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Friday, October 14, 2005
Book ReviewsSimone and Rachel: Together at LastWar and the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff. Translated by Mary McCarthy, with an introduction by Christopher Benfey and afterword by Herman Broch. New York Review of Books, New York, 2005, 152 pages, $14.95.
As related in Christopher Benfey’s introduction, Weil and Bespaloff led lives with arresting similarities although they did not know each other: they both shared in the intense intellectualism of Europe’s Jewish haute bourgeoisie, both escaped through Marseille to America (although Weil later went on to England), and both in one sense or another took her own life. In 1949, by that time a professor at Mt. Holyoke, Bespaloff killed herself from the gas of her kitchen stove. Weil died in 1943, having determined, although in fragile health, to subsist on the rations of the victims of Hitler’s oppression eking out their existence in France. She essentially starved herself, dying finally in a tuberculosis sanatorium. When she was younger, still in France, she had at one time determined to work in a factory, at another to join the military forces trying to keep fascism from Spain. Both attempts to share in the physical privations and agony of the working class ended in failure for this constitutionally frail, delicate child of privilege. Bespaloff, by contrast, had the more conventionally realized life, as a lover, mother, wife, published author, and respected philosopher. Nevertheless, it seems that, in the end, separated from her husband, lodged in the provinces far from her émigré friends in the cultural excitement of New York (and no doubt faced with yet another pile of mindless student essays to correct and “sympathize” with), she could not see the point of it. Both women read ancient Greek and were intimately familiar with the text of The Iliad. By coincidence, they each began research for an essay on the poem. It seems that Bespaloff read Weil’s essay when it appeared in Cahiers du sud in 1940, although she was well on her way to completing her own commentary by that time. Yet, most critics would argue that there is a sense in which she is answering Weil’s arguments. Weil was a pacifist whose essay is a condemnation of the substance of The Iliad, that is, warfare, whereas Bespaloff reads the poem as a heroic struggle against the enemy aggressor. Weil’s sympathy with the working class makes her detest all war, any war, which she sees as so much sloganeering, benefiting the elites while destroying the ordinary men in the trenches. Helen, she claims, was nothing but a specious pretext masking economic and social realities, no different from the twentieth-century cries for “freedom,” “honor,” or “glory” that misled men into battle. A pacifist, Weil openly sympathized with Chamberlain’s Munich gambit, although she came to realize belatedly that peace at all costs was not the solution to the menace posed by Hitler. Bespaloff, however, had been aware of the impending disaster from the start, and read civilized Europe into Troy and Hitler’s barbarism into the opposing Achaean forces. Both Weil and Bespaloff wrote as though they had extracted an eternal truth from The Iliad. Mary McCarthy’s excellent translations from the French bring readers as close as possible to the original texts. One senses that both Weil and Bespaloff were writing as though revealing eternal verities, with a style and perspective that were so much of the time and of their intellectual background. Thus, one might be tempted to dismiss the essays as overly determined by their context. These two intelligent readings of Western civilization’s founding poem, however, require the reader to rethink The Iliad. Weil begins with the much-quoted proposition, “The true hero, the true subject, the center of The Iliad is force,” foregrounding an abstraction over the claims of masculine heroics (the foundation, one would imagine, of praise-blame poetry), storyline (whether the wrath of Achilles or the battle writ large), or the sheer, luxuriant sensuality of 16,000 lines of dactylic-hexameter Greek. As a philosopher, she no doubt felt compelled to extract a “truth” from the narrative. But literature—particularly long, shifting, complex narratives—rarely offer up truths so easily, and one is perhaps better off simply experiencing rather than analyzing. As someone who has read The Iliad in Greek numerous times, gone through it in seminars with graduate students, and taught it to undergraduates in English translation more times than one can imagine in a 40-odd-year career, I am still never sure that I know what the poem is all about. Force, as Weil defines it, is the power that annihilates humankind absolutely, even if only psychologically. Homer would no doubt agree, although he would probably call it death, or harsh necessity. Where he and Weil would part company is over the rage and indignation with which she treats force. Weil finds force anomalous, whereas, for Homer, it is in the nature of things. Her furious response to the poem either affected her memory of it or gave her what she thought to be rightful license to alter the text. Consider the scene in which Priam comes to Achilles for the corpse of his son, Hector, and kneels and kisses the young Achaean warrior’s hands. For Weil, this is a supreme acting-out of the annihilation that force works upon a human being. In the event, she has the right to ignore the awe the narrator describes in the witnesses to this scene, the indubitable sense of command, theater, and self-discipline of the old Trojan king, which allow him to enact this obeisance. What is not permissible, however, is to falsify the response of Achilles, who, as Homer tells us, gently pushes the old king’s hands away. Weil excises “gently” in her determination to reduce Priam to nothing and Achilles to the force that creates nothing. Instead, Homer gives us a tentative rapprochement, the intimations of a social moment leading, as it does, to a shared meal. Amid the killing, about which Weil is so eloquent in page after page, come brief glimpses of redemption, and in this scene more than most. Here, at the poem’s close, Achilles—having accepted life’s meaninglessness, first in his humiliation by Agamemnon so many thousands of lines earlier and then in the death of his beloved friend and alter ego, Patroclus—now can guide the bereaved father back into living his life by seating him at the dinner table. The endless parade of deaths on which Weil concentrates is, as she says, a spectacle without the consolations of immortality, or patriotism. Weil calls it “bitter,” a word that has the underlying sense of resentment, which seems altogether absent in the narrator’s world-view. True enough, there was no Christian heaven or nation-state in Homer’s time, but Weil will not consider that every culture finds it own palliative for the horror of existence, and what heroic poetry offers is the consolation of fame and glory. “On the two of us Zeus set a vile destiny, so that so we could be the subject of song in later generations,” says Helen speaking of herself and Paris (6.357ff.). The narrator mentions (11.227ff.) Iphidamas, a Trojan ally, who “g[etting] married, left the marriage bed, looking for glory from the Achaeans” (i.e., in fighting, killing, and being killed). In its own way, Iphidamas’ story parallels that of someone leaving a dustbowl farm in Kansas for the sin and corruption of Hollywood. Weil’s strenuous condemnation of the active violence in the narrative causes her to condescend to these warriors: “They commence a war,” she says, “as though on a holiday from the confinements of daily life” (p. 21). Weil confuses twentieth-century proletarian soldiers with ancient-epic warriors who are professionals who make their living, and survive, by war and plunder. “Men wielding power,” she claims, “have no idea their acts of violence will come home to them” (p. 14). But she herself quotes both Achilles (p. 25) and Hector (p. 17) predicting their death in battle. Weil then introduces the Gospel (p. 14), saying that he who lives by the sword perishes by the sword. That observation, however, rests upon an entirely new idea to be found in the Gospel narratives, that love is an alternative to violence, with its corollary of everlasting life, and redemption, as an alternative to death. But such belief was not for the men of The Iliad; there were no witness-protection programs, or United Nations refugee camps, for them. In literary terms, they are all stuck in the narrative, prisoners of the formula and of the dactylic, hexametric line, reiterated over decades, and centuries, just as Fred and Ginger are locked forever into the pixels of the images of their dance routines. There is no way out. “The idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature,” Weil insists (p. 22). That may be true, but it is the essential reality of The Iliad: that we must die is the great discovery already articulated in the Akkadian Babylonian story of Gilgamesh and somehow brought over into early Greek culture. Weil wants to be reasonable (p. 24: “But actually what is Helen to Ulysses?” etc., etc.), but Homer posits a universe in which killing or being killed is entirely reasonable, and nowhere is that idea more powerfully expressed than in the similes comparing the behavior of these warriors to predator animals. Weil considers these similes proof of her proposition that force reduces humans to nothing; she claims that they inspire regret (p. 42). But perhaps they simply reiterate the mournful truth of natural human existence. And just as “mournful” rather than “regret” focuses on the sense of the inevitable that seems to permeate the poem, so, instead of bitter or bitterness, one might rather say “unsentimental clarity.” Weil sees “a monotonous desolation were it not for a few luminous moments” in The Iliad (p. 27). Somewhere in her fierce concentration on her thesis, however, she has lost sight of the extraordinarily rich panorama of humanity that enlivens almost every scene of the poem: Agamemnon’s haughtiness; Achilles’ rage; Agamemnon’s testing speech; Nestor’s exhortation; Odysseus restraining the troops; Hector rebuking his brother, and Paris’ response; Helen on the walls, or her exchange with Aphrodite, Diomedes, and Glaucus; Aphrodite complaining to her celestial family; or, finally, Hector with his family at Troy. Yes, force lurks in every scene, but it’s the knowledge that we all must die. Homer further redeems this grim thought with the brilliance of his narrative’s verbal construction. In the context of the rise of Nazi militarism, one might say that Weil wages her own war against the appeal and glamour of militarism upon which The Iliad insists. The Nazis’ uniforms, swagger, emphasis on blond good looks, athleticism, Aryan purity, and conscious insistence that they were the heirs to the Achaean heroic ideal, would naturally have made The Iliad suspect in Weil’s eyes. And perhaps the horrors of warfare in the twentieth century—going on without pause into the twenty-first and brought into every home by television, which demands the viewers’ consent in the proceedings witnessed—make it logical that we retire The Iliad from the canon. Weil’s essay has a force of its own that demands that we see the poem as a horrid seduction. Bespaloff, on the contrary, reads The Iliad from the vantage-point of the war she has escaped in Europe, as well as the great military conflict that underlies Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is the conflict between Trojan and Achaean, not the wrath of Achilles, the self-announced theme of the narrator, which defines Homer’s narrative for her. Among the throng of players in this vast panorama, she focuses on Hector, as the defender of his city and by extension civilization itself, and thus can say, “the duel between Achilles and Hektor forms The Iliad’s true center” (p. 48). Simone Weil compared Helen to Anna Karenina. Whether that inspired Bespaloff to look more closely at Tolstoy, there is no denying that War and Peace seems to be much influenced by the Homeric poem. Nikolai Rostov’s first encounter of warfare, for instance, is one of the great battle narratives in literature, immediately reminiscent of the many vivid scenes of battle in The Iliad. The young count fairly glows with both fear and excitement as his horse carries him through the mêlée, itself a peculiarly Homeric mixture of particularity and mass. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s narrative manner leads Bespaloff to construe the characters of Homer’s poem as if they are Tolstoy’s: detailed, well-realized psychological portraits instead of stereotypes of a traditional, formulaic, storytelling tradition. She talks of Hector’s need “to be brave” and to “fight in the first rank,” and of his “passion for defying destiny,” when, in fact, she is invoking narrative formulas. Having earlier singled him out “in a crowd of mediocrities”—that is, his brothers—she fails to see that the narrator actually sees him as no different from many of his distinguished brothers and kinsmen: Helenus, for instance, or Aeneas, or even Paris, for that matter. It is Priam, rather, in his rage and despair, who curses them all, and more for the fact that they are still living after Hector is dead, an extravagant invocation of survivor’s guilt, one might say. By contrast, Bespaloff singles out Achilles as “gorging himself on complaints,” the man of resentment, when these are actually insults hurled at him by Agamemnon, who is certainly not the stand-in for the narrator. Nonetheless, Bespaloff psychoanalyzes Achilles’ valor, “which has been nurtured on discontent and irritable anxiety” (p. 44). There are many peculiar observations in this piece, as, for instance, “With Hektor the will to greatness never pits itself against the will to happiness.” What is this happiness? It is not clear at all that the Homeric world accommodates happiness. Having spoken of the horrors of war in The Iliad, Bespaloff can say, “Yet at the same time [Homer] sees warlike emulation as the fountainhead of creative effort.” This poem is about fighting men, so it is only natural that the narrator praises them for what they do well, intelligently and cleverly. In the same philosophical vein, Bespaloff can say, “Achilles and Hektor are beautiful because force is beautiful, because the beauty of omnipotence is converted into the omnipotence of beauty,” which to this reviewer means very little. Bespaloff has that French tendency to generalize and go to first principles, which is alien to the Anglo-American obsession with facts, details, and statistics. Mary McCarthy, a Francophile if there ever was one, was certainly the right translator for this particular essay. Bespaloff’s love-hate relationship serves up the erotics of masculine violence that we see in a Sylvester Stallone or an Arnold Schwarzenegger, culminating in her observation that, “Without Achilles men would have peace; without Achilles, they would sleep on, frozen with boredom, till the planet itself grew cold” (p. 55). Yes, the warfare in so superbly conceived an epic as The Iliad is exciting, intoxicating, just as Saving Private Ryan and similar films revivify all those of us sunk into our lounge chairs, glutted on Fritos. Still, Bespaloff never had to experience trench warfare at the Battle of the Somme or go in on the Normandy beachhead. Those who did would probably have said that boredom is better. There is much philosophy in this work, much about ancient error and original sin as though one could tease out a proto-Christian sensibility in the poem, when, in fact, the concept of “sin” is altogether foreign to the Greek mind, not even to be found in tragedy, where hamartia, to miss the mark, is not at all sin. Bespaloff muddies the waters with Christianity’s contamination of ancient thinking. Much that she writes is incomprehensible. For example: “War itself, then, appears as the way to unity through the flux of Becoming that undoes and remakes worlds, souls, and gods. To the life it is forever consuming, it lends a supreme importance. Precisely because war takes everything away from us, the All, whose reality is suddenly forced on us by the tragic vulnerability of our particular existences, becomes estimable.” Hegel and Nietzsche flavor this philosophical stew as much as the Gospels do. It gets harder and harder to recognize The Iliad in all this. One is tempted to rephrase that old “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” as “Those who can make poems, do, those who can’t, philosophize.” The plan to publish the two essays together when Mary McCarthy first translated them fell afoul of copyright agreements. The Bollingen Foundation undertook to publish Bespaloff alone, but added an essay by Herman Broch, “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff,” commenting on her essay. On the first page, one encounters, “Homer is on the threshold where myth steps over into poetry, Tolstoy on that where poetry steps back into myth”; it is hard to read on. The rest of the essay continues in this vague, mystical, and impressionistic way, which one would like to excuse by noting that this was the German-speaking Broch’s first attempt at writing English, except that his famous roman à these, The Death of Virgil, reads just the same in English translation. Essentially, the conservative Broch used this piece on Bespaloff to argue for tradition, conventional poetic narrative, the catholic view of things in epic poetry, and, thus, by extension, the Roman Catholic Church as opposed to the Protestant Reformation, which introduced individuality, romanticism, and, presumably, the decline of Western culture and literature. Woolly-headed in the extreme, Broch’s essay reminds this reader of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, a period piece from the same milieu and time, but, certainly, like so many strange items in yard sales, definitely a collectible. Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.
