Friday, May 18, 2007
How to Fail in Empire Without Really Trying (Or, What Did You Do in the Long War, Daddy?)
By The Editors
The
good news is, Paul Wolfowitz
is toast. The bad news is, George W. Bush will name
his successor. There is so much instruction, moral and otherwise, in this one
more disgraceful tale of what has become the most disgraceful—but also, unhappily,
disastrous and destructive—government in the history of American government
that one doesn’t know where to begin. In this case, we’ll move swiftly on from
the masterminds (such as they are, since the notion of “mind” in regard to the
current US administration is more rueful longing than realistic description) to
the accomplices—or, to put it in terms more amenable to current American
fashion (and flight from reality), the “codependents.” Notice
the plural. There are many of them, a veritable planet’s worth (as befits the
major international development bank), but, once again, it is the Europeans
who’ve played the central role of spear-carriers to George Bush’s Nero. As with
so much else, the Wolfowitz burlesque acted out at
the World Bank (which wasted two years of the institution’s work) would never
have happened had the Europeans on the bank’s board of directors shown some—any—independence from the imperial
metropolis when the US president first nominated his then-deputy secretary of
defense to head the organization.
At
the time, it will be remembered, a profound institutional issue was exercising
many of the bank’s shareholders, those from the developing world in particular.
Why, these countries wanted to know, was the US continuing to exercise the sole
right to name the bank’s president? After all, a plausible, and defensible, privilege
granted in the final year of the Second World War, when both the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund were established at the Bretton
Woods conference, hardly seemed so in a radically changed political and
economic context six decades later. To point to the obvious, not only is the
world drastically different today from what it was in 1944 (especially in the
global distribution of actual economic weight),
but the US has also changed enormously (in every real sense, for the worse). In
fact, it takes considerable effort today even to imagine similarities in vision
and purpose between the administration of FDR, which sponsored Bretton Woods, and that of George W. Bush, which openly
proclaims its contempt for the very idea of international settlements in which
the US must, like every other nation, on occasion follow as well as lead.
Given
the preexisting discontent with the US monopoly on the World Bank’s presidency,
the consternation was palpable following Mr. Bush’s announcement of his nominee
in March 2005. Adding insult to injury does not begin to describe the clamor.
The headline in the Financial Times
(March 16, 2005) did not mince words: “Wolfowitz
nomination a shock for Europe.” The
most succinct comment on the Wolfowitz nomination was
made by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prizewinning
economist, who knew something both about the World Bank and its mandate, having
served as its chief economist during the WTO Seattle protests: “The
World Bank will once again become a hate figure. This could bring street
protests and violence across the developing world.”
In
the event, neither protests nor violence ensued, in the developing world or
anywhere else. Nor did the World Bank become a figure of hate—at least, no more
so than it has been for the last few decades. The world as a whole, it seems,
was—once again and for the umpteenth time—willing to give the United States a
pass, and the benefit of the imperial doubt, willing to let it lead and see
where it aimed to take us, willing to sit down quietly and avoid rocking the
boat of “international consensus,” which
has proved so…consensual (the precise word is servile) to American wishes since
the end of the Cold War (and the onset of this new, successor crusade,
indeterminate in length, indefinable in purpose, impossibly—if
interminably—waged against an abstract noun, although its victims, by the tens
of thousands, are far from abstract).
One
of the oldest tropes in European politics is of American “naïveté” in
expectations of politicians and political reality. The truth is that the
gullibility of European politicians, and of their governments, vis-à-vis the
United States during the last quarter of a century has been spectacular—to such
an extent that it makes one wonder whether it is actually gullibility or, more
probably, a strategic surrender to US interests masquerading as (endlessly)
violated innocence. As European electorates (in “new” as well as “old” Europe)
are not as forbearing of US brutality in the world (and of the corresponding
mendacity about it) as are their governments, the latter, for that reason, now
constantly feign shock, shock, to learn of American actions after they’ve
occurred (and of American motives after they’ve been revealed). And so, once
again, the representatives of Europe’s governments presumably slumped into
their armchairs slack-jawed when George W. Bush proposed to transfer the
intellectual author of Operation Iraqi Freedom (and of the The Arabian Nights-like tale of Mesopotamian houris showering American
soldiers in rose petals and feeding them baqlawa) from DoD
to the World Bank in a bizarre, ideologically inverse, wannabe replay of the
famous migration decades earlier of Robert McNamara, confirming Marx’s observation
about history’s tendency to intellectual degradation the second time around. A
day after the Financial Times
headlined the “shock” to Europeans, however, The Wall Street Journal was editorializing a different point of
view altogether. “Banking on Wolfowitz,”
the newspaper titled its leader (March 17, 2005),
subtitling it, “And you thought Iraq was
difficult.” Clearly, according to the
house organ of unreconstructed neoconism,
the point to appointing Mr. Wolfowitz was precisely
to shock and awe the World Bank.
Mission
accomplished. And, once again, as ever with neoconism,
the imperial agenda was camouflaged in sermons of virtue in the delusion that
the natives abroad are as stupid as the empire’s own citizens back home, who
gave up caring a long time ago about who lives and dies in the various
expeditionary missions to civilize the barbarians as long as it isn’t them.
When serving directly under Mr. Bush at DoD,
Mr. Wolfowitz’s mantras were democracy and freedom,
and his cause the war against terror. At the World Bank, serving Mr. Bush
indirectly, the new mantras became “accountability” and “governance” and the
war to be fought was against the depredations of “corruption” (invariably of
the developing world, and of its brown, black, and yellow peoples, who must be
edified in the high moral regimen of the white men and women running the Enrons and Halliburtons and BPs and Shells and Exxon-Mobils
and stock exchanges and military-industrial complexes in New York, Washington,
London, Paris, and Berlin). It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it; to
quote the Wall Street Journal again,
“…if anyone can stand up to the Robert Mugabes
of the world, it must be the man who stood up to Saddam Hussein.”
The
notion, of course, that Mr. Wolfowitz “stood up” to
Saddam Hussein, in a High Noon kind
of duel in the sun, would be laughable had it not become so tragic by now for
the Iraqi people. As for “the Robert Mugabes of the
world”—let alone Mugabe himself—it’s not at all
clear, to be polite about it, what Mr. Wolfowitz has
done, exactly, in the last two years to “stand up” to them. Then again, there are Journal
editors who remain convinced that we’ll find weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq one day. No retreat, no surrender. War is hell, whether against terrorism
or corruption.
Nevertheless,
even if you think that he’s performed a service to humanity despite all the
destruction and infamy he’s helped to visit upon the world and his own country,
you’d still think it was a bit rich for Mr. Wolfowitz
to be lecturing other people, and governments, on “accountability” when he
denounced the then-chief of staff of the US army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, for
making “outlandish” (in other words, correct)
assessments of the necessary US force strength in a “post-Saddam” (that is,
occupied) Iraq, and then helped to supervise the worst foreign-policy disaster
in the postwar history of the United States. (Yes, worse than Vietnam, as military strategists are increasingly
pointing out, since the latter tragedy never provoked the infinite number of
fronts against us the world over that this one has, and will.) Has Dr. Wolfowitz ever been brought to account—will he ever—for his
tenure at the defense department? Or, for that matter, for his hugely
unsuccessful couple of years at the World Bank, which have, quite literally,
paralyzed the institution from his first day in office? We know better. (We
don’t want to be accused of American naïveté.) Still, one would think that the
good professor, being such an expert on arms and the man, would understand the
advantages of discretion over bravado.
But
that is not the way of the neocons, who are nothing if not impermeable in their pride. What was it that that Bush adviser once told
journalist Ron Suskind? That Suskind
was part of “the reality-based community,” who believed that “solutions
emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality,” but that that was
“not the way the world really works anymore.” For Bushism,
that anonymous adviser explained, “discernible reality” was an illusion: “We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other
new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.” (“Faith,
Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” Ron Suskind,
The New York Times Magazine,
October 17, 2004) This is breathtaking, mindless arrogance
(and positively bone-chilling in its neo-Hitlerism). It is also, quite
literally, lunatic nonsense.
It takes
a real emperor to understand the pitfalls of empire. There is no more succinct
description of Bushism’s imperial shipwreck(s) than
Napoleon’s famous diagnosis that, “The
great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means.”
As Corsica’s most glorious son essentially invented French patriotism (among
many other codes), he also understood the sheer artificiality of any notion of
“great” (let alone “indispensable”) nations. “A celebrated people,” he
warned, “lose dignity upon a closer view.”
Fortunately, for the
world, reality does exist, and, for quite a while now, it has been laying Bushism, and the Bushists, lower
and lower each day, as it’s been stripping the dignity of the celebrated people
who have allowed themselves to be led by such men and
women. Last month, The Economist
dedicated a column to neoconism’s walking wounded. It
titled its analysis, “Sidelined by reality” (April 19). The problem, the
magazine stated, “can be
traced back not just to flawed execution but to flawed
thinking.” Well, yes, obviously.
Take Mr. Wolfowitz, for example. It has been argued that, despite
his actions at DoD, he cares
profoundly about fighting corruption in the developing world and, therefore, of
alleviating poverty. Such an argument was made earlier this month—by an
African, no less—in the op-ed pages of The
New York Times. The article by Nuhu Ribadu, datelined Abuja, Nigeria, and entitled, “Why Wolfowitz Should Stay” (May 1), argued that, “Mr. Wolfowitz’s presidency…has been largely defined by his
energetic support for a new Africa that is struggling to emerge.” It went on to
aver that:
Over
the last two years, Mr. Wolfowitz has effectively
directed the bank’s energies toward
fighting poverty and improving human life. He is a champion of
using international development institutions to deal with some of the world’s
major problems. And he has been a steadfast supporter
of the efforts of African organizations to rescue our people
from the scourge of misrule, which leads to poverty, disease and
early death.
