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Book Reviews

Courtesy Brookings Institution Press

The commercial success of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, for example, meant that they are remembered not for the Soviet-bloc boycott that was a tit-for-tat for the Western bloc’s earlier boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Rather, they are known for inaugurating a new era in which international sporting events, including the Olympics, relied more and more on corporate sponsorship and less and less on government funds. The trend toward global economic integration accelerated by the Cold War’s end also accelerated the trend toward internationalization of sport. In 1990, the Phoenix Suns played the Utah Jazz in the opener of the National Basketball Association’s season in Tokyo. Since then, NBA teams have played each other in regular games in Japan and Mexico and preseason games in Europe, Asia, and Israel. In 2004, England’s flagship soccer club, Manchester United, claimed it had 75 million fans worldwide, with 4.6 million in the Americas, 5.9 million in South Africa, 23 million in Europe, and 40.7 million in Asia.

Crowds waving national flags in anticipation or celebration of a national team’s victory in an international tournament are proof enough that the new era has not eroded national identity in sport. In fact, some observers argue that globalization strengthens national sentiments because the more international the context, the bigger the stage on which to showcase national capabilities. Fear of the effects of globalization can also cause an affirmation of national exceptionalism. In his How Soccer Explains the World, for example, Franklin Foer made the case that the anti-soccer lobby in the United States is driven by fear that the spread of soccer there will undermine sports that are quintessentially “American” and, by implication, pure, competitive, and manly.

Pointing to tangible proof of the constitutive triad in sport of economics, globalization, and national identity is much easier than making sense of the synergy between the parts and understanding how their interaction unfolds both locally and globally. Here is where National Pastime makes a huge contribution: it offers a persuasive account of the evolution of two major sports, baseball and soccer, and, in doing so, explains how sport developed throughout the twentieth century and reached its present, globalized condition. The authors argue that “tracing this evolution…leads us to a diagnosis of baseball’s and soccer’s current problems and to identifying some solutions that are gleaned from each other.” (p. 8)

Yet this book achieves even more than it sets out to do because by comparing and contrasting the evolution of baseball and soccer—itself an innovative and fruitful exercise—it explains how economics led to globalization, but also preserved the dimension of national identity in sport. Given that the two authors are economics professors, Stefan Szymanski at Imperial College London and Andrew Zimbalist at Smith College, it is not surprising that their account places economics firmly at the base of their analysis. While this base was conditioned by national cultures, it dictated the extent and shape of globalization as it developed along with the growth of professional sport.

The concentration on economics is the major strength of this book, if only because the authors’ premise that the differences in the economic organization of baseball and soccer are crucial to their history and their present is so persuasive. The primacy of economics is also responsible for the book’s few weaknesses, however: in some parts, the focus on economic hard facts could have been leavened by reference to the deep cultural resonance of both sports, and to the passions they ignite, as, for example, in the otherwise excellent chapter on achieving competitive balance and making leagues more exciting.

National Pastime opens with an account of the differences in how the founders of professional baseball in the US and professional soccer in England and the rest of the world conceived of their respective sports’ organizational structure—despite the eye cast over the Atlantic by British soccer administrators to see how baseball was being established. Baseball was run as a closed, monopolistic league focused on ensuring the financial success of its members and the elimination of rival leagues. Professional baseball thus quickly, and quite explicitly, evolved into a business. Soccer’s evolution was very different, with a conscious effort made to retain as much as possible of the old, amateur spirit. The teams were run as clubs, not overtly as economic enterprises, their purpose being to make moderate profits and establish deep roots in their communities. A league was organized into several tiers divided hierarchically, with the teams finishing at the bottom being relegated to the lower division, while the top teams in each lower division were promoted to the higher one.

These two radically different organizational models owed their inspiration to the respective business cultures emerging in the US and Britain in the late nineteenth century. Following the Civil War, the US saw the rise of values “of self reliance, the work ethic, and aggressive individualism” (p. 44). In contrast, already industrialized Britain, at its imperial apex, was “a society in which distinctions of class and etiquette could be as influential as money” and, therefore, “any innovation was required to fit into the social order, not least because that order was seen to be so successful.” Moreover, the two economists note, “Napoleon’s taunt that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers still rang true, an empire built on ‘small’ rather than ‘big’ business” (p. 45).

This opening chapter that outlines the different structures of baseball and soccer is the cornerstone of the analysis that follows. In the next chapter, Szymanski and Zimbalist explain that professional baseball experienced a very limited international diffusion mainly because it was too concerned with fending off challenges from potential business rivals and ensuring the continued well-being of the business model put in place. In contrast, the British elites, who saw soccer less as a financial project and more as part of their national culture, were in fact eager to promote the game throughout the world, either as a means of cooptation in the case of their colonies or as a way of spreading their influence elsewhere around the globe. Imperialism, we should note, was the only way baseball spread as well, to a smaller number of countries, if only because the American imperium has governed historically more often indirectly rather than through direct rule and colonization.

The following chapter discusses the development of the baseball and soccer labor markets, arguing that they, too, were influenced by the original conception of their respective leagues but that, over time, they became more and more similar. This discussion involves a fairly technical set of issues, and, although the authors introduce us gently to them by reference to the similarities in earning power of a star baseball player (New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez) and a star soccer player (Real Madrid right winger David Beckham), the chapter may be heavy going for some readers. Yet, it is worth persevering because it is a most helpful presentation of the economic fundamentals of the two sports, the difference between trading and transferring players in baseball and soccer, respectively, baseball’s reserve clause and free agency, as well as soccer’s wage caps and the present mobility afforded by European Union regulations following the ruling that enabled Jean-Marc Bosman, a minor-league player in Belgium, to move to a team in France. In that December 1995 decision, the European Court ruled that soccer was not exempt from the European Union’s commercial laws and therefore had to adhere to Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome, which mandates unrestricted freedom of movement of employees (including soccer players) in the EU.

The analysis then moves on to inquire, “why baseball clubs make money and soccer clubs don’t.” Szymanski and Zimbalist do an excellent job of explaining why Major League Baseball, which operates as an unregulated monopoly, and its individual clubs are very profitable although owners also have many ways of hiding their profits. The influx of money, however, and the success of expanding tournaments—in search of even greater profits—has increased financial instability for European soccer because there is much more regulation. Part of the problem, as the next chapter explains, is that television networks overpaid for broadcast rights in the 1990s and when the TV soccer bubble burst, many clubs that had overspent and over-borrowed were left in the lurch. Yet baseball has, on the whole, profited from television, although less so in the case of small-market teams, whose future, the authors warn, may be precarious.

The penultimate chapter raises the question of how to make baseball and soccer championship races more competitive and exciting for the fans. It may just be that this is such an important issue that it could not be contained simply in a single chapter, as this one seems to burst at the seams with a rich analysis of how competition has been achieved more successfully in baseball. Yet, as the authors explain, despite the dominance of a few big clubs in most European countries, soccer remains immensely popular and fans remain riveted by the championship races. One of their examples is Greece, where they mention the near-monopoly exercised by AEK, Olympiakos, and Panathênaikos (p. 183).

This phenomenon of fandom trumping competitive balance could have been discussed much more extensively, although perhaps it leads away from strictly economic considerations. It has been treated by several authors in the case of Spain, a country whose intense regionalism generates strong identities, with a long list of clubs headed by FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. But probably the best-known accounts of this passion are Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and the even more captivating A Season With Verona by Tim Parks. There are no similar accounts by fans of any of the top Greek clubs. (In the movie made of his book and released last year, Hollywood transformed the object of Hornby’s tale of mad love from London’s Arsenal to the Boston Red Sox[!]—an ironic, if confirming, case of the cultural untranslatability of “national pastimes.”)

Szymanski and Zimbalist conclude their study by examining the current problems faced by baseball and soccer, including baseball’s not-so-subtle stagnation and soccer’s recurrent financial instability. They make several recommendations that amount to proposing that each of these two major sports borrow some of the other’s ideas in order to survive and prosper. In brief, they suggest that baseball become less of a business and more sensitive, both to the grass roots and to the need to become more international, while soccer should become more of a business without losing its local roots. If that cross-fertilization should happen (one suspects that, with its greater global reach, soccer stands to do and gain more), then, perhaps, we can talk of the globalization of sport not merely as a trend but as the status quo.

Arts & Letters

The project is the brainchild of Uncivilized World’s founder, Arnaud Frisch, who describes his vision this way: “We want to provoke people who like these artists to read something about the dangers of savage globalization and have a debate about it.” Another World Is Possible has a secondary goal as well. Proceeds from sales go to ATTAC, the French-founded but now internationally organized Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l’Aide aux Citoyens (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens), which seeks to implement Nobel Prize-winning American economist James Tobin’s ideas of a tax on currency speculation in order to fund efforts such as combating global warming, poverty, and disease. (In a related move over a year ago, French president Jacques Chirac, speaking at the UN General Assembly, proposed an international tax on airline tickets, among other things, that would fund anti-AIDS, -tuberculosis, and -pollution initiatives. A couple of months ago, the French government acted on this proposal independently and announced that the tax would come into force in France on July 1, 2006.)

Listen to Manu Chao, Tonino Carotone “La trampa”

Truthfully, I have great difficulty believing that the activists whose words are included here, such as Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, aren’t already familiar to at least a good part (if not the overwhelming majority) of Another World’s anticipated audience: the kind of scenesters who would seek out recordings by Mali’s Salif Keita or Nigeria’s Femi Kuti (son of one of the twentieth century’s most influential, and socially committed, musicians, Fela Kuti), who are two of nearly 20 solo artists and groups rounded up for this project. But no matter: the music is, for the most part, still fabulous, gleaned from musicians as far-flung as France (bands No One Is Innocent and Orchestre National de Barbès), Jamaica (The Skatalites), Ivory Coast (Tiken Jah Fakoly), and the United States (Moby).

We learn the barest outlines of who the essayists are, for instance. Again, I find it hard to believe that anyone who’d pick up this package wouldn’t already know who Noam Chomsky is; even so, there’s a pithy bio (“Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”) just in case. So why not provide the same for the musical talents assembled for this project, especially since many of them (Orchestre National de Barbès or Tonino Carotone, for example) are most likely to be far less easily recognizable than, say, Arundhati Roy or Subcomandante Marcos, even to true world-music fans?

Listen to Emir Kusturica, The no smoking orchestra “Lost in the supermarket”

One of the most fascinating contributions is undoubtedly Arundhati Roy’s; it’s a meditation of sorts upon the role of the artist in society, in which she addresses the artificial divide that others force upon her as a “writer-activist,” as though her fiction is not as political as her overtly political essays. (After her debut novel, The God of Small Things, topped bestseller lists around the globe, Roy wrote on such important topics as India’s nuclear activity, environmentally and socially catastrophic big-dam projects across the world, and the alarming trend of privatization and corporatization of basic public utilities like water and electricity.) That meshing of roles comes to the fore more explicitly in the musical portion of Another World Is Possible. The one commonality between these disparate artists is that they all weave together art and social activism: none of these musicians could ever be thought of as mere “entertainers.” Either their music is often overtly political, as with the UK’s Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) or Algeria’s Idir, or they are active as leaders within their respective communities. Some go even further: French-born and Spanish-based singer, guitarist, and producer Manu Chao regularly donates royalties to the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

One of Chao’s own most important influences was The Clash, and, unsurprisingly (considering the philosophical spirit of Another World Is Possible), two distinctly different Clash covers find their way onto this album. The first is a version of “Police on My Back” from ADF and France’s Zebda. While the Clash sang about being disaffected English youth in the UK, the song receives an extra tweak here about the second-generation immigrant experience in Europe: the members of ADF come from Britain’s South Asian population; Zebda, from France’s Algerian community. Given the distrust and suspicion that people who look like ADF and Zebda face after September 11, the London train bombings, and, most recently, the Paris riots, the bitter lyrics of “Police on My Back” find renewed relevance, and the groups’ addition of galloping tablas give the song an even more urgent undertone. Similarly, Sarajevo-born filmmaker-cum-musician Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra uncover new strata of ironic commentary in The Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” which they give a thoroughly fresh instrumental spin: a raucous Balkan brass band meets reggae’s one-drop beat, with the words delivered in an entirely charming, fractured, and heavily accented English, whose use hints at yet another layer of commentary about globalization and its corresponding lingua franca.

Listen to Underground Resistance “The strangler”

The music portion of Another World Is Possible gradually evolves from a set of block-rocking, hip-twitching dance tunes into moody and reflective electronica. One of the most wonderful tracks is hidden in this second shift: the elegiac, country-tinged “Wives of Farmers” from the Modesto, California, band Grandaddy. This group knows of what they speak: Modesto lies in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, and there’s no false admiration or condescension in lyrics like:

Wives of farmers care about the way their husbands feel
Wives of farmers know the power of a home cooked meal
Wives of farmers grow pretty flowers out in the yard
Wives of farmers know that life is sometimes hard.

And while Granddaddy’s paean to a nearly lost way of life in America certainly isn’t any kind of direct commentary on globalization, it does offer a corrective to the “norm” of Northern/Western relentlessly commercial, blinged-out, ever increasingly globalized pop culture. And, in the end, that’s what Another World Is Possible does best. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of answers, it provides a range of other voices: songs and stories firmly rooted in their respective cultural grounds—voices often lost in the mechanized din of globalization.

greekart

The Legacy of Homer, in both its strengths and weaknesses, demonstrated the academic taste of a new classicism in France, where the love of things Greek and Roman took place alongside art that challenged the classical ideal, which held such sway in the academy through the middle of the nineteenth century. A conscious attempt to represent the heroism of ancient culture, the neoclassicism of nineteenth-century France was technically exquisite, even as its subject matter was flaunted as a return to the achievements of earlier times. Interestingly, the movement took its precedents from literary texts, illustrating the best-known anecdotes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The question remains whether the highly wrought artworks of this period do justice to the heroic mode or are so closely faithful to Greek narrative that they lose their way because of excessive adulation of the past and emphasis on purely technical skill. Unlike post-Impressionist artists such as Manet, who struggled to represent the realities of late-nineteenth-century culture, the academician lived in a lost time, deriving inspiration from what can best be described as a historical, idealized past.

