Identity Divisions:
A View of the Reformation
December 31, 2008
We might think of ourselves in terms such as American, Jewish, and working class.. but these are not words that distinguish anything actual in our world, they represent the boundaries created by humans to form group identities. Benedict Anderson makes this point when he defines nations as "imagined communities" and then goes on to note how every form of community, whether based on religion or kinship, is similarly imagined or created (5-6). This being the case our interest will be drawn to examinations of how human beings define and press home these boundaries.. or of the mechanisms used to create identity.
We tend to attribute conflict in our world to "long memories".. and maybe even throw in some Faulkner to boot: "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." Underneath this kind of talk is the notion that groups have some form of deep memory that pushes them to hold onto antagonism and hatred. When we see violence in Ireland between Protestant and Catholic or in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni this is the kind of thinking that gets trotted out. It's more helpful, I would argue, to see this as a case of the contemporary use of history.. rather than anything like a memory.
Here's an example. Say you live in a suburban neighborhood.. and maybe like me you don't pay a lot of attention to the cars people drive. The neighborhood gets along fine and everyone shares a sense of being American. Then one day a radio announcer starts to call attention to the essential differences between people who own different colors of cars. People with bright colored cars are haughty and arrogant! People who own cars with a neutral color are good citizens and kind neighbors! Even if you found this ridiculous, your would begin to notice the colors of the cars in neighboring driveways as never before. You would start to think about differences. And perhaps if other shared identities (national, regional) had grown weak, some people might even start to see their world in this way.. if the radio messaging was insistent enough. It would be an essentially random way to break up and define a group.. but that is the point: an identity draws a line that is not really there around a group of people.
This is the basic story of the Reformation era as told by Benjamin Kaplan in Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. His description of the rise of confessionalism is I think a close parallel to my car-color example:
In medieval Europe, ordinary laypeople knew little church doctrine. They received no formal religious instruction, and their pastors rarely preached... Such ignorance did not matter greatly in a world where everyone was by default catholic. It did after Europe split into competing "confessions," each propounding a rival truth. As each church began to define its identity in terms of its unique teachings, doctrine took on an unprecedented importance... [30]
So we move from a time in which the population is more or less indifferent to fine religious differences. Then because of some weakness in accepted identity categories there is an opening for a new way of drawing social divisions, and various groups impress on the population a new way of understanding the world that expresses itself through finely defined religious differences.
Learning to see the world in terms of doctrinal differences takes time.. and the Reformation era saw an immense amount of effort: "The churches had to undertake massive pedagogic campaigns, which they conducted via preaching, education, printed propaganda, church discipline, and revamped rituals" (31). We could lose ourselves examining the doctrinal details of the various camps (Calvinism, Lutheranism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism), but that would miss the sociological point: we are witnessing in all this talk the rise of new community boundaries, which break along lines that could not have been predicted beforehand.
Having established these new identity groups, the real possibility of religious conflict arose.. and the necessity of finding paths to tolerance. And this is what Divided by Faith is mostly about. One of the most effective means of limiting conflict turned out to be physical separation of the communities, and during the Reformation era there was a surprising (to me at least) amount of emigration. Kaplan notes that over the course of some decades about 300,000 Huguenots fled France.. 150,000 Protestants fled at the Spanish conquest part of the Netherlands.. perhaps 100,000 from Austria during the Counter-Reformation.. and more examples could be listed (158-9).
At the end of this sorting of religious communities (which took many wars), we get something like confessional nation-states.. and this is an important point to grasp:
...the resulting confessional allegiance eventually became a defining aspect of political identity. Whether or not it initially had wide support, the allegiance was institutionalized and sank popular roots. In some essential and irreversible way, England became a Protestant country, Poland a Catholic one, Sweden Lutheran, the Dutch Republic Calvinist, and so forth. [102]
The result of this consolidation of religious (and linguistic) traditions is something like the modern nation state.. a form of identity that is "modular" (according to Benedict Anderson) and thus transferable to new social situations.
As I wrote those last sentences I could hear the firecrackers going off to mark the new year: 2009.
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.
Benjamin J. Kaplan. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Harvard University Press, 2007.
3rd Base, Dodger Stadium
December 29, 2008
Ry Cooder's song "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" rewards a careful listen. The repeated chorus
And if you want to know where a local boy like me is coming from: 3rd base, Dodger Stadium
might lull you into thinking it's an ode to youthful memories of attending Dodgers home games. Actually the speaker is mapping a personal past onto the public space of Dodger Stadium.
The song begins with the buttonholing of someone arriving at the stadium by a guy who "works nights parking cars." The speaker goes on to elaborate his memories with a high level of specificity: "2nd base, right over there/ I see grandma in her rocking chair." By the end of two stanzas like this we can imagine the person who has come just to watch a ballgame getting fidgety; it has all gotten too personal. And the speaker acknowledges this at the start of the final stanza: "Hey mister, you seem anxious to go."
The setup is remarkably similar to that of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Famously the story-telling Mariner stops "one of three" to elaborate his great tale of destruction and redemption:
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone :
He cannot choose but hear ;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
In "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" the ancient mariner is replaced by a guy working nights at Dodger Stadium, and the wedding guest by a fan arriving to see a game. The tale related by the narrator is not that of a fantastic journey to the southern seas, but a trip back in time.
The past is evoked by the visionary night worker through a series of details laid out on top of the current topography of the stadium:
Back around the 76 ball, Johnny Greeneyes had his shoeshine stall.