No one at greekworks.com is an expert on Africa,
let alone Nigeria. Just a passing glance at the Times’s foreign-news pages,
however, offers enough information for a very different perspective. We don’t
know if Mr. Wolfowitz is “a champion of using
international development institutions to deal with some of the world’s major
problems.” What we do know are two salient facts: one, broadly biographical,
the other, specifically programmatic. First, for the
biography.
- Mr. Wolfowitz’s
dissertation (in political science) on desalination projects in the Middle
East was actually about nuclear proliferation in the region.
- In 1972, newly minted Dr. Wolfowitz went to work at the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (ACDA).
- Five years later, Jimmy Carter
appointed Mr. Wolfowitz deputy assistant
secretary of defense (the first and last time Mr. Wolfowitz
would work for a Democratic administration, although he remains a
registered Democrat to this day).
- In 1982, Mr. Wolfowitz
was appointed director of policy planning at the state department.
- Two years later, he became assistant
secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
- In 1986, he was appointed ambassador
to Indonesia.
- In 1989, he became undersecretary of
defense for policy.
- In 1993, after Bill Clinton took over
the White House, Dr. Wolfowitz temporarily
retired to private life after over two decades in government as dean of
the Nitze School of International Studies at
Johns Hopkins.
- After George W. Bush’s election, he
was appointed deputy secretary of defense.
As one can see by this
brief biographical outline, Dr. Wolfowitz’s entire
life has been spent on military and security issues. He is not an economist,
and has never run a business. With the exception of his stint as ambassador to
Indonesia, he has never had anything to do with—and would be the first to admit
that he has neither basic nor extensive experience in—development issues. As
such, being named head of the World Bank was, one would think, a professional
bridge too far. Robert McNamara, at least, was an economist who had once been
the youngest assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a famously
successful president of the Ford Motor Company (the first outside the Ford
family to hold that position) when LBJ named to him to head the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz’s immediate predecessor, James Wolfensohn, was an investment banker with a degree, again,
from Harvard Business School who had worked on three continents before going to
the Bank. (As an Australian who was a naturalized American citizen when Bill
Clinton appointed him, he also had a decidedly international view of the
world.) It is an indication of the contempt with which the current US president
faces most global issues (with the obvious exception of “terrorism”)—from
climate change to the consequences of globalization to, yes, development in the
developing countries—that he named such an evidently unqualified person to such
an unquestionably important post.
It is hardly a
coincidence, then, that, upon taking up his new position, Mr. Wolfowitz did not direct the World Bank’s “energies toward
fighting poverty and improving human life,” but, rather, toward fighting
“corruption” in the developing world—or, to use Mr. Ribadu’s
formulation, toward “rescuing” people “from the scourge of misrule, which leads
to poverty, disease and early death.”
First things first: the
“scourge of misrule” is an innately slippery phrase. What does it describe,
exactly? Robert Mugabe? Saddam Hussein? The Saudi state? Or, perhaps, the US
occupation of Iraq? Or Afghanistan’s present
“democratic” regime? Or, even more to the point, municipal government in
New Orleans? In any case, the jury is out as to whether the “scourge of
misrule” actually leads to poverty, let alone to disease and early death. It might lead to such; it often does lead to such; it will ultimately
lead to such, but, ultimately, to echo Keynes, we’re all dead anyway. The truth
is that the links between “misrule” and poverty are complex and, occasionally,
even benign.
There is not an American
historian who does not know that Tammany Hall, while stupendously corrupt, also
made it possible for many of the huddled immigrant masses that ended up on New
York City’s teeming shores not only to survive, but also to secure a government
job and, thus, some sort of future for their (extended) kith and kin. The Irish
cops and Italian sanitation men and Jewish teachers and Greek diner-owners
(and, decades later, black bus drivers) who became the backbone of New York’s
lower middle class would have taken a lot longer to do so had it not been for Gotham’s notorious “misrule.” Every sociologist knows that
political corruption is simultaneously a political morass and a social network.
That is why the repressive (Ba’athist idealists would
say distorting) violence aside, the Ba’ath party
under Saddam Hussein essentially functioned the same way as Tammany’s Democrats
did—or as the Republican party did under Ulysses S. Grant during the Gilded
Age. It is also why “good government” and “reform” movements are so often led
by upper-middle, professional, and upper classes, as the depredations of “corruption”
are perceived to be the work of benighted plebeians.
Funny, though, how those
plebeians see things radically differently. We have no
doubt, for example, that the more Hugo Chávez extends
his Bolivarian revolution throughout Venezuelan society, the more corrupt that
revolution becomes. We also have no doubt that there is, in fact, something
authentically democratic about this effort, and that to extend the principles
of democracy into social life, as Mr. Chávez is
doing, requires a redefinition of “good governance.” Mr. Chávez
is clearly not only a popular leader, but also one who has not been afraid to
test his popularity fairly at the
polls. While the US, and the World Bank and IMF—from which institutions Mr. Chávez recently and conspicuously withdrew his
country—might abhor him, the manifest majority of his fellow citizens have
repeatedly elected him to lead them. (The Western mediacracy
habitually transmogrifies popularity into “populism” when the popularity in
question threatens Western interests.) Thus, to the choice posed by so many
fastidious NGO types in the West—corruption with Chávez
or “good governance” without him—most Venezuelans would not hesitate to opt for
the former. Actually, they would not hesitate to laugh out loud. Good governance,
they would respond in disbelief? In Venezuela, before Hugo Chávez? Excuse us, señor(a), but you obviously don’t know
anything about our country.
Or, we would add, about
any country. Why did Lula win reelection in Brazil with the same 61 percent of
the vote (minus a few tenths of a point) that he received in his original
election, although his entire administration was mired in a vast corruption
scandal the second time around? Or, to take a completely different example, in
a different socioeconomic context, why has Vladimir Putin
been so consistently popular in Russia although he has conspicuously (and with
authoritarian sang-froid) flouted all
the “rules” of “free-market” governance and Anglo-Saxon notions of capital(ist) order? The answer is
the same in both cases (although for very different reasons), and would have
been the same answer given by a Tammany wardheeler on
the Lower East Side decades ago: the great mass of laboring people believe that
economic democracy is impossible without some form of “corruption”—i.e., social
intervention—in the (re)distribution
of economic goods and services. (Greeks know all about the efficient
redistributive social effects of partisan corruption from the recent two and
half decades of rule under PASOK, which created unprecedented wealth—much of it
linked to government contracts or “access”—for that notoriously indefinable,
and therefore expansive, class of the mikro-mesaioi.)
What really sticks in
the craw of Mr. Wolfowitz’s critics is that this is
the man whose department of defense handed the US armed forces to Halliburton.
This is also the man under whose “management” Iraq itself was handed over to
systematic pillage. On May 12, the lead story on the front page of The New York Times read, “Billions in
Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says.” It began:
Between
100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq’s oil production over the past
four years is unaccounted for and could have been
siphoned off through corruption or smuggling,
according to a draft American government report.
Using
an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5
million to $15 million daily.
That’s roughly $1.8 to
$5.5 billion per annum, or about $7 to $22 billion in the
four years of the US occupation. Quite a swag. Of
course, in an age-old Western tradition of ceremonial hand-washing that goes
back to Pontius Pilate, the criminal appropriation of all this wealth is blamed
squarely on—who else?—the occupied, not the occupiers. The report was prepared
by the US Government Accountability Office and completely whitewashes US
responsibility for this “misrule”—although, according to the Times, it does point a finger at
(surprise, surprise)“smaller refineries not controlled by large
Western companies in places like China, the Caribbean and even small European
countries.” It’s the fault of the Chinese again, or of the Jamaicans, or of
those perennially perfidious Europeans—but not of “large
Western” oil companies because, of course, we all know how deeply moral and
steeped in profound traditions of corporate integrity and social responsibility
these companies are.
The Times article ends as follows:
[T]he lack of modern metering
equipment...at Iraq’s wellheads made it especially difficult
to track smuggling there. [A] State Department official
agreed that there were no meters at the wellheads,
but said that Iraq’s Oil Ministry
had signed a contract with Shell Oil to study the possibility of putting in the
meters.
The
official added that an American-financed project to install meters on Iraq’s main oil
platform in the Persian Gulf
was scheduled to be completed this month.
As
sizable as a discrepancy of as much as 300,000 barrels a day would be in most parts of
the world, some analysts said it could be expected in a
country with such a long, ingrained history of corruption.
“It would be surprising if it was not the
case,” said John Pike,
director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely follows security and economic issues in Iraq.
He added, “How could the oil sector be the
exception?”
How, indeed? After all,
theft is “ingrained” in these semi-barbaric people. Allah be praised that Shell
Oil will put everything right. (We just hope it doesn’t lead to the same
results as in Mr. Ribadu’s native Nigeria, where the
Goldman Environmental Prizewinning journalist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the country’s military junta for
his unceasing opposition to the environmental destruction of the Ogoni people’s homelands in the Niger Delta by, yes, Shell
Oil.)
After reading this
reportage—shameless both in its racism and in its exoneration of the US (and,
more generally, the West) for destroying not only Iraq’s economic viability and
social coherence, but its national unity—one understands why “they” hate “us”
with a purple passion. Meanwhile, in the ether regions of unimpeachable Western
morality and integrity, the head of the World Bank cooks up sweetheart deals
for his…sweetheart, hires old cronies at will, hems and haws, denies and
recants, threatens and conciliates, fulminates and abnegates, vows holy war and
everlasting love, claims to be the victim of conspiracies and cabals one
minute, and merely misquoted the next, while billions of people in the
developing world are continually maligned for their “ingrained” corruption.
