Well, I'm not generally a fan of musicals, but Hooray for What?, mentioned by Martha a week ago, sounded interesting, and anyway L. loves musicals and hopes to write one about the death of Natalie Wood, so we went to see it Friday.
As Martha mentioned, the play was first produced in 1937, with lyrics by Yip Harburg, who went on to have a big hand in The Wizard of Oz and then to get blacklisted.
It starts off in a small town in Indiana with a few scathing numbers about American xenophobia and provincialism and ends with a few scathing numbers about internationalism and war profiteering. In between there are some nice half-sarcastic love songs and lots of idiots walking around dressed as spies with ridiculous fake accents.
It's not hard to imagine Yip getting blacklisted after seeing this play, which is charming and occasionally hilarious. Good old leftist fun. But as an anti-war play it really would have been more topical had it been released in, say, 1913. An obvious point, I guess, but something I never realized before, that it's not only the generals who always try to fight the last war. The last half of the play takes place at a peace conference in Geneva, across the street from which the armaments manufacturers naturally set up a weapons exposition. And then, of course, there's the fact that one of the central characters is a scientist who invents a "death gas". No one was about to touch that one after a certain point.
Very enjoyable. I haven't felt so all-American, sitting in a theater, since I saw The Cramps Halloween show a few years ago, in which Lux Interior fellated Poison Ivy's five inch spike-heeled boot to the strains of "Strychnine", among other things. Oh, how times have changed. Well, it's hard to explain.
Mags has a link-rich essay today on tea vs. coffee in the UK. Backhandedly appropriate for U.S. Thanksgiving maybe. Best wishes to all from here in any case.
BTW isn't there a theory that the British political ferment to which we owe quaint but lovely ideas like free speech and habeas corpus had something to do with urban gathering-places serving coffee instead of beer?
Big events in the Ukraine today, with more possibly to come soon. The accusations on both sides are flying so thick and fast that it's difficult to know what to think; all one can hope is that there's a peaceful and just outcome, whatever that means. Ukraine is an important country that had about as interesting (i.e. dreadful) a Twentieth Century as it was possible to have; it deserves the chance to become a dull, 'ordinary' place in the Twenty-First. It would be a tragedy if it became another Belarus, or, for that matter, Russia.
Not the most confident of Thanksgiving sendoffs, but the best I can manage today. See you all next week.
George Lakoff is sending his readers to their Thanksgiving dinners with instructions on "How to Respond To A Conservative". Dunno what I think, either of his specific arguments (tho several make sense) or of handing out propaganda advice for people's own private family dinner tables. ("Use wedge issues, cases where your opponent will violate some belief he holds no matter what he says....")
Whudda you think?
--
Completely different subject: if anyone has the Orwell essay that mentions reciting the poem "Felix Randal" to himself while on sentry duty, could you please send it or post the cite? Thx much.
For all those current or former English majors still wondering what good their traning did them, here's a consolation. The best way to avoid being taken in by some random email with an attachment full of malicious code or a link to a fake login page is not to be computer savvy, but to have good grammar.
I just received a fairly impressive email claiming to be from Red Hat, one of the largest Linux distributors, telling me that a new security problem had been identified and urging me to download a patch (from a provided link), and run it on my Linux machine.
Granted I'm not a Linux guru (in fact, my grammar's not so hot either), but the email was relatively convincing. The reply-to address looked real, the link looked real, the technical details seemed plausible to a casual user, and it even ended with convincing boilerplate. And, most impressive of all, it was almost free of grammatical errors.
I have never seen any kind of email hoax, whatever the con involved, that didn't have at least one obvious grammatical error. It's true that a lot of the ridiculous ones are clearly written by someone with nothing but a dictionary, but this rule applies to all of them without fail, even the ones which were obviously written by someone with a good command of the language.
It's as if someone goes to the considerable trouble and risk of setting up an exact duplicate of some bank's or software company's website, and then doesn't bother rereading the email they are about to spam half the world with to lure it there. Strange.