PoliticsA Principled Basis for a Just and Lasting Cyprus Settlement in the Light of International and Europeby the International Expert Panel of the Committee for a European Solution in Cyprus greekworks.com was sent the following appeal last month by Prof. Marios Evriviades of the Panteios University of Athens on behalf of the International Expert Panel convened by the Committee for a European Solution in Cyprus. We reproduce the text below as we received it, and in support of its call for a “fair and equitable settlement” that will permit the country’s two ethnic communities “to achieve reconciliation and a peaceful and prosperous future.” A principled basis for a just and lasting Cyprus settlement in the light of International and European Law PREAMBLE 2. The fundamental principles of international and European law offer a unique guide and methodology by which to initiate and successfully conclude a process leading to a Cyprus settlement within the framework of a new and genuinely Cypriot Constitution in accordance with the right of self-determination. This is at the very core of a European solution for Cyprus, consistent with international and European law. 3. The solution of the Cyprus problem must be found by respecting and applying the fundamental principles on which international law and the European Union are founded: these are in brief, the peaceful settlement of disputes; the sovereignty, independence and equality of states; the prohibition of aggression and the non-recognition of its consequences; and respect for human rights, liberty, democracy and the rule of law. Both the present state of affairs in Cyprus and the terms of the current Annan Plan are inconsistent with these fundamental principles. It is also essential to arrive at a solution that fully respects the need for the reconciliation of, and cooperation between, the communities and all relevant parties. 4. The European Union is called upon to seize this historic opportunity and to assume its special responsibility for actively helping to put in motion a process of constitution-making that will finally allow the Republic of Cyprus, as a member state, to recover full sovereignty and independence and to establish peacefully a constitutional order respecting the above mentioned principles, and based on full respect for diversity. BASIC FACTS 6. The Annan Plan as presented in its final version by the Secretary General of the United Nations on 31 March 2004 provided for a federal state, the “United Republic of Cyprus,” replacing and abolishing the existing Republic of Cyprus and incorporating the occupied northern area. On 24 April 2004, two separate referendums were held. While 65% of the Turkish Cypriot and settler voters in the occupied north accepted the Annan Plan, 76% of their Greek Cypriot counterparts in the Republic of Cyprus rejected it. On May 1st, 2004, the Republic of Cyprus as a whole became a member state of the European Union. An Additional Protocol to the Treaty of Accession provided for the temporary suspension of the acquis communautaire in the occupied areas. Negotiations on Turkey’s accession are about to start. THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES b) Annan Plan Deficiencies 9. Any settlement of an international dispute must also be in accord with justice. This point is noted below (paragraph 15) in relation to the fundamental principle of respect for human rights. 2. The Sovereignty, Independence and Equality of States b) Annan Plan Deficiencies 12. In addition, one notes under the Annan Plan the right of the UK to complete and unimpeded access for any purpose whatsoever to the waters between the Sovereign Base Areas’ waters and the fact that international judicial or third party settlement procedure is expressly forbidden with regard to disputes concerning the Sovereign Base Areas. Such disputes were to be resolved by an arbitrator appointed by the authorities of the Sovereign Base Areas. 3. The Prohibition of the Act and Consequences of Aggression b) Annan Plan Deficiencies 4. Respect for Human Rights b) Annan Plan Deficiencies 5.Democracy b) Annan Plan Deficiencies 19. On 24 April 2004, 76% of the voters of the Republic of Cyprus in the government controlled area rejected the Annan Plan. This decision must be accepted by all as a valid exercise of democracy and of the right to self-determination. 6. The Rule of Law 21. There can be no international rule of law in a territory illegally occupied by a foreign power. Indeed, the fact that a member state of the European Union is prevented from exercising its sovereignty over part of its internationally recognised territory challenges the reality of the European rule of law itself. b) Annan Plan Deficiencies THE WAY FORWARD: A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION FOR CYPRUS 24. A democratic process of autonomous constitution-making consisting of several steps should enable all the people of Cyprus to overcome the present stalemate and to find means and measures that will eventually bring about re-unification and reconciliation consistent with the fundamental principles noted above. The Constitutional Convention as an instrument of democratic constitution making has been successfully used, particularly in the decolonisation process. Constitution drafting must be integrated in, and not separated from, the democratic political process. 25. A Constitutional Convention for Cyprus, democratically elected or designated so as to reflect appropriately the will of the voters and the aspirations of civil society of the different communities of the island as a whole, should have the sole responsibility for drafting and adopting a new Constitution for Cyprus, building on, and eventually amending or replacing, the existing 1960 Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus. 26. The members of the Constitutional Convention should have complete liberty and responsibility for choosing whatever political system they may prefer, whether presidential, parliamentary or combinations thereof; for finding territorial arrangements by an appropriate decentralization scheme—in regions, districts, communes or whatever—and for shaping procedures that will be able to protect efficiently minority and human rights, in the interest of the people of all the communities in Cyprus. Experts both from within and from outside Cyprus may be asked to give advice and assistance to the Convention or its members. The only legal limits of the Convention’s sovereign constitutional power are strict compliance with European constitutional principles and the acquis communautaire, and international human rights and minority protection standards derived from international law and from the European Convention on Human Rights and other European instruments.16 27. The new Constitution as framed by the Convention should be submitted to separate and simultaneous referendums to be held on both parts of the island, according to the April 24, 2004, experience.17 Only the people of Cyprus can bring about the legitimacy essential for a new beginning. Any solution of the Cyprus problem must be legal and legitimate and must build on the only existing constitutional scheme that is recognized by the European Union and the international community, and that is the 1960 Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus. The procedures regulating the election or designation of the Constitutional Convention, its composition and functioning, as well as the holding of the constitutional referendums will have to be provided for by amendments to the 1960 Constitution. It is further proposed that the Constitutional Convention process take place under European Union auspices. RECOMMENDATIONS 29. The International Expert Panel recommends: b) The adoption of a Resolution in the European Parliament (and in other pertinent international institutions) reaffirming the Fundamental Principles. c) The establishment in the European Parliament (and in other pertinent international institutions) of a monitoring mechanism by which the conformity of any proposed Cyprus settlement with the Fundamental Principles may be ensured. d) The creation of a Constitutional Convention under European Union auspices and on the basis of the 1960 Cyprus Constitution to bring together the parties directly concerned in order to reach a settlement in conformity with the Fundamental Principles. CONCLUSION 31. Had the Annan Plan been accepted and implemented before accession, that very accession would have rested on shaky legal grounds, as the Union would have integrated a new member state which would not even have signed the accession treaty, while the Republic of Cyprus, which has signed the treaty, would have ceased to exist. Now that accession has become a reality, the abolition of the Republic of Cyprus through a revised Annan Plan is prevented by the very existence of the European Union. 32. The European Union has the historic opportunity and the special responsibility for promoting a new process of democratic constitution making in Cyprus and for convincing all communities to take part in such a process. In so doing, the European Union would ensure the application of its own principles and values, as well as those of international law generally, within the territory of one of its own member states. *** APPENDIX: Article 6 of the Treaty on European Union “1. The Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles which are common to the Member States. 2. The Union shall respect fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms signed in Rome on 4 November 1950 and as they result from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, as general principles of Community law. 3. The Union shall respect the national identities of its Member States. 4. The Union shall provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies.” *** International Expert Panel 1. Professor Andreas Auer, Switzerland 2. Professor Mark Bossuyt, Belgium 3. Professor Peter Burns, Canada 4. Professor Dr. Alfred De Zayas, United States of America 5. Professor Helmons Silvio-Marcus, Belgium 6. Professor George Kasimatis, Greece 7. Professor Dr. Dieter Oberndoerfer, Dr. h.c., Germany 8. Professor Malcolm N Shaw QC, United Kingdom Footnotes 1. See the European Commission of Human Rights which referred to Turkish violations of the European Convention on Human Rights in the first two Cyprus v Turkey applications, 10 July 1976 and the third application, 4 October 1983 (published by the Committee of Ministers in 1992) and the European Court of Human Rights giving judgement in the fourth Cyprus v Turkey application, 10 May 2001. See also below para. 15. 2. Referred to by the European Court of Human Rights as a ???subordinate local administration??? of Turkey, Loizidou v Turkey, decision of 23 February 1995, para. 62. 3. See also the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations, resolution 2625 (XXV) and the Manila Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes, resolution 37/590. 4. See article 2 of the UN Charter and the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations. 5. See Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, Chapter VII of the UN Charter and resolution 3314 (XXIX) on the Definition of Aggression. 6. See the Nuremberg Principles and the Statutes of the War Crimes Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. 7. See also resolution 83 (13) of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe and the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the Cyprus v Turkey case, 10 May 2001. 8. See the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 9 July 2004, para. 119 and following. 9. Most significantly, the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Cyprus v Turkey, 10 May 2001. 10. See the Rutili case, 1975, ECR 1219 and article 6 of the Treaty of European Union, 1999 (reproduced in the Appendix to this Report). 11. This situation would also have been incompatible with numerous UN resolutions on the right to return, see especially the study of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights by Special Rapporteur Awn Shawkat Al Kassawneh on the ???Human Rights Dimensions of Population Transfers,??? E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23. 12. See also the Charter of Paris, 1990. 13. Reproduced in the Appendix to this Report. See also the European Community Declaration on the Recognition of New States, 1991. 14. See above para. 5. 15. See above para. 8. 16. For example the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, 1995, to which Cyprus is a party. 17. But conducted so as to exclude the competence of Turkish settlers, see above, para. 14. Thursday, September 08, 2005Our OpinionThe Twilight of EmpireThe Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time, if we just wait. I’m 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like this. None of us have. What is truly painful, however, is the thought that, as the coming years fall on one another like the massing rockpile of a chain gang, we will all still have so much to bear witness to that we never thought we’d ever live to see. America is ending. That much is obvious. What is not (yet) apparent is what exactly will replace it, or how. But the America all of us above a certain age were born into and grew up in is clearly over. Finished. The problem is that while it is now plainly moribund, it is not yet completely dead, which means, above all, that the road from here to there, from manifest degradation to final expiry, might still be long and, worst of all, littered with countless corpses. Just as they are never built in a day, empires never collapse in one. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, all that was essentially left of the Byzantines was their capital. For hundreds of years before that fateful Tuesday of May 29, the Byzantine imperium had been shrinking continually, while its “authority” had increasingly degenerated into elaborate court theatricals as it ceased to reflect any genuine worldly power. Five hundred years later, in 1945, Winston Churchill still believed—how could he not, intractable reactionary that he was—that he was fighting the Second World War to “save” the British empire (and only secondarily “against” fascism). Unfortunately, it was clear to nearly everyone else, from Roosevelt to Stalin to most Britons themselves—who voted Churchill out of office later that year—that the sun had set on imperial Britain over a quarter of a century earlier, at the end of the previous global conflict, when Woodrow Wilson messianically (albeit with crystalline political vision) arrogated the leadership of the world to himself and, more to the point, his country. It’s impossible not to observe in the two examples above that, along with every other aspect of material production and cultural evolution, modernity has vastly accelerated the processes of imperial decline. What was China even a generation ago, and what is it now—and what will it be a generation hence? Who could have imagined, even a decade (let alone a generation) ago, the kinds of images daily broadcast on the world’s television screens from (what was once) New Orleans? In our attempt to reflect on the devastating consequences of Hurricane Katrina, we have been left, as so many times before in the last few years, not merely speechless but morally stunned, as if history is no longer a wellspring of hope but of panic. What is there left to say, in any case, that all of us don’t already know—don’t already feel, in the pits of our stomachs. Anyone who’s ever been by the bedside of a dying parent recognizes that sinking feeling: the beginning of the end. Categorical, inexorable, merciless. We can ape the American media in their now truly pathological emptyheadedness and blather on about “healing” and “coming together” and “facing the future as one people,” or we can be honest, with ourselves above all and—if we still have any touch of belief left in the more fundamental truth of community—with each other. For the facts are not what media tell us they are, and certainly not the utterly misshapen fabrications of the current US government—if one can use such a term to describe the most pernicious maladministration of the country in anyone’s memory. No, the truth is different—very different—and in stark opposition to the aggressive know-nothingism that has now effectively become the suicidal form of the bipartisan American consensus. And what is that truth? Simply that, the barren triumphalism since 1989 notwithstanding, history is not at an end, but has only just gotten its second breath, and it is about to overwhelm the United States of America. *** In a couple of days we will commemorate, once again, the attacks on September 11, 2001. It has now been four years, the tenure of a presidential administration, since that truly black day that sealed the fate of the United States. But what do we see when we scan this deeply insecure homeland’s borders, from sea to shining sea, and then move on to the rest of a world that is increasingly horrified by what it finally understands to be the dreadful, and steady, dissolution of the “indispensable nation”? In America, obviously and first of all, we see New Orleans, a city of less than half a million people in the richest, most powerful society in the history of human history that could neither be safely protected nor safely evacuated from a storm—from a natural occurrence of weather—although it had almost a week’s warning to do so in an age of instantaneous communication and almost equally instantaneous transport. We also see, days later, as reported by Dan Barry in the New York Times (“Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” September 8), a body lying in the street of the city’s central business district, a few feet away from an ATM, with a soldier—sent ostensibly to shield and succor the living and honor the integrity of the dead—taking “a parting snapshot” of the corpse, “like some visiting conventioneer.” Barry continues: On Sunday…several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store. A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: “Hey, how do you get to the interstate?” …Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock. Or maybe the nation has just become indecent. It happens to nations, sadly, invariably when they are allowed to fall into the hands of indecent leaders. From Germany (and half of Europe) in the Thirties, to the Soviet Union after Stalin’s rise, to most of Latin America (aided and abetted by the US) in the Seventies and Eighties, to Israel today (again aided and abetted by the US), indecent governments lead to indecent societies (and, of course, although it is not politically correct to say so, especially about democracies, vice versa). That is what we mean when we say that a society is “hardening.” We’ve all seen it. The French hardened during Algeria’s independence struggle; Tony Blair is hardening now, after July 7. Israelis have been hardening without interruption since 1967. We call it “hardening” because we’re afraid to say what we know it really is: coarsening, regressing, desocializing and de-democratizing, seeking fearful refuge in the primitive sanctuary of a Hobbesian redefinition of our lives. How do you get to the interstate? Just turn right, and follow the Humvees. Those of us born into another time and polity in America have, however, gone from a constitutional swamp into a geographical morass. We don’t even recognize our country any longer: Are the pictures we see televised every day really coming from where we grew up? But they look like Haiti, or Somalia, or Rwanda. How can this be? How did it happen? When did it happen? Who’s responsible? But that last question is the one we’re no longer allowed to ask. As “unity” is the last refuge of the wretched, please—please!—no “blame game” here. That’s what we call responsibility now in morally lobotomized America: the blame game. Never mind that a democratic government is by definition accountable for everything that occurs during its administration (from the Latin, “administrare,” to manage); never mind that the constitution of the United States fully anticipates, and endorses, “blame,” which it calls impeachment; never mind that Herbert Hoover was blamed for the Great Depression, LBJ for Vietnam, Jimmy Carter for the American hostages in Iran. Never mind that Harry Truman famously defined the Oval Office as the terminal of buckstopping or that Richard Nixon was so thoroughly blamed for what happened during his presidency that he was forced to resign it. No, the strangely ungoverning—degoverning—government of George W. Bush will not accept any blame, nor give any explanations, nor be held as a hostage to the fortune of its fellow citizens. And its fellow citizens concur, and validate, and ratify. From September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2005, George W. Bush has proven that he is the master of abandonment (and disorientation). As the only president of the United States to go AWOL while doing his military service, he has also become the commander-in-chief of dereliction of duty. And yet, his fellow citizens approve, and apparently would not have it otherwise. When American GIs allowed Baghdad to be looted of its cultural and historical presence, the world wondered what had gone wrong. We now see an American president sitting idly by, in an indifference verging on psychosis, as one of the most culturally profound, and vital and irreplaceable, cities of America is devastated. But that’s what happens when a society slowly descends into barbarism. It is only a matter of time before the “other” becomes its own (albeit former) self. Meanwhile, South Korea has pledged $30 million, Afghanistan a million, and even tsunami-recovering Sri Lanka $25,000 in aid to the nation that used to provide aid to South Korea, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka. For their part, Europeans have agreed to draw on their own oil reserves to “help” Americans get through their oil “shortfall”—although Americans, with their artificially low prices and criminal consumption, are singularly responsible, not only for their own shortfall but for the global energy crisis in general. As for Iraq, over 1,800 US military, 91 civilian contractors, and—an irrelevant point to most Americans—at least 25,000 (and probably vastly more) Iraqi civilians have been killed in “liberating” the country, at a cost to date of $204 billion, and climbing, billion by billion, every day, with no end in sight. Moreover, as each week passes, Iraq seems closer, not to self-government and legitimate independence, but to multiple, and permanent, fracture. Finally, at “Ground Zero,” in Manhattan, work continues apace on the “Freedom Tower,” which, at this point, is not so much a replacement for the World Trade Center—let alone a memorial to the human beings killed there—as a testament to…itself and, mostly, to the regime of lies and complicity that has made it possible. But Americans are a patient people. And, like their secretary of state, they know that the Lord Jesus Christ is going to come, if they will only wait. SportsLondon for 2012? It’s All About the IOC, Not the City!
When the IOC chose Athens over Rome as the host of the 2004 summer Olympics, no one spoke in terms of the Parthenon beating the Colosseum. And the IOC’s choice of Sydney as the host of the 2000 games did not elicit favorable comparison of Australia’s capital to its competitor candidates, Beijing and Berlin. And when Greece’s Melina Mercouri said that Coca-Cola had beaten the Parthenon when Atlanta was chosen over Athens for the 1996 games, she was not suggesting that Atlanta’s skyline was superior. There was, from the start, a strong element of which-is-the-best-city-in-the-world? in the contest over the 2012 games. Aside from Paris and London, the other final candidate-cities were New York, Madrid, and Moscow. Put differently, the largest city of the current global empire was running against the capitals of four former global empires. There has never been such an impressive array of candidate-cities in the history of the Olympics. No wonder there was a sense that the selection was a referendum on which was the fairest of them all.
Britain’s celebration of the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar only days before the IOC met in Singapore served as a reminder of the deep historical antecedents to this Anglo-French matchup. Nelson’s victory in 1805 over a French and Spanish fleet shaped the course of world history. Britain marked the event with a reenactment of the famous battle, as 17 tall ships and mock fusillades of gunfire and cannon blasts, with real fireworks and an actor impersonating Admiral Nelson, all performed in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. The decision to hold the mock battle between a red and blue fleet rather than Britain and France was an empty gesture that could not disguise the sentiments of the organizers. In Singapore, the IOC’s voting patterns on the big day confirmed that this was another Battle of Trafalgar. Moscow received the least number of votes in the first round and was eliminated, followed by New York, which went out in the second round, leaving London, Madrid, and Paris. The third-round tally gave London a narrow lead over Paris, 39 to 33, with Madrid dropping out after garnering a respectable 31 votes. It was a close call for Paris. But would enough of those 31 votes for Madrid switch over to the French capital in the final round to give the favorite its victory, after all? The answer was no. London received 54 votes to Paris’s 50, winning the right to host the 2012 games in one of the closest-ever contests to select a host city.
In the past couple of decades, London has, indeed, undergone a remarkable transformation: a broad variety of ethnic cuisines and open-air cafés flourish, while, for those still interested, pubs continue to abound. Meanwhile, about 300 languages are now spoken by the denizens of Britain’s capital. Still, to regard London’s change as somehow diminishing Paris’s considerable cultural capital and allure is a non sequitur. When dealing with the International Olympic Committee, “people and politics” are more reliable for understanding policy decisions than language or issues of cosmopolitanism. Yes, the IOC is an international body and the games are universal, but precisely because of that, they do not need the cosmopolitan imprimatur of any host city; otherwise, the games would not have gone to Atlanta in 1996, for example. Instead, each decision to award the games is made on the basis of which particular city will serve the Olympic movement, and that decision is usually made on the basis of the merits of the campaigns launched by the representatives of each candidate-city.