In the middle of the 1st base line, got my first kiss, Florencia was kind.
Now, if the dozer hadn't taken my yard, you'd see the tree with our initials carved.
So many moments in my memory. Sure was fun,
'cause the game was free.
It was free.
If you wonder what the "76 ball" refers to, take a look at the photo at the top of this post.. and out there in left field you can see the red ball advertising Union 76. The other spots mentioned in the song, like the middle of the 1st base line, are more easily located.
While the exact placement of these personal sites may be fictional, Cooder is drawing on a real event: the eviction of a small Hispanic community that once lived at the site where Dodger Stadium was eventually built. It was a village of rural character right up until 1950 when residents received notice that their homes would be seized by eminent domain. The original idea had been to build a public housing project, but that was put aside and finally the Dodgers moved into Chavez Ravine.
click here for a slideshow of old Chavez Ravine
The song by Ry Cooder has a haunting quality with its description of the past. We can imagine Palestinians or any other expelled group looking at their past with similarly resigned eyes.. and with a similar mania for getting the details right: "this is where that happened."
Cooder offers no hope of getting back to this place of memory:
Just a place you don't know, up a road you can't go.
And that is unfortunately the fact of our modern world: Dodger Stadium is not coming down. The best we can do is learn to look out on our world with the kind of eyes that can see the layers of history underneath the concrete of the present. That means learning to listen to the odd voices that speak of the past.. and using technology (a product of the modern world) to preserve the world that once was here. We can yet see these places and travel those roads in our imaginations.
photo by Flickr user Rafael Amado Deras, used under Creative Commons License
slideshow link from webpage for documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story
Symbol of the Snow Man
December 28, 2008
Christmas is quite the time for symbols of belief. Between Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, and America there's a lot of demand for personal belief. There's really no way to be a principled objector to Christmas: that's known as being a Scrooge. So I muddle along through the holidays skeptical, but unwilling to step off the prescribed path.
All the snow here in Appleton this December (record breaking!) reminded me of "Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
That idea of a "mind of winter" seems like the perfect antidote to Christmas and its multiple claims for belief. And I note that Stevens places us in "January".. not December. But even in his holiday-less winter cold there is still the temptation to impart meaning and symbolic value to the bareness of the world. The stirring of the leaves and the wind in the trees calls up a sense of human misery and grief.. but really it is just wind.. just a nothing that we impart with meaning.
The poem is called "The Snow Man".. which given its theme would seem to imply a certain ironic imaginative ideal: to be unmoved by what is not there. Stevens works through this interaction of the imagination and the world many times and in many ways, but by the end of his career he is sounding a lot like a Snow Man:
...We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality....
["An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" IX]
The human hubbub of a city like New Haven has become an object of a pure perception.. a thing in itself.
The Snow Man may be an ideal for Stevens, but it is notable how the snow man lives and breathes in our American imaginations as Frosty the Snowman. At the mere mention of the name the holiday song undoubtedly enters your consciousness. But that is exactly what Stevens is trying to push away.. and the reason why it takes being a snow man to exist imaginatively in this world. There is a necessary imaginative effort to break through the symbols of belief that have invaded even the body of the snow man. In the vein of Stevens: one must be a snow man to think of a snow man and not imagine Frosty the Snow Man.
WTF Israel?
December 28, 2008
I have about the same thoughts about the Israeli attack on Gaza as I did for the last major military adventure into Lebanon (see here). I have no doubt that Gaza will be significantly easier to beat up on, but how does this advance the cause of eventual peace in the region?
One reason the American "surge" was successful in Iraq is that it took counter-insurgency seriously: people need jobs and a stake in success. Counter-insurgency is what Petraeus was all about. So why can't some of those same principles be applied by Israel to Gaza? Get the standard of living up and make it less of a hell hole. Yes, that would involve being nice and spending money on people who may hate you.. but it's the only possible route to peace.
I was impressed by the force here in a post by Ezra Klein:
The rocket attacks were undoubtedly "deeply disturbing" to Israelis. But so too are the checkpoints, the road closures, the restricted movement, the terrible joblessness, the unflinching oppression, the daily humiliations, the illegal settlement -- I'm sorry, "outpost" -- construction, "deeply disturbing" to the Palestinians, and far more injurious. And the 300 dead Palestinians should be disturbing to us all.
There is nothing proportionate in this response. No way to fit it into a larger strategy that leads towards eventual peace. No way to fool ourselves into believing that it will reduce bloodshed and stop terrorist attacks. It is simple vengeance. There's a saying in the Jewish community: "Israel, right or wrong." But sometimes Israel is simply wrong.
Christmas at Home in Appleton
December 27, 2008
Welcome to a little glimpse of our Christmas here in snowy and cold Appleton, Wisconsin. Aurora was initiated into the practice of getting up early to open presents.. in fact, it was Mommy who woke up Aurora! This kind of family scene is not the usual topic for an Old Roads Essay, but I want to extend the form into a more personal-essay style. For the second time I ended up leaving aside my own narrative voice.. and also for the second time I am not completely happy with the results. There is a string of associations that come up a little past the midpoint: The Polar Express, Luke chapter 2 on the birth of Jesus, and then a poem by Wallace Stevens. There is a thematic link in my own head.. but communicating this without providing some narration is difficult. On the other hand, this is an essay that does not require as much narration as some of my other videos, so I worry that my voice will be intrusive. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this family portrait.