On the other hand, there are the legions of copy editors and proofreaders that companies employ, all for the sake of making sure that "proofreader" is not spelled as two words and that the rules for "affect/effect" are adhered to. The arguments for rigidly standardized grammar and spelling have always been a little thin and unconvincing, especially considering that most of the world got along fine without them for so long, as well as the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory nature of the rules themselves (which we inherited, after all, from Latin, a very different kind of language).
All the stuff about clarity and linguistic ambiguity are mostly hogwash. Companies employ copy editors to give their communications with the outside world the kind of cache that comes with perfect grammar. Grammar that is so perfect, that is, that a team of experts is needed to uniformly produce it.
Yes, although most people could not reproduce this heavily edited language without a lot of effort, if at all, they somehow can sense it when they are reading it, and, what's more, think that the ability to write this way is a sign of intelligence. Thus hyper-correct grammar becomes an emblem of institutionality which most people with a reasonable grasp of English grammar can recognize intuitively. And this, something which normally serves little more purpose than to help keep exclusive groups exclusive, turns out to be such a useful defense against virus propagators and online con artists.
Another example of the weird politics of the times: former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage is taking the Transportation Security Administration to task for its refusal to disclose the federal regulations allowing it to stop and search passengers at US airports. Chenoweth-Hage belongs to the black helicopter wing of the Republican Party, with all its unhealthy paranoia about the Impending UN Takeover of the Republic, fluoride in the water system, etc. And by the sounds of it, she is more upset about the fact that a Godfearing Christian grandmother such as herself is liable to stop-and-search than she is about any more generalized principle. But credit where credit's due; other small-government Republicans have retained their skepticism about the benefits of a surveillance state regardless of the fact that a GOP-dominated administration in Washington is overseeing it, and have remained unmoved by that anaesthetizing phrase "National Security" which has been stencilled on all the new regulations.
Was looking for something else at The Online Books Page and ran across this 1917 treatise on shell-shock. I've only glanced at it quickly but apart from some hair-curling mentions of electricity and "baths" that are a product of their times, there seems to be a fair amount of good sense in it. Interesting given the usual assumption that most mental health treatment was brutish before the current generation. Now, as soon as I say this someone will take a closer look at the book and find something really godawful, but actually it looks not so bad.
Yip Harburg, lyricist of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" -- and blacklist subject 1950-1962 -- will be appearing on a postage stamp in April.
Meanwhile a California theater company is reviving Harburg's 1937 musical, changing its title from "Hooray for What?" to "Hooray for What!" Dunno why. 'fyask me, the question mark added a certain je ne sais quoi.
I found three apparently fairly obscure short stories of Mikhail Bulgakov (of Master and Margarita fame, one of the very best novels of the 20th century that I know of) on the site for a literary magazine called Conjunctions which, it turns out, must be a very good magazine since it also published some of Bernhard's work.
Only $15 a year. Tempting.
Personally, I think it looks more like Jean Harlow.
I've been flipping through Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer, the woman he sort of wanted to marry but never did. This is from January 1913. There are a lot of interesting and seemingly unconscious echos of motifs that appear around this time in his writing, especially to some of the stuff published in Parables and Paradoxes such as "An Imperial Message". It was not long after this that Kafka wrote "The Judgement", which he considered to be the beginning of his literary career.
Let us assume that by some special stroke of luck it were possible for us to spend some days together in the same town—Frankfurt perhaps. On the second evening we have arranged to go to the theater, and I am supposed to fetch you from the exhibition. Hastily and with the greatest difficulty you have disposed of important matters to make quite sure of being on time, and now you are waiting for me. You wait in vain, I don't arrive; a purely accidental delay can no longer be assumed, the time limit conceded even by the most amiable person is long past. Nor do you receive a message that might explain; meanwhile you could have disposed of your business matters with the greatest care, would have had time to change; in any case it will now be too late for the theater.