Athens learned its lessons during the 1996 bid and launched a completely different campaign for the 2004 games. The bid leader, Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalakê, was exceptionally qualified to court an international audience and present a businesslike and details-oriented proposal, putting aside the unctuous invocations of Olympic history that had ultimately short-circuited the Greek bid for the 1996 games. By that time, and in the wake of the bribery scandal connected with its award of the 2002 winter Olympics to Salt Lake City, the IOC had cleaned up its ethics stables so that the onus on the Greeks was to be even more careful and efficient in garnering support among the committee’s members. Angelopoulou achieved this magnificently. The little information that exists at the moment on the bidding war between London and Paris indicates that while the French sat back assuming that they had already won—as the Greeks had done in bidding for the 1996 games—the British team heeded Angelopoulou’s example and launched an energetic public-relations campaign coupled with a technically proficient set of presentations. Although a great deal has been written about the respective bid teams, people forget that what counts most in the closed club that is the IOC are the dynamics among members. Privately, “neutral” IOC members confirm that their French colleagues distinguished themselves by their aloofness. At IOC meetings, they took some of their meals in their hotel rooms rather than mingle with their colleagues, and French IOC member and former ski champion Jean-Claude Killy is known for his imperious behavior.
Another influential participant behind the scenes was British IOC member Philip Craven, another former athlete turned sports administrator. He combines the unassuming friendliness of his native Bolton in Lancashire in the English north with another important asset, a French wife, Jocelyne—as well as a fluent command of French. In contrast, Henri Sérandour, head of the French Olympic committee, speaks only French, according to his biographical note on the IOC website. Bearing in mind that the IOC was led until recently by Juan Antonio Samaranch, who refused to visit any country that would not receive him with full head-of-state honors, the egos of individual members should not be discounted in understanding their votes. London’s bid leader, former Olympian Sebastian Coe, was attuned to the need to appear approachable, but, naturally, since this is the IOC, it was the respective political leaders who made the difference. Tony Blair knew what he was doing when he pampered IOC members with private, 15-minute sessions of tea and biscuits on the eve of the vote in Singapore. Jacques Chirac, another imperious Frenchman, barely made it to Singapore, while the official announcement of his arrival included the striking faux pas that he was traveling despite his overburdened schedule. In the end, it looks like Paris’s failure was not the city’s lack of international stature but a lack of international as well as political savvy among its main advocates. It was also due to the British, whom Napoleon once described as a nation of shopkeepers, being able to sell London’s bid more effectively to the IOC. Word from Paris is that the city will not be bidding again soon for the Olympics after three failed attempts over the past few decades. One thing is certain, however: Paris will still be “Paris,” with or without the Olympics. Alexander Kitroeff teaches history at Haverford College and is a contributing editor to greekworks.com, which published his most recent book, Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.
Chronicles of OzymandiasWhose Fear, Whose Rejection? A Response to David Brooks from an American Living in Europe.Part 1 The reader should keep in mind that this two-part article was written several weeks before New Orleans was struck by Hurricane Katrina, which confirmed, in the most tragic, and ugliest, way the continuing, and criminal, disarticulation of American society. Who you gonna believe? Me or your eyes?
Introduction Nothing, as it turned out. Or, rather, it had already occurred long before. I quote Brooks: Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline. That last sentence speaks volumes about Brooks’s “analytical” method.
Four days after reading Brooks’s piece, my wife and I flew to Paris (from Greece, where we live). We were there ostensibly on (my) business for greekworks.com, but had decided that, since we were going anyway, to also look for a place to rent, as we were thinking of setting up a pied-à-terre there. We thus took the opportunity to do some old-fashioned apartment-hunting; every morning, we hit the pavement of a different neighborhood we thought we might like to live in, walking up and down innumerable main and side streets. At week’s end, we had pretty thoroughly scoped out the several neighborhoods on our list, as well as a couple we’d only discovered after we began searching. If nothing else, we got a chance to see Paris up close and personal, and in a way that is impossible when one is just a tourist or visiting (which I’ve been doing for over 30 years). What really struck me, from the first day—checking out neighborhoods, making mental notes of local supermarkets and dry cleaners and pet shops (for Sam, our dog), trying to gauge vehicular noise and pedestrian traffic, seeing if there were places where I could pick up an Economist or FT—was…David Brooks. I swear: this is absolutely true. The more my wife and I walked, the more we fell in with the daily street-life of Paris, the more we actually saw, and began to understand, what constituted the everyday reality of the city, the more livid I became with Brooks, whose column was banging around the inside of my skull like a horrible intellectual migraine. I seethed, and exploded regularly. My wife had to put up with me loudly swearing at Brooks as we walked down Rue St-Sulpice or up Rue du Cherche-Midi or down Rue Monge or across the Pont St-Louis or up Rue des Rosiers or down Rue de Buci. It was like a curse: I could not get my mind off the sheer, appalling fraud of what he had written. “Far from thriving,” is the first thing that hits you, like a sharp jab square on the face. Far from thriving?!? Far from thriving? The judgment itself is, literally, insane. Brooks writes that: “Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results…reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition….” (There’s that weasely “seem” again; what really “seems” to be going on here is Brooks’s evasion of any straightforward, declarative statement. Brooks lives in the permanent analytical conditional.)
Can someone run that by me again? Last time I checked, the most acute example of a poor country “moving forward” at a pretty fast clip, where expectations were higher than the moon, was a place called…the Soviet Union. (It’s maddening to know that Brooks gets paid a lot of money to write this stuff.) As for the “happiness” of the people who lived in Soviet “expectation,” the question will undoubtedly be debated for hundreds of years, but suffice it to say that even if some (or many) people considered themselves happy, I—and I’m sure Brooks—would rather have been living in Paris. But ideology wouldn’t be ideology unless it were ideological. Brooks’s very sentences are models of mystification. “…[I]t is not the absolute standard of living that determines a people’s morale, but the momentum,” he says. But what does that mean? It is, in fact, as the Brits say, “a nonsense.” “Morale” is a psychological, philosophical, or moral term; “standard of living” is a term denoting just that, a social standard. It is a socioeconomic measurement, a developmental gauge, an admittedly nebulous but nevertheless honest attempt to quantify empirically a society’s anecdotal sense of itself. Morale? Has Brooks ever heard of the “Vietnam syndrome” or the “malaise” of which Jimmy Carter spoke—and for which Carter was crucified by Brooks’s right-wing comrades-in-punditry? Morale? If morale had anything to do with it, the US today would be the last place in the West in which one would want to live. Except that the US also has a standard of living that’s none too shabby. Not to mention that one man’s demoralization is another man’s “momentum.” “Morale” might be as low as Death Valley among most working people in the US today, but all those Central American and South Asian immigrants pouring into the States know that an “absolute standard of living” counts for something. More than meets Brooks’s eye, for sure. Which is why he’s so big on “momentum.” Talk about the road to nowhere. Brooks is moving so fast he can’t be bothered with trying to explain where it is, exactly, that he’s going, or, more to the point, where he wants Europeans to follow. Let’s take a look again at his bill of particulars above: “Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe,” Brooks says, rightly. He then stipulates: generous welfare measures; ample labor protections; progressive tax rates; single-payer health care systems; zoning restrictions to limit big retailers; and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. (Incidentally, European tax rates are not “highly” progressive, as Brooks says, since they’ve all been seriously adjusted downward during the last two decades—something that I happen to believe is fundamentally misconceived. Indeed, in 2004, the average top rate for the EU 15—that is, before the entry of the low-tax eastern European countries—was, according to Eurostat, 46.2 percent for individuals and a mere 31.4 percent for corporations. Until Ronald Reagan, the top rate was 70 percent in the US; it was 39.6 percent until George W. Bush.)
And do. Which is why Brooks’s stubborn, right-wing refusal to face reality reminds me of the kind of left-wing self-delusion so famously lampooned in Ninotchka. When Melvyn Douglas (playing a roué aristocrat) kisses Greta Garbo (portraying the eponymous heroine) and then asks her if she’s felt anything, Garbo responds, “a chemical reaction.” In fact, whenever Douglas tries to commend the pleasures of Paris (where most of the film takes place) over the rigors (to say the least) of Moscow, Garbo retorts, with conviction (another sign of ideology), that what seem to be the “advantages” of the French vie en rose over the Russian vie en rouge is symptomatic of the moral and intellectual flabbiness, and capitalist underdevelopment, of the French, and that, in any case, one day, the whole world will see the wisdom of the Soviet Union’s ways. (Douglas is skeptical: at one point, he tells his Soviet interlocutors that their five-year plan has fascinated him for the last 15 years.) If you believe that pleasure is a chemical reaction, you will also believe, with Brooks, that “quality of life” is a matter of “momentum.” The truth is that the United States today is, in many ways, akin to the erstwhile Soviet Union, particularly in the moral link between its imperialism abroad and its Stakhanovism at home. One of the sadder side effects of the puritanism that is so deeply entrenched in American life is the sanctification of busyness. This goes beyond any notion of a Protestant ethic. Half of Germany, after all, is Protestant; in France, the Protestant minority has, for centuries, notably constituted a dynamic business elite. But a German or French Protestant still believes that lunch, every day of the week, should be eaten slowly, and perhaps even accompanied by wine, perhaps even of a decent vintage. And a German or French (or Dutch or Swedish) Protestant will still look upon his faith as a guidepost to social purpose—and, therefore, social construction—and not as the most direct (and convenient) escape from wider social engagement. Most important, Europeans do not believe that either their nations separately or, even more so, their integrated European culture as a whole can ever be defined solely (or even largely) by GDP or “productivity” or—and this, I believe, is the crux of the issue and the most pernicious resemblance between today’s US and yesterday’s USSR—“throw-weight,” as it used to be called, or “lethality,” as it is now described. Because, let’s face it, all this Americans-are-from-Mars-but-Europeans-are-from-Venus idiocy is nothing but American penis-pumping on a Himalayan scale. Location, location, location
The problem with Brooks, as always, is that his tendentiousness verges on self-parody. Not only is Western Europe’s standard of living “about” a third lower than that of the US, but—gadzooks!—“it’s sliding.” Indeed, “European output is…about on a par with Arkansas”! How does one even respond to such a cartoonish notion? I’m sorry, but the last place I’ve ever thought of comparing France to, the last few years my wife and I have been visiting, has been…Arkansas. Apparently, I’m not alone. Anybody who reads the New York Times knows that it has had France on the collective editorial brain for a number of years now. Hardly a day goes by when it doesn’t feature the country (and especially its capital) somehow, in the fashion section, or in dining or travel, or even in the book review (French Women Don’t Get Fat). Maybe it’s media globalization or the fact that it is now sole owner of that icon of la vie Américaine in Paris, the International Herald Tribune, but you can’t pick up the Times anymore without coming across some breathless report on France hier, aujourd’hui et demain. Three weeks to the day after Brooks’s column appeared, his paper ran a story by Deborah Baldwin, entitled, “In Paris, Romancing the Deal” (New York Times, June 23). I quote: Paris, that fantasy destination for so many expats and luxury goods connoisseurs, has become an unlikely destination for Americans hoping to acquire second homes. The prospective buyers are so plentiful, in fact, that they have spawned a cottage industry of local fixers who specialize in ushering Americans through the…bewildering rituals of French real estate. Never mind that typical Times touch of “bewildering rituals of French real estate.” (Has the Times checked out the bewildering rituals of American real estate lately, including the bizarre insertion of the Patriot Act into all property deals?) Revealingly, Baldwin went on to comment that, “A strong euro has scared away some buyers, but others have clearly decided that it’s a sign to buy in.” A strong euro? Brooks didn’t mention anything about a strong European currency in comparing Europe to Arkansas. But maybe that’s because of the euro’s (passing) “weakness.” His Times colleague was unfazed, however. “Though the euro has sagged a bit in recent months,” she stated, “many economists see it bouncing back, indicating that now may be the time to buy.” Baldwin ended with what any semi-sensate human being would consider a self-evident observation: “Of course, when the alternative is investing in municipal bonds, who wouldn’t prefer a private hideaway stocked with French armoires and raw-milk Camembert?”
Smoke and mirrors, mostly. With the hoary Anglo-American superiority complex thrown in pour encourager les autres. That’s the irony. While the French are consistently bashed for their arrogance, it’s actually the Anglo-Americans who are hopelessly self-satisfied to the core of their cultural (and social) being. The further, and more relevant, irony is that the French, as individual citizens and as a nation, have been the most self-critical and self-searching people in Europe in the last decade. That’s what that extraordinary debate, and massive turnout in the referendum, on the EU “constitution” was all about: France’s role as France in Europe and in the world as a whole. And the French had the magnificent, democratic audacity to defy their entire political and social “leadership”—all the major parties, all the trade unions, all the politically correct conclaves of the great and the good—and demand a voice for themselves as masters of their own fate. Across the Channel, meanwhile, those who work for a living ceaselessly (and uncomplainingly) bite the bitter dust of New Labour’s old Thatcherism. As for the US, let’s not even bother. Arkansas may be, according to Brooks, “about on par” with Europe in “output per capita,” but common sense tells us all that a place in which “intelligent design” serves as the governing educational and intellectual model is, quite literally, a fool’s paradise and, as such, a generation away from bitter disappointment and inevitable decline. But don’t take my word for it. I cite one of Brooks’s Times op-ed colleagues, albeit somebody who knows considerably more about economics (and of what he’s talking about generally) than any autodidact neocon. To wit: Modern American politics is dominated by the doctrine that government is the problem, not the solution. In practice, this doctrine translates into policies that make low taxes on the rich the highest priority, even if lack of revenue undermines basic public services. You don’t have to be a liberal to realize that this is wrong-headed. Corporate leaders understand quite well that good public services are also good for business. But the political environment is so polarized these days that top executives are often afraid to speak up against conservative dogma. Instead, they vote with their feet…. There has been fierce competition among states hoping to attract a new Toyota assembly plant. Several Southern states reportedly offered financial incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But last month [June] Toyota decided to put the new plant, which will produce RAV4 mini-SUVs, in Ontario. Explaining why it passed up financial incentives to choose a US location, the company cited the quality of Ontario’s work force. What made Toyota so sensitive to labor quality issues? Maybe we should discount remarks from the president of the Toronto-based Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, who claimed that the educational level in the Southern United States was so low that trainers for Japanese plants in Alabama had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech equipment. But there are other reports, some coming from state officials, that confirm his basic point: Japanese auto companies opening plants in the Southern US have been unfavorably surprised by the work force’s poor level of training. There’s some bitter irony here for Alabama’s governor. Just two years ago voters overwhelmingly rejected his plea for an increase in the state’s rock-bottom taxes on the affluent, so that he could afford to improve the state’s low-quality education system. Opponents of the tax hike convinced voters that it would cost the state jobs. Thus wrote Paul Krugman a couple of months ago (“Toyota, Moving Northward,” New York Times, July 25, 2005). I’ll return to Krugman later, but, first, I want to readdress the issue of Brooks’s data. The CIA on the USA
But I’ll start with the CIA. What struck me instantly was how much more honest its World Factbook is than Brooks. Its statistical survey of the EU begins with a “preliminary statement,” which itself begins: The evolution of the European Union (EU) from a regional economic agreement among six neighboring states in 1951 to today’s supranational organization of 25 countries across the European continent stands as an unprecedented phenomenon in the annals of history. Dynastic unions for territorial consolidation were long the norm in Europe…but for such a large number of nation-states to cede some of their sovereignty to an overarching entity is truly unique.
Since so much has been made the last few years of the alleged monumental waste, and cost, of the EU’s CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), the first thing I did was go to the farming data. Right off, the numbers jumped out at me. Total irrigated land in the EU is 115,807 square kilometers as against 214,000 square kilometers in the US. Although the US figure is almost 80 percent higher, however, agriculture constitutes 2.2 percent of EU GDP, but only 0.9 percent of US GDP. Much more important, agriculture accounts for 4.5 percent of the EU’s labor force, while only 0.7 percent of Americans work in farming, forestry, and fishing, the closest comparative category. There is an obvious fact and one a little less obvious, but just as relevant, hidden in these data. The obvious fact is that many more Europeans work in agriculture as Americans—although Europeans work on 80 percent less land and with a labor force 68 million larger than in the US (215 million to 147.4, respectively). That translates into 9.675 million Europeans in agriculture compared to 1.032 million Americans in farming, forestry, and fishing. The more interesting fact hidden in these data, however, is the comparatively spectacular extent of US farm holdings. If one divides American acreage (and again, we’re talking about farming, forestry, and fishing as a whole) into American workers, you get 4.8 workers per square kilometer of irrigated land. In the EU, the comparable ratio is 83.5 workers per square kilometer. If one goes one step further and assumes a (minimal) family of four per worker, that adds another 29.025 million people to the agricultural economy, for a total of 38.7 million people, or almost 8.5 percent of the entire EU population. We see here plainly that—despite its huge distortions and unjustifiable subsidization of Europe at the expense of the developing world—the CAP does indeed, in the end, affect tens of millions of Europeans. Easily extrapolating from the figures above, we also see something else, as two competing social truths suddenly reveal themselves behind the numbers. Clearly, agriculture is still overwhelmingly a matter of family farms in Europe; by contrast, enormous properties operated with so little manpower mean that the vast majority of farming in the US is now in the hands of agribusiness. (The Blairite bashing of the CAP has become such second nature to the globalizationist punditocracy that nobody even bothers anymore to try to determine the truth behind the self-serving headlines. And what is the truth? That, according to the OECD, the CAP took up only 1.3 percent of EU GDP in 2002, a mere 0.4 percent more than the 0.9 percent of the US—and 0.1 percent less than Japan’s 1.4 percent.)
