Roadside City Center
June 30, 2007
Today I went looking for downtown Snellville, Georgia. The common roadside vistas of Snellville are familiar enough.. strip malls and restaurants galore.. but I wanted to know if there were any remnants from an earlier pattern of town growth. The place to look would be in the area around the newly constructed (2005) city center of Snellville.
The picture above shows the city center as it appears from Georgia 78, the main road running from Stone Mountain to Athens. It is obviously a new building.. lacking any elements that could be called ostentatious.
Externally the building resembles town halls and county courthouses throughout the south (both in its brick construction and classicizing motifs). But it is different in its placement just off two major thoroughfares (Georgia 78 and Scenic Highway). Traveling through the south on older roads one is inevitably taken right past the central building, surrounded by a square. Traffic is forced to slow down as it moves through the central section of the town. In the case of Snellville, the city center just stands to the side and demands no slowing down. It has a manicured lawn surrounding it, but this hardly counts as a square. The roads at no point frame a view of the center; it is always seen obliquely.
This is the back parking lot for the city center of Snellville. A thin line of trees separates it from other properties located behind it. This view clarifies the model along which the city center was constructed. What we have is the city center as strip mall. The goal is to be accessible, to be convenient, and to look like a city center should look. Sacrificed, however, is centrality and the sense that this is a structure with cultural authority. In other words, the city center is simply an addition to the road-lining strip malls and not in any way a monument to civic pride and identity.
As I mentioned, there is nothing like a public square around the city center. But that does not mean there is a complete absence of symbolic markers. In an older town there would be the usual statue dedicated to the Confederate dead.. an important marker of regional identity. Snellville has no such central memorial for the Civil War, but it does have two dedications on the grounds of the city center: one for those who died in the Vietnam War and a second for those who died in the attacks of 9/11. It is no coincidence that both of these events are central to contemporary political debate.. both manipulated symbolically on a regular basis. Absent is anything that could be thought of as regionally symbolic.
Almost across the street from the city center is the First Baptist Church of Snellville. I say "across the street" but it would be more correct to call it "across the highway".. as this is no pedestrian friendly area. I was struck by the announced subject of this coming Sunday service..
The First Baptist Church of Snellville is flanked by a humongous parking lot. From the air it would look like a black U around the central red brick church building. Outside of a few external signals about the use of this building (cross, steeple), it is hard for me to distinguish this structure from the strip malls which occupy the same position on the landscape and also feature large parking lots.
What I am heading for here is a notion that these structures (city center, church, standard strip mall) are all basically the same thing. They partake of a remarkably similar set of symbols. Shopping, 9/11, and church are related; civic values underline the commercial and religious values.
Development and Destruction in Georgia
June 28, 2007
In recounting the life of Kit Carson, Hampton Sides reflects on the way the world had changed around Carson:
Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered. The beaver he had trapped were on the verge of extinction. The Indians he had lived among had been decimated by disease. Virgin solitudes he once loved had been captured by the disenchanting tools of the topographers. The annual rendezvous of the mountain men was a thing of the past. Even the seemingly indestructible Bent's Fort was no more... [249]
Sides points out how the new West was in a large part the creation of Carson and his associates. That strikes me as typical of America. Even as we embrace the land and its vastness, we are working to destroy it. The culprit is never quite "us". It is always a force outside our control, some economic necessity or historic inevitability.
This morning I took a walk around Snellville and through another housing development. The houses were not mansions.. like the ones in Roswell.. yet they raise some of the same issues of sustainability. A certain allergy to thinking ahead seems to flourish among us. Consider the following points:
1. Without public transportation, these housing developments lock America more unalterably into the oil economy. We can talk until we are blue in the face about energy independence, but the physical arrangement of the Atlanta suburbs (and the suburbs of other cities) are a major part of the problem as the only way they are manageable is by long commutes.
2. The ubiquitous green sloping lawns in these developments obviously require a lot of water. Large houses are livable only because of central air conditioning. So by constructing these sorts of housing developments we are making large scale future commitments with respect to water and energy use. Both are likely to be drains on our economy in the future.
3. These housing developments bring together families within a similar income band. Small houses are never intermixed among the mansions. If you were to move into a suburban development, you could rest assured that you would be around people a lot like you in terms of economic resources. That kind of residential choice has social ramifications.. but whether that is a choice we as a society want to make has never been up for debate. It is a choice that is being made for us.
4. Presumably America's population will continue to grow in the next century or two. How do we imagine the American landscape at the end of that process? The assumption of recent suburban development is that the suburbs will just keep expanding in an ever-widening circle. No need to worry about a plan. But I am not sure that is realistic.. in terms of actual space or realistic transportation possibilities. So again the real possibility looms that we will be locked into a living arrangement which is fundamentally irrational and unsustainable.
What is needed is some kind of broad and forward-looking land use policy.. requiring a comprehensive plan for urban centers in the US. That would be an unlikely turn of events.. I know. We like to treat our land as a great pyramid scheme. Get out of it whatever you can get right now! Let those who come later figure out what to do for themselves. At that point the American myth of technology enters: issues will be solved by advances in technological know-how.
Near to where we are staying in Snellville is the E.R. Snell Contractor, Inc. headquarters. The connection between the family name Snell and the city name Snellville is not coincidental. Sitting in back of the headquarters are a few pieces of heavy earth-moving machinery.. ready to go. The website for E.R. Snell lists a number of large multi-million dollar contracts that they have won.. among which are important road projects.
I wonder how it must feel to reside in an area that your family arrived at back at the end of the 19th century.. and then to be major participants in the development (and therefore destruction) of the very landscape your family would have known. It must sometimes.. on some nights.. be like the feeling that might have come over Kit Carson: "Everything he touched, it seemed, had withered." If one is reflective, that is a feeling that should come often to Americans.