Because of the inherent historical distancing involved in the École des Beaux-Arts’ competitions, it seems unfair to judge these artists from an ahistorical, postmodernist point of view. Even so, it proves hard to interpret the show’s compositions from more than a formalist standpoint; the notion of a stale perfectionism comes easily to mind when viewing the art. Of course, the work is more than that, as the exhibits amply show, but the question of contemporary integrity in light of narrative—itself an archaizing device—refuses to go away. How, in fact, do we make sense of the art we are seeing: does technical facility and fidelity to nature promise enough to satisfy us now, when postmodernism has rendered the very notion of history suspect, a tale told by those in power? Today’s art, given its emphasis on the political sublime, has little patience for the outpouring of historical issues—except as they demonstrate the metaphysical leanings of the status quo. This is likely a superficial judgment, yet the study of classicism now seems tainted because of its closeness to standards of behavior that seem to many as aristocratic and class-oriented. It would appear that art that championed such standards was actually a call to the culturally and economically powerful to perceive the past as historically and spiritually alive, at a time when class awareness in culture was beginning to take hold of the general society.

The works themselves are odes to technical brilliance and literary emotion; they enact feeling through a fair amount of artificial posing and heavy atmosphere. At the same time, the best of the works—low reliefs, sculptures, painterly sketches, and highly finished works alike—show their audience just how enthralling references to classical culture can be: the collection of award-winning efforts shows off the high skill and noble themes of the most talented of the French academicians involved in the competitions. You can see it in the low-relief plaster by Pierre-Amédée Durand, Ulysses Recognized By His Dog (1810), in which Odysseus, naked but for a cloak draped over his left shoulder, extends his left hand around his staff to touch his dog’s muzzle, which is raised in recognition. This scene comes at the end of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus looks at his now-old dog, moved by its current life as an abject, often disregarded creature. The plaster perfectly captures the lean, hard, muscled body of Odysseus, who, despite his heroic status, is moved by the encounter. But if we concentrate on the forms themselves, the clarity of the lines defining Odysseus’ body and cloak, as well as the treatment of the hound, serve a deeper purpose: a retelling of a tale that emphasizes strength of character as much as openness of feeling.

Another powerful sculptural treatment of Homer’s tragic telling of the death of Achilles concerns the warrior’s famous weakness, his heel, which his mother held while dipping him in the Styx and therefore left vulnerable. In The Iliad, Achilles’ death results from his profanation of Apollo’s temple: in anger, the god causes Paris’ arrow to penetrate the great warrior’s heel. Achilles, who chooses to die young and famous as opposed to living a long, safe life of obscurity, is shown in the sculpture by Charles-Alphonse-Achille Gumery, Achilles Wounded in the Heel by Paris, as turning sideways to inspect the wound; this very young man, wearing a crested helmet that is close to overwhelming him, is seen as treating the injury nonchalantly—although it will kill him. Given the physical beauty of Achilles’ naked body, the artist seems to be downplaying the seriousness of the moment in favor of a glorifying treatment of the warrior as great hero. As the catalogue points out, Achilles is literally and figuratively looking backwards and down here: toward the inevitable fate of death arranged for him by the gods. Gumery depicts an elegant youth casually looking over a wound that in most cases would be more of an annoyance than a deadly blow; however, we know the story and see the wound as evidence of the gods’ bitter power, often unfairly used.

There is another treatment of this story from a point earlier to Priam’s request of Achilles to retrieve Hector. In two similar oil-on-canvas sketches, both entitled Achilles Places the Body of Hector at the Feet of the Dead Patroclus and dated 1769, Joseph-Barthélemy Lebouteux and Pierre Lacour, respectively, envision the moment of revenge when Achilles sets the lifeless body of Hector at the feet of the dead Patroclus. An important moment in the narrative of The Iliad, it is not at the same time one of high honor, and the interpretation of both artists tends to emphasize the pathos of the scene over any notion of noble motive or action. In Lacour’s version, Achilles is active and militant but hardly great; he occupies the center of the scene, the canopy sheltering Patroclus’ body a frame for a victorious but nonetheless tragic moment. Lebouteux’s vision is similar, with Achilles attending to the pale white figure of his dead friend, Hector abject on a thin mat separating him from the ground. In both paintings, the emphasis on fidelity to the text takes over any sense of nobility or idealization. True, it is a complicated, conflicted moment in the text; however, the emphasis in the paintings appears to be on raw emotion. Achilles is too late to save his beloved comrade from the dangers of combat, but he achieves a brutal revenge in his desecration of Hector’s body.

This is not to say that the exhibition fails. All in all, it is a show of extreme interest, in part because it is so rare to see these works. In the best of them, there is an attitude toward the past that transcends any mere iteration of anecdote; some sense of the greatness of literary antiquity comes through. Curiously, and sometimes excitingly, the viewer has the sense that the work has been made by anonymous artists, whose level of skill is so high that the notion of personal expression is lost to an impersonal vision of art. The idea that the authority of these works should be entirely indebted to the literary precedents they illuminate is not a modern notion and brings much of the art precariously near to illustration. Even so, something of Homer’s greatness comes through; the literary quality of the artworks serves to remind us just how powerful the epic poems are. At a time when there is a rejection of antiquity for political reasons, it is moving to see Homer’s legacy treated as a great source for art. Even if we are no longer in a time when such art carries with it the moral authority it used to, we can enjoy the works as bearers of a heroism that is exciting in its implications of greatness. When the works rise above illustration, we become entranced, not for historical reasons but for the sake of the stories themselves. As a result, we experience the art as narrative, its meaningfulness seen as something fully alive.

Collectors are only a small part of the reason that antiquities move from one country to another or disappear altogether. If one wants to show reasons why archeological sites are destroyed and works of art lost, we can look at the archeologists, who have claimed the moral ground. Archeologists are very destructive. They leave mud brick walls to deteriorate…or they remove things that they think are insignificant….Or they allow a site simply to deteriorate.

…But if we follow the line of thinking…that all objects should remain in their country of origin, museums all over the world would have to send their treasures away. Surely, in this day of global mobility, this is not practical or even thinkable.

…Even an object without an immediately known provenance should not be considered suspect. Some objects, especially small things, were kept by private individuals and never reported. So the provenance may exist but is lost.

…Collectors are the traditional preservers of our shared history. Knowledgeable collectors bring value to the objects.

…We believe that as collectors, we are following a long and honorable tradition. We remember that the great museums of Europe have, as their core, the private collections of kings and reigning families….We hope that we, too, will contribute to preserving our cultural heritage….
—Shelby White, art collector

Shelby White’s breathtaking comments—dripping with a patronizing, shameless entitlement that makes the Marquis de Sade seem absolutely humble (and pure as the driven snow) by comparison—were delivered in April 1999 at a panel entitled Antiquities: International Cultural Property?, where they duly shocked and awed the assembled audience. The panel was part of a three-day, international conference on cultural patrimony organized jointly by Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America under the title, Who Owns Culture?. White’s comments are, of course, even more resonant (and self-incriminating) today. The debate on the illicit international movement of cultural property, and private and institutional acquisition practices, is becoming more and more clamorous each year. But it is only now, following the decision of the Italian government to actively pursue its claims to, and even prosecute individuals for smuggling, its antiquities that it has reached such an unusually high decibel level. The trial in Rome of Marion True, the Getty Museum’s former curator of antiquities, on charges of acquiring artifacts that were illegally removed from Italy—and the fear that this case is only the beginning of an aggressive campaign, not only by Italy but by other countries that are vigorously seeking the return, from the permanent collections of prominent museums, of their illegally removed artifacts—has drawn extraordinary international attention, and the attendant focus, on the fundamental issues of cultural property and national patrimony.

It is hardly accidental that Selby White figures prominently in the latest developments. The private collection of antiquities that she and her late husband, financier Leon Levy, amassed over a long period is considered one of the world’s best. It is also one of the most scrutinized. For many years, the couple has been accused of illicitly obtaining ancient artifacts. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art moves toward completing its ambitious reinstallation of its classical galleries—and the creation of a Roman gallery that might possibly bear White and Levy’s names—the Italian government insists that the couple’s collection contains art that was illegally removed and trafficked from Italy.

As the scrutiny of museums, collectors, and art dealers intensifies, so does the debate over a possible global policy on illicit art traffic that would satisfy everyone. The problem is that, in their overwhelming majority, most discussions begin with the assumption that museums exist for the altruistic purpose of acquiring, preserving, and making available to the public at large the world’s cultural heritage—as opposed to the commonplace reality, well-known to any sociologist of bureaucratic organizations, that their primary purpose is self-aggrandizement and -preservation. It is thus taken for granted that no policy on the trafficking of cultural property can question, let alone endanger, a museum’s self-defined function as a cultural “safe house.”

White’s risible defense, cited above, of private collectors, museums, and, by extension, art dealers as guardians of culture against the alleged depredations of archeologists and nation-states would be pitiable were it not so tragic in its consequences. In the event, a more polished version of it has, for a very long time, been the main rationale against implementing new legislation—and strictly enforcing existing laws—to combat the illegal traffic in cultural patrimony. It has also stymied any possibility of dialogue to address the specific issue of the collections of some of the world’s major museums. This impediment to any kind of reasoned exchange of ideas has been abetted by the very influential notions of Stanford law professor John Henry Merryman, who has argued tenaciously that the “cultural internationalism”—i.e., using (oftentimes stolen) cultural property to enhance the understanding of human civilization generally—of these major world museums must be supported and defended against “cultural nationalism.” The latter term is how Prof. Merryman describes the general policy of seeking to return cultural artifacts to their countries of origin, since, according to him, such an attempt only reinforces national identities and cultural particularism.

Of course, the notion of the museum as a cultural “safe house” completely ignores the process by which the world’s leading museums came to play this role. This is not the place for a history lesson on Western imperialism or the sanguinary Western colonial projects and missions civilisatrices to which the West’s “great” museums were so directly bound. Suffice it to say that any debate on cultural property has to begin with the fundamental truth that most of the collections of the West’s important museums were forcibly and/or illegally removed from their countries of origin. Having said that does not mean, or suggest, emptying out these institutions. On the other hand, neither does it mean allowing them to continue to function as if business were usual, as if nothing has changed in the world—as if India is still part of the Raj, Guatemala a latifundia of the United Fruit Company, Cambodia the pleasure garden of French Orientalists, and Greece a province of the Ottoman empire. The foreign plunder with which most of these museums were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and were enriched beyond any imagining in the twentieth, cannot be considered sacrosanct in the twenty-first. Any debate on the issues involved has to account for the utterly fundamental fact of the origins of most of these collections. This is the only way to level the playing field and give equal power to both sides in this ongoing dispute. Until museums acknowledge that their self-appointed, and occasionally deleterious, role as “guardians” of the world’s cultural heritage is the result of a largely illegitimate (and sometimes even violent) process, a comprehensive solution to the trafficking of cultural patrimony will never—indeed, can never—be attained. Which is finally why, pace Ms. White, it is especially “in this day of global mobility” that repatriating national patrimonies is very “practical,” indeed—and why all of the world’s museums had better start thinking what she considers to be the horribly unthinkable.

Our Opinion

But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically….First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up against itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: well grubbed, old mole!
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Marx might have (ultimately) gotten it wrong about Europe, but he was apparently prescient about Latin America. Indeed, the famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire above is uncanny, in its virtually step-by-step description, of what has occurred in Bolivia during the last few years. It appears that the Old Moor still has a few things to teach us.

At this moment, following a series of democratic elections over several years, ostensibly leftwing governments are ruling in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, and now, of course, Bolivia. These six nations constitute just over 75 percent of the total population of South America (roughly 279 million people) and almost precisely 80 percent of its area. Putting aside the former and present Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, and, obviously, the French “région d’outre-mer” of Guyane), that leaves only four countries not nominally in the hands of the left: Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru. Of these, however, the latter will be going to the polls next April, and already a previously obscure former army officer by the name of Ollanta Humala is making waves, and quickly gaining in popularity. Mr. Humala was involved in a military mutiny against Alberto Fujimori’s regime in its last, most repressive, days (shades of Hugo Chávez); he is also supported by the country’s cocaleros (shades of Evo Morales). In any case, while Mr. Humala’s self-proclaimed “nationalism” is hardly assured of victory in next year’s elections, the specter of Latin American “twenty-first-century socialism” (to quote Mr. Chávez) is increasingly haunting the corridors of power in the capital of the norteamericanos, and turning the dreams of its “Washington consensus” into one policy nightmare after another.

Meanwhile, Paraguay’s president, Nicanor Duarte, recently met with Mr. Chávez to sign an oil agreement, as well as a common “agenda” for “social” development and “integration.” As for Ecuador, its government is now headed by Alfredo Palacio, who was actually elected vice-president on the ticket of Lucio Gutiérrez, yet another former cashiered army officer (Mr. Chávez’s shadow is a strikingly looming presence), who, after winning the presidency in 2002 with 55 percent of the vote and the support of the leftwing Movimiento Popular Democrático and the Pachakutik movement of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples (further shades of Evo Morales), abruptly turned hard-right and embraced Washington’s anything-but-consensual consensus. Unsurprisingly, he immediately found himself facing mass street protests. More to the point, he was ultimately removed from office, fled the country, returned, and was instantly arrested—which is why Mr. Palacio is now running things.

Which leaves us with the only true reactionary, Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, who, not at all coincidentally, is also George W. Bush’s only genuine ally in Latin America—although even Mr. Uribe is now negotiating in, of all places, Cuba with a group that is part of Colombia’s decades-long leftwing insurgency. Meanwhile, north of the Colombian-Panamanian border, the current favorite in next year’s presidential elections in Mexico is Mexico City’s popular leftist mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, while in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega is also tipped to return to the presidential palace in October—through an election this time.

We would remind our readers here that, while first running for the presidency, George W. Bush insisted that Latin America would become a central focus of US foreign policy, stating in August 2000 that, unlike Bill Clinton, he would “look south, not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental commitment to my presidency.” Of course, Mr. Bush has added an entirely new dimension to the notion of attention deficit disorder (for which, unfortunately, the world, and the people of Iraq in particular, are paying). In the event, he might or might not have been looking south during the last few years. What is certain is that Latin Americans have been looking north, and have collectively trembled at what they have seen.