Nations in the Long View
December 23, 2008
When people come to look back on our time, say from the vantage point of 300 years, it may well appear foremost as an intense period of nation sorting. In 1908 the majority of the world would have had no idea where their allegiance belonged in an assembly of nation states. This was not just a result of European colonization; it was simply the case that other parts of the globe organized themselves politically in quite different ways, whether that be a tribal pattern or the kind of loose political economy of the Islamic world.
The violence of the 20th century can be likened to an ocean tide forced through a rocky pass.. there are destructive currents by the nature of the set up. Much current discussion of the history of our century turns on ideas about evil: Hitler is the ultimate evil, while Mao and Stalin line up behind him as butchers. This version of history makes it seem as if our world has been passing through an unlucky period in which bad men got control.. and maybe we can stop that from happening in the future. But this ignores how neatly these "evil" figures fit into broader historical movements.
My current page-turner is Freedom at Midnight, telling the story of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. I knew the broad outlines of this story, but I had no idea of the incredible slaughter that took place as Hindus and Sikhs in India and Muslims in Pakistan killed and violently expelled their religious minorities. The number of dead varies, but the minimum appears to be 225,000.. and the number of refugees reached 10 and a half million. Both sides were involved in what today we call ethnic cleansing. If there had been a single mastermind for this killing, we would label that person evil, and he might get put into one or another of the levels of the historical inferno where we condemn such leaders. But the events in India and Pakistan were different because the atrocities caught the political leaders (Nehru, Jinnah) by surprise, and they worked to hold back the killing. So we have no evil leader, only a situation.. a tidal flow of violence.
To what force can we attribute this flow of violence? Again, the evil or hatred lurking in human hearts is too easy an answer. If we chose some person to nightly count out $100,000 dollars in cash receipts, and assigned no oversight or checks to this task, then it would be no surprise if before long that person were stealing some of the money. The evil in the human heart is not a helpful explanation for this problem: it is a perverse situation that gives a powerful incentive to steal. We are better off critiquing the system than the character of the individual.
The case of the nation state is similar. A crucial aspect of the nation state is the notion of some level of ethnic/cultural purity within physical borders. The imposition of that system upon regions that were not ethnically or culturally pure led inevitably to efforts at purification. These could be done through peaceful population exchanges (Greece and Turkey) or through mass murder (Germany), but the end result was similar. Some of these national purifications were led by leaders who aided and abetted the process, and others were characterized by local and unorganized mayhem.. but the result was always a modern nation. So instead of evil, we should talk about the perverse incentives associated with nation state building. In essence this process led the entire world to go through the sieve of border and history creation.. and the result is a kind of slow motion violence.
One of the hardest things for us to imagine is the experience of the world before the dominance of the nation state. An important take-away from A Mediterranean Society by S.D. Goitein is that there existed a society organized along quite different lines. Cairo is his main point of reference, but he jumps from there to discuss the broader Mediterranean region. In that region ethnic and cultural identities were allowed to coexist because political power did not define communal identity. The borders of the political state in which a person lived did not define the laws for that person (Goitein is particularly interested in the medieval Jewish community). That form of social organization worked great in its time, but when it ran into the nation state it was confronted with the need to define and purify its identity. The result? 1) The state of Israel and the Middle East largely emptied of Jews, 2) a much slower diminution of the Christian communities of the Middle East, and 3) the regional sorting of Sunni and Shi'a communities and the development of a homogenous "fundamental" version of Islam.
photo by Flickr user Luke Redmond, used under Creative Commons License
Sermons and Flag Raising
December 20, 2008
Reading Freedom at Midnight, a classic account of the rough birth of independent India and Pakistan in 1947, I came across a passage concerning the response of one elderly English woman to independence:
To friends who suggested it was now time to leave, she replied: 'My dear, whatever would I do in England? I don't even know how to boil the water for a cup of tea.' And so, while the former summer capital of the Raj celebrated, she sat at home weeping, unable to bear the sight of another nation's flag going up that pole where her beloved Union Jack had flown. [340]
Reading that passage we instantly understand her emotional response to the raising of another flag in place of the Union Jack. We become accustomed at an early age to feel the symbolic value of a flag.. and its instant message: this building or ship is under the authority of such and such nation. The flag is the ever present sign of the nation state; our soldiers die to raise a victorious flag on enemy soil.
As with many of the accoutrements of the modern nation state, it is important to forget about flags when reading medieval Arabic histories. The idea of weeping at the raising of a new flag is unimaginable since the flag is not the important symbol of authority. The modern reader has to be careful to find the emotional points of reference for the medieval writers.
Reading Maqrizi's account of Salah al-Din, I found this passage pointing to a very different type of symbol:
When the Fatimid Caliph al-Adid died, Salah al-Din dropped his name from the sermon and enjoined the preachers to mention instead the name of Mustadi' bi-Nur-Allah, the Abbasid Caliph... Imad al-Din al-Isfahani... wrote a message of good tidings to be read in the presence of the Caliph al-Mustadi' bi-Nur-Allah in Baghdad, which he sent by the hand of the Qadi... The Qadi departed and left no town or village in which he did not read the proclamation, and at last reached Baghdad, where the citizens came out to meet him. [after translation by R.J.C. Broadhurst, 37]
At a major transition of power (from Shi'i Fatimids to Sunni Ayyubids in 1171 AD) there is no mention of flags being taken down and new ones pulled up. The emphasis is entirely centered on the change of the name read out in the Friday sermon. That verbal symbol held such importance that a messenger was sent to announce the change to village after village.. and finally to the Caliph in Baghdad.