Two last points. Nuhu Ribadu is chairman of
Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission—an appointed position. He
was appointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was also responsible for the recent elections
in Nigeria, condemned by the EU, in the words of the head of its monitoring
team, for “ballot box stuffing, alteration of official
result forms, stealing of sensitive polling materials, vote buying and underage
voting” (BBC, April 23). The head of the Transition Monitoring Group,
the Nigerian citizens’ organization monitoring the polls, called the election a
“charade.” Under the circumstances, Mr. Ribadu’s
praise of Mr. Wolfowitz provokes many more questions
than it answers.
Finally, this whole
debacle might have had a constructive, and profoundly renovative,
ending if, following Mr. Wolfowitz’s inevitable
resignation from his position, the European members of the World Bank insisted
that the US finally give up its right to name the institution’s head, just as
they would, in turn, surrender their right to name the head of the IMF. But
that did not happen, of course. Essentially because the Europeans, in the end,
are as dishonest about their commitment to global democratic governance as the
US is. Naturally, all this hypocrisy and patent self-aggrandizement is obvious
to the entire world—which is why Hugo Chávez is
laughing all the way to his own, newly founded development bank.
Remembering a Soccer Legend: Ferenc Puskás, 1927-2006
By Alexander Kitroeff
News of Ferenc
Puskás’s death on—of all days—November 17 last year
brought back memories of the first time I saw him, and nearly kicked a ball
to him. It was on a hot August afternoon at Panathênaikos’s
home ground at Leôforos Alexandras
in Athens, during a team training session. A little incongruous perhaps, given
that Puskás acquired his legendary status as a player
with star performances in the greatest stadiums of the world while competing
in major tournaments. But for a 15-year old Athenian born when Puskás
was already famous, it was good enough.
After scoring on three straight
shots, all with his lethal left foot, Puskás’s fourth
effort crashed against the cross bar, spinning high over the barrier behind
the goal and bouncing up the concrete stands. I rushed up the steps and caught
the ball. I looked over at him as I readied myself to kick it back on the
field, but he had turned away to talk to the admiring players. It was after
all, a training session, the fun was over, and the real task at hand for Puskás was coaching his players on how to kick the ball into
the net.
Still, for me, it had been a cherished
moment of close contact with a legend of European soccer. And it was a rich
reward, back in 1970, for being part of a small crowd watching the pre-season
training of Panathênaikos on a very hot August afternoon
at the team’s home field. We were there to witness with our own eyes what
the notoriously unreliable Athenian daily sports papers had reported, that
Panathênaikos had managed to secure as its coach
the great Puskás. For two decades, he had starred
as a player, first, for the Hungarian national team in the early 1950s and
then, following the 1956 Hungarian uprising, for Real Madrid, the greatest
team in Europe.
 | No one seemed to worry that this
was Puskás’s first coaching job. (No wonder he was
out there shooting the ball himself that afternoon). That Puskás had deigned to come and work in what was, let’s face
it, one of Europe’s soccer backwaters was an honor
for Greece. It was proof, moreover, that Panathênaikos,
the perennial champions in the 1960s, had earned some international respect
despite a string of unimpressive performances in the annual European Champion
Clubs Cup (now the UEFA Champions League), the major, European-wide knockout
competition that included the winners of the domestic leagues in each country.
Yet none of us could imagine that
Puskás would not only grace Greek soccer with his
presence at Panathênaikos’s helm, but that he would
lead the team farther than any other Greek team in the history of the European
Cup. Those were the days, of course, when Europe had just over 30 nations,
so the tournament of all the national champions involved only 32 unseeded
teams. Nonetheless, for a Greek team to make it through to the round of 16—a
rare occurrence—their first-round opponents had to be weaklings. Luckily,
that year, Panathênaikos drew the champions of Luxembourg,
Jeunesse Esch, whom they
disposed of easily by winning both on the road and in Athens.
The draw for the next round pitted
Panathênaikos against the Czechoslovak champions.
That year it was Slovan Bratislava, a team that
had won the championship for the first time since 1955 by overcoming the two
powerhouses, Slavia and Sparta, both of Prague.
But while they may have been provincial upstarts, Bratislava were, nonetheless
(in those days), Czechoslovaks, and their country a respected soccer power.
In the first of the two games between them, in Athens, Panathênaikos
scored a quick goal and went on to win 3-0. So, while they lost the return
game in Bratislava 2-1 on a cold November evening, the Greek champions went
through to the next round thanks to the rule in such cases that favors the
team with the wider winning margin. It was the first time a Greek team had
made it to the quarterfinals. The coach was the toast of the town.
 | Puskás must have found Greek elation
at this minor success very amusing. He himself had won the European Cup three
times as a player with Real Madrid, and he had scored a hat-trick in the memorable
1960 final in which Real beat Eintracht
Frankfurt 7-3. His prolific scoring rate of 512 goals in 528 matches helped Real win five
successive Spanish league titles and Spain’s annual Copa
del Rey tournament once (which, when Puskás’s team won it, was actually called the Copa del Generalísimo—as in Franco),
along with their three European titles.
Known as the “Galloping Major”
because he had played for the Hungarian army team Honvéd,
the great Puskás had always been as interested in food as he had been
in football. Indeed, his short, barrel-chested, and stocky frame deceived
many opponents, who underestimated his skills before they saw him perform.
On that August afternoon I first saw him, there was ample evidence that his
girth had expanded considerably after retiring as a player a few years earlier.
His celebrity status augmented by Panathênaikos’s
success in Europe, Puskás would eat out almost every
night. His favorite taverna was Ta Souvlakia
tês Kyra Marias in Chalandri, a suburb
just north of Athens, and his favorite dishes were grilled pork sausages,
souvlakia, and suckling pig on the spit.
Puskás took
a low-key approach to his coaching job in contrast to his visits to tavernas. Personally unassuming, he used warmth and
humor rather than fear to assert his authority. He fostered team spirit, and
good relations among players and himself, by organizing team outings to movie theaters and,
of course, restaurants. This was unique for Greece, but it was welcomed by
sportswriters as yet another sign of the Greek sport’s “Europeanization” thanks
to Puskás’s coaching style.
 | But “coaching style” may be putting
it a little too strongly in Puskás’s case. He himself
was the product of an innovative coaching philosophy that the Hungarian national
team honed in the early 1950s. It entailed nothing less than revolutionizing
the static way the game had been played until then: players limited to their
regular positions. The Hungarians replaced this static style by teaching their
players to move around the entire field interchangeably—what is known in basketball
as “moving without the ball”—a system that required them to acquire a variety
of skills.
There was no chance, however,
that Puskás would experiment with the good but mostly
workman-like players he had at his disposal in Athens. In his ghostwritten
memoir, Puskás on Puskás,
published in English in 1997, he had this to say about how Panathênaikos
went on to eliminate Everton, their opponents in the next round of the European
Cup: “I honestly did not think we’d stand much of a chance against the English
champions. I told the players to just relax and play; try to help one another
all the time. I didn’t give them any fancy tactical instructions; you can
draw a lot of pictures on the board, but have you got the players to do it
with?” (p. 218). Nonetheless, he got the most out of them—just as he did with
the modest but satisfying offerings of Greek tavernas—and the Greeks went on to defeat
their English opponent.
When Puskás’s
team played Red Star Belgrade next, in the first of the home-and-away games
of the semifinals, the lack of star quality of most of his players was exposed
by a heavy defeat in Belgrade. With Panathênaikos
losing 4-1, a 3-0 or a 5-1 margin victory was needed in the return game in
Athens to progress to the final. Puskás worked his
magic yet again. His players won 3-0, which meant they were going through
to the final game. (The rules state that, in the case of a tie in number of
goals scored after the two games, the team that scored the most “away” goals
in the series wins.) Crowds poured into the streets to celebrate.
 | In 2001, Greek TV broadcast a
special to commemorate Panathênaikos’s participation
in the European Cup final. The players were asked what it had been about Puskás that made it possible for him to make them the first-ever
Greek club to reach the final. All of them answered that it was neither strategic
nor tactical training, but, rather, just the sheer self-confidence they gained
from the fact that this legend of world soccer was quietly reassuring them
that they could do it. The fact that they had Puskás on their side instilled in the players a confidence
in their abilities that helped them overcome Greek soccer’s perennial inferiority
complex when faced with the challenge to do well in Europe.
The 1971 European Cup final took
placed at hallowed Wembley Stadium in London on
Wednesday, June 2. Panathênaikos faced the mighty
Ajax Amsterdam, who were something of the Real Madrid
of the 1970s. The Dutchmen won 2-0, but playing in that final represented—and
still represents—the highest achievement of a Greek team in a European club
tournament.
For Puskás,
it also meant a return to the scene of one of his greatest triumphs. It was
at Wembley in 1953 that the Hungarian national team, having won
the Olympic gold medal the previous year, became the first foreign team ever
to defeat England on home soil with a stunning 6-3 victory. Puskás unwittingly contributed to stoking the complacency
of the English players before the game by his telltale appearance. “Look at
that little fat chap; we’ll murder this lot,” one of the England players remarked
as the teams took the field. But the murderer turned out to be the Galloping
Major, with his left foot just inside the eighteen-yard box. The portly Puskás bamboozled the English defenders all afternoon and
scored two goals.
Puskás’s state funeral took place on December
9, 2006, in Budapest with a Panathênaikos delegation in attendance. It began with a ceremony
at the
national stadium, which had been renamed Ferenc Puskás Stadium in his honor
a few years ago. His casket—draped
in Hungary’s red, white, and green flag—was placed on a black catafalque in
the center of the field, while a sea of candles lit up the stands. The casket
was taken by horse-drawn caisson to Hero’s Square for a military
salute, on its way to the funeral service in Budapest’s Saint Stephen’s Basilica. Puskás was laid to rest under the dome, bringing a day of national mourning to an
end.
Meanwhile, on the same day back
in Athens, Panathênaikos was eking out a hard-fought
victory against Larisa in a Greek league game at
the Olympic Stadium. Puskás would surely not have
been very impressed with the level of play. But he would have seen a silver
lining. Just across Kêfisias Avenue that runs next
to the stadium lies Chalandri, and its taverna
offerings of grilled meats.