You can't imagine that it was sheer neglect on my part; perhaps you are a little worried that something may have happened to me, and on the spur of the moment—I can hear you giving the driver his instructions—you go to my hotel and get them to show you to my room. And what do you find? I am still lying (I am now copying the first page of this letter) in bed at 8, not tired, not rested; I maintain that I had been incapable of leaving my bed, complain about everything and insinuate even worse complaints; I try to make amends for the terrible wrong by stroking your hand, by seeking your eyes, lost in the dark room, and yet my whole behavior shows that I am quite prepared to repeat the whole thing at any moment. Although I am at a loss to explain myself in words, I am aware of our situation in every detail, and if I were in your place, standing at my bedside, I wouldn't hesitate to raise my umbrella and in my anger and despair break it over my head.
"He left behind a violent legacy and possibly a dozen children. But the Wu-Tang Clan rapper also helped forge an irresistible pan-Asian-ghetto-gangsta style." Oh, well, that's all right, then.
With the unfortunate Boris Johnson in mind, I can't help but quote portions of the biography of an equally absurd Tory of an earlier era, Sir Henry "Chips" Channon, 1897-1958:
"Born in Chicago on 7 March 1897 (although he claimed 1899 as the year of his birth, until a distressing exposure in the Sunday Express). He was the only child of Henry (II) Channon, who inherited a fleet of vessels plying the Great Lakes, and his wife, Vesta Westover. After accompanying the American Red Cross to Paris (1917), he was subsequently an honorary attaché at the US embassy there (1918). His lifelong Proustian infatuation with the aristocratic civilization of Europe was enhanced during eighteen happy months as an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford (January 1920–June 1921). He acquired the nickname of Chips, which afterwards was his London telegraphic address. On leaving university he shared a house in Westminster with Viscount Gage and Prince Paul of Serbia. When the prince became regent of Yugoslavia (1934), Channon described him as ‘the person I have loved most … the only human being with whom I am completely, wholly natural’. Adoring London society, privilege, rank, and wealth, he became an energetic, implacable, but endearing social climber who pursued the Curzons of Kedleston as part of his self-reinvention as an upper-class European. But away from the smart drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia he was often less comfortable. He seemed spurious to many of those on whose acceptance his happiness depended. To Lady Gladwyn he was ‘that American pipsqueak (alas naturalized British)’ and a ‘twerp’. James Lees-Milne thought him ‘a flibbertigibbet’ and Duff Cooper ‘a toady’.
Channon is chiefly remembered for his diaries which survive for the years 1918, 1923–8, and 1934–53. Discreetly edited extracts compiled by Robert Rhodes James and published in 1967 open with Lady Diana Cooper's announcing the death of King Albert I of the Belgians (12 February 1934) and close with Channon's cocktail party for King Umberto II of Italy (18 November 1953). The intervening entries are by turns scintillating, epicene, snobbish, fatuous, self-mocking, and cliché-ridden. There are captivating descriptions of great parliamentary occasions as well as intriguing confidences about backstairs intrigues; but each page demonstrates Channon's preference for manners over principles. ‘Everybody is on about Chips's diary—you can't think how vile & spiteful & silly it is,’ Nancy Mitford wrote after its publication. ‘One always thought Chips was rather a dear, but he was black inside how sinister!’.
Channon's American patrimony was insufficient for the life he craved. He married on 14 July 1933 a glamorous heiress, Lady Honor Dorothy Mary Guinness, daughter of Rupert Edward Cecil Lee Guinness, second earl of Iveagh, and his wife, Gwendolen Florence Mary Guinness. He proudly doted on their only child, Paul, who was created Baron Kelvedon in 1997. The Channons acquired a sumptuous house at 5 Belgrave Square (1935) and an estate at Kelvedon in Essex (1937). Hospitality at these homes was as effervescent and lavish as their interiors were ornate. The newly married Chips was a thoughtful, shrewd, witty, and worldly gossip who loved to help people. His social radiance could be entrancing; he was resolute in promoting the interests of his friends. The earl of Drogheda found him ‘an immensely kind man, with many acts of generosity to his credit’: when Viscountess Castlerosse sat on a wasp, Chips sucked the sting out of her buttock. Channon wrote of himself in 1935:
I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second rate ambition: I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am rivetted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels."
Just came across this newspaper piece by Bertrand Russell which reminds me quite a lot of almost everything right now.