That change in the sermon brought with it all the emotional and symbolic weight that we associate with flags. One of the most important lessons to be learned about reading ancient texts is that the symbolic values of different acts and conventions diverge widely. Arabic travel literature (Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Jubayr come to mind) is full of citations and discussion of the names used in the benediction of the Friday sermon. The modern reader is tempted to glance over these passages as extraneous wastes of space, but the medieval writers are actually communicating something important about the political world they are seeing; they just do it through a different set of symbols.
This is also an example of why it is so much easier to read contemporary literature. The emotional response to the final lowering of a flag is grasped by everyone today, but the importance of mentioning the Abbasid Caliph in the sermon is tougher for us to connect with. That gap in immediacy necessitates extra work and attention from the reader.
Freedom at Midnight. Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins. Vikas Publishing, 1997 (new edition).
A History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt. Al-Maqrizi, trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst. Twayne Publishers.
Film and the Age of Adventure:
More on Werner Herzog
December 18, 2008
Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World returns obsessively to Ernest Shackleton and his Antarctic explorations in the early part of the 20th century. Right off the bat, on the way to McMurdo Station after getting off the airplane, Herzog films the bus driver pointing out the original cabin built by Shackleton and his men.. and three times in the course of the documentary Herzog adds footage taken by Shackleton.
He first uses Shackleton to point out the immense changes in the human experience of Antarctica.
One hundred years ago the human presence here was the result of genuinely heroic efforts. Now visitors are treated to climate controlled dorm rooms, a cafeteria serving ice cream, and even a yoga studio. Herzog can't wait to get out of McMurdo Station..
Later in the film Herzog returns to this comparison of the early explorers with modern adventures.. and his answer provides an insight into his rationale for making films:
One thing about the early explorers does not feel right: the obsession to be the first one to set foot on the South Pole. It was for personal fame and the glory of the British Empire... But in a way from the South Pole onwards there was no further expansion possible and the empire started to fade into the abyss of history...
Herzog appears to be saying that while he admires the spirit of adventure, these explorers were compromised by a fixation on being "first".. something meaningful only in terms of fame and political capital. The unaffiliated and plain human value of their effort was being lost in this obsession.
Herzog continues:
On the cultural level it meant the end of adventure. Exposing the last unknown spots of this earth was irreversible, but it feels sad that the South Pole or Mt. Everest were not left in peace in their dignity. It may be a futile wish to keep a few white spots on our maps, but human adventure in its original sense lost its meaning, became an issue for the Guinness Book of World Records. Scott and Amundsen were clearly early protagonists and from there on it generated into absurd quests. A Frenchman crossed the Sahara desert in his car set in reverse gear. I am waiting for the first barefoot runner on the summit of Mt. Everest, or the first one hopping to the South Pole on a pogo stick.
So adventure has fallen onto hard times. Explorers of Antarctica like Shackleton were the last of their kind; they filled in the last blank spaces. After them adventure became defined by repeating something in an odd way.. and it's at this point that Herzog breaks of to give us the only footage of the entire film set outside Antarctica: he interviews a man who sets weird records that only Guinness could find interest in documenting.
It is a humorous sequence, but Herzog is getting at something serious: adventure and exploration hit a dead end about the time that the South Pole was reached. The big question is Now What? Collectively we have filled that space with meaningless pursuits.. of which world record pogo-sticking is only a colorful example.
It is surely a happy coincidence for Herzog that the beginning of documentary filmmaking corresponds with the last real explorers. He gives us a glimpse of Shackleton standing on a set trying to re-create his experience in the far south:
The maker of Little Dieter Needs to Fly is not going to throw stones at anyone attempting to later re-create an experience! We sense appreciation from Herzog.. and acknowledgment that his work in film represents one form of continuation from the efforts of these men. He will not fall into the trap of "being the first".. but will find his theme in the genuine human struggle with the world. He finds a cue in the work of Shackleton.
A central search throughout the work of Herzog is to locate images that are not empty.. that can speak to our unprecedented time. This search is clear early in his career in Fata Morgana (1971), whose central images mirror what we find in Encounters at the End of the World:
In the audio commentary that comes with the most recent release of this film (from Anchor Bay), Herzog says:
I have been sick and tired of the images that are surrounding us, the posters, the ads in the magazines, and whatever you see on TV. It's so worn out, those antiquated images, images that are not really adequate to our civilization anymore. And that's a dangerous thing.. to have something like that. It's dangerous if a civilization doesn't find an adequate language... I think a quest for new images is something essential.
That is a parallel way of saying what he said above about explorers: We have collectively reached a point at which the old images and symbols have become meaningless, and the only way to respond to this state is to throw it all away and look at the world for ourselves. This loss of meaning can be understood as the same general malaise evident as human beings began to look at a world with no blank spaces.. and to invent little absurd quests for themselves. Film for Herzog is a way of answering that malaise.. and of identifying a new human sense of adventure.
The Street View
December 16, 2008
When I search on YouTube for an American city, there are naturally tons of hits. If Obama has ever spoken there, videos of him will appear early on the list. Various concerts come up.. as do local sporting events and shaky clips of natural disasters. But a curious genre that will also be there is the street view video. Below is an example I found for Calgary, Alberta:
The essential element of this genre is that it represents the experience of place through the windows of a car. The fact that these videos routinely get plenty of views (this one has gotten over 40,000!) is an indication of how standard the car view has become in our collective notions of place. Evidently when we imagine visiting a place what we think about is what it will be like driving through it.