Alexander Kitroeff teaches history at Haverford College and is a contributing editor to greekworks.com, which published his most recent book, Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.
The Theatricality of Crime: Petros Martinides
Part 2: Olmezoglou Redux, or The Author’s Anxiety Before the Penalty Kick
By Apostolos Vasilakis
Petros Martinides’s
second book (see the first part of this essay, “Reflected Fates,” February
20) of his recent trilogy, H elpida pethainei teleutaia (Hope Dies Last, 2005), takes place during
the summer of 2004, an unforgettable time, one can argue, in modern Greek
history. For this was the summer that Greece, for the first time since 1896,
had hosted the Olympic Games. But this event took place in the shadow of yet
another event that has since been engraved into the collective Greek psyche.
I am talking, of course, about the participation of the Greek national team
in the European soccer championship (Euro 2004) in Portugal. Against even
the most optimistic predictions, the team not only qualified for the second
round of the tournament, but managed to go all the way to the final round
and win the trophy in a memorable final game against the Portuguese host team
(and one of the favorites).
Martinides’s story unfolds in the shadow of this event
in Thessalonikê. The pace of the narrative follows
that of the soccer games themselves, with a climactic ending that parallels
the night of the championship match. While the entire country is captivated
by the miraculous, thrilling performance of the Greek soccer team, another
drama takes place in the city. It is in this parallel drama that Alexis Olmezoglou
appears again in a lead role. The author effectively captures the spirit and
the atmosphere of that memorable summer in his novel’s prologue:
It was the spring of hope and the summer
of ecstasy, it was the accumulation of malaise and the fulfillment of the dream;
it was the March of promises and the solstice of miracles;
the glutted greens who got hungry again and became blue in
order to eat again; it was the blue who denounced favoritism
while they didn’t stop asking the grace of God; …it was there,
the first few days of July when the Greek team reached the
top of “Euro 2004,” painting everything blue, in villages
and cities….At the same time, inside the city limits, a young woman
was about to be murdered….In His meteorological gallantry,
God was neglecting such personal misfortunes. As a Greek,
as it was proven July 4 with the triumph of the national
soccer team, He was preparing such a joy for His country, that it was probably impossible to take care of anything else….Her
name was Elpida and she
died first in this story. (pp. 9-11)
One
can see here how the author, with narrative precision and a heavy dose of
irony, is capable of reflecting a zeitgeist, of capturing and situating
a particular moment or event within a broader historical and political frame.
But it also quite clear in the following pages that this context soon pretty
much disappears altogether from the plot.
What
follows instead is a narrative that fills in the gaps of the young intellectual’s
story since the last time we read about him. He has defended his dissertation,
experienced a disappointing affair with a young actress that has financially
ruined him, and is in a state of indecision about his future. As a character,
he remains essentially a solitary figure, without family, friends, or any
real interest in what is taking place in the outside world. (Perhaps this
is why the author abandons any references to the political climate in the
country at that time). His references to soccer and its role in the formation
of national identity, for example, remain at the level of cliché, very similar
to his attitude (full of irony) toward public life in general. His life begins
to resemble some of the fictional lives in the books and comics that he has
spent his time reading and writing about. Martinides’s
depiction of the detective figure as detached and uninterested in the outside
world is very much within the confines of the genre. Although he acts, moves,
and forms relations within his social space, he prefers to maintain a distance
from it at the same time, especially emotionally.
The
narrator also informs us that Alexis Olmezoglou
has spent the last few months writing a crime novel, based on his own recent
painful experiences, with which we the readers are already familiar since
they constitute the plot of Martinides’s previous
novel, Moiraioi Antikatoptrismoi
(Fateful Reflections). As we read in the story:
[Alexis] spent the whole winter and spring
without moving again. Locked in the house with his impressive
car in the small garage, he tried to capitalize on a final legacy from
his father: his experiences from the double murder in Delphi and anything
that was related to it. Including the defense
of his doctoral thesis that gave him the idea. He turned everything
into a detective narrative….Alexis had no idea of how to live his
life. To isolate himself in his house, inherited from no one, and
turn into narrative the adventure of the last meeting with his
father, was something like a farewell to his youth, and his dead parents.
(pp. 20-22)
The
idea that the main character has just written and is about to publish a book,
which we have already read, raises questions about his identity and its relationship
to the fiction. Olmezoglou’s identity is already
shaped and determined by the book that he hasn’t yet published but that we
have already read. The character’s own presence and reality are not only haunted
by his previous experiences but already destabilized by the fact that he was
fictionally created in the previous work, a work he now duplicates. Consequently,
although Olmezoglou as investigator attempts to
expose the fictions that other characters create about themselves, it is the
“reality” of his own life that is ultimately put into question through the
self-reflexive nature of the stories within stories. In the end, Olmezoglou overcomes his obstacles because the other characters
underestimate him as a result of their failure to read his manuscript properly.
What
seems to be the main event in the lives of his fellow townsmen, indeed the
entire country, leaves him indifferent. For him, Euro 2004 is only a distant
event. It just provides him with the opportunity to take advantage of an empty
city whose inhabitants are riveted in front of the television set. Just as
the tournament is about to begin, another event captures his attention: a
destructive fire in the warehouse of his publisher and the discovery of two
bodies in the ruins. As it turns out, it is a case of arson, and one of the
victims dies of asphyxiation before he is burned in the fire. The other, however—Elpida, whose death was introduced in the prologue—has been
strangled. Initially, this event attracts his curiosity only because it concerns
his future publisher; yet it soon becomes a central event in his life. Taking
advantage of everyone’s absorption in the televised soccer games, Alexis engages
in an erotic game with the publisher’s wife, Magda.
While her husband watches the matches with friends, Alexis volunteers to teach
her to drive in the hope that the lessons will turn into something more interesting.
What he fails to see at this point is his engagement and participation in
another very dangerous and well-orchestrated game.
What
begins as a story of infatuation and seduction with the young, beautiful,
and elusive Magda turns into a dangerous contest
of deception, violence, and murder. For it is during
the driving lessons that something goes terribly wrong and turns Olmezoglou from an innocent outsider to someone in deep trouble
who must prove his innocence in order to save his
life. Like any good soccer game, Martinides’s well-constructed
narrative is suspenseful, with characters whose intentions and plans are hard
to read. No one is to be trusted or beyond suspicion. Our young protagonist
finds himself in yet another scrape, and, as time and the story progress,
the possibility of hope and survival narrows. Olmezoglou
himself needs to take the appropriate action, anything necessary to save himself.
To quote from Tzvetan Todorov’s
commentary on the genre and on “the story of the suspect as detective” in
his now classic essay, The Typology of Detective Fiction: “In order
to prove his innocence, this person must himself find the real culprit, even
if he risks his life in doing so. We might say that, in this case, this character
is at the same time the detective, the culprit (in the eyes of the police)
and the victim (potential victim of the real murderers)” (p. 51).
It soon
becomes clear that the boundary between lawful and criminal behavior is tested.
The young intellectual, Alexis Olmezoglou, engages
in a dangerous game that forces him to cross and confuse these boundaries
in order to exonerate himself and, ultimately, save his life. In the end,
in an unexpected (and, one might add, ironic) conclusion, it is the very unexpected
and unimaginable themselves that allow him to get out of a very difficult
situation. The victory of the Greek soccer team demonstrates to him, and to
all of us who spent a memorable month glued in front of our TV sets (or radios,
in my case), that, indeed, “hope dies last.”
In the
end, I found Martinides’s second novel of more interest
than his first because of the narrative’s fast pace, relative simplicity and
tightness of plot, and the avoidance of some of the
problems I touched upon in my previous review (endless literary references,
pretentiousness, etc.). Through the parallel drama that takes place on the
soccer field, the book creates a thrilling anticipation and climactic conclusion,
while employing some of the classic elements and themes of the genre: a femme
fatale, the testing of boundaries between lawful and criminal behavior,
corrupt cops, and the greed and moral corruption of the bourgeois intelligentsia.
And yet, at bottom, the problem remains the elusive main character, Olmezoglou
himself, who is still too much of an intellectual creation and not enough
of an imaginative one. In other words, he is hollow as anything other than
an intellectual exercise and, in the end, remains bound within the self-recursive
gesture of the two novels, rather than fully capturing the reader’s imagination.
Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
All So Long Ago
Athens-Sparta, sponsored by the Onassis Cultural Center in collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, New York, December 6, 2006-May 12, 2007.
By Charles Rowan Beye
 | This
is a handsome show in every respect. Two hundred eighty-eight objects of all
kinds—coins, vases, inscriptions, bronze figurines, even larger marble pieces—are
augmented by a splendid catalogue in which photographs of the highest quality
provide a permanent record and, in the case of items difficult to see, much
welcomed enlargement. It is a luxury to study the photographed coins and small
bronzes up close, as it were. The lines on the lekythoi
are suddenly so distinct as they never seem to be
when gazed at in the vitrines. The Onassis
Cultural Center is a treasure not that well known. The exhibition hall is
small, and the wallspace limited, but, in this show,
the objects are arranged for maximum ease of viewing as well as for reasonably
good circulation. Whenever museum burn-out threatens to descend, the visitor
can escape to an adjacent cafe with the now only too ubiquitous waterfall.
Some viewers will want to settle into the cafe with the catalogue, in which
one can read longer, fuller versions of the captions affixed to the objects
on display. Most visitors, I suspect, will want all the clarification they
can get.
The
pride of the exhibition is the famous marble bust from the archeological museum
of Sparta identified (on no particular authority) as a representation of Leonidas, the king of Sparta who led his band of soldiers
to their deaths defending the pass at Thermopylae against the invading Persian
forces of Xerxes in 480 bce (in
case you haven’t seen 300). Its iconic value is such that there were
reportedly demonstrations in Sparta objecting to its exportation even on a
temporary basis. For those who will never get to Sparta, this is a rare treat.