Two Sides of a Snellville Road
June 28, 2007
Sumerlin Park in Roswell, Georgia
June 27, 2007
I drove from Snellville to Roswell this afternoon.. a trip that took me through quintessentially suburban territory. I took the Ronald Reagan Parkway, Beaver Ruin Road, Jimmy Carter Boulevard, Holcomb Bridge Road, Sandy Plains Road, Five Forks Trikum.. I'm not making these up! Where else could I be but greater Atlanta?
On my hour-long drive I didn't pass through one recognizable "downtown". What I passed were innumerable strip malls, restaurants, and gas stations. Snellville and Roswell (along with small communities lying in between) do have city-centers, but they are small and inconsiderable.. tough to locate, actually. No real effort has gone into bestowing an identity upon these communities. People just want to live here, not worry about local government. I suspect that the home owner's associations are the form of government with which people have the most connection.
Old Roads today attempted to document some of the suburban communities in Roswell:
Driving along a main road one sees fancy signs such as the one above. These generally have a pastoral ring to them. The above development is not a "park" at all.. but a rather intensive housing development. This sign is accompanied by the following advertisement:
I find it humorous that even when we are talking about the purchase of houses from the $600s, there is still the need to rely on bright red explosions that proclaim: "only 2 homes remain". It is as if all the advertising techniques that would be put in place to popularize a roadside car wash get broken out to sell these glorified tract homes. I imagine that when one gets up to the really big money houses, this kind of roadside advertising declines.
What kind of culture is this in which houses for over $600,000 can be advertised from the side of the road? I can just imagine the in-car discussions: "Honey, pull over.. that one back there has houses with four sides brick and for only about $600,000!"
There is often only one entrance to these housing developments. No one wants through-traffic.. that might raise the unsafe factor and drag down home prices. The houses are huge.. God knows how many square feet. If we were looking for an image of the American dream as it exists popularly, this would have to be it. But what a poor dream and hollow dream!
Right across the street from the entrance to Sumerlin Park are homes of a very different quality:
That is a nice house (one in which I could imagine myself living), but it won't be confused with the mansions of Sumerlin Park. This house and others nearby are examples of relic neighborhoods. These are homes that probably do not belong to any home owners association. They were evidently built a good while before the invasion of the mansions. One must strain to imagine these suburbs as sparsely populated rural areas with scattered houses.. and now that the rural areas are largely filled in with new housing developments, these older houses stand as reminders of the past (a past the larger developments would love to erase).
Occasionally today I dipped into a fancily named neighborhood and found that instead of mansions it contained houses like this. I am sure someone could date this style of houses for me.. but I will just call it an early suburban wood gem. There were whole developments filled with houses like this. Here again I think we are dealing with a relic. These are the cheap developments that were once "way outside" Atlanta.. but which have now been overtaken by the mainline housing market. These inexpensive early suburban houses are now swamped by mansion developments.
Having entered one recent development, I drove up and up a steep hill. All along the street there were mansions.. none quite looking exactly the same as the others, but all looking about the same nevertheless. At the top of the hill the homes had a long view across the rolling hazy green of northern Atlanta. One house up there had a for sale sign out front. "As far as the eyes can see" is the promise on the real estate ad. And of course on the front porch there are two comfy looking rockers. It radiates a promise of self-satisfaction. It sure seems like wherever one looks in America, this is the life that people are after.
Another American Occupation
June 25, 2007
Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides was the most enjoyable book I have read in a long time. The genius of the book was its wide angle lens on the history of the west from the 1840s through the 1860s. There are biographies out there of Kit Carson and John C. Fremont, as well as histories of the Navajo, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War in the West.. but this book manages to work them all onto a single canvas. Themes that would be lost in other, more single-mindedly focused books, here take on a surprising strength because of the multiple story-lines.
The theme I found most compelling was that of American moral blindness. It was difficult not to compare the events of the 19th century to our current situation in Iraq. The book never makes that comparison outright.. but there is a certain parallelism in language that draws one toward it. When Sides talks about the Mexican-American War he calls it our "first war of foreign intervention" (197). And surprise surprise, once America conquers New Mexico it finds itself playing the part of an occupier and trying to mediate between two bitterly divided parties: the New Mexicans and the Navajos. The two following passages, to my ears, sound kind of familiar:
...the real war in New Mexico was not between the Americans and the Mexicans, but rather between the nomadic Indian tribes and everyone else. He had stumbled into an age-old conflict that showed no signs of abating with the American presence. [119]
...the territory was seething with hatred toward the Americans. Bent could feel the spite thickening in the air, could see it in the false grins and narrowed stares of the locals. The Mexicans had failed to fight at first, but they despised these foreigners just as surely as any occupied people must despise their oppressor. [167]
The Americans sent in a series of military commanders and tried out a range of optimistic agendas for putting an end to the low grade war. This effort culminated with the arrival of the American general James Henry Carleton.
There is something about this general that should send chills down our spines. Sides gives an introductory description of him as a perfectionist with a rigid sense of ethics and perfect manners.. an intelligent man (308). He devises a scheme for finally solving the continuing issue with the Navajos. He would round them up and escort them to a (supposedly) fertile area where they can farm and learn to settle down into a civilized life. Of course this final solution will not just keep the Navajos from raiding the New Mexicans.. it will also destroy.. completely destroy.. a way of life. To make matters worse, the settlement was botched. Sides comments:
In a sad way, it represented [Carleton's] life's work. Until his death, in fact, he seemed blind to the horrors he had wrought. Three thousand Navajos—one out of every three captives held there—died at Bosque Redondo. [388]
It is easy to imagine someone else growing old without ever confronting head-on the massive failure of an idealistic policy.. and the sad cost in terms of human life.