Here are three more series of data, specifically designed, it seems, for Brooks. The first has to do with that “strong” currency Deborah Baldwin wrote about. Specifically, in 2001—when the Supreme Court appointed George Bush president—the dollar bought 1.12 euros. It has been falling ever since: 1.06 euros in 2002, 0.89 in 2003, and 0.81 in 2004. Currently, even after its meteoric but (very) temporary rise earlier in the year, the dollar has fallen back to 0.81. Next, although, according to Brooks, the “Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American…and…sliding,” EU exports were, according to the CIA, $1.109 trillion last year while America’s were $795 billion—almost a third lower. While Brooks doesn’t provide any data to support (or sources for) his assertion of a “sliding” Western European standard of living, it’s obvious from CIA figures that the EU is producing, and selling, to the rest of the world—including, strangely enough, to the US, which is the EU’s largest single market, gobbling up 23 percent of its exports. What was that about “momentum,” and about how it’s better to live “in a poor country…moving forward…than…in an affluent country…looking back”? And, since we’re talking about poverty and affluence, and—the one thing Brooks, along with most of his ilk, hate to talk about—poverty amid affluence, here’s one last series of devastating data: distribution of family income according to the Gini Index. What is the Gini Index? The CIA explains it with admirable concision: This index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The index is calculated from the Lorenz curve, in which cumulative family income is plotted against the number of families arranged from the poorest to the richest….The more nearly equal a country’s income distribution…the lower its Gini index, e.g., a Scandinavian country with an index of 25. The more unequal a country’s income distribution…the higher its Gini index, e.g., a Sub-Saharan country with an index of 50. If income were distributed with perfect equality…the index would be zero; if income were distributed with perfect inequality…the index would be 100.
Last of the first The UNDP has also designed a Human Poverty Index (HPI), both for developing and developed countries. Its HPI-2 index, restricted to the 17 richest nations in the OECD, is calculated on four major factors: probability at birth of not surviving to age 60; functional adult literacy; long-term unemployment (lasting 12 months or longer); and the percentage of the population living in poverty (using several variables). Well, guess which nation comes in dead last, Number 17 out of 17, in this index? That’s right, the US. And the Scandinavian social democracies take up four of the first five spots, with Sweden first, Norway second, the Netherlands squeezing in at third, Finland fourth, and Denmark fifth. France, by the way, comes in at Number 8, way ahead not only of the US but also of the UK, which is third from the bottom. Regarding “probability at birth of not surviving to age 60,” the US is first (in other words, worst), with 12.6 percent of the population not reaching 60. It is third worst in functional illiteracy (an astounding 20.7 percent, confirming Paul Krugman’s point above), preceded, interestingly enough, by the UK (21.8 percent) and Ireland (22.6 percent). Finally, the US is, again, first in poverty, defined as 50 percent of median income over a 10-year period, with 17 percent of the population (Finland is last, with 5.4 percent and France at a decent 8 percent, with the UK, again, at the very high end, with 12.5 percent). The only category in which the US excels, with a rate of only 0.5 percent (which, however, is beaten by Norway’s 0.2 percent) is in long-term, or “structural,” unemployment. Interestingly, supposedly statist and (permanent scapegoat) France with 3 percent is not the worst of the OECD 17, with Belgium recording 3.4 percent, Germany 4.1, and Spain 4.6. (At the time the report was released, by the way, Spain had been ruled by the relentlessly deregulating, aggressively right-wing government of José María Aznar for most of the previous nine years). Yet, even in this category, the data are ambiguous. The Human Development Report contains 33 different tables that chart various categories; if one goes to Table 20, Unemployment in OECD Countries, one sees, once again, that the US is in a far more nebulous position when put within a comprehensive framework. Over a 10-year period (1992-2002, which is actually overly kind to the US historically because it mostly parallels both the technology boom and the stock-market bubble of the Nineties), US unemployment stood at 5.4 percent. That is manifestly better than most of the top 20 OECD countries monitored by the UN, but not the best. Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Austria all beat the US, with unemployment of 3.3, 4.4, 4.8, and 5.3 percent, respectively. More to the point—and because these small European economies might seem marginal when compared to the “robust” global standards of US hyperpowerdom—during the same period, which was the time of its worst postwar economic crisis, Japan had an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent, over 40 percent lower than the US. And then we get to healthcare. The astonishing figures here reveal an American exceptionalism that verges on collective—I can think of no other word—retardation. The US is the only society ranked in the top 20 in the HDI without national health insurance, and yet—are Americans congenitally incapable of understanding the economics of healthcare?—spends far more on health per capita, $4,887 in 2001, than the others. Switzerland (interestingly enough) is second, with $3,322 in expenditures, which still translates into US spending that is 47 percent higher. For the other 18 nations, healthcare costs range from a Spanish low of $1,607 to a Norwegian high of $2,920 per capita. (France, once again, far from being the socialist economic cripple it is portrayed to be, is actually almost at midpoint, ranking ninth out of 20 in spending, with $2,567 per capita.) Moreover, even in relative terms, the US far outstrips any advanced country in health costs, wasting a whopping 13.9 percent of GDP on them. Again, Switzerland is second, with 11 percent of GDP, and Germany third, with 10.8 percent—the only two other nations in double digits. What is most interesting, yet one more time, is the relative frugality of the actually existing European socialism Brooks abhors. Sweden, the classic US social bogeyman, spends 8.8 percent of GDP on health, lower than nine other countries in the top 20. And now comes the worst news of all, of which every American is deeply aware but also, it appears (because of the bizarre nature of American “self-reliance”), profoundly indifferent. Of the 13.9 percent spent on US healthcare, 7.7 percent is “private expenditure”—i.e., paid by individuals. The nearest comparable outlay of private funds comes from—whom else?—the Swiss, with 4.7 percent. The Dutch spend 3.3 percent, Germans 2.7, French 2.3, Japanese 1.8, British 1.4, Swedes 1.3, and Norwegians 1.2 percent—which is finally to say that Americans spend almost six and a half times of their own, personal resources on healthcare than Norwegians do. Of course, it’s not exactly “healthcare” that Americans are buying with their wages and life’s savings. Rather, they are providing the windfall profits of the insurance companies, drug companies, and HMOs, as well as of more than a few multimillionaire doctors who pride themselves on their “entrepreneurship.” (An article in the New York Times on August 16, “Doctors’ Links With Investors Raise Concerns” by Stephanie Saul and Jenny Anderson, reported that, on top of everything else, nearly 10 percent of doctors today in the US are “consultants” to investment companies.) In his remarks about “…electorates…anxious about declining quality of life…[that] feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition…,” Brooks thought he was talking about Western Europe. He should have been looking closer to home. I ask readers’ indulgence for burying them in all these data, but both God and the devil are in the details. Furthermore, the actual details are necessary to expose the Anglo-American attack on Europe, which is, almost exclusively, ideological and only passingly economic; in truth, it has very little to do with issues of either economic efficiency or rationalization—let alone “quality of life,” which is now, and has been for many years, manifestly superior in Europe, and “Old Europe” in particular. Here are three more (groups of) facts, all of them scandalous. Of the top 20 countries in the HDI: • The US is second to last in life expectancy (77.1 years), beating out Ireland by 0.1 year. It is noteworthy that the Japanese—who are supposed to be so “similar” to Americans (but whose society is radically different, and much more socially integrated and coherent than the US)—are first, living, on the average, an impressive four and a half years longer than Americans (81.6 years). The “socialist” Swedes are second, with 80.1 years. (I don’t know about you, but socialism is beginning to look better and better to me with each passing statistic.) Even Greeks—despite their smoking and overeating—have a longer life expectancy than Americans, at 78.3 years. • The US is last, both in infant mortality (7 per 1,000 live births, tied with a US-embargoed Cuba that has had minimal access to state-of-the-art medical equipment for the last four decades) and in under-five mortality (8 per 1,000 live births). Again, socialist Sweden is tied for first (with equally social-democratic Iceland) for infant mortality (3 per 1,000 live births) and is first in under-five mortality (again, 3 per 1,000 live births). I wish Brooks—and his fellow “pro-lifers”—would humbly reflect on that last statistic, which hides a vast infant’s graveyard. Think about it again: five children per 1,000 who would not have died had they lived in Sweden will die before they reach the age of five because they were born in the US. Socialism, indeed. • The US is dead last (no pun intended) for both women and men in “probability at birth of surviving to age 65.” American women have only an 86.4 percent chance of reaching 65, while American men have a truly dicey 78.1 percent chance of reaching retirement age—although, even if they do reach it, there’s no guarantee anymore that they’ll be able to survive financially. Sweden is, again, first in both categories, with a 91.6 percent chance for women and an 86.1 percent chance for men to survive to 65, at which point, not at all coincidentally, a decent pension and a full range of social services await them to ensure that they can continue to live healthy lives well past that age. (Greece’s corresponding figures are also impressive: 91.5 for women, 82.3 for men.) This extraordinary social regression, which defines American “exceptionalism,” did not just happen. In politics, as in life, there’s no such thing as virgin birth. It was all the specific outcome of concrete policies over a period of many decades. Of the eight major international treaties on fundamental labor rights negotiated since the end of the Second World War—namely, 1) the 1948 convention on the freedom of association and protection of the right to organize; 2) the 1949 convention on the right to organize and collective bargaining; 3) the 1950 forced labor convention; 4) the 1957 convention on the abolition of forced labor; 5) the 1951 equal remuneration convention; 6) the 1958 convention on discrimination in employment and occupation; 7) the 1973 minimum age convention; and 8) the 1999 worst forms of child labor convention—15 of the top-20 HDI countries have signed all eight, three (Australia, Japan, and New Zealand) have signed six, Canada has signed five, and the US has signed…two! Moreover, neither of these two—on abolition of forced labor and worst forms of child labor—are related to labor organizing or collective bargaining per se, but more properly concern fundamental human rights. What we see here is the foundation of the edifice, the bedrock of American “self-reliance,” “individual initiative,” and, above all, “freedom.” It is not a pretty sight, and the deeper one digs, the uglier it becomes. Next: Part 2 Peter Pappas is co-founder of greekworks.com.
greekartRobert Mapplethorpe and the Classical TraditionRobert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints, Guggenheim Museum, New York, July 1–August 24, 2005
The artist’s subject matter, then, became a matter of overt acceptance of what it was: an exploration of atypical sexual practice rather than a coy, superficial illustration of a gay lifestyle presented for our personal, and prurient, interest. There is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is much to be gained from exposure to “unconventional” sex, if for no other reason than it makes us examine our own notions of sexuality. Yet, this artistic stance presupposes that the actual documentation of the sexual practice depicted will justify itself, since it is not, for the most part, part of our experience. And this is where Mapplethorpe can be criticized for failing to communicate completely; he takes sexual rarity and proceeds to examine it as if it were mainstream. When the artist himself says, as he does in the catalogue, “I’m just trying to sort of be on the edge,” the justification for his work moves away from the rather ingenuous assumption of mainstream consumption to assert itself as other—a shift in values that, unfortunately, ratifies a prurient curiosity in certain forms of gay sex. Mapplethorpe therefore challenges us to respond to his images as though we were active practitioners of a gay lifestyle, while the more extreme forms of his art—in particular, his presentation of bondage and leather practice—are placed before us as inherently natural expressions of sexuality.
While it must be granted that this shared vernacular makes for powerful points of contact, especially in light of the drama of Thomas and Dovanna and A Roman Abducting A Sabine Woman, I remain skeptical of the argument because the energy of Mapplethorpe’s photographs is not easily converted to similar baroque poses—at least in part because his work is expected to make a difference in the audience’s experience, which is jaded regarding the kinds of effects we find in Mapplethorpe’s imagery. Indeed, we are so overwhelmed by the current culture’s interest in pornography, in which everything points to lust, that we instantaneously accept Mapplethorpe’s sexually charged photos as indicative of a sexualized convention, something the artist himself seems to have intended. The play of interracial sex in Mapplethorpe’s work also takes an overtired trope and rather coldly uses it for artistic purposes, while the violence seems more real, more believable, in Muller’s etching. All of Mapplethorpe’s energy is summed up in the overall gestalt of the two actors, who play out a fantasy intensified by the artist’s calculating eye. Is calculation always a part of classical art? Does coldness inevitably play a role in such a tableau? These questions are central to the way we respond to the photos of Mapplethorpe, who relies on sexualized spectacle to convince us of the esthetic rightness of his art.
Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.
Book ReviewsAthens NoirDeadline in Athens by Petros Markaris. Translated by David Connolly. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., New York, 295 pages, 2004, $23.