---
How to Become a Man of Genius
If there are among my readers any young men or women who aspire to become leaders of thought in their generation, I hope they will avoid certain errors into which I fell in youth for want of good advice. When I wished to form an opinion upon a subject, I used to study it, weigh the arguments on different sides, and attempt to reach a balanced conclusion. I have since discovered that this is not the way to do things. A man of genius knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are pontifical and depend for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather than argument. It is necessary to be one-sided, since this facilitates the vehemence that is considered a proof of strength. It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing.
There is no novelty in this recipe for genius; it was practised by Carlyle in the time of our grandfathers, and by Nietzsche in the time of our fathers, and it has been practised in our own time by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is considered by his disciples to have enunciated all sorts of new wisdom about the relations of men and women; in actual fact he has gone back to advocating the domination of the male which one associates with the cave dwellers. Woman exists, in his philosophy, only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labours. Civilised societies have been learning to see something more than this in women; Lawrence will have nothing of civilisation. He scours the world for what is ancient and dark and loves the traces of Aztec cruelty in Mexico. Young men, who had been learning to behave, naturally read him with delight and go round practising cave-man stuff so far as the usages of polite society will permit.
One of the most important elements of success in becoming a man of genius is to learn the art of denunciation. You must always denounce in such a way that your reader thinks that it is the other fellow who is being denounced and not himself; in that case he will be impressed by your noble scorn, whereas if he thinks that it is himself that you are denouncing, he will consider that you are guilty of ill-bred peevishness. Carlyle remarked: ``The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.'' Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark. You must not denounce well-defined classes, such as persons with more than a certain income, inhabitants of a certain area, or believers in some definite creed; for if you do this, some readers will know that your invective is directed against them. You must denounce persons whose emotions are atrophied, persons to whom only plodding study can reveal the truth, for we all know that these are other people, and we shall therefore view with sympathy your powerful diagnosis of the evils of the age.
Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
28 December 1932
The political phenomenon known as Boris Johnson appeared to be at an end last night after Tory leader Michael Howard sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet. For those who are unaware of the tousle-haired Mr. Johnson's contributions to Keeping Life Colourful, a precis is provided here. David Aaronvitch has a (slightly) more serious point to make also.
...is a good thing. Isn't he?
Anyhow there's a juicy interview/tribute feature on him in the Guardian today. Fun to read for lots of reasons.
And partway through there's an interesting sidelight on the Microsoft/Slate editorial-independence argument we had a few days ago. The interviewer writes,
He is one of America's most uncompromising film-makers. He doesn't work with the studios, relying on grants and sponsorship from private companies (notably the Japanese electronics giant JVC).Huh? So how come JVC is a better sponsor than, say, Miramax? Wot, corporate sponsorship is better than getting your film made by film people in the film business?
The interviewer mentions "winklepickers" midway through. Sign of a Waits obsessive. Yep, been there, gotten over it.
Back in the 1970s, Spire Publishing--producers of lurid evangelical Christian books like The Cross and the Switchblade--decided to publish comic books that attempted to incaulcate evangelical values through the devil's medium for corrupting children. These comics, drawn by artist Al Hartley, included comic book adaptations of Biblical stories and biographies including an adaptation of Charles Colson's autobiography Born Again. You can see a listing of Spire's output (including some available on PDF) here.
Somwhere along the line Spire managed to somehow get the rights to the Archie Comics characters. Hartley had worked for Archie and the publisher thought, in the words of writer Buzz Dixon, "the stories were going to be run of the mill Archie stories with a little patina of Christian morality ("Gee, Betty, it's not good to cheat on tests!")" How wrong they were.
Hartley drew the Riverdale gang in preachy morality tales of the decline of values and how believing in Jesus can change all that. Especially of interest is Archie's Parables (1975 - available on the above site in PDF form) which includes the lovely bit of dialogue from the usually heavenly (for other reasons) Betty Cooper: "Oh Sheriff when they took the Bible out of school more and more problems came in...now we have books that say we all came from monkeys!" Archie's Date Book (1978 - also a PDF) comes close--at first-- to duplicating the feel of a real Archie comic, but in the end it asserts its candy coated morality about dating ("When we go steady with Jesus he lifts us up"). Archie's owners, who were Jewish, apparently were not amused.