What was the problem? Sides includes a sketch of the aftermath of Mountain Meadows Massacre (I did mention that everything gets into this book!). Carleton was involved in the investigation and wrote the report that fingered the Mormons as being guilty of the murders. In the report he also goes on to describe the Mormons as "an ulcer upon the body-politic which needs more than cautery to cure. It must have excision, complete and thorough" (327).
Something is wrong right there with that impulse to "excise". With respect to the Mormons, it would have been the wrong tactic to bring the Mormon leaders to justice by means of some kind of large-scale invasion.. no matter the calls for retribution stemming from the massacre. Sometimes the collateral destruction required for justice is too great.. and itself becomes unjust. But that kind of moral calculus demands a character less self-righteous and more pervious to the complexities of actual life.
American Road Scenes
June 24, 2007
And we can't forget to document our little traveler, who made it through her first extended car trip with a modicum of good humor!
Another Wisconsin Traveler
June 21, 2007
The New York Times has been running a series called the Frugal Traveler, written by Matt Gross. This guy has the fun assignment of traveling around the US on backroads and writing about what he sees. And each week he also seems to have a video of his experience. This week he came through Wisconsin.. which is Old Roads territory.
I was curious what the Frugal Traveler would do with Wisconsin. He focused on an intentional community in a tiny town called West Lima. The video features a few road scenes of farms and small town stuff.. but then he winds up at the community and he gives us some interviews with the people who live there. What I found lacking in this approach is any interest in reading the landscape or looking for public signs about what a place means. The goal seems to be to find characters that can stand in for "off the beaten path" America. But to my mind that just means you interview odd people. I see no connection between finding odd and colorful people and understanding a place. The video that accompanies his report tells the viewer nothing about the everyday Wisconsin that Emily and I have been discovering.
I came to a similar critique after watching a series of short programs on European cities filmed by Orson Welles.
I obviously like Welles a lot, but these programs (made for television, I believe) were tedious and uninsightful when it came to the cities he was filming (Paris, London, Madrid). His method was exactly that of the Frugal Traveler: show a few local scenes to establish a sense of place, then proceed to find a colorful atypical person to interview. It is a method that clarifies very little about a place.. it just kind of proves that Welles has a knack for finding odd people.
Cairo of the Mind
June 21, 2007
Within each of his sections al-Maqrizi follows a standard progression. For the Fatimids (a Shi'ite dynasty that ruled Cairo from 969-1170 AD) he gives an overview, traces the history of the dynasty, describes the area of Cairo before there was any construction, and then turns to developing an outline of the walls and buildings of Cairo. This latter chapter works one by one through the elements that comprised the city, and the remainder of the chapters in this section expand upon each of the individual elements, providing more background and description. The end result of this textual and verbal effort is an imagined Cairo. The description almost invites the reader to sit down and work out the placement of all the palaces, mosques, residences, and stables. The recent edition of the Arabic text by Ayman Fu'ad Sayyid comes with some illustrations (above and below) that exemplify the urge to imagine that comes upon the reader of al-Maqrizi.
The diagram above is a fascinating superimposition of the Fatimid palaces upon the later medieval map of Cairo. There is today nothing that remains of those two great palaces that marked the center of Fatimid Cairo, but this zone (known as "Bayn al-Qasrayn" or "between the palaces") became a high-prestige zone of construction. It is choked with impressive structures. The visitor, however, can certainly imagine this old city.. haunting the later urban landscape.
My argument is that this imaginative experience is encouraged by al-Maqrizi. He was writing at a time when the historical novel or time-traveling fictions of a later period were inconceivable.. yet his goals were similar. Note some of the following excerpts from his chapter:
The length of Cairo at that time was less than its length today... The area between the Qaws Gate and the large Zuwayla Gate was not part of the city which Jawhar founded, rather it was an addition which occurred later.
The interior of the walls of Cairo contained two palaces and a mosque. One palace was known as the large Eastern Palace, which was the place of residence for the caliph, abode of his harem, and the site of his sitting for the entrance of the army... As for the large Eastern Palace it was entered from the Golden Door—its place now is the site for the mihrab of the madrasa of Zahir...
There was between the Shawk Palace and the Daylam Gate a great courtyard, known as the "courtyard of the Shawk Palace". It began from the courtyard of the armory and ended where the shrine of Husayn is today.
I could go on and on like this. You will notice that in each case a historical structure is settled within the group of early structures that made up Cairo. But then inevitably there is an attempt to establish with exactness where this structure should be located within al-Maqrizi's own version of Cairo. This can be as exacting as to describe the "Golden Door" to the main palace as being in the place where the mihrab [notch that shows direction for prayer] is located in a later structure.
The broader question for me is how al-Maqrizi organized this imagined version of a Cairo that no longer exists. There were no illustrations in his Khitat. But his exact placement of elements in Fatimid Cairo would seem to demand some kind of representational rough draft. I know of no evidence for that kind of procedure, but I have trouble thinking of any other way he could accomplish this feat of the imagination.
Experiencing Cairo (and Every Other City)
June 19, 2007
Making Cairo Medieval is an excellent collection of essays on the social construction of what we know as "Cairo". The first six essays in particular I highly recommend. Each in its own way discusses the way Western conceptual categories made their way into common perceptions of the city. The essay by Derek Gregory ("Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights") is fascinating for its description of how Cairo was experienced as a slice of the Arabian Nights. Take the following quotation from a 19th century traveler:
It was a fair festal evening. The whole world was masquerading, and so well that it seemed reality.
Abon Hassan sat at the city gate, and I saw Haroun Al-Rashid quietly coming up in the disguise of a Moussoul merchant. I could not but wink at Abon, for I knew him so long ago in the Arabian Nights. [83]
That is a revealing passage, no? Here is a visitor who is literally seeing the people of Cairo as characters recollected from the Arabian Nights. This was not the oddball experience of a single imaginative tourist either.. this was a system of perception that was imposed on travelers by the canonical texts that they held in their hands: the works of Edward William Lane and guidebooks composed under his influence.