But of considerably greater interest perhaps is the small, marble grave stele
of a young man, also from Sparta’s museum, which is dated to the second quarter
of the fifth century. It displays a dejected youth seated, his drooping head
propped up by his left hand. His upper torso is bare while a himation
drapes his lower body and thighs, thus allowing for the modeling of an adolescent
chest, as well as the folds of fabric against limbs. The piece is exquisite
for the refinement of carving, for a sentimentality that is more than a hint
but hardly excessive, and it will come as a surprise to many viewers who entertain
the notion that Spartans of the fifth century were indifferent to the arts
in their singleminded pursuit of military prowess.
 | There
are many Spartan surprises in the show, which is its great merit. The world
knows, or thinks it knows, the artistic achievements of Athens. Sparta is
often a blank page in the book of cultural history. True enough, the Spartans’
cultural production was demonstrably nowhere near the quality or quantity
to be found in Athens (although excavation has also been nowhere so pervasive
in the area of ancient Sparta). But an item such as a structural detail of
a marble throne for the god Apollo designed by an Ionian working in Sparta,
which combines features associated with Ionic and Doric architecture and is
dated to the late sixth century, shows a society open to experimentation and
foreign influence. The vases on display reiterate the well-known fact (to
professionals at any rate) that Athenian vase-painting owed much in its earlier
years to the Laconian ware exported from Sparta. Some of the Laconian pieces are a revelation, such as the kylix by the Arkesilas painter depicting Atlas and Prometheus, which was
lent to this show by the Vatican Museum. The intensity, the drama of the painting
of the two figures, is remarkable in an art form that seems to celebrate stasis
above all else.
 | One
wonders about the type of audience the curators had in mind in creating the
show, however. A chronology (geometric, archaic, classical, etc.) or taxonomy (Corinthian, Laconian, black-figure, red-figure, etc.) that is right out of a Classical Archeology 101 handbook seems to be directed at the neophyte viewer (although he/she would need a crash course in relative and absolute chronologies), and indeed one would imagine that a public exhibition such as this (with free entrance, to boot) is catering to a crowd off the street.
In thanking the curators for inviting his contribution to the exhibition,
Paul Cartledge remarks that the exhibit “marks a ‘first’ for the
presentation of a selection of Spartan artifacts en masse in a North American
context.” We may assume, therefore, that the target audience is New Yorkers
or tourists visiting Manhattan. On the other hand, the exhibition captions
demand some level of expertise. Terms such as “protomes”
to describe the head and shoulders of a horse, or “coroplastic
workshops” (places in which small terracotta figures were produced), like
the use of the Latin title of an ancient Greek text, produced in this reviewer
a frisson of déjà vu, returning him to graduate school. The
same narrowness that a reliance on technical language suggests seemed reflected
in the omission of references to analogous or complementary material in the
extraordinarily rich collection on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It might have been a big help to the man on the street who might want to stroll
just some 30 blocks up Fifth Avenue. Likewise, the viewer might have welcomed
an explanation of what is meant by saying that a scene painted on an Attic
red-figured pelike “is imbued with the ethos of the Parthenon and
Erechtheum friezes.” While looking at an eighth-century
geometric pyxis from Sparta, this
viewer was astounded to read, “This pyxis is representative of Laconian
pottery produced in the second half of the eighth century b.c. At the end of this century,
which coincides with the end of the First Messenian
War, the Parthénies (the lineage founded by Spartan
women who bore children to helots during this war) founded the colony of Taras (Tarentum) in Italy. The presence of corresponding pottery
in Italy indicates that relations between Sparta and Taras were close.” Hey, wait a minute. Helots?
Spartan women? Adultery while the men were at the
front? With social inferiors? Everybody lived
to tell the tale? More information, please!
 | So
much needs to be explained, the “archaic smile,” for instance, on the Leonidas
bust; likewise, the nudity of small, bronze male figurines that are described
as a “trumpeter” or “a rustic.” A viewer puzzling over why a bronze “man
putting on his greaves” would put on his shin-guards without bothering to
slip into some underwear might also ask what, exactly, is a greave? The quotation
from Theognis written in over the head of a male
reclining at a banquet depicted on an Attic red-figure kylix
is properly identified as a homoerotic and pederastic
sentiment, just as the curator notes that the hare depicted on the vase is
a commonplace erotic gift to youths. But why hint when everywhere else the
didactic tone is so relentless? Don’t ask, don’t tell, just
hint. The curator omits to mention that this is a stag party: “lots
of dancing, singing, reciting,” he says, but should have added “lots of flirting.”
What is an ill-informed person to do with these hints, especially a contemporary
American who has been educated to demonize homosexual experience? There is
no reference to the great value placed on homoerotic relationships by the
aristocracy of both Athens and Sparta, or the belief among conservatives such
as Xenophon that homosexual relationships among Spartan males—a hallmark of
their culture—was one of the reasons for their superiority.
 | In
a show that is meant to encapsulate Athenian and Spartan cultures, its organizers
have encountered the usual dilemma of offering up ideas when visuals are what
are displayed. Essentially, they count on the viewer knowing the tried and
true story of Greek-speaking peoples in the sixth and fifth centuries bce: the invention of the alphabet, the invention of coinage
(although really a Lydian invention, the Athenians and Corinthians seemed
to have perceived its use as money and for commerce), both of which made democracy
possible; Spartan subjection of their neighboring populations, and their subsequent
evolution into a controlled and repressive society, vaguely reminiscent of
South Africa; the Persian War, in which a relatively small group defeated
the mighty hordes of Persians, thereby illuminating the virtues of steadfastness,
courage, and self-sacrifice; the establishment of the Delian League, which brought unprecedented prosperity to Athens,
allowing for the “Greek miracle” of fifth-century Athenian high culture—the
Parthenon and all that (ignoring if possible the underpinning tribute money
demanded of what started as allies in the League and became de facto
subjects). Allusions and discussion of all this are to be found here and there
in the exhibition captions, as well as in the two essays on Greek history,
one by Cartledge, an eminent authority on Sparta and professor at
Cambridge, and the other by Donald Kagan, the Yale
professor, some of whose writings on Athens and the Peloponnesian War have
sparked controversy for his conservative political reflections on contemporary
events. He is more subdued here, but both men, while exalting courage and
steadfastness in the face of danger, also view the story of Athens and Sparta—and
their military engagement with Persia—as a clash of civilizations: democracy,
individualism, and capitalism against totalitarianism, faceless hordes, and
irrationality. The average viewer might easily succumb to thoughts of the
conflict of Islam and the West as it is played out in the media. Well, maybe
we are meant to see Charles Martel in Leonidas although
history repeating itself is an idea pretty much discredited nowadays. As Louis
MacNeice so memorably wrote in his poem, Autumn
Journal:
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.
Professor
Kagan seems to be warning us, who have allowed our self-discipline
to soften into decline here in the West, when he says on page 267: “The result
in 338 was a major Macedonian victory at Chaeronea
that brought an end to the era of the independent Greek polis and the Hellenic
period, Greece’s most creative epoch.” What does it mean to say “Greece,”
one wonders. There was no nation-state, not even a rudimentary structure that
allows for the word, Greece, one would imagine. How was the independent Greek
polis such as Athens to continue? There were no annual operating budgets,
no economic base to the society other than tribute money. That did not make
for political stability. Sparta, with its diminishing population, had been
in decline for some time. (Rosa Proskynitopoulou has an excellent if brief assessment of Sparta
on the way out at the close of her essay on Laconian
metalworking.) Kagan makes it sound as if it could
have been otherwise. Maybe, when all is said and done, the Macedonian victory
was a natural consequence of the situation? What, in fact, does most “creative”
mean? What is the broad overview? Maybe the metaphor should be sought in the
destruction in the battle at Chaeronea of Thebes’s
Sacred Band, the battalion of men who fought with their lovers to the last
against Philip. Isn’t it finally all about adaptability?
Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.
Suicide is Painless
By Peter Pappas
Y’all take it easy now.
This isn’t Dallas. It’s Nashville. This is Nashville. You
show ’em what we’re made of. They can’t do this here
to us in Nashville. OK, everybody,
sing. Come on somebody, sing. You sing.
—Haven Hamilton, after
Barbara Jean
is shot, Nashville
The
anthem sung by the crowd following the impassioned plea above, as Robert Altman’s
film comes to its piercing end, is a peculiar—and peculiarly American (this
is Nashville, after all)—circling of the affective wagons. The chorus resounds
in oxymoronically defiant resignation: “It
don’t worry me. It don’t worry me./You
may say that I ain’t free,/But it don’t worry me.”
Robert
Altman never won an Academy Award. But, then again, neither did Hitchcock
or Chaplin or Lubitsch or Hawks or Welles, although
they all received honorary Oscars, those “lifetime achievement” consolations
meant to assuage Hollywood’s easily assuageable
guilt and to camouflage the stupidity, cynicism, and (worst of all) thermonuclear
envy that has always driven its prizegiving. Altman got his last year. He was gracious, but
also unsparing, if in a characteristically indirect way: “Of course I was happy and thrilled…to accept
this award. And I look at it as a nod to all of my films because, to me, I’ve
just made one long film. And I know some of you have liked some of the sections,
and others you….Anyway, it’s all right.”
Well,
no, it wasn’t, and isn’t, but there’s nothing to be done for it now. Altman
won’t be making any more movies, as he died last November, and so Hollywood
won’t get another chance to make amends. But Tinseltown’s
tough. Besides, as Altman once explained, “They sell shoes and I make gloves.”
If anything, it’s a miracle the cobblers let him make his handwear
for so long.
Nashville was released on June 11, 1975, exactly
five weeks to the day after the fall of Saigon on April 30. Less than nine
months earlier, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon had resigned from the presidency.