Back in the 1970s you couldn't go to a church Christmas party as a kid--no matter how liberal your denomination might be-- without getting dumped some Spire comics on you. (I kept Spire's revisioning of the story of St. Paul, which is actually pretty good.) In the current climate, I'm amazed they haven't made a comeback.
Very sad to hear about the apparent suicide of 36-year-old historian Iris Chang, author of bestselling, controversial The Rape of Nanking.
Today is November 11, Armistice Day, the traditional moment to commemorate the dead of the First World War, and the wars that followed it. Obviously a day of great significance this year. The most moving war memorial I have ever seen is not a particularly well-known example. It's at Philadelphia's Washington Square, a block removed from Independence Hall and overlooked from another side by the former home of the Saturday Evening Post (of Norman Rockwell fame); in other words, about as quintessentially American a place as one can get. In addition to a rather lovely collection of exotic trees, the square is also the home of the nation's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, chosen because it is the final resting place of at least 2,000 Continental soldiers and sailors, as well as many British Prisoners-of-War who were held at the now-vanished Walnut Street Prison. Most of the men buried there died not of battlefield wounds but in the inglorious, commonplace way of the 18th Century serviceman: of infection, disease, and neglect. The tomb itself, which is a bronze replica of Houdon's famous statue of Washington (complete with Roman Republican fasces - the ironies of historical symbolism), is engraved: "Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness." I find that very touching, and as true today as it was in 1777.
Per Romenesko and, via same, the Online Journalism Review, it seems that Slate, Salon, and some other first-generation online journalism institutions are up for sale. I'm especially curious about Slate, knowing it has avid readers here & knowing it employs some good honest writers, & yet still wondering how a portal owned by the Microsoft company can maintain any kind of journalistic standards. Are these sales likely to be a good thing? Or more likely to cause the kind of dumbing-down and homogenization we've seen in the conventional print media?
Joel (of Martha's-Joel) reports hearing a rendition of 'Satisfaction' on the accordian at a public transit stop. I would point out that on his fabulous album 1,000 Years of Popular Music, Richard Thompson performs 'Oops! I Did It Again' using acoustic guitar and snare drum; and it's not half bad. (His 15th Century reorchestration, 'Marry, Ageyn Hic Hev Donne Yt' is worth catching too).
Lots of reputable news outlets, including NPR earlier tonight, are referring to the, erm, beneficiaries of our current offensive as "Fallujans." It sounds strange -- shouldn't the word be "Fallujis" or something? "Fallujans" has this sci-fi sound, like "Romulans." Like they should have green skin, three eyes, and a psychokinetic bump on the left toe knuckle. "Fallujans"? It makes the world news sound like a Star Trek episode.... So I meant to ask, does anyone know if this word is the right one?
Speaking of revolution I've recently picked up Hobsbawm's Age of Revolution. Anyone here read that one? If there's anyone who can make the textile industry fun, it's not Hobsbawm.
And also speaking of revolution, I found an interesting review of a set of conference articles from Amsterdam about historical objectivity. In other words, it was a conference where a bunch of historians, including Carlo Ginzberg and others I probably would like to know but don't (oh yeah, and Richard Rorty wrote the afterword), try to pick up the pieces of their profession after the early postmodernists' attack on narrative, engagement, perspective, and all those things which (whoops), it turns out humans need to make sense out of anything.
So, just to blather a little bit, it strikes me that what postmodernism has undermined in the practice of history is not its method so much as its purpose. Not so long ago history was written mainly to illustrate ethical values which were considered universal. And it did a good job until someone pointed out that some of those values were probably not universal after all. But, nevertheless, history had a clear purpose and did what it set out to do.
Reading of the enlightened hand-wringing of the famous historicists in this article makes it pretty clear to my untutored mind that history, like I suppose all of the humanities and many of the social sciences, no longer has a purpose that the discipline as a whole can actually agree on, and, facile as this might sound, it is not such a surprise that society would start to lose interest in (and withhold funding from) any profession that can't account for its own purpose.