This all represents to Gregory an example of Orientalism and its misperception of the East. I agree, but I would like to ask a couple of questions:
The relationship between the Arabian Nights and Cairo is not completely arbitrary. Try as one might, a visitor would have difficulty seeing stock characters from the Arabian Nights in the cityscape of Tokyo or Moscow. The reason Cairo can be read as a story from the Arabian Nights is that there is indeed a connection between this Muslim cultural capital and the milieu of the Arabian Nights—more evident in the 19th century than now, to be sure. I would strongly agree that to walk around 19th century Cairo pretending to be in a masquerade is a reductive way to see the city.. but to see some connection is surely not crazy.
The word "Orientalism" drops a hush around any topic. I find it a frustrating hush because it tends to point up the uniqueness of a given situation.. and therefore safely disregards larger questions. The larger question in this case is: doesn't every city on the planet suffer from this kind of misperception? Visitors from all over the US travel to New York and see characters from Sex in the City or Friends running around. Visitors travel to Paris all the time and recline on the Left Bank thinking about artists and revolutionaries. So Orientalism is simply a particular case (perhaps more insidious) of a general human tendency.
The chapter by Derek Gregory is quite similar in method to my dissertation. I look at the travel narrative of Ibn Jubayr and watch the way he describes the cities he visits. When Ibn Jubayr visits Mecca for the hajj, he is clearly under the influence of the local historian al-Azraqi. When he visits Damascus he again has the works of a local historian in hand.. Ibn Athir. What we get in his first person descriptions of these places, then, is not a "personal" account, but rather a mediated and guided version of the city. Cairo too would have had various historical ways that it was to be perceived. The fun for scholars is to understand these historical perceptions. Orientalist readings of Cairo are just one more in a line of such misperceptions.
John Stuart Mill on Homogeneity
June 19, 2007
In my reading today I came across an interesting quotation from John Stuart Mill.
The longer our species lasts, and the more civilized it becomes, the more, as Comte remarks, does the influence of past generations over the present, and of mankind en masse over every individual in it, predominate over other forces; and though the course of affairs never ceases to be susceptible of alteration both by accidents and by personal qualities, the increasing preponderance of the collective agency of the species over all minor causes, is constantly bringing the general evolution of the race into something which deviates less from a certain and preappointed track. [from A System of Logic]
What I would like to add is an argument for the linguistic mechanism that is largely bringing about this general evolution toward conformity. Despite the wide appeal of "diversity", we live in an era in which there is less and less genuine diversity. Languages are going extinct at a record rate and the languages that are surviving are doing so by expanding to allow for the inclusion of globalized discourse. What made ancient Egyptian unique (to use just one example) is that it was a complete system for referencing and understanding the world. It was filled with ideas and beliefs that we now would classify as crazy, but it also was a system that worked. If ancient Egyptian scribes everyday had to transcribe the New York Times into their own language, they might preserve their language as a grammatical system, but they would soon lose it as a conceptual frame for understanding the world.. and that would be a great loss. My predilection for studying dead languages comes from my sense that it is more fun to study a language before it has been transformed into a carrier for the New York Times.
(BTW On Liberty would be a great Freshman Studies book.)
Pan's Labyrinth and the Internalization of Pedro Almodóvar
June 17, 2007
It turned out I really enjoyed the Spanish film Pan's Labyrinth (2006) .. but I had the odd feeling that I was watching a film that had gotten its message and values from the films of Pedro Almodóvar. I am not saying that just because I thought the faun (above, played by Doug Jones) was a dead ringer for Antonia San Juan, the transsexual in All About My Mother.
Leaving that notion aside, I thought the thematic parallels ran deep. The setting for Pan's Labyrinth is the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. A cruel captain leads the military against a band of rebels hiding out somewhere in the forest. The young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is living in the fort, but she discovers an alternative fairy world. The two secret worlds of fairy and rebel (both encountered mostly in the dark) are contrasted with the sunlit world of the military. The goal of the captain is to clean up the vermin that are the rebels:
Almodóvar develops alternative societies that can stand against normative social patterns. Arguably his best film is All About My Mother, and there we find a rag-tag group of women (+transsexual) who create their own family and values. The film is not set in the Civil War, but there is a masculine chaotic force present in Lola.. a sense of death. I find Almodóvar's vision of an alternative social group more gripping than that of Pan's Labyrinth because it does not lose itself in fantasy and history.. but firmly points the way toward an imaginatively engaged and socially fulfilling life within the modern world as it is.
Almodóvar is also always in favor of the body. Live Flesh (1997) begins with the birth of Victor Plaza (Liberto Rabal) in the midst of the national state of a emergency of 1970 called by the dictator Franco. This is a Spain that does not let the nameless and dirty get ahead. Victor is framed for a shooting (although we don't know this at first) and when he gets out of jail he begins to claim a real life.
In claiming his own life he upends the life of the policeman, now in a wheelchair, whom he had supposedly shot. It is hard to imagine an American film in which a policeman handicapped in the line of duty would ultimately be shown to be living a lie.. But that is the sharp edge of this film: the healthy and poor are no longer going to be held back by "correct" people.. no longer going to give deference to what is "morally right". The movie becomes an allegory for a new Spain.. one in which Almodóvar can thrive.
Pan's Labyrinth is officially about the Spanish Civil War.. but I don't buy that, really. It is the same world as Almodóvar.. and operates within the same conceptual framework. Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan's Labyrinth) is equally enthusiastic about the alternative worlds of fantasy and rebellion.. and equally insistent on a physical revolution in which the clean and self-righteous are overthrown by the dirty and free. It is as if he has internalized the main themes of Almodóvar and cast them into a genre more amenable to international audiences.