When Che Guevara was summarily executed at La Higuera, Bolivia, on the ninth of October 38 years ago, the US government, which had orchestrated his capture, assumed that it was the end of Latin America’s “revolutionary era.” Clearly, no one in Washington had reckoned with the old, continually grubbing mole. But the Bolivian peasants who, immediately upon his murder, rechristened the fallen guerrillero as “San Ernesto de La Higuera” and “El Cristo de Vallegrande” knew instinctively—their very lives were proof of it—that an era can last decades or centuries, and that revolution was not a momentary cry for justice, doomed to dissolve as soon as it is uttered, but a perpetual articulation of freedom and resolve. In the last four decades, the image of Che Guevara has been ubiquitous in Bolivia. This has been so for many reasons, but primarily because Bolivians understand that he died in their country, not his own, prematurely and violently, not in old age or in his bed, because he had chosen to. Because, for him, Washington was not the capital of America but merely the headquarters of “USA, Inc.,” a corporation whose only function is to ensure (peacefully if possible, violently if need be) the permanent domination—and, in fact, cultural extinction—of all the peoples of what he always called, echoing José Martí, “our America.”

History is its own science. It possesses its own physics and geometry. It is its own calculus. We said above that South America at the moment has six “ostensibly” leftwing governments. Chile’s Ricardo Lagos bears hardly any resemblance to Mr. Chavez. Brazil’s Lula da Silva is a fifth-grade dropout while Uruguay’s Tabaré Vázquez is an oncologist. Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner was elected president as the candidate of the most politically entrenched, and historically suspect, party in his country, the Peronist Movimiento Justicialista, while Evo Morales rode the wave, under the banner of a relatively recent formation, the Movimiento al Socialismo, of a new and audacious movement of the most socially marginalized and historically repressed Bolivians. There are no formulas here. No recipes. And certainly no hidden “foreign” interference, as the Bush administration keeps insisting, by Hugo Chávez, let alone by that US demon for all seasons, Fidel Castro.

Quite the opposite, if there is any “external factor” operating in Latin America today, it is obviously the reverse influence of the United States, whose model of economic growth, social development, and political rule is universally scorned. There are, of course, Latin Americans who continue look to the US as their beacon of self-validation (and social survival), but they are the usual suspects: those Manhattan-dreaming pseudo-cosmopolitans whose only connection to their own countries has always been defined by privilege (or illusion) and a particularly appalling form of moral absence that comes close to pure brutality.

So, the old mole grubs on. In the New World if not in the Old. But that Old World—the hoary burrower’s birthplace now sunk into a social lassitude verging on moral dissolution—can learn much from the New, particularly about resistance and purpose. The irony, of course, is that it is the Old World that has the wealth and power and sheer sovereignty to assert its freedom of will and action. It is afraid to do so, however, always skulking away pathetically like a beaten dog in the face of any opposition from the One and Only Hyperpower left in either World. But why is that? Fear? A sense of complicity? Or just the painful truth that it’s gotten used to a deeply indulgent social masquerade in which the license to retreat (invariably into a grotesquely inflated self) has replaced the freedom—the right, in other words—to engage and, most important of all, contest reality? No matter. The old mole keeps grubbing.

Politics

A talented football player and straight-A student, Ahmadinejad sailed through educational and professional hierarchies with great ease. People who know him speak admiringly of his “indefatigable habits of work” and “financial incorruptibility.” A modest man, he inhabited an unpretentious house in a lower-middle-class area of Tehran and drove a Paykan, Iran’s cheapest, mass-produced car. So far, this description sounds nothing like the Western media’s new demon. Describing him, however, as a radical fundamentalist who was such a fervent supporter of gender segregation (in accordance with Islamic religious norms) during his time as mayor of Tehran that he proposed separate male and female graveyards, Western critics have pointed to his military background as proof that he is a fearless religious nationalist. For their part, upper-class Iranians sneer at his common looks and ordinary-Joe appearance, even as Ahmadinejad himself stresses it to appeal to large segments of the population.

As usual, the truth is somewhere in between. Ahmadinejad is arguably the most controversial Iranian leader since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself was greeted upon his arrival in Iran by delirious millions one February morning in 1979. Khomeini, of course, went on to overthrow the second and last occupant of the Peacock Throne and institute an Islamic republic that has had only two other non-clerical presidents in 26 years, none of whom remained in their posts to the end of their terms. Abolhassan Bani Sadr was impeached while Mohammad Ali Rajai was assassinated in a terrorist attack. For a country that is not short on flamboyant politicians, it is surprising that Iran’s most controversial one so far is unassuming, colorless, deeply ordinary, and—by common agreement—lacking in the charisma of his dashing predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. His election in June this year came like a thunderbolt in a summer sky, shocking foreigners and locals alike and dividing Iranian society along previously obscured class lines.

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—still teetering in the presidential hot-seat five months after being elected in an unprecedented two-round contest—is already such a controversial leader outside Iran, his standing is not all that better at home. Recently, following the Iranian parliament’s rejection of his third nominee for the crucial position of oil minister, Ahmadinejad found himself embroiled in the most serious political crisis of his brief presidency. Having already angered and unsettled the clerical establishment by appearing as a younger upstart who pledged to “cut the hands off” the corrupt officials exploiting Iran’s wealth, the 49-year-old former Revolutionary Guard appeared to be sailing perilously close to the wind. The fact that several reformist MPs voted for Ahmadinejad’s choice while the conservatives opted to reject him en masse sent a signal to the new president that he should consult more with others and take fewer decisions unilaterally.

“They are intending to give Ahmadinejad a year to prove himself and if he hasn’t settled down by then, then they will decide whether to remove him or not,” said an Iranian analyst to me. “But for the time being, impeaching him and removing him would reflect very badly on and destabilize the Islamic republic.” In fact, it was exactly in order to protect the republic that Ahmadinejad’s rival, Hashemi Rafsanjani, did not step down immediately after the presidential elections went to an unprecedented second round. Despite the opinion of a number of his colleagues, and classified internal government polls, that he was destined to lose, Rafsanjani resolved to become a sacrificial lamb and stick out the election in order to preserve the appearance of a normal contest at a time when Washington was accusing Tehran of being insufficiently democratic. He is now garnering his reward for his selfless act by being apportioned some foreign-policy duties and a greater share of decisionmaking in negotiations with the EU-3 (Britain, Germany, and France) on Iran’s nuclear program. A meeting with Rafsanjani remains a must-have appointment on any foreign official’s itinerary. Ordinary people look at each other knowingly when his name is mentioned, implying that he remains the real power behind the throne.

Despite not being a cleric, critics have identified Ahmadinejad’s intense religiosity as his defining and potentially most unquantifiable trait. His apparent belief in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the twelfth and “missing imam” who entered occultation in 941 CE and who the Shi’a believe will return to rule before Judgment Day, has prompted concern among Iran-watchers, who discern a sharp swing away from the pragmatism of former president Khatami. Ahmadinejad has already donated $14 million to the holy well of Jamkaran in Isfahan, at the bottom of which many Shi’a believe the imam is hiding and around which a magnificent mosque has been constructed. Ahmadinejad is said to have required members of his cabinet to sign a formal declaration of loyalty to the twelfth imam that was subsequently dropped into the well, fluttering down to rest on top of several thousand prior petitions and letters already lying there from worshippers over the centuries.

But Ahmadinejad also comes from a military background, a sign of the times in a country that fought invading neighbor Iraq to a bloody standstill for nine years. That nine-year war, in which over a million men died on both sides, intellectually molded an entire generation and laid the seeds of today’s militarization. While many Iranians lost faith in their Islamic revolution as they saw its leadership manipulate the war, artificially extending it in order to consolidate power at home, others identified ever more closely with the Islamic republic. Ahmadinejad belongs to the latter group.

So, while Ahmadinejad may be only the third non-clerical president of the republic since its inception, he is just as pious, if not more so, than his predecessors. His first action following his electoral victory was to visit Behesht-e Zahra, a sprawling cemetery in south Tehran that is the world’s largest, to pay his respects at Khomeini’s shrine. Then, obviously sending a pious message to the country, he convened his first cabinet meeting in the holy city of Mashhad, site of the tomb of the fourth Shi’a imam (and the only one buried on Iranian soil). It must have come as a shock to him, therefore, and the first intimation of trouble, when, as reports suggest, he was bluntly snubbed in his request for an audience with the powerful Ayatollah Tabasi, who runs the Imam Reza Foundation, one of the largest in the country. In a humiliating rebuff, Ahmadinejad is said to have been booked to meet with the ayatollah’s chief-of-staff.

Moreover, Iranian lawmakers and the press have been harsh in their criticism of Ahmadinejad’s appointees, whom they describe as people of limited competence who have been selected on the basis of connections and a shared background with the president. As the head of Iran’s energy commission, Kamal Daneshyar, said recently, Ahmadinejad’s criteria for nominating ministers is “membership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Council or the Ministry of Information, studies at the ‘Ilm-o-San’at University [where Ahmadinejad taught], membership of the Tehran city council or being related to certain conservative politicians. The only thing…not important [is] competence.”

On the morning after Ahmadinejad trounced Rafsanjani, who had twice previously been elected president of the country, Tehran was eerily quiet. With tension running high, both sides urged their supporters to avoid celebrations or troublemaking. Commentators spoke of the end of the reformist era and a return to the radical early days of the Islamic revolution, Khomeini-style. On the empty streets, a few of Iran’s signature Paykan taxis cruised aimlessly for passengers. Ahmadinejad had ridden to victory on a wave of popular and official support, promising a return to original revolutionary values that were sorely needed, his speeches implied, in a country grown soft on corruption and Western goods. What Iran needed, 16 years after the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war, was to be transformed into an Islamic Sparta, its youth pummeled into shape and reminded of the Islamic ideals that once made their country great.

Most people agree that the new president’s most tangible contribution to Iranian political life—beyond slamming the door on reform and heralding the rise of a military bourgeoisie—has been the way in which he has brought into the electoral process an entire social class of pious, apolitical people whose presence continues to completely fail to register on the Western media radar. On the afternoon of the first ballot, chador-covered women swirled through the front gate of the Imamzadeh Saleh, a pilgrimage site in Tehran’s Tajrish district, and toward the electoral center set up right in front of the mosque. Two women who had just voted were walking away, discussing their choice. Laughing, one turned to her friend and confessed to having voted for Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf “because he’s so handsome.” Qalibaf, a conservative who failed even to make the second round, has now taken Ahmadinejad’s former position as mayor of Tehran. While that particular woman might have been bewitched by Qalibaf’s professional ad campaign, a great part of Ahmadinejad’s critical support came from the local Bassij militias and from those pious folk for whom voting was just an afterthought on the way home after Friday prayers. The latter’s choices very often tended to match the suggestions of their imams, and anecdotal evidence points to many prayer leaders switching their support from Qalibaf to Ahmadinejad at the last moment.

These largely poverty-stricken urban and rural masses, whose religiosity would likely have stopped them from participating in elections before, appear to have voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. He appealed to them through his low-profile campaigning, divorced from the glitter that other electoral hopefuls employed. Describing himself as a mardomyar (man of the people) and the Iranian nation’s “little servant and street-sweeper” boosted his popularity and tied in with his proven track record as mayor of Tehran. Even as Iran’s Westernized bourgeoisie sneered at Ahmadinejad’s looks and comportment, they miscalculated the emergence of a new, populist idol filling the widening class void. Since his election, Ahmadinejad has donated several expensive Persian carpets in the presidential office to the Carpet Museum, and has refused to receive dignitaries in the shah’s opulent former palaces, preferring to see them instead in his old offices in smog-choked, downtown Tehran. Last week, he reportedly refused to fly a VIP jet, which cost $59 million and had been specially set aside for foreign trips, and instructed his transport minister to use it “for public, commercial purposes.”

The pitched battle between an entrenched and largely corrupt elite, on the one hand, and a surging neoconservative class of purists, on the other, has unsettling echoes from Ryszard Kapuscinski‘s slim but insightful book, Shah of Shahs, which was published in 1982. As he witnessed the birth pangs of the Islamic republic, Kapuscinski observed popular committees being set up and staffed by barely literate but fervent revolutionaries. He noted that:

the newcomers invariably have more ambition than skill. As a result, with each upheaval, the country goes back to the starting point because the victorious new generation has to learn all over again what it cost the defeated generation so much toil to master. And does this mean that the defeated ones were efficient and wise? Not at all—the preceding generation sprang from the same roots as those who took its place.

A generation later, Kapuscinski’s comment has lost none of its topicality. When he writes that, “a young, energetic workforce that knows little (they are often illiterate) but possesses great ambition and is ready to fight for anything” moves to the city, where its members “find an entrenched establishment…learn the ropes, settle in a bit, occupy starting positions, and go on the attack,” he could be reporting today from the slums of south Tehran or the urban accretions of a half-dozen major cities peppering the great Iranian plateau. “In the struggle, they make use of whatever ideology they have brought from the village,” writes Kapuscinski, and concludes:

Usually this is religion. Since they are the ones who are truly determined to get ahead, they often succeed. Then authority passes into their hands. But what are they to do with it? They begin to debate and they enter the spellbound circle of helplessness. The nation stays alive somehow, as it must, and in the meantime they live better and better. For a while, they are satisfied. Their successors are now roaming the vast plains, grazing camels, tending sheep but they too will grow up, move to the city, and start struggling.

For the community of Western analysts, diplomats, and journalists whose task it is to observe the new Iranian president, the emergence of a new elite reputedly inspired by a mysterious, hardline ayatollah is unsettling. They seek to penetrate a mentality and social background to which they have no direct access, and in which their very presence would be cause of intense suspicion. Foreign diplomats in Iran who make the effort to visit Qom, the spiritual home of the Islamic republic, are subject to restrictions. Meetings with senior clergy are encumbered by protocol and highly structured, inflexible settings. Iranian interpreters, paradoxically, add an extra layer of inaccessibility.

Aside from homing in on Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s primary inspiration, analysts have also identified Mojtaba Hashemi Samareh as the president’s closest adviser. An intelligence and foreign ministry veteran, Samareh is said to have met Ahmadinejad in western Iran during the war, when both men served in the Revolutionary Guard. Subsequently, he became a confidante of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi and entered the foreign ministry through his recommendation. Today, Samareh keeps a portrait of his mentor on his desk, rather than the traditional pictures of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei (the Islamic republic’s first and succeeding supreme leaders). He is said to sit in on all presidential meetings and has the power to dismiss ambassadors and ministers with just a word. Having devoted his entire life to the Islamic republic, his professional background stretches from the Revolutionary Guard to the intelligence services, and has always involved extremist, right-wing circles. (He was not only director of the foreign ministry’s placement office, which checked the backgrounds of diplomats headed to Iranian missions abroad, but he also taught the “psychology of infidels” during his time at the ministry.) On foreign trips, Samareh refrains from going to hotels or even guesthouses of Iranian embassies, but prefers to sleep in a mosque, guarded by a heavy security detail. He is said to have done this often in London and Hamburg. When at his office in Tehran, he is said to go with Ahmadinejad to the mosque at the presidential palace every day after work, and pray with the president. His strong support for the Jamkaran well finds an echo in the recent financial donation made to upgrade the site.