Below is a video I ran into early as I got into the habit of browsing YouTube. It's a multi-part tour of Madison, Wisconsin by an Indonesian student about to return after graduating. He points out various buildings and switches from English to Indonesian at various points. Evidently his goal was to describe where he has been for the past few years to friends back home.. who he knows will have access to YouTube.
The point of interest in this video is that it has a reasonably clear audience and speaker.. and it thus contains interesting information about what is important to a particular person. But lots of these street view videos lack even this basic layer of interpreted experience.. they are simple window views.
Complementing this ubiquitous video genre is the "street view" addition to Google Maps. If you haven't seen this feature you should try it out. For many places you can not only get the standard bird's eye view of your neighborhood, but also a view that mimics what it would be like to drive down a street. At the top of this post is an image of our house taken this past fall.. and you can see that my tardy fall raking has been forever enshrined on the Internet! I could get a similar picture of any house in Appleton.
But what does this street view preference say about our perceptions of space? It seems that we have a lot of trouble thinking about vantage points for our world that are outside the windows of a car. The street is the frame of reference for place. These videos in their general lack of interpretation also point to a discomfort with thinking through what place means. Place is most definitely not something to think about.
The video below features window shots from an LA-Las Vegas car trip. The landscape is faceless and storyless. The interest is focused on the road itself.. the white lines of the pavement and the other vehicles. It's likely that the person has to concentrate on driving, I realize. But the video's emphasis on "types" of scenes encountered during this drive (which I have made plenty of times) points to the emptiness of the common experience of place.
Throwing Shoes at Power
December 15, 2008
This shoe throwing incident in Iraq is loaded with symbolic weight. Anyone can get a shoe thrown at them, but not everyone has been as intent as Bush on getting a "thank you" from the Iraqi people for his efforts on their behalf. Those shoes help to build a counter "un-thankful" narrative. Every political leader has someone in the audience who would love to throw shoes, but mass rallies on the thrower's behalf elevate the incident into a statement of public sentiment: a mass "no thank-you."
The incident offers a great model for the way an individual act becomes a public symbol. It is certainly possible to imagine another leader getting a pair of shoes thrown at them.. and then the incident vanishing from view. But in this case the act found a resonance with the public. Note these scenes from the Middle East:
In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, people calling for an immediate American withdrawal removed their footwear and placed the shoes and sandals at the end of long poles, waving them high in the air. And in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, people threw their shoes at a passing American convoy.
A particular act becomes one in which the public actively participates.
It is interesting to note president George W. Bush's response to the shoes: he argued that this was a person trying to draw attention to himself and pointed to the other Iraqi journalists who apologized. Bush instinctively narrows the opposition into an individual who carries no symbolic weight.. and almost chastises reporters for falling into the trap and asking questions about the act. Bush wants to treat the shoe throwing as parallel to a pie-in-the-face joke, and to move on. But of course the shoes were not pie-in-the-face.. they were an insult that millions of people evidently wish they also could give.
This reminded me of a presentation for a class that brought to my attention a little known incident under the presidency of the older Bush. The story is told on the radio program "This American Life." In 1992 Charles Monroe-Kane was in Munich, Germany and finagled his way into possession of a top level press pass. He would be present at a press conference carried live on CNN and decided to take the opportunity to make a public statement about US policies and to rip a flag. (The story, by the way, is hilarious and I recommend that you give it a listen.) After just a minute of the press conference Monroe-Kane stands up on his chair and yells: "The homeless and the trees are mourning your economic decisions. Repent dear king or go to hell." (The transcript of the event can be read here on The American Presidency Project website.)
In the interview on "This American Life" Monroe-Kane does not regret shouting at the president, but he does feel silly about his chosen message. It is a silly message, stilted in its mock religious tone. But looking back on that incident after 14 years or so Monroe-Kane lingers over the idea that he could have said something that would have had an affect on the world. He muses:
I wish I would have said something that hung in the air for a moment and made everybody silent. That would keep him awake for one moment of his life. That just would make him think: wow, I do have some responsibility and I have squandered that responsibility.
But his words did not do that. They were spoken.. and they disappeared from view.
Compare that to the words and actions of this Iraqi journalist. For the first shoe he shouted: "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!" For the second shoe: "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!" It really is not too far from what Monroe-Kane said and did.. although you have to trade flag-ripping for shoe-throwing. The difference between these two acts, one resonant and the other just humorous, is not to be found in more effective wording or more spectacular action. The difference is in the Iraqi public's broad desire to take part in this symbolic act. The act thus takes its place within a publicly shared narrative.
Isaiah Layers
December 13, 2008
The biblical book of Isaiah is the best kind of text: complicated. Every canonical text (whether for a religion or culture) acquires layers of interpretation that can be excavated and analyzed. But most fun is when all that interpretive activity is fossilized within the text itself. Isaiah was composed over the course of perhaps five centuries.. and since each successive layer appears to know about the earlier layers, the result is a text that continually re-interprets itself.
At a few points this process of reinterpretation steps out of the shadows and into the light, as in the following passage that follows a denunciation of the land of Moab:
This was the word that the LORD spoke concerning Moab in the past. But now the LORD says, In three years, like the years of a hired worker, the glory of Moab will be brought into contempt... [16.13-14]
Embedded in this response is recognition that a long time ago God said A, but now that will be updated with B. This kind of passage only makes sense by the assumption of a much later writer stepping into the text and making it speak for his own time.