That’s what you call overdetermined. If there was
a zeit to the geist
of American cinema in the Seventies, it was Robert Altman, although, ironically
(or, maybe, pointedly), he had turned 50 a few months before Nashville’s
premiere.
***
Those people who make love
while saying: “We’re going
to have a magnificent child”; well, they won’t have
a magnificent child, they may not have any child
at all that evening….The magnificent child comes
by chance, one day after a good laugh, a
picnic, fun in the woods, a roll in the hay, then
a magnificent child is born!
—Jean Renoir
Renoir
was, of course, the greatest filmmaker ever known, both in his own time and
well after his genius was universally recognized, as an “incompetent.” Writing
more than a decade after Renoir’s death, even Andrew Sarris referred to the
“lapses and longueurs” in his work. Despite Sarris’s oft- and effusively documented admiration for Renoir,
he, too, could feel that the director’s results were often so “messy” that,
arguably, none of his films could be considered “well made” (see “The Magnificent
Child,” The New York Times, March 25, 1990).
Of course,
“well made” is in the eyes of the beholder, just as one person’s mess is another’s
riches. To take the most famous “mess” in the history of cinema, even if The
Rules of the Game hadn’t suffered its infamous butchery because of distributors
and producers (and censors) that relegated almost a third of it to the cutting-room
floor, it seems so fractured, so disordered, even today (when it has
been more or less restored) that a first viewing of it is exceptionally disorienting.
But that’s exactly the point, not only to this work, but to every movie Renoir
ever made.
 | There
is a reason Renoir is the greatest naturalist in the history of filmmaking
and why, moreover, he is a much greater artist than his father, whose work
imprisoned him in a sentimentality that might have been inadvertent but was,
ultimately, an inevitable consequence of an emotional entrapment that arose
directly from his art. For the son, however, the depiction of the human world
meant exactly that: surveying an affective, social, and—something that was
always enormously potent for him—environmental topos
that could only be determined to the extent it was recorded. This is naturalism
shorn of ideological presumption and certainly liberated from sentimental
prescription. This is the world as it is: complex, contradictory, often inexplicable,
and usually impervious to arbitrary attempts at explanatory order. In other words, “messy.”
Put
another way, this is the world seen agnostically: layered, diffuse, inconstant,
self-defining, but, in the end, accessible to us, even if not particularly
familiar or amenable to uncomplicated understanding. Lapses?
The camera in Renoir’s films is so often not where it “should” be because
human understanding is so often a result, not to say a function, of accident
rather than purpose. Renoir’s editing is also frequently less than “seamless,”
but, then, human consciousness is repeatedly jarred into comprehension, as
the confrontation between being and otherness almost habitually results in
disjunction rather than connection. As for his “longueurs,”
what makes human relations so poignant if not the cumulative paralysis of
men and women frozen by their very need to communicate with one another? What
is psychoanalysis, in the end, but an endless “longueur”?
Indeed, it is precisely Renoir’s longueurs that
make his work so utterly, and consistently, revelatory, if for no other reason
than that silence is the most ancient and effective form of expression, in
its directness even more so than in its ambiguity.
And
then, of course, there is Renoir’s roving camera and depth of field. Well,
yes, getting at “truth”—as much as it can be established—is a bit of a bother.
You’ve got to figure out which cranny to look into, which hint to follow,
which “obvious” and “self-evident” truth is no more than strategic mendacity
and self-interest disguised as moral certitude. There’s a reason why classical
decoupage—i.e., Hollywood’s esthetic of (apparent) continuity and
contiguity, of shot/reverse-shot, master and cover shots—is the most effective
form of propaganda ever conceived by the human mind: it works. Which is to say, it deceives. One’s mind—one’s entire affective
universe—is guided in a way that only music can duplicate (something that
Ingmar Bergman always understood), except that the
movies’ narrative singularity give them a power (and verisimilitude) that
music cannot begin to compete with.
 | As
the two dominant paradigms of filmmaking, editing and mise
en scène (to use shorthand to denote visual style in the frame,
as opposed to one based on the relationship of frames), are both famously
associated with left-wing filmmakers (Eisenstein and Renoir, respectively),
ideology doesn’t help much in explaining artistic structure. Furthermore,
any theory of art claiming greater (or more “authentic”) reality is, fundamentally,
belied by the fact that art is always artifice, and making art a series of
subjective interventions on (against?) the objectivity (and innate contingency)
of the world. Which is obviously why there’s also no such thing as documentary
filmmaking per se, let alone “direct
cinema” or “cinéma vérité.”
The best we can hope for is honest self-consciousness on a filmmaker’s part,
so that the nature of his or her deception is both transparent (which
transparency, of course, is precisely what classical decoupage strives so
hard to conceal) and, even more so, of a mimetic quality that reproduces,
even if only in the faintest form, the actual perception (and perceptual obstacles)
of human beings in the world, as opposed to outside of it, literally
watching it roll on—a physical impossibility in “real life,” but precisely
the position in which most movies always put us.
The
critical problem is (accounting for) the world’s contingency. How does an
honest filmmaker depict what’s what in the world, and why that is? Renoir’s
answer was also his response to classical decoupage: a redefinition of the
temporal (continuity) and spatial (contiguity) as emanating not outside but
inside the frame—in other words, through the camera, as opposed to on the
flatbed (and to decoupage, be it classical, Eisensteinian,
or otherwise).
This
is the world of messy movies, of lapses and longueurs.
Of a realism that is the closest film will ever get to reality, of a naturalism
that is as faithful to—and structurally mimetic—of natural contingency, if
not exactly nature, as artifice can ever be. This is the cinema of Renoir
and Robert Altman, in which what happens, happens, not because it must but
because it will.
***
“Remember,
son,” Buffalo Bill counsels his nephew in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, “the
last thing that a man wants to do is the last thing he does.” When he died,
Altman was in preproduction for his next (quintessentially Altmanesque)
project, a fictionalized remake of the 1997 documentary, Hands on a Hardbody.
This was, after all, the man who, when asked about it, likened retirement
to death. Still, there is an eerily elegiacal quality
to his
last film, A Prairie Home Companion: it almost seems to be a requiem,
not so much for a man as for an entire culture.
“We come from people,” Garrison
Keillor says early on in the movie, “who brought
us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy,
be patient: this will pass.” Hearing that line in the theater in Paris, where
my wife and I have been
living for the last couple of years and where we saw the movie, after Altman’s
death, I immediately thought of the lunatic euphoria in which Americans have
been sunk for the last quarter of a century since the dawning of morning in
America. It just seems that, somehow, in some way, the long, postwar march
from 1945 to 1980 had become, by that latter year, too difficult, too painful,
too demanding of general sacrifice and needful of genuine citizenship. Somehow,
in some way, by 1980, just five years after Altman released what is probably
his most resonant movie, the American people decided to collectively stick
their heads out the window, exhale, and scream—following the now-famous advice
of the film made the following year by Altman’s fellow fifties-something director,
Sidney Lumet—“I’m as mad as hell, and
I’m not going to take this anymore!”
As so
often before in the twentieth century, however, the injunction by an artist
to his fellow citizens to express and then channel their rage ended up having
radically different results from those intended. The
man elected fortieth president of the United States in 1980 was not the man
that that infinitely lucid ranter, Howard Beale
(“We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions….None of
it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all
ages, colors, creeds—we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions
we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and
that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress
like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your
children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness.
You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real
thing. WE are the illusion.”) would have voted for, as he was the absolute embodiment of
the tube’s domination of American life. (It is vain but instructive to speculate
on what Howard Beale would have made of YouTube.)
 | So began
our excellent adventure of moral and existential deregulation (and ideological
re-regulation): from the Reaganite Eighties, when
greed was good, to the Clintonite Nineties, when greed was even better because
it was now “globalized,” to the Bushite Noughts, when greed just
wasn’t good enough and had to be pumped up by empire. There were hiccups along
the way (there always are in hostile takeovers)—a couple of towering Manhattan
infernos here, a Madrid train-station massacre there, mass murder even farther
away, in Mesopotamia—but, hey, “stuff happens,” to quote our former secretary
of defense.
And
yet, according to Keillor/Altman, we came “from people who brought us up to
believe that life is a struggle….” Well, yes, we did, once upon a time and
long, long ago. But we don’t believe that anymore. What we believe now is
that struggle is a burden, a misfortune—bad financial planning. That only
happiness matters in life (my happiness, my life), that happiness
is the sum total of human purpose, that happiness is the only goal
in a “goal-centered life,” to echo the autistic instrumentalism of America’s
professional purveyors of existential sedation. And what is “happiness”? Indefinable,
perhaps, but, like pornography, recognizable as such. Like pornography,
too, able to transform genuine desire into coopted,
commercialized, alienated—thoroughly exploited and therefore thoroughly exploitable—need.
Happiness as it ever was, except more so, excessively so, not merely
material, but freighted, not simply accumulative but a Himalayan swagheap,
as if sumptuary exchange is equal to, better than, sexual exchange,
which has now become so prosaic, so easy, so ubiquitous, so spectacular (as
defined by Debord, not DeMille), and, thus, so utterly boring that accumulation in
itself—massive, disproportionate, irrational, endless, verging on, indeed,
spilling over into, psychic disorder—is the only way to reconstruct our erotic
lives, is, in truth, the only eros we have left
in our civilization.
You
may say that we ain’t free, but it don’t worry us because we’re fat and rich
and happier than hogs in shit—or at least we think we are, which is all that
matters in the end. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians,
Ned Buntline explains the rise and fall—and self-deception—of nations (and,
presumably, empires): “A rock ain’t a rock once
it becomes gravel.” Later, he points to an existential chasm: “Injuns gear
their lives to dreams….The white men—they’re different. The only time they
dream is
when things are going their
way.”
***
It
is not hyperbole to say that most of Robert Altman’s films were about America’s
reveries, and of the delusions arising therefrom.