In 1997, with newly elected president Mohammad Khatami spearheading a rollback of hardliners, Ahmadinejad taught engineering classes at ‘Ilm-o-San’at University, sporting a Palestinian kaffiyeh around the campus. While kaffiyehs are standard symbols for the pro-Palestinian cause in the West, in Iran they also represent religiosity and a commitment to the hard-right wing of the Islamic republic. To have worn one in the relative liberalism of a university environment at the peak of the reformist wave indicated single-minded opposition to what the Khatami era represented.

Today, Khatami is banished and Ahmadinejad in power. It is a sign of the times that Rafsanjani, bête noire of the reformists and suspected of sanctioning the assassinations of intellectuals in the mid-1990s, appears to be the sole voice of moderation on the political landscape. Last summer, shortly before firing 40 ambassadors in what was possibly the largest purge of the foreign service since the shah’s fall, Ahmadinejad addressed an annual gathering of Iranian envoys from around the world. Coming face to face with many of them for the first time, he is reported to have told them, “We have had a revolution in this country. Some people among us seem to have trouble understanding that fact!”

Diaspora

American and Greek flags were flying from a huge construction crane, silhouetted against the Sears Tower, that was busy clearing a plot of land on Halstead Street, the site of the city’s future Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center. The museum, established in 1992, will move out of its cramped quarters in a nearby office building and into its own structure, which will provide ample space for exhibits, an archive, a library, and an auditorium. Its new facilities will enable it to do an even better job in memorializing an important chapter in the history of the Greeks of the United States.

When Greek transatlantic emigration began in earnest in the 1890s, Chicago was a major destination. It offered work in its industries and retail sector, and was the gateway for all the Greeks who went on to the railroads and mines of the Mountain West. Soon, Chicago acquired the biggest Greektown of all US cities and, by the 1920s, a population of over 20,000 Greeks. It would take the Greek influx in the 1950s to push the numbers of Greeks in New York higher than those in Chicago.

Greek America’s unofficial capital during the first half of the twentieth century has been celebrated by Greek American writers like no other American city. Chicago has been a regular reference-point in the prolific writings of novelist Harry Mark Petrakis and of the late Theano Papazoglou-Margari, the doyenne of Greek American women newspaper columnists. In Papazoglou-Margari’s story, “Ê allê Eugenia” (“The Other Eugenia”), two women who left cosmopolitan Istanbul to settle in Chicago praise their new surroundings. The narrator feels at home in Chicago because it has trees and grass verges that remind her of home, while the title-character does not feel the need to join her relatives who have moved to Greece because Chicago is like a “big village by the sea.”

What passes now as Greektown is basically a strip-mall of ethnic businesses that are reaping the benefits of gentrification. It is made up mainly of restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, and specialty shops that sell Greek music, Greek Orthodox icons, Greek soccer shirts, and trinkets such as blue and white kombologia and lapel pins that proclaim—ironically, considering what happened to Greektown—“Greek Power.” Thus, in search of something between ethnic memory and ethnic kitsch, I returned downtown and visited Greek America’s most famous diner, the Billy Goat Tavern—although less famous perhaps among Greek Americans than it is infamous among baseball and Saturday Night Live fans who watched the show in the 1970s.

It is quite extraordinary that among the thousands of diners that Greek Americans have owned and run for over a century, this eatery would become associated with two facets of American popular culture. The first is the “curse” cast on the Chicago Cubs by the owner of the original tavern, William “Bill” Sianis, in 1945. Sianis, a Cubs fan, was ejected from Wrigley Field because he insisted on viewing the game accompanied by his pet goat, Murphy. There was no formal prohibition against taking pets to the baseball stadium at the time, but the billy goat’s smell was apparently too much for the ushers, as well as, legend has it, for the Cubs owner himself, Philip Knight Wrigley.

It was Game 4 of the World Series, and the Cubs were leading the Detroit Tigers by two games to one. Upset at the ejection, especially since he had bought two tickets, Sianis uttered the now infamous curse: “The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field.” The Cubs ended up losing that World Series (four games to three) and have failed to make another Series appearance since then. They are known as baseball’s losingest team, and while they’ve come close to the championship and made some rare postseason appearances, the curse has, apparently, proved too strong.

Sam’s use of “τραΐ” instead of the more formal “τράγος” pointed to his rural background in Arkadia, which I asked him to talk about. He’s from the village of Palaiopyrgos, actually “Bodia” or “Bodea” before a Greek government commission “Hellenized” its name in 1937 during the Metaxas dictatorship. A website on the village’s history, administered by the University of Patras, mentions a Petros Sianis aka Bodaitês (from Bodia) who fought in the Greek war of independence. The area, the highlands of the nomos of Arkadia, has witnessed waves of emigration to America for over a century.

Sam, born in 1934, immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and started off as a “piatas” in San Francisco, working a 60-hour week. I paused, not knowing what to write—it is so rare to hear that term describing Greek Americans this side of the Atlantic, and so frequent to hear it spoken in a deprecating tone by Greeks in Greece. Sam catches me out. “Yes, write it,” he said, “there are some people who don’t want to admit where they started from, but not me.” (His strong Arkadian pronunciation of Greek was intact after a half-century in America.) After a stint on the railroad, Sam moved to Chicago in 1963; by the next year, he had joined his uncle at the Billy Goat Tavern, which had relocated to its present address in downtown Chicago.

William rescinded the curse in 1969, a year before his death, but the Cubs kept losing, so Sam, along with Socrates, a descendant of the original billy goat, took the joint responsibility of lifting the curse. In 1984, they were invited to a now-welcoming Wrigley Field, and that year the Cubs made their first postseason appearance since the curse had been cast. But, as Sam explained, “they had us to the games here in Chicago, and they won two games, but they didn’t take us with them when they went to San Diego, and they lost three there and were eliminated.” Other visits to Wrigley Field have followed, but 1984 was the closest Sianis and the goat would come to reversing the curse.

Naturally, the Tavern now parodies the parody of itself. All the while I was talking to Sianis, his assistant, Nontas, from the village of Levidi a few kilometers away from Palaiopyrgos, was replicating an old Sianis and Charuhas tactic that led to the skit, getting customers to order double cheeseburgers. As the line of customers approached the counter, Nontas “ordered”: “Dablecheez! Dablecheez! Dablecheez!” Sam meanwhile was telling me proudly that he was opening a branch in Washington, DC—there are already six more Billy Goat Taverns around Chicago. When I asked whether his children are following the family tradition, he gave me a sharp look. A stupid question, of course: I know Greek Americans worked in diners to help their kids have a better future, not to take over the parents’ shop. So it is with Sianis, despite or perhaps because of the Billy Goat legend. All six have gone to college, he answered, the pride resonating in his voice, but as they are lawyers and accountants, they have helped him keep an eye on the business.

Sam would not let me go without a bite to eat. I accepted gratefully and took my place on the storied counter. What I would be having—with double-cheese, naturally—was too obvious for either of us to mention. Sam took the opportunity to help in flipping the burgers on the grill and confirmed that he still does all the jobs around the store. Serving me the cheeseburger, he said, deadpanning: “Δεν έχω φράις, πάρε τσιπς” and handed me a packet. He then asked me what I wanted to drink. By then, I knew my Greek American history well: “Κόκα-Κόλα, παρακαλώ.” (I hope I got that right.)

Arts & Letters

The Olympics, of course, make room not just for schmaltzy ballads, but for real GAS: the more large-scale, “classical”-sounding, and fanfarish, the better (see John Williams’s singularly large number of contributions to this genre). Pretentious gestures toward noble ideals and universal goodwill are de rigueur, but careful composers understand that any Olympics-related musical expression still has to be easily communicated and palatable to global audiences. The results, almost inevitably, are dismally vapid and middlebrow, appealing to the lowest common cultural denominator. So when Philip Glass was commissioned to write a large-scale piece to commemorate the 2004 Athens games, hopes were raised anew. Could the 68-year-old, Baltimore-born maverick, who studied not just with European giants like Nadia Boulanger but also with such luminaries as Indian tabla virtuoso Ustad Alla Rakha, breathe new life into the Olympic-music genre?

Orion, the largest constellation in the night sky, can be seen at all times of year, from both hemispheres. It seems that almost every civilization has created myths and drawn inspiration from Orion. As the project advanced each of the musicians and composers, myself included, used part of this inspiration to aid us in our creative task. And so the star-studded skies, seen from every corner of our planet, inspired us to present a multicultural, international, musical composition.

Glass elicited musical partners from five continents to help him realize his vision. They included India’s celebrated octogenarian sitarist Ravi Shankar (Glass’s former teacher and longtime collaborator, who, however, rather than participating in the Orion performances himself, passed along playing duties to a student, Kartik Seshadri); Australian didgeridoo player Mark Atkins (a musician of mixed Yamijti Aboriginal and Irish heritage); Canadian Celtic fiddler Ashley MacIsaac; Chinese pipa (stringed lute) virtuoso Wu Man; the Gambian Mandingo griot multi-instrumentalist Foday Musa Suso; the Brazilian percussion group UAKTI; and Greek singer Eleutheria Arvanitakê. Many of Orion’s featured performers are not just masters of their respective musical instruments and ethnic traditions, but are anyone’s artistic equals, regardless of genre. (In recent years, for example, I’ve heard Wu Man perform everything from arrangements of hit Bollywood tunes to new music by composer Terry Riley, and I’d probably happily attend a Wu Man program of Britney Spears transcriptions for pipa, if it came to that, in order to experience her extraordinary grace, wit, and technical virtuosity.) Surely, with a lineup like this, Glass would dodge the Olympic-schmaltz bullet—or would he?

I don’t reject Glass’s idiom out of hand; to my ears, much loveliness emerges from his intricately patterned webs of sound. Being a fan and student of some of the traditions from which he takes inspiration (such as that of North India, and West and North Africa) has, in retrospect, probably helped me to find my way into his music. Certainly, many other listeners find these Glassisms either boring or deeply irritating. At the performance I attended, Glass and his small group of keyboardists, percussionists, woodwind players, and vocalists (a band named, with a distinct lack of self-effacement, the Philip Glass Ensemble) brought these motifs to the fore from time to time before settling into the background. Whether one cares for Glass’s idiom or not, it is true that his contributions provide Orion’s one very slender and ill-fitting thread of musical continuity in what is otherwise a procession of poorly conceived, wholly artificial, and sappily “multicultural” episodes.

The first such exchange was between Atkins and Wu Man: the textural contrast between the heavy, rich tone of the didgeridoo and the pipa’s bright, pointed sound is one of this work’s pleasures, as is the extended solo by Wu Man that follows. Compared to Wu’s elegant restraint as a performer, Ashley MacIsaac’s nearly manic intensity was quite jarring. Decked out in (what else but?) a kilt, grubby A-shirt, sunglasses, and combat boots, MacIsaac demanded the audience’s attention. For him, it’s just not enough to be a fierce fiddler; he leaped about the stage, breaking into a manic jig at the end of his appearance that sent the audience cheering.

After Orion’s brief sojourn to India, Glass’s globetrotting ended in Greece with the arrival onstage of vocalist Eleutheria Arvanitakê, singing a traditional song about emigration, Tzivaeri. Despite the aid of a microphone in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s resonant Howard Gilman Opera House, Arvanitakê’s voice that night was disappointingly thin, tired and querulous. Her deficits, though, were rapidly obscured when all the night’s performers—Atkins, Wu, MacIsaac, Suso, UAKTI, and Seshadri, along with the Philip Glass Ensemble—returned to the stage to launch into numerous rounds of the song’s chorus: Orion’s obligatory Grand Finale. Although it’s a beautiful and striking song, Tzivaeri morphs, in this setting, into a symbol of the tepid, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory, and ultimately empty feel-goodism that is Orion. Who could have anticipated that the refrain, “Sigana, sigana, sigana patô stê Gê,” would become a We Are The World-like anthem for the twenty-first century?

But my cranky demand for artistic insight and nourishment definitely seemed to be a minority opinion on Orion’s extremely well-attended opening night. (The program was repeated on three other evenings as part of BAM’s venerable Next Wave festival, a series that is now generally content to be the organ of a very small and select group of prominent composers rather than a showcase for truly cutting-edge experimentation—but that matter deserves another discussion entirely.) As I left the theater, I observed other concertgoers wiping tears from their faces and asking ushers excitedly where they could purchase a recording of Glass & Co.’s masterwork. Indeed, such an artifact—a live recording from the Athens performances—is available, courtesy of the composer’s recently launched Orange Mountain Music, which not-so-modestly bills itself as a “new record company created to serve the fans, aficionados and academics studying the music of Philip Glass.” (Just for the record, I don’t believe that Orion works any better as a recording as it does live; I’d actually say that it’s even less interesting when one can’t see the performers.)

Although it’s rare for new music to get a second chance at life past its world-premiere performance—even if it deserves the opportunity—Orion has already escaped that common fate. Since its debut in Athens last summer, it has been presented, and well-received, not just in New York, but in Chicago, southern California, Austin, Melbourne, and Guanajuato, Mexico. Clearly, Orion’s “message” has done much to extend its shelf-life past the 2004 Olympics. In the end, the strengths of the composition itself, its elements, or the artists involved don’t really count for much: Orion’s wash of feel-good multiculturalism—devoid of any true dialogue, exchange, or insight—is all that matters. Of course, Glass’s star power—with a certain audience, at least—doesn’t hurt, either.

greekart

Politics

The following essay was first published, in a significantly different form, in the Greek journal Synchrona Themata in September of this year (number 90). Because we thought it was important that it be made available to as large a readership as possible, and outside a strictly academic environment, greekworks.com decided to translate it into English and update it for our current edition. We will be publishing a follow-up essay in our next edition.

The two versions of history
The official Turkish version of events consists of the following main points:

• The clashes in the southern and eastern provinces of the Asia Minor peninsula had already broken out by the late nineteenth century when armed bands, under the guidance of the Hunchak and Dashnaktsutiun organizations, terrorized not only the Ottoman authorities but also the native Muslim populations. The violence ultimately spread to the capital where, following events such as the bombing of the Ottoman Bank in 1896, it led to reprisals against Armenians throughout the empire. The argument, therefore, is that Armenian separatists were first to begin exterminating Muslims and then simply faced the consequences of their actions.