Joseph Blenkinsopp summarizes this process:
A cumulative process of interpretation and expansion of an initial core of material was going on throughout the period of the formation of the book, until the point was reached after which commentary could no longer be incorporated in it but had to be written up separately. [56]
The model for understanding a heterogeneous book like Isaiah is to see it as a book that was for centuries in a process of becoming. As new historical situations arrived, the text was made relevant by new readings.. and those readings were embedded within the text itself. Finally this process came to an end and the book of Isaiah was closed (sometime in 2nd century BC by evidence of Dead Sea Scroll text). The text did not at that point stop acquiring new meanings, but the activity of interpretation shifted to external commentaries that functioned like lenses for understanding the book.
If we accept it that texts/scriptures are used by a culture as a way to understand or define itself, then interpretation will be seen as a constant strategy for forcing texts to speak to contemporary situations. If all we had left from the Hebrew prophets were denunciations of places like Moab and Edom, then these books would have been lost a long time ago. But thanks to the fact that in later readings parts of Isaiah that mention "Edom" were thought to be referring to Rome.. and who knows what else as time passed.. the texts maintained their value to readers.
Such interpretation would take place in different ways depending on the nature of the text. I can think of four models for interpretation:
1) oral text. In this case there is no written text within which a new interpretation can be embedded. But as the story is re-told new elements or emphases will be introduced. Each time a story is re-told it is by definition re-interpreted.
2) written text. In this state a text is written down, but the pristine borders of authorship are not widely held, and the text remains fluid in a way similar to the oral text. As the text is copied it is at the same time re-written and additions are incorporated if coming from a suitably inspired source. This is the category for a book like Isaiah.
3) settled text. The text acquires an authoritative status. The process of interpretation will continue, but it will now be embedded in some way outside the text (margins or independent commentary). Due to these commentaries the actual meaning of the text continues to be in flux as it is applied and re-applied. Religious change will often be accompanied by a re-interpretation of the central texts.. that is, the writing of a new commentary.
4) translated text. This is an easily ignored process by which texts are transferred into a new medium: scrolls to books, passages to pictures, books to website, books to video. The transfer of a text to a new medium brings about shifts in meaning that are often hard to detect, but nonetheless real. The choices made in such translations often amount to a new interpretation of the text.. or an updating of it.
Joseph Blenkinsopp. Opening the Sealed Book: Interpretations of the Book of Isaiah in Late Antiquity. Eerdmans, 2006.
Next Fox River Video!
December 12, 2008
Part two of a projected five part series on the Fox River is now complete. I struggled for a while about how to put this together, but I finally decided to build the central section of the video around a walk from Lawrence University (where I work) to our home on the other side of the Fox River. Along the way there happens to be a number of significant things to see.. and the scenic use of the Fox by Lawrence allows me to build something of an argument about the way what was once an industrial waterway is being converted into a scenic waterway. Many of the images in this video are scenes and places that I pass everyday, and that will distinguish this video from the other parts of the series. Since I do live close to the Fox River I figured it was silly not to forefront that.
Penguin Derangement:
Encounters at the End of the World
December 10, 2008
The ice bound regions of our earth hold a special place in the history of documentary films. There is the 1919 Shackleton true life adventure South, Nannook of the North by Flaherty in 1922 (see my review here).. and then who can forget March of the Penguins (2006) and the National Geographic-style follow ups? Werner Herzog is cognizant of this cinematic polar tradition. In the opening minutes of Encounters at the End of the World as he explains his purpose for coming to Antarctica he dismisses the notion of making another penguin film.
Not surprisingly, his sequence on penguins is hilarious.. and telling. He meets a pensive penguin expert and plies him with questions about cases of gay and insane birds. The goal would appear to be to break down the family values aura woven around them in March of the Penguins. The penguin expert seems slightly at a loss, but Herzog finds his opening with the notion of "disoriented" penguins.. which he quickly terms "deranged." It seems that some birds lose their sense of direction and move with confidence toward the icy and bare inlands.. and certain death. In the picture at the top of this post you can see one penguin, having separated from others, making his way to nowhere (see also YouTube clip below). Herzog asks "but why?".. and provides no answer.
This penguin sequence is effective as a riposte to feel-good penguin films, but it also ties to an important theme of the documentary: misdirection and lostness. Herzog captures the survival training that anyone venturing out into Antarctica is required to go through. To simulate white out conditions a group must put buckets over their heads and try to reach a goal. Herzog finds this irresistible:
The scene in itself is colorful and funny.. but the symbolic value of this group failing to get anywhere is the deeper reason for its inclusion. Herzog is deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to survive and find a sustainable path.. and so these sequences of misdirection serve as object lessons.
This is one theme, but it would be impossible to tie Encounters at the End of the World to any single thematic goal. It is a successful and winding "meditation" or "essay" that takes as its raw material the Antarctic and all the people he finds there (thus the "encounters" in the title). When I think of my goals in creating video essays, this film by Herzog is an example of where I would like to get someday. It is a travel narrative that follows the experiences and impressions of Herzog as he learns about Antarctica. There is no sense of Herzog becoming an "expert" in the Antarctic and talking to his audience with that high-register knowing voice (perhaps the drawback of Flaherty's work). He is instead a significance-finder willing to listen and passively find the symbolic in his daily experience. Herzog is an artist (one who has not gotten enough attention in this blog) who has had a strong influence in my developing sense of what a film essay should be.