And this reminds me of those calm, reasonable fellows over at the New Criterion who spend so much time bloviating about it all. Ah, but let's not go there. Enough for one morning before first cup of coffee.
There's an essay in Foreign Policy this month that casts an interested but cautious eye on the blogging phenomenon. I might as well admit now that I haven't read it all yet, but I intend to. A couple of lines towards the end caught my eye:
"The growing clout of bloggers has transformed some into “blog triumphalists.” To hear them tell it, blogging is the single most transformative media technology since the invention of the printing press. Rallying cries, such as “the revolution will be blogged,” reflect the belief that blogs might even supplant traditional journalism. But, as the editor of the Washington, D.C.-based blog “Wonkette,” Ana Marie Cox, has wryly observed, “A revolution requires that people leave their house.”"
It's a facetious remark of course, and I'm not trying to read too much into it, but Gutenberg didn't leave his house either, did he?
While grepping for "foreign entanglements" in Washington's Farewell Address, I came across this piece of advice:
One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.
Seems timely.There's a small but potentially significant liberal meme developing that the history of American slavery explains in some way the results of the 2004 Presidential election - illustrated graphically by maps comparing pre-1861 free-versus unfree states with last week's electoral college results (c/o Demisemiblog). OK, time to knock this on the head, isn't it? Not only is the comparison misleading because it (a) makes factual errors - "bleeding Kansas" was not, in the end, a slave-state (an attempt to foist a slave constitution on it was successfully crushed); (b) fails to recognize the difference between rights of slaveowning and their practical application (Delaware and West Virginia, for instance, were both nominally slaveholding regions but had few actual slaveoweners - you'll note that each voted differently in 2004); (c) ignores the marginal difference in many states' vote counts last week - if 400,000 Floridians had thought differently on November 2, would it be considered one of the historically 'good' rather than 'evil' regions? (I wonder where all this leaves staunchly emancipationist-but-GOP-voting Ohio, by the way); but (d) it also singularly fails to explain decades of previous elections. Look at the map of the 1960 results (which, one would presume, would be far more relevant to slavery) and try to explain them using this thesis. Bush-voters-are-closet-bigots is just a way to avoid hard questions rather than explain them; the kind of solipsistic sulking that has arguably derailed the American Left for decades. How about some thinking instead of facile consolations?
Been rereading Don Quixote & finding a lot of proto-Python and proto-Gilliam moments. Just for example, the heading to Part II, Chapter XXVI: "Which continues the amusing adventure of the puppeteer, together with other really very good things." And a paradox presented to the guardian of a bridge, and a knight errant wanted by the police for assault, and an impractical romantic worshipping a coarse, practical farm girl, and a comment about people with missing limbs (including the author himself, presumably) at least having a good livelihood available from begging and... well, that's where I run out of specific examples from this reading-through, but I'd thought there was a set-piece a little like the Cheese Shop Sketch in there too.
So as folks here know to their weariness, I always get too forensic about this kind of stuff, looking for scraps of earlier works in later ones with a mentality that's more investigative than properly literary. But from a properly literary perspective, is there a shared sensibility here or what?
A couple of months ago, I finished George Packer's The Village of Waiting, an impuse buy spurred by one of Martha's comments here.
I'm pretty familiar with the PCV-in-West-Africa genre, as my sister-in-law spent 2001-2003 teaching math in Koundara, Guinea, and we embarked on a flurry of reading after we found out where she'd be assigned. Packer's done a much better job than many, as he really concentrates on describing Togo itself. As a result, the book explains what it's like to be in West Africa, instead of what it's like to be George Packer, and his descriptions seem to be spot on. The overwhelming sights and smells of a capital city, the friendly neighbors and polio victims, the taxi rides and roadblocks were all so reminiscent of my brief visit that the first half of the book actually seemed a bit boring. The book picks up in its second half, though, as Packer tries to dig a bit deeper into the history of the country and the the lives of the people in it.