• During the First World War, a large segment of Armenians living in the provinces bordering on the Russian empire collaborated with the advancing Russian troops against the Armenians’ own homeland. For this reason, and as a preventive measure of military security, it was decided that, temporarily and for as long as existing conditions so necessitated, the entire Armenian population of a large area would be “relocated” and resettled in safer territories. In the process, it is claimed, miscalculations may have been made; certain cadres of the security forces or the army may have proved overzealous; and, along the way, the deportees may have fallen victim to attacks by Kurds enraged by the criminal activities of Armenian separatists. Be that as it may, the central government had—as much as possible, especially considering wartime conditions—taken measures for the safe transport and resettlement of the population. In other words, not only was there no organized plan of extermination, but the Ottoman state tried, as it always had, to protect its subjects. In any event, the archives are open and whoever wishes can study the relevant documents. Whoever can read Ottoman Turkish and can thus form an opinion will see that no decision, or order, for the mass extermination of the Armenians exists. Everything else is wild speculation.

• Today, when Turkey is well on its way to joining the European Union, those who oppose its accession have in their arsenal and proceed to exploit a series of obstacles that will finally force Turkey’s political leadership to exhaust its compliance and abandon its effort. First, it was the Cyprus problem; then, it was minority rights; now, it is the Armenian issue; tomorrow, it will be the Aegean, and so on. This ploy swells the wave of discontent against Europe as well as a sense on the part of Turks of being unfairly treated because they are not Christians.

Broadly speaking, these are the official Turkish views. Indeed, their most extreme advocates among academics, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, and politicians—mainly from the opposition parties but also in government circles—go so far as to claim that there is a conspiracy against Turkey’s sovereignty, and that the sooner the Turkish people and its government realize this, the better. However, in recent years, another perspective has emerged, supported by academics, intellectuals, and journalists who belong either to the broader left or are liberal democrats. Although some may dissociate themselves from others within the group, according to this view:

• The decision for expulsion described by the Turkish word tehcir did not refer only to strategically sensitive areas. Armenian populations were also expelled from the regions of İzmit and Edirne, which were very far from any war zone. Moreover, those who masterminded the plan were aware of the fact that survival was impossible in the regions to which the Armenians were expelled—in effect, the Syrian deserts—and that, therefore, expulsion equaled death. It is believed that Talat Paşa, the empire’s interior minister at the time and a member of the Young Turk triumvirate that included Enver Paşa and Cemal Paşa, was the mastermind of the plan. It is claimed that an apparatus that Talat kept at his home transmitted the orders sent by telegram to the local authorities in Anatolia. Actually, as early as the Balkan wars, the Young Turks had put together a secret group, the Teşkilatı Mahsusa (Special Organization), a precursor of today’s MİT, which was in charge of “security”—whatever that entailed—and undertook all manner of what would, in the Cold War, be called “special operations.” The persecution of Christians, mainly Greeks living on the Asia Minor coast and in Eastern Thrace, had already begun prior to 1914. These measures were deemed necessary as reprisals for the violent uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Muslims during the Balkan wars. But the First World War gave the Young Turks the opportunity they sought to do away with the Armenians, who were a constant source of annoyance, at the moment when the Western powers had their attention turned elsewhere. There are many cases of military commanders who refused to collaborate in these activities because they felt that these actions would tarnish the honor of the Ottoman army. As for the argument that no documentation of a plan has been found, it is obvious that the official orders included in the archives are very different from the secret orders that were received by the local authorities. No one expects to find written orders by Hitler commanding his generals to exterminate the Jews. But that doesn’t mean that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

• The crimes against the Armenians were acknowledged in the trials against the Young Turks following the Ottoman empire’s defeat and collapse, but also by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, who allegedly mocked former comrades that, instead of fighting at the front as their duty demanded, stayed behind the lines slaughtering women and children. Furthermore, when Atatürk set out to win the support of the local elders of Anatolia’s vilayets during Turkey’s war of independence, one of the first things he had to promise was that seized Armenian fortunes would henceforth belong by right to those who had seized them—assuming that Turks won the war, of course.

• One cannot ignore all these crimes, but that does not mean that the Turkish people or republic should be held responsible. Although the latter has utterly appropriated the Ottoman past, the fact is that all these events occurred within the context of an empire that was breathing its last and against which the Turks themselves finally won their independence. Therefore, political leaders and the academic world should express their regrets over these tragic events, but that should be the end of it. What is more important is ending the mentality that led to these crimes and might still exist among nationalist circles, thus contributing to the repression of minorities as well as preventing the full democratization of Turkish society.

The ongoing intellectual battle
The new round of controversy began in October 2000 when the historian Halil Berktay gave an interview to the liberal newspaper, Radikal, that caused a storm of protest. It had been preceded in March of that year by a meeting behind closed doors between Armenian and Turkish historians in Chicago organized by the sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek and the historians Gerard Libaridian and Ronald Suny that was denounced equally by both Turkish and Armenian hardliners, including the historian Richard Hovannisian, who declared that he would never sit at the same table with the Turks. As it turned out, that meeting was not only attended by many important scholars, who adopted an “alternative” approach to the issue, but, in June, at Bosphorus University and within the framework of the eleventh conference of the International Oral History Association, a workshop dedicated to the Armenian genocide included Richard Hovannisian himself. It was this workshop that prompted Turkey’s Economic and Social History Foundation, the Tarih Vakfı, to withdraw as the conference’s co-organizer, following pressure by the Turkish government. The conditions, therefore, had been prepared, and alliances formed.

Although Halil Berktay did not use the word “genocide” in his interview to Radikal, he highlighted the role of the Young Turks’ Committee of Union and Progress, and specifically of the Teşkilatı Mahsusa, in the persecution of Armenians and Greeks in the bleak climate following the Balkan wars. The interview led to Berktay becoming the target of attacks by various nationalist groups. Pressure was put on Sabancı University, where he teaches, to dismiss him. Soon afterward, on January 22, 2001, in a message posted in a chat room, Faruk Alpkaya, a young political scientist at the University of Ankara, claimed that what had happened in 1915 absolutely corresponds to the definition of genocide used by the United Nations in 1948. A month later, calling in to populist/nationalist journalist Hulki Cevizoğlu’s television program, the historian Taner Akçam said that not only had there been a genocide but that Turkey should apologize for it. Akçam lives and teaches in the US, and his book, Türk ulusal kimliği ve Ermeni sorunu (as well as its English translation, From empire to republic: Turkish nationalism and the Armenian genocide), also became the target of Turkish nationalist circles. On March 8-11, 2002, the second in a series of Turkish-Armenian workshops (“Contextualizing the Armenian Experience in the Ottoman Empire: From the Balkan Wars to the New Turkish Republic”) was held in Michigan, with roughly the same participants as in Chicago. Back in Istanbul, a meeting was held on June 29-30 on “Civil Approaches in Turkish Armenian Dialogue” on the initiative of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly—Turkey. In the same year, Hüseyin Çelik, today Turkey’s education minister, published a book entitled, The Armenian problem in Turkey: Taking responsibility/solutions. In it, he rejects the term “genocide” but argues that the governments of the Turkish republic should take responsibility for their actions. On March 27-30, 2003, the third Turkish-Armenian workshop (“Vectors of Violence: War, Revolution, and Genocide”) was held in Minnesota. On May 29 of the same year, in a lecture in Istanbul, the historian Stefanos Gerasimou, who passed away recently and unexpectedly at the age of 63, claimed that the issue’s legal questions should be separated from its historical ones, and that those who move in the field of legal responsibility should not selectively use archival material that belongs exclusively to historians in order to prove their point. In October 2004, a conference was held in Venice entitled, “In History and Beyond History—Armenians and Turks: A Thousand Years of Relations.” Finally, in April 15-17, 2005, the fourth Turkish-Armenian workshop (“Ideologies of Revolution, Nation, and Empire: Political Ideas, Parties, and Practices at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1878-1922”) was held in Salzburg, Austria. (Most of the information in this paragraph is cited in Mete Tunçay, “Çağdaş Türkiye son beş yılda Ermeni sorununu nasıl tartıştı—Tarihsel bellek ve aydınlar” [“How modern Turkey has discussed the Armenian problem over the last five years: Historical memory and intellectuals”], Toplumsal Tarih, March 2005, excerpted in Agos, No. 470, April 1, 2005, p. 9.)

This, finally, brings us to the conference that was supposed to have been held in May at Bosphorus University in conjunction with Bilgi and Sabancı universities. Although the organizing committee decided that the conference would not be open to all and its participants would be exclusively academics, intellectuals, and journalists from Turkey, a fierce debate had already begun in the media two months earlier. Interviews with Halil Berktay in Milliyet and Taner Akçam in Radikal, in which both referred to genocide, had touched off the controversy, whereas the historian Selim Deringil had pointed to the ambiguous character of the archival material in an interview to the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos. The debate was joined by two more leading figures from either side. The well-known historian and newly elected director of the Topkapı museum, İlber Ortaylı, accused the participants of not having carried out any specific research on the topic; he also charged that many did not even read Ottoman, and that others, such as the intellectual Murat Belge (who had studied English literature as an undergraduate) were not even historians. Belge counterattacked with a series of articles in Radikal in which, as a “philologist,” he criticized Ortaylı’s closed-guild elitism and statist perceptions, while defending his own right, and that of many others who do not read Ottoman, to express opinions publicly on the historical and political issues involved. In the end, one week prior to the conference, its program—which had been kept secret until then—was published. The storm was not long in breaking. On the eve of the conference and following a question submitted in parliament by Şükrü Elekdağ, the former diplomat and member of parliament for the Republican People’s Party, Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek accused the organizers of “stabbing the Turkish nation in the back with a view of the Bosphorus,” adding that “if it were within my jurisdiction, I would begin prosecution procedures immediately” and that, in any event, those responsible for the conference were all “traitors.” Given that Istanbul’s security director did not offer any guarantees for the university’s safety; that the city’s supreme public prosecutor had already requested copies of the papers to be presented in order to establish possible grounds for criminal prosecution; and that it was common knowledge that various hotheaded and extreme nationalists were preparing to raid the conference in busloads, the university authorities decided to postpone it.

Of course, this caused a scandal that tainted Turkey’s image around the world at a very critical juncture—just when the country is trying to show that it has begun to consolidate recent reforms, and that democracy and political freedoms in Turkey are no longer violated. Damning comments and protests in the media and on the Internet put the Turkish government in a very embarrassing position. At once, both Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül stated that they had no problem with the conference and that, indeed, it had to take place. Over the summer, emotions calmed down, which gave the organizers the opportunity to regroup and readdress the issue, this time with government support. When a brief announcement in the press made it known that the conference was scheduled for September 23-25, and that in fact Abdullah Gül himself would open it, people took heart. Since then, however, and despite the fact that very little had been written in the press, clouds once again began to gather over the Bosphorus. Nationalists mobilized; the foreign minister stated that he would not be attending the conference after all; the Association of Retired Officers threatened to parade in front of the university’s gates; and it was made clear that security measures would be draconian. It was hoped that this conference would finally take place, and that we would soon be able to present its proceedings, as opposed to the backstage activities that had accompanied it until now.

Our Opinion

On October 3, after many long hours of squabbling and intense negotiations, the European Union finally agreed to begin membership talks with Turkey. By overcoming Austria’s considerable efforts to delay and even derail the process by imposing conditions for entry that were clearly unacceptable to Ankara, the EU succeeded in avoiding a historic collapse in Turkey’s decades-long effort to “join Europe,” as the saying goes.

Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, had relentlessly pushed for, and ultimately brokered, the deal. His subsequent triumphalism was, therefore, both predictable and irrelevant. (Its presidency of the EU having turned into such a muddle, the UK is desperate for any positive spin.) US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who had been actively involved in the arm-twisting, was more sedate. Things have not been going well lately for the Bush administration, and Dr. Rice may be suffering from imperial fatigue. Still, the secretary of state’s reserve was a better gauge of what actually occurred a couple of weeks ago than the foreign secretary’s premature celebration and forced, faux-historical rhetoric.

To many, the consensus reached on Turkey proved that the EU is capable of functioning as a united, and integrated, body on a very difficult—in fact, potentially divisive—issue, particularly when compared to the failed efforts to ratify the constitutional treaty a few months earlier. The problem is, the two issues could hardly be more different in nature—or, more to the point, in their fundamental meaning. The rejection of the European “constitution” by the overwhelming majority of the people of both France and the Netherlands represented a very conscious and direct repudiation of the EU’s direction—which is to say, of its leadership—during the last few years. The “successful” resolution of the Turkish talks on October 3, however, was negotiated precisely by that same leadership, a political and (even more important) social elite whose credibility among European electorates seems to diminish more each day.

In the event, the agreement on accession talks was reached because the entire negotiation was simply about that: accession talks, a mere first step in what is already proving to be an inordinately long haul. Austria notwithstanding, most countries, including Greece and Cyprus, did not seriously attempt to derail Turkey’s Occidental Express because they know that, at the moment, it looks more like a milk train than a TGV. Once again, the vast majority of the Greek media showed how disconnected it is from reality. In accusing the Greek government of not assuming a hard enough line against Turkey, it ignored the overarching European truth: namely, that Ankara’s fate will no longer be determined in Athens or even Leukôsia, but in Paris and Berlin and Copenhagen and, yes, Vienna.

Which is why things look bleaker now for Turkey than they ever looked when opposition to its accession to the EU came only, and conveniently for Ankara, from Greece and Cyprus. Public opinion among the electorates of the 25 EU member-states is negative, to put it mildly. This attitude is not likely to change quickly, if at all, unless Europeans become convinced—which they are clearly not now—that Turkey is not a Trojan Horse, either for religious medievalism or (six of one, half dozen of the other) American hegemony. In its vast majority, European opposition to Turkey stems from Europeans’ perception of what Europe actually means, of who they really are, and of how all of this is threatened by a transparent, and cynical, desire to sacrifice culture and society to politics and economics.