Illusions of Tradition
December 8, 2008
The Battle of Algiers provides a series of images of life in the Casbah. The Casbah is the old city and contains the narrow, winding paths so easy to get lost in. Watching the film we learn that it is home to a large population of Algerians.. and this "Islamic" part of the city is contrasted with French colonial space.
It's easy to fall into thinking of life in the Casbah as "traditional".. since we see the clothing elements commonly associated with traditional Islam. Director Gillo Pontecorvo was interested in capturing contemporary life, and consequently did not explain the historical background to the crowded Casbah. But it is an important story, one of displacement of the rural poor by the colonizers and the clustering of Algerians in and around cities like Algiers. During this shift "traditional" residential areas like the Casbah were transformed into slums.
I went through and chose some pictures that give a sense of residential space inside the Casbah:
Above is a scene that comes and goes pretty quickly. Jafar and Ali are running from the French and they duck into a house off an alley.. and they are safe there from the pursuing French. The interior of the house is not the focus, but note the tiles wasting away and a slender column next to them. The house still contains signs of a past when it was a beautiful.. even luxurious.. place to live.
The structure of houses is never explained in the film. The few images we get might even seem bewildering. There is a central courtyard and then a number of living spaces ranged around it. In effect this home has become a multi-unit residence.. an apartment complex. As people move about you see how much is going on in a tight space. There are multiple families and individuals crowded in here.
At one point Ali looks up from within this house and this is what he sees:
It is possible in the image above to see the central opening of the courtyard and then note the top stories of the house. During my summer in Morocco I saw many houses like this. These once expansive homes get subdivided so that individual families inhabit bedrooms or floors. And the house falls into disrepair. But this "slum" is hardly traditional. What is traditional is the rich and luxurious way of living that these houses once represented.
In various places these homes have been lovingly restored.. and begin to regain something of their elegance. Below is a contemporary picture of an interior from a home in the Casbah of Algiers:
photo from Flickr user Millie J, photo here
That is a more traditional view of Islamic urban life. You can see how this is not a home that serves as an apartment complex.
Many old cities in the Islamic world look and feel run down.. homes to dense poverty. It is this way in Cairo, Damascus, and Fez. Areas of the city that were once where the elite lived have been abandoned by that elite, who now live in the Westernized sections of the city. The old section falls into disrepair and comes to be the poor section of town. And then we serve it the final insult by calling it "traditional."
Reading on My Computer
December 6, 2008
I picked up Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate at the Lawrence University library. It was published back in 1900, but it holds up well since it focuses on original sources and attempts a project of limited scope: the re-construction of Baghdad as it existed during its golden age. There's lots of speculation about where this bridge or that canal once lay.. and attempts to determine exactly when famous palaces went to ruin.
But here was my problem: I had a library copy, but for reading of this kind of material to be really valuable, I need to be able to underline and make marginal notations. That's just the way I operate. In the future—for who knows what project—I may want to find a specific passage. So instead of just reading the library's copy I looked to see if it was available for purchase online. I found it on Amazon.com from a third party seller for $125. Not too bad.. not out of reach. But then I decided to look on Google Books, and there it was: I could download a full text PDF for free.. just like that.
The problem up until now has been what to do with the PDF. I can print it out, but that's a waste and leaves me swimming in paper. My new strategy is to read this PDF on my computer and make use of Adobe Acrobat's editing tools to mark up passages like I would in a book:
This is an example of how I can mark up my reading. (Obviously this is a page with more underlining than usual!) I can circle the footnoted sources at the bottom of the page and even put in a blue checkmark connected to a textbox where I can type in marginal comments. I developed this method of marking things up as I graded papers this term.
One of my necessary discoveries has been the process of creating multiple bookmarks as I read. In a column to the left of the text I keep a running list of bookmarks organized according to subject. For example, I am interested in the places in Baghdad mentioned by the traveler Ibn Jubayr.. and so when Strange brings up Ibn Jubayr I bookmark the reference. Here is an excerpt from my bookmarks:
This running list of bookmarks is an improvement over what I could do by marking up books. As I finish reading I simply save my markings and these are present whenever I open the book. Right now I have a folder for PDF books.. and eventually maybe I will have an external hard drive where I can keep my reading and other files.
The problem comes with reading on a computer screen. I can do it, but I do enjoy lying down on the couch and reading.. something impossible to do if I want to read this book by Guy le Strange. On the other hand this wouldn't be a couch book anyway. It's a sit up and pay attention book.. and right now that is the kind of books that works well with this reading method.
On Sitting and Spinning:
R.E.M's Accelerate
December 4, 2008
R.E.M.'s recent album Accelerate is growing on me. The opening song is "Living Well is the Best Revenge".. and it continues a theme that I have mentioned before: a dialogue with those who would attack the singer's sexuality. The chorus contains some lines that seem elusive at first:
all your sad and lost apostles
hum my name and flare their nostrils
choking on the bones you tossed to them
now I'm not one to sit and spin
because living well is the best revenge
and baby, I am calling you on that.
The singer again faces those who disapprove of him. These people were evidently set on in their hatred by some unnamed "you".. who I would imagine as an establishment Evangelical like James Dobson. The vitriol of this message eventually destroys their own followers: "choking on the bones you tossed to them." The song is permeated by a conviction of the self-destruction of the attackers.. as hatred comes home to roost.