One strange thing about the genre is that almost all books written by Peace Corps Volunteers about their experience are written by people who never finished their 2 year term. Packer went AWOL during his Christmas vacation on his second year. I've read books by volunteers who never made it more than nine months. The result is a self-selecting sample, in which an inordinate amount of time is spent on a 22-year-old's experience of meltdown, rather than on their surroundings.. With the exception of two chapters, Packer manages to rise above this, and so is very much worth reading.
Time for a dirty confession: I quite like Cops. Or, let me put it this way: I find it far more interesting, from a sociological perspective, than all the other reality-TV shows (and, for that matter, most PBS-style 'human interest' middlebrow docu-fodder) put together. Which is why I was a little disturbed by Brian Montopoli's claim in Salon that Cops is a "celebration of the value of unfettered capitalism"; that
"COPS" teaches us that the poor deserve to be that way ... we almost never see the large swath of underprivileged America that [John] Edwards likes to invoke, and so many Americans can't even begin to contemplate the possibility of a hardworking, socially responsible underclass. Instead, they're given a show that functions to free them from any lingering guilt about their relative affluence. 'COPS' is perhaps the most Republican show on television, a horror show that offers up anecdotal evidence in support of harsh prison terms, tax cuts for the rich and a curtailing of welfare programs."
Hmm. Am I watching a different show? I'm not going to act naive about Cops' voyeuristic qualities, or its pandering to the Jerry Springer end of social investigation; Seebohm Rowntree it 'ain't. But I don't see a horror show; I see a tragedy play. Most of the 'crimes' committed on camera are nickel-and-dime bullshit, and the "criminals" more pathetic than frightening; indeed, quite often the policemen (who are as often forced into the roles of de-facto social workers as law enforcers) seem more pitying than judgmental. Cops also reminds us (whether it intends to or not) that the vast majority of victims of crime are the poor themselves, and that those crimes emerge more from structural causes - drug problems, institutional neglect, the desperation of poverty - than from conscious wickedness. Maybe I've completely missed whatever nefarious point Murdoch was trying to brainwash into me, but I emerge from an episode of Cops with rather more sympathy for the underclass than I did before.
I'll indulge myself in one post-Tuesday comment.
My preferred candidate didn't win (at time of press the Kerry campaign has not conceded, but I'm assuming that the outstanding difference in the Ohio count is insufficiently small to make a sustained challenge prudent, and that the Democrats will throw in the towel shortly). But: the fears of critical voting irregularities don't seem to have materialized. And the popular vote has parallelled the electoral college count (as someone who would prefer the college was scrapped I suppose I should regret this on the principle of 'multiply the contradictions', but I don't. Even though this may make electoral reform more difficult, I am glad that the country's rickety apparatus has managed to elect a President successfully. Whether it can continue to do this for such a neatly bisected electorate remains unclear.) There was no Nader factor this time: or, rather, the small number of folks who voted for Nader did so because they genuinely wanted him for President, not because they wanted to send a nihilistic message of protest to their 'real' candidate - no-one can be labelled the spoiler in 2004. It's healthier for the Union that its leader be seen to have won without dispute; it's also healther for his opposition, I suspect, as it dampens the kind of self-defeating sulkiness that has characterized some of the anti-Bush mood these last four years. And who knows: maybe the returned administration will celebrate its real but narrow victory by pursuing less stridently divisive policies for the next four years ... alright, sleep deprivation is obviously setting in here. In any case, that's as much of a glass-half-full summary as I can manage this morning.
Here's hoping that the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage is successful in its attempt to stop the aesthetic and environmental vandalism proposed by the country's Public Works Division, which wants to tear down large stretches of Lutyens' colonial bungalow zone.
As The Independent says: "It is not only misty-eyed colonels, nostalgic for the Raj, who will mourn the destruction of Lutyens' Delhi, if it happens. His creation is admired by architecture-lovers the world over, and it has as many admirers among Indians as it has among Europeans. The Indian press is regularly full of encomiums on the city's grace and beauty. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the CPWD now wants to tear part of it down."
Bored/Horrified/Weary of today's brouhaha? Then follow all the action in downtown Pago Pago as American Samoa votes for its new governor!