We have said it before, we repeat it now, and we will probably have to repeat it for many years to come: we support Turkey’s entry into the European Union, given that Turkey wholly fulfills the conditions for it. But even we have to wonder what Turks themselves really want from Europe when we see their leading writer, and Nobel Prize candidate, Orhan Pamuk, threatened with prosecution for defending historical truth (on the Armenian exterminations and Kurdish repressions), Turkish women being assaulted by police for demanding equality of citizenship, universities and scholars being legally enjoined from holding an academic conference (to determine precisely the premeditated nature of the destruction of the Armenian communities of Turkey), and newspaper editors being tried for “seditious” opinions. 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 Gul, recently said that no country “can shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can.” Turkey runs the risk of shooting itself in the head. And more’s the pity, since we believe that Turkey’s accession to the European Union can radically alter the continent’s character—and not at all for the worse, as currently feared by so many.

Sports

A roar from the 30,000-plus crowd inside the stadium interrupted our conversation. The two teams had taken the field, and the fans were getting a first look at the players acquired by Panathênaikos over the summer transfer season, in a bid to challenge the reigning champions and perennial rivals, Olympiakos Piraeus. As I took my seat, I could not but think back to the last time I was in the stadium, watching the track-and-field events of the Athens Olympics. There were few signs of the stadium’s recent past, aside from the famous Calatrava-designed roof. The column atop of which the Olympic flame burned stood silently behind one of the goals, pushed to the background by the green-and-white banners and flags of the Panathênaikos faithful. A faded Athens 2004 sign on the track that encircled the soccer field was just visible.

The transformation of the main Athens 2004 venue back into a soccer pitch typified the fate of the numerous facilities built in the capital to host the Olympics. For those that had been used for the country’s two most popular sports, soccer and basketball, it was business as usual a year later. In the case of the other facilities, however, there was no business whatsoever—a worrying prospect given that their post-Olympic use was supposed to pay in part for the whopping €9 ($11.25) billion debt officially left by the games. The plan was—in fact, is, because nothing has happened yet—to lease or reassign some facilities to the private sector as a way to draw down some of the debt, while using the rest to promote sporting and leisure activities for the public.

Rather than owning up to dragging its feet, the government pretends that all is well. In what must be one of the most grotesque misrepresentations of reality during its 15-month tenure in office, it organized a first-anniversary series of events ironically labeled (although the irony was inadvertent and apparently lost on the government), “Open Stadiums—Places of Celebration—Way of Life,” which were held at the Olympic Stadium and Falêro. They involved a “birthday party” at the stadium, attended by schoolchildren bused in from their summer camps, and a songfest (featuring—who else but Greece’s current unanimous “Number 1”?—Elena Paparizou, the winner of this year’s Eurovision contest) at Falêro’s newly redesigned beach-volleyball-cum-concert-hall facility.

The Olympic stadium “celebrations,” which included 150 children blowing out candles on an “Olympic” cake, were evidently a source of inspiration to Deputy Culture Minister Fanê Pallê-Petralia. “These stadium open-days,” she declared, “will be held next year with children from all schools—not only in Attica—which enjoy athletics and Olympic sports. Celebration of the Olympics will continue.” But what about the facilities and the Olympic debt?, reporters asked. Brought down to earth, Petralia blithely assured everyone that the government had worked to repair and maintain the facilities, and was proceeding apace with a “plan” for their public and private use in the future. “This was a dream Olympics we held,” she said proudly, “in which the sole sponsor was the Greek taxpaying public, which is why it is time for citizens to reap the benefit. Our approach is people-centered.”

It would be tempting to blame both major parties for Greece’s massive Olympic hangover. The government, after all, either runs things (as best it can) or at least has a finger in the pie in all Greek public projects. Yet, there is more to the current, Olympic-size problem than the usual incompetence of public officials, many of whom owe their positions to cronyism, nepotism, and place of birth (to mention only the more egregious forms of Greek political clientelism). The reason for the hangover’s size is the same as that which earned Greece universal acclaim for organizing such a spectacular event in the first place: the enormous sense of responsibility of the Greeks to their ancient Olympic heritage, magnified (or complicated) by their unabating insecurity over their relatively recent status as a “modern” European nation. These two extremely potent factors combined to ensure the last-minute completion of preparations for and successful execution of the games. In 2004, the Greeks managed to confound their critics, who consistently underestimated, or mocked, the significance of the Olympics to modern Greek identity.

By the same token, however, Greeks are now confusing themselves by their failure to follow up with plans to take advantage of their Olympic facilities a year later. Nevertheless, the answer to that apparent confusion is tautologically simple: there is no Olympic challenge involved in the post-Olympic era. There is nothing particularly inspiring or heroic, in other words, about leasing facilities or reconfiguring them for “commercial activities,” whatever that means. Moreover, there is no longer an international spotlight on Greece, as there was before and during the Olympics. While the foreign media reported briefly on the padlocked stadiums, they quickly moved on to other, more important maters.

While this might seem to be an idealistic proposal, it is actually a realistic strategy: Greek politicians are better at building stadiums for major international events than at figuring out what to do with them afterward. The 1896 games produced the Panathênaic Stadium; the bid for the 1996 games produced the Olympic Stadium; the preparations for 2004 led to the Olympic Stadium’s refurbishment and Calatrava roof. If those and other facilities cannot be used profitably for non-sporting activities, Greece should make a virtue of necessity and work toward using them more often. Sugarcoating the proposal with some allusion to the Olympic or any other ancient games may make it palatable to the international sports community. It would certainly resonate in Greece: as Athens 2004 and post-2004 have demonstrated, Greeks are infinitely better at rallying around their ancient athletic heritage than at dealing with their contemporary sporting facilities.

Politics

One 24-hour-layover later, a homogeneous, all-Iranian crowd took its seats on the flight to Tehran. Dubai is mostly a destination for those secularized and well-off Iranians with enough cash to burn in its malls and five-star hotels, or hoping to flee the Islamic republic by obtaining a rare United States visa. On the return to Tehran, however, there was a shockingly calm defiance in some female passengers’ refusal to put on the obligatory veil until the plane was airborne. Away from the restrictions imposed upon them in Iran, and having tasted a few days of freedom, Dubai-style, these women now made their way back to Tehran laden with rebelliousness and duty-free appliances.

At the time, their insubordination was even more noteworthy as it came a few days after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as Iran’s new president. A veteran of the bloody Iran-Iraq war, Ahmadinejad is only the second non-cleric to lead Iran since the 1979 revolution; because of his return-to-the-roots, hardline policy, however, he scares secularized Iranians more than any other current politician. Representing the second generation of Islamic revolutionaries, he has surrounded himself mostly with the old companions alongside whom he matured intellectually on the battlefields of Iraqi-occupied Iran. Four months after his election, his record is mixed. His speech at the UN was a crowd-pleaser back home but triggered his country’s potential referral to the Security Council. More to the point, while few of the threatened social restrictions have yet materialized, there is increasing talk of a power-grab.

The minister of intelligence is Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehyi, a cleric who, in his former capacity as a judge, persecuted moderate clerics. Minister of Interior Pour Mohammadi is a former deputy minister of intelligence implicated in the killings of pro-democracy intellectuals. Both alumni of the fundamentalist Haqqani theological seminary, they are thought to have once belonged to a shadowy brotherhood of Shi’a extremists called the Hojjatieh. Although the group flourished during the 1979 revolution, it was banned in 1983 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself, who objected both to its rejection of his doctrine of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) and to its conviction that chaos must be created to hasten the coming of the Mahdi, or twelfth Shi’a imam, and, therefore, of the genuine Islamic republic.

***

At home, a foreign friend who has lived there for two years and speaks fluent Farsi informed me that Tehran was “depressed” following Ahmadinejad’s appointment of “a cabinet of hard-right-wing nobodies with no experience of government.” The next day, an Iranian friend whose father had served as an ambassador both under the shah and the revolutionary regime told me that neither she nor her father had any idea of who the new people were. “No one has heard of them, no one has worked with them before. They’re unknown,” she said. “Complete unknowns.” Further confirmation of that fact came from a producer for the Iranian state television network. When the new cabinet was announced, he told me, there was a scramble at national television for archival footage to run alongside the announcement of the proposed ministers. Nothing could be found for several of them, however: there was simply no visual trace of their political careers, or even of attendance at a mosque, hospital inauguration, or revolutionary or religious celebration.

Intrigued at how Ahmadinejad had appeared to keep his promise to purge Iranian politics by appointing technocrats, I dug deeper. An Iranian journalist described a prominent ideologue whose teachings had influenced several of the Islamic republic’s grandees. As he went down the list, this revolutionary mentor harrumphed at several intervals, and finally exclaimed: “My, my, these ones are really hardline!”

The swift social changes that followed Ahmadinejad’s election in June further worried the already shaken liberal Iranian bourgeoisie who refused to abandon Iran after the revolution and have clung to their former lives behind the gates of their well-appointed villas and apartments. Such a group gathered in late June in the garden of an Iranian businessman and his foreign wife. It was the morning of the second round of voting in Iran’s presidential election and the tension was palpable among the select crowd of Westernized Iranians sipping tea or coffee and nibbling on dainty cakes. In a burble of Farsi, English, French, and German, they discussed the looming possibility of a political unknown with no international experience running their country. Rattled by the decisiveness with which Ahmadinejad claimed the second spot for himself in the first round, the wealthy crowd poured forth their fears to each other, punctuated by digressions about the European and North American destinations where they’d be spending their summer vacations. “You’ll see what will happen,” one middle-aged man working for a Western multinational predicted: “This demonization of Ahmadinejad is all a smart ploy by [rival candidate and former president Ali Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani to get himself elected. He’ll win by a landslide.” Beyond the walls surrounding the property, however, the citizens of Iran’s Islamic republic were in the process of overwhelmingly voting Ahmadinejad into power.

But popular perceptions of Islamic practice are changing among ordinary Iranians. Year after year, the ranks of devotees marching in the popular feast of Ashura, the commemoration of the death of Shi’a martyr Hossein, swell with hip, urban youth who come out to join what they call the “Hossein parties.” Fashionably dressed young men and women reinterpret the uniform of mourning by slipping on tight black clothes and chatting each other up, exchanging phone numbers, and even dancing in public to the disapproving stares of the more devout. “I’m not a believer but I find myself feeling sorry for Ali [the fourth caliph of Islam and inspirer of Shi’a] when his name is being chanted by girls wearing black lipstick, nail polish, and mascara,” said an Iranian woman in her forties, who remembers that only the devout would attend Ashura marches during the time of the shah.

Reflecting such feelings, many voters opted for Ahmadinejad, a sort of Islamic Robin Hood who, it was believed, would redistribute Iran’s wealth (currently estimated at $200 million of oil income gushing into the country everyday) and return the country to the early, purer years of the revolution. Iran’s disastrous economic plight has seen per-capita income plunge since the days of the shah to an average of $1,800, seven percent less in real terms than during the 1970s. While Iranian economists estimate that $3 billion of capital has fled to safe havens such as Dubai, the Iranian government counters by saying that the revolution’s true achievement has been the redistribution of wealth.

The victory of the ultra-conservatives temporarily ends the eight-year success enjoyed by the reformist movement under twice-elected former president Khatami. Despite enjoying unprecedented popular support, and winning back-to-back electoral landslides, the reformist movement lost the battle against Iran’s parallel power system, which consistently blocked reform. What Ahmadinejad has going for him, therefore—uniting all government institutions under a conservative banner—may also lead to his downfall. Obliged to push through reforms, and with supreme leader Ali Khamenei unlikely to block him, Ahmadinejad will live or die by his policies. Many anti-regime Iranians even cheered the election upset, arguing that the new government was sure to fail its voters and discredit the Islamic republic in the process. It is widely assumed that the 2009 elections will become a general referendum on the republic, with even more massive changes following in its wake.

Three months after the elections, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government has largely left Iranians to their own devices but moved decisively to bolster its claims to a nuclear program and a right to negotiate with the West on an equal footing. With Iran presently stronger than any of its neighbors and amassing record oil profits, the planeloads of Iranians heading to Dubai are not likely to thin out in the near future.

Chronicles of Ozymandias

David Brooks is a past master at distortion through reduction. The only way to fight such strategic deception is to bury it with facts, especially because its effectiveness is so dependent on the assumption that nobody will bother to spend the time to marshal the evidence needed to refute it.

***

As I wrote in the first part of this article, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) tries to quantify precisely how economic growth leads to human development, and vice versa. While it is not interested, therefore, in tracking economic growth for the sake of “growth” alone, devoid of any social purpose, it does, in fact, record raw economic data and set criteria for purely economic development. For example, according to the UNDP, the US is fifth in R&D in the top 20 countries in its Human Development Index (HDI), with spending equaling 2.8 percent of GDP. Who’s first? Socialist Sweden, with 4.6 percent of GDP committed to research and development, almost two-thirds higher than in the US. Finland (3.4 percent and home of Nokia), Japan (3.1 percent), and Iceland (3.0 percent and site of world-class alternative-energy research) all lead the US in R&D.

Regarding GDP itself, annual growth per capita from 1975 to 2002 has been 2.0 percent for the US, which is the same as Germany and Finland—and worse than the UK and Austria (2.1), Spain (2.2), Japan (2.6), Norway (2.8), Luxembourg (4.0, but admittedly a special case), and, above all, the “Celtic Tiger,” Ireland, whose GDP growth over 27 years has averaged an astounding 4.4 percent per annum. That last fact is not accidental: ask any Irishman or -woman how it happened and the reply will be that the tiger really began to show its stripes with the massive subsidies—including enormous CAP transfers—that the country began to receive after it joined the European Community in 1973.

In Part 1 of this piece, I quoted David Brooks to the effect that, “The Western European standard of living [was] about a third lower than the American...and…sliding.” Not quite. The reason Brooks didn’t provide any data to support his ridiculous statement was because he couldn’t, since it isn’t true. In its measurement of global economic performance, the UNDP records (Table 13) 2002 GDP per capita for every country in the world in purchasing power parity (PPP) in US dollars. As it actually measures what a person can buy, PPP is the relevant magnitude in any discussion of standards of living. As the UNDP explains, “To compare standards of living across countries GDP per capita needs to be converted into purchasing power parity (PPP) terms that eliminate differences in national price levels.” The UNDP adds that, “The GDP per capita (PPP US$) data for the HDI are provided for 163 countries by the World Bank…” (both quotes from p. 138, Human Development Report 2004, UNDP, 2004). So, what do we have for the top 20 countries in the HDI?