A line that particularly interests me is "now I'm not one to sit and spin." It's here that I continue to think that Michael Stipe is a careful reader of the poetry of John Ashberry. The line is an elliptical allusion to what people (back in junior high?) would say when they gave you the finger and wanted to be expansive: "sit and spin baby." It was a vulgar expression that meant something like "go fuck yourself." Bound up in this line, then, is the notion that someone has given Stipe the finger and told him to go fuck himself.. and then the response is "I'm not one to sit and spin." The line demands the filling in of that implied context. From a broader point of view the message is: "I won't fall into the self-hatred that you are seeking to impose on me.. I'm going to live and love and ignore you."
Stipe refuses to imagine any overt vengeance against his attackers. But he does allow himself the satisfaction of seeing the failure of his attackers:
don't turn your talking points on me.
history will set me free
the future is ours and you don't even
rate a footnote. now
The double time references to "history" and "future" point to a growing certainty that history is on his side. Although there is nothing explicit about the nature of the conflict, it is hard not to hear this as a reference to the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians in American culture. It is no longer difficult to imagine a future in which those who oppose these rights are no longer remembered ("don't even rate a footnote").
The final verse brings a fascinating challenge:
you, savor your dying breath
I forgive but I don't forget.
you work it out.
let's hear that argument again.
camera 3. go. now
This calls to mind Dylan's classic "Masters of War." In that song Dylan baldly sings to war pushers "And I hope that you die/ And your death'll come soon." A little before that he notes that "Even Jesus would never/ Forgive what you do." Both of these ideas are present in the lines by Michael Stipe, but in a more passive way. We seem to hear the attacker wheezing on a deathbed.. and forgiveness is allowed.
Stipe refrains from a Dylan-like attack and instead offers his attackers the purgatorial fate of having to explain themselves for the cameras over and over again. He takes pleasure in the notion of the patent absurdity of their hateful argument.. which repetition only makes more patent. The last line sets the camera rolling so that they can show to the world their emptiness. This is as much a revenge song as "Masters of War".. but the revenge is all passive. It is a victory gained by a refusal to return hatred for hatred.
By the way, I think the video announcement below by Stipe in which he "outs" his bandmates as heterosexuals (but remains silent about himself) puts his own sexuality on the table. It's pretty clear that in this song and elsewhere we are dealing with personal struggles to understand himself. As Stipe sings in "Hollow Man":
I took the prize last night
for complicated mess
This sense of the complexity of the personal.. often hidden in veiled and difficult comments about public issues.. is exactly the halllmark of my favorite work by Michael Stipe.
Tour of Saudi Globalization
December 2, 2008
This video clip is part of the longer documentary Saudi Solutions (full video here) filmed by Bregtje van der Haak. The documentary itself deserves commentary, but it is the world glimpsed in the video that interests me now. In the above clip a Saudi woman walks us through her home in a neighborhood that she describes as upper middle class. Because she is appearing on video the Saudi woman wears her 'abaya and keeps her face hidden.. and it is tempting for a moment to think of this as a view of traditional Saudi life.. but then getting a look around the house it is evident that she is every bit as modern and every bit the participant in global culture as Americans or Europeans.
A few things that I think are worth noting. The Saudi woman speaks flawless English.. which is easy to take for granted. She is surrounded by recognizable brands such as Raisin Bran or the makers of the electronic gadgets. She speaks easily about the advantage of the wife having a job to bring in a second income. Since she works for a Saudi newspaper she participates fully in the kind of knowledge exchanges that characterize our time. The elements of her world, from the kitchen to the dining room, are all recognizable to us. There is almost nothing that in itself an American would call foreign or strange.
That said, this is nevertheless a way of life that on its face appears strange. The woman at the center of all these "normal" elements is fully covered with her 'abaya. All we see are her eyes. Her house is filled with strategic spatial additions that would befuddle us: she has a special door placed so that she can go to the house of her in-laws without having to cover herself. There is a majlis or sitting room where visiting men are received.. but separate from the living areas of the house. Managing life here takes a deep knowledge of the social system. An American set down in this house would recognize all the elements.. and be able to prepare breakfast with ease.. but the spatial configuration of everything would be mystifying.
So how do we make sense of the normalness of the elements and the overall strangeness of the lifestyle? It's tempting to think of all oddities as elaborate work-arounds for a modern lifestyle, meant to satisfy religious sensibilities but not actually restrict anything. One could make the argument that technology is easing this process tremendously since this woman is able to work from home and send articles via e-mail. Sure she is not allowed to drive.. but perhaps she has enough money to hire a servant.
The lifestyle as a whole can be thought of in a way similar to Islamic banking, which also consists of elaborate work-arounds designed to allow Muslims to follow Islamic law but get all the benefits of modern banking. Here is an example of Islamic banking from Wikipedia:
Bai' al-Inah (Sale and Buy Back Agreement)
The financier sells an asset to the customer on a deferred-payment basis, and then the asset is immediately repurchased by the financier for cash at a discount. The buying back agreement allows the bank to assume ownership over the asset in order to protect against default without explicitly charging interest in the event of late payments or insolvency.
A point of Islamic law is respected, but in actuality bypassed. It would be pointless to talk about Islamic banking or the life of this Saudi woman in terms of medieval Islam.. or in terms of anything like tradition. The most important thing to grasp is the way this is to its core a modern way of living, fully connected to global culture.
The video brings out an important point about globalization: the elements that compose this life are all recognizable, but it is their arrangement that strikes us as strange. That is an important point about what we should look for in other cultures. Yes, if we visit Japan or India or Saudi Arabia we will see lots of familiar brands and gadgets. But if we miss the way these elements are re-arranged into a new whole that fits each particular culture, then we miss something essential about how globalization allows for external continuities with the past.