Following many of the traditional characteristics of the detective genre (see especially the work of George Pelecanos, reviewed in these pages), the novel takes place in contemporary Athens and focuses on the attempts of homicide detective Costas Haritos to solve the murder of an Albanian couple. A bare mattress was laid on the concrete floor. The woman was sprawled on it on her back. She must have been around twenty-five….The man beside her must have been about five years older….The rest of the house looked like the house of anyone else who leaves one hell to go to the next: a folding table, two plastic chairs, a gas stove. Two dead Albanians is of interest to no one but the TV channels, and then only if the murder is sensational enough to turn the stomachs of those watching the nine o’clock news before sitting down to dinner. In the old days it was biscuits and Greeks. Now it’s croissants and Albanians. (pp. 2-3) Initially, the crime appears to be a straightforward case involving Albanian immigrants in Greece, but the more Haritos investigates, the more complicated the case becomes. As Haritos reminds us in his description of the stereotypical attitude of the Greeks toward Albanians, “with terrorism, robberies, and drugs, who has time to worry about Albanians? If they had killed a Greek, one of ours, one of the fast-food- and crepe-eating Greeks of today, that would be different. But they could do what they liked to each other. It was enough that we provided ambulances to take them away” (p. 4). Soon, however, things change, after a famous reporter (a Greek version of Geraldo Rivera), investigating the couple’s murder as well, is found murdered. At this point, the inspector’s investigation leads him into numerous directions that reach and threaten the lives and reputations of people from different levels of Greek society. It is no longer a matter of being Greek or Albanian. The more Haritos investigates, the more frustrated he becomes by all the different people and paths in the case, which involves not only multiple murders, but also child-smuggling, the release of a (supposed) pedophile from jail, secret relationships, and internal leaks. The story focuses on Haritos’s efforts to reconstruct and bring together these loose ends, as he ultimately presents both his superiors and us, his readers, with a coherent, linear narrative about who has committed the crime(s) and why. As is typical in this genre, we expect that the detective (or whoever is involved) will solve the case. In that respect, there is nothing different here. What makes the story interesting, however, is both Markaris’s skill as a storyteller and the way he represents the space of the city as a signifier of different social and political relations. The crime(s) and Haritos’s investigation allow the author to mark the historical territory and context of the country and its various elements. Contemporary crime fiction (and I am thinking here of writers like George Pelecanos, Andrea Camilleri, and Henning Mankell) typically reflects on real-life social conditions within the constructed space of fiction. Likewise in Markaris’s novel: although the story’s focus appears to be on the crime, and on the psychology of its characters, it is a means at the same time to comment on contemporary Greek life and history, and on specific issues such as immigration and xenophobia, media and class. In this sense, the story, although local, makes a larger statement about contemporary life and its transformations in the age of global capitalism. It reflects on the anxieties of modern life, on the permutation of life by the mass media (Haritos at one point refers to a journalist as a “modern day Robespierre with a camera and a microphone”), and on the spectacle this creates. Significantly, Haritos is well aware (and, when he forgets, is reminded by his superiors) that he must carefully negotiate his position within a specific political discourse since he faces not only the political power and influence of the media, but also the power of the capitalist elite that is threatened in one way or another by his investigation. In an ironic twist, it is the old enemy—a former leftist prisoner whom Haritos, then a cell guard, met in jail during the dictatorship—that provides valuable information to Haritos about the case (in an act of solidarity among people of the same class perhaps). Although the story takes place in Athens, we do not hear much about the bleakness of that modern city or how urban space and topography determine and shape the lives of individuals. We do not learn about the social transformations of the city in the way that Pelecanos, for example, talks about Washington, DC, or Mankell about life in Swedish towns. But we are told about the traffic and how long it takes the inspector to get from one place to another. Some of us, who grew up and spent considerable time in his city, can sense, perhaps, the parallels between this specific urban space and the miserable and empty life of Inspector Haritos, a figure of modern-day alienation who has closed all channels of communication with and affection for his wife, and whose private time is spent reading dictionaries. The inspector is essentially a middle-aged, racist, and misanthropic character who maintains cynical views on everything that constitutes his reality, and who manages to maintain a distance from human suffering. In other words, Haritos is a police officer who was trained under the military junta and whose life is still haunted by that period. The novel addresses the ghosts of that traumatic period in modern Greek history and mirrors a world and a country that is suspended between its traumatic past and a present under constant transformation and change. Markaris returns to the past, perhaps, in order to emphasize the collapse of ideology or to remind us that former binary oppositions (between left and right, for example) are no longer valid. It must be said, however, that I found the relationship between the inspector and Lambros Zissis, the “retired leftist” (as he calls himself) and former prisoner of the junta, less than convincing (even in the spirit, one might add, of what the Greeks call ethnikê symfiliôsê, or national reconciliation), primarily because the author does not elaborate further on the effects of that past on contemporary culture and relationships. Nevertheless, Markaris uses Haritos’s investigation and the detective story in general as a way of investigating and reflecting on contemporary Greek life. In other words, Haritos not only investigates and presents all the facts about the crime to the reader; at the same time, he embodies the modern detective (or storyteller) who attempts to give us a multilayered picture of life in modern Greece. Markaris’s fiction (like his screenplays) is a journey into contemporary Greece. What makes it so interesting is precisely how it not only depicts an individual life marked by personal disappointments and crises but, more important, how it captures the nature of a country trying to recover from the catastrophes of the past and face the uncertainties of the present and future. The author successfully reveals the anxiety of a country trying to deal with change, and with the ensuing flow of illegal and legal immigration, the rise of violence, and the way that the mass media are affecting traditional forms of communication and even social structures. In the world of Markaris’s fiction, the old intolerance has been replaced by a new one: the Albanian immigrant is the other now, to be kept isolated. Through the eyes of Inspector Haritos, we become witnesses to the particularities of modern urban life, and to the specific conditions of market capitalism and its resulting alienation. Apostolos Vasilakis teaches literature and philosophy at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Our OpinionThe SystemIf there is any consensus among the ruling elites of the West, it is that the current Global War on Terrorism (to use the Bush administration’s official nomenclature) is precisely that, a global struggle against a global menace. Just last week, Tony Blair reiterated that the attack on London was not the latest outrage of a “clash of civilizations,” but the deadly spawn of an “evil ideology.” Of course, Mr. Blair was not exactly clear on what the specific constituents of that “ideology” were except to rehash the stale (indeed petrified) notions of a “cult of death” and a vile (and, naturally, utterly lunatic) “hatred” of “our way of life.” The fact that three of the four suicide bombers who wreaked their carnage on London were native-born Britons and that the fourth had lived in the country since the age of one; that they generally seemed to be both intelligent and relatively educated; and, above all, that they were so young—ideal representatives, one would have thought, of what Mr. Blair used to call (but does no longer, to avoid ridicule) “cool Britannia”—should have made even the British prime minister pause, despite his well-known contempt for anyone’s else’s opinion or, more to the point, anything that vaguely approaches the truth. What has always been most terrifying about Mr. Blair is his quickness of mind—and his consequent capacity to justify the most tortured distortion of reality. The fluent, steely response has always been his version of George Bush’s smirk. But they both (badly) camouflage an infinitely dangerous character, ruled not so much by unbridled egotism (a trait shared by many politicians) as—and this is the danger—by the delusion that pride is the same as conscience, and therefore speaks for collective principle instead of private aggrandizement (or self-justification). Indeed, never have there been two leaders of the US and UK who were, ostensibly at least, so programmatically different politically and yet so psychologically identical, to the point that this interior identity overrides, and in fact negates, their political differences—at least in Mr. Blair’s case. That is why the rest of the world—although, regrettably, not yet Messrs. Blair and Bush’s fellow citizens—has become so suspicious of the platitudes repeatedly mouthed by the two, since this jointly delivered rhetorical fraud has come at the increasingly heavy cost of lives, as we saw again, tragically, on July 7. An “evil ideology,” Mr. Blair said, assuming, like his counterpart in Washington, that the meaning, or judgment, is self-evident. According to the American Heritage dictionary that we use at greekworks.com, the word, evil, has five meanings in its primary, adjectival form, and another four in its secondary form, as a noun. As an adjective, it means: “1. Morally bad or wrong….2. Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful….3. Characterized by or indicating future misfortune; ominous….4. Bad or blameworthy by report; infamous….5. Characterized by anger or spite; malicious….” The noun, evil, means: “1. The quality of being morally bad or wrong; wickedness. 2. That which causes harm, misfortune, or destruction….3. An evil force, power, or personification. 4. Something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction….” As for “ideology,” American Heritage defines it as: “1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, a group, a class, or a culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs forming the basis of a political or economic system.” On the prior definitions, we have no doubt that at least half of the people of the UK and US, and the vast majority of the people of every other nation in the world, would contend that “evil” has been done consistently and even remorselessly by the UK and, especially, the US, not only, most recently, in Iraq, but in many countries on every continent on the face of the planet over the last many decades. Power predisposes to evil, and vice versa. To believe that empires have been built on altruistic motives is not merely to wallow in credulity. It is—as in the case of the recent academic propagandists for American empire, such as Harvard’s Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff—to traffic in hypocrisy and a particularly transparent mendacity (especially for “human-rights advocates” such as Ignatieff). If nothing else, the evil that has been done in the name of fighting evil since time immemorial is not simply a part of humanity’s historical record; it is, in more ways than is decent to recount, the historical record. Which is, of course, precisely where ideology comes in: “1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, a group, a class, or a culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs forming the basis of a political or economic system.” Well, yes, quite. We have no idea what the four suicide bombers in London—and their accomplices, wherever they may be hiding—believed in. What is clear—the only thing that is under the circumstances—is that they did not share Messrs. Blair and Bush’s vision of the best of all possible worlds. In this, however, they were—are—not alone. That is why to accuse them of being hostages to, and perpetrators of, an “evil ideology” is, quite literally, to say nothing at all. It is, in fact, to admit, not only that you hardly know anything about them, or their motivations, but—much worse—that you don’t care to. It is to adopt the moral stance of the aggrieved colonialist when the benighted colonized rises up in vengeful violence and slaughters the innocent along with the guilty. It is to denounce Mau Mau “atrocities,” or FLN café-bombers, or Tupamaro “terrorists,” but to refuse to ask what those English in Kenya, or French in Algeria, or Americans in Uruguay were doing there in the first place. On July 18, Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, in cooperation with the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, released a detailed and scathing report on security and terrorism in the UK whose central conclusion was that, “Riding pillion with a powerful ally[the US] has proved costly in terms of British and US military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure, and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign.” British foreign secretary Jack Straw’s response was predictable: “The time for excuses over terrorism is over.” The next day, the Guardian released the results of a poll that showed that two-thirds of Britons believe that the attack on London was related to British participation in invading and occupying Iraq, while three-quarters think that there will be more attacks. On the day after London was struck, one of Britain’s finest journalists, Robert Fisk, wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (“Blair’s alliance with Bush bombed,” July 8) that, “It is easy for Blair to call yesterday’s bombings ‘barbaric’—they were—but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is ‘collateral damage’; when ‘we’ die it is ‘barbaric terrorism.’” And the product, always, of “evil.” Which it is, and which is why what happened in London was evil, but, sadly, no more so than what happens in Baghdad every day. To understand that is also to begin to understand the nature—and likeness and connection—of the crimes in both Baghdad and London. Once upon a time, before “New Labour,” when English socialists were deeply honest men, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Not Counting Niggers,” in which he reminded his fellow Britons that, “What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain but in Asia and Africa.” Such, Orwell concluded, “is the system in which we all live on.” Indeed. PoliticsJuly 1965: The Royal Road to Dictatorship
The early 1960s witnessed a shift of power in Greek politics away from the right and toward the center. Geôrgios Papandreou (the grandfather and namesake of PASOK’s current leader) had led the Center Union party to victory in 1963, ending the right’s near-monopoly of power, which it had enjoyed since the end of the Civil War in 1949. This did not sit well with the three-cornered Greek establishment comprising the conservative politicians, the armed forces, and—last but not least—King Constantine, who had ascended to the throne in 1964 at the age of 24. As the Center Union victory had also occurred in the midst of the Cold War, the Americans were even less amused. As was the case nearly everywhere else in the world, state department officials suspected politicians who were not explicitly anticommunist of being “soft on communism,” if not fellow-travelers. It is a measure of Cold War paranoia that Papandreou—who, upon Athens’s wartime liberation, had spearheaded the return of the exiled government that, with the help of the British, suppressed the communist-backed left-wing resistance movement—was, 20 years later, suspected of pro-leftist leanings. Now, battling the formidable US-backed Greek right, Papandreou had made every effort to turn his Center Union into a big-tent party that included an array of center-rightists and center-leftists. His son, Andreas, was a leader of the more radical tendency in the party. Unlike the center-rightists, however, many of whom had ties to the palace, the center-leftists had nothing to do with the proscribed and enfeebled communist party. The July 1965 crisis was the result of Constantine’s determination—bolstered by Queen Mother Frederika’s interference in the country’s public life—to prevent Papandreou from consolidating the Center Union’s power. In view of the army’s sway over Greek society, the Center Union’s victory at the ballot box—narrowly in elections in 1963 and more handily in 1964—was meaningless without the ability to assert some sort of control over the armed forces, which had been under US tutelage since the Civil War. At the time, the military—which, through the covert Pericles Plan exposed by Papandreou, had secured a right-wing victory in the notorious 1961 elections of “via kai notheia” (“violence and fraud”)—was roiled by two ongoing investigations. The more significant one was the so-called ASPIDA affair, an alleged conspiracy of young officers supposedly aligned politically with Andreas Papandreou. The second probed the alleged involvement of Greek officers in Cypriot president Makarios’s attempts to procure Soviet missiles.
Papandreou had a constitutional right to implement any changes he wished in the military, but his timing was not good. In 1964, he had roared into power with an impressive 53 percent of the national vote, which gave him 171 out of the 300 seats in parliament. By early 1965, however, disunity in the face of pressures from the royalist establishment had already chipped away at his solid parliamentary majority. A group of Center Union deputies had threatened to declare their independence in early 1965. Moreover, many potential party leaders saw Andreas as a rival and suspected that his father’s moves against the royalist army were motivated by paternal rather than political concerns. In the event, Garoufalias and other government leaders close to the king, such as banker Stauros Kôstopoulos, the foreign minister, deserted Papandreou. Ambitious strongmen in the Center Union, among them center-leftist Êlias Tsirimôkos and center-rightist (and future prime minister) Kônstantinos Mêtsotakês, also saw an opportunity to further their own careers at the expense of the 77-year old prime minister and refused to support him. The depth of political betrayal felt by Papandreou was summarized in his accusation that the Center Union deputies who abandoned him were “apostates,” or renegades. Papandreou was well aware of the deeply religious connotations that the term apostatê has in Greek Orthodoxy. It is used to describe those who do not believe in God, and is also, of course, the word used to describe fourth-century Byzantine emperor Julian (the Apostate), who unsuccessfully attempted to restore paganism. As part of the abiding legacy of the Iouliana, a political turncoat is routinely described as an apostatê in Greece. The American element was naturally present in the political mix. The state department’s records made public a few years ago indicate that Athens embassy chargé d’affaires Norbert Anschuetz—Ambassador Henry Labouisse was in the process of being appointed to UNICEF—placed himself at the center of proceedings by maintaining close contact with the king, the Center Union dissidents, and Papandreou. Anschuetz, a Harvard law-school graduate who would retire from the foreign service after 22 years in 1968 and become a Citibank vice-president, freely dispensed advice to those seeking to undermine the prime minister. He believed that Papandreou should not “interfere” with the army, and his only concerns were the timing and manner in which the prime minister’s plans were to be stymied.
Papandreou may have resigned assuming that the king would ask him to form a new government, as he was still the leader of the party with the majority in parliament. If so, he underestimated the king’s determination to take charge. Constantine had a puppet prime minister waiting in the wings, 72-year-old Geôrgios Athanasiadês Novas, the speaker of parliament. Novas had been elected to parliament for the first time as a member of a right-wing party headed by General Iôannês Metaxas, the man whose coup d’etat in 1936 suspended both the legislature and the constitution, and initiated the Fourth of August dictatorship that lasted until Greece was occupied by the Axis in 1941. Upon hearing of Novas’s appointment, Center Union supporters streamed into the street to protest what they considered a new coup, this time the work of the palace. Pandemonium broke out in parliament itself when it met to ratify the king’s appointment. Mêtsotakês worked hard to persuade enough Center Union deputies to join the pro-royalist, conservative minority to ensure that the Novas administration received the required 50-percent-plus-one majority in the chamber. While Papandreou’s party would eventually fragment, it would not be over Novas. In their effort to ridicule the king’s choice, the Center Union faithful were helped by a pro-Papandreou journalist who falsely claimed that one of the many poems written by Novas—a prolific author who celebrated the purity of Greek rural life—included the lines, “Your breasts/Were milky white/And you told me/Tickle them.” The jeers that greeted Novas included cries of “Gargala ta! Gargala ta!” (“Tickle them! Tickle them!”). The king’s first attempt to get his own prime minister approved thus ended in a fiasco, as did his second, with the former leftist Tsirimôkos as the candidate. On the third try, however, conservative politician Stefanos Stefanopoulos, who had joined the Center Union in 1963, managed to muster enough votes—a narrow margin of 152 to 148—in September. This was all due to Mêtsotakês’s orchestration of the defection of the requisite number of Center Union deputies, who had been induced to abandon Papandreou with promises of ministerial posts and, allegedly, large sums of money. The bribe offers have never been proven, but it is known that the state department turned down Greek requests for additional funds to help secure the parliamentary approval of the king’s appointee.
The Iouliana remain a watershed in Greek politics, not only because the king’s clash with the democratically elected prime minister triggered a domino effect that resulted in the 1967 coup d’etat and ultimately the end of the monarchy. They also constituted the most divisive event in Greek politics after the Civil War, pitting the center and center-left against the center-right and right. The communist left—decimated by years of persecution—was conspicuously absent, no matter what the Cold Warriors in the US embassy in Athens stated. The two sides that lined up against each other in 1965 may have been inchoate and hastily assembled, but their politics presaged the ideological divide between conservatives and social democrats, New Democracy and PASOK, that would dominate Greek politics after the restoration of democracy. Indeed, the legacy of the Iouliana can help explain the crudeness of the exchanges between New Democracy and PASOK over the past three decades. The opposition between these two parties is notable for its lack of engagement with the ideological content of the opponent. New Democracy has often resorted to painting PASOK with a pro-communist brush rather than critically judging the party’s social democratic policies. This is especially convenient since, given Greek society’s demands for a social safety net, New Democracy has tiptoed around the prospect of implementing a neo-liberal economic agenda. By the same token, PASOK prefers to talk about the specter of the anti-democratic right; indeed, when Mêtsotakês headed New Democracy, the stain of “apostasy” was invoked on a daily basis by PASOK’s partisans. An anti-democratic right with skeletons of apostates in its closet is a much easier target than a pro-European and otherwise standard conservative party. Finally, as far as former king Constantine is concerned, the Iouliana will have to fade completely from public memory before he can begin to contemplate his permanent return to Greece, even as a private citizen. Alexander Kitroeff teaches history at Haverford College and is a contributing editor to greekworks.com, which published his most recent book, Wrestling With the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics.
EnvironmentReevaluating the GridCurrent thinking about city and neighborhood planning is rooted in the Hippodamian method of laying out cities such as Miletus, Piraeus, Priene, and Rhodes, but also incorporates and reflects the ideas of more recent thinkers such as Raymond Unwin, Clarence Perry, Clarence Stein, and Constantinos Doxiadis. For example, the 1902 Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard have since been overlaid with the functional requirements of contemporary transport modes, resulting in the expanded, modern city with its suburbs that are accessible mostly by automobile. This is particularly the case in newer cities and in countries where a high proportion of car ownership was achieved early in the century, such as in the US and Canada. The newness of the cities offered opportunities for innovative and unencumbered design directions, and the prevalence of the automobile influenced the directions that were chosen. The resulting city form found many critics, most influential among them the US-based theorists that advocated Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) as the solution to what was seen as a failing urban system. Since the emergence of the TND school of thought (1992), the Hippodamian grid system of laying out streets has gradually returned as an essential feature of good planning. The grid’s interconnectedness is seen as the foundation for fostering true community, and even as the necessary condition for nurturing it. Although other features of TND (such as mixed use, village centers, moderate density as opposed to low density, and housing diversity) are arguably more critical in achieving its objective of recreating small-town ambience, the grid has become its signature, as no other design feature is as clearly discernible or a more enduring mark of its approach. Although the grid system undeniably has positive attributes, such as interconnectedness and a clear mental image (that helps to find destinations), there are instances where its applicability may be rightly questioned. Questioning street patterns is fully justifiable, not only because roads are the most expensive infrastructural investment, but also because they are virtually laid for perpetuity and, as such, may leave a legacy of unsatisfactory conditions. Rationale for the grid In the mid-1980s, the grid experienced a renaissance, propelled mainly by the TND movement. It was argued by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in 1992 that, “Streets ought to be laid out largely in straight segments, as they were until the 1940s. After all, the vast majority of our successful towns and cities, from Cambridge to Portland, were laid out this way” (see “The Second Coming of the American Small Town,” winter 1992, Wilson Quarterly). Although many American cities were indeed laid out in pure grids of varying dimensions (Figure 1), the link between grid geometry and success is tenuous. There are as many grid-based towns and cities in decline (e.g., Winnipeg, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Detroit) as in good health and, conversely, there are cities that are laid out in meandering routes and dead-ends, particularly Arab cities but also certain British towns, that are prospering. If success is to be measured by economic vitality and the general quality of life of a city’s inhabitants, it can be easily shown that city location, transportation, and economic base contribute far more than street layout. Cities of all forms, as evidenced, for example, by Athens, can fluctuate from peaks of wealth, power, and cultural attainment to valleys of insignificance and deprivation. Evidently, other forces or factors besides street patterns explain a city’s well-being.