Travel to the Land of the Fatimids
June 16, 2007
Today I talked on the phone with a friend who will be going to Tunisia in a couple of weeks. He asked me if I plan on getting back to the Middle East any time soon.. and I explained that there are a couple of possibilities coming up. But what I wanted to say is that I am right now doing stuff in the Middle East! I have begun to read al-Maqrizi's section on the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt (969-1171 AD) and so I find myself looking over maps and trying to imagine the placement of different squares and buildings.
If I were actually in Egypt right now I would in fact find my mental traveling quite impeded. There are certainly remnants of Fatimid Cairo (Al-Azhar to name the best known), but for all intents and purposes Fatimid Cairo is gone. We know where certain buildings were once located. We can re-create on a map the layout of the city. We can even imagine through the descriptions of travel writers something of the life of the city. But that is all gone and contemporary Egypt is a rather poor tour guide for the re-creation of the Fatimid world.
One reason I enjoy the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi so much is the immense intellectual effort he puts into getting the details of this lost time down in writing. It is as if he can somehow pin it down and preserve it if he can only describe it. But still, al-Maqrizi knows the past is gone. Here is a paragraph he includes in his introduction to the Fatimid section:
So Cairo became a city of residence, after it had been a fortress and the abode of the Caliph. It became of no importance after it had been exalted and wasted away after it had been honored. This is the nature of kings, who continue to obliterate the remains of those previous to them and destroy the memory of their enemies. For this reason they have wasted most cities and fortresses. The Persians did this and likewise the Arabs in the days of ignorance. They are engaged in the same practice in the days of Islam...
Al-Maqrizi goes on to give three specific examples of this process of destroying the memory of those who came before. It is a rather glum picture, all told. Dynasties rise but then their great works are inevitably torn down.
A deep understanding of this process leads not so much to renewed vigor in travel as intense effort in the quiet of one's home. After all: there is nothing to see anymore. That is the message of al-Maqrizi. So one must imagine and set down as best one can the world that once was.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the world of the imagination is practically the only way to understand these worlds that are gone. It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of the changes that are piling up around the world. The past is not hidden.. it is simply gone. Perhaps someday only tourists will travel while scholars stay home and imagine.
Preservation by Superstition
June 15, 2007
When my buddy and I visited the Native American site Aztalan we wondered about the source of information for the restored enclosure wall, composed of a series of tree trunks settled vertically into the ground (see Aztalan video). Aztalan flourished about 1150 AD, so I figured archeologists had discovered traces of wood or pits in the earth. But amazingly the enclosure had been perfectly visible at the time of the first American visitors.
The map included by Increase Lapham in his The Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855) clearly shows the enclosure wall running around the site. In his descriptive text Lapham details the composition of the enclosure, which he calls a ridge. He provides its dimensions: 631 feet at the north, 1,419 at the west, and 700 at the south. So the entire enclosure was still there.. albeit in a weathered and damaged form.
At some point after 1200 AD Aztalan was abandoned.. and the site lasted in decent condition for another 600 years. There were other Native American groups in the area.. some of whom may even have been hostile to the Mississippian culture that had maintained this outpost so far to the north. But the site remained intact.. until modern Americans came and plowed the land over and clumsily dug into the mounds. Because of all this latter day damage the site has had to be largely restored.
I found a parallel example this week in my reading of Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. The book tells the sprawling story of Kit Carson and the American presence in the Southwest. At one point Sides describes an American military incursion into Navajo land. This included the first American survey of Chaco Canyon and its great houses left by the Anasazi. These ruins were in nearly pristine condition as the Americans explored and recorded them. But that seems odd: why would the later Navajo countenance the ruins of a past civilization to stand untouched? That is counter to the impulse that I comment on here.
But Sides provides an answer:
...[the Navajo] refused to go into the great houses, believing they were places of evil and death.
[The Navajos] would remain masters of this region, living their roving kind of life in the midst of these crumbling rock cities, incorporating stories about the ruins into their own mythology, but always leaving them alone. [216]
So the reason they left these ruins alone is that they were connected to deeply held superstitions.. spirits and death and the like. So the magnificent ruins were just left to stand in their land as a testimony to a past culture. It is not a far stretch to assume that Aztalan was mostly left alone for similar reasons.. and thus lasted over 600 years as a ruin in the landscape of another culture.
Which just goes to show how convenient superstitions can be. One could see them as a natural human mechanism for preservation of the past. Maybe the most natural response for humans is not to destroy the past.. but to fear its power.. and steer clear of it.
Aztalan
June 14, 2007
Stanley Fish on Convictions
June 13, 2007
In one of his weekly posts for the New York Times, the literary critic Stanley Fish briefly analyzes whether it is possible for the mind to analyze an issue in what we might call an objective fashion:
But why not come to a situation with no beliefs, or with the beliefs you have held in abeyance or bracketed, and take a good, hard look at the facts? Aside from the point I have already made (that any facts we look at will be available and perspicuous only from the perspective of some belief or other), what is it exactly that we would be looking with? Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely – and if there were all disputes could be settled by just going to it – we can only look with or within the convictions that anchor our minds and provide the possibility of judgment. It is within a conviction or belief that some assertion or description will seem to us to be right or wrong, adequate or inadequate. Absent a belief that grounds it and gives it a direction, the mind would be rudderless and incapable of going anywhere.
I agree that human beings are limited in their ability to step outside their own convictions. Every active perceiver of this world is fundamentally a biased perceiver. We take in ideas and facts only through a heavy screen of our own convictions. But.. and this is a big BUT.. the human mind is certainly able to bracket its own beliefs and ideas about the world. Not perfectly, but to a limited extent.
