, you are in this already.

Sometimes an exit's an exit. But sometimes, Jean-Paul Sartre said it best.

Looking around, looking ahead

Graham Allison has peered into the dark glass, and he thinks (PDF) that the future's more likely radioactive than radiant:

Prior to 9/11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not just unlikely, but inconceivable. Psychologically, Americans imagined that they lived in a security bubble. Terrorist attacks, including those on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, occurred elsewhere. These beliefs were reinforced by the conventional wisdom among terrorism experts, who argued that terrorists sought not mass casualties but rather mass sympathy through limited attacks that called attention to their cause.

As we approach the fifth year without a second successful terrorist attack upon U.S. soil, a chorus of skeptics now suggests that 9/11 was a 100-year flood. They conveniently forget the deadly explosions in Bali, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, and dismiss scores of attacks planned against the United States and others that have been disrupted. The idea that terrorists are currently preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning.

[…]

[M]y best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen."

Meanwhile, rather quietly, in places like Berkeley, people like Harold Palmer Smith, Jr. are "thinking the unthinkables":

I've asked my colleagues to think about the unthinkables, and they have done a very fine job. To be fair to the [Bush] administration, a lot of energy is being expended on making sure it doesn't happen. That's wise, but some effort has to go into thinking the unthinkable -- denying the denial. Universities particularly, broad-based universities like Berkeley, are the ideal place to carry on work like that. Furthermore, the Defense Department recognizes that and has sponsored this kind of work, and I think they're very pleased with their product.

[...]

There's no indication whatsoever until there's a blinding flash of light, the proverbial mushroom cloud, and worse yet, if the device is exploded on the ground, then there's all the debris from the weapon and the activated soil, concrete, glass that's around it. It is a big, black plume, and it will move in whatever direction the wind is moving. Those people who are in suburban housing have to move, because exposure to that plume for short periods of time, many minutes to an hour, could be lethal. Those people have to move.

But if we go back now to the Houston experience, everybody is going to be scared to death, and everybody will want to move, in which case nobody can move, which is what Houston showed. That means then that those in the plume will suffer radiation death, and I don't mean cancer thirty years from now, I mean death that day. So, we've formulated a problem which we call selective evacuation, and your guest a few days ago, Professor Smelser, has been a great leader in this. But it's quite simple. Those who will be in the plume should move, and those that would not be in the plume should seek shelter -- the deeper, the better. Unfortunately duct tape would be a good idea, to seal windows and things like that. One has to shelter oneself for periods of many hours, not many days.

So, it is not the Armageddon that we think of, or the nuclear exchange in the Cold War. This is one single nuclear weapon which will have death and devastation but only for perhaps a mile around the weapon, and then we fear this plume, and there, if we do it right and move the people who are in it and keep the other people sheltered, the number of fatalities goes way, way, way down. It's a very humanitarian undertaking, but it's fraught with the technology problems of how do you predict which way it's going to go, and more importantly, the psychological problems: how do you convince people to stay put with a nuclear explosion going off, or maybe equally difficult, how do you make people move, particularly since you may not have the communications system that you would like to have?

There are legal aspects here. There are political science aspects: who's in charge? There are organizational questions. The interdisciplinary nature of Berkeley and its surrounding national laboratories [makes it] ideal for us to look at [the problem]. Furthermore, [it's] better to have a university look at this terrible problem than for the government to do it, because the government then will be telling the people they honestly fear it's going to happen. There is, as we call it, plausible denial when a university and its academic thinkers take it on, but we're undertaking this project for the very reasons that you and I have been discussing.

What I'm interested in is who, if anybody, is really thinking through the chain of events in world politics likely to unfold in the days and weeks and months and years that will follow, if Graham Allison's fears flash blindingly true. (And I mean thinking them through seriously and responsibly, not that Three Conjectures nonsense.)

Bang

bang bang.


BANG.