What we have (always in terms of PPP US$) is US GDP per capita in 2002 of $35,750, which is very high—but exceeded by, yes, Ireland (a member of the EU), which stands at $36,360 and Norway, at $36,600. Actually, another EU country weighs in at GDP that is almost 60 percent higher than that of the US. As that country, Luxembourg, is a very special case—and, in my opinion at least, a statistical anomaly—I don’t take its $61,190 into account. But in “Western Europe” per se, Denmark ($30,940), France ($26,920), Germany ($27,100), and the Netherlands ($29,100) average out at GDP per capita of $28,515, which itself equals 79.76 percent of the US figure—nowhere near the “about a third lower,” or 67 percent, that Brooks threw out. But that’s just the beginning.

The very notion of a “standard of living,” or a “quality of life,” bespeaks and points to the nature of the society in which one lives, which affects both realities. Sweden’s per capita GDP (again, at PPP US$), for example, is $26,050, or almost 28 percent “lower” than that of the US. Except that Sweden provides all its citizens free, state-of-the-art, medical care and virtually free prescription drugs, all its mothers (and newborns) free pre- and postnatal care, all of its university students a higher education at a fraction of the cost in the US, all of its retirees decent and comprehensive pensions. It also provides culture (theater, music, cinema, dance) that is subsidized by the “state”—that is, by the society itself—and so is affordable to the vast majority of Swedes. Americans, however, have to pay for every social and cultural benefit that Swedes take for granted simply because they’re Swedes. So, Swedes don’t have to worry about IRAs or 401(k)s or the imminent rape of Social Security or a dog-eat-dog dystopian society that Americans grotesquely call “free enterprise” (free to and for whom?) but is actually permanent economic bondage writ “democratic.”

A “lower” standard of living than in the US? In Sweden, or France, or Denmark, or the Netherlands? Only in Eurobashers’ dreams. Visit Stockholm and then visit New York (or Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami), and then let’s talk. As for France’s socialistic, inefficient, and historically doomed $26,920 GDP per capita, it was only $20 lower than Japan’s $26,940 and actually $770 higher than the $26,150 produced by “dynamic,” massively deregulating, Blairite Britain. And, just in case anybody’s interested, the difference between the French and US “HDI value”—i.e., the UNDP’s statistical quantification of “human development,” or, put another way, “standard of living”—is less than four thousandths of a percentage point (0.936 for the US as opposed to France’s 0.932). That’s four thousandths of one percent, not the 33 percent Brooks took out of his hat. If nothing else, what is clear here is that most of the media in the Anglo-American world have become witting transmitters of pure, and the most specious, ideology.

To Davos and back
As opposed to David Brooks, the movers and shakers of global capitalism are nobody’s fools. They know that untrammeled “free enterprise” is an accident waiting to happen, whereas capitalism with a human face—aka the social market—is money in the bank. I began this long excursus with the CIA, then went to the UNDP, and conclude now with the organization that represents (and actually meets on) the commanding heights of capitalist globalization, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which gathers annually in Davos, Switzerland, to parley over where things are going and how they’re getting there.

It gets even more interesting when one goes behind the headline numbers. The analysis of each of the WEF’s three “pillars” reveals an unusually frank—one could almost say unsettling—look at the US economy. It’s true that the US ranks first—followed by Taiwan, Finland, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, Switzerland, Israel, Korea, and Norway—in the technology index, which measures technological achievement and preparedness. When we go to the public institutions index, however, which ranks countries according to the quality of legal environment, degree of corporate transparency, and extent of corruption, Denmark places top of the list, followed by Iceland, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The US, in other words, is nowhere in the top 10. In fact, it’s not even in the top 20. It is Number 21, after Chile, in quality of business and legal environment. Finally, when we go to what many people consider to be the most significant indicator of economic health—at least in the short term—the macroeconomic environment index, Number 1 is Singapore, followed by Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK, Taiwan, and Austria. Again, the US is nowhere in the top 10, coming in fifteenth.

Bottom line? Western European countries—both inside and outside the EU—constitute either the plurality or clear majority in the top 10 of every index, with five places in technological innovation, seven in business environment, and—this is truly astonishing and goes against every cliché daily propagated by the US media, from Fox News to the New York Times—eight places in macroeconomic environment, with six of those eight places held by EU member-nations. (What was that about “momentum”?)

The New York Times has consistently had one voice crying out in the wilderness of its op-ed pages for economic reason and, above all, respect for economic reality. On July 29, Paul Krugman wrote a column entitled, “French Family Values,” in which he asked the question,“…[A]re European economies really doing that badly?” His fellow columnist Brooks had answered that query in no uncertain, and thoroughly negative, terms the previous month in the column under discussion here, but it seems that Krugman was not impressed, either with Brooks’s method or knowledge of economics. His own response?

The answer is no. Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe—France, in particular—shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We’re talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time. And there’s a lot to be said for the French choice.

Krugman continues:

First things first: given all the bad-mouthing the French receive, you may be surprised that I describe their society as “productive.” Yet according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, productivity in France—GDP per hour worked—is actually a bit higher than in the United States.

It’s true that France’s GDP per person is well below that of the United States. But that’s because French workers spend more time with their families.

“The point is,” Krugman concludes, “that to the extent that the French have less income than we do, it’s mainly a matter of choice.” That’s exactly right. Krugman then essentially makes the argument I made for Sweden to explain that “less income” or a “lower level of consumption” is not indicative of a “lower” standard of living. Quite the opposite, in a genuinely advanced society, it actually indicates a much higher standard of living, as well as a much more rational society:

Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn’t have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.

So which society has made the better choice?

As I’ve already asked that question myself, the reader knows how I—and, I believe, most people—would respond.

What is most frustrating in this ongoing, unceasing, years-long “debate” about American “dynamism” and European “weakness”—and the allegedly “structural” reasons for both—is the fact that the data have existed for decades that confirm that every element in that statement is, literally, false. It is also pointed proof that Pravda and Stalin could never match the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal, and their minions such as Brooks, in their distortion of an everyday reality that everybody can see and experience, and in their ideological contrivance of a world that is the exact reverse of what the world is in fact.

Are you shocked? Most people are. It’s hard, after all the sheer lies that Americans have been fed about their Olympian economy (in a calculated, “bipartisan” consensus, I might add), not to rub one’s eyes looking at the numbers above. But here are some more, heavily redacted by me (from the data for 35 countries and the eurozone) to save the reader eye-strain, all taken from a recent OECD update (Productivity Database, July 2005).

But the reader will retort that he or she has seen all those statistics endlessly cited in the media about how US GDP per capita is so much higher—but that’s because, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his article about the French, Americans work more hours per year than the French, approximately 17 percent in 2003. Following is another table taken from OECD data for 2003, for the G7.

Yes, it’s true: the French are actually the most productive workers in the G7, beating out not only Americans, but Germans and Japanese. And who are the least productive? That’s right, those mythical Japanese, who also work more than anybody else. One other thing: if we look at PPP, the French are only 9 percent below Americans, and the Germans only 5 percent, in standard of living—before factoring in that comprehensive social protection that Americans can’t even fantasize about. Where did Brooks get that one-third lower stuff? But, wait a minute, there is a European country whose PPP is 38 percent lower than that of the US—but it’s nos semblables, nos frères, those supposedly capitalist dynamos, the British. Meanwhile, Canada’s standard of living is a quarter higher than that of the US, and the Japanese, while seriously unproductive, have a standard of living over a third higher than Americans although they only work about 5.82 percent more.

Andrew Warner challenges the traditional measures of productivity, by highlighting the importance of hours worked. He demonstrates that while growth of GDP or GDP per capita puts the United States clearly ahead of most industrial countries during the boom years of the new economy (1995–2000), this supremacy is not quite so obvious when data on growth of GDP per hour is used to quantify productivity growth. Warner also questions the common notion that productivity has suffered a serious decline in Europe over the last decade. Using GDP per hour calculations, he shows the clear lead of some European countries over the United States, and implies that the European “productivity slowdown” may be more myth than reality, when we focus on per hour data.

The only questions left to ask on this matter are: Why don’t Americans know any of these things (and why don’t they want to know), and why do the American media keep these facts from the people they are supposed to inform? (And, of course, a directly related question: How can Brooks and his ilk get away with writing their mendacious and thoroughly disorienting drivel given that some of their editors at least know better?)

Who works, and who doesn’t?
This is not to say that Europe—the EU, specifically—does not have profound structural issues to contend with, and resolve, if its economy is going to provide as it must for most of its citizens. (I purposely do not use the word, “grow,” incidentally, because I believe that the mindless notion of endless, and therefore purposeless, “growth” is what has allowed neoliberal ideology to so skew the debate on economic necessity.) One issue is, of course, the demographic problem of an aging population (and, consequently, of an extensive system of social support for that population), which Europe shares with most of the developed world. I happen to believe that the problem is not insoluble; quite the opposite, Europe could steal a page here from the New World, and easily align its demography with its economic needs through immigration. But immigration is a complex issue, especially at this time, and requires its own, exclusive focus. Suffice it to say that I think the EU will solve its demographic problem, and that it will do so by remaining faithful to its principles of democratic inclusion and social solidarity.

Another issue, of course, which, however, unlike the demographic one, is extremely urgent—is, in fact, the most pressing social problem in Europe today—is unemployment. Here, it is true that most of Western Europe—and Germany and France in particular, since they represent “core” Europe—has much to answer for. It is also true that the US has consistently been more successful during the last many years in employing people.

In its July 30 issue, The Economist provided the beginnings of an answer in its “Economics Focus” column, which began as follows:

How strong is the American labour market?...Twelve months and one election later, much of the political heat has gone out of the issue. In June, unemployment fell to 5% [!], the lowest rate since September 2001….Alan Greenspan warned…that the “slack” in the labour market was being taken in, and that unit labour costs had “turned up of late.”

The Economist then cited a new study by Katherine Bracken of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, however. “By her yardstick,” the magazine wrote, “there may be as many as 5.1m Americans who do not appear in the unemployment rolls….If so, the ‘true’ unemployment rate could be over 8%…the true number of jobless 12.6m, not 7.5m.”

It seems that Bracken has found that the “labor-force participation rate” has declined in a “striking” way, as The Economist put it, since the 2001 recession. In March of that year, when the economy crested, 67.2 percent of Americans over 16 either had a job or sought one; for the past year and a half, however, labor-force participation has been stuck at 66 percent. As The Economist points out, this seemingly infinitesimal difference alone translates into 2.7 million people who are so discouraged that they have stopped even considering looking for work. As a whole, according to the experience of the last five recoveries, Bracken calculates that the current “recovery” should have generated 5.1 million jobs, but for some reason—which no one can explain—hasn’t.

The infinite mystery of US unemployment figures is, of course, a hoary puzzle familiar to Western economists and statisticians. Notoriously, in the States, once your unemployment benefits run out, you’re summarily expunged from the unemployment figures and cast forever into a statistical limbo and the—oh-so-convenient—indifference of government. For years, American trade unionists, economists, and academic specialists have requested that the Bureau of Labor Statistics improve its data-gathering in order to accurately reflect real levels of unemployment in the country. But that dog’s never been allowed to hunt. In a classic case of American bipartisanship, all such attempts at statistical reform have been systematically squelched, since it doesn’t serve either Republican or Democratic interests to tell the truth to the electorate about the state of its own self.

***

As I said above, I’m not an economist (which I’m sure is obvious to any economist reading this piece). I am, however, resolutely, a man of the left, which means (among other things) that I’ve always believed that if citizens depend on “experts,” let alone the government, to tell them what is good for their οίκος—their household, from which the word οικονομία, or economy, comes—they are condemning themselves to political marginality and social misery. I know that Marx didn’t get it right on everything, even on base and superstructure, but he was certainly right to follow Adam Smith in the belief that economic enfranchisement is the foundation of political equity and, therefore, of social morality. The Greeks have a term for it: “τα κοινά.” Not at all coincidentally, it translates perfectly into a wonderful, and resonant, English term, which links the most glorious moments in the history of Britons’ struggle for self-government with the birth of an American nation: the common weal. This notion crystallizes a mighty Anglo-Saxon tradition that, sadly, is no longer honored, or even respected, in the lands of its birth and development. Put in a more personal way, it is precisely because I’m an American that I live in Europe today.

France’s saving grace has always been its conception of its own self. It is the way it looks at its history, its famous Revolution, its vast rich contribution to the arts, its leadership in style and fashion and its love of its language, the last under attack in an increasingly English-speaking world….Fashions change, but one invariable quality is the universally held belief that France was made for greatness, in the new world, as it was in the old. (“The World Still Comes to Paris,” Asian Age, July 28)

But David Brooks talks about “a lost decade,” “endurance,” “decline.” And where Singh sees a “world [that] still comes to Paris,” Brooks sees “sliding” standards of living and Paris on an existential and social par with Little Rock.

What Brooks wants, of course, is for Paris to self-destruct, to commit collective suicide. Not only to embrace McDonald’s and Disney and Starbucks, which it has, but—as in the US—to close down every mom-and-pop shop, every antiquarian bookdealer, every little petit magasin selling only puppets, or crêpe de chine, or puzzles, or cheeses from the country’s southwest, or sausages from the country’s northeast, or wines from every hamlet in the land, and for all those innumerable, and therefore economically redundant and pointless, cafés and patisseries and bistrots to cease and desist and roll down their pathetically quaint shutters forever. He wants Paris to become Peoria; he wants it to stop threatening the peace, and viability, of the American model of the best of all possible worlds. Well, Paris is not going to do that, of course. It would rather sink in its own glory than swim in somebody else’s. The good news is, it won’t have to do either.

Finally, as for all those statistics, data, lies, damn lies, and punditry, I modestly advise sticking with what your eyes can see and your brain can process. It’s always worked for me. Besides—and this is the happy ending to this particular story—my wife and I did end up finding a nice little place, right around the corner from the Rue de Buci. So, no matter what David Brooks says, we’ll always have Paris.

***

Postscript: This series was written in July and August, and submitted for publication in early September. Since that time and the publication of the second part of this essay, both the UNDP and WEF have released their reports for 2005. Moreover, certain other events have occurred in Europe and the US, most notably—and disastrously—Hurricane Katrina. Everything that’s transpired in the intervening few months has not merely confirmed the analysis above, but made it starker and deeper. Here, now, the depressing update:

In the UNDP’s annual global Human Development Report, the US has dropped two places, from eighth to tenth, while the UK has dropped three places, from twelfth to fifteenth, just ahead of France, which has remained Number 16. Pace David Brooks, in other words, the “Anglo-Saxon” model has led to a deterioration of quality of life in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon world, while the French are no worse off than they were last year. And what about the “socialist” Scandinavian model? Norway remains Number 1, where we last left it in 2004.