Fish pokes fun at this notion when he writes: "Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely..." Well, that makes it sound ridiculous, but I would propose that the imagination plays a role similar to this. The ability of my mind to reason: "If I valued this and believed that.. then maybe I would reason or act thus." That is a fundamental part of our cognitive ability.. and it is essential for either the writing of fiction or the reconstruction of the past. Linguistically this ability manifests itself through the easy use of counter-factuals.
I worry that Fish's denial of pure perception devolves all too easily into a denial of the worth of striving to imagine other people and their convictions. Fish himself is a master at this effort, and I have heard him in a lecture walk easily through the religious convictions of John Milton. That imaginative reconstruction of the convictions of another person (often distant in time) is at the heart of what I consider liberal education. Getting students to think imaginatively and counter-factually about historical figures is difficult. I have found that it means asking them to bracket their own values and convictions and try to imagine the world as it was perceived by someone else. To do this purely might be impossible.. but to do it a little is everything.
The Sufferers Then and Now
June 12, 2007
The words of Taha Hussein at the beginning of The Sufferers, a collection of stories and polemics, sound oddly familiar. Looking back at Egypt's time under the monarchy Hussein writes:
...Egyptians formed two groups. One represented the great majority of the wretched, who burned with a yearning for justice in wakefulness, in sleep, and in the darkest hours of night. The other represented the small minority, which cowered from justice when confronted by the light of day... [1]
Hussein goes on to further develop this central contrast between the two Egypts.. one for the poor and one for the wealthy. Transpose America for Egypt and you could almost have a campaign speech by presidential candidate John Edwards!
This central contrast enlivens the short stories of The Sufferers. The story "Saleh" is a portrait of two boys, one prosperous and the other poor as can be. Saleh is the poor one, but Hussein makes sure to point out that Egypt is filled with boys like Saleh. Then in the second story "Qasim" we encounter a poor family left worse off than before after an uncle takes advantage of the seventeen year old daughter Sekina. Her mother Amuna beats her when she learns of their trysts. Hussein then addresses his Egyptian reader:
But the reader does not need me to portray these misfortunes. For it is very easy for him to observe his tumultuous life around him. He will recognize many 'Amunas' and 'Sekinas,' who can be counted not in hundreds and thousands, but in hundreds of thousands or perhaps in millions. [49]
It is bracing to read The Sufferers and to encounter such a clear call for social justice.. but in the back of my mind there is a nagging issue: the world of poverty that Hussein is describing sounds a lot like modern Egypt. In 1955, just three years after the revolution, Hussein could call those earlier days of injustice "distant". Judging by Egyptian films, the 50s and 60s were years of cultural optimism. Clearly Taha Hussein was a part of that broader optimism.
The government of Hosny Mubarak understands itself as a direct descendent of the 1952 revolution. Taha Hussein as a supporter of Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser is to some extent co-opted by the current government of Egypt. And so results one of the ironies of national histories. A writer who stood strongly for justice and equity has been made part of the intellectual heritage of a government that has largely ceased to care about those issues.. except in name. I have to remind myself that Hussein could not foresee where history was trending.
In the introduction to The Sufferers Hussein mentions the early confiscation of his book in Egypt and its subsequent printing in Egypt. He saw this as an embarrassment to Egypt. How would he respond now to the jailing of dissidents and bloggers? One hopes and trusts he would still write:
To these burning with their yearning for justice
And to those rendered sleepless by their fear of justice
To these and those together
Do I direct these words
Beyond Belief by V.S. Naipaul
June 10, 2007
It is hard to know how to classify V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief, awkwardly situated as it is with respect to his earlier effort Among the Believers. Is Beyond Belief an update, an expansion, or a replacement for the earlier book? I began reading Beyond Belief expecting it to take me someplace new. What else could be the motivation for revisiting the same countries and even talking (in many cases) to the same people? But I was disappointed when I found Naipaul's views on the Islamic world restated and elaborated.. but hardly changed or renewed. I could not finish the book.
On the back of the book there is a note about Naipaul's methodology: "V.S. Naipaul deliberately effaces himself to let the voices of his subjects come through." I find it hard to understand how Naipaul can be said to efface himself when there is constant description and framing. Naipaul is quite present.
What may be unique is the way Naipaul's commentary arises from his own personal sense of the world. At no point does Naipaul make reference to other opinions about the Islamic world. He is not about to give the reader any alternative Western frames for the people they will meet in the course of these travels. We encounter the stories of various individuals from Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Iran.. and then we get Naipaul's often critical frame. Those individual stories have to stand or fall on their own with no interpretive or contextual help.
There are many places where Naipaul could have made use of alternative approaches to these regions. To illustrate what I mean we can look at the paragraph that made me decide to put the book down:
The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people—the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet—a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism. [64]
These ideas are already crystalized in Among the Believers, from 15 years earlier.. raising the question for me as to why I should go through the newer book? It is also worth noting how Naipaul as judgment-maker is present in this passage.
More important are the actual fallacies in this passage. Naipaul sees himself as traveling among "converted peoples" to the East of the central Islamic lands (although there is no reason to view Iran as somehow more "converted" that Egypt). According to him these converted peoples must look to the land of the Arabs for sacred places. But Islamic fundamentalism is hostile to sacred sites in Arabia itself.. along with other places in the Arab world. Islamic fundamentalism is a destroyer of sacred sites, wherever they might be. Read about the Wahhabis and their tearing down of shrines in Arabia!
In traditional versions of Islam the landscapes are littered with sacred places. This is true from Morocco to Indonesia and everywhere in between. Naipaul talks to people that have a very modern skin-and-bones version of Islam.. and neglects to show us the undergrowth of popular belief in these places. It would be like showing up at Cairo and talking to members of the Muslim Brotherhood but missing the wide flow of Islamic practices that are alive there. The view of Islam in Egypt would be strangely bare. Why could Naipaul not read just a few anthropologists who have the language skills to make sense of Islam as it is practiced among people that he could not talk to? This contextualization of his narratives would have been immensely helpful.