Since 1992, the grid’s main attributes, interconnectedness and clarity of layout, have regained focus and prominence as site-planning features. The grid’s crossweave inherently produces convenience, route options, and traffic distribution, and it is now presumed by many to alleviate congestion and to reduce car travel. Legibility, which is defined as creating a clear sense of a path to a destination and a comforting rhythm of intersections along this path, is the outcome of orthogonal geometry and increases a pedestrian’s comfort. Some of these advantages were recognized, with reservations, by those who experienced the grid at the time of its early application. New reservations have emerged in regard to the direct application of the grid in the current, much different, context of motorized transport. These include issues of land-use efficiency, which focuses on land consumption as an additional criterion for evaluating street patterns (Figure 1), and concerns about the proportion of impermeable surfaces (those, in other words, that do not filter water), including streets, as well as pedestrian safety and traffic flow. Reasons for applying or modifying the grid The arrangement of private dwellings is considered to be more pleasant and more convenient for other purposes if it is regularly planned, both according to the newer and according to the Hippodamian manner; but for security in war [the arrangement is more useful if it is planned in] the opposite [manner], as it used to be in ancient times. For that [arrangement] is difficult for foreign troops to enter and find their way about when attacking. Thus the grid was lauded for its convenience and delight but disapproved of on the grounds of security (Figure 2). The old “organic” layout was praised for being confusing to invaders but, Aristotle implied, not to residents, who had memorized its paths and passages from childhood. When it came to the ease of finding one’s way (legibility), the grid’s orthogonal geometry, it seems, served visitors more than it did residents of small towns. Contemporary urban tourists would agree.
The most notable variation on the original idea of the orthogonal grid was Vitruvius’ (first century BCE) departure. He introduced a version that more accurately reflected the centric nature of the city and its transportation needs. His radial plan retained the legibility of the pure grid while improving on its convenience by reducing the walk-length to the center. Few cities followed Vitruvius’ model; the majority of founded towns and cities as well as many expansions to existing ones followed the Hippodamian prototype or slight variations of it, such as an elongated block (e.g., S. Kleanthis and E. Schaubert’s 1833 proposal for the expansion of Athens). One marked innovation was introduced by James Oglethorpe in 1743. In the plan of Savannah, Georgia, which Oglethorpe founded, he deviated from the pure grid by introducing a “ward” or “cell” structure with a central open space that intercepts parts of the grid, thus rendering some streets discontinuous, although still aligned (Figure 3). This arrangement enhances the perception of a physical neighborhood by emphasizing a common space framed by buildings.
These assessments and modifications show that, within a walking distance, the grid is simply one option for legibility, but not the best option for convenience. As for neighborhood identity, the grid may require a slight modification to achieve distinctiveness in each case when a city has many neighborhoods. Another modification that was proposed recently abandons the orthogonal geometry of the grid to achieve “closure” by changing the direction of streets at chosen intervals. This proposal argues that “…humans do not like endless vistas,” an opinion apparently derived from shopping center (marketing) experience (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 1954, and “The Second Coming…”). Urban experience tells a different story: some of the most celebrated shopping streets are straight and, in some cases, extend for a few kilometers (Yonge and Bloor Streets in Toronto; Broadway in New York; and the boulevards of Paris). This proposed departure, although it produces a picturesque effect, might, if used liberally, endanger clarity of layout (legibility) and, potentially, convenience, both essential functional attributes of a street pattern. It is generally agreed that curved streets produce both the beneficial and detrimental effects of “closure,” which is why they have been judged undesirable by many. New reasons for applying the grid • is more convenient for pedestrians A closer look at these reasons yields doubts about the grid’s effectiveness in delivering expected results and suggests that beneficial modifications to it may be required. Pedestrian convenience
More route options For drivers, route options become valuable when one route has fewer intersections or turns, or is less congested. Each of these conditions would save time (effort is no longer a factor when driving). In a grid, all routes have an identical number of intersections; consequently, no one route offers a distinct advantage in that respect. Absence of congestion depends on the number of cars choosing the same route, the number of routes available, and the number of delays encountered; all routes are equally vulnerable to congestion depending on their collective flow capacity. An alternative route is not an automatic guarantee of a shorter trip. It would seem that, regarding convenience, unless the grid is modified, its route options are valueless to pedestrians and of doubtful value to motorists. Traffic distribution For vehicular circulation, however, the grid’s capacity has often been gradually used up due to the constant rise in car use. Traffic distribution with more and wider roads has increasingly become one of the few means to accommodate the growing number of cars. As the grid becomes finer (e.g., Portland), it theoretically provides greater capacity for traffic since more roads are available per unit of space. It was found, however, that this progression toward a finer grid reaches a threshold of diminishing returns: the finer the grid, the more intersections and, consequently, the slower the traffic and the greater the chance for gridlock. Similarly, the greater capacity of a finer grid means more traffic is eventually accommodated; consequently, more residents are negatively affected by traffic. To strike a balance between traffic flow that improves mobility and traffic distribution that limits the negative effects on residents, adjustments to the grid may be necessary. Neighborhoods in many cities have implemented modifications toward this balance.
Congestion relief on arterials Reduction of car travel Evolutionary and creative adaptations of the grid Many of these conflicts that emerged in existing grid-based areas of cities were resolved in the design of new suburbs when their street patterns were adapted to the car: quiet and safety at the local street level, with speed and convenience at the district level. The grid geometry was abandoned as a method for laying out streets in favor of discontinuous streets such as cul-de-sacs, crescents for residential streets, and fully engineered continuous arterials for regional mobility and accessibility. These adaptations, however, rendered street patterns inhospitable and dysfunctional for pedestrians. Creative mutations, cross-fertilization, and hybrids
These new hybrids resolve the apparent incompatibility between the inherited grid system and the car-adapted suburban patterns of the last 50 years, and they show how the connectivity, structure, and legibility of the grid can be combined with the tranquility, safety, and economy of the more recent street types.
Evidence suggests that this may be a workable model for new cities, for expanding existing ones, and for a careful, staged remodeling of built-up areas. Milton Keynes, a “new town” (1960s) in England, reports few traffic problems, a fact that is attributed to the one-kilometer grid of regional roads, a central feature of the fused grid. Stockholm transformed a central area of the city in 1970 by creating a quadrant that consisted of perimeter roads, loops, cul-de-sacs, and a diagonal open space weaving through the center of the block, a solution that is unmistakably analogous to the fused grid quadrant. (Figure 8)
Rapidly expanding cities in Greece as well as new satellite towns will inevitably experience the effect of rising car ownership on circulation and neighborhood quality. They could benefit from this contemporary interpretation of the Hippodamian grid, which is designed to accommodate pedestrian and motorized traffic equally well. Fanis Grammenos and Douglas Pollard are senior researchers at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada’s national housing agency.
greekartPoetry to Painting: Peter GolfinopoulosCharms: Recent Paintings, Walter Randel Gallery, New York, through July 30.
For a writer such as myself, Golfinopoulos’s paintings succeed not because of their form alone, but because of a depth suggested by the artist’s relation to words. Rather than paint words themselves on the canvas, he involves an unseen idiom that gives a context to these relentlessly abstract compositions. Words are brilliant at mediating the ideas in art, but they are not easily made interesting visually, with the exception of the relatively minor medium of calligraphy. We only know of Valéry’s influence because the artist has told us of it; can it be said that the organization of form complies with the ideas of the poet’s text? While these queries are fascinating, they are, at the same time, moot in the sense that words form an invisible matrix in which the paintings are made. This invisibility is powerful only if we know intellectually that the words are there, hidden in the craft of the artifact’s making. One thinks of great works of literature, such as Paradise Lost, in which the influence of other literary pieces is easily traceable; often, Milton’s nods to Latin and Greek take the form of direct appropriation. But painting is unable to divulge the effects of wide reading, without which it seems that Golfinopoulos would lose inspiration. As a result, we can neither take it for granted nor ignore those literary elements that mean so much to the artist; because the paintings are so good, so specifically realized, we accept the slightly idiosyncratic conditions of their construction, silently reading not only the image but the words behind it. Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.
Chronicles of OzymandiasFreedom: A Requiem In Four PartsPart 1: If you build it, we will hide [The] new design provides for a level of bomb blast mitigation consistent with the NYPD’s report on the Freedom Tower and adequate to the threat…. The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world…. The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke….
Before I proceed to bring in the Ghost of Freedom Future, however, I will, like Dickens, set the stage with the Ghost (or, at least one of many such) of Freedom Past: Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, April 30, 1975, a mere (?) generation ago. The city, and the (southern, arbitrarily divided, part of the) country “falls” to the communists, as the last Americans pile onto helicopters on the roof of our embassy and end another hastily knocked-off chapter—not only poorly composed but, this time, literally just thrown together at the last minute—in our endless, collective epic, humbly entitled, Building Everybody Else’s Nations (and subtitled: We May Not Have Gotten It Right Ourselves Yet, But At Least We Know What’s Good for the Rest of the World). Americans, of course, hate to look back, since the only direction we know is (fast-) forward (which is why even a generation is an eternity in the land of the unending frontier). But since we’re on the subject, both of memorials and of the Glorious Fourth, I do feel the need to address an obvious question: Do any of the millions upon millions of my fellow citizens who make their pilgrimage to the Vietnam Memorial year in and year out, and were there in great numbers again during this last Fourth of July weekend, ever pause, even momentarily, to reflect upon the obscene fact that the names etched on its wall are a mere token of the vast criminal enterprise that perpetrated a pitiless destruction and mass murder rare even by the hideous standards of the twentieth century? Don’t take it personally. I was just asking. The point is that, beyond the obvious psychic (and political) self-defense of selective memory, Americans have been inordinately guilty, during the last few decades, of selective memorialization. I quote Nicolai Ouroussoff again: At a recent meeting at his Wall Street office, [David M.] Childs [of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was asked by New York governor George Pataki to “simplify” Daniel Libeskind’s design for the “Freedom Tower”] tried to deflect…criticism by enveloping the building in historical references….The fortresslike appearance of the base was partly inspired by the Strozzi Palace in Florence, the relationship between the base and the soaring tower by Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” sculpture [according to Mr. Childs]. But the tower has none of the lightness of Brancusi’s polished bronze form, let alone its sculptural beauty. And the Strozzi Palace’s rough stone facade is beautiful because it is a mask: once inside, you are confronted with a courtyard flooded with light and air, one of the Renaissance’s great architectural treasures. What the tower evokes, by comparison, are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass—an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power. (“A Tower of Impregnability, the Sort Politicians Love,” New York Times, June 30, 2005) In a New York Times poll last month, only 43 percent of New Yorkers said that they would work in a higher floor of a new building at the trade-center site. That was before the new plan for the “Freedom Tower” was unveiled, however. Now, in addition to its new, 200-foot (20-story), essentially windowless, concrete-and-steel base, the building will be set 65 feet away from West Street (originally it was “only” 25 feet) and 125 feet from Vesey Street. In addition, the first three floors of the base will be completely solid. It has undoubtedly already been forgotten by those who inhabit the island at the center of the world that, following the attack on September 11, the collective consensus of its citizenry was that any new building(s) that went up to replace the World Trade Center had to be “integrated” into the daily “street” life of the “neighborhood.” As things have turned out, the only precaution that apparently hasn’t been taken (yet) against any such possible integration has been to divert the Hudson into a moat surrounding this new and emblematic portal to the land of the free and the home of the…well, you know. But that’s what happens when one’s world, and life, and entire identity and sense of self, is, to quote the Times’s architecture critic one last time, “shaped by fear” (“A Tower of Impregnability…”).
Part 2: Terror, A Theme Recently, I read Paris: The Biography of a City, written by the English historian Colin Jones. Like any good historian, Jones understands that it is in the detail that we capture an entire, lost world. More to the point, and again like a good historian, he knows that the past often makes more sense than the present precisely because it is the past, and we at least have the guidance of historians to assist us in wending our way through it, whereas, as far as our own time is concerned, we only have ourselves and, worst of all, journalism, which is usually not so much a guide as a disorientation. Following are two excerpts from Jones’s book. …[O]n 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794)…Robespierre was overthrown by his fellow Conventionnels. Much of the assembly had become fearful for their lives in a Terror which seemed to be spinning out of control the more that “Year II” advanced. The Law of 22 Prairial (22 June) had facilitated convictions in the Revolutionary Tribunal, so that the streets of Paris witnessed the ever-more frequent passage of tumbrils [sic] on the way to the guillotine. It was rumoured that it had been decided to shift the place of execution out to the east of the city in the present-day Place de la Nation…because the soil under the guillotine on the Place de Grève was becoming so sodden with blood that there was a risk of contamination of urban water supplies. Some 2,600 individuals perished in this way at the hands of the Revolutionary Tribunal. (pp. 234-235) We now move ahead 77 years, to 1871. The Mur des Fédérés is the site of one of the most chilling and sickening acts of political violence in Paris’s long (and in this domain) rich experience….From March 1870 the Parisian National Guard had been formed into “federations” and, once the Commune experience began, the term fédéré was used interchangeably with “Communard” or “supporter of the Commune.” On 28 May 1871, following a frenetic manhunt through the tombstones, 147 Communard rebels were shot in the Père-Lachaise cemetery against the south-east perimeter wall. The remains of nearly a thousand more Communards were brought here from killing spots within the city and dumped into grave-pits…. To the Left, the Mur des Fédérés represented the savagery to which bourgeois government was driven by fear of proletarian revolution, but it was also a heroic site commemorating the irreducible bravery of the working classes. At the end of the Paris Commune, the government stationed in Versailles had sent the army to dislodge the rebel Paris Commune from power. As they moved out of the centre of the city, the Communards not only left a trail of incendiarism and destruction behind them; they also shot prisoners taken as hostages, including the archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Darboy. There were atrocities on both sides, but in terms of numbers killed the government troops were far more brutal and ruthless: 20,000 deaths…plus even more arrests and imprisonments…as against about a thousand army casualties. What gave piquancy to the Left’s commemoration of the Communards at the Mur des Fédérés, was that it was they, rather than the Versailles troops, who were most severely attacked by writers and intellectuals—surprisingly few of whom had a good word to say for what one writer called “this orgy of power, wine, women and blood known as the Commune”…. (pp. 328-329) Entire treatises on the ethics of memory, historical justice, and historiography as war, and retribution, by other means can be written based on the multiple moral and social implications bursting out of the 400-plus words penned by Jones above. I will limit myself to the few paragraphs that follow, and only to stress how Jones’s historiographical conscience speaks directly to our time and its moral disorder.