Altman made a lot of movies (about 50), a few of which deserve an entire volume
each. Suffice it to say that when future historians look back on the cultural
terrain of the last quarter of the twentieth century, M*A*S*H; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Nashville; Buffalo
Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson;
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Secret Honor;
Short Cuts; A Prairie Home Companion, and about 40 other movies
together will constitute a chronicle of that time (and of the times before
and after) with which very few other accounts—artistic or academic—will be
able to contend for sheer poignancy and narrative power.
It is
telling of his global influence that three of the four filmmakers competing
with Martin Scorsese for the Best Director Oscar this year—American Clint
Eastwood, Englishman Paul Greengrass, and Mexican
Alejandro Gonzáles
Iñárritu—were honored for making
the kind of multilayered, multiperspectival movie
most associated with Altman. In Iñárritu’s case especially, the artistic
line from Altman is so direct as to be almost genetic. Not that multiple perspectives,
or apparently disparate stories coming together in the (usually terrible)
end, prove that Iñárritu (or Greengrass
or, to take another obvious example, Paul Haggis, who not only directed last
year’s Oscar-winning Crash but wrote Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters from Iwo Jima)
would not have made the films he’s made had Altman not made his. Indeed, Altman
himself was always the first to point to Hawks’s
influence when film illiterates credited him with “inventing” overlapping
dialogue. (“People talk about my signature, but I ask them
if they ever saw Howard Hawks’s films,” he inquired
of a Guardian interviewer last year.) In Eastwood, in fact, it is clear
that we’re dealing with an entirely different, and autonomous, esthetic (and
moral) model. (Letters
from Iwo Jima is not only a work of genuine genius and
uncommon complexity that will forever change the genre of which it is a part
and of which it has immediately become a classic, but a remarkable dissection,
of devastating lucidity, of the “American century.”) Still, virgin birth is
a theological concept, not a biological one and certainly not an artistic
one.
(Although
the less said about this year’s Best Director Oscar, the better, I have to
add that rarely has an honoree been so mismatched with an honor. Put aside
the fact that Scorsese got the award for what is arguably the worst film he’s
ever made—although with appallingly pretentious examples such as The Aviator,
Kundun, The Age of Innocence, and
The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s a hard call—or that he competed
against four other directors who crafted films superior to his in every possible
way. The problem is that he is the most overrated director of the most overrated
generation of directors in the history of American moviemaking. With the exception
of Francis Ford Coppola—whose The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation
both deservedly competed for the Best Picture Oscar in 1974 and are essential
works of American cinema in the Seventies—it is sobering to realize how much
less than first seduces the eye there really is in the work of the “iconic”
Gang of Four standing on the stage after this year’s Oscar for best director
was awarded.)
 | So,
what did Altman give to succeeding generations of filmmakers? Essentially,
what Renoir gave him: everything. “The Rules of the Game,” Altman once famously
acknowledged, “taught me the rules of the game.” I’ve always suspected that
this recognition of debt referred to more than moviemaking. In any case, Altman
shared with Renoir a sense of his own work. At the outset of this article,
I quoted Altman’s judgment that he had made “just…one
long film.” Renoir, too, believed that a “director makes only one movie in
his life” and then “breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” (A major problem
with Scorsese has always been precisely that the course from Raging Bull
to Kundun, and Taxi Driver to The
Age of Innocence, shows not so much “evolution,” let alone an unappeasable
and encyclopedic esthetic, as a confused and utterly unfocused sense of his
own work.)
Altman’s
most important inheritance from Renoir—in actuality the singular one, encompassing
all others—was the notion of plenitude, which is not merely an esthetic vision
but a moral one. I said before that Renoir’s perception of the world—and,
so, consequently, his filming of it—was “agnostic.” What I meant was that,
as opposed to so many other filmmakers, many of them as great as he, Renoir
did not approach the world as a problem but as a fact. Although he was (deeply)
a man of the left, he did not believe that human rationality could be imposed,
but, rather, that it could only be extracted from the social ecology (and
accretions of custom and cohabitation) that human beings had developed both
among themselves and, even more important, in active relationship with the
natural world into which they’d been born. The greatest illusion for Renoir
was precisely the notion that humanity could force any rules at all on the
world’s self-regulating game, which, for him, was always one in which society
was actively delimited by the realities of nature. Which was also why, in
the end, it was obvious that “tout le monde a ses
raisons”—although what is so often forgotten is the judgment that leads to
that brutal certainty: that that is “Ce qui est terrible sur cette terre.”
It
is ridiculous—a gross and utter miscomprehension—that this profoundly demystifying
and disenchanted artist is now lauded as a “romantic” or even an idealist.
Of course he was an idealist; what is any artist, after all, but a practicing
idealist? It’s just that he didn’t believe his ideals defined actually existing
humanity. He undoubtedly wished they would, but, in the end, it was more important
for him that human beings understood that, regardless of ideals, the world
was what it was, and had to be accepted as such. That was precisely
the meaning of his agnosticism. The world—our world, made up equally
of culture and nature—was, after a certain point, not amenable to reason,
but only to acceptance. Life is hard, and then you die. Except that (thank
the world for the small pleasures that are actually the greatest ones we can
possibly imagine) there are occasional days in the country and picnics on
the grass.
“I
just think, um, there’s so many people in the world nowadays, it’s hard for
Him to give the personal attention that He used to,” Sissy says about God
in Come Back to the
Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. This is Altman’s translation into American
demotic of Renoir’s agnosticism. Indeed, every aspect of Altman’s style—the
multiple storylines, overlapping dialogue, dense soundtracks, ensemble acting
and improvisation—confirmed an artistic and moral conviction that God is always
in those details that may or may not be discernible at first glance to us
mortals. It goes without saying that since this vision of the world was stubbornly
democratic, it was just as obstinately opposed to
the weird division of human beings into them and us, friends and enemies,
good and evil. In fact, as far as his own country was concerned, Altman believed
that everybody had a stake in, a right to, the American Dream—which, however,
was, time and again, more American than dream. “I
am the American Dream. Period,” Richard Nixon says in Secret Honor.
“That’s why the system works. Because I am the system.
Period.” Or, to echo Renoir one last time, “What
is horrible about this Earth is that everybody has his reasons.”
Peter Pappas is co-founder of greekworks.com.
Whispering Pines
Whispering Breeze among the Pines, Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, October 25-November 22, 2006
By Jonathan Goodman
Tina Karageorgi is an artist based in Greece who
makes installations and intricate paintings that often involve collaged materials.
Her work in no way connotes an active sense of classically Greek materials
or themes; instead, she is part of an international idiom that is more aware
of formal and transcultural identifications than of the expression of culturally
specific subject matter. It is easy enough to reconcile the specificities
of one’s background with the need for a larger, more inclusive communication;
however, the gap between the two grows wider as the pressure of a kind of
conformity develops in the art world, the result of globetrotting and international
awareness brought about by the media, ambitious shows of artists foreign to
the venue in which they are exhibited, and an agreed-upon postmodernism that
tends to be all-inclusive from a stylistic point of view.
 | As a result of this particular set of circumstances,
the notion of art being Greek in a specific way is no longer a valid
reason for its existence. There is something healthy about this new situation,
in that the call of an essentialist nationalism carries with it the less attractive
aspects of cultural awareness—as if there really were something that made
one kind of art unique, and distinct from any and all other kinds. But the
romantic notion of national identity can also be regarded as dying hard; indigenous
characteristics of different peoples have a way of persisting, even if they
are considered questionable by the intelligentsia who would use them. The
real question facing artists, curators, and critics has more to do with whether
such attributes can survive the international vernacular of installation,
performance art, and conceptualism that currently dominates the market: it
appears that there is greater meaningfulness in shared methodologies than
in making boundaries, intellectual as well as geographic, beyond which the
artist is unable to go. As it turns out, the art world has become so pluralistic
that it proves almost impossible to tease from its productions an impression of
genuine national difference, in the sense that such variation might be responsible
for differing views and creations in art.
 | This is why Karageorgi’s art visits other cultures
without succumbing to the domination of any particular outlook. Her technical
skill in creating installations owes something to the idiom of environmental,
site-specific works, developed for the most part in the 1990s: such art was
often the currency of ambition for artists working at that time. Karageorgi’s
art demonstrates a decided penchant for an existence on the cusp of painting
and installation, a hybrid product that joins categories of conception, in
ways that emphasize the integrity of the particular work being described.
In Kimono (2006), for example, Karageorgi nods in the direction of
Japan, her complex collage of different panels highlighted by freewheeling
sketches of branches, with a center filled with blood-red blooms, in actuality,
poppies. The arrangement of the panels echoes the structure of the kimono
itself, such that we cannot choose between the idea of the clothing or its
reality. The artist’s rejection of categories in favor of a holistic approach
emphasizes the work as a gestalt, a work of art complete within itself.
The rough impressionism with which Karageorgi has covered the work shows that
there is a decorative cast to Kimono, which would make sense as it
is an article of women’s clothing.
 | The lyricism taken up by Kimono repeats regularly
in Karageorgi’s art, which appears to owe its poetry to Asian culture. Yet
there is a starkness to much of her work as well, borne out by the sharp contrast
of colors in the large (340 cm. x 323 cm.), painted construction entitled Section
of Memory (2004), in which two columns divide a background into three
equal parts. The columns are covered with images of modern houses painted
black on clear plastic sheeting, while the background rises and ebbs with
gatherings of bright red flowers, very much like the red poppies in Kimono.
In her catalogue, essay curator Thalia Vrachopoulos sees the color
as suggestive of blood and as an artifact from Japan: “in its shape it can
be read as a Heian Period kimono that could have been illustrated in one of
the ‘Tale of Genji’ scrolls.” As Vrachopoulos points out, the dramatic contrast
of colors is reprised in the juxtaposition of hard buildings with the softness
of flowers; here, artist Karageorgi appears to relish the sensory differences
not only of materials but also of imageries put out for the viewer to see.