Chess Smackdown in Appleton
June 10, 2007
My buddy was destined to look long and hard at that chess board, but it was all for nothing. He lost five games and won zero. His losses mounted in an even worse ratio than his losses back in Cairo four years ago..
But Old Roads wants to recognize our buddy as a real trooper and as a guy that has come a long ways since our rollicking debates over Koshari. On the issue of the relationship between religion and politics, we found ourselves a step closer together.. both a bit more nuanced in our positions.
God, John Lennon
June 6, 2007
In a notebook Wallace Stevens wrote: "Loss of faith is growth". Nothing is more dramatic than the internal struggle of losing one's religion. It feels terrible, but at the end there is indeed an abiding sense of growth.
John Lennon's first solo album was John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, released in September, 1970. The cover looks calm enough, with Lennon reclining peacefully in the lap of his wife Yoko Ono, but the songs on the album tell a different story: loss of faith in almost everything.. and lashings out at the social system and those whom he perceived to have failed him. Listening to this album in our conservative and pious latter days is shocking, especially when he takes on such verities as Mother:
Mother, you had me but I never had you,
I wanted you but you didn't want me,
So I got to tell you,
Goodbye, goodbye.
Try singing that Garth Brooks or Kenny Chesney!
The song that gives me chills is "God". If you want to hear what it sounds like to lose your faith, then this is worth a listen. Unlike a standard such as REM's "Losing My Religion", it is hard to imagine anyone except John Lennon singing "God". The song is resolutely personal; its impact depends upon knowing something about who is singing.
The song begins with some lines I have never quite gotten my head around:
God is a concept,
By which we can measure,
Our pain...
There is no build-up or argument.. just a statement that might take some unpacking. Obviously if God is a concept then he is not a person or actual existent being. He is just something that lives in our mind.. a concept. This concept has a particular use: a measure for our pain. Perhaps he means that the strength of our need for something unseen like God is a direct measure of our deepest pain.
But this brief introduction is hardly the meat of the song. Following this enigmatic definition of God Lennon proceeds to list all the false gods he has ever held. It is a long list. Every "I don't believe" bringing forth a name more personal and central to his past:
I don't believe in magic,
I don't believe in I-ching,
I don't believe in bible,
I don't believe in tarot,
I don't believe in Hitler,
I don't believe in Jesus,
I don't believe in Kennedy,
I don't believe in Buddha,
I don't believe in mantra,
I don't believe in Gita,
I don't believe in yoga,
I don't believe in kings,
I don't believe in Elvis,
I don't believe in Zimmerman,
I don't believe in Beatles
It is a rather complete list of anything in the religious, political, and popular worlds that could be thought of as sacred. One by one they are all cast down. He ends with the greatest idol of all: the Beatles.
Who could not call that growth?
Having exorcised all these falsities, Lennon comes round to name something he does believe in:
I just believe in me,
Yoko and me,
And that's reality.
These words are not delivered with soaring confidence.. they seem to be diminished after the grand chords introducing what he doesn't believe in. They are anticlimactic. And when he says "And that's reality", his voice is full of resignation.. not pride. It is hard not to recall his lines from "Isolation":
Just a boy and a little girl
Trying to change the whole wide world
It is a little John Lennon that arises in these songs.. not some monstrous "I".
"God" concludes with what is perhaps the most bluntly beautiful message in the history of popular music:
The dream is over,
What can I say?
The dream is over,
Yesterday,
I was dreamweaver,
But now I'm reborn,
I was the walrus,
But now I'm John,
And so dear friends,
You just have to carry on,
The dream is over.
The dream here has nothing to do with God. Lennon turns now to the Beatles.. a band which after all may be another ideal concept by which we measure our pain. Lennon had played the role over the past 7 years.. he had been the Walrus.. and now he is through. It is telling that Lennon dispenses with the Beatles in the same song that he dispenses with God. It is a clue to the immense and overpowering place of the Beatles in his mind.. and the strength it took to leave it behind.
In contrast to Paul McCartney, who has always tried to get "Back to the Egg" and recapture something of the original magic of the Beatles, Lennon in his solo career was partial to images of rebirth and starting over. Those who want to live with the illusion of fiction would have to find it elsewhere.. he would no longer be dispensing that kind of thing. The dream is over. It is time for reality, painful and diminishing as that might be.
Old Roads on Immigration
June 5, 2007
An international perspective on immigration might aid clear thinking. Listening to the current discussions one might be tempted to believe that our current predicament is due to a unique lack of political spine and get-tough policies. As is well known, European nations such as France and Germany have to deal with their own major immigration problems. We could add to them Australia, Kuwait, and even China (if we count the waves of internal migration to wealthy coastal cities). So the United States is simply one out of many international examples of a country that has to struggle with immigration.
Why has this become an issue that confronts nearly every wealthy country? That seems simple enough: modern economies have created huge disparities in wealth. Life in Britain is very different than life in Pakistan. But let's get a little closer to home: life in Tijuana is different than life in San Diego. These huge disparities create a nearly irresistible pull of poor people toward opportunities and wealth. That pull can be desperate.. and it has so far proven impossible for wealthy nations to keep out large numbers of immigrants. It is not at all clear to me that even a formidable obstruction like a concrete wall will manage to keep out determined immigrants.
The unspoken assumption of much anti-immigrant rhetoric is that the wealth and opportunities of our nation can be locked up behind walls.. something only for citizens.. and preferably ones who have been here since the Mayflower! As if the wealth of our nation could possibly keep rising and people in neighboring countries just be happy in their poverty. But just as nature does not abide a vacuum, so the international world will not abide a pocket of extreme wealth. Immigration is a step toward alleviating these inequalities. It doesn't matter if we like it or not, it will happen inexorably as long as there are huge disparities defined by national borders.