So, following 1989 (ironically enough, the bicentenary of the formerly great French Revolution), it became the conventional consensus, even among many historians and “intellos” in France to look, quite literally, upon the Jacobins as proto-Bolsheviks and the revolutionary Terror as the archetype for the Soviet Gulag. It is a cliché that all historians write of their own time regardless of the period under inquiry; a reason we read multiple histories of the same period, in fact, is because one historian’s perspective can illuminate it in a way that another’s cannot. In historiography, therefore, contending grinding axes are a good thing. The danger in intellectual revisionism, however, is dropping the baby as one discards the bathwater. Suffice it to say that revolution and terror have been synonymous in the English-speaking world ever since Burke (and even more so, again, from the time that Dickens, that great moralist of the British liberal middle classes, made that simplistic formula the pablum of received wisdom in a far, far, more effective way than the Irish reactionary ever could have). So, to be told that Robespierre was a Leninist avant la lettre is to be told nothing new, and certainly nothing of substance. We all grew up with Madame Defarge knitting murderously. Indeed, for those of us who made our own intellectual and moral way to the left, that was one of the first images that haunted us, and had to be exorcised through our private, invariably individual examination, and understanding, of who Madame Defarge was—and wasn’t. It’s here that Jones’s insight into the subsequent historical defamation of the Paris Commune as an “orgy of power, wine, women and blood…” is especially acute, and poignant. The point is not so much that the victors write history as that they edit it, and pass it on formally and ritually, from schoolbooks to national holidays. It is this emendation of history that distorts moral perception even more than the original, ideological myopia. Regarding the very word, “terror,” one cannot seriously argue that it was a slander hurled against the Revolution by its enemies when the Revolution itself adopted and used it as a basic weapon in its defense. “The terror,” Robespierre famously declaimed, “is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.” Well, yes, but then why didn’t “the Incorruptible One” just refer to it as “the Vigilance,” or “the Alarm,” or “the Security,” or even “the Defense,” or, simplest of all, “justice” itself? Precisely because he wanted to strike terror into the hearts of the Revolution’s enemies, not vigilance or alarm or security or defense—although he did believe he was acting in the name of justice and in defense of republican “virtue,” of which, he also insisted, terror was “an emanation.” (We all know now that the notion of “enemy of the Revolution” represented, by the Year II, not fact so much as revolutionary contention. Yes, revolutions do devour their offspring—not to mention, oftentimes, their parents as well.) In the event, the left cannot blame the right for tarring it with a pitch of its own manufacture. What the left can do, however, is point to the fact that most of that revolutionary pitch was used to seal a historic democratic victory against the reactionary assaults of a dying regime, and that the genuinely “great” resonance of this triumph changed the course of nations, peoples, and the world as a whole. Which leads us to the notorious issue of numbers. What price progress? And what is the human, civilizational worth of the notion itself. No one can say exactly, and yet everyone knows it. In their recent book, the historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton quote from a letter sent by an Ohio corporal in the Union army to his wife in 1864. “If I do get hurt,” the man wrote, “I want you to remember that it will not only be for my Country and my children but for Liberty all over the World that I risked my life, for if Liberty should be crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human Progress anywhere else?” (The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000, p. 303) In his extraordinary Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln blamed the fratricide then ravaging the nation on Americans themselves: If…He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth compiled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” To this day, the Civil War remains, by far, the bloodiest slaughter of Americans. Almost as many men died in it—roughly 620,000 soldiers—as have died in all the other wars combined that the United States has ever waged. Was the conflict “worth” it? Should it have been fought at all? These are not merely academic questions; they are questions that can only be posed by those whose sense of the world is uncomplicated to the point of aphasia. Colin Jones cites “some 2,600” victims of what probably remains the most frightful, pre-Soviet nightmare of purely political (as opposed to racial or ethnic) violence in the West’s collective unconscious. He then cites “20,000 deaths” that most of the West’s otherwise brilliantly informed citizens have undoubtedly never heard of. Let us dig a little deeper. As Arno Mayer showed a few years back in The Furies, his brilliant shredding of revisionist theories of violence and terror in the French and Russian revolutions, revolutionary violence only becomes extreme when it is attacked, not simply by domestic reaction but also by a coordinated foreign assault. It is conveniently forgotten by most (if it ever was known) that while Louis XVI was not executed until January 1793, two and a half years after the popular investment of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the first foreign armies, urged on to holy war by the Vatican against French democracy (another oft-forgotten detail), had already invaded France in August of 1792. Furthermore, it was only the day after—September 21, 1792—the French defeated the Prussian-led forces at the Battle of Valmy, and thus halted the foreign advance on Paris, that the revolutionary convention declared France a republic. The social revolution, in other words, was the consequence of a national and, above all, patriotic defeat of foreign occupiers. Let us now examine the repression of the Paris Commune. In July 1870, the Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte went to war against Prussia; by September 2, the Prussians had crushed the French at Sedan and took Louis prisoner, along with 80,000 troops. Two days later, the Third Republic was declared, as the Prussian army surrounded and laid siege to Paris. I return to Colin Jones: “Famine conditions led to most mammals from the Vincennes zoo—along with any dog, cat or rat that could be found—being consumed by hungry Parisians. In January 1871 Edmond de Goncourt turned down the offer of elephant steak and camel kidneys from a vendor on the Champs-Élysées, and contented himself…with having snared a blackbird which he intended to eat for dinner” (p. 324). In the same month that Goncourt sat down to a meal of blackbird—January 28, to be precise—the fledgling Republic surrendered to the Prussians; it was a moot point, as Wilhelm II had proclaimed himself Kaiser of all the Germans 10 days earlier in the Hall of Mirrors of the palace at Versailles. By March 3, the Germans were marching down the Champs-Élysées and out of Paris, having handed over the city’s administration to the Republic, which rewarded the long suffering of the Parisians during the city’s horrible siege by immediately deciding to abandon the French capital and repair to Versailles to establish its provisional government there (after also ceding Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans). That was the final straw. Units of the national guard were still armed and in control of several hundred cannons; they were now joined by their fellow Parisians. When the Versailles government sent in the army to recover the cannons, a crowd confronted the soldiers, who, in the end, refused to fire and retreated. Paris was in the hands of its municipal government, called the Commune. The rest is bloody history. Indeed, the French call the suppression of the Commune la semaine sanglante, or “Bloody Week.” In addition to the 20,000 Parisians butchered by the government on May 21-28, 1871, 35,000 were arrested and 5,000 were condemned to penal servitude in New Caledonia. This was all done, of course, under the watchful eye of the Germans, who allowed the provisional government to rearm to the extent it needed to murder…its own citizens. It’s no wonder that the Third Republic was so despised by so many French for so long, and came to an ignominious end after the Germans occupied France again 70 years later and allowed Marshal Pétain to dissolve it and replace it with his own collaborationist regime. (The phrase, “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre” is, in the moral lexicon of the West, synonymous with pogromist butchery. One-tenth the number of people—2,000—died in 1573 as died in 1871. I do not want to get into—in fact, I despise—that comparative exterminationism of the competitive victimhood that has become so popular, and obsessive, in our time. Still, six million dead Jews slain throughout the European continent, as opposed to a couple of hundred murdered in a Ukrainian village, is of another criminal magnitude entirely, not only quantitatively but morally, and is precisely what separates a pogrom from the Holocaust.)
Part 3: Future Imperfect There’s no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I’ll never see it. I’m not sure about that, but it doesn’t matter. There will be hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of others, who will see the legacy, and feel it. The question is, of course, what will it be. Let us pause for a few moments to take in the world around us. Item: In a dispatch from Kabul published on June 30, the New York Times’s Carlotta Gall wrote that, “For the first time since the United States overthrew the Taliban government three and a half years ago, Afghans say they are feeling uneasy about the future.” She continued: Violence has increased sharply in recent months, with a resurgent Taliban movement mounting daily attacks in southern Afghanistan, gangs kidnapping foreigners here in the capital and radical Islamists orchestrating violent demonstrations against the government and foreign-financed organizations. “Three years on, the people are still hoping that things are going to work out, but they have become suspicious about why the Americans came, and why the Americans are treating the local people badly,” said Jandad Spinghar, leader of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Nangarhar Province in the east…. Item. On the same day that Gall’s report was published, the Times ran a dispatch from Basra, in which their reporter, Edward Wong, wrote that: With the Aug. 15 deadline for writing a new constitution bearing down, a cadre of powerful, mostly secular Shiite politicians is pushing for the creation of an autonomous region in the oil-rich south of Iraq, posing a direct challenge to the nation’s central authority…. “We want to destroy the central system that connects the entire country to the capital,” said Bakr al-Yasseen, a former foe of Mr. Hussein who spent years in exile in Syria. He is one of the chief organizers of the autonomy campaign, which is supported by Ahmad Chalabi, the one-time Pentagon favorite and scion of a prominent Shiite family from the south, among others. Mr. Yasseen, who has ties to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and a Kurd, is demanding for the south the same broad powers that the Kurds now have, including an independent parliament, ministries and regional military force…. Less than 10 days later, the Times ran another dispatch from Basra, again by Edward Wong, which began, “The loudest sounds emanating from musicians’ row these days come from explosions.” Wong went on to explain. Ahmed Ali walked through a shop that sold musical instruments before it was gutted by a bombing a week earlier, the latest in a series of mysterious attacks in this narrow alley in the last half-year, he said. The men here, just a block from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, sell instruments by day and perform at weddings in the evening. “They say it’s forbidden by Islam,” Mr. Ali, 18, said as he went back to his own shop, its shelves stocked with drums. “We’re afraid of everything. I’m afraid of it all. I’m afraid even when I’m talking to you.”… The once libertine oil port of Basra, 350 miles south of the capital and far from the insurgency raging in much of Iraq, is steadily being transformed into a mini-theocracy under Shiite rule…. The [music] bazaar is just blocks away from a strip where sidewalk alcohol vendors once thrived, before armed vigilantes and policemen drove them away…. Few women walk around without a head scarf and full-length black robe. A young woman who gave her name as Layla said she could wear jeans without a robe a year ago. But seven months before, as she strode from her house, a group of men came up to her and warned her that she was improperly dressed. She says she no longer goes out in public without a robe.
But Ahmadinejad is not some semi-literate rabble-rouser, Beeman writes; he “has a Ph.D. in civil engineering…and ran a tight ship as Tehran’s mayor. His modest life style and sober demeanor gained him the trust of many Iranian voters.” Ahmadinejad is also the first non-cleric in 24 years to be elected president of Iran’s Islamic republic. To anyone who followed the run-off election between him and the brazenly opportunistic former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, it was obvious that Iranians had voted, more than anything, as they had wanted to vote and not as the West had wished they would; in fact, they had voted, to a certain manifest degree, against any further Westernization of their country, against the West, and, above all, against the US. They also voted for Ahmadinejad en masse, giving him a famous victory against Rafsanjani, 61.6 percent to 35.9 percent, respectively (with roughly 56 percent turnout). Item. On the same day as the Iranian run-off elections, a judge in Milan ordered the arrest of 13 Americans, all presumed to be CIA agents. I quote the report in The Economist (July 2-8): Relations between Italy and America have been tense ever since the accidental killing of an intelligence officer by American troops in Iraq in March. Now a new sore point has emerged: “extraordinary rendition,” the CIA’s phrase for snatching terrorist suspects and sending them to third countries where torture is routine. This week Silvio Berlusconi’s government, a staunch ally of the Bush administration, summoned the American ambassador in Rome to explain the disappearance in Milan two years ago of a Muslim cleric suspected of belonging to a militant Islamist group. …[Italian] investigators have knitted together the story of what happened…. The [Italian] prosecutors’ reconstruction was presented to a judge who…ordered the arrest of 13 American suspects, on charges of kidnapping. Her order has been passed to the European Union’s prosecuting unit, Eurojust, which means that police across Europe will soon be obliged to arrest the suspects. Obliged, perhaps, but not able to. All 13 suspects apparently escaped Italy before their arrest warrants were issued and, in a form of rendition as usual, are undoubtedly back in the US or in a part of the world, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, that is now considered de facto US territory. Item. On June 30, the International Herald Tribune published a dispatch from Eric Schmitt in Washington; among other things, it reported that: The Pentagon has promoted or nominated for promotion two senior army officers who oversaw or advised on detention and interrogation operations in Iraq during the height of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal…. A third officer…the former top intelligence officer in Iraq, took command earlier this year of the army’s intelligence center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. An independent inquiry led by a former defense secretary, James Schlesinger, faulted the officers for their actions in Iraq, but a subsequent review by the army’s inspector general exonerated them, clearing the way for their advancement, military officials said. Item. In the same issue of the Tribune, Arlie Hochschild described a vile new twist in what the Pentagon calls the GWOT (or Global War on Terrorism). It is a truly chilling report, entitled, “Children, too, are abused in US prisons.” Here are parts of it: …Under international law, the line between childhood and maturity is 18. In communications with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon has lowered the cutoff to 16. For this reason among others, we don’t know exactly how many Iraqi children are in American custody. But before the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government a year ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as young as 8. Since that time, Human Rights Watch reports that the number has risen. The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported “800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody.” Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse. According to Amnesty International, Muhammad Ismail Agha, 13, was arrested in Afghanistan in late 2002 and detained without charge or trial for over a year, first at Bagram and then at Guantánamo. He was held in solitary confinement and subjected to sleep deprivation. “Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick at my door and yell at me to wake up,” he told an Amnesty researcher. “They made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours.” A Canadian, Omar Khadr, was 15 in 2002 when he was captured in Afghanistan and interned at Guantánamo. For two and a half years, he was allowed no contact with a lawyer or with his family. Akhtar Muhammad, 17, told Amnesty that he was kept in solitary confinement in a shipping container for eight days in Afghanistan in January 2002. A Pentagon investigation last year by Major General George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to “‘go nuts on the kids,’ barking and scaring them.” Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old in the prison’s notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. “He told me he was almost 12,” Karpinski recalled, and that “he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother.” … A Pentagon spokesman told Hersh that juveniles received some special care, but added, “Age is not a determining factor in detention.” Some of these children may have picked up a stone or a gun. But coalition intelligence officers told the Red Cross that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees in Iraq are eventually found innocent and released. Many innocent children are swept up with their parents in chaotic nighttime dragnets based on tips from unreliable informants…. Item. Meanwhile, back in the heartland…: two days before the previous story ran in the Tribune, the Times published a story entitled, “How to Market Hummers to the Masses.” I quote in part: …[L]ast month, Hummer introduced the H3, a squatter, scaled-down version of its top-selling H2. The H3 is being billed as the Hummer for people and pocketbooks of all sizes…. About 17 inches shorter in length and 6 inches lower in height than the H2, the H3 is petite by Hummer standards. It’s also the least expensive Hummer, with a base price around $30,000…. “Hummer has a huge opportunity as a brand to expand into lots of segments down the road,” said Liz Vanzura, Hummer’s marketing director. “With the H3, there are a lot of people that can say, ‘Hey, now I can get one.’ So it’s a larger audience for us.”…
Item. On the same day as it ran the previous story, the Times published a report by David Cay Johnston about those Americans who can presumably afford the H1. I quote excerpts: The number of affluent individuals and married couples who paid no federal income taxes jumped more than 15 percent in 2002, to 5,650, new government data showed yesterday. The chances of having a large income but not paying taxes on any of it are growing, according to the data, issued in the Internal Revenue Service’s annual report to Congress on well-to-do Americans who live tax free. About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000. Over all, the top 2 percent of earners, the 2.5 million filers with income of $200,000 or more, paid almost 27 cents in taxes for each dollar of income they reported in 2002, other I.R.S. data showed…. Among that high-income group, however, almost 83,000, or one in 33, paid less than a dime in taxes for every dollar of income. An additional 79,000 paid less than 15 cents. The average for all Americans was 13 cents. Congress taxes Americans on their worldwide income. Of the 5,650 individuals and couples who paid no income taxes to the United States, only 728 paid any to a foreign government, while 4,922 lived completely free of income tax. Item: Finally, a dispatch from Reuters, sent out over the wires on the same day as the Times story above. Washington (Reuters)—The US House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly voted to block the Bush administration from approving a Chinese company’s attempt to acquire U.S. oil and gas producer Unocal Corp. The House approved the measure 333-92 and attached it to a spending bill for the departments of Treasury, Transportation and other agencies for the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1. The House also voted 398-15 for a nonbinding resolution calling on the Bush administration to immediately conduct a review of the possible takeover. The resolution also states that a CNOOC [China National Offshore Oil Corporation] takeover of Unocal could threaten US national security. In the items above, I tried to give as varied a picture as possible of this particular “point in time,” as they say in Washington. More relevantly (and frighteningly), I arbitrarily chose two weeks from the end of June through the beginning of July—which means, naturally, that any comparable period chosen, before or after, will produce the same amount and ratio of truly unsettling news. *** Intermezzo of Blood: July 7, 2005 It is July 14 today. When I began this essay, on July 4, I didn’t think it would take me so long to complete it. So, what began as a reflection on one “revolution” has ended up, I suppose invariably, as a consideration of the meaning of that wellspring of all modern revolutions. It is a famous story: When Zhou Enlai was asked his estimation of the French Revolution, he replied that it was too soon to tell. It is the same with all fundamental moments of historical (re)definition. The previous section, “Future Imperfect” was written on July 7. In fact, I’d just finished writing the last item about CNOOC’s bid for Unocal when my wife called my mother-in-law in New Hampshire to wish her a happy birthday. It was my wife’s mother who told us about the attacks that day that had struck London. We immediately turned on the BBC, and learned of the events. It’s taken me a week to get back to this piece. There is nothing I intend to—or, at this point, can—write about what happened in London. After a while, ethical, existential pain is the same as physical pain: a constant throbbing, an invasive presence, that ultimately leads beyond anger to exhaustion and, worst of all, resignation. It’s already become a cliché: Everybody knew that London was going to be the next victim of…what, exactly? Oh, yes, of course, “terrorism.” The vile actions of “them,” who despise our “values” and believe only in a “cult of death.” Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush, Britons, Americans, we—all of us in the West—are guilty of nothing at all, except wanting to bestow our unique, ineffable goodness and multicultural and omniconfessional concord on the benighted and wretched of the earth. There really is nothing I can write about London. There comes a moment when elemental decency, and self-respect, dictates silence. *** Part 4: His Terrible, Swift Sword Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice [about invading Iraq]? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says [Bob] Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.’”