More to the point, at a time when the US has named as its ambassador to the UN a man who despises the organization and fundamentally believes in its abolition, the UNDP undiplomatically calls a spade a spade in a rare frontal attack on US domestic and foreign policies. In what the UK newspaper, The Independent, called “statistical proof that…the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare,” “a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad,” and “a clear challenge to Washington” (see “UN Hits Back at US in Report Saying Parts of America are as Poor as Third World,” Paul Vallely, September 8), the UNDP discloses that infant mortality in the US is now the same as in Malaysia and that black children in the States are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white children.

Indeed, the report unusually spotlights the US in two mini-analyses, normally reserved for countries from the developing, or even undeveloped, world. The first “box” (as the report calls these sidebars) is entitled, “Inequality and Health in the United States,” and begins: “The United States leads the world in healthcare spending. On a per capita basis [it] spends twice the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average on healthcare, or 13% of national income. Yet some countries that spend substantially less…have healthier populations. US public health indicators are marred by deep inequalities…[and] are far below those that might be anticipated on the basis of national wealth.”

But the second sidebar is truly “stinging,” to echo the Independent (I actually can’t think of any other way to describe it than as a public slap in the face of the Bush administration), and is entitled, “The Great Society.” Yes, that Great Society. It begins: “US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society speech in 1964 marked a new era in social legislation. It also set out principles that continue to resonate in debates on aid. Underpinning the…reforms was a simple idea: public action was needed to equip people with the skills and assets to escape cycles of poverty. Growth alone was not enough.” It is truly astonishing that the UN has cited—publicly, respectfully, and, above all, for global emulation—the single domestic policy (and vision) most reviled by the American right (both Republican and Democratic) during the last 40 years. Telling George Bush to emulate Lyndon Johnson on domestic affairs is like telling him to emulate Mikhail Gorbachev on foreign policy.

Meanwhile, back in Davos, the WEF delivered its own spanking of the US, as the world’s capitalist high muckamucks publicly displayed their disappointment in US behavior. While the US remains second in the GCI, Finland remains first, Sweden remains third, and Denmark has moved up a spot to fourth. Indeed, once again, to quote this year’s Executive Summary, “the…Nordic countries continue to do very well in the competitiveness rankings.” The report goes on to say that, “These countries share a number of characteristics that make them extremely competitive, including very healthy macroeconomic environments and public institutions that are highly transparent and efficient.” It then directly rebuts George W. Bush’s notions of intelligent economic design: “There is no evidence that relatively high tax rates are preventing these countries from competing effectively in world markets, or from delivering to their respective populations some of the highest standards of living in the world” (p. xv).

In the event, while the US has improved its standing—it is now 18 instead of 21 in the public institutions index (due more, undoubtedly, to Eliot Spitzer than to George W. Bush)—it has fallen precipitously in what I previously called the category that many people consider to be the most significant indicator of economic health, the macroeconomic environment index, where it has dropped eight places in one year, from fifteenth to twenty-third, one spot below Austria and two spots lower than Kuwait.

Moreover, this year, in a further refinement of their annual analysis, the WEF has reconstructed its initial three “pillars” into a total of nine new pillars. For those interested in the small print, the US now ranks only third in business sophistication (Japan is first), fifth in technological readiness, eighth in infrastructure, sixteenth in institutions, forty-seventh in health and primary education, and sixty-second—that’s right, that’s not a misprint—in the macroeconomy! Of course, thanks to Harvard, Stanford, and all those prep schools, it ranks second in higher education—although social-democratic Finland is first—but one wonders how long it will maintain its number-one rank in innovation being macroeconomically sixty-second? It is true, however, that the US also comes in Number 1 in one other category: market efficiency.

While the global analysts were globally analyzing, European voters in national elections were voting, again, in a way as to make the mediacracy tear its hair out. In Norway, the center-right coalition lost to the center-left opposition. But why would a government that’s led Norway consistently to the top of the UNDP’s Human Development Index be thrown out by the voters? I quote the Financial Times’s correspondent in Oslo, Päivi Munter:

Labour party leader Jens Stoltenberg…promised increased spending on social welfare thanks to the country’s soaring oil revenues….

At 75.9 per cent, turnout was marginally higher than in the previous elections in 2001.

Prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, who has led a centre-right coalition since 2001, said the government’s tight fiscal policy had cost it votes. The coalition campaigned on a platform of prudent economic policy to help keep interest rates low and the krone’s exchange rate competitive.

Widespread discontent over public services, however, surprised political pundits because of the strong performance of Norway’s oil-driven economy….Just last week, the United Nations Development Report named Norway as the world’s best country to live in for the fifth consecutive year.

But many voters, especially women, felt that the government needed to spend more of the country’s record revenues from the export of oil and gas to provide better public services. (“Centre-left wins majority in Norwegian election,” September 12)

The better services women specifically wanted were, in fact, improved daycare, which, for some reason unfathomable to their American “sisters,” Norwegian women consider to be a social right—and, therefore, part and parcel of their quality of life.

Just a week later, in Germany, the right-wing opposition blew a 20-point lead in the polls within just a month and managed to squeak by in the end with only three more seats than the SPD. Why did this immense collapse occur, turning an expected landslide for the right into a nail-biter, which eventually led to a grand coalition of the two opposing parties? Well, just a few weeks before, Angela Merkel, Germany’s wannabe Maggie Thatcher and presumptive chancellor, presented—painfully prematurely, as it turned out—her new finance minister, a particularly reactionary academic by the name of Paul Kirchhof, who proceeded to declare his intention of replacing progressive German income taxes with a flat tax. That announcement was greeted with an electoral panic rarely seen in normally boring Western elections and a quick rebound for the SPD; needless to say, Herr Doktor Kirchhof will not be serving as Germany’s next finance minister. (Prof. Kirchhof has many strange beliefs, including the particularly perverse view, given that the right’s leader is Ms. Merkel, that “the mother’s career lies in the family, which doesn’t produce power, but friendship, not money, but happiness.”)

I end with a comment about Hurricane Katrina from The Asian Age written by Jayati Ghosh. I follow the Indian press regularly for two reasons. The first is obvious: India, along with China, is an up-and-coming economic superpower—and seen as such by the rest of the developing world; its perception of global reality, and of the US in particular, is acutely important, therefore. More significant for me, however, is India’s extraordinary history of commitment to democracy since national independence, which gives its voice on international affairs even more weight and substance. Here, then, is an excerpt of what Ghosh wrote on September 14, in an article entitled, “The Destruction of New Orleans”:

Hurricane Katrina, which hit the port city of New Orleans and surrounding areas in the last week of August, was a major natural disaster, which would have qualified as an emergency in most countries. But what has been even more devastating is the abysmal lack of preparedness and appalling state of disaster relief in the richest country of the world, the imperial superpower….

Two weeks after the disaster, basic public order in the city has still not been established, and the US government has still no estimate of the number of dead or dying….

What is amazing is that both the extent of the disaster and the subsequent even worse calamities in New Orleans could have been prevented by relatively modest spending….

Thus, only $2 billion would have provided for immediate reinforcement and upgrading of the levees and canals in and around the city. Longer-term protection against the impact of hurricanes by restoring the ecosystem of the Mississippi delta would have cost only around $14 billion.

But Washington has been obsessed by tax cuts and any additional spending has been diverted to the war in Iraq….

In fact, it is a symptom of the problem that even as the levees in New Orleans collapsed, the US Congress was returning from its August break to take up, as its first order of business, a bill to make permanent the virtual elimination of the estate tax, a measure which would gift hundreds of billions of dollars to only a few thousand families, the richest of the rich….

Instead of quick action to deal with the calamity, there are reports of a “strange paralysis” that had set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died. While the local and state governments were certainly found lacking, the lack of response from the federal government was truly remarkable.

When George Bush finally visited the ravaged area several days later, he reminisced about the wild parties of his youth in New Orleans….

This is partly reflective of the dynamics of social and political power in the US. The victims of Hurricane Katrina were largely black and almost always poor—the ones who simply did not have the resources to leave the city on their own. These are not the US citizens with voice and political clout—just as this category provides the cannon fodder for the Iraq war, it also has less chance of demanding basic rights of citizens in the wake of a natural disaster….

Compare this experience to another American natural disaster, in a very different but neighbouring country. A year ago, in September 2004, a Category Five hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm.

Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died. The civil defence system in Cuba is embedded in the community, so everyone knew what to do and where to go. And Cuban government leaders were visibly leading from the front in organising the relief.

In Cuba it would have been unthinkable just to push people into a stadium and leave them there for days, as was done in New Orleans. There are neighbourhood-based shelters, all with medical personnel. The evacuation also involves moving animals, TV sets and refrigerators, so that people are not reluctant to leave their homes.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation, saying that “the Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their citizens form natural disaster.”

Yes, well….In any case, what’s obvious here is that, for the first time since communism’s implosion, the rest of the world is beginning to consider the prospect of the last remaining superpower collapsing as well. Until recently, most rational people just couldn’t believe that the US could possibly be as pathetic as it seemed. After the truly shocking stupidity and bigotry revealed by Hurricane Katrina, however, the world is slowly awakening to the sheer dysfunction, social incoherence, and pure and calculated disenfranchisement and abuse of the vast majority for the sake of the fewer and fewer, which all define American “core values.” It’s not a pretty picture, and most people, frankly, don’t want anything to do with it.

Arts & Letters

All of which, however, doesn’t appear to have cheered the composer himself that much. Perhaps suspicious of the process by which a persistent iconoclast is turned into an icon, Theodôrakês announced at a press conference in February that his primary emotion these days is “desolation…I have my family, my friends, but deep down inside, I am bitter.” The newspaper Kathimerini interpreted this as “giving voice to an entire generation that is beginning to lose its own”; in fact, Theodôrakês seems to have felt for some time that the river of history—which he worked so hard to divert from its predictable course—has returned to its usual banks, passing him by and leaving the stables as soiled as ever.

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Theodôrakês’s place in Greek music and society can be difficult to grasp for Americans, where culture has become so fragmented that no single individual can hope to capture centerstage in quite the same way, and where genre-crossing of the sort that marked Theodôrakês’s most revolutionary musical maneuvers has become virtually passé. Perhaps the closest parallel would be to his near-contemporary, Leonard Bernstein, for the fame of both composers can be traced to a similar nexus of talent, charisma, populist instincts, and leftist politics, and it’s not surprising that Bernstein was active in the fight to get Theodôrakês released from prison after the coup of April 21, 1967. Still, one would have to imagine a Bernstein morphed together with Dylan and bits of, say, Bartók or Stravinsky tossed in for good measure, not to mention perhaps a touch of Ralph Nader or even Martin Luther King, Jr. That it’s virtually impossible to imagine this is testimony to Theodôrakês’s overwhelming presence in contemporary Greek life.

It’s this adoption and representation of existing Greek music that has made Theodôrakês such a central figure in Greece. It was summed up in a comment by an audience member at the Thessalonikê concert: “This is something special to us,” she explained. “I look on stage and I see not a symphony, and not a bouzouki, but a symphony with a bouzouki!” Theodôrakês was responsible for an apotheosis of Greek song—not as classical music, but as itself on a higher plane.

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This made her the perfect interpreter for a retrospective of his work, although, in truth, the Thessalonikê concert was less a retrospective, in the sense of a career overview, than a juxtaposition of two snapshots from different eras. Reversing the temporal order, however, the recent Desolation opened the concert, while Anagnôstakês’s Ballads appeared in the second half. Set to music in the late Seventies, the Ballads marked the first point in Theodôrakês’s life when his popularity—immense from the early Sixties through the end of the dictatorship—had begun to wane. Sidelined politically because his idiosyncratic positions didn’t fit within any of the existing leftist parties, Theodôrakês found his music similarly sidelined by the influx of Western pop that followed the end of the junta. Gail Holst, in her excellent Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, quotes him around this period as saying that, “[M]y music once coincided with the spirit of the time. Now I am quite alone.” It’s fitting that he turned to the poetry of Anagnostakês, one of the so-called poets of defeat, whose life had followed a similar trajectory from political engagement to increasing isolation. As a group, the songs are more introspective and intimate than many Theodôrakês works, less immediately melodic and more complex.

It was the first half of the concert, though, that was the most thought-provoking. Where Pandês’s voice mirrored Farantourê’s in its tonality, Manolês Mêtsias’s voice was in sharp contrast. Like Bithikôtsês before him, Mêtsias comes from the popular tradition, and his singing is marked by the strong, slightly nasal and plaintive tones of the rebetiko singer. To hear him trade songs with Farantourê, as they did for the first half, is to become aware of the two quite different streams that have nourished Theodôrakês’s work: the Western classical and the eastern Mediterranean.

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Perhaps, after all, Theodôrakês’s musical and political life has been less about integrating opposites than about simply experiencing and expressing them, for as Schiller pointed out, balance is achieved equally well with full or empty scales. Theodôrakês, a lifelong leftist jailed repeatedly during the Nazi occupation, the Civil War, and the junta, also has accepted cabinet positions under rightist governments. Trained at the Paris conservatory, he returned to devote himself to the national music of his homeland, and yet this fiercely nationalistic composer also composed the theme for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He’s written a popular song for Cyprus in the wake of the Turkish invasion, then toured Turkey to promote closer relations between the two countries, then gone on to fight for the rights of Kurds and Turkish dissidents. His 1964 Mauthausen cycle was one of the first musical works to address the Holocaust, yet he’s also written a Hymn to Palestine that functions as the Palestinians’ national anthem—and both pieces were played, at the request of Simon Peres and Yasser Arafat, at the signing of the 1994 Oslo accords.

Most recently, Theodôrakês has drawn criticism for remarks that Jews were “at the root of evil” for their support of Bush’s war on Iraq (it’s Bush himself, Theodôrakês made clear, who is the root of evil); in a long interview in Haaretz, however, Theodôrakês reaffirmed his belief in the necessity of a Jewish state, and rejected Palestinians’ claims to a right of return. No wonder he feels bereft in a world that increasingly demands from its public figures that they adopt simplistic and immobile positions, and from its composers that they offer simplistic and immaterial pop songs. As full as the scales of his life have been, Theodôrakês may well feel the desolation that any ambitious artist must eventually feel about the impotence of art to deliver on its promises in a world that shuns it. As his favorite poet and comrade, Giannês Ritsos, said, “if poetry cannot absolve us, there is no mercy anywhere.”