The powerful drama generated by the use of opposing colors stays with us after
we have seen the painting; for all its beauty, we also see a dramatic, potentially
dangerous tableau, in which the red relates to blood as much as to flowers.
Is it possible to link such a scenario to the stark dramas of Greek literature?
It is hard to say. Even so, the very possibility of such a connection presupposes
Karageorgi’s ties to her place and culture—even if those ties are tenuous
and open to differing interpretations. There is an extravagance to Karageorgi’s
work that might well affiliate, albeit in an abstract fashion, with the intensities
of her background.
 | Sometimes the artist presents her concerns more
straightforwardly. Forest (2006), of a medium size in its dimensions
(150 cm. x 170 cm.), represents the poetic mystery of a stand of trees, the four
major vertical trunks with short branches not so far from the inspired intricacies
of a painting by Jackson Pollock. Against the gray background, the black trees
and foliage at the bottom of the composition look enigmatic and portentous,
as if containing a knowledge difficult to know and express. The ghostly imagery
is lyrical in the extreme; throughout Karageorgi’s work there is a plan, a
sense of purpose that intimates a higher order, in which the decorative becomes
beautiful and the mysterious turns transcendent. What is most exciting, at
least for this viewer, is the combined vernacular of figuration and abstraction,
resulting in a seamless switch from one category of being to the other. While
Karageorgi owes some of the effects of her lyricism to modernism, the gestural
efforts of the abstract expressionists in particular, the conception behind
her works is clearly her own.
Some of Karageorgi’s most compelling work can be
found in her books: transparent pieces of glass painted over with abstract
and figurative motifs, the individual panes layering together to culminate
in both a sophisticated and complex imagistic collage. The blood-red poppies
are again present; they serve as a symbol of both ephemeral beauty and the
ubiquity of violence. As the viewer turns the pages of glass, held together
by steel frames, there is a real sense of opening up to possibilities, both
visual and thematic, that express what might well be called a tragic view
of life. Karageorgi brings us to the center of an awareness influenced by
certain kinds of fragility—is there anything more subtle or delicate than
the blooms of a flower? Yet, at the same time, we can see in the force of
her art a commitment to a truth intrinsically moral in its awareness and severity.
There is a real task completed in her lyrical efforts: it is the labor of
attaining a particular vision at a time when art can easily feel the same,
no matter from where its origins derive. The lyrical moment is something that
is hardly undertaken, let alone achieved, but it is clear that the artist
wants us to undergo something of a conversion in the face of her exquisite
imagery. Karageorgi’s world turns on the supposition that beauty and suffering
are concomitant in the world, with the result that we are both charmed and
warned by her art. This is neither popular nor easy to effect, but we are
made richer by our participation in the subjective assertions and dilemmas
of Karageorgi’s imagination.
Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Assassination of a Turkish Citizen: Hrant Dink, 1954-2007
By The Editors
I am an Armenian of Turkey, and a good Turkish citizen.
I believe in the republic, in fact I would
like it to become
stronger and more democratic.
—Hrant Dink
Those who wanted to harm
Turkey couldn’t have chosen a
better target….As opposed to other killings in the past, Turkish public reaction
against this murder will show us where
Turkey stands in the world.
—Haluk Şahin, columnist, Radikal
We are not all Armenians now. We are Turks
and we will remain Turks.
—Hasan Ünal, professor of international relations, Bilkent University
I have killed an Armenian!
—Ogün Samast, Hrant Dink’s assassin
Unhappy
is the land that needs a hero, the eponymous anti-hero famously warns in Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. By that measure, Turkey
stands as a wretchedly unhappy land today.
Please click here to view this article’s associated slide show.
Make no mistake. Hrant Dink was a hero. And, as Brecht well understood, he was one precisely because his country’s
unhappiness demanded it of him. In the end, Dink sacrificed his life not because
he wanted to—he had two daughters, a son, a wife (truly a comrade), and that
driving sense of mission that only comes from a deep attachment to the world—but
because his country was so thoroughly, pathologically unhappy that it needed
to make him a hero for all time, which is to say a martyr.
The only fate more abject for a country than the need for heroes is the grim compulsion
to transform them into martyrs. Blood will have blood, another playwright
wrote centuries before Brecht. It is one of the
sadder truths of the history of nations (invariably the history of mass murder)
that those who openly reject facile identities are the least understood by—and,
therefore, the most conspicuous scapegoats for whatever ails—the particular
nation. Ironically, of course, these defenders of historical humility (and,
so, of historical integrity) are—and this is where the irony swerves into
tragedy—the truest and most unwavering patriots. Although he was viscerally
opposed to partition, for example, Gandhi was, in the end, assassinated by
a Hindu nationalist, not a Muslim separatist, since he was just as viscerally
committed to Hindu-Muslim unity and saw an amputated India as artificial (and
colonial) a creation as a monoconfessional “Land
of the Pure” (aka Pakistan).
Here,
in the United States, Malcolm X was murdered by hitmen
of the Nation of Islam, that is, by his former co-religionists and comrades.
Malcolm, too, had come to reject facile interpretations (idiocies, more accurately)
of “white devils” and “original people.” During his umrah to Mecca just months before his assassination,
he had finally witnessed authentic Islam, “a true brotherhood…of all colors
and races,” he wrote to his followers back in Harlem. “You may be shocked by these words coming from me,”
he continued, “[b]ut on this pilgrimage, what I
have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns
previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” That
rearrangement had not been “too difficult,” he continued, as “I have always
been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new
experience and new knowledge unfolds it.” Above all, Malcolm concluded, “I
have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that
must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”
An
“open mind…necessary to…every form of intelligent search for truth”: there
is no more concise description of Hrant Dink’s
civic plea to his fellow Turkish citizens and—it should not be forgotten—to
his fellow Armenians. All Dink wanted, both for the society and country in
which he was born and lived, and for the Armenian diaspora
from whose political program he often conspicuously dissented, was an intelligent—that
is, a conscientious and, above all, honest—search for the truth. He
knew, however, that such a moral passage was impossible without the preparation
of an open mind. Dink wanted Turkey to face up to itself, to its past crimes
and current incapacities. He wanted his fellow Armenians, however, to move
on, to liberate themselves from the moral deadend of increasingly pointless, and debilitating, historical
recriminations. Does it matter if the systematic extermination of 800,000
to 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians is labeled a “genocide”?
Of course it does. Should this one question, nonetheless, precondition or preempt the relations of Turks and Armenians
till the end of time? Of course it shouldn’t. Dink famously counseled his
fellow Armenians to pull Turkish-Armenian relations from the pit “of a 1915
meters-deep well.” As Baskın Oran, the prominent
Turkish political scientist, human-rights activist, and columnist for Agos, Hrant Dink’s newspaper, said of
his colleague and friend, Dink implored Armenians to look at past and present
“through the eyes of the other side.”
Still,
if Dink wanted Armenians to examine the world through Turkish eyes, he also
very much wanted his fellow Turkish citizens to reexamine their historical
presence—and national rationale and self-constitution—through the eyes, ears,
mouths, and hearts of the countless Armenians (and other minorities) who had
been annihilated on the way to “modern” Turkey. The historical facts have
been known to almost everyone outside of Turkey from the very beginning, namely,
that the Turkish republic was predicated on a series of—for lack of a less
controversial term—ethnic cleansings.
This
in itself is not the problem, however. The United States was founded on the
genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. The “United
Kingdom” is a euphemism for the often sanguinary suppression of Scots, Welsh,
and, especially, Irish. No one knows what “Spain” will look like 100 years
from now, as the current configuration (of 17 “autonomous communities”) is
the result of centuries of inquisitions, national repressions (of Basques
and Catalans, most notoriously), and reconquistas
of every sort, from that of Los Reyes Católicos to the most recent one of El
Caudillo de la Última Cruzada y de la Hispanidad,
which is being contested today as vigorously (and in more parts of the country)
as ever. As for republican France, we know the human cost
of that particular exercise in national formation—essentially, a civil war
that lasted from 1789 to 1945. (We’ve manifestly refrained from delving into
American and European crimes beyond the respective nations’ borders,
as that would drown us in veritable oceans of blood.) So, no, the problem
with modern Turkey is not its foundation, which it shares with all nation-states,
including all currently democratic ones. The problem with modern Turkey, as
Hrant Dink never ceased in trying to make his fellow
citizens understand, was—and remains—its subsequent national development.
Or lack thereof. Which is to say that, in Turkey, as in most
countries (including the United States), a republic is not the same as a democracy,
and it certainly does not automatically endow its citizens with the inalienable
constitutional refuge of either liberty or equality (especially before the
law), let alone that most mystical of notions, fraternity, which was so brutally
imposed in Turkey’s case that Atatürk’s infamous
formulation—“Happy is he who says, ‘I am a Turk’”—quickly degenerated from
an avowal of national pride to one of ethnic peril.
Eight months ago, we wrote:
We believe that [Turkish prime minister
Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s major problem right now is…the Kemalist regime: both overt and hidden in what Turks call “the deep state.” He must finally decide to take it on, in one fell swoop….
There really is no other way….Kemalism is dying. Unfortunately, it falls to Mr. Erdoğan—and to everyone who wishes only the best for Turkey—to
ensure that its death throes do not claim more
innocent victims.
Eight months before that, we had written:
We know European bigotry when we see it,
and hear it. But we can also discern Turkish ambivalence,
and panic, and arrogance, and, yes, even a reverse anti-European
bigotry, and—worst of all, and something that only
Turks can struggle against and defeat among
themselves—active opposition to conforming to European values because they are considered to be “anti-Turkish.”
Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gül, recently said that no country “can shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can.” Turkey runs the risk of shooting itself
in the head.
The
person who was shot in the |