A trip to California is always a trip into immigration hysteria. This past weekend I was shown an article entitled: "Remittances from U.S. Sap Desire to Work: Guatemalans Spend Money Sent by Migrants, Wait to Head North" by the AP journalist Juan Carlos Llorca. The article delivers a rather oblique attack on immigration, charging that Guatemalans are avoiding work and school because of large remittances received from relatives working in the US. Such remittances have thrown the economy out of whack and have led to the destruction of traditional crafts. Ergo: stop immigration to the US.. for the good of Guatemala!
The article is fascinating, though, because with some careful attention to the details the reader can discern a different and more revealing story. Here is the basic background:
During the 1980s and part of the '90s, almost every household in Salcaja had at least one loom, and weaving the fabric use for traditional Mayan skirts was the first way young men earned their own money.
This traditional weaving industry has had to move to more remote areas where people will still work for the equivalent of $120 month. In explanation the author cites the owner of a mill: "The thing is that this work is really hard, and you earn very little... It's easier for a young person to sit back and receive money..."
Earlier in the article the author pointed out the way young men had taken to hanging out at video game salons or at pool halls. Ah, so there is the problem! These young people have gotten into the habit of playing video games and other non-industrious sorts of pursuits that a conservative can feel good about condemning.
So if we could just get rid of the remittances, then people would be willing to work "very hard" for $120 a month?? And willing to forget about those video games?? That seems absurd. The deeper problem here is one that is repeated over and over in the process of globalization (a process the US has championed for decades). A traditional economy fails to generate the kind of wealth that allows for its people to participate in the global economy. Meanwhile there are large numbers of young people who grow up wanting to play video games, watch television, and talk on cell phones. Things that $120 a month cannot support. That is the generator of the desperation that pushes people to head North.
I am not claiming that remittances cannot have a negative net effect on a local economy.. but they are a symptom of a problem: an economy that cannot generate the wealth that would allow for people to engage with the global economy.
Needless to say, Old Roads deplores the inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric that seems common out there on the airwaves. Our best guess is that the anger over immigration reflects anxiety about the gradual erosion of the economic security of average Americans. Instead of getting angry at the real source of this erosion—conservative economic policies that invariably favor corporations—, they set the blame on all these people who have crossed into our country to make a better life than they could find at home.
Salt Lake City's Airport
June 5, 2007
Coming in to Salt Lake City I could look out my window and see the beautiful mountains of the West. It is so different than the landscape here in Wisconsin.. or in Georgia for that matter. Somewhere inside I am keyed to the landscape of the West. Even the Middle East feels right to me, in large part, because it makes me think of the deserts of the West. I had only a brief layover in Salt Lake City, but I thought I would try to capture a couple of scenes from an airport.
Redlands Alliance Church
June 4, 2007
I spent a large portion of my life in the Redlands Alliance Church. Ronald Reagan was president when my family moved to Redlands. I was in the 7th grade. Twice on Sunday, in the morning and then again in the evening, my father delivered a sermon up there at the pulpit. John Browning played the piano over there on the left. I invariably sat somewhere on the right. I attended regularly until I left for college.
This last weekend I was back in Southern California for my sister's wedding.. and on Sunday we were back in church. It is interesting to return to a place after years away from it. Memories come rushing back.. certain people that are now gone appear in my mind. This time I was remembering old Henry Voss and his impassioned soulful prayers standing before the communion table. Or Ross Edwards and his sometimes off-key and off-time song hymn leading.
This may well have been the last time I will ever sit through a service at the Redlands Alliance Church. My father was preaching again, but this was only a guest appearance since he has now officially retired. His message was a warning about the decline of the church that he fears is taking place in America today. I disagreed strongly with the cultural critique that he was delivering, but I can readily imagine how different churches.. and Evangelicalism in general.. appear to him. The megachurch was not around back then.. and my father has never been a Wal-Mart kind of preacher. His was a message that fit perfectly into a small church, but not one that meshed with rock choruses, Starbucks in the lobby, or James Dobson style political action. It has been all about the soul and salvation.. all the time.
There is Mike in the tan shirt to the left. His daughter Allison is jumping round in the foreground. Mike and I were best friends throughout high school and the early years of college. A little while after I took this photo Allison asked where Mike and I had met.. and I could not remember exactly where. But it was certainly somewhere here in the Redlands Alliance Church. It was a friendship that spread beyond the confines of the church to school and other places.. in fact at first neither of us had any particular interest in religion. That friendship was another gift that came from this old church.
I have made this point before, but it is worth re-stating that one important thing I got from attending the Redlands Alliance Church is a sense of the wider world. Every year we had a missionary conference and individuals and families who worked in Africa, Asia, South America, or even Europe came and delivered their slide show to us. It was not like some Discovery Channel program where only the amazing and colorful aspects of a country were shown. We got a pretty good view of daily life in different countries. My first trip abroad (a six week trip to Chile) was in large part funded by people in the Redlands Alliance Church who wanted me to experience missions.
Looking around the interior of the Redlands Alliance Church I see many changes. In fact, few current elements of the interior of the sanctuary were present when we first arrived. The wooden pulpit and communion table go back to that time. So do the wooden pews (but not the cushions). Almost everything else has been changed since then. But this decorative map of the world is definitely an original element.. and I am glad it has remained on the wall.
The interior would be fun to excavate.. to figure out the changes and ask why they occurred. But so many of the people who could remember information like that are slipping away. And so like everything else this will be a history that no one tells. But we here at Old Roads are committed to bringing you bits of micro-histories.. along with the broadest possible theoretical lens.