As for Madison—the architect of our constitutional framework—his dread of religion was overt and unmitigated. “What influence…have ecclesiastical establishments had on society,” he asked, not at all rhetorically. He answered the question himself. “In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people.” He went on to warn against those “convenient auxiliaries” that “[r]ulers who wish to subvert the public liberty” find in “an established clergy.” (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments) Madison would have been appalled, and fearful for the future of his country, by the influence, not simply of religion but of fundamentalist Christianity in the nation’s government today: “The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles,” he declared. It is not difficult to deduce what he would have made of the contemporary institution of White House “prayer breakfasts,” and of the men who have imposed them. He would also have been deeply dismayed by the fundamentalist penetration (as with most of the Founders, he would not have hesitated to call it subversion) of the armed forces (the size of the armed forces in a time of peace is also a fact of current American reality that would have profoundly disturbed the Founders): “Better…to disarm…the chaplainships for the army and navy,” he wrote in 1817. (Both quotes in this paragraph are from Madison’s Monopolies, Perpetuities, Corporations, Ecclesiastical Endowments.) Still, in the end, it is not so much the “faith” abroad in the land today that makes the United States such a fearsome landscape to behold. It is the nature of that faith. It is truly sobering to reflect again on that Ohio corporal’s letter to his wife during the Civil War: “…it will not only be for my Country and my children but for Liberty all over the World that I risked my life, for if Liberty should be crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human Progress anywhere else?” The complexity of sentiment here is immense, and of a character that Americans today are entirely incapable of understanding. When that corporal speaks of risking his life “for my Country and my children,” he does not mean what we, today, think he means, but something radically opposed to our currently deluded, and altogether false, patriotism. His patriotism, on the contrary, leads him to a love of country that is pure, precisely because it is stripped of all false consolations. What he means, of course, is that he is willing to die in a war against other Americans, which further means, above all, that he is willing to kill other Americans, both “for Liberty all over the World” and “the cause of Human Progress.” This is a genuinely—most Americans today would say chillingly—revolutionary avowal. And it points to the revolutionary essence, both of the Civil War and of the man who presided over it with such utter (Jacobin?) tenacity. When Lincoln was reelected in 1864, he received a letter of congratulation that subsequently became famous, although (unsurprising, this) it is little-known in the United States itself. It was sent by the International Working Men’s Association in London and composed by the organization’s corresponding secretary for Germany, Karl Marx. It begins: Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. It continues: “From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” And concludes: The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest [sic] of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. In August 1862, a month before the Battle of Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation that ensued from what proved to be the war’s single bloodiest day, Marx wrote a prescient article for the newspaper, Die Presse. “So far,” he said, “we have only witnessed the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.” It was, indeed, and was to lead to “the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” Or, at least, so was thought by many “workingmen” at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. In the end, of course, black Americans were re-enchained, and the “social world” of which the International Working Men’s Association dreamed was left brazenly unreconstructed, in ruins, in fact, to this very day. Still, there was a time in America when soldiers from Ohio believed that “Human Progress” was worth the killing of Americans by Americans; when the “workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class”; and (how far away it all seems) when the president of the United States did not consider God to be his adjutant—let alone his “Father”—but his, and his nation’s, “mighty scourge.” And, of course, there was even a time, before the time described above, when Americans believed, as Jefferson wrote to John Adams, that “the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” Sadly for all of us, however, that day came and went a long time ago. Peter Pappas is co-founder of greekworks.com.
Book ReviewsLimboThe Unnumbered by Sam North. Scribner, London, 2005, 358 pages, £7.99.
Among limbo’s denizens in Sam North’s harrowing novel, The Unnumbered, are the illegal aliens, resident immigrants, and homeless who variously live in London’s forgotten corners, on its edges, below its surface. Nio Niopoulos, the novel’s 23-year-old protagonist, inhabits—and is eventually evicted from—an unlawful shack he erects in an ancient, long-disused cemetery; unemployed, he creates sculptures from bushes, trees, leaves, pieces of coal, anything that comes to hand on the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital. Mila, the 15-year-old with whom Nio falls in love, is the daughter of illegal immigrants from Romania who manages to buy false papers so she can work as a cashier in a department store, under a different name and as a 20-year-old. At the novel’s beginning, she and her extended family occupy three trailers located at the edge of a parking lot for warehouse retailers; constantly forced to move, the family at one point is parked in a wrecked-car lot between London’s A406 highway and an access road, and ends up in a dismal trailer park of sorts run by evangelists. Anjali, the young East Asian woman who personifies the immigrant success story (her loving, Urdu-speaking parents are modestly well-to-do, she is a university student), falls so far from grace when she hits rock bottom that she finds herself—and remains—among the homeless in London’s vast Tube underground. Lives on hold, in Sam North’s world, are lives at stake. Anjali, paralyzed by the shame of a near-rape, disappears herself from home and university because she has failed both, in the first instance by having placed the personal ad that led to her victimization, in the second by not having recognized criminal sociopathology—her field of study—when confronted with it. Nio, the son of Greek immigrants whose only address in London has ever been the curbside cantinas in which they work and live, is on his own. He wants nothing but a decent, simple future—a job that would use his talents, wages enough to support a small apartment, a life with Mila. Mila also wants a future with Nio, but any future, for her, is complex, as her family is disintegrating. Her father’s spirit has been broken; an older brother is missing (perhaps still in Romania, perhaps not); and her youngest brother, Little Vlad, has become a panhandler and petty thief. No one among the extended family can work legally; and there is no turning back. There are only Mila’s paltry paychecks, and Mila’s fantasies: to be rich—maybe famous, but certainly rich—for only money will pave the way to a better life for all, let Mila search for her missing brother, and get Little Vlad off the streets. Her family’s desperate situation, and Mila’s naïveté, makes her the perfect quarry for Lucas Tooth. Tooth—conman, thief, blackmailer, rapist—is a character of pure, predatory evil whose perfectly credible malevolence never trespasses the bounds of what is possible. He chooses his female victims carefully, then preys on them by pretending to be what they want, and need, him to be. In Mila’s case, he poses as the head of a management company for models, actresses, singers; when he wins her confidence, he leads her on. Smitten as much by the possibility of becoming a model (no, a singer, Mila later decides) as by Tooth himself, Mila’s relationship with Nio deteriorates until, ultimately terrified by Tooth, she realizes she has been duped. Nio—a character of extraordinary goodness, Lucas Tooth’s paired opposite—patiently bears Mila’s emotional inconstancy without ever fully understanding its cause. By the time Mila rids herself of her delusions and (so she thinks) Lucas Tooth, her and Nio’s lives begin to come together: Nio’s talent is recognized, of a sudden he becomes employed as a garden sculptor, Mila begins to make handbags (based on Anjali’s design, for, in a convoluted but frankly believable plot twist, Mila meets and befriends Anjali) and finds additional, part-time work at a clothing stall at Camden Market. Mila’s family can no longer object to the “fish and chips”—their term for a Brit, their way of referring to Nio—now that he’s making money; it’s unstated but understood that, given the situation, there might be hope that everyone will soon be better off. And that that small apartment Nio and Mila both desire is about to become reality. This anticlimax (the only word I can think of to describe the brink-of-doom edge to which North, with great poise, brings The Unnumbered) embraces—for the sweetest, briefest moment—the saved and the damned. But the hold doesn’t last, can’t last: reality is too complex, and there is too much at work against any enchanted ending. Human malevolence, for one thing: Lucas Tooth does not go away, and Mila (as was Anjali before her) is stalked and finally sexually assaulted by him. Then there is anti-immigration sentiment, and racism: Mila’s family, considered by some to be gypsies and detested by all, remain illegal, unwanted, and further humiliated when they’re told by the evangelists to pretend to be Turks. Economic degradation plays its role, and leaves Mila’s destitute family at the bottom of the barrel, where they remain. But it is deeply rooted culture—otherness—that ultimately prevents both Anjali and Mila from returning to their homes, their lives, to those whom they love, after they are victimized. For they both suffer shame. That there are people for whom the concept of shame still matters profoundly is hardly understood any more in the West (to the West’s own cost). It once was, along with the notion of honor—Lord Jim would never have made sense otherwise—but both seem to have gone out of fashion. That North has managed to create characters for whom such values are fundamental, despite the standards of the new world in which they find themselves, is a remarkable achievement. Nio, a man who knows right from wrong, believes in honor, in codes of conduct; it is no minor element in the novel that, despite his desire and Mila’s tempting persistence to the contrary, he insists upon waiting until Mila is sixteen (legally of age) before they make love. Anjali and Mila come from cultures in which shame is a curse, and neither can mitigate (never mind erase) the disgrace of their own victimization except by not “going public,” by not going to the police, by not telling anyone about Lucas Tooth. Instead, they become part of that world inhabited by the displaced anonymous, and are lost to limbo. By Britain’s own, very recent accounting, there might be up to 570,000 illegal immigrants in the country. They come from all corners of the globe, but even those who come from what any of us might consider near the UK—Romania, say—can and do bring with them different values, a different way of being, which more often than not conflict with the values they confront as immigrants. In the face of an anti-immigration backlash scarcely confined to any one country in the West, illegal immigrants are hardly willing to draw attention to themselves and, so, remain mostly voiceless. Without being heard, without being able to tell anyone who they were, how they came to be wherever it is they are, who they’ve become, what they want to do, or what they wish, they don’t stand a chance of being understood. Sam North puts words in the mouths of those who cannot speak for themselves, shapes every finely honed character’s past and present, dreams and fears, and makes—no, insists that—the unnumbered speak with such authenticity that it’s difficult to know whether North is simply an extraordinary novelist or a phenomenal medium. Hear Mila, furious with Nio for thinking her too young, protest: […] “You know what?” she asked, “look, all the people here in London, how many walk from the Black Sea, or hike-hitched, losing from their family in Braşov, how many waited in the old school, three months we waited in that broken down old school, in the yard, how many go and made the journeys with no ticket, or no money? Our family split up two times! I had different shoes, you know, for months, not a pair, but different, and I wanted them, for dear life. Two hours in the middle of the road, next to the metal thing, too scared to move, two whole hours, like this, next to…and Mama carrying his [Mila’s father’s] spectacles, all that time, when there was only one glass, only one side was in, the other gone, empty. In the petrol service station area, when we are in this country, our whole family, with nowhere to go. No police escort because there are too many of us and it’s a Sunday. And every man…every one…especially the what is it, junior housing officer, here in Haringey, he offered me…well…to run away from the housing officer, with nowhere to go…And you know what, Vlad took a photo of me, he was asked to do it by this man in France, he was given a camera to take a picture, given it for free, and you know what happened to that picture, it went all around London, and back in France I get men who have seen the photograph, they send other men with money, and they offer to pay me everything to come here, hundreds of pounds they will pay me, but I have to say no because I know about the traps, the houses here in London where girls are prisoners. OK? Anyone in this whole country who did that, who’s that happened to them, any girl who’s twenty years old! Or fifty years old? How about, is all right?!” Sam North’s The Unnumbered speaks for, and to, every displaced, misplaced, person sitting there in limbo, waiting, as the song says, for the tide to turn. Whether it ever does or not, one can’t help but hope that some getaways will indeed be made, and lead to many, many more. Melanie Wallace is a novelist and frequent contributor to greekworks.com. Her latest novel, The Housekeeper, was published by MacAdam/Cage in April.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Our OpinionThe People Who Refused to be DissolvedThe Solution Brecht’s famously caustic poetic advice to the rulers following the workers’ uprisings in the German “democratic” republic in 1953 has once again proven not only his legendary mordancy but his equally rare understanding of political and social power. Given the endless scolding, uncontrollable finger-wagging, and ridiculously overblown harrumphing of the intellectual (invariably leftish) and political (invariably self-interested) European elites following the results of the French and Dutch referendums on the European “constitution,” it is also (once again) timely. We’ve said before in these pages that you can never predict where democracy will lead when it’s taken seriously. As those who read our editorial in our last edition know (see greekworks.com, “A Salutary Crisis,” May 28), we pointed to these results for reasons that we thought were self-evident: the people of Europe are sick and tired, not of Europe, but of its leaders. They are particularly fed up with all those modishly cosmopolitan, self-appointed, and unaccountable elites, with their ceaselessly arrogant assumptions of a divine right to determine the future of an entire continent without even a fare-thee-well to their fellow citizens, who just happen to inhabit the aforesaid continent and have to bear the consequences of all the decisions made in (oh, yes) their name. Well, goodbye to all that. On May 29, the French once again proved that if there’s one thing they know how to do better than anybody else, it’s revolution. And make no mistake about it. On May 29, the Bastille of EU institutional tyranny was stormed and breached. The king is not only dead; there’s no other king to take his place. As this French political journée was quickly followed, and validated, by a Dutch one only confirmed that there is in fact a popular, pan-European response to a united European future. It’s just that the response of the people—or, more accurately, of the electorates—of Europe is radically different from that of the European elites, which don’t know, or care, about electorates since they are, of course, unelected. The mighty are quickly fallen, however. Now everybody knows, and cares, about these electorates, which have proven that they truly constitute the base of that much-ballyhooed European “architecture” that, as it turns out, cannot be built without foundational support at the bottom. A great deal has been written and said since May 29, most of it silly and some of it painfully stupid (the notion that the euro is “doomed,” for example, is downright cretinous). A great deal more will be written in the months and years to come as events play out, and as Europeans grapple with the issues that have now all come to the fore. Under the circumstances, the only sensible thing to do at this point for anyone who believes unreservedly in the European project, as we do, is to set down some markers for the discussion, and arguments, that will inevitably ensue.
In our last editorial, we said that a French “no” to the proposed EU charter would provoke a crisis. It has. We also said that it would be a salutary one. It is. Now comes the hard part. (We do not mean, by the way, to downplay the Dutch referendum. However, the fact is that the Netherlands is not France. If the French had approved the EU treaty, even if only by a whisker, the Dutch rejection would have not provoked the comparable crisis in the EU that the French vote has. That is simply the reality of the situation. The Netherlands is important to the EU, especially as it is a charter signatory of the treaty of Rome; the French, however, are fundamental to European unity and identity.) The EU has been coasting on its self-satisfaction for far too long, mostly because of the extraordinary condescension and conceit of its elites. It was about time that it, and they, was finally brought down to earth, and that the people who did it were…the people of Europe themselves. And what will happen now? We haven’t a clue, but we do know what will not happen, and that is that Europe will neither collapse nor disappear. Quite the opposite. It is only now that we can finally start speaking of Europeans genuinely, and consciously, building a self-determined structure of European federal integration. But that’s what crises are all about, after all: provoking resolutions of profound, and often seemingly intractable, problems. In the event, only one thing is certain: the people of Europe will not be dissolved. greekartThe Gates: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s New York Extravaganza
Since the time during which The Gates stood was limited to a bit under two weeks, the event had the additional aura of being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude in action. For those of us who until now had encountered the pair’s art only in the photographs of textbooks and monographs, this was the chance to view an actual work by the artists, whose emphases on size and on the repetition of form have never been visually fulfilling in reproduction. So, on a cold mid-February day, this author and his students from Pratt Institute first negotiated the saffron gates from a position above them: we took the elevator to the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the bright, more or less industrial, orange color of the sets of gates stood out in contrast to the muted grays, greens, and browns of the park itself. The acrid saffron of the flags themselves produced a complicated experience for many viewers: some were taken with its vibrancy in an otherwise colorless park; others were bemused by the hue’s tie-in to Buddhism, whose monks wear robes of saffron. In actuality, the curtains felt slightly disturbing in their high-tech brilliance; while they transmitted light, so that the outlines of trees became visible in bright sun, the cloth itself felt thick, nearly impenetrable: the opposite of an esthetically appealing surface. Hoping for a diaphanous material as part of the display, The Gates’ spectators must have been disappointed, as I was, by the lack of a lightly billowing fabric. But one must also be fair to the artists; most likely the thicker cloth was needed for technical reasons, perhaps for resistance to the wind.
The contrast between the artificial and manmade was therefore moot. But that does not necessarily mean that the installation lost its effectiveness entirely, only that its essence as a work of art was more complicated than it seemed, given the industrial nature of the intervention. Still, it posed problems for the purist: what is one to expect if the meaning of the contrast does not do justice to the facts? Like so much that happens currently in New York’s overexcited artworld, the hyperbole surrounding The Gates gave the project a nearly circus-like ambience. The entire intervention was justified more for economic reasons than artistic ones, creating a hole in the integrity of the work. This is not to say that The Gates was entirely unsuccessful; a likable consequence was its ability to bring together people from all walks of life. So, as social modification, The Gates rather succeeded—even though its visual cohesiveness was in fact a disappointment, given its intentions. The lack of focus, visually speaking, was underscored by the artists’ rather vague insistence that the project spoke for itself, being a kind of art for art’s sake, which lent the work an estheticism that conflicted with the inevitable involvement of the public agencies and myriad individuals needed to realize it. For whatever reasons, despite the high rhetoric of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the major service done to the audience took the form of a momentary community rather than a landmark visual experience.
Along with the social sense of community formed by The Gates came its economic impact: the project supposedly brought more than $250 million in revenues into the city, which is an impressive figure if one’s interest is only in money. Since the cost of The Gates to New York City was nil—Christo and Jeanne-Claude raise the money for their projects through the sale of drawings and other art—one can only praise the outcome’s financial success. Yet looking at The Gates in this particular way only underscores the power of late capitalism over art, seemingly the most resistant medium available to us, the one means we hope can withstand the coarsening of the culture. In fact, the emphasis on the economic aspects of The Gates inevitably reminds us of the towering power of the market, whose financial center in America is New York. One hesitates to dwell on profits and money spent, but that was a large part of the project’s attractiveness—at least to some people. One would have hoped for a less mercantile presentation of things, but it now seems that just about everything must be justified financially, a practice that harms not only the aura surrounding the object but the object itself, which loses its dignity as art.
Jonathan Goodman is a contributing editor to greekworks.com